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Post by Deleted on Nov 1, 2021 9:05:21 GMT -5
We watched Candyman (original) which was new to me. I liked that it was a different approach to many horror movies, with the main character being a college student writing a thesis on urban legends. It gave her more agency as opposed to the usual cliché helpless teenage girl fleeing for her life every ten minutes - not that that isn't enjoyable, it's cliché for a reason; but it's nice to see something different here and there. Similar to Spacek it's got the tried and true much older cast playing their roles; or at least it appears that way, I didn't bother to Google. 35 year old teens seemed to be a common sight in the college. There is a theme about racial violence which gives the story a greater depth and source of empathy.
That was it for this year. I do enjoy a bit of horror cheese though so I'll watch this kind of thing all year round.
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Post by Snake on Dec 18, 2021 13:26:40 GMT -5
No Time to Die.
The Daniel Craig series of 007 films finally made time to die.
Reasonably entertaining, but like the previous film, became needlessly dipped in daytime soap opera levels of coincidences and connections. Half liked it, half disliked it. Mainly the ending. Not the best note to go out on, but I suppose it's a harder book end than Pierce Brosnan's, Roger Moore's, or Sean Connery's last films.
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Post by Snake on Dec 20, 2021 19:23:48 GMT -5
Spider Man: No Way Home
This movie deserves the positive reviews and fanfare it has been getting. Like the Mandalorian and Thor:Ragnarok, it oozes with smart fan-service. While the overall theme is a bit too cliche'd in morality VS revenge tropes, it's the small moments along the way that make it fun. Stylistically, it really does feel like a comic book come to life. Comic book dialogue, comic book moments, with amusing cameos of different characters in the Marvel universe. And for the amount of light-heartedness, there's some bitterness and heaviness to the mood as well for balance.
Watched it in 3-D, can't say if it was well-implemented. I forgot I was watching it with 3-D glasses after a while.
Thumbs up.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Dec 22, 2021 18:09:30 GMT -5
First of all, a very belated response to the Fargo talk: That's a 5-star movie if I've ever seen one! I have yet to see a stinker by the Coen Brothers, and it's hard to decide if that one, No Country, or the Big Lebowski is their best one (from what I've seen so far).
Second, I also saw No Time to Die the other day, and I found it a
Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn't "the other day" at all, it was more than two months ago at this point.
Anyway, I did see it. I found it a pretty interesting one. It takes some risks, and tries to be contemporary (which I always like - JB movies always feel 'of their era'). The part with Ana de Armas was very fun! I would've said that even if it wasn't because Ana de Armas is hot as hell.
I do think some of it fell flat a bit. Some of the humor was just no bueno. And this is a series with plenty of bad jokes and puns. It felt like they tried a bit too hard to do 10's/20's humor. But I respect the way they ended the Craig-era saga, even though I'm still not convinced an overarching storyline is really a good idea for 007 flicks. But that's just how the film industry rolls these days I suppose. I hope the next bond will be a bit less gritty in tone. Even the bond theme was pretty damn serious this time around. Lighten up, Billie!
Still, the Craig era wasn't bad at all. Skyfall was fantastic. Now that's an original one. The bondgirl in that one was M!
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Post by spanky on Dec 29, 2021 19:39:31 GMT -5
I was expecting Matrix 4 to be a lot worse than what it was. I'm not going to say it was good, but I didn't hate it and it was fun. That's about the highest praise my cynical ass will give a movie nowadays.
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Post by Woody Alien on Jan 3, 2022 11:49:20 GMT -5
We had to switch to a "Smart TV" so I linked my Prime Video account (Netflix doesn't work for whatever reason, I heard that it's a problem common to some Samsung models) and I started watching some stuff these new year days. First an Italian comedy/satire, then a French comedy, then I went back to my sci-fi/horror tastes with another one of Vincenzo Natali's films, "Splice", the one that's about ethics in genetic engineering. Adrien Brody is kinda ridiculous as the hipster scientist with an emo haircut, but for the rest the film is quite well-made, intriguing, with very nice special FX and the morals are not clear-cut at all given the subject matter. A good movie that however didn't leave any impression on popular culture for whatever reason (not even in monster girl-loving circles).
Edit: I also went seeing the latest Spider-Man in theater with a few friends. Quite nice too but I find all the "science is the best" angle kinda preachy and delivered with no subtlety at all since they want superheroes to become good role-models for kids.
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Post by JDarkside on Jan 21, 2022 5:46:46 GMT -5
This is a youtube doc but I feel it's long enough to deserve a placement here. Someone made a documentary going over the live of Lowtax, the founder of Something Awful, and his spiraling decline.
