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

TSwizzle said:
Sling Blade, 5/10; Stars Billy Bob Thornton as a newly released mentally handicapped (retard) who befriends a family in a small town in Arkansas. The movie has some interesting and familiar themes and is well acted but it is very slow. It's an artsy independent movie that became big with the Hollywood luvvies for some reason but it's a mediocre move at best.
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I haven't seen it since it initially came out, and I remember it being a pretty powerful movie. The relationship between the boy and Thornton's character was especially touching. Maybe it didn't hold well because it was a product of its time?
 
Adam Sandler is playing a different character for a change, which makes this surprisingly watchable. It won't knock your socks off, but it is good.
 
TSwizzle said:
Sling Blade, 5/10; Stars Billy Bob Thornton as a newly released mentally handicapped (retard) who befriends a family in a small town in Arkansas. The movie has some interesting and familiar themes and is well acted but it is very slow. It's an artsy independent movie that became big with the Hollywood luvvies for some reason but it's a mediocre move at best.
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It wasn't just "Hollywood luvvies", but every demographic of the public who saw it that liked it. It has an 8.0 on IMDB for each age group and gender, with the lowest ratings of 7.5 among teenage boys. It is a realistic slice-of-life focus on interesting characters that are neither decidedly good nor evil, but is low in explosions and absurdly contrived implausible plot twists. I guess that makes it "artsy".

It is meditatively "slow", but that is integral to the perspective of the "slow" protagonist, and the small town rural setting.

All the acting is great, especially John Ritter, whose character is more complex than you'd see in most movies where the gay guy in a small southern town would be a one-dimension lovable hero/victim without his own flaws (Vaughn is good guy who cares for the mother and son, but also somewhat of a self-absorbed, holier-than-thou martyr).
 
mother!
2/10

Mostly scenes of very irritating people being irritable. Unpleasant to watch, and more so when you figure out it's an allegory and of what.
 
Sphere Sci Fi. Thriller.

A team of scientists descend into the ocean to explore an ancient spacecraft.

The then delicious Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson star in this over long movie.

Quite rare to see Jackson in such a mediocre movie. But I enjoyed it, and it's premise of making contact with an alien civilasation.
5/10
 
angelo said:
Sphere Sci Fi. Thriller.

A team of scientists descend into the ocean to explore an ancient spacecraft.

The then delicious Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson star in this over long movie.

Quite rare to see Jackson in such a mediocre movie. But I enjoyed it, and it's premise of making contact with an alien civilasation.
5/10
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i know this is a bit of a trope at this point, but the book is *so much better*
after jurassic park they made a bunch of low-rent michael crichton adaptations and all of them suck, and sphere was a major victim of this trend.
everything poignant about the characters and plot got cut out from the movie, it's a travesty... sphere is always in my top 5 worst adaptations list.
 
Ox Bow Incident - It is a movie about mob ‘justice’. Spoiler alert, there is mob justice.

3 of 4
 
A Star is Born 9/10

What a great film! Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are outstanding as romantic partners, great chemistry between the two of them. I was very pleased that the story did not go in directions I expected, it avoided tropes that would have annoyed me (and that I was totally expecting at any moment). Very deserving of the Best Picture Oscar nomination, I hope it wins.
 
prideandfall said:
angelo said:
Sphere Sci Fi. Thriller.

A team of scientists descend into the ocean to explore an ancient spacecraft.

The then delicious Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson star in this over long movie.

Quite rare to see Jackson in such a mediocre movie. But I enjoyed it, and it's premise of making contact with an alien civilasation.
5/10
Click to expand...
i know this is a bit of a trope at this point, but the book is *so much better*
after jurassic park they made a bunch of low-rent michael crichton adaptations and all of them suck, and sphere was a major victim of this trend.
everything poignant about the characters and plot got cut out from the movie, it's a travesty... sphere is always in my top 5 worst adaptations list.
Click to expand...

Had Sharon Stone not been in it, I would have rated it a 3/10
 
Goodchild said:
A Star is Born 9/10

What a great film! Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are outstanding as romantic partners, great chemistry between the two of them. I was very pleased that the story did not go in directions I expected, it avoided tropes that would have annoyed me (and that I was totally expecting at any moment). Very deserving of the Best Picture Oscar nomination, I hope it wins.
Click to expand...

The original of this blockbuster was nowhere near as widely applauded as the 2018 version. 4/10 for the original. But then again, I never thought much of Barbara Streisand or the acting abilities of Kris Kristofferson.
 
prideandfall said:
angelo said:
Sphere Sci Fi. Thriller.

A team of scientists descend into the ocean to explore an ancient spacecraft.

The then delicious Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson star in this over long movie.

Quite rare to see Jackson in such a mediocre movie. But I enjoyed it, and it's premise of making contact with an alien civilasation.
5/10
Click to expand...
i know this is a bit of a trope at this point, but the book is *so much better*
after jurassic park they made a bunch of low-rent michael crichton adaptations and all of them suck, and sphere was a major victim of this trend.
everything poignant about the characters and plot got cut out from the movie, it's a travesty... sphere is always in my top 5 worst adaptations list.
Click to expand...

