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Nothing But Trouble (1991): (2/10). I remember when seeing Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd's names involved with a movie meant that you could count on it being good. This is an odd film. It's supposed to be a comedy (I think), but it presents grisly scenes that would be more at home in a horror picture for laughs, and it's jarring. Right smack dab in the middle of "hilarious" scenes of people getting chewed up in some sort of death rollercoaster is a hip-hop performance. No joke. Avoid this movie and save yourself an hour and a half of life you'll never get back.
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Feb 10, 2017 06:25
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I saw The Crowd and was excited, because I originally misread it as A Face In The Crowd (a very relevant movie in the Trump era). Anyway: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: 9/10
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Feb 20, 2017 18:08
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Movie 43 (2013): 0/10 The Asphalt Jungle (1950): 8/10
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May 31, 2017 16:30
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I finally got around to seeing some animated movies from the past decade or so. Cars: B+ Finding Nemo: B Both good movies, but I think I actually liked Cars a little more than I liked Finding Nemo. There was a bit of cuteness overload for me, and Dory was occasionally somewhat irritating. I don't blame Ellen DeGeneres for that; the character was just a bit too perky and eager at times. Others: The Haunted Mansion (Disney, 2003): C The Loved One (1965): B I caught this on TCM a few days ago. What a delightfully odd film! I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Funny in some parts, poignant in others. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jul 3, 2017 |
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Jul 3, 2017 17:09
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1776 (Mr. Feeny as John Adams?!): A Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: D
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Jul 5, 2017 20:12
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I Before E posted:Always love to hear people's takes on 1776. Sure! I watched 1776 on TCM last night, and I have to admit that it inspired me in a way that the 'rah rah' patriotism of A Capitol Fourth did not. For all these men knew, they were signing their names to their death warrants. The Continental Army was a small force of undertrained and underdisciplined men facing what was, at the time, one of the most powerful empires on Earth. And yet despite those long odds, and the very real possibility of being hanged for treason, they had the courage to see "independency" through to the end. I'm not a historian, so I'm not sure about the historicity of all the things that were depicted in the movie, but I was impressed with the eye for detail. This movie had the balls to tackle several issues head on (for instance, the issue of slavery) without prettying it up for posterity. It's so easy to view the founding fathers as larger than life, but this movie didn't really do that. It depicted them as brave men, to be sure, but men with blind spots and character flaws. One song mentions how much John Adams was "obnoxious and disliked" several times. Franklin is depicted as a fairly horny old man, which was both amusing and correct. Even Jefferson, one of the greats of the Continental Congress, was shown as being reluctant about writing the Declaration - even refusing outright to do it, because he wanted to take his wife to bed. Seeing the founders have the courage, even in the face of what seemed like certain death, to openly defy King George gave me courage to defy King Donald I and never stop fighting for what's right. And, of course, it was cool seeing Mr. Feeny as Adams.
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Jul 6, 2017 02:30
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I Before E posted:See, I love it too but I take a very different read, where it's a dark comedy about how for all Adams' bluster the US is born out of compromising on the greatest atrocity in our nation's history which every single person in that room is complicit in, if not for the sale of slaves ("they don't see them as figures on a ledger, no, they see them as figures on a block!") then for all the rum they buy, and the cowardice of a man who just doesn't want to change history. Very true. Kicking the can down the road to deal with American independence before the issue of slavery was a devil's bargain. It got them what they so desperately needed, but it only delayed the inevitable north/south split by about ninety years. To its credit, though, the movie doesn't shrink away from using pretty harsh language - with a South Carolinian as the mouthpiece - to decry what Adams, Franklin, and others freely admitted was the hypocrisy of loathing slavery while benefiting from it.
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Jul 6, 2017 06:31
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Ode To Billy Joe (1976): B/B+ The Winning of Barbara Worth (1927): B+
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Jul 19, 2017 06:04
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Movie 43 (2013): F
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Jul 21, 2017 16:29
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EL BROMANCE posted:And an F is being kind. It definitely is. Movie 43 is not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it was fundamentally unfunny and disgusting.
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Jul 21, 2017 19:24
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Dark Passage (1947): A The Marrying Kind (1952): (missed the first part but watched most of it on TCM) B
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Jul 24, 2017 15:50
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Goosebumps (2015): B- Went in with low expectations, but it was not too bad.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:21
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Wild In The Streets (1968): A Delightful movie!
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Aug 3, 2017 05:41
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License To Kill (1989, Rewatch): A I don't understand why people don't like this movie. It's one of my favorites, and I favor Dalton's interpretation of Bond.
