What films have you watched recently?

FarleyUK

Bill and Ted Face the Music - 9/10

Actually really enjoyed it! Managed to capture the feeling of the earlier films, although loses a point for the sudden ending.

boogieman

Emp_Fab said:

...and another thing about that bloody blind aliens rubbish; they ran at high speed through the forest, head down, on all fours.

Blind aliens.

Not once did you hear "Donk.... OWWW!".

I thought the most stupid bit was when they went to the waterfall to have a conversation. So if rushing water fools the aliens why not just live next to the waterfall? You know, rather than constantly creeping around the place and keeping your baby in a coffin down in the basement?

EricTheWeary

And the moment you’ve all been waiting for...



Babylon


1980 British film on Prime starring Brinsley Forde. 

Long haired Mel Smith has a part, bit of a surprise. Karl Howman, star of many a half arsed sitcom and Buster in Eastenders another recognisable face. 

Brixton in 1980 looking like a war zone, bloody hell. 

I suspect a modern audience might be shocked by the amount of racist language - although by no means a film with racist intent. 

The heavily featured soundtrack is Jamaican sound system tracks plus original music by Aswad and Dennis Bovell. 

Something like a reggae Quadrophenia. 

[ looking through IMDb afterwards it’s co written by Martin Stellman who wrote the screenplay for Quadrophenia; I am genuinely shocked by my perception...] 

JezWynd

Christiane F. First time I’ve watched it since it’s original release. It’s held up surprisingly well, in part because it was shot on location at Zoo Station and works as documentary with Bowie’s Low as the perfect visual accompaniment. Bowie also appears in some superb concert footage near the start of the film performing Station to Station.

Based on a book about teenage whores ‘n junkies in 70’s Berlin, it has a stamp of veracity - they’re all very much ordinary kids and the main subject does a good job - def helps that she’s petite and pretty but her performance takes off quickly; wouldn’t surprise me to find they shot it in sequence as she shakes off her self consciousness. Not an easy watch but it catches real and is very reminiscent of London in the late seventies. 8/10.

sinbaadi

Tenet.
What a load of stylistic self-indulgent clap trap.
It's not hard to follow or keep up with, it's just nonsense.  Nolan has taken an idea and turned it into a world with rules, but then really struggled to make a coherent story fit within those rules.  At times it's laughable.  I burst out laughing when they unboarded the helicopter/container and the car chases are like a comedy sketch.
Once you have this concept that time "travel" is a thing and everything that has happened or will happen has already happened because it all exists simultaneously, then there really is very little suspense, things feel forgone even if they attempt to make it feel like they aren't.

Those clichéd "anonymous" characters where everyone immediately knows who they are going to turn out to be...... Really quite tired.

Very disappointed, I expected it to be a challenge, but it's just really not very good!

SteveRobinson

I've just watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things  on Netflix. 

It was like a strange dream and I'm not quite sure what it all means...

Philly_Q

SteveRobinson said:

I've just watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things  on Netflix. 

It was like a strange dream and I'm not quite sure what it all means...

I heard Kermode and Mayo review it last week.  Mark's a Charlie Kaufman fan but thinks he hasn't made a good film for quite a while.  Simon (for what it's worth) absolutely hated it.  I'm intrigued, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be in the right mood to watch it.

Danny1969

Eternal Beauty : Welsh film .... mentally ill women from a dysfunctional family battles through life. 

If you like Marvels films and stuff blowing up and fights and car chases you will hate this film. If you appreciate great writing and dialogue then this is a great film 

RobertW

Danny1969 said:

Eternal Beauty : Welsh film .... mentally ill women from a dysfunctional family battles through life. 

If you like Marvels films and stuff blowing up and fights and car chases you will hate this film. If you appreciate great writing and dialogue then this is a great film 

It is possible to like both of those types of films, they're not mutually exclusive.

adamino

Greyhound with Tom Hanks.Excellent.

ICBM

Grave Of The Fireflies

Kindly sent to me by dafuzz after it was mentioned before.

Japanese animated film from Studio Ghibli about two children struggling to survive at the end of WWII. It's deeply moving and sad - although it's the usual Ghibli style of animation it's not a children's film really, although older ones would probably be able to relate to it. It's not a complex story but it really brings home the reality of life for civilians in a war on that scale.

