What are we watching now?

MTB1973 said:
Finished Dopesick the other night. Really good, but the ending kinda leaves you empty. Very depressing.
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Fitting for the subject matter.

I really enjoyed this show. While I’m sure they took some liberties, it presents a very compelling argument to why we’re experiencing the opioid epidemic we are, and how many millions of innocent people ended up hooked on opiates because they took what was marketed as a non habit forming drug prescribed by doctors for everyday injuries.

Many of us who grew up in the 90s remember losing friends to oxy. I lost several friends in high school alone in the late 90s, more in college, and several more since then. One was prescribed oxy to help after a car accident. He was dead from an overdose within 2 years. The local town paper treated him a like some delinquent drug addict because he was a drummer in a metal band.

It’s terribly sad and frustrating, particularly when the Sacklers were able to successfully isolate their personal fortunes when the families tried to get recourse recently.
 
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Just watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from 1960, because I really felt the need to have Albert Finney look like he's fourteen but sound like he's sixty-five bellowing his lines for an hour and a half at my face. He treated the English language like it was a filthy cigarette to put out in baby's crib in that movie. Great film!

Martin Scorsese said the mirror scene in Taxi Driver was inspired by the mirror scene in this film, so I had to try it. It was such a nihilistic piece, really interesting and cool and totally sociopathic. It felt original.

We had to use subtitles because the Northern English dialect sounded like a foreign language, in the best possible way. Cool directing and cooler acting.
 
Watched the Season 2 finale of Severance last night, and wow, what a wild ride. I’ll definitely need to rewatch it—there are so many subtle details that are easy to miss. It’s just such a brilliant show. Already hyped for Season 3!
 
EOengineer said:
Fitting for the subject matter.

I really enjoyed this show. While I’m sure they took some liberties, it presents a very compelling argument to why we’re experiencing the opioid epidemic we are, and how many millions of innocent people ended up hooked on opiates because they took what was marketed as a non habit forming drug prescribed by doctors for everyday injuries.

Many of us who grew up in the 90s remember losing friends to oxy. I lost several friends in high school alone in the late 90s, more in college, and several more since then. One was prescribed oxy to help after a car accident. He was dead from an overdose within 2 years. The local town paper treated him a like some delinquent drug addict because he was a drummer in a metal band.

It’s terribly sad and frustrating, particularly when the Sacklers were able to successfully isolate their personal fortunes when the families tried to get recourse recently.
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Butal! :(

I sat on the Jury of a Murder Trial in the County I live in. A Nephew got addicted to Oxy, and killed his Uncle
who came home while the Nephew was in his house searching for Pills. Shot him with an Handgun
the Nephew stole from another house he broke into a few weeks earlier looking... again... for Pills. :(
 
State of Epicicity said:
We watched Awakenings from 1990. God, it's one of the brutal concepts ever; the fact that this is based on a true story is unbelievable. Robin Williams is just the most nuanced and wonderful actor; I can't believe how beautiful his performances were in general. What a fucking loss.
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One of my favorite movies of all time. Multiple onion sandwiches on this one :cry:
 
Last night we watched Ed Wood from 1994. I really do like Johnny Depp's acting in general; I feel like, in the films I've seen, he's mostly a worker. Here you can see him working hard even when lazy models like Patricia Arquette are giving nothing in return. Bill Murray is hilarious, and Tim Burton's directing is really the funniest thing. Of course Martin Landau is off the charts in how world class his performance is. We'll have to watch Plan 9 from Outer Space next. I saw it decades ago, but I barely remember.
 
State of Epicicity said:
Last night we watched Ed Wood from 1994. I really do like Johnny Depp's acting in general; I feel like, in the films I've seen, he's mostly a worker. Here you can see him working hard even when lazy models like Patricia Arquette are giving nothing in return. Bill Murray is hilarious, and Tim Burton's directing is really the funniest thing. Of course Martin Landau is off the charts in how world class his performance is. We'll have to watch Plan 9 from Outer Space next. I saw it decades ago, but I barely remember.
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There's a reason why Chuck Russell was so hard on Patricia during the making of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Her style is basically giving just about nothing.
 
JiveTurkey said:
True Romance = lifetime pass, no matter how shitty she actually is.
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It's funny you brought that up, because I was actually pretty pissed off about how she just ruined any parts of scenes she was in in Ed Wood, but that the one exception I know of for her is True Romance. I was thinking about the fight scene between her and James Gandolfini, where she loses her mind, how she became a worker for one movie, then slacked off in everything else I've seen.

I love a few films she's been in, including Lost Highway, and she's a shitty actor in that too. It's great that she's smoking hot as she undresses in that movie, but it would be way better if she just decided to build a character and be in the moment like what trained actors do, rather than just relying on being smoking hot.
 
State of Epicicity said:
Oh I didn't know that. Power to Russell. I think she's just inherently a shitty actor.
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In context, he was kind of a difficult director to work with and apparently the film (Dream Warriors) was very tense. At one point, a producer asks him what he thinks being a director is. Apparently, his answer was basically being a survivor. Even Robert Englund was on edge.
 
We watched Plan 9 From Outer Space. I had seen it a couple of decades ago, but I forgot just how a lot of it is surprisingly boring. But there are still a lot of moments where the prodigiously awkward dialog combines with the no less than brutal acting to make cinematic magic.

I feel like The Disaster Artist was very inspired by Ed Wood, the idea of making the highest quality film about someone who makes the very lowest quality film. This is the Dizzying Paradox genre of cinema.

I'm also put in mind if Timothy Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner from 1962. I kept thinking, "Yeah, no wonder this asshole didn't get any funding." I'm thoroughly convinced that most of Hollywood has always been comprised of people who essentially just don't want to work for a living. It's one industry where incompetent, lazy people have so often risen to the top that it feels like a lottery.

With Ed Wood, he seems like a guy who loved the idea of movies, without ever studying what makes a director, actor, or writer great, or even good. To me a good artist is someone who can tell if what they do sucks.

So why begin to criticize B movies? What's the point? I don't get pissed off about it often, but sometimes it makes me think of every band I've been in where I'm working my fucking ass off and some asshole I'm working with hasn't even bothered to practice. It feels exactly the same. You can see when people are working and when they don't, and it's in great film too; it's this incongruous, disjointed patchwork of artists that I think of zeitgeist.

The most B of B movies represents a ridiculous extreme, but it's indicative to me of charlatans in all areas of life, and when I think of it that way, it stops being fun and just gets way under my skin.

The same goes for the other end, when films are so pretentious they are trying to fool you they've created something mind blowing when they're really just trying to cover up for their inherent lack of creativity. We recently tried to watch The Assassin from 2015, and it was beautifully shot, the sound was incredibly mixed, and it was bullshit. Pretentious shit. My wife kept making smartass commentary until I shut it off. Tarkovsky falls in this category too, along with what Terrence Malik became.

To me you can just feel when a movie is coming from a real place, just like when you can tell a person is phoney. And that is I guess the main thing that pulls me in or repels me fundamentally.
 
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