What have you watched recently? 3D!

gossamerfabric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122361668#Comment_122361668

Austin Butler's character looked constipated.

Jody was fine and comes out of it all well.

Tom Hardy was in mumbles mode.

Bikes looked loverly.

Fysh

160 Metres: A History Of Rock In Bizkaia (from 2013, in Spanish and Euskara) - This was a really interesting portrait of Greater Bilbao in the 80s and 90s, and the backdrop against which a bunch of significant punk, rock and metal bands were formed and came to prominence in Spain. I'm biased in my interest as I've recently moved to the area, but I found it really interesting - not least the way that the west side of the river (a more working class area with a greater history of social deprivation) seems to have correlated with both punk/metal as the musical styles and the likelihood of singing in Euskara, while the east side of the river (a historically more affluent area) tended more towards straight-up rock and opted for English rather than Euskara if they didn't want to sing in Spanish. I watched it on Filmin but the doc is also on YouTube for those interested.

The Rover (2014) - I got a hankering to revisit this after some of the discussion around Furiosa and the original Mad Max trilogy. It's not really the same as any of those films - while it shares a conceptual underpinning (and a lack of interest in the specifics of how the status quo came to be), its tone and focus is very different. The Rover doesn't have any of the larger-than-life elements that make the Mad Max films so distinctive, but its characters are distinctive and well-realised - with the core of the film being Eric's *very* slow trajectory to trusting and respecting Rey.

It holds up to a rewatch well, and its pacing impresses all over again - at a little over 90 minutes it strikes a perfect balance between not rushing the introspective moments or the scenery and not dragging its heels unnecessarily.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122373278#Comment_122373278

Criterion said no, but Mubi? Clearly they read my review, the timing is too convenient 🤡

GLEE

EXCLUSIVE: Arthouse streamer and distributor Mubi is set to re-release Tarsem‘s cult 2006 film The Fall in a newly restored 4K version from 27 September 2024 in the US, Canada, Latin America, the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux, Turkey and India. The Match Factory is handling sales for the rest of the world.

The 4K restoration will have its world premiere at this year’s Locarno Film Festival where it will play on the Piazza Grande. Mubi will subsequently stream it on its service.

https://deadline.com/2024/07/the-fall-mubi-rerelease-4k-lee-pace-tarsem-1236010225/

Homelander

The Outwaters on Amazon Prime.

Good critical reviews, poor audience reviews. A found footage movie of a trip to the desert to film a music video goes terribly wrong after a group start noticing strange audio/visual occurances.

And honestly it's not hard to see why. The first hour of the movie is very slow, the second hour is absolutely bonkers, barely any dialogue, completely incoherent, extremely difficult to make out what's going on.

But I did think it was a good movie and one that you find yourself thinking about for quite a while afterwards, as it only really starts to make sense towards the end.

I don't want to give too much away but if you enjoy disturbing cosmic horror it's well worth a watch and it's fairly accomplished for something that supposedly cost $15,000 to make.

Not going to be for anyone but definitely it's one I appreciated and found rather disturbing in content, execution and theme.

Could've been a real classic with a proper budget and better execution but for what it is, I thought it was fairly solid.

pixelburp

Kelly's Heroes (1970)

I love how there was a succession of WW2 films whose scale and authenticity was down to productions shooting in Spain or Yugoslavia, the countries' respective national armies press-ganged into service as Hollywood extras, all while dusting off their ageing stock of cast-off weapons as the rest of the world moved into the Jet Age. Not so much that they don't make 'em like that anymore - they just can't, the world has simply moved on too much. Yet the end result was often was that classical "cast of thousands" effect, instantly giving the genre heft and grandeur; as it was here as real tanks ploughed through what seemed like a genuine Yugoslavian village.

