The only scene I remember as well, and I suspected that would be your answer.
Angels and Demons was on basic cable. I had seen it before but only remembered who the real bad guy was but not the rest of the movie. What I didn’t remember was how it was nonstop Catholic torture porn.
We went to the theater last weekend to see Disclosure Day before it’s completely pushed out of the metroplex…and were disappointed when we arrived to hear that the showing was cancelled because the A/C was broken and the temperature in that auditorium was around 95 degrees. Checking what else was starting at the same time, we settled on Toy Story 5, unenthusiastically.
I was pleasantly surprised. The story was overly familiar – the toys get split up, one group has to rescue another, it involves hitching a ride on a vehicle. But I thought some of the gags and lines were literally LOL funny. (A pig named “Jimmy Dean”, for example. That’s awesome.) The wedding of Buzz and Jessie, officiated by the hedgehog in a pope hat, was hilarious.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Highly recommended.
Did you like the other three Spider-man movies with Tom Holland? If no, this will not bring you on board. If you did, this one is also excellent. He has now been in 4 excellent Spider-man movies.
I won’t spoil the entire story. It definitely picks up plot threads from the previous films and introduces some new interesting things.
I’m glad they didn’t let Tom Holland go. He’s my favorite Spider-man even though I will always remember Tobey as the original.
Go see this if you like the MCU and the recent Spider-man movies.
Just watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Wow, what a mind fuck. Loved Sam Rockwell, as usual. Highly entertaining movie as long as you don’t look too deep.
Agreed. Just got back. Loved it. I felt like the action scenes were outstanding. Some characters may have been included for those great scenes, more than driving the plot, but I’m not complaining. The audience applauded when it ended. I don’t recall the last time that happened. Also, the last scene was just great.
I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day today. I enjoyed it. It might revive the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which seemed to have lost its appeal in recent years.
By the way, the multiplex was crowded in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in years (perhaps not since the Barbenheimer phenomenon).
Truly. Yesterday when we sent to see The Odyssey, there were long lines for it and for Spider-man as well.
Is the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe just the new Avengers movies? I watched Thunderbolts and then forgot I’d watched it, and started it again by mistake. That and the dire Spiderman offshoots like Madame Webb? Have they killed off the deluge of series swamping the genre too?
DCU seems much better due to relative sparsity and quality (apart from Supergirl).
They’re kind of floundering. They haven’t had a mega-hit since the last Spider-Man and before that the last Avengers. Nothing since has sparked much of a reaction. So though they originally had plans for a big Kang-the-Conqueror-oriented saga for all the characters more recently introduced (Shang-Chi, Ms Marvel, Yelena Black Widow, Kate Bishop Hawkeye, maybe Moon Knight, possibly Echo) they hit a roadblock when Jonathan Majors turned out to be a horrific piece of crap. They scrambled, abandoned pretty much all their plans, tied up some loose ends where they could (largely in the Loki series) and have regrouped with restarting everything again with another Avengers movie, engineering a story that can bring back the hits like Steve Rogers and Thor and even Robert Downey Jr in a different role. In order for as clean a start as possible, they have kept their TV series to a minimum with them not affecting any new continuity, so Daredevil, Wonder Man, and such-like.
Which, as I say, seems like they’re floundering.
I know about Jonathan Majors causing havoc, but I suspect it was a fundamental problem they had with the universe, and I guess, a problem they have in the comics too: too bloody much.
I don’t read too many superhero comics (more of horror/vertigo style stuff), but even back when I was a kid Marvel was a hundred superheros all over the place, and DC a few good quality ones. You can see this effect on the X-men movies where they’d have 10 characters and 5 of them turn up to do something in one action sequence and disappear to never been seen in any movies again. Quantity over quality.
They managed it correctly in the first set of Marvel movies, they added a character as a side one, and they became a main one in their own movie. But this time around they chucked about 8 at you from nowhere and then they just never appeared anywhere else, the crossover was minimal. And another new movie and another new set of characters. Throw in the many series they seem to have on the run and that was 50 odd spare hours of marvel you’d have. Then there’s the remember “who the hell they are”, which leading to needing a Phd In Marvel Studies to understand the post credits scenes (there’s still a few I don’t know who the hell they were).
