I Just Watched (Films)

[Achtung Englander]

The Spectator review ripped it a new one, while Mark Kermode liked it for some bizarre reason

Chappie

Wow, just wow. All that potential just to re-make Robocop 2. Chappie development is totally unbelievable. I genuinely do not think I have seen so much over-acting. Everyone was hamming it. Completely bizarre film. This was earmarked to be a trilogy but the film is so bad, the other 2 projects were axed.

3/10

The Florida Project

Well that was sweet

8/10

[Alan]

Unbreakable
I didn’t like it much when I watched it when it was new. Turns out I like it even less now! Bad writing, bad acting, awful camera angles and stupid motives. Ok good premise and if you give a 5min synopsis it will sound pretty good but the execution is just real bad.

[Achtung Englander]

24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters

This is an interesting documentary but it loses its way after a great start. Being interested in movie poster art the first half an hour is great as it delves into the history and development of poster art from the 20s to the early 90s. It touched upon several of the greatest movie poster artists like those who made ET, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner and so on. It then moved on the crap that was the photoshop movie posters since the 90s of floating heads, stock photos and blue and orange or shadows. Posters that all looked the same.

It then moved on to the movie poster art that I find fascinating. Called Mondo, its artists revisiting movie posters and making something new and original. To get an idea here are some links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MoviePosterPorn/

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/the-5 ... 1-51-am-2/

The problem I found with the documentary is that they focused 60% of the time on Mondo. While interesting it would have been more fascinating to get an insight from the studios on why they moved away from art to photo stock and then moved back again to original art work.

One fascinating thing - almost all the collectors are men.

6/10

[Alan]

Glass

Not as bad as Unbreakable, not as watchable as Split. McAvoy is far and away the best thing about it.

[Achtung Englander]

Bohemian Rhapsody

That was a lot better than what I feared. I read that critics generally panned it but given this is a stable biopic, with snapshots of Freddie Mercury's life told from the time he was working at Heathrow to Live Aid, it was pretty good. Like all biopics there is a lot of cinematic licence but that is to be expected. The last 20 minutes of Live Aid was awesome. I would have loved to have seen that in the cinema. Overall not a decent stab and I leaned a lot about Queen.

8/10

Sorcerer (1977)

Being biased as I love gritty 70s cinema this film floated my boat. Directed by The French connection, William Friedkin, the story is about 4 criminals on the run who each are given a superb backstory that on their own could be extended into interesting films themselves. I did like the fact the 4 come from all different corners of the Earth and were not all Americans. They all end up in a shithole in Costa Rica and each want out. The only way to make money fast is to transport 6 large boxes of high unstable explosives in 2 large trucks to an out of control fire at an oil field.

The film is classified as a thriller but I would call it a suspense as the 2 trucks navigate narrow steep inclines, storms and rickety bridges. I thought it was brilliant. Reading on IMDB it had a good 1st week on release but had the huge misfortune that in its 2nd week a small film called Star Wars opened and sucked all the interest and punters from the film and the film bombed.

Many consider this an undiscovered gem and I can see why. Next time its on Film 4, check it out. This would make for a superb a TV show.

9/10

[Animalmother]

The Favourite

That was great, really enjoyed it. Everyone in it did a great job and looked like they were having a blast making it. I was initially afraid that it would drag at 2 hours but it flew by. Go see!

[DjchunKfunK]

Posted this in the wrong thread originally.

Vice

Went to see this last Monday. Bale was excellent and really nailed Cheney and Carell did a great job with Rumsfeld, big props to the hair and makeup people as well. The film itself though was a bit uneven, there was no real through-line and while it had some interesting parts I don't think it quite nailed what it was trying to do. I also think totally blew it with the end which was clearly a sop to right-wing types.

They manage to convey the impact they believe he has had on American politics and how he set the stage for someone like Trump, but you come away not really knowing what the film was trying to say about Cheney himself as it provides conflicting viewpoints.

[Alan]

Alita Battle Angel
I thought that was great fun. It breaks at a clear “sequel is coming” point but I would have happily sat through another 2 hours right there. I didn’t like the manga eyes and maybe she’s a bit too sexified but all in it was pretty great.

[Sly Boots]

I watched a couple recently, not recent films but hey.

Gone Girl

Ben Affleck plays a fairly average schlub, who marries a highly intelligent woman. One day she goes missing and initially it looks like a kidnapping, before police start to suspect Affleck had a hand in it. For the most part a very good film. It's pretty long at 2.5 hours but while it starts off a bit slow things soon start to move pretty quickly, and there are some twists and turns along the way to sustain interest. Then the ending happened and for me anyway it coloured a lot of the good stuff that had gone before it.

Spoiler

For the last half hour or so I was confidently predicting she'd get her comeuppance for all the awful things she'd done, but then she... didn't. All it needed was her missing one detail, and/or the detective stumbling across a telling clue at the end that could lead to Amy's downfall, and it would have fixed the ending imo.

Split

Guessing most will have seen this by now, but basically the middle film of M Night Shyamalan's superhero trilogy of Unbreakable, this and Glass, which came out recently. This was a pretty good film, and once again James McAvoy delivers an outstanding performance. I was particularly impressed by how he was able to convey each personality's presence through facial expressions alone at points. I liked it.

Ghost Stories

British supernatural thriller-type thing. A professional sceptic is given the task of investigating three seemingly inexplicable cases. What follows is an anthology of sorts, which are then tied up in the final act. I think it worked quite well, worth a watch if you aren't expecting anything totally amazing.

[Strudel]

I agree with you on Gone Girl. I was quite enjoying it until the last half hour and then it just went stupid. Complete waste of a film in the end for me.

[Sly Boots]

I agree with you on Gone Girl. I was quite enjoying it until the last half hour and then it just went stupid. Complete waste of a film in the end for me.

I kept giving Affleck too much credit in that last half hour. I kept saying 'ah, he's doing that so he can set her up for that', and 'ah, now he's definitely going to take advantage of that so he can trip her up there', and each time the potential was completely wasted. Makes it a hard film to recommend, even though 75% of it was pretty damn good. I get the writer wanted to leave the ending open, but the way it's done sends out a pretty terrible message imo, that you can be an awful, manipulative person and get away with it scot-free.

[Strudel]

I think for me it was partly just too unbelievable. After all that happens it's basically "ah well, just carry on".

[Sly Boots]

I think for me it was partly just too unbelievable. After all that happens it's basically "ah well, just carry on".

I loved the bit near the end, when the hot-shot lawyer, the diligent, cynical cop and Affleck are all sitting together. Despite knowing damn well it didn't add up, they basically went 'welp, nothing we can do about that' and noped straight out of the film. It was like Poochy being sent back to his home planet

[Stormbringer]

Assassin's Creed

One hour and fifty-five minutes of complete and utter garbage.

[Stormbringer]

the constant cuts to Frodo and Sam, and Merry and Pippin doing very little of interest were a little irritating. I'm not sure how their stories could have been implemented in another way, and they're definitely necessary, but it's a bit jarring to cut from epic battle to two men chatting while riding a talking tree.

Those bits are irritating in the books too!

I watched The Fellowship on Netflix the other week--the theatrical cut. Having just read the book, it felt WAY too fast-paced.