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[MOVIES] OCTOBER 2018 DISCUSSION


Dolfan in NYC

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I just made Logan Paul in Fire Pro, dude. His finish is the Neck Hanging Tree Slam and he laughs when he hits it.

He's got jobber stats, obviously. I needed someone for my KSI edit to beat up, or if I ever intended to make YouTube clickbait.

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Dear Dictator (2017) Starring Michael Caine, Odeya Rush, Katie Holmes, Seth Green and Jason Biggs. It's about an outcast Punk Rock high school student who is given a class assignment to write to a public figure they admire, so she writes to a South American Dictator (played by Michael Caine, making no attempt to change his accent). But then there's a revolution, so he escapes, sneaks into America and starts hiding out in their house. With his experience of overthrowing regimes and fomenting revolutions to seize power, he tells the girl how to overthrow the ruling cliques in the school. Katie Holmes is playing the Mum, which she seems a bit miscast for. Too pretty. It's a plot point that she can't cook so all they eat is junk food and candy, but she's all skinny with flawless skin. Seth Green licks her feet a lot. He's playing a dentist.

It's OK. Doesn't really live up to the concept. But the soundtrack is full of 80s punk rock, so that's good.

Chokeslam (2016) is a Pro-Wrestling Rom-Com from Canada. Stars Chris Marquette, Amanda Crew, Michael Eklund Mick Foley... also features Lance Storm (who looks surprisingly huge next to ordinary sized people), Harry Smith and Chelsea Green/ Lauren Van Ness. It's a boy met girl, boy lost girl, 10 years later they meet again and boy tries to get girl back by promoting her retirement match. They found a really tiny guy to be the male lead and a much taller woman to be the female, but... she doesn't look like a Wrestler. You can kind of see the low budget all the way through. Maybe they should have spent less time trying to teach an actress to wrestle, and more time looking for a Wrestler who could act. The Wrestling match parts of the match are very oddly choreographed, in a way that makes you think whoever wrote and directed it didn't actually bother doing any research at all (also, one match has no referee, another has the referee also being the ring announcer). I'm sure anyone who actually lives in the town in Saskatchewan where they filmed it would love seeing their town in an actual movie and so on, but.... naah. Don't bother. Not good.

My all time Top 10 'Movies that start with someone in a Wrestling Mask Doing an Armed Robbery":

  1. Perdita Durango
  2. Chokeslam
  3. - 10. No entry
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Ingrid Goes West (2017) Starring Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O'Shea Jackson Jr and Wyatt Russell. Interesting premise, well executed, but... once you know the premise, you can basically figure out literally everything that's going to happen in this movie. Point A is very obviously leading to Point B and then on to Point C, so there's not really anything surprising here. Although possibly it's intended for a much younger audience who would be less aware of the tropes... although at one point someone does literally say "This is like Single White Female" and that younger audience wouldn't have been born when that came out in 1992. Maybe that's one of those things where if your movie is very similar to another one, but someone on screen acknowledges it somehow that gives you a licence to copy. Like if at some point in Mean Girls, someone had said "This is like Heathers but without all the Death and Jack Nicholson impersonations". I dunno. Pretty Good, anyway. Wyatt Russell seems to be very good at playing "Guy who is really disappointed with how all of this turned out" type guys.

Life (2017) Starring Jake Gyllenhall, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada and Ariyon Bakare. It's name is very appropriate, as it is indeed predictable and not as scary as you might have thought. In terms of Alien Sci-Fi/ Horror ripoffs, I preferred Event Horizon. Nice concept, and in the beginning they try to make it a bit more relatable present day science, not far future magic science, but ultimately it's a trapped in a house with a monster movie, only in zero gravity. And when it gets into the 'The Monster is loose!' portion of the film, it starts to get not as good. The original Alien really hangs over everything anyone tries to do in this genre, and with this one being an actual alien monster (unlike in Event Horizon) that's actually stalking and killing the crew, it's an even less escapable comparison. Also, the idea of Life's monster being a thing where every cell is simultaneously an eye, a brain, a muscle and a stomach, when it's just a tiny thing in a petri dish, that makes you look forward to seeing what it's final form will be. But I didn't like the actual final form.

Spoiler

It seems like, if you were that lifeform, being super smart you would either make yourself look as non threatening (or alluring?)as possible, or make yourself inescapable by stretching tissue thin and covering every available surface. Or possibly, to be able to traverse corridors in zero G, like a sort of Octopus with wings. But you certainly wouldn't want to look scary, because what's the point? You want to eat people, not scare them, right? But it seems they couldn't resist making their monster look as scary as possible (like a Xenomorph), while also trying to make it look as much like "Look, this really isn't a ripoff of a Xenomorph OK" as they could.

Again, it's OK, but if you've seen the trailer, you can pretty much figure out the movie.

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Watched Unbreakable last night and Split this morning. Did the guy dealing drugs in the Stadium grow up to be a CCTV operator?

I will say this, if I'd seen Split without knowing it was in the Glass universe I would have totally rejected the stuff about people with dissociative personality disorder physically changing depending on which persona was in control. Their should have been some indication that we weren't playing by real life rules early on. Unbreakable did it with the train crash.

Also, I never clocked that the Home Invader murderer (in Unbreakable) guy was watching a  Ken Shamrock UFC fight before. You only hear commentary. 

