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

I think the 3d in How to Train Your Dragon is the only 3d that ever really got to me. The flying sequences are just amazing.

Go watch Norsemen on netflix to see how....unthreatening a scandinavian accent is in english. Kind of like how ancient greeks and italians are played by english actors as well. Our ear has been trained by decades of film to respond to certain dialects.

ChristopherMD wrote: I liked that the town was basically a run by what seemed to be a few gossipy old ladies and that you have to piece some things together yourself.

It suddenly dawned on me why the two sisters didn't look at all like each other, and why there is no father around.

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood - the nostalgia put a smile on my face, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as two buddies were entertaining. But there wasn't a lot of movie there. Stuff happens, then more stuff happens, then it backs into an ending. For a three-hour movie, that's not necessarily a good thing.

Yeah. That's pretty much what I thought, too: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2019/07/h...ack-of-interest.html

That's too bad, I really like most QT stuff. Even if it is just meaningless dialogue it is usually at least interesting or delivered in a novel way. Heck, Hateful Eight is about 15 minutes of plot and 2 odd hours of dwadle but I loved it. RD and PF are kinda the same way. It ain't all good, the stunt car of death one was dry even for me.

jason10mm wrote: That's too bad, I really like most QT stuff. Even if it is just meaningless dialogue it is usually at least interesting or delivered in a novel way. Heck, Hateful Eight is about 15 minutes of plot and 2 odd hours of dwadle but I loved it. RD and PF are kinda the same way. It ain't all good, the stunt car of death one was dry even for me.

I stumbled into the middle of Death Proof at 2 AM a few years ago, not knowing anything about Tarantino's Grindhouse project. I watched what felt like about an hour of the scene in the bar, and thought, "This is like really bad Quentin Tarantino." Little did I know.

Danger Close: Battle for Long Tan. This is one of the best depictions of warfare I've seen in a film in a long time. It goes to some lengths to help the layman understand what's happening without resorting to the cinematic equivalent of crayons, and while some compression of space is inevitable, it's not too bad here. It's always challenging to film military units in a way that depicts their size clearly, and here what's supposed to be a company looks like a platoon at best, but despite that, it's a competent depiction of what happens when a larger force attacks a smaller one that has superior firepower, ambushes, reactions to fire drills, difficulty of manoeuvre to support, the paramount importance of artillery, the problem of air support, etc.

Death Proof was the last Tarantino movie that I really enjoyed. The pacing is languid for most of the first half of the movie, but I enjoyed the banter and the music. Stuntman Mike is an interesting villain, but Zoe Bell is the best thing about the movie. The car chase is also one of the best that I've seen.

Inglorious Basterds was a mixed bag. I love that several scenes were simply intense, high stakes conversations that sometimes ended in mayhem. Brad Pitt phoned in his performance. There is a lot going on, and the elements don't all come together in a cohesive way. The fire at the movie theater felt like a weird meta-commentary and pulled me out of the viewing experience. Some of the musical selections were entirely wrong.

Django Unchained was completely unenjoyable. The heavy usage of the n-word was entirely appropriate for the setting, but grating and exhausting in such a long movie. America has a shameful history of racism, but wallowing in a lurid exaggeration of the evils of slavery is just trolling the audience. Maybe Tarantino feels like he needs to try harder with each movie to shock his jaded viewers, but in the process he is losing other viewers.

The Hateful Eight is another round of high stakes conversations that eventually leads to mayhem, but it is also transparently a remake of John Carpenter's excellent remake of The Thing. The cast might be the best line-up of any Tarantino film, which is crucial because The Hateful Eight is more like a play than a movie. Upon reflection, maybe I should watch this again and see how I feel now. My original viewing was marred by a couple of Hmong teenagers in the audience who tittered every time someone uttered Tarantino's favorite (n-) word on screen. It was especially distracting because there were less than a dozen people in the theater at that weekday afternoon. Nearly 50% of my experiences in movie theaters in recent years have been disappointing due to assholes in the audience, so I rarely watch movies in the theater and try to go at times when attendance will be low.

