I loved it. It was so well written. The characters were instantly likable and just the right amount of cliché, which appropriately grew over time. I knew a little bit more than I wish I did going into it, but not nearly enough to have it spoiled. The trailers gave away that Topher didn’t die, but otherwise all the stuff that seemed spoilery is actually set up in the opening scene. Great opening scene by the way, with the title card popping up like it does.
The acting in the cabin was ok, as to be expected. They all played their parts well enough for their purposes. In the control room though, everyone rocked. It got to the point where I did not care about the cabin at all, I just wanted to watch the puppeteers. This changes the way I will watch any slasher/horror movie again. I can never not imagine that they are behind the scenes manipulating every little thing.
I hope that this means the end of the genre as we know it. I know it doesn’t, because just like the gods below in this one, we moviegoers need to see the same old teen sacrifices year in and year out. But maybe it will make the filmmakers go at it just a little bit differently.
This one demands a rewatch or three. I need to see the scene in the basement again, and identify all the little trinkets.
Even as a fan of the first three movies, I found it hard to love this one. There were some moments that really worked, like MILF, but so much just fell flat. Like The Hangover Part II, this was full of rehashes of jokes that worked way better last time. And the acting, which has never been a highlight of this series, was particularly bad. Especially Rookie of the Year and Chris Klein. So bad. Alyson Hannigan felt completely wasted here. Jim’s Dad was good, even Jim was good. Finch too. And Stifler did exactly what you’d expect, so that worked. But no new ground was broken. “Hey guys, we’re old now, and things didn’t turn out like we hoped, dick joke”.
I gotta say, I really liked it. I was a naysayer the whole time it was being made, but in the end it all came together quite nicely. Not everything was perfect, but enough was. The world of Panem was so wonderfully realized, especially the Capital. They could have gone way over the top, but they kept it pretty real, like an extension of the celebrity that already exists today. The games themselves were pretty good, except for the cave part but thankfully that was short. Lots of stuff was left out or slightly altered from the book, but nothing that really hurt the movie.
The ending kind of sucked. Well, I guess I’d say that if there were an ending. It’s so clearly just part 1 or a trilogy (please don’t make it 4 movies…), and I knew that going in, but it’s no excuse. Even the Lord of the Rings movies felt like they each had a solid conclusion to the story. I still think that having the whole series be two movies would have been best. Cut all the bullshit out of this one, have a rather quick victor’s parade, and then hit us with the cliffhanger ending: they are going back into the arena. Part two would be 30-40 minutes of solid games action, and then the revolution for 2 hours.
So yeah, I was a hater, but I’ve come around. I look forward to seeing it again on blu-ray, hopefully with some kind of enhanced viewing mode, or at the very least a commentary. Catching Fire is going to be awesome. Mockingjay will probably suck, but that’s a story issue and it doesn’t look like they’ll be making and huge changes to that.
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.
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.
We saw this weeks ago and I just forgot to write about it. I went in only because Crystal wanted to, I thought it would just be a stupid waste of time with maybe a couple good action sequences. Boy was I wrong. It was a solid movie, with LOTS of AWESOME action sequences. My fave would be the one toward the beginning with the Japanese looking robot (I forget his name), but every single one was great. The father/son story was one we’ve seen many times before but it worked anyway. The relationship between the boy and Atom was good too, it has a very Speilbergian feel to it, this could have been called “A Boy and His Robot”. The boxing story is straight up Rocky, and it works juuuuust fine. This was one of the biggest surprises of the year for me.
I went into this with very little information, all I knew is that he was a stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. And it’s a good thing too, I later watched the trailer and it really gives away a lot.
I loved it, everything about it. The music, the visual style, the acting, I don’t have a bad word to say about it. The mystery behind Driver’s character and motivations may be frustrating to some, but I thought it worked just fine. In this way it’s like a modern western, the man with no name rolls into town, trying to do good and live his life but fate has other plans.
The sudden, terrible violence kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. No one was safe, and anything could happen at any time. The music was distracting at first, like they had an old Miami Vice temp track and just decided to go with it, but it grew on my by the end. Great ending too, a bit ambiguous, but he did what he needed to do, and the girl is safe. Easily my favorite movie of the year so far.
We saw this at least a month ago and I just forgot to write about it. I didn’t really want to see it, but it turned out to be pretty good. It had excellent performances, a tight script, and some unexpected funny bits. I do have one question: what exactly do you put in a pie to not only cover up the taste of shit but make it taste good?
The Cowboys were awesome, the aliens not so much. As a western this could have been a really good movie, but it ended up falling flat. The effects, cinematography and acting all stood out as very good, and even the writing when it didn’t involve alien stuff, but I was not a fan of the overall story.
So the aliens are there to get gold. Whatever, it’s a thin premise but we need to get behind it. My thinking is that a space faring civilization has clearly figured out lots of stuff we haven’t, do they really need to mine other planets for gold, even if it’s something they use for tech instead of value? There must be an easier way to accomplish whatever it is the gold does for them. Anyway, they need to gold, and have set up shop mining a shit ton of it. So why start abducting humans? To figure out their weaknesses? Why the fuck do they care, they are happily mining a shit ton of gold out in the desert with no human interference! Plus, it’s pretty clear that human weakness is basically “shoot/explode them and they die”, it’s easy. Why all the light blades and hypnotizing blobs and disintegration? Even is movies like this where the central conceit is one very far from reality, it still needs to make sense within its own internal logic. I don’t care how crazy a movie gets, if it follows its own rules I will be on board.
The Olivia Wilde storyline was just dumb. So she’s another alien from another planet, but she’s the only one who is following them. It’s never quite clear what powers she has or why she’s pretending to be human. She could have just watched from the distance, but instead decided to become romantically involved with Daniel Craig.
I just don’t care enough to go on anymore. This movie had some solid western parts, and it was shot very well, but the story was lacking.
