Top 3 favorite non-kung fu/non-CBM movie, and it ain't #3:
what was the last movie you watched?
- Thread starter Folsom Al
- Start date
Saw Tron: Ares today in IMAX with a couple of friends. All 3 of us thought it was very well done. Not a "great" movie, but definitely good, especially if you liked Tron: Legacy. I thought it was better than that one overall, but they are a bit different. The NIN score was excellent as well. The IMAX sound was excellent.
Cast is good and pretty well acted. I'm not the biggest Jared Leto fan, but he does a pretty good job here.
There is one mid-credit scene (happens pretty quick after the credits start). Also, if you go in IMAX (not sure about others?), there is a Q&A after the credits with NIN and Jeff Bridges. Short, a few interesting tidbits, but nothing earth-shattering. Jeff Bridges is a funny dude.
Watched House of Dynamite (Netflix) while donating blood this morning. Well acted, with a great cast. It follows several people’s storylines during a missile launch threatening a US city. I don’t particularly care for the approach (playing each story sequentially instead of concurrently), but otherwise a good flick.
This was clearly edited to make it fit, but it's perfect!
Wait, am I missing something because it was already on Netflix
That was Godzilla Minus One - I was confused for a while too.
I finally got around to watching the Ben+Matt vehicle Air (2023) about Nike's pursuit of a Michael Jordan endorsement deal...
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are both in their comfort zone as "the smartest guy in the room" and "the guy who thinks he's smarter than he is" respectively, so neither is really stretching their range here but it still makes for an enjoyable if predictable dynamic. There's also a lot to like here as a basketball fan as one humorous scene early on in the movie hinges on our knowledge of the players in the 1984 draft and how their NBA careers turned out and our protagonist is a basketball junkie who feels that his player evaluation skills are underappreciated by his employer but ultimately is vindicated in the end. Call it wish fulfillment.
I think Viola Davis steals the movie in the role of Deloris Jordan (Michael's mom) despite only appearing in 3 scenes. And I was surprised how much I was moved emotionally by the final scene when she pleads to Sonny Vacarro (Damon) that her son deserves to share in the profits from his likeness. I was too young at the time to appreciate Michael as a basketball player -- he was already a legend by the time I started dipping my toes in NBA fandom and without cable my opportunities to watch 'outside-of-market' NBA games in the 1990s were almost non-existent. But I certainly could and did appreciate him as a cultural icon and seeing it spelled out in the movie how much this one contract changed the lives of so many athletes was pretty powerful.
There was one head-scratching decision that I did not like which was the intercutting of a monologue delivered by Matt Damon during the Nike pitch to the Jordan family with newspaper clippings from Jordan's NBA career -- most shockingly the murder of his father in 1993. I didn't see the need for that and absent any kind of context, it came across as tone-deaf to me in what was otherwise a feel-good story about one of the most pivotal events in the history of sports marketing. But aside from that one quibble, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a cut above what I usually expect from a streaming service financed exclusive and worth the watch.
I think Viola Davis steals the movie in the role of Deloris Jordan (Michael's mom) despite only appearing in 3 scenes. And I was surprised how much I was moved emotionally by the final scene when she pleads to Sonny Vacarro (Damon) that her son deserves to share in the profits from his likeness. I was too young at the time to appreciate Michael as a basketball player -- he was already a legend by the time I started dipping my toes in NBA fandom and without cable my opportunities to watch 'outside-of-market' NBA games in the 1990s were almost non-existent. But I certainly could and did appreciate him as a cultural icon and seeing it spelled out in the movie how much this one contract changed the lives of so many athletes was pretty powerful.
There was one head-scratching decision that I did not like which was the intercutting of a monologue delivered by Matt Damon during the Nike pitch to the Jordan family with newspaper clippings from Jordan's NBA career -- most shockingly the murder of his father in 1993. I didn't see the need for that and absent any kind of context, it came across as tone-deaf to me in what was otherwise a feel-good story about one of the most pivotal events in the history of sports marketing. But aside from that one quibble, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a cut above what I usually expect from a streaming service financed exclusive and worth the watch.
Löwenherz
Starter
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is set to hit theaters nationwide on December 5th.
Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2 with additional footage including an extended anime sequence played as one film as was always intended.
Has only ever been screened in private session with Tarantino previously.
This is not a drill.
Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2 with additional footage including an extended anime sequence played as one film as was always intended.
Has only ever been screened in private session with Tarantino previously.
This is not a drill.
I finally got around to watching Repo Man (1984) last night -- a Blu Ray I picked up super cheap secondhand after Criterion announced the 4K re-release and then sat on for months, not really knowing what I had.
Wow! This is one crazy carnival ride of a historical artifact. It's got the gritty look of 70s film courtesy of legendary cinematographer Robby Müller, who absolutely made the best possible use of Los Angeles as a backdrop with gorgeous shots of the LA river and the original 6th street viaduct throughout. It's got baby-faced (and ear-pierced) Emilio Estevez playing a punk teenager who "goes straight" when Harry Dean Stanton tricks him into aiding with a car repossession. From there we get side-plots about an FBI conspiracy, aliens, a mysterious 1964 Chevy Malibu toting a nuclear payload, and a dash of street-level social commentary in the vein of The Outsiders.
I thought Fight Club was a totally original artistic statement when I first watched it as a teenager in 1999 yet here we have a movie released 15 years earlier which strikes the same chords of satirical dark comedy crossed with a bitingly cynical take on the reality of economic inequality lurking just below the surface of the American dream. It just keeps coming at you in waves as seemingly insignificant side-characters pass in and out of the frame repeatedly until the ebb and flow of subtext rises above the main plot to become the plot. I'm probably going to have to watch this another half dozen times just to be able to unpack it all. In a lot of ways this movie felt like it predicted the indie movie boom of the 1990s, much like Easy Rider (1969) presaged the turn toward ambiguity and deconstruction in the films of the 1970s.
Wow! This is one crazy carnival ride of a historical artifact. It's got the gritty look of 70s film courtesy of legendary cinematographer Robby Müller, who absolutely made the best possible use of Los Angeles as a backdrop with gorgeous shots of the LA river and the original 6th street viaduct throughout. It's got baby-faced (and ear-pierced) Emilio Estevez playing a punk teenager who "goes straight" when Harry Dean Stanton tricks him into aiding with a car repossession. From there we get side-plots about an FBI conspiracy, aliens, a mysterious 1964 Chevy Malibu toting a nuclear payload, and a dash of street-level social commentary in the vein of The Outsiders.
I thought Fight Club was a totally original artistic statement when I first watched it as a teenager in 1999 yet here we have a movie released 15 years earlier which strikes the same chords of satirical dark comedy crossed with a bitingly cynical take on the reality of economic inequality lurking just below the surface of the American dream. It just keeps coming at you in waves as seemingly insignificant side-characters pass in and out of the frame repeatedly until the ebb and flow of subtext rises above the main plot to become the plot. I'm probably going to have to watch this another half dozen times just to be able to unpack it all. In a lot of ways this movie felt like it predicted the indie movie boom of the 1990s, much like Easy Rider (1969) presaged the turn toward ambiguity and deconstruction in the films of the 1970s.
Is it going to be like 5 hours long?
Löwenherz
Starter
Just about
Löwenherz
Starter
I watched Repo Man and Stalker back-to-back not long ago. That was a trippy Saturday.
Very different vibes obviously, but both were mesmerizingly weird and I loved them for it.
Bro. Bro, I would have been there for you.
Watched Guillermo Del Toro’s version of Frankenstein on Netflix last night. I liked it quite a bit. GDT told the story from multiple perspectives. Well worth a watch
Oscar Isaac delivers his usual solid performance as Viktor Frankenstein
Jacob Elordi was excellent as the monster, played him with some heart
Christopher Walz and Mia Goth also contributed a great deal to the movie.
Oscar Isaac delivers his usual solid performance as Viktor Frankenstein
Jacob Elordi was excellent as the monster, played him with some heart
Christopher Walz and Mia Goth also contributed a great deal to the movie.
