Movie/TV recommendations

[twmac]

The Final Girls just came out to stream and I was really impressed.

 

The film is a love letter to old slasher films but the core story is actually really a touching story of a girl learning to cope with the loss of her mother. It dances away from being too sugary. Definitely worth it and Taissa Farmiga is slowly putting together a solid acting portfolio (she was really good in 6 years).

[Erkki]

I can confirm that Girlhood is really good.

[seamus2389]

I can confirm that Girlhood is really good.

 

Girlhood is a great movie made better by this

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJcYFGTvb4o

 

The Final Girls just came out to stream and I was really impressed.

 

The film is a love letter to old slasher films but the core story is actually really a touching story of a girl learning to cope with the loss of her mother. It dances away from being too sugary. Definitely worth it and Taissa Farmiga is slowly putting together a solid acting portfolio (she was really good in 6 years).

 

This episode of comedy bang bang has 3 of the cast memebers of the movie on it and was pretty good.

[Erkki]

Just watched The Stunt Man (1980) on a recommendation by Adam Saltsman in the Designer Notes 12 interview with Davey Wreden about The Stanley Parable. I guess some parallels can actually be drawn between that movie and TSP, and one scene seemed particularly video game-y to me; anyway I really liked the movie, about a fugitive who becomes a stuntman. Steve Railsback gives a good performance, looking like a confused but confident country man who looks exactly like Jason Connery's Robin of Sherwood. And Peter O'Toole is excellent.

[Erkki]

Also, today I saw Sicario, which was really thrilling to watch, although I'm not sure if I understood what the message was, if there even was any. And before that I watched Tomboy yesterday, Céline Sciamma's (who made Girlhood) earlier movie. I didn't like it QUITE as much as Girlhood, but it is also really good and I would recommend watching that as well to anyone who liked Girlhood. I especially loved the little sister character. Now I'm going to have to watch Water Lilies as well.

[Bolegium]

I've started making my way through Villeneuve's filmography. So far the order has been pretty haphazard, 'Enemy' was the first of his I watched, then 'Sicario', and just last night I saw 'Prisoners'.

 

My immediate reaction after finishing Enemy was pretty negative. The movie deals in a lot of metaphor, but other scenes seem completely straightforward. In the end though it feels like the only way to make sense of the film is to accept that ALL of it is metaphor. I don't know if that even helps with understanding the movie better, or if it's a valid conclusion to make at all. I definitely was unprepared for how intellectual the film is, and would be interested in a re-watch (I watched it with my mum when I was visiting and had time to kill - turns out this wasn't the mystery/detective film we assumed it would be).

 

It also doesn't help that the most coherent interpretation of the film that I've come up with is that its 'message' is just your standard misogyny.

Also the movie feels needlessly slow for it's relatively short 90 mins.

 

Watching Sicario helped me understand what Villeneuve might be going for. The world is a nihilistic wasteland, and ALL the characters are slaves to institutional systems of control/ideological beliefs. None of the characters act to create, or even try to imagine alternative realities. The 'message' of the film doesn't seem to be that "one side is better than the other", instead it's about how the the horrors of the world are sustained and self-fulfilled by the false dichotomy of "both sides", who fundamentally share the same beliefs about how the world functions, and their inability to take alternative courses of action.

 

I hadn't really organised those thoughts until after watching Prisoners, and most of what I thought about Sicario can be applied to Prisoners (or vice-versa). Even Enemy seems like it would make more sense seeing it from this perspective, as a character study of a person trapped by their own beliefs (or the shared beliefs of a population) instead of being about a guy who is actually trapped by some external bullshit.

 

You could argue that making films depicting the realities of close-minded characters/societies, without presenting or acknowledging the possibility of alternatives, is itself close-minded. It's like if Snowpiercer didn't have Namgoong Minsoo and Yona as characters who could see beyond the system they were trapped in. Someone brought up in a different forum that Sicario could have been a great season 2 of True Detective as well.

 

In any case I could be completely off the mark. Regardless of what the intended messages of the films may be, they're interesting to think about and open to interpretation (even if they're about people who are closed off to other possibilities). They're also fantastically well-acted and well-made, at least with Roger Deakins shooting and Johann Johannsson scoring. I found out that Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins are attached to the Blade Runner sequel, and that pairing sounds perfect, even if a Duncan Jones-directed Blade Runner would be even more perfect.

[Mawd]

So the premier of American Horror Story: Hotel was solidly awful. Within the first minute we felt like it was going to be terrible. My partner managed for a time to hold out on the hope that the show would acknowledge the audience and say that everything we'd seen up to that point was a self referential joke. No such luck in fact.

 

Now the show has never been Fantastic but usually it's been Good Enough to keep watching. This was just a mess. Honestly the worst tv I've seen in years and that's including Game of Thrones Season 5.

 

In other news the Sci Fy show Defiance was actually decently good if a bit cliche at times. It's a shame that it wasn't renewed but a least it got a third season which is more than I can say for many shows on that network. It wasn't Mr. Robot, or Rick and Morty brilliant but I think it was actually some of the better Tv I'd seen in a while. Also worth mentioning is how well it treated it's rape plotline. That feels like a really odd thing to say but with almost every show having a rape plot somewhere in the mix it was nice that this show didn't make me outright hate the way they dealt with it.

[Erkki]

I've started making my way through Villeneuve's filmography. So far the order has been pretty haphazard, 'Enemy' was the first of his I watched, then 'Sicario', and just last night I saw 'Prisoners'.

Hmm... that sounds like something I might want to do as well. I really liked Sicario.

 

Today I watched a movie that I guess could be considered the opposite of Sicario -- Lawrence of Arabia. Man that was truly an epic. I lack historic knowledge to appreciate all of it, but overall it seemed like a really great story about a man who had real agency to change the world.

[seamus2389]

To me Sciaro was No Country for Old men with emily blunt playing the part of Tommy Lee Jones as someone who idea of who the law/crime works is woefully out of date in this modern 

[seamus2389]

Hmm... that sounds like something I might want to do as well. I really liked Sicario.

 

Today I watched a movie that I guess could be considered the opposite of Sicario -- Lawrence of Arabia. Man that was truly an epic. I lack historic knowledge to appreciate all of it, but overall it seemed like a really great story about a man who had real agency to change the world.

 

A book came out a few years ago called Lawerence in Arabia which look at him along with a German man, an American oil man and a Romanian Zionist Jew who were all in the Middle East at the same time trying to further their own specific ends. NTY times review is worth a read

[Mawd]

The Martian was great. Best movie we've seen for a while. Best space movie I've seen.

[brkl]

It's very thin on the human drama side (the protagonist has a ridiculously resilient personality), otherwise a very good watch.

They had to have him say he thought he was going to die at times, because you never saw it.

[Mawd]

And it's still one of the best wide release movies I've seen since Mad Max: Fury Road. Taking that lone blip out it's probably the best wide release movie I've seen for a few years.

[TheLastBaron]

It's very thin on the human drama side (the protagonist has a ridiculously resilient personality), otherwise a very good watch.

They had to have him say he thought he was going to die at times, because you never saw it.

Yeah that bothered me, but I also probably expected it to be more like Castaway than was fair.

[Merus]

It didn't bother me that Mark Watney was ridiculously resilient, because he's an astronaut and they choose the people who can handle the stress of having to figure things out or die. It does mean you get people like that woman who drove across America as fast as possible, wearing adult diapers so she didn't have to stop, but it also means you get people like the astronauts in Apollo 13. Mark Watney's not out of line there; heightened, sure, but not unreasonably so.

[Gwardinen]

It's also a little more present in the book. A lot of ancillary science and Mark Watney-focused stuff had to be cut down for it to be film length, and it's still fairly long. That said, I think they did well with the pacing in the film, and if I felt anything was missing it's only because I knew there was more originally. As a standalone piece of work, it holds up well.

 

It also got more actual out loud laughter from the audience I was in than any film I recently remember going to.

[brkl]

It didn't bother me that Mark Watney was ridiculously resilient, because he's an astronaut and they choose the people who can handle the stress of having to figure things out or die. It does mean you get people like that woman who drove across America as fast as possible, wearing adult diapers so she didn't have to stop, but it also means you get people like the astronauts in Apollo 13. Mark Watney's not out of line there; heightened, sure, but not unreasonably so.

The time scale is pretty huge. I don't mind him being resilient enough to survive, it just came too easy. I mean there's a single jump of seven months in the film. That's a long time to be alone.

[Gormongous]

The time scale is pretty huge. I don't mind him being resilient enough to survive, it just came too easy. I mean there's a single jump of seven months in the film. That's a long time to be alone.

 

That sort of thing is really mockable in the book, too. There's one point where he's like, "Whew! Finally, a day with no problems to solve. I've been looking forward to a break," and I just laughed out loud because, as the book presents him, Mark Watney lives to solve problems. He might even go mad if there were no problems to solve, there being so little else going on in his head.

 

Honestly, that's why the book was such a failure for me. Survival is not just dealing with emergencies, it's dealing with yourself, and the book had no interest in depicting that beyond the occasional, "Gee, I'm a little lonely today," every half-dozen chapters. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm hoping that it fixes a lot of my problems with the character writing because, in order for an actual human being to inhabit the role, Mark Watney has to be more than a pair of figurative waldo arms for the author to solve nerdy "what ifs" on a foreign planet.

[Gwardinen]

Err... if you're going to the cinema to see Matt Damon put on a display of profound dramatic depth, this may not be the film for you. If anything it brushes past the psychology of survival even more than the book.

[Gormongous]

Err... if you're going to the cinema to see Matt Damon put on a display of profound dramatic depth, this may not be the film for you. If anything it brushes past the psychology of survival even more than the book.

 

I was hoping more for "serviceable" than "profound," but alright.

[Gwardinen]

He shouts a bit at one point. I don't know, I'm not sure I've ever been able to read emotion on Matt Damon's face. When I think of every role he's been in he looks the same in my head.

[brkl]

I actually like Matt Damon and his performance hints at a character that is believable, but the script prefers to show the NASA PR side. I could imagine a three hour version with more depth.

[Gwardinen]

I actually kinda like Matt Damon too. At least I like many, maybe even most, of the films he's been in. But casting my mind back I can't actually find a memory of him in which I understand what emotions he's portraying, unless he's literally shouting or crying at the time. I might have a really strange version of face blindness that extends only to Matt Damon.

[Gormongous]

I actually kinda like Matt Damon too. At least I like many, maybe even most, of the films he's been in. But casting my mind back I can't actually find a memory of him in which I understand what emotions he's portraying, unless he's literally shouting or crying at the time. I might have a really strange version of face blindness that extends only to Matt Damon.

 

I mean, that seeming alienness of emotion is part of why Matt Damon's the only fun part of Interstellar, but I get your point.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hey I enjoyed Crimson Peak a lot. Not sure why Guillermo Del Toro has to play down that it's not a horror film and that people are saying it's not scary. I mean it's not consistently scary, but it's unnerving and makes me think of The Shining in many ways.

 

Either way it was pretty, engaging, creepy, and I am very confused why it seems all critics and fans loved Pacific Rim so much more.