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I just finished watching "Hector and the Search for Happiness". I guess this would be a rom-com. Instead of the boy chasing the girl to the airport he leaves on a plane without her in search for happiness. It is not the kind of movie I expected Simon Pegg to be in. Where are the zombies? Where is the of the end of the world? But he does seem to figure it out in the end.
Score 10/10
I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel with a friend yesterday, who said he had liked it the first time he saw it. I hated it and only finished because he said he had liked it; after it was over we each foud out that the other hadn't liked it either! He had changed his mind on a second viewing.
double trouble a presley film. good entertainment
A Most Wanted Man -- excellent Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Whiplash -- excellent J.K. Simmons
The Sapphires -- fascinating, recommend it, on Netflix
Very tough and serious film -- '71, as in Belfast, Ireland in 1971. Very involved and suspenseful. Exceptional directing, fine acting.
I saw "Ghost World" last night. Two high school graduates have to transition into a larger reality. One makes it OK. The other finds a bus.
Score: 8/10
Interesting movie. It was based on a graphic novel.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Yes, it had that introspective, graphic novel feel about it and the main character liked to draw. My favorite movie that came from a comic was Posy Simmond's "Tamara Drewe".
I saw Gabe Polsky's documentary "Red Army" last night. It's about the Soviet hockey teams of the 70s and 80s, and concentrates on the career of Slava Fetisov, one of the all-time great defensemen. Fetisov is now the Minister of Sport for Russia, and he's clearly a charismatic character, in a phlegmatic, Russian manner. The movie contrasts the methods and style of legendary Soviet coach Anatoly Tarasov (whose, daughter, by the way, is the world's most famous figure skating coach) and his successor, the KGB-man Viktor Tikhonov.
The viewer revisits the Cold War, attempts by Russian players to get high-paying NHL jobs, and the nationalism that was a part of the sport. Fetisov and his famous "Russian 5" line mates dazzle the North Americans with their fluid play, and move on to success in the NHL. I'm about the same age as they are, played and coached college hockey, and idolized the Soviet style of play, so I liked the movie. So did my girlfriend, who hates watching sports in general, though.
It's interesting to me, Y/N, that we had opposite interpretations of the end of this film. I haven't seen it for many years, but my memory is that the girl you say "makes it OK" failed to leave the "ghost world" of their petty and insipid little town, and that the one who got on the bus was the one who made it okay.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I think you are right about the author's intent in Ghost World, Pompey Bum, although I have not read the graphic novel.
However, it could also be viewed the other way. The girl who followed the old man on the bus vanished into the ghost world like the old man did. She scorned the petty and insipid world and caused personal damage to those around her. That she caused damage to others makes me think that her view of reality was wrong, or "ghost"-like.
My disagreement with your perspective (which I respect, by the way) is that a kind of harm also befell the girl who stayed. Her free spirit and potential were crunched into the cheap and controlling needs of the town (didn't she become a popcorn vendor at a local cinema or something?) The girl who left, however, remains free in a world where big girls and big boys have to deal with a little hurt sometimes. But I guess the title could be taken either way--or even as an indictment of both ways.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
The Goonies, every now and then I try to show my son some classics from my youth and we both enjoyed the Goonies last night. good fun
Saw Home at a special showing for toddlers in the daycare circuit. I enjoyed being there instead of managing kids in a playroom or whatever, but the movie really sucked.
0/10, I didn't find any redeeming qualities.
Also is there a worse animation studio than Dreamworks? I really don't know how they manage to put out such crappy movies so consistently.
I liked the first Shrek movie which was by Dreamworks. Also The Croods and Kung Fu Panda were pretty entertaining, but I am easy to please.
Here is the list of Dreamworks movies. I don't recall seeing the others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamWorks_Animation
The first Shrek was quite good actually, definitely their high point Prince of Egypt, Chicken Run and Antz are tolerable, though Antz is hindered by some really bad animation. Kung Fu Panda sort of epitomizes everything lame about Dreamworks. Take a lame story, lame jokes, get a lame, recognizable, celebrity, voice actor for pizzaz and just lame your audience out, they're kids anyway.
