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

I watched three films I had never seen before this weekend. Here they are from worst to best...

Mitchells vs. the Machines - I am NOT the demographic for this film, but I watched it because it's the team that made Spiderverse, which was the best film I saw that year. (2017?) This movie is fine, and very stylish. Worth a watch. Netflix.

Tenet - Finally got to see this. I am a Nolan fan. Prestige is one of my all time favorites. I liked this film, and am eager to watch it again. It strikes me as the kind of film that really benefits from a second viewing. As Michael said, it is intentionally pulling the wool over your eyes, and while none of the surprises really surprised me, it was cool and well worth my time. Will watch again. HBO Max

Another Round - if you have hulu, watch this film. Mads Mikkellsen is one of my favorite actors. This movie is such a delight. A group of four friends decide to conduct an experiment, maintaining a specific blood alcohol level all day. The results are.... varied. If you like drama with heart, seek this one out.

I was going to watch Nomadland but I ended up watching Land instead. A city woman (Robin Wright, who also directed) suffers personal tragedy and buys an old cabin in the middle of nowhere so she can be completely alone. Murphy's Law hits her plans to feed herself and she starves until a hunter comes by who saves her and teaches her how not to die. I enjoyed her progression from newbie to master wildsperson. It's also got some nice wilderness slice-of-life scenes and Robin Wright's good in everything I've seen her in.

hotseatgames wrote: I watched three films I had never seen before this weekend. Here they are from worst to best...

Mitchells vs. the Machines - I am NOT the demographic for this film, but I watched it because it's the team that made Spiderverse, which was the best film I saw that year. (2017?) This movie is fine, and very stylish. Worth a watch. Netflix.

Tenet - Finally got to see this. I am a Nolan fan. Prestige is one of my all time favorites. I liked this film, and am eager to watch it again. It strikes me as the kind of film that really benefits from a second viewing. As Michael said, it is intentionally pulling the wool over your eyes, and while none of the surprises really surprised me, it was cool and well worth my time. Will watch again. HBO Max

Another Round - if you have hulu, watch this film. Mads Mikkellsen is one of my favorite actors. This movie is such a delight. A group of four friends decide to conduct an experiment, maintaining a specific blood alcohol level all day. The results are.... varied. If you like drama with heart, seek this one out.

Another Round is also now available on Kanopy, which is a free streaming service for people with public library cards.

Tenet was a steaming turd. Overwrought story so they could do cool effects. Awful and devoid of fun. The lead actor was pretty cool. We need more of that guy.

LOL now review Mortal Kombat!

I loved it. It’s shameless junk, a total b-movie if that is even possible anymore. I laughed and groaned incredulously through the whole thing. Which is exactly how I received MK ‘95. The doofy new character with a vulnerable family wasn’t really necessary, should have just been Johnny Cage.

I saw Tell me who I am, a documentary about a man who lost his memory on an accident and how his twin brother helped him recover his identity. Most of the film focuses on the sexual abuse suffered by the brothers at the hands of their mother, who pimped them out, and the decision of the non-amnesic one not to tell the other about it. Sadly, this kind of abuse is so common that I immediately deduced all the details the moment I recognized the family came from a high-class British family.

It was interesting to watch it with my girlfriend, who wanted to watch it as part of her psychology studies. And I had fancied a documentary for a long while so it was very interesting. Not a light watch, though it's not a morbid film. I don't think they should have interviewed them in such a depressing set, though.

Got around to Monster Hunter . Wow, what a weird disjointed, but really fun movie! Like virtually all of Paul (W.S., that's an important distinction!) Andersons films there us a kinetic energy to it that carries the weight from a nonsensical plot and paper thin characters. Milla anchors yet another joint project though her character must have been gutted in editing because I don't think her little memento box is ever explained and her military porn parts jar quite a bit with the fantasy parts.

Tony Jaa is forced to be a bit cringe, including a terribly hackneyed chocolate scene. I've never played one of the games but I gotta think he has a whole nother movie as a hunter scavenging body parts to make gear that exists over in Asia or something.

