Amph What was the last movie you saw?

That sounds exactly like the kind of film Seinfeld would make up. I feel like it would make a solid double feature with Chunnel.

The Mark of Zorro. The 1940, talkie, Tyrone Power version. It doesn't have the playful wit of the silent Fairbanks version, and the action scenes aren't as spectacular and frequent (and with the Spanish characters speaking in 1940s all-American accents, it might have been better off silent). It's never anything less than a pleasure to see a classic hero like Zorro adventure onscreen, and the film is good fun. I had a smile on my face the whole time. But it doesn't quite measure up to the original. What it does have going for it is a strong cast, with Tyrone Power's charming performance, and Basil Rathbone, always a fantastic villain. And it's all worth it for the duel between them, one of the best swordfights in cinema history. Fantastically choreographed and well shot, with the characters lunging all across a confining office, the action driven by precise swordplay. There's something about a classic swashbuckler that's deeply satisfying. And this, though not on the level of Fairbanks's masterpiece, is certainly a classic.

 

Bananas (1971) and Young Frankenstein. Great double bill on TCM last night. Bananas, I completely forgot the Howard Cosell play-by-play of the newly weds first time in the bed. That was the funniest scene in the film and what a way to end the movie. Cosell looked like he was going to laugh at one point too. Young Frankenstein - Nnnnnhhhhmmmmmmmm (great). What else can be said?

 

Watched Everest earlier on one of the movie channels. Saw it in the cinema but it's still worth another viewing.

 

Dracula (1979)

I've always meant to see this, and tbh, I was left rather underwhelmed. John Williams's soundtrack is just...there, the cinematography is rather grainy to the point where it's almost impossible to see what's going on at times, and it's very slow moving. However, Langella owns the role of the Count. He comes off as charismatic and menacing at the same time. I still think FFC's version is the best.

The Cowboy Way (1994)

This was back when Woody Harrelson was still (unfortunately) considered a good leading man. He's terrible as expected, but Kiefer Sutherland is pretty decent in the straight man role. It's a bad forgettable movie regardless.

 

The Magnificent Seven: Meh....Fun, but little else.

The original was 128 minutes, this was 133 minutes, and yet I felt I got more out of that time in the original.

 

Solaris (1972). A bit confusing, but I think I liked it.

 

Taxi Driver (1976). I haven't seen many Scorsese movies; just GoodFellas, Wolf of Wall Street, some of the Aviator and Casino, and this. GoodFellas is clearly the best of the bunch, but this was pretty good. I felt like in a lot of ways it's really relevant now in a world of mass shootings by white males and gun control debates. DeNiro was of course great in it, and Foster and Keitel as well. The thing that interested me the most was just the image of the world Travis was living in, and how scarred and broken it was. A lot of movies from that era have a similar feel that I find really interesting, about the darkness of urban life. Think French Connection, Dirty Harry, Chinatown, even The Warriors. This film carries a lot of that to the extreme. One of many reasons why that era of film from the late 60s to the late 70s is one of my favorites.

 

I'm sorry you felt this way. It's always been one of my favorites. Langella is just at that right place between sinister and sexy.

The grainy cinematography may be the result of the version you watched. The director went back and sucked a lot of the vibrant color out of the film when it was released on home video. It was another Lucas like revamping to match his 'original' vision.

 

End of Smokey and the Bandit and now all of it.

 

He Walked by Night. A police procedural noir, it reminded me a bit of The Naked City, which came out the same year. It doesn't have quite as much pop as Jules Dassin's film, but the narrated, pseudo-documentary style is similar. It's fascinated by the process of a police investigation, following the officers as they piece together clues using cutting-edge science, old-fashioned questioning, their intellect, and a little luck. As often happens in this kind of film, the detectives themselves are pretty thin characters. The film isn't interested in them as people; it's interested in their jobs, in what they do. They don't need to be particularly colorful, though, as the procedure is fascinating and the film has enough color in its criminal, a cop-killing mastermind based on the real-life case of Erwin Walker. Intelligent, devious, and prepared, he and his diverse crime spree make for compelling subject matter and a great challenge for the police. Very solid.

 

First Blood, the only one of the Rambo films I can enjoy.

 

The Private Life of Henry VIII. A playfully satirical take on England's most notorious king, it also manages to give its characters some moments of real weight. Charles Laughton's performance as Henry is wonderfully human, allowing him to be both compellingly vulnerably and hilariously bombastic. The comic peak of the film has to be the Anne of Cleves sequence, where Laughton plays befuddlement to perfection. Eighty-three years later, it's still a witty, funny, entertaining film.

 

Yeah, Seven Samurai was so much better...

 

both seven samurai and the original magnificent seven are classics imo. was kind of looking forward to this new version until i saw the trailers.

 

April and the Extraordinary World (2016)

French animated film from the makers of 2007's little gem Persopolis, but it's nowhere near as good as that. The animation is gorgeous, and the storyline is somewhat original, though downright bizarre ultimately. It really fails on the awful and uninspired gee-wiz dialogue and the fairly terrible American dub which took me out of the film. I kinda wish I had thought to just watch it in its original language. I ****ing hate dubs. But, 2D animation is a dying art, so I'll take what I can get I guess.

So...maybe this review is unfinished?

 

Eddie the Eagle



In a word, inspiring.

Eddie the Eagle is in the same mold as Rudy and Cool Runnings, where the main character doesn't fit the part of an elite athlete but defies the odds and haters to pursue his dreams. It's not about winning, but participating and achieving.

Thumbs up!

 

The Magnificent Seven (2016). I thought it was a decent western. Not as good as the original Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai (very few are in the latter films case), but I did really enjoy it.

 

Watched Strange Magic a little while ago on one of the movie channels. Pretty good - I really liked the animation!

 

Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick finds a nice balance, making a Vietnam War movie that depicts war as hell without seeming judgmental. It's an anti-war film, but without the pot-smoke haze, bitterness, and cynicism of the typical cinematic narrative. The film's soldiers aren't exactly happy to be there, but they're not constantly griping, going insane, or burning out, either. They mostly adjust. The reality they adjust to might be awful, but they adjust. The film is really rather remote from its characters, but the lack of overt judgment, the understanding its has of their mindset, makes it feel surprisingly sympathetic. It manages to be about the people in the war, not about The War. Which is pretty impressive, given that the characters are pretty thinly drawn and there's no clearly defined narrative. Until the Hue climax, the entire film is basically an hour-and-a-half montage. Yet it works. Some great dialogue, too. R. Lee Ermey's been dining out on this movie for almost thirty years.

 

Okay, so here's my Star Trek Beyond review at last. I got as emotionally involved in this review as I have in any in a very long time. It's super-long and . . . well, I know there are a couple of people around here who like me best when I'm pissed and losing control of my civil demeanor, so here you go I Are The Internets & Boba_Fett_2001. Everyone else is welcome to tackle this one if you think you can handle it, though if you loved the movie, you should probably just keep scrolling.




Star Trek Beyond (2016) – Justin Lin

The farther out we go, the more I find myself wondering what it is we are trying to accomplish.

This movie is godawful. But wait, let’s set the table. And, yes, this is going to be a long review and a pretty fierce one, so strap in. My previous experience with this rebooted/parallel universe Star Trek has been overwhelmingly positive. I went to a special opening night marathon of Into Darkness and saw the first Star Trek with this cast, took a twenty minute break, and saw Into Darkness. At the end of that great evening, I walked out high on life; I ended up giving both of those movies four stars, yes, even Into Darkness, which a lot of people have dissected since and found a failure. Could there be a person more primed for the third in the franchise?

Okay, first off, let’s table the way Into Darkness set up the Klingons as the perfect villains for the third one, set them up so masterfully with such a tantalizing and menacing and iconic sequence as to leave me salivating for the third movie with the Klingons as the villain. Let’s also table the way the studio told the writers on this film that they wanted something less Star Treky and thus inspired them to use villains found nowhere in the franchise, thus kicking the Klingons to the curb without so much as a regretful sigh. Let’s table those things. Because I will become furious again at just how god-blessed stupid the studio was in that decision.

So, let’s start with the positives, which will be easy because a) all the positives come in about the first twenty minutes and b) there are about two of them. No, honestly, the film has a decent start with a fine premise. I like the self-aware nature of the opening where Kirk laments that the journey has become episodic and how this new mission promises to break up the routine. Oh, wait, I forgot the actual start of the film was that whole thing with those aliens that roll around in balls. That was stupid as ****. But, anyway, the first encounter with the enemy was suitably grim and panic-ridden. The idea of starting the movie with our heroes just getting their asses handed to them was a bold decision and a great one. Everything in that fight is pretty great up until the actual crash. Seeing the Enterprise get demolished was chilling and thrilling in equal measures. The moment when the villain growls “Cut its throat” and then the disc shears away was a genuine holy **** moment for me. And then the ship crashes on the planet where not a damn thing makes sense.

