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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Extremely mixed bag
This movie felt like a touching tribute to Chadwick Boseman and a *stellar* performance from Angela Bassett bolted to an absolutely paint-by-numbers Marvel movie.
The villain was boring. Many of the stunt sequences could have been completely reused from other movies but with new CG body doubles dropped on top, and the entire thing is held back by Disney's need to make the movie as bland and palatable to a wide audience as possible. The fight scenes felt like they wanted to show death and destruction, but wouldn't show anyone so much as getting a cut - it was extremely jarring to see a bloodless battle between dozens of people in two armies using entirely melee weaponry.
The new protagonists were clearly an attempt at setting up new television series or further movies, and simultaneously a way to get an Iron Man-type and a Black Panther-type character back into the MCU. It gets boring when the current thing is mostly about the next thing instead of attempting to be good on its own.
Dead Like Me: Nighthawks (2003)
Clip show? Really?
It's a clever short story - maybe one third of an episode - padded out to the full runtime by showing us gobs of barely-relevant clips. Should've just skipped this one, guys.
Halo (2022)
Surprisingly entertaining
As someone who's never really played the games since the first one, I've found this show to be a fun watch.
There are a couple actors whose performances seem lost or notably worse than the rest, but the show holds together as a pretty entertaining action sci-fi that can afford to have a big-budget fight scene every now and then instead of hiding it all behind camera tricks.
There are a few scenes peppered throughout that do a good job of selling how devastatingly superhuman the Spartans can be - scenes that could've easily looked outright comical - but they pull it off somehow.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Why risk doing anything new when the first movie was a hit?
This movie is just the first one over again, but with people who don't like each other and gawky kids instead of great comedians.
The one twist is revealed in the *title*. Combine that with weird CGI backgrounds and cars... what a disappointment.
Look Who's Talking Now (1993)
Jumbled mess
This is like watching two separate movies at once on cable TV and switching back and forth whenever the ads come on. One channel has a mediocre family Christmas comedy and the other has a kid's talking animal thing... then there's weird hallucinations from accidentally switching over to MTV or something.
Imawa no Kuni no Arisu (2020)
Good if you want to fall asleep then be startled awake by loud noises
Interesting concept. Extremely poor execution. You don't care about the characters (they're all annoying stereotypes), the acting is terrible, the English dubbing is terrible, the dialogue (English subtitles) is stilted, people don't act like actual human beings, and everything takes so long to happen. There's dozens of scenes just waiting, lingering on something we already know is going to happen - just get on with it!
As the title of my review says, it's a great way to get bored to sleep then startled awake by random loud noises.
Vitamania: The Sense and Nonsense of Vitamins (2018)
Tonal whiplash
Overall, this seems to be a decent review of some of the basics on vitamins, without getting too far into the weeds. But then... WHY ARE YOU SINGING? What is happening?? I haven't felt this much secondhand embarrassment for something happening on my TV since "The Office".
It's like whoever helped fund the thing said "yeah ok but only if we get four songs to play in elementary schools!". Skip the songs, there isn't any information that isn't repeated later anyway.
Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)
Surprisingly decent
Up until a couple days ago, the last DC movie I'd watched in this continuity was Man of Steel when it was new in 2013. I also don't read comic books and do my best to avoid spoilers for everything, so the entire plot was new to me.
I marathoned the 3-hour cut of Batman vs Superman yesterday, and then this 4-hour movie today. They were both entertaining movies. I don't really have any complaints aside from a few plot/character quibbles, and a few scenes where I had no idea what was going on since I've never watched the Flash or Cyborg TV shows - the details did eventually get filled in, though.
I'm not going to say the movie felt like it flew by - four hours is a long time - but it also felt like it was the correct amount of time to give to this story.
Six stars is a good review - I try to base everything around five stars as 'fine',(instead of the way a lot of people essentially think of anything below five as 'unwatchable garbage'.) That all being said, it also doesn't feel like something I'll ever undertake again.
Torden (2020)
Boring, disappointing
There are a lot of good elements in this movie. The issue is they're not connected together in a particularly enjoyable way, leading to a bunch of questions. There are many scenes that disobey the fundamental rule of cinema "show, don't tell" - not that there is a big dump of exposition, but rather that stuff just feels left out.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was intended to be a pilot for a TV series - cutting it in half and then having an entire season of episodes after it to fill in the gaps would be far more satisfying.
Honestly, just go read Neil Gaiman's "Norse Mythology" instead.
Suspiria (2018)
Incomprehensible
This movie is an hour too long and feels like the great bits of the writer/director's vision, strung together in a way that makes no sense unless you are the people who actually created it.
I think I got the gist of it, but I didn't come away with anything additional - you know, like a movie is supposed to give you. Instead, 150 minutes of boredom, anxiety, and attempting to figure out what the heck anyone was saying is what I ended up with.
It didn't help that the version I watched on Amazon Prime Video (this is an Amazon Studios production!) didn't properly show subtitles for the German or French spoken after about 10 minutes. I had to force closed captions on and watch two hours of "panting" "door closes" "child sings in German" "mumbling" "screaming".
Would not watch again.
Vivarium (2019)
Hmm.
Lots of good elements, entertaining moments, and so on but it didn't really say anything in the end, rendering it pointless. This probably would've worked better as an episode of The Twilight Zone, the same basic story but with 45+ minutes edited out.
Garm Wars: The Last Druid (2014)
Wait, huh?
Well, it was alright except for the part where it just ended right before the most exciting bit was about to happen, and all the "dramatic" staring at things.
The Skeleton Key (2005)
Not terrible
To start off, I'm not really a fan of the "horror" genre, and this movie was not good enough to change that. The movie's not nearly as cliché as some of the garbage that's shoved through theatres, but that being said, all of their attempts to surprise didn't actually surprise me all that much. You can tell that the folks making the movie knew that there wasn't all that much going for it either, thanks to the random half-naked shots of Kate Hudson to keep otherwise-bored male moviegoers interested... (insert eye-rolling here). It's got some fresh ideas, and if you're superstitious and into horror movies, this movie's got all the right things going for it... but don't bother otherwise.
Starship Troopers (1997)
Yech
Virtually everything was wrong with this movie. It was so horribly messed up that I can't give a 'non-spoilers' review, but rather just highlight some of the wonderful problems I had with the movie. These are just the ones I can remember.
Spoilers follow, but nothing critical to your enjoyment (or rather lack thereof) of this movie.
To begin with, the premise of the aliens hitting the earth with an asteroid was a bit sketchy. I mean, that's a heck of a job for bugs to see an asteroid, calculate its orbit, and somehow launch a projectile in order to change its path with enough precision to hit a planet. Sure, earth may seem big to us people, but in, say, the volume of the solar system it is an immensely tiny speck. But, lets suspend disbelief for this. Now, conveniently, this asteroid not only hits the earth, but it hits *land* on a planet where three quarters of its surface is covered in water. Then, to top it off, it hits a MAJOR POPULATED CITY. One in which the main character also conveniently has family. Right. Very likely.
Next, we have the human's approach to the bug planet in their fleet. All the ships bunch together, and they get wiped out as much by the bugs as they do from running into one another from being bunched together. Space is really big folks, spread apart so you don't kill yourselves! Anyway, this, again, is forgivable. Until they do it AGAIN, on their second attack!
Now we get to the actual combat. Why, oh why, did the powers putting together this film decide to abandon the high tech machinery such as cybernetic exoskeletons from the book in favor of simple ground troops? Again, they can be forgiven for this- until they show that they DO have advanced weaponry, and don't use it to effect. They wiped out huge piles of bugs with their air strike, yet they only thought to use the air strike once. They have miniature nuclear warheads that can do massive damage yet they only bring a couple along. With the technology demonstrated in the movie, it would have been possible to annihilate the entire planet without even setting foot on the planet- just drop nuclear bombs from the ships safely in orbit!
This leads up to my favorite part of the movie. There is a scene in which Pretty Young Face # 3 (Denise Richards) must pilot a battlecruiser after stereotypically showing that she's the best hotshot pilot ever. For some reason, they don't notice a giant asteroid bearing down upon them as they are traveling in the opposite direction, and a suspense-filled scene follows in which she barely turns the ship out of the way in time, and saves the day, but not before they loose their only means of warning the earth about this impending disaster.
