I can’t blame anyone for mixing them up, I know I did at the time, but it is very funny how twice in this thread there has been Looper/Jumper confusion.
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I still can’t quite believe the Willis makeup they put on poor old Joe. The movie (which starts strong and gets worse as it goes on) would be like 15% more watchable if they just let him keep his face.
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the golden buddha (1966) - shaw bros spy film with a really charming mix of on location bangkok filming and extremely artificial and colourful stage sets. it is probably like 30mins too long despite this but has two extremely redeeming features: the crazy dracula-cape-and-gold-jumpsuit costumeof the leader of the evil Skeleton Gang, and a lair that looks like it’s from 5000 fingers of dr t but with more skull decals around
(in a surprise twist the main baddie takes off a mask at the end and turns out to be Fist Of Fury director Lo Wei)
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Great to see Mila Jovovich, always, but her latest film Protector is not as good as you would hope it would be when you hear the premise is her rescuing her daughter from traffickers using all her black ops military training and brutality. It has like one incredible chase sequence, and a few other Wick-ian farces in the rest of the film. Mediocre through and through, from production, to performances, to wasted concept.
Except! for the wild turn in the end which basically says Mila has become a zombie or Jason Voorhese type slasher figure for pederist traffickers, unable to know when to stop because of the trauma she has experienced.
Always and forever locking and loading, rescuing her daughter. Savior. Protector.
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dog movie is actually so fucking funny. trans roomate drama that gets really bad once the couple who are letting someone stay on their couch get a dog with the same name as the houseguest
low budget, takes place mostly inside the house and front yard. but its super self aware and pokes fun at itself in a really endearing way
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honestly while this does sound like primo slop I would not complain if they made 11 more movies where mila kills pedophiles. if fucking sniper can get 12 sequels then why cant shit like this
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you only live twice - or so it seems, one life for yourself, and one for your dreams. a very beautiful and enigmatic statement which only seems moreso in the context of james bond, a man possessing no dreams or other form of interiority whatsoever. good for him. i like the idea of theme songs that seem to come from a totally different aesthetic dimension, like, what if the credits summary rap described characters and plot events that weren’t in the movie, reached a different moral conclusion etc…? anyway this was ok. britain’s postwar armament stockpile finally discovers its purpose in the form of “things for james bond to fly around or have sex on”.
the elevator - eric roberts IS the elevator, or is stuck in the elevator, fun late period robertsploitation that gives you what you want (eric roberts stuck in an elevator, wailing, muttering, writing a will, etc). in return his UNGRATEFUL family learn how much they should stop giving him a hard time for working late, missing birthdays etc… the title card says “based on a true event” and i sort of picture it as like someone being stuck in a lift for an hour and getting out and being cranky that nobody they tell really cares or seems interested in their story. ok but what if i’d been stuck in a lift for five hours and had almost DIED?? and everyone was around my hospital bed crying, don’t go, we love you.. we appreciate you, we should have listened to you more, listened to your story about the elevator… we agree now that it was interesting… don’t go in the elevator!!
a good theme song written by somebody’s cousin. i know youtube comments are their own thing but it’s funny to see hundreds of ride or die eric roberts fans talking about how he’s not like the other liberal media celebritie$ etc on the basis of his cheerful, unusually reliable presence in the mulchy cinematic tubiverse. mr roberts, give word to your supporters. the capital can be yours inside 72 hours.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Cartoons 3: The Animation
I think I had Election and Election 2 on my to-watch list because of someone’s recommendation years ago on SB, and I finally got around to seeing them this week.
I was expecting crime action movies, and I was surprised by and impressed with the heavy themes and oppressive bleakness. The second one is almost a horror movie.
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I love the Election duology. The best portrayal of politics I’ve ever seen in a movie
I saw the movie Hokum today with a friend. I went in totally blind. After about 5 minutes, I realized it would be yet another “the monster is grief” type movie. Those are a dime a dozen in the post Hereditary era. But after about 25 minutes, I found an aspect of the film I really appreciated. Once Adam Scott arrives at the spooky hotel, it becomes clear the director LOVES survival horror games. I’ve only played about 20 minutes of Silent Hill but from the way people talk about that series, it feels a lot like it. Same withAlan Wake
Once I started thinking of the movie as an adaptation of some non-existent PS2 survival horror game, I had a great time . My favorite part of the film was legit the 20 minute sequence near the middle where Adam Scott solves what is essentially a Resident Evil playstation one era puzzle.
