Reviews

It's a bit sad that this will be probably lost in the glorious chaos of Barbenheimer sucking the oxygen of 2023, but James Gunn deserves the award for Millennial of our Generation. He took the brief and the money and ran with it and somehow made it all work out.

Yes, there's a lot of marvel cruft weighing this entire trilogy down, but it truly does rise above as a heartfelt, funny, genuine tribute to everything great about pop culture of the millennial generation - the nostalgia for the music that came before us up until the music that we grew up with. The aesthetics and the references are just perfect.

We grew up with the Spielbergian backwards looking nostalgia sure. But Gunn captures more than the myopic usian view. This is clearly the work of someone who grew up with Douglas Adams, Red Dwarf, the Muppets, Chris Cunningham, Aphex Twin, Monty Python as well as Hollywood, Star Trek/Wars and comic books.

We see you James and we appreciate you. May you inspire generations to come.

It has been 36 days since I first watched / experienced Everything Everywhere All At Once for the first time and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I've watched it a second time in the theatres since and I'm already planning seeing it as many times as I can before it exits.

It's just a testament to how beautiful and life changing art can be. It can encompass profound truths; wrapped in comedy, absurdism, philosophy, action and drama all at once. It is brutally sincere in the best ways while stretching comedy and taste in the complete opposite direction. It is a movie that wears both its title and it's heart on its sleeve in a way no one could possibly predict.

At this stage it is almost impossible to talk about its influences or compare it to other works of art, authors or directors because the influences are both overt and subtle. Yes it is if Douglas Adams wrote a script about the motherwound directed by Michel Gondry. But it's also Ang Lee directing the Matrix as if it was a parable of generational trauma instead of coming out as trans. It's an insanely wild ride that has the power to heal and change the people watching it for the better.

It's almost impossible to overstate its power. I have personally seen it help a hardened friend come to terms with their depression and loneliness, and soothe the grief of a couple losing their first born to a miscarriage.

It's art at its most life changing purest and that's the highest recommendation I can give.

A somewhat brutal satire of toxic masculinity and touching on intergenerational trauma, this like Fight Club before it is doomed to be lost on men who will see it as a glorification of alpha males instead of the quite obvious deconstruction it is - complete with howling wolf bonding rituals.

As a movie? It's mostly unpleasant watching even as you get to the twist that brings home the futility and stupidity of the protagonists all consuming quest for vengeance. With a lot of the supposed heroics, including the ending itself happening mostly inside his own fantasies it doesn't leave much else left to chew on. Some great performances, some wildly miscast actors that usually work excellent elsewhere. A welcome cameo by Björk - having reneged her vow to never act again. And mostly boilerplate Viking mythology and violence and set building we've seen way too much of late, albeit well done and with some great Elden Ring style weirdness and a boss fight thrown in the mix.

Worth your time if you can't get enough Vikings post all the Viking series and video games of late, but expected more from Eggers.

Well shot, well acted, entertaining and will have you salivating. Please eat beforehand. Gets a bit ridiculous when going overboard with having LITERALLY EVERYTHING being invented by the two sidekicks, from menus to pommes frites to table service to desserts and cheese platters. But it's so engaging that it's easily overlooked.

Just finished Part I and what a stunning contrast it is to Let It Be (movie). It's vibrant, it's human, and it's ...definitely for Beatles die-hards who pour over the fly on the wall segments from the Anthologies and Let It Be ...naked. I can understand that two and a half hours (just for part 1 out of 3) sitting in with a band practising for a show that they have no idea if they even want to do is a lot.

But as one of those guys (who own several copies of every album and multiple box sets), - though also of the opinion that there's far too many Beatles documentaries - I am very very happy that this now exist. I fully understand the aversion to killing your darlings when it comes to this absolute treasure trove of previously unavailable and incredibly candid footage (and audio), but I think for most the planned theatrical cut will be quite enough.

It has been a while since I've watched this, and I was a bit apprehensive screening this for my Australian girlfriend. It's a very particular piece of Norwegian pop culture - predating even the first Star Wars. I should not have worried.

It's a universal masterpiece. The humour translated through subtitles (I gave her the option between subtitled Norwegian and the British dub and she chose the former). And the race itself was so intense she squeezed my hand almost to the point of leaving marks. The attention to detail and the feeling of speed is unparalleled through a combination of cinematography and sound design that should be studied in film schools for the ages (obviously was by Koeningsegg and George Lucas).

It was also my first time watching the HD restoration on a big screen and it almost made me cry with how good it looks. Truly a timeless masterpiece.

Whilst I enjoyed my self plenty, busting out laughing at many points during the movie, something felt off when it came to a close. Whereas the first movie captured lightning in a bottle, delivering great, original (to most) characters, in a bright, colourful and most importantly funny sci-fi fantasy; the second feels less fresh and suffers from what I call "Marvel scope creep".

What do I mean by that? It feels way more "comic book"-y this time, forcing itself to integrate with the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ in ways that feels inorganic and downright puzzling. Having a detailed universe to draw upon is great when it can add texture and make the stories feel like they are supported by a living breathing world. Star Wars of course being the prime example here.

