Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
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But they're MAGIC swords and bows!!!
Kind of reminds me of how it's a shame Iron Fist never got a third season, because if it did, we'd had have Danny Rand dual wielding 1911s that shoot chi. Now that's what I want to see in the MCU, a man in a silly green and yellow suit mowing down ninjas with gun-kata.
You actually had me thinking of the Wakandan military, which is apparently composed purely of motherfuckers with essentially magic rocket launchers. Which is cool right up until you need to go against a mindless horde of baddies. Warmachine, with the superpower of "has lots of guns", was more effective on his own than the hundreds of soldiers present.
I enjoy the John Wick movies and their clones, but I wouldn't mind a return to over the top gun battles. Equilibrium is so stupid but I enjoy it so much.
That sounds surprisingly fun. On one hand, I didn't expect them to let Raimi make a Raimi movie. On the other hand, his Spiderman movies are in many ways what the average MCU flick is trying to be.
*sigh* If only they could actually succeed in it.
Rock and Rule? Though, whether that's a musical cartoon or a cartoon about musicians is another question. They just happen to be furries and one of them wants to open a portal to hell for no real reason, which is a bit unusual.
The Batman
First half, because I literally fell asleep.
You know, I get that Batman is going to grumble in a monotone. But does everybody? Gordon, every cop, every criminal, freaking Catwoman, all talk like that? And the whole movie is at night, so I'm strainging and squinting and nothing interesting is happening and zzzzzzzzzzz
So I was reading a bit about this flick on the interwebs and everybody talking about how it's inspired by movies like Chinatown, Klute, The Pentagon Papers, Taxi Driver... I love those movies! And that somehow the portrayal of Bruce Wayne is inspired by Kurt Cobain... I love Nirvana!
But just smushing references and inspiration results in a bland goop of sort of nothing, which is what this felt like.
First half, because I literally fell asleep.
You know, I get that Batman is going to grumble in a monotone. But does everybody? Gordon, every cop, every criminal, freaking Catwoman, all talk like that? And the whole movie is at night, so I'm strainging and squinting and nothing interesting is happening and zzzzzzzzzzz
So I was reading a bit about this flick on the interwebs and everybody talking about how it's inspired by movies like Chinatown, Klute, The Pentagon Papers, Taxi Driver... I love those movies! And that somehow the portrayal of Bruce Wayne is inspired by Kurt Cobain... I love Nirvana!
But just smushing references and inspiration results in a bland goop of sort of nothing, which is what this felt like.
The Northman
As a genre film it follows familiar beats, but it looks like a movie in which mysticism and a pretty insane idea of honor drives people forward. Or y'know... some of them. I got a lot of Ari Aster vibes (Hereditary, Midsommar) and wouldn't you know it, Aster's and Lars Knudsen's company Square Peg was among the producers. 8/10
As a genre film it follows familiar beats, but it looks like a movie in which mysticism and a pretty insane idea of honor drives people forward. Or y'know... some of them. I got a lot of Ari Aster vibes (Hereditary, Midsommar) and wouldn't you know it, Aster's and Lars Knudsen's company Square Peg was among the producers. 8/10
Oldboy (2003)
South Korean revenge thriller by Park Chan-Wook and one of the earlier korean productions to get widespread critical acclaim abroad. Which, I suppose, shouldn't surprise, it is a very attention grabbing flick. Oldboy is the story of businessman Oh Dae-Su who finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a small room for 15 years by unknown forces. Upon his release he vows to take revenge on whoever was resonsible for it, embarking on a blood soaked revenge mission. I don't think anyone will be surprised to find out that it's based on a manga.
No matter how foreign, critically acclaimed and well directed it is, make no mistake, Oldboy is an exploitation flick through and through. The violence is as crunchy as it gets, featuring an often referenced fight scene that delivers some real Hongkong shit. The justifications for it are about as contrived as you can get away with. The tone fluctuates between that of a particularly unhinged action comedy and a no less absurd urban thriller. Its plot twists are ridiculous to the point of being borderline nonsensical and prioritize shock value over even the flimsiest pretense of realism or logic. Oldboy also goes hard as hell.
