Movie Recommendation Thread

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noman

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Seen a movie recently you really enjoyed? Post a recommendation here!

Do it! You know you wanna.
 
I recently watched A Dark Song.

I enjoy horror the way many people enjoy comedy. Usually, I tend to a bit like this when it comes to most horror concepts. Most horror plots fall part when confronted with solid, tactical thinking and decent firepower.

But A Dark Song scared the crap out of me.

Where it stands out for me is this is a modern, occult horror movie based (loosely) on modern interpretations of classical hermetic magic. They don't just name drop occult terms (Kabbalah, Abramelin, etc) and try to wrap it around a cheesy murderfest plot. The scriptwriters did a good deal of homework, above and beyond what you'd normally find with this kind of genre. The movie is about the darker side of modern magic.

It starts slow, with a lot of quiet, moving shots punctuated by well done exposition that moves the plot along and slowly unravels the mystery of what's actually going on. Was totally engrossed.

No real jumpscares. can you believe that? No jumpscares in a modern horror movie. Slow loading, building suspense, and when the supernatural elements begin to pop up, it's quietly terrifying.

It falls apart a bit at the end, as I thought the final moneyshot of demon scares was a bit campy, but even then, it wasn't enough to put me off from the movie. And one of the final scenes where Victoria is talking to her "son" -- brilliant! Just brilliant!

Anyway, if you're in the mood for something a little different, check it out.
 
I saw Logan a couple days ago. I highly recommend seeing it even if you aren't really a superhero movie fan.
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Oh, come now. Logan has a low bar to clear compared to the other entries in the Wolverine franchise, but it clears it easily. I'm a fan of the X-films and this film is as good as Days of Future Past or X-2, which i would recommend as well.
 
It was 2 hours and 21 minutes of mind-numbing tediousness.

*not saying you can't like it, to each their own and blah blah
 
I liked Logan because it reminded me of other tales of heroes past their prime nevertheless having to be heroic by overcoming their own self-doubt or impotence.

Reminded me of the Unforgiven, in a way.

Also, it wasn't as schlocky as other super hero movies of the X-men genre. Don't get me wrong: I liked X-men Apocalypse for some strange reason.
 
Want to watch the bizarre, ignominious end of Sam Peckinpah's career?

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Robert Ludlum AND Sam Peckinpah? Holy crap.

Is she the protagonist? Does she actually shoot anyone with that bow? That would be awesome.

EDIT: trailer. Lots of great actors in this one:

 
Last week I watched the two Guy Ritchie takes on Sherlock Holmes. I had initially turned my nose up at their action hero approach, but some yammering about James Bond on this forum put me in just the right frame of mind and I ended up enjoying them a lot.
They managed to be fun and funny and exciting without stomping all over what I like about the 'straight' versions of Holmes.
 
Robert Ludlum AND Sam Peckinpah? Holy crap.

Don't get too exited, it's incoherent as heck, and I say that as someone who is very forgiving of plot holes. Still, it has some great scenes and good ideas, and the performances are mostly good. The behind the scenes stories are quite interesting.

Is she the protagonist? Does she actually shoot anyone with that bow? That would be awesome.

She's the protagonists wife and she does take a dude out with that thing.

EDIT: trailer. Lots of great actors in this one:

Many of them took less than their usual salary for the opportunity to work with Peckinpah. Despite being all but blacklisted and on the brink of death he still had that much mystique left in the early 80s.
 
If your interested in Peckinpah, you've got to watch "Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia". Pretty much the last movie he had total control over.
"An alcohol-soaked fever dream involving revenge, greed and murder in the Mexican countryside, the film featured Bennie (Warren Oates) as a thinly disguised self-portrait of Peckinpah, and co-starred a burlap bag containing the severed head of a gigolo being sought by a Mexican patrone for having impregnated his young granddaughter. Bennie is offered a reward of ten thousand dollars for Alfredo's death or proof thereof and Alfredo's head is demanded as proof that the contract has been fulfilled. The macabre drama was part black comdey, action film and tragedy, with a warped edge rarely seen in Peckinpah's works."
 
I liked Logan, but I couldn't help but wonder...how the hell do you adamantine-coat the bones of a person who hasn't finished growing yet? Talk about Growing Pains. :grin:
 
I was doing some nerd reading on Laura (X-23) and apparently only her claws are coated with adamantium. The rest of her body is au naturel.
 
