I find the repetitive and extended warfare scenes in the transformers films boring. It’s just a jumble of machines in various forms bashing each other.
Bumblebee has those scenes but it wasn’t as non stop compared to the other films.
I watched Beverly Hills Cop late last night. I hadn’t seen it for almost 20 years. I was surprised that it was better than I remembered.
I’ve been known to curse when angry. I don’t enjoy hearing it in movies unless it serves a purpose.
Eddie Murphy movies like 48 Hours, Trading Places etc. are crammed with casual and unneeded cursing. I can’t even watch the movies when kids are in my house.
Beverly Hills Cop has some of that. I prefer watching it on cable with it cleaned up.
Funny, it must be because you avoid cursing, but I don’t even really notice. What does bother me is watching bleeped or expurgated cursing. Annoying and stupid. Just slap an R rating on it and leave it alone.
This is family film, which may not be immediately obvious. It’s a Sam Jackson action movie, but very family-oriented.
Very cute, fun, and demonstrates a great use of budget. They had a limited budget and were able to make the most of it by creative filming and editing.
I would recommend this to anyone, but especially to families who need a fun, PG-13 action movie.
We watched “Everything Everywhere All at once” last weekend , we were enjoying it and made it about 1/2 way through, Checkovs Butt plug was unexpected and had a laugh out loud moment when the penny dropped . Then daughter called and it got late and we were tired so didn’t finish it, so we have to go back to that.
We watched Napoleon last night, I have no idea why they bothered making it. Great director and actors but a pointless mess of a movie.
We saw Dune in the theater. Summary: at least I still have the book.
It’s not a bad movie, but it’s not Dune. Story was fine. The pacing and beats captured the feel of the book. Acting was good, especially Zendaya and Javier Bardem. Effects were great, except for the flame from the Imperial Sphere—looks like the Reynolds number was wrong. The cinematography is absolutely beautiful.
The story changes were cohesive, but made the characters in the movie not the characters from the books. So we got a nice Dune-flavored movie, which while good is not as great as the book.
I’ll have to read the book again to cleanse my mind of the movie.
I saw Dune part two in the theater yesterday. It’s interesting the way they’ve changed it to be more politically correct. Seriously.
They’ve gone out of their way to play down the religious part – the “oracular vision” sort of thing – even though religion and religious fanaticism are a big part of the book. They worked to play down the Great White Savior aspect, too. And, while they couldn’t avoid the sexist implications of Paul being the Kumquat Haagendazs (being the only male who could drink the Water of Life and survive, having capabilities women couldn’t have), they soft-pedaled it.
The sandworm-riding scenes were much better than in the David Lynch or the SciFi versions. I liked the Harkonnen physical feature of baldness and weirdly-shaped heads better than having them all red-headed.
Villeneuve worked hard to tone down the more fantastic elements as much as he could – no grotesquely mutated Guild Steersmen, minimizing the effects of protective fields, and so on. His ornithopters look like the ones in John Schoernherr’s illustration, rather than the way they did in the previous versions. I knda miss the three-loved sandworm mouths – the sandworms actually look the way I’d pictured them when I first read the original book (I hadn’t seen the Analog illustrations at the time).
Having Baron Vladimir Harkonnen being eaten by ants rather than swallowed by a sandworm seems much more appropriate and believable.
Surrounded is a 2023 Western, streaming on Amazon Prime.
Really? They still make Westerns?
The place: Post-Civil War New Mexico. A Black woman, posing as a man, pretty handy with a firearm and holding a deed to a gold mine, buys a ride on a stagecoach which is soon attacked by a band of outlaws. The ringleader is captured, and she is given the unenviable task of guarding him while the others ride to bring the Sheriff. From then, it becomes a two-person drama of who can be trusted and who will survive.
Letitia Wright and Jamie Bell quite effectively play the leads with a solid cast in support. It becomes a little talky and slows down a mite as the two develop a wary relationship, but it soon picks up, leading to a fiery and rousing conclusion. Nice location shooting in New Mexico too.
Good to see the Western genre hasn’t yet ridden into the sunset, and at 1:41, Surrounded is well worth a watch, pardner.
We do not deserve Andrew Scott. His performance in this was heartbreakingly good. I thought he really captured the younger version of himself, especially in his joy at seeing his parents again.
I had an inkling of the twist but just a brief thought about it, I only realized I might be right just before it was revealed.
Yeah, they do, and it appears that these films have consistently been made since the early days of the movies. Take a look at each of the websites linked to in the website given below. There were more Westerns made in, say, the 1930s through the 1960s than are made today. Furthermore, the ones from that period are move (shall we say) traditional Westerns. That’s mostly because some of the political assumptions of the early period are now considered out of date. People now know that much of the worldviews of those older Westerns are things that are considered offensive. The current ones take account of current worldviews:
I stole that from National Lampoon’s Doon, which came out about the same time as the David Lynch movie. Doug Beekman wrote it. Despite some really good lines, overall it falls flat, and isn’t up to National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings. But worth a read, if you can find a copy.
I watched Iron Man 1 and 2 tonight. Amazon doesn’t offer a rental. I had to buy them at $21.99 each with tax. That’s the most a movie has cost me on Amazon Prime.
I liked the first movie better. There’s more character development. Both were good.
I’ll eventually watch The Avengers and Iron Man 3. Thats another $44. Maybe in April. It’s a big hit for almost 10 year old movies.
That’s enough of the MCU for me. I’m not spending a couple hundred to see them all.
Most movies on Prime are between 9.99 and 12.99. Some are free! I usually buy at that price instead of renting for 2.99 to 3.99.
Those MCU movies are keeping Mickey in gold covered pellets.
The plot hole in Iron Man is so over the Top. Stark is just a normal dude without the suit and vulnerable. But I’m willing to enjoy the ride and have fun. The movies are very entertaining.
Watched 1986’s After Hours, described in Wikipedia as “ in a grouping that revolves around a young working professional who is placed under threat, named the “yuppie nightmare cycle” Since I’ve seen them all over the years, I guess it fits, although I’m personally more inclined to view them from the environment of 80’s punk culture rather than indentify with the mainstream everyman fish-out-of-water at their centers.
After Hours could be seen as a comic twist on the Hero’s Journey that itself goes as far back as Homer’s Odyssey or Xenophon’s Anabasis, a twist that includes Candide and probably other stuff I forget now. But Martin Scorsese never had a real flair for flat-out comedy, and here his Kafkaesque aspirations come off as simply pretentious. But probably the most dated aspect of After Hours is the assumption that the main character is entitled to the trust and assistance of all the various women he’s only just met. Scorsese isn’t as overtly a jerk to the women characters in his movies (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore notwithstanding) compared to, say, Clint Eastwood. But it’s noticeable as a trend if you look for it.
The better example of the 80’s take on the Hero’s misadventure remains Repo Man. In that era, Transgressive fiction was coming to the forefront, which meshed well with punk. And, having been in both NYC and LA myself in the 80s, punk LA was the city that said fuck you louder and more sincerely than I ever heard it at NYC’s Danceteria or Mud Club. I guess if it had to be a movie set in NYC, Liquid Sky is a better time capsule than After Hours, even though its creators had no familiarity with the local scene, so they just made up neon geometric staging and makeup and used European techno for the soundtrack.
I don’t enjoy hearing it in movies unless it serves a purpose.