So if you think of it as a survival horror fan film, it’s pretty dang fun
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been on an early 2000s bollywood kick the past few weeks - just nostalgia i guess. did a couple SRK movies and one Hrithik Roshan
kaho naa… pyaar hai (2000) – ***
no one has ever danced as good as hrithik roshan in bollywood, his rhythm and sense of choreo timing is standard deviations above everyone else in the industry and in this movie. there are even some scenes that look to be filmed at higher speed and then slowed down to provide a dramatic effect, and even at the higher speed you can see he is hitting every beat PRECISELY on point. it’s unbelievable. just rewatch the song “Ek Pal Ka Jeena” on youtube, it’s insane. amazing y2k fashion looks as well
seriously check this shit out
KNPH is just a generally sweet confectionary fun sort of movie, it’s not a groundbreaking plot or narrative, but as a launch vehicle for hrithik’s career it was very effective. he’s got that movie star energy every time he appears, he literally looks like prince charming was a real human being and his characters have a sweet sort of harmlessness about them that is lacking in so many other bollywood stars of this era. everyone in this story is basically on his side apart from the few gangsters who are trying to kill him for various silly plot reasons. some of the songs are really good. i watched the north american cut which apparently deletes several scenes for length but whatever, i didn’t miss them
it was really good when rohit is running away from the gangsters trying to kill him and bonks directly into a concrete pillar knocking himself out. feels something like i would do
–
before that i watched a few shah rukh khan movies, also with K names for some reason
kabhi khushi kabhie gham – ****
the best “worst” movie ever. much more bearable than other srk movies, his usual male manipulator shtick is greatly reduced which gives time for excellent and endearing character turns among kajol, hrithik roshan, and kareena kapoor (whose it girl antics are really great). so sappy it wraps back around to being deeply heartfelt and genuine. also does the classic bollywood thing of talking around caste (sure, you’re disowning your son because his girlfriend talks too loud and dances in the street or whatever, uh huh) but really has a lot in common with Shakespearian modes of drama so it’s fine, we can make our own reads of the movie.
In short, K3G is about a rich family torn apart by its patriarch’s intolerance; playboy elder son who happens to be adopted (Shah Rukh Khan) falls for a girl from the streets (Kajol), which leads to him being disowned by the wealthy industrialist father Yash (Amitabh Bachchan) for going against the father’s wishes to arrange his marriage to a woman of good breeding. Son therefore elopes to London with his new wife and her family, where they can be free of this stifling ‘tradition’. They do not tell the family where they are going. His mother (Jaya Bachchan) and grandmothers are heartbroken, as is his traditionalist wife, who wants the in-laws’ blessings. Timeskip and we see the grown-up younger brother (Hrithik Roshan) who overhears a conversation between the women and learns of the reason behind elder brother’s exile, and resolves to travel abroad, find him and reunite the family. Peak Shakespearean (melo)drama.
this one i thought was the most relatable of the Karan Johar movies that are held up as ‘early 2000s classics’ (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham, Kal Ho Naa Ho). Many people read K3G as KJo trying to construct a fantasy whereby his father (famous producer Yash Johar, note the first name being identical) will someday accept him despite KJo’s being gay. the only place the fantasy really shows its artifice is in the idea that your father will ever apologize for what he’s done to you.
the beginning screen that claims “it’s about loving your parents” --Karan Johar (yes this is a movie that doesn’t believe in subtext and tells you its moral before the opening scene) – is a massive red herring imo; it’s about loving your parents AND YET insisting that there are things they do not get to do to you. Which is historically progressive for the type of movie this is!
also it’s nice that this is the era of Bollywood where you always get at least a Muslim side character or subplot. Not so nowadays I fear.
kal ho naa ho – *
ignore my k3g review, karan johar should be banned from writing movies. not content to have SRK do his usual male manipulator antics, he’s turned saif ali khan into male manipulator by proxy . really just a movie to endure rather than watch. fucking interminable. for a diaspora community in queens they sure spend a lot of time on the jersey city waterfront. these “modern classic” bollywood movies just get lapped by tamil cinema i’m sorry.