Löwenherz
Starter
Yeah, there aren't a ton of classic Thanksgiving movies. I guess there's Alice's Restaurant, but that's really just an excuse to pad out the song. There's a 1997 film with an outstanding cast called The Myth Of Fingerprints that I have a soft spot for, but I don't know that it stands out much more than the standard family drama film.
coolhandluke
Starter
Dan Trachtenberg has changed the trajectory of the franchise with those two movies and opened up new avenues for growth. Predator: Badlands was such a fun outing. Though the movie follows traditional tropes in story progression, it took a bold gamble in making the predator vulnerable and relatable. The Genna planet design was intriguing transporting us to a new world.
Löwenherz
Starter
House of Dynamite (2025) - Netflix
TL;DR: Love Bigelow, but this was too much filmmaking sizzle that smoked out what little steak was there. Needed to focus on Elba as President.
I will forever admire and honor Kathryn Bigelow for her sheer audacity in making the original Point Break to say nothing of her “important” films this side of the millennium in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.
But this was a mess from the words “handheld shaky pan and zoom” and go, making it so that every conference call and boardroom meeting is shot like a Jason Borne action sequence.
I went back to a random scene from Zero Dark Thirty to see if this was some kind of recent Bigelow staple I’d never noticed, and shocking to me, there it was - the ever so subtle shifting of the camera in otherwise static settings as if watching a mockumentary from Dunder Mifflin or an interview with Spïnal Tap.
But in House of Dynamite this is cranked to 11 - and I know its desired effect is to raise my adrenaline while people talk about dry procedures and the Constitution. But here it has the opposite impact turning tense moments into parody, like a sweaty, nervous, amateur magician trying to oversell a card trick.
And that’s before we even get to the ill-advised Rashomon-inspired narrative structure - which itself is a misnomer because Rashomon had a series of stories that contradicted each other, leaving the truth up to the viewer. This is more like Go and other indie Tarantino copy cats of the 90s that tell the same story from different perspectives evoking a certain thrill when the audience sees the stories line up.
Except here every narrative alignment or reveal is astonishingly benign or irrelevant.
- In story 1 we see a guy on the Zoom conference desperately running through the streets of Washington causing his screen to wildly jiggle as he tries to contribute to the meeting. In story 2 we realize he was running because … he was late for work.
- In story 1 a General announces to the Zoom call the missile has gone “suborbital” signifying it is not a test but an actual offensive launch. In story 2 we see the General’s assistant tell him this information … and then the General makes the same announcement to the Zoom call.
- In story 1 a guy identifies a subject matter expert the President should call for insight. In story 2 we see the phone call from her perspective. In story 3 we see the call from the President’s perspective. To my knowledge, there is no significant outcome with the information she provides.
The film wastes Idris Elba as the American President, hiding him behind a blanked out screen on the Zoom call until story 3. Significant attention is given to a checked-out FEMA worker completely bored of her job until she is thrust into the role as the agencies’ designated survivor while simultaneous having positively zero relevance or impact to the story itself. Ultimately the only people who actually do anything of substance in the film are the soldiers who launch the anti-ballistic missiles meant to intercept the nuke, which ultimately fail. Otherwise everyone else is running around with their hair on fire pretending to be professionals making important decisions while doing little of consequence beyond tracking the nuke’s path toward Chicago much as I was.
To the film’s credit, a good amount of attention is given to retaliation options and the President’s decision on who, where, and how hard to strike back - made complicated by the fact no one seems to know exactly who launched the missile or why. That’s largely the subject of story 3 and really should have been the focus of the entire film. Elba as the President being whisked away from a WNBA photo-op publicity event and suddenly forced to make decisions about nuclear war was the film’s strength. Mix in the inner-workings from the Situation Room in story 1, and the greenhorn Deputy National Security Advisor way out of his depths trying to avert a global nuclear war in story 2 and that is the bones of an engaging political drama.
I don’t need a Roland Emmerich-style cast of thousands disaster movie. I don’t need my political dramas presented like Run Lola Run. I don’t need to be constantly reminded that these people are all humans attempting to remain professional and make rational decisions in the most impossibly intense situation imaginable while all not-so-secretly wanting to call their loved ones at any giving moment and scream at them to hide in a bunker. And I certainly don’t need the story to be reset to the beginning every 20 minutes so we can see the exact same thing from a different camera angle.
Just give me an adult throwback political drama in the vein of Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men or even Oppenheimer for a modern reference.
