Amph What was the last movie you saw?

The2ndQuest I went into it with a mindset of compare/contrast, but unfortunately it'd been so long since I'd watched the theatrical cut that I didn't have a fresh enough reference for comparison. But you'd mentioned that the Director's Cut integrated material that helped to flesh out some of the mythology (I'm reasonably sure Riddick's Furyan visions weren't in the theatrical cut), and I sorta sensed that intuitively. It felt more fully realized than I remembered.

 

The other weekend I saw Colossal, which was a very fun science fiction/comedy film that is apparently only getting a limited release. It reminded me of those Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes where something supernatural serves as a metaphor for everyday high school life. Only in this case, the main characters' predicament mirrors down-and-out thirtysomething life. The story follows Gloria, played by Anne Hathaway, an out-of-work, alcoholic writer who trails chaos in her wake. By some mysterious means, she becomes connected to a gigantic monster who appears each night in Seoul, Korea, inadvertently smashing things as it blunders around. I won't give more of a synopsis than that, because that might ruin it if you decide to see it.

The end result is a weird, charming, touching film about 30-year-old adolescents in their quest to grow up (or not). And it's got huge creatures stomping through an Asian city. All movies are better if they have that.

 

I think too often studios shortsightedly put commerce before art. I say that not because I don't understand the importance of the former, but because if they'd simply concentrate on putting out the best version of a film, regardless of rating and runtime, it'd ultimately take care of itself. In the internet era, word of mouth is instantaneous, and bad word of mouth will sink a film faster than 10-15 extra minutes or an R-rating.

That said, I think the Director's Cut feels a tad flabby, but I'd prefer flabby to incoherent.

 

*double post*

 

I am hopefully going to see that this weekend; it's been one of my most anticipated movies of the year ever since I saw the poster. I've avoided the trailer, but I know the basic premise. I can't wait to see it.

I agree in principle, but I think it's very generous to even bring up the word "art" in a conversation about the Director's Cut of this movie. The editing of an R down to a PG-13 is basically always a mistake and it certainly was in regards to this movie, but I can sure see a studio getting the Director's Cut of this movie and having no idea how to release a "best version" of it. But I basically only like Pitch Black (though I haven't played the supposedly excellent games) from this franchise. But I do love Pitch Black; it's a near perfect thriller in my opinion.

But I do think part of the problem is that Riddick is really part of an ensemble in Pitch Black; Radha Mitchell is great in her role and she's really the main character. I think Riddick kind of becomes parody if you put a really strong focus on him; he's such a self-serious character that he becomes silly sometimes. Certainly, there was no one in either Chronicles or Riddick that I actually cared about and was interested in the way I was in Mitchell's character in Pitch Black.

 

I saw Tropic Thunder for the first time a few days ago. It was pretty good.

 

Finally saw Arrival. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this...I was happily surprised and I consider myself lucky to have gone this long unspoiled.

 

Fair.

It's been too long since I've seen the theatrical cut for me to go to the mat for the Director's Cut as being definitively better. My only metric is that I came away this time with a clearer sense of the galactic mythology they were trying to build, and I figure if you're go down that particular road you might as well go all in.

That's a very good point. It could be argued that Riddick is a "less is more" character, and that when you put him front and center and build the entire story around him, you're not using him properly or to his best effect. It's like... eating cereal with a fork. Maybe not my best analogy. Anyway, I do think Riddick can be an effective central character, and I believe Twohy's instincts were right on here, making Riddick the reluctant hero. I just think they could've handled that arc much better.

Just watched it a few days ago, and I agree about it not quite being what I was expecting. I blame the trailer, which creates a vibe that doesn't really match the film itself IMO.

 

Why Don't You Play in Hell? I somehow wandered into the "gonzo Japanese cinema" corner of Amazon Prime and said, "Sure, why not?" I was pleasantly surprised with a gloriously ludicrous, balls-out blast of deliberately over-the-top nonsense. The plot, after a ridiculously long and complex buildup, involves a crew of juvenile, imbecilic film nerds (who call themselves, hilariously often, the ***** Bombers) getting hired to film a yakuza raid on a rival clan in order to revive one yakuza boss's daughter's career as an actress. Full of deliberately overdramatic stylistic tics, frantically hammy performances, fountains of CGI blood and obviously fake body parts, and a guy who wears a Bruce Lee jumpsuit the entire time, it's a loving, loony tribute to enthusiastic filmmaking with a hilariously goofball sense of humor.