I mean, where to start? Okay, Lin’s direction. I’ve enjoyed Lin’s directing before this on other films and I’m not averse to a chaotic style of action. But this isn’t chaotic; it isn’t even disorienting; it’s completely incoherent. There’s a scene where a chase scene/fight scene ends with a long, long slide down the face of the Enterprise’s disc. That’s a great idea and should have been a great sequence, but it fails completely because you can’t tell where anyone is or what they’re doing. There’s a shot in this sequence where we see two characters do a jump across a gap in the wreckage, complete with intense, blaring music. And I had no idea which two characters those were, where they were jumping from, where they were jumping to, and where they were in relation to the other characters. This whole action scene is really indicative of the action problems. It’s a bunch of people running about chasing each other through dark corridors, shooting and screaming and leaping and there’s not the slightest idea of what’s actually going on.

But that’s not all. Oh, no. You see, this movie has no idea what’s happening, not just in the action sequences, but in the plot itself. The script seems to want to explain nothing to an absurd degree. Okay, a few examples. The Macguffin (and, yes, I know a Macguffin “doesn’t matter,” but really Hollywood screenwriters have completely beaten that idea into the ground and we still need to have some idea of its function in the story) is some kind of ancient weapon. See, Bones & Spock make this interesting discovery. Want to know what it does? Me too. We get the vague idea that it releases some kind of black dots (nanobots? bugs? chemical spray?) and those things kill people by eating them (?) or shrinking them (?) or possibly pulling their souls into the weapon itself (?). Late in the film, we’re alerted that if the weapon is released in Yorktown that everyone that breathes will be dead in seconds. So, it’s something you inhale? And why does it take several seconds to kill one person early in the film, but will take approximately the same amount of time to kill millions at the climax? And what is Kirk doing at the end in that whole gravity box thing? Scotty blurts out one of the most ludicrous expository monologues as Kirk prepares to do his whole hero thing that I have ever heard. There is mention of a button to be pushed, several switches to be flipped, a tube that will open, something about a ventilation system, something about being sucked into space and I don’t know what all. And I’m supposed to be able to grasp all of this in seconds so I can both understand what Kirk is doing and be engaged by it? Forget it.

And this isn’t only the weapon. It’s nearly everything in the story. It’s supposed to be a great reveal when we discover that the villain, Krall, is in fact a different character. “Oh my God, Krall is really . . . SOMEONE I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND DO NOT CARE ABOUT IN THE LEAST.” Jaylah has a device that is extremely important to the plot because it can create doubles. No, holograms. No, it can actually transport people. WHAT IS THE GOD-DAMNED THING? JUST WHAT IS IT? Krall horrifies Uruha by showing him what he does with his prisoners. He hangs them from the ceiling and . . . tortures them? Shocks them? Drains their life force? Uses their blood? Doesn’t matter. Happens ONCE and then never again. The film gives us an interesting limitation factor by having the crew use an old ship which they state will be difficult and then never is. The beaming technology is so old that it can only be used to beam one person at a time. Until Kirk vaguely tells Scotty to fix it and suddenly we’re up to twenty people at a time. And suddenly once we know Krall’s SHOCKING TRUE IDENTITY (*sigh*) all of a sudden he looks like the guy at the end. When did he change? How did he change? Could he just always do it? Why didn’t he do it before? Why did he change to Krall in the first place? BEATS ME! NOT A SINGLE ******* CLUE! I know the whole “oh, gee, I didn’t understand it” is a criticism trotted out by idiots who can’t be bothered to pay attention. But, look, you know me. I love movies. I pay attention. And I have never seen a movie just leap merrily over this many necessary explanations.

