Amph What was the last movie you saw?

Sully was a really fun movie to see on IMAX last year. It was a good way to kick off the fall movie season, just like IT is a glorious way to kick off this year's fall season.

 

Every time an airliner goes down there's a serious investigation, and it gets intense when the captain didn't follow established emergency procedure to the letter. The National Transportation Safety Board's job is to dig deep into every little facet of such accidents to see what they can learn to prevent them recurring. Judging by the reports I've read, Sully and Skiles got the tough but fair treatment, and were thoroughly vindicated.

As for their calmness, the kind of people chosen to fly airliners are naturally self-disciplined, accustomed to dealing with stressful situations, and extensively trained to remain calm and in control. In my experience, it's all about tuning out the distractions and focusing on what needs to be done. That's what always worked for me when missions got "interesting."

 

Before Sunset. Jesse and Celine meet again almost ten years later for another day of wandering around, having far-ranging conversations, and falling in love. Again, it starts a little clunky, getting them back together through the device of making Jesse an author who's written a book about their night together in Vienna and starting the dialogue off with a lot of dull political talk that situates the movie firmly in 2004, but it quickly gets back in the groove as these characters believably fall effortlessly back into the camaraderie they shared nine years ago. They hit that comfort zone, but as the conversation comes back around to the paths their lives have taken, they have to deal with all the feelings swirling around that single romantic night and the way its unresolved possibility has cast a shadow across their entire lives. It's a beautiful film about the bittersweet way the past lingers in our lives, lovely memories mixed with the uncertainty and discomfort of wondering what could have been. Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy are a magnificent team.

 

Today, I saw that on Youtube someone had made an "The Ending Explained" video for this film. Why?

Who didn't understand a impaling a monster with steel bars, beating it with baseballs bats, and throwing stuff at it? Was anyone honestly confused about the effect of what was going on?

 

Today, I saw that on Youtube someone had made an "The Ending Explained" video for this film. Why?

Who didn't understand a impaling a monster with steel bars, beating it with baseballs bats, and throwing stuff at it? Was anyone honestly confused about the effect of what was going on?

 

It would've been about Pennywise falling down the well and how he isn't actually dead, or something along those lines.

 

Mad Max Fury Road - as one long chase scene, it is fantastic. All the characters feel in universe, except for Max. Lke all the Max movies though, only so much time I want to spend in that world (I'm pretty much done with this universe myself.) I would love to see George Miller create a new action film and characters, and/or take an established universe or characters and put his awesome stamp on it.

 

Along with a clever structure (present/flashback/present/flashback) and excellent performances by Hanks and Eckhart, the saving grace of Sully is its nice, tight runtime. There's no flab, excess or wasted motion.

 

I just saw "Mother." Nicely intense. This movie is so unconventional that I'm almost surprised it got a wide release. I would have liked to have seen more people in the theater just to see if they would have walked out, but I liked being alone in the theater. The happenings in this movie are an anti-social person's worst fears. People obsessed with box office to the point of talking about opening weekends like football games are bashing it like crazy, because they've become conditioned to where they equate that with success.

 

I just saw "Mother." Nicely intense. This movie is so unconventional that I'm almost surprised it got a wide release. I would have liked to have seen more people in the theater just to see if they would have walked out, but I liked being alone in the theater. The happenings in this movie are an anti-social person's worst fears. People obsessed with box office to the point of talking about opening weekends like football games are bashing it like crazy, because they've become conditioned to where they equate that with success.

 

'The Mummy'

It's pretty awful and well deserving of it's putrid reputation. I laughed a lot at it and so I guess it has that going for it. If you can laugh at the fact that Universal thinks it's audience is full of morons who will chug down this deluded Marvel rip off then give it a shot (I can't even remember what the **** they called monster SHIELD but I knew that was exactly what they were doing as soon as I saw the big sterile hallway with the Creature's arm in a jar).

As I said earlier I don't know who the hell Universal thought the target audience was for this. No one who had an appreciation for their monster heritage will having anything but the utmost disdain for this dark universe.

On the bright side though I can easily see them rebooting the whole thing. We never got a sequel to either 'Dracula Untold' or the Benicio Del Torro 'Wolf Man' and while they are both meh movies they are still lightyears above anything in 'The Mummy'

 

Buster's Mal Heart Surreal without being pretentious or overly confusing. Rami Malek is great in it.

