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

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Pretty funny old flick I finally got around to seeing, but not as outright hilarious as Ive been lead to believe. It had it's moments, but in my opinion it was too long a film. Ethel Merman and Jonathan Winters owned that film. Those annoying intro/intermission/outro things were supremely annoying when youre watching it on cable and cannot fast-forward.
I saw that was on, but we were watching Forest Gump (see above ;) )

I agree that it doesn't have the same feeling as it did when I first saw it ~30 years ago. Definitely too long and doesn't feel as dense packed with laughs as I once thought it was.
 
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Took the Mrs to Stardust Saturday. Good show. Don't know that there were any hidden messages of great import, but it was a pleasant diversion. Best line in the show (crew talking to Capt. Shakespeare) had absolutely nothing to do with the story, but I'm glad it didn't end up on the cutting room floor.
 
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High School Musical 2 (4 / 5)

Sure, it is fashionable for teens to twentysomethings (esp males) to roll their eyes at High School Musical, but that just shows their clueless bravado. ;)

My younger son is a huge fan or the original and all of us ended up enjoying it (and the soundtrack) more than we expected ... of course my older son grouses about it but still listens - such a tween ;) So he also pre-ordered the soundtrack and listened to it all week, and had the calendar marked for release night for all of us to sit down and watch it together.

It was much better than I expected - the story was simple and predictable, but the singing and dancing and overall sense of joy that just flowed out of the screen made it a wonderful experience. They had the cast doing a 'cast party premiere' thing before and after commercials that was a nice (if heavily scripted) affair.

(yes I do realize the amount of hardcore / geek / elitist cred this all costs me ;) )
 
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Watched time-travelling Denzel in 'Deja Vu' last night.

Promising start and good premise..rapidly went downhill after half an hour..last half hour could have been almost any Hollywood movie with all the cliches to be expected from the genre. Shame.
 
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The Wild Dogs went thru a similar countdown, so I was part of the record 17 million viewers (which knocked a Cowboys game out of all-time first place for a basic cable program).

I did think the story was considerably weaker than the first one. I found the decision to focus on Efron and Tisdale to be a strange one since there couldn't be any chemistry there. Tisdale seems to be pretty talented (although she was asked to overact her part to the point of being caricature), but Efron is a lousy actor and a dreadfully bad lip-sync'er. Mrs dte tells me a third installment is already in the works with a fourth episode planned for the big screen. Oh yippee.
 
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A Beautiful Mind (2001) - 4/5
We watched this as a family and I'm glad we did. Both the boys greatly enjoyed this and it was wonderfully done.
 
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We showed Casablanca on the big screen at the theatre I work at last Monday. It was a full house! I hadn't seen it on the big screen before - it's so much better than on a little tv screen!

I also watched Death At A Funeral, the new dark comedy directed by Frank Oz. It was amusing. I probably won't watch it again though.
 
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A Beautiful Mind (2001) - 4/5
We watched this as a family and I'm glad we did. Both the boys greatly enjoyed this and it was wonderfully done.

Yeah, it was a great movie.
Btw, I have a math professor that had a student that met John Nash in person. He said he is a great guy.
 
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Beerfest

actually didnt want to watch this one, but due to peer pressure here at work (and the constant quoting) I begrudginly gave in and put it on while I was rolling up my Monk character for Saturday's game. Whaddya know, before long I put down the book and paper and gave it my full attention. I thought it was hilarious!
 
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Brazil was on tv here last night, enjoyed it.
 
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Did quite a few since the weekend.

The Last Mimzy- Watched with the Wild Dogs. It took them a little while to get into it, but once they did they were hooked. I wasn't terribly thrilled with it--there were lots of implausible bits (even taking the whole "alien" thing for granted) and none of the "just for the adults" zingers ala Shrek.

The Thing (John Carpenter's remake)- I really enjoy this one. Even though I know the story well after watching it numerous times, it still manages to develop tension.

The Day After Tomorrow- Mrs dte bought this dvd a while back for some reason. A fun little movie as long as you keep your brain firmly turned off. Adventure movies always force you to accept a few things, but this movie pushed it pretty bad (and I'm not talking about the whole environmental premise).
 
