Black Christmas (1974) - It's well regarded, a Canadian film, and a slasher flick that came out several years before Halloween! I thought I'd seen it before but I hadn't.
Very interesting camera work, with those panning closeups, and multiple actors I recognized from their later work.
Most important, this thing was scary! Full of tension. The still shots of the empty hallways and doorways were very creepy - the stalking scenes (again with the closeups) had me on edge, and the phonecalls were super creepy.
I don't think it ever explained what the heck was going on in the end – but it still worked for me. Glad I saw it finally!
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
What are you watching right now?
The little movie marathon I've planned for New Year's Eve includes
Another Round
Everything, Everwhere, All at Once
and The Suicide Squad.
All rewatches, but the pal who's coming over probably haven't seen either and they're all entertaining enough. Might include one I haven't seen yet though if I'd get tired. Django Unchained was a good choice a few years ago, Tenet was not, just like anything that's already hard to follow without alcohol.
Banes wrote:
Black Christmas (1974) - It's well regarded, a Canadian film, and a slasher flick that came out several years before Halloween! I thought I'd seen it before but I hadn't.
Black Christmas was excellent, one of the best slashers I have seen. In fact, Halloween was sold to John Carpenter as a kind of sequel. What would the killer do next?
Check out Deadly Games. It came out a year before Home Alone and is a real horror film. Two movies that will be on my yearly Holiday watch list.
sleeping_gorilla wrote:And it's on YouTube for free. A pre SCTV Andrea Martin! I'd have to check the SCTV episodes but they might have spoofed this.Banes wrote:
Black Christmas (1974) - It's well regarded, a Canadian film, and a slasher flick that came out several years before Halloween! I thought I'd seen it before but I hadn't.
Black Christmas was excellent, one of the best slashers I have seen. In fact, Halloween was sold to John Carpenter as a kind of sequel. What would the killer do next?
Check out Deadly Games. It came out a year before Home Alone and is a real horror film. Two movies that will be on my yearly Holiday watch list.
InkyMoondrop wrote:I saw Everything, Everwhere, All at Once the other day and I really liked it. It had a lot of heart. Very touching!
The little movie marathon I've planned for New Year's Eve includes
Another Round
Everything, Everwhere, All at Once
and The Suicide Squad.
All rewatches, but the pal who's coming over probably haven't seen either and they're all entertaining enough. Might include one I haven't seen yet though if I'd get tired. Django Unchained was a good choice a few years ago, Tenet was not, just like anything that's already hard to follow without alcohol.
People compare it to Dr Strange because of the dimensions thing (including Jamie Lee Curtis) but they really aren't comparable. Everything, Everwhere, All at Once has better depiction of same sex couples though.
It was a really good film.
Which Scuicide Squad?
I like the first one. The second one is good too but I've only seen it half way because my silly ex turned it off in the middle and I never got back to it 😅
Ozoneocean wrote:InkyMoondrop wrote:I saw Everything, Everwhere, All at Once the other day and I really liked it. It had a lot of heart. Very touching!
The little movie marathon I've planned for New Year's Eve includes
Another Round
Everything, Everwhere, All at Once
and The Suicide Squad.
All rewatches, but the pal who's coming over probably haven't seen either and they're all entertaining enough. Might include one I haven't seen yet though if I'd get tired. Django Unchained was a good choice a few years ago, Tenet was not, just like anything that's already hard to follow without alcohol.
People compare it to Dr Strange because of the dimensions thing (including Jamie Lee Curtis) but they really aren't comparable. Everything, Everwhere, All at Once has better depiction of same sex couples though.
It was a really good film.
Which Scuicide Squad?
I like the first one. The second one is good too but I've only seen it half way because my silly ex turned it off in the middle and I never got back to it 😅
Yeah, Everything Everywhere All at Once is great, it has its own world and logic built up in one film, so crazy and random and yet it still works. The Daniels duo directed it, who are also responsible Swiss Army Man and the music video for Turn Down for What, I'm convinced that they're one of the most creative voices in filmmaking today and are Charlie Kaufman level of players. They also shot the film during COVID and did most special effects without CGI, the old-fashioned way.
