Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
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I can further expound that objective box office success (what studios deem to have been a worthy/expected return on their time and investment) =/= subjective quality. There have been quite a few movies I enjoyed that didn't rake in the cash at the box office, and as many films that killed at the box office that owe my hours of my life back (Once Upon A Time Hollywood, no, I will NEVER forgive you, and will take every pertinent moment to shit on your existence.)
That said, I'm absolutely reeling at the idea that this Barbie movie might compete with Oppenheimer next week. I'm not even sure who the former is for, women in their '40s feeling nostalgic? Kids today who pay $20 for an irrelevant doll? Someones in the middle? Who asked for this absolute garbage, and yes, I'm saying that with only having seen the overly-pink trailers that are little more than an affront to my intelligence. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, I am very much looking forward to seeing. I know a lot of eyes roll when Christopher Nolan's named is mentioned, but the cast looks stellar, and the subject actually interesting. Looking forward to the deep brass stabs and "wall of sound" score that most have probably been over since Inception; all the more for me.
Hence why this whole 'Disney/Pixar are bombing because they lost their way' talk kinda irks me.
Across the Spider-Verse is being used by all these commentary channels as an example for high box office because of quality, but Into was just as good yet didn't do too well in theaters, actually being the lowest performing Spider-Man movie.
Spoilers for all sequels.
My brother and I are seeing the movie Saturday. Nice always see Cruise go above and beyond. He's basically America's Jackie Chan when it comes to stunt work. Minus the kung-fu, but we all know Cruise can do hand to had greatly.
Just go out, enjoy life, and have fun! It's Mission Impossible. You're either in or your out. Speaking of which:
Correction: Mission Impossible 2 happened in 2000.
Better!
Remember the Rabbit's Foot? Seriously, what was the Rabbit's Foot?!
Yet Into is better than Amazing Spiderman 1 & 2, and the whole Raimi Trilogy as far as I'm concerned.
Atlantis: Milo's Return (5/10)
Never seen the original Atlantis film (I know, shame on me), and while I wouldn't say watching this has put me off the idea, it HAS put me off the idea of watching this again. Like, ever.
Okay, maybe that's an exagerration, but even going in with low expectations for a variety of reasons, this did nothing for me. It's a collection of TV episodes that were never aired, stitched together into a single film. Which would be fine if there was any real throughline, but there isn't. The gang spends X minutes solving one problem, Y minutes solving the next, Z minutes solving the third, and then the movie ends. Oh sure, it tries to do a throughline, the notion that their experiences have convinced Kida that Atlantis must rise to the surface (which it does), but there's no real sense of climax here. No real sense of triumph.
Thing is, if I'm treating the segments as episodes, they're not terrible or anything. Standard children's flare of "team of explorers of various tropes go to place, deal with mystery of said place, which is tied into (insert mythology here), they solve it, rinse and repeat. The ending monologue states (paraphrased) that "Atlantis was raised, and the world was never the same - it was better," which hypothetically could make for an alternate history take (apparently this movie takes place in the 1910s, so maybe WWI never happens or something), but hypotheticals don't make the movie good. It's just bog standard average kid's fare, and even in the genre in question, these stories are a dime a dozen.
So, yeah. Atlantis might rise, but the movie flops and splashes.
Rankings below, as usual:
As for the LM audience rating, you mean the one on RT? The one that's almost certainly jacked up? Considering how much hate LM got (some of the reasons being less savory than others) prior to release, I can't believe that the audience score is that high.
Never seen the original Atlantis film (I know, shame on me), and while I wouldn't say watching this has put me off the idea, it HAS put me off the idea of watching this again. Like, ever.
Okay, maybe that's an exagerration, but even going in with low expectations for a variety of reasons, this did nothing for me. It's a collection of TV episodes that were never aired, stitched together into a single film. Which would be fine if there was any real throughline, but there isn't. The gang spends X minutes solving one problem, Y minutes solving the next, Z minutes solving the third, and then the movie ends. Oh sure, it tries to do a throughline, the notion that their experiences have convinced Kida that Atlantis must rise to the surface (which it does), but there's no real sense of climax here. No real sense of triumph.
Thing is, if I'm treating the segments as episodes, they're not terrible or anything. Standard children's flare of "team of explorers of various tropes go to place, deal with mystery of said place, which is tied into (insert mythology here), they solve it, rinse and repeat. The ending monologue states (paraphrased) that "Atlantis was raised, and the world was never the same - it was better," which hypothetically could make for an alternate history take (apparently this movie takes place in the 1910s, so maybe WWI never happens or something), but hypotheticals don't make the movie good. It's just bog standard average kid's fare, and even in the genre in question, these stories are a dime a dozen.
