Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Really? I was going to watch that tonight. Disaster avoided.

 

I’d say watch it anyway mate . Many a time I’ve watched a film that critics and other people have panned and actually enjoyed it; even if it is shite you can always turn it off

 

I say go for it. As long as you don't take it seriously. Especially C-Mac's charac-ature.

Watched it last night and I'd give it a 6 or 7. The fighting is very well done and there is some particularly chortlesome dialogue. You're never going to be able to take too many sub-themes from a film like this and you know what you're going to get going in. The whole thing is over the top, predictable and mindless, but easy to watch fun.

 

^This @Vault-Tec

I often liked slated films and not enjoyed liked ones, the same with books.

Tis a personal thing.

Perhaps it's if I hear how bad a film is before watching my expectations are so low they sometimes impress me

 

The fighting is terrible, and there's only one funny line in the whole film;

Now I like a bad film as much as the next guy, but this has no redeeming features, OK so I went into it knowing it was never going to match up to the original but damn.

 

Troo. I'm a big Jake fan, so yeah I may give it a whirl.

I don't even remember the first one (just remember some girl we used to call the turnip being obsessed with it and PS).

 

Just finished watching the new Roadhouse. While it's never going to be a classic, it was okay.

 

I realise that I've gotten into the habit of reading up about movies before watching them, and I dunno if that's a good or bad thing. I'm surprised to see that some of my favourite movies don't actually score particularly well on RottenTomatoes etc, so maybe I should be less influenced by critical review and approach movies with a more open mind.

On that note, I just finished rewatching the Star Wars prequel trilogy and I absolutely loved it. I'm a sucker for nostalgia and I remember watching each movie at the cinema, and watching them again brings it all back. Yeah, there are places in which they clearly haven't aged well (particularly some of the VFX and set designs), but IMO the story arcs are great and I like that the tone gets particularly dark by the third movie.

I'd give the trilogy a solid 8/10.

 

I'm on the "f everyone else's opinion, watch it anyway" side too. And I'd definitely say, don't watch or read critical content before seeing it. For me, all critic culture is water cooler chat, the conversation you get into after you've all seen something. I love comparing notes afterwards. We are way too easily cowed by critic culture, especially the general public's criticisms. Once the internet collectively goes "wow that's terrible" it becomes a sort of thought crime to like it.

I really enjoyed Star Wars Ep9. So did a friend of mine. He and I had the same experience, of loving it in the cinema, then seeing the online teardowns and "realising" it was actually rubbish.

The teardowns are objectively accurate in many of their criticisms - it is full of ridiculous contrivance, lazy writing and plot holes. Did I care at the cinema, just on my tod, trying to have fun? No. Barely noticed. It was a huge pile of beautiful effects and epic set pieces with emotive performances, and I enjoyed it.

This is why my response, when someone enjoys a film I hate, is always "good for you!" Because it is good for them.

I also love Twilight (both books and films) and that naff cheerleader film Kirsten Dunst did, Bring It On. And Vampire's Kiss, come to think of it - it's regarded as schlock but I legitimately think people missed what it was doing in their haste to chew on another rubbish Nick Cage film. It doesn't really matter if nobody else likes them. I don't invite people to assess the artworks hanging on my walls, because I didn't hang them there for anyone else, I hung them there for me.

 

Still, feel free to post some pics of the artwork, and we'll give it the slagging we think it deserves.

 

Expend4bles
Now that's how you make a good bad movie.

The franchise lost its way badly with 2 & 3, but is back on track

 

It's bad mate, really bad. My wife got this kitsch framed jigsaw of cartoon cats sitting around a living room, it makes me feel ill, it's so bad, but she adores it so I tolerate it. Love is compromise.

Dune 2 - Muah'dip / 10

Solid, appeals on the same grounds as the first one. All very weird, striking, memorable. But still for me has the same problem all middle films in a trilogy or series have (as well as first parts of a 2-parter), that the story isn't resolved at the end of the film and there's a feeling of dissatisfaction and a lack of tidy structure, because both film and audience are required to pick up all the threads from the previous film and develop them but then not tie them off anywhere.

Several members of our group remarked that they found the film "too fast", i.e. thin on exposition and thick on plot developments. Once again I think I'm just not a typical movie-goer because I found it very straightforward, almost minimalist, and easy to follow. That said, the second half is a bit thin on exposition; new elements are introduced and the film doesn't bother itself with explaining them to you, they're just presented as-is. I personally love this because it makes the world feel more natural and authentic; I feel in this film like an anthropologist watching an alien culture, which is something a lot of sci-fi and fantasy tries but fails to evoke because everyone's stopping every 5 seconds to explain everything to our naive protagonist. I don't need to know everything about the southern tribes, the sandworm life-cycle, the intricacies of spice extraction, the pharmacology of the water of life, the power dynamics in the imperial family, etc. to get the broad strokes of what's going on. A lot of people don't seem to agree with me, though, and were remarking that they now wanted to read the books to understand it all better.

I dunno, I watch this film the same way I watch stuff like Koyaanisqatsi/Powaaqatsi - as an undereducated tourist marvelling at strange cultures and scenes that aren't tailored for my comprehension:



Dune is such a good piece of visual storytelling that I could almost watch it entirely in constructed languages and still have a sense of what's going on, and still enjoy the heck out of it. Again, it's alien cultures, alien planets, strange faraway places, and I like feeling that I'm outside it, looking in, struggling to understand the mysteries of another world. That's how I want to feel in sci-fi and fantasy.

