The Return of Even More Movies You've Watched This Week III

True. It was dissapointing.

Right? I loved it. The mummies lookes scary too. I also like dr jackyll and mr hyde

Jumanji

I left the theater halfway through the movie. First time in 20 years. The last time I did this was during Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever.

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Love the part john bloens the guys brains put because him and samuel jackson ran over a speed bump or something. Makes me laugh everytime

I saw it with my kids but didn’t think it was that bad. 5/10

holy shit, have they remade Jumanji?

I have much lower tolerance for a movie when Kevin Hart’s in it lol.

It’s a sequel with no relation other than a bunch of kids are sucked into a video game.

Insidious 4

There seriously needs to be a complete reboot with only the Elise character. Not a remake nor a sequel, just a complete reboot. Because Elise is awesome. The actress who plays her is bloody awesome. But the writers have no fucking idea what to do with her, particularly when constrained within the Insidious “Universe”.

This movie sucked btw.

Legend of the Demon Cat (China 2017)

The Great Chen Kaige finally made a film that didn’t suck after 20 years. And it’s a bloody amazing piece of work. For anyone interested, Chen Kaige is the genius who directed Farewell to my Concubine, The Emperor and the Assassin and the ambitious failure(IMO) Temptress Moon. He is also an old fart now still carrying the baggage of denouncing his own father as a student at the request of his enlightened and well-meaning schoolteachers during the Cultural Revolution. He then depicted the revolution so realistically in Farewell to my Concubine that he got banned from filmmaking for 5 years by the Chinese government. So, younger guys, please don’t become communists.

This movie starts off with a demon cat going on a bloody rampage filmed and lit like an Italian giallo, along with ominous scenes of enlarged shadows and silhouettes of the cat like in Nosferatu. The camera moves around like it’s a Sam Raimi movie. There are even scenes from the cat’s POV like in American Werewolf in London. And the cat is actually purring while he’s at it. It’s so fucking absurd I laughed so fucking hard and went, “What the fuck?!” multiple times especially when the cat claws a dude’s eyeballs out and then starts licking it’s paws.

But The Master knows exactly what he’s doing. After making the audience accept this absurdity from the start, i,e, all sorts of weirdass shit can happen, he pulls the rug from under everyone with a complete shift in tone and turns it into a visually astounding fantasy/mystery tale of love, loyalty, betrayal, obsession and penance that can only be described as a live action Miyazaki movie. The cat sheds tears near the end and you actually feel a lump in your throat.

This is the equivalent of what would happen if George Miller(Mad Max Fury Road) decided to make an epic CGI fantasy flick just to say “Fuck you” to all the hacks out there nowadays.

Unfortunately, some elements of the movie might not be accessible to a Western audience but it’s worth a watch as an epic visual feast. 9/10

Took my 15 year old son to a midnight showing of Rocky Horror…he’s still a bit shell-shocked. Should make for some interesting discussion over (a late) breakfast, lol.

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I just watched The Mummy. Not a bad film but not my fave Tom Cruise’s movie.

I finally watched the film.

I think this is the first film of its kind where I was wondering when the film will end. I think it didn’t help that I knew the film has an ~2 and a half hour runtime.

I agree with EyeDentist and dt79 here- The leads simply cannot carry the film.

And can anyone explain to me what ultimate purpose Rose and Finn actually served in the film?Did they have an actual arc or any purpose to the film, or was Finn in the film simply because he happened to be in the first film and was one of the leads there, and Rose was in the film for… I dunno.

Regarding Snoke- That was the most amazing reveal ever.

I’m beginning to think everything was an elaborate troll job. Probably why I enjoyed the film. The spaceship flying really fast kamikaze scene is seriously not something a lousy director would be capable of executing. So, under the assumption that Rian Johnson was, indeed, trolling everyone, I would assume he wrote the script as a subtle parody or he was pissed off at someone at the top screwing with his movie from the start. Or maybe he just hates Star Wars fanboys.

If the ending scene was a reference to this:

I’m going to call Rian Johnson God.

Really, just think about how AWFUL the writing was.

Rey doesn’t understand The Force.

She moves SMALL ROCKS while she’s learning to control The Force.

That’s a set up for a later situation where what she has learnt will be a decisive factor in a critical situation where not only does she utilize her new found skills, she will also realize that The Force is deeper than her initial perception of it.

In the end she moves… BIG ROCKS.

Wow! I mean, fucking WOW!

What the fuck is this? The Karate Kid?

LMAO!!!

No, wait, it was No Retreat, No Surrender!

