The Movie Thread

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With Woody though even his mediocre efforts have a certain charm about them that make them enjoyable to watch even if there isn't anything particularly interesting or insightful about the plot....
I know what you mean. That's how I feel about Vicky Christina Barcelona.

While it's not a great movie or even a really good movie, and there are no memorable scenes or acting performances, the film has a certain charm that makes it likable.
 
I know what you mean. That's how I feel about Vicky Christina Barcelona.

While it's not a great movie or even a really good movie, and there are no memorable scenes or acting performances, the film has a certain charm that makes it likable.
I think that pretty much sums up most of his repertoire. I know the "Jewish neuroticism" comments will come out and some of the criticisms are valid but most of his movies are at least watchable which can not said of most drek coming out these days.
 


Ugh...I just knew the people who run this studio would start putting out stuff like this. Angel Studios is just your cucked Christian church in studio form.

Their new movie, Cabrini, centers on how Italians were treated when they first came to America. The fact that a white Protestant mayor plays the villain tells you all you need to know. I doubt they'll go into how the people in America didn't want the Irish here either because that would mean the story can't be a fight against racism.

I bet they also don't go into how a lot of the hate for immigrants stemmed from the fact that there weren't enough jobs to go around for both Americans and all the immigrants pouring in (sound familiar?) And I wager the film doesn't show the increase in crime due to a mafia presence that is now part of this new America which the Italians brought with them that Americans didn't want.

I predict none of this is shown because then this entire racist narrative would fall apart. Either Angel Studios is some kind of controlled opposition or they are as clueless as your ordinary Christian as to what is wrong with current day America.
 
Didn't know about that movie, but there was a preview I saw when I went to Dune 2, called Immaculate, which was all about a Catholic girl, I think a nun, who becomes pregnant. The movie looked boring and ridiculous, about as ridiculous as the other preview I saw where Zendaya, a tennis superstar, is being courted by two white guys. Movies seem to be getting worse and worse and I noticed heavy use of the deep bass sound to try to make each film appear grander than it clearly is.
 
Just watched David Lynch's Elephant Man. What a beautiful and moving film. I cried during probably nine or ten different scenes. Movies about people overcoming physical disabilities are so often emotionally manipulative, and I didn't find that to be the case here. I will definitely be watching it again.
 
I just watched a film, practically unknown, called 18 Again! on Tubi. It's a late 80s film that is an age-switch trope. With this movie, it's an 81 year old man switching bodies with his grandson. I thought the film was good as far as these types go. But what really stood out to me was the sincere friendship and closeness between the grandfather and the grandson. It's not that they were unusually close, but they had a good relationship, a relationship that actually seemed otherworldly to me, or at least, not anything you hear about or see these days. I almost teared up at seeing a grandfather and a grandson love each other and get along. You hear so much about how Boomers basically ignore their grandchildren and will leave them nothing. I'm not sure if I can recall any films made in the last 15 years about grandparents and their grandchildren. Maybe with grandmothers, but nothing with grandfathers, I'm sure. I wonder how much of that is because Boomers are fairly well known as bad grandparents, squandering wealth, leaving a scorched earth behind, not spending any time with their grandkids and not helping out with raising them (I know from my own experience I was never able to get my parents or my in-laws to watch my kid for longer than a few hours and it always felt like we were imposing).

So, this film, 18 Again!, is yet another 80s film that showcases, even if by accident, what has been lost in American culture, namely, good relations with grandparents. I also felt sad about it because both of my grandfathers died before I was even born since they died of heart attacks early after their retirement and I was born late to kids they had late in life. I think the loss of a dignified grandparental generation is bigger than we imagine. What does it mean for a society when there are no elders? Elders almost always had a place before, but now? Sure, those in power in government are elderly, but that does not make them elders after the older fashion.
 
Films that I would recommend are few and far between these days. Here is the rare exception called The Taste of Things.


