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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)


Mr. Breathmask

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1 hour ago, Jay said:

serendipity-movie.jpg (792×456)

 

Serendipity


Watched this over the holidays.  A small classic from 2001, with a silly plot but really nice performances by John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, Jeremy Piven, Eugene Levy, and Molly Shannon make it entirely watchable.   Nice wintry imagery in New York City doesn't hurt either, Silvestri scored it, but I don't remember anything about the score.

 

I remember liking that one. Haven't seen it since, though.

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Forces of Nature

 

Pretty stupid 90s rom com.  26 year old Ben Affleck has to choose between the 34 year old Maura Tierney he's engaged to, and the 34 year old Sandra Bullock (playing a 27 year old) he meets on the way to his wedding.  It's tries to be a Planes Trains and Automobiles type road trip movie as they attempt to take a plane, then a car, then a train, then a bus, then whatever else on their way from NYC to Savannah.  Affleck cheats on his fiance with Bullock while she cheats on him with some random dude, and they end up together at the end anyway.  Good luck!

Hey, I didn't pick it.  

 

The score was by John Powell, and featured a Bourne-like cue and not much else of note from what I could tell.

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She wanted to watch Forces of Nature last  night, yea.  I got a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes in during it.  It did feature a nice scene of Sandra Bullock in her skivvies, but they paired a decent bra with practically granny panties for some reason


Serendipity is a classic!  We watched it in New Hamppshire when we were up there for Christmas.

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Catch Me If You Can was on last night. There's another one I haven't seen in a good while. I've always loved it. I mean, it's still not on the level of the classic Spielberg stuff, but it feels the closest he ever got in the 2000s. He actually seemed to be into it. Leo still looks like he did in Titanic. Not long after this, he would become bloated, bearded and all wrong.

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Oh hey, we watched that a month or two ago and I never wrote about it, why don't I hop on

 

 

Catch+Me+If+You+Can+2.jpg (615×403)

 

Catch Me If You Can

 

Hadn't seen this one since the theaters in 2002, had no idea what I would think about it now . Turns out, its a nice, well-made movie.  It's pretty impressive that Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale from age 14 to his late 20s or early 30s while being in his late 20s at the time of filming - that babyface of his continued to work well for him for quite a while.

 

The cast is really impressive - The scenes Leo has with Christopher Walken are all good, and Tom Hanks chasing him was good too.  Then you got Amy Adams as the fiance, Martin Sheen as her father, Elizabeth Banks in a few scenes, and a really weird scene with Jennifer Garner.

 

In fact, that Jennifer Garner scene really stands out as an oddity in the film; It's fairly unconnected from anything else and I would have thought would have been ripe to just be cut entirely.  I think Spielberg was just enamored by her on ALIAS and wanted to stick her in the movie, but the scene is redundant and doesn't deliver any information or advance the plot in any way that other scenes hadn't already done.

 

Another aspect that didn't work for me was the framing story; I didn't like that it opens with Hanks catching DiCaprio and flying him back on the plane, etc, with most of the movie being a flashback inside that story.  That device didn't improve the storytelling at all, in my opinion.

 

I really liked a lot of individual scenes (like when Hanks catches DiCaprio in the room and DiCaprio talks his way out of it, his scenes in the bank with Elizabeth Banks, etc) and the whole ending where he gets a job at the FBI instead of staying in a life of crime.  

 

A solid, fun movie that I'm sure I'll revisit again.

 

The score by Johnny Williams was great, especially the jazzy opening titles and the theme for DiCaprio and his father.

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What's wrong with the Jennifer Garner scene? He's living it up dressed like James Bond blowing absurd amounts of money just to bang women in the wee hours of the morning. The Spielberg who directed that scene is the Spielberg who directed Indiana Jones!

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As an isolated "short film" its fine, as a part of a larger film its redundant and doesn't add anything we don't already know about his character.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring-Extended edition

 

I've never been the hugest fan of the films, but this time I enjoyed watching it more than usual. I generally find the score overwhelming, but I actually really enjoyed it this time. 

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22 hours ago, Jay said:

Forces of Nature

 

Pretty stupid 90s rom com.  26 year old Ben Affleck has to choose between the 34 year old Maura Tierney he's engaged to, and the 34 year old Sandra Bullock (playing a 27 year old) he meets on the way to his wedding.  It's tries to be a Planes Trains and Automobiles type road trip movie as they attempt to take a plane, then a car, then a train, then a bus, then whatever else on their way from NYC to Savannah.  Affleck cheats on his fiance with Bullock while she cheats on him with some random dude, and they end up together at the end anyway.  Good luck!

Hey, I didn't pick it.  

 

The score was by John Powell, and featured a Bourne-like cue and not much else of note from what I could tell.

 

Powell's score is great!

 

 

21 hours ago, Jay said:

Catch Me If You Can

 

Really underrated film, in my opninion. The autobiography it's based on is pretty great too, if you're ever interested. Quite amazing how much he was able to get away with at the time. He paved the way for some pretty standard security measures these days. 

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Song Of The Sea

 

Really enjoyed most aspects of this one, from the wonderful Irish folklore story to the music and performances. However, something about the animation itself rubbed me the wrong way. At times it was crude enough to be some TV cartoon and there was a real lack of perspective and depth to everything that made most wide shots seem awkwardly flat. Not sure if this was a stylistic choice in the art direction or a budgeting one, but I found it distracting. 

