Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Is this a feature on certain channels or something?
Last time I posted a video game trailer in the video thread since I did not comment on it. So. For some time already, Russia's been spending part of that hydrocarbon money on Hollywood-style cinematography. But you see, that's the problem with it - they want to present themselves as equal to the US by copying the style. It's kind of like, I dunno, lower class guys naming their child with a fake foreign-sounding name. Americans can make a stupid superhero movie and still bestow it with a certain charm; copying the superficial aspects doesn't make your own into a blockbuster. But at least the money's enough for special effects.
Considering this is the third independent time I've heard of this, I'm starting to thing the universe is telling me something.
Yeah, I'm not big on action movies like this, otherwise I'd be all for it.
I heard (read) it was actually a pretty good movie in some aspects, but I'll probably still not see it until I'm reaaaaally out of things to watch.
So, I watched Guardians. It was really fun, but also extremely ineffective as a movie. But as a person who sort of watched Man of Steel whilst not really paying attention, I don't have much to compare it to in terms of superhero movies.
I thought each hero was cool, at least. I liked Ler and Arsus the most. I'm not sure how far behind it is of American superhero films in terms of the female characters, but every time they were defeated, Kseniya went down first. The first time she even went down before she could show off her cool powers. She was pretty effective later, but it was noticeable how she kept falling back at times.
Anyways, as for the actual film; the setup took like 15 minutes. They explain literally all the plot including the Russian army's new spider mecha in like five of those. I'd like to see this done more instead of keeping stuff a secret in danged action movies. Then everybody is gathered without much question in the next 10 as really epic music will not stop playing.
All four main characters get their own plotline and depth dumped in four (nice) monologues at various points in the story. I particularly liked Ler's backstory; that he'd watched two generations of his family that came after him die already (since the Guardians effectively immortal). The actor really landed the emotions (I watched it subbed, of course, because me). There's Arsus' plot about being afraid he'll become a bear forever that doesn't really go anywhere, which was odd.
I liked the villain a lot. There's no chaff with him; the heroes face him and him only. His goals are clear, if pretty basic ("I'm MR. SMARTYPANTS and the world should BEND TO MY WILL"). He's menacing and fights all his own (non-mook) battles, regularly taking the heroes down in ways that never feel cheaty. I also like that his power was to control tech and instead of just typing he now does this (multiple times!) to set his evil plans in motion.
I really like that in the end defeating the villain is just
There's a sequel hook, obviously, featuring (a third blonde?) girl who is probably another Guardian. Wonder if that'll ever happen.
I really enjoyed watching it. No regrets at all, I'll probably remember it for way too long after this.
I think Elena says it best:
Also; Science:
bu bu but
Thank you terrible investment decisions.
woah
Makes we wonder about the third one already. Also, nice review.
Now that Hirokazu Koreeda won the Palme D'Or, Bandai Visual is releasing all of his older movies in priced-down (for Japan, I mean) BD reissues with English subs. I wonder if I could actually make it through all of them...
I hate to say this, but I think I liked this movie way more the first time I watched it. I don't know if it's a permanent sort of feeling, because I started to really appreciate this movie a bit after watching it. Maybe it's because I knew the story beats before they happened.
Even so, I don't really have a whole bunch of negative stuff to say aside from Terry's death was a bit anticlimactic and unwarranted. He was making the game interesting, so why would they kill him off when he was already on the backfoot?
Okay, there is a big thing; the security guard's analog radio works. It works a lot, they draw attention to it multiple times! There are 80 people in the building when it goes on lockdown, not one of these people can figure out how to make it a two-way radio. Did they explicitly screen for people who could do so and eliminate them?
I'm also way over every horror movie having to be dark. I understand locking them in, but why didn't they just have super heavy-duty windows? I think a horror movie shot in completely good light could still be super terrifying.
The little subplot with Melonie Diaz' new girl character surviving for most of the movie, but I was annoyed Barry just sort of ends it in a really anticlimactic way.
I enjoyed that under the circumstances, middle management basically set up a murder group and justified it using office-speak and psychological mind games. It was a good way to go for the 'villains' until the ending.
