Yup, saw Train to Busan a couple years ago. It’s great. Probably elite tier.
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Train to Busan is the perfect zombie movie. It nails every single aspect of the genre.
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Thought Train to Busan was overrated, tbqh.
While I’m in here dropping takes on movies… I watched Nightcrawler the other night and had a pretty strong reaction to it. I’m wondering if others felt similarly or if something about the movie just triggered me.
First, I found the protagonist really unlikable. Like, I actually was really repulsed by him. And I’ve loved tons of movies with all kinds of protagonists: heros, anti-heros, regular slobs, etc. This guy just seemed to have no redeeming features whatsoever.
In fact, about half way through, I stepped away to get a beer, and thought seriously about just bailing on the movie altogether, and I never do that. Even when the movie is shitty I usually stick it out to the end, but I was not digging this one at all.
I ended up hanging in there. And then the other thing that happened was for about the last 30 minutes, I had this really tense, nervous feeling in my stomach. Like I was just so apprehensive about what was coming that I could feel it physically. And again I watch a ton of suspenseful and/or violent movies and don’t have that kind of reaction.
Anyway, I was mulling over my reactions and was curious about others’ experience. Anybody else have a take?
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Have you noticed that he never blinks in the movie?
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Yeah, I mean this movie was meant to provoke and make you feel uncomfortable. It’s a dark commentary on where we are all headed. I suppose Nightcrawlers is not ever classified as a “sci-fi” movie, but it’s in the same spirit of classic dystopian science fiction. It makes you mull things over and worry about the future and that is one of the defining aspects of excellent science fiction in my book.
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I love feeling uncomfortable with these kinds of movies and loved Nightcrawler for this reason.
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Me too. The Gilroy brothers are among the best storytellers currently making movies.
It’s been ages so I might be misremembering, but I believe the person with an extensive take on this movie was motorcycle crash survivor riverboatking
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Yeah, I thought they nailed it with Nightcrawler. It was direct and engaging with a lot of on the nose political and social stuff going on. Pretty rare these days and I remember being surprised it didn’t seem to get awards ‘buzz’, but I don’t follow that stuff very well.
It was also an example of a strange phenomena here in France where English language films are retitled for seemingly no reason, so here it was “Night Call”. Idiots.
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Germany tends to do that as well. The stupidest example is when they renamed the Van Damme movie “Black Eagle” to “Red Eagle”.
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Well, there goes my theory that it was to use ‘simpler’ English.
I don’t know but maybe it was renamed because a black eagle is part of the German coat of arms, a simplified version of which was used for the Nazi’s Iron Eagle.
I saw Knock Knock on the Netflix top 10 so I watched it, terrible. I mean most Eli Roth movies suck but they at least have some entertaining violence and gore, this was just boring and pointless. The only positive was Ana de Armas
I think I saw this in the theaters so it’s been a while but I really liked it. Obviously the main character is a massive shitbag but the movie was really well made and I don’t think i ever felt physically ill. That is a pretty rare feeling with movies, if it happens then hats off to the director.
I think that is the motivation for renaming a lot of movies. For example “Taken” became “96 hours”.
While “Nazis” is always a good guess why Germans do anything I don’t think it’s the case here. At least until the 1980s it was a marketing trick to give them titles that remind cinema goers of other movies.
Earlier that year “Red Heat” was released. I think they wanted to ride its coattails and therefore called it at first “Red Hunter” and then later “Red Eagle”. At least that’s my theory.
Another example for this is the Schwarzenegger movie “Raw Deal” which was released as “Der City Hai” (The City Shark). A few months later Stallone’s “Cobra” was thus retitled “The City Cobra”.
German “translations” of English movie titles has been hilariously bad for the longest time, eg. Bill Murray’s “Stripes” was called “I think I got smooched by a moose” and “Dawn of the Dawn” became “Zombies in the department store”.
Cliffs: Germans are weird when titling movies
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Movie discussion starts at 3:55. Foreign movies at 7:55.
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Watching Jim Jarmusch’s zombie movie “The Dead Don’t Die” on HBO. Can’t believe it took this long for me to watch. It’s great.
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“Angry Inuk” is a great documentary about how the animal welfare movement has devastated the Inuit seal hunting communities of the Arctic.
Behind a paywall, just quoting the portion where he makes a comment on the recent Joker:
“I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars.’”