What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Re-watched The Thing last night. Fantastic as always! It makes me want to at least look into the Thing board game.

repoman wrote: Re-watched Breaking Away again this morning. It's available on HBO Go.

Man I really like this movie. So much of it just exudes authenticity. That existence in a nowhere town at the time of life after high school where so many think "Now what..." as life doesn't automatically go in the direction you wish it would. Being filmed entirely in Bloomington Indiana certainly adds to that gritty feeling of actually being there. The run down cars, the run down houses, the run down people...except for the bright shiny ones at the local campus of Indiana University.

Breaking Away is a fine movie that I need to watch again. I saw it once as a teenager, and that movie caused a close friend of mine to seriously get into biking. His favorite scene was when the main character is fixing his bike. I saw it in again as a freshman at Indiana University, in the the student union where the brawl breaks out in the bowling alley in the movie. The movie does a great job of capturing both the beauty of the campus and the grit of the rest of the town. When I went there, there were about 33,000 students and 100,000 non-students in Bloomington. I had a blue collar upbringing, so I could strongly relate to both parts of the father-son dynamic.

That Little 500 bike race was a really big deal back then. It was typically held right near the end of the spring semester, and so was the last major party weekend on a hard-drinking campus. The greek system was a high-profile part of campus life, and they fielded nearly 100% of the bike teams. When I was a freshman, a group of guys in my section (Rollins-Dewey) of the Wright Quad dormitory formed their own team and trained very seriously. They biked in their dorm rooms on rollers, and they spent both winter break and spring break riding in Florida. They competed and won in the spring, and for years after that, as The Cutters.

Looking briefly at the wikipedia entry on the race, it appears that the Cutters have won more than any other team, though their rivals from Dodds House (also in Wright Quad) managed to win a couple. Campus always went wild when the Cutters won, because there was a lot of resentment of the frats.

I didn't realize that the Little 500 was a real thing. Makes me like the movie even more.

I hated Kong, which is sad because Peter Jackson's Kong is one of my favorite movies.

I found Valerian to be tons of fun, however.

Is it weird that I have William Friedkin's coffee mug from when he was on TCM? My wife was on the shoot, brought the mug home and said here, William Friedkin used this.

Anyway, after years of never getting to it, I watched his 1977 picture Sorceror. Roy Scheider is in it, at the peak of his awesomeness. It's a remake of Clouzot's The Wages of Fear so it is about down and out scoundrels transporting cases of unstable nitroglycerin through the jungle to cap a burning oil well. Lots of great tension, suspense and drama including a great scene where they are moving the trucks over a rickety rope bridge in a torrential thunderstorm.

It's an interesting film. Structurally, it takes a LONG time to get to the central action. This is a script that spends almost an hour developing the characters, atmosphere, and situation. It has all of the clinched-up grittiness and moral uncertainty you want from a 1970s Hollywood movie. But it isn't ever spoken of in that hallowed pantheon of Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, The Conversation...or the Exorcist and The French Connection.

The thing is, it really plays out more like a Herzog film- specifically Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. The krautrock score (Tangerine Dream!) exacerbates this It's demanding in a similar way.
It _is_ a thriller, but "slow burn" is putting it lightly. It's also grimmer and more existential than many of its peers.

The title is also misleading. The idea was for it to resonant with The Exorcist, there is a truck with that name in it, and something-something about the Miles Davis record being an influence or whatever, but it is almost hilariously misleading. There is nothing to do with "Sorceror" anything in the film- literally or thematically.

It was also handicapped by having the misfortune to open just a couple of weeks after Star Wars. By the time it hit theaters, virtually no one apart from critics was going to see this kind of film. Summer of '77 belonged to Star Wars, period, and everything changed almost overnight. Had Sorceror come out a few months ahead, it might have been a bigger success and it might have a higher status than it does today.

Definitely worth watching, and definitely a very good film. I prefer it to the original somewhat. It would make for a great double feature with Runaway Train.

I skipped Sorcerer back in the day because a friend warned me that there wasn't any supernatural element in it. I finally got around to seeing it 20 years later, and found it to be a really intense experience. I bought the soundtrack when I came across it in a discount bin, and still play that during the occasional rpg session to weird the players out.