The second Suicide Squad movie. It was similar to the first one just a lot more enjoyable. There's a lot of unnecessary gore, but all the characters and the humor were spot-on this time without the film falling apart.
But we ended up watching just two films instead: Everything Everywhere… and The Good Nurse. It was an okay film, Redmayne really sold it, one of the few portrayals of a serial killer who's not fetishized as some psychopathic monster and is an otherwise genuinely kind person, which offers a really weird perspective without trying to relativize the morality of what he did. It's based on a true story, probably with very little dramatization compared to average Hollywood.
I think Knives Out was a decent whodunnit, but Glass Onion struggles to live up to it. It doesn't want you to invest in the case just wants to pull the rug out from under you and it more and more feels like that Rian Johnson just uses the murder as an excuse to really punish and humiliate certain types of characters that he finds morally detestable and he has his favorite pick that aside from Blanc is in the absolute moral right and gets to really show the middle finger to all the non-woke ones. It's like an adorable power-fantasy, which you can at least tolerate, regardless of your political alignment, but I just really wish this was a more engaging story for the viewer, not something where it doesn't matter how smart you are, because what they show you is already misleading, so they could have this gotcha moment later on. That's a cool thing, it has great entertainment value, I like twists like that, it's just… as traditional crime-solving mystery that people like to join in on… it's not smart.
InkyMoondrop wrote:I liked the over-the-topness of the characters and the setup.
as traditional crime-solving mystery that people like to join in on… it's not smart.
The position of the film-maker: all those people are "shitheads" XD
Yeah, it's a tiny bit on-the-nose that the villains HAVE to be the traditional "cis-white male" and stupid the men's rights guy while the hero has to be the young black female, while the old whit guy detective gets a pass because he's gay… all that is high school level culture politics, directly equivalent to the old style villain with the black hat and curly mustache and the hero in the white hat.
But simply because it's so obvious and cartoonish I think it gets a pass because it's meant to be a silly film with big, broad tropes and parodies of these types of people. You're in no way getting a clever film but you are getting a fun one with a really obvious point of view.
I liked it better than the first one. The first one tried too hard to be clever and never really fully got there, it just had the IMAGE of cleverness so it came off as a bit too pretentious to me and not very fun. The pretension in glass onion is drowned out by the fun.
Ozoneocean wrote:InkyMoondrop wrote:I liked the over-the-topness of the characters and the setup.
as traditional crime-solving mystery that people like to join in on… it's not smart.
The position of the film-maker: all those people are "shitheads" XD
Yeah, it's a tiny bit on-the-nose that the villains HAVE to be the traditional "cis-white male" and stupid the men's rights guy while the hero has to be the young black female, while the old whit guy detective gets a pass because he's gay… all that is high school level culture politics, directly equivalent to the old style villain with the black hat and curly mustache and the hero in the white hat.
But simply because it's so obvious and cartoonish I think it gets a pass because it's meant to be a silly film with big, broad tropes and parodies of these types of people. You're in no way getting a clever film but you are getting a fun one with a really obvious point of view.
I liked it better than the first one. The first one tried too hard to be clever and never really fully got there, it just had the IMAGE of cleverness so it came off as a bit too pretentious to me and not very fun. The pretension in glass onion is drowned out by the fun.
I just realized what these films are. Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu… they're all "Richsploitation" films, where the wealthy gets tortured for our enjoyment. And unlike in the early 90s horrors where home invaders and psychos targeted the somewhat wealthy family men, there is no redemption here, just torture. Richsploitation.
THE PALE BLUE EYE - Christian Bale, Harry Melling (as Edgar Allen Poe!), Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, and Robert Duvall in cameo role. Takes place way back around 1840ish, Bale is a private detective? called to a military academy to investigate a grisly murder. He meets Poe and they work to find killer. Suspects galore and another murder happens and then another! Wait for stunning ending, fooled even me! But one of those films where they leave final scene up to viewer to decide what happens. Still not a bad watch getting a 3 on the Moizmeter.
