JFF: What Was the Last Film You Saw, and How Would You Rate It? (Pt. 20)

The Tutor (2023) - A very good little low budget / Indie thriller. Much better than its IMDb rating would suggest. 7/10

The Night Agent (2023, Season 1) - Very strong conspiracy thriller. Lead girl is a bit annoying but she's cute so she can get away with it. 9/10

La Brea (2021, Seasons 1 & 2) - Manifest + Lost = WIN! 9/10

"Pain? You have no idea what pain is."

Ant Man & The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) - 7/10

The Darkest Minds (2018) - 7/10

Invitation To A Murder (2023) - 7/10

@cinephile​ 

Spoiler alert (but seriously the film was released 94 years ago and the story is well known).

The Greek gods created a woman - Pandora. She was beautiful and charming and versed in the art of flattery. But the gods also gave her a box containing all the evils of the world. The heedless woman opened the box, and all evil was loosed upon us.

It first looks like it will prefigure screwball comedies then it takes really really dark turns. Incitation to suicide, murder, human-trafficking. Germans prove yet again that they are the best when it comes to Silent films. (Lang, Pabst, Murnau, von Sternberg)

As you can all see. Lulu is my new profile picture.

Really powerful images too. When Lulu gets killed by Jack the Ripper. We only see her hand drop, there is no scream (because it is a silent film). It is even more terrifying. Pabst sure knew how to use silence.

Ae, you there! Yes, you!

I must've spent half an hour writing, proofreading, rewriting and editing the following message:

The guidelines for movie reviews on IMDb have no bearing on how folks are expected or not expect to cast ratings on IMDb for movies. For any given movie, most people who can be bothered to cast a rating cannot be bothered to write a review. Surely we hope that everybody has the decency to not rate anything that he or she hasn't actually observed, but even learned erudite folks may put a utilitarian agenda ahead of what they might consider a signal of basic respect (for IMDb or whichever venue). Even watching so-called works of "art" in cinema, some folks cannot set aside their disgust with one topic or another. Some people don't even like art, whether it is very creative or not, very imaginative or not, very artistic or not. Wouldn't matter how many works of long-dead, frequently-referenced, occasionally-critiqued philosophers they read and even understood; they wouldn't care. This stuff isn't axiomatic, and it is definitely not science.

I will point out that I'm not in the business of assigning ratings to movies, because there is no way for me to do it to a large number of movies in a satisfactory and adjustable way. I've only effectively rated three thus far (two nearly two decades and one more just half a decade ago), and only because I thought at one time or another that they deserved a ten on the scale of one to ten, whereas I won't even cast a vote for anything that isn't what I consider to be close enough to the highest possible score (which might be considered reserved for perfection, but the may be no such thing). I spent a lot of time thinking about those ratings and observing what others though about the corresponding movies, before casting them, but I can never shake the feeling that they somehow not "correct". I also don't give much credence to any ratings. I don't believe in this system, and I barely use it, as I've indicated. I won't even use the ratings widgets provided on streaming services. Any feedback of such a nature I provide is ultimately completely arbitrary, and also customers can lose track of their respective usage histories by forgetting their respective login credentials or being locked out on account of inactivity, or, hell, banned (be it unjustified or perfectly fairly).

With regard to movie reviews on IMDb, usually the only time I even read the reviews is when the outline, summary and synopsis data is empty. The only other time I read them is for movies that are the somehow subject of viral controversy (even unfair memes), or if I've already seen a movie, found it to be taboo, maybe just plain weird, and not very many posts to the old IMDb Message Boards (of which a snapshot exists) had been made. I generally take at least a little interest in the threads created on this forum to complain about movie review submissions that were declined or about abuse reports submitted against the same data type but which were declined. The threads dealing with these topics are thankfully not of a majority kind, but every few months, there is at least one, and sometimes I'm compelled to wonder why people complain so bitterly so much, when there is maybe too much going wrong simultaneously to bother complaining about anything. They are mostly self-centered, and understandably so. When I go to investigate any bit of whataboutism that may arise in the discussions, I often bored to tears reading the big collection of reviews (some short and some long) attached to some IMDb title pages.

I did get around to seeing Maïmouna Doucouré's Mignonnes, a while back. I'm not going to pretend that the thing is completely bereft of some value of some kind, perhaps social or otherwise, but numerous aspects of it are fairly disgusting, perhaps intentionally so, for shock value or some shit, and one shot in particular was completely unnecessary and in such a way as to wonder about the personal nature of the cinematographer and the editor, which harms the immersion. Also, the protagonist is insufferable and her redemption arc felt a maybe just a little shallow (and [but] apparently possibly magic was involved). Certainly, I can cut the director some slack for being somewhat new to the craft, but that means that I will expect better of her next time, lest there be no next time after such a next time. Regardless, I'm a bit concerned about the people behind these kinds of productions, financing them, marketing them, so on and so forth, and certainly that ought not have much if anything to do with how folks rate the pictures, but there always room for some kind of caveat emptor or exposé.

But that's fine (since it is mostly me discussing myself rather than being an "answer"), and I expect to offline this which I hope to be effectively conveyed via the notifications system.

Excellent!

NYVKE, I was intending to delete (sooner rather than later) the message above posted by me, but since you gave it a thumbs up, I'm feeling hesitant about doing that. Just so you know, the passage quoted in the message was originally going to be a reply to a thread concerning what is going on with the way a certain new pseudohistorical Netflix movie produced by Will Smith's wife is being represented on IMDb, but the thread was deleted sometime between when last time I had re-loaded and when I clicked the post button.