Movie Reviews 2.0

zed said:
2!, Im up to 221 so far :mrgreen:
Then again I havent watched any tv shows and only played a single game (peggle)
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Man, that's impressive :LOL:, but surly that can't all be movies released in 2015?

Also forgot to list one of the 3 movies I've seen at the cinema this year.

Chappie.
Visually stunning movie, that ultimately failed to live up to my expectations. It wasn't bad, but nowhere near as good as Blomkamp's first film. (District 9)
 
Elysium wasn't very good either. I'm hoping he won't fuck up the new Aliens movie.
 
Elysium was pretty poor, I thought. I was very disappointed with it after enjoying District 9 so much.

I've not seen Chappie, but a review I read in the paper indicated that it was ruined by the casting choices - a couple of South African rappers were cast in two of the main supporting roles and their acting abilities were basically non-existant.

Don't know too much about the plot but the whole idea of a robot 'accidentally' gaining sentience and then (no doubt), horrible humans trying to do something nasty to it makes it sound much like a violent, modern day rehash of Short Circuit. :p

I'll watch when it's released on DVD, but I'm not expecting much.
 
Mariner said:
Elysium was pretty poor, I thought. I was very disappointed with it after enjoying District 9 so much.

I've not seen Chappie, but a review I read in the paper indicated that it was ruined by the casting choices - a couple of South African rappers were cast in two of the main supporting roles and their acting abilities were basically non-existant.

Don't know too much about the plot but the whole idea of a robot 'accidentally' gaining sentience and then (no doubt), horrible humans trying to do something nasty to it makes it sound much like a violent, modern day rehash of Short Circuit. :p

I'll watch when it's released on DVD, but I'm not expecting much.
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Yeah, I wasn't to impressed with Elysium either and from the trailers it looked like it could have been a really good movie. I guess it's how the saying goes, Lightning doesn't strike twice :D. Fingers crossed he doesn't screw up the Alien movie :)

I read that as well, but I though they (Dei Antwoord) did a passable job.

Can't remember having seen Short Circuit, but from a quick look at the plot summary on IMDb, I would say your not far off.
 
Came home a couple hours ago after watching Avengers 2 in 3D at an early afternoon screening in a quite large movie theater. It was quite good it was. Not quite at the same level as the original Avengers, but it was good. For sure.

The plot - such as it is in an action movie - was rather busy and a bit jumbled, I felt. It reached a bit far, with the
Hydra angle early on, then the twins, and that's just before Ultron himself even shows up on the screen, Fury reappearing and so on. Strucker being introduced as a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker in the teaser at the end of Winter Soldier like he's quite the big enchilada and worthy of being a main movie badguy on his own terms, then he's simply killed off, and not even on-camera. Feels very anticlimactic.
There was also a LOT of fighting scenes. A whole lot, a bit too much really I feel like. You reach a visual overload level when it ceases to be impressive to see superheroes do their thing when they mow down badguys wholesale for ten minutes straight on multiple occasions in the movie.

Ultron himself felt like a fairly disorganized and not particularly threatening villain. While he had megalomaniacal schemes that were undoubtedly very dangerous to our big screen heroines and heroes, his
rambling manner of speech, facepalm-worthy attempts at humor, repeated loss for words, and penchant for duplicating himself into countless numbers of ineffective throwaway clones of himself makes him...not very threatening on the whole, IMO. The alien in Alien was threatening and dangerous even though there was just one of them. In Aliens, there were many aliens, and they were threatening because they were actually dangerous. They weren't just cannon fodder, mowed down like hay by regular humans armed with pistols and bow and arrows.

On a positive note, Hawkeye received some very nice fleshing-out though. I didn't care much for him in previous movies, but now he feels like a much more balanced and sympathetic character.
It was also very nice to see his wife being supportive of his adventuring for once, instead of being an emotional antagonist as women so often tend to be the case in action movies.

Of course, the special effects are really top-notch. Whereas they've been good in other recent Marvel superhero extravaganzas, now they're REALLY good. Sometimes to the point that you stop thinking of the SFX as SFX; they look so casually natural in everyday situations that they bridge the uncanny valley and make you feel like there really should be - for example - VTOL deltawing fighters landing in copses of trees near old farmhouses and things like that. :)

I'd say Avengers 2 deserves a pretty solid 7/10. It's not a total slam dunk like its forerunner, but shit, maybe my own expectations simply were too damn high? It's a very watchable, enjoyable two-hour+ experience, and certainly one of the most well-done action movies in recent years. I absolutely recommend it, even though certain aspects of it could have been better.

Edit:
There was no Star Wars teaser trailer shown before this movie! I was led to believe there would be, but that seems to be true only in the U.S... :( What a bummer.
 
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Mariner said:
The problem with that view is that the best stuff you can watch over the past few years is on TV.
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tears of laughter, the best!!!
No movies can compare with the scope and quality of shows such as Breaking Bad (and Better Call Saul!), Game of Thrones, The Wire, House of Cards, Sopranos etc etc. All the usual suspects (not The Usual Suspects, though that was very good!).
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still crying, wipes tears from eyes, No films (including these multi million dollar hollywood stuff), can compete, perhaps the scope thing is true, but really :) and you know this how? ..... OK yes the avengers film etc are not up to that quality (london-boy "damn right - avengers sux ..... wait .. what did I say")

On the other hand, if you watched 700 films last year, chances are the quality of over half of them range between average and rubbish. There really is a lot of really good TV these days and you're missing out of you don't bother with some of these shows.
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more than 90% of the stuff I watch is crap ... but I enjoy crap and readily admit to this, hell most of my fav films are crap.