Without giving away too much I will give some points as to why I personally enjoyed it. In no particular order:
  • No wokeness. As far as I remember all of the actors are white. No gay characters.
  • Everyone is very polite and respectful, the children are well behaved.
  • Extremely beautiful visuals. Most of the film is focused on food preparation (with great care and attention to detail) and serving/eating the dishes. It is a French production and they nailed this.
  • The main characters are genuinely in love and get married at one point.
  • Almost no nudity. There is one or two scenes but it is very limited and you can skip forward if you would like.
If you are a fan of preparing tasty dishes you will almost certainly enjoy it. It is what the film is all about and it goes above and beyond in this aspect. Could you argue that it is not ascetic, or even that it outright promotes gluttony? Perhaps, but with what is available these days I will gladly take it.

Overall I rate it 9/10 and will definitely rewatch it in the future.
 
Films that I would recommend are few and far between these days. Here is the rare exception called The Taste of Things.


Without giving away too much I will give some points as to why I personally enjoyed it. In no particular order:
  • No wokeness. As far as I remember all of the actors are white. No gay characters.
  • Everyone is very polite and respectful, the children are well behaved.
  • Extremely beautiful visuals. Most of the film is focused on food preparation (with great care and attention to detail) and serving/eating the dishes. It is a French production and they nailed this.
  • The main characters are genuinely in love and get married at one point.
  • Almost no nudity. There is one or two scenes but it is very limited and you can skip forward if you would like.
If you are a fan of preparing tasty dishes you will almost certainly enjoy it. It is what the film is all about and it goes above and beyond in this aspect. Could you argue that it is not ascetic, or even that it outright promotes gluttony? Perhaps, but with what is available these days I will gladly take it.

Overall I rate it 9/10 and will definitely rewatch it in the future.
I will seek this out because...Juliette Binoche. Loved her acting in The English Patient. I also want to see her in the 3-color films: Blue, White, and Red. I heard they are all quite good.
 
The JQ has spoiled movies for me. I saw the trailer for the new Joker movie and I realized I had no interest. Why do I want to watch something dark that creates entertainment out of mental illness? I looked it up and the director and writer are both Jewish. The guy who plays Joker is Jewish. The guys who created the Joker character long ago were Jewish. I'm tired of letting them influence me in subtle ways through movies. I used to get the feeling I was missing out when I didn't watch movies like the new Napoleon or Oppenheimer or this second Joker film. I no longer feel that way. I finally grew up like my parents, who didn't seem to ever care if they missed films.
 
More JQ spoilage. I saw a thread on Logan, a dark movie about Wolverine, which I assume many here have seen if you have seen any Marvel films at all. I remember liking it, but also remembering that it was dark, dreary, and depressing. And the death of favorite characters. Turns out the film's screenplay was written by Jews and the director was a Jew. So many dark films now make sense when I find out who wrote and directed them.
 
More JQ spoilage. I saw a thread on Logan, a dark movie about Wolverine, which I assume many here have seen if you have seen any Marvel films at all. I remember liking it, but also remembering that it was dark, dreary, and depressing. And the death of favorite characters. Turns out the film's screenplay was written by Jews and the director was a Jew. So many dark films now make sense when I find out who wrote and directed them.
Almost all popular music and entertainment is like this now. I see it everywhere, and feel alienated from the society that surrounds me. My church and circle of Christian friends are like an island in the wilderness to me now. Fortunately, my boss is Christian too, so work it not the kind of hostile environment so many people face.
 
Almost all popular music and entertainment is like this now. I see it everywhere, and feel alienated from the society that surrounds me. My church and circle of Christian friends are like an island in the wilderness to me now. Fortunately, my boss is Christian too, so work it not the kind of hostile environment so many people face.
I was mentioning to my wife this information (she's informed on the JQ) and I was telling her that I wondered if a lot of the secularism of society we experienced growing up wasn't people becoming atheists, per se, but that so much of our popular culture was created by Jews, who have no interest in Christian values, so everything feels secular but in reality it's Jewish.
 
