The last movie you saw....

[|iR|Focalor]

Probably gonna finally watch Cocaine Bear tomorrow.

Cocaine Bear -
Kinda funny, kinda dumb. Worth watching if you have nothing else, but probably not something I'm gonna want to watch more than once.

Sisu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2k4QAItiSA

this Finish film got an imdb rate of 7.1 and got a 94% Rotten Tomato rating.  Saw the trailer and said to myself "hmm seems damn good".  So I tried watching it.

What the fuck did i just saw!

This guy is 10000x better than Rambo and not even a tagteam of Rambo + the Terminator could prolly kill him..

Damn, cant trust ratings nowadays even if its from Rotten Tomato.

Does that mean you did or didn't like it?

It was pretty good. Reminds me a little bit of 70's grindhouse kinda movies, which is obviously what they were going for... or they were kinda borrowing a bit from similar movies by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, which used the same font and colors as this movie did for all the titles. I guess the idea was to either blatantly rip off a Tarantino/Rodriguez movie, or to pay homage to them. It was pretty good though - it was unique enough that I wouldn't call it a "rip-off". The gore-factor was pretty high, but could've been a lot higher. Would've been nice to see the girls doing some super-graphic horrible gruesome shit to the one guy that he left begging for his life in the road. I mean why be realistic with the blood, go insane with it. I mean why not, it's not like anyone will call the movie out for being "unrealistic" - they already have him using a pick axe to swing from the underside of a plane.

[|iR|Focalor]

Winnie the Pooh - Blood & Honey

Got about 15 or 20 minutes into it... and that's all I could take. Wow. What a tremendous piece of shit. 1 out 10. Awful.

[|iR|Focalor]

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny



It had action and adventure. But then again, lots of other movies do these days. I mean... if you just wanted another Indiana Jones movie... and one with ridiculous shit like time travel, MORE nazis (because the 1st and 3rd ones didn't have enough for you I guess), 80% of the movie looking like it was shot in front of a green screen (yet oddly enough still costing shitloads of money to produce as if they used physical sets and real effects and stunts), and rampant plot "borrowing" from the other 4 Indiana Jones movies (like the room with shitloads of creepy crawly insects from Temple of Doom)... then this is the movie for you.

Personally, I didn't think Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was as bad as the critics said it was. I kinda liked it. It wasn't as good as the first 3 Indiana Jones movies obviously, but I felt like it fit enough to be a legit 4th installment, and it was written by George Lucas and directed by Spielberg, so even though it was an obvious cash grab of a movie, it felt like it fit with the others.

This one is NOT written by George Lucas and is NOT directed by Spielberg. And you can tell. And if the 4th one tarnished the reputation of franchise, the critics were very accurate on this one for once: it was rehashed mediocre crap.
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Here's what I notice:

*1st movie - the ark of the covenant (was a real thing)

*2nd movie - chakra stones (pretty sure they were a real thing in Indian culture, maybe not THOSE SPECIFIC stones in the movie, but such things were known to have existed)

*3rd movie - holy grail, the cup christ used at the last supper (likely a real thing, I'm pretty sure certain historical accounts do reference certain people possessing a thing believed to be the cup, unknown for sure if they actually did)

*4th movie - crystal skull (fake, all the discovered supposed native american crystal skull artifacts were proven to be fakes)

(note: moving away from reality and believability here, aren't we?)

*5th movie - dial of archimedes (fake, not a real thing, VERY loosely based on the Antikythera mechanism, a greek artifact theorized to have been created to predict the movements of the stars and the occurrence of eclipses)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the movies feature some kind of "magical" aspect: The mystical power of the Ark and it's curse being able to kill people, the magical powers of the chakra stones, the mystical power of the grail cup and it's ability to heal and give eternal life to whoever drinks from it (even though Indy's dad did end up dying eventually... strange, right, lol), the otherworldly power of the crystal skull, the magical power of the dial to predict time fissures that allow for time travel.

