What have you watched recently? 3D!

Achebe

glasso wrote: »

Birds of passage

Interesting film set in Colombia that was highly touted and billed as based on a true story.
Doing some research it appears that it's all made up from the events not actually taking place in the Wayuu tribe to the US Peace Corps being in that part of Colombia at the time and instigating demand for drugs.

6.5/10

Was it marketed as a true story? In Colombia it was very much marketed as a fictional film.

"Rams" starring Sam Neill.
Solid Australian film about two estranged Brothers trying to save their respective flocks of sheep.
Special mention goes to Tig/Sage the Sheepdog(s) and Locke the Ram who excelled in their supporting roles.

joficeduns1

Philadelphia
Fantastic film for me, Hanks was sublime. For a film that showcases so much hatred, judgement, and disdain it captures so much love too from family and friends.

I expected Washington's character to have a bit more of a turnaround considering his words against homosexuals near the beginning. I think that staggered his redemption a bit?

I found the use of shots where the characters look directly at the camera in dialogue interesting, almost like the director wants you to feel like you're in the shoes of that person in the conversation. That's my amateur view of it anyway.

joficeduns1

joficeduns1 wrote: »

Philadelphia
Fantastic film for me, Hanks was sublime. For a film that showcases so much hatred, judgement, and disdain it captures so much love too from family and friends.

I expected Washington's character to have a bit more of a turnaround considering his words against homosexuals near the beginning. I think that staggered his redemption a bit?

I found the use of shots where the characters look directly at the camera in dialogue interesting, almost like the director wants you to feel like you're in the shoes of that person in the conversation. That's my amateur view of it anyway.

One thing I found questionable about the movie, was that the hero Hanks who was in a serious relationship living with his partner, went into a cinema and had unprotected sex with a stranger, hence contracting aids. I dunno, I just never felt that was a very hero worthy thing to do!

joficeduns1

[Deleted User] wrote: »

One thing I found questionable about the movie, was that the hero Hanks who was in a serious relationship living with his partner, went into a cinema and had unprotected sex with a stranger, hence contracting aids. I dunno, I just never felt that was a very hero worthy thing to do!

Definitely seemed out of character and a fact to just stir the mood of the trial maybe. I don't think Hanks had any other flaws up to that point so maybe it was to ground his character a bit?

vriesmays

They drive by night - Bogart loses an arm in a lorry crash and Raft gets blamed for a murder in a garage.

barrymanilow

Deleted User wrote: »

One thing I found questionable about the movie, was that the hero Hanks who was in a serious relationship living with his partner, went into a cinema and had unprotected sex with a stranger, hence contracting aids. I dunno, I just never felt that was a very hero worthy thing to do!

We don't know if he was in that relationship when he contracted aids from the cinema. As far as I know there is nothing in the movie to say that he was.

barrymanilow

barrymanilow wrote: »

We don't know if he was in that relationship when he contracted aids from the cinema. As far as I know there is nothing in the movie to say that he was.

I remember it differently, he was living with Antonio Banderas at the time he went and did that!

vriesmays

This gun for hire - Alan Ladd kills a man and collects the reward only to find out it's stolen money and he's on the run from the cops with Veronica Lake to LA with Robert Foster on the chase.

billyhead

Dredd 2012. It was a solid watch. Urban nails the character.

Del.Monte

Watched two atrocious Irish films yesterday.




"The Shark" (2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=DmAAC0Rmm-c&feature=youtu.be a 28 minute feature film shot in Cork about a Pool champion (?) and gangsters and most of the 28 minutes are taken up showing indifferent pool shots and some lad getting beaten up. It was bad beyond belief!

By chance the same day I was contacted by somebody wanting to know if I had a copy of "Undercurrent" (1994) which unfortunately I did. I had last watched it in 2012 and thankfully it is now winging its way to the person who contacted me.

