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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 watched Boondock Saints (1999) last night and, much to my surprise, it absolutely holds up within the context of the late 90s.
The casting is perfect with the supports, too. Only a few of them have done anything big, the main probably being Kevin Chapman as a burned out detective in nearly everything.
Unfortunate that Troy Duffy was such an asshole. He clearly has a talent for a type of film, but lost his mojo trying to recapture it with the sequel.
I haven't revisited the film since I saw it in the 2000s, but it definitely felt like a good movie of that era - walking the line of absurd but cool gun action.
definitely watch it again and back me up! so good.
F. A.!
I just watched The Creator (2023) and I do not understand how multiple people signed off on it being released outside of it being a tax write off. The plot felt so disjointed and there was no real commitment to any individual character's story that it I just did not really care what happened to most of them.
My partner said it felt like it was written by an LLM, and while the timing isn't quite right with the public release of LLMs it does feel that way. There are so many bizarre choices that feel contrived from whole cloth to set up the next scene, and the acting felt so stilted as if the actors knew this made no sense. I wonder if they had a much more fleshed out script that got cut down through the editing process.
Having said that, the premise was great. I really enjoyed the set up of the movie and the special effects were done very well. It had the makings of a great story, but probably needed to be a two part movie or a miniseries so it could have some room to breath and set up character motivations amd maguffins.
The Creator sucked so hard. I was extremely disappointed by it. The plot made next to no sense in the end.
Seriously! It got more and more unhinged and all these things kept happening that felt so unmoored from reality.
I watched Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026) last night. It's a direct sequel to Dhurandhar (2025) that was released towards the end of last year. Just like the first movie, this one again draws heavy inspiration from events that occurred in early to mid 2010s between India and Pakistan as part of India's counter-terrorism plans.
Overall, I enjoyed this movie, would probably rate it a solid 7/10. I don't think it was as good as the first movie however. I found the story to drag on just a bit and it wasn't as interesting to me as the more spy focused original. I think they could've split the movies into 3 slightly shorter movies instead of stuffing everything into 2 longer ones. Having an almost 4 hour runtime is ridiculous in my opinion. I also found parts of the editing to be quite rushed/messy? Like the first movie, the chapters are clearly split with a title card for each chapter. For whatever reason, the text was simply not anti-aliased? It's a minor thing but it was driving me mad. Often, they'd also put white text on a bright background that made it hard to read. During various gunfights, they'd either not have the gun muzzles flashes but would have the sound of the gun firing, have the muzzle flashes but not the sound, or have neither but the actor would still be shaking the gun as if they were firing the gun. So, I'm not sure what was happening but I guess they didn't have too long to do post-production as filming only wrapped up last October.
I watched Le Samouraï over the weekend. It's very good, I'd give it about 4ish stars out of 5. Is the allusion to samurai is a little tenuous though? I don't recall anything about the main character Jef that evokes something necessarily unique to samurai/bushido and not found in other stoic hero stories. Then again, maybe that wasn't a popular archetype at the time, especially in France or in noir movies, and I'm thinking of things from a modern viewpoint where there have been so many other examples of such a main character since the film's release.
Ruimy posted his retrospective on 2016
Here’s my top 10 list:
Honorable mentions: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, War Dogs, Sing Street, Deadpool, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
I think back a lot to that landscape and how we didn’t realize how good thing were back then comparatively lol. Like an original movie musical made over 400 million worldwide. Theaters were still more part of the culture, a monoculture still somewhat existed, I feel like the texture of the films and music during this time just felt different it felt heavier more tangible. Obviously there’s a part of this that’s nostalgia, but you look at the state of the movie industry today and it’s dire. People said the same thing back then but it was objectively better back then.
Manchester by the Sea is one of the most gutting movies I've ever seen. My wife and I went to see it in theatres and she came out and said she'd never watch it ever again lol I don't think I've gone back to it before either, but I have rewatched a couple scenes, like the one in the police department after the fire.
Incredible performances by Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges
I rewatch that pretty frequently and also rewatch specific scenes. The police station scene, the moment with him and Michelle Williams, and all the moments that women are hitting on Affleck.
I didn’t love it the first time I watched it. It grew on me and then by my first re-watch it really landed much better for me. And strangely it lands very well with normie people that I’ve shown it to.
I relate a lot to Affleck’s character, never been through anything like that but the sort of feelings of detachment and self-isolation and constantly ignoring attention.
It’s also such a brilliantly edited film. Jennifer Lame edited it, she later edited both Marriage Story and Oppenheimer.