Movies you've been watching...

[gabito]

An interesting movie could be made in Bioshock's setting. Objectivism, libertarianism, the abuse of power... all current topics that a lot of people would understand.

I don't know why they would make a 1:1 adaption from the game's plot, that almost never works except for games like The Last of Us which is practically already a movie. They could do whatever with the setting and lore.

Also big daddies gutting people for 90 minutes would be enough for me.

 

[wankerness]

I don't really see it happening considering a bioshock game hasn't come out in over 10 years and isn't really discussed anymore besides by aging nerds. Then again, Netflix loves burning money on expensive projects for niche audiences, so that's a good pairing.

 

[Seabeast2000]

I don't really see it happening considering a bioshock game hasn't come out in over 10 years and isn't really discussed anymore besides by aging nerds. Then again, Netflix loves burning money on expensive projects for niche audiences, so that's a good pairing.

I will personally finance a Bioshock movie and release on YouTube. Already have a GoPro.

 

[SlowTopic539]

my top 5 movies of all time

1: Edward Scissorhands
2: The Crow
3: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
4. Sleepy Hollow
5. South Park: Bigger, Long & Uncut

 

[gabito]

I just watched Crimes of the Future.

Yeah, um... what the fuck, David Cronenberg.

Fantastic movie. Probably. I don't know. What the fuck, David Cronenberg.

 

[Seabeast2000]

I just watched Crimes of the Future.

Yeah, um... what the fuck, David Cronenberg.

Fantastic movie. Probably. I don't know. What the fuck, David Cronenberg.

Yeah what the fuck was that? I made it maybe 30 or 40 minutes.

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

I just watched Crimes of the Future.

Yeah, um... what the fuck, David Cronenberg.

Fantastic movie. Probably. I don't know. What the fuck, David Cronenberg.

Crimes of the Future came out around the same time a trend about film makers making films about film making. Like with The Menu, Fablemans, Babylon, and hell, even Clerks 3, this could be Cronenberg's version. In that case, your reaction is pretty valid.

Speaking of Cronenberg, The Fly just had its 38th anniversary. I loved that movie as a kid, even if I was way too young to be watching it. People often forget The Fly was actually a remake. I'll have to revisit it soon.

 

[gabito]

Crimes of the Future came out around the same time a trend about film makers making films about film making. Like with The Menu, Fablemans, Babylon, and hell, even Clerks 3, this could be Cronenberg's version. In that case, your reaction is pretty valid.

Speaking of Cronenberg, The Fly just had its 38th anniversary. I loved that movie as a kid, even if I was way too young to be watching it. People often forget The Fly was actually a remake. I'll have to revisit it soon.

Never liked that one too much, maybe because it was on TV all the time here when I was a kid. I should rewatch it someday.

I didn't know anything about Crimes of the Future before watching it, except that it looked like something Cronenberg would've made in the 80s or 90s before he abandoned body horror or whatever it's called. It's pretty much a classic Cronenberg movie with modern practical effects, so it looks very good. The performances are good too, very weird in a Yorgos Lanthimos kind of way.

The movie is superficially about a very simple sci-fi concept, but Cronenberg's style makes it what it is. It's like giving Terminator to David Lynch.

But, yeah: what the fuck.

Naked Lunch is one of my favorite films and I think the same every time I watch it: what the fuck. This one is probably not as weird, but way more extreme. Similar in a sense to Crash (which I found terribly boring) but worse... maybe.

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

I didn't know anything about Crimes of the Future before watching it, except that it looked like something Cronenberg would've made in the 80s or 90s before he abandoned body horror or whatever it's called. It's pretty much a classic Cronenberg movie with modern practical effects, so it looks very good. The performances are good too, very weird in a Yorgos Lanthimos kind of way.

It's exactly that. The script was originally written in 1998, but Cronenberg argued that it was intended to be a super modern concept. So yeah, it makes sense that it feels both timeless and 'of its time'. Viggo Mortensen apparently said to Cronenberg that it's his most personal movie. So it checks out.