The complaints about the pacing of it still leave me baffled. I can't explain it. People felt the film was too fast? This was the majority opinion, but I found it comfortably slow and steady, a film that plods from one scene to the next and gives you plenty of time to get what's going on.

I wonder if it's because people are used to different conventions of storytelling: film and TV use a lot of little techniques to ground you, to explain things, without you even noticing. Dune 2 doesn't use a lot of these techniques. The information is mainly visual and mainly implicit; it expects you to think laterally a bit, infer things about the characters, their motivations, the politics. Very little is explicitly stated, which I really like because it makes the tense, subtle political strategizing feel more mature and realistic. People with big, careful long-term plans don't go about reminding their co-conspirators what's going on all the time, because they all know exactly what's going on.

The Bene Gesserit are the weakest component in this regard, because where in the first film they are shrouded in shadow and mystery, here they do actually have exposition scenes where they carefully spell out their plans and methods to a naive newcomer. I found that a bit on-the-nose; I like shadowy secret organisations more when they're shadowy and mysterious.

Not sure how I feel about the sound design in this, and all, modern films - you know, the post-Zimmer world of movie scoring? Everything is BWAAAAAAAAAAAM and BRRRRRRRRR like you're in a metalworks factory. Idk. Personal taste. I find it a bit silly after a while. The score is strongest when it leans into the Arabic influences that are in the film's DNA, and weakest when it's just making giant horn noises.

 

With the caveat that I still haven't seen the second film yet... (I know, I know, get on it...)

I'm kinda expecting that.

Spoiler: Possible book spoiler, almost certain "Dune 2" film spoiler

The book lays out how the Missionaria Protectiva laid a lot of the groundwork that Paul, and more specifically Jessica, exploit on Arrakis. How the "prophecy" of the Lisan al Gaib was planted deliberately so that the Bene Gesserit could later exploit it as and when the need arises. I'm not sure how much detail film 2 goes into, but it also talks a lot about the Kwisatz Haderach and just how many "potential Kwisatz Haderach" plates the Bene Gesserit were really spinning.

Dude... the throat singing though....

 

Dune: Part 2 - Florence Pugh in bondage gear/10

As the film goes on, it's clear that these aren't so much an adaptation of the books as a reimagining of it. It's certainly less faithful than LotR was but it's still really, really good. It's also really, really long.

 

We have a local cinema that still has intermissions, in defiance of its parent company's norms and the industry as a whole. I wish more cinemas still did it, especially now we're getting all these wonderful long-form 3hr epics. They're great value but hot damn, if I didn't live near a cinema with intermissions I think I'd just wait for the blu-ray.

On the other hand, with how LotR and the Alien films ended up being significantly better on blu-ray, maybe the meta strat is to save all that ticket money and just invest it in the best home cinema tech one can afford.

On the first hand, there is a little cinema in Lincolnshire called Kinema In The Woods, my father took me once when I was young. It reportedly still has many of the things that have made it locally famous, including (in screen 1) an actual organ pianist who rises through the stage and plays the organ during the intermission. I want to make a trip out there again because that sounds ****ing cool.

edit - re: the Sardaukar chanting, this is my favourite comment on youtube and I won't be able to watch those scenes properly again now

huh in fact some of these youtube bods have a knack for saying in 20 words what I manage to stretch out into 800,

Maybe I should try a new brevity style of reviewing...

 

2.5 - 3 hour long films are getting close to the norm now and 40%* of the reason I stopped going to the cinema, by the time you've got there early, bought snacks and sat through endless adverts and trailers it's nearly a full day out.

Shame as the cinema I used was only a fiver for a ticket, and as I used to take half a day off I was pretty much guaranteed there would be no more than a dozen people in there with me.

*the other 60% comprises, 10% noisy inconsiderate people, and 50% Hollywood just haven't had a good original idea for a long time.

 

I paid for my son and partner to go to the cinema last week to watch a kids film, £34 at the Odeon, standard seats too! Then about the same on food/snacks. I refuse to watch anything in the cinema these days because of all the noise, people eating/slurping, phones, people getting up and down etc.

Much rather sit around at home in my pants and be the one making all that racket.

 

Back when I lived in Boston trips to the Kinema happened at least twice a month. It's ace and the intermission is something I miss even if it's little more than a ruse to sell more ice cream (the owner of the place freely admits this). I saw so many films there and it's one of the few things about living in Boston that I miss. It's teeny tiny though so it's quite often rammed. And yes, they do have a Wurlitzer.

Woodhall Spa's got a really sweet outdoor swimming pool too.

 

Star Wars VII, VIII and IX 7/10?

So I decided to complete my Star Wars journey by watching the newest trilogy, and it was alright - not great, but alright. I'm giving it an extra point because the visuals were juicy, especially in the final film. As for the lore and how it ties in with the very, very long arc that began in The Phantom Menace, I can understand why some fans got really upset about it, but -- and I can't stress this enough -- I really don't care. The movies are entertaining, the action sequences are great, and there's a reasonable-enough conclusion that the average viewer (yours truly) ought not to feel let down by it.

I was curious why so many people want this trilogy essentially removed from the canon, and whilst I broadly agree with most of the objections, it's not going to rob me of my sleep. Happy days.

 

Which is why I gave up on the cinema, my local has an enforced 3hr limit on the car park.