I’m with you on that front. If I’m not enjoying it I usually just stop, but I was just morbidly curious by the end. I stopped Lost and The Walking Dead as soon as I realized they were just gonna keep the plot going as long as they got enough money to continue.
It really could have been a fun show - 11 or so 5-600 page books with fun plot lines and lots of action to draw from.
Enjoyed Bullet Train a lot. Great action, funny. It would have been interesting to see a Guy Ritchie or Tarantino version of it.
I finally got around to Top Gun: Maverick. I really liked it. Not enough Kenny Loggins, for my taste. I’ll give this on a 9/10.
The flight scenes are amazing. I impressed with the original Top Gun’s flight scenes too. Interesting fact about the first movie is that in the scene where Goose dies, the stunt pilot also died while filming it.
Dude I watched that movie last week, I thought it was pretty good too. I give it a 7/10, it doesn’t hit as hard as other “military” movies I have watched.
If you are old enough to have watched the original Top Gun in the 1980s, you have to like the new one. Completely did justice to the original.
Last night I watched the movie Pig. It is a story about a hermit trying to get his cherished truffle pig back after she is stolen. As the hermit (Nicolas Cage) goes to Portland to find his pig, he returns to his past and his old connections to find his pig.
I think for the story line they were working with, they made about as good of movie out of it as they could. The acting was good, and the movie was not predictable. I’ll give this 7.5/10.
The Shining is a terrible movie
Watch “The Ritual” and the shining becomes a horror masterpiece again.
Highly Controversial Opinion!
But last time I watched, I did wonder how today’s youth would like it.
What’s wrong with it? Too slow? Not enough talking?
Next, watch the “IT” mini series from 1990 and tell us if it’s still any good.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
I watched this a long time ago, but wasn’t posting much here then hahah.
I rate it 1000000 out of ten !! Bravo Mr. Cage!!
That was fantastic.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was such a great movie. It was the best Marvel movie to come out this year.
I watched “Prisoners” on Netflix last night. I liked this one. Never heard of it, but it kept me interested the whole time. Kinda dark though.
This one is kinda a mystery / drama. I think it kinda wanted the viewer to think it was going to twist one way, or think it was predictable. It wasn’t predictable for me at least haha.
One of the problems with modern TV and movies is that unpredictability is seen as a universal good in a vacuum. I don’t care how unpredictable a movie is unless it’s also coherent in hindsight.
I’d say this movie made you think it was trying to be a movie with a twist, but it was more so just telling a fictional “true” crime story.
We watched Avatar 2: Aquatic Boogaloo in 3D today. I enjoyed it quite a bit and my 22 year old barely peeped at his cell phone for the whole 3 hours.
If you come in expecting the plot to be something deeper than a tried-and-true series of entertaining storytelling tropes, you will be disappointed. If you come in expecting to be immersed into the world of Pandora like you were when Avatar first re-defined what 3D cinema could be, you should walk away quite satisfied.
Our local theater is quite nice, with heated leather recliners and current technology. I may make the long drive to go see it a second time, but in IMAX. I’d recommend seeing it on the biggest screen you have access to.
The movie was pretty mid ngl. Now if spider was killed and quaritch was more victorious, then we can talk.
Spider was my least favorite character. He looked like the guy who sold me mushrooms at a Phish concert in 1997. Most Phish fans would be eaten within minutes on a planet like Pandora.
I’m excited for Avatar 3: Way of the desert, mountains, caves, or tundra. Any of those will do just fine.
Alright, I’ve finally got myself into doing stuff I like doing after a bloody horrible loooooog assed project that required every bloody minute of my time not allocated for household matters and scooping litterboxes.
It’s like fucking Apocalypse Now and Hurt Locker shit where you actually have to remember what you enjoyed before this and the period of 3.5 months was like over a year in my head.
Seriously. I’m not joking about the perception of time. It was exactly like that when I was starting my career and had to go on extended trips abroad even though everywhere I went and resided were all in my timezone.
So, I craved a BAD MOVIE. And for my sins, they gave me one. Served it right up to me on my recommendations list even when though I wasn’t using Plex.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Alright, to be fair, this is not one of those cheap The Nun knockoffs. And only James Wan can intend to make a really “so bad it’s good flick” and actually make a “so bad it’s good flick” instead of some overly self-aware, audience nodding drivel that misses the point and neglect to create any character worth rooting for, which completely nullifies any stakes we have in them. This is because James Wan is a man of exquisite tastes. A connoisseur of bad Hong Kong flicks and really fucking good Italian giallos which were all thrown in our faces from the choice of lighting and colors to the ridiculous physical motions that even a possessed woman’s body would be able to do without her spine ending in several pieces in his last movie.
And the reason why I thought of James Wan in this brain fart is because I realized I can’t fucking remember what went down in the movie I watched, which is the one in the link above. All I recall is that what I felt, or acknowledged to their credit was that they were trying to make a good movie without cheap JUMP SCARES!!! and had kind of a story along with a little feminist stuff to boot but it bored the fuck out of me.
But, I’m who I am. Others may find it entertaining. The problem with exorcism movies nowadays is the religious stuff is pretty minimal. Not that they don’t bring up religion or anything. It’s that they don’t utilize the IDEAS of demons and stuff in the Bible and related lore (even literature and paintings from specific art movements).
I gotta admit. M.Night Shymalannie’s Devil was pretty silly fun. But one scene actually gave me chills for a brief moment. It was the part where one chick got bitten by something in the dark. No expanding on it but anyone who knows this stuff knows that it’s the biting. The 9th circle. Chewing on the heads of the ones who committed treason or something like that I can’t remember. Can’t remember who wrote that. Blake? Dante? Because the only thing that’s in my head at the moment is the painting of Dante and Virgil Crossing the Styx by some dude which I think was some Romanticist era thing. Who did it? Goya? The Raft of the Medusa dude who’s name I still can’t spell. Fuck it.
Well, my point is the exorcism movies aren’t scary anymore because whoever makes these normally don’t get that the Bible has really TERRIFYING SHIT in it.
So, that’s what I watched and did some flowchart for work at the same time because I was bored… But it’s well made. Technically. Run-of-the mill stuff. Decent effects, Dialogue that doesn’t make me laugh, which means it didn’t suck but it wasn’t anything to even bother to remember,
3/10
And I watched Spiderman: No Way Home and thought I had lost interest in movies. The only part was a fuckng mindmelting scene when Doctor Strange and him were in the other world or some comic book thing I can’t recall the name of. The dimension(?) the former can take others into where the whole city turns into a dreamscape from Inception. Damn. That was bloody amazing. Nothing else managed to retain my interest and I have no idea how it ended.
BUT THEN I DECIDED TO SEE WHY STALLONE WAS IN A TV SERIES.
Tulsa King.
HOLY FUCK, This is binge watch material. And the writing is some of the greatest writing I’ve seen in a TV show… actually I don’t watch many TV shows but the writing is fucking brilliant.
And I’m 99.9% sure that the initial premise to the show followed Takeshi Kitano’s Brother thematically and conceptually. @loppar Have you watched this?
Stallone has been jailed for 25 years. He is released and wants fair compensation from his boss since he was jailed to cover his ass. The Omerta thing. Keeping his mouth shut. Like in Brother, the theme of a kind of “honor” from doing your duties and maintaining loyalty to your gang, boss and brothers.
While Kitano’s character in Brother was a Yakuza member whose gang got taken over from elimination of his boss, his lieutenant decided they must accept the offer the current incumbant gang has given them. And he declares loyalty to the new leaders but he’s also an old school dude so he’s seen on his knees apologizing to Kitano because Kitano did not want to assimilate and there’s some kind of ranking system where he should have followed Kitano going by unspoken old school rules. Later events build on this leading to a the self-inflicted demise of the current dude and one of Kitano’s loyal dudes. The former does it out of humilation becasue no one in the new gang trusts him even though the rules he broke are unspoken. Along with the shame of and the specter of betrayal following him, he “proves his loyalty” after getting aggravated by some smirky remark at a normal dinner and commits seppuku. The latter shows a young gang leader in the US what it means when an old school dude says his words = his balls and he don’t break them for no one. He shoots himself in the head without hesitation when the young leader challenges him by saying he’ll join Kitano, his boss, gang as a subordinate if the dude shoots himself in the head and asks if he would really do it.
Damn off the main point too much. Kitano is exiled to the US. Finds a motley crew of wannabe gangsters selling drugs on street corners becasue his young brother (real one) is one of them and decides he’s taking over operations and the next thing that happens is he’s taken over the drug trade from half the drug lords in the area.
It’s similar to Tulsa King.
Stallone is given Oklahoma where 'there’s nothing there". He does his stuff once he arrives that at a rapid pace like in Brother. Sees a marijuana store, walks in, quick spurt of violence and walks out with the place paying him 20% of their profits for protection.
The main guy he actually likes is the young Black dude who drives him around after he hires him. In Brother, it was Doctor Foreman, A young naive black dude whom Kitano made his driver.
The relationship is similar. The naive, optimistic counter to the world weary but still fighting for his shit protagonist. Both do not want their guys to be gangsters. Because they’re not mentally built to be gangsters. And I think I can guess how this will play out in Tulsa King even though I’ve only wanted till the 6th episode.
And I’m bringing up the race of the secondary character because it’s also a kind of parallel between the TV show and the movie. Japanese didn’t trust Black dudes. Mafia dudes? Lol.
The other theme is the loss of roots. Which was kinda one of the themes in Godfather 2 which did it pretty explicitly by shifting between time periods and depicting one where people lived by unspoken rules, either as a result of culture derived from distrust of authorities in the native countries or otherwise. The scene in the present were about there being no rules. The last dudes who were old school was Frankie Four Fingers. When the stakes were high enough, a short conversation with Robert Duvall with only small hints and nothing really described and he know what to do. And Rovert Duvall knew that he waas GOING TO DO what he needed to do.
“Goodby Frankie Four Fingers.”
A masterpiece.
But the stuff I’m talking about… Brother isn’t Godfather 2, Tulsa King isn’t either, nor does it tries to be. The themes about the loss of RULES, which is how people preserve personal HONOR are there. Without any of these, there’s no IDENTITY. Which results in CHAOS. Because no one remembers their ROOTS. Which is what the remake of The Seven Samurai (the Yul Brynner one) never got the remake of that remake with Denzel actually DID.
Seriously, that’s what Brother was really about. Only thing is Kitano lost because of this. I do not know what Tulsa King is going to do in the later episodes but I’m pretty optimistic,
I can think of several scenes from Hollywood movies that understand this shit.
Gangs of New York.
“Guns?”
“No guns.”
“Good boy.”
The entire fucking Fury with Brad Pitt.
Anyway. Tulsa King, in execution, is nothing like Brother other than the hilarious spurts of violence. The dialogue is fucking great and hilarious at the same time. And every word actually means something. Kitano movies have minimal and sparse dialogue, and they usually suck anyway.
I REALLY HOPE THEY DON’T FUCK TULSA KING UP. It’s fucking great as it is and the potential to be a bloody classic is there.
9/10
I’ll probably check out Tulsa King. It sounds like something I’d enjoy. I am in need of a show at the moment too.