What Movies Have You Seen Lately?

Quote: Nareed

Batman got an heir in one iteration. And beat the crap out of Superman in another.

Some of the themes are similar to Frank Miller's "Dark Knight". "Logan" goes much further with violence, gore and adult language though. Did you ever see Bruce Wayne, or Superman have trouble starting their car? Wolverine does.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Did you ever see Bruce Wayne, or Superman have trouble starting their car? Wolverine does.

"What would Superman want with a car?"

But Batman has had car trouble in the animated series, ranging from crashes to sabotage.

Superhero movies can tackle deep issues. But they are not realistic.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Did you ever see Bruce Wayne, or Superman have trouble starting their car? Wolverine does.

Whoa! Whoa! Spoiler tags, man! Geeeez!

Quote: Fleastiff

It is listed on TCM's Friday the third's schedule which in TCM's own unique way means it takes place at 4:00am of Saturday the Fourth. There being some sort of "day" on TCM that is roughly simlar to a casino's 'day'.

4:00 AM EASTERN
Z (1969)
A political assassination uncovers a hotbed of corruption.
Dir: Costa-Gavras Cast: Yves Montand , Jean-Louis Trintignant , Jacques Perrin .
C-127 mins,
4 Saturday

Sorry... I guess my mental deterioration is accellerating... I got confused between Costa Gavras "Z" and his "State of Siege" which is the movie I was thinking of.
Brain deteriorating ... CRS Can't Remember Stuff.

Appologies.

The Belko Experiment

Written by James Gunn (writer/director of Guardians of the Galaxy), but not directed by him cause he was busy working on Guardians Vol. 2.

It's about a bunch of Americans who work in a Columbian office who get locked in the office building and are told via the intercom that they need to start murdering each other or else....

I'd recommend it to fans of violent horror/suspense movies, but not to anyone else.

Quote: ams288

The Belko Experiment

Written by James Gunn (writer/director of Guardians of the Galaxy), but not directed by him cause he was busy working on Guardians Vol. 2.

It's about a bunch of Americans who work in a Columbian office who get locked in the office building and are told via the intercom that they need to start murdering each other or else....

I'd recommend it to fans of violent horror/suspense movies, but not to anyone else.

Sounds like all the SAW movies
I watched all the SAW movies
Pretty well done for the horror genre

do not waste your time with "The Grey" [2011] with Liam Neeson

I often have a problem with "suspension of disbelief" but if I like one or more of the actors, it's usually enough to brush it off. And, recently, I've found I like Liam Neeson's work.

As before, if the movie is bad enough I don't worry about spoilers, but you have been warned.

So I can often deal with s.o.d. But if the movie just won't quit with dubious crap, where you just got over your last s.o.d. to be presented with yet another, all the way to the end, man! I'm ashamed to say I watched the whole thing - I got committed, only to find out the ending was what sucked the most.

I should have known with one of the first* bad moments, when Neeson shoots a wolf, walks up to it while it is dying, and puts his hand on it while you can see it still breathing. I was thinking, "I wouldn't take a chance like that with so much as a groundhog - oh well, time for an s.o.d."

But the whole movie was like that, one after another. I'll quote a sampling from the internet to give you an idea:

Quote: link

Posed to an expert:
First off, would wolves see men as prey and stalk them in the wild? I’d think that in a remote area like this one, wolves might fear or avoid humans.
In my 16 years of studying wolves in Yellowstone National Park, I have never been approached by a wolf or wolf pack. On the contrary, when I’ve inadvertently bumped into wolves they turn and run away—which is a problem when my objective is to observe them!
One of the characters in the movie says these wolves a) have a 300-mile hunting radius, b) will attack anything that comes near their den, and c) “are the only animal that will seek revenge.” Is any of that that true?
No. Nonsense, all of it.
Would a wolf attack a man standing next to a fire, with other men nearby, as happens in The Grey?
Not a chance.
At one point two men are running alongside a riverbank in the middle of the day. Two wolves race out of the trees and charge them. Possible?
No.

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/03/would-real-wolves-act-like-the-wolves-of-the-grey/

by the way, on that last one, the men see the wolves, then start running, always a monstrous mistake if an animal would stalk you. That mistake is shown more than once.

Let me add to this, answers by me:

is a wolf den sort of an above ground clearing in the woods?....... No.
if you fell into the freezing water and got soaked in the conditions shown, could anyone survive it unless a fire was built immediately?....... No, not me, not you, not the young, hale and hardy, nobody. You'd be done for in a very short period of time.

