Movies Seen 2018, January-March
Apr. 27th, 2018 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayne01/05 Bright (vod)
01/06 Dark Crystal (v, rw)
01/06 Labyrinth (v, rw)
01/07 Kung Fu Yoga (vod)
01/13 Get Out (vod)
01/25 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
01/30 Wasabi (v, rw)
02/17 Black Panther
02/24 Atomic Blonde (v, rw)
02/24 Killing Gunther (vod)
03/17 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (v, rw)
03/18 Tomb Raider
03/25 Run, Lola, Run (v)
03/28 A Wrinkle In Time
Fourteen movies seen, four via video on demand, six through my personal library and five of those were re-watches.
Bright is a 2017 Will Smith movie from Netflix that is a contemporary setting where elves and pixies and orcs and who knows what else are contemporaneous in Los Angeles with humans. Smith is a cop who is back on the street after having been shot. With an orc partner. A magic wand is on the loose, and it means death to anyone who picks it up and isn’t a Bright, or someone who has an innate magic ability to weild one, an astonishingly rare trait. The movie had a very mixed reception on Netflix but apparently was watched enough to get them to do a series.
Dark Crystal. I was VERY bored one weekend when my wife was working and it had been I don’t know how many years since I’d seen Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, so I dug ‘em out and watched them both. Dark Crystal is notable in that it’s the first live action movie to have no visible humans in it! Even in long shots the people are covered in costumes. And I’m sorry, the movie just didn’t do much for me. I think I was probably more impressed when it was initially released.
Labyrinth was a more interesting to me than Dark Crystal because of David Bowie and it was a lot more manic in the puppeteering. And you had the music. It also was notable in that according to the bonus material it was the first movie to feature CGI: the flying owl was digitally animated! Both Labyrinth and Dark Crystal are featuring re-releases this year, they were released in 1986 and 1982 respectively. I think they’re also getting board game treatments.
Kung Fu Yoga. In early January I’m writing up my post for my movies seen in the last half of ‘17 and wanted to look up something for Yoga Hosers (which was hilarious) and came across an entry for Kung Fu Yoga on IMDB and saw it was a Jackie Chan movie! OK, immediate must watch movie. It was great. Classic Jackie Chan clowning, and while it was apparent that Jackie is not the same Jackie that he was 20 years ago, he’s still capable of great stunt fighting. The movie starts hundreds of years ago in India with good guy/bad guy mystic battle, Jackie is a Chinese professor of antiquities and is recruited to locate an ancient cave of religious artifacts. Awesome movie, worth watching if you like classic Jackie Chan clowning.
Get Out. WOW. So wish we’d seen this in the theater! I don’t like scary movies, and this comes in under the threshold, but it begins to push it. More of a thriller. Created by Jordan Peel of the hit comedy series Key & Peel, it involves a black man going to the rural home of his white girlfriend’s family for the holiday, against the advice of his TSA agent friend. A party is going on and it’s a very white gathering of friends that gets a bit creepy, then VERY bad things happen. Man, excellent movie.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. I really liked the trailers for this and loved the movie when we finally got around to seeing it. I enjoyed the original movie from 1995 as it had some amazing effects work. This one updates the concept and the board game updates itself with the times and turns in to a video game cartridge, sucking four high schoolers into itself. Amazing cast, very cool seeing teen insecurities being played through adult bodies. Seeing Jack Black playing a teen sex kitten was so much fun. And Karen Gillan? Always amazing. Loved her in Doctor Who, loved her in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Wasabi is a classic 2001 movie by Luc Besson starring Jean Reno. Reno plays a French cop who is exceptional at his job (what a surprise). Years ago he was assigned to Japan while he was a commando and worked with a woman whom he fell in love with, now he’s informed that she has died and he is executor of her estate. When he arrives for her cremation and the reading of her will, he finds out that he is the father of her daughter, and she’s about to turn 18. She doesn’t know he is her father. Both of them don’t know about a rather large sum of money in her bank account, or the rather shady figures who are following them…. Excellent Besson/Reno action movie, if you liked La Femme Nikita, The Professional, Fifth Element, you really need to see this film.
Black Panther. By now, if you’re a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ve either seen it or you’re not going to. The Black Panther is the king of Wakanda, an African country that masquerades as an impoverished nation that self-isolates. In reality they are the most technologically-advanced country on the planet. T’Challa, the current king and Black Panther, ascended to the throne when his father was killed in Captain America: Winter Soldier. There’s far too much plot to talk about except to say that this was all set up to establish Black Panther for the Avengers: Infinity War that opens this weekend. One thing to point out that I was aware of: the ruler of the ape tribe of Wkanda is the same actor who played the TSA agent in Get Out!
