• Most new users don't bother reading our rules. Here's the one that is ignored almost immediately upon signup: DO NOT ASK FOR FANEDIT LINKS PUBLICLY. First, read the FAQ. Seriously. What you want is there. You can also send a message to the editor. If that doesn't work THEN post in the Trade & Request forum. Anywhere else and it will be deleted and an infraction will be issued.
  • If this is your first time here please read our FAQ and Rules pages. They have some useful information that will get us all off on the right foot, especially our Own the Source rule. If you do not understand any of these rules send a private message to one of our staff for further details.
  • Please read our Rules & Guidelines

    Read BEFORE posting Trades & Request

The Last Movie(s) You Watched... (quick one or two sentence reviews)

Guns Akimbo (Harry Potter has guns 'surgically' attached to his hands by badguys, and not much else...) This movie was just ok, I expected more energy in the direction and editing based on the trailers. I wanted to compare to Scott Pilgrim but that would be a really unfavorable comparison because this is attempting to be kinda like Scott Pilgrim, but lacks the charm and music, and adds a layer of dirt and grime. The more apt comparison would be with Upgrade but without the AI character. That low-budget, semi-near non-utopian future, everybody sucks so no deaths squeeze out even a little bit emotion, kind of setting.

Recommended for @Jrzag42 I assume you would like it more than I did. I didn't hate it, it's fine.
 
addiesin said:
Recommended for @Jrzag42 I assume you would like it more than I did. I didn't hate it, it's fine.
Click to expand...
Haha I keep trying to get people to watch it, I love it. It's a shame that you weren't big on it, but oh well. I didn't expect anyone else to compare it to Scott Pilgrim (or in your case not compare it), it definitely came to mind for me as well (maybe its more obvious of a comparison than I remember). This movie really made me fall in love with Daniel Radcliffe, I was never big on Harry Potter and this was the first thing beyond that that I saw him in (and then of course I went on to watch swiss Army Man which was... weird), I really need to check out more of his smaller films.
In any case, there aren't enough small, fun, stylistic action movies these days.
 
I watched it a few weeks ago also and was disappointed. I'm not sure what I was wanting or expecting, but that wasn't it.
 
Flight of the Navigator (1986)
Showed this to the kiddos for the second time. This movie is the perfect family film. The 80s soundtrack is over the top with corny synths, but the dramatic orchestrated synth music and main navigator theme are just perfect. I don't give out many perfect tens, but this movie is super fun and connects on so many levels emotionally. 10/10

Here's a great video about how they pulled off all of the fx in the movie.
 
West Side Story. It looks great, the music is great, the acting is mostly good, and (unfortunately) the themes are just as relevant today. Still, I struggled to get through this. I’m not a musical fan. People singing and dancing the plot forward just doesn’t work for me. Elgort, though a good singer, doesn’t measure up to his more professional costars, and he doesn’t have the charisma and screen presence to justify his casting.
 
Okay so it's not a movie, but I just saw a play earlier tonight. These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich. It's a true story about women that worked for a The Radium Dial Company, where they painted numbers onto watches with radioluminescent paint that was really nifty because it made the numbers on the watch glow in the dark for up to six months! However, the radium in the paint also gave the women terminal cancer.
The play ran a quick 90 minutes and it was fantastic; had great moments of levity, and was ultimately heartbreaking as you watch these characters slowly die for their livelihoods while the company did everything it could to hide the truth about the dangers of radium.

It's not been turned into a movie yet but it absolutely should be!
 
House of Gucci. Is it just me or did this feel a bit like Scott doing Scorsese. It just feels different from a Ridley Scott movie. There is also some wonky editing and poor backgrounds. It just feels like it was meant to be an epic but rushed and isn’t up to snuff. Even the stellar cast has issues. The Italian accents seem to come and go. The dialogue that no one would ever say but is just there to expeditiously advance the plot doesn’t help. Tonally it’s all over the place. I think this is also what reminds me of Scorsese. Scorsese makes that work; here it simply doesn’t. It’s a frustrating movie actually because there’s so much talent involved and you can sense a great movie just beyond the fingertips of this movie. It’s not awful, but it should be way better.
 
Heist (2001). David Mamet’s heist movie. I’m a sucker for a good heist movie so I was surprised to see this on Netflix and realize I’d never seen it. It had decent reviews so I gave it a shot. It’s not good. If you know anything about heist movies you know the original plan (spoiler warning) is never the actual plan. As such, it’s easy to see what’s going to happen. The positive reviews praise Mamet’s dialogue but IMO it’s just awful. Lines feel written for a screenplay. An example, one guy says, “nice day for a race.” Other guy answers with the only answer that could make the line work, “oh yeah what race is that?” To which the original guy says, “the human race.” If the guy doesn’t answer with that exact question there’s no one liner. The whole movie is like that. I could go on, but I’m sure I’ve already exceeded this thread’s word count for reviews. Very disappointing.
 
Sphere (1998)
This was one of the first modern psychological sci-fi thrillers I ever watched. It's not perfect, but I've always thought it was a pretty good movie. I'm not the biggest fan of the cast, but the story and plot are intriuging enough to keep you engaged. The biggest issue I have is that the main 3 characters just feel tired and casual in their acting. Sharon Stone has the most dynamic performance of the three, while Samuel L. Jackson and Dustin Hoffman play a psychologist and mathematician as themselves. Still, this is a solid 7/10 for me.
 
^ Many years ago I bought the DVD of 'Sphere' genuinely thinking it was that cool space movie I'd rented on VHS in the late 90s where they fly a ship into hell, only discovering it was not in fact 'Event Horizon' when I started watching it, so I was inevitably very disappointed :LOL: .
 
