Last Movie You Watched (2017)

zlogdan said:
I have loved the first two seasons of Black Mirror but was very disappointed with the third maybe because it has become less British. On season 3 I only liked San Junipero a lot.
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Agreed. San Junipero was incredible.

The last movie I watched was Kong: Skull Island. Despite having to sit waaaay down in the front of the theater, it was a fun experience. Not a perfect movie, by any means, but it was really enjoyable. It's very reminiscent of old sci-fi/adventure films. Definitely not okay with the giant spider, though. That was an unpleasant scene, so to all you arachnophobes out there--just know that there's a really nasty giant spider scene (that I watched through my fingers)!
 
Stranger things
Nice little series with open ending and second season in production. Definitely worth a try for everyone who loves Stephen King, D&D and the whole atmosphere of 80-th. The best part of this series so far is that anything can be added to the next seasons without ruining the initial concept.

Child actors were great. Loved their acting and characters.
 
The Lego Batman Movie - took the kids to see it in the cinema. I was overcome with indifference by the end of it - but my kids enjoyed it to various degrees.

The movie alternated between frenetic, making-it-up as they went along action OTT sequences and almost static, mawkish, 'Finding the Meaning of Family' character development as Batman went, during the course of the film, from being an arrogant, self-obsessed prick at the start, to being a slightly less arrogant, self-obsessed prick at the end.

I loved the character in The Lego Movie but here his endless "I'm so awesome" shtick soon outstayed its welcome.

I think I laughed twice during the movie. I laughed more during the episode of the 1966 Batman TV series that we watched tonight.
 
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Fist Fight:
8/10
A decent comedy movie from start to finish with likable characters including the 2 teachers of the fist fight, multiple characters have character development, problems get solved, and a terrific exciting climax the fist fight which is a realistic believable fight in Hollywood movie as blood, broken bones, bruises and messed up hair is shown.
No cliffhangers so no doubt the writer wants no sequel because movies can end in 1 movie.

Kong Skull Island
8/10
This becomes a Moby Dick kind of story and with what the group is fighting or arguing about its not something trival or dumb stuff.
As a result humans are divided as not all agree with killing King Kong. A entertaining great movie start to the end with spectacular visuals and colossal animals.

Flawed unique likable characters including Hiddleston as a badass hero and multiple monster animals that attempt to kill humans.
Obvious foreshadowing for the sequel including a after credits scene.
 
Awooga! Awooga!
Another: "I've Just Watched This
So You Don't Have To" Movie.​



Stranded (2013) - I bought this in a local charity shop purely because of the bit of the blurb that read "Directed by Oscar Nominated Roger Christian; the creative mind behind Star Wars and Alien" Whoo hoo! The creative mind behind Star Wars and Alien. Cool! George Lucas and Ridley Scott's Svengali!

No.

Sadly I knew this to be a piece of wishful thinking on some sales person's part because if anyone from marketing had bothered to look him up they would have soon found out that, though Roger Christian did indeed work on both movies, he was hardly the 'creative mind' behind them. In the 1977 Star Wars he worked as a 'set decorator', and was one of two 'Art Directors' on Alien.

What the blurb writer failed to mention though was that fact that Roger Christian is probably most famous for having directed the millennial mega-stinker Battlefield Earth.

Sadly Stranded isn't as enjoyably bad as Battlefield Earth. It's just bad. It's yet another small crew in a confined space with something horrible in the air ducts picking them off one by one story. The entire crew of four of a lunar mining base are thrown into horrible jeopardy when an unexpected (huh?) meteor storm punches holes in some small bits left over from an episode of Space 1999 and suddenly everyone is running around in the dark trying to stop something happening while things explosively decompress stuff in the wrong direction - and for ten or so minutes I had no idea what anyone thought they were supposed to be doing. Seriously no idea. But whatever it was they had to do it NOW! Before things went CRITICAL! or OVERLOADED! So they did. And things GOT WORSE until Christian Slater OPENED A BIG AIRLOCK THAT WOULD FIGURE PROMINENTLY LATER IN THE MOVIE and let all the evil Carbon Monoxide out. After that things settled down for a bit and we found out what our characters were called - because you know all that boring stuff that you usually find at the start of this kind of movie. The sequence where you get to see them wake up and have breakfast and squabble for a bit? Where you get to meet the cast and find out who they are, and work out who the likeable ones are, and who the funny one is, and what the hell they actually DO for a living...? This movie didn't bother with that bit. It just threw rocks at the characters.

