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those are fair points. i think if i was a prior fan of Alita, i would've enjoyed it more. like i say, it's spurred an interest in the manga for me. and yeah, John Carter... i didn't mind that film. enjoyed it. wish it did better and got a sequel. but in that case it too was good enough to get me interested in the source material. i went out and got a collection of the John Carter books. just the ones where John Carter himself appeared--I haven't gotten around to reading all the Barsoom books. fun pulpy novels those were.
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Feb 16, 2023 01:48
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And now, a science fiction double-feature. Predator 2 - 1990, dir. Stephen Hopkins, starring Donald Glover and Gary Busey  C'mon, that's a pretty good tag line. This is sort of cheating - I've seen very tiny chunks of Predator 2 before, but only on broadcast TV and all that entails. It's not as good as the first Predator, but it is funnier. Donald Glover plays Lieutenant Mike Harrigan, who is absolutely legally distinct from Roger Murtaugh. The plot is mostly a result of someone sitting down with a notepad and going "urban jungle??" with all the subtlety and nuance that you'd expect from a script writer working in the very late 80s. The Predator's back, going trophy hunting in a 1997 version of LA that Fox News stole wholesale for describing Portland, OR in the last few years. Our hero prevails and wins the most dangerous game, the end. Good bits include the only thing that terrifies Harrigan more than an alien monster is an empty, unthreatening subway tunnel, the gigantic arsenal he keeps in the trunk of his car, and how the 90s humans almost come up with a pretty good plan to defeat the Predator that isn't an honor duel. There's also Gary Busey. The effects aren't as good as the first film - it feels sorta like they had to cover for some damage to the monster suit with how they shot the thing - and they give us a lot more of the infrared vision shenanigans than we really needed. I guess they spent a lot of that budget on doofy stuff to stick on guns, because every single gun-like object in this movie is encrusted with gadgets; special mention to the federal monster hunter team's liquid nitrogen cannons for being some amazingly greebly budget props. Bless 'im, Donny Glover is not one of nature's action protagonists, but he's doing his best. I'm not sure how I feel about Harrigan, since the performance is pretty solid and he does some clever things for an action movie protagonist, like aiming. But whoever was writing his one-liners was content with gems like "that's right, rear end in a top hat," and who could forget "Not again! poo poo!"? In addition to a little cutting and a little more consistency with the cinematography, the picture could really benefit from fewer references to Aliens and Predator 1, which it lifts wholesale in ways that feel less like homages and more like struggling for things to do with its runtime. The deck is stacked against this movie as a sequel to one of the great action films. I'm also coming to it after years of other Predator media that've taken the good parts of this film and run with 'em. Abstractly, it's got some problems, and it's more than a little silly, but I can also fully accept that if I'd seen this movie around the same early age I'd seen Aliens, it would have changed my life, so I can't be too harsh on it. And it's certainly not the worst Predator film, which despite the best efforts of the AvP franchise is still The Predator. Prey - dir. Dan Trachtenberg, starring Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers Spoilering this because it's relatively recent. For non-spoiler content, don't watch this movie if you don't like to watch animals getting decapitated and having their spines extracted. And this is one of those things that takes the cool part of Predator 2 and runs with it, answering the question of "just where did that flintlock that Murtaugh won as his deadliest gameshow prize come from?" Naru is a young Comanche woman who has an excellent dog and, all things considered, a pretty cool brother, Taabe. Instead of some variety of jungle, our story takes place in the upper Great Plains, and it's picturesque as hell until the white man shows up. They're French, though, so we can feel okay about them doing a colonialism and getting merked. It's probably the best thing to come out of Calgary. Good action, good characters, good acting, great landscapes. The list of gripes are few - This particular Predator is a total chump. Like, wow, you beat a snake when you've got interstellar travel, good job buddy. The escalating series of predator-prey contrasts is a bit on the nose. They really missed a chance to make the main theme an inversion of the Predator theme. This is a perfectly good film made with care by someone who really likes the extended Predatorverse, and it shows. Watch it, preferably with the extremely cool Comanche dub.
