What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Maybe they said it was a black comedy and people thought it was a black comedy.

JEM wrote: Maybe they said it was a black comedy and people thought it was a black comedy.

Heh, right. I suppose it is. The whole thing has an undercurrent of black/white racial attitudes and stereotypes and such, and early parts of that play as amusing. But the tone becomes seriously uh, serious, pretty quickly, and only briefly lets up from that as it goes on. The conclusion of the story is also a racial kind of thing, and it is very clever. I appreciate the whole thing very much on that subversive social commentary level. It's just that the tone of it never feels comedic. There is a side character who is meant to be a little bit amusing, but again, it doesn't ever feel like comedy, as much as a little bit of levity. Which is great to have in something like this. Anyway, it's a great film, however you interpret its description.

Started watching Doctor Strange last night...pretty cool so far...

Look, I know it's not a great movie and it may actually be bad, but I _love_ Silver Bullet. It's on Hulu and I've been watching it while painting. What's really weird is that I haven't seen the movie in like 30 years but I had almost the whole thing committed to memory. I used to rent it from this little video store sometime around 1986 and I watched it a bunch. It really stuck with me. And surprisingly, I like it just as much now as I did when I was a kid.

It's funny watching it now because it ALMOST feels like a sequel to...Stranger Things! The soundtrack even sounds like S U R V I V E. I think this movie must have been on their list of references, I think it may actually be the closest analog to it.

Another strange echo...the town preacher looks JUST like Jesse Custer from the Preacher comics...and he has an eyepatch, just like Jesse.

OH...and GARY BUSEY. Playing, it seems, himself opposite a Feldman-less Haim.

Yeah Silver Bullet is incredibly enjoyable. I watched it last October and was really glad to see how well it holds up. The werewolf is a little too cuddly, like a teddy bear, in the final scene...but overall the special effects still hold up really well. It's such an easy movie to forget about, especially when talking werewolf movies. Yet it somehow still manages to be one of the better films in the genre. Its not high art by any stretch of the imagination, but there are way worse ways to spend your evening. Fuck anyone that thinks its a bad film. It's got heart and moxie...way more than most shit that comes out today. Especially in the horror genre.

For more than the first half of Barnes' post, I was thinking Silver Streak, with Wilder and Pryor. I got really confused when he compared it to Stranger Things...

Silver Bullet is great, and so is Gary Busey. Now, if you want to see Busey at his finest, watch Surviving the Game.

Gregarius wrote: For more than the first half of Barnes' post, I was thinking Silver Streak, with Wilder and Pryor. I got really confused when he compared it to Stranger Things...

The irony is I just watched that a couple of days ago!

Oh, I finished Doctor Strange. Loved it! What a surprise, I started it thinking "great, another Marvel thing". But it turned out to be light, fun, inventive and loose- which I think is going to be what ultimately characterizes most of the best of their movies (witness Guardians). After Civil War's frowny face superhero pageant, it was nice to see the creative team on this just let go of the rigidity and take a chance on a mostly marginal character.

The magic battles were great fun and I _loved_ the psychedelia- so glad that they picked up that thread from the 70s (choice cut with "Interstellar Overdrive" too). Cumberbatch was good. The only real weak link was Dormammu, anytime you have a giant disembodied head for a big bad it kind of just doesn't work. Mordo was much more compelling. That said, the end "battle" with Dormammu was cool and super trippy.

Of course it has all of those hooks for future films and tie-ins, which is annoying, but they felt a little less egregious this time...despite the casual mention of the Eye of Agamatto's, uh, thing.

There was some nice human touches throughout and I was very glad that Spider-Man or whoever didn't pop in. It could almost be a standalone film.

So an unexpected win from Marvel- definitely one of the top titles they've done to this point.

I've been trying to tell people for two months now that Doctor Strange is a great movie, but The Internet already decided that it was just like Iron Man only a little bit different. Some days the internet seems like a big roomful of people passing around memes and holding up thumbs.

i might be reading a different internet but the general consensus seemed to agree that it was very, very good. Maybe they're saying it's just as good as Iron Man (which is really high praise)

I'm one of the dissenters about Dr strangers quality. Not because it is bad, but because I expected it to be better since it is my fave marvel property.
But I don't care what anyone says, Otter Snivelpatch isnt Steven Strange. He is some bizzarro doppelganger that DC implanted through Hollywood espionage to make it not be as good as it could have been without him.

with all this Dr Strange talk, I decided to give it a go. I watched the first half on the plane and I liked it a bunch. I understand all the Inception comparisons. I'll try to finish it on the way back. His arrogance seems pretty standard and easy, so I hope there is more to the character, as I'm sure there will be. But like when he's banging on the door of the temple for five hours and that impresses the monks...i was thinking this isn't exactly the Dark Knight here impressing the League of Shadows with the stuff HE pulled off. Why didn't he bang the door for 15 straight hours or something? It just seems a little lazy as a way for him to change their minds. "Oh, ok he's been whining about it for a bit, let him in, and yeah let him not eat his vegetables either"

also, Rachel McAdams seems really miscast.

