What Non-New Films Have You Seen? (2020 Edition)

[Famous Mortimer]

Cyber Vengeance

Not a bloody clue. Someone uses death row inmates as "NPCs" in his virtual reality game, and gets rich people to hunt them. But no-one dies in the game, so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.

Another stellar ending, though, as just before the final fight you're preparing for is about to start, it just fades to the credits. Excellent audience alienation!

[Charles Lindberg Jr]

Just treated myself to an afternoon of doing fuck all and double featured 'In the Mouth of Madness', with 'Hellraiser'. Hellraiser I can get around, but 'In the Mouth of Madness' just didn't do it for me. Sam Neill's character seemingly from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and America simultaneously.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Very much so.

Cool, I'll definitely give it a go soon then, thanks for that.

I'm a big fan of Terry Gilliam's work as a director but I find Time Bandits, Jabberwocky and that bit at the beginning of The Meaning of Life really tough going.

I rewatched (and loved) Brazil recently and so along with Time Bandits I was going to give Jabberwocky a go, but I'm not sure I'll bother now.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Last night I watched Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, it was a good enough melodrama, but I feel this and to a lesser extent Volver are less seedy and fun compared to some of his earlier films, I didn't really care about any of the main characters really which made enjoying it difficult, it was clearly a well made film though.

After that I watched the 1945 thriller/noir Leave Her to Heaven. Noir might be pushing it, aesthetically it doesn't seem right to call it that, being in colour and the story is more of a sob story about a possessive woman, there's hints of melodrama in there too, I think it's supposed to be sympathetic but just feels a bit grim really. Gene Tierney made a good job of it though.

[rjd2]

Good Will Hunting.

Incredibly cheesy and predictable, but despite that it was still quite engaging. Its probably the best performance I ever seen from Affleck and My God Minnie Driver looks magnificent.

[JaDanketies]

Men In Black: International was watchable but felt like the worst in the MIB franchise. No Will Smith or Tommy Lee, and very few jokes or wisecracks. The aliens didn't even look as good as they did 20-something years ago in Men In Black 1 - it was less imaginative - and it was unexpectedly dark. I'm not sure it's appropriate for kids with all the dead bodies, which begs the question "who is this movie for?"

But yeah if you've got nothing better to do then it's not the worst thing to watch. It did make us think that we need to find some actual decent films.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I rewatched (and loved) Brazil recently and so along with Time Bandits I was going to give Jabberwocky a go, but I'm not sure I'll bother now.

I rewatched Brazil recently too, as good as I remember. Also skimmed through the "Love Conquers All" version, awful of course and crazy that it's the version which has generally been shown on American TV over the years. A lot of people have grown up not even knowing that there is a version which is 40 minutes longer and doesn't have a happy ending.

[Menu]

Cool, I'll definitely give it a go soon then, thanks for that.

I rewatched (and loved) Brazil recently and so along with Time Bandits I was going to give Jabberwocky a go, but I'm not sure I'll bother now.

I'd be interested in what you think if you did decide to give it a go. I've given it so many goes over the years. Each time I sit down and think how can I NOT like this, Gilliam, Palin etc etc. But within half an hour I just feel drained. It's just too......boring.

[zomgmouse]

Special Effects. Interesting de Palma-esque thriller about a film director who murders a woman and then makes a film about it starring her husband and a lookalike. Eric Bogosian shines as a real slick creep and Zoe Lund is absolutely brilliant. Very fun and cool film, it's one of those "provocative viewer-as-voyeur" films. Also the

Spoiler alert

"twist" of the police detective having "made" the film

[close]

was a great touch.

[SteveDave]

Frantic

Our Harrison Ford season comes to a close with this. I really enjoyed it. When Michelle almost fell off the roof I actually screamed out loud at 9:30 at night. There was only one point 'n' pout from Ford though. 

[zomgmouse]

Flicker aka Flimmer, a Swedish comedy about various employees of a telecommunications company for whom everything is going wrong. One of those dark comedies with a light touch and oddball characters and situations. Some very funny moments though doesn't seem to add up to much.

[Famous Mortimer]

A night of oddball religious propaganda!

