Erkki

I haven't seen any of these films yet, and very little of giallo or horror genres in general. I bought the Rabid Dogs Blu-Ray when Arrow (UK) had a sale about a year ago, though, so I might watch that some time soon, maybe even tonight. Also very curious to see at least Black Sunday now, and if I like those too, then probably more. [edit] Well, Rabid Dogs was great! "Kidnapped" on the same Blu-Ray should be just a different cut of this film, right? I think I will buy more of Bavas Blu-Rays when Arrow has another sale or something.

I started watching this series, but seems I accidentally started from Season 3 (damn Netflix user interface is so stupid). I think it's not important, though, as there doesn't seem to be any continuity between them? Anyway, I really like it so far. I think the San Junípero episode (4th) really captured well a very creepy feeling that

Just saw 3-D Rarities (2015) - an amazing look at early 3D films, starting from 1922! I didn't know it went back that far, but I guess the basic technology is not neccessarily that high tech - just put two cameras/lenses at close distance like the human eyes and synchronize them. I really like some of the early stuff up to the psychedelic short animations from the 50s. After this it's a new era of "Hollywood discovers 3D" and the content becomes gimmicky and sexist. It's as if they didn't even understand the medium (which I now think is way more demanding than 2D films), but somewhy wanted to spend money on it. All they saw was the gimmick and they made sure to reference it verbally a lot. I'm not sure today's 3D movies fare any better. I guess nowadays they are at least better at making sure people don't feel sick from the disparities, but 3D movies are still just 3D versions of 2D movies, but IMHO this is the wrong way to approach the medium.

I tried HTC Vive for the first time yesterday, they had it at some escape room place with hourly pricing. We took one hour with a friend and tried some game where monsters were coming at you from all directions, then The Lab, and Raw Data. Pretty fun, I'm impressed with the precision of everything, including the head tracking and the controllers. Also with the Vive price decrease, I'm now very tempted to get it, but don't have that much spare money at the moment.

It seems Olive Kitteridge hasn't been mentioned here. I just watched it and I think it's pretty great. It deals with relationships similar to how Bergman did it, but with more production values I would say, or at least more varied scenery. And perhaps less dialogue, more in a kind of "show don't tell" way. Bergman would just have the people stuck in a house talking or something, but here we see the characters actually moving between different parts of their lives, and we see a span of 25 years of their lives (great make-up BTW!). To me the first half was stronger and the ending was really good again, but some parts of episode 3 and 4 were kind of losing me. Don't look at the spoiler if you intend to see it, but haven't yet.

I know the movie for you : Bad Batch by Ana Lily Amirpour

Robert Altman might be becoming my favourite Hollywood director after Kubrick who consistently* made great movies. Just watched Short Cuts, and during the last year or so I saw Nashville, 3 Women, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. All are great movies. But strangely, I think several of his movies are ones that I've seen before and some point and forgotten about even seeing. I had this feeling watching Short Cuts, that some scenes and events were quite familiar. I have very likely seen the movie before as a teenager, when I wasn't systematically interested in film. Seeing it again now, the film totally drew me into it and had my full attention. Every minute of it seems extremely well made, but I suspect that there's maybe no single thing to remember about this that makes one go "you know that movie where <...>" years later. And maybe the same thing applies to some of his other films, as I have a very strong suspicion that I've also seen The Long Goodbye, The Player, Gosford Park, M.A.S.H. and maybe even others, without remembering exactly. But as I'm watching movies more systematically now, I think this time I will remember. * I say consistently, but I've only seen some of his top-rated movies. It seems he made a lot more, so maybe that statement doesn't really hold.

So this is almost the only game I've played this year, at least from start to finish. Have to agree with Nappi's criticism: it wasn't funny (most of the time). I think the writing overall was somewhat weak. Most of the game was kind of aimless wondering, often times you picked up items for puzzles that were way in the future, and since you had 5 characters you never knew exactly when you were bottlenecked by one of them. And a few times I got not only into the mode on "try everything on everything", but even "try giving everything to every character and make them try everything on everything". The one part I was stuck in was I had to call the hint line then and of course after that I called it again - that's usually the way it goes - when I just didn't realize I had to go to a very specific place and do something there, even though that location was never explicitly hinted AFAIK. The ending was also rather disappointing to me, although making the closure for some characters optional was maybe not the best idea, since it meant I went back and did it again - what use is that? I wish they had focused on better writing and forgot about the 1000+ book library and phonebook, which were kind of cool, but unnecessary.

Watching some PC gamer video overview... man it looks so familiar in many ways, especially the world map, menus etc. I hope they will actually have a better single player campaign this time, though.

Maybe it's that I've been away from playing any games lately, but it seems a bit too chaotic. I can't tell what's going on from those videos, or what the actual dynamics of the battle are. (I skimmed the videos)

Wow, that would be amazing. At this point, I don't care much about the series. For me it's still fun to watch for the production values, but yes the writing has been a bit off in the last season especially. But I didn't notice it during watching, I was entertained and immersed. It's only in hindsight that I notice the problems. And yeah at this point the fact that all the "good" characters just keep on surviving all hardships is becoming off-putting.

