Amph What was the last movie you saw?

We should make a new thread for classic movie tie in commercials.

Dan Cortes lol

I was working at BK when this promotion hit.

 

Awesome. I was in second grade. Maybe you served me a kids meal.

 

Wow, do those bring back memories. Especially the Alfred/Diet Coke commercial. Batman '89 was the first movie I ever bought ($15.99) and I still have a shrink-wrapped copy of it on VHS.

The tie-in promotion I remember most from Batman '89 was with Taco Bell. I'd never been a big fan of TB before, but once I saw they those cups I had my Mom taking me there once a week .

 

I am one of the few ardent defenders of 'Batman Forever' (which in my opinion is the best Pre-Nolan Batman film) and it maybe largely for nostalgia's sake. These glasses definitely could sell this movie. I still own the Batman one from '95 and I bought Two-Face from eBay recently. I had Riddler from 95 but it broke along the way and I intend to replace it.

 

Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events

Good movie, quite enjoyed it, and quite disappointed that there won't be any sequels

 

I thought they were working on a stop-motion as a sequel?

 

No idea, if there was a sequel, they wouldn't be using the same actors to play the Baudelaire children

 

That could work

 

Premium Rush
Suspenseful light-hearted action with bicycles. You would never think a film featuring NYC bike messengers as the protagonists could be this fun, but it kept me on the edge of my seat, so to speak. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets a delivery in his lap that someone doesn't want delivered and winds up in a cat and mouse game with a corrupt cop. Entertaining, suspenseful, exciting, funny and clever, with fun to watch bike trickery. But when I say "funny", don't misunderstand that to mean that the antagonist here is made into a slapstick Home Alone robber. I mean that light-hearted moments arise in the course of the narrative, like it would in, say, Die Hard. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5.

 

Changing Lanes

Good movie

 

Holy Motors

Pretty Good. Not something I would watch again.

 

Chronicle
'Found footage' super-hero/comic book drama about a trio of high schoolers who are endowed with telekinetic abilities. Shenanigans ensue. I initially was fine with the 'found footage' documentary style, but quickly found it fake, in the sense that it didn't seem natural in some of the scenes for the person behind the camera to still be filming, have a reason for filming, or even that he would have the camera along with him at that time. It took me out of the film at several points, as I was annoyed by the implausibility of the character continuing to document everything in particular moments. Some of you might object that the entire premise is implausible to begin with, but the characters are the central point of any story regardless of premise, so even if every conceivable aspect of their circumstances are implausible, they must remain natural human beings who behave and react in natural plausible ways. That's what makes a story interesting to follow in the first place - the characters and their actions. If they start behaving in ways that don't make sense, the story is not interesting or fun to follow any more.

In other scenes, the clear and obvious intention of narrating a story with regards to what the camera is focusing on at a given moment and how it is edited made it all too obvious that this was not random footage, and were clearly shot as scenes of a script. Of course, right? But if the film wants to give the impression that it's random footage, it at least should be convincing. I would have preferred that they just shot it normally. However, admittedly, in some sequences, the premise that the characters themselves are doing the filming was incorporated in clever and artful ways.

The most impressive aspect of the film to me was the special effects. Their abilities looked very convincing. Overall, I liked it and would recommend it. The fact that it avoids the conventions of vigilante crime fighting, or the epic juxtaposition of hero versus villain, of other stories about people with superhuman or supernatural abilities in itself makes it a breath of fresh air. In a way, the 'self-filmed' footage also made the scenes with them just hanging out together feel that much more endearing and immersive. I think if it had been shot like a normal film, a lot of the sequences would have felt like unnecessary filler material and a waste of time, whereas they felt like genuine prologue in this format.

So in conclusion, it's a mixed bag. I think I would have preferred it shot like a normal film and felt like some parts of it seemed fake because of the narrative format they chose, while at the same time, some parts of it are more effective in this way, and probably wouldn't have worked otherwise. But in the end, story-wise, I don't feel like I got much out of it, even though it was entertaining enough. I give it 3 out of 5. Or 6/10.