But having the climax of the movie give significant screen time to characters that have never been introduced, or a seemingly major character arc and plot inferred to by two lines of dialogue earlier, is downright puzzling. Who are these people and why should we care? I can imagine comic book readers or even viewers of the billion plus Marvel movies getting a kick out of seeing quartzface or whatever get a short cameo. But this is literally the ending of the movie and we get more combined reaction time from bit players than our main characters. Bizarre and off putting.

There are no surprises, and posters having already revealed well in advance which previous antagonists would end up joining our heroes, or who Quills father would be and his alignment, so that tension is well out the window. Even the Awesome Mix vol 2 seemed to have spent all its best tunes on the first one.

I'm sure this all sounds like I'm too down on the movie, but I am not. I still had a great time whizzing through space with this motley crew. It is as funny as ever (even though the best jokes were in the trailer), trippy and downright beautiful to watch. Even with the diminishing returns, it is still well worth your while.

I tried watching this for the first time in 2016. I'm a fan of nineties cheese, so I thought this would be a good watch. Boy, was I wrong!

This is just bad. Not bad in a funny way. Not bad in a so bad it's good way. Just a hard watch. The animation is ugly. There are parts that were done in a 3D that looked like a 1994 screen saver. There were attempts at making the characters look more 3D using an airbrushing effect that had the effect of making them look like they had the bevel effect applied in Photoshop. Despite coming out a whole eight years after Who Framed Roger Rabbit it somehow were much worse at integrating live actors with the animation. Heck, I think Mary Poppins probably did a better job in the sixties.

The Mel Blanc impressions were incredibly jarring, with dialogue that made Chuck Jones cringe. Not Billy West's proudest moment I must say. The movie takes itself way too seriously, and the product placement is so clumsy one scene is literally just a character reading out sponsors. There's no punchline, no self-referential wink and it doesn't even go on for long enough to make it a joke.

At least these days, the 90s hip hop and R&B soundtrack has a certain charm where at the time it was meant to capitalise on what the cool kids were listening to at the time.

Not sure how could manage to make Looney Tunes so soulsuckingly dreary and unfunny, but there you have it: The worst product of cynical marketing towards kids. Completely unwatchable today, not even for nostalgia-purposes.

I recently acquired the full Rutles set (albums and all) on the basis that it is my dad's favourite movie (and thus by osmosis one of mine along with everything Python related). I decided to watch the first one knowing full well that it probably hadn't aged as well compared to the memory of my teenage watching of it.

Having just come home from watching the Python Live (One Down, Five to Go Show) I was on a Python high. My dream of finally watching the Python's live had come true and I (as well as my wife who didn't have a Python loving family and thus is reluctantly late to the Python game) was on a Python high.

So, having exhausted pretty much every other Python related venue (except for Jabberwocky), Rutles seemed to be a good choice. And surprisingly it was. I even did a rare spit take, showering my wife's laptop with wine at how Barry was included in the band.

And then we (or really, I) made the decision to watch the sequel. With casual dread naturally. This being a 2002 project it was contemporary to the painful "new material" of the re-re-re-release of the Holy Grail DVD. So my expectations were set suitably low.

My relief at how actually funny the second round was a surprise like no other. Maybe it was my expectation. Maybe it was the fact that a rethread of the same subject was suitably fitting considering how every Beatles documentary ever is the same (meta-commentary?). Maybe it was the fact that Eric Idle is naturally funny. Maybe that the celebrity cameos have increased their status in the later years (Unexpected Jimmy Fallon?). Maybe how the re- thread was in the style of VH1's Behind the Music - a genre unto its own? Or maybe just how obvious it was that Idle had dragged his coat around to his many holidays and filmed short sequences with a shitty hand-held DV camera for so many scenes.

Whatever it was, it was worth the effort. I will gladly show this to my dad. My dad, who performs covers of the Beatles and will drop in a verse of Get Up And Go Back Home into every rendition of Get Back even if the audience has no idea what's going on.

When is this ever coming out on DVD? There's a huge untapped nostalgic market waiting for you in Norway and Sweden. TVIN, the Russian TV-company who owns the rights to this, are you listening?

If you are interested in seeing this come out on DVD, you can mail your interest in the DVD to: info@tvin.ru

Their contact page can be found at: http://www.tvin.ru/cgi-bin/section.cgi?IdS=15

Please do not force us into piracy just to watch this great piece of work. Bring Christmas of days past into our hearts again! Songs like "Mommy" are forever classics, and so is this tale.

I rented this utter BS from the bargain bin of my local videostore...and boy was it misplaced. The garbage bin would be the appropriate place for it! I don't know where to start, the misplaced american family values (from alcoholic to great mother in two seconds flat?), the daylight (?), the crap acting, the cliches, the intro (some people believe...jeez), the police, sarah, the ripoff plot...aaaaaaaaaaah! Make it stop!

Brandon Lee truly must turn in his grave!

Makes Crow, City of angels look like a masterpiece! (and yes, it did suck too...)

ROFLMAO, and I thought the movies were funny! How did they come up with sketches like "Confuse-a-cat(TM)" and "A man turns into a scotsman (The science fiction sketch)"? It's beyond me. It must be an act of pure genius! Most so-called "humor" series' producers ought to be slapped with a chicken. Truly and honestly silly!