NEW: List some movies you've watched recently. Theatre, rental, TV... and give a */10

Monsieur Hire - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097904/reference/

A 1989 french film that somehow made it into my watch list.

.. i .. can't explain how much of a non-film this is. I understand that it's the adaptation of a somewhat famous novel, but - just because the writing is good - doesn't mean that the material is suitable for a film.

Random middleaged tailor Mr Hire is bald, ugly, and has something weird about himself. Basically an incel, he spends his spare time discreetly spying on the woman that lives in the apartment in front of his building. And, that's it. That is the extent of his maleficence.

There is a crime and he sees that the girl is somehow involved, but decides to say nothing; and there is an asshole cop who is convinced he's the bad guy, despite having no proof.

This that i described is about 90% of the film. There is a rather sudden ending where the cop and the girl, probably both convinced that Mr Hire is so weird and therefore best eliminated from society, that they conspire to frame him, and Hire, aware that society hates him *just because*, panics and falls from a roof, and splat he's dead.

5-ish/10 - my recommendation is to just read the wikipedia page and don't bother investing an hour into this.

DigDog said:

Random middleaged tailor Mr Hire is bald, ugly, and has something weird about himself. Basically an incel, he spends his spare time discreetly spying on the woman that lives in the apartment in front of his building. And, that's it. That is the extent of his maleficence.

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I can sympathize with that guy. That could almost describe me, except for the spying part (don't see the point in doing that). The world is full of people who just want to mind their own business and simply live but other people won't let them.

DigDog said:

Murder*yawn*bot - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30444310/reference/

Extremely lame CGI tv show about what's it like to be a security cyborg with some vague anticorpo message.

One of the Skarsgaard brothers is Murderbot, a "security unit" cyborg who has managed to crack his control chip, i.e. he is free!! but since he's still gotta earn a living, he pretends not to be - a bland parody of office work, "smile and eat shit".
He is a cheap, discontinued model and he's been sold to a group of space hippies who create a commune in a desolate planet. And i'm not sure if the comedy is making fun of the hippies (which was fun 30 years ago but it can stay in the 90s), or if somehow the hippies are meant to represent the audience. And .. no, they are not. I hope they are not.

This show is so fucking bland. The Skarsgaard boy may be decent in doing a vaguely funny character, but little of the show is even about this, with maybe 40% based on the hippies and 40% based on shit action scenes with CGI monsters.

Would not recommend unless you are really desperate for some scifi, 5.3/10

i understand the books were better. The robot character was like a lazy human, a robot who doesn't understand humans but loves to binge telenovelas. That sort of stuff.

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MrSquished said:

As someone who just read the first three books, I didn't feel the vibe in the show either. It's just a bit too goofy and something just doesn't work with the vibe they went for vs what I got out of the books. I mean they missed on a core level.

I saw some reviews that said the second half of the season gets pretty good, but it's too little too late.

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so i watched the first 5 episodes.
it is definitely not great at the start but by episode 3 it actually gets to the plot, and from there on it is watchable and the cliffhanger endings of ep4 and 5 are enough to make you want to know what comes next. i cant tell if they are going for a bit of cringe factor and not finding the right balance.

but yes the showrunners didnt find the right tone or have a solid enough understanding to adapt it properly. skarsgaard does only ok on the humor and a lot better when the action thriller stuff hits. but i kinda think they needed to find an actual comedic actor to get the slacker mentality inside a military juggernaut grizzled veteran personality when you are doing so much inner monologue narration. if you are going to lean so heavily on that mechanic so often, then the actor has to nail the timing and inflection and the director/showrunner/writer has to know what point they are making.

i dont know if it is the books or the screen adaptation but somebody hasnt thought out exactly why you make your security system have full sentience but not understand humanity while having decades/century of lived experience interacting with them. there probably is some nuance to be mined from having human type sentience but not having to deal with most of the annoying/limiting parts of human biology.

