The New Cinema and Movie Thread

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

I first watched Galaxy Quest when I was probably like...six or seven years old? My mom then made me re-watch it probably a hundred more times...and then a whole bunch of random bits and pieces of Star Trek: TNG and Voyager over the succeeding decade. Like with Holy Grail, you can consider it a form of childhood bias - the only difference between them (plus a few others like The Fellowship of the Ring, Beauty and the Beast...) and most of the other stuff that she made me re-watch a million times (e.g. the Indiana Jones films, the original Star Wars trilogy, A Christmas Story, The Goonies, and a pile of other random crap) is that re-visiting them as an adult still yields a "ok actually this is really good" reaction from me, hence why it and other exceptions rate higher than the rest. You can probably thank the cast and the characters they played for that (particularly, I'd say, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver).

I see, and that makes sense. Alan Rickman is great in everything, he's the primary reason I watched the Harry Potter films and actually liked them - for the most part, at least. Not very fond of Order of the Phoenix or the way the finale drags itself out, but I think we've been over that before. We never really rewatched films outside of me wanting to see them and just putting in the tape when I was six*. Which was, by far and large, the original Star Wars trilogy, I must have watched the films over a hundred times. I'm pretty sure my parents are completely sick of the films.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

I get why other people don't like it, and that's okay. There are certain thematic, character, and setting elements that make it work for me where pretty much no other Pixar film does. Literally every other Pixar film has some kind of fatal flaw in at least one of those areas that makes it impossible for me to get into them nearly as much as I did WALL-E, but they're probably all things that literally nobody else cares about. I've always been a pretty big Pixar hater outside of WALL-E, even back when practically everyone insisted they were chef's kiss (pre-2010).

Out of the Pixar films I've watched, I liked A Bug's Life, but that came out at a time where I simply had an appreciation for the technical leap in between Toy Story and A Bug's Life, I'm unsure how the film would hold up nowadays and I don't feel like rewatching it just to check. Finding Nemo was okay insofar as Dory is a character that is a perfect match for a friend of mine. When the film came out she used an image of Dory as avatar and started calling herself Dory in real life.

WALL-E on the other hand is good fun, has really nice moments between WALL-E and EVE, and now that I think of it, it dawns on me that the interactions between Hibiki and Uta in Bubble are perhaps a little similar to WALL-E and EVE. Huh. Guess rewatching WALL-E is up at some point.

1 hour ago, Hurlshort said:

As much as Bart derides my taste in movies,

Can't deride something that's not there. Kidding. It's not your taste, actually, just your -  admittedly enviable - ability to enjoy apparently everything because it's just a movie**.

 

*We had - still have, in a way, just in the basement - this massive film library at home. Hundreds upon hundreds of tapes, then DVDs, then Blu Rays, and at best they got used once directly after buying them, and only when they were films we wanted to watch but didn't go to the cinema for.

**Infuriating when it happens in online games. Yes, perhaps this is just a game, but that does not give you the right to waste my time, filthy casual.

[Amentep]

6 minutes ago, majestic said:

WALL-E on the other hand is good fun, has really nice moments between WALL-E and EVE, and now that I think of it, it dawns on me that the interactions between Hibiki and Uta in Bubble are perhaps a little similar to WALL-E and EVE. Huh. Guess rewatching WALL-E is up at some point.

WALL-E bugged me seriously. I think I've mentioned this before...

How does the human ship keep creating waste productsl when they been dumping their waste in space? How are they replenishing the stuff they're wasting? Where's tge extra material coming from? Is Soylent Green people?

For the happy end, people who live in machines that carry them places and are highly overweight suddenly stand up under earth gravity - How? Surely even if the ship has an artificial gravity, their muscles would be atrophied to the point they couldn't stand on their own because they used machines to travel?

What's weird, is I could probably forgive that in other films, but it really threw me out of Wall-E.

[Lexx]

5 hours ago, Keyrock said:

While I love The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I still think A Fistful of Dollars is the best movie in the trilogy, and not just because it's a ripoff homage to one of my favorite movies ever, Yojimbo.

Might as well put Bruce Willis' Last Man Standing on the pile too. It's pretty much the same movie as well.

[Hurlshort]

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Hey, I don't deride your tastes in movies. Well, not much...publicly, anyways, . I'm about to start deriding your recent usage of those lousy art style emojis if you don't stop with that nonsense, though. Who in their right freaking mind would use that crap over the legacy emoticons? Some of us have eyes, man!

Well, that's the nice thing about Galaxy Quest: it has a good emotional core driven by its characters, strong performances from its cast in their respective roles, some clever but also cliched humor played tongue-in-cheek with regards to its nature as a semi-parody...and some sci-fi silliness and action to top it all off. What more could you ask for from a film of this type?

  Reveal hidden contents

Seriously, who the hell wants to look at...

...instead of your classic...

?

Tasteless psychopaths, that's who.

 

I was actually surprised when I typed in : - ) that it popped up with the new ugly winker. But I was on my phone and in a hurry, and scrolling way down through the emojis is a hassle.  

See, that one typed in fine with : p

Whoa, I just noticed this one   

[Bartimaeus]

7 hours ago, Amentep said:

WALL-E bugged me seriously. I think I've mentioned this before...

What's weird, is I could probably forgive that in other films, but it really threw me out of Wall-E.

They're thematic shortcuts meant to get across an idea quickly (and probably to less critical children) even if it doesn't make much sense in the real world. Humans continue to litter everywhere they go to show that their nature hadn't fundamentally changed even if their environment is carefully managed to be squeaky plastic clean (i.e. they're still the same humans that trashed the Earth even hundreds of years later or whatever the time-frame is); the humans finally stand up at the end as a symbol of hope in trying to make a change, as wanting to make a change, as still being capable of making a change and righting the ship that is Earth if they really try. I would think much more offensive is the fact that clearly so few humans were afforded the opportunity to get off Earth in the first place, so where is all the evidence of incredible social upheaval, mass violence, and the survivors slowly asphyxiating in their own burnt out husk of an atmosphere? Where are all the hills of corpses, and why aren't the bones being slowly compacted into cubes by WALL-E? Well...it's probably for much the same reason: it's a lot easier and less problematic to skip over that kind of level of detail so we can get back to the silly robot love story, .

I would say it seems likely that the film just didn't appeal to you enough on other levels to make it so you're not reacting hypercritically to these over-simplified symbolic devices, . If this were a more serious film (or if I didn't otherwise like it myself), I would agree that it's insufficient...but I mean, c'mon, it's crappy Pixar who makes movies about talking toys and fish - that we got any kind of attempt at a real world setting is kind of a miracle in my eyes. I would say that a more serious film should show the humans as being incapable of making any kind of change on a long-term (multi-generational) basis, and playing in with the themes, should also probably have our characters end up in the garbage themselves with all of their effort ultimately being for naught...but um, that would be a pretty different film aimed at a different kind of audience.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[bugarup]

14 hours ago, Malcador said:

Always found it interesting how they never seemed to show For a Few Dollars More on TV as near as often as the other two. As if they wanted to cover it up or something.

That's because it's the bestest of the three and they treat it like a dessert, i.e. in limited doses. 

[Amentep]

7 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

They're thematic shortcuts meant to get across an idea quickly (and probably to less critical children) even if it doesn't make much sense in the real world.

My problem isn't that it doesn't make sense in the real world, but that it violates the premise of the movie itself (something which even less critical children should be able to pick-up on).  Humanity leaves Earth in starships because they've polluted Earth.  Wall-E is left behind to take care of the waste, etc.

But once we get to the starships, we find that they have the technology to waste resources almost infinitely in an environment many times smaller than that of Earth.  Which means they have some form of replication technology (or else it makes even less sense, since these are generational ships).  So why did they blast themselves off into space instead of...blasting the trash itself off into space? There's no reason for the piles of trash to exist on Earth if they have replicator technology AND spaceships.