Anyway, before we've got the characters' names straight in our heads (there are only four of them how difficult can this be?) one of them has got herself infected by some alien spores that came off one of the meteors and is suddenly MASSIVELY PREGNANT! Boss man Christain Slater is yelling about keeping her in ISOLATION and opening the door to med bay every three minutes (and leaving it open) and then LOCKING HER IN ISOLATION again till he has open the door again a few seconds later and then he's yelling he has to QUARANTINE her. But then she gives birth to an alien thingie which escapes through the door he left open.... And on and on it goes with people doing stupid and pointless things just to keep the plot running. For instance: at one point in this pile of keich our commander is wrestling with the infected quarantined woman in the med bay and, before he subdues her, is stabbed by her with some sharp surgical instrument . At which point the doctor comes in (through the door the commander left open - yet again) and, for no other reason than the plot says he has to, the doctor takes his belly-stabbed commanding officer OUT of the Med bay (where all the medical equipment is) to to stitch him up somewhere else in the station (oh and they leave the door open again). You see, if he DIDN'T take Slater's character somewhere else to stitch him up, and leave the door open, another character couldn't do what he has to do to keep the plot moving in the med bay simply because there would be someone there to stop him. And the film would have ended. Stupid film.

I spent most of the film trying to work out why a base on the moon would have seatbelts in the office chairs.
 
JunkMonkey said:
I spent most of the film trying to work out why a base on the moon would have seatbelts in the office chairs.
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Probably for the same reason that Moonbase Alpha has windows that slide open.
Last movie I watched was Hacksaw Ridge, which was good but very gory. We had to turn it off while we ate supper.
 
I picked up this 2015 version BlueRay of The Fifth Element
from the $1.00 table at a local charity white elephant sale... just finished watching it for the first time since 1997 when I saw it in the theater....Gary Oldman's turn as the evil Zorg is a highlight as is the Diva's song wits imposable to sing parts that could only be done with sound editing as the intervals between some of the notes and their pitches had to created... all in all a cool popcorn and beer movie.
It holds up very well and i would give it a solid 4 out of 5 it is a very fun film in many ways and the violence is cartoon like due in part to to the bright lighting and pallet that the director chose.
I am working my way through the extras and they are first rate for the period and apparently were done for the 2004 first blue-ray release, which I understand had problems with its transfer... so if you hunt this up make sure you get the 2015 version i linked to above or the iTunes e hd version which I am told uses the same transfer.
 

Last weekend I watched the 2010 German film Die Farbe (The Colour out of Space) which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name. It was available for free streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the US, so I thought I'd give it a try since I'm a big Lovecraft fan. My initial impression was that this was a low-budget black-and-white art-house film, but it began to impress me a little as it went on. First, the setting in rural Germany was really well done. I didn't expect so many subtitles, but I quickly got used to them. The characters were pretty well developed for a Lovecraft film, and you even began to empathize with them. The alien "Colour" itself was the only color in the film, which actually worked pretty well with the black-and-white pallet of the rest of the picture. CGI was used sparingly, which was best (and no doubt good for the budget).

Is this a great film? Not at all. Is it a pretty good Lovecraft film? I came to think so. I appreciated the mostly successful attempt to make a relatable film about a malevolent alien color. There are a number of attempts to make movies based on the works of HP Lovecraft. Most are not very good, but a few overcome the difficulty of their source material and budgets to make a film that contains some of the essence of Lovecraft's stories. I think this film is one of those few.
 
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Prairie_Dog said:
Last weekend I watched the 2010 German film Die Farbe (The Colour out of Space) which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name. It was available for free streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the US, so I thought I'd give it a try since I'm a big Lovecraft fan. My initial impression was that this was a low-budget black-and-white art-house film, but it began to impress me a little as it went on. First, the setting in rural Germany was really well done. I didn't expect so many subtitles, but I quickly got used to them. The characters were pretty well developed for a Lovecraft film, and you even began to empathize with them. The alien "Colour" itself was the only color in the film, which actually worked pretty well with the black-and-white pallet of the rest of the picture. CGI was used sparingly, which was best (and no doubt good for the budget).
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I'll have to give this a try! Thank you for the heads-up.

Interestingly, the last movie I watched was From Beyond, which is also based on Lovecraft. I've seen it half a dozen times, but my boyfriend, who is reading Lovecraft for the first time, had not. He hated it, but I think it's fun! The visuals are very cool, and it's got Jeffrey Combs in it, so that's good enough for me. A serious departure from the Lovecraft short story, for sure, but still entertaining.
 
