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Movie Time 2.0: TT mini reviews

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
The big problem with the Hobbit films was time. Lord of the Rings was painstakingly planned out for years, whereas because of the Guillermo del Toro situation they ended up with a year and a half's planning time for The Hobbit. The fact the studio got watchable films out of the situation at all speaks to Jackson's skill as a film maker.
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
IIRC they started shooting Hobbit without a script, which seems less than ideal.

I've enjoyed the stuff pulled in from the appendices quite a bit. The main part of the first movie where it felt like it dragged was after they escape the goblins and then are immediately beset by Azog and his orcs, so there's another chase, and a fire, and like, OK, this is a lot of consecutive action sequences and very little else. I enjoyed it more this time, though. We're about 1/3 into Desolation and it's fine so far. I liked the sequence in Mirkwood and the Thranduil stuff a lot, though the river/barrel escape went on a bit long. The Tauriel/Legolas stuff feels (and is) jammed in awkwardly. Bombur momentarily got to do something besides be a fat joke, but still too much of fat joke for me to enjoy.

For an immortal race that are few in number, elves never seem very upset when one of their thousands-of-years-old comrades bites it.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
The fact the studio got watchable films out of the situation at all speaks to Jackson's skill as a film maker.
At what personal cost, though? I don't think I've seen a single picture of him during production of Thorin: A Thorin's Thorin Tale of Thorin (Guest Starring: A Hobbit), where he doesn't look utterly miserable.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Oh yeah, I feel for the guy. The sustained stress he must have been under must have been awful, now all he gets is people whining at him about how crap it was.
 
The Mirkwood scenes are in the second movie.

I checked plot synopsis of the films; I genuinely thought Mirkwood was in the first movie. There are Mirkwood sequences in both movies. Maybe the Mirkwood spiders which I spoke about in my original post are exclusive to the second film?

In the Unexpected Journey there is Gandalf confronting the Necromancer in his Mirkwood castle.

In the Desolation of Smaug there is a Mirkwood sequence with the Hobbit adventuring party.
 
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Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I'm not sure the cheque was worth it. It was years of stress, he put all his weight back on, he was fired for a bit - which must have been pretty humiliating - and I'll bet he doesn't like the films any more than we do.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
At what personal cost, though? I don't think I've seen a single picture of him during production of Thorin: A Thorin's Thorin Tale of Thorin (Guest Starring: A Hobbit), where he doesn't look utterly miserable.
Everyone else too, for that matter. Everything I've seen suggests that that entire trilogy is the work of a whole bunch of people having an absolutely miserable time and wanting it to be over already.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Which is an extra shame because by all account the core cast of LotR were having a *great* time during those movies.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Finally watched The Fly (Goldblum Style). Pretty... pretty glad I didn’t watch that on a full stomach. Turns out turning into a manbug over the course of 90 minutes is rough.

Seth elected to test His teleporter machine with a steak only AFTER ruining a perfectly good baboon with it. I can’t help but question his methodology. If nothing else, baboons have to be way more expensive than steaks. Even really good steaks.

Even if it was baboon-flank!

Also can’t help but feel worse for Geena Davis; she’s had a really bad week
 

Purple

(She/Her)
So I'm finally watching Terminator: Dark Fate and I'm kind of amazed by how lazy, cynical, and stupid of a soft reboot this is. Allow me to present my thoughts on this in 4 major sections:

The half-assed reboot softening:
We open with a technically impressive scene where yet another as yet unmentioned Arnold from the future just kinda strolls up five minutes after the end credits of Terminator 2 rolled and unceremoniously shoots adorable child John Connor in the back with a shotgun, killing him, and pretty firmly establishing that we are now in a continuity where all other sequels just did not ever happen. And also where none of the events of the movies we are accepting as canon make any damn sense, because we are also explicitly stating that this is treating as canon the alternate ending to 2 where smashing any future robot pieces prevents apocalyptic blue skullscape future from ever happening.

And... look, any way you slice it, this is just a massive plot hole. You can nerd the hell out about how this one successful assassin robot was somehow sent back to the past from this never-happened future, and indeed a throwaway line it'd be cool if we'd explored it at all suggests the really bleak Chrono Cross style explanation of things where that no longer existent future still exists in some weird hypothetical time hole and just keeps sending robots back out of spite, but in addition to being pretty damn bleak, and a problem that fundamentally has no possible resolution, AND contradicting Reese's confidence in the original movie that they have the robots on the ropes and this time traveling robot thing was just a desperate Hail Mary they shouldn't have the resources to keep doing essentially forever...

