Recent Viewings, Part 2

[FatFreddysCat]

"Riot On The Dance Floor" (2014)
Way-cool documentary about the legendary Jersey rock club City Gardens, a mecca for alternative rock, punk, and hardcore throughout the '80s and early '90s.
Lots of photos, vintage video clips and interviews with club regulars and musicians who played there (including Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, Dave Brockie, Dean Ween, Jack Irons, Ian MacKaye, and many more) give all the props for City Gardens' success to promoter Randy Now, a young DJ and music fanatic who started booking bands into a run-down warehouse building in a particularly crappy area of Trenton (which, if you've ever been to Trenton, is really sayin' something), and built a thriving "scene" there out of nothing. Rollins' story about Black Flag opening for Venom (!) at the club is a highlight.  
I never went to City Gardens (I lived at the opposite end of the state) but I remember seeing their concert schedules in the local Jersey rock rag every week and read many reviews of shows there. It looks like I missed out on quite a place.

[Rev. Powell]

CODED BIAS (2020): Documentary about the biases embedded in current artificial intelligence technology, and the danger of blindly relying on A.I. algorithms. A rare study of the intersection of race and technology, but it goes deeper than the acknowledged fact that facial recognition technology returns a much higher rate of false positives on blacks and women than white men: a machine's unsupervised algorithmic thinking could affect your credit score, job prospects, and even your freedom--and you'd probably never know it.  The movie doesn't even feature the innocent black guy who was arrested solely based on facial recognition---must have happened after they finished shooting. 3.5/5.

[Dr. Whom]

Fando y Lis (1968)

The directorial debut of Jodorowsky. As full of 1960s artistically intended random weirdness as you might expect. It follows the quest of Fando and the paralysed Lis to the fabled city of Tar, whith Fando mostly acting as an abusive jerk to Lis. There may be some deep meaning behind all this, but the constant push to come up with yet another weird scene or shocking image quickly killed my interest. 

[FatFreddysCat]

"You Should Have Left" (2020)
Looking to get away from it all, a bickering couple (Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried) rent a house in the Welsh countryside -- a strange place containing a maze of rooms, endless long hallways, and mysterious staircases. Of course, weird stuff quickly starts happening to them, and all of it seems to be tied to a dark incident in the Bacon character's past.
A pretty decent suspense/psychological thriller from the Blumhouse horror factory; the constant twists & turns kept my attention throughout.

[lester1/2jr]

freddy -  "Rollins' story about Black Flag opening for Venom (!) at the club is a highlight. " that's a brutal bill. you would def want earplugs for that one


Look Away (2018) - 17% on rotten tomatoes, "83% of viewers liked this movie".

In other words, it's a decently trashy time waster that uses cliches to move the plot along and doesn't say anything about climate change or race relations.

A nerdy girl who is also impossibly beautiful (a la a lot of movies) begins to see images in the mirror of ...herself! except it's actually her alter ego who is also her twin sister who died at birth. Honestly, it started off being pretty effective. The good girl/ bad girl thing worked as a metaphor for depression and anger and so forth but they took it too far to the point where she basically becomes a pirahnaconda. Of course, part of her empowerment is coming on to her own Dad. Is there a more tired staple of trashy soap opera type movies? It was more interesting when she was just slowly coming out of her shell.

The girl's house is like the one from "Orphan" crazy modern style amid icy tundra for you architecture fans

3.75 /5 one of those movies that's not boring but not very fulfilling and later on you think of it like "Yeah that was kind of not very clever"

[FatFreddysCat]

"A View to a Kill" (1985)
In Roger Moore's final turn as James Bond, 007 travels from Siberia to France and finally to San Francisco on the trail of Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) -- an insane industrialist who plans corner the world's microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley. The late Tanya Roberts is Bond's female sidekick this time around.
This one is generally considered the worst of Moore's era but I've always liked it. It's certainly livelier than the sluggish "Octop***y," and though Tanya couldn't act worth a damn (basically, her role in this movie is to repeatedly get into peril so she can scream "James, HELP ME!" a lot), she sure could fill out a set of satin pajamas.
As an added bonus, the theme song by Duran Duran is one of the great earworms of the mid '80s.
Roger Moore was 57 years old during filming and legend has it that his decision to leave the Bond role came when Tanya Roberts' mother visited the set one day and he realized that SHE was younger than him... ouch.

[FatFreddysCat]

freddy -  "Rollins' story about Black Flag opening for Venom (!) at the club is a highlight. " that's a brutal bill. you would def want earplugs for that one

Oh yeah, I like both bands, but I imagine there wasn't much crossover between their fan bases in 1986, haha.

