What films have you watched recently?

mikeyrob73

Valley Uprising 

the history of climbing in Yosemite Park

really enjoyed it, some of these free climbers are just mental 

paulk

Went to see Logan with the missus recently and loved it. Watched Hacksaw Ridge a couple of evenings ago - what an incredible man Mr. Doss was. Mindblowing.

boogieman

Adrift. Allegedly a horror movie, about a bunch of people getting stuck in the sea because none of them was bright enough to drop the ladder when they all dived off a yacht.

The lead actress was cute. Not many other reasons to watch it. Zzzzzz. 

paulnb57

Patriot Days, good watch......

Sporky

Prometheus.

Not as bad as I'd feared, but it would have been nice if they'd watched Alien first, and maybe had someone with physics and biology A-levels check some of the numbers. And which way 'round the DNA helix is.

It baffles me that so many fillums and telly shows get the DNA helix wrong. It'd take moments to look it up.

VimFuego

HIgh Rise, an adaption of a JG Ballard novel. Think I need to read the book as the film seemed to have some gaps in the plot. But I really liked the concept of the film.

fretmeister

Sporky said:

Prometheus.

Not as bad as I'd feared, but it would have been nice if they'd watched Alien first, and maybe had someone with physics and biology A-levels check some of the numbers. And which way 'round the DNA helix is.

It baffles me that so many fillums and telly shows get the DNA helix wrong. It'd take moments to look it up.

Have a look at the heart rate monitors on the explorers too. Their POV shots.

BigBearKris

Brimstone - another great western (after "The Proposition ") with Guy Pearce.

Climate, music, bit grim - has it all
Well recommended.

7.5/10

EricTheWeary

Populaire - on the iPlayer. It's a rom com I guess, but a French one so quite stylish. I loved the retro look (set in1959 ish) and the soundtrack (US and French songs of the period). C'est excellent. 

menamestom

Life.  A bit of an Alien rip-off, lots of sci-fi horror clichés but I got into it as it got going and it ended well. Not a classic but worth seeing 6/10.  

Philly_Q

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies.  A 77-minute comedy zombie film - with snowboarding - which somehow manages to be painfully slow and boring.  Not sure how than managed that, but they did.

guitarfishbay

Moana. Thought it was great... Best Disney film since The Lion King

BigBearKris

Aftermath.
Lives of two men are affected due to plane crash - one loses his whole family, the other is responsible for it. Quite a good drama, touching on a subject for the 1st time I think. Pretty watchable and nice to see Arnie in a different role again. 7/10

Ghost in a shell.
Lovely camera work, good music but Clint Mansell and Scarlett very eye pleasing. Climate was there but the pace was awful - even in the middle of action I could barely keep my eyes open. Bit of a wasted opportunity. Visually great though.
5/10

ICBM

The Aviator

Never saw it at the time, got it on DVD recently.

Interesting… it's not 100% historically accurate - skipping quite a lot and mixing up a few chronological events I think - but by and large not bad. The first half is a bit messy, and the direction is strangely surreal in places and a bit over the top, but doesn't detract too much - Scorsese maybe showing his hand a little too much possibly though. Some of the CGI isn't very realistic. (And the 'Spruce Goose' never flew that high! [/PlaneGeek].)

DiCaprio is very good, but the film is stolen by Cate Blanchett and Alan Alda - both brilliant performances and Blanchett deserved her Oscar.

8/10

Myranda

Life - Not bad at all, kinda scary-ish... 

Suffers from being a re-make of Alien.... because it's not as good as Alien (group of spacey types, unknown alien, lots of vents... picked off one at a time... it's Alien...). Unlike Alien there's not nearly enough character development in the beginning so there's no reason to care about any of the characters dying. The Alien is meant to be smart, but somehow understands all sorts of specific concepts without access to an education... the space-ship has all sorts of air-vents that apparently go directly to space... the rocket engines have a direct route into the cabin...  why does a "creature" that is made up of cells that are brain/muscle/eye need a face, formless shapeless blob, and it develops a face - which can scowl? Alien horror films do better by not showing the alien all the time (Alien did it for reasons of budgets and effects quality, but it added to the mystery ... Pandorum lost all of its scary mystery when we saw the aliens).