So, yeah. Atlantis might rise, but the movie flops and splashes.
Rankings below, as usual:
6) Atlantis: Milo’s Return
5) Peter Pan: Return to Neverland
4) The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
3) The Little Mermaid III: Ariel’s Beginning
2) Aladdin: The Return of Jaffar
1) The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride
5) Peter Pan: Return to Neverland
4) The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea
3) The Little Mermaid III: Ariel’s Beginning
2) Aladdin: The Return of Jaffar
1) The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride
All of those films were released in cinemas though. The figure comes from the films making X dollars, after production/advertising costs of Y dollars, and the net loss being $890 million. The simple fact is that not enough people are seeing them in cinemas.
As for the LM audience rating, you mean the one on RT? The one that's almost certainly jacked up? Considering how much hate LM got (some of the reasons being less savory than others) prior to release, I can't believe that the audience score is that high.
A ★★ review of A View to a Kill (1985)
Not as bad as I remembered it being...but also not good. This film's production was actually pretty smooth. There were some issues with casting, but even then, it was pretty minor. For example, Priscilla Presley was the original choice for the main Bond Girl, Stacey Sutton, but she was unable to...
letterboxd.com
There, ya happy? I did it.
Well, then can an audience rating ever be taken sincerely? The live-action The Lion King had no race controversy to supposedly jack up the score for and it still has a very favorable audience rating, so was it jacked up there as well? In the youtube critic bubble these live-action remakes are looked at and reported on with scorn, but the people outside of that, i.e. the vast majority of the viewing audience, look at these movies with a lot less scrutiny. You take away the racism and both The Little Mermaid and The Lion King were pretty much at the same level of 'ugh, another live-action Disney remake' from youtube commentary channels, with the former actually enjoying some positive reception on release.
But this goes back to Elemental and the Mario movie - Where both have less the stellar critic scores, but very high audience scores, yet with one it's being used to claim critics are out of touch and with the other it's seemingly being ignored to keep talking about how Pixar movies are shit now.
I don't hold any real value to audience scores on these sites, but I do find it peculiar that they get brought up or ignored when it's convenient. The Little Mermaid has a high audience score, and it's obviously doctored. The Mario movie has a high audience score, and it's proof professional critics just suck.
To address the above:
-To be clear on the "race thing" with Little Mermaid, what's eyebrow raising is that when there's been similar hub-bubs in the past, the user ranking on RT has tanked - Ghostbusters 2016, Last Jedi, Captain Marvel, etc. Regardless of your views on these films, all of them were involved in culture war stuff, and were review bombed as a result. So either the review bombing just happened to stop with Little Mermaid, or RT has done something. Normally I'm wary of this kind of conspiratorial thinking (the idea that critics are paid off to give positive reviews), but even critics who've reviewed the movie have commented that something's weird here.
-With the Lion King, yes, you may be right, people may be less discerning overall (especially if this is the first time you've seen the film, as opposed to the original), but again, LK didn't attract nearly the amount of controversy pre-release as LM, nor was it of the same nature. So again, what happened (or didn't happen?) with LM? I'd love to believe that the trolls just stopped, but that's unlikely.
-The "critics are out of touch" argument is similarly worthless to me, because it only ever comes up when there's discrepencies. As in, apparently the critics aren't out of touch when audience and critic scores line up, but then they become "out of touch" when there's discrepencies. But if we're comparing the audience scores to Mario and Mermaid, the difference is that Mario never had the pre-release backlash Little Mermaid did, and some (very stupid) people have gone so far as to call Mario "anti-woke," whereas the Little Mermaid apparently is woke because of everything from Ariel's actress to Ariel being the one to kill Ursula (which isn't a change I'm fond of, but haven't seen the film so won't comment too much).
Thing is, I'm not fond of trolling and review bombing, but not fond of review doctoring either. Said it plenty of times with the films I've listed above, there are perfectly valid reasons to dislike them.
They did at a certain point decide to take action at what they deemed hate mobs - fueled by either racism, sexism, or homophobia - downvoting a movie. Whether this happens to audience scores where people had genuine discontent for the product I don't know, but with The Little Mermaid I think we can say it wasn't that.
The trolls aren't as numerous as general audiences, not by a long shot, and the trolls typically frontload the negative audience score - it very likely started off very negative until the vast majority of non-trolls went to see it, thought it was alright, and brought the score up. And again, internet bubble, most people probably weren't even aware of the controversy. Not that it wasn't covered on regular news channels, but that was probably just the one item, not the non-stop 24 hour barrage from the commentary community.
