This was good but very unsatisfying in that I could've watched 4 more of these. It goes through all of the issues but it comes off more like a greatest hits and leaves further answers up to the viewer to attain in their own time. At the very least its a reminder to those who now try to lionize Ronald Reagan of his very worst policies that started us on the racial and criminal roads we still travel on today.
Appropriate Killer Mike song: https://youtu.be/6lIqNjC1RKU
This had showed up in my youtube recs a bunch but I ignored it until this past Halloween season. I like a Found Footage horror if done right. This one mostly is. When they reveal too much it can be silly but that happens extremely rarely, I think twice for a total of 3 seconds in the whole thing. Also, the character who covers ALL of his clothes in tin foil I can see really taking people out of the movie for being so cheesy and it almost did me but I was able to mostly deal with it to the point that by the end I had come around on it. The guy is just SUCH a tortured psychic that he'll do anything to stop the voices. I kind of like that. Hard to say much more without giving away key plot moments that are better off left seen by the viewer themselves, but this is definitely worth your time. I want to see his genre-follow up Occult sooner than later.
Hugely successful at the time, Borat still holds up today as a lot of the things being mocked still apply 15 years later, maybe even more so. It had a huge cultural impact, how many times have you heard someone in a generically Slavic accent say “it’s nice, I like”? Even people that have never seen the movie attempt to use that catchphrase. Borat was brilliant in that it pushed the bounds of what was acceptable, by going after things that are unacceptable. Racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism, and more - they’re all here and all being exposed for the ridiculousness that they are.
Probably the best season so far (I would go 3, 1, 2, I didn't really care about all the political intrigue of season 2). The main cast is stronger than ever, with Laura Linney almost taking over the show with her powerhouse performance. The last two episodes of this season are so tense and an incredible explosion of all that had built up during the season. I'm not sure I like where the show is heading with all the Langmores aligning with Darlene, but I trust the writers enough at this point to know they'll do it right. Add in the cartel's new direction with the finale and we should be in for a great season come 2021.
This was really good. The plot is really only there to give people an excuse to fight but fight they do and its brutal with about every way you can think of to kill someone with a pistol or a knife at play. Very stylish martial arts action the whole way through and an exciting ride.
I had read that this was modern Kids and well, for better or worse, it is not that. It is however a really good movie that is a shit ton of fun and an accurate and loving tribute to the best decade there ever was with a ridiculously spot on perfect soundtrack.
I have seen every Christopher Nolan film except Larceny and those 3 shorts he did. He may be my favorite director. This is the worst movie he has ever made. When I think of this movie I think of George Costanza yelling ITS FINE and that's what I want to do. I am pretty sure Nolan had the idea about a backwards car chase and thought, "well how do I make that into a movie?" and poof, here we are. The writing is extremely snappy, almost to the point of parody. People non-stop rattling off 6 word sentences at one another with almost zero silence between them. The action, well, I had no idea what the heck was going on most of the time. It's just not written well. I am a geek for time movies or time-anything. I watch it all. I have never once not understood the movie/whatever. Even the so-called complicated ones. This? I have no idea what was going on. I mean I get what the evil Russian big bad was doing, but the actual action sequences with the inverse-whatever its called? No idea. There's also stupid stuff like loudly discussing terroristic plans on airport subways in a crowd while everyone around does seem to notice. But its a pretty movie with pretty people that are all good to great actors. Nolan should be glad COVID made it so nobody saw this in theaters. It helps his reputation to not see it, because this was not up to his standards in anything but the visuals. Maybe he can get back to that Jim Carrey cum Howard Hughes movie he had to cancel all those years ago. As for Tenet? ITS FINE.
Well, I thought I saw the best "comic book movie" ever earlier this year when I finally saw Logan. That title has now moved to Joker. I was a bit hesitant going into this. One, because I'm not that into comic movies normally, two, because DC movies are a lottery of quality standards, and lastly because its by the guy who's famous for comedies like The Hangover and Old School taking on the aforementioned 2 things. But I'd recently seen a still from the movie, of Phoenix laying back against grimy 70s subway glass and for some reason that sparked something in me that made me want to go watch it finally. I'm glad I did. This is the first "super hero" movie I can recall, that would be the same movie even without the "super heroes". Phoenix is completely amazing through-out the entire movie, and the story held up its end of the bargain. Was this ever a comic story or was this brand new? I have no idea. I do know that if every comic movie was this dark and grounded in reality, I'd watch them all, constantly. The whole cast shines through, but 1970s New York (Gotham) outshines them all but Phoenix himself. The city is disgusting and scary and going through collapse. Thomas Wayne is not the white meat good guy. Joker is not entirely a bad guy, certainly not until the very end and certainly not when the movie starts. I cannot say enough about how much I liked this movie. I read that it was supposed to be a one-off but the obscene success it saw has lead to a sequel that is currently in the idea phase. I can only hope it lives up to this. Stay f*cked up and stay in reality, and it just might.
