What movies and TV shows are you watching?
What’re you watching now?
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Hamilton lived up to the hype.
Good casting, sharp lyrics and music and some very neat satirical swipes.
I particularly liked rendering George III as a psychopathic ex-boyfriend, while the whole “room where it happened” song was bang on the money.
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I’m watching this thing on the Disney thi.g called “Hamilton”.
Not sure if you guys have heard of it but it appears to be just a filmed stage musical. Quite novel in a lot of ways.
It’s about New York circa… I dunno… the 70s?
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Does it work? (Hamilton, we all know how David works)
I’m intrigued by Ben’s view of King George.
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I’m not the biggest fan of musicals but I’ll watch it later.
We could all have a sing-along.
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It took me a while to realize King George was Jonathan Groff.
Fuuuuuuuuccccck
I love Mindhunter
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I watched some Wim Wenders movies recently. The American Friend is one of my all-time favorite noirs (and an even better Ripley movie than The Talented Mr. Ripley) and Wings of Desire is very good but until now those were all I’d seen by him.
Paris, Texas – This immediately rocketed into my top ten, and put Wenders in my top ten list of directors, along with Lynch, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Kubrick, Altman, Scorsese, Claire Denis, Bergman, and Michael Mann. I think everyone should watch this movie. It’s a very simple story–a near-amnesiac man treks across America to reunite with his son, then takes the boy to find his ex-wife and the boy’s mother–that is among the most emotionally rewarding movies I’ve ever seen. It’s equal parts devastating and hopeful.
Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, and Dean Stockwell (as the drifter’s brother) deliver knockout performances, and Hunter Carson gives a strong child performance. The final half hour or so that sees Stanton and Kinski’s characters reunited is one of the most powerful sequences in film.
Alice in the Cities – The first of Wenders’s road movies, it follows Philip (Rudiger Vogler), a disaffected German travel writer in America, who meets a German woman and her 9-year-old daughter, Alice, in NYC on the eve of his flight home. The mother abandons her child on an unsuspecting Philip and he must bring her home himself. Their trip takes them from NYC to Amsterdam and then on a road trip through various German towns along the Rhine as they search for Alice’s grandmother. Paris, Texas tells a similar story better but this is still a very good, even great, movie. The child actress, Yella Rottlander, is spectacular.
Wrong Move – In many ways this is better directed than Alice in the Cities, and has even more interesting things to say about loneliness and the performative nature of identity, but it’s marred by a horrible creative choice: the decision to show a topless Nastassja Kinski, only 12-years-old at the time, attempting to seduce the main character (also played by Vogler). The scene is brief but it’s just wrong. The same scene could have been done without showing any nudity, but to make matters worse its unclear whether the main character actually sleeps with Kinski or whether the filmmakers would see that as the deeply wrong thing it would be.
Thankfully Paris, Texas takes a much more righteous stance on adult-child relationships. Stanton’s character is in his 40s and Kinski only 17 when they get together prior to the events of the movie and Wenders and writer Sam Shepard don’t flinch in detailing the toxic way in which the relationship plays out.
@Christian What do you think of Wenders? And how is he viewed in Germany–is it a case where he’s more popular abroad or is he seen like Murnau or Lang? -
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I watched Birds of Prey this evening.
Wow, that was surprisingly dull.
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I watched Pure over the last day, it’s a Channel 4 comedy/drama from last year, based on a novel of the same name about a young Scottish woman who almost uncontrollably pictures people she encounters in sexual situations, and after this happens at her parents wedding anniversary she flees to London to start a new life, hoping to figure out how to deal with these images and the anxieties they cause.
It’s billed as a comedy/drama, but I have to say I didn’t find it incredibly funny. I laughed a few times, but I’m not a huge fan of cringe humour and a lot of the jokes came from that side of the spectrum. That said the drama elements, especially the exploration of mental health is fantastic. The dialogue is well-written and the characters are very interesting, it feels quite real while some elements of the show are a bit over the top.
Definitely enjoyed it, and there’s plenty left to explore with the characters so a second series would be very welcome.
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There’s so much to unpack in this series… but maybe I should wait until more people have seen it, otherwise it’s gonna be a gigantic wall of blakced out text.
