Movies

[NotMiki]

So one other thing I noticed in the movie is that the music where the title appears in the beginning sounded like they were referencing this melody.  To me it did, at least.  I hope it's true because it would be awesome.

It seemed more like they were just going for the 70's scifi synth type sound.

Stop denying my reality

[Hunter Sopko]

So one other thing I noticed in the movie is that the music where the title appears in the beginning sounded like they were referencing this melody.  To me it did, at least.  I hope it's true because it would be awesome.

It seemed more like they were just going for the 70's scifi synth type sound.

Stop denying my reality

What's wrong with running away from reality if it sucks?

[dunie]

Girl's Trip. I can dig it. It had some legitimately funny parts, but I'm generally not a fan of Haddish's obnoxious-style humor so there were several comedic moments I was just exhausted by--- anyway, gonna see what skin products they using bc I know brown melanin is p cool but i wanna glow like that when I'm 50 damn

[The Duck]

Everyone should watch Lady Bird ASAP.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Yay, finally got to see Thor: Ragnarok!

The movie is just -fun-. Like, the cast is having fun. The setpieces are fun. The dialogue is fun. The villains are having fun. Korg the New Zealand Rockman is fun. Cate Blanchett is fun. Like... her character was written kinda horribly... but it doesn't matter because Cate Blanchett can out-act everyone else in the movie without even trying (and I actually quite respect most of the other actors!) so the character gets a pass on charisma alone.

There's nothing really meaningful about the movie. No deeper human identity to latch onto. It was just funtime fantasy action. And that's okay. 5/5 fun movie. 0/5 meaningful movie. I hadn't watched any trailers, so the Hulk's little cameo was a nice surprise.

Does anyone know what that _spaceship in the stinger was?

[NotMiki]

The marvel people have confirmed that it belongs to Thanos

[Hunter Sopko]

Cate Blanchett is fun. Like... her character was written kinda horribly... but it doesn't matter because Cate Blanchett can out-act everyone else in the movie without even trying (and I actually quite respect most of the other actors!) so the character gets a pass on charisma alone.

Written kinda horribly and -still might probably be in the Top 5 Marvel Villains-?

Vulture in Spiderman: Homecoming (Michael Keaton is a boss)
Loki (Avengers)
Red Skull (Captain America)
... Obediah Stane? Uhhh. I'm blanking. Not sold on Winter Soldier Bucky. Ultron had some charisma but not quote Cate Blanchett level. Ronan is L-O-L. I do love me some Justin Hammer, but he's not quite the main villain there. Oh wait! Guy Pierce is kinda good and the twist with the Mandarin I loved. So yeah, I'd put him here.

Only one I haven't seen is Guardians 2. So... holy shit, she might actually make that list.

[Cmdr_King]

I might well put Guardians 2's villain in the top 3 myself, so hard to say.

Anyways Djinn, Thor 3 was totally about something, its just that thing was not really the core narrative thrust during the entire Skaar interlude which was, y'know, like half the movie.

It's really quite grim.  There is no escaping the legacy of your bloody imperialist past.  Any attempt to defend the home you built on the plundered riches of the past only strengthens those that wish to revive it, for they draw far more strength from that plunder and the pillaging that acquired it than you will defending your home.  The only solution is to cast it all aside, and let and those who would attempt to revive the bloodied past be burned.

Really what cinches it is the self-proclaimed Revolutionary (and director-insert) is an ineffectual farce.  No, you can't revolt and overthrow the reactionary throwbacks glorying in the bloody past.  They can only burn.

[Captain K]

I'm a big fan of Zemo from Civil War, but I know not everybody liked him.

Marvel villains are more miss than hit.  Agree with Vulture being the best though.

[Grefter]

So since we are getting closer to Infinity War, is it time to pimp out the first Adam Warrock album that was his concept album all about it with the serial numbers filed off?

Because I am totally down with doing that.  The War For Infinity is fucking dope.

[Sierra]

I'm a big fan of Zemo from Civil War, but I know not everybody liked him.

I thought he worked very well for being an understated manipulator with very personal goals. Came out better than most MCU villains for being so different.