One needs to let go of many conventional notions of what constitutes "good" writing when entering the strangely gleeful rollercoaster of violence and cruelty that is Oldboy. Park's snappy direction lends a sense of fluid momentum and practically pitch perfect (often comedic) timing to a story that revels in hyperviolent sleaze and manages to lend a kind of shakespearian grandeur to what, in lesser hands, would have been a B-movie at best. As does the performance of lead actor Choi Min-Sik who completely throws himself into the role of its PTSD ridden antihero. It's this combination of powerhouse direction and performance that allows Oldboy's story to have actual impact, no matter how little sense it makes. And make no mistake, I can't emphasize enough how absolutely bonkers it is for something that presents itself as a gritty thriller.
Hypnosis. Amnesia. Incest. Secret Prisons above Japanese restaurants. And yet, as the movie draws to an end and reveals its biggest plot twists, it genuinely left me shocked. The fact that this is, rightfully, remembered as a classic of korean cinema, rather than trashy asian curiosity speaks for the skill of everyone involved and much moreso, shows how much mileage there can be in a script that's by most definitions low brow and exploitative.
What Park saw in this story was, effectively, a modern, urban twist on the classic jacobean revenge play. Sir Peter Greenaway approached this type of story with his trademark hyper stylizised, painterly visual sensibility with "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover", its surreal and highly theatrical staging leaving no doubt about how, despite its grisly subject matter, it's an arthouse production. Park let's the tragedy, in all its absurdity, play out on the grimy streets of a modern city as a brawny martial arts action flick. The jacobean revenge play as the ultimate dad movie, or the ultimate dad movie as a jacobean revenge play.
Oldboy is kind of amazing, honestly. Visceral, shocking, at times hilarious and at other times nauseating. Park directed his heart out to produce an exploitation masterpiece. This is the movie S. Craig Zahler wishes he could make.
South Korean revenge thriller by Park Chan-Wook and one of the earlier korean productions to get widespread critical acclaim abroad. Which, I suppose, shouldn't surprise, it is a very attention grabbing flick. Oldboy is the story of businessman Oh Dae-Su who finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a small room for 15 years by unknown forces. Upon his release he vows to take revenge on whoever was resonsible for it, embarking on a blood soaked revenge mission. I don't think anyone will be surprised to find out that it's based on a manga.
No matter how foreign, critically acclaimed and well directed it is, make no mistake, Oldboy is an exploitation flick through and through. The violence is as crunchy as it gets, featuring an often referenced fight scene that delivers some real Hongkong shit. The justifications for it are about as contrived as you can get away with. The tone fluctuates between that of a particularly unhinged action comedy and a no less absurd urban thriller. Its plot twists are ridiculous to the point of being borderline nonsensical and prioritize shock value over even the flimsiest pretense of realism or logic. Oldboy also goes hard as hell.
One needs to let go of many conventional notions of what constitutes "good" writing when entering the strangely gleeful rollercoaster of violence and cruelty that is Oldboy. Park's snappy direction lends a sense of fluid momentum and practically pitch perfect (often comedic) timing to a story that revels in hyperviolent sleaze and manages to lend a kind of shakespearian grandeur to what, in lesser hands, would have been a B-movie at best. As does the performance of lead actor Choi Min-Sik who completely throws himself into the role of its PTSD ridden antihero. It's this combination of powerhouse direction and performance that allows Oldboy's story to have actual impact, no matter how little sense it makes. And make no mistake, I can't emphasize enough how absolutely bonkers it is for something that presents itself as a gritty thriller.
Hypnosis. Amnesia. Incest. Secret Prisons above Japanese restaurants. And yet, as the movie draws to an end and reveals its biggest plot twists, it genuinely left me shocked. The fact that this is, rightfully, remembered as a classic of korean cinema, rather than trashy asian curiosity speaks for the skill of everyone involved and much moreso, shows how much mileage there can be in a script that's by most definitions low brow and exploitative.
What Park saw in this story was, effectively, a modern, urban twist on the classic jacobean revenge play. Sir Peter Greenaway approached this type of story with his trademark hyper stylizised, painterly visual sensibility with "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover", its surreal and highly theatrical staging leaving no doubt about how, despite its grisly subject matter, it's an arthouse production. Park let's the tragedy, in all its absurdity, play out on the grimy streets of a modern city as a brawny martial arts action flick. The jacobean revenge play as the ultimate dad movie, or the ultimate dad movie as a jacobean revenge play.
Oldboy is kind of amazing, honestly. Visceral, shocking, at times hilarious and at other times nauseating. Park directed his heart out to produce an exploitation masterpiece. This is the movie S. Craig Zahler wishes he could make.
