Yeah sounds great. Really need to watch Stalker and Come and See. They've been on my list for a long time.

I wish the devs hadn't fucked the dead rising sequels. That first game did a good job of slow zombie swarm and it could have been even better with more powerful consoles

Watched Battleship Potemkin in MosFilm's YT channel.   Coming up to 100 years old and it remains an effective piece of work. The scenes on the steps at Odessa is still a really tense and shocking piece of film making.

A quick check on wiki and it seems pretty accurate to the events of the time and it looks like it was a logistical nightmare putting it together. What it's real achievement to me is that is is stirring. Even to a Western pig like me , watching it from a 100 year distance, this would have been a sensation in the day.

Hmmm.  Won't stop me spending a fortune taking the kids to watch it and buying lots of cinema food.  It's like a day out for the kids!

Eraserhead in the cinema is a great experience. It's Criterion's 4K transfer and it looks gorgeous. What really makes the difference though is the sound. I probably first watched this on VHS on a mono CRT   It really makes its impact on the changing tone of the film and I'm fairly certain there are audio cues throughout.

It's also fun to watch it with a big cinema crowd. I had forgot how funny some scenes are (the dinner) and there was plenty of laughter then.

This is perhaps my 4th viewing since the 90s and it gets better. There's quite a lot going on. We all have theories and I have mine which started to take form this time. (for me - the lady behind the radiator is the thought of suicide and my theory is anchored around that).

Not a popcorn movie then. Watching it in the cinema on my own surrounded by young(er) people drinking coffee stout and beer with various fruity flavours in them assaulted my nose but I enjoyed the experience. Free poster to be shown below when I get home later.

poprock wrote:

Spiderhead Chris Hemsworth as a mad scientist with a private prison island for testing his behavioural control drugs. Events get predictably out of hand. Not a bad movie, but not a great one by a long shot.

I also popped on here to write about that...

Spiderhead.

Netflix movie with Chris Hemsworth that I watched primarily because I enjoyed the short story on which it's based. The original - Escape from Spiderhead - is a wonderfully precise little thing.  Short, but filled with interesting ideas, and musings on the nature of free will, consent and redemption.  

Spiderhead the movie takes that story's premise (an island where criminals can roam free on condition they allow themselves to be tested on with a variety of mind altering drugs) and many of its key moments - and then completely fails to understand what makes them work, or arguably the very point of the story itself.

This would be forgivable perhaps, if they'd grafted something more compelling from the pieces they collected.  But where there are moments here that should be utterly horrific they're oddly devoid of any real emotion. The film's makers are far too scared of showing anything that might make their viewers feel uncomfortable, and as a result create something entirely empty.

I won't get too heavily into spoilers, but I knew we were in trouble in the opening scene. In the story the main protagonist is given a drug that alters his perceptions, and then a second drug to help him describe the world he now sees. What follows is a beautiful paragraph in which the writing moves from short simple sentences to long ornate descriptions - then back again as the drug wanes.  In the film's opening broadly the same scene happens - but they cut away before he actually starts describing things, as if worried that flowery words might lose the viewers. (Instead we get some soft filters and low key psychedelia.)

So, yeah.  An oddly pointless film adaptation of some potentially inspiring source material.

That's cool.

I would also agree with that view on Spiderhead.

A good number of these Netflix movies seem that way.
The conversation seems to be "we need to make a movie, what should we do?" rather than "I read this great short story and I would love to turn it into a movie".

It's fine but lacks passion.

Presumably there is a certain amount of consideration of what Netflix will pick up with Netflix considering what will attract/retain subs.

"We want to sell a movie to Netflix"

There is just something committee about many of these movies. Not just Netflix, Prime and others as well.

A rare flurry of movies for me - Top Gun in anticipation of finally catching Maverick at the cinema tomorrow. And The Gentlemen. And the start of Big in Japan. All fun enough in their own ways.

davyK wrote:

American Sniper effective real life tale of top US sniper dealing with the after effects of war. I'd have liked to have had the post war work concentrated on more though as ultimately that Middle East city fighting has been done quite a bit. I'd also have liked to have had the operational tactical aspects of sniping covered more. 

But enjoyable.  I was sideswiped at the end because all the way though I just thought it was fictional piece. Seems he was quite the hero.

He was an absolute cunt of a man. An utterly amoral racist psycho who took pleasure in taking lives (by his own admission), killing men, women and children at home and abroad. He was a serial killer, a mass murderer with a licence to practice his favourite pastime - slaughter with no restraint. That Clint Eastwood made a fawning hagiography of him comes as no surprise.

Top Gun Maverick. Enjoyable fun really, totally daft but more of the same from her original so it's kinda what you want/expect...

Natalie Portman though
YUM.

She's (un)spoken for though.  YOSS.

Cube is another old DVD I have had kicking around for many years. It's been a long, long time since I watched this  however my memory of it was quite intact.

The opening scene does its job of grabbing the attention and it has stuck with me all though the years, as did the basic idea and I shied away from sequels as I like the fact that nothing was really explained.

One opinion that has changed is that I found most of the shouty characters nowhere near as annoying as I remember. I anticipated that aspect to annoy me more.

Really nice idea implemented on a budget. Splendid stuff. The DVD is a keeper for me.

I've got a bad feeling about this one. I think Taika Waititi likes the smell of his own farts a bit too much