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

Finally got around to seeing The Fast and The Furious (2001). It was okay, better than I expected. Plenty of action, and not just car chases, but I feel like this cast could have shined with a better script. I always like Vin Diesel, and Paul Walker was better than expected. Michelle Rodriguez might not have great range, but she should have gotten more lines. As usual, any movie featuring an undercover cop inevitably results in said cop blowing his own cover by the third reel. Even if that's a genre trope, I still call that bad writing. Some of the music was good. Still, it's hard to believe that this Point Break imitation spawned a movie franchise nearly as extensive as Star Wars.

Underwater (2020) is an okay horror movie that takes place in the Marianas Trench, about 7 miles underwater of course. Kristen Stewart stars and delivers an average performance, as does the rest of the small cast. There were nods to better movies, including Alien, The Abyss, and The Haunting (due to the frequent booming sounds). The monsters were not bad, but somewhat disappointing. After a couple of normal minutes at the start, the movie lunges into action so abruptly that it felt like someone fast-forwarded through the first half hour. There was a stretch where the movie heated up with some fine suspense during a very claustophobic crawl through a semi-collapsed passage. Otherwise, Underwater is a horror movie that is a little light on the scares, and the limited gore is literally watered-down. The plot was okay and this could have been a much better movie with better writers and acting.

Sagrilarus wrote: It just started. This is awful. Y’all paid money for this?

Paid Imax money. Sometimes that giant screen can hide some of the flaws

Yeah, that final Endgame battle is almost physically exhausting. The all girl rally is a bit cringe but felt well earned after me and the kid binged all the films over the past month or so.

I still feel that Hollywood REALLY underestimates the power a couple dozen Tomahawk missiles or MLRS volleys would do to what is almost a medieval battle with a bit of magic being tossed around but I get that these heroes need to justify themselves

Underwater was an odd duck. It had so many surreal moments (anything discussing the captains daughter, for example) that never went anywhere that I gotta think there was a lot cut out to make the film just a monster film instead of something more. Shame really, because we don't get many films at this level with these actors anymore.

I also don't think they really explain why these folks didn't just get into a suit and swim....up. They didn't seem to be living at pressure like in the Abyss which would require a decompression (I may have missed this though) so why not just get in a pressure suit and head to daylight? Anyway, minor quibble really.

A few movies this weekend...

We started with Triple 9, a new crime movie on Netflix that desperately wants to be Heat, but doesn't bring the writing chops to back it up. Feel free to skip this one.

Next was everyone's favorite Christmas film, Die Hard. It hadn't actually been that long since I've seen it, but I'm pretty much always down for this film. It's so, so good. Every little detail matters.

After discussing how we had never seen the fourth or fifth Die Hard movies, we made the poor decision to watch number 4, Live Free or Die Hard. I had never heard anything good about this 2007 film, which was why I had never sought it out before. It started out alright, and I started wondering if I had been misled.

But as the film wore on, it became obvious that I was not misled; this movie is dumb, and gets dumber every second. Something happens towards the end of this film that was so stupid, had it been in the first 5 minutes I would have turned it off immediately. Incidentally, Timothy Olyphant is the villain (for a change) and I can safely say I have never seen him in anything worse.

I watched Triple 9 recently as well. It confused me when I realized it came out a few years ago as Netflix was pushing it like it was a new release.

The star power in that movie is much stronger than the actual end result. Still, I enjoyed it enough as a run of the mill heist film.

Would indeed be better off watching Heat or The Town though.



I thought Live Free or Die Hard was absolute garbage, on par with Crystal Skull. I only saw it back when it came out, but that scene where he drives the car up the ramp and into the helicopter sticks in my head. After Bruce Willis jumps out of the car he's on the floor just laughing. It's as if he's recognizing how ridiculous and idiotic the whole picture is.

Mosul on netflix. Fascinating, if utterly depressing look into an iraqi unit fighting against ISIS in the city. It has some really nice war choreography, including all of the fuckups like friendly fire, grenade mishaps, and tension between groups within the city.

It's a decent flick, if small in scope. It has little humor other than the unintentional laughs from one actor who really sounds like he's speaking arabic with a thick schwarzenegger-esque accent.

My eight year-old daughter hadn't seen Gremlins so we watched that last night. I unabashedly love this movie and haven't seen it in a few years so I just let the nostalgia wash over me. We've recently upgraded to a larger TV so for this viewing I paid more attention to background details to see if there was anything I'd missed over the years. There were a couple - the H.G. Wells time machine that is visible and then disappears between cuts while the father is on the phone from the inventors convention, gremlin paw prints in the dust on top of the stereo next to the record player playing "Little Drummer Boy" - but I noticed something else I'd never noticed that made my night: after Billy's mom stabs the gremlin on the counter, when she turns to confront the microwave gremlin you can see the counter gremlin squirming in the background as it clutches the knife in its belly. It squirms the entire time she's killing the microwave gremlin and I was thrilled to discover yet another morbid detail in that part of the movie.

My daughter liked it: she was a little confused by the weirdness of the scene at Dorry's Pub but her favorite part was easily Gizmo driving the Barbie car.

I just came back from watching Akira in theaters.

It has the best special effects I've ever seen in a movie, animated or not. It's not the quality of the "normal" animation, but all the effects: Smoke, explosions, ground tearing up, violence. Even computer screens look amazing. But it has no characterization or plot so it can't sustain itself over its two hours of lenght. By the midway point I was bored. When Tetsuo was walking down to go to the stadium I was hoping the movie would get it over with. But it went on because it has some nonsense epilogue mixing tech jumbo with pop shintoism.

