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RanKizama
Apr 22, 2015

Shinobi Heart
Beauty and the Beast 2017 - 6.5/10

Visuals were spot on throughout the entire film with a vast amount of the animated film being translated amazingly into live action. New background development for characters like Gaston, Beast, and even the castle staff were pretty drat good and really the characters more dimension. The background surrounding Belle's mother had potential but was handled in the worst loving way imaginable.

New songs are...meh overall though the Beast's new song is pretty good and feels like an actual Broadway number. The changes to Gaston's song were also welcome. Be Our Guest was loving great. Emma Watson is auto-tuned in every song she sings and it's horrendously obvious and terrible.

The emotional impact at the almost end surrounding the castle staff had me misty-eyed in the way it was handled.

RanKizama fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Mar 22, 2017

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got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
The Red Turtle: a man stranded on a desert island falls in love. It's a real pretty movie about life's ups and downs, told with only sound effects and a bit of music. I have no complaints! :) :)

Criminal Minded
Jan 4, 2005

Spring break forever
Everything I've seen in the last couple weeks, review on request ofc:

Lyrical Nitrate: 7/10
Song to Song: 9/10
L'Ange: 9/10
Life: 7/10
Lady Battle Cop: 7/10
The Deadly Spawn: 5/10
Kong: Skull Island: 7/10
Get Out: 8/10
The Exterminating Angel: 9/10
Three Colors: Blue: 8/10, White: 7/10, Red: 8/10

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Criminal Minded posted:

Everything I've seen in the last couple weeks, review on request ofc:

Song to Song: 9/10


Please!

Criminal Minded
Jan 4, 2005

Spring break forever
Song to Song: I actually really didn't care for Knight of Cups, and it was the first film of Malick's that I would classify as a failure. Malick's form had become so removed from convention and so ungrounded that its characters felt like hollow vessels for philosophical proselytizing. At the same time, it was curious watching his evolution, beginning with To the Wonder, after he so convincingly said everything he could possibly have said with The Tree of Life; I sensed that for whatever its failures, there was a merit to the approach, as he further fractured his narratives and eschewed diegesis, including dialogue, in favor of a more impressionist sensibility.

In Song to Song, he pushes this approach even further, so if you were totally against it in Knight of Cups, I'd be wary, but if you thought the attempt had promise, I can't recommend this enough. After bouncing back and forth between awe and utter frustration, I came to totally understand what Malick was driving towards. More than anything, the way he presents his characters and their stories here has the feeling of walking through somebody else's memories, everything presented in brief but vivid moments of agony or bliss, eschewing dialogue in favor of pure feeling. You feel the paralyzing self-doubt that seems to wholly inhabit them, so that their inability to pursue happiness with each other feels even more anxious and frantic; likewise, it makes the moments of bliss feel bittersweet and fleeting. It made me feel alive in a specific way that very few films do, like it was actually teaching me how to watch it as it went on, and as if I was seeing an artist break through and achieve a new way of approaching and understanding things. By the end my heart was racing. It's hard to describe exactly why, but I've rarely felt so strongly by the end of a film.

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Criminal Minded posted:

Song to Song: I actually really didn't care for Knight of Cups, and it was the first film of Malick's that I would classify as a failure. Malick's form had become so removed from convention and so ungrounded that its characters felt like hollow vessels for philosophical proselytizing. At the same time, it was curious watching his evolution, beginning with To the Wonder, after he so convincingly said everything he could possibly have said with The Tree of Life; I sensed that for whatever its failures, there was a merit to the approach, as he further fractured his narratives and eschewed diegesis, including dialogue, in favor of a more impressionist sensibility.

In Song to Song, he pushes this approach even further, so if you were totally against it in Knight of Cups, I'd be wary, but if you thought the attempt had promise, I can't recommend this enough. After bouncing back and forth between awe and utter frustration, I came to totally understand what Malick was driving towards. More than anything, the way he presents his characters and their stories here has the feeling of walking through somebody else's memories, everything presented in brief but vivid moments of agony or bliss, eschewing dialogue in favor of pure feeling. You feel the paralyzing self-doubt that seems to wholly inhabit them, so that their inability to pursue happiness with each other feels even more anxious and frantic; likewise, it makes the moments of bliss feel bittersweet and fleeting. It made me feel alive in a specific way that very few films do, like it was actually teaching me how to watch it as it went on, and as if I was seeing an artist break through and achieve a new way of approaching and understanding things. By the end my heart was racing. It's hard to describe exactly why, but I've rarely felt so strongly by the end of a film.

