Tocky on 21/4/2021 at 03:46
I sort of expected blood to spatter the advertisement at the end. But damn. You find out it's one year. How bad must one year be that you can't wait?
Harvester on 26/4/2021 at 14:37
I watched Them on Prime Video. It's a powerful show about racism in the 50's, but also involves supernatural horror elements. Like HBO's Lovecraft Country, I feel that it tries to do a little too much and that the actual message get a bit muddled in the process. This show does a better job at conveying a powerful anti-racist message than Lovecraft Country, which was a bit too grotesque for its own good, but with Them too it remains a bit unclear to me what it's actually trying to say. Still an entertaining, sometimes fittingly uncomfortable watch.
heywood on 26/4/2021 at 15:59
Quote Posted by demagogue
This is a pretty awesome scifi short somebody made, "Slice of Life".
Very nice, thanks.
Harvester on 1/5/2021 at 22:19
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree in the case of Brandon Cronenberg's (son of David) Possessor. I have a strong stomach and won't quickly call a movie disturbing but this fits the bill. It contains gruesome, close-up violence, the kind of body horror his father was famous for in his early work (also in Dead Ringers), and almost pornographic sex scenes. However, the most disturbing part is how cold and emotionless and unempathetic the movie is. The story is intriguing but don't expect to care about any of the characters. This kind of cold, clinical, detached filmmaking gets under my skin more than the actual violence on display. I admired this movie more than I liked watching it.
There are a lot of things to admire here. The weird technology on display, how utterly alien it looks, like a calibration device encased in leather for some reason, and the device used to transfer conscientiousness reminiscent of the work of H.R. Giger. How alien human bodies look for that matter, with extreme closeups with weird lighting that can make even a human ear or hand look alien. There are frequent quick flashes of horrifying imagery that look grotesque but pass too quickly to really get a grasp of what you're seeing, which reminded me of the horrifying quick flashes of hellish images in Event Horizon.
The events later on in the movie get kind of disjointed and not everything is explained. Partly this is not a problem, for example I didn't mind that they explain very little of the purpose of this organization and why it exists. Unlike Inception, which also deals with transfer of consciousness, there isn't a lot of explanatory dialogue and Cronenberg is clearly not aiming for maximum clarity. But other things that aren't explained are a little more grating, like how Riseborough's character seems to be fairly pragmatic and unemotionial about her job and doesn't seem to have a particularly sadistic personality yet she repeatedly chooses the most violent ways to kill her targets, I mean she's issued a gun but chooses to kill her targets by violent stabbings with a knife and a fireplace poker respectively, all of which is shown in extreme detail of course.
I don't want to sound like a Puritan but this is a pretty sick movie (that I nevertheless watched all the way through). Whether that's a turnoff or a recommendation for you, that's your call.
ZylonBane on 20/5/2021 at 22:23
Saying "I like anime" is like saying "I like books". It's a medium, not a genre.
henke on 25/5/2021 at 10:37
I just rewatched the first movie I ever bought on VHS, Thunder Run. It's never been re-released on DVD but someone put the whole thing on YT.
[video=youtube;ypaLFbBdsvM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaLFbBdsvM[/video]
Forrest Tucker plays an old trucker/cobalt miner/war-vet who gets hired for ONE LAST JOB: transporting plutonium in a Kenworth W900 truck through a stretch of desert while being beset by Mad Max villains. The titular Thunder Run only begins halfway through the movie, but from there on it's straight-up action till the the end. It's like a proto-Fury Road! Ok, it's not, but it's very charming in a typical 80's Cannon-films B-movie kinda way. The stakes are well set up and the action is decently directed. This thing held up better than I expected, really.
Also recently watched:
Horse Girl - Allison Brie plays a woman who loses her mind. The whole thing is told from her perspective and it's just fascinating.
Star Wars Clone Wars - I've been sporadically watching this as a Saturday morning cartoon for the last few years and I recently got to the end. The last couple seasons sets up a lot of stuff that continues in Mandalorian, Ep. 3 and Solo. Those were the most fun episodes. I also watched the first few episodes of the Bad Batch, buuuut, eh. The titular batch aren't an especially interesting bunch.
The Ring - I've been meaning to see this for like 20 years now and I finally got around to it. Not too scary, but it has some very memorable scenes and I can totally see what the big whoop was all about.
Army of the Dead - Perhaps not as good as Snyder's first zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead, but I think I liked this more than anything he's done since Watchmen. At 2.5h it's a bit too flabby, but there's a lot of great character moments and action scenes. Loved Tig Notaro in this.
henke on 28/5/2021 at 20:32
I'm watching Withnail & I. Its like Fear & Loathing except Brittish and unintelligble (because of of all the Brittish accents)
Dia on 29/5/2021 at 22:03
I'm all excited because season 2 of the Norwegian drama 'Ragnarok' is finally out!! Just started the 1st episode of season 2 and it doesn't disappoint! Puts a whole new twist on the Norse legend.
(
https://youtu.be/7H9AaiBLHCo)
demagogue on 2/6/2021 at 12:20
Speaking of Norwegian dramas, Atlantic Crossing is great drama. And I'm just coming off of World on Fire. Both of these are WWII dramas being aired on PBS, although I think they may have originally been made for or in cooperation with BBC or something like that?
The whole period is just infused with drama to begin with. World on Fire takes a lot of personal drama in the lives of some interconnected characters and just, as the title suggests, sets fire to the whole thing by placing it all in the middle of WWII on top of everything else. It goes to show how personal lives can get completely obliterated by the movement of history like this. Atlantic Crossing is more specifically on the family drama of the Norweigen royal family, and the political drama of their nation & the region they can't help but be wrapped up in.
Anyway, long story short, I think it's a good time to be looking back on the history of WWII. The reaction I keep coming back to, that probably a lot of people would, and that's increasingly relevant in our own time, is fuck nazis. Not just in general -- although it's true that any time is a good occasion to let nazis know they can fuck off -- but a point I feel like these dramas keep hammering on is that it's a very specifically shit thing to do for a group of humans to become so intolerant, so caught up in their stupid worldview of will to power and fuck the weak and here let me rub shit in your face just because we can... how monstrous humans can become to each other, and how it's not content to just stop with the monsters' own crimes, but it has to infect every person in society just trying to lead a decent life to have to be complicit and join in their stupid nazi games.
I think it's important to watch now just to remember this is a thing that can happen to humans sometimes. I hate that in my own country, I feel like I hear more and more rhetoric that's so inhuman and cruel. I can grant okay it's not literal nazism in the technical genocidal sense, but once you cross a line where it's okay to dehumanize some groups and be cruel just for cruelty's sake, it's like the monster has already gotten inside of you. And I don't like it! And these dramas are doing a really good job of reminding me exactly why I don't like it!
We're all, most of us anyway, each on our own perilous journeys fraught with complications and vacillations and life is hard enough without assholes feeling entitled to butt in and ruin people's lives just because they get a hard on for being cruel to strangers. A little compassion please, or at the very least, just chill and tend to your own mommy and daddy issues if you're so full of hate. Cruelty to others isn't going to give you that feeling of wholeness back.
Anyway, yeah, 8.5/10. Both of 'em. A bit heavy with the sentimentalism and slick with the plotting sometimes, but minor foibles aside, great shows.
Dia on 3/6/2021 at 00:53
Well said indeed, Cade.:thumb: