Films you've seen recently and would recommend WITH reservations

[Clinamenic]

Just watched Fast X, the tenth installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, and I liked it more than the last few. The franchise makes use of this narrative technique where the villain of the previous film ends up joining forces with the protagonists to fight against a tougher villain, and in the process the old villain ends up becoming a protagonist. They've done this at least four times, and it works pretty well. Anyway this one was a lot of fun, I thought.

 

[Corpsey]

With reservations because I'm not sure if it will be up dissensoid's streets but

This film (almost) made me cry like a little baby



Plus you get to see people free diving 100 metres down and up again on one breath and regularly have horrible corpse-faced blackouts on the surface, it's beautifully filmed and will give you a sense of Sublime dread

 

[Murphy]

Fire in Babylon



I’m not completely ignorant when it comes to cricket. A swathe of school mates from Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani and local families would debate batsmen vs bowling combinations endlessly. Now my youngest is fully committed to this surreal faith

Superb time capsule for those old enough to remember the period and a brilliant undiluted sociological study for the relatively uninitiated, like myself

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

talk to me (new aus horror). bit like heriditary, theme wise, IIRC, and other films trying to combine horror with grief. its well executed, i could see the directors going on to better things, its nice and visceral without going the nasty route (it does have quite a few gloopily gross looking characters though). basically it gets better in the last half or third, but a lot of what comes before that, its hard to know what it really adds up to, and i hated almost all the teenagers in it. it was good as a modern horror that wasnt going for gleeful gore/blood (eg the recent evil dead reboot), nor trying to go for the 'elevated horror' thing either. basically, good horror scares, not so well thought out scripting (doesnt really do much with its themes, or ideas, or even explain its concept that much).

 

[Murphy]

Fire in Babylon



I’m not completely ignorant when it comes to cricket. A swathe of school mates from Jamaican, Indian, Pakistani and local families would debate batsmen vs bowling combinations endlessly. Now my youngest is fully committed to this surreal faith

Superb time capsule for those old enough to remember the period and a brilliant undiluted sociological study for the relatively uninitiated, like myself

wrong thread

recommended!

 

[IdleRich]

Yesterday or maybe it was the day before in fact we finally got back from UK. Been a really tiring trip (took 36 hours from Lisbon to Kirkwall on the way there) compounded by eating so much rich food and drinking tons every day.

Coming back we had the all-night ferry last Friday from Kirkwall to Aberdeen and then the train to Edinburgh, Liza was DJ-ing that night with a coveted 0330 until 5am slot and we vowed we would sleep straight afterwards to make up for the sleepless night before and the huge sleep deficit before that - thought it was gonna be easy to manage cos the person we were staying with and who booked Liza to play was some sort of teetotaler DJ - something which I've never heard of before and assumed was just a myth - and her friends were similarly bor... sensible. Not all of them though, so in fact we actually got to bed early on Monday morning.

And then London was tiring and the journey was tiring and so on and so forth. Finally got back to Lisbon on Friday and time for an early night at last, but our friend is house-sitting round the corner from here and asked us to pop round for a beer or two... then he pulled out a bag so it was another all-night thing... yesterday morning got in at 8am and decided to really start taking it easy, nice relaxing day and many more to follow. Abd then the cat threw up and the sick had blood in it! Fucking panic stations, instead of bed had to go to the vet at 10am, carry him through the heat and stress in Graca and then sit there in the waiting room surrounded by old ladies and their own sickly bundles of joy, dreading all the time the prognosis.... now thank god turns out it's nothing serious, but it crushed me mentally, a final straw that wiped me out... which.....


TLDR

... is my excuse for spending the whole remainder of yesterday in a state that was borderline vegetative, doing nothing but watch telly, just about able to move my eyes to follow the action.

And during that telly fest watched the following films; Last Tango In Paris, Blithe Spirit and The Limehouse Golem...

 

[IdleRich]

You've all seen the first one millions of times and it's been reviewed and discussed to death so much that I don't need to go over it again.

But, Blithe Spirit, probably none of you have bothered to watch it, and honestly there is no particular burning need to do so. Still, I'm gonna tell you about it anyhow. If it helps, imagine me as an annoyingly enthusiastic drunk bloke who has button-holed you in a pub and whom you are too polite to brush off.

it's a kinda remake of a Noel Coward thing. Basically some guy and his posh wife live in a ridiculous modern-style mansion (the English countryside seems to contain an inexhaustible number of such, presumably built by long-sighted Agatha Christie fans who knew that if someday someone invented telly there would need to be a load of mansions in case Poirot was ever adapted for the medium. It seems to me that if you ever explore the English countryside you are pretty much guaranteed to stumble over a few of them and so for that reason, along with your torch and tent etc make sure you have packed a morning suit and dinner jacket and that your valet is on call)

The place is called Joldwynds and I believe it was in actuality in a Poirot as predicted.









The story comes to life when the main guy persuades a medium (Judy Dench) to perform a seance at the mansion hoping it will inspire him with a few ideas to get over his writer's block - however it goes wrong and summons the ghost of his deceased previous wife - with hilarious consequences.

The film becomes a battle between his old dead wife and his current one, with a bit of a story rumbling along in parallel about his attempts to finish his screen play - there are a few good lines in there but really the main reason to watch it is for the beautiful house, furniture, views etc etc

 

[IdleRich]

Oh yeah, and then The Limehouse Golem - which we selected from the available options purely on the basis of its Victorian London setting. I was really expecting a kind of cheapo slasher which might be of slightly more interest to me cos of where it happened to take place. And while in one sense it is that I suppose, I was surprised to learn that it was based on a book by Peter Ackroyd called Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem and so of course it had to at least try to be something more.

Apparently Dan Leno was a big musical hall star in real life although I don't know if he was ever suspected of being a psychopathic mass murderer named after a thing from Jewish myth.

Mildly interesting the way the description of Leno's act sounds like many of those flyers I picked up in Edinburgh last week (not the bits about clog dancing or being well paid obviously, I'm talking about the bits in italics).

As a youth, he was famous for his clog dancing, and in his teen years, he became the star of his family's act. He adopted the stage name Dan Leno and, in 1884, made his first performance under that name in London. As a solo artist, he became increasingly popular during the late 1880s and 1890s, when he was one of the highest-paid comedians in the world. He developed a music hall act of talking about life's mundane subjects, mixed with comic songs and surreal observations, and created a host of mostly working-class characters to illustrate his stories

In the film (and the book I imagine) the identity of the murderer is quickly narrowed down to one of the four people who were in the reading room of the British Museum on a certain day; Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing or John Cree.

As stated Dan Leno and was a real music hall actor, George Gissing was a fairly prominent Victorian novelist, and it turns out that Karl Marx was a real guy as well although I'm struggling to get a handle on what it was he actually did for some reason.

Anyway, it's a murder mystery with a feminist slant and a half-hearted gay subtext stirred in the pot with some real history plus a bit of a twist. Lots to dislike about it but the woman who plays John Cree's wife and who - along with Bill Nighy - kinda turns out to be the main character, is very good and she carries the film a bit, I think she was in House of the Dragon.

 

[IdleRich]

Having read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle the other day, I was keen to check the film, and so we did. I had it in my mind that there was a much older film version than the one we found which was from about 2019, however, if so I can find no record of it, so maybe I imagined that. Anyhow, the one we watched was a solid enough, fairly faithful adaptation that did the basics without ever really feeling inspired.

The story was there and it's a fairly creepy one with a decent atmosphere, but what I liked about the book was the clinical precision of her language which allowed her to switch between chilling lines, and sharp ironic humour almost like in a comedy of manners at will.

I felt that this element was somehow lacking in the film, things were not impressed on the viewer quite the way that they should have been and so, for someone watching who had read the book, it was an ultimately frustrating experience that should have been able to deliver a stronger punch, but somehow could never quite manage it

 

[Clinamenic]

So I finally watched Encino Man, with my friend who has been quoting it for years. I see in the locked Choons thread that @padraig (u.s.) has seen this movie many times - its one of those movies with their own private dialect and slang. It actually reminds me a lot of Eric Andre (I suspect he got the whole "nugs" thing from Encino Man), and its also the first thing (aside from Entourage) that I've seen Pauly Shore in.

Anyone else here seen Encino Man? Its set in my neck of the woods, but doesn't really look like it.

