I watched some of the years films at Christmas such as Logan, Kong: Skull Island, Wonder Woman etc. All entertaining.
Alien Convenant was ok, although I'm not sure that I want be the origin of the aliens? It's a bit confusing. Psycho II was the best film I watched at Christmas.
The last two films I watched were the Hitchcock classic Frenzy, and the Amicus horror From Beyond the Grave with Peter Cushing in great form as the strange antiques shop owner.
The Greatest Showman. Not really my cup of tea, but Mrs Kristatos enjoyed it. As did a lot of people, apparently. The cinema was a lot fuller than I'd expected for a film that's been out since Boxing Day, and along with Jumanji, it seems to have become one of the surprise hits of the season.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
Been watching a couple of the old Fu Manchu movies starring Christopher Lee in yellowface! Wisely, he doesn't try to do the accent, and he seems to have the same "10 minutes of screen time per movie" clause in his contract that he did for his Dracula movies, so they're not as embarrassing as they could have been.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
Favorite Bond Movie: Moonraker Goldfinger The Spy Who Loved Me
Favorite Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Crazy For Christmas, The Empire Strikes Back, League of Gentlemen (1960's British film), Big Trouble in Little China, Police Academy 2, Carry On At Your Convenience, Commando, Halloween III: Season of the Witch,
Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry wrote:I watched the Westworld film for the first time in ages.
Haven't seen it in years. All I really remember is vague impressions of people being chased by Yul Brynner, and the pixellated shots from the robot's point of view (which I later discovered was the first ever use of CGI in a movie).
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"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
Favorite Bond Movie: Moonraker Goldfinger The Spy Who Loved Me
Favorite Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Crazy For Christmas, The Empire Strikes Back, League of Gentlemen (1960's British film), Big Trouble in Little China, Police Academy 2, Carry On At Your Convenience, Commando, Halloween III: Season of the Witch,
Capt. Sir Dominic Flandry wrote:I watched the Westworld film for the first time in ages.
Haven't seen it in years. All I really remember is vague impressions of people being chased by Yul Brynner, and the pixellated shots from the robot's point of view (which I later discovered was the first ever use of CGI in a movie).
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It's very interesting and stylish - as those 70s sci fi movies are. The new Westworld television series is rather good too.
I watched Invitation to Hell. It's a Wes Craven tv horror about a family who move to a new posh suburb and are asked to join a mysterious country club.
I watched Ghost Stories, a 2017 horror film directed by Jeremy Dyson from The League of Gentlemen. It is a anthology film and the stories are quite good and it looks wonderful. Not a classic but well worth a viewing.
I saw The Crimes of Grindlewald last night. My impression of it is that while it had some impressive setpieces, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. It may seem better in retrospect, once all 5 films have been released. My two biggest complaints were the use of an "idiot plot" (why does it take Newt so long to Spoiler
tell Tina that the story about him getting married was fake news?
); and the confusing message of the finale. It makes it seem as though we're supposed to Spoiler
root against the guy who wants to prevent Hiroshima and Belsen
.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
As I said I felt the story in a way had too much ground to cover, and there are several times where the scenes jump to another with a character we lost track of trying to move the story to the next part almost unexplained. I don’t think it’ll fit better or be a better movie as part of a series of movies.
Basically one set up the characters and did it well only to have JK try to reset all the story lines as if FB2 were the starting point instead of a segue way with established characters.
Don’t know if the spoiler tag will work, do to that there’s some space below
Spoiler
Queenie’s story in particular felt last minute, JK suddenly decided she needed a good guy on the side of hitler, I’m sorry grindelvald. She should be the harder to trick of all of them, and her motivation was too close to being like Anakin Skywalker, “ I will ignore great evil and genocide if it helps me marry/save the one I love”
Also the explanation of why whatshisface remembers newt or any of them is too cheap and flimsy. The exlinatiob was working at the end of FB1 when his pastries were dream based and he and queenie reunited with some sort of déjà vu, we really like this ending and how much queenie loved him throughout the first story. But 1st to 2nd is like a car shifting gears, missing a gear then grinding before finding the wrong gear.
