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Movie/TV recommendations

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1 hour ago, Patrick R said:

The Boxer's Omen is a 1983 Shaw Brothers kung-fu/horror/black magic movie and one of the most wonderfully ludicrous things I've ever seen. The intensity with which it surprised me at every turn, while still being a completely earnest and well-constructed film about religious piety and good vs. evil, was absolutely baffling. It's pretty gross (it comes with the sub-genre of black magic movies), with a lot of bugs and maggots and goop and organs and bodily mutilation, but it all happens on a surreal operatic level that makes it much easier to take.

 

This clip highlights the film's stream of consciousness structure and also it's amazing special effects bugfuckery. I could not recommend The Boxer's Omen more strongly to anyone who has an interest in cult or strange films.

 

I'm not much for "kung fu" movies, but my cinephile friend and I discovered The Boxer's Omen four or five years ago and it remains one of the most interesting things I've watched with him. It just has such an extremely meticulous and intensely absurd sense of reality, it's impossible not to get sucked in a little. The Shaw Brothers are so hit and miss for me, but when they hit do they hit.

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3 hours ago, Gormongous said:

 

I'm not much for "kung fu" movies, but my cinephile friend and I discovered The Boxer's Omen four or five years ago and it remains one of the most interesting things I've watched with him. It just has such an extremely meticulous and intensely absurd sense of reality, it's impossible not to get sucked in a little. The Shaw Brothers are so hit and miss for me, but when they hit do they hit.

 

It really is the meticulousness that makes Boxer's Omen. To contrast, I recently saw Happiness of the Katakuris for the first time and while that is also a crazy and unpredictable cult movie, it feels a lot less focused and a lot more impersonal than The Boxer's Omen. There is a very specific vision of good and evil in The Boxer's Omen that is very refined and carefully constructed, even if it is also ridiculous and has a sense of humor about itself.

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Some great recent movies that haven't been mentioned here(?):

 

Raw (Dir, Julia Ducournau) - a really intimate and empathic coming-of-age film about a young woman, got a lot of hype and marketing presenting it as a vomit-inducing horror film but it's way more than that.

Get Out (Dir. Jordan Peele) - i'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned here as it seems to be a huge box office hit. It hit on so many mundane (as in ordinary and common) themes and situations that are terrifying and anxiety inducing. It's brilliantly constructed and acted, and so much fun to watch with an engaged audience.

Colossal (Dir. Nacho Vigalondo) - MRAs probably hate this film and it has Kaijus in it.

 

*Edit - Thanks to TychoCelchuuu below, I didn't search outside of the megathread!

Edited by Bolegium

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3 hours ago, Bolegium said:

Get Out (Dir. Jordan Peele) - i'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned here as it seems to be a huge box office hit.

 

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Last night I watched Wake in Fright. This is a deeply strange Australian movie from 1971, which was considered something of a lost classic until it received a proper remaster and re-release a few years ago. It is, apparently, getting remade as a TV series this year.

 

The film is about a man who works as a schoolteacher in the middle of the outback. He's educated, middle-class, and hates his job: he harbours a high opinion of himself, which is another way of saying he thinks little of the people out there. On the way back to Sydney during the holidays, he finds himself stranded in a mid-size Australian town. Embraced by the local hospitality, he falls in with a group of men. Bad things happen.

 

I've sometimes seen this billed as a horror movie, but that designation doesn't seem quite right to me. There are no cannibal rednecks out here. But it is extremely unsettling, made more so by how ordinary much of it is. You could call it a thriller, I suppose, but that doesn't quite seem adequate to describe the gradual escalation of threat witnessed here. It is a psychological terror in the truest sense: the feeling that, divorced from the ability to form natural relationships within society, a man's own worst enemy tends always to be himself.

 

It's one of the rare movies to remind me of that menacing quality often found in David Lynch's work - quite apart from that which is often wrongly called 'Lynchian' as shorthand for surreal. I mean something like the relentless quality of those scenes in Blue Velvet with Dennis Hopper, where it seems impossible that the raging menace of this threat could ever end. In that movie it did, just about; Wake in Fright offers no such catharsis. Highly recommended. 

