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The Last Movie(s) You Watched... (quick one or two sentence reviews)

jswert123456

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it was  awesome
still blown away at the digital art in those movies
so much going on and how so much of this is added with a computer.
no wonder the credits are almost as long as the movie
 

The Scribbling Man

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Jaws - First time in years since I've seen this. Great film. The first hour is perfect, the second tends to drag a bit, but is still good nonetheless. 
Very well made and genuinely tense -  how the mighty have fallen. The gap between this and Ready Player One is cavernous.

Also - PG? And yet so many older, tamer movies get a 15 rating (Triffids, Frankenstein - heck Predator should be on Cbeebies at this rate). There are some proper nasty moments in this. I wouldn't let a kid watch it.
 

Sinbad

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^ Can we expect a slighlty trimmed version at some point Scrib? A sacred cow Ithink for me personally, Speilbergs output from Jaws to E.T (ignoring 1941) is pretty much unparelled in my opinion. 

Silence of the Lambs

It still retains much of its power even though its been spoofed to death. The finale is still gripping even after a dozen viewings over the years, I'm suprised Ted Levine didn't become more ubiquitous as a supporting actor after his work in this and 'Heat' too.  I also really like Brian Cox's less theatrical take on Lector  in Manhunter, that's due a rewatch too..
 

The Scribbling Man

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Sinbad said:
^ Can we expect a slighlty trimmed version at some point Scrib? 

I don't plan on it. Although I found the 3rd act a bit lengthy, I'm not sure I'd trust myself to know what to cut. It's long, but it's also filled with lots of great scenes, even if those scenes don't necessarily need to be there.

A sacred cow Ithink for me personally, 

Understandably. It's a very well made film. If I was tempted to touch it, I wouldn't lay a finger on the first hour 15 or so. It's amazing how tense it is and how it creates an atmosphere of danger even when away from the water.
 

Garp

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'Supergirl' [1984]

Not even Helen Slater's radiant beauty is reason enough to sit through this exercise in tedium. A piss-poor origin story that leads to non-action in a very confined arena. Peter O'Toole is a standout amongst a plethora of bad-to-mediocre acting; he may also be just drunk, though. I wondered why I had never got round to seeing this previously. Wonder no more.
 

Q2

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Finally got around to watching Avengers: Age of Ultron. My one word review? Ugh.

I really enjoyed the first Avengers movie but this one stunk. The CG intro was immediately off putting. (I hate when directors do camera work that is physically impossible.) The story wasn't interesting at all, and all the story beats just felt like it was there just to set up the next battle.
 

Masirimso17

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Q2 said:
Finally got around to watching Avengers: Age of Ultron. My one word review? Ugh.

I really enjoyed the first Avengers movie but this one stunk. The CG intro was immediately off putting. (I hate when directors do camera work that is physically impossible.) The story wasn't interesting at all, and all the story beats just felt like it was there just to set up the next battle.

I couldn't disagree more. I love Avengers: Age of Ultron. The story is very interesting, and each action sequence has a thematic and character purpose. The characters are great with a common theme of self-doubt within each of them and thinking of themselves as monsters. I'm adding my detailed thoughts to the other review thread (because this one's a short review one).

Also an Alien (1979) review too. Fantastic movie.
 

TMBTM

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Took me 42 years to finally watch The Deer Hunter.

It belongs to that special kind of beast that you know you will probably not watch many times (or ever again...) but that you're happy to have seen.
The actors are simply amazing. Some scenes are unforgettable. It is simply a must see.
It's just... I have difficulty calling it a masterpiece when I feel I can cut at least 25 minutes without compromising the whole experience.
 

Moe_Syzlak

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TMBTM said:
Took me 42 years to finally watch The Deer Hunter.

It belongs to that special kind of beast that you know you will probably not watch many times (or ever again...) but that you're happy to have seen.
The actors are simply amazing. Some scenes are unforgettable. It is simply a must see.
It's just... I have difficulty calling it a masterpiece when I feel I can cut at least 25 minutes without compromising the whole experience.

I have very mixed feelings about that movie. I do think it’s overlong and racist, but I also think it’s misunderstood. I found this, which I can’t link to for some reason, by someone named Daniel Case, which I feel is a good overview. 