Well the reason is that in that case you wouldn't have the environmental themes of the film, but those themes are completely undercut by having humanity never actually learn the lesson of conservation anyhow, since they're still wastrels on the ship - wastrels, in fact, until they crash on earth and then, inexplicably and with no motivation, break free of the shackles of technology and embrace nature (which is, I'm sure, what they want you to take away from the film, but its not an earned takeaway). 

I have the same basic problem with UP!  It also sets up a premise that it violates in the end of the film.  UP! establishes in the opening the fragility of humans and the inescapable effects of aging...then spends the rest of the film having Carl bounce around like a Looney Toons character without suffering any real harm.  And the thing is, that both films could have used their established concepts and still had their adventure finales had they better crafted the sequences.  Wall-E finds the ship, but finds a humanity that, while initially the wastrels that left Earth have learned conservation (and thus earned their regaining the planet) or have Carl still be adventurous but wary of what age has wrought on him and his own frailty.  But neither film pays off its set-up, and therefore both violate 'Chekov's gun', IMO.  I think instinctively, most people recognize this but then dismiss the problem under "well its just a kid's film", but I think as a kid I would have still been bugged by it (then again, we saw films as the theater as a kid so infrequently, I had a lot of time to think about them, which maybe isn't the case now for kids who saw these films and had tonnes of channels and DVDs to pick from as well as cinema releases)

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

My problem isn't that it doesn't make sense in the real world, but that it violates the premise of the movie itself (something which even less critical children should be able to pick-up on).  Humanity leaves Earth in starships because they've polluted Earth.  Wall-E is left behind to take care of the waste, etc.

But once we get to the starships, we find that they have the technology to waste resources almost infinitely in an environment many times smaller than that of Earth.  Which means they have some form of replication technology (or else it makes even less sense, since these are generational ships).  So why did they blast themselves off into space instead of...blasting the trash itself off into space? There's no reason for the piles of trash to exist on Earth if they have replicator technology AND spaceships.

Well the reason is that in that case you wouldn't have the environmental themes of the film, but those themes are completely undercut by having humanity never actually learn the lesson of conservation anyhow, since they're still wastrels on the ship - wastrels, in fact, until they crash on earth and then, inexplicably and with no motivation, break free of the shackles of technology and embrace nature (which is, I'm sure, what they want you to take away from the film, but its not an earned takeaway). 

I have the same basic problem with UP!  It also sets up a premise that it violates in the end of the film.  UP! establishes in the opening the fragility of humans and the inescapable effects of aging...then spends the rest of the film having Carl bounce around like a Looney Toons character without suffering any real harm.  And the thing is, that both films could have used their established concepts and still had their adventure finales had they better crafted the sequences.  Wall-E finds the ship, but finds a humanity that, while initially the wastrels that left Earth have learned conservation (and thus earned their regaining the planet) or have Carl still be adventurous but wary of what age has wrought on him and his own frailty.  But neither film pays off its set-up, and therefore both violate 'Chekov's gun', IMO.  I think instinctively, most people recognize this but then dismiss the problem under "well its just a kid's film", but I think as a kid I would have still been bugged by it (then again, we saw films as the theater as a kid so infrequently, I had a lot of time to think about them, which maybe isn't the case now for kids who saw these films and had tonnes of channels and DVDs to pick from as well as cinema releases)

Everything you say about WALL-E makes perfect sense and I'd be hard-pressed to argue, and yet it doesn't really feel it makes much difference to me - I get what it was going for even if the way it got there didn't work. The benefit of being more pre-occupied with the characters and it thus not feeling like an overt issue, I guess. Maybe I'm being too kind in giving a film with such an obvious construction issue too high of a rating...but then again, I've always said I try to rate films 75% subjectively and 25% objectively, and it's the only Pixar film I particularly like in the first place (out of the...fourteen I've seen - A Bug's Life would be next but significantly farther down, I guess).

Up, ironically, was a film that started out on a high note that then spent its entire run-time steadily descending, so you'll see no disagreement from me there.

