Movies You Watched Today: 35mm Scan v4.0 Regrade.mkv

[falsedan]

two recents I have to share

The Legend of Ochi
a community living on an island in the Black Sea has very real night monsters that they must defend themselves from. a girl on one of the defense hunting trips accidentally finds a baby ‘ochi’ and seeks to return it to its family

pretty bad. the director does a lot of music videos but this means 90% of scenes are on sound stages covered in moss + fog, with ludicrous post-processing for improbable depth of field. framing and blocking sucked. every scene looked like it was taken straight from the storyboards with no adjustments for the set, a couple of “AI zoom” shots probably copying some generated animatic. I heard people raving about the effects, “you won’t believe how they did this shot”: it’s CGI. wow a bug walks from her hand to the ochi’s hand → all CGI, both hands + the bug

maybe I got a bad 5.1 → 2 downmix, but I think the lead was directed to mumble all of her lines in some semblance of a regional accent. there’s a crew of other youths tagging along with Willem Dafoe (great costume of pseudo-Roman armour) but they do nothing & add nothing to the story, felt like aping a Wes Anderson cast (there are a few wide symmetrical compositions)

I don’t even remember what the point/moral was to the plot. the ochi kind of look like orangutans but the conservation aspect is not really brought up. the lead character’s mother wants to protect the ochi but she does this by living in a shack & talking to no one

would have been a fine comic

[falsedan]

Arco

an Annecy 2025 headliner. a young boy called Arco uses his sister’s flying/time-travel rainbow suit to go see dinosaurs, but crashes in the late 21st century. he is rescued by Iris while a group of three brothers attempt to track him & prove their conspiracy theory correct. Iris’ nanny/carer/servant robot Mikki is involved as the closest thing to a parent (Iris’ actual parents are too busy working to live at home and only appear via telepresense holograms). the typical late anthropocene climate disasters provide the main friction preventing Arco from returning home

obvious sadness in this, loss of family and ecosystem. the three brothers (always sporting rainbow angled sunglasses) turn out to be helpful, which is nice. but I don’t know what or if this was ‘about’ anything

I liked how Mikki’s voice was a blend of a male and female voice, to keep it gender-neutral. then in the credits I noticed a couple of entries for “AI Engineer”. oh no! turns out the voice was generated from the VAs for Iris’ parents

a couple of other, not announced genAI bits too:

gloves, handles, seed packets

I suppose, since this was started 2020, there was less awareness & no idea of what the public opinion of genAI would be. but if I were Ugo Bienvenu I’d have redone these backgrounds

[falsedan]

old movie night has been fruitful, bit behind. here’s one

How to Steal a Million

Peter O’Toole blah blah blah breaks into Audrey Hepburn’s house blah blah steal the family’s forged statue from the museum before it’s tested for authenticity etc. and so on

I last watched this at an old friend’s place where she was fascinated by the striking, funny shots. very good, very fun, very understandable and followable

every other of Hepburn’s outfits was done by Givenchy…

I had to stop commenting on how much brown liquour they were drinking (at lunchtime!). jesus they were necking it down

[SUPERSONNICK]

James Bond — Casin0 R0yale 7:

idk what’s wrong with me, but i didn’t understand why people were raving on about this back when it came out/when i saw it the first time. Gave it a second chance in 2015+, though still didn’t click with me, esp after Spectre … so, third time’s the charme, right?

Wrong.

It’s getting even worse the more time passes! You can tell it didn’t get the carte blanche budget that later titles had and it shows left and right — locations looking B-tier esque, lighting of scenes feels off way too often, Bond-Song is random pop-drivel, shuffling around random locations without connecting tissue almost reaches Transformers-flick levels and since we’re talking about Mr Bay, the epic chase sequence involving the Aston DBS falls so flat on its face that i would LOVE to see what Bay could have gotten out of this … and the Fancy Gadgets feel horribly outdated even then. General feel of the whole thing is B-tier movie material, so

Maybe that’s what people see in it, it reminds them of the old Bond movies that weren’t exactly cinematic masterpieces — it is a deliberate choice!

I tell myself, but even then — you can do better than this. Timed myself when i was checking the remaining running time, and the first time was after 13 minutes already, then 35m, 47ish, 1h08m, 1h40m, 1h46m, 1h55m … The Pokering didn’t make my heart race, neither the Vesper × Bond Lovestory, and Mads Mikkelsen slapping Craig’s balls doesn’t exactly make me swoon either. So instead of finally getting it and upgrading my rating from 2 s, got a downgrade to 1.5 instead.