as far as who the hippie scientist team is supposed to represent it is a mix. they are contrasted with the corporate endentured wage slaves who have had their spirits broken. the hippies are trying to do thing right by respecting rights and freedoms, but being overly sensitive to emotional consideration. so arguably the more extreme side of liberal privelage. the author of the books is aparently somewhere on the scale of neurodivergent according to some skimming i did, so she may be making a statement on having to deal with pressure associated with people being overly considerate and attentive in social situations being exhausting. there is no seeming redeeming qualities shown for the corpo-types.

you would need a dan harmon or eric kripke type to come in and help get the sick and twisted humor side of the writing down while someone else handles the drama.
7 ish out of 10 for now.

(also they cribbed the mask design from naruto's tobi)

Escape from Sobibor - 6/10

Back in the 80's TV mini-series were a thing and this aired on network TV as a two-parter.

Alan Arkin & Rutger Hauer star as prisoners in a WWII Jewish death camp in Poland. It's a made for TV movie so light on atrocities and focuses a bit more on character development as they plot the escape. At just under 2.5hrs it moves pretty good and was solid entertainment.

DigDog said:

So, i watched Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0270288/reference/

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I watched it again too because I had forgotten the story. Barrymore played cute barbie doll roles so well. It was an overall depressing movie and most of the fault lies with the camera used. Every shot had a narrow field of vision. Gave the movie a claustrophobic feeling.

Mountainhead - not bad. The movie was starting to lose my attention but then the little twist in the plot happened, and then it was fun to watch. Good commentary on these dark times we are in due to big tech, and wealth.

A Murder at the End of the World (2023 mini-series)

I don't remember my exact impulse for wanting to watch this in particular, I think I fancied something a bit murder-mystery-sleuthy. I've watched two episodes (an hour each IIRC). I think if you want to try something that's slow-paced and "no alarms and no surprises", this certainly seems to fit that bill so far...

BUT: While it has some interesting ideas, so far it hasn't managed to get me engaged, I'm at a point where I might continue watching it to give it a fair shake as I can, but if I stopped watching now then I wouldn't feel like I'm missing anything. The only character who is potentially interesting is the female protagonist, who gives me Lisbeth Salander vibes what with the introverted personality, interest in puzzles and hacking skills but minus the extremely troubled history. Right now either the protagonist needs to carry the show or the other characters need to provide some backup. If this were Agatha Christie then you would have a bunch of quirky/engaging characters vying for your attention before the murder has been committed, and that just hasn't happened here. They're there, they've been introduced, is the best that can be said.

The tech element is bugging me a bit. I'll ignore the dramatisations in lieu of technical correctness because that's likely a necessary compromise and the faults in that respect don't seem to be holding the whole story together. The main thing that bugs me is that when going to this highly exclusive and secretive event, the guests attending are asked for their phones. The Gen-Z protagonist is visibly irked about this and says that her phone is half her brain. I thought they were being asked for the phones for the duration of the flight (one guest asks if it could be fully charged when he gets it back), but apparently it's for the whole event, and no-one has said anything about this, especially the fact that one person snuck one past the staff and was visibly using it in a public area. My phone isn't like "half my brain", but I would be irked with someone demanding my phone from me for any period of time, let alone "sure, I don't need that for a week". What if a necessary phone call comes in? Don't any of the guests have anyone else they need or want to talk to, anything going on in their lives that necessitate a phone or more specifically *their* phone?

This leads me into my other big criticism of what I've seen so far. To me this seems like yet another story that suffers from video-game-style mechanics, the sort when you spot an enemy but they're only triggered when you advance beyond a certain point: This person has no life, no purpose, may as well not exist until you approach them. This is not how real life is, yet this is how some fiction is written: The plot here seems be written entirely around the protagonist and meanwhile the other characters seemingly stop while the protagonist does their own thing. For example, this event they're all attending seemingly has (for lack of a better term) interactive seminars, but the protagonist has gone off and done her own thing, doing sneaky tech things to solve the mystery. There's no-one around, no-one is asking if she's going to show up to whatever, no sounds of other things going on. Furthermore, the other characters don't seem to show any lingering interest in the mystery; this is a big tech hotel and a bunch of pioneers/free thinkers are there, and a *very* basic inquiry to me seems to be, "did anyone check the cameras yet?". The protagonist even admits to all of them that she watched the victim die, and they're like "ok then".

- edit - at the start of EP3 I'm reminded that he died of an overdose (though the protagonist has discovered that it's murder), so some of what I've said here isn't fair. The protagonist performing a camera check has revealed that it wasn't just an overdose.

- edit 2 - Conclusion here: http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...rental-tv-and-give-a-10.2614070/post-41460631

mikeymikec said:

My phone isn't like "half my brain", but I would be irked with someone demanding my phone from me for any period of time, let alone "sure, I don't need that for a week". What if a necessary phone call comes in? Don't any of the guests have anyone else they need or want to talk to, anything going on in their lives that necessitate a phone or more specifically *their* phone?

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When I spent around 26 days at 42 Abu Dhabi, I shut off my smartphone (the one that had Whatsapp). I only had my Alcatel 1x 2019 phone with me which is hardly ok for even taking phone calls (Mediatek chip gets seizures from time to time and it seems to work faster in power saving mode). I did not miss Whatsapp. After a few days, I got a call from the UK. It was my friend who was concerned about me. I hadn't told him where I would be. He was happy that I was doing something productive and wished me great luck. And that was it. I'm such a popular guy that I did not receive any other phone call during that bootcamp

So I think the reasonable explanation is that the guests in the series thought that the event was worth dealing with phone/internet downtime. Not defending the series though. I myself couldn't get past the first episode.

igor_kavinski said:

When I spent around 26 days at 42 Abu Dhabi, I shut off my smartphone (the one that had Whatsapp). I only had my Alcatel 1x 2019 phone with me which is hardly ok for even taking phone calls (Mediatek chip gets seizures from time to time and it seems to work faster in power saving mode). I did not miss Whatsapp. After a few days, I got a call from the UK. It was my friend who was concerned about me.

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Thank you for proving my point...? My wife would think that I'm an insensitive jerk if I didn't check in with her after travelling, and I live a somewhat less in-demand life now than I did when my dad was in his final years (during which time I would have regarded being without my phone for that long as gross negligence, I once had an unexpected conversation with social services while standing in an airport). Most people have family of some sort, friends, etc that they keep in contact with. My brother gave me a prod the next day after I didn't check in with him to say I made it home after staying with him last weekend, and this is a guy who sometimes doesn't return my texts at all, or maybe weeks after the fact.

I think the chances of *any of* 12 random people being able to switch off their phones without prior planning for say a week and there being no repercussions are virtually zero, let alone all 12. I think if 12 random people were offered a free holiday with the caveat that they have to have their phone off no matter what for that period of time, one at the very least will refuse the holiday.

It's not about FOMO, phone addiction or anything like that. Most people have obligations to people they care about. Some demographics are more in danger than others, and unexpectedly going no-contact would raise alarm bells especially if a week goes by. "Oh, you've accepted an offer to stay outside of the country from someone you've never even talked to, yeah, sounds fine! You're probably not being trafficked, I'm sure."

IMO this point of the story was completely unnecessary and was added purely for drama.

Don't let Tom Cruise down, folks!

Watch both movies

Not sure if I mentioned it - but Department Q on Netflix was good fun. I enjoyed the lead actor quite a bit, and other actors too. It was a fun and somewhat ludicrous detective whodunit but done pretty well.

MrSquished said:

I enjoyed the lead actor quite a bit

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He was great in the movie Leap Year.