This movie isn't out yet, but this place holder image is absolutely hysterical so 10/10 already.
This movie could alternately be called "Stress Will F***ing Kill You". Because often times, this movie could be taken as the occasional break downs of an over burdened woman named Yoshimi hurdling towards mental collapse. From the director who started the J-Horror craze of the turn of the millennium with Ringu, Hideo Nakata, The plot follows a recently divorced woman, trying to take care of her daughter and avoid the same divorced childhood that she grew up in, which, coincidentally, was also the same circumstances of the vacant apartment above them where the daughter ended up going missing. Her callous ex-husband tries to make her efforts as miserable as possible, out of simple spite. She attempts to put on a strong front and has little successes, but eventually the water just will not stop dripping from the ceiling and her sanity is chipped away slowly.
The end of the movie was almost the most tragic of all. Ten years later, the daughter, Ikuko, randomly ends up in her old neighborhood and finds her old apartment, now condemned. She has no memory of the place at all besides "I used to live with my mother here," forgetting Yoshimi's extreme sacrifices for her in life, that she has even continued on carrying out in the afterlife.
Honestly I'd have preferred if the movie was just about mental breakdowns from stress but alas the monster here is real. It may make the movie have a bit less of a statement, but it doesn't make it any less good as others could help themselves by borrowing from the "less is more" philosophy seen here.
Sorkin is awesome at dialogue. Everyone in this movie is a piece of sh*t (much like Wolf of Wall Street). It was very good but didn't quite live up to the hype.
I... really liked this. I did not expect to but something in the trailer grabbed me so I gave it a shot. I liked the movie, I liked Lil Peep, and holy shit I think I actually even like a few of the songs ("Witchblades" is especially good). I still can't say I understand these people, or the face tattoos, or whatever, but he was a really unique and creative dude and was actually leading the way and doing things first instead of just copying other people. This movie, semi-based upon handwritten letters he'd get from his grandfather, is really well done. It even led to me checking out his discography on spotify and liking way more songs than I expected to. I checked out the artists in the movie besides him, and, well... yeah they suck. XXXtentacion has a few good songs but the rest are pretty bad and nobody is near Peep. 21 is just an obscenely early age to die but he packed a lot of life in on his way there. Going to give this one a high score, if you actually liked him already, definitely check this out. RIP.
Due to the name, I've wanted to see this for well over a decade. I know its an artsy fartsy name, but something about it appeals to me. TSoGP is not a movie for everyone. For the first hour and twenty minutes of its hour and forty minute runtime, there is almost no dialogue, and little hint of a plot. Yet more movies should be made like TSoGP in the sense that it conveys such overwhelming positivity and beauty. The movie is about a poor village girl in early 1950s Vietnam named Mui, who comes to Saigon to work for a well off family of cloth sellers. On the surface the family appears to have it all, but knowing the details of their lives reveals they suffer as much or more than anyone. We watch the family through Mui's eyes and Mui pays very close attention to not just them but to the nature around her as well. She is seemingly most pleased by the ordinary, such as a single ant transporting his food, or the milk of a papaya stem dripping onto a leaf. She works hard and she works well. Outside of the older servant she learns from, the youngest son that torments her in childish ways usually involving lizards or farting, and the mother who comes to view her as something of a daughter, much the rest of the family doesn't seem to notice her at all. In the final act of the movie we skip 10 years ahead and the family is down on its luck and must send her away, but she is hired by the family of a boy she has had a distant love for since they were both children. He is rich, a pianist, speaks French, and has a high class fiancée. But eventually despite their separate roots, he comes to love Mui much like the viewer has. It is a whirlwind romance to end the film. Its probably not believable any more than Cinderella or Pretty Woman. But we are still happy for Mui in the end. Good things happen to good people in this world. And that's wonderful.
I have mixed thoughts on Fury Road. I loved the story, the characters, the scenes completely drenched in blue or red, the chases, the action. It was a great time. But wow did I hate the costuming for basically everyone except the protagonists. From the electrified yellow hair of the main villain to the baby/man thing, to the bikers with dreads made out of cloth and on and on, I just didn't like any of it. Luckily though, everything else is excellent and overall it was a very fun watch.
Also, on a side note, watching the movie, it came off to me as a bit of a rip-off of Fist of the North Star. A quick google shows FOTN debuted in 1983 and the original Mad Max in 1979. So actually it's the other way around and now they just kind of "borrow," so to speak, from each other. Just thought that was interesting, both are very clearly inspiring one another to the point even someone with minimal knowledge of either like myself can notice it.
