Since the first thread became over 1000 pages long and seems to be prone to slow response time from the server and timeouts when posting, we're hoping a fresh one will perform better.

Link to the first thread.

 

Yeah, I was wondering why the last thread was randomly locked.

 

Yeah fair enough. I used to post on the old Star Wars.com boards and the forum rule was that thread were automatically locked after, I think, 500 pages.

 

Atomic Blonde

Like Salt, only sweeter. Theron has nothing to prove as an actress, which is just as well, as this movie proves nothing other than stunt choreography looks like hard work. The plot twist is as expected as it is inconsequential to the story. We don't care. We don't have to. We know everyone wants Broughton dead and that in return she will make everyone dead. That is the point. You know what you're paying for, plus the period music is fun.

 

I have not seen any movies recently.

 

The Accountant .

Ben Affleck plays an autistic ( well movie autistic) accountant / hitman , he's not bad in it and it doesn't always go by the numbers , but the plot is a bit muddled with tons of flashbacks , the action scenes are good with Affleck doing that very practical style of killing ( very precise , no exertion , analytical etc.)
Anna Kendrick is in it because ... well Affleck needs someone to talk to I guess .

 

Oh, wow, new thread. Well, it's sad to see the old one go. But yeah, this one will probably run better and it'll be more apt to attract new posters with its new short length.

 

Just noticed the old thread was started in 2004...that's the year my oldest son was born and I joined these boards...

*wipes tear*

*makes fart joke*

Anyway, Wonder Woman....FINALLY. And yeah, it was as good as I had heard. Was nice to not hate a DC film.

 

Stalker

incredibly slow paced but i really enjoyed it. some of the shots just sit for minutes.

 

The old thread is dead.

Long live the old thread.

 

A Brief History of Time. Very, very good documentary about Stephen Hawking and his contributions to astronomy and astrophysics.

 

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) Dario Argento's debut ultra violent murder mystery kick starts the gallo genre with a vengeance. U.S. novelist Sam is in Rome after completing a nonfiction book on birds for an Italian publisher. Rooming with his British girlfriend Julia, Sam just got paid and is thinking of taking her with him back to the States. En route to his flat, Sam witnesses an attack in progress at a very chic art galley. A man in black is attempting to slay a lovely redhead Monica Ranieri. Sam arrives not before Monica is stabbed and he gets stuck between the gallery's glass doors.

The man in black flees. The police come to Sam and Monica's aid and he tells the local inspector what he saw multiple times (as true in most giallos, the police aren't very smart, so it's up the arm chair detective protagonists to figure out the whodunnit.) Meanwhile, the audience is told there is a killer slaying young women in Rome. The police keep Sam's passport so he and Julia are stuck until the cops get more leads on the man who attacked Monica and may have killed other women. A strange painting recreating a sexual assault is at the center of the murders being committed and Sam being Sam wants answers. As he digs deeper, he and Julia become targets.

The revelation of the killer is still quite stunning almost five decades on. It's a troubling rationale to say the least, but one that I could see happening. Dario was only able to recreate that kind of surprise with his killer's identity one more time imo (in 1982's Tenebrae.) Unlike many giallos that would follow, some of Dario's early films boasted titles that were actual clues. This is one of those (the bird in question is actually a Gray Crowned Crane...)

This was loosely based on the novel The Screaming Mimi and while Tony Musante was not a good actor by any stretch of the imagination, he's serviceable as Sam. Suzy Kendall would become a fixture of giallos and she's good as Julia. Mario Adorf has a great cameo as a rather twisted hippie painter whom Sam discovers is the artist behind the painting at the center of the story. Up until today, I'd never seen this film in Italian, so I was kind of surprised when I was skimming through the digital HD print to discover it was in Italian. That's great, because it covers up some Musante's campy delivery. This is also quite violent for 1969-1970. Though I am grateful most of it is off camera. The cinematography and sets are amazing though (especially the art gallery with those super creepy and suggestive sculptures) and the story still holds up. I'd give this a hard R rating on account of the violence and how disturbing the killer and their storyline winds up being.

 

it's not a huge deal, but it's slightly annoying that we have to reboot these long-standing discussions when it's really the entire website that needs rebooting. i didn't notice any problem with the old thread that i haven't noticed in every other thread, but maybe that's just me.

anyway i saw thor with my dad on sunday. i guess i didn't feel it was worth posting about, but i agree with a lot of others that the overall light and comedic tone made it hard for the dramatic scenes to carry weight. but i didn't hate it, didn't love it, mostly enjoyed it. ate a whole bucket of popcorn. the thor/hulk dynamic was really fun.

 

Agnes of God (1985) – Norman Jewison

In Agnes of God, John Pielmeier adapts his own play into a moving, thoughtful drama about faith and doubt and the miraculous. A young nun delivers a child that then dies immediately after birth; when the mentally challenged young woman claims that the pregnancy was miraculous, an atheist psychiatrist is called in to judge her mental stability. The psychiatrist quickly falls into conflict with the hard-edged, pragmatic mother superior of the convent and the stage is quite neatly set for a rumination on faith. The performances are all very good. Anne Bancroft is the canny mother superior and her performance grounds the woman in reality and, with help from a multi-layered script, she makes the woman come to life as a real person, not simply as a cardboard cutout. Meg Tilly is a real revelation (pun intended) as the titular Agnes, a young girl that is either touched by God or very mentally disturbed or perhaps simply playing a game to avoid responsibility. Jane Fonda is also very good as the psychiatrist; she gives us hints of fragility behind the tough exterior. The direction is quite good; Jewison captures the desolate countryside and the chilly convent to perfection. The score by Georges Delerue is magnificent, one of his absolute best, an ethereal mix of strings and voices that creates a real atmosphere, a mix of traditional sounds of faith filtered through Delerue’s own perspective. The film was controversial upon release; Roger Ebert gave it one star out of a possible four. A lot of the people who had issues with the movie seemed to be expecting a resolution more concrete than the one the film provides and it is true that the film has sequences that feel very much like they’re out of a mystery-thriller. But this isn’t a mystery-thriller; it’s an exploration of faith that uses the trappings of a mystery-thriller and it’s a mistake for the viewer to expect everything to be absolutely clear at the end of the film. Personally, I found the ending to be absolutely perfect; the final scene with Tilly is one of the most beautiful and strange of the entire film in my opinion. Ultimately, I think the film adds up to being both really thought-provoking and also really emotional. I thought about the movie a lot in the following days after watching it and at the same time, it really did work on a spiritual level as well. I found it to be really compelling. The scenes where Agnes recounts her visions are beautiful; the performance, the music and the religious strangeness of the monologues all combine to really create a very unique mood. Again, this one was very controversial, but I absolutely loved it. 4 stars.

tl;dr – great performances & a wonderful script create a thoughtful, evocative, spiritual meditation on faith & miracles; don’t expect everything to be wrapped up perfectly, but why would you? 4 stars.

 

Goldfinger - The most fun Bond movie up to this point, it takes a step into wacky territory that isn't a problem here, but perhaps sets a bad precedent for future Bond films.

I don't really need to say much about these first few Bond films, they're such classics you already know them, but I guess it won't hurt for me to do the complete opposite. Skip to the rankings if you want.

Right away we take that step into silliness when the first thing we see is Bond swimming with a bird on his head as a disguise.

Offsetting that almost immediately is a bit of ruthless Bond behavior that I've really enjoyed in the first few movies. Bond coldly executing the out-of-ammo Professor in Dr. No, and helping to snipe a Russian assassin FRWL. Here, he uses a woman he's making out with as a human shield and she gets her head bashed in by a bottle that was meant for him.

We get our first great title song in Goldfinger, and I love it. It's really the most iconic of them, isn't it?

Okay, so Goldfinger has Jill Masterson killed...and then he has her painted in gold? lol okay. Obviously it's a message, but, like, they brought paint brushes and cans of gold paint and everything and they took the time to cover her entire body? Real clean job they did, too, because I didn't see any on the sheets.

When I first saw this, some 25 years ago as a little kid, I had some thought about the bad guy turning people gold being some kind of superpower or magic or something. Like there was something supernatural about it. Like Goldfinger had gold powers, like Midas or something. I guess I missed the line about it being paint.

First actual look at the department of Q branch, having only briefly seen Q himself in FRWL.

Intro of the DB5 and first real Bond car. Bond mentions something about his old Bentley, just as he mentioned his Beretta in Dr No. I like these little hints at history.

The driving stunts in these early films are really primitive, making a lot of use of the old fast forward button.

Connery has a great way of delivering dialogue in these early films, like his trollish comments toward Tilly.

"Defect of some kind". I just love the trollish way he says it.

"It's for my ice skates"
"lovely sport"

For some reason the fight stops when Tilly is killed, after which the bad guys let Bond drive himself back in his own car with only a single guard with him in the front passenger seat. Old lady working the gate pulls out a submachine gun. For some reason, golden high beams make Bond crash. I never did understand that. Pretty silly sequence.

I loooooove Pussy Galore. "I must be dreaming."

"Now Pussy, you know a lot more about planes than guns. That's a Smith & Wesson .45. If you fire it at this close range, the bullet will pass through me and the fuselage like a blowtorch through butter."

They love establishing that Bond knows guns, and at least they got it right this time. Back in Dr. No Bond drops the great line, "That's a Smith & Wesson, and you've had your six", only the gun Dent was wielding was not a S&W, nor was it a six shooter.

Connery does a great job with these cool guy lines, I can't imagine Roger Moore delivering something like that. I guess I'll see when I get to his movies.

The hoods' convention is really lame and utterly pointless. There's no reason for them to be in the movie. They exist so Goldfinger can villain monologue the plan to them and then he promptly kills them off. And the commentary from the gangsters is awful, with the most cliche wiseguy accents.

What's with that trick pool table? Turn those lights back on! What are you trying to pull, Goldfingah? I don't like being cooped up like this. What's that map doing there? Knock off Fort Knox? Got a key or something? Who's going to say boo to them, Goldfinger? Hey? What's going here? The floor! My feet! What is this, a merry-go-round?

They're incredulous 1940s Chicago gangsters, see? Muggsy? Nyah!


The worst scenes in the movie.

The gangsters are just ridiculous...but I don't see how Goldfinger is any better after his "EXCEPT CRIME!" speech.

I'm just going to wrap up the rest of the movie by saying that I love Honor Blackman. God, what a woman.


There have been times when I have considered this the greatest Bond movie of all time, and it's still great...but I guess the silliness didn't go over as well with me this time. I still had a lot of fun, maybe more fun than with FRWL, but FRWL isn't dragged down as much by stupidity that would become a real problem for the franchise down the road.

Rankings

FRWL
Goldfinger
Dr. No

 

Fast forwarded through Dragon Lord (1982) to get to Chan Wai-Man’s thief gone good character, and cinematic karma rebounded on that when a local station televised Drunken Master (1978) which I sat through for one reason: Hwang Jang Lee. Both movies cement why I have a Jackie Chan allergy. But it was great fun to see Hwang in his Tony Iommi looking phase kicking and punching like the master he still is today.

 

Scream (1996) - Plot; Teens in a small town find themselves in a deadly game with a killer who plays by standard horror movie clichés.

Often credited with revitalizing the horror genre in the mid-90s (it certainly influenced it thereafter for at least the rest of the decade), Scream still holds up as a clever, well made twist on the genre. It deftly balances horror and humor, with each complimenting the other to deliver something that's both familiar and fresh. - 7/10

- Skeet Ulrich looks like Johnny Depp cloned by C students in a community college laboratory filled with dirty beakers.

- I hadn't watched it in 20 years, and was expecting it to feel more 90s than Bill Clinton wearing Birkenstocks and drinking a Surge at Lollapalooza, but a few things aside (video cassettes, cell phones being new fangled) it's not nearly as dated as I thought it would be.

 

Thunderball - The first failure in the Bond series, it is an utter bore. I recommend turning it off after Tom Jones belts out that final note.

