What have you watched recently? 3D!

The Raging Bile Duct

Watched Synchronic at the weekend and really enjoyed it. Made by the same team that made The Endless and Spring. Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan are two paramedics working in New Orleans who find themselves dealing with the consequences of a new designer drug that has hit the streets. If you're a fan of The Endless, I think you'll enjoy this. It's got the same kind of twists and turns in it.

homerun_homer

Got through a few films at the weeked.

Promising Young Woman
I really liked this. Without spoiling I will say the end will be divisive and it is probaby worth noting that going in. As I'm still letting it mull around in my head I haven't settled on a final rating but for now I'll give it a 4/5.

I'm Thinking Of Ending Things
I want to love Charlie Kaufmann's work. I did in the early days, and I think that's where he worked best in letting someone else adapt his work. I've yet to love, or even really like any of the movies he's made himself.
There is a lot to unpack and decipher with this film but it was such a slog to get through. To merit getting more out of it then it surely deserves a rewatch and I can't imagine bringing myself to go through it again.
2/5

Escape from New York
I recorded this on Film4 at the weekend. After re-watching Big Trouble in Little China recently, which I love, I decided to re-visit this as I watched it at too young an age and thought that I maybe didn't appreciate it then. It's still not great if I'm honest. It has a great 80s movie premise, I love the Carpenter score and style, but the action is never exciting, fun or interesting compared to BTILC.
2/5

IAMAMORON

The Choice ( 2016 )

Watched this sentimental romantic drivel yesterday... although .. I must admit it kind of touched me somewhere and I ended up listening to love songs and getting nostalgic of former crushes all last night. The cast is beautiful with some serious eye candy - Teresa Palmer ( a dotey little cutey bunny rabbit, you just want to wrap her up and bring her to meet your Mum immediately ) ,Alexandra Daddario ( text book vampy love rival to show's main love protagonist ). They both look lovely. The main male leads are textbook catches, a doctor, hardworking farmhand and a cuddly nice guy Veterinarian.

The big draw however is the location setting. A sumptuous North Carolina with banging blue skys and cold homemade lemonade everywhere you look. If the cast is not lazing around all afternoon fishing for crayfish they are getting cozy on sofa hammocks, pitched facing the stars from the temperate coziness of the early evening veranda. It is sublime lovey dovey stuff.

I wont spoil the drivel plot, but for a heartwarming romance, which hopeless romantics like me are born to sit through, it is well worth a goo, if only to drool over the attractive cast and the surrounding location. Even the pick up jeep was spotlessly vomit inducingly clean. Blond Labrador retriever included. Wooden old style American country houses with spotless kitchens and interiors. Constant sunshine apart the symbolic "storms" near the end.

This is a textbook hopeless romantic must watch - I must admit I loved it.

Retr0gamer

House Party

Decided to check this out as Amy Nichols on Unspooled wouldn't shut up about it. I really enjoyed it but didn't love it. It well written with jokes that always land and has great energy. Some great performances. John Witherspoon was great as the angry neighbour, you might recognise him as the dad in the Friday films. Kid and Play were a big surprise and were great and the rap sequences were fun.

Good fun even if it could have done with a few more gags.

budgemook

Retr0gamer wrote: »

House Party

Decided to check this out as Amy Nichols on Unspooled wouldn't shut up about it. I really enjoyed it but didn't love it. It well written with jokes that always land and has great energy. Some great performances. John Witherspoon was great as the angry neighbour, you might recognise him as the dad in the Friday films. Kid and Play were a big surprise and were great and the rap sequences were fun.

Good fun even if it could have done with a few more gags.

For a minute there I thought they were after remaking this! I loved the House Party movies when I was a kid, I remember TLC showing up in one of them as Sex as a Weapon. Always good fun. There was another one with Kid 'n' Play too called Class Act - the 12 year old me loved it. Maybe I'll check these out again one of the days.

S.M.B.

Fond memories of House Party and Class Act. Assuming I'm better off leaving it that way too by not rewatching.

Tom Mann Centuria

Watched the original version of The Magnificent Seven. A good fun western with a brilliant soundtrack. Enjoyed the remake too, but I still think this version has the edge.

Retr0gamer

S.M.B. wrote: »

Fond memories of House Party and Class Act. Assuming I'm better off leaving it that way too by not rewatching.

House Party is definitely worth a watch.

Tony EH

'Big Jake'

When a young boy gets kidnapped by a bunch of no good outlaws, Jacob McCandles is asked by his estranged wife to seek out the gang and bring him home.

'Big Jake' is an old fashioned John Wayne western made at a time when old fashioned westerns were pretty much a dying breed. Even in 1971 it must have seemed kind of quaint, so now 50 years later I'm sure it could seem positively ancient to some people. But it's decision to set it in 1909, complete with motorcars and bikes gave it an unusual feel to the average cowboy movie, if only for the first third. It's also clear that the impact of the more violent spaghetti western was being felt in Hollywood, as 'Big Jake' was a lot more bloody than regular.