I guess they were waiting on the full Weapon-X treatment. With adamantium blades anchored on bone, too much leverage or torque and snap. Of course, it would heal soon... I know, comic logic, but I like to think about cyber like that from a medical viewpoint.
 
I know, comic logic, but I like to think about cyber like that from a medical viewpoint.

One of these days I'll dig out the article I wrote (as a first year medical student) on Rifts full conversion cyborgs. You might enjoy reading it. ;)
 
One of these days I'll dig out the article I wrote (as a first year medical student) on Rifts full conversion cyborgs. You might enjoy reading it. ;)
I've wondered before how much your profession might influence your approach to game stuff... combat and such.
 
I've wondered before how much your profession might influence your approach to game stuff... combat and such.

Good ideas for crits, mostly. And a strong skepticism towards "death, no save" and "save (and walk away unharmed) or die" effects.

I also wrote this article over at the 'Site a couple of years ago.
 
Love to see it, Butcher. Btw, did you ever see the Cybertech supplement for Shadowrun? I think that one was partially written by a doctor.
 
Just saw Ghosts of Mars. Fun flick.

Love to see it, Butcher.

Couldn't find it. :sad: But the skinny of it was, full conversion 'borgs, being brains in jars, would still need oxygen, nutrients (even if in considerably pared down quantities) and sleep, and still be vulnerable to any disease, drug or toxin which might affect the human brain.

Btw, did you ever see the Cybertech supplement for Shadowrun? I think that one was partially written by a doctor.

Not really. Shadowrun is one of these games I've always wanted to play but never did.
 
Last week I watched the two Guy Ritchie takes on Sherlock Holmes. I had initially turned my nose up at their action hero approach, but some yammering about James Bond on this forum put me in just the right frame of mind and I ended up enjoying them a lot.
They managed to be fun and funny and exciting without stomping all over what I like about the 'straight' versions of Holmes.

It helps that Holmes has been "straight" enough times that this isn't the first image the general public is getting of the character. There isn't any risk of this image becoming to standard one on the cultural subconscious. It's just a fun alternate take on the character.
 
... but some yammering about James Bond on this forum put me in just the right frame of mind and I ended up enjoying them a lot.

Glad to have been of yammering service. :grin:

EDIT: Though on the subject of those Sherlock movies, I'm really unhappy that...
they killed off the female lead right at the beginning of the second one after all the effort that went into saving her in the first. It was like that stupid Austin Powers sequel brush-off played straight.

ugh.
 
Glad to have been of yammering service. :grin:

EDIT: Though on the subject of those Sherlock movies, I'm really unhappy that...
they killed off the female lead right at the beginning of the second one after all the effort that went into saving her in the first. It was like that stupid Austin Powers sequel brush-off played straight.

ugh.
Complete agreement.

On that note, The Amazing Spider-Man
had its problems, but it was saved by Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacy having good chemistry. The movie was fun when they were working together. Instead of realizing that was the best thing about the franchise, the second movie has Peter Parker avoiding her out of guilt, then kills her off. Yeah. I know she dies in the comic, but she was around for something like eight years in the comic book. There was no need to hurry. In fact, I would have been fine with them just diverting from canon and keeping her around indefinitely, working with Peter Parker as a team.

As with planning an RPG campaign, sometimes the GM just needs to embrace what is working at the table and throw away the ideas for the campaign that they had in their head before it began. The same applies to movie series.
 
I felt the same about Franka Potente's character in the Bourne movies.
But I did note that the missed actress is listed as part of the cast of the third Holmes movie (which seems to be in production, maybe).
 
I watched Ronin for the first time yesterday. It's supposed to be this well regarded cult classic, but that last car chase through Paris, where the protagonists' choices clearly resulted in the deaths and injures of many innocents, left a really bad taste in my mouth.
 
My wife and I watched Hacksaw Ridge last night. It's a movie about Desmond Doss, who served as a medic during World War II. We both loved it. Andrew Garfield gave an inspired performance. Loved Hugo Weaving as well. High recommended.
 
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1993's Tombstone is one of my absolute favorite movies and possibly the greatest Western I have ever seen.