Still love this show. It's more clear than ever that its Breaking Bad inspired but on this show the action comes at a more consistent pace, and its also a bit less grounded in reality. Not really a complaint though, BB is going to inspire a hundred shows and this will likely be one of the best ones of that class. One complaint is the writing in this season did seem to take a bit of a dip from season 1. Also, the violence went from legit frightening to a little hokey. Also, the violence went from legit frightening to a little hokey. But still, looking forward to starting season 3.
I'm a huge sucker for Jason Bateman, I'll watch things purely because he's in them. That's what happened here for this Joel Edgerton written and directed thriller about bad things happening to bad people. It's hard to discuss this movie without spoilers but basically you go in expected one thing, and getting it, and slowly the movie gradually turns into something else. Bateman is outstanding in this, playing a nasty character that I've never seen from him before, and his wife, played by Robyn Callem, and antagonist Gordo, played by Edgerton, do a great job of ratcheting up the tension through-out the movie until the very end, when everything explodes. If I had one complain its that I'm not sure I like that the movie ended on SUCH an open ended note, with a lot of horrible questions going unanswered.
The cinematography in this is amazing. The yellow shots of life behind wire, The Zone being in full color, the use of blues. There are long shots of "nothing" that allow you to enter the same mind set as the people you are watching. The 4th wall is broken at times. It's a beautiful movie. The soundtrack is also great.
It's not particularly easy to review though. Stalker is a movie about a, well, "stalker" who guides people into "The Zone", which is a place outside of their secure walls, where people go to find "The Room" which can grant anything your heart desires. He takes "writer" and "professor" and they stick by their code names, and all go through "the very complex maze full of death traps". Sometimes they don't believe in anything special about The Zone. Sometimes they do. Some things happen that can't be explained. It feels like a dreamy visual poem.
As for negatives, I never bought into The Zone as being real or having power from the first moment it was shown, and thinking Stalker was a kook. This was much before the movie itself suggested these things to me. It just seems like outside the walls, they haven't interacted with such a world in hundreds of years and thus attach metaphysical bullshit to things that are common to our own lives. Am I wrong? Well, the voice and cup may say I am. I still don't know. Also, some of the monologues do approach self indulgence at times.
Overall, the movie is just so beautiful visually that I can't help but give it a high score.
This will be semi-spoiler-y but nothing important.
Yeah. So I thought it was going to be a rip off of Battle Royale but I was wrong. It's actually a combination of both art house and grind house. So you get some really high concept stuff, mixed in with ultra violence. It basically starts off with a bus of Japanese school girls going on a class trip. After about a minute of this, the, uh, wind, cuts the entire bus in half and everyone on it, except for the main character, who was picking a pen up off of the floor. Hilariously corny cgi.
Well, she ends up in another reality bla bla. Then her and some classmates skip school and go to the lake and start pontificating about life. When this girl turns around, a crocodile jumps and pulls a Donald Trump and grabs her by the, well, you know, with his jaw. Then he just starts eating her. But then that stops and snaps back to reality, because that didn't actually happen.
Eventually in another life she is trying not to get married to a pig-man.
Then at the end, I won't spoil the what and why, but she ends up having to violently kill herself in all these different realities.
I don't know, I'm not really doing this justice. It was weird as f*** and ultra violent with awful cgi and "art house meets grind house" really is the perfect description but it's impossible to describe, you just need to watch it yourself.
5-1/4 stars out of 2.
I didn't even know this movie existed a month ago. I went to the library to look for Kurosawa movies when I returned some books for my son. I found a couple, struck up a conversation with a librarian checking out, and she recommended this and immediately reserved it for me with me barely saying a word. Now I'm thankful. The movie finally came in and I decided to watch it last night.
As it turns out, I randomly happened into the best food movie I've ever seen. Defined, with tongue in cheek, as a "noodle Western," Tampopo is the protagonist, a woman running a small ramen shop. One night by chance the male lead Goro enters her restaurant and from there the journey begins to become the best restaurant in Japan.
The movie is mostly different flavors of comedy and a love of food, with unrelated, small, food related sequences randomly interspersed to break up the main timeline, including a grocery store manager trying to catch a food squeezer in the act, a white suited gangster who happens to be a serious lover of food and women as he provides the food filled sex scenes, among others.
This movie is hard to describe. But it's truly great. It has genuine humor, it's genuinely interesting, and the main character and story are endlessly charming.
Roger Ebert gave this movie a perfect rating, and who am I to disagree.
Pretty overrated. I can see why. Abnormal ending, good twists, lines and scenes you can look back on and go "ohh I get what that was now". But there was also something inherently... annoying about the movie too. It was an ok horror with some interesting uniqueness to it but... meh.
