Here a weaponized film suggestion for "i need deep meaning" snobs. Dancer in the dark. It sucks the joy dry out of you and is a masterpiece.

How about a side of Kung pow?

I tell people that my favorite film is Vertigo, but my favorite movie is Tommy Boy.

That one has been on my list to watch for a while. I wanted to do a big drink viewing with friends though so it's gonna be a bit

Not one mention of Tombstone. Not a ‘ner one of y’all got any sense at all.

Step Brothers was alright and it was good for a little referencing but it never made me feel the things that 12 Angry Men, Rear Window or Jaws has.

Upvote for Dead Alive.

The movie is also a pretty hardcore criticism of capitalism and its willingness to reanimate your corpse to make a buck and then kill you again when you start to question it.

The Fifth Element is a movie that in theory I should hate, but I actually love it. The title refers to love and the romance plot doesn't work for me at all. They do an overly clever thing where the villain and the hero never meet (and kinda rub it in your face about it) and normally I hate it when movies are overly clever in that way. And Chris Tucker is annoying as hell.

But somehow that doesn't matter because it's so over the top about everything. The action, the costumes, the dialog, the visuals are all so over the top the stuff that normally would make me not like a movie doesn't really matter.

The overall meaning works even if the execution on the romance plotline falls flat for me. Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis not having any kind of confrontation is fine, since it's kinda how things work with billionaires. You oppose them without ever meeting them. Corbin Dallas is a man of action and Zorg is a man that's all about money, so they're from different worlds so it makes sense they never actually meet. And everything being weird as hell works because it's the future, things should be weird and unfamiliar. Chris Tucker is somehow the same kind of annoying as social media influencers are today, so even that works.

So the Fifth Element is a movie that is terrible on paper, but somehow everything fits together so well that it's actually great.

The Game is worth two watches, minimum, to catch all the details.

Bullet Train, every day of the week, and twice on Sunday

If they don't respect The Fifth Element as the iconic masterpiece that it is, I don't want to hold a conversation with them anyway.

Gattaca. That "I never saved anything for the swim back" line always gets to me.

I remember when Harmontown existed, they invited Neumann over and most of the interview was just drunk Dan Harmon saying "ok so you wrote two of the best screenplays in history, what the fuck bro". (Second one was Starship Troopers obviously). On a podcast that was obsessed with dissecting storytelling, this must have been the most cited movie, along with die hard.

Personally my go to is Mad Max Fury Road, as a kind of filter similar to what you have going on. It's a movie you need to engage with on its own terms, otherwise it is completely meaningless and you will miss the whole entire point.

It seems a lot of people have a problem with clear and radical artistic choices, and will mistake them for defects. This kind of media "literacy" is utterly boring to me as they just train themselves to detect and detest any deviation from Hollywood norms.

I'd just be suspicious of they idolized any of the sequels. They were tacked on and not nearly as well written as the first one.

Was the first one a critique on the praxis of computerized sentinels and the morality behind that, the sequels where more of a celebration of the cool shooty cyber cowboy.

I watched that movie so long ago and as quite a young child, but that line and Gerome Gerome the metronome always stuck with me.

RoboCop radicalized me.

Holy shit someone else who knows about Velocipastor.

Robocop is a great movie and far from bring a dumb action movie. Behind its appearance it's actually a very deep and layered movie
Even Paul Verhoeven couldn't see it when he first saw the script until he actually read it carefully. The title and the main concept are subtly satirical and it's not apparent until you actually watch it. When I say it is one of my favorites to movie people, they always look at me funny. Unless they actually saw it.

My favorite movie IS actually Mulholland Drive but I never say it to anyone because I'm always afraid people will think I'm a pretentious dick trying to look smart. This post doesn't help XD

Well, the slur isn't saved as a word in my phone. So autocorrect can't accidentally make me a bigot.

You gonna do something, or just stand there and bleed?

Somehow I thought this was a joke from the movie step brothers so I was reading it in will ferrels voice and the response in jon c rileys voice.

Id say go ahead and make it cannon.

Have you read the comics, tho? The movie is only the first 1/4th of the whole plot

Nausica is the superior film imo, both are trying for different things. One is a coming of age story that is post societal upheaval. The other is an adventure into the unknown that is pre societal upheaval.

Castle in the sky really combines both.

Casablanca and Demolition Man are tied for first.