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Feb 17, 2023 06:45
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OP I hope you have room for a little more Canadiana https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/ Edit: apparently there was a sequel and here is some awesome trivia: “The interior walls of the bunker are made up of pie and muffin forms as well as cardboard egg crates turned upside-down and painted gray. The factory tables and shelves are stainless steel kitchen equipment.” HAmbONE fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Feb 17, 2023 |
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Feb 17, 2023 16:58
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On the recommendation of CineD's resident chatbot SMG, I watched Warriors of Future 2023, Netflix. Swiping from my letterboxd: quote:The black levels are consistently through the roof in a way that makes the CG environments look a few degrees more artificial than is strictly necessary. The two women characters are both pretty interesting and should have been given more to do. The kid's hair is an absolute mess. In the grand scheme of schlocky sci-fi, I'm not sure I'd recommend it over The Wandering Earth (2019) or The Tomorrow War (2021), but I did enjoy it.
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Feb 17, 2023 18:28
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grassy gnoll posted:And now, a science fiction double-feature. I enjoyed both those movies
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Feb 18, 2023 21:58
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Demolition Man, 1993 dir. Marco Brambilla, starring Sly Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock This movie sucks! Do you know the bit about the three seashells and Taco Bell? Cool, you don't need to watch the movie. Too many writers imagine for us a terrifying future where the police don't murder people for fun and you're allowed to be queer as long as you're quiet about it. The genesis of the film was one of the original writers listening to the Police song "Demolition Man" on repeat, and then deciding to write a movie with the same title. This gives us gems like Sandra Bullock's character being named after the female lead from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and also Aldous Huxley. That's it, that's the script. This film is the crappy action movie equivalent of a Dennis Leary standup bit, which is why Leary was cast as a valiant freedom fighter, and why he gets to do a Dennis Leary standup bit that brings the movie to a screaming halt. The actual action sequences are about as bad as the plot, but they did film the demolition of a big factory for the opening sequence, and that was kinda neat. Stallone sleepwalks through the film, while Bullock does her best with some bad material. Also cool story, they left a dangling plot thread where Stallone's John Spartan is revived in 2032, only to find his wife dead and daughter abruptly not discussed every time it comes up. He displays no curiosity about this fact, and actively turns down any chance to learn about his surviving child. This is because they had a plotline where he reunites with the daughter, and then it reminded everyone that Johnny S is getting it on with a woman of the same age as his child. I think a reshoot may have been worth it to make our protagonist a little less Woody Allen-ish. Wesley Snipes seems like he's having a good time, though. Supposedly his character is why Dennis Rodman started dyeing his hair. Also Glenn Shaddix is in this! He's good and fun.
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Feb 20, 2023 01:55
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grassy gnoll posted:And now, a science fiction double-feature. this is a pretty legendary double feature! i've only seen Predator 2 once, so i am probably due for a rewatch, but i saw Prey soon after it came out. drat good movie. really really good. great action, great actors. i had the same complaints you did, but i was happy to overlook them because they made sense within the flow of the film as silly as they were. very satisfied with that one. also yeah, the Comanche dub rules. when the French showed up speaking a foreign language in a dub it made the film feel even more alien, haha.
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Feb 20, 2023 06:03
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The Mist - 2007, dir. Frank Darabont, starring Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden A science-fiction film that dares to ask the question - what if it's man that's the real monster? It's good, don't get me wrong, but trapping a bunch of people in a place they can't leave and making them stressed and scared hearkens back to the dawn of fiction, let alone science fiction. And that's sort of the point - it's a well-done story that knows what it is, what it wants to do, and succeeds at it. Plus it's got a bunch of great character actors doing their thing. It will surprise you to learn that this story, based on a Stephen King novella, takes place in Maine. Strange doings are afoot in the aftermath of a storm, and a group of townspeople from disparate walks of life end up trapped by a mysterious mist that hides Lovecraftian monsters, stuck together in the town's grocery store. We see our protagonist, a good family man with a little kid, come up against a deranged religious fanatic who starts her own little cult around the monsters, swaying otherwise good and wholesome Mainers with the notion of "God" and "talking to other people." Eventually, things come to a head and violence breaks out, including a couple of ritual sacrifices. Turns out the Army may have done some light resonance cascading and unleashed the monsters. The original story doesn't contain the mercy killings or the what-have-I-done twist where the Army rolls up and saves the day, and frankly I prefer the film version. Yeah, it's a little extreme, but I'm always a sucker for humans mounting an effective institutional response to otherworldly horrors. The pacing could maybe be a bit tighter toward the middle of the movie, and after checking the production trivia, I think I would have preferred the version shot on digital instead of the extremely grainy film stock we got. It's okay for a scary movie to look pretty! Still, while it's not the most original idea, it's a solidly-implemented version of an old classic.
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Mar 5, 2023 05:14
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 Godzilla vs. Kong I did not care for this very much. Though maybe my fault? I've not watched any of the new Godzilla or King Kong movies. In fact, I am pretty unversed in Kong and Godzilla media in general! I've only seen the Matthew Broderick Godzilla remake and the Peter Jackson Kong remake, both films that I also did not care for! (Though Godzilla having Jean Reno had that going for it... and the Kong XBOX game was surprisingly good). Part of this thread was to hopefully expand my knowledge of both film franchises, but I think I chose a bad one to start with. For one, I didn't really know what was going on. The opening credits were great with all these neat flashbacks to past monster battles I kind of recognized through cultural osmosis, but when it got going I just didn't really know what was going on and the film didn't do a great job of explaining things to new viewers imo. I had a hard time caring about anyone... or anything. By the time Kong started jumping from battleship to battleship to fight Godzilla like some video game cutscene, I started to tune out. I've slowly been watching this film for the past month, 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. I considered dropping it entirely, and maybe I should've, but drat it I am committed to this project and wanted to see it through. The whole Journey To The Centre of the Earth subplot felt flimsy and weak. Kong got a battle axe, I guess. It all felt kind of silly. All villain deaths were wet farts. Human underestimates Kong or Godzilla, briefly has an "oh poo poo, I underestimated them" realization, then dies. Everyone moves on quickly and they are forgotten. Ho hum. There were moments that were neat, but all the action just kind of blurred together for me. Just... eh. Need to go back and watch the original films I think.   2 out of 5 Dashes. Wasn't feeling it.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:09
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Sally posted:I''ve only seen the Matthew Broderick Godzilla remake and the Peter Jackson Kong remake There's your problem. The Matthew Broderick Godzilla is an absolute piece of poo poo (probably the worst movie I ever saw in a theater), and Jackson's Kong was pretty blah.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:41
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you saw it in theatre too?  but yah i think i gotta bump OG Godzilla to the top of my list. i know so much about it from just... well existinv but havent sat down and watched it.
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Mar 22, 2023 22:25
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i nearly walked out of Jackson's Kong. went with a bunch of friends and was getting bored. tried to get them to leave too but they wanted to stick it out. the consensus at the end was "yah it was okay probably not worth sticking out" but ah well
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Mar 22, 2023 22:27
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Sally posted:i nearly walked out of Jackson's Kong. went with a bunch of friends and was getting bored. tried to get them to leave too but they wanted to stick it out. the consensus at the end was "yah it was okay probably not worth sticking out" but ah well Saw both the Roland Emmerich Godzilla and the Peter Jackson King Kong in theaters as well. Of the two of them, Godzilla is the only one I could probably stomach to ever watch again. It was at least a fun kind of bad. King Kong went on too long and was mired in Jackson's lifelong obsession with creating the definitive modernization of Merian Cooper's original film and it shows on every frickin' frame of the film. I was also done with watching the film around the time of the giant bug attack, the scene where Andy Serkis gets gruesomely devoured alive by 9 foot long leeches, but was not seeing it alone so I couldn't really get out either. And to think that's still only around the halfway point of the movie. I also saw the 2014 Godzilla, the one that kicked off the Monster'verse films, and it was... incredibly forgettable. The film basically dies at the exact moment that Bryan Cranston's character does, which is like around the 20 minute mark, and he's literally the only interesting character in the film so it just kind of coasts for the rest of its run time. It's a very well shot and well framed movie, but the Emmerich Godzilla is infinitely more entertaining in comparison. I had and still have no interest in seeing either Kong: Skull Island, King of the Monsters, or Godzilla vs. King Kong.
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Mar 22, 2023 23:28
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I fell asleep multiple times trying to watch the 2014 Godzilla movie. Kong: Skull Island is actually a fun watch.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:49
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BTW, if you're going back to OG Godzilla, watch the Japanese original and not the American re-edit with Raymond Burr.
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Mar 23, 2023 22:55
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I'd been meaning to watch this one, and it seems like a good follow-on to Sally's review. Kong: Skull Island, 2017 dir. Jordan Vogt-Roberts, starring a whole lot of folks.  This is a weird setup movie for the Expanded Kong Cinematic Universe or whatever. It's disjointed and pretty unpleasant when it's not boring. Turns out there's an island that's all messed up and weird, but not in any ways that would be expensive to film, and something throwaway about Hollow Earth theory, which is where all the giant monsters come from instead being allegories for nuclear weapons, and just...what a waste. Like, this is a film with Sam Jackson, John Goodman and John C. Reilly, where we see a man shooting a machine gun at an alien dinosaur-monster from atop the skull of a giant triceratops, and it is boring and the characters are flat. The action scenes are weightless and free of consequence except when we need to kill someone off for... sometimes stakes? Sometimes an ineffectual attempt at a comedy beat? There is no awe to be found looking at a giant ape, and the only thing they can think to have him do is stomp on people or punch larger monsters. It's a creature feature, there's gotta be more monster fan-service, and this ain't it. Normally for a film this disjointed, I'd say that the movie doesn't know what it wants to be. The problem here is that it wants to be Apocalypse Now, and Akira, and Shin Godzilla, and Evangelion, and Metal Gear, and a whole ton of other things that Vogt-Roberts likes because he is effectively jabbing you in the ribs and waggling his eyebrows every time he makes a reference, and not a one of them lands. Skull Island is actively worsened for trying to compare itself to much better things, some of which weren't that great to begin with, because it never measures up to any of the things that made those original movies or games or cartoons engaging. I wish we'd gotten more of the Venture Industries super-science group and less of everything else. The sets and costumes were great for those parts.
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Mar 26, 2023 20:05
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updated movies lists. grassy gnoll, you are killing it! i gotta catch up. halfway thru another film... i picked another stinker though...
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Mar 31, 2023 05:59
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Presto posted:BTW, if you're going back to OG Godzilla, watch the Japanese original and not the American re-edit with Raymond Burr. I am definitely going to this.
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Mar 31, 2023 05:59
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 Tides aka The Colony Wanted to watch a higher brow sci-fi after Godzilla v. Kong, so I tossed this one on. Trailer looked pretty sweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5fVmaO2C0g. The plot is that a small subset of humanity fled Earth to the Kepler system to avoid a complete global breakdown, leaving all the poor huddled masses to die in war and destruction. Decades later, the radiation from the Kepler system has rendered those humans infertile, so they send a mission back to Earth to see if it is viable to live there again... first mission never reports back, so the film picks up with the second mission crash landing on the planet. Some great visuals. Love the post-catastrophe Earth being reduced to an endless tidal flat. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but I'm willing to go along with a contrivance for an interesting film. The trailer gave me a whole bunch of vibes... Mad Max, Waterworld, The Road... I was in! Plus it has Jorah Mormont and Dollar Store Liam Neeson. Only problem is there's just not much to it. At all. What we see in the trailer? That's it. The movie starts well enough. Slow moving. Builds a good mood and atmosphere. And then just keeps spinning its wheels. The first half hour is the best when the protagonist is just wandering around interesting shots of a dead earth or trying to figure out what the gently caress is going on after being kidnapped by the post-apocalypse tidal flats people. When she inevitably joins up with survivors from the first Kepler landing, things just kind of plateau. It's all extremely predictable. None of the twists are interesting or revelatory. The slow plodding shots can no longer hold up the thin plot. The movie just kind of ends and you don't really care. Would not recommend. Well, the first half hour was pretty neat. Like I say, once the protagonist joins up with the other Kepler survivors everything just ground to a halt. Like, I am not opposed to movies breathing, lingering on scenes, seeing some beautiful cinematography... but the director here is no Terrance Malick. 2 out of 5 Dash heads.