A- Why can't Skynet be reverse-engineered out of any of these other Terminators' various strewn corpses?
and
B- Why in the world would Sarah Connor of all people, whose entire deal is being a hardcore survivalist brinker convinced that evil robots will end the world no matter what, and the best case scenario is that SOME of humanity will survive if her son does be firmly convinced that there will be no future robot apocalypse after straight up watching a 3rd future robot shoot her kid in the back? Because she's kind of our main source of information that things worked out.

Fortunately, absolutely none of the above plot hole-ery actually matters, because that poorly thought out intro only really serves to justify getting Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger on set.

The actual plot is that, somehow, leftover time robots and trauma notwithstanding, the events of Terminator 2 prevented blue skull future from ever happening, BUT for reasons I don't think we even bother getting into, a completely unrelated evil robot future happens for completely unrelated reasons, and those evil robots ALSO send a future robot assassin back in time to keep the resistance against THEM from ever forming, and THAT resistance also sends back a Kyle Reese to stop it.

And that all just kinda plays out and like original Sarah Connor is redundantly there hanging out but honestly kinda contributes nothing.

Everything about this is bad, lazy, cynical, and poorly thought out, and they'd have been much better off just doing a straight up remake.

Pretending they didn't bother and this was just a straight up remake:
Instead of having Arnold-shaped meat over a robot skeleton, or a shapeshifting pile of goo, we have a shapeshifting pile of goo over a robot skeleton. Which also kinda means we just straight up have two Terminators teaming up I guess? The potential mechanics of this seem interesting but are not particularly explored. It's really just kind of a set up for a single WOAH moment where it leaves the skeleton behind to steer a truck while otherwise climbing up on the hood to throw rebar.

And instead of having some kind of forgetable actor as a weird wild-eyed syncophant Kyle Reese we have a cool butch woman channeling that Furiosa vibe so well I had to double check that is wasn't actually Theron in the role, who is also a cyborg. And that's great. She's the one good thing about this movie.

Also because having Remake Reese be a girl kinda makes it impossible for her to get Remake Sarah pregnant (unless they'd made her trans or she had some really fetishy cyborg bits I guess), there's a scene where she admits that she was raised as an orphan by Remake Sarah and came back in time to save her own mom. Which is a way less creepy (if way more tragic) way of having basically the same ending.

Unfortunately, we have like... no real scenes or lines for Remake Sarah, Remake Terminator I don't think has a consistent face, no real establishing shots of it doing anything, and is basically just a big special effect, and there really aren't any particularly good or memorable action scenes (I hadn't even finished the movie when I started this post and already all I can really remember is throwing rebar at each other on the highway). So... better Reese aside, yeah, this doesn't even come close to holding a candle to the original movie.

The incredibly dumb 3rd act twist that almost got me back on board:
So the other bit of older movies continuity we have is that, and I am not making this up, I swear:
After unceremoniously strutting up and shooting John Connor in the back with a shotgun, the Arnold robot that walked in through a plot hole had nothing left to do, and just kinda wandered off, met a nice young woman, married her, raised a child with her, and retired to a nice little cabin in the woods where our heroes just kinda run into him. He offers them beers, pets his dog, and agrees to come along and help them, after quickly pausing to tell his family of 20 years to just kinda screw off and leave the movie entirely, adding that he told them offscreen "I won't be back."

This is... quite possibly the single stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life. It feels like some sort of hacky joke you'd have as a throwaway line in a cheesy sketch show or something where you were specifically trying to go for the most nonsensical backstory ever. And... I mean I'm kinda here for it? This movie was just kinda terrible and soulless and felt completely without any sort of appeal until they busted this absurdity out, so, hey. I'll take it, but.... you DID turn your whole movie into a total joke by even considering this angle.

Also you're uh... ripping off an idea that Genisys already did but in a way that actually made sense and established a character the main cast had a meaningful connection to.

But yeah, evil killer robot settles down, raises family, has dog. Sure.

Feminism:
So... for a movie that basically doesn't have any men in it at all, this movie kinda seems to hate women and especially hate them having any sort of agency? And it's super weird?