I do this for Starship Troopers since it's both a masterclass in parody but also works as a solid idiot filter. Though there is always the chance for it to devolve into two largely intelligent people devolving into a weird mashup of Earth Defense Force, Helldivers, 40k, and Starship Troopers memes.

Also go watch the sequels, they get increasingly weird and eventually devolve into weirdly horny 3d anime. Also read the book and then read any of Heinleins other books, the dude was a competent author and just kinda liked playing around with weird ideas like psychic sex cults and obviously fascistic protagonists.

I said devolve way too many times.

The part where he shows his medallion to the temple guard like he's flashing his ID to the bouncer at a club is chefs kiss

Some of them! Unfortunately I moved, and had to put my boxed set in storage, and I can't get to it because it's lumped in with all of my family's stuff, probably buried which is really annoying and makes me wanna just repurchase them at this point

I did get as far as past the section that the movie was based on, definitely didn't expect the Tolmekians Torumekians to be just the knights, with no chickenhead soldiers or birdface tank guys, with the chickenheads originally being wormhandlers. That is one thing that I prefer about the movie since the chickenhead helmet bears a striking resemblance to the giant warrior, which is a nice parallel to the monster that they aspire to use

Edit: just realized that you can actually see the birdies in some panels like here

Why is it raining inside?

I think that's what makes it so good. It gives you hope that we will find peace in this huge barren land where mercy wins in the end

Agreed haha.

I don't think anyone ever has, but I am meeting more and more people who don't know what it is

Perfectly summarized. It's so weird and really shouldn't hold up, but actually it just causes it to be a masterpiece.

It's just a constant good time.

I think that's supposed to be patterns on the wall. In the last panel the main character is nervously sweating.

Demolition Man is one of my all time favorites, up there with Fifth Element

Yeah, Blade Runner was great for the atmosphere, but it didn't really emphasize PKD's overall message about empathy. Robocop came out of that, it was about underlining that message. And yeah it's about a corporation literally taking away a person's humanity, but also removing humanity from society in general.

The US is at war with Mexico in Robocop, but nobody even cares. There's one line where a cop says "Damn! They bombed Acapulco!" the other cop says "So what?", and the first cop says "I booked my vacation there, I gotta call my travel agent!"

It's a world where there's virtually no empathy left, and turning a human into a robot is representative of what corporate culture is doing to people.

Alex Murphy is able to recover some of his humanity, but he doesn't fully escape from the system. He is still limited by the corporation's directives at the end of the movie, but he does have his identity as Alex Murphy in the end, so that's good I guess? It doesn't hold your hand about this, it's a smash cut to the end credits. It's just like "you figure it out!"

West by Northwest

I'm assuming this is supposed to be Hitchcock's North by Northwest, or is this a parody that I'm unaware of?

Ahahhaha it is. I was not awake when I wrote that lol!

Fixed it.

It also explains the far more common overall grimy behavior where so many of us will do whatever awful (but legal) things our employers demand, because we have almost no worker protections and keeping employment can literally be life or death. Its an insidious rot that permeates our society.

I know, but I only got to this conclusion after thinking "they're clearly inside, so that can't be rain. So what is it?"

Starship Troopers

It's just giving the wall texture so it's not just a flat colour

It's doing it wrong.

Can someone please explain why people llke Step Brothers so much?

The movie is literally about two NEETs being as insufferable as possible. Where is the comedy in that?

I wasn't a big fan but I watched it in front of others and they really liked the 'putting my balls on your drum set' part.

So as a person of culture, how do you think the 3 seashells are used?

~ diva dance ~

You don't see how a bunch of former Redditors could like and relate to a movie about NEETs?

Also read the book and then read any of Heinleins other books, the dude was a competent author and just kinda liked playing around with weird ideas like psychic sex cults and obviously fascistic protagonists.

It boggles my mind that people can treat Starship Troopers as proof of Heinlein sincerely promoting fascism when Stranger in a Strange Land was published immediately afterwards. Dude liked playing with ideas, it's not that complicated.

Art is subjective, it can never be truly wrong, just different

Honestly I think people have problems with two major concepts, firstly the fact that the protagonist of a book can be morally repulsive, and secondly a book doesn't necessarily reflect an authors opinions. Honestly if you want a repugnant mid century science fiction author Hubbard is right fucken there.