I’d say less floundering more self-harming. It will be interesting to see if they’ve learned from any of this. But I doubt that. DC’s lesson seems to be mostly “let James Gunn do whatever he wants”.
I don’t buy into the superhero fatigue myth (not that anyone has explicitly cited to it). Rather, I think interest has fallen because the movies are simply bad at the mist fundamental level. Bad writing = bad movie. No amount of CGI can fix that.
Motor City with Alan Ritchson. Not sure what I was expecting (mostly action/shooting/punching I suppose), but while it had that it was very ‘arty’ and not as violent as I expected (until the end). Not sure if this needs spoiling, but it is basically a silent movie - maybe 15 words of dialog/ - I thought it was well done and I enjoyed it 7/10.
One thing I noticed was that the copyright date was MMXXV - 2025, so this apparently sat on a shelf for a while.
Deadpool and Wolverine was a hit.
Those are Sony only, no MCU. Venom did briefly, and kind of pointlessly, warp into MCU universe, but he warped right back and only interacted with a bartender. I should say “Eddie Brock”, not Venom.
Blitz 2011 Jason Statham
On Prime
The film is based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Ken Bruen, which features his recurring characters Detective Sergeant Tom Brant and Chief Inspector James Roberts.
This film has a very good script and is one of Statham’s grittier and better movies.
A Serial killer (Aidan Gillen) is targeting cops. Statham and his partner (Paddy Considine) have to hunt him down and stop the murders.
Early film for Jason. He hadn’t developed his stock character used in his current films.
Aidan Gillen is probably best known for his role in The Wire. He plays the Baltimore City Councilman. Excellent actor.
8 out of 10
Oh yes, I forgot that one as I didn’t like it. But having said that, it’s not a movie they can learn anything from going forward. It was a conclusion to a series Marvel largely had nothing to do with up until then.
It also seemed to indicate that Logan and the X-men we all know and love were in the MCU, since Logan died in “Logan” and remained dead in Deadpool and Wolverine. They had to go get another Wolverine.
All Five Pirates of the Caribbean Movies
Highly recommended.
I’m going to go there. I think all 5 Pirates movies are terrific. I think they are some of the very best action-comedy-adventure movies out there. Some people only love the first one, but those people are wrong.
I could watch these movies every year. I saw all but the fourth one in the theater. I think my kids were too little when the fourth one came out.
Johnny Depp does not need to do any other movies as far as I’m concerned. These are awesome and he deserves an Oscar for the character of Jack Sparrow.
Wicked: For Good… was anything but. It clearly suffered from being pigeon-holed into the events of Wizard of Oz. Characters made uniformly stupid decisions contrived to touch on the necessary plot points, and what I personally would have imagined to be one of the most “weighty” scenes (the aftermath of the death of Elphaba’s sister, from having a house literally dropped on her) was somehow both predictable and suffered from extreme whiplash.
Because of course we all knew it was coming, but when it came I was like, “Wait, what? Did that just happen? Is that really how they’re going to show it to us?” It was just such a weird, incomprehensible way to cover that plot beat.
Anyway, the love triangle was stupid, Elphaba was stupid, Glinda was stupid, the wizard was stupid, Elphaba’s sister was stupid (and unlikable—actually, all the characters were unlikable too, but the sister doubly or triply so for her sudden pivot to fascism over feeling jilted of all things), the love interest (both the Munchkin one and the Glinda/Elphaba love triangle one) was stupid, and the animals were stupid. Seriously, name a character: they were stupid.
It was contrivance layered upon idiot plot layered on contrivance with a few just “meh” songs sprinkled in here and there. A big, fat, bloated cake with some “meh” sprinkles on top that somehow manages to both be layered in frosting and calories and fat and yet tastes like shit.
So glad I waited to see it on Netflix (it’s on Netflix, by the way, if you didn’t notice its blink and you’ll miss it appearance on the front page when it dropped). Alas, I did not blink. Would that I had missed it…