Isn't the whole point of the movie, and book, that it was the first representation of BDSM in a mainstream erotic thriller?
Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
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Since it's officially (not really) been 10 years since I watched it as a horny teenager, we watched The Nice Guys, starring Russel Crowe and Ryan Gosling in a detective comedy set in 70s California. Gosling is a seemingly incompetent private detective with a precocious daughter, while Crowe is a professional "tough guy". They need to work together to uncover the truth behind a pornstar's death. Given how much the movie has to do with porn, there's not that much raunchiness. A handful of boobs here and there.
It's become a bit of a cult classic apparently, and for years I have been seeing clips from the film that made me think "Hey, that was pretty funny. I should watch that again". Turns out, those handful of clips are pretty much the best the movie has to offer. It's not laugh out loud funny, mainly because it feels like Gosling hadn't really perfected his style of humor for this kind of character yet. He goes to 0 to 100 in ways that just make his character seem schizophrenic.
I still enjoyed watching it, maybe from nostalgia. My girlfriend was suffering through it though, and she is generally much more forgiving on movies than I am.
It's become a bit of a cult classic apparently, and for years I have been seeing clips from the film that made me think "Hey, that was pretty funny. I should watch that again". Turns out, those handful of clips are pretty much the best the movie has to offer. It's not laugh out loud funny, mainly because it feels like Gosling hadn't really perfected his style of humor for this kind of character yet. He goes to 0 to 100 in ways that just make his character seem schizophrenic.
I still enjoyed watching it, maybe from nostalgia. My girlfriend was suffering through it though, and she is generally much more forgiving on movies than I am.
That is legitimately what happened.
Its a little hard to let that go because we've known it for decades but remember that Romulus takes place after Alien but before Aliens. Ergo the company actually know sweet fuck all beyond what was in Ripley's log and I don't know how much of the science nitty gritty she got into in the log stored on the Narcissus.
F1: The Movie - 8/10
Really solid movie. It's exactly what you think a movie starring Brad Pitt playing an aging race car driver "teaching" a young driver the ropes would be. The most interesting/unique element of the movie is all the strategies Brad Pitt uses during the races. The one thing I really didn't like was how the movie started to focus on Brad Pitt's injury towards the end of the movie and adding unneeded tension to the movie. The racing movies as of late have been really good from this to Gran Turismo to Ford v Ferrari.
Roofman - 7/10
A movie that's an easy watch where you do know literally every beat the movie will take (but it's kinda OK because that's how it happened based on the true story). The story is about a criminal that very nicely robbed a bunch of McDonald's, got a bunch of time in prison for it, escaped and started living in a Toys R Us for several months. Channing Tatum is really good in the role where he's in like every scene and carrying the movie. Kirsten Dunst is as solid a love interest as ever still. You get some fun scenes of Tatum hiding in the store, setting up cameras to watch the workers throughout the day and whatnot.
Thelma & Louise - 4/10
I really did not care for this movie. Every character was essentially such a gender stereotype that they were a caricature, it felt like Married with Children but played straight. At one point, Thelma calls her husband who is yelling at her because she left without telling him and he has to "pause" the phone call because his football team on TV just fumbled the ball and he has to yell at that first. And Thelma is such an idiot. The main conflict of the movie is that she almost gets raped and Louise kills the guy. But then the next hot stranger guy (Brad Pitt) she bumps into, she's super fucking flirty with like a day after the incident. Then she leaves Brad Pitt in the hotel room to shower when there's an envelope of money sitting on the desk AND BRAD PITT TOLD HER HE'S A ROBBER... How this was nominated and won an Oscar is beyond me.
Really solid movie. It's exactly what you think a movie starring Brad Pitt playing an aging race car driver "teaching" a young driver the ropes would be. The most interesting/unique element of the movie is all the strategies Brad Pitt uses during the races. The one thing I really didn't like was how the movie started to focus on Brad Pitt's injury towards the end of the movie and adding unneeded tension to the movie. The racing movies as of late have been really good from this to Gran Turismo to Ford v Ferrari.
Roofman - 7/10
A movie that's an easy watch where you do know literally every beat the movie will take (but it's kinda OK because that's how it happened based on the true story). The story is about a criminal that very nicely robbed a bunch of McDonald's, got a bunch of time in prison for it, escaped and started living in a Toys R Us for several months. Channing Tatum is really good in the role where he's in like every scene and carrying the movie. Kirsten Dunst is as solid a love interest as ever still. You get some fun scenes of Tatum hiding in the store, setting up cameras to watch the workers throughout the day and whatnot.