 

Police Story

Jackie Chan tries to commit spectacular suicide over and over. In the end he survived so they decided to make the footage into a movie.

 

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2 - Faithful to the original comic, right down to its Cold War setting, TDKRP2 veers off the strong "Hero returns" narrative from Part 1 and mixes in a clumsy and ham-handed dose of geopolitics and Superman. Fine for what it is, but it belongs in another arc IMO, and comes off here like a 2nd rate version of Watchmen (Which, like TDKR, debuted in print starting in 1986). The story is strongest when Batman's arch nemesis, The Joker (Played here for the first time by Michael Emerson, who makes the character his own in a solid turn) is involved. Had that been the focus, it would've been a powerful ending for this two-part saga. As it is, this is a well and faithfully made--but ultimately unsatisfying--conclusion. - 6.5/10

 

This segment is now my favourite thing on YouTube. I'm going to be following this guy's next reviews.



Warning: language.

 

I have just started to go through the 316 movies I have which I have not yet seen. People over in FF-UK are picking random numbers which correspond to the movies. Yesterday I saw Chinatown and Clueless

Chinatown​

Well, that was annoyingly dull. I grant that it was made in the 1970s but it was nothing more than a 1hr TV show dragged out for 2 hours.

A perfect example of the tedium is where Jack/Jake asks the receptionist in the Hall of Records for a ruler. It takes about 30 seconds for him to find one. Needlessly timewasting.

A few other moments that caught my attention

1) Is this the origin of the phrase "How do you like them apples"? I don't recall it being in anything before 1974
2) Good to know that Jack Nicholson likes going commando. After the sex, he puts his trousers on without pants
3) Is it just me or is it really annoying when main characters have half their face covered up. I hated Patrick Stewart having a plaster on his nose throughout the poor Conspiracy Theory, and I hated it here. If you're gonna get a big actor, it's nice to see them.

So yeah, very dull but I got through it. Someone will have to explain why it's a "classic", but be brief otherwise I'll get bored again​

Clueless​

This was worse than Chinatown. A 90 minute movie where absolutely nothing happened. The biggest "plot" point was the revelation that one of the characters was gay. This was the biggest non-surprise since people realised Kerry Katona was a bad mother. Truly truly awful.​

 

I took a small pack of 9 year olds to The Croods. They loved it. It was entertaining enough, although Nicholas Cage has the wrong voice for Daddy Crood. Despicable Me 2 looks like it might be better. We also saw a trailer for Epic, which looks astoundingly awful: Honey, I Shrunk the Lord of the Rings.

 

i watched the hunger games with my kids yesterday. it was mostly really stupid but i was still fairly entertained.

 

​

Yes, old films are generally more time-wasting. The older, the worse. I especially hate the old 70s convention of the camera lingering in a location for a few extra seconds after the actors have left the scene, before the viewpoint changes. It's typically no longer than 2 extra seconds, but once you're aware of its regular occurrence it gets agonizingly annoying. You can even spot the occurrence of this phenomenon, and its absence in modern cinema, by comparing the original Star Wars films to the prequels. A New Hope is the one most guilty of it. But aside from that, films just wasted more time in general back in the day. Maybe it's a phenomenon of the MTV generation that films over the years have become increasingly tighter in their editing, but it's a welcome development as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, perhaps, it has spoiled me such that it makes the slower pace of old movies excruciating for me to watch. I have to be in a patient mood to carry myself through older movies than the 80s.

 

I have no problem with slow-paced films if the story is engaging. But in Chinatown it just isn't. It's a really boring 'detective' story. The last 15 minutes are quite engaging, and it's always good to see an unhappy ending. But the lead up to it is dull and tedious. There are no engaging characters. There is no significant plot development to speak of. It's just 2 hours of "stuff happening".

 

Sushi Girl - Mark Hamill's latest project. REALLY creepy, a great mix of characters and a very cool ending - It's on Netflix right but I am definitely going to get the Blueray.

 

It has J Law...

 

Consolation prize.
http://superherohype.com/news/articles/176133-dredd-3d-sequel-coming-in-comic-book-form