Topic: Latest Movie You Watched

[8ullfrog]

I admire the care you present your hardware. My MBP was killed by a beverage in the keyboard, and then living in a smoking household. Getting that hard drive out would be a bless'ed nightmare.

Mom's G4 powerbook is flat out dented inward, her optical drive is a bless'ed memory, but the machine booted up just fine the last time I turned it on.

I've been cautioned by smarter people not to take the G4 book online, and I defer to their expertise. Still, THAT notebook was impressive. I did use it for some router nonsense a while back, Internet was down, they said it was fine, I did some poo in a terminal and proved it was not fine, they rolled a van. It was a whole thing.


Back to movies though. ahem

I got a fat stack of DVD's outside goodwill the other day, and I wanted to get my mom off her youtube/news cycle that seems to just exist to upset her.

So I threw on "No country for old men". Coen brothers! Raising Arizona! The Big Lebowski! This will be a laugh and a half!

It was not a laugh and a half. My mom asked me to explain why the man with the shitty haircut was carrying around the tank... and honestly I want to know too.

from an outside standpoint, that's a captive bolt pistol, used to stun or execute livestock.

There wasn't much argument for gun control circa 1980, so that's not why he uses it. I found it somewhat interesting when he busted out a deadbolt with it, I didn't know there was that much force behind the thing.

Anyway, the movie felt like a pressure cooker to me, and not a pleasant thriller by any means. I believe the film deserves every award it was nominated for, but I found it deeply unsettling and I hated it. I walked away shortly after Chigur backs down from the trailer park manager lady. He was clearly going to murder the poo out of her, and stopped when the toilet flushed. I decided that was my cue to stop watching.

Oddly enough, the experiment worked! Mom came out of the viewing feeling alert and clear from the cowpoo fog politics and network news had put her in.

We watched the pilot of "What we do in the shadows". I sadly found it less amusing than the first viewing. She likes that the vampires are all stupid.

[6pairsofshoes]

No Country for Old Men is a good film but pretty tense.  I don't know that I'd watch it to get me away from the disturbing news cycle.  I can hardly go onto FB these days as it's primarily a constant stream of rage against Donald Trump.  Right now, I don't see the point of wondering if he can walk gracefully down a ramp or drink water with one hand.  And the incessant series of articles about Covid 19, punctuated by photos of people's dinners, gardens, children, grandkids.

I have plants that have to be weeded.  That works in lieu of movies.  I'm glad that the film got your mother out of the funk.  I don't know that the vampire comedy would hold up to multiple viewings, but the vampires are charmingly stupid in an old world way.  When I took French, my instructor liked to help illustrate short phrases by using books from The Stupids series of children's books.  The first one, "The Stupids Step Out," kind of sets up a trope that What We do in the Shadows could be following, except there's no smart vampire killer familiar or energy sucking cubicle inhabiting roommate.

[smokester]

Just for the sake of it we thought we'd watch Artemis Fowl as the cast and budget made the ratings hard to believe.

What an utter pile of steaming, rancid horse crap. That is at least an hour and a half of my life that I'm never getting back and, believe me, I'd file for it if I could.

If Dame Judy dies this year, her life would be a failure as this movie would be what she is remembered for. Let's hope she can pick it up and get back to some level of self-respect.

Battlefield Earth just climbed up off the bottom.

[6pairsofshoes]

From Alex Garland, the guy who brought you Devs, Annihilation.   With Natalie Portman.

Aliens, in the form of a mysterious prismatic structure that looks like an art student's idea of LSD hallucinations take over a lighthouse in some odd undisclosed location that also is surrounded by a swamp and cypress trees.  It manages to eat or kill everyone that attempts to penetrate it.  Nice CGI work so the settings are pretty and prismatic.  Lots of flowers, fauna and fungi.  Five strong, intelligent women go on a mission to get to the bottom of this since it's threatening to engulf the earth and other inconveniences. 

There are ugly CGI gators and bears that consume people in a predictable fashion.  The script is like: Day 1:  explore the odd landscape and sleep; Day 2:  explore more and meet a scary mutated creature that eats somebody;  Day 3:  people start acting irrational and another mutated creature eats someone else while you discover some creepy mutated stuff growing on concrete and images from a memory card of not so happy developments of people who were sent earlier.  I had to fast forward through parts of it because who has that much time?  It was dull and predictable in its monster movie structure.  There's a twist at the end where you just scratch your head and say, "are you shitting me with this glued on coda?" 

All of this is interlaced with flashbacks to purportedly happy marriage with guy who is main love interest and while this business is going on is fighting for his life from a cluster of odd symptoms.  I don't know how it compares to Artemis Fowl, but that's a couple hours of my llfe that could have been better spent teaching myself to play the cello or something similar.  If I were Artemis, I'd soon unleash the hounds on this one.

[8ullfrog]

Did you miss the corruption aspect? Or did I just read a weird review?

Like they said people were melting together and poo, the skull bear absorbed the voice of a dead person. I'm not one for psychedelic films, so I gave it a pass.

I did read that one lady found out other people were turning into trees and decided to die and become a tree. That's some weird poo.

I just remember you were annoyed by the anti-radiation meds in BSG.

I don't blame you for fast forwarding though, I read the whole thing was a bless'ed downer.

I watched the preview for Artemis god damn golly spelling that name, and it just seemed like lame attempt to retread the Harry Potter market. That didn't go so well for Percy Jackson or even the harry potter spinoff.

Like they go for wonder and whimsy and output poo and annoyance.

I've heard the kid is an absolute bottom criminal in the books, but I'm not one much for YA lit. And I like bottom criminal protagonists.

[6pairsofshoes]

No.  I didn't miss it.  I guess I was tired.   The prism seemed to be refracting DNA and people were turning into plants that looked like vines in human form, there was the scene with some kind of odd moving intestines inside the guy and the end where the revived husband turned out not to be the husband but the duplicate caused by some kind of melding or duplication with the prism.

That leads us to the unresolved ending.  Are the two main characters alien copies of the original people?  I've never been sure about introducing spoilers and didn't know how far to push it.  Since I can not really recommend this film, I can leave it there for you.  The CGI was pretty odd.  And the scene of Portman staring into the oddly rotating cone in the basement of the lighthouse that takes a drop of blood and does the replica thing with it was disturbing but so clumsy. 

The comment that her husband made at the beginning of the film about seeing her in the room and coming into it, as how he got home, etc. sort of lays out a clue for this, but he's dying with liquifying innards, so they get bundled into an ambulance, hijacked by the army and then the whole adventure begins.  Later we see him attempting to burn the replica in the lighthouse video camera.

If you can make better sense of this than I did, I'm all ears.  I just thought it was a good idea that got poorly executed.  Devs was a great deal better.  Garland seems like a thoughtful innovative producer, but this film didn't work.  Mostly I fast forwarded through the ineffective flashbacks of intimate exchanges between Portman and her husband.  They had no chemistry and the scenes just seemed forced, like "these two were really in love so this will be a real tragedy if this alien force separated them forever, sniff..."  Snore.

[goldshirt*9]

watched Schindlers list with number one son, his first time

[smokester]

I've been in Schindler's lift:

All of them, at the same time, no doubt.

[Beatrix]

The 5th underworld.  I was disappointed by the last two, mostly.  Kate beckinsale doesn't get old though, her character celiene gaining powers just like a vampire masquerade game is pretty cool, although.

[goldshirt*9]

All of them, at the same time, no doubt.

though i would see that again 

[smokester]

I finally got round to watching The Lobster tonight.

Some time in the near future I'm hoping my sanity will return.

[goldshirt*9]

I finally got round to watching The Lobster tonight.

Some time in the near future I'm hoping my sanity will return.

I gave up at around 40 mins.

[6pairsofshoes]

You probably should have had some melted butter on hand.

[goldshirt*9]

Hard hitting film, struggled with the accent though. Surprised to see Usher in it

[goldshirt*9]

Had to watch as i have read the book based upon Red Platoon
No bad attempt at a Afghanistan conflict movie.