16 hours ago, majestic said:

Out of the Pixar films I've watched, I liked A Bug's Life, but that came out at a time where I simply had an appreciation for the technical leap in between Toy Story and A Bug's Life, I'm unsure how the film would hold up nowadays and I don't feel like rewatching it just to check. Finding Nemo was okay insofar as Dory is a character that is a perfect match for a friend of mine. When the film came out she used an image of Dory as avatar and started calling herself Dory in real life.

Finding Nemo is one I haven't seen since I was like ten, so it's not included in the fourteen that I've seen...particularly because I hated it then, which is why I haven't seen it since. I've been forced to re-watch The Lion King at the end of the proverbial blade by my nieces (another that I disliked as a kid and didn't ever want to re-visit), so it's possible I'll eventually find myself similarly endangered there as well, .

[Amentep]

Sometimes you just like films regardless.  I've liked worse films than Wall-E, to be fair.  I love Disney's THE BLACK HOLE but even as a kid I knew the end was stupid (that people couldn't walk in a decompressed section of a spaceship without environment suits nor could you actually survive a trip through the Black Hole).  But I can forgive the lack of space suits (they had them, but they weren't properly vented, so the actors vision was obscured and it was ditched for safety reasons, something I only found out about years later) and accept that they wanted a 2001 style metaphysical end even if, really, it doesn't work.

I think part of my knee jerk reaction for Wall-E and UP! is they got so much universal praise when they came out, I was mind-boggled that no one seemed to be seeing the major flaws I saw in both.

 

[Raithe]

The Black Hole is just a glorious film regardless.

It's the one you never expected to see out of Disney in the 80's.

The sheer ballz of the visuals and model design of the ship.

Plus, I shall always be amused that WEG Star Wars RPG actually slipped in a Maximillian droid that had fallen through some weird spatial black hole connection and ended up in a dodgy port in one of their official adventures..

[Amentep]

I love the 'haunted house in space' stuff in THE BLACK HOLE and the ship and robot designs are awesome.  The Cygnus is, far and away, still my favorite starship design.  

But I recognize the end is...a mess.  I still watch the film every couple of years though.  And John Barry's score for the film is really good.  And its a solid cast, and...the end is a mess.

[Raithe]

The Virtuoso.

A strange and kind of compelling feel.  Slow-paced unfolding of a professional assassin sent to a sleepy town to take out a hitman with only a partial clue to the target's identity.

Anson Mount, Anthony Hopkins as his mentor, and the mixed bag of Abbie Cornish, David Morse, Richard Brake, and Eddie Marsan as various characters at the local diner...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

5 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I've been forced to re-watch The Lion King at the end of the proverbial blade by my nieces (another that I disliked as a kid and didn't ever want to re-visit), so it's possible I'll eventually find myself similarly endangered there as well, .

I imagine your nieces holding you hostage, forcing you to watch movies you despise or else.

Anyways I guess I'm lucky enough to not remember Wall-E or UP or any Pixar film enough to love them or hate them. When I think about movies I watched when I was younger that had a lasting effect on me I've got to say Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is what comes to mind. I haven't seen it in a while but I think it's perhaps the only vampire romance, besides Only Lovers Left Alive, that I feel really works.

Oh, now that I'm thinking about it Lost Highway confused the **** out of my teenage self when I saw in on IFC. After it marinated for a while I genuinely think that it is one of the best films ever made.

[Bartimaeus]

Persepolis (2007). The local movie club is doing a watch of it, and it's been sitting in my bookmarks for years and years. Five minutes in: "...wait, this is Only Yesterday, only it's during the Iranian Revolution when everything's going straight to hell. But the thing is, I love Only Yesterday..."

It didn't end up being quite Only Yesterday, but I enjoyed it anyways. Outside the occasional spot of animation floatiness for more background-y stuff, I thought the visual style was quite nice as well.

Spoiler

A quote from the film: "Talk about a crappy movie: all the Japanese seem to do is hack each other up with samurai swords and run away from gruesome monsters."