I was surprised by how much leeway Raimi apparently had in designing the composition of the shots and the movement of the camera (the look not so much). There's the obvious second camera crew for the more grandiose standard issue Marvel brawls, but Raimi is clearly directing the movie around them. There's a lot of weird little pickups involving extras that reminded me of his Spider-Man movies. He sets up a lot of goofy but effective jump-scares. There's cameras behaving with a personality of their own and fourth-wall breaking and possessed characters contorting like Deadites and what looks to me like a clear homage to Darkman. And his love of torturing characters really shows here. You rarely see Marvel characters show any pain or fear (ACTUAL pain or fear, without trying to look cool or jaded about it) but here it's as over the top as those get. And again even for a relatively bloodless movie there's a lot of body horror straddling the line between gnarly and ridiculous.
The movie is a mess and doesn't have a clean-cut journey that structures any meaningful message or development around it. The villain's motivation is nonsense as usual, and the plucky teenager is a wash, and the whole exciting premise of a multiverse is wasted on Spy Kids-level of CGI and celebrity showboating. But Raimi made the best version of the movie possible and made it entertaining.
This was the perfect movie for me to go see when my wife was out of town for a couple of days. Real dudebro type flick. I'm like "look honey, Viking movie!" and she's like "what's it about besides Vikings" and I'm like "who cares... Vikings!" which was not a selling point. Yeah, she'd have hated it. I dug it.
You know what's great about Egger's films- there is ZERO subtext, meta, irony, or meaning. It's just f'n badass shit. The Witch is about a Witch, the Lighthouse is about a lighthouse, the Northman is about a northman, and crazy shit happens, and it's intense and wonderful. Good stuff.
The Good Guys - 7/10
A really solid kids movie that thematically is more subtle than Zootopia in its rather similar message and it's solid for kids but a bit too basic for adults, though there's plenty to entertain everyone. There's some pretty funny bits and lines, humorous but not very laugh out loud funny. I liked the animation style that is CGI but not super detailed (the fur isn't nearly as detailed as say Zootopia) so it has more of a cartoonish feel to it. The main song played during the climax is a jam, why are songs from a kid's movie so much better than probably anything currently on the top 40?
A really solid kids movie that thematically is more subtle than Zootopia in its rather similar message and it's solid for kids but a bit too basic for adults, though there's plenty to entertain everyone. There's some pretty funny bits and lines, humorous but not very laugh out loud funny. I liked the animation style that is CGI but not super detailed (the fur isn't nearly as detailed as say Zootopia) so it has more of a cartoonish feel to it. The main song played during the climax is a jam, why are songs from a kid's movie so much better than probably anything currently on the top 40?
It felt the same as Joker to me, all inspiration/reference, but no substance. Even the end felt like a teenager being like "wouldn't be so badass to end a Batman movie just like Tool's Aenima?"
Goldfinger
Peak Bond. The movie checks all the marks: open with some mission wrapping up, provocative title sequence with a semi-naked lady, the MI6 trifecta (Bond gets berated by M, flirts with Moneypenny and gets on Q's nerves while collecting his gadgets), meet a villain obsessed about one particular thing and a badass henchman with a gimmick; introduce one or two Bond girls (first one always dies), get captured and tortured in a novel way, etc. The name's Bond (James Bond), takes his martinis shaken (not stirred) and he's finally quipping witty remarks whenever he kills someone. Coming from the more Hitchcockian Fom Russia With Love, this one is both a return to form (Dr. No was a milder version of this, slower and more uneven) as well as a blueprint for the rest of the movies to come, going all in on 60s slick sexy spy flick appeal (Dr. No feels more like a dull mad scientist movie from the 50s).
Having said all that... boy does Bond come across as a mysogynist in this movie. Dr. No and From Russia also treated Bond like a relentless stud too but at least he seemed to revere and enjoy the ladies with a bemused, this-is-all-a-dream detachment. In Goldfinger he flat out despises women, treating them as hurdles in the way of "man talk", carelessly getting two of them killed and essentially raping the third one. The worst part (well, maybe not the worst, but the irony stood out) is that raping Pussy Galore ends up being a crucial step into foiling Goldfinger, not that Bond planned it that way or that it makes any sense that it would work out that way either.