Atomic Blonde. I love movies with kick-ass women. Kill Bill, Wonder Woman, Valarian, Resident Evil, etc. And I saw Atomic Blonde as soon as I could. Plus I suspected that our theatre wouldn’t have it for long. And I’m a sucker for movies set in Berlin, I love pointing and saying “I’ve been to that place!” Well, I picked up the DVD and thoroughly enjoyed it. The bonus material showed how Charlize Theron trained for the fight sequences and how they developed her fighting style based on her size and strengths. I especially liked the fact that the fight coordinator was also the director for the fight sequences! Just an awesome movie. I hope they plan on doing sequels. The source material is a comic, which I still haven’t obtained, so I have no idea how devoutly they followed the source material.
Killing Gunther Don’t waste your time. A bunch of up and coming entitled assassins want to take out the Top Dog: Gunther. Played by: take a guess – Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it has amusing moments, it is just not a good movie.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’ve been wanting to pick up some classic westerns for some time, and this one was on that list. My wife had never seen it! She knew of it, but as it released the year after she was born, just hadn’t had much in the way of opportunities to see it. It was a lot of fun, the music interludes were great. I remembered the Raindrops interlude, didn’t remember the others. One thing that was quite interesting were the hats that they wore. Quite small compared to what you see these days.
Tomb Raider. This re-launch of movies of the game series was interesting, but I have a hard time giving it better than a C or C+. The actress was very good, I understand that she was more true to the original game franchise – I’ve never played them. I liked her being not uber-competent, I found that refreshing in an action hero. Then again, one of my favorite superhero movies is Mystery Men. I thought the movie suffered from Hyper-Cut Disorder where the cuts came too fast and made it difficult for me to follow the action, resulting in ‘who was it that did that thing?’ questions. I think they did an excellent job of setting up the next movie, and I think she’ll be more like Angeline Jolie/smarmy Lara Croft in it. Now I do love Jolie’s two movies, but I really like Alicia Vikander’s smaller chest size better.
Run, Lola, Run. Of the movies that were new to me that I saw in the first quarter this year, this was THE BEST. Hands down. And what’s funny is it was recommended to me under a mistaken assumption. Conveniently, I was in Phoenix a few days after he told me about it and I found a used copy very inexpensively. The guy who recommended it thought that the woman who played Lola was Mila Jovanovich. It is not, it’s just an actress with her hair dyed bright red. Anyway. This is a German movie filmed in Berlin in ‘98 concerning Lola and her boyfriend Manni. Manni is involved with a gang of drug runners. He has a simple job today: transport 100,000DM from a sale to across town and give it to his boss. Lola will meet him at the sale on her moped and take him. Except Lola stops for a carton of cigarettes and someone steals her moped. She’s late, so Manni takes the underground. The Berlin underground does not have gates: you just walk on the cars. If the ticket inspectors catch you without a ticket, it’s a stiff fine. Manni gets on to the train next to a homeless guy. And the inspectors start coming down the train. He freaks and leaves the train. And there are inspectors on the platform and they won’t let him get back on. And he left the money on the train. As the train departs, you see the homeless guy opening the bag. Manni calls Lola and tells her that he has 20 minutes to come up with the 100,000 Deutschmarks or he’s dead. It’s 11:40, if Lola doesn’t get to him by noon, he’s going to rob a grocery store. Lola’s father is a banker, he runs a branch of Deutschebanke. Lola starts running. Here’s the thing: the movie has three different endings from this point. I absolutely loved it. The director chose a perfect color pallette for the film, the film is just perfect. Definitely a contender for my Desert Island list.
A Wrinkle In Time. I have to admit that I am among the great unwashed who have never read this book, so I went in to this movie cold. I intended to read it while I was in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, but it didn’t happen. Be that as it may, I enjoyed it. Husband of a family, theoretical physicist with NASA, vanishes under strange circumstances. People in town think he ran away with another woman. Teen daughter and even younger son go on quest to find and rescue father. My wife is a huge fan of the book and told me about a lot of the missing or collapsed material which sound like it could have added a lot to the movie without greatly increasing the run time.
01/06 Dark Crystal (v, rw)
01/06 Labyrinth (v, rw)
01/07 Kung Fu Yoga (vod)
01/13 Get Out (vod)
01/25 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
01/30 Wasabi (v, rw)
02/17 Black Panther
02/24 Atomic Blonde (v, rw)
02/24 Killing Gunther (vod)
03/17 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (v, rw)
03/18 Tomb Raider
03/25 Run, Lola, Run (v)
03/28 A Wrinkle In Time
Fourteen movies seen, four via video on demand, six through my personal library and five of those were re-watches.
