The Films You Watched Thread VI: The Undiscovered Movie

[Atticus]

Not watched it yet but I just just clocked that Another Round was added to Sky Cinema this week. Been looking forward to seeing it.

[randombs]

^^ brilliant

One more I forgot to mention:

Nutcracker

The recent one with Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and Laura Knightley from The Bill. I rather liked it. It’s got a huge monster made out of rats.

Tonight we saw Home Alone, then I remembered I got it free on iTunes years ago and it has special features! We watched a compilation of scenes in different languages, the making of doc and a short doc on the stunts(the tarantula was meant to be mechanical but they decided to use a real one, they hadn’t removed the poison because the tarantula would die soon afterwards, and they told Daniel Stern that tarantulas don’t hear very well so he could scream as loud as he wanted). A lot of the stuff was also in the Home Alone episode of the Netflix “movies that made us” series.

My favourite extra was the Angels with Filthy Souls video.

[Atticus]

Watched Another Round last night. It's very good at using a hook (the theory of using just enough alcohol throughout the day to enhance personality and performance) to explore many areas. One of the best films I've seen in a while. Absolutely brilliant.

[Dogg Thang]

That sounds like a celebration of functioning alcoholics.

I watched JoJo Rabbit last night and thought it was superb. It’s quite dark and sad given the subject matter (it’s about a kid who wants to be a Nazi and he has Hitler as an imaginary friend) and tackled it in a very thoughtful way and a very human way, across most of the characters. Oddly, I felt Taititi himself as Hitler was probably the weakest thing in the movie and I’m normally a big fan of seeing him on screen. Partly I think it’s that his sections weren’t well integrated into the film so they felt like breaks in the narrative but I think I just heard him more than the character. Still, a very good and thoughtful film with pretty brave subject matter.

[randombs]

Continuing our Xmas film fest:

Trading Places

Second time watching this and, unfortunate blackface scene aside, I love it. Also, it suddenly hit me that the Duke brothers are in Coming to America

[wakka]

I watched Old, Shyamalan's latest joint.

The premise is that a family go on holiday to a fabulous tropical resort, and while there visit a remote beach. While on the beach, they start rapidly aging - approximately one year every half an hour. And they can't leave, because if they try to they conk out and wake up back on the beach.

It's a cool idea, apparently based on a graphic novel called Sandcastle, and if you like this kind of Twilight Zone hokum (I do, I really do) then it's worth a watch. There are things to recommend it, for sure. The meat of it, the promise of the premise when they're on the beach and they're getting older and they're wondering WTF is going on, is the best part of it. There are some ideas in there about the ramifications of it that are really cool and intriguing to watch. And it looks great. Shyamalan is always good visually, I think, and although the film is 90% set on this one beach it manages to be continually visually interesting and often very beautiful to look at. Lovely use of colour.

But M Night giveth and M Night taketh away. It also has the other problems which his films usually contain. Characterisations are sketch-like for most of the cast, dialogue is awkward and stilted in places, and the obligatory twist ending feels unnecessary to the point of near irrelevance. It also contains M Night himself acting as a minor character, which feels egotistical and faintly ludicrous (you're immediately pulled out of the film and just thinking, oh, there he is. It's like a terrible, terrible version of what Hitchcock always did).

There are much worse ways of spending a couple of hours on a film though. It's lightweight, spooky fun in the sun. Hokum, of course. Pure hokum. But I like hokum.

I rented it on UHD on Prime. The picture was very good but the sound felt anaemic.

@Dogg Thang, I really liked JoJo Rabbit too. Such an original story and touchingly told. Brave, too. Hella brave. Imagine having the stones to make that, and the skill to make it work. Really great.

@Atticus Really want to watch this. Good to hear you enjoyed it.

@randombs I love so much of Trading Places, except that bit on the train with the silly costumes. That just kills the pacing and I always get bored. The rest of it is brilliant, though. Must watch it again this Xmas, I forgot that it's Christmassy.