I agree that Kung Fu Panda was lame. I wouldn't want to see it again. I think I saw Antz when my daughters were young, now that you mention it, but if I can't remember much about it, it probably wasn't very good.
It's the one where Woody Allen is an ant, dealing with the psychological issues of being a drone in a colony. It's not horrible, but like I said, the animation is bad. A Bug's Life is about a jillion times better anyway.
I think it was "A Bug's Life" that I saw with my daughters. I remember watching a 3-D animation related to that movie at Disneyland. My youngest was small and she wanted to sit on my lap. I wasn't sure how much she was understanding or even seeing with the 3-D glasses on until I felt her startle when one of those locusts (or whatever the bad bugs were called) burst out at us.
I think I might have seen Antz now that you mention Woody Allen. I remember he wanted someone to step on him to put him out of his misery. That part was amusing.
my most recent movie was (apart from bits and pieces of the avengers on television) was "dawn of the planet of the apes."
I found it absolutely enthralling and intense. id watch it again. I love how current technology can take old classics and remake them with better visuals. the movie raises all sort of questions about human nature and the human condition too.
I saw "Accidental Love" last night: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/accidental_love/
This is a mockery of romantic comedies. And politicians. And the medical profession. And police on motorcycles. And Indiana small town eateries. And girl scouts. And health insurance. And lobbyists.
I loved it. Score: 10/10
I saw "Chappie" a couple of nights ago: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chappie/
This is a story about reincarnation through artificial intelligence. AI supposedly solves the problem of death by "saving" individual consciousnesses onto some digital medium and then loading it back into a body. The problem with all this is if AI can move an individual's consciousness from one body to another, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of a person's body. This undermines a materialistic notion of consciousness which AI seems to also promote.
One of the things I didn't like about the movie was that the bad guys were portrayed as "spiritual". Two of them crossed themselves before going into battle for selfish reasons. This attempt to create a stereotype of a bad, religious opponent of AI spoiled the entertainment value this movie might have had.
There was also another idea of taking the next "evolutionary step". I suspect this implies letting AI machines become the next species replacing us. I like the idea that evolution has a cultural component. It is not selfish genes replicating. However, I suspect we are the new species, the next evolutionary step, not some machines. We have only begun modifying the environment by our cultural activity.
The movie seemed to be visually well-done, but the dialogue left me questioning. The movie should have made me forget my questioning and enjoy the film as any well-done fantasy would, but I couldn't forget that the underlying message was nonsense.
Score 3/10
I finished "Interstellar" about an hour ago: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/interstellar_2014/
It is the near future and the Earth is done for. Space missions are being sent through a wormhole to find another planet to inhabit. Who put the wormhole there? Who is the ghost bothering Murph?
I found it amusing that right at the beginning there was mention that the Apollo missions were faked for political reasons.
There is a lot in this movie that doesn't make sense, such as going through the black hole and going back in time, but unlike Chappie, I didn't mind for some reason. I think because the going back into time stuff was just there to hold the story together until it finished. It was not critical to believe in it to be entertained. Ultimately this movie was a rom-com at heart.
Score: 8/10
This is the first full-length film that I have watched for some time . It falls under the category of 'ripping yarns' insofar as it's about a group of disaffected ex-submariners who following WWII attempt to find a hidden cache of diamonds on board a ship that was wrecked on the African coast during the war. Starring Richard Johnson, Jeremy Kemp and Peter Vaughan as a very unlikely German, the female interest is provided by Honor Blackman who is totally superfluous to requirements and an embarrassment to boot. Ninety-nine per cent of adventure films require the suspension of belief and this is no exception.
5/10
We went to see "Spy" last night: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/spy_2015/
I don't think my scores count for much since before the previews were finished, that is, before I actually saw the movie, I knew this one was going to be a 10.
This is a movie about how one overweight female and another rather tall one team up to kick butt, retrieve the missing nuclear weapon and save something or other.
