Movie Discussion Thread

OK, now I get it (misunderstood before). You're conveying native 4K content to the TV via a streamer (vs 4K blu ray player + 4K disc). No doubt that's more convenient. Interesting setup.

 

I have an 8TB NAS that stores everything and an ethernet network. With the software I am using, I have created a personal, mini Netflix that can play everything uncompressed with no buffering. Much easier to browse and watch than swapping discs. A fair bit of investment of time and money up front, though.

 

I was sorely tempted by the UB-820. But the UB-420 is 1/2 the price of the 820. More important, the 2 share identical video processing/upscaling circuits (much praised by reviewers). Still, I know the UB-420 has weaker build quality, fewer "under-the-hood" settings, and no counter/display: some corners were cut to get the price down.

I also considered my pattern of using visual media: I never acquired 100s of VHS tapes, DVDs, or blu rays, because I typically don't rewatch movies or TV series. But I like certain films enough to rewatch them occasionally. So along w/the UB-420, I picked up 11 discs, most 4K w/3-4 std blu rays (RONIN; COLLATERAL; all the BOURNE films; ATOMIC BLOND: ARRIVAL; 2 TRANSPORTER films).

I expect my viewing of 4K or blu ray discs will be infrequent, with most viewing being streaming Netflix (the quality of their streaming is routinely excellent, as you point out).

 

Anybody seen The Lighthouse? I really liked The Witch from the same folks, so saw The Lighthouse last week. 4:3 aspect ratio. Black and white. I was both intrigued and disturbed, and regret wasting the $17.

Joker was totally worth it on the other hand. How does the timeline at the end of the movie fit in with the recent trilogy?

Spoiler: more details

Specifically, we see the guy in the Joker mask shoot Bruce Wayne's parents near the end of the movie, which means Bruce is around 8 years old then. Gotham is in complete turmoil at that point, and people are going crazy with their Joker worship, wearing masks and treating Fleck as the god of the criminal underworld. Yet the Dark Knight movie doesn't take place until 15-20+ years later. We don't see any evidence of Joker or criminals wearing clown masks in Batman Begins, so the timeline didn't feel quite right to me.

 

The Joker movie is supposed to be a one off. Its own thing having little to do with Batman. Who even knows if the Bruce in that movie becomes Batman. But like all things that make a gazillion dollars, one offs suddenly become part of some franchise plan all along.

 

I saw "The Lighthouse" as well. Visually interesting, superbly acted, eminently strange. The punctuation with the foghorn was quite effective (i found the score to be just about perfect as well), but it was very disconnected overall, which was likely intentional. i wanted to like it, but in the end it just didn't move me.

I'm not sure if it's been said but I thought that the Joker would have been a better movie if it wasn't about the Joker. Take it out of the DC universe & it could stand on it's own quite well, but in the Batman paradigm it feels kinda forced to me like a puzzle piece that should fit, but doesn't.

 

Another issue with Joker was that Fleck was nuts from the start. So his "journey" wasn't that interesting to me. You were watching a clearly mentally ill man just become more unhinged.

A more interesting direction would've been a Falling Down type situation (excellent movie if you haven't seen it), where a more ordinary law abiding do gooder goes nuts over the course of a single day. But you realize his break from reality had been building from the societal oppression and institutional lies he had been swallowing his whole life.

Falling Down had some of the same "society is oppression" themes as Joker but the protagonist was far more interesting because he could've literally been anyone in the audience, which made his fall from grace all the more disturbing. I wasn't disturbed by Joker because Fleck never stood a chance.

That's even the plot of The Killing Joke comic. That even an ordinary man can go insane after a really really bad day. Even Joker in The Dark Knight film at one point says:

"Madness is like gravity... all it takes is a little push."

 

FALLING DOWN is excellent. Michael Douglas often did terrific work when not in leading man mode.

FD belongs to a deep/resonant genre involving meltdown of the fraught/susceptible individual in the face of a hostile world. One of the best is TAXI DRIVER; other fine ones are BAD LIEUTENANT and JASMINE. Every generation has its own examples.

