Films Recently Watched

Hotel Transylvania: Fun. I solely watched it so sample the gothic girl voice. 8/10

  On 1/29/2015 at 6:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

 

  On 1/28/2015 at 1:57 AM, TRiP said:

^^^ The Devils is a great film! Russel is a gem. (Altered States was a little bit of a let down for me, seemed to go on longer than it should and obsessed about the techno babble details rather than purely embracing it's strong imagery and performances)

 

 

Ex_Machina:

Really good! Intelligent, minimal, sleek. Great to see top sci-fi in the cinemas.

Naked sex robots/10

 

Whiplash:

Also very good! Great to see so many decent and strong original films in the cinema at the moment.

Mad tempos/10

 

Whiplash was good but it didn't give you much to chew on after it was over. It's like one of those films that feels really good in the moment then after its over you just sort of forget about and go about your day

 

Indeed it did not give as much to chew on as something such as Ex_Machina, which is bringing up big and tasty discussion topics, but as most oscar season films go it wasn't so bad - it did drift back into my mind, albeit just thinking about how messed up the characters psyche was, but it still made some impression

Locke

Went into this thinking it was about a hand edged British gangster doing his dirty deeds over the phone and yelling out profane threats etc. but was quite surprised to find it was the exact opposite, following a Welsh man trying to sort out some mundane real life problems...but funnily enough its just as gripping and entertaining. very enjoyableeee, but gosh darn, when you think back over some of the dialogue - on paper it must have seemed like the most potentially boring cinematic experience, but great non-the less!

3 Ciders/10

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Was really looking forward to this, but was a tad' let down. It's got a really strong visual style, and is fairly crazy, but just a bit empty overall. It's funny, anytime the girls are on on screen you're completely distracted - in shots where their bodies are covered up you start to snap out of the trance and start to realise it's actually not a good film at all...but then Tura Santana cleavage appears again and suddenly you're gripped.

Intense cleavage/10

that girl's lils should've had their own reference in the credits

  On 1/25/2015 at 5:07 PM, Alcofribas said:

as a pynchon and pta fan i thought "inherent vice" was awesome. i think the only real issue i had with it is simply that it didn't exactly nail the tonal ambiguity of the book. in the book the paranoid stonerisms dovetailed with an elusive and sinister tone in a much more bizarre and moving way. the movie rather nailed the stoner stuff i think but the melancholy cultural backdrop (end of the 60s) was too often absent and i think doc's personal experience in the movie felt much more thin as a result. there were, however, some solid scenes that brought this home for me but i do feel like the bizarre tone of the book didn't translate so well. but that's not surprising bc...pynchon.

 

overall i thought the movie was great. i liked that it kept the conspiracy developing merely by introducing doc to all these fragmented conversations and brief encounters, thereby preventing a coherent picture from ever developing (bc, of course, doc is a totally unreliable protagonist). this was a cool structural way of capturing an aspect of the story (again, more evident in the book), viz., how this ever elusive conspiracy signifies for doc as well as his era a turning point from something familiar to something much more fragmented and foreboding. for doc personally this means the disintegration of his personal life, the reemergence of a kind of tragic, unresolved relationship from his past, the confrontation of his highly limited professional endeavors with something beyond the scope of his understanding of the world and the legal parameters in which he's used to navigating, etc. and this all takes place in a cultural environment where the known and familiar are eroding and beginning to spin on their heads -- there's that great line when he goes to the party just before conversing with owen wilson at the kitchen table which captures this perfectly. it's a wakeup call of sorts but doc is too stoned to work it all out.

 

i definitely think the movie had excellent acting and was pretty obviously funny throughout (lots of lols in the theater). imo it was a cool journey orbiting around a strange conspiracy that never really pans out which i guess is the perfect metaphor for a middle-age stoner life at the end of the 60s. it glorified the period with its humor but it at the same time it portrayed the the melancholy and futility of the era in a unique way. could've been a lot weirder but whatever man, this movie rules.

can't wait to see this movie !

birdman - hated it, complete crap. it's like a movie made by some particular hollywood types to be consumed and awarded exactly by those types. a barrage of tired references and meta meta meta everything, and it all looks so banal and shallow while the guy obviously thinks he makes some serious statement. kinda pathetic really. even stylistically it's a failure, looks like a pointless mishmash of punch drunk love and synecdoche new york. it doesn't even feel like cinema, it's like some project where the director is trying to reassure himself of his cleverness with every second.