 

Logan Lucky. The trailers marketed this as a big comedic heist movie, but it's something a bit more offbeat than that, which may explain why it's disappearing from theaters so fast. It gets most of its comedic mileage out of how utterly deadpan it plays its weirdness, and it treats its cast of hillbilly doofuses with too much actual respect to spend much time making fun of them. It doesn't emphasize the intensity and tension of the heist, but moves through everything at a fairly deliberate pace, and finds it climax not so much in the heist as in Channing Tatum's daughter singing John Denver at a beauty pageant. It's a weird movie and I have no idea who it's designed to satisfy. Soderbergh hasn't made a very approachable film. What it is, though, is pretty clever and slyly funny, with a wonderfully left-field extended digressive joke about the A Song of Ice and Fire release schedule delivered by Dwight Yoakam, which has to be the last thing I ever expected to see in a mainstream Hollywood movie about a redneck heist. Not great, but pretty good.

 

Planes. It's got plenty of flaws as a movie, but they did a fantastic job of getting the aviating right.

 

mother! What a load of ****. If anyone understood that this film was a bible story, you should get a round of applause. You shouldn't have to look something up online to be able to understand a film. There's not much else to say here. 4/10.

 

Blade Runner - theatrical version This is currently playing on UK Sky TV and is a version I guess I haven't watched for nearly 30 years, (in fact I can't remember watching any version all the way through for a long time). This was one of the movies of the 80's that was a staple on late night independant televsion and video rental. To watch it for the first time when I was about 12 or 13 back in the mid 80's was a real treat as it was an adult film. I can clearly remember thinking when watching it at that young age how hard work the film seemed to be to get through and that not a lot happens in it. But obviously now I'm watching it through much older eyes.

I still love the opening of it as the cityscape comes on screen with a perfectly timed flourish in the score and everything is bleak. Hard to believe that back then 2019 seemed so far away, yet we are nearly there. Visually the look of the future in the sets and seeming industrial was presented very similarly in the late 70's and 80's, films like Outland or Alien spring to mind. The future this film presents is miserable and with it being set at night and in the rain enhances that, and it gives a feeling that the Earth is now in perpetual darkness even. Everything about it is dark and gloomy from the from the lighting, to the look of the interior and exterior sets, to the attitudes of most of the characters. Its like theres no hope in the world and that people have no order in their lives, especially when you see the police station, Deckards apartment and JF's abode too. I still find its look and tone quite unsettling and strange, the constant strobe lighting, punctuated by the strange Japanese ads and the Vangelis music (which is not as prevalent as I remember throughout though).

The film noir vibe is clear with Deckards jaded outlook to the job and the voice over adds to that feeling even more. Speaking of the voice over I was looking forward to hearing it again as I don't remember much about it and obviously its been much maligned. Hearing it again and I actually didn't mind it all that much, even though it does seem a touch out of place in a modern(ish) movie and its more like an idiots guide for the viewer. Theres something strange going on with the continutiy between the deaths of Zhora and Leon, which is being discussed over on the Blade Runner thread. But overall I don't see too many issues with the story that would need clarifying with the voice over.

Harrison Ford is excellent, although hes good at his job I think he portrays Deckard jaded reluctance very well and the line between human and replicant seems blurred to him. The support is excellent too and the 'villains' of the film are not really villains as such and going back to seeing this when I was younger in the 80's I was disapointed that they had no clear action orientated motive, watching it now its not about that, its all about their own mortality. Its a lot deeper than my 12 year old self ever realised. Its quite a unique film I guess. I still think its not that easy to get in to and its a film thats fascinating in its design and look that I can see why took time to build up its cult status.

Agreed. The reality is that the subject matter does not need to be a 3 hour blockbuster. Eastwood realises this and as a result there are no excesses or bloating of the story and its all the better for it.

 

Anti Matter - If you're as well-versed in bad sci fi movies as I am, you will see the ending coming from an hour away. Good sci fi is partly about beefing up really outlandishly dumb ideas by placing them in close proximity with a lot of plausible ideas. Bad sci fi is partly about never bothering with the plausible window dressing at all. Go dumb. Go dumb big and go dumb early.