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Aaah there we go. Harsh as announced but hey. As I said earlier I like this film a lot. Its only issue is Moore's age, and he was very very aware of that. He did complain about his bathtub sequence with the russian agent who could be his granddaughter.A ★★ review of A View to a Kill (1985)
Not as bad as I remembered it being...but also not good. This film's production was actually pretty smooth. There were some issues with casting, but even then, it was pretty minor. For example, Priscilla Presley was the original choice for the main Bond Girl, Stacey Sutton, but she was unable to...
There, ya happy? I did it.
The plot is fine for me. It's a direct remake of goldfinger, Zorin (Zorin! Drax! Spot the baddies.) wants to drown computer chip fort knox, and is first introduced as a petty cheater. I like the whole slow burn investigation better than Bond movies that are just sequences of rambo, and I like the dracula-vs-helsing mutually gauging interactions between a Bond and his baddie. The Spy Who Loved Me botched it by including a short ridiculous one with no rhyme or reason, but here it makes sense (Moonraker-like) and we have stuff like the delightful PERSONAL COMPUTER scene (everybody should have one).
Walken is fantastic, and the mine slaughter scene is one of my favorite Bond scenes. Just for the sheer childish sociopathic delight of Walken. Another of my favorite Bond scenes is in that film too. The fight at Stacey's home, with Bond's desperate efforts to save that nice vase. That is Bond at its Moorest, and illustrates all I love about this era as opposed to Craig's.
It's also a filming I wish I had experienced first hand : Grace Jones and Roger Moore hated each other's guts (according to Moore, Jones was absolutely odious to her subordinates), and Grace Jones is the only person the ever elegant Moore isn't nice to, in his writings (at best he refuses to discuss her). He does admit appreciating her sardonic humour in their conflicts (she brought a huge dildo in bed for their awkward scene), but the filming was very tense due to their clashes.
The music is fine, but either Barry ceased to give a damn, or the director wasn't sure of the scene lengths : his nice tunes as just short loops repeated at infinitam. They feel like computer music (for action sequences depending on the player's speed) more than nicely crafted pieces fitting a sequence. Compare the raid on fort knox and the golden gate fight. It's sad because the musical loop is great. Music in movies is dying, nowadays, films cease to be crafted around it Leone/Morricone-like, and maybe this was the beginning, an early symptom.
Anyway. These films did indeed start to be torn between two tones, and the John Barry versus Beach Boys intro illustrates it violently : is it meant to be epic and heroic, it it meant to be silly and terence-hill-ish ? It tries to be both, not by striking a balance but by alternating styles within seconds. The result there is horrid. The film as a whole balances it better. For me it's a very good last james bond movie. Okay, a good one. A very decent one.
Despite Tanya Roberts not being Kim Cattrall.
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I didn't mind the slow burn investigation. Heck, I like Dr. No quite a bit, and that movie's almost nothing but slow burn investigation. It was more that the slow burn investigation at the horse auction especially just seemed to go almost nowhere other than a way for Bond to meet Zorin, which could have been done just about any other way. I do agree that Walken is fantastic, and I will also cop to enjoying the fight at Stacey's home, and "He loved a good fight" as a way to cope with using your grandfather's cremains urn as a weapon is Moore cheese at its best.
I tried to get into the camp mode for this movie, but then stuff like the mine scene took me out of that mode. I think that's the biggest issue with this movie: it wants to be camp, but it also wanted to appeal to the action movie crowd, and didn't mesh the two styles together well at all.
And yeah, Roger Moore did not get on with Grace Jones. In his words, " If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything. So I will say nothing about Grace Jones."
One last bit of trivia: Take a close look at the KGB agents who are with General Gogol during his talk with Max Zorin, and you might recognize one of them. You see, an extra got sick, and Grace Jones' boyfriend at the time happened to be on set and was asked to step in. And thus, Dolph Lundgren began his film career.
I tried to get into the camp mode for this movie, but then stuff like the mine scene took me out of that mode. I think that's the biggest issue with this movie: it wants to be camp, but it also wanted to appeal to the action movie crowd, and didn't mesh the two styles together well at all.
And yeah, Roger Moore did not get on with Grace Jones. In his words, " If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything. So I will say nothing about Grace Jones."
One last bit of trivia: Take a close look at the KGB agents who are with General Gogol during his talk with Max Zorin, and you might recognize one of them. You see, an extra got sick, and Grace Jones' boyfriend at the time happened to be on set and was asked to step in. And thus, Dolph Lundgren began his film career.
…So you’re saying you’re destined to be a lifer at your work (Not sure if that’s good or bad)?
