@sleeping gorilla - I don’t think we can top “Hagsploitation”. It’s just too good haha.

I saw The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

There are a lot of memes being made of that movie!
- The one where buster makes the guy shoot himself by flipping a board on a table with his boot and also the one where the condemned guy looks over at another condemned man and says “first time?”


Good film by the Cohen brothers.
It's a bunch of western vignettes, short stories basically. Some provide a very realistic take on the old west and some a much more stylised version, including musical interludes.

One of my faves was the Tom Waits gold prospector story.
After decades of imitating a gravely voiced, grungy old guy Tom has FINALLY turned into one for real. This is the role he was born for.
He even sings a few old west folk songs and his voice it beautiful! It's matured a lot and far better than the fake gravelly version he used to use as a pop singer. Just a really good performance all round by Mr Waits.
It was also a really clever and realistic look at how old style prospective/gold mining worked.

The only think that didn't appeal to me were all the head shots… It's a Cohen film so they love their gritty murders though so you have to expect it.

Netflix mini-series The Watcher with Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Mia Farrow, and a cast of many….watched all 7 epi's and still no idea who the watcher was…anyone know?

moizmad wrote:
Netflix mini-series The Watcher with Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Mia Farrow, and a cast of many….watched all 7 epi's and still no idea who the watcher was…anyone know?

I am doing my annual Horror marathon which includes “The Watcher” it is apparently a real, unsolved case. It was good, but I would warn anyone interested in it that it will piss you off in the end. (I think it was the Dad.)

moizmad wrote:

Netflix mini-series The Watcher with Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Mia Farrow, and a cast of many….watched all 7 epi's and still no idea who the watcher was…anyone know?

Just saw the Netflix preview for this. I was quite intrigued until seeing that it was from “The Creator of American Horror Story”. Much as I wanted to watch this I know how that guy's stories play out, kind of all over the place and not delivering.

So I appreciate the insight scoop on this! I may still watch but with
the right expectations. It's interesting that it's based on a true case.

Watching a new series on Amazon Prime: Peripheral
It supposedly based on a William Gibson story.

I'm only a few minutes in so far but I'm a bit disappointed (hopefully this will change!). It says it's set in 2099 but all the clothing, hair, cars, architecture and technology are just the stuff we have now. Zero effort has been put in. Nothing.

Their only idea of futurisim is to make VR games more sophisticated (like they've been doing in movies since the 1950s). It seems they think giving people Bluetooth headphones, a Roomba and a print shop that does 3D prints is enough to make it futurisic :(

Imagine… It's set 80 year in the future, that's the same space of time between us and 1940! And just look how culture, technology and fashion have changed since then!

I may be judging it too harsh from the beginning. There could be a good reason for this. Or it could just be lazy and terrible prop people like in Firefly, where they used old unmodified 20th century machineguns and pretended they were laser blasters.

—–

Giving it the benifit of the doubt;
My theory is that the show actually takes place in only the near future (hence the low effort with props and costumes), but the scene at the very beginning was a flash forward to 2099, in the virtual world.

The scenario of the show is that people interact in a virtual world. And it's better than the real world, which is drab… So nothing original there.
Hopefully it expands on the premise.

Ozoneocean wrote:

I'm watching Vox Machina on Amazon Prime.
It's a fantasy comedy based on Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, with D&D type characters.
I'm only watching it because I played the game for the first time with Banes, Em, Pit, Tantz, and Gunwallace. The show itself sets my teeth on edge, for a number of reasons, chief of which is the mixed tone: silly childish 5 year old level humour about people liking sandwiches and being a bid dumb doofus (for example) mixed with anal sex jokes.
It's so jarring and awkward it's like fingernails on a blackboard.

That's bad writing.

Started watching it myself. Yes, all that's awful with the the RPG community. Even down to everyone using “fuck ” every other word because isn't that what adults do?

It's the same D&D group every fantasy RPG show has. Hit all the character races and their only difference is pointed ears and height. My auto spell put “they're” for “their”. That is about Vox Machina's speed.

Oh and of course the elves had their village wiped out by a dragon and so have to kill this one. Sorry GATE: and the JSDF fought did the definitive version of that trope. They own it, here it's meh.

And the fourteen year old 9th grade idea of bad ass. Right. Guess it doesn't help that I rewatching GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka at the same time. GTO teaches a 9th grade class.

I'll watch it because the animation is done by the same studio that does Lower Decks and without Paramount and only Amazon prime it's all I got. :D

bravo1102 wrote:
Started watching it myself. Yes, all that's awful with the the RPG community. Even down to everyone using “fuck ” every other word because isn't that what adults do?

