Movies Rate and Discuss the Last Movie You Saw v.16

[eddymotto]

Fight Club (USA, 1999)
Rating: 10/10

Fight Club would be a great film even if it had quietly faded after 1999. It is sharply directed, visually obsessive, and bracingly confident in ways that still feel alive. But its claim to masterpiece status lies in its cultural stickiness. Teenagers born a decade after its release still recognize “The first rule of Fight Club…”. This is a film that refuses to become inert. It keeps being quoted, misread, argued with, and reactivated. Not because it offers clarity, but because it withholds it.

David Fincher’s photography is magnificent: slick, sickly, hyper-controlled in a way that mirrors the protagonist’s obsession with mastery and order. The film looks expensive and diseased at the same time. Offices glow like aquariums. Basements sweat. Bodies are slowly dismantled. This aesthetic matters. Fight Club understands that modern ideology doesn’t arrive as doctrine. It arrives as confidence.

The famous twist doesn’t weaken the movie on repeat viewings. It strengthens it. Once you know what’s coming, Fight Club stops functioning as a puzzle and reveals itself as a case study. Not Who is Tyler Durden? but Why did the narrator need him so badly? The simplest and most uncomfortable reading is also the most accurate: the protagonist is profoundly unwell. Not metaphorically alienated. Not spiritually lost. Genuinely insane. He is an unreliable narrator in the strictest sense. We should never trust him, only listen. Once the narrator’s unreliability is taken seriously, even Marla Singer stops functioning as a guaranteed reality.

Tyler Durden isn’t an ideology; he’s a symptom. Project Mayhem isn’t a revolution; it’s a psychotic coping mechanism dressed up as philosophy. His worldview is a mash-up of misremembered Nietzsche, pop-Freud, and gym-bro Zen: liberation through negation, meaning through pain, authenticity via destruction.

Fight Club itself is not about dominance, but pain. Nobody keeps score. Tyler’s instructions involve losing, surrendering status, accepting humiliation. Pain functions as proof of existence in lives numbed by comfort, abstraction, and managed emotion. But rituals demand repetition. Repetition demands rules. Rules demand authority. Project Mayhem is not a betrayal of Fight Club; it is its logical endpoint. Anti-conformity hardens into orthodoxy. Liberation is replaced by uniforms, slogans, and obedience.

That is why the film continues to be misunderstood in opposite directions. To some, it’s a satire of toxic masculinity. To others, a rallying cry against softness. Or an anti-capitalist screed. Maybe even a libertarian fantasy. The film refuses to resolve these contradictions because its narrator can’t. Every interpretation reveals more about the viewer than the text.

Fight Club isn’t a manifesto. It’s a mirror, and many viewers still don’t understand what it reflects.

 

[eddymotto]

Wishing everybody who posts in this thread a Happy New Year! (even malignant narcissist and forum bully @HenryFlower )

I hope that we all watch a bunch of great films in 2026.

Sad shout out on the loss of colemanwasthegoat. As some of you may know, he was a frequent poster on this thread (and big fan of STAKE LAND) but went through a really tough personal time (wife left him, no friends, barely getting by economically) and chose to delete his account. I hope that he is in a better mental space now.

 

[revoltub]

Wishing everybody who posts in this thread a Happy New Year! (even malignant narcissist and forum bully @HenryFlower )

I hope that we all watch a bunch of great films in 2026.

Sad shout out on the loss of colemanwasthegoat. As some of you may know, he was a frequent poster on this thread (and big fan of STAKE LAND) but went through a really tough personal time (wife left him, no friends, barely getting by economically) and chose to delete his account. I hope that he is in a better mental space now.

Happy new year to you and the rest also.

 

[eddymotto]

Primitive War (Australia, 2025)
Rating: 3.5/10

Vietnam War + dinosaurs is such an inherently stupid, delightful premise that it is such a disappointment that it was filmed it as though joy were a liability.

This should’ve been lean, scrappy, tense, and fun. Instead, it’s bloated (seriously, a 2:17 runtime?), humorless, and weirdly solemn, like someone tried to remake Platoon using expired CGI and a cast under-qualified for dinner theatre. It’s the rare movie that feels padded and undercooked at the same time. A film like Monsters understood the assignment: fewer monsters, shown better. Here we get too many dinosaurs, shown too often, looking worse each time. Diminishing returns, but with teeth.

The accents are a special achievement. Almost every character sounds like they learned their accent phonetically using AI generated YouTube clips. Yes, that includes the American accents. The dialogue is already stilted gibberish, so the accents feel less like a mistake and more like an intentional act of hostility. Honestly, Australia might need to be banned from making movies for a year, not as punishment, just a cooling-off period. A wellness sabbatical.

And the movie is aggressively unfunny—an impressive feat given the premise is dinosaurs in the Vietnam War.

