Film; or The Silver Screen

[Mirefox]

I enjoyed F1. It is exactly what you would expect as a quasi-ad for the sport, but it was fast, exciting, and just fun. Brad Pitt has a charisma and is always likable (presuming that’s the role).

As a fan of F1, it was fun to see the real drivers and principals in the movie, though it was also slightly jarring since these are teams from a couple years ago. It was fun to hear Martin Brundle in commentary. That said, there is a lot of F1 exposition, and while it is fully understandable so that wide audiences can enjoy the movie, it was slightly painful to my ears to hear Brundle giving some of this exposition. Driving was a little over-the-top and certainly filled with more action than a normal F1 race, where a single overtake can be a momentous occasion, but it was thrilling.

I also have to say that a certain event made my theater gasp, shout, curse, etc. and I don’t hear those kind of reactions in theaters that often anymore.

[Mirefox]

Jurassic World Rebirth was as dumb as it looks. There are a couple exciting scenes, but the pacing felt a bit off, the red shirts were obvious about 10 minutes into the movie, Scarlett Jahannson is egregiously miscast as some spec ops specialist, which is even harder to believe than the dinos, there are nice again kids on the island, but this time one of them even gets a cute little poor-CGI dino pet that fills the same role in this movie as BB-8. And then there are the dinos themselves - this movie, like every before it, tries to up the spectacle with bigger dinosaurs and some horrific hybrids. The titanosaurus scene tried to evoke the same feelings as the apatosaurus scene from the original and just looked stupid. On top of that, what the heck is a titanosaurus? I know I’m 40 years out of the loop but what happened to the classic dinos. The most thrilling scene in the movie actually involved the T-Rex and was reminiscent of a scene from the original novel that hadn’t made it into the movies yet. It is awfully telling that the best part of the movie seems to have come from the source material and had the iconic dinosaur while the Hollywood creations paled in comparison.

This was the first JP movie my kids got to see in the theater, so that made it a bit more fun for me, though I wish the movie lived up to the experience.

Overall, it was a mid-level popcorn movie and a mid-level JP movie. I can’t say if I liked it better or worse than the last two but I can say that it was giving me JP3 vibes (that said, I didn’t hate 3 as much as it seems many people did).

[whovian223]

We’ve seen a bunch of movies in the last 2 months, more than we have in years (at least in the theaters). A bunch in IMAX, but not all.

Thunderbolts (IMAX): Probably the best Marvel movie in a while because it deals with unexpected subjects for a superhero movie. The performances are amazing and just seeing people dealing with depression (and not in a boring way) was just so great. The cast is also really good, and it has a lead-in to the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday as well. I think this is streaming now, so if you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s not “typical” of the genre.

The Accountant 2: Pretty bad, though Bernthal is always good. The first movie is great, the second is a nothingburger.

The Amateur: Remi Malik is really great in this one. It’s not plausible in the slightest, but it’s a really fun movie with great performances. I always love Laurence Fishburne, too.

Ballerina: John Wick light, lots of fun action but if you’re not already a fan of the world and lots of cool fight sequences, then this one isn’t really anything you need to watch. I did like how it turned a couple of John Wick tropes on their heads, though.

Mission Impossible - Final Reckoning (IMAX): Wow, this is the most implausible movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s still fun. The stunts are amazing and if you can see this in the theaters, do so. It may still be fun on streaming but the camerawork and stunts definitely deserve the big screen if you can.

Sinners: We saw this right before it exited the theater, and wow is this well done. I love blues music, so I was already the natural audience for this one, but the performances are great and it was nice to see Buddy Guy in a movie! Lots of homages to From Dusk Til Dawn, but still a good movie (if you don’t mind blood and gore). A bit slow at the beginning, but I liked Coogler’s world-building so your mileage may vary.