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Mar 31, 2023 23:19
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The Signal, 2014 dir. William Eubank and starring Brendon Thwaites and Lawrence Fishburn. Lawrence Fishburn gets a paycheck and a bunch of nobodies parade around in front of a camera for an hour and a half. No one learns anything and nothing is accomplished. The end. Thwaites and his awful dipshit sidekick and his maybe girlfriend are MIT Geniuses who receive a mysterious signal, like in the title of the movie, and follow it out to the desert for no particular reason. Then there's a bad found-film horror montage, and then an hour of various vaguely spooky images paraded before the camera for your delectation. It turns out Lawrence Fishburn is both the NOMAD signal (Dr. Damon, get it?), and they had actually been abducted by aliens all along because ????, and Larry really just wanted to yank our protagonist's chain for a bit before harvesting his human horn. Or something. There's no reason for the alien abductor to do literally any of the stuff it does, apart from just for kicks. Also, super weird the alien abductor apparently has a CGI budget that needs to be obscured with these stupid suits when it can make a perfectly good human puppet. This film exists because someone had some ideas for Totally Cool Imagery That'll Stick With the Audience, Dude, and couldn't cobble together a story to support any of it. It tries for a Twilight Zone ending, but even the shittiest episodes of Twilight Zone had a point. There is no plot here. People say nonsense things to each other, nobody reacts to it, and then we move on to the next scene. There are late-series metaplot episodes of X-files that have more emotional heft and coherent storytelling than this clunker. Somebody fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 04:41
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Another movie not on my list, but one that I've been meaning to watch since I first saw the VHS cover of it in a video store in the 90s... Johnny Mnemonic (1995) I'm not sure what I expected from this. The only William Gibson book I've read was half of Neuromancer, so the plot here was entirely a surprise. Keanu Reeves is pretty wooden in his performance here. I mean, I didn't hate it. But this was pretty schlocky. Was a fun watch, though! Kind of zoned out here and there, but it changed set pieces quickly enough that I was pretty entertained throughout. Got some serious "Escape From LA" vibes from it. Just very schlocky. I was surprised to see Dizzy from Starship Troopers here. Turns out this was Dina Meyers first film role. She was alright. Again, but wooden. Now that I think of it... the most exciting thing for me was seeing actors I know from other properties in bit roles here. Henry Rollins popped up as a super hacker, Ice T was part of some low-tech cyborg gang, Udo Kier was a scummy pimp, Takeshi from Takeshi's Castle plays an assassin, and Dolph Lundgren is a wandering murder preacher. I think it's this aspect of the movie that made it feel most like an "Escape From..." film... just the main character wandering from set piece to set piece with a famous character in between to carry the plot, all while they are racing against a clock that ends in their death. Only Escape From New York was a better film over all and Escape From LA was a better schlock mess imo. Decent flick, though.
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Apr 18, 2023 07:44
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i am halfway through Cloud Atlas right now. like... 2 hours in halfway. and i feel like i am still waiting for something to happen. not sure if these intertwining stories are gonna pay off...
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Apr 22, 2023 03:45
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is super mario bros scifi? wondering if i should count it... 
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Apr 23, 2023 16:45
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Sally posted:is super mario bros scifi? wondering if i should count it... yes.
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Apr 23, 2023 17:34
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You mean the Super Mario Brothers move? Yes, absolutely. A classic example of dystopia.
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Apr 24, 2023 07:26
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Sally posted:Johnny Mnemonic (1995) This movie always kind of blew my mind because the main plot and characters are so dull, but all the background details are so rich and interesting. It's like it tries to actively pursue a story about the least interesting elements it has to show off.
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Apr 25, 2023 05:34
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The X From Outer Space 1967, dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu, starring Eiji Okada and Toshiya Wazaki, I guess? A rocket crew is assigned to find out why all the prior missions to Mars have failed. (It's because of UFOs.) They take a trip to the moon when the ship's doctor falls ill, which contributes absolutely nothing to the plot. The spaceship is jizzed on by a UFO, which brings spores back to earth, which turn into a kaiju. People get space madness for a little bit, but they get better. Schtick happens in the same scenes, and sometimes even the same shots, as deadly earnest attempts at drama and action, which mostly seems to consist of wiggling the camera to imply something's happening. The kaiju looks like a chicken on top of a second-hand Godzilla costume. It has glowy bits and I'm pretty sure it pees acid in enormous, mountain-melting quantities. We see meetings interposed with footage of a dude in a rubber suit stomping on miniatures. Very little happens, except when they want an incredibly dumb gag. Nothing can be done to stop the monster for Reasons, so our heroes just gently caress off back into space for a while. At one point, the monster eats a nuclear power plant and turns into a glowing ball of plasma, up until it doesn't. The heroic space crew are just kind of dicking around in space while this is happening. A jeep is poorly driven and explodes for no reason. Finally, the JASDF drop spray foam bombs on the monster, which causes it to return to being a spore, and they launch it into space, where it will never trouble anyone again. The monster somehow teaches one of the female leads that the other female lead will just always love the male lead more than her in the second-to-last scene of the movie. We end with the male lead and I guess the female lead, who have shared maybe 25% of the film, walking off into the sunset, then a cut to the rocket carrying the spore disappearing into the void to a jazz ballad. I want to be extremely clear, I am not loving around or making light of this film in that summation. It is a literal description of what happens in this movie, in about the same tone. It's a story told by a five-year-old, with all the nonsense delivered with deadly earnestness, that you would expect from such a description. First Man Into Space has pretensions of artistry, like it's going to teach us all an important message. This is just childlike fascination with monsters and toy tanks given a budget. This is objectively a bad film, but I can't hate it. There's a definite level of glee to be found watching a movie that loves its subject so much, even if it's not very well-told. The miniature sets are also really killer! It's a surprisingly diverse cast for a Japanese movie from the sixties, with a couple of token gaijin, and there's even a black guy in a bit part. Oh, also all of the above is set to either awful discordant noise or jazz harpsichord. It is an incredible soundscape. What struck me the most is that you can see the through line of procedural drama interposed with giant monster mayhem that brought us Shin Godzilla, and really most of the Hideki Anno oveure. Sincerely, this is one of my favorite movies I've watched this year so far. It is awful, and I find myself not caring.
