You get exactly what you're expecting if you know the guys from the Crank movies and Ghost Rider movies are behind it: a bouncy plot, choppy action, blurry effects, oversaturated colors, a couple of horndog moments and tons of screaming and overacting. I'd be embarrassed for anyone who watches it as a fan of the comics. I got some Wild Wild West flashbacks from the steampunk and the let's-attack-capitol-hill plot (Ulysses S. Grant included!). The last movie you wanna be reminded of is Wild Wild West.
It's fine. It's a Coen Bros movie about the Golden Age of Hollywood(the 1950's) and follows a Studio fixer around his day dealing with various crisises and such, showcases a bunch of different films types that were big during the period with a lot of famous stars who are portraying expies of famous stars from the period, the big setpiece of which George Cloony doing his Charleton Heston Impression in the Ben-Hur expy HAIL CAESER! Except he get abducted early in the film by Communists for the purpose of.....recruiting him apparently(and something about a ransom). That' s the purported main plot but only like a quarter of the movie has any focus on it.
The rest is the other little stories around the studio but none of them are terrible interesting and it's to the films detriment. The main plot doesn't get much screen time and doesn't feel like it really goes anywhere and the rest of the mini-plots are really just there to show off the Studio of the 1950's and give the other actors something to do but not in any meaningful way. Sure, it's amusing to see Channing Tatum dressed like a Sailor performing a full on musical number(god, that's a phrase I never thought I'd write) but a lot the film probably won't do anything for anyone who isn't interested in the studio system of the era(and as someone who does kinda find that stuff interesting, I was still kinda bored by it).
Apparently at one point it was meant to be a semi-sequel to Barton Fink and I can see that, since it shares some of the same issues. Barton Fink also feels like it goes on for too long and is very niche, but Barton Fink had the advantage of being focused and being able to feel very Indie and minimalist, while Hail Caeser! has a much higher budget(evinced by the star power they were able to pull) and it loses out in comparison.
It's not a bad movie and it has some good production values but even by Coen Bros movie standards it's not gonna blow anyones socks off. And if you don't like their particular brand of offbeat quirk it really isn't gonna do anything for you.
So two movies that I had heard about, but hadn't actually seen until now:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Honestly, with the general feeling that 2020 has been giving off (IE of a large pile of trash that is on fire), it's so refreshing to have a movie about aliens coming to Earth without any sort of 'evil aliens come to kill everyone' vibe. Like, there was never a feeling of danger throughout the story as the focus of our narrative (the team of scientists and Gillian/Roy) is just them trying to figure stuff out. The only gripe I had with the story was how it seemed to be pushing Roy and Gillian into being a couple towards the end, but atleast they didn't kiss. Kinda hard to write anything about it tbh, was just such a pleasant movie to watch.
The Departed
On the other hand, there's The Departed. A good crime drama thriller from Scorcese that, unfortunately, torpedoed my enjoyment of the whole thing with the last 15 mins of the movie. I'm a guy that likes well executed twists (see my thoughts on Spec Ops), but, ugh, this movie.
For starters, I absolutely did not understand that whole 'Carmello is an informant for the FBI bit, but seeing as this was my first time watching this I'll let it slide. And shit, I was ok with Bill getting shot at the end due to the movies 'Bill is gonna die' vibe they were throwing out for the whole last hour or so of movie. But goddamn if that whole 'Sullivan's friend was also a mole the whole time' fucking dumb. Ok, it makes logical sense that he would have more than a single mole in the police, but ffs, your mole tells you he has been transferred to IA to find a mole in the force, and not even a little 'just don't dig too deep' type warning from the guy?Fine, whatever, I'll roll with it, but holy fuck, how the fuck did he show up at the end? Sullivan was totally unaware of any other moles, so how did he know Sullivan was on the take? And how the fuck did he show up to the exact right spot too? And this is before we get into Marky Mark showing up at the end in his little murder booties.
And the movie was great to that point too. Ugh, I just don't know why that ending got me in such a mood but oh well.
As I watched Predator, I thought to myself how lucky that movie was to get a 4K release before Disney bought Fox. The last Fox catalog title on 4K was Alien in April of 2019, shortly before Disney bought Fox. There had been a steady flow of Fox catalog releases on the format until the acquisition. Since then, they've just been sitting on hundreds of Fox titles. It's obvious they wanna force people to join their streaming service. I'm not interested. There's no way Disney Plus's 28 Mbps speeds can deliver picture and sound as detailed as what I watched tonight, and besides, like many Comcast subscribers, I'm capped at 1 terabyte. With how many movies I watch, I'd go through that in no time. Really wish Disney would get broken up. They're way too big of a monopoly.
It's about an old man who goes to see an estranged partner he used to be friends with but who now hates him. He is then never seen again.
Fairly well done, I thought, not to much "hey, remember the first film", but there was a bit of that. Rather predictable in parts, and notable in that Spencer and Martha never showed any signs of affection until they were in different gender bodies.
Surprisingly decent. Mindless action film with a wobbly plot, but eh, fair enough.
Though, if he's secretly doing stuff for the church, a lot of his job would be silencing child sexual abuse victims, and if he's 800 years old he'd get distracted by the prospect of killing Jews and Muslims instead of just witches. Which are ok to kill, I guess? Movie touched on this a little bit, though.
Surprisingly decent. Mindless action film with a wobbly plot, but eh, fair enough.
Though, if he's secretly doing stuff for the church, a lot of his job would be silencing child sexual abuse victims, and if he's 800 years old he'd get distracted by the prospect of killing Jews and Muslims instead of just witches. Which are ok to kill, I guess? Movie touched on this a little bit, though.
