What films are you watching right now?

just watched this, and it was incredible beyond words. the kind of thing that nothing can be said about, or everything must be said about, so you don’t say anything and just watch, dumbfounded and awestruck. the difficulty is that this is something so alien to the rest of us that we can’t begin to make sense of it. you want to say this was unbelievably stupid, but you know you can’t say that. you want to say it was unbelievably brave, but you might not technically be able to say that, either. at one point in the documentary he was given a brain scan, and the results showed that he had abnormally low activity in the amygdala (the region responsible for processing fear). so if alex doesn’t feel afraid, can we really say he was brave? ah. see that?

i also saw that he was noticeably unemotional in his interactions with the various people throughout the documentary. he was able to laugh and joke and show some personality, but it always seemed as if he were having to make an effort to do so. you almost got the feeling that he had a very minor case of autism or something. there was an awkward scene at a small family gathering… he seemed totally out of place… like he was just playing the role because he had to be there.

it’s obvious that this guy is wired differently. it’s subtle, but it’s there if you watch closely. his climbing was an obsession to the point of him having a one-track mind, driven only for that purpose. the trailer:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urRVZ4SW7WU[/youtube]

Yep, he’s a freak for sure. I haven’t seen the movie (the bit about the brain scan is interesting) but I have seen him interviewed and two things stuck out like sore thumbs… his thumbs (oh man, I make myself larf sometime. Too funny, Chakra) or more accurately three things: his monkey hands, his facial features and his social interactions.

I don’t think it’s autism; I think there’s something stranger happening with his chromosomes. When he holds his hands in certain positions they can take on an apish look and it’s more than just big, muscley fingers.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the recessive ape genes are coming through with this chap/chimp. :-" His facial features, his hands, his obsession with climbing, his abnormal lack of fear, his social interactions and the fact that he prefers living outdoors (in his car) all point to one thing – he’s an ape-man.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEep67akIn4[/youtube]

Lawless (2012): Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, a trio of bootlegging brothers are threatened by a new special deputy and other authorities angling for a cut of their profits.

imdb.com/title/tt1212450/vi … f_=vp_pl_1

Director: John Hillcoat
Writers: Nick Cave (screenplay), Matt Bondurant (novel)
Stars: Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Guy Pearce | See full cast & crew »

Cast (in credits order) complete, awaiting verification
Shia LaBeouf … Jack Bondurant
Tom Hardy … Forrest Bondurant
Jason Clarke … Howard Bondurant
Guy Pearce … Charlie Rakes
Jessica Chastain … Maggie Beaufort
Mia Wasikowska … Bertha Minnix
Dane DeHaan … Cricket Pate

Hands of Stone

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxocWVbC4Is[/youtube]

The Puero Rican trainer is Venezuelan rapper El Budú from Vagos y Maleantes.

The director is also Venezuelan, Jonathan Jakubowicz, and had previously directed one of my favourite movies ever.

Secuestro Express

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWUHVa5QKCo[/youtube]

It may seem like cartoonish bad guys and scared white people, but try to imagine that being your normal. The fear, the excitement, the salsa. The portrayal is actually very accurate, which is what made the movie so fun.

Secuestro expresses were very common back then. My girlfriend at the time had had it done, it basically was they kidnapped you for a couple hours, drove around with you in your car while emptying your credit cards and bank accounts, saught some low volume ransom, and dropped you off the same day.

Granted, my girlfriend’s ordeal was much less chaotic than in the movie, but neither her nor I nor anyone we knew made much of it. A 20 second story followed by where should we go for dinner?

One wouldn’t say secuestros express are common anymore simply because crime has become so much more normal and chaotic, we don’t have names for the things anymore.

Oh yeah, secuestro express wasn’t just some corny name they came up with for the movie. It was what the practice was actually called.

The fat dude is Budu (of course), the classy guy is DJ Trece and the fucking psycho is el Nigga. I forgot to mention. Vagos y Maleantes portrayed the kidnappers.

Lol, actually, now that I remember, the dude that kidnapped her (she was waiting in the SUV for her family to come back with some mcdonalds) at some point asked her age and when she said 15, he actually went like “Oh, sorry about that” and dropped her off somewhere and just took the car.

Hahahahahaha. Class acts, Venezuelans.

As an aside, my mother tells me Caracas did not use to be even close to that crime-ridden. She lived a time when secretaries and other lower middle class to upper lower class workers famously went on vacation to Miami.

There was one president, Carlos Andres Perez, who realized the debauchery was coming to an end, the crazy leftist policies combined with the growing population that outpaced the oil industry were not gonna be sustainable much longer, and he put together all the nerdiest economy nerds to put together what we today know as austerity measures. They called it “El Paquetazo,” The Package, um, -azo, because they called it an economic package. One of the first things to address, of course, was the essencially free gas. When he raised the price SLIGHTLY and the bus fares went up SLIGHTLY, then we had in 1989 what is now known as El Caracazo, where people started revolting en masse, or rioting rather, and the government’s genious response was to call a curfew and send in the military to shoot rioters. Nobody knows how many died, but Chavez and his ragged band of rebel colonels stormed the presidential palace 2 years later with a tank. They were quickly outmaneuvered and caught and I don’t think anybody died, and Chavez went to jail and became a legend.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QqaR1ZjldE[/youtube]

They found some bullshit reason to impeach Carlos Andres Perez and the austerity was rolled back.