The Duke is his usual self so there's no surprises there, despite him being visibly over the hill, which is the subject of a few jokes here and there. But there's an undeniable charisma to him that manages to get what he does over the line and he carries out everything he needs to with the expected professionalism that he was famous for. He's joined by his own son, Patrick, and Robert Mitchum's son, Christopher, who play Big Jake's lads. They're members of the party tasked Martha McCandles (Maureen O'Hara) to go and retrieve their grandson, played by John Wayne's youngest son, Ethan.

'Big Jake' is one of those films that would have done the rounds on TV when I was a kid and I remember it being one of my old man's favourites. We must have watched it every time it was on (which felt like an annual outing) and it still remains as enjoyable today as it was all those years ago. It's, no doubt, a silly story for sure. But that doesn't really matter as everything flows along relatively smoothly, although there are a couple of missteps here and there, most notably in the area of some ill-fitting comic moments that don't really work and in the (very) limited acting abilities of Wayne younger and Mitchum.

The gang are a very suitable group of scumbags, headed by the great Richard Boone as John Fain (who Wayne would also get to knock about with in his last movie 'The Shootist') and you just love seeing them get their just deserts. That goes especially for one character, John Goodfellow (Gregg Palmer), who was responsible for killing two of my favourite members of the protagonist posse in the final act.

'Big Jake' is the final effort of director, John Sherman - a veteran of over 100 movies - and is a pleasing film of the type that has been forever lost to the past and one which manages to overcome its weaknesses. Plus there's a genuine charm to seeing Wayne as an old horse who has outlived his time and is struggling to come to terms with how the times are changing in the 20th Century.

8/10

flasher0030

The Raging Bile Duct wrote: »

Watched Synchronic at the weekend and really enjoyed it. Made by the same team that made The Endless and Spring. Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan are two paramedics working in New Orleans who find themselves dealing with the consequences of a new designer drug that has hit the streets. If you're a fan of The Endless, I think you'll enjoy this. It's got the same kind of twists and turns in it.

I watched the first half hour of this at the weekend. Got distracted and couldn't get back to it again. Looks interesting. A little slow moving, so far anyway. But the music is just so haunting - an eerie feeling that something unsettling is about to unfold. Hope to get to see the rest of it tonight.

The Raging Bile Duct

flasher0030 wrote: »

I watched the first half hour of this at the weekend. Got distracted and couldn't get back to it again. Looks interesting. A little slow moving, so far anyway. But the music is just so haunting - an eerie feeling that something unsettling is about to unfold. Hope to get to see the rest of it tonight.

It takes a little bit of time to get its ducks in a row - and there's one plot point that's just a tad too convenient - but it gets interesting once you find out what Synchronic can do.

SheepsClothing

Sound of Metal was excellent. My favourite from 2020.

El Gato De Negocios

Spookies (1986)

One of those movies that has fond memories for me seeing the cover in the video shop but never being allowed to rent it.



Its a supernatural / psychic / zombie / human spider mish mash of genres and even has farting living dead. Pure and utter cheese but unfortunately, not the enjoyable kind of cheese.

um7y1h83ge06nx

I just watched Quarantine Girl, a film about a woman having a mental breakdown during Covid.

What an odd fcuking film, only an hour long. Thought at times it was going to descend into softcore porn - so bad was some of the acting and how odd some of the script was.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12283738/

el Fenomeno

I just watched Elephant (2003) by Gus Van Sant. I know his style can be very divisive - I still don't know whether I detested Last Days or just thought it was okay.

So I can get that this film has a certain style (and I get the "Walking: The Movie" jokes too). And so many people love this movie, but I just can't get me head around the acting / reactions when the shooting takes place. So many people standing around deadpan, barely reacting, as if a glass of milk had been spilled as opposed to a school shooting. I don't get how that can be excused or defended?

Retr0gamer

el Fenomeno wrote: »

I just watched Elephant (2003) by Gus Van Sant. I know his style can be very divisive - I still don't know whether I detested Last Days or just thought it was okay.

So I can get that this film has a certain style (and I get the "Walking: The Movie" jokes too). And so many people love this movie, but I just can't get me head around the acting / reactions when the shooting takes place. So many people standing around deadpan, barely reacting, as if a glass of milk had been spilled as opposed to a school shooting. I don't get how that can be excused or defended?

Did nothing for me either. Sure it's interesting that it's done all in one take but considering the subject matter the fact I came out of it feeling nothing says a lot about it. There's a school shooting sure but there's no emotional connection with it and it therefore ends up saying nothing about it.