But the first three were based on religion, major ones that still exist. The 4th one... arguably a religious myth, although based on fake archeology. 5th one, COMPLETELY MADE UP, no religious context at all. I think the fact that the first three used artifacts from religions still in existence today lent a bit of believability to the magical aspects of the plots in the movies. Just my opinion, just my theory. I think if they could've found some other religious based artifact, like the "spear of destiny", perhaps that would play better. (the spear that was used to stab Christ as he hung on the cross, a special division under the direction of Nazi SS Reichsfuhrer H. Himmler was trying to find it, it's rumored that the catholic church has it hidden somewhere) And HEY, since they obviously had to have a nostalgic callback with Nazi's, that one would've let them use Nazi's again as the bad guys, right!?!

[yahoo]

that movie aint really good nor bad.. just enjoyable

[yahoo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ikl8vy4zs

loved it. 

[|iR|Focalor]

Oppenheimer (2023)

Watched it last night. Yeah... so... it's a dramatization of Oppenheimer's life and story. Nothing really more to say than that. It is what it is. Pretty long though, 3 hours total. I fell asleep somewhere after hour 2 and woke up about 15 minutes before it ended. Didn't miss a damn thing that I could tell.

The explosion of the first test... seems like they didn't want to use any real footage of a real nuclear test. Did they maybe feel like the difference in the look of the shots would disrupt the flow of the movie somehow? I don't know. What they did end up creating in it's place looked FAR smaller than any kind of nuclear explosion. It was very underwhelming, and I think this movie had a moral duty to really demonstrate and relate just how unfathomably vast and powerful a nuclear weapon is. The real Oppenheimer was horrified by what he had created. And the movie showed that, but the explosion they showed looked more like a regular old fireball from a gasoline explosion. In my opinion, the bullshit explosion they used did more to disrupt the movie than using stock footage of the trinity test would've.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ikl8vy4zs

loved it.

Tried watching it tonight. Got about 30 minutes into it before I had to cut it off. There's so much Italian being spoken in the movie, and when I converted it to MP4 from the MKV I downloaded, I didn't burn in the subtitles. So I had to re-convert it a couple times trying different subtitle tracks before I got the one that added all the Italian parts. Will watch it tomorrow night I guess.

Instead, I watched...



The Killer (2023) starring Michael Fassbender.

The previews I saw for it on Youtube made it look like it was going to be some kind of start-to-finish high impact action marathon like a Jason Bourne movie or something, but... it really wasn't. It was okay. The flow was a bit weird the way it did "chapters" for each target he identifies. But the whole "he's a hitman who obsesses over details and methods" thing has kinda been done before, ya know?

[|iR|Focalor]

Vertigo (1958) - starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

WOW. See this.

I've never been too much of a Hitchcock fan. I remember the first time I saw The Birds (1963, starring Tippi Hedren) when I was maybe 7 years old and it scared the piss outta me. I remember my parents and grandparents thought it was funny that it scared me because to adults its not all that scary... but think about some of the scenes in the movie for a second. Hordes of crows attacking little children on a playground, killing them and pecking peoples eyeballs out. I was fuckin' 7 years old. My family: buncha fuckin' sadists. 

I was always more into 80's and 90's cheesey, campy, horror, cult kinda stuff. But you get older, your tastes evolve. I'm starting to appreciate older movies a lot more, especially the black and white stuff from the 40's, stuff you see on TCM typically. So Christmas Eve I was flipping through the guide on the satellite and saw that TCM was doing a bunch of Hitchcock movies on Christmas. I knew no one else in the house would wanna watch that stuff on Christmas day, so I DVR'd it.

Rear Window (1954)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Vertigo (1958)

I've seen Rear Window before,... I think I've even seen a remake of it too, but I can't remember who the hell was in it - it was a long time ago. Rear Window is pretty good, a classic. I watched it the other night, but didn't get to finish it because rain or some kind of interference screwed with the recording on the DVR. The very ending was blipped, right at the scene where he falls out of the window and all the police finally show up. Almost like someone planned it that way just to annoy me. Totally ruined it, I had to hop online to watch the ending on youtube. 

Same thing Man Who Knew Too Much. About 10 seconds into it, the recording died and kicked me back out to live TV mode.

Vertigo worked though.