Very excited now, having felt a similar form of exasperation and intrigue with regard to his current experimental style. Mostly it just looks like the cast clicks pretty well.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Clearing out dvr before month ends...

Fantastic Planet 3/5, good visuals and story, too much padding.
Shane 5/5, probably the second-most influential western (behind Stagecoach), it's a great simple story that takes its time to unfold without ever being boring.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Batman Begins 7/10 - This was a solid, fun movie with a bit more humor than I remembered. It also has by far the grubbiest rendition of Gotham City of all the 3 movies, which I appreciated. The villainous plot is dumb, and Katie Holmes is just an egregiously bad actress with only 1 facial expression, but her character is used sparingly so it doesn't harm things very much. It's already a little too long, but it's the least bloated of the 3 films. Your rear end is only going to go more numb from here...

The Dark Knight 7/10 - In retrospect, this movie ONLY works because of the Joker. I'm sure dumb people on the internet overreacted and called it the GREATEST PERFORMANCE EVER, but I'll be goddamned if Heath Ledger doesn't steal the show and make every scene he's in weirdly menacing and/or genuinely funny. Which is a good thing, because if you take away the Joker you're left with a meandering, overlong melodrama that doesn't really hang together. Replacing Katie Holmes was a fine idea, but it feels like the Bruce Wayne-Rachel Dawes-Harvey Dent love triangle they're trying to make the foundation of the film can't bear all the weight they're trying to put on it. I also never really bought into what Two-Face was doing as a villain; I understood it in the abstract, sure, but nothing he did had much visceral impact on me. That said, the Joker held up for me as a villain, which is refreshing when comic book movies seem to be so bad at having bad guys.

The Dark Knight Rises 6/10 - And now we're irredeemably bloated, having added 24 minutes to the running time of the already-long Batman Begins, just to tell a story of basically identical scope but without the burden of being an origin story. Bane's gimmick with the mask is dumb, but he is both menacing and sometimes even funny, though God knows what that loving accent even is. You'd think a film about a populist demagogue who is actually full of poo poo and a massive liar would resonate more in 2017, but these movies are more about creating the sensation of being topical than actually saying anything. There are a lot of individually enjoyable things here, so it's hardly a total loss, but they really lost sight of how much of the run time was sheer filler somewhere along the way.

What surprised me about watching these movies in 2017 is how shallow they felt. They're really no more serious than the MCU movies, beyond being browner and not being as overtly joke-y. They're a more cohesive trilogy than anything the MCU produced, certainly, but you can't say that The Dark Knight raising the specter of mass surveillance, only to literally delete it at the very end of the movie and never bring it up again, is anything but the same poo poo they did in The Avengers when the same topic was hinted at and then forgotten. It really feels like the seriousness of this trilogy is largely one of surface style rather than any substance worth talking about.

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

I'd like to prove someday that The Dark Knight Rises was abandoned halfway into editing. It's almost amateurish.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Belladonna of Sadness 5/5, I was rooting for satan. That last shot sure is odd though implying the french revolution was in part spurred by Jeanne's pact with Satan to overthrow the king coming true. Gorgeous visuals and a great soundtrack made every second worth watching, as long as you can handle an enormous amount of phallic imagery.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Logan - I'm finding this one difficult to rate so I'm not even going to bother with giving it a number.

This isn't a superhero movie. Not really. It takes characters from comic books and puts them in... a modern Western with apocalyptic undertones? The world isn't ending, at least not for the average American (if they can stay out of the way, which they often can't), but the subtext is that all the bad trends in our current society are continuing to their logical lovely conclusions. Diversity is getting a pharmaceutical cure, and anybody left that's outside the norm is being hunted down by white trash paramilitaries with guns and neck tattoos, who in turn work for erudite white guys who regard the suffering their decisions cause with glacial indifference. This is alone among the X-Men related movies in actually making good use of the "Mutants as [insert persecuted minority here]" metaphor, probably because the mutants here aren't 90% fit young good-looking white people with exciting abilities and token difficulties. They're adults who are winding down physically and/or mentally, or children who often act like... actual children. When redneck shitfucks threaten to round them up and send them to camps, it's actually threatening. CONSTANTLY threatening, in fact. Oppression here is actually... oppressive. It's not window dressing for eye lasers blowing poo poo up and psychic duels, it's basically the whole movie.

