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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)


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Between COVID and boredom with Youtube, I've watched a few movies lately:

Colonia - Emma Watson is the fiancee of a guy who protests against the government in Chile in the 1970s.  The guy gets arrested and is taken to Colonia Dignidad, a camp in the middle of nowhere from which no one ever leaves.  The camp also doubles as something of a cult.  Watson shows up and joins in hopes of getting her boyfriend out.  She eventually succeeds in one of the more ridiculous scenes I've viewed in quite awhile.  The whole thing is just flat and lifeless.  Colonia Dignidad was a real place, a real cult, with real evil happening but this movie doesn't deliver.  3/10.

88 Minutes - Al Pacino is a psychology professor who testified in a murder case and got the bad guy put away.  Now the bad guy is coming up on his execution date and new murders start happening.  Was the bad guy really guilty all along?  Is it a copycat?  What's going on?  The title refers to a phone call made to Pacino's character where he's told he has 88 minutes to live.  This is a terrible movie with bad acting and dialogue throughout.  The story is stupid and is implausible on pretty much every level.  Al must have needed a paycheck really, really bad to make this.  2/10.

Laggies/Say When - Laggies (also called Say When) is the story of a woman (Keira Knightley) just out of college who finds she is woefully unready to do the job (therapist) for which she has studied.  She's engaged but kind of terrified to move forward with her life.  On a night out, she encounters high schooler Chloe Grace Moretz and agrees to buy her beer.  Knightley and Moretz end up hanging out and a friendship develops.  Knightley ends up spending the night and eventually staying for a week.  During this time, she wins over Moretz's father and they end up starting a relationship.  The premise is stupid but Knightley and Moretz pull it off well.  It all leads to the very predictable ending where a bunch of characters on the periphery end up suffering but it's all OK because the main protagonists get what they want.  Ugh.  This is kind of a mix of Reality Bites and several other movies but not as good.  5/10.

Only the Brave - Miles Teller is a screwup who wants to be a forest fire fireman.  Josh Brolin is the grizzled veteran leader of a team, the Granite Mountain Hotshots.  Only the Brave tells the true story of 2013's Yarnell Hill Fire in which 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots perished.  The last 30 minutes during which they fight the fire and ultimate succumb are top notch storytelling, extremely powerful stuff.  The rest...not so much.  There's a ton of padding here trying to make us care about the characters as people with lots of unnecessary conflict scenes with Brolin's wife, played by (an overly thin and rather unhealthy-looking) Jennifer Connelly.  They play the "he's about to retire but is going on one last mission" card, etc.  The end result is a movie that's too long and doesn't live up to its powerful source material.  6/10.

Goalie - Biographical movie of superstar hockey goalie Terry Sawchuk.  Kind of a paint-by-numbers movie of this type.  Nothing special, nothing terrible.  6/10.

Finding Forrester - Rob Brown is Jamal, an inner city kid with a special talent for writing that he tries to hide.  Sean Connery is a reclusive author who once had a massively popular novel before retreating into his apartment and never coming out.  After being dared to break into his apartment, Jamal leaves behind a book bag.  When he goes back to retrieve it, a hesitant mentor/student relationship begins with Connery's Forrester.  This movie is roughly 20 different cliches all rolled into one and yet somehow it still works.  Brown, in particular, is great here.  It's nothing you haven't seen 100 times before but it's done well.  8/10.

 

I need to choose better movies.

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1 hour ago, Control said:

What's the best action movie since Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)?

Fury Road is almost in a class by itself.  Maybe if am being generous, I'd say Mission Impossible: Fallout or John Wick: Chapter 2. 

If we're including superhero movies in with traditional actioners, then Spider Man:  No Way Home easily falls into that mix.

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Connery and Brown are very good in Finding Forrester, but the engine that keeps that movie running is F. Murray Abraham heeling it up as the professor, who’s essentially institutional racism made flesh. He raises the stakes with a performance that could’ve easily gone sideways in the wrong hands. 

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7 minutes ago, (BP) said:

Connery and Brown are very good in Finding Forrester, but the engine that keeps that movie running is F. Murray Abraham heeling it up as the professor, who’s essentially institutional racism made flesh. He raises the stakes with a performance that could’ve easily gone sideways in the wrong hands. 

Good call.  He was terrific.

