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[Vector]

I saw RRR last night on Netflix. It was really good! Recommended to those who like action films. Double-recommended for any of us who have an admiration for handsome men. Triple-recommended for those who would like to see the British empire being stomped.

[RoseHeart]

Can't wait. 2 years! (Deadpool 3)

[Vector]

Really happy for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu ;_;

[NRDL]

Fucking terrific performances from all 3 of them. Ke Huy Quan's acceptance speech made me cry.

Of all the movies I watched that were released last year, Everything Everywhere All At Once and RRR are tied for my absolute favorite. Gonna be shilling them for the next few months to pretty much everyone I know.

[scriver]

Were there Oscars or something?

[hector13]

Golden Globes, presumably.

[King Zultan]

I still don't get why people get all excited about those award shows.

[Vector]

It gives us a distraction from the genocides and the poverty :/

[King Zultan]

With all the stuff on TV there has to be something better to distract you from that stuff than award shows though.

[Superdorf]

Just watched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish with some college buddies.
It's the best thing Dreamworks has ever done, and it's not even close.* Nothing I say is going to do it justice - y'all just need to watch it ASAP

*except mayybe for Prince of Egypt

[Cthulhu]

I watched part of Skinamarink and kind of hated it.  If it was 20 minutes long it would've been good but 100 minutes of what it's doing is just intolerable. It feels like a reductio ad absurdum of the analog/liminal horror fad that's been going around.  Endless lingering shots of nothing, ludicrously overdone VHS effects, absolutely nothing happening, imagine paranormal activity without the jumpscares, and make it more pretentious.  I dunno.  I like what they're trying to do on some level, like I remember being a little kid and hearing a noise in the dark and making myself physically ill imagining what might've made it, but the execution is obnoxious and it made me mad.  And then you say that and people are like "hrm hrm you must be a michael bay fan" and then I get madder.

Anyway the story is that two kids wake up in the middle of the night and their parents have disappeared along with all the windows and doors. Nothing ensues.

I like boring feel-bad movies. I like slow, quiet horror movies with experimental visuals. This is the trappings of that with nothing behind it.

I also watched Threads and rewatched Sicario.  Both are great.

Threads is a 1985 British TV movie that mixes documentary style narration and drama, where a US-backed coup in Iran escalates to a nuclear war.  It's pretty frightening, especially the buildup really nails the dread of seeing shit on the news slowly getting worse, and then of course the actual nuke.  It's a very rude awakening type movie, very upfront about what the experts of the time anticipated a nuclear war would be like, with a naturalistic portrayal of the human drama element. No big heroes or plot armor, the guy set up as the protagonist is outside when the nuke hits and he's just gone from the movie.  Sheffield's chief executive is going over a map of the town and subtly points out where he sent his wife and kids like "how are things over there you think?" and the nuke expert in the emergency powers HQ is just matter-of-factly "no way, if anyone's still alive there they'll be dead tomorrow." 

Dismal, frightening, unapologetic, very "people imagine surviving this because they have no idea what it'd really be like."

Sicario's an action/drama movie where a by-the-books FBI agent who still believes in the cause gets seconded to a joint task force on a mission to take down a cartel jefe, and it soon becomes apparent that they're not what they claim to be and illegal spook shit is going down. Great all around, fun operator style action is tempered by a social commentary element about how the war on drugs is self-perpetuating.  Everything bad the protagonists are trying to stop is a direct consequence of their attempts to stop it, and under the surface that's the point. If nobody got sick the doctor would be out of a job.

[Il Palazzo]

Threads is the best of those nuke-awareness films that came out in the 80s or thereabouts. An essential viewing for everyone, I think. The bleakness of the post-apocalypse is especially frightening in its plausibility.

[Travis Bickle]

Lately I've been on a search for any good Spanish Civil War movie that isn't some magical realist trash; from what I can gather, it's an uphill battle trying to find any actual war movies on the subject. Mientras dure la guerra was a pretty good film and had some memorable scenes, but it was definitely a drama rather than a war film. I just watched Rojo y Negro from 1942 and it seems like even back then they weren't interested in filming battles and reenacting triumphant victories of the war; this one was also a drama. The name is apparently a reference to the flag used by the Falangists, but said flag hardly appears in the film outside of a handful of transitional scenes (Carlists and anyone else involved in the Nationalist faction make no appearance in the film). The film focuses on a small handful of Falangists operating in socialist-controlled territory. The movie as a whole isn't as triumphalist as one would perhaps expect, concerning itself mostly with showing the brutality of the socialist side. It has some pretty good cinematography in a lot of scenes, it's just a shame that the movie is so short at only 75 minutes.

Oh well. The search for a good war film about Spain continues.

[King Zultan]

I watched part of Skinamarink and kind of hated it.

I gotta agree with what you said about this one, I only watched a bit of it and it was boring as hell, just darkness, crap effects, and cameras the spend more time pointing at the ceiling and floors than what's happening.


Also I quite liked Threads because it's one of the few movies of it's kind that doesn't down play any of the threats of a nuclear war and the after math.

[Starver]

There's definitely scarce hope, at the end, unlike many a disaster movie[1]. You are certainly left with the idea that there's a Great Reset upon humanity, if not a complete decline and Game Over. And much of that residual hope would be far off-screen, with the 'global north' likely suffering to a varying range of degrees (and probably far too much of the 'global south' that is ultimately downwind - see also On The Beach).

That said, since seeing that I (partly for reasons of nuked cities, partly for when the zombie apocalypse arrived) have identified a nice spot up in the hills where - assuming I can even get through the initial events and then deal with the lingering dangers unleashed - I might possibly be able to hole up a little easier[2] than down here where much of the remaining human chaos might do in the face of smashed infrastructure and roving bands of desperate looters. And I know some of the landscape in which the finale was set (it can be that bleak, or worse, on a regular day, and had the advantage of being able to point the camera away from any sign of still continuing civilisation that didn't fit the scenario being filmed at the time) plus very similar areas that are even more isolated with handy hidey-holes in them.






[1] Where the few surviving (often 'accidental') heroes jet off to the eden-like planet, or get to ride the 'ark' to escape the worldwide megaquake tsunami, or find the 'shangri-la' valley where they can rebuild and defend against the zombie hordes/alien slime/whatever. At least until someone decides that they need a sequel and thus the tenuous protections they gained are put under stress that forces the new plot to accept its own wave of jeopardy.

[2] I never really imagined it'd ever work, unlike with The Survivalist series of books which was basically 'gun porn' post-apocalyptic fantasy/sci-fi writ large where of course one man (and his family, friends and mish-mash of various odd-ball alliances) can survive, thrive and make a difference for hundreds of years into the future... Yeah, read that link (though that wikipage very badly needs editing for grammar and style!) to get the basic runthrough. Though I don't think I got beyond the twentieth-or-so book, myself, looking at the dates of publication and when I remember borrowing them from the library.