ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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I want it to be good, am afraid it will not be.

 

Broken Lizard has delivered more than failed (for me), so I think they've got a shot at making something good.  I love Super Troopers, so so so much.  Club Dread was not great, but it was an interesting experiment with trying to make sure none of the troop got typecast by their Super Troopers characters.  I liked Beerfest a bunch, probably because it reminded me of all my old buddies.  I just discovered they made another movie a few years ago, Slammin Salmon, which I have not seen, but will soon. 

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The Woman is good (I'm a big fan of Lucky McKee) but I haven't seen The Mooring. I'll have to check it out.

 

But if you really want to see a film with a similar style, you should check out It Follows director David Robert Mitchell's first film Myth of the American Sleepover. It's not a horror film, but it has that same languid slightly dreamy approach to adolescent sexual tension. It's really really good. Just think a slower younger version of Dazed and Confused.

 

It's funny, after I first saw that I said that he should direct an adaptation of Charles Burns' Black Hole which is a surreal horror-tinged graphic novel about an STD going through a high school and mutating all those infected. And lo and behold his next movie was a surreal horror film about an STD (or, I supposed, a sexually transmitted curse) working it's way through a group of high school friends.

 

Yeah, I eat up everything Lucky Mckee releases, even when it is bad (I pre-ordered All Cheerleaders Die as soon as it was available).

 

If you are in the US The Mooring should be on Netflix. The biggest crime is that no one from it went on to do bigger and better things.

 

Will definitely check out the other film as you are right that slightly hazy, dreamy feel to the film is what made me really like it.

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I saw A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night a couple of nights ago. Very moody, interestingly shot film. Between that and What We Do In The Shadows, that's two vampire movies in the last three weeks for me. Both were awesome in different ways. Girl was very reminiscent of Jarmusch at his best (Down By Law or Mystery Train). That will be very appealing to some and very unappealing to others. If you are in the former camp, check it out.

 

On my last day of Sundance 2014, I waitlisted and got into A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and then spent the next few months raving about it to anyone in earshot. I'm super, super glad that it came out and got the acclaim it deserved, and I'm really glad Ana Lily Amirpour (who is a MEGA BADASS, ffffuuccck) is being given the rein on other cool projects

 

(By the way, the film I saw at Sundance 2015 that I feel the same way about is

, a film that not only looks and sounds great, but features a great set of young "nerd" protagonists that are not often depicted in film with the respect and authenticity they get here. Fuck yeah, Dope.)

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There is a very complicated "How much did I dislike this movie?" VS "How much do I support more movies like this, politically?" equation that goes on in my head whenever someone mentions A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. I was not really a fan at all but I am very happy for it's success. I hope Amirpour goes onto better things.

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Yep! I think that even if you didn't like it (which is a thing that happens all the time considering films are art, and art appreciation is subjective), it's really great to have a creative sensibility like Amirpour's out there, making movies that are different. 

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After a week of using Mubi, I'm both :tup: and :tdown:.

 

  • Selection is good, I found a lot of interesting movies to see. And I usually wouldn't watch old movies that much without such a curated selection.
  • On the other hand, being limited to around ~30 movies at a time seems kind of arbitrary. I guess the 5€ a month price is competitive? How much does Netflix or other services with a wider selection cost?
  • The streaming quality is good, I didn't really run into any issues. I didn't see anything with super-good video quality but maybe it was just the selection of movies.
  • With some movies I have the question of whether the original was actually super bad video quality like it is on this service (e.g. Lars von Trier movies).
  • Software quality is so-so. It's slow to boot up (I don't see why, really, does it need to pre-load all the images?) and crashed my PS3 several times on two evenings. Today it didn't crash any more, thankfully.

A few negative points, but overall I'm really happy to have a new curated source of movies I probably wouldn't watch otherwise. Some movies I saw (some I'd seen before):

 

House on Trubnaya Square (1928, Russia)

Jacquot de Nantes (1991, France)

Louisiana Story (1948, US)

101 Reykjavik (2000, Iceland)

The Goat (1921, US)

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, France)

Arena (2009, Portugal)

Documenteur (1981, France)

Two Cars, One Night (2003, New Zealand)

 

I enjoyed most of them. I skimmed through some others, there's some crap on the service as well, for example even as I loved the 3 Agnes Varda movies listed above, another 2 of hers were too boring to watch fully. Also I realize I should probably make a list of watched movies because one that expired already I can't remember the title or details enough to find it again, and the service doesn't show my watching history.

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Watched The Myth of American Sleepover, and I liked it. Will watch It Follows next.

 

Also saw A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and it was fantastic. Indeed made me think of early Jarmusch movies.

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Two Cars, One Night (2003, New Zealand)

 

If you liked it, watch Boy. Same director, great movie.

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Yeah, already added to my to-watch list. Will try to see it the first chance I get. Just saw Meek's Cutoff, a western about 3 families trying to make it on the Oregon Trail. I liked it, but it's only for those who like really slow-paced movies.

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Finally saw Inherent Vice yesterday. My expectations were somewhat lowered by certain things I read in the reviews and comments, but I found myself enjoying the movie quite a bit. It's a shame that the excellent foreboding atmosphere of the novel was largely missing (or at least toned down) in the film, except for a couple of music choices and a few lines fed to the narrator. Fortunately, the sense of stoner paranoia and of Doc being completely baffled and lost most of the time was still there. I didn't expect the film to be as funny as it was, and I am mostly happy with Anderson's effort to transfer Pynchon's weird humor into film. Some reviewers seem to take issue with the plot being too dense and incoherent to be enjoyable, but I (having read the novel years ago and remembering almost nothing of the plot) and my friends (having not read the novel at all) did not find this to be an issue at all.