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Staying Vertical is a sort of nightmarish comedy (think along the tonal lines of The Lobster) about responsibility from the director of the gay thriller Stranger By The Lake. This shares that film's explicit sexuality, so fair warning, but Staying Vertical is a really dark and funny movie and it features what is surely the greatest jump cut in history.

 

I think it's the best movie I've seen this year and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes unusual films. The trailer doesn't quite capture the playfulness of the film, but it captures it's tone pretty well.

 

 

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23 minutes ago, marginalgloss said:

It's one of the rare movies to remind me of that menacing quality often found in David Lynch's work - quite apart from that which is often wrongly called 'Lynchian' as shorthand for surreal. I mean something like the relentless quality of those scenes in Blue Velvet with Dennis Hopper, where it seems impossible that the raging menace of this threat could ever end. In that movie it did, just about; Wake in Fright offers no such catharsis. Highly recommended. 

 

 

This is dead on. I think the first time I watched Wake In Fright I spent way too much time waiting for the horror to kick in, but once I began to settle into what it was actually doing I was hooked. Part of what makes it such an intense experience is that, in addition to being a psychological film, it's physically exhausting to watch. It's so hot and uncomfortable and so much beer is consumed, it starts to feel like a cinematic hangover, I just felt ill watching it.

 

Fair warning to people who want to watch Wake In Fright, there is an actual kangaroo death onscreen.

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On 12/10/2015 at 9:04 AM, Ben X said:

 

I loved Kimmy Schmidt but it definitely only hits its stride around episode 3 or 4.

 

I didn't enjoy season 2 as much, but 3 really felt like it was back at top speed again, I was cackling throughout.

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Yes! I'm watching season 3 now and the first three episodes are just non-stop laughs. They've really embraced the insanity of the characters and the show now feels like a delightful playground for them.

 

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I'm Lemonading.

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Wow, I am having the exact opposite reaction to Season 3. Some good moments but it feels like it has lost the thread completely with their need to fall back on some pretty generic plot points (Kimmy isn't happy go lucky and has to solve a problem that also gives her insight into her own foibles).

 

 

Don't get me wrong, there are still some great moments but not enough.

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I saw Wonder Woman over the weekend. Every fight scene was super over produced and way to reliant on CGI. Fast cutting between totally fake 'awesome' moves is not my cup of tea. The love story felt very tacked on and unbelievable and the whole film felt like it was rushing to check boxes.

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Just watched Hardcore, oh man this fps perspective action movie was so good and insane r rated movie. I think it came out originally in theaters last year?

 

Sharlto Copley also put maybe his best performance since District 9.

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I was in the mood to re-watch The Matrix and I enjoyed it quite a bit, it holds up very well. Then I made the mistake of deciding to re-watch the sequels as well, even though I never liked them to begin with. Even within the first minute of Reloaded you can tell that they're going in the first direction, because they spend a full minute on the masturbatory green 'matrix effect'. They turned what was a cool scene transition into pointless effects wankery, it's horrible. Aside from that one shot of trinity landing in front of the exploding building I don't particularly care for the opening. It's gets worse though, as the movie spends a quarter of its entire run time on characters we don't and won't care about, in a boring location with utterly uninteresting dialogue. I know that it's setup for the 3rd movie, but it's such a drag.

 

Some of the fight scene are alright. In general I think they look too floaty because of all the wire work, but it's fine I guess. It's just never particularly exhilarating. I was expecting to like Revolutions even less, because that's how I remembered it, but somehow it was more watchable. Most of it takes places in the real word, a setting I simply do not care for, but at least there are some stakes there. The hovercraft chase scene, ripped straight from RotJ, is more exciting than all the martial arts nonsense in Reloaded. That said, I think this movie is a disaster as well because I am not the least bit interested in the world they're portraying. I would say that the only good things from the first movie that the sequels retain are the costume designs and the music. Even as silly as they get, I still love the leather fetish costume designs they have.