I found this film a lot more entertaining when you realise its about Vin Diesel's Dungeons and Dragons character, if only because some of the dumb stuff is exactly what the people I play with try to do or can be excused as someone getting a low roll
Meh. Take her out of Victoria, keep most of the cast back there so they get one scene, put supernatural elements in, not great ideas. Also, terrible weapon discipline, but that probably wasn't intentional.
Ok, so there was a zombie plague, but there was a cure (hence the title) which works on most infected, but not all. So Ireland has second-class citizens (the Cured) and people they maybe want to kill of (the ones the cure doesn't work on). The Cured start up with terrorism and then...
Then the writers remembered that being stupid is a stereotype associated with the Irish and every character has a massive attack of the stupids and the entire movie just gives up. It was doing really well for a bit, depressing, but believable, then, meh, we don't care, bad action movie time.
Meh. Take her out of Victoria, keep most of the cast back there so they get one scene, put supernatural elements in, not great ideas. Also, terrible weapon discipline, but that probably wasn't intentional.
Overall, not as clever as it pretends to be as a Clue-like murder-mystery, but still a fun watch. I feel it was a bit of a misstep revealing what it does as early as it does, but it was a clear attempt at an ultimate double twist that comes off as more of an “Oh, okay” as opposed to the “A-HA!!” it wanted to be, but “A” for effort. Also, it was a little hard watching Daniel Craig try to pull off a southern accent (Louisiana? Georgia?) but kudos for trying. Worth the watch, but doesn’t merit much in the way of a rewatch.
Knives Out, which has Daniel Craig doing a bad accent...wait, the last post is also about Knives Out? Huh.
Anyway, agree with the above, also mention that the first part is an Agatha Christie style story about boring rich people I don't care about doing boring rich people stuff I don't care about. Then they dropped that (which is good, because I forgot who all those people are) and it's about Daniel Craig and the nurse.
Not as clever as it wants to be, not really worth a rewatch.
Overall, not as clever as it pretends to be as a Clue-like murder-mystery, but still a fun watch. I feel it was a bit of a misstep revealing what it does as early as it does, but it was a clear attempt at an ultimate double twist that comes off as more of an “Oh, okay” as opposed to the “A-HA!!” it wanted to be, but “A” for effort. Also, it was a little hard watching Daniel Craig try to pull off a southern accent (Louisiana? Georgia?) but kudos for trying. Worth the watch, but doesn’t merit much in the way of a rewatch.
I thought that the movie was intentionally trying to portray Benoit Blanc as Cajun, with that name and that attempt at an accent, but no, I read in an interview somewhere that that was just Daniel Craig's best try at a Southern accent. "Generically Southern" is probably what the script was indeed going for, giving the KFC and Foghorn Leghorn cracks from other characters, which I initially just took as a portrayal of Yankees being ignorant of different Southern subregions. Ah well.
I thought that the movie was intentionally trying to portray Benoit Blanc as Cajun, with that name and that attempt at an accent, but no, I read in an interview somewhere that that was just Daniel Craig's best try at a Southern accent. "Generically Southern" is probably what the script was indeed going for, giving the KFC and Foghorn Leghorn cracks from other characters, which I initially just took as a portrayal of Yankees being ignorant of different Southern subregions. Ah well.
I wanted to give Craig the benefit of the doubt and say he was exaggerating for the sake of the satirization of the "who dunnit" murder-mystery genre as the film started out quite farcically with the cutting head shots as they established everyone's character during their interrogations, but no, the film ended trying to take itself a tad too seriously for that to have been the case. Sometimes a bad accent is just a bad accent.
Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) is a beta Uber driver who has the misfortune of picking up alpha passenger LAPD officer Vic (Dave Bautista) who's recently had eye surgery, can't see, and thus conscripts Stu to drive him around LA in search of a drug kingpin. You can tell Bautista is really trying, even pulls off some genuinely funny moments, but I'd not guess comedy is his forte; Nanijani is the star here. Decent-if-predictable anti-buddy flick, lots of fun, some good belly laughs. This is the kind of movie you can delightfully rewatch when nothing else is on.
The year is 2020, the US is run by a totalitarian government, the news is all lies, police keep attacker unarmed protestors and everyone's obsessed with reality TV.
Oops, I should have been talking about The Running Man, not current events. *boom tish*
Anyway, The Running Man (set in 2019) is a fairly run of the mill Arnold Schwarzenegger dystopian sci-fi film. Quite decent, holds up well, nothing special. Terrible outfit he had to wear, but impressively tacky in general.
Ghibli film about 2 clans of tanuki (shape-shifting raccoon folk of Japanese folklore) who set aside the petty in-fighting to halt and repel human development of their woodlands. It has a more historical, kinda documentary approach to the story, which has a narrator but no real protagonist and takes place over several years as the tanuki try different approaches to a "war" that goes completely unnoticed by the human side. For all the slapstick and general goofiness - including a an awesome parade of every yokai ever chronicled in Shinto - the film ends up being an unabashedly realistic impression of the uncompromising urbanization of nature by man. And while I'm sure the story is meant to be taken literally as a cry for endangered wildlife, you could tell the same story about any indigenous peoples' struggle against colonialism: the escalation from pranking to sabotaging to trying to scare away the invaders, the failures of religion and warfare, an attempt at diplomacy and the final inevitable compromise of assimilating into the invading culture as best you can. The American version would probably invent a foppy villain that sings about money and falls to his death, at which point we pretend everything works out and will always work out. Don't watch if you don't like reality checks. Or, uh, cartoon racoons swinging their testicles in battle.
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