Cinema and Movie Thread: coming 2 a theater near u

[Gfted1]

 

[Amentep]

  

On 2/4/2025 at 10:49 AM, Gfted1 said:

 

Looking forward to this - I think it looks pretty interesting.  Is Malkovich playing the Red Ghost?  Might be the only way such a cold-war villain might make sense is in a retro-future alternate universe.

[Gfted1]

Ive seen it mentioned that Malkovich could be playing The Red Ghost, The Mole Man or even Franklin Richards.

[Amentep]

Needs Mole Man glasses to be Mole Man. Franklin Richard's could be interesting but time travel ain't the best idea, I think.

[Bartimaeus]

On 1/31/2025 at 9:20 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Interstellar (2014).

I had a pretty similar experience with that 90s Jodie Foster film, Contact...but at least there, you've got Jodie Foster starring instead of Matthew McConaughey, which helped a lot.

Addendum: I was just reading some comments on Interstellar, and someone else compared it to Contact as well while mentioning "McConaughey is in the driver's seat 15 years later", which left me confused. Lo and behold, I'd completely blanked out that Matthew McConaughey also happened to be in Contact as well: he's the greasy gross love interest. Whoops. Honestly, it's just as well, since now that I remember he was in Contact, I mostly just recall being yucked out and annoyed by him.

[LadyCrimson]

I don't think Interstellar was terrible or anything, but I did personally find it kind of a snoozefest.  The best thing about Interstellar was desperate/crazed Matt Damon. Which was funny at the time because then The Martian came out and one was half-expecting Damon to be similar-roled, at first. Ha.  I know it's a different type of film but The Martian was 100x better, imo.

I didn't like Contact either, even on the big-screen. I even bought/tried reading the book wondering if it would make me appreciate it more. I didn't like the book much either. Thus I've come to the conclusion I don't enjoy overly metaphysical/transcendent sci-fi (or whatever the words for such might be) - 2001 and Arrival (2016) bored me to tears too.  Which is fine - just doesn't "speak" to me is all.

[Lexx]

Interstellar was absolutely awesome (except this "god/love" thing in the end), you people are just stinkers.

Also, the TARS robot was amazing and I wish we could have that in realz.

Edited Saturday at 09:52 AM by Lexx

[LadyCrimson]

2 hours ago, Lexx said:

Interstellar was absolutely awesome (except this "god/love" thing in the end), you people are just stinkers.

Also, the TARS robot was amazing and I wish we could have that in realz.

I don't even remember Interstellar having a robot, probably zoned it out.

 

[Bartimaeus]

12 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

I don't even remember Interstellar having a robot, probably zoned it out.

 

TARS was the comic relief.

He doesn't really have the most distinctive design, so I can understand if this visual aid doesn't help. I actually found him to be the least awful character out of everyone, and when you can say that about the comic relief robot in a serious sci-fi drama film, you probably have a really crummy set of characters that you didn't like and which sunk the movie for you.

Edited Saturday at 01:12 PM by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

^ I do remember the water/time dilation planet (somewhat) but I still don't remember it/robot specifically. I remember the farm start, the daughters "ghost", scattered planet moments, Matt Damon,  the wtf weird ending, Matthew's chr. going off to try to find the other main chr in the final. I think on-ship/flying interactions/exposition or whatever I wouldn't recall at all, without cheating via looking stuff up on YT. Not much of that film stuck in my brain, I guess. Maybe I fell asleep in parts.

Edited Saturday at 01:27 PM by LadyCrimson

[Lexx]

Maybe you didn't watch the movie at all if you can't remember the robot.  

[Bartimaeus]

27 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

^ I do remember the water/time dilation planet (somewhat) but I still don't remember it specifically. I remember the farm start, the daughters "ghost", scattered planet moments, Matt Damon,  the wtf weird ending. I think on-ship/flying interactions/exposition or whatever I wouldn't recall at all, without cheating via looking stuff up on YT. Not much of that film stuck in my brain, I guess.

The "WTF weird ending" really just felt like the product of lame storytelling that wasn't able to effectively tie together the grounded reality of the world/universe that the movie had constructed and the simple, relatable human story that it wanted to tell. We have a hard sci-fi story that should have concrete issues and solutions (or lack thereof), but it in the end, it just comes down to...the most base character emotions and beliefs driving us towards a magical resolution that is only the most tenuously connected to the real physical world. Which, hey, if you at least enjoyed the preceding two hours and if you liked and cared about the involved characters, that might just be alright and you'll get into that emotional ending and accept it for what it is, or you'll at least forgive it. I...did not.

Edited Saturday at 01:54 PM by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

49 minutes ago, Lexx said:

Maybe you didn't watch the movie at all if you can't remember the robot.  

It was ten years ago, I found the film rather ponderous/not very "entertaining" and I never rewatched it, so pfft.  That walking wall apparently did nothing my brain found interesting enough to spare permanent brain cell storage room for.    

I knew this guy way back when - before YouTube/streaming and even video rentals weren't for months after - he could see a movie in theater once and repeat whole scenes almost verbatim (long multi-dialogues) weeks/months later. One of those types. It was always amazing.

[Bartimaeus]

Chelovek s Kinoapparatom AKA Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Oh my gosh, look at the poster. How can you not be seduced by this poster? Well, I couldn't. I'm not very knowledgeable about art, so I don't even really know what to call it, but it always gets me whenever I see it. Bizarre superimposition of foreground and background, those circular or recursive or liminal elements...all rendered in a kind of art deco style. And when I learned that the movie was a Soviet experimental film "documenting" several Russian/Ukrainian cities in the late 1920s, I was all in. No dialogue, no intertitles, just cinematography of life, society, industry, and many different kinds of objects - set to several musical scores that you can choose from (including one by In the Nursery). I genuinely had a good time watching this, and the filming techniques used lived up to the "experimental" label - it was often times quite bizarre what things they decided to do with the camera as well as how they would interstitch different scenes and shots together.

Wikipedia:

Quote

Man with a Movie Camera was not always a highly regarded work. The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses".[14]

Vertov's Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form over content, with Sergei Eisenstein even deriding the film as "pointless camera hooliganism".[15] The work was largely dismissed in the West as well.[16] Documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha said that in Britain, Vertov was "regarded really as rather a joke, you know. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously."[17] The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including The New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:[18] "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."

Man with a Movie Camera is now regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made, ranking 9th in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world's best films. In 2009, Roger Ebert wrote: "It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it."[19] The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.[6]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of 40 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 9.10/10. The website's consensus reads: "Groundbreaking in its exploration of the medium, Man with a Movie Camera is proof that cinema in and of itself can be a source of grand entertainment and sociological value."[20] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 96 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[21]

In particular: "The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including The New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:[18] "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."

Oh, you sweet summer children of 1929... If only you'd known what the future would hold for you.

 

Edited Saturday at 07:46 PM by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

I am currently dying of a covid infection, and so to celebrate the occasion, I decided to re-watch Rosemary's Baby. While my temperature spikes to 102 and above over the next few days (if current evidence as well as my first bout with the miserable fake news disease that's bound to disappear - like a miracle! - any day now were indications), I'd like to think to think that my illness in some way compares to

Spoiler

9 months of carrying the Antichrist while everyone around you gaslights and poisons you. It doesn't, but I'd like to think so.

It's a great movie: shame who made it, but this at least is one occasion where I can separate the art and the artist, maybe because it feels so much like Mia Farrow's movie than anything else. Now, I must return to my fever dreams.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

38 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Now, I must return to my fever dreams.

I have some wonderful recs for fever dreams, lmk if you want to be driven (more) insane.

[Gfted1]

@Bartimaeus That was a funny read...not that youre sick, just how you described it.  Get well soon. :airfistbump:

Knock on wood, Ive somehow been able to shuck and jive the rona this whole time, even when my wife sweating her way through a bout of it laying right next to me a few years ago. Out of curiosity, do you keep up with the booster shots? I had the first two shots whenever it all first started, and one booster after that, then I was done with it.

 

[Bartimaeus]

32 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

@Bartimaeus That was a funny read...not that youre sick, just how you described it.  Get well soon. :airfistbump:

Knock on wood, Ive somehow been able to shuck and jive the rona this whole time, even when my wife sweating her way through a bout of it laying right next to me a few years ago. Out of curiosity, do you keep up with the booster shots? I had the first two shots whenever it all first started, and one booster after that, then I was done with it.

 

Yeah, I do...though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that a big part of it is simply because children are disease magnets. Which is honestly probably faulty thinking, since both times I've gotten Covid, it's actually been the fault of the same stupid bastard-ass coworker whose kneecaps I want to take a sledgehammer to because she's always coming in while sick. I barely work in-person and she's not even in my department, and yet somehow this part-time moron still manages to get me (and others) sick.

When I was a kid, my father literally killed one his coworkers, who he knew was immuno-compromised, by going into work while he was sick while not bothering to try to be careful (and while I wish I could say that it might've been his mind being affected by his illness, my father was, in fact, also a total bastard-ass, so I'm not much inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt). It's so incredibly negligent, especially if your job is not actually trying to make you come in to work while sick.

48 minutes ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

I have some wonderful recs for fever dreams, lmk if you want to be driven (more) insane.

I feel like watching fever dream movies while you're sick is like, probably the worst time to watch them, while a movie you've already seen is not nearly as big of a deal, even if it still fits the billing. Time to re-watch some Ken Russell films...

Speaking of Ken Russell films, I've watched Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971) literally about 15 times since I first watched it early last year, so someone please send help. It's so rare that a film you watch the first time as an adult is one you can watch over and over and over like you would have as a child (or at least it is for me!), so I think I can now fairly qualify this as one of my very favorite films of all time. I've even purchased DVDs and blu-rays to give out to family and friends that I think might be interested, since it doesn't stream anywhere and I need the share the madness of this silly matinee show musical that is unlike any other I've seen...

Edited Sunday at 09:21 PM by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

37 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Time to re-watch some Ken Russell films...

Iirc, Ken Russell is a director that somehow consistently hits for both of us, which is a rarity. The anti-Villeneuve.

43 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Speaking of Ken Russell films, I've watched Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971) literally about 15 times since I first watched it early last year, so someone please send help. It's so rare that a film you watch the first time as an adult is one you can watch over and over and over like you would have as a child (or at least it is for me!), so I think I can now fairly qualify this as one of my very favorite films of all time. I've even purchased DVDs and blu-rays to give out to family and friends that I think might be interested, since it doesn't stream anywhere and I need the share the madness of this silly matinee show musical that is unlike any other I've seen...

It did stream on Criterion (which far and above is the most valuable streaming), but it's currently not on and who the hell knows when or if it will be brought back. I watched it a while ago but haven't seen it in a minute. Guess it's time to go looking. But before that......

On 2/8/2025 at 1:41 PM, Bartimaeus said:

No dialogue, no intertitles, just cinematography of life, society, industry, and many different kinds of objects - set to several musical scores that you can choose from (including one by In the Nursery).

I was going to post a pic of ole Denis but by god his face is so naturally smug that it inflicted psychic damage on me. Something tells me experimental early Soviet cinema is not quite what he has in mind by "pure image and sound".