Last movie watched...

[Frank]

... Frank ...

I will destroy you.

[Professor Bear]

Not if I beat you to it.

[MacabreMagpie]

Knives Out.

Watched this after a long day in crowded Birmingham and pretty knackered so was fighting to stay awake at points. Not the movie's fault but I think that's what I can put me not quite following one minor plot thread down to, so I'll give it a pass on that one.

Besides that, it was pretty good. A few good laughs and great performances all around. Worth seeing if it's not your usual kinda thing.

[Tiplodocus]

Return of the Jedi in preparation for Rise Of Skywalker.
It was great. I've even grown to love the Ewoks which eighteen year old me thought were a bit too childish. 

[TordelBack]

Return of the Jedi in preparation for Rise Of Skywalker.
It was great. I've even grown to love the Ewoks which eighteen year old me thought were a bit too childish.

I've long cited RotJ as my least favourite of the 'real' SW films*, but a recent re-watch with an identical purpose really showed me how fantastic that whole final act is, and how brilliantly the intercutting of the three strands is judged. They're all good, and they all get just the right amount of time to shine, in the right order.


*Although I've always liked the Ewoks, what we see of them on the screen and what we think about them due to merch, spinoffs etc is so often confused.

[Hawkmumbler]

PROMARE

Studio Triggers latest theatrical venture is like snorting 5 lines of coke and looking into a neon lava lamp for 2 hours with the sounds of Bowie echoing in your head.

It's a superbly daft movie, as is any Trigger production, about a militia of weaponized spontaneous combustion aliens and firefighters with giant robots and firetrucks trying to stop a white supremacists neo-nazi from starting a mass exodus to another universe as the planets about to blow up.

Yeah. Thats about the plot.

And lots of skin on display. This movie is oozing Bisexual energy. 

[Leigh S]

I thought John Wick was supposed to be good?  Remove Keanu and it is like a less interesting Accident Man (and I'm talking about the movie version let alone the comics).

That's harsh, Keanu is a likeable lead so it is watchable, it is action packed, but.... did I miss something?

[broodblik]

Just finished a marathon session watching The Irishman. For me the movie struggled to get going and was a big disappointment.  The thing that was done quite exceptionally is the make-up  or rather the technology on the actors to de-age them. 

[sheridan]

Return of the Jedi in preparation for Rise Of Skywalker.
It was great. I've even grown to love the Ewoks which eighteen year old me thought were a bit too childish.

*Although I've always liked the Ewoks, what we see of them on the screen and what we think about them due to merch, spinoffs etc is so often confused.

I was young enough to like the Ewoks at the time and haven't gone through any 'hate' phase.  I really dislike the Tarzan yell and the Wilhelm scream in Jedi though.

[sheridan]

Last film watched: Bladerunner: The Final Cut - because it was a contemporary film until yesterday.  Now it's a historical drama.

[Professor Bear]

There's a bit in Rambo: Last Blood where Rambo has to sneak into America from the Mexican side of the US/Mexico border, so he drives up to a run-down waist-high wire fence in the middle of nowhere and just drives over it.  You know it's the border because it has rusty signs sprayed with shit that say "US Border" and "Do Not Cross" in English.  Because subtext.
The Rambo movies - even at the lunk-headed nadir of Rambo 3 - are about the consequences of violence, from Rambo's PTSD to the scarred wastelands of Afghanistan and postwar Vietnam becoming the playground for his enemies - but this movie revels in sadism to the point that Rambo ends up yelling down a phone that the baddies will "feel muh RAAAAAAGE!" and describing the ludicrous things he's going to do to them, which he then does.  The action doesn't start until the last 10 minutes of the film, but when it does it turns into Tom And Jerry stuff, with Rambo magically appearing to shoot off the tops of people's heads after they've stood on a rake.
The closest it ever gets to awareness that there were other Rambo movies and that they were about "stuff" is when we find out Rambo has dug loads of tunnels under his backyard, because uhhhh the Vietcong had tunnels I guess?  But nothing is made of it, even though the tunnels come into play later in the film.
This is a really poor send-off for this character - or maybe that's the point: maybe it's a commentary on how victims of violence sometimes don't move past it and just end up turning it into a toxic hatred for foreigners, with the final act essentially being the most pointed endorsement of the Stand Your Ground laws you're likely to see.  After I watched this, I asked if a mate had seen it and he said he wasn't bothered about Stallone anymore as he'd turned into "a massive Trump c*cksucker" in recent years, which I am glad I didn't know going in, as seeing anti-Mexican sentiments in the text would have been unavoidable.  As it was, I just saw a very stupid film that had learned the wrong lessons from successful franchises of recent years like Taken, but now it's hard to see its anti-Mexican themes as anything other than cynical capitalising on current US racism, something even First Blood Part Two - in which Rambo returned to Vietnam to fight the Vietnamese - didn't do in the far less-enlightened times of the early 1980s.  First Blood Part Two never actually went after the Vietnamese as a race as they were merely depicted as cannon-fodder flunkies of the Soviets, which is relatively clever in how it cynically exploited the original circumstances of the Vietnam War in order to finally declare a victory in it, but it wasn't actually racist.  Last Blood can't say the same.