IMO there's a sub-genre in which the main character melts down in extreme heat (heat as character accelerant). This would include FALLING DOWN; DOG DAY AFTERNOON; DO THE RIGHT THING (collective meltdown); DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (the Samuel Jackson character); others I can't recall at the moment.

 

Interesting how you mention Die Hard 3. I always thought Jackson did the opposite of melt down. By the end he's wanting to go first in jumping off bridges, wielding a gun at the terrorists and sacrificing himself to save McClane. It's a heroic arch.

But I do understand that the character initially has some pretty intense pressure from all the craziness. He is an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, but like the traditional Campbellian heroes, he rises to the challenge to become something greater as opposed to crumbling under the pressure like say Douglas in Falling Down.

But it's funny because you still root for Douglas, as he's still the protagonist even though he's wreaking havock. Which makes his chilling final line so much more heartbreaking:. "I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?"

 

BTW Douglas is probably my favorite actor of all time if I was forced to choose.

He's got an amazing everyman persona, but with a dangerous edge when called for. And he just breezes his way through performances in an effortless and endlessly entertaining manner.

The Game is another amazing Douglas performance about a man having a really bad day. One of my favorite David Fincher movies.

 

The Game is f'ing great.

The 80s Ridley Scott fanboy in me says he likes Black Rain as his favorite Michael Douglas film.

 

Douglas wouldn't be my #1 fave, but he'd surely be one of them. IMO that leading man/progeny of Kirk aura he had a young man was a misdirect. I always liked him more as a character actor...he got better as he aged (all the best ones do). Even a star turn like Gordon Gecko was a high-profile character role.

Another quality he brought to many roles was subversive snark. He readily showed his character's frustrated awareness of ironic/absurd plot developments.

Speaking of good character actors, I saw a very good one in BLACK AND BLUE: Frank Grillo. His intensity & undercurrent of violence lit up the screen in every one of his scenes. I loved his work in the small, gritty WHEELMAN. He's also very good in a Netflix series I occasionally watch, POINT BLANK. Though totally different physically, he reminds me a lot of Jimmy Cagney, whose macho intensity, complexity, and physicality came through in so many roles.

 

I just watched "The Game" and "Killer Joe"!
Both great movies. I'd give "The Game" a 7/10, and "Killer Joe" a 8/10.

 

I saw Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old". What an incredibly powerful and moving experience. Even if it wasn't particularly entertaining as such it was still captivating & worth a watch IMHO. The contrast of the calm conversational tone of the British WW1 veterans being interviewed and the stark sometimes graphic and shocking images (restored to color from B&W) held me throughout the 2+ hours. If you have any interest in WW1, this unique foray into the subject should pique your interest.

 

A number of people recommended the South Korean movie Parasite. I just saw it and it's excellent. It's a movie with an excellent set up and it then goes in an unexpected direction.

Highly recommended.

 

I also saw Parasite, yesterday afternoon. I went into knowing nothing about the movie except that everyone said it was good.

I thought it was a well done artistic dark-ish comedy. Artistic in that I think its very well shot and composed, very humorous, but as Kunlun alluded to, it goes in an unexpected direction. I dont think its some sort of masterpiece, or even close to my favorite Korean film, but its definitely worth seeing.

 

I'm looking forward to this film. I've been consistently impressed w/Korean cinema of all kinds. It's exciting/encouraging to see a film like this (subtle, artistic, not strictly dependent on violence or sexual content) get a launch in the U.S. market.

 

Sigh... So Terminator Dark Fate.

SPOILERS!!!

Trash from top to bottom. Indicative of everything wrong with Hollywood's smash and grab philosophy toward it's intellectual properties .

It's a movie made by someone who seems better suited as a visual FX artist than director. I believe that was Tim Miller's profession before he took up the chair.

There is little to no dramatic tension in neither the action or dialogue scenes. Linda Hamilton is great but she's acting in a different movie it seems. A movie that would've suited her much better. What seemed to work for Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween reboot (and I say seemed because I have alot of problems with that movie) doesn't work for poor Linda.

