Amph What was the last movie you saw?

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: second time I've seen this. It's a weird movie, but I've seen it twice now and it kept me watching throughout. I've always found Ledger to be charismatic, and Lily Cole was very appealing in the lead female role.

Lockout: Guy Pearce basically does Snake Plisken in space. Surprisingly good considering how badly I remember it tanking at the cinema. Not great you understand, but watchable. A nice surprise.

 

Rambo III

 

I was surprised to find in their entirety on YouTube, the 1985 films Secret Admirer and Better Off Dead. Now I'm watching an episode of "Misfits of Science". I don't want to leave this year. This is what Saturdays are for.

 

Ghostbusters. Arguably, it's a little dated, as far as the effects go. But it is a treat to see Murray, Ackroyd and Ramis in their prime, all ready to believe you.

 

The Last Samurai, where excellent cinematography and production values cannot save an asinine, racist plot wherein Tom Cruise plays an
alcoholic cavalryman who murders hundreds of Native-American women and children, which qualifies him to travel to Japan where he rolls
on the floor screaming "sake" and then eventually tells the feeble-willed, snot-nosed adolescent Emperor of Japan how to run his country.

There were rumors of a sequel to this film with the working title The Last Zulu, wherein an alcoholic Tom Cruise travels to Natal Provence,
Africa, takes control of Zulu King Cetshwayo's army, and uses it to destroy the British 24th Regiment of Foot at the battle of Isandlwana.

 

Star Trek Into Darkness - Meh. Some good, lots of bad. I don't like how transparent the terrorism stuff is, I don't like the way the violence is done, I think Quinto puts on a poor performance, Uhura has been turned into an absolutely garbage character, the transitions to attempting to talk their way out of violence (Uhura and Klingons, for example) are so jarring that it's like watching a speech check in a video game, and I wasn't impressed by Cumberbatch.

I don't like how ridiculously "meta" it is. Enough with the red shirt jokes. McCoy is a ridiculous flanderization of the old one, and it's never funny. Which reminds me, there's so many examples of putting a shallow "twist" on the original (even Spock is a sort of inverted Spock), the series is a mirror universe. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

It's a very weird experience watching endless callbacks to a superior original overwhelm the entire movie.

But hey, I guess it's pretty. Oh, and Spock getting to kick ass was cool. It's certainly not the worst Star Trek movie by any stretch, but it's just not close to the best, either.

The Obnoxious Spider-Man 2 - Ugh, this was quite tiring. Boring plot fatigue, villain fatigue, ending fatigue. A poor mix of tones.

Spider-Man is still an obnoxious try-hard and I don't like him, and putting him together with the creepy douchebag Harry Osbourne is just a pain to sit through. They do a great job of portraying douchey young people, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to enjoy watching it. Garfield goes so heavy on the informal speech that it makes you think he's trash instead of a scientific genius.

I guess I'll spoiler tag just in case.

Spoiler

Garfield's reaction to Gwen's death is just a total, unemotional failure. It's a non-reaction and incredibly amateurish. How flat was that? People say Tobey had Aspergers? Having Harry just show up and kill her after like two minutes of on-screen villain time didn't help.

There was some nice effects, I thought there was some legitimately cool stuff done with Electro and the Spider-Man action, but it goes to show that all the special effects in the world are not enough on their own.

Oh, and LOL at Paul Giamatti. Wtf.

The Other Woman - Leslie Mann did what she could and even Diaz shows glimpses of talent, but it's pretty weak and even painful quite often, especially early. Mann and Diaz's talent garners a few small laughs, nothing more.

 

Just today... Air Force One. It's good. Let's say 7 out of 10 stars. I just have a hard time believing all those bullets flying on the airplane didn't cause explosive decompression at SOME point. Can't give Harrison Ford less than five stars, though.

 

Sorry... double post.

 

Air Force One gets worse every time I see it, the sentiment gets more and more obnoxious, the idealized nobility of Ford and Macy is taken to absurd degrees. I'm not sure I can say Ford did a bad job, but I know I want to vomit every time Ford says "GET OFF MY PLANE" or "I'M THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!"

 

I suffered through Revenge of the Sith again as my kids nagged me all weekend to watch it. It's just so awful. The dialogue, the acting, the characters, the story. Everything.

 

Better off Dead is one of my all-time favorite movies. I love how it skewers 80s teen movie conventions and at the same time does them light years better than most of its contemporaries. Brilliant movie. Secret Admirer is sort of a forgotten teen comedy that deserves a bit more recognition. And it's got Lori Loughlin and Kelly Preston in an almost unmatched one-two punch of hotness.

I really hope this will be playing all week. I'd love to catch it on one of my two off days.

 

Best SW Prequel movie though.

 

Filth. It started out kinda reminiscent of In Bruges but then it sorta spiraled out of control. It's dark but also funny.

 

Get used to it, Abrams' next film will probably be the same way.

 

Or it'll be a "Government is evil; don't trust the government" type of film considering Orci's in the director's chair for III.

 

I'm not talking about Star Trek...

 

Whoops!

To be fair, I just left the Star Trek thread when I saw your post.

 

"Dated" to me isn't a negative qualification. When I watch say a 70s film, I want to actually see the 70s. Those shaky, pale visual effects in Ghostbusters are exactly what I like about it.

