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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 finally watched Sinners about two weeks ago. It was really really good and I have enjoyed getting to dig into the analysis of symbolism and other discussions of the film
I rewatched PhoneBooth (2002) for the 10th time or something last night and it made me think why I like this movie. I'm deeply fascinated by honesty and authenticity, probably because I've struggled with these issues in my own life and just recently in the last couple of years really worked on it myself. Colin Farrell delivers in his role and while this is probably before he was revered as a top performer this movie really shows his abilities. Plus how great is Kiefer Sutherlands voice! Great casting. I'm always drawn to movies that takes place in a single environment because it relies heavily on characters, performances and a great idea. PhoneBooth does this very well IMO and with just the right duration (81 minutes).
I'm open to suggestion in this "genre" including horror cause I know it's a classic approach in that genre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_a_single_location
After a quick scan of that list, I can wholeheartedly recommend 12 Angry Men, The Breakfast Club, Dial M for Murder & Rear Window (last two both being Hitchcock classics)... especially since all four are generally regarded as being amongst the best films ever made, and for good reason!
Tarantino's The Hateful Eight and Reservoir Dogs are on the list too and well worth watching if you haven't seen them yet (but who hasn't seen Reservoir Dogs at this point!?).
For some slightly lesser known ones from the list that I also really enjoyed so can recommend:
10 Cloverfield Lane - Super tense. John Goodman is fucking terrifying!
Clerks - Not the greatest acting, but great writing.
Clue - Star studded cast, highly amusing, and I fucking adore Tim Curry. ;)
Cube - Ultra-low budget Canadian cult horror classic that soooo many other movies have ripped off concepts from, e.g. the Saw franchise.
The Man from Earth - Similar to Clerks in not having the greatest acting but great writing... but it also has an amazing premise which I don't want to spoil for you (and I recommend not watching the trailer either for that very reason!!!).
Panic Room - Another oft ripped off movie concept. Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, and Jared Leto are great in it.
The Platform - Highly disturbing metaphor for society. :(
And another couple of movies that actually aren't on the list for some unknown reason, despite also taking place in one location, that I think are also worth watching:
The Lighthouse - Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson absolutely crush it in this movie.
The Menu - Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy similarly crush it in this movie too.
Thank you very much! I've only seen half of these movies and of course there's a wiki list.
YVW! Hopefully you find some movies in there that you can enjoy. And if you watch any, please let me know what you thought of them. I'm always curious to hear other people's opinions on movies I have enjoyed and recommended to them... even if they end up absolutely hating them. :P
My wife and I finally watched alien covenant since we have been enjoying the show and both like Prometheus.
Man was it rough. I love the world and characters but really struggled to enjoy this movie. Maybe a second watch would help but that’s for another time. Curious to hear if anyone here really enjoyed the movie.
At least we had Romulus and now alien earth doing the franchise justice. Also, the sequel to alien isolation can not come soon enough.
Covenant suuuuucks. As much as I don’t like Resurrection it’s at least not a slog compared to Covenant. Easily the worst of the franchise. It has a weird online following though, which baffles me.
Clue (1985): ★⯪☆ (rewatch)
Some of the jokes land, some of them don't. My theater got the least-popular ending.
The Breakfast Club (1985): ★★★☆ (rewatch)
I liked this a bit more than the first time I watched it. The theater experience helped - it was half full of mostly 50- and 60-somethings who would have been the target audience when the movie originally came out.
This the first I've heard of this movie, and I find the alternate endings such a great idea, but how does it work practically? How different are the clues? Can you tell which version you're watching halfway through?
Very minor spoilers about the story structure
The same facts are able to logically lead to any of the three endings. So the clues are the same and everything plays out the same until the very end. Only the final scene where the characters talk it over and figure out what happened is changed from one version to the next.
The Conjuring: Last Rites
I had only seen the first Conjuring film from the mainline franchise and I saw it when I was 14. It was one of the first horror films I saw voluntarily (I used to be terrified of them). And I had seen Annabelle Creation, Annabelle Comes Home, The Nun movies, and La Llorona (which is adjacent to this universe). So i decided to watch Conjuring 2 and The Devil Made Me Do It to watch Last Rites in theaters. I didn’t care for either of those two. I don’t like James Wan as a director. I think Devil Made Me Do It was visually better but messy and boring. I would say the first Conjuring and Annabelle Comes Home were the only ones I’ve truly enjoyed.
