What have you watched recently: Electric Boogaloo

8mv

Conspiracy
After some astute recommendations on this thread (thanks folks!), I got this from Amazon and I'm glad I did. Based on what is known of the 1942 Wannsee Conference where Nazi and SS leadership discussed how to finally solve the "Jewish Problem". Great acting all round but Kenneth Brannagh is especially good as Heydrich - charming and terrifying at the same time.

NachoBusiness

Grandma.

Diabolical lefty right on junk. Made me want to self harm.

Liberals and feminists will love it.

McGrath5

The Ring

Saw this years ago when it was in the cinema, it was on TG4 last night and surprisingly enough it has held up well over the years.

FloatingVoter

8mv wrote: »

Conspiracy
After some astute recommendations on this thread (thanks folks!), I got this from Amazon and I'm glad I did. Based on what is known of the 1942 Wannsee Conference where Nazi and SS leadership discussed how to finally solve the "Jewish Problem". Great acting all round but Kenneth Brannagh is especially good as Heydrich - charming and terrifying at the same time.

The entire script is taken from the minutes. They were so good at hanging themselves.

http://prorev.com/wannsee.htm

A film that everyone should watch. Any anyone who saw Heydrich make an appearance in The Man In The High Castle where he comes across as a creepy uncle would need to see this.

Harry Palmr

Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) Dir Karel Reisz.

This was on True Movies of all places (every now and again they pull a 60s British classic out of the vaults). The story of an eccentric ape obsessed artist with Communist parents who is not quite estranged from his well to do wife (and her new man), the leads David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave are both excellent as is Irene Handel as his Marxist mother.

Reisz tells the tale with some imagination and lots of good humour even though we know its going to be a somewhat downbeat ending this being a 60s British film in B&W.

and

Drive Angry (2010) in 2D

A sort of Race with the Devil mixed with Something Evil and Devils Rain, strained through an Escape from New York style sock.

Stupid but quite entertaining.

e_e

NachoBusiness wrote: »

Grandma.

Diabolical lefty right on junk. Made me want to self harm.

Liberals and feminists will love it.

Was gonna ease up on the new movies until January but I might go now.

Liam McPoyle

Watched docudrama, Threads last night.

For those that havnt seen it, its an 80s, made by the BBC production which documents events leading up to, during and the years after a nuclear holocaust decimates the world.

Bleak doesn't even come close to describing it. Without been in anyway melodramatic it captures just how much another world war would basically end civilization as we know it, the war won't be on a battle field, it will be fought by a couple of people with their fingers on the button of nuclear warheads.

It follows various people in the weeks leading up to the war, captures the mundane everyday things we all experience, the growing sense of disquiet as news reports from the middle east tell us about the heightened aggressions between US and Russian forces until finally it peaks with all out Armageddon.

I swear, when the attack siren starts blaring the sense of dread that I was filled with was higher than pretty much any horror flick I've ever watched could generate.

It's a truly frightening watch and it should be screened in every school in the world as a warning to the future heads of state of the world.

Astonishing stuff.

Tony EH

I remember seeing that on BBC1 when I was a kid. Put the fear into me more than any horror film.

It's a pity that the BBC don't sanction that type of hard hitting drama any more. They really pulled out all the stops on some stuff, like 'Scum' or 'Threads', although 'Scum' was actually pulled from broadcast at the last minute.

It's funny, a little before 'Threads' was on TV, 'The Day After' was shown. I never got to see that until many years later and there's absolutely no comparison. In fact 'The Day After' was laughable when stacked up against the British effort.

My only complaint about 'Threads' is that it's too short. It needed another half hour at least.

One of the greatest "made for TV" films I've ever seen. We could do with more of that type of stuff on the box.

Liam McPoyle

Tony EH wrote: »

I remember seeing that on BBC1 when I was a kid. Put the fear into me more than any horror film.

It's a pity that the BBC don't sanction that type of hard hitting drama any more. They really pulled out all the stops on some stuff, like 'Scum' or 'Threads', although 'Scum' was actually pulled from broadcast at the last minute.

It's funny, a little before 'Threads' was on TV, 'The Day After' was shown. I never got to see that until many years later and there's absolutely no comparison. In fact 'The Day After' was laughable when stacked up against the British effort.

My only complaint about 'Threads' is that it's too short. It needed another half hour at least.

One of the greatest "made for TV" films I've ever seen. We could do with more of that type of stuff on the box.

I've never seen TDA so downloaded it last night, will give it a spin over the next wee while.

Tony EH

It isn't great. Worth a watch for pig iron, but once you've seen 'Threads', you've seen the best.

There's another older BBC film about nuclear war called 'The War Game' that's quite good too.

Del.Monte

Business Cat wrote: »

I've never seen TDA so downloaded it last night, will give it a spin over the next wee while.

Don't do it - it's one of the most depressing films ever made.

Liam McPoyle

Del.Monte wrote: »

Don't do it - it's one of the most depressing films ever made.

Sounds right up my street tbh!