Like, OK, we have original Sarah Connor here who we're just torturing with like the cruelest possible existence. She already lived through the first two Terminator movies, which is pretty rough, and left her basically feral, tortured in an asylum for years, constantly on the run, etc. And then she watches her like 12 year old son get straight up shot in the back, and gets like choked out by an evil robot. Then she's told everything she's been fighting for for her entire adult life ultimately doesn't actually matter at all and affects nothing. Then she finally tracks down the robot who murdered her son, is forbidden from getting revenge which she just quietly accepts, and has to suffer the indignity of it joking around about how great raising a son is and offering her beers. PLUS she has this fourth wall breaky knowledge that she's in a remake of her own life to the point where she actually goes "Oh OK, so you're actually John" to Remake Sarah at one point. It's just awful and painful to watch. Both the actress and the character deserve way better.

Then we have Remake Sarah who... I mean just really isn't a character. We don't focus on her at all, we don't get any sort of backstory to her. She's introduced in kind of a comedy scene where she watches Remake Reese's time bubble appear while her I think nameless boyfriend is banging her, and berating her for suggesting they check if the random teleporting naked woman is OK after she steals his clothes (and actually I'm not even fully sure that wasn't just some other woman) and past that she just kinda... gets told what to do by what are eventually 3 different tough badass guardians. She has so little development that I can't even say whether sending her own future daughter back in time to save her own life feels deeply out of character, but... you know that's also a thing she is eventually revealed to be on board with and that makes her pretty unlikable!

Then we have Remake Reese there, who again, I do like, but I mean it's pretty purely for aesthetic reasons. She still has the same problem as original Reese of being this one-dimensional zealot just here to protect her parent-figure from robot murder, and while she gets to do some action movie stuff, she doesn't really get much in the way of development, does the whole noble sacrifice thing, and spends an AWFULLY large amount of the movie all things considered being passed out/incapacitated/needing to be brought a bunch of drugs. And you know, ultimately has to team up with two other guardians to do her job, not even getting the final big heroic sacrifice of the finale. So, that sucks.

And then we've got the 4th (or 5th?) woman of note here, joke-Robot-Arnold's human wife. Who we are specifically calling out as being too stupid/oblivious/unconcerned to pick up on the fact that she's been married to a killer robot who does not eat or sleep for something like 20 years "because he's good at cleaning diapers," and who... agrees to just kinda walk out of the movie, and her home, and her marriage, without so much as a word of dialog, after being briefly introduced just for the sake of a ridiculous joke.

And like, that would be bad enough, especially for a movie that's specifically trying to cash in so hard on Badass T2 Sarah Connor, but this is as an immediate followup to Terminator: Genisys, the movie that was mainly about calling its own predecessors out for having this pretty gross plot where some future jerk sets up this weird manipulative time travel plot to get his friend laid by his mom in the past, make sure he's born, and gets to be future war Jesus, by both directly observing how that's messed up, and further altering the past so she just gets to be the big world saving badass herself and do a way better job of it to boot. And I mean yeah it kinda mucked things up enough to make a sequel practically impossible to do, but it's also the one movie in the franchise that was at least kind enough to actually leave a sequel hook open they could have used.

So yeah, not a fan.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I feel gratified whenever anyone appreciates Genisys for the work of art that it is.

Also, didn’t mention it with my summary of The Fly, but I think Jeff Goldblum kept his own severed ding-dong in a medicine cabinet.

And, man, that’s just unhygienic. You’ve got toothpaste and aspirin and stuff in there. At least put it in a sealed container!
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Dragonheart wasn't half bad, which is another way of saying "halfway through the movie I lost interest". But the first half of the movie was a lot of fun; with Dennis Quaid befriending Sean Connery and the two of them scamming peasants by faking dragon attacks while everyone EXCEPT the giant CG dragon just chews up all the scenery they can.

Then the tone shifts to Dennis Quaid and Sean COnnery trying to lead a peasant revolt against Evil King Badhaircut and the movies momentum just disappears.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
The Kid Detective takes such a dark swerve near the end, and yet still manages to end the film on a laugh. It’s very impressive.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Sartana and the Shadow of Death

So I saw there was a whole spaghetti western series called Sartana, so I thought I'd check out one of them that was on Prime. I was disappointed with how cheap it looked and it being mostly perfunctory. Then I went onto wikipedia and found out that Italy made a number of Sartana movies but even a GREATER number of non-official Sartana movies. Turns out the characters Sartana and Django, while apparently having copyrights, are characters that people use as if they WERE in the public domain and I guess no one bothered and "Shadow of Death" is one of those films. The official Sartana films sound trashy and fun: he is always tricking factions into killing each other a la A Fistful of Dollars, there are 80 kills of a 90 minute films, he sets up death traps and at one point GETS A ROBOT. IN THE OFFICIAL SERIES. I imagine it isn't a wisecracking Johnny 5 but still... Man, I have to see these True Sartana's.