Another part where JK wanted a character there in the plot but forget where she left then then had a post it note on the page of the script to fix it.
Le strange , WTF?
no problem with where she ended up or her love confession to newt at the end, but where was this user who betrays newt at school?
I like Hogwarts scenes and it seems to be the Turing point of her redemption at the end, still the character we were sold in FB1 never showed up in FB2, could be a great story there if they filmed it and if jk wrote it at all.
The last sion of a powerful wizzard family? where the hell was any of this in the first story?? where it should be front and center, again felt like JK thought of where she wants the character in the later installment but forgot where the character began
A couple of other problems like kris mentioned, probably best summed up by a friend who said it was too many love stories for the plot to deal with. She likes love stories mixed in with action adventure movies but felt the main characters love arc was dealt with in the first movie and should build on their story from there. She also dislikes antman and wasp for the same reason, they forced the characters who already fell in love to fall out of love to re-fall in love for the sequel so the audience could relive it again.
Mary Poppins Returns. Better than it had any right to be. It was somewhat overlong, and I doubt the songs will become classics the way the ones from the original film did. But Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda were worthy successors to Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (the latter of whom makes a cameo appearance, and who has still got the moves at the age of 93). The decision to do it in the style of the original was the right one (director Rob Marshall apparently had to fight Disney for the right to use 1960s-style hand-drawn animation rather than CGI for the mixed live-action/animated sequences). However, the depression-era setting, and Blunt's slightly darker take on Mary, gave it a little bit more grit than the previous film. I think PL Travers (who famously hated the original Mary Poppins) would have approved.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
Mortal engines, the Peter Jackson team bringing the early 2000s light novel to the big screen.
Verdict kind of sucked.
Visually stunning, incredible background for all of the characters and decent actors but it needed to be two movies at a minimum. Peter Jackson did a decent job of trimming away everything but the essential story, it just wasn’t enough to justify the movie they made. I may be alone but the most compelling character to me was the one they spent the least amount of time on, shrike the undead soldier, essentially a cyborg of something called the Lazarus brigade. A unstoppable killing machine after the lead character Hester, the audience has no real expectation of why except the same reason the bad guys release him he just wants to kill hester and because he’s a undead solider fixated on her he will not stop until he does kill her.
What I liked is he was the most human of the characters, with from what I could tell based on the movie he had the best story too. The twist and pay off in this chase story is He is after Hester because he raised her after her parents are murdered by the movies msin villain.
this undead killing machine forcefully made by his creators he had one emotion left, the sense of a parent loving a child. His and Hester’s memories really show this and honestly I’d rather see the terminator raising a orphan than this world of mobile cities pirate raiding other cities. Of corse this just could be the old soldier in me finding something nobody else would see in that characters. Dunno.
I did like shrike enough to find out a little wiki information on him, the reasoning in the movie is correct but not the whole truth, London mayor had more to do with it than the movies lets on.
Also I said Hester’s parents were murdered while the movies does not. There’s a twist there as well that I don’t know is accurate to the book.
It’s worth a watch as a lot of locations and situations may remind audiences of the LotR trilogy, but in the end I feel disappointed with the movie while acknowledging it had potential
We went into this movie with low expectations. The ads didn’t do the story justice but were enough to get our interest.
And d**n what a ride. Without spoiling the story for others this is how you defy expectations. Skillfully told so when you expect the character to perhaps fall into a standard Hollywood cliche, at the last minute the story expands. May not be anything new except recent Hollywood movies are so paint by numbers getting a kick ass battle angel story not afraid to cut and slash is refreshing, at least to me. I’m so used to the heroin coming right up to the line they need to cross to do what’s right far as the story goes and the story tellers blink. Too afraid to how some might react to say a small young woman kicking the head in of a killer. And it’s not a splatterfest in like a Deadpool kind of way, it’s violence in a violent setting but not too much IMHO.