Peak Bond. The movie checks all the marks: open with some mission wrapping up, provocative title sequence with a semi-naked lady, the MI6 trifecta (Bond gets berated by M, flirts with Moneypenny and gets on Q's nerves while collecting his gadgets), meet a villain obsessed about one particular thing and a badass henchman with a gimmick; introduce one or two Bond girls (first one always dies), get captured and tortured in a novel way, etc. The name's Bond (James Bond), takes his martinis shaken (not stirred) and he's finally quipping witty remarks whenever he kills someone. Coming from the more Hitchcockian Fom Russia With Love, this one is both a return to form (Dr. No was a milder version of this, slower and more uneven) as well as a blueprint for the rest of the movies to come, going all in on 60s slick sexy spy flick appeal (Dr. No feels more like a dull mad scientist movie from the 50s).
Having said all that... boy does Bond come across as a mysogynist in this movie. Dr. No and From Russia also treated Bond like a relentless stud too but at least he seemed to revere and enjoy the ladies with a bemused, this-is-all-a-dream detachment. In Goldfinger he flat out despises women, treating them as hurdles in the way of "man talk", carelessly getting two of them killed and essentially raping the third one. The worst part (well, maybe not the worst, but the irony stood out) is that raping Pussy Galore ends up being a crucial step into foiling Goldfinger, not that Bond planned it that way or that it makes any sense that it would work out that way either.
You should read the book. Movie Bond is practically a saint in comparison.
Dr Strange 2. Even watching the day after premiere, barely anyone in the theater. The perks of still being a student I guess, man I'll miss it.
Anyway, it was good. But plenty of things keeping it from being great. But mostly, America Chavez. She, to put it simply, sucks. Her acting sucks, which honestly feels like both the actor's fault and the director's. I hate Captain Marvel because she comes off like Brie Larsen was told explicitly to act "like an MCU character". The same is for America and her actor. Doesn't help that her origin story, arc, and dialogue are garbage. As she is the main character alongside Strange, she really drags this whole movie down with her.
But what I did enjoy about the movie was how obviously Sam Raimi it was. I could genuinely believe that the New York in this movie is the same New York from his Spider-man trilogy. Felt like a completely different New York in the MCU, which is funny when we've seen New York twice last year. The same could be said for the action sequences. There are plenty of generic ones, and they still do rely way too much on the awful glowing lines martial arts bullshit, but there are a few that are easily the most creative sequences in the MCU. The horror stuff wasn't scary to me, but it was shocking? If that makes sense. Definitely the goriest MCU movie out there.
The multiverse concept itself is a mixed bag. What we did get was pretty cool. But they blew all their load on the multiverse concept in one go, so you are kind of left thinking "was that it?".
I'm still hoping that the MCU can put out a movie again that I can love with no reservations. There hasn't really been one since Far From Home, which was like three years ago. Maybe I've just changed as a person, maybe I'm just had too much of the MCU. But Thor 4 looks like good fun, and I'm glad to be watching movies back in theaters again, so here's hoping Taika hits it out of the park.
Anyway, it was good. But plenty of things keeping it from being great. But mostly, America Chavez. She, to put it simply, sucks. Her acting sucks, which honestly feels like both the actor's fault and the director's. I hate Captain Marvel because she comes off like Brie Larsen was told explicitly to act "like an MCU character". The same is for America and her actor. Doesn't help that her origin story, arc, and dialogue are garbage. As she is the main character alongside Strange, she really drags this whole movie down with her.
But what I did enjoy about the movie was how obviously Sam Raimi it was. I could genuinely believe that the New York in this movie is the same New York from his Spider-man trilogy. Felt like a completely different New York in the MCU, which is funny when we've seen New York twice last year. The same could be said for the action sequences. There are plenty of generic ones, and they still do rely way too much on the awful glowing lines martial arts bullshit, but there are a few that are easily the most creative sequences in the MCU. The horror stuff wasn't scary to me, but it was shocking? If that makes sense. Definitely the goriest MCU movie out there.
The multiverse concept itself is a mixed bag. What we did get was pretty cool. But they blew all their load on the multiverse concept in one go, so you are kind of left thinking "was that it?".
I'm still hoping that the MCU can put out a movie again that I can love with no reservations. There hasn't really been one since Far From Home, which was like three years ago. Maybe I've just changed as a person, maybe I'm just had too much of the MCU. But Thor 4 looks like good fun, and I'm glad to be watching movies back in theaters again, so here's hoping Taika hits it out of the park.