films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

[IdleRich]

ive only seen his american films. seven psychos was fucking awful sub tarantino. three billboards was just sentimental manipulation of the crudest variety i thought.

7 Psychopaths was really properly bad right? He - the director I mean - totally lost control of it at some point and it was like a runaway juggernaut of badness gathering speed as it rolled down a hill getting worse and worse. Eventually it became unstoppable, all you could do was jump out of the way and hope you didn't get hurt.

Also, thingy's character was so annoying, even thinking about him just a tiny bit just to write this post has my fists clenching in helpless rage.

 

[IdleRich]

Get Carter... terrible film, definitely not one of Caine's better roles, or Stallone's for that matter - but it was funny when he said to Michael Caine "You're a big man but you're in bad shape, with me it's a full time job". Definitely prefer the original but actually it wasn't as bad as I was expecting/hoping though all the women were incredibly bland and it was difficult to imagine that he cared enough about his niece to go on the rampage he did. And

Spoiler

he doesn't get shot at the end

Generally lacking in grittiness in fact... these two scenes though,







Except isn't the whole point of that scene that you the guy who... never mind.

 

[Murphy]

someone tell Caine you administer tinctures sublingually (cracking theme track tho)

 

[IdleRich]

One of the very best. A sort of viciously gloomy funk.

 

[IdleRich]

someone tell Caine you administer tinctures sublingually (cracking theme track tho)

What is he administering?

 

[Murphy]

Cod liver oil?

 

[IdleRich]

What does tincture mean? I thought that was a general term for a drug in solution? So wouldn't the method of administration depend on the drug? Or is that always the way that solutions are best taken? Obviously this is something that you do know quite a lot about and I really know nothing about at all, so I'm not challenging what you say or saying that you're wrong or anything... just trying to understand really.

When you say sublingually that means under the tongue of course, but does it specifically mean putting it under the tongue so that it is absorbed through the thin skin there rather than being swallowed?

 

[Murphy]

https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667335

see above for history of applications, laudanum is the classic where ethanol is the carrier, so tinctures are about solubility and lifespan as much as practicality and strength

sublingual is to get your ethanol carrier the best access to sublingual artery with the least amount of harm, eg I used to be able to get 30mg timed release diamorphine tablets on a sketchy script, suck the coating off and then parked a few under tongue for a good 90mins...ok not a lot of harm reduction but you get the point - you leave it soak in to the artery for as long as possible

raft of drug availabilities are increased this way, far more immediate than via the stomach, benzos very fast interactions too eg 10mgs sublingual is more like 20mgs swallowed (gaba system, well worth reading around)

with tincture droppers you do the same, just get the dose right where you can go light or intermediary or balls deep or Thirdform equivalent of 10g’s

 

[IdleRich]

I just watched The Counsellor for the second time cos it was on telly. It's still rubbish. On top of everything else, I think that a big part of the problem is that those interminably long philosophical monologues that McCarthy insists in putting in the mouth of random characters - always ridiculous in a sense, or let's say requiring a suspension of disbelief, even in the books - just doesn't work on telly. Especially with the tone of the film which despite hamfisted attempts at surreal moments (I'm thinking here of the scene where Diaz has sex with the car, presented proudly to the viewer as though it is something that should somehow grab you and shake you to the core rather than cause a slight shrug of the shoulder) doesn't really hint at a world in which its possible for magic to somehow seep in through the cracks - something necessary for you to be accept this kind of pontificating delivered in this way.

The actors all do their best but it feels that they are in different films from each other at times and the director (Ridley Scott!) is in another one again.

 

[IdleRich]

Another day, another terrible re-make. This time Spike Lee reworks Oldboy - now, with hindsight (or at least as I see it), Pak Chan-wook's original was the start of both his career as a megastar director and also the first (I'm sure some cunt will name something that came first now - in fact, sure enough, I've checked and it wasn't even the first one of his "vengeance trilogy") of that new wave of Korean cinema which has taken over the world for the last twenty years or so with another cult bomb dropping every few months (most of which I've found pretty underwhelming to be honest but that's another story). It has to be said that if it had been based on Josh Brolin's interpretation of the character then I doubt that Korean wave would have ever got off the ground...

Despite the promising start of a useless alcoholic being inexplicably locked away by mysterious gaolers, the film falls apart very quickly when he gets out and starts investigating why it happened - as does the original to be fair, but not to the same extent, this deteriorates into a real mess. I read that the producers hacked thirty-five minutes from Spike Lee's cut which is why instead of the usual "A Spike Lee joint" he just put "A film by Spike Lee" - halfway to taking his name off it I guess.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

Tar. Cate blanchett is good but not enough as its pretty standard Oscar bait. Its a character study that flirts with some bigger issues, ie cancel culture, but in a typical detached, ambiguous, withholding arthouse way. The novelty here is that its a female character abusing her power but it doesnt try to get to grips or debate cancel culture or abuses of power or sexual exploitation, it thinks showing the fallout in flashes is enough. Formally well directed but soooo long, the first hour is too bloated, and its ponderous and actually filled by a dull character/caricature, not a complex one

 

[shakahislop]

also saw Tar, and it belongs in this thread i think. there are some good bits, some good issues covered, and it deals with the cancellation and sex thing a bit better and in a bit more of a nuanced way than other things i've seen (that promising young woman one for example). its a bad film though, i say that pretty confidently, the best way to describe it is that its shit. its really boring for a start. all it made me think of is how my mate said that cinema is a dead medium. it really felt like they couldn't get anyone good enough at making films to work on it.

