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

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

More entertaining than watching a monkey throw it's own poo at visitors to the zoo, but only just

 

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Superman and Reacher kill all ze germans, very silly but very enjoyable

 

Remember, Sir Christopher Lee was (EDIT - allegedly) an IRL member of that outfit in WW2.

 

Maybe, maybe not https://allthatsinteresting.com/christopher-lee-military-career

 

Boy Kills World 7/10 not too serious action comedy movie coulda been better but i enjoyed it.

 

They make valid points, but the whole "after his death, person X questioned..." reminds me strongly of Rita Skeeter releasing hit pieces on Dumbledore as soon as he died. It's easy to go "aha but MAYBE" once someone's not around to contradict you. So I automatically throw out any speculation that closely follows someone's demise, unless it's backed by evidence.

 

It makes no nevermind to me either way

 

Aliens (4K) 10/10

Finally got round to watching this last night, and it was glorious. It confirms what an absolute masterpiece this movie truly is. Having recently exposed myself to Rebel Moon, it's interesting to juxtapose the brilliance of peak 80s sci-fi with a slice of modern style-over-substance cinema, where almost everything is green screen and CGI. Yeah, it can look great, but it can also feel stale and unspectacular in a way that Aliens never does.

The final showdown at the end of the movie still gives me chills. It's perfection.

 

Bullet Train Well worth a watch/10

Well, after a busy day packing yesterday night I tiredly stumbled upon this. It didn't sound too much of a muchness but it turned out to be a really good watch.

The right amount of action, comedy, slapstick, violence and a thread of a story.

Turned out a surprisingly fun film that both of us enjoyed.

 

Been some shockers whilst moping on the sofa recently. I think we should include current source as well, so I'm going to start that.

Meg 2: The Trench Full of Cliches (Sky) - 4.5/10
It's what you expect so you can't mark it down for that and there were some humorous moments (from memory)

Hobbs and Shaw (Netflix? Maybe Sky as well) - Vanessa Kirby/10
Seems like a Statham weekend. This wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Reckon a 7? 6?

Also, I know there's another thread for this, but you should really watch The Bear on D+.

 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Actually tied in with original and had a coherent (ish) plot - Michael Keaton is clearly enjoying his late career renaissance and milking it for all it's worth (and who can blame him), very enjoyable/10

 

That's a 10/10 in effect, then!

I'm looking forward to seeing Beetlejuice sometime. It looks genuinely in keeping.

We rewatched Team America this week: still hilarious and absurd. So many little jokes that just lodge in your brain and forcibly surface days later while you're trying to have a serious conversation with someone.

Durkadurkastan, of course!

 

I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in their Blackhawk helicopters. The infidels fired at the oil fields and they lit up like the eyes of Allah. Burning oil rained down from the sky and cooked everything it touched. I could only hide myself and cry as my goats were consumed by the fiery black liquid death.

In the midst of the chaos, I could swear that I heard my goats, screaming for help. As quickly as they had come, the infidels were gone. It was on that day I put a jihad on them.

And if you don't believe it... then you'd better kill me now, because I'll put a jihad on you, too.

 

The Witch

"Caleb, we will conquer this wilderness. It will not consume us."

An absolute belter, and a horror in the traditional sense of aspiring to genuine horror and to the depths of negative emotions and fears, not merely endless meat grinder variations on human injury and victimization. An English pilgrim in the 17th century falls into dispute with his local settlement, considering them to be incorrectly interpreting and applying Christian values (the Puritan equivalent of "my neighbour trims his hedge wrong"), and pridefully accepts banishment, taking his wife and four children out into the wilderness to establish a homestead of their own. They hope to banish the darkness and hostility of the unknown with the unwavering flame of their faith, but almost immediately things begin to go wrong. An evil presence seems to prey on the family from without, and suspicions begin to dart back and forth within as well. Why is misfortune plaguing them? Is one of the family members secretly harboring sin, failing to honestly repent of their innate wickedness, or even consciously and deliberately consorting with evil forces?

It works perfectly as a straight horror, genuinely one of the creepiest ****ing things I've seen in years. It's got that muted, quiet horror that True Detective S.1 had, which I love. But beyond that, like all the best horror films, it's getting into some bigger ideas. I like that too. The Ring (2004) dealt a lot with the rage and emotional turbulence of disturbed children, and the guilt and shameful secret relief of their parents - pretty heavy stuff - and was richer for it. 28 Days Later had its themes of existential despair and nihilism, the atomisation of society down to the individual and the possibility for the rediscovery of family values and bonds of trust in the wreckage of the postmodern. Alien was psychosexual, constructing a humanoid, masculine figure out of phallic imagery and animalistic rage and having it stalk, penetrate and eviscerate the innocent.

I missed a lot of these themes when I was younger but it's what I go in hoping for now, and The Witch brings something pretty new to the horror table - religious psychology. The film's main preoccupation is the mindset of the late middle to early modern Christian, which was (like so many religious cultures in history) socially conservative, deeply superstitious, tribal, insular, suspicious of womanhood and self-flagellating. Rational survivalist fears which would threaten the stability of a tribe - the unknown, the wild, outsiders, other cultures, rival belief systems, wild beasts, the elements of nature, lust, rage, deception, betrayal - were personified as a primitive force of evil, Satan, lurking eternally at the periphery of any happy group, waiting to tempt, corrupt, consume and enlist the sinful and the weak.

The Witch is unusual in modern supernatural horror in that it takes explicitly Christian values - including this dark side of the belief system - and plays it out in earnest. The Omen and The Exorcist did so too, but otherwise it's a bit of a niche - most horror prefers to keep its dark forces non-denominational and vague, or else reduce them to a mere lunatic, wild beast, monster, demon or cult. Not so here: this film totally inhabits the middle ages religious mindset, which is as powerfully alien to most modern people as the lost civilisations of Lovecraftian fiction. My religious lecturers were keen to stress that a modern person simply cannot imagine what religious belief - true middle ages religious belief - is like. We live in a post-belief world. Even if you can find faith, you know it can be lost; you know it's one faith of several; you know millions of people don't believe in anything, and billions believe in something different. You know your faith is not absolute or given credence by society at large. The premodern theist did not know they were a theist. To them (my lecturers would stress) God was as real as the rising sun, the field of crops and the village hall; God inhabited their reality, unquestioned, ever-present, more valid than money or common law.

And so did Satan.

The abject terror of really, actually believing in Satan is, again, something we 21st-century chin-strokers cannot fathom. When we go into the wilderness, we pack bear spray and mosquito repellent and identify the vicinity by satellite; when the Pilgrims went into the wilderness, there was the illuminated island of their known reality, and there was the capital-W Wild of Jack London novels, the oppressive, uncharted forests and hills, poised to swallow them up and rot their remains without so much as a noise. Beyond their campfires there were bears, wolves and cougars but there was also Satan; the amalgamation of all external and internal fears. Once you're beyond the protection of your tribe, with their rifles and torches and walls, what do you do if one of your tiny band starts killing people and you don't know who it is? (c.f. The Thing.) What do you do if wild beasts begin acting strangely and encroaching upon your group? (c.f. The Edge.) What if aliens begin to stalk you from the shadows, studying and hunting you? What if the values you brought with you begin to break down, and immorality, conflict and treachery begin to pit you against one another?

The film constantly presses the modern viewer to take seriously a middle-ages addition to this list which would have been paramount to the Pilgrims, even if it's borderline comical to us. What if Satan reaches out to extinguish the flame of your faith, whispers to someone in your group, and starts to take away everything you have?

I suppose a lot of horror films (The Ring, The Grudge, It Follows, etc. etc. etc.) deal with a supernatural threat manifested as part of reality, stalking the characters. But The Witch is different in that the supernatural threat is presented as simultaneously outside and inside the family group. It is never entirely clear whether Satan is waiting in the trees beyond the meadow, or waiting in the hearts of the family members - which, of course, is exactly the point. That is how a middle ages Christian would have conceived of and experienced the threat of Satan - as both a real, external threat, manifested in beasts, outsiders, natural forces and so on, and as a heart of darkness in themselves, a kernel of self-loathing and shame threatening to rear up and derail their lives if they dropped their guard.

Actually, The Babadook does some of the same stuff. But for my money, The Witch does it better. Also the acting is amazing, I mean you really feel the religious terror of the characters at the mere idea of Satan's presence or invocation. Everything else: it looks really nice, some great low light cinematography; the 17th-century period dialogue is so good a number of linguistics nerds mentioned it on Youtube, but the audio mixing is so bad on 2-channel that you'll need subtitles on half the time; and don't watch it at all if you're easily disturbed by themes of child endangerment or children coming to harm. I'm bad with that stuff. Around the 1 hour mark I realised I was really not emotionally equipped to weather this film, but by then I was too captivated to stop, so now I'm just emotionally scarred.

edit - oh, this person on Youtube wrote a way better analysis of the film's merits than mine, if you don't mind copious spoilers (it is a very good analysis):



Tenet

A total disappointment for me, I'm surprised the reviews are so good. Superficially it bears comparisons to Inception, because it's a puzzle-box plot built around a clever mind-bending gimmick, but unlike Inception, it doesn't have any depth or quality beyond that puzzle-box plot. Amazingly little character development or emotional content, no arcs, very little subtext to speak of. Nolan had one really fascinating idea - what if there were a sort of war in the future whose munitions included the means to reverse time's flow for specific objects and people? This sets the ground for a kind of cold war concept, with dead drops, double agents, secret signals, and so on, except instead of fighting across territorial borders, the war is fought between the present and the unknown future.

