TV/Movies Megathread

[Savonarola]

Have you seen Madchen in Uniform, Sav?

I haven't.  I see the 1931 version is available on You Tube; I'll watch it if I can find the time. 

(The 1958 version is too contemporary for me.   )

[Ideologue]

Talkies are for posers, Sav.

[Valmy]

At the end of the First World War, Germany abolished film censorship.

Ah ok that explains all those weird silent movie German pornos.

[Savonarola]

The Sea Lion (1921)

Set in nineteenth century San Francisco this is a tale of the sea.  Sixteen years ago John Nelson's wife abandoned him while he was away at sea.  For that reason he's become an irrepressible bastard and workaholic.  Tom Walton is a San Francisco playboy who has recently been disinherited and joins John's crew.  Hilarity ensues as Tom adjust to life at sea, and the crew runs short of water.  As they go ashore to find water on a remote island they discover an old man and a young girl who (get this) were shipwrecked sixteen years ago.  The girl was born shortly after the shipwreck and has never seen another person other than her elderly guardian.

The film comes from a more innocent time; as no one gives a second thought to bringing a young innocent maiden in the first blush of womanhood aboard a ship filled with burly sailors.  What could possibly go wrong?  Anyhow, in an most unexpected coincidence we discover that she's the daughter of the captain's dead wife.  The captain assumes that she's his rival's daughter and treats her mercilessly; prompting sneak out to sea with the whaling expedition.  Just then the storm strikes and the captain abandons the whaling vessel, but in the ensuing storm he learns, in another farm fresh plot twist, that the girl is his daughter and his wife was actually kidnapped.  Will the captain be able to rescue his new found daughter before she's drowned in the storm?

[Savonarola]

Talkies are for posers, Sav.

I'll watch it with the volume turned down low.  I'm hard core.

[Barrister]

Wow - the LEGO Movie is currently ranked at 99% fresh at Rottentomatoes.

I have to admit - despite it being a bit too old for my kids, I kind of want to see this. 

[Eddie Teach]

I'm not surprised, looks good from the trailer.

[Ideologue]

Children of Men (2006).  Jesus Christ, that long take in the car--according to the featurette, not requiring much if any CG--is probably more technically impressive than Gravity's computer-rendered oners.  This is a really brilliant movie, and I like it a lot more now than I did at the time.  Back then, it was 2006, see, and I was highly dubious about the premise's argument that the removal of children would result in the collapse of Western civilization.  Turns out the two things were simply unrelated.

The shakycam aesthetic is a little annoying, but that's life in the future for you.

A+

The Omega Man (1971).  Kind of the same exact movie: emotionally raw man turns out to be key figure in the salvation of the human species.  Anyway, though it never ceased to bother me that they kept inserting long shots with moving cars clearly visible in the background, this is a very fine picture as well.  The score is an amazing accompaniment, sometimes because it's awesomely good, sometimes because it's brazenly inappropriate, and sometimes because it's just bizarre.  Chuck Heston didn't have a lot of luck with the endings of his 60s-70s sci-fi outings, did he?

B+

I'm So Excited! (2013).  Lotta homo stuff.  I'll probably write it up at some point, but despite a serious super-problem with Pedro Almodovar's ongoing disinterest in the idea that men ought to be able to consent to sex, it's a hell of a fun movie.

B

World War Z (2013).  As previously mentioned I did write this up.  Right at 2000 words, cut about 600.  So give me a break.

An apocalyptic action horror science fiction fantasy thriller mystery thing, with practically no brains at all, but there is joy in all its unconscious pleasures, from its well-appointed set-pieces to its almost too-scathing social commentary to the most absurd and invasive yet shockingly appropriate piece of product placement of last year—and that's saying an awful lot.

These zombies are making me thirsty.

B

[Duque de Bragança]

Children of Men (2006).  Jesus Christ, that long take in the car--according to the featurette, not requiring much if any CG--is probably more technically impressive than Gravity's computer-rendered oners.  This is a really brilliant movie, and I like it a lot more now than I did at the time.  Back then, it was 2006, see, and I was highly dubious about the premise's argument that the removal of children would result in the collapse of Western civilization.  Turns out the two things were simply unrelated.

The shakycam aesthetic is a little annoying, but that's life in the future for you.

Children of Men is just a preachy (UK police state and immigration) CGI-intensive bad rip-off of 2019 after the Fall of New York, itself an italo-exploitation rip-off of Escape from New York, Mad Max 2, Planet of the Apes. At least the Italian rip-off was entertaining and had an original name for the character: Parsifal. Immortality through offspring (yes another last fertile woman to save).
The Guernica painting idea was also stolen.
The only good thing of Children of Men was watching Michael Caine as a hippy.

