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

Well thanks for that. I thought I had proven to myself that nothing could convince me to give the Batman a try and here you come along. This sounds perfect for a nice October watch.

Went to see a Swedish film called Hypnosis in the tiniest cinema. A young couple - Vera and Andre - have the lifetime chance to present their business idea to investors. Vera is unhappy that she doesn't stand up for herself enough. She decides to try to stop smoking by hypnosis right before the big weekend. After the therapy session, her behaviour changes. She becomes an agent of chaos. Andre on the other hand seems to be completely made of wood. Watching him try to control situations he has no way of understanding is pain-inducing. The film is stunningly well written and the constant barrage of cringey and awkward social situations almost gave me cramps. Great movie.

I really enjoyed The Batman and have watched it twice. Yes it is long as fuck. I think Pattinson makes a great Batman. A less great Bruce Wayne, but the movie isn't called The Billionaire.

I look forward to the next film. I'll catch The Penguin at some point in the future when I sign up for Max again.

I expect both Ferrell and Millioti to get Emmy nominations if not outright wins.

My problem with The Batman, shared by most, if not ALL Batman, probably even all superhero, films is that Batman does NOTHING to change the villain's plan. Batman just discovers clues and puzzles laid out for him but there is no sense that he is responding to or preventing the villain in any substantive way that causes the villain to have to change plans. The need to make the villain be smart (when the writers don't have the capability or the faith in the audience to follow an elaborate plan) by making the hero dumb or just reactive is a recurring issue I have with a lot of films and shows.

THAT scene in Bone Tomahawk is mirrored in Terrifier. Not sure which one did it first but seeing both is illuminating as a viewer because I responded differently to each one. Highlights my personal bias for sure. Though the Terrifier series has a particularly misogynistic cruelty streak (I've watched all of them this month) that goes above and beyond most slasher films, I think, though the genre in general is heavily weighted towards putting women in danger.

I watched Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman last night, after being shown clips for about three years on Youtube shorts. Kind of a fun, violent movie. The British gangsters reminded me of a lot of late William Gibson set in the UK.

Love that one.

Finally saw True Romance. I skipped it back in the day because critics dismissed it as too violent, which has got to be pretty bad considering the socially acceptable levels of violence in American entertainment. I would have seen it sooner if I had known that the cast included: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Bronson Pinchot, Samuel L. Jackson, James Gandolfini, and Tom Sizemore. That's a murderer's row of solid B-list stars, plus Pitt and Jackson. Pitt is barely even present, getting a half dozen easy lines as a stoner roommate. Oldman does his usual remarkable bit, disappearing completely into his part as a vicious pimp. The script by Quentin Tarantino allows this remarkable cast the opportunity to soar above the tawdry story about love and drugs and violence.

That six minutes of screen time by Oldman may have been his greatest performance in a lengthy career of them.

I watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent on Hulu, and that is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Largely a film about a bromance between Nicholas Cage and Pedro Pascal, it ends up punching way above its weight. Highly recommended.

Nodens wrote: the constant barrage of cringey and awkward social situations almost gave me cramps.

Such a great phrase, and could apply to so many contexts.

I went to see Gladiator II while the rest of my family saw Wicked.

I may have chosen poorly.

Remember when studios would make direct-to-video sequels of popular movies, and they were cheap, beat-for-beat remakes of the original, but with lesser actors because they couldn't get the original actors back? Yeah. That's pretty much Gladiator II.

Other than Denzel Washington, who easily steals the entire movie, the sequel tries to hit all the same notes as the original. Sad to say, Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe. Everyone in the movie keeps telling us how ANGRY Mescal's character is, but he's not able to convincingly SHOW us that anger. Instead, he mostly just seems petulant. I love Pedro Pascal, but he is sorely underutilized, and is hardly even in the movie. And it took TWO actors to replace Joaquin Phoenix' role, and sadly, they both fall way short.

