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13 Hours - Have you seen Black Hawk Down? Then just imagine the same thing, but much worse in every single way. That's exactly what this movie is. It's not the BENGHAZI CONSPIRACY OMFG movie people feared, just dumb and above all else loving boring. Think about something that wasn't even that good about BHD, like how the characters were kind of simplistic cliches. In this movie the 6 main guys are literally written as the exact same white dudebro fuckface. There's just nothing loving there, not even by the standards of The Expendables or something like that. Compared to other Bay movies it's lovely. I was worried it was going to be some conspiracy garbage but it just stinks in a general way all over. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 00:30
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Batman Begins 7/10 - This was a solid, fun movie with a bit more humor than I remembered. It also has by far the grubbiest rendition of Gotham City of all the 3 movies, which I appreciated. The villainous plot is dumb, and Katie Holmes is just an egregiously bad actress with only 1 facial expression, but her character is used sparingly so it doesn't harm things very much. It's already a little too long, but it's the least bloated of the 3 films. Your rear end is only going to go more numb from here... The Dark Knight 7/10 - In retrospect, this movie ONLY works because of the Joker. I'm sure dumb people on the internet overreacted and called it the GREATEST PERFORMANCE EVER, but I'll be goddamned if Heath Ledger doesn't steal the show and make every scene he's in weirdly menacing and/or genuinely funny. Which is a good thing, because if you take away the Joker you're left with a meandering, overlong melodrama that doesn't really hang together. Replacing Katie Holmes was a fine idea, but it feels like the Bruce Wayne-Rachel Dawes-Harvey Dent love triangle they're trying to make the foundation of the film can't bear all the weight they're trying to put on it. I also never really bought into what Two-Face was doing as a villain; I understood it in the abstract, sure, but nothing he did had much visceral impact on me. That said, the Joker held up for me as a villain, which is refreshing when comic book movies seem to be so bad at having bad guys. The Dark Knight Rises 6/10 - And now we're irredeemably bloated, having added 24 minutes to the running time of the already-long Batman Begins, just to tell a story of basically identical scope but without the burden of being an origin story. Bane's gimmick with the mask is dumb, but he is both menacing and sometimes even funny, though God knows what that loving accent even is. You'd think a film about a populist demagogue who is actually full of poo poo and a massive liar would resonate more in 2017, but these movies are more about creating the sensation of being topical than actually saying anything. There are a lot of individually enjoyable things here, so it's hardly a total loss, but they really lost sight of how much of the run time was sheer filler somewhere along the way. What surprised me about watching these movies in 2017 is how shallow they felt. They're really no more serious than the MCU movies, beyond being browner and not being as overtly joke-y. They're a more cohesive trilogy than anything the MCU produced, certainly, but you can't say that The Dark Knight raising the specter of mass surveillance, only to literally delete it at the very end of the movie and never bring it up again, is anything but the same poo poo they did in The Avengers when the same topic was hinted at and then forgotten. It really feels like the seriousness of this trilogy is largely one of surface style rather than any substance worth talking about.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:28
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Logan - I'm finding this one difficult to rate so I'm not even going to bother with giving it a number. This isn't a superhero movie. Not really. It takes characters from comic books and puts them in... a modern Western with apocalyptic undertones? The world isn't ending, at least not for the average American (if they can stay out of the way, which they often can't), but the subtext is that all the bad trends in our current society are continuing to their logical lovely conclusions. Diversity is getting a pharmaceutical cure, and anybody left that's outside the norm is being hunted down by white trash paramilitaries with guns and neck tattoos, who in turn work for erudite white guys who regard the suffering their decisions cause with glacial indifference. This is alone among the X-Men related movies in actually making good use of the "Mutants as [insert persecuted minority here]" metaphor, probably because the mutants here aren't 90% fit young good-looking white people with exciting abilities and token difficulties. They're adults who are winding down physically and/or mentally, or children who often act like... actual children. When redneck shitfucks threaten to round them up and send them to camps, it's actually threatening. CONSTANTLY threatening, in fact. Oppression here is actually... oppressive. It's not window dressing for eye lasers blowing poo poo up and psychic duels, it's basically the whole movie. It doesn't depend on the past X-Men movies (never mind the Wolverine movies) in any meaningful plot sense, but there is an impact in seeing THIS as where it all ends up, to see how the scale of hope in those movies was so utterly naive and stupid and wrong. Logan isn't a totally hopeless movie - the whole plot is driven by a literally childish hope, in a way - but it's a very distant kind of hope. It's the hope that you'll lose 99% instead of 100%, that some speck of something will survive somewhere. It sure as gently caress won't be here, and YOU won't get to see it, but maybe SOMEONE will. In a way it seems to be about what apocalypses are really like, after so many X-Men stories about looming doomsdays narrowly averted. They aren't big and exciting, with killer robots or magical ancient Egyptian mutants or psychic death towers or whatever. Instead, peoples pass from history in waves, and are little noted nor long remembered, their contributions stolen and re-purposed or just plain forgotten. Millions get plowed under without notice or comment, the simple fact that they were even people at all often lost somewhere along the way. All of the above is important, but the movie is also exciting and even funny sometimes. The performances are excellent across the board, and it deserves special credit for prominently featuring child acting that is Actually Good. It was riveting and, for want of a better way to put it, I liked looking at it. It's certainly can't be accused of being just another comic book movie, and it also avoids feeling like a juvenile exercise in WHOA DUDE THAT'S SO ~GRIMDARK~ *sick guitar riff* in spite of the fact that it really is grim as hell and turns the ultra-violence up to 11. I mean, it does showcase every kind of goddamn stabbing and chopping you can think of doing with unbreakable hand swords. Also, you get to watch Wolverine just lose his poo poo and yell WHAT THE gently caress?!?! at a kid, which is nice. It runs a little long, but it's Batman Begins long, not The Dark Knight Rises ARE YOU loving KIDDING ME? long. The downside is that I don't know how much I actually like watching this. I don't know that it's really more hopeless than Mad Max: Fury Road, which I really liked, but it just struck me as more viscerally depressing. I'm probably going to have to go back and watch it again at some point and see how I feel about it the second time around.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:54
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Ghost in the Shell (2017) - 5/10 So, this thing. I saw the 1995 anime and liked it well enough. 7/10 maybe? This movie is pretty great visually and has some individual scenes that work, but it really comes across as a mash-up of multiple stories that don't add up to a single coherent plot. There are two main antagonists, one of whom seems to be going 2 directions at once, I assume because he's a composite of 2 completely different villains from past GiTS stories (looked it up, turns out that's true!) It's kind of just a dumb sloppy mess if you try to think about it at all; it regularly teases exploring an interesting idea so it can be dropped and never heard from again. It really seems like less than the sum of its parts. The best that can be said about it is that it looks nice and didn't actively make me angry. Kong: Skull Island - 7/10 It's a monster mash that's actually exciting and has monsters that are actually threatening, and the comic relief is usually pretty funny. Enough said. Well, I left out something important: this movie is basically Apocalypse Now with CGI monsters doodled all over it. It overshoots homage, flies past grand theft, and comes back around to being kind of awesome for it. Hope you like Hueys with loudspeakers flying into jungle sunsets blaring the most obvious era-appropriate rock songs, because you're getting a shitload of it!  But seriously, it's Movie Vietnam with a giant ape, and Samuel L. Jackson has napalm and doesn't give a gently caress in the best way possible. It's main problem is that some of the characters are just sort of there, but at worst they're forgettable - none of them were bad enough to be actively irritating.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:46
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Black Panther 4.5/5 This is the best Marvel movie at actually being a real movie. It's just the best crafted of the bunch top to bottom. It has better characters performed by better actors in a more vivid and fully realized setting. The humor flows more naturally from the characters and situations. All good villains are the hero of the movie in their own head, and Killmonger convincingly embodies this better than any comic book villain I can think of. There is basically zero effort to shoehorn references to other Marvel movies or set up future franchise movies. The pacing is by and large very effective; it never really felt like things were being overly rushed or needlessly dragging. Above all else it just sucked me into the world of the movie and really held my attention. The costume design and production design in general are just wall-to-wall fantastic. Really, forget the Marvel poo poo, it's really just an excellent standalone sci-fi adventure movie. I went in hoping it would be good and came out impressed. My criticisms border on nitpicking, but here goes: I do think the final bigass outdoor battle scene maybe got away from them a little bit. For the most part I found the action scenes to be exciting and even riveting, but there were points where they went overboard with the fastcutfastcutfastcut poo poo in the hand-to-hand fighting, which always grates on me a little. And it suffers from the modern CGI blockbuster thing where no matter how much money they sink into it the effects (and this is a $200m movie), they still end up with a handful of scenes that don't actually look that good.
