Jumanji 2 ……tried to be the same plot as Jumanji except it was a video game kids facing their fears and standing up for them selves and dealing with regret
even had the kid stuck in the world bit …… but it was about as a deep as the 1989 Nintendo game save the world plot they played through …. and there was a lot of swearing and hs jokes
the humor comes through with the premise the avatars of the game (who are basically game stereotypes ) are complete opposites of the person controlling them (basically hs movie sterotypes ) ….the shy smart geek is controlling the rock… the hot girl is a smart male professor… (jack black) and seeing the rock act like a high school geek that’s scared of squirrels and jack black acting like a "mean girls " type
When they do find the kid that’s been in the game for 20 years its so tacked on that it doesn’t add much to the movie
So its a somewhat funny comedy but a bad Jumanji movie …….
First Reformed. I’m not sure what to make of it. It was powerful and intense…and then the final 5 minutes of denouement was so surreal, I wonder if it actually happened or was some fantasy of the protagonist’s. Elendil’s Heir – what did you think?
I just don’t know, and I don’t think the director meant us to know. It just got seriously weird at the end, and then weirder still, and left me scratching my head.
It’s been a little while since I last dipped my toes into the Duplass brothers waters, so here I go:
Paddleton (Netflix). Mark Duplass and Ray Romano are misfit-type friends and neighbors. Mark gets the Big-C diagnosis and stuff happens.
Despite that basic topic, it is surprisingly funny for much of it. Quite a few nice touches.
I often wonder how much better something would be if someone more suitable than Ray Romano was cast in it. (It happens a lot.) But for this one he almost passes muster.
It’s basically a two person movie. I saw a page on this that had Alexandra Billings among the cast pics. I think she’s a pretty interesting actress. Turns out, she was in it for all of 15 seconds. Ouch.
The third most significant role was Dendrie Taylor as a motel keeper. Did a great job.
Filmed in Santa Barbara county and has a road trip segment. So almost Sideways-like.
One stupid thing: Some times Duplass is wearing a hangman-game t-shirt with the following two lines: _ _ T _ Y / _ _ R _. It is mentioned that this has “no solution”. But clearly it does. Lots. My pick: Gutsy MarkAn almost but not quite (?) thing: there’s a seeming reference to Duplass’s fetish from the last season of Goliath.
Hanna
An ex-CIA agent raises his daughter in the Finnish wilderness and teaches her to be an assassin to eventually find and kill the murderer of his ex-wife. Zany hijinks ensue. Good to look at, with an interesting fairy-tale subtext and some great chase scenes, but just didn’t do much for me.
They Shall Not Grow Old
Peter Jackson’s first documentary, a remarkable tribute to the common British soldier in World War I on the muddy, desolate battlefields of France. Jackson has done remarkable work in colorizing, digitizing and adding voices and sound effects to contemporary wartime footage. The short making-of documentary that followed the final credits in the version I saw was also very interesting.
The Silence of the Lambs
Still a creepy, taut, well-crafted and macabre thriller, with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster both excellent as an imprisoned cannibalistic serial killer and the FBI trainee who tries to learn from him without losing her soul. Highly recommended.
Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future
A new documentary about the great science fiction illustrator. I knew about his many book and magazine covers, and his pre-Mercury work with NASA, but hadn’t realized that he also did matte-painting work on Citizen Kane, and architectural illustrations for the firms which designed the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building. A very talented guy, and I learned a lot.
The Florida Project
A small-scale film about a homeless young mom and her spunky little daughter staying, for the moment, in a motel near Disney World. It was a good character study, and Willem Dafoe was understated and very good as the motel manager, but the mom’s many bad decisions and self-destructive behavior were just painful to watch.
I finally saw La La Land last night, and was underwhelmed. All I knew going in was that it was a well-received musical, so I was expecting something prettier and more cheerful.
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling were both very attractive, but I didn’t like their characters. He doesn’t pay his bills? She walks out on a date because she’s tired of her boyfriend?
The movie did gain some points right at the end. I’m wasn’t bored, and I’m glad I saw it, but I wouldn’t sit through it again.
ETA: I did like the scenes at Griffin Observatory, because it’s somewhere I’ve been.
I rented The Wife and Can You Ever Forgive Me? the last two evenings. McCarthy deserved the Oscar nomination; Close did not. In fact, I thought “The Wife” was just a crappy movie and a bit of a poor variation on Virginia Woolf.
Silence of the Lambs holds up really well, watched it a couple weeks ago for the third time and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I also watched Our Idiot Brother last night because I noticed that several people from Parks and Recreation were in it. About halfway through I realized I had already seen it, but it’s still a great comedy with a great cast.
