Ennio Morricone season at the BFI!

hylian_elf wrote:

Criterion Collection finally moving to 4K Ultra HD!  First 6 releases will include Citizen Kane, Menace II Society, and Mulholland Drive.  Excite!

Criterion haven't moved all their content to BluRay yet. I suppose it depends on the raw materials they gave to work with.

I_R wrote:

After digging out the DVD the last time Miller's Crossing was brought up here, I finally got around to watching it last night.

I remember enjoying it but not loving it the last time I saw it and that still holds true. Finney, Turturo and Buscemi are excellent, but there's a real lack of star power elsewhere. Byrne is a decent actor, but I'm not sure he was ever leading man material. I'd completely forgotten Marcia Gay Harden was the femme fatale as well, I don't remember her ever being this young.

There are echoes of a lot of later Coen films - elaborate and misunderstood plots, nods to old Hollywood, snappy dialogue, but it's more clever than fun. I mean it's really a bit of a violent downer. The laughs that are pretty constant in most of their later works never really materialise here. For a film so lauded at the time, feels fairly unpolished in comparison.

Oh come on, Iain. Look into your heart!

Im 45 minutes into The Suicide Squad. Its super fun. And so violent.....Idris Elba is fantastic too. So glad Will Smith wasn't in for this one.

I’ve always wondered.
When advertisers do this movie mash up things where they cut to characters saying a line from a movie that riffs with the dialogue of the advert.
Do they have a app or a bit of software that looks for phrases in the video or do they have an encyclopaedic knowledge of phrases from movies that might be handy?

https://getyarn.io/

Think that's it

Ooooh. Cool.

Thanks guys.

Well, that does actually sound like a bit of a Herculean task.
Thanks.

That looks shit

Minkymu wrote:

That looks shit

Looks like prime film-night-with-mates fodder to me.

Yep. Depressing film. But good.

Finally finished The Suicide Squad. Bloody great. Makes me realize Idris Elba is far too underused

The Suicide Squad
I don’t think I enjoyed this as much as the rest of you if I’m honest. Which is to say that I still had a good time with it, but I thought it was the weakest of Gunn’s superhero movies (yes, including Super).  I think my main issue with it was that totally it felt a bit messy.  I would have loved the film it frequently threatens to be - an all out gonzo superhero splatfest - but the repeated stalls to accommodate sweeter sentimental moments didn’t work for me at all. Equally Suicide Squad’s defining characteristic - it’s a big old team - meant that I struggled to care very much about anyone or anything within it.

I think it was also harmed by me having seen the trailers.  Quite a few reveals would probably have been hilarious, had they not been part of the marketing in advance. As a film that largely gets by on shock value, removing that surprise seems foolish at best.

Still, a thousand times better Captain String’s Suicide Squad.


Fear Street Trilogy

Let’s make one thing clear right off the bat, the Fear Street films aren’t particularly good.  They’re fine - classic Netflix fare really - but what they do represent is an interesting experiment.

For the uninitiated, Fear Street was a run of R.L.Stine books, essentially aimed at teenagers who’d grown up reading his Goosebumps series.  As such the films have this slightly odd hole to fill, they need to both echo the content of these teen novels, whilst also trying to appeal to an older, wider Netflix demographic.
As individual films it’s an approach that doesn’t really work (“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” chased a similar audience more effectively a few years ago.). Each film is soapy, and not remotely scary, with very occasional moments of surprising gore that seem to have fallen in from some completely different film.  

So as films they’re not great. But that’s not the experiment.  The experiment is in how to make a movie trilogy that actually works, and at this it’s surprisingly effective.  Each film is essentially its own thing, released a week apart as if they were episodes of a TV show. Fear Street 1994 is a pastiche of 90s horror movies - a xerox of a xerox of Scream.  1978 is an homage to 70s slasher movies, inevitably taking place at a Summer Camp.  Then 1666 goes right back in time for a somehow even more soapy tale about the witch’s curse that started it all - rounding the whole thing off and tying it up with a surprisingly neat little bow.  Whilst the movies themselves may not be masterpieces, it’s a rare example of a trilogy that knows where it’s going from the outset, confidently seeding elements for the finish line.

So, like I say, as horror films, they’re perfectly adequate entertainment - basically Scooby Doo with the occasional decapitation and no dog - but as a trilogy, and a means by which to put such things out there, it’s a potential sign of things to come.  (I have no idea what sort of numbers this did for Netflix, but had they been released differently I’m not sure I would have watched one, let alone all 3…)

Summer Of Soul

You don’t need reams of my tedious explanation for this one.  A documentary about the 1969 “Black Woodstock” concerts in Harlem. Amazing footage of some of the greatest soul and gospel singers of all time, with thoughtful asides about the times and the context.  If you have even the slightest love of the music, or interest in the period, you should watch this.

My daughter recommended I watch Birds of Prey… before watching The Suicide Squad. I don’t think my daughter likes me.

Going to have to watch TSS on the high seas, no ppv options here and I’m not comfortable going to the cinema yet.

You can download it as an MP4 file here. It's just over a gig in size.