EDIT: I rarely enjoy hip-hop, but I can endorse Infinity Gauntlet reimagined as a rap battle.

[SnowFire]

Star Wars The Last Jedi
Pretty good!  I liked it, it has a lot of great moments, the cinematography knows both how to make visual jokes as well as make things DRAMATIC.  Some good plot twists, too, at a low level - lots of nice head fakes.

My main complaint is that I'm not really a fan of where they decided to have the plot go from here.  It's kinda like Apollo Justice deciding that Phoenix got disbarred then sat around playing card games for 7 years.  Even to the extent that plotline was well-done, it's kinda not what I want.

Stuff I liked:
* Basically any time Finn is on the screen.  Really, just maybe do some spin-off series called "Adventures of Finn."
* Actually acknowledging the cost of these crazy missions was pretty cool, too.  I wish they hadn't turned it into pop philosophy in the very end by Rose, but still.  Progress.
* I like that after setting up a Bond-esque casino sequence, they rip the parachute cord off, remind the audience that the kind of people who come here are probably scum, and then chill out with the underclass & the rando-guards.  And ignore doing what they were supposed to.  That was sweet.
* Rey's parentage.  Thank you, TLJ.
* The rogue turning on Our Heroes.  I like that not every random scalliwag you pick up is actually Han Solo.  Makes Han stand out more.
* Snope's plotline was also pretty awesome.
* Luke's no-selling of the laserfire.  Okay that was pretty amusing.

Nitpicks / plot ideas I didn't like:

* Opening crawl: "Despite blowing up the First Order PLANET in SW7, the First Order reigns, the Republic sucks, etc." I'm not a fan. It made sense in Empire Strikes Back because the Empire *started out* as ruling the galaxy, they could recover from losing the Death Star. The First Order should not already be the new Empire ruling everything, and if it was supposed to be, they shoulda done SW7 differently. I think the writers are still absolutely terrified of being like the prequels where Our Heroes are The Man, and want to go back to scrappy rebels against impossible odds, even though this devalues the achievement in Return of the Jedi. And more generally, the idea that the First Order might be in trouble is plenty dramatically interesting: they've got their backs to their wall, time to pull out every scuzzy trick in the book and get creative and skirt ethics. An even fight would have been fine too! Instead it's the super-tiny resistance vs. the omnipotent First Order. Meh.
* The setup for the casino town sequence was pretty random.  "Call Maz-Kanata, get a very vague recommendation that doesn't even mention a place, have a convenient shuttle that the bad guys wouldn't notice?"  I get that it's more intense if the characters aren't sure what they're looking for, but this was maybe TOO vague.
* How did Mr. Wheeler-Dealer codebreaker guy find out about the "cloaked" transports?  That discussion is one that Poe is in, but I don't recall any indication it happened with, like, a live mike or something.
* For that matter, not a fan of "cloaked" stuff at all.  It's kinda stupid and didn't seem to work anyway.
* I always assumed there was some invisible rule that going to warp speed doesn't work as a military option, because (reasons).  Considering that it does, and does big in TLJ, then why weren't people doing this throughout the entire movies?  It should be utterly standard operating procedure to ram your ship into the enemy fleet once it becomes too difficult to salvage, and suicide traders would be a major weapon of war.  Really, don't open that jar, TLJ.  Yes, it makes sense this should work, but then there should be all SORTS of knock-on effects on fleet security, and big huge ships being absolute liabilities.  (Hell, why not just suicide a few X-Wings at light speed into StarKiller Base's weak point in Ep. 7?  Why not evacuate the supply ships, then turn them around on the enemy fleet?)  It's especially true since Star Wars has always been clear that wimpy little ships can go to light speed too and travel long-distances, and even in STAR WARS physics, that's gonna hurt.  (Sopko says that warp interdictors are standard with any large fleet in the EU for how they addressed it there...  much like Starkiller Base, it's an okay piece of plot for a movie where the twists have to be understood on the spot, but makes no sense in setting where people who've lived within it think about this issue longer than 2 hours.)
* Did they kill Phasma off?  I hope not!  She was fun.
* I like to think of the Star Wars universe as being huge and with lots of possibilities.  Yes, Our Jedi save the day as usual, but the galaxy is a big place, lots of things to do for both the Empire & Rebels.  Why they decided to "reset" down to the Resistance being 20 guys in a cave on a single ship, I'm not sure.  I'm not sure that's really the stuff of legends like Luke, that's more like a band of space mercenaries.
* This might yet happen, but HAVE SOMETHING, ANYTHING that happens to the First Order stick, please!  Like.  If in Episode 9, the galaxy is in chaos as both the First Order AND the Republic have fallen apart, that would be fine by me, and a refreshing change-up of the Star Wars formula - get back to the idea that the Empire/Republic was really big, and it wouldn't be shocking if the Inner Worlds acted like the Outer Rim sometimes and devolved to their own fiefdoms. 

