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[Movies]: YOU MANIACS!!! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
https://youtu.be/oZlSoiE7YlMThis discussion has been closed.
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I watched Steve Jobs yesterday, and while I have some issues with the psychology (which strikes me as too foregrounded and overly facile), I love Sorkin's verbal sparring delivered by actors who know how to work with his writing, and that's definitely the case here. I also like the structure a lot. Is the film a realistic depiction of Jobs and the way he was with others? No idea, but the fictionalised Jobs works well for the story the film is telling. And Boyle reigns in his directorial excesses while still giving the film a clear, fitting, eminently watchable style. I'd probably pick The Social Network over this one, mainly because I like TSN's ending better than the final scene here between Jobs and his daughter, but I'm glad I got to see this and I'm looking forward to seeing it again - not least because it's great to see Kate Winslet working with strong material (the last film I saw her in was Divergent... 'nuff said).
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Somewhat mockumentary mixed with flashbacks because the film never really does a good job distinguishing the cutbacks, we're told of the story of Sandy Wexler, a business manager to F-listers who has a penchant for lying all the time even as he tries to do right by his clients. There are so many cameos it's sort of amazing, as this relies heavily on 90's 'memberberries and jokes about not investing in Apple but investing in bookstores, because history lol. Anyway, in 1994 Sandy stumbles across a Mariah Carey stand-in singer in Jennifer Hudson and helps make her a big name. And then we even have a romance story shoved in because it was in the leftover script template.
It's clearly made to be a movie you watch bits and pieces of, not a complete piece. Perhaps that's Netflix's wish now, to have people watch their original films like snacks, coming and going to inflate the numbers. This is a comedy that is over 2 hours, that's.....that's not how comedies work, fam. And you're got some good chuckles here in places, but they're filled with long bits of forced romance subplot or just not editing out bland parts that it does feel like padding. Which kind of stinks because this movie actually did a decent job showing the 90's. The branding for Coke (this is a Sandler movie so lots of product placement) is in line with the time, they put up billboards of actual movies from the time in the background, and Fuitopia, that terrible, terrible drink is here.
Nothing really comes from the stars reminiscing about Sandy with the documentary style, and you can tell what even they're at midway through the film which makes the ending not worth it, but compared to the other two Netflix movies Sandler does seem to be trying here since he's actually doing a different character. Jennifer Hudson isn't a good actress but she is a good singer and the song they make (a knockoff of Carey's Fantasy) is actually a good song, just played to death over and over, and some of the bigger cameos do a good job (Jane Seymour is still amazingly hot especially as a blonde).
It does do some bits where it's not completely kid friendly but isn't crude enough to be more of a raunchy film.
It is a movie, I guess is what this comes down to. Completely average.
It was good, bit of a letdown compared to the 2 past installments.
GOTG 2, Thor Ragnarok, Spider-man: Homecoming, The Mummy, War of the Planet of the Apes, Valarian, Baywatch, Baby Driver, Free Fire, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Alien: Covenant
PotC5
Colossal
Baby Driver
The Hitman's Bodyguard
I haven't seen it yet but that's not surprising. The series seems to have peaked with 5.
@Astaereth or @Atomika
i'm not saying that you owe me but how am i supposed to explain this to my children?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
http://www.wehavealwayslivedinthekraken.com/ (Kyu is @Astaereth if I recall correctly)
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4255304/
John Carpenter's love child with H.P Lovecraft. Really great practical effects for such a small budget.
And holy hell is it gory.
and i check it from time to time, when my brain mouth becomes parched and thirsts for new thought waters
but there is not always a ton of movie stuff on there
and i mean, i get it, everyone's got busy lives
i just like to suck up to our resident film experts whenever possible
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
We've been kinda tied up with Torchlight right now, but we have several projects in the pipeline. There's a multi-part podcast roundtable we're still finishing up, I've got a piece on Get Out to put up, and I'm sure there be much more coming once the summer season heats up. We're about three weeks away from there being more movies to write about than time on the clock.
Stay tuned, friendo
But we still have good stuff at www.insidethekraken.com on anime and video games and I've been podcasting on Syfy's The Magicians.
I still watch movies but it's been a while since I wrote any real reviews. I still want to do something on Logan, maybe I'll get around to that this week.
It's doubly annoying because 2017 is shaping up to be the best year in film in quite some time.
After a bit of cuban propaganda and one of the dumber car races in the entire film series, Dom turns on the team to work for Aeon Flux when they have to steal an EMP from some baddies in Germany. The mission is off the books so he frames The Rock for it, who is given a chance to fix things with the help of The Transporter and Dom's team. Something something hacking the tubes, family, family tubes, Scott Eastwood is terrible even when his character is supposed to be terrible.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way:
-Statham's the highlight here, he anchors the two best scenes in the movie and they are among the best of the series, even though they're the least F&F. They are essentially Transporter kung-fu highlight reels, one being the prison break scene you see in the trailers. The other car stuff here is rather standard car action stuff. The series continues to be unrealistic with car chases, but now it's circling around again from "turn off your brain dumb" to "it's so dumb your brain can't help but kick back on."
-Tyrese Gibson as Roman is really keeping the "original" crew together in terms of just being someone fun and relatable since they continue to make The Rock not as front and center. I was hoping they would switch around the screentime since he got so little in Fast 7, but no, everything has to be Dumb Dom. But Roman is still great, steals scenes like speakerbox blast go rat a tat tat
-Charlize Theron as the baddie works, especially in this series. She's like Luke Evans from 6 in terms of being perfectly used and while you realize a lot of her stuff was done probably in a few weeks because she's mainly by herself or with Diesel, she works as the villain everyone is looking for. And at least in her history for the series, the revising works.
-Kurt Russell makes it look so easy. He's not Mr. Nobody, he's Mr. Charisma, making the exposition and hand holding the plot work well as it could be.
-there's two nice cameos here that are better than some other cameos even though a lot of it makes no sense:
Now the bad:
-Scott Eastwood. He is supposed to play Russell's #2 and slide in as the new government stooge, the rookie learning how to create super spy teams, and he's supposed to be unlikable, but he's just terrible. It's not completely his fault, because the movie really, really wants to make him Paul Walker, even making him the rice rocket dude of the group so he drives a Z and an Evo like Brian was. And the film at least has the common sense to make everyone shit on him by mocking him but even his "I'm cool now" scenes are just.....bad. He makes Paul Walker's bland time in the series look like he's RDJ. You gotta have some charisma even as the stooge, because you'll just get run roughshod over when you're around Tyrese Gibson, the Rock, Russell & Statham. Someone like Matt Bomer or even Zach Levi would have worked better just to really be some kind of banter equal and likeable enough that you want them to stay around in the series.
-the "family" part of the story is terrible. Big spoilers that makes a character look stupid and feeds way more into the "Dom is amazing" narrative that has been hurting the franchise, especially with Walker gone:
And then she is killed off by point blank execution by Theron's henchman in front of Dom.
Now, they ruined Elena in 6 by making her just let Dom go and find another chick and just accepting she's not gonna be with him despite no real build up to that (and no one's gonna choose Michelle Rodriguez over Elsa Pataky anyway). It was stupid and unbelievable, even in this F&F world. It was dumb then, and this makes her look worse. The timeline doesn't really make sense either, as when she saw Dom in 7 she could have easily said something like "hey that guy who nearly killed the Rock might come after me because I have your son." And hell, even The Rock might have said something since he would have likely seen a pregnant Elena walking around in his LA office but what the hell do I know anymore. I can't even get a good timeline on when this is supposed to take place after 6 then.
And at the end when the kid is saved they name him Brian, in a bit of 4th wall breaking when they should have just named him Paul and gone full on wall break. Furious 7 had a great, touching ending, and this felt more like trying to still cash in on Walker's death which felt cheap and a little slimey.
-Dom being amazing is terrible, he's over 5,000!
ALSO, everyone seems to forget Statham killed Han. AND blew up Dom's house. He's treated with disdain by the Rock because he nearly killed the guy in 7, but we see later on that Statham is actually a good guy who Theron wanted to work for her but he refused and she ruined his military career and used his brother to help her instead, making him a bad guy. So he's basically like The Rock in this regard in this franchise. So you have this weird characterization trying to clean the slate because everyone likes Statham as the good guy, but at the same time there is no talk at all about anything that happened in the previous films about this change. It's film blinders to any justified conflict that could have worked and helped show greater bonds of family, which is why I'm surprised it wasn't brought up.
It could have worked in the story had they planned it better, and maybe showing once that Dom had some computer skills, but yeah, nah, whatever, he's just great at everything. He even has a car with so much horsepower he's better than everyone combined because again, fuck you, that's why.
