2024 MOVIES DISCUSSION THREAD

[(BP)]

11 hours ago, Andrew POE! said:

Out of Sight (Peacock, leaving on Sunday) - Disjointed movie but great at times. A bit like Jackie Brown at times

They’re basically part of a shared universe since Keaton is playing his ATF character Ray from Jackie Brown. 

[HarryArchieGus]

10 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

So, there's not only a short list of blaxploitation classics I need to finish watching after reading an entire book about them (starting with Super Fly which I've only seen the end of), but here is a short list of random movies that I've acquired on the old DVR in the past couple weeks (months, really). Sell me on watching some of these, please. I need motivation. 

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Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead

Dream Scenario

Le Samorai (again, kinda bored me first time?)

Being There (I know)

The Naked City

The Vanishing

Beau Is Afraid

Knight of Cups

The Long Riders

The Northman (probably watched)

Alphabet City

Summer of Sam

The Last Run

The Silent Partner

The Incident

Shit, I've got On the Waterfront sitting on here and haven't watched it. I need somebody to strap me down Ludovico-style with these suckers.

Neat list. 

I always confuse Naked City with Night and the City. I've seen the latter, but really need to see the former. There's some wrestling in that one. Jules Dassin is a master filmmaker and I've yet to see anything that wasn't fantastic.

I saw clips of the Vanishing remake when I was a kid, and it always stuck with me. I have the Criterion original, but have yet to see it. I suspect it's in your wheelhouse. 

Le Samourai is an all time great from an all time great. This and Elevator to the Gallows (featuring an incredible Miles Davis score) are my two favorites from the treasure trove of the Jean-Pierre Melville catalog. It might be worth approaching this a second time after a little research. There's a lot going on here - very inventive. I always enjoy hearing Tarantino discuss this classic. He nicely lays out a lot of why this movie rocks. I do see how on the surface the Euro pace of La Samourai would be a miss for many. I would suggest it's a great second watch movie for anybody willing to give it that.
 
Beau's Afraid was the first Ari Aster film I actually enjoyed. If you're looking for a fast paced anxious mind-bender it'll fit the bill.

Being There, you know. So just dive back in. Hal Ashby rules. This, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail and Shampoo are all masterpieces. 

I don't think you need much encouraging for On the Waterfront. Let it lead you into a bigger dive of the Kazan catalog - A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, Streetcar Named Desire, Splendor in the Grass etc etc etc.

Very curious of the Silent Partner. That's on Criterion, so maybe I'll take this as a reminder. I don't know much about Summer of Sam, but I'm curious to see just about any Spike Lee Joint. Even if he is very hit and miss. Fun list full of nice reminders.

Edited March 27 by HarryArchieGus

[HarryArchieGus]

10 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Is The Vanishing the original or the remake?  They're as disparate in quality as Insomnia 1997 and Nolan's ill-advised, pointless retread, so, watch if original, delete if Jeff Bridges.

I've heard similarily of the Vanishing. I totally disagree on Insomnia. Nolan's remake is a rare case of a director arguably topping the original. I really like the '97 Danish film, and love Stellan Skarsgard, but Nolan's version ups the ante with Wally Pfister's incredible cinematography. It's a big component of the film - you could argue budgetary reasons between the two versions, but obviously a bigger budget doesn't always or often reflect improvement. Not to say the original isn't well cast (it is), but the casting for Nolan's film is my main reason for preferring his version. Robin Williams villain is amongst the best things of his career, and Al Pacino perfectly fits the role of a celebrity cop. This is my favorite latter day Pacino role (if you can still call it latter day). Al was on a roll here coming off the Insider and the underrated Any Given Sunday. This is the last of his good to great roles til the Irishman. I love remembering tired Al trying to deal with everything spiralling out of control. So fun! Hilary Swank, who was also on a good run, is perfect as the local law enforcement. Understated work from Maura Tierney as well. This is amongst my favorite Nolan films - alongside Memento, Oppenheimer, and Dunkirk. All that said, I think both Erik Skoldbjaerg's 97 original  and Nolan's remake are well worth seeing. Both provide plenty of thrills.

