Be Excellent To Each Other

It was huge down here.

Fair enough, I was just always curious how well it translated. And I haven't seen really any chat about the new film outside of Scottish circles.

I really enjoyed Hell or High Water. It was a decent character driven tale. The only problem I had with it was that it reminded me so much of No Country for Old Men but couldn't compete as one of my personal fave films of all time. I really rate Ben Foster though. He should be in more things that aren't *hnnngh* Warcraft.

I also watched Shia LaBouf in Man Down. What a load of old bollocks that is with a twist that is telegraphed more than a Hulk Hogan Leg Drop.

Slightly weirdly I've never seen Ben Foster in anything before that but when talking about that film all I heard was chat about how good he is in general. And he is, based on his form in that film, but I'm not sure how I've never come across him before.

We watched Arrival last night, I throughly enjoyed it although Lady T said it was good but she didn't quite 'get' it. I feel like I did, but unfortunately not enough to be able to explain it to her in a satisfactory way. I thought it was well acted and shot and pleasingly balanced between being a global thing and focussing on the small team trying to establish communications. It was thought provoking.

We also watched The Equalizer. Denzel was in it, it was a Denzel vehicle with Denzel basically being Denzel with his fast-talking big-word-using high-intensity delivery of lines. I did enjoy it, it seemed to have a good balance of softness and steeliness from the main character, who basically owned pretty much everyone (surprise right?) although he was perhaps a little too unstoppable. It felt a bit contrived at times with the lengths the film went to avoid having guns used as the murderkillweapon. It was fun at first to see corkscrews/bottles/power tools used but after a while I just couldn't help thinking that it would've been better (as in, less risky) to just shoot the bad guys. The main baddie was good - he seemed genuinely threatening in his behaviour.

See that La La Land......No wait Moonlight won best picture

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39099454

We watched Sing Street and Passengers at the weekend.

Sing Street is perfect for an old bastard like me with plenty of nostalgiac 80's music in there and is completely and utterly charming. It could so easily have turned into a horrible cheese fest but avoids it through some compelling performances and the songs have a habit of drawing you in quicker than you'd expect. Definitely recommended.

Passengers - it felt like an episode of Star Trek stretched out into a film with somewhat worrying message of. Michael Sheen is good though as a robot bartender. It's worth a watch because Chris Pratt is always engaging but probably not worth repeated viewings.

Rather running out of stuff I've heard of on Netflix/Amazon that I want to watch, so I gave Fair Game a try last night as Netflix recommended it based on me liking Margin Call (guess they're both in the 'films based on real life shitshows'). The trivia for the film says there's apparently a code in the end credits that hasn't been cracked yet.. although I guess that could just mean it's not a code at all and has been put in there to troll those watching the credits till the end.

New Guardians trailer

Batista for Best Actor Oscar 2018

Logan:

They have certainly earned the higher certificate. The violence is very violent!

Also it's a good movie. Stewart, Jackman and the kid are all very good in it. It does a good job of not over-explaining things, and doesn't ever flip into flashbacks or exposition of how they got to where they are. This is almost entirely a good thing, apart from a bit towards the end where a little context would have helped.

All in all a good showing.

Yep it's good. Not perfect, but pretty great.

Fairly formulaic, but a different formula to what you've seen any superhero movie take before.

It's greatest success was taking 17 years of baggage and turning it into emotional weight.

Even if how it ties into and wraps up threads from other movies wasn't entirely satisfying, it had emotional impact.

I liked the violence a lot, but the action scenes would have benefitted from being a bit more grounded, with less wire jumping and spectacle, just letting the brutality alone make the impact.

Cool, for someone who hasn't seen an X-Men film since X-Men Go Cuba!, would you say that I could happily enjoy it after skipping the last two or three movies? Trailer impressed me as it looks more like a low-key character piece, fingers crossed.

It's more character, but also a lot of jumpy action too.

I don't think you need to have seen any of the movies to enjoy this, to be honest. A few throwaway remarks may pass you by, but overall as long as you know who Charles Xavier and Wolverine are, you'll be fine.

Yeah I think knowing both Jackman's Wolverine, and Stewart's Professor X are essential, but you can have skipped a few films.

