Movie Tab II

Why don't you make your own reviews thread, Mark? This is kind of a tidal wave of one man's opinion in what's usually an open thread.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Yeah, I'd agree. In addition to just making sure other people's stuff doesn't get drowned out, it's generally about films people just saw (or saw since their last update), rather than reposts of reviews from before.

I'd be happy to move them en masse, so it wouldn't require much effort.

Yeah, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. It does drown out a lot of people's posts. On the other hand, they're being drowned out by mark f reviews. If I was being drowned, that's how I'd want to go. By a tidal wave of mark f reviews.

@Yoda @Tacitus If you want to move them, go ahead. I'm on my way out of this world and just trying to have my reviews actually counted as reviews. Before my stroke, I tried to write almost everything in here with just enough wordage to constitute a "review". Looking back at this thread now, from late 2007 to early 2010, it's amazing how many different people wrote long, thoughtful reviews in here. I don't recall when the actual Reviews section appeared, but by then I know that most of my reviews didn't qualify, and it's always been a huge hassle for a bedridden, one-handed typist to try to somehow get them to count. I couldn't even figure out where most of my reviews were in this thread because only 2000 posts can be searched and ALL those were after my stroke. I would appreciate anything that can make my life and other posters' lives easier. Am I still going to have to do what I've been doing in here in my own thread to have my reviews count? That's just a simple question. I won't post anymore in here, including my newest set of ratings, until this is worked out.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Seen in December, Pt.2



Hardy’s performance was good. The CGI used when the Kray’s are punching/touching each other is extremely impressive.



James Franco’s performance was amazing. Extremely funny, since I’m a huge fan of the Room. gets very emotional and intense. Slightly wish it was more about the behind the scenes aspect than the Greg’s relationship to Tommy aspect. I don’t think this film would appeal to people who haven’t seen the Room yet.



A fine popcorn experience. Direction, editing and soundtrack are very ‘eh’. The plot wasn’t very difficult to predict but was good. The supporting characters are likeable but overall forgettable. The yellow/vomit-looking tint is very unpleasant. There’s one or two scenes near the start that could’ve been removed and it wouldn’t have changed the film at all. The practical effects are awesome. The film would have worked a lot better if it was made tongue-in-cheek like the other Evil Deads. It’s the same director as ‘Don’t Breathe’, which just shows how much he improved since this.

Also the post-credits scene is literally God himself.



I guess you could say it was impressive it was done in only 26 shots. The direction is really boring, the camera basically only points at things that are happening and moves along with it. The script is really ‘eh’, considering most of it is just the peasants singing and dancing or talking about socialism. It does a atrocious effort at trying to get us to sympathise with the peasants, so yeah I didn’t care for anything in the movie.There’s a biblical reference that is so obvious it’s hilarious. The actors might as well have been robots and I wouldn’t have noticed the difference. There are some very silly things about the film, you couldsay they were done for artistic reasons, but I don't at all se their meaning. The songs are very good and there are about one or two really good scenes but that’s about it.


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Holy crap, this movie is tense. Throughout the movie in each scene it provides you with enough information and is shot in a certain way where the longer the film goes on the more tense you become, and by the end of it, you’re absolutely terrified. The improvised dialogue is quite good, and I liked the characters.



A very fun movie. The 80’s ascetic felt very appropriate. Kurt Russel’s character is very interesting. The plot was very good. I noticed a ton of actors I know.



All of the kids do a fantastic performance, especially Josh. The building up to the event is handled very well. It’s themes are very interesting. The ending’s a little sappy but I don’t mind it.



Great direction from Welles as usual. He does a very good performance, I didn’t see him as Orson Welles, I saw him as the character. Lots of great use of lighting. The long shot was very impressive for its time.



My review: https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/...sode-viii.html



A beautiful end to a beautiful trilogy. This film would not work on its own. The emotions the film creates would pretty much be lost on a new viewer, but for people who have watched the previous two films, you are genuinely hurt when you see Jesse and Celine arguing. This film might as well have been written by a Greek philosopher. The characters talk about ideas and theories that really boggle your mind. You even get to like the side characters. I also love how they get details about what they did in the past two films wrong and have drastically changed some of their opinions, it really shows how they have grown in nine years.

