Red Letter Media

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Favorite recurring character? (Select 4)

  • Jack / AIDSMobdy

    Votes: 257 24.0%

  • Josh / the Wizard

    Votes: 77 7.2%

  • Colin (Canadian #1)

    Votes: 460 42.9%

  • Jim (Canadian #2)

    Votes: 230 21.4%

  • Tim

    Votes: 386 36.0%

  • Len Kabasinski

    Votes: 208 19.4%

  • Freddie Williams

    Votes: 274 25.5%

  • Patton Oswalt

    Votes: 27 2.5%

  • Macaulay Culkin

    Votes: 541 50.4%

  • Max Landis

    Votes: 64 6.0%
  • Total voters
    1,073
Flexo said:
You know where I still get that experience? Foreign films. Grab one at random, and you have a decent chance of having a good time.


It also helps you can get a lot of foreign fare on free services like tubi as well. So take a chance and it costs you nothing.

At $20+, I'd rather go to one of those fathom events which at least are rebroadcasting something you know you'll like.
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ive seen a number of foreign films but they all tend to be older films, just like the american films i watch. ive sen a number of french neo noir films, especially those by jean-pierre melville. all of them have been good. ive seen a few swedish films, a couple of them bergman films, but also the two films 'the emigrants' and 'the new land' both of them excellent films.

ive seen a few tarkovsky films, ive liked the ones ive seen. im also a fan of czech new wave films. i can recomend 'i served the king of england', 'larks on a string', and 'closely watched trains' as three good ones to watch if you havent seen them.

ive seen a decent number of kurosawa and other samurai films. ive also seen quite a few of jackie chan's hong kong films. and ive also seen a few other non jackie chan hong kong action flicks from the 80s/90s. those are pretty good. i'd recomend the genre to anyone looking for fun, maybe a bit cheesey, action films.
edit: the genre also includes films staring BoTW star cynthia rothrock. she is actually pretty good in those.

ive seen a few more foreign films over the years, some from here, some from there. there was this south korean film i saw 15 years ago and barely remember, it had somethign to do with ufos and aliens. i cant remember it but i do remember i liked it. (if any of you have any clue what this movie is id be so elated)



as for selecting movies, i tend to just stay at home and pick one of the old movies i have on a hard drive/priate one and watch that. tons of movies from 1920-1994 which i havent seen yet. most of them are probably hands down better than anything coming out today.
 
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Neo-Nazi Rich Evans said:
anyone else miss the time when you used to be able to go to the theater and pick a movies which "looks like it might be good" and have a very good chance of it being at the very least decent? now going to the theater and hoping the movie is good is like playing russian roulette with 5 chambers loaded.
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It's always been like this, there's been tons of garbage from the earliest days of cinema. You probably just don't remember the misfires (or were younger and more forgiving of them).
 
Hybrid Icing said:
It's always been like this, there's been tons of garbage from the earliest days of cinema. You probably just don't remember the misfires (or were younger and more forgiving of them).
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I'm not going to argue that there was this great untapped pool of quality or anything - yeah the schlock back then could be pretty low compared to the best of the time - but even the schlock back then had at least the semblance of attempts at entertainment.

Nowadays even the schlock lacks soul.
 
mlanguishi said:
Interesting, Alien movie got pretty well praised everywhere else I saw, but they sure go hard on it.
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I just got done watching Romulus and I fucking loved it. Felt that Mike and Jay were being even more jaded than usual about this one. The film is very well shot, the effects are mostly great, the callbacks were kinda cheesy but they were brief, I liked the main character chick a lot(strong woman, but not condescending or redditish about it), and it has some quite tense scenes. Of course, I'm a Prometheus apologist that likes all of the Alien films to some degree, but I think Romulus was an easy 7/10. Hell, maybe an 8.

also that thing at the end was sketchy as a motherfucker, and I loved it. An abomination that HAD to die.
 
Hybrid Icing said:
It's always been like this, there's been tons of garbage from the earliest days of cinema. You probably just don't remember the misfires (or were younger and more forgiving of them).
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Having seen Elves, The Blob, and Earth versus the Giant Spider, I am aware enough of shitty B movies of the past. And it bears repeating that even bad 50s B movies were sincere attempts to tell the stories being told with effects that just weren't up to the tasks. Modern shitty media are extremely public AND massively overbudget, like The Marvels or The Acolyte. Modern budget media is like most A24 or Asylum films; modestly budgeted, but ultimately forgettable.

Not that this Alien movie really warrants the negativity from older fans. It's really hard to write new stories using the Xenomorph. It's a giant cockroach essentially. The second you get a weapon capable of killing it, it stops being a horror movie and all that Weyland-Yutani lore is a red herring that implies a bigger universe than it actually is. It's a cooler name than Umbrella Corp, but Umbrella actually succeeds in making Bio-weapons for terrorists.
 
Neo-Nazi Rich Evans said:
ive seen a number of foreign films but they all tend to be older films, just like the american films i watch. ive sen a number of french neo noir films, especially those by jean-pierre melville. all of them have been good. ive seen a few swedish films, a couple of them bergman films, but also the two films 'the emigrants' and 'the new land' both of them excellent films.
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Korean films are my go to to now. Horror, action, historical, cop dramas, all top notch.
 
Neo-Nazi Rich Evans said:
anyone else miss the time when you used to be able to go to the theater and pick a movies which "looks like it might be good" and have a very good chance of it being at the very least decent? now going to the theater and hoping the movie is good is like playing russian roulette with 5 chambers loaded.
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TBF, It's always been that both bad and good movies are released each year, but the sheer amount of mid level garbage today is astounding. If you look at each year of the 80s there's always a bunch of good movies each year, lodged in with the bad ones. Can you honestly say the same these days? Like even if an original movie is ok like Oppenheimer you have way fewer good ones.

​

1980​

"The Shining"
"Star Wars: Episode V - Empire Strikes Back"
"Raging Bull"

1981​

"Escape from New York"
"An American Werewolf in London"
"Raiders of the Lost Ark"
(Road Warrior usually goes here instead of American Werewolf, but considering it was released in the U.S in 1982, I guess you could claim it doesn't count)

1982​

"Blade Runner"
"E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial"
"The Thing"

1983​

"Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi"
"Scarface"
"National Lampoon's Vacation"

1984​

"The Karate Kid"
"Gremlins"
"The Terminator"

1985​

"The Breakfast Club"
"Back to the Future"
"Pee-wee's Big Adventure"

1986​

"Aliens"
"Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
"The Fly"

1987​

"Predator"
"RoboCop"
"Evil Dead: Part II"

1988​

"Die Hard"
"Beetlejuice"
"Who Framed Roger Rabbit"

1989​

"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"
"Batman"
"Back to the Future: Part II"

I limited myself to 3 which still includes a lot of variation, and each of them are still considered pretty good nonetheless. There's way more you can list from each year, and on just a brief rundown, there's numerous absolutely classic films every and all year of the decade which most importantly has stood the test of time. Is it the same for movies today at least in number? Even if you could cobble together such a list from today I don't think it would be as good or as numerous, even sequels and remakes back then had a much more daring quality to them. This is from a surface observation that comes from someone who watches a lot of stuff from every year.

This is not nostalgia for me personally. I was not born to experience the 80s, and I know shitty movies were made at the time. But I find myself going back to that decade and the 70s far more than I do the 2010s and 2000s. It could just be a preference, but the ages I am apparently supposed to look at nostalgically with rose tinted glasses I really tend to not revisit as much. I feel like other evidence of this is how many remakes go back to 80s and late 70s too, and I don't think it's just because people making stuff are nostalgic for that time, it's that those properties were good and there is a corporate shift in taking risks which they don't do as much anymore.
 
