Expend4bles (2023). There really is not much to recommend this movie. The appeal of these movies is the ensemble cast, but this one ended up being mostly action scenes for Jason Statham, with a few group scenes. The fun parts of the previous films where mostly removed and the fight scenes suffer from the super cuts that make you wonder if anyone actually did anything. I generally like mindless action flicks, but this one barely entertained.
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For a time it looked as if the first major feature-length fully computer animated cartoon was going to be something called The Works, which was in long production from 1979 to 1986. From what I’ve seen of it, it would not have been anything like as good as Toy Story. The short films put out by John Lasseter and his bunch that eventually became PIXAR easily outclassed this stuff. A lot of people working ion “The Works” evidently ended up at Pixar
I’m going to have to look that one up. Robert Sheckley was one of my first favorite SF authors (mainly because his stuff was so easily available), but the man was horribly abused by the film industry. They either ripped him off without attribution (I still believe that the bulk of the movie Total Recall was lifted wholesale from his novel The Status Civilization) or else they did abysmal adaptations of his work (“Freejack”, which has almost nothing to do with Sheckley’s “Immotality Inc.”, or the travesty they made of “Killbird” on “Masters of Science Fiction”)
Here’s a preview of The Works. It doesn’t seem to have any footage of the Giant Mechanical Ant, though.
FYI, it (Robots) is available on Hulu for free or on AppleTV+ for four dollars.
I remember seeing stills from The Works in a magazine- maybe Omni or Discover- as a kid and eagerly awaiting its release for years.
Life before the internet.
There were pictures from the film published in Cinefantastique while it was in process. You might have seen them there.
Ticket to Paradise (2022, Prime) The blurb: George Clooney and Julia Roberts team up as exes who find themselves on a shared mission: to stop their lovestruck daughter from making the same mistake they once made.
A rom com with Julia Roberts and George Clooney, you knew what you were signing up for and yet it was still pretty rough. The adults are despicable, the young love struck kids are cookie-cutter when they are on screen and everything else is just a series of predictable pratfalls. ON Rotten Tomatoes the critics gave this 57% and the audience gave it 87%. While I usually side with the audience over stuffy critics they are correct on this film.
C-, avoid unless desperate for a fairly unfunny rom com rehash and/or happen to be big fans of the two leads. They say the words, ‘Bali’ a few times, and that is the closest this film gets to that island in any respect.
I was surfing through MAX yesterday and discovered that there is a Venture Bros. movie! How did I not know about this???
I had a few small nitpicks (not enough of the Venture family together), but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it serves as a very satisfying series finale.
Then we put on The Suicide Squad (Not to be confused with Suicide Squad - Who decided it was a good idea to give a sequel the same title as the original except with “The” at the beginning? That won’t be confusing at all! But I digress.)
My God, a lot of people die in this movie, including many innocent bystanders. This might just have the highest body count of any film I’ve ever seen. That was slightly disturbing, but it was mostly balanced by the very stylized nature of much of the violence - including a fantastic scene with Harley Quinn escaping her captors. There’s still plenty of very graphic stuff though, so if that bothers you, beware.
Overall, however, it was quite well-made, nicely paced, exciting, and very imaginative. Lots of tropes and cliches get subverted, which is fun. And there’s an underlying theme about the nature of good and evil, which actually makes for some serious food for thought. I think it’s a better film than the first one (which you don’t need to have seen first). Recommended.
Oppenheimer
Meh.
That’s it. 3 hours and a “meh” was the result. I like Nolan and his movies are, by and large, fascinating, but this one?
Meh.
(Replying to this post since it’s about the same movie.)
We watched Elemental on Disney Plus this weekend. The art was imaginative. The story was touching. I highly recommend it.
The director and co-writer, Peter Sohn, also directed and co-wrote The Good Dinosaur and it shows. Both movies fall into a weird genre that’s difficult to market, being character-focused dramas, but animated. They both have some humor and some action, of course, but it’s incidental. TGD was an American Western of a boy and his dog. E is a Korean melodrama of family dynamics. In both movies, the animation is a format choice, not its genre.
My wife and I just watched Robots last night.
Obviously it’s not going to push the envelope in the “robots that look like humans” genrecompared to the Blade Runner, Terminator, or Westworld franchises (or the two douchebags find love romcom genre) . But it was a mildly amusing and cute date film
Yes, and who gets to point that out? Tour Guide Barbie!
I’ve seen 51 movies released in 2023 and Oppenheimer won’t make my top 10. Nice, but I was closer to “meh” than “amazing” on this one.
The Lost King (saw it on a plane, but it’s also available on many streaming platforms). Sally Hawkins (“The Shape of Water”) as an everyday nobody who becomes obsessed with finding the earthly remains of king Richard III. Based on the true story, although I imagine many liberties were taken.
Quirky, whimsical, heart-warming. Recommended.
Rebecca (1940). Continuing my Hitchcock festival with an early one. What a fantastic, atmospheric psychological thriller! I’d rate this gem as one of Hitchcock’s best films. It was also his first American project, though set in England, oddly enough. Brilliant performances by Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and, really, excellent performances by the entire cast. And the title character never appears in the film!
Rear Window (1954). An excellent follow-on to Dial ""M for Murder because it was released the same year, and also stars Grace Kelly. I must admit that despite it being regarded as one of Hitchcock’s best, and some suspenseful moments near the end, I didn’t enjoy it as much as Dial “M” or Rebecca. Possibly because practically all of it involved views of other apartments out of the rear window of the protagonist’s apartment opposite. Some slow moments along with seemingly irrelevant plot points. Still pretty good, though.
Apparently the apartment building that the whole movie centers around was the largest set ever built on the Paramount lot. Another bit of trivia is that the film negative had considerably faded by the 1960s. Nearly all of the yellow image dyes had faded. Restoration experts worked a miracle on restoring it to pretty much its original quality. It’s not clear whether they restored the physical negative or whether the restoration was digital. All I can say is that the high-def version I watched had beautiful, vivid natural colours, so whatever they did, they did a great job. It looked more like modern colour cinematography than most older films.
Good movie, book is even better and darker. I find it kind of amusing that Hitchcock disowned this movie due to studio interference, but it is really one of his best movies. I think Psycho is definitely better than this, but I’m not sure he made a movie other than Psycho that is better than Rebecca. I have not seen every single movie of his, but Rebecca is a great movie and a great adaptation of the book.
They released a new Rebecca a couple years ago. It was…meh.
I believe he directed a version of Jamaica Inn from the same author, but I’ve never found a quality copy easily available and never have seen it.
Yes, I forgot to mention that Rebecca was based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier.
The remake was done in 2020 and has a fairly low rating, and features relative unknowns. You can’t beat Hitchcock directing the great Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, who went on to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
The Expendables 4
Not recommended.
The first two Expendables movies are fun, but the third and fourth one are disappointments. I thought they could get it back together with this one, which returns the R-rated violence, but it feels like a generic action movie. Jason Statham is the only one really trying here.
This may be the most recent movie to show a man looking through a newspaper in the classified section to find a job, by the way. What job does he find in the newspaper? You know, head of security of a big social media influencer. Yeah, you know how those folks post jobs in the classified section in 2023.
Hardly an atrocious movie, but extremely forgettable and generic. They used to try to put together a big all-star cast for these. Get this, Stallone is only in 20-25 minutes of this one. Yeah, even the creator of the series didn’t want to appear throughout the entire movie. It’s basically a lower tier Statham movie.
Skip it unless you can get a free stream and need something. It is, mercifully, 90 minutes long.
Not as bad as Cocaine Bear or El Conde, but in the lower portion of 2023 movies.
As was The Birds.