What DVD / Video did you watch last night? (pt3)

[Reno]

I got bored with it after ep2. I only really like the emo Frankenstein's Monster storyline.
Was shocked by the big reveal in the Dorian Gravy segment. Wow!

I find Frankenstein's monster kind of boring and it involves the dreaded Billie Piper but I like Dorian Gray and Eva Green.

 

[Virtual Blue]

Run All Night - Liam Neeson films suits my mental capacity of late. Easy, not too elaborate and simple. Sad times.

 

[Belushi]

Even the Rain (Iciar Bollein 2011) A decent, if a bit heavy handed, film about the on going exploitation of Native Americans.

 

[DaveCinzano]

Haywire.

Stephen Soderbergh's action movie, starring MMA champion Gina Carano. Also Ewen McGregor, Michael Douglas, and Michael Fassbender. Channing Tatum does his usual excellent imitation of a meathead (what do you mean that's not acting?).

As good as any of the classic chase thrillers of the 70s, but maybe just a little too chin-strokingly intellectualised. But I really enjoyed it, I have to say. Even the bits set in Ireland (really).

I liked that there were so many interesting characters and story threads and bits of backstory, but none of them overcooked at the expense of the main narrative or the action.

 

[DotCommunist]

Blood

A pair of brothers are coppers and kill someone who they belive to be a child murderer. Comedy does not ensue. Good film, taut.

6/10

 

[trabuquera]

The Sergeant (1968) - odd and very downbeat tale of US Army life in France in the wake of WWII; Rod Steiger is a crusty, respected old master sergeant sent to whip a slack platoon into shape and get them to keep the barracks s tidy, but he ends up being overwhelmed with lust for a young officer (John Philip Law, a tall blonde Alain Delon lookalike who was the angel figure in Barbarella), losing his marbles, taking to drink and disgracing himself. It's very very weird; not explicit (at all) about gay desire but doesn't hide it either. Can't really tell if the film is homophobic or not (? is this a clichéd tragic take on how gays are all so messed up inside? or is Steiger's blistering performance meant to humanise the 'other' and portray serious PTSD as well as other agonies?). It's very slow moving and a right downer in the end, but may be of interest to queer cinema fans or researchers.

 

[Belushi]

Audition (Takashi Miike 1999) Too slow moving and then too gruesome for my tastes.

 

[Yetman]

Before I Go - Stifler appears out of stereotype in romantic suicide comedy. Some points were very funny indeed, was a nice Sunday afternoon flick

 

[DotCommunist]

http://io9.com/interplanetary-travel-is-only-for-the-rich-in-the-short-1717324297

this 30 minute short film is worth your time. Its the future and after 10 years surveying a new earthlike planet its open for settlers. But you need to be rich to get a ticket. The rest of us stay here in the rapidly decaying ecosphere.
Good little short, crammed a lot of plot into that half hour

 

[Reno]

Finished Penny Dreadful S2. Didn't think this was as good as the first season and I got a bit bored with it, though the third episode with the Cut Wife was great and Billie Piper got a lot less irritating in the second half.

 

[Indeliblelink]

The Guest (2014), starts as a thriller then the end is dark comedy parody of 80s culture. Made very watchable by the Drive influenced soundtrack of new era synth wave and old synthpop / EBM and Brit. actor Dan Stevens' lead performance.

 

[TheHoodedClaw]

I'm not proud, but I found five new episodes of The Last Ship. At this point in the story, a rag-tag crew of evil scumlords have control of an Astute-class Royal Navy submarine (fucking somehow), and the lonely US Destroyer hero ship is fighting it. Highly recommended for anyone who likes the full Neeson vibe.

 

[Johnny Vodka]

Ilsa She Wolf Of Siberia (off da Horror Channel) - so bad it's good

 

[DotCommunist]

that'll be based on koch no doubt, the infamous 'bitch of buchenwald'. How people so love to slaver over nazi women is beyond me.

 

[Johnny Vodka]

that'll be based on koch no doubt, the infamous 'bitch of buchenwald'. How people so love to slaver over nazi women is beyond me.

There's a whole series of those movies - many of them were banned in the 70s/80s. It's pretty tasteless (though by all accounts not as bad as the earlier ones), but not to be taken seriously...

 

[Reno]

There was Ilsa She Wolf of the SS and Ilsa Tigress of Siberia, which was the second sequel. Yup, tasteless, but that's the point of 70s/80s Grindhouse fare, which drew an audience with illicit thrills where production values weren't an option. There was a whole sub-genre of Nazi soft porn in the 70s which ranged from the cheap to the relatively lavish Salon Kitty. The Ilsa films would have especially appealed to men who like to be dominated I assume, with Dyanne Thorne playing the ultimate dominatrix in all of them.

 

[inva]

Brute Force
1947 film directed by Jules Dassin. Burt Lancaster (this role following his debut in The Killers) stars as a convict who is determined to attempt a prison break, and to do so means getting by the scheming and sadistic Captain Munsey (a superb menacing performance by Hume Cronyn) and his guards and informants. It's brutal and has a noirish sense of inevitability, brilliantly and starkly shot by William H. Daniels and with a powerful score by Miklós Rózsa. It does stick quite closely to the genre conventions but it is executed in great style and I'd strongly recommend it. The only slight criticism I would have is the series of flashbacks explaining why some of the main characters were imprisoned - while some worked better than others, I think maybe they interrupted the sense of pressure building up that the film creates.

I've been very impressed with Dassin's films. Before this I'd seen a few others - Night and the City, Rififi and Topkapi, all of which were excellent. I also have The Naked City and Thieves' Highway lined up for some other time.

 

[Idris2002]

Dassin did Topkapi? I never knew that.

 

[inva]

Dassin did Topkapi? I never knew that.

yeah, it was one of quite a few films he did with Melina Mercouri.

 

[Reno]

I watched Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum and the Wachowski's Jupiter Ascending. Corman won.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Three failures last night. I thought I had not watched the end of the dreary insurgent, so skipped to the end, only to discover that I had. It was so dull that I had simply forgotten.
Tried to watch age of ultrons second half. I had previously switched off, but fancied another shot, how bad can a wizz bang popcorn adventure be late on a Friday? Pretty bad it seems. What an utter mess of a film. Like a great big shitting mess all rolled into one tight messy ball.
Screw this, I'll watch those minions. Those despicable me films were good fun . . . . Jesus no. Plotless and jokeless. Not cute, not funny, just an endless series of dull situations.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I watched Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum and the Wachowski's Jupiter Ascending. Corman won.

A spicy Corman will always taste better than bland, unseasoned and overcooked turkey

 

[TheHoodedClaw]

Kingsman: The Secret Service. My reaction: hahaha holy fuck. I'm not sure what I expected, but Colin Firth going full rage-comedy-Neeson in a church wasn't really it at all.

 

[purenarcotic]

Mardaani - been working my way through the Hindi / Bollywood films on Netflix. Excellent film but depressing content.

 

[Belushi]

In Darkness (Agnieszka Holland 2011) Well made film based on the true story of a sewer worker who hid a group of Jews beneath the streets of Lwow for 14 months in WW2.

 

[magneze]

The Raid 2: Decent martial arts nonsense.

Advantageous: Very good female-led Sci Fi drama. Thoughtful and asks some interesting questions.

 

[trabuquera]

Couple of weird ones off the telly:

Man with the Iron Fists - RZA's demented cinematic love letter to Shaw Brothers-era martial arts films. It makes no sense at all and glories in violence, mutilation and noisome sexist & racist stereotypes. But most people in it are clearly in on the joke and some (especially Lucy Liu) give fine, campy, tongue-in-cheek performances. It's sort of fun in the end. Personally I found the level of actual scrapping rather disappointing.

Seraphim Falls - moody atmospheric modern(ish) Western with Liam Neeson (for it is he!) angrily tracking down former Confederate fighter and lone-wolf assassin Pierce Brosnan (who is also quite angry at Neeson for having burnt down his farm and home and family during the War.) There's lots of macho grunting and some good action sequences but it goes a bit soggy/soppy/Christian in the final act. You would have to judge for yourself the fullness of Neeson's neesoning.

 

[Idris2002]

A Walk Among the Tombstones/Ruhet im Frieden.

The Full Neeson, but this time in the context of a proper movie.

The Taken movies are good fun, but they're no more than hokum. This flick, where Neeson is a hard-boiled ex-cop turned unlicensed PI is an actual proper piece of cinematic art - not just one of the best crime/mystery films I've seen, but also just one of the best films I've ever seen, full-stop. He does threaten the bad guys over the phone, but does it better in this one.

DotCommunist, you saw this one, I think - what was your verdict?

 

[DotCommunist]

A Walk Among the Tombstones/Ruhet im Frieden.

The Full Neeson, but this time in the context of a proper movie.

The Taken movies are good fun, but they're no more than hokum. This flick, where Neeson is a hard-boiled ex-cop turned unlicensed PI is an actual proper piece of cinematic art - not just one of the best crime/mystery films I've seen, but also just one of the best films I've ever seen, full-stop. He does threaten the bad guys over the phone, but does it better in this one.

DotCommunist, you saw this one, I think - what was your verdict?

I found it suprisingly bleak as it goes- the bit where he nearly gets garroted is closer to the hokum of Taken but there wasn't much of the throwaway action thriller in WATT

 

[Idris2002]

I found it suprisingly bleak as it goes- the bit where he nearly gets garroted is closer to the hokum of Taken but there wasn't much of the throwaway action thriller in WATT

The horrors it deals with (by the way, no one should watch this is they're easily upset) aren't that different than those which motivated the bad guys in Taken, but they're done in that is much more shocking and disturbing than in that one.

Neesons' character in AWATT is also far closer to being a dyed-in-the-wool fuck-up than the role he played in Taken.