I was very much into diving at the time I read that book. The fact is that Crichton got the diving physics all wrong, which made the book unreadable to me. It wasn't just a matter of a little thing here or there, it was like he went out of his way to write it incorrectly. He would've been better off just never mentioning that stuff at all because it so ruined the book. Yeah, it sounds a little nerdy, but the fact that he bothered with diving physics but didn't bother to get them right seemed lazy. I felt ripped off.

Clive Cussler on the other hand, that guy writes terrible books that are also somehow page turners. He doesn't give AF about the sciencey stuff he writes about and he doesn't pretend to either. So I find his trash much less offensive than Crichton's.
 
angelo said:
Goodchild said:
A Star is Born 9/10

What a great film! Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are outstanding as romantic partners, great chemistry between the two of them. I was very pleased that the story did not go in directions I expected, it avoided tropes that would have annoyed me (and that I was totally expecting at any moment). Very deserving of the Best Picture Oscar nomination, I hope it wins.
Click to expand...

The original of this blockbuster was nowhere near as widely applauded as the 2018 version. 4/10 for the original. But then again, I never thought much of Barbara Streisand or the acting abilities of Kris Kristofferson.
Click to expand...

Streisand/Kristofferson was version 3. The original was made in 1937, v.2 in the 50’s. V.3 is considered the worst of the four.
 
hurtinbuckaroo said:
angelo said:
Goodchild said:
A Star is Born 9/10

What a great film! Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are outstanding as romantic partners, great chemistry between the two of them. I was very pleased that the story did not go in directions I expected, it avoided tropes that would have annoyed me (and that I was totally expecting at any moment). Very deserving of the Best Picture Oscar nomination, I hope it wins.
Click to expand...

The original of this blockbuster was nowhere near as widely applauded as the 2018 version. 4/10 for the original. But then again, I never thought much of Barbara Streisand or the acting abilities of Kris Kristofferson.
Click to expand...

Streisand/Kristofferson was version 3. The original was made in 1937, v.2 in the 50’s. V.3 is considered the worst of the four.
Click to expand...

My apologies. V3 is what I meant. Actually, Iv'e overrated it at 4/10. It's more like 2.5/10
 
Not a movie but an original Netflix animated series..........Family. I watched three 30 minute episodes last night and enjoyed them.

 
True Stories 8/10

My wife couldn’t believe that as long as I’ve lived in Texas I still hadn’t seen David Byrne’s True Stories (1986), so she bought me the deluxe DVD and we watched it last night.

It’s a quirky, whimsical satire set in the fictional town of Virgil, Texas, but actually filmed in Dallas and adjacent counties and nearby small towns. Byrne stars (he is of course the founder of Talking Heads). It co-stars John Goodman and has many lesser-known (or completely unknown) actors, including locals. The plot revolves around characters lifted from the “true stories” tabloid press (“the woman who never gets out of bed,” that sort of thing) and other quirky characters invented by Byrne. It creates a surreal snapshot of twentieth century America, but it’s not necessarily an unfriendly vision. Byrne, as a sort of visiting anthropologist, manages to stay good natured.

Some aspects of the movie haven’t aged well. The high tech industry that dominates Virgil seems positively medieval today. Another very mild irritation is that the two minute narrative that outlines the history of Texas at the opening is completely botched. I suppose it works as a sort of overview of how settlements arose in the West.

Perhaps I gave it an 8 out of 10 because I’m prejudiced (I recognized many of the places, and knew several of the actors, or at least knew who they were), but I really enjoyed the quirkiness. Also the soundtrack, largely by the Talking Heads, was very enjoyable. DVD came with a separate soundtrack CD. Running time: 90 minutes.

[youtube]mhRgCsQf3CU[/youtube]
 
Bohemian Rhapsody

It was okay. I understand that artistic license is often a necessary thing, but there were so many things in this movie that were wrong for no good reason. For example, the timeline of when albums came out, the phony breakup of the band, when Mercury knew that he'd been infected with the AIDS virus, etc. It really worked towards ruining the movie.

Also, while I'm sure Mercury was at times a preening queen, he wasn't that way all the time. I've seen him in interviews and he was a really articulate, down to earth, and well spoken guy for the most part. The contrast between his offstage personality and his onstage persona is one of the most intriguing things about him.

And the dialogue. So much of it is hokey and cliche, and there were multiple times where I thought that they wrote some lines and filmed them in such a way specifically because they thought it would look good in the trailer, not because they got done editing the film and then picked out some things they believed exemplified it. IOW, it felt really contrived.

But in spite of some piss poor decisions and bad filmmaking, I was entertained throughout.

Is the thing Oscar worthy though? Not by a long shot. And I don't know what that says about this year's crop of Oscar movies.

6/10
 
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