Cinema and Movie Thread: coming 2 a theater near u

[Amentep]

 

 

 

 

[Amentep]

Based on Barrie's Mary Rose that Hitch**** wanted to adapt.

 

[Amentep]

Interesting looking folk horror -

 

 

 

[Bartimaeus]

5x Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning Anora (2024), by Sean Baker (director and writer of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Florida Project).

Kind of feels similar to Parasite for me, where it's not quite entirely my movie, so it'll never be an all-time favorite of mine, but I nevertheless really enjoyed it, even despite the really gratuitous amounts of sex and nudity (particularly in the first third or so). I liked how nasty, unsentimental, and unglorified the film was, befitting the realities of the subject material ...but without having the most obnoxious visual style it could possibly ever have (The Substance). I'm a little surprised that it won all the awards, and that it would tie Sean Baker as the all-time Oscar leader in a single awards show...shared with the ever-esteemed Walt Disney all the way back in 1953, whose four award-winning films that year (The Living Desert for Best Documentary Feature; The Alaskan Eskimo for Best Documentary Short; Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom for Best Short Subject Cartoon; and Bear Country for Best Short Subject Two-Reel) no-one has now ever heard of.

 

Nosferatu (2024).

I wasn't into it, but I also wasn't not into it. I watched this last week and I don't really have much of a lasting impression, except that it's always nice to see Willem Dafoe. I don't think Robert Eggers is going to be better than The Lighthouse for me at this point.

 

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965).

I feel like I've been deprived by not watching this (and maybe other Charlie Brown stuff) every year: it's really great. All the little facial expressions that punctuate every dialogue really get to me, and the character writing is just lovely and hilarious, and I really liked that it sounded like they must have used real kids to voice all of them. It felt silly, simple, but authentic and enjoyable for all ages in a way that I think cartoons are currently struggling to be today.

Edited March 9 by Bartimaeus

[Lexx]

I think the part I liked the most about Nosferatu is how much it looked and felt like Bloodborne. There is even one scene where music plays that for the first few seconds sounds almost 1:1 like taken from the game. Also that carriage ride is 100% Bloodborne, which actually makes sense, since it was very much inspired by the original movie, so there's that. 

Edited March 10 by Lexx

[Sarex]

I agree with @Bartimaeus mostly. While the movie is not bad and it did engage me, the only impression I have left of it is how oppressive it felt. Still can't decide if the movie could have used some trimming.

[Amentep]

Personally I loved Nosferatu.  It felt like Eggers was trying to take the basic Dracula story (as cribbed by the original Nosferatu) and draw together a take on the material that tries to get to the heart of the vampire story, using myth, magic and esoteric thought.

It also plays symbolically as a story regarding the destructive nature of men who obsess over an individual woman and how that woman is trapped by such obsessions towards them.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

I liked Nosfearatu because giving Dracula a mustache is pretty funny

[Amentep]

1 hour ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

I liked Nosfearatu because giving Dracula a mustache is pretty funny

Bram Stoker was a riot.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

2 hours ago, Amentep said:

Bram Stoker was a riot.

Anyone who writes a novel casting their boss as an undead monster has a funny streak.

But I do think it's genuinely funny how Eggers broke with the zeitgeist of (modern) vampires to make a historically accurate monster that would be almost unrecognizable as a vampire in contemporary fiction.

[Amentep]

Well Eggers like historical detail; everything I've read indicates Orlok's look was spot on for period, location and status.

It is amusingly anti-handsome stud vampire though! Which, in its way, the original was too.

[Bartimaeus]

With Nosferatu, I found myself just kinda checking out a bit any time any of the three main characters were being focused on, but my ears would perk back up anytime I heard Willem Dafoe's or Ralph Ineson's voices. Honestly, I could've just gone without the whole vampire thing and instead went along with those two trying to deal with a plague, so maybe it's my mistake for watching the entirety of a movie that apparently just didn't much appeal to me. Just one of those times where a movie inexplicably doesn't click for you, I suppose.

[Amentep]

 

 

[Hurlshort]

Anora - My wife chose this one, but I enjoyed it for the most part. People had told me it ended badly, which I thought was a given based on the premise, but I was surprised by:

Spoiler

I thought it ended quite well. Or at least, all things considered, it was not a terrible scenario to end up with. I figured she'd end up dead or human trafficked. I mean staying married to the guy wan't a happy ending. He was a spoiled dumb kid. Her character definitely grew on me. That being said, I don't understand how these people live like this. It seems super unhealthy. I am sure that there are rich people that party like that, but it just seems exhausting to me. 

 

[Lexx]

Watched Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person yesterday. Was kinda nice. Also Sara Montpetit is really pretty.

[majestic]

Having had some spare time at my hands I re-watched parts of the MCU and ventured bravely forth into the multiverse era, which I so far have avoided. To put it bluntly, I probably should have continued avoiding it. Alas.

Films I have rewatched:

The Avengers
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Captain America: Civil War
Doctor Strange
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Endgame

Rewatching the films did not really change my opinions much, with two exceptions: Doctor Strange I didn't dislike as much as I did when watching it at the theater. The CGI's still terrible and the ending was and always will be utterly predictable and boring, both of which drag the film down immensely. Still, I guess not having to watch all of it at once helps with some films, right?

I also disliked Endgame a lot less the second time around, but it is still so much worse than Infinity War. Still not a very enjoyable experience, but being able to ignore the extended CGI battle bonanza at the end because I already watched it once helped.

Almost all of the films after The Avengers (except the Doctor Strange origin story, obviously) suffer from a lack of proper setup (watching them back to back makes this even more noticable), with Age of Ultron more or less taking the cake, being a completely incoherent mess of ideas and concepts thrown into a blender, basically the Star Trek: Into Darkness of the MCU. Civil War will always be dreck, but the film cannot really help being based on the comic storyline.

Things I watched from the Multiverse:

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
Thor: Love and Thunder

Plus some bits of WandaVision and Loki, but I am not finished with the series. I am somewhat willing to ignore the complete lack of sense that the Doctor Strange movie made and simply hope that the ending of WandaVision will explain what the hell happened with Wanda. If it doesn't, then that is another negative. It speaks volumes of what I think of WandaVision that I so far have not managed to finish a nine episode series. That sitcom gimmick became so old so fast that even I stopped watching and moved on (and I sat through all of Rings of Power so far). Eh.

Loki's first season was fine, but it left me with no real desire to continue with season two - I'll watch that eventually though, of course, just like WandaVision. Looks like they brought Short Round to Loki, which... I guess could be a plus.

Thor: Love and Thunder though, yikes. What the hell. I love surrealist reinterpretations of a series as much as the next guy (the Darin Morgan episodes of X-Files were top notch entertainment), but that just fell completely flat. The goats were fun. Everyting else? Uhm. Nope.

[Sarex]

Iron Man, the first part, is the only truly good movie from that lot.

Edited 6 hours ago by Sarex