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

[TV and credit cards]

Gold 7/10

Adventure, greed, deceit, and a Matthew McConaughey that looks more like me than Matthew McConaughey. Intrigued now, aren't you?
Story stays strong throughout. Best if you're unfamiliar with the events the film is based on.

 

[Opoponax]

Daylight's End

Low budget, poorly acted, zombie flick. I watched for about 15 minutes, got a text from someone, and then continued texting while the suckage played in the background.

Poop smilie/10

 

[Ford]

Manchester By The Sea

Short review:


"Oh, so that's why Casey Affleck won an Academy Award."


8/10

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - 8/10

Hilarious and well done movie. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one. Some of the jokes were overdone, such as how the Taserface thing went on about two minutes too long, but most the lines hit and hit well. I especially liked Drax's deadpan humour and Yondu owned every scene he was in.

Worth seeing if you're up for a good laugh.

 

[KeepTalking]

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - 8.5/10

It's a great movie. If you are at all interested in fun action, sci-fi or superhero movies, or just enjoyed the first movie, you will not be disappointed. I am not sure if I liked the first movie, or this one better, which is not a bad problem to have with the second movie in a franchise at all. The first movie was about assembling the team, this one is more about exploring the individual characters. There are some big changes from the comics, specifically with Star-Lord's father now being Ego, but truth be told, it makes for a better story than I think they could have done with keeping King J'son as his father.

There are a ton of Easter eggs for longtime GoTG fans. What many people don't realize, even the comic readers who have only been exposed to the newer GoTG, is that Yondu is the only original member of the team who appeared in the first movie. All of the other original members, Starhawk, Martinex, and Charlie-27, make appearances as Ravagers in this movie, as well as many other old school GoTG team members. I quite enjoyed picking out those character cameos, though most of them come very late in the movie, and very quickly. I was only slightly disappointed that Taserface did not live up to his moniker in the movie. I was waiting for the line from the comics, "Why do you think they call me Taserface?", followed by energy beams blasting out from his eyes. Since all of these characters were ret-conned as Ravagers, however, it is expected that they shouldn't really have super powers.

Anyway, I am going to see it again tomorrow night. This will be the first time in decades that I have seen a movie multiple times while it was still in theaters, so I guess that says something about how well I liked it.

 

[Sarpedon]

I watched a good bad movie today, called "Alien Vs Ninja."

On my absolute movie scale: 4/10. On my good bad movie scale: 6/10

I enjoyed it a lot more than I did John Wick, despite it being, on paper, worse in every conceivable way. In execution, it had a number of saving graces, primarily that it didn't take itself seriously, unlike John Wick, which was presented as if it was MacBeth. The title says it all, an alien being crashlands in the mountains of Japan, nearby a ninja village. The being is a hilarious man in a rubber suit, with cgi bits that emerge from time to time when budget allows, and which forgets halfway through the film that it can tunnel through the earth. But it remembers it has wings, so its all good. The fight scenes were well choreographed, with the notable exception of the overly sexualized and utterly unappealing battle between the alien and the kunoichi. In such movies, there is inevitably at least one annoying character, and this one had a particularly annoying one, in the form of a cowardly and unskillful ninja who somehow manages to invent a submachine gun. It takes nearly 50 of the movie's 80 minute running time for him to be killed off, which is FAR TOO LONG. The highlight of the movie is when the alien reanimates dead ninjas to fight the still living ninjas, and the zombie ninjas curse at the living ones in english for no apparent reason (I'm guessing it is some kind of message, and it doesn't take much imagination to figure it out).

A good movie for a drunken night with some friends. But of course, bad in any rational sense. But hey, why does art need to be rational?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Star Wars - Rogue One : Umpf. Well, people said "It is much better than VII!", "This is what a Star Wars movie should be!" Well, it was better than VII, but I didn't enjoy it too much. This movie suffered from too much Fate Syndrome and the action sequences made no sense.

Show

For instance, the Rebel fleet arrives at Shield Planet. So what is their plan? Just fly ships into the shield area until they close the shield. Not blow up the shield thing. No, just you know... show up with a massive fleet, and then abandon a few X-Wings without any other support.

Cut screen:

The guy in the Empire battle cruiser of death says he needs to talk to someone else. Why the fuck do that?! FIRE SOME FUCKING MISSILES OR BLAZING LASERS OR SOMETHING! Don't just hand off the problem to superior.

Sorry mate, but blowing a Jedi ship fleet is above my pay grade.

And it gets better:

Shrimp 1: We've got the intel! Should we leave?
Shrimp 2: No, let's wait for that big ass moon thing to get here first.
Shrimp 1: But we lost dozens of good people to get this...
Shrimp 2: We're going all out on this one. Gonna make it more dramatic.
Shrimp 1: But we still have over half of our fleet.
Shrimp 2: People will remember our stand here one day.
Shrimp 1: But we can leave now!
Shrimp 2: Remember us!!!

Meanwhile

General: Okay Darth, we've blown up their entire fleet except that big ass ship.
Darth: Umm, why is that still around?
General: Thought you'd want to send a boarding party.
Darth: Why the fuck would I do that? The message got to their ship(s), we need to destroy them all!
General: But a boarding party would look pretty cool.
Darth: Hey look, what is that?
General: Looks like a smaller ship is moving away from the bigger ship.
Darth: Aren't you going to blow it up?
General: But we need to leave it open to A New Hope.
Darth: And this is how we are going to do it? By looking like complete fucking bipolar idiots? I mean, one minute we are shredding through the Rebels and the next minute we want to have a meaningless boarding party while the fucking blue prints from the Death Star get away!

So we end up with a Star Wars III sort of situation (when Anakin goes ***spoiler alert*** full puss and joins the Emperor) where you find out that there is magic is vaguely describing events, because when you try to actually film those events and you don't do it right, it sucks very badly!

It was real disappointing.

2 of 4

 

[Shadowy Man]

It was real disappointing.

Doesn't say much good about Ep VII when "real disappointing" is still better. Sigh... How's the saying go? "Fool me once shame on me. Fool me six times..."

 

[Rayschism]

I really enjoyed Episode VII.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

What people forget about this movie in their over the top complaints about it is that it is indeed an introductory movie to a new set of movies, and JJ Abrams did some research to keep to the formula out of respect for the fans.

he really didn't all that good of a job with his Star Trek films.

And personally I appreciate what he has done being a long term Star Wars fan.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I really enjoyed Episode VII.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

What people forget about this movie in their over the top complaints about it is that it is indeed an introductory movie to a new set of movies...

Let me guess, Jar Jar Binks is also your favorite character.

 

[Opoponax]

Sully

It's about the airline flight captained by Sully that landed in the Hudson.

Overall, it's a solid movie. The scenes covering the landing, what led up to it, and the rescue operation were pretty good. The thing missing from it though was any real suspense as to what was going to happen to Sully in the end with respect to the continuance of his career. It was a "duh" issue in real life and it's a "duh" issue in the movie. There's also some pretty lame antagonists in the form of NTSB investigators (or whatever their titles were). Their portrayal was almost cartoonish while Sully is the tower of all things good, pure, and bitchin'.

6/10.

 

[Rayschism]

I really enjoyed Episode VII.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

What people forget about this movie in their over the top complaints about it is that it is indeed an introductory movie to a new set of movies...

Let me guess, Jar Jar Binks is also your favorite character.

No, he is not. But he doesn't annoy me as bad as he annoys some.

 

[Opoponax]

Beyond The Gates

1980s theme music coupled with 1980s nostalgia VHS board games combined with horror = sure hit. No?

No!

This movie had the irritating quality of having just enough interesting moments to keep me watching, thinking "Okay, now it's finally on track" but then it just goes back to sucking. The cast is badly mismatched, and at times you can say the dialogue word for word before the actors speak their lines. And like many movies of this quality, it totally goes in the toilet at the end. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but I would have preferred not to see it.

3-4 out of 10.

Flight World War II

A modern passenger liner goes through a weather anomaly and ends up in 1940. A clever twist is that it's not exactly the same WWII that we know from history. The Germans have already invented the jet fighter and the Brits have surface to air missiles. Dunkirk wasn't a big rescue operation it was a slaughter. So cool, no?

No!

See, even though the Brits have air to air missiles, they haven't yet invented radar. As far as I know, it just doesn't work that way. The stupid, sappy, and inconsistent run thick in this one. I think it must be hard to make a decent movie. This one had some things going for it as a potentially solid B movie. But in the end, just like almost all of them, it can't help but shit its own pants so many times that the stench becomes unbearable.

3 or so/10

 

[Sarpedon]

Actually, air to air missiles were a thing before air to air radar guided missiles. One of the things that the germans developed to counter our bombers were the ME110 fighters armed with a battery of unguided missiles which they would fire to break up the bomber formations, making the bombers more vulnerable to other interceptors.

