Freaky Tales (2024) on Max
Describing or critiquing this film would be exhausting so I’ll just say I had a lot of fun watching it.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). This is certainly one of the better Marvel Movies. They skipped the part of how they became the Fantastic Four and simply started with it being a fait accompli, which I think made it better (like was done with the Holland Spider-Man). They immersed you in a world where they have existed, which isn’t really our world, but a futuristic version if the future had a 50s aesthetic. The way they leaned into it was particularly good as it gave it more verisimilitude. Overall the plot was unusual in what motivates the central characters and gave us a good ending that was not your typical fare.
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Those are good observations, thank you, and provide food for thought. All intellectual criticisms aside, I still have to say that I found the remake more intense and immersive. It most definitely wasn’t the kind of failure that many remakes are, and one can have a reasoned debate about which is the better film.
Honestly, I think it is the best acting job she’s ever done. She won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award (lost to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking). She probably should have run for Best Supporting Actress and was advised to - Mira Sorvino won for Mighty Aphrodite that year. But apparently she lobbied hard to be considered in the more prestigious category even though she realized she was far less likely to win.
Eddington
Not recommended
Ari Aster. His first feature was Hereditary, one of the best movies of the past decade. His follow-up was Midsommar, which was really good. His third movie was Beau is Afraid, which has great moments, but was overlong and badly edited down(could have been 30-40 minutes shorter).
Eddington, his fourth movie, is his worst and it is not just a little bit overlong. It’s massively overlong at about 150 minutes. Not a horror movie in the usual sense, it is a movie that takes place in 2020 during the outbreak of Covid-19. We have two mayoral candidates, one who wants to take precautions and another that is a “I have my rights” type guy and doesn’t care about the virus.
It’s dull. About 90 minutes in, the movie picks up and gets really interesting. In fact, the final 60 minutes of this movie are really good. But 90 minutes??? That is a very large hurdle to overcome just to get to the good stuff. I found the opening 90 minutes watchable, but repetitive. Too slow, not very original at all.
The last 60 minutes play much better, of course, and if 30 or so minutes were trimmed from the first 90-minute-chunk, it would have been a much better movie.
I’d basically review it like this:
Opening 90 minutes - not recommended, you could almost watch it at 1.3X speed or go to the bathroom once or twice and miss very little
Final 60 minutes - really good stuff, worth your time
Overall, not recommended. Maybe chop it up into three 50-minute viewings like a TV show? That might pull you through better. As a movie in one sitting, it does not work very well.
Probably my biggest disappointment of 2025 so far. Still……the final hour is really great…ugh, just not enough.
Space Adventure Cobra (1982)
I had trouble sleeping two nights ago and Prime recommended this to me for whatever reason. It looked familiar but I know that I have not seen it before. This was an interesting space adventure with some fun action and a hero that is a bit goofy at times (in a good way). Cobra is a space pirate with a Psychogun on his right arm (spoiler!) who everyone believes is dead. He connects with Jane, who is on the Pirate Guild’s hit list. They start working together and fall in love, Jane’s two sisters are in the mixas well, and the main bad guy is called Crystal Boy. Eventually, Cobra triumphs but loses something big along the way.
Like I said, it’s a fun adventure and there are themes about love and sacrifice that make the story deeper than you might expect. I did wonder if these themes were deeper in the original Japanese dub and lost somewhat in translation, but it worked for me nonetheless. Also interesting, in Japan, the antagonist is called Crystal Bowie and it’s unfortunate that he couldn’t keep that name in English. He was also dispatched a little too easily at the end despite being completely unbeatable up until that point. I feel like I missed how Cobra did it. Also, there is some nudity so this may not be appropriate for younger kids.
The Butterfly Effect (2004). Ashton Kutcher plays a guy who, with the aid of a set of journals that he keeps, can experience blackouts that take him back to his childhood past. There, he can change events that he wishes had turned out better, but the changes invariably create drastic changes to the present, often very bad ones.
The ratings for this movie are unusual in that most critics panned it, a few loved it, and audiences generally rated it much higher than critics. My own view is that at 7.6 on IMDb it’s grossly over-rated. It’s not entirely bad, but I wouldn’t rate it higher than about 6.2. Over at RT the critics’ average is 34%. I also wouldn’t consider it sci-fi as there’s no “sci” in it; it’s more like fantasy.
I like that movie a lot too. If I recall, the blowback was mostly because Kutcher, at the time, was just the pretty boy dumbfuck on That 70’s Show. He got zero credit as an actor.
It’s interesting, if you look at the rating distribution, that’s about as few 0 and 1 ratings as I’ve seen on a film (and I’ve looked at them quite a bit). There must be at least a little something for everybody.
I did not realize there was a movie. I remember seeing the show a long time ago and liking it, but did not know there was a movie, it does look like the movie precedes the anime (of course the manga precedes both), so I will definitely be checking it out.
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I think now he is kind of rejected because, if I understand correctly, he and his wife spoke out in defense of the rapist Danny Masterson to try to get him a lighter sentence.
They did the whole “he was a great guy and a leader when we knew him” thing and they were under the impression it wouldn’t be shared publicly. It was. It looked really bad.
