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

Ah, no - I meant the films in the cinema, actually. They just don't seem to be as good as at home, somehow. When the streaming is bad, that's fine (or at least understandably acceptable) because I just chalk it up to either my network or the infrastructure, back to and including the streamer. As luck would have it, I don't often get toooo bad quality for my streams, sometimes blocky blackness, but it doesn't last too long.

I just thought cinema films were all recorded/shown in 4K RED-vision super-dynamic HDR Retina format these days, now it's been invented, but it looks more like VHS where I go.

 

Iron Lung (cinema) - ??/10
I didn't get the ending. Starting to think either I'm a bit thick or I'm really picking the wrong films lately. I had to look it up and then wondered if what had been written was about the same film. Then my second thought was that even if I had understood the ending, it would have been crap and made no sense anyway. Which is a shame, because it was intriguing up to that point. One for video, if it makes it that far. I wouldn't promote it up the watchlist though.

Zootropolis 2 (cinema) - little 'un thought it was great/10
This one I understood, at least (although it was touch and go because I wasn't giving it my full attention and was thinking about other stuff. Probably still trying to work out Iron Lung). The main thing is the kid thought it was great. She's almost eleven, so judge the rating for yourself that way. I'd say it's probably not one for much older than that, to be fair.

 

Predator: Badlands (Disney+) What Gunny Said/10
If you're not invested, fkg leave it alone and play a game instead. That's what we're here for. Christ, even some of the franchise games are better than this pile of spineless entrails (see what I did there?).

I ventured that this might be safe for my ten year-old. I was wrong. This would scar her for life that a gritty, gutsy dismemberment-by-alien-hunter franchise could be so badly mauled. If I'd espoused this film on the basis it's Predator-related, our relationship could have been severely damaged. Watching this first, you would never watch the original, it's THAT bad.

Tron:Ares (Disney+) Shiny and vacant/10
On the face of it, made by the same team as Badlands and most of the other cack I've seen over the last six months. There was no point at all to this remix of Tron 2.0 other than to show more graphics, which a) don't fit with the rest of the real film world and b) don't look any better than 2.0 really. My shed could have carried this film in less wooden a manner than some of the big names signed up to it; the plot is the same as all other Tron films, give or take; there is not one character to care about; and every cliché they could shoehorn in shamefully has been.

Avoid like a digital (or any form of) virus.

 

All this warning off of Badlands is having the perverse outcome of making me want to watch it, just to find out exactly how bad it is...

edit - the cinemas looking pants thing is a thing, it just varies a lot by individual screen. Even within one medium sized family-run business in my area, across two venues and between screens within them, the quality varies tremendously. I imagine every part has an effect: the screen, the rig, the lenses, the operator (I had one that was slightly out of focus for 10 minutes until somebody complained and the guy woke up and refocused it). There's one screen in our nearest cinema that we simply won't watch films on; we'll wait 'til they drop down to the smaller screen, because it looks better.

I feel for them, really, because cinemas are bleeding to death; now isn't the time to be investing in upgrades. But that's the nature of a death spiral. People will trail away because their TV looks better than the cinema; the cinema won't risk investing in upgrades that would make them competitive, because people are trailing away.

 

This is interesting - and good to know someone else sees this as well. I know nothing of what's involved with all these "moving parts" (ha!) but it just strikes me that you set the setup up (?) for the current visual standard and that just sticks around until the next improvement ie. go for full HD 1080 screens/lenses/projectors/whatever until 4K comes along, then do a one-off upgrade (which should have been done years ago) for 4K, then MAYBE if you have the budget and the blockbuster support is there, head off 8K early or go IMAX, 4DX etc..

There are also other "external" factors as well, like health and safety - one of the screens at our place (and I think it is only one of them, but could also be the other "mirrored" one in the other run of screens across the corridor, if that makes sense) has these REALLY FKG ANNOYING exit lights or the red lights from the floor or something, that are so close/bright/badly positioned/whatever that all they do is reflect off the screen. You have no chance of watching anything with a remotely dingy scene in these screens, because you just see red. In both senses.

