Films you've seen recently and would recommend WITH reservations

ghost

ghost

Well-known member
Decision to Leave: great acting and concept marred by an overly convoluted plot. To follow this movie you have to keep track of the locations of no fewer than six cell phones (of which three are identical) and at least two apple watches. But the vibe is otherwise impeccable.
 
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ghost

ghost

Well-known member
Boy and the Heron: Incredibly visually striking. Plot makes sense if you've spent a decade studying Japanese mythology and visual art.
 
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linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Oppenheimer, which a quick search shows has only popped up in the 'would NOT recommend' thread.

I have half a mind to stick it in the 'unreservedly recommend' thread because I really did like it quite a bit, but there's no doubt that it's jam packed with all of Nolan's flaws—cringey exposition, clunky dialogue, bombastic music etc.

However, I will also say that there's something so WEIRD about Nolan's films, including their flaws, that makes them worth watching. Like the editing. The first hour or so is a bit like the typical Hollywood biopic but it moves along at such a ridiculously frantic pace that it feels almost avant-garde. And although I was rolling my eyes a lot and also feeling turned off by the absence of breathing space (this is the opposite of 'slow cinema'), the pace definitely hooked me in.

Then there's the way it's shot, all those IMAX shots—which make predictable sense applied to sweeping (gorgeous) aerial shots of landscapes but also render these fairly standard dialogue scenes hyper-vivid.

The sequence leading up to the first test is really gripping, tense and anxiety inducing. There's a sense of horror accruing around the bomb, this cursed object. The explosion itself, as many have said, was a big let-down visually, it just doesn't manage to convey the scale of the explosion at all, which is a shame, because everything leading up to it manages to convey the scale of the threat. (Also there's these snapshots of the quantuum world in Oppenheimer's mind that are effective in inducing dread, presumably done with CGI, as the bomb arguably should have been.)

I didn't fancy watching this at the cinema /IMAX much at all (mainly due to the length but also I didn't really understand what was so interesting about Oppenheimer) but now I wish I had.
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Ive been making the same comment about the editing being almost avant garde and no ones been buying it so this is great to read. Ive also seen it called music video editing which I see too.

I got a similar feeling from the shoddy sound mixing where the way sounds overlap and jostle to the point of illegibility was actually almost psychadelic. That was probably the vest part of seeing it in theatres. Its a LOUD movie.
 
DLaurent

DLaurent

Well-known member
My brother bought me a film noir boxset for Christmas, seen them all before but didn't want to mention, he did get me another I hadn't heard of though, called The Swimmer (Burt Lancaster) so I watched that last night and it's pretty good. Like a Hockney painting of swimming pools but with a darkness in there somewhere too.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think that is a really good film. I really didn't know what to expect when I saw it... or rather I knew the bare bones and so I thought that I understood what t was going to be, but in fact cos of the way it evolved as it went on I'd only got hold of half of it. And what it did in fact evolve into was, I want to say, a literal metaphor. Which obviously sounds like bollocks, but bear with me...

What I'm trying to say is that all of the swimming pools in a row make some sort of pretend river that he can swim along and so the swimming pools are a sort of pretend manifestation of a river or something... but then it sort of changes so that the experience he is having becomes an actual horrible mirror image of his life... aaarrgh, I'm struggling to express this correctly in the way that I want to cos a) I'm stupid and b) I'm a bit fucked and c) I can't remember the film that well.

I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that, quite commonly in a film (or whatever) there can be a thing that we the reader or viewer or whatever understand to be a metaphor..... it's a thing in the piece of art that we realise represents something else and so the story is actually about the thing that it stands for - but in this film, it doesn't stay as just the journey through the pools it actually changes before our eyes and becomes, in the film, literally the thing which it previously just stood for.

The journey through the swimming pools is thus at first a metaphor for his path through life, but then, unusually, this metaphor becomes his actual real life. At leat, I think that I am accurately recalling what happens in the film - and I hope that I am also accurately describing what it means...

Am I on the right lines there? And I am I correct when I say that that kind of change is quite unusual? I think that what I was expecting was that it would not become so clear and so literal, I assumed (probably subconsciously) that at the end it would be a case of "Oh I've figured this one out, the journey through the pools was actually a representation of his journey through life" and then I would give myself a pat on the back and think that I was clever. But here, you don't need to figure anything out because it abandons being a metaphor and goes "fuck it, I'm gonna be his actual real life" - which makes it simultaneously simpler in that you don't have to work anything out at all, but at the same time it's a weird thing cos it sorts slips weirdly from being one thing to another.
 
DLaurent

DLaurent

Well-known member
I think that's a good analysis, I'm going to have watch it again with my sister though. Films usually become clearer for me after a couple of watches, just the way I'm used to watching them on my own normally means just soaking in the atmosphere.
 
V

version

Well-known member
The Man on the Roof. Corrupt cop gets bayoneted to death in his hospital bed, giallo style, and a slow investigation unfolds for the first hour or so before the film erupts into life as the killer starts gunning down any officer he sees from a Stockholm rooftop.