Going to see the A24 Civil War movie tomorrow in theatres - it'll be my first time back in a movie theatre since Top Gun 2 came out. I've deliberately not read up too much about the film so I can go into the movie with an open mind. That being said, I'm hoping against my better judgement it doesn't end up being some propaganda piece for the Left that casts them as underdog heroes fighting to "sAvE dEmOcrAcY" from people on the right who are deliberately cast as the insurrectionists/terrorists/etc. The painted fingernails in the trailer still make me wonder lol....

 
Almost all popular music and entertainment is like this now. I see it everywhere, and feel alienated from the society that surrounds me. My church and circle of Christian friends are like an island in the wilderness to me now. Fortunately, my boss is Christian too, so work it not the kind of hostile environment so many people face.


This is somewhat off topic but I feel the same way too. It's extremely difficult raising kids in this as they just want to relax and watch movies sometimes like anyone. We have a family movie night most weekends but we have run out of good movies. Knowing what I know now even some of the older ones I used to like from the 90s don't seem so great anymore. My views are rubbing off on my kids as they are even seeing the messaging and getting turned off.

This leads me to what I wanted to share. I've started collecting volumes of fairytales that I read to my kids at night. They are, overall, amazing. They are extremely good at telling a compelling story without sounding like propaganda. They are inspiring and uplifting, even though, yes, they are dark and severe too. I started with Grimms (these are mostly German) and then sought out other volumes of fairytales from different regions (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, etc). They are so different than the deconstructive drivel in all the movie storylines. It's amazing nearly none of those old stories have been used in cinema - there really is an incredible rich bank of stories out there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised as I'm sure jews would recoil in horror at such a rich beautiful tradition that points upward and subtly to Christ. But, an amazing history of stories infused with the Christian cosmos are out there. And here's a small whitepill: one of my kids actually said the other night their favorite thing to do was listen to me read these fairytales, over watching movies!
 
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Going to see the A24 Civil War movie tomorrow in theatres - it'll be my first time back in a movie theatre since Top Gun 2 came out. I've deliberately not read up too much about the film so I can go into the movie with an open mind. That being said, I'm hoping against my better judgement it doesn't end up being some propaganda piece for the Left that casts them as underdog heroes fighting to "sAvE dEmOcrAcY" from people on the right who are deliberately cast as the insurrectionists/terrorists/etc. The painted fingernails in the trailer still make me wonder lol....


So did you see it? If so, what did you think? Were there many people there? It opened here in Canada on Thursday so I saw it then; barely anybody in the cinema with me...
 
So did you see it? If so, what did you think? Were there many people there? It opened here in Canada on Thursday so I saw it then; barely anybody in the cinema with me...

I did see it and it turned out to be much better than I anticipated. What did you think of the film? It was a full house where I watched it (very conservative area).

I was worried that the movie would be very partisan but imo it was the opposite, to the point that in many scenes it’s difficult to ascertain which side you’re seeing fight. In fact the only explicit reference to a political group I can recall is when one of the characters mentions the “Antifa massacre” but it’s done in a way where you can’t tell whether Antifa were the perpetrators or victims of the massacre.

I am not very familiar with the director but I came out of the theatre thinking the movie was made as a warning to all the people salivating the idea of civil war. The film doesn’t glamorize the conflict at all. I thought the premise of CA and TX fighting together as the “Western Front” was implausible going into the film but I now think it was done deliberately so as not to take a side. The focus instead (I think) was to show Americans what it would be like to see political violence they’re used to seeing reported on the news about other countries taking place in their own country.

The movie being told through the eyes of journalists was good in the sense that they are cast as observers only. You cannot tell their political views from the film. In fact they mostly come across as adrenaline junkies who get a rush from being in war zones and this time the war happens to be in America. They’re just trying to get the best war footage. The pictures they take look like images from the Troubles in Ireland but set in modern day US cities.

I’m being deliberately vague because I think the movie is worth seeing in theaters. I thought the cinematography was excellent. The fighting sequences are tense. I have my own guesses as to who the president and Western Front represent but thought the movie was done in a way that neither side is going to come across as the “good guys”

I’ll be interested to hear what other forum members think of the film.
 