It’s possibly the greatest trilogy I’ve ever seen, a beautiful study on the fragility of true love. Bravo Linklater, bravo.

You're a legend to me, @mark f! I respect you more than Roger Ebert! All the best!

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Hey Mark, if everything you're posting is already in the Movie Tab all you need to do is hit the edit button on the post and check the reviews box. It'll automatically show up in my feed, no need to go to the trouble of creating a whole new post.

When we were doing our initial sweep of reviews for the database we started to sift through Movie Tab but ended up with so many reviews from dedicated threads that we made the decision to concentrate on them. That's the reason why yours weren't tagged initially.

My problem was that most all these reviews were originally in long posts which had several reviews in them.

Yeah, unfortunately there's no way to help there re: tagging. The entire system is based around reviews on a per-movie basis. But the good news is that the tagging is exactly the same no matter what thread it's in: it's totally thread-agnostic. And yeah, I'd be happy to move these to a dedicated thread; no effort on your part required.

I'd also be happy to try to help with a more robust solution if organizing these is proving difficult, for any reason. If there's some moderate technical change I can make that would make the process a lot easier on you, drop me a PM and we'll figure it out. I've done this a handful of times over the years for people trying to sift through large numbers of posts, and I'd be happy to do it again!

@Yoda Please move them so I can keep at my "project".

You got it. Will do today. I'll pick a whatever thread name and we can change it to whatever you prefer.

Mark although I have not been here long I still think you have made a impact on me and my taste and many many others. Like minio said you are a legend and I wish you the best and hope you keep up with these great reviews

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@Yoda Call it mark f's Movie Tab III.

I voted for this thread as #1 in the Reviews Countdown as Mark F's Movie Tab The foresight on me

Great Set of Recent Watches:
Requiem for a Dream (Arnofsky,2000)-

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Nocturnal Animals (T. Ford, 2016)-

[REWATCH] Bean (M. Smith, 1997)-

Welcome to Leith (Nichols & Walker,2015)-

Sully (Eastwood, 2016)-

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Maybe, this will be my last post in Movie Tab II this year, there are 10 movies missing in this list but I'll put them later.


Kagemusha (1980) - Akira Kurosawa
This film is art!
I was delightful to see this film in bluray for the first time, I'm very proud to look to this in my collection.

The Life of Oharu (1952) - Kenji Mizoguchi
Tokyo Story (1953) - Yasujirō Ozu
Fallen Angels (1995) - Wong Kar-wai
Once Upon a Time in China (1991) - Hark Tsui
The French Connection (1971) - William Friedkin
Spotlight (2015) - Tom McCarthy
Blood Simple (1984) - Joel Coen
Boyka: Undisputed IV (2016) - Todor Chapkanov
Days of Being Wild (1990) - Wong Kar-wai
Anyone notice Tony Leung in the end of this movie? He's the same character that we see in "In The Mood For Love"
Instinct (1999) - Jon Turteltaub
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - J.J. Abrams (Changed my mind about this one)


As usual, december is that time of the year that I finally start to watch a lot of films released during the year.

Thelma (2017) - Joachim Trier
A film about sexual repression and religious pressure. Well done!


mother! (2017)- Darren Aronofsky
Incredible! Watched twice in a row. For the first time ever I can say that I liked Jennifer Lawrence. I can see why this film was hated, the way Aronofsky shows the wrongness of religion and the mythology of Christ is breathtaking. Maybe the bravest movie of the year.



Stronger (2017) - David Gordon Green
Jake Gyllenhaal was great, right? Yes, what more? Well... nothing more.


The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) - Yorgos Lanthimos
Interesting ideas, mixing greek mythology with one family daily life was a great idea, unfortunately, the film doesn't do anything new, and the same ideas that I thought it was intereting, was bad executed imo. Colin Farrell was good, I liked him. Nicole Kidman was just more of the same (as always).