Jeremy Piven radiates strong “I got paid upfront, I’m gone by Thursday, and no one can stop this terrible Southern accent” energy. Everyone else performs like they’re hoping this never follows them home.

The producers should’ve either gone minimalist (Monsters) or full lunatic (Iron Sky). Instead they chose the worst possible option: earnest, humorless excess.

What’s most depressing isn’t that this doesn’t work. It’s that it was so easy to imagine a version that could have become a cult classic.

That said, it’s probably no worse than a few of the Jurassic World sequels. Which is less a defense than a cry for help.

 

[Via Heeto]

Year 10. 3/10

pure trash. No reason at all to have zero words spoken in this movie It was lazy and unrealistic. Plus the protagonist was easy to root against. I fought the urge to turn it of the entire movie. i wish i had given in to the urge

 

[eddymotto]

Murder of Couriers (Canada, 2012)
Rating: 5/10

Murder of Couriers is a documentary that wants to do something worthwhile. You can feel it straining in its attempt to document a fringe working class, a self-contained urban tribe living at the intersection of risk, freedom, and slow-motion self-destruction. Vancouver’s bicycle couriers (Canadian and therefore pasty with bad haircuts and somehow even worse teeth) are framed not as quirky urban color, but as people who have slipped through—or opted out of—more conventional economic paths.

At its best, the film captures something real. Courier work is not romanticized as hustle culture cosplay. It’s dangerous, underpaid, and physically punishing. Many of the riders are plainly struggling with addiction, mental health issues, or social dysfunction. This is a job chosen partly because it demands very little institutional compliance. No resumes, no interviews, no soft skills beyond showing up and riding. The documentary is most effective when it lets that reality sit unadorned: people eking out a living in traffic because the alternatives feel worse, or impossible.

There’s also an honest acknowledgment of why the job still appeals. Couriers talk about freedom with the fervor of converts. No bosses hovering. No offices. No fixed schedules. The city becomes both workplace and playground, chaos as a kind of shelter. These moments are compelling, not because they’re inspirational, but because they’re deeply human.

Unfortunately, the film never quite coalesces. The biggest problem is structure, or the lack of it. Threads that seem like they should matter simply vanish, leaving a series of half-started conversations. Many of the participants are painfully self-conscious. You can sense people performing versions of themselves, leaning into courier mythology rather than letting their lives unfold naturally. Instead of intimacy, you get posturing. Instead of observation, you get commentary.

Murder of Couriers is admirable in intent but never escapes the gravity of its own half-formed ideas.

 

[eddymotto]

Afternoons of Solitude (Spain, 2024)
Rating: 9/10

You don’t have to approve of bullfighting to be fascinated by Afternoons of Solitude. No more than you have to approve of crime to watch noir. Moral discomfort isn’t a side effect here, it’s the method.

Albert Serra approaches his subject with surgical restraint. No title cards. No talking heads. No interviews. No explanation. The film refuses context and rejects justification. It simply observes.

We begin not in the arena but in a van. Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey sits drenched in sweat, surrounded by his entourage, riding back to the hotel after an afternoon of fights. At the hotel, he peels away the elaborate costume of the matador. Beneath it, his body is smeared with blood, presumably much of it his own. This is the closest the film comes to vulnerability, and even that moment is denied interpretation.

Serra imposes strict parameters on what the camera is allowed to see: the hotel room, the van to and from the fights, and the arena itself. Outside of ritual, Rey is a cherubic blank slate. Inside it, he becomes something else entirely. His entourage hovers constantly, a chorus of sycophants praising his courage, his skill, and—always—his “big, big balls.” Masculinity here is performative and constant.

The film relies on repetition to do its work. Again and again, Rey enters the arena: chest puffed out, face contorted into a kind of cartoon bravado, orchestrating the ritualized torture and slaughter of the bulls. The bulls always bleed. Sometimes Rey does too. The violence becomes simultaneously easier and harder to watch as it repeats. Familiarity dulls the shock but sharpens the nausea.

I found the footage genuinely sickening. Not in a sensational way, but in an accumulative one. I was transfixed even as my stomach tightened. This is not a film that eases you into its imagery or gives you room to look away. Serra traps you inside it.

The cinematography is exceptional. The lighting feels impossibly precise. The camera is steady, tight, invasive. We never pull back for perspective. The crowd is reduced to ambient noise. There is no sense of scale, no relief, no escape—just man and bull, circling, bleeding, collapsing. Tunnel vision as method.

If it sounds repetitive, it is. That’s the point. The film’s brutal efficiency lies in its refusal to explain. Whether Rey is an artist or a machine barely matters. In the arena, he is both the star and a replaceable part of a much older mechanism. Serra does not judge. He shows. What he shows is a system built on blood and pain that runs —beautifully, even—and leaves us alone to decide whether that smoothness is artistry, tradition, or simply cruelty.