HOLLOW IN THE LAND - Dianna Agron, Michael Rogers, Jared Abrahamson, Shawn Ashmore. A fine Canadian film shot in and around Castlegar, B.C. Dianna's (in virtually every scene) father is in prison for a murder he didn't do. She is looking after her young brother (Jared) who is now main suspect in another murder and Chief of Police (Rogers) is going to get him no matter what. Dianna leads us thru many somewhat confusing scenes while she tries to find her bro. Finally she finds the bad guy and kills him and her bro is found alive and well. An OK watch getting a 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.
I'll tell you what I'm not watching: this painfully awful-looking remake of SNOW DAY that Nickelodeon felt was necessary to make for some reason.
I mean, sue me, I actually liked the original movie, even though I know everybody hates it, but the remake actually looks terrible. Chris Elliott was great as the original Snowplow Man, despite being a little hammy, he made the character seem menacing and sociopathic . . . the new Snowplow Man seems like a fruity GLEE character . . . not helped by the fact that Nickelodeon also decided that apparently the remake needed to be a musical.
I re-watched School Of Rock staring Jack Black.
I does not hold up.
I saw it many years ago, not expecting much because I didn't really know about Black at the time and it looked like a kid's film. I loved it and thought it was really fun and engaging. Loved the inclusion of the music too. I really remembered it very fondly.
On this watch however it just seemed dumb. I kept thinking that Black's fake teacher character was stupidly depriving the kids of a valuable education. His passion for the kids was good and the fact that he stopped being a slacker was great too, but he's mostly just an extremely selfish bastard and all the great music licensed for the movie is only used in a very token way for 20 second clips of the starting riffs.
Overall it's just a shallow formula film The only good parts are Jack's mannerisms, which are his own rather than the character.
———————————–
I watched all the Back to the Future movies.
They hold up. The first one is very tight in its writing, references and call backs. None of them are clever intellectual films, but they're clever in their structure and internal logic. They're all very well made.
The second one opens up more of Marty's world and gives us a great glimpse of the future. The third one was made at the same time as the 2nd so it fulfills a lot of references from it. They're not as tight as the first movie but they're all really quite well done.
The Green-screen could use some digital remastering to blend things better though.
I watched episodes 13 & 14 of Balssreiter, a Gonzo anime from mid 00s-ish.
I literally only watched those two episodes out of context, cause they were recommended to me on youtube, and it was late and i had nothing else to do.
This show is probably pretty bad all around, but what i saw was a flashback to the protagonist's chilhood and just those two episodes were the bumpiest, most hilarious emotional rollercoaster i experienced in a long time. I burst out laughing at the levels of melodramatic soap opera writing on display. Just one catastrophe hit this kid after another. Parents died, raised in an orphanage, the orphanage burns down, he gets beat up daily by the rich kids, get accused of a crime he didn't commit, his father figure bites it, everyone is dying of the plague, he finds his long lost sister only for her to be beaten to death on the street… and all of this only to lead to the protagonist being infected with nanobots to become some superhuman fighting machine.
Anime, man.
Ozoneocean wrote:
I watched all the Back to the Future movies.
That scene where one of the band members calls Chuck Berry, "Hey Chuck, it's your cousin Marvin. You know that new sound you're lookin' for? Well, listen to this!" He also sings "Earth Angel" in the movie.
That actor is Harry Water's Jr. who was a teacher of mine at the youth theatre I went to for years. We were pretty good friends while he was there.
Is the Karate Kid trilogy worth burning through for context before watching Cobra Kai? I'm not a fan of sports, but my boiler decided to fall and turn my bathroom into a warzone and as much as I love creative work, it's not the best distraction when I'm stressed with a terrible sleep schedule and tomorrow I have to go to work, dirty or not, so… if I start to burn through something along a few glasses of Cuba Libre, I wouldn't mind enjoying it.
"Copenhagen Cowboy, " a six-episode mini-series on Netflix. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Either I am too ignorant to understand such high art, or it's just too pretentious for its own britches. I fear it's more the latter. The director seems to have taken the last shot of Antonioni's "The Passenger," and built his entire directorial style off of it. Talk about derivative. So, yeah, in short: pretentious and derivative.
