Movies you've seen recently (Part 1)

I watched the trailer which is above and beyond any duty I have to this board.

On what do you base this claim, other than that sometimes FAS kids grow up to be underweight? Did she ever display any other symptom of FAS or FASD? Facial deformity, poor impulse control, poor motor coordination, low intelligence, anything besides thinness?

One thing that @Wendell_Wagner’s link left out was that she was a very heavy smoker, up to 3 packs a day.

I might check it out, just for curiosity. There were a ton of “Mad Max” style movies in the 1980’s, all pretty terrible. Raiders of Atlantis was just one of them. They are all from Atlantis, but…just look like Mad Max bad-guy rejects.

Has Asylum ever released a good movie?

Like good, good? No. They don’t have the budget for that, for the most part. But they’ve put out some pretty decent low budget horror films, which is not a surprise, since that’s the category most amenable to low budget entertainment. I also enjoyed their take on war of the worlds.

I think I remember hearing one of their Sherlock Holmes* movies was decent as well.

*public domain, easy to use actually famous characters, etc.

Mad Max Fury Road

Strongly recommended. Essential.

I have a list of 10/10 movies, movies that I have “no notes” on and they are perfect. I’m sure my list is incomplete as I have to dig back and think of movies from the past, but Fury Road is on the list for a reason.

It’s the greatest action movie of all time and probably remains the best movie released in the past 10 years. Perfect, thrilling. I feel bad for anyone that has not seen it. It’s out in 4K now; get it as soon as possible.

George Miller puts younger directors to shame. This and Furiosa are better, slicker, and cooler than almost any other films out there.

For the record, Furiosa would be about an 8/10 from me. I loved it, but come on, Fury Road is unmatched.

I had always presumed that Audrey Hepburn’s thinness was an aftereffect of her suffering malnutrition during the Dutch Famine of WWII.

She was also active in humanitarian causes esp. in relation to hunger.

She might have had a kept herself thin so that there was more food for others psychology.

She was also an actress trying to live up to the ridiculous female body expectations of 1950-60s Hollywood.

I agree with it being the best action movie ever. The only other film within the past ten years on my list of my favorite films is Boyhood, which was released on August 15, 2014. This is just barely within the past ten years.

My son took me as a Father’s Day gift to see Kinds of Kindness, the latest Yorgos Lanthimos film. Very much stuffed full of Lanthimos themes (identity, the desire to belong), plus a ton of very wtf moments…Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and a few others.

Even though I don’t understand all of it, I liked it a lot. Slots in below the Lobster, and above Poor Things.

Yes, agreed, and she also could have just been naturally on the thinner side, too.

The Watchers

Recommended.

The best Night Shyamalan movie in a little while and it isn’t M. Night Shyamalan, but his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan instead. She both wrote and directed this movie, based on a novel.

I liked this movie quite a bit. I was hooked by the setup, though it did take just a bit too long to get Dakota Fanning where she needed to be for the main story to take place.

Creepy, gripping, the resolution was not as bad as so many of her father’s movies tend to be. I suppose there are twists, but nothing that ruined the movie.

Yeah, I would definitely recommend a rental or wait for streaming and put this on. I liked it quite a bit.

Suze. A new empty nester is stuck with her college bound daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Movie ensues.

It stars Michaela Watkins as the title character (who is actually named “Susan”). She’s a longtime Groundling and has been in a large number of things over the years including a season on SNL. I remember her as a superstitious patient from season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy which is some time ago. If you’ve watched the usual off beat comedy shows, you’ve seen her. Her oddest role: playing Ivana Trump in a Trump bio movie.

The rest of the cast not so much. Mostly Canadian actors, a few with roots such as Second City Toronto. There is the wonderfully named Rainbow Sun Francks whose first names comes from Finian’s Rainbow which his father appeared in. No mention of the middle name source.

Fairly decent movie. I like the fact that this is a very non-standard story line. You don’t see much coming.

Give it 4 water towers.

Watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire last night. It was just okay. It was nice to see Bill Murray in it again, but he had no real purpose in the story, he was just there.

I’ve been thinking more about this film today, and I have to warn you that it has some genuinely disturbing and grotesque moments.

You did warn, when you said:

This prompted me to watch Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire myself, I had forgotten about it. I found it to be a lot of fun, and just as good as Afterlife, which I admit is not necessarily high praise for a lot of people, but I enjoyed that one, and also this one, very much.

You can’t recapture what the original did, it was lightning in a bottle, but taken on their own merits, these modern sequels are better than Ghostbusters II and have a lot of great performances, original ideas, and exciting action.

I hope there’s another coming, and if so, I look forward to it.

I agree, mostly. I mean, the script was bad, the story made no sense, and Conor MacGregor is a bad, bad actor*, but other than that one exception, the acting was solid, the sights were pretty and Doug Liman is a very good action movie director. And as you said, everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun, and it rubbed off.

(*) That’s presuming he’s human, and not a partially shaved specimen of some hitherto undiscovered species of great ape, in which case he did a excellent job of almost mimicking human speech.

I mean, he was hired to cause anarchy. That’s it. While the film could have used a wise ass charismatic Antagonist that wouldn’t be the in the job description.

If MY asshole father was breathing down my neck to force a roadhouse to sell and I wanted to cause some destruction while making it look like it was the rowdy businesses fault Conor is who I would hire to start indiscriminate bar fights with men and intimidate women.

We watched Top Gun (1986) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022) in sequence. The first one holds up, even though it’s not a great movie. It feels real enough, but I’d rather rewatch Captain Marvel.

The sequel feels like pure fantasy. At some point I figured it out: it’s actually “Star Wars: Maverick”. Once you get past the modern-day costumes, it has all the beats and elements of a Star Wars movie. Not that surprising, since they’re drawing from similar works.