 

Hidden Figures. Very good spaceflight movie.

 

Me and my brothers just watched the DC animated movie "Teen Titans: The Judas Contract". I really liked it.

Good story. Good characters. Good villains. Good voice acting. Good animation. Good action. It has pretty much anything a Teen Titans fan like myself would want from a Teen Titans movie.

 

I liked it, pretty cool effects and such, lots of great action. Also, I know there were complaints that Matt Damon, a white guy, is the main hero, but, from what I saw, this movie does not make him into some 'white savior'.

In fact, it portrays the Chinese themselves as courageous warriors

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Including the ladies, who freaking bungee jump into the enemy

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and their fearless leader

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Though it is never clear if she fell in love with Matt Damon or just simply grew to respect him, as a fellow soldier lol

But, yeah, they use all kinds of high-tech (for the time period) weapons

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including something almost akin to an early missile system lmao

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If anything, this film seems to highlight how China was much more advanced, technologically and culturally, back then, then Europe, which would have been in the Dark Ages at that time... I believe Damon and the other white guy are even referred to by a Chinese officer as "savages" or something, at one point haha Which would have been very much true, back then, from the point of a Chinese looking at a Westerner, in that time period

Monsters look scary as hell too

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Great movie, overall. I loved it.

 

Just saw Logan. What a fantastic movie, and a great end to the story of Wolverine, with potential to keep telling a story with those children.

Loved it. Will see it again.

 

Several,

'Return of the Living Dead Part II'

The original is an outstanding cult classic with one of the most biting satirical look at horror films. It is self aware as it exists in a universe where 'Night of the Living Dead' is based on a true story. It's also filled with character actors and not just monster meat teenagers. I like it a great deal and this sequel is very much in the shadow of it. That isn't to say it's completely a waste. It actually does something kind of clever in bringing back James Karen and Thom Mathews from the first film( in different roles of course). Karen is a fantastic character actor who is outstanding at comedy as the first film clearly showed us. He actually is kind of better here. Here he is playing a grave robber who decapitates corpses to make money from necrophilliacs. But they don't focus on Karen or Mathews very much. The movie has a plucky little kid who is ready to fight zombies. Yeah yawn on that one. It's an 80's horror trope that is just annoying.

'The Black Legion'

One of Bogie's first films. He stars as a blue collar factory worker whose promotion is given to an immigrant and so he joins the racist vigilante Black Legion. Sounds pretty timely right? It's a good film although it is definitely a B movie and Bogart while good is nothing close to his persona. I liked it though because it loudly condemns the ideals of such groups and racist thinking(for it's time). It's kind of nice to see that some filmmakers evolved in the twenty years between this and 'Birth of a Nation'.

'Evil Dead II'

A revisit for me. It is still arguably the quintessential horror/comedy hybrid. I think I still like 'Army of Darkness' the best but this is definitely the better film. There isn't really much to say as it kind of has been dissected to death. You forget how relentless it is though. The whole thing is a giant set piece with Bruce Campbell being tortured for it's entirety. For all the reputation Bruce Campbell has as being a bad ass with great wit Ash still doesn't say a whole lot in this one until the finale.

 

Evil Dead II is the best horror sequel, perhaps best sequel overall, of the 80's. And Ash talks quite a bit more in this one compared to the original.

 

The Circle: Starring Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega and Karen Gillan. Based on a novel, it's about a young woman who joins a Google-like company, and it raises questions about social media, privacy and our "need" to know.

 

Running outta Felicity Jones movies because I'm currently watching "Cheerful Weather for the Wedding". (I had "The Invisible Man" on my Netflix cue but then it was removed) Actual line in the first 4 minutes "How I've missed your custard". Lucasfilm hurry up and make a Jyn Erso spin off prequel or something, need more Jones in my life.

 

Unstoppable: Chris Pine and Denzel Washington have to stop a runaway train.

I always try to watch this movie when it's on TV.

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The Thing(1982) Remains as brilliant as ever.

