Over/Under-rated movies: the redux

Demolition Man is a work of art. I won’t accept rebuttals :stuck_out_tongue:

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I also have a review of Zardoz somewhere up in this thread. It confused me, but I really liked it.

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Yeah i was quoting from your post/review :slight_smile: i also like it, i’ve seen it maybe 3 times? But it is quite a chaotic uneven movie, and somewhat pretentious but it’s the kind of movie that you could watch over some drinks with a group of friends and make fun of it or just take in the weirdness.

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As far as a movie that i felt was vastly overrated, and felt very disappointed by, was The Green Knight. It’s directed and shot really well, has great music, editing, acting, all of it is good… but the script/story was very unapproachable. I have seen some challenging movies, where you have to put in a bit more work as a viewer but the experience seeing The Green Knight was frustrating because they try to stick very close to the poem that the movie is based on. As someone wholly divorced from the poem and ancient English literature I constantly felt like there was information was being withheld to me, after watching the movie I looked on Reddit and someone had fleshed out everything that I had missed and in hindsight the story made more sense but it just reinforced my feeling that the film was made to be unapproachable to a casual viewer. Instead of fleshing things out it would rather present you with less, the end result was a disjointed movie where things constantly happen and you have no idea why. And the more I thought about it after the fact, and the more I learned about the story the more frustrated I felt.

At the end of the day all I can say is that I hated it and would actively tell people not to bother with it. I also don’t get it because universally i kept reading online how people loved it and gushed about it and i just wonder if i missed something. If you’ve seen it I’m curious to hear what your impressions were.

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Ah. It’s been a while.

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i’ll second this. Love that movie!

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As far as I’m concerned Toecutter somehow survived that head-on with a semi and later returned with the new alias of Immortan Joe. I don’t care if George Miller agrees with me or not.

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My daughter and I have been watching horror movies lately.
We watched Suspira - both the OG and a recent remake; we watched The Witch, which I enjoyed SO MUCH because I took a course in Salem Witchcraft and it was a fantastic way to step into their vision of the world.
We watched the Japanese original version of The Ring.
None of these were all that scary.
We wanted a movie that would scare the pants off us.
So, we watched The Exorcist.
And, maybe it’s just been too spoilered and too riffed on, but it was NOT scary in the least. I was so disappointed. The blood and vomit looked so fake, the story didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it wasn’t very creepy.

Maybe you need to watch horror in a movie theater with other scared people?

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I want to recommend a Sean Connery movie that doesn’t come up much, if at all. It’s called Outland (1981), tone-wise it’s a mix of Sci-fi + a western sheriff trying and barely keeping the peace + a noir story, akin to a detective trying to untangle a conspiracy. It may not blow your socks off, but i had zero expectations when i saw it and by the end of it i was really on board. Really enjoyed how grounded and unpretentious it was.

The story is of a Federal Marshall (Connery) stationed in a mining colony on the Jupiter moon Io. He’s trying to untangle a criminal web that’s threatening to overtake the colony. I’ve you’ve seen it i’d like to hear your thoughts on it :slight_smile:

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Personally, I found the original Ring scary! Suspira is less scary and much more atmospheric (which ever version)… for myself, two of the scariest movies I saw in recent years were the Innkeepers and I am the Pretty Thing that lives in the house:

I love horror films, even ones I don’t find scary… But lots of horror films rely on gore, but both of these I found more unsettling than the ones you mentioned… I also found The Haunting of Hill House (on netflix) to be pretty creepy and unsettling… It’s a great series if you’ve not watched that yet.

I wonder if most of us are so familiar with horror tropes at this point that it’s hard to actually be scared of such films…

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Perhaps a different approach?

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Recently got into Petzold

I’m almost afraid to learn the truth about lectures at the SenSBW. Or about Heinrich Heine.

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Oh, now that’s a feel-good romp if ever there was one!

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I agree! I also liked the fact that it wasn’t focused on the science and technology side of the story - they’re mining Io, with everything that implies (space travel being the least of it), but it’s a story about the people. Not much character development beyond Connery’s character and the doctor (Frances Sternhagen), but that sort of feeds the sense of the miners as just interchangable components.

Another Connery film I really like is Medicine Man, which also stars Lorraine Bracco.

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Hangover Square (John Brahm 1945)

A promising young classical composer suffers violent dissociative episodes when subjected to discordant sounds.

20th Century Fox’s follow-up to 1944’s The Lodger, with the same killer (Laird Cregar), detective (George Sanders), scriptwriter (Barré Lyndon), director and a similar period setting. Reportedly, a very unfaithful adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s novel, but still a very good film in its own right. Cregar, in his last role before his untimely death, does a great job as the lead, who keeps audience sympathy by not realizing what he does during his blackouts. Linda Darnell almost outshines him as the music hall singer who seduces and betrays him. (This horror/thriller has got more than a bit of noir in it.)

Marvelous bits include Guy Fawkes Night and the even more fiery Grand Guignol climax, which features excellent use of Bernard Herrmann’s Concerto Macabre, written especially for the film.

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Afire is probably one of my favorite movies ever. I don’t think I have ever seen a better exploration of being an asshole.

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I loved it as a subversion of the atomic-age monster movie - “what if, instead of becoming giant, they got their shit together in a way we can’t and started cooperating?”

For the complete psychedelic experience it’s worth finding a version with the restored original ending. Four minutes on-par with the end of 2001.

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I saw Phase IV decades ago on BBC2 or Channel 4; I remember getting a similarly trippy-apocalyptic feel from The Last Wave.

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[laugh/cry gif]

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