Cybershell, a goon YTer who you may remember for a video he did about an argument on a gameFAQ spinoff forum over getting Cloud and Barrett to level 99 in the first area in the game turning into a decade long humiliation or the infamous Operation Soda Steal, did some voice work for this, and helped with research, among others.
(TW: Discusses suicide, physical and emotional abuse, drug abuse, child abuse,use of r-slur, ect)
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Post by Woody Alien on Feb 18, 2022 14:14:14 GMT -5
It's a movie that has yet to come out, but I didn't know where to post it, so...
Disney too takes the way of post-modernism, re-imagining Chip and Dale as a couple of has-been celebrities in a world where real humans, cartoons, anime and CG characters coexist. Feels strange to see this kind of humor (with apparently some jabs at fandoms and some slightly more adult gags) from them... I don't know what to make of it, but that Roger Rabbit cameo is epic. He's probably the most underused Disney property so it's interesting to see him again, if only as a jab against nostalgia and/or to show off the Mouse's many properties just like Warner Bros did with their new Space Jam.
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Post by Snake on Feb 18, 2022 20:36:06 GMT -5
Wow, diggin' the Chip 'n Dale film. Way to update the Roger Rabbit/Cool World concept. Did I just spot Paula Abdul with the wolf from her music video?!
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Post by spanky on Feb 19, 2022 6:30:49 GMT -5
I'd normally not be interested in something like this and I absolutely despise Seth Rogen... but the Lonely Island guys are in it and I thought Popstar was fucking hilarious...
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Post by Woody Alien on Feb 19, 2022 7:21:07 GMT -5
Wow, diggin' the Chip 'n Dale film. Way to update the Roger Rabbit/Cool World concept. Did I just spot Paula Abdul with the wolf from her music video?! Yup, it's Paula Abdul with MC Skat Kat! It's interesting how they justify it as humans and cartoons co-existing! spanky I do not know about them, but I like that Chip and Dale speak like normal people and not with the usual annoying high-pitched squeals. Can you imagine 2 whole hours of that? (the reason why I never saw any Alvin and the Chipmunks movies) Also dig those Capcom NES cartridges, even if those games were nothing special!
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Post by Woody Alien on Apr 27, 2022 16:45:03 GMT -5
Saw a bunch of stuff in the meantime so I'll try to keep the details short.
Porco Rosso I generally like the Studio Ghibli films but I have never saw this one in its entirety until now for whatever reason. Maybe I was afraid they would represent Italy in a weird way? Nah! In any case it's quite a good film though not my favorite from them (they would be Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa) and it has a nice balance between realism and fantastical/cartoonish stuff. The dubbing/adaptation kinda sucked but it's all fault of the lone guy who is ruining Ghibli movies in Italy for more than a decade.
Choose Or Die What a piece of crap! If this is the quality of Netflix original movies, maybe they deserve to lose a bunch of subscriptions... Basically it's another of those "killer video games" schlocky films, this time a 1980s cassette adventure game that warps reality with its choices, because someone found a curse and put it into the source code of the game, blah blah... nothing makes sense, nothing is scary, everything is cheap and lazy, the fake-retro graphics suck and Robert Englund makes an useless vocal cameo that goes against the internal logic of the film, but who cares? It's just the equivalent of those direct-to-video crappy films a la The Lawnmower Man.
The Final Girls A girl somehow gets sucked into the world of the 1980s slasher movie her deceased mother starred in, along with other friends, she not only wants to survive but also to save her mom's character from the homicidal maniac, even though it's not really "her" but a copy of a fictional character she played long ago. A curious little film, it's not an outright parody, rather a homage that pokes some fun at the stereotypes but without being too harsh. A meta film that plays with the conventions of horrors and film itself (flashbacks, camera angles, titles etc.) is nothing new anymore, but this one is still quite enjoyable for what it is.
The Addams Family (2019 animated film) Better than I thought, still mediocre though and with an unoriginal message against conformity and in favor of diversity that the TV series presumably did better without resorting to apps and shit. Nobody cares about the new lore and new characters, and all the good parts are basically rehashed from the 1990s live action films so... I heard it has a sequel but I haven't the slightest interest in seeing it.
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Post by dsparil on Apr 29, 2022 8:00:53 GMT -5
I kinda want to go on a rant about how awful Netflix is now, but everything there is to be said on that has been. I will say that it's my least used streaming service because it doesn't really have a hook. It's just a dumping ground where it's impossible to find anything unless they shove it in your face. I would have canceled it years ago if I hadn't been keeping it around for my parents to use on occasion.
