What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Emily is seven now so i figured it was a good time for her to see E.T. with me. I still remember seeing it with my dad when i was seven. And just like i did with my dad, she asked me tons of questions the entire time. She loved it in the end and was blown away when the bikes started flying (spoiler).

I was bracing myself for the walkie talkies but the version we watched had the guns. I wish Lucas would circulate the original original trilogy as well. Its just simply better.

Black Barney wrote: I was bracing myself for the walkie talkies but the version we watched had the guns.

There was more than one version of ET?

Sagrilarus wrote:

Black Barney wrote: I was bracing myself for the walkie talkies but the version we watched had the guns.

There was more than one version of ET?

IIRC, for its DVD release Spielberg digitally replaced the rifles that soldiers are holding with walkie-talkies.

ChristopherMD wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote:

Black Barney wrote: I was bracing myself for the walkie talkies but the version we watched had the guns.

There was more than one version of ET?

IIRC, for its DVD release Spielberg digitally replaced the rifles that soldiers are holding with walkie-talkies.

And also replaced some of the practical effects with CGI (fortunately very little, but it's still noticeable).

My copy has both versions, though I don't know if anyone buys DVDs anymore.

so we're in for a bit fo a rain soon so I'll take her to a movie or two. My mom wants to take her to Christopher Robin which I don't mind skipping in order to see the new Mission Impossible or whatever. But then I'll take her to Teen Titans Go! The Movie, which I know nothing about except that it's supposed to be really good. I wonder if she'll not appreciate the step down from E.T. to that, and if she notices it then I'll be super proud

edit: so I tried introducing her to Narnia today and she couldn't even get half way through it. I thought fantasy might be a sure bet but it was just not enough action I guess? The pacing of E.T. didn't seem particularly quick but I guess the story is just so much better that it doesn't matter.

Will attempt Teen Titans Go today I think.

edit2: we drive all the way to the movie theatre to be told it's not playing anymore. But the website had a time that it was playing. Ugh. Instead of settling for Christopher Robin or Hotel Transvlania Cruise Ship Edition, we went to play mini golf. I forgot how much I despise that game. I feel like i'm getting melanoma the entire time. i got a hole in one on some difficult course (had to put through a small log) and they gave me a free round of play. I can't wait to give it away.

also I haven't even been in the US for a week (vacation) yet, but MAN is your pizza better than ours. I can't get enough of it.

edit3: So sounds like THE MEG is not going to be great. They cut out all the gore scenes to get it to PG-13 and instead of it being scary at all, it's just a plain ol' action movie. Oh well I wonder if SlenderMan is going to be any good. It also looks horrible.

I was rewatching Alien Covenant for some reason and it's even worse than I remember. The idea of couples being in charge of a super important missions with all those colonist lives on the line already makes no sense. But for some reason watching it this time it hit me for the first time just how unprofessional the crew is. Like, NASA typically sends its best into space. Math geniuses, great scientists and all that. But the crew of Covenant is not unlike the crew in Armageddon. Just a bunch of bozos. I hate this movie, I'm glad I stopped watching. I ended up watching the last half of Predator 2 instead and it was far more satisfying (in terms of decisions making sense)

i really need to see the new Mission Impossible and stop watching all this crap

Saw BlacKkKlansman tonight. Pretty good. dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2018/08/not-quite-klassic.html

Teen Titans Go! the tv show is hilarious. I'd love to see that movie but I'd need a kid to go with me so I don't look like a freak. Maybe I'll go see it at the drive in.

I'm curious about Hotel Transylvania 3. It was written by Tartakovsky and not Adam Sandler so it's got to be better than HT2 by several orders of magnitude.

I just watched "The End of the Tour" on Netflix, with Jason Segal as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipski, who wrote a profile about him. It was a nice, small movie that felt rather poignant given Wallace's fate, especially the "jumping out of a burning building" quote.

Also what Wallace said about writers needing to be alone and using other people.

Today, at the urging of my son, I took him to see Slender Man. What a useless film this is... they took a dozen older, better, horror films, stole elements from them, threw those in a blender, and tossed the result up on the screen. I'm certain their justification was that their audience was too young to know any better.

Well I knew better. Don't see Slender Man. Also, if you have seen The Ring, you have already seen a better version of Slender Man.