-There's some choppy CGI here. I wonder if it was shopped out to Chinese studios to help get it in their theaters because they're financing this franchise now, but some stuff with the cars like was in some trailers really doesn't look good compared to that sweet tank on the road in Spain that we saw in 6.
-It's 20 minutes too long. This is filled up by some bad telegraphed jokes from the Rock early on (the soccer stuff) or the forced use of Cuba in the beginning for no real reason (they make Havanna look like a little Rio and I'm all yeah right).
Overall, it was a fine matinee movie, but I don't plan on buying this when it comes out on digital like I have the last three films. A few great scenes do not make up for the other weakspots. If you are a big F&F fan, lower your expectations and you might have a better time than I did. They can easily fix some of this stuff in the future films but they likely won't because it's a franchise that's Transformers powerful now.
I watched this too! I liked it a lot. Is funny that in a movie stuffed with cosmic nightmares, the scariest thing is just regular monk guys standing en mass. Also that one nurse was Knives Chau!
That's where I knew her from!
The whole last 1/3rd was pure cosmic horror.
Logan
Oh, that already came out? No, I mean the blu ray, so I can cry in the privacy of my own home this time, thanks.
I don't know what you're talking about, i definitely didn't cry at Logan, and anyone who says that I did is a liar and I will sue them.
I did not find the movie touching or emotionally resonant in any way, I instead enjoyed it and then did at all drag my weepy ass out of the theater.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The beginning of October looks really interesting too.
Kewl
It's become something of an interesting historical curio, I think. Very much a product of its time, but thankfully without too much '80s hair going on (although, speaking of hair, Gina Gershon's is just magnificent in this flick); no, it's more that it's very much a snapshot in time of where US/USSR relations were, shortly before everything changed in the subsequent few years.
The buddy cop movie and Arnold Schwarzenegger were two of the biggest things in movies at that point, so there's a logic to combining them. It was interesting to look over director Walter Hill's notes on the movie's Wikipedia page - the concept came from that exact combination, yet also making Arnold's accent work for him rather than it being glossed over. Arnold makes it work, clipping his dialogue a bit and rolling his R's to create a distinctive riff on his usual style. He also has a really good chemistry with Jim Belushi, and between them they do pull off the staple of the characters who can't stand each other at first, but are forced by circumstance to work together, and grow to respect, trust and ultimately like each other. It's the cliché of movies like this but it works here, with the Russian/American spin played for all it's worth. Plus, there is never a hint that Schwarzenegger's character is ever tempted to defect, which is another turn away from what you might expect.
Gershon is sorely underused although she's great for the short time we get her; Ed O'Ross really is fantastically snarly and borderline psychotic as the big bad; and the rest of the supporting cast (I'd forgotten that Brion James and Larry Fishburne were in this!) is solid.
There are some great set-pieces, the bus chase being a highlight, although again, perhaps too brief. The hotel shoot-out is another favourite.
It's a movie that takes very well established formulae and offers several unusual takes on them. I'm not quite sure how it would come across to a new viewer now, but as someone who saw it not too long after it came out (and who vaguely remembers the accompanying novelization - I did go through a few of those back in those days), I feel that it holds up - although it is a reminder of just how much the world has changed since the late '80s. But it's also a well paced, sharply written, energetic and tightly shot movie, and I still like it a lot.
Fun trivia fact: it was the first Western film production ever permitted to shoot in Moscow's Red Square; a sign of what was to come.
Steam | XBL
Monster Trucks
Rings
Trespass Against Us
Lost in London
Detour
I Am Not Your Nego
A Cure for Wellness
Get Out
War on Everyone
The Great Wall
American Fable
Tulip Fever
Kong: Skull Island
The Last Word
Before I Fall
T2: Trainspotting
Personal Shopper
Song to Song
Wilson
Ghost in the Shell
Life
The Blackcoat's Daughter
Sleight
Colossal
Gifted
--
(not out yet)
Unforgettable
The Circle
Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Alien: Covenant
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
Wonder Woman
The Mummy
The Beguiled
Rock That Body
Wish Upon
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Dunkirk
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
The Dark Tower
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
(Katheryn Bigelow Detroit project)
Baby Driver
My Cousin Rachel
The Coldest City
All I See Is You
The Hitman's Bodyguard
It Comes at Night
It
The Lego Ninjago Movie
American Made
Blade Runner 2049
The Snowman
mother!