A very cool idea, and the plot works fine for that, but there's nothing else. The dialogue is all really badly edited, really quickly edited - you could do an entire essay breaking down how bad the editing of the non-action scenes is. I suspect this was a cinematic-cut situation, where they needed to bring down the runtime, but it doesn't explain why the cuts are so poorly done, with half the dialogue spoken off-screen and much of it clearly dubbed in post. The conversations are so heavy with exposition and so fast that you feel like you're watching one of those exam crunch revision episodes where they summarise Ancient Egypt in 180 seconds. Much of the film's key information is delivered once in a single visual detail or line of dialogue, and if you miss it, entire portions of the film will make much less sense.

All the reviews are talking about the plot. Is it plausible? Did it make sense? Are there paradoxes? Is it a clever new version of time travel fiction? Did we miss any easter eggs?

To quote Dan Olson, this approach "treats plot as a problem to be unpacked and solved". The reviews make very little mention of the characters, the human story in the film, because it's underdeveloped and ****. The protagonist doesn't even have a name, let alone a backstory or any kind of arc. There are hardly any supporting characters - most of the film is literally 4 people, and one of them is Elizabeth Debicki playing the exact same character she played in The Night Manager, in exactly the same situation. It's such a heavy case of typecasting it almost feels malicious, because she does actually have range.

Once you strip away the nice visuals, the impressive special effects, the time travel shenanigans and so on, what this film most closely resembles is actually the Jason Statham film The Transporter. Generic tough guy gets in lots of gun fights and car chases and explosions on way to solve plot macguffin and save damsel in distress from evil thug. That's it. That's the film. It has no higher aspirations. Inception got some flak for being "just a heist film" underneath its fancy clothing, but I reject that accusation: it had a lot of emotional weight, dealt with some very painful and serious themes. Cobb's backstory and its bittersweet resolution in the ambiguous ending are charged with pathos, so memorable and tragic that I still remember it in detail. Tenet's main character, by contrast, has the backstory of: "man is good at fighting and shooting", and the events of the film basically establish that he is still good at fighting and shooting, and will probably continue to fight and shoot.

Totally overrated. Also, slight nit-pick but the visual style of the action scenes is really bland and bloodless; it has the look of a Battlefield machinima. Everything is monochrome, faceless soldiers running around throwing grenades and getting knocked about by rubble. All the violence is totally bloodless, to such an extent that it becomes quite jarring - like they wanted to make a Call of Duty cinematic, but had to keep it PG13. Video game comparisons are unavoidable, because that's what the action scenes look like. In the film's opening sequence, a frantic gunfight takes place amongst the gassed-unconscious audience of an opera show; logically, many of the audience members must have been hit by stray bullets, but the film takes pains to avoid showing any of them being injured; I guess the terrorists/evil bad guys were really careful to avoid them while shooting wildly at the other guys. It felt slightly farcical.

Anyway, that's not why the film falls flat for me. It falls flat because it has no soul at all, it isn't trying to make you feel anything or care about any characters, it's just in love with how clever its own Rube-Goldberg Machine of a script is. I don't know what's going on with Nolan these days, he seems to have followed the Tarantino arc where you get so successful that you can basically make anything and have it shown, so you stop making good films and start making films you just want to make for your own amusement.

edit - Oh, but! I have to say, Kenneth Branagh is astoundingly good in this, I literally didn't recognise him. His accent, demeanour, physical acting and presence are something else. Watch this, then pull up a scene from Harry Potter 2, then ask yourself why Branagh isn't more famous, because his performance is miraculous.

Michael Caine's single scene in this film, on the other hand, will go down in history as the most pointless 'technically on the cast list' appearance by any major actor, ever. He literally just tells the protagonist "yeah, I heard about that fake painting. You need to go speak to so-and-so about it. Now leave me alone to eat my lunch." But with like 80 lines of dialogue fired between the two characters inside of 3 minutes, most of them spoken while you're looking at the back of the actor's head. 10/10 amazing film-making

 

Just rewatched "The Lost Boys" with the missus for like the 5th time since it was released. It's still a great movie, but this time around I noticed how much they say say his name (Michael) throughout the whole movie, it started to get a bit annoying.

 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Needs re-editing and approximately 2 hours 18 minutes removing.

Just gone to watch more paint dry.

 

Speaking of watching paint dry, Joker: Folie a deux.
God that was awfully dull.

Such a disappointment, I loved the first one.

 

Damn that's a shame, because I loved the first and was really looking forward to the second.

 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - messy/10

4 sub plots? really? and at least two of those could have been pruned. overall it felt very messy with Michael Keaton not getting nearly enough screentime imo, if your really bored then i suppose it'll scratch an itch but I wouldnt do a repeat viewing.

 

Speak No Evil 2024- Excellent performances all round and a very tense movie. 9/10 and compelled me to watch the 2022 Danish original next.