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

Did you guys hear that they're actually making MOVIEs based on Battleship and Monopoly?

It worked for CLUE!

and Schindler's List too!

Clue would make sense for a movie. I'm not sure about Monopoly or Battleship though.

But what the hell....they are remaking Fame. What's next Flashdance?

Well us ATers already have movies based on Queen's Gambit and War Of The Ring.

There should definitely be a Twister movie, ideally taking place at a sorority house.

Apparently there's one on Pacman too.

Columbob wrote:

Apparently there's one on Pacman too.

They used to show "A Pacman Christmas" on TV here in Oz some time into the early 90's. One channel had their set of standard Christmas cartoons which was decided upon in 1982 and never changed for about 10 years.

Day Of The Dead (original). I've seen a lot of zed movies and continue to be a fan of the genre even though they tend to be comedies now. I've seen all of Romero's other zed movies and their remakes, including the Day remake. I had never seen this one though despite its high recommendations. Not even sure why, I just never got around to it I guess. This movie is what every other zed movie should aspire to be. I loved it from start to finish. Instant favorite.

Gary Sax wrote:

Watched Road House with the g/f last weekend in honor of Patrick Swayze's death.

Pain don't hurt.

I actually watched Red Dawn just before or just after he died (can't remember) - it wasn't as bad as I thought I remembered (all those years back), and it was good to see no punches pulled with the heroes and good looking women not all surviving and when people were shot they fucking died. Still not a top movie, but bloody top points for trying to do something different and keeping it to a plan. Now to try and get the guys at the club to play Fortress America - that hasn't happened yet.

And watch High Fidelity on cable last night. I like (a lot of) John Cusack movies and being about people looking for obscure vinyl music (me from the late-80s and 90s) it was good entertainment.
Another light hearted John Cusack movie I like to watch when it shows up, and which I'll probably be absolutely slammed about here, is Grosse Pointe Blank - Cusack and Dan Ackroyd are great and I love a lot of the 80s tracks (especially the Violent Femmes) ... oh well, we can't all be the same.

High Fidelity is one of my favorite movies.

The thing about Roadhouse that I love is that it was made near the end of the R rated action movie genre. The movie would be way worse if it wasn't R rated and didn't have some explicit and ridiculous R rated action--if made today it would tame PG 13 BS with way less gratuitous Swayze shirtless scenes.

Saw Before Night Falls with Javier Bardem last Thursday. Pretty good, moving. It does an admirable job at letting identify with a raving gay in a state that tries to be totalitarian. Bardem makes him an engaging character who is not just gay, but also funny and vain and gives a convincing descent into despair as he is in and out of jail.

His escape to the US doesn't seem to make him very happy, though. He is not a migrant but an exile.

The ending (with his death) is rather conventional, with grand vistas of Cuban landscape suggesting a spiritual home coming. Seeing him die (mostly at his own hands) is moving, although intreaguingly the don't mention him having AIDS. I was wondering what he was dying of, but maybe I'm just too dim to notice the obvious.

All in all an interesting view for me into a side of Cuban society I didn't know much about.

I just saw Doomsday yesterday. It was a science-fiction action movie by Neil Marshall, the same director that made Descent. (Descent, by the way, is a pretty good horror movie, definitely one of the best in recent years.) He also directed Dog Warriors, which is one of the greatest werewolf movies I've ever seen.

Doomsday is okay. It had a lot of action and violence, and somehow felt like a turbo-charged version of Children of Men. Mostly, it was kind of derivative of too many movies to have a personality of its own. There was a scene swiped straight out of The Warriors, with the busload of howling punks barreling down on the good guys. The movie also owed a significant debt to the first two Mad Max movies, the 28 Days Later movies, plus there was a whole medieval section of the movie. Remember that great swordfight in A Game of Thrones, the one where that lightly armored guy fights a knight in full plate? Yeah, that's kind of in here, too.

At the heart of the film is Rhona Mitra, the discount version of Kate Beckinsale. She's pretty much the same actress, only not quite as attractive, though possibly even more convincing as a stone cold killer. Overall, Doomsday holds up okay, in terms of plot, stunts, pacing, etc. A certain car chase strained credibility somewhat, but the multiple twists at the end make up for it. For F:AT folks, I definitely recommend it. For normal audiences, I would say it's just so-so.

Watched BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (LE PACT DES LOUPS) last night for the first time in a couple of years.

I _adore_ this movie, and I can't believe there are people who hate it. It's brilliant, a shouldn't-work cross between Hammer horror, a HK movie, and James Fenimore Cooper.

I love that the hero is an 18th-century naturalist with an Iroquois sidekick. I love that it's about the Beast of Gevaudan. I love that it has an anti-religious subtext. I love the fighting, I love the mix of serious French court drama with customized weapons and werewolf movie tropes.

It's such an amazing combination of high art and low trash, and the filmmakers were totally aware of that and that really captures that Hammer element of Very Serious austerity mixed with pure camp and melodrama in a way that imitators like SLEEPY HOLLOW completely missed.

It's a shame Christopher Gans hasn't done much after...SILENT HILL was his last feature, I think.

I finally got around to seeing Brotherhood of the Wolf last year. I'm glad I waited for the DVD rental, because there was a serious WTF moment late in the movie which made more sense after I saw the original version of the first fight scene in the extras.