You could always start a dedicated spoiler thread if there’s spoilery stuff you want to discuss in depth.
Only if there’s interest, and judging by the lack of coments in general, either there’s not, or people haven’t watched it yet…
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Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga : Too long at two hours, but a lot of fun, and helps fill the gap left by the lack of an actual Eurovision this year, especially including Graham Norton as commentator. Glad to see Dan Stevens and Rachel McAdams continue to do more comedy.
I just watched it and dear Bob, this movie needed a judicious editor to go at it with a scissors. It’s incredibly self-indulgent and spends way too much time faffing about, especially in the middle. Which makes it an authentic Eurovision experience, I guess. (That singalong bit at the party whipped around from funny to excruciating and back at least five times as it overstayed its welcome). And the plot is basically the same as the Eurovision episode of Father Ted, but with a much bigger budget. Also, asking us to believe that the UK is going to win Eurovision any time soon at least adds such an unbelievable element to the story that it makes all the plot contrivances feel realistic by comparison.
All that said, I enjoyed it for the most part. I’m not a huge fan of Will Ferrell, but he got a few laughs out of me here, a bunch of the running gags worked well, the songs were that great Eurovision mix of good and crap (I need to check if that Belorussian entry from the semi-finals was a legit song, I really liked it!), and it takes some potshots at Americans. What’s not to love there? Though when Lars returns to Edinburgh, he probably could have just gotten a tram into town? Like the station is right beside that exit from the airport?
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The Netflixy effect has seeped everywhere.
But not Princess Mononoke. Have you watched it before? I’m very fond of Moro.
Of course I’ve seen it! I’ve seen every Ghibli movie ever at least 400 times! Basically, whenever I’m not posting, I’m watching Ghibli. Whenever anyone asks “Where’s Tim?” the answer should be “Watching Ghibli”.
But I wanted to watch this one again for reasons.
Anyway, I’m going to watch the new Spike Lee film now. Hopefully it’s about Ghibli.
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The Netflixy effect has seeped everywhere.
But not Princess Mononoke. Have you watched it before? I’m very fond of Moro.
Of course I’ve seen it! I’ve seen every Ghibli movie ever at least 400 times! Basically, whenever I’m not posting, I’m watching Ghibli. Whenever anyone asks “Where’s Tim?” the answer should be “Watching Ghibli”.
But I wanted to watch this one again for reasons.
Anyway, I’m going to watch the new Spike Lee film now. Hopefully it’s about Ghibli.
The new Spike Lee film was good. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Have you seen My Neighbor Turturro?
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I enjoyed Warrior Nun Quite a bit. It’s a bit slow to start off, but once they get rid of some unnecessary characters and tone down the awful first person narration, it feels like it finds its feet.
I liked the cast, especially the main actress who has a fun energy too her. There’s some cool revelations in the finale so I hope it gets renewed.1 user thanked author for this post.
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@Christian What do you think of Wenders? And how is he viewed in Germany–is it a case where he’s more popular abroad or is he seen like Murnau or Lang?
I love Wenders, but haven’t quite seen all of his movies. And yeah, he is very much seen as a genius film-maker here, and has been very much revered for a long time now. But I would guess that his movies are actually more successful abroad, considering that the German audience for his kind of movies is pretty small… Wings of Desire is very much a cult movie, and that means only serious cinephiles will have seen it (which goes everywhere, I suppose, it’s just that there’s more of them outside of Germany). His documentary on Pina Bausch was probably the most successful movie of his, in Germany.
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Finished The Sisters Brothers yesterday, which I’d seen the first half of a while back – not a great way to watch this kind of (or any) movie, but well. Anyway, that was a very good western.
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The Netflixy effect has seeped everywhere.
But not Princess Mononoke. Have you watched it before? I’m very fond of Moro.
Of course I’ve seen it! I’ve seen every Ghibli movie ever at least 400 times! Basically, whenever I’m not posting, I’m watching Ghibli. Whenever anyone asks “Where’s Tim?” the answer should be “Watching Ghibli”.
But I wanted to watch this one again for reasons.
Anyway, I’m going to watch the new Spike Lee film now. Hopefully it’s about Ghibli.
Where’s Tim?