Well taking A: tWoW and Quantumania into consideration respectively -
Now, Deadline reports that Avatar: The Way of Water's actual profit is $531.7 million. After factoring out the additional costs of filming most of Avatar 3 and parts 4, which were shot concurrently, the film's production budget is pegged at $400 million. The film's $2.3 billion box office haul is further eaten into by hefty marketing costs, residuals, participations, overhead, and more, with the film's total expenses being $1.087 billion. The $531.7 million profit makes Cameron's sequel undoubtedly a huge success, and this number doesn't include the additional revenue generated by the movie's presence at Disney theme parks.
Usually, theaters retain around 50% of the profits collected during any film's theatrical run, meaning Disney received around $235 million dollars for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This means that, technically, the Phase 5 film did make a profit, though a profit of only around $30 million is below initial expectations - especially when further marketing and promotional costs are considered. While Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania perhaps can't be considered an honest-to-goodness box office bomb - it didn't make a loss - the film certainly didn't reach the numbers done by the most successful MCU projects.
Quality can represent a large number of things, and box office success requires, at minimum, some sort of quality. Even if it misses the mark on a great deal more things we might think of as quality.
Fast and the Furious (2001), 4/10
The opening film to probably the most flanderized franchise in movie history after James Bond, this film is very, very tame and low-key compared to what the series is now, or even 10 years ago. It's a very basic, pretty low-stakes story about an undercover cop, and pretty much nothing about it is remarkable aside from being a time capsule of the early 00s, and of course its status as the franchise starter. The script and acting are all quite mediocre, and there's really nothing special about almost any aspect of the filmmaking. The film's two core action setpieces, which come back to back at the very end, are about trying to get an injured guy off the door of a truck, and chasing two guys on mopeds. Followed by an incredibly abrupt ending, which could almost leave on a "to be continued" for how quickly it cuts to credits. That's it.
I guess Dom Toretto is kind of interesting as an ambiguous not-really antagonist, and you do get a sense of him taking a shine to Paul Walker's character. But that's just a few bits among what is the bulk of this film, which is the nerdiest car porn I've ever seen. There's a car in most of the shots in this movie, often as the core focus. There's ridiculous amounts of dialogue about car models, engines, modfications, all of which is just incomprehensible gobbledygook to someone like me. I guess it's interesting to experience what watching a movie about, say, tabletop wargaming would be to someone who's the core audience of this move.
I was intent on going to see the latest instalment right after this just to experience the whiplash, but now I'm kind of intrigued. A youtuber I follow once characterized these movies as anime, and that you have to slog through the early "slow arc" to get an attachment to these characters and really feel the good bits. Since these movies don't really demand your attention, I think the bar for watching a whole 9 other films after this is a lot lower than usual. There's not dense lore or stylistic changes to experience, it's kust cars going vroom and things going boom. I might actually do it.
The opening film to probably the most flanderized franchise in movie history after James Bond, this film is very, very tame and low-key compared to what the series is now, or even 10 years ago. It's a very basic, pretty low-stakes story about an undercover cop, and pretty much nothing about it is remarkable aside from being a time capsule of the early 00s, and of course its status as the franchise starter. The script and acting are all quite mediocre, and there's really nothing special about almost any aspect of the filmmaking. The film's two core action setpieces, which come back to back at the very end, are about trying to get an injured guy off the door of a truck, and chasing two guys on mopeds. Followed by an incredibly abrupt ending, which could almost leave on a "to be continued" for how quickly it cuts to credits. That's it.
I guess Dom Toretto is kind of interesting as an ambiguous not-really antagonist, and you do get a sense of him taking a shine to Paul Walker's character. But that's just a few bits among what is the bulk of this film, which is the nerdiest car porn I've ever seen. There's a car in most of the shots in this movie, often as the core focus. There's ridiculous amounts of dialogue about car models, engines, modfications, all of which is just incomprehensible gobbledygook to someone like me. I guess it's interesting to experience what watching a movie about, say, tabletop wargaming would be to someone who's the core audience of this move.
I was intent on going to see the latest instalment right after this just to experience the whiplash, but now I'm kind of intrigued. A youtuber I follow once characterized these movies as anime, and that you have to slog through the early "slow arc" to get an attachment to these characters and really feel the good bits. Since these movies don't really demand your attention, I think the bar for watching a whole 9 other films after this is a lot lower than usual. There's not dense lore or stylistic changes to experience, it's kust cars going vroom and things going boom. I might actually do it.
I also thought it was a bit strange how they keep talking about the truck drivers taking their own steps to stop the armed robbers. That is, drivers in the US will take their own civilian legal shotguns with them in the cabs to defend against highwaymen.
How is this a strange or (for the US) dangerous move?
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And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
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