-5 stars for srk melodrama
+1 star for NYC diaspora representation
he really is on his peak male manipulator shit here. basically the story in KHNH is that they’re in NYC with the frigid girl archetype MBA student (Preity Zinta) and her happy-go-luckless financier best friend (Saif Ali Khan). Shah Rukh Khan swans in from India to gaslight everybody into loving him, including our heroine. He is SO! ANNOYING! Literally a man who has never heard of boundaries and still thinks you should neg women constantly to get them to love you. the path to a woman’s heart apparently is to constantly insist she should be smiling more.
But gasp! Secretly SRK is dying, and plans to use his Robin Williams charms to set up the girl with her childhood friend so he can feel like his life contributed something worthwhile. But gasp #2! Preity Zinta ends up never falling for childhood friend, and while she does eventually marry him, sobs during the whole wedding that SRK is dying, because she still loves SRK. Also SRK falls in love with her too, but rip he’s dead now. That’s it that’s the story.
Also there’s a lot of intra-Indian racism against the Gujaratis and Punjabis, and external racism against the Chinese, played for laughs. Its scenes are also cut together in a really piecemeal and ramshackle manner. Really bad imo, feels like it’s 18 hours long. says something deeply negative about society that this was so popular.
saif ali khan was a sweetie in this tho. And it shows a gay couple on screen in this song which was sort of groundbreaking.
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I can definitely post in my thread alone and be happy. But I’d be even happier if others joined in. The period I’m looking at now is especially rich. We’re looking at the peak of silent film making. Soviet, German, and American films are the most prominent.
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Mile End Kicks absolutely rips. Captured being a millennial twenty something and making poor choices constantly very well
I watched all of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job recently and decided to cap it off with watching Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie.
Some important context, I guess, is that I watched these things originally in a very particular context - I’d go to my friend’s apartment when a new season came out on DVD, and I would get way too drunk and pretty much pass out by the end of it. Same went for the movie, too.
Anyway the big take away, show and movie, is that the stuff I did manage to remember after all these years was still pretty good. And the stuff that I didn’t, well, maybe it wasn’t entirely too much drinking that made me forget those. Maybe.
I mean it’s also been like at least 14 years since I watched all this stuff anyway.
As for the movie - it sucks, it’s bad. John C. Reilly is probably the best thing it has going for it. RIP Taquito…
(Fake edit but I think the latter day Tim and Eric (maybe mostly Tim) stuff is alright. On Cinema is fantastic, Beef House was fun. The old stuff is some real “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” and after all this time, whole heck of a lot fell off, haha)
It’s not a movie but I’m gonna finally watch all of Check It Out and then do…something else with my life, hahaha.
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shredder orpheus - not quite as fun as you might expect from the screenshots but i actually did end up really liking the specific mix of sorta melancholy orpheus retelling and weird diy forbidden zone / meet the tubeheads-isms, especially as it gets to the ending. the scenes of people skating around the empty parking lot at night were cool. sort of wish it had a liquid sky tier soundtrack to go with some of the outfits but alas, some really nice handdrawn effects at times though
under siege 2 - on reflection its funny to do a die hard type movie starring steven seagal, whose cinematic persona seems to be playing on invincibility mode every movie he’s in. he does get shot in this one but walks it off(?) and it doesn’t come up again. on the other hand most of the fun in this was just the villains freaking out whenever he kills another half dozen people offscreen, so maybe it works. i wanted to watch this bc the combo of eric bogosian and everett mcgill (big ed on twin peaks) as the main bad guys appealed to me, and that was fun, but special shout out as well to the sleazy cia guy always sucking on a cigarette.
another touch i enjoyed about this one is the effort it puts in to maintain that his character is a cook. he drops by his own restaurant for 5 seconds at the start, which is enough for the other main chef to say how much better everyone works when he’s around, and the train hijack happens when he’s in the middle of instructing two very attentive chefs in the kitchen car how to make a cake. after whisking the mix for a while he just puts it in the microwave, which seemed kind of deflating to me but what do i know. maybe thinking outside the box is why he’s the best.
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a couple weeks ago i stumbled on a very striking screenshot from “red rooms”, which made me download it.
watched the movie on saturday and i’m still thinking about it. man, it’s so so good. not the type of film i go after at all, but it’s just so raw; i keep coming up with new angles or thinking back to one scene or another and being like “huh, i wonder why that is”. it just goes and goes.
profoundly disturbing film and the subject matter is obviously very heavy. one of the most violent endings i’ve ever seen, despite there being no explicit imagery shown throughout the whole thing.
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Great film. Such good performances, and so shocking without doing anything cheaply. It reminded me of a Dennis Cooper story.
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