Wetlands: This is one of the filthiest movies I've ever seen, and I mean that in both senses of the word. Anal fissures are a major plot point, and it's German so of course there's chest-shitting.
Trouble Every Day: It's a vampire movie. There, I spoiled it for you. Everyone's a creep and really sad. I should know better than to watch anything with Vincent Gallo in it.
The Countess: Julie Delpy does the story of Erzebet Bathory and her innovative skin-care regime. It's a little slow, but good.
The Anomaly: Super-assassin has his memory reset every few minutes and wakes up in the middle of a heist somewhere else. It's a lousy enough retread of old ideas that I expected to see P. K. Dick's name pop up (since there have been a thousand movies "based on" his work and exactly one was any good).
I Origins: There was a germ of an interesting idea in here -- "I think I found physical evidence that my Manic Pixie Dream Girlfriend was reincarnated as an Indian street urchin!" -- but every character was an irritating piece of shit and the dirtbag convenience-store clerk playing the lead was completely unbelievable as a scientist.
The Woman in Black: This movie lost me when 20 minutes had gone by and I had already been repeatedly subjected to ham-handed foley scares. Here's a hint: pipes in old houses don't make 110 dB dubstep-drop boom noises. And even if they did, that's terrible film-making unless what happens immediately next is "the sink actually explodes" rather than, "oh look, it is actually a fully functional sink." Then later there was a floating Scooby Doo creeper in a cheap Halloween mask or something. I've already forgotten.
The Device: Finding the Alien MacGuffin makes everyone act like assholes. Snore.
The Signal: I think this was better when it was called "Laserblast". I feel sad for Laurence Fishburne that money is so tight that he decided to be in this.
The One I Love: This wasn't bad, but really it was a 30 minute episode of Tales From The Darkside stretched out to feature length. It's better if nobody has spoiled the central twist for you before you watch it.
Soulmate: Attempted suicide meets actual suicide, has tea. Gonna go with Tales From The Darkside again. Though it was refreshing to see a ghost story that was trying to have a plot instead of only being scary.
Drinking Buddies: Sad, dissatisfied people realize they aren't happy with their relationships, change things, nothing changes. I was going to say, "Hey, they're still making 90s slacker angst movies!" except if this was one of those there would have been a bunch of overwrought monologues. It wasn't a bad movie but it was just a total bummer.
Dead Before Dawn: I just remember a lot of running and screaming and drooling. And then maybe it was all a dream? Yeah, I've already forgotten it.
...on a related note, is there a replacement yet for tvtorrents.com that works with flexget?
" and it's German so of course there's chest-shitting. "
" and it's German so of course there's chest-shitting. "
"Wetlands" is pretty gross.
"Wetlands" is pretty gross.
I second your Vincent Gallo sentiments. Barf.
At first I was indignant then I realised I was thinking of Vincent Cassel. Who might find Gallo on the bottom of his shoe.
I second your Vincent Gallo sentiments. Barf.
Ha! The usual lack of documentaries.
It may be hard to find as the DVD isn't out yet, but if 'An Honest Liar' comes around it's well worth the effort to see it.
God I hate Vincent Gallo. He's kinda racist and he destroyed the vintage hollowbody guitar market by spending more than anyone else could afford.
God I hate Vincent Gallo. He's kinda racist and he destroyed the vintage hollowbody guitar market by spending more than anyone else could afford.
Blade Runner, Total Recall, or A Scanner Darkly?
There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
That said, the interesting thing about adaptations is that sometimes the worst one is the best. For example, New Rose Hotel is a pretty faithful adaptation, but it's an absolutely shit movie unless your fetish is hours of watching Harvey Keitel cry. Whereas, the best Gibson adaptation is unquestionably Strange Days, even though he didn't write any of it. It captured the essence of his "sprawl" books in a way nothing else ever approached. So maybe The Matrix was the best Dick movie. Or maybe it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Sometimes I'll argue that Dick and Lovecraft were the most influential writers of the Twentieth Century (though when I'm in that mood I'm more likely to argue that The Pixies have been far more influential than The Beatles, but that's neither here nor there) because even though their actual, you know, writing and stories were kind of crap, their ideas defined, predicted, categorized and possibly invented the fucked up world we live in: that the world is vastly larger and more complicated than you can possibly comprehend, and that you are surrounded by conspiracies -- real, existing ones -- that desperately want to hide from you who you are and what is really pressing in around you. That's basically the human condition from the Cold War through Y2K and beyond. Pre-Millenium Tension: a phrase that is now quaint.