Call me a hater, alright, but e.g. both Jack Reachers or even the first Transformers movie manage to look better/less dated, have better pacing (even TF1! From Monsieur Bay!!!), are more solid experiences all around … going to work my way through the remaining Craig Bonds, it can only get better from here.

[falsedan]

that movie was “for the fans”

[winkerwatson]

@SUPERSONNICK

it can only get better from here.

Lol

[SUPERSONNICK]

Spectre has at least Mr. Waltz, so a man can dream!…. until proven otherwise.

[MintyJuffowup]

I am the architect of all your pain.

[Gimelrey]

that line was sam mendes breaking the fourth wall

[villain]

I finally got around to watching Ford v. Ferrari. I saw the last like, 25 minutes of it on TV at a hotel, and figured I’d watch the rest when I got home. It was OK. I think the scenes involving Christian Bale’s character’s family were kind of boring. I think I would’ve preferred a bit more about Shelby’s history leading up to the events of the movie because they don’t really go into it all that much, so I have no frame of reference for this dude other than he won Le Mans once, his heart sucks, and he’s got a pretty bitchin’ pair of shades.

Apparently, you can get these for like, $300, but I think anything more than ~$30 for sunglasses is outrageous. You’re just gonna lose, break, or scratch up the goddamn things and have to replace them anyway.

60s race cars look way cooler than modern race cars. I also love the orange and baby blue colorway, it’d be rad on a guitar.

---

I watched Happiness a few weeks back; a friend had mentioned it was one of her favorite movies so I had been meaning to check it out but it took me a few years. I was expecting something like, Noah Baumbach-esque based on the synopsis and the time it came out, but uhh… the humor was a lot, you know, like, edgier than I was really expecting. I don’t know if I cared all that much for it.

I am.

[extrabastardformula]

Watched the Fisher King

Years after his suicide, seeing Robin Williams playing someone self destructive and unhinged hits different. It’s shot well and well acted, but it’s just relentlessly sad. It’s a snapshot of the end of the eighties. There’s a whole lot of movie here, and coming in at two and a quarter hours it still feels like a lot was cut.

The plot involves a delusion of being characters from the King Arthur cycle of stories come to life in America, and that will somehow redeem the two main characters, Jeff Bridges as a radio shock jock who is more Bill Hicks than Howard Stern and Robin Williams as a former professor who reivents himself as a knight errant after his wife’s death.

They both get love interests, Merceded Ruhl plays Jeff’s girlfriend who tries to keep Jeff grounded while Robin Williams drags him through a bizarre fantasy that requires the two of them to team up to steal the holy grail from a billionaire investment banker. Robin Williams’ interest is barely there and exists to show him that he can love again. I probably would have loved it if I were in the right headspace, but I wasn’t when I watched it.

If you want to see how low of rock bottom a couple dudes can get before getting ruminations on the nature of redemption, if it is real or acheivable or even necessary, and if it is an abstract concept why should it require anything real, than this might be for you. It’s directed by Terry Gilliam and stars Robin Williams so you’ll likely have expectations.

[LaurelSoup]

Sunrise

Margaret Livingston > Janet Gaynor

[vodselbt]

About to walk into Sirat. Don’t know nothin about it.

[GherkinForce]

I similarly went into it knowing nothing except what my friend described as ‘like a Moroccan Mad Max’. Which definitely did not prepare me for what the movie actually was about

[GherkinForce]

Reminds me of how I went into Parasite expecting a sci-fi movie, and when the rock is shown at the start I was like “yep that’s where the alien parasites will come out of”. Then like an hour later I was “they sure are taking their time with the aliens”

[vodselbt]

lol this is such a funny misunderstanding. thanks for sharing.

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Sirat was great I thought. Slight characters and contrived situations, but ultimately a really existential movie about apocalypse. Great soundtrack!! Super intense.

[swarm]

Oops it’s a bit late (nobody cares) but here’s

SWARM’S TOP 20 FILMS OF 2025

1. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
2. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
3. Redux Redux
4. Marty Supreme
5. One Battle After Another
6. Train Dreams
7. Zootopia 2
8. Good Boy
9. By Design
10. Bugonia
11. The Mastermind
12. Sentimental Value
13. Mickey 17
14. The Golden Spurtle
15. Your Friend Logan
16. The Phoenician Scheme
17. Father Mother Sister Brother
18. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
19. Sorry, Baby
20. Rental Family

[Rudie]

An image collage of Doraemon 2026 now in theaters:

[hellojed]

Time Bandits - which is basically one long Monty Python sketch that goes into another. Shelly Duvall is pretty great in it as a reoccurring character.

[Ghosto]

I have a very vivid and good memory of seeing the very end of this movie when I was 15