TV/Movies Megathread

[The Minsky Moment]

Lone Star. Life and death on the border, and how people's actions echo down the years. I love it, I've seen it before years ago and it's such a great movie. [spoiler]Note: there is no lesbian sex.[/spoiler]

Is that the one with Chris Cooper?  Liked that one too.

[The Brain]

The Bad Batch. Young woman gets exiled from the US into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where she encounters an old lesbian couple who immediately subject her to Ace of Base and worse. Slow af, I mean it's painful to watch, the movie is 2h and could easily have been 1h. Every scene is slow and drawn out until you feel like shooting yourself. Plot and dialogue are unengaging and less than believable. By the end I was wondering if they had made the movie as aggravating as possible on purpose. Avoid this one. Notes: the chick is hot. [spoiler]If you're into amputee chicks then good for you, the movie is still horrible though. There is no (!) lesbian sex. In fact there is no sex at all.[/spoiler]

[The Brain]

Lone Star. Life and death on the border, and how people's actions echo down the years. I love it, I've seen it before years ago and it's such a great movie. [spoiler]Note: there is no lesbian sex.[/spoiler]

Is that the one with Chris Cooper?  Liked that one too.

The same.

It is definitely one of my favorite movies.

[Liep]

Nico - Above The Law. Not very good

What's your favourite Seagal movie? Besides Under Siege, of course.

[The Brain]

Flock of Seagals.

[Eddie Teach]

King Rat

[Savonarola]

Nico - Above The Law. Not very good

What's your favourite Seagal movie? Besides Under Siege, of course.

I like the one where the Detroit police taze one another to prove how macho they are (Exit Wounds).  That was memorable cinema.  That film has it all; DMX selling heroin disguised as t-shirts on line, Tom Arnold, the Michigan militia, crooked cops and the bad guy attacking our Akido champ with a circular saw.  (What most people don't understand is that when someone comes at you with a circular saw he puts himself at an immediate disadvantage.)

[Admiral Yi]

Nico - Above The Law. Not very good

What's your favourite Seagal movie? Besides Under Siege, of course.

The one he starts out in a hospital bed is the only other one I can remember.

[The Brain]

I recently read Richard Ayoade presents The Grip of Film by Gordy LaSure. There's quite a lot about Seagal in there.

[frunk]

I finally caught The Last Jedi.  Not bad, better than the Abrams retread Force Awakens, but the tone was all over the place and a few of the plot holes made very little sense even for a space opera.  Would have been better stopping at the [spoiler]end of the space battle rather than tacking on "red under the surface" Hoth[/spoiler].

[Liep]

The Lobster

Colin Farrell is brilliant in an absurd movie that's surprisingly coherent despites it's insane premise. Also, the opening scene is hilarious. Olivia Colman continues to be great in everything.

[Duque de Bragança]

Nico - Above The Law. Not very good
What's your favourite Seagal movie? Besides Under Siege, of course.

I disagree strongly about Nico. A non-obese Steven Seagal, RUNNING at times, and somewhat acting is a joy to behold.

Plus, points about popularising the shady CIA deals in a Reagan-era action movie before it became fashionable.
One of the few '80s action movie which is not homo-erotic (bad for some good for others I guess) unlike many others too, according to the left-wing oriented but tongue in cheek Ruthless Reviews site.
Henry Silva is a great villain too.

Under Siege might be better, but Nico is pretty entertaining and better than your average Reagan era action movie.

Homoeroticism:
Pretty minimal. Seagal makes sure to show off those big arms in a tight wife beater. He also wrestles another muscular guy at one point, but it's hardly Stallone's fiery helicopter tryst in Rambo. He is happily married, however, and enjoys flirtatious banter with his female partner, ever-hot Pam Grier. In a shocking break from 80s Action protocol, none of the women in his life are killed.

[spoiler]The line about a Nuremberg trial for the CIA is a great one The Above the Law reference to Nixon must have pissed off our former resident Nixon groupie.[/spoiler]

How Bad Is It Really?
Not very! Above the Law is competently directed and written and decently acted

[spoiler]Stupid Political Content:
(..).

But this film is The Communist Manifesto of a genre in which the benchmark of leftism is giving the protagonist a black sidekick and, in cases of radicalism, allowing that sidekick to survive past the halfway point of the film. Seagal does have a surviving, black sidekick in Pam Grier, but this film goes way beyond that. Seagal talks about being recruited into the CIA, but being disillusioned and quitting after learning about the seedier side of the agency. What? I thought the CIA were the champions of freedom and goodness throughout the world!
(...)

There's also some pretty clever political commentary when one scene shows Nixon speaking about how no one is above the law. He's talking about war protestors and why it's ok to shoot and beat them. The next scene is of Nixon's illegal operations in Cambodia, though I bet one or two viewers missed that.
[/spoiler]

Maybe one of my favourite leftie movies. 

Last endorsement by Ruthless Reviews, '80s action

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/1421/above-the-law/

What You Learned:
What would happen if Charles Bronson and Noam Chomsky collaborated on a script.

[The Brain]

The Bad Batch. Young woman gets exiled from the US into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where she encounters an old lesbian couple who immediately subject her to Ace of Base and worse. Slow af, I mean it's painful to watch, the movie is 2h and could easily have been 1h. Every scene is slow and drawn out until you feel like shooting yourself. Plot and dialogue are unengaging and less than believable. By the end I was wondering if they had made the movie as aggravating as possible on purpose. Avoid this one. Notes: the chick is hot. [spoiler]If you're into amputee chicks then good for you, the movie is still horrible though. There is no (!) lesbian sex. In fact there is no sex at all.[/spoiler]

Addendum: one thing that seemed odd to me was [spoiler]that when the cannibals take a limb they go straight to the saw. When you take a limb surely you first use a knife to cut the soft tissue and THEN use a saw to get through the bone? Sawing through flesh seems like it could be a frustrating mess. And it was obvious that the cannibals had done this many many times so they weren't n00bs, and they carefully saved the "patient" (for later) so it's not like they were simply ripping them apart. Ah well.[/spoiler]

[Savonarola]

With our recent discussion of the Dark Age of Animation, I thought some might be interested in this from the BEEB:  Why the Beatles Yellow Submarine is a Trippy Cult Classic.

Some of this isn't quite right; rotoscope, for instance, had existed in the 1930s (and Fleischer studios used it to much weirder effect than anything in "Yellow Submarine.")

I didn't see "Yellow Submarine" until I was older.  I'll admit the animation is, well, in the spirit of the times; but the story is such that the film is almost unwatchable.

For Fanatics:



Yours for only $82 on Amazon.

[Duque de Bragança]

Nico - Above The Law. Not very good

What's your favourite Seagal movie? Besides Under Siege, of course.

I like the one where the Detroit police taze one another to prove how macho they are (Exit Wounds).  That was memorable cinema.  That film has it all; DMX selling heroin disguised as t-shirts on line, Tom Arnold, the Michigan militia, crooked cops and the bad guy attacking our Akido champ with a circular saw.  (What most people don't understand is that when someone comes at you with a circular saw he puts himself at an immediate disadvantage.)

This was a savvy move by Seagal to reach another demographic as in the Glimmer Man 5 years earlier, without the Casablanca references nor the reindeer dried penis powder joke.
His career was already in decline, though nothing compared to his nowadays direct-to-video crap.

Great acting by Seagal during the anger management class and the "happy face".