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

I liked the first 2 hours of Endgame, loved the last hour or so. There's a lot of fanservice, but I don't really have a problem with that. I'll probably see it again in a couple of weeks to catch a lot of the little stuff that I missed.

Shellhead wrote: I would love to see Metamorphosis Odyssey, The Price, and Dreadstar get some kind of movie/tv treatment. It seems incredibly unlikely, but then Guardians of the Galaxy was a not a team that I ever expected to see on the big screen. Starlin's epic Adam Warlock story is great, but the space jesus angle might make it a really tough pitch to a studio.

There’s a Kickstarter campaign going on right now for a Dreadstar omnibus. $99 is steep, but I guess that’s in line with books in a similar format. I’ve never read it but always wanted to so I’m in for now.

Josh Look wrote:

Shellhead wrote: I would love to see Metamorphosis Odyssey, The Price, and Dreadstar get some kind of movie/tv treatment. It seems incredibly unlikely, but then Guardians of the Galaxy was a not a team that I ever expected to see on the big screen. Starlin's epic Adam Warlock story is great, but the space jesus angle might make it a really tough pitch to a studio.

There’s a Kickstarter campaign going on right now for a Dreadstar omnibus. $99 is steep, but I guess that’s in line with books in a similar format. I’ve never read it but always wanted to so I’m in for now.

Out of curiosity, I just took a look at that omnibus Kickstarter. I've already got most of the contents, but it would probably cost quite a bit more than $99 if I ever needed to replace those issues. Plus you are spared the mostly disappointing contents of several issues of Epic magazine where the Metamorphosis Odyssey installments first appeared.

The overall Dreadstar series can be divided into 3 eras, based on creative teams and stories. The first era (including everything in this omnibus) is my favorite, introducing the setting and some good characters while featuring both the writing and artwork of Jim Starlin in every issue. The second era starts with issue #32, and has a more downbeat tone and a less cosmic scope. The creative team of the second era is Jim Starlin as writer and Luke McDonnell on pencils, and the art simply isn't as good. The era is from issue #41 through the end of the series, and it's almost as good as the original Starlin run. The third era creative team is Peter David as writer, and Angel Medina as the artist. I enjoyed the art in the third era, and the there was more humor in the stories. But the final two issues feature a fanboyish battle against satirical versions of the original Star Trek bridge crew, and those issues are awful.

I originally planned to watch the new episode of Game of Thrones, but a close friend wanted to hang out. I knew that he was a fan of the show, so I assumed he was hoping to watch it on my big 4K screen. But he surprised and disappointed me by admitting that he had stopped watching the show after season four. Not because he was unhappy with Game of Thrones, but just because life stuff got in the way and he fell behind. So he didn't want to watch the new episode until he had time to binge a few a seasons to catch up.

So instead of Game of Thrones, we watched the original Rollerball, courtesy of Amazon Prime. Everybody remembers the violence, but there was also various indications that it took place in corporate-owned dystopia. The movie isn't merely about James Caan beating some dudes up in a violent sport, it's about a cynical corporate overclass using drugs and violent sports to distract and hold down the downtrodden masses. Rollerball is deliberately designed to be a violent sport so that injuries tend to prevent the emergence of influential sports stars that might upset the tight control of the corporate executives. Veteran player Jonathan E manages to beat the odds and rise to the top of the sport, then resists attempts by the league to force him into retirement. In the same way that the Starship Troopers movie trolled fascists, Rollerball manages to simultaneously entertain and troll fans of full-contact sports. The violence continues to escalate through the movie then staggers to a bitter and yet triumphant finish.

The overall look of Rollerball can best be described as a very '70s vision of the future, but it holds up well enough to the modern eye. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but many of the indoor sets had a circular layout that reminded me of the Rollerball track. The particular shade of orange in the Houston team's colors shows up in various places away from the track, especially in Jonathan's home. This kind of attention to detail helped sell the setting and the story, but James Caan closes the deal with his steady performance and casual machismo. I suspect that Rollerball was an influence on both Slapshot and The Road Warrior.

End Game was worth waiting eleven years and twenty-odd movies for.

Before going to Last Jedi, I asked my dad what it was like to see Empire Strikes Back in theaters. I think End Game is going to be the same for my kids. Someday they’ll see it, and love it I hope, but it won’t be the same experience.

just saw Endgame too...absolutely incredible. Weird thing is that there were a couple of specific parts of the movie where my allergies started acting up like when and when and when

What an amazing, complicated, elaborate movie...I think it stands with the LOTR films as high points of genre filmmaking. The amount of cohesion and continuity with the past films is astonishing.

