Big budget, A-list actors, lots of marketing, great movie. Is anyone here not aware of Dredd?
I keep trying to come up with recommendations for cyberpunk movies that people might not have seen. Yet most obscure movies are obscure for a reason. It’s usually “this movie is good but ____” or “it’s a fun movie if you can ignore ____” So for most of these recommendations, I hesitate to say “this movie is awesome and you need to see it!” because I don’t want to mislead anyone. Of course, this means all the movies that I truly do think are awesome I assume everyone has already seen and I don’t need to suggest them.
But maybe enough time has passed that some people here haven’t seen Dredd? Well, if you haven’t, you should. It’s awesome. Just don’t watch the 1995 Judge Dredd movie with Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider because that one is not good.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqqgrUna28w
Of course, I say everyone should watch Dredd but it isn’t streaming anywhere… except DirecTV I guess, if that counts. But I made a post earlier where I mentioned I’ve been avoiding recommending movies that you can’t watch online and some people said I should recommend them anyway. So here we are.
It’s been a pretty rough 11 years for Cinema. I am only slightly less harsh than Farman.
In no particular order:
Limbo (2023) Logan (2017) Ex Machina (2015) Whiplash (2014) Dallas buyers club (2013) The master (2012) Parasite (2019) All quiet on the western front (2022) The grand Budapest hotel (2014) Under the skin (2014) The Babadook (2014) Bullet Train (2022)
That is the complete list of films in this time period I have bothered to recommend to friends.
I watch a lot of movies but even my favourite writers and directors have not impressed of late. Even Tarantino has dropped the ball IMO.
On the contrary it has been a great decade for truly weird and disturbing movies but not many in my circle tend to enjoy those and they aren’t highly rated.
That’s a pretty good list you’ve got, my friend; at least those I’ve seen from it. Allow me to make some suggestions from the last 11 years:
That’s off the top of my head, at least.
Man, how you gonna do Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) dirty like that? Django is pure revenge fantasy good times, Eight is beautiful and tense with some amazing character acting, and Hollywood just revels in being part of a mythological time and place in movie history.
Arrival!! I was searching my brain for that one and couldn’t dig it out. Such a great movie! You have just convinced me that I need to re-watch Siciario with an open mind and try again.
Blade runner is certainly worthy of a re-watch too but I was pretty disappointed at the cinema. I’m a huge fan of both the original Blade Runner and Philip K Dick. 2049 might grow on me with repeated viewings but on initial viewing it just didn’t hit the mark for me. Same goes for Dune for very similar reasons. Like facsimile of great films; all the ingredients are present but they just haven’t resulted in a succulent meal.
It’s a similar story for me with the Tarantino movies from this era. Sure, they’re better than most films but they aren’t in the same league as Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds, Kill Bill or even Jackie Brown for me and as a result they feel like a massive step backwards.
Fury Road stands alone as a great movie. Unfortunately for me I was raised on Mad Max! Growing up in Australia the first 3 Mad Max movies are pretty much required viewing to get a glimpse of our imminent future and fury road just doesn’t fit into this canon. Again great movie, but it’s just an action movie with a dude named Max in it. Imagine making a Mad Max movie without Mel Gibson?!
I can acknowledge Jordan Peele’s enormous talent as a director (and writer, producer, actor, comedian…shit don’t tell me he sings as well?!) but this Netflix type of schlock is just not for me. Entry-level social commentary dressed up as a horror movie? Come on, show us what you can really do.
I’m pretty surprised to see the Jump Street movies in your list! I don’t generally bother watching anything Jonah Hill is in. I find him completely without talent on screen. In general, he plays characters that make my skin crawl but they’re all eerily close to his actual personality. He doesn’t seem to understand the core concept of acting. You know, where you pretend to be the person you are portraying in the film or play. I feel like he needs to watch this clip on repeat until he stops ruining perfectly good movies. I can’t look at him. https://youtu.be/m5CX00i4uZE
I will set about catching up on the rest of your list. Again seeing the Apes movies in the list is a surprise but I’ll give them and the rest a crack. Thank you!
To be completely honest, many of these films took me a second viewing to really appreciate. Blade Runner 2049 is not a good sequel to the original, imo, but if you let it stand on it’s own a bit, it’s got some real interesting ideas at play, and of course, all of Denis’ movies are just visually beautiful. Similarly with his Dune, I’m a huge fan of the Lynch version, so it’s hard not to let that color my perception, but if you let it, it’s a visually stunning movie with amazing world design and it just nails the vibes I got reading the book.
Tarantino, too, I would have mostly shared your opinion two years ago. The first time I watched Basterds, Django, and Eight, I was pretty unimpressed, but I think I was letting my love of his earlier works color my opinions too much. Then, I got a copy of “Taratino: A Retrospective” for xmas, and that got me to go back through his entire filmography: I’d watch a movie, then read up on it in the book afterward. Even absence the additional stories and details from the book, I found all of those films really hit much better for me the second time around: no, they’re not doing that same effortlessly cool “Tarantino” style from the earlier works, but it’s clear that the man was interested in building on his own writing tropes and slowly branching them into different stories, and I really loved watching that evolution.
Fury Road: Fair enough, though at this point, Mel was probably a bit too old for the types of stunts they wanted to put Tom Hardy through.
Peele, I’ll just have to disagree, but mostly because I don’t see them as horror movies, but dark comedies. They’re not scary, not really, but boy did I laugh my ass off watching them. Nope, especially, manages to tell a funny, dramatic story with real stakes, imagination, and literally inventing a new way to do night filming that’s probably going to be mimicked by the entire industry going forward.
Jump Street: you’re not wrong about Jonah Hill, but in this case, the surprise is how funny Channing Tatum can be, and how expertly Lord and Miller bounce the two of them off each other. The standard Hill schtick just works in this screwball set of movies, and plays a perfect complement to Tatum. Oh, and that clip is amazing.
The Apes trilogy is criminally overlooked, again, probably because of “CGI Monkeys” and cultural memory of the old films, but they’re really amazingly good. Well, the first is just regular good, but the second two are great. A lot of it comes down to just how great Serkis is at working within the CGI character space: he plays the lead ape, Ceasar, but also does a lot of the motion capture for the rest of the apes, and nails it in movement and manerisms. All in all, the movies are able to create an epic about the decline of one civilization and the rise of a replacement, not because “apes good humans bad”, but because at every point, every character makes choices displaying their innate “humanity”, and have to deal with the consequences of those choices, good or bad.
Anyway, Dredd was awesome, Karl Urban is my husbando, and his DOOM movie is the best video game movie of all time. Thanks for coming to my TEDx talk!
I gotta agree with you on the Tarantino films.
However, I really loved BR2049. I’ve heard so many conflicting opinions on it and I haven’t figured out yet exactly what other people hate about it. I think it captured the original vibe of BR really well and carried on the story in a realistic and exciting way. Maybe people miss the voiceover narration? But the original BR director never wanted the voiceover and only added it because the studio said people wouldn’t be able to follow the story otherwise. I think the lack of voiceover in BR2049 is a compliment to viewers for assuming we are smarter now and able to better understand scifi without being spoonfed.
I find your opinion on Dune very interesting too. I have not seen the old movie but I have read the books. From my perspective, I think new Dune does a fantastic job of adapting the book to screen. There are way too many slow parts and introspection in the book that would not play out well on screen. There were a lot of added scenes too that were entirely not in the source material, but which I believe really enhance the plot, giving the characters more motivation for their actions and doing a better job at world building which I think the book glosses over too much.
Yeah, I 100% owe both of those movies a re-watch just based on what yourself and /u/[email protected] have said. I liked the vibe of both but as I said, they somehow just felt like cheap copies of master works.
Dune I think my main issues were pacing and casting. Just generally what they did to some of the characters. I read a couple of Dune books again over the last few years as excitement built around the upcoming film.
They really did my boy Paul Atreides dirty by casting Chalamet in the role. Paul is not supposed to be a simpering, anxious boy…
With that said, the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune is one that has proved impossibly difficult to adapt to screen over the years and in terms of overall world building and feel this is by far the closest to hit the mark for the overall world I think. I just feel they missed the mark entirely with some of the characters to the overall detriment of the story and spent a lot of screentime on scenes that don’t contribute a great deal whilst ignoring a lot of good source material entirely.
I’m going to track down all of the apes movies and spent a weekend on these and re-watching Dredd, BR2049 and Dune. Been a while since I had a proper movie day! Good chats, all. Thanks for the ted talk ;p