 

I also watched some other stuff a while ago but I never have time to post:

Casino Royale, which I hadn't seen since it first came out. I was quite astonished how well this movie held up, it was better than I remembered. I would probably have to say that it's my favourite bond movie, and maybe the only one that I think is legitimately great. Infinitely better than what came after.

 

Then I watched both Kill Bill movies. I'd seen them a long time ago and didn't particularly enjoy them, but I saw some random scene on YouTube that was good and decided to re-watch them. I still don't understand the appeal to be honest, I know that people love them. I sort of feel that way about Tarantino in general though. Pulp Fiction is the only movie of his that I like, but I have a hard time even with that one sometimes. Even when he isn't a literal self insert in a movie, the dialogue often feels like he is. I don't want to hear characters talking like they're Tarantino, I want them to talk like they're their own characters. The foot massage thing, or the uncomfortable silences thing, that to me comes off like Tarantino talking directly through the characters. And I get that writers do that, but they should obfuscate it more. Anyway, Kill Bill doesn't have that problem, but it also doesn't have very interesting dialogue. I think a lot of it is shot well, but beyond that I don't get what people think makes these movies exceptional.

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18 hours ago, eot said:

Casino Royale, which I hadn't seen since it first came out. I was quite astonished how well this movie held up, it was better than I remembered. I would probably have to say that it's my favourite bond movie, and maybe the only one that I think is legitimately great. Infinitely better than what came after.

 

Which one?

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I meant the Daniel Craig one. I've never seen the 60's one actually

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Neither have I, but Casino Royale (with Craig) is just an excellent Bond. Surpassing its own genre, in fact: it's a really good spy thriller. Moody, understated, heartfelt, and with a terrific poker scene in the middle. I love a good poker scene. It's why Maverick is so much fun.

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@eot

I was always bummed that the best Matrix characters were really only featured in the crappy Enter the Matrix game.  Niobe is shown some in the movies but the rest of her crew is great too.  Sparks has a few brief but memorable moments in the live action cutscenes from the game and Ghost is my absolute favorite Matrix related character.

 

I also feel the same as you about Tarantino.

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I'm not a huge fan of the first Matrix either, and I think the reason is that there's no real story to go with the high-concept setting. It's just "Is Neo the one? Yes."

I also find the 'real world' sections to feel a lot more fake than the matrix sections, which is really the wrong way round.

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On 2017-06-26 at 5:12 PM, Ben X said:

I'm not a huge fan of the first Matrix either, and I think the reason is that there's no real story to go with the high-concept setting. It's just "Is Neo the one? Yes."

I also find the 'real world' sections to feel a lot more fake than the matrix sections, which is really the wrong way round.

I see what you mean but I'm not sure I agree. Well, with your second point I do because the real world sections are definitely weaker.

 

The story is about Neo's journey to get to that point, about gradually waking up. There are at least four scenes in the movie that begin with him waking up. I actually prefer it over the typical action movie story, because the story isn't about the protagonist defeating some bad guy, it's just about his character growth.

 

Anyway, that's not why I think it's a fantastic movie. Although it is of course subjective, I find the aesthetics of it to be great. It's a cooler version of the 90's that never was. More importantly I think it's edited and paced extremely well. As an example, the way they cut from the night club scene to Neo waking up. First they fade almost seamlessly between two quite different songs, and then they make the alarm clock sound like it's part of Mindfields and cut perfectly into Neo oversleeping. The whole movie is filled with that level of attention to detail.

 

I also like that it's very lean, there's almost nothing I would cut from it. The density of scenes that will stick in your mind crazily high. It's famous for its action sequences, but the non-action scenes are just as memorable, if not more. A lot of movies have one scene that stand out and that people remember, but The Matrix has a dozen of them. Even just the opening sequence is better than most action movies. That's my perception at least.

 

Now it's not my favourite movie of all time or anything, but I think it's probably better than most of my favourite movies. How badly they screwed up everything that followed is more baffling to me than even George Lucas' crap, because you can see hints of his insanity even in A New Hope. The Wachowskis on the other hand went from making something legitimately great to something with no trace of that greatness.

