Movie Reviews 2.0

Watched the lost city of z the other day and really liked it. Very well shot and it's nice to see this sort of slightly slow pace adventure movies among all the high adrenaline CGI lovefests movies released these days.
 
Maybe it's just me, but the background of the preview frame for the Justice League video seems like it has a subconscious downward feel to it.
The lower middle of the sigil is cut off by Batman, and I am hoping isn't normally a downward arrow. The font choice for the J and L and nearly completely cutting off the top of the lettering leaves another what is mostly another downward arrow or perhaps an anchor.
The placement of the sun and horizon effect through the logo's bottom doesn't provide visual information to counter the visual flow.

A more full view of the shield logo elsewhere lets the lettering break up the feel somewhat, but I think that is undermined by the bottom of the shield completing an arrow. There are other ways of evoking the Justice League, either in other contexts or franchises or different marketing for the DC film universe that don't make that impression for me.
 
Watched Valerian last Saturday. Expected to love the hell out of it, but alas, it was not meant to be. I was prepared to accept Dane Dehaan and Cara Delevigne as a duo of intergalactic super soldiers, hoping they'd tackle the various situations with gadgetry and wit. That said, expecting me to also accept these tiny-ass, barely-graduated-from-child-actor looking kids as master hand-to-hand combatants, not to mention posterboy for teenage angst Dehaan as a lady killer, was simply pushing the whole thing way past the point of where I could successfully suspend my disbelief. As per usual with these movies, it was also overlong and the story never really went anywhere. Despite a restless pace and staggering visual creativity, I found it surprisingly unengaging. Imagine Valerian as a 2 hour version of the "there's always a bigger fish" sequence from The Phantom Menace if you will. The 3d was absolutely terrible too: Ghost images everywhere and a sense of scale that was completely off most of the time. Whenever the film ventured into outer space, everything looked like a tiny, little toy diorama. The Terminator 2 3D trailer didn't help matters either, because despite being 26 years old, this post-converted oldie looked about as good as 3d movies come these days.
My gf loved it, though. And I expect so will many others.
 
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Really enjoyed Spider-man Homecoming. Still, my usual pet peeves with these movies are all live and accounted for: It's a simple story that goes on for way too long. It also suffers from surprisingly lacklustre "set-piece" moments. I'd argue the final confrontation downright sucked. What the hell was even going on there? Seriously, you can shit on Sam Raimi's Spider-man 3 all you want, but when that movie fired on all cylinders it was positively epic. The big smackdown at the end of SM3 was a landmark of big budget action cinematography. In general, the whole thing looked like a movie. SMH looked more like a very expensive and lengthy tv episode. It also didn't really help that Spider-man, a self-made comic book hero forced to make due with his intelligence because he's broke more or less perpetually, got all these expensive toys handed to him.
 
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Sigfried1977 said:
Really enjoyed Spider-man Homecoming. Still, my usual pet peeves with these movies are all live and accounted for: It's a simple story that goes on for way too long. It also suffers from surprisingly lacklustre "set-piece" moments. I'd argue the final confrontation downright sucked. What the hell was even going on there? Seriously, you can shit on Sam Raimi's Spider-man 3 all you want, but when that movie fired on all cylinders it was positively epic. The big smackdown at the end of SM3 was a landmark of big budget action cinematography. In general, the whole thing looked like a movie. SMH looked more like a very expensive and lengthy tv episode. It also didn't really help that Spider-man, a self-made comic book hero forced to make due with his intelligence because he's broke more or less perpetually, got all these expensive toys handed to him.
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Yup I agree, the original trilogy by Sam Reimi continues to be the best for me. Especially since it came long before the MCU we now have (and I must say I'm not a huge fan, got too much "disneyfied/kidified" for my tastes) and was so ground breaking at the time as super hero movies that bluntly do not suck, which is proved by being the first comic book real trilogy (batman movies were more stand alone before Nolan's).
 
I watched again the original Predator. Much better than nearly all super hero or remakes of action/fantasy movies that Hollywood ever did. It shows how much Hollywood blockbusters\action movies declined in the last 20 years or so, especially in the last 10.

Mctiernam was so good, shame he retired with only 40 years old.

From what I remember, the original SM trilogy is where a few of the half dozen good post 2000 super hero movies are.
 