6.5/10

Ghost in the Shell

Looks STUNNING - and not just because Scarlet Johanson is in a skin-tight body suit the whole time showing off a nice bum and nice pert boobs. Trouble is that they didn't seem to spend a thousandth of the time on the story as they did on the visuals - which, given that it's a re-make of a film-with-a-story is an achievement - two teams of writes/directors managed to generate less story rather than more.

Lacks any of the character of the original. As for the Whitewashing accusation on SJ being cast as the Major - they had only to say "It's a human brain in a manufactured body, why should that pre-made body match the brain from corpse number 98 in a series of experiments?" Instead they went with calling her "Major" all the time and still having the original her as an Asian. I'd have tagged that as possible spoiler - but it's stuff that was mostly in the original 

Some scenes re-created so faithfully that there's a question of "why bother?" some exposition changed and some left out... somehow makes an Anime with a slightly convoluted plot that in the English translation is hard to follow, and leave it as more convoluted and less deep that before. The whole defining-of-self-and-conscienceness  elements seem gone.

There are two - jump off a building in order to burst through a window scenes - but in both there's no reason for the character to stop falling and start moving laterally fast enough to burst through a window... at least holding onto a rope would have been enough, so why didn't she just plummet past the window? I mean, the Anime does that too... but given the shit that happens in Anime it's easier to overlook than in a live action film - she's not said to have built-in jets, there's no balcony... 

6/10

Snap

Arrival - liked it, stretches belief at times, plotwise, but its worth a watch for sure. And that is exactly how governments would react if aliens arrived. It also had some really heart wrenching moments that made me well up. Not good on a plane!

Passengers - average. Well made, watchable, hugely predictable and cheesy, but spectacular in parts. If I wasn't stuck on a plane, I wouldn't have bothered.

Jack Reacher- great violent drifter film. Not really a Tom Cruise fan, but he is quite cool in it. Find it difficutl to belief he's a bit handy in a fight though. Clever camera work made him look not a shortarse too. I will watch the second one.

hotpot

Kong Skull island, I was half expecting it to be the usual over CGI'd film but I really enjoyed it, best Kong film yet, there was a bit of the 'predator' 'godzilla' type thing going on, the helicopter scene was brilliant, not too sure of the choice of some of the cast though, some of them didn't seem to work out in their characters!!!
7/10

EricTheWeary

I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore.

Much as I am not a fan of Netflix my son put this on and I got into it. I guess words like 'quirky' are what might go with it. Apparently based, extremely loosely, on a true story it's a tale of ordinary folk who've had enough and with a tight script rather than CGI pretty much my kind of thing.

Blueingreen

Logan - I was pretty well entertained throughout, definitely a notch or two above your average superhero actioner but for me still too many genre cliches to live up to the hype. 7/10.

Jackie - not what I was expecting, which was a bland but stylish period piece, it is basically a film about a bereavement and a funeral.  It is stylish, mannered verging on stilted, and one of those historical films that leaves you sceptical about what was left out and why, but thought provoking, moving in places and with a good performance from Portman. 7/10.

The Lion in Winter - never seen this and grabbed a chance to see it in a theatre.  Stagey, weird, never very far from self-parody and you would have thought the sub Shakespearean dialogue would be enough to kill any film stone dead.  But it somehow survives as an extremely watchable reminder of a type of ambition that's gone out of mainstream cinema.  Glorious insults, fabulously OTT performances. 8/10

Dopesick

Hook - LOVED this as a child. Haven't seen this for nearly twenty years, and I've been dying to see it again for ages. While it does trigger some bright shades of nostalgia, it's not really as brilliant as I remember it being. Maybe because I'm older and mentally disheveled from all the drugs, booze and decadence over the years.