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

The Spawn Cultural/Historical Education, Movie Edition (SCHEME) project continues apace:

ALADDIN (1992). Never actually saw this before, I was a teenager when it came out and too cool for Disney. Had the Disney cultural depiction warning at the front and I can see the need — everyone except Our Hero and Heroine had a prominent accent and the villains were so, so swarthy. But boy, what a movie. The plot and songs were fine, but absolutely gorgeous animation, so fully realized and really a complete worldview expressed dynamically onscreen. RIP Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried. Both of them took the movie to the next level.

THE JUNGLE BOOK (1967). Another disclaimer movie, I guess because the monkeys spoke some variant of AAVE? Didn’t seem as necessary to me as the one in Aladdin, but no one’s hiring me as their cultural sensitivity reader, so don’t trust me on this. Has kind of a picaresque feel to it for large parts of the movie, which makes it come off as a bit random. But the two main songs are stone classics. Gorgeous animation, although you see some hints of the decline coming that would plague Disney for the next 20 years.

Bill and Ted Face the Music was a mediocre, possibly borderline bad movie. The acting in the opening scenes is deliberately bad, I guess, but there are some tolerable scenes later on. The concept of the movie makes it a worthy sequel to both of the previous Bill and Ted movies, but the execution is disappointing. The best I can about this movie is that it is no worse than Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

At least Bill and Ted Face the Music offered some nostalgic smiles, which is better than the meager offerings of Pineapple Express or 5 hours of Seth Rogen shouting at a camera.

I watched the 4k upscale of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Paramount+, thinking it was a restoration of the original cut rather than the 2001 director's cut. The sound is now pretty incredible, with a Dolby Atmos mix, and the director's cut remains an improvement over the original cut in terms of pacing and the removal/reduction of some annoying elements. (I believe the wormhole scene is slightly shorter; the computer doesn't shout out "INTRUDER ALERT: A SONIC SHOWER," and instead Chekov gets the line in the background). However, the "enhanced" visual effects are, on the whole a downgrade. There are some nice touches here and there, probably some removal of matte lines and the like, and the scene on Vulcan is much more sensibly and canonically framed, but, IMO, they completely ruin the ending with a heavy-handed change in lighting and the addition of Hanna-Barbera-level CGI lightning. The core is still a movie I care for very much. (I should maybe note that I have seen the director's cut before, when it was out on DVD, but it's been a long time.)

I have tickets to see the restoration with some friends at the end of the month, and I'm really looking forward to it. I jokingly told my friend that in this cut, "the Enterprise fly-by sequence is 40 minutes long!"

Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.

Saw The Survivor: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2022/05/hammered.html

Was excellent.

Doctor Strange Stephen and the Multiverse of Madness - I'm not a big Doctor Strange fan but I like Sam Raimi's films so not too surprising I liked this. After reading the Darkhold the Scarlet Witch is scary like if that girl from The Ring was also a Terminator with god-like power. This is still a Disney movie but its one of their darker ones. It's a multiverse film too so of course there's several superhero cameos that pop up.

ChristopherMD wrote: Doctor Strange Stephen and the Multiverse of Madness - I'm not a big Doctor Strange fan but I like Sam Raimi's films so not too surprising I liked this.

Sam Raimi really Sam Raimied the hell out of this movie. It's filled with his signature touches.

Once again, I am late to the party. Finally saw SLC Punk! (1998) and liked it. The SLC stands for Salt Lake City. Matthew Gillard and Michael Goorjian were apparently born to star in this movie, and felt like archetypal punks to me. But maybe I'm wrong, I orbited the local punk scene for a time in college, but have never been punk except maybe in attitude. Which was somewhat the idea behind Jason Segel's character in the movie, but either his part was either underwritten or he just didn't deliver a full performance this time. Annabeth Gish plays a decidedly non-punk but unconventional role.

The sound track is adventurous, with some very solid '80s punk selection alongside an eclectic mixture of other period music. The overall tone of the movie is wry humor mixed with some reflection of the role of punks in society, and Lillard sometimes directly address the viewer through the fourth wall. The end of the movie comes with a bit of an anti-punk message, but perhaps that is the ultimate punk gesture, or merely the appropriate end for this one punk's story.

I don't know if Goorjian is a good actor, because I don't remember seeing him in anything else, but he seemed extremely familiar like I knew him from somewhere in real life. I looked him up on IMDB and he has done a fair amount of tv and some movies over the years, including a sequel to SLC Punk a few years ago.

The Gentlemen on netflix. THIS is what people expect of Guy Ritchie and he Guy Ritchie'd the HELL out of this film. All that wasted time doing Aladdin and King Arthur and sorta wasted on the Statham action heist flick is rewarded with this one. Stellar performances across the board, a tight script, tons of wry humor. You gotta watch this one REALLY close though because it makes a lot of time jumps, has some unreliable narrator, plenty of dangling clues for later, and visualized supposition so it is really easy to lose the plot and characters if you are, like my wife, surfing the web and then bugging me to explain what's going on every 5 minutes.

Saw The Northman last night. It's good, but not great. The plot is basically Viking Hamlet (the main character's name is Amleth, like, duh). But I don't mean that as "Hamlet in a Viking setting;" it's like how Vikings would do Hamlet. No wishy-washy indecision, I'm gonna brutally murder that mofo as soon as possible. All of the minor characters basically act the opposite of how they do in the play.

It also had a very strong Conan vibe to me. There's a lot of brutal violence, but it all felt of a piece with the setting. They tried to be as accurate as possible (aside from some mystical stuff) and it paid off. There's a great sword fight among lava fields that felt like what the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel should have been.

Given two major budget viking series just dropped with S5 of The Last Kingdom and Vikings:Valhalla as well as The Northman, that Tiny Epic Vikings release could not have been timed better.

Maybe they will have Tiny Epic Avatar ready for December

Oh damn, now I kinda want that.....

I saw Dr. Strange 2: Electric Boogaloo for $5 at Imax. I didn't regret seeing it, and it was fun.



I recently saw Everything Everywhere Hot Dog Fingers on a regular screen, and it felt pretty great and immersive, so I was thinking that maybe I am making too much of a deal about Imax, but no, Imax easily adds at least 1/2 a point to a movie, at least in the spectacle category. Unlike EEAAO, I don't think I would encourage anyone other than Raimi/Strange fans to see this.

The multiverse is a "great" way to hand-wave away all the inconvenient plot points the makers made earlier in the film and/or previous movies.

"Tony Stark! How are you still alive?"
"The multiverse! Ta-da!"

Greg Aleknevicus wrote: The multiverse is a "great" way to hand-wave away all the inconvenient plot points the makers made earlier in the film and/or previous movies.

"Tony Stark! How are you still alive?"
"The multiverse! Ta-da!"

More like a producers best friend when it comes time for actor contract negotiations...

"I want $30 million per film, 50% of toy sales, and 5% of the gross profits!"

"Hmmm, how about we replace you with an Earth-56883745 version of your character?"

"I'll take $1 million a picture and can the toy at least make my butt look better?"