What have you watched lately?

[Tom Foolery]

The whale. Hoo boy. Lotta crying. Lotttttta crying.

I’m getting to the point in my life where I don’t need sad energy in my life. The real world is just fucking depressing; I don’t need fake depressing on top of it. Don’t care how good the acting is.

[jjreason]

I'm kinda with you, honestly. I started it out of curiosity & wanted to turn it off a good few times. There is positivity too, but also parallels with my own struggles which made it tough. There are 2 or 3 lines in there that really get you. Yeesh.

[Diabolical]

The whale. Hoo boy. Lotta crying. Lotttttta crying.

I’m getting to the point in my life where I don’t need sad energy in my life. The real world is just fucking depressing; I don’t need fake depressing on top of it. Don’t care how good the acting is.

That's a big reason I still haven't seen Joker. It looks too depressing.

[Tom Foolery]

Meteor. Holy shit, how have I never heard of this movie before? Starring Sean Connery, Karl Malden, Natalie Wood, and Brian Keith(he was Hardcastle on Hardcastle and McCormick). It’s the plot of Armageddon and Deep Impact, but it was made in 1979. A meteor flies thru the asteroid belt out past Mars and a collision sends an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. Ex-NASA scientist Sean Connery has six days to stop the world from ending. The US has a nuclear missile array in space, but it wont do the job alone, so, at the height of the cold war, they have to convince the Soviets to also use their space nukes to also destroy the asteroid. Near the climax of the film, a smaller rogue asteroid crashes into NYC and blows up the WTC! I hearby certify this movie awefulsome.

Blink Twice. A rich tech mogul CEO invites a bunch of his friends and some female wait staff from an event his company catered to his private island for a vacation of excessive partying. As the movie progresses, the women start noticing gaps in their memories. Once they realize what’s going on, it turns into a horror/thriller the women have to try and escape from. First time director Zoe Kravitz delivers a creepy film with Channing Tatum as the tech mogul.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. First time I’ve seen it since it came out. Still supremely disappointed this is how the Indy series finished. I can’t understand how all the executives at Disney and Lucasfilm sat in a screening room and watched this and said “yes! Nailed it!”
Riding off into the sunset in Last Crusade is how this series ended.

[Tom Foolery]

Wild Robot. Animated movie about a robot that raises a duckling after she accidentally kills the duck’s mother. It had a unique art style I enjoyed. The movie was pretty okay, but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. It’s got a ridiculously high Rotten Tomato score. It wasn’t all that.

Saturday Night. The ninety minutes leading up to the opening of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, told in real time. Lorne Michaels was trying to wrangle the cast, the writers, cut four hours worth of material down to 90 minutes, placate George Carlin and Jim Henson, and keep the network happy so that they didn’t preemptively pull the plug on a premise they didn’t get and just rerun an episode of Johnny Carson. I enjoyed it.

[anarky]

Sonic the Hedgehog. I was legitimately shocked by how good this was. I'd heard rumblings that it was a solid movie, but it really caught me off guard. The third one is coming to P+ later this month, so hopefully I have 2 and the Knuckles show done by then. Jim Carey is, woo, when that man is on, he is on, and there's no turning him off.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Switching to the ST thread for that.

[anarky]

Sonic 2. Not only was the first far, far better than it had any right to be, but the second is just as good. I wouldn't say better, but definitely just as good. I can live with adaptations straying so far from the source material when the finished product is so high quality and shows respect for the original even if it's not faithful.

We started the Knuckles series right after, though we didn't get far. Pretty safe to say we'll watch the third within a few days of it hitting P+.

[Tom Foolery]

Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s one of those movies that’s been part of the cultural zeitgeist forever, but I had never actually watched it. Holy shit, not what I was expecting. Right off the bat, Mickey Rooney is playing a horribly racist asian character in yellowface. Like, way worse than the one from Remo Williams. And if the character hadn’t been in the film at all, it wouldn’t have changed the narrative one iota. It was shockingly offensive. The rest of the film was not what I was expecting. Audrey Hepburn is a prostitute trying to land rich husbands, and George Peppard is a male prostitute who moves into the apartment upstairs. Even though this bitch is exhibiting an entire parade of red flags from the minute they meet, he starts falling in love with her because she’s ‘quirky’. I don’t know how this film was received when it came out, but it was a cringey two hours. Even though it had a ‘happy’ ending where they get together, I turned to my wife and said ‘I will bet every dollar that ever existed or will exist that this relationship doesn’t last another two weeks.’

Secret of NIMH. Hadn’t watched this in years(maybe decades). Beautiful Don Bluth animation. I’m even more appreciative of old hand drawn stuff since everything is computers now. The mystical stuff wasn’t in the original book, but otherwise it was solid. I was unaware that there were sequels to both the film and the book.

Leave the World Behind. A Netflix film from a couple years ago about the beginning of the end of the world. It started slow, but got suitably slightly creepy as the movie went on. Enough to keep me engaged. Then ending came abruptly, but it made me laugh.

The ‘Net. Sandra Bullock movie from the 90s. Lol, that’s not how the internet works. But it was amusing to think that’s how people in the 90s thought it did.

Dark Tower. Tried rewatching it. Fuck me, what a travesty of an adaptation. If you’re gonna fuck up a perfectly good book series that badly, then don’t even bother.

[anarky]

The wife and I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's probably about fifteen years ago. She's Asian. Needless to say, Mickey Rooney's character did not go over well. Even that aside, we were shocked at how popular that movie is. You feel a little sorry for Buddy Ebsen's character, partly because he's the only one bordering on being a decent human being, and partly because it's scientifically impossible to hate Buddy Ebsen, but even he was kinda some weirdo pervert. Every other character was so fucking awful that the universe would send a thank you card if they all died in a train wreck. We simply could not figure it out. Even Aubrey Hepburn couldn't make her character not a pile of shit.