London-boy said:
Nowadays the envelope is being pushed by TV and there's no denying it
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I think perhaps you are talking about TV vs mainstream hollywood films, perhaps thats true (and then even thats debatable) but is US TV is pushing the boundries more than say independent US cinema or worldwide cinema? (more tears from the eyes, wiped away), when I say films, I mean FILMS not just box office films in one land

Im not laughing at yous but just what you're saying which with further though Im sure you will agree is just based on a limited exposure

heres some great stuff I've watched recently (mostly old stuff, though I do watch recent stuff as well, but this is whats hit me recently)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_(1987_film) I was in the land not long after the berlin wall fall, glorious vibe and music, a haunting film that will stick in your mind longer than the 'macdonalds' avengers 2 does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Green_Planet! been meaning to for a while since I've heard its good, and it is, really well shot as well
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litan_:_La_Cité_des_spectres_verts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcana_(film)

films like history can't be judged in the occurring moment, give it a couple of years
how many times here have I seen gushing praise for some piece of superhero drek (im guilty also) yet if you asked the person a couple of years later they will be like, "um yeah, it was OK I suppose (blush)"

Im not putting down todays tv, but to say a medium that has to leave each episode with a cliffhanger after 40mins (to be resolved next episode) is laying huge constraints on the writers, plus the even bigger constraint (commercial interests)

sure money helps
but even with 10k you can make magic
a hard watch but one of the greatest marriages of music and images ever, and filmed for about 10,000$ (all the guys films are great he just is a genius)
 
zed said:
Im not putting down todays tv, but to say a medium that has to leave each episode with a cliffhanger after 40mins (to be resolved next episode) is laying huge constraints on the writers, plus the even bigger constraint (commercial interests)
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Well, that's the issue. The TV shows I mentioned have a long-running, cohesive storyline which doesn't require a cliffhanger every week. You might get the odd cliffhanger each series, but it's all about the story, not plot devices. The length of some of these shows means that the characters can become properly fleshed out so not as many of the two-dimensional archetypes you tend to find in many films.

There is still plenty of dross around on TV (unfortunately, my wife seems to like watching a lot of this stuff!), but it is now widely accepted that the best of TV is much better than the best of film.

Obviously, if you're happier watching films that's fine for you but don't knock it until you've tried it! ;)
 
To me, I get the feeling that it's much easier and probably cheaper to access what I'd consider 'envelope pushing' TV shows, as they're pretty much mainstream now, than great 'envelope pushing' films. Which require all sorts of investigation, many aren't available in some countries, or aren't showed at all and well, all the things we've become accustomed to when it comes to film distribution.
 
London-boy said:
To me, I get the feeling that it's much easier and probably cheaper to access what I'd consider 'envelope pushing' TV shows, as they're pretty much mainstream now, than great 'envelope pushing' films. Which require all sorts of investigation, many aren't available in some countries, or aren't showed at all and well, all the things we've become accustomed to when it comes to film distribution.
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Blu-rays of movies are pretty easy to buy.
 
TV is unquestionably a big thing nowadays. Lots of AA Hollywood talent appear in the shows; McConoughey's Oscar is usually accepted to be as much a reward for his work in True Detective as it is about Dallas Buyer's Club. Or there's Spacey in House of Cards, with Fincher directing the pilot himself and producing the show. And the list could go on and on. This also works the other way, a lot of TV talent can easily make the step up to movies now.

Then there are the production values - all shows are shot in HD, with all the bells and whistles, they no longer look any different or cheaper than a movie. Game of Thrones is as good as the LOTR movies in almost everything, sometimes even in CGI.

I'd also have to agree with the others about the character arcs and such. Breaking Bad in particular was really outstanding IMHO, and it'd be pretty damn hard if not impossible to condense such a story into a movie's length.
 
I saw the Age of Ultron 2D yesterday. A solid action movie, the action scenes were really well made. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I'd say this was at least a few notches below the first one or Winter Soldier imo. There was a lot to like here, but unfortunately quite a bit not to also. It simply isn't the grandiose homerun the first Avengers was, where mostly everything just clicked right, or coherently told and executed as the Winter soldier.

Most of the humour was fun, but there were some stinkers, forced or just misplaced pieces as well. The added darkness in the movie didn't always mix that well with some of the joking, but there were many good pieces as well.

The Ultron character imo had a lot more potential to be a much better villain than what was realized in this movie. I think what they did with him here wasn't worthy of a main Avengers movie villain, but maybe a villain in some stand alone Avenger movie, It would have been GREAT in Ironman 3...

Still I enjoyed watching this! It was entertaining, just don't expect it to be as good as the first one and you can still come out of it not too disappointed.
 
Dr Evil said:
I saw the Age of Ultron 2D yesterday. A solid action movie, the action scenes were really well made. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I'd say this was at least a few notches below the first one or Winter Soldier imo. There was a lot to like here, but unfortunately quite a bit not to also. It simply isn't the grandiose homerun the first Avengers was, where mostly everything just clicked right, or coherently told and executed as the Winter soldier.
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Ditto, we saw it last night and really enjoyed it but something elusive was just off. Whereas pretty much all the scenes in Avengers Assemble were close to perfect and naturally flowed, many of the scenes and dialogue in Age of Ultron felt a bit forced and off cue. A little more time in editing may have helped.

For anybody who liked the first film and the MCU films in general, you'll likely enjoy this movie. There's lots of funny one liners in this film and the action is incredible. There's also some interesting character progression. It's now a long 3 year wait until Avengers Infinite Crisis Part 1 in 2018 with Part 2 in 2019. Meh.
 
The good thing about the MCU films is that we don't really have to wait 3 years. We'll get bits and pieces along the way - if you can call Civil War, the new Spider-Man and Thor among others "bits and pieces".

And With the wave of DC films coming, we'll really be superhero overloaded by the time Infinity and JLA come out.
 
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