He went back to his home planet
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This past weekend, I rewatched A Clockwork Orange.
It’s one of my favorite movies. It had such a nihilistic ending. It’s not a movie that could be made today or if it was, it would be so watered down and gutted that it would lose its effectiveness. It would probably end with Anthony Burgess’s original Chapter 21.
Watching it again, I have come to realize how realistic the dystopian future was. You could set it now and it would work. That’s scary.
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Watching it again, I have come to realize how realistic the dystopian future was. You could set it now and it would work. That’s scary.
Ultraviolent hat wearing hipsters drinking drug-spiked milk drinks at sex parties? I may have been to similar events but I’m not sure that would’ve been made real without the movie influence man.
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Hi Will I have looked and there’s nothing on the spam queue. It was a big issue in the early days but I think the filter has realised who all the regular posters are so there hasn’t been anything trapped in there for quite a while.
Unfortunately the board seems to randomly hit a bug sometimes and refuses to post something. It has happened to me even though I have full admin rights. The best I have is a workaround, if it fails to post pressing ‘back’ on your browser should show it again to copy to the clipboard. Log out and log back or just close the tab and reopen and it should post.
I know that’s not great and it’s frustrating if you’ve written something long but so far asking the support forums nobody has been able to find a reason or solution yet, but I’ll keep trying.
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That explains and helps a lot Gar – it is utterly random but this tells me why it is.
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I watched The Old Guard, I liked it. It’s not an all time classic but a good solid action movie with a twist (of course I knew the twist as I’ve read the comic).
Nice to see that Rucka did the screenplay himself. It followed a lot of what was in the original 6 issue mini (I haven’t read the follow-up yet) but presented a clearer plot for a one-off movie (although it’s clear they are looking at a sequel). Netflix liked to tell me it’s the #1 most watched thing in Malaysia today so seems to be doing all right.
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@Christian What do you think of Wenders? And how is he viewed in Germany–is it a case where he’s more popular abroad or is he seen like Murnau or Lang?
I love Wenders, but haven’t quite seen all of his movies. And yeah, he is very much seen as a genius film-maker here, and has been very much revered for a long time now. But I would guess that his movies are actually more successful abroad, considering that the German audience for his kind of movies is pretty small… Wings of Desire is very much a cult movie, and that means only serious cinephiles will have seen it (which goes everywhere, I suppose, it’s just that there’s more of them outside of Germany). His documentary on Pina Bausch was probably the most successful movie of his, in Germany.
Cool, I’m glad he’s big in Germany, at least with the art film crowd. He’s a great director, and with cinematographer Robby Muller has made some of the best-looking movies of all time (especially whenever they filmed a city). I haven’t watched any of his documentaries yet, though; I’ve been making my way through his features.
A couple days ago I had the apartment to myself so I watched his 5-hour sci-fi road epic Until the End of the World. Set in 1999 (this was the near future when the film came out in 1991), it’s about a restless party girl named Claire (Solveig Dommartin from Wings of Desire) who falls in love with a scientist named Sam (William Hurt) and follows him around the world to protect him from the bounty hunters and government agents on his trail. She herself is being followed by her novelist ex-boyfriend (Sam Neill, also the narrator) and a private detective she betrayed (Rudiger Vogler).
Over the course of the film they move from France to Germany to Portugal to Russia to China to Japan and then to America, before finally ending up in the Australian Outback where Sam’s parents (Max von Sydow & Jeanne Moreau) run a research lab in an aboriginal village. As this is happening, the world lives in terror of a malfunctioning Indian nuclear satellite that could trigger nuclear apocalypse.
The reason Sam is being chased is that his father has developed a technology that can record images from people’s brains. Sam has been traveling the globe to record messages from his blind mother’s friends and family so that she can see them for the first time in her life. Sam and his family are worried that governments will want to use the technology to rip thoughts out of people’s minds.
The last half of the film is set entirely in the Outback village, where a radio blackout causes everyone to fear civilization has been wiped out in a nuclear accident. All of the main characters, along with one of the bounty hunters hired to find Sam, gather in the village, where past animosity and rivalries are forgotten and new friendships are forged. There’s recurring scenes of the outsiders and villagers coming together to play music, the band growing bigger every time.