 

Overall, the adaptation was not what I had initially hoped for or expected, but I still enjoyed a lot.

 

 

Oh yeah, and I really really loved the soundtrack.

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Just watched Short Circuit, an 1986 movie about a military robot who becomes "alive". Also saw Ex Machina last week, and having recently seen Chappie, it's interesting to compare the three. Maybe it was also mentioned in this thread already, it Chappie seems to draw a lot from Short Circuilt.

 

 

While Chappie was entertaining but ultimately superficial, I think Short Circuit is even more so. It's characters are likeable, but cartoony; it's a very 80s movie. It hardly deals with any philosophical issues relevant to the story beyond whether Number Five is "alive" or not. Chappie is a bit more thoughtful than that, even just by going beyond "aliveness" by talking about conciousness.

 

I liked Ex Machina as well, but... It appeared to be a more intellectual movie, but ultimately ended up disappointing a bit with an outdated romantical idea of AI. Not saying that Chappie's idea is more realistic or rational, but it at least tried to somehow explain the conciousness within a sci-fi framework. The whole situation in Ex Machine seemed very set-up for this story, it didn't feel like it could happen in any universe.

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My wife and I finally got around to watching John Wick last night. Really awesome and possibly my new favorite action movie. I don't really care too much for action movies these days but this one just had so little bullshit and got straight to the point with pretty much every scene. And the ending was pretty much perfect.

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Now that the season is almost over I would say that 12 Monkeys is definitely worth your time if you like moderately scoped, twisty, science fiction television. Far more hits than duds. 

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Watched the Babadook and the Honeymoon since I got sick of hearing about them. Babadook was alright, didn't hit me the way I thought it would after all the hype, the mother was really well acted though. Honeymoon was fucking spot on. Had the cogs turning in my head the whole time. Smartest thriller I've seen in ages.

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I think that was more or less everyone's reaction to those scenes. I watched it with my primary movie watching buddy and his dad, and we frequently alternated between being enthralled by the movie and laughing out loud/cringing at how ludicrous the sex scenes were. I feel more conflicted about it in retrospect hearing about the awful treatment the two lead actors got at the hands of the film's director, and the hissy fit he threw when they started talking to the press about it, but... it's hard to argue with the results.

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Recently watched 2001: A Space Odyssee and Going Clear, HBO documentary about Scientology.

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Excellent review for It Follows. Have ordered Myth of an American Sleepover from the US and it is probably going to take about 3 weeks to get here.

 

Had a hankering to watch Fun again - looked up whether it had ever been released on DVD and they want at least 43 USD for it. Still tempted.

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So I'm seeing so many movies these days that if I mentioned all that I liked here, I would be spamming this thread quite a bit, perhaps I already am? There are several reasons, like finally having a big screen at home; not playing that many video games any more; discovering that I can really appreciate old movies, whereas earlier in my life I didn't really want to watch old black and white movies that much; and finally that I spent most of the 2000s up to 2013 or so not watching a lot of movies.

Last week the best thing I saw was Half-Nelson. It was really great, and cemented my opinion of Ryan Gosling being one of the best actors right now. I was already really impressed by him in The Believer, but forgot his name as that was about when my mostly movie-free decade begun. Now I've seen a lot of the movies he played in and he is great in most. My lost movie decade also means I discovered Michelle Williams only about a year ago in Wendy and Lucy. I didn't even realize she was the same person who played in Dawson's Creek.

I wonder what other great things I may have missed. But I also wonder whether it's actually a luxury to go back and pick movies from the last decade based on what has been filtered out by time and critics, instead of seeing everything when it comes out. I know I've had a few disappointments in cinema recently, when I started going more.

Another one worth a mention from last week - rewatched Fisher King. Last saw it in the 90s and it seemed much simpler back then. Now it feels even more magical.

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Since you liked Half-Nelson I'd recommend checking out Detachment if you've not seen it.

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I've been watching a lot of Cheers recently and the guy who plays the judge in night court shows up a fair amount so I decided to watch some Night Court since it's been a while. I'm pretending that it's a spin-off since Harry Stone's character is the exact same as in Cheers (where he was also named Harry) and it's pretty good. And by good I mean it's Night Court.

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I watched Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: The Motion Picture Dracula Untold. As someone who is a huge fan of the classic Universal monster lineup, I ...actually really liked it? It suffers from modern blockbuster movie bullshit (there's some shakycam fights, it doesn't even make an attempt to pass the Bechdel test, and the CGI bats everywhere look ridiculous), but it does some legitimately clever stuff with the Dracula mythos.

The fight in the room full of silver coins is clever, the giant bat fist is so ridiculous that I'm on board with it, and setting up Count Orlock as the main villain for a Universal Monsters Avengers deal is inspired.

I mean, it's not a great movie, but it's way less stupid and cynical than it has any right to be, given what it is. They made a good version of what they set out to achieve and it opens up a lot of potential re-interpretations of the rest of the pantheon.

 

Oh, also, the final scene makes Dracula look like the shittiest PUA, which is unintentionally hilarious.

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The Foxy Merkins has a pretty lame title but is actually one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. It's about two lesbian prostitutes who are friends in NYC and the best way I can describe it is if someone made a lesbian version of Midnight Cowboy, but with the casual surrealism of an episode of Louie. Except it's funnier than any episode of Louie I've ever seen.

 

And it's on Netflix Instant! Well worth seeing.

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Jupiter Ascending is a lot more fun if you imagine it's written by Tina from Bob's Burgers.

 

I mean come on it's about a misfit who discovers they are a special person in a world just next to our own, but also has rollerblades, a royal wedding, and a magic tattoo.

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