The Movie (and TV show) Watching Thread

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) is on YouTube for free, English sound but Spanish subtitles:

The 1969 film "Z!", about the military dictatorship in Greece and the cover up of a political assassination, is also online:

Watership Down:

Italian musicarello "Howlers on the Dock", from 1960. These films didn't really have much of a plot, but were mostly "for fun" films that were more about promoting music rather than an actual movie with a storyline. This one was also about promoting blue jeans, and features many famous Italian singers and actors such as Mina Mazzini, Joe Sentiri, Adriano Celentano, Elke Sommer, Marliu Tolo, and Bruno Martino. Italians called singers of this late-50s/early-60s style of rock 'n roll as "Howlers". Italian only, no subtitles:

The 1986 USSR film "Come and See", a hyperrealistic war horror film about the Nazi occupation of Belarus. WARNING: extremely graphic and disturbing, with violent murder and implied rape scenes. Has original Russian sound, but choice of official subtitles in English, German, Spanish, and Italian:

"The Signalman", a Charles Dickens supernatural horror story, was made by the BBC into a short film in 1976. Tradition is to watch this on Christmas:

"100 Years of Silence", a documentary about the German genocides in Namibia (then German Southwest Africa) in the 1900s decade:

"All Quiet on the Western Front", from 1979, available in English here:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Psych-Out! is available on YouTube for free in HQ:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

The 1931 German thriller "M - A City Searches for a Murderer" is available for free on Youtube, original German audio with official English subtitles.

The 1929 silent documentary "A Man With a Movie Camera" was shown in the atrium of my school last year. It is purely experimental and simply shows daily life in several large cities in the USSR, but there is no obvious propaganda.

Both are listed on the list of Greatest Films of All Time

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Der Dritte Weltkrieg ("The Third World War") is a fictional alternate-history documentary film released in Germany in 1998 that theorizes about how the transition to democracy in the USSR goes horribly wrong in 1989 and leads to a full-scale nuclear war in April 1990 that wipes out humanity.

Audio is in German but there are official English subtitles.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Perhaps a controversial opinion but I watched Cabaret (1972) and I absolutely abhored it.

Such a boring f-ing film. The pacing is dreadful. I really dislike these stories about privileged out of touch foreigner treating another country as a playground, and it especially offended me because I hate how people treat Berlin that way and also this was the time of the Depression and the rise of the Nazis. Yet here we have some ditzy American girl and prissy rich English boy doing exactly that and are untouchable due to their foreign status. It echoed my similar disdain for the main characters of The Great Gatsby.

There were some good moments like the beer garden scene, and some of the songs were good, but otherwise I was not very impressed. Also reading about Isherwood's background makes me wish he took the place of some poor local who was sent to a concentration camp instead, because Isherwood was a pedophile.

If you want a good series about what life was like during the downfall of the Weimar Republic, I thought Babylon Berlin was far better in showing the contrasts between the struggling lower classes and the salacious endeavors of the well-to-do. There are very few films that I have watched and felt disgusted by and that I want my time back, and Cabaret was one of them.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Saw the new Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) tonight. I highly recommend it!


I've read the book and seen the 1979 and now 2022 versions, and i think each film had something to bring to the table (I've only seen snippets of the 1930 one). The 1979 one felt more nihilistic and really hammered home the futility and stupidity of it all; the 2022 version had you get emotionally invested in the lives of the characters so it felt more real when they died.

Although i didn't like some of the soundtrack of the 2022 film; the jarring modern Dunnnn-DUNNNN-Dunnnnn sound just seemed so out of place for a film set in 1917-1918 and took you out of it. But i especially liked how they mixed the politics and the negotiations into the film; it hammered home the callousness and indifference of the German High Command and how self-serving they were. I think the scenes where Ludendorff rants about the Social Democrats selling out the country makes a nice segue into the Babylon Berlin TV series, where you can understand how the Weimar Republic was set up to fail from the inside by a reactionary military and bureaucracy.