Random Movie Thoughts Thread

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Watched Monkey Man (2024) this morning -- surprising good with Dev Patel leading and directing and doing writing on it. The closest American counterpart would be "John Wick" but this actually has some depth to it and isn't all about the action -- although the fight sequences are quite good + brutal.

Actually has a very positive inclusion of the hijra community in India, and it was cool seeing Hanuman being included in the mythos of the story (I had once based an Aberrant hero on some of the lore about Hanuman).

Oh, that's interesting. I learned about the hijra quite a while ago (as well as Native American two-spirits). I would be interested in understanding more.

 

[Totenkindly]

Well, here is something nice:

Tarantino's Kill Bill is finally releasing to 4K the first week of January. I normally get steelbooks but I hate hate hate the steelbook art this time and it jacks up the price to $80 for both, so I am just ordering the regular 4K releases where I like the cover art so much better, for significantly less cost.

So is Fincher's Se7en.

Been waiting literally years for these to release.
Apparently there's been a big stink over Se7en and I'm not sure what has happened -- it was supposed to have a lot more stuff in it and there was some kind of revision to the release so now it's just $37 for a single disc steebook. So I refuse to pay that much for a single disc with no extras and am just ordering the regular 4K disc. There seems to be a lot of audiophiles bitching about it and it not having an Atmos sound release.

The past released (mostly on DVD0 were generally shite, although I did not see the bluray that released earlier this year (if it did release).

 

[Totenkindly]

No comment, aside from how unaware Sony is...

Sony Pictures CEO On Why ‘Madame Web’ Flopped At The Box Office; Suggests Shift In ‘Spider-Man’ Spinoffs To Avoid Getting “Destroyed” By Critics

Tony Vinciquerra, the Sony Pictures CEO, acknowledged that Madame Web underperformed at the box office and shared why he thinks it didn't do well.

deadline.com

Well, one comment: I mean, Venom films suck too... but Tom Hardy at least brings kinetic energy / chaos to the role, so he's entertaining despite how eh the writing is.

 

[Totenkindly]

Denis Villeneuve isn't at peace. And he's OK with that

The director strives to make a perfect movie that stands the test of time. His holy grail, he calls it. And yet the quiet of the woods still calls to him.

www.yahoo.com

 

[The Cat]

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

No comment, aside from how unaware Sony is...

Sony Pictures CEO On Why ‘Madame Web’ Flopped At The Box Office; Suggests Shift In ‘Spider-Man’ Spinoffs To Avoid Getting “Destroyed” By Critics

Tony Vinciquerra, the Sony Pictures CEO, acknowledged that Madame Web underperformed at the box office and shared why he thinks it didn't do well.

deadline.com

Well, one comment: I mean, Venom films suck too... but Tom Hardy at least brings kinetic energy / chaos to the role, so he's entertaining despite how eh the writing is.

I caught part of the second Venom film once. I enjoyed it more than I expected, mostly because it brought a smile to my face. I liked the dynamic of the symbiote constantly berating Eddie for a wimp; that was amusing.

I think if Madame Web actually had the Spider-women in it (beyond a dream sequence), I would have probably watched it. That was the one thing about the movie that piqued my interest from the advertising.

Vinciquerra also acknowledged that Kraven the Hunter underperformed like Madame Web and suggested, “for some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films … and the critics just destroyed them.”

Lol.

 

[Totenkindly]

I think if Madame Web actually had the Spider-women in it (beyond a dream sequence), I would have probably watched it. That was the one thing about the movie that piqued my interest from the advertising.

Yeah. I'm not going to comment on Kraven as I did not see it, but basically the two issues were (1) a failure in telling an interesting story, that people wanted to see and (2) a failure in the execution.

The cast was fine and the lighting and technical aspects of the film was fine -- although it felt like the director handed over the reins to the visual director because there really wasn't a director's vision in place. It just looked like it got run through a particular filter, whether or not that filter supported the vision of the film... and I'm not sure what the vision was. A lot of the film felt that way.

I saw Morbius and it was the same crap - cast was fine, inability to write and tell a story and tell it in a unique way was completely missing.

Was this the hallmark of the SSU (Sony Spider-man Universe) film series -- a bunch of Spider-man tangential films without Spider-man? Lol.

Lol.

Poor little guys. The mean nasty media and critics are picking on them.

 

[The Cat]

Yeah. I'm not going to comment on Kraven as I did not see it, but basically the two issues were (1) a failure in telling an interesting story, that people wanted to see and (2) a failure in the execution.

The cast was fine and the lighting and technical aspects of the film was fine -- although it felt like the director handed over the reins to the visual director because there really wasn't a director's vision in place. It just looked like it got run through a particular filter, whether or not that filter supported the vision of the film... and I'm not sure what the vision was. A lot of the film felt that way.

I saw Morbius and it was the same crap - cast was fine, inability to write and tell a story and tell it in a unique way was completely missing.

Was this the hallmark of the SSU (Sony Spider-man Universe) film series -- a bunch of Spider-man tangential films without Spider-man? Lol.


Poor little guys. The mean nasty media and critics are picking on them.

They all make for strangely compellingly weird romantic comedies.

 

[Totenkindly]

They all make for strangely compellingly weird romantic comedies.

Lol. I never thought about them as rom-com's... but you might have something there, with the lighting and whatever else also in play!

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

This scene was so great. I'd watch a movie about her.

 

[The Cat]

Lol. I never thought about them as rom-com's... but you might have something there, with the lighting and whatever else also in play!