It's the same D&D group every fantasy RPG show has. Hit all the character races and their only difference is pointed ears and height.

It's happened.

We have reached full concord! I agree with ALLLLLL of that.
Even GTO (love it), and Lower Decks (awesome).
Gate is the best and Vox Machina is hyper-cringe.

OK, I finished watching the first episode of Peripheral-
It IS all set in 2099 so the fact they're using 2022 technology, fashion, hairstyles, slang etc IS indeed shit.

Maybe their idea is that because the action starts off in a Hillbillyville in the Appalachian mountains that new tech and culture hasn't really disseminated their yet…? But only a moron would think that. At most, isolated communities in a world that very connected are only a 0ne or two years behind, not 80.

Seriously, go back in time 100 years and look at photos and things of the furthest places in the world and tiny little towns- the people there were up to date with the same tech and fashion as everyone else. (unless they were culturally separated like Amish or people stuck in an Indonesian fishing village).

-This is something I've actively done. I've looked at heaps of old photos checking to see if fashions and hairstyles were consistent across regions. What I EXPECTED to see was that they wouldn't be. I expected more isolated areas to be quite behind and older people to be in older styles- I didn't find that at all, I was amazed to see instead that people tended to be up with the latest styles and older people just as much as the younger ones, plus the latest tech spread just as much.

———-

Apart from the LAZY prop and costume work (there may yet be an explanation for it…), the story is good as is the acting, casting, and writing.

I watched Halloween Ends (13). I am a fan of the original movie, and that is pretty much it. Without giving too much away, it is not a bad film by any means, but is a complete failure as a franchise “ending”.



(spoiler)
It is a tragic romance of all things. Laurie Strode's granddaughter gets involved with a young man who is being ruthlessly bullied by the high school marching band. Michael Myers is in the movie for about 15 minutes, and part of that is him getting jumped and mugged.
(/spoiler)

Forces of Nature

Forgettable romance film starting Ben Afleck and Sandra Bullock. The title refers to a couple of storms that show up and bother everyone and also Bullock's character, who is pretty wilful and commanding in a lot of ways…

She's basically a more realistic version of the “manic pixie dreamgirl”- This is thought of as a male fantasy of a young woman with no real responsibilities, who comes into a man's life and forces him to try new things, often going on a bunch of whimsical adventures…
It's not a fantasy really, rather it's just a matter of perspective: The world is a huge place with a lot of personality types and there are plenty of people who fit into all sorts of tropes, either by accident or choice.

Bullock's character is a less whimsical version of this trope. I've known plenty of people like this.

who comes into a man's life and forces him to try new things, often going on a bunch of whimsical adventures…

I think I saw 2/3 of that film like 18 years ago. I remember sort of liking it. Like she had worse romantic comedies. But now that I think about it, what you're describing is very much my favorite type of personality when it comes to women (with occasional differences here and there) so who knows, that might be a factor.

InkyMoondrop wrote:

who comes into a man's life and forces him to try new things, often going on a bunch of whimsical adventures…

I think I saw 2/3 of that film like 18 years ago. I remember sort of liking it. Like she had worse romantic comedies. But now that I think about it, what you're describing is very much my favorite type of personality when it comes to women (with occasional differences here and there) so who knows, that might be a factor.

They're a much loved character trope, but some people find them really irritating. XD
For people who think they're totally based on fiction I'm sad for them that their life experience has never been wide enough that it included those sorts of people :(

The film DID have one notable and interesting aspect to it though…
SPOILER:

The husband to be gets lost on the way to his wedding and hooked up with a wild woman who imposes herself on hm and shows him new things. Meanwhile the wife to be rekindles things with an old flame who was a “true love” sort of character…
The twist is that both he and his wife to be still marry at the end because they ARE “supposed to be together” and the wild woman and true love are left by the wayside…
That was usual, but didn't really redeem the film.

The best parts of the film were the slow motion storm scenes, especially the hail. They're quite beautiful.

Guillermo del toros cabinet of curiosities.

It's a horror anthology and in many ways reminds me of others I've seen before, hell I've even seen another version of one of the stories in a horror anthology. Even so this was vastly superior to that version of dreams in the witches house.

Overall I really enjoyed it, great production values and all of them are decent, but some are definitely stronger than others. There's a definite a love of Lovecraft on show.

Ozoneocean wrote:
I saw Blade the other day for the first time. After all these years I finally saw it!