The action scenes are good. Ridley Scott still knows how to shoot an action scene. But everything else is rote and repetitive. All in all, I was disappointed. I guess I should have seen Wicked instead.

I finally watched Zoolander (2001) and Zoolander 2 (2016), and found them both disappointing. Both movies featured star-studded casts of comedians and attractive actors, but the jokes were not very funny. The first movie did make me smile at times, but the concept of a really dumb protagonist wore thin quickly. The second movie had a fun start, with Justin Bieber playing Justin Bieber getting shot about 20 times. It was all downhill after that, and I got restless during the final stretch and got up to tidy my living room. Ben Stiller has been occasionally amusing in the past, but I am struggling to recall even one time when Will Ferrell ever made me laugh.

I watched the new Netflix film, Carry-On. Jason Bateman is a terrorist (his character says he isn't, but come on), attempting to social engineer Taren Egerton, the hapless TSA agent, into allowing a contraband bag onto a flight.

I must warn you, this is one of the DUMBEST films I've seen in a long time. The plot is so fucking ridiculous, it's astonishing. Check your brain at the door.

And yet! It's not an unpleasant watch, probably due to having actual actors on board. I imagine they all read the script and said fuck it, the check is good.

3 / 10

Sonic 3 is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But my expectations were low. You win some, you lose some.

To compare it to its onetime rival, the Mario movie isn’t a real movie. The plot doesn’t matter. The characters don’t matter. It’s just barely-related scenes of things that kind of look like things you’ve seen before. But it was made by humans. There’s inspiration in background gags, and the scene of Mario running down the street and through the construction site.

Sonic 3 has a plot and character arcs, thin as they are, but it shows as much inspiration as The Hangover 2 did. There’s the Jim Carrey techno dance, again. James Marsden has a heartfelt talk with Sonic, again. Sonic has a heartfelt talk with the villain, again. James Marsden’s wife’s sister shows up, again.

I genuinely laughed once when Jim Carrey says “… I hate watched Green Lantern in 2011.” The joke was over explained and hedged against a future Green Lantern movie being good,

Kids liked it.

5/10

Yesterday, I watched the lowest rated movie (per Rotten Tomatoes) that I have ever seen: A Sound of Thunder (2005). And it wasn't actually the worst movie that I have seen. I have seen comedies that weren't funny, glacially-paced and sleep-inducing Oscar bait, atrocious horror movies, and dismal crap mocked by the unfunny wags of Mystery Science Theater 3000. (MST3K is locally beloved, but suffers from churning out a huge volume of lame comments in hopes of getting a couple of laughs.)

A Sound of Thunder has a promising concept, a Hollywood pitch along the lines of Jurassic Park meets The Butterfly Effect. It's based on a classic short story by Ray Bradbury of the same name, and that story is literally the origin of the concept "the butterfly effect." As a kid, I remember reading a comic book adaptation of the same story in Marvel comic Worlds Unknown #2, under the name "A Gun For a Dinosaur." Basically a company monetizes time travel by sending rich people back to prehistoric times on dinosaur safaris. Time paradox happens, with disastrous effect. If you squint, you can see the inspiration for the excellent board game Escape From 100 Million B.C.

Although any time travel story will necessarily play fast and loose with the science, A Sound of Thunder is pretty bad at it. A small change in the distant past could theoretically lead to a big change in the future, but that change should be instantaneous and not occur in stages separated by visible waves of paradox. And one of these changes postulates an Earth overrun by creatures resulting from the impossible combination of primates and reptiles. Late in the movie, there is finally a lot of action, punctuated by shouty exposition. The brave hero scientist undoes the original paradox, which would theoretically reset everything, except for one another small paradox that ensures a happy ending by preventing the original problem from ever happening again. The best that I can say about the handling of paradoxes is that the movie was relatively consistent within its own very flawed logic. Final score: 6% from critics, 18% from audiences.