The Raging Bile Duct

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Did nothing for me either. Sure it's interesting that it's done all in one take but considering the subject matter the fact I came out of it feeling nothing says a lot about it. There's a school shooting sure but there's no emotional connection with it and it therefore ends up saying nothing about it.

It's been years since I saw it but I thought it was marvellous. It makes the viewer an impartial observer of the day of the massacre which I found very disturbing. Gus van Sant doesn't try to shoehorn in a motive for the killers' actions and there is no attempt to understand it. It is a senseless act that cannot be fully rationalised. There's no attempt to make this a film about heroics or villainy. He doesn't use fast edits or a dramatic score to ratchet up the tension. Everything unfolds in an almost dreamlike stupor where these kids, not knowing the tragedy that is to befall them, are like lambs to the slaughter. It's one of those films that always stuck with me.

al87987

Promising Young Woman - 8/10

Enjoyed this a lot, bit of a genre hopper and probably best to go in blind. Carey Mulligan is very good as the lead.

flasher0030

The Raging Bile Duct wrote: »

It takes a little bit of time to get its ducks in a row - and there's one plot point that's just a tad too convenient - but it gets interesting once you find out what Synchronic can do.

Watched it. It was ok. It seemed like it was going to come up with some fascinating unexpected ending. But it didn't. But it was satisfactory enough.

I would recommend it, only for we have access to so much media content these days, and there are far more movies that one would be better off spending 2 hours with, in my opinion.

yerwanthere123

Deleted User wrote: »

Nomadland 2021 Im sure some people will rave over this, but at the half way point I could not care less to see any more of Francis pi**ing and shi**ng her way from caravan park to caravan park meeting various uninteresting people who would be better served in a Sky One reality tv show about people who left their homes to live in a van.

Completely agree with this unforunately. I had high hopes when I saw Frances McDormand was in it, but it turned out to be 1 hour and 45 minutes of.. well nothing much really. I rated it 6/10 on my IMBD account but tbh I think I was being too generous.

I watched Sound of Metal a few nights ago, that was very good. 7/10.

shrapnel222

just finished watching "the dissident", new documentary by Brian Fogel (the guy who did Icarus). It's a grim and fascinating documentary about Jamal Khashoggi's assassination. Incredibly slick, well paced accompanied by a great score.  8/10

splashthecash

shrapnel222 wrote: »

just finished watching "the dissident", new documentary by Brian Fogel (the guy who did Icarus). It's a grim and fascinating documentary about Jamal Khashoggi's assassination. Incredibly slick, well paced accompanied by a great score.  8/10

Is this on a streaming service?

splashthecash

My wife and I started watching "Defending Jacob" on Apple + recently - joined with a free 7 day trial so should be able to finish the first season (I believe there is only one so far anyway)

Chris Evans stars in this as an assistant DA whose son is arrested in connection with the murder of a fellow school mate - legal\thriller\drama...very good so far

shrapnel222

splashthecash wrote: »

Is this on a streaming service?

nope found from other sources not to be discussed here;)

Tom Mann Centuria

The Matador

Pierce Brosnan is brilliant, weird, sinister, sleazy, hilarious, broken and just his best role. Greg Kinnear and him bounce off each other so well throughout the film. It's great fun and I think it flew under an awful lot of people's radars.

Harry Palmr

Terrific little film, even better the second time. Hope Davis probably steals it for me.

BBC had it for a few years and screened it every so often on BBC One.

barrymanilow

The News of the World



In post Civil war Texas Tom Hanks plays an ex rebel Captain who travels town to town reading the newspapers to packed town halls. His faith becomes intertwined with that of a German child who had been kidnapped and raised by Indians.

Decent modern western drama, heartfelt and engaging, not without some gunplay and engaging tension. The particular time in American History it is set in plays in interestingly and is not something I have seen explored in westerns before.



8/10

p to the e

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

The Matador

Pierce Brosnan is brilliant, weird, sinister, sleazy, hilarious, broken and just his best role. Greg Kinnear and him bounce off each other so well throughout the film. It's great fun and I think it flew under an awful lot of people's radars.

Haven't heard this film mentioned in an age. I saw this in the cinema when it was out and really enjoyed it. Brosnan really nailed the role. He's like Archer in real life. I think there was a lot of controversy around the bull fighting scenes in it at the time.

silverharp

Youtube threw this up for me, set in a Dublin prison , starring Patrick Magoohan, looks interesting , watching it now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-CB3Zi-oY

joficeduns1

The solids over the weekend.

Jackie Brown
Not Tarantinos best but definitely one of his most charming (Hollywood maybe clips it). Soundtrack is phenomenal.

The Bourne Identity
Rewatched after an age. The score stood out to me last night, it helps manage the tension, action, and pacing flawlessly. Will be following up with Supremacy soon.