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- 5 de Mar, 2021
Bob Balaban plays a critic whose entire personality is just CinemaSins. It’s like if Michael Crichton wrote a book and there’s a character who keeps saying his book is dumb, and then he dies from having a small penis.
What old media are you watching? - Since new media isn't worth watching
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Bob Balaban plays a critic whose entire personality is just CinemaSins. It’s like if Michael Crichton wrote a book and there’s a character who keeps saying his book is dumb, and then he dies from having a small penis.
- Registrado
- 16 de Feb, 2025
GGSurvivor
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 4 de Feb, 2026
Currently watching Kenneth Clark's BBC serious "Civilization". Really enjoying it so far, especially when there are no stupid "different POVs" like in other history documentaries.
- Registrado
- 5 de Mar, 2021
- Registrado
- 16 de Mar, 2025
I've been trying to watch more movies lately to expand my media palette. A recent blizzard in my state gave me time to check out a few on TV. This past weekend, I saw Miracle, Lavalantula, Rudy, and Midnight Sun.
Miracle and Rudy were great historical sports dramas that nailed the underdog story.
Lavalantula was a funny so bad it's good movie that apparently takes place in the same world as Sharknado.
Midnight Sun was a poor man's Boy in the Plastic Bubble, but Bubble at least had its sick teenager wear a funny suit.
I also watched 12 Angry Men last month, and I can see why it's regarded as a classic.
Miracle and Rudy were great historical sports dramas that nailed the underdog story.
Lavalantula was a funny so bad it's good movie that apparently takes place in the same world as Sharknado.
Midnight Sun was a poor man's Boy in the Plastic Bubble, but Bubble at least had its sick teenager wear a funny suit.
I also watched 12 Angry Men last month, and I can see why it's regarded as a classic.
- Registrado
- 3 de Oct, 2022
I don't have any specific choices to yay or nay to speak of , but dicking around more with a chinesium cheap projector has given me a new metric of "do I give enough of a fuck to fix the focus" to determine how much I'm digging some slops
- Registrado
- 5 de Mar, 2021
Calamity Jane (1953)
Calamity Jane is a Western musical where the historical setting is Deadwood. Doris Day is "Calam." Her rival / flirtation is "Wild" Bill Hickok, played by Howard Keel.
Deadwood’s main civic problem, apparently, is that the saloon act is ass.
So Calamity volunteers to travel to Chicago and bring back a famous showgirl named Adelaid Adams. Instead she accidentally kidnaps Adelaid’s maid, Katie Brown.
Katie becomes the hottest woman in Deadwood (as she should
) which creates this weird love triangle. Eventually everyone figures out who they actually like.
Doris Day is just one of the boys. She tries to become super feminine halfway through, like she saw Katie's big naturals and had a panic attack. Eventually she settles on "still loud but now wearing a dress." The movie forgets about the saloon after like 20 minutes and turns into this jealousy thing where Wild Bill starts getting thirsty for Katie. So Calamity accidentally creates her own romantic rival like in Clueless.
Allyn Ann McLerie, who plays the fake Adelaide/Katie, is extremely cute and functions as a great foil to Calamity. My favorite part is when the maid moves into Calamity’s shithole shack. They actually let the two women hang and argue and become friends. (Normally in these old movies, there’s just the lead woman and then some redhead with a name like “Violet" who wanders in every couple of scenes to deliver a zinger about men being pigs, then vanishes.)
The songs are pretty good. Not the best Doris Day musical but fun. "Secret Love" is the big hit from the soundtrack but I really like the title theme, too.
VERDICT: 5 stars. This is the campiest version of Deadwood ever recorded. The corsets are doing a lot of the work, too.
Calamity Jane is a Western musical where the historical setting is Deadwood. Doris Day is "Calam." Her rival / flirtation is "Wild" Bill Hickok, played by Howard Keel.
Deadwood’s main civic problem, apparently, is that the saloon act is ass.
So Calamity volunteers to travel to Chicago and bring back a famous showgirl named Adelaid Adams. Instead she accidentally kidnaps Adelaid’s maid, Katie Brown.
Katie becomes the hottest woman in Deadwood (as she should
) which creates this weird love triangle. Eventually everyone figures out who they actually like.Doris Day is just one of the boys. She tries to become super feminine halfway through, like she saw Katie's big naturals and had a panic attack. Eventually she settles on "still loud but now wearing a dress." The movie forgets about the saloon after like 20 minutes and turns into this jealousy thing where Wild Bill starts getting thirsty for Katie. So Calamity accidentally creates her own romantic rival like in Clueless.
Allyn Ann McLerie, who plays the fake Adelaide/Katie, is extremely cute and functions as a great foil to Calamity. My favorite part is when the maid moves into Calamity’s shithole shack. They actually let the two women hang and argue and become friends. (Normally in these old movies, there’s just the lead woman and then some redhead with a name like “Violet" who wanders in every couple of scenes to deliver a zinger about men being pigs, then vanishes.)
The songs are pretty good. Not the best Doris Day musical but fun. "Secret Love" is the big hit from the soundtrack but I really like the title theme, too.
VERDICT: 5 stars. This is the campiest version of Deadwood ever recorded. The corsets are doing a lot of the work, too.
Última edición:
- Registrado
- 3 de Sep, 2018
EXCALIBUR (1981)
I recently watched Arrow's 4k restoration of Excalibur. Its my first time seeing the film.
Its a very odd film. Very european in style: visually stark with little dialogue. Structurally, its a lot like a modern biopic. There's no "story." Rather, the film is a bunch of vaguely connected vignettes following the history of Excalibur and the reign of King Arthur.
The adaptation of quest for the holy grail is the best part of the film*. As soon as the grail quest starts, it steers into surrealist horror and doesn't let up until the end of the film.
Also needless to say, the restoration is beautiful.
While I wouldn't recommend Excalibur to anyone, if you have a high tolerance for european cinema, you might enjoy their take on King Arthur.
*sadly, the holy grail adaptation is not as overtly religious or as in depth as the source material, but its nonetheless as harrowing as the quest in the book
I recently watched Arrow's 4k restoration of Excalibur. Its my first time seeing the film.
Its a very odd film. Very european in style: visually stark with little dialogue. Structurally, its a lot like a modern biopic. There's no "story." Rather, the film is a bunch of vaguely connected vignettes following the history of Excalibur and the reign of King Arthur.
The adaptation of quest for the holy grail is the best part of the film*. As soon as the grail quest starts, it steers into surrealist horror and doesn't let up until the end of the film.
Also needless to say, the restoration is beautiful.
While I wouldn't recommend Excalibur to anyone, if you have a high tolerance for european cinema, you might enjoy their take on King Arthur.
*sadly, the holy grail adaptation is not as overtly religious or as in depth as the source material, but its nonetheless as harrowing as the quest in the book
- Registrado
- 12 de Dic, 2022
Miami Vice cause it's back on Tubi
- Registrado
- 3 de Oct, 2022
thanks for the heads-up, I've got the whole thing downloading for the wife
she's squeamish about torrents for normal shit after we got a letter for The Real Housewivers Of Love And HipHop Atlanta
Virtue's Last Reward
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 21 de Feb, 2026
I've been slowly acclimatizing to sitting through old cinema, but pre-1950s is difficult to bear. 2010 is my cutoff point.
OP mentioned the 1930s, there's a classic film 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' from 1938. It looks insanely fucking good for the time. Full color, crisp picture, fast paced plot advancement, timeless story, no dated references, decent comedy, epic sets. It feels 40-50 years ahead of it's time.
OP mentioned the 1930s, there's a classic film 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' from 1938. It looks insanely fucking good for the time. Full color, crisp picture, fast paced plot advancement, timeless story, no dated references, decent comedy, epic sets. It feels 40-50 years ahead of it's time.
Archivos adjuntos
![The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938 [00_25_14].png](http://uploads.kiwifarms.pa/data/attachments/8661/8661071-633a1f9f9ac609dfd28efa2817893d8c.jpg?hash=GTgdzYn8Jc)
![The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938 [00_20_29].png](http://uploads.kiwifarms.pa/data/attachments/8661/8661073-b54dd11de1f5a3234fe4304a1f6b4708.jpg?hash=R4I-aKIQxC)
- Registrado
- 29 de Nov, 2020
I dunno if this is a hot take in terms of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography, but Frenzy > Psycho. The combo of black comedy and thriller elements is just.....*chef's kiss*.
- Registrado
- 5 de Mar, 2021
Captains of the Clouds (1942)
Two hours of James Cagney playing the most annoying bush pilot in Canada. No, he doesn't trim pubes. He's like a guy flying supplies in the Canadian wilderness. Cagney’s character is Brian, this five-foot-six psychopath flying a seaplane around northern Canada stealing jobs from other pilots like he's Zalinsky in Tommy boy.
“Sorry bro I already picked up that moose carcass delivery."
And the other pilots hate him because he’s constantly undercutting them. At one point he hits his head on a propeller blade because he’s too busy peacocking like an asshole. Then the guy he’s been fucking over, Johnny (Dennis Morgan) flies through a blizzard to bring a doctor and save his life. And Brian learns a valuable lesson...
...immediately afterward he marries Johnny’s girlfriend Emily (Brenda Marshall). Wait, what?
Then World War II starts and they all join the Royal Canadian Air Force. The military immediately realizes they’re all like 48 and insane so they make them flight instructors instead of combat pilots. Anyway Brian still refuses to follow rules, crashes another plane during training, kills a fellow pilot, and gets kicked out of the Air Force. So he’s just the worst pilot alive.
But then the movie remembers it’s wartime, so they give him redemption. There’s a mission ferrying bombers to England and Brian sneaks onto the plane under the dead guy's name. Anyway German fighters show up and Brian finally uses his lifelong habit of flying like a drunk maniac to ram his bomber into a Nazi plane.
This is one of those movies Cagney hated because he was trapped in the studio system. He was sick of Jack Warner casting him as the same psycho in every movie. Also his brother co-produced it, so it was basically a family favor.
But it’s also a propaganda movie so the characters randomly become patriotic cutouts every 30 minutes because the military had to approve everything.
In the beginning. Brian immediately decides Johnny’s fiancée is bad news but instead of just saying that, he agrees to start an airline with Johnny. They pool all their money, start this bush-pilot airline crap, and then Brian decides the Emily is going to break Johnny’s heart. So he heroically… elopes with her. And then he leaves her with his share of the startup money like a weird 1940s divorce settlement and disappears while Johnny donates the rest of the cash to the Salvation Army.
Then the war starts with the worst Winston Churchill impression I’ve ever heard.
Cagney starts the movie as the reckless young hotshot, but the moment he’s in the military everyone treats him like he’s old. (Yeah, because the character is actually like forty. But the movie doesn’t explain the time jump so it’s just confusing.)
Johnny is played by Dennis Morgan, who basically just stands around making square-jaw GI Joe expressions so boomers can soyface.
The interesting guys are the other bush pilots: Tiny (Alan Hale), Blimp (George Tobias), and Scrounger (Reginald Gardiner). Scrounger steals the movie because he’s homesick for England the entire time, and the actor looks and sounds exactly like the Brigadier from Doctor Who.
Anyway Scrounger finally gets sent on a bombing mission back toward England which is supposed to be his big emotional homecoming and then he immediately dies before they get there.
The ending is weirdly abrupt. Cagney heroically crashes during the final mission and then the movie just plays that same bad Churchill voiceover again like they ran out of film.
And the plot with Brian and the fiancée? Resolved in about ten seconds in an empty room. “Hey about that time I stole your girl and killed your airline...”
The special effects: The bush-pilot scenes are cheaply shot, but the final bombing mission actually looks expensive. Bullets ripping through the cockpit, glass shattering everywhere, it’s still pretty tense.
And Cagney’s still great. Yeah apparently he turned the script down like four times but he’s still having fun. All the funny lines go straight to him and some were improvised.
Verdict: 4 stars.
Two hours of James Cagney playing the most annoying bush pilot in Canada. No, he doesn't trim pubes. He's like a guy flying supplies in the Canadian wilderness. Cagney’s character is Brian, this five-foot-six psychopath flying a seaplane around northern Canada stealing jobs from other pilots like he's Zalinsky in Tommy boy.
“Sorry bro I already picked up that moose carcass delivery."
And the other pilots hate him because he’s constantly undercutting them. At one point he hits his head on a propeller blade because he’s too busy peacocking like an asshole. Then the guy he’s been fucking over, Johnny (Dennis Morgan) flies through a blizzard to bring a doctor and save his life. And Brian learns a valuable lesson...
...immediately afterward he marries Johnny’s girlfriend Emily (Brenda Marshall). Wait, what?
Then World War II starts and they all join the Royal Canadian Air Force. The military immediately realizes they’re all like 48 and insane so they make them flight instructors instead of combat pilots. Anyway Brian still refuses to follow rules, crashes another plane during training, kills a fellow pilot, and gets kicked out of the Air Force. So he’s just the worst pilot alive.
But then the movie remembers it’s wartime, so they give him redemption. There’s a mission ferrying bombers to England and Brian sneaks onto the plane under the dead guy's name. Anyway German fighters show up and Brian finally uses his lifelong habit of flying like a drunk maniac to ram his bomber into a Nazi plane.
