What have you watched recently: Electric Boogaloo

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Wild Bill

Why on earth was I even watching this? I guess there was nothing else on. It's one of those films that really make you think "I could do that." and by "that" I mean take a shed load of someone else's money ($30 million according to imdb) and piss it up against a wall.
It's supposed to be a biopic of Wild Bill Hickock but it's just a mess. It starts with about 10 minutes of various clips of Bill randomly getting into fights and killing lots of people. Then it jumps 10 years and he's in Deadwood and David Arquette wants to kill him and there's some opium induced dreams, or flashbacks or visions, no idea. The acting is terrible, there is no clear plot line, the editing and direction are non existent, it really seems like Jeff Bridges is just spouting random stuff and then shooting someone. Incredible that this ever saw the light of day.

johnny_ultimate

La Belle et la Bête - another gorgeous restoration of a gothic classic reaching the IFI thanks to BFI's thorough Gothic retrospective. This is Jean Cocteau's captivating 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast. It's easily one of the most memorable cinematic fairy tales of them all. The surreal imagery is utterly haunting - the Beast's residence with its mysterious arm candelabra and living but eerily silent statues is just equal parts magical and creepy, stellar production design and cinematography allowing light to seep in in extraordinary monochrome. The Beast is another astonishing creation, that make-up / costume job still looking extraordinary many decades later. The story itself is a loyal adaptation of the original story, but brought to live by committed performances and Cocteau's incredibly rich direction (assisted, it should be said, by a team of wonderful artisans). Certainly there were times in the second half when it felt like it lost a bit of steam - Belle's return to her village, for example, feels over-extended - but it pulls it together for an evocative, poetic ending (happy, maybe, but also very weird). At the very start of the film Cocteau breaks the fourth wall to urge us to watch the film with a childlike, non-cynical eye, and just take the story for what it is. He's underselling the complexity of the film - plenty of Freudian and metaphorical undertones, if you care to look - but it's an invitation worth accepting.

The Missing Picture - I don't know if the recent resurgence in formally inventive documentaries could be considered a genuine trend, but damn is it welcome. Here, Rithy Panh combines voiceover, archival footage and - most unusually - clay dioramas to recount his memories of his experiences as a young man forced to work in the Cambodian 'killing fields'.

On one hand, it's a stark, emotional and often quite devastating firsthand account of a social revolution gone terribly, terribly wrong - a deeply personal story that Panh has clearly struggled to tell. But what makes the film so special is the themes and concepts Panh explores through his offbeat stylistic choices. One of the more fascinating ideas that develops as the film plays out is how the archive footage that exists is extremely limited in its abilities to reflect this era of Cambodian history. Mostly filmed by camera people 'loyal' to the Khmer Rouge regime, the footage - used liberally here - sticks to the party line, betraying the reality of everyday life to insist on the communist ideology so tragically distorted by the victorious, cruel revolutionaries. Panh uses static clay figures as a startling contrast to this, articulately describing the plight of those forced into repetitive labour and desperate conditions: trying, in a small way, to reflect the victims, whose experiences were not captured in photographs or newsreels. It's a film that teaches us to actively distrust the images we're fed, and Panh frequently reflects on the nature of the cinematic image itself: its power, its abuse, its potential. The Missing Picture, for all its grand ponderings, is very much a fascinating and emotive piece of filmmaking itself: an inventive and deeply individual way for the director to confront his troubling, complex memories.

Marty McFly

Fire with Fire: Well if ever there was further proof that Bruce Willis doesn't care less anymore it's this film.

Saw the cast including Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis and Josh Duhamel and a lot of other well recognised faces and figured sure it can't be that bad.

Boy was I wrong alarm bells first went off after a few minutes and Vinnie Jones appeared on screen and from there it just got worse a film with a terrible plot horrible visuals and full of cliches.

It actually reminded me a lot of one of those terrible WWE films in every way.

Siosleis

Just watched Battle Royale(original) with the OH who won't watch anything subtitled.I sold it to him by saying it was the original hunger games and also not all subtitled films are bad films. He was glued.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

"the original hunger games"

kinda want to have a long soapy bath now

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

The Iron Giant

Been wanting to watch this for a long time. It was all going fine, nothing super special and then POW! Right in the feels!