Score: 10/10
Ping Pong: The Animation
Eleven episode anime series which tracks the progress of four major characters over a two year period of competition in the Japanese high school ping pong national championship. This series has been recommended to me quite a few times and since it's freely available on youtube I decided to check it out, and it's definitely worth a watch. The series features animation which is heavily stylized to a degree that some people, like myself, may find slightly jarring or unsettling. Ultimately I didn't end up overly disliking or appreciating the animation style, but I can see how it might possibly pose a challenge to some viewers. The show starts out strong from the first episode and only gets better; by the end I was very committed to the overall story line, and by the time every plot point converged into the very satisfactory, but open ended, conclusion I was quite moved.
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSuAhbtIFg
9/10
Just Before I Go: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/just_before_i_go/
This is romantic comedy where the main character decides to commit suicide but first he wants to confront the people in his past whom he thought caused all his problems. He discovers after contacting them again that they have problems of their own. Some of their problems are a bit odd such as his sister-in-law pretending to be sleep-walking. The people he was going to beat up, he turns out befriending. A female whom he viewed as a friend, he turns out damaging.
Predictably he meets a cute girl and that is one of the two problems with this movie: too much is predictable. The other problem is when you get to a part that is not predictable, such as his sister-in-law pretending to sleep-walk into his room at night, it is weird and you wonder just why is someone doing that?
Score: 5/10
Real Genius 1985
This was a futuristic comedy but very outdated. Was expecting a classic but it's a 5/10
Its about students getting into Pacific Technical University to figure out things about a laser. It couldn't be done any worse because the whole movie is a party until the very ending.
"The Voices": http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_voices/
Jerry is a young man with issues from his childhood. He lands a job where he falls in love with one of the accountants. She doesn't like him, but her co-worker likes him and another coworker wouldn't mind being his girlfriend either. He also has a female psychologist who sort of likes him, but not in a romantic way.
He has a dog, who is his good angel, and a cat, who is his not-so-good angel. They talk to him when he is not taking his meds giving him advice, some good, some not-so-good.
The three accountants each end up in his--well, I don't want to spoil the story, but they start giving him advice as well as if he were married to all three of them. Finally he captures his psychologist and insists she explain to him why God made him like this. She gives a pretty good answer which I forget at the moment.
Things don't go well for Jerry since the police have him trapped, but everything works out in the end.
The whole movie is weird, but entertaining.
Score: 8/10
Just saw Jurassic World, like the rest of the world apparently. Liked it for what it is, a few weird moments in it but ok. I like raptors and they have a kinda of a wolf-like relationship with Owen. Very predictable and pretty easy to see beforehand who wouldn't make it through to the end, but that is often the thing with action of this kind.
Entertaining and my son loved it.
I can only rate it against the other 3 and I would say it's second or third best... 1,4,2,3, I think or 1,2,4,3, three is crap
Really? Weren't there at least dinosaurs running around?Quote:
Originally Posted by Helga
Being a connoisseur of the 1950's, the last decade before TOTAL conformity finally triumphed under the guise of phony non-conformity, I watched the British film Venetian Bird that's set in post-war Venice and starring a range of stock English actors as Italians. In the capable hands of director Guy Green, this adventure yarn about a plot to assassinate a leading politician is well worth its You Tube presentation. 7/10
Robert Mitchum plays the part of an assistant to a very rich man the origin of whose wealth is a closely guarded secret. When the man dies of a heart attack, Mitchum sets off on a search for the truth about the money. This takes him to various European countries where he discovers that his employer's fortune has been derived from blackmailing important people. Unutterably dull, if not entirely pointless, the film turns out to be one of Mitchum's rare duds.
Written, directed and produced by the same man, Sheldon Reynolds, this quest to uncover a secret bears a very slight resemblance to Citizen Kane but Reynolds is no Orson Welles and there all similarity ends.
2/10
I saw 'to kill a Mocking bird' with Gregory Peck. I'd give it a 6. Some of the acting was over the top (stage acting on a movie) and focuses on the message rather than the plot.
This is a fine example of the post-war films that Britain excelled in before the great dumbing down.
John Mills, one of Britain's finest actors, plays an engineer who suffers a brain injury in a bus crash and who spends a long time in hospital before being signed-off as fully recovered.
He returns to work for a company in a town where he is living in a residential hotel and where shortly afterwards a young woman resident is murdered in a nearby park.