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Aug 8, 2017 07:09
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Into The Woods (2014): C+
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Aug 9, 2017 23:25
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Baby Face (1933): A Blow-up (1966, rewatch): D
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Aug 15, 2017 16:19
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The Violent Men (1955): B+ The Mesa of Lost Women (1953): F
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Aug 23, 2017 06:57
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Blazing Saddles (1974, rewatch): A Moonraker (1979, rewatch): C-
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Aug 29, 2017 05:09
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Westworld (1973): B+ 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, rewatch): A
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Sep 4, 2017 06:02
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On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970): B, I guess This was an odd movie, and I'm not altogether sure what to make of it. A young Barbra Streisand plays a college student who has played a variety of past lives, including a British seductress in the early 19th century. Yves Montand is a psychiatrist who stumbles upon the past lives when hypnotizing Streisand's character to compel her to quit smoking. It was entertaining, and Streisand is definitely a talented singer, but the ending is somewhat vague, in my opinion, and the story line itself is strange and a little meandering.
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Sep 12, 2017 06:46
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Butterflies Are Free (1972): A Alice's Restaurant (1969): B+
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Sep 16, 2017 04:26
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Super Mario Bros. (1993): D This was my first time seeing this movie, and I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it. I may end up amending my rating upwards or downwards. Reimaginings are not necessarily a bad thing, but recasting the Mushroom Kingdom as some sort of....cyberpunk dystopia where Goombas are dinosaur things, and Koopa is a white guy with a horrible haircut, is just...weird. I felt so sorry for Bob Hoskins. After all the good will and praise he (rightly) generated after Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he embarrasses himself in this movie - not through his acting, which is fine, but by simply appearing in it. Granted, a Japanese game about an Italian stereotype eating magic mushrooms to take on anthropomorphic turtles is weird enough on its own. This movie, though, was just a little too strange and overly stylized for my tastes.
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Sep 22, 2017 15:09
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Macarius Wrench posted:The super Mario movie is oddly brilliant because it's like an exec said there needed to be a Mario movie to capitalise on the franchise success and there has to be a plumber and dinosaurs and mushrooms and a Princess and someone with no context for how any of that applied to the games was given the go to make it. Mindfuck is a good word for it. I didn't exactly hate Super Mario Bros., but I don't think I can say that I liked it either. It's not as clearly awful like Freddy Got Fingered and other horrible movies I've seen. It's just....something.
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Sep 22, 2017 15:38
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Huh. I thought that Freddy was universally seen as bad. Interesting. Out of curiosity, what is the consensus on Caligula? Die Another Day (2002, Rewatch): D- I'm going to go out on a limb and say that having Bond get captured and tortured by North Koreans was innovative. In all the movies before this one, Bond was always able to get out of whatever situation he faced with a gadget and a wisecrack. Here, for one of the first times in the series, Bond was out of control. I liked that very much. But almost immediately after that, the movie went off the rails and returned to being same-old, same-old. Bond handily (too handily, in my opinion) escapes British custody and, with only the clothes on his back, is able to book an expensive suite in a hotel, complete with a personal tailor and fancy food. Except for a few lines of dialogue here and there, Bond apparently suffers no ill effects from being tortured and beaten for fourteen months; he pretty much just returns to business as usual. The plot itself is, in my opinion, labyrinthine and confusing. A North Korean officer fakes his death and uses some sort of "dream machine" to change his DNA to 'rich British douchebag', showing off his doomsday device (which is a copy of Scaramanga's Solex device) to the entire world under the guise of wanting to provide heat and light to disadvantaged parts of the world, etc. I'm probably getting details wrong, but I didn't find the plot to make all that much sense. And then there are the ridiculously over-the-top special effects: invisible cars, ice hotels being demolished by sun beams, etc. It's no wonder that they felt the need to reboot the franchise with Daniel Craig; like the post-Moonraker Moore movies, the Bond series was in a rut.
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Sep 23, 2017 15:41
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Adam's Rib (1949): B If this film had ended at the conclusion of the trial, I might have given it a C+. But the scenes after the trial fleshed out the characters and made it seem like they both had a point. Hepburn was right that women's lib had a long way to go in the late '40s, but she was so aggressive that I sometimes found her hard to take. I also don't like how she clouded her case with a lot of grandstanding about women's rights (even though she definitely had a point) instead of sticking to the facts. As for Tracy, I don't think his character was treated quite as fairly as Hepburn's. More often, he came across like a bumbling old fuddy dud, though I like how he exacted a measure of revenge for losing his case at the end of the movie. What I liked about the movie was that there was no "good guy" or "bad guy"; both sides were depicted as having a point, and they both had their winning and losing moments over various points. The acting was great; how could it not be with luminaries like Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy? The only character I truly didn't like was "Kip", whom I found annoying.
