I Just Watched (Films)

[Animalmother]

Idiocracy
Originally a comedy about people in the US getting dumber with each generation is starting to look more realistic every year Not the greatest thing ever made but it's still funny and the parallels with present US politics make it all the more interesting. Written by Mike Judge so you kind of know what to expect. Some of the more insane shit from the Saints Row games seemed to have been inspired by this film as well.

The Wolverine
Somehow got this mixed up with Logan when I put it on first but stayed watching and enjoyed it. Been a while since I'd seen it and forgot that's it's a pretty good film, up until the last 20 minutes anyway and even then that's not terrible. The opening sequence in the POW camp is great as is watching Logan tear through waves of Yakuza thugs with wild abandon.

[Achtung Englander]

Last Breath (Netflix)

A very compelling documentary with a superb soundtrack. Very uplifting and really makes you think.

8/10

[Achtung Englander]

Black Panther

So my partner got Disney+ free for 6 months. Having lost interest in Marvel, I wanted to see what the fuss was about regards Black Panther. It was pretty good as far as Marvel films go. I mean its all pretty much bollocks but I did enjoy the amazing colour palette and the acting was good. Martin Freeman was the worst bit of film - badly miscast.

7/10

[Raid]

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies - I didn't exactly go into this with high expectations - it hardly has the best reputation, but I was in the mood for some fantasy escapism. I didn't hate it, by any means, but I was just bored. It's a few years since I saw the previous film, but this one did absolutely nothing to make me care for any of these characters. Not a single character in this is likeable, and I'm including the ones that were in the LotR trilogy. There's just no personality on display to care about.

It's astonishing how bad it all looks. The original LotR trilogy had a combined budget of around $300million. The low estimates for the Hobbit trilogy are double that at $600million, yet it looks dreadful by comparison. Honestly it just reminds me of the Star Wars prequels; the entire film looks like it was shot almost entirely on green screen. The acting is somewhere between bad and just phoning it in.

But the worst thing about this is that there just aren't any stakes worth caring about. I genuinely don't remember what the motivation for the orcish armies was. Everyone else was just in it for gems or gold. Maybe that's a reasonable motivation for a crime film, but not in a high fantasy world.

Oh, and I'm sorry, but I didn't count five armies. There are four. Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and the other Orcs (although these may have just been bats or something; I'd lost interest by this point). The human survivors of Laketown are not an army. Radagast's eagles are not an army. Four armies, Peter Jackson, FOUR.

[Mantis]

There is an interesting documentary on YouTube about the Hobbit series and the struggles it faced, plus the damage it did to New Zealand's actors as a unionised force due to the pressure the studio exerted over the government. Essentially it boiled down to Jackson being parachuted in to save the movies after Del Toro departed due to disagreements with the studio, forcing Jackson to rush through all the movies at once with basically no preproduction in place. Given how lovingly he treated the LotR series prior to that I do feel quite sorry for him seeing how stressed out he clearly was when trying to manage these train wreck movies.

I liked the first one, Smaug was mediocre, Five Armies is a total catastrophe of a movie.

[Wrathbone]

The extended edition documentaries for the Hobbit films are starkly different to the tone of the LOTR ones, which gave an impression that everyone was positive and excited to be a part of bringing Middle Earth to life. The Hobbit docs don’t shy away from the fact that everyone involved was dubious and downbeat about the project, Peter Jackson especially. You can see moments where he just doesn’t give a fuck anymore and decides to try some gimmick to pad some more time on and amuse himself. By Five Armies, all the remaining meaningful source material covered about 20 minutes, which is why the rest of the film was almost entirely gimmicks. Things like the... ugh... ‘twiddly-diddlies’, and the dwarves riding goats into battle, and Legolas defying basic physics and riding a bat, and so on and so on. I imagine Tolkien isn’t so much spinning in his grave as generating a high-powered centrifuge that is boring its way to the Earth’s core.

This is, unsurprisingly, the result of corporate greed stretching a relatively short book over three long films. One film may have been a rush; two films would have been ideal. I seem to recall two was the original plan, but the execs saw dollar signs and demanded more, and Five Armies is the turgid product of that decision.

[Raid]

I'm spending the morning watching Lindsay Ellis' fairly lengthy breakdown of The Hobbit films, and yeah... this was a troubled production wasn't it. They'd written it as a pair of films, but the studios carved it into three, moving critical character moments around to make sense for a trilogy with three lots of 4-part story structure but that there just wasn't the material to support. She interviews one of the actors that played a lesser dwarf, and he mentions how they were constantly being put into makeup (a grueling process - the makeup and costuming was one of the few things that didn't suffer) and then weren't even included in the day's shooting. They got paid of course but sitting around waiting is hardly good preparation for an acting role.

The look of the film seems to have been heavily dictated by the decision to shoot the entire thing in 3D. They couldn't use the excellent forced perspective trick they did in LotR to make the hobbit actors appear so much smaller than their co-stars because, well, 3D viewers would be able to see that they're further from the camera. The matte paintings they'd used in LotR would have appeared flat, so that's all replaced by CGI. That CGI becomes enormously more expensive because 3D has to be shot in 48 frames per second rather than the usual 24, so that's twice as much rendering time required.

[Maturin]

I suspect it's no coincidence PJ hasn't made a feature film since filming the last Hobbit one in 2013 (not including that WW1 documentary).

You get the feeling that process destroyed him a bit.

[Alan]

Bill and Ted 3
Fucking hell.....

[Sly Boots]

Bill and Ted 3
Fucking hell.....

Yeah.

[Drarok]

Aw no, is is that bad?!

[Achtung Englander]

3 Women (1977)

Being a fan of Shelley Duvall, I found this film to be really compelling. A story that is wholly original, complex and masterful in its narrative. At the end of the film you realise you have seen the story of one woman but told from 3 different perspectives. It is all about growing up and how your life perspective changes over time. Superb. I love this kind of shit.

Shelley Duvall won the Best Actress Award for this film at the Cannes Film Festival. She deserved it.

8/10

[Achtung Englander]

Ida

This is a beautiful, compelling film of a Polish nun in the 1960s who discovers her roots are Jewish and her parents were murdered by the Nazis. She goes off on a road journey of discovery with her alcoholic but brilliant aunt. Shot in black and white in 4:3 ratio, it is a lovely film with an ending that is honest as it is real. Superb acting from the 2 actors especially given the young girl was discovered in a resturant and picked due to her innocent look. Remarkable given this was her debut film.

8/10

[Achtung Englander]

7500 (Amazon Prime)

I really enjoyed it. A pretty decent edge on your seat thriller. It does have some plot issues but what film doesn't

Spoiler

yeah I would have killed the hijaker as well. God knows why he didn't especially when its life or death

7/10

[Animalmother]

Fury Road

Been a while since I watched it, does it still hold up?

Dear lord I love this film, 2 hours of beautiful insanity intermixed with the some of the best action scenes ever filmed. It's relentless with maybe 10 minutes of its runtime not involving an explosion or a a vehicle getting demolished is spectacular fashion. The plot might be shallow but it just works so well. It would be a crime if we didn't get another film.

Wonderful stuff