Movie/TV recommendations

[BigJKO]

Heeeey, Snowpiercer was pretty excellent! Now I'm sad that everyone's opinion of it is buried somewhere in this monstrosity of a thread.. I wanted to read those opinions now, damnit! :(

[Merus]

You're in luck! Scroll up to that search bar at the top of the page, and watch amazed as it only finds results in this thread!

[Gormongous]

You're in luck! Scroll up to that search bar at the top of the page, and watch amazed as it only finds results in this thread!

Except for that extended period when I changed my username to "Snowpiercer." That'll probably mess things up pretty bad.

[BigJKO]

Whaaaaaaaaaaa?!?! I did not know this. Thanks!

[Codicier]

In its best moments Interstellar is a monumental film, a Cathedral built to the dream of space, inhuman but possessing undeniable majesty.

And yep I know that's a slightly pretentious thing to say but it's a slightly pretentious film, but I 100% admire it for even attempting to reconcile the vastness of space with something more human and even getting close to succeeding.

Sadly the other bit of sci-fi I watched this week felt like it utterly bottled it. As some people have said above I'm 100% aware Doctor Who is a YA/kids series at it heart, but feck me that felt like they had been borrowing for the big book of Sci fi clichés.

Apart from the one poor red shirt scientist and a couple of unfortunate troops every major character either surving remarkably untouched or 'died' in a way which left a huge amount of doubt over whether they had actually popped their clogs or not.

What really pissed me of was they tried to tap into what I feel is so pretty heavy stuff that surrounds those who died in the World Wars, pulling the whole 'remember those who sacrificed for you' card while happily allowing Missy to kill a couple of soldiers almost incidentally and immediately forgetting about them.

what about future Danny guy and now Danny's dead and c'mon. I can only assume they won't let Clara storyline end on that super sour note, so I'm sure she's coming back either during or after the Christmas episode, right?

My initial reaction was that Clara is pregnant and we are going to get a Christmas birth

[Apelsin]

 So ultimately, I don't like The Killing I suppose.

 

Huh, since I've only just started on the second season I guess I've not yet encountered most of the bullshit. Maybe best to stop now while things are still decent.

[Twig]

Codi:

Hmm, I suppose it's entirely within the realm of possibility that she's pregnant, BUT given that, as you say, it's a show for children, is it really that likely that Clara will have a child out of wedlock? I don't know how willing the UK is to do that sort of thing with a Family Friendly Television Show. I think it definitely wouldn't fly over here in America. (As in, they'd probably air it, but they'd also probably never make it.)

 

Maybe I'm just being cynical, though.

[Codicier]

Codi:

Hmm, I suppose it's entirely within the realm of possibility that she's pregnant, BUT given that, as you say, it's a show for children, is it really that likely that Clara will have a child out of wedlock? I don't know how willing the UK is to do that sort of thing with a Family Friendly Television Show. I think it definitely wouldn't fly over here in America. (As in, they'd probably air it, but they'd also probably never make it.)

Maybe I'm just being cynical, though.

Honestly I don't think they would hesitate for even one moment.

at least no more than they did when they suggested heaven is a hard drive owned by a psychotic Mary Poppins, more specifically the idea of a single mum has been to a certain extent(though by no mean complete)de-stigmatised in wider society here, at the very least those who are critical are careful to not frame their criticism in religious terms because religion over here while still respected is seen as a personal choice about your life, those who try to impose it on others are generally mocked or ignore by most people

[Twig]

Fair enough! And good.

[deleted user]

_

[ariskany_evan]

I'm late to the party, but I saw Gone Girl last night.  Had read the book about a year ago, so it wasn't entirely fresh in my mind.

 

The cat theme!  The opening and close shot of Amy's head being stroked, and then in the latter, shooting up a quick, cold stare.  Fincher seemed to want to play up the feline aspect of Amy's character.  Unpredictably cunning.  Treating her loved ones like a cat treats its toy (one moment grooming it, another moment treating it as prey).

 

My memory of the book was that by the end, both Nick and Amy were in it together.  We were back in Nick's head and he was starting to feel like he wanted to be back with Amy (in a way that felt absolutely crazy).

 

The movie, though, begins with Nick talking about bashing his wife's brain in.  And the final moments of the film find Nick trapped, and agreeing to go along with the game begrudgingly.

