QI Films.

[efros]

A pity to start this thread in our new home with a negative. 

The Union: Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry

Currently has a 5.5/10 on IMDB, I'd be ok with that rating in fact a little lower would be more OK. Not a film I'd go out of my way to watch again. It is streaming on N'flix and I'm only watching that as it came free with my current phone contract. To be fair it is a fairly inoffensive piece that passed the time with a modicum of enjoyment.

Some enjoyable moments, but large plot holes and too much money spent on locations rather than script. Lorraine Bracco has a cameo as Wahlberg's mother and it took me a while to figure out who the familiar looking woman was. It was also curious to see that Wahlberg got a higher billing than Berry did, she really hasn't fared too well of late.

[jenny]

We watched that on Saturday and I'd pretty much agree with your assessment Efros. It was mildly entertaining and that's about as far as I'd go.

[tetsabb]

By a strange coincidence, I was just thinking of starting a film thread, as we have seen a couple in the last week that I thought worth mentioning

Songs my Brother Taught Me. 2015
Episodes from the lives of a brother and sister living on the Pine Ridge Reservation. 
Slow-moving, with not much happening, yet utterly gripping and moving.
Some of the short incidents are too short so occasionally hard to follow, but there is a gradual build-up of emotion.
I realised at the end why so much of tge feel of it was familiar: it was created and directed by Chloe Zhao, who was responsible for the amazing Nomadland.

Riders of Justice 2020
Danish thriller, starring Mads Mikklesen, as a military officer who is called back from a distant posting due to the death of his wife in a train accident.... or was it?
A survivor approaches him to help prove it was anything but an accident, with tge help of his hacker friends.
Little clues and coincidences and chains of events lead you one way and another, and raise questions about fate and choices.

Utterly gripping, with moments of humour darker than your average black hole.
Special mention to Andrea Heicke Gaderberg, who plays the teenage daughter: excellent performance

This was on Channel 4 , in Danish with subtitles. Occasionally you read the English, and hear the Danish. More than once it sounded similar to an English phrase.  We have learned that the Danish for 'fucking' as in 'this fucking car won't start' appears to be.... 'fucking'
😉

[suze]

Oh yes!

Should you ever need a lesson in Danish swearing, this song by a Danish woman called Anna David will provide it.  Despite being sung in Danish, NSFW I suppose. 

Lest you were wondering, du har pisset mig af also means exactly what you thought it did.

[crissdee]

Other than something to do with micturition, it suggests nothing to me...

[suze]

It means "you have pissed me off".  The pronoun mig (me) is pronounced like English "my".

[crissdee]

That makes sense, I should have seen that myself, but I am currently much occupied with my own troubles....

[jenny]

We watched a movie last night called Passengers, with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. The story is about a spaceship carrying many many passengers to colonize a new world. The journey takes 120 years so the passengers are all put into hibernation, expecting to be woken a month before they arrive. However, en route the spaceship is hit by a large series of rocks which damage its shield and damage the computers that run the ship, and one of the first things to happen as part of an eventual cascade of disasters is that one passenger is woken after only thirty years. The only "person" he can talk to is a robot bartender (played by Martin Sheen) and he is almost losing his mind when he sees through one of the hibernation pods another (female) passenger, with whom he falls in love. He is a mechanic, and he figures out how to jinx her pod and wake her up. The story continues from there. It wasn't a particularly successful movie at the box office, but we enjoyed it.

[Bondee]

I finally got round to watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Almost every scene had a Mario Bros. reference that had me pointing at the screen and (silently) yelling "Oh! Oh! That's from <insert game here>!"

One particular scene gave a massive nod to the history of the company that gave us the Mario Bros. It depicted a map of Brooklyn and two visible street names were Hanafuda Avenue and 1889th Street. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a company that produced hanafuda playing cards.

It was an entertaining 90 minutes for a Nintendo fanboy like me.

[suze]

I'm guessing that the movie doesn't make any nods to pre-cooked rice or to "love hotels". Those two things were less successful parts of the Nintendo corporate history.

[celebaelin]

Kind of tempted by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - it would be my first trip to the cinema in a few years.  I'll wait until I'm further recovered though because coughing and snivelling throughout doesn't sound like much fun for anyone.

[Leith]

Since there's a third installment out, and I enjoyed the first, I thought I'd get round to watching A Quiet Place Part II.

So good. Proper nail-biting thriller, just like its predecessor.

[jenny]

I liked that one too - there's also a prequel available on streaming, but I haven't seen that yet.

We watched a movie last night called "A Haunting in Venice", in which Kenneth Branagh played Poirot and Tina Fey played Ariadne Oliver. Despite the fact it had two good actors in the lead parts and was filmed in Venice, it really wasn't worth watching.

[crissdee]

Finally got around to watching "Valkyrie", which has been sitting in my DVD box for some time.

