Topic: The Movie Thread

Movies I've watched over the past couple weeks:

Blazing Saddles (Blu-Ray) - Definitely delivers quite a few laughs during it's runtime (I especially liked the Looney Tunes-esque bits), and I can definitely see why it would have been such a seminal satire for it's era, but like most films made before the 80's I kinda found it hard to really connect to it on a personal level (just a bit too far culturally removed I guess). Still a pretty good film though.

Heaven's Lost Property the Movie: the Angeloid of Clockwork (Blu-Ray) - Anime film that follows up the two HLP TV series. Kinda disappointing as the first half is just an abridged retelling of the preceding shows, and once it does get to the meat of things it feels more like a side step narratively than a way forward, but if you liked the shows (which I'd only recommend if you like raunchy comedies), it may be worth a watch.

Kingsman: the Secret Service (Blu-Ray) - Perhaps the best action flick of the 2010's? Every single action scene is just as exciting today as they were when it first released, it successfully modernizes the "Bond" archetype movie going experience by making dapper chaps in suits with fancy gizmos awesome instead of cheesy. It maybe loses a bit of something once Colin Firth is written out, but is still highly enjoyable.

Troy (Blu-Ray) - the Extended cut. Absolutely fantastic historical epic. Top notch acting performances from everyone involved, incredibly immersive epic scale recreation of Troy & the battles surrounding it, and some great action (especially that fight between Hector & Achilles). My only criticism is that I got a little tired of how constantly brown/beige the whole color pallet looked, but that's a small issue.

Watchmen (*Blu-Ray) - The Director's Cut. I have quite a bit of nostalgia for this one, though I'll admit I didn't quite like it as much this time as I did in the past. Still a great film though, and much more interesting take on the superhero genre than most of the "cinematic universe" superhero films we get these days.

Films I watched over the weekend.

Alien Romulus (Cinema) - No overwrought lore and overbearing technical jargon kept to a limit, this is a back to basics affair that follows a group of scared youths fighting for their lives against unimaginable horrors amongst the decaying husk of an orbital research station. It's absolutely stunning, brutal, tense, icky, and the best thing I've seen in theatres since Dune Part 2. If you have even a passing interest in deep space/future sci-fi you owe it to yourself to see this.

Gran Torino (Blu-Ray) - Every once in awhile my parents will introduce me to a movie that I otherwise wouldn't watch but end up loving, and this is one of those films (though this isn't the first time I watched it). Clint Eastwood plays the role of a crotchety (& kinda racist) old man who forms a connection with a new immigrant family next door, and in his own way tries to keep their teenaged children from falling in/victim to the local gang(s).

Heaven's Lost Property Final (Blu-Ray) - What a load of crock. Following on from the preceding two TV series & film in the HLP franchise, this film seeks to be the big finale, or at least the title would lead you to believe so. However in practice this has to be the most ill conceived/mismanaged efforts in closure I've ever seen (even by anime standards of "we're cancelling the series before reaching the manga's conclusion", it's terrible). Starts out in the middle of the big climactic final battle with no context as to what's going on, precedes to have a 40 minute long flashback (which is like 90% of the film's runtime) that never gets around to addressing how the final battle begins, then in it's final moments returns to the "present" only to not show how things end either.

Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (Blu-Ray) - For the first ever feature length animation this has a lot of elements that still impress (like a lot of the water effects, such as when the camera is looking up at the titular heroine from the inside of a well), you can really tell that the animators really poured their heart & soul into this as they had everything riding on it. That said it's characters don't have much in the way of character, especially Snow White (and her "Prince Charming", who shows up like twice), although the dwarfs have a few good comedic relief bits.

Star Trek 2009 (Blu-Ray) - I may be a bit biased as it's one I watched in theaters when it first came out, but this one is a blast. The cast has great chemistry & seems to be having fun, and it's a big fun roaring sci-fi film. I can't really speak on it's qualities as a "Trek" film as it was never really an important franchise for me growing up, but on it's own merit I always have a good time watching this.

Cutthroat Island (Blu-Ray) - I hadn't heard of this until now, but as I didn't yet have any seafaring/pirate movies in my collection, I picked up the BD when I saw it at a thrift store. Nothing particularly noteworthy, but it's a fun enough swashbuckler (I really liked the big ship battle in the climax though).

I know this will probably be a bit TL;DR for most, but here's a list of all the films I've watched over the past few weeks.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - After a wartime video goes viral showing the titular Billy Lynn heroically protecting his commanding officer's body from being taken by enemy forces, his entire squad is sent on a publicity tour back in the States where they must face how disconnected the populace is from their struggle (outside of vague patriotic platitudes) and what it really is they're fighting for.

Godzilla 2014 (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - I think this one is sooo close to being something great, but just makes too many mistakes to quite get there. I love that it spends time building up suspense (the best Godzilla films often don't have much of Big G and have great human drama, after all), but Bryan Cranston is the only one who really puts in a noteworthy performance & it really loses something once he's killed off. Again, I don't really have an issue with the amount of Godzilla, but rather how that time is used (oftentimes it'll completely cut away to something entirely else as soon as he clashes with one of the MUTO, dodging the actual monster fighting). That said, there are some good shots, and a satisfyingly brutal finish. It's also waaay too dark (in terms of lighting), the scene where the MUTO attacks the train is a huge example of this where I could barely see anything except it's glowy spots & the flaming wreckage in the river at the end. A real shame too as it can be a real looker when you can actually see what's going on (like the sequence in the rain where Godzilla & the MUTO descend on San Francisco).

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - A tonally confused affair, on one hand resigning itself to being nothing more than popcorn entertainment (any poignant "man vs nature" themes are undercut by Monarch transforming into a facsimile of the MCU's SHEILD, and it starts to dive headlong into the "Hollow Earth" nonsense), but on the other hand it seems like it wants to take itself waaay to seriously with an overdramatic environmentalist message & visually gritty aesthetic. As a big Godzilla fan there are things for me to like here (there are a lot of fan favorite Kaiju here, including a pretty cool version of King Ghidorah that goes pretty hard, though it's so much that it teeters along a similar issue that Spider-Man 3 had with too many big names for one movie), but I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking it.

Godzilla VS Kong (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - At this point the Monsterverse has given up any pretense of offering any sort of compelling human drama (which it was rarely good at anyways, at least not on the level of stuff like Godzilla: Minus One) and lunged head first into being a big dumb monster punch 'em up flick, and honestly, it works. Revelling in the absolute dumbest aspects of it's convoluted lore, it's a film more concerned with having fun than trying to say/do anything meaningful, and boy is it a fun film. Godzilla & Kong's fights are awesome (the best in the franchise), and you never go too long without them tearing through things on screen.

Hancock (Blu-Ray) - Before we had like 6 different versions of "Superman but Evil", we had "Superman but just kind of a jerk in need of some good PR". I think this is pretty fun in the first half when it's working on that core concept, but kinda loses itself when trying to explore lore/backstory & forcing and endgame villain.

the Killer's Game (Cinema) - Dave Bautista plays the best assassin in the game, but wants to get out once he finds a woman and starts developing health issues. Soon it's learned he's come down with an incurible disease, so he puts a hit out on himself so she doesn't have to watch him slowly die & can get his life insurance. He learns that the diagnosis was a mistake and he's going to live, but now only if he can survive the onslaught of eccentric assassins out to get him. I'm pretty sure this just bombed, but honestly I kinda liked it. It's not a masterpiece (and I think kinda tonally inconsistent), but with a lot of creative (& bloody) kills, explosions, and some light female nudity, it's an enjoyable enough "Dude/Dad" film if that's something you're into (not as good as "the Beekeeper" from earlier this year though).

Kong: Skull Island (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - Even as someone who is much more of a Godzilla fan, I'll say that Kong's solo movie is probably the Monsterverse's best. It's really the only one that successfully invests you to it's human cast (you really want to see John C. Reilly's character make it home, and Samuel L. Jackson's Packard is a compelling villain, jaded after pouring his military career into Vietnam with nothing to show for it, he becomes obsessed with taking out Kong, even if it means the deaths of his men that he supposedly cares so much about). There's a lot of imagination on display when it comes to the flora & fauna of the titular island itself, which leads to a lot of exciting encounters, whether it be our group of survivors finding themselves underfoot a massive spider, or the various punch 'em ups Kong winds up in with other beasts. Just a really enjoyable time.

the LEGO Movie (Blu-Ray) - Who knew that a movie about LEGO would be so solid(ly built)? At it's core it's just a family film with a message about how we're all special in it's own way, but it's still one of the most visually stunning/unique CGI animated films from a big studio and the cast is pretty fun, whether it be Will Ferrell hamming it up as unrepentantly evil "President Business" or Will Arnett's "Batman" trying to hard to be cool. Enjoyable watch.

Lone Survivor (Blu-Ray) - Speaking of "Dude/Dad" films, this one goes pretty hard. I can understand that glorifying war (especially something as modern/touchy as recent Mideast conflicts) is going to rub some the wrong way, but I honestly liked this. Based on a True Story (but obviously embellished for movie's sake), it follows Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of a small band of Navy Seals who found themselves surrounded by a couple hundred Taliban fighters after getting found out during a reconnaissance mission.

Ranma 1/2: the Battle of Nekonron: the Fight to Break the Rules! (Blu-Ray) - Very by the numbers movie adaptation of a long running Shonen anime. New one off villain shows up to antagonize our protaganists, has just enough henchmen that almost every recurring cast member gets to tag along as they get a fight (though I'm a little salty that Ukyo & Kodachi were who were left behind this go around, lol), but the good guys save the day in the end and go home. For die hard fans of the franchise only (even the animation is nothing special. There are some TV & OVA episodes that look better).

Ranma 1/2: the Battle of Togenkyo: Rescue the Brides! (Blu-Ray) - Much like the first film, it sees the extended cast facing off against a one off movie villain, and although the concept wasn't anything new, I think it was much better executed here. The animation quality was a pretty big jump up (not up there with something seminal like Ghost in the Shell or Memories, but still nice 90's anime vibes), and it was overall much more fun and the cast has never looked better. I'd still likely say this is one for existing fans of the property only, but as a fan I couldn't much tell you what more I could want from a film in this franchise (other than the fact that it completely snubbed Kodachi, the only extended cast member to be left out).

the Shallows (Blu-Ray) - While surfing off of a secluded beach in Mexico, a woman is injured by a shark (which is stalking the area due it being the site of it's latest kill, a whale) and must find a way to get back to land. There's a few contrived moments narratively (how did no one see that huge whale carcass just a few hundred feet from the shore while they were surfing?), but overall it was a tense ride that gripped me throughout and it has some of the most gorgeous scenery shots I've seen in a film.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - This is perhaps one of the most epic superhero films ever crafted. Now, I get that a 4 hour+ runtime is a huge ask and that a better storyteller may (should?) have found a way to trim some fat (I could have probably done without the lengthy epilogue added, which was a lot of buildup to stuff he knows he was never going to get to do), but at least it now has the time to build up characters like Cyborg & some of the greater lore behind what is going on. It's certainly better than the theatrical cut though, and the definitive way to watch the film if you decide to do so.

@RR529 You watched some solid films.

@MsJubilee, thanks for taking the time to read!

Only a couple this past weekend, but both pretty amazing.

Braveheart (4K UHD Blu-Ray - Blu-Ray) - I think this may be the first time I watched the whole thing, and it ended up being a pretty great watch (granted, I'm not judging it on historical accuracy as I don't know jack about Scottish/English history). I just love the historical epics of the 90's - 00's (the Patriot, Gladiator, Troy, the Last Samurai, 300, ect), and this fits along nicely. Absolutely gorgeous scenery, brutal large scale battles, it's all here. Unfortunately my 4K copy is borked and turned into a slideshow with no sound around the 55 minute mark, but luckily I was able to finish it as it came with a regular BD copy as well which worked.

Schindler's List (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - Probably the most important film of Spielberg's filmography. I had seen parts of this in class in high school, but this was the first time I watched it in it's entirety, and man was it maybe the best film I've seen in a long time. Certainly brutal & hard to watch at many points, but essential viewing. Really underlines that the Nazi's weren't some over the top cartoon villains, their evil was cold, calculated, and played out on an industrial scale. Chilling stuff, and I absolutely started bawling when they jumped to the modern (well modern in the 90's) footage of the survivors he saved visiting his grave.

I watched Furiosa, which I thought was terrific, it does everything you’d expect from a Mad Max film, very visual and kinetic and also odd and funny.

@RR529 No problem friend, keep on doing it. Hey. I have been wondering if you don't have a Letterboxd account. Because I think it will do wonders for you, I can tell that you're a huge movie fan.

Watched Luca last night on Disney+ and honestly I didn't enjoy it. I don't know if I am getting older or if it's the direction Disney has gone but I just didn't find it interesting at all. There didn't seem to be a plot at least that I could see and the characters were boring. Maybe I will check out Inside Out 2.

Watched the entire Back to the Future trilogy over the weekend (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - These were probably my favorite movies as a kid growing up, so it's absolutely impossible for me to give them an objective look. In fact the second is probably my favorite because of the Super 80's... err, 2015, even though it probably has the biggest plot holes given how time travel works in universe. Never had these on physical media until now (even to this day it seems like they pop up somewhere on cable every other month, so I've never felt the need), but I picked up the 4Ks on Prime Day earlier this year and it was a great way to revisit them. Had lots of fun extras too, like two episodes from a 90's cartoon that I didn't know existed (unfortunately those weren't remastered), and a few shorts they came out with in 2015 in celebration of "Future Day".

Riding Bean (Blu-Ray) - Anime homage to American crime/cop action flicks of the 70's-90's (think stuff like Dirty Harry or Lethal Weapon). Bean Bandit, the "Road Buster", is the best courier/getaway driver in Chicago, and when he's framed for kidnapping he hits the streets to take out the gang who set him up, but he'll have to do so while avoiding Chicago's finest. The dub is absolutely terrible (but kinda charming in a way), and it's so over the top it's pretty fun (Bean is a beast of a man who can rip off car doors with his bare hands and tank gunfire thanks to a bulletproof leather jacket & headband), and at a pretty brisk 45 minutes it sticks to the (ultraviolent) action.

@MsJubilee, thanks! And yeah, I do have a Letterbox account (I think I use the same username there).

Dune 2021 (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - My second time watching this (my first was last year around this time on Netflix). Don't think I loved it as much as I did the first time around, but it's still a solid watch and provides a lot of world building for what's to come in the sequel.

Risky Business (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - Despite it's fame I've never actually watched this before, and it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was expecting a goofier teen debauchery comedy like Weird Science based solely on the infamous dance scene (which is the only thing I knew about the film beforehand), but it ended up having a bit more of a dry satiric wit. Not a bad thing though, I'll just have to watch it again in the future with the right mindset (which is something I'll definitely do, as my dad spent like 60-70% of the film's runtime listening to social media videos really loudly on his phone, so I couldn't focus well).

1917 (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - It's been a few years since I last watched this (first time on 4K disc though), and it's still as fantastic as I remembered. Wonderful set design and the "single take" gimmick do an incredible job immersing you into the horrors of WWI, and it had just been long enough since my last watch that I couldn't remember if/when either of the two core characters died, so the journey was just as tense as it was the first time around.

Dune (Blu-Ray) - The 80's version. I really wasn't feeling this one. I think it certainly had big ambitions with some really memorable & trippy visual sequences, and many set pieces felt "big", but I think it's just too much book to fit into one movie (IIRC, it's not quite as long as even the first movie of the modern duology), with the last 3rd of the film really moving along at a breakneck pace (with Chani being nothing more narratively than some random Fremen girl Paul loves). There are some other oddities as well, such as the fact that they largely abandon the personal shield generators after their introduction (envisioned here as a bunch of polygons that surround the wearer, making them look like vaguely human shaped polygons, which while sort of impressive how they brought it to life, looks silly), and they spend largely the rest of the movie shooting each other (including with some sort of sound guns, which may be more accurate to the books AFAIK, but again look silly in practice). It certainly doesn't help that the Harkonnen come across as merely generally gross rather than truly intimidating, and a lot of the tech & ship designs personally didn't land with me, often times coming across as lame or plain ugly.

Jonah Hex (Blu-Ray) - More westerns need horse mounted Gatling Guns. I'm admittedly not too familiar with the comics it's based on, but on it's own it's a serviceable enough & sometimes fun post Civil War actioneer with a supernatural twist, if nothing remarkable. It feels 10-20 minutes shorter than it should though (they never explain how those special cannon balls are supposed to work, which is a pretty big deal since the bad guy's plan hinges entirely on them. That, and Jonah was clearly supposed to find himself in that fighting pit against that weird snake guy they set up, and then it just doesn't happen), which doesn't make much sense as it's pretty brisk at just under an hour and a half & it could have easily used the extra time.

Kite (Blu-Ray) - Ultraviolent & taboo 90's anime OVA that I think even surpasses Ninja Scroll & Wicked City in terms of how far it pushes the envelope. Sawa is a teen assassin who kills the absolute dregs of society, but the corruption runs deep as her handlers (a pair of police detectives) are just as twisted as those they order her to take out. The new Discotek Blu-Ray includes three different cuts (all remastered), including two different earlier western releases which cut back on the most taboo content (to various degrees) and condense it to "film" format, plus the completely uncut version (a two episode OVA) how it originally released in Japan. It's definitely not for the faint of heart or those who (understandably) shy away from some very questionable content, but it had a very grungy vibe (not unlike Perfect Blue), which I really dug.

Toy Story (Blu-Ray) - Time to wash the above away with something much more wholesome. I don't think I've actually watched this in it's entirety since I was a kid, but it's still a really fun watch that provides a good amount of laughs. Visually it's starting to look really simple, but I really dug the neon lit interiors of Pizza Planet & some of the glow in the dark elements of Sid's room. I liked noticing some things I missed out on as a kid, such as the Binford tool box (a Home Improvement reference), and the "Whack-A-Alien" game at Pizza Planet that features knock off chest bursters popping out of a bloody Astronaut corpse (this probably wouldn't pass the test in a modern Disney cartoon, lol, though I don't think they completely owned Pixar at this point).

Been watching too much stuff as of late!

17 Again - It’s pretty much your standard 2000s teen comedy film, and is about a middle-aged man being magically transformed back into his 17-year-old self and reenrolling into his old high school and trying to fix his relationships with his soon-to-be ex-wife and estranged children. I’m not really into watching comedy films, but I did enjoy this one. I thought a lot of moments in the film to be funny (Ned was by far the best character in the film) and the ending was super heartwarming, though some of the scenes and moments, knowing the context and what was happening, did make me feel very weirded out and uncomfortable when watching it at times. Unlike most of the films I watched recently, I saw this movie on HBO Max/Max.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie - YouTube has a pretty decent selection of movies that you can watch for free on there without having to buy or rent. I have watched some VeggieTales media before, including a few Netflix shows and another film called The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie. I have seen Jonah, but I didn’t remember a lot of it besides the opening scene before I watched it. The film tells two stories; one being a car mishap with a group of vegetables and an adaptation of the Biblical story of Jonah, with the two seemingly unrelated stories having a connection with each other via their themes of mercy and forgiving people. Although this movie is aimed toward younger audiences, I really enjoyed this one a lot! For an early 2000s movie, the animation is really impressive and holds up well by modern standards, usually CGI films around this time had animation that was stunning for the time but didn’t age well visually (with a few exceptions). The songs were pretty catchy and I liked the themes and humor they put into the stories, and I will say that the way Jonah’s story ended shocked me quite a bit with how he refused to forgive the Ninevites despite learning about forgiving people and having a song sung to him about second chances when he was in the stomach of a whale and how Khalil and Jonah’s own camel abandoned him in the desert in the end.

Poupelle of Chimney Town - Did I forget to mention that YouTube also offers free anime films? Poupelle is animated in 3D unlike the other anime films I watched, and I did also like this one. Like the previous film, this is also aimed toward kids, and the film is about the friendship between a young boy and a man made of actual garbage. I really thought the premise was interesting. I really liked this one, mainly from its story and the visuals and setting. The story is pretty heartwarming, deep, and all about accomplishing your dreams and believing, and I did find the moments midway and nearing the end to be very bittersweet and beautiful. Being someone that likes drawing, I really liked the art style, use of color, and the industrial look of the city they were in, and for a movie that is set in a city with lots of chimneys and highly polluted skies, there were a few shots and character designs that were funky (in a good way), colorful, and bright (e.g. the Halloween dance sequence in the beginning of the film) and I really like the mechanical and built-together design of Poupelle a lot. Only criticism is that the animation sometimes gets choppy in a few scenes and looks unclean, and the animation sometimes swapping from 3D to 2D looked a bit off and inconsistent, but that does not really affect the movie’s quality a lot or made it any less enjoyable for me.

The House of the Lost on the Cape - Another anime film, being about an elderly woman taking in a runaway girl and an orphan in a special house but I was surprised when the film to introduce supernatural creatures and elements midway through and there being a final battle at the end with all three of them and a bunch of supernatural creatures banding against a gigantic, evil entity, and I had initially thought it was a pretty simple film from what I read about the plot and premise. I loved the film for its heartwarming story and the relationships the three main characters build with each other. It’s a bit more obscure, but I think it’s a hidden gem!

The Wonderland - This one caught my attention, mainly from a famous artist named Ilya Kuvshinov working on the film as a character designer. It is probably one of the most prettiest anime films I have seen with has really gorgeous visuals and animation (especially during a ceremony near the end of the film) and Kuvshinov’s art style is animated so wonderfully. The visuals of the world are very surreal, but beautiful to look at and very unique, and the film kind of reminded me of Studio Ghibli with the animation, visuals, and the film being mostly set in a weird, whimsical and fantastical world, plus the main conflict being driven by environmentalism and the lack of rain. So many of the shots are beautiful (my favorites being the ceremony with the prince and the final scenes in the Wonderland), and they seem to take a lot of inspiration from Ghibli films. Though, I think the story is kind of generic and I didn’t feel any strong connection with the characters unfortunately (mainly from how they don’t tell a lot about their backstories besides maybe two characters in it) but I think the film did really well in the animation and visual department, even though the film doesn’t have a super unique story or interesting characters.

The LEGO Movie - Don’t have much to say on this one. Seen this before and it’s a classic! Love how comedic LEGO media is and this one is still fantastic.

Battle: Los Angeles (Blu-Ray) - Advanced alien invaders may be capable of interstellar travel, but there's no way they could ever be prepared for "the Few, the Proud, the Marines™". I didn't like it as much as I'd remembered (it doesn't have the charm of an Independence Day & it has a bit too much shaky cam), but it still has some pretty cool battle sequences, and I generally love movies where aliens are fought off with largely contemporary military abilities, so it'll stick around in my collection (maybe one day I'll do a triple feature with the aforementioned ID4 & Battleship). Unfortunately the BD I picked up thrifting skipped once or twice (small enough not to ruin the watch), but luckily I found another copy the very next day (this time in a snazzy slip cover), so I took that as a sign and grabbed it (hopefully this one doesn't have any issues).

Grumpy Old Men (Blu-Ray) - I'm probably overrating this a bit because it invokes a lot of nostalgia in me (we used to take fishing trips to Minnesota every summer, my earliest memories of which were in the 90's, so the vibe of this just hits with me. Plus, the movie takes place over Thanksgiving & Christmas, so that's a whole lot of cozy baked into it), but I really think this is genuinely enjoyable. The banter between Lemmon & Matthau is often hilarious (the guy playing Lemmon's 90 something year old dad is by far the funniest here though), and it has some good emotional beats to boot.

Spaceballs (Blu-Ray) - I've seen bits & pieces of this before, but never watched the whole thing because my dad said it sucked (to be fair, we generally have different taste in films). I seen the BD while thrifting however & figured it couldn't hurt to give it a watch, and I really ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I can totally understand why Blazing Saddles was a more important & seminal film when it comes to Mel Brooks' comedies, but in terms of personal preference I liked this more (it helps that I like future/space sci-fi a lot more than westerns).