Wow, it's already a year since I started the last thread (and since I saw Avatar)?!?
Anyways, in my opinion 2009 & 2010 were two of the worst years for movies in a long time. Here's hoping there's some better releases in 2011.
So what was the last film you watched?
War Between the Planets (1966) - one of the classic 'Gamma 1' series of Italian SF movies made in the mid-60s, and maybe the weakest of the four. In this episode the Earth is threatened with destruction by unknown forces which release a tidal wave of stock footage from 'all four corners of the globe' (sic). After about an hour of on-screen helplessness in which nothing much happens apart from technicians at consoles bark chunks of technobabble to one another while people in authority listen to them and say things like "This is fantastic! Why wasn't I informed before?", our hero gets it into his head to load an anti-matter bomb into a space ship and set off for somewhere for some reason not made very clear to the audience. For a variety of equally obscure motives almost everyone else in the cast with speaking parts follow him. They find a red glowing farting asteroid and decide to blow it up. After endlessly wandering around its glowing interior and strungling with viciously inert rubber tentacles, they finally succeed. The music was kind of groovy and the endless wandering around the same small alien set got hypnotically dreamlike towards the end but they weren't really worth the effort to get there.
Managed to score a babysitter and took my wife to see The King's Speech. It tries very hard to be Oscar worthy but I still found myself enjoying it. It's not the stodgy period piece you might expect. Events leading up to the World War Two is a fascinating period of history and I find the idea of one person becoming the focus point for an entire nation during harrowing times very interesting. Colin Firth's performance is excellent; full of wry self deprecation and rage. Geoffrey Rush wasn't as exciting for me but he gets some good lines. Helena Bonham Carter is better than Rush, in my opinion, and even though I'm really only familiar with the Queen's mum as the older lady she became, I can see strong shades of the real life woman in the portrayal of the young woman on screen. The director frames his shots in a slightly skewed way and there's a lot of detail in the sound design - you can hear everyone of Firth's agonised swallows. All the elements come together in a very enjoyable package, even if it the package is a little bit too neatly wrapped.
Alien Intruder (1993) - Straight to video **** from a first time director who stretched five minutes worth of story (an alien virus in the shape of Tracy Scoggins infects a spaceship crew's individual virtual reality sleep pods and makes them kill each other) out to two hours. Two hours in which we are expected to buy the phenomenal idea that people will fight and kill to sleep with Tracy Scoggins! Two hours in which we get to watch Maxwell Caulfield wishing he was back making quality products like Grease 2. (If you drew a straight line between Grease 2 and British soap Emmerdale, where he now works, this movie would be well below it.) We also get to watch Billy Dee Williams playing some weird game in which he tries to put the stress on the wrong word in every sentence without the director noticing; I suspect he was trying to keep himself awake. We also get to watch the future security chief of Babylon 5 snog his commanding officer. (Jeff Conaway and Tracy Scoggins - but only total geek fanboys would have: a. noticed, b. thought it noteworthy, c. found it pervily arousing. Luckily I score only 2 out of the 3, so there is still hope for me.) All in all another 75p well spent at the charity shop.
Deja Vu Junk Monkey, posting beneath you again!
"Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World"-I forgotten how funny it was for me, even now I'm at my cynical best-Ethel Merman's "Mrs. Marcus" just stole the show IMO. Going to have to buy to watch the commentary; for a film making viewpoint, well shot and edited, I learned a few tricks from the film. Well done indeed!
Death at a Funeral (2010 remake)
One of the funniest movies I have ever seen. So many great actors that just played off one another so well. Hilarious.
I loved the original but am kinda put off by Chris Rock and especially Martin Lawrence.Originally Posted by 3rdI
Haven't seen it, but how was Dinklage/Tyrion?
Death race 2- Was gooood, Sean Bean and Luke Goss....perfect! And rewatched Little shop of horrors the other day too
Have Legion here to watch so will try that later and see what it is like but also have a good book at the moment so t may have to wait.
He was pretty funny. I was fine with Chris Rock but yeah, Martin Lawrence was really creepy. Maybe he should try having a sense of humour about himself for a change instead of trying to be some kind of lady's man and being really creepy about it...
Shepherd (1999) - More post-apocalyptic nonsense (characters wearing fingerless gloves? Check!). Somewhere in Roger Corman's book How I made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime I seem to recall that he gave one sure-fire simple way of getting 300% out of any location involved in a car chase (or maybe it was mentioned in the Dov Simens' 2-Day Film School™ I once attended - I got in for free) either way the advice given was this: Put the camera down, have the cars drive past. Put an oil drum in the foreground and have the cars drive past the other way. While they're turning around for a final pass, set fire to the oil drum. Three set-ups without moving the camera. Advice the director of this turd took to heart. There isn't an exterior without at least one burning oil drum somewhere in the shot. Great attempts were made to give this movie a cultish vibe, great dollops of knowing 'weirdness' are thrown at the screen: David Carradine as a drunken ventriloquist whose dummy tries to strangle our hero, an unnamed character who is totally extraneous to the plot and does nothing more than vaguely comment on the action and ask unseen punters to place bets on what happens next, an old lady who spontaneously combusts in a restaurant for no apparent (and unexplained) reason - but none of it sticks. It's all too self-knowing and clumsy. It becomes irritating. What you end up with is a another poverty-row 'Sci-Fi' actioner with added, not very good, 'weird' bits climaxing (as usual) in a final showdown battle. This time the battle is between rival religious cultist leaders who can summons up a grand total of three stuntmen each. No amount of rapid-fire editing or well placed oil drums with gas burners in them could rescue it. C Thomas Howell hid behind a beard and got to pretend to bump uglies with four women - tough job but I suppose someone has to do it.
Cyborg 3: The Creation (1995) - Even I found this one hard going. But I do think I've found the nadir of Malcolm McDowell's career. I thought Moon 44 was the bottom of the curve till I saw Beings (aka The Fairy King or Ar) but this.... Sticking firmly to the Rule of Part 3s (they're ****!) this is the second sequel to a Claude Van Dammit! movie (Part 2 starred Angelina Jolie) and is the usual post-apocolyptic desert wasteland driving shooting and explosions crap.
Mr McD, so prominently displayed of the box front, "Starring Malcom McDowell", has about four lines that contribute nothing to the plot - or any possible 'character development' that might have been going on. (I didn't see any.)
At first I thought his scenes were footage left over from a previous 'Cyborg' movie - but he wasn't in either of them so that can't have been it. Maybe he was just driving past, saw the film crew, and said, "Give us a fiver and I'll be in your movie!". His scenes cannot have taken more than a couple of hours to shoot.
Extremely funny. I can see why they cast him as Tyrion I suspect he will be a great fit.
Tracy Morgan stole the show. He is ridiculously funny.
I used the bottom half of my Sunday night to watch Skyline. I have never imagined how exciting it must be to film an entire movie in one condo complex. I am glad it was a black market copy of the film and not money that actually went towards any of the B listed celebrities that "acted" in the film. I liked the idea but at no time did they mention the aliens motivation or develop any of the characters it was mind-numbing.
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