I liked Wendell as a creepy villain, but I feel like he was supposed to be two separate characters who were truncated into one. Either that or they just decided that he should both the the creepy nice guy who can't leave the girl he's obsessing over alone and the axe toting one. I can't decide if the axe was a nice visual cue or way beyond overkill.
I liked that MC/Mike basically knew all of the conventions of death game logic as soon as they were presented to him. It was a good way to build his credibility. I also really liked the casting of this movie, it had everybody who was anybody in B-role actors. Owain Yeoman, John McGinley, Melonie Diaz and even David Del Rio from The Troop as the Camp Gay guy (who I unfortunately did not like too much either time around).
I was also able to notice a weird amount of "new" characters; like the nice blonde woman, who I literally didn't remember existing.
Other notes;
Sounds like the financial industry version of Kill Your Friends*.
I did not expect that.
As for comedy; I don't really find my self laughing out loud a lot when watching stuff (aside from when I watched the Last Period anime) but I did laugh a lot at one episode of the third season of Superstore and now I can't remember what episode it was.
*I actually didn't know the book got a movie adaptation.
I've been thinking about doing another look into old cinema ("old", he says). Same as before; four movies that were part of the zeitgeist, but nothing too popular to maintain my hipster pride. Also probably nothing SF, so human interest stories.
I've been considering doing a children's movie version of my original thing, but I can't come up with anything other than The Babysitter's Club.
Also I feel like I owe it to the film canon to watch Body Heat, so maybe I'll just do normal movies instead.
So, you know what's the story with biographies. Life has a tendency to be more boring on average than fiction, so stories about real events often have to do things like piece together the narrative from episodes separated by time. Yeah, that's the case. We start with our hero as a competent, but sidelined officer of the British Army hungry for promotion, who gets to better his lot by performing an important survey in the Amazonia. There, he discovers what he assumes to be traces of a lost civilization, and trying to prove its existence remains the focus of his life. But, it's not all about the jungle - woven into the story is the influence his desire for exploration has on his family relations, and conversely, how the events of his life factor back into that matter.
I had heard about the guy before, but after reading a bit more post-watching it seems like the film exaggerated a lot. Also, that the real events had nothing of the sorts of the message the film tries to present. Not that it hurts the story, or the message itself, though concerning the latter it seems it could have been presented in a bit less in-your-face way.
So, if you like to watch a film about sensible and culture-conscious exploration, one that is a lot more about the experience than Indiana Jones-style action, and if you like stories set in the period, then you'll be fine with this one.
Speaking of documentaries; I've wanted to watch Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for a bit. I guess I should get round to that.
Similarly, I was pretty good with movies during 2016-early 2018, but I seem to have fallen out of the habit again. I think movies are good not just for entertainment purposes, but for me as a weird tool of communication/meditation on whatever the filmmaker is on about.
It's probably not always just the director or writers either. I've been thinking about the massive role than the editor(s) play in making things work at all. Spending all those hours cooped up in an editing room feels like the sort of thing that should be celebrated more, but there are zero famous/well-known editors out there (aside from to people to pay attention, I guess).
It's a really great comedy, and there are some wonderful quotes* as well as slapstick bits.
The plot is essentially that the mysterious Mr. Boddy has gathered people in a house and is blackmailing them and then bodies start piling up (six in total!). The bit just before the end is a really great scene that sums up what's happened so far that works well for the comedy and I really liked 2/3 of the endings (there are three alternate endings).
I don't not like the third ending just because it makes Mr. Green canonically not gay (the last one is canon) but it feels like it took agency away from the Butler (who is supposed to represent the player) and handed it to one of the other characters. It also makes sure Mr. Green comes out clean as a whistle even though everybody else killed at least one person.
Anyways, I really enjoyed it and it had some great reaction shots.
EVERYTHING!
The Disney Channel greenlighted a Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2!
It was a good movie, and I liked all of the (very severe, actually) changes they made to everything. But does every single modern movie have to end with a sequel hook? Like, I just finished absorbing this one, I don't need more yet.
I really liked it. It was poignant, knew when to go and when to stop. It took the 'humanize the people who really really screwed up' route and I always like that, even if it is based on real life people
Benedict Cumberbatch is actually a really good actor it turns out.
Also when I looked it up on Amazon:
Algorithms joke now, apparently.
