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Ever done this?

Started by Norton Canes, January 04, 2021, 02:29:36 PM

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Norton Canes

I was scrolling through the Freeview guide on the television last night and noticed something called 'Zathura' (2005). I checked out the info text and saw that it was a sequel-of-sorts to Jumanji, except with a sci-fi theme - and that it was directed by John Favreau, as what I calculated must have been his last film before Iron Man. Yes, I thought, I'll give that a go. It had already been on for five minutes but that's OK, I thought, it can't be hard to pick up the plot. I'd missed the titles and had arrived in the middle of a scene where three teenage kids, one with an oxygen nose tube thing, were discussing the angst-ridden aspects of their lives. These were clearly the protagonists whose existence was about to be profoundly altered once they assumed the roles of avatars in the virtual reality of the game world. I kept watching, enjoying the emotional depth with which the characters had been invested. Until, after about fifteen minutes, I started wondering when they were going to find the game.

When the film finally got to the next ad break I looked at the guide again and realised I'd gone to the wrong channel and had been watching almost half an hour of The Fault In Our Stars.

Bad Ambassador

A few years ago I asked a podcast guest to watch the film Safe. We started talking about it, but she looked baffled by my comments about the film's feminist themes and period detail, and instead referred to the action scenes. It turned out after five or six minutes that I'd watched the Todd Haynes psychodrama, while she'd watched the Jason Statham film of the same name.

Captain Z

I'd occasionally heard good things about True Romance, but knew nothing about it other than it being a Tarantino film. A couple of years ago I saw it was on terrestrial TV so I made an effort to watch it. Was surprised that Arnie was in a Tarantino film. 10-15 minutes before it clicked that True Lies =/= True Romance.

Glebe

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 04, 2021, 02:29:36 PMWhen the film finally got to the next ad break I looked at the guide again and realised I'd gone to the wrong channel and had been watching almost half an hour of The Fault In Our Stars.

Laughed.

Magnum Valentino

Someone I worked with claimed to have watched the entire bowling film Split wondering when James McAvoy was going to turn up (piracy/streaming).

Apparently there were three films released that year called Split, I'm after reading.

sevendaughters

I never saw Zathura and I will NOT be looking it up but I seem to recall the synopsis was kind of like Space Jumanji?

ProvanFan

I obtained Split off a piratey site. Had no reason to think it odd that it would begin with some Koreans at a bowling alley, but after a while I got suspicious. It was just too Korean and bowling focused.


ProvanFan

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on January 04, 2021, 04:07:22 PM
Someone I worked with claimed to have watched the entire bowling film Split wondering when James McAvoy was going to turn up (piracy/streaming).

Apparently there were three films released that year called Split, I'm after reading.

Ha!

Icehaven

"Crash" is good for this, there's loads of them.
What's the best example of films with the same name that couldn't be more different?

shagatha crustie

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on January 04, 2021, 02:34:22 PM
A few years ago I asked a podcast guest to watch the film Safe. We started talking about it, but she looked baffled by my comments about the film's feminist themes and period detail, and instead referred to the action scenes. It turned out after five or six minutes that I'd watched the Todd Haynes psychodrama, while she'd watched the Jason Statham film of the same name.

LOL

Gulftastic

Quote from: icehaven on January 04, 2021, 07:41:46 PM
"Crash" is good for this, there's loads of them.
What's the best example of films with the same name that couldn't be more different?

Tangerine (1979). First hardcore porn film I ever saw
Tangerine (2005). Comedy drama about relationships between two transgender sex workers.

Magnum Valentino

I think Jack Frost (Michael Keaton Dead Christmas Rock Father Film) came out the same year as Jack Frost (Snowman Monster Film).

Icehaven

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on January 05, 2021, 08:50:53 AM
I think Jack Frost (Michael Keaton Dead Christmas Rock Father Film) came out the same year as Jack Frost (Snowman Monster Film).

And I got the Keaton one confused with the Jeff Goldblum horror Mister Frost when it was on over Christmas.

Sebastian Cobb

Once came back from the pub with a housemate and we stuck on the new Cohen Brothers film I had downloaded.

We got about half an hour in and had no clue what the fuck was going on. Turns out it was one of those torrents that came in two CD-sized parts and I'd started part 2 by mistake.

BritishHobo

Quote from: icehaven on January 04, 2021, 07:41:46 PM
"Crash" is good for this, there's loads of them.
What's the best example of films with the same name that couldn't be more different?

If you don't have Disney Plus and you're trying to find a stream of the uplifting animated musical Frozen for your demanding kids to watch before they go apeshit, be very careful, or they might end up in front of the 2010 horror film about three teenagers stranded on a ski-lift slowly freezing to death, their attempts at escape causing only gory injury
Spoiler alert
(broken bones from jumping down, shredded hands from trying to climb across the wires, general frostbite) and culminating in two of them being mauled to death by wolves.
[close]

On the plus side, they'll never fucking ask again.

non capisco

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on January 05, 2021, 10:58:36 AM
Once came back from the pub with a housemate and we stuck on the new Cohen Brothers film I had downloaded.

We got about half an hour in and had no clue what the fuck was going on. Turns out it was one of those torrents that came in two CD-sized parts and I'd started part 2 by mistake.

I did that with one of those double sided DVDs they used to have at the dawn of the format for especially long films. Watched the second half of Dr Zhivago first thinking 'this has got more of an oblique narrative style than I was expecting for a mid-60s major studio film'. Just about followed what was going on, despite not having a clue why he had a cob on with Rod Steiger in what I thought was a strange non-sequitur of a cameo, then after 90 minutes it ended and I thought "Isn't this meant to be an epic?". When I discovered my obvious mistake I just watched part 1 and pretended it was the prequel that filled in all the narrative gaps and unlocked the mystery. Still never seen it the right way round.