(Spoiler tags for spoilers and to avoid wall of text)

[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]I originally took my interpretation from Danny Peary, whose Guide for the Film Fanatic was my recommended viewing list in college and after (I still recommend it, if you can get your hands on a copy and don’t mind that it stops at 1986, when it came out). He had been an antiwar protester at college in the late 1960s, and as such really hated The Deer Hunter, calling it “infuriating”, in particular for its admittedly racist treatment of the Vietnamese (a widely made criticism at the time, since the Russian-roulette scenes had no basis in reality (in fact, they had come from another script, set in Las Vegas)), its condescension to its working-class characters, as well as its apparently deliberate apoliticality, especially as compared to Coming Home, its rival at that year’s Oscars (Jane Fonda was so upset about her film’s losing the Best Picture Oscar that she refused to shake Cimino’s hand afterwards, and told Vanity Fair in 2008 that she still hadn’t seen The Deer Hunter) and the “puerile” script (the authorship of which is still disputed, Deric Washburn’s WGA-awarded sole credit notwithstanding. He did, however, admit the film was visually powerful and Christopher Walken deserved his Oscar.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]There are other criticisms besides politics, and some of them are legit. The wedding/reception scene does go on too long, foreshadowing Cimino’s Protection From Editors that would be so damaging to Heaven’s Gate. William Goldman, in Adventures in the Screen Tradecalls the movie a comic book, due to so many improbabilities in the last act that most professional screenwriters like himself would have avoided.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]But I’ve also heard from more than a few people who grew up in that kind of rural small-town environment around that time, like my mother (one of her three brothers, the one who couldn’t get a draft exemption, went to Army OCS instead and served a year in-country (when I told another guy I knew who had been in ‘Nam about that, he said he’d like to shake my uncle’s hand, because any 90-day wonder who came back alive deserved a medal just for that)) that the movie’s depiction of the kind of guys who went over there and the culture they’d come out of was realistic. So, I began to wonder if I might have been missing something in The Deer Hunter.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]I now understand that I was. But I think the people who embraced what A.O. Scott called the movie’s “wounded conservatism” are as well.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]A few years ago, I stumbled on this interesting essay by film scholar John Hellman, “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film”, in a 1991 anthology, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]He argues that The Deer Hunter can best understood as a western—but a western that deliberately subverts some of that genre’s tropes to ultimately give us an idea that Vietnam was, for America, a rejection/repudiation of its sustaining myths, many of which have been reproduced and retransmitted over the years by the western, and “the beginning of a mature consciousness”.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]By using so many different locations to create the film’s steel town, Cimino was clearly situating the film on the terrain of myth rather than reality. This was a rather ballsy move for the time, three years after the fall of Saigon, as the protests in response to the film demonstrated—Americans at that time wanted to-the-letter realism, which would have felt honest yet avoided the real self-confrontation The Deer Hunter offers. Yet if you didn’t realize the film was set in some mythic America when the young men from Western PA go hunting in the North Cascades, you have serious problems understanding anything in movies.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]Robert de Niro’s Michael is a classic Western archetype: the “old hero” who is closer to untamed nature than most of the other men in his community, who lives (literally) on its edge, who keeps his romantic distance from the women of the community despite feeling for some of them, and who has through his willingness to live closer to nature obtained skills necessary to protect a community that, like Ethan Ford at the end of The Searchers, he must accept he can never fully be part of.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]Christopher Walken’s Nick, the only one of Michael’s younger friends he really likes because Nick seems to understand how important things like taking down a deer with just one shot are to him, is the corresponding “young hero” who must go into the frontier with the old hero to protect society against external threats (usually, yes, visualized as the Indians, Vietnamese, or other non-whites, but in a deeper sense representing the unconscious), the young hero’s girlfriend Linda being secretly desired by the old hero.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]The Vietnam they go to for this is, Hellman writes, a hell, a nightmarish inversion of their hometown. But there, instead of the usual regeneration through violence committed on the enemy, the heroes are themselves subjected to violence and torture. The captivity experience is central to the narrative rather than peripheral.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]The heroes escape, due to the old hero’s skill (I have assumed when watching the film, more and more, that Michael had some previous service, perhaps even in ‘Nam—look at all the decorations on his uniform later in the film; I don’t think he got them on one tour) But the young hero can no longer reconcile his acceptance of nature with what it turned out to be in Vietnam, and because of this can’t even talk to Linda on the phone. The young hero, who normally because of this experience with the old hero will return to society better able to serve as a husband and father, chooses instead the path of the old hero, unable to fully reintegrate into society, and deserts to play Russian roulette in divey Saigon bars.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]Michael eventually learns the hard way that even he, with all his unique skills, cannot save Nick and bring him back, a realization parallel to the one that irreversibly broke Nick. So, upon his return, this old hero does what the young hero would normally have done, joining society more fully. In refusing to shoot the deer despite a clear shot in the last hunting scene, the one after he comes back, he realizes that he cannot be what he once was.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]The final scene, with Michael sitting at the table and joining everyone in singing “God Bless America”, is where the community accepts his acceptance. “Vietnam is viewed as the self-projected historical nightmare through which American can awaken from its dream of innocence into a mature consciousness”, Hellman writes. That was a view way ahead of where the country was in 1978, but easier to appreciate now, 40 years later.[/font]
[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]Based on this, I have also come to realize that The Deer Hunter is actually a very feminist film, something that seems even more counterintuitive than what I just wrote. If there is enough demand in the comments, I might add it in an edit.[/font]