Undercurrent is an extremely low budget, Dublin based, murder drama with nothing to recommend it. Not exciting, not funny, nobody likeable in it and it's not surprising it's little known outside the movie nerd community. The budget was apparently as little as IR£25k and it shows. Avoid.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Driveways

Watched on Now TV. A really slow and gentle little film about a woman and her young son who have to spend part of their summer cleaning out her estranged dead sister's house before selling it. The son is shy and not great at making friends his own age but befriends the old man who lives next door, played wonderfully by Brian Dennehy, in what, I think, was his last role before he died.

That's really all that happens. So if you're someone who needs a lot of action or plot, this isn't for you. It's a really lovely film though, about lonliness and connecting with people, and again, it's probably the whole covid thing, but I think a very fitting film for the time.

joficeduns1

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I remember it differently, he was living with Antonio Banderas at the time he went and did that!

He was living with Antonio at the time. You can see the looks they give each other when it comes up and the lawyer even states such.

dubstepper

Coherence (2013) Surprisingly good scifi. A group of friends attend a dinner party on an evening when a comet passes the close to the earth. A power outage occurs and when they attempt to go to another house down the street they find that reality seems to be splintering. Well worth a watch.

cdgalwegian

dubstepper wrote: »

Coherence (2013) Surprisingly good scifi. A group of friends attend a dinner party on an evening when a comet passes the close to the earth. A power outage occurs and when they attempt to go to another house down the street they find that reality seems to be splintering. Well worth a watch.

Starts off slow, but develops into a proper mindfvck film. Very clever low-budget film by up-and-coming writer-director.

Del.Monte

"Resist" (2018)


YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPRyqkBFKfA

Well crafted, British made, Indie WW.II. movie filmed in England and the Channel Islands.


A British agent is parachuted into occupied France to help local partisans harass German forces ahead of D-Day. Some of the dialogue is a little amateurish but it compares well with many big budget movies. 7/10

The Pacific 2010 The sequel to Bank of Brothers more or less, and while not quite as good overall still outstanding. The battle scenes however watching this on a decent tv, are something to behold. The translation of the pure horrors of the fighting in the Pacific is shot with brilliance. Consider the storming of the beach in Saving Private Ryan and have about 10+ of those throughout the series. At some points you are almost feeling each shot and explosion, I was flinching and grimacing through these scenaes and I don't remember doing that in a long time. Harrowing stuff.
They also manage to capture the somber tone of the families, and the ptsd. This sombreness ultimately is why Band of Brothers is more memorable because things slow down a bit too much at times in this series, but there is a very uncomfortable realness about many of these scenes. One in particular when a soldier comes home after 4 years at war, and his parents have filled up his room with junk. You realise that they had already assumed he would die and had gone through that process already.

bnt

I finally took the time to watch Peggy Sue Got Married; for some reason I imagined it was longer and darker than it is, possibly because it's directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It's an odd time-travel movie in which Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) travels back from 1985 to 1960, just before she turns 18.

There were obvious comparisons between this and Back To The Future at the time, but there's no story about time paradoxes. Instead, it's a more personal exploration of how it was to be a teenager at the time and how Peggy Sue, with 25 years of experience under her belt, is better able to appreciate what she had back then. (There's a touching subplot involving her grandparents that could have been overplayed for tears, but is instead more subtle and memorable.) Some of the silly things that concerned her and her friends don't matter any more - but some still do.

This wasn't Nicolas Cage's first film, but it was the one that got him noticed as a leading man. I suppose it helped that his uncle was directing, and a young Sofia Coppola is in there as the snotty little sister. A few more future stars are there, such as Joan Allen, Jim Carrey, and Helen Hunt. Turner is the stand-out, though: she wasn't playing a 17-year-old, but an older version of that 17-year-old who tries to act 17 again, but doesn't always succeed, and that's where much of the film's humour comes from.

Tony EH

'Dracula' Some spoilers ahead...