It's a really lovely simple story and the "old fashioned" animation is lovely to see. There's a real feeling of nostalgia about it too, I'm not sure what exactly it makes me nostalgic for but I loved it never the less. The part where

The Giant thinks Hogarth is dead, and then when he flies into the missile

had me an emotional mess.

MilanPan!c

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

The Iron Giant

Been wanting to watch this for a long time. It was all going fine, nothing super special and then POW! Right in the feels!

It's a really lovely simple story and the "old fashioned" animation is lovely to see. There's a real feeling of nostalgia about it too, I'm not sure what exactly it makes me nostalgic for but I loved it never the less. The part where

The Giant thinks Hogarth is dead, and then when he flies into the missile

had me an emotional mess.

One of the best animated movies, ever.

Directed by Brad Bird, and really the quality he brings to the project is obvious (his AVERAGE RT score is 96%).

It's a great shame that the marketing of the movie was so botched and it was basically a flop.

But at least we have the movie.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

MilanPan!c wrote: »

One of the best animated movies, ever.

Directed by Brad Bird, and really the quality he brings to the project is obvious (his AVERAGE RT score is 96%).

It's a great shame that the marketing of the movie was so botched and it was basically a flop.

But at least we have the movie.

Yeah, I'd definitely put it on a par with How To Train Your Dragon. By no means a definitive rating system there, just personal opinion. Both films have real heart without being over sentimental, they have a really entertaining story and neither goes down that route of having the odd "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" jokes for the grown ups and yet still manage to be appealing to an adult audience.

Real shame it wasn't a bigger success.

Bipolar Joe

The Iron Giant makes me cry everytime. "Superman....."

Kick Ass 2

Fairly entertaining. Much like the first one, I didn't really find any of the funny bits very funny. I did crack a smile when the couple kissed at the final showdown, and the bit where Hit Girl got stabby with the glass was damn well done and super stylish. Most of the fight scenes were great, but the bit with the cops at Night Bitch's place was drawn out, and it didn't even go on for that long.

I really thought Carrey would have a much, MUCH bigger part in it, considering his part was the talk of the town despite not doing any promotion for it. With Cage not being in it, it would have been nice to have another actor given the chance to go as batshit crazy as he does.

I really like the graphic novels, but the movies have left me pretty flat. Not bad, but still not something I'd recommend to people for a laugh. If you want something funny, 6 / 10, if you want mental fight scenes (Of which there wasn't much) 8 / 10.

MilanPan!c

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Yeah, I'd definitely put it on a par with How To Train Your Dragon. By no means a definitive rating system there, just personal opinion. Both films have real heart without being over sentimental, they have a really entertaining story and neither goes down that route of having the odd "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" jokes for the grown ups and yet still manage to be appealing to an adult audience.

Real shame it wasn't a bigger success.

WB was basically trying to figure out if it wanted to be in the animation biz, having released a total disaster/flop before IG, and the chaos had two effects:

- BB was left alone to make his movie, as the power structure in WB didn't have the wherewithal to pay attention to him

- There was a hugely disastrous roll out/PR push...

So the same cause both allowed it to be great and kept it from succeeding...



Ah poor HogHug.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

MilanPan!c wrote: »

WB was basically trying to figure out if it wanted to be in the animation biz, having released a total disaster/flop before IG, and the chaos had two effects:

What was the huge flop they released?

MilanPan!c

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

What was the huge flop they released?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Camelot
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120800/

They (apparently) lost at least 40M on it.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

Cannibal the Musical.

the first movie by the two lads behind south park/team america/orgazmo etcetc. it looks like a cheap student movie but it's hilarious. the comic genius running through south park and everything they've done since then is all over this film.
It's the story of alfred packer, an american gold rush mining fellow (i know there's a word for them) who led an expedition from utah to colorado territory but ended up being accused of murder and cannibalism when only he arrived months later. And it's a musical. Fantastic.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

MilanPan!c wrote: »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Camelot
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120800/

They (apparently) lost at least 40M on it.

Wow, it doesn't even sound familiar to me.

MilanPan!c

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Wow, it doesn't even sound familiar to me.

Check the cast as well! Full of big names.

Complete disaster for WB (even if the movie is at worst extremely m'eh).

hefferboi

Just finished watching 12 Years a Slave. Hard to put into words tbh. I've watched a lot of great movies recently and I thought Rush was the movie of the year before I watched this. It blows everything out of the water imo. Everything was perfect. The score, the screenplay, the story but most of all the performances from the whole cast, especially the lead actor, Fassbender and the lead female. It was tough viewing in parts but it had to be. I thought I was going to have to turn it off before the end or I'd start bawling. I've been close to crying before, like most people, but this was genuinely the first time I actually shed a tear.

