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

Black Barney wrote: How was Divergent?

Divergent is like a training montage that's been stretched out to a whole movie. She starts out basically Amish and by the end is a hardcore warrior. I also give it a 7. Also there's no love triangle or really any romance. Unlike most of the YA crap. Possibly why this series isn't as popular as others. All the actors do fine in both movies.

Popularity doesn't mean anything anyway (for us). We just want good movies.

What's YA? Young Adult?

I really would like to see it cuz I like Woodley but I really don't think I'm missing anything by skipping it. It's another franchise-builder and if it's not fantastic, then I won't bother. Thanks for the reviews!

I'm surprised there is no love triangle, that's good at least.

Black Barney wrote: What's YA? Young Adult?

Youthful Angst.

Just when I thought I had exhausted everything decent on Amazon Prime, I watched Laggies, Slow West, and Catastrophe (mini-series). I quite enjoyed all three.

M:I5, yup it's great. Starts with the plane sequence from the trailer and hits probably about 7-8 other action scenes from there. My favorite was a scene at an opera, which plays out well with the drama of the music. Sure, that kind of thing has been done before, but this series always has clever ways of making action particularly cool.

Saw The Fault in Our Stars

An utterly blatant and shameless tear jerker.

And I cried like a big fat baby.

The leads are very charismatic and turn what could have been pure saccharine garbage into a movie that I quite enjoyed albeit in a dark room late at night while the rest of the world was asleep. I do have a tough guy image to maintain and having anyone witness my eye faucets flowing while I choke out "Ohmygahd...love...unfair...beautiful..." just would not do.

Of course you have to accept that these are the most attractive cancer victims you are likely to see but its Hollywood so shut yer yap and enjoy it.

Nightcrawler staring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo is a really good movie.

But damn if I don't feel like I need a scalding hot shower after watching it to try and get the slime off of me.

Yeah, Nightcrawler is quite good...it's almost like the offspring of Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Blow-Up and There Will be Blood. It strikes a lot of the same thematic notes as those pictures...apart from a couple of modern references, that movie could have come out in 1977 and it would have fit right in. Gyllenhall's performance anchors the whole thing...very impressed with that film.

I was watching Flash Gordon on the weekend for the zillionth time and had a moment where I wondered why I had never noticed this hawkman's extraordinary broken nose before:

After years, I finally got to watch A History of Violence. I liked it, but for me it felt like it was about 3/4th finished. I'm also not sure how William Hurt got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for that role. It was good, but his part was in about 5 minutes of a 2-hour movie.

He got nominated for that?!? That's nuts.

i loved that flick tho

Continuing on my kick of watching movies about the seedy rotten side of life, I watched:

The Harder They Fall from 1956 and starring Rod Steiger and Humphrey Bogart.

The story follows the exploits of a has-been sports writer who takes on the job of manager/handler/publicity man for an unknown boxer destined to fight the heavy weight champ. This ain't Rocky though. It's dirty and gritty and filled with the smell of week old garbage, sweaty lockers, and smoke hazed back rooms. This isn't a Cinderella story and the only feel good moment is when you realize you had enough sense to flip burgers for a living rather than to get into the boxing racket.

Humphrey Bogart is great of course but Rod Steiger as the Machiavellian owner of a "stable full" of boxers, is outstanding. Also it is worthy of note that the performances of real world boxers cast in the movie are actually quite good especially Pat Comisky as Gus Dundee, the punch drunk ex-champ who has just one more fight left in him.

A classic of the first order.

You should have done a double feature with this:

Watched Ant Man last night. Loved it.

I'm quickly noticing that when it comes to the Marvel films, I much prefer the smaller, weirder characters. I mean Avengers 2 is technically a better movie than Ant Man, but if I had to pick one to re-watch over and over..it would be Ant Man. It's not wrapped up in the crazy melodramatics and super high stakes of something like the Avengers. It's a more personal movie and for me yeah it's more enjoyable. I also love that it doesn't take itself seriously at all. Rudd was good, but the film was well cast in general. The film certainly has a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe which is a big plus for me.

The movie is essentially Marvel's version of a Heist film. Looking at it that way...it works pretty well. It still suffers from the typical CGI laden "end of the game Boss Battle" that occurs in all of these films. Luckily that sequence is just as ludicrous as the rest of the film, with a few genuine "laugh out loud" moments. The film is not flawless, but as a silly popcorn film it really works.

This was a great way for Marvel to end "Phase 2". I'm very much excited for some more of these "lesser character" films.

I watched High Fidelity and it was like seeing a movie about people I know, that is; about geeks. I kept getting flashbacks of my friends, of hanging out in conventions, of arguing online in internet forums and getting dates with girls using trivia as an excuse. I really saw myself on the film through the main characters and not in the usual masturbatory, unrealistic "geeks are cool" sense, but in deeper-reaching mundane way.

It's also a very well made movie. There are lots of small details I appreciate, like how the people you see on the film are people you could actually see in the street and not extremely attractive actors or misplaced caricatures. The film pushes along quite nicely without ever feeling overbearing and it's neither celebrating nor condemning, it would have been very grating otherwise.

I like to check reviews of film after I see them, and it was interesting how the less positive reviews seem to miss this aspect enterily. I read a review by Owen Gleiberman in which he laments that the movie didn't show a deeper appreciation of music, that it was mostly trivia and minutae. He didn't seem to realize that what mattered was that useless minutae and that the music didn't matter. It could have been about anything else, it could have been a movie about video games or one about movies. On the other hand, the best reviews, like Ebert's, focused on this aspect. The movie got a great critical reception and the main reason is that most movie critics are, well, geeks and can also see themselves on the film.

Really liked this movie. I think everyone here would like it.