 

At least Christopher Lloyd dies a spectacular death. In a following scene, Gary Oldman simply drifts away with a near-comic look on his
face as if his dying thought was, "Thank you, Harrison--anything to get me out of this wretched film."

 

Oh, make no mistake, Ghostbusters is still great as it. A still untarnished piece of my childhood. I wouldn't change a thing about it. Let it remain as it is. No remastering. No re-imagining. And most of all, no ****** remake. Ever!

 

I watched a couple old silent shorts -- Two Tars, Never Weaken, and The Immigrant. Two Tars is pretty great, featuring Laurel and Hardy as sailors on leave who tool around in a rented car and pick up a pair of girls, only to find themselves in a traffic jam that takes up most of the short as it dissolves into a massive, madcap melee when they start fighting with the guy behind them. It's a wonderfully silly, exaggerated comic reality, as they fight mostly by ripping apart each other's cars, and the chaos spills over throughout the traffic jam. The payoff of seeing all the mangled cars taking off after Laurel and Hardy is great, especially the surrealistic trick-photography shot of an overturned car somehow scooting along on its roof. It's like a live-action cartoon and completely hilarious. Never Weaken was my favorite, a completely brilliant Harold Lloyd short featuring him as an office worker who proposes to the girl in the doctor's office next door. When she's going to get let go because of slow business, however, he enlists the acrobat across the hall to rustle up patients by pratfalling in the street and letting Lloyd come in and "fix" his back and hand out the doctor's business cards. That's pretty good, but he comes back to see his girl with a man who tells her that he'll marry her. Lloyd heads off and we get the reverse angle to see it's her brother, a minister, who will perform the ceremony for her, but too late, Lloyd's already decided to kill himself. This makes for some wonderfully dark comedy as Lloyd keeps setting up to kill himself but finding some little way to delay and giving up on the method, until he settles on blindfolding himself and setting a gun up to fire when the door is opened. Of course, he hears a bang, and even starts floating up and away -- but that's because his chair has gotten caught on a steel beam coming in through the window, and after a delay in figuring out that he's not dead, there starts a very long, very hilarious sequence of Lloyd teetering and tottering his way across the under-construction building across the street. It's wild stuff, inventive and brilliant physical comedy. The Immigrant is Chaplin as the Little Tramp, making his way over to America and getting in trouble at a restaurant where he can't pay once he gets off. Classic comedy. All were incredibly funny classics.

Taken 2. I actually thought this wasn't too bad. I mean, it's a sequel to Taken, we're not talking about great filmmaking here, but aside from how hilariously cheesy all the family stuff was, it was actually a pretty competent, trim action film. If anything, it feels tighter and smarter than the original. Rather than the step-after-step chase from one clue to another, which got draggy and didn't have enough going on, here we've got villains who seek to kidnap Neeson's whole family for revenge. The concept is still simple, but there are more distinct steps going on as Neeson tries to flee his captors, guides his daughter to escape, escapes himself, gets his daughter, goes after his ex-wife, gets his daughter to safety, goes after his ex-wife again -- it's all still more or less one big long chase, but it's got a couple different flavors in there. There's also some clever stuff, like Neeson leading his daughter to him by having her set off grenades and trying to figure out how close they are, or finding a location by going from sound to sound that he heard while being driven around blindfolded (when will kidnappers figure out to blast the radio when hauling blindfolded superspies around?). Without the sex-slavery plotline, it also feels less sleazy and exploitative. It's never a great action film, but it's actually a fairly good action film, and an improvement on its predecessor.

The Glass Key. An adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's fantastic hardboiled noir novel, it features Alan Ladd as the unflappable fixer for a local political boss who finds himself in trouble when he's suspected of murder and he's alienated his criminal associates. Ladd's okay in the role, but I'd prefer someone who projects a little more world-weary grit. The film still works great, though. The rest of the cast is great, and it's close enough to Hammett's novel that it can't go wrong in plot and atmosphere. A good, solid film noir.

 

The Hobbit 2: Desolation Boogaloo

I don't have too much to say, other than the Hobbit movies are definitely better than the LOTR movies, by virtue of never reaching the horrific boredom of the many long traveling/talking scenes of LOTR. Notice how the chase scene to start the movie is over relatively quickly.

The Hobbit is exactly what I think it tries to be, a long but otherwise fun and simple fantasy adventure story, hopping from one frying pan to another. It's not really as grand as the history suggests, it doesn't try to be as epic as LOTR, nor should it, and I think it's better for it. After the chase it's giant spiders, captured by elves, escape in barrels, smuggling, then off to the mountain, and it ends with a nice cliffhanger that left me wanting more. They never really spend too much time on any one thing (except maybe Bilbo with Smaug, but it's Smaug), they don't belabor the point as painfully as LOTR, they say/do enough to set up the next thing and then move on.

 

the last forty five minutes is peter jackson endlessly belaboring a pointless point

 

The Hobbit 2

There's a lot of standing around doing nothing, and again a bunch of main characters bouncing about helplessly without sustaining any injuries (seriously? not even a broken rib?). I liked the giant spiders, though. Creepy as hell but that was probably the only part of the movie where I felt anything at all.