[font=q_serif, Georgia, Times,]
[/font]
 

TV's Frink

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TMBTM said:
Took me 42 years to finally watch The Deer Hunter.

It belongs to that special kind of beast that you know you will probably not watch many times (or ever again...) but that you're happy to have seen.

I feel that way about Deliverance.
 

The Scribbling Man

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The Lady In The Water - Slow, silly, pretentious, unconvincing and bloated with extremely poor exposition. There are glimmerings of the old Shaman Llama here, and some entertaining performances, but at the end of the day it just doesn't work.
 

Zamros

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Winstanley - Film by Kevin Brownlow about the Diggers, a radical movement of peasants who created non-hierarchical societies on common land, following the English civil war. Pretty good stuff, in between what feels like a feature length version of the Primitive Technology YouTube channel
 

Sinbad

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Anon

Another sci-fi social commentary flick from Andrew Niccol, this time its augmented reality and real-time tracking/recording of everything we do much like the Black Mirror episode 'The entire history of you'. It does its best to weave a detective mystery into the plotline but theres not enough going on here really to warrant a feature length film here.  I'm always interested when Andrew Niccol has a new film in the works, he seems destined to never hit the heights of Gattaca and his Truman Show script again sadly.
 

theryaney

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Primer

Interesting movie with a great premise. Evidently low budget, but it's not a bad movie even with the impossible to understand science-y dialogue. Won't spoil it, but I'll just say that it's intriguing.
 

Moe_Syzlak

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theryaney said:
Primer

Interesting movie with a great premise. Evidently low budget, but it's not a bad movie even with the impossible to understand science-y dialogue. Won't spoil it, but I'll just say that it's intriguing.

Now that you’ve seen it once, check out this timeline and rewatch. 

We recently watch Kodachrome and Hostiles. The former had some good performances but I disliked the movie overall. The latter was very good and I’d recommend.
 

The Scribbling Man

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They Live - Fun sci-fi/social satire that at times feels as if it's aiming for something higher than the B-movie label, and at others settles for being trashy. Great fun and pretty good overall, though the setup is far too glacial. 

^^ A good modern candidate for the B+ Series ^^
 

Sinbad

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^One of my absolute faves John Carpenter's last great movie though I do think Mouth of Madness was a decent horror romp too.  If you have never seen it I highly recommend 'The Hidden' which came out around the same time and has a similar vibe/theme.

One or two other 80's early 90s movies on the 'secret aliens' on earth theme would make a cracking anthology edit.
 

theryaney

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Moe_Syzlak said:
Now that you’ve seen it once, check out this timeline and rewatch. 

giphy.gif


Will do. Thanks. :)
 

The Scribbling Man

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Sinbad said:
If you have never seen it I highly recommend 'The Hidden' which came out around the same time and has a similar vibe/theme.

I'm visiting my brother, who recently bought a bunch of movies - They Live and The Hidden being among them! I have seen The Hidden before and remember liking it. We may well end up watching it while I'm down.
 
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