Dawn of the Dead is also awesome, specifically the 1978 George A. Romero original. It is the best zombie movie of all time in my opinion, and when grouped with 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1985's Day of the Dead, it comprises a horror magnum opus. They even made a board game based off of it in 1979.

If I could get a copy of said board game for a decent price, I wouldn't mind running a modified OSR-style campaign based on Dawn of the Dead, with a bit of Dead Rising and the early Resident Evil games in there for good measure. The story would mostly take place in a massive mall, serving as a mega-dungeon of sorts. I'd use the board as a map, sort of like how Outdoor Survival was used in OD&D.

On the other hand, the 2004 Zack Snyder remake was just plain awful.
 
1993's Tombstone is one of my absolute favorite movies and possibly the greatest Western I have ever seen.

Dawn of the Dead is also awesome, specifically the 1978 George A. Romero original. It is the best zombie movie of all time in my opinion, and when grouped with 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1985's Day of the Dead, it comprises a horror magnum opus. They even made a board game based off of it in 1979.

On the other hand, the 2004 Zack Snyder remake was just plain awful.

I agree with most of this. Not as much of a Tombstone fan as some. It was good, but weirdly enough, I preferred Wyatt Earp, which came out about the same time, but was buried by Tombstone at the box office. I even prefer Dennis Quaid's Doc Holiday to Val Kilmer's.
 
I watched Ronin for the first time yesterday. It's supposed to be this well regarded cult classic, but that last car chase through Paris, where the protagonists' choices clearly resulted in the deaths and injures of many innocents, left a really bad taste in my mouth.

My Ronin experience:

Buddies: "Dude, you gotta see Ronin! It's badass!"

Me: "Don't wanna."

Buddies: "But it's like, got that Italian guy who does the mobster movies, and like, gunfights. In Europe! You gotta watch."

Me: "Fine."

*Watches Ronin*

Buddies: "Well, what did you think?"

*Builds a time machine, goes into the future, copies Shipyard's above post, returns to the past, and reads it line-by-line*

Buddies: "..."

Me: "Also, it was objectively stupid."

I liked Heat, though. Some guy did a parody of the diner scene, except with Bats and the Joker. And it's awesome.
 
I like Ronin well enough but there is a bit of hype going on. It is a good 90s flick but Heat is definitely superior in my book.

Carlito's Way trumps both, though. Brilliant with a punch-in-the-gut ending worthy of a Norse saga.

And as good as Tombstone is, I find it weird that it gets touted as the best Western of a decade that had The Unforgiven.

Incidentally, of all of the above movies, Heat is the only one available on Netflix. I have no idea how I'm going to raise a kid in a world without Blockbuster. :/
 
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Incidentally, of all of the above movies, Heat is the only one available on Netflix. I have no idea how I'm going to raise a kid in a world without Blockbuster. :/

"Hey citizen, is that thing you want to watch not on Netflix or Itunes because of byzantine copyright negotiations and maneuvering? Well fuck you, welcome to the convenient future that is The Cloud, where culture only continues to exist on our say so! Hope you enjoy giving your info and even more money to sketchy rival sites. By the way, the following movies and documentaries have been 'disappeared' because they offend the current zeitgeist...

*grumbles and goes back to paper books*
 
I like Ronin well enough but there is a bit of hype going on. It is a good 90s flick but Heat is definitely superior in my book.

A friend of mine brought over Ronin to make me watch it sometime in the '90s. I liked it. I don't remember much about it.

Incidentally, of all of the above movies, Heat is the only one available on Netflix. I have no idea how I'm going to raise a kid in a world without Blockbuster. :/

Netflix isn't the modern equivalent of Blockbuster. It's the modern equivalent of a premium cable channel. You pay your subscription fee, and you get what they are offering that month.

The modern version of Blockbuster is renting from Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, etc.

Carlito's Way is available for rent on 7 services for $2.99 rental, $9.99 to own. I have it on Cinemax too.
Tombstone on 6 services at the same prices.
Unforgiven is the same, plus I have it on HBO right now
Ronin is for rent on four services at $2.99, and I can buy it for $9.99 to 14.99.

"Hey citizen, is that thing you want to watch not on Netflix or Itunes because of byzantine copyright negotiations and maneuvering? Well fuck you, welcome to the convenient future that is The Cloud, where culture only continues to exist on our say so! Hope you enjoy giving your info and even more money to sketchy rival sites. By the way, the following movies and documentaries have been 'disappeared' because they offend the current zeitgeist...