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Anyone notice after these sorts of movies were rediscovered on DVD, they went through a honeymoon period where everyone posts glowering reviews about them, all mentioning their impact on popular culture, then the memes and references become saturated? Then someone like BloodBoal and others like him start trending reviews that say "it's just okay", as some sort of reactionary thing to the wider consensus that it's "great" and a "classic"?

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1 hour ago, Quintus said:

Rick Moranis in the first film is one of the reasons it's a much sharper comedy than the poor sequel. His hapless dinner party scenes crack me up every time. 

 

Who is the hideous wench?

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On February 12, 2017 at 0:06 PM, Jay said:

In fact, that Jennifer Garner scene really stands out as an oddity in the film; It's fairly unconnected from anything else and I would have thought would have been ripe to just be cut entirely.  I think Spielberg was just enamored by her on ALIAS and wanted to stick her in the movie, but the scene is redundant and doesn't deliver any information or advance the plot in any way that other scenes hadn't already done.

 

Interestingly in the making-of, Spielberg said that scene had always been left out of the script but DiCaprio loved that scene so much from the book (wonder why!) that he convinced them to put it back in. I do think it's a pretty funny scene, for once Frank never gets the upper hand, as opposed to everyone else he meets who he just charms the pants off and they do whatever he wants. But there's just not really much of a payoff, it just ends with a young rich dude paying $1000 for sex lol. 

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Yea, maybe I'd like the scene more if it had a little more to it / ended better

 

And of course Leo fought to include the scene where he gets to make out with 29 year old Jennifer Garner!

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We recently watched Ghostbusters as well

 

 

Ghostbusters

 

 

You know, before this rewatch, I would have called it one of my favorite films; growing up, I watched it in a regular rotation with other 80s classics like Back To The Future, Ferris Bueller, Breakfast Club, Predator, Die Hard, Gremlins, Goonies, etc and loved them all.  But I had recently realized that I hadn't actually seen Ghostbusters again since college, so it had probably been around 15 years since I'd seen it.  I wasn't sure if it would hold up....

 

.. and after watching it recently, I thought that it actually didn't hold up, not really.  My experience was similar to Blooboa'ls: I thought the special effects were REALLY dated, more than I expected (not sure if this was partially due to the poor Blu Ray transfer or what), and yea, it kind of is The Bill Murray Show for a lot of it (Aykroyd gets a lot of the funnier moments though).  But seriously, scenes like Murray in Weaver's apartment go on for kinda too long, like the director didn't want to cut any of Murray's improving.

 

Anyways, the classic lines I knew by heart were still really funny, the whole fact that's a goofy movie about an ancient magic guy wrecking havoc on modern day Manhattan is cool, plenty of other stuff to like, but overall, its not the amazing, flawless comedy masterpiece I remembered form my childhood.  Oh well.

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I saw Ghostbusters at the cinema, my mum took me. I can't really remember the experience, but I recall seeing it on tv a few years later, and the effects never looked "realistic". Didn't matter to me. It's a silly movie which for whatever reason seemed to achieve classic status about twenty years after it came out. I like it, but it's never been one of my nostalgic favourites or anything like that. 

 

I'm not about to reappraise the thing looking for the Blade Runner of fantasy comedy or something. 

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On 12/02/2017 at 6:17 PM, Rose Dawson said:

What's wrong with the Jennifer Garner scene? He's living it up dressed like James Bond blowing absurd amounts of money just to bang women in the wee hours of the morning. The Spielberg who directed that scene is the Spielberg who directed Indiana Jones!


Yep. As a Bond fan, I dug the hell out of that scene. 

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See? The whole "Meh Movement" is the new craze. Where movies that were always lauded as "classics" are now being downgraded by a group of contrarians who have probably only reached their new conclusions due to their overexposure to online memes, excessive quoting and whatever else is related to the film's brand.

 

Is this just an attempt by some to look more "grown up"? Like a teenager who liked Star Wars as a kid, but now feels under pressure to abandon things he liked a few years before in order to appear "cool", but rediscovers it years later when those social anxieties wear off? Dunno.

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Oh fuck off!

 

Really now, some movies age better than others. And reapraising what was once a childhood classic is perfectly acceptable.

 

You can be such a grating little turd sometimes.

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Ghostbusters has been a classic since day one. It inspired a cartoon, merchandise, a Universal Studios attraction and Ecto Cooler. I was there. It was considered pretty great. And for the record, I prefer Ghostbusters 2.

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It never became un-great. It became even more popular, so it became trendy to dislike it. It wasn't a case like Back to the Future where it was just too much exposure and a realization that the sequels really were just kinda shitty.

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4 hours ago, Daniel Clamp said:

See? The whole "Meh Movement" is the new craze. Where movies that were always lauded as "classics" are now being downgraded by a group of contrarians who have probably only reached their new conclusions due to their overexposure to online memes, excessive quoting and whatever else is related to the film's brand.

 

I've never seen online memes or excessive quoting of Ghostbusters. What are some of the most famous memes of Ghostbusters?

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10 hours ago, Stefancos said:

Sometimes something used to be great, but really isn't that much anymore 

 

I think Ghostbusters is about as good as it always was, I don't think it's deteriorated with time. The thing is, it was never an especially brilliant movie to begin with. Some people love it to bits, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it's a fun movie. It suddenly being called out for not being greatness is a bit misplaced if you ask me. 

 

Then again I suppose there's bugger all else to talk about. 

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