What a payoff.

Saw Endgame Thursday. Wife and I loved it. Kid had to go to the bathroom twice but otherwise sat through the whole thing without any talking or anything at all.

Saw Endgame. Can't wait for the spoiler thread in a month or so. I cant be trusted and I'm bad with tags.

I cried three times. What a pay off.

Yeah, I really want to rap about it full throttle...but it REALLY shouldn’t be spoiled...like, every ten minutes there is a MAJOR spoiler and I think even the main plot lines beyond “we gotta get Thanos” are spoilers.

I totally cried, and more than a couple of times. When you realize that you’ve been watching some of these characters for over a decade, and how much you actually ate emotionally invested in them especially if you were ever a kid that never in a million years you would see something that was like reading Secret Wars in 1985 in a movie...it does get a little emotional.

But man, I almost sobbed when

There’s so fucking much in this movie...I mean .

Oh and what about ? Holy shit, that is classic comics junk right there.

I also actually really liked how

Seen Endgame. It's a top ten MCU film, not a top five one for me. There's too much waffly set-up before the payoff and, visually, the film is exciting but it's a mess compared with the more careful cinematography and choreography of the top films. Also, I'm not sure the capstone on a 22 film arc could ever live up to its billing.

So, of course, I had to then go and make a ranked listed. There are eight, because after #8 on this list there's a big drop in quality between it and the next closest contender.

8 Spider Man: Homecoming
7 Endgame
6 Captain America
5 Dr Strange
4 Guardians of the Galaxy
3 Black Panther
2 Winter Soldier
1 Infinity War

Some random thoughts on this list:

- I've seen most of them twice. Guardians, Infinity War and Black Panther were as good second time round. Winter Solider was actually better: it would have been at the end of that list first time. Most didn't hold up, Dr Stranger, in particular, failed to do so: it was originally my favourite.

- The top 3 are the films which best attempted and succeeded in tackling wider themes beyond just explosions and big aliens, that's why they're the top 3.

- The interweaving of these films into a satisfying arc is perhaps their best achievement, lessons clearly learned from big-ticket TV. They've essentially turned it into a brilliant sci-fi soap opera.

- Captain America had by far the best character development over the series. Endgame didn't make me sad: in fact I found the symbolism of the handover at the end hugely uplifting.

Saturday morning, I had to run a bunch of errands. I noticed a huge line at the local comic/game shop, wrapping around the outside of the building, but drew a blank on why that might be. One errand included returning stuff to the library, so I lingered a bit to find a couple of movies to watch, including Solo. It wasn't until I was getting ready to watch Solo on Saturday night that I remembered that it was May the Fourth (be with you), so the line at the game shop was something Star Wars-related.

Solo was a solid 7, about on par with Predators, which seems to be a 7 according to everybody. The guy cast as Han Solo was decent, and even looked like a young Harrison Ford at times. Really, the whole cast was decent, except that it felt like Donald Glover could have heisted the whole movie if he had been given more screen time. Glover wasn't necessarily a better actor, but he really had panache, a star quality that could carry his own movie with ease. I hope that we get a Lando movie, but I don't really expect it.

I'm not really a Star Wars fan anymore, and haven't been one since 1983. But this looked and felt like a Star Wars movie, except for some parts where it almost seemed like a Firefly movie. Which is coming around full circle, since the basic premise of Firefly is roughly a Han Solo tv show. The story moved along at a good pace, except that the heists were ridiculous and dangerous failures that made everyone involved seem suicidally reckless. I'm sure that I would have loved Solo if it had come out in the '80s, but I'm not that kid anymore.

Iron Sky 2 The Coming Race was so funny I almost choked on my dinner. Definitely check it out if you liked the first one.

Apollo 11 is fucking amazing! Spoiler alert, they go to the moon and back. The quality of the footage is unbelievable. They even removed the wires so you don't see how fake it is. j/k. The filmmakers did a great job making this and I find myself kind of grateful this new record of it exists.

I normally steer clear of spoilers, but I had no reason to believe that I would ever watch an Iron Sky sequel. Now that I read the spoiler, I really want to see it.

Saw Ash is Purest White tonight. It's a Chinese film about a young woman and her experience in a town that's rapidly being left behind by modernization and her connections to the local underworld. It was well worth it if you can find it at the local art house theater.