What I've Been Watching: The Catch-All Film Thread

pibbur who said:
pibbur who wonders if he should be scared of the synth lookalike
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Actually, these mecha mooks are quite nice. Unless you break the law, that is.
 
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I watched Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie. It was awesome! :thumbsup: Really enjoyed it, felt so warm and fuzzy afterwards :beam: Snoopy and Woodstock(s) are the cutest :smitten:
 
SpotLight 8.5/10 for the acting and movie. -10000000/10 for the story as my wife and I were watching it I felt physical ill.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/

I have included the imb link to the movie if you don't know what it is about. I won't write of the story it is just to sad and twisted as it is based on a true story.
 
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CelticFrost said:
SpotLight 8.5/10 for the acting and movie. -10000000/10 for the story as my wife and I were watching it I felt physical ill.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/

I have included the imb link to the movie if you don't know what it is about. I won't write of the story it is just to sad and twisted as it is based on a true story.
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As someone who grew up in the Boston area, and has a childhood friend who was molested by a priest and struggles to this day ... The movie hits really deep.
 
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txa1265 said:
As someone who grew up in the Boston area, and has a childhood friend who was molested by a priest and struggles to this day … The movie hits really deep.
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I am very sorry to hear you know someone personally Mike. Hopefully they can find some sort of peace with themselves about the horrific acts committed.
 
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Since the theme of the thread has deviated on matters pedophillic, an interesting counterbalance to the one mentioned by celtic is Doubt (2008) starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the ubiquitous Meryl Streep. It's also adapted from a long-running stage-play, so it's no singular oddity. Like probably most people I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to be watching, but tuned in to see some Hoffman and Streep with the expectation of quality movie making. The story turned out to be quite a mind-opener as, we the viewer, are invited to let our personal biases decide which of the two we root for.

Streep plays a classic old-school strict nun who runs a school with an iron fist. Hoffman plays a reformist priest who is all for a more progressive teaching style. This pits the two against each other as the plot underlay. As a result of the progressive tendencies, a black kid starts attending school there. One of the other nun's informs Streep that Hoffman might be more interested in the new kid than is really healthy. Streep is then highly motivated to find truth in this claim, which forms the overlay of the plot.

So while we often hear wonderfully positive stories about gangs of criminals being arrested and brought to justice for wholesale organised abuse, it's always healthy to take account of the side-effects of a McCarthy-like approach to the law by seeing what damage it costs to the day-to-day interactions of individuals in a world of obsessive suspicion.
 
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lackblogger said:
an interesting counterbalance to the one mentioned by celtic is Doubt (2008) starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the ubiquitous Meryl Streep.
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"Counterbalance"? A fictitious story of a single 'false accusation' compared to thousands upon thousands of PROVEN molestations by Catholic priests and a massive, multi-national, century + long coverup?

Doubt is a decent film - and it is always worth remembering what can happen when we run away without facts or proof ...
 
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txa1265 said:
"Counterbalance"? A fictitious story of a single 'false accusation' compared to thousands upon thousands of PROVEN molestations by Catholic priests and a massive, multi-national, century + long coverup?

Doubt is a decent film - and it is always worth remembering what can happen when we run away without facts or proof …
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Yes, a counterbalance. There are thousands upon thousands of cases which have trouble even making it to court, let alone factual accounts that would make for a decent movie (though some have been made, though I can't remember all their names, forum post, not dissertation), both between adults and with claims of pedophilia, because, as is common knowledge, matters sexual are incredibly difficult to prove, particularly the concept of consent/truth, when it's just individuals reacting to social environments.

The thousands of ignored stories are probably statistically greater than the number of proven cases. A fictionalised account of the philosophy of societal suspicion is as much a big picture movie as a movie based on a real case. Take Twelve Angry Men, for example. TAM is a more renown and 'bigger picture' movie than any factual courtroom movie, because allegorical themes touch us all, but watching a factual case unfold is quite a detached process where things happen to 'other people'.