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21 hours ago, J.T. said:

Fury Road is almost in a class by itself.  Maybe if am being generous, I'd say Mission Impossible: Fallout or John Wick: Chapter 2. 

If we're including superhero movies in with traditional actioners, then Spider Man:  No Way Home easily falls into that mix.

MI: Fallout and Endgame were what came to mind for me. Endgame is still one of the damnedest things I think I have ever seen, but the action parts are really just at the very end and the rest of that movie is 1 part Back to the Future and 1 part Ocean's Eleven.

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1 hour ago, Contentious C said:

Somehow Tabe manages to watch a pile of movies I haven't seen any of.  Bravo.  Or, in the words of Mr. Connery: you the man now, dawg.

Thanks, brother.  And, as you can see, you're not missing much!

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I was staying in an AirBnB over the weekend and they had a VCR with a bunch of VHS tapes. Haven't watched one in maybe 15 years so figured I had to. Mostly kids movies or stuff that I'd prefer to watch on a big screen in top quality, so I decided on something that has no pretensions of looking good - The Wedding Singer. I've never been a Sandler fan and before this the earliest movie I'd seen of his was Mr. Deeds or Anger Management. I was expecting some gross out juvenile flick with dick jokes or something, but this was actually a very sweet movie (albeit not something you haven't seen in a million romantic comedies) and maybe the best comedic Sandler performance I've seen him do. Steve Buscemi singing at the wedding at the end is the best.

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On 2/4/2022 at 10:42 AM, Swift said:

I was staying in an AirBnB over the weekend and they had a VCR with a bunch of VHS tapes. Haven't watched one in maybe 15 years so figured I had to. Mostly kids movies or stuff that I'd prefer to watch on a big screen in top quality, so I decided on something that has no pretensions of looking good - The Wedding Singer. I've never been a Sandler fan and before this the earliest movie I'd seen of his was Mr. Deeds or Anger Management. I was expecting some gross out juvenile flick with dick jokes or something, but this was actually a very sweet movie (albeit not something you haven't seen in a million romantic comedies) and maybe the best comedic Sandler performance I've seen him do. Steve Buscemi singing at the wedding at the end is the best.

I LOVE that movie (The Wedding Singer). I think it's hilarious, with a bunch of great moments. 

Edited by Tabe
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Alright, another movie:

 

Collateral Beauty - Will Smith is a grieving father whose daughter died 2 years prior. Will has stopped actually working and his marketing firm is circling the bowl. His partner and top employees can't convince him to sell out. When they find out he's written letters to Death, Time & Love, they hire actors to play those concepts, confront Will, get it on film and use that to show people he's incompetent. If sounds pretty gross, and kind of is, but they do actually mean well. The cast is top notch but there's not much here before the ending. "Main character deals with profound grief" is a sub-genre of which I'm a fan but this is mostly a miss. 4/10.

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Well that was fast.  Nightmare Alley (2021) debuts on HBO tonight only two or so months after it's theatrical debut.

The 1949 original with Tyrone Power has departed TCM On Demand, but it might be available on the app.

Edited by J.T.
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Watched Nightmare Alley last night. Bradly Cooper might end up being my favorite actor this generation. I feel people will look back on him like the previous generation looked back on Paul Newman’s career. An extremely versatile charming actor who can choose leading man parts that balance acting confident, while hiding a much darker side.

Edited by LoneWolf&Subs
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Jackass Forever was as funny as always. The two hours flew by (which me and my friends were in agreement on). Maybe not as good as hearing someone vomit in the theater one of the times I saw 2, but nothing can beat that. I wonder how they found the new guys and gal; nice to have a woman in the cast btw, though she was only in like three scenes. 

Spoiler

Poor Danger Ehren just gets the worst of it every time. If getting punched in the dick by Francis Ngannou isn't bad enough, just put honey and salmon on it and let a bear go to town! The fear in his eyes is the stuff of legends. 

There was a surprising amount of cock and balls in this one too (well, duh). As far as bodily fluids I'd say about standard, injuries... well, you'd have to ask them though there is plenty evidence. Knoxville gets real hurt at one point. The real surprise is that people haven't ended up with compound fractures from some of the bumps they take. 