There is apparently a pending faithful adaptation of The Man In The High Castle. I’ll reserve judgement until I see it.
I just rewatched Adaptation the other day. Nic Cage’s usual chewing of the scenery aside, what did you make of that?
And yes, you are right about the Pixies. The Beatles perfectly encapsulated an existing Weltanschauung, the Pixies voiced a new previously-inchoate one.
I am the proverbial last person to get the memo. Why did no one tell me to watch Strange Days?
And the Pirate Bay seems to turned into a AR game...
Which of the Philip K. Dick adaptions did you actually like?
Have you watched Wristcutters: A Love Story? Might be something you'd enjoy.
Also, What We Do In The Shadows is much better than the shitty trailer advertises. I typically dislike mockumentaries, but this one really did it for me. Wish Pietr had more screentime, though.
Yes, loved Wristcutters.
Did you recognize Ginger?
American Mary => Ginger of Ginger Snaps all growed up (sic).
Of course. I loved Ginger Snaps and the second one. Though #3 was crap.
I never used tvtorrents, but if what you're looking for is a source of RSS feeds for episodes I recommend tvunderground.org.ru. Registration is mandatory now (when I did it this involved registering for the forums just to read the post where they explain how to register for the site) but the quality of the curation makes well worth it.
Stating the obvious but films and novels are different mediums. Writers like Gibson and Dick take us into a very textual place which simply can't be replicated on the screen. It's like the books Mervyn Peake. They keep remaking Gormenghast as though it's simply pages of story instead of a book with a deeply gothic textual architecture. You're right, I think, in that Gibson is a major literary figure or will eventually be seen that way. He brought a density to prose that's been often imitated and might yet been seen as defining our age. It's simply unfilmable in the same way that nobody can (or, in my opinion, should) try to film James Joyce's Ulysses.
Speaking of crap movies which I loved: you should check out Luc Besson's 'Lucy'. Maybe I just have a thing for Scarlett Johansson but I thought it was great sci fi.
Previously.
The guys from tvtorrents are working on a replacement at http://www.shazbat.tv/index - your previous user/pass should work.
Not quite as good yet, getting there.
Old login doesn't work.
Hmm, looks like it's still in closed beta and they don't want new "old" users yet, with a big "don't ask to add more users!" on the IRC msg. I'll let you know when it's open again.
I use http://showrss.info/ with flexget. I never used tvtorrents, so I don't know if it's better or worse, but it works for me.
another vote for showrss. although it seems to be really just a prefiltered https://eztv.it/search/
Giving it a shot. Seems ok so far. Unfortunately it's more than EZTV -- which means that sometimes the torrent payload is encoded into a subdirectory full of random other nonsense.
apparently this has to do with availability....when the non-directory version becomes available, it will switch over to that. Since I don't auto-download, that works for me ok, but I imagine that if you just download everything it would suck.
They may have posted somewhere how to make that not happen, but I can't find the details anymore
Is that where the payload is given some weird, I dunno, base-64'ish filename and not like showname_s03e12_720p_4theLuLZ.m4v ? I occasionally have to go back through my feed and rename files to whatever feed they came from which sort of annoys me, but I'm so peripheral to the scene that I don't know what's going on there.
(rss->nzb instead of rss->torrent, but I assume the archives are similar.)
No, I mean that instead of just being the video, it's a a directory full of other bullshit like a readme and a JPEG and other crap.
Well, I'm unimpressed with the latency on showrss, that's for sure.
So far, kickass has had 5 copies of American Horror Story s04e11 for over two hours; eztv has had 1 copy for over an hour; and it only just showed up on showrss.
(And yes, the show is profoundly disappointing, but it's popular and so should be easier than this to get.)
And -- oh look -- even after a torrent shows up in the HTML search results on showrss, it's still more than 20 minutes behind on showing up in the RSS feed.
These people fail at internetting.
I watched Predestination this weekend. I thought it was far better than I expected it to be. I was expecting the new element they added to be the weakest part, but I was pleasantly surprised that they integrated it into the fabric of the plot, again, better than I thought they would.
And you guys did an excellent job with redacting the name on the older thread because I had no idea at the time what it was based on.