Quote from: the_antithesis on December 27, 2023, 10:31:18 PMGodzilla Minus One

There's been a lot of buzz over this movie, so I decided to see for myself.

Incidentally, the movie-going experience has become a nightmare, as usual, and the meme stocks are doing super good because I saw this in an AMC and was surprised that a cockroach didn't scan my phone ticket thing.

So, a lot of the hype is that it may be the best Godzilla movie ever made with Dark Knight-esque Oscar buzz (remember how that turned out?) So, is it?

I dunno, but it's pretty good.

I will say that it has strong focus on the human characters, particularly the main character who has a heartbreaking arch who must overcome multiple personal obstacles to earn the victory he gets at the end. Godzilla movies often have scenes of people talking in a room, which makes sense. A giant fire-breathing lizard is a problem that will take planning and cooperation to solve, but they're usually boring and I find myself wondering where the big lizard who breaks stuff is. Well, I didn't do that here. It's compelling drama. They could rewrite it so they're deciding who gets the last Mallowmar and it would work, probably. I won't disappoint you by attempting to summarize the plot. Just see the movie. It's good.

I should note that unlike the Godzilla movies of my youth that were all dubbed poorly, this is subtitled, so a lot of reading. And I still got into the characters. The cherry on top is the monster attacks are pretty cool, too.

Truth be told , I haven't been watching the "monsterverse" movies because I don't care. So I don't have much of a yard stick for the state of special effects. I don't really watch movies anymore.

But, the monster attacks are pretty cool. Big G is used sparingly because of all the human plot to hold the movie up, but when he is used, they fucking use him. He's pretty fucking brutal in the initial attack. The devastation is also weighty They made it look like the city was just fucked.

The effects are important because the movie was allegedly made for less than $15million and has so far grossed $77M. I guess many of the big block busters have underperformed lately. So Godzilla Minus One is a lesson to Hollywood. So maybe we'll get a bunch of cheaper but better movies in the future. However Hollywood is pretty good at taking the completely wrong lesson, so time will tell.

So it's a good movie, but I'm not sure if it's a great movie. I'll have to let it sit and see if I feel any compulsion to watch it again. That doesn't happen as often as it used to. It's a matter of whether it stays with me or not.

I've seen every Godzilla film at least once, and Minus One is the only one where I ever felt scared for the main characters. They really outdid themselves with this film. I was particularly impressed with how well the soundtrack triggered an emotional response in me. The track "Divine," for example, is exactly what hopelessness sounds like.

No props for the original Serizawa? He went kamikaze in the hope of saving the world. No greater love...

Quote from: Hijiri Byakuren on December 30, 2023, 02:46:55 AMI'm glad you liked it. For me, though, it was the first and so far only movie that ever made me leave the theater angry. I thought the first third was awesome, which made it all the worse when the last two thirds were the most horribly scripted garbage I've ever seen. And I'm a Godzilla fan, so it's not like I'm some cinema snob who's above watching garbage. SF Debris did a good review of it which pretty much matches my thoughts, so I won't repeat them here, but man... that movie made me mad. I still haven't watched Star Trek Beyond because of it: that movie could be the best thing ever made, and I'd still refuse to see it just because of how much the one before it put me off.

Lucky for me I have very low standards when it comes to movies! 🤣

Quote from: Hijiri Byakuren on December 30, 2023, 02:46:55 AMI'm glad you liked it. For me, though, it was the first and so far only movie that ever made me leave the theater angry. I thought the first third was awesome, which made it all the worse when the last two thirds were the most horribly scripted garbage I've ever seen. And I'm a Godzilla fan, so it's not like I'm some cinema snob who's above watching garbage. SF Debris did a good review of it which pretty much matches my thoughts, so I won't repeat them here, but man... that movie made me mad. I still haven't watched Star Trek Beyond because of it: that movie could be the best thing ever made, and I'd still refuse to see it just because of how much the one before it put me off.

I haven't seen it, either, but you might want to consider giving Star Trek Beyond a chance. Simon Pegg took over writing it and corrected the trajectory a bit. Maybe not enough, but the RedLetterMedia guy, who is a massive Trek nerd, gave it the high praise of saying that it's like there's something you love that you thought was dead and then there's a blip on the monitor. It's not completely dead yet. It is the one of those three films that he actually enjoyed.

Watching "Quatermass and the Pit", 1967. I only saw part of it the first time. 16 years old and a driver's license. It was a good year.

Recently I watched "Hunting Emma", a 2017 film from South Africa (dialog in Afrikaans with English sub-titles).

