Did you notice that that D. Rex, or whatever it was called, seemed to change sizes as the scene needed. At one point it was borderline kaiju and a couple scenes later it was like a big T-Rex. That really annoyed me.
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Next youâll be telling me the whole film is poorly thought-out.
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It was the most 90s-video-game-plot story theyâve had yet. I can see the 32-bit map of the island all in Mac green with a talking head in the corner telling me I need to find these three eggs, which are blinking on the map.
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Together. Dave Franco and Alison Brie are having a great time in this, and it is assuredly funny, a smart film about a couple struggling with complacency and unsure about each other, only to find out they have other, more pressing priorities. Both leads are great, the effects are mostly good, the script is smart and funny, I was happy. Genuinely fun and has the right balance for those interested but squeamish to want to avoid the extremes of body horror. The cheap CGI didnât dampen my enjoyment much.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. I never got the chance to see this at the cinema, so when my local did a 4K remaster viewing, I jumped at the chance, and itâs still great. Idiosyncratic and unusual at every turn, for sure, but the slightly mournful visage of a pudgy Forest Whitaker, acting opposite an array of over the hill mafioso, proves to be compelling, from his effortless stealth walking the streets, his technological sophistication (electronically breaking into cars in 1999), and DIY expertise (building his own suppressors at home), to his selection of quotes from the Hagakure, and looking after his pigeons. Absolutely banging soundtrack, bags of style.
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Quite enjoyed Weapons. It was certainly a different vision of what a mystery horror should be. I found myself completely taken in by some scenes, and of course the rewarding (if ever so slightly darkly comic) climax.
I do wonder how its going to hold up on home set ups though. Many scenes were of dark interiors and grey on black has traditionally not held up well at home.
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Superman. It certainly is a film, and it has the usual James Gunn charm, but it doesnât hit any high notes, doesnât use the theme music well enough, and Superman also happens to be mostly irrelevant to what happens. Thatâs fairly damning. As much as I enjoy the little witticisms and jokes that pepper these films, thatâs not enough to carry the whole thing. Hoult as Luthor is good. Itâs not doing anything new, the xenophobia doesnât sit well with the new setting.
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To each their own. I quite enjoyed it and canât wait to show it to my wife when it hits Max. Sheâs a big Guardians fan.
Itâs funny how we all skewered DC for rushing into the shared universe thing and botching it so bad with Snyderâs clumsy attempts. But Gunn used one clever opening bit of text and immediately set the table for everything heâs about to roll out. Apparently it can be done without a ton of setup, it was just a skill issue all along.
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It was okay. It wasnât bad. It doesnât surprise me the sheer amount of bad faith criticism Iâve seen of it on the Internet, that itâs not a bad film at all, itâs just not doing what Snyder did. But itâs certainly not taking any risks either.
Eddington. Not, on the surface, what you would expect from Ari Aster. I was more than a little surprised by the final third, but the preceding two acts were no slouch either. Both Pablo Pesto (as one cinemagoer called him) and Joaquin Phoenix are very good, and the setting amidst covid and the BLM protests worked for a rather surprising amount of laughs. It doesnât feel like 150 minutes, and contains enough surprises and atypical scenes for me not to be able to guess much of it.
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Loved Superman and Iâm really stoked for Peacemaker Season 2 coming on Thursday (yes, I know this is movies, but Iâm talking about the whole DCU).
I think Gunn (at least so far) is doing an amazing job making a cinematic and TV universe and Superman was a great beginning to that.
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Relay is an action thriller that falls just short of being great. The thriller part shines, but the action part in the final third lets the whole thing down.
Riz Ahmed (excellent) is a fixer who helps people with corporate secrets escape their corrupt corporations without losing everything. Tense, paranoid, with an antagonist youâd love to punch.
Insane to watch Brave New World and Thunderbolts for the first time on the same day. Take about going from a low low to a high high.
I thought thunderbolts was OK, though it didnt feel particularly super for a super hero movie.
I did like the villian though, which redeemed it somewhat
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Toxic Avenger. Pitch-perfect comedy, Dinklage doing some amazing work in the lead.
So, I did a foolish and self-indulgent thing, and rewatched Treasure of the Four Crowns on prime for the first time since I saw it in the theater, in 1983. I remembered it as kind of scary, but interesting because it was basically a heist movie in which everything goes wrong, and also as setting the paradigm in my experience for overly optimistically including a scene at the end setting up a sequel, and thereby undercutting the impact of the movie.