J.Rainey said:
Interestingly, the last movie I watched was From Beyond, which is also based on Lovecraft...The visuals are very cool, and it's got Jeffrey Combs in it, so that's good enough for me. A serious departure from the Lovecraft short story, for sure, but still entertaining.
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From Beyond is definitely a polarizing film. While it has very Lovecraftian elements, it diverges into places of its own. Clearly, the device that allows us to see into the ether where otherworldly creatures live in a dimension that overlaps with our own is very Lovecraftian. It's effect on the people who use it though could have been done better. However, overall, it clearly is one of the more memorable Lovecraft-inspired films.
 
I just rewatched John Wick and it was just as good the second time through. This is a great action movie but be warned the body count is very high.
 
Justin Swanton said:
Nah... (and water in a pool that in zero gravity suddenly rises upwards?)
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I just watched Passengers. While it was contrived and did have some major inaccuracies (e.g. the traditional Hollywood spaceship whose engines run all the time), that scene made sense to me. The pool was rotating with the ship, which--however implausibly--suddenly stopped rotating. When that happened, the water wasn't just suddenly going to stop. I haven't done the maths, but I suspect it would bounce off the walls a few times and end up in a sphere in the air, as it did in the movie.

One of the entertaining parts of the movie was reading through some of the IMDB reviews afterwards, where people rate the movie one-star for being scientifically impossible... for 'reasons' that merely prove the reviewer doesn't know what they're talking about.

I didn't think it was a great movie, but it was entertaining and had a few good scenes. I'd give it maybe 7/10, which is what it's currently rated at on IMDB.
 
Just watched Logan.

If you haven't seen this yet, it earns it's R rating for sheer violence and an almost Reservoir Dogs level body count.

Despite that, I found the most disconcerting thing in the movie (which is not in the main Fox X-Men continuity) was Professor X swearing.

And the most interesting thing was that it reminded me strongly of another movie...and that movie was, of all things, Clint Eastwood's western Unforgiven.
 
Beauty and the Beast - live action film with Emma Watson.

I watched the animated version plenty of times so I know what would happen, but the movie was so good I was almost brought to tears at the end.
 
Power Rangers
7/10
Cameos of familiar persons if you watched the original power Rangers tv show or saw mmpr the movie.
As expected it's a great serious action fantasy movie the right mix of serious and light hearted stuff so mostly like the Marvel studios movies.
Most of the drama from them discovering they got powers but how exactly , plus the growing pains of 5 strangers that have to become a team to save the world plus so they can use their armor suits.

Decent acting,great action, best use of the original power Rangers theme at the perfect time, believable relatable flawed characters, lines and a line that makes it obvious sequels and a sequel, after credits scene likely where the sequel resumes, great exciting climax with huge high stakes.
 
I just watched Ghost In The Shell. I am not really able to have a firm opinion on it. I suppose I liked it. I enjoyed the whole Artificial Life discussion the story provoked, but the actual plot of the movie was too predictable. Scarlett Johansson performed the role of Major well. The special effects were decent, but the world of GitS felt strangely empty (devoid of people) unlike Blade Runner.
Overall 7/10 - but it did make me look forward to Blade Runner 2049. I saw the teaser for the latter in the cinema before GitS and it was a different experience than watching it on YouTube.
 
I watched Arrival the other day. Very interesting and well done, allowing for some this-is-a-movie-we've-got-to-do-some-handwaving, but unexpectedly sad. I figured out the "twist" well before the end, but that was okay. It certainly made me want to read the print version -- good ideas.
 
Beauty and the Beast 9/10
A great fantasy romance movie which has obvious scenes from the animated disney version but still has things not in the animated disney version so it's not a utter copy and paste.

Today
Going In Style (2017)
A decent entertaining funny movie start to the end. 3 guys all friends that got fired from the same company have no pensions along with others that also got fired.
Some funny stuff could be possibly mean spirited but the other funny stuff is not dirty, mean spirited or anything like that which is terrific because a movie can be funny without that stuff.
Plus the 3 have other problems including Willie played by the brilliant Morgan Freeman needs a kidney to avoid dying with a narrow window for living.
Outcome in the climax seemed obvious but still throws the curve ball which is great.
 
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Fantastic Beasts... Still can't decide whether it's a great expansion of the Potterverse or a cynical cash-in... was OK, if a bit long. Think I might need to see it again.

Kong.... much much better than I was expecting. Rather messy for younger viewers, though. Nice post-credits scene.
 
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