I think Until the End of the World is the ultimate movie. It brings together people and cultures from around the world and shows how art bridges differences. It finds new, breathtaking ways to photograph cities and nature all over the globe. It has a seriously stacked soundtrack–Talking Heads, U2, Can, Peter Gabriel, Patti Smith, Neneh Cherry, Julee Cruise, R.E.M., Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Depeche Mode–and threads the songs perfectly into each scene. It’s epic in scale but still manages to tell a deeply personal story. And with the mind-recording device at the center of the plot, it’s able to comment on cinema–and art–itself.
After Sam and his father succeed in transmitting Sam’s memories to his mother’s mind, they start recording their dreams. Sam, his father, and Claire become obsessed with viewing their own dreams, breaking away from the makeshift community that has formed around them under the shadow of possible nuclear holocaust. They stop eating and taking care of themselves and wander out into the desert holding the screens that contain their dreams. It’s only by the intervention of others that they survive and are able to kick their addiction to dreams and images.
Cinema speaks to us in images; it’s a subconscious experience as much as an intellectual one. Great films, and great art in general, always work on deeper levels that we can’t fully comprehend. We make art to try and understand what’s inside us and we seek out art for the same reason. It’s an inherently connective act, and an introspective one. But there’s always the frustration within the artist that they’ve failed to communicate all of what they were trying to say. Visual art like cinema has an added frustration because the images it consists of are at odds with the language the artist has to describe them. At its heart, Until the End of the World is a work about the conflict in the artist between the world they want to communicate with and the murky subconscious realms they have to mine in order to do that.
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Looks like you found a better workaround than mine, glad you got it back.
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^This was the post I was looking for. I was able to find it in my activity tab on my profile and then I copied and pasted it in a new post.
It was worth the effort.
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Just watched the Artemis Fowl movie on Disney+. What a mess.
There are some fun concepts in here that could have made for a good kids fantasy movie, but the plot is all over the place – ill-explained and often doesn’t make any sense, with things happening for no real reason – and it suffers from that franchise-starter-syndrome which means there’s a shit-ton of boring exposition early on and then nothing really gets resolved.
Avoid.
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I watched The Old Guard, I liked it. It’s not an all time classic but a good solid action movie with a twist (of course I knew the twist as I’ve read the comic).
Nice to see that Rucka did the screenplay himself. It followed a lot of what was in the original 6 issue mini (I haven’t read the follow-up yet) but presented a clearer plot for a one-off movie (although it’s clear they are looking at a sequel). Netflix liked to tell me it’s the #1 most watched thing in Malaysia today so seems to be doing all right.
Yeah it was solid… I hadn’t read the comic so I went in blind… it’s not earth-shatering cinema, but it’s a good watch. I’m always up for some Charlize Theron action anyways…
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Cinema speaks to us in images; it’s a subconscious experience as much as an intellectual one. Great films, and great art in general, always work on deeper levels that we can’t fully comprehend. We make art to try and understand what’s inside us and we seek out art for the same reason. It’s an inherently connective act, and an introspective one. But there’s always the frustration within the artist that they’ve failed to communicate all of what they were trying to say. Visual art like cinema has an added frustration because the images it consists of are at odds with the language the artist has to describe them. At its heart, Until the End of the World is a work about the conflict in the artist between the world they want to communicate with and the murky subconscious realms they have to mine in order to do that.
I remember watching Until the End of the World when it came out. Must’ve been a shorter cut, though – I watched it at an open air cinema, and I would’ve remembered if it’d been 5 hours. I didn’t remember any of the plot you related, but I do remember liking it very much (this is when I was like sixteen, so it must’ve been a bit of a strange experience to me, even though I’d seen a few arthouse movies at the time).
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Cinema speaks to us in images; it’s a subconscious experience as much as an intellectual one. Great films, and great art in general, always work on deeper levels that we can’t fully comprehend. We make art to try and understand what’s inside us and we seek out art for the same reason. It’s an inherently connective act, and an introspective one. But there’s always the frustration within the artist that they’ve failed to communicate all of what they were trying to say. Visual art like cinema has an added frustration because the images it consists of are at odds with the language the artist has to describe them. At its heart, Until the End of the World is a work about the conflict in the artist between the world they want to communicate with and the murky subconscious realms they have to mine in order to do that.