Edited March 27 by HarryArchieGus

[(BP)]

I’d say middle period Pacino starts with Sea of Love and ends with Insomnia. His next picture after that is Simone, and that’s about a wrap on Al. I wonder what kind of relationship he had with Nolan because they never worked together again. 

[odessasteps]

I like Melville. I saw almost of his available in 1994 films when I was in grad school since I wrote a paper on him (due to his influence on QT). I think he’s also an interesting historical figure vis a vis the French New Wave / Cahiers.

[Dolfan in NYC]

Film critic Gene Shalit turned 98 yesterday.  Let's relive the greatest sentence ever written in a movie review:

[Log]

2 hours ago, HarryArchieGus said:

Elevator to the Gallows (featuring an incredible Miles Davis score)

Ha! I have owned that soundtrack and listened to it a ton and never bothered to 1. see what the title translated to or 2. learn anything about the movie itself.

It's great "late night" jazz, IMO.

[The Comedian]

17 hours ago, J.H. said:

Rewatched Road House and damit... it is the best low budget action major release of the 80s

(does Highlander count as low budget when you've paid Sean Connerey a cool $1 million, $250,000 to Sir Sean's "Spanish Dialect Coach"?)

There is literally nothing bad I can say about a movie whose last line of spoken dialogue is "A Polar Bear fell on me".

James

Ben Gazzara doesn't get enough credit for the gleeful chewing of scenery he does playing what's essentially an R-rated A-Team villain...

[HarryArchieGus]

1 hour ago, Log said:

Ha! I have owned that soundtrack and listened to it a ton and never bothered to 1. see what the title translated to or 2. learn anything about the movie itself.

It's great "late night" jazz, IMO.

Absolutely! It's a very significant album in Jazz and Miles' catalog. It's kinda the beginnings of 'Modal Jazz'. In the US it was released as 'Jazz Track' which is the version I have. It's a bit less repetitive, condenscing down to the essentials with a B side of 3 huge Miles cuts featuring the Sextet that would go on to record Kind of Blue.

Oh man, check out 'Elevator to the Gallows', it's so good, and you'll have the bonus of knowing that soundtrack.

[Curt McGirt]

1. It's the OG Vanishing.

2. I loved The Last Detail.

3. I've seen a little of Beau Is Afraid (WEIRD.) and Summer of Sam, I turned on and there was John Leguizamo fuckin' away in an orgy scene! So both of those are big question marks. Most of these picks are TCM late night airings. After Hours in fact is one I left off the list that I probably don't need to be prodded into at all.

[Andrew POE!]

Movies I watched today, all are on Peacock and leaving on Sunday....

The Places Beyond The Pines - Incredible movie.

Spoiler

It's incredible when the focus is on Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper's characters but loses steam when the focus shifts to their sons. A.J. (Emory Cohen) has the most punchable face I've ever seen so even when he gets beaten up or arrested, I'm like "fuck yeah!" Jason (Dane DeHaan) comes across as a 'school shooter' type rather than a loner who does drugs and gets drugs for douchebag A.J. They were starting to run out of runaway with the movie so the last hour or so felt a bit sped up.

I somewhat wished the movie had been more about Ryan Gosling's character Luke and there had been a dream sequence where Jason talks to his dad. Eva Mendes (Romina) and Kofi (Masherala Ali) weren't in the movie enough although they were great (Ali especially).

I especially loved the opening tracking shot following Ryan Gosling.

Vanity Fair - Movie is over 2 hours long and feels longer. Reese Witherspoon as Becky is interesting at times but bland at others. Her accent slips quite a bit and she sounds like she's from the very Southern part of England, y'all. First 30 minutes were the best part of the movie but once her character grew up, it got boring. I don't remember much else about the other people in the movie to have an opinion although Gabriel Byrne shows up to at least do something interesting.

