What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

High Fidelity is a pretty good movie...it's a great book though. I know the books better blah blah blobbity blah. But seriously, it's a really good read. I thought the movie did a commendable job of bringing it to life on the silver screen. It was sort of ahead of it's time in that it was a chick flick but with a group of guys instead. This was LONG before Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and Co were pumping out their brand of "bromantic comedies".

One of my favorite films. My experience is that it is a movie that is frequently misinterpreted by viewers who think that the filmmakers are making Rob admirable---it has these sound bites that I've heard people say in earnest before ("it's not what you're like, it's what you like" being a prominent one). Or there's the whole scene where Rob is talking about the bad things he's done and he justifies 3 out of the 4 extensively and seems to have reasoned his way out of the situation... only he never even mentioned where he cheated on his girlfriend.

The film is subtly but relentlessly attacking Rob and his worldview and how bankrupt his lifestyle is. You're right on that it plays better now in the internet tough guy/geek king era than it did even at the time.

High Fidelity is one of my favorite novels that doesn't have spaceships, dragons, or magical swords. Just real good British entertainment.

We watched "The Rogue Cut" of X-Men: Days of Future Past last night. The main changes are Rogue to a part of the story and how her presence changes a couple other aspects.

There's that and then some longer dialogue scenes. I thought it was great and I like it this way more than the theatrical release

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

This movie seemed like a good time from the trailers, and I enjoyed the previous one. While it was fine, I was let down by my expectations. First, the trailer shows pretty much all of the action sequences, which makes the movie feel less action packed that it should be. And second, the trailer implies (at least to me) that they are going to be going up against this rogue nation and fighting them to shut it down. But no, IMF is just trying to track down the leader of the organization. The actions of the Syndicate are not a part of the movie and not the threat. It's just a cat and mouse game between Ethan Hunt and the head of the Syndicate, which I found to be kind of boring.

The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies

The high pitched whirring noise you hear is the sound of Tolkein spinning in his grave at 9000 RPM.

I didn't think this movie could be as bad as it was reputed to be and it's not. It's worse.

What part did I hate worst? Was it the piss poor CGI which looked laughable (though that may be due to being on TV)? Was it the pointless Grima Wormtounge wanna be who despite being obviously treacherous and vile is still an aide to Bard throughout the movie? Was it the 300 instances of someone staring wide eyed at an irresistible enemy charging at them only to be saved by the unseen ally shooting, stabbing, or throwing something from behind? Was it an Orc floating under the ice dead only to explode upward even though there was nothing for him to push off of to enable this physical impossibility? The retarded love story between dwarf and elf? Legolas' unresoved mommy issues?

I can't decide because it was all dreadful.

That movie is total garbage. How about Smaug being in the movie for like five minutes. Did they think they were doing an Empire Strikes Back opening sequence?

Worst for me was either horrific CGI (legolas sequences being the worst) or that grima ripoff.

I just watched Kingsman - The Secret Service. Man, that was awesome! WAYYY better than you might expect. Not a single dead spot in the whole film.

Great movie! They do some fun stuff with class in the movie, too.

And what the fuck left field shit is the Samuel l Jackson character?

Ant-Man.

Lots of fun! Wow. I thought I was done with the superhero flicks, but this and that Daredevil were great. I'm not a super fan of Guardians and felt this was a much better movie. His buddy, Luis, was a great character and he was used in just the right amount. Great job writing his character being sort of a goof yet he's at wine tasting events and art shows. Ha!

Definitely goes into one of my top 5 favorite superhero films.

Saw Mission Impossible. A couple of the action sequences were good (car chase in Casablanca very good) but the story was so boring. Movie way too long too.

Inside Out

I really liked this film, I don't think that any other CGI I've ever seen has this amount of expression into its animation. I've always felt that the animation of most CGI films tends to be very workmanlike beecause it doesn't tend to carry any narrative or emotional weight compared to the plot or the dialogue, but here the poses and movements of the characters are a vital part of their expression. There's a fair dose of Tex Averian influence lingering over the characters and the art direction and backgrounds are quite amazing too, the beginning of the film is simply magical.

Still, the more I think about the film the more flawed I realize it is. It's a very well-made film, with impeccable comedic timing but a significant part of its content is very generic. There are "broccoli is disgusting" and "left the toilet seat up" jokes, a clown shows up as a nightmare and the framing story is a dull tale of a family moving and missing their previous home.

Compared to the colorful world of the mind, the whole narrative seems lifeless. Things seem to happen not because of the actions of the characters but because they are necessary to keep the movie going. This is particularly glaring with the "castles" breaking down just at the right moment to prevent the characters from getting back to HQ twenty minutes into the movie but it also applies to the whole arc surrounding Bing Bong or the subconcious. It has the same problem as other Pixar films in that there's a clear beginning and a clear end without the in-between pushing the narrative foward. I think you could reduce the film to half its lenght and get a better sense of progression.

The movie had a quite troubled production and apparently the initial premise had Joy and Fear working together only for him to be replaced by Sadness at a later point. And I don't think it worked because there's no chemistry between Joy and Sadness. Joy pushes her ideas onto Sadness and literally drags her from place to place but there's no meaningful interaction between them. Sadness is a flat character with very few lines, and lacks the secondary traits that make Joy fun to watch (Impulsiveness, prepotence, disregard for others/protocol, etc.). She simply mops and says she's sorry. I don't think she says anything meaningful in the whole movie except for two scenes. I would even argue that the whole reason Bing Bong wasn't streamlined out of the movie is that they found the Joy/Sadness relationship is impossible to define.

I get a sense that many other aspects of the film are inherently problematic and that the writers never found a good solution to them. There are many important ideas that are simply name-dropped but never explained (How the emotions are supposed to work, what the "islands" are, etc.) while throw-away concepts like "Imagination land" are constantly overexplained by Bing Bong. In fact, the more and more I mention his name, the more I dislike Bing Bong. Geez, he's everywhere and he's probably the film's worst character.

So yeah, I liked the film, but thinking back about it I'm not sure it's great. I'm glad I'm not a movie critic, I would be roasted alive for this.

Yeah, bing bong is weird. He's the jar jar of this movie yet he has the most emotionally impactful scene.

I loved that flick tho

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

I rather enjoyed this movie. Maybe the 50s/60s aesthetic helped, but it was fun. Definitely had Guy Ritchie's style, which I like.

Bing Bong is the best part of that movie to me.

I may have an above-average tolerance for Richard Kind, though.

I'll just leave this for you: "BING-BONG, BING-BONG!"

Nightbreed - The Director's Cut

I typically say that September 1st is fair game for me to start indulging in a constant diet of horror movies and General Mills Monster cereals, but the itch has hit early this year.

So Netflix has practically begging me to watch this movie. I have logged a ton of horror and I did give a good rating to Hellraiser, so I guess I can see why. I've never seen the original cut but I do know the history and that it's kind of a mess. Well, the DC is still a mess. Ambitious for sure, there is no taking that away from it. But man, is it just completely illogical even by horror movie standards. It's about an hour in when you get any sense of what the hell is going on, and given how illogically the characters act, that moment feels LONG overdue. It also has a major identity crisis towards the end, with it being over the top satirical, and all-out action movie, and the crazy nightmarish thing it had been all along. This has to be one the hardest movies to my mind up over that I've seen in a long while. I can't take how imaginative it is and how it was reaching for that "Star Wars of horror" goal, but the frequency with which it falls over itself or fall flat completely is hard to overlook. Plus, the overall theme of humanity being the real monsters is certainly nothing new now and wasn't then, either. Hello, Universal Monsters.