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Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
We watched Barbarian last week. What a trip that movie is, and while a bit campy in places, is definitely one to remember!
I haven't been able to deduce if it's 2spooky4me. I like some horror, but there's even some mainstream stuff out there I'd rather not watch.
Is there a particular brand of horror you dislike? I’d be happy to divulge that behind a spoiler if you’d like, although it may also kinda ruin the movie, hmm.
Generally stuff that gets into torture or body horror is too disturbing. I'm fine with jump scares, tension and many dark themes.
Horror that I like:
Edit: I should also add self harm to the blacklist.
Not sure how useful it is, but there's a site/app called Does the Dog Die that crowd sources various warning tags.
There's definitely some body horror/gross stuff, so maybe not for you... although that doesn't happen until the second half of the movie.
The stars aligned. @highsomatic mentioned the lack of a place to discuss movies on the TV Tuesday's thread, and I had recently stumbled across the
movie mondaytag yesterday.It made more sense to put this recurring topic on a Wednesday now though, due to the sheer volume of recurring topics that sprout up on a Monday. Plus it flows nicely on from TV Tuesdays and I couldn't see anything else in the calendar for Wednesdays...
Unless @Adys wants to make last week's 'Tildes Video Thread' a permanent addition to Wednesdays too, that is. Might be a nice pairing?
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll move my comment and delete it from the TV Tuesday thread.
I think the Tildes Video Thread went quite well but weekly is IMO too much. Semiweekly?
Good call on semiweekly. I enjoyed the thread!
Can you post the next one please? I will not remember to do it :)
Of course! I'll simply copy paste the format, as is, next Wednesday. 👍
Love that this thread is happening! I enjoy keeping up with what other people are reading, playing, and watching in the form of TV, so a space to share movies too is exactly what we needed.
Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King (2022)
For someone who spends as much time online as I do, I genuinely know little to nothing about crypto and also don't care about it in the slightest. I know some people are into it, and I also know a lot of people seem to hate-follow it, but I don't tune my radar into it at all.
As such, I thought this was a fascinating documentary. I had no background knowledge going into it, so the unfolding twists and turns were exciting for me. For anyone who was familiar with the specific case they examine (QuadrigaCX), it's probably not great to watch because you already know the outcomes and where it's going.
It reminded me of American Kingpin, a book about the dark web that I couldn't put down.
Console Wars (2020)
I had recently read A History of Video Games in 64 Objects and loved the retrospective it gave on gaming -- especially the early days. I saw that this documentary was available on Paramount+ and was excited to dive in.
It was a massive letdown.
It's the story of Nintendo vs. Sega in the 90s, told almost exclusively by marketing executives at the companies. It's very... thin. Light on substance, and not what I was particularly interested in learning about. I don't want to trash people's hard work, but the film completely glosses over the efforts of programmers and game designers and makes it sound like the consoles succeeded on buzz alone.
If you take the film at face value, you'd get the impression that Sonic 2 was a big seller on the Genesis not because it was the follow-up to an acclaimed and iconic flagship title on the Genesis, but because they decided to release Sonic 2 on a Tuesday so that they could call it "Sonic 2sday".
Again, I don't want to belittle anyone's efforts, and I do think marketing is important to some extent, but I also don't necessarily think it's the driver that the people in the film seem to think it is. Case in point, most of the movie is about Sega's marketing success as a relative underdog to industry giant Nintendo, but then right at the end of the film they just sort of quietly imply that the Saturn was a failure in some text on the screen without any comment from any of the Sega employees. I would have loved to hear the inside story of some of the Saturn marketing decisions (e.g. the surprise launch) and the same for the Dreamcast in Sega's waning days in the console industry, but the documentary felt more like it was supposed to be a victory lap for Sega for the years of 1991 - 1993.
If you're interested I will recommend this Folding Ideas video about crypto and NFTs. It's a long watch but very thorough and worth it IMO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Turned it on, saw the runtime, and honestly, expected to bounce off of it. Instead it was a magnetic rabbit hole that pulled me in. Fascinating!
Thanks for the recommendation. It was a great complement to Trust No One.
No prob and I had the same experience. Then again I think I have an intellectual crush on Dan Olson by now and he could make a 3,5 hour long video about logging or Polish potato recipes and I would watch the hell out of it.
It's kind of weird, but media that covers video games tend to be more about people's feelings about the topic rather than about the people and actions that actually shaped the era. Like everyone's trying to do a modern History Channel show instead of a 90s era History Channel show.
And the worst thing is that even when they actually do delve into the depths, if they are covering the 80s and 90s, they tend to focus entirely on Nintendo and discount what the rest of the industry was doing at that time. "There was this other console from NEC, but don't worry about that, it had zero cultural relevance to anyone".
The Gaming Historian is excellent.
I don’t see a dedicated post for movies so I’ll just put this over here.I just saw Smile (supernatural/psychological horror) in the movie theatre today with some friends and it kept me on edge. The formula is nothing new, but I found it to be very well executed, I have to praise the sound effects and music which really contributed to the unnerving tensions.
I usually like to watch horror movies because my coping strategy when I get scared or nervous is to laugh, the relief I get is a good rush. This one actually have me a feeling of claustrophobia all throughout and had me tensed up—but I still couldn’t look away. Loved the acting as well from the star actress and some of the side characters.
Spoilers
The guy who managed to break the curse and was in prison, while his scene was brief, his acting was amazing. He really sold the fear of god placed into him with his screams and panicking behaviour.
My one issue is that the practical effects in the final monster kinda broke the spell a bit for me. It felt like it was taken out of a horror video game.
I watched two movies, both sequels, with different feels to them: Hocus Pocus 2, and Wreck-It Ralph 2.
Hocus Pocus 2 was a nostalgia trip, and it wasn't centered around a white guy's quest to get laid. Here ends the list of upsides. Aside from that, it was just Hocus Pocus over again. Same story beats, every funny or cool thing from the first one done over again. It didn't feel like a new movie with something new to say, it was just a new skin sewn over the withered bones of the first movie. But instead of something resembling a climax, it ended with a collapse of any tension or consistent characterization.
Wreck-It Ralph 2 was at least something new. It wasn't great, but it addressed the changing nature of friendship over time, had some cool scenes, was a fun little romp. Even if it also ended with a heavy-handed statement about friendship, the movie worked to support it leading up to that climax. Not an amazing movie, but fun to watch on the couch.
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised you liked Wreck-It Ralph 2 more than you liked Hocus Pocus 2. HP2 was a deliberately campy romp that was made for pure entertainment value, whereas WiR2 felt like they were trying to squeeze whatever value they had left out of the IP. Sure, a lot of the ideas are recycled in HP2 from the original, but the nostalgia is the selling point. It is, after all, a sequel to a nearly 30 year old movie and the target audience is people who saw it when they were kids.
I don't mean to knock your opinion, though. Camp isn't for everyone, and the plot in HP2 takes some very very strange turns that I'm sure would turn off many.
HP2 felt like I was just watching HP1 again. If I wanted that, I could have just watched the original, like I often do around Halloween. I like sequels to say something new, or at least a new take on the old thing. WiR2 tried, and I appreciate that effort even if it was weird.
Junior British Bake-Off. They managed to take the happy, calm energy of normal bake-off and make it even lower stakes and cuter. Also Liam is a freaking gem. Definitely a good "warm blanket before bed" show.
Probably need to migrate this to the TV Tuesdays Free Talk thread? 😉