It doesn't depend on the past X-Men movies (never mind the Wolverine movies) in any meaningful plot sense, but there is an impact in seeing THIS as where it all ends up, to see how the scale of hope in those movies was so utterly naive and stupid and wrong. Logan isn't a totally hopeless movie - the whole plot is driven by a literally childish hope, in a way - but it's a very distant kind of hope. It's the hope that you'll lose 99% instead of 100%, that some speck of something will survive somewhere. It sure as gently caress won't be here, and YOU won't get to see it, but maybe SOMEONE will. In a way it seems to be about what apocalypses are really like, after so many X-Men stories about looming doomsdays narrowly averted. They aren't big and exciting, with killer robots or magical ancient Egyptian mutants or psychic death towers or whatever. Instead, peoples pass from history in waves, and are little noted nor long remembered, their contributions stolen and re-purposed or just plain forgotten. Millions get plowed under without notice or comment, the simple fact that they were even people at all often lost somewhere along the way.

All of the above is important, but the movie is also exciting and even funny sometimes. The performances are excellent across the board, and it deserves special credit for prominently featuring child acting that is Actually Good. It was riveting and, for want of a better way to put it, I liked looking at it. It's certainly can't be accused of being just another comic book movie, and it also avoids feeling like a juvenile exercise in WHOA DUDE THAT'S SO ~GRIMDARK~ *sick guitar riff* in spite of the fact that it really is grim as hell and turns the ultra-violence up to 11. I mean, it does showcase every kind of goddamn stabbing and chopping you can think of doing with unbreakable hand swords. Also, you get to watch Wolverine just lose his poo poo and yell WHAT THE gently caress?!?! at a kid, which is nice. It runs a little long, but it's Batman Begins long, not The Dark Knight Rises ARE YOU loving KIDDING ME? long.

The downside is that I don't know how much I actually like watching this. I don't know that it's really more hopeless than Mad Max: Fury Road, which I really liked, but it just struck me as more viscerally depressing. I'm probably going to have to go back and watch it again at some point and see how I feel about it the second time around.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
The Third Man, 4/5, great direction and performances, the murder mystery is good but not very exciting until the titular third man appears. The guitar soundtrack detracted from a couple scenes that would have been tenser without it.

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Koyaanisquatsi - 91/100
Personal Shopper - 69/100
Mulholland Drive (rewatch) - 92/100
Cure For Pain - 64/100
Get Out - 78/100
Pather Panchali (rewatch) - 95/100
Happy Together - 85/100
Chungking Express (rewatch) - 87/100
Moana - 65/100

TychoCelchuuu
Jan 2, 2012

This space for Rent.
Wet Hot American Summer - 85/100
Clouds of Sils Maria - 86/100
Paris, je 'aime - 80/100
The Ox-Bow Incident - 91/100
Amadeus - 82/100
Beauty and the Beast (2017) - 71/100
A Matter of Life and Death - 90/100
The Man Who Knew Too Little - 69/100
Aloha - 78/100

got any sevens posted:

The guitar soundtrack detracted from a couple scenes that would have been tenser without it.
ZITHER MOTHERFUCKER

I Before E
Jul 2, 2012

TychoCelchuuu posted:

Clouds of Sils Maria - 86/100

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:

Personal Shopper - 69/100
Mulholland Drive (rewatch) - 92/100

Nice, also I'd like to hear more

TychoCelchuuu
Jan 2, 2012

This space for Rent.

TychoCelchuuu posted:

Clouds of Sils Maria - 86/100
I think Kristen Stewart is a great actor, even though she looks like she's always about to fall asleep, and Juliette Binoche is always amazing, so a movie that's basically just the two of them talking is always going to be a winner in my eyes. This brings even more to the table, though. It gets a little bit meta every once in a while, but even better than that stuff are the parts where there's a bit of slippage/confusion between what's going on the the play Binoche is rehearsing and what's going on between her and Stewart. You can tell the characters know, because they know the lines and the play, but we don't, and in any case the two are blurring together enough that in some ways it's sort of a moot point whether the particular words they're saying are from a script or not, because it's all about what's going on in the performance at the moment. There are some standout scenes, like the conversation in the casino where Binoche is excellent, and I love the end of the second part of the movie (right before the epilogue).

Criminal Minded
Jan 4, 2005

Spring break forever

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:


Chungking Express (rewatch) - 87/100

You have to justify why this isn't 100/100 :colbert:

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Rebel Without a Cause 4/4, had no idea what this was about and am glad. Just a solid teen drama in the 50's.

