Last movie watched...

[TordelBack]

WarGames.  Still good stuff if not quite as nail-biting as I remember from 35 years back, but to my disappointment 'Reality TV Star Goads North Korea' never materialises as one of Joshua's Global Thermonuclear War scenarios: I suppose some things are too far-fetched for even a super-computer to simulate. 

Mathew Broderick is stiffly one-note to the point of embarrassing, actually worse than he is in the near-contemporary Ladyhawke: he goes on quite an acting journey between this and Ferris and Private Jerome, one he sadly retraced back to its origins for Godzilla.  Luckily the director has decided that the far more charismatic Ally Sheedy is where to leave the camera in any given shot, even if that means following her gratuitous exercising in a rather worryingly lascivious way, given her character's stated age. 

Had great fun explaining all the prehistoric tech (and geo-politics) to my kids.  Don't think they believed the bit about PCs having 8" floppy disks (I typed that one very carefully) instead of hard-drives, but no-one should believe everything their parents tell them. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014): The cost of making them watch WarGames was watching this.  Actually, this isn't as bad as I feared (and I knew Michael Bay was the producer), as long as you aren't too invested in any of the Turtles' previous incarnations (I'm not).  It's twee to the point of nausea, the human characters are hopeless ciphers, there's no hint of internal logic whatsoever, but: the character designs work surprisingly well; the Power Rangers fight scenes are quite fun; and the centrepiece off-piste multiple-sliding-vehicle battle is precisely what was missing from Spectre.  The only really sour note is the explicit worshipping of Megan Fox's arse by Lego Batman, which feels like it belongs in an entirely different film (probably not one nominated for Best Actress at the Kids' Choice Awards), and one which I wouldn't want to watch.   

[von Boom]

WarGames.  Still good stuff if not quite as nail-biting as I remember from 35 years back, but to my disappointment 'Reality TV Star Goads North Korea' never materialises as one of Joshua's Global Thermonuclear War scenarios: I suppose some things are too far-fetched for even a super-computer to simulate. 

I think if you go back and freeze-frame the Tangerine-Buffoon scenario does appear briefly.

[Keef Monkey]

Rewatched Phantasm II at the weekend, got a nice Blu-ray set recently which we're slowly working through. I've seen them all except V but Bea had only seen the first film, and it's always great fun watching an old horror film with her when she's seeing it for the first time. Doesn't matter how many times I've seen it, her reactions always make them seem fresh and I think seeing it through someone else's eyes like that gives them a bit of new life.

I really like this one because you can really see what's happened in horror cinema in the years between Phantasms 1&2 - it's clearly been informed by the success of Nightmare On Elm Street and Evil Dead 2, with a new emphasis on Reggie as a horror-action icon and on fun splattery gore effects. The road movie aspect of the first half is cool and the idea that the Tall Man has been travelling across America leaving 'murdered' towns in his wake is really bleak and gives it an almost post-apocalyptic vibe, but it does give it a very languid pace. Then it really comes to life in the last act when a bigger sense of fun and gory mayhem takes over, great stuff.

Like the first film, it's really hokey in places, but great fun. Only complaint is that the new 5.1 sound mix was very poor - the dialogue was so barely audible that I started to worry one of my speakers had blown or something, but it would appear to just be mixed that way which is disappointing. Oh, and there's nowhere near enough fake blood pumped out during the silver ball deaths in this one (watching the extras it confirms the ratings board made them cut out a great deal) which is a shame.

[Modern Panther]

Lobster, on Netflix. A dark comedy about a world where, if you don't find your true love within a set period of time, you get trans formed into an animal of your choosing...or have to run of and live in the woods where people will hunt you.  A charming tale of societal expectations.

Couple of hours to burn...hmmm, this looks interesting.  Oh, its got Colin Farrell in it.  Oh, and whatshisface...Ben Wishaw.  This is a bit weird.  Aaah, I get it now.  Olivia Coleman as well.  And John C Reilly.  That's quite a collection.  Umm..this is a bit strange.  Oh, its....no, it can't be a...OH, SWEET JESUS, THEBLOOD, THE BLOOD, THIS IS HORRIBLE.  THE POOR DOG!...

[Eric Plumrose]

you get trans formed into an animal of your choosing

Just like Time Lords (and Ladies)!

[Keef Monkey]

Lobster, on Netflix. A dark comedy about a world where, if you don't find your true love within a set period of time, you get trans formed into an animal of your choosing...or have to run of and live in the woods where people will hunt you.  A charming tale of societal expectations.

Couple of hours to burn...hmmm, this looks interesting.  Oh, its got Colin Farrell in it.  Oh, and whatshisface...Ben Wishaw.  This is a bit weird.  Aaah, I get it now.  Olivia Coleman as well.  And John C Reilly.  That's quite a collection.  Umm..this is a bit strange.  Oh, its....no, it can't be a...OH, SWEET JESUS, THEBLOOD, THE BLOOD, THIS IS HORRIBLE.  THE POOR DOG!...

Yeah that was a weird one for me. The trailers had me expecting a dry, spiky but ultimately heartwarming love story, and initially I felt like that's what I was getting. And then things got dark real fast. It's way more brutal in its dissection of relationships and societal pressures and expectations than it first appeared, and there are some events in it that were really disturbingly grim and stuck with me a bit. I think it's a very good film, but I definitely didn't leave it feeling good.

My latest watch was Blade Runner 2049, which I loved a greeeeeat deal.

[Smith]

29th Street.Meh,I remember it being funnier.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

Wonder Woman. Thought it was terrific much better than BvsS and had something rather dark to say about human nature but our better selves do exist within us. Effects were occasionally ropey, but the cast was excellent particularly Ewan Bremner as a  sniper suffering from PTSD. Well worth a watch.   

[Rara Avis]

Just back from The Snowman. I honestly can't recommend this movie .. I felt there were bits in the trailer that never made it to the screen cut and the movie (like the book apparently) leaves a few strands of the plot unresolved. If you absolutely had to, it's not the worst way to spend a few hours but don't expect much going in.

[Professor Bear]

Caesar goes full Monkey Jesus on us in War For The Planet Of The Apes, with crucifixion and the spear in the side and everything, and it even has a bit of Monkey Moses thrown in for good measure.  As fun as a post-apocalyptic movie where [spoiler]the humans get wiped off the face of the Earth[/spoiler] can be, the first and second halves seem to be on nodding terms only, with the revenge flick first hour giving way to sword and sandals stuff in the second, and a last twenty minutes that shoehorns in some explosions.
For all the biblical allegory, the central premise of revenge doesn't really get resolved one way or another, but despite that, it's a good laugh and one of the best Apes flicks.

Mutant Apocalypse - cobbled together from three episodes of the last Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, as with almost all modern Western animation, the influences are apparent to the point of obnoxiousness, but it takes a sterner man than me to turn down a Ninja Turtles film set 50 years after the extinction of humanity in which Old Man Raphael sports a ludicrous beard and travels with a bio-chipped Donatello across the parts of America that are easy to render on a mid-range pc.  First it's Steel Dawn, then it's Fury Road, then it's Beyond Thunderdome - it's quite ephemeral and inoffensive, but also surprisingly brutal in places.  A fun waste of an hour.

[Tiplodocus]

DUNE

I actually think I'm growing to love this more everyone I see it. The Harkonen scenes obviously the most lynchian aspect of the whole thing. They are so delicously OTT that if these scenes were badly sound synched, they'd fit right into Mulholland Drive. And I've grown to love the score.

The special effects (involving anything that moves) were always shit though despite the inventiveness of the imagery and the obvious ambition.

[Frank]

Wild (Film 4, last night); the one with Reese Witherspoon, not Stephen Fry(e).

It's easy to see why Witherspoon chose this role; the growth trajectory of her character is the same as Legally Blonde (but with with cancer and heroin), and lots of the early scenes rely on her likeable persona and comic abilities to reassure the nervous viewer (me) that it's not all going to be shooting your dead Mum's horse and rough sex with strangers in alleys.

I watched it as a counterpoint to Jeremiah Johnson, which was on ITV the same day. Both are wilderness survival stories about learning to live without other people - and it was interesting to see how many of the same character functions and story turns feature in both - but Witherspoon doesn't murder nearly as many native American tribes people.

Like End Of Tour, it also functions as a nineties nostalgia piece, although producer/screenwriter Nick Hornby's canny music choices avoid the obvious candidates. I'm not sure the central metaphor* works, and it's fun to entertain the possibility that all the rationalising of bad behaviour is misdirection, and the character is just an awful person.

This is the kind of Oscar bait - virtue signalling from people and organisations that, like Harvey Weinstein, spend the rest of the year making decisions of which they are (rightly) ashamed - I would never have chosen to rent or buy, which is something I can say of many films I now rank amongst my favourites.  I'll be sad when broadcast telly finally goes.

I enjoyed it, despite the lack of aliens and robots. I like a good cry.


* 'I'm walking my way back to the person my Mom thought I was'

[Arkwright99]

Just back from The Snowman. I honestly can't recommend this movie .. I felt there were bits in the trailer that never made it to the screen cut and the movie (like the book apparently) leaves a few strands of the plot unresolved. If you absolutely had to, it's not the worst way to spend a few hours but don't expect much going in.

100% agree. I was slightly concerned during the credits when I saw there were two separate editors - the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker and Claire Simpson (not a name I recognise but she edited Platoon, Someone To Watch Over Me & Wall Street, amongst others, so clearly not a neophyte) - but there are entire scenes/sequences in the trailer that simply don't feature in the final movie or are heavily truncated to within a gnat's crotchet of their life and it's almost as if they shot two films and left the better one on the cutting room floor.

How the Norwegian PD solve any crimes at all is the greatest mystery in the film. No-one in the department seems to have a clearly defined role or any sense of process and Fassbender's Harry Hole just wanders around picking up other people's files, having a shufty at cases he's not been assigned to and then sticking his nose in. Loads of time is spend on [spoiler]an utterly inconsequential Winter Olympics bid[/spoiler] which doesn't go anywhere and is swiftly dropped the moment it becomes even less relevant to the main storyline (despite there being the whiff of a Harvey Weinstein-esque scandal at its core.)

When it comes to the ending/reveal it's almost as though everyone got bored and decided sod it, let's just finish up and go home. To be honest, I can't say I blame them. Avoid, unless you want to see how far Val Kilmer has fallen from his glory days.

[radiator]

Wild (Film 4, last night); the one with Reese Witherspoon, not Stephen Fry(e).

It's easy to see why Witherspoon chose this role; the growth trajectory of her character is the same as Legally Blonde (but with with cancer and heroin), and lots of the early scenes rely on her likeable persona and comic abilities to reassure the nervous viewer (me) that it's not all going to be shooting your dead Mum's horse and rough sex with strangers in alleys.

I watched it as a counterpoint to Jeremiah Johnson, which was on ITV the same day. Both are wilderness survival stories about learning to live without other people - and it was interesting to see how many of the same character functions and story turns feature in both - but Witherspoon doesn't murder nearly as many native American tribes people.

Like End Of Tour, it also functions as a nineties nostalgia piece, although producer/screenwriter Nick Hornby's canny music choices avoid the obvious candidates. I'm not sure the central metaphor* works, and it's fun to entertain the possibility that all the rationalising of bad behaviour is misdirection, and the character is just an awful person.

This is the kind of Oscar bait - virtue signalling from people and organisations that, like Harvey Weinstein, spend the rest of the year making decisions of which they are (rightly) ashamed - I would never have chosen to rent or buy, which is something I can say of many films I now rank amongst my favourites.  I'll be sad when broadcast telly finally goes.

I enjoyed it, despite the lack of aliens and robots. I like a good cry.


* 'I'm walking my way back to the person my Mom thought I was'

I like that movie. It was filmed all around where I live and I have been to a lot of the shooting locations, so I have a special affection for it.

I believe a local hiker took it upon themselves to locate and retrieve the boot Witherspoon flings from the mountaintop at the beginning of the film.

[JOE SOAP]

100% agree. I was slightly concerned during the credits when I saw there were two separate editors - the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker and Claire Simpson (not a name I recognise but she edited Platoon, Someone To Watch Over Me & Wall Street, amongst others, so clearly not a neophyte) - but there are entire scenes/sequences in the trailer that simply don't feature in the final movie or are heavily truncated to within a gnat's crotchet of their life and it's almost as if they shot two films and left the better one on the cutting room floor.

Trailers are cut by trailer companies from selected footage supplied sometimes well in advance of a film's completion. They're not generally cut by the editors of the film.