In many ways Its what a sci-fi story should be, unfortunately unless foreign bo goes into overdrive it’s not going to get sequel. It will achieve cult status which might be more important to cultural evolution.
It’s similar to ghost in a shell in being a Japanese comic or anime first, while ghost in the shell was enjoyable this is probably the best translation of Japanese source material to date.
I guess a sci-fi fan should enjoy this movie. If this kind of story is not your thing I doubt you’ll like it.
Watched a couple of movies that I Tivoed off Talking Pictures TV this weekend.
AND SOON THE DARKNESS: Really good little suspense thriller, written by Brian Clemens & Terry Nation, and directed by Robert Fuest. Fuest does a fantastic job of creating a mounting sense of unease in the early scenes, and mercifully doesn't blow it with an OTT grand guignol finale the way many films of this type do. The only thing that lets it down a bit is Laurie Johnson's main theme, a cheesy light jazz piece that doesn't work even at the beginning of the film, before the menace sets in. I imagine also that it would be a different experience watching the film if you are fluent in French. The lead characters are two young women on a cycling holiday in rural France, and the filmmakers create tension by having several scenes of minor characters talking in un-subtitled French, which the protagonists don't understand. If, like me, your French is limited to a few words remembered from middle school, it does a brilliant job of recreating the experience of being on holiday in a foreign country and not quite understanding what is going on. A tense, underrated gem. 9/10.
FATHOM: Raquel Welch stars as a champion skydiver recruited to a spying mission by British intelligence. I saw this on TV many, many years ago, but couldn't really remember much about it. Knowing that it came from the Batman (1966) team of writer Lorenzo Semple Junior and director Leslie Martinson, I was expecting a fun, campy Bondmania-era spy spoof, but this was just dull, sadly. Welch was good, though, and it was nice to see a very young Richard Briers in a sort of combined Q/Moneypenny role as the personal assistant to the M figure (Ronald Fraser). Roger Ebert slammed this film based on Welch's acting, but I think this is unfair. It's true that she wasn't exactly hired for her acting ability, but as well as her statuesque beauty, she has an easygoing charm that enables you to buy into the idea of her playing an ordinary woman (a dental nurse from La Jolla, CA) who does skydiving as a hobby and who quickly finds herself in over her head. Still, an unforgivably boring movie. 2/10.
"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig
Verdict did not suck.
7 out of 10, might deserve more finale verdict after rewatching.
Yes a lot of girl power theme to this, but it follows through with Very good story, honestly it’s a prequel story about nick fury, several immersions set up the avengers and guardians of the galaxy.
I know someone who thought Larsons performance was out of balance in the early parts getting better by the end, don’t know if she noticed something about the performance that distracted her or if she knew the comic book character better than we did but I didn’t see a half baked performance it’s a complicated story going back and forth in her memory at times. Larson is not who we want to think she is from the start of the movie with only the trailers to go on. I’m not sure any of the trailers did it justice.
Just as teasers, I’ll talk about the movie more if somebody else wants to later.
Mar-vell is not who we are lead to believe it is.
Carol Danvers does not know what she is,
The Cree and Skrull are not what I was expecting either.
Favorite Bond Movie: Moonraker Goldfinger The Spy Who Loved Me
Favorite Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Crazy For Christmas, The Empire Strikes Back, League of Gentlemen (1960's British film), Big Trouble in Little China, Police Academy 2, Carry On At Your Convenience, Commando, Halloween III: Season of the Witch,
Vampire Circus, a film that has a good reputation among Hammer aficionados, but is less well known among the general public. I can see why people like it, it has a lot of interesting ideas and a unique atmosphere, but it felt a bit half-finished. It ran behind schedule and over-budget, and it was obvious that the director couldn't really make the film he wanted to make. Still, he did the best he could with what he had.
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"He's the one that doesn't smile" - Queen Elizabeth II on Daniel Craig