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55 minutes ago, AxB said:

 

I will say this, if I'd seen Split without knowing it was in the Glass universe I would have totally rejected the stuff about people with dissociative personality disorder physically changing depending on which persona was in control. Their should have been some indication that we weren't playing by real life rules early on.

 

Believe it or not, this is a real thing.

I haven't seen SPLIT, and I'm sure it exaggerates the phenomenon significantly (as you would expect in a comic book-inspired universe), but physical changes between personalities have been scientifically observed in real life going back a long time.  It is fascinating.

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Exaggerates significantly is selling things short. But it starts out totally comprehensible, and only loses touch with reality once you're a ways in. That's the issue.

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Yeah, wish I saw Upgrade sooner, it's in that great strike zone that I love: just serious enough scifi but not too technical and a nice pulpy texture.

I'm freakin loving this subgenre too. Like The Machine (2013) and Ex Machina (2014)... even the flawed ones were entertaining (Automata (2014), Kill Command (2016), Morgan (2016) ).

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First Man. Left half an hour early. I really enjoyed the cinematography and the ensuing psychology behind it, focusing on the primitive nature of the technology they were working with, and that it wasnt so much as the possibility of something going wrong, but how it would ever work.

Beyond that it was a massive wtf clusterfuck. I hope Claire Foy gets a razzie nomination for her awful off-off-Broadway monologues and period accent. Whilst I thought Ryan Gosling was good, he ultimately played Neil fucking Armstrong as Astronaut Patrick Bateman. 

Theres so much to work with his story, and it's a compelling story how steadfast he was to not cheapen his legacy and huckster himself out. Instead the film starts with the on screen death of his three year old daughter, and then the progressive violent deaths of his crew members, where you think it's only a matter of time before him and Buzz Aldrin hunt down Yuri Gagarin and torture him to the slick pop tunes of Huey Lewis and the News.

The aesthetic is boring and generically "it's a period piece so everyone has to be retrosexy". Theres possibly as much as ten minutes of screentime dedicated to men shaking hands, and even more to earnestly exchanging frank but polite views over classy drinks. At least have someone wear corduroy and have polio, if I have to sit through two hours wondering if and when Neil Armstrong is going to Benoit his family. 

2/10

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On 10/15/2018 at 1:04 PM, Technico Support said:

All that, plus a human had a baby with a robot.  I guess you'd enjoy it if you can look past that key conceit, which I couldn't. 

That's kinda why I began to lean towards the theory 'Decard was a replicant' finally (as much as it pains me to admit), the whole film seems to hinge on the slavery allegory and if replicants are able to reproduce it upsets this very insecure status quo. 

It's a conflicting movie to me... it seemed to be constantly striving to be an epic but kept falling short. I could have done without Harrison Ford showing up at all if I'm honest, and I wish the replicant unrest had been explored more. Loved the scenes with K and Joi, I liked Gosling's performance and thought he played Peter Pan perfectly. Sylvia Hoeks was absolutely badass too.

Someone made a fan edit that took all of the slow pacing out of 2049 and believe it or not ended up with 13 minutes cut. Needless to say, that's my preferred cut.

 

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On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 9:54 PM, turk128 said:

Yeah, wish I saw Upgrade sooner, it's in that great strike zone that I love: just serious enough scifi but not too technical and a nice pulpy texture.

It helped that Upgrade had a really dumb trailer. I went in with low expectations and got smashed in the back of the head with a gold brick covered in lemon juice. 

Upgrade was stupid good.  I need to buy the Blu-ray for my shelf porn.

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Most of the Upgrade discussion I've seen lately has been about how Logan Marshall Green is a Tom Hardy clone, and Upgrade is basically the same film as Venom.

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18 hours ago, AxB said:

Most of the Upgrade discussion I've seen lately has been about how Logan Marshall Green is a Tom Hardy clone, and Upgrade is basically the same film as Venom.

Those people are idiots.  If Venom had been more like Upgrade, it wouldn't have sucked.

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2 minutes ago, Betsy Zeidler said:

I actually said that VENOM looked like a terrible knock-off of UPGRADE, so I think we're good.

If that is what you said, then I owe you an apology for my snarkyness and salute your good taste.

Upgrade is fucking awesome.  Venom is not.

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Just got back from watching Mid90s. I won't go too deep into it but on a personal level, it made me really emotional. It's as close to KIDS as you can probably get for a theatrically released film in 2018. Certainly not even close in terms of grittiness or nihilism and really that isn't the tone it's going for. Like KIDS, it had the feeling of something my older brother would have shown me when I was slightly too young to be watching it and it's the first movie since he passed that made me feel that way so it hit me pretty hard. Hill even flat out copies the sequence where KIDS goes back and forth between the girls and the guys talking about each other, although to a much less explicit degree.The soundtrack was killer and they hit the feel of 90s skate vids head on.

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Just saw Can You Ever Forgive Me?.  I can honestly say, I never expected that good a dramatic performance out of Melissa McCarthy, but my girl's got chops.   

The movie itself is alright, but doesn't really set out the stakes for Melissa's character.   Overall though, it was terrific and so much better than I expected. Definitely would not be surprised if she and Richard E. Grant get nominations out of this. 

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