Top 100 (50, 250, etc.) lists can be weird. They're maybe not that important in the grand scheme, but I have found them to be a good tool for finding interesting movies, especially "must see" classics. Maybe this thread could be used to link to various lists we think are good, but I wanted to make this post for a particular one that really weirds me out: http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-movies/ This is like a list from some alternate universe where I remained a teenager forever, as time still went on. I mean, if that were the case, then I could have compiled this as my top 100 favourites or something. It's totally filled with the kind of movies I loved in the late 90s and early 00s. My actual current favourite of such lists is the living Letterboxd films by rating, although it contains some anomalies like docs about series rated as if they were the series. Sometimes a new film pops up there (and then starts dropping gradually), and then it's usually good. It happened with Moonlight, La La Land, Mad Max: Fury Road, maybe a few others. And also I like the Sight & Sound Directors' & Critics' polls for best movies of all time. I used to like Rotten Tomatoes as well, but now their top 100 is just some above average movies from recent years interlaced with actual classics.

I started playing, but was overwhelmed at the first AR recording and stopped there.

Yes, for some reason the Mavic Pro tracking mode didn't work on the boat, and I had to manually keep up. Was quite annoying and I got very few clean shots without dodgy camera movement. Maybe I had too much ND filter in front of the lens and light wasn't enough for the tracking to work or something. But I've also heard that it doesn't do well above water. Also my drone drowned on first attempt to land on the anchored ship. What is dead may never die - the video is made post-drowning.

I'm trying to move from taking photos to also making video. This was done as a short promo for a friend in exchange for some free sailing.

I hardly play games any more, but this is exciting. M&B Warband multiplayer was the most time I've ever spent on any single game.

I saw Jackie yesterday because some friends wanted to see it and was quite disappointed. I've seen a great movie from Pablo Larrain and that's El Club, but the rest have disappointed me so far (Neruda with it's awful out-of-focus effects and Jackie with it's boring material). I have seen five Buñuel movies in the past few years. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has a similar core idea as The Exterminating Angel, I guess, but I didn't like it as much. My personal favourite is Viridiana, it has some really memorable scenes. Los Olvidados is very bleak, it's worth watching too.

Somewhy I hadn't seen any of them so far. Strange, Romero's name is definitely in my brain as if I should know his work, but this was the first time I saw a movie he has directed. Maybe I'll watch a few more if they happen to be on Mubi.

I just saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time. It wasn't bad, but I was expecting more. But definitely worth seeing just for being the first movie to show modern zombies, I guess.

I stopped watching after episode 3 or 4, just didn't remember to watch the next one. But I think I'll get back to it soon. [edit] Tried to resume from episode 4, but less than 10 minutes in I'm totally bored and I stopped. I think sadly this series is not for me, although I've even said on various occasions that the book is one of my favourites. Still might pick it up again if opportunity favours it, but not sure. It's like the director thinks the name of the show/writer is enough motivation for anything that's happening. I don't see any motivation inside the work.

There's A LOT to like in this movie, but on the other hand even most children's cartoons are way better than this at storytelling these days. The core idea of the movie is really cool, I think it's pretty accurate to say that it's an expansion of that music video Patrick linked on the previous page, but in my opinion they didn't really manage to expand that to a good full story, so the whole movie kind of ends up feeling shallow. It's even a lot shallower than La La Land, to compare to another recent musical. But still, I can say that I liked it more than an average movie.

I liked the second one more, thanks to not having the dumb Russian voices and the non-linearity which just didn't work for me in the first one.

I'm liking the show a lot, at least since after the episode that was only about Ehrmantraut. Overall the production values seem really high and I've grown to liking the characters. But to be honest I was initially expecting a much quicker movement towards what we saw in BB. I'm at the end of season 2 and while Jimmy is doing increasingly shady things, he is still Jimmy and not Saul. It's like they found how to make the whole metamorphosis into a soap opera. But I guess you could say the same about BB.

Hey, I found this old thread. I built my second home theater (more like living room theater) now in my new home, but I got to say the audio part is really difficult for me. I would really like to get real quality audio, but at the moment I only had like 250€ budget. I'm afraid it's also a much more subjective than video. Some people are saying that sound bars are so much better than stereo speakers, but others say that you don't get the same separation due to the physical width limitation and I think I rather believe that, although I haven't heard any sound bars in a real setting, only as a quick demo in a store... Anyway I think I currently made the worst choice and got some all-in-one 2.1 speakers, where the amp is built into the subwoofer and it takes digital input (convenient so I can wire the audio from my HDMI Switch, which switches between PS3/Steam Link/Vero (Kodi running device) and also analog input from Amazon Echo, which I use to listen to music from Spotify. A few downsides of this: 1) Well, the sound quality isn't as good as I hoped - there weren't many reviews and this was actually one of the few products I found which fit into my system without changing anything about it (Edifier S530D) 2) I can't hear Amazon Echo while anything else is playing with this setup :/ e.g. too bad if I miss a timer because a movie is playing 3) I can't get the PS3 to downmix Blu-Rays to 2 channels. The PS3 only allows setting either "Bitstream" or "Linear PCM" as HDMI sound output for Blu-Ray/DVD, but it doesn't let you specify the number of channels, so what seems to be happening is that some channels get lost. At least that's what happens with the Mad Max Fury Road Blu-Ray, which has 7.1 audio. I haven't tried any others yet. Vero can play a rip of the blu-ray easily with good results from downmixing, because I can specify the output channels, but not PS3 I think what I really needed was a Home Theater Receiver to replace the HDMI switch with... and some proper speakers to go with the receiver... Although I never want to mess with having surround speakers placed around the room, so a proper receiver would kind of be a waste...

I loved it