Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

This forum is to learn about foreign cultures and habits, because language skills are not everything you need as a world citizen...

Moderator:Forum Administrators

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Re: Which movie(s) have you watched lately?

Postby linguoboy » 2016-02-13, 3:19

1911 starring Jackie Chan/成龍. Pretty disappointing. Strip away the high production values and big name cast and all you're left with is a dry history lesson about the Xinhai Revolution.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
mōdgethanc
Posts:10890
Joined:2010-03-20, 5:27
Gender:male
Location:Toronto
Country:CACanada (Canada)

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

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-02-13, 21:42

Varislintu wrote:Casablanca. I didn't even know what this old classic movie was about when I checked it out of the library. Who knew it would be so brilliantly relevant, decades after it was made? :D It's like the current Middle Eastern exodus crisis, but in a diferent time, so the people on the move are white Europeans. White Europeans stuck on-route to a better life, peddling their last possesions and self-dignity to smugglers, trying to get to somewhere better. Not a bad movie in itself and the coincidence of the theme made it super interesting to see. 10/10.
You might have come across this already, but it's often seen as an allegory already - Rick Blaine, who owns the Café Américain in a city whose name literally means "White House", claims to be neutral but secretly has Allied sympathies, and has to decide whether he should get involved in the fight against the Axis. Essentially, he's FDR but with less polio and more alcoholism.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

User avatar
Meera
Posts:8782
Joined:2008-05-27, 22:01
Real Name:Meera
Gender:female
Location:Philadelphia
Country:USUnited States (United States)

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

Postby Meera » 2016-02-15, 15:23

Deadpool this was one of the best movies I have seen this year. I could go see it again.
अहिंसा/เจ
Learning: (hi) (ja) (ko) (fr)

User avatar
Antea
Posts:3954
Joined:2015-08-23, 10:53
Real Name:c
Gender:female

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

Postby Antea » 2016-02-15, 18:28

Ok, I will talk about the latest movies for children, because for obvious reasons that is what we mostly see now.

The best for us was "Inside out". And yesterday we saw "Zootropolis" (in Catalan) and it was also Ok. And latest "Alvin and the Chipmonks", how to put it, this one was just for children... :roll:

Now I'm expecting with interest the new Disney princess film "Moana", with a character from Hawai'i, I think. Maybe they will be using some words in 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, besides Moana (ocean) :yep: :hmm: ?

User avatar
Lada
Posts:4299
Joined:2003-08-10, 15:23
Real Name:Anna
Gender:female
Country:RURussia (Российская Федерация)

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

Postby Lada » 2016-02-17, 10:38

Antea wrote:I couldn't wait anymore and yesterday I watched " Битва за Севастополь"...even without subtitles :roll: . Because I liked so much the song "Кукушка" of the OST of this movie posted on the Song's thread :yep:

As I'm guilty for posting it, I hope you enjoyed the movie :) As for me I haven't watched any of the last Russian blockbusters - war and biopics do not really interest me at least now.

The last movie I watched was The Master. It's a story about relations between mysticism teacher and his protege who was at first alcoholic, then some kind of fanatic and then became a free man. Generally speaking it's about person's evolution, about closed societies and cult. I would name this movie a strong psychological drama, definitely not for big screens. So if you liked Whiplash as me, you would love this movie too.

User avatar
Antea
Posts:3954
Joined:2015-08-23, 10:53
Real Name:c
Gender:female

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

Postby Antea » 2016-02-18, 6:42

Lada wrote:The last movie I watched was The Master.


It seems interesting. I will look for it :yep:

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

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

Postby linguoboy » 2016-03-02, 4:13

101 Reykjavik. Decent enough as a slice-of-life from Iceland, but I've really had it with movies about man-child protagonists.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
Michael
Posts:7126
Joined:2009-07-21, 3:07
Real Name:Mike
Gender:male
Location:Oak Park, IL
Country:USUnited States (United States)

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

Postby Michael » 2016-03-02, 17:14

Currently watching Fetih 1453 ("Conquest 1453"), a Turkish movie about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. It would be nice if it were subtitled, because I can hardly understand Turkish at the low level I'm at, but I can infer from context what's going on.

