100% did not enjoy or get Repo Man. I was surprised, too.
Juror #2 2024 Nicholas Hoult,
Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland
Clint Eastwood retired shortly after directing this film.
HBO Max
Legal Thriller
In the film, a man serving on the jury of a high-profile murder trial realizes that he may be responsible for the victim’s death.
Interesting dilemma. Should Juror #2 speak up? How will he vote?
93% of 175 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10.
I agree that it’s a good film. Nice swan song to end Clint Eastwood’s career.
Juror #2 is a Suspense Thriller.
Some viewers may want more action.
I liked the steady pace as the character grows more and more concerned that the wrong man is on trial.
Eastwood is making a strong statement about the court system.
Concur, except I wouldn’t contradict other people’s dislike of them. IMHO the Hobbit films are the start (?) of a slippery slope that continues through The War of the Rohirrim and ends up (so far) at The Rings of Power.
Personally, I don’t really mind any of those places and am happy to visit them for their alternate-universey echoes and glimpses of the places I was expecting. But I won’t argue with other LotR fans who feel strongly that at some point on this slope we have left, or are eventually bound to leave, the actual Tolkienverse, and that that’s unacceptable.
Psycho Killer
Recommended…a bit.
Satanic killer goes around killing and an officer tries her hardest to find him before he does something more wide-scale…like initiating a nuclear meltdown.
Well made, good use of low budget. Malcolm McDowell is in the movie, but only for 20 minutes or so, which was probably budgetary. The actors do a great job, especially the “psycho killer”, who is very well done by an actor I’d never heard of before.
Decent stuff, streamed on Hulu.
I will admit I am not much looking forward to the Andy Serkis directed Hunt for Gollum movie. I don’t think too much of Serkis as a director and Hunt for Gollum is quite a stretch in terms of making a whole movie out of it.
Nope, sorry, they are not good: terrible writing, overly melodramatic acting, and cartoonish CGI. Mediocre (at best) filmmaking from start to finish.
Those movies were like the Legolas surfing down an oliphaunt trunk scene stretched into 8 hours.
But to each their own 
LOL, good thing I pre-defused that conflict of aesthetic judgement! 
Haha, for the record, I am not a purist by any means. I love Jackson’s LOTR trilogy to this day (warts and all) and I really wanted to like The Hobbit movies!
But, um, they suck, so… I don’t.
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Eh, I enjoyed the Hobbit movies well enough. Not everything has to either suck or be a masterpiece.
I do think that a single film that adhered more closely to the book could have been fantastic. But oh well, that’s not what they made. The trilogy was way too bloated and dragged in many parts. But it was also fun and entertaining a lot of the time.
Firmly in the middle ground between masterpiece and suck.
I finally sat through the last Hobbit film The Battle of the Five Armies. Here is the plot: there is a battle. Five armies are involved. That’s pretty much it.
There are some good moments in the films but the trilogy is a grossly bloated mess that could have been reduced to one good film.
Well, no - they also killed off Smaug in the fucking prologue.
Or barring that, three much shorter movies.
Seems to a divisive opinion here on the hobbit movies. Mines? It should have been one film about the length of the first. But maaaaan they spacefilled. And spaccceeefillled. And spaccceeeefilled. Arse-numbing, I called it. I watched the first in the cinema, fell asleep during the rest during flights. Never got the urge to watch them again.
But I was a fan of the book, which was pretty short, like a third of a size of one LOTR book. So the source material really wasn’t there. So if you like it, fair enough, but to me it will always be “THHHHEEEEEEEEEEEE HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT”
From memory, I believe my reactions to each film were:
First film: Enjoyable, but not as good as any of the first trilogy (to state the obvious)
Second film: can’t remember much but enjoyed it, had some good bits but not as good as the first.
Third: waste of time, wayyyy too long and had a lot of cheesy stuff in it.
My terrible descriptions emphasise that they’re not particularly memorable.
Mostly I remember the “It’s A Small Dwarf World” boat ride in molten gold bit.
I went to see Minions and Monsters last night. Pepper Mill refused to go, thinking tat she wouldn’t like it. She was right. I wanted to see what they did with the obvious Lovecraft stuff (as I remarked in another thread, this looks like “an attempt to make a cute, cuddly Lovecraft movie with Jim Henson’s Cthulhu Babies”).
Well.
