Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Meera » 2017-01-07, 20:06

Passengers- This movie was such BS. It had such potential too because it was a cool concept. I really don't like Chris Pratt, he is so overrated and he isn't even that good looking. Jennifer Lawerence was really good in this movie though.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Johanna » 2017-01-07, 21:24

I don't think he's overrated in Guardians of the Galaxy, he does that role extremely well, the main problem is that Hollywood tries to cash in on actors' popularity and they get put in everything with a big budget for a while, especially if the movie that made them famous was of the blockbuster type to begin with.

A perfect recipe for making the characters a lot blander than they have to be, if not downright miscast, and people to grow tired of the actor.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-01-07, 23:11

Meera wrote:Passengers- This movie was such BS. It had such potential too because it was a cool concept.

I was appalled when I found out what the "twist" was. Truly appalled. I lost all interest in seeing the film at that point, even though I like Pratt, Lawrence, and Sheen.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Meera » 2017-01-07, 23:47

linguoboy wrote:
Meera wrote:Passengers- This movie was such BS. It had such potential too because it was a cool concept.

I was appalled when I found out what the "twist" was. Truly appalled. I lost all interest in seeing the film at that point, even though I like Pratt, Lawrence, and Sheen.


Yup, I was appalled too, if I knew that happened I probably wouldn't have seen it. I felt it was really disgusting.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Osias » 2017-01-16, 2:19

Just saw "Saneamento Básico" on Netflix, where a bunch of amateurs from a small city on Brazilian southmost state try to make a short feature monster movie without the faintest idea of what they are doing. Very funny. :rotfl:

Unilang exclusive note: The actors don't have a gaúcho accent, even if they use southern words like "dormente" and other things typical from the local dialect.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Meera » 2017-01-28, 3:04

I just watched Resident Evil the final chapter today and I loved it. I'm so sad the series is ending though.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-17, 7:49

OK, I haven't finished watching it yet because too many tears were streaming down my face and I couldn't stand any more tonight, but Valentine Road, a 2013 HBO documentary.

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Meera » 2017-02-20, 16:00

The Great Wall- I just saw this because it was the same director as House of Flying Daggers (which I loved) but omg it was horrible, Matt Damon was horrible, the movie would have been much better if it was fully in Mandarin I think. I liked seeing Oberyn Martel though.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Osias » 2017-02-20, 19:46

Meera wrote:I liked seeing Oberyn Martel though.
Watch Narcos! :)
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Meera » 2017-02-20, 22:09

Osias wrote:
Meera wrote:I liked seeing Oberyn Martel though.
Watch Narcos! :)


Okay I will :)
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-28, 5:32

Rewatched Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977) by Satyajit Ray. It makes a lot more sense to me now that I'm watching it at a time when I haven't seen one of Ray's movies in years. Still, I honestly think he made so many movies in his own mother tongue that were so much better - or perhaps it's just that Shatranj Ke Khilari strikes me as a movie that doesn't challenge what I'm already familiar with as much as those other movies.

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Osias » 2017-03-28, 14:46

Split.

Shyamalan is crazy.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Antea » 2017-03-28, 16:27

نهر الحب "River of love", an old egyptian movie with a young Omar Sharif. But as it was an Egyptian version of a very well known Russian book, I found it a little bit depressing (because of the story). Fortunately it had English subtitles, because they talked in Egyptian dialect. And first of all I had to listen, then I read the subtitles, and then I mentally related to standart Arabic, and then to its correspondent word in the dialect. It was somehow tiring :hmm:

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-28, 23:29

Osias wrote:Shyamalan is crazy.

:lol: He's also (half) Malayalee. :P

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby Osias » 2017-03-29, 0:07

This map of where he's born can't be right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puducherr ... :IN-PY.svg
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-29, 0:28

In what sense? That is indeed the Union Territory of Puducherry, formerly the French territory of Pondicherry (which was also pretty much synonymous with French India before India won its independence). It is made up of four districts: Puducherry District, Karaikal District, Mahé District, and Yanam District. Puducherry District and Karaikal are located within the boundaries of Tamil Nadu, and the local people speak Tamil. Similarly, Yanam is located within the boundaries of Andhra Pradesh, and people speak Telugu there.

Mahé, where Shyamalan was born, is located within the boundaries of Kerala, so people there speak Malayalam. It's right next to Thalassery (known by the British, and to some extent by Malayalees themselves these days, as Tellicherry), which is where Tellicherry black pepper comes from (or at least is supposed to...).

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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-03-30, 14:52

Finally got around to seeing Milk and I cried through half of it. The next generation has no inkling of most of the shit their predecessors put up with.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-01, 1:37

A friend invited me to see The Lost City of Z on a chilly rainy afternoon. It's overlong but it held our attention well enough. It's also "based on a true story", which is Hollywood-speak for "a complete pack of lies from start to finish". Seriously, almost nothing it tells us about the central figure (described by the real Amazonian explorer who provided a lot of source material as "a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster") is true. Amusingly, he himself was apparently pretty honest about how little he achieved but for some reason an American journalist wrote a ridiculously exaggerated account of his exploits which the filmmakers simply took at face value.

He's portrayed as so impossibly noble that my bullshit detector was pinging throughout, but it's interesting to see just how far from the truth the characterisation of him is and why. As you'd expect of British army officer of his era, he's a racist bigot and a chauvinist, but because he's the hero the movie makes out that the major obstacles to his success are class bigotry and racism. And, as this article ably summarises, it tries so hard to contemporise his martial relations that it almost breaks the film.

To paraphrase a scathing review of my college roommate's debut film, "I know white people have to keep making films, but why do they keep having to make this film?" As a number of critics have pointed out, if you want to make a movie about a heroic explorer, there's no shortage of interesting people who really accomplished something. Others have pointed out that nuanced films about obsessive failures are often more interesting that movies about people who actually succeeded. But no, apparently what we all want is to see ourselves as saintly tragic figures. (I swear, there should've been a halo around his head in the death scene.)
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2017-05-01, 2:24

Damn. I should've known Hollywood would bugger it up, but I was hoping that it would be a tragic story about an obsessive, screwed-up and unlikable guy and his bizarre quest for fame that inevitably ends in failure. Think Aguirre, the Wrath of God meets Moby-Dick. Now I definitely won't see it.
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Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-01, 2:31

mōdgethanc wrote:Damn. I should've known Hollywood would bugger it up, but I was hoping that it would be a tragic story about an obsessive, screwed-up and unlikable guy and his bizarre quest for fame that inevitably ends in failure. Think Aguirre, the Wrath of God meets Moby-Dick. Now I definitely won't see it.

That would've been a more interesting film to be sure. There's even a nod to Fitzcarraldo in the first thirty minutes like the filmmakers are taunting you with where they could've gone.
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