 

I left the theater feeling like the movie made Amy into a villain, and Nick into a hapless saint.  Whereas the book made them both feel equally crazy by the end.

 

Loved the movie overall, just felt like the subtext read more misogynist than the book (Amy is evil and is objectified by thematically linking her with a cat, something sub-human).

[syntheticgerbil]

Huh, since I've only just started on the second season I guess I've not yet encountered most of the bullshit. Maybe best to stop now while things are still decent.

I don't know your mileage may very. The third season is really good! It made me feel more disappointed with season 4 though. I think part of it is Season 4 is a half season, a lot of season 3 drama is not resolved and too many things happen too quickly because of the small amount of episodes. AMC actually cancelled it at the end of 3 but then Netflix funded a few more episodes.

 

It's weird, I loved the main characters, and the seasons alternated from good to cheesy and back, I think it would have benefited from a season 5 at the full 13 episodes to give a better end to the series and not end on such an uninteresting and contrived case.

[brkl]

I kind of loved The Killing, even though the plots are not great. I just love the main characters and how they are performed.

[Bjorn]

Weird, The Evil Dead is returning as a TV series, complete with Raimi and Campbell. That was unexpected.

[Twig]

Weird, The Evil Dead is returning as a TV series, complete with Raimi and Campbell. That was unexpected.

haha wow what

[Bjorn]

I'm tentatively excited about it.  Like, if it's terrible, then I just won't watch much.  And if it's good, then cool, it's an extension of one of my favorite series of movies.  It's not like it can ruin the originals.  And a limited run series seems like a good match.  A chance to explore some more of the absurdity of Ash's world, but not too long for Ash's schtick to wear thin. 

[Merus]

I'm late to the party, but I saw Gone Girl last night.  Had read the book about a year ago, so it wasn't entirely fresh in my mind.

 

The cat theme!  The opening and close shot of Amy's head being stroked, and then in the latter, shooting up a quick, cold stare.  Fincher seemed to want to play up the feline aspect of Amy's character.  Unpredictably cunning.  Treating her loved ones like a cat treats its toy (one moment grooming it, another moment treating it as prey).

 

My memory of the book was that by the end, both Nick and Amy were in it together.  We were back in Nick's head and he was starting to feel like he wanted to be back with Amy (in a way that felt absolutely crazy).

 

The movie, though, begins with Nick talking about bashing his wife's brain in.  And the final moments of the film find Nick trapped, and agreeing to go along with the game begrudgingly.

 

I left the theater feeling like the movie made Amy into a villain, and Nick into a hapless saint.  Whereas the book made them both feel equally crazy by the end.

 

Loved the movie overall, just felt like the subtext read more misogynist than the book (Amy is evil and is objectified by thematically linking her with a cat, something sub-human).

 

More Gone Girl:

 

One of Fincher's signature techniques is that his camera is always subjective. We see the vast majority of the movie from Nick's perspective - but when we're seeing it from Amy's perspective, we're seeing things we find out are completely fabricated as if they're really happening.

 

I think the lawyer's got Nick bang to rights when he says that they deserve each other: Nick is projecting the idea of the wounded husband, but we know he's a liar and a fraud and a main character in a Fincher movie. The text is lying to us because Nick is lying to us, and that changes how the subtext is supposed to be read: it's Nick that sees his wife as subhuman, even after all she's done, and he still thinks that even though he's willing to physically and emotionally manipulate her (and his sister, for that matter), he's the aggrieved party here.

 

Gone Girl reminds me a lot of Fight Club in the way that if you don't realise that Fincher is deliberately misleading you, the subtext of the film is way shittier than Fincher intended.

[CollegeBaby]

Well I just saw Interstellar and... I have no idea how to feel about this movie. I have many mixed emotions that add up to exactly zero. I don't think I understand films well enough to know what is wrong with this movie, but I think it tries to hit a balance between high reaching themes and down-to-earth character drama that doesn't really give enough justice to either of them.

 

The following are comments on the tone of the film that could be interpreted as spoilers, but contain no actual plot details.

I'm not entirely sure what this film is trying to achieve. The best I can gather is it seems to be asserting that anti-intellectualism is holding back human progress, and that science will save the day as long as we believe in THE POWER OF LOVE. I guess that's cool, but I think the best science fiction films make you ask questions about humanity, technology, reality, the future, and the relationship between these things. I don't think this movie asked anything of me. If it was trying to cheer on about the power of science then it was just preaching to the choir, so maybe this film wasn't for me. I don't know. Prometheus was a mess of a film, but it least it was curious about something.

