Last movie watched...

[Dandontdare]

I Claudius really is a remarkable adaptation. Despite the awful wigs/beards and painfully limited sets, it remains utterly compelling. I used to wistfully imagine a 'special edition', with digitally added exteriors, or even a full remake with battles and elephants, but having watched so many (enjoyable) big budget tits'n'torture series over the last number of years (most recently Borgia), I think the lack of such distractions is what makes the terrifying claustrophobia of Claudius' tale so palpable. For all that the Julio-Claudians sit atop an empire, it's the scrabbling of trapped rats that defines their lives.

I persuaded my folks to let me stay up past my bedtime when this was shown, on some dubious pretext that we were "doing the romans at school" - but then had to sit through embarrassing sex'n'gore scenes with them in the room. The scene where Caligula comes out bloody-faced after eating a fresh foetus stuck vividly in my mind to this day.

[Keef Monkey]

Profondo Rosso - Have said on here before that I'm not big on giallo, I found after the first couple I saw the rest have dragged a lot by virtue of following very similar structures. Saying that, this had a lot of great looking shots and yet another incredible Goblin score. Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to given my previous experience with the genre!

Probably the greatest of all giallos. Definitely the best soundtrack. The bit with [spoiler]the animated doll [/spoiler] is probably the most frightening thing I've ever seen in a film.

That was a great moment! [spoiler]You're getting quite comfortable with the film and what it has to throw at you by that point, but that's so unexpected and bizarre that you could feel the whole cinema tense up suddenly, like they'd let their guard down and were now out their comfort zone.[/spoiler] The little 'intermissions' where the camera tracks over objects of the killer's while the theme plays were really stylish too, like you're looking at all the broken pieces of their mind, very cool touch. And can't rave enough about that music! Definitely one I'd watch again.

It was in the surprise film slot and the print that they had was an old US one with 'The Hatchet Murders' as the title card, so it wasn't until I looked into it the following day I realized what film I'd watched.

[Mattofthespurs]

Profondo Rosso is my fave Argento film by a mile.
I dont even care that Goblin ripped off the soundtrack.
It's the tops

[ThryllSeekyr]

I Claudius really is a remarkable adaptation. Despite the awful wigs/beards and painfully limited sets, it remains utterly compelling. I used to wistfully imagine a 'special edition', with digitally added exteriors, or even a full remake with battles and elephants, but having watched so many (enjoyable) big budget tits'n'torture series over the last number of years (most recently Borgia), I think the lack of such distractions is what makes the terrifying claustrophobia of Claudius' tale so palpable. For all that the Julio-Claudians sit atop an empire, it's the scrabbling of trapped rats that defines their lives.

I persuaded my folks to let me stay up past my bedtime when this was shown, on some dubious pretext that we were "doing the romans at school" - but then had to sit through embarrassing sex'n'gore scenes with them in the room. The scene where Caligula comes out bloody-faced after eating a fresh foetus stuck vividly in my mind to this day.

I got a little confused as to wether John Hurt was Tiberious or his son Caligula.  Eventually murdered by his own men when they couldn't tolerate his antics anymore.

Does any body recall how the Celts of that time in history were portrayed with their frosty looking spiked hair?

[Greg M.]

I got a little confused as to wether John Hurt was Tiberious or his son Caligula.  Eventually murdered by his own men when they couldn't tolerate his antics anymore.

Caligula. He was Tiberius's great-nephew. A career-defining performance by Hurt - up there with his Quentin Crisp and his Merrick as one of the very best things he ever did (though to be honest, the man has seldom put a foot wrong.) You can't beat I, Claudius. So many superb performances - Brian Blessed's likeable, (relatively) reasonable Augustus, for instance, shows a far greater range than Blessed is sometimes credited for.

[Hawkmumbler]

Profondo Rosso - Have said on here before that I'm not big on giallo, I found after the first couple I saw the rest have dragged a lot by virtue of following very similar structures. Saying that, this had a lot of great looking shots and yet another incredible Goblin score. Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to given my previous experience with the genre!

Probably the greatest of all giallos. Definitely the best soundtrack. The bit with [spoiler]the animated doll [/spoiler] is probably the most frightening thing I've ever seen in a film.

That was a great moment! [spoiler]You're getting quite comfortable with the film and what it has to throw at you by that point, but that's so unexpected and bizarre that you could feel the whole cinema tense up suddenly, like they'd let their guard down and were now out their comfort zone.[/spoiler] The little 'intermissions' where the camera tracks over objects of the killer's while the theme plays were really stylish too, like you're looking at all the broken pieces of their mind, very cool touch. And can't rave enough about that music! Definitely one I'd watch again.

It was in the surprise film slot and the print that they had was an old US one with 'The Hatchet Murders' as the title card, so it wasn't until I looked into it the following day I realized what film I'd watched.

Aye, a favourite of mine as well, his magnum opus alongside Suspiria. Out of curiosity did you watch the Directors or International cut, Keef?