Revolver (2005)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JAYfZOHms[/youtube]
The Ultimate Con? Hmmm…
cinema.com/articles/3624/revolve … e-q-.phtml

0:06

Based on the graphic novels by Mike Mignola, Hellboy, caught between the worlds of the supernatural and human, battles an ancient sorceress bent on revenge.

Release date: 11 April 2019 (United Kingdom)

Director: Neil Marshall

Budget: 50 million USD

Production companies: Lionsgate, Dark Horse Entertainment, Summit Entertainment

Producers: Lloyd Levin, Lawrence Gordon, Mike Richardson

Official trailer on IMDB - more Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale gore, rather than I and II’s gritty comic-book style, but worth the theatre ticket price…

When obscenely rich hedge-fund manager James (Will Ferrell) is convicted of fraud and sentenced to a stretch in San Quentin, the judge gives him one month to get his affairs in order. Knowing that he won’t survive more than a few minutes in prison on his own, James desperately turns to Darnell (Kevi… MORE

Release date: 27 March 2015 (United Kingdom)
Director: Etan Cohen

Box office: 111.8 million USD

Budget: : $44 million (gross); $31.7 million (net);

Screenplay: Etan Cohen, Adam McKay, Ian Roberts, Jay Martel

Official trailer on IMDB - I came late to the table with this one, but enjoyed the silly humour and jokes.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHEc66d08YU[/youtube]

Genious. Did you catch the Sherlock Holmes one he just made? I was disappointed to see all the Trump bashing and accompanying political correctness, but the truth is it did little to diminish Will Ferrel’s pure genius. What a funny motherfucker.

Yeah… that clip made me laugh the most :slight_smile: Any other combination of comedians would not have worked as well as these two, on this project.

A comedy? if he’s just made it, it probably isn’t out here yet - Release date: 26 December 2018 (United Kingdom)
Director: Etan Cohen
Box office: 41.9 million USD
Budget: 42 million USD
Screenplay: Etan Cohen - some of the reviews here suck… as they do for Get Hard… it seems that Brits don’t know the meaning of the word comedy. :icon-rolleyes:

The trailer :laughing:

=D>

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J08YVVc-c_g[/youtube]

Orson Wells’ ’ The other Side of the youtu.be/fm73NFrkpP4://youtu.be/nMWHBUTHmf0’

Spurs 2005 NBA Championship documentary

watched ‘brothers’ recently. good movie, good cast. had an especially good element of the tragic going on in the background there.

there’s nothing spectacular about the storyline of a guy going off to war and presumed to be dead by a wife (portman) who then begins an affair with the guy’s brother. we’d expect that. the loss was overwhelming, she’s very alone and in need of companionship and intimacy. it’s not like she was cheating because the official report was that he got killed. so far so good.

but then there’s this twist. while taken prisoner in afganistan, toby is forced to either kill his fellow soldier who was captured with him, or be killed himself. he chooses the former… especially because he doesn’t want his wife and daughters to lose him (obviously). but then when he gets back to the states, he finds out that jake is having an affair with his wife.

here are the impossibly entangled existential dilemmas he’s caught up in. first, he’s both angered by the affair, but understanding of it… because the wife really thought he was dead. but then in being so shaken by this and unable to come to terms with it, he realizes that killing the soldier was in vain… since, technically, the family situation back home is no longer what it was. i mean that was the whole reason he killed the guy, right? so now he’s like ‘fuuuuuck!’ in addition to this, he hasn’t told anyone he killed the guy because like how awkward would that be? toby is literally seething over with regret and despair and at one point freaks the fuck out, trashes the kitchen (which jake remodeled for the wife), and almost has a shoot-out with the POleece. really good shit. only at the very end when he’s finally resolved to accept the rationality of the situation - that neither the wife nor jake meant to betray him - does he calm down and tell the wife that he killed the guy back in afganistan. but by then he’s been put in a mental institution (after the freak-out incident), and the movie ends. not a great ending, but it worked i guess.

but think about that, man. that retroactive remorse for deciding to do something tremendous that ends up being in vain. ain’t that a bitch.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnkqEIoN9wc[/youtube]

Watched The Great Wall… featuring Matt Damon, last night. It had everything I would expect, and love, in this genre.

youtu.be/DefILRrX77k - first attack scene

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avF6GHyyk5c[/youtube]

Just watched the original “The Magnificent Seven” (Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen etc). This, at first, largely for the music. I have not seen this film for easily 30 years, although I recently saw the remake (with Denzel Washington) on tv. It’s interesting to watch modern remakes of 60s or 70s films to see how fashions change. To my surprise I really, really liked the original version. Much lighter in tone with more humour. Also, modern fashions are to have characters with dirty, greasy hair and, often, dirty looking clothes too, so nice to see good old clean-cut cowboys for a change.

Have also seen The Seven Samurai upon which the above film is based, but not recently.

Guardians of the Galaxy… better than II, but II wasn’t that far behind, so both equally entertaining all round.

The Trailer


Brash space adventurer Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) finds himself the quarry of relentless bounty hunters after he steals an orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain. To evade Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with four disparate misfits: gun-toting Rocket Raccoon, treelike-humanoid Groot, enigmatic Gamora, and vengeance-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when he discovers the orb’s true power and the cosmic threat it poses, Quill must rally his ragtag group to save the universe.

Release date: 31 July 2014 (United Kingdom)

Director: James Gunn

Featured song: Come and Get Your Love

Budget: $232.3 million (gross); $195.9 million (net);

Box office: 773.3 million USD