 

[Clinamenic]

 

[IdleRich]

I reckon it was called California Man in the UK when it came out. Is the rest of it as funny as the bit in the trailer?

 

[Clinamenic]

I reckon it was called California Man in the UK when it came out. Is the rest of it as funny as the bit in the trailer?

Yeah that trailer is a pretty indicative sample of the rest of the film, as half the lines involve that sort of lingo.

 

[version]

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

The Creator is a decent blockbuster, but its also just another new agey Hollywood sci fi movie dabbling in liberal soporific beliefs about otherness and tolerance (eg Arrival). It's got a lot of inspiration from Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, etc, and it looks really good, but its pretty weak on ideas, debate, and the science part of sci-fi.

 

[DLaurent]

Watched Joseph Losey's The Prowler last night with my sister. I'd seen it before and it clicked with me but I couldn't remember it exactly. Halfway through I thought, I've done it again, recommended a bad film. My sister actually text me and told me she wanted to watch another film noir as she finds them easy watching and short running times. Halfway through this one and it has the adultery theme, like I'm trying to tell her and my brother in law something.

It gets better if only for it's relenting grimness in that none of the characters are likeable. The male villain is just a bad guy, and the woman is too gullible.

I heard it of it from looking at James Elroy's favourite noirs.

 

[shakahislop]

after sun. good for the girl in it - she should def be nominated for an award. paul mescal doesnt really do that much except emanate a certain broodiness, which he does well. but the script doesnt really illuminate very much.

thought this was good. for a bit i thought it was like a cropped and neutered version of that kind of slow arty film, coz i've been watching some of her films recently it felt like a distant weak trail of chantel akerman and so on. but it got me in the end. all that overlapping stuff about memory i thought was saying something that i haven't seen expressed as well before.

one thing i keep seeing about is the late 90s now being long enough ago for there to be a nostalgic retrospective. i never understood why people liked films set in the 70s and 80s so much but now i'm old enough i get it. it's intellectually provocative to be taken back to that kind of lost world and film is perfectly suited to it

another example as well of the way some demographics get to record some aspect of social history like that and (probably most) others don't. know nothing about the director but wikipedia'd her and her secondary school looks like a castle. only some worlds get recorded. the film itself felt quite universal though

the amount of money in this bio:

Wells was born in Edinburgh. She attended secondary school at the independent George Heriot's School.[3] Wells was interested in film from a young age, but did not initially pursue it. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from King's College London and then a Master of Arts from Oxford University. She went into finance and rediscovered film through helping Callum Just, a school friend, run Digital Orchard, a post-production and DIT agency.[4] She used this experience to apply to New York University's joint business and film graduate program with the intention of becoming a producer. She completed a dual Master of Fine Arts and Master of Business Administration at Tisch School of the Arts and the Stern School.

 

[IdleRich]

I read that as "Callum, just a school friend" at first which pretty much sums up the whole review.

 

[shakahislop]

Emily the Criminal - Aubrey Plaza is a zero hours worker sucked into a black economy of credit card fraud. Quite an interesting insight into a world that no doubt exists and Plaza is always watchable as a downtrodden type finding reserves of strength. The message such as it is seems to be that the quirks in her character that led to her picking up a minor criminal record and cause her to explode in interviews telling potential employers to get fucked are in fact representative of an inner strength that allows her to go around tasering and stabbing gangsters and climbing to the top of the pile. Though I'd guess that for a lot of people they are just unlucky and it doesn't work out that way.

watched this in the morning. liked it by the time it got to the middle, went off it towards the end. the world that they're in is really interesting to be immersed in, i really liked that. i like scams. there were a few quirks that reminded me of other things, like the sudden insertion of things people say on twitter coming out of the mouth of the heroine (the bit where she gets offered an internship), and something about the colours and budget-ness of it that reminded me of something i couldn't put my finger on until i googled and realized it was on netflix. which is 100% what it felt like, netflix stuff, bang bang bang churned out. i guess its the current equivalent of a TV movie.

a million people have said it before but this is a good example of the thing of films having this layer of very unsubtle social commentary talking points woven into them at the moment. a kind of ventriloquised twitter.

 

[IdleRich]

So... yeah, with reservations right?
One thing I don't know much about is Netflix so can't comment... or, missed that let's say.