The film goes pretty bananas in the third act, that damned chef

Still, it is fun, beautifully shot, if a bit heavy with the Michael Bay spinning panoramic shots and modern military vibe. Anderson, as always, makes a film that puts EVERY DAMN CENT on screen. How this guy lives in the sub 100 mill space but makes glossy sci-fi movies must be a case study in tax shelters or something.

Trash reruns at our house. First was Under Siege. Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones make that movie. It's peak Steven Seagal. It's a good thing he gets to kill a lot of people because he can't act for shit. Then it was Pacific Rim. For some reason I'd never seen the first 5 minutes or so of it previously, even though I've seen it three times. Granted, I hadn't missed much. It's a top-notch Kaiju movie.

hotseatgames wrote:
Mitchells vs. the Machines - I am NOT the demographic for this film, but I watched it because it's the team that made Spiderverse, which was the best film I saw that year. (2017?) This movie is fine, and very stylish. Worth a watch. Netflix.

Got the family together to watch this one and it was a big hit. Soooo many moments of family interactions that we could point to each other and say "See? This is how I feel!". I'm curious how well it will age, both from a "social media is probably bad, m'kay" angle and just the visuals with all the pop-up cartoons and the.....tiktok/instagraminess of the whole thing. But the bones are solid, this will probably be in regular rotation for a while.

Gotta say though, they made me THIRST for another Tron film with those clean neon graphics and synth music in parts. The all too brief Disney show was an interesting look into the daily(cyclically?) lives of programs but I want it to really pop like this film. I also feel like this film, amongst others (like Love and Monsters) is really nailing an anthropomorphic robot design with animated faceplate thing that we will probably actually see (and has evolved so far from what was shown in the stellar Robot and Frank)

I rewatched AI: Artificial Intelligence for the first time in decades I guess. It holds up! The mecha/androids are really cool, especially when you see several generations together. And the ending is so sweet and touching.

I like how the ending of A.I. can be read as sweet or (at least to me) horrifying.

With all fair warning as to quality but with little sense of the behind-the-scenes drama, I watched Woman in the Window with some hope that it would be OK. The acting was OK, although it seems to continue to mark the distressing decline of the quality of roles for Amy Adams (who is not the problem in this movie), but the third-act plotting and acting were atrocious. I've since read that they reshot the ending because the first tested ending was confusing to test audiences, but apparently the reshot ending tested no better. I would've suggested sticking with whatever the director had come up with instead of the rewritten version if they both tested poorly, but what do I know?

Woman in the Window (novel and movie) rips off a lot of other works, including Gone Girl, which I hadn't seen before until last night. I don't quite like how it unwinds, but the dialogue, especially early to mid-movie, is sharp and the performances distinctive. It's still pop lit, but it's a good kind of pop lit.

I started Woman in the Window, but quickly got bored. I have seen Rear Window, and this was not as compelling as that. Bounced out of it pretty quickly.

Army of the Dead is new on Netflix. If Left 4 Dead was a movie, this would be it. Turn off your brain and have a good time, because this movie is way better than you expect it to be, while also being kind of dumb. Enjoy.

I watched Rush, yesterday. Nikki Lauda vs. James Hunt. I liked Ford v Ferrari a lot more, but this was a pretty good movie. The main characters are drawn a little too broadly for me, although maybe they were exactly like that in real life.

Hunt's character is right in Chris Hemsworth's wheelhouse, and Daniel Bruhl is good. The ladies in the movie don't do much but look pretty, and there's really no reason to GAS about anyone else. The race scenes are good.

My personal recommendation is that if you haven't watched Rush and Ford v Ferrari, watch them in that order for good, then better.

I reWAHtched the fuckin DePAHted. Wheah the fuckin' AXsents ah so fuckin' THICK you can cut em like a fuckin' SLICE-a-BUDDah.

What this show doesn't get, and which basically every Boston film/show doesn't get is that the accents disappear outside of a few select neighborhoods. Not every cop in the state police is from Southie. A number of them are from Framingham, for example.

Very convoluted. DiCaprio is really good, and plays a fucked up Boston kid better than Matt Damon, which is odd given where they're from. Wahlberg beats them both though, which makes the most sense. Great cast, and I'm a little sad to have noticed the age-parity the female lead (Vera Farminga, doing a lot with not much) has with DiCaprio/Damon, even though that should be the most normal thing in the world.