That wasnât totally wrong, but I had forgotten how abysmal it was. Just an absolutely crap movie, which I honestly had kind of a lot of fun watching because the ways in which is was crap were so easily amenable to critique by even as uneducated a critic as myself. First of all, it has the problem of all 3D movies of the era of setting up numerous shots throughout the film specifically designed to have something move directly toward the audience, because that was basically the only way to get the stereoscopic technology to have a noticeable impact. But it was atrociously edited, too! The first sequence is 20 minutes of the main character jumping away from animals (often in slow motion) and various traps and poltergeist-related hazards, often absurdly, and with no thought given to how each shot might relate to the next. Rather than going from one location to another, he just ping-pongs around inside a single room for no discernible reason. And, I guess because they wanted to get their moneyâs worth out of setting up these 3D shots, theyâd often repeat them two or three times in succession. Through it all, the actor clearly had no direction on how he was supposed to feel or what was even going on, as his emoting is all over the place, sometimes stoic, sometimes trying to reflect surprise or, uh, manly fright, I guess? But from shot to shot, it changes seemingly at random.
Eventually, he delivers the key he was there to steal, and says he absolutely will not do the next job for those employers. The very next scene has him recruiting a guy for that job, with no explanation. The middle third of the movie is all about putting together the team, placing warnings about all the things that can go wrong, and basically setting the audience up to wonder how theyâll overcome all these challenges. In the end, they donâtâthe nervous guy freaks out, the guy with a bad heart has a heart attack, the drunk gets drunk, and all three of them die and set off the alarm. The only way the main character gets out is literal magic he canât really control and nobody seems to understand, which was not part of the plan, and the two surviving members of the team leave without the supernatural macguffins, having learned the lesson that this was a power man was not meant to possess, but instead was meant to literally leave lying around on the floor in a dangerous cult.
Also, the two crowns they went to steal had the power of basically good in one and evil in the other. TWO crowns, though, you might wonder? Yes! The employers already had one, which contained nothing but a note about how cool the other crowns were, and the fourth crown was a cautionary tale about how you really needed to use the key they got in the first sequence to open the ball at the top of the crowns, because some asshole just tried to jimmy the lock on that one and it blew up.
Partly, I rewatched it because it had an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, and I figured maybe that was a sign there was some effort put into quality. But, not only was that not the case, I think the film itself did such a poor job of hanging together that he doesnât seem to have had a great idea of how to score it to emphasize the appropriate emotions and help the audience follow along.
I think itâs the only movie Iâve seen which attempts to portray tambourines as sinister and threatening.
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This thread owes me coffee and a keyboard lol. Well done.
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I canât believe I forgot to mention two other things. In the Amazon transfer, thereâs a scene that cuts off halfway through and returns to an earlier point in the movie. It goes fine from there, so they seem to have the whole thing, but if you were to watch it straight through, youâd repeat five minutes or so. And the absolute best part: after a dialog-free 20-minute opening scene, the person doing the subtitles appears to have had a psychotic break, and, for the rest of the movie, randomly includes declarations of love or hatred for the audience. Or maybe I did, and hallucinated it?
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Caught stealing. The mainstream Aronofsky film nobody asked for or wanted. It felt like an artist at the end of a 3 album deal with their record label, just putting something out to end the contract. Lacking inspiration, though it is still an Aronofsky film so itâs never gonna be that bad.
Our unwitting protagonist comes into possession of the McGuffin and is chased around 90s New York by a variety of villains. Supporting actor Matt Smith as an unflinching middle aged punk who steals every scene he is. The dark comedy of the second half probably should have been the tone throughout.
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Honey Donât! Well, if I have to go to a film and be surprised by a Margaret Qualley/Aubrey Plaza lesbian sex scene, thatâs fine, I suppose. Traditional Coen brother humour, some nice Charlie Day, a wonderful role for Chris Evans as a cult leader, but the film never really unifies and comes together, it just has strands running in parallel the entire time. Plaza steals one scene in particular that then limps on to a slightly unsatisfying ending.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, We Promise. Itâs fine. Itâs too long. There are some great set pieces, and genuinely interesting sections, with great stunts, but the vaguely optimistic tone is badly misplaced these days. And the technological gobbledegook is unbearable, just absolute and total bollocks made up by idiots.
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Id heard Honey Dont wasnt particularly good. Id also heard it had Qualley and Plaza as lesbian lovers. I was surprised how relatively explicit it was, considering both leads have successful careers.
The Long Walk. Based on the 1979 book by Stephen King. Presumably released now to cash in on the squid games/alice on borderland hype. About as well paced as it can be, considering its a film about a bunch of guys walking above 3mph otherwise they get Charlie Kirked, quite graphically too.
From what I understand, the book was pretty average for King. Thats what the film delivered
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Fantastic 4. Ok for a modern marvel film, but still not great. No homework required, all the characters and plot points are self contained in the movie. My cinema had an anniversary offer of nz$8 (gbÂŁ4) per ticket, so worth it at that price for the space sections and the boss fight. Rather too much pregnancy and baby issues to be entertaining and funny throughout.
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