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Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?

The Shining
6/10
Kubrick's horror classic - scared the hell out of me when I first saw in the late 80's, but it just doesn't seem to hold up. Shelly Duvall and Danny Lloyd never seem comfortable in their roles and the Nicholson's performance for the first third of the movie seems flat. It isn't until the one scene when Wendy disturbs Jack while he is typing that the whole movie ramps up to the proper level. The score is fantastic and the tracking shots of Danny big wheeling around the hotel are great. I really like Scatman's performance, but the one character missing from this movie is the Hotel itself.

An American Werewolf in London
8/10
A Horror comedy? Well maybe just a horror movie with a great sense of humor - thanks mostly to Griffin Dunne's Jack Goodman. The make-up effects - especially those of Jack Goodman's decaying corpse are wonderfully grotesque.
 
American Sniper

No doubt this one's been done to death, but whatever.

I don't know if Clint Eastwood meant to make such a nuanced film, but he did. And thankfully the widespread dismissal of the idea that the creator's intention is paramount helps to better interpret a movie like this.

This wasn't a movie about America kicking ass. It wasn't about the bad-assery of the sniper. It was a richly metaphoric film about a country torn apart by an unnecessary conflict that still has the nation fighting with itself. A U.S. Marine murders a Navy SEAL well after they were absent from the conflict; the huge rift in the main character's family; the man who started off with good intentions but who flirts with psychopathy and suicide; redemption, and then the bleak occurrence of the murder that renders that redemption empty.

It's understandable to want to dismiss this movie when every goddamned hillbilly and conservative is praising it as an homage to American ass-kicking. But they miss the point--badly. To me, this movie wasn't about glory in war, it was about the tragedy of the Iraq conflict and how it killed and corrupted the soldiers who went to fight what their government told them was a good and necessary fight, but instead turned out to be nothing more than a bloody hoax. And again, it was also about how it divided the nation and continues to divide it to this day.


9/10
 
The Wolf of Wall Street, 7/10: Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a huckster broker on Wall Street who makes a shit load of money and indulges in a hedonistic lifestyle that comes to an end once the Feds take the rug from under him. It was quite entertaining with some really funny scenes.
 
Bacillus anthracis said:
American Sniper

No doubt this one's been done to death, but whatever.

I don't know if Clint Eastwood meant to make such a nuanced film, but he did. And thankfully the widespread dismissal of the idea that the creator's intention is paramount helps to better interpret a movie like this.

This wasn't a movie about America kicking ass. It wasn't about the bad-assery of the sniper. It was a richly metaphoric film about a country torn apart by an unnecessary conflict that still has the nation fighting with itself. A U.S. Marine murders a Navy SEAL well after they were absent from the conflict; the huge rift in the main character's family; the man who started off with good intentions but who flirts with psychopathy and suicide; redemption, and then the bleak occurrence of the murder that renders that redemption empty.

It's understandable to want to dismiss this movie when every goddamned hillbilly and conservative is praising it as an homage to American ass-kicking. But they miss the point--badly. To me, this movie wasn't about glory in war, it was about the tragedy of the Iraq conflict and how it killed and corrupted the soldiers who went to fight what their government told them was a good and necessary fight, but instead turned out to be nothing more than a bloody hoax. And again, it was also about how it divided the nation and continues to divide it to this day.


9/10
Click to expand...

Eastwood meant to do that. As usual, jingoistic types just take it at face value and run with the idea of a movie about a 'hero', patriot of the USA military without looking any deeper.
 
Redemption, 4/10: Not what I expected from a Jason Statham movie. I was expecting some kick ass action but it seems the producer/director had a story to tell. It's a drama about two characters, Statham's traumatized ex special forces marine and a nun both questioning their place in the world and the two characters play off of each other in what ultimately is a damp squib of a movie. Maybe it was ruined for me because I was expecting some serious ass whooping to be dished out but the movie seems to have been a serious attempt at drama. Statham for James Bond ? I don't think so.
 
Runaway Jury. Gene Hackman and John Cusack at their best. A renegade juror tries to manipulate a high profile court trial.

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Cake (2015)

Reviews were generally negative to bland for this movie. Lightweight movie that belongs on the Lifetime channel, etc.

It does have a few stereotypically "chick flick" things keeping it from being really good.

The main character has lots of money. And she has an overly devoted, and religious, Mexican maid. Finally, there's a hunky stranger with a cute kid who provides motivation for the main character.

But it has one thing that rescues it from complete blandness.

A bloated, scarred, bitter, pain-ridden, drug-addled and hallucinating Jennifer Aniston giving a pretty good performance.

The movie could have been better.

But I wanted to know what happened to the characters. And that's why I'll rate Cake higher than a well-done, but boring to me, classic like His Girl Friday.

6.5/10
 
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Kingsman: The Secret Service

6 to 7/10

Pleasantly surprised (especially after hearing it was good from someone who doesn't generally know what good means)

Plotting good overall, a few missteps. Character development uneven, could be better. Special effects and casting were intriguing. 400 million + at the box office. Sequel in the works.
 