BTW, I chose the Sartana with the most boring title. Here are the official Sartana titles.

  • If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death
  • I Am Sartana Your Angel of Death (this is the most boring one)
  • I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin
  • Have a Good Funeral, My Friend... Sartana Will Pay
  • Light the Fuse... Sartana Is Coming
Even the unofficial ones have some great titles

  • One Damned Day at Dawn... Django Meets Sartana!
  • Django and Sartana Are Coming... It's the End
  • Sartana Kills Them All
  • Let's Go and Kill Sartana (Sartana doesn't even appear in this one)
  • Trinity and Sartana... Those Dirty S.O.B.s
  • Alleluja & Sartana Are Sons... Sons of God
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
So I've been looking forward to "Zack Snyder's Justice League," and also to "Godzilla vs. Kong," and in anticipation of those I decided to arrange me an HBO Max subscription. And I was browsing the offerings, and I was like - lordy bagordy, they got Kurosawa flicks on this thing!

In short order I was testing it out with "Ikiru" (1952), reputed as one of the master's masterpieces. It's a rather sentimental film, as is expected and appropriate when the story is about a man who learns he has only months to live and realizes that his life up until then had been meaningless. The structure, however, was unexpected and novel, when halfway through it abruptly jumps ahead to the protagonist's funeral and tells the rest in flashbacks as mourners ponder his final acts.

It's the craft of it all that I loved best, though. Earlier in my life I would not have appreciated the artistry evident in the framing and pacing of each and every scene, no matter how mundane. The motion, the tension! Akira Kurosawa was simply the best.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
Wolfcop- A hidden gem of a movie that simultaneously manages to be exactly what the title conveys, but also manages to have a rather shockingly well thought-out plot, with lots of payoffs and twists and reasons to get invested in the characters.

Another Wolfcop- Not that.

Like, I didn't hate it. I don't regret watching it. But... nothing that ever gets set up pays off. Scenes just kinda happen. Characters just sort of exist.

There's a big fight scene with a robot in a strip club. Why was that robot in the strip club? They make a big deal out of fixing it after, but then it never shows up again.

There's this whole thing with like, enough monster babies to wipe out the whole population of the town, and they start attacking, and then... that scene is just kind of over.

There's a main villain, towards the end he just kinda leaves?

There's a main villain's right hand tough gal goon. And... no real like big confrontation with her.

The one thing they really did right was they brought back the protagonist's weird crude conspiracy nut friend, despite him very definitely being dead by the end of the first one which also just kinda happens because of a weird big plot hole, but, you know, I'll take it.

Also they gave the ol' college try to topping the sex scene in the first one but... that scene worked because it was actually properly set up and played totally straight. This... felt like it was out of the Austin Powers sequels in the execution.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Zatoichi the Fugitive

I guess Zatoichi is technically a fugitive in this one but he spends no time on the run if that's what you are looking for. This one is a bit of a disappointment. The villain isn't as interesting this time out. The last two where Zatoichi's one armed brother who was also his love rival and then his mentor who turned out to be a hypocritical shit compared to Ichi's would be assassin, who starts shitty but has surprising compassion. This time its a guy who respects him but wants to kill him and I feel like we've been there. Still, I like the lead a lot.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Thanks to Purple reminding me that I had the original Wolfcop on my queue, I sat down and watched Wolfcop.

Kind of feel like she enjoyed it more than I did, but I did quite enjoy myself with this tale of a willwhorf who is also a cop. S’like if Troma made Robocop.

It also ended with a rap that summarized the plot, objectively the best way to end a movie.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
I feel like anyone who is on the Discord when I watch a movie can tell you, it's very clear when I like what I'm watching. To that end, I just watched Beyond Skyline. The unexpectedly excellent sequel to the original Skyline, a movie which I liked, but the vast majority of people did not. Or simply didn't watch it. And while I liked this one even more, it also couldn't be less similar in tone or content. Much of it actually feels like a (much better) second run at the Independence Day sequel.