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Apr 25, 2023 05:38
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grassy gnoll posted:This movie always kind of blew my mind because the main plot and characters are so dull, but all the background details are so rich and interesting. It's like it tries to actively pursue a story about the least interesting elements it has to show off. This sums up my feelings of the film way more succinctly, haha
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Apr 25, 2023 07:09
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yeah, okay, sure.  The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) It was alright.
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Apr 25, 2023 07:27
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Sally posted:yeah, okay, sure. It was a Mario Bros. game with 90 minutes of dialog instead of 10 seconds.
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Apr 25, 2023 07:30
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At least they've again re-confirmed that Mario and Luigi are a pair of bumbling schlubs from Brooklyn.
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Apr 25, 2023 07:46
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 Cloud Atlas (2012) This one was interesting. I'd heard of the premise but I hadn't read the book. Cloud Atlas was big enough in 2012 that I was aware of the critical division. My expectations have long since tempered, so I went in just ready for whatever. Like I mentioned earlier, felts like I spent a whole lot of time waiting for something to happen. I'm not opposed to films taking time to breathe and set-up. I really liked Inception considering it's 2 hours of set-up for a 1-hour non-stop action setpiece. Cloud Atlas felt a lot like that. There's six interweaving plots just the story cuts between. Feels like it takes forever for things to be set in place... perhaps because they have to jump between so many plots? It took a while for me to really get invested. Like... not until the last hour. But that last hour? Pretty sweet. I did not care for the Neo-Seoul action rebellion and chase sequence, but the 1970s crime thriller where Keith David helps Halle Berry avoid a murderous Hugo Weaving? That poo poo loving ruled! Good lord, give more heroic roles to Keith David. Also just give more roles to Hugo Weaving in general, many doesn't get nearly enough love on the big screen these days (i know he'sbeen doing television roles). Basically every incarnation Hugo Weaving played was great, but the 1970s assassin and the Knock-Off Nurse Ratchet role were particular perfect. Didn't expect to get so caught up in the role of the old guy locked up in an institution against his will by his vengeful brother. Good one, that. Otherwise, Hanks was alright, but Halle Berry was great throughout. Best part of the movie was going onto Wikipedia and looking up the chart of who was who in each iteration. I was really taken aback to figure out who Halle Berry was. She really just disappeared into her roles. Also shout out to Hugh Grant as a murderous post-apocalypse cannibal. Harder to rate this one... For the first two hours I was thinkin' three Dashes, but it really picked up in the end. Raises my estimation. If I had half Dashes, I'd more happily give it a three and a half, but I am not too bothered to make it a four either, so:
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Apr 25, 2023 08:41
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I really love Cloud Atlas, I'm glad you (on balance) liked it! I've just finished the book, which has a much stricter six-level structure to it, and some of the scenarios (notably neo-Seoul) have a bit more exposition and a bit less action. Otherwise extremely similar - impossible not to imagine Jim Broadbent in the Cavendish role. The Wachowskis famously have a four-hour cut that they screen for friends. Dunno if having more of it would appeal to you, but I'd be very excited to see it.
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Apr 25, 2023 10:17
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even ruminating on Cloud Atlas overnight my appreciation has grown. confident 4 Dash. i think of i pulled a Roger Ebert and rewatched it a bunch of times i would just see more and more details that would improve the experience. not gonna do that with this challenge but... yah. still wonder if it could be cut more. not sure how or where you'd do that. not sure how i feel about a four hour version haha. not that i am necessarily adverse to long long movies.
