You could just make a new one called "Films you've seen recently" and we'll all start posting in that one instead?
I was thinking about just going straight in like that and just creating my own. But then I thought, no, that would be rude, I'm more polite than that, I'd rather see what people want and work together towards a mutual solution, rather than just starting a thread and trying to impose my will on everyone in that way. I thought "that's probably the sort of thing Version or someone might do, but not me".
I have noted this unhelpful comment, sadly I'm too drunk to think of a suitably devastatingly acerbic riposte right now, but if/when I do I will be gunning for you matey!
Case in point for the new thread that I'm suggesting being last night when I saw Overlord. I would not recommend it wholeheartedly, I would not tell people to avoid it, I did not think "WTF" and it's not substantial enough to warrant its own thread. So, for the moment, it's going here.
Overlord - 2018
Basically it's another one of those ones which builds on the myths or true stories or whatever they were about Nazis trying to build superhuman solders so that they would definitely win the war. A lot of people seem to think that this was being tried one way or another; it's never been quite clear to me if the accepted version is that they were most interested in using occult magic to create unholy monster beings, or if they were planning to use more prosaic scientific methods to simply increase the strength and toughness of people much like everyone does in the Olympics these days - although come to think of it the leading proponents of that, both in terms of doing it first and of doing it best, were the East Germans, which can't be a coincidence can it? Oh and some people claim that they also tried fucking gorillas to see if that would produce a super soldier but seems hard to believe, I reckon was probably just some pervy Obergruppenfuhrer who wanted to take his lust for hairy women to the next logical step and realised he could be paid for doing it.
Anyway, I digress, this film skates over precisely how it works but in this instance it appears there is some kind of magic (or science, same thing really) serum which, when injected, turns you into an almost indestructible zombie warrior.
The film starts of with the protagonists in their plane being pep talked as they fly through the explosions caused by various anti-aircraft weapons targeting them and their compatriots, and prepare to parachute into the drop zone from where they will ultimately be able to take out the mcguffin which has to be destroyed because of a reason. And this scene is really good, it does much better than almost any other film that comes into my mind at showing how terrifying it must be to sit there in a flying tin can over which you have absolutely no control, waiting for various types of ordnance to hit you or not*. A surprisingly strong scene that could sit well in any straight war film - in fact at this point, if you didn't know that the film was about GIs versus zombies and gorilla fuckers (probably) then you would be assuming that you were in for the new, I dunno, Full Metal Jacket or something.
But anyway, they land, they meet a super-hot French catwalk model who, just before the war, decided to chuck that in and move back to the countryside where she could live a simple life as a peasant and forage for acorns instead (they don't go into the full details of her backstory but that's the only possible explanation) and then they go to her house and for quite some time they argue amongst themselves, play a bit of cat and mouse with the nazis and their particularly odious leader who is always trying to rape her - and then the zombies show up kinda near the end and it all goes a bit crazy as they try and blow up the thing that has to be blown up AND rescue Kate Moss's daughter from the very heart of the zombie infestation.
The problem for me is that there is a little bit too much arguing about the best way to blow the thing up and not enough zombies. I understand the idea of holding the good stuff back and building up tension that way and so on... but, it's a film about nazi zombies, let's not think about it too much, let's get them on the screen charging towards our heroes and trying to eat their brains eh? So a little bit frustrating for me, great scene at the start which really sucks you in and has you thinking "Wow, that was nuts, when the zombies show up this is gonna be fucking crazy" but really it doesn't quite deliver on that. The middle is too slow and the final battles are fairly standard "Oh my god it's coming but I can't reach my gun oh no no oh god - oh got it just in time" kinda stuff, it's all well done, no shitty CGI or anything, decent performances (Kurt Russell's son is in it, he's always good) but ultimately it would have been better if it had been a bit less thoughtful and a little bit more explosioney, cos that's what you want from a glorified b-movie like this isn't it?
*As an aside, when you see a scene like this - which is good in its own right -but I also think it's very good the way that it makes it so clear that invincible James Bond type characters who are guaranteed to survive this sort of thing are a ridiculous myth. Of course we all know that intellectually, but here it's shown so viscerally; people randomly being "selected" to die as though in some kind of bullet lottery is, to me anyhow, a fairly welcome antidote to this idea which your average Bond/Bourne etc implicitly puts across - as long as you are an amazing soldier (and ideally one who is handsome with some killer quips ready to deploy) then surviving the battle - even the war - is in your hands.
This is never spelled out, but people who sign up for the army don't expect to be killed do they? At the back of our minds we always think "it won't happen to us" and all those adverts for the army when they "Be the best" would be less seductive if they said "But even if you are the best, when you go into battle it's basically like rolling a die and if you get a six you die. And you'll have to do that loads of times - whether you live or die is totally out of your hands".
And then for me, when you start thinking about that, it's impossible to not move on to thinking about the naked statistical calculations the generals are making when they're planning a mission. It's just horrible to understand that you're just a number in a ledger valuable only in as much as you tip the statistics in your side's favour.