Logan Lucky
The Commuter
Marshall
The Mountain Between Us
God Particle
Thor: Ragnarok
Paddington 2
Justice League
Coco
Murder on the Orient Express
Red Sparrow
Darkest Hour
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Jumanji
Downsizing
The Greatest Showman
There's not a lot here that I'm like, "I'm excited to see this because I know it's going to be great" (only Star Wars really fits the bill for that this year), but there's a ton of "could be good, could be terrible" movies this year and so far those bets are paying off. So we'll see.
(Also I love that I've already forgotten what half of these are since I made this list.)
Not interested in Free Fire, or is that one that didn't make it on there yet?
As I hit the guide again, I see that Hellboy 2 is just starting. I've only seen it all the way through once, and that was back when it came out, so I decide to go with it. It jived pretty well with my memories - enjoyable despite its flaws, and it looks fantastic with some truly beautiful moments.
When it was over though, I was struck by something: Hellboy 2 made me want to go read some comic books. It made me want to pick up some Hellboy and dig in, even though I've never read any Hellboy before or really had much interest in it. Hell, given that it was too late to do so it had me considering going back to Fables, or some Harry Dresden stuff, or anything else that covers that territory of ancient fantasy creatures living a secret existence under the noses of modern reality. Whereas what I saw of Suicide Squad, which actually involved numerous characters I like and a number of actors I usually enjoy, made me even less interested in seeing any upcoming DCU projects or picking up any DC comic books.
I have a few quibbles with the movie--it's cut with some weird pop music montages which feel like an anime show's opening sequence, so that an otherwise well-produced film ends up feeling a little made-for-TV. The plot, while well-constructed, does hang a little bit on not asking too hard "Why didn't these characters just do X?" And, as with Shinkai's Garden of Words, some of the emotional climaxes are overwrought and probably should've been toned down a little.
For me this is definitely one of the best anime films this side of Miyazaki, and I feel like it's also very accessible to people who don't watch anime.
An oversight. I intend to see that one, although I'm pretty wary of the director after Kill List disappointed.
Not sure why, but it seems to be a mandatory staple for Easter Television. Like the Wizard of Oz during Thanksgiving, or that English movie during Scandanavian New Years.
Good movie, but I tend to lose interest after the plagues. Egyptian Prince Moses is so much more fun than Prophet Moses.
Prince of Egypt is a worthy successor, though. Great songs, the best of animation (just before pure CGI became commonplace), and a humanization of Pharaoh.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Heh. I thought it peaked with 6. lol
5 is Brazil right? Because the bank vault Chase is the best set piece out of any of them.
The producer of the series, Neal Moritz, was on Bill Simmons pod this week, overall not a great episode but there was some interesting bits.
First was that the vault Chase was done by actually dragging a vault around Puerto Rico and really fucking up tons of stuff in the process.
Second was that the studio really, really, really, wanted Timothy Olyphant in the Dominic Turetto role. That's a what if that I wish happened.
Third that he completely didn't understand why anyone might dislike the twist in passengers and that he blames a single critic for linking the film to date rape. He just thinks it's completely unfair that anybody thinks that about hIs wonderful, lovely movie.
Yeah, 6 is with Owen Shaw.
More like A Girl Watches a Boring Flick About a Vampire Who Eats Junkies. It had a decent aesthetic and a good premise, but it was just such a goddamn slog. The whole thing seemed like something filmed through molasses and then replayed at half speed.
I'm pretty excited for Blade Runner 2049. I think Denis Villeneuve will do a great job. He seems to be able to stand up to executive meddling much better than Ridley Scott. He was able to do Arrival without having to put in a big flashy action sequence. I think he'll be able to keep a tone and pacing that's right for Blade Runner.
I am curious about Wonder Woman. This is the only DCEU I kind of care about and want to succeed. And I really hope Patty Jenkins was able to do a good job. I am still unsure of Gal Gadot. They really haven't shown much of her acting in the trailers. That little girl who plays young Diana seems to be more charismatic in her line deliveries than Gal.
A weird, whimsical 'getting your life back together while also moonlighting as a kaiju' movie, however, definitely piques my interest.
Baby Driver as well for Edgar Wright reasons that are self-evident.
Seems like good Easter entertainment.
What a movie. The rotating hallway scene is still jaw dropping as always.