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Apr 25, 2023 16:37
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Something in the Dirt 2022 - dir. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, starring Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead Two LA dipshits find incomprehensible phenomena in one of their run-down apartments. Like true Angelinos, they try to make a movie about it so they can get rich. Drama ensues. Commentary about filmmaking is had. I didn't like this very much. For starters, "actually the real monster is man" is one of my least favorite sci-fi ideas. We get it, it was old when the Twilight Zone did it, let it die already. But on top of that, okay, it's lockdown and you want to tell a story of man's inhumanity to man, on a budget with a small cast. I get it, I like a tiny stage play done up for the screen, and if this were just a regular story about one guy being an awful fascist sociopath to another guy, I could get behind it. It didn't need to be a sci-fi movie and it didn't need to tie into their other movies. It's a shaggy dog story, and one told in such a fashion that it feels the creators are pretty down on the concept of science fiction after literally making their careers with their wholehearted embrace of the genre. Like, I admit I'm coming to this with some baggage, having simultaneously finished an otherwise good book that ended in exactly the same "ha ha, it was all actually a lie, and gently caress you for going along with a story as told to you" way. But if you want to do your own little version of Twelve Angry Men or whatever, have the stones to make it about entirely the characters and knock it off with the gimmick scripting formats and extraordinary trappings. Watch The Lighthouse instead. It's really good.
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May 2, 2023 04:30
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bit of a dry spell... but watched Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 last weekend as an excuse to go to the theatre. also The Bad Batch which i have jad on my Netflix to watch lost for literal years. will come back and write up my thoughts
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Jun 3, 2023 08:13
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 Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (2023) Solid movie! Really enjoyed it. Best Marvel film I've seen in a dog's age, but that's a low bar to clear imo. I've basically stopped watching Marvel films since Endgame, barring a few here and there (Into the Spider-Verse, which was great; Venom, which was... eh; Thor: Love and Thunder, which was hit and miss for me). It's a pretty common opinion, I'm sure, but the Guardians movies have always been more fun to watch than the other greater Marvelverse films. I like that they're basically their own thing. The first one was a real breath of fresh air--brought me joy in a sci-fi film that I haven't experienced since I first saw The Fifth Elements. Just a drat good movie. Vol. 2 was also a great follow-up... for what was basically a film about dad problems, the Ego and Yondu stuff was fantastic. Michael Rooker and Kurt Russell just dominated the film. That said, while Vol. 3 was equally fun in the moment, I felt myself less and less invested this time around. It was clever and charming and the various cameos and absurdities were a joy, but by the end I had a hard time really connecting with it. Seeing Sylvester Stallone pop up as a Ravager was great, as was Nathan Fillion appearing as a hemmoroid space marine... but they really cranked up Drax the Destroyer's silliness. Mantis's characterization felt hit or miss... Groot is just kind of there... Peter Quill is... well, whatever. Gamora's arc was real good with Quill, but I dunno. It was kind of side-lined for Rocket Raccoon's story and while I know a lot of people like Rocket Raccoon, James Gunn especially, I don't! The 3D animation was very good. Making me pathologize with the sad animals being abused was powerful. It was done in a satisfying way, too. I just... don't care all that much about Rocket Raccoon. The movie ended, I felt entertained, and within 24 hours I had basically forgotten the movie. I had to re-read the plot to remember what happened. Almost forgot about the great Dr. Moreau stuff going on because I just couldn't really get into it. Chukwudi Iwuji was a great villain, though. Pleasure to see on screen every moment. Big fan of him from Peacemaker, so glad he got brought back. Anyways, it wrapped up the whole James Gunn Guardians trilogy in a satisfying way, but I just felt the earlier movies were far more memorable. I considered giving this a 4-Dash rating, but it seems to be actively forgettable. Whereas I found myself appreciating Cloud Atlas the more and more I thought about, I find myself less and less impressed by Guardians here. Makes a solid popcorn flick. Fun, but simply not as memorable as the other two Guardians films.