But yeah, basically, if I was in charge, I would not systematically destroy and dismantle all the famous original Star Wars characters and reduce the Resistance to rubble.  They can all go off over THERE off-screen and have crazy adventures, and we can focus over HERE on what Our Heroes are up to, and they are LOCALLY outnumbered and outgunned for whatever reason, but the Republic still exists, they're dealing with their own problems, etc.

[Cmdr_King]

* Basically any time Finn is on the screen.  Really, just maybe do some spin-off series called "Adventures of Finn."

I mean, there's already one of those in comic form for Poe, so it's really overdue at this point.  Welllll, I guess he did end Force Awakens in a coma, so it'd have to be set after this movie and they wanted to hold off until it came out.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi-

I'm not sure if this is what I want from my Star Wars.  But I have to acknowledge that this is the Star Wars the world needs.


- The failure to establish the nature of the New Republic absolutely bites HARD in this one, and is easily it's biggest failing.  Like, here's the thing- it's easy as shit to figure how this all went down, flows naturally from the series history, and is backed up by one of the Despair moments in the ending.  See, sure, Star Killer base was a huge investment for the First Order, but... they also took out the Republic's current capital and all assigned defensive fleets right? 
So let's set that up.  The Galaxy went GENERATIONS with more or less the Jedi and local policing forces for defense.  The militarization of the Clone Wars and the later expansion into Imperial militarism was a massive aberration that left the galaxy scarred and distrustful of centralized authority.
That was the whole of the New Republic's forces.  Aside from Leia's Resistance, which had always been a tiny plausible deniability force whose size as seen in the film is entirely sensible, there WAS no organized military force in the galaxy, not one that could fight even the displayed fleet the First Order has in the film.
- Honestly on that note the vast red shirt casualties (seriously, they quote about 400 survivors getting off their base in the opening.  Generously, the Falcon has 20 people on it.  95% casualties?  Holy fuck.) got to me a bit.  You don't really need to kill off that many people to set up the story you want, and you can do a bigger victory than "well they weren't TECHNICALLY annihilated" and still reinforce the theme you're going for.
- I know you wanted a Trust Women thing but uh guys?  When you have someone who you employ because they're dedicated, defy the odds, and are always looking for a way to win, unless you WANT them to go behind your back and do what they think needs done, you KEEP THEM IN THE LOOP.  How hard is that.  C'mon now.  Not that Leia stunning the fuck outta Poe wasn't fun in a vacuum.
- I know you were going for backstab% in the end but... really?  You telegraphed Billy Lee Williams that hard and denied us?  the balls, so blue.

- Killin' off Snoke?  Fuckin' awesome.  Actually that entire scene is the climax of the movie, both in Kylo overcoming his master and in him then assuming control.
- Hux is such a PERFECT nazi puke.  Bully, taunt, threaten, exterminate those weaker than him, but he's also an idiot who has no idea how to use the tools at his command and is actually good for little else except being a weapon for wiser, more nuanced villains to point at those he needs exterminated.
- Luke's last stand is so utterly perfect in both narrative and thematic terms that... I don't want to say any more, even here in the spoilers.