Circumstantial evidence and his former mental condition point to his being the killer but even when he finds out the real murderer the police refuse to believe him and he goes on the run to get proof of the man's guilt.
Reminiscent of Hitchcock's better work, this is a first class film with top notch direction, acting and atmospheric photography.
They really don't make 'em like this any more.
10/10
Alighting on this title whilst surfing the web, I imagined that it was another piece of American rubbish along the lines of 'I Was a Teenage Werewolf' and other hyperbolic screenings. I was wrong, because it's a piece of British rubbish along the lines of 'The Trollenberg Terror': both of which found it necessary to have an American actor in the leading part.
Supposedly set in a northern English village, it was in fact set in Shere, a village in southern England that I have often walked through. The village pub, which, unsurprisingly, I am also familiar with, is a hotel in a film that concerns a supposed invasion by robots that kill the citizens and resurrects them as zombies. Why they do this isn't explained but suffice it to say that although the film was directed by Terence Fisher, a kind of ersatz Roger Corman, and lasts for only 1 hour and two minutes, it was too long by 62 minutes.
A guitar strumming hick is visited in prison by a radio station presenter looking for the 'authentic American music' and is later taken up by television and elevated to the position of the nation's homespun philosopher and voice of the common man. From there he is championed by politicians seeking to use his manufactured popularity to ensure the people's vote but he turns on his manipulators and tries to get power for himself.
A less manic performance by the leading player (Andy Griffith) and tauter direction might have created a genuinely interesting film about the gullibility of the average Joe but it manages to be both glum and rampant at the same time and at 2 hours+ it long outstays its welcome.
5/10
Frenzy was the penultimate film that Hitchcock directed and it's a good one.
Set in London and using an all English cast of stalwarts, the story concerns a number of women being found strangled and still wearing the killer's necktie around their necks. The prime suspect is the former husband of one of the victims who has a personality disorder that leads him to be violent when mildly provoked. Eventually the police track him down and arrest him with the help of the real killer, whom he thought was his friend, and is sentenced to life imprisonment. However, the police inspector in charge of the case decides to follow up on the convicted man's assertion who the real killer is and discovers the truth.
While not for the squeamish, the murders are convincing in their presentation, and the crude dialogue of some of the characters is realistic but not gratuitously so as is the case nowadays.
Some unlikely happenings and a pointless subplot about the police inspector being subjected to his wife's unpalatable cooking detracts from the story but it still gets 8/10.
:)Quote:
Originally Posted by Emil Miller
The title of that film might have been a warning. I'll make sure I don't watch it.
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We recently saw Train Wreck: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/trainwreck/
Parts of this movie could be funnier. Other parts probably shouldn't get funnier.
There is a delightful scene with Amy and her sister listening to their father trying to explain to them as children that monogamy was an unrealistic social construction. Another scene to look out for is Amy running her mouth in a movie theater while her boyfriend holds off another couple (actually the male half of that couple) telling them to shut up.
It is sort of a feel-good rom-com except Amy is too strange for stereotypes. She goes all out to finally get the man she loves, but her low faithfulness factor, thanks to her father, makes me wonder if we will not get a sequel to this one.
Score 8/10
CAKE - 2014
At first, this film certainly promises something difficult and challenging. But having struck variously angry or black-comic notes in its opening section, it morphs into a piece of indie-sentimental awards-bait for its producer-star Jennifer Aniston. She plays Claire, a Percocet addict who is in chronic pain, given to angry outbursts at her support group and left depressed and conflicted after the suicide of her counsellor, Nina (Anna Kendrick). Claire is drawn into a friendship with Nina’s widow, Roy (Sam Worthington), and remains impossibly difficult with her long-suffering maid and carer, Silvana (Adriana Barraza). Inevitably, the explanation for her condition is left for the third-act reveal, which we reach via the mandatory grieving, healing and self-forgiveness. The relationships and plot transitions feel forced, and the trope of the ironic hallucinatory ghost is glib and cliched (David Cronenberg carried it off more successfully in Maps to the Stars). As for Aniston, she gives an honest, well-intentioned performance, but it is marooned in an unsatisfying script whose emotional effects are unearned.