I keep watching bad movies!

Cafe Society
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Warning. Some spoilers for Day Night Day Night, Bug and Civic Duty. So tread lightly.

In the past month I have watched…

Day Night Day Night - A day in the life of a 19 year old suicide bomber. She bathes. She eats apples. She wears grannie panties. She might be middle eastern, but she might not. She might be an American citizen or she might not. She might want to kill a whole lot of people or she might not. But we don’t know because nothing happens.

Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane - With a title like that, how could this not be fun for at least cheap thrills? Oh how wrong and misguided I was. It was bad even by direct-to-DVD zombie movie standards.

Bug - Ashley Judd somehow catches schizophrenia from a possibly retarded drifter. But Bonus Points for the movie absurdly ending with Judd ripping off her clothes and shouting “I am the queen mother bug!”

Civic Duty - Nate from Six Feet Under loses his mind and thinks his neighbor is a terrorist. It should be a good movie, but it just isn’t. Maybe Nate should stop watching the all-terrorist news channel (a CNN-like CVV), but he does. Further Negative Points for the fact the movie paints Nate as crazy from the first frame and the final twist-within-a-twist in the last minute.

Planet Terror - The best of a sad bunch. It was mildly entertaining and had a great cast, but it was still really dumb and stupid. And that “Missing Scene” scene really irritated me.

Last Night - It’s the end of the world in six hours and I do not feel fine. A decent 30 minute short expanded out to a much worse 90 minute movie. The second best of the bunch.

Beneath The girl who plays Eden on Heroes and Laura from Brick stars in an MTV Films “R-rated” horror-mystery that is maddingly predictbale and has no blood, no gore, no scary monsters, no vulgarity and no nudity. Why is it rated R and why did I watch it? Oh right, my mad crush on Nora Zehetner…

So why can’t I stop myself? Before this sad string I saw 30 Days of Night, The Simpsons Movie and Brick, three movies that took the awesome bus to the awesome airport and dropped awesome dust on the world.

But I think I’m due for a reprieve, my next movie will be either Team America, In the Mouth of Madness or The Specials. Wish me luck.

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Whoa, whoa. Last Night was a great movie; the only problem is that it’s inexplicably available only in a pan&scan version. That’s probably why you didn’t like it.

30 Days of Night was a disappointment.

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The end was great, I’ll give you that much. But everything that happened after Sandra Oh drove away until she came back was just too slow. The whole sex quest could have been shortened. The weird piano-playing guy could have been removed completely and why was Sarah Polley even in this movie?

I still say it would have made a great short, but not so much a full movie.

4

I’m sold.
I liked Planet Terror, incidentally. Way more than Death Proof.

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All three are awesome. After all that, you’re due for a treat (or three!)

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I haven’t bothered with the video releases of the Grindhouse films because I’m convinced they lose something when removed from context. You make it sound like I’m right. The movie was supposed to be dumb, stupid, and incompetently made; that was the joke but without the bumpers and ads and double feature it’s sounds like it comes across as just another stinker. (Which isn’t to say you got whooshed by the movie since it is possible to know the gag and still not find anything worth watching in it.)

And I thought they were adding back in the “missing” reels with the separate releases. Yet one more reason not to bother with the current DVD releases.

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Hey, try watching The Marine. That will get your bile ducts going! And there was some film called Horrors of War. Supposed to be about Nazi werewolves. Anyone know if it’s goodish?

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Has this been intentional or not? I’ve had a string of losers recently from Netflix. I don’t know if I’d peg them as objectively bad, but they just didn’t work for me.

Bullitt: I know it’s supposed to be a McQueen classic–but even the coolest man in the world wasn’t enough to save this one for me. Dialogue was nearly absent, no one displayed much of an emotional response to anything (except for McQueen’s GF, and by that point I was fast-forwarding to look for the good stuff), and any time I started to get involved in the movie, it went off the rails with a long, boring and completely unnecessary digression into, say, Steve McQueen’s taste in frozen dinners. Even the famous chase scene dragged on far too long.

Mad Max: I really wanted to like this, and I think maybe Netflix’s description threw me off a bit–they basically described the action-packed last fifteen minutes of the movie, and completely neglected to mention the dreadfully dull middle section. Had the movie been compressed into the first and last bits, it’d have been pretty decent. I hear that Road Warrior & Thunderdome are better, so I’m still not giving up on the series.
**
Battle Royale**: Loved the book, couldn’t get into the movie.

On the other hand, I’ve had some great ones lately (Sunset Boulevard, Key Largo, Witness for the Proseuction) so I can’t complain too much.

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Not at all. I went into most of those movies believing they’d be interesting or at least fun.

Bug had a few great reviews and a great trailer. But the trailer turned out to be misleading. Civic Duty had a great hook, but they pulled a Shining by making the main character nutty from the beginning, so it lost any drama. Last Night was a recommendation from the Dope, but it just didn’t do it for me. And Planet Terror was almost good but I really hated the Doctor and wife subplot and (Quentin Tarantino’s part (the man can’t act). And I think both of those were expanded in the video release.

But please stick with the Mad Max series. The Road Warrior does everything better than Mad Max and is just an amazing movie.

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The Road Warrior is certainly one of the top ten action films ever made.

Watch it, and after the twist ending, ask yourself if Max knew. I think he did, but I’m in a very small minority.

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Aww, I loved them both. Saw the movie first, though.

I agree with the OP on Bug. Went into it thinking it would be a fun but clever horror movie…not quite.

I tried watching Brick but couldn’t get into it. Seemed a little pretentious…should I give it another try?

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If bad movies are your milieu, look for movies made by the dreaded duo Merchant and Ivory. And may God have mercy on your soul while you slog through endless, interminable hours of art-house tripe.

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I don’t know who told you Beyond Thunderdome is better than Mad Max. It has some awesome elements, but overall, it’s not that good. Time may have passed Mad Max by, but it’s still heaps better than Beyond Thunderdome.

Road Warrior, however, is great. Rocketeer:He didn’t. But you’ve heard that too many times already.

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To each their own. The Remains of the Day is one of my very favorite movies.

I have *Brick *recorded but haven’t watched it yet.

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Arrrrrrrrrrggggh! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I never realized there was a debate. I always just assumed…

he knew and that it was his idea.

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Really?Don’t you see the same look in his eyes as I do when he sees the sand pouring out of the tanker? On the other hand, the point of the movie is enforced if he knew, and especially if it was his idea.

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This was the subject of a long thread, started by me when I was just a newbie here:

Needless to say, I was heavily outnumbered…