Thelma & Louise - 4/10
I really did not care for this movie. Every character was essentially such a gender stereotype that they were a caricature, it felt like Married with Children but played straight. At one point, Thelma calls her husband who is yelling at her because she left without telling him and he has to "pause" the phone call because his football team on TV just fumbled the ball and he has to yell at that first. And Thelma is such an idiot. The main conflict of the movie is that she almost gets raped and Louise kills the guy. But then the next hot stranger guy (Brad Pitt) she bumps into, she's super fucking flirty with like a day after the incident. Then she leaves Brad Pitt in the hotel room to shower when there's an envelope of money sitting on the desk AND BRAD PITT TOLD HER HE'S A ROBBER... How this was nominated and won an Oscar is beyond me.
In hindsight, true, reading up on it it seems it was set earlier than I thought, that this wasn't obvious from me just watching the film. So, ok, they didn't know about acid for blood right away, just that it was extremely dangerous and killed an entire crew of people, and they had loads of time to research it and do evil science company things before things went wrong. So...not great.
Also, it mucks the timeline around rather, they'd known about the xenomorphs and been doing evil science with them long before the Aliens film? They knew there were xenomorphs on the planet from the Aliens film before they put the colony there, but nobody found them (within driving distance) before the film?
Also also, apparently the director says that you can see Ripley's escape pod leave the station before it's destroyed, she was there the whole time doing stuff she never tells anyone about in later/earlier films, and she just didn't happen to bump into anyone from this film.
Given what they recover at the beginning of the film, which is basically the flash-fried body of the Alien, the acid in the blood would have long neutralised so its not an obvious danger. I'm going to need to go watch Romulus again - which is hardly an imposition - because I can't remember if its ever made clear where they got all the face huggers from. My guess is since the Alien was a sort of micro-queen it could produce at least one egg, as a deleted scene from Alien attests, they got that and went with cloning maybe or they recovered more eggs from LV-426, I honestly can't remember.
I have distinct feeling that Weyland Yutani practices a lot of what they call siloing in large organisations. In that it means that each division is largely self-sufficient BUT they tend not to talk to each other. The whole operation in Romulus taking place on a largely restricted space station also has the whiff of black site about it meaning it could be 'off the books' in every way that counts. Meaning all the data was stored on storage drives - or given the level of tech they're emulating it may even be magnetic tapes and actual discs - that can't be accessed outside the station. So when it crashes, all that data is gone and unrecoverable.
Then the director is talking out of his arse because Ripley isn't in an escape pod, she's in a shuttle. Salvage crews don't bother grabbing pods cos there's fuck all of value in them.
Again, not from the film but reading up on it later, apparently they were mass producing face-huggers after they'd examined the xenomorphs DNA.
True, though it's still a stretch that all the information was there, and nobody outside the station knew anything...doesn't Rook send a message back home saying the serum was recovered?
Oops, that might be me, they might have said shuttle and not escape pod, I don't recall their exact wording.
Fifty Shades Darker
It's a marginally better movie than the first one because it at least has the presence to feign a semblance of plot: while Ana and Grey are back to square one as they try to figure out what works best for the relationship (no contract this time around), the movie slowly introduces an array of jealous little bitches coming out of the woodwork to tear them apart. There's Grey's psycho ex girlfriend, Ana's handsy boss, and Kim Basinger in the Mrs. Robinson role that was alluded to in the first movie. Not to spoil anything but let's say Kim B. doesn't get much to do in the movie, beyond act as a goodwill ambassador from 9½ Weeks and other erotica from the 1980s.
As for the steamy bits, Dakota doesn't have her tits out as much as in the first movie, and there's more of an emphasis on public sex and humiliation. So Dakota's removing her panties in public, getting fingerbanged in a crowded elevator, walking around with strings of beads up her birth canal, etc. This is all supposed to be either titillating or scandalous or both but comes across as just more items in the montage checklist, along with multiple shopping sprees, fancy dinners, yach sailing and extravagant masked balls. At least the characters seem to be getting more joy out of their lifestyle this time around, instead of being intensely miserable for each other all the time.
Directed by James Foley, who did the pine weasel episode in Twin Peaks. RIP.
It's a marginally better movie than the first one because it at least has the presence to feign a semblance of plot: while Ana and Grey are back to square one as they try to figure out what works best for the relationship (no contract this time around), the movie slowly introduces an array of jealous little bitches coming out of the woodwork to tear them apart. There's Grey's psycho ex girlfriend, Ana's handsy boss, and Kim Basinger in the Mrs. Robinson role that was alluded to in the first movie. Not to spoil anything but let's say Kim B. doesn't get much to do in the movie, beyond act as a goodwill ambassador from 9½ Weeks and other erotica from the 1980s.
