Saturday, July 25, 2020

Weekend Open Thread


17 comments:

  1. The Kissing Booth 2:

    second instalment in the KBCU (Kissing Booth Cinematic Universe), in which worlds collide, the universe is in peril and lives are destroyed. will Elle be able to gather all the Kissing Boothy and save everyone. the search for hot guys to be in the booth is endless. look, this is not Citizen Kane, this is a sequel to a weird rom-com, and it is just as weirdly written as the first one. i mean, none of the love relationship make sense. and all the weirdness is why it's worth a watch. plus, you get Joey King having fun for 2 hours (2 F***ING HOURS). it's a bit long, but if you had just a little fun with the 1st one, go for it.

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    1. Oh, and it's actually not about kissing booth anymore, but about Dance Dance Revolution. So... yeah.

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    2. I skipped the first one after reading comments here about it. But yesterday I found out that my kids had watched it at a friends house, and they want to watch the 2nd with me. I'm not sure how to feel about delving into this particular cinematic universe. My counter offer was that we watch all the IP Man movies instead. We'll see what ends up happening.

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    3. I mean, it's not required to watch the first one. It's still just a basic rom-com. But as any sequel go, the first one establish who's who

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  2. After a full week of films last week (I did a late post here), finding the focus this week has not been easy. After winding down a few days from the tax season and a week of dog sitting, I had to start training for a job. My movie viewing will come tomorrow night at the Mahoning Drive-in. Forbidden Planet and House on Haunted Hill (I have never seen that) are on the schedule. I am really looking forward to seeing Forbidden Planet on the big screen. I would be there tonight if not for keeping up with the work training. Maybe I can fit in a watch tonight from the DVR, which I have added to a few times during the week.

    A major activity this week relating to movies is compiling a list of physical media purchases I would like to make. I have held off on any major expenditures in the uncertainty of this period, but I am finding enough funds to justify a couple of splurges for the rest of the year.

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  3. I don't have much to talk about in the way of stuff I've seen lately. I was happy to hear though among all the news of movies being delayed that Bill & Ted Face the Music would be getting a VOD release. As someone who works for a theater chain managing a theater, I'm perfectly ok seeing more delays and VOD releases because I absolutely don't think it's safe to open theaters any time soon.

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  4. I don’t know why, but I’ve still got it in my head to try some of these foreign action movies are deeply buried on the streaming sites.

    THE GREAT MAGICIAN (2011) Tony Leung plays a stage magician who secretly can do real magic, which he uses to take on an evil warlord. More of a costume drama with fantasy elements than full-on action. The best thing about the movie is the production design and costumes, as the whole thing is just amazing to look at. There’s not much movie beyond that, but I didn’t hate it.

    THE WITCH PART 1: THE SUBVERSION (2018) You know the story: Young girl with special powers, shadowy government agency after her, and so on. It’s Carrie/X-Men/Hanna all over again. But that doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had. The fight choreography does a great job of combining martial arts with telekinesis. The movie’s down time, with our young heroine just wanting a normal life, is maybe stretched a little thin. A subplot about a TV singing contest (shades of Eurovision) could have cut pretty easily.

    THUGS OF HINDOSTAN (2018) The filmmakers swear this movie was not inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean, then you watch it and it’s totally Pirates. A lone ship full of quirky characters fights for freedom against the British East India Company (just like POTC). There’s huge production design and massive battles, yet everything's lifted from other, similar movies. It’s fun enough, but feels like it doesn’t have anything of its own to say.

    In other news, Netflix sent me BRIGHTBURN in the little red envelope, but the disc was scratched and wouldn’t play. Next they sent me AD ASTRA, but the disc was scratched and wouldn’t play. A pattern begins to emerge.

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    1. I still have a physical media subscription with Netflix. (I dropped the streaming service a couple of years ago.) In the past few months I received two discs that were broken after not receiving any problem discs for a long time. I am thinking that a decreased mail volume during this Covid-19 period volume is allowing the discs to move around more during transit.

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    2. Yes, @Kunider, they still do discs. From what I gather, their library for the disc service is quite a bit bigger (10x? 20x?) than what's available for streaming. It's unfortunate that this part of Netflix was never available in Canada.

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    3. Though the selection available is not as good as it was a decade ago, the Netflix rental service still offers a good range of movies. I used if for Junesploitation and am looking at some horror titles for October. I should be using the service more than I currently do.

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    4. I recently cancelled by disk version of Netflix that I had for over 10 years. I used to make the argument that it was the place to find somewhat obscure films that you weren't quite ready to shell out the money to buy. However, my "saved" list (movies they recognize don't have) grew to three times that of my queue. This was not the case as little as 4-5 years ago. It is obvious that they aren't buying older films on disk anymore.

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  5. I did get around to a couple of films tonight. The first one was the featured film on Svengoolie: The Land Unknown from 1957. Even for a 1950s Universal drive-in movie this looks cheap; the T-rex design is especially laughable. The fog machine was in heavy use to cover up the paltry sets. Still, it is not a film without entertainment value. The story is an interesting twist on The Lost World type of prehistoric creature narratives.

    The second watch was THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, a Shaw Brothers production from 1977 mixing story elements from King Kong, Tarzan, and Godzilla. It is on Amazon Prime. Everything about the film is disjointed in a whiplash inducing way. I was laughing all the way through it, though. If you like goofy B-movies, The Mighty Peking Man should not disappoint. It is one of the films that was being shown at the drive-in, so I feel like I did not completely miss out tonight.

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  6. R.I.P. JOHN SAXON :'(. A true Junesploitation! legend and a fine actor in his own right. Saxon may be gone, but his movie legacy ("Tenebre," "Nightmare on Elm Street," etc.) will live forever. :-)

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    1. Yet another link to genre cinema's past gone. The obituaries will mainly mention A Nightmare on Elm Street and Enter the Dragon, but the FThisMovie! community knows he did much more. Outside of those films, I immediately think of (yes!) Tenebre and Hands of Steel.

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  7. There is another notable actor death being reported today, Olivia de Haviland. She was 104 years old and the last living cast member of Gone With The Wind. She had a great career in Golden Age Hollywood and became notable as well for challenging the studio system. With her death and that of Kirk Douglas, I am not sure if any big name stars from the studio are left.

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    1. Brutal weekend for entertainers. :-( Besides Saxon and de Havilland the co-founder of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green, has also passed away. And who can forget TV's Regis Philbin. :'(

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