Uncharted (2022)
Some gamer superfans have been ripping into this fun popcorn film adaptation. JC, how faithful were the Super Mario Brothers and Double Dragon movies?! Or the Resident Evil adaptations, for that matter? I swear, <old man voice on> kids these days don't know how good they got it.

Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020)
I want a time machine to go back and assemble a team of history's most mediocre screenwriters...they would still come up with a better script than this unfunny nostalgia cash in.

Cobra Kai (Season 4)
Speaking of nostalgia cash-ins, here's how you do one right. Each season is basically its own 4-hour movie riffing on the original trilogy. While they're diminishing returns as they focus more and more on new characters, this is still just a damn smart revamp.
 
The 355 (2022)
This is basically a TNT made for tv wannabe action spy flick movie. The characters are bland and predictable as is every twist in the plot. I honestly never really knew what the main plot was. The choreography of action scenes is non existant. It's just flat out bad. 1/10
 
A triumvirate of movies that would be bad for Valentine's Day:
The Crying Game (1992)
I feel like not living in the UK and not living in 1992 have made it impossible to connect with this one. Its sentiments are admirable, but it was impossible for me to conceive of how anyone was surprised by the twist, leaving a stiff and awkwardly-plotted film.

The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski's film which seems set up to be a neo-noir love quadrangle but devolves into an overblown political spy thriller. I actually quite liked it for most of the runtime, but Polanski re-wrote the ending quite obviously and poorly.

Just Like Heaven (2005)
The most typical rom-com V-day watch, this is a film I would normally claw my eyes out before paying attention to, but the strength of the cast almost made it bearable. Also, hope you like the Cure song, cuz you're gonna hear it every twenty minutes.
 
Unknown (2011)
I forgot most of this movie. It's ok but nothing special. If you like Liam Neeson action flicks, you'll most likely like this movie.

Non-Stop (2014)
A bit more substance to this one when the mystery is revealed. It feels convoluted along the way though. Again, if you like Liam Neeson action flicks you'll most likely like this one too. Seeing Lupita Nyong'o in a tertiary role was a bit frustrating, seeing how she had just won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 12 Years a Slave which released a year before this movie.
 
^of all Neeson's old man actioners, I'd been led to believe that those by Jaume Collet-Serra were a cut above, that is: Unknown, Run All Night, Non-Stop, and The Commuter.

Morbius (2022)
Yeah, the negative hype around this is well-earned, though not for Leto himself, who actually turns in what I think would be a very solid lead performance if the rest of the film around him weren't so unspeakably mismanaged. Opposite him, Matt Smith comes off better because his ridiculous overblown energy later in the film matches the movie's absurdity.

The Power of the Dog (2021)
I appreciated The Piano more than actually liked it, and the same can be said here, only less so. I just do not connect with Campion's particular version of feminism, which seems to rely on all male characters being different varieties of Scumbag. Her "characters" are mere ideas of people.

What If? (2021)
Marvel's animated mini-series managed to get an astounding number of the MCU actors back to reprise alternate versions of themselves. Sadly, they didn't get any of the writers back, and the stories here are (for the most part) the kind of geeky comic book pablum that makes cinephiles write off comic book movies as something for teenagers and nerds. Chadwick Boseman's last performance goes out on a high note, however.
 
The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)
Well, for all of its cringeworthy moments, poor dialogue, SLOW MO to the max, and too zoomed in fights that weren't close to the original trilogy's choreography.......I loved it. I smiled, I laughed and I stood on the edge of my seat. Is this the same caliber as The Matrix or Reloaded? No. Does it expand the story in an intriguing way? Yes. If you love nostalgia and a fresh continuation that isn't perfect, but captured everything you had hoped for for the two stars of the original trilogy, this is near perfect story wise. I wasn't a fan of the motorcycle scene at the end and that last scene was a bit too on the nose. The story is definitely better than the movie, but I enjoyed it and will probably return to it in an edit some time in the future. 6.5/10
 
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Hmmm, perhaps I just don't get this one. I didn't find it compelling and often lost interest and started to multi task. I'm not the biggest Bogart fan, but I really enjoy him in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Sierra, Dark Passage, and The African Queen. For me, this movie just was flat out dull. Peter Lorre is the typical eccentric character he usually plays, Bogey is the cold heartless character he usually plays and everyone else is simply forgettable. This is definitely not the stuff that my dreams are made of.......4/10

Trying Casablanca next.
 
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
I was pretty hype for this movie as a kind of hip indie I could promote, which I love doing. But go figure, it's more like a pretentious hipster indie, all deliberate style, and (for me) not really a clear idea of what it's trying to say.

The Wave (2019)
Otoh, here's an indie film from the same year that got about zero attention. I found it nearly as pretty, with actually a better cast, and with a much tighter script and a very clear idea of its theme and point-of-view. But it's Sci-Fi, so film critics automatically count it as less-than.

GATE (2015)
A one-season anime that has an interesting premise (modern tech vs fantasy world) but ends up being kinda creepy and very much a propaganda piece.
 
Dune (2021)
I don't often use the word beautiful to describe a movie, but there is a beauty in this movie that I have rarely ever witnessed in this medium. The beauty is not that it's overly gorgeous or desirable, but rather that it is orchestrated in such a way as to pull you in completely so that you feel what you are watching and believe that it is real. The previous film I felt this about was Blade Runner 2049. Denis Villeneuve is a master of visual story telling. This collaboration between he and Zimmer is a sensational masterpiece so far. Yes, I'm only an hour into this one. Couldn't wait to share thoughts on it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom