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

So Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny wasn't all that bad. Almost every fear I had for it was true, just not as obnoxious as it could have been and the Indy bones...the music, the adventure, the wit, were all there. But there are BIG flaws in the story structure, egregious flaws for a film of this caliber and cost, which shows that no matter the talent and budget, the end result can still have problems a 5 year old can point out.

Still, it is a fine farewell to Ford (and seeing the abysmal box office, a farewell to all things Indy) so as a capstone of 40 years of films it's worth a watch.

Then there is Transformers...Way of the Beast? Beast Wars? whatever which is a BLAST. They take all the Bay stuff, run it through a normal person filter to slow down the CGI and the action edits, and slap an OG transformers skin on all of it. It's silly fun and actually feels more like an Indy film than Dial of Destony in parts. Not all the great OG transformers are in this, but enough of them are to make it sing. Plus it heralds a crossover event that would make Godzilla vs Kong feel quaint.

That’s too bad about Indy. It would be ideal to give him the James Bond treatment; recast with a new Indy every 10 years, tell new stories.

A few months ago, I re-watched the first three Indiana Jones movies. The original is an all-time classic. The second one is very flawed, and I regret re-watching it. The third one has some great scenes, and the interaction between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery is wonderful, but it wasn't as good as I remembered. I am completely unwilling to re-watch the fourth one, or to spend any more time in my life watching anything involving Shia LaBeouf, a vile, toxic criminal slimebag. I don't feel even the slightest urge to watch this new Indiana Jones movie, but maybe someday I will be very bored and it will be available on one of my streaming service subscriptions.

dysjunct wrote: That’s too bad about Indy. It would be ideal to give him the James Bond treatment; recast with a new Indy every 10 years, tell new stories.

Possibly , but if they do, I hope they keep it rooted in the interwar era - that 1930s time period is perfect for this sort of character and would pay homage to the original.

THE BIRDS (1963). We spent a week in Bodega Bay at an AirBnB with my mom, so we watched this when we got home. Scared the crap out of my 8yo, mission accomplished. It is a great film and still holds up; in a way it’s the precursor of Night of the Living Dead — things attack for no reason and bad stuff happens. I tried to impress upon my kid the greatness of the cinematography, especially the last scene where Tippi is slowly going up the stairs and the camera keeps cutting from her face to the doorknob — but secretly I was impressed by how classy everyone dressed, and how cool their cars were, and how they could light up a cigarette in your house if they randomly felt like it, and how you were the asshole if you didn’t immediately offer them booze.

THE MUPPET MOVIE (1979). Palette cleanser. The kid has no knowledge of muppets so this was pretty great. This is a fantastic movie that 100% holds up. What a treat, although I appreciated the Steve Martin cameo more than she did. The verbal jokes are great, the visual jokes are great (Kermit riding a bike e.g.) and the plot rolls along without a dull moment. I have an extremely vague memory of seeing this in a drive-in with my parents, I would have been about 5yo, and when Animal swallowed the mega-gro pills and popped through the roof I was absolutely terrified.

The muppets are one of the most criminally underused properties in Hollywood. I saw some wag online positing a muppets Beauty and the Beast remake, where everyone is a muppet but the “beast” is a conventionally attractive human man, who everyone thinks is hideous, and when Belle kisses him, he turns into a muppet. How is this not a thing already?

If you're a Muppets fan, one of the best accounts on Twitter (for as long as it lasts; thanks, Elmo!) is Muppet History (@HistoryMuppet.) He's always posting clips from the show and the films and talks a lot about their cultural impact.

Saw Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One after binging the first six movies last week, and quite enjoying them. This is very much just a setup for the second movie. It is mostly talking and running/chasing the macguffin, with not a lot of Mission Impossibley stuff. There was a long car chase sequence that was pretty boring, but I think I am just completely over movie car chases entirely.

Picked up Come Drink With Me in Arrow’s sale. It was a decent watch. I can see how it inspired Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. I enjoyed the quirky characters, but wish the story was more fleshed out. It felt like parts had been edited out or not completely written.

Watched Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, another buy from Arrow. This is a good movie, with a varied collection of characters that are easy to like and care about. The ending was violent, but before that it was like slice-of-life drama and it was well written.

Yet another Arrow sale buy: Daimajin. Two parts samurai story of taking back an overthrown castle, one part giant monster movie in the form of a mountain spirit who is angry and goes on a rampage. It is pretty cool.