Bright is a 2017 Will Smith movie from Netflix that is a contemporary setting where elves and pixies and orcs and who knows what else are contemporaneous in Los Angeles with humans. Smith is a cop who is back on the street after having been shot. With an orc partner. A magic wand is on the loose, and it means death to anyone who picks it up and isn’t a Bright, or someone who has an innate magic ability to weild one, an astonishingly rare trait. The movie had a very mixed reception on Netflix but apparently was watched enough to get them to do a series.
Dark Crystal. I was VERY bored one weekend when my wife was working and it had been I don’t know how many years since I’d seen Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, so I dug ‘em out and watched them both. Dark Crystal is notable in that it’s the first live action movie to have no visible humans in it! Even in long shots the people are covered in costumes. And I’m sorry, the movie just didn’t do much for me. I think I was probably more impressed when it was initially released.
Labyrinth was a more interesting to me than Dark Crystal because of David Bowie and it was a lot more manic in the puppeteering. And you had the music. It also was notable in that according to the bonus material it was the first movie to feature CGI: the flying owl was digitally animated! Both Labyrinth and Dark Crystal are featuring re-releases this year, they were released in 1986 and 1982 respectively. I think they’re also getting board game treatments.
Kung Fu Yoga. In early January I’m writing up my post for my movies seen in the last half of ‘17 and wanted to look up something for Yoga Hosers (which was hilarious) and came across an entry for Kung Fu Yoga on IMDB and saw it was a Jackie Chan movie! OK, immediate must watch movie. It was great. Classic Jackie Chan clowning, and while it was apparent that Jackie is not the same Jackie that he was 20 years ago, he’s still capable of great stunt fighting. The movie starts hundreds of years ago in India with good guy/bad guy mystic battle, Jackie is a Chinese professor of antiquities and is recruited to locate an ancient cave of religious artifacts. Awesome movie, worth watching if you like classic Jackie Chan clowning.
Get Out. WOW. So wish we’d seen this in the theater! I don’t like scary movies, and this comes in under the threshold, but it begins to push it. More of a thriller. Created by Jordan Peel of the hit comedy series Key & Peel, it involves a black man going to the rural home of his white girlfriend’s family for the holiday, against the advice of his TSA agent friend. A party is going on and it’s a very white gathering of friends that gets a bit creepy, then VERY bad things happen. Man, excellent movie.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. I really liked the trailers for this and loved the movie when we finally got around to seeing it. I enjoyed the original movie from 1995 as it had some amazing effects work. This one updates the concept and the board game updates itself with the times and turns in to a video game cartridge, sucking four high schoolers into itself. Amazing cast, very cool seeing teen insecurities being played through adult bodies. Seeing Jack Black playing a teen sex kitten was so much fun. And Karen Gillan? Always amazing. Loved her in Doctor Who, loved her in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Wasabi is a classic 2001 movie by Luc Besson starring Jean Reno. Reno plays a French cop who is exceptional at his job (what a surprise). Years ago he was assigned to Japan while he was a commando and worked with a woman whom he fell in love with, now he’s informed that she has died and he is executor of her estate. When he arrives for her cremation and the reading of her will, he finds out that he is the father of her daughter, and she’s about to turn 18. She doesn’t know he is her father. Both of them don’t know about a rather large sum of money in her bank account, or the rather shady figures who are following them…. Excellent Besson/Reno action movie, if you liked La Femme Nikita, The Professional, Fifth Element, you really need to see this film.
Black Panther. By now, if you’re a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ve either seen it or you’re not going to. The Black Panther is the king of Wakanda, an African country that masquerades as an impoverished nation that self-isolates. In reality they are the most technologically-advanced country on the planet. T’Challa, the current king and Black Panther, ascended to the throne when his father was killed in Captain America: Winter Soldier. There’s far too much plot to talk about except to say that this was all set up to establish Black Panther for the Avengers: Infinity War that opens this weekend. One thing to point out that I was aware of: the ruler of the ape tribe of Wkanda is the same actor who played the TSA agent in Get Out!
Atomic Blonde. I love movies with kick-ass women. Kill Bill, Wonder Woman, Valarian, Resident Evil, etc. And I saw Atomic Blonde as soon as I could. Plus I suspected that our theatre wouldn’t have it for long. And I’m a sucker for movies set in Berlin, I love pointing and saying “I’ve been to that place!” Well, I picked up the DVD and thoroughly enjoyed it. The bonus material showed how Charlize Theron trained for the fight sequences and how they developed her fighting style based on her size and strengths. I especially liked the fact that the fight coordinator was also the director for the fight sequences! Just an awesome movie. I hope they plan on doing sequels. The source material is a comic, which I still haven’t obtained, so I have no idea how devoutly they followed the source material.