Sorry, but I have a few problems with this. First, how do you not *notice* an asteroid like that? Second, why do they loose all communications from this collision? You're telling me a vessel like this, which must survive in the vast empty environment that is space doesn't have a redundant set of antennas? Finally, the entire scene is completely impossible. Both the ship and the asteroid are traveling in OPPOSITE directions at interstellar velocities. Even if they were traveling at, say, merely the reentry velocity of a space shuttle, both would be moving at 8 km per SECOND! The asteroid would have flashed past and destroyed whatever part of the ship happened to be in the way- not the heart-stopping, nerve-wrenching slow turn more fitting of a submarine movie.
The only thing in this movie that was vaguely interesting were, at the time, the advanced computer graphics. Now, there's nothing left holding it up. Well, maybe one thing. I suppose there's the shower scene for all the teenagers who aren't old enough to rent porn.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Worth every cent
The best of the trilogy... if you've seen the other two you cannot go without seeing this one. A perfect cap to the best film adaptation of a book I've ever seen.
Worth every cent of my opening-day (he he, 9:00 AM showing!) ticket, without a doubt.
Call of Duty (2003)
Amazing, great fun
If you love world war II movies, you will love this game. It's like being part of the best world war II movies I've seen... everything is absolutely stunning in terms of presentation, and you can knock your house down with the rumblings of gunfire if you have a decent set of speakers on your computer- I've seen high budget movies that don't capture the chilling snarl of gunfire in the same manner.
The voice acting is excellent... yes, that IS Jason Statham of "The Transporter" and "The Italian Job"! Everything is put together in a manner deserving of a high-budget movie. The charge on Stalingrad in tha later parts of the game seems eerily familiar if you've seen "Enemy at the Gates"... only, this is better because *you're* part of the action!
They really went all out on this game, and it shows. Highly recommended!
Black Hawk Down (2001)
Brutally honest
While BHD may not have depicted the conflict with pure realism as some people complain, it is more honest and untainted with American prejudice than almost any other film I have seen.
The horror of war and the stupidity of the American government (mainly in not authorizing heavier weaponry) is honestly shown rather than hidden behind propaganda and "hero" crap.
Hats off to Ridley Scott. Thank you for showing this to the world.
Wing Commander (1999)
Why does everyone think it's so awful?
I don't understand all the negative critisism about Wing Commander. Sure, the actors were a bunch of pretty boys and girls, and the Kilrathi looked like rubber mice stuffed into battle armour, but the movie managed to do several things for me.
(Some minor spoilers, but no real plot givaways following...)
Battle in space is more realistically portrayed than many other movies I have seen. Cruisers fighting actually take time to fire at one another and move slowly because of their immense intertia. My favorite scene in *all* space type action movies is still Wing Commander's "Give them a broadside, Mr. Gerald."
To the person who was wondering why, upon engaging silent mode, he "shhhd" a crew member... although this seems unlikely in space, the ship was LANDED on a small asteroid. The Kilrathi (in the games, and also in the books based on the games) have probes that would be more than capable of dropping down to the surface of the asteroids and detecting vibrations. It was a bit silly, but it wasn't completely retarded either.
They might have changed a lot coming from the game, but the only unforgivable change was the Kilrathi (see above). The fighters, carriers, and cruisers have a very plausable military look to them while still retaining some of the Wing Commander feel- plus there are realistic additions, like the ability to close off the launch bay on the famous Tiger's Claw carrier.
I'm too tired to write a full review right now, but I have to say: this movie is not as awful as you may think. Maybe it's just because I've been playing Wing Commander since I was six, but this movie was a half-decent portrayal of one of the best game series of all time.
Resident Evil (2002)
Kickass sound and great mood
This movie has simply the best sound I have ever heard in a movie. You must see it using at least a 5 speaker Dolby Digital system. That said, I also enjoyed the incredible mood and ambience the sets and lighting created. Although the plot is a bit lacking and somewhat rushed, it doesn't matter- that's not what Resident Evil is about.
*minor spolier*
The biggest drawback is the computer generated 'big bad guy'. Although the bad CG doesn't ruin the movie, they are a jarring reminder that the movie isn't real- the other special effects, however, are amazing, and could easily draw you in to the world of Resident Evil.
7/10 stars.