I haven't bothered watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so far, due to very mixed reviews, but curiosity will eventually get to me. I'm sick of Tarantion's gleeful and unrepentant enabling of his racist fans, and I feel like he is less interested in telling stories than provoking shock. His talent is undeniable, but his choices of how to use that talent are increasingly questionable. Though Pulp Fiction is his most popular movie, I think he peaked while working on Kill Bill.

It's worth noting that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood doesn't feature even a single use of his favorite word.

Makes up for it with other racial slurs, though. More than one reviewer raked him over the coals for it.

I grew up reading superhero comics. After a few years, I developed a preference for Marvel comics, because their characters had more personality, I was lucky to grow up during a time when comic book writers gradually adjusted to an older audience, so the comics grew up with me. Some pretty good superhero comics were also getting published by small companies during the '80s. By the late '80s, DC was putting out better comics than Marvel. By the '90s, both companies were publishing a lot of bad comics, and in the '00s, the quality at both companies improved again. So I no longer prefer Marvel over DC or vice versa. However, modern Marvel movies are nearly always superior to modern DC movies. Aside from the Nolan Batman movies and the Wonder Woman movie, DC movies have been generally disappointing. Oh wait, that Shazam movie was also pretty good.

So I didn't expect much from the Birds of Prey movie and yet still found myself disappointed. Casting Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn was a brilliant decision, and probably the only good thing about Suicide Squad. But Time/Warner just won't trust Robbie to carry a movie on her own, so now we get another ensemble cast instead of solo Harley Quinn movie. The writing is uninspired. The story is thin. Aside from Robbie, none of the main characters can carry a scene, and I would be hard-pressed to pick some of them out of a police line-up. This movie is very nearly a complete waste of time.

And yet Bird of Prey does have some merits. Robbie has real star power and lights up the screen as Harley Quinn. Her character is fun and a little unpredictable, which makes her at least ten times as interesting as anybody else in the movie. The best moments are when Harley is on her own and just following her whims straight into mayhem. Put her in a scene with some of the other leads and she has to turn down the volume to give them a chance to shine. They never do. The fight scene at the funhouse near the end is moderately entertaining, and then it's over.

Usually the modern DC movies fail because they go grimdark or cheesy or both. Birds of Prey falls short because it won't let the star be the star, and weighs her down with mediocre co-stars.

Shellhead wrote: Last night, I watched Most Likely to Succeed, and that was the movie I needed instead of Mystic Pizza. Most Likely to Succeed is a documentary that starts with four high school seniors who were each considered "most likely to succeed" by their classmates at their respective schools, and then follows them for a decade, covering a span from 2007 to 2017. ...

Thank you. Watched this last night and you summed up my feelings well.

It made me think a lot about the complicated paths our lives take, and made me quite reflective of my own complicated path. I definitely couldn't have imagined myself being where I am now 10 or 20 years ago. I have also been thinking a lot lately about the how much success in life comes from the ability to make mistakes without being overly punished for them, and this really reinforces that.

Ancient_of_MuMu wrote:

Shellhead wrote: Last night, I watched Most Likely to Succeed, and that was the movie I needed instead of Mystic Pizza. Most Likely to Succeed is a documentary that starts with four high school seniors who were each considered "most likely to succeed" by their classmates at their respective schools, and then follows them for a decade, covering a span from 2007 to 2017. ...

Thank you. Watched this last night and you summed up my feelings well.

It made me think a lot about the complicated paths our lives take, and made me quite reflective of my own complicated path. I definitely couldn't have imagined myself being where I am now 10 or 20 years ago. I have also been thinking a lot lately about the how much success in life comes from the ability to make mistakes without being overly punished for them, and this really reinforces that.

This movie really interested me and I eagerly sat down to watch this tonight. I was thoroughly confused. Yes, the subject matter involves high school but it was laser focused on some High Tech High which offers an alternative learning style. What happened to Sarah and Quay? Is that them in the background? When do we get to their stories? It would seem that there are two recently produced documentaries called Most Likely to Succeed on Amazon Prime and I watched the one that was most likely to suck.

Last night I watched Die Hard. I had not seen it in quite some time, and you'll be happy to know, it's still the best action movie ever made.