Movies you've seen lately.

[Deef]

The Matrix - Resurrections

Uff.

Written in a not-spoilerish way, but these impressions alone will probably spoil things.

Spoiler!

I liked the freshness of things... which is more due to it being a new movie than anything else. Revolutions especially is a massive drag, so I enjoyed getting away from that.

But boy there are a lot of things not going well here. There are good bits, and good ideas, but it's all been turned into a big mess.

The self awareness completely jumps the shark. This is the virtue-signalling of self awareness.
The choreography isn't up to the originals' standards.
Other than Trinity, the "returned" characters had no reason to be there at all.
The CG friendly creatures don't actually look impressive; they seem out of place and a bit below the standard of most other things.
Neo doesn't act like Neo at all, or even an older, traumatised Neo (which could have worked). Instead, he acts like Keanu. Tall, somewhat stilted, goofy Keanu. After a while you just realise that there just isn't the badassery here that was in the original.
Oh and Neo's "flight" scene.... Jesus. The whole movie discards the serious tone of the originals, which I don't mind too much, but this flight moment was too far.
The story is just full of weird explanations for weird things you need to hear more about, but don't. There's tonnes in there that creates immediate interest, that they could go into more fully, but instead it's just another piece of daftness added to the pile and the movie marches on.
And the whole driving goal here doesn't even really seem to matter. It probably doesn't help that Neo and Trinity have always had possibly the worst on-screen chemistry in history.

Bugs was the best character imo. The "returned" characters were really great on screen, but just wasted on those characters. The supporting actors were all pretty good really.

For the first 3rd or so it seems promising. You haven't yet realised that the self awareness is being way overcooked, and you still feel like all these new terms and connections to the past (and time spent dwelling on it) are going to turn into some cool new adventure with new rules. Instead... it just kind of keeps throwing random things at you, here's some action that doesn't quite impress, and we're done.

Just a score:

Spoiler!

6/10

[Deef]

Having that 2nd spoiler tag in the previous post seems broken, so here it is again:

Spoiler!

6/10

[Deef]

Sing 2

8.5/10 - Pretty much just as good as the first.

The Sing movies entertain by celebrating music, as opposed to just complementing a story with it. Both films do this really well; at their funnest when the music's playing. The story itself is fine and fun in its own right too -- the characters are fun, Buster Moon especially sunny, the character designs are entertaining in themselves, and there are laughs to be had -- but ultimately it's the musical celebration that props the Sing movies a above the pack of animated films (for me).

Sing 2 does have two things missing from the first though:

- Being the sequel, it misses that joy of seeing the main characters develop. The new characters are great, but the "character growth through song" fun of the first movie doesn't get to fly this time.
- The car wash scene. That was wacky fun that came out of nowhere in the first film. Sing 2 doesn't top it.

But there aren't any real mis-steps here. If you liked the first you'll definitely like this.

[t0mby]

Bought a couple of 4K Blu Rays in a sale back in June and hadn't watched them yet, although only one movie I had seen many times before but the others I hadn't seen at all. I watched two over the weekend.

Jaws 4K UHD

Probably my favourite Spielberg movie, yeah sure, in some parts the shark looks hella fake but overall it's got great pacing and doesn't feel like a 2+ hr film at all. The 4K remaster is amazing, so crisp, right up there with the Stallone First Blood 4K. They even managed to add an Atmos mix in and although there's not too much going on to utilize the top speakers, the underwater scenes sound excellent. Definitely one for the collection.

9 scars out of 10


Ghost in the Shell 4k

This was the live action movie with Scarlett Johansson and I'm a sucker for Cyberpunk movies. I don't recall if I ever saw the original manga in its entirety as it's pretty old now but this movie was way better than I expected. Certainly had some great effects and the world imagined came across great. A great show piece and an enjoyable film but I can see why people were a bit angry having a westerner play the main character over an Asian but they made it work.

8 augmented body parts out of 10


The third movie I purchased I haven't seen yet, Black Hawk Down but am looking forward to it as I've heard great things.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Black Hawk Down is fucking amazing and I need to watch it again.

[t0mby]

Black Hawk Down is fucking amazing and I need to watch it again.

My subwoofer is ready!

[t0mby]

Black Hawk Down 4K Extended Edition

First time watching this in its entirety, movie holds up really well for 20yrs old..I suppose the film grain is part of the experience, definitely not as sharp as some of the other older 4K remasters (Jaws, First Blood) but the sound, phwoar, from the time they start the mission to the end the Atmos gets a workout with RPGs, Helicopters and debris all above you, amazing. Thoroughly enjoyed the movie, all 2hrs and 30mins of it.

9 butchered trigger fingers out of 10

[Ambrose Burnside]

I really need to watch it again.

[Gamma]

Jackass Forever.

A 96 minute celebration of cock and ball torture. I haven't seen any of the movies since the first one so there were a few new faces, but everyone earned their stripes. The stunts are all pretty crazy, but the cast are constantly pranking each other as well which just gave it a really fun vibe. Amazing how much mileage Knoxville can get out of an unexpected stun gun and a good sense of comedic timing. Great production too, the intro sequence is incredible. I'd watch it again.

[GeneraL CyberFunK]

Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Probably one of the most incredible movie experiences I've ever witnessed. So much happens. The fight scenes are so creative and.. this movie has the most unique and never before scene fight scene.. EVER.

Michelle Yeoh is a force of nature but I have to mention Ke Huy Quan.. (Data from Goonies) who reminded us of how much an absolute treasure he is..

It's laugh out loud hilarious.. but 5min later you will be fighting off tears. I will have to see it again.

10 bloodied dildos out of 10.

[unfnknblvbl]

Prey

Really not sure why this wasn't released to cinemas. This movie is properly excellent.

[Froggy]

A not shit Predator movie?

[unfnknblvbl]

a not shit Predator movie. I can see some people having a whinge about a female lead, but who cares. It's an excellent action film.

[Deef]

Jurassic World Dominion

Bit LTTP but anyway.

You've probably heard that this is bad, but expressing the "how" bad doesn't really get the message across. It's not just amazingly bad in the way that makes you unable to suppress a groan. It's amazingly bad even with no feeling of disappointment. No need to vent any emotion, but I was still left speechless. I still just can't fathom how they made this.

I think I was maybe about 40 minutes in that I caught myself frowning pretty hard. I realised that I had been for some time without being aware of it. The movie had been a sequence of simply stupid events, building up this unconscious demand for patience and wondering of when things will steer back into feeling less idiotic. But by the time Tim Cook (I mean, Dodgson) got his big intro, the unconscious became conscious because my face was literally getting tired from frowning.

It's like that Trump interview with that Aussie reporter. That guy, that face. Not expressing disagreement or jest, but frowning all the while nonetheless as he genuinely tries to process the stupidity. Watching Jurassic World Dominion is that same feeling. It is just hard to process how stupid it is.

Sorry that I'm not going into any details. I would be here all day and that wouldn't be getting the point across. It's the not the power of the stench, it's that everything stinks. Everything is wrong. The story, the escapes, the acting, the characterisation, the "chemistry", the conclusion, the story, the story, the story. It even retcons a thing that no-one cared about in the first place, but might have at least been interesting, and turns it into a new nothing. It took something already boring, retconned it, and made it more boring. If you made a drinking game of finding scenes that have nothing wrong with them, everyone would go home sober.

Forget about the IP. In case you had a little hope remaining that some of that old, great Jurassic Park spirit would make a return here -- especially with the returning oldies and all -- forget about it. Don't just forget about it; get ready to get owned. I don't think I've ever seen a movie kill its own IP this brutally.


Maybe watch it to witness the train wreck, but even that's a tough call. The most literal application of that Will Ferrel "Not even mad" meme would go all over this movie.

I can't even think of how I'd give this 1/10. Oh I know. Goldblum gives a nod to his open shirt scene from the original movie. There you go.

1/10. Unmitigated disaster.

[F for Fake]

And yet it made almost a billion dollars.

[t0mby]

I would've walked out of Dominion is we didn't have the boys with us. I'd promised them I'd take them to see it two years ago when first revealed so it was all about them but yeah, what a shite film. Way to end on a low.


Also, Prey, another vote for excellent, best in the franchise since the original. Watched it the exact minute it appeared on Disney, 8pm local time and was glued to the screen. Watched it a second to e a few days later with a friend and they agreed, great film.

[F for Fake]

Avatar: Teh way of water

See it in 3D or not at all. It really is quite a spectacle, though I'm glad it's the only series (worth seeing) that does it. Especially since it was such a long time since the original that the spectacle is kinda new again. Was surprised to see half of the sessions weren't even 3D though :S

Story isn't' anything special. Characters doing stupid shit that makes the same situation happen multiple times, but nothing pants on head retarded like most stuff these days.
Some great new human-tech vehicles. I could just imagine them as GI-Joe toys. Beautiful ocean visuals *cue Emerald Coast theme*.

The framerate is changing from 24 to 48fps throughout the movie, which never bothered me, however I went out to grab a beer just before the last act (need it for 3 hours of this) and when I came back it felt like everything was at 2x speed. I guess because of all the action in the climax it was running at 48fps. It was off-putting though. So maybe not good for the eyes/brain to have that break.

7 Bros out of 10 Cuz's

[unfnknblvbl]

Avatar: The Way Of Water

It wasn't as shit as I was expecting. A nice, big, brain-dead spectacle of a movie. Would have been great in an iMax cinema in 3D. Not sure why the Naavi all speak kiwi. Laaaaame ending, obviously setting up a million sequels.

7 talking whales out of 10

[Froggy]

Saw Spiderman on release day.. pretty good, the animation is fantastic. It's a bit slow in parts but it's weaving the two stories together plus introducing the multiverse. The next one is set up to be a great finale.

[Deef]

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

10/10

I will say one thing though. I'm a person who hates spoilers more than anyone, but I do wish something about this had been spoilt for me. Not that I'll say what that is.

The only other nitpicks I can think of are that a few voicelines were a bit muffled out, particularly early on. And, lastly: There's no banger that competes with Sunflower from the first film. That's literally the one thing this didn't do better than Into the Spider-Verse.

Otherwise, yep an easy 10/10 from me. It was just exactly what I wanted. All that we've been led to expect, but lived up to and then some. At some point I was registering that this felt like a videogame sequel more than a movie sequel; everything was so dialed up, but it also managed to not fall on its face. The story is also solid; mostly spoilt by trailers but some good payoffs in there too. The emotional angles were more impactful this time round too.

The animation and action gets a little information overload at times, but that's exactly what I wanted. Just a deluge of creative, good-looking, entertainment in your face that really did not let me down. Despite the intensity it gets to, and the large-ish runtime, I could have kept watching for much longer.

[Froggy]

Indiana Jones.. had some free gold class tickets so went in for this with really low expectations and came out... pleasantly surprised. It was great, did a great job of trying to capture the film style of the 80s, it's a million times better than the crystal skull and it's focused on Indy. I'm not a huge Indiana Jones fan and I thought this movie was pretty damn good, I'm expecting it to get legs from word of mouth to beat the bad vibes. Phoebe W didn't dominate how I was worried she was going to and was a real supporting actress in this with Harrison still clearly the main man. Does alright for a 80 year old but they don't try and pretend he's not.

[Deef]

The Flash

You know how you can have a great game despite it being ugly, or even a janky bug-ridden mess? The Flash is that. Well, still not "great", but actually the best DC movie in modern times; a few steps above "inoffensive", which was really the best I had dared to expect from it.

It is comically bad, all the time. Its production quality in particular is just confusingly, hilariously low when I had been thinking that these guys were trying to compete with Marvel. Well, those pretenses have definitely been dropped here as every 2 minutes there's a character looking worse than old rubbery Neo in The Matrix : Reloaded. Straight out of the gate, opening minutes, get ready to be blown away by how poor the CG is. It's incredible. Later scenes get significantly worse, as the movie quite clearly decides that it simply isn't even attempting to cross the uncanny valley for many appearances. It's really weird to witness this decision being made in such a big budget movie. I kept feeling like I was watching something that was doing its very best... for the year 2001.

Yet, all that badness is only amusing, and you then... you get past it all; all the shoehorned cameos, all the terrible CG, the story that's a fun but hot timey mess, that cringey Flash running style... even the suit is fuggers. But you get past all that and... it actually felt fine to watch?

That surprised me.

So yeah, I definitely didn't mind it. It was actually... decently... enjoyable... to watch, even amid all the jank.


7.5/10

[t0mby]

I have seen so many movies this year, most are probably rewatches but a few were going in blind now I primarily buy 4K discs. Probably bought between 50-100 since my last post.

A couple of blind buys the last few weeks, Bullet Train, Source Code (2011) and Everything Everywhere All at Once. The latter blew me away, such a fantastic film, not surprised it has the record for most awards, totally surprised me in all the good ways..

Bullet Train was good, not great but it did have it's moments

Source Code, well, I found out about this title after reading an article on rating the best time travelling movies. Stars Jake Gyllenhal (sp?) who uses some device to relive the last 8 mins on a train before it exploded as he tries to find the location of the bomb and who the bomber is. It's not too bad at all and just the right length coming in at just over 90mins.

Few more movies expected from Amazon, most I've seen such as The Prestige, Train to Busan, Riddick Trilogy and a blind purchase of a film called Mayhem. Totally bombed at the box office bringing in $17,000 but the story sounds great and it has 85% on Rotten Tomatoes out of 61 reviews. It's a Action Horror. Here's the Wikipedia link.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(film)

[unfnknblvbl]

Dune Part II

I gave moisture to the dead. Sure, it deviates a whole lot from the book, but not so far as for it to not feel like Dune, like the David Lynch from did. As a die-hard Dune fan, I would go as far as to say that this pair of films did the source material justice.

