Last Movie You Watched

I love that movie. I saw it on my 18th birthday though I'm not really sure why or how we wound up there. I was out with a few friends making a wild night of it and the next thing I remember it's just myself and one friend sitting in a theater waiting for this new Jim Carey movie I'd never heard of. At that point my Jim Carey experience was In Living Color, the two Ace Ventura movies and Dumb and Dumber so I'm sure I was expecting a silly comedy and not what it ended up being but I was pulled right in. Then afterwards in the car my friend must have thought I was more out of it than I was because he was trying to convince me that my life was a TV show and there was a camera in his stereo.

 

The Truman Show is a genius gem! I saw it in theaters, back in the day, as well. Have seen it several times since.
Always nice, such friends...

Another (lesser known) beautiful, more serious Jim Carrey film is The Majestic!
If you haven't seen it yet, it's well worth it!
It's set in the early 50's, during the fear-fed upheaval around "suspected commies".

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 13, 2023, Original Post Date: Feb 13, 2023 ---

Last 2 movies I saw were



and

 

Halloween Ends.

 

I saw part of The Majestic on cable once but I've never gotten around to the whole thing. I've never gotten around to Bicentennial Man, either even though I'm a huge Asimov fan I'd always heard it was a pretty bad movie and just avoided it. What did you think of it?

That bad huh? I saw the first one in that new series back when it came out and that's where Halloween ended for me. I'll just stick with Halloween I-III

 

Full disclosure: Many years ago, I lived in Cairo, Egypt. It was an amazing time, but that's beside the point. When we were not out on some wild adventure, my gf and I had a hard time finding something to do in the evening. There was an amazing book store just around the corner, and they had a small DVD sellection where one day I picked up Bicentennial Man at random, just to have something to watch. As I remember it, the film was entirely alright -- a sweet little story about an android with a big heart -- and Robin Williams is always interesting to watch.

Perhaps it was the circumstance, (read: we were really quite bored), but we liked it just fine and I have fond memories of seeing it. The DVD is still on my shelf, somewhere, and while I haven't rewatched it since Cairo, I do intend to see it again, sometime.

Caveat: My memory is poor so I don't actually remember it all that well, but... I thought Bicentennial Man was a fine, little, SciFi-exploratory movie.

 

Its not actually bad. None of the last three have been bad in my opinion. Just not great.

A tad boring at odd times. Bewildering or bemusing at others. And quite gruesome the rest of the time. But generally quite agreeable to watch with interesting if not always successful creative choices, which they strangely seem to try to keep in balance by resorting to cliché and mediocrity at times. And I appreciated how playful they could be.

The major problem with all of them is the now ubiquitous and tell tale signs in modern movies of multiple rewrites, reshoots and 2nd, 3rd 4th.. etc thoughts. I could make a list as long as your arm of the logical inconsistencies and how many times they appear to contradict themselves or just drop and forget about things that seem important at one time. But in truth David Gordon Green makes good looking films, and gets very good performances from a well chosen cast and that's often half the battle.

I don't think these movies embarrass themselves or the franchise at all and I'd much rather watch these again before any other Halloween sequel besides III. I don't even rate the first sequel which I find utterly uninspired despite looking nearly as good as the original.

 

I don't like the second as near as much as the first and third but better than a lot of the slasher sequels back then or stuff like Halloween 4, 5, etc. And I always liked the way that it picked up right where the first one left off taking place the same night and making it one long movie. Albeit an uneven one where the first half is way better than the second. Even if Michael's killing spree is boring and there are some head scratching moments it's interesting to see the immediate aftermath of a slasher film as the news of what happened gets around to the town and friends/family of the victims. The first of the new Halloween movies I found pretty boring, I thought it was a pretty standard slasher movie and that's not a genre that lends itself well to playing it safe after decades of being done to death.

 

I watched Say Yes with my mom, and we really enjoyed it. The music was good, the story had the right amount of cheese, and people actually talked about things instead of just assuming things! ...for the most part anyways. 7/10.

Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantamania - My initial impressions and review are as follows:
Ant-Man 3 is one of the movies to exist. It's an actually tolerable Star Wars movie. (The main villain literally Force Lifts people.) Jokes aside, this movie forgoes what made the first two special - their size. (Pun intended.) The first two movies are fun palate cleansers focused on Scott and his life. This movie is clearly trying to be grander and more epic but drops Scott and the people in his life mostly, which makes it feel more generic.* It's a set-up movie. Hopefully this will help it age well, because right now, I wish Kang was set up in a different movie and this one just focused on Scott and his life again. 5.5/10 or 6/10. Not the worst movie ever, but definitely another dud in a string of duds by Marvel. The best one in the past two years (read: 2022 & 2023) has been Thor, which sucks.


Black Adam:
This movie wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. It gets props for its anti-imperialism message, but loses those same points for making nearly everyone an antihero jerk. (And for the Henry Cavill Situation.) Maybe it was because I was distracted, maybe it was because I was still in a slump after seeing Ant-Man last night, but I couldn't care about this movie for the life of me. It was just...there. Still, I'd recommend it over Ant-Man. Again, that's not saying much, but at least it's saying something. 6.5/10.



*The superhero family remains, but Scott's friends are all gone, the FBI detective makes a one-scene cameo, and even his ex-wife is mysteriously missing. It's jarring. In their place are a bunch of random once-named characters who feel more like special cameos than actual characters. Doctor Strange & the Multiverse of Madness had a similar problem.

 

You should really give The Majestic another chance... it's a bit slow at times, but it's a beautiful love story, set in a turbulent period in fairly recent US history.

I don't know who told you Bicentennial man is a bad movie, but I hereby personally question his/her/their ability to judge the quality of film.
(probably people who only think action-flics are good and if they need to use more than three braincells, they'll say it's "bad"... )

I's a story about love, selfdiscovery and selfdetermination. It spans several generations of one family and their android. Beautiful movie with ao: Robin Williams, Sam Neill and a genius role by Oliver Platt. Music is by James Horner (Titanic and Avatar) and directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and the first 2 Harry Potter movies)

It's not action packed like "I, Robot", but it has a great story and a lot of heart!

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 28, 2023, Original Post Date: Feb 28, 2023 ---

Sorry to read you didn't like "Prey". Personally I thought it was the best by far, since the original.

 

I rewatched this incredible movie as this week was the 43 year anniversary of this event, which IMO was the single greatest upset in the history of sports....

 

I've been watching movies on VUDU in a somewhat serial manner, getting bits and pieces, because I started this new practice with... Apocalypse Now! Final Cut. This is a Coppola film, and it is one of the finest films ever made. I do recommend the Final Cut as I've now seen every version released, including the 6-hour Redux. If you've never seen this film before, just see the Final Cut version. If you're a hardcore fan who has not sat down with some food and drink to binge on the Redux version, it's probably about time that you did. If you do, or even if you don't, it helps to have some knowledge beforehand of the history of the Viet Nam war.

I just finished Apocalypse Now!, as enthralled by it as ever, and then went on to something entirely different (to quote Monty Python): Arrival (the sci-fi first-contact movie), which became an immediate classic for me when I first saw it. Well, for one thing, I hadn't had any idea at all that Jeremy Renner could do anything but the perennial action figure type of role, and here, he really broke out for me.

But if you're a fan of hard sci-fi and you want something to sink your teeth into, where someone with some IMAGINATION proposes a life form that comes to earth from somewhere that is actually ALIEN, then this is the film. If you can handle reading Piers Anthony, Frederick Pohl, James Blish or Larry Niven, then Arrival will do it for you.

 

Well it wasn't a reputation I'd heard of just by word of mouth it was also a pretty big financial/critical flop. I'll have to check it out sometime though.

 

Last night, on the very last night it was shown in my local theater, I saw



14 years after the original, I thought it was quite enteraining. It had all the necessary fun, exiting, emotional and tense moments against jawdropping scenery! (pretty much a no-brainer why they won the Oscar for Visual effects, last night)
Was it the greatest piece of Cinema Ive ever seen? Not exactly, but neither was the original tbh.
But like the first one, this movie (in 3D ) ticked all the boxes for a fun bit of popcorn entertainment!
I actually did enjoy it with a box of salted popcorn!











There was a lot of talk beforehand, if people were still interested in an Avatar sequel after all this time... well, it sits at number 3 in the Highest Grossing Film of Al Time list! So I think that's a resounding YES!!

 

I rewatched John Wick 3 to prepare for John Wick 4 next week

 

watched Sadako vs Kayako on Shudder this weekend. Its actually pretty good.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 20, 2023, Original Post Date: Mar 20, 2023 ---

and tonight im watching these

Child's Play 1
One Dark Night
and either Manhattan Baby or Tenebrae on Shudder

 

A month or so ago, my wife and I saw M3gan. It was a blast. A few nights ago, we saw Cocaine Bear. Now, that was a BIG blast.
I won't spoil it, but it's definitely worth your time. It's just like the trailer says: cocaine drop goes awry, bear does a massive dose of coke, bear loses its blast and some human idiots lose a LOT of blood. And flesh. Yeah.

Go see it and enjoy the carnage.