Re: Recent movie playlist

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In the last few days I've watched:
The Interview
A Christmas Story
Evil Dead 2
Lucy
X-men: Days of Future Past (It's becoming my favorite of the X-men films)
Christmas Vacation (in honor of getting Griswald'd on my xmas bonus this year)
Fire Walk With Me - Extended Fan Cut (because there's never a bad time to watch it)
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: Recent movie playlist

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TC wrote:Food of the Gods - hilarious movie about the singer from REO Speedwagon battling giant hamsters or something. so hilarious. did MST3K ever do this one?
I must see this film. I'm surprised MST3K didn't do this one. I see it's a Bert I. Gordon film and they did a string of his.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: Recent movie playlist

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darkness wrote:
TC wrote:Food of the Gods - hilarious movie about the singer from REO Speedwagon battling giant hamsters or something. so hilarious. did MST3K ever do this one?
I must see this film. I'm surprised MST3K didn't do this one. I see it's a Bert I. Gordon film and they did a string of his.
everyone is amazingly calm throughout. our buddy died? huh, that's odd. well, better not miss the ferry!

Re: Recent movie playlist

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Alexhead wrote:
_Marcus_ wrote:The Babadook.

Solid horror/psychological horror flick with minimal budget but interesting camera work, good acting throughout and really amazing design. Loved the ending too.
I'm looking forward to that, have a friend who always works the local film festival who saw it about 6 months back and loved it.
watched The Babadook last night. was really good. they really dive right into making you empathetic with the mother hating the kid, it was giving me anxiety just watching it. that kid has a long career ahead of him playing the most aggressively annoying child ever if he wants it. it left me with several questions, but i get the feeling it may have been trying to say something that went over my head. my only real issue with it was the ending. it seems like they probably didn't have an ending and had to come up with something very quickly. after coming on so strong in the first hour or so, it's a letdown. but again, it may have something to do with whatever it is they are trying to say that was lost on me.

Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic - documentary on the man. boy do they skip over a ton of stuff. i understand the man had a four-decade career, but holy shit. it's like reading the first sentence of every chapter of the game of thrones books and figuring you know all the characters now. mildly interesting at best for someone that has never heard of him maybe.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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We will probably rent that this weekend. Watched The Interview on NYE, I liked it. Anything lampooning those assholes is worth my time and $5.99. Franco continues to be a fairly poor actor, and is given many opportunities to overplay his hand here, and Roggen just plays Roggen every time out, but there are some laughs to be had.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: Recent movie playlist

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The Grand Budapest Hotel - another wes anderson film, another zillion scenes of people walking across the frame. when i make a film, if i include anyone rapidly traversing the frame, someone please shoot me in the fucking head. film was entertaining, mostly due to the cast, which was fantastic across the board, minus the distraction of owen wilson. i get that he's somehow bound to appear in every WA film, but goddamn did he take me out of it. kind of amusing that ed norton (and really, everyone else) didn't even attempt an accent. the film reminded me of one of those "caper" movies, and in that context it was fun. but i just can't stand the fucking cutsey, aggressively annoying style of anderson.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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Three Miles North of Molkom

A documentary about the No Mind festival in a small swedish village where thousands of people gather to, well, hippie it up something fierce. The directors managed to find some really solid characters to follow, ranging from the super skeptic to the downright scary (we called one of them Rape-face while watching the doc). Well worth a watch.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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klimov wrote:My business partner co-directed that. New film coming this year - about (wait for it) North Korea :ssh:
They did a fine job. Especially like the way they stayed completely neutral in both camera work and sound, and let the people at the festival tell the story.

Also weird that it turns out old DLDB member Maria knew one of the main characters from the film...

Re: Recent movie playlist

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TC wrote:The Grand Budapest Hotel
I watched this over the weekend. It's the first Wes Anderson movie I've come close to liking since Tenenbaums, and even then I doubt I'd have enjoyed it much absent Fiennes' performance. Really, I give Wes full credit for being one of maybe three filmmakers in the past 20-plus years to realize that Ralph can do more than play cartoon villains (e.g., Schindler, Harry Potter) or brooding romantics (English Patient and its ilk). He's a graceful, charming, deft comedian and pretty much any line he delivers here is a hoot. The rest of the movie is the usual Wes Anderson antics and dollhouse production design, overstuffed with distracting and unintentionally funny star cameos (WTF Ed Norton?).
This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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heartily agree.

Mallrats - had a "fun moment" over the weekend where the wife and i were talking about ben affleck, mallrats came up and we decided it had been too long. watched the theatrical cut. this is the first time it didn't feel like it held up very well for me. funny parts felt too far apart. i may be filing this film into the memory vault, where things go that are better left remembered than revisited. it's getting pretty crowded.

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Jesus, a Kevin Smith movie doesn't stand the test of time? OK that was too easy.

I probably like Anderson better than you guys but still not 100%--I wasn't a fan of Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom even though those are two of his most popular ones, they cross over into cute for cuteness' sake too much for me--but I did like Grand Budapest. Not sure if either of you have kids the right age to enjoy it but he did a really great job doing his stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox, that's one I can re-watch with my children again and again. Really well suited to his fastidious skills and sense of humor.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: Recent movie playlist

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Saw Blackhat last night. Will say more later. Decent, not great. And now, it's a massive box office disaster. Ouch.
This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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OK, so, Blackhat.

This is a weird one. The first 30-45 minutes or so are so flat, so un-Mann-like that you'd swear the studio retook control and had a journeyman do reshoots. It's just talky, uninteresting dross. I was getting worried.

But then at some point (I'd have to re-watch to pinpoint exactly where) we re-enter Mann Land: HD nighttime digital photography, brooding antiheroes, dialogue swapped out for tech jargon, explosive shootouts and chase scenes, the works. The last two-thirds isn't flawless, but it's a solid enough B entry from the director of Manhunter and Miami Vice (movies this one echoes, sometimes quite explicitly). Blackhat is exploring how small the world has become, with both borders and language barriers quickly being rendered irrelevant. People shed their citizenship to survive. Some critics have complained that Blackhat doesn't slam the Chinese enough, which seems to miss the point entirely.

I ended up liking Blackhat well enough, but coming nearly six years since Michael Mann's last movie (Public Enemies) and close to a decade since his last great one (Miami Vice), it can't help but carry a whiff of a disappointment. If he had released this in 2011 or 2012 I wouldn't have minded so much.

Re: the box office. Boy, did this one crash hard. But perhaps unsurprisingly. It was placed in direct competition with the patriotism-affirming American Sniper. A movie about alienation from national identity didn't stand a chance.
This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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darkness wrote:He's not the original. They are all clones. His clone is remembering things of the original.
TC wrote:Oblivion - man this was dumb. really, really cool helicopter-thingy, like that idea. really cool drones idea. but everything else is dumb. why would they leave the "original" alive, let alone mix him in with the others? that's just the leading question about the many, many dumb things in this. did i mention it was dumb? neat to see the kingslayer in something else, but man... this was just dumb.
interesting:
DH wrote:"Oblivion" Scribe Upset By The Final Film

Film scripts are re-written all the time by numerous writers, with each subsequent iteration often differing from the last. Changes can take place to such an extent that you often end up with a shooting script that doesn't resemble the one that sparked a studio's interest.

Such is the case with 2013's Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle "Oblivion" according to the film's original script writer William Monahan. Monahan, who penned the likes of "The Departed" and "Kingdom of Heaven," handed over his "Oblivion" script which then scored re-writes by the likes of Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt.

In a new interview with Den of Geek, Monahan surprisingly laments the loss of his original script and what Joseph Kosinski's film ultimately turned out to be:

"It differed enormously. I’d written something I think was very good, perhaps a science fiction classic, which I imagine got the film greenlit, and then it was turned by subsequent writers into cannon fodder, despite Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman and Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko, all of whom I love.

There’s nothing left of me except drone behaviour, some story, the seawater collectors, and Horatius at the Gate. I never tried for credit. The director and the studio made their bed and they can have it. Not taking credit probably cost me a significant amount in royalties, but I don't care."

Despite his misgivings, "Oblivion" ended up making $286 million worldwide even though it only scored mixed reviews.
too bad we'll never see it.

Re: Recent movie playlist

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Funny that he seems to be trying to take all the credit for the original script, when it was co-written with Kosinski and based on Kosinski's graphic novel. The film was greenlit based on the graphic novel and Tom Cruse's involvement, not the script as he implies. I saw the pages from the graphic novel and honestly it's not that much different from what was in the film. So either Monahan went in his own direction and wrote something different (and apparently brilliant), only to have later writers take it back closer to the source, or Monahan is just trying to distance himself from an unsuccessful film. He might want to disown Sin City 2 while he's at it.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: Recent movie playlist

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TC wrote:funny that $286MM is an unsuccessful film.
That's worldwide gross, not domestic. It only made about $86 mil in the US. Budget was 120 mil, assume marketing was probably around $60 and take into account that studios make less money on foreign box office than domestic. It probably barely broke even in its theatrical release. I'm sure it turned a profit when it hit home video though (real profit, not Hollywood accounting profit which few movies ever do).
Just cut them up like regular chickens