 

31 minutes ago, KP From Another World said:

I imagine your nieces holding you hostage, forcing you to watch movies you despise or else.

No, that's correct.

31 minutes ago, KP From Another World said:

another David Lynch film

Edited August 22, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Amentep]

I disliked Lion King when i saw it.  Thankfully my niece didn't make me watch it billions of times.

I still haven't seen Lost Highway.  My Lynch viewing has some gaps in it that I'll correct eventually (or die trying).

[Hurlshort]

With Wall-E, I assume we don't see the robots purge 99.9% of the human race as the 0.1% flees into space.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

17 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

No, that's correct.

So the blade ain't so proverbial? My suspicion has proved correct.

17 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

For me that was my first David Lynch film, THE David Lynch film if you will. I had never seen anything like it before, having only been exposed to trashy horror films and big movies at that point. I couldn't quite get it at first, but I knew that I had seen something profound.

11 minutes ago, Amentep said:

I still haven't seen Lost Highway.  My Lynch viewing has some gaps in it that I'll correct eventually (or die trying).

I highly recommend it, but it is a tough watch.

[Amentep]

Oh wait, my mistake I have seen Lost Highway.  I haven't seen Wild at Heart.

Awkward.  In my defense, I saw Lost Highway once when it first came out, so I probably need to rewatch it (I definitely need to re-watch Blue Velvet as I also saw it once when it came out).  And I think I caught the tail end of Wild at Heart once, but my memories of that are vague.

So for Lynch...

Seen - Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks (both series), and On The Air

Not Seen - Eraserhead, Hotel Room, Inland Empire, Wild at Heart.

Would love for On the Air and Hotel Room to get home media releases.  And Eraserhead remains a big gap in my watching, both for Lynch and Cult Movies in general.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

2 hours ago, Amentep said:

Oh wait, my mistake I have seen Lost Highway.  I haven't seen Wild at Heart.

Awkward.  In my defense, I saw Lost Highway once when it first came out, so I probably need to rewatch it (I definitely need to re-watch Blue Velvet as I also saw it once when it came out).  And I think I caught the tail end of Wild at Heart once, but my memories of that are vague.

So for Lynch...

Seen - Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks (both series), and On The Air

Not Seen - Eraserhead, Hotel Room, Inland Empire, Wild at Heart.

Would love for On the Air and Hotel Room to get home media releases.  And Eraserhead remains a big gap in my watching, both for Lynch and Cult Movies in general.

You're also missing What Did Jack Do? A short film pastiche of neo noir where David Lycnh interviews a monkey.

I haven't seen On the Air, Hotel Room, or The Straight Story.

Restorations of Lost Highway and Inland Empire were released this year, so maybe when (hopefully) they get a home media release you can check them out like that if you're interested.

[Amentep]

I can't remember which shorts of his I've seen, but they were early ones on that set of early shorts.

[Keyrock]

I think I'm soon going to go on a Len Kabasinski deep dive soon. GOD HELP ME. I'm still not fully recovered from my Neil Breen deep dive, but I must do this. For country. For science. For mankind.

[Chairchucker]

I don't know that I'd say I disliked The Lion King, but I do remember being miffed that people were calling it the best Disney movie ever when Aladdin had been released not even two years prior, and overall found The Lion King overrated.

 

Great soundtrack, though.

[Keyrock]

Update: DVDs of Ninja Prophecy of Death and Hellcats Revenge are on their way to my door. Expect reviews in the near future (I will need strong beer). After that I can decide whether I want to go deeper into Len Kabasinski's rather extensive catalogue.

[LadyCrimson]

--The thing about WallE and Up is that their start/early sequences are so marvelous that it's all downhill from there. I enjoyed both overall but it's a case where they both end up skating on goodwill from the first 10-20 minutes, or whatever it was.

I've said it before but for me the best Disney animated film is still Beauty and the Beast. The original one, not that live action one (which was ok in small parts but overall, meh).

[Chairchucker]

Actually it's Emperor's New Groove.