I saw Blade when I was much too young to see it. Awesome film my Friend who's a comic collector loves it as well. It still holds up today IMO, some of the CG looks a bit rough at times but that's to be expected considering it was made in the 90s.

To be fair it looked rough back then too, but it was a modest budget movie.

90s cg wasn't always terrible, but it had to be done very well to have much chance to hold up in 4k.

I was disappointed at first, couldn't find an old 5-part favorite on youtube anymore. But someone uploaded a remastered version of it, God bless his soul! You should check out “Puppet Rapist”. I know it sounds bad, but it's actually really well done.

Time for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I powered through Andor. I have been done with Star Wars since the prequels 20 years ago. The Mandalorian was pretty good.

This, however, is a boring slog that suffers from Battlestar Galactica syndrome. We have no story, so we'll have everyone talk in intense whispers so what they are saying sounds important. If anybody notices we will tell them they don't like it because our show is too smart for them.

Seriously, NOTHING happens for the first 5 hours. I would just skip to the heist episode, you won't miss anything. Who greenlights this boring trash?

Ouch. Never figured I'd run into someone who outright hates my favorite sci-fi series. Well, I guess that's life.

THE WEEKEND AWAY - Leighton Meester, Christina Wolfe, Ziad Bakri,Luke Norris, and many more unknowns. Leighton and Christina travel from their home in London to Croatia for a weekend getaway but Christina suddenly disappears after a night out clubbing. She is found dead from drowning and Leighton is #1 suspect. Husband Luke isn't much help and she finds out he was having an affair with Christina. First looks like police man killed Christina but we will discover who the actual killer was. Not a bad watch getting 2 3/4 on the Moizmeter.

moizmad wrote:
THE WEEKEND AWAY

I wonder if that was loosely based on the female tourist who was found drowned and floating in the sea in Dubrovnik?


————

Vacation.
This is a sort of a remake/sequel to National Lampoons Vacation, starring Chevy Chase.
This one stars Ed Helms and Christina Applegate as the hapless couple.
The address the sequel/remake aspect explicitly IN the movie, explaining that it's “the same. but different”. That's funny and honest of them.
“This one has 2 boys instead of a boy and a girl” LOL

Ed Helms plays “Rusty”, the son of Clark Griswold from the first movie. He's dorky and uptight sort of like Clark was (NOT like Rusty was though), and he basically plays the same character he did in The Office (American version), the Hangover movies and everything else I've seen him in: Upper middle class, uptight, timid, hapless and wound up.

There are many, many cameos in this from popular sitcoms, it's a star studded cast. Too many to name.
Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo return as Rusty's parents, living in San Francisco in a small cameo near the end.

It's not as glorious as the original or the sequels of course, but it's a good modern addition to the old trilogy.



Personally, I would have liked to see the original Rusty (preferably played by Anthony Michael Hall, or in a pinch Ed Helms), with his own original personality instead of Clark Grizwald's. It felt weird that the stupid, horny Rusty grew up to be SOOOOOooo different in his way of acting and thinking. Really weird. Maybe that's just me?

Top Gun: Maverick
I have to say I didn't remember the first movie at all, but I never really loved it anyway. Still, the hype was great for this second one, I gave it a shot. It's pretty much what I expected, just a little over two hours of Tom Cruise schooling everyone one how to be the ultimate macho (the whole acting tough thing by the way just feels out of touch with how people tease each other these days, it faintly reminded me of gang members from West Side Story), where getting shot down brings long-standing and dramatic consequences, so the enemy is almost never shown dying and their deaths are always justified, where most characters are sidelined and only exist in the context of this mission so the movie can just focus on the main conflict… and even the angry-looking superiors have to come around eventually and admit that they're wrong and man, what a macho Tom Cruise is.

Yeah, it looks good, yeah, it has its tense scenes (even though it's extremely predictable), sure, people who loved the first one or just the whole flying / air force theme are all over it, but it's the simple, family-friendly entertainment that makes sure you'll take your son to watch it because it reminds you of your dreams when you were his age. I think I'm gonna watch The Mighty Ducks films, those are similar, they just don't take themselves as seriously.

Re: Maverick:

Turn off brain and watch it for the airplanes. F-18 Super Hornets just aren't Tomcats though. Oh, and join the Navy ‘cause like you could do this too!

Did we mention join the Navy?

And Oz, plenty of horny stupid teenagers turn into geeky, uptight adults. It’s called responsibility. I used to be like what? Well that was before marriage, mortgage and kids. It's a trope in the “rediscover the fun you had as a kid” and “eek, I grew up and turned into my parents” movies.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
Top Gun: Maverick

I saw the first one when it came out, and I despised it. I think I'll be giving the second one a skip.

