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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.
Well I’m pretty excited for the venture bros to finally conclude this month. It’s been a long and frustrating journey. It always feels bad when a show as good as venture bros wasn’t allowed to shine and have a solid release schedule.
I've been watching a lot of grindhouse/exploitation flicks. I had a similar binge phase two years ago and I'm back on it. Let me go through some of them:
Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS
A nazisploitation film. From the little I saw of it I thought it was gonna be kind of like a zanny movie. It's mostly played straight and macabre. I suppose like how a film taking place during the holocaust would. It actually reminded me of Seven Beauties which is the more high brow version of this story.
I wouldn't highly recommend it. If you're gonna watch a brutal holocaust movie from the 70s, you should just watch Seven Beauties.
Goodbye Uncle Tom
I just learned about this and had to immediately watch it. It's considered incredibly racist by a lot of people (most notably Roger Ebert at the time). The director's have gone on record to say that it was supposed to be anti-racist. I can see what they mean, and I can see what they were going for. But, considering how they got a bunch of Hatian extras to do some of the utterly humiliating things in this movie, I also understand the backlash.
It's a strange watch. And unless you're morbidly curious about it, you don't have to watch it. From a technical perspective it's kind of brilliant. It looks like a Terrence Malick movie, the editing is crazy and energetic, and the score is so awesome. I am glad I watched it cause it's such a wild part of film history.
Thriller: A Cruel Picture
One of Tarantino's favorites. You can definitely see the influence this had on Kill Bill. It's a slow burn. There's a steady build up to the actual revenge portion of the film which takes place during the last 20 minutes of it. But man is it a hell of a pay off. Really just an incredible film of it's genre.
The Laughing Woman
I've been meaning to watch this for over two years now, but wasn't easily available until this year. It's now streaming on Tubi.
I also thought this was a masterpiece. It's subversive and it really takes you for a ride. It's incredibly engaging and has a pretty cool atmosphere like Ex Machina. Highly recommend.
Just to make a separate comment. I also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part 1. This is a good summation of my reaction.
Tom Cruise productions are just insanely good. Top Gun was one of my favorites of last year and Mission Impossible is going to be in my top 10 at the end of this year as well. It's not quite the 5/5s that Fallout and Top Gun were, but damn it's good. There's an car chase sequence that goes on for like 15 minutes, and it's some of the best action captured on film. Such an insane sequence.
I think some of the writing is weaker than it was for Fallout (and weak for McQuarrie in general considering how good of a writer he is) but it's just a thrill ride from beginning to end.
I watched Mega Time Squad and thought it was pretty good. It's a 2018 New Zealand film with some time travel and small time organised crime shenanigans. I usually love time travel in movies so yeah, this was better than I expected.
I tried watching the highly rated (on rotten toms and random podcasts) Marcel The Shell... But oof, I couldn't manage more than about 15 minutes before giving up. The annoying kid voice and slow pace were too much.