I watched Kong Skull Island a couple of days ago. I really enjoyed it. Despite existing in the same universe as 2014's Godzilla, it's pretty much the anti-Godzilla in terms of priorities. The film's primary concern is with Kong and the various nasties living on Skull Island. We get the Kong reveal within less than 5 minutes actually. The humans get very little screen time here. Or rather too little for such a large cast. I'd say there's about one and a half actual characters in this thing. One of them being John C. Reilly who plays a WWII fighter pilot stuck on the island for 30+ years. He's the warm, fuzzy center of humor and an absolute delight who breathes life into the picture whenever he's on-screen. Then there's Sam Jackson who gets some decent mileage out of the military bad guy cliche. Think a slightly weaker version of Avatar's Colonel Quaritch. You'll probably dislike him vehemently, and that is all that's necessary in this case. The rest of the characters can be described by their jobs. Well, except for the Chinese girl who I'm asuming is only there so the film is gonna play to a Chinese audience.
Where Kong shines is with the creatures. ILM did a marvellous job with the giant ape. They really managed to flesh him out here. He's every bit the fierce yet tragic character he was in Peter Jackson's ludicrously protracted version of the classic. I also really appreciate the bold decision to have all his extensive action scenes in broad daylight. Another thing this new Kong has in common with Peter Jackson's is a surprising level of gnarly deaths. Seems like a tradition to take Kong movies as far to the edges of a 12 certiicate as possible.

Bottom line: If you want a monster movie that doesn't mess around and hates dilly-dallying, then Kong is your giant ape.
 
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Evidently it got a lot of recent publicity when it changed the cost of the service from $50/mo to $10/mo. Which has led to AMC Theatres suing them. It's founded by guys from Netflix & Redbox.

BTW it works on your phone & won't allow you to pre-order tickets ahead of time & you can only order them within a 100 yards of the theatre. Plus, you also can't see a movie you've already seen. Might try out for a month when Justice League is out.

Tommy McClain
 
How does that work? Movie studios and cinema owners are fine with this?
 
MoviePass re-sells the tickets to customers and purchases them at full price using a MasterCard debit card. It claims it boosts attendance by 111% and that its customers buy more concessions. But exhibitors have preferred to bolster their own loyalty programs instead of aligning themselves with the service.
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Basically they're subsidizing the tickets themselves. Their business model is based on mass subscription and low attendance, with the idea that they can partner with the theater companies for advertising and kickbacks.
 
Think about it, a lot of people go to the cinema what, once every two months maybe? It's all about finding that sweet spot where it makes financial sense. I feel that I'm quite a good movie goer but even I don't really go every month.
 
When I was a young bachelor my best friend & I would probably go to a movie at least once every weekend. Now I'm lucky if I go twice a year. LOL There's more to it than being married, like kids, finances & entertainment center at home. But something like this would get me back in the theatre especially during the summer. Getting excited to to try it out.

Tommy McClain
 
Currently watching Religulous (yup, sometimes I have a hard time doing just one thing at a time, I need to do more than one). Brilliant, so far! :D
 
BlackSilver said:
I watched again the original Predator. Much better than nearly all super hero or remakes of action/fantasy movies that Hollywood ever did. It shows how much Hollywood blockbusters\action movies declined in the last 20 years or so, especially in the last 10.
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The action movie wasn't new by the 1980s of course, but it evolved into this new form, sometimes with talented young (at the time!), daring directors.

Many of what we consider the best action movies of the '80s weren't made with a whole lot of money. Predator, Aliens, Die Hard, and so on - they were relatively low-budget, and the budget concerns forced filmmakers to wring maximum amount of work out of every dollar. Also, technical limitations forced creativity - you couldn't just go CGI and do anything. Practical effects had to work on set so it could be filmed, and had to work on film too or it would look shite in theatres when people come to watch the movie.

Being constrained, not being able to do anything, breeds creativity and ingenuity. There's awesome CGI scenes and effects, but relatively little of it has the same impact as a guy in a rubber suit faking tossing around 100 kilos+ of Arnold Schwarzenegger with the help of an overcranked camera. :p

Cutting, pacing... The best '80s classics were all very tight and smooth-flowing, with hardly a frame wasted on fluff or boring filler scenes. And yes, some of today's action movies are too long, granted, and some of yesteryear's shorter action movies were fucking awesome, that doesn't mean shorter automatically means better though. Several of James Cameron's oldest movies are noticeably better in their extended version, Aliens and The Abyss in particular.

I haven't seen any attempts at looking at action movies from some kind of scientific point of view; do people like me love '80s action movies because that's when I was a teenager and I'm overly nostalgic and sentimental about them and their accompanying time era, or do I love them because they're genuinely great, awesome movies? Not sure!

Someone should screen some of the best '80s stuff to teens of today and get them to rate it all. Hopefully without them getting too hung up on lower quality special effects... :p
 
I think the biggest problem with these super expensive action movies of today is the fact that they have to cast the widest possible net if they want to have any chance of turning a profit, and this means working within the limitations of a PG-13 rating. The stuff stuff from the 70s, 80s and 90s was almost exclusively R-rated, so if the director felt like Sylvester Stallone should overkill Brian Thompson by impaling him on a giant metal hook - A metal hook which then proceeded to slowly drag the screaming, twitching body into a blast furnace - he was free to do just that.
 
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