The GMD Movie Club Thread

[challenge_everything]

I'm trying to be a good boy after being notified by my ISP squeaky clean rms

Did you not use vpn?

 

[no country for old wainds]

ISPs aren’t gonna do shit about you downloading something with a generic name from my google drive lol, vpn or not

 

[rms]

Did you not use vpn?

nah haha

ISPs aren’t gonna do shit about you downloading something with a generic name from my google drive lol, vpn or not

oh yeah I don't worry about Google drive

 

[no country for old wainds]

personally i’ve been downloading shit from the pirate bay without vpn for like 15 years without issue haha, i think it’s less risky here than some countries though

 

[challenge_everything]

that's the reason for my question too. i assumed the US was more heavily scrutinised than elsewhere. having said that, i have used a vpn for 5 years at least

 

[rms]

personally i’ve been downloading shit from the pirate bay without vpn for like 15 years without issue haha, i think it’s less risky here than some countries though

Yeah about the same. This is my second time and before it was like 2014. Need some good karma in my life so deciding I'll start paying rental fees instead of scouring rarbg

that's the reason for my question too. i assumed the US was more heavily scrutinised than elsewhere. having said that, i have used a vpn for 5 years at least

Fucking lawyer sent out a list of IPs and fishing who's worth going after in civil court

Well when I watched it after years of avoiding it, I was surprised by how cool it was, and it seems like nobody I know has seen it and has an instant disgust reaction at its mere mention. So I want to force people to see it, and see if it confirms their instincts that it'll suck or if it surprises them too.

As far as I'm concerned it's the only wild card choice up there. The rest feels pretty obvious they'll be enjoyed by most if not all. *shrug*

Guess there's an interesting angle of checking out Hollywood remake flops years later, but after watching a hour Oldboy 2.0 last night I don't know haven't seen the original in what feels like ten years, but this was rough . And I didn't think the original was anything worth a damn, just had that famous action sequence

 

[AbelTim]

The Proposition
Point Blank
Black Book
No One Lives

 

[no country for old wainds]

waiting on @Einherjar86

 

[Einherjar86]

No One Lives
Oldboy
Black Book
Point Blank

 

[no country for old wainds]

GMD Movie Club Watchlist #1: REVENGE​

Black Book (7 votes)
No One Lives (6 votes)
Point Blank (5 votes)
Alexandra's Project (4 votes)​

with commiserations to Oldboy (3 votes), Lady Snowblood (2 votes) and The Proposition (1 vote)​

well that was nice and neat, glad i didn't need to figure out a tiebreak. please watch and rank the four films (i think i agree with c_e this is better than rating with such a small group, although you're welcome to rate as well), and preferably elaborate on your reactions so this isn't super boring. flexible deadline is 4th August.

Availability
Black Book is available on Amazon Prime Video.
No One Lives is available here (second server on the list seems fine), here and here.
Point Blank is available here.
Alexandra's Project i'm struggling to find in acceptable quality, so can the person who submitted please PM me with either 1) a link or b) a request that i provide one myself. (EDIT: click here)

if anyone doesn't have access to any of the above or doesn't think they're of an acceptable standard etc, just let me know. i genuinely don't mind providing download links when needed, but i also don't want to bother when it's unnecessary.

p.s. i'm gonna be watching lady snowblood as well as i'm working through a '70s watchlist concurrently and have wanted to see it for ages, so i'll probably post my thoughts on that one too. maybe i'll even go all-in and watch all 7, we'll see (obviously i won't include them in my official rankings).

 

[rms]

Early thoughts: have no one lives last on the queue. My god what a rough start

@no country for old wainds what's the rating system for this?

 

[Vegard Pompey]

I thought this was gonna be a riveting noir thriller and was not prepared for this mindfuck. It was kind of an unpleasant watch; at first I was very frustrated by the nonchronological editing and artificial dialogue and lack of context for anything that was happening. I was not enjoying myself for a good portion of it but I think by the end I was acclimated enough that I understood why it was the way it was.

Spoiler

There is unsurprisingly a common theory that Walker died at the start of the film when he was shot by Reese and that the events of the movie are a dying dream or purgatory or something like that. Regardless of how you choose to view that event, the movie certainly seems to take place in a hell created by violent criminals, where the only values are murder, betrayal and the accumulation of wealth, all as ends in and of themselves with no grander purpose or extenuating circumstance. Even revenge barely figures into this as a motive; when Walker finally confronts Reese, there is no gratification in it, the death is accidental, and he is succeeded by a parade of higher-ranking villains that Walker confronts even more perfunctorily.

This was a seriously hard film to get invested in, but I think I'd like it more on rewatch knowing where it all leads. That abrupt ending, with Walker slipping into the shadows and then the lingering still shot of the prison that, dead or alive, Walker never truly left. The perfect anticlimax to a quest for nothing. That shit gave me chills.

Rating: 2/5 when I was watching it, 3/5 when I got to the end, 3.5/5 now and rising the more I think about it.

 

[no country for old wainds]

Early thoughts: have no one lives last on the queue. My god what a rough start

@no country for old wainds what's the rating system for this?

let's say out of 5? but the main thing is just to rank them in order of preference i guess, unless everyone would prefer to do it by rating. i just think c_e is right that one extreme reaction might skew things too much with only 7 people playing.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

Don't count my rating, I just threw that in as a temperature readout or whatever. I'll do a proper ranking once I've seen all four films.

And yeah I'm down to do rankings instead of ratings

 

[Einherjar86]

shit, I'm psyched for this. Also, thanks for the gracious timeframe--not sure when I'll get to these, but if we have until august I should be good.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

This started out with some Oblivion NPC-level dialogue and got worse from there. There were some very strange narrative decisions in the first act that had me hoping I could at least appreciate how feverishly off-kilter it is but it ultimately ends up being a slasher film that is garbage even by the exceedingly low standards of slasher films. There's no tension whatsoever because the movie seems to go out of its way to establish everyone in the biker(?) crew/family as irredeemable scum, so you can't really care if anyone lives or not. And you can't really root for the killer either, because he's the worst part of this movie. Luke Evans plays this smug, self-mythologizing, edgelord villain protagonist who always gets the final word, never has his plans foiled, never gets to be fazed by anything. Anytime he's not directly on screen they make sure to have Adelaide Clemens' character comment on or reminisce about how cool and unkillable and badass he is.

The editing is really abysmal too. Any action scenes are borderline incomprehensible and there's a very funny car explosion scene that drives home the importance of POV in editing. Just absolute hack-level filmmaking across the board, can't believe I'm saying this but rms was right.

Rating: Don't watch this sober.

 

[no country for old wainds]

i thought this was super obvious from the trailer lol idk why literally everyone but me voted for it

 

[Vegard Pompey]

I voted for it because it's a genre movie by an asian director. That's usually all I need to get my rocks off! I don't watch trailers.

 

[CiG]

I haven't seen that but after Versus (a masterpiece) it really seems like Ryuhei Kitamura has shit the bed ad infinitum.

 

[rms]

Yeah it's so fucking bad. Oldboy isn't much better and I think I've seen lady snowblood.before, but maybe I'll watch it to make up for the two garbage ones finishing black book tonight