Amph What was the last movie you saw?

Escape From LA..Kurt Russell in an eyepatch can make anything better., even when the plot is kinda silly and not too different from EFNY.

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First viewing?

 

Mhm. First viewing, and I knew nothing of the plot save for a fear of heights factoring in, so it was a funny little discovery to see the story unfold.

 

'Batman vs Superman.'

Is it bad? Oh hell yeah. Is it a cinematic abortion? Probably not.

It has about twenty really solid minutes and I'll be honest I probably thought 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' was far worse. But there are so many plot points and would be story arcs that just spin in circles with no resolutions and thus no stakes until the fight sequences. If the movie had picked the plot of Batman wanting to save the world from Superman after the events of 'Man of Steel' and stuck with it the movie might have worked. It also has no visual personality.
The one thing that really stops me from condemning it fully is that Affleck is responsible for the good twenty or so minutes. I think Affleck and Jeremy Irons have a good Batman movie in them. If Affleck were to direct it and not have any input from David Goyer than I think we might have the first solid entry in the DC Cinematic Universe.

 

Equilibrium. After a long run of watching quality films because they were about to leave Amazon Prime, I felt the need to watch a terrible film because it was about to leave Amazon Prime. And boy, is this terrible. But it's terrible in the best, most gloriously entertaining way. It's the kind of movie that comes from an idiot thinking he's making a "smart" action movie because it has the Mona Lisa in it. If you can put an incredibly simplistic dorm-room sci-fi idea behind your action movie, suddenly it's smart! So here we get a movie where all emotion has been banned thanks to emotion-suppressing pills that stop people from feeling but of course it's a movie so nobody's ever actually emotionless, they're just kind of boring about it. But all that is really just futuristic, Nazi-chic-appareled background for why Christian Bale is running around killing the third-highest personal bodycount in film history with "gun kata," writer-director Kurt Wimmer's ridiculous excuse to have people whirl around dramatically while shooting guns in the effort to make gunfighting look like a martial art. This has to be the ultimate dorm-room movie, a dumb exercise in teenager-targeted overstylized action that pretends to depth.

But nobody should be able to get past the first eight minutes, which feature a dramatic expository speech set to stock footage of World War II and Saddam Hussein that subtitles itself for no reason, underground art enthusiasts who wear black trenchcoats and carry automatic weapons while looking at Renaissance paintings in an abandoned warehouse, Christian Bale shooting a room full of people by standing there and seeing how many different ways he can cross his guns across his body under strobe lighting that just makes the whole thing look absurd, and the Mona Lisa being set on fire to show just how evil the bad guys are, without breaking down in laughter.

What makes it work as an entertainingly bad film, though, is the slumming cast (Sean Bean shows up just to die), and the fact that the action is actually tolerably entertaining despite being cheesy.

 

That's probably a defense mechanism . I picked it up for a few bucks at a used DVD store a couple of months back and let's just say that it's aptly named, as I was definitely punished. Like you, I hadn't seen it in a long time, but I distinctly remembered liking it when it came out. Then again I also liked Milli Vanilli when they came out...

It's biggest sin is that it's just incredibly dull. There's not even any cheesy, B-movie fun to be had ala director Mark Goldblatt's previous effort, Dead Heat.

 

Well there were scenes that were lifted verbatum from EFNY, but this got the tone all wrong even if they were mocking Los Angeles. Kurt had a few great moments and I love the last 20 minutes and some stuff in between, but for this cranky fan woman, Snake Plissken starts and ends with Escape From New York.

Eastern Promises (2007) So why didn't Viggo win an oscar for his performance as Nikolai? This movie is still as riveting and intense as when I saw it theatrically. My favorite Cronenberg along with Videodrome (and I don't like James Woods.)

 

Havac Incidentally, that movie combined with American Psycho was enough to convince me Bale would make a good Batman.

(He did, overall, when he wasn't emo for the wrong reasons at least.)

 

Master_Lok
This cranky fan woman agrees. EFNY was definitely better than LA. Though I don't hate the LA movie either. I mean I still get to see Kurt Russell in all his sexy glory. He definitely is one of the few that can rock and eye patch. But LA is still good for a few laughs.

I can't say I've ever totally disliked any of Kurt's movies, even the cheesy Disney stuff he did as a kid. But man did he clean up well when he reached adulthood.

 

I see what you did there ^

 

Check it out again sometime. Kim Novak's doing some extraordinary work in the first half that's hard to pick up on when, well, you haven't yet seen the story unfold.

 

I saw this film as a teenager or college freshman and my friends and I absolutely loved it. I have tried to watch it since and really couldn't get through it without wondering how I liked it so much back then. I mean, I like Christian Bale and Sean Bean, and the action is tolerable, I suppose...though it's certainly not as good as I remember it.

That said, I wonder if a modern-day viewing of the Matrix will give me the same dissatisfied experience. The action in the Matrix was jaw-dropping back in the 90s. But today, I'm almost certain that it'll be worthy of a couple eye-rolls.

 

Night of the Living Dead (1990). A remake of the George Romero classic, I found this version of the story to be just okay. It stuck too close to closely to the original, making it a bit of a boring retread for anyone, like me, who has seen the earlier film. The only new things this version offers (aside from being in colour) is that the character of Barbara has a more active role and the ending is different.