Anyway, I finally got around to watching the last two movies in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Again something where everything that can be said has been, but it was overwhelmingly clear that Disney did not go into the venture with any kind of plan. The whole thing is so muddled and confusing. There's plot details that should have been mentioned in the movies that are still coming out! I feel nothing but deep lament at nearly everything in the prequels, but at least Lucas had a concept that makes sense at a high level.
I was a huge Star Wars dork when I was a kid, and when Disney decided that all the EU stuff was non-canonical that sort of killed my general interest in Star Wars. People make all these overdramatic statements about how something destroyed their childhood, but every time I'm at my parent's house, there's a bookshelf full of all my old Star Wars books and I start to wonder if that was even time well spent. I guess my overall problem with the new movies is that they come across as officially sanctioned fan fiction just as much as the EU was but without even the cursory attempt at keeping things consistent.
The quality of the EU is all over the place, and the sequels are the same way from moment to moment to moment. Rise of Skywalker is the worst though. If Abrams hadn't done The Force Awakens, I'd have wondered if he'd even seen a Star Wars. The Last Jedi is okay, but it felt like it should have been the last movie of the trilogy setting up a second sequel set although TFA sort of put it in a bad place to start. Maybe the mistake was hiring JJ Abrams at all really. The Force Awakens has some pretty stupid stuff in it that I had completely forgotten.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Apr 29, 2022 9:51:28 GMT -5
Netflix is still by far the biggest (almost only notable, really) streaming service over here in the Netherlands. Netflix libraries are region specific obviously, and over here the movie selection is absolutely abysmal. I'm decently movie-buff-ish, but most titles are crap I've never heard of and are usually like 6/10 on IMDB or 3/5 on Letterboxd or something (if even that). Series-wise it's probably better. I feel the average person here watches a lot of series, and people're always talking about seeing this or that series, and 99% of the time it's on Netflix. Most people over here probably don't know that Netflix sucks because they rarely watch movies, and they're usually a bit surprised when I bitch about Netflix sucking. Netflix barely has any movies from before 2000 either, but we're getting to the point where a lot of people don't think that's a big deal because those are 'old' movies anyway. Not that their post-2000 library is good. But imagine if something like Spotify didn't have any pre-2000 music. They would probably find that a lot worse.
Of course browsing on Netflix sucks too but everyone knows that...it's all part of the trend in technology to take as much out of the control of the consumer as possible and it's probably the worst application of it.
There's some other options now, like HBO Max (went through a list of all their movies available here and it's hilariously short), and Disney Plus, but you're either going to have to subscribe to a million services to get even a fraction of what's avaible in the US on one service, or just be a sensible person and pirate everything.
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Post by dsparil on Apr 29, 2022 13:05:23 GMT -5
You still have to subscribe to a bunch of different stuff in the US. I'm not sure I even want to count how many streaming services I get… It's actually 9!
The ones I outright pay for Hulu/Disney+/ESPN+ - I've used Hulu since the very beginning and got the subscription plan when that came out and then switched to the ad free version. This is what I use the most mainly because I grew up on so much network TV although since it's going to be wholly owned by Disney soonish, I'm not exactly sure what the future of it is going to be. It was what to get if you wanted network and some cable shows the next day, but I think that it's going to turn more into "mature Disney+" in the future if the day after shows go away. Disney+ and ESPN+ are available as a bundle with Hulu in a buy two get one free type deal so I just broke down and did it at some point.
Netflix - Again subscribed since streaming was first available and DVDs before that. I'm getting more mad at them as a company with every passing year. I think they are somewhat a victim of circumstance since they got so many good content deals that let them shoot right up, but they've mismanaged themselves too. All I personally get out of Netflix these days is cooking shows.
PBS - This is more of a technicality because I had a monthly recurring donation to my local station and that gets access to the streaming back catalog; things usually get locked after a month, but some things are always free.
Things I get for free Apple TV+ - I get the bundle of all the Apple services since it was cheaper than what I was paying individually for what I was getting before it was available. Definitely goes for quality over quantity which is good from a secondary service perspective.
HBO Max - I get this for free as part of my internet subscription for some reason. I barely use it although it gets all the Warner Bros. stuff.
Peacock - NBC's streaming service. Everyone that gets internet through Comcast gets the ad supported premium tier for free. I use it a little, but I'm not quite enamored enough to upgrade to the ad free version. NBC owns Universal so all the movies end up here.
Prime Video - I always forget that this even exists because it is so awful to use. There's probably some decent originals, but so much is just a store front for digital purchases and rental. Does anyone even get this without Amazon Prime shipping?
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