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Post by Maolsheachlann on Jan 7, 2018 0:03:56 GMT
This is a sticky thread where people can write about films they saw in the cinema, and about the cinema-going experience in general.
I went to see Star Wars: the Last Jedi today. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, I've only seen Revenge of the Sith out of the second trilogy, but I really enjoyed Rogue One so I was quite hopeful about the Last Jedi. And it didn't disappoint, but I wasn't blown away, either. In terms of plot, the series seems to simply recycle old ideas.
I do like how the Star Wars series as a whole is decidedly mystical. The Force is an apparently spiritual reality which underlies the universe, and which seems to be the most powerful thing in the universe. I'm even rather surprised that so many millennials love Star Wars in spite of this.
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Post by kj on Jan 7, 2018 1:36:55 GMT
I enjoyed it well enough, without being a Star Wars fanatic. I found the Luke Skywalker scenes quite poignant and moving. Skellig Michael looked great!
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Post by cato on Jan 7, 2018 18:34:39 GMT
This is a sticky thread where people can write about films they saw in the cinema. I went to see Star Wars: the Last Jedi today. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, I've only seen Revenge of the Sith out of the second trilogy, but I really enjoyed Rebel One so I was quite hopeful about the Last Jedi. And it didn't disappoint, but I wasn't blown away, either. In terms of plot, the series seems to simply recycle old ideas. I do like how the Star Wars series as a whole is decidedly mystical. The Force is an apparently spiritual reality which underlies the universe, and which seems to be the most powerful thing in the universe. I'm even rather surprised that so many millennials love Star Wars in spite of this. Star Wars was one of the first films I ever viewed and is a classic good versus evil saga dressed up in futuristic garb. I haven't watched the subsequent offerings yet but the latest movie appears to suffer from all the vices of 2018 - a strident arrogant feminism and a angsting self doubting masculine leadership in the guise of Luke Skywalker. I haven't seen it yet so maybe I am being rigid and judgemental......
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Jan 7, 2018 18:41:26 GMT
This is a sticky thread where people can write about films they saw in the cinema. I went to see Star Wars: the Last Jedi today. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, I've only seen Revenge of the Sith out of the second trilogy, but I really enjoyed Rebel One so I was quite hopeful about the Last Jedi. And it didn't disappoint, but I wasn't blown away, either. In terms of plot, the series seems to simply recycle old ideas. I do like how the Star Wars series as a whole is decidedly mystical. The Force is an apparently spiritual reality which underlies the universe, and which seems to be the most powerful thing in the universe. I'm even rather surprised that so many millennials love Star Wars in spite of this. Star Wars was one of the first films I ever viewed and is a classic good versus evil saga dressed up in futuristic garb. I haven't watched the subsequent offerings yet but the latest movie appears to suffer from all the vices of 2018 - a strident arrogant feminism and a angsting self doubting masculine leadership in the guise of Luke Skywalker. I haven't seen it yet so maybe I am being rigid and judgemental...... I should HOPE you're being rigid and judgemental....otherwise what are you doing here?!? Seriously, there is certainly a lot of PC casting, but it's fairly easy to ignore. Personally I don't care what colour anybody is, so I'm as indifferent to a rainbow cast as I would be to an all-white cast, or an all-black cast for that matter. The high command of the Resistance being mostly female is another matter, and is quite annoying. But not that annoying. Skywalker's angst and self-doubt seems fairly organic to the saga and to the story, so I give that a pass.
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Post by cato on Jan 14, 2018 21:54:19 GMT
Gary Oldman is brilliant in Darkest Hour and Kirsten Scott Thomas plays his long suffering wife Clementine , now running in cinemas. The film seems to be a metaphor for Brexit. Chamberlain and Halifax are the surrender minded remainers. Or maybe I am over analysing it.
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Post by kj on Jan 14, 2018 22:30:10 GMT
I don't know that I could stand another rendition of Churchill's glory. I always end up feeling sorry for Neville Chamberlain. I gather Robert Harris' last novel 'Munich' sought to present NC in a better light.
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Post by cato on Jan 14, 2018 23:40:25 GMT
I don't know that I could stand another rendition of Churchill's glory. I always end up feeling sorry for Neville Chamberlain. I gather Robert Harris' last novel 'Munich' sought to present NC in a better light. British revisionist historians claim Churchill lost the Empire by resisting Hitler and that a Chamberlain/ Halifax peace agreement would have saved the Empire and averted British bankrupcy in 1945. I prefer the traditional rendition of Churchill's glory which ironically leads to the loss of Empire even though Britian was one of the victors. Chamberlain also explicitly used an appeasement argument when he handed back the three remaining British bases in the south of Ireland to De Valera hoping it would improve Anglo Irish relations much to Churchill's annoyance.
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Post by cato on Jan 28, 2018 19:51:08 GMT
Our national treasure Mary Kenny had a great article in yesterday's Irish Independent on the pleasures of the cinema. She links it to mental health , communal living and fending off addiction - the demon drink in this case. Mary is one of the few journalists I like. She's like a kind wise aunt who had a rakish past and who is just a little bit dotty too.
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Post by cato on Mar 7, 2018 14:05:54 GMT
One of my favourite cinemas is the Irish Film Institute in Temple bar. It was set up originally by Dr John Charles Mc Quaid the great Archbishop of Dublin.
They have started an annoying habit of rating films with an F rating to indicate female directors/general feminist outlook. The irony of giving a movie an F grade passed them by. I noticed most of the current crop of non action movies are about enraged women , creepy predatory men , transgenders , paedoristic relationships or sex with animals. More proof of our cultural collapse if we were still in any doubt.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Mar 7, 2018 14:55:29 GMT
One of my favourite cinemas is the Irish Film Institute in Temple bar. It was set up originally by Dr John Charles Mc Quaid the great Archbishop of Dublin. They have started an annoying habit of rating films with an F rating to indicate female directors/general feminist outlook. The irony of giving a movie an F grade passed them by. I noticed most of the current crop of non action movies are about enraged women , creepy predatory men , transgenders , paedoristic relationships or sex with animals. More proof of our cultural collapse if we were still in any doubt. That's hilarious-- one of the funniest things I've heard in ages. Also, useful. I'd know to avoid F-graded films! I've rarely been to the IFI. I think I can remember all the films I've seen there: 1) March of the Penguins, which I found incredibly dull-- doubtless this reflects badly on me. 2) Taxi Driver. I liked it, even if I think it was rather overrated. 3) A film by Terry Gilliam called Tidelands which I think must be the sickest film I've ever seen (in competition with The Devil's Rejects, but at least the DR was entertaining). 4) A French film called 5 x 2, a film about the disintegration of a marriage told in reverse order, and with the usual focus on sex, including kinky sex. I think that's it. I must admit I've always found it a rather uncomfortable location. I like plush, comfy cinemas. I'm not willing to suffer for art!
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Mar 19, 2018 16:22:00 GMT
I really like the existence of this thread. Keep them coming!
I haven't been to the cinema since The Last Jedi.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Mar 23, 2018 11:24:15 GMT
I liked the 2017 film Hidden Figures. Despite being heavily hollywoodised it got some simple things right. Mostly the actors themselves made it worth seeing (that´s about as high as the bar goes for any newly made films in the era of mainstream mediocrity).
If I´d put myself on the couch for self analysis on the liking of ordinary films on the screen it could be like this: "Maybe I enjoy just the fact that cinemas, and their shows, still stands as some artefact of the 20th century. Mere spatial nostalgia sprinkled with earlier pop culture reminiscences." Whatever, even the few mainstream films I see can make me happy for the moment! I love the whole cinema experience, the whole cinema ambience, and the whole cinema aesthetic. It's funny that, in one of his Illustrated London News articles, Chesterton spoke rather disparagingly of cinema and suggested it could never have the magic of theatre, and especially cheap theatre. It just shows (in my view) that innovations are not always bad. The theatre certainly has its own magic, but give me the magic of the cinema any day! I can think of several "conservative" reasons to love the cinema. The cinema is steeped in tradition, even though it's a young medium. Popcorn is a tradition. Trailers are a tradition. (They are called trailers because they used to come after the movie.) The aesthetic of cinema seats and curtains are a tradition. The conventions of cinema naming (often grandiose names such as the Savoy) are a tradition, too. Cinema is such a PUBLIC medium. Instead of watching it on our own or with a small group of selected people, we watch it with THE PUBLIC. We become a part of the cinema audience. It's quite a refreshing tonic to the social atomization of our era. Admittedly, it's a passive kind of shared experience, but even still, it's a shared experience. And the public experience of cinema doesn't simply apply to the experience of watching the film, but extends to talking about it with others....the latest cinema releases are generally a good conversational topic in almost any company. Do you remember how EVERYBODY spoke about Lord of the Rings when it came about? It's a shame that, in our day, the cinema has really been taken over by SJW propaganda. This seems to have crept in within the last five years or even more recently...I hope it will be a passing thing, and I think it will be. (Obviously, Hollywood has been left-wing for decades, but the situation has become particularly ridiculous recently. The fact that the Oscars had relatively poor ratings this year, and that most people seem to ascribe this to all the virtue-signalling, might have some effect on this.) Cinema also has an inclination towards the permanent, the timeless. A great movie becomes a landmark in the public consciousness, something that we return to again and again. The same is true of TV and music and many other artforms, but somehow they don't have the same monumental atmosphere as movies. A movie is both self-contained in a way that many other artforms aren't, and sustained in a way that music isn't. A film like Casablanca or Star Wars (though I'm not a fan of the latter) becomes a world of its own, it has a kind of independent existence. In our era of the ephemeral, I think that is very valuable. Oh, I love everything about the cinema. Even the use of a celluloid strip as a symbol of cinema, or the sort of lettering typical on cinema marquees, puts me in a pleasant mood. The great era of cinema-going in my life was my twenties, and I'm never going to go to the cinema nearly as often as that again. But I don't have to.
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Post by Tomas on Mar 23, 2018 12:42:20 GMT
All these nice-factors even increase when one has been away from cinemas for a period of years. For me that sense of revisited past came about only few years back. Sitting in a classic cinema house in Edinburgh along with a cineast friend was a moment of bliss! The Lord of the Rings also recalls memories of sheer emotional nostalgia back home. It was an special event for the time since the place were actually fullpacked like it usually hadn´t been for at least a decade, "high expectations" and more than 200 people in the seats since it was the greatest salon in town (now destructed and gone... with only one smaller cinema house left around).
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Post by tomás laserian on May 6, 2018 8:24:39 GMT
it was a strange thing in the avengers movie seeing the heroes getting virtually annihilated in the story. i was with a grandson and his two sons. the great grandsons were too stunned for the rest of the day to even be upset by the outcome.
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Post by Maolsheachlann on May 6, 2018 9:02:28 GMT
it was a strange thing in the avengers movie seeing the heroes getting virtually annihilated in the story. i was with a grandson and his two sons. the great grandsons were too stunned for the rest of the day to even be upset by the outcome. I haven't seen it, but does anybody ever really die in these comic book movies? There are so many parallel worlds, so much time travelling, etc. that nothing seems final. Indeed, this takes away a great deal of the suspense and drama for me.
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