Xmen 1/2 are a good idea, plus Days of Future Past is great for the inversion of the Wolverine/Professor X son/father dynamic, then maybe The Wolverine by the same director. It falls apart at the end imo, but has some great stuff in it.

3, Origins and Apocalypse are definitely skipable.

First Class is maybe the best Xmen film, but not massively relevant to Logan.

First Class starts off really good, but the second half is largely balls. The entire part with them training the younger kids is pretty fucking cringey.

Yeah. If it was more just Macavoy, Fassbender and Bacon it would be a lot better.

everything's better with more bacon, though.

I wasn't actually a massive fan of their version of Sebastian Shaw, but I could've watched an entire film's worth of Macavoy and Fassbender's gleeful recruitment tour. With short breaks for Magneto to brutally murder more nazis.

That's the third time this question has come up on a Yougov survey. It's like they're regularly checking up to see if I've watched Jurassic Park yet.

It's an interesting question, though.

The Godfather, I think.

I'm pretty sure there's a scene in a David Lodge novel where a group of English literature academics discuss the most important book they've never actually read, and someone wins with 'Hamlet'. Which, incidentally, I haven't seen yet either, although I'm told it's basically 'The Lion King'.

I feel a thread coming on...

From contemporary popular culture, the second and third parts of 'Lord of the Rings', or all of the Harry Potters. And any 'Star Wars' after the first part of the original first one.

Hamlet isn't a book!

I guess it would be Harry Potter for me, but there must be quite a few.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_h ... sing_films ( I know highest grossing and most famous are not the same thing, but it will do for now) I've seen everything apart from Furious 7, The Transformers, Secret Life of Pets, and I know I haven't seen all the Pirates of the Caribbean films, I don't think I've seen that Ice age film, but I have seen some of them.

For me, it's easier to count the ones I have seen, all eight of 'em.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-highe ... ?r=US&IR=T

Adjusted for inflation Top 10

Same

Out of that list I haven't seen:

Doctor Zhivago
Gone with the Wind

No interest in either, frankly.

After seven cottage quizzes we should know these by now!

It's a baby pig.

It's a cigar

It's a small street.

This

Watched Logan.

Very very slashy. Really good though.

Don't Think Twice -- very good ensemble comedy about an improv group forced to face up to the fact that most of them are not going to become famous comedians after one of them is hired onto a big TV show. Mike Birbiglia wrote, directed, and starred.

Brokeback Mountain was on telly Sat night, so we watched that.

It was OK overall. The scenery and the cinematography was great, but I didn't really care much for the main characters (hard to relate to, on many levels I guess, but mostly because they seemed so dumb). And yet, I was kind of engaged with the story and wanted to see how it ended, again though, not so much for the main characters but the toll taken on their families.

Muddied speech seems to be a trend in films and telly overall, but especially in this film. Many times we found it quite hard to understand what Heath Ledger was saying.

If he were alive today, he'd most likely still sound muffled, shouting "Let me out, let me out!"

Malicomedy

Malificent

well played Sir, well played.

*saves*

Just watched the Alien: Covenant trailer (was trying to hold off so I was totally de-spoilered when watching it, but couldn't)

A+, would watch again. Let's hope the film carries the same quality all the way through, eh, Ridders?

Re alien: covenant. Apparently Scott was stung by the criticism of there not being enough Alien in Prometheus and allegedly said, "they want more aliens, I'll give them bloody aliens!" In other news, the script for the sequel to covenant is finished and if this film is successful, they're ready to start shooting later this year!

I quite liked how Prometheus tried to take things in a bit of a different direction. The Alien universe is one I'd like to see explored more (who are those mysterious giant 'space jockeys'? etc)

The trailer for Covenant looked cool and all, but it didn't feel all that exciting - oh, there's a group of humans, they'll probably get picked off and killed, yep there are the aliens (they are cool) come to rip through the people, oh look there's a strong looking female, maybe she will survive the nightmare (tm)

Prometheus explained that quite well, I thought.

It did, but it wasn't hugely satisfying. I wanted to see proper biomechanical space jockeys, goddamnit, not the Engineers in a Shell that we got.

I actually really enjoyed Prometheus on second viewing (which was quite recently). I don't know why as the flaws were still apparent.