F1 (IMAX): Totally agree with @js619. I don’t know anything about Formula 1, the wife knows even less. We just basically went because we’re in movie-going mode and this is in IMAX. The production is amazing, the racing scenes are great. Loved Pitt and the other performances as well. And damn, does an Irish accent turn me on, so Kerry Condan was just…ok, I’ll stop there.

Jurassic World Rebirth: Yeah, this didn’t really need to be made, and yeah, Johannson is probably miscast as a special forces operative, but it was amusing and loud and fun. Probably the worst of the ones we’ve seen in the last couple of months, but we enjoyed it even with all of that. Predictable as hell.

We’re off in July and going to go on a movie binge, so Superman and Fantastic Four (plus 28 Years Later) are on the docket! We’ve watched the first two “28” movies ahead of time and yeah, they’re interesting. Probably won’t be awesome but will still be an enjoyable day at the movie.

[OhBollox]

Thunderbolts. They talked a good game, but this is largely just another Marvel film. I was expecting some sort of tone change at some point, but the action is lightweight and disposable, and that never changes. I think this was a good idea rewritten into mediocrity. Pugh and Harbour can’t save this, Stan is badly out of place and promptly crowbarred in, Pullman is a void. Depressing.

Becky. This is just Home Alone but not as good. McHale, still playing a character called Jeff a decade later, is grim.

[whovian223]

(ETA: this is about Thunderbolts, obviously. I missed that you were talking about 2 different films)

I totally disagree on this one.

I love how the movie talks so much about mental health and actually does a great job doing it.

Loved how the final “battle” was a low-key battle involving that kind of thing too.

Pugh was amazing and the others carried it as well.

Bucky was kind of pointless, but I like that he’s part of the team going forward, so it’s a setup for future
Marvel movies as well.

I did tear up during some of the final sequences. I don’t have mental health issues nearly as bad as some others do, but I still felt them when being shown on screen like that.

It was almost like they were talking to me (not as much as some other people I’ve heard talk about the movie, where the movie really did speak to what they were going through, but still some for me)

[Snotty128]

Bring her back. Billed as an Australian supernatural horror , with a slow burn on the supernatural. As the supernatural doesnt take centre stage, we get a psychological horror involving two half siblings finding themselves in foster care.

An a24 production, really nicely made blend of horror genres. Upsetting and uncomfortable. Enjoy.

[Snotty128]

The new Superman film surprised me, in a good way. Lighter and more irreverent than Snyder/Cavills Superman.

No origin story this time. They respected us enough to get straight into the plot, though that led to some clunky exposition early on.

Nicholas Hoult as a fully evil Lex was a pleasure for the most part.

No shoehorned wokeness despite the murmurings online

[OhBollox]

Bring Her Back. Better than Talk to Me, which felt like half of a film made for teens, Sally Hawkins has a great role as a grieving mother, and the whole thing feels grim and mean enough to be real. The awful state of foster care is the least of the problems here, which quickly go from the unfortunate right through to the Hellish. Sora Wong brings a lot to her first role, really impressive.

We’re All Gonna Die. Traumatised people road trip, as a depressed beekeeper and a depressed firefighter embark on a journey together. Nothing new, but genuinely expressed, unusually funny, and touching.

28 Years Later. Well. I think one thing this film made clear to me is that what I find interesting in post-apocalyptic fiction are the practicalities of life after a calamity. What the writers find interesting is something completely different, apparently, and they remain totally unconcerned as to the practicalities. This is the core concept of the film that alienated me the more I watched. I won’t go on to point out it is not feasible because of various interferences, to both have a child lead and have that lead die, thereby killing any tension in quite a few scenes. The film saves its worst 'til last, and truly shits the bed in the final five minutes, just incomprehensible masturbatory, vapid, trash. The poor sound mixing barely warrants a mention by comparison.

[Snotty128]

Id probably watch the next one in the trilogy because this one occasionaly had some cool zombies. Damning with faint praise is about the best I could muster.

