Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Wow.
I just found out that my wife didn't know the plot twist at the end of The Planet of the Apes (1968)

I just assumed everyone knew.

 

There was great bit in Cheers where Sam didn't know the ending either and gets his mind blown when Cliff tells him.

 

Maybe she just didn’t connect the dots, Homer style.

 

I didn't realize until a few years ago that Rip Torn played Judas. Yeah, the same Rip Torn from Dodgeball and the first two Men in Black movies.

 

This is my favourite post ever in this thread.

 

If you can dodge a crucifix you can dodge a ball

 

"The Romans aren't hosting an intraempire kegger here."

 

Godzilla vs. King Kong for the second consecutive night. I most likely won't watch it again tonight. Perhaps a week from now.

 

Cold Pursuit (2019)

Liam Neeson revenge movie. Simple, straightforward, and pleasing. It’s not as good or creative as Taken, but it doesn’t have to be. A giant snow plow barreling down on you through a small path in a mountain of snow in the dark of night is creative enough, and quite menacing. Didn’t really appreciate the humor. It wasn’t bad, but I thought it made the movie less than it could have been. I think it would have been better, if less quirky, if it were played more seriously.

 

D3: The Mighty Ducks The Ducks are awarded scholarships to a private high school. There, they have to contend with a snobbish culture, including brutal pranks and hostility from the varsity team and a coach who doesn't seem to appreciate everything they went through together.

Even though Emilio Estevez got top billing for the film, he wasn't in it that much.

 

The Strange One. An Actors Studio production, this remains a fairly obscure film despite being an interesting effort. It stars Ben Gazzara as a glibly sociopathic upperclassman who hazes and manipulates fellow cadets at a thinly disguised Citadel. After a particularly vicious plot against a fellow student and his faculty father, the other students implicated by having gone along under pressure, including Pat Hingle and George Peppard, have to figure out how to respond.

It has the intensity and the traces of clumsiness of this sort of heartfelt fifties issue movie, but despite clearly seeing itself as being “about” hazing, that’s not really the focus that comes through. It’s really a character study of these college-age young men navigating a high-intensity environment full of clashing signals. Do they go along? Do they follow the official, promulgated rules, or the unofficial code of what they see everyone doing? Adapted from a novel and play by a Citadel dropout, it avoids some of the pitfalls of overly personal takes, with its best and most personal touch being the varieties of closely observed personality types populating the story. It’s a sharp, well-acted film that doesn’t hit the heights this kind of material might have reached in the sixties, but does a good job of prefiguring that kind of coming filmmaking.

 

Zack Snyder's Justice League. The second half of the movie was as enjoyable as the first. I admit that while I liked the calmer bits and character development between the fighting, it could have been cut just a little bit tighter without losing anything. Some of the slo-mo stuff just made me yawn. All in all a well-crafted story, even if the 4K in the 4:3 screen ratio (IMAX) felt a bit pretentious at times. To be fair, at times the storyline felt a bit too well-worn and too similar to Avengers: Endgame (what is it with the plot of killing all life in the universe, or multiverse, it's getting old, man).

There's no post-credits coda, but I'm glad we didn't switch off as soon as the credits started rolling. Allison Crowe, who sings the end theme after a long musical intro (Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah) is the only celebrity, no matter how minor, that I've interacted with online knowing who she was. We were members of the same fandom forum years ago. She also appeared in person in Man of Steel, as the singer in the bar.

 

The Big Heat. This is a movie that starts with a dirty cop shooting himself in the head, and doesn’t let up from there. A relentless Fritz Lang noir, it stars Glenn Ford as a homicide detective investigating the suicide and refusing to back down in the face of rampant corruption. Ford is a man on a mission, especially after his family is menaced, and he charges through the movie like a bull in a china shop, upsetting the city’s corrupt boss and his enforcer, Lee Marvin. You’ve also got Gloria Grahame as Marvin’s shallow, dangerously underestimated girlfriend, and Jocelyn Brando as Ford’s wife, with whom he has a great, bantering rapport. That domestic sweetness is an oasis of normality in a film that’s dark and brutal in the best noir fashion, helping round out Ford’s compelling protagonist. This is the kind of movie that just works — driving, intense, grim pulp. One of the (many) great noirs.

 

Road to El Dorado by Dreamworks

Very enjoyable movie that has a lot of funny moments, along with a beautiful soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, who has yet to disappoint, he creates true masterpieces. Dreamworks have done a very good job, as they usually do, and I am always in awe at their animations:

 

So, Crawl on Netflix.

A movie that takes a simple premise and works on it pretty well.
Daughter and Father and Dog caught in a house while a hurricane and floods trap them with lots of alligators.
So the movie is basically lots of escaping from alligators, being bitten by alligators, as the weather gets worse and worse.
Not complicated, and it does what it does just fine.

And, all through it I'm thinking "Don't you hurt the dog, damn it. Eat the girl, eat the dad, but don't you eat that doggie."

 

Boss Level on Hulu

Always good to see Frank Grillo in action, and for the good guys too.

 

Godzilla vs. King Kong, sort of...

...I tried to watch this. I stuck with it through

Spoiler

the big CG boat battle

, which to be fair was among the more novel action scenes I can remember. After that the movie cratered. I switched it off once the

Spoiler

hollow earth

thing got going... what sort of writers think this stuff is acceptable? Was this written by interns from junior high school? So in its defense maybe it rebounded from there, but I'd had enough and no longer care enough to find out. And I loved Skull Island. That's why I made the effort. I fell asleep the times I tried to watch the last two Godzilla movies, so I should have known. This movie had none of Skull Island's charms other than a whole lot of money and attention paid to animating Kong.

I feel bad for the relatively decent actors attached to this franchise. Who would have thought there were this many steps down from Iron Man 3? "Congrats" to Rebecca Hall for finding the bottom rung.

 

Godzilla Vs. Kong (2021)
This was certainly a popcorn movie meant for theaters, but I don't regret being able to watch it currently on my TV with HBO Max.

Spoiler

There was a lot of material going on besides the obvious. I don't remember all that went on with the previous Godzilla and Kong movies, but this movie seemed to carry bits and pieces of them. Of course I assume this takes place in an alternate universe than the original King Kong movie (and remake with Jack Black) since Kong died at the end. The movie had some great and flashy special effects. It was a good idea to have the big fight in Hong Kong with all the neon buildings. Tbh I wasn't all that impressed by Mechagodzilla; it kinda reminded me of the scrawny exoskeleton of the Terminator in the original film from the 1980s. Mechagodzilla was larger in Spielberg's Ready Player One. Overall I thought the movie was fine; just not something I'd watch over and over again.

 

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
The art direction of this movie is just amazing.

 

Mank There's the usual Oscar-bait element of "Hollywood makes a movie about Hollywood" and the Citizen Kane/old-timey style can get annoying sometimes like the fake film burn. It's still a genuinely good movie. The title character is an interesting person and it's wild that the writer of Kane actually knew Hearst and his mistress. I also liked that it covered Upton Sinclair's (played by Bill Nye in a cameo) run for Governor of California; one thing the film left out was that, while of course the GOP opposed him, a lot of the Democratic elite also participated in sabotaging the candidacy of their own nominee.

Black '47 I like a good rampage movie, and it's satisfying for genocidal English noblemen and their lackeys to get what they deserve. The film makes good use of its obviously limited budget. It reminded me of Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin.

 

Wonder Woman 1984. Definitely not as good as the first one, but very watchable, if a bit predictable. And I loved seeing Lynda Carter in the coda, and of course Pedro Pascal in a very different role from Mando.

 

Run (2020)

So this is Aneesh Chaganty's second film, his first one being Searching which I really enjoyed. I don't think Run is as good but it was still solid. Sarah Paulson and Kiera Allen are excellent and for the most part the tense scenes worked really well. Easily my biggest complaint is

Spoiler

that we got the classic "victim finds out the whole backstory through a newspaper clipping stored away in a long forgotten box" trope. Considering how well made Searching was I thought the writers would be smarter than this. Oh well.

Still, I'd recommend it if you're looking for a good thriller.

 

News of the World (2020)
Tom Hanks stars as a newspaper reader after the fallout of the Civil War down in the Old West. What's a newspaper reader? He rides from town to town reading papers from faraway places to local patrons looking for well, News of the World. One day he's just leaving a town and he comes across a young girl alone in the woods who doesn't speak word of English, and he winds up taking her in to see about bringing her home. It's not really a typical Western where there's gunfights in every other shot, but it's still a relatively faced paced film for one that centers around Hanks and the girl mostly. I thought it was all right overall.

 

Finally saw The Hours (2002)...I am of course now too depressed to write much more.

*loses self in Philip Glass soundtrack*

 

Saw "The Undead" on Svengoolie. It's Roger Corman's take on the reincarnation kick that started with the book "The Search for Bridey Murphy". The basic story is interesting, and the cast makes a good effort. But the low budget and some seriously inept choices by the characters (the square-jawed hero Pendragon is a major dolt who nearly makes the same mistake as Ani did) bring the average down. It was memorably MSTed during the Sci-Fi era. And, since both MST and Sven did a bit about a Digger Smolken album, I can see it going platinum easy.