InkyMoondrop wrote:
Is the Karate Kid trilogy worth burning through for context before watching Cobra Kai? I'm not a fan of sports, but my boiler decided to fall and turn my bathroom into a warzone and as much as I love creative work, it's not the best distraction when I'm stressed with a terrible sleep schedule and tomorrow I have to go to work, dirty or not, so… if I start to burn through something along a few glasses of Cuba Libre, I wouldn't mind enjoying it.
They have the rights to all the movies so Cobra Kai is able to use them in flashbacks for context. However, I and II are quite good and are worth watching. Plus Mr. Miyagi is only in the films and is a major part of the story.
III is referred to, but I don't think I ever really watched it. IV can be avoided.
sleeping_gorilla wrote:InkyMoondrop wrote:
Is the Karate Kid trilogy worth burning through for context before watching Cobra Kai? I'm not a fan of sports, but my boiler decided to fall and turn my bathroom into a warzone and as much as I love creative work, it's not the best distraction when I'm stressed with a terrible sleep schedule and tomorrow I have to go to work, dirty or not, so… if I start to burn through something along a few glasses of Cuba Libre, I wouldn't mind enjoying it.
They have the rights to all the movies so Cobra Kai is able to use them in flashbacks for context. However, I and II are quite good and are worth watching. Plus Mr. Miyagi is only in the films and is a major part of the story.
III is referred to, but I don't think I ever really watched it. IV can be avoided.
Thanks, I ended up watching the 1st film and then started the series. I enjoy the series so far. "IV can be avoided" to be fair, I would've only watch it for Hilary Swank. I like her tomboy energies in other films.
Last night I saw a short interview with Pat Morita about how he got the role of Mr Miagi, it was pretty cool. Hahaha!
He was a funny guy. ^_^
—————
Ive been re-watching Gavin and Stacey.
-Mathew Horne and James Cordon comedy drama. It's just as god. I really like it. Love Bob Brydon in that show, he really leans into his Welshness. Love the expressions "And I'll tell you for why" haha!
My daughter is home from university and she's got us all watching Singles Inferno, which is a sort of Korean take on Love Island, if Love Island has been made in the 1950s.
The singles sit around in casual clothing, discussing their feelings with great sincerity, while being flawlessly considerate of how the others might react to said feelings. In the British Love Island, the singles sit around slagging each other off in their underwear, until the whole thing turns into a drunken slanging match.
Has Korea become the new Bollywood? My mom and her best friend binge K-dramas like they have terminal illnesses and are try to cram as many in single sessions as they can before they pass - it's been leading to spikes in our internet usage that exceed our data allowance.
It might originate from Gangam style
Personally I thought the wave started with the rise of the K-pop phenomenon… J-pop had been a bit of a thing but k-pop quickly overtook it and gained a big following, mainly due to the hyper stylised nature of it with the performers wearing so much makup and with so many filters that they look like pretty, artifical, hyper-beautful people, and the dance moves are similalry weirdly more than human.
I think Gangam style came out of that because it was the antithesis of it, which made it stand out. And its sillniess made it even more popular so it spread much further beyond the young women who made up the K-pop audience.
Also, a lot of American animated shows are drawn over in Korea and their style of anime has slowly filtered across over the years as well.
For whatever reason Korean shows are a huge block of the content on Netflix… This might just be because they have a large amount of Korean American subscribers in the USA where Netflix is based?
Amazon Prime here in Australia has a huge block of Indian content and I can only assume that's for all the recent Indian migrants here for work.
—————
One thing I really don't like about streaming services is the lack of British content, mainly older shows. I grew up with old British shows and I'd like to see a lot of them again but you're out of luck with all streaming services in Australia. You get a few newer ones on various services but the selection is pathetic.
"Britbox" is the only specialised one we have for it but even the selection there is super-duper thin! Very disappointing.
It's supposed to be a joint thing between the BBC and ITV but that just makes it even more pathetic considering the paucity of their offereing.
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