First class film all round. Excellent cinematography, making wartime Berlin look permanently gloomy and foreboding, and nary a wasted frame in the whole film. Every single second of it seemed to move the plot forward to some extent, with no unnecessary romantic interludes. Surprising number of relatively small British players (Eddie Izzard, Ian McNeice, Tom Hollander, Kevin McNally), all of whom did sterling work.

[efros]

The plot of this film makes me want to watch it, even though I have a distinct feeling of having already seen it.

www.imdb.com/title/tt2397535/plotsummary/

[jenny]

I'll give that one a miss I think.

We watched the 2024 movie of Salem's Lot last night. Not bad, but not as good as the book.

[tetsabb]

We watched Boss Level a few days ago.
A guy wakes up and is killed. 
He wakes up again and is killed again.
He has to work out what is happening  and keeps surviving longer.
Fast-paced  terrific fun, with some very neat self deprecating humour.

[ali]

Oct 6, 2024 14:14:31 GMT efros said:

The plot of this film makes me want to watch it, even though I have a distinct feeling of having already seen it.

www.imdb.com/title/tt2397535/plotsummary/

I haven't seen the film, but it is based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story  called " '—All You Zombies—' " that I first read back in the '70s (conceivably the '60s, but I don't actually remember). The plot summary follows the original pretty accurately, except that the story ends with the protagonist (i.e. everyone who appears in the story) denying the reality of everyone who's not him.

[suze]

Oct 6, 2024 18:02:40 GMT tetsabb said:

A guy wakes up and is killed. 
He wakes up again and is killed again.
He has to work out what is happening  and keeps surviving longer.
Fast-paced  terrific fun, with some very neat self deprecating humour.

That actually sounds rather like an episode of The Avengers which we saw in an idle hour a few weeks ago!

[tetsabb]

Nowt new under the sun...

[celebaelin]

Not to mention Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat (2014 - Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt); quite a good film IMO.

[alexanderhoward]

I'd like to see Megalopolis - it has to be on the big screen. I can't see anywhere showing it on Saturday though - there are a few reluctant weekday showings. Cinemas don't think audiences are interested. Maybe it isn't what turn-your-brain-off viewers like these days, but come on cinemas - it is by Francis Ford Actual Coppola and so is a major event.

[tetsabb]

One review of Megalopolis said something to the effect that it is a trainwreck  where the train had come off the tracks, turned on it's roof  and then set fire to itself. 
We are still quite tempted to go and see it in the cinema...

[jenny]

A friend of mine has just recommended a movie called White Bird, that is on this week (possibly has Helen Mirren in it) - might go and see that one.

[Leith]

I saw The Outrun over the weekend - based on Amy Liptrot's memoir of reconnecting with her Orkney homeland while battling alcoholism. Saoirse Ronan plays a fictionalised version of the author, and does so very convincingly.

The movie inevitably has to condense some of the themes explored in depth in the book to more symbolic episodes but manages an affecting portrayal of an attempt to pull a meaningful life from the wreckage.

[jenny]

We haven't got a thread for plays, and possibly the incidence of play-goers wanting to record their responses is fairly low, so I'm putting mine here.

Woodsman and I went to see a play called Conscience at the Portland Stage Company on Sunday. It was about a Maine senator called Margaret Chase Smith, of whom probably not many Brits have heard but she's pretty famous here in Maine. She's famous partly for being the first woman to serve in both Houses of Congress, and mainly for being the woman being the first senator to publicly criticise Senator Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare of the 1950s. She was also the longest-serving Republican woman in the Senate until Susan Collins (also R and from Maine) was elected for a fifth term.

The play was gripping, not just because of how clear it was what a big decision she made to publicly oppose this awful man, and the effect that opposition had on her life and career , but because of the parallels in today's world. I found myself thinking of Liz Cheney and Lisa Murkowski's public opposition to Trump, and also of the nature of that party's clinging to demagogues. I kept hearing little gasps and murmurs from the audience as things came up that were clearly parallels while also being historically accurate. 

I don't suppose this play will be staged in the UK and probably not filmed either. But it should be seen more widely outside Maine.

[alexanderhoward]

Megalopolis - I saw it last night. It is fair to say that my wife and I had different reactions to it.

I found it a glorious feast of the senses. The story was odd and disjoined, but so is life, and from where I was sitting, with the giant screen filling my consciousness that did not matter at all - it was a spectacle. The themes and styles were explicitly a mixture of the last days of the Roman Republic in Modern New York, which no one but Coppola could have achieved so well. The characters are numerous and nuanced. It combined Livy, Shakespeare, Rand and Coppola. All the modern and historical references, the subtleties and the unspoken subplots would take a thesis to explore. The central character, Caesar Catalina, in name and roles, combines very different contemporaries, and towards you end you realise who is the voice of the director, and it is not who you think. I will just say that the critics are wrong, and this was a magnificent film, but that said everyone will see it differently.

[jenny]

We rewatched (in my case - first time in his) Silence of the Lambs last night. Still an excellent movie.

[tetsabb]

Did Woodsman enjoy it?

[jenny]

He did!