 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
watched palm springs on my computer last night. nothing special but pretty good and bangs along. i'm a sucker for down to earth sci-fi. first thing i've seen with that zoomer saturated colour palette that hasn't been offputting. maybe i'm acclimated now. they also do a lot of that cut-to-the-chase dialogue thing, where they're aware the audience is way ahead of the story and can see half of the exposition coming a mile off, so they just go bang bang bang and get it over with. i see that everywhere at the moment. tiktok speed. it was alright.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
gaga as gucci was pretty spectacular
i would unreservedly recommend but i reckon it's probably a bit much for most of you apart from craner

some people's lives are just intensely dramatic

Mr Fischer was with the popstar’s three dogs named Asia, Koji and Gustav.

During a violent struggle, Fischer was hit, choked and then shot in an attack captured by the doorbell camera of a nearby home.

The video captured Fischer screaming, “Oh, my God! I’ve been shot!” and “Help me!” and “I’m bleeding out from my chest!”

Lady Gaga's dog walker says he had part of his lung removed following shooting

The dogs were returned two days later by a woman who claimed she had found them tied to a pole and asked about Lady Gaga’s offer of a $500,000 (£359,000) reward if the dogs were returned “no questions asked.”
 
V

version

Well-known member
The Devil, Probably. Bresson tackling what would now be termed 'doomers'. Impressive a bloke in his 70s managing to make such a convincing 'angry young man' film. Recommended with reservations because I was into it, but it was very French. A lot of moping around, pontificating on the pointlessness of things.

One thing that really stuck out was the timelessness of the predicament. There are scenes of characters watching footage of seal clubbing, pollution being dumped into the sea, at one point they end up around some blokes felling trees and you get this sequence of tree after tree being brought down. There's a debate with a professor advocating for nuclear power and people in the audience are asking about solar panels and hydro. This was in 1977.



Another thing which stood out, although it wouldn't have been significant at the time, is that a character opens their fridge and, aside from a couple of bottles of champagne, it's all real food. It's bottles of milk and veg. Probably some cheese and meat. And everyone's so thin. I don't think there was a single overweight person in the film. It wasn't a case of every actor being some gorgeous model either. They looked like real people, but even the unhealthy ones were thin. If you were to make it now, you'd have to comment on what's happened to diets along with the environment.

The way he films people's movements is interesting too. Whenever they're opening doors or walking around, he tends to focus on them from the stomach down. You don't see the face. Just the hands, torso and legs moving around, like a headless automaton.

"Obscure forces whose laws are unfathomable. It's true that something is driving us against our will. You have to go along with it. And we do go along with it. Who is it that is making a mockery of humanity? Whose leading us by the nose? The devil, probably."

 
R

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
sufi said:
gaga as gucci was pretty spectacular
i would unreservedly recommend but i reckon it's probably a bit much for most of you apart from craner

some people's lives are just intensely dramatic

Mr Fischer was with the popstar’s three dogs named Asia, Koji and Gustav.

During a violent struggle, Fischer was hit, choked and then shot in an attack captured by the doorbell camera of a nearby home.

The video captured Fischer screaming, “Oh, my God! I’ve been shot!” and “Help me!” and “I’m bleeding out from my chest!”

Lady Gaga's dog walker says he had part of his lung removed following shooting

The dogs were returned two days later by a woman who claimed she had found them tied to a pole and asked about Lady Gaga’s offer of a $500,000 (£359,000) reward if the dogs were returned “no questions asked.”
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HOG is one of the best films of the last few scenes. brilliantly ridiculous entertainment. incredible cast/performances. jared leto outdoes himself.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
The other day I watched this film called The Invitation from 2015. One of the advantages of having loads of friends or at least acquaintances who are film geeks is that if you scroll through fb or Insta for a few minutes you are pretty certain to see someone recommending a film you've not heard of and in conjunction with moviesjoy you can watch it a minute later.

So, i saw someone tipping this film and his review made it sound pretty interesting; i took a second to make sure i had the right film cos there are about twenty with this name and i dived in.

So, the set up is a guy and his gf attending a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife and her new fella. It seems that some kind of tragedy destroyed their Matti and had repercussions that hugely affected their entire friendship group - and as a result this is the first time they have all got together for two years or something.

Anyway, there is a weird atmosphere and a couple of extra guests who are kinda peculiar if not downright sinister... it becomes apparent that his ex overcame her grief by joining a cult and now they are trying to recruit the rest of them.

The film is very low-key, lots of talking in hushed voices, muted colours throughout and a sense of slowly building tension. Or at least that's what i thought, unfortunately i was watching it with someone else who kept moaning about how boring it was, nothing was happening, she couldn't follow it and it was totally the wrong kind of thing for recovering from NYE etc etc until i couldn't take it any more and, even though i was enjoying it a lot and keen to know how it finished, i turned it off and instead we watched a drily witty comedy of manners in which the guy out of Mad Men has a pair of bollocks dangling from his chin.

When she finally fucked off i turned it back on and... the final third was a huge disappointment, there was a ten minute period in which they completely wasted the tension and atmosphere they had skilfully built up over the previous two hours. It was as though someone got hold of the camera and deliberately sabotaged it, for most of the film I was leaning forward trying to catch every single word, desperate not to miss anything... and then after it went wrong I lost interest so completely I didn't even care who lived or died. Never seen anything go off the rails so quickly and completely, what a shame.
 
R

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
Poor things is great, but (possible spoiler) it adds a new character right near the end to make the films feminist bent that much more on the nose which was a bit unnecessary. Emma stone is totally brilliant though and has some very funny lines. She makes the whole film. Mark ruffalos accent is also
excellent in a ridiculously exaggerated way.
 
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