Everybody needs to watch this.

10/10

Mizu_Ger

2 Guns:
Better than I was expecting! Non-stop action, some nice twist and turns throughout, but the finale is pretty standard. Washington and Wahlberg are hardly stretched, but it all works well together. Can't remember the last time I saw Bill Paxton in a film!

The Colony:
Haven't seen Bill Paxton for ages and them I see him in 2 films in a week. This is a decent B-movie that's mixes half a dozen other films at least (The Thing, 30 Days of Night....). Effects are quite good and the action keeps going. There was some almost interesting drama on the leadership of the colony, but anything along those lines was thrown out in favour of the action.

The Magician:
Had been waiting ages to watch this one. A very atmospheric, striking (in B&W) almost play-like film. Max von Sydow playing a tormented artist seems to be doing a test for his Ming the Merciless look! I initially thought this would be along the lines of Being There, with everyone seeing something different in his (mute) character, but the performances and finale point towards the power of the cinema on the audience. The finale was particularly satisfying.

The Innocents:
Another one to tick off my watch list. I knew nothing except it was to do with a haunted house, but it was a surprisingly disturbing tale. Very heavy atmosphere with a mystery that doesn't play out the easy you might expect. Quite dark thematically

with an ending that would be rare even today

. Definitely worth seeing.

Rambo First Blood:
Brilliant action film. Refreshing to see something with no CGI, real stunts and locations for a change. Stallone's return to 80's style action films come nowhere near this.

MJ23

Mud - A very enjoyable watch. MMC is very good when he's not in a chick flick.

MilanPan!c

MJ23 wrote: »

Mud - A very enjoyable watch. MMC is very good when he's not in a chick flick.

The little brother of a childhood friend directed that. Funny. His big brother, my friend, is a successful major label musician.

Their dad was a furniture salesman.

Funny old world.

maguic24

Christmas Movie Binge:

The Proposal
I do not like Rom Coms. My little sister loves them, so we came to a compromise. I watched a rom com with her and she'd watch a psych thriller with me. It's a romantic comedy where an over-bearing boss coerces her assistant into marrying her. I thought the chemistry between the 2 main characters was lacking/non-existent. I'd give it a 3/10 but I personally do not like romantic comedies so perhaps that's a bit biased. :P I wasn't feeling it.

The Glasshouse
Psychological thriller. After their parents die, two children are sent to live with a couple who used to be their parents neighbours in the past. A few jumps here and there but a bit predictable. Also a few holes in the plot. I'd give it a 4/10.

The House down the street
Psychological thriller. A mother and her daughter move into a new house. There's a house next door where a little girl apparently murdered her parents and disappeared. The son still lives there. Not great. 4/10

The Cabin in the Woods
Horror/Comedy or Dark Comedy, it's more funny than anything else. It's starts of serious and then crazy **** starts happening. It's an enjoyable film. I was not expecting it to end the way it did! A bit long winded. I'd give it a 6/10

Grabbers
Sci-fi Comedy. Irish Humour. Set on an fictional Irish Island where alien sea monsters start attacking people. Was hilarious, I thought it would be god awful given the description but it was actually quite good! 8/10.

Magdalene Sisters
Drama based on Magdalene Laundries. Good film. 8/10

Supersize Me
Documentary. A guy goes on a McDonalds 3 meal a day diet for 30 days and looks at obesity in the United states. His health is monitored at the beginning and throughout his crazy diet regime. Good film! 8/10

WALL-E
Sci-fi kids film. A robot called WALL-E who was designed to deal with waste was left stranded on Earth when all the humans left for space because planet Earth could no longer support human life. It's a great film for kids. Good core message and I got a good few laughs out of it! 8/10.

Despicable me 2
I loved the first film and I loved this film. The minions simply make this film!! 10/10. I am a massive Despicable me fan. I think I have watched both the first and second film 4 times.

johnny_ultimate

Arbitrage - Wow, this film really left a sour taste, which TBH left me pretty surprised since I'd heard many positive things about it and had been meaning to check it out for quite a while. It starts off alright, albeit offering nothing new - a character study of a wealthy executive who it is slowly revealed is cooking the books. There's indicators its going to be an examination of the repercussions of the financial collapse. Then, around the half hour mark, something ridiculous happens, the film does a U-Turn into even more generic territory and transforms into utter muck. Director Nicholas Jarecki ups the stakes to a ludicrous degree, illustrating he has little to no respect for the audience's ability to get involved in a more subtle, down-to-earth story.

