Movie 2023 MOVIE DISCUSSION THREAD

[odessasteps]

Like many 70s and 80s kids, I watched all kind of R rated movies and movies for adults, esp once we got a VCR in 82 or 83. (No cable until 88)

[Matt D]

And look at how all of you people turned out.

[Curt McGirt]

My folks dressed me up as Rambo and my uncle let us watch Terminator and Aliens and my dad took me to see T2 and Die Hard: With A Vengeance with him and I saw Cobra on TV when I was like seven and I was watching semi-scrambled HBO including Dream On and Real Sex and Oz and renting every horror film under the sun, all before I was 12 years old. 

It could have been way worse. They could have made me read the newspaper! 

[Mister TV]

Look at how F'ed up the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards were back then, I guess they didn't really work the results but I'm scratching my head at Whoopi Goldberg getting nominations for movies I don't think were on any kids radar in that time frame.

1988

Favorite Movie: Beverly Hills Cop II (R), it beat out Adventures in Babysitting (PG-13) and La Bamba (PG-13)

Favorite Actor: Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop II (R), he beat out Arnold in The Running Man (R) and Swayze in Dirty Dancing (PG-13 that is border line R)

Favorite Actress: Whoopi Goldberg in Fatal Beauty (R), she beat out Shelley Long in Hello Again (PG) and Elisabeth Shue in Adventures in Babysitting (PG-13)

1989 wasn't as bad but kind of weird

Favorite Movie - Who Framed Roger Rabbit (PG), over Beetlejuice (PG) and Police Academy 5 Assignment: Miami Beach (which was somehow a PG)

Favorite Actor - Arnold in Twins (PG, totally thought this was PG-13), the other nominees were Eddie Murphy in Coming to America (R) and Pee Wee Herman in Big Top Pee Wee (PG)

Favorite Actress - Whoopi Goldberg in The Telephone (R), over Bette Midler in Beaches (PG-13), and Molly Ringwald in For Keeps (PG-13)

1990 is pretty tame except for Eddie Murphy getting a nomination for Harlem Knights (R), Michael Keaton not even getting nominated for Batman and Batman losing fav flick to Look Who's Talking.

1991 Julia Roberts wins Favorite Actress for Pretty Woman! Yes she won a Kids Choice Award for playing a hooker in a hard R!

[Zimbra]

I had never even heard of The Telephone, but it was written by Terry Southern and Harry Nilsson(!) and directed by Rip Torn(!!!).

[Curt McGirt]

Now I want an Oral History of the Nick Kids Choice Awards. The MTV Music Video Awards, too. 

[Mister TV]

I’m wondering if whoever listed the 1989 winners on Wikipedia goofed or was playing a joke and Whoopi won for Clara’s Heart not The Telephone. After reading the synopsis of The Telephone, I can’t imagine any kid sitting through it, I totally thought it was another Jumping Jack Flash kind of flick. 

[Contentious C]

About as believable as a kid sitting through fucking Beaches, of all things, and thinking anyone under the age of 12 would give a shit about Bette Midler in the first place.  Seeing Murphy, Keaton, Arnold, Pee-Wee, maybe Bruce Willis I would predict as well, suggests that whoever ran that crap was evidently willing to ask their pre-teen or teen sons who they liked, but when it came to girls, "Eh, we'll just make some shit up, girls like the same stuff women like, right?"

Also, count me in the "Scarred by Robocop" camp, though it was really the Peter Weller scene that did it for me.  But rewatching that recently, it was bad but obviously not anywhere near as bad as the imagination of my 8-year-old self made it out to be at the time.  Doubly weird because I remember watching Predator back then, too, and just thinking the action scenes in that were cool instead of terrifying.  I think it was the helplessness and cruelty of what happens in Robocop that garnered such a response.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Contentious C

[Mister TV]

3 hours ago, Contentious C said:

About as believable as a kid sitting through fucking Beaches, of all things, and thinking anyone under the age of 12 would give a shit about Bette Midler in the first place.  Seeing Murphy, Keaton, Arnold, Pee-Wee, maybe Bruce Willis I would predict as well, suggests that whoever ran that crap was evidently willing to ask their pre-teen or teen sons who they liked, but when it came to girls, "Eh, we'll just make some shit up, girls like the same stuff women like, right?"