You find more personal relevance to the movie because you actually know someone who was caught up in it. If the movie was about institutionalised pedophilia in Mongolian tribal traditions then you'd be viewing it more like a National Geographic, in a detached way, than if it was just an allegorical Mongolian fictional drama based on literary traditions that converts well to humanity, not just a singular culture.

If you had a group of people in a room and a desire to watch a movie about a court case, would you communally choose Twelve Angry Men or that factual court drama no-one remembers?

I agree, the general point of 'counterbalance' is precisely to try and temper the natural urge to pitchfork and McCarthy a subject or person, which is what happens when people get too excited about one specific topic.

I agree, the movie is an important one, and fully deserving of a good movie and it was a great and beneficial catch to humanity the events that unfold in it, I'm just challenging your surprise that a 'small scale' fictional allegory can be described as comparable. Take any law, let's take speeding as a good comparable:

Even 1 mile/kilometer an hour over the speed limit is a punishable offence, the police can stop you and proclaim you a wrongdoer. This law has the same 'absolutism' as pedophilia. If the person is 1 hour short of their correct birthday then the police can stop you and proclaim you a wrongdoer.

However, with regards to humanity, there's a vast gulf between driving 100 miles an hour in a built up, heavily populated area on a weekend daytime on an icy day, - and driving at 71 miles an hour on a long empty 4-lane highway on a dry day. With the former, 0.0001% of people would ever even consider doing such a thing, with the latter 99.9999% of people would think of doing such a thing, even though they know "its technically illegal".

The movie spotlight is about catching those obviously incredibly bad 0.0001% of people who are obviously doing something highly illegal. Doubt is about the 99.9999% of people who have experienced social paranoia about the topic but in a form that is more shades of grey than blatantly obvious criminality.
 
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lackblogger said:
The movie spotlight is about catching those obviously incredibly bad 0.0001% of people who are obviously doing something highly illegal. Doubt is about the 99.9999% of people who have experienced social paranoia about the topic but in a form that is more shades of grey than blatantly obvious criminality.
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It is was and is 6%!!!!!!!!! It wasn't also isolated to one area, it turned out to be world wide. This undercover reporting by these 4 reporters broke open how bad it was with in the Church world wide.

Also all the people including law enforcement and lawyers covering it up.

"In 2012, there were a total of 414,313 priests. " That could be over 24,000, I guess that could be to some a small number to some people.
 
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You are quite right, my stats were entirely made-up and fictional, if pressed I'd go for 0.01% of the world's population, that's approximately 700,000 out of 7 billion, but that seems too high still, maybe 0.001%, but 70,000 seems a bit low. With a long-standing culture like The Church such things are likely easier to implement with just a few nut-jobs in control at one point in their history. The big cases in the UK have been Rotherham Council and the Savile Enquiry, we don't really have The Chruch (Pope variety) here much, so, for us, it's like peeking into an alien culture.
 
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Anyways back to movies…

I try to watch all movies that are up for awards so I had no agenda. Nor until you posted that this thread was trending towards the topic of this movie knew there was another movie just posted. I try not to read to much of what HHR posts.
 
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Yes please, keep the discussion about the movies. Political/world view/agenda topics can be discussed over at the P&R forum.
 
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Watched a couple of movies over New Year's weekend:

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Touching and really well put together in every way, you can pretty much see the trajectory of the movie from the start, but that isn't the point. The kids do a great job, and the scriptive and narrative style are all effective and great to watch.

The Gift

I guess I missed that this was supposed to be good, so when my wife wanted to watch it I had low expectations. Then suddenly the opening shots were framed so beautifully I was recalling some of the things my older son had talked to me about. Turns out this is a smart and well-paced movie that goes from awkward to surpenseful to fully engaging and takes you along for the ride.
 
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lackblogger said:
I saw a wonderful movie today. Flight of the Navigator (1986).

I adored this movie so much I have no idea where to begin praising it. It's like the closest I've ever come to watching a perfect live action children's movie where the child is actually the star. Easily on par with all those other 80s children's classics like Goonies and Stand By Me.