I maintain that Sony's Venom series has given us the least toxic leads in a romantic comedy with Venom and Eddie. The Asian girl with the spicy personality and glasses friend is even included with Mrs Chen.

But yeah, check out any of them through the lens of a romantic comedy and they all kinda work much better than as super hero movies... All you gotta really do technically is swap out some of the soundtracks and add in some GooGoo Dolls and My Chemical Romance and baby you got yourself a stew going.

My theory is the market has been so saturated with Marvelesque movies, you gotta start looking at the other movie genres to make sense of them. Because no way hollywood wants to do all these as straight up adaptations of comics.

 

[The Cat]

Wellp. I'm probably old enough to see Robocop now.

 

[Totenkindly]

Wellp. I'm probably old enough to see Robocop now

That scene with the Boddicker gang taking him apart is one of the craziest things I've seen in any film, and I've been watching films for 50 years. It's still unsettling.

 

[The Cat]

That scene with the Boddicker gang taking him apart is one of the craziest things I've seen in any film, and I've been watching films for 50 years. It's still unsettling.

Yeah. The practical effects were visceral. I found myself thinking of the movie in terms of: "What if Frankenstein's Monster was a cop?" It's billed as sci fi action, but this was a pretty decent flash bang horror movie. Nancy Allen though... meow.

The animal sounds the other cyborg made left me with questions about animal testing, I wonder if that was the point? Either way it was surreal.

 

[Lexicon]

That scene with the Boddicker gang taking him apart is one of the craziest things I've seen in any film, and I've been watching films for 50 years. It's still unsettling.

There's a scene from that movie (Toxic Waste Guy... that's all I'll say)... I first saw that when I was like, 5 or 6 yrs old. When the movie aired on TV in later years, this scene was often omitted. NO ONE knew what the hell I was referring to. Kids thought I made it up and was a giant weirdo for even imagining something so graphic.

IT WAS REAL, DAMMIT!

 

[The Cat]

There's a scene from that movie (Toxic Waste Guy... that's all I'll say)... I first saw that when I was like, 5 or 6 yrs old. When the movie aired on TV in later years, this scene was often omitted. NO ONE knew what the hell I was referring to. Kids thought I made it up and was a giant weirdo for even imagining something so graphic.

IT WAS REAL, DAMMIT!

Yeah same thing for me. I saw that one scene somehow, I think back when I used to sleep walk as a kid I came out to the living room and my parents were watching it and my subconscious mind logged it, but I thought I dreamed it. I saw it tonight and I was like:

​

 

[Totenkindly]

There's a scene from that movie (Toxic Waste Guy... that's all I'll say)... I first saw that when I was like, 5 or 6 yrs old. When the movie aired on TV in later years, this scene was often omitted. NO ONE knew what the hell I was referring to. Kids thought I made it up and was a giant weirdo for even imagining something so graphic.

IT WAS REAL, DAMMIT!

Lol -- that was another memorable moment. Paul McCrane plays the guy -- he's better known in his later career for that Leonard Betts episode of X-Files plus those years he spent on E.R.

You could also refer to it as "Bug on the Windshield" scene

God bless Paul Verhoeven.

 

[The Cat]

Lol -- that was another memorable moment. Paul McCrane plays the guy -- he's better known in his later career for that Leonard Betts episode of X-Files plus those years he spent on E.R.

You could also refer to it as "Bug on the Windshield" scene

God bless Paul Verhoeven.

The movie was a lot...juicier than I was expecting. I found myself unsettlingly tasting a v8 more than once during the run time.

 

[Totenkindly]

Egger's Nosferatu -- very sweet!

It might be my least favorite of his four films, but they're all like treasures. He has never made a bad film yet and they are all distinctive in their own ways. He's an actual director with his own unique vision. Just the opening five minutes with Count Orlok's shadow appearing repeatedly on the curtains is visually incredible, and there's this sublime shot of Nicholas Hoult standing in the lit crossroads in the middle of the woods with snow silently falling from above -- so beautiful.

Lily Rose Depp is really great. Rest of cast is great too. Skarsgard is pretty much unrecognizable under his prosthetics.

 

[Totenkindly]

Watched Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) today too. Not sure how I feel about it. At the time it might have seemed rather new, but I have 50 years of cinema built on top of the concepts in this film and now it just seemed like a derivative throwback with ambiguity over its rapes and violence in the film. The protagonist, while buckling down to move from an ineffectual and mild-mannered intellectual early in the film who can't deal with conflict, seems to swing to the opposite pole and still remain entirely clueless and insensitive towards his wife while apparently now "proving himself" in his capacity to kill or maim the group of men attacking the house.

The men themselves -- the "villains" -- don't really seem to have any purpose driving their violence either, they are just drunk self-feeding reprobates and aren't really fleshed out.... although I now know where the tittering villain cliche comes from (as there's one of them who continuously breaks into high-pitched giggles, which gets annoying fast).

I read a little about the book it is based on, and the book does not have the rapes (which in the film have some ambiguity in the woman's response, which caused a controversy) and it actually has a more complex plot where you can understand the townsmen -- while misunderstanding a situation -- think there is a threat that the protagonist is housing and that it's their job to protect the village, which they think they are doing by trying to capture and punish the supposed culprit (who actually is innocent in the book of the specific act they are concerned about, although he's guilty of similar crimes in the past). So the book has a lot of complexity in the moral threads. The film seemed stupid in comparison, in terms of how the hero is contemptible for most of the film and doesn't become any more admirable despite "embracing his machismo" by the end because he still is clueless about his wife and treats her like dirt. There was a lot of this film I either laughed at or I kind of felt REALLY uncomfortable watching (e.g., the rape sequences).