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

Hesher 7/10

I found this film as I was scrolling through the channels while stoned. It hooked me with intro music by Metallica, and once it started I couldn't look away. Not surprising as it portrays the trainwreck of a life that a young boy (TJ) is going through after the loss of his mother, and who can resist watching a trainwreck? Anyway, it starts Joseph Gordon Levitt as the titular character, who is a homeless stoner/metalhead that befriends TJ and moves into his family garage uninvited. This throws the family (TJ, his father, and his grandmother) who are already dysfunctional, into further disarray. TJ, who is apparently a high schooler, though he appears younger, also befriends a local grocery clerk (Natalie Portman) who is having a bit of a life crisis of her own. The trio cause chaos together, mostly instigated by Hesher, and the film is equal parts depressing, disturbing, and funny. The plot often veers off into unexpected directions, but there are a few scenes that you definitely see coming. The dialogue and acting are top notch, and feel very realistic.

If you do watch the film, stick around for the end credits, which are hand drawn, and stylistically comparable to that of Metallica cover artist Pusshead. It was a nice touch, especially for a stoned metalhead.
 
The Magnificent Seven
5/10

Meh. Forgettable. Too rated PG13. Everyone looks pretty clean. Their costumes look very new.

The victims are no longer an ethnic group. The hero is a black guy for whom no one in the 19th century US ever says a slanderous word. A woman character runs around in a VERY low cut dress and is one of the leaders of the resistance and no red blooded man ever eyes her.

A very important part of the battle is left COMPLETELY to chance.

Too bad. It couldn't have been much better with such a cast.
 
Anyone got any world war 1 movie recommendations? I've seen Blue Max, Gallipoli, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
 
Sarpedon said:
Anyone got any world war 1 movie recommendations? I've seen Blue Max, Gallipoli, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
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The Red Baron (2008) was passable, but after having just read its historical inaccuracies, you may want to give it a pass.
 
Sarpedon said:
Anyone got any world war 1 movie recommendations? I've seen Blue Max, Gallipoli, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Paths of Glory. I haven't seen it in awhile, but I'll give it a 9/10.
 
Arrival 9/10

Unfortunately, I can't say very much about this movie without spoiling the [bad word] out of it. The central conceit of this science fiction story involves, uh, bad science which I can't discuss without spoiling stuff, but they use said bad science as an excuse to do really fun things with the narrative structure which I also can't discuss without spoiling things.

Lovely little small budget science fiction film full of big ideas. Even if the biggest idea was bad science, I still had a hell of a good time watching.
 
Finally saw Rogue One.

Loved it. Some of the new SFX are, I suspect, going to look very clunky in a few years, as cgi humans get better and better; however I suspect that that will help it to tie in to A New Hope (and I think they did an excellent job of setting that film up as the sequel - I can't wait until it comes out in 1977).

This film is a massive improvement on the clunky re-make of ep IV that was ep VII. Frankly, it's the first addition to the franchise since Return of the Jedi that I consider good enough to bear the Star Wars name.

But then, I find it hard to honestly criticise the original trilogy, as I was the age of their target audience when they were released, and was young enough to forgive them their many flaws.
 
Sarpedon said:
Anyone got any world war 1 movie recommendations? I've seen Blue Max, Gallipoli, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Lawrence of Arabia?
War horse (which was meh)?
Lighthorsemen (which was OK)?
 
Trolls 7.5/10. Made for kids, but surprisingly alot better than the trailers suggested.

Moana 10/10. Possibly manufactured magic, but magic nonetheless.

Sing 7.5/10. It's all been seen before, but good fun all the same.
 
Catch-22 (1/10)

I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and thought that it would be very hard to make a film of it. So I searched and yes, there has been made a film of it. I watched it. It turns out it was very hard to make a film of it. Terrible. It has no redeeming qualities. A total fail right across the board. Not so much as a smirk. To be fair, the main character, Yossarian, would require a master actor. He's basically Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Tower's but a young good looking man we're supposed to identify with. Not easy to pull off, which is wasn't.

Go and see MASH instead. Similar but better suited as a movie.
 
DrZoidberg said:
Catch-22 (1/10)

I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and thought that it would be very hard to make a film of it. So I searched and yes, there has been made a film of it. I watched it. It turns out it was very hard to make a film of it. Terrible. It has no redeeming qualities. A total fail right across the board. Not so much as a smirk. To be fair, the main character, Yossarian, would require a master actor. He's basically Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Tower's but a young good looking man we're supposed to identify with. Not easy to pull off, which is wasn't.

