What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

John Carpenter's The Thing is a fantastic movie that is every bit as good today as it was in 1982. A masterpiece.

I remember seeing Tom Savini on David Letterman once, back in the '80s. He showed off this one prop that looked like the back half of a realistic rat. Where the front half of the rat should have been was instead a metal plate and a small lever. Then he demoed it for Letterman by sticking it in his mouth so that only the realistic-looking part stuck out. Then he used his tongue to manipulate the lever, causing the tail and back feet to wiggle in a terribly life-like manner.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is one of my least favorite MCU movies, even though I'm a big fan of both the Avengers and Joss Whedon. I suspect Whedon was dealing with an impossible set of constraints and did the best he could, but fundamentally he was stuck with a team that was too large and a plot that had to connect to too many other movies. My favorite part was the downtime interactions between the core Avengers from the first movie, and that reflects Whedon's strength at portraying interesting social dynamics within a group of that size (see Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Cabin in the Woods, etc). My least favorite part was the big fight scenes, which were too busy, too cluttered, and too exhausting. It was an unusually dark MCU movie, too, even physically dark or dim in nearly every scene.

Ant-Man is one of the best MCU movies. While Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly are well-cast, Paul Rudd dominates the movie as a sweet, sunny, underdog who never gives up. Plenty of action, as typical for MCU, but it's also easily one of the funniest of the whole series. Though the overall feel of the story is very grounded and authentic, there are also some wonderfully surreal moments, especially near the end.

Amazon Prime carries a surprising amount of Shaw Brothers movies, including Killer Clans. Though it comes up a little short in terms of impressive acrobatics or fight moves, Killer Clans makes up for it with an astonishing amount of treachery. The sets are higher quality than par for Shaw Brothers, and there was even some pleasing poetry early on. I loved that there was a character who was notorious for carrying 72 weapons on his person, and there were also some neat secret passages.

Going outside my usual taste range, I just watched The Kids Are All Right. I thought I knew years ago just how the story would play out, just based on the premise and the stars, and I was actually right. I knew there would be a love triangle, I knew how it would be configured, and even how it would play out. The pleasant surprise was the teenage kids turned out to be complex and interesting characters, and the overall acting was great. My only disappointment was that the song The Kids Are All Right was not used in the movie.

I'm at the point where I'll watch almost anything to not think about everything, so last night at 10:30 I started watching the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana on Netflix. I stayed awake almost the entire time, and even though I'm not into her music I came away impressed by her work ethic and dismayed by her need to be successful in a way that could never really be satisfied. They completely skipped anything about John Mayer, in case you were wondering. I think I would really enjoy listening to minimalist acoustic versions of her stuff. It's a miracle she's alive after living inside the fame grinder for 17 years. Here's a real review: www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/movies/taylor...mericana-review.html

Unrelated but I'm sad that Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne was killed by Covid-19. Sky Full of Holes is a solid album and he was talented.

Watched The Rim of the World. My wife wanted to give it a try. It was horrible.

Last night my girlfriend and I made the dubious decision to spend 70 (!) minutes watching VelociPastor on Amazon Prime.

Imagine if a priest suddenly started turning into a small dinosaur, much like a werewolf, befriended a prostitute, and also there were ninjas.

I have to believe that the abysmal "effects" in this movie are intentional, because I have seen better effects in just about every B movie. This movie looks cheap as hell; even the priest outfits look fake.

While it is amusing in that way that terrible movies can be, I have to say that this movie is worse than The Room. At least The Room has sincerity.

Shellhead wrote: Going outside my usual taste range, I just watched The Kids Are All Right. I thought I knew years ago just how the story would play out, just based on the premise and the stars, and I was actually right. I knew there would be a love triangle, I knew how it would be configured, and even how it would play out. The pleasant surprise was the teenage kids turned out to be complex and interesting characters, and the overall acting was great. My only disappointment was that the song The Kids Are All Right was not used in the movie.

I enjoyed this movie whenever it came out, though it was largely unremarkable. I don't remember a ton of specifics beyond liking the cast and the quote "Is no look, is just my face!", Which my wife and I say to each other to this day.

CranBerries wrote: I think I would really enjoy listening to minimalist acoustic versions of her stuff. It's a miracle she's alive after living inside the fame grinder for 17 years.

Although not exactly acoustic, Ryan Adams did a song-for-song cover of her entire album 1989 that's really good.