Her
Jeezz, pretty disappointing, feels like a big missed opportunity. It provokes such big topics yet seems to be more concerned with fashion, hipness and male crying. Nothing bad really ever happens to him either, there's not really any conflict, sure he breaks up with the girls, but whatever - Chris Pratt's character seems to only exist to tell us how much of a 'great guy' Phoenix is, feels like it's Jonze subconsciously writing himself into the film and patting himself on the back. A.I. evolving and reaching a higher plane of consciousness is visualised by Phoenix crying, c'monnnnnn son.

lame/10

watched this and yes it's pretty bad- mostly because it's too cliche and the story is very silly. also, mila kunis and channing tatum just don't sell their roles (regardless of the fact that most of the dialogue is written very unbelievably- kinda like star wars/anime hybrid). also the sfx wasn't all that great mostly because it didn't matter. there's a scene where there is a battle in the air and you just see these tiny dots flashing lights at each other with over the top music and i guess you're suppose to be on the edge of your seat- but how can you when you can't see what's happening to warrant any kind of suspense?

conclusion: this was pretty bad

American Sniper - an american eagle circling the corpse of a small afghan boy/10.

It was too long.

John Wick - pretty good

Lucy 5/10

As it was Luc Besson was expecting a cross between Leon and Fifth Element. I was however sorely disappointed. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was so bad about it and I've come up with the following.

1. Lack of character development. You don't find out enough about Lucy to care about what happens to her. When she becomes super smart and loses her personality you don't notice as there's not enough of a difference between that and what she's like initially.

2. The fight sequences are boring, cone on Luc! He spends too much time focusing on how it looks and not enough what happens.

3. The timetravel sequence which he stole from Michel Gondry. Totally irrelevant and unnecessary to the wildly random plot.

4. The super computer design was crap. Seriously it looked like a big oily turd. Why not go for crystals or something? (like superman's fortress of solitude)

5. The tone was muddled. Was it a thriller? Was it a Sci-fi? Who knows. Who cares.

6. Luc Besson has lost it.

Inherent Vice - Very Lush / 10

nsfw

[youtubehd]HoLSaBaMhcE[/youtubehd]

Hedwig 250/10

  On 2/5/2015 at 7:55 AM, Rubin Farr said:

nsfw

 

[youtubehd]HoLSaBaMhcE[/youtubehd]

if thats your groove you might like Surspiria by Argento. Its got it all.....creepy as fuck moods, Italian witches, 70's synth soundtrack, nymphs galore and the worst case of getting stuck/caught in razor-wire possible. Tres weird/10

You mean Suspiria? Saw it when I was a lad in the 80s.

God awful live action Macross/Robotech adaptation is back on, sans Toby McGuire.

http://otakuusamagazine.com/LatestNews/News1/Robotech-LiveAction-Film-Back-Online-6212.aspx

ugh. Hollywood pls.

[youtubehd]YCmAaNk_iIQ[/youtubehd]

Why?

  On 2/5/2015 at 8:28 PM, azatoth said:

Why?

Well...Because they can. Capitalize on an old brand to make some cash.

I like how they gave the girl the same haircut as the original carol-ann.

american sniper was interesting

  On 2/5/2015 at 5:42 PM, Rubin Farr said:

You mean Suspiria? Saw it when I was a lad in the 80s.

dont u find modern horror doesnt have any style or balls? Dario Argento had it in spades. Equally Zulawski's Possession (1981) is a notch up in the all out strangeness stakes (plus Isabelle Adjani, who's also in Nosferatu, is hotness personified)

After the 80s I gave up on horror. Still hoping Phantasm 5 doesn't suck. Even Eli Roth is making crap films with Keanu Reeves now.

I wasn't aware that Eli Roth made anything but crap films.

AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!