Go and see MASH instead. Similar but better suited as a movie.
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But it's a classic movie, so there is kind of an obligation to see it at least once and yet it's not worth seeing even once. That's some kind of an unsolvable conundrum.
 
Goonies 6/10

So this is a film that is near and dear to me since it was the film I saw on my first date. Sure, it is a good teenagers adventure film. And it has got good dialogue in it. But it makes no sense. This is for people who just turn off their brains. Because there's no logical progression. Things aren't connected. It's just an amalgam of cool scenes squished together. It really comes off as a film where they've sent around the script two 50 screen writers to ask them pitch their best idea, and they just added all of them, regardless if they work together.

I found this. A fan-fic author has attempted to piece together the One Eyed-Willy back story.

https://aahabershaw.com/2014/07/14/the-last-revenge-of-one-eyed-willie/

And that's the next criticism. The implausibility of basic story. This is a pretty light criticism since the absurdity of it is part of the fun. But it makes no effort to explain why a crew would create this booby trapped maze through the mountain and then just to kill themselves. The idea that they're trapped is also stupid. It's like 18'th century pirates didn't have access to gunpowder. If the Goonies could help them escape with one stick of dynamite, I'm pretty sure a pirate ship fully stocked with gunpowder and cannons would have no problems escaping. So obviously they wanted to stay. And they obviously could make it to the outside (or why else the booby traps). So why didn't they? And why did they put all that effort into making the booby trapped maze pretty? It's like they're advertising the way to the treasure.

Not to mention all that hemp rope doing fine after 300 years in a damp cave, so that all those primed traps could spring perfectly. Which they all did.

The idiot criminals, I give that a pass. It's a classic role. But why did they keep the freak brother alive and cared for him all those years (in chains) just so he could turn on them? They're obviously fine with cruelty and murder. So what was the deal with that? One possibility is that they were great to their retarded brother but due to his retardation the kids manage to make him turn on his family anyway.... which is just sad. Reminds me about watching Disney movies as an adult. The fact that they are preachy and that the moral values in them are awful sucks all the fun out of them. Clean and beautiful = good. Ugly = bad.

I loved this as a teenager. Probably my favourite film back then. So they clearly did something right. But as an adult there were too many things that bothered me with it. Shame.
 
DBT said:
Passengers - 8/10.

Quite good, if you are able to ignore the related physics.
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The one thing that I didn't like was the ending


How was there only one of those medical devices to deep freeze them for the rest of the trip? They'd gone on at length about how there were backups for every single system on the ship, but they not only just have a single medical bay for all the thousands of passengers, but don't have a backup for the superhealing bed if it gets broken or something? I get what they were going for by having them to choose to stay together even though it meant dying before reaching the planet, but it was silly how they went about that.

 
Tom Sawyer said:
DBT said:
Passengers - 8/10.

Quite good, if you are able to ignore the related physics.
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The one thing that I didn't like was the ending


How was there only one of those medical devices to deep freeze them for the rest of the trip? They'd gone on at length about how there were backups for every single system on the ship, but they not only just have a single medical bay for all the thousands of passengers, but don't have a backup for the superhealing bed if it gets broken or something? I get what they were going for by having them to choose to stay together even though it meant dying before reaching the planet, but it was silly how they went about that.

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For sure, that's one oddity. But I suppose for the sake of the story, even if it is a bit irritating.

The visuals like the interstellar space walks were spectacular, I thought.
 
Jupiter Ascending 4/10

The basic story and background is actually really clever. They could have done so much with it. But they didn't. Instead of a story of somebody thrust into power and having to deal with issues of finding themselves corrupted... nope... none of that. All the "good guys" is just mindlessly fighting to help the main character... for no reason. They have no reason to think that she will be any different than the rest of the royal family. That bothered me.

I'm aware the target audience is 14 year old girls. But that doesn't mean it has to be stupid. It was stupid
 
The Imitation Game, 6/10; Stars luvvie Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the WWII cryptographer responsible for cracking the Nazi Enigma Code. It's not particularly interesting or entertaining. I thought it was a rather pedestrian movie.

Catch Hell, 7/10; Stars Ryan Phillippe as an actor who is kidnapped by two psychos while filming on location in Louisiana. He is kept tied up in a remote building while his kidnappers trash his reputation using social media and also beat him. There are some really good tense scenes in this movie and it works pretty well. The reviews are horrible but I quite enjoyed this move, it's not great but I thought it a lot better than the reviews would have you believe.
 
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