As for the steamy bits, Dakota doesn't have her tits out as much as in the first movie, and there's more of an emphasis on public sex and humiliation. So Dakota's removing her panties in public, getting fingerbanged in a crowded elevator, walking around with strings of beads up her birth canal, etc. This is all supposed to be either titillating or scandalous or both but comes across as just more items in the montage checklist, along with multiple shopping sprees, fancy dinners, yach sailing and extravagant masked balls. At least the characters seem to be getting more joy out of their lifestyle this time around, instead of being intensely miserable for each other all the time.
Directed by James Foley, who did the pine weasel episode in Twin Peaks. RIP.
A ★★★★½ review of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
"We done a lot of things we're not proud of. Robbing graves, plundering tombs, double parking. But, nobody got hurt. Well, maybe somebody got hurt, but nobody we knew." This film's concept dates back to 1996. After working together on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the team of producer Don Hahn...
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Fifty Shades Freed
I have a theory about this series. The author got rich and famous by writing escapist fanfiction about getting snagged by a billionaire playboy, but when her editors asked for more she continued writing from experience rather than fantasy. Now I haven't read the books but at least going by movies 2 and 3 you can tell the author is more excited about chronicling her self-insert's permanent vacation than coming up with more smut. By the third movie Fifty Shades has more in common with tourism ads and hotel promos than with anything close to saucy or even particularly intimate. Even their lifestyle becomes bland and conservative: she marries him, then her bestie marries his brother, then her bestie's brother marries his sister... by the end all the women are being duly bred and the Greys make for one big stock family photo.
And since sex isn't really the focus anymore the screenplay has to manufacture drama by essentially playing on soap opera cliches. Ana's maligned ex boss, a magazine editor in movie 2, is suddenly a lunatic bomber/serial kidnapper from Grey's past (uh huh). What are the odds. Jack Hyde shows up when the story needs to channel some drama pronto and it's fairly comical to what extent he'll go to get his revenge. Movie 2 at least had some tension in the form of multiple suspects, but here we're immediately told who the bad guy is (and so are the characters), so nothing much in the way of being a thriller, either. I'm not sure what would anybody get out of this. There's more porn to the scenery than the actual porn.
I have a theory about this series. The author got rich and famous by writing escapist fanfiction about getting snagged by a billionaire playboy, but when her editors asked for more she continued writing from experience rather than fantasy. Now I haven't read the books but at least going by movies 2 and 3 you can tell the author is more excited about chronicling her self-insert's permanent vacation than coming up with more smut. By the third movie Fifty Shades has more in common with tourism ads and hotel promos than with anything close to saucy or even particularly intimate. Even their lifestyle becomes bland and conservative: she marries him, then her bestie marries his brother, then her bestie's brother marries his sister... by the end all the women are being duly bred and the Greys make for one big stock family photo.
And since sex isn't really the focus anymore the screenplay has to manufacture drama by essentially playing on soap opera cliches. Ana's maligned ex boss, a magazine editor in movie 2, is suddenly a lunatic bomber/serial kidnapper from Grey's past (uh huh). What are the odds. Jack Hyde shows up when the story needs to channel some drama pronto and it's fairly comical to what extent he'll go to get his revenge. Movie 2 at least had some tension in the form of multiple suspects, but here we're immediately told who the bad guy is (and so are the characters), so nothing much in the way of being a thriller, either. I'm not sure what would anybody get out of this. There's more porn to the scenery than the actual porn.
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A ★★ review of Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
“Angelo’s was not perfect. It was perfectly planned, but it was executed with neolithic incompetence.” While this movie didn't seem to have a troubled production, it did show signs of what I predict might become issues in the next installment. First, the director of the original declined to do...
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A ★★★½ review of Good Boy (2025)
“Does he seem like he’s searching for something you can’t see, or that doesn’t exist?” “Oh, you mean being a dog?” The idea for this movie was conceived as far back as 2012 by writer/director/producer Ben Leonberg, who was specifically struck by the dog in Poltergeist being the first of the...
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Adam from YMS put it best when he said that the only way to get US Christian conservatives to watch not only a gore movie, but also a subtitled movie, was The Passion of the Christ.
Also I watched The Notebook, 5/10
This is based on a Nicholas Sparks book, and if that name says anything to you then you know what to expect. It's a story about Allie and Noah in 1940s South USA, who have a whirlwind summer romance as teenagers, and then end up reuniting 7 years later under more complicated circumistances. I went into this expecting a gigantic schmaltzfest, but the 7.6 on IMDB suggested otherwise, so I kept my mind open. And I was pleasantly surprised in several respects. It's not something I'd deliberately seek out or watch, but it was pleasant enough.