[Eddie Teach]

Parsifal is an original name? 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084476/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[Duque de Bragança]

Parsifal is an original name? 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084476/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

For an Italian rip-off, it is.
I remember a critic back then stating it was the only original thing about this film.

[spoiler]the Wagnerian link was intended since the holy grail was the last fertile woman[/spoiler]

[Sheilbh]

I'm not sure you're right Duque. It may reference those films but it's an adaptation of P.D. James's novel, which she described as a 'Christian fable'. It's a sort-of, kind-of nativity story (though in her version the men are infertile). And I could be wrong but I doubt she's seen many of the films you've mentioned

I like Children of Men a lot though, I think Cuaron's a very good director (best Harry Potter too ).

[Duque de Bragança]

I'm not sure you're right Duque. It may reference those films but it's an adaptation of P.D. James's novel, which she described as a 'Christian fable'. It's a sort-of, kind-of nativity story (though in her version the men are infertile). And I could be wrong but I doubt she's seen many of the films you've mentioned

I like Children of Men a lot though, I think Cuaron's a very good director (best Harry Potter too ).

I know it's adapted from PD James but just because PD James is not into italo-exploitation does not mean Cuaron is not as well.   Besides, as you point out the women are infertile in the movies, another interesting parallel. But yes, Children of  Men brings something new cliché shaky cam and CGI-heavy action scenes into the mix. Colour me unimpressed. The crappy miniatures in 2019 don't look so bad anymore.

As for best Harry Potter, I'll take your word for it since all the hype around it killed any interest for me, despite having watched two movies with friends.

[celedhring]

I will admit that I loved the trailer for the LEGO movie too 

Rewatched The Usual Suspects, one of my favorite movies from the 90s the other day. Found that there's still a lot to like despite the shock finale not being as mind-bending as it was after all these years. Spacey owns as Kint, and the film has a devilish pace to it. There's lots of little details in there (one of my favorites always was casting Postlethwaite as a guy with the Japanese name and always surrounding him with East Asian imagery, despite him being british as fuck), that justify a rewatch being aware of all the twists of the plot. The characters are pretty thin on the paper, but all the actors do a good job of bringing some life to them (it's a damn good cast for such a small movie from a then unkown writer and director). The plot is convoluted, indeed, and if you tried to piece it apart it possibly wouldn't make much sense ([spoiler]I have always thought Söze would have a less convoluted way to get rid of that witness - but since the story is all made up we don't know if that's exactly the reason Kint orchestrated the attack on the boat, Söze might be indeed a myth for all we know and Kint is using him as a smokescreen[/spoiler]), but the fact it still works after so many years of over-ellaborated "twisty" thrillers, and still makes think about what was real and what wasn't, is a testament of how good it was, in my opinion.

[Sheilbh]

The Guardian didn't like the Robocop remake:

RoboCop – review
José Padilha's heavy-handed remake of Paul Verhoeven's black-comic film quickly degenerates into a boring action pile-up
1 out of 5
Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian, Thursday 6 February 2014 21.15 GMT

Paul Verhoeven's black-comic gem from 1987 has been remade – which is to say, all the wit has been removed and it's been turned into a dumbed-down shoot-em-up frontloaded with elaborate but perfunctory new "satirical" material in which the movie loses interest with breathtaking speed. The original film imagined an anarchic future Detroit in which authorities yearned for robotic solutions. An early, tank-like prototype was discarded after it failed to respond to orders and killed an official – a famously hilarious scene for which, tellingly, this new version has no equivalent. Then the mangled remains of a half-dead officer were salvaged into a cyborg-style armoured "RoboCop", who clanked and wheezed around the streets with thrilling and hilarious efficiency and ruthlessness. In its opening 10 minutes, this new film appears to remember both the early and later "tank" and "humanoid" prototypes, deploying them against counter-insurgents on the conquered streets of Tehran, and these robots are explicitly called "drones". All cute or cute-ish ideas. But once the action is removed to the US, all these cerebral touches just vanish, and they turn out simply to have muddled and delayed the main event: a deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than RoboCop. And if you're waiting for action sequences in the legendary ruins of that economically ravaged place – forget it. Director José Padilha seems uninterested in or unaware of Detroit's tragi-surreal reputation. Or perhaps he thinks the ruins will be cured, because this just looks like any generic sci-fi dystopian city, and Padilha is as heavy-handed as he was in his Brazilian "Elite Squad" movies. A serious case of rust.