I sometimes wonder if movies have shifted to more compressed storytelling, where they are trying to cram in a lot more story than was normal for movies in the past. Maybe that is appropriate for modern audiences, as we are more accustomed to information overload in this fast-paced cyberpunk world that we live in.

Captain America: Civil War is my favorite of all the MCU movies. I haven't seen a couple of the others yet, but I doubt they will knock Civil War off its pedestal. I had fears, because the title was an obvious reference to company-wide Marvel event from 2006-7. The comic book version of Civil War wrestled with the idea that maybe superheroes should be under government supervision, and was theoretically going to wrestle with some interesting ideas that might support either side of that debate. Captain America and Iron Man became the most vocal proponents either opposing or supporting government intervention, but ultimately all the writers came down really biased in favor of Cap and practically made Iron Man the villain of the piece.

The movie Civil War does a great job of laying out all the pros and cons for the role of the government with respect to the superheroes, and gives viewers the freedom to pick a side. Better still, the movie does a great job of juggling a dozen heroes and a villain while giving all of them a viewpoint and some good character moments. It's Cap's movie, but Robert Downey's Iron Man often grabs the spotlight, and other characters get full scenes with Cap nowhere in sight.

There is a fantastic fight scene midway through the movie, and all of the other action scenes are great. The jokes land well, though the tragic moments could maybe have used a little more breathing room, but the whole movie tells a complete story. Despite the ambitious scope of the story, there is decent time afforded to the introduction of Black Panther and Spider-man, and even time for a couple of well-placed moments of silence. If you haven't seen all the other MCU movies, you might miss the significance of some details or supporting characters, but everything you need to enjoy the movie is included.

Just watched an interesting kung fu movie called Unbeaten 28, courtesy of Amazon Prime. Though not actually a Shaw Brothers movie, it looks and sounds exactly like a Shaw Brothers movie. So by general standards, a movie with below average acting, story, and aside from acrobatics, even the fight scene choreography falls far short of modern standards.

But there is one compelling reason to watch Unbeaten 28: a significant portion of the movie is practically a D&D dungeon crawl in the form of a series of challenges to be overcome to prove worthy of a rare kung fu manual. There is a mixture of traps, puzzles, and combat that will seem very comfortable to any D&D player, capped by an interesting zen riddle.

Thanks, that sounds perfect!

Gregarius wrote:

CranBerries wrote: I think I would really enjoy listening to minimalist acoustic versions of her stuff. It's a miracle she's alive after living inside the fame grinder for 17 years.

Although not exactly acoustic, Ryan Adams did a song-for-song cover of her entire album 1989 that's really good.

I wonder what Taylor Swift thought of that. I'll check it out, thanks.

Last night I watched two mediocre Mark Wahlberg movies back to back. The Other Guys had some hilarious moments but wasn't great. Spenser something something was like an extended TV episodes with so many F-bombs that my preferred filtering method (Advanced Profanity Filter mute option for streaming services) couldn't catch them all due to subtitle mistranscription. I think that collectively, we could probably write a better Mark Wahlberg movie script than Spenser something something. Every single second of that movie explained itself in the most heavy handed way possible. You knew from the first frame that his old partner was a dirty sleazebag. etc.

I feel like I need to watch some Japanese art films to purge my system.

Does Ryan Adams still freak out when someone requests "Summer of '69"?

My wife and I had at first been marching through a set of 200 (!) crappy "cult" (mostly not really cult) movies on DVD that she bought me, thinking they were all horror movies. Turns out a big slice of them are mostly awful 70s/80s teen "comedies," biker movies, dramas, and assorted public domain shovelware. After getting through the first 16 horror movies (well, except for the one that was so offensive I had to stop it), we started crashing on the teen comedies. Now we're just slipping around. Last night's was one I wasn't familiar with, but it's apparently a fairly famous bad movie: Prisoners of the Lost Universe, starring Richard "Apollo-not-Survivor" Hatch. You can see the RiffTrax version on Amazon Prime, and maybe the un-riffed one too. It's not the worst 80s-cheap-D&D on film, and the characters other than the main ones were pretty entertaining, but, like a lot of these, 90 minutes can seem like three hours after a while. For reference, probably the best ones we've seen from the horror patch are Blood Mania, which I've seen before, and Stanley, a whacked-out 70s eco-nut snake/revenge movie. (We have another, overlapping collection that also includes Invasion of the Bee Girls and The Pick-Up, both of which are pretty memorable.)