[JayzusB.Christ]

I got a little confused as to wether John Hurt was Tiberious or his son Caligula.  Eventually murdered by his own men when they couldn't tolerate his antics anymore.

Caligula. He was Tiberius's great-nephew. A career-defining performance by Hurt - up there with his Quentin Crisp and his Merrick as one of the very best things he ever did (though to be honest, the man has seldom put a foot wrong.) You can't beat I, Claudius. So many superb performances - Brian Blessed's likeable, (relatively) reasonable Augustus, for instance, shows a far greater range than Blessed is sometimes credited for.

I watched I, Claudius a few years ago and loved it.  The great thing is, it carries on from only a few years after the time the series Rome was set.  Strange to see a slim, fey, high-production Augustus become a mountainous, shouty and beardless 1970s Brian Blessed but I watched the two series back-to-back and know a lot more about ancient Rome than i used to.

[Mardroid]

I started watching Suspiria a few years back, but I found the over-the-top unsettling background music incredibly off-putting, although that was probably the point. I don't mind* creepy sound affects and music to help set the mood but they really whack you round the head with it in this film.

So I never made it very far.

From what I've read here and elsewhere, I think maybe I should give it another go.

The last film I watched was Insurgent at a special showing at the O2 dome. It was actually hosted by my church who actually meet at that cinema, so I thought it might be a Christian film** but no, not really. They just host films there from time to time at a discount. Which is nice of them.

A friend informed me it is in fact the sequel to another film, Divergent. I'm not all that keen on catching sequels first, but thought I'd give it a go.

Glad I did. Seeing Divergent first would have helped, but there was enough to go on to get the premise. A decent sci-fi action film and actually amusing in places. Rather predictable at times and but there [spoiler]was a twist which still kinda surprised me. I mean, I expected a twist at that point, but not quite the way it happened.[/spoiler]

Not the best film I've seen. I'm not all that fussed to get it on DVD or Blu-Ray (but I might) but it was very enjoyable.

*Okay, I DO mind, but I like it for that reason. If you get what I mean.

**Despite my faith, I'm not all that keen on Christian films. They can be a bit corny and heavy handed with their message.

[TordelBack]

Oooh boy, have I had a bad run of luck with films lately.  Thanks Netflix, I'll stick to the TV series in future.

This is 40.  Take the two most irritating characters in Knocked Up and make a whole film about them - but don't put in any jokes.  A movie about two awful, awful people living a privileged existence of self-absorbed indulgence and still managing to be jealous of everyone and everything.  And just when you think that this is the point, and they might get their comeuppance for treating everyone around them like some class of servitor animal tasked with enabling their every dull whim, it all works out fine for them and all proceeds as normal, except everyone has grown a little closer. Awww. There's nothing here that rings true about relationships, or life in general, it's just smug, nasty nonsense that isn't even a little bit funny. 

Sadly there are some good performances wasted on this soulless thing, Apatow and Mann's kids are both very good as the sisters they are, John Lithgow is John Lithgow (which is all anyone can or should ask - who needs anything else?) and Albert 'Hank Scorpio' is plausibly moochy.  Unfortunately none of them get anything interesting to do, so that instead we can watch Debbie and Pete attend one unnecessary medical checkup after another (it's 'cos they're 40, see? See?). Megan Fox is wheeled out so both audience and cast can ogle her tits (this is literally the only thing she contributes, cheerily being groped and ogled in her undies on multiple occasions), and two characters (Chris O'Dowd and Jason Segel) appear to be in the film solely to do this for several long unfunny scenes.  And then there's the only non-white character (Charlene Yi off House) who naturally is an insane drug addict thief. 

I absolutely loathed this film. I can only assume that Apatow has secretly converted to the most extreme anti-western fundamentalist sect, and made this as a propaganda film to encourage total war against everything it represent.  Where do I sign up?


Star Trek Into Darkness is a cackhanded piece of shit that made me want to rip out my eyeballs more than once as they were stabbed repeatedly with stupid, ugly strobing sets.  There's been a lot of stupidity in Star Trek films all in all, but this one seems to have cruised around assembling all the stupidest bits (McCoy and the torpedoes springs to mind) and stringing them together with a mere flick of a plot that makes absolutely, completely no sense.  When did Starfleet start wearing Imperial Officer caps and grey burlap anyway?   

Cumberpatch's Khan (oooh spoilers, look mate, it's not me doing the spoiling) could be okay, except that he's just bloody Sherlock - as evidenced by his reveal to Mickey Smith where the camera lingers on this anonymous slightly gormless looking person who we know nothing about yet for a dun-dun-DUN moment because, look, it's only bloody SHERLOCK!  He goes on to display no superhuman intellect whatsoever, beyond encasing his entire crew [spoiler]in functioning torpedoes[/spoiler], which I believe is a subplot cut from Batman (1966) because it was deemed just too silly - he's just good at shooting and punching, and has magic Jesus blood.   Oh I do hope they come back to the implications of this 300-year old world-altering panacea in future instalments the way they did the moronic trans-warp beaming of the first one: it'll be great, I'm sure.