And don’t keep resetting your ticking clock. Dr. Strangelove handled the natural building intensity and suspense of a nuclear strike with more care and reverence than this.
But this was a mess from the words “handheld shaky pan and zoom” and go, making it so that every conference call and boardroom meeting is shot like a Jason Borne action sequence.
I went back to a random scene from Zero Dark Thirty to see if this was some kind of recent Bigelow staple I’d never noticed, and shocking to me, there it was - the ever so subtle shifting of the camera in otherwise static settings as if watching a mockumentary from Dunder Mifflin or an interview with Spïnal Tap.
But in House of Dynamite this is cranked to 11 - and I know its desired effect is to raise my adrenaline while people talk about dry procedures and the Constitution. But here it has the opposite impact turning tense moments into parody, like a sweaty, nervous, amateur magician trying to oversell a card trick.
And that’s before we even get to the ill-advised Rashomon-inspired narrative structure - which itself is a misnomer because Rashomon had a series of stories that contradicted each other, leaving the truth up to the viewer. This is more like Go and other indie Tarantino copy cats of the 90s that tell the same story from different perspectives evoking a certain thrill when the audience sees the stories line up.
Except here every narrative alignment or reveal is astonishingly benign or irrelevant.
- In story 1 we see a guy on the Zoom conference desperately running through the streets of Washington causing his screen to wildly jiggle as he tries to contribute to the meeting. In story 2 we realize he was running because … he was late for work.
- In story 1 a General announces to the Zoom call the missile has gone “suborbital” signifying it is not a test but an actual offensive launch. In story 2 we see the General’s assistant tell him this information … and then the General makes the same announcement to the Zoom call.
- In story 1 a guy identifies a subject matter expert the President should call for insight. In story 2 we see the phone call from her perspective. In story 3 we see the call from the President’s perspective. To my knowledge, there is no significant outcome with the information she provides.
The film wastes Idris Elba as the American President, hiding him behind a blanked out screen on the Zoom call until story 3. Significant attention is given to a checked-out FEMA worker completely bored of her job until she is thrust into the role as the agencies’ designated survivor while simultaneous having positively zero relevance or impact to the story itself. Ultimately the only people who actually do anything of substance in the film are the soldiers who launch the anti-ballistic missiles meant to intercept the nuke, which ultimately fail. Otherwise everyone else is running around with their hair on fire pretending to be professionals making important decisions while doing little of consequence beyond tracking the nuke’s path toward Chicago much as I was.
To the film’s credit, a good amount of attention is given to retaliation options and the President’s decision on who, where, and how hard to strike back - made complicated by the fact no one seems to know exactly who launched the missile or why. That’s largely the subject of story 3 and really should have been the focus of the entire film. Elba as the President being whisked away from a WNBA photo-op publicity event and suddenly forced to make decisions about nuclear war was the film’s strength. Mix in the inner-workings from the Situation Room in story 1, and the greenhorn Deputy National Security Advisor way out of his depths trying to avert a global nuclear war in story 2 and that is the bones of an engaging political drama.
I don’t need a Roland Emmerich-style cast of thousands disaster movie. I don’t need my political dramas presented like Run Lola Run. I don’t need to be constantly reminded that these people are all humans attempting to remain professional and make rational decisions in the most impossibly intense situation imaginable while all not-so-secretly wanting to call their loved ones at any giving moment and scream at them to hide in a bunker. And I certainly don’t need the story to be reset to the beginning every 20 minutes so we can see the exact same thing from a different camera angle.
Just give me an adult throwback political drama in the vein of Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men or even Oppenheimer for a modern reference.
And don’t keep resetting your ticking clock. Dr. Strangelove handled the natural building intensity and suspense of a nuclear strike with more care and reverence than this.
Insomniacal Fan
Starter
It's a polarizing film; but I liked it
The point of the 3 stories is to show the events in real-time. It would take about 30 minutes for an ICBM launched from the Sea of Japan to hit the continental U.S. Showing 3 perspectives allows it to be movie length, while being naturalistic about the decision making processes (depicting human decision-making under maximum pressure is the purpose of this film, dealing with the consequences is out of scope.)
Hiding Elba until the end was pretty cool imho. Based on the way the president was depicted in the first two stories off-camera, he looks bumbling and incompetent, and then Elba pops up, and I'm predisposed to like him. (I didn't watch the film expecting to see him, so when he popped up it was a nice surprise). I went from frustrated that the President wasn't sharp enough to keep up with the military professionals, to sympathetic for a guy that woke up thinking his day would go very differently.
Hiding Elba until the end was pretty cool imho. Based on the way the president was depicted in the first two stories off-camera, he looks bumbling and incompetent, and then Elba pops up, and I'm predisposed to like him. (I didn't watch the film expecting to see him, so when he popped up it was a nice surprise). I went from frustrated that the President wasn't sharp enough to keep up with the military professionals, to sympathetic for a guy that woke up thinking his day would go very differently.
Opportunities to see it in a theater are few and far between because that's the Netflix business model, but I really enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man and it's an easy recommend for anyone who liked Knives Out and/or Glass Onion.
Part of what made the first two movies in this series fun was the shifting point of view which allowed them to be both whodunnit mysteries (which save the big reveal for the end) and crime thrillers (which reveal the details of the crime to the audience and then build suspense through the cat-and-mouse game between killer and investigator). This particular brand of having your cake and eating it too appears to be what Rian Johnson was born to write but this presents a new problem as he gets further into the series: Three movies in we now have a growing back log of past re-directs and twists in our heads and so we're actively looking for the red herrings right from the beginning, even more so than in Part 2. I half expected this movie to be the breaking point and there was a nervous moment about 2/3 of the way into watching this for the first time where I thought that Johnson had pushed his experiments with narrative structure too far and it was heading toward an unsatisfying conclusion but he managed to stick the landing (for my taste anyway).
It's not as much fun as Glass Onion (Ed Norton hamming it up as an unlikeable tech-bro in that one is a tough act to follow) and it tips further into the kind of uncomfortable political and religious conversations we have all been warned to avoid at Thanksgiving than even Knives Out did, but in the end it's probably the most thematically resonant of the three because of that. Which is all the more annoying because I know I won't be able to buy a physical copy of this movie either. Sigh.
Oh and Josh O'Connor is terrific in this movie and if this had been produced by Amazon instead of Netflix we probably would have already seen an announcement that he's been picked as the next James Bond. He's got my vote anyway.
Part of what made the first two movies in this series fun was the shifting point of view which allowed them to be both whodunnit mysteries (which save the big reveal for the end) and crime thrillers (which reveal the details of the crime to the audience and then build suspense through the cat-and-mouse game between killer and investigator). This particular brand of having your cake and eating it too appears to be what Rian Johnson was born to write but this presents a new problem as he gets further into the series: Three movies in we now have a growing back log of past re-directs and twists in our heads and so we're actively looking for the red herrings right from the beginning, even more so than in Part 2. I half expected this movie to be the breaking point and there was a nervous moment about 2/3 of the way into watching this for the first time where I thought that Johnson had pushed his experiments with narrative structure too far and it was heading toward an unsatisfying conclusion but he managed to stick the landing (for my taste anyway).
It's not as much fun as Glass Onion (Ed Norton hamming it up as an unlikeable tech-bro in that one is a tough act to follow) and it tips further into the kind of uncomfortable political and religious conversations we have all been warned to avoid at Thanksgiving than even Knives Out did, but in the end it's probably the most thematically resonant of the three because of that. Which is all the more annoying because I know I won't be able to buy a physical copy of this movie either. Sigh.
Oh and Josh O'Connor is terrific in this movie and if this had been produced by Amazon instead of Netflix we probably would have already seen an announcement that he's been picked as the next James Bond. He's got my vote anyway.
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There's zero chance this is going to be good, right? Of course I'm going to go see it anyway.
Padrino
All-Star
It seems like such a shame that an effing Spaceballs sequel in the not-very-Mel-Brooksian context of 2025 is what pulled Rick Moranis out of retirement. I hold him in high esteem, and I wish he'd found a more worthy project to make his proper return to live action comedy. I cannot imagine this will be any good.
I don't know - this may give Netflix reason to release more content in theaters or on physical copies as well. Hard to know.
