Haven't kept up with the latest movies tbh. What are like the must watch of this year?

Very nice, as Patrick Bateman would say.

Went and saw Arrival at my local cinemas this morning, and I'm glad I did, probably the smartest alien invasion movie so far. Sadly it'll be out of cinemas by the week's end. Awesomely mysterious and thought provoking stuff with a mix of some striking semi-Kubrickian visuals.

Sidenote: IHE provided some morning chuckles.

The Arrival was pretty cool but I figured out what was going on about 30 minutes into the film, which sort of hampered my own personal experience of going through the sort of revelations the protagonist was herself going through. Oh well, I still liked it.

While I'll concur I caught on far quicker than the main protagonist It was easy enough to ignore, with mainstream Hollywood you take what you get.

It was just sort of how they showed all those scenes in that non-linear timeline thing similar to Pulp Fiction and you're supposed to think it's one thing but it's another. and every time they would pop up I was just like, well, okay... I think because I already saw it coming, it made me stop guessing at the point of the movie far before it was getting to that point in the story. Those Heptapods were super fuckin rad though.

Indeed. Brilliant visual design.

The VVitch, Arrival

Edit:
I just read up a bit on the VVitch after posting this because I wanted to know how well the movie did financially.
Holy fuck, they made this masterpiece with a mere 3 Million dollar budget? That is very impressive.

The Family Fang, Swiss Army Man, Captain Fantastic, Hell or High Water, Nocturnal Animals and Imperium are all some of my favorites - just excellent stuff. Arrival and The Witch too but those have already been mentioned.

Not this year, technically, but Turbo Kid is a must-see. I also highly recommend Purge: Election Year and Hardcore Henry if you're down with a more grindhouse feel.

Turbo Kid is basically the ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic Mega Man movie we never got.

The remastered version of the original Phantasm was just released on Blu-Ray and DVD! Great news for me, since I lost my old DVD. Speaking of Phantasm, what's everyone's take on Phantasm: Ravager? I haven't seen it yet, but I heard a lot of bad things, including from King Fowley, whose favorite movie of all time is Phantasm. That just came out on DVD too, but I'm holding off on buying it until I either hear more or see it myself for free.

Same. I've heard a lot of bad things from long time fans and even reviewers who can see the good in anything. Seems to be the budget hurt it with terrible visuals, awful CGI action and a ho-hum story, with nostalgia-porn thrown in because Phantasm, verdict going around is it's lackluster but not completely awful.

Watched Scanner Cop last night haha, what a glorious b-movie, it's so damn cheesy but so entertaining and fun to watch. Better than Scanners 3 that's for sure, with some well done gross-out make up and practical effects and satisfying scanner battles.

My favourite movies so far this year are:

The Wailing: http://kluseba.eklablog.com/goksung-the ... a127407806

Hacksaw Ridge: http://kluseba.eklablog.com/hacksaw-rid ... a127410712

Chasse-Galerie: http://kluseba.eklablog.com/chasse-gale ... a126295122

The Wailing is an absolute masterpiece and must-see for anyone who likes horror movies or sinister suspense flicks. It's available on DVD and BluRay in North America. It's worth every single cent of its price.

I will post a more exhaustive list in the beginning of next year. There are still some promising movies I haven't been able to watch like Allied, Arrival, Shin Godzilla and Train to Busan.

Yoga Hosers - Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp apparently decided one day it would be fun to make a bizarre movie starring their daughters. The two girls, both named Colleen, are clerks at a Canadian convenience store, where they discover a Nazi plot to take over the country with tiny, not very threatening monsters. The Colleens fight back using their yoga skills, although I'm not sure why any specialized training is necessary to kill something that's small enough to just step on.

This wasn't as terrible as I'm making it sound, but also not good enough to recommend.



This showed up on some annual list of best horror movies, and I figured I'd skip it when I found out it's 2 hours 36 minutes long. But if it's really that good, screw it, I'll set aside the time. Thanks for the rec.

Yoga Hosers is one of those movies I could go my entire life without seeing. Even if I was off-my-face drunk I would prefer to watch Maniac Cop 3 or Porky's Revenge or Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal.

Yoga Hosers wasn't even the worst thing I've seen in the past few months. Off the top of my head, the Prom Night remake and Mutant Chronicles were worse.

I would rather just put tape over my eyes and be blind for as long as Yoga Hosers is, than ever see that movie. Tusk was already unwatchable.

Just watched Angst (1983). Super fucking crazy movie. Really good if you're into that sort of thing, excellent cinematography and performance by Erwin Leder.

