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

I watched Godzilla vs. The Astro-Monster on Saturday. It was hokey and my 10 year old self loved it.

I showed my girlfriend Old Boy since they just added it to Netflix. I warned her that it was traumatic, but was not prepared for how much she did NOT like that film. I hadn't seen it myself in quite a while, and had actually forgotten (repressed) the more disturbing scenes. It's a rough one. Still, an excellent film with a fucked up story that I highly doubt you'll anticipate.

Just watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (aka Mission Impossible 7). In the last two months, I rewatched all of the previous MI movies except for the first one, which has such a useless plot that even Tom Cruise admitted that he couldn't follow the story. The rest are all good or even great action movies, generally improving with each installment in defiance of the usual diminishing returns for sequels.

I saw MI 7 (and the previous installments) on Paramount Plus, which is a very suitable choice for streaming because it has all the Star Trek shows and movies, and both franchises have a couple of things in common: Leonard Nimoy (who was a regular cast member of the orginal MI tv show) and competence porn... shows that always depict relentlessly competent heroes.

As always, the MI theme song is thrilling, but this particular version featured unusually violent-sounding percussion. The opening sequence is strangely lacking in familiar faces but crucial to the story. The cast is loaded with attractive people playing extremely competent characters, except that Tom Cruise's face often looked bloated. He is still a good-looking guy, even with the bloated face. Although I have become a jaded action movie fan over the years, this movie featured two amazing fight scenes and an entertaining car chase. There is one final suspenseful scene that is almost unbearably thrilling. Thankfully, the movie does not end on an intense cliffhanger, because we will probably be waiting at least several months or possibly a couple of years, depending on how they filmed everything.

For you MCU fans, this movie includes a couple of familiar faces, and they both look amazing here: Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) and Pom Klementieff (Mantis). It's almost as if both of them are aging in reverse.

Aside from being the first part of a two-parter, the only other minor complaint I have is that there was somewhat less humor than in the last 3 MI movies. Oddly enough, some of the humor present does not involve returning supporting actor Simon Pegg.

I thought MI7 was fine, but due to the massive PR blitz before it came out, watching it felt somewhat anticlimactic since I had already seen most of it in trailers etc . As for using AI as the villain….meh .

Also not a fan of the one key character death.

hotseatgames wrote: I showed my girlfriend Old Boy since they just added it to Netflix. I warned her that it was traumatic, but was not prepared for how much she did NOT like that film. I hadn't seen it myself in quite a while, and had actually forgotten (repressed) the more disturbing scenes. It's a rough one. Still, an excellent film with a fucked up story that I highly doubt you'll anticipate.

Which Old Boy? The Korean or American one? I appreciated both but was NOT expecting Thanos and Wanda to be soooooooooooooo intimate I would thought there would be a bazillion memes around this when Endgame came out but I don't recall any, guess it slipped under the radar.

Korean, I have not seen the American one and have no desire to do so.

Rocky IV: Rocky VS Drago - With yesterdays' passing of actor Carl Weathers, I decided to watch one of his older movies. I haven't watched any Rocky movie in at least 20 years. They're all kind of a blur of memories of Sly, Carl, Mr T, Dolph, the old dude, the other old dude, and some stupid robot. So I decided to watch the one I remembered being kind of hokey but fun, number IV. But I accidentally watched Sly's cut from a few years ago. Apparently it cuts like half the movie and replaces with unused scenes. Having been so long, I could only guess at the new stuff. I just know that it was remarkably better than I remembered it and far more of a serious Rocky film. Also, being remastered, it looked fantastic and all the fights have had the sound changed to be more realistic. I've also read this was the one with the robot. That's all gone. Replaced with more scenes with his wife or with Apollo. There are some rough spots but overall, I can now say that this is my favorite Rocky movie. Although I'm not going to re-watch any of the others to confirm that.

Rocky IV was far from the best of the Rocky films but damn if it wasn't the most fun. If I had to name off the best 80's movies it's in the top 10-20, be a hard decision to put it as the best Stallone film over Rambo 1 or 2 (I think R:FB part 2 would take it though).

Speaking of Carl Weathers, I really need to give Action Jackson another spin, about all I remember from it is a really young Sharon Stone and Craig T. Nelson as the bad guy and I'm not even 100% positive about that.

“You almost tore that boy’s arm off “

“He had a spare “

Watched the Japanese remake of Cube (2021). Of the original Cube movies from Canada, this new one is most similar to the original Cube (1997). Production values are slightly higher and the bits of philisophical dialogue from the original are missing here. With one exception, this movie is less interested in the individuality of the charaters. The exception is that one particular character is directly confronted with a past trauma from long before they entered the Cube. Overall, this movie is just about the same level of quality as the original, except for one specific problem with Japanese movies in general.

Thanks to my ex, I have watched a fair amount of anime. Due to my own interests, I have also watched a couple dozen non-anime Japanese movies over the years. They are often marred by a particular Japanese trait, the need to slow a story down to a glacial pace in a futile effort to increase drama. Perhaps that is my silly and patronizing American attitude talking, just because I was raised to associate excitement with fast-paced action. Anyway, Cube drags in a few places and then slows to a crawl in the final ten minutes. In order to slow the pace down further, less things happen. Characters speak more slowly and repeat themselves unnecessarily. All possible excitement drains away into ennui, like watching a eurogamer take a half hour to play a turn in a game with too much open information on the table. I'm not sorry that I watched this movie, but I am certain that I will never watch it again.

You reminded me of something I have noticed in a lot of Korean television; they often do flashbacks to things that literally just happened, as though the audience has short term memory loss.

They also play up scenes as though they are far more dramatic than they really are.

That aside, I do think a lot of Korean shows are quite good. And Netflix has a LOT of it.

That's an interesting observation about Korean shows. The only Korean movie that I have seen in recent years is Train to Busan. and I don't recall any instant replay flashbacks offhand. In the mid-
'90s, I dated a Korean woman for a while. She told me that Korean soap operas were always medical dramas because it was considered inppropirate to have address topics like infidelity and adultry.

My girlfriend and I watched Mystic River this weekend, having never seen it before. It has a lot of top tier talent in it, and was pretty well regarded back when it came out in 2003. It's leaving Netflix soon, which is why it popped up for us.

Let me tell you... good fucking riddance to this shitty movie. You get a murder mystery that involves a lot of misunderstandings, which could have been cleared up if people just communicated with each other. You get a subplot with Kevin Bacon's character involving his estranged wife, and it is not only stupid, but it adds literally nothing to the film at all. He is the most "together" character in the film, perhaps they felt he needed something to fuck him up.

Boston apparently also has the country's most efficient crime lab, because the cops literally steal a suspect's car during the night, and have blood samples back from the lab the next morning.

The basis for a good film is here, but the end result is a jumbled mess. Don't waste your time.

Introduced the kid to KING KONG (2005). Haven't seen this since it came out, and I just thoroughly enjoyed absolutely every aspect of it. The run length (3 hours) was too long for the theater, but at home when we could pause whenever we wanted, it wasn't an issue.

I loved the cinematography, the characters, the acting. The whole shebang. What a treat.

Dune Part 2 is legit. I have my quibbles, particularly with the emphasis on Chani at the expense of Paul and the general lack of any chemistry between the leads, but the spectacular visuals and narrative thrust of Paul driving/being driven into jihad carry it. The score is overly bombastic without being especially memorable, but it serves. The ending will be contentious, I think, but I'd like to see a Part 3 at some point.

But most importantly, this is a classic CINEMATIC experience and there are no superheroes or Jedi. It feels like a movie made by professionals, not the usual slapped together shovelware film we get in this era of streaming.

I suspect the 6 month delay was more to have less competition from Barbenheimer than any real strike issues. I liked Dune p2 far more than Oppenheimer though both are a little hollow for me, TBH. Still, this film has got to be a lock for a half dozen or more of the production/set design type Oscars, and I'm sure it will get noms for 5-6 of the acting/directing ones as well.