- So yeah like, obviously they're doing a changing of the guard generational shift thing here, which is natural.  They've blended it into this "burn down the old ways, democratize the power" bit, which makes sense thematically but I don't really think works logically, and doubly so in Star Wars, where yeah the Force is in all living things but the ability to sense, communicate with, and manipulate it really is something not just anyone can manage.
- At the same time, we live in a world where all our institutions are burning themselves down.  We do need fiction that suggests that people, protecting one another, forming new bonds and forging new paths, is a very real way forward.
- Really though I think this film is something of a rehabilitation for the prequels.  And perhaps a refutation of the Kreia View of the Force.  The 'Chosen One', forced into being by the Sith, becomes their downfall.  Born into a world without Jedi, his heir realizes the 1000 generations of folly of the order; the Force was never 'theirs', and by trying to be the only path for the Force, they not only created a blind spot for the Sith to exist, but rendered them unable to fight them when they revealed themselves.  Between them, they bring balance by removing use of the force from blind duality, and allowing the next generation to hear it clearly and discover (or rediscover) deeper wisdom.  I think Rei's scene in the dark side cave is super illustrative; she immerses herself in it, can see in a straight line how her actions cause the future, she is in control... but it holds no answers for her.  The darkness will always exist, will grant power and certainty, but all that you'll find is yourself.  No future, no past, just your ego.   In the wisdom of the Force, the Darkness will never truly triumph because it can never be anything but a mirror.


So like large stretches are deeply troublesome/unsatisfying on a narrative level, but the exceptions are amazing and the thematic resonance is very high.  Not as much sheer joy as Force Awakens (seriously, the backlash there is tiresome, your nitpicks should not get weight over the sheer fun of it all), but lots of good stuff and leaves one big question that's so easy to build the next episode out of.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Star Wars - The Last Jedi

Pretty great. Definitely belongs in the conversation for best Star Wars movie.

I could watch an entire movie of Rey and Kylo Ren psychic-talking to each other, holy crap those scenes are charged and the actors sell them well. Basically any scene where one of those two is on screen is amazing. Luke is excellent as well. When the story decided to be about other characters I often found myself wanting to get back to them, for all that there was some pretty good stuff elsewhere too. But yeah, the core characters are so good, and there are multiple key scenes with them which wonderfully on both a narrative and thematic level.

The movie completely sheds one of TFA's flaws of feeling derivative. "This isn't going to go the way you think," indeed. It retains the other of being weak at setting work (Snowfire's complaint about using light speed as a weapon is something I agree with; that doesn't feel well thought out). So it goes. Still excellent.

I could probably say a lot more but that works for now.

[Luther Lansfeld]

fuck yeaaahhh

#teamkylo

[Random Consonant]

Star Wars - A Failure To Communicate

I mean I liked the movie that probably should've been the subtitle instead, hey maybe tell people what your grand escape plan entails before hand so people don't get dumb ideas into their head except considering how contrived the First Order is in general they'd probably have been listening in instead, stupid contrived space nazis besides it would've meant less pewpew and someone probably would've been upset over that, as well as other, less annoying examples, and hey they did fix the overly derivative of original trilogy stuff problem The Force Awakens had.

Also birds.

[NotMiki]

Star Wars - I liked it a great deal.  The high points more than make up for the low points.  Kylo Ren and Luke were perfect.  Rey *could* be perfect in retrospect but I'm gonna have to render a grade of incomplete pending the next movie (pretty much how I felt about Kylo after TFA).  More words later.

[Captain K]

Star Wars - Count me in the "didn't like it" category.  Just as TFA was a copy of A New Hope, this pulls too heavily from Empire Strikes Back.  Even if it was a matter of "Hey this happened in ESB, watch us emphatically not do it!  Totally different!"  I will retroactively give them bonus points if Benicio del Toro *doesn't* become a good guy in the third movie.  But you know he will be.

Adam Driver was great as usual, and also Mark Hamill.

[Meiousei]

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle-  Yes yes I know. With all the action and drama movies I watched this year, I have to say, coming to a nice family friendly comedy movie is a bit weird, especially since I rarely post my inputs. But I do have to say, this movie was actually pretty good. The fact they got...the cast to work the way it did actually fits. And goshdarnit Jack Black as a teenage girl really sells it. The audience was laughing a lot. And I have to admit, it had its parts.


