Movies you've seen recently (Part 1)

Aw Face/Off is a lot of fun! Yeah it’s a silly premise but it’s just such a cool looking film. I really loved it when I first saw it in 1997.

I think I missed the boat on it. I can see teen me liking it back then.

Nicolas Cage playing John Travolta playing Nicolas Cage, what’s not to like?

I know, I know. I shouldn’t be harsh on it. To be honest, it was kind of fun in a very goofy way.

Face/Off is one of 2 movies I can ever recall, that’s so aggressively stupid that it kind of makes me angry.

Well, Battlefield Earth is much stupider and worse, but it reaches the level of comedy, so it can’t be that one. Is the other one Independence Day? The Happening?

First Knight – “Arthurian” drama with Richard Gere and Sean Connery.

Yeah, we tried watching it last week, and I just got really bored with it and gave up halfway through. I remember liking it a lot a few decades ago!

I thought it was OK when I saw it recently and I’d never seen it. Not great, not bad.

My reaction to Midnight Run was similar. I didn’t dislike it. It was good in some scenes. It got too repetitive with De Niro getting his prisoner snatched away and then returned. @carrps mentioned getting bored. I was reaching that feeling too at the end. I wanted the story to wrap-up. It’s obvious what De Niro will do.

John Ashton’s character is completely opposite from his straight-laced, suit and tie, Beverly Hills Cop role. He’s Wile E. Coyote to De Niro’s Road Runner.

I watched it for the first time a few years ago and remember being disappointed in it. It had a reputation for being a bit of a minor classic but I thought it was just ‘ok’. A 6/10 film all day long.

Charlies Angels 2019

I was curious how it compared to the tv show. It was ok. There’s more comedy than I expected…

Challengers. Seeing a lot of talk about this movie. Decided to put in some time watching it. Should have made a different decision.

3 tennis players, 2 men and 1 woman have various stuff happen to them over a long period of time. Problem: The bulk of it is told in flashbacks. Very frequent flashbacks. Makes the story very disjointed. And you know right away the outcome of certain key events early on.

It was a slog, especially near the end where stuff got insanely dragged out for no good reason. You know when you’re watching something and you think “Only ten more minutes, I think I can last that long.” But here I kept thinking that over and over.

Plus there’s stupid cinematography and such.

Apparently the Big Buzz is the naughty stuff. There’s a little of it but nothing to really care about.

The three main actors are Zendaya (Coleman) who is decent enough, Josh O’Connor who can reasonably act but seems to channeling a young John Turturro, and then there’s
Mike Faist channeling a young Matt Damon who hasn’t learned how to act well yet.

This is a movie that needs to be unbuzzed.

Give it 1 flying piece of paper.


Re: Midnight Run. Yeah, I thought it was 2nd rate at best when it came out. I find Grodin a hard sell in most things but he was a good choice for The Heartbreak Kid.

Over the last week we watched all the Despicable Me and Minions movies in release order, ending with the one currently in theaters. It’s a fun series, with the charm of the Three Stooges, the silliness of Get Smart, and weirdness of the Addams Family. The most recent, Despicable Me 4 (2024), had some great superhero parody among its multiple subplots. Great movie and series for kids of all ages.

And I see they’ve announce a third Minions movie for 2027.

Fly Me to the Moon. It’s a rom-com; if you like the genre, you’ll like it. It’s light and fluffy and entertaining. It plays fast-and-loose with actual history; ie, I don’t recall NASA having any budget issues leading up to the launch of Apollo 11. Pretty sure they had all the money then wanted, until the plug got pulled after a few moon landings.

And they give Channing Tatum’s character some emotional “depth”, unnecessarily and which gives the tone an odd shift mid-way.

But recommended, anyway. And Scarlett Johansson is very easy on the eyes.

And for a space program geek, it’s great fun-- the mission launch sequences (Apollo 10 and 11) are genuinely thrilling; more so than even in films devoted to the topic, like Apollo 13.

“Bee Keeper” with Jason Statham and “My Spy: The Eternal City” with Dave Bautista and Chloe Coleman. Anna Faris is also in it, but it took me a while to even recognize her. I liked them both very much.

I saw The Beekeeper on a flight yesterday. I also played Road House but slept through much of it.

I watched Affairs of State on Amazon Prime. Do not waste your time.

I didn’t realise there was a sequel. I liked the first, will add this to my list.

We , along with my daughter and her boyfriend ( both early 20s) watched The Sixth Sense , neither of them had seen it or were aware of the twist.
I know there is a lot of dislike for the movie and many people saw through it straight away. I think it’s a pretty decent movie , and having seen it before didn’t think the clues were super obvious if you didn’t know there was a twist. they didn’t see the ending coming so all in all a not a bad couple of hours watching a movie.