The visual effects were utterly breathtaking. The sound was astonishing. The performances were dead on for the most part, although I think Christopher Walken as the Emperor was a bit weak.

While during part 1, I was in love with how accurate it was, this time around I was enthralled with where the story was going next. I knew, but didn't know for sure how we were getting there. Every interaction between Paul and Chain had me choking up (it was the first love story I ever gave a shit about as a youngster).

Eleven giant sandworms out of ten. A bonus nerd point for dropping "the battle for Arrakis" just after the "Dune Part 2" title.

After this, Denis Villeneuve has earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wants imo. If he can turn Dune into a colossal success while doing it justice... wow. Bless the coming and going of him. May his passage cleanse the world. May he keep the world for his people.

[Deef]

My impression of Dune Part 2 is fairly different to unfunk's.

In its own right I had only a few complaints:
- The fly-by-wires were distractingly poor, like they were in Part 1.
- Most of the fight choreography was just phoned in. Having nothing entertaining to look at stood out to me.
- I got sick of the last third of the movie cutting to Chani's face every 2 minutes to ensure we knew she was still frowning.

But these are nitpickish. Unlike unfunk, my main problem with it was to do with its handling of the source. I could agree that in terms of tone, it did the source material justice. I think it was going for the right thing. Production, effects, and (most of the) casting were good. The dive into black and white for the Harkonnen scenes was a great choice imo.

But for me, the movie just struggled so much with actually wrangling the book into 2 movies. This was frequently bugging me; not what it glossed, but how often it glossed. I kept getting this mental image of a worn blanket jumping out at me; threads across bare patches, the movie trying to hold so much together with very little that the viewer could just absorb freely or enjoy. It made the moments of actual exposition stick out too, like when Chani blurts out in one breath:

Hi Paul oh you just woke up and you've had another nightmare like you've been having for the last few months because that's how much time we've been together now having kissed in the previous scene and I want you just you not everyone watching at home to know that I love you and I'm here for you and have been for months tell me about your nightmares PAUL!

I haven't read the book in maybe 20 years so that was probably contributing to my impression, but I think that's kind of the point. While I'd refer people to unfunk's opinion over mine, I'd also say that my lesser ability to fill in the gaps without the movie's help validates my impression. Meanwhile for someone who hadn't read the book, like my viewing partner, they just couldn't put things together enough to follow. And that was just for what was on show, let alone all the background stuff only barely alluded to.


Oh, one other large-ish complaint I just remembered, affecting 3 characters.

1. Regardless of whether her character was significantly changed, it felt a bit jarring how much attention Chani received throughout the film. She felt a bit too front and centre for nothing; even the closing scene was the Chani story. That was really, really off-kilter imo.

2. And Irulan, similarly, giving me a feeling of why is this character getting so many scenes. Princess Irulan kept appearing, I kept feeling like I'm supposed to get invested in her, but I knew it was for a lot of nothing. This could possibly be blamed on the the fact that it was Florence Pugh; a popular actress making me expect more to happen with the character. I came away from it suspecting that she's in the movie to be in the trailers.

3. Likewise for the general vibe with Alia. Again, big name actress with one weird scene of attention given to her. Meanwhile it just... didn't gel for me every time fetus Alia got attention. I get that that's the story, but it felt jarring to see a movie try to work it. Introducing a barely human character two-thirds into the story is just a challenge for a film, where nothing can just gently slide across the viewer's awareness like it can with text. This is my reasoning anyway. So it just goes back to saying how hard the source was to work with. I can't think of how to make Alia work without more hours of time to let the story cook.

So for those 3 characters, their screen time frequently felt lost to me. I was often distracted by questioning their presence more than I was listening to what they were saying.


I didn't really enjoy the old 80s Dune movie but... it didn't give me the feeling of such heavy glossing, nor jarring character presences, like this Villeneuve take did. Even though it was obviously glossing even more.


So overall I'd say that where the book is a heavy story held together with awesome sci-fi enjoyment, these 2 movies were a heavy story that barely holds itself together at all and just smashes on through to the end, because it just does not have time to flesh out anything.

The sandworm-mounting scene is a great example of the kind of fun via deliberation that I wanted to see much more of, and a great example of the book's appeal that I wanted to see more of. It was that awesome sci-fi glue that made the book so enjoyable for me, so for a story that has so much other cool stuff in there to enjoy, it just feels wrong that the fun of this sandworm scene was a rare exception for the film.

It's bizarre to me that it sets itself up hard for a third movie, when the 2 films we've had so far absolutely should have already been 3, imo.