The first... quarter or so of the film is a recap of the original movie, from a different set of character perspectives (even reusing some of the same shots), which leads you to assume it's a low-budget rehash of the original (complete with the hallmark of low-budget sci-fi horror; aliens who are constantly off camera and in shadow). And then, like a switch were flipped, the movie changes into COMPLETELY different gear, with a rag-tag group of heroes trying to escape a bio-horror alien ship, before crashing into a mob cartel in Laos where they team up with drug-runners after discovering that one of their number has a weird power to subvert and control alien tech, and then it becomes a full on action movie with the Laotian Mob versus Aliens, culminating in a huge sequel hook, and a rock-song over a blooper-reel for the end-credits.

The movie is just relentlessly fun, the visuals are amazing for the budget (lots of instances of the aliens in full view broad daylight, letting you take in their full appearance (more of them are Guys in Suits than the original, but they're really cool looking suits, and there's still a lot of giant CG monsters), and the movies giger-esque bio-mechanical aesthetics look incredible. Even the characters who barely affect the plot manage to steal the show; a particular standout being one of the Crime Guys who never gets named, never puts on a shirt and just screams a lot while swinging machetes at people.

Absolutely loved it; can't recommend the movie enough.

Now I'm all geared up to watch the conclusion!
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Watched Tenet exactly how Chris Nolan wanted me to: on a tiny airplane screen broken up across two flights a day apart because it was too damn long.

Pretty good! Kept my attention throughout. I think I prefer Memento for my Nolan time related mindfucks. Some stuff got pretty silly Nah man, see Fire makes you cold in backwards time world. That’ll have almost no bearing on the plot whatsoever. .

Had another hour and a half to kill on flight two so watched Booksmart again as a palate cleanser. Still great. Didn’t have it in me to watch the awkward sex scene again though so that got skipped.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Watched Big Ass Spider, a 2014 horror-comedy featuring... well... a big-ass spider.

Say what you will of the movie, but it delivers what it advertises.

The comedy doesn’t really ever land (a lot more jokes about the thick accent of the goofy comic relief character than I’d like), but it moves at a lightning fast clip and the CG on the giant spider is surprisingly good considering the movies budget. And at a lean 80 minutes it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.

Nothing I’d urge others to go out and see (mainly because of aforesaid Accent Humour, it was 2014, we knew better by then), but sometimes you aren’t in the mood for a steak, you’re in the mood for a handful of Slim Jim’s.

Absurd amount of product placement for the Western Exterminator Conpany, too.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I decided to watch the only ACTUALLY OFFICIAL Sartana movie on Prime, Have a Good Funeral, My Friend... Sartana Will Pay.

Its still cheap looking and lacking a lot of the style of Sergio Leone but it is still a much better movie and is fun from stem to stern than the off-brand Sartana movie. The premise is a bunch of baddies kill an old prospector on his land, so Sartana kills them and looks into the conspiracy as to who wanted him dead and why. Of course, the answer is his land but that's not a reveal so much as a foregone conclusion. And its also pretty obvious who is responsible. But the real fun is the baddies sending assassins after Sartana, who murders them in kind and, as a running theme in the movie, pays top dollar for his victims funerals. Its a fun cheapy and much more of what I was hoping for. Still no robot, though.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Battle Beyond the Stars is a remake of Magnificent Seven made by Roger Corman that also serves as a Star Wars knockoff.

I feel like that sentence alone should tell you whether or not it’s worth watching to you.

Robert Vaughn is in it, playing the exact same character he did in Magnificent Seven, and... George Peppard is also there playing a guy named Space Cowboy. The credits seem to think George Peppard was the bigger draw

Apparently Kathy Griffin was there too, stealing the show as “Alien (uncredited)”
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Pooh's Heffalump Movie

In my quest to watch all the "released in theatres" Disney animated movies on Disney Plus, I finish my push through the nadir of the Winnie the Pooh movies. There's one left but I'm told its actually pretty solid. This is not. Its not even that this or the Piglet movie are bad, they are just kind of dull and despite the cast's efforts, it lacks the charm of the first film. The word play isn't as fun and its just not very clever in a pretty basic "different people aren't bad" story. Good message but dull movie and I am increasingly unhappy with the music in these films, which oscillate from treacly to treacly and also there for a montage to sell the soundtrack. I mean, its what I was expecting but I'll say its never as bad as it could have been, simply dull.
 
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