What films have you watched recently?

skullfunkerry

stickyfiddle said:

Dude, there's no way BF is worse than B&R... Though both are best thought of as 90's retellings of the original 60's show, and squarely aimed at kids after the frankly odd Returns (which is a great Tim Burton "gothic fairytale movie vehicle" but not a v good Batman). Viewed through that lens they're actually quite fun. 

I actually agree with that... I only gave B&R a higher rating because I found it less tedious than BF, and found it genuinely funny in places (albeit some of it unintentionally).

I agree about them being aimed at kids; I thought of them as live action comics, rather than films...

Offset

Haych said:

The Adam Project

Hmm, what do I think of this one?  It was alright, ok, not bad.

If you accept it for what it is, as sci-fi fantasy aimed at 11 year old lads then it ticks all the boxes.  Beyond that it has no real merit or substance.

As a family film it's alright, there's nothing I noticed that was offensive, frightening or overly violent and I'm surprised it had a 12 rating on Netflix.

Ryan Reynolds does his thing quite well and I thought the kid who plays his younger self did quite a good job of imitating Ryan Reynolds mannerisms to pull off being his younger self.

It was entertaining enough but made to a formula and it's not a movie you'll ever find yourself eager to see again when one of your friends asks you round for movie night.

Adequate but forgettable.  6/10

We watched this last night.  Mrs O thought it was dross.   I surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying it.  It was lightweight for sure, and aimed at teen boys but the plot bounced along at a pace, the acting was good, the sfx were great and it made me grin frequently.  Gets the thumbs-up for me - 7.5/10

Moominpapa

Rewatched Blade Runner 2049. I saw it first on initial release in a proper cinema with killer sound and big screen, and it was magnificent. It loses a little having to watch it on laptop with headphones, but I still think it is a very good film. I've never understood why people mock Ryan Gosling's acting - he is excellent in this, plays the character exactly right. The real stars, though, are the cinematography, lighting, and sound design. They are the virtuosi that Denis Villneuve orchestrates beautifully to create a compellingly awful world for the story to play out in.

Shrews

Almost Famous

I'd heard a lot about this film and it's one I'd wanted to watch for ages but well, I almost turned it off after 30 minutes. I never got into any of the characters, the story didn't ring true (one minute he's a kid at school, the next he's writing for Rolling Stone magazine - wtf?).

Hmm...

But by the end, I sort of got charmed by the story I suppose and actually began to like it

Hmm...

But the age gap was too big between a 15 year old kid and the bandmates, I mean they're late twenties/early thirties aren't they? Going to a pool party and jumping off a roof trying to look cool to kids half your age? And the guitarist falling in love with a girl who's maybe 16,17,18? If she's older then she wouldn't be hanging around with a kid of 15.

Hmm...

But, it did kinda make feel good at the end and I do want to watch it again.

Hmm...

But I didn't really give a stuff about that girl who went to Morocco, or about any of the band members, or the girl who was in Elf. In fact, the only one I really liked was the kids mum. 

5/10

Hmm...

7

Offset

Black Crab (2022, Netflix).  This was a film of two halves (well, 60:40) which I desperately wanted to like because of its premise, setting and lead actor (Noomi Rapace).  However, there are problems.  

Basic premise:  6 soldiers are tagged for a do-or-die mission to end a war.  They have to carry two mysterious packages (each the size of a shoe-box) from point A to point B.  The catch is they have to skate 100km across a frozen archipelago, by night,  in order to do so.  

Here's the good bits.  The scenery is stunning, the photography fabulous and the frozen landscape, complete with Northern Lights, is haunting.  The first half-ish of the film deals with the soldiers' traversal of the archipelago (with some preamble) and is taut, tense and keeps you hooked.

The distractions:  There are flashbacks throughout the film relating to Rapace and her daughter.  They are completely pointless, a total irrelevance and ultimately prove irritating.  Then there is the war itself.  We're never told who the protagonists are, why they are fighting, the extent of the war or, indeed, anything else about it.  Sometimes less is more and you don't need to know the detail because it detracts from the main theme of the film (I won't say what it is), but that isn't the case here.  All I was left wondering throughout the film is why the war was being fought and who was fighting it.  Ultimately it undermined the main premise of the movie to an annoying degree.