It took a while to get to that. It starts out similar to earlier Minions movies showing prehistoric minions looking for evil masters to serve (and inadvertently destroy), including what appears to be a Slavic wizard with grimoire, which they retain. But then they’re in America in the 1920s and get involved with silent movie studios. The movie is filled with a lot of in-jokes about movies and iconic scenes that will go miles over the head of the kids who seem to be the target audience – Charlie Chaplin in scenes from Modern Times, the Buster Keaton “House Falling on him and just missing because of an open window” scene. Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock face. A black guy named Sam playing “As Time Goes By” on a piano,… As my daughter pointed out, having the Minions in 1920s-1930s Hollywood contradicts the continuity outlined in the Minions Wiki ( of course there’s a Minions Wiki) that has them frozen in Siberia or something to explain their absence from two World Wars.
The Minions turn out to be stars in 1920s Hollywood, but as in the 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain they are done in by talkies, because no one can understand what they say. So they’re forced to do something else. Some of the minions decide to make a Monster Movie, for which they need a real monster (since they can’t afford effects), so they find a use for the grimoire and summon what looks on the index page to be Cthulhu. Instead, they get a diminutive Muppet Babyesque squishable figure named Goomi with three moustache-like appendages hanging down from his upper lips, making him look like Zoidberg’s nephew. Unnervingly, he speaks much more intelligible English than the Minions. With Goomi’s help they unleash two huge monsters named Howard and Philip (nudge, nudge – get it?) who want to go on a spree of destruction, but keep it bottled up at Goomi’s insistence. Until later. Howard and Philip don’t look particularly Lovecraftian, but Irene, who shows up later, might be a shoggoth. At least she kinda resembles the one on the cover of the first publication in Astounding, except she’s orange, like another monstrosity.
According to imdb “trivia”, “Goomi” is a nod to François “Goomi” Launet, the creator of the Lovecraftian parody web comic Unspeakable Vault. The movie has it that “GOOMI” is an acronym for “Gary Orkam Oliver Magma Ichabod the Deceiver”
That’s about all the Lovecraft you get out of this film. After that it’s back to lts of slapstick and movie references. The other Minions go off in search of another Evil Master and find it in Dort, a science fiction fan dressed in a robot costume (with some resemblance to “Gort”, from 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still), and who will ultimate help in the kaiju demise. There are lots of science fiction references that are blatantly anachronistic (flying saucers?), and which unaccountably bother me more than the fact that I’m watching a movie about apparently immortal banana-colored capsule-shaped short creatures interacting in human history. Dort ends up in love with a suffragette (yes, really. Tim has no meaning here). despite the fact that he never takes off his helmet, even to eat or drink or kiss.
A very weird night at the movies. The kids in the audience seemed to love it, and were throwing their stuffed Minion dolls all over the place (I had to retrieve one after it landed on me). The adults were —tolerant. I don’t remember much adult laughter. Christoph Waltz, jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, and Trey Parker (among others) contribute voices. George Lucas gets a brief image and voice cameo (he’s an exhibit in a glass case at some movie museum in Hollywood). The movie was made by a French company, and the movie poster the minions make up for their projected movie is in Spanish – “Minions y Monsteras”. Well, why not?
It’s filler for a boring evening. Wait for it on basic cable.
The Goomi depiction of Cthulhu makes me think that at least it wasn’t the “Buff Cthulhu” that seems to show up with increasing frequency. Cthulhu should have abs or defined muscles. Lovecraft himself desc ribed Cthulhu as “flabby”, and the drawing h did shows a figure not merely grotesque because of his tentacled head, but with unimpressve arms and a rotund body. Cthulhu really should have spent more time in the Rl’yeh gym, even if his body was sleeping. Deathless and Undying is no excuse for not being at least toned.
In the credits for Minions & Monsters, it says that the makers of the film got permission from Bogart L.L.C. for the scene parodying a Bogart movie.
I don’t recall a scene parodying a Bogart movie – the one with Sam the piano player didn’t look like Casablanca – the parody was in the dialogue. Later on there’s what appears to be a figure of Humphrey Bogart in a glass case.
I know I missed a lot of references. The closing credits mention Kirk Douglas and Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I missed completely. But I caught plenty of others, including the bouncing inflated globe from The Great Dictator
There’s a scene in black and white with someone playing a detective in a trench coat which is at 0:33 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcR_kw7NaCo .