I did notice a few historical inaccuracies. The way it portrays Byzantine Constantinople as immaculate, when by the time the city was invaded by the Turks, it had already lost much of its grandeur since Frankish Crusaders sacked the city centuries earlier and it never quite recovered from that. Also, it shows Sultan Mehmet II entering the Hagia Sophia as soon as his army took over the city, addressing the fearful congregation, telling them not to fear, and showing affection to a Christian infant… Yeah, the Ottomans turned the city upside down for three days, massacring citizens and pillaging sacred Byzantine sites. Only after the fact did the Sultan reportedly express regret at the destruction caused by his army.
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
Every human being is hostage to their own deeds.

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

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

Postby linguoboy » 2016-03-20, 3:48

Auf der anderen Seite. I think I've posted before about how Fatih Akın seems to alternate between lame comedies and really excellent explorations of human relationships, as if he's using the easy money from the former to subsidise the latter. Well this is definitely one of the latter. It's an ensemble piece and it was fun to see actors I know from very different places (e.g. Hanna Schygulla, one of Fassbinder's muses; Baki Davrak from Lola und Bilidikid, the first Turkish-German film I ever saw) in the same production.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
Antea
Posts:3954
Joined:2015-08-23, 10:53
Real Name:c
Gender:female

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

Postby Antea » 2016-03-20, 7:53

Michael wrote:Currently watching Fetih 1453 ("Conquest 1453"), a Turkish movie about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. It would be nice if it were subtitled, because I can hardly understand Turkish at the low level I'm at, but I can infer from context what's going on.


It seems like a super-production! I would like to watch it, if I find subtitles. Sometime ago I tried to see a Turkish serie "Muhtesem yuzyil" but subtitles were in Arabic and went just to fast, and then I found Russian subtitles, but finally I had to let it go, because it was too much difficult :hmm:

Varislintu
Posts:15429
Joined:2004-02-09, 13:32
Country:VUVanuatu (Vanuatu)

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

Postby Varislintu » 2016-03-21, 13:23

Big Hero 6, the animation movie. I was a bit disappointed, as it wasn't really something that works for adults. The worldbuilding was way too illogical. (Inventions with huge social and technological consequences were being made by individual youth/teenagers, apparently from scratch, and yet the society around them was not showing signs of the previous stages of that technology. In simpler terms, the kids lived in a society seemingly void of AI-technology, but were building incredibly smart robots at home. Among other things.) Maybe kids like it, I didn't really. 5/10.

User avatar
mōdgethanc
Posts:10890
Joined:2010-03-20, 5:27
Gender:male
Location:Toronto
Country:CACanada (Canada)

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

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-03-23, 22:27

I liked it. It was implausible, sure, but it is an animated movie.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

User avatar
Dormouse559
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:6939
Joined:2010-05-30, 0:06
Real Name:Matthew
Gender:male
Country:USUnited States (United States)

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

Postby Dormouse559 » 2016-03-23, 23:13

There was only moment that really jarred me. It was when Baymax scanned the medical information of everyone in the city. Massive invasion of privacy? Not cool, dude. Other than that, though, I liked it.
N'hésite pas à corriger mes erreurs.

Varislintu
Posts:15429
Joined:2004-02-09, 13:32
Country:VUVanuatu (Vanuatu)

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

Postby Varislintu » 2016-03-26, 8:48

Dormouse559 wrote:There was only moment that really jarred me. It was when Baymax scanned the medical information of everyone in the city. Massive invasion of privacy? Not cool, dude. Other than that, though, I liked it.


I felt like there were several moments of Baymax either invading privacy or showing a worrying lack of understanding of the concept of patient consent. :P

I know that it was an animated movie, but it was still situated in a non-magical real world (our own world). So the constant implausibilities were just Jarring me the whole way through. The kid (apparently middle class, no factory access) invents and manufactures the intelligent herd-minded mind reading mini-robots that, if real, would revolutionise the entire world, in a garage just to get into a university, and then simply declares to a potential byer that "they are not for sale", as if it's that simple. Then later is shocked, shocked that someone stole one of them and is copying it without permission -- because the way this world works is a apparently that everyone is the sole developer of inventions and never make notes, share notes, or base their work on previous advances. (Or imitate each other's inventions.)