Lilo & Stitch (2025) - 7.5/10 - Just a good overall family movie. Had some funny parts in it and the little girl did surprisingly well. I don't remember much of the original but had a good time watching it with the wife and teenage daughter.

The Last of Us S2 - No rating yet as I'm only into Episode 4, but I'm just not into it. I'm having a hard time trying to binge it for some reason. I feel like the plot is kinda lame right now. I never played the games so I'm not sure how well it's being translated but I can't get into it. I'll continue to watch it and hope that it picks up.

i've been watching

Sherlock & Daughter - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31322085/reference/

The current IMDb rating is 6.8/10 and i would agree, maybe even a little too generous. The otherwise excellent David Thewlis is Holmes, and some girl that looks frightfully like rachel zegler but is actually "Blu Hunt" (no idea), playing the illegitimate, American daughter of Holmes.

Thewlis plays Holmes in a very classical way, which is always a pleasure, but where the acting is good (at least on his part, and some of the supporting) the plot is weak. And "modern" character design is still here, not only does this yank from the prairies show up in London, but they also recruit none other than the hitherto-unknown son of Moriarty as another investigator in the team; the mission, to rescue Watson, who has been kidnapped since before the start of episode 1.

more of a 6/10 for me; pleasant at times, annoying some other.

Mike Birbiglia makes me hate comedy. I wouldn't even call his new special comedy.

What is it with Netflix comedians talking about themselves, their families and all this positive personal crap they talk about. Even Bill Burr did it in his last special. I'm glad he is a changed person but I'm solely watching as an escape from our shitty reality. Comedy is my crutch when I'm having a bad day or decade.

balloonshark said:

I'm solely watching as an escape from our shitty reality. Comedy is my crutch when I'm having a bad day or decade.

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has anyone watched The Prosecutor with Donnie Yen? looks pretty slick. might do a movie night with the GF (also on our list is the french version of The Count of Monte Cristo)

Watched The Perfect Couple on Netflix with Nicole Kidman. I like your average priggish rich mystery shows, so it was decent. How does Nicole Kidman look so young and not quite look like total crazy plastic surgery riddled?

Saw the Mission Impossible movie (can't remember the number, lost count, the current 'final' one). Don't have the energy to review it (wasn't bad, lots of impressive action sequences, but too damn long). Only things that really struck me that I had to mention were that having the guy who played Milchick in Severance as a submarine captain was really distracting - I kept expecting him to call for a waffle party or hand Ethan Hunt a bunch of balloons.

Also, the airplane stunt sequence, though impressive and everything (as every review seems to mention) for some reason I kept thinking it should be in Black & White (and even maybe feature Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy? There was something slightly comical about how over-the-top it was)

pmv said:

(wasn't bad, lots of impressive action sequences, but too damn long).

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You can tell us that you watched the too damn long movie to catch glimpses of Hayley Atwell. We won't judge you

igor_kavinski said:

You can tell us that you watched the too damn long movie to catch glimpses of Hayley Atwell. We won't judge you

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i think she played Girl With Massive Tits in a Black Mirror episode.

DigDog said:

i think she played Girl With Massive Tits in a Black Mirror episode.

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This 50+ married guy asked me if I had seen the new Mission Impossible. I said yes, the one with the long sequence involving a train. And he goes, "Man, I love that actress!" and I knew which one he was talking about

I finished watching A Murder At the End of the World. Link to what I previously wrote about this.

It had an interesting conclusion. I think if you don't mind a slow-paced story, maybe you're looking some something to help de-stress (it's not loud, characters aren't particularly shouty/combative, bullets are not flying, etc), this might be a good choice. In terms of plot, I would pigeon-hole this story in a similar category as 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'; there are "men who hurt women" aspects, topical tech, hacking, etc. There's no question that I will watch TGWTDT many times more, not so much this, but I don't feel like I wasted my time with it.

Most of my previous criticisms still stand, I think the main fault with this story is how the support characters are written, they're just there. Clive Owen gets a bit more time and content to work with though.