[Trevor]

Faces of Death which I've wanted to see for a while: not bad.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Snake Eater III: His Law" (1992)
In the third and (thankfully) final installment of the cartoonish ultra-cheap action trilogy, John "Soldier" Kelly (Lorenzo Lamas, wooden as ever) has been suspended from the police department (again) for disorderly conduct, so he takes a side gig as a private eye. His first clients are an elderly couple who want him to rescue their daughter from a vicious biker gang, which leads to the usual poorly acted shoot'em up mayhem. Think "Stone Cold" on a cheese and crackers budget. Sharp eyed wrestling fans may recognize the late "Bam Bam" Bigelow as one of the biker heavies.
"Snake Eater III" is probably the most well made of the trilogy in a technical sense, but that's faint praise because all three of them are still basically crap...but at least they were fun crap.

[Rev. Powell]

ERREMENTARI: THE BLACKSMITH AND THE DEVIL (2017): A blacksmith keeps a demon prisoner in 19th century Basque Spain. An enthralling spell that makes medieval superstition vital for an hour and a half. My Netflix watch group picked this based on its name, knowing nothing about the story, and it lived up to its title. 3.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Nemesis" (1992)
Set in a cyberpunk 2027 where cyborgs co-exist with humans, a former L.A. cop (French martial artist Olivier Gruner, whose accent is even more impenetrable than Jean-Claude Van Damme's) is called back to active duty to stop the machines from replacing humans altogether... or something like that.  
This mish mash of bits borrowed from the "Terminator" and "Blade Runner" franchises features some cool stunt work and pyrotechnics, and the supporting cast includes some dependable B-Movie regulars like Tim Thomerson and Brion James, but the plot doesn't make a lick of sense. Eventually I gave up trying to follow it and just watched stuff explode. That's not exactly a surprise, because this was directed by Albert "Cyborg" Pyun, who has proved time and again that he can create impressive action sequences, but he can't tell a story worth a damn.
"Nemesis" was somehow followed by numerous sequels, all of which I shall be sure to avoid. Simply awful.

[indianasmith]

ANTHROPOID (2016)  -  I try to watch most WW2 movies that come out, and I am not sure how this film slipped under my radar.  "Anthropoid" was the code name British intelligence gave to the secret mission assigned to Czech commandos in 1942 - to assassinate Reinhardt Heydrich, second in command of the SS and the chief architect of the Holocaust.  The Allies considered Heydrich to be the most dangerous member of the Nazi leadership, and Josef Gabcek and Jan Kubis succeeded in killing him with a grenade in April of 1942.  The assassins escaped the scene and were hidden in the crypt of a church in Prague when the Nazis found them.  In a furious firefight that lasted seven hours, the seven commandos killed over sixty German soldiers and SS before taking their own lives.  The murder of Heydrich sparked fierce reprisals from the Nazis, but the heroic sacrifice of the "seven men at daybreak" fanned the flames of Czech resistance for the rest of the war.  The film tells nearly every detail of the story correctly, with impressive performances from all.  EXCELLENT war movie!  4/5

[lester1/2jr]

Villmark Asylum (2015) - pretty decent haunted asylum movie, kind of like Session 9 with serious people instead of David Caruso.


Whatever this country is (norway??) it's going to bulldoze an old awesomely imposing looking asylum. Wouldn't you know it, there's a bunch of people and weird energy still inhabiting the place. You know how it's going to go and it goes that way, but it does it well. So much so that theres a sequel, not that that is any measure of quality but it kind of is. I would have liked more depth to characters and less sloshing around in the watery basement but the sloshing was well done.

My sense is this was a big movie in the country and they put a lot of effort into it

on tubi

4.5/ 5

[pacman000]

Star Wars Ep. II & III.

II is too slow, & it looks very 90's.

III isn't bad.

[Zapranoth]

We also watched Star Wars episodes 1, 2 and 3 recently, with Rifftrax.

Was tolerable that way.

Episode 1 is just badly written and it's so Jar Jar-infested and painful.

Episode 2 is long, poorly written, and the dialogue is a new level of painful.   CG Yoda is obnoxious uncanny valley territory too.   My 18 year old said she'd much rather a puppet than this CG.

Episode 3 has the distinction of being "the best" of the prequel trilogy, and I still think that the best way to watch it is to watch the "Star War the Third Gathers:  The Backstroke of the West" (dubbed version).
In case anyone here (of all places) isn't familiar with it, it's a painful recursive translation.   The dialogue was translated to Chinese, then some translator used dialogue (not written) back to English.  Some other group of people then dubbed the movie with this recursive translation.   It's awesome.

It's amazing how badly these movies have aged.

Here's the link for Backstroke of the West if you haven't seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok