Wot films are you watching?

[LexW]

And nausica is indeed a little bit dark. Wonder if earlier version you watched was censored, Warriors of the Wind?

It’s quite likely if Ben saw it sometime between about 1990 and 2005, on the BBC (which again, is quite likely - the BBC, whilst slightly late to the party, did end up showing a number of anime classics in that period, many of them at least a bit censored), that it was censored. The same would apply to virtually any action movie on the BBC too, up to the end of the same period. I dunno if it’s precisely 2005 but some time in the 2000s it seems like the BBC finally got tired of being relentlessly mocked for stuff like the infamous “melon farmer” censorship in Robocop and the like and started showing uncensored versions and just showing them later if necessary (which it generally wasn’t - the “melon farmer” version of Robocop broadcast at like 9pm).

[BillButNotBen]

(late reply). I think i’d have watched it on DVD/VCD so I don’t think it was the censored version.
It’s more that watching things with young kids means you spend a lot of time going ‘this is darker/sexier than I remember!’ or 'I hope this is ok?!'
Nausicca isn’t too dark really for older people, it’s just a bit darker than I expected for little kids. Good though.

---

Speaking of, we watched E.T a few days ago. I also spent half that movie thinking 'i hope this isn’t too scary!'
Excellent movie, and even the kids seemed to enjoy it.

My parents took me to see it in the movie theater when I was about 6 or 7 I guess, and I remember them loving it and me not being so impressed.
I think a lot of it went over my head at the time. I’m not sure I picked up on any of the ‘ET/Elliot link’ stuff at all.

Watching it as an adult it’s signposted much more than I remembered. But basically the movie is just really well put together. There are lots of little incidental touches, and the kid actors all do really well.

I teared up at a couple of points. My kids went ‘Ewww!!’ at elliot’s big kissing scene .
A few scenes are shot in pretty scary ways, almost like horror movie framing, although it is often revealed reasonably soon that there isn’t anything too scary.

I was worried it’s be either too scary for the kids, or too slow paced for modern kids, or the sfx would be laughable for them, but they seemed to go with it.
Though, early into the big bike chase scene, my daughter did say ‘why don’t they just fly?’ so the big take off scene was more of a ‘Well, duh!’ moment

A lot better than the last few Spielberg movies I watched.

[BillButNotBen]

I had a free evening with enough time to actually watch a whole movie, which is rare.
So I looked at the long list of movies that I’ve wanted to watch and not had time… and picked Halloween.

I don’t know why I always pick horror movies in these situations.

So, it was the newer version of Halloween from a couple of years ago. It got pretty good reviews (for a horror movie) and so i’d wanted to watch it at the time.

It was ok, but nothing special.
I suspect it got good reviews mainly on the back of Jaime Lee Curtis’ performance. Not that her performance is anything groundbreaking, but more for the novelty of having her in a rough badass grandma role.

As far as I can tell, the movie ignores all/most of the sequels and positions itself as a direct (but 40 years later) sequel to the original. Michael has been in jail all that time, and Laurie has gone all Sarah Connors.
(Actually, it occurs to me right now that this film shares quite a lot with Terminator 2. Paranoid survivalist mom who has lost her kids due to her paranoia. Returning silent unstoppable killer.)

The problem with making your movie erase all the mediocre sequels is that you kinda need your movie to be pretty great to justify it. I’m not sure this is. It’s perfectly fine, but it’s not really head and shoulders above some of the other sequels.

It’s well shot with some nice performances, but it suffers from being very predictable. Within the first 10 minutes you can probably guess exactly what will happen, and who will die and who will survive. Half the fun of 80s horror movies was guessing who would make it.
They throw in a couple of twists near the end, but they don’t really alter the overall results.

I watched the original Halloween back in the 80s and didn’t find it that great (Other than the music). It was apparently pretty groundbreaking and influential, but things like that often feel very generic later.

One problem is that Michael Myers isn’t really a very interesting bad guy. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t have any really unique features/skills/moves. He basically just kills people and is apparently incredibly tough and unstoppable for some reason. As such, there’s not a lot for the movie to do other than introduce a lot of people and have him kill lots of them.

I kept hoping for some kind of big twist to make it all worthwhile, and there were a couple of small ones at the end, but they didn’t really amount to much and were kinda undermined by dumb things that the characters did around them.
Despite Laurie apparently spending the last 40 years preparing, training and fortifying for his inevitable return, she still seemed to have a house filled with walk in closets, various metal tools hanging on the walls, and glass panels in her front door!
I know nothing about guns, and don’t ever want to, but I’m pretty sure that the best weapon for going cautiously room to room in a house isn’t the one with a long barrel that has to precede you into the room!

The few nice moments that should have come at the end were slightly undermined because the film didn’t really commit to them.
It’s a very amateur movie, but at least You’re Next commits to its concept. I felt like Halloween wanted to go a similar way, but couldn’t because it needed to maintain the myth of Michael Myers.

It clearly wanted to have the women turn the tables on Michael, but it also wanted to remain as a horror movie where Michael was the scary big bad.

I’ve written many more words than I intended on a reasonably fun but average horror movie, but the final thing that threw me was that it has Will Patton as a cop and as basically the only really decent logical guy in it… but I just finished watching Swamp Thing where he’s the slimy duplicitous bad guy… so I was having a fair amount of cognitive dissonance.

[edit] Just discovered there’s a sequel coming out this year, and another next year, so I guess that’s another reason why they couldn’t really end things in any significant way.

[BillButNotBen]

Did not really plan on watching another horror movie so soon, but it was late and it was the only movie I could find that was under 2 hours. So I watched A Quiet Place.

Now that’s a really good movie. Really well acted, directed, paced, I spent the last half of the movie gripping the sides of my chair and leaning forward into the screen… it just really ramps up the tension very well. It’s also a masterclass in show-don’t-tell storytelling, partly due to the fact that its idea means it can’t tell very much.

Watching it alone, in the dark, with headphones… either great idea or terrible one.

It’s not especially gory, but it manages to make some scenes much more wince inducing than movies with lots of gore manage. I can’t really think of anything bad to say about it.

I’ve previously watched Bird Box which seemed like a similar idea, but with sight instead of noise. I also watched Don’t Breathe. This is so much better than either of those.

[Zephro]

I was bored doing housework so I put Doom the movie on. My god it’s as bad as I remember. There’s an actual conversation about the virus targeting the DNA for evil… I mean Karl Urban and Rosamund Pike are doing that conversation and even they can’t sell it. Doom 2016 the video game has better dialogue and plot FFS.

[ToomuchFluffy]

(Edit: I think I watched all of them in 2019. Just to make that clear. Basically the standouts which seemed most worth mentioning.)

It has been a while, but for anyone in the mood for a mostly traditional, but surprisingly good action movie, I’d strongly recommend Dredd (2012). Didn’t even know that it exists until they mentioned it on redlettermedia. It’s satisfying as an action movie, the actors are all fitting and it’s very stylish at times. The latter is mostly due to a particular plot point, the drug Slo-Mo. And yes, it does exactly what you think.

Other than that I also enjoyed The Ugly Swans (2006) by Lopushanksy. He apparently assisted Tarkovsky on Stalker and it shows. It’s about a quarantined zone in which it has been raining perpetually and some strange people that are teaching some equally strange children, well, something. Point being, some want to understand, others want to make it go away. Classic, but the execution leaves little to be desired. Great atmosphere, the children are appropriately alien and creepy and of course it all ends badly.

