Been watching lots of movies but haven’t written about much. Some highlights:

Shiva Baby felt like A Serious Man but the protagonist is a twenty-something woman instead. Pokes a lot of fun at Jewish culture.

Mogul Mowgli Riz Ahmed is a beast. He wrote all of his own raps playing an up-and-coming Pakistani rapper who gets stricken with an auto-immune disease. Little out there w/ some hallucination scenes, but overall an interesting look into both cultures and generational struggle within.

Bad Education is about a wild, true story of embezzlement at a Long Island public school. Written by a student there. Jackman and Janney are great.

Bad Education is good.

Bad Education is best picture-worthy!

Cocaine Bear C-

I can tolerate a low productions value B-movie if it is at least well-written. Not here! This movie is utterly confused about what it wants to be. It isn't so awful that I turned it off, but it really is not worth watching.

Now wait, everything you said until this makes it sound like an amazing movie!

lol it has a cult following, so maybe you'll like it!

I read some reviews saying it was kind of a ripoff of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. But since I love all of those movies, I imagine I would at least like this one. For some reason I generally enjoy any films about the devil. Really surprised I had never heard of this one before.

A24 just does things right.

The lighthouse released yesterday on 4k UHD with a hand bound book and production notes.







Actual screen shot with my cell phone...

Nice package, but do you think 4k UHD really adds anything to a film that was deliberately made to look old?

over the last few months been meaning to catch up on the big franchises that i've previously ignored, quite frankly, i'm just annoyed at always missing references

mcu

went through and watched the newer ones i hadn't seen yet along with the older ones i also missed

at some point i'll probably revisit the others because for the life of me I can't remember any plot points of any of them

Thor Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy are by far the best ones and it's not even close - those are good movies, the rest not so much - some of them are downright awful

never really understood why these films are so popular

the spiderman films are fun guilty pleasures but i must admit my favorite one was the animated one

black panther films are all terrible, recently saw the newest one and it was so bad i found myself looking at my phone during even key action sequences because it was just so stupid i didn't care

mission impossible

i wasn't a big fan of the first when i came out (i saw it in theater) but on rewatching, i really enjoyed it, it's hard to believe this dark and gritty film that was all about deception and outmanuevering the opposition would go on to become the big explosion and fireworks franchise with loads of comic relief later on

one of my all time crushes

also had peak kristin scott thomas, actually did a double take when i discovered that's who she was because she's decidedly dressed down and unsexy in her other roles



the second one is kind of dumb, i just remember that back in the day i too saw that in theaters and recall thinking how insulting it was to have what they had for the opening scene and then they later have motorcycle jousting and it was just too much

but saved by peak thandie newton


fun fact, the main villian got injured during the motorcycle jousting scenes and as a result could no longer be in the next film he was booked to be in, where he was to play wolverine in x-men - one of those big what ifs in life, would hugh jackman would have become a big star without that role? would that guy have become one without the motorcycle accident?

third one was surprisingly enjoyable on a rewatch, which i found surprising because this is where i gave up on the franchise, by now i'd stopped watching in theater and would see it when i got around to it and didn't like what i saw

they sped run through a romance and we were supposed to feel like we now cared about this couple because they hosted a party together and he remembered a lake

definitely annoyed though how they skipped through the chinese action scene to avoid upsetting the chinese market and never once even bothered to explain what the rabbits foot was so the entire thing was just a macguffin, philip seymour hoffman was poorly cast in his role, it was super off putting seeing a great dramatic actor amongst a bunch of action stars

the scene in the vatican is one of the best in the franchise and it's easily the best ensemble cast they put together
they loved this leg focused car exit so much they revived it for the next film



4th one was first one where they really nailed the proper formula of not having too much absurdity and where it did exist it made sense for the plot, ie tom is no longer risking his life for no reason other than because he knows he can do it but now they acknowledge it's insane but he has no other choice - simon pegg being brought in as comic relief works really well, this one is my favorite of the sequels



5th one got kinda weird with the whole syndicate thing, it was really dumb but watchable, it did a good job at least in leaving you wondering what was really going on but sadly it was done through poor writing which didn't make sense


6th one sadly decided to bring back the entire syndicate thing and then yet again brings in the wife that nobody cares about, really nice seeing tom cede space to henry cavill as it's the first film where he genuinely has a costar and i think that aids things immensely, it's kinda sad they need to make the one chinese character super awesome and incredible and indestructible to appease their funding and market

even more impressed they agreed to go with a costar who was over 6' which required them to literally block every scene to have tom closer to the camera so he didn't dwarf over him



overall enjoyable films that have really perfected a formula to produce entertaining low intensity viewing but upon rewatching, it's really sad that none even attempt to recreate the style of the first film, which is head and shoulders better than the rest

harry potter

was too cool for school when the books came out and therefore way too cool to watch the films when they came out

later at the insistence of friends i listened to them as audiobooks and was surprised how good they were so later watched the films, films overly simplifying tended to expose more plotholes because in audio book format you're just flooded with info and steamrolling ahead and don't really have time to think back that x doesn't make sense for y reasons

first film was a dud but i understood its purpose in the sense of world building but whereas the book felt like a real book the first film just felt like its sole purpose was to lay down background info and foundations for the later sequels

