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

I doubt bridge of spies will break your top five list.

Black Barney wrote: You gotta see Brooklyn, King

After reading your review, I think I need make a date to bring QueenPut to see Brooklyn.

Caught up with some Oscar-nominated pictures over the weekend.

A friend of my wife's is an Academy voter so they lent us a "for your consideration" screener of The Revenant. It is undoubtedly a very well made, very well executed film with some lovely photography (all natural lighting from what I understand) and a couple of excellent scenes like that bear attack. Tom Hardy is, as always, fucking ace. The sound design/editing was just stunning.

BUT THE MOVIE SUCKED!

It was _BORING_. From the very beginning, I felt zero connection or interest in the story. It simply was not compelling, and Hugh Glass was not really all that interesting a character beyond "he fought a bear and lived". Other than that, it was just uninteresting and the survival story came across as more trite than grueling. The Native American elements were very welcome and I appreciate the significance there (especially the sweat lodge), but it still veered into the "magical indian" tropes too much.

But hey, you know it was an "art film" because it had lots of shots of running water. Seriously. Watch for it the next time you are watching an "art film". Running water. Mark my words.

I also watched The Martian on PPV. I liked it somewhat better than The Revenant (although that movie was better made on a technical level), mainly because I loved how optimistic it was despite the situation. I really liked how Watney was just like "you know what, this sucks but I'mma just get it sorted and see how far I can go here." I liked the soft science/engineering, I liked the ingenuity. But here again, the story was just kind of crap- not very interesting to watch unfold at all. By the time the Hermes gets the coordinates to go back, it was just really kind of stupid...I would have been the dude on the ship saying "nope, fuck that guy, let's go home". But Hollywood Heroism, Doing the Right Thing and all that. Interstellar was WAY better and far more compelling.

your description of the Revenant sounds eerily like Fury Road

Watched a couple of movies this weekend.

My wife picked Kingsman: The Secret Service from On Demand. It was an OK spy movie. The concept is kind of fun, this secret secret service that's all about being the gentleman spy and throw in this fish out of water street kid and a megalomaniac villain and you've got yourself a movie going on. As the movie went on it started feeling more and more like a Mark Millar comic, I had to look it up, and yep, it's based on a Millar comic called The Secret Service. So you get what you expect from Millar, lots of violence, really characterized characters and of course some juvenility.

The next night I watched Jodorowsky's Dune. Good documentary. It definitely would be interesting to see how Jodorwsky's version of Dune would have gone down. He had definitely assembled an amazing visual team, but I question his decisions to cast his son and Salvador Dali. Dali was a genius of course, but as an actor? I'd love to get my hands on a copy of that book though, it would be amazing if they someone got the rights to reproduce it. Even though Jodorowsky had everything meticulously planned out as evidenced by the book they sent the studios, I get why they didn't have faith in him. I mean Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre still top my list of weirdest movies I've ever seen.

The shame is he never made another movie again, until he reconnected with his producer during the filming of the documentary. He did go on to have an amazing career in comics though. If his career had been reversed and created The Incal, Metabarons, etc., first I'm sure a studio would have snatched up Dune right away.

Michael Barnes wrote: I also watched The Martian on PPV. I liked it somewhat better than The Revenant (although that movie was better made on a technical level), mainly because I loved how optimistic it was despite the situation. I really liked how Watney was just like "you know what, this sucks but I'mma just get it sorted and see how far I can go here." I liked the soft science/engineering, I liked the ingenuity.

This is exactly why I enjoyed the movie. I had been watching so much bummer, everyone dies shit for the past year that coming into this movie I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and something terrible to happen. And it didn't, and I loved that. I also loved that the hero of the story was not a member of the military and that it was, in fact, his scientific skills that won him the day. Watching the military get glorified in every film about the US government by Hollywood is just fucking grim.

Just this morning I watched World of Tomorrow on Netflix. It's a short animated film from Don Hertzfeldt, whose "Rejected" was watched over and over again by me and my friends in college.

"World of Tomorrow" is a really fascinating bit of existentialist sci-fi. It's dark, funny, sad, and will probably yield a lot more stuff on further viewings. If you have like twelve minutes, I recommend checking it out.

This marks perhaps the first time I've ever seen an Oscar-nominated short film before the award has been handed out.

Yeah, I was so excited to find World of Tomorrow was available. I definitely want to watch it again because it seems to be so densely packed with ideas. I'm afraid I don't quite understand the huge amount of praise it has received, but I did like it. I'm probably just too slow.

The Pixar shorts that play before their films are usually nominated--you've seen them man.

I watched EX MACHINA. It was OK. It's so much beloved here, I am reluctant to talk about what I found lacking. I'm glad everyone else was digging it so deeply though. As genre flicks go, it's better than most, that's for sure.

Lego, when you watch Attack the Block, see if you recognize a certain stormtrooper in that one. Pretty cool.

Speaking of which, someone tell JJ to start up an Episode VIII thread. It's about time we get that party started.