Hard to Be a God from 2013 is by Aleksei German who died before it was finished. Similarly to Tarkovsky’s Stalker it doesn’t seem to keep that close to the Strugatsky book and it’s pretty hard to follow the narrative if you are not aware of the original’s story. I’m not sure how much it really matters though. Everything is incredibly dirty and brutal and people mostly behave as strangely as you might expect from a culture that is very far removed from the 20th/21st-century. I have never seen something like this before and I’ll probably never see something like this again. It wasn’t necessarily enjoyable to watch, but then again, that’s not surprising considering the subject matter (medieval barbarians want to murder all the Renaissance people). Even so, the longer I watched the less I was able to pull myself away. I’m not sure if I’m recommending it, but it’s a monumental achievement. I think.

And something eh… a little lighter I guess. I think it has been outdone by some other movie at this point, but back when it was released, Dark Planet (2008/2009) was apparently the most expensive russian production to date. Another Strugatsky-adaptation (Prisoners of Power) of course. It’s a two-parter with more than three hours running time and in spite of some cheesy romance and action, I mostly enjoyed it. Even the main protagonist, whose incessantly smiling, blond ubermensch face can make a strange impression, this seems to very much have been deliberate. He’s from earth after all, which in this universe is much more advanced (in a “have solved all the problems” kind of way) than the planet it takes place on. There are some standout scenes, but I especially liked most of what concerns the “Unknown Fathers”, the leading figures of the totalitarian regime, which rules the nation the protagonist ends up in.

[Similar]

Trawling Prime Video, for the nth time, trying to find something worth watching.

Enemy at the Gates (2001). Probably fifteen years or so since I last watched it and this time even my fascination with the Stalingrad battle couldn’t really save it. I forgot how much is taken up by the love story and the intrigues (why does there always have to be intrigues…). And the sniper battle isn’t really all that interesting either (it might have been, but they had to put intrigues in that too).
All in all, it felt vaguely insulting, I think.
The Stalingrad environment is still very good, though.

Gangs of New York (2002). I don’t remember when I first watched this, but it must have been a long time ago. I don’t know if Prime Video has a special overextended version or something, but it was far longer than I remembered; when I started to feel it had gone on long enough, I was only halfway through it.
It’s a very simple plot, but it feels oddly messy. Possibly because it’s so much longer than it had to be.
I don’t think revenge movies are really for me anymore either, at least not the ones where the hero has someone who loves him, but he’s so much of an idiot that he risks that love to go get his revenge.
The ending is kind of amusing, though. The whole movie builds up to the grand finale where the hero will finally get his revenge, but in the sole twist in the whole plot, almost everybody gets blown to hell by ship cannon and the villain is practically already dead when the hero kills him. So that’s a little anti-climactic, in a good way.

One thing that it’s very serious about is the violence. There are some remarkably ugly scenes of black people getting beaten and lynched by the mob in all the chaos at the end of the movie, and all the rest isn’t too pretty either (I don’t know if that part is historically correct, but it seems like it’s based on something. And I’m not really sure I want to know what).

oh, and the theme music sounds like it’s made by U2, fronted by a very bored Bono (I don’t know if it is U2).

I also watched the first three Jurassic Park movies recently, but I mostly only remember the screaming. There’s a lot of screaming, rather more than necessary, I feel. I can’t claim that I know how I’d react to suddenly seeing a raptor or whatnot, but I’m fairly certain my first instinct wouldn’t be to scream my head off and attract its attention.
So three thumbs down to those (the first is still okay, to be fair).

[Shadoko]

Enemy at the Gates

Baddies at the Doorway.
Unpleasant Humans by the Entrance.

[BillButNotBen]

Watched Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
I’d heard it wasn’t great, but hoped it’d be one of those movies that was bad but enjoyable.

It almost was. There were a couple of action scenes that were pretty fun (though not really outstanding).
It’s just such a misfire on many levels. It has so many parallels to The Fifth Element, and I can’t help but think that if it’d had Bruce Willis in the lead role it might have been enough to push it into the dumb-fun realm.

There are some cool weird creature designs, and some interesting ideas, but almost everything comes across as an attempt to ape something that worked better in the 5th element.