Modern Japanese animation classic that doubles as the highest gross box office in Japanese history. It was excellent. I'm not sure it was "top box office ever" excellent, but it was still good. Tells an extremely complicated story as far as time lines go, combined with body switching, and that's 2 things I'm a pretty big mark for so this was almost a guarantee I'd like it. Plus I love the soundtrack, I've listened to it way too much since it came out. It's hard to talk about without spoiling things as there are a lot of unexpected turns that change your understanding of what's happening. Not sure if it was as good as the best Ghibli or that, but it was close enough.
I heard the complaints coming in but Death Metal has always been a fascination of mine... because of the book this movie took its name from over fifteen years ago. This seems to only be the somewhat fictionalized story of Mayhem, which is fine.
Even though a lot happens in this movie, it still somehow manages to be a bit boring and every single character is a total piece of sh*t. I think what I like most is that in a subculture obsessed with not being a poser, this movie blatantly makes them all out to be just that. Because screw em.
Overall it's a missed chance with a great IP on an incredibly interesting topic and source material. Not awful, but a real shame, this genre doesn't get enough chances to around blowing them.
You never know what you'll get with horror. In this case, as a reliving change, The Invitation is a horror movie that eschews the supernatural (outside of the Twilight Zone-esque final shot) in exchange for a dose of tension that at times is almost too much to bear.
At first played as a dinner party among the middle aged and semi-rich, thrown by a couple that has spent the past 2 years in Mexico, the scenes gradually become slightly more uncomfortable as the movie goes along and you become equally suspicious alongside the main character, grieving father and ex-husband of one of the hosts, Will. Plus it has John Carroll Lynch doing his usual creepy thing.
By the end of the movie, you can't tell if the viewer and Will are totally misinterpreting everything or not, and its not until a disastrous final toast that we learn for sure. What follows is next is the only action in the movie, 15 minutes at most of chaos that comes to serve as a giant release valve for the previous hour and a half.
An outstanding effort, and really defines the "turning of the screw" style story telling at a level not often achieve.
I didn't really even watch this. The person next to me on a plane had it on with English subtitles though and I read the entire thing so close enough.
4 hour documentary from HBO but luckily it didn't feel that long. Essentially some probably racist upstate cop frames a black guy for dating his ex girlfriend... maybe. Nothing outstanding but an interesting story.
Enjoyed it. It's no Milo and Otis or Homeward Bound, but it's a movie about a dog making it's way home over a long distance and I'll watch any and all of those.
The Tommy Caldwell Story basically. I love mountain climbing documentaries. Usually I like the summit type stuff but this one about climbing a big flat stone is pretty good too. The original title was "White People Hobbies." Not bad as background noise, and certainly inspirational and a good story of perseverance.
Loved this movie. My only complaint would be some over the top attempts at humor fell really flat with me, like when Pratt danced to distract Roan (sp?) and moments like that that just felt out of place. There was plenty of humor that worked, it's just that there were 2-3 times the joke missed badly for me. Still not a big deal and probably the best super hero movie I've ever seen that isn't a Batman movie. I love Groot.
I think it's well on its way for me at this point that I prefer Isao Takahata to Hayao Miyazaki. Maybe that will change, I'll have to go over all my ratings when I've finished watching all the Studio Ghibli movies. His films are more sentimental than action, which I prefer at this point in my life. His art is always unique and a break from the "normal". Also COUGHCOUGH he doesn't have to make every movie about airplanes COUGHCOUGH.
Only Yesterday is about a woman going for an 8 day vacation to work on a farm in the countryside as she's always felt more at home there than in the city. Because she remembers as a child all her friends got to take summer vacations in the countryside and she was left alone wishing she could too. Now because of her older sister's parents inviting her, she finally has that chance. This sparks memories of that entire era for her As she plans and takes the train out and works there she is constantly thinking about her 10 year old self in 1966 and various memories of that year. The beginning of puberty and boys and hating math and, well other things I won't spoil. Which then leads to her wondering if she stayed true to her childhood desires. Also, she meets a sweet young farmer during her time there and two end up having a lot in common.
It's a very simple, pensive movie. What I really loved in this movie was the half drawn and/or erased presentation of all the memory sequences. We get neat little sequences such as explaining the history, uses, and farming of Saffron flower. But really it's a movie once again about people accepting themselves and being accepted for who they are despite the pressures of society and the world and god damn that speaks to me.
EDIT: Oh and I learned what an Aiaikasa is and I like it. It's very sweet. So there.
Meh. Unfortunately it's just one of those filler types of documentaries that tells you absolutely nothing new. May as well have been an hour long VH1 biography or something. Very strange since the one guy said he spent years just recording everything, then you get about 5 minutes of that tops in the whole thing. Guess it was boring or bad quality or both. Disappointing.