 

[shakahislop]

on the cancellation thing: there was a bit of nuance. unlike promising young woman which was rabble rousing moral righteousness etc. but in the end it amounted to showing us a fictionalised version of the suffering that 'we' want the cancelled to go through. their downfall and their gradual humiliation. the bit at the end was gratuitous in that respect. sticking the boot in, a kind of catharsis against a recently emerged category of hate figure. cheesy storyline done in a non-cheesy way. done in a boring way instead.

deliberately boring actually. that was an interesting feature, all those scenes in the first hour that seemed designed to try the audience's patience. with no payoff.

 

[shakahislop]

that said they captured institutional power really well i think. that thing of the deputy conducter being scared to lose his job because he'd have to leave berlin. and the traditions and nice old rooms, expensive performance halls, every opportunity rolling in one after the other to powerful people in the institution, the shit that people are willing to put up with to be part of a prestigious institution and all of that.

they also got the smooth international travel thing of a certain type of elite right as well. that has cropped up in lot of fiction i've read recently as well. the way that its nothing to jump from new york to berlin and so on and how seamless and natural it ends up being. the way it melds into the background, just a fact of life.

 

[IdleRich]

I watched this weird film the other day called, I think, Archenemy. As far as I could tell it was about this mad homeless guy who may or may not have been a superhero from another planet or dimension.

There were these two kids who sort of worked for, but then got in trouble with, a gangster called The Manager (played by that guy from It's Never Funny in Philadelphia) and his boss may or may not have been the (arch)enemy of the supertramp from his home planet or something... to be honest I lost interest pretty quickly and so my description may be slightly or even totally wrong.

It was one of those films that pulled off the seemingly difficult trick of being quite unusual, in fact almost uniquely weird, and yet... at the same time; stunningly, I mean powerfully, mind-blowingly boring. And it's this wasted opportunity that makes it an even more frustrating watch, the way the storyline was pretty original - in that each line and scene seemed to be almost randomly generated with very little thought given to such tediously outdated concepts as sense or being at all interesting to watch.

I guess the FX were quite good at times, but fuck me what a tedious mess of a film it was.

 

[IdleRich]

Prisoners of Ghostland (or something like that anyway). In many ways it's similar to the film above it in the list now I come to think of it. Like Archenemy this film is original, visually arresting and seems to represent a genuine attempt to create a unique piece of art - also like Archenemy it is an absolutely pitiful mess, an embarrassment, a film so hair-achingly boring that by the end (which I haven't reached yet - and I never will, fuck it, I'm just gonna gouge my eyes out instead) you wish that the medium of cinema had never been created. Like Archenemy this betrayal of humanity is particularly dangerous because if you saw the trailer or read something about it you might think that it sounds potentially interesting - although in fairness they did have the decency to put Nicholas Cage in it to quickly disabuse you of that notion.

Speaking if which, how is it possible for a film in which Cage has a testicle blown off be so boring?

 

[IdleRich]

The Ghostbusters reboot was on telly the other day, I wanted to wind Craner up and say it was better than the original but I simply can't.

For me a big problem with the first film was the mundanity of the ghosts, the whole idea of a spooky, otherworldly afterlife was ditched in favour of floating, glowing fatties burping and throwing food. Later on even the more important ghosts were more zany than creepy - I get that it was a comedy film for kids but I still wish they had gone in a different direction with that. I didn't really get it at the time but, looking back, I can see that once the earthbound nature of the Ghostbusters universe had been established my potential enjoyment of the film had been severely limited.

And this all came flooding back with the remake. But at least the original had a spark of life to it, in fact it crackled with energy as it zipped along, it was silly and fun and if you forgot the missed opportunity - what it could have been - and just watched it for what it was then it was enjoyable enough.

With the reboot this was very much not the case. No spark of life at all. Not even the slightest hint of one, dead on arrival, in fact long long before that, something that belonged in the morgue if not the graveyard. Someone has stitched together a beloved film with an ill-fitting female cast and Thor to create a Frankenstein's money-monster but they forgot the animating electricity. The result being the ghost of a film that needs to be busted.

The only thing it had over the original was it didn't feature that walking smirk Bill Murray - and then he turned up in a cameo. The twat.

 

[IdleRich]

Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out. The first film was a shamelessly unoriginal pomo pastiche of your Agatha Christie style murder mystery, but with a decent enough story and sense of humour to make it a fairly harmless but enjoyable ninety mins or so. The follow up dispensed with anything good that the original had and completely failed as any kind of entertainment. It's hard to see what they were thinking, the story telling seems almost designed to alienate the very people who liked the first one.

 

[Clinamenic]

The second did give a sense of being overly confident in its own style (like how I felt about French Dispatch, for example), but overall I found it super enjoyable.

 

[IdleRich]

Amsterdam; horribly confused and badly paced, boring mess of a film with the thinnest of plots somehow stretched out over more than two hours and all held together by an hilariously hammy performance from Christian Bale. He should hang his head in shame, truly, I felt embarrassed every time he appeared. Although he's not the only one... the whole thing was totally misconceived, the period details all felt wrong, the characters non-existent, a huge... no, a colossal dropped bollock. Compared to this, yesterday's fuck-up Glass Onion was a masterpiece.