Spatulater bro!
Aug 19, 2003

Punch! Punch! Punch!

Criminal Minded posted:

You have to justify why this isn't 100/100 :colbert:

For me it's because I watched the film three years ago and California Dreamin is STILL stuck in my loving head.

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

got any sevens posted:

Rebel Without a Cause 4/4, had no idea what this was about and am glad. Just a solid teen drama in the 50's.

Nicholas Ray is the cinema. :cool:

You should also see In a Lonely Place, Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, and his remake of King of Kings.

Bigger Than Life is basically a body horror/monster movie disguised as a melodrama.

I Before E
Jul 2, 2012

TychoCelchuuu posted:

I think Kristen Stewart is a great actor, even though she looks like she's always about to fall asleep, and Juliette Binoche is always amazing, so a movie that's basically just the two of them talking is always going to be a winner in my eyes. This brings even more to the table, though. It gets a little bit meta every once in a while, but even better than that stuff are the parts where there's a bit of slippage/confusion between what's going on the the play Binoche is rehearsing and what's going on between her and Stewart. You can tell the characters know, because they know the lines and the play, but we don't, and in any case the two are blurring together enough that in some ways it's sort of a moot point whether the particular words they're saying are from a script or not, because it's all about what's going on in the performance at the moment. There are some standout scenes, like the conversation in the casino where Binoche is excellent, and I love the end of the second part of the movie (right before the epilogue).

God I love the bar scene.

DeimosRising
Oct 17, 2005

¡Hola SEA!


Egbert Souse posted:

Nicholas Ray is the cinema. :cool:

You should also see In a Lonely Place, Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, and his remake of King of Kings.

Bigger Than Life is basically a body horror/monster movie disguised as a melodrama.

They Live By Night is drastically inferior to Thieves Like Us, peace

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

Eh, I have both of these already, but I couldn't resist TCM's airings:
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) [TCM - rewatch] - 5/5
Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell) [TCM - rewatch] - 5/5

These are all from my DVR, which I'm continuing to clear out.
The Petrified Forest (1936, Archie Mayo) [TCM] - 4/5
Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green) [TCM] - 4.5/5
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968, Tony Richardson) [MGM HD] - 3/5
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy) [TCM] - 4/5
Jane Eyre (1943, Robert Stevenson) [TCM] - 4/5
Captain Blood (1935, Michael Curtiz) [TCM] - 4.5/5
Moby Dick (1956, John Huston) [MGM HD] - 3.5/5

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Ghost in the Shell (2017) - 5/10

So, this thing. I saw the 1995 anime and liked it well enough. 7/10 maybe? This movie is pretty great visually and has some individual scenes that work, but it really comes across as a mash-up of multiple stories that don't add up to a single coherent plot. There are two main antagonists, one of whom seems to be going 2 directions at once, I assume because he's a composite of 2 completely different villains from past GiTS stories (looked it up, turns out that's true!) It's kind of just a dumb sloppy mess if you try to think about it at all; it regularly teases exploring an interesting idea so it can be dropped and never heard from again. It really seems like less than the sum of its parts. The best that can be said about it is that it looks nice and didn't actively make me angry.

Kong: Skull Island - 7/10

It's a monster mash that's actually exciting and has monsters that are actually threatening, and the comic relief is usually pretty funny. Enough said.

Well, I left out something important: this movie is basically Apocalypse Now with CGI monsters doodled all over it. It overshoots homage, flies past grand theft, and comes back around to being kind of awesome for it. Hope you like Hueys with loudspeakers flying into jungle sunsets blaring the most obvious era-appropriate rock songs, because you're getting a shitload of it! :haw:

But seriously, it's Movie Vietnam with a giant ape, and Samuel L. Jackson has napalm and doesn't give a gently caress in the best way possible. It's main problem is that some of the characters are just sort of there, but at worst they're forgettable - none of them were bad enough to be actively irritating.

Ewar Woowar
Feb 25, 2007

Get Out 7/10

While this was certainly enjoyable I had expected more given the praise it's received. For a thriller/horror there was very little suspense and the comedy aspects, while good, seemed a little out of place at times. Was well shot, well acted, and was certainly a fun movie but I think it's a missed opportunity to have done something excellent with the idea. Felt like a weaker episode of Black Mirror and a less B version of The Invitation (which was another movie that could have been great with a few tweaks).

