Movies you just recently watched

[Keane]

Atomic Blonde
I literally had no clue what was going on during the entire movie, and when I asked my bro to summarise it afterwards he couldn't explain it either. Other than some accents and inaudible dialogue I don't know why it was so hard to follow this movie but I just couldn't figure why characters were doing things and for what reasons, I only got the basic premise and the rest just went past me.

The rest was all fine though, a lot of the sets and lighting was actually pretty impressive: Every scene looked like they put a lot of effort into picking specific colour combinations, everything had this sort of edgy 80's aesthetic which sounds gay on paper but it actually really complimented the movie. The choreography was good too, I've become kind of numb to fist fights and car chases but here I thought they almost all worked really well.

Dunkirk
One of the most original WWII movies I've ever seen, it's consistently tense and a masterclass on how to set a war into scene. I also loved Hans Zimmer's work on the soundtrack, way too often movies opt for his loud Inception noises because epic But here it actually really worked together with the visuals, like some of these scenes would not work without specifically this music in them.

The Dark Tower
In a year that already brought us some epicly bad movies like The Circle, The Mummy and now The Emoji Movie, I didn't expect another title to stack onto that list so quickly. Like the other three on the list The Dark Tower is such an insultingly lazy cash-grab it feels like the movie equivalent of an online ad claiming you won an iPad, you just gotta fill out your personal information (or buy a movie ticket!) to get your price.

To give an idea of how incompetent of the movie is, watch the trailer and every unanswered question you have afterwards remains just as much a mystery after seeing the whole thing. What is the dark tower? Who is the man in black? Why are there people helping him? What is this other dimension? All of these major plot elements remain completely undeveloped and unaddressed, it doesn't even care. The man in black wants the apocalypse to happen because, he just does. Even though he wants to murder everyone a lot of people seem to actually respect and admire him, for a reason we're never given. Inside this dimension we come across this long deserted theme park the movie implies there's a deeper secret about its existence we've yet to learn about, and then it's never referred to again.

But the terribleness goes even further beyond these giant plot holes, there's also just no creative energy in anything this movie does. The main character, Jake, learns there's this whole other dimension and goes inside, what does it look like? An empty desert, an empty forest, and a small town in the middle of nowhere. How fucking boring. The people in the town aren't anymore interesting, there's a girl who seems to like Jake for no reason at all and then it goes nowhere so OK. There's a woman who speak with Jake through her mind, but that's her whole schtick, she doesn't have a personality beyond that. The villain was also just so, so fucking silly and stupid. He looks like a Take That member, not a villain from another dimension. Every single scene he's in is just him having unexplained extreme power which he uses to gain info from someone, and every single time he goes through practically identical dialogue while doing it. There's also these like, teenagers I think who are helping him and they just look like ordinary teenagers in this supposedly otherwordly dimension. Why they're helping him is, of course, never explained, and they have zero personality.

I also just found the whole premise kind of dull, like the whole "kid who sees things but everyone thinks he's crazy!" thing just seemed very cliched and derivative. I'm sure Stephen King's books handle it a lot better but here I felt like the first 20 minutes were something I've seen a dozen times before. Some of the action was admittedly OK, Idris Elba actually did a great job on his performance, the jokes were bad but not the worst I've seen (Valerian was much more insufferable in that regard), but this is really about as low as you can go as a filmmaker. This felt like a movie no one wanted to make and no one enjoyed seeing, it's just kind of a miserable mess.

If you're a fan of the books or have any other reason to see this I encourage you to just wait until it's out there "for free" instead of give these people money. Normally I can get a kick out of seeing a movie trip over itself so badly but this was more of a The Circle situation where it just felt like the movie didn't give a fuck if you would hate it, it just wanted your money and knew that by the time you realise how fucking pathetic it is you've already paid.

[R4Y_ANC3L]

• The matrix movie

• Matrix reloaded

• Matrix revolution

• Kingsman secret service

One of the best movies watched.

[Ambidextroid]

I just watched Inside Out, which was really good. The visuals were amazing and I loved the way each of the elements of the mind were represented and all of the subtle details they included. The actual story of what happens to Riley outside of her mind is pretty simple but the way her thought process is represented is incredibly well done and makes for a well-rounded story.

I thought the way her subconscious was represented didn't really make sense, in the movie it served as a "jail" for everything that causes trouble in her mind, mostly things that she was afraid of. I think a much better representation of her subconscious would just be the entire world in her mind that the movie's set in excluding the headquarters, which seems to represent her conscious thought process. Otherwise the rest I thought were very well done and the analogies for her thought processes as physical places and occurrences were great, they didn't always make perfect sense in terms of how a brain works but nothing strayed too far from believable.
I think it would have been cool for the dream bit to be a little more creative and analogous to an actual dream, like parts of the world or the subconscious going a little haywire or something, but it was still entertaining and to be honest these minor complaints are just personal preference, the actual film as a whole was really good.

[R4Y_ANC3L]

I just watched Inside Out, which was really good. The visuals were amazing and I loved the way each of the elements of the mind were represented and all of the subtle details they included. The actual story of what happens to Riley outside of her mind is pretty simple but the way her thought process is represented is incredibly well done and makes for a well-rounded story.

No way!! I watched that movie as well. It really interested me.
Her feelings are personified.

[Keane]

The Hitman's Bodyguard
I kinda wanted to like this movie because it's a sort of humour I enjoy and Samuel Jackson seemed like a potentially really good pick for it, but it didn't even get a chuckle out of me. It felt more like it was trying to imitate a sense of humour rather than really capturing it. I was also really annoyed by the awkward shifts in tone, like a couple times it really abruptly cut from joking around to trying to pull heartstrings and it was just too sudden, too forced. It was still one of the better movies I've seen this year, it seems like they tried and a lot of people in the audience seemed to be enjoying it.

The Shining
Holy fuck, this was really good. I love how disorienting this movie feels, like the layout of the hotel seeming to be inaccurate and the music not flowing with the movie itself - a potential jumpscare intentionally ruined by a lack of accompanying sound, or tension building in scenes without anything frightening happening in them. There's like a constant sense unpredictability to it, to the point where it managed to make me jump just at playing a loud noise over a transition slide.

And just the cinematography and sound itself is insanely good. I especially loved the scenes with Danny riding his tricycle where the following camera makes you expect something each time he turns a corner, those were awesome. Even just the sound of Danny's tricycle riding over the hard floor and then softening on the carpet has something strangely uncomfortable and really memorable about it.

The only sort-of criticism I can think of is that the climax wasn't quite as tense as I wanted it to be, but I feel like that's unfortunately more due to having been spoiled to some of the scenes prior and that so much of it has since been turned into cliches by more recent movies.

2001: A Space Odyssey
I'm really glad this went unspoiled for me, I had no idea what to expect going in and it was one of the most fascinating movies I've seen. It's retardedly meticulous but I never found it to be a movie you have to go look up an analysis for afterwards, it always made complete sense to me and it clearly doesn't intend for people to all get the same precise takeaway from it. It's more just posing grand questions and leaving the answers up for debate, and all in the most interesting way possible. I cachn't (read in ocg voice) wait to see this probably a dozen times again down the road, I've already spend a couple hours today thinking it over and rewatching nearly every scene.

And just like with The Shining, Kubrick is such a feckeng cool gay man when it comes to presentation. I loved the shot where the pod slowly turns around and suddenly has a quick zoom-in on HAL, and then it cuts to Poole floating away on a screen back inside the ship. That was really fucking creepy. All the colour coding of scenes, and the occasional changes away from the static dull shots to signify something, so gewd Merio. Annnnd as has been said in past : it's unbelievable this movie is from 1968, it literally looks on par with 90's movies and I'd argue even then it's aged better much better than a lot of 90's movies.

[R4Y_ANC3L]

The terminator:Rise of the machines
The terminator:Salvation
Rise of the machines was what I liked better. I like the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and there was more humour in it than the others, as far as I know. The story did ended in failure.But my favourite part of the movie was where one of my favourite lines was said:
You Are Terminated as he held The TX's head after he stuffed an explosive inside Her mouth and it exploded along with The terminator;taking out the TX with it.