There's still a few curious hints of the moral ambiguity driving the main character (played capably enough by Richard Gere) but the plot is absolutely ludicrous, the characters shoddily written (Susan Sarandon's character is a non-entity until she turns into some sort of evil genius in the penultimate scene, for some reason) and the direction pretty terrible. It also looks downright ugly, any potentially cinematic cinematography drowned out by aggressive blanket lighting.

Maybe it caught me in a bad mood (I was in a pretty good mood when I started watching it ), but for whatever reason Arbitrage was a complete failure IMO, and a very unpleasant cinematic surprise.

Tipsy McSwagger

maguic24 wrote: »

Christmas Movie Binge:

The Proposal
I do not like Rom Coms. My little sister loves them, so we came to a compromise. I watched a rom com with her and she'd watch a psych thriller with me. It's a romantic comedy where an over-bearing boss coerces her assistant into marrying her. I thought the chemistry between the 2 main characters was lacking/non-existent. I'd give it a 3/10 but I personally do not like romantic comedies so perhaps that's a bit biased. :P I wasn't feeling it.

The Glasshouse
Psychological thriller. After their parents die, two children are sent to live with a couple who used to be their parents neighbours in the past. A few jumps here and there but a bit predictable. Also a few holes in the plot. I'd give it a 4/10.

The House down the street
Psychological thriller. A mother and her daughter move into a new house. There's a house next door where a little girl apparently murdered her parents and disappeared. The son still lives there. Not great. 4/10

The Cabin in the Woods
Horror/Comedy or Dark Comedy, it's more funny than anything else. It's starts of serious and then crazy **** starts happening. It's an enjoyable film. I was not expecting it to end the way it did! A bit long winded. I'd give it a 6/10

Grabbers
Sci-fi Comedy. Irish Humour. Set on an fictional Irish Island where alien sea monsters start attacking people. Was hilarious, I thought it would be god awful given the description but it was actually quite good! 8/10.

Magdalene Sisters
Drama based on Magdalene Laundries. Good film. 8/10

Supersize Me
Documentary. A guy goes on a McDonalds 3 meal a day diet for 30 days and looks at obesity in the United states. His health is monitored at the beginning and throughout his crazy diet regime. Good film! 8/10

WALL-E
Sci-fi kids film. A robot called WALL-E who was designed to deal with waste was left stranded on Earth when all the humans left for space because planet Earth could no longer support human life. It's a great film for kids. Good core message and I got a good few laughs out of it! 8/10.

Despicable me 2
I loved the first film and I loved this film. The minions simply make this film!! 10/10. I am a massive Despicable me fan. I think I have watched both the first and second film 4 times.

Wall-e is a masterpiece.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Jump

Irish/Northern Irish film. Set in Derry on New Years Eve it follows a few different characters as their stories slowly intertwine.
There was the bones of a half decent story here but it's a bit all over the place. The separate but intertwining stories thing is very hard to get right and it felt unnecessary here, as did the weird time jump thing. It worked to some effect at literally one point in the whole film, the rest of it was a bit of a mess. The tone is also all over the place. The gangster guy's henchmen seem to be played as comic relief but then the main girl is suicidal and apparently dealing with serious mental health issues. It feels like they're trying to do way too much in way to short a time and as a result get it all wrong. It looks nice though. I've a thing for night shoots and street lights. Loses points too for the array of accents on show, not a single Derry one as far as I could tell and the main actress wasn't even Irish, I don't think, she sounded okay for short sentences but when she got emotional there was no Northern accent at all. I'm fussy about accents.

Populaire

French film about a young girl who wants to become a secretary to break away from her mundane rural life. She gets hired at an insurance firm because the boss sees she's freakishly fast at typing and he wants to train her up to enter the national speed typing championships. Set in 1958 it's very stylish looking and it reminds me of that Down With Love film asthetically. It's a really ridiculous premise, are there really speed typing championships and would anyone actually care that much to dedicate a year of their lives to someone else so they could win it? Doesn't matter, it's all very charming and sweet and it works. Tad long maybe.