''Tusk'' and ''Yoga Hosers'' are indeed two very particular cases with a very special type of humor. I perfectly understand why most people hate these movies and a select minority adores them. Personally, I adored the former one and have watched it three times already. I still liked the latter one which I watched just two days ago and will watch again in the future. I usually dislike comedy films but I like absurd or slapstick humor as well as dark humor and I also love Canada, so these two movies obviously have a certain appeal for me. I'm actually looking forward to ''Moose Jaws'' and to watch the entire True North trilogy with a couple of friends and something nice to drink

This was the review I wrote about ''Tusk'' some time ago which describes my thoughts in detail: http://kluseba.eklablog.com/tusk-2014-a ... a114851548

I don't really know how to feel about Tusk. Pretty sure I disliked it overall but it sorta scrambled my brain on the whole.

I'd be hard pressed to find any director that went as far downhill as Kevin Smith... I know some hate all his stuff, but I found him a lot of fun when he was doing all those Jay and Silent Bob movies. Dumb stuff, sure, but funny when I was a bit younger anyway. Recently I've absolutely hated everything he's done to the point where I think I'm about done.

At this point I'd argue the Wachowskis have fallen harder, because Kevin Smith didn't start as high IMO. Nothing in KS's early filmography ever impressed me the way the first Matrix did. Now the Wachowskis have done Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, and some Netflix show I don't watch.

Also at the risk of reigniting a debate that seems to pop up every 10 - 20 pages here, Shyamalan deserves a mention. Even if I don't despise his past couple efforts as much as some people do, I don't think he has another Sixth Sense level success in him.

Yeah, maybe the Wachowskis. Cloud Atlas is worse than either of the recent Smith movies I saw.

I never really thought Shyamalan was that great. Unbreakable and Sixth Sense were decent, but I don't like anything else I saw from him.

I know I'm a minority on this... but I actually thought The Village was his best flick (though I haven't seen some of his newer stuff...). The Sixth Sense is a classic for good reason, though I thought The Village was more mature and well-done overall. I think it got a lot of flack for a) its "twist" coming midway through the movie which was b) kinda disappointing. By then, people had expectations of what a Shyamalan movie "should" be and it didn't fit within those confines which frustrated/disappointed many. I thought the visuals, acting, characters, music, and story to be really well done though. I do think it would have been received much better had he not directed The Sixth Sense prior.

Re: Smith: I basically worshipped the guy when I was a teenager and thought Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was the funniest movie ever, but I've grown to dislike him more and more the older I get. I haven't seen it in a while but I feel like Dogma probably holds up, and I'll admit to finding Clerks 2 quite funny, but everything else is just... bad. I rewatched Mallrats recently and I didn't notice until then just how unwatchably terrible that movie is. Everybody who isn't Jason Lee or Ben Affleck is just stilted and awkward and delivers lame jokes terribly. That was when I realized that Kevin Smith's biggest problem is that he writes every character with the same voice, so you have a movie with fifteen Kevin Smiths all trying to out-quip each other with obviously premeditated paragraph long thesaurus vomit and it's just exhausting. He's also just generally a really obnoxious dude and always has this unexplainable air around him that screams "I'm better and smarter than you" at all times. If anything sealed it for me, it was him explaining that his tantrum when critics didn't like Cop Out was actually premeditated because he wanted to get out of Hollywood and make independent movies like Clerks again, which is such a blatant backpedal that I just can't take the guy seriously anymore.

Re: Shyamalamadingdong: I hated The Village. Not necessarily because "people knew his formula by that time and were upset that he changed it" and more "he himself was aware of his formula so he tried changing it by throwing a plot twist in the middle of the movie but he's so blissfully unaware of how full of himself he is that he couldn't help but adhere to his formula anyway and throw a second twist in in the last few minutes".

I admit to occasionally quoting parts of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, like the (NSFW) Movie Poop Shoot scene. Kevin Smith also was listening to King Diamond way before I was, so I salute him for being more metal than me.

Still, I stand by what I wrote about nothing from his early days being as classic as The Matrix or The Sixth Sense. Is Chasing Amy considered his best? I'm pretty sure I saw it once, but can't remember more than the basic plot outline. I've been meaning to watch Mallrats to see if it's as bad as I've heard.

And I almost forgot he did a segment in the 'Holidays' horror anthology. It was an elaborate gross-out dick joke IIRC, barely even related to Halloween.

Considering I wasn't able to actually finish Cloud Atlas since I got way too fucking bored and annoyed, I'm inclined to believe Emp. Tusk seems pretty lame, no interest. I liked the first Clerks and Chasing Amy but that's about it for Smith. Dogma was merely ok but I thought Jay and Bob was pretty shitty.

Jupiter Ascending was a beautiful movie with an abysmal plot, it was fun to watch once, I guess and Channing Tatum playing a mandog was something unique.

Cloud Atlas was a silly movie, and an amazing book. Even the author called it "the most unfilm-able book ever"

Also Signs is a fun movie

Yeah Signs gets way too much hate, I really don't know why it gets lumped in with his Suck Age.

Kevin Smith: Like Bastard I used to be a huge fan of his movies and I'd say Dogma is probably his best. Zack and Miri Make a Porno - To me is where things started to descend, although not wholly bad it was definitely a dip in comedy from Smith with all the funny bits in the trailer. Jersey Girl was a harmless light-hearted drama/comedy and not nearly as awful as people say. The jokes in Zack and Miri rarely hit, not to mention Seth Rogen is so predictable and samey in every facet of every role he's done, "hey ha, I'm the overweight sloppy looking pot-head character, ha ha".

Cop Out was insanely unfunny and instantly forgettable, like "wow, lookout for the wacky hi-jinks of JOHN MCCLANE and Tracey Morgan, and they're after some rare stolen baseball card" *cue chuckles at oddball concept* -__-, not to mention the actual film was so bland to look at and carbon copy Hollywood. Rob Schneider probably turned it down. -_-

Red State: I honestly enjoyed it and thought it had some great moments until the bullshit third-act, it was just so momentarily stupid a climax that even John Goodman acting his heart out couldn't save it. Too much like WBC for any type of escapism as well.

Tusk: Although I watched only half of it, I was profoundly uninterested in watching another human centipede slog and that's mostly where it was going. Just a quirky oddball horror movie that neither sucked completely nor offered something worthwhile.

Manchester by the Sea was a masterpiece.

Dude, Signs has aliens that can be stopped by fucking wooden doors. Like, just regular-ass wooden doors

Finally saw the force awakens.

It was decent- could've been great. Glad they had the balls to at least kill one major character off.

Problems-
I hate williams scores, always have always will, this was no exception.
c3po is basically the jar jar binks of the original trilogy, so seeing him back was a major bummer.
R2D2 is kinda shitty too.
Plot that was basically the same as a new hope
A bit too much CGI. Done far better than the prequels ofc, but still.

Cool things-
I really liked how the lightsaber battles are back to hack and slash instead of shit over-choreographed shit.
It was also cool seeing them used more sparingly!
The new characters were great, not sure on kylo ren though. Angsty darth vader? No thanks. Finn and Ray were really good characters and the actors did a sweet job. Supreme Leader if done right could be a really menacing character.
Ford and Fisher were both really, really good. That's how you do fan service

7/10, I guess I'll watch the next one whenever it comes out on netflix.

My dislike for Kevin Smith comes chiefly from his dopey 'critique' of The Lord of the Rings in Clerks 2. Seriously, can you be more of a bonehead? Also, he didn't need to verbally state his dislike for walking. One look at the guy reveals that.

It surprises me that you dislike Williams' scores. Not because his work is untouchable, mind you, but because of how revered his work is overall. It's like when you hear somebody go "man, fuck the Beatles" for the first time, even if you're not a Beatles fan.

Robert Rodriguez. Desperado (1995) was his peak and it's been downhill ever since, with the Spy Kids sequels running from below average (second one, 2002) to headache inducing (third, 2003) to suicidally terrible (fourth, 2011). Planet Terror is shit outside of one scene (which, oddly enough, is the "MISSING REEL" gag around the climax), Machete is what happens when you do a lot of coke and forget your name, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico is only watchable when Depp is front and center.

John Carpenter. From practically creating the slasher genre with Halloween to crafting the claustrophobic body horror brilliance of The Thing to his last hurrah by way of Lovecraftian eldritch horror with In the Mouth of Madness, can you think of a horror director whose body of work in that 15-year time frame is as celebrate or important? Then Escape From LA. Then Ghosts of Mars. Then The Ward. Now he's retired to focus on his music.

It's so bad. It's just utterly pretentious trash... I don't always throw that word around these days, but it fits here. Cloud Atlas is full of shitty, dull stories, and the way they are tied together with the message about everything being connected is so trite and idiotic - they basically just tell the same boring story in a bunch of different time periods and makeup-styles, and it doesn't work at all because none of it is interesting. It's an overly long and drawn out, laborious journey to reach an extremely simple, candified, Hallmark Card message. It sucked.

This is a stupid and really roundabout way to dislike a director.

...especially when the critique is spot-on...