[Mardroid]

Return of the Jedi in preparation for Rise Of Skywalker.
It was great. I've even grown to love the Ewoks which eighteen year old me thought were a bit too childish.

*Although I've always liked the Ewoks, what we see of them on the screen and what we think about them due to merch, spinoffs etc is so often confused.

I was young enough to like the Ewoks at the time and haven't gone through any 'hate' phase.  I really dislike the Tarzan yell and the Wilhelm scream in Jedi though.

Heh. I remember The Last Jedi being criticized for sending itself up somewhat with that ironing scene* but right back in Return of the Jedi they had that Tarzan parody. Which I confess I also found amusing.

I like RotJ a lot. It might even be my favourite of the original films. I get the criticisms (the cutesy stuff with the Ewoks -which never bothered me**  and the similarities in the latter part of the film to A New Hope, with the whole Death Star stuff) but it's got so much else going on. I particularly liked the whole redemption arc with Luke and Vader. Curiously I've seen that criticised, as it appears many would prefer Vader to have just remained a one dimensional villain, or they dislike the idea of bad guys being redeemed instead of getting their comeuppance. (Not directed at anyone here, I hasten to add. Just something I've seen online.)

*Not by me. I found it very amusing.

** Those weird teddy bears are actually pretty grim, when you consider what they were planning to do to Han and Luke. Alive.  Part of me wishes they'd gone with the original idea of using the wookies instead of the ewoks though. I've got nothing against the ewoks, and I understand why Lucas went that route (and I'm not cynically referring to the merchandising opportunities, although he might have had that in mind as well). It's just we have a wookie support character, so having an arc dealing with saving his species from slavery (it makes sense that the Empire might use Wookie muscle to build their new space station), would have been nice and provide extra symmetry, maybe. Still, we've still got the Holiday Special😝. ( I've never actually seen that!)

[TordelBack]

Still, we've still got the Holiday Special😝. ( I've never actually seen that!)

Keep it that way.

[Keef Monkey]

Knives Out, which I absolutely loved. Very funny, brilliantly written and directed and with a wonderful ensemble cast all hitting it out the park. I kept thinking while I was watching it how I haven't really seen anything like it in a very long time and wondering why I don't watch more of that style of film, and realized it's because they don't really make them like that anymore. I'm glad Rian Johnson did!

Also watched The Changeling for the first time, a haunted house horror from 1980. It's aged pretty well and has some creepy moments but feels more like a mystery than a nerve-shredding horror, focusing more on figuring out what happened in the house. Enjoyed it.

Oh and a rewatch of This Is Spinal Tap, because it's mandatory to wheel that out occasionally. Still brilliant, and I still find every time I watch it a different line is my favorite. This time it was the preserved moose line that killed me.

[Greg M.]

The Fly (1986) – I watch 'The Thing' every year. It's consistently wonderful. But 'The Fly' – possibly the greatest practical-effects body-horror movie of them all – only lurches from its telepod into my DVD player a few times a decade, and then consumes me for weeks on end, living with me unbidden. It is unique – graphically gory but unutterably, achingly sad. With only three significant characters, all of whom are well-played, complex and real, you could almost do the whole thing as a play. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis are superb, but John Getz was the standout this time around – at first he seems the classic sleazy 80s asshole antagonist, but whilst Seth Brundle steadily loses his humanity over the course of the film, Stathis Borans discovers his, and ends the movie a genuine hero.

The Fly II (1989) – Tonally, this film is all over the place – fascinatingly so. It's a B-movie monster flick that cheerfully employs 80s-kids'-adventure-film tropes, whilst also indulging itself in particularly nasty manifestations of post-Robocop cruelty. It misses so many tricks – most of the worst fates are doled out to hapless redshirts when there's at least two characters who deserve far nastier demises than they get -  yet it also lands some sickening punches: poor dog! Poor (evil) Bartok! Best viewed as a 'What If?' rather than a canonical sequel, so it can be appreciated in its own demented right, rather than merely skulking in the shadow of its untouchable sire.