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

Now and again, I remember that I can't really remember one of my nostalgia movies, and get to enjoy it again. Tonight I had a double bill - Starship Troopers and Police Academy. :p There's a chance my bar for enjoyment has been lowered by the Covid afterscape, but that was pretty sweet.
 
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All the talk around The Mist made me want to rewatch it. It's still as solid as I remembered it, but I'm not sure why I completely forgot the ending. I was sure I saw a different ending, and got to searching on whether the movie had an alternate ending, in a different cut. But it doesn't seem like it. It's just different to the book ending.

Anyway, it was very enjoyable, but the CGI does show it's age.
Also, how did the mist disippate when the army shows up with flamethrowers and such. Didn't make much sense. I hope that's not what the ending suggests, that all the cthulhu monsters can get pushed away by the army.

I was fine with him uselessly killing the group, even though it's a bit on the nose that 5 mins later the army shows up. But a happy ending where the army cleans up its mess doesn't fair well with me. The proper ending is the world is engulfed in this new world, and that's that. A true lovecraft ending.
 
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But it doesn't seem like it. It's just different to the book ending.

I love that ending, despite how crushing it is (or maybe because of how crushing it is). King himself said that he prefers the movie ending and felt that though he hadn't considered such an event when the wrote the story, it's more fitting than his own.
 
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I love that ending, despite how crushing it is (or maybe because of how crushing it is). King himself said that he prefers the movie ending and felt that though he hadn't considered such an event when the wrote the story, it's more fitting than his own.

It's crushing on a personal level, for the main character, but I would have liked a more bleak ending on a global scale. Not just for the main dude. It seems to suggest the threat can be contained, or at least managed.
 
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I think one of the themes of The Mist was faith in its different forms, and the ending was part of that.

If you fancy rewatching it, I enjoyed the director's cut, which is the same movie in black and white as Darabont originally wanted. I really like it, and the black and white gives a kind of timeless look that kind of covers the dated bits of CGI.

EDIT: Someone set clips of it to Radiohead's There There. Pretty cool. (Spoilery if you've never seen the movie)

 
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That ending for the Mist is just so bleak. I've not seen many films/shows from King's work that equal or surpass the job he did in the written form, this is one of those occasions. Having said that, both forms of the story are enjoyable. I think it's a huge credit to the film creators that King had such praise for the work they produced, as he's often not been a fan of how his stories transferred to the silver screen.
 
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Slight spoilers for Amulet and Nightmare Alley

Speaking of bleak endings, the BBC reviewer Mark Kermode enjoyed the films Amulet and Nightmare Alley. He said of both they had really bleak endings, and admired them both for "not bottling it".
 
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Prospect.

So someone in discord mentioned this film, I thought I'd take a gander. It was ok, right up to the part where something bad happens to her pop, then she decides to work along with the guy that did it?? F no, even if I died ten seconds later, that a-hole would be a corpse the moment I had a chance, you kill someone in my family and your time comes next! A lot of the film was also pretty lean on explanations, which I guess is ok, yet I thought even a text explanation at the beginning might have helped a great deal with the context/plot of the movie.
 
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Belfast

Belfast was written and directed by Kenneth Branagh. The action takes place in Belfast in 1969 with the focus on a family of Protestants in a mixed religion area during what we in the UK call "The Troubles". Branagh was 9 years old in 1969 and lived in Belfast so not surprisingly the main character is a young boy. So we are seeing the world through the boy's eyes so there is no big political message just a family trying to survive a situation it had no control over and no wish to be part of. At times it is funny and sometimes a little frightening.

Other critics and viewers in general give it a good review. The one or two reviews, that I read, that score it badly do so because it didn't have a full explanation of the source of the troubles - but then it would not of been a young boy's view of the world!
 
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Now and again, I remember that I can't really remember one of my nostalgia movies, and get to enjoy it again. Tonight I had a double bill - Starship Troopers and Police Academy. There's a chance my bar for enjoyment has been lowered by the Covid afterscape, but that was pretty sweet.
None of them are great, but they are both solid entertainment! I watched Police academy sometime about a year ago. Still funny in a silly way :)
 
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I just had a look at my collection. Starting with "A" - Avatar, Arrival and a Matter of Life and Death. Then the maybe include the Alien franchise (almost any), Ad Astra, A Quiet Place, and Alita: Battle Angel. I think the poll would be too hard for me.
 
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None of them are great, but they are both solid entertainment! I watched Police academy sometime about a year ago. Still funny in a silly way :)

Starship Troopers I actually rate highly. I'm a fan of Verhoeven, and that's partly because I think he was always very subversive - he made those fun, over-the-top sci-fi romps, but at the same time was completely taking the piss. I'm sure the way he cast Starship Troopers was no accident - they embodied the vapid, fascist nightmare of the society he was portraying.
 
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I consider Starship Troopers a classic among campy sci-fi flicks. I wish it could have had a sequel that was on the same level.

I've liked every film I've seen from Verhoeven with the exception of Showgirls which I thought was absolute shit.
 
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I've liked every film I've seen from Verhoeven with the exception of Showgirls which I thought was absolute shit.

It was spectacularly bad, but I do wonder whether that was Verhoeven getting carried away with taking the piss.
 
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Starship Troopers was such a small and nice book, and the film was so campy and enjoyable, you cannot help but enjoy it. Yeah they deviated a lot from the story yet that's quite understandable, given what special effects were like at the time. The casting was pretty solid, personally I think Heinlein would have been pleased, for the most part.
 
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Starship Troopers I actually rate highly. I'm a fan of Verhoeven, and that's partly because I think he was always very subversive - he made those fun, over-the-top sci-fi romps, but at the same time was completely taking the piss. I'm sure the way he cast Starship Troopers was no accident - they embodied the vapid, fascist nightmare of the society he was portraying.
I agree. Around its premiere a lot of my friends disliked it, but I thought it was brilliant to portray humanity's future and voracious appetite for resources like that. I haven't seen it since then, but doubt I'd find it quite as great now.

I think what made it great to me at the time, was that it put the finger on the worst part of human nature and it was the first big budget film I'd seen up to that point to do that. Maybe I'd still enjoy it as much, but part of the enjoyment was the surprise of the premise. And I had less experience with storytelling and life in general.

I'll have to try to see it again. :)
 
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Got around to watching Once upon a Time in Hollywood. I liked it the least of all Tarantino's films. The main issue I have as I have said before regarding other things is that I don't identify at all with the leads. Rick Dalton is the better written, but he is a petty, insecure, self-entitled man who would be fine as a secondary character, but not one I want to spend 2 hours with. Cliff Booth has almost no personality at all beyond loyalty and a tendency for excessive violence - a thug in other words. Now
I'm going to explain why I found the ending to be truly disappointing, spoiler tags.
The leads anti-hippy bigotry explodes into mayhem as they "save" Hollywood from the hippy invasion. If the Family were black and Dalton and Booth were racists would this still be seen as a "happy" ending? Throughout the Family don't do anything threatening, the implied threat comes from our own knowledge of the true events. All Manson wants to do is get his music career going, but these rich pigs treat him like shit. If his mental illness had been recognized, and he'd received the help he needed, THAT would have been happy ending I would have liked to see. Instead, just like the Nazis (cliche unrealistic stereotypes) in Inglorious Basterds, QT feels it's ok to mercilessly destroy them because they are the Bad Guys.
 
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