I enjoyed this a little bit. Michael Chavez is behind it (Devil Made Me Do It and La Llorona). And, while he’s not some great director he does a pretty good job at crafting the haunted house sequences here. I think the weakest parts of the movies is the love story it’s centered on. The romantic aspect of the previous films only works because of Wilson and Farmiga’s chemistry. In fact I would say the films are mostly built on Wilson’s charisma alone.
But yeah decent horror movie fare.
Just got around to seeing Weapons last night in theaters before it moved over to streaming- I really liked it! I was hopeful given Barbarian from the same director a few years backs, but the optimism was very cautious.
I found it a really good balance of tension, jump scares, and gore. Similar to Barbarian, there was occasional comedy to relieve the tension and then whiplash back into the horror. Additionally, the movie has some really overt symbolism that was simultaneously on-the-nose, but still ambiguous enough to leave me with some fun questions to mull over at the end. I give it a solid thumbs up. My partner also liked it but said the gore was sufficiently off-putting that they wouldn't want to revisit it for a few years, so heads up if you're squeamish!.
Watched Tár from 2022. One of those film experiences that I am definitely not done pondering over, and it is difficult to define what makes it work so well. Most of all, I simply liked how this was made, how it approached telling its narrative, the mental deroute, the shifts, the loss of control, the importance of sounds, and most of all - how the film lets me keep my confusion and doubt. I was left to fill in the blanks many places, where other films would have added several transfer scenes. It is gradual, as the beginning of the film really takes it times with things that seem less relevant, but then suddenly things goes fast by and everything makes perfect sense in the end. Perfectly structured and built-up from start to finish. This really deserved the Oscars more than Everything, everywhere, all at once that year.
I didn't know much about it before, but I like classical music and the whole setting was great to sort of "be" in. Maybe I expected something like a mix of Black Swan and Whiplash, and those are not completely missing the mark in terms of comparison, but this is really something else. Maybe closer akin to The Piano Teacher. Definitely not done with this film. And I want to listen to Mahler again.
Loved Tar, little fun fact is that I saw that in a screening with Benny Safdie. It wasn’t a special screening or anything, he had been here shooting both Oppenheimer and The Curse. He had a mask and hat on trying to hide.
I loved that movie instantly. I think the craft is undeniable in a way that people who normally wouldn’t ended up praising a film that was critical of political correctness and the MeToo movement. I think Tar’s characterization is brilliantly balanced. And I love her monologue while she was teaching at Julliard trying to encourage younger students to engage with the art rather than dismissing it as old and bigoted.
After my screening as I was walking out, these older people went “I thought it was going to be about the rise of a composer. I didn’t know she was gonna be wacko.”
Islands (2025) is a great little film. The cast is outstanding, but Sam Riley has such a natural cool about him.
Great little film with some really great, subtle acting from Stacy Martin, too.
I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this, but my wife, kids and I love the movie Captain Ron, and watched it just last weekend. We watch it at least once a year, and I don't care how bad it sucks, I love it.
Does anyone know if the Downtown Abbey movie would make any sense to someone who hasn't seen any of the prior material, but is intrigued by the concept?
I wasn't particularly interested, but I went to watch another movie in the theater today. On the way to my screen, I walked past an auditorium showing it that was 100% sold out. As I left my movie, the same auditorium as before was in the middle of another showing that was 80% full. So naturally I checked its reviews once I got home, and they seem to be quite positive. My concern is just about being able to understand the plot without having seen the rest of the series beforehand.
I think it would be really hard to appreciate wtf is going on without getting to know the characters through hours of drama beforehand. You might be able to get away with Season 1 only, which isn't that long.
Personally, I'd save your money and just try watching the series instead. If you like it enough to keep watching, this movie should be available on streaming by the time you need to watch it. IMO this movie should have been a 7-10 episode season anyway, the show is higher quality than any of the movies because this sort of drama needs time to stew and a movie tends to rush that.