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Oct 10, 2017 07:22
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First new movie I've seen in a while. This Property Is Condemned (1966): B
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Nov 13, 2017 01:05
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Natalie Wood is great in that. Yes she is. The reason I kept watching the movie was that her character was so interesting. You really feel for her throughout the movie because her acting seems so real. That, and mid '60s Natalie Wood was definitely easy on the eyes.
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Nov 14, 2017 18:47
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The Naked Spur (1953): B Caveat: I caught roughly the second half of the movie on TCM last night I'm not a huge fan of Westerns (except for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), but the interesting plot caught my attention fairly quickly. Jimmy Stewart was a unique actor because he could play both fairly bumbling characters (like the one he plays in this movie), and 'strong' characters, equally. Maybe it's just me, but I always thought Robert Ryan looked quite a bit like Pierce Brosnan in the face.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:12
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It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947): B+ A movie about a rich man looking through the glass onion to see the other half live, and gaining perspective from it? Just the kind of movie we need in this modern Gilded Age. The Sound of Music (1965, Rewatch): B I know the story is saccharine and not particularly accurate (the Von Trapps didn't flee from the Nazis during or immediately after the Anschluss; they boarded a train to Italy in 1938, if I remember correctly). It's not my favorite musical movie (that would be Fiddler on the Roof), but I actually like this movie. The music is good, the acting is good, and it's an engaging story.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:26
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The Christmas Shoes (2002): D- I willingly subjected myself to this tripe to write a humorous review for friends. It wasn't quite as saccharine as I was expecting, but it was still enough to make my spleen hurt.
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Dec 21, 2017 23:01
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InterrupterJones posted:I'd be curious to see that humorous review, and also to hear your opinion on which is worse: the movie, or the song itself. The tone is set for this movie very early on when a character complains to her mom "I'm queasy". No doubt that by the end of this movie, most of the audience felt the same way. Of all the jingly Christmas songs you tend to hear this time of year, one of the most divisive is "The Christmas Shoes". There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground with this song; you either love it or hate it, and I readily admit that I fall into the latter camp. Someone evidently listened to a song designed to be as saccharine as possible and said to themselves, "Gee...that would make a great movie!". As expected, the result is less a movie than a series of Hallmark channel movie-like cliches: finding the True Meaning Of Christmas (tm). In one case, this involves a son buying his mom what looks like Dorothy's ruby slippers before she passes away from plotitis. In another case, an embarrassed looking Rob Lowe plays a grinch-y workaholic dad who learns to value his family time over his very prestigious small-town lawyer career. He's working on an environmental case ("something something fishermen something land use") that occupies so much of his attention and time that he fails to show up for his daughter's performances at one of the town's seemingly hundreds of Christmas concerts. These two plot lines converge when the dying woman's son collects empty cans so that he can buy the shoes. Just as in the song, Lowe shows up at a local department store on Christmas eve, buying random things (a Monopoly board, a teddy bear, a doll) in order to placate his daughter (because, you see, he was so eevil that he didn't think to buy her any Christmas gifts until just now). While there, he runs into the son, who is $5 of the cash needed to buy the shoes. Lowe gives the kid a $20 to cover the cost of the shoes, but neither he nor the kid actually walk up to the cashier to give the money; the kid runs out to give his mother the present before she passes, and Lowe realizes that Christmas Is More Than Things and walks out without paying for anything. So I guess the takeaway was that it's OK to openly loot a store if it's for Christmas. Son gives his mom the shoes, and much weeping and gnashing of teeth (from me, as I sat and watched this crap) happened. Rob Lowe, meanwhile, met his wife and daughter while they were caroling and has a reconciliation scene. The final scene confusingly jumps from the kid running around with his dog sometime after Christmas to "modern day" (about a decade or so later), where Rob Lowe (who looks exactly the same) is at the grave of his mother. The kid, now a twentysomething adult in medical school, shows up at his mother's grave to honor her. The way this was filmed made it either look like they had buried the mom on Christmas day or that Rob Lowe was a time lord. My teeth were hurting from the sugar by the end. So to answer your question about whether I think the song or the movie is worse: I'm going to go against the grain a bit and say the song. The movie wasn't 'good' by any stretch of the imagination, but the movie was not quite as horrifically bad as I was expecting. You can always just refuse to watch the movie, but the song is three minutes of scientifically-designed, focus-tested syrup that you just can't escape this time of year. I can't really say anything more about the song that Patton Oswalt hasn't already covered, and probably more hilariously than I ever could.