For some reason that I can’t put my finger on, I’ve never liked Ashton Kutcher. Maybe my instincts about him were right. But I’ll give him credit – his performance in The Butterfly Effect was solid, even if one doesn’t like the movie itself.
I can definitely see why Prime recommended this to you, Intergalactic Gladiator 
Lucky coincedence?
I haven’t seen the show but my curiosity is piqued. I did see that it’s on Tubi but it has a Spanish dub. It’s probably out there elsewhere.
I believe there was multi versions of this with different butterfly effects, I saw one which was quite savage, and there’s a heavily neutered version, not an airplane version, but some sort of variation, The savage one was quite striking.
According to Google, there were four different versions of this movie: “Theatrical Cut, Happy Ending, Open Ending, and Director’s Cut”. Which I think only affected the endings. I doubt any of them would have changed my opinion in any way. It was not a bad movie. It was a “meh!” movie.
Almost sounds like they were channeling the multiple cuts of Brazil, whose entire plot is the product of a literal “butterfly effect” (well, “beetle effect”).
Incantation
Recommended.
Taiwanese movie, on Netflix. Wow, color me very happily surprised. This was really great and thrilling and even, just a bit, scary. It has a framing device where a narrator has you memorize:
- a symbol
- a chant
The symbol and chant come back through the movie so by the time you reach the climax, you are chanting along with it and even kind of knowing where things are going, you kind of chant along.
It was great. I won’t go into more details.
Check it out.
I’m a fan of the Butterfly Effect, but it was released in a time of Kutcher fatigue. Sort of like Amy Schumer in the mid/late 2010s.
He’d been doing That '70s Show for years, and then in 2003 he tried to start his movie career – previously only known for Dude, Where’s My Car? – with a couple high-profile romantic comedies: Just Married and My Boss’s Daughter. They weren’t great. Also in 2003 he started Punk’d on MTV, which had its charms but was also very hateable.
By the time The Butterfly Effect came around in 2004 a lot of people were over him.
I started rewatching Project Moonbase (1953), but didn’t finish. This is a movie I’d heard about for years, ever since running across it in the first edition of Nicholls and Clute’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia. A movie scripted by Robert Heinlein! That wasn’t Destination: Moon! I really wanted to see it, but nobody ever seemed to show it, and I couldn’t find it on VHS. I finally got to see it on the late night series Canned Movie Festival (hosted by Laraine Newman), which mocked old movies. The version I was watching recently was the MST3K version, which also mocked it (It’s episode #109 from 1990, which still had Josh Weinstein doing Dr. Erhart and Tom Servo). For the record, I have a DVD copy of the film without mocking.
The film evokes mixed feelings. Heinlein was pissed that they took what was supposed to be a TV miniseries and condensed it into a movie. But you can’t blame that for its problems – it’s recognizably Heinlein’s plotting and dialogue, and some of it’s painful. But some of it is brilliant, as well.
Some of the good stuff – interesting setup of ad Guys from another, but Un-named country (pretty obviously the USSR) working to sabotage the US space program in general and the first Moon Landing in particular. The telephones, which had cordless handsets that used antennas to communicate with the desk sets, just like the first generation of cordless phones eally did. The antennas were ostentatiousl large, probably so people would notice them. They were never directly referred to or pointed out in the dialogue. They were just there, a piece of future life treated as an everyday thing – as it ought to be. Another great thing was the way, on the zer-G, non-rotating space station people oriented themselves in different ways, not all on a horizontal as on Earth. Again, shown, not discussed.
Also cool is that the first astronaut to orbit is female. As is the president of the United States.
On the other hand, two of the worst things are the first astronaut into orbit and the president of the United States. Colonel Briteis has a name that is pronounced “Bright-Eyes”, and you KNOW everyone thinks of it that way. They wouldn’t treat a male Colonel Briteis that way. The president of the US is treated as one of Heinlein’s patented 1950s club ladies. Hillary Clinton she ain’t. You couldn’t see this film’s president as acually achieving the office. As MST3K’s Kevin Murphy wrote: “The best thing I can say about it is that it was very very short,” calling the film “openly and condescendingly hostile toward women as a gender”.
There’s plenty more, but I’ll have to watch it again before I comment. One thing that stands out, because it’s a pet peeve of mine, is that the earth is depicted without freakin’ clouds, as it usually was in pre-1960s illustrations and movies. Even Star Trek was guilty of the “cloud-free Earth” Heinlein must’ve been pissed, because his earlier movie, Destination: Moon featured a properly cloud-enshrouded Earth – possibly the first movie to ever do so. But that movie had many of its paintings and depictions made by or inspired by Space Artist Chesley Bonestell, who got his facts straight. (I honestly think the thing that broke the barrier and made a properly cloud-enshrouded Earth the standard depiction was the famous “Earthrise” photo taken by William Anders on the 1968 Apollo 8 mission. It’s not that the people making illustrations and movies were unaware of the way things looked. I suspect the movie executives and editors thought the public wouldn’t accept the image as “real” unless they could see the unobstructed continents. After all, people saw images of a cloud-enshrouded earth all the time from weather satellites, but that wasn’t the same, was it? But once that image of a cloud-covered Earth was sent back from space people were convinced that THAT was how the earth ought to look from orbit.