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

Go watch some 60s 70s era bond and then watch a Craig (or even Brosnan or Dalton) bond and tell me nothing has changed. They are LIGHTYEARS apart on the the aspects anyone on the internet would scream about.

I'm looking forward to the Henry Cavill bond, he is the obvious choice.

And the Muppet Haunted Mansion on Disney+ is, if you love the ride, a wonderful bit of nostalgia. It is only a mediocre Muppet film, though better than a lot of their recent stuff, but damned if they didn't pack a lot from the Haunted Mansion ride in there. One bit in particular is so awesome I'm proud Disney let them do it. Worth a Halloween movie night with the kids.

Monster Squad, circa 1987 or whatever (free on Amazon prime) is NOT the lighthearted kids monster romp I remember from 30 odd years ago. When I saw Shane Black as a writer I knew this was gonna cause trouble with the kiddos. Language aside, the spectacular Stan Winston effects freaked out my kids and the brutal violent ending led to a lot of eye covering. Fortunately the extremely creepy peeping Tom bits and blackmail went over my kids head but wow, this was legit in the 80s! Anyway, it holds up OK for a nostalgic viewing as it does hit all the universal monsters and the emotional beat of Frankenstein monster getting sucked into the portal had my kids crying. But if you are going into this fresh it might not be as appealing.

Can't quite get in the Halloween mood yet, because I am dealing with the real horror of my sick cat. Some action movies instead.

The Game of Death (1979) has a complex history that you can google for yourself. I was a cynical teen when I saw it in the theater, so I laughed at the weird bird noises that Bruce Lee made while fighting. But now I can appreciate that this movie holds up okay given that it was patched together years after Bruce Lee's death and uses another actor for many of the scenes. The second half of the movie plays out like a video game, with a variety of fight scenes strung together in escalating intensity. The fight scene with Wilt Chamberlin seemed silly when I was young, but pretty cool now.

The Great Gatsby (2013) is indeed an action movie, or is at least as fast-paced as many action movies. There admittedly isn't much violence, but there are parties, wild behavior, reckless driving, and general chaos in many scenes. I haven't read the book since school, but the movie seems to cover the book well enough. The movie is a visual feast, but it does that annoying thing with the chronologically inappropriate music, just like Lovecraft Country or A Knight's Tale. Di Caprio is solid, but is held back by the limits of the source material. Toby Maguire is well-cast as a passive observer/narrator to the proceedings.

Justice League vs The Fatal Five (2019) is a cartoon that is a bit short to be a movie, but too long to be dismissed as not a movie. The voice actors are decent, and Kevin Conroy reprises his classic Batman role. Doom Patrol fans should note that Diane Guerrero plays a Green Lantern. Despite the title, the story covers a lot of DC territory, including the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Green Lantern Corps, and even Checkmate, without wasting much time telling the viewers the minimum to keep the story moving. The writing is decent and managed to take some interesting turns along the way, while skipping some of the usual tropes. It was better than many DC cartoons, and much better than most DC movies.

Shellhead wrote: The Game of Death ... The fight scene with Wilt Chamberlin seemed silly when I was young, but pretty cool now.

That was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Prey - This is on Netflix. It's a German film with a familiar setup. 5 friends hiking in the woods, and they suddenly find themselves being stalked. I'd call this film squarely average. I'd say below average in the wilderness misadventure genre.

Taking Lives - Angelina Jolie is an investigator trying to find someone who has been stealing identities. It's really more than that, the killer is actually living as the victim. This movie is from 2004, and perhaps if I had seen it back then, it would have been more impressive. Now, it's just kind of been there, done that.

No Time to Die falls for me in the middle of the Craig run--better the Quantum of Solace and miles better than the execrable Spectre (which, after watching it twice, is, again for me, the worst Bond film ever), not as good as Skyfall or especially Casino Royale. It didn't quite fall in the trap I was expecting, based on the ham-fisted continuity efforts of Spectre, but it doesn't really earn its exhausting runtime, which dulls its emotional impact. Lea Seydoux is, I'm sure, a fine actor, and while she's better here than in Spectre, she just does not have the charisma or pull to sell the relationship with Craig's Bond, and reminding us (as the movie does very early on) that she's in some sense competing with Eva Green's mesmerizing Vesper Lynd further undercuts whatever wispy appeal she has. Rami Malek is present. Ralph Finnes is also in it. Ana de Armas, Lashana Lynch, and Ben Winshaw are standouts.

DukeofChutney wrote: Saw the new James Bond movie at the cinema, Lots of Time to Die. It was quite good, but man the DUNE trailer!

I am so hype for the Dune film.

I can't remember the last time i was genuinely excited for a film to come out, as most modern films suck.

It might be a massive disappointment, but I must not fear, because fear is the mind killer.

I might have stolen this from here: Timothée Chalamet as Paul Muad'Dweeb.

Gives a 'still sticks baseball cards in his bicycle spokes' vibe to me.

RobertB wrote:
I might have stolen this from here: Timothée Chalamet as Paul Muad'Dweeb.

Gives a 'still sticks baseball cards in his bicycle spokes' vibe to me.

Some actors just have that soft look. Hell, Adam Driver looks like a wuss to me and he is a Marine!

Kyle Maclachlan had such a great intensity from a young age, gonna be hard to top it.

I was thinking of Kyle Maclachlan in the DeLaurentis Dune. Then again, he was 35 years old when they made the movie.

(Slight exaggeration - he was born in 1959).

Yeah, and I guess if you're going to stick to the novel, he's supposed to be a teenager; 16 or 17 years old? It's probably been 30 years since I last read the novel. Maybe it'll work - I thought the casting in Lord of the Rings was going to be an utter disaster, and now that's what the book characters look like to me.

Went to the cinema for the first time in a year to see No Time to Die and loved it. Was thoroughly entertained from the start to the finish two-and-a-half hours later.

The action sequences were really fun, especially the high speed vehicle based chases, and I think it earned its emotional end.

Craig really nailed it here, having a bit more fun with the character than usual which made it feel more 'Bond', at least in my view. There were plenty of nice little winks or humorous moments scattered throughout, like his action-man one-liners when taking someone out or stopping to mix a drink in the middle of a gunfight.

There's some problems, the main villain has all the pieces to be memorable but is fairly forgettable, its convoluted and, as said above, Craig has more chemistry with all the other women actors than with his actual love interest.

I'm not the biggest Bond fan, I've found some of Craig's films boring, but I really enjoyed this one. It's not perfect but it's a fun watch.

We didn't have enough people to play Dune so we decided to watch it instead.

What surprised me the most about it is how good it looked. I might not like some small details but there was an actual, strong art direction for the film. It does not look like a generic film, it has its own atmosphere.

Most importantly, it's the first film I've seen in years, if not over a decade, that didn't make me think of a bad video game whenever an action scene came up. I've talked about this before, but the majority of films have obvious, poorly disguised CGI that is blatanty overused even in scenes that don't need it. The result are poorly light films whose effects just clash. Not here, here they look fantastic and no different than the rest of the movie. It was a massive refresher and I'm glad to have seen it in the cinema.

The actual script is clumsy. It doesn't quite know how to introduce the unfilmable world of Dune so it has a few introductory scenes that sell concepts shorts. Most notably, spice is mentioned to enable space travel but it never mentions why, that it extends life or that it grants expanded conciousness. I admit it felt a bit watered down, with a more colonial narrative, Christian iconography instead of a Muslim one and many concepts reduced or not mentioned. I actually think several aspects, such as Bene Gesserit's role, or the Emperor and Royal Houses won't be clear to most of the audience.

Still, it was fun and I liked it. I just think I would have had more fun playing the game again than watching the film!

We're planning on making Dune a half-term cinema treat - Erik, are there any creepy or sleazy moments that would make this a bit troublesome for young teens? I know this isn't Lynch this time around but even the source material has its moments and age ratings can be a bit wonky at times.

Re: doubts about Chalamet. If you have doubts about Timothee Chalamet delivering in Dune watch The King. He can be surprisingly tough and the fact he is easy to underestimate may make him the perfect choice.

The film is very Hollywoodian. There's no sex or nudity at all and it's shot in such a way that you never see killing blows. It has those "Marvel decapitations" where people defeat each other by moving a knife near their necks but they just imply the movement and there's no blood or anything. It's not even the PG-13 type of stuff you might see as a Indiana Jones movie, it's tamer.

scissors wrote: Re: doubts about Chalamet. If you have doubts about Timothee Chalamet delivering in Dune watch The King. He can be surprisingly tough and the fact he is easy to underestimate may make him the perfect choice.

He is a great choice. In general, the casting is much better than I thought. There are a couple odd choices, Feyd-Raid is off in both looks and personality, Leto looks more like the Emperor and it's one of those things where "diversity" doesn't apply to mooks. But it was more fitting than I thought and I liked it.