[Keane]

It (the new juan)
This was such a missed opportunity, I really liked the concept and could easily see how this could work as a great story but if anything it just made me want to check out the book. It definitely tries to step above the crowd in the modern horror genre and try something a little more interesting, but ultimately it's brought down by the usual, deeply uninspired abuse of jumpscares, and they're not even good jumpscares. They looked like shit out of Five Night's at Freddy's, goofy CGI monsters that undermine their attempt at a sp00k by just being so poorly designed. The amount of times this movie did the thing where the music goes silent and someone slowly look at something and then-BOOM! spooky!, was literally like 50% of the movie's scares.

Pennywise's design is also just terrible, the whole point of the character is to bring out the unsettling masked type of fear that clowns elicit, so when you just make him look scary by default it doesn't work. It doesn't make any sense that a kid would mistake Pennywise for a real clown. And nobody does seem scared in this movie, something freaky happens and most of the time characters are like yeah um, I just saw a horror clown trying to murder me but instead of tell someone I'll just not bring it up and continue my day...

But there really was a good concept here and at times it does work and these moments really made me wish it tried better. The kids are admittedly a likable crowd of characters to follow (minus the one that had like 6 lines of dialogue in the entire movie) and their chemistry usually worked, in fact the best parts of the movie were when we just followed these kids living their lives instead of all the epix sp00ks that kept interrupting.

It struck me as a story about that point in childhewd where you're entering middle school, friendships become more complicated than liking the same cookie and your dick starts tingling around girls, and if you don't find a group to insert yourself in you might end up as the loner, and this is like an allegory wherein Stephen King tries to advice those kids about how to deal. Which is really interested and often overlooked group to focus on. With a better director this could've been a fascinating movie but instead they opted for the creepy clown with big teeth who goes "woohoohoo!" and jumps at the screen. I was like: fuck!

[R4Y_ANC3L]

The Emoji Movie
At first, I wasn't fond of seeing it. But, It was actually better than I thought it was.
It gave resources you Would find in a phone(or computer), life. That is the thing that I Found amusing about this movie. This movie is Kinda similar to "Inside Out".
It was pretty Funny as well.

[Ambidextroid]

Get Out was very good, a racial-centric horror film. There wasn't a lot of jump-scare stuff, it was more creepy and sinister and I was genuinely unsettled at times which I don't usually find myself being watching movies.
They never went into detail about why it was only black people being chosen and pretty much shrugged it off at one point when it was directly addressed, which made it feel a little gimmicky especially when you find out the two black people working at the house are not servents but the relatives of the family (pretty much ruling out the possibility that the family are just racist which would have actually made sense).

[Master]

From what I recall, didn't one of the prospective clients state that they were "in" at the moment? It might have been some twisted fashion trend, of sorts.

[Ambidextroid]

Now that you mention it I do remember something like that, though I would have preferred a more fleshed out reason.

[Ambidextroid]

I just watched Passengers, which I thought was actually very good for the first half of the film but was ruined by a succession of cheesy coincidences and nonsensical plot drivers in the second half that changed the tone of the film from an interesting sci-fi to a cheesy love story

[Keane]

Kingsman: The Golden Circle was really disappointing, it's by the same director and cast as the first movie but somehow everything that gave the first one it's personality got lost along the way here and it ends up feeling like a really tired, uninspired sequel, and ironically being the kind of movie that the original parodied. It's 2 and a half hours long and you really feel it, there's like a good 30 minutes of scenes they could've easily cut from the movie and it would've made no impact on the plot.

It wasn't terrible, I've seen much worse this year, but it was just kind of a "throw everything in, see what sticks" type movie. There's a really unnecessary girlfriend subplot that the movie needlessly extends but then it just kind of fizzles out and disappears, they also did probably my least favourite thing in comedy where they take a famous person and the fact that that person makes a cameo in the movie is supposed to be the joke. Elton John is in the movie and every one of his scenes doesn't have a punchline, it's just...Elton is in the movie, so that makes it funny. Elton John says "Fuck!" and it's funny cause it's Elton John...

And then they also really awkwardly kill off characters for no reason, all very nonchalantly as if the movie itself doesn't even care that it's taking out people we actually liked from the original. Even the one character who I felt did manage to hold up in this one gets booted. It feels a bit ill-spirited, like I guess what they were going for is to try and catch people off guard and add shock value to the plot, but none of them really added any emotional impact to the movie.