This one is science fiction and actually has a very complicated hard sci-fi premise/plot that put's a lot of serious adult sci-fi to shame. The emotional range that gets displayed throughout is astounding, made more-so by the child star's huge range and almost natural delivery. In a film about love and loss it's like magic how the viewer grows to love the lead so that by the end of the movie you're feeling every emotion the child is encountering.

There are no villains and yet the movie is full of dramatic tension as to the future of the boy and whether there will be any kind of happy ending. While the main plot is verging on the tragedy levels of the emotional spectrum, the movie is also jam packed with smart, well delivered and punchy humour that even professional comedians would be proud of.

Normally with these kind of movies it's possible to predict the narrative as it plays out, often in a very cheesy and dragged out format, but here there's nothing that makes you facepalm, nothing that makes you scream "get on with it" and nothing horrendously cliched. It's like a Steven Spielberg movie but without the desperate over-sentimentalisation.

The only genuine negative I could think of would be when Pee-Wee Herman pops up in the form of a Hal-like voice for an alien craft, full of the usual Pee-Wee'isms. For me it wasn't so bad as I've never been over saturated with Pee-Wee to become tired of it, but I could see how that might "ruin it" for some.

Also, if you can't watch movies that star incredibly, unbelievably cute 12 year olds (yes, that's even one of a young Sarah Jessica Parker's lines, telling the young lad how incredibly cute he is), then don't torture yourself, this is entirely the young lad's movie and everyone else revolves around him and his story.

In fact, the kid is so cute and lovable that people still try and hunt him down even to this day. He was as per Elton John's classic song, a candle that burned out long before the legend ever did. He stopped doing movies, rumours of drugs and stupid living, rejects fame and recently had a run-in with the law. But, damn, if you could take a picture of love and frame it for eternity, then the 12 year old Flight of the Navigator is the closest I've seen (which also fits the plot of the movie for those who understand the irony).

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9/10 movie for me, only losing a point for the over-the-top Pee-Wee'ing in the latter stages, some actual swear words like shit and bastard (kids' movie!), and some lost-in-time 80s references. I was stunned to see this only has 6.9 on IMDB, but then I remembered how allergic some people are to 12 year old boys in movies. Of the written reviews there's only 2 people who rated it less than a 6, and they mostly bleat on about Disney being assholes blah blah blah.

Edit: almost forgot, interesting trivia, his mum is played by the 'other' female from Alien :)
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Flipping heck, I'd forgotten all about that film. A classic no doubt. That lad looks in a bit of a tangle now though. Shame.
 
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Yeah, I'd completely forgotten about it prior to watching it again, its one of those unique movies that exists in its own space bereft of franchise hysteria, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Batteries Not Included, or indeed ET. Many people even rate this movie better than ET while others claim it was an ET clone.

A sad part of its history is that its often referred to as a flop at the time, which isn't entirely true, it made double its budget at the box office, it just didn't set box office records. Also, like a lot of classics from the 80s, it was one of the movies to shine brighter in the new innovation of home movie VHS/Betamax revolution for which it was a gigantic hit. A similar story in this regard can be seen with other titles such as Blues Brothers, Terminator, Evil Dead and many other titles that have developed greater historical love than the actual blockbusters of the day.
 
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Watched Antman and Sicario last night and they were both really good.

I didn't have high expectations for Antman but they did a really good job in that movie with the humor.

Sicario was a much more serious movie but quite good.

Tonights another cold rainy night so I'll probably hit the Redbox for 2 more movies.
 
Another rainy evening so I watched American Ultra which was ok but not great and the latest Mission Impossible which was excellent. The MI was the best yet and better than the Spectre.
 
Toff said:
Another rainy evening so I watched American Ultra which was ok but not great and the latest Mission Impossible which was excellent. The MI was the best yet and better than the Spectre.
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Did you like Rebecca's performance in it ( Ilsa Faust ) ? ( Just curious )
 
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