They reference the first movie interestingly enough (like several times with Alan's house in the game and the board game itself in the start of the movie), and Jonas was an interesting characters to have in the movie. Also Dwayne acting like a scaredy cat is hilarious. The twist with the lives makes me wonder what would have happened if someone actually FAILED. I was bloodthirsty for death dangit! But PG-13 so nope...so sad but oh well.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Watched some movies on the plane ride home.

Lego Batman: This is the pure essence of joy distilled in movie form.

Logan: A dark mirror of the above. This movie is hard to watch. It has a lot of emotional weight and it's well-done, but it is not a happy film.

The sheer contrast between these two movies that both technically fall under the 'Superhero movie' genre is staggering. People that are burned out on superhero movies clearly aren't watching -enough- of them. I think there's an argument to be made that there's more variety in this genre than most.

[SnowFire]

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (aka the 2011 sequel w/ Robert Downey Jr.)
I seem to recall a somewhat lukewarm reception to this movie - that it was too derivative, more of the same, etc.  Having watched it now, I get that criticism, but it was still good!  There are definitely more pointless action scenes than strictly necessary for a Holmes movie - plenty of "and then we fought psychotic mooks out of a video game for 10 minutes" - but it's got a solid core.

Notably, I think it manages to be a solid modern adaptation / update of Moriarty, who is a character who survived Doyle's books well, but doesn't necessarily make TONS of sense.  The movie keeps the idea that he's a Respectable Professor that Holmes can't just ask Lestrade to go arrest him, and keeps his hands personally clean while his minions blow shit up.  Anyway, because of this, there's an excuse for Holmes & Moriarty to have chats where they rag on each other.  Good times!  (The movie also remembers that Colonel Moran is more of a sniper and less a random tough.)

Also, Holmes's deductions are sufficiently bullshit to count as Holmesian, but not so bullshit as to be totally ludicrous.  (Well, maybe one of his gambits.)  And while still sporting a huge ego, one of the main climactic scenes has him trusting Watson & female-lead to figure stuff out without him, which was nice.

A solid B+.

The Accountant
This is the Matt Damon is an autistic vigilante superhero film.  He does the accounting books of various criminal enterprises and then possibly murders all the embezzlers, or something.  So a very, very shooty accountant.

It's actually a pretty good movie, but I feel like the narrative errs too far toward portraying the guy who goes on killing sprees at the behest of a mysterious computerized voice too sympathetically.  Same with Mr. Father of the Year who raised him; the movie acknowledges it'd have to be a weird childhood that trains someone to become Batman, but maybe isn't quite harsh enough on the dad. 

There's one major plot point I didn't understand (not sure if I can call it a plot hole when characters in the movie puzzle over it too), or at least wasn't quite resolved.  The main company that Matt Damon does the audit for in the movie has a fairly high-placed embezzler.  So...  why was the best of the best even hired to conduct this audit at all?  Couldn't the bad guy have just, you know, not done the audit, or hired Cousin Bob, or something?  Would need less of an action movie if you did that!

I might be slightly biased because the novel Rule 34 (recommended by LadyDoor and Grefter as well!) features a bit of a similar character, an autistic-but-smart fellow who finds an organization happy to give him orders to find crime syndicates in trouble and turn them around, possibly with bullets if necessary.  And...  he's a bad guy.  An interesting bad guy who's being taken advantage of and manipulated, sure, but still a bad guy.  Not all that different from Matt Damon's character, really, except Damon is actually MORE violent but also is portrayed as having all of his killings as reasonably justified against people we are assured are all killers too, so no big deal.  Meh.  (But read Rule 34, it's good.)

[Shale]

Last Jedi: Good but not great, mainly because it's just too dang long. There's no big scene that I actively disliked, but there are two third acts in this movie and that's a problem. Still, my main problem with TFA is how predictable the whole thing was, so I give Rian Johnson lots of credit for going in some unexpected directions and drawing an interesting contrast between how the Jedi and the Sith (or whatever Snoke and Kylo are supposed to be) work.