Duggy747

Spy

Thought it was a bit shíte and it lost it's laughs the further it went on to an incredibly humourless end, GF and I aren't fans of McCarthy and she eventually wore thin on us after providing some decent laughs at the start. Her foul-mouth rants got old real quick and I thought it was odd that they made her look so much like Dawn French :pac:

Jason Statham was brilliant and was the only thing that perked me up for this whenever he appeared, been so long since I seen the guy do comedy that I forgot he has great timing.

fin12

Duggy747 wrote: »

Spy

Thought it was a bit shíte and it lost it's laughs the further it went on to an incredibly humourless end, GF and I aren't fans of McCarthy and she eventually wore thin on us after providing some decent laughs at the start. Her foul-mouth rants got old real quick and I thought it was odd that they made her look so much like Dawn French :pac:

Jason Statham was brilliant and was the only thing that perked me up for this whenever he appeared, been so long since I seen the guy do comedy that I forgot he has great timing.

I didn't mind Spy, thought it was pretty funny, way better than her film Tammy which is really poor and a complete letdown. I like McCarthy though so..........

NachoBusiness

Hector.

Predictable in parts but a likable little film nonetheless.

Feels more like a TV movie or one of the old BBC2 plays.


The Lesson.

A bit mad but I liked it. Slow moving but only in a good way.

Today (Thurs) is its final screening at the IFI.

Harry Palmr

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Dir Stanley Kubrick

Beguiling, baffling, beautiful.

mewe

Harry Palmr wrote: »

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Dir Stanley Kubrick

Beguiling, baffling, beautiful.

Very succint and agreed.

Duggy747

Saw it on it's re-release in the cinema, had seen it plenty of times but watching it in the cinema for the first time just elevated it to God-like status for me. Amazing experience.

ButtersSuki

All the fillums on Emirates in-flight system (well, all the ones I was interested in watching) start with the following "this film has been modified from its original theatrical version" or some sort of disclaimer like that. So I read a book on my flights home instead.

Tony EH

That could simply mean that the picture has been cropped from 2.35:1 to 16x9 or 1.85:1.

e_e

Tony EH wrote: »

That could simply mean that the picture has been cropped from 2.35:1 to 16x9 or 1.85:1.

*grinds teeth*

TV stations need to stop doing that too.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

I wonder what % of people watching any given film see it exactly as the director intended? From cropping, to editing, to over dubbing even just to the basic settings on people's TV's if they're watching at home or the quality of the projection system at the cinema?

e_e

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

I wonder what % of people watching any given film see it exactly as the director intended? From cropping, to editing, to over dubbing even just to the basic settings on people's TV's if they're watching at home or the quality of the projection system at the cinema?

Yeah I've become such a stickler that unless it's obviously a letterboxed movie I have to have IMDB at my side at home to check that they're showing it in the right aspect ratio. I did a bit of a horror movie marathon on Netflix in October and not once but twice did I find a supposedly great horror movie that was cropped to bits.

It's definitely something film fans should be more conscious of though because it can outright ruin some great films where framing is very very important to what the director is getting across.

ButtersSuki

Tony EH wrote: »

That could simply mean that the picture has been cropped from 2.35:1 to 16x9 or 1.85:1.

l (as you say) mean that, but I doubt in all seriousness most ordinary film goers are even aware of such things.

I'd be almost certain it means edited (and by that I mean shortened). When I see that, I'm out.

Tony EH

Sometimes it does, but you can't tell til you get to the relevant part.

Cropping I can take. Cutting, though, drives me round the fucking frigging twist.

Liamalone

Ack sure, the story is still the same lads!

The Black Oil

Grandma

I thought it deflated a bit when Marcia Gay Harden's character turned up, but in the main, I liked it. Lily Tomlin's on fire in it...

MadDog76

Liamalone wrote: »

Ack sure, the story is still the same lads!

ButtersSuki

Liamalone wrote: »

Ack sure, the story is still the same lads!

I know you're taking the p!ss there!

Case in point, one of my all time favourites "Betty Blue" has s 68minute difference between the Theatrical and Director's cuts. 68minutes! I've seen full films that are shorter than that, and the longer version adds serious depth to the film itself.

johnny_ultimate

The Forbidden Room - very probably the last great film to be released in 2015 is a bizarre, eye melting phantasmagoria from the great Canadian maverick Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson.

Have you ever seen examples of creepy old-school paranormal or seance photography? Imagine a two hour long barrage of that sort of imagery, but you're also on some ****ing intense acid trip at the same time. Maddin veterans will now the man has a totally unique visual signature, but this is another level - an explosion of disorientating editing, aggressively unsettled camera filters, 'WTF' special effects, subversions of classic silent filmmaking techniques and all manner of other crazy distortions. The soundtrack is equally unhinged - from hyper-real voice distortions to a score that constantly pulsates and drifts, assaulting any viewer foolish enough to think they can actually grasp a lasting grip on it.

As experimental as it all is, it's not exactly plotless. The film takes the form of a series of 'lost' classic films, that are a mix of broad Saturday afternoon serial, horror cinema, wacky comedy, theatre and pure abstraction. They're linked together with a sort of strange dream logic - echoes and recurrences (some explicit, some less so) serving as connecting ectoplasm between the disparate wild tales. A few well known faces pop up - Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Almaric, Caroline Dhavernas - perhaps helping keep track of the madly fluctuating and cross-cutting stories.

I've seen and liked a good few Guy Maddin films before, but this feels like the most successful realisation of his aesthetic concerns. It's simply a fascinating film to just watch and listen to - deeply cineliterate but also unapologetically experimental. It's certainly weird (mutant bananas show up at one point). It's certainly funny (the central linking story is a lewd instructional video on how to have a bath). It's certainly all over the place. It's certainly Guy Maddin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwKvz-wA3I0