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

I watched The King's Man on HBO. I really enjoyed the first two films, but this prequel is mostly boring. It's squarely average, and I'd like to know who was asking for a prequel to these films....

We went back to the beginning of kaiju with Godzilla last night. Worth it. Some gorgeous imagery of Godzilla looming over the ruins of Tokyo holds up, and the shots of the filled hospitals hit.

Unfortunately, it was the American edit. I hate it. Raymond Burr is trying to balance the overreactions of the original cast by not emoting at all, and they couldn't be bothered to make any of his scenes look good. Every shot is just him standing and looking just offscreen where things are actually happening. I don't know if the sub/dub wars are still raging, but I think we can all either is preferable to this abomination.

Attention Horror Hounds!
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) is no good.

Last night I watched one of my favorite films, Fargo. I've seen it MANY times, but this was the first time watching it in 4k. It's on Prime right now, and make sure you look for the 4k version because the other one is there too.

Anyway, it was as excellent as ever, but I saw something I had never noticed before. There is a pivotal scene early on that takes place in a bathroom. This is presumably a family shared bathroom as it is not an on-suite.

By the toilet is a magazine rack, and right there, front and center, is a Playboy. This house has a mom, a dad, and a teenage boy living there. Makes me wonder if this was a joke they never thought anyone would notice.

It took three nights, but my wife and I finished Eternals. There were better ways I could have spent my time. It’s not bad, but it really doesn’t do anything to stand out. It was definitely one of the prettier Marvel entries, there was a great sense of scale whenever a Celestial appeared, the fights were better lit than typical but it missed on the one thing a Marvel movie absolutely needs to hit. I needed to care about the characters, and none of them left an impression. Maybe it’s a problem with introducing ten entirely new characters, but none of them had a chance to make their mark. If Marvel wants me hyped for the next Eternals, I need to remember some names. As it is, I’d rather see Kingo’s valet get a Disney+ series than any of the heroes.

I guess it was nice to see Kit Harrington smile and be charming rather than morose.

I should have trusted my instincts and steered clear of The French Dispatch. I only like about half of Wes Anderson's movies, and this one looked iffy. It was even worse than I feared, with a large amount of exposition anchored in places by fine cinematography. It was a lazy effort by an artiste who has disappeared up his own ass.

Despite living in Minnesota for many years, I just now got around to watching Fargo. It's a solid movie, with the Coen Brothers taking many shots at the strange, cold land where they grew up. The story is good, and the acting is solid, with Frances McDormand dominating every scene. Her utterly banal dialogue disguises her shrewd analytical abilities, though both are crucial to her character. It's not nearly as clever as Blood Simple, nor as funny as Raising Arizona, but still easily one of their best movies.

Alita Battle Angel was not terrible, but it tried to cram a dozen volumes of manga into one 2-hours movie and it just doesn't work. The most glaring example is how a guy is killed, then revived in a robotic body and then killed again in three consecutive scenes. You can also tell the "power upgrades" occured over time in the manga and not over the course of 30 minutes.

The worst example of it is just the ending. There isn't one. The movie reaches a climax of sorts, then Alita prepares to play Murderball and the movie ends. As far as I know, there's no sequel, either.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) was ok. I wanted to see it because I'm reviewing Suspects but I haven't read much of Agatha Christie's work. For example, I didn't know about the ending even though, apparently, everyone does. Either way, I can see why people say the tone is off in this one. From what little I know of him, I think part of the appeal of Poirot is that he's not menacing. He's short, a bit of a stickler and charming. This allows him to be underestimated and I actually thought the whole thing about the previous murder was a bluff at first. Poirot in this film is pretty aggressive and there are even a few action scenes.

As a film, it was fun but not great. The first half suffers a bit from "look at the celebrity we got for this" but the second half goes at a very fast pace to accomodate the plot. Either way, I think there should have been more focus on the abundance of evidence and the surprising solution and less on Poirot intimidating people.

Poirot is also given the now-popular treatment of treating mental illness like a personality trait. He's now obsessive compulsive in the medical sense just like so many adaptations of Sherlock Holmes now make him autistic instead of cold. It's a tired trope.

I'm a train nerd so I was dissapointed to see it wasn't very realistic. The train runs on single track even out of capitals, it never changes the engine and I would wage it's not a historically accurate locomotive but something far bigger and modern.

Shellhead wrote: I should have trusted my instincts and steered clear of The French Dispatch. I only like about half of Wes Anderson's movies, and this one looked iffy. It was even worse than I feared, with a large amount of exposition anchored in places by fine cinematography. It was a lazy effort by an artiste who has disappeared up his own ass.

I love a lot of WA movies and was not much moved by French Dispatch. It seemed very cold and detached. The first story was the only one that really got into the characters, and was fine, but even it had the distracting Tilda Swinton frame that kept the subject at arm's length. The character of the reporter in the final section was great, but the story was just there.

Both this one and Grand Budapest fell flat for me. After Moonrise Kingdom I was eager to see more from him but these two are pretty by-the-numbers and uninvolving.

Here’s the thing about Alita: it’s not an adaptation of the Battle Angel manga but the OVA. Of course the OVA is based on the manga, but the film pretty well follows the OVA beat for beat with the exception of the motorball and crashed spaceship scenes. Your problems with pacing are all there in the OVA because it’s slamming together the first two volumes of the manga.

For what it was, I think Alita largely succeeded. I would have rather had adaptations from the manga, though it might have stretched the material, and I wouldn’t have cast Walz as Ido, but for an adapted genre with so many incredible failures, competent and faithful to the source is pretty good. My biggest problem was how sunny and healthy the streets of the scrap city were. If they really wanted to make the sequels, it needed to be filthy and populated by people barely recognizable as human for the later themes to make sense.

My issue with Alita was the bizarre choice to CG the lead with that weird Ana Taylor Joy eye spacing. Either hire a more distinct looking woman or maybe just some prosthetics. I know Cameron was probably developing some avatar tech on the studios dime but that one choice probably added 10% to the budget and put a lot of folks off.

DarthJoJo wrote: My biggest problem was how sunny and healthy the streets of the scrap city were.

Yeah, my girlfriend and I had a laugh about that. "What's the dystopia here? Walkable neighbourhoods? Chic cafeterias and kids playing sports on designated areas of the street?"

I didn't know about the OVA. I just saw what's happening and thought it's the kind of stuff that is normally separated by several volumes of manga. I'm surprised the OVA just adapts the first two! Are they normal size volumes or larger ones?

The OVA is easy enough to find on YouTube if the movie piqued your interest.

Regarding the manga, it’s a little odd. The first series is normal-sized volumes, and it’s done in nine. However the ending is pretty clearly rushed possibly due to a creator breakdown. After a few years, once he was feeling better, he came back to the series to fill in the parts he wanted to do the first time. This is Last Order. Now there’s also Mars Chronicle which I assume is a prequel.

I don’t know if it’s high art, but I absolutely loved the original series in high school. It’s high on gore and more than a little gonzo.

I don't enjoy musicals and find it unsettling when actors suddenly break into song, which is why I have always avoided Bollywood movies... until now. I have been dating a woman from India recently, and surprised her by taking her to see Gangubai Kathiawadi at the 14-screen theater attached to a shopping mall near my home. She was leaning towards seeing Death on the Nile, but looked Gangubai Kathiawadi at IMDB. It stars Alia Bhatt, who has starred in a number of good Bollywood comedies, so she was expecting a comedy.

Gangubai Kathiawadi is not a comedy, though there are some comedic touches. It's actually a crime drama that is loosely based on the real story of a brothel owner named Gangubai Harjivandas, who was prominently featured in the book Mafia Queens of Mumbai. Apparently it was not unusual for a teenage girl in India to get tricked into going into a brothel and forced to work there. Once they have seen a few customers, they are unable to return to their families, who might kill them for bringing dishonor to the family. The title character starts out that way, but by sheer force of personality eventually takes over the brothel and becomes an advocate for the legalization of prostitution in India.

Alia Bhatt displays considerable range in her performance, and transcends her comedic roots with bravado. The story was continually engaging, but ran long, thanks in part to four song and dance numbers. By American standards, the violence is tame but still presented effectively. The film was performed in Hindi and has English subtitles, though I noted certain phrases were spoken in English (like "business partners") possibly due to the lack of Hindi equivalent.

I'm going to give a split review for The Batman.

Technical merits: 3/4. "The Batman" is well shot and generally well acted. Pattinson is fine as Batman and virtually nonexistent as Bruce Wayne. Kravitz is the standout as Selena. Wright is fine as Gordon. The supporting cast, including Dano, is generally good and more tonally consistent than is, say, the support in Nolan's Batman Begins. Some of the action is excellent. The treatment of Batman as both detective and ninja--the former of which has almost entirely been ignored by modern treatments--is appreciated. Pacing and length are significant issues (the movie felt to me like a TV season, not a movie), as is what I see as a general flatness of the emotional arcs, such as they are; there's definitely some character movement, but it's relatively slight and somewhat confused.

"Feel": 0/4. I guess I'm just too old for this. I've gone through every evolving TV/cinematic treatment of Batman since Ward and West (in reruns, you guys; I'm not *that* old), and I've watched, generally with approval, as the treatments have become increasingly dour. But this movie is just too nihilistic for me, especially at nearly three hours. There's almost nothing to leaven the movie's tone. It's hard to understand why anyone with any means would live in Gotham at all if they had any choice. Even, say, "The Dark Knight Returns" or the recent "Joker" had some lighter moments. As bloated and somewhat silly as "The Dark Knight Rises" was, it at least earned its--comparatively tight--running time on the backs of one very good and one superior movie.

A quick separate point: "The Batman" as a PG-13 film just shows how completely broken the rating system is. There's no way, in a holistic sense, that "The Batman" is anything but an R; yet the (near) absence of profanity and sex plus the antiseptic and sometimes visually obscured treatment of violence manages to result in a PG-13. Crazy.