Killing Gunther Don’t waste your time. A bunch of up and coming entitled assassins want to take out the Top Dog: Gunther. Played by: take a guess – Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it has amusing moments, it is just not a good movie.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’ve been wanting to pick up some classic westerns for some time, and this one was on that list. My wife had never seen it! She knew of it, but as it released the year after she was born, just hadn’t had much in the way of opportunities to see it. It was a lot of fun, the music interludes were great. I remembered the Raindrops interlude, didn’t remember the others. One thing that was quite interesting were the hats that they wore. Quite small compared to what you see these days.
Tomb Raider. This re-launch of movies of the game series was interesting, but I have a hard time giving it better than a C or C+. The actress was very good, I understand that she was more true to the original game franchise – I’ve never played them. I liked her being not uber-competent, I found that refreshing in an action hero. Then again, one of my favorite superhero movies is Mystery Men. I thought the movie suffered from Hyper-Cut Disorder where the cuts came too fast and made it difficult for me to follow the action, resulting in ‘who was it that did that thing?’ questions. I think they did an excellent job of setting up the next movie, and I think she’ll be more like Angeline Jolie/smarmy Lara Croft in it. Now I do love Jolie’s two movies, but I really like Alicia Vikander’s smaller chest size better.
Run, Lola, Run. Of the movies that were new to me that I saw in the first quarter this year, this was THE BEST. Hands down. And what’s funny is it was recommended to me under a mistaken assumption. Conveniently, I was in Phoenix a few days after he told me about it and I found a used copy very inexpensively. The guy who recommended it thought that the woman who played Lola was Mila Jovanovich. It is not, it’s just an actress with her hair dyed bright red. Anyway. This is a German movie filmed in Berlin in ‘98 concerning Lola and her boyfriend Manni. Manni is involved with a gang of drug runners. He has a simple job today: transport 100,000DM from a sale to across town and give it to his boss. Lola will meet him at the sale on her moped and take him. Except Lola stops for a carton of cigarettes and someone steals her moped. She’s late, so Manni takes the underground. The Berlin underground does not have gates: you just walk on the cars. If the ticket inspectors catch you without a ticket, it’s a stiff fine. Manni gets on to the train next to a homeless guy. And the inspectors start coming down the train. He freaks and leaves the train. And there are inspectors on the platform and they won’t let him get back on. And he left the money on the train. As the train departs, you see the homeless guy opening the bag. Manni calls Lola and tells her that he has 20 minutes to come up with the 100,000 Deutschmarks or he’s dead. It’s 11:40, if Lola doesn’t get to him by noon, he’s going to rob a grocery store. Lola’s father is a banker, he runs a branch of Deutschebanke. Lola starts running. Here’s the thing: the movie has three different endings from this point. I absolutely loved it. The director chose a perfect color pallette for the film, the film is just perfect. Definitely a contender for my Desert Island list.
A Wrinkle In Time. I have to admit that I am among the great unwashed who have never read this book, so I went in to this movie cold. I intended to read it while I was in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, but it didn’t happen. Be that as it may, I enjoyed it. Husband of a family, theoretical physicist with NASA, vanishes under strange circumstances. People in town think he ran away with another woman. Teen daughter and even younger son go on quest to find and rescue father. My wife is a huge fan of the book and told me about a lot of the missing or collapsed material which sound like it could have added a lot to the movie without greatly increasing the run time.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-28 05:34 pm (UTC)It's funny, the oldest movies you watched are all ones I haven't seen since the '80s, I think. I recently saw parts (or was it all?) of BC&TSK on cable, and it's definitely worth watching. I keep meaning to watch Dark Crystal & Labyrinth, but I haven't gotten to them yet.
Yes, Get Out is brilliant. I was so happy to see it make the Hugo finalists. So good.
Lola -- Yes, another good movie. Franka Potente has since appeared in the Bourne movies (she's the love interest from the first two) and also Copper, a BBC America historical series set in 1860s New York City. It only ran for two seasons/series, but it was good. (ETA: And of course other things, but those are the one's I've seen.)
no subject
Date: 2018-04-29 03:57 pm (UTC)I really enjoy good westerns. Butch & Sundance, Big Jake, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, some of Clint's early westerns. I got a copy of The Shootist recently, John Wayne's last movie. While I don't like his politics, I do like a lot of his movies. And I particularly like his reaction when Mel Brooks asked him to be in Blazing Saddles.
I hadn't noticed that Get Out was in the Hugo pool, excellent! I must have glossed over that. (goes and checks the list) We didn't see Shape of Water, but that'll be easy to catch via subscriptions to HBO, Amazon, and Netflix. Interesting selection, we shall see how the voting turns out.
Franka also did an episode of House! We loved that show, I know I don't have that episode as we don't have many boxed sets of House, have to see if Amazon has that ep streaming. It was when House was committed to a mental institution.