This is one of those movies Cagney hated because he was trapped in the studio system. He was sick of Jack Warner casting him as the same psycho in every movie. Also his brother co-produced it, so it was basically a family favor.
But it’s also a propaganda movie so the characters randomly become patriotic cutouts every 30 minutes because the military had to approve everything.
In the beginning. Brian immediately decides Johnny’s fiancée is bad news but instead of just saying that, he agrees to start an airline with Johnny. They pool all their money, start this bush-pilot airline crap, and then Brian decides the Emily is going to break Johnny’s heart. So he heroically… elopes with her. And then he leaves her with his share of the startup money like a weird 1940s divorce settlement and disappears while Johnny donates the rest of the cash to the Salvation Army.
Then the war starts with the worst Winston Churchill impression I’ve ever heard.
Cagney starts the movie as the reckless young hotshot, but the moment he’s in the military everyone treats him like he’s old. (Yeah, because the character is actually like forty. But the movie doesn’t explain the time jump so it’s just confusing.)
Johnny is played by Dennis Morgan, who basically just stands around making square-jaw GI Joe expressions so boomers can soyface.
The interesting guys are the other bush pilots: Tiny (Alan Hale), Blimp (George Tobias), and Scrounger (Reginald Gardiner). Scrounger steals the movie because he’s homesick for England the entire time, and the actor looks and sounds exactly like the Brigadier from Doctor Who.
Anyway Scrounger finally gets sent on a bombing mission back toward England which is supposed to be his big emotional homecoming and then he immediately dies before they get there.
The ending is weirdly abrupt. Cagney heroically crashes during the final mission and then the movie just plays that same bad Churchill voiceover again like they ran out of film.
And the plot with Brian and the fiancée? Resolved in about ten seconds in an empty room. “Hey about that time I stole your girl and killed your airline...”
The special effects: The bush-pilot scenes are cheaply shot, but the final bombing mission actually looks expensive. Bullets ripping through the cockpit, glass shattering everywhere, it’s still pretty tense.
And Cagney’s still great. Yeah apparently he turned the script down like four times but he’s still having fun. All the funny lines go straight to him and some were improvised.
Verdict: 4 stars.
Última edición:
- Registrado
- 24 de Feb, 2016
I am currently watching both The Critic and Dilbert on Tubi. It's refreshing to see actual effort in writing topical and pop culture references. I wonder what Kathy Griffin regrets more: being in an adaptation of comic strip created by the late Scott "Around blacks, Never relax" Adams or having a scene with Donald Trump in an episode of Suddenly Susan.
Última edición por un moderador:
- Registrado
- 3 de Oct, 2022
I had a neighbor who's brother was an extra in that
Brother had gone missing a year or two before, and it turned out he lost his memory and ended up in Hollywood paying the bills as an extra
family back home goes to see the new movie and HOLY SHIT THERE'S ERNIE
Pokemon Conquistador
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 13 de Dic, 2022
Fun Fact: This was the movie that John Boorman made when his plans to make an adaptation of Lord of the Rings fell through. (Perhaps it's for the best. His adaptation was a bit....trippy.) Boorman was obsessed with the character of Gandalf, or rather, with the wizard archetype he represented. His Hobbits also resembled fairies - the mischevious fae kind - when Tolkien's original intention was to have them be a stand in for conservative English country folk. Boorman's LOTR was also a lot more overtly sexual than Tolkien would have probably liked, and Arwen was 13 years old in his version. I'd argue Boorman's LOTR was as trippy as Jodorowsky's Dune, although maybe not as influential.
- Registrado
- 5 de Mar, 2021
Whatever you think of Excalibur, it has the most metal cinematography of any movie. The fog rolling in, the knights clanking around in those absurdly reflective suits, Merlin looking like a druid.
Pokemon Conquistador
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 13 de Dic, 2022
It's an absolutely gorgeous film, and Nash's Here There Be Dragons review of it (now defunct) was what convinced me that he was an idiot.
- Registrado
- 29 de Nov, 2020
It also has one of if not the best use of O Fortuna in film
WhiskeyJack
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 4 de Jul, 2022
Excalibur is legit in my top 5 films of all time. My favorite moment is when Arthur gets knighted mid-battle.
My old history professor had us watch this in the college auditorium (this, Apoclypto, and his favorite, Red Dawn), just so he'd have an excuse to talk about post-Roman britain and the Saxon invasions. And mostly so he could bitch about the then-new King Arthur film with Clive Owen and Kiera Knightley.