Rankings

FRWL
Goldfinger
Dr. No
Thunderball

 

Justice League. My friend with terrible taste in movies wanted to see it. Me and my other friend were willing to go to mock it. I expected a disaster and actually didn't get it. That said, it's not a very good movie. The attempts at humor, though occasionally landing, are forced and sit awkwardly with the tone, especially Flash, who's just off in his own universe of cartoony, geeky self-aware comic relief, a terrible imitation of a Marvel movie. The action is all CGI mess (dependent on the by-now-tired superhero "spectacle" of people leaping long distances and smacking each other across rooms, as if this is supposed to impress us anymore, rather than any coherent or original usage of superpowers), set against Snyder's preferred (and awful) painted-on-a-greensceen wildly artificial CGIscapes. The visuals are just awful in general, all smeary CGI blahscapes and dingy dark rooms and overcast skies. It's kind of weird when there are actually a few scenes set in what looks almost recognizably like an actual city existing in reality, except for the total absence of sunlight. The first hour of the movie is an interminable, terribly-edited agglomeration of character introductions, exposition, and setup, clearly the first part of a two-and-a-half-hour Synder epic, which then smashes abruptly into a slapdash-CGI third act showdown without ever quite figuring out where its second act went. So it's a total mess structurally, and never gives the characters any room to breathe. And it's victim to the terrible tendency of superhero movies to just throw in a bland villain with a generic Macguffin that threatens to destroy the planet for vague reasons, and an army of disposable henchmen for a giant CGI confrontation (in this case, remarkably terrible-looking flying monkey men in inexplicable thirties-aviator goggles, which seem to be a thing Zack Synder likes). Ciaran Hinds deserves better than the nothing role of blustery characterless CGI blob Steppenwolf.

Most critically, the film makes the common superhero-movie mistake of not realizing that a superhero movie still has to be a movie. It can't just be spectacle; it has to be about something. It should have actual characters, it should have something to say. This doesn't. The Justice League are all likable enough, but they don't get any significant character development; they're just there to barrel through the stock plot. The film doesn't engage with any significant themes or ideas. It's just empty spectacle. All the best superhero movies, especially Nolan's Batfilms but also the better Marvel movies, have been about characters, about ideas, about an actual story first. This isn't a movie about anything except the pure franchise function of bringing all these characters into one movie. That's it. It doesn't even have anything meaningful to say about teamwork or anything. It's just moving pieces around.

But I'll say this for it: it's not excessively plodding and dour. It moves along and it's generally disposable fun, so it's not the terrible grim slog I was fearing. And it does a decent job of getting the characters, at least at the surface level it's operating at. It does a pretty decent job of introducing Cyborg and Aquaman, and Gal Gadot remains massively watchable. Its Flash is up and down, and I'm largely indifferent to Affleck's weary Batman (not bad, but he does nothing to excite me), but it hits the right notes, at least. And most crucially, it actually gets Superman, unlike Man of Steel. Everything about the film's take on Superman works -- it understands his iconic power, his nobility, his awe-inspiring asskickingness. It gets that Superman is a huge asset to the film, not a liability. Every moment built around Superman is magical. Everything about Superman in the film relentlessly hits one point: MOTHER****ING SUPERMAN IS MOTHER****ING AWESOME. So I can't completely knock it, because it got Superman right and it's a delight anytime he's onscreen. The rest of the film is mediocre. But it's a great Superman movie.

 

Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express. It popped up on iTunes, and as I want to see the Kennenth Branagh movie, I decided to watch this.....yeah, this was not very good. It was made in 1974, right at the very, very tail of the studio system, as Speilberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Coppola were beginning their ascent. It has the productions of a glorified TV movie and Lumet manages to completely waste an A list cast. Also the solution felt really, really contrived. I’ve never read the original Agatha Christy novel, but movies centred around elaborate revenge conspiracies are a lot more fun when you show the conspirators plotting their revenge, instead of unravelling the conspirators’ plot.

 

Legends of the Fall. It's meant to be a sweeping period epic about three brothers who grow up in the Montana wilderness before World War I and a woman drive them apart, but I think it's really about how terribly unhappy they make poor Julia Ormond. It's not a particularly profound or brilliantly-executed film, but it's stately, complex, and adult, which is worth quite a bit. Ormond is excellent as the woman who is disappointed in love by all three brothers, while Anthony Hopkins is also excellent as the stern patriarch. Aidan Quinn is quite good as the stuffy, frustrated eldest brother, and Brad Pitt does a solid job of holding down the central role of the unruly, war-damaged, charismatic middle brother, though the main thing I kept thinking was that this was a role that called for a young Paul Newman. Pitt has movie-star good looks but frankly I just don't find him that compelling onscreen most of the time. I didn't love it, but I liked it.