Man! What a good movie. A lot of people these days rank it as Hitchcock's #1 masterpiece. I might have to agree with that. (I always thought Psycho was Hitchcock's best - one of the greatest horror/psych thrillers and it was top 3 on my favorite horror movies list.) Great use of augmented reality with some clever usage of animation in key spots that doesn't interrupt the flow and feel of the movie the way you'd think tossing in some animated effects might. Sort of a noir kinda thing, little bit of a mystery, a classic romance/thriller like Hollywood was known for back in the 40's and 50's. An absolutely gorgeous Kim Novak. James Stewart is not really one of my favorite actors, but he was perfect for the part. And just the fact that it was made in '58 - the cars, the buildings, the clotches, art-deco style of everything... It was the PERFECT time and place for such a story. You can try to recreate it in modern film, but it never has the same feel to it.

It's piqued my interest in Hitchcock movies now. Went online and looked up a complete list of all of his movies. Eh... too many to get em all. I made a list of about 20 of them (which might be close to half (chatgpt says theres 53).

[|iR|Focalor]

Since I'm on the topic of "oldies", another old one I watched a while back that I'd recommend...



Lady in the Lake (1947) - starring Audrey Totter

Definitely in the noir genre. A bit of an oddball movie for the time. The entire thing is shot in 1st person perspective. YOU are the main character. The synopsis from IMDB:

The lady editor of a crime magazine hires Phillip Marlowe to find the wife of her boss. The private detective soon finds himself involved in murder.

Audrey Totter. Like Kim Novak, an absolutely gorgeous woman - both proof that class matters and you don't have to look like a slutty whore to be a knockout. It's kinda funny how her character interestingly evolves from an aloof ice queen bitch to a clingy smitten-with-love submissive as it goes on.

Not a particularly amazing movie. The story is okay. I just thought it was something out-of-the-ordinary and interesting enough to recommend as something "different". So keep that in mind: not "amazing"... it's "different".

https://archive.org/details/lady-in-the-lake-robert-montgomery-audrey-totter-leon-ames-tom-tully-lloyd-nolan-1947

[|iR|Focalor]

A weird short film with James Brown.

From the videos description: James Brown, Clive Owen, Gary Oldman and Danny Trejo star in this hyperkinetic short film from the director of True Romance. Commissioned by BMW to promote their cars, it was one of a series of shorts directed by top tier tHollywood filmmakers.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfh7NBIh4hg

[yahoo]

if Danny Trejo is in it then Im in

[TriggerHappy{FLP}]

Oppenheimer (2023)

Watched it last night. Yeah... so... it's a dramatization of Oppenheimer's life and story. Nothing really more to say than that. It is what it is. Pretty long though, 3 hours total. I fell asleep somewhere after hour 2 and woke up about 15 minutes before it ended. Didn't miss a damn thing that I could tell.

The explosion of the first test... seems like they didn't want to use any real footage of a real nuclear test. Did they maybe feel like the difference in the look of the shots would disrupt the flow of the movie somehow? I don't know. What they did end up creating in it's place looked FAR smaller than any kind of nuclear explosion. It was very underwhelming, and I think this movie had a moral duty to really demonstrate and relate just how unfathomably vast and powerful a nuclear weapon is. The real Oppenheimer was horrified by what he had created. And the movie showed that, but the explosion they showed looked more like a regular old fireball from a gasoline explosion. In my opinion, the bullshit explosion they used did more to disrupt the movie than using stock footage of the trinity test would've.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ikl8vy4zs

loved it.

Tried watching it tonight. Got about 30 minutes into it before I had to cut it off. There's so much Italian being spoken in the movie, and when I converted it to MP4 from the MKV I downloaded, I didn't burn in the subtitles. So I had to re-convert it a couple times trying different subtitle tracks before I got the one that added all the Italian parts. Will watch it tomorrow night I guess.

Instead, I watched...



The Killer (2023) starring Michael Fassbender.