Not Sure wrote:

RAF Museum on this very thing. This was well drilled into me by Derek Robinson's Piece of Cake, probably the best WWII novel I've read (and they made a nice 6-part Masterpiece Theater out of it, but not a big Hollywood movie).

Piece of Cake is a fantastic book. I read it a few years ago and still think about it. Really makes the point about war being random and unsentimental.

Sorceror is awesome, and the soundtrack immense. Tangerine Dream were the shit in the 70s. If you want to freak your RPG group out more Shellhead you should pick up Rubycon, Phaedra, Stratosfear, Cylone, all that 70s Virgin era stuff they did. Alpha Centauri and particularly Atem ("Wahn" the track that has the primeval caveman type chanting) were great. If you enjoyed the Sorceror theme (and I guess you've certainly heard "Thief", check out also "The Keep" soundtrack.) Of course, by the time they got to Airwulf and all that stuff ("Le Parc") it had moved well away from the ambient atmospheric mind bending stuff

Yeah, I love Sorcerer and Wages of Fear. Both great films.

I watched Jupiter Ascending the other night...and I kinda loved it.

^^love is a strong word, but me too! Search back in this thread ages ago. The script was bad but watching a non-sequel sci Fi movie with engaging visuals that wasn't DEADLY SERIOUS BUSINESS was refreshing.

Egg Shen wrote: I watched Jupiter Ascending the other night...and I kinda loved it.

Me too. By the end of it, beyond all the rather dumb plot devices, I was convinced that this was the best sci fi movie made to that point visually. It sets the bar, imnsho, for all other sci fi flicks in that department.

If somebody could make a version without the bees and some of the hokey lines and romantic elements, this would be a rather good hour long sci fi short film.

Jupiter Ascending is a mess, but it is also tragically misunderstood. Totally singular and quite original. I kind of love it too.

I watched Shin Godzilla. I think it may be the best Godzilla movie ever made.

It's very much an update of the '54 film in that G embodies national tragedy. But in this, he kind of embodies ALL of Japan's national tragedies including very specifically Fukushima and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami...and also Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The really interesting thing is that about 90 percent of the movie is politicians bureaucrating around in offices, makeshift command centers and so forth. They talk about the yen falling, the PM's line of succession, unilateral international responses, getting on the phone with chemical manufacturers and shipping agencies...I mean, when they come up with a plan it actually shows them trying to figure out how to make and transport what they need.

It sounds really boring...but the direction is brisk and it's actually sort of riveting. It's a pretty realistic depiction of how the Japanese government (or any other) would handle a Kaiju attack. There would be red tape, committees, confusion, experts brought on to counter agency ignorance, difficult decisions about population and infrastructure, logistical and economic concerns...all of this is actually shown, and it is all very much not Hollywood.

Also, it's not about a hero. There is no misfit, outcast, exceptional person or persons that save the day. It's just government officials doing the right thing and coming together as a nation to beat G- before the international community (led by the US of course) steps in with quite literallly the nuclear option.

G looks AMAZING. He goes through a couple of changes, and each one is WEIRD and surreal. The destruction is the best ever, but it's also more realistic and horrifying. There is no Jet Jaguar or Baragon that shows up. It's just this monolithic icon of devasatation plowing through. He looks damaged, mutated, and sickly. His powers are uncontrollable and bizarre. There is nothing cute or endearing about him. And when he bleeds...GIGANTIC blood falls from the sky.

And the ending...the way they beat him is crazy as is the final outcome but the last shot, which you see literally just long enough to make it out...WOW. It opens up 100 questions. It's sick and disturbing and also awesome.

Very highly recommended- it's a serious modern Kaiju picture that fees relevant and resonant, it's not just the usual fun filled Toho monster bash and it is better than the 2014 US Godzilla. Side note, the director is Hideki Anno- Neon Genesis Evangelion.

I bought it on Amazon Video and accidentally got one that was dubbed without a Japanese track/subs, which pissed me off at first but the dubbing is very good and given the amount of dialogue I wound up kind of glad.

I enjoyed Jupiter Ascending too.