Never has a book or character been so wildly abused as poor old Bram Stoker's late 19th Century creation and this effort from last year sees yet another attempt to mangle the author's classic for the screen. Shot as a miniseries, where each episode is about 90 minutes long, it runs the gamut of the (nearly) sublime to the catastrophically ridiculous and it's very hard to remember anything that starts out so, so, well and then shits the bed so badly it can only be cleansed by fire.

This BBC/Netflix production of 'Dracula' kicks off, as most adaptations do, with Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) and his misadventure with the titular Count (Claes Bang) and it's easy to see that this particular episode is where the bulk of effort went into. Drawing on the novel's best section, its opening, the series does an admirable job of front loading itself with tons of creepy atmosphere and a real sense of dread as Harker stumbles around Dracula's artistically designed castle where each turn leads to an M.C. Escher like confusion. Not giving anything away, Harker escapes Dracula's clutches and winds up in a nunnery where he meets, probably, the series most interesting character, Sister Agatha Van Helsing, a straight talking, no nonsense, member of the cloth played excellently by Dolly Wells who gets all the best lines. There numerous liberties taken with Stoker's work here, but this miniseries is not alone in doing that, and it's certainly by no means perfect. But it's still an entertaining 90 minutes and helped no end by a decent cast and pretty formidable go at set design.

Part 2 sees everything set aboard the Demeter, the ship that brings Dracula to England. However, in this adaptation, we're presented with something more akin to an anaemic Agatha Christie tale than anything Bram Stoker may have imagined, as the crew and guest travellers are picked off by the vampiric aristocrat and the captain and his mates have to solve the mystery. A mystery that remains a non-starter to the audience, of course, because we all know who's doing the killing and it's a mystery that sort of gets tossed aside in any case. It's a nice idea in some ways, but it was always going to be scuppered. But in it's own right, it was middling entertainment and it kept the attention for its runtime, although it was quite poor in comparison to the preceding entry. The ending, however, foreshadowed a deep, deep, drop off in quality that Part 3 was to present.

And what can I say about Part 3, other than it's something that takes a 90 mile an hour run at a cliff edge and jumps gleefully over it, crashing to the bottom in a shapeless mess. Dracula, who escaped the sinking Demeter at the end of Episode 2, now finds himself a prisoner of some shadowy 21st century NGO headed up by the descendent of the Van Helsing we previously encountered, which allows Dolly Wells to also be transported forward. But he doesn't stay a prisoner for long as certain (ridiculous) legal loopholes allow him his freedom, where he goes on to discover the wonders of smart phones and mingles among some deeply unpleasant late millennial yawn infested arseholes. Part 3 of this Dracula and its rocketing into the modern day fails spectacularly, as do all efforts to do this with the Count, it must be said. But whereas the 70's Hammer efforts to update Dracula to the "modern day" have a certain WTF charm to them, here the failure of the timeshift is complete. Absolutely nothing works here and the shift in tone, as well as the leap in time, destroys any of the charm that the first two episodes had. To say it's a disappointment of staggering levels is to give understatement a whole new definition.

2020's 'Dracula' could have been great which, in the end, is probably its biggest let down, which is a shame as there's a great lead in the shape of Danish actor Claes Bang and good support, too, from the likes of Heffernan and Wells. Some of the effects are excellent, as well, and the series manages to make old bloodsucker kinda creepy again. So a lot of the ingredients are actually there. But the unnecessary need to do something different just makes the whole thing come undone at the seams and everything ends up at naught in the end because the writing choices by Stephen Moffat and The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss vary in quality to such enormous lengths.

Part One - 8/10

Part Two - 5/10

Part Three - 1/10

CastorTroy

Watched Kid Detective based on this thread and really liked it.

I will say the actress playing Caroline would struggle to pass for a CW 16 year old, never mind passing for that age when all the other schoolkids actually look like schoolkids

The Skin I Live In

One of PA's more unusual efforts (which is saying something) which I had put off watching for a long time.
Definitely different and when it's revealed what is going on it's a bit of a mind-fook but it's an interesting ride all the same.