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Feb 26, 2018 16:51
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Ghostbusters (2016) - 2/5 So I finally watched this after missing it when it came out. Since this had a big internet controversy stirred up by MRA garbagemen because they let girls in the playhouse, I guess I need to point out that I always want those people to gently caress off whenever they talk about anything. I liked the original movie but I was fine with a sequel/reboot/whatever, even if it was completely different, as long as it had some good jokes in it. I think I went into it with a pretty neutral attitude. This movie is pretty bad. Having seen everybody in it be funny in other places, I'm pretty sure that the problem is that the writing is just dull as all gently caress. So much of the dialogue just feels like generic filler to move the plot from A to B, or the straight (wo)man's setup for a punchline that never materializes. Every comedy doesn't need to shotgun 10 jokes a second, but so much of this movie is lifeless dead space that it's kind of alarming. It's a comedy with a thudding lack of wit, just in general. It's also a film that seems to be wrapped up in depicting its protagonists as realistically miserable about the fact that they're hated by stupid people for dumb reasons. You might think this is an interesting hook for a Ghostbusters movie hated by stupid people for dumb reasons before it ever came out, but it seems to have nothing to say about it except that life is depressing because the world is full of assholes. It's just weirdly defeatist; even in victory everything feels oddly flat. The entire supernatural world is also less threatening than the original, and more just an avalanche of candy-colored CGI. Everything always felt inconsequential and weightless. I probably wouldn't have cared so much if this was a funnier movie, but everything felt like a brightly colored cartoon nothing. I don't want to say it was a total loss, and you had moments where the actors managed to turn nothing into something, but taken all together this was just profoundly mediocre.
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Jul 30, 2018 16:51
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Harime Nui posted:Serenity (2005, d. Whedon; Netflix; TV) - lmao/10 - Probably should have left Firefly back in the happy halls of dim memory In retrospect Firefly was just a nice novelty show for its era, but somehow became A Thing. The movie is quite a bit less than that. It doesn't really work as a standalone OR as a continuation of the series; it's in a creative dead zone where character development from the TV show (such as it was) is dropped for no discernible reason, while all the new things that were added were actually WORSE than what had been set up in the TV show. The villain is a moron's idea of a clever villain to the nth degree, speaking almost entirely in catchphrase meant to sound deep that don't actually say poo poo.
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Aug 8, 2018 12:44
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I give Brightburn slightly more credit because its overwhelming focus is just delivering tense horror experiences and severe gore, and it definitely delivers those things. So maybe more like 2.5 or 3 out of 5 for me.
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May 25, 2019 13:10
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House (1977) 9/10 (re-watch) So this is mostly infamous for being batshit insane, but the more I watch it the more I think it's sneakily a thoughtful little film. I love the sequence on the train where the girls are "watching" the silent movie of the story Gorgeous is telling them about her family history around World War II. The imaginary movie becomes relentlessly grim, but the girls are completely unable to engage with it as anything but a squee-worthy teen melodrama, even as we see people getting machine gunned and the atomic bomb goes off. They regard the horrors of war with complete incomprehension,which is going to be very unfortunate for them because those horrors haven't really gone away. This is a film where the monster is arguably nothing less than the inability to let go of the traumas of war... directed by someone who had all their childhood friends die in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. This is so unsubtle that it's hardly even subtext so much as "poo poo the movie directly shows you" but Obayashi buries it under layers of visual effects tricks and random slapstick and eccentric editing until the human mind can barely process it. Because this movie is still pure  y'all.
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Sep 17, 2019 02:26
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Godzilla King of the Monsters (2019) - 2/5 I have a high tolerance for dumb in my giant monster movies if they're fun, but uh this is not not not that. It didn't even work as a mindless eye candy CGI spectacle for me because so much of it is dark, blurred and/or rainy to appreciate the look of it. It doesn't have the simple pleasures of the shabbier old Godzilla movies or the satisfying doom-and-gloom of the 2014 movie. It's stupid in a flatly boring and irritating way. Terminator: Salvation (2009) - 2/5 This wasn't a total loss, but it was just kind of boring and I never gave a poo poo. It seems determined to deprive everybody of the cool world the first two movies' Future War snippets promised in favor of dour dudes dressed like extras from Black Hawk Down shooting Terminators with the exact guns that didn't work on them in the first two movies. It also seems like it's just missing chunks that are supposed to tie everything together. It's flatly worse than Terminator 3, which was itself fairly pointless but nowhere near as dull. Aquaman (20180 - 4/5 This was pretty good! It essentially accomplished what the Marvels movies all shoot for, but clearly did it better than most of them. The humor was more organic, the CGI spectacle was more spectacular, the action was more dynamic. They really seemed to stick to the axiom that if you can't make something look real, you'd better at least make it look real interesting. Instead of, I dunno an airport or some poo poo.
