Tonight I watched Osmosis Jones on an impulse. I regret it.
I was thinking the same thing while watching it.
I’m a teacher and my summer vacation is now ending. I watched 87 movies this summer, might get one more in tomorrow(Labor Day). My movie-viewing goes way down during the school year. I’ll catch movies here and there for sure, but not daily like I have the last 90 days or so.
I will only rank “newly seen” movies here. For example, In Bruges is definitely the best movie I saw this summer, but I’ve seen it 4-5 times before. So, of the new-to-me movies I saw, the best were:
My best 5 new-to-me movies from June 11-September 5 2021 were:
Horse Girl
The Wailing
14 Days in May
Another Round
The Green Knight - best movie
Honorable Mentions: Gretel vs. Hansel, The Fly, The Empty Man, Relic
The 5 worst new-to-me movies I saw this summer were:
I Blame Society
The Vault
Fast and the Furious 9
The Limehouse Golem
Xtro 3: Watch the Skies - worst movie
Other really bad ones: Uncanny, Ford vs. Ferrari, Bad Trip
Yakuza Princess
A young Asian working a dead end job in a large American city is suddenly under attack by a vast criminal organization to which they are heir. Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings? Nope, the young person is a young Japanese girl, the American city is São Paulo (South America!) and the shadowy criminal organization is a Yakuza crime family of which she is the last survivor of a massacre by a traitorous lieutenant twenty years earlier. But wait! There is more! There’s an amnesiac gaijin searching for her, an ancient katana that may eat souls, and a wise sensei who has been teaching her martial arts her whole life (and may know more about her past than he lets on).
It takes a while to get going, but once it does, there is ultraviolence, gore aplenty, shootouts and duels in the rain, seppuku, and a colony of old retainers tending their own graves. Plus full frontal nudity. 
Too be honest, given that it probably cost less than 1/20th of what Shang-Chi cost, I liked it more (and I liked Shang-Chi). There is something antiseptic and corporate about Marvel films. When Shang-Chi teased the future sequel, it did not really excite me as much as the blatant “we want to make Yakuza Princess 2” ending of this movie (don’t worry, it does not end in a cliffhanger).
“Mindy Kaling is a comic writer genius”, say other characters about Mindy Kaling’s comedy writer character in a comedy film written by Mindy Kaling. Kaling is actually a pretty good comedy writer but maybe she could take the blatant self-promotion down a notch.
Watched The Keeper this weekend, a biopic about German-POW-turned-Manchester-City-goalkeeper Bert Trautmann. It was a decent film about an interesting person; there were the usual mild liberties taken with the timeline of events, but as I was unfamiliar with Trautmann it was worth watching.
Stargirl - streams on Disney+
No, this isn’t the comic book character. I teach middle school and this year, we are reading the 2000 novel Stargirl by Jerry Spinneli. I just finished reading it to prepare for the school year and wanted to see the movie for comparison.
They did a nice job. Cute is the main word. This is a romance-like movie for teens, though one thing I love about the book that the movie kept is that(spoilers for a kids book you will likely not read):
The girl leaves at the end and the boy(main protagonist) and her do not end up together. Sometimes you meet people who are amazing, but then you lose touch. I thought the movie would force them to stay together in some way. Nope, it kept the love-heartbreak ending of the book.
Anyway, a cute movie, but nothing outrageously amazing. Very well made, though.
Ask yourself: How could any movie with Anthony Hopkins be truly bad?
Well, I dare you to try to get through 20 minutes of The Virtuoso and you will realize that not even the great AH can save a movie that’s dead on arrival. It starts with a gawdawful narrator’s voice (that isn’t Anthony Hopkins) and the talentless wooden acting by Anson Mount. You might be inclined to forgive one or the other, but he just keeps talking and sucking at acting. It gets much much worse from there. Absolute dreck.
You’ve obviously never seen Freejack. Or Meet Joe Black. Or, let’s face it, lots and lots of other movies. He’s a British actor. He’ll appear in any crap that pays.
Here are all the Metacritic scores of films that Anthony Hopkins is in:
So it’s quite a mixed bags of scores.
Goonies was on Sundance Sun night. I was expecting a kids version of Raiders Lost Ark.
Wasn’t prepared for the Fx and non human character. I couldn’t get into the story. I ended up leaving it on and playing on my phone.
I’ll try watching again. Knowing what to expect will make a difference. I know it’s a popular movie.
You’ve never seen Goonies? I thought everyone had. And there were, as I remember, no “non-human” characters. My understanding is that Sloth was deformed but human (and a member of the Fratelli family).
And also surprised that you were bored by it. Perhaps you have to be a kid when you first see it, but I have fond memories of that film.
I missed seeing Goonies in the theater and never got around to renting it.
I’ll give it another chance. I had watched a lot of TV this weekend. My attention span wasn’t ready for another movie.
I had always assumed it was Raiders with kids and it’s not. It’ll watch again without that expectation.
I’ve never seen Goonies. I’ll have to look for it to rectify that.
I just finished the Avengers movies up to Endgame. I had seen Black Panther at some point and Dr. Strange at some point and had picked up general spoilers from living in the world, but hadn’t actually seen any of the others.
It was very good, of course. Long. Stupid as it sounds, Endgame, especially a few days after Infinity War, was exhausting to watch and I’m going to take a break before moving on to any of the rest of it.
Did you cheer when:
Captain America caught the hammer? And when the heroes came back through the portals?
My kids watched all of them this summer and cheered for both.
The restored version of The Good The Bad and the Ugly Restored version is on TCM tonight at 715. I liked that it fleshed out Eli Wallachs Tuco a bit.
Binged over the weekend. Saw lots of stuff. Some really good, some interesting, some Gad-Awful.
Really Good:
Unlocked With Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette, John Malkovich and Micheal Douglas, Great cast, well written.
Noomi Rapace was excellent in a tense action thriller, playing a haunted CIA operative who can kick some ass when she needs to. This should be a franchise
The Empty Man
Good horror film. They did not really try to explain things at the end, which was a good decision. If they had, may have taken the punch away from it. As it is, it left you with a WTF? feeling, in a good way. Kept you interested throughout.
Parallel
Streaming on Netflix. Overage kids find a mystical mirror into other dimensions, make head-scratching bad and ethically challenged decisions. Still, pretty well done.
The Satan’s Triangle, a TV movie with Kim Novak (oh goodness is she a muffin) and Doug McClure, which is always a bad sign.
.
Shockingly bad film trying to be horror while never actually being scary. Mainly because it was directed…I don’t know if it was actually directed. Maybe he didn’t show up. That would explain things.
It’s set mostly on a disabled ship on the ocean. Many scenes call for it to be in ‘sudden’ storms with rain and fierce wind. They were filmed on sunny days in good weather. The ‘stormy’ was done by, get this, being completely out of focus . It’s sole saving grace was Kim Novak (My Lord, she was HOT)
I never knew Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville had a movie together, but it worked. Decent action/comedy called Skiptrace. Knoxville’s a better actor than most people give him credit for I think.
Watching The Patriot on Sundance. I’m really enjoying it. All the actors are doing a great job. I was already familiar with Tarleton’s Raider’s and the battles in South Carolina. He was known as the butcher to the colonials.
I’m pretty sure the movie exagrates some of the atrocities. I’ve never read any history about burning a church with innocent people inside. Something that horrific would be in the history books.
I highly recommend this movie.
I watched Johnny Destiny Space Ninja today.
Imagine anime by Godfrey Ho.
Now imagine watching it while horrifyingly sober.
I’m another person who’s never seen The Goonies. I was twenty-four when it was released and I’m not a big Spielberg or Columbus fan.