[Bzzit]

Watched 'This is England' again for the 10th time and it's still a top tier film

[Ambidextroid]

It:

I thought It was pretty great, and while I haven't seen that many horror films so I don't have the best base to form a comparison I still think this one was particularly good.
The CGI was genuinely disturbing (in a good way) and the kids were played by really good actors. I thought Ben looked a little out of place as he looked way younger than the rest of the cast, but he still played the character great.

Pennywise was creepy but I think his accent was a bit of an odd choice. He sounds kind of European which I think is somewhat out of place for a monster that's only lived in a small town in America. Also I think it would have been a slightly better choice to have the creepy red streaks that reach his eyes only appear when he's trying to be scary, because it sort of defeats the purpose (it's supposed to lure children in after all).

The lair with all of the dead kids floating around was creepy but I didn't really understand the significance. I think it would have made much more sense for the kids to be alive but in some kind of catatonic state and It fears on their fear, but that doesn't seem to be the case and they're just dead and floating for no reason.
Overall I thought it was great though.

Blade Runner (original):

Watched this just before the sequel and I liked it a lot, but I liked the visuals more than the story. The 3-D photo thing sort of broke my suspension of disbelief though.

Blade Runner 2049:

This one was also visually great but I liked the story of this one a lot more than the original; that is until the ending, which I thought was a poor choice and a slight change would have made the whole movie way better.

Throughout the film the main character finds out he's Deckard's son, but at the very end you find out he's not. He risks his life, almost dies, his wife is killed and he loses almost everyone close to him just to get a brief thanks from Deckard and then probably dies of depression or something.

I think a much better ending would be that Joe says to Deckard "go meet your daughter" and then Deckard says "I had a son". Such a simple change would have improved the whole film by a lot and given it a great twist ending, but instead you find out some barely relevant random character from earlier is Deckard's daughter and somehow Joe and Deckard both know.

It makes no sense, because the only time Joe could have found out she was his daughter is when he spoke to her about his memories, but in fact he still thinks he's Deckard's son until way after when he meets the replicants who are forming an army (which is never actually returned to and didn't make much sense to me either).

[Keane]

hey same movies it must be, we might be related? brother?

Blade Runner: I think the plot is kind of hit and miss, the initial setup remains practically unchanged and it's really just Deckard going around trying to kill these four replicants, and then it ends. The only real addition is Roy's ark which I actually liked better than Deckard's, to the point where I think it would've made for a better movie if they'd each gotten equal screen time and the replicant perspective got fleshed out a bit more. The climax is so fucking good though, it's worth sitting through just for that.

I really enjoy scenes where it's just Deckard sitting in his apartment slowly deciphering an image with a device, or he's out in the city and there's all these layers of sound going on, sparkly twinkle noises when Rachel comes into the scene. I think the slow pacing was a great choice too, there's enough time to breathe and soak in the atmosphere, process a scene, etc.

And then there's a rape scene with 80's porn music, alright.

Blade Runner the new one: This was directed by the same guy who did Arrival, my favourite movie of last year, and I think 2049 might be my favourite this year. Just like Arrival it really knew how to create some incredible cinematography with relatively simple settings, every scene is beautiful to look at without it ever feeling like it's trying to wow you with it's visuals or throw up on the screen with a CGI overload (I loved the shot where K is flying over the city and it's just a giant concrete block where you can make out the lights of the city inbetween the cracks, a bit of a red glow alluding to the first movie's Coke billboards). It feels like a very lived in, believable world even though it opted for some more isolated settings than the original's overcrowded city.

It improved on everything the first movie slightly struggles with: I thought the romance was more interesting, the "blurring the lines between man and machine" theme was explored with more depth and K makes for a stronger main character. It really feels refreshing to see one of these remake/reboot/sequel-the-80's-movies that actually feels like a genuine sequel expanding on the original rather than nostalgia pandering. I think this might be the first of these movies where a returning character from the original makes sense and doesn't feel like they're just pulling these old actors back out the cabinet and going "do the thing you did, people want to see the character" (and Harrison Ford's performance was actually great in this too).

The only bit I was kind of bothered by was the replicant resistance, which seemed awkwardly crammed into this movie and aside from being kind of cheesy it also didn't serve much purpose besides having a scene where stuff is explained. I got the impression they were maybe teasing a third movie a little bit but seeing the box office numbers that's not happening now.