The other thing with the decline of the cinema is the quality of tat being pushed out to it of late. To me, cinema is blockbusters. Things that are meant to be seen as spectacles, sound blasting you, big action. **** that would be difficult to replicate or the experience different at home. Looking back at some of the films I've seen over the last year or so and just trying to come up with some good examples of what I would go and see for an experience (some of which are out of whack anachronistically), versus things that are not big screen experiences (note: despite them possibly being great films), things wot I reckon are:

Big screen winners for spectacle and enjoyment
Star Wars - esp Rogue One cos it's the best
James Bond (newer ones, but not the very last one)
F1 (but film was ooookay)
Days of Thunder (in same vein as above)
Maverick
Valerian and the really long film name
Avatar (I suppose, grudgingly) - although I've only seen number one and will not watch the others at cost in the cinema. They're on Disney anyway

Big screen fails - set up to be "big screen efforts" but just fail, both as films and experiences
Predator: Badlands
Tron: Ares

- Now these last two I did not see at the cinema, but they're the sort that are designed to entice you to the cinema. I did have them booked but by golly I'm glad I didn't bother. I would concede the point that Tron might have looked good on the big screen, despite being a diabolical film, but I am struggling to separate those two factors so am not the best critic here, especially if I didn't see it on the big screen
​

Home cinema
Rental Family
Rocky Horror (unless it's a "let's everyone get dressed up and make a thing of it, maybe a party of sorts at the venue itself" affair)
Primate
The Horror One With The Dog as Hero
Shady Pines (or something, where the sister went missing years ago in a small town)
Shelter (but it's crap anyway)
Iron Lung (confusingly bad and could actually be watched on your phone, in four sittings, on the way to and from work on the train)
Pillion

Although there is very much a stigma attached to "straight to video" releases, I really think with the advent and take-up of streaming, some of these might be better off heading straight there. Save the budget. You're not going to get a big spectacle release with some of these and there really isn't as much of that stigma attached to "Netflix Originals" or [insert equivalent other platform here] any more, since everyone streams.

Jesus. That was a long and rambling post for this time of morning.

Apologies.

 

This is the "old boys talk mainly to themselves and their pints about the decline of cinema" thread, you have nothing to apologise for.

Another oddity I've noticed lately is a kind of loudness war. Cinemas are now so incredibly loud that several people I know wear earplugs. I'm sure this is new.

The films that gave me that proper 'big screen' wow factor were Star Wars prequels (scripts aside these films are visually breathtaking), Gravity, Dune, 1917, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. 1917 in particular was such a hypnotically immersive experience that it seemed to change my perspective on WW1:as a real lived historical event, making it present in my mind in a way years of school and countless moving poems and novels just couldn't.

****, I need to watch 1917 again.

Tonight, though: Murder On The Orient Express (2017)

This was great. Kenneth Branagh was the only good thing about Tenet, the only good thing about Harry Potter 2, and one of the best things about Blue Eye Samurai. He also directed Thor, achieving the impossible both by making that IP genuinely good and by finding a completely novel tone in the already overcrowded comic adaptation space. The man is a complete chameleon, a triple threat, a true professional. He's the only thing that could have hoped to live up to the iconic David Suchet Orient Express.

This one looks beautiful and has flair. He seems to like verticality in his camera work, which I (a vertigo sufferer)'do not, but he uses it to serve the story in neat ways. The visual effects are very good, CGI not always seamless but pretty close.

The story is an absolute belter and he knew better than to mess with it. You don't go to see Orient expecting something new and daring, because why fix what's already perfect? So no surprises. But there is room to vary the portrayals subtly, and he does. His Poirot is slightly different, different enough to step out of Suchet's LONG shadow and feel like an original piece of sincere acting work. His accent isn't as good but it's bloody close, and to be fair, Suchet's accent was something of a spooky trick, a Belgian accent so authentic I (who spent every summer of my childhood in France) thought he was actually French or Belgian. Branagh isn't on that level but it's still really good.

He made his Poirot a bit strong and physically adept, though - reminiscent of the weird direction of Robert Downey Jr's Holmes. I don't get it. The strength of these men is their minds; that strength is emphasised by their not needing to resort to violence. Having them scrap and use force undermines that.

Still, though, excellent. The rest of the cast, too. They are so...famous. It's almost funny seeing loads of big names in an ensemble cast, in roles that have one or two lines of dialogue each. But no miscastings.

 

It's true, I rarely go to the cinema any more.

But I have this morning booked tickets for Project Hail Mary at our local Everyman cinema. I've read the book and listened to the audio book at least half a dozen times, and it's a fantastic story. Despite the sci-fi trappings, and Andy Weir's scientific accuracy*, at its core it's a human story. I was initially a bit... miffed... with some of the reveals in the trailers, but I'm coming around.

I'm looking forward to it, but I'm quite apprehensive at the same time. Ridley Scott absolutely knocked it out of the park with The Martian, so let's see how Phil Lord & Christopher Miller handle Project Hail Mary.

*Weir himself admitted that the one place he 'fudged' things was right down at the level of quantum physics. It's not really a core plot point, it's only there to provide nerds like you & me with a vaguely plausible-sounding explanation. So...yeah... don't let that whole thing with neutrinos and 'super cross-sectionality' ruin your suspension of disbelief...

 

I think we'll be going to see it at the cinema.
I wanted a YT short this morning saying that I should really rad the book first.
As you've partaken so many times, I'll take that as a second recommendation!

 

This is one of the few times I’m going to suggest listening to the audiobook instead. The voice actor did a fantastic job with it. Sadly it’s an Audible exclusive, it’s not available anywhere else.

Well… of course… it’s available via torrents and usenet indexers/downloaders, but the only way to “pay” for it is with Audible .

 

Nitpicking, but in the original serials/books Holmes is a coke snorting, chain smoking lunatic 'of great strength' who goes boxing for fun and bashes several ne'er do wells into submission along the way. It even gets remarked upon that Holmes could have been a prize fighter if he had had the interest. The Downey jr portrayal is probably the closest to the books of any film/TV adaptation.

 

Must say, although I agree with the "doesn't/shouldn't need to use his brawn because he's the brains" side, I do think he's the sort of guy that might seek out the mystic enlightenment of the "elusive Eastern arts" as they probably were around that time, not least of all on his travels (assuming he did indeed travel as a result of wanting to feed his intellect - I haven't read the books).

Plus the whole kung fu thing (and from personal experience) also seems to speak to his avoidance of conflict/most efficient route to success/use the enemy's own moves against them/out-think the situation thing that they seem to have imprinted on him in the films. I can believe that angle as a character more than I can if it were The Rock or Arnie (Arnie! Imagine! ).

 

The iron mask.. or Tayna pechati Drakona.. it was very much a WTF did a just watch. I only looked it up as I wanted a Jackie Chan film. But oh my god was it bad. It was beyond cheese and poor acting to a whole new level.

 

I think I might have this on DVD - £2 from HMV or something. Not sure if I've ever even watched it, but your review has placed it firmly in the "one for comedy film night" camp. If you can confirm it has that fantastic out of sync Doritos-style dubbing track then I'm sold.

doritos - bruce lee

 

Oh it's a Russian film and the audio felt off the entire time, like a English dub on a English film it was uncanny valley kind of film. But the Arnie and Jackie scenes where beyond cringe. It felt like the film had been translated through Google the jokes never landed.

 

The Fall Guy: I liked it /10

A weird hybrid of romcom and action that was good humoured throughout. Not trying to be anything other than a bit of fun and it was nice to see the actors letting their hair down and chilling out. Some pretty amazing stunts too!

I would watch Metal Storm if it was made...

 

War Machine: Stellar/10

Battleship is a loud and brainless popcorn nomming guilty pleasure of mine, War machine is a more violent Battleship but with grunts.

perfect.

 

Yeah, fair shout, I know on paper it's a fit, the portrayal just felt too...rough? I never got from the books what Downey was doing. He played it like a sort of thrill-seeking nihilistic vagabond alcoholic, more like a man who'd try to sell you a dog at the end of a night out than a man to straighten his tie after winning fisticuffs over an insult. It's that cultured Victorian vibe that I think he was missing. Jeremy Brett got the demeanour down better, I think - less homeless pirate, more refined gentleman with a keen, restless edge.

Also true. It works, I think I'm just biased because I've so much affection for Suchet's Poirot. The more I rewatch Suchet, the more I suspect his interpretation is quite soft and interpretive. From wikipedia:

Which makes me wonder how much firmer and less likeable he may be in the books. I have neither read them. I might try, I think I've got The Big Four lying around somewhere.

Today, though,
K-Pop Demon Hunters
This is very much a kids' film, which put me off on my first attempt because the humour and acting are so juvenile, especially in the first act. Like wow. My generation all have kids around 4-8yrs now so this is something they end up watching with their kids; like a lot of the Disney films, it's got broader appeal buried in there which elevates it and gives the parents something to enjoy. But it's not for adults. Watching it without kids is a weird vibe.

Once you get past that, though, you start to really notice things, like how the CGI is astonishingly high quality and the art style is very original and odd. I first encountered it via Corridor Crew, where one of the directors guest featured and talked about how they were inspired by Shrek 2 in their youth, how that film pushed boundaries visually and in its writing, doing things that nobody had thought an animated film could do. You can see it here. KDH blends little visual tropes from daytime animé with heavier photorealistic imagery from Asian cinema and lands somewhere between Bleach, Tron and a black-and-white war movie in its aesthetics. It's very jumbled and surreal, but somehow works fine once you abandon preconceptions and just accept it for whatever it is.