Also, my comments about unpredictability notwithstanding, it's weird how accurately this Twitter meme predicted half of the movie.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

The world did not deserve Carrie Fisher and that's why we lost her last year.

[NotMiki]

Black Panther: lived up to the hype

[SnowFire]

Yeah, Black Panther was pretty rad.

It does a few things really, really right that a lot of actiony / comicsy movies get wrong, I thought.  (Or heck, media in general, literature / theatre / video games qualify too.)  Spoilers!

* Ever since ancient myth, people really, really love pulpy secret hidden family members & such.  Especially secret hidden royalty.  Wouldn't it be awesome to find out you're really a Prince in some far-off country?  Well, fine.  But...  Black Panther remembers that this generally means something *awful* happened.  T'Challa is quite clear: his father screwed up and did a terrible thing by just abandoning this kid to his fate.  So many stories get this wrong and just let the previous generation off the hook for abandoning some kid and raising him/her in isolation.  Plus, in this story, the foreign interloper who returns and is made king is...   a completely terrible ruler who never should have gotten close to the throne, and it was a weakness of the system that let him take it in the first place.  Very often, in fiction, the wish-fulfillment surprise foreigner who becomes ruler is great at it, which can happen, sure, but it's only fair to include the reverse too.

* Both audiences & writers also really love to throw secret hidden awesome stuff into the normal world.  Hey, there's secretly Harry Potter wizards doing cool stuff in the shadows or whatever.  The thing is, the immediate implication is that...  why don't they share all this cool magic / tech / whatever with everyone else? Just why are they hidden anyway?  The best answer: because they're uncaring isolationists.  Harry Potter is actually a good example of *owning* the implications: the stodgy core of magicians don't care about Muggles and view them with uninterested disdain, the villain hates them, and the sympathetic Dumbledore and Harry think this is stupid and there should be more integration between the worlds.  Cool.  The Black Panther movie does the same thing: it has sympathetic characters who believe that Wakanda should have been more interventionist.  Maybe not "start World War III interventionist" like Killmonger wants, but certainly "share the bounty" interventionist. 

* Plenty of ink has been spilled on the feminist side of Black Panther already, but specifically for comic book movies, I'm impressed that they had multiple solid female characters with agency.  They had opinions, they had plot arcs, they mostly skipped heavy-handed "I have something to prove" chips on shoulders, they didn't go around dressed in swimsuits.  Marvel tends to do its female characters right in general, but there's generally not too many of them around; Black Panther largely fixes that with three pretty major parts for 'em.


And the one thing that doesn't really work (but is more nitpick than major problem):

* Killmonger's plan for getting into Wakanda…  doesn't really work.  It's less overcomplicated than some movie plots, which is something, at least.  The comparison is something like…  If there's a bounty out for some Wild West criminal, he gets captured, Killmonger blows up the jail and breaks the bounty out, then comes back and tries to cash in the bounty, except that the same sherriff that caught him before is right there.  As a plot to win over (W'Kabi ?  the guy whose parents Klaue blew up), this should utterly fail.  The Black Panther already caught him, and you BROKE HIM OUT so you could turn him in yourself (and caused a bunch of collateral damage).  You (should) get zero credit for this, I'm sorry.  Maybe if they'd made it so T'Challa was going to send Klaue off to the Americans and W'Kabi didn't believe he'd come back.  Or make it so that W'Kabi was already in tune with Killmonger's ideological argument, and Killmonger doesn't bring Klaue into Wakanda and claims someone else did it (to further the idea that T'Challa is incompetent).  Something.  I was also a little confused as to what went down at the airport…   what caused the breakdown in relations?  I *think* that what was supposed to happen was Killmonger wanted Klaue to guide him to Wakanda first, then backstab him later, but Klaue immediately freaked out, hence the shooting, but still.  Seems like such a distant hope that you might as well kill him by surprise earlier; he certainly wouldn't have been able to stop at right after he was "rescued" and unarmed.


Also, I kept expecting the explosion in the news at the start of the film to get investigated, or for there to be some shocking revelation about who really perpetrated it.  The weird things that happen when you didn't see Captain America 3 first, I suppose.