I went and saw Oppenheimer: Cheekbones and Hat today, mostly so I could tell people I'd seen it. It really feels like a high quality artsy drama set in the cold war that would normally get a 7.6 on IMDB and go to Netflix after a short theater run where it would be ignored by the masses.

The cinematography was great, and I got to see all these actors in amazing makeup, so that I didn't know who they were at first. I didn't realize that was Emily Blunt until I went to IMDB later. Also, wait--that was Florence Pugh playing the super naked commie mistress. The IMAX was impeccable, but it was mostly talking heads and the Trinity test. There is some good plotting, and many, many scenes of Oppenheimer looking anguished.

I would say it is a fantastic movie for folks that like this kind of movie, but the theater today felt like it was filled with folks who, I think, wanted Inception or Batman and were cruelly denied.

But good for Nolan for using IMAX to get people into theaters.

I had to pee so bad for the last five intense minutes, I stood up and walked from the middle of the row to the entrance ramp, but standing alleviated the agony enough that I could watch from the sidelines. I was really tired and only dozed off very briefly, so I'd say it was pretty engaging, but still three hours long. I was in the theater from 2:30 to 6:00.

It was an important movie because I had totally forgotten that the nuclear arms race was terrible.

sometimes I catch myself feeling self-conscious about the amount of time I spend with my head plunged in this slipstream of "chorfs" and "Cthulhus" but then I come up for air and everyone is talking about "Barbenheimer weekend" and it feels like I can't go back to drowning fast enough.

Last Podcast on the Left just wrapped a five-/six-episode run about the Manhattan Project, so I'll be finishing that instead of seeing the Oppenheimer flick. The only things I know about Greta Gerwig are that she voiced Pony in the Adult Swim show "China, IL" and that she apparently recorded a sketch for Brad Neely's Harg Nallin' Sclopio Peepio that wound up too racy for the station to air. If I ever see him at an event of some sort, I want to ask him about that, but I'm not going to watch Barbie for clues.

*"chorfs" = Chaos Dwarfs

Finally saw Battle Royalle (2000), courtesy of Amazon Prime Freevee, which means that it's included in my Amazon Prime membership, but with mandatory ads. The ads only occasionally interrupted the movie, but they were lengthy interruptions, with several commercials each time. I stopped watching network television in 2007, and I think Freevee aired nearly twice as many ads per commercial break. And of course the ads were broadcast somewhat louder than the movie, in case you happened to go to the kitchen for a snack during the ads. Still, the ads were a small price to pay, in order to see a movie that was effectively banned in the U.S. when it first came out. Not officially banned, but all distributors in the U.S. decided to pass because it was soon so after the mass shooting at Columbine High School.

The concept of Battle Royalle is that an entire high school class from Japan has been selected for a brutal competition on an island where there will be only one survivor. Each contestant gets a duffle bag of food, water, and a random weapon or other convenient item (like a bulletproof vest or binoculars). Everybody wears a collar with small explosive device and tracking unit. The device will explode if it gets removed, or if the contestant is in a danger zone at the wrong time. There is an extensive PA system on the island, so that the military unit running the game can periodically broadcast announcements about who has died recently, and which zones will be danger zones at specific upcoming times. If nobody has won within three days, all of the collars will detonate. This is a good premise for a board game or a one-shot rpg, and very definitely the inspiration for The Hunger Games franchise.

So how was the movie? I liked it. I am too jaded to be disturbed by the extensive carnage in this movie, but I'm sure it was a bit shocking for audiences in 2000. There were more than a few flashbacks, in an effort to make the deaths of various supporting characters more meaningful, but flashbacks could only do so much when there are over three dozen deaths onscreen. Certain characters have traumatic backgrounds that tend to make them more resilient in the game. At the end of the movie, there is a flashback showing many of the young contestants at a high school basketball game, with everybody happy and excited, plus a shot of a class picture in sepia tone. Battle Royalle is a bold movie that really swung for the fences, and it's possibly a very good movie that just didn't quite overcome my cynicism. I think I saw a version that was dubbed in English (really, all non-silent movies are dubbed, if you think about it), and it was done so well that I barely noticed.

Shellhead wrote: Finally saw Battle Royalle (2000)

It is also, of course, the inspiration for battle royale video games, of which there are many. And features Beat Takeshi, of Takeshi's Castle (here, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge) fame.

If I recall, the whole thing is meant to be an anti-war movie that teenagers can relate to. Because governments send kids that age to random places and order them to kill other kids their age. And those other kids are probably not all that different from the ones they went to school with.