 

The Lost City of Z. This has been getting a lot of hype as the best movie of the year so far. This may be true, as it's early in the year. It's not an outstanding film -- it's a bit pat in some ways, and feels like it could dig deeper -- but it's a pretty good portrait of obsession featuring a complex lead character. Percy Fawcett is a man whose quest for knowledge and whose apparent compassion for the Amazonian natives would seem noble and inspirational in many movies, or else the obsession that led to his and his son's 1925 disappearance would be treated as growing madness. Here, his good intentions are acknowledged as something to admire, but his obsession is not quite healthy, burdens his family in ways he seems unable to fully comprehend or care about, and his theories are more than a little crackpot, with his admiration for the natives driven more by ignorant noble-savage fetishization than genuine understanding. And much of it is fairly subtly handled. It's nice to see a film take such an ambiguous position on its main character, though it can keep things a bit distant through its lengthy runtime, which even with the historical facts compressed, moves rather slowly through two decades. The result is a movie that, despite many adventure beats and a World War I interlude (plus an outstanding opportunity to shout "Jock! Start the engine!"), is unlikely to raise your pulse, but gives you a fair amount to think about.

 

Just watched Passengers..

Pretty good!

 

Waterworld (1995) - Plot; In the distant future, the polar ice caps have melted, leaving continents buried under water and mankind scrambling to survive on a seemingly endless sea.

Waterworld is a rather notorious movie for a number of reasons; Dubious science, massive cost overruns and the squabbling between star Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds (friends who'd teamed up for the massive hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves four years earlier) during production. It did go on to gross over $250 million worldwide (the equivalent of $425 million today), but it still wasn't enough to offset the cost of production and distribution (though it later turned a profit thanks to home video sales). Critics destroyed it, with reviews always containing references to its troubled production. But is Waterworld the turkey its reputation claims it is? To my surprise, no. I'd seen it a few times before, but not in well over a decade, so I went in with low expectations but otherwise unsullied by any specific prejudices.

Waterworld is essentially--actually rather unabashedly--a Mad Max rip-off. Replace gasoline with land and the dry desert setting with water and they're virtually indistinguishable. Strictly from a production values perspective, Waterworld is quite impressive. The sets and the menagerie of vehicles are neat, and the film itself looks great. Toss in some very impressive stunt work and the movie works pretty well on a strictly popcorn level. That's good, because I never really found the characters or their search all that compelling. Costner's quiet Mariner is an abusive jerk for much of the film, and the villainous Smokers (Named so because their vehicles belch smoke or because they literally smoke themselves, I don't know) are cartoonish to the point of removing any real threat. But thankfully the movie doesn't rest on the shoulders of its characters so much as it does the action and post-apocalyptic eye candy, and the latter is enough to keep Waterworld afloat. - 6.5/10

 

Doctor Strange. Driven largely by Marvel, blockbuster movies these days seem to have adopted a pattern. Put together a great cast and run them through big action sequences accompanied by a lot of smartass wisecracks and jokes. If the characters are likably self-awarely-jokey enough and the action is exciting enough, audiences probably won't notice that the villain is an afterthought and the plot is a barely functional skeleton that appears to have had an absolute minimum of time spent on it. The main legs up Marvel has on its competition is that they almost invariably execute well, and they do work hard to make their heroes likable and engaging, and usually to take them through some kind of arc, so that you really do enjoy hanging out with them and their sheer presence can carry a film without a meaningful plot or conflict with the villain. But that only gets you so far, and the Marvel movies have struggled to overcome those limitations. Doctor Strange is likewise a prisoner of the Marvel formula, and in some ways a less successful one. Yet somehow it works better than expected.