Anyway: I'm watching Daybreakers (2009), after watching Underworld a few days ago for the first time in at least a decade. It's definitely held up better than Underworld, which was mostly riding on Beckinsale's ass in tight leather. Sam Neill being a villain again, Ethan Hawke, and Willem Dafoe, all help carry the film.
Daybreakers is a very 2000's film that slots in neatly between Underworld, 30 Days of Night, Priest, Pandorum, etc. That sort of pre-MCU era where films were still visually interesting and the script was written before filming began.
It's a scifi-noir flick with some horror elements that might be intended as dark-comedy. Then about halfway through it turns largely into an action movie. Overall, it fills like an amalgamation of other works, mostly the Blade trilogy, with Gattaca's visuals. But also a little Dark City and the Matrix (especially some of the action sets feel Matrix-inspired), and the core plot elements of Matheson's I Am Legend story.
The story is fairly straight-forward: humanity has been hit with a vampire virus spread by vampire bats and now humans are nearly extinct and we have a global vampire society of immortal night-dwelling vampires, full of retro-futuristic vampire tech, like cars with built-in sunshades and auto-inflating tires out of Demolition Man, blood dispensing vending machines, underground tunnels and covered walkways between skyscrapers, and a pharmaceutical company that farms humans for blood.
Everyone smokes because cancer doesn't exist, children are trapped unaging due to the virus' immortality effects, and vampires eventually mutate into Nosferatu-looking things if they don't drink blood often enough.
The plot revolves around the few remaining humans developing a cure for vampirism, while the vampires are trying to develop a blood-substitute as humans are nearly extinct and blood supply is running low. Even has scenes straight out of Blade Trinity, with a warehouse full of hanging comatose humans being farmed for blood.
There's a big twist in the third-act, that largely negates the entire human plot to find a cure, but the film doesn't seem to realize it or at least nobody acknowledges that they could've saved a lot of time.
But then, weirdly, these clearly scientific, grounded vampires also don't have reflections, something the film focuses on right at the start. Meaning these vampires are actually supernatural creatures and this film's whole grounded, scifi premise kind of just flies out the window. Nobody ever pulls out a cross or holy water, but presumably that would effect them.
My old history professor had us watch this in the college auditorium (this, Apoclypto, and his favorite, Red Dawn), just so he'd have an excuse to talk about post-Roman britain and the Saxon invasions. And mostly so he could bitch about the then-new King Arthur film with Clive Owen and Kiera Knightley.
Anyway: I'm watching Daybreakers (2009), after watching Underworld a few days ago for the first time in at least a decade. It's definitely held up better than Underworld, which was mostly riding on Beckinsale's ass in tight leather. Sam Neill being a villain again, Ethan Hawke, and Willem Dafoe, all help carry the film.
Daybreakers is a very 2000's film that slots in neatly between Underworld, 30 Days of Night, Priest, Pandorum, etc. That sort of pre-MCU era where films were still visually interesting and the script was written before filming began.
It's a scifi-noir flick with some horror elements that might be intended as dark-comedy. Then about halfway through it turns largely into an action movie. Overall, it fills like an amalgamation of other works, mostly the Blade trilogy, with Gattaca's visuals. But also a little Dark City and the Matrix (especially some of the action sets feel Matrix-inspired), and the core plot elements of Matheson's I Am Legend story.
The story is fairly straight-forward: humanity has been hit with a vampire virus spread by vampire bats and now humans are nearly extinct and we have a global vampire society of immortal night-dwelling vampires, full of retro-futuristic vampire tech, like cars with built-in sunshades and auto-inflating tires out of Demolition Man, blood dispensing vending machines, underground tunnels and covered walkways between skyscrapers, and a pharmaceutical company that farms humans for blood.
Everyone smokes because cancer doesn't exist, children are trapped unaging due to the virus' immortality effects, and vampires eventually mutate into Nosferatu-looking things if they don't drink blood often enough.
The plot revolves around the few remaining humans developing a cure for vampirism, while the vampires are trying to develop a blood-substitute as humans are nearly extinct and blood supply is running low. Even has scenes straight out of Blade Trinity, with a warehouse full of hanging comatose humans being farmed for blood.
There's a big twist in the third-act, that largely negates the entire human plot to find a cure, but the film doesn't seem to realize it or at least nobody acknowledges that they could've saved a lot of time.
But then, weirdly, these clearly scientific, grounded vampires also don't have reflections, something the film focuses on right at the start. Meaning these vampires are actually supernatural creatures and this film's whole grounded, scifi premise kind of just flies out the window. Nobody ever pulls out a cross or holy water, but presumably that would effect them.