TV/Movies Megathread

[Josquius]

Watching Fresh Prince of Bel Air for nostalgia's sake.
Two points.
1: Oh my god. The 8th episode of the first series and already they do a clip show
2: It being a show for young guys a lot of the adventures revolve around picking up girls.... girls who are always black. I remember a similar episode of Malcolm in the Middle once. The boys were all after a bunch of girls...and of course the black guy ends up with the one black girl. Pff....

[Admiral Yi]

Prelude to a Kiss was some weird shit.

[Josquius]

3096 Tagen- True story about a girl kidnapped and kept in a crazy guy's basement. It is surprisingly good.
Strange film generally. I started watching and everyone was speaking normal British English...but then the girl went outside and I thought "Wait, that is not Britain...that's somewhere continental". And it wasn't dubbed....
Turns out its a German movie made entirely in English

[Eddie Teach]

Prelude to a Kiss was some weird shit.

Was that the one where the chick body swapped with an old man?

[Admiral Yi]

Was that the one where the chick body swapped with an old man?

Yup.

Always kind of sad to watch Meg Ryan movies.  So cute, and right on the edge of acting, but not quite getting there.

[Admiral Yi]

Trying to rewatch Westworld because of my doh! on missing the two timelines, but I'm finding it heavy sledding.

[Barrister]

So went out for dinner with Mrs B and her sisters for her birthday.  Went to a teppanyaki restaurant, which was fun - chef was a funny guy with a well-rehearsed patter - but then it was over.  Mrs B's family went home (to be fair they are all an hour out of town), so since we had a babysitter we decided we weren't ready to go home just yet.

So we went to the movie theatre with no specific plan.  We settled on watching Lion, mostly because it was the next movie to start.  I knew nothing about it, while Mrs B had heard a brief plot synopsis but nothing more.

It was a really good movie!  The basic plot is that as a 5 year old child the protagonist Sarroo gets separated from his mother and brother and trapped on a train which takes him two days away from his small Indian village into Calcutta.  There, isolated because he does not know the local language of Bengali (he only speaks Hindi) he lives on the streets having several tragic experiences before finding himself in an orphanage then being adopted by an Australian couple.

As a now very much Ozzified adult, he finds himself haunted by memories of his childhood.  He starts trying to search for his home village using Google Earth (who better have paid handsomely for all the product placement it gets in the movie) before, ultimately, finding the village and of course having the tear-filled re-union with his mother 25 years later.

It's based on a true story, and although on the one hand it seems incredible, it's also pretty straight-forward (and could easily slip into cheesy melodrama).  But the movie seemed very well done.  The kid playing young Sarroo was really good - being able to go from incredibly cute and charming in the opening scenes at home, to be very lost and haunted in the Calcutta scenes.  The second half of the movie moves to adult Sarroo (played by Slumbdog Millionaire's Dev Patel).  It's hard to portray hours of searching on a computer screen interestingly, but it does a competent job there too.  Then of course the waterworks come in the final scenes.

Anyways, there was a smattering of applause in the theatre when it was over - and I can't ever remember people clapping at a movie before.  It was very well done, being emotional without being really obvious or over-the-top at doing so.

[Duque de Bragança]

Silence - almost 3 hours of Japanese trying to physically and psychologically torture a Catholic priest into apostasy,  in XVII century Japan.

I suppose that if I gave more of a fuck about religion I would've found the faith elements and conflicts more engaging, although at the end of it all is a story about what it takes to break one's spirit in front of tyranny. Still, a bit boring despite the fact that Scorsese is as masterful as usual. Garfield seemed grossly miscast.

So Scorsese does a remake. Interesting.
How does it compare to the original btw? The original was shorter.
Scorsese's movie shows up in cinemas next week.

[celedhring]

I saw the original long time ago, and I recall loving it (then again, I love pretty much all of Shinoda's work), but I'm really sketchy on details 

But it seems a good idea to review it!

[Admiral Yi]

Watched a bit of Money Monster the other night.  George Clooney, with a rare awful script choice, plays a Crameresque (not Krameresque) character who gets held hostage on air by an angry pleb who lost all his money on one of George's "sure picks."  The screen writers, apparently having seen Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and having considered it the ne plus ultra of financial sophistication, make up a nonsensical story about algorythm trading and a computer glitch.  The bit I watched was train wreck bad.

The main chick in that TV show about traveling in time to Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion adds one bearable note of aesthetic relief.

[CountDeMoney]

Next up: Yi's review of Margin Call.  MORE LIKE MARGIN BULLSHIT

[Ed Anger]

Money Monster was a wet, runny shit.

Anyways, Wargames and a bit of Red Dawn on AMC.

[celedhring]

Ben Affleck has quit from the director gig for the next Batman movie (he'll still star in it). Well, that's all my interest in that film gone. I was looking forward seeing what he would do with that.

[viper37]

Ben Affleck has quit from the director gig for the next Batman movie (he'll still star in it). Well, that's all my interest in that film gone. I was looking forward seeing what he would do with that.

Didn't he direct Batman vs Superman?

[celedhring]

Ben Affleck has quit from the director gig for the next Batman movie (he'll still star in it). Well, that's all my interest in that film gone. I was looking forward seeing what he would do with that.

Didn't he direct Batman vs Superman?

No, Zack Snyder was the culprit.