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
Reverend Estus Pirkle rants about how communism will take over the USA unless everyone gets behind his particular brand of fire-and-brimstone Christianity. Scenes of commies riding around on horseback (because they were on horses in the Bible) killing people are interspersed with Pirkle delivering a sermon, and a young woman being converted with the power of his words. Directed by a guy called Ron Ormond, who'd had a long career in Z-list movies until he nearly died and converted to Christianity.

The Burning Hell
Pirkle and Ormond reunite to give us Pirkle's view of Hell. Every bit as entertaining as the previous movie, this time the convertee is a biker whose friend dies. Pirkle eases the biker's mind by saying yes, he's in Hell right now, and yes, he will burn there for all eternity. A gem.

The Second Coming of Christ and The Time Machine
25 minute machinima about a professor who finds a time machine, goes back to Biblical times, stops Jesus from being crucified and brings him back to the present day. Because of the lack of Christ's sacrifice, everything is bad now, like the professor's wife married someone else and the Devil is Vice-President of the USA. It has a weirdly large amount of padding.

[Artie Fufkin]

Frantic

LOVE that film!
I re-watched Spider-Man : Into The Multiverse.
So good! A solid 4. Possibly even a 5.
Really cleverly animated.
And one of the best Marvel outro's ever.

[zomgmouse]

Live and Let Die. It's just missing something isn't it...

[Sin Agog]

Runaway Train.  Despite Jon Voight's utterly bizarre, mealy-mouthed accent, this is some primo masculine manly manliness, with some great lucid action and the occasional ever-so-slightly poetic moment from its Russian director.  One of the Cannon Group's unironic best.

Woman in the Dunes. Still a straight top tenner.  Has the best black-and-white photography I've ever seen (with the white being the sand and the black being everything not sand), perfect two-hander performances from its leads, one of the most sensual (and grimy) love scenes ever, and all wrapped up in Kobo Abe's perfect existentialist metaphor for how readily we normalise our trapped, workaday existences and wouldn't climb that ladder out of the pit even if we could.  I'm always welded to the spot for three hours straight every time I watch this.

Seinen Asbestos Disaster.  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5498350/ This guy did one of my favourite documentaries ever, The Naked Emperor's Army Marches On, about an unhinged war veteran literally beating up octogenarian high-ranking officers on camera until they admit that they cannibalised privates during WWII.  This is the director a little older, and while it still has its moments of gonzo filmmaking, and its ire against the Japanese government is no less hot, it's more like his equivalent of Fredrick Wiseman's Near Death, with some of the most achingly candid footage of sufferers of asbestosis and their attempts to get, if not compensation, at least some kind of acknowledgement of what they've gone through.  My mum, straight out of school, got a very short-lived job in the civil service basically telling 99% of people who applied for compensation that they didn't qualify (I half-suspect she may have gotten some asworstos in her lungs from when school signs were all made using the stuff).  It sounds like the Japanese government were even more appalling, doing their 'don't tell me what to do!' shtick they still do with whaling by continuing to mass-produce asbestos products long after the rest of the world grokked that lungs are important.  Anyway, really long, and I'd still start with Naked Emperor... and the painfully intimate Extreme Private Eros (about various early '70s cast-offs and demimonde, including Japanese mothers abandoned with American G.I.s' mixed-race children, or 'hafus'), but I'm grateful to see so many old, languishing faces preserved on film, and anything so markedly pissed off at governmental indifference is always cool with me.

[dissolute ocelot]

Runaway Train.  Despite Jon Voight's utterly bizarre, mealy-mouthed accent, this is some primo masculine manly manliness, with some great lucid action and the occasional ever-so-slightly poetic moment from its Russian director.  One of the Cannon Group's unironic best.

Runaway Train is really great action cinema. It's got some nice existentialist touches with Jon Voight really good as an antihero set on living

Spoiler alert

and dying

[close]

on his own terms. But it never goes too far away from the thrill of fast trains and the beauty of snowy scenery. (The connection with Kurosawa, who wrote the original draft of the screenplay, is intriguing, but I'd argue that Kurosawa was primarily a great genre director himself.) I have a soft spot for the Denzil Washington train flick Unstoppable which isn't quite in the same league but is a good, fairly gritty and realistic actioner, and probably Tony Scott's best film.

Meanwhile, I've been watching former members of the counterculture spend the weekend together, with Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) and The Big Chill (1983) (the latter seems to be on Sony Movies quite often). Two films about groups of former 60s radicals spending the weekend together, one super-low-budget from John Sayles with a largely unknown cast, the other packed with future big Hollywood names. Of the two groups of friends I'd rather hang with the Secaucus dudes who seem to have a better time (in fairness, The Big Chill happens after a funeral so maybe they're not at their best). Both have funny scenes and are very worth watching as historical documents apart from anything else (for the history of Hollywood/filmmaking as well as the history of the US). But while Secaucus 7 is firmly rooted in left-wing politics, it's hard to get any sense from The Big Chill of what the people actually believe in, what they once were, or even in some cases what they are now behind their facades. Still, BC works well as a chamber drama about a bunch of people annoying each other and discussing death, and it's fun to see Jeff Goldblum and William Hurt being young and irksome. I've also ordered Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000 (1975), which is apparently the Swiss equivalent of the same theme.

[A Hat Like That]

Runaway Train.  Despite Jon Voight's utterly bizarre, mealy-mouthed accent, this is some primo masculine manly manliness, with some great lucid action and the occasional ever-so-slightly poetic moment from its Russian director.  One of the Cannon Group's unironic best.

There's a bit where someone is hanging from rope ladder tied to a helicopter and a guitar solo is absolutely squalling away and there's the snow and the train and it is absolutely, 1000% pure distilled testosterone awesome.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Godzilla, Mothra And King Ghidorah - Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001) - They did the mash, the monster mash, though not until 35 minutes in, before that we just get tiny glimpses of them. Still, once they're out and about in public it's pretty much wall to wall action bar the odd break for the humans to talk about how fucked they are. Oddly Godzilla looks like a really cheap plastic toy version I had of him in the early eighties and so a bit naff, but that just made me find the whole thing really endearing, even if the cgi elsewhere is also dodgy. The main thing is that at least there's a lot of it, and seeing Godzilla and co fight each other is lots of fun. 7.6/10

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) - Satire where Peter Cook's PR man worms his way in to politics and by the end is all but a dictator. It's kind of okay and amusing and there's some fun ideas, but sometimes it's a bit obvious and certain aspects haven't aged well, ultimately it's a film that I wanted to like more than I actually did. 6.4/10

[itsfredtitmus]

Konchalovsky is interesting for two reasons, one because his Hollywood films sometimes betray more touches of Soviet reverie than his rather parochial, domestic work (Siberaide notwithstanding, of course) and him being one of the 3 contemporary Soviet directors to denounce Tarkovsky's work - his co-writer and I'suppose mentor - as dealing in postured put-ons after Mirror

[Artie Fufkin]

Tom Hanks IS Mr Rogers in A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood - 2019

My word this was a lovely film. Just a genuine love for the guy throughout. Nothing nasty or cynical. Really really good, with some great performances. There was one particular scene

Spoiler alert

in the diner where Tom breaks the fourth wall

[close]

that really sent the chilly-willies down my back.
I think I'd like to give this a 5 out of 5, if you don't mind.

[Famous Mortimer]

The Outsider (2014)

The one with Craig Fairbrass in, not the documentary about Harry Partch or any of the other dozen movies with that name. Like "Taken", but a hundredth of the budget and with a hard Cockney geezer as the star. You know what you're getting with this, and it's fine.

[Menu]

him being one of the 3 contemporary Soviet directors to denounce Tarkovsky's work - his co-writer and I'suppose mentor - as dealing in postured put-ons after Mirror

Could you develop that(as Melvyn Bragg would say)? I've not heard about this.

[rjd2]

The Outsider (2014)

The one with Craig Fairbrass in, not the documentary about Harry Partch or any of the other dozen movies with that name. Like "Taken", but a hundredth of the budget and with a hard Cockney geezer as the star. You know what you're getting with this, and it's fine.

5% on rt!