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Jun 4, 2023 21:46
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 The Bad Batch (2016) Saw this one on Netflix a while back with a weird picture of Jim Carrey and the promise of post-apocalyptic wandering. Was intriguing enough, so I added it to my To Watch list and forgot all about it. Figured with this whole 52 movies exercise, I'd finally put it on. Real mixed back this one. Kinda like "Tides" in that is has a really strong opening but then peters out. That said, this movies opening stays enjoyable far longer than Tides and doesn't go quite so sour. The opening is great. The main character is found guilty for whatever crimes she's committed and exiled to a walled off desert. Very Escape From... films, but less fantastic than either of those. What's great is the film never says what her crime was. Fill in the blank with whatever batshit you want, though I like to think it's some President Adam from Escape From LA bullshit. Anyways, the protagonist wanders around for a bit and promptly gets captured by cannibals. Gets a leg and an arm cut off, manages to kill a captor, and escapes by pushing herself on a skateboard across the dry plains before being discovered by Jim Carrey, the desert hobo, and dropped off in a Fallout-esque city called Comfort. If I'm selling it, great--if not, this is a fantastic sequence and the film looks beautiful. Just gorgeous to watch. It has a lot of potential to go completely off the rails and the most batshit way as well. Comfort city is run by a guy called The Dreamer, who keeps the town happy by providing them drugs and hydroponic vegetables and has his own personal harem of pregnant women armed with automatic weaponry acting as personal bodyguards. The main character, Arlen, is healed, given a prosthetic leg, and gets a gun to learn how to shoot for self-defense... only she then goes wandering the desert looking for cannibals from cannibal town to murder. It's so good! There's so much melancholy in every shot. The linger camera is amazing. Again, it just looks fantastic. Only it kind of peters out in a way that I wasn't expecting. Mundane. More realistic... was I wanting a more schlocky ending? Sure. But a lot of momentum died about halfway through the film and it just sort of coasted to a stop. Jason Momoa played "Miami Man", one of the cannibals, and the film is weirdly partly a redemption of him and it could have done more interesting things with him... or Keanu Reeves... or Suki Waterhouses's main character... or Jim Carrey or anyone! But like I say it just kind of peters out. About three-quarters of the way through the film I was thinking to myself "Well, this was nice. I'm about done though." Still a way more enjoyable film than Tides.
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Jun 5, 2023 15:25
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also in a gamble to try and catch up on films--so many weeks behind--I'm gonna go check out the new into the spider-verse movie. Spider-Man is more sci-fi than Mario to me, so i'll include it this time.
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Jun 5, 2023 15:32
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 Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (2023) Into the Spiderverse was real freaking good! fantastic casting, absokutely engaging story, and easily some of the best animation i've seen in a film since... the last Spiderverse. would absolutely recommend this to anyone. caveat: would need to see first film for those not insanely into comic book lore... but this one does an admirable job of diving into things. much less accessible than the first though, which was the peefect intro to everything Spiderman that is not Peter Parker. I wouldnt say it is a perfect film though. There are definitely some parts where the action starts to drag. I'm looking at you climactic final chase scene... it's kinda weird but maybe that is where i am for all things super hero. i dont really care about long dragem out action sequences in animation. i rather the drama with friends and family in these flicks. gimme more of Miles' mum and dad being Miles' mum and dad. gimme more of Gwen struggling with hiding her identity from her dad. loved all that. way more human and emotional. when ot comes to extensive choreography i love it in live action films (eg John Wick) but care far less when it is animated 3D or 2D. Like, I loved the wire fights in The Matrix but fell asleep whenever the action went full 3D (gently caress off hurly burly fight). this may be obvious to loads of people but i kinda just had this epiphany watchibg this film. just full grin the whole time loving this movie but as that final set piece wore on i found my eyes glazing over. biggest crime of the film was the cliffhanger though. i heard there was one but didnt expect it to be that egregious. that's some NEXT WEEK ON BATMAN level bullshit. i was expecting resolution to at least SOME of the story's plot here. not everything but poo poo... what a way to end. as i type this i am tryibg to figure out i am so annoyed here but wasnt at all bothered with say Empire Strikes Back... i am not sure why. is it because with ESB the immediate plot issue of Luke needing to rescue his friends is solved? sure the Empire and Vader still exist and Han is frozen in a brick of carbonite, but there was the sense the hero's landed on their feet and were going to regroup... that scene with them all looking out the Mon Calamari cruisers viewport out into the stars... definitive yet promising future adventure. here the heroes square off with the primary antagonist only halfway through the film before he essentially disappears entirely from thus narrative. Vader won his showdowm but at least it was in the climax of ESB... in Spiderverse 2 the film keeps going on and we get a NEW secondary antagonist for the climax of the film, do not reconnect with the first villain, then end on a stinger that reveals a third antagonist before cutting to credits. the heck. there's kind of am ESB parallel where one hero is captured by the villain and the other heros band together with the promise to save the first hero but... i dunno. was talking to crow about this film and he mentioned he really liked it but would have to wait for the conclusion to really rate how it landed and now i get why. unlike the first film, this Spiderverse doesnt feel like it stands well on its own and that's disappointing. regardless of complaints overwhelmingly e joyed it 4 outta 5 Dashes.
Sally fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jul 13, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 15:46
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