What was the last film you watched?

[hillbilly]

Birdman.  Not bad man.

[Steph]

Red - okay, brain out stuff. And Bruce Willis really cannot act. But that all said, a watchably silly bit of cinema. John Malkovic kind of steals the show for me even though he also is not pushing himself, playing a bit of a tried and trusted loon. Morgan Freeman is Morgan Freeman.

No, I'm not selling it well, I know, but it's enjoyable if you don't take it seriously.

I enjoyed both it and RED 2, with Malkovic very, very silly and La Mirren managing an admirable stoneface while playing a more likeable version of Rabbit from Utopia.

[T42]

The Long Goodbye, 1972.  Fun, but there's at least one scene missing.  I have a chum in the cine trade who mentioned once that the moguls quite often cut a crucial scene out of a film simply because it brings it under the 2-hour limit, knowing that the punters will be puzzled but will think it's something they missed rather than the film's fault.

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How the money got back to Augustine can be inferred with about three leaps of faith but it's far from clear. And the cut from Mexico to LA is far too abrupt.

Chinatown tonight.

[Jakob]

Asterix and the Mansions of the Gods I put it on as background noise (netflix), while I was soldering up some LED lights and ended up not soldering anything.
 I grew up on Asterix, so needed no introduction to any of the characters (and there was none), but I can see it might struggle a bit with people who aren't all that familiar with the series...

[T42]

When we first came over here I added a deal to my French vocab by reading Asterix & Boris Vian.  There are some wonderful puns in Asterix that must be impossible to translate.

Domaine des Dieux came out in the first year we were here.

[Andrew]

I've given up on 2 Bond movies over the last week; Never Say Never Again and The Living Daylights. They were dire. Just plain awful.

Now I realise the former is not an official Bond movie, and it does have a mildly amusing 'ageing Bond' take, but it has the same Bondesque feel and lame gags - I managed maybe twenty minutes of it. I gave Dalton a little bit longer. I more-or-less gave up on Bond somewhere during the Roger Moore era. Dare I Try Brosnan? That could be a Bond movie title.

[T42]

Chinatown was fun as well as being coherent.  Thinking of diving back into the film noir era tonight.

[mrcharly-YHT]

kajaki

Recounts tale of a hapless group of british soldiers trapped in a minefield in Afghanistan. Gory, gruelling and has epic, epic rants.

I looked it up later. Pretty much exactly all true with very little embellishment. Very worth watching.

I keep thinking about this. Looked up the film on rotten tomatoes

The film holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 15 reviews, indicating universal acclaim.

There is one scene where a character does something stupidly, absurdly heroic. Truly incredibly ridiculous. If you watch the film you'll recognise the scene.
It wasn't made up for the movie. That soldier really did what was shown in the film.

[Wascally Weasel]

Red - okay, brain out stuff. And Bruce Willis really cannot act.

I don’t know if that’s fair – it’s certainly true that he’s very rarely required to do anything other than essentially play the same character he has done in most films since the 1980s* (and asks for and gets an inordinate amount of money for doing so).

However he can act, or at least act a bit more than the limited repertoire he gets paid millions for.  He’s pretty good in Pulp Fiction – I actually really like the long one take shot where he’s walking through back yards to his old apartment looking for his watch.  Tarantino considers himself an ‘actors director’ and he does get interesting performances out of people who otherwise are similarly typecast in their normal output – Samuel L Jackson phones in  his character in most other films but he’s very different in each of the Tarantino films he’s in.

Terry Gilliam got a great performance out of Bruce Willis (in my view), in the film Twelve Monkeys.  Apparently before filming Gilliam gave Willis a list of Bruce Willis acting clichés he didn’t want to see.




*He’s not alone in this.  It always amuses e that people bang on (or at least used to) about Di Nero and Pacino being these great method actors.  Who essentially keep playing the same character in almost everything they’re in.

[T42]

First saw BW in Bonfire of the Vanities, when he still had hair.  He was good in that, too.

Watched The Big Sleep last night.  Had forgotten there was so much yakketty-yak. Not to mention corn.

[Andrew]

You're right. It is a little unfair as there is a degree of type casting for which Willis cannot be blamed. He plays to his strengths maybe. As you say, he was as good as he gets in Twelve Monkeys and, to a lesser extent, Pulp Fiction. Trouble is, for me anyway, whatever character he plays I always see Willis. That distinctive smirk he has  just reminds you. Not his fault, and arguably harsh of me, but nonetheless. Makes me feel he just plays variations of himself. But, as you rightly point out, there are no shortage of actors that do that!

[geraldc]

Bruce Willis has killed his reputation. He's acknowledged as a difficult, greedy and lazy actor. Kevin Smith listed the problems directing him, Sylvester Stallone kicked him off the Expendables franchise, and he got fired a couple of months back from Woody Allen's latest film.

I still like him though.

[Andrew]

I've got both Manhunter and Red Dragon to watch (the latter being the remake of the former... no, not really "remake" as both are from the same book, anyway...)

Not sure which order to watch them in. I saw Manhunter years ago, and my memories of it are probably now over written by having recently watched the Hannibal TV series and having read Red Dragon. Manhunter is generally considered the 'better' movie of the two. Decisions eh? I'm inclined to watch Red Dragon first.

[mattc]

You're right. It is a little unfair as there is a degree of type casting for which Willis cannot be blamed. He plays to his strengths maybe. As you say, he was as good as he gets in Twelve Monkeys and, to a lesser extent, Pulp Fiction. Trouble is, for me anyway, whatever character he plays I always see Willis. That distinctive smirk he has  just reminds you. Not his fault, and arguably harsh of me, but nonetheless. Makes me feel he just plays variations of himself. But, as you rightly point out, there are no shortage of actors that do that!