I did see it and it turned out to be much better than I anticipated. What did you think of the film? It was a full house where I watched it (very conservative area).

I was worried that the movie would be very partisan but imo it was the opposite, to the point that in many scenes it’s difficult to ascertain which side you’re seeing fight. In fact the only explicit reference to a political group I can recall is when one of the characters mentions the “Antifa massacre” but it’s done in a way where you can’t tell whether Antifa were the perpetrators or victims of the massacre.

I am not very familiar with the director but I came out of the theatre thinking the movie was made as a warning to all the people salivating the idea of civil war. The film doesn’t glamorize the conflict at all. I thought the premise of CA and TX fighting together as the “Western Front” was implausible going into the film but I now think it was done deliberately so as not to take a side. The focus instead (I think) was to show Americans what it would be like to see political violence they’re used to seeing reported on the news about other countries taking place in their own country.

The movie being told through the eyes of journalists was good in the sense that they are cast as observers only. You cannot tell their political views from the film. In fact they mostly come across as adrenaline junkies who get a rush from being in war zones and this time the war happens to be in America. They’re just trying to get the best war footage. The pictures they take look like images from the Troubles in Ireland but set in modern day US cities.

I’m being deliberately vague because I think the movie is worth seeing in theaters. I thought the cinematography was excellent. The fighting sequences are tense. I have my own guesses as to who the president and Western Front represent but thought the movie was done in a way that neither side is going to come across as the “good guys”

I’ll be interested to hear what other forum members think of the film.
I'll say one thing...A24 makes some really good films.

A few of my faves are:
The Florida Project
Slow West
Mississippi Grind
While We're Young
The Sea of Trees

 
I began to rewatch Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. I had to pause at Bree. I am already disappointed in the poor quality of my DVDs on my TV. Apparently they were formatted to look best on the kinds of TVs from 20 years ago because the movie looks atrocious and I need to fiddle with it, but it's not high definition. Because of this, the opening scene showing the initial battles against Sauron looked atrociously bad, like unfinished-obviously-cgi bad. The shire was maddeningly saturated and the hue of the green looked fake. I didn't care for the melodrama of Frodo running to leap on the ferry to cross the river with the black rider right behind him. I think the first time I saw the movies after reading the book it was jarring how quickly they moved on from the black riders in the shire to Bree. It's several chapters in the book, but to go from the ferry to Bree all in one night was too much. I still think cutting out the old forest and barrow wights was a mistake, but that's probably because they had to show backstory and what Gandalf was doing with Saruman and they didn't want the movie to be 5 hours long. A lot of visuals and decoration were good, but having Merry and Pippin stumble into Frodo and Sam in a cornfield was too abrupt. They make Merry and Pippin a bit too exaggerated. In fact, all of the hobbits are exaggerated bumpkins and not what I think Tolkien would have appreciated. I kind of understand why Christopher Tolkien thought the movies were terrible.

I hope to finish them again, but it will probably take me awhile since I find I cannot stomach to see much of it. I can already see how such spectacle can taint good literature, and as much as we like to see stories come to life, I am now not so sure if that's a good thing. It's not that Peter Jackson did a terrible job, but he is simply not Tolkien and even though they had first-rate source material from which to work, even little things like Gandalf hitting his head on the chandelier and then again on one of the crossbeams at Bag End were annoying to me, they were silly comic relief that made Gandalf less serious. Some parts of Gandalf, like him being tempted by the ring when Frodo offers it to him, were quite good, but again, my view of Gandalf has already been tainted, made fun of a little. Lastly, in the books the black riders never got close to Frodo until he came close to the river near Rivendell and then one of the elf-lords assisted him, and I say all of this because Tolkien kept a lot of tension in the hobbits early travels by use of the black riders but the movie couldn't keep tension like that, it had to be action because they have to keep a pace books needn't worry about.
 
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