Judgement Day

Another YouTube round-up.

“The Running Man” (1987) Arnie makes yet another entertaining Sci-Fi movie. I’d seen this one before but it’s still hits the spot for outrageous escapism. 8/10

"The Dieppe Raid" (2001). History's Raiders series. A well put together TV documentary about the ill-fated British raid on the French port of Dieppe on the 19th August, 1942. In terms of losses to British forces, (over 60% of the force of 6,000 men killed, wounded or captured, plus more than 500 casualties sustained by the Royal Navy, along with the loss of more than 100 aircraft), it was a disaster but the lessons learned were put to good use in the D-Day landings in 1944. Worth watching.

“The Odd Man Out” (1947) – James Mason, Kathleen Ryan, Cyril Cusack, William Hartnell, Robert Newton, Dan O’Herlihy etc. Directed by Carol Reed who later went on to make “The Third Man” on a similar material theme – a hunted man in a post war city.

James Mason plays Johnny McQueen, the leader of an IRA gang who rob the payroll from a Belfast Mill. Things start to go wrong when they attempt to make their getaway, a mill employee is shot dead and Johnny is badly wounded. He becomes separated from the rest of his gang and spends the next hours on the run in the mean streets of Belfast as the police dragnet closes in. This film was made for black and white, and is an atmospheric tour-de-force of epic proportions! James Mason has little dialogue but he has rarely been better – apparently he considered the movie his best film role – and by the movie’s end even the most hardened soul would feel pity for Johnny.



Set against the backdrop of a dark, wet, muddy and snowy Belfast, complete with trolley buses and horse drawn hackneys, this movie oozes atmosphere in a way rarely seen. I’ll be buying a copy on DVD. 10/10

krudler

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Yeah, I'd definitely put it on a par with How To Train Your Dragon. By no means a definitive rating system there, just personal opinion. Both films have real heart without being over sentimental, they have a really entertaining story and neither goes down that route of having the odd "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" jokes for the grown ups and yet still manage to be appealing to an adult audience.

Real shame it wasn't a bigger success.

both The Iron Giant and HTTYD are in my top animated films of all time, HTTYD is worth watching just for the music, have listened to the score countless times.

MilanPan!c

krudler wrote: »

both The Iron Giant and HTTYD are in my top animated films of all time, HTTYD is worth watching just for the music, have listened to the score countless times.

I assume you've seen all the Miyazaki stuff as well...?

Mizu_Ger

The Call
Genuinely edge of the seat thriller for the first 2/3. Changes pace after that (kind of slows down a bit) into more standard thriller setups, but still keeps some decent tension. As with any of these thrillers you have to accept people doing stupid things for the sake of the plot, but this keeps that mostly for the last 1/3. The final scene was unintentionally funny. Had my wife and I both groaning! At 90 minutes it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

Walking with Dinosaurs
Two ways of looking at this one: the storyline and the effects. The story was very Disney-like, which was a bit annoying, but it's aimed at kids so forgivable. The effects were excellent. CGI Dinosaurs against real backdrops were seamless. The film is half educational with each dinosaur getting an introduction, pausing for some on screen text and voice over explanation (also, the dinosaurs' "lips" don't move with the dialogue). It's only 80 minutes long, but my 4 year old was a bit bored by the end. There are some dino fights in there but they are not too scary for young kids.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

krudler wrote: »

both The Iron Giant and HTTYD are in my top animated films of all time, HTTYD is worth watching just for the music, have listened to the score countless times.

Still annoyed that they lost the Oscar to The Social Network! :mad:

ButtersSuki

Saw a trailer last night for American Hustle on tv which pretty much only featured Jennifer Lawrence in it. That's somewhat misleading as she's not in the movie all that much compared to any of the other stars. Kinda weird as it's so good it doesn't need to focus on her performance to draw in the punters IMO.

Will post on my other viewings later.

hefferboi

ButtersSuki wrote: »

Saw a trailer last night for American Hustle on tv which pretty much only featured Jennifer Lawrence in it. That's somewhat misleading as she's not in the movie all that much compared to any of the other stars. Kinda weird as it's so good it doesn't need to focus on her performance to draw in the punters IMO.

Will post on my other viewings later.

I saw a trailer for 12 Years a Slave which was also misleading as I thought Brad Pitt was the main star when he was only in it for at most 5 mins screen time.