I remember watching Until the End of the World when it came out. Must’ve been a shorter cut, though – I watched it at an open air cinema, and I would’ve remembered if it’d been 5 hours. I didn’t remember any of the plot you related, but I do remember liking it very much (this is when I was like sixteen, so it must’ve been a bit of a strange experience to me, even though I’d seen a few arthouse movies at the time).
Yeah the theatrical version was 2.5 hrs, then Wenders released a director’s cut that was the full 4 hours, 45 minutes. That version was recently remastered in 4k with a bunch of other Wenders movies. Harvard was screening them and I went to see The American Friend with my dad. Very underrated movie, at least in the States. It’s as good as any of the great neo-noirs of the 70s and 80s.
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I think Until the End of the World is the ultimate movie.
I’ve never seen the film, but I wore out my CD of the soundtrack for it. Almost 30 years later, it still sounds fresh and relevant.
Talking Heads: “Sax and Violins”
Julee Cruise: “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears”
Neneh Cherry: “Move With Me (Dub)”
Crime and the City Solution: “The Adversary”
Lou Reed: “What’s Good”
Can: “Last Night Sleep”
R.E.M.: “Fretless”
Elvis Costello: “Days”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World”
Patti Smith and Fred “Sonic” Smith: “It Takes Time”
Depeche Mode: “Death’s Door”
Jane Siberry and k.d. lang: “Calling All Angels”
T-Bone Burnett: “Humans from Earth”
Daniel Lanois: “Sleeping in the Devil’s Bed”
U2: “Until the End of the World”
plus musical interludes by Graeme Revell1 user thanked author for this post.
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Snowpiercer. Episode 10 (Which I am assuming is the season finale).
Look, for a while this was just a fairly casual watch on a Monday night while I cooked dinner because otherwise I would have to watch the news (and fuck the news gets depressing).
Turns out, towards the “Tail” end of the season (see what I did there? I’m so clever) the show gets pretty compelling. I’d say you can pretty comfortably snooze the first half of the season which is just world-building and watch the last half.
Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs are wonderful.
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I just watched The Old Guard as well and I really enjoyed it. It’s paint by numbers, but the artist put a hell of a lot of effort into making the colours in the painting look vibrant and fresh. I don’t know where I’m going with this metaphor. Suffice it to say that while the story is linear and there are very few surprises, the dialogue and performances really elevate that side of the movie, and the action setpieces are all fantastic. It’s one of those action movies that knows exactly what it wants to deliver, and does so almost flawlessly.
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Me and a buddy watched Birdman together via Discord. Man, it’s such a tour de force. Forth time around, and it still gets me all fired up.
I wonder if @TMasters has seen it.
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Harvey Birdman?
Yeah I’ve seen it – what do you think inspired me to become a lawyer in the first place?
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I just watched The Old Guard as well and I really enjoyed it. It’s paint by numbers, but the artist put a hell of a lot of effort into making the colours in the painting look vibrant and fresh. I don’t know where I’m going with this metaphor. Suffice it to say that while the story is linear and there are very few surprises, the dialogue and performances really elevate that side of the movie, and the action setpieces are all fantastic. It’s one of those action movies that knows exactly what it wants to deliver, and does so almost flawlessly.
I’m happy for Rucka after his Whiteout adaptation was a bit Shiteout.
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That was exactly the clip!
I had this whole speech about how I may be an asshole but I am not quite that level of asshole. But who am I kidding? You all know me.
I’m off to repossess a bunch of schools
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I was trying to remember what movies I saw this year before lockdown started, and I can’t think of any.
This means that as it’s possible I will never go to the cinema again, the last movie of my entire life will be Rise of Skywalker.
Now I feel really depressed
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I was trying to remember what movies I saw this year before lockdown started, and I can’t think of any.
This means that as it’s possible I will never go to the cinema again, the last movie of my entire life will be Rise of Skywalker.
Now I feel really depressed
I missed seeing Rise of Skywalker on the big screen. The last movie I saw was Joker.
You’ll have the cinema again. In the meantime, why not pick something for us to watch here? Would you like to watch Paddington?
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