As soon as it was over, one of us (can't even remember which) turned to the other and said, "The only good thing about that movie is the Deep Blue Something song it inspired." Even then, we decided they only picked it because it fit the melody.

[Tom Foolery]

As soon as it was over, one of us (can't even remember which) turned to the other and said, "The only good thing about that movie is the Deep Blue Something song it inspired." Even then, we decided they only picked it because it fit the melody.

Ha. During the final scene in the taxi cab(which, by the way, when she throws the cat out, my wife said ‘Turn this fucking movie off. We aren’t watching the rest of it.’ and then when I went to pause it, there was like six minutes left, so we just finished it, but she just kept saying ‘they better go back and find that fucking cat or I swear to god….’ over and over.) but anyway, as soon as he gets out and she’s mulling it over and then follows him I half expected that song to kick in on the soundtrack. And when it obviously didn’t, I started singing it myself. Boom. Ending improved like 10000%.
I cannot begin to fathom how this movie got nominated for multiple Oscars.

[Tom Foolery]

Kraven the Hunter. As far as Sony Spidey movies go, it’s closer to the Venom movies in quality than it is to Morbius and Madame Web. But that’s a low bar. The CGI is terrible(the “lion” and the Rhino were just hard to watch). Russell Crowe is at the ‘take a paycheck and chew scenery’ stage of his career. It happens to all the great ones. The flashback origin scenes took up way too much of the film, and his powers were nonsense. But I’ll give those a pass, since its a comic movie. Aaron Taylor Johnson was trying to make a crap script work, but he has a solid screen presence, and there were a couple decent action set pieces, even if they were silly as fuck. They also try to cram way too many easter eggs into these movies, even if they don’t organically fit the story.
There have been a lot of shitty comic films over the years, and this is technically better than quite a few of them. But I think they should have learned from those mistakes after all these years. Sony keeps churning out turds thinking the Marvel cache is enough.

Trap. M Night Shamamayama’s new film about a serial killer trapped at a concert with his daughter. The ludicrous number of lucky coincidences that happen during the first half of the movie that let him escape the venue was just lazy writing. The second half of the movie becomes mildly more intense. M Night is famous for having twists in his movies. This one, as far as twists go, was pretty weak.

Plane. When I saw the trailer for this a couple years ago, I laughed my ass off at the title of the film. But as far as action thrillers go, this one was better than it had any right to be. It doesn’t reinvent the genre or raise the bar at all, but it was a decent watch. They are making a sequel called ‘Ship’.

There’s also been quite a few Gene Hackman movies on the streaming services. Some I’d never watched, some I’d only seen once before.
I watched Mississippi Burning, Runaway Jury, No Way Out, and Crimson Tide.

[Tom Foolery]

Lift. Netflix movie with Kevin Hart about a team of professional thieves tasked by Interpol to steal a half billion dollars of gold from a plane while its in flight. The suspension of disbelief isn’t the in-flight theft, it’s that a half billion in gold on a pallet doesn’t completely fuck with a plane’s flight characteristics. Get past that, and you’ve got a suitably entertaining heist movie.

Ronin. Robert DeNiro action flick from the 90s. Epic car chase in the third act. Like maybe top five car chases on film ever. There’s also a bunch of characters actors in it, that have gone on to be more famous since.

Dark Blue. Kurt Russell is a dirty cop investigating a homicide, set against the backdrop of the Rodney King trial and subsequent riots.

Rebel Ridge. Another Netflix movie. I only watched this because the main guy in it is cast as John Stewart in Gunn’s new DCU movie-verse. His character is the victim of civil asset forfeiture in a corrupt southern town, and he uses his Military Martial Arts skills to take down Don Johnson and his corrupt cops. Pretty decent. And has an unusually low body count for an action film. Tied with First Blood.

The Grey. A group of pipeline workers survive a plane crash in the middle of nowhere…and then all subsequently die from the elements, drowning, and a pack of ravenous wolves before the movie ends. Uplifting.

Without Remorse. Based on a Tom Clancy novel featuring a character from the Jack Ryan books(and subsequently the Rainbow Six video game series) starring Micheal B. Jordan.

Se7en. Rewatched this excellent moody thriller. What’s in the box?

Enemy at the Gates. Been wanting to rewatch this for awhile. So I dug out my DVD boxes in the basement and found it. WWII sniper movie set in Russia with Jude Law and Ed Harris.

Jurassic Park. I’d also been hankering to rewatch this for a few weeks. Usually it’s on at least ONE of the streaming services I subscribe to, or poach from others. Finally, I just went and dug out my DVD and watched that. Then, the next day, it fucking showed up on Hulu.

[anarky]

Season 4 of Jurassic World: Chaos Theory.

Camp Cretaceous was Jurassic World's Clone Wars, a better-than-expected animated series running simultaneously with a mediocre trilogy. Chaos Theory, then, is Rebels, upping the ante to give us what's easily the best JP-verse story since the original.

[Diabolical]

Enemy at the Gates. Been wanting to rewatch this for awhile. So I dug out my DVD boxes in the basement and found it. WWII sniper movie set in Russia with Jude Law and Ed Harris.

Love this movie. Jude Law and Ed Harris are so damned good.
I believe the only reason this movie didn't get more love is because it wasn't about Americans.

[Tom Foolery]

A MineCraft Movie. What the shit did I just sit through? This is the worst movie I have ever watched. It’s the greatest movie I’ve ever watched. I will never bother watching it again. I would watch it again tomorrow.