Now for the bad bits.  Once the skating escapade ends and the geographical objective is reached, the film goes rapidly downhill and descends into cliche.  All very predictable with a limp finale worthy of a sub-Die Hard US flick.  No satisfactory conclusion and just left me thinking 'meh'.

That said, I found that 60%+ enjoyable and well-made, despite the distractions.  The final third or so was very disappointing, but the director/writer had effectively hemmed themselves into this predictable ending through what came before.

So... 6.5/10.

boogieman

Moominpapa said:

I've never understood why people mock Ryan Gosling's acting - he is excellent in this, plays the character exactly right. 

Trouble is, Ryan Gosling plays the emotionless android in every film I’ve seen him in. He might be perfect for this film but I don’t understand how he gets other leading parts when he’s got such a limited range of expressions and general lack of talent. 

It’s a good film, though a little too dragged out in places for my taste. I do agree about the cinematography, it’s stunning. 

VimFuego

inspired by my 21 yr old niece who is president of her uni's dodgeball soc, Dodgeball - A Underdogs Story. When she mentioned yesterday her dodgeball soc I started quoting lines from it, she looked at me like I was talking in tongues, so when I explained they were from the film she said "oh, I don't really like those old films". So that's her out of my will then.

Back to the film, still great. 

Offset

Re-watched Underwater (2020) for the third time last night.  Still one of my favourite recent sci-fi movies and one of the best H.P. Lovecraft homages out there.  8.5/10.

fretmeister

Offset said:

Re-watched Underwater (2020) for the third time last night.  Still one of my favourite recent sci-fi movies and one of the best H.P. Lovecraft homages out there.  8.5/10.

I might give that a go. Whatserface being in it put me off a bit after being forced to watch all the Twilights with my daughters.

Offset

fretmeister said:

Offset said:

Re-watched Underwater (2020) for the third time last night.  Still one of my favourite recent sci-fi movies and one of the best H.P. Lovecraft homages out there.  8.5/10.

I might give that a go. Whatserface being in it put me off a bit after being forced to watch all the Twilights with my daughters.

That's parental abuse - shame on them!

boogieman

The King. On Netflix. 
A reworking of Shakespeare’s Henry V, complete with various historical liberty-taking inaccurate bits (Falstaff as leader of the troops at Agincourt for one). For all that it’s still a decent film. Henry is portrayed as a brooding teenager, totally uninterested in succeeding his father, who gets manoeuvred into becoming a great monarch when he has no choice. It’s all well done, the battle scenes in particular are brutal and pretty grim. Robert Pattinson is great as the completely bonkers Dauphin, although his cod French accent is a touch silly… I expected him to come out with “go away silly English person, your father is a hamster and your mother smells of blueberries”. 

Overall, I liked it. Solid 7/10. 

fretmeister

Matrix Resurrections.

Oh dear.

I so wanted this to be good. I loved the original trilogy - even the third one.
It was awful. I didn't mind the central idea of a false memory cover story, but it was just so badly done.

Even the nostalgia scenes were awful. Didn't raise a chuckle, just a cringe.

Not been this disappointed by a film since Prometheus.

1/10.

stickyfiddle

fretmeister said:

Matrix Resurrections.

Oh dear.

Yep. I was quite excited by the trailers. I watched it a couple of weeks ago, but apparently it's still a Matrix sequel and all that previously applied to that descriptor still does. 

boogieman

Fall of the House of Usher, another old horror on Talking Pictures. Based on an Edar Allen Poe story, with Vincent Price starring and Roger Corman directing. Unfortunately neither of them can rescue this because although it’s fairly atmospheric, ultimately hardly anything happens. There’s also some glaring continuity errors, the hero’s boots regularly appearing and disappearing between scenes. (I only noticed because Vincent Price makes a big deal of the guy not wearing them because his hearing is hugely sensitive). 