Hanna - Great action movie....it gave me the same feeling as Bourne Supremacy movie did (a lot of the story is remarkably similar). Why it didn't turn into a film franchise, I don't know. It did become a TV series, which isn't the same. I would love for them to revisit this premise in another movie with Saoirse Ronan (Hanna).

Story wise is great although a bit light....great cinematography throughout and Cate Blanchett is just wonderful (despite her goofy Southern accent). Worth checking out.

EDIT: Just finished this on Hulu and it's leaving on Sunday...

Bronson - What the fresh hell is this?

Spoiler

Tom Hardy plays Bronson and he spends over half the movie naked. He beats people up for....I don't know, Bronson doesn't know either. Nicolas Winding Refn tends to make movies that have a specific style in mind. Drive was essentially an '80s Michael Mann movie.

If you like Tom Hardy and like to him see naked, you'll love this.

 

Edited March 28 by Andrew POE!

[Contentious C]

Welp.

Notting Hill - Of course, I've watched this before, as I do about once a year or so, once it lands safely on one streaming service or another long enough to remember I haven't seen it in a while.  But somehow I hadn't written about it during a prior rewatch.  I go back and forth as to whether I prefer this or When Harry Met Sally... - I think the latter is better-written and has the virtue of brevity, but I also feel like I identify a lot more with William Thacker than I do Harry Burns (even if I probably come off a lot more like Harry than William considering my attitude toward life and society).  But really the smaller roles make this, especially Tim McInnerny and Gina McKee.  It's probably the least heavy lifting Julia Roberts ever had to do, and of course that makes it one of her most believable roles in the process.  Probably the last really, really great rom-com, before the genre became too self-aware and stopped being enjoyable.

The Devils - Yeah, that's quite the transition in content!

This, uh...well, I didn't see the British/BFI cut, but I don't know that I necessarily missed much by missing Vanessa Redgrave diddling a charred thigh bone.  To be honest, Oliver Reed was Yet Another Dude I Don't Appreciate, but this might have been the movie that set me straight on that to some extent.  I still don't understand in the least why *everyone* was so relentlessly horny for him, but be that as it may, it's still played well enough.  And I love Redgrave in...well, just about everything.  But anyway, yeah, I have a hard time personally seeing why this remains "controversial", but that lack of shock is very much a case of preaching to the choir (haha) with me as the audience, because its opinions on religion don't differ a great deal from my own.  And it's also pretty delicious to see the degree to which this wound people up when the parallels to a certain end-of-life story are rather obvious.  I don't know when or if I'll go out of my way to watch it again, unless I get my hands on the less-edited copy, but everyone with a genuinely critical eye owes it to themselves to see it at least once.  Million billion stars.

Hot Boyz - SPEAKMANIA, CHAPTER FOUR! It's telling that the people who think guns are badass but don't actually know how to handle them are capable of gunning down dozens of other perps without taking so much as a flesh wound on their side. Hootie-who knew firearms worked that way? The same people who have a movie called Hot Boyz where the main character is named Kool, evidently.

Seriously, the first hour of this makes next to no sense (like, you've had 10 years of Law & Order episodes by now, The Sopranos, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and you can't figure out people have to be read their charges?), and the last half-hour is such an embarrassing pile of self-aggrandizing bullshit that I would have been less offended if Master P had just filmed himself sucking his own dick for the full 30 minutes. It's basically just an entire film full of callbacks to other scenarios in other, better movies, where, in between lines of coke, our dear writer/director must have thought to himself, "You know what this movie really needs? More karate, more carnage, more craziness, more of my licensed apparel: that's the stuff. Just watch until everyone sees my joint." *SNOOOOORT*

But somehow, *somehow*, the two car chase scenes in the movie are actually rather good. The Fast and the Furious came out a year and a half after this and didn't have stunts as good as this. The mind boggles.

