Last movie watched...

[shaolin_monkey]

I watched Reservoir Dogs again for the first time in over 15 years last night. Bloody hell, I forgot how good it was!

[JamesC]

Filth.


Crap.

[Hawkmumbler]

Well that doesn't bode well for tomorrows outing.

[JamesC]

Well that doesn't bode well for tomorrows outing.

I wrote a bit more about it in the Filth thread but it's not very eloquent! The whole experience made me feel a bit angry and put me in a bad mood. I had to have a cup of tea and read Jack Kirby's 2001 adaptation to cheer myself up.

[Frank]

The Hunter, with Willem Dafoe, which I enjoyed a lot.

[Professor Bear]

I had my issues with the first movie, but it was at least an amusing superhero comedy if taken at face value.  Kick Ass 2, however, is easily one of the worst films I have ever seen in my life.  Watching it, at some point I thought "fuck me, this must be what Garth Ennis feels like all the time when it comes to superheroes."  Just because you pretend to be comedy (on that score, jokes are always a good idea), that's no excuse for thinking internal logic is something that happens to other films - you need to go from a to b to c, there has to be a progression, an evolution from plot threads and story elements sown earlier, but this was just some scenes that were in the same film for some reason.  Utterly nonsensical, the experience was akin to spending two hours in a room with a teenager no-one likes when he has his first beer: devoid of even the slightest sliver of awareness of itself and what a fucking twat it sounds like.

Speaking of not having any jokes, Boss Nigger is basically Blazing Saddles, and not just because I was biting my knuckle every time someone said a certain word that has appeared in this sentence once but will not do so again, but because it has exactly the same plot, which the proprietary theme describes succinctly:
Black man
In a white man town
He so bad
Now they call him Boss.
Boss rides into town, declares himself sheriff, then the rest of Blazing Saddles happens as expected including the big fight at the end and the bit where Boss and his sidekick ride away.  Like most blaxploitation movies, it doesn't really hold up outside an appreciation for the genre as a low-rent and politicised alternative voice to mainstream cinema, which is a purdy way of saying that though enjoyable it's still total horseshit.  But fun horseshit... are you paying attention, Kick Ass 2?

[JOE SOAP]

There were no more ideas left after Kick-Ass Uno (they even dumped the conceit half-way through that) which is probably one of the reasons why Vaughan & Goldman jumped ship leaving the writing and directing to Wadlow.

[Bat King]

DAEMONIUM: La Hora Cero, the film that took the top prize at Wasteland Film Festival in California.

I watched it yesterday & today. Really enjoyed it. Argentinean production in Spanish with subtitles (which is good by me, I hate dubbed movies).

It's a post apocalyptic world, a team of soldiers have been searching for a portal from which they can summon a demon. One of the soldiers, Razor has found it...

There is a review on my blog & a link to the video. Was talking earlier to one of the crew who +Friend me on Facebook after reading the review. Another film is due out possibly end of November.

I'm recommending this one to my mates.

http://judgetutorsemple.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/daemonium-the-zero-hour-a-short-film-embeded-video-of-full-film/

[HdE]

FINALLY got around to seeing District 9.

And it was much better than I thought it would be!

Quite frankly, the premise of this movie always struck me as boring and a little bit heavy-handed. I'm thankful to see I got it wrong. BRILLIANT CG aliens throughout. Think I'll have to watch this one again.

[TordelBack]

BRILLIANT CG aliens throughout.

This is one of the interesting things about District 9.  Despite having a famously low budget, the CGI aliens are superbly convincing - possibly the most successfully sustained CG screen aliens yet - even though the effects themselves are relatively crude.  Much as with a good man-in-a-suit or latex puppet job, it works because the audience is disposed to believe it's an alien, not because it has sooper-dooper ultra-res refraction-fidelity or somesuch.  I'll take prawns over Gungans or Na'vi any day*.



*Little bit of themed racism there, nudge nudge, bit of politics.

[Hawkmumbler]

Filth. Now bear in mind the fact I have never read the book, or watched or read anything vaguely related to it. I went in practically blind with only the expectation that it was going to be characteristics bleak. So what did I think of it? Meh. It straddles the line between being good and bad, having abysmal moments followed by some rather good ones. Its never awful enough to make me hate it, at its worst the animal hallucinations felt like a step to far, though they do serve a porpoise to show the collapse of Bruce's mind and the revelation at the beginning of the final act was clever if not completely ridiculous. The contrast between the otherworldliness set inside Bruce's home with Carroll, set against the blackness of Bruce's life, underlined just how far his psych had fallen. The hallucinations where offsetting though.

Its not going to make my worst list, but its not going to make my best list either. Its a curious piece.

[TordelBack]

...the animal hallucinations ...they do serve a porpoise...

This I gotta see!   

[Hawkmumbler]

I think we all know I was referring to the Cetacean when I wrote that.

[Mabs]

BRILLIANT CG aliens throughout.

This is one of the interesting things about District 9.  Despite having a famously low budget, the CGI aliens are superbly convincing - possibly the most successfully sustained CG screen aliens yet - even though the effects themselves are relatively crude.  Much as with a good man-in-a-suit or latex puppet job, it works because the audience is disposed to believe it's an alien, not because it has sooper-dooper ultra-res refraction-fidelity or somesuch.  I'll take prawns over Gungans or Na'vi any day*.



*Little bit of themed racism there, nudge nudge, bit of politics.

Same here, and Prawn tastes better than smurf and knob put together. Actually that came out wrong!

The Na'vi 'smurfs' looked very photounrealistic at times, and the knob Jar Jar did not look convincing at times. Maybe he was too cartoony in his rendering, sorta like a Warner Bros. cartoon character stuck in a live action film. I much preferred the Ewoks to be honest!

[Recrewt]

Yup, they did a fantastic job on District 9 with some of the design elements.  It seems to be really hard to come up with decent aliens in movies - I have seen far more rubbish ones than decent ones.  The ones in D19 were different and believable.  I also thought the mothership (or whatever it was) was good too - nowadays we seem to be bombarded with floppy CGI spaceships whereas this one looked like it had real 'mass' to it.

I thought they were supposed to be doing a sequel to this?