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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.
I'll just keep the "in review" stuff going in these threads rather than make a whole post. Here's my post from last year that includes links to previous years.
I watched 240 movies this year, not as many as I would have liked but slightly better than last year. Here are some of my favorite first time watches:
Most of these movies I watched by April 2024, because May onwards stuff started happening in my life that made movie watching difficult, not even necessarily time wise just anxiety wise.
what’s your method for choosing films? I never cranked through films as much as when i was watching whatever was leaving Mubi.
these days i have my calendar system, but i still need to populate it.
tell me your secrets, mr 240 isn’t enough :)
I don’t have a method, I have a lot of torrented films I haven’t seen. There’s also a lot of movies I haven’t seen that I’ve been meaning to watch for like 10 years. I just watch stuff based on what I’m in the mood for.
I just don’t have any kids, don’t really have a lot of responsibilities, have a job that gives me free time during work hours, and movies are my main hobby.
u/winther is much more impressive considering he has more responsibilities than me.
I've got a spreadsheet with 3526 films in it that I have said I want to watch at some point. I've watched 1210 of them so far. My calendar system helps, but I keep bumping everything back this time of year. I've been meaning to watch La Bête for over a week :)
You're better at settling on something and discerning your mood. If I went by that, I'd be watching The Deer Hunter and a few others on loop.
Just to chime in here if we are talking about "systems", having over 3000 in a watchlist would for me basically just be "I want to watch everything". True in theory, but also somewhat impractical :-) My current list is around 150 and I really want it to be around 100, but while I watched 140 from the list last year, there was 200 added, so it grows! And more than half of the stuff I end up watching is not from the pre-populated list. It shouldn't feel like a job to complete specific lists, though I know many find great enjoyment in trying to complete the IMDb top 250, 1001 movies to watch before you dire or the Sight and Sound list, but in the end I think it is best to just watch stuff I think I might enjoy. Which can be based on everything from critics whose taste I know I allign with, film festivals that usually have good quality, directors or actors I enjoy and so forth. I do tend to have a rough plan for the coming week, but all is subject to change. How much time I have on a given evening is probably the most deciding day-to-day factor. Shorter movies or breaking up a very long movie into two evenings, or a medium long movie if I have the time and don't need to get up early the next day.
this is a good system. this is what mine looks like for the big one. Its pretty much just a dumping ground when I find a movie I want to watch. Col1 is where I mark if I want to watch it asap, have it downloaded, etc. I don't use that as much as I used to. this sheet feeds my calendar. It updates every hour.
This second one has been way better for me for the most part. The dates are all generated, so overriding a date just pushes everything forward to my schedule. Right now I'm focused on watching all of the stuff that I marked to watch but never got around to.
I only did 96 this last year, which is a nice spot for me.
Speaking of which I watched Deer Hunter for the first time in 2024. Interesting choice to watch on a loop for sure.
yeah, it’s a little heavy — but i love it. did you also do the commentary tracks?
Nah I never really watch those, when I want to get more info on movies I’ll watch or read interviews and essays.
The one with Cimino is great. The long and short of it is that they pulled in people from the community for everything and the town in Pittsburgh still celebrates that wedding every year. The women with the cakes made those themselves and everybody pretty much treated it like a real wedding. They also had real alcohol for the wedding, so everybody was plastered.
Some commentary tracks are absolute shit, but there are some true gems like Ebert's Citizen Kane and Soderbergh + Gilroy's for The Third Man. Some people just watch the movie and tell you whats going on, which is an absolute waste of time. Stephen Prince does some great ones for Kurosawa's work.
I also have La Bête on my watchlist. If you are up for it, let's commit to watch it till the next movie midweek thread :)
good call. i bumped it back with The Pelican Brief of all things.
Have you seen The Searchers? I have been watching a lot of movies I missed and if Lawrence of Arabia is top of your list, just imagine that level of camera work and almost as epic a story in a post civil war western. It's not as good as LoA but it's pretty rare to watch a film that gives me that 'feeling' of grandness and scale
Yeah I saw Searchers back in 2021. I do love it, I love John Ford and I love that sort of epic filmmaking. I think the movie that’s gotten the closest to that style of filmmaking in recent years is Oppenheimer.
I finally watched Dune Part 1 and Part 2 on a tiny airplane screen and I REALLY regret not being able to see it in theatres, what an amazing world and story. Timothee Chalamet was incredible too, It's honestly forcing me to read the book at this point.