Writing-wise, there are familiar elements there - West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet loom, as a hot young antihero and a hot young starlet from utterly opposed rival gangs make puppy eyes at each other and speculate about the validity of their strife, to the horror and fear of their musical comrades. But it's off in a slightly different direction to those, and pulls further and further from that narrative as the film progresses. It's doggedly determined not to be a love story, or a story about boys at all, which is interesting. The writers clearly have no prejudices, or have worked very hard to compensate for them, so why are there exactly three named male characters in the entire affair, one a one-dimensional stooge, one a faceless supervillain and the other a tortured love interest whose main purpose is to be a foil for the female lead? It's like the gender roles of a 1970s Western, but flipped.

Is it because somewhere along the way, somebody worked out that the biggest demographic for this film would be girls aged 5-9, and that those kids think boys are boring, dumb and icky? We're baited into expecting West Side Story in the first half, and given none of it in the second. I guess it's fine, but I thought we were moving beyond the era of "this is a girls film"/"this is a boys film" programming. It is what it is, and it's self-consciously a film "for girls".

Anyway, all this is wrapped up in a modern fantasy story about a world of demons parasitizing the world of the living, and plucky young women intergenerationally trained and destined to destroy demons and covertly hold back the evil tide with melee weapons. Have you seen Buffy? I've seen Buffy. I think the directors of K-Pop Demon Hunters have seen Buffy.

Like Buffy, this all works fine for a juvenile audience but gets more uncomfortable the older you are, because the ethics and metaphysics of it are weird. Our accumulated expectation is that a hero wielding a sword will mow down legions of evil enemies. It's an expectation leveraging millions of years of evolution (genocide being the natural world's oldest and most mathematically logical crime) and, more recently, many generations of feudal and colonial otherizing; the infidels, the savages, the natives, the invaders, the bandits. The other tribe. But to a modern multicultural mind it's getting harder and harder to parse without creating serious discomfort. It's fascinating to see how modern writers and directors have worked around this discomfort: android armies, clone armies, animal armies, evil armies, undead armies. How can we make the enemy tribe acceptable targets, now that the average person's circle of compassion automatically includes all humanoids and a lot of animals as well?

Buffy and KDH both handle this the same way, by invoking Christian metaphysics about souls. A soul is something that a normal person in the upstairs world has, which makes them a sensate, compassionate and potentially good person; the downstairs world is populated entirely by creatures or people who don't have souls and therefore aren't capable of compassion and are constitutionally evil. To make things extra-clear, the downstairs people feed on the upstairs people specifically because the latter have souls. Acceptable targets! Right? Right?

Both works immediately raise difficult questions by doing the irresistible: presenting a downstairs character who, through some variation of the world's internal logic, has a soul, or otherwise resembles an upstairs person. They seem capable of good thoughts and compassion. Uh-oh.

KDH deals with this tension head-on. The lead protagonist is deeply disturbed and begins questioning everything after encountering ensouled-demon hottie antihero. What if all demons are prisoners of the evil supervillain? What if they all have potential personhood? Uh-oh!

But thereafter, the entire thought experiment is dropped like a wet rag. All other demons besides hottie antihero are tacitly understood to just be unthinking, dumb, angry killing parasites. Job done. Hottie antihero gets his place in the story, but nobody else, and the overarching goal of sealing off the downstairs world and killing demons remains the overarching goal.

Buffy had the same problem and did even less to confront it, delving into torturous moral depths with the agony and confusion of Spike and Angel's characters but then refusing to elaborate on the metaphysics or ethics of it at all, and by close of curtains, all vampires and demons are still just evil acceptable targets, no need to think about this any further.

I'm sure a normal reviewer would have a lot of normal things to say about KDH, like all the artistic nods to other works and the voice acting and the singing and the incredible animation and choreography, but hey, if you ask a dog to fetch your paper, your paper will have tooth marks in it, and I'm a philosophy graduate, and this **** is philosophically weird. I'm not being a cloudshape reading weirdo here - these questions are explicitly invited by the text, and provide the bulk of the intrigue and tension in the middle act. They're half of the fun. But then in the third act the directors remember they're making a film for 9-year-olds and decide not to have a moral crisis about the sentience of downstairs people, and I get it. But boy howdy, when somebody finally makes a fantasy work that acknowledges the sentience of the downstairs people, and identifies the heroes' actions in act 1 as actual genocide, I'll be there for that screening.

 

Ah, that makes a lot of sense…

 

You think just anyone can produce this amount of unrequested verbiage?!

 

Predator Badlands: Average/10

It's not bad, it's not great, it's average. General pop corn viewing with far too many "convenient" plot points and fight scenes to make it a compelling story. The world building was pretty decent, visuals interesting and acting is solid but nothing exceptional in any. A perfectly acceptable way to kill 2 hours.