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Brazil
The Prestige
Little Children (saw this for the first time and loved it)
Love Actually (in my opinion the best romantic comedies ever)
Crash
The Constant Gardener
Life is Beautiful
Babe II: Pig in the City (I just like all the animals)
 
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introduced a friend to Ball of Fire today and she loved it. It always makes me happy when i turn someone on to an "some old flick" they would otherwise never even consider, and they like it. It's a great movie, "Sugarpuss O'Shea" steals my heart every time. Gary Cooper is hilarious as the stuffy hermit-like professor (and his other 7 professors) who get mixed up with sassy nightclub singer Sugarpuss when he hires her to be his consultant on slang for an encyclopedia he and his fellow professors have been writing for years. She's also a mobster's girfriend on the run, and needs a place to lay low for a while, because the cops want her to testify against him. What better place than with a group of reclusive eggheads whom the cops would never suspect? She of course starts to fall for Gary Cooper, and the whole lot of them fall for her. Except the frumpy old maid, of course ='.'=

Good scene where Coop attempts to evict Sugarpuss, who stayed overnight because it had been raining and she *supposedly* had a sore throat. The uptight old maid declares its her or me! Watch and see who wins

Sugarpuss's nightclub act. Notice Coop scribbling down any slang he hears for his research!

A nice all-round tribute to Barbara Stanwyck

A great scene w/ Henry Fonda from "The Lady Eve"
 
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Took the Mrs to see Halloween over the weekend. She liked the original series and wanted to see this remake. It was fairly good. The obligatory "we're getting an R rating for the violence so we might as well give 'em some nudity" T&A was interesting in that the actresses weren't all the typical skeletor-types. Still not reflective of real world women by any stretch, but moving closer than usual. Not that I noticed any of that, of course... ;)
 
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I guess less people would want to watch if Queen Latifah or Kathy Bates has the nude scenes.
Violence can be entertaining, one of my favourite movies is Reservoir Dogs and that's a little violent.
 
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The Devil Wore Prada (2006) - 2/5

Mildly entertaining and fluffy, but really not very good. My wife had read the book and found it entertaining and had talked about it while reading so I also had some expectations. They weren't met ... intended as more than a 'paycheck movie' but that was how it came across to me.
 
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didnt watch the whole thing, just the bizarre Zombie vs Shark battle from Fulci's 1980 undead opus "Zombie".

I'm killing far too much time on this youtube bizness, I had things to do tonight and I must have spent like 4 hrs watching stuff!
 
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didnt watch the whole thing, just the bizarre Zombie vs Shark battle from Fulci's 1980 undead opus "Zombie".

I'm killing far too much time on this youtube bizness, I had things to do tonight and I must have spent like 4 hrs watching stuff!

Whoa, pretty interesting clip. I'd like to know how they filmed that scene, as that appears to be a real live Tiger shark he's wrestling with.

Might have to look that up.
 
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Oh yeah man, Zombie is a classic of the genre, not to be missed. Also has some really graphic bits of the old zombie ultraviolence, one in particular, the notorious eye impaling that will make even the most seasoned horror cat wince. It's also called "Zombie II" sometimes, as it was marketed in Europe as the sequel to Romero's Day of the Dead (which was marketed as "Zombie"). Whatever, that's just inside baseball that's meaningless, aside from someone who insists on having the Zombie II edition for collectors sake. Just search for Fulci's Zombie.

The strange aquatic zombie seems to get a good piece of the shark in the beginning of the fight, yet toward the end, the shark appears to pretty much rip the thing's arm off when his hand gets too close to his mouth. Almost looks like the zombie was attempting to do the King Kong mouth rip or something on the shark from behind. Sadly, the shark seems to flee in the end. I'd say the zombie won. He lost an arm, but that's not generally lethal by any means for his particular species, meanwhile the shark got a pretty good wound. If the shark dies as the result of his wound, will he become a zombie shark? Talk about a nightmare. I mean, animals are not normally attacked by the undead, thus we cannot be sure if the zombification can be spread to different life forms other than human.

Now, the zombie's hanging out underwater (in salt water!) already. The fact that the zombie is not just flat out dissolving in the salt water is amazing in itself, but then again we cannot make snap judgements on the nature of this particular specimen's physiology. These are pretty much assumed to be voodoo zombies, risen by the bad mojo of the natives on this particular island. What effect does this have on their corrosion resistance?

He's one tough mofo, I'll give him that!
 
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Cold salt water is actually a fairly good preservative for organics, Sammy. Plays heck on metals, but not so bad on organics.
 
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