Derivative, convoluted and wacky Korean CG-saturated sci-fi evoking the style/spirit of ca. 1990s Hong Kong action fantasies. Uneven, to say the least, not always easy to follow and way too long, but with lots o’ outlandish action hijinx, aliens, UFOs in the streets, random destruction, beamage, tentacles, visual nods to MI (suspended in midair), The Matrix (lean back), Avengers (dissolving dudes) and some I probably missed and so much more! All of it tainted by a heinous cliffhanger ending (two movies were apparently filmed simultaneously; IMDB has no release date yet on the sequel). Still, it exceeded my expectations, proving genuinely entertaining, if not actually good.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : Sword of Destiny
I saw this the day Netflix dropped it 7 years ago and was not impressed. I was wrong; this is actually a very good movie and while not as good as the original Crouching Tiger, it is a very impressive and solid sequel.
I think I was hoping for it to reach the heights of the first movie, but that was probably a bit too high a standard. Watched on its own, it is a good movie and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit.
To show how much I’d forgotten, I had genuinely forgotten that Michelle Yeoh reprised her role in this movie. Yeah, I’d forgotten almost the entire movie.
I remember at the time the whole alien thing did not go over well, and just a general feeling of “They brought back 66-year-old Harrison Ford for this?”
Also, people just don’t like Shia LaBeouf.
I only liked him in Constantine. But that movie was a pleasant surprise to me. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I liked it quite a lot.
Good news, they are making a sequel to that as well. But, no, LaBeouf is not expected to return. He did survive if you watch the post-credit scene.
I heard about the sequel. I hope it’s not disappointing.
I once got sucked into watching it on some cable channel, and it got to the end and they cut that scene!!! I love that scene.
“Tentacles” always raises a movie a star minimum in my experience.
Saw Enys Men last night. (Pronounced Ennis Mane.) It’s a British folk horror that takes place on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall in 1973. A woman lives alone on the rocky island and each day does the same routine of checking on some rare flowers that grow on a hill. The only other figure is a standing stone outside her front door. It’s very very slow in its pacing, but is very atmospheric and unsettling. It was shot in 16mm and all sound and dialogue re-recorded after, which gives it a strange disturbing quality. It’s not so much centered around plot as it is on playing with linear time and depicting a dreamlike sense of unease.
Excalibur (1981, directed by John Boorman). I’m surprised that the sole mention of this film upthread is just a reference to one of the actors rather than to the film itself.
I saw it a couple of times shortly after its release and thought it was interesting but flawed by its deliberately unusual approach. I enjoyed it much more the other day, probably because I was anticipating the weirdness. IMO, the film has a unique charm, and I don’t really care if certain parts or elements could be better. I like it fine just the way it is, which is probably nostalgia on my part, although I think the film deserves high praise in objective terms.
Part of the charm is the contrast of realistic and abstract, dramatic and absurd, direct and obscure, such that there’s a dreamlike quality in which logic and illogic are so intertwined that you have to abandon reasoning and just go along for the ride.
More subjectively, I couldn’t help thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) during many scenes. Because of that and the acting and production values of the time, I was expecting parody or farce at any moment, which I suppose created some tension that paired very nicely with the comic relief provided by Nicol Williamson’s Merlin.
I wonder if the Monty Python film had any bearing on the making of Excalibur: the crew trying not to laugh at certain points, deliberately filming scenes a certain way so they wouldn’t look too similar to the Python film, etc.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), In theaters. A fun adventure movie. Not a lot of character development, or much of anything deep, but completely entertaining. There were no points in the movie where the plot dragged, but it did not feel like we were being treated to action scene after action scene, or joke, to joke. To a certain extent very reminiscent of Indiana Jones, though it is in the fantasy genre.
This type of film is really dependent on how enjoyable you find the actors playing the roles to be, so if you don’t like the main players, this might not be for you. I felt it was worth the watch and I will likely watch it again when I am in the mood for something light.