Norton Canes

Quote from: BritishHobo on January 05, 2021, 03:25:09 PM
Spoiler alert
shredded hands from trying to climb across the wires
[close]

Is that the bit where they sing 'Let It Go'?

Inspector Norse

Not quite the same thing, but I've never seen the end of The Great Escape because the VHS we recorded it on at Christmas one year cut out at the "good luck" bit. I choose to assume they all got away.

Inspector Norse

I do wonder if Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic epic The Postman was such a critical disaster because viewers were racking their brains trying to figure out which period of Pablo Neruda's life it was dramatising.

Shaky

Quote from: Inspector Norse on January 05, 2021, 06:50:46 PM
Not quite the same thing, but I've never seen the end of The Great Escape because the VHS we recorded it on at Christmas one year cut out at the "good luck" bit. I choose to assume they all got away.

They did, and of all the sequels The Space Escape is probably the best one.

dissolute ocelot

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on January 04, 2021, 02:34:22 PM
A few years ago I asked a podcast guest to watch the film Safe. We started talking about it, but she looked baffled by my comments about the film's feminist themes and period detail, and instead referred to the action scenes. It turned out after five or six minutes that I'd watched the Todd Haynes psychodrama, while she'd watched the Jason Statham film of the same name.
Todd Haynes' Safe also came out about a year after Antonia Bird's British drama Safe starring Aidan Gillen, Kate Hardie, and Robert Carlyle, which won some awards and acclaim. It's a very popular title.

Ridley Scott and Shohei Imamura, one of whom is one of the greatest directors ever, both released films called Black Rain in 1989. The Michael Douglas cop drama is on TV a lot more than the drama about the bombing of Hiroshima.

The first few times ITV's Wild At Heart was on, I wondered why they were showing David Lynch in primetime.

Lost Oliver

When DVDs used to come with half the film on one side and the second half on the other I watched Goodfellas the wrong way round. Didn't even click when the credits came on after the first half, just thought it was a really whirlwind of an opening and then a retrospective of sorts in the second half.

BlodwynPig


The Mollusk

The first time I watched Eraserhead I got about 15 minutes into it before I realised the fucking telly was muted. There's no dialogue for ages, I thought it was setting a mood with total silence.

Some years later I was at an after party in a squat after a rave and I told this story and someone absolutely ripped the piss out of me for it. If there's one thing you don't need when you're knackered and the sun is coming up and you're in a derelict block of flats with a smashed up toilet after listening to a load of gabber on a boat down the Thames, it's a total stranger calling you a fucking stupid idiot for mistakenly watching the first 15 mins of Eraserhead with the sound off.

Years ago, my girlfriend said she really wanted to see the film "Kicking and Screaming", which I'd never heard of. In Fopp, shortly before her birthday, I noticed a Kicking and Screaming DVD and thought "what luck".

But rather than 1995 Noah Baumbach debut she wanted, I gifted her the 2005 Will Ferrell vehicle of the same name, about a kids soccer team.

Ferris

I was absolutely baffled by the film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it took me about 40 minutes to realize it was not some gritty reimagining of Kerouac's On the Road.

I just thought they were going in a bold and mental direction with it.

zomgmouse

Watching Abel Ferrara's Tommaso at a film festival they stopped it after the five minutes apologising for the lack of subtitles and we had to wait another ten minutes only for them to apologise for stopping it because it was in fact intended to be without subtitles because it's about an American man's life in Italy and restart the film.

Sonny_Jim

I did a great windup on a flatmate once, where we were flicking about channels, only to end up on 'Step up 2:  The Streets', which is some absolute shite film about 'street' break dancing.  He was about to keep on flicking when I told him to wait, that 'there's this amazing scene in a minute, honestly it's absolutely sick'.

Ended up watching the entire rest of the film (45 minutes worth).  There was no amazing scene, I knew there wasn't one.  I just wanted him to watch a shit film.

St_Eddie

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on January 26, 2021, 02:25:11 AM
I was absolutely baffled by the film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it took me about 40 minutes to realize it was not some gritty reimagining of Kerouac's On the Road.

Eh, could be worse.  At least The Road doesn't make for as much of a grimly depressing and morale sapping viewing as David Brent: Life on the Road.

Keebleman

Quote from: zomgmouse on January 26, 2021, 04:02:33 AM
Watching Abel Ferrara's Tommaso at a film festival they stopped it after the five minutes apologising for the lack of subtitles and we had to wait another ten minutes only for them to apologise for stopping it because it was in fact intended to be without subtitles because it's about an American man's life in Italy and restart the film.

Ten or eleven years ago I attended a showing of a documentary called The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu at the London Film Festival.  It was I think the only screening of the film at the festival and the cinema was packed.  The director was there and gave a short speech beforehand.  Even the Romanian ambassador was in attendance. 

Fifteen minutes into the three hour film we began to twig that the lack of subtitles was not an aesthetic choice but a cock-up.  There was an announcement that they would find the director and see if he had the correct version on him.  Then there was another announcement that the director had popped out for a drink and no-one could find him.  "You really aren't spoiling us, Mr Ambassador!" someone shouted, though presumably His Excellency had been enjoying the film a lot as he knew exactly what was happening.

The problem was never resolved.  The screening was abandoned and we were all offered free tickets for something else at the festival.  I chose the Italian Le Quattro Volte which by coincidence also didn't have any subtitles, though in that case it was because the film had no dialogue.  I still haven't seen The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.