I've watched BoB all the way thru 3 times, that's almost 30 hours! It really is GOAT.

Another Underworld movie coming out:



this makes what, like 11 of them? Do they count as B-movies yet? They are pretty much all the same movie each time but I will keep watching because loldon'tcare. Tywin Lannister up in this bitch yo.

Speaking of Charles Dance, have you guys seen any of the Terry Pratchett television adaptations? Kind of want to give one a try but somewhat skeptical, don't want to Doctor Who myself.

Likes the Underworld movies but considers The Big Lebowski to be garbage.

Well, you certainly qualify as unique Chopstick, I'll give you that.

Spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen it:

Some of the things they do for dramatic purposes are unnecessary too, like the dude who has a brother on the U-boat they might save. Completely unnecessary and makes the movie worse.

I did like some things, such as the strategy of trying to crack enigma using a computer, the notion of being careful where you use your information so that the other side doesn't figure out that you broke their code, and the discussion about Turing's homosexuality and how he was (possibly) drive to suicide by the unfair policies at the time.

Marooned Apollo astronauts encounter a malfunction and are unable to return to earth.

This movie is part Gravity and part Apollo 13. The visuals are pretty clunky by today's standards but the story is good. An all star cast, including Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman, help make this a solid movie. I particularly liked Peck's character and his "buck stops here" role.

I found it interesting that they made an Apollo movie during the Apollo space program. And not just an Apollo movie, but depicting a mission gone wrong. This was before Apollo 13.

There are a couple of eyeroll plot devices (i.e. the hurricane) and I'm sure the science nits would tear it apart, but overall it holds up pretty well.

TIFF started up yesterday so here's the schedule of what I'm seeing this year. Subject to change but should end up pretty much as this.

Free Fire
Carrie Pilby
Trespass Against Us
Planetarium
Sing
Nocturnal Animals
Jackie
Bleed For This
La La Land
Arrival
The Bad Batch
Manchester by the Sea
Two Lovers and a Bear
In Dubious Battle
The Headhunter's Calling
Christine
City of Tiny Lights
LBJ
Loving
The Promise
Dog Eat Dog
Their Finest
The Birth of a Nation
Colossal
The Edge of Seventeen

Let me know if you want any specific details for any of these and I'll try to include in my reviews.

Free Fire. Ben Wheatley's new movie about a 1970's IRA gun deal in a Boston warehouse that goes bad. Pretty much the entire movie takes place in the warehouse. I don't think saying that there's a large shootout would be a spoiler or an understatement given the title. It's a fun action movie. Actually gets a lot more laughs than I was expecting. Armie Hammer is probably the best part of a really good cast (Brie Larson, Cilian Murphy, and all of the characters are great). It starts to drag towards the end and probably should have been 15 minutes shorter even though it's only 90 minutes to begin with. But it was an enjoyable start to the festival. 6/10.

Carrie Pilby. Carrie is a 19 year old Harvard graduate. Her mother died when she was 12 and her father shipped her off from London to attend Harvard at 14. So the story picks up with her in therapy as an unhappy teenage genius living alone in New York. The more I try to think about how to explain the movie the more empty it starts to feel. The most interesting parts are when they look at a variety of broken relationships and how those broken pieces affect Carrie. But I don't think it went quite far enough into really exploring them fully. It tended to veer back towards comedy quite a bit, and even though a lot it was funny (especially Vanessa Bayer), I think that tendency hurt the movie overall. I thought Carrie (Bel Powley) was good and a lot of the acting was really strong (Gabriel Byrne, Nathan Lane, Bayer, Jason Ritter), but it ended up feeling average on the whole. 5/10.

Rewatched Weird Science for the first time in along time.

Doesn't hold up so well,but still better than most 80s comedies.

And I made the mistake of googling Kelly le Brock...

Sully Sullenberger: Airport Pilot

eh, it was fine. The structure was wacky, which I didn't like at first but then I thought it was fine. I probably knew too much about the incident, I read multiple long articles about it. They made out the investigation to be waaaaayyyyyyyyy more adversarial than it actually was, which really annoyed me. I'm probably not the target audience. It was OK I guess.

It's a movie though, gotta fill the 2 hours with something. 3.5 minute plane landing might be harrowing and exciting as all hell but what are you going fill the other 1 hour and 57 minutes with, an endless parade of people waiting to shake his hand, pat him on the back and say 'good job hero,' ?

Even if that was more realistic to reality that's not selling seats or winning Oscars.

I would guess that the median age in the audience is around 70.

Trespass Against Us. Brendan Gleeson and Michael Fassbender are the father/son leaders of a family of pikeys in the UK who make their living committing robberies. Gleeson is the overbearing crime boss while Fassbender is looking for a way to get out with his wife and kids. Honestly, I had a hard time at the beginning of the film even understanding their accents. Everyone sounds like Brad Pitt in Snatch and it was hard to pick up at first. There are a couple of nice robbery scenes and a couple good car chases but the family stuff is straight-forward and bit uninteresting. 4/10.

