Cinema and Movie Thread: flickering images

[bugarup]

5 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Challenge of 5 Gauntlets (2018) - I'm back for another film from Pennsylvanian schlock auteur Len Kabasinski.

New profile picture when, Keyrock? You've been on this current Rubberface dude, like, forever! 

[Keyrock]

15 hours ago, bugarup said:

New profile picture when, Keyrock?

New picture now!

Edited March 10, 2023 by Keyrock

[uuuhhii]

operation fortune

impressively boring movie

didn't even have that one decent fight scene of netflix mass produce action movie

why waste so much budget on nothing

[Bartimaeus]

Peter & Wendy (1911). Well...this is a book and not a movie, but they're making a movie of it, and Disney's animated Peter Pan is a very crude adaptation of it as well. I actually quite enjoyed it. Peter Pan himself is a somewhat dark and tragic figure, and the book ends with everyone but him rapidly aging or outright dying of old age while he continues on with his adventures, forever refusing to return but very momentarily from his childish fantasies. He's quite awful and really more some kind of antihero by many measures, yet I found myself empathizing with his intransigence towards growing up nevertheless. But that makes sense - even when I was still a child, I never wanted to grow up, and that certainly still holds today. Life as an adult is a complicated and uncertain cosmic nightmare full of perpetually growing anxiety and suffering, what's there to like about it? I'd go back to the simple perspective of a child in a heartbeat, even if it meant being forever trapped in silly dreams as well...though I hope I wouldn't grow to be nearly so callous as Peter Pan.

Edited March 14, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Raithe]

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-03-10/dungeons-dragons-honor-among-thieves-five-fast-reactions

https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/dungeons-and-dragons-honor-among-thieves-review-chris-pine-michelle-rodriguez-rege-jean-page-1235549630/

Looks like the early views are all saying it's a fun film.

[Lexx]

Just a shame that you can never trust any of those reviews.

 

Watched Doctor Sleep. Good movie. A lot better than I expected it to be.

Edited March 11, 2023 by Lexx

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Luther: Fallen Sun (2023) - A feature length police procedural with Gollum as a serial killer using internet magic. Ok if you're into that sort of thing and/or liked the series.

Citizen Kane (1941) - It has been a long time and the talk about it here me want to see it again. It's definitely dated, from the way women are portrayed to the way the sets look, but the archetype of Kane seems to reoccur both irl and in fiction enough that it feels relevant enough, even if we ignore the massive impact it has had on cinema as an art form. I wish more current films were made in black and white, there was something disturbing about the way the darkness framed faces that I would like to see in more films but seems to get lost in color.

[Gromnir]

cameo and hard light pioneered in kane is not just a black and white thing.

 

hardly an isolated example.

edit: the first godfather film is homage to kane in terms o' lighting techniques. is worth watching godfather and kane together... at least for film nerds. 

literal first scene of godfather

HA! Good Fun!

Edited March 13, 2023 by Gromnir

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

Luther: Fallen Sun (2023) - A feature length police procedural with Gollum as a serial killer using internet magic. Ok if you're into that sort of thing and/or liked the series.

I tried to get in to the series a couple of days ago, but I am so fed up with the detective formula that I could not get past the first episode.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 hour ago, Gromnir said:

cameo and hard light pioneered in kane is not just a black and white thing.

 

hardly an isolated example.

edit: the first godfather film is homage to kane in terms o' lighting techniques. is worth watching godfather and kane together... at least for film nerds. 

literal first scene of godfather

HA! Good Fun!

It's not only in b&w and those are phenomenal scenes, but I'm thinking more of how the lack of color makes it feel like.... seeing shadows projected on a wall is the best I can describe it as.

There's something eerie about the above that I don't find Apocalypse Now doing quite the same, partly because the faces in Citizen Kane aren't lit and partly because the different perspective. Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now evokes a more personal feeling from me because of the perspective makes you feel in the middle of his conversation with Martin Sheen. Comparatively I feel more removed from the reporters, more voyeuristic and outside of their world.

It has been far too long since I've seen The Godfather.

43 minutes ago, Sarex said:

I tried to get in to the series a couple of days ago, but I am so fed up with the detective formula that I could not get past the first episode.

I think I watched the first season, maybe two? It's been a while and my memory is bad. The person I watched it with was a bigger fan than I was and enjoyed it.

Recently I enjoyed Three Pines, which is a detective series, but the feel is much different than how I remember Luther.

[Zoraptor]

Watched the Luther movie as well. It was OK, rather contrived but probably better than anything from the series itself post S2. Which isn't saying that much, to be fair.

Did kind of laugh at the ending ending though.

Spoiler

While Idris Elba may never be the first British African American (sic) James Bond John Luther --> off brand 007 anyway. Sensible given the amount of silly action sequences in Fallen Sun that would be far more at home in Bond.

 

[Keyrock]

Curse of the Wolf (2006) - One of Len Kabasinski's earliest movies. This is the tale of Dakota, a werewolf who has figured out a way to keep her werewolfism in control via veterinary medication. She desires to lead a normal life but other werewolves, her pack-mates, I guess, won't leave her be. There are bar fights, shootouts, plenty of boobs, the works. Len hadn't come to rely on terrible digital effects much at this point, so there are less than a handful of them and no green screen AFAIK. 75% of the time he does a good job of using darkness and/or smoke/fog to obscure the costumes, however there are close up shots of the masks in clear lighting where it's hilariously obvious that they are rubber. The story is as threadbare as threadbare gets, only serving the purpose of giving an excuse for fight scenes. The acting is atrocious, as expected. On the plus side, the title theme is every bit as great as RLM purported it to be. In fact, there's a ton of music in this movie, mostly heavy metal, but there are some other tracks as well. The quality of the music is... uneven. Also, the sound quality, while nowhere near as bad as in some of his other movies, left something to be desired. While you could always hear the dialogue and the sound levels were more or less consistent, there were a number of scenes with significant background noise that would have greatly benefited from ADR.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

Cool Hand Luke (1967). What we've got here is failure to communicate.