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Oct 23, 2019 16:57
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zer0spunk posted:jojo rabbit - 3.5/5 - i liked it, it has heart/charm and a few solid moments.. i'm kind of over the hidden jew in the floorboard/wall trope though personally, it just feels lazy as hell when its the exact same scene in every movie..historically jews were saved in a lot of clever ways, can we show anything else for once? My take is that evil should be insulted constantly, because it's almost always dumb as loving poo poo if you look at it for 30 seconds. The horrors of the Nazi regime weren't funny at all, but Nazisim was always some really loving stupid trash for gullible garbage people, and fascist efficiency was almost always IRL a clown car full of drunk morons fighting over the wheel as they careened off a cliff. It's actually hard to overstate what creepy weirdo fuckup losers the Nazis mostly were. Depicting them as uniformly efficient monsters is ahistorical and glamorizes them in its own way. Also there's nothing that those kind of people hate more than to not be taken seriously. You don't make people who love Stalin mad by saying he killed lots of people, you do it by showing him acting like a bitch and then pissing himself. (I'm also pretty sure I stole this whole like of thinking from Mel Brooks FWIW)
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Oct 31, 2019 15:29
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Midway (2019) - 2/5 This is the definition of a mediocre war movie. Not terrible, not offensive or insulting, but just incredibly by the numbers. It's also weirdly sterile, not just because it's PG-13, but everything in the movie just looks too slick and clean. Even scenes in offices and bars look too neat and sanitized. The CGI battle scenes are too much like a flashy action movie and not enough like a war movie, everything is amped up and overblown in a cartoony way that's sometimes hard to take seriously. A handful of scenes are genuinely tense or visually impressive, but not nearly enough. In terms of plot, it covers the entire period from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the end of the Battle of Midway. Everything about the war in the Pacific gets the most superficial treatment possible just to make it fit, and we never get much of a feel for the personalities of most of the people involved beyond Cocky Pilot Guys or Serious Staff Officer Mans or Dour Japanese Admirals. None of it stood out as being inaccurate, but it's the summary of the summary of the summary of events. The sad thing is that the Battle of Midway is an absolutely batshit insane historical event with a bunch of weird and interesting characters, and this movie just does nothing interesting with any of it. Just watch Midway (1976) again if you want to see a Hollywood depiction of the event. That movie is itself far from perfect, but watching a basic war movie is a lot more palatable when its full of famous old-time actors and archival gun camera footage. Unlike the new movie it also touched on things like the Japanese interment camps, and somehow got across the horrors of war better while being rated PG and using models and rear projection and paint squibs and poo poo. tl,dr: It's exactly what you'd expect if you close your eyes and imagine Roland Emmerich half-assing a war movie.
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Nov 26, 2019 20:59
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mobby_6kl posted:Yeah this is spot on. I watched right after Ford vs Ferrari because a friend of mine was bored that day and insisted on doing a double feature. The contrast is pretty hilarious, this looks like a straight to VHS type of movie in comparison to the cinematography, effects, production values and acting in FvF. The battle might have been decided by the original commander on the scene (Halsey) getting a crazy rash out of nowhere that caused him to be replaced by Spruance, who was probably the greatest fleet commander in US history. They show Halsey getting the rash that eventually sent him to the hospital, but it's just a thing that happens that we're given no reason to care about. poo poo, Spruance is barely even in the loving movie, and he was the commander on the scene at the battle that the loving movie is named after!
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Nov 27, 2019 14:50
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The Clowner posted:Dune 1984 looked and sounded fantastic. Too bad it sucked. It has a great atmosphere, a unique look and a good cast... but it's a trash adaptation that doesn't work as a film. What gets me about it is that the biggest problem with adapting Dune is just making the story fit in the theatrical runtime, so they... added *extra* poo poo not in the books? It's such a wierd mix of rushed and full of filler.
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Mar 14, 2020 14:06
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DeimosRising posted:Interested in your thoughts on ravenous and lifeforce Seconded. I've always assumed that would be my kind of trash but I've never gotten around to seeing it.
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Jun 2, 2020 19:07
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DorianGravy posted:Omega Doom (1996) - Rutger Hauer stars as Omega Doom, an android who finds himself in a town with feuding android gangs in this post-apocalyptic Western-ish movie. Rutger Hauer has a good screen presence, and I was amused that a character called "Omega Doom" seems to be a good guy. I also liked the "robotic" movements of some of the other actors, but this movie is just so slow. It only has about 10 actors and, for a movie with an 84 minute run time, scenes just drag on and on. I made it thirty minutes before turning it off. This sounds suspiciously like at least one Doctor Who episode lol
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Jun 14, 2021 14:36
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TommyGun85 posted:I adore Ramis and Murray and also hated this movie. It was never great but completely falls apart after boot camp.
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Jul 9, 2021 18:51
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