Don't Breathe 7.5/10

This movie had no right to be as good as it was. The dialogue was awful in places and the acting veered towards it too but drat, it really was some good entertainment. While many aspects were predictable it still had some great surprises and some genuinely hilarious moments.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Lost City of Z: not sure what to say yet, just got out of it. It's fascinating and terrifying and gave me the wonderment of discovery but the hollowness of there always bring more to find. If the premise sounds interesting to you then check it out, it looks great on a big screen.

SimonCat
Aug 12, 2016

by Nyc_Tattoo
College Slice

got any sevens posted:

Lost City of Z: not sure what to say yet, just got out of it. It's fascinating and terrifying and gave me the wonderment of discovery but the hollowness of there always bring more to find. If the premise sounds interesting to you then check it out, it looks great on a big screen.

The Lost City of Zinge?

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

* = my favorites of the programmes

National Film Board of Canada shorts (mostly TCM, some on NFB.ca):

Mail Early
Boogie-Doodle*
Lines Vertical
A Chairy Tale*
Very Nice Very Nice*
Fine Feathers*
The House That Jack Built
What on Earth!
Walking
Hot Stuff*
Monsieur Pointu
An Old Box
Who Are We?
The Goose Who Married An Eskimo
Mindscape
The Family That Dwelt Apart*
When the Day Breaks*
Why Me*
Every Child
My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts
Blackfly
Irises
The Street
Zea*
Log Driver’s Waltz
The Sweater
The Cat Came Back*
The Big Snit*
When the Day Breaks
Bob’s Birthday*
The Railrodder*
Paddle to the Sea*
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen*

Carnal Knowledge (1971, Mike Nichols) - 5/5
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989, Steven Soderbergh) - 5/5

American Experimental Films (Blu-Ray):

Four in the Afternoon
Abstronic*
Eaux D’artiface*
Bells of Atlantis
Evolution
Gyromorphosis*
Hurry, Hurry!
N.Y., N.Y.*
9 Variations on a Dance Theme
Castro Street
Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter*
Walden: Diaries Notes and Sketches (reels 5 and 6)
Our Lady of the Sphere
Love It/Leave It*
Disintegration Line #2*
Transport
Sappho and Jerry, Parts 1-3*
Ch’an

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



SimonCat posted:

The Lost City of Zinge?

Looking forward to this one myself.


Egbert Souse posted:


Carnal Knowledge (1971, Mike Nichols) - 5/5


Hell yes.

GoldStandardConure
Jun 11, 2010

I have to kill fast
and mayflies too slow

Pillbug

got any sevens posted:

Lost City of Z: not sure what to say yet, just got out of it. It's fascinating and terrifying and gave me the wonderment of discovery but the hollowness of there always bring more to find. If the premise sounds interesting to you then check it out, it looks great on a big screen.

How does it compare to Aguirre?

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747

GoldStandardConure posted:

How does it compare to Aguirre?

Haven't seen it but it's not as narratively vicious as that, since this is based on real life and the dude kept going back and just scratching the surface.

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Free Fire: holy poo poo what an inventive and hilarious take on action gangster movies. Each character is unique and unfolds naturally, even the surroundings become a character, and the direction is clever. 9.5/10

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
King Arthur (2017) - 3/4. Entertaining while watching, had some interesting imagery and a few nice twists on the old legend, the guy-richie monologue/montage bits were hilarious, and jude law was very game. the main drags against it are the cgi-blur action and almost no women characters, and the half-dozen main allies couldve been pared down to about four to give each a bit more character time.

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Alien: Covenant - 70/100
Prometheus (rewatch) - 85/100
Kedi - 80/100
Dr. Strange - 68/100
Raw - 79/100
My Blueberry Nights - 66/100
Ghost in the Shell (2017) - 65/100
1984 (1984) (rewatch) - (19)84/100
Something Wild - 70/100
Les Diaboliques - 87/100
Rachel Getting Married (rewatch) - 88/100


edit

Logan - 75/100

BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 20:47 on May 24, 2017

coyo7e
Aug 23, 2007

by zen death robot
Trainspotting 2 - 9/10

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Alien Covenant - 3/5 if you liked Prometheus (which was a 3 for me), 2.5/5 if you didn't.

It's somewhere between the classic Alien films and Prometheus, for better or worse. Actors did a good job despite questionable character writings (especially the lead and Danny McBride) and the visuals were solid, though not as gorgeous as Prometheus. It's more on the action horror side of things than atmospheric horror.

Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Nov 24, 2021

BeanpolePeckerwood
May 4, 2004

I MAY LOOK LIKE SHIT BUT IM ALSO DUMB AS FUCK



Bottom Liner posted:

Alien Covenant - 4/5 if you liked Prometheus (which was a 4 for me), 3/5 if you didn't.

It's somewhere between the classic Alien films and Prometheus, for better or worse. Actors did a good job despite questionable character writings (especially the lead and Danny McBride) and the visuals were solid, though not as gorgeous as Prometheus. It's more on the action horror side of things than atmospheric horror.

I don't think it's possible to construct an accurate metric for this series, to be honest.


Prometheus is my second favorite of the bunch, after the original, and it's definitely the installment I've watched the most. Whereas, after a bit of consideration and arguments with friends, I think Covenant might be the weakest of the 6 main films, or pretty far down there along with Resurrection.

Covenant makes me appreciate the tone of Prometheus more every day.

Donovan Trip
Jan 6, 2007
War Machine 9 / 10

Retrowave Joe
Jul 20, 2001

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales - 7/10 this could shift a point or so in either direction based on whether you'd seen the previous films and/or were fans. The fan in me gives it an 8, but it's not much more than an average film.

Pros: The guy they got to play Will Turner's son looks like he could be Orlando Bloom's kid.
A few inventive action set-pieces
Special effects were top notch, especially on the ghost pirates (in particular how Salazar's hair floated like it was always underwater)
Geoffrey Rush is the highlight of his too few scenes
Tons of payoff for long-term series fans as it wraps up a lot of threads

Cons: The McGuffin is dealt with in short order
The writing wasn't on par with the first trilogy, especially the jokes
David Wenham's character could have been cut with nothing lost. He's killed with no fanfare towards the end
The lady on the front of Salazar's ship comes to life for some reason
The post-credits scene makes me happy to see Davy Jones may be coming back and at the same time a bit sad that they're going back to the well instead of doing something new

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Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

Bunch of first-timers:

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams - 4/5 [Blu-Ray]

This is a bit of a departure from his earlier films. I've seen most of his output through High and Low (just missing The Quiet Duel, The Idiot, and I Live in Fear). This is a film meant to be 100% about the visuals. And they're breathtaking from start to finish. Perhaps not the most cohesive, but still one memorable sight after another. It also has a clever use of special effects, with a man walking through Van Gogh's paintings or Mt. Fuji on fire. Intentionally episodic, but worth it just for how beautiful it looks.

The World of Apu - 5/5 [Blu-Ray]

The Apu Trilogy was one of the big holes in my film viewing list. In fact, I've only seen one other Indian film, The Music Room, but I hope to further remedy that. These are films that go for true emotions without embellishment. The last of the Apu films, this carries on more of the themes while having the best production values of the trilogy. I think my favorite part of the film is seeing the relationship between Apu and Aparna grow over the film. I'm going to have to check out more of Ray's work, since he's probably one of my favorite filmmakers now just on the merits of the Apu films.

Blood and Black Lace - 4.5/5 [TCM DVR]

You always know a Mario Bava film is going to at least look incredible. Candy-colored lighting, great tracking shots, and spooky framing. This is apparently the film that started the Italian giallo/slasher trend. The plot itself is a little silly, but it has some really neat turns and twists. I guess I need to see more giallos since I'm usually turned off by excessive gore, but this is done artfully enough.

Advise and Consent - 4/5 [TCM DVR]

While I think it's just a little inert and a few performances are kind of hokey (Charles Laughton is slightly irritating, perhaps intentionally), it's still a neat concept to have an almost documentary-like approach to politics like this.

The Best Man - 4.5/5 [TCM DVR]

Involving political drama with Cliff Robertson and Henry Fonda acting the hell out of the film. Not a lot has changed in politics.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre - 4.5/5 [HDNET Movies DVR]

Roger Corman can do no wrong. This is part procedural, part historical, while remaining fun and suspenseful despite the obvious conclusion. Paul Frees as narrator. :cool:

D.W. Griffith: Father of Film - 4/5 [DVD]

Rewatches (all Blu-Ray):
The Big Parade - 5/5
The Man with a Movie Camera - 5/5
The Kid - 5/5
City Lights - 5/5
Intolerance - 4.5/5

Also, I've watched all of MST3K Season 11 except for At the Earth's Core, plus a bunch of classic episodes.

Egbert Souse fucked around with this message at 16:53 on May 30, 2017

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