Spoiler

Well, I wouldn't have expected to care one iota for a manly prison drama film (that turned out to be a lot more thoughtful, loving, and emotional than it first appeared), but sometimes that 100% on RT and acclaim as one of the greatest films of all time is actually worth something. Very enjoyable.

 

Edited March 17, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

I did not watch the Oscars, but I guess Everywhere...All At Once won Best Picture and Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress. Good for her, happier about her win then the Best Picture thing.

Naatu Naatu won Best Song which also pleases me, although the Academy's dance rendition of the piece was "meh."

The Oscar's ratings went up a bit this time ... it was the 3rd worst in its history instead of 2nd worst. 

[Bartimaeus]

Ewa Wants to Sleep (1958). Girl arrives in new town one day before her school opens and wanders about trying to find somewhere that will take her in for the night, causing a very strange chain reaction of mistaken identities between citizens, criminals, and policemen to ensue.

It's a 1958 Polish comedy that I selected purely on the basis of the poster. Polish comedies sure are...different. Eh, it could've turned out a lot worse.

Edited March 18, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

Poland has had some awesome movie posters:

 

 

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, I have a fondness for Polish posters. They go pretty hard with very creative concept pieces.

Edited March 19, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

Ka is a wheel.

Having a deja vu here. Although it's not a feeling, I'm pretty sure polish posters were a topic before.

[Keyrock]

12 minutes ago, majestic said:

I'm pretty sure polish posters were a topic before.

Almost certainly it was, and there's a 99% chance I participated in said topic. I don't care, any chance I get to rep some cool, old, hand painted posters I will. Everything today is all digitally slapped together, and some of the posters are kinda cool, but they just don't have that hand drawn magic of old movie posters.

Side-note: I should watch Westworld (1973) again.

Edited March 19, 2023 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

I don't need it to be hand-painted (particularly given how samey ye posters of olde were anyways, as imitators would imitate imitators), but the fact that digital art can be made so much easier and with fewer limitations makes it all the more bewildering that the vast majority of movie posters are simply lazy publicity photos of the stars slapped together with nary thought or feeling put towards its creation. It's the style of poster Hollywood currently desires for its movies, but hopefully it'll someday soon fall in favor of more creative endeavours.

The only problem with a great/fun high concept poster is that often times, the movies to whom they belong to will markedly fall short of the expectations set by the poster... That last one here is Alien, of all things - not exactly a perfect stylistic fit if you ask me, .

Edited March 19, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

I'd say Alien lived up to that awesome Polish poster for it, even if the xenomorph looks nothing like that.

[Bartimaeus]

Oh, I love Alien, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, but seeing that poster...well, the film wouldn't be exactly how I'd expect it looking at that, to say the least, . Still, a fun piece. Crazy concept pieces like those pictured above have a way of making me...you know, actually excited to try out a film, which is certainly a novel idea.

Edited March 19, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

At least we seem to be mostly past the phase where every movie poster was at a Dutch angle for no ****ing reason whatsoever.

Edited March 19, 2023 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

Return to Neverland (2002). 3D animation was a mistake. I mean, this is mostly fine enough 2D animation (although a bit blunt in its detail and shading a lot of the time like most digital animation of the early 2000s), but the parts that look bad look really bad. Ya ain't never seen bad 3D animation 'til you've seen a giant 3D pirate ship flying alongside 3D WW2 bombers in front of a 3D Big Ben in all its ugliness and floatiness. Anyways, interesting film. Well, it'd be even more interesting if it hadn't been so...Disney-fied, but I suppose the only reason it can exist in the first place is because Hook wasn't killed and the Lost Boys didn't disband at the end of the original film like was supposed to happen as per the book (and never mind all the other framing differences, like Peter Pan coming across as a brave and mostly considerate boy hero in these movies, as opposed to a bit of a narcissistic dunderhead like in the book). Nevertheless, there's something thematically powerful in the idea of taking a war-traumatized kid like Jane...

...whose childhood, sense of imagination, and love for life has been thoroughly crushed, and then dropping her into the silly and carefree Neverland. Interestingly, Peter and the other Lost Boys are disgusted by Jane - they know an adult when they see one, as it were. And a point is made of the fact that no how much pixie dust they try to drown her in, she cannot fly. This all would've probably been put to a lot better use if it had been explored in a book...by the original author, as opposed to Disney, who instead made a mostly silly movie with only hints of something more thoughtful out of it (and who made arguably even worse books for the series after that). However, from what I understand, it may be a little difficult for the original author to write that book even if he was interested in the idea, seeing as he's been dead for...oh, I suppose a little more than eighty years now. Ah, well, I suppose that's the way it goes. Still, not as bad as the reviews had me expecting.

Edited March 19, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

Somehow, Neo and Trinity have returned.

The movie goes hard in parodying the idea of milking a franchise for all it's worth, which is probably the best part of it. It's certainly not game changing like the original Matrix and it's not as odious as some other sci-fi reboots, it's mediocre. Hopefully this is the end of the Matrix.