Saw "Christopher Robin" with my kids (ages 12 and 8) yesterday.
They wanted to see this new Winnie the Pooh movie. With no idea what to expect I went into the theater to be treated to my surprise by a truly endearing experience. Paddington 2 received alot of rave comments over here, but I dare to say this easily matches
that in quality and emotions. First of all, unlike many Disney movies this is not pushing an all too obvious sugary morale lesson
towards the audience. Instead it has a very subtle delicate tone, with some truly moving dialogue that manages to be philosphical
in a very approachable way that can move both adults and kids on the same fundamental level. Quite an accomplishment.
The acting is of a very high standard. It suddenly occured to me how layered the performanse of Ewan McGreggor is.
There is so much minimal expressions that say alot more than words.
The cinematography is beautiful, with the camera taking time to register alot of poetic detail of the english countride...filmed in muted beautiful colors. But most of all this movie hits exactly the right tone, allowing a deep melancholy to sink in with the audience, without losing it's joyfulness. A stunning balancing act.
Didn't see that one coming for sure...

i rewatched TRUMAN last night (that Spanish movie about a guy dying and his friend visits him for 4 days to help get his affairs in order). Still holds up and there are still a couple of killer scenes (when he runs into a friend of his who's wife he slept with and wrecked their marriage, only to see the friend really mournful that his old friend is now dying...wow...).

Anyone seen EIGHTH GRADE yet? That's next on my list but I might end up wanting to see Mission Impossible first. Also if anyone has seen The Meg, would love to hear if any part of it is worth it.

Eighth Grade is great, Barney. Not as *funny* as I thought it might be, for a Bo Burnham film, but nails a lot of the feeling and awkwardness of that age. And a terrific performance by the girl.

Christopher Robin is super sweet when it involves the stuffed animals and the 100 Acre Wood, but is kind of weak and a bit screwy otherwise. It’s message is delivered with very heavy hands, to the point where, as someone who already works very casually and devotes a fair amount of time to whimsy and leisure, I found myself pushing back against it a little, thinking, no, movie, people do need to spend some ample time working, or the world shuts down. It was fine, and worth watching for the Pooh characters, but it ain’t a zit on the ass of Paddington 2 in terms of overall quality and charm and inventiveness.

Black Barney wrote: i rewatched TRUMAN last night (that Spanish movie about a guy dying and his friend visits him for 4 days to help get his affairs in order). Still holds up and there are still a couple of killer scenes (when he runs into a friend of his who's wife he slept with and wrecked their marriage, only to see the friend really mournful that his old friend is now dying...wow...).

Anyone seen EIGHTH GRADE yet? That's next on my list but I might end up wanting to see Mission Impossible first. Also if anyone has seen The Meg, would love to hear if any part of it is worth it.

I'm eager to see Eighth Grade as well.

I saw The Meg over the weekend. Terrible. Not even "so bad it's good," just bad. It's also almost two different movies. They set up the beginning with an underwater facility and lots of subs, but someone must have realized it was too much like Deep Blue Sea meets The Abyss, so they scrapped all of that and spent the rest of the movie on the surface in a ridiculous beat-for-beat remake of Jaws. I will say the effects are pretty good, and maybe some of the action scenes, but overall I thought it was just boring. It really, really needed some cheesy, action movie-style one-liners, even though I know that's not Statham's style. Surprisingly, despite the plot and the title, I think everyone thought they were making a serious movie.

I was pretty OK with The Meg. It's by no means great, and it's also not-so-bad-its-terrible, but I found it to be an OK time waster. The disappointment is that it's neither of the contradictory things the trailer promised--a legitimate thriller and a spoof.

ok thanks guys! I have zero interest in seeing a Jaws spoof (even though it's not), and would much rather see a real thriller here (which it doesn't sound like either). So forget that noise.

Just got back from Teen Titans Go! To the Movies so that review should be up soon.

Next up is either Eighth Grade, Mission Impossible or MAYBE Christopher Robin but reading Grud's post really makes me think that would be my reaction to it as well.


I don't know if any of you thought of me when you read or heard about the latest news on the new Academy Awards category, but yeah, I'm obviously not very happy about it. For anyone that doesn't know, they are making a new category to cover popularity. This is obviously the band-aid fix to the age-old problem of the Academy not giving credit to movies that are immensely successful. But why should they?! There is already a reward system in place for that. It's called the Box Office. It's THE competitive measure that movie studios and the public and the media ALL use to measure how good or successful a movie is. It carries far more weight than an Academy Award ever did. Movie studios couldn't care less for nominations and awards, they want box office results. So now they're going to put this ridiculous category which I have no idea how you even measure, and it will stick out like a zit compared to the other awards. In fact, i'd be EMBARRASSED if my film's only nomination was that one. I'd rather have no nominations. It's almost like a razzie. "Hey your movie wasn't very good but everyone went to see it, so here you go" That is supposed to be a paycheck, not a prestigious award.

Can't wait to hear all the chatter this will cause as Hurt Locker will once again get thrown under the bus for beating Avatar. Which it absolutely should have done.