As an origin story, it doesn't have the advantage of using characters we've already come to love. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a great job of making us love the ones it originates. Strange's prickly-smartass routine is bargain bin Tony Stark; he's interesting when he's most openly an a-hole in the beginning, as that gives him real flaws to overcome, but his shift from there is toward blandly complaisant do-gooder, not into a winningly snarky screen presence or a compellingly idealistic spiritualist. It's symptomatic of the larger problem of Strange's arc, which isn't particularly well-developed. He's an arrogant materialist who, in his desperation to heal himself, hears a bunch of mind-healing mumbo-jumbo and just goes, "Yeah, okay," because it's time to move the plot forward. Then he argues with the Ancient One for a bit but studies anyway, gets to the point of being decent but still an amateur, and then all of a sudden the battle is on and he's the great hope to figure it out, which he's suddenly willing to do when he wasn't before because he got caught up in it. Strange spends the whole movie pretty much either doing things just to do them, because the script needs him to, or because he got thrown into them. There's not a lot of organic development of his character, not much time spent on changing this guy's mind. His character is more or less defined by happenstance, and crucially, the film never quite finds a way to make Strange himself a compelling, charismatic character. He's got a ton of potential and I don't dislike Cumberbatch in the role, but this is a rare instance (the only other being Hawkeye in Avengers, which was remedied in Age of Ultron) where Marvel just whiffs on introducing a hero, doesn't manage to make him a compelling, film-carrying character. They're not tremendously far away, but they need to pay more attention to the guy, give him a stronger character and/or a less somber personality.

And while Mads Mikkelsen is quite good in the role of the villain, and gets some nice moments, the film suffers from the same neglect of the villain and the plot as other Marvel movies. Kaecilius, who has a clear philosophy and a bit of personality, is a much better villain than Malekith or Ronan or Robert Redford, but he gets very little to do. Thankfully, Mordo does get a lot to do, establishing a connection with Strange that should pay off by making him a much stronger villain for the next movie. The plot is typical in that it establishes an incredibly vague, generic threat (the villain's going to annihilate the world! Which was the threat of at least three previous Marvel movies -- I really miss the days when some guy just wanted to murder Tony Stark or Loki wanted to usurp his father's throne), then goes through the origin story motions, and then throws the threat at the hero in a random, unmotivated rush into a third act that has no actual meaningful connection to the hero. When the plot doesn't matter, and the hero has no personal stakes in it, no meaningful interest in the conflict with the villain, the film's going to have a hard time being engaging. I love a tight, concise film, and this is a rare occasion of a film being extremely tight, with a sub-two-hour running time, and my gut reaction being that it should have run much longer, should have had more time to develop itself, to take Strange farther through his journey and enter the third act more naturally and have more breathing room within it.

What the movie did have going for it is a good cast, highlighted by Tilda Swinton, whose puckishly wise Ancient One has the humanity, intrigue, and playful charisma to steal every scene. She's got the pizzazz Strange needs. It also had tremendous, innovative visual effects that made the action scenes compelling and creative. It had a third act that actually wasn't a huge fight -- it found a way to stage a climax around exciting effects and confrontation without depending on a big, bombastic action scene, which is of tremendous value. The last superhero movie I can think of that managed that is The Dark Knight. Its resolution is ultimately about creativity and negotiation, not violence. A final confrontation that comes down to ideas is a great fit for the movie's themes. And those themes are another strength. Its mysticism gives a significantly new flavor to the Marvel setting, and director Derrickson clearly loves the ability to play around with delightfully kooky psychedelic visuals. Even as a slave to formula, the movie still manages to feel genuinely creative. Perhaps that's why, despite its flaws, I did ultimately enjoy it. My mind automatically drew comparisons to Ant-Man, Marvel's other latter-day origin story, and while it was less superficially engaging than Ant-Man, without Paul Rudd's goofy charisma or that film's punchline-chasing humorousness, it did feel like there was a bit more substance there, less of a pure and otherwise empty distillation of the Marvel formula. It has the weaknesses of the formula (and more, with Strange's lack of crowd-pleasing appeal as a character), but rather than trying to cover them up with more and more jokes, it at least tries to do something different, diving into a unique psychedelic mysticism, significantly freshening its superhero action, and leavening its flippancy with an equal portion of gravitas. Marvel needs to shake up its formula. This film tries more than some, and the way it's setting up Mordo, its sequel may succeed. I saw a lot of obvious flaws as I was watching it, but I enjoyed it anyway and managed to connect with it. It lacks the rousingly crowd-pleasing elements that helped something like Civil War cover up its weaknesses -- but I respected the ways it tried to overcome, rather than cover up, its weaknesses more. I guess I have a complicated relationship with Doctor Strange, but I do have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit and I'd like Marvel to learn from it, both what to do and not to do.