It sucks because I really liked the beginning of the movie. It really has a great look. But you can't build a movie on just good looks. Specially not a two hour movie. It's even worse, too, but the movie is simultaneously too long and too short. This was adapted from a manga and it's really obvious where whole arcs were cut. There are characters that are supposed to be important but aren't, ideas that don't pan out. It's rough.

It sucks because now the dissapointment weights much more on my head that the rest of the movie. By a lot. I exited the theater thinking "I'm glad it's over" and "I'm glad I didn't bring my girlfriend over". Neither is a good thing. We talked about the experience and while we all agreed the movie looks great, we took time taking a few potshots at it, which is not a good indicator.

I remember when I was a teen I was very hyped for Steamboy, which was actually made by the same director. And that's a very dull, dissapointing movie. I couldn't help but think that both movies have the same problems. Sure, Akira is visually stunning while Steamboy cheats at every possible opportunity by obscuring the mechanisms with steam. Akira is extremely influential while Steamboy is a forgotten dud. But it has the same flaws: No characters, no real plot. Weird, paper-thin ending.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it! Akira is one of my favorites, actually. I watch it every year. I agree it has slow parts, and I also have the entire manga, and yes they are quite different.

Visually, Akira is so amazing. Perhaps I give it a pass on other things because of when I first saw it (I'd say 1995), and how many times I've seen it since then (a lot). For me at this point it's like visiting an old friend.

hotseatgames wrote: I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it! Akira is one of my favorites, actually. I watch it every year. I agree it has slow parts, and I also have the entire manga, and yes they are quite different.

It is a shame. I think that if I had left after half an hour I would have been very impressed. But it was just too long for its characters.

I remember a friend of mine saying that the manga works much better than the movie. She had great taste and read a lot of more adult, niche comics when we were teens. She was always more mature.

Visually, Akira is so amazing. Perhaps I give it a pass on other things because of when I first saw it (I'd say 1995), and how many times I've seen it since then (a lot). For me at this point it's like visiting an old friend.

I talked about it with my friends and we agreed the movie had lost impact for us. There's a lot of the movie that was groundbreaking in 1988 but that has become cliché in anime. I can imagine it blowing minds back when it was new or even recent. Just the concept of adult, violent animation must have been incredibly foreign. It came out at the same time as The Little Mermaid, it must have been huge.

For example, to us the whole Tokio being destroyed by a totally non-nuclear bomb has become a tired and even "problematic" trope. And we are so divorced from the 80s the film felt more fantastic than it should. I think I can appreciate how important it was historically and see how it impacted others but it didn't do it for me.

I saw Akira nearly 20 years ago, and was disappointed. It looked amazing, but the story seemed thin. The real dealbreaker was the dramatic conclusion, which dragged on and on at a glacial pace. It made me realize the Japanese movie goers have a different sense of drama. I'm using to seeing action movies that are especially fast-paced near the end, and punctuated with at least one explosion. But the Japanese want a dramatic conclusion that is constructed almost entirely of tense anticipation followed by a moment of shocking truth. They're not wrong, just different, but it made Akira less enjoyable for me.

I ponied up for HBO max and watched WW84. It was.....fine I guess. It is oddly paced and very uneven with a lot of dodgy CGI and mediocre stuntwork. The story is very small and personal on most levels but then balloons into a global crisis very quickly and it just feels off. For a film set in the 80's there is surprisingly little '80s' in it other than a few throwaway jokes. Almost no music or pop culture. AHS:1984 did a WAAAYYY better job evoking the era IMHO.

Still, Gal does her best, Pedro Pascal brings a wealth of emotion to his role, and Kristin sells her role as well as anyone. Chris Pine steals his scenes but he isn't given much and a lot of the humor falls flat.

I think seeing this on the small screen first was a mistake. The film is so colorful, it would benefit from the theatrical experience IMHO.

Anyway, the real star of the film is the lasso. They find a million things for it to do, I want WW3 to just be about a down on her luck rodeo rider who finds it

Wonder Woman 1984 - I'm not sure why they bothered with the 80's setting other than to maybe avoid the other Snyder-DC films timeline. In fact I'll go one further and say they should have gone early 60's for full Cold War but I guess X-Men did that just like Capt America did WWII already. This wasn't as a good as the first one and ultimately felt low stakes even when the world comes into play. There's a scene where she's going after a convoy and after all the CGI and bullshittery it took to do it and fail all I could think was how much better non-super, non-CGI Indiana Jones did the same thing. The movie was pretty but easily forgettable.

hotseatgames wrote: A few movies this weekend...

We started with Triple 9, a new crime movie on Netflix that desperately wants to be Heat, but doesn't bring the writing chops to back it up. Feel free to skip this one.

Next was everyone's favorite Christmas film, Die Hard. It hadn't actually been that long since I've seen it, but I'm pretty much always down for this film. It's so, so good. Every little detail matters.

After discussing how we had never seen the fourth or fifth Die Hard movies, we made the poor decision to watch number 4, Live Free or Die Hard. I had never heard anything good about this 2007 film, which was why I had never sought it out before. It started out alright, and I started wondering if I had been misled.

But as the film wore on, it became obvious that I was not misled; this movie is dumb, and gets dumber every second. Something happens towards the end of this film that was so stupid, had it been in the first 5 minutes I would have turned it off immediately. Incidentally, Timothy Olyphant is the villain (for a change) and I can safely say I have never seen him in anything worse.

I read an interview w/Olyphant awhile back. He’d just bought a house as DEADWOOD was unexpectedly cancelled. He needed the money. See also, HITMAN.

I kind of like Live Free or Die Hard. It's totally stupid but the cast is good. Better than your average Michael Bay movie.