An open challenge: I’ve likely seen the worst movie recently of anyone in the thread.
The Godmonster of Indian Flats.
Pretty good!
Galaxy Quest on Sundance Channel
It holds up remarkably well. The jokes about Comic Cons and Trek fans are great. Tim Allen’s send up of Shatner is perfect.
I still don’t understand the ending. The ship crashes at a Comic Con. The bad guy alien emerges with the crew. So, was this all a fan movie or an actual adventure?
It’s a fun movie and worth watching again.
I had no idea a movie had been made out of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy until I came across it on Amazon Prime last night. It was made in 2005 and had a stellar cast. What a disappointment! The special effects were quite good but the acting varied between underplayed and waaaay over the top. It had its amusing moments but overall was just too loud and frantic to be enjoyed. I did like the title sequence and theme, though, with dolphins singing “So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish.”
Agree with you 100%. My first exposure to HHGTTG was the BBC 1981 series with Peter Jones as the narrator/Guide book. I’d never so eagerly anticipated a movie and ended up so disappointed; I was hoping for a sequel which just HAD to be better.
First we watched SLEUTH (1972), with Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. It was quite a lot of fun…I last saw it around the time it came out, and one thing I likely missed when I was 10 or so years old was the whole class element.
Then we immediately watched CLUE (1985) after that. We knew nothing about it, other than the fact that it was a sort of force based on traditional murder mysteries and the game Clue(do), and we really quite enjoyed it. Every one of the actors gets to do some scenery chewing, but Tim Curry is the best of all.
I recently watched Paterson, starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani on Amazon Prime. It’s a poignant story about a bus driver named Paterson living in Paterson, NJ who leads a routine, regimented existence and see’s poetry in everyday life. It’s a simple, slow-burn film all about character development. I thought it was excellent.
Revolt (2017). Aliens invade, people scramble to survive. It’s a decent movie - but the real standout is Bear McCreary’s outstanding music score. Well worth watching just for that.
Loved Infini (2015) - has lots of blood though. Dan McPherson is excellent. It’s a pity we don’t get to see him more.
My take on it was they took the book, extracted the start of all the jokes and removed all the punchlines. As if they were too clever or funny for movie goers. It was awful, with so much polish.
I watched PATRIOT GAMES (1992) for the first time since it came out. Boy is it definitely a period piece, with the IRA, and then an ultraviolent IRA spinoff, and then a member of that ultraviolet IRA spinoff who is himself possibly insane, and a bunch of Irish accents and mood music .
Plus, of course, Sean Bean dies as usual. And Harrison Ford was really handsome.
It was pretty meh.
I’m still trying to finish Blade Runner 2049. Very dark, of course. I think Harrison Ford was very good in it.
Watched Encanto , not against my will exactly, but let’s just say it’s not something I’d ever pick. I do like some animated movies but this one didn’t do too much for me. The songs are forgettable(with the exception of We Don’t Talk About Bruno) and the story didn’t make much sense. When it first came out, the person I ended up watching it with highly recommended it. I don’t have Disney channel but I looked it up in case it sounded good enough to sign up for a month. It didn’t sound remotely interesting and I just kind of forgot about it. At least my expectations were low so I wasn’t disappointed.
The songs are forgettable? Are we talking about the same Encanto?
Ah well - de gustibus non est disputandum.
I haven’t finished watching it, and I had seen it years ago, but I started watching Atonement. Mainly, because there was some reference to it somewhere, and my sister wanted to know the story. When I saw it On Demand, I started to watch it.
I told my sister about the creepy kinda-rapist guy that sort of kicked off the whole mess. I remembered him as repulsive and icky. Imagine my shock when I saw, wait!, it can’t be him!, it is him – Benedict Cumberbatch!
He did a good job at making himself oily and creepy and totally unappealing.
But good movie and was quite faithful to the book.
Gorgeous house. Oh, yeah, that’s where it was mentioned – a house tour on Escape to the Country.
TCM recently had The Trial (1962), with Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles. It’s from a screenplay partially written by Kafka, and it shows. Beautiful black-and-white photography, shot in the vacant Gare d’Orsay before it was converted into the art museum. As I was watching, I was thinking of 1984 and Severance and other mind-controlling authoritarian organizations, but I’m still not really sure what was happening!
Doctor Faustus (1967). Saw bits and pieces of it a few months ago and it made enough of an impession on me to mention it here in the hope that someone more familiar with it will have something to say. It appears to be Richard Burton’s only directorial credit, shared with Nevill Coghill. I wouldn’t call it a very good film, but I thought it was entertaining at times, especially insofar as having a look at filmmaking in 1967. Parts of it are really weird, like surrealist and absurd, maybe influenced by Fellini and others? Elizabeth Taylor plays several roles, none of which have any lines, and I got the impression that a very enamoured Burton dedicated his efforts to her in this film. So, anyone care to comment?
Interesting piece of trivia: Nevill Coghill taught medieval literature at Oxford. Doctor Faustus was his only directorial credit too. He was a member of the Inklings, the group of people at Oxford who read their manuscripts to each other and just talked generally every week or so. Tolkien and Lewis were the most famous members of the group:
Watched The Fly on TCM yesterday. Umm… not a very good movie.
Lots of questions… What happened to the cat? And how was it Meowing? Why the goggles? They do nothing!
Oh, and I guess the biggest one is, “Hey! This corpse on the Comically Giant Hydraulic Press has a fucking Fly head and Arm! Sure, its smashed as shit, but Goddamn, that ain’t no human head! What the Fuck is up with this???” Nope. Nobody was fazed at all about that. Top-Notch Crime Scene Investigation, right there!
“Help Me! Help Me!” Yeah, you really do need some help.
Saw Hatching tonight, a Finnish horror movie about a young girl who finds a bird’s egg in the forest and brings it home to care for it as it hatches into a disturbing deformed creature. The film seems like it’s going for a metaphor of some kind, with the family being excessively superficially perfect and the mother forcing the daughter to excel as a gymnast, but I’m not suite sure what that metaphor with the creature is. It’s got some really nasty body horror scenes and the creature effects are pretty well done. (I also want to add that I am sick and tired of horror movies introducing cute dogs into a film because then all I can focus on is “oh god they’re gonna kill that dog. When will they kill it? Just please don’t linger on the death.” It’s such a cheap emotional play.)
I agree with your comments on dogs. It used to be that the dog would become scared and be the smart one who ran off; now it’s just another cheap device to increase the horror.
There was actually a 2014 horror film I liked quite a bit, except for that very scene. Just stop please.