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

Started watching S2 of American Horror Story. Enjoying it, but fucking hell it’s so gloomy and unpleasant. As it should be of course, but it’s gonna take me a while to get through. Will be done with all the seasons by 2025 at this rate. Are they all worth a watch?
 
Started watching S2 of American Horror Story. Enjoying it, but fucking hell it’s so gloomy and unpleasant. As it should be of course, but it’s gonna take me a while to get through. Will be done with all the seasons by 2025 at this rate. Are they all worth a watch?
it starts to tail off around the carnival season, where I stopped watching. Skipped a couple of seasons (roanoke and cult) and picked it up again for Apocalypse. It never gets as good as the first two again though imo.
 
Asylum/S2 is by far the best season of American Horror Story. The 3rd one with the witches is watchable, after that I didn’t make it through a whole season. I tried to watch most of them and after an intriguing set up, they always turn crap. I recently gave up on Apocalypse, which was hailed as a return to form. As always, great start and then I gave up after four episodes.

Channel Zero, is another horror anthology series where every season is self contained and I think it’s better. It’s based on creepypasta web stories. Wasn’t that keen on the first season, but I thought season 2 & 4 were great. Haven’t gotten round to season 3 yet.
 
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Started watching S2 of American Horror Story. Enjoying it, but fucking hell it’s so gloomy and unpleasant. As it should be of course, but it’s gonna take me a while to get through. Will be done with all the seasons by 2025 at this rate. Are they all worth a watch?
It's awful imo. Some of the nastiest TV I've ever seen. No upside that I could find. Unremittingly grim.
 
Ivan's Childhood - 1962 - Andrei Tarkovsky's breakthrough hit, an amazingly hallucinatory tale of an underage Russian lad fighting through the hellscape of WW2. Probably one of the best war films ever made. Also a bit of outrageous Soviet propaganda. Extraordinarily beautiful, horribly ugly, kind of pretentious, kind of baffling, also unbearably moving and unspeakably brutal. Warning: absolutely not for the squeamish - there is very little gore (and it's all in b&w anyway) but there's an accelerating turn in to horrors of war towards the end where all sorts of genuine war footage gets collaged in. It's proper shaken me up!
 
Eps 1 & 2 of the new HBO show The Outsider.

So far so good Stephen King adaptation (that I've never heard of).

This watches like HBOs grittiest police procedurals with sprinkles of supernatural mystery and whodunnit (not like scooby doo)

Great cast, great direction from Jason Batemen and episodes written by Richard Price and Dennis Lehane.

lots of King's stuff gets silly at the end. Hope this avoids it.
 
Teddy Pendergrass - If You Don't Know Me - 2017 documentary. Uneasy mix of star hagiography, true-crime investigation, soap-opera drama and 70s vintage-kitsch extravaganza, but it's a fascinating and bizarre and sad story of how the prototype "lurve man" soul star rose to fame and what came next. One hell of a life lived, for sure, and some of the stuff early on about the lawless nature of the music business and Philadelphia in that era is hair-raising and original. (BTW I was never ever a Teddy P fan, but watching some of the footage from this, have new respect for his amazing voice.)
 
Bumper Day waiting at my mates house for a delivery that never arrived:
The Great Train Robbery
2 Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone
Paul Blart - Mall Cop 2

Im off to the pub now
 
Saw Lilting the other day.

There's admittedly not an awful lot of story to it, but the acting is superb and it manages to be sad and full of emotion whilst not giving in to mawkishness. I quite rate it.
I normally don't watch that sort of thing because it's needlessly manipulative, but this one never felt that way.
 
Love it :cool: great Sunday film. Cheesy but done well.
It had a scene inside the ship when the chap went inside which wasn't in the original. The quality seemed a bit sharper than the original, but there is only so much they can improve on the video quality of the day.
 
It had a scene inside the ship when the chap went inside which wasn't in the original. The quality seemed a bit sharper than the original, but there is only so much they can improve on the video quality of the day.
There are three versions on the blu-ray. The one you watched is the Special Edition, which due to that scene is the worst. Roy going into the space ship, with the aliens looking in from a distance feels sinister, it makes me worry about anal probes. Spielberg cut and released that one in part to regain the rights to the film. He later did a Directors Cut which thankfully eliminates that scene and which he considers his definitive version, it’s also in the blu-ray. I still like the Theatrical Cut best though because that the one I watched about ten times at the cinema when Close Encounters first came out.

I don’t know what you mean with “a bit” sharper than the original, the film was shot on 35mm, not on video. No theatrical films were shot on video, especially not in the 70s. 35mm is actually a tad sharper than what a blu-ray is capable of. It’s just that the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond liked a look at the time, which had a slightly soft quality. I’ve watched this on my projector a few times and it looks great.

Sorry for nerding out but this is one if my favourite films of all time.:oops:
 
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It had a scene inside the ship when the chap went inside which wasn't in the original. The quality seemed a bit sharper than the original, but there is only so much they can improve on the video quality of the day.

Sounds like the Special Edition. There's a Director's Cut as well, which omits that scene, but retains some of the others added to the original release. It was shot on 35mm film though, which is higher-res than blu-ray, so the video quality is there. The FX probably need reworking though.

It's one of my favourite films, but I really wish there was a cut that omitted one line of dialogue that has bugged me for decades.

Edit: simulpost with Reno, heh
 
The FX doesn’t need reworking either, can’t stand that revisionism of replacing old school analogue effects with shiny new digital effects which Lucas is so fond of. Classic movies should look of their time. A film like Close Encounters doesn’t need CGI, it still looks great and special effects technologies of the time should be preserved.

Spielberg did that once with E.T. for the DVD release. Everybody hated the result and he junked it, never making it available for the blu-ray.
 
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The FX doesn’t need reworking either, can’t stand that revisionism of replacing old school analogue effects with shiny new digital effects which Lucas is so fond of. A film like Close Encounters doesn’t need a CGI, it still looks great and special effects technologies of the time should be preserved.

Yeah, you are right, and that was a dumb throwaway line by me. The team on Close Encounters did extraordinary work. Early ILM?

(they still need to cut that damn fool Einstein line)
 
Shazam!

Old fashioned kids superhero film with nods to Spielberg, Harry Potter, The Greatest American Hero, Big etc. Occasionally, DC can deliver.
 
Safe...Julieanne Moore is a California step mum who contracts a strange illness which nobody appears able to diagnose until she comes across a flyer at the gym. The environment appears to be to blame. She moves to a commune of others with the illness in the desert.

Mubi had it down as one of the best films of the 90s and it's really good although I kind of lost interest in the second half.

Tina Goes Shopping...Watched it on Youtube. Still very entertaining. Might watch the second one today.
 
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