I'm not sneering though I will probably watch it and have spent money on Rise Of The Footsoldier films so I am also a pleb!

King Of New York 3/5

Walken and Fishbourne are great and its very sleazy but didn't really care about anyone in this whatsoever. Sound track nearly elevates it to a 4 though.

So Long My Son 5/5

3 hour epic where we follow 2 families who were close in the 80's but drift apart after one of their kids dies in a swimming accident. As its set over three decades starting from the 80's, plenty of social commentary but despite that, the grim premise and long running time its very accessible, moving and at times uplifting.

[Famous Mortimer]

5% on rt!

I'm not sneering though I will probably watch it and have spent money on Rise Of The Footsoldier films so I am also a pleb!

I notice there's a new Rise Of The Footsoldier installment coming out soon. I ought to give them a go when I'm in a forgiving mood.

The Outsider is undoubtedly terrible, but it's watchable. The charming low-budget ripoff of Taken wraps up at about the 1 hour mark, then they decide to do a "raid on the boss's lair" act 3. It's got the

Spoiler alert

cop claims responsibility for all the baddie death and allows the hero to leave

[close]

ending too!

[rjd2]

I notice there's a new Rise Of The Footsoldier installment coming out soon. I ought to give them a go when I'm in a forgiving mood.

The Outsider is undoubtedly terrible, but it's watchable. The charming low-budget ripoff of Taken wraps up at about the 1 hour mark, then they decide to do a "raid on the boss's lair" act 3. It's got the

Spoiler alert

cop claims responsibility for all the baddie death and allows the hero to leave

[close]

ending too!

The first ROTS is enjoyable cheap entertainment. I found some of the criticism a little snobby although obviously it did look very cheap and not exactly many stellar actors involved. However a decent soundtrack some hilariously crap dialogue and Farbrass hamming it up . 2 " Tickle my ballsssssssssssss".  If you accept it is for what is then you won't be that let down. It's got proper menace also unlike many of these cheap UK crime films.

The second made the mistake of  trying to be a proper movie, no cringe, no Fairbrass,,no point.

The last 2 which are prequels are not the best obviously as they are way to old for their roles including Fairbrass but they are played for laugh's now and that's perfectly fine.

Trailer for three catches the mood of the mood of the films nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPsLEHImzk

[Small Man Big Horse]

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984) - Strange blandness that clearly set out to be a cult movie but manages instead to be surprisingly dull and there's long stretches which are quite boring. It has the odd funny or amusing moment but a lot of the time it's just tedious conversations, and it wastes a fun premise and a really great cast. 4.4/4

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984) - Strange blandness that clearly set out to be a cult movie but manages instead to be surprisingly dull and there's long stretches which are quite boring. It has the odd funny or amusing moment but a lot of the time it's just tedious conversations, and it wastes a fun premise and a really great cast. 4.4/4

Spot on. I watched it last year and was very disappointed by it.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Spot on. I watched it last year and was very disappointed by it.

I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling disappointed, I've read many a review online which loved it but I couldn't see what the fuss was about.

Forbidden City Cop (1996) - Early effort from Stephen Chow and Vincent Kok, this is a crazy piece about the secret agents who protect the Emperor, and is sort of a romantic comedy as well as an action filled work. And I really, really liked it, it's sweet, charming and very funny. 7.7/10

[Egyptian Feast]

I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling disappointed, I've read many a review online which loved it but I couldn't see what the fuss was about.

Forbidden City Cop (1996) - Early effort from Stephen Chow and Vincent Kok, this is a crazy piece about the secret agents who protect the Emperor, and is sort of a romantic comedy as well as an action filled work. And I really, really liked it, it's sweet, charming and very funny. 7.7/10

I still have to get around to watching that again. Glad you enjoyed it.

I couldn't get on with Buckaroo Banzai either, especially that fucking finger-clicking dance at the end. It might have been a laugh if recent attempts to get a spin-off TV series made (with Kevin Smith directing) had succeeded, but I doubt the original film has enough of a cult following to make it worth the effort.

[Menu]

You guys don't half watch a lot of films. I can barely manage one a week.