7.1 / 10

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1189073/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3

gmisk

Tony EH wrote: »

'Dracula' Some spoilers ahead...

Never has a book or character been so wildly abused as poor old Bram Stoker's late 19th Century creation and this effort from last year sees yet another attempt to mangle the author's classic for the screen. Shot as a miniseries, where each episode is about 90 minutes long, it runs the gamut of the (nearly) sublime to the catastrophically ridiculous and it's very hard to remember anything that starts out so, so, well and then shits the bed so badly it can only be cleansed by fire.

This BBC/Netflix production of 'Dracula' kicks off, as most adaptations do, with Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) and his misadventure with the titular Count (Claes Bang) and it's easy to see that this particular episode is where the bulk of effort went into. Drawing on the novel's best section, its opening, the series does an admirable job of front loading itself with tons of creepy atmosphere and a real sense of dread as Harker stumbles around Dracula's artistically designed castle where each turn leads to an M.C. Escher like confusion. Not giving anything away, Harker escapes Dracula's clutches and winds up in a nunnery where he meets, probably, the series most interesting character, Sister Agatha Van Helsing, a straight talking, no nonsense, member of the cloth played excellently by Dolly Wells who gets all the best lines. There numerous liberties taken with Stoker's work here, but this miniseries is not alone in doing that, and it's certainly by no means perfect. But it's still an entertaining 90 minutes and helped no end by a decent cast and pretty formidable go at set design.

Part 2 sees everything set aboard the Demeter, the ship that brings Dracula to England. However, in this adaptation, we're presented with something more akin to an anaemic Agatha Christie tale than anything Bram Stoker may have imagined, as the crew and guest travellers are picked off by the vampiric aristocrat and the captain and his mates have to solve the mystery. A mystery that remains a non-starter to the audience, of course, because we all know who's doing the killing and it's a mystery that sort of gets tossed aside in any case. It's a nice idea in some ways, but it was always going to be scuppered. But in it's own right, it was middling entertainment and it kept the attention for its runtime, although it was quite poor in comparison to the preceding entry. The ending, however, foreshadowed a deep, deep, drop off in quality that Part 3 was to present.

And what can I say about Part 3, other than it's something that takes a 90 mile an hour run at a cliff edge and jumps gleefully over it, crashing to the bottom in a shapeless mess. Dracula, who escaped the sinking Demeter at the end of Episode 2, now finds himself a prisoner of some shadowy 21st century NGO headed up by the descendent of the Van Helsing we previously encountered, which allows Dolly Wells to also be transported forward. But he doesn't stay a prisoner for long as certain (ridiculous) legal loopholes allow him his freedom, where he goes on to discover the wonders of smart phones and mingles among some deeply unpleasant late millennial yawn infested arseholes. Part 3 of this Dracula and its rocketing into the modern day fails spectacularly, as do all efforts to do this with the Count, it must be said. But whereas the 70's Hammer efforts to update Dracula to the "modern day" have a certain WTF charm to them, here the failure of the timeshift is complete. Absolutely nothing works here and the shift in tone, as well as the leap in time, destroys any of the charm that the first two episodes had. To say it's a disappointment of staggering levels is to give understatement a whole new definition.

2020's 'Dracula' could have been great which, in the end, is probably its biggest let down, which is a shame as there's a great lead in the shape of Danish actor Claes Bang and good support, too, from the likes of Heffernan and Wells. Some of the effects are excellent, as well, and the series manages to make old bloodsucker kinda creepy again. So a lot of the ingredients are actually there. But the unnecessary need to do something different just makes the whole thing come undone at the seams and everything ends up at naught in the end because the writing choices by Stephen Moffat and The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss vary in quality to such enormous lengths.

Part One - 8/10

Part Two - 5/10

Part Three - 1/10

I think that's a tad harsh on part 2.
But entirely fair on part 3.
The two leads are excellent.

pixelburp

Moneyball (2011)

I suppose for those invested in the emotional purity of sport, a film celebrating the power of math to cut through the mythical nonsense probably rankles. I continue to love it though.