Jurassic World - 9/10 - very much enjoyed this, the humans were a little bit boring in places but thankfully the dinosaurs were on hand to save the day.
 
Jurassic World (2015)

I agree with Draconis.

dinosaurs - lots of action, lots of fun 9/10

humans - stereotypes played out with reasonable skill 5.5/10

If you want a monster movie, it's great.
 
I saw "the Yellow Sea" 6/10, another slow paced, moody Korean crime drama.

Perhaps someone here can help me, but is the police in South Korea monumentally violent and incompetent? Virtually every Korean crime movie I've seen (and I've seen a lot) have policemen who are either incredibly brutal, appallingly incompetent, or both, as in this film. In one scene, our hapless hero is fleeing from a murder he didn't commit (though he intended to) on foot, and is pursued by the police both on foot and in cars. The police manage to not only crash their cars into one another (a normal staple of such films) but also run over their compatriots who were pursuing on foot (which is completely new to me). When they are not doing that, they are beating suspects, being blase about civilian casualties, and inadvertantly shooting one another. One policeman criticizes rural police for their incompetence, despite the urban police not being noticeably more competent.

While this film is generally well done and is doubtless centered around an important social theme in Korea, it suffers from slow pacing, unsympathetic characters, and bizarre lack of motivation on the part of the villains.
 
War Horse

If I did believe in God, I would have thanked him a hundred times over for the fact that this movie came out long after my kids were little, because I would have taken them to see it, and then suffered the torture of having to watch the whole thing.

The horse is named Joey and through idiotic circumstances Joey comes to be owned by an adolescent boy, who I'm pretty sure wants to fuck Joey. In a vomitus English accent: "We'll always be ta-getha you and me, Joey."

The dialogue in this movie is so cornball, so sickly sweet, that it was like Spielberg and a bunch of other writers wrote it line by line after taking a bong rip. One bong rip = one line of dialogue. At least one person must have actually died laughing during this writing process.

Is Joey the underdog horse than can-do? You know it.
Is Joey the fastest horse in the British army? There's no way he can't be.
Is Joey the only horse who survives the first battle? Almost; there a black horse he's bonded with and so the black horse lives too.

But the most important thing about the movie is that Joey is the kiss of fucking death to whomever comes into contact with him. Once the kid's drunken dad sells Joey when WW1 starts, the officer who buys him (who also seems to want to bone the horse) ends up dying in his first battle. Joey is then taken on by a young German soldier whose younger, underaged brother is also in the army. Stuff happens, they both get executed in the presence of Joey.

And then I fell asleep. It was like being swallowing an Ambien with side effects of annoyance and eye rolling.

1/10
 
Tony Rome

7.5/10

An enjoyable and reasonably successful attempt at updating the conventions of 1940s private eye films for the late 1960s. Frank Sinatra is the title character, a shamus who finds himself in the middle of a rather messy plot involving blackmail and jewelry theft. A solid supporting cast includes Jill St. John, Simon Oakland, Gena Rowlands, Sue Lyons and Richard Conte, with comedian Shecky Greene in a rare straight role and boxing great Rocky Graziano in a cameo.
 
Jurassic World

Judging it as a movie and taking into account things like plot, character development, acting, a storyline that remains consistent from scene to scene, etc - 2/10

Judging it as a frigging awesome spectacle of awesomeness that's the most awesome way to spend an awesome two hours this summer - 10/10. I was going to rank it 11, but then I just made 10 higher instead.

It's what the sequel to Jurassic Park should have been. It basically ignores the two pieces of dog turd that were the actual sequels and picks up in the future of the first movie and is amazing running-away-from-dinosaurs action. I heard one commentator say that if you chopped $100 million off the budget and called it Escape From Dinosaur Island, it would have fit in perfectly as a cheesy sci-fi channel weekend movie, but that extra budget worked and they made themselves an awesome spectacle.
 
RANSOM. A better effort from Mel Gibson. Also starring Renne Russo. A boy is kidnapped by a crooked cop's gang. Good acting from the leads resulted in a trim and taught thriller.
7/10

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Coherrence 2013 (1/10)

Science fiction film about multiple worlds coming into contact. People from a party meeting people from the same party but slightly different. The film has one huge problem. There´s no conflict. For some reason the people in the house find the people from the other dimension threatening for no reason. So they don´t bother to talk to one another. They just flee in terror. This is the case even though they know that they are the same people. If I would meet myself I would be totally chill about it because I know I´m a nice guy. And I think everybody would react the same. So these peoples reaction is just bizarre.

Another problem the film has is that everybody is super anxious about everything. It´s just not believable. Maybe one person could be like that. It would be fun for comic effect. But everybody at a party. Not believable. It becomes silly.

I find it truly baffling that it has gotten as good ratings as it has. I don´t get it. I think it is dumb. It´s a dumb film. I think the basic premiss is clever. But there it stops. They should have spent a little bit more time working on the characters IMHO. They forgot motivation. None of the characters has a reason to do the stuff they do in the film.
 
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