middle films were the best, the later ones got way too hung up on nonsense to be enjoyable imo, big letdown imo

pirates of the caribbean

first one was the light hearted (but also dark by disney standards) film that I remembered fondly as a fun adventure and even saw in theaters, i recalled liking the first and hating the sequels but was genuinely surprised by how much i liked this first film

second one was decent, while i'd forgotten the plot and it was basically like seeing it for the first time, the entire time I was trying to figure out what exactly it was that happened which turned me off this franchise so much - obviously i hate all the cgi with davy jones etc, it's just too absurd for me even when undead pirates wasn't absurd in the first film, but the film itself works and i find myself watching

third one, this is it, this is where i gave up on the franchise, sadly, i don't think i can continue, i've tried maybe 3-4 times to watch this film in the past month and can just never do it, there's too much info to casually follow and everything is absurd, stupid, and uninteresting so I don't even want to watch and find my attention drifting until i look up and realize i have absolutely no idea what is going on, why x is doing y or how they got there, i've tried, last time was an honest effort where i kept all other devices away but then just fell asleep

movie is just terrible, but to get through it since there's at least 2 more after this one, i think i'll just black panther wakanda forever it and not really pay attention nor care and just wait for it to be over

You're spending hours and hours watching movies you didn't like the first time or didn't like the earlier films in the series, just because you dislike missing references to them?
Life is too short for that.

I walked out of the theater before the first Mission Impossible movie was over and never looked back. Started to watch the first Pirates movie at home and turned it off.

I was in my 20s when Harry Potter books started coming out and couldn't care less about anything related.

I was late to the MCU, but eventually got curious and enjoyed most of them. Thought Black Panther was definitely one of the worst though, no idea why that was so praised (ok I actually have a guess). Not watching the new one, and really none of the new movies look good, so I'm probably done with them.

I also walked out early from Jurassic Park and never looked back. I disliked the first LOTR film despite the books being some of my favorites; had no interest in watching the rest.

Motorcycle jousting in M:I-2 probably the high point of my life.

hard lol, and yeah, virtue signaling will get you really far, my sister who hadn't been in a theater for an english language film probably since high school and hates action films in general (like me she doesn't own a tv and that's saying something considering they have a kid) but she was all about wonder woman, saw it in theaters and praised the f out of it because she was so amped to see a female action heor

i was with you until no on jp and lotr, those are absolute gems - and yes I had the misfortune of having read the books prior to seeing the films so the entire time i was saying "omg they did that wrong" but alas they are great films anyway, first mission impossible is pretty good until the train, it got a little weird at the end with let's send both a helicopter and a train into a tunnel together but the first 4/5 of that film are just great imo



for the most part, it's not so much wanting to understand the references, but rather wanting to better fit in with normies, ie i'll be at a bar with friends or at a poker table amongst strangers and someone will make a jack sparrow or iron man reference that goes over my head and I explain I haven't seen them it always comes off as snobbish

and frankly, i am aware i'm a bit of a snob and want to work on this and being able to at least nod my head in understanding when someone references a marvel character could help me better fake it until i make it

I know that bit of a snob thing. Some of my friends think I will only watch artsy movies, but I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and I loved Paddington 2. My daughter even had this hoodie made for me:




Today I saw John Wick 4. As Dom said, it's insane. Sometimes the fight scenes go on a little too long, and you have to wonder why all these killers go after Wick, no matter what the bounty, after he's already dispatched about a thousand others in the first three in the series. Still good fun.

Followed that up tonight with Hitchcock's The Lodger, a silent film from 1927. The show featured a guy playing a synthesizer to accompany the film. I saw The Lodger about 40 years ago, and I'm surprised at how little I remembered. It was a lot of fun watching with a soundtrack, and the guy playing was making it up as he went along. Good stuff.

So for all those who think I'm a movie snob because I've seen Jeanne Dielmann and Satantango, it's possible, to paraphrase John Keats, to have Shakespeare and Robin Hood
too.

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I watched the first one with my nephews and thought it was fine but nothing extra special - is the second one much better?

reminds me how I watched the muppet movie with my niece last year

movie did not hold up in the slightest and really surprised cause i thought it would - it just feels totally dated

The second one is sublime. Paddington goes to prison. Cast is wonderful.

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Paddington 2 is close to perfect

saw pieces of paddington 1 when visiting a nephew, didn't think much of it and didn't know there was a sequel

but paddington in jail, now that i got to see

Is Paddington a boy or girl? I'll watch any "women in chains" prison flick.

Boy.

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I heard he has no genitalia but identifies as a male teddy bear.

Nice hoodie, John

recall being boring and without substance but everyone i know who's seen it loved it and now free on youtube

Good reviews on these and I agree with your takes on them all. They are just fun films where you can sort of turn off your brain and enjoy them for what they are and they have decent rewatch ability. My wife loves action films like these and I just cannot stand the majority of films in this similar genre. Jason Bourne films for example other than maybe first one just don't do it for me.

The MI's are just more fun. Cruise actually kills it in most of his action movies in my opinion or maybe he just picks the better ones, idk. Edge of Tomorrow was quite fun too.