Watching the Mario Movie trailer on repeat. But only the Bowser scenes.

Because… it's Bowser… and he's allowed to talk.

Bowser wasn't allowed to talk since Sunshine. Even Wreck-It-Ralph muted him, which is utter BS. You'd think the one Disney movie about videogame characters would have loosened Nintendo's tightness with its IP cashcows. Nah, they'd rather throw them to the wolves that spawed the Minions plague. Life is weird.

Oh and i guess Mario talks too but who cares, Mario never had a personality. Bowser used to be hilarious and utterly steal the show in every Mario RPG. I want the age of funny Bowser back.

fallopiancrusader wrote:

InkyMoondrop wrote:
Top Gun: Maverick

I saw the first one when it came out, and I despised it. I think I'll be giving the second one a skip.

Having had a girlfriend who would routinely quote Meg Ryan from Top Gun “you big stud, take me to bed or lose me forever” I can't hate the movie that much.

And Tomcats.

Though I served with some ex-carrier crew and jet jockeys really can be such self-absorbed arrogant pricks. Fact inspiring fiction and then rubbing back off on reality. This is true even going back to the days of Phantoms and Scooters in the 1960s. Supposedly the culture was different when flight groups all had fans up front. (Propeller planes) It's a culture all to its own and really hard for outsiders to see anything but those jet jockey strutting bastions of machismo like in Top Gun. Give me HOT SHOTS! any day.

I thought I saw Elvis!
Let it go Topper, the king is gone.

bravo1102 wrote:

…Though I served with some ex-carrier crew and jet jockeys really can be such self-absorbed arrogant pricks. Fact inspiring fiction and then rubbing back off on reality. This is true even going back to the days of Phantoms and Scooters in the 1960s. Supposedly the culture was different when flight groups all had fans up front. (Propeller planes) It's a culture all to its own and really hard for outsiders to see anything but those jet jockey strutting bastions of machismo like in Top Gun…

Haha I know what you mean. Back when I was a skydiver, I ran into many arrogant pricks and bastions of machismo in that community as well. I couldn't stand them.

I gave the Ginger Snaps series a shot not expecting much. I remember seeing these movies at Blockbuster for years even though they apparently came out in 2001-2004.

It is easy to dismiss this as The Craft with Werewolves. I did not know that it was written and directed by John Fawcett, who was involved in Being Erica and created Orphan Black. Tatiana Maslany, who starred in Orphan Black and had a part in Being Erica, has a starring role in Ginger Snaps Unleashed. No, I am not going to talk about She-Hulk. The point is that he has a good record for writing female characters.

Ginger Snaps is something I would expect from Blumhouse. Low budget but free from the constraints of Hollywood. Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are excellent in these movies, they are probably the most convincing sisters I have ever seen on film.

The titles are also deceptively clever. Ginger Snaps is about Brigette trying to help her sister Ginger after a wolf attack. This is an allegory for Ginger starting to pull ahead of Brigette socially, attracting boys for the first time, and it quickly turned tragic for them.

Ginger Snaps Unleashed deals with the fallout of the first movie and is an actual sequel, not just a remake. Brigette has to become tougher now that Ginger is gone as she evades another Werewolf and deals with her own infection. You miss the chemistry between the sisters, but that is the point. Bridgette is now “Unleashed.” Get it?

The third movie is set in the early 1800s with Perkins and Isabelle back together as their own ancestors. I am watching it while writing this review. The nearest thing I can compare it to is the little-known Guy Pierce movie Ravenous, which came out a few years before. This is sort of a reset of Brigett and Ginger but the sisters are on more even ground.

I like that the Werewolves are depicted as disgusting monsters and are only briefly shown in any of the movies. I think you only see the GingerWolf entirely for a few seconds in the first film.

THE STRANGER - Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Jada Alberts and a bunch of cops undercovers. Australian film and I suggest turning on sub-titles as I could only make out about 1/2 what anyone said. Sean is suspected of a brutal murder of a young boy 8 years ago. Cop Joel is assigned to befriend Sean and gain his confidence in investigating minor offences not related to the murder. Slowly he introduces Sean to a mess of crooks who are actually police. Whoa, how many cigarettes does Sean smoke during filming. Finally Joel gets Sean to confess and show where it happened. Hundreds of police looking for evidence near crime scene, all that for 1 murder 8 years ago. Still a not bad watch getting a 3 on the Moizmeter.