Life Itself was fantastic. Some strange mix of uplifting and depressing for me, but I loved every moment. Especially liked the relationship with Siskel, which was also a lot of conflicting emotions: sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad.

I've watched Life Itself several times. Agreed, fantastic documentary.

Please no one say anything about the new alien movie, please.

At least, not until next week.

Good strategy to come into a movie thread.

Have seen both, and both are terrific.

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Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was absolutely awful. The plot is too stupid for words, the sort of muddled, puerile nonsense a 10-year old would produce. The script thinks it's five times more hip and funny than it actually is. You know there are meant to be jokes in the movie because characters laugh uproariously at each other's wisecracks, just to draw your attention to the fact that humour was intended as you'd be unaware otherwise. There are a few chuckle-worthy moments here and there, but too many of the jokes are stale.

Even worse are the mind-numbingly tedious action scenes, which rehash a lot of the first movie. There's another large fleet of small ships which cluster together and a long sequence is devoted to the homing dart. People use jetpacks to fly, big guns are fired, lasers shot, glowing things do glowy stuff. It's like watching a video game, and totally lacking in originality or even a hint of excitement.

The film is a box-ticking CGI-fest, and I can't help suspecting that the actors knew how superfluous they truly are to the proceedings as they mostly sound like they're phoning it in, perhaps struggling to do any decent acting when there's such heavy use of bluescreen. Chris Pratt's performance consists largely of walking into a room, and looking up with his mouth hanging open, staring at something which isn't physically there. The one actor who truly stands out is Kurt Russell, but for the wrong reasons, grossly overacting his scenes. I've always liked Kurt Russell and know he can do better than this, so it's disappointing to see him turn in such a lousy performance.

IMO this has displaced Thor 2 as the worst of the Marvel movies, as that was partly redeemed by the always excellent Tom Hiddleston's Loki.

Absolutely awful?

so your staying it was better than the first installment...

eh... it was aight. nothing special even though RS made it.
I was completely drunk off my arse, so maybe I need to see it again. I quite honestly did not feel affinity for any of the characters, except Walter and of course the Alien.

I do love seeing me some wondrous Alien action though.

I am beginning to think that the David/Walter character needs his own movie franchise.

Hate this so much. It's even worse when it happens in books; Ready Player One does that type of thing a lot.

Saw Alien Covenant, not nearly as big a disaster as Prometheus was but still didn't particularly impress me. The Alien franchise was better without all the pseudo-religious, pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo thrown in. Then again, without that stuff I guess it's just the same Alien franchise cliches every movie.

I mean, Alien Covenant is to Alien what Force Awakens is to a New Hope when you really look at the main plot



Basically just watch Alien and Aliens whenever you want a good horror/scifi movie and pretend the franchise ended there.

Watching Stargate again for the first time since the 90s. The acting is really bad, especially the soldiers.

Overall still worth a watch or rewatch

Couple of Philip K. Dick adaptations I re-watched recently...everyone knows Blade Runner and several of his bigger titles, and most know Terminator was jacked from him. These two were based off of my favorite two short sci-fi stories I read as an early teen, in both cases they read a lot better (and faster) .

Screamers (1995) - Based on Second Variety. A war changes when one side develops automated killer robots, who start designing models of themselves, eventually to human form. Movie was lower budget, is slightly dated, and fresh adaptation would be nice, but it still works. Peter Weller (Robocop) carries it pretty well.

Imposter (2002) - based on story of same name. This came out about 6 months before Minority Report and nobody cared. It was originally a short 20-minute film the studio liked, and then they awkwardly decided to turn that into a feature-length thing by filming and hour of filler. The 20 minute version works like a good episode of The Outer Limits, the movie was a disaster and major bomb.

Both of which make me think that there's room for a sci-fi TV short story show like Science Fiction Theatre or Outer Limits. And Twilight Zone when they did sci-fi. I guess that format kind of died in favor of things like Stargate and BSG but wouldn't mind a good revival.

I loved the Blade Runner book (Do Androids Dream...) in college, literally just about my favorite read ever, but when I read a short story collection of his I was really disappointed. Nervous to re-read DADOES in case it's actually crap.

If you're putting together a film time capsule for the '80s with say 30 films, Weekend at Bernie's is definitely in there right? (The goal of the capsule is not just quality film.)

You realize that that was one of conceits, right? The whole space fight sequence with the Sovereign was that the Sovereign were attacking as if playing a video game. In fact, their pattern of attack directly mimicked the classic 80s arcade video game Galaga.

So I guess you could either call that "totally lacking in originality", or an incredibly awesome and inspired piece of originality.

The depiction of drone warfare in movies is hardly original. And I'm referring to every action scene in the movie. The more important point is that the scenes were so boring and lacking in excitement.

Incidentally I love video games, but watching someone play one isn't terribly interesting unless you're looking for tips on beating a boss.

I love space ships that can make 90º turns in a vacuum...

what are we, stupid?

I have a real fondness for this low budget classic. I have always thought the story worked really well and should be remade.

Do I need to have seen Prometheus to understand the new film?

Wizard of Lies last night. An HBO-produced film with Robert DeNiro playing Bernie Madoff.

Extremely meh. I didn't feel as if they even made an attempt to explain what actually did (i.e., how did he produce statements for his clients that seemed legitimate; what did he actually do with the money). Even their attempt at explaining what the term "Ponzi scheme" meant to Bernie's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) was weak.

I didn't care about any of the characters, found the storytelling uninteresting. Maybe I went in with too high of expectations, knowing that it was DeNiro & Pfeiffer, IDK.

Yea, I wanted more back story.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006). Robert Altman's (the movie's director) last film. An ensemble of good talent including the man himself, Garrison Keillor.

I enjoyed it. Great music. Could have been done better but that can be said of many movies. Worth your time if you liked the radio show. Otherwise pass and watch a Godzilla Flick.

But it's not a generic depiction of drone warfare; it's a tongue-in-cheek takeoff of an actual 1980s arcade video game. If you aren't old enough to have played the game or remember it, then the entire joke just went over your head. But that's okay, there are a lot of Easter eggs in the movie that are meant for just a small section of the audience. Those of us who remember the game think that the use of it in the movie was fantastic; those who don't, just think that it was an unoriginal depiction of drone warfare.


Look, I didn't think it was a great movie by any means (I believe I gave it a 6 out of 10), and everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so I won't try to change yours. But people should know that when you rate it as "absolutely awful," over 99% of the people who have seen it and rated it disagree with you. Of the 132,287 IMDB users who have given it a rating, only 1212 have rated it as low as a 1 or a 2 on a 10-point scale. (945 & 267, respectively) In fact, only another 1280 (again <1%) have it rated as a 3 or 4. So roughly 98% of 132K people have rated it a 5 or better. This in no way invalidates your opinion that it was truly awful, but it does put it in perspective for anyone considering how much to value your opinion when deciding whether to see the movie.

but every alien speaking English is cool?

Prometheus was far worse than I even imagined. It's totally incomprehensible. There are some god people who have to fly ships which can be taken down via a fender bender. There are also some snake things which have nothing to do with Aliens or these god people. Throw in some high school pot philosophy and you end up with a really bad film.

This makes Bay films seem like literature.

I think I'll be skipping the new one.

Grade: F

No it really does invalidate his opinion. Anyone who goes to see GotG2 and then describes the writing as puerile is a ****ing useless hipster.