Like Megan Fox before her (see above), but with rather less charm, Alice Eve seems to be jammed into this film solely to appear randomly and unnecessarily in her pants.  Why is Dr. Carol Marcus an English toff?  Why is she here at all? In a film whose only real strength continues to be its casting, she sticks out like a particularly sore thumb. 

But the biggest crime of this loop of shiny offal is this: it made me hate the Enterprise.  Now say what you want about the various crews that have walked her various decks, but I've always loved that ship, in all her incarnations.  I was prepared to allow that the atrocious interiors of the first reboot film were down to the pressure to create a lot of new stuff in one go, and you can't get it all right.  Here every ghastly misstep of the first film is repeated, extended and magnified - every interior set is ugly, busy, glaring, overlarge, impractical, sterile, and just basically looking nothing like it could ever be in space.  It's just a disgusting mess from stem to stern.  I shudder to imagine the effort that went into making something so completely plasticky and vile.  The same criticism extends to the Qo'noS sets/locations and Klingon designs: painfully dull and characterless.   

I'm not even going to bother pick holes in the plot here, it was stupid, contradictory, and felt like it was made up on the fly.

There were five good things about this film: the core cast continue to be good value for money (except Pegg, who continues to be awful); the aliens in the opening sequence were simple but nicely done, and that story at least was actually Star Trekky; the starship battles were fast and solid, and actually seemed like a new non-BSG way of doing these things;  it was lovely (if illogical) to see Leonard Nimoy's Spock one last bittersweet time, especially as I wasn't expecting it. 

And it's a better setup for another film than the first one was.

[Professor Bear]

I loved Star Trek because it was dumb, but I hated Into Darkness because it was stupid.

An interesting side-effect of the stupidity of Into Darkness is that the guy who writers the IDW Trek comics seems to have taken it as a given that every NuTrek tale has to be stupider than the last one, so this month the title's bold new direction is to have the Enterprise and its crew "stranded in the Delta Quadrant".
My alternate theory is that someone bet the writer he wouldn't do it and blowjobs were at stake - but even if his dick didn't end up getting blown, my mind certainly was.

Walking Tall, which I decided to watch because I quite fancied digging into a movie trilogy but didn't want to watch the remakes because from the sequel onwards they star racist fuckface Kevin Sorbo, so I went back to the source with the 1973 original, a broad adaptation of the life of redneck sheriff Buford T Pusser, an ex-wrestler who was elected to office after beating up a casino and then takes to wandering around the county battering people over the head with a plank of wood instead of using a gun.  Because it's based on reality - and a well-known story at the time - the tone is really over the place, with the knockabout lawmakin' of Sheriff Plank being all laughs and japes - like moving a corrupt judge's office into the courthouse toilet - until Pusser gets ambushed (which happens on a regular basis) and gets shot in the gut or nearby family members' heads explode like melons and you go HOLY FUCK.  Then it ends with a lynchmob setting fire to a private business where Pusser has just murdered two dudes.  It is the South, I suppose.  Pretty entertaining, with Joe Don Baker showing that he was always a pretty intense presence, though Pusser's thoughts on why he left professional wrestling were pretty funny - "It was organized dishonesty. It was the system - you win when they let you win, you climb the ladder when they let you, you breathe when they feel like giving you air.   I got fed up with other people living my life their way." - when you consider that they were cut from the remake that starred The Rock.

[Jim_Campbell]

I am largely coming to hate being a science fiction fan.

SRSLY.

Jim

[Professor Bear]

From what I can tell, hating science fiction is the biggest part of being a science fiction fan.

Also the new Mad Max will be out soon, so there's no going back.

[TordelBack]

I am largely coming to hate being a science fiction fan.

SRSLY.

Jim

I hope that isn't a reaction to my moany nitpicking entitled fanboy review of ST:ID, I don't claim to speak for fandom in general.  I'm generally pretty positive about silly SF movies and ST in particular, even had good things to say about the 09 reboot and its inspired casting and performances, but that last one really was a horrid stupid waste of my time. Maybe the explosions were better in the cinema or on blu-ray, I don't know, but there wasn't an ounce of wit or thought on display. I'd rather watch the equally stupid STV:TFF, which at least has one good line and a few good gags.

[shaolin_monkey]

Son of Rambow - not what I expected. Pleasantly surprised! And Jessica Stephenson is totally hot.

[Mattofthespurs]

Lucy which was so very bad on so many levels it almost deserves congratulating.

Jersey Boys which was one of the worst Clint Eastwood directed films ever, if not the worst. Desperately wants to be Goodfellas without the violence.

The Imitation Game is next for me. Looking forward to it and then Sin City 2.