Topic: The Movie Thread

In a rather strange turn of events, "Rambo 3" (working title "Rambo Joins The Taliban" - no judgements from me, a similar thing once happened to James Bond - it was the cool thing to do in the Eighties, apparently) has several situations and two or three lines that are, on the surface, intentionally funny but it's difficult to tell - I laughed, anyway so it's another thumbs up from me. This was the most expensive movie ever made up to that point - most of that money appears to have gone on hair stylists and body butter for Mr. Stallone. Much better sound on the blu-ray this time, too. Tomorrow evening it's "Rambo 4: Rambo". Great title - looking forward to it.
PS RIP James Earl Jones.

I watched that Aretha Franklin movie cause it was on BBC One. Not bad actually, slightly overly long, but it doesn’t steep itself in melodrama when it probably could given I had no idea just how horrific her life was.

"Rambo 4:Rambo" was a little bit disappointing. Here, a significantly older, bloatier, more (if it was even possible) monosyllabic Rambo shoots, dismembers, detonates and gouges his way through various extremely unsavoury Burmese militia types (in admittedly satisfactory fashion) on a mission to save a contingent of hapless Christian missionaries/aid workers. A film with (charitably) a one act structure, it's esentially one of those 20 minute Saturday Morning cartoons (with slightly less humour and character development) blown up to feature length with added extreme, gratuitous violence. Here's hoping that "Rambo 5: Last Blood" is both an improvement and a title that sticks to it's word.

Finished watching the first Lethal Weapon. It's an okay movie but not anything special. I'm hoping the sequels are better as I've heard great things about this franchise.

Just watched Aladdin 2019 with my wife and kids this weekend. I really liked it and the cast were great especially Mena and Naomi. Will Smith did a great job too as the Genie. I was afraid at first before watching it as the old Aladdin cartoon movie was one of my favorites.

Just back from watching Lee starring Kate Winslet. I would never have thought to watch this, as I hadn't seen any trailers or heard of it. One my dad wanted to see after seeing a trailer on Facebook. Fantastic performances by Winslet and Andy Samberg and a great supporting cast!

@MightyDemon82 Cool! That is a movie that just recently showed up on my radar ("The Wild Robot" being another) that I've added to my fall cinema itinerary. Glad to hear it's a worthwhile trip to the movies

"Rambo 5: Last Blood" was not an improvement over the previous installment. Rambo's adoptive daughter goes to Mexico, gets immediately drugged and sold into sex slavery whereupon our hero heads south of the border on a rescue mission before luring her captors back to his farm where a full array of extremely grisly "Home Alone" style death traps awaits them. Torture porn for Trump supporters - it's not even unintentionally funny, just unpleasant.
PS I just got an import of the excellent "Weird:: The Al Yankovic Story" on 4K blu-ray. That will make for a welcome change of pace.

I know this will probably be a bit TL;DR for most, but here's a list of all the films I've watched over the past few weeks.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - After a wartime video goes viral showing the titular Billy Lynn heroically protecting his commanding officer's body from being taken by enemy forces, his entire squad is sent on a publicity tour back in the States where they must face how disconnected the populace is from their struggle (outside of vague patriotic platitudes) and what it really is they're fighting for.

Godzilla 2014 (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - I think this one is sooo close to being something great, but just makes too many mistakes to quite get there. I love that it spends time building up suspense (the best Godzilla films often don't have much of Big G and have great human drama, after all), but Bryan Cranston is the only one who really puts in a noteworthy performance & it really loses something once he's killed off. Again, I don't really have an issue with the amount of Godzilla, but rather how that time is used (oftentimes it'll completely cut away to something entirely else as soon as he clashes with one of the MUTO, dodging the actual monster fighting). That said, there are some good shots, and a satisfyingly brutal finish. It's also waaay too dark (in terms of lighting), the scene where the MUTO attacks the train is a huge example of this where I could barely see anything except it's glowy spots & the flaming wreckage in the river at the end. A real shame too as it can be a real looker when you can actually see what's going on (like the sequence in the rain where Godzilla & the MUTO descend on San Francisco).

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - A tonally confused affair, on one hand resigning itself to being nothing more than popcorn entertainment (any poignant "man vs nature" themes are undercut by Monarch transforming into a facsimile of the MCU's SHEILD, and it starts to dive headlong into the "Hollow Earth" nonsense), but on the other hand it seems like it wants to take itself waaay to seriously with an overdramatic environmentalist message & visually gritty aesthetic. As a big Godzilla fan there are things for me to like here (there are a lot of fan favorite Kaiju here, including a pretty cool version of King Ghidorah that goes pretty hard, though it's so much that it teeters along a similar issue that Spider-Man 3 had with too many big names for one movie), but I wouldn't blame anyone for not liking it.

Godzilla VS Kong (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - At this point the Monsterverse has given up any pretense of offering any sort of compelling human drama (which it was rarely good at anyways, at least not on the level of stuff like Godzilla: Minus One) and lunged head first into being a big dumb monster punch 'em up flick, and honestly, it works. Revelling in the absolute dumbest aspects of it's convoluted lore, it's a film more concerned with having fun than trying to say/do anything meaningful, and boy is it a fun film. Godzilla & Kong's fights are awesome (the best in the franchise), and you never go too long without them tearing through things on screen.

Hancock (Blu-Ray) - Before we had like 6 different versions of "Superman but Evil", we had "Superman but just kind of a jerk in need of some good PR". I think this is pretty fun in the first half when it's working on that core concept, but kinda loses itself when trying to explore lore/backstory & forcing and endgame villain.

the Killer's Game (Cinema) - Dave Bautista plays the best assassin in the game, but wants to get out once he finds a woman and starts developing health issues. Soon it's learned he's come down with an incurible disease, so he puts a hit out on himself so she doesn't have to watch him slowly die & can get his life insurance. He learns that the diagnosis was a mistake and he's going to live, but now only if he can survive the onslaught of eccentric assassins out to get him. I'm pretty sure this just bombed, but honestly I kinda liked it. It's not a masterpiece (and I think kinda tonally inconsistent), but with a lot of creative (& bloody) kills, explosions, and some light female nudity, it's an enjoyable enough "Dude/Dad" film if that's something you're into (not as good as "the Beekeeper" from earlier this year though).

Kong: Skull Island (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - Even as someone who is much more of a Godzilla fan, I'll say that Kong's solo movie is probably the Monsterverse's best. It's really the only one that successfully invests you to it's human cast (you really want to see John C. Reilly's character make it home, and Samuel L. Jackson's Packard is a compelling villain, jaded after pouring his military career into Vietnam with nothing to show for it, he becomes obsessed with taking out Kong, even if it means the deaths of his men that he supposedly cares so much about). There's a lot of imagination on display when it comes to the flora & fauna of the titular island itself, which leads to a lot of exciting encounters, whether it be our group of survivors finding themselves underfoot a massive spider, or the various punch 'em ups Kong winds up in with other beasts. Just a really enjoyable time.

the LEGO Movie (Blu-Ray) - Who knew that a movie about LEGO would be so solid(ly built)? At it's core it's just a family film with a message about how we're all special in it's own way, but it's still one of the most visually stunning/unique CGI animated films from a big studio and the cast is pretty fun, whether it be Will Ferrell hamming it up as unrepentantly evil "President Business" or Will Arnett's "Batman" trying to hard to be cool. Enjoyable watch.

Lone Survivor (Blu-Ray) - Speaking of "Dude/Dad" films, this one goes pretty hard. I can understand that glorifying war (especially something as modern/touchy as recent Mideast conflicts) is going to rub some the wrong way, but I honestly liked this. Based on a True Story (but obviously embellished for movie's sake), it follows Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of a small band of Navy Seals who found themselves surrounded by a couple hundred Taliban fighters after getting found out during a reconnaissance mission.

Ranma 1/2: the Battle of Nekonron: the Fight to Break the Rules! (Blu-Ray) - Very by the numbers movie adaptation of a long running Shonen anime. New one off villain shows up to antagonize our protaganists, has just enough henchmen that almost every recurring cast member gets to tag along as they get a fight (though I'm a little salty that Ukyo & Kodachi were who were left behind this go around, lol), but the good guys save the day in the end and go home. For die hard fans of the franchise only (even the animation is nothing special. There are some TV & OVA episodes that look better).

Ranma 1/2: the Battle of Togenkyo: Rescue the Brides! (Blu-Ray) - Much like the first film, it sees the extended cast facing off against a one off movie villain, and although the concept wasn't anything new, I think it was much better executed here. The animation quality was a pretty big jump up (not up there with something seminal like Ghost in the Shell or Memories, but still nice 90's anime vibes), and it was overall much more fun and the cast has never looked better. I'd still likely say this is one for existing fans of the property only, but as a fan I couldn't much tell you what more I could want from a film in this franchise (other than the fact that it completely snubbed Kodachi, the only extended cast member to be left out).

the Shallows (Blu-Ray) - While surfing off of a secluded beach in Mexico, a woman is injured by a shark (which is stalking the area due it being the site of it's latest kill, a whale) and must find a way to get back to land. There's a few contrived moments narratively (how did no one see that huge whale carcass just a few hundred feet from the shore while they were surfing?), but overall it was a tense ride that gripped me throughout and it has some of the most gorgeous scenery shots I've seen in a film.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (4K UHD Blu-Ray) - This is perhaps one of the most epic superhero films ever crafted. Now, I get that a 4 hour+ runtime is a huge ask and that a better storyteller may (should?) have found a way to trim some fat (I could have probably done without the lengthy epilogue added, which was a lot of buildup to stuff he knows he was never going to get to do), but at least it now has the time to build up characters like Cyborg & some of the greater lore behind what is going on. It's certainly better than the theatrical cut though, and the definitive way to watch the film if you decide to do so.

Finished watching Lethal Weapon 2. This movie was so much better than the first one! It feels like the first movie had a hard time finding its identity. It didn't know whether it wanted to be a serious or a funny movie. The second one focused more on being a funny movie and it worked out wonderfully. It also helped that Joe Pesci was in this one. He was absolutely hilarious. I'm really looking forward to watching the third movie now.