Recently watched movies!

[klen7]

[jellydonut25]

[eabaker]

[MekaGojira3k]

I would never call disliking a film "suffering", but I also just really like going to movies. I don't even care if it's terrible, I still enjoy going.

[lhb412]

The Adventures of Don Juan

From my experience of these late-period Errol Flynn swashbucklers (which, including this, is just two movies I've seen) all I can think is that anything beyond the early '40s done by Flynn is enormously depressing. The man "got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did" (to quote Warren Zevon) and that constant self-imposed stress on his body just beat the hell out of him. This is ten years after Robin Hood and he's aged at least a decade more. The film itself is a modest attempt to capture the spirit of those swashbucking hits from a decade earlier - and it would be more serviceable had it had a younger star who still had the bravado that Flynn, by this point, had lost.

Don't let drinkin' and whorin' take over your life, kids.

The Sea Hawk

Now, I travel back about a decade and here Flynn is the dashing, young, charming fella that we know and love! The miracle of movies!

This is the third (and last) of the famous swashbucklers starring Flynn and directed by Michael Curtiz and featuring much of the same cast and crew. I don't like this one as much. From a technical standpoint it's as good a film as Robin Hood and Captain Blood, but it doesn't have the freewheeling sense of adventure those had - and there's a reason for that: this is very much a film in the shadow of the events of the time, i.e. the war in Europe and the feeling that eventually we'd be full participants. The relationship between Britain and Spain in this film is an obvious stand-in for relationship between Britain and Germany.

So, there's a bit less swashbuckling and a bit more political intrigue and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Flora Robson is a real standout in the cast as Queen Elizabeth.

[Dr Kain]

UI really hope Skyfall shows that people are not stupid enough to see a good movie over garbage.

[MekaGojira3k]

[Dr Kain]

[jellydonut25]

[MekaGojira3k]

[Dr Kain]

Young Frankenstein - Awesomely hilarious. I love this movie a lot.

[Dr Kain]

[klen7]

So i watched a few movies this weekend.. mostly chipping away at that Netflix queue

Heckler - Documentary from Jamie Kennedy.. 1/3 about Hecklers.. which was good.. the rest was about film critics.. which didnt work as well
Bellflower - I thought this was going to be a post apocalyptic film.. it was actually a indie romance.. i think i liked this movie substantially more 4 hours after i watched it, then when i watched it.
The Stuff - Horror Comedy about ice cream. This kept coming across my radar for one reason or another, so i watched it.
Savages - Oliver Stone thriller about cartels kidnapping and the benefits of marijuna. I dislike a couple of story telling mechanisms that were used in this. The voice over that explained everything and the ending particularly
Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood - there is a certain amount of whimsy in the TftC stories which makes them enjoyable
Werewolf: The Beast Among Us - There were several points in this movie where i thought to myself "this isnt as bad as i thought it would be".. but there were just as many moments that cancelled those out.
Black Lightning - The best Russian movie about a flying car that i have seen recently
John Waters: This Filthy World - I got a few chuckles from this.. i also scratched my head at a number of cinema and literary references.

I also watched most of Babe 2: Pig in the City and Muppets Treasure Island but i've seen those both before

[lhb412]

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Excellent movie (I have been watching several truly excellent ones recently) . My favorite war stories aren't about the battles, but about the bizarre events that can happen in the margins. They don't get any more bizarre than this. Plenty of great performances, but I think the Japanese Colonel may be my favorite just because of those mostly silent shots in the second half of the film: having started out as a sadistic and in-control character in the first act, to see him so strangely humbled is very interesting.

[eabaker]

RocknRolla

Solidly my favorite Guy Ritchie movie so far, as he took his usual stylistic and narrative fixations, but this time used them to tell a story with more of a satisfactory conclusion and emotional payoffs.

[klen7]

^ i liked that one, wouldn't mind seeing it again, but it is hard to rank it against Lock Stock just because there is a decade between them. I might put this one above Snatch though. but it is certainly a gigantic step up from Revolver and Swept Away... and this really isn't the place for me to rant about the SH films

[lhb412]

Genocide

First off on my Shochiku set.

What an aggressively bizarre little B-movie, and the fact that it thinks its themes are so deep and important just heightens the craziness. So bad it's good? I wouldn't go that far - but it's certainly interesting and worth a watch.

[Dr Kain]

I went to see Rise of the Guardians. It was a fun movie, very enjoyable, but I don't think it was worth the $14 ticket prices. I liked the characters though, especially Sandman and Jude Law made a great villain. Definitely a movie you should at least watch once whether it be in theaters or on BD.