There are some interesting ideas presented. Like the Terminator's interfacing with cell phones, cameras and drones to find their target. But some of them are nonsensical. Like Grace the enhanced human who breaks down after any major action like a caffeine crash from hell, making her incapacitated, so she becomes virtually useless as a protector. And frankly, it's an idea that belongs in another sci-fi universe. Terminator is about humans vs machines. Not humans slowly evolving into machines themselves. Same for what ends of being a slight twist with Arnold's T800(?) model settling down and becoming a first class citizen who enjoys football and raising a family! Didn't the end of T2 put this nonsense to bed? "I know now why you cry, but it's something I can never do." And he proceeds to self terminate... demonstrating that the T800's learning ability is to blend into society in order to protect their assignment. Not for self determining purposes. And certainly not as a machine that was birthed from A.I. who saw fit to exterminate all of humanity.

The action sequences, especially hand to hand melee combat, have a lightweight, rubbery CGI-ness to them. So slams and crashes have little effect. They are obviously heavily enhanced with CGI. What happened to good old fashioned stunt work? This visceral weight and realty is what makes the great action classics so great. It's part of what seared T2 into the minds of movie lovers. In fact the whole film has this weird "digital sheen" to it, in which even shots that should have no visual FX seem strangely "enhanced" and as a result, phony. Constantly taking me out of the movie.

There's obviously no point in hoping to relive the thrilling highs of T2, what is still, I feel, the best action movie ever made. But is it too much to ask for Hollywood to honor the previous two films that made the franchise what it is, by creating grounded, realistic action sequences at least?

And an uncomfortable topic of late is the whole gender swapping thing, which alot of established franchises seem to be doing. In an of itself gender has little to no effect on my enjoyment of a film. The movie is the movie. But Dark Fate seems to go out of its way to rub male faces in the mud in some clever gotcha fashion and it comes off as mean spirited and petty, and not at all what I envision a gender neutral future to be like. One of the "twists" is that Dani doesn't birth the leader of the new resistance (yes, judgement day is never stopped but put in a different timeline), like Sarah before her, but that *gasp* she IS the leader of this new resistance. The movie treats this like a big deal, even Grace has a sarcastic line about Dani not birthing some dude to lead humanity, in a mocking tone. As if it's some big shock a woman has the ability to lead. My biggest problem with it isn't her gender, but that Dani is such a terrible actress that I don't see her leading a class field trip let alone humanity. They say Hollywood is usually decades behind when it comes to progressivism. Well apparently they didn't get the memo that tons of other countries have and have had female leaders for a very very long time. This idea shouldn't be calling so much attention to itself. This is a bit of a rant but it's something I notice so need to talk about.

In the end, Dark Fate is just a stupid, worthless, badly made attempt to remake T2 and act as a soft reboot of the franchise. Watch it at your peril.

 

Damn that sucks I was looking forward to Terminator: Dark Fate. Just checked it did not fare too well at Rotten Tomatoes either. I will still rent it when it streams, can't help myself. The only movie I ever walked out on was the first Starship Troopers in 1997, now it has become a cult classic.

 

This franchise lost me a long time ago. 1st & 2nd were seminal, high-level productions, but after that, downhill. Part of it is my own sensibility: this material wears on me quickly. I had no plans to see this latest one, but read your comments with interest: big-$$ genre films like this are (for better or worse), the core offering of Hollywood these days.

The following comments are painfully accurate re many modern blockbusters:

"The action sequences, especially hand to hand melee combat, have a lightweight, rubbery CGI-ness to them.... What happened to good old fashioned stunt work? This visceral weight and realty is what makes the great action classics so great..... In fact the whole film has this weird 'digital sheen' to it..."​

Noticed this very thing about action scenes in GEMINI MAN, in which the normally appealing leads (Will Smith & Mary Elizabeth Winstead) take a backseat to digital gimmickry...a quick shortcut to boredom.