I thought that it was a good movie, not great, but good in that it was a feel good, victim kicks ass flick with good cinematography.

WARNING:  The rest of my review is just a big fucking spoiler!!!! -- ok, you've been warned 

The main character, Emma Le Roux, is a mid 20's kindergarten teacher who is traveling by car for the holidays to her father's farm in a remote part of the Karoo, when her car breaks down.  The area is too remote for cell phone coverage, so she walks down the road to see if she can find any help.  Not far away, she comes upon a group of 6 men who were in the process of transporting a large shipment of illegal drugs when they were stopped by a traffic policeman.  As she approaches, she witnesses one of the men shooting the police officer.  Seeing Emma, the men decide to rape and kill her.

When the men are distracted by the not yet dead policeman escaping, Emma seizes the opportunity to break free and escape with a knife carelessly left behind by one of the men.  Before the men realizes that she is gone, she gets to her car, and picks up her hiking gear from the trunk, and flees into the veld.  Realizing that she has escaped, the men begin their pursuit of Emma.

In a series of flashbacks, the viewer learns that Emma was trained in survival and self defense from the time that she was a small girl by her father, Jacques, a former Special Forces Commando, and surviving in the wilderness of the veld was a part of her childhood experience. 

So, the plot begins to unfold in a classic tale of the hunters becoming the hunted, as beautiful sweet young Emma draws upon the skills she learned years ago from her father, and kills the murderous assholes one by one as she makes her way through the wilderness to the family home. 

I enjoyed the movie.  The plot was fairly simple, and although there were a few twists, it was mostly predictable.  The hunted, a young woman who seems at first to be a likely victim, overcomes the odds to become the victorious heroine, and the bad guys all die in miserable ways.  So, if you are into that kind of story, watching it is a feel good experience.  Also, the movie, filmed in the  Karoo of South Africa, was visually stunning.   

Totally not intended, but pretty interesting observation.

Note: When viewed on YouTube, the video would loop. So that's why it ends abruptly. It's meant to loop seamlessly. lol

Quote from: Blackleaf on January 04, 2024, 11:37:12 PM

Totally not intended, but pretty interesting observation.

Note: When viewed on YouTube, the video would loop. So that's why it ends abrupted. It's meant to loop seamlessly. lol

Fun historical fact:  in the US, tomatoes were banned for a while.

We look at that today and think they were stupid as hell for banning such an obviously quite safe and nutritious fruit (yes, it's a fruit).  The thing is, at the time wealthy people were eating off pewter plates...  It didn't take long for people to get suspicious of the tomatoes.

Of course, at the time, people in other parts of the world (and also some parts of the US) were eating tomatoes and surviving just fine, so that was a big hint that the tomatoes themselves weren't the problem.  Eventually Robert Gibbon Johnson and Michele Felice Cornè helped allay American fears, while Alexander W. Livingston made them look much more appealing by selectively breeding those big round tomatoes we know today (for some reason, he has a french-language wiki page but not an english-language one, despite you know, being an American historical figure)

As he didn't make the wiki I would suspect those that did were Francophones.

Nightshade fruits do have small amounts of toxins that deter insects, most can handle it. Best to not eat a lot of green tomatoes. The plant world is a secret chemical battlefield.

When I was a kid we often had fried green tomatoes. Very tasty!

Quote from: Unbeliever on January 05, 2024, 10:53:25 AMWhen I was a kid we often had fried green tomatoes. Very tasty!

Well you gonna rate that movie?

It's a movie?.🤔

So I just watched an interesting theory...a film theory...about Fight Club.

Fight Club is a strange movie with an unreliable and unnamed narrator with a heckuva twist towards the end.  Like a bunch of films (Joker and Blair Witch 2 come to mind), just piecing together what really happened and what didn't happen is an open question for the audience.

So what if I told you that neither Tyler Durden nor Marla Singer are real?  Marla is not a real person but another alter ego - Marla represents the narrator's feminine side as opposed to Tyler representing his masculine side.

Source

(technically, Tyler Durden is the narrator's real name - hence the plane ticket with his name on it - but that name is used in the movie to refer to the narrator's alter ego, a hypermasculine but immature and ultimately rejected version of the narrator, hence his "death".  So for simplicity's sake I'll use Tyler Durden for the character played by Brad Pitt and narrator for the character played by Edward Norton) 

The most compelling hint imo is that very few people ever directly interact with Marla, very similarly to the Tyler Durden persona.  She's very much like a ghost in the world yet the narrator cares about her deeply.

Quote from: Unbeliever on January 05, 2024, 12:49:11 PMIt's a movie?.🤔

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101921/