[randombs]

Didn’t get round to this last year, but just watched Klaus on Netflix.

It’s brilliant.

Funny, heartwarming and gorgeous to look at.

[Brad]

Jojo rabbit is good. Not as good as you lot hyped it up mind but good

Nutcracker And the four realms is awful in every way

Don’t look up was great

[randombs]

HAPPY FESTIVUS ONE AND ALL. To mark this most auspicious of occasions, we watched:

Home Alone 2

“Another Christmas in the trenches”

Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol

Crikey, this one is pretty scary! Jim Carrey was wonderful and the CGI didn’t look dated.

[eastyy]

Don't Look up

I do not watch movies that much but saw this film...and it stuck in my mind far more then most, scary thing about the movie with what has happened the past few years it really feels possible,

And it makes me think of the scene in Simpsons with the comet where they say " burn down the observatory so this can never happen again"

[Dogg Thang]

I watched it last night and it didn’t land for me at all. I get what it was doing and can totally buy that people just wouldn’t care in that scenario but, even after the Trump years and living through the total denial of the pandemic, I found the characters way too cartoony to work for me. Maybe I was supposed to consider it more of a comedy but I didn’t really find it funny and the characters stopped it working as a drama for me.

I watched the Val documentary too and thought it was superb. Quite sad but seeing the honesty on display and just someone being human was very touching.

[teddymeow]

Not really a film but it was 85 minutes long - Wolfgang on Disney+.

Biographical documentary about celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck. It was, and I mean this in a good way, "nice". It was just where he came from and how he became famous. The director hadn't gone looking for any sort of dirt or scandal and it didn't feel like there was any ulterior motive to it having been made.

Yeah, was enjoyable.

[fallenangle]

Watched, or tried to watch Guy Ritchie's King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword last night.

Never heard of it until the Xmas trailers started promoting it.................................just awful, gave up after half an hour.

The director's big idea: take the Arthurian legend and give it a British 'Sarf London' gangster movie twist.

Misconceived and utterly tedious hotchpotch of, mostly bad, elements 'inspired' by far better films and TV series.

It should have been strangled before it was even made.

Nothing more to say.

[Dogg Thang]

We put on a film with Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller and didn’t even get to Stiller showing up before we turned it off. So we put on Joker. I must admit, I had no interest in seeing it and my view of the film was influenced by the trailers which made out like it was just going to show me someone turn violent because they felt sad and I didn’t really need that. And yes, the film is exactly that so it wasn’t really my thing. And yet that said it was definitely a far better movie than I expected and very well made. The vibe was excellent and Phoenix played the part really well. I have some sort of mental Batman block now though because the second I hear a Wayne reference I start to cringe. No idea where that really came from. I turned off Suicide Squad the moment Batman made an appearance. I enjoy many of the Batman films and yet, for some reason, now I just can’t seem to stand any connection to him.

Anyway, that connection aside, yeah, Joker wasn’t really the film for me but it was very well made.

Last night, I watched Candyman. The new one. It wasn’t completely successful for me and fell down in a few areas. For one, it wasn’t really scary or tense and I felt the original did a better job there. And some of the storytelling I felt was a little clumsy. Nevertheless, I got sucked into the movie and I think it delivered a very interesting sequel to the original movie, embracing the original completely, not trying to repeat it or render it redundant and adding a whole other intriguing side to the story. And as that, I felt the movie worked. It wasn’t quite everything I think it could have been and yet I still got a lot from it and enjoyed it. A good follow-up to a classic horror, even if not quite a classic in its own right.

[MartyG]

Don't Look up

I do not watch movies that much but saw this film...and it stuck in my mind far more then most, scary thing about the movie with what has happened the past few years it really feels possible,

I thought I might be watching a documentary. It's depressingly good, holding up a mirror to the world on so many levels.

Definitely warrants a second watch.