Oh, and there were a few Brit centric landscape shots. The only one that did anything for me was when they were in a rapeseed field, and thats because I used to play on the edge of a field where that was the crop, and I havent seen that flower in forever

[OhBollox]

Certain shots have aged badly with incredible speed.

[Snotty128]

I thought Id spotted that. I assumed that in the 28 years that zombies had been roaming Britian, not one of the brain dead horde had been nearly as dumb enough as the fuckwits that chopped it down in real life

[whovian223]

I’m not sure what you mean by having a child lead and that lead die?

[OhBollox]

It’s apparently correlated with lower box office to feature any kind of on-screen child death, so the minority of films that did do it, has shrunk further under financial pressure (real or not, I’m not sure how you’d compare it), and placing a child in peril has become a cheap way to build tension, and hopefully audiences won’t notice that it can’t result in the child dying. Even non-violent child death in tragic films tends to be montaged into bullshit. In 28YL, you know he’s not going to die because he’s the protagonist. He has double plot armour because he’s a child. It doesn’t matter how stupid he is (and he is very stupid).

[whovian223]

Ah, I get it. Yeah, I can see that.

I still enjoyed the movie, but I’m sad we wasted the time watching the first two thinking they might be important to this one.

I’m looking forward to the next one, though.

[OhBollox]

I did enjoy how quickly they dealt with 28WL: “Nope.”

Weapons. I enjoyed Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, but this was a step up, and I honestly felt I was in for a treat about halfway through, only to be surprised by the steep rise in my enjoyment in the final third. As a horror film, it’s only partially successful, but it goes on to change into something very different from a conventional horror, and the complete opposite of 28 Years Later, a film which got steadily worse as it progressed, and fell apart at the end. Josh Brolin is just himself again, nothing remarkable there, but Julia Garner and Austin Abrams turn in two excellent performances. There’s some top-notch Benedict Wong to enjoy as well. Worth watching just to see the director snap a genre over his knee.

[Snotty128]

The film reviewer on the radio was really quite pleased by weapons too. Im looking forward to it

[rinelk]

K-Pop Demon Hunters. My teens like animation and music, so this was an easy watch. Some motivations are unpersuasive or absent, the animation is kind of interesting and often very pretty without pushing boundaries nearly as far as the Spider-verse movies or Mitchells vs. the Machines did, the internal logic disposable, the plot and resolution at best adequate, but it was joyous.

I found its willingness to be pretty openly inattentive to some things well-tuned to give the audience permission to acknowledge that some stuff didn’t hang together, and then just go along with the rest of the movie and have fun. Musicals do this well generally, so perhaps that oughtn’t surprise me, but I think the addition of magic emphasized it.

I will say, the songs were generally catchy, but I definitely liked having subtitles on. I don’t mind not knowing the Korean parts (I like that little reminder that the world is large), but it reduced frustration to know that they WERE in Korean, rather than English I was just failing to interpret.

[OhBollox]

I don’t want to talk about it much more to avoid spoiling anything, but while the basic horror elements are its weakest aspect, everything else about it is remarkably good, and I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a film more this year. Certain scenes were just delightful.

[kennfusion]

Yeah, my daughter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, she is into some kpop already so had to explain to me this is typical of kpop, to have songs that mix English and Korean.

[OhBollox]

Jurassic World: Rebirth. I think these films ran their course decades ago, so it’s comforting that this one is struggling to not be a horror film in the exact same way Jurassic Park was; the complete tonal whiplash is just brute-forced out of sight as much as possible. Multiple quite horrific deaths, people screaming as they are being eaten and drowned simultaneously, and then on to the next scene with a wisecrack and what passes for a gag in these awful scripts.

Two characters sharing stories of their best friend/child dying, marriage dissolved, etc with no other appearance or mention of these lost loved ones before or after means maybe if you had the best actors in the world, these lines could land, they could have some weight, the audience might feel something, but Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are not those actors.

They might make an interesting film one day, but the constant need to reinvent new, more threatening dinosaurs and yet downgrade the peril so it stays family-friendly is irreconcilable.