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46 minutes ago, eot said:

[...] George Lucas' crap, because you can see hints of his insanity even in A New Hope.

 

I'm curious what you're referring to here as for me the problems I have with the prequels aren't in A New Hope.  There's lots of problems, but for me above everything else the primary flaw with the prequel movies is just that they're really fucking boring.  I've always attributed a lot of this as to being due to Lucas getting older and being drawn to different things (for example a guy in his late 50's might be really into trade routes and tax disputes in a way that a guy in his early 30's wasn't and less interested in other things).  

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I think every movie the Wachowskis have made is good and I think the three Matrix movies are about as good as each other. George Lucas's movies got worse because he divorced his editor.

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9 hours ago, TheLastBaron said:

 

I'm curious what you're referring to here as for me the problems I have with the prequels aren't in A New Hope.  There's lots of problems, but for me above everything else the primary flaw with the prequel movies is just that they're really fucking boring.  I've always attributed a lot of this as to being due to Lucas getting older and being drawn to different things (for example a guy in his late 50's might be really into trade routes and tax disputes in a way that a guy in his early 30's wasn't and less interested in other things).  

I was thinking primarily about all the weird things that pop out of Lucas' imagination. When those ideas turn out well they're one of Star Wars' greatest strengths, but when they're bad they can be insufferable. Just on Tatooine you have Jawas, the Tuskan Raiders, all the weird creatures in the cantina and so on. Hell, even Chewbaka. I think all of that stuff walks a fine line, and when we get to the Ewoks in RotJ that line is crossed. It's not surprising to me that the same mind that gave us the Ewoks also gave us the Gungans.

 

I find RotJ to watch nowadays, not just because of Endor but also because of the opening act set in Jabba's palace, which is also filled with Lucas' indulgences. The problem is that he doesn't know how to tell the good ideas from the bad ones.

 

Of course the problems with the prequels run deeper than the goofy creature designs, but it's what I think of first.

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Me and my partner finished the latest series of Silicon Valley last night, and it's still completely hilarious, addictive telly. The acting is astounding, at times, which I don't usually expect from a sitcom

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Band of Brothers really is just a very long action movie, isn't it? Character arcs are very shallow and boilerplate and mostly seem to exist on a single episode basis, and I can barely tell anyone apart. Just one of the downsides of a show where your cast is all white dudes who are dressed the same. Had the same issues with Boardwalk Empire. I just finished episode 6, so maybe things will pick up from here.

 

Luckily some of the action scenes are very good approximations of Saving Private Ryan, and since I've watched the Ken Burns doc The War and started reading Five Came Back, I finally have a context for all this. I never took a history class that covered the 20th century, and it's nice to have a basic understanding of events that actually affected people you've met (my grandfather was in the Battle of the Bulge, a fact I always knew but didn't appreciate), even if Band of Brothers definitely qualifies as what Samuel Fuller called "[a] goddamned recruitment picture".

 

I've heard The Pacific is richer and more nuanced & complicated, so maybe I'll give that a shot after this.

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On 3/31/2017 at 9:29 PM, Patrick R said:

Paterson is such an incredible, beautiful movie. As someone who works a minimum wage job, with no ambitions of marriage or children or career advancement or any of the things the world constantly tells me is vital to being a real person, it was wonderful to see something more resembling my life in a film. There is precious little cinema that doesn't judge low-wage work as either demeaning or romantic.

 

So I watched Paterson the other night and I liked it, but some things in it didn't work for me personally.  Basically all of it boils down to "I wanted this movie to be more of something that it wasn't trying to be in the first place".  Basically I really liked the premise and a lot of what the movie did (and for the record I'm a big Jarmusch fan), but I think I wanted more grounded-vignette-of-a-normal-dude's-life and less quirky-indie-movie (half-way through the movie I stopped and thought to myself about how much I felt like I was just watching 500 Days of Summer or something).  Like the parts where he encounters the little girl or the Japanese man on the bench were just so serendipitous that it made things feel a little saccharine to me.  It was like having a normal like life where you do the same thing every day wasn't good enough so Paterson has to have all these special encounters to make his life worthwhile which didn't really work for me.  The scene with Method Man did work for me though, I guess because the encounter happened as the result of Paterson hearing his verses and going out of his way to listen and that made the whole shared moment something that came from within the characters and not just the script.  