 

The Station Agent. Peter Dinklage, Bobby Cannavale, and Patricia Clarkson star in an indie movie about friendship, basically. Dinklage plays a train enthusiast who has responded to his dwarfism by shutting the entire world out, preemptively ignoring it before it can annoy him. When he moves into an old train depot in nowhere, New Jersey, hoping to find solitude, he instead runs into Cannavale and Clarkson, and against his will ends up friends with them. Clarkson, struggling with depression after her son's death, is pretty isolated herself, but they're brought together by the irresistible force of Cannavale, an outgoing food vendor with childish enthusiasm and unselfconsciousness, whose relentless, unencouraged pursuit of friendship with Dinklage and Clarkson betrays just how lonely he is as he struggles with his father's illness. The debut film of Tom McCarthy, whose Spotlight just won the Oscar, it doesn't look like much and there's really not much to the story. It gets along on the strength of the performances, with Dinklage doing great work with his slow thaw and Cannavale's incredibly strong goof-off bro charisma carrying any scene he's in (plus it's got Michelle Williams and John Slattery in smaller roles, both reliably great). I could watch Cannavale eat a bowl of cereal while eagerly watching an ex-couple fight, completely oblivious to his own awkwardness, all day.

 

I lost it when the "underground resistance" was literally in the basement.

 

The best part was that they illustrated that they were "underground" by having the ceiling be gratings with people walking on them, like they've got twenty people living in a brightly-lit area right under the sidewalk. So apparently the only reason the government was never able to find the underground is because nobody in history has ever looked down.

Rounders. God, Amazon Prime is moving its whole stock of old Affleck and Damon movies. They're all leaving. Anyway, this was entertaining enough. Damon and Edward Norton, who doesn't always work for me but was pretty great here, play poker-playing buddies. Damon is the serious, play-it-straight lead character, a law student who funded himself through poker and dreamed of winning the World Series of Poker until he swore it off but this is a poker movie so of course he goes back. Norton is his sleazeball friend who's fresh out of jail and still deep in debt, a guy who just can't stop taking stupid chances and getting in over his head. Norton gets to have a lot of fun, while Damon does well at balancing the sympathetic straight-arrow brainy protagonist with the edgier street-wise gambler persona. This is a promising law student who seems pretty comfortable hanging out in brothels trying to negotiate with loan sharks, and Damon makes you actually believe it. It's a pretty standard narrative, complete with drag of a girlfriend who wants Damon to stop playing poker because she hates fun or whatever, but Damon's and Norton's charm carries it pretty far, it's got John Malkovich doing a ridiculous Russian accent and hamming it up, and it manages a pretty great atmosphere with its exploration of the world of poker, from fleecing tourists at the casino tables to locked-door basement games with mobsters to regular backroom games at bars and country clubs, each with its own crowd. It's just a fun movie to hang out with for two hours.

 

Charlie Chan in London A 1930S 'classic' sees Warner Oland as the famous sleuth, this time hes enlisted by the sister of a man whos sentenced to hang for a murder she thinks he didn't commit. But he only has 3 days to solve the case.

The murder was committed in an old country mansion, so Chan goes to the mansion where conveniently all the socialites who were also there when the murder was committed just happen to be together. The socialites are your stereo typical upper class country mansion fox hunting dwellers, (including a very young Ray Milland). Chan goes around the house questioning everyone, in a Poirot style I think, before finally exposing the real murderer and revealing that the motive was in fact military secrets related.

Oland is arguably the best incarnation of Chan and hes at ease in the role here. Minor gripes are that they obviously never left England to film this, the country house looks like nothing I've seen in an English country house, whilst the exterior English country side settings look nothing like the English country side. Despite that I thought it was well staged and very typical a murder mystery of its era. Its very much of its time. Every character has the traits that you'd come to expect in films like this from the butler to the maids to the upper class women and even the local police. The studios were like a well oiled machine in churning these out.

 

Scrooged. No, I haven't defected to Wockyism. It's just leaving Prime. But this is now definitely in my Christmas rotation. A Christmas Carol by way of Network, it's an absolutely hilarious film. It's a funny, clever riff on A Christmas Carol that doubles as a devastating TV critique. Murray is in absolutely top form, and I loved seeing old Bob Mitchum and the ever-lovely Karen Allen. It really is one of Murray's best performances, in my opinion.

 

The Madness of King George. A darkly-comic take on George III's 1788 episode of madness, it never manages to be anything special, but it's a competent little ramble with a very good central performance from Nigel Hawthorne. It's just sort of another blandly cultured-seeming British period piece. Perhaps the best thing to say about it is that it bears no real trace of its origins as a play, as Nicholas Hytner's direction is confidently cinematic; it's a very good job of adaptation for the screen.

 

I had my yearly Easter viewing of the best horror movie of all time, The Exorcist. The tradition is about 19 years old, so it must go on. Plus, I'm always ready to listen to Mercedes McCambridge doing her marvelous voice over of possessed Regan. Pure magic

 

chappie. otherwise known as "die antwoord :the movie"

 

I dunno, I just thought Hynter and Dunn chucked in a bunch of wide-angle shots roaming through corridors - I don't think they told much of a story with those shots.

It was nice that it got Hawthorne some international acclaim after delivering one of the greatest TV performances of all time (well, it was an equal partnership with Paul Eddington) but I'm with you on it being nothing special. If I need a regency "feel" I'll stick with Blackadder the Third.

HM though: Jim Carter.