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

@Maxence_G​ 

Witness For The Prosecution is one of Christie's all-time worst stories, so the source material is atypically weak to start off with.

The best Christie adaptations by far are the David Suchet ones.

The Ustinov ones are decent enough, and the new BBC mini-series are also good although they take a lot of liberties with the plots and characters.

The Branagh ones are horrible - he should stick to directing and featuring in the genres of films he excels at.

@NYVKE​ 

In general, I am not a big fan of Agatha Christie. I read a dozen of her books when I was younger, and I dislike the pattern of her mysteries (retrieving clues, interviewing witnesses on a remote island, hotel, big revelation afterwards). It is pretty stupid. For a author who wrote so much about crime, I find it disheartening to notice that she has never thought about it really deeply. 

I agree with you that the best adaptation are David Suchet's TV Series. Although, it gets as boring as Agatha Christie's books on the long run.

Sacrilege!!!

@Tsarstepan​ 

Nimona could be interesting (maybe). I will not watch Asteroid City, I have had an overdose of Wes Anderson.

I only got to see the shortened composite version. I missed the opportunity to see the miniseries version.

@jeorj_euler​ 

The Criterion Collection is not available in your country?

They released nearly all Bergman's films (including Fanny and Alexander TV version). Anyway, even if you live in Region 2, since Bergman is Swedish you should not have problem finding a Region 2 format.

They also releases films that are rarer, and not released by the traditional studios. (e.g. Salo or the 120 days of Sodom). The disadvantage is that their DVD and Blu-rays are quite expensive.

Well, I pretty much only watch movies that are available for streaming, either free with ad breaks or at no additional charge with a paid subscription. I've not purchased a Blu-ray/DVD release since 2018, and I've never ever ordered such a thing through an online retailer. In lieu, I may take advantage of whatever happens to be available at underwhelming general stores like, say, Big Lots!. Oddly enough, the only Blu-ray disc that I have was acquired at Best Buy. I've only bought stuff that I've seen before too. Fanny and Alexander the three-part edition was available on the Hulu streaming from some period of years between half a decade and a little over a decade ago. Later on, I was only able to find the shortened edition. To make matters worse, Netflix will be discontinuing its disc rental-by-mail service, so even though I've not utilized the service, I won't have ever have the opportunity for it, going forward.

Finished the miniseries (9/10). I decided to gave the same rating to the feature film even though I haven not seen it yet.

@jeorj_euler​ 

Norton 360: ~$35 / year

A Decent VPN: ~$35 / year

[Fill in the blanks 😉]

NYVKE, honestly, I would fair better if I simply kept a copy of certain things I've watched or plan to watch. Too many short movies have vanished off YouTube, Vimeo and Max. Sometimes they reappear somewhere, but usually not. I'm not really worried about material that hasn't gone out of print and out of stock, because I wouldn't mind paying (and forgoing anonymity usually) in some cases, yet I hold that at a low priority since there are plenty of things that I plan to see that are already easily available, which underscores the main problem, that of scheduling. Just as a side note, I do have a great affinity for Gnu/Linux, nearly any distribution (but usually Knoppix, Ubuntu or Debian), so I probably wouldn't be bothering with certain antivirus software products.

I hear you.

I own external hard drives totaling about 20 TB

(Wow, you have enough hard drive space to run a Bitcoin full node for several years, NYVKE.)

When watching From, I was reminded most of Salem's Lot.

@jeorj_euler​ 

That's one of few of King's works that I have neither read nor viewed.

Must get down to it.

I had only seen the first season of From. Now, after having seen its second season, I can definitely see some resemblance to Lost and Stranger Things, but I should point out that I've only seen bits and pieces of Lost and only the first season of Stranger Things. I did see all of Fringe, which had investigations into anomalies so generic that almost anything resembles them, and maybe there are some parts I don't remember. Apparently there is a theme in From about the power of imagination, superstition, faith, fear and other things relating to belief.

True.

"Fringe" explored lots of different themes, but I still like to reference it since it is one of my all time favourite shows.

To be fair, there are so many threads on here, it is amazing that even a tenth of them receive feedback.

The digital "face lift" stuff and mocap face paste staff feels like it is still in the experimental stage, maybe because the big studios don't yet use generative adversarial networks (GAN). Seems like what can be observed in Rogue One, Gemini Man and Blade Runner 2049 is only slightly better than what can be observed in X-Men: The Last Stand. Anyway, in regards to the plot of ♊︎ Man, I found it to be maybe a little shallow, for such an interesting concept, and perhaps some unreasonable creative liberties against physics were taken in some of the action scenes. I'm none too fond of the some of the thematic absurdities that can be found in pictures like most of The Fast and the Furious installments, for example.

The Resident Evil movies belong to a great concept (in that just about any deceased lifeform could be reanimated or newly-animated rather than only humans, by the Tyrant virus), but they have always felt like they vaguely sort of had fourteen-year-old boys in mind for the target audience, never really going into depth about how and why a biological research firm (even if a defense contractor) could become so powerful, with its own paramilitary outfit (S.T.A.R.S.) and having several mansions, each having a gigantic subterranean research facility (hive bunker) kilometers deep underneath it. That's totally plausible, but what is the real motive and how does the firm ordinarily make its business revenue? With that in mind, I can see why the movie franchise was seemingly rebooted, but what would be the point of rebooting if few if any of the narrative defects (and shortcut-taking) are mitigated? Maybe audiences are not yet ready for more new Resident Evil movies to be made. On the other hand, the visual effects have gotten a lot better over the past two decades.

@NYVKE​ 

Good to know that it is not that bad. I bought it in Blu-ray for my father, and was so fearful about the film's quality that I decided to gift him another film instead. Now, I guess that I will give it a try someday or another.

The Blackening (2022)

Amusing for the first hour or so, but "dat shit get old fast, ni**a".

5/10

Hypnotic (2023)

Rodriguez read a couple of PK Dick stories and made this.

Upper average popcorn watch.

6/10