First off: Rachel McAdams must have dealt with some serious back issues from how hard she carried this movie. Among a cast of not very remarkable characters and fairly good acting across the board, McAdams is putting every inch of her soul into her performance, and elevates the movie all by herself. At first I was dreading this movie turning out to be a combination of Titanic and Twilight, but those fears were allayed after the first act, and McAdams is a big part of that. The acting and tone overall are a lot more grounded and nuanced than what you might initially expect. Despite this being a straight up melodrama, it has an honesty and a groundedness to it that kept me from rolling my eyes all the way through. It's also got some nice period piece production value to it, and it's shot pretty well, so it's also a good looking movie. The score is also nice, if rather overly insistent at several points.
In a way I'm kind of conflicted about how to view this movie: is it a bog-standard romance drama that's elevated by its great aspects, or is it a romance drama that could be great, but is dragged down by being so bog-standard? A movie like this lives and dies on its characters, and they're about as basic as you get: Noah is a poor, rough country boy, Allie is a wealthy city slicker, and they just don't get along, but oh they do love each other so much! Allie is at least elevated by McAdams' acting, but Ryan Gosling's best work this is not. Plus he looks so much like Bo Burnham in Inside that it's hilariously distracting. The rest of the cast have so little effect on the plot that they barely warrant a mention: I liked that James Marsden's character wasn't a romantic foil or antagonist, but instead an actual good guy. Joan Allen is also great as the mom, even if the character is also very basic.
Whoops, I guess I forgot something: the movie's presented from a framing device where a man is reading the titular Notebook to a now old and dementia-ridden Allie at an old folks home. It's nice enough, but the two narratives are completely separate from one another. It feels like two movies smashed into one: one about a young romance, one about an old couple in their fading years. It ends up dragging out the movie's runtime and ending, making both of its constituent parts feel partly incomplete. I get what it's going for, but as executed it doesn't really make good use of the combination.
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A ★★★★★ review of Jiang Ziya (2020)
“The Great War ripped untold soldiers from home and family. I’m ashamed of my role. I no longer want to be a god, to have power. All I want is to save whoever I am able.” A spin-off of Ne Zha, and a retelling of the Chinese mythological tale of the titular character, this was originally intended...
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What the fuck was The Running Man 2025?
I felt embarrassed to watch this movie. I'm embarrassed for Edgar Wright for directing such soulless slop. I'm embarrassed for Glen Powell for portraying a man revolting against corporate overlords as an annoying, unwatchable dickwad. I'm embarrassed for Stephen King for seeing his pretty creative premise adapted into a shitty MCU movie.
Seriously, I think this might be the worst movie I have seen in years. I am genuinely shocked this has any level of positive reaction from audiences.
I felt embarrassed to watch this movie. I'm embarrassed for Edgar Wright for directing such soulless slop. I'm embarrassed for Glen Powell for portraying a man revolting against corporate overlords as an annoying, unwatchable dickwad. I'm embarrassed for Stephen King for seeing his pretty creative premise adapted into a shitty MCU movie.
Seriously, I think this might be the worst movie I have seen in years. I am genuinely shocked this has any level of positive reaction from audiences.
I rewatched the 1971 wuxia A Touch of Zen in a small cinema.
Hearing an audience laugh made my dead heart appreciate the humor more.
Good movie. I think it meanders.
Wanted to rewatch the Japanese movie Giants and Toys at the same cinema an hour later, but it was already late.
Hearing an audience laugh made my dead heart appreciate the humor more.
Good movie. I think it meanders.
Wanted to rewatch the Japanese movie Giants and Toys at the same cinema an hour later, but it was already late.
A ★★★★ review of The Northman (2022)
“Your strength breaks men’s bones. I have the cunning to break their minds.” This movie came about due a mutual love of Viking mythology between Alexander Skarsgard and Robert Eggers. The former had been trying to get involved in a Viking project for years. Meanwhile, a trip to Iceland in 2016...
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A ★★★★ review of This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
"This pretentious ponderous collection of religious rock psalms is enough to prompt the question, 'What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap, and couldn't he have rested on that day too?'" This film was the brainchild of Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, who met and played music together in...
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A ★★★½ review of Twins (1988)
“The embryo did split in two, but it didn't split equally. All the purity and strength went into Julius. All the crap that was left over went into what you see in the mirror every morning.” As the first pure comedy for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Universal Pictures considered this a much bigger risk...
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