The previews I saw for it on Youtube made it look like it was going to be some kind of start-to-finish high impact action marathon like a Jason Bourne movie or something, but... it really wasn't. It was okay. The flow was a bit weird the way it did "chapters" for each target he identifies. But the whole "he's a hitman who obsesses over details and methods" thing has kinda been done before, ya know?

yeah oppenheimer i think i tried to watch it as well but honestly i was so bored watching it i think my gf and i both fell asleep to it within an hour i haven't really given much thought past that and i actually really like cillian murphy's acting i think he's one of those hidden gems especially after the peaky blinders show last movie i watched was cold pursuit with liam neeson not a bad movie i've seen it before in theatres 

[QwazyWabbit]

Reading some of the stuff posted about how they did the explosion for the movie, it was non-CGI practical miniature explosions in a studio as big as they could manage without destroying everything. I guess they didn't want to use the actual footage from Trinity because it wasn't filmed in the proper aspect ratio for wide screen cinema and would have detracted from the movie. If you go to YouTube and watch them there are enhanced versions of many of the nuke tests but when they add sound they don't account for the delays and I think it detracts from the experience. A 20kT observed from 5 miles away would be utterly silent until just before the shock wave arrives and the first thing you would hear would be the sound emanating from the earthquake under your feet created by the impulse of the explosion at ground zero. You can't observe the flash with your eyes even with goggles on or you'd be blinded so all you can see would be the fireball after the primary detonation.

I haven't seen the movie but from what I've read about Oppie and the team, they had Germany in mind during the project and once they had achived the goal of creating a practical nuclear weapon they really didn't want it actually used but wanted it to be the big stick to force surrender. Truman didn't want to risk a possible dud in a demo explosion in front of the world so I guess it was all or nothing in a drop on Japan. They were fire-bombing cities all over Japan except for certain targets and still the empire wouldn't surrender so Truman decided to make a sudden impression on the preserved target cities. I think racism and revenge for Pearl Harbor had a little bit to do with it too and that also entered into Oppenheimer's regrets, IMO.

I should also say that the argument that there might be a possible dud is rather specious. Trinity was a plutonium device, similar to Fat Man and it worked perfectly. Little Boy was a Uranium device, a gun type A-bomb, virtually guaranteed to work so the actual risk of a dud demo was very low. Lower even that a live drop from a bomber.

[|iR|Focalor]

The Silent Mountain (2014)

Haven't seen it yet. Came across this youtube clip about it. A movie about WW1. Looks pretty interesting. Trying to download it now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dszlIAF5zfg

I saw a couple of other movies about WW1 in the past few years...

1917 (2019) - was REALLY good. About 2 soldiers tasked with taking an important message to the front line warning the officers to call off an attack. From what I remember, apparently the enemy found out about the attack, knew they were coming, and were set up to ambush and slaughter them. Don't wanna say more than that lest I give it away for anyone who will want to see it now. You should though. Seriously, it's really good.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - Was filmed in German, but dubbed pretty well in English. Usually dubbed movies kinda suck because the dubbed voices are completely void of the proper emotion... or they OVER-emote things... this one, the English dubs do tend to match the actors appropriately. About a German boy and his friends who join the war effort thinking they will become heroes, but quickly find out that they got themselves into a veritable "world of shit" as they say. Accurately depicts the horrors of WW1 as well as any movie possibly could. Not a happy tale at all, very sad ending and would be categorized as a "tragedy" as far as plays go.

From what little I've seen of clips of the 1979 version, I guess it borrows a lot from the 1979 version of the same name starring Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, and Ian Holm. I haven't seen that one all the way through, perhaps I'll download it too. And THAT one is a remake of the original 1930 version... which I ALSO haven't seen.

[|iR|Focalor]

I've always been a fan of the original Road House with Patrick Swayze (ever since it first came out in '89). And not because it's become a cult classic and people think that it's "so bad that it's good", I disagree that it's "bad". I'll grant you that some of the dialogue is a little awkward, but as a late 80's, early 90's action flick goes, it's got it all - a great villain (Ben Gazzara as Brad Wesley  ), a likeable badass hero, good action, interesting scenes like the monster truck driving through the car dealership, and the special guest appearance of the Jeff Healey Band at their peak. (Big Jeff Healey fan, dude was an awesome guitar player). It's just a certain kind of movie, made a certain kind of way, at a certain point in time. And you can't duplicate that - times are different now, it could never come out the same. The old classic action movies, you can't copy the formula, it's just not the 90's anymore, it'll never be the same.

But that didn't stop someone from trying to remake and re-define Road House.



Road House (2024) - starring Jake Gyllenhall, Conor McGregor

Watched it this weekend. Eh... not terrible. Definitely not as good as the original. It does very little to stick to the original story, which I actually kind of appreciate. Rule #1: NEVER remake a fucking movie. But if you're fucking determined to be an asshole and do it anyway, at least don't make the same movie. And with the exception with when he meets the "love interest" in the hospital and some of the dialogue between them, most of the movie goes entirely it's own way. I think they did some weird 3d camera stuff to get the fight sequences looking a certain way... I wasn't a big fan of it, it looked too unnatural, and I suspect much of it was done in front of a green screen.

Conor McGregor... kinda plays himself for the most part. A wild obnoxious violent 24/7 party-time kinda guy. Looked like he was beefed up a little on 'roids, looked bloated up and much more Hulk Hogan-y than his typical fighting weight. I suppose he's an interesting villain, but nothing supremely special in my opinion.

It's watchable, especially if you're an action movie person. If you're not, you might lose interest somewhere in the middle. The 1989 Road House is still better in my opinion. Honestly, they could've retitled the movie, renamed Dalton to something else, and severed any connections to the original Road House movie, and it wouldn't change anything.

[|iR|Focalor]

Caligula - The Ultimate Cut (1979, 2023)



So the story behind this movie in a nutshell...

It was supposed to be a BIG deal. The guy who owned and started Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, had used Penthouse to partially fund movies before (Chinatown, The Longest Yard), but had never produced a movie entirely on his own. Then came the idea for Caligula. Basically he wanted to make a movie with porno movie scenes in it that was still considered a mainstream feature film with big budget mainstream film production value. (Perhaps his idea to help push porn into a more mainstream thing being that he was what I guess you'd call a "hedonist" himself.) He gets a big time writer like Gore Vidal to write it, an up and coming Italian director like Tinto Brass to direct it, and casts it with some well known and respected actors like Peter O'Toole (Lawrence of Arabia) and John Gielgud (probably most well-known for playing opposite Dudley Moore as the sarcastic mouthy butler in "Arthur"). Caligula was to be played by Malcolm McDowell, who had previously played the lead in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange... another pretty fucked up movie about another pretty fucked up character. But I guess no one involved in the movie (other than Bob Guccione) really wanted to make a PORN movie. Guccione saw what they had shot, didn't think it was pornographic enough, so he spent a few nights on his own unbeknownst to everyone else with his own cast of extras and several Penthouse Pets such as Lori Wagner and Anneka DiLorenzo shooting lots of scenes of pornographic material. He re-edited the film himself, splicing the scenes in where he wanted them with no input from the director. When everyone involved with the movie had heard what he had done, Gore Vidal and Tinto Brass both wanted their names taken off the film, several of the actors objected - it was a disaster.

The movie was eventually released, and I think it did actually MAKE money, probably mostly because of the press around it talking about how filthy and shocking it was. For example... Showgirls. What an AWFUL MOVIE. It was FUCKING TERRIBLE! But when you stick one of the Saved By The Bell girls in it, advertise that she gets explicitly full-frontal naked in it, and slap an NC-17 rating on it, some people are gonna go see it just because of the rating, just because they're curious about, "well, how shocking could it possibly really be?" - which is why that movie "almost" made it's production budget back at the box office (I think it fell about 4 or 5 million short of the 40M budget sunk into it.)

--------------------------

Anyway, with that said...

Caligula (1979) (the original release)

The original movie was pretty... meh. I never really liked it. The sets all look like shit from a stage play. The pervasive nudity in it I didn't really "mind" - that's kinda how life was in those days, it wasn't something people were uptight about. Not talking about the porn scenes, that stuff was spliced in like I said above, and the overwhelming majority of it honestly feels completely out of place. All in all, just not really a movie I liked. If you cut out all the acting and the story about Caligula and just had nothing but the scenes of Penthouse Pets eating each other out, then it would be a perfectly acceptable porno movie. But as a movie itself... I can't really approve... and I'll expand on that later.

