I thought it was great, very engaging from beginning to end. Brad deserves some recognition here, I don’t know about Oscar, but certainly a nomination. I read the book in the weeks before seeing this which really helped because so much stuff is just glossed over in the movie. Not that you’d miss it if you haven’t read the book, but it was great to know the full story behind some of the seemingly unimportant comments or actions in the movie. Sometimes when I like a movie a lot I don’t have much to say, and this is one of those cases. I don’t know if I want to say flawless, but I certainly can’t think of anything I’d change. I will definitely give it another watch sometime.
Colin Farrell killed it in this one. I thought it was really fun, and an interesting take on the currently oversaturated vampire genre. Finally we get beastly looking vampires instead of just pretty people with fangs. Red Mist was good too. A few weeks after watching this we rented the original, and only watched about half of it. We got too tired and said we’d finish it the next day, and then just didn’t. It was pretty lame, but it seems like the remake more or less followed that story. The biggest difference is that the main character was not skeptical, it’s like they rolled the Chekov and McLovin characters into one. Pretty awesome fight scene at the end too. Overall no great but no complaints.
I prepared myself for this to suck, but it surprised me. A crew of mercenaries, murderers, and general badasses (and Topher Grace, but spoiler he’s a murderer too) are dropped on what is presumably either the Predator home planet or just some jungle planet they use to hunt, and then are picked off one by one. You know that only one or two people are going to get out, and it’s easy to predict that it will be Adrien Brody and the chick. I figured this would be the case, with another possibility being that he sacrifices himself at the last minute to helpt he girl escape. She was definitely gonna make it, because this is a movie.
The references to Arnold are what made this really work. Tying in his report of what happened in the 80s lends a huge amount of credibility to this, and gives these characters a reason to not just repeat everything he did. The kills were pretty good for the most part, and while no one did any stellar acting work, they did exactly what was needed for a “Predators Are Gonna Murder Almost Everyone Just Sit Back And Enjoy” movie. Well worth a stop if it’s on TBS.
This was a very fun little action/comedy. Or maybe comedy/action. It was foremost a comedy but had lots of very well done car chases and fights. Anyway, clocking in at under 90 minutes this things gets going right away and doesn’t really slow down at all. Aziz and Eisenberg play off each other quite well, as do Kenny Powers and Nick Swardson. And they didn’t kill the Major, I was pleased to see him in the post credits bit. It’s a perfect time waster kind of movie, well worth 90 minutes but once it was over it started to fade.
Wow I really enjoyed this movie. I have nothing bad to say about it. Every actor was great, it had a good story, good music, good everything. I probably should have seen the “twist” coming but I didn’t, which made it even more enjoyable. Gosling stands out as the highlight of the film, but I don’t want to take away from anyone or anything else, it was one of the best of 2011.
Pretty sweet action flick. Ultimately forgettable, but in the moment it’s pretty awesome. The IMAX looked great, except maybe the sand storm scene because you can’t see shit anyway so now we can just see a huge amount of nothing rather than an average amount of nothing. The story was good, they kept it simple, brought it back to M:I’s cold war roots: There is a Russian plot to start nuclear war, and the IMF needs to stop it. Of course they’re rogue now, that’s what happens to agents like this. The action set pieces were great and didn’t feel forced. There was some tie in to the other movies that I didn’t expect (Ving Rhames!), Simon Pegg was particularly funny, and Tom Cruise has still got it.
It looked AMAZING. Awesome plane stunt, the IMAX was huge and beautiful and it was shot wonderfully. Unfortunately, I was really disappointed by it overall, and it had everything to do with not being able to understand Bane. If the viewer is struggling just to comprehend the main character of a scene they will be pulled out of the experience and can’t enjoy it. I don’t care if it’s a directorial choice to add mystery to a character, if characters onscreen are shown to be able to communicate with a another character that the audience cannot understand, even though they’re speaking English, we have a major problem. I hope Nolan sees the reaction to this and does something about it, because if viewers are distracted and struggling just to interpret everything the main villain says it’s going to take us out of the movie and really hurt the experience. If the person he is talking to understands him the audience needs to as well.
Before looking up a copy of the script I honestly had no idea what happened other than the obvious action. Bane had some plan, part of which was to be caught by the CIA. He and his men manage to gain the upper hand via another plane and some machine guns. Bane transfers some blood from the doctor who gave him his mask(?) to a dead body, but not a whole lot. Then Bane tells one of his henchmen to stay behind to be found in the wreckage. Bane and the doctor allow the plane to fall away while they are hoisted up into the other plane. Annnnnd scene. Why did any of this happen? Beats me. At least the Joker scene had a clear intention: rob a bank. It didn’t matter whether or not it was connected to the rest of the movie, it was a mini-movie in and of itself. Even after reading the script for TDKR Prologue it seems like the only point of this was to rescue that doctor, because he is presumably important to Bane/Bane’s mask. The audience has no idea who he is yet, so should we care?
The bank heist in The Dark Knight is just so much better than this scene. It’s an easy to understand story that sets up the character of the Joker perfectly. The only thing we know about Bane from this scene is that he has loyal henchmen and if he removes his mask “it would be very painful”, unclear if he meant for him or for the person doing the removing. I really hope this is not an indication that the rest of the movie will be hard to follow and borderline pointless. Not that this scene is definitely pointless, tied in with the rest of the film it may eventually make sense. But after the prologue of The Dark Knight I expected something to at least match that. Instead we got a beautifully shot, action packed scene devoid of any real characters or point as far as the audience is currently concerned.
I was pleasantly surprised by this. It had received overwhelmingly good reviews, but I still thought it would be overly schmaltzy and happy and meh. It was those things, except meh. Sandra was pretty awesome, and her little son stood out as well. As did her big adopted son. The script was pretty tight, witty, and flowed perfectly. I didn’t know much about the true story except that he is now in the NFL, so I didn’t really see every bit of it coming. I watched this 2 weeks ago and slacked on the review so I don’t have a ton of details, but I’ll say it was deserving of the attention it received, maybe not a Best Picture nomination, but it was only in there because of the stupid 10 film rule that year.
The description of this movie does it no favors, but then I saw the trailer and as soon as George Clooney started narrating I was on board. It’s a really good movie, not a typical “family dealing with death” movie, but it does hit those points. They sit there and yell angrily at a woman in a coma instead of sitting around crying (they do that as well eventually). The little detective story with George trying to find the man who cuckholded him is really fun. The relationships in this movie feel very real. It was well acted, written, directed, I really don’t have a bad thing to say.
Machete. Maidens. Unleashed! Really good documentary about the exploitation films of the 60s and 70s in the Philippines. I didn’t realize that they were all shot over there. I haven’t really seen any, just clips and stories about them, but they’re always in the jungle to it makes sense. Some of the details are pretty rough, terrible working conditions, mistreatment of the locals, but they defend it with the “those were the times” argument. Jackie Brown seems like the only actress to make it out of the genre to do anything else of note. And that little dude, Weng Weng! Fucking hilarious.
