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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've been on a Fan Edit kick lately and last week I was raving about the Fan Edit of The Hobbit. I also mentioned that I want to watch The Matrix Revolutions Decoded so I did. And I am really glad I did.
I find the original trilogy just fine. The first movie is an absolute masterpiece, but found the other two to lose their footing a bit and I have a bit of problems following the story (even though I love movies with convoluted stories meant for rewatches like Memento or Inception).
This Fan Edit streamlines the plot masterfully and will definitely be my go-to for rewatches. Zion is toned down, Revolutions in general is almost not present and it ends on a somewhat more positive note. I don't want to spoil anything for people wanting to watch it so I'll leave it at a really strong recommendation.
The next watching project are the Fan Edits of Star Wars by HAL 9000. They seem to be considered the gold standard of Star Wars Fan Edits and I'm really interested in what the community came up with, especially with the prequel trilogy.
HAL9000s prequel trilogy is the only one I’ll watch. It’s weird — i know stuff was removed, but i couldn’t tell you what. it’s the perfect level of Jar Jar, too.
Harmy’s despecialized was great until 4K\d+ all came out — those are my go-to for the OT.
I saw a good Rogue One edit, but i can’t remember who made it. I don’t watch any ST.
Have you tried Fight Club: I Am Jack's Laryngitis? Fight Club without a narrator is pretty good and works just as well.
Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time and the idea of a Fight Club without the narrator seems preposterous enough that it intrigues me very much. It's definitely in my backlog now, thank you!
we're on the same page with it. I figured it would be terrible -- but I think it works if you're familiar with the story... its kind of more arty.
If you know how to mux audio, I can send you just the audio track, too.
A quick Google produces the Laryngitis version so I had a quick look here and there and it's definitely something. I'm contemplating watching the original and then watching this fan edit back to back because I'd really like to experience it fully. Let's see. But thank you again for the gread recommend.
when you get a copy of it, it'll have both the fanedit track and the normal, which is handy. Want me to cut a sample scene?
No, thank you. Yeah, the fan edit has both audio versions, but I'll rather watch the original on my Blu-Ray at home to enjoy it fully. :)
sweet. I muxed it into a 4k remux :)
Had a bit of a spree with WW2 movies, with many interesting ones that doesn't deal directly with the war but with the fringes of it and the consequences afterwards.
Lore from 2012 and Phoenix from 2014 both deal with the time right after the war ended in Germany, and both symbolically and directly dealing with the guilt and reflective process the country was going through. In Lore we follow five children on a long arduous journey across the country as their high ranking Nazi-parents have left them. A quite bleak and brutal film, but told with very slow poetic film language. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the characterization but I am a sucker for that 16mm look. Phoneix has an almost absurd premise, with a Jewish-German concentration camp survivor returning home to find her husband, but he can't recognize, because she had some facial surgery. Instead he sees the resemblance and wants to collaborate with her to claim her inheritance as he presumes her dead. All of this works as a artistic metaphor for German's needing to redefine identity at the time. I also tend to really like films that deal with loss of identity in some form, so I quite liked this.
I also watched two newer Italian films where the ending of the war is something that mostly happens in the background, but of course influences events. Vermiglio from 2024 is set in a beautiful snowy Italian mountain village where the arrival of two deserting soldiers set some events in motion. It is a slow moving bleak narrative dealing with child death, broken marriages, and unhealthy family dynamics giving it a very melancholic mood. However, I was more or less waiting the entire film for it to show what it wanted to do with that. It didn't really work for me. There’s Still Tomorrow from 2023 is black and white and tells the story of a working class woman with kids and a violent husband, who fights against rampant misogyny in Rome just after the war has ended. It took me some time to properly "tune in" to the film language of this. It is interesting combination of something very modern and something that more than draws inspiration from Italian neo-realism of the 50s. It looks stunning in the same way Roma did, and it does share thematic similarities with its depiction of woman in a historic context set in a country undergoing political turmoil. This however leans more into a poetic experimentation and downplayed humor. I am conflicted about its very heavy handed thematic handling of fight for woman's rights, with almost every man in the film being an asshole and characters having blunt conversations that removes all subtext. This style leaves less room for doubt and self reflection as everything is told by the film itself and its clear as day symbolism. On the other hand, I need to acknowledge how well it is done here. How great everyone plays their part, and most importantly how it servers as a great showcase of a strong woman demanding her rights as an equal citizen, despite every man around her opposing and obstructing her.