 

[wankerness]

Crimes of the Future has concepts that come from more his mid period movies, but very much as the icy tone and dry approach of his more modern movies. People said it was a "return to form," but I didn't really think that. I thought it was pretty good, but it's very much in the "watch once and probably never again" category of David Cronenberg, while I've watched Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and The Fly many times and love them every time. The main thing I was impressed by was that he had written it in 98 and yet it was INCREDIBLY prescient with the whole microplastics making everyone sterile thing. Otherwise, I'd put it in the same category as something like Existenz. Interesting, but not very rewatchable, and it's so DRY in tone, making it feel more like Cosmopolis than something from his gooey period.

Here was what I wrote when I watched it. 6/10 was my rating.

Spoiler

The movie opens with a little boy devouring some plastic, and his mother smothering him with a pillow since she's decided he's not human.

Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux are a performance artist couple in some distant future where the human race seems to have evolved past being able to feel pain or pleasure (or get infections, causing surgery to become EXTREMELY casual), and where there seems to have been some kind of serious environmental devastation that has massively depopulated the world. Their "performance" is that Viggo grows new organs, and Lea tattoos them and removes them as soon as they're "ripe" in public displays.

There's an "agency" (it consists of two people - Kristen Stewart as an extremely weird woman clearly sexually attracted to Viggo, and an older man who seems a bit less "off") that is inspired by Viggo's cataloging of his new organs to start tracking the growth of new organs anywhere in society (society seems to be a single sparsely populated city).

There's a weird underground "movement" of people who have evolved new organs that allow them, with some surgical enhancement, to fully digest and live off of "synth," purple candy bars that are made out of plastic that kill normal humans. This movement is led by Scott Speedman, who is the father of the boy who was killed at the opening, and he approaches Viggo and Lea to have them do an autopsy on the child in public. The child was apparently the first person born who was fully able to digest plastic without any surgical procedures having been done, a next phase in human evolution.

Oh, and Viggo is also a double agent reporting to a vaguely sinister agent guy whose interests lie in suppressing the rise of this underclass. And there's also a creepy duo of women that are going around repairing biomechanical equipment (like Viggo's breakfast chair and autopsy table) who are clearly up to something.

Obviously this is a deeply strange movie, and a lot of these plot details aren't immediately obvious and are rather slowly and casually revealed instead of through expositional speeches or anything. There's also a fair number of disturbing scenes of organs being cut into by biomechanical equipment, and it's all just very, VERY "Cronenbergesque," in contrast to his last several films. This definitely is more like his older stuff than anything else he's done since Existenz. There's plenty of twisted sexuality here, in this world where people no longer feel pain or pleasure and thus sex is now called "old sex" and no one does it. But, they do get naked and get chopped up by surgical tools while seeming to be turned on by it!

This all said, it preserves the extremely icy, clinical feel of his more recent films like Cosmopolis, and thus probably won't satisfy those who jumped off the Cronenberg bandwagon somewhere back in the 90s. This is nowhere near as conventionally "entertaining" as something like Videodrome. But, it's certainly an interesting movie. I also find it amusing that he wrote this 20 years ago, and then was urged to film it by someone that looked at it and found that it had just become relevant through all the recent revelations about microplastics. That Cronenberg is always way ahead of the curve when it comes to anxiety-inducing medical stuff!

The Fly 86 is probably my second favorite horror movie after Mulholland Dr. It's got such incredibly strong lead performances and is one of the best examples of horror as obvious metaphor with it being a really, really depressing movie about a loved one being diagnosed with a terminal disease and rapidly deteriorating. It's incredibly depressing and also has some of the best of the 80s grossout effects. Redlettermedia released a video about it yesterday, so I'm kind of in the mood to watch it again. That's also one of the movies that's most interesting as far as blu-ray extras go. There are a lot of deleted scenes that are really effects-heavy and radically change the tone of the movie. They're really neat to see, especially the monkey/dog scene and the alternate butterfly ending, but boy would the movie have sucked if they'd left them in.

