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

Do we have a separate thread to discuss stand-up, or do we usually do it here?

No, should be a separate thread. We have to be careful not to get political though.

Could start in off topic land. Maybe I'll do that. Hard for it not to get political if you're picking the right comics.

I think off-topic land got nuked by Shellie in the recent revamp. I can't find it anywhere.

I don't miss it. We can probably talk about Stand-up in the Cantina or something.

Brian Regan is still my fave

I made it, muahaha.

therewillbe.games/forum/off-topic/205779...-are-you-laughing-at

When you create a thread you can still make it there.

CranBerries wrote:

I finally Redboxed Mission Impossible: Motorcycles in Paris. Or maybe it should be called, Mission Impossible: the beatification of Ethan Hunt. Or Mission Impossible: Golden Goose surgery.

I 'saw' that in the theater. I'm not sure what possessed me to do this (thought I was dying of thirst, whatever), but I bought the 55-gallon sized soft drink, and drank it all in like 5 minutes while the previews were on. I couldn't tell you what that movie was about, because I then had to run to the can six or seven times. So I guess I should hit a Redbox to rent it and find out what all the hubbub is about.

I enjoyed Bandersnatch, and appreciated the volume of different clips they made. I also liked the quality of life stuff like making it easy to view alternate paths.

As for a Black Mirror episode.... it is probably one of my least favorite. I just didn't find it impactful.

For some reason I went to Netflix last night at 10 pm and started watching "A Bridge Too Far," which is about Operation Market Garden in World War II. I quit after about an hour and fell asleep, then woke up at 4:30 a.m. for some reason and watched the rest. The movie feels like it is six hours long. I'm putting off cutting and installing the floor for our bathroom, after having spent about two weeks off and on installing bracing between the joists that we really didn't need, because we're putting in linoleum and not tile.

Roger Ebert wrote,

" 'A Bridge Too Far' is such an exercise in wretched excess, such a mindless series of routine scenes, such a boringly violent indulgence in all the blood and guts and moans they could find, that by the end we're prepared to speculate that maybe Levine went two or even three bridges too far. The movie's big and expensive and filled with stars, but it's not an epic. It's the longest B-grade war movie ever made."

The movie came out in 1977, and stars literally everyone, and is about five hours long. Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Elliot Gould, Liv Ullmann, Sean Connery, etc. I had seen it about 15 times growing up. I was 11 when it came out, and it must have played on TV a lot. I vividly remember the lunatics in the woods scene, and the theme song. Seeing it now, having played a few war games, made me aware of their supply line problems immediately. Seeing it as a 52 year old adult, I was aware that their tidy plans were going to be blown to hell, because tidy plans always are. I identified most with the Polish general played by Gene Hackman, who said, "When someone decides to play the war games, everyone dies." Anyway, it was good, sort of, to relive part of my wasted youth. The movie was panned just for the sheer expense, $27 million at the time, but that comes to only $83-116 million in today's dollars. By comparison, Into the Spider Verse cost $90 million.

I like the soundtrack to A Bridge Too Far.

Me too, I've been playing it on repeat on our Echo. It was written by John Addison, who was there.

I showed my girlfriend the classic Satoshi Kon anime film, Perfect Blue. It had been a while since I had seen it, and I actually forgot just how fucked up some parts of it are. It's from 1997, so discussion of the "internet" is a new thing in the film.

I think this is the first full anime film my girlfriend had seen, and she was really surprised at how detailed and in-depth it was. I told her that Satoshi Kon makes legit movies that just happen to be animated; they are not junk cartoons.

This movie holds up, and will probably shock you. I warn you, there is intense violence, and sexual assault. The plot centers around a pop idol who ditches her successful career to become an actress and a model. This upsets some people, and she soon finds herself being stalked. From there, things spiral out of control.

Satoshi Kon was such a talent...if he hadn’t have left us too early, I think he could have really transformed animation. There still isn’t anyone doing anything like what he was doing. He could have been the Hitchcock of animated films. I don’t think we ever got his masterpiece, sadly.

Every Satashi Kon film is a masterpiece.

Two movies this weekend.

The first was The Sisters Brothers, which I somehow never heard of prior to watching it. It's a western from 2018 where John C. Reilly and Joaquin Pheonix play a couple of brothers with the last name Sisters. They're assassins and work with Jake Gyllenhaal as well. The violence was quick and intense (often occurring just off camera), and it had a bit of an oddball ending, but I enjoyed it. Love seeing JCR in a serious role.

The next one was Leave No Trace, another weird one where Ben Foster (one of my favorite actors) and his daughter live off the grid. It's about loneliness, depression, PTSD, and trying to force others to be something they're not. It was a great display of acting but the story wasn't that interesting by the mid-way point and the ending really bothered me.

Escape Room is probably a C, C+ film. The actual escape room elements are more than a bit farcical but manage to evoke some genuine sense of urgency and fear. Thankfully, these compose the bulk of the movie. The flash-forward beginning is a tiresome, cliched misstep, and the ending is rubbish, but the parts in between are marginally worth it. See it, don't see it--this one's on you.