I knew that seeing Son of Saul from 2015 was going to be tough, as it set directly inside the gas chambers and crematories of Auschwitz, and while I won't really recommend doing this as it will be quite a tough evening, but this film serves well as a double feature with The Zone of Interest. Going from planning meetings where the layout of a "factory" of genocide with humans as input and ashes at output, to this film where we see what that means in practice.
Somewhat more uplifting was the Danish film The Good Traitor from 2020. Yet another lovely looking 16mm film. It looks absolutely amazing. Tells the real story of Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador in the US at the time when Denmark was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. I wasn't familiar with this part of Danish history during the Nazi occupation, which was really fascinating. We have plenty of Danish films covering the resistance groups, but not that many that ventures into our collaborative government and the dilemmas faced. This focuses on the American ambassador and how he basically went rogue, so we don't get much from the Copenhagen side of things. I think some nuance is lost in that decision, as he is portrayed mostly one-sided as a hero. I can't judge how historically accurate that is though. Suffice to say, it is by all measures a very engaging narrative and Ulrich Thomsen plays his part very convincingly.
I was very intrigued when I realized that Verhoeven had made a WW2 resistance film, Black Book from 2006. How would the director of Robocop, Starship Troopers and Showgirls handle that subject matter? It was everything I hoped it would be, which means it was still full of surprises despite being filled with his trademarks of sleaze, melodrama, nudity and extreme violence. Only Verhoeven could have pulled this style off, where it does take its subject matter seriously - it isn't a parody or anything. It depicts the brutality of the Nazi occupation without making light out it. Yet it still manages to be funny, sleazy, entertaining with one crazy turn of events after another. Other WW2 films are usually more dreary, serious, heavy and tragic. Verhoeven manages to not do that, without compromising the respect for the subject. So many odd scenes that doesn't feel like they belong in a WW2 movie, yet he makes it work perfectly. It feels right for all the wrong reasons, or wrong for all the right reasons.
Well, I think I am taking a break from WW2 for the foreseeable future though.
Does anybody want to talk about:
City Lights (1931): ★★⯪
Not surprised that this is considered one of Chaplin's best movies. The plot is simple enough for idiots like me to follow, and it really focuses on developing the three main characters. The jokes mostly land. The ending is a bit abrupt, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie.
Back to the Future (1985): ★★⯪ (rewatch)
My local theater was showing this for its 40th anniversary. I was surprised by how much of the beginning I had forgotten since my first viewing. I think it took about 40 minutes to get to where the movie starts in my mind. I remember the characters, so I forgot how much time the movie spends building them up before really putting the plot into motion.
The Lady Eve (1941): ★★☆
I'm not usually huge on romcoms, but this one was good enough to be worth watching. I realized that All About Eve came out only nine years after this movie. It makes me wonder, due to similarities that I can't discuss without spoiling both movies, if the name for Eve was inspired by Eve in this movie.
I have one question that isn't very important, but I can't ask it without (potential) spoilers in the answer.
Spoilers!
About 37 minutes in, why does Pike ask the card sharp not to tell Jean his middle name that he wrote on the check? I don't remember this specific detail ever being relevant again. Although we see the check later, the middle name on the signature isn't important, so I'm assuming I missed something.
Bugonia (2025): ★⯪☆
This was good until the last ten minutes. The ending was disappointing and soured my opinion on the rest of the movie. It feels like a movie that is meant to be fun on a rewatch once you know all the secrets, but that ending doesn't make me want to actually go watch it again. :/
I liked the long sequences of unbroken dialogue. This movie has a lot of "close up of someone talking for 30 seconds straight, then a 30 second close up of the other person responding, repeat five times." I know that a general principle of film is "show, don't tell," but this movie seems to pull off the opposite effectively. Then again, 12 Angry Men is one of my favorite movies ever, and it's 90 minutes of people sitting around talking, so maybe I should have already known that. But anyway, it was nice to see it done well again here.
Does anyone know why this movie was shot in a 3:2 aspect ratio? I really noticed the difference when the trailers ended and the movie started. But I don't know enough about cinema to know why they would do it that way. Some other people online have talked about how it's an artistic choice, but not why the director would choose to make this particular choice.
National Board of Review 2025 Predictions:
Best Film: One Battle After Another
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Top 10:
AFI Predictions:
How do you decide which films to put in which list (and how to order them)? I'm aware that different organizations prefer different kinds of movies, but I'm not super familiar with which groups prefer what.
They’re both populist organizations but NBR has a rotating list of film critics that vote for the films. So they tend to go for artsy stuff (which is why I placed Ann Lee with them and put the other Searchlight film Is This Thing On with AFI). NBR is also not constrained to only having American productions like AFI (American Film Institute) is, which is why I placed Sentimental Value with NBR and not AFI.