They could have cut the entire “casino planet” story line and the movie would have been much better and probably 20 min shorter. It just distracted from the actual meaningful story arcs and added useless, boring length to an already long movie.

I think that Rian Johnson was simply uninterested in telling a Star Wars story. Seen in that context, the casino planet storyline is the only real meaningful portion. After all, the film ends with one of the slave kids on said casino planet showing both the ability to use the force and looking at the supposed symbol of hope in the galaxy.

But Rian Johnson had to ignore or kill off almost everything set-up by TFA and the previous films to get there, and therein lies the problem I think.

Also doesn’t help that most of the leads (except for Rey, but she seems to be a blank canvas so I dunno) seem unlikable and boring to me.

I wouldn’t have gone to see The Last Jedi if I hadn’t gotten free tickets, so disappointed I was with TFA. After reflection, I have realized that TFA set the bar so low that I sort of liked TLJ. But ultimately it was a pretty bad movie. Most of the problems with TLJ are actually time bombs that TFA set and Rian Johnson wasn’t good enough to adequately de-fuse. Frankly, this is the sort of junk that JJ Abrams seems to be able to get away with perennially and for the life of me I can’t explain why. Time bombs include:
–Luke was set up for failure. There was never going to be a really satisfying reason he was hiding on a remote planet. TLJ just pretended that TFA wasn’t driven by a map that Luke left, as Luke’s motivation for leaving such a map was not at all made clear.
–Leia’s character was always going to be sort of stupid and boring. Leia apparently spent the last 30 years leading up to TFA doing nothing of particular importance other than giving birth to a supervillain. She didn’t learn to be a Jedi or even manage to set up a particularly effective government. She’s still a general in a rag-tag group of freedom fighters, whose name now appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She should have been a Jedi. Yellow lightsaber optional.
–Han, well, they killed the most interesting of the original trio, while also letting us know that he was a quitter who died a chump.
–Unless Rian Johnson was allowed to just throw out the interesting backstory that JJ made up for Snoke, it’s now clear that TFA just didn’t have any answers for the very reasonable questions about this villain who either ages really quickly or is Palpatine’s contemporary (or/and has a really weird skin disease).
-Rey is boring. Mostly because she isn’t ever really shown to struggle. This is set up by TFA sort of finishing her arc, but in a very unsatisfying way. We know more is to come. But what? Maybe her struggle is that she doesn’t know who she is. But we don’t really get that it’s a problem for her. And why should it be?
–Finn never really had an arc. And his character just really isn’t that likeable. Giving him a romantic pairing might have helped, but they have no chemistry and/because the Asian chick looks like a pudgy little boy. Should have let Finn hit the cannon and die.
Some bad decisions that fall squarely on TLJ:
–Poe should have been cool and his character was pretty well set up by TFA, but TLF leaves him simultaneously overdone and underdone. The opening sequence is over the top and lacks peril. The conflict with Holdo relies on a tired trope. It feels so preachy that I want to understand what it’s trying to say so that I can do the opposite.
–BB-8 is now a super-soldier who can effortlessly commandeer enemy combat vehicles (minor gripe).
–Holdo is literally a throw-away character that feels like a stand-in for Leia because they wanted Leia to live on. Frankly, it would have been better if Leia just took the Holdo scenes and ended it there. It would have given an emotional payoff. And Carrie Fisher is gone anyways.
–Luke should have died in real life, not via skype.
–The female characters are not at all sexy. Ridley, who I think is actually a good looking woman, manages to look frumpy for the whole movie. The Asian looks like a chubby little boy. This is Star Wars. Give us some slave girl Leia or Padme vs. whatever that was.
Good parts:
–Kylo Ren is now an interesting character. Actually, this is pretty much the only thing that came out well. Snoke practically breaks the fourth wall, admitting that Kylo Ren was pretty dumb in TFA and basically declares that he will be better. And he is. He is now simultaneously evil, driven, and sympathetic. I want him to be redeemed. But also maybe want him to get his.

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I (re)saw a portion of Wolf of Wall street on Cable. It seemed less Iike a great movie, and more like a great comedy full silly hijinks.

This influenced me to rewatch Wall Street with Gordon Gekko. It was great! Compelling story, great characters, good pace. Not at all dated, it still stands up.

A few months ago I watched The Color of Money. Scorsese/Newman/Cruise/Fast Eddie/Hustler sequel! I was excited and really wanted to like the movie, but it was pretty disappointing. It just felt boring, slow, dull and small.

We rented Dunkirk on NYE… Man, what an exhausting movie.

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You should have watched that film on IMAX.

I found it to be an interesting experience.

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