Film/Video Discussion Thread - The Bear and Badger

regmcfly

Getting an X in the UK and a PG in the USA is some Taken shit

nick_md

Did it get an X? I would've thought that was discontinued by then.

regmcfly

November 1982, same year Poltergeist came out, saw the change to 18.

g.man

It was one of the last big X cert movies. 18 certificate was introduced just a couple of months later.

g.man

I remember seeing Poltergeist in the Odeon in Leicester Square when it was first released.
Four of us had piled down to London in a tiny hatchback, to see Neil Young at Wembley. We had no money, and slept in the car at Watford Gap services overnight. In the afternoon, it started pissing down, so the driver, who was the only one of us that was well flush, paid us all in to see Poltergeist just to get out of the fecking rain. Good times.

ShabbyMcCrabby

Tempy wrote:

Kow wrote:

Rewatched Poltergeist for the first time in decades. It hasn't aged badly really, apart from one or two moments of dodgy animation. I always thought it was a Spielberg film but he's only credited with the story, not even writing. I was surprised to see it was Tobe Hooper that directed. Anyway it's not remotely scary - more of a typical Spielberg film really.

Annecdotal evidence suggests that Spielberg did a lot of the work. It's one of my all time favourite films, for all its failings it has some amazing atmosphere, some brilliant special effects, and one of the best "it's not over" moments ever.

After watching Salem's Lot I really don't think Hooper had it in him to make something like Poltergeist without some heavy involvement from Berg.

tin_robot

Debated whether to put this into film or TV, but opted for film in the end...

Anyway. I watched Don Hertzfeldt's latest over the weekend. World of Tomorrow, Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime. (Not the punchiest title, but it makes sense once you've watched the film.)

It's a stand alone story - although those that have watched episodes one and two will arguably get more from it as there are various connections between them.

It's absolutely brilliant. Like the first two, it contains more solid SciFi ideas than most fully fledged SciFi movies. This one's longer than the other two, but whilst epic in scope it's still only about half an hour. It is both hilarious and tragic in roughly equal measure. Whilst it lacks the cute child protagonist of previous episodes, it does offer star/time crossed lovers as well as the long time Hertzfeldt staple of grown men going "Aaargnngrhghh" a lot.

I recommend it a lot, with the only downside being that it costs about a fiver to rent - which is quite a bit for 30 minutes. On the other hand Disney are asking £20 to watch their creatively pointless Mulan remake, whilst this is a fiver to an independent filmmaker to keep doing his stuff. So, yeah, if you can afford it, do it.

poprock

Outstanding. Thanks Tin.

ZMM

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

ZMM wrote:

Hmm most new 4k releases are rarely under £20, so for 3 films at release, £75 doesn't seem that bad to me? If £105 is the RRP then yes that would be way too much. I just ordered The Matrix and A Few Good Men on 4k in a 2 for £30 HMV deal, along with the first Men In Black on 4k that was £6.99. Excited to watch them all! Apparently they've got rid of the horrible green hues from The Matrix, and A Few Good Men is one of my all time fave movies.

Does it cost more to release a movie in a 4k format? That much more? Or do they think people with 4k rigs actually want to pay more - in a sadistic sense, it makes them feel special?

I dunno, blu-rays used to be £20 each when they first came out, so did DVDs. So did VHS (probably, I don't remember).

Kow

Back in the 80s a new release vhs cost up to 70 or 80 quid. That's why everyone rented them and most rental places made copies that they could also rent out.

hylian_elf

Yeah I remember seeing Predator at my local Co-op for £85 and thinking WTF.

ZMM

but at the time it must have been amazing, like wow, a movie you can own and watch any time you want, revolutionary!

Kow

Yeah, it was. I saw Clash of the Titans at a friend's house in 1982. The parents had rented the player and the tape for his birthday and pausing it for cake was amazing.

LivDiv

VHS tapes were definitely more expensive than modern media. People's libraries exploded with DVD.
Tapes were more like cart games, you had a few and lent them around or went to people's houses to watch/play them.

As late as Cribs was on MTV I remember it being a big deal that Hugh Heffer had this massive movie library on tape and his son "managed" the collection like some librarian.
I probably have more movies on my HDD now.

poprock

I won a copy of The Hidden (C-tier sci-fi I weirdly liked) on VHS in a mail-in magazine competition. It arrived with the £79 price tag still on it.

RamSteelwood

i'd never considered or known the cost of vhs movies back in the 80s, but now i think on I don't think we owned any bought movies back then, just some blank tapes that we recorded stuff off the telly. not sure i owned any proper vhs until buying the starwars remastered releases in the mid 90s...

LivDiv

I think we had maybe 10 VHS movies.
I can name most tapes we had, DVDs impossible too many.

I_R

My memory is that were two distinct phases of buying VHS. Early on, you just didn't. The rental shops could sell them, but they cost a fortune. Supermarkets and the the like did sell them eventually at a reasonable price. I remember Star Wars being for sale being a huge event. I certainly had a few tapes, but nothing like the number of DVDs I would buy.

I think by the time they were available to buy the sheen had worn off the format. You knew that your old player could mess up or break the tape and you had a load of films recorded off the TV anyway.

poprock

It was a big deal when the first few Hollywood movies came out to ‘own at home’ on VHS instead of being rental only.

Batman (the Tim Burton one) was the first one. It was such a big deal at the time.

davyK

I remember the eye gouging prices if one wanted to own a video. £70 in 1981 equates to £270 today.

The Star Wars video releases were a big thing - esp. later when they were affordable - that was as late as the mid 90s. Those boxsets of the 3 films are the first I remember owning. Rental was the thing then. We had a goodly pile of blanks for recording films.

bad_hair_day

The video rental van was like a weekly Santa visit in our village, except the latest titles were always gone.

RamSteelwood

We actually had a betamax until the 90s.
we had a blank tape that was full of cartoons recorded off tv. and another that had star wars recorded on it. that was all i needed and all i really remember (i know we had a few other tapes but they would have been for random recordings).

Kow

Our local rental van brought copies of copies of copies. The quality was awful, to the point that you could claim a film was unwatchable and get a free rental. They supposedly then retired that copy, but more likely tried to get a few more goes out of it. I think we were last on the route so we only got the dregs anyway. I watched a lot of straight to video sci fi.

poprock

We used to rent tapes from the village shop, but more exciting were the pirate copies of new blockbusters that my Dad would bring home from ‘a bloke at work’. Sitting on the floor in the living room fiddling with the tracking setting on the VHS machine trying to minimise the lines and static across the shit quality picture … but then getting to enjoy the likes of Robocop before any of my schoolmates.

LivDiv

Ha. Yeah my dad used to get pirated tapes from work along with Amiga games.
He used to say a workmate had gone out to so and so country on a job and picked them up and the photocopied covers and manuals were just how they sold them over there.

poprock

Remember the excitement of watching pirate copies on little TV sets in bars on holiday too?

We’d go on coach holidays to Spain and all the tourist pubs would have chalkboards outside saying what films they’d be showing that night. All stuff that was still on at the pictures back home.

bad_hair_day

Hahaha yes!

LivDiv

I remember being excited to see what movie and shows would be on during the flight.
One time it was some kids film I had wanted to see at the cinema but the tape wouldn't play. They instead put on some fuck awful film about some blokes going to the World Cup, it had some ghostly vision of Gary Lineker.

Another time the tape player broke and my dad (aircraft engineer) fixed it mid flight and got an applause like he had saved someone's life.

nick_md

An Evening With Gary Lineker? That was good.

LivDiv

A quick Google suggests yeah thats it.
I would have been too young for it to be anything but boring.

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