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Dec 22, 2017 19:38
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Airplane II: The Sequel (1982): C The original Airplane! is a classic. It's been quoted so much that it's gotten cliche. Its sequel is only half as good - if that. Although there are some funny bits, the movie feels like it's trying too hard. When it's not rehashing old jokes from the original (often unfunnily), it's milking jokes so much that they really aren't that funny anymore. Most everything else - including Shatner being Shatner - feels forced. They were probably going for the type of sequel where it's clear that the writers have run out of ideas, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams to show that. Edit: Amended my rating downward and cleaned up a few grammatical errors
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Jan 23, 2018 20:41
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I finally saw The Last Jedi this afternoon with a woman I've been seeing. A few plot details were spoiled for me already (ramming enemy ships in hyperspace), but most of them weren't. Overall, I would probably give the movie a solid B. A few stray observations: * A lot of the story was deus ex machina (Finn and whatshername about to be executed by the stormtroopers until, at the last moment, BB-8 shot at them, Leia being able to use the Force to fly back into the ship just in time), etc. * At the same time, the movie sometimes played with our expectations a little in unexpected ways (Benecio del Toro ending up being an amoral turncoat, Admiral purple hair actually being cool), etc. * A lot of the story we had seen before. In some cases, that was OK because it was a parallel to the past (the way Rey's showdown with Snoke was handled, Luke begging "our last hope" not to be impulsive and run off to do battle against evil). In some cases, it seemed like setting up set pieces for the sake of set pieces (the battle on the planet with the old Rebel base), etc. * As someone who is much more of a Star Trek fan than a Star Wars one, I thought Luke was handled with much more respect and honor than James Kirk. I don't understand nerds who claim that the movie "ruined" Luke. * The scenes of the Resistance hanging on to the barest amount of hope to hold out against the New Order was extremely inspiring to me in the Trump era.
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Jan 25, 2018 00:08
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The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, Rewatch): A+ One of my favorite movies. How The West Was Won (1962): A Edit: I don't see the point in monopolizing the thread by making a new post for another movie I've just seen. Cocoon (1985): B+ Interesting themes about aging and facing one's mortality. I also couldn't help but notice that Horner self-plagiarized music he lifted directly from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, another one of my favorite movies. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Feb 8, 2018 |
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Feb 7, 2018 20:03
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The Raid: Redemption (2012): B+
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Mar 20, 2018 06:33
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Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961): B Not exactly the movie I was expecting, but it was all good...except for that shockingly offensive walking stereotype that Mickey Rooney played. Deathtrap (1982): A Full of twists that I honestly didn't see coming. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie, both because of the acting (Reeve and Caine) and the convoluted - in a good way - story. I don't want to say too much more because it might potentially spoil it, but this movie is an underrated classic. It also had a great soundtrack that sounded like baroque-era classical music. But because there's a video game with a similar name, I couldn't find it on Youtube, unfortunately. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 1, 2018 |
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Apr 1, 2018 05:29
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Leonard Part 6 (1987, Rewatch): D Ridiculous and unfunny story. Joyless, wooden acting. The most obvious product placements since Mac and Me.
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Apr 12, 2018 16:57
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The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, Rewatch): B I have nothing against McQueen, Dunaway or the rest of the cast of the original, but I honestly prefer the 1999 remake. I've always thought that Brosnan's version of Thomas Crown was more clever. It felt like he was really playing a cat and mouse game with Rene Russo. Another problem with both the 1968 original and the 1999 remake is that both Dunaway and Russo figure out the plots way too quickly. The police are completely flummoxed, but they both waltz in there and in the space of five minutes, are on to Crown. It's unrealistic; especially with a plot as intricate and clever as Crown's.
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Apr 27, 2018 03:08
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The Terminator (1984): A I was born the same year as this movie's release, but somehow I had never seen it. It was fairly familiar, though, because I had gotten some of the disparate plot points from cultural osmosis. Now I understand some of the references from Conker's Bad Fur Day (especially one of the boss fights). Great movie. It reminded me a lot of Westworld (the original '70s movie; not the new series). I actually saw the twist at the end coming, but it was cool to see future events coming together. The writing is tight; the plot gives you a minute or two to catch your breath before getting right back into the action, and I like that initially, you're not sure whether Kyle is an enemy or a friend. Is the sequel worth watching? F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 00:42
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:30 |
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Will do. The best part is that I'm coming into the sequel almost completely unspoiled. I know almost nothing about the movie except that it happens years after the first and that Schwarzenegger returns (presumably as a Terminator). And there's apparently something about destroying the headquarters of the company that made cyborgs or something (I accidentally read something about it on imdb while reading trivia about the original Terminator).
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Jun 12, 2018 16:00
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