So Dunkirk is the next significant big screen movie being shot with 65/70mm film...

Not too minor, since it was trying to make a statement about how you can't allow mercy when you're up against an obvious evil. You need to eliminate it at every chance. Not that I agree with it, but he was pretty clearly trying to express that sentiment.

And yeah campy is way wrong. Corny is probably what you were going for.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Great stop-motion animated movie about a kid on a quest to stop his evil grandfather, accompanied by a monkey and a samurai beetle. The narrative is straightforward but beautifully told. End credits give a glimpse into the animation process, which must require a silly amount of work.

Saw Once More With Feeling, Andrew Dominick's film about the death of Nick Cave's son, the work of putting together a new album, and how we tell stories. I found it gripping.

Saw Ronaldo a documentary about Cristiano Ronaldo in 2014. The documentary crew followed Ronaldo for 14 months. The emphasis is on the ballon d'or competition. Ronaldo comes across as vain, but he also comes across as a loner. Very little people appear on this documentary besides Ronaldo's son, mother, brother and agent. The documentary wasn't great, but as a fan of Real Madrid, I enjoyed it.

Sully felt very procedural and the acting came off as a bit wooden to me. Was very short though I think they said what they needed to. I liked it still. My father was a pilot so aviation movies are always interesting to me.

Just saw this too. It was ok but nothing outstanding. The editing was very odd. No reason it needed that chopped up structure.

Time for Malpaso to retire... its been a good run.

Planetarium. Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp play sisters in the 1930's who host seances and can channel spirits (maybe for real). It's well shot and there are a few really beautiful scenes but the story is all over the place and the direction is too poor to hold it together in any meaningful way. The movie is I guess about 1930s cinema. Portman and Depp get taken in by a film producer who believes their seances are really bringing someone back from the dead to him. I was going to write a longer summary but the story is so all over the place that it barely made sense when I wrote it out. 3/10.

Sing. An animated movie by Garth Jennings focused on a Koala theatre owner (Matthew McConaughey) whose theatre has fallen on hard times and in an effort to bring people back decides to host a singing competition. The cast is awesome (Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon, Taron Egerton, Nick Kroll, John C Reilly, Tori Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, Seth MacFarlane, Nick Offerman, a bunch more). It's definitely a kids movie with a pretty simple plot but it's enjoyable and the music is great. 7/10.

Nocturnal Animals. Damn this is a gorgeous film. Tom Ford's 2nd film is awesome. He brilliantly weaves three different timelines (present, past, and a fictional novel in the film) together seamlessly so that each story enhances the others. I don't think I can speak highly enough about this. When you just take 3 of the best actors working today, point the camera at them and let them do all of the work you can't really go wrong. But when you layer Tom Ford's visual aesthetic on top of it you get something special. Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Michael Shannon are all perfect and he gets a really good performance out of Aaron Taylor-Johnson as well.

As a brief summary because it's probably better to not know too much of the story going in, Amy Adams is an art gallery director who receives a package from her ex-husband (Gyllenhaal) containing the manuscript for his novel. The story then moves back and forth between Amy Adams currently as she is reading the novel, the story in the novel itself, as well as Adams reflecting on the past relationship with her ex-husband. I feel like I often over-hype movies coming out of TIFF screenings especially when I write this immediately after I leave the theatre but I loved it. 10/10.

Movies I saw today:
XOXO: Very fun as an experience, all about optimism of music as a great unifier of people regardless of background, creed or sobriety level, without extending that optimism towards the music industry.

It was fun, even though a bit disjointed for the first and second acts, had too many plots and subplots but it looked like it was all going to crumble until the third act managed to hold it all together, just barely.

I was surprised this wasn't done with the assistance or permission of the actual real life Portland EDM event, XOXO. The filmakers just gave them the greatest publicity ever. Hell, I want to go to XOXO now, even though I don't particulary like EDM and think DJing is stupid and barely an art form.

3.5/5

The Big Short. I imagine others have talked about it here in 2+2 so I'm just going to say, yeah it's great. It managed to explain the 2008 economic crisis to me and I'm a complete dumba$$ when it comes to that sort of stuff. You gotta pay attention though, it's not a movie you can watch while looking at your phone. If you miss one of their (admirably short) exposition scenes then you will probably not understand what's going on later in the movie, unless you already know all of that stuff, of course.

4.5/5

Mike and Dave need Dates. It's funny, with funny actors playing funny characters (one of which is so much like my friend that I'm a bit worried for her), a funny set up and funny situations... but the constant adlibing kind of kills it. It's like just write a goddamn funny script and make the actors say the funny lines, you know? There are legit laughs to be had, but some scenes just drag for so long they stop being funny. It's good for a lazy sunday morning, and really nothing else.

2.5/5

is anybody here on letterboxd?

here's mine

(that's just what I've kept track of since 2015)