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

the_jake_1973 wrote: We watched Gunpowder Milkshake last night. It was ok, but would have been so much better without the main protagonist. She is not believable as a gun for hire and not a very good actor anyways. I could have watched a movie solely about the librarians kicking ass as they are the best part of the movie.

Not the worst way to spend 90 minutes. Not the best either. It was so close to being a good movie though and that is frustrating.

Karen Gillan is a fine actor. This movie was just another style over substance action-flick so really nobody was showing their acting chops.

I watched the just-released Netflix animated film, Witcher - Nightmare of the Wolf. This movie follows Vesemir, so if you are wanting a Geralt story, look elsewhere.

I would say this film is squarely average. If you are really into the Witcher, you can add a couple of points. There are worse ways to spend your time, but at the end of the day it's just... fine.

I watched Val last night. He is an intriguing person. Val Kilmer really cares about acting and it did lead to him being regarded as difficult. I do have a lot more respect for him after that, but still think he only truly nailed about half a dozen roles.

Admittedly, it has been many years since my one viewing of Wedding Crashers, but isn't them being loathsome pretty much the point?

We were two of the four people in the theater to see Free Guy. Predictable, but also pretty enjoyable.

Tango & Cash is everything good and bad about '80s action movies, pushed right to the brink of parody. While Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell obviously dominate the movie, the cast also includes Jack Palance, Teri Hatcher, and solid character actors Brion James and James Hong. It's weird, dumb, fun, and there are explosions. And one of Stallone's early lines is worth the price of admission: "Rambo is a p*ssy."

I was warned that Tenet is a problematic movie, and it's true. As always, Christopher Nolan tells a story that is excessively complex and maybe thirty minutes too long. The subject matter is interesting but not well executed, but the movie works well enough if the viewer simply goes with the flow, enjoying the cinematography, the action, the acting, and the emotional beats.

Nolan has directed less than a dozen full-length movies, but he is one of the most successful directors of our time. He has a very visual way of thinking about things, and likes to tell stories about activities that are similar to directing a movie, like the dream-hacking of Inception, the magic tricks of The Prestige, and the execution of complicated heists like in The Dark Knight, Inception, and Tenet.

And so his interpretation of the core mechanic of this movie is necessarily visual, betraying an early fascination with watching a film scene in reverse. He played with the same idea as a particular form of brain damage in Memento, but here it is a literal reversal of time and cause and effect. But it doesn't make sense, even compared to other science-fiction stories, and so the viewer must constantly wrestle with the tension between what is happening on the screen versus any story that might hold up under even cursory examination. I can't fully explain what I just watched, but I did understand the internal logic of the movie well enough that I anticipated one of the more dramatic surprises in the movie.

I really enjoyed watching John David Washington in action. He has steely confidence and poise, and likely has a great career ahead of him. However, he is not much taller than Tom Cruise, so he needs a bigger hit than Tenet under his belt to really break through to the A-list. The camera work does a decent job of downplaying his height, but I couldn't help noticing at times that he is several inches shorter than Elizabeth Debicki. Robert Pattinson exceeded my expectations, but I still don't see his potential to successfully play Batman.

Yeah, that was basically my reaction to Tenet, as well: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/basic-tenets.html

Shellhead wrote: Nolan has directed less than a dozen full-length movies, but he is one of the most successful directors of our time. He has a very visual way of thinking about things, and likes to tell stories about activities that are similar to directing a movie, like the dream-hacking of Inception, the magic tricks of The Prestige, and the execution of complicated heists like in The Dark Knight, Inception, and Tenet.

If you like the film-like activities and Inception, please watch Paprika which is one of its main influences. You'll love it.

Reminiscence on HBO max. One the one hand this is a new release that reunites Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson (and she sings!), has a strong film noir vibe, and an intriguing plot of a memory retrieval device allowing for a sort of retrospective crime solving capability. Sounds great!

But alas the film is bogged down by a criminally underused climate change background, an overly complicated legal element, and the tired trope of a guy who JUST CAN'T LET GO.

So it is a bit of a wash for me, playing out more like a budget Minority Report or Inception that a really mind bending sci-fi film. Granted, I was assembling GF9 Aliens figures for most of it (and realizing that my eyes and hands are no longer up to this challenge without assistance) so maybe I was just missing some elements that could propel this to classic status.

It does have one FANTASTIC scene that does exploit the memory recovery aspect to the full and it is incredibly tragic and creepy. But unfortunately the sci-fi plays out more like set dressing than core plot, this film could have been set in the 30's, just using flashbacks as a mechanic instead of memory projection, and I think it would have played out basically the same and perhaps would have been a better noir film in the process.

I was so underwhelmed by Reminiscence that I had forgotten I watched it last weekend, until seeing Jason's post.

I was really looking forward to it since I really like Hugh Jackman's performances, but this movie is just the same old thing. The climate change aspect is interesting, but doesn't affect the movie all that much.

Jurassic Park - I happened to put this on last night and turned out to be in just the right frame of mind to sit and watch it all without quoting the lines before they happen or thinking about the sequels. It was still an enjoyable movie. The CG hasn't held up great but it gets the job done. I even caught something I hadn't picked up on before. The dilophosaurus spit blinds its victims then paralyzes them then the dino "leisurely" eats the victim. I didn't think Nedry's fate could be much worse; then I noticed that word used to describe how it ate him very slowly while he was alive. I always assumed it killed him once he was incapacitated in the jeep but I guess not.

Watched that recently, too, because I'd been playing the Funkoverse characters for the film and wanted to remind myself of a couple moments. However, I followed that up by watching The Lost World, which I had only seen bits and pieces of because I'd been told it was awful... and it was awful. How did Julianne Moore and Pete Postlethwaite end up in this film? (I mean, if people are throwing ridiculous amount of money at you, I guess you do the work, but...) It was atrocious. It's basically King Kong, but not even as good as the original. Multiple plot holes, nonexistent motivations for characters, inane dialogue, choppy pacing, and on and on. Sequels are usually bad, but this is an almost-trademark example of why. I kinda love that it highlights a Crichton conceit, where he grabs whatever hot topic of the moment happens to exist and drops it into his utterly unrelated screenplays. In Jurassic Park, it was chaos theory, which explained(?) the presence of Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum.) Since Goldblum was apparently the only one willing to take a lead role in the sequel, they had to contort themselves again into explaining why they would send the chaos mathematician to an out-of-control nature preserve. Again. What a waste of two hours.

I watched First Blood last night. It is such a good film, and such a tragedy that such an interesting and well rounded character as John Rambo got turned into the parody that he was in the subsequent films.

The scene where he cries at the end is heartbreaking. Having the character lose all the humanity, tragedy and emotion is just a disgrace and those writers should hang their heads in shame, He was the epitome of manhood, coping with the complexity of life as a soldier and integration into society, and we need more characters like that in cinema.

Yeah, it's incredible the way the actual movie content has been memory holed for something completely different and at odds with the initial movie.