[sentaison]

Watched Amazing Spiderman and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter over Thanksgiving. Neither would make my top 10, or even 50. That being said, both were much better than I was led to believe by a lot of reviewers.

[Dr Kain]

[RaptorG]

I Finally saw "The Cabin in the Wood" last night and........I actually liked it. It was actually a very good lovecraft style movie.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

Watched Genocide last night before bed what a weird little film in fact of the three Shochiku films I've seen they've all been weird.

[lhb412]

The Living Skeleton

What seems at first to be a stylish but straightforward ghost story takes several left turns into lunacy during its runtime, punctuated by short special effect sequences that look like they were meant to look lousy ironically. It's a perfect Halloween film, really - too bad it arrived a month late!

[eabaker]

Over the weekend, I watched:

Marley and Me - A lovely basis for a movie, and very well executed. However, a little more time could have been dedicated to showing Marley in his better moments; we're never given the opportunity to fully connect with him as a character.

Charlie Bartlett - I had no idea what to expect from this movie, thanks to its disasterously uninformative ad campaign. I'm glad I checked it out, because it's an interesting flick, entertaining flick. It frequently feels like a strange cross-breeding of Pump Up the Volume and Rushmore - both in tone, and in specfiic story points.

[MouthForWar]

Haven't posted in here in a while. Here's the stuff I've been watching the last 2 weeks or so.

Beyond Re-Animator- Not too bad, but not that good. I don't think any movie with Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West can ever be all bad. There's some great stuff in there for a sequel, but it doesn't have the class of the original and it doesn't embrace the absurd nearly as much or as well as the second film. The tone is inconsistent as hell and it is SORELY missing the character of Dan Cain... the new guy is boring as hell and he just sucks.

HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon- An anthology horror of Lovecraft adaptations by prolific directors including Brian Yuzna, Christophe Gans, and our own Shusuke Kaneko (how he got involved in this is anybody's guess, but who cares). Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the wrap around segment (wearing a fake nose and chin, which oddly makes him look like Bruce Campbell). Not as good as the talent involved would hype you up to expect, but still a perfectly decent anthology flick. I think Christophe Gans has the best segment of the bunch. Unfortunately this only came out on VHS.

The Hunter- Willem DaFoe is a mercenary hired to track the last living Tasmanian tiger. Pretty depressing stuff, but a very well done character driven flick... and DaFoe is awesome as usual.

V/H/S-A found footage anthology film that was touted as being a new classic by every horror website on the face of the earth... but this is easily one of the worst things I've seen all year. Each segment is more or less frat boy jocks walking around being sexist assholes for 20 minutes and at the very end they get killed in some way, sometimes by something supernatural. Usually by the time this happens, the segment is far beyond redemption and you just want it to f*cking END. F*CK this movie and f*ck all the critics who praised it up and down. GARBAGE.

The Loved Ones- Another over-hyped piece of junk by the horror movie websites. After hearing nothing but rave reviews I was looking forward to checking this out, but it was a fruitless effort. A torture porn movie that thinks its being more clever than it is by including dumb 80s teenage drama movie tropes. Watch Carrie or May instead. Not only that, but the A and B plots LITERALLY never connect with each other and have NOTHING to do with each other. They don't even tie into each other by the end of the movie. Again, f*ck everyone who told me this was good.

Cold Fish- FINALLY a good horror/suspense flick after watching too much over hyped nonsense. From Shion Sono (Suicide Club, Love Exposure), this is an utterly chilling serial killer movie that has the balls to go as far as it needs to. The lead character is a total bookish dweeb who brings a lot of this on himself and his family (much like like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs), which I think was the intent here. When this guy snaps, he f*cking SNAPS. And the guy playing the killer is terrifying because he seems like the nicest guy you could ever meet until he shows his true colors. As far as I know this is the only serious film produced under the Sushi Typhoon label and its a damn good one. If you like stuff like Straw Dogs, I Saw The Devil, or Chan-Wook Park's vengeance films, this will be way up your alley. I haven't seen a lot of Shion Sono's films (regrettably), but this seems to be his most straight forward, and its definitely my favorite thing I've seen from him. HIGHLY recommended.

The Bay- I posted my thoughts in the thread for this movie, but this is a decent fake-documentary style horror flick. Not so much a linear story (although we do get a loose narrative) as a compilation of squirm inducing body horror and really bad things happening. For people into aquatic horror, biological/sciency horror, and body horror flicks, this is definitely worth watching. One of the best horror flicks I've seen this year.

Genocide- From the Criterion Shochiku horror box set. This movie is insanity incarnate. It just doesn't give a f*ck and doesn't care what you think. Its bleak, trippy madness and it'd be one of the most depressing horror movies ever if it wasn't so stupid and goofy. I love stuff like this.