[CollegeBaby]

Ok, spoiler commence!

 

Also, you can't just fly into a black hole. You can't. You'd get ripped apart pretty quickly. And black holes don't have weird dual accretion disks orbiting at 90 degree angles that are kind of like rings. They have singular accretion disks that are superheated until they glow insanely bright. This, by the way, is my specific field of study. I have a PhD in supermassive black hole accretion disk emission. So when a film decides to just use this as a fun little plot point, it's incredibly disappointing to me, specifically.

 

You'd know more about this than I would, but I assumed the apparent ring passing over the poles of the black hole was actually just the lensed effect of the equatorial ring passing around from the far side of the black hole.

[Argobot]

Interstellar is the most frustrating movie experience I've had in a while. You can tell that there is a good movie in there somewhere, it's just buried under cliched dialogue and a failed attempt at recreating parts of 2001. It's the fastest moving three hour movie I've ever seen, which means that the movie never felt long, but I also never felt that it gave its audience enough time to understand or appreciate what was happening on screen. The idea that love is this powerful force that can transcend time and space is something that I am willing to accept in a certain kind of movie, but Interstellar wanted to be three kinds of movies all at once, and ended up weakening its central point. The overuse (and misuse) of the Dylan Thomas poem was also unhelpful.

 

Matt Damon's character had no business being in this movie. His subplot was the nadir of the film and he also has the worst reference to the Dylan Thomas poem in the whole movie. The father/daughter relationship stuff was mostly fine, but I couldn't stop thinking about the son. Poor Casey Affleck. Guess your dad doesn't love you enough to cross the fifth dimension or even ask where you are when he is resurrected on the Saturn station.

[Mawd]

Okay so I used the search bar to see if anyone had seen Under The Skin but it seems no one has or if they have their opinions have been sanctioned by evil forces.

So has anyone else seen it? I did a few months back and it became easily my favourite movie of this year and almost certainly my favourite film made since Drive, Kill List, or The Place Beyond The Pines.

Some people say it was a little too thin exposition wise but I think it was enough for me to subsist on because I felt it was sublime and amazing.

 

I'd thoroughly recommend it if anyone wanted a modern day, understated, humanist, sci fi story.

 

 

Okay with that said I must confess that it is a movie almost so completely built on the "Show don't tell" method that it can physically hurt you if that kind of experience isn't your thing. More than once during the movie my partner and I asked ourselves "What the fuck is going on with this movie?". It's good that the film is such a visual feast otherwise it might not be able to withstand our repeated attempts to demand some kind of explicit plot, some kind of Gordon Freeman avatar to come along and knowingly explain everything to us in the same way that I've come to dislike from him in almost every movie (except Shawshank because I can't hate the original G.F. explain-a-thon it didn't mean to hurt anybody and also excepting The Lego Movie since it's having so much fun with him).

 

However I do think there is a great reward in seeing this movie and later coming back to it. By staying aloof it opens the door for return visits unlike say Inception.

I do kind of wish that the film was less subtle than it was in particular about the main character's emotional journey but I think it's done a wonderful job as it has and I don't really think I'd change a thing about it which is more than I can say for most films these days.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Read the description and thankfully the video backed up your post! I'm all for this. I don't even mind if the plot is going to slide all over my brain without penetrating, judging from the trailer I could watch this like Enter the Void and get a fully gratifying experience.

[Merus]

I am really hoping that Half-Life 3 has Gordon speak, and it's Morgan Freeman's voice.

[Patrick R]

Under the Skin is really good. It feels pretty clear to me that it's all about male gaze, but there's plenty of other theories.

 

My partner wrote what I think is a really interesting essay about what Under the Skin meant to them as a gender-queer person. It's spoiler heavy so I wouldn't reccomend reading it before watching it, but I think it's a really interesting way of looking at the movie.

 

It isn't really that the plot is hard to follow, it's totally linear and stripped down. It's just got a different rhythm to it.

[Erkki]

Okay so I used the search bar to see if anyone had seen Under The Skin ... easily my favourite movie of this year and almost certainly my favourite film made since Drive, Kill List, or The Place Beyond The Pines.

 

Well, that's 3 movies added to my to see lists, after watching the trailers. Already saw Place Beyond the Pines, that was great.