I won't go on, there are plenty more. What bothered me the most was that Neeson's character was supposed to be an expert himself, and they had him coming out with these 'facts' in an authoritative manner. Maybe, just maybe, I could have taken it better without that - it's just wrong. Nevertheless I was still heading for that awful ending, where Neeson takes on the alpha male with basically his bare hands while the pack sits back and appreciates a fight between two alpha males, you see. The movie doesn't show the fight, but we get to see who won.

The movie was an adaptation of a book by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers [edit], who got to help write the screenplay too. So, do not read the book either, I have to think. How does crap like this get sold?

*the first probably was the premise, the need to hire someone to kill wolves to protect workers in the arctic.

Quote: odiousgambit

do not waste your time with "The Grey" [2011] with Liam Neeson

I appreciated this movie as an exploration of the significance of life. If you don't think of the film as a documentary, but as a drama with the wolves representing the challenges in a man's life, the story takes on a new meaning.

As for their behavior, I don't know much about wolves beyond what I've seen on Disney nature documentaries in the 70's, but I think it reasonable to assume that wolves in the Arctic may not behave like wolves in Yellowstone, just as bears in the Arctic may not behave like bears in Yellowstone. If the wolves always run from people that "bump into" them, why have people been eaten by wolves?

my comments -> spoiler warning again.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Quote: odiousgambit

do not waste your time with "The Grey" [2011] with Liam Neeson

I appreciated this movie as an exploration of the significance of life. If you don't think of the film as a documentary, but as a drama with the wolves representing the challenges in a man's life, the story takes on a new meaning.

We sometimes disagree it seems! That's good, no problem, I like the discussion. You are right, you can take a different look at this movie from this angle, which did in fact provide some balm for me. BTW, I couldn't quite get one thing, as a flashback Neeson is shown laying down with his woman in several scenes. On the last one, we see someone, her I guess, is connected with a drip like they do in a hospital. Is that supposed to say she was dying?

Quote:

As for their behavior, I don't know much about wolves beyond what I've seen on Disney nature documentaries in the 70's, but I think it reasonable to assume that wolves in the Arctic may not behave like wolves in Yellowstone, just as bears in the Arctic may not behave like bears in Yellowstone. If the wolves always run from people that "bump into" them, why have people been eaten by wolves?

On this I will defend myself!

OK, you have a point. And I think I would have been able to get over the suspension of disbelief problem if this one thing, with a couple of others thrown in, was all I had to get over. Maybe wolves would stalk wounded men - I could believe that. It was being confronted over and over again with BS that 'did it.' And having someone pose as an expert who was full of it - I repeat, that's just wrong.

Every outdoor scene was wrong. Every scene. What a survivable crash-landing would look like vis-à-vis the horrific crash shown. How long a person can stay conscious while rapidly losing blood. How you can't just remove a stick from a fire and have a torch. Even how long your cigarettes would last - each scene was a bump in the road for me.

You know, I talk about my interests, but nobody is going to hire me to speak as the local naturalist acknowledged to know it all. I like to hunt, forage, fish, camp, and so on, but I don't do it professionally and frankly don't get out as often as I'd really like. But just what bit I do know about it was too much.

As to modern day incidents of non-rabid wolf attacks, from what I know about them, the wolves have been acclimated to humans. In a well publicized recent example, see link, a woman was working professionally with captive wolves. They were considered 'wild' but it is a case of acclimation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Wyman_wolf_attack

BTW I corrected my previous post: the writer of the book the movie was taken from was Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, not Carnahan, the latter was the awful director* as well as one of the screenwriters. A short story, it's the only book he has for sale at Amazon. Don't buy it.

*at least awful for survival stories

Speaking of animals.

Re-watching Hitchcock's "The Birds."

I think it's the only movie I ever remember seeing that takes a fairly harmless animal and makes a successful and not laughable monster.

Apparently based on a real life incident. Seagulls poisoned by algae toxin started flying into houses and buildings and acting crazy. Of course they didn't know that at the time, so it was considered a pretty bizarre incident.

I've also been meaning to mention something I always notice about Hitchcock movies. There's always a noticeable stiffness about the movement from scene to scene. You can almost sense the storyboard for each section. Not sure how much he allowed for slight improvisation of scene.

And he sure loves his pretty blondes.