If they were guided missiles, it might be a problem, unless they were infared. Infrared detection existed at the time, but was mostly too cumbrous for battlefield use. (some late german tanks had it) The main obstacles to guided missiles in that period was twofold: lack of small computers to guide it, and the size of the necessary equipment. The Germans experimented with trained pigeons as guidance systems for their V1 missiles, but couldn't get it to work. The Japanese just used people.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I really enjoyed Episode VII.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

What people forget about this movie in their over the top complaints about it is that it is indeed an introductory movie to a new set of movies, and JJ Abrams did some research to keep to the formula out of respect for the fans.

he really didn't all that good of a job with his Star Trek films.

And personally I appreciate what he has done being a long term Star Wars fan.

Following the formula of Episode IV was only one of the many problems that beset Episode VII. And in many ways the least problematical.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I really enjoyed Episode VII.

I give it a 7 out of 10.

What people forget about this movie in their over the top complaints about it is that it is indeed an introductory movie to a new set of movies, and JJ Abrams did some research to keep to the formula out of respect for the fans.

he really didn't all that good of a job with his Star Trek films.

And personally I appreciate what he has done being a long term Star Wars fan.

Following the formula of Episode IV was only one of the many problems that beset Episode VII. And in many ways the least problematical.

"Following the formula of" is a kinder way of saying "Plagiarized the story of".

 

[DrZoidberg]

Following the formula of Episode IV was only one of the many problems that beset Episode VII. And in many ways the least problematical.

"Following the formula of" is a kinder way of saying "Plagiarized the story of".

And why is that a problem? Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. All pulp adventure books and films are extremely formulaic. That's what Lucas was trying to copy when he first created Star Wars. He tried to plagiarise Buck Rogers. True story. But he wanted to get rich, so he changed it ever so slightly to get to cash in on the IP. I'd argue plagiarism is at the heart and soul of Star Wars.

Where Star Wars is creative and shines in it's uniqueness is in it's set design, creature design and costumes. That's why the prequels suck. He didn't have enough talent on-board. Thought he knew the secret sauce. Nope.

I do have one request though. Next time, I hope they don't destroy another Death Star. I think they've milked this baby enough now. They need a new gimmick to blow up.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

"Following the formula of" is a kinder way of saying "Plagiarized the story of".

And why is that a problem? Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

Paying homage is one thing. Plagiarizing is another. And as Shadowy Man noted, that "issue" was one of its least problems.

Where Star Wars is creative and shines in it's uniqueness is in it's set design, creature design and costumes.

Yes... 30 to 40 years ago, it was unique. And the original trilogy, minus the Ewoks, will remain unique.

That's why the prequels suck. He didn't have enough talent on-board. Thought he knew the secret sauce. Nope.

Talent? No, it was the story telling and coming up with a viable set of circumstances that would turn Anakin. We never really got there.

I do have one request though. Next time, I hope they don't destroy another Death Star. I think they've milked this baby enough now. They need a new gimmick to blow up.

You think?!

 

[Ford]

I'm gonna use something I wrote elsewhere on this topic. Plagiarizing from myself is okay, right?

Allow me to use a musical analogy...

Star Wars is like a classic rock band that put out some really huge albums in the late 70s and early 80s. Very successful stuff. Then they vanished off the scene. No more albums, no more tours.

Then in 99, the band came back. Rumors were they'd been working on new stuff, and when that first new album hit the fans initially went wild. Then upon closer examination, it became clear that the lead singer (who also wrote the songs) had sort of lost it. The new albums sounded similar, but the lyrics were absurdly self-indulgent, the concepts were way off the reservation, and it was clear that giving the guy complete creative control was a huge mistake.

Then after those three albums, he quit the band. Sold the rights to the guitar player...who went out and found people who really loved the band's first three albums, and tried to recreate that magic.

When the new album dropped, the fans were like "wow, this sounds a lot like the first album...we love it!" And now you have a situation like Journey, where Arnel is going out on stage every night and singing the band's songs. Purists think "he's no Steve Perry," but the fact is that they're playing gigs and bringing the music to a new generation of fans.

I totally understand the purists, but the new band does sound pretty good.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This has nothing to do with purity, but consistency. VII was just crap. Nobody dies from anything. Becoming a Jedi master is a piece of cake, and flying the speed of light for the first time in a shuttle you've never been in... ever easier. But being able to place a piece of a star map into a larger map, apparently impossible. Oh, and another death star?!