films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also, @shakahislop if you don't mind, can you tell me about your film club? How does it work, do you meet up to watch films and if so where - in a bar? - and if so how often and how many films do you show and so on? Is it successful and how many come and how long has it been running etc etc? I need help cos I'm supposed to be running one here soon but it's so fucking hard to get Portuguese people to do ANYTHING except sit around for days on end taking drugs (which fair enough, they are pretty good up, right up there with the English I'd say).
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
Also, @shakahislop if you don't mind, can you tell me about your film club? How does it work, do you meet up to watch films and if so where - in a bar? - and if so how often and how many films do you show and so on? Is it successful and how many come and how long has it been running etc etc? I need help cos I'm supposed to be running one here soon but it's so fucking hard to get Portuguese people to do ANYTHING except sit around for days on end taking drugs (which fair enough, they are pretty good up, right up there with the English I'd say).
it's winding down now that the pandemic is sort of over. basically after failed attempts to get everyone together to do it in person pre-pandemic (started well but petered out, hosting is annoying etc), my mate decided to do it online instead. So everyone picked a film, two were chosen at random / pseudo-random each month, everyone watched them in thier own time, and then everyone wrote a short review. there were zoom discussions as well but I never went to those. I loved the review aspect though. I liked writing them and I liked how there was generally no consensus whatsoever.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I'm glad I didn't bother then. Thing is, I could see that we were gonna discover why she was like that and then - my guess is - she would thaw bit by bit, hopefully endearing herself to the audience as she found a way to face and defeat her demons - but I already found her too annoying to spend another second with and to care whether or not that happened.

There had just been a bit with what I took to be a big hint, she finally did go on a date with a former fellow student who came in her coffee shop and he mentioned a few names along with what they were up to now - and when he said one name the lighting and music suddenly went all dramatic and sinister; I don't think that there was an actual flashback but there was a sort of loaded and intense moment which I took to be subtly saying....

"That name right there was a guy who assaulted her causing her to drop out of college and abandon her dreams, retreating from the real world by training herself to become a seemingly unfeeling and spiteful automaton, and over the course of the rest of the film, as we grow to like her this will slowly be revealed to us and soon enough she will be hunting him down to get her revenge by which point we will well and truly be rooting for her. He will turn out to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work and probably do a few more really really horrible things to make us properly hate him enough that we will be cheering when she does battle through and kill him by putting his balls in some kind of mincing machine and at the end we will all be happy. However we are right now gonna leave it open as regards her new friend, he might be part of her healing process OR there might be a terrifying stomach-turning twist which means that he was in on the rape too but she didn't know about it and as a result she has to cut off his dick as part of the revenge".

Am I on the right lines there @shakahislop?
this is pretty much exactly what happens, yeah
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I watched Licorice Pizza just now as well (rather than going to techno with a banker actually), was it someone on here who was talking about how bright the colours are in everything at the moment? Everything looks like a toy.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
this is pretty much exactly what happens, yeah
Well I can't take much credit for guessing that cos most of it was fucking obvious... although I would like to know about the new boyfriend character, does he stay good or does he does he turn out to be evil?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I did like that the actors weren't beautiful in that one

Fair point.... although do you think that plain dwayne main guy would have got the role if he wasn't the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman? Is that relevant? It sort of feels that the takeaway from that is "Don't worry, you don't have to be beautiful to be a Hollywood star, you can also break into the industry due to raw talent or simply because of good old-fashioned nepotism".
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it's winding down now that the pandemic is sort of over. basically after failed attempts to get everyone together to do it in person pre-pandemic (started well but petered out, hosting is annoying etc), my mate decided to do it online instead. So everyone picked a film, two were chosen at random / pseudo-random each month, everyone watched them in thier own time, and then everyone wrote a short review. there were zoom discussions as well but I never went to those. I loved the review aspect though. I liked writing them and I liked how there was generally no consensus whatsoever.

I'm aiming for one with a meet-up - originally I was thinking of doing it in someone's house but basically I live too far out of Lisbon for there to be even the slightest possibility that anyone would even consider coming to mine (according to the Portuguese mindset I might as well be on the moon although I think I'm actually closer to the town centre than I was when I lived in Hackney*) and I don't think it's fair or realistic to do it at someone else's, so it looks as though it will be in a bar. Cosmos is good in that it has a backroom we could use and also a dvd player and a projector - plus Joao the manager was bang up for it when I suggested it to him, sadly however when I next saw him he was sober and he sounded a little less certain. If he eventually says no though I can take the concept elsewhere easily enough I guess.

My plan is to take over the backroom once a month on a weekday and to show two related films. There will be a FB group or something listing the two films and with a short piece (by me I guess) explaining the reason for showing them together. On the actual night the plan is to have a DJ (probably me) playing film soundtracks from maybe 1900 - 2000, then show one film, then have a break of 45 min or so with the DJ again, then show another film at about 2200 and then DJ again until about 1am or so. Alternatively, if the films merit it, we could use some of the DJ time for a discussion or a Q&A or something.

The main reason that I asked you about format is that people have said to me that showing two films is asking a lot of people. Now I think if a load of people go to the trouble of actually getting off their hole and meeting up then we might as well put two films on once we're there but I fear others are not as keen as me - even though I explained that people wouldn't have to watch both if they didn't want to, they could just leave or go to the bar if they got bored and of course it would be fine to just come to the second - but maybe I'm expecting too much and it would be better to show only one... or maybe compromise by showing some shorts and then a feature, I dunno.... to be honest I'm feeling quite disheartened about how fucking useless everyone is cos I spent aaaaages organising something for today and then when it finally came to it, out of the six people involved one dropped out sick, one claimed to be too hungover and one cried off due to period pains so the whole thing was cancelled.



*Just to be clear, I mean that where I live now is closer to the centre of Lisbon than Hackney was to the centre of London
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
on licorice pizza, i'm not exactly going out to bat for it, but i did like that there was a layer of ambiguity about it, the characters were a bit contradictory and it wasn't always clear what i was supposed to think about any of it. and it was a nice world to be immersed in. the thing that i can see a lot of people have commented on online, the fact that the main storyline is about a 25 year old having a relationship with a 15 year old and it isn't condemned, is an interesting parallel to promising young woman in a way. in that the latter is all about moral condemnation. i'm not sure exactly what i think about that. i think overall on the odd occasion i watch a film i'm not looking for that kind of projection of ethical rules. but its probably a good thing that they're out there and that other people watch them.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
Fair point.... although do you think that plain dwayne main guy would have got the role if he wasn't the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman? Is that relevant? It sort of feels that the takeaway from that is "Don't worry, you don't have to be beautiful to be a Hollywood star, you can also break into the industry due to raw talent or simply because of good old-fashioned nepotism".
probably not. i mean almost certainly not. i'm almost sick of saying it, it's just so obvious, none of this stuff works in a fair way at all. it's one of the weaknesses of films taken as a whole isn't it, that it's such a restricted group of people who make them. i was thinking about that film Florida Project, great film in a lot of ways, but in the end it felt like outsiders looking in, like no-one who made it had ever been poor for a second, like they were basically using their imagination rather than their experience.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I'm aiming for one with a meet-up - originally I was thinking of doing it in someone's house but basically I live too far out of Lisbon for there to be even the slightest possibility that anyone would even consider coming to mine (according to the Portuguese mindset I might as well be on the moon although I think I'm actually closer to the town centre than I was when I lived in Hackney*) and I don't think it's fair or realistic to do it at someone else's, so it looks as though it will be in a bar. Cosmos is good in that it has a backroom we could use and also a dvd player and a projector - plus Joao the manager was bang up for it when I suggested it to him, sadly however when I next saw him he was sober and he sounded a little less certain. If he eventually says no though I can take the concept elsewhere easily enough I guess.

the reason it didn't work for us in person, even somewhere tiny like oxford where everyone lives close to each other, is just that it is so much more hassle to get everyone in the same place at the same time to watch a film that they may or may not be up for watching.