In fact the movie leaps willy-nilly over things like character development and plot points as well. Jaylah is a pretty flat character, so the film suddenly reveals that her father was murdered by “the one called Manas.” Okay . . . DON’T KNOW WHO THAT IS, MOVIE! Oh, wait, here he is, like ten seconds after he’s mentioned. I mean, this IS the most efficient way to develop characters: reveal the character’s internal conflict ten seconds before she resolves it. And the crew has a clever plan to rescue the prisoners from the Enterprise. They’ll create a distraction wherein Kirk drives in circles on a motorcycle while Jaylah’s device creates countless hologram doubles so that all the soldiers will be busy trying to kill Kirk and fighting the doubles. No one asks the central question which is WHY IN THE GODDAM **** IS IT SO NECESSARY THAT KRALL KILL A GUY WHO’S JUST DRIVING IN CIRCLES ON A MOTORCYCLE?! HE IS LITERALLY DOING NOTHING! N O T H I N G! BUT IT IS SO IMPORTANT THAT THEY KILL A GUY WHO IS ESSENTIALLY DOING DONUTS IN THE PARKING LOT OF KRALL’S PRISON CAMP THAT HE DECIDES TO LEAVE ALL HIS PRISONERS UNGUARDED. I MEAN ******* IGNORE HIM! IGNORE HIM! IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE Jesus this movie is as stupid as a piece of stupid, stupid ****.

I don’t know how to really communicate that I am genuinely angry at this idiotic movie. When I was writing those questions about Krall changing appearance, I literally had a flash of rage that went all through my chest. And when I was writing about the motorcycle, I wished that I had a way to be even louder than all caps because I was so furious at just how idiotic this movie assumed I would be. OH MY GOD!! I was just getting ready to wrap up and I honestly JUST REMEMBERED that I haven’t even talked about the whole VICTORY VIA BEASTIE BOYS thing at the end. OH MY ******* GODDAMNED SON OF A BITCH WAS THAT NOT THE STUPIDEST THING YOU HAVE EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER SEEN IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE?! I mean, it was bad enough when it was just the one ship, but then suddenly the Yorktown dude is like “WE HAVE THE FREQUENCY!” and suddenly the entire goddamned universe turned into a subwoofer or something and it was just like “DID YOU KNOW THIS SONG WAS ORANGE BECAUSE ITS ORANGE ISNT THAT COOL HA HAHAHAHAHAHA WE’RE SO EDGY AND CREATIVE LOOK IT’S A CALLBACK!!!!!!!!!!!!~!!!!!!!!!!! YYYYYYYYAYAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY FOR US !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HGAR HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!!!”

You genuinely do not know how ******* furious I am right now. This is why I was not looking forward to this review. Anyway, four stars if you want to have an aneurysm. You know, the way the writers did just before writing the script. This movie is ******* Star Trek night in the brain injury ward. This is the Star Trek themed toilet paper roll after all you can eat chili night. This is the Star Trek story told by that blonde news reporter who had that stroke on the air. But, hey, Sulu’s gay, so progressive! #thumbsup! #futureisnow! #verysamelove! #onlyinthemovieforfivesecondssoyouknowsuperbold. You know what? My initial reaction to this movie was a one star review, because, you know, there’s a few cool moments in that first bit and all the actors are trying, etc. But you know what? Don’t **** with me, movie. You don’t know who you’re playing with. Just don’t do it. So, you know what? 0 stars. 0 ******* stars. You don’t come in my house and try to **** with me. **** you. 0 stars.

tl;dr – horribly written, confusing visually and logically, almost entirely nonsensical, stupid plot hole after stupid plot hole; unbearably insulting to its audience. 0 stars.

More Movie Reviews!

 

Morgan (2016)
Good but very generic.

Suicide Squad
The action was bland and I didn't really care for any of the villains except maybe Deadshot. Harley Quinn was overrated and the Joker wasn't in it enough for me to really judge the character(but I hope he isn't the main villain in Ben Affleck's solo Batman film). The special effects for the Enchantress and Amanda Waller were the highlights of the film for me.

 

Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Jason Segel plays a stoner eagerly searching for meaning in coincidences, who gets high and ends up spending the day with his brother, Ed Helms, spying on his wife to figure out if she's having an affair. I like Segel and Helms a lot, but they can't do much with a film that lives down to indie stereotypes. Its vague, feel-good mumbo-jumbo, its aimlessness, its piano-plinky score . . . it just never coheres into anything. It's a dramedy without any real depth to its drama and it's not particularly funny. It just kind of meanders weakly. Ed Helms is a selfish a-hole, but somehow he earns his wife, an underused Judy Greer, back by buying into Segel's generic stoned New Age mysticism that was tired fifty years ago. Not by being a better person to her; no, by finally validating Segel's protagonist. That, the movie decides, earns him his wife back. A waste of a good cast on a stupid movie.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half: Brilliant. I love it. Imagine that sort of passion in support of Elizabeth.

 

Stardust

A wonderful movie, I wish I had watched it much sooner.

Oh, and look, it's Matt Murdock. And Superman.