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

Colonel Sanders said:
Ted 2

Low expectations always makes a movie better. I thought this was doomed to be turned off in half an hour, but I made it all the way through. It has some good laughs and earns points for being an R rated comedy that says "fuck" as much as it wants.

5/10
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I caught the Neeson scene by accident while flipping channels, which I believe means I watched the best part of the film and got to miss the rest of the likely needless plot.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
The only way this movie works is if the humans lose. Why is it that generally only horror films (and some westerns) can have the good guys lose?

This project was doomed from the get go. There was no proper way to follow up ID4.
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While I doubt they could have ever recaptured what they managed to pull off with the first one, they could have done a lot more than they did. The characters could have mattered. The aliens could have been marginally scary and imposing. They could have come up with a crazy plan to save the day that they didn't rip off from the Phantom Menace ... and the Avengers ... and probably three or four other things.

I agree that they were never going to make this movie great, but they could have put in more effort and made it good.
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ID4 barely held on, itself. It was an action blockbuster because of the special effects and generally decent though formulaic plot, god help you if you decide to watch the directors cut (You'll end up wanting the entire family of Quaid's character to die). The plot was just good enough, the acting just good enough, and the special effects carried it the rest of the way.

They were doomed with a sequel, because they already did the "we are going to be made extincted" route. So they have to bulk up the enemy, but then bulk up the humans enough to win, which you know is going to happen. If they really wanted to make it interesting, you let the aliens win and ID4 - Revolution is released and you just rip off the Terminator. Have Emily Blunt star in the third film and you have a 50/50 chance of turning crap into a decent film.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Colonel Sanders said:
Ted 2

Low expectations always makes a movie better. I thought this was doomed to be turned off in half an hour, but I made it all the way through. It has some good laughs and earns points for being an R rated comedy that says "fuck" as much as it wants.

5/10
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I caught the Neeson scene by accident while flipping channels, which I believe means I watched the best part of the film and got to miss the rest of the likely needless plot.
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There were several scenes like that which made the movie a pleasant surprise (cameos and clever random stuff).
 
Dreamland

This is a public service announcement--a warning, if you will. This movie is a sic-fi B flick about Area 51 and some other indecipherable nonsense with bad special effects and bad acting. But somehow, it has just enough suspense to keep you watching until you figure that there's only half an hour left, so you might as well see it through. Then for 20 minutes straight it hits you in the face with pies crammed full of stupid that it's been saving up for the past hour and 15 minutes or so.

It's on Hulu, so if you have Hulu, be sure to avoid it.

2/10
 
Ice Age 5: Collision Course - 4/10 Nice animation and a lot of scrat (!) But alas the writers have run out of ideas and it shows. I sat there thinking if the fat was trimmed away the movie would be 20 minutes long. The kids around us seemed to like it though.
 
Finding Dory - May take some nudges on this one. I remember when watching Finding Nemo, thinking that this movie was just one character (Dory) short of being kind of a snooze fest. Oddly enough, when surrounding the film around the funny character and not having her be the comic relief, seems to prove that suspicion correct. While the film had its typical heart warming aspect and the plot (and resolution) and voice acting was good, my problem with the film was it was much more repetitive drama (taking too much from the first film) than comedy. It really felt like this should have been 30 to 40 minutes long. The name of the film could have been How to Stretch Finding Dory as the complications just wouldn't stop landing on top of each other. Hank is the resolution to the boredom. In fact, the start of the film was more cutesy than interesting. Kind of like how Futurama started going more story driven than comedy driven in Season Four. Hank enters the story and all of a sudden there is a sense of humor in the film. Pixar's last film Inside Out had many levels of humor, Finding Dory took the teeth out of its funniest main character, and the result, a good heart warming story, but one that drags on.

The opening short wasn't much to talk about (again, it was cute, but only one or two bits of humor) other than what I thought were out of this world computer animation of the feathers. That looked incredible.

2.5 of 4
 
Ghostbusters 7/10

Not as good as the first movie, far better than the second movie.

They didn't do an exact duplication of the first movie, actually did a few things different, but kept the spirit and tone of the original alive, and the comedy was decent. I appreciate that they did a remake without trying to exactly duplicate every element of the original, but kept the spirit of the original. If we're going to have to suffer through a remake, isn't that what we want?

I do not understand what all the whining and crying was about, but then I never understand the tantrums of woman-haters.
 
Underseer said:
I do not understand what all the whining and crying was about, but then I never understand the tantrums of woman-haters.
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there's actually a kind of blog type thing you can read to get a window into the mind of these types of people, you have to look at it in aggregate to really grasp the full context.
if you read through this a bit you'll come to completely get why they're flipping out, it's like a running diary of irrational woman hating.

http://talkfreethought.org/search.php?searchid=437073
 
Robin Hood (1991 British film)

7.5/10

This is a fairly conventional Robin Hood film story wise, but in place of the big-budget opulence of the Errol Flynn classic, or of the Kevin Costner vehicle from the same year, this one has a realistic, even gritty feel much of the time. Patrick Bergin is a solid lead and a young Uma Thurman, as you might expect, is an adventurous, even at times militant Maid Marian.
 
Underseer said:
Ghostbusters 7/10

Not as good as the first movie, far better than the second movie.

They didn't do an exact duplication of the first movie, actually did a few things different, but kept the spirit and tone of the original alive, and the comedy was decent. I appreciate that they did a remake without trying to exactly duplicate every element of the original, but kept the spirit of the original. If we're going to have to suffer through a remake, isn't that what we want?

I do not understand what all the whining and crying was about, but then I never understand the tantrums of woman-haters.
Click to expand...

One non identity politics based complaint that I heard about the movie that seemed to possibly be a valid negative was that some people thought it did not play the ghostbusting straight - meaning that in the original no one looked at the camera like "yeah this ain't possible - but it makes a fun movie". Ghost busting was totally real and not questioned.

Did this remake/reboot/whatever do that as well? I could see Paul Feig wanted to tweak this premise since it matches his style. It might even be a good part of it. Too much reverence can also kill comedy.

I found the Robocop remake fairly good, but I loosened my critical nature to take it in as a moderately different movie than the original. If I didn't do that I would have said it sucked.
 
repoman said:
Underseer said:
Ghostbusters 7/10

Not as good as the first movie, far better than the second movie.

They didn't do an exact duplication of the first movie, actually did a few things different, but kept the spirit and tone of the original alive, and the comedy was decent. I appreciate that they did a remake without trying to exactly duplicate every element of the original, but kept the spirit of the original. If we're going to have to suffer through a remake, isn't that what we want?

I do not understand what all the whining and crying was about, but then I never understand the tantrums of woman-haters.
Click to expand...

One non identity politics based complaint that I heard about the movie that seemed to possibly be a valid negative was that some people thought it did not play the ghostbusting straight - meaning that in the original no one looked at the camera like "yeah this ain't possible - but it makes a fun movie". Ghost busting was totally real and not questioned.

Did this remake/reboot/whatever do that as well? I could see Paul Feig wanted to tweak this premise since it matches his style. It might even be a good part of it. Too much reverence can also kill comedy.

I found the Robocop remake fairly good, but I loosened my critical nature to take it in as a moderately different movie than the original. If I didn't do that I would have said it sucked.
Click to expand...

The main critique I would make is the lack of an equivalent to the Gozer subplot, which made fun of the convoluted backstory of some horror stories. The original villain did not give way to a greater villain, and the one villain just wasn't interesting enough to carry the whole film.
 
Underseer said:
repoman said:
One non identity politics based complaint that I heard about the movie that seemed to possibly be a valid negative was that some people thought it did not play the ghostbusting straight - meaning that in the original no one looked at the camera like "yeah this ain't possible - but it makes a fun movie". Ghost busting was totally real and not questioned.

Did this remake/reboot/whatever do that as well? I could see Paul Feig wanted to tweak this premise since it matches his style. It might even be a good part of it. Too much reverence can also kill comedy.

I found the Robocop remake fairly good, but I loosened my critical nature to take it in as a moderately different movie than the original. If I didn't do that I would have said it sucked.
Click to expand...

The main critique I would make is the lack of an equivalent to the Gozer subplot, which made fun of the convoluted backstory of some horror stories. The original villain did not give way to a greater villain, and the one villain just wasn't interesting enough to carry the whole film.
Click to expand...

The fun thing with the original Ghostbusters (and the sequel) is that all their babble about the supernatural is actually stuff that Akroyd believed in. Perhaps not all of it. But a lot of it. He's seriously into occultism. All that stuff sounds like jokes. It wasn't. They just changed the names around (slightly) and merged, or split, various gods. It's fun to trace the origin for each reference.

Some of the references are Lovecraft, and those Akroyd obviously didn't actually believe in.
 
Black Mass, 7/10: Stars Johnny Depp playing the lead role of James "Whitey" Bulger an organized crime kingpin in Boston. It's watchable because it is quite interesting and the acting was good. But it's not particularly dramatic or has much in the way of suspense but it is a story well told.
 
What We Do In The Shadows, 8/10.
A mockumentary about four vampires sharing a flat in New Zealand. Their lives, hunts, servant, and finally their attending a ball for the secret society of vampires and zombies and witches....

A dark comedy in that several people die, but some of them get back up again.
It has an interesting mood to it. It turns out that they wrote a script but then never showed it to most of the actors.
 
Star Trek: Beyond

I'm honestly not sure how to rate this. If you liked the previous two JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, you will also like this one. If not, then not.

If I watch the new generation of Star Trek movies and think of them as just another sci-fi action flick and/or Star Wars knock off, then I can enjoy them. However, if I think of them as Star Trek, then I get kinda mad. Star Trek should be full of big ideas that give you something to chew on after you leave the theater. When I walked out of this one, all I was thinking was "Wow, cool explosions! Boom! Kapow! Pew! Pew!"

Sigh.

Like I've said before, everything that makes J.J. Abrams perfect for Star Wars makes him wrong for Star Trek.

As one movie reviewer said, Star Wars is fast and dumb while Star Trek is slow and smart. He said this while defending Abrams' decision to turn Star Trek into fast and dumb. Grah. But still, I think that is a fair way to characterize the franchises.

Then
Star Trek: slow and smart
Star Wars: fast and dumb
Ghost in the Shell: fast and smart

Now
Star Trek: fast and dumb
Star Wars: fast and dumb
Ghost in the Shell: fast and dumb

That about sum it up?

PS -- what happened to the TABLE tag? That would have been ideal. Ah well. No biggie.
 
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Super 8
5/10

JJ Abrams's homage to Steven Spielberg movies. I watched this because I enjoyed Stranger Things quite a lot, and some reviews indicated that I might like Super 8 also. They were wrong. While Super 8 certainly tries to be like a modern day E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it doesn't capture the nostalgia nearly as well as Stranger Things (there wasn't that much lens flare in 1980s if I recall) and both the plot and the characters are predictable and boring, in particular the main character is way too heroic and resourceful for being a kid.

There is one delight in the movie though: during the end credits, they show the entirety of the Zombie movie that the kids are making. That was a far better cinematic experience that the rest of Super 8 in its entirety.
 
Predestination

6.5/10

A time travel paradox film starring Ethan Hawke as a "temporal agent" sent back to an alternative universe 1970s New York to stop a mad bomber about to devastate the city. For some reason, his "cover" is that he's a barkeep in a seedy part of town. One night he meets The Unwed Mother, an androgynous man who writes advice columns for trashy magazines. He (she?) offers to tell him a story. Is this the bomber he's been looking for? Is this the criminal he's supposed to stop?

It takes awhile to get going. Most of the first act is just them talking in the bar, with flashbacks filling in The Unwed Mother's story. We learn next to nothing about the barkeep. Then it does a solid job of peeling back the layers and revealing the...um...well I can't say anything else without spoiling the film.

I'm going to watch it again, because it deserves that. The only reason I didn't rank it higher is because it really is a stretch to make a story like this into a feature length film. It would have been better as an hour long episode of an anthology series.
 
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