If anyone's interest is piqued by Dune movies, I'd encourage you to read the first Dune book and Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein.
You could read Dianetics if you want, but I haven't and opted instead for all the HBO Scientology stuff you probably have seen too. I still need to read Nightfall and always forget it's part of this quote.
The reason is this quote:
The Fugitive - 8/10
Watched this the first time a few years ago so thought it was time for a rewatch. This is such a solid movie. It has a lot of great scenes and while the story on its face seems somewhat predictable and simple, it just works. Kind of a non sequitur but I used to follow skateboarding and if anyone knows Nyjah Houston, he is to skateboarding what this movie is to filmmaking. It's one of those that makes it seem easy, and kind of makes you wonder why so many movies miss despite having interesting premises.
Despite only being in one brief scene together at the start and one other slightly longer but still brief scene later, Harrison Ford's and Tommy Lee Jones' characters have such great chemistry as they sort of battle each other at a distance, trying to calculate the other's moves. I guess that's kind of what the movie is about too. Another example of this is Catch Me If You Can, maybe Die Hard with a Vengeance too.
Anyway, great watch, even satisfying.
Gave us the world's greatest GIF to send to your friends too -- https://tenor.com/view/tommy-lee-jones-i-dont-care-care-no-dont-care-gif-3355501
So iv recently just had a massive craving to watch decent cinema. Iv never been massively into film but something seems to have clicked and now I'm basically going watching a film a day.
Im going through some classic godzilla films as well as dipping into the giallo genre. I'm also going to be exploring more kurosawa in the coming weeks. I have also decided to use a diary to rate everything I watch. I'm really enjoying it and so far everything iv watched has been enjoyable when taken in the context of its genre. I will hopefully have some thoughts to add to this topic in the future.
Letterboxd works pretty well for tracking ratings/thoughts btw!
So iv heard but I'm purposely avoiding online websites because I'm trying to cut down on my time spent online.
I just use IMDB with good results. Not cluttered or pushing you to interact much and you can watchlist and rate movies.
I watched Lethal Heat on Prime because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Pretty typical noir murder mystery. I'll usually watch something with JGL in it, but the stuff he makes tends to be a little weird and introspective.
Just looking back at 2024 as well and it doesn't quite compare to 2023. Though I will likely catch up on several 2024 releases this year, so too early to really pass judgement, but there hasn't really been the same level of attention and "hype" around 2024 movies. 2023 had the whole Barbenheimer thing going which somehow had positive side effects on movies in general. Cannes that year also had a pretty high base level of quality with Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest and Perfect Days as the highlights, but I also really enjoyed How To Have Sex, Fallen Leaves and Asteroid City. Though many of those did first get a wider release in 2024, so depending on where you look, some of this will appear in best of 2024 lists.
For proper 2024 releases the highlights for me was Anora and The Substance. Great cinematic experiences, but also not quite to the level of greatness of the best from Cannes 2023. Both a tad too long. Kinds of Kindness was disappointing. I admire that Lanthimos goes and does something so bizarre and crazy after the success of his relatively normal Poor Things, but it became to caught up in its own symbolism. Civil War was a really intense experience with good sound in the theater, but afterwards the movie has fallen a bit for me. I don't think it will hold up to a rewatch as I don't felt it really had that much to say with its potential premise. With the kids, they enjoyed Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. I thought Inside Out 2 was an okay sequel for the groundbreaking premise of the first one, but it was also messy in parts. The introduced too many superfluous extra emotions and the disconnect between what happened inside Riley's mind and the action taking place was even greater this time. The Wild Robot was a big surprise, as I have not come to expect something like that from DreamWorks. Not quite the heights of Wall-E but pretty damn close. The Garfield Movie was a waste of time. I tried watching Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga but I had to give up after about 30 minutes, which I rarely do. Something about the aesthetics felt and looked completely off. Very cold, digital and artificial. Fury Road was also filled with CGI, but the whole atmosphere of that was way more organic looking. I know it is a weird detail to dismiss a movie by, I just couldn't stand it.
For my personal 2024 year I had somewhat of a loose goal to prioritize more non-English film, which I managed with 149 out of 360. Most of those were French. I have listed my best first time watches and the films by Michael Haneke and films starring Isabelle Huppert have been a very prominent theme this year for me. I have also refound my old love for spaghetti westerns and plan to go even further this year into even lesser known titles.