Saturday, January 26, 2019

Weekend Open Thread

It's a livin' thing.

17 comments:

  1. Haven't been watching a lot of movies these past few weeks, since I got sucked into watching Battlestar Galactica (the 2000's one) for the third time through. Finished it a few days ago. Love that show.

    So I finally caught up with Upgrade, since it never got a theatrical release in Finland and only now showed up on VOD. Loved the lo-fi scifi aesthetic, the action was fun and the story enjoyable. Definitely one of last year's best.

    Also went and saw Glass yesterday. IMDb says the movie's budget was 20 million and I'm guessing at least half of that went to the three lead actors, because the movie takes place primarily in one location and looks cheap. The twists and turns make no god damn sense and I left the theater scratching my head. Maybe I'll come back to it some day but I was, not even disappointed since I didn't expect much, but underwhelmed.

    Oh, and I got through Mamma Mia!, but not in one sitting. Just reinforced my stance that I'm not a musicals kind of guy (though I will still keep trying from time to time).

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    1. I liked Battlestsr Galactica enough, but i never understood the hype. It always felt so random to me. But i'm a fan of Stargate, so what do i know 😀

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    2. I kinda love BSG for going for broke on a convoluted and messy mythology, especially towards the end of the series. Plus I really like the characters. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan) is one of my favorite TV characters ever.

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  2. Finally decided to pull the trigger and bought Judgment Night on blu-ray. First thing people said when i talked about the movie was 'oooh, great soundtrack'. Which is very true, but the movie is simply great. The perfect good guy/bad guy combination.

    The blu-ray is underwhelming. Picture Quality is just okay, and there's no extras

    I think this movie deserve a podcast

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  3. I rewatched DIe Hard and Die Hard 2 and now all I can think about is pre-9/11 airport security. John has a gun in the opening scene of the first and the old lady has a taser in the second. Was security really that lax?

    Also, just watched Eighth Grade. It was a great movie and one of the most painful watching experiences of recent memory. I audibly groaned and looked away from the screen for a good chunk of it because it does such a fantastic job of capturing adolescent awkwardness, insecurity, and loneliness. Well done, Burnham.

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    1. Not sure about aurooai security, but when I was a kid, you only needed a driver's license to cross from Canada to the US, as a tourist. I remember once, we wanted to go view the Niagara Falls from the American side, and they let us through even though my aunt had forgotten her ID entirely.

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    2. In case that wasn't clear, I meant crossing the border by land.

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    3. Aaaaahhh, those were the days. Reminds me when I took a tour of the FBI in 96' and it ended with an agent shooting semi-automatic weapons for the tour group. (No joke.)

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  4. I only finished a couple of flms during the week.

    THE REVOLT OF THE SLAVES (1960) – This is a good example of the peplum genre, standing out on several levels and comparing favorably to the Hollywood epics of the period. The plot deals more with Christian persecution than slaves, though. Despite the pious scenes slowing the film down, REVOLT moves faster than most peplum I have watched.

    THE VAMPIRE’S NIGHT ORGY (1974) – Mediocre Spanish horror that has some of the most inappropriate music I have encountered for a long time. The indifferent dubbing does not help, either. I am curious if the Spanish version sounds better. The one bright spot was the presence of Helga Line, a familiar face from many Eurohorror features over the years.

    I picked up a 4-movie DVD collection on the cheap with Child's Play, Pumpkinhead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Dolls. The fullscreen presentation of the first two is disappointing, but I am not complaining with each less than $2. Dolls, on the other hand, is a lovely widescreen version. After work today I stopped at the used goods store and picked up a few DVDs, including the documentary Into Great Silence and the 1973 film Emperor of the North.

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  5. So far this weekend I’ve watched How to Train Your Dragon 2 & Hacksaw Ridge. Both surprisingly good. HTTYD2 does a really good handling mature themes & the animation is above & beyond. You’ve seen Hacksaw Ridge a couple times but this is a interesting angle & V. Vaughn plays the Sarge, so go watch it already.

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  6. Hoping we get an F This Movie Fest announcement soon so I can get the time off work.

    Work has still been fairly busy for me since the theater I manage mostly shows art house kinda stuff and it's awards season.

    I picked up the 50 Years of Planet of the Apes box set because I love 8 out of the 9 movies in it. Haven't started watching through it yet though.

    I've also been slowly ripping all my blu-rays onto my PC (and transcoding them so the file size is manageable). I like having a physical collection but it's handy to be able to stream stuff when I'm out of town visiting family.

    Hopefully I can get some more actual movie watching in soon.

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    1. Don't keep us in suspense... which one don't you like? OK, just kidding.

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  7. I saw Serenity. Christ on toast that was something else.

    It contrasted nicely with The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, though. Because Standoff is a movie that just does the thing. It is a mystery/thriller, and it delivers that. There is no other level or late movie genre shift. It does its thing. (Not to say that there aren't twists, but they don't break the premise.) Serenity starts as this sun-bleached noir, but then it shifts into something much crazier and far less interesting than if it had just been a noir set on a tropical island.

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  8. I recently saw Bohemian Rhapsody, and I am really surprised by all of the award season attention it’s gotten this year. It is a fairly mediocre rock biopic with an amazing soundtrack loaded with songs that everyone loves.
    BR and it’s reception raise two interesting debatable topics. To me, Malek’s Mercury raises the debate between performance versus imitation. Should a great imitation be considered a great performance? And the second would be that apparently this is essentially Bryan Singer’s film. As more details and accusations emerge painting him as an alleged predatory monster, should this change how his work is viewed?
    The finale is set to Queen’s legendary performance at Live Aid. For some reason they chose to raise the stakes with false information and manipulation of the timeline, which to me seems wrong when you are making a biopic. They attempted to faithfully recreate much of the performance in a near shot-for-shot style right down to the Pepsi cups on the piano. This reminded me of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho “experiment/exercise”, in that it was about as successful and made me yearn for the real deal which is available on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, it is a must. It is the greatest frontman at his absolute peak with a completely engaged massive crowd.
    BR made me think of Straight Outta Compton in that it was always clear which of the principles were in control of the narrative. I would have loved to see Sacha Baron Cohen’s non-PG and likely more accurate portrayal of Mercury. One of the reasons he left the project was that at the time the band envisioned a film in which Mercury died in the middle and the second half was the band carrying on without him?!??? Remember in Ray, when Ray Charles dies right in the middle of the movie? Me neither.

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  9. Finally got around to watching GAME NIGHT, which was a lot of fun while being completely ridiculous. I couldn't help thinking the filmmakers watched the Every Frame a Painting video on Edgar Wright and visual comedy, but if they did, that's a good thing. I also watched THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX for the first time. Loved it visually, but felt like the story was a bit slight. Still need to see ISLE OF DOGS. Then there's GLASS, and a day later I'm still not sure overall how I felt about it. Shyamalan is an incredibly talented filmmaker, but not a particularly great writer, and there are some significant story choices he makes that just don't work for me (including a lack of a clear protagonist, and the decision to keep most of the characters isolated from each other for most of the film). I admire the achievement of pulling off a stealth trilogy and feeling like it mostly worked, and I'm glad he's experiencing a comeback, but I wish I'd liked GLASS more, since I loved UNBREAKABLE and enjoyed SPLIT, for the most part.

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  10. Every movie buff knows about the book Hitchcock/Truffaut. Well, now there's a documentary about the meeting of the 2 great directors. And it's freely available on youtube for a short while. Only 80 minutes. No reasons to skip it

    https://youtu.be/Z8tAqMp2qGo

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