This odd world building continued in the plotline of the company-army collaboration that invented teleportation (or more like wormholing). Frigging teleportation, man! But there is one single mishap in the demo event, and get this, the army decides to completely abandon the entire research (that was already working, apparently). I mean, nice to paint the army in such a human-concerned light, but come on... What would have been much more likely is that the army would have confiscated the kid's mini-robot invention in the name of national security or something. And definitely they would have reaped the benefits of the teleportation technology after pouring what looked like millions into the development of it. Even NASA still operates space technology even if several astonauts have died in failed launches, etc.

And then just the same issue with how the teens build superhero outfits but nobody else in the world seems to enjoy the same technology, like flying or chemical bombs with awesome effects or even instantly appearing ice (?) blades or super-fast disc skates. Or super-intelligent companion robots.

And the icing on the cake was the recording of the older brother trying to get Baymax to work, which amounted to him trying to get the thing to say its greeting phrase correctly. Not moving around, not recognising human beings, not scanning them for all known diseases plus blood type remotely, not being able to solve complex puzzles without prior experience (like when it comes up with using a window to break into a locked factory -- a "fat" nursing robot that never even climbs). No, the difficult thing was getting it to say its greeting phrase. :silly:

But I can tell that the reason I thought the movie was so implausible is my cumulative adult experience of this world, technological advances and politics, so I can understand that that's not the only criteria through which to evaluate the movie.

IpseDixit

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

Postby IpseDixit » 2016-03-31, 15:42

American Sniper - I wanted to watch it just because judging by the trailer it seemed visually gorgeous and indeed it was, but although I was mentally prepared to hear a good dose of patriotic propaganda, there were a few things that really got on my nerves like the "why do they hate us?" kind of victim complex and especially the fact that Iraqis are called "savages" throughout the movie. Then things became outright grotesque for me when Chris Kyle pronounced a Fascist motto (i.e: God, Country, Family) as if it were the most normal thing to say, and speaking of Chris Kyle, gosh, his character has the emotional depth and complexity of an amoeba.

Koko

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

Postby Koko » 2016-04-10, 18:52

Yesterday watched My Neighbour Totoro :mrgreen: Only downside is Mei being a little annoying... actually a lot annoying. But I should expect no less of a four year old than to hate them. I want the cat bus.

Then I saw Battle Royale! :twisted: Definitely a fave now. Gotta love watching children kill each other. And a while ago Seven Samurai was suggested to me, so I should pry watch that sometime this week.

IpseDixit

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

Postby IpseDixit » 2016-04-11, 23:15

The Theory of Everything - Jeez, how boring. I thought it was about Stephen Hawking the physicist, not about how his wife used to take care of him.

User avatar
france-eesti
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:4236
Joined:2016-01-02, 19:41
Gender:female
Location:France
Country:FRFrance (France)

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

Postby france-eesti » 2016-04-12, 6:04

Why? I quite liked it :D but indeed there wasn't as much astro-physics as I would have expected but hey, that was still a biography :D

I saw the Estonian film Crosswind - though it was a very unusual filming (mostly from static scenes with a narrator), I liked it a lot and didn't see the 90 minutes... Completed very well my reading of Sofi Oksanen's books about deportation of Baltic populations to Siberia for no reason :cry:
(fr) Native - (en) Fluentish - (pt) Fluentish when I was younger - (hu) Can sustain a conversation with a patient and kind magyar or order some beer and lecsó in Budapest - (it) On Duolingo ma posso ordinare uno Spritz ed antipasti in un ristorante :blush:

Varislintu
Posts:15429
Joined:2004-02-09, 13:32
Country:VUVanuatu (Vanuatu)

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

Postby Varislintu » 2016-04-12, 8:42

Mockingbird (USA, 2014). A horror movie about a handful of people who start getting creepy gifts and instructions from an unknown "watcher" that they have to follow through. The problem with this movie was that at some point (kinda early, really) I just got so annoyed with this "watcher" that I stopped being creeped out completely. I just wanted the victims to go out and effing confront the person(s) and call their bluff. But of course the victims rather deteriorated into barely functional heaps of fear. Blech, I don't recommend this movie really. Let's say 3/10.

IpseDixit

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

Postby IpseDixit » 2016-04-12, 17:27

france-eesti wrote:Why?


I've already said why, it's basically a movie about how his wife would take care of him. I mean, I'm sure there would've been an awful lot of more interesting things to recount about Hawking's life than, say, how many wheelchairs he has changed over the course of his life.


Return to “Culture”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests