Speaking of Snatch; I watched “The Gentlemen” last week. It was pretty fun and worth watching.
Maybe not as great as Ritchie’s earliest stuff, but way less dumb and forgettable than “Revolver” and “Rock and Rolla” and that other gangster movie of his.
Also, you guys were right about that Jax guy from Sons of Anarchy, he’s not great.
The “Fauci funding COVID” shit I just read in another thread was more entertaining than any movie I’ve watched recently.
9/10
Seriously, I’m so sick of watching the shitty movies being released while not being in the mood for good movies all I’ve been doing is watching YouTube breakdowns of new releases.
Same here. I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer to keep sub-titles on for everything. Once your hearing starts to become sketchy it’s a lifesaver.
A lot of media has awful mixing lately anyway
I watched The Unholy and 1/3 of Army of the Dead.
The Unholy
All I’ve got to say about this movie is that that dude who played The Comedian in Watchmen is probably one of the only actors alive who can elevate crap to piss. He gets too many shitty roles. 4/10
Army of the Dead
I don’t know if I want to continue watching it…
Watched Highlander 2 again. I remember it was bad. But not THIS BAD.
OMG I think I subconsciously erased the part about all of them being aliens from my memory. If they retconned the first movie, why is Sean Connery still playing a SPANIARD and fucking comes back to life in SCOTLAND in this one???
What was the fucking plot about?
Michael Ironside wants to kill Raiden because he’s pissed off or something even though the guy is going to die of old age pretty soon since he’s the only one left in his timeline. So he sends 2 guys to kill him and Raiden becomes immortal again BECAUSE there are now 2 other ones in his timeline. And they can’t even kill an OLD Raiden.
And then, since Raiden kills them and absorbs their powers or some shit, he brings Sean Connery back to life. So there are now 2 of them in his timeline and both are immortals but they’d probably have to fight each other in the end, which would end up in both of them eventually dying anyway.
But then Michael Ironside decides to go to Raiden’s timeline to kill him himself, which now has 3 of them and he’d have to fight 2 of them alone. Then when Sean Connery died, he could have just gone home and Raiden would have died of old age eventually just like at the beginning of the movie.
But, no, he decides to go fight a young Raiden when the original 2 guys he sent couldn’t even kill a fucking old Raiden and gets himself killed so now Raiden is STILL GOING TO FUCKING DIE of old age since he’s the only one left.
AGAIN.
What the fuck is this? What were they trying to pull off? Some kind of Lynchian “mobius strip” shit? You think I’m grasping at straws here? The chick from DUNE was in it!!!
And I’ve not even brought up the dumbass crap about corporate overlords maintaining the shield under the “previously depleted” ozone layer and have the ENTIRE WORLD ON RETAINER. That’s the LEAST DUMB thing in the entire movie.
Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!
I’m gonna give it a point only because of this line:
Raiden: “She’s wanted by the police.”
Sean Connery: “I didn’t know they had shuch good taste-sh.”
1/10
I can’t say for today’s movies, since 95% of what l watch are Turner Classic Movies, but any tv programs made in the last few years are too much mumbling, music, or sound effects.
Bahhh, maybe it was the years of Zeppelin et al.
I think I posted about starting it and nodding off. Thought it was ‘cause I was tired, so I finished it the next night, and it was just because it was bad. Couldn’t even tell you half of the plot.
I strangely like Dave Bautista, though. He channels that same WWE energy without being a carbon copy of the rock, and can definitely get some chuckles out of the audience.
Watched “Those Who Wish Me Dead” - the Angelina Jolie movie about a firejumper who helps a kid being chased by assassins. Funny as that sounds, it wasn’t half bad. Jolie gives a solid performance, plenty of emotion, not as deep of a character as she seems but that’s more in the writing than anything. Aidan Gillian is a fantastic bad guy. Blitz was a fun movie with him in it as a psychotic bad guy, too - and Jason Statham, to boot. Jon Bernthal is just Jon Bernthal in it. The kid is not bad - certainly not bad enough to ruin the movie. The movie kept me engaged, for sure. 6.5/10. It’s only on HBO max right now, and I’m using a coworkers account info, so you’ll have to wait.
I also, tonight, finished the last of the Harry Potter movies. Been watching them with my kids over the past couple months. I’ve seen them all before, and before that, and first and foremost, had read the books. My first time watching them, fresh from the books, I was very critical, but they honestly weren’t half bad. 1 was alright, 2 was a bit awkward, 3 was great, 4 was pretty good, 5 was a bit forgettable but appropriately dark, 6 got much darker and was well adapted, and both parts 1/2 of 7 were fairly intense. As a whole I’d give the adaptation a 6/10, which is not bad given one set of actors over the course of a decade.
I’ve gotta admit there was something magical about part 4 that somehow managed to bring out the kid in me for 2hrs. Oh fuck this. Now I’ve got to go kick a puppy…
I think Bautista is my preferred wrestler-turned-actor. The Rock just plays The Rock in every film
Bautista wouldn’t be able to pull this off lol:
EDIT:
I think Bautista’s really good at looking sad when he’s not playing Drax. I first noticed this in that shitty Blade Runner sequel but Ryan Gosling can look even sadder. And then Harrison Ford somehow managed to look sadder than Ryan Gosling.
Nowadays actors keep trying to look sad when they want to get an Oscar but Bautista just naturally looks like that. I really suspect the hidden “genius” of Guardians was that James Gunn actually noticed this too and managed to turn this into a parody of itself.
This does nothing to dissuade me of the opinion that the F&F series is live action anime
They’re called cartoons!
I watched Wrath of Man and it was ummm… competent. I thought it was like one of those entertaining but forgettable action flicks Luc Besson was producing in the 2000s like the ones starring John Travolta, Jet Li and Statham so I googled it and it IS a remake of a French movie but not one by Luc Besson.
You don’t remember much of any of these movies, do you? Neither do I. Do you remember the name of that John Travolta action flick despite the fact that it was pretty entertaining and he bought a Big Kahuna burger as an explicit reference to Pulp Fiction? I don’t. Tell me the plot of The Transporter. I’ll bet you can’t.
It’ll be the same for this one a week later.
Boring characters. Standard predictable plot but told in a redundantly non-linear fashion that doesn’t add much to the film and would have completely backfired if it wasn’t made by Guy Ritchie. Serviceable action scenes.
It’s not crap like The Machinist or that remake of that Burt Reynolds movie which may or may not have been The Machinist (see? I can’t even remember half of the crap Jason Statham has starred in), but it’s nowhere near the standard of any of Guy Ritchie’s other heist films.
People talk about Superhero movies and “templates”. While most don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and are just regurgitating what they’re heard on YouTube, they kinda have a point since what they’re really referring to is a standard 3 act plot structure revolving around a hero’s journey as most of those movies are introducing a new character. Yes, Dr Strange is basically Iron Man, but that’s just standard, albeit safe and not very inspired, storytelling. At least the visuals were cool.
We didn’t get that shit in the ensemble movies from Winter Soldier to Endgame.
For “original” genre movies like this, I can literally visualize the fucking template along with the storyboards and the big white board in meetings with the creative team with the arrows and shit lol.
6/10
Do you mean The Mechanic? Fairly sure The Machinist is the Christain Bale one.
Marvel movies are just very safe. They will never say much or do much but they’ll always have That Famous Person and some pretty CGI. The fight scenes are universally fucking awful though. The Daredevil and Punisher tv shows are the only ones that got it right really
I don’t remember! 
The fight scenes in The Winter Soldier were what really turned me on to Marvel movies. They knowingly made Captain America do a Donnie Yen signature back kick just to suck in kungfu movie nerds like me and and I was like “Take my money! Take it!” for every movie after that.
I haven’t watched more than 2 episodes of each the TV shows you mentioned but I’ve seen clips of the fight scenes and they were pretty good.
I watched The Virtuoso and I hated it more than Highlander 2.
Imagine a story about a hitman like The Professional.
Now imagine Leon was narrating EVERY SINGLE THING going through his fucking head just short of his fucking grocery list throughout the movie.
Now imagine there’s no cool bad guy, no plot, no real characters, infantile dialogue and a shitty twist that you can see coming by the 1st half of the movie.
NOW imagine you only watched it because Anthony Hopkins was top billed and he plays cliched mastermind bad guy who mainly communicates over the phone in a dark room. He probably spent ONE fucking day filming in a fucking room that may or may not have been in his own home and collected his pay check.
Fuck, there’s a scene where he’s dozed off on his chair right before the phone goes off and I think that was REAL.
0/10.
Watched Spiral: From the Book of Saw.
Chris Rock saved the movie. I didn’t see that coming. It looked like it had a refurbished script that may have worked on it’s own if it didn’t have to adapt in all the Saw stuff.
Shit, there were so many Pulp Fiction references I think it was a very different script to begin with. Chris Rock’s character is named “Zeke”, as in Ezekiel, ffs. You know, “The Path Of the Righteous Man” and shit. He’s a cop who’s now a pariah in his department because he ratted on his old partner 10 years ago for executing a witness. Sam L Jackson plays his FATHER, who was once the head of his department and a fucking legend from what we’re told at the start.
I’m not really a fan of the Saw series but at least they tried to keep it consistent. This movie is all over the place. The acting is good, the writing is bad. The gore effects are good but the scenes are unnecessary. There was some statement about internal police policies in the past that even I can identify with over here that led to what’s happening today but it made no sense because of the Saw stuff thrown in. There was an entire subplot that could have stood alone as a compelling movie in itself.
But when Chris Rock decides to be Chris Rock AND act at the same time, you can’t really complain that much. The bloody movie even starts with an opening similar to True Romance but with Chris Rock giving a hilarious monologue about Forrest fucking Gump lol.
And, imo, it was better than the last Saw movie but that’s not really saying much. The standalone one called Jigsaw, not the last one with the chick with the big boobs in it. Jigsaw sucked balls.
5/10
I watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon yesterday. It’s a clever mockumentary about a slasher villain who’s preparing for his big break. He leads a student film crew around the location where he’s going to do his killing spree and documents the preparations he’s making for the night. Worth a watch if you’re okay with low budget films.
I also watched The Final Girls which is another meta-horror. It began very weak and actually got better as the movie went on. CGI is awful in it, I would have preferred if they just cut the sequences entirely. It had its funny moments and I ended up being disappointed there was no sequel.
Watched “Rocky through Rocky V” earlier. They’re still good and yes EVEN “Rocky V”.