Zack & Miri Make a Porno - Just when you need to set things right again from watching total garbage, you watch...Kevin Smith?  Eh, no, no, no, no, no.  Maybe YOU do, but I fucking don't.  Gotta say, the first 30 minutes or so of this worked for me, and then, meh.  It just collapses under its own lame need to be like Every Other Rom-Com and give the same stupid ending, except with the added bonus of Smith's weirdly puritanical, highly insecure fucking nonsense about how it matters, apparently, if certain Ps went into certain Vs or not, instead of the adults in the movie, I dunno, ACTING LIKE ADULTS.  For a guy who makes so many movies about sex shit, he is a motherfucking fruitcake when it comes to understanding actual relationships.  Too bad literally anyone else didn't write the back half.

Street Knight - SPEAKMANIA: EPISODE FIVE~! (Yeah, I know, chapter, episode, we're not sticking with a theme here, just deal.)  The utterly goddamned ridiculous dedication at the end of the film almost justifies sitting through the rest of this dishwater-quality trash. Really, guys? You think your movie where you try (and fail) to innovate new ways to blow people's heads off is going to raise awareness for the need for GANG TRUCES? What in the sandwich fuck.

This is massively overedited, badly paced, badly acted, badly written, badly shot total bollocks; the only reason I wouldn't go lower with a rating is because, hey, it isn't as bad as the particularly dreadful Side Roads, in that at least a few actors have some chemistry with one another, and the boom mic is out of every shot.

But, damn, if this isn't quite possibly the stupidest Xerox-of-a-Xerox-of-a-Xerox (don't sue me like you did BoJack, guys) of the Die Hard plot imaginable, then I don't know what is. Former cops somehow have enough resources to buy up real estate and use high-quality equipment but not enough resources (or sense, evidently) to come up with a less complicated way to make money (like there aren't a million more-or-less legal scams running in the U.S. on a daily basis). Oh, but revenge! Yeah, sure, that plot line is so well-developed, its abs have abs. /s

Once again, Speakman's true nemesis remains his insistence on wearing pants (and button-up shirts, for that matter) that make him look like an old guy in a Seinfeld episode.

Edited March 28 by Contentious C

[RazorbladeKiss87]

1 hour ago, Andrew POE! said:

Movies I watched today, all are on Peacock and leaving on Sunday....

The Places Beyond The Pines - Incredible movie.

  Hide contents

It's incredible when the focus is on Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper's characters but loses steam when the focus shifts to their sons. A.J. (Emory Cohen) has the most punchable face I've ever seen so even when he gets beaten up or arrested, I'm like "fuck yeah!" Jason (Dane DeHaan) comes across as a 'school shooter' type rather than a loner who does drugs and gets drugs for douchebag A.J. They were starting to run out of runaway with the movie so the last hour or so felt a bit sped up.

I somewhat wished the movie had been more about Ryan Gosling's character Luke and there had been a dream sequence where Jason talks to his dad. Eva Mendes (Romina) and Kofi (Masherala Ali) weren't in the movie enough although they were great (Ali especially).

I especially loved the opening tracking shot following Ryan Gosling.

 

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I was riding high on Gosling at the time and really looked forward to this. I agree about the first half vs the second half. 

[odessasteps]

 

[elizium]

I haven't watched The Silent Partner in years, but remember really liking it. It is also a bit of a curiosity, being an early Canadian attempt at a straight genre film. 1970s Elliott Gould is always worth a watch.

[Curt McGirt]

40 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

 

Jesus, I feel like that needs a trigger warning. That poor man. It makes total sense of course, given that face of stone and personality in his films. He had a lot of experience to work with...

It would be interesting to compare the torture/execution scenes of Grandier in The Devils and William Wallace in Braveheart. I recall the latter as being pretty nasty as well but of course, Gibson not only got that through the censors but got to go buckwild on Jebus himself afterwards. 

Edited March 28 by Curt McGirt

[RazorbladeKiss87]

11 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Jesus, I feel like that needs a trigger warning. That poor man. It makes total sense of course, given that face of stone and personality in his films. He had a lot of experience to work with...

It would be interesting to compare the torture/execution scenes of Grandier in The Devils and William Wallace in Braveheart. I recall the latter as being pretty nasty as well but of course, Gibson not only got that through the censors but got to go buckwild on Jebus himself afterwards. 

I fully consider "The Passion of the Christ" to be a modern day grind house/exploitation film. Truly for the bloodsucking freaks. 

[Curt McGirt]

That's exactly what I considered it as after seeing some of the juicy parts at a friend's house, I just said "this is a splatter film. Torture porn."

[Andrew POE!]

14 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Jesus, I feel like that needs a trigger warning. That poor man. It makes total sense of course, given that face of stone and personality in his films. He had a lot of experience to work with...

It would be interesting to compare the torture/execution scenes of Grandier in The Devils and William Wallace in Braveheart. I recall the latter as being pretty nasty as well but of course, Gibson not only got that through the censors but got to go buckwild on Jebus himself afterwards. 

I haven't seen Braveheart in awhile but Grandier in The Devils isn't really bloody until:

Spoiler

you see him dragging himself to the execution and the one shot of his feet

Wasn't Mel Gibson a shithead to a police officer before The Passion of the Christ or after? I have a morbid fascination to see that, Braveheart, The Patriot, and Apocalypto.

[odessasteps]

19 minutes ago, Andrew POE! said:

I haven't seen Braveheart in awhile but Grandier in The Devils isn't really bloody until:

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you see him dragging himself to the execution and the one shot of his feet

Wasn't Mel Gibson a shithead to a police officer before The Passion of the Christ or after? I have a morbid fascination to see that, Braveheart, The Patriot, and Apocalypto.

Do you mean the “sugar tits” quote? That was 2006. 

[Tabe]

On 3/25/2024 at 1:20 PM, Andrew POE! said:

 

The Way Back - What's this? A Ben Affleck movie that's incredible that's NOT Good Will Hunting?

  Reveal hidden contents

One of the best sports movies I've seen. You end up getting caught up with the team and the way Ben Affleck coaches them to be in the playoffs. Yet the whole time what goes on in his life is affecting him. He gets fired by the school administrators due to his alcoholism (whereas most other schools would be like "fuck it, he's getting us people interested, we'll have him go on a leave of absence until he can figure things out").

Definitely watch this one before it leaves Peacock.

 

I watched this last night based on your recommendation. I think you liked it more than I did. I liked it but definitely wouldn't say "incredible". It's a recycled plot done well that avoids at least a few of the tropes of the genre. 

I got a good chuckle out of the Affleck character working in constructing. "Aw, he kept the same job from Good Will Hunting". 

7/10. 

[Curt McGirt]

Something that I remember disturbing me more than anything about the execution of Grandier was him being shaven bald and sans facial hair. For some reason that very simple, basic emasculation is striking. 

Don't forget to do We Were Soldiers for the full run of the Gibson Universe war pictures. (I didn't know until looking that up that he was exec producer on Sound of Freedom. Go figure.)

[Andrew POE!]

14 minutes ago, Tabe said:

I watched this last night based on your recommendation. I think you liked it more than I did. I liked it but definitely wouldn't say "incredible". It's a recycled plot done well that avoids at least a few of the tropes of the genre. 

I got a good chuckle out of the Affleck character working in constructing. "Aw, he kept the same job from Good Will Hunting". 

7/10. 

I tend to give movies over-enthused reviews based on cinematography and the vibe of the movie and I'm fine with recycled plots. If I'm bored with it (like I was with Vanity Fair), it doesn't bode well for me.

[Mister TV]

21 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

Do you mean the “sugar tits” quote? That was 2006. 

There was also a lot of antisemitic things said in that one, here’s a transcript.

https://www.latimes.com/la-gibson1aug01-transripit-story.html

[Curt McGirt]

That led me to the transcript of him arguing with his wife and it's absolutely vile. How he ever got work again is beyond me, but there he is in Machete Kills for example. Shame on you Rodriguez.