But the tv show winners and nominees totally make sense for a “kid” audience, the likes of Alyssa Milano and the Cosby Kid’s were getting nominated, it’s not like Susan Dey from LA Law or Blair Brown from the Days and Nights of Molly Dodd were getting noms. I’m wondering if it was a lack of big studio films that were geared towards girls in the Nick demographic in that time frame, is why the favorite movie actress is so weird. 

[Contentious C]

I only have the vaguest recollection of Molly Dodd, probably just from the commercials, so I looked it up, and damn does it sound kinda interesting.

[AxB]

10 hours ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Here is the best commercial for Oppenheimer ever:

 

Logan Paul went on an infamous Twitter rant about how Nope didn't make sense and was too slow.

It makes perfect sense, he's just too stupid to understand it.

[odessasteps]

Maybe they voted for Whoopi because they knew her from Star Trek.

Edited August 22, 2023 by odessasteps

[Eivion]

Every time you people talk about 80s/90s films I find it weird realizing I saw so much of these PG-13 and R movies before I was even ten. Still not sure if my parents just figured I could handle it or if my siblings didn't give a shit about me watching it with them. 

[J.T.]

10 hours ago, Matt D said:

And look at how all of you people turned out.

Yes, I could have made better life choices.

[elizium]

Finished the first disc of Terminal Degeneration: The Films of Jon Moritsugu.

My Degeneration (1989) is kind of an art house, proto-Josie and the Pussycats. Young band Bunny Love is signed up by a beef conglomerate, have their named changed to Fetish, play songs about meat being love, and become the biggest band in the world. Featuring a severed pig's head love interest and an attack by a mechadinosaur.

Hippy Porn (1991) With nothing better to do, M goes to the art school her parent's are paying for. Not knowing what she wants or who she wants to be she, along with her friend L and sometimes boyfriend Mick, drink wine and attempt to find enjoyment in boredom. It does not work.

Loved both of them. My Degeneration was visually much more interesting, but Hippy Porn was the better movie. One thing about all these movies is that the soundtracks fucking rule. Lots of fuzzy early 90s alt rock. Bigger names like Superchunk and Thurston Moore, but also lots of bands that were hanging around the LA trash art scene.

Going to skip ahead to the third disc that has his later movies, before returning to the 2nd disc to watch his PBS funded Terminal USA and a rewatch of Mod Fuck Explosion.

[driver]

Watched Asteroid City last night. I really liked it. Between the cast, the setting and the dialogue I was all in.

The Communion Girl. Spanish horror that seems like a mashup of a bunch of different stuff. I liked it plus it kept my attention because I had the subtitles on.

[odessasteps]

2 minutes ago, driver said:

Watched Asteroid City last night. I really liked it. Between the cast, the setting and the dialogue I was all in.

The Communion Girl. Spanish horror that seems like a mashup of a bunch of different stuff. I liked it plus it kept my attention because I had the subtitles on.

Did the “out of character” stuff in Asteroid City annoy you? I think it distracts from how good the “movie” stuff was. 

[driver]

No it didn't. It just added to the surreal feeling of the whole thing.

[Contentious C]

Yeah, more stuff.  I hate my life, evidently.

I already talked about Death Wish elsewhere, so I'll leave that be.  But, other Jeff Goldblum awaits.

Earth Girls Are Easy was a movie I wondered about for a long time, since it came out when I was just old enough to start veering away from my parents' taste in things and have more curiosity about what was out a little more on the fringes.  It's...kinda worth a watch, in that sort of "making something like MST3K but for real" sense.  I thought at first that anything with a similar title would be hard to get made today, but then I saw that Julie Brown was the primary screenwriting credit, so, well, maybe not so much!  But it's still closer to a curio than a memorable film, especially with Jim Carrey & Damon Wayans in it.  There are some decent laughs, mostly in a couple of the musical tracks Brown does, but not enough to carry this off for 90 minutes.

James Cameron's Undersea Fetish Film for the 2020s - err, I mean, Avatar: The Way of Water - was pretty fucking disappointing.  It's.  Egad.  It's even more egregiously unoriginal than, say, The Force Awakens was, since at least that was a good 40 years after the movie it copied.  This is just redoing almost the entirety of the prior movie's plot with a few more characters.  The only bit of it that worked was Sigourney Weaver's (new) character, and of course that is just there to be a Plot Device, instead of something with meaningful consequences or themes to explore.  As much as part of me wants to like the whale stuff, it's merely emotional blackmail to use animals that way, which points to lazy storytelling more than anything else.  Plus, it's rather screwed-up to think of how much CGI, and by extension, how much graphic card usage, this film must have required when it's nattering on about the environment so much.  I mean, how comparable to cryptocurrency farming was making this movie, Jimmy?  I'd love to know that.  Maybe you'll have something snide to say about it with the next re-tread installment of your franchise.