 

The Furies (1950)

Early Anthony Mann western starring Stanwyck and Walter Huston. The lighting is excellent, the dialogue is rough but effective, and there's certainly lots of (ahem) interesting things going on, but just about every character in this movie is too thoroughly awful for me to truly enjoy, including Ms. Stanwyck herself.

 

Double post...

 

I loved Logan Lucky. Loved its weirdness. Loved its pacing.

 

Hitman's Bodyguard .

Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson , better than I expected , kind've a throwback to those 80's Shane Black movies , it's R rated stuff too , its funny and some good action sequences .

.

 

They actually make some good jokes about that in HPpodcraft podcast when discussing Dracula.

The idea is to my understanding is that Dracula is alone (beside his "brides") but try to give the appearance to Harker(in the book)/Reinfield(in the movie) of having servants. The problem is that by showing Draculas face in the movie when he is the coach driver they cast that away directly, to my understanding so was it mentioned in the manuscript that he was supposed to have his face hidden in that scene but for some reason they did not do that when filming.

 

Guys, we get the fateful flight four times. I was so bored by this movie. The one really lengthy crash sequence is well done and Hanks is quite good, but by the time we've heard the entire cockpit recording over and gone through two simulations, I was cringing. It's short, but it's still bloated. There's enough material for about a forty-five minute short if you ask me.



Detroit (2017) – Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow reteams with her Zero Dark Thirty screenplay author Mark Boal to create a really harrowing, street level picture of people under siege in a war-torn city. I went into this film expecting a broader portrait of the Detroit Race Riots of 1967 than I ended up getting, but I think the decision to take this movie down into a narrower focus is a good one and the film ends up working really well as a kind of bottle story as we’re introduced to a varied cast of characters who then all come together for a fateful, terrifying night at a small motel. Bigelow captures the intensity of the violence that rages through the streets and the claustrophobia of the motel as well. The film is gritty, grimy and charged with constant tension; the longer you spend in the motel, the worse it feels, until you can almost taste the cigarette smoke and feel the oppressive heat. This movie is stifling, confining and brutal. The performances are absolutely brilliant right down to the line. I think John Boyega has the most complicated character, a black security guard drawn into the charged situation by chance and Boyega gives the performance of the movie in my opinion and the best performance of his career so far. He’s less showy than some of the other performers because his performance is more interior and restrained, but he has, I think, the widest range of emotions and the most complex motivations and feelings. He may lose out when it comes award season, maybe to some of the bigger performances from this very movie, but this performance is, I think, going down in history, award or not. Will Poulter, a young actor who is so good he managed to actually register as a memorable part of The Revenant, is gripping and scary as a racist cop who is genuinely driven by a moral code, just an unbearably repugnant one. Algee Smith gives a really, really fine performance; he makes his character feel the most vulnerable of the victims here, the one most likely to be completely destroyed even if he does manage to survive. Jack Reynor, an actor I’ve been back and forth on a couple of times, is absolute perfection as a cop that is painfully, horrifyingly, ultimately fatally, stupid; he finds a sense of dumb sheepish idiocy that is cringe-inducing it’s so real. I didn’t even recognize him, so fully does he disappear into the wide-eyed obliviousness of his character. Hannah Murray is spectacular as a white female victim who refuses to embrace her victimhood; John Krasinski overcomes all the affection the audience has for him as a performer with a brief role as a slimy, utterly reprehensible lawyer. Chris Coy has a tiny role as a terrifying police detective and he lands it like a ton of bricks. I should mention that these are not the only great performances in the film; I’m restricting myself to naming those that are really just above and beyond because everyone in the movie is so good. The documentary style filmmaking, the grimy production design and the naturalistic, powerful performances really do make this movie feel incredibly visceral and real. It really puts you in the experience of this hellish night in a serious way. It’s gripping, powerful and an intense experience; superlative in every way. 4 stars.

tl;dr – visceral & compelling, this intense film has the feel of absolute verisimilitude thanks to powerful performances and immersive direction; truly immersive & powerfully experiential. 4 stars.

 

This animation is amazing, so lifelike. Makes me wonder: as animation technology improves, will there eventually be no longer any need for live human actors anymore, aside from maybe voicing??? Crazy...

 

Remember Rogue One and General Tarkin. Eventually is still a ways away.

 

Why would you choose Tarkin over Leila when making that reference? That's like complaining about the inadequacy of 2016 Presidential candidates and choosing anyone over Donald Trump.