And they are mostly the guys earning the biggest pay. You'd probably find 80% of the pay to Hollywood leading men goes to "stars" rather than "actors".

Twelve Monkeys was interesting - perhaps he was good in that precisely because the role didn't allow him to fall back on the smirking and smart-arsing. Pulp fiction was more regular bruce, just with much better dialogue than usual. (I'm probably biased, as they're both in my favourite movie long-list.)

[Mr Larrington]

*He’s not alone in this.  It always amuses e that people bang on (or at least used to) about Di Nero and Pacino being these great method actors.  Who essentially keep playing the same character in almost everything they’re in.

Now you mention it, the parallels between Jack Byrnes, Fearless Leader and Travis Bickle are plain to see.

[StuAff]

I've got both Manhunter and Red Dragon to watch (the latter being the remake of the former... no, not really "remake" as both are from the same book, anyway...)

Not sure which order to watch them in. I saw Manhunter years ago, and my memories of it are probably now over written by having recently watched the Hannibal TV series and having read Red Dragon. Manhunter is generally considered the 'better' movie of the two. Decisions eh? I'm inclined to watch Red Dragon first.

Manhunter first. I watched maybe ten minutes of Red Dragon once before thinking 'why am I watching this?', as (regardless of its own merits which I can't really comment on), it's just the same again, only a bit different. The only reason for its existence is someone decided there had to be a version with Anthony Hopkins as Lecter. And he's a cameo in this story, really...

[Kim]

The Martian

Better than expected.  A lot of the engineering got Hollywoodified - sometimes to the point of not making sense (as opposed to merely dubious), and some of the best bits got cut for length (and pretty much everything electrical got cut, presumably for maths, so no PirateNinjas), but Ridley did good on the space pr0n.  It's undoubtedly the best silly NASA propaganda movie since the unfortunately timed Space Camp.

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Someone obviously made an executive decision to be consistent about implausible wind.  That wouldn't be so bad if half the scenes didn't have a pressure gauge superimposed on them.

Points for disco, and making full use of limited boabwords.

The Ironman thing was dismissed as patently ridiculous in the book.  I kind of assumed this was a dig at Gravity.  Re-instating it was too ironic.

I'm disappointed the bricking Pathfinder scene was cut.  That was one of the best bits.

The marker pen wouldn't have survived the Hab depressurisation.

[mattc]

Town of Runners

The local documentary film club was showing this so I popped along  -  I think it was released a few years ago. A good inside view of the way that running is developing in Ethiopia - it's turning into a dream escape for many young people, much like football/boxing in developed countries with all the up and down-sides of that. A good film for athletics fans.

The Martian

I had to suspend my disbelief when he made a marker pen last 461 days. Entertaining thobut.

(TofR sounds interesting, will look out for it in other channels/formats/venues ... )

[redshift]

The Martian

Better than expected.  A lot of the engineering got Hollywoodified - sometimes to the point of not making sense (as opposed to merely dubious), and some of the best bits got cut for length (and pretty much everything electrical got cut, presumably for maths, so no PirateNinjas), but Ridley did good on the space pr0n.  It's undoubtedly the best silly NASA propaganda movie since the unfortunately timed Space Camp.

Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq3xtZ8AjPE

[Mr Larrington]

The entire Back To The Future trilogy

No DMC-12 ever came out of Dunmurry with an exhaust note like that.  And it was interesting to see the taxi of "the future" was a Citroen DS with bits of plastic glued to it.  I am prepared to suspend my disbelief to a certain extent, but I do not think it is possible to travel from Monument Valley¹ to California that quickly, even with the aid of the US Air Force.  And I'm pretty sure that was a 1957 Studebaker parked just next to the building-with-the-clock in 1955.  OTOH Part III had a BEAR in it

I enjoyed it.

1: Which was inhabited by Indians from the Movie tribe, rather than the Navajo.

[hillbilly]

Inherent Vice

I like PT Anderson films - he's possible the finest director of the early 21st century, with a string of great films.  This one slots in at the lower end of his ouvre, never touching the highs of The Master or There Will Be Blood, but approaching Magnolia and Boogie Nights.  And better than Punch Drunk Love.   

It is one of those films that is a little too disjointed, due to the source material, to ever really comfortably flow from one scene to the next.  It kind of grips you, but never as strongly as it should due to the lead actor's portrayal of Doc (it lacks the power of Daniel Day Lewis's performance in TWBB or Phillip Seymour Hoffman's in The Master). 

An interesting film, that is almost Lynchian, but without the surreal framework that make Lynch's films so unsettling. But not so interesting as to be essential viewing.

[Ruthie]

Two Days, One Night.  Starring Marion Cotillard (french, subtitled).

One of those films with a lot going on under a very simple premise.  A woman is faced with losing her job, unless she can persuade her colleagues to vote to keep her.  So she tries to persuade them, one at a time.

The director plays with your preconceived ideas, and takes you through the sort of emotional rollercoaster that such a situation would mean in real life.  It's really clever, and very affecting.

There are no explosions and none of it is set in space.

[Mr Larrington]

Mad Max: Fury Road

Care In The Community Max. more like.  Plenty of explosions, has a satellite in it.  Needed someone like Bruce Spence to lighten the mood a bit.

[Kim]

Mad Max: Fury Road

[...] Needed someone like Bruce Spence to lighten the mood a bit.

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If you look carefully, the Giro Captain's head-onna-stick appears to be mounted to the front of car that Max ends up chained to.

[Mr Larrington]

That's another thing which bothered me - if Max's blood is so precious why take him out into the Great Bugger-All at all, never mind chained to the bit of '32 Chevy that's nearest to the accident?