I also saw the second Fantastic Beasts movie on Tuesday and liked it well enough. It wasn't really good though.
Nick was still as ineffective as he was in the book, and I never bought the romance for one second. Didn't help that in movie form it's much more noticeable when the couple you're supposed to root for is split up for the majority of the runtime, and one of them is well... Nick Young, who isn't compelling on his own.
I feel like they could have truncated some of the side-characters, because there was a lot of Rachel's different support systems coming in and out of focus which was odd in a movie vs in a book. I also would have preferred if Rachel had just left Nick forever at the end of the movie because I've always felt that way about this series.
However, it did offer a great deal of representation... for us girly economics people. Rachel's economics background was much more prominent here than in the book, which is nice. I think after this I'll spring for the deluxe edition with commentary, and hopefully the China Rich Girlfriend adaptation happens soon.
It really wasn't a real adaptation of the bookm which is okay. I mean, removing Simon's "oh darn am I racist" moment right towards the end by shifting the Bram thing earlier was a good move, but I'm pretty sure the "You know what you get when you mix black and Jewish? Blewsish!" thing wasn't in the book and isn't even good foreshadowing because Martin (who is danged blackmailing Simon) doesn't know Bram is Blue and if I'd just said that out loud I would basically immediately figure it out considering Bram is sitting right-danged-next to him at the time.
The movie also turned Simon into a giant Adventure Time fan (I was taken aback when I noticed the Princess Bubblegum Funko! Pop, and then later there's also one of Jake in a separate shot) and changed Passion Pit to Panic! At the Disco which was I guess good for branding but bad for Passion Pit since that shout-out would have done him a lot of good considering how basically nobody knows who he is. It also cut the whole part where Simon baaaaasically almost goes home with a twentysomething year old man after getting drunk at a bar, but kept his walk home of shame. I was actually kind of convinced they were going to accidentally turn him into a bit of a teen alcoholic after this scene since I still expected the latter to happen.
I feel like the book didn't have any F-bombs, even if there was a bit of swearing, but in the movie (rated a hard 13 on my TV) actually includes an F-bomb when Martin attempts to explain his situation to Simon and Simon is just not having it. It's weird how they added this but removed the bit where Simon read an unhealthy amount of explicit Harry x Draco fanfic as an early teen (it got changed to Simon having a lot of dreams about Daniel Radcliffe instead).
The Martin blackmailing Simon situation has always inspired a lot of criticism in the YA community because like "Blackmailing somebody over their sexuality" is bad bad and very bad but like that's ignoring the circumstances around Martin and Simon. Martin is an idiot for sure, a somewhat scary idiot even, but he's not overtly malicious in his blackmailing, and I'm sure if Simon hadn't just caved in or had freaked out Martin would have probably never gone so far.
This applies both in-book and in the movie, but the movie softens it somewhat because Simon even hangs out at Martin's house and has a lot to say about him. This part was really well streamlined by cutting out the excessive bits in drama club from the book. It also helped build a good world by including a lot more scenes with Simon's family, but the school atmosphere had a lot lacking for a teen movie. I don't know why, but that's how I felt.
Also the intro to this movie is exactly like The Clique (basically my favourite movie ever). The main character gets up, greets their dog, gets out of their impossibly huge house and then picks up their best friends on the way to school. I mean aside from the possible 37 or so differences otherwise in these scenes they are exactly the same.
But yeah, good movie.
One last thing; when I saw the coffee shop guy I almost wished the movie would 180 and make him Blue instead of Bram because there is a guy out there who is even more OTP-worthy than Keiynan Lonsdale how is that even possible.
I think I've watched more movies in Q12019 than I have in the past two years combined.
After about exactly a year of interest in this movie, I finally saw it. I really liked it, but I find I don't have too much to say about it. It was basically everything I expected, which is great actually.
Oh one thing is that it was like, really realistic in imagery and such. The main characters look like average people and they don't magically get better at synchronized swimming, even by the time the competition rolls around. It also turns out that the real winners of the 2007 Unofficial Men's Synchronized Swimming competition came back to play themselves (the movie is based on a documentary about them).
The DVD also like, actually had extras which I think has become a rarity for DVDs, including a whole featurette shot in-character on Water GoPros (they are another brand though, but "Water Action Cameras" doesn't sound right) which was nice.
I guess it did make me think a lot more about finding your interests in middle age which is a really important thing to think about in a sea of movies about super-young people finding their interests.
I don't know if I talk about the Descendants series here as much as in other places, but it's a really important franchise to me. Lately I was really pumped in the lead up to Descendants 3.
Overall, this is really tragic. However, he died pursuing his career and living his dream despite his medical condition.
By this fan, at least, he'll be remembered fondly.
I enjoyed the characters (except for Audrey, who moved from scene to scene in a telegraphed manner that made her more plot-device than character), and there were lots of funny moments. At first I didn't think the songs were as memorable as ones from previous movies, but looking back I like a whole bunch of them. Mal's duet with her dad is way better than her duet with her mom.
However, one aspect that really stood out for me this time around was the fashion. Goodness guys, the fashion in this movie was everything. I particularly liked the VKs Hampton Chic looks (especially Dizzy) and the demure Royal Duty looks for Mal and Belle. Kara Saun somehow outdid the amazing work she did on the first movie this time around.
The first hour was everything I'd want from an Anna Kendrick-Blake Lively movie, but after first-half twist things became... rote, almost Lifetime-ey. Then it just lost it's mind, and not in a good way. It was still, however, a very beautifully-shot film.
Edit: Oh wow I totally forgot; the main character in this movie, in something that's completely unrelated to anything else, is revealed to have slept with her half-brother moments after meeting him at her father's funeral. Her husband even suspects their child is his (which he probably is). So... that happened!
It also featured Nicholas from Crazy Rich Asians playing yet another British professor love-interest and his son was even named Nicky.
I feel like last year I had a couple more movies I wanted to see, but as it stands now I can't think of anything I want to watch aside from Brightburn and the live-action The Lion King. I'm not a fan of the original, but the photorealistic animals in the commercials look amazing.
I haven't really watched any horror movies lately aside from Truth or Dare, which I also liked, so I was thinking it'd help me get back in the spirit of things.
Apparently the Chinese government was mostly fine with this premise, since it's based on real events and the real conspirators are considered heroes by the Party too. They, however, complained about their portrayal, which was kinda unflattering.
Plot details follow.
Y'see, the film can be divided into two parts. The first is the story of the students who luck onto a particularly good opportunity to stick it to the Japanese. In order to do that they spend un-student-like amount of resources, make personal sacrifices, and ultimately achieve nothing. The second focuses on one of the former conspirators who gets recruited for another attempt at their old target, invests herself pretty immensely and for a long time, and when her superiors finally make a move, she fails.
There's also an extraordinary amount of sexual intercourse performed in ways that would raise an eyebrow of many a porn afficionado.
So. That's the plot, now let's move on to my impression of the film. I said it can be divided into two parts, because it's pretty much how I pictured it. It's pretty longish, so I felt like it could be cut in two and both parts could be sold as separate movies, one about the student conspirators, and the other about the erotic-espionage affair. Even without any editing, the second one would just start in medias res and I'm pretty sure there'd be enough details for the viewer to catch up even without the character introduction from the first part.
And, you know what? I felt quite more involved in the first part, because I found it immensely applicable to our own history. Because it's about a group of patriotic student conspirators doing their best to stick it to their oppressor, but they obviously fail, because despite their pretenses they're still a bunch of barely-out-of-their-teens with much of spirit and ideals but precious little of practice, and everyone's life is worse as a result, save perhaps for the bad guys, who don't really lose anything of matter. Yeah.
tl;dr if you like your wartime drama with a dose of naked body you may want to watch it.
Sounds like a fun montage.
Ah, a good movie about really, really screwing up. Those are rare indeed.
Oooh.
I did once watch Breathless and that featured, ahem, full-frontal nudity (woo~) but I think if you think it was on a whole other level I'm sure it'd make me feel really weird.
I remember reading that one book... The Screenwriter's Workbook? There's a thing in that about movies always having a bit that changes the feel of the first part to the feel of the second part, but this sounds extreme.
Man this reminds me of all those movies I used to watch on a weekly basis. I should do that again sometime.