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Flexo said:
You know where I still get that experience? Foreign films. Grab one at random, and you have a decent chance of having a good time.
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Speaking of foreign films, why didn't they watch Godzilla Minus One? I can understand why they didn't watch Shin Ultraman or Kamen Rider but why no love for big G? They had no trouble watching all the American slop except for the very latest Godzilla/Kong movie but they couldn't be bothered actually watching the good one? Jay even watched Shin Godzilla and liked it. For a bunch film snobs complaining about Hollywood they are pretty intellectually apathetic to anything else for Half in the Bag.
 
sneedem&feedem said:
Speaking of foreign films, why didn't they watch Godzilla Minus One? I can understand why they didn't watch Shin Ultraman or Kamen Rider but why no love for big G? They had no trouble watching all the American slop except for the very latest Godzilla/Kong movie but they couldn't be bothered actually watching the good one? Jay even watched Shin Godzilla and liked it. For a bunch film snobs complaining about Hollywood they are pretty intellectually apathetic to anything else for Half in the Bag.
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I wanted to come back with at least something concrete, so:
1724001502502.png
-- but the thing is that I remember Mike being openly hostile to Godzilla in the past; in this case, Adam Wingard and associates seem to be friendlies, and that probably bridged the interest gap, at least in part. I consider Godzilla to be Mike's Achilles heel in the same way that Jay went 40 years before watching his first Spaghetti Western.
 
sneedem&feedem said:
Speaking of foreign films, why didn't they watch Godzilla Minus One? I can understand why they didn't watch Shin Ultraman or Kamen Rider but why no love for big G? They had no trouble watching all the American slop except for the very latest Godzilla/Kong movie but they couldn't be bothered actually watching the good one? Jay even watched Shin Godzilla and liked it. For a bunch film snobs complaining about Hollywood they are pretty intellectually apathetic to anything else for Half in the Bag.
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I don't know but it seems to me like it came out around a time where they weren't watching much of the new releases, where now they seem to be going to everything.
 
sneedem&feedem said:

Woah, I guess all those grifter youtubers didn't hate watch enough.
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Wow, couldn't have seen this coming. But of course the Star Wars simps are going to pretend it had nothing to do with the quality of the show and that instead Disney assumed the hate backlash was bigger than it really was, because only worthless nazis could ever think a show about black lesbians could be less than amazing.
 
marvlouslie said:
This kind of shit is why I pirate, and why I'm not particularly feeling bad about watching movie theaters die off.
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You've got to be careful not to be too rose tinted about how it used to be but the movie going experience was on the decline a decade or more ago with the rise of the homogeneous multiplex. Often poorly projected films onto damaged screens with dodgy sound quality as there's no-one on the staff with the competence of the typical pre digital projectionist. No staff in the individual screening to deal with the cretins who are incapable of not using mobile phones, talking loudly or eating in a way by volume and/or odour that just can't be ignored. It's not a pleasant experience.

Alternatively I can watch a film at home on a large screen with arguably better picture quality and surround sound with definitely better quality. I can't justify the extra cost and aggravation of the less enjoyable movie theatre experience unless it's part of a wider occasion meeting friends I otherwise would not see.

The quality of the films is just icing on the cake. There were always stinkers but the proportion of stinkers to quality seems so much worse now. A couple of days ago I watched Futureworld, the 1976 Westworld sequel. It has a bad reputation and rightly so. The sex robot references are just as cringy as they were at the time and the effects are quaint/limited to say the least. But it has an interesting concept played out well mixing the sci fi / conspiracy themes that were common at the time. The real kicker is that I enjoyed it far more than Black Widow, Dr Strange 2 or even Endgame. I have no moral problem with pirating, the industry having given up the moral high ground long ago but haven't pirated for a long time, maybe a year or more. I have more films and series on disc than I will ever get round to watching and struggle to find new stuff that is worth the time to pirate.

Alien Romulus: the only thing the release of that has prompted me to do is pull the Alien Quadrilogy box set off the shelf.
 
sneedem&feedem said:

Woah, I guess all those grifter youtubers didn't hate watch enough.
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I tried to get those channels out of me feed, but yes the way to "win" is to stop watching the stupid show.

I would ve been happier if the grifters said "show looks stupid.....watch the lesbian orgy.....I m not gonna watch this"

Fuck that James AVGN dude said it correctly with that ghost busters movie
 
Ok let me just add some levity because I just had a thought.

Why does Rich Evans enjoy TUMS so much when he could be chewing on ROLAIIIIIDDSS?

Well it's probably been done before but I'm elderly and a little drunk so I don't care.
 
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