I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, but the lead actor is totally miscast. Too young, too short, not charismatic enough, not good looking enough (given all the comments about him being irresistible to women) .
The central relationship is just weird too, with him being her superior officer, and basically sexually assaulting her at the start, getting told to sod off, deciding that’s a cue to propose, and then of course by the end of the movie they’re a couple.
If they’d dumped the stuff at the beginning, and made them equals, it might have worked.

The central pair also appear to be somewhat incompetent, but are treated as some kind of indispensable ‘james bond’ type operatives. They also manage to get quite a few side-characters killed and mostly don’t bat an eyelid about it.

Cara Delvigne is ok, but it’s a bit hard for her to sell her role as a tough woman when the script keeps putting her in places where she’s disempowered or has to utter crappy lines.
Even the main guy it isn’t fully his fault, as some of the lines are pretty leaden or tone-deaf. I can imagine someone like Bruce Willis pulling them off, but he spends the whole movie sounding like a kid in the playground doing an impression of an action hero.
@Similar

Rhianna does a pretty visually cool burlesque performance, though quite why she only gets to be a stripper is beyond me. It’s not as good as the opera scene in T5thE though.

It’s also way too long. The opening scene is beautiful, but stretched out forever.

That said, I didn’t hate it. But basically you should watch 5th element again instead.

[Similar]

The central relationship is just weird too, with him being her superior officer, and basically sexually assaulting her at the start, getting told to sod off, deciding that’s a cue to propose, and then of course by the end of the movie they’re a couple.

yeh, it’s pretty creepy, really.
Plus, like you said, there’s just no credible explanation for why anybody would be even vaguely interested in him. A fencepost would have more charisma.

Cara Delvigne is ok, but it’s a bit hard for her to sell her role as a tough woman when the script keeps putting her in places where she’s disempowered or has to utter crappy lines.

yes, she really didn’t have much to work with, and it feels like the director didn’t care either (if he was even present).

I haven’t paid attention to Luc Besson in a long time, but his early movies were all very much carried by the characters, so I found it really surprising how flat and unnatural they all were in Valerian. Maybe that’s how he does things now, but it seemed very odd.

Rhianna does a pretty visually cool burlesque performance, though quite why she only gets to be a stripper is beyond me.

yes. She was the only one who felt like a person to me.

[LexW]

I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before, but the lead actor is totally miscast. Too young, too short, not charismatic enough, not good looking enough (given all the comments about him being irresistible to women) .

Yeah it’s pretty wild just HOW miscast he was. It was one of those really strange Hollywood casting decisions where you wonder if there’s some secret system where they all roll dice to see who gets certain roles, or allocate tickets or something equally mad. I’m sure that’s not how it works but sometimes the casting is so very obviously off that you just have to “What the fuck?”. It’s not like he’s a big draw or charismatic or whatever. He’s a perfectly functional actor and I think probably stronger in an antagonistic or difficult role, but an action hero? Sheesh. He’s not actually too young, either (he’s 34 now), he just has a baby-face which doesn’t suit the character at all. Also re: too young, I think the much younger Timothee Chalamet actually could have pulled this off, because he does have the charisma and intensity that kind of lead needs, and even though he’s not tall and looks very young, he can work it.

[Skalpadda]

Yeah, I also wanted to like this movie despite the terrible word of mouth I’d heard beforehand, but I agree with everything you said. It has some fun ideas, but the script is just bad and the casting is downright baffling.

[BillButNotBen]

Watched Alien: Covenant as it was on. Been meaning to try it, but wasn’t super hyped about it after Prometheus.

It’s not bad, but it never really grabbed me. That might be because I spent a lot of the movie desperately trying to remember what happened in Prometheus… and all I could really remember was the giant rolling ship and Noomi Rapace - who isn’t in this one.

Like Prometheus, it probably has big things to say about god, creation, faith, etc… but it’s let down by a middling script. It’s also rather over-familiar and takes ages to get going. So nothing really comes across as new or surprising. The main actress is pretty good, but her flip into action hero at the end seems waaay too sudden. Some of the other supporting cast are good too, but there’s too many of them and so a lot of them become faceless.