Eh. Blockbuster had plenty of things they refused to carry, starting with any movie that NC-17 or R. By the end of the '90s, studios didn't want to release movies that wouldn't be meet Blockbusters standards. Netflix and Prime don't care about that at all. Blockbuster also started the trend of getting exclusive rights to rent a title.

Things are still far, far from perfect, but things weren't all that great before.

If I were in charge of copyright law, given the ease of getting content online these days, I would say that any corporation that fails to keep their content available to consumers loses the copyright on it after a year, maybe two. If you are sitting on a bigger library than you are capable of distributing, you have a year to sell it to someone that can or let it into the public domain or reverts to the original creator (if applicable as with books). No more of this Disney Vault crap.

By the way, if you don't already use it. Just Watch is a site that tracks what is available on all the streaming services and premium cable channels. You can search there once and see everywhere it is, and it will link you right to the movie on that service if you have it. You can also maintain a watch list on the site. I find this helpful as I go on and off with streaming services. I may subscribe to Hulu for a month, let it lapse and get Filmstruck for a month, etc. Having a watchlist not tied to service is handy for me. It's also good as it puts up movies on theatrical release, not when they hit streaming services. If I read reviews of a movie, I can watchlist it now and keep checking to see if it has appeared anywhere you.

That's right. I am spambot that has been on deep cover here for months waiting to drop this ad.
 
I love buying or renting digital. I'm a big Amazon and Spotify user. I got tubs of old dvds and cds taking up space in my storage. I know some people like physical copies of stuff, but I don't have the room.
 
I love buying or renting digital. I'm a big Amazon and Spotify user. I got tubs of old dvds and cds taking up space in my storage. I know some people like physical copies of stuff, but I don't have the room.

I was in an online discussion yesterday about a TV show I own online. There was a debate about a plot point in one episode. Without getting out of my chair, I was able to call up the episode in my browser, use the slider to jump to the scene and clarify what happened. Took less than a minute. If I had to find the DVD set, pull out the right disc, wait for my DVD to load, jump around in scene selection, and then fast forward to the right part of the scene, I wouldn't have bothered.
 
Yep, it's the same thing in my car too. I use to have to change up the CDs constantly. They would be in my console, in my trunk, under my seats (pain in the ass). I just use my iPhone and Spotify now and I can listen to anything through Bluetooth. I love it.
 
I was camped out at a friend's house for a month and consumed a bunch of Netflix... really hard to serendipitously discover things on there, they seem intent on pushing crap at me.
I did see a couple things I liked though... namely Peaky Blinders and the recent Monkey King movies.
Another standout was I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore... that suited my taste for tales of oddball people attempting vigilante justice, ala Blue Ruin and Super.
 
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I was camped out at a friend's house for a month and consumed a bunch of Netflix... really hard to serendipitously discover things on there, they seem intent on pushing crap at me.

Netflix has made their interface harder to navigate over time. It's intentional. If people could clearly pull up lists of movies, they would be able to get a better sense of the entire selection, and they might decide they have seen everything they want to see. If the interface remains baffling, you can never be sure there isn't some gem hidden there if you just spend another hour browsing around.

I did see a couple things I liked though... namely Peaky Blinders and the recent Monkey King movies.
Another standout was I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore... that suited my taste for tales of oddball people attempting vigilante justice, ala Blue Ruin and Super.

I've watched a little of Peaky Blinders, and I keep meaning to go back to it. I discovered it when I first got Netflix, so my attention was too scattered to stick with it for more than a few episodes. At least I only watched a little, so I don't have that quandary of returning to a show where I keep putting it off because I need to rewatch two seasons to refresh my memory and get back to where I stalled out. That is what happened to me with Fringe.
 
Netfix was never all that easy to sort through to begin with. I got a lot more use out of other people's lists and the forums area, until they decided to squelch that.

I've watched a little of Peaky Blinders, and I keep meaning to go back to it.
Peaky Blinders isn't anything amazing... mostly just fun for the period scenery.
 
Just watched Dr. Strange last night, and most of its action scenes are so visually creative I have to say it's probably mandatory viewing for tabletop fantasy roleplayers.
 
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