TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

You would go to Chicago just to watch a bad movie? 

the man moved to Florida, he's clearly not thinking straight.

Well, with the supreme court decision on DOMA, you don't have to think straight in any state of the US.

I think you misunderstood that ruling.

[katmai]

World War Z
Solid zombie film that has no connection to source material.
The zombies are more like 28 days later in they want to infect others but no real hunger for flesh.

I give it a B

[Ideologue]

Gaslight (1944).  Ingrid Bergman is a young heiress, on account of the fact her opera superstar aunt (in loco parentis) got murdered in front of her when she was wee.  Now largely grown up, at least by early 20th century female standards, she is seduced by a charming and kind of quasi-handsome man who marries her and convinces her to move back into her aunt's old house.  In short order, she starts losing things, blacking out, and thinking someone is turning the gas on somewhere else in the house.  The movie isn't particularly coy about whether she's actually going crazy, and the audience learns long before she figures it out that she's on the receiving end of a campaign of psychological torture that destroys her ability to trust her own sense impressions and comes pretty close to landing her in the nuthouse.  Fortunately, a Random Man takes an interest in her misery and saves her, and it is revealed (to her) that her husband was really her aunt's murderer, who'd targeted her so he could get back into that house to find the crown jewels he knew his aunt had for vaguely explained reasons and which he knew were hidden somewhere in her stuff.

Hilariously, it takes him about five months' searching at about four hours per day to actually find them, when the domain of his search was nothing more than a normal-sized attic, i.e. about a week's worth of work, tops.  Even more hilariously, they were hidden in plain sight the entire time, sewn into one of her aunt's opera costumes along with costume jewelry, i.e. the first place a human would actually look.  Naturally, the night he finds them is the night that Random Man intervenes.

The film is pretty good at conveying Ingrid Bergman's crumbling mental state, but it doesn't provide the denouement you know in your heart must be coming.  After they tie her husband up, a potentially great sequence begins as he pleads with her to cut him loose with the knife he'd put down earlier.  Bergman picks it up and starts screaming "WHAT KNIFE?  WHAT KNIFE?  WHAT KNIFE?" and she's totally going to stab his fucking face off, and then because movies from 1944 were made by and for pussies, she totally doesn't.

An important see for its cultural resonance; it's thanks to this that "gaslight" is a verb, meaning to fuck with someone's perceptions until they're a malleable ball of depression and crazy in your hands.  But as a film qua film it does leave something to be desired, namely a good dose of revenge.

Maybe the 1940 original (Hollywood, remaking movies when their prints are barely cold?!) features cold-blooded murder of the heiress' husband.  If so, B+

As it stands, B.

P.S. Slutty Angela Lansbury in the role of the maid.  Maybe I put the adjective in the wrong place!  Maybe I want to live in my fantasy for a while.

[Habbaku]

Dear god. Please tell me you're not drinking them together as a cocktail.

Not during pregaming.  For the theater I'm pretty sure I put them together in a big thermus because I wasn't sure about the policy of bringing in alcohol-only to be surprised that everyone in the audience seemed to have at least a fifth.

But you put ice in with it, right?

[Ideologue]

Lol.  The Martinus of Northwest Territory.

[11B4V]

World War Z
Solid zombie film that has no connection to source material.
The zombies are more like 28 days later in they want to infect others but no real hunger for flesh.

I give it a B

Good to hear.

[Josephus]

World War Z
Solid zombie film that has no connection to source material.
The zombies are more like 28 days later in they want to infect others but no real hunger for flesh.

I give it a B

yeah, after reading the book, I knew it would be terribly hard to make that into a film.

[Josephus]

Liking The Killing a lot. It's less dark than last year (if a show about a serial killer killing teenage girls can be not considered dark) but you know what I mean. It was pretty grim and dark in the past. Pretty gloomy. The only thing that gets me, is it possible for a street kid with no money to have a phone service with voice mail and call display?

[Josquius]

World War Z
Solid zombie film that has no connection to source material.
The zombies are more like 28 days later in they want to infect others but no real hunger for flesh.

I give it a B

That's surprising, seemed set to be terrible

[Syt]

Lisa: She's a stupid bitch. She wants to control my life. I'm not going to put up with that. I'm going to do what I want to do, and that's it. What do you think I should do?

That's it, I must watch this film.

The movie is best encapsulated by this scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWNmVyNBAfE

And you'll be very well served by the Nostalgia Critic review:
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/nostalgia-critic/25743-the-room

[Ideologue]

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

B+

Bartertown's infrastructure, famously, is built upon pigshit (and the resulting methane).  The pigs are controlled by compound man Master Blaster, a wee natural gas engineer who speaks economic violence as a first language and English as a second, third, or possibly fourth, riding atop a giant with cognitive impairments and a dislike of high frequency noises such as the pig squeals he encounters routinely in Bartertown's Underworld. Think of Master Blaster as a sort of Russia, ready and willing to choke off the supply of natural gas for advantage or just to make a point, and Bartertown as a European Union with lower unemployment.

Two plots enter, no plot leaves

[Admiral Yi]

Way too high.  It's a C movie.

[Ideologue]

Roger Ebert gave it the equivalent of an A or A+.  Now he was off the reservation on that one, but (as I elaborate at length), the great parts, namely the first act entire and the Thunderdome fight in particular, plus any scene where Turner speaks, outweigh its less great parts (Captain Walker's children) and its shitty parts (the mediocre retread of the last movie's climax).

[11B4V]

Way too high.  It's a C movie.

You're on crack: B+

Mad Max: B
Road Warrior: A+

[CountDeMoney]

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderturd