Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

[Johnny Unusual]

Predator is still a film I really really like. The mini-monologues are better than I remember and while it is mostly muscle men but I forgot that I think the film is definitely thinks of these characters as more than just victims, so it matters when they die.

24 Hour Party People is a very well-made, informative, clever and often funny biopic. That said, I kind of didn't care about any of the characters until the last act. I think part of it is I don't think I'd enjoy spending time with any of these characters but also the meta-ness keeps me a bit at arms length. But I can see all the virtue of the film and really respect all the choices it made. I just think it's a cool movie that isn't for me.

 

[Paul le Fou]

...boobs?

Disappointing on that front, even!

 

[Baudshaw]

What happens when you're trapped in a house with only teens and preteens? That's right, you get Scary Movie. It's so disconnected and random, and barely any of the jokes are funny. I give it a 2/10.

 

[BEAT]

On a whim I rewatched the Venom Movies while doing job search bullshit.

They're just fuckin FUN.

 

[Octopus Prime]

This story rings true.

ANYWAY

Lately my dad has gone from wanting to watch horror movies almost every night to action movies. Which is good for me, because I was getting burnt out on them, and good for him because he gets scared of them real easy. TO THAT END

Nobody is John Wick except with Bob Odenkirk, Chris Loyd and Rza, and it's not nearly as good as John Wick, it IS a movie with Bob Odenkirk, Chris Loyd and the Rza, so what kind of life are you living where "John Wick except with Bob Odenkirk, Chris Loyd and the Rza" is anything except a 10/10.

Plane is also a movie made out of other movies, but in this case, half of them are video games, and the other ones are Con Air and any number of Tom Hanks is a Captain movies. Gerard Butler is the pilot of an airplane that crashes and then there's a bunch of boardroom meetings to figure out where he is, and one of the passengers is a prisoner being transferred and also the island they crashed on has pirates on it and one straight up says "Look at me; I'm the captain now". Then it becomes a Farcry game for the last 40 minutes or so. It's a pretty solid Dad Movie, by merit of the fact that he was completely wrapped up in it and I quietly played on my ipad

 

[Büge]

Gerard Butler

Dad Movie

redundant

 

[Octopus Prime]

No lie detected

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Asteroid City is not my favourite Wes Anderson but it does seem like he is reaching for something beyond "dealing with distant/complicated father figure." Don't worry, that's still in there. But this feels very much a reaction to the pandemic (something he confirmed, at least in regards to a plot point). I think he's also trying to explore because the film tells us time and time again "I don't have an answer to this". It isn't a lazy cheat, it's more trying to deal asking if life has meaning or if there's a grander purpose.

But I think the reason it speaks most to the pandemic is not the quarantine section (though that is part) but that it's about people who have a shared Earth-shaking experience (in this case, a brief and enigmatic visit by an alien) and the question is "wait... this feels like it's supposed to change everything. But did it?" The characters seem like they should be having some great revelation about the nature of their reality but in the end, there are no answers. This could be bleak but while I am a bit tired of Anderson's deadpan style of humour in this one (still well played, just... I've been here a lot), I think it is ultimately... not hopeful but caring about the people living through it and seeing the beauty in the mystery, even if it's the same thing that frustrates us. Maybe in the end, we might not learn as much as we want or solve all are problems or even have some great road map for figuring things out but we did have that shared moment and even if we don't understand what it means, the experience means a lot. I think it's a film I'll appreciate more on rewatch because while I liked it, I enjoyed thinking about it's themes after the film than in the watching of it. Still.... good movie.

Fifty Shades of Grey is as bad as you imagine. For two hours and five minutes.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Argylle is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is (I expect most people will be able to guess the various reveals before they occur), but it is still a largely enjoyable meta spy-comedy. It is weirdly committed to giving its very attractive stars the worst possible hair styles.

This is accurate. We saw it to kill time while waiting for the puppy's spay yesterday. Not a movie I'd normally have paid to see in a theater, but as a time killer it was pretty dumb and weightless, but fun. Good cast too.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

Fifty Shades of Grey is as bad as you imagine. For two hours and five minutes.

fifty shades is Old News, get with the program and watch 365 Days and the After franchise

 

[Octopus Prime]

Deep Rising waspretty much a film adaptation of Resident Evil Revelations, with Treat Williams and Famke Janssen as Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine (and also the weedy guy from The Mummy, and Kano from Mortal Kombat). Ad a bit more Tedious Stupid than Fun Stupid.

full credit for having a pretty cool looking monster that animated really well considering how it was made of 90s CG, and the finale had Treat and Famke zipping around the corridors of a cruise ship on a jetski, and no fool could possibly complain about that.

 

[Bongo]

2023 Chilean martial arts movie Fist of the Condor is pure wuxia and very stylish, even though it's a bit light on closure and logic. Highly recommended.

 

[YangusKhan]

How gory/visceral is it? Like if someone had an aversion to on-screen blood or close-ups of bodily injuries?

 

[Bongo]

It's mostly pretty clean, with blood but not much. However, there's one particular bit of gore that is a marked contrast from that, which may be too much for some. Specifically - this is both a content warning for gore and because it is a spoiler for a dramatic moment - he punches a guy's head open, such that the brains spill out on the floor, where they are eaten by a condor.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Predator 2 is a weird beast. It's aged pretty poorly, hanging onto the trope of monstrous and inhuman super gangs, a trope born of the fear-mongering of the era. But also it's set in the slight future for some reason? And Danny Glover is in it and is good but weirdly it feels like not only is he replacing Arnold, he's being written like him and it's an odd fit for Glover. Bill Paxton is in it and I feel like his character might have been intended to be a John McLane type, representing the sea change in the kind of action stars we are seeing to more wisecracking people person. But really it's just in the mode of "annoying *funny* guy" in an Arnold movie and it's very irritating.

The movie is really dumb but it's not without some merit. The new Predator weapons are pretty cool additions to the canon. But that's small potatoes to, say, a good story. It's trying to have a sense of fun but it's doing a bad job balancing the tongue-in-cheek and genuine thrills and I think "Predator decides his greatest challenge would be modern day street crime" would be more fun if said criminals weren't practically non-characters. It might have been fun if, like Attack the Block, the criminals were the anti-heroes of the film or perhaps ended in a uneasy alliance with each other and/or the police to stop the unstoppable force. Time that could have been taken away from Gary Busey and his less-successful attempt at aping the "Wayland-Yutani plan to weaponize an extraterrestrial force" beat from Alien/Aliens. In many ways it does inch towards being a somewhat cheesy good time with a good cast and competent if uninteresting filmmaking but it's just a bad balance overall.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Predator 2 is a Frankenstein of a movie where there’s *just enough* good parts that you could build a great sequel out of it, but, instead… we got what we got.

The fact that the script seems to be really convinced that The Guy Whose Old and Wanted To Retire from Lethal Weapon is who you think of as a replacement for Arnold is… definitely one of the more significant problems

 

[Johnny Unusual]

A much more sobering film, After Sherman, is a great and thoughtful documentary about cultural inheritance that deals with the black South Carolina community in the wake of a shooting. The film isn't about the shooting, though, but is about the history of the era, what has stayed, what has changed and what has been fought for. It's doesn't seem to come in with a clear thesis statement (or if it did, it found other avenues) but is more an exploration about these people and the struggles and shared heritage. I hope to see more documentaries from
Jon Sesrie Goff because this is a powerful work.

 

[Purple]

Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron:

Spoiler

For what it's worth it's closer to the Nausicaa end of the spectrum than the Totoro one. Maybe right smack in the middle?

 

[Johnny Unusual]

After Blue is a movie that I think will appear to a lot of people here; a 1970s-styled sci-fi sapphic erotic weird western. Set on a planet without men, a young woman named Toxic frees another woman trapped in sand who immediately kills her friends, claiming is the first of three granted wishes and also her name is Kate Bush. Now Toxic is persona non grata for freeing a killer and she and her mother are sent to make up for it by killing her and collecting a huge bounty on Kate's head, only to run into dangers, monsters and questionable allies. And this wild description does not nearly prepare you for the madness of this film.

But this doesn't feel like the director is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. It feels more in a weird, dreamlike state of internal logic and never feels like it is trying to hard as it explores the horror and sexuality of the landscape. If you don't mind bizarre violence and a film where explaining the plot does very little to relay the experience of the film, After Blue... might be for you? It's an odd one. Personally, I really liked it, even though I was pretty lost by the end.

 

[Voncaster]

The Church (1989)
In this unholy sanctuary you haven't got a prayer...

In medieval times, a group of demons (women and children with crosses on their feet) are rounded up, killed, and thrown in a pit. A cathedral, the titular Church, is build over the burial site. The burial pit is covered with a stone seal.

In modern times the cathedral still stands. A female preservationist and a male librarian discover a parchment. The parchment leads the librarian to find the the stone seal. Not knowing what it is, he naturally opens it. This triggers an Indiana Jones style lock down of the Church with ancient contraptions.

Its chaotic horror once the seal is opened. Some of the people inside are possessed by demons and kill other people. Others have to flee the demons and find a way out of the locked down Church.

Also there is a sex scene between the female preservationist and a goat demon. I'm pretty sure that is the first time I've seen that in a film.

Italian horror movies are climbing the ranks as my favorite genre of films. This one is definitely fun!

Two other notes:
The Church was directed by Michele Soavi who also directed Cemetery Man.
The Church was produced by Dario Argento and a young Asia Argento plays a girl trapped in the Church.

Rating (out of 5):

 

[Rascally Badger]

Hail, Caesar! rules. I did trivia tonight, Coens themed and the MC suggested that it was one of the weaker Coens movie. I almost walked out (Glad I stayed, we came in a close 2nd).

All the fake movies are delightful, everyone is great in it. The scenes with the Communists. Perfect movie. With full knowledge of everything since this, how is Alden Erenreich not huge doghammed star.

 

[Voncaster]

Coens are all over the map for me in terms of how much I enjoy their films.

The Coens have a consistent level of quality with the level of craft that they put into their scripts and cinematography. But some of their work does not connect with me.

A Serious Man is my favorite Coen Bros film.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I watched Beautiful Disaster, a romcom about gambling and underground fighting, because it's on this week's How Did This Get Made? podcast. It's a bad movie but I get a weird cognitive dissonance from it because it has a weird polished look not unlike a puritanical Hallmark movie but they constantly say fuck. It's got a weird vibe (also it feels like it's gender and sexual politics are weirdly stuck in the 90s. Which makes sense because it's from the director of Cruel Intentions).

 

[Pajaro Pete]

Guess Who (Tubi Original): A woman travels with her fiance to visit his family for a Mummers Night event. Allegedly a slasher film, but you could remove the Slasher and related scenes entirely and it wouldn't actually change the movie? I don't think the Killer is ever unmasked or revealed, but that's fine because no one in the main cast ever interacts with that part of the plot. The climax is messy, but not in the way one might want for a Slasher movie. In better hands, the premise could have worked as a psychological thriller by playing up how disorienting the whole Mummering thing is, but alas.

Also, the Slasher's gimmick is dressing up in a Mummers costume and asking the victim riddles, and the answer to the first riddle is "shears" and he stabs the victim in the neck with garden shears, and so it's like, "oh, the riddles are all gonna be related to how he kills the victim" but then the second riddle's answer is "heart" and he.... hit the victim in the head with a nail bat. Like if you're gonna make a Slasher With A Gimmick at least try to keep it consistent.

The Last Exit (Tubi Original): Two criminal brothers arrive at an isolated farm house during a storm. Tension ensues. This was also tagged as horror, but imo the actual horror elements feel like they were tagged on in reshoots? Otherwise it's mostly a psychological crime thriller, and I think it would have been stronger if the description hadn't given away the major elements of the movie and just let us marinate in the uncomfortableness of the first half of the movie. The second half of the movie sort of falls apart, which is kind of heralded by the use of dutch angle b-roll shots of rooms around the house.

The horror elements just feel too over the top and could be removed entirely, imo, but otherwise I think there's something that resembles an Ok movie in here, which is not something you usually get from a Tubi Original.

 

[Voncaster]

Dune Part Two (2024)

Dune Part Two is a very well crafted movie. A lot of the scenes are beautiful. I liked a lot of Dune Part Two, but it is long and complicated. Its not a propulsive movie throughout. There are sequences of action that are good and compelling. But there is also slow behind the scenes plotting.

The ending, which I would guess is similar to the book, was a bit confusing and unsatisfying to me.

There is a sequence on the Harkonnen home world in black in white that, for me, is the highlight of the film. This sequence reminds me of WWII propaganda films. There are also a beautiful part of this sequence with fireworks and a hallway.

I don't think I can fully appreciate Dune Part Two on one viewing. I could see this and Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 going up in ratings after repeated viewings.

Rating (out of 5):

 

[Paul le Fou]

Fun fact, the black-and-white sequence wasn't just shot on b&w film, it was shot in infrared. I think that's pretty cool!

 

[Rascally Badger]

I've been thinking about nothing but Dune 2 since leaving the theater dune 2 chicks

Seriously, that was a good ass movie.

 

[Baudshaw]

Oh right, Oppenheimer was cool. Were the nukes actually practical effects, or just CGI?

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Oh right, Oppenheimer was cool. Were the nukes actually practical effects, or just CGI?

I remember somewhere they detonated a bunch of TNT to simulate it, but my memory isn’t great and I’m not gonna look it up lol

 

[lincolnic]

Girlfriend and I watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny tonight after my dad mentioned a couple of times how much he'd liked it. I had zero expectations but we had a surprisingly fun time. A lot of it is patently absurd but Old Indy seems like such an effortless role for Harrison Ford that it's hard not to enjoy watching him do it.