I thought It was pretty great, and while I haven't seen that many horror films so I don't have the best base to form a comparison I still think this one was particularly good. The CGI was genuinely disturbing (in a good way) and the kids were played by really good actors.

Throughout the film the main character finds out he's Deckard's son, but at the very end you find out he's not. He risks his life, almost dies, his wife is killed and he loses almost everyone close to him just to get a brief thanks from Deckard and then probably dies of depression or something.

I think a much better ending would be that Joe says to Deckard "go meet your daughter" and then Deckard says "I had a son". Such a simple change would have improved the whole film by a lot and given it a great twist ending, but instead you find out some barely relevant random character from earlier is Deckard's daughter and somehow Joe and Deckard both know.

I interpreted it as being an intentional contrast wherein K/Joe the robot is out living life and the real human bean is stuck inside a room, irrelevant to the bigger plot, slaving away for a job that's ironically creating imagery of human life for robots. Hence the movie ending on her creating snow inside the room while K is meanwhile dying outside in an actual snowstorm. But yahe, the whole daughter thing does feel a little like, oh this character is still here and also the end result.

It makes no sense, because the only time Joe could have found out she was his daughter is when he spoke to her about his memories, but in fact he still thinks he's Deckard's son until way after when he meets the replicants who are forming an army

Yeah that made no fucking sense, I'm not sure if they were trying to be ambiguous with that or it's just a plot hole.

[Adsolution]

it's unbelievable this movie is from 1968, it literally looks on par with 90's movies and I'd argue even then it's aged better much better than a lot of 90's movies.

I'd argue it looks even cleaner and crisper than most 90's movies to boot, and would be right at home in... 2001, and is best still watched on a big screen! The practical effects and models are so well masked too (not that there are many effects in the first place) that they look indistinguishable from the best modern CG.

But yea, Kubrick is my favourite live-action director for so many of those s and I especially love how much he makes use of additive lighting - a lot of scenes are initially dark, and only illuminated incompletely by artificial lighting - which is also used extensively in A Clockwork Orange. They make everything feel incredibly focused and almost surreal, as if they take place on another plane of existence. It's kind of like Rayman 2 backgrounds where you're like, "i wonder?"

--

2film i just saw


The Martian
yeah, good!! I rewatched Interstellar just before seeing this too, so I could see Matt Damon be the same guy. They're pretty much the same character, he's just gone insane in Interstellar, which is really neat, because you can almost think of The Martian as a "what-if" good-ending scenario, with Interstellar being the bad ending. I actually really wish they were related like that, because it'd work perfectly.

It wasn't quite as much of a thriller as I was expecting; it did manage to evoke some tension, but it felt more like a semi-lighthearted survival adventure to me over all. The dialogue given to the NASA people was pretty cheesy, which I wish wasn't the case, but didn't bother me too much, since I think it did what it set out to do just right. My biggest issue with the movie as a whole was that you could moreorless predict what was going to happen every step of the way - not exactly how, but ballpark - because I don't know if I've seen another space movie where literally every single thing that could go wrong did go wrong. You could say that was the case with Interstellar too to some extent, but I think it's much more reasonable for that to be the case there because the things that went wrong were definitely "out of this world", things they never could've seen coming, whereas in The Martian, it's more of a checklist of technical failures and human error.

Solid and enjoyable movie though. Space movies (as opposed to space-station movies, which are dreck) have always been a space (h1) for exploring (lpl kek!) some really creative ideas, and they have yet to disappoint, especially given how bizarrely uncommon they are.


It
It was phenomenal, if you're comparing it to almost any horror movie from the last decade or two. Objectively speaking, it was borderline serviceable.

It really took its time, which I appreciate a lot - it was well-paced, if a bit drawn-out at times. They did a surprisingly good job at fleshing out and dedicating just the right amount of screen time to each of the protagonists, both together and apart, which is saying a lot given how many there were. What I didn't like was how every adversary in the film, whether bully or parent, were portrayed as downright evil, most of whom die with absolutely no resolve. I would have at least liked to see the bully become an antihero or something, and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it death left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. It was also the case with a lot of scenes in the movie where they would introduce something that looks like it's going somewhere, only for it to cut away and never be touched on again.