.... to be honest I'm feeling quite disheartened about how fucking useless everyone is cos I spent aaaaages organising something for today and then when it finally came to it, out of the six people involved one dropped out sick, one claimed to be too hungover and one cried off due to period pains so the whole thing was cancelled.
i've never figured out how to navigate this, its a feature of doing anything, when it gets to the day of the event basically anything could have happened, people can be in any kind of mood, any kind of chemical state etc. it's great when it all comes together and people turn up. but for anything that's in any way voluntary you never really know who's going to actually come. i used to make a point of turning up for things i said i'd turn up for but in the long run it doesn't work, you turn up to things tired, annoyed, unable to actually contribute to the vibe, i end up totally knackered coz i've booked stuff every night of the week, or suddenly work gets heavy and i need to concentrate only on that. in the end i think the conclusion i came to is that you've basically got to keep the faith and organize things on the hope that people do turn up like they say they will, but accept that like most things in the world it only really works properly every now and then.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
Well I can't take much credit for guessing that cos most of it was fucking obvious... although I would like to know about the new boyfriend character, does he stay good or does he does he turn out to be evil?
i can't remember properly, i think there's a bit where it emerges that he was involved in some kind of gang rape at some point, or at least he was in the room, a video shows up. not sure what happens after that. i guess it's part of the quite heavy-handed way the film makes its point, that all men are implicated in sexual violence in some way. it reminds me actually this film genuinely made me think of twitter, in that it felt like at some level it was in a feedback loop with (the shallow end of) twitter feminist writing.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
i've never figured out how to navigate this, its a feature of doing anything, when it gets to the day of the event basically anything could have happened, people can be in any kind of mood, any kind of chemical state etc. it's great when it all comes together and people turn up. but for anything that's in any way voluntary you never really know who's going to actually come. i used to make a point of turning up for things i said i'd turn up for but in the long run it doesn't work, you turn up to things tired, annoyed, unable to actually contribute to the vibe, i end up totally knackered coz i've booked stuff every night of the week, or suddenly work gets heavy and i need to concentrate only on that. in the end i think the conclusion i came to is that you've basically got to keep the faith and organize things on the hope that people do turn up like they say they will, but accept that like most things in the world it only really works properly every now and then.

This was actually a day-trip thing, another visit to the palace of the garbage king which I've been kinda strong-armed into organising...

the reason it didn't work for us in person, even somewhere tiny like oxford where everyone lives close to each other, is just that it is so much more hassle to get everyone in the same place at the same time to watch a film that they may or may not be up for watching.

Oh this was Oxford? I was thinking NY, not that the general principle should change I'd have thought.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
This was actually a day-trip thing, another visit to the palace of the garbage king which I've been kinda strong-armed into organising...



Oh this was Oxford? I was thinking NY, not that the general principle should change I'd have thought.
Yeah it was in Oxford, a bunch of Oxford people, obviously the format was easy enough to do from anywhere

one of the enjoyable things about it was that although the reviews were anonymous, it's a crowd of people that I know, or at least I know the general vibe, so you have that context for the reviews which makes it more concrete
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
If it was in new york everyone would spell everything wrong and everyone would be showing off in the hope of getting laid

In England everyone was wording things gently and trying to avoid hurting anyone's feelings
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah it was in Oxford, a bunch of Oxford people, obviously the format was easy enough to do from anywhere

one of the enjoyable things about it was that although the reviews were anonymous, it's a crowd of people that I know, or at least I know the general vibe, so you have that context for the reviews which makes it more concrete
We did a dissensus online bookclub one time, we did read a few books. But I want an active meet-up in Lisbon, playing some music, getting drunk, watching films together. Doesn't seem too big an ask.
 

luka

Well-known member
i saw this for my film club, absolutely everyone else totally loved it, praise through the rafters. i thought it was bad. this happens quite often in film club.

it doesn't really get any better.
shaka is trying to improve himself. elocution lessons. film clubs. earnestly going to galleries and wrinkling his brow. reading short fiction in The New Yorker over his venti vanilla latte.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
shaka is trying to improve himself. elocution lessons. film clubs. earnestly going to galleries and wrinkling his brow. reading short fiction in The New Yorker over his venti vanilla latte.
no luka you've got it wrong i'm downwardly intellectually mobile, slumming it with the complete thickos of dissensus, i got a pumpkin spice latte this morning, reading Wolf Hall, i only joined the film club to wean myself off iranian arthouse
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
i'm trying to make myself worse, i'm memorising the menu at taco bell, i used to listen to foucault in french staring out the window composing poetry on the schoolbus
 
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