I couldn’t sleep the other night and I ended up watching Footloose. Not the piece of shit remake - the piece of shit original.
Wow, I forgot how bad it is. It’s basically MST3K quality at this point. The dance scene in the warehouse was shot as if the director said, “let’s come up with something that people will make fun of for decades!”. A near-middle-aged Kevin Bacon hams it up (no pun intended) like he knew he would star in *Quicksilver *someday. The plotholes and ridiculous coincidences scream out in every scene, like how when Wren drives the gang across the state line to go dancing and they act like he’s brought them to Oz. They all own pick-up trucks but they’ve driven five miles to the state line? And the final scene sent chills down my spine as I realized it was every high school popular-kid fantasy I had when I was sixteen - everybody loves me and wants to watch me dance because I’m so darn cool, I have the prettiest date in the world and I beat up the bully in front of the whole school. Hey kids, let’s have a dance!
I say it is an excellant summary with of hypocrisy which is going to help a great deal(I mean the summary, of course). The satire is so talented that it’s almost rare.
BTW I picked it up from a random youtube video that shows some filmmakers, actors, writers’ favourite movie of all time. I made a list out of them, eliminated the ones I have seen or not interested, and ranked them from most like to least. It was a little struggling to make the list because I just have no idea how much exactly I like a thing, let alone making a high-to-low list, but I also can’t stand what I madly love and what I like a little just laying next too each like chaos. So I force myself to rank them.
Here it is,
1.
Angela Robinson_All that Jazz 1979
2.
George Clooney_Network 1976
3.
Emma Thompson_Blade Runner 1982
4.
Duncan Kenworthy, Ian McEwan_Some like it hot 1959
5.
Craig Gillespie_Shining 1980
6.
Emma Thompson_Young Frankenstein 1974
7.
Greg Barker, Ben Rhodes_Casablanca 1942
8.
Bella Heathcote_The Red Shoes 1948
9.
Bella Heathcote_The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964
10.
Allison Janney_All about Eve 1950
11.
Michael Mitnick_Back to the future 1975
12.
Paul Scheer_Ghostbusters 1984
13.
Bel Powley_Stand by me 1986
14.
Bella Heathcote_The Assassination of Jesse James 2007
Furie - A lot of fun, with no real slow sections. A gang kidnaps the wrong kid from the wrong single mom. A Vietnamese feature reminiscent of The Raid: Redemption in its fight scenes and Oldboy in its hammer scenes (yes, there are hammer scenes). Unless you have a large Southeast Asian community in your locale, don’t expect to see this one on the big screen.
Its been a slow start to the year. Most of the memorable movies I saw in Jan-Feb were from 2018. I’m hoping things pick up with Captain Marvel.
I also saw them both recently (The Wife just yesterday). Agreed definitely on McCarthy. I liked The Wife slightly more than you and more than i thought I would…Glenn Close actually doesn’t act at all for the first 90 minutes – just a tight-lipped pained expression. But when she finally breaks, she chews up the scenery and gets the Oscar nod.
I saw Apollo 11 in Imax yesterday. I’d never seen an Imax film – it was quite the experience. The launch sequence was overpowering, in a good way. The film as a whole was excellent, although it’s 90 minutes of white guys in short-sleeved shirts saying “go for launch” over and over.
Billed as one of the first blockbuster sci-fi movies made in China, story by the writer of The Three-Body Problem.
Non spoiler version: Garbage. Story sucks, science worse, visuals are good though. I disliked it for some of the same reasons I disliked Interstellar so maybe if you liked that, you’ll like this. But not for me.
Spoiler version:
This movie had surprisingly good visuals, and shows Chinese movie makers are starting to have the financial clout to begin to think about taking on Hollywood. Apart from that I can’t say anything good about it.
The science is terrible and makes a Michael Bay movie look like an MIT lecture. The sun is going to engulf the Earth within the next 100 years, so a plan is made to move planet Earth to the Alpha Centauri system with fusion rockets:dubious:. But oh no! We pass too close to Jupiter and a “gravity spike” tears apart many of the rockets. But the hero saves the day by remembering Jupiter is part composed of hydrogen so why not fire up it’s atmosphere – that’ll push earth away and back on course!
The heroes may as well have saved earth by throwing their faeces at the sun – the physics would have been equally plausible.
In terms of story it’s just a drip feed of someone sacrificing themself and some other person saying “Noooo!”.
And I know Hollywood does that too, but I promise you, not to this degree. The whole movie is third act.
Finally the attempts at humor are dreadful. Just some peroxide blonde guy doing vaguely slapstick things.