Detroit (2017) - Kathryn Bigelow
The Foreigner (2017) - Martin Campbell
A Special Lady (2007) - Lee An-kyu
Pokémon: I Choose You! (2017) - Kunihiko Yuyama
Mayhem (2017) - Joe Lynch
(A film called Mayhem, but without mayhem)
Wonder (2017) - Stephen Chbosky
Shot Caller (2017) - Ric Roman Waugh
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) Rian fu***ng Jhonson

Long Shot (Jacob DeMendola, 2017) -

A largely pedestrian true-crime documentary that gets by on a novel enough twist in its proceedings (which I am still hesitant to spell out even as they make up the main reason to watch this, so look it up if you're interested) but I don't think that it makes for an especially strong reason to actively recommend this unless you're already into true-crime stuff and looking for something short.

Supernova (Walter Hill, 2000) -

This spaceship-intercepts-distress-signal-and-things-go-wrong story ends up playing like the poor man's Event Horizon with its semi-competent visuals being outmatched by a plot that's paced just quickly enough to compensate for its sheer dullness.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning, 2017) -

Very much a shameless rehash of Curse of the Black Pearl (pretty young couple, undead villain, stuffy British secondary antagonist, etc.) that admittedly recaptures a fraction of the franchise's swashbuckling magic but not enough to totally distract from how this installment once again goes through the same motions.

Girls Trip (Malcolm D. Lee, 2017) -

Pretty standard as far as comedy plots go and I didn't get as many laughs as I'd hoped for given its reputation as one of the year's best comedies, but it's got a big heart and that goes quite a long way towards making it work as a whole.

The Hitman's Bodyguard (Patrick Hughes, 2017) -

The high concept of a washed-up bodyguard being forced to protect a hitman he hates sounds decent in theory, but its execution here is abysmal. The action is mostly clunky (there's one stand-out scene involving a hardware store and that's it), it has some of the ugliest digital cinematography I've seen, and it can barely muster any sense of fun whatsoever through its constantly-bickering cast.

American Made (Doug Liman, 2017) -

I think I have to admit to myself that I ultimately don't care too much for this particular kind of true-crime movie that functions as a tragicomic perversion of the American Dream (or, to put it more bluntly, a GoodFellas riff). Even its greater point about the politically twisted intersection of the War on Drugs and the military-industrial complex is largely lost in the middle of seeing Tom Cruise bumble his way through a generic rise-and-fall narrative.

Hatchet for the Honeymoon (Mario Bava, 1970) -

I've watched a bunch of Bava films now and I find him to be a fairly dependable filmmaker who can deliver lean and mean movies that trade in agreeably lurid styles that more than compensate for fluffy thriller plots. This one plays like a prototype for American Psycho with its mix of satire and sadism, which makes it an enjoyable watch but I do think Bava's done this same thing much better in other movies.

Manos: The Hands of Fate (Harold P. Warren, 1966) -

I've already watched the corresponding MST3K episode at least three times, so watching it without the riffs is practically a formality at this point. In any case, whatever you've heard about this movie is true - it really is one of the worst movies ever made. The entertainment value here mainly comes from the off-kilter screen presence of Torgo and the uncanny-sounding jazz on the soundtrack (plus the odd moment of bizarre production design), but otherwise you really are better off watching this with Joel and the 'bots.

Pottersville (Seth Henrikson, 2017) -

A bizarre little movie where Michael Shannon's small-town shopkeeper inadvertently perpetrates a Bigfoot hoax while drunk on moonshine. The curiosity factor of seeing noteworthy names attached to such a strange-sounding project is enough to make this more intriguing than your typical holiday-season Netflix-queue fodder, but the novelty definitely wears off before too long and leaves you with a saccharine mishmash of moments that'll remind you of better movies.

Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2016) -

A film about a group of French terrorists who carry out a series of bombings before hiding out in a high-end department store. It's a very protracted exercise that plays with its technical and narrative conventions enough to compensate for moments where its existentialist treatment of the terrorists wears a little thin on one's interest level.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

The Last Jedi



Seems like everyone is just kind of going with the flow on this one and keeping their opinions to themselves. I obviously really enjoyed despite not liking certain aspects. I will stick with what I did love though. Everything with Rey and Kylo, including maybe the best action sequence of the series for me. I wanted Rian to take these new characters in a new direction and he certainly is. He know what Star Wars fans expect and he, although not subtly, subverted those expectations every chance he got. Maybe that is what has riled so many people up to a fever pitch. I am glad for the change up though. This movie has a lot more going on thematically than other films in the franchise have and that makes me excited to see it again. Probably my fifth favorite in the series but I like where we are heading.

The Verdict



This has been popping up in places over the last couple of months. It was a Lumet I hadn't seen so I moved it to the top of the que. Right up my alley. Simple story with complex characters and some fantastic writing. I am a sucker for a good courtroom drama as well. Just solid in every single way. The type of film I could watch everyday and never get bored.

Young Mr. Lincoln



Saw this was leaving Netflix so decided it was about time to get to another Ford flick. Glad I did as this is probably my favorite of his. Looks great as you would expect but I really love the story as well. Ford characterizes Lincoln in such an endearing way. He has a false humility that is really easy to get on board with. Which is saying something because that sort of thing can easily be insufferable.

It's A Wonderful Life



I think this is the first time in a couple years I have given this a proper start to finish watch. It is just one of the greatest on every level. The type of film I can't imagine any film fan not loving.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World



I saw this in the theater and hadn't thought about it much sense. I wasn't planning on watching the whole thing. I put it on to go to sleep to but didn't. I think it is kind of a bit of a gem. Easy to watch and pretty fun despite the subject matter. Yeah, I am definitely a Carrel fan boy if I just called this a gem.

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Letterboxd

What's the Worst that Could Happen? (2001)
Martin Lawrence and Danny DeVito are at odds in this comedy mess. I can't help but watch good talent paired up even if I know the movie will most likely stink. This one stinks but it's not the absolute pits. There are a few choice moments. Good for falling asleep to since you won't miss much.

The Machinist (2004)
Incredibly crafted suspense mystery film with Bale giving a beyond dedicated performance. The music is beautifully done. Vibraphones galore. A real treat for the midnight mystery junkie.

Blown Away (1994)
Jeff Bridges is a bomb squad hero and Tommy Lee Jones is an Irish terrorist who makes bombs to destroy. Some clever macro photography and sound design make this worth it at times but overall this movie is an embarrassing mess that somehow manages to be watchable. I swear it wants to be a U2 music video, though.

Daddy's Home (2015)
You know what you're getting with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg so there's not much to say other than this movie is garbage with a few funny scenes. Another beofre-bed time waster that won't have you sleepless.

Mr. Church (2016)
Eddie Murphy can clearly act and be who he wants to be. Mr. Church's writing unfortunately undermines this film from something great to something annoying. The whole time we have a girl with a very animated voice narrate every scene. I mean she narrates walking across a garden.
"Yeah, I KNOW!! I can see!!"
Ridiculous supporting cast and LARGE, EASY TO READ narration wastes Eddie Murphy in what could have been his big comeback in drama.

Damnit!

Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)
Ridley Scott's film after Legend is a nice looking picture. Stylish and slick. Sadly the writing brings it all down. It's about a socialite being stalked after witnessing a murder. A detective (played by Tom Berenger) is assigned to babysit her. Berenger's character is happily married, but soon falls for Mimi Roger's wealthy victim character. This could have been a top shelf movie had it not been for the cliche 80's killer on the loose story that is not fleshed out at all. It simply gets in the way. Lorraine Bracco, who plays Berenger's wife, is amazing. Bracco and Berenger, if they had done this movie together with no plot involving the thriller aspect, this could have been a very memorable film because they work terrifically together, and their scenes are very interesting and endearing.

Star Wars: the Last Jedi - I loved this flick. Exciting, unpredictable, timely...this is how you make a space epic. The film tosses aside what you think you know and goes in new directions, abandons the black and white morality of past Star Wars flicks, and creates new questions to be answered by the next one.

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