One of my biggest issues with the film is how poorly I thought they had the childrens' fears manifested themselves. The Jew kid was scared of a painting, I think? So the person in the painting chases and tries to eat him? The asthma kid is scared of disease, so a demonic leper runs after him trying to kill him? I don't know, I think the fact that they're just fucking chasing and trying to eat/kill you would take priority over whatever clearly (not clearly) life-inhibiting fears they have.

I think what I appreciated about it most was that you could clearly tell there was some level of heart put into it, and the final encounter at the end I thought was legitimately well done. I'd still highly recommend seeing it (h111111111) because it's a movie that feels relatively free from corporate bullshit (and I guess also filmmaking technique lol) and it looks like something they genuinely had a blast working on. It leaves you feeling pretty good, even if it does kind of fall into the pile of mediocre-to-terrible horror modern movies, a pile which on which it deservedly stands atop, above the rest.

[Keane]

The Snowman
The director more or less confirmed this movie was released unfinished and poorly edited and it really, really shows, like it's one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen. It feels like they just loaded all their video onto an editor, didn't properly rearrange anything and randomly deleted a couple scenes. Literally nothing leads to anything, none of the mysteries are resolved, a subplot that's clearly intending to tie into the main plot just disappears towards the end of the movie and they never refer to it again, there's this character they keep focusing on with the implication that she's hiding something...never made clear what it is or why it matters.

I don't know if fixing the terrible editing would've made it better, I believe they did shoot some scenes that would've tied up some of these loose ends but they just never made it in for some reason. But even then I don't know, there was never any tension or anything interesting going on, the attempts at creepy snowmen were hilariously bad, etc. But the acting was actually great, everyone did a good job even with their bare bones characters, Fassbender's character had potential, and the cinematography was fantastic. I would be interested enough to see a director's cut readding the missing footage and unfucking the editing.

[Ambidextroid]

Murder on the Orient Express

I've always been a fan of Poirot since watching the TV series as a kid, and while this film doesn't feature David Suchet I thought Kenneth Branagh did a great job as Poirot. There are a bunch of famous actors crammed into this film (Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe to name a few) but they all play their roles well. A lot of the actors had to put on an accent but I thought they were pretty convincing.

So the story was clever, Poirot himself was really likeable, the actors were great and the music was fitting if not particularly memorable, but one of the best things about this film is the visuals. It was shot beautifully with some really nice scenes, and while I don't know anything about directing or camera work it still stuck out to me. The colours were beautiful too, mostly how the blues and whites of the snow outdoors contrasting with the orange glow within the train gave the film a really comfortable retro feel.

There were only a few small details I didn't quite understand the significance of, but overall I thought this movie was really great and Kenneth Branagh did a wonderful job.

[Keane]

Yeah, the vague teaser trailer set to an Imagine Dragons single going "Look, famous faces!" made me go into this movie very cynically but I was surprised at how lacking in usual Hollywood cliches it was (aside from a wacky opening scene to portray how totally eccentric the main character is). Basically, we didn't get to see Poirot get magically fit for his age and brawl it out with the bad guys, and that's the best thing about this movie. It's very relaxed and almost soothing in a way, I almost got kind of sleepy in the middle.

One problem I did have with the plot is that it didn't give the audience too much time to really consider the puzzle themselves, rather as soon as a new clue got revealed it would immediately go to the next one before giving you a chance to think about what this new information meant. It's aware that you'll predict the least suspicious characters to actually be the most likely candidates, but the only trick it really knew to play on the audience was to just make every character very suspicious so it would become impossible for you to figure it out yourself. Even if the ending was satisfying (and the movie's best part overall!) I would've liked if when the final reveal happened I made that "a-ha!" connection in my own mind as well, as opposed to just having the movie reinforce how genious it's main character is to have figured it out when you obviously couldn't.

And yeah, the train was a great setting and they very creatively managed to keep it interesting in the cinematography (the topdown shot when they entered the crime scene was really gewd). I will say that outside of the train the movie looked a little awkward. Aside from the CGI having that fake, too shiny look to it, I think it was a really poor choice to edit CGI shots inbetween shots of the actual settings, every time it happened it immediately killed my believe in the environment. They also seemed to be there only to have a few "look, an epic landscape!" shots for dummies.

Bbbut overall, yeah I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would.