The last movie you saw Thread

[Frelga]

My son used to read Artemis Fowl in middle school. I wondered if he wanted to watch for nostalgia's sake, but word of mouth told him it's too terrible.

[Túrin Turambar]

Boy Erased

Very good understated and low-profile film about gay conversation therapy. Reminded me of Johnny describing his experience with an 'orientation counselor' back in the old b77 days.

[RoseMorninStar]

I don't watch many movies, but I watched 'Rosemary's Baby' on Amazon last night. I'm not sure I'd ever seen the entire film. It's quite a classic.

[Frelga]

Speaking of classics, son and I are both missing baseball, so we watched Angels in the Outfield all the way through.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was an adorable kid. But it irked me that the angels were actually the least unrealistic part of the movie.

[Alatar]

I watched the National Theatre Live production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" last night. What a fantastic play, and what a disappointment that the movie was so hamstrung by The Hayes Code that the entire homosexual plot was eviscerated. I'd have loved to see Liz Taylor and Paul Newman deliver the original script.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm not a big fan of remakes of films, but that might be a good candidate, though obviously it wouldn't be Liz and Paul delivering the goods.

[Túrin Turambar]

Two recent movies, both of which I was impressed by –

Ant Man

This might be my bias as an author (rather than as an actor, editor, or cinematographer) but I’m convinced a movie stands or falls on its script. And I was really impressed with how a sharp, tight and clever script turned what was, quite frankly, a pretty silly premise into a really good, compelling and entertaining film. It was well-cast and I liked the editing and cinematography a lot, but I was probably most impressed with the writing. In particular, how you can make a perfectly-good superhero film without needing absurdly high stakes – the villain doesn’t need to be plotting the destruction of the universe to pose a threat.

Barry Lyndon

One of Kubrick’s lesser-known works, nowhere near as popular as his big hits but with a certain cult following of its own. It’s an adaptation of a Thackeray novel describing the adventures of an eighteenth-century conman. It’s known in cinematic circles today for the lengths Kubrick went to in order to give it an authentic look, for example, by making the interior night scenes appear to be lit only with candlelight. This effort wasn’t lost on me, and I was hugely impressed with how authentic the film felt. With a couple of exceptions where characters were speaking in English when they should have been speaking in German, I didn’t hear a single out-of-place line of dialogue or see anything which wouldn’t have belonged in the 1760s. Kubrick made no attempt to modernise the characters or their motivations, which might explain why the film doesn’t have all that much lasting appeal. But if you sent a movie camera back in time to the eighteenth century this is pretty much the exact sort of film they would have made with it, and I liked that immersive feeling.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Selma.

[Snowdog]

Was going through the boxes of DVDs and watched Alice's Restaurant with Arlo's commentary on. Quite interesting!
Lots of added Hollywood fluff as he said without it a movie would be quite boring and short.

[Frelga]

I never knew there was a movie!

I tried watching Battleship for some brainless entertainment, but while it scored on the brainless part, it completely failed as entertainment.

[Túrin Turambar]

Kingsman: The Secret Service

(Because it was on TV)

There’s a real challenge in adapting a comic book with a pretty absurd premise into a good film. This one does it better than most I’ve seen. If it took itself more seriously, it’d be a bland action movie. If it went all-out parody, it’d be a silly slapstick comedy. I think it finds a good balance for the first four-fifths but goes off the rails at the end, losing what was actually a pretty compelling story in whimsy and heavy-handed satire. But I went into this with low expectations and was impressed.

[Túrin Turambar]

With all the Dune talk around I watched the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune about the unsuccessful attempt by the avant-garde Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky to adapt the novel into a film in the 1970s. Jodorowsky wanted to make a 14-hour film that would, according to him, provide such an experience to his viewers that would never need to take LSD again. His ambition went far beyond contemporary special effects and, unsurprisingly, no studio would finance it, so it foundered. But the creative team Jodorowsky developed – his ‘spiritual warriors’ – went on to play a significant role in later sci-fi films like Alien and Blade Runner.

[elengil]

With all the Dune talk, I actually just went back and watched Dune (1984) again. Yep. Nostalgic Awesomeness. Especially the soundtrack.

[Frelga]

Since V wanted to have less of an echo chamber...

With all the Dune talk, I have once again failed to get invested in Dune. I thought the trailer would be obscure to someone without existing knowledge of the canon, and not fresh or exciting enough in the context of fantasy and SF adaptations of the last two decades.

[elengil]

To echo that I have absolutely no interest in the new Dune (series? movie?) and I couldn't put my finger on anything necessarily wrong with the trailer, I just felt not the least bit of excitement at any of it. I chalked it up to just being entirely jaded with adaptations anymore, but maybe it was just the flatness of the trailer all on its own.

[Frelga]

To echo that

Well, I tried.

[Túrin Turambar]

Perhaps we could put all the Dune talk into a new thread, as we did with Marvel and Game of Thrones? There's certain to be a lot of it, but I also appreciate it's not everyone's thing (as with Marvel and GoT).

[RoseMorninStar]

Since V wanted to have less of an echo chamber...

With all the Dune talk,(...)

To echo that

I see what you did there...

[elengil]

Not a movie, but watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix and it's... enlightening and terrifying and at the same time reinforces a lot of what I already knew or suspected.

[elengil]

So I don't get into politics much on facebook, I tend to use it to keep up with some family and with my SCA groups, but after watching the Social Dilemma I really pulled back and have only been on it I think twice (very short term periods) in over a week.

I have noticed over that week that I've gotten about 5 email notifications from facebook telling me that some friend or other has posted something. Before I might have gotten 1 in a month, if that.

It does feel like their algorithms send out notifications specifically in an attempt to keep you engaged, especially if you aren't. It's a somewhat unsettling feeling, really.