 

[BlackMastodon]

Like, I know a lot of people absolutely hate Rogue One cause they think a lot of the movie callbacks in it are just like LOOK AT THE AT-STs!! REMEMBER THAT?! instead of them having organic relevance to the plot.

I missed this conversation last week and the only thing I have to add to it is that I think Rogue One is the second best Star Wars movie.

 

[wankerness]

I listened to a couple reviews of Alien: Romulus and it sounds like exactly the sort of fan service I hate. Ex, a character going GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH for no reason that makes any sense in the context of the movie cause "omg reference!!!!" Sounds like it starts off good and then turns to crap. I guess I'll wait for the blu-ray to hit 10 dollars like with Covenant, cause it sounds like if nothing else it LOOKS great.

 

[gabito]

At this point good Alien movies are the exception, not the rule.

 

[SlowTopic539]

i plan to watch The Lovely Bones. my family has a joke where whenever we eat salmon we call it "salmon like the fish" and i just figured out it's from a movie yesterday so now i'm gonna watch it.

 

[wankerness]

I missed this conversation last week and the only thing I have to add to it is that I think Rogue One is the second best Star Wars movie.

I liked it in the theater but then heard someone say "imagine if at the end of Glory after all the soldiers die there was a scene where a big badass confederate general came out and started killing random union soldiers and it was supposed to be awesome" and now that's all I can think about whenever I get to that part. I also find the characters uniquely ponderous and lifeless compared to the surrounding movies - Jyn in particular is a drag (and I really like that actress in other stuff!) and her two "inspirational speeches" about hope are pure cringe. I think the way it's shot is occasionally great and it has some really good effects scenes and Garth's ability to convey sense of scale is second to none. But, overall I get less enthusiastic about it every time I see it, looking at my ratings for each watch I had it at 7.5/10 - 6/10 - 5/10. And the CGI Cushing has always bugged the hell out of me. Just get someone that looks kind of like him!! Jesus. Disney apparently has really gone all out with that deepfake shit with some of their shows, none of which I've ever watched. Someday I'll watch Andor.

 

[wankerness]

Speaking of Deepfake shit, I just read about the resurrected actor they used in Romulus. Wow! I'm guessing they didn't agree to that considering they've been dead for years, but maybe they made them sign their image rights away at some point.

 

[BlackMastodon]

I liked it in the theater but then heard someone say "imagine if at the end of Glory after all the soldiers die there was a scene where a big badass confederate general came out and started killing random union soldiers and it was supposed to be awesome" and now that's all I can think about whenever I get to that part. I also find the characters uniquely ponderous and lifeless compared to the surrounding movies - Jyn in particular is a drag (and I really like that actress in other stuff!) and her two "inspirational speeches" about hope are pure cringe. I think the way it's shot is occasionally great and it has some really good effects scenes and Garth's ability to convey sense of scale is second to none. But, overall I get less enthusiastic about it every time I see it, looking at my ratings for each watch I had it at 7.5/10 - 6/10 - 5/10. And the CGI Cushing has always bugged the hell out of me. Just get someone that looks kind of like him!! Jesus. Disney apparently has really gone all out with that deepfake shit with some of their shows, none of which I've ever watched. Someday I'll watch Andor.

All fair points but I've never seen Glory. I also didn't take the Vader massacre on the shuttle to be bad ass or awesome, I think it did a good job of showing how ruthless he is and the stark difference between the capabilities of basic soldiers with guns and 1 jedi/sith.

If nothing else, I'll take this retcon to this goofy shit:

 

[SalsaWood]

Yall are gonna shit when you see what he does to the younglings.

I liked Andor and Rogue One as much as the OG trilogy. The best thing about them still being they're not the last trilogy.

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

Someday I'll watch Andor.

Absolutely watch Andor. Don't let the faults of Rogue One stop you either. If anything, Tony Gilroy made it less Star Wars and more Michael Clayton. Andor is prestige TV disguised with a Star Wars pastiche.