One thing I'm not totally sure about is the daily interactions with his co-worker where he talks about what's going on with his life.  I like the whole thing, it does a good job of portraying the sort of conversations you have where you're asking what's new to get a sense that things are changing despite the fact that every day things are essentially still the same, but also at the same time you're just kind of going through the motions out of routine.  What I'm not 100% sure how I feel about is how on the last day his co-worker just figures Paterson doesn't care and leaves.  Is this supposed to be like a whole relationship arc for them over one week?  Presumably before the movie starts they've been doing this for years and is this the one week where the guy just decides to stop?  For me I can relate to the scenes a lot, and I've been the co-worker where I know someone doesn't really care all that much about what's going outside of work, but I'll rant for my own sake as much as theirs just so I can get it off my chest and I'm glad to have a sympathetic ear even if it's an unresponsive one.  Maybe this isn't the end of some sort of relationship between those two characters, I could totally see the other guy coming by again come Monday and rambling on to Paterson again and the cycle continues.

 

Regarding his girlfriend once again I'm conflicted, but I think I might have misheard a line that changed how I framed everything.  When she decides she wants to get a guitar so she can fulfill her dream of being a country singer I thought Paterson mumbled "You wanted a dog..." meaning first she wanted their bulldog and now she wants a guitar and in a week she might want something else and it would totally make sense that between these things and her art and her aspirations of stardom we're being shown how she's feeling unfulfilled and looking for some sort of outlet, and from Paterson's point of view he loves her and wants to make her happy, but obviously money is tight.  If this is the case part of me wishes the film had had to address the end result of this sort of thing, which is getting to a point where you're forced to say "I want more than anything for you to be happy, but there just isn't any more money".  Then again the movie does present a picture where I would totally just buy a "Well, money's tight, but we'll find a way to make it work..."  sort of thing, and to undercut this whole paragraph the more I think about it the more I think I just misheard Adam Driver mumbling and he didn't mention the dog at all and rather than the scene being about spending money you can't afford in the hopes of wish-fulfillment it's actually the opposite and about finding ways to be happy and fulfilled even in lean times and how special it is to have someone who supports you.  

 

To talk about something positive, I liked the bar scenes a lot.  Seeing Paterson leave with his dog every night always got me excited.  I also really like resulting scene, probably my favorite in the movie, where Paterson passes the actor-boyfriend (I'm really bad at names, if Paterson wasn't the most used word in the film I would be calling Adam Driver Adam Driver) on the sidewalk after the incident the night before.  The way they just sort of approach each-other and there's some awkwardness, but then it ends with a good character moment where they both ask each other how they're doing and they both say they're doing fine despite having both just lost something big to them and there's the line exchanged about there always being another day capped off with "see you around" and it does a great job of showing how all the little things don't really matter it's the big picture that's important.  Lots of movies are based around some big event happening, but in Paterson the big event is just life so one thing that happened one night isn't really that important, you get over it and move on and grow.  This isn't totally fitting, but it made me think of the Richard Linklater quote about high school, "The stakes were really low. To get Aerosmith tickets or not? That’s a big thing. It was really rare when the star-crossed lovers from the opposite side of the tracks and the girl gets pregnant and there’s a car crash and somebody dies. That didn’t really happen much. But riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up, now that happened a lot!".  

 

I definitely ended up writing more than than I expected, so that's probably a good indication that it's a good movie.  I guess I didn't state it at all earlier, but I am also a career-minimum-wage-worker so I definitely appreciated a lot of what the film went for.  Definitely something I'll have to watch again sometime. 

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