They make some dumb decisions, though probably not as dumb as Prometheus. The problem is a lot of their decisions end up being wrong for reasons that we in the audience know because we’ve seen it before.
IMHO there’s also way too much focus on the Fassbender character.

Spoilers:
I can’t believe they did the Alien 3 thing of:

Summary

Killing off the main/popular character off screen between movies

as that was really annoying in Alien3 as well. I guess it might have been out of their hands, but still.

It seemed really weird editing to suddenly throw in the scene where

Summary

David unleashed the virus as it gave away that he was a bad guy which then made a couple of later scenes much more obvious.

Summary

Also, the end twist was really obvious.

Overall though, I think the main issue was it just wasn’t as exciting as Alien/Aliens. The action scenes were mostly a little flat and nothing very original.

[LexW]

Overall though, I think the main issue was it just wasn’t as exciting as Alien/Aliens. The action scenes were mostly a little flat and nothing very original.

It’s kind of astonishing that Ridley Scott decided that, in his old age, not only did he want to make totally unnecessary prequels to Alien (which wasn’t his concept in the first place - that was Dan O’Bannon, who also wrote the entire script to Alien), and instead of like, really working with the mythology in the way that most people understood it, he decided to basically reboot it, and use the whole thing for trashy, extended, fatuous meditations about life/death/creation/god etc. in the format of a dubious horror movie. And he couldn’t even stick with Noomi Rapace, he tried for a Ripley 3.0 in Covenant. It’s also noticeable that each Ripley-replacement is more conventionally “feminine” in their behaviour and especially reactions than the previous one, which is a pretty shit trend in the 2010s.

What’s particularly striking for me is that in the late 1980s and very early 1990s (generally before Alien 3), several attempts were made by comic book writers to continue or pre-figure the story from Alien/Aliens, and whilst they were all bad, a couple of them did focus on very similar themes to Prometheus and Covenant, so it kind of seems like maybe there’s a peculiar madness that afflicts some people when trying to continue or pre-figure these movies. Either that or Scott read one of this dire comic books and was “inspired” by it.

[Chaz]

Watched Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

I’d heard it wasn’t great, but hoped it’d be one of those movies that was bad but enjoyable.

Yeah, it’s not a bad film, it just didn’t have that certain spark. Looks amazing on a 4K HDR screen, but for all the incredible special effects, it just falls flat unfortunately.

A shame really as I really enjoyed the graphic novels when I was a young lad. I don’t think they captured the essence of the two main characters very well, which was also not helped by the fact that there was zero chemistry between the two main leads. I think that was a problem all over though. It felt like all the actors had just turned up, done their lines with very little enthusiasm just to get the job done, taken the pay check and then gone straight home. Also some of Besson’s quirkiness, which seemed so cool and fresh in Fifth Element, just felt rather dated and a little embarrassing in this one.

[BillButNotBen]

Watched Ghost Story.

It may have been a mistake to watch this movie late at night, alone, sitting in a dark room.
If you’re British, it’s a bit odd, because you’ll recognise a lot of the cast, and they consist of people you might associate with other types of role/movie.

It’s basically a compilation type movie, with 3 ‘ghost stories’ within a framing narrative. Starring Paul Whitehouse, The guy from End of the F**ing World, and Martin Freeman.

The first story stressed me out so much I had to stop watching. That’s never happened to me with a horror movie before… maybe I’m getting old. Maybe it was the darkness.
I went back the next night and watched the rest of it, and nothing really stressed me out from that point.

It’s weird, because I’d say the ‘twist’ doesn’t work super well, and most of the scary things we see in the movie are things we’ve seen before in other movies. And it’s the guy from The Fast Show.
But it does a pretty good job of making somewhat generic horror elements scarier than they should be.
You know? That thing where you know exactly what’s going to happen, but when it happens it makes you jump anyway? It’s very good at that.