On the other hand, Strange Days is a movie of his worth revisiting.  Yeah, it's overlong and too bombastic and overwrought by the end, and it definitely shows its hand way too soon, but when it hits, damn does it ever hit.  Bigelow's direction in that opening sequence is just bonkers.  It's crazy to think that the Doom movie ever, ever thought they were going to do a compelling "first-person" section, when she used tech that Light Storm invented for her to do a sequence like this in a movie literally a few months after Doom the video game first debuted.  Plus, the opening dovetails so well into all the best bits of the film, mostly how seedy and raunchy and beyond broken everything is, to the point where ending the world and starting over begins to make a lot of sense.  It feels at times like a prequel of sorts to a kind of world that could have ended up as the "2019" of Blade Runner.  There have been plenty of screw-ups as the leads in noir films (arguably all of them), but Ralph Fiennes plays this with the same kind of zany foolishness we'd get out of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang or The Nice Guys (I suppose I owe it to myself to watch Altman's take on Raymond Chandler at some point to see if that's an even earlier instance; I'm guessing yes).  And of course, as much as Angela Bassett has been praised for being an "acTOR" in other movies, I don't think she's ever been more utterly badass than she is in this.  This was a movie the world wasn't ready for yet...and really, we're still not ready for that awful wig Tom Sizemore was wearing.  But despite the warning it represented, we've spent almost 30 years refusing to fix our problems, and we're still here.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Contentious C

[(BP)]

I like Earth Girls Are Easy because even if I’m going to watch it a tenth of the times I’ll watch The Fly in my lifetime, it’s comforting to know there’s a goofy high concept rom com with Goldblum and Geena Davis as an emotional palate cleanser if need be. Also, Michael McKean RULES. 

[Contentious C]

Yeah, when I watched it, I managed to somehow forget that they'd done The Fly a couple years before, so it's quite the flip in tone.  I wonder where I'd put that in terms of 80s stuff, but no doubt I'd have it no higher than third-place just among Cronenberg movies.  Davis was in quite a stretch of doing oddball shit, most of which worked.  But as I mentioned in the Payback thread, I didn't think Goldblum was anything but strange to begin with, and seeing Death Wish immediately prior to watching this kind of cemented that.

[odessasteps]

I don't know if I'd call The Big Chill "strange." Overrated maybe.

Oh. I initially read your post as "he hadn't been IN anything but strange..." 

Edited September 7, 2023 by odessasteps

[Curt McGirt]

Robocop 2 is on right now. 

1. I could not watch the scene where the new Robocop pulls its face off. That's the first time I've actively turned away from a movie in I don't know how long, maybe ever. I mean, I just shrugged off the eyeball staking in Zombie on TV the other day but that one was just too much. 

2. Didn't notice this before but the guy from the first one who holds up the liquor store is the same dude that helps rob the gun store in this one. 

3. If you read that New Yorker article about Elon Musk/Amazon/Space-X where they said Space-X is entirely responsible for functioning Internet in the Ukraine and the US government is billions in debt to him, it is clear that he is pretty much the Old Man from OCP now. If the Old Man was an autistic thrillseeker who's willing to crash cars that he's driving for kicks, that is. 

[Kuetsar]

On 9/7/2023 at 12:40 PM, Curt McGirt said:

Robocop 2 is on right now. 

1. I could not watch the scene where the new Robocop pulls its face off. That's the first time I've actively turned away from a movie in I don't know how long, maybe ever. I mean, I just shrugged off the eyeball staking in Zombie on TV the other day but that one was just too much. 

2. Didn't notice this before but the guy from the first one who holds up the liquor store is the same dude that helps rob the gun store in this one. 

3. If you read that New Yorker article about Elon Musk/Amazon/Space-X where they said Space-X is entirely responsible for functioning Internet in the Ukraine and the US government is billions in debt to him, it is clear that he is pretty much the Old Man from OCP now. If the Old Man was an autistic thrillseeker who's willing to crash cars that he's driving for kicks, that is. 

Bond villain. 

[Contentious C]

More like "villain from Tenet" (who is a shoddy copy of a Bond villain in the first place) with far less personality and an unfortunate lack of terminal illness.