I like the Tilda Swanton reveal. Is she even wearing any makeup? I don't even think they had to alter her.

The scene in the library where he starts to discover forbidden powers was really well done.

yeah, pretty good so far. Because I had rented an iPad (they didn't charge me even), i could watch whatever I wanted. They had Manchester by the Sea so I specifically just watched the big scene with Michelle Williams on the street and I wept like a baby. A big previous executive I used to know walks down the aisle (he owns his own asset management firm now), and I poke him to say hi (He was up in business class). He starts talking to me and I forget that my eyes and cheeks are all watery. omg...

I saw a trailer for Logan a couple of months ago, and it looked sad and violent. But the choice of music for the trailer was perfect, with the late Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails on Hurt. Then I happened to hear that Logan is really great, and it had extremely high reviews. So I went to the Sunday AM showing, and the place was half full even though it was only 10:30 AM.

Anyway, I was wrong about Logan being sad and violent. It's actually extremely savage and somewhat tragic. It's a long, grim look at the future of Wolverine, aka Logan, aka James Howlett, in the year 2029. The movie is anchored by two great performances, from Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart, and there is also a young girl with an amazing and expressive presence. It isn't relevant to the story, but I thought that the girl looked like she could be Famke Janssen's daughter. Though the movie is a quite bleak, there are dashes of humor and empathy here and there, like cool sips of water during a hike through the desert.

This is the anti-superhero movie. No masks, no costumes, no stereotypical heroics. The opening scenes seem almost calculated to troll Wolverine fanboys, though also delivering some exceptionally brutal action. And yet there is real regard for Logan, for what he has done and what he has stood for, both with respect to the the x-movie franchise and also in the comics. There is a wonderful absence of exposition, and with the lean dialogue telling you just enough, and then letting the performances and the action tell the real story.

This movie is rated R with good reason, almost entirely for the intense violence, so probably not a good movie for the whole family. That said, this is an amazing movie, and anybody mature enough to endure the violence should see it. The inflicted pain is just a little more intense in this movie because the performances demand that the audience sympathize with the people getting hurt.

I go back a long ways with Wolverine, all the way to the fateful day when a very young me stole Hulk #181 from the barber shop just so I could take another look at this little guy with claws giving the Hulk a hard time. I jumped on to the all-new, all-different X-Men, though I finally jumped off the Wolverine bandwagon as he got massively overexposed in the '80s and '90s. I never hated Wolverine, I just hated the way Marvel milked him like a prize cash cow. Anyway, this movie transcends the entire rest of the Fox X-franchise and is a very fitting send-off to Wolverine. If I never saw another Wolverine comic, cartoon, action movie or even action figure, I would be content because I saw Logan. After the movie, I felt old and tired, but I also knew that I saw a great movie.

Black Barney wrote: also, Rachel McAdams seems really miscast.

WRONG. When you need someone to play the girlfriend of someone who can manipulate time, Rachel McAdams is your girl (c.f. The Time Travellers Wife, Midnight in Paris, About Time).

My wife and I ended up staying overnight on our way home from Indiana. Turns out two weekends in a row driving there and back in a day (about ten hours) was tiring--who knew? Especially as I can't drive due to my disability and my wife has fibromyalgia. Anyway, we ended up seeing the 7:45 Logan in Peoria. Turns out we couldda made the IMAX showing because they were still running trailers by the time we got in, and then they ran "content" and trailers for what felt like almost a half-hour before our 2D show. We generally prefer 2D anyway because the 3D doesn't really "work" on either one of us and because the IMAXes tend to be so damn loud. Anyway, I agree that Logan is somewhat surprisingly great. After (probably?) botching the first Wolverine movie (I don't honestly remember it much) and having about two-thirds of a decent one, this one had some middling expectations for me but managed to exceed them pretty handily. Jackman and Stewart are very good, and almost certainly better than they've been in any of the other outings. Different creative teams and all I know, but whereas the stakes couldn't have been higher in X-Men Apocalypse and in some ways couldn't be much lower in Logan, the former feels meaningless and the latter gripping. The violence associated with Wolverine finally seems real and dismaying.