If it's not the best animated film ever from a technical point of view, it might be for its subject matter.

If I have any criticism it's that the English dubbed voices seem a little out of place occasionally - I'll have to check whether the DVD will let it run in Japanese with subtitles. (I've got a couple more Studio Ghibli films where they can, and the translations are sometimes quite different.)

10/10

EricTheWeary

Prevenge

British 2016 film on Play. I think described as a black comedy. I wouldn't say it was a chortle fest but a bit different, interesting. Alice Lowe writes, directs and stars but a strong supporting cast of British funny people. 

bobblehat

XMEN - Dark Phoenix - complete garbage and easily the worst of the X-Men Franchise.   

sweepy

Le Mans 66, lasted @15 mins, utter shite imho, absolutely terrible script and the racing scenes were like rush hour on the North Circular

EricTheWeary

Zodiac

BBC/iPlayer. 

I watched this in three chunks and struggled to keep interest quite a lot. 

The period detail is quite cool at times, some of the music used is great and it’s, as far as I know, a reasonable overview of events but resembles the actual case by being long and searching for structure. 

Haych

El Camino

Having just binge watched Breaking Bad (behind the times, I know) it seemed fitting to finish off with El Camino which continues the story of Jesse Pinkman. 

While Breaking Bad was really quite gripping I found the follow on film was rather more pedestrian and with a totally different mood to the series. That doesn’t make it bad, it’s just different in an unexpected way. I guess I assumed it would be much the same as BB but with Walt dead and that story ended I suppose it’s not that surprising the film has a different mood. 

The one thing I thought Breaking Bad was extremely good at was the cast of very well written and developed characters and Jesse seemed to be written as a guy with a good heart but a self inflicted bad start. Through the series’ I wanted to see him have an eventual happy ending so I’m glad El Camino picked up his story where the series ended. 

Like I say, much slower burning than I thought it would be but with plenty of flashbacks to events in Breaking Bad and even finalised some of the loose ends I’d missed. 

Final thoughts? Worth watching but could probably have been done in half hour less than the two hour run time it took to finish Jesse’s story. 

7/10

Philly_Q

Pacific Rim: Uprising

Wow, that was shit.

ICBM

Memento

I had never seen this when it came out, although I’d heard the basic premise. A man with no short-term memory relies on Polaroid photos with notes written on them and tattooing messages on himself to tell him what’s going on, and is trying to work out what happened in a violent incident which is the last thing he remembers...

It’s interesting and original (I think) in that it’s a set-up which hasn’t been used before as far as I know, and you do have to pay attention as the narrative essentially winds backwards in sections. It’s clever in the sense that it makes you think about the way we all remember things, but overall I found it a bit contrived in that the real story is simpler than it appears, and the basic premise of the end (or really, the beginning) became obvious about three-quarters of the way in, for me - although that didn’t spoil it.

8/10

(iPlayer)

Haych

Bill and Ted Face The Music

I love Bill and Ted, the original film is timeless (no pun intended) and never gets old no matter how many times I watch it. 

The latest film is very, very different. It wasn’t particularly good but it was still enjoyable, if that makes any sense. It wasn’t awful either and was a much better film than Bogus Journey. 

Alex Winter seems to do Bill Preston still quite well but I couldn’t help thinking that Keanu Reeves had forgotten how he played Ted in the original films. Brigette Lundy-Paine, as Ted’s daughter, Billy, seemed to do a better Ted than Keanu. I also thought there should have been more “Excellent!” air guitar moments. 

The plot was, well, not brilliant and went round too many houses to get to an anticlimactic ending. 

While we were entertained and it was enjoyable it didn’t really capture the essence of the first Bill and Ted film. 

I’m glad they made it, it was a decent attempt at revisiting the past while remaining in the present but I also wished that there was only one Bill and Ted film and that Bogus Journey and the latest film hadn’t been thought of. 

It seemed to me that it was only made because they could, and the fan base wanted it, than it was a natural follow on to the story. 

6.5/10

Sassafras

Watched 2 films today.
First up, Guardians of the Galaxy which was a huge fat turd of a film.
Couldn't make head nor tail of it. A wasted mega bucks budget.

Second one was Funeral in Berlin.
Bloody great. Brilliant dialogue, witty and good photography.
Highly recommended even if it is about 60 years old. Who says Brits can't make good films?