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Airplane had a very few great gags, a couple of good ones, a bunch of so-so ones, and a pretty decent batch of bad ones...

I wasn't too big of a fan either, I was more of an air conditioner... but, uh, anyways, I bet it will get better with rewatches.



I wasn't too big of a fan either, I was more of an air conditioner...


I don't know. I don't think it would win any more favor from me a second time.
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"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel





The Secret of Kells
Fantasy / English / 2009

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been meaning to ever since I saw Song of the Sea.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Just like Song of the Sea, Tom Moore and Cartoon Saloon bring another Irish myth to life with fantastic visuals and great animation.

While this is clearly inferior to Song of the Sea's level of quality provided it was it's predecessor, it's still exceptional with the same elegant preference for presenting characters as simple rounded polygonal shapes and presenting it's environment as a busy canvas with what I might describe as "a creative disregard for reality".

Again, just like Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells frequently takes creative liberties with it's presentation and framing, abstracting out environments to appear as portraits and playing with perspective to evoke a sort of paper-cutout aesthetic.

I really like it and even more than before I get a strong impression of the creators' reverence for nature.

As much as I might praise the visuals and talk up the themes the movie might present however, I can't help but point an accusatory finger at the story.



The story sets up a young Brendan living a sheltered life within the walled town of Kells which is lorded over by his surrogate father (who I'm just gonna call Dad) who maintains a strict belief in the inevitable arrival of a viking horde.

The movie presents Dad is a negative light all throughout giving him all the typical elements of a zealous overprotective ruler: it's always the job before Brendan, he makes light of personal growth, he throws around scary words like "faith" and "pagans", but REALLY...

Dad's not such a bad guy, and that I'm supposed to root for Brendan rebelling against him simply doesn't work.

For one thing, Brendan's main driving motivation is a single speech and subsequent dream that feels to brief to mean anything about a book said to have wondrous powers. When the writer of the book visits, the old man indulges in Brendan's curiosity and pushes him to write in it firstly suggesting he go outside the wall to collect berries in the admittedly dangerous forest.

Brendan's saved by a "fairy" named Aisling (but is pronounced Ashley for some reason, probably because Celtic names are friggen' obnoxious) from wolves that would otherwise have eaten him.

So let's take a moment and consider:

Dad warns Brendan that the forest is dangerous.
Old man urges Brendan to go into the forest.
Brendan goes into the forest and nearly dies because it is dangerous.

Dad's the bad guy?

While Brendan's out in the forest he stumbles across some ancient evil tomb that Ashley warns is dangerous, professing an intimate familiarity with the forest. Brendan, after acknowledging that SHE'S A FAIRY, poopoos her claim as "just kid stories". ****in' really? Are we really going here? Yes.



Later the Old Man encourages Brendan to go to the tomb to find a jewel that will help him write the book. Once again...

Dad reminds Brendan the forest is dangerous and the vikings are coming.
Brendan goes into the forest, almost dies, and returns to a viking attack.

Dad's the bad guy? He legitimately wants to keep Kells safe, but it's like the audience is somehow supposed to be invested in this stupid book instead EVEN THOUGH both the book and jewel turn out to be completely mundane trinkets anyway. Sorry guys, but your artbook is second to OUR LIVES.

The viking attack is dumb too, so what, they built a wall and really thought any aggressor would just see it and go, "Ah, screw that noise."

No, they siege the damn wall, and you know who's there to stop them? Nobody. There's no offense, this entire population is just building the wall, no weapons, no armor, no other defenses to speak of, they just put all of their eggs in the proverbial basket (which is reminds me... >_>).

On top of everything, the movie ends on a timeskip that tries to force Dad into some sort of redemption arc that obviously can't work because it wasn't set up properly and Ashley who was set up in a key role as a main character isn't resolved either, she's just ignored. She's not even well presented as any sort of narrator on the outside looking in on this story about Brendan and Dad, so what gives? She's so heavily promoted along with this movie, but the story only seems to involve her by chance.

Song of the Sea was WAYYY better. Better visuals, better music, better story, better characters, and an ending that's ACTUALLY pretty emotional.

I hope Tom Moore and Cartoon Saloon do another of these Irish fables because I still think they can do better.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]

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I have to return some videotapes...
Wasn't really a fan of Secret of Kells either, but I thought the art style was incredible.
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It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.





Battle