---------------------------

Caligula (1979) (The Ultimate Cut) (premiered at 2023 Cannes Film Festival)

Bob Guccione died in 2010. Not really sure what the story is, but some other producer apparently got ahold of a ton of the thought-to-be lost footage from the movie, and reconstructed the film with tons of extra previously unseen footage, and making no use at all of the pornographic material shot by Guccione.

It's a good idea in theory I suppose... however... they spliced shit up wrong. In the original movie, it opens with Caligula and his sister Drusilla running around the forest dressed in white. It's nothing that an Emperor would be caught wearing. For some reason, The Ultimate Cut removes this scene from the opening and makes use of it much later in the film after Caligula is made Emperor. Again, the scene looks out of place because of what they're wearing. It obviously belonged at the START of the movie to show how childlike and carefree they were before being thrust into the roll of Emperor.

The Ultimate Cut really feels more like a REAL movie. The original always felt like exactly what it was: a movie hacked up and glued back together with porno scenes that didn't belong. I also notice in the new cut that many scenes remain very similar except for entirely different angles, like especially in the end when Caligula is assassinated. They cut the gruesome closeup of the slave bashing their child's head against the marble stairs to kill him, and instead have a much wider angle brief shot of it from higher up. Right after that, in the original, you see Longinus rushing down the stairs with a red sash and a crown to Crown Caligula's uncle Claudius, who is cowering in a corner, as the new Emperor. This is a closeup shot of the front. But in the new cut, it shows this same scene looking down from the top of the staircase at a side angle.

The Ultimate Cut is longer. Total runtime is like 3 hours (original was about 2 and a half hours). Seems like a great deal of extra footage is added to the beginning of the movie, especially the scene where Nerva (played by John Gielgud) commits ritual suicide by wrist slashing in the bath.

The Ultimate Cut is certainly more watchable, but I still can't say that I really like it, for many reasons. Primarily, I just don't think Malcolm McDowell really plays Caligula the way he should be played. Yes, Caligula was an asshole and a psycho at times and he really did many of the things depicted in the movie. He actually DID force the Senators wives to whore themselves out. There's a scene where he's in bed with a fever thinking he's about to die, and someone in the crowd standing by his bed (I forget the characters name or if he was named at all, but in reality, he was just a random unknown equestrian) speaks up and says, "I affirm my life if Jupiter would only spare our beloved Emperor!", at which point Caligula sits up and says, "Jupiter accepts your offer. Execute him." It then shows the guards dragging the man out, presumably to execute him. This is used in the movie to show what a callous psycho he is. But in reality, he never REALLY executed the man. He was taken to the Tiber river and tied in a sack and they threatened to throw him in, as was a common method of executing many people. But at the last second, they let him out as they were instructed to do by Caligula himself.

You see, Caligula wasn't nearly as "crazy" as movies and some historians would have you believe. Like how I said I would expand later... this is why I'm not a fan of this movie. It comes off as more of a stage piece meant to be tragic and cerebral, and in it's effort to BE that, it doesn't really tell the true story of Caligula well enough. Malcolm McDowell plays a nice psychotic Caligula, but fails to really embody him in how intelligent and fast-talking he was. Caligula was a wry and often sarcastic kind of guy who would speak to others in a tone of contempt, but didn't necessarily have a boiling psychotic hatred for everyone around him like the movie suggests. In reality, he was not entirely the mad tyrant the movie would have you believe. And like I said earlier, the sets all look like something to be displayed on the play stage in a theater, not something for a movie. It looks weird. It looks wrong. I don't like it.


Still... that's just MY opinion. And my opinion maybe isn't the most reliable thing to go on when it comes to this movie in particular.

I'd recommend it with maybe a 50/50. Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. But if you're the kind of person who would've never dared to watch Caligula before knowing about the porn bullshit in it... then know that this version is fairly safe to watch. NOT with your kids, of course, FUCK NO. It's still got plenty of nudity, including some male full-frontal nudity. But none of the hardcore porn that used to be in it. I mean if you've seen the Spartacus or Game of Thrones miniseries, there's a ridiculous amount of nudity in those. This is comparable.