 

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20 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Jackass Forever was as funny as always. The two hours flew by (which me and my friends were in agreement on). Maybe not as good as hearing someone vomit in the theater one of the times I saw 2, but nothing can beat that. I wonder how they found the new guys and gal; nice to have a woman in the cast btw, though she was only in like three scenes. 

  Reveal hidden contents

Poor Danger Ehren just gets the worst of it every time. If getting punched in the dick by Francis Ngannou isn't bad enough, just put honey and salmon on it and let a bear go to town! The fear in his eyes is the stuff of legends. 

There was a surprising amount of cock and balls in this one too (well, duh). As far as bodily fluids I'd say about standard, injuries... well, you'd have to ask them though there is plenty evidence. Knoxville gets real hurt at one point. The real surprise is that people haven't ended up with compound fractures from some of the bumps they take. 

 

How much gross shit is there? I love the live action looney tunes stuff, the baggy not so much.

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There is some Looney Tunes/Buster Keaton stuff but not as much as the last two. I can't remember which, but I think it's Part 2 where they peaked on that. Still there is a Roadrunner gag in this that will have you wondering how it was fallen for or if it was already known ahead of time. The gross-out factor is definitely not as bad as 3. I would say they aimed and hit a solid middle on the target for this one. In fact some of the gross ones are mild, the painful ones are leaned into more. 

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Pulled an interesting, unintended thematic double feature this weekend.

Started with GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE, which…The first 30 minutes were charming enough (despite the FORCE AWAKENS-caliber character assassination of the original characters to set up the whole premise), but it started losing me once it turned into a beat-for-beat remake of the original. And THAT ending.  It made me kinda sick.

To me, the whole film could be summed up with a quick shot of a fucking Twinkie in the Ecto-1 glove compartment. The camera lingers on it, like its expecting you to have an emotional reaction to it. REMEMBER WHEN EGON TALKED ABOUT THE TWINKIE??? Just the absolute pits of our current wave of nostalgia porn.

Followed that up with Edgar Wright’s LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, a film that, as it turns out, is explicitly about the dangers of nostalgia. Honestly, it’s probably the least of Wright’s films, but even at his “worst,” his direction is stunning. The entire first sequence set in the 60’s is one of the best things put to film last year (that I saw, anyway). I just didn’t feel like the script was all the way there. The rules of what’s going on aren’t always clear, and it outright cheats on a few occasions, most importantly in the climax. I also was not  really buying how the movie wants you to feel about a certain character in the end, but I won’t get into it right now, for the sake of spoilers.

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Spoilers for Spielberg’s The BFG.

Spoiler

Film was kind of a snoozer on the whole, but the climactic fart gag is a legit all-timer. A masterpiece in the genre. Hardest I laughed in months. You could see it coming and building but it went off harder than I could have imagined. Five stars. Yes, I am six years old. 

 

Edited by John from Cincinnati
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Alright, another movie:

Crossroads - Ralph Macchio is Eugene, a kid from Long Island with an affinity for blues guitar. When he meets Willie Brown, a former friend of blues legend Robert Johnson, he tries to convince Brown to teach him a lost song of Johnson's. They set out on a road trip to Mississippi. Along the way they run into Jami Gertz, get into trouble, and Eugene shows off his guitar skills. There's some nonsense about soul selling and a final showdown with Steve Vai. I remember liking this. I have no idea why. This movie sucked. 3/10.

 

I need to watch better movies. 

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Well at least you got to see Jami Gertz' hot ass. Steve Vai doing a blues guitar showdown is absurd, that dude can play anything. It sounds like a bad imitation of the storyline of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia". 

Reefer Madness is on and I've only seen bits and pieces til now. MARIHUANA MADE ME A RAPIST!

Edited by Curt McGirt
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Hey I just remembered the two notable songs from Jackass Forever: the first needle-drop of the film is "Alternative Ulster" by Stiff Little Fingers and later on they play "Where Eagles Dare" by the Misfits. Also of note is a graveyard segment where Pontius has Hank von Helvete from Turbonegro's makeup on ? Speaking of dead guys, they give Dunn a shout at the end. Bam is only seen in the background of some old footage; I didn't catch him but a friend did. 

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Found a behind the scenes video for Masters of the Universe (1987) today. New to me. I still have a soft spot for the film watching the cartoon then this as a kid along with Frank Langella's Skeletor as the standout, Meg Foster's Evil-Lyn and Bill Conti's score.

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