Dunno why, but first time around, I never picked up the near constant, simmering rage in Pitt's character. Beyond the obvious moments of chair throwing, there were all these little tics, grimaces and the like, really making Pitt's performance stand out that bit more as someone one really bad day away from flipping out.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Turns out The Truth were the friends we handled along the way.

A solid, unshowy yet gripping courtroom drama whose arguable entire legacy stems from a single, unrepresentative moment of high melodrama. Tom Cruise surprised, in playing to strengths later seen in work like Magnolia; leaning into that ****-eating grin and persona to inform the arrogance of his character. Jack Nicholson remained the psycho we all knew and loved.

Tony EH

gmisk wrote: »

I think that's a tad harsh on part 2.
But entirely fair on part 3.
The two leads are excellent.

Ummm, I thought Part 2 was middling fare on balance. It had some good ideas, mainly the central one. But, as I said, that could be completely discarded by the audience because the central deceit was ruined by the fact that there was no mystery. Plus the Columbo aspect (where the audience knows who done it) is null and void because there were no actual Columbo's to break down the case. I can certainly understand what the writers were trying to go for, but it just didn't come off entirely successfully. The biggest nail in its coffin, as it were, was that truly awful ending and the foreboding sense of what was to come in Part 3. So overall I thought it worked out as a perfectly average watch and worth a look. But it was neither very good, nor very bad. It was just...OK. Which, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing.

Incidentally there's a movie in production that will focus on the Demeter's doomed journey to England. Although when it will come out is anyone's guess.

budgemook

I was in the mood for an action film yesterday, almost to the point where I was going to subject myself to 6 Underground on Netflix, and luckily Star Trek Beyond was on Channel 4. I had not seen this one despite having seen and enjoyed the previous 2. I thought this one was pretty good - better than the second one. The Beastie Boys scene was incredibly cheesey but I enjoyed it alot. Especially when the Yorktown guys figured out what was going on and joined in right at the big part of the song :pac:

barrymanilow

Cross of Iron 1977

Great Anti War Classic

The battle scenes look dated but in another way are fantastic as they are so intense and chaotic with slo-mo effects and reverbing gunfire and explosions.

The sense of brotherhood in this film between Steiner and his men adds great depth. Ahead of its time, I say it rivals more modern stuff like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers in this respect.

Steiner is a fascinating character. In my opinion he hasn't been matched as a portrait of the tortured solider in any war film since. He hates the war and laughs at the folly of it but at the same time is lost in the world without it. He wears his hatred for the officer corp on his sleeve , he mocks the meaningless of the Iron cross he has been decorated with and he grinds out his duty while clinging to a humanity and sense of duty to the men under his command above all other responsibilities.

A learning point for me in this film was that the German Wehrmacht or regular army were not necessarily Nazis , a point born out when we see the disdain the men have for a party member who has been transferred into their platoon.

The film is set at the end of the War with Germany retreating from Russia and defeat just a formality at that stage. There is a heavy sense of hopelessness throughout the film and a kind of band playing while the titanic is sinking trope throughout.

great war film , worth checking out if you have not seen.

9/10

Del.Monte

If you enjoy the anti-war genre you might like "The Train" (1964) with Burt Lancaster in the lead roll. There's plenty of very realistic action from the pre-CGI days and no glory. Shot in black and white it's right out there on its own.

Achebe

Achebe wrote: »

Was it marketed as a true story? In Colombia it was very much marketed as a fictional film.

Did you catch the ads on Colombian RTE yourself whilst slurping an Ajiaco?

At the start of the film it did the usual "based on a true story" spiel.

Sugarlumps

Point of no Return – I always knew it as the Assassin. Aged horrifically. RTE have higher value productions.

Singles – Stars Fonda again with a wigged out Matt Dillon. Cracking soundtrack, AIC murdering live.