This was thrown on as a reflexive response to Donald Sutherland's recent death: by all accounts perhaps not his most lauded or sophisticated performance, but this has been a longstanding favourite and in no small part formed by Sutherland; oddball by (character) name and oddball by nature, his performance robbed the limelight every time he was on screen, his intentionally anachronistic stoner-hippy tank commander the most memorable aspect to an already breezily singular treatment of WW2 as a workplace full of exasperated stiffs, eager to make a little bank. In stark contrast to the predominance in culture to mythologise the Greatest Generation, half the named characters here seemed on the verge of nervous breakdowns if they weren't simply idling around while the war passed them by; here was conflict prosecuted not by precision and logistics but the incompetent, hysterical or harassed, many just trying to look busy (or in Oddball's case, look like they needed repair).

I couldn't shake the feeling that if this got made even a few years later when Gen X truly started flexing its muscle - or any generation after for that matter - it might have been a more cynical and interrogative, deconstructionist vehicle. That wasn't to say there wasn't a deep well of cynicism here given the motivation of the cast was simple greed - born from being at the "broken end of a bottle", as Big Joe remarked - yet there existed a cheeky playfulness in the entire thing that married the misanthropic with the adventuresome, totalling something more balanced & seductive than it had any right to be. There was no intent towards commentary on war here, no subtext on the military industrial complex, man's inhumanity to man & whatnot: this was a loose sketch doodled with a wink and a grin; a caper written as one of the downtrodden getting one over those in charge; Captains and Generals rendered as buffoons rather than malicious or indifferent.

Or to contextualise more succinctly: at no point in this film was the origin of the Nazi gold ever theorised or explained - despite it being entirely & tragically obvious where it all came from. Its protectors were a group of SS soldiers, later looped into the conspiracy without blinking - and again, without nodding towards their status. A dozen other treatments would either have underpinned the human cost, or just come off crass and insensitive - yet somehow this strange brew pulled it off. The attempted comedy wasn't great, lines often falling completely flat - with the very definitive exception of one Donald Sutherland.

Tony EH

^

There's all kinds of brilliance going on in 'Kelly's Heroes', a film that I'll admit to hating when I was a kid. But, by christ, it's one of those pictures that has wormed its way into my heart and I cannot hear a bad word about it these days. It's stupidly great for reasons that will probably be lost on a lot of people, but not least of which is its casual ability to turn 1950's/60's "conservative" era war movies on their head. The fact that there's a hippy in charge of a Sherman - "it makes pretty pictures" - is such a stroke of WTF genius that it's a one in a million thing that manages to, bizarrely, work and in a film where nothing should work.

It's a Mad Magazine version of a WWII story and in that respect, it functions as it ought to. Nothing matters and nothing has to matter, because everything's gonna be great baby, and you should stop with the negative waves.

In fact the original poster, painted by the excellent Jack Davis, is pure Mad Magazine.

You'll, genuinely, never ever see another film like it.

jj880

Thought Id found an active thread dedicated to 3D movies 😔.

Recently watched Bladerunner 1982 UHD disk on PS5 with LG OLED. A neon sci-fi feast for the eyes and ears. The sound in particular was really good from the UHD disk.

steve_r

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me - 1992

I only recently started watching Twin Peaks, and watched this shortly after Season 2.

This is a striking piece of work, a psychological horror that is really disturbing at times. It strips away the levity and the melodrama of the tv series and instead focuses on the darkness at the heart of the story.

As this is a prequel, we know the fate of Laura Palmer. The film instead focuses on the darkness of her final days, and the trauma that she endures and suffers through. There's a brutality and a cruelty to it that is truly haunting and we are left haunted by her fate in a truly a masterful performance by Cheryl Lee.

I can see how jarring this must have been for fans at the time, as the film really takes a hard turn into darkness. And yet the course correction after a meandering second season was exactly what was required. The final sequence leaves us exactly up to the start of Season 1, and there is a sad but beautiful moment where we understand that Laura is finally at peace. This profound contrast between darkness and light, underscored by the wonderful Angelo Badalamenti, will stay with me for a long time.