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Saw the trailer for the NEXT Indy film the other day, for the first time. Looks like they have done that de-aging thing on Ford for at least parts of it. Hopefully just where he is sitting down or walking at the most. It did not work well in Captain Marvel for Sam Jackson if he was doing anything more strenuous. The face may be ‘young’, but the body gives it away.
I watched Indy 4 recently, for the first time since it was released and I enjoyed the first half, and wondered if I’d unfairly thought of it as the poor relation of the other 3. Then the second half happened. Not good, at all.
It looks like it’s only one scene, and they dug up a bunch of archival footage from Indy 1 to make it work. I don’t like deaging much either, but I do trust James Mangold to approach it sensibly.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) in Theaters. Another fun movie with a ton of easter-eggs. Some that I recognized, some, mostly in the soundtrack that I did not but was whispered to me by someone that did know as we watched the film. The plot is rather thin, but engaging enough and the voice acting is very good. The music and sound is really good in how it incorporates the original themes from the games in appropriate ways for the action occurring on screen.
Overall, it is a bit like an extended cut-scene from a video game, although with a lot better production values.
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All I really remember from this movie are the absurdities, like Gabriel Byrne’s character having sex in full armor at the beginning of the film.
Watched Hearts Beat Loud (2018) on Kanopy, the library streaming service. Nick Offerman stars as the owner of a record store (dying, of course) whose daughter is preparing to leave for college on the other coast. The wife/mother is dead.
The daughter is mature, the father not-so-much. Ted Danson and Toni Collette have supporting roles.
The movie has problems, but is also likable. I give it a B grade, but it’s something you can watch with your spouse, enjoying the good parts and ignoring the weak parts. The acting is good, but the script keeps the characters from coming alive. I was always thinking, ‘How’s Offerman going to handle this?’ Or ‘Hey, Danson put a good spin on that line.’
The film made me think of High Fidelity (record store setting) and That Thing You Do (the characters perform several songs), but was made on a lower budget and was not as good as either of those films.
BTW, Kanopy does not allow fast forwarding or rewinding, which can be frustrating.
All I really remember from this movie is that my roommate and I went to it drunk, and in the scene where Lancelot is riding in the back of a haywain and the girls are blushing and giggling, my roomie shouted, “they’re laughing at his tiny penis!”
Nobody laughed, but nobody asked us to leave either.
Well, yeah, there’s no way to take it seriously, which is something that has turned me off right quick plenty of times in plenty of films. This one’s different for me, probably because of nostalgia, as I said upthread.
In particular, full body armor didn’t look like that and wasn’t used until centuries later. Artistic license, etc.
What surprises me most about my reaction is that I’m very much against the concept of royalty, and this film stinks of it.
Yesterday, I came across this review. Pretty well done, and I was surprised to hear some of the same observations I posted upthread.
ETA: I read that the guy who created the armor worn throughout the film has a cameo as an armorer toward the beginning. Young Arthur is a squire who leaves his knight’s sword behind. Of course, he ends up pulling Excalibur out of the stone, but, before that happens, he notices an armorer’s wares and considers taking a sword, until the armorer sees him and gives him a look.
I think the weirdness of Excalibur properly captures the tone of Malory’s Morte de Arthur (had to read it in college). The stories are a tad surreal.
I used to think I loved the film but it turns out I really just love Wagner’s Siegfried Funeral. The combination of that music, and the scene of Percival returning the sword to the water, is visually and aurally stunning.
What about the scene in which he recovers the grail? Is that taken from one of the works that inspired the film? In particular, I’m wondering about the booming voice that asks him three questions, because I couldn’t help thinking about the bridge scene toward the end of the Python film.
Boorman’s version of the Grail Quest is completely his own with no connection to the medieval sources (Malory, Chretien de Troyes). For one thing he made it entirely secular: where the original would have visions of Jesus, he substitutes a vision of Arthur.