I’m sure I must’ve seen this in the past because I love Vincent Price films, but I didn’t remember it. Maybe the fact it’s pretty dire is the reason why? 

LastMantra

Offset said:

Haych said:

The Adam Project

Hmm, what do I think of this one?  It was alright, ok, not bad.

If you accept it for what it is, as sci-fi fantasy aimed at 11 year old lads then it ticks all the boxes.  Beyond that it has no real merit or substance.

As a family film it's alright, there's nothing I noticed that was offensive, frightening or overly violent and I'm surprised it had a 12 rating on Netflix.

Ryan Reynolds does his thing quite well and I thought the kid who plays his younger self did quite a good job of imitating Ryan Reynolds mannerisms to pull off being his younger self.

It was entertaining enough but made to a formula and it's not a movie you'll ever find yourself eager to see again when one of your friends asks you round for movie night.

Adequate but forgettable.  6/10

We watched this last night.  Mrs O thought it was dross.   I surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying it.  It was lightweight for sure, and aimed at teen boys but the plot bounced along at a pace, the acting was good, the sfx were great and it made me grin frequently.  Gets the thumbs-up for me - 7.5/10

I watched it last week and I'd pretty much forgotten I'd even seen it.

Brio

Moonfall. Enjoyable tosh by R Emmerich.
God he hates planet Earth doesn't he?

The world stands on the brink of annihilation when a mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling toward a collision course with Earth. With only weeks before impact, NASA executive Jocinda "Jo" Fowler teams up with a man from her past and a conspiracy theorist for an impossible mission into space to save humanity.

My advice: a couple beers first and turn off the brain and wallow in spectacle not plot details or physics.

LastMantra

Shrews said:

Almost Famous

I'd heard a lot about this film and it's one I'd wanted to watch for ages but well, I almost turned it off after 30 minutes. I never got into any of the characters, the story didn't ring true (one minute he's a kid at school, the next he's writing for Rolling Stone magazine - wtf?).

Hmm...

But by the end, I sort of got charmed by the story I suppose and actually began to like it

Hmm...

But the age gap was too big between a 15 year old kid and the bandmates, I mean they're late twenties/early thirties aren't they? Going to a pool party and jumping off a roof trying to look cool to kids half your age? And the guitarist falling in love with a girl who's maybe 16,17,18? If she's older then she wouldn't be hanging around with a kid of 15.

Hmm...

But, it did kinda make feel good at the end and I do want to watch it again.

Hmm...

But I didn't really give a stuff about that girl who went to Morocco, or about any of the band members, or the girl who was in Elf. In fact, the only one I really liked was the kids mum. 

5/10

Hmm...

7

I gave up half way through. Just thought it was wishy-washy weakness. 

VimFuego

Underwater. It was OK, had a nice Alien feel to it. Some bits irked, the whole underwater station seemed waaaaaay too big and complex to my mind, and you never get the sense they were at the bottom of the ocean (I recall seeing a film/episode of something a few years back set in a Russian deep water sea floor drilling station that had been abandoned and it had a much better feel, it was all dark concrete boxes/domes in the dark, gave a really claustrophobic feeling) but it was entertaining enough, and seeing Kirsten Stewart running around in her under crackers is always a plus.

Haych

Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King

A Netflix documentary about Gerry Cotten who was the apparent founder of Canadian crypto currency exchange Quadriga CX and who died under odd circumstances when the company failed in about 2018 after the value of BitCoin plummeted.

Quite a revealing insight into the murky world of crypto currency, although it came to no solid conclusions.

I enjoyed it and would recommend watching if this sort of thing interests you.  It seemed to end quite abruptly and, like I say, with no real answers offered.

EricTheWeary

Murder on the Orient Express.

Disney +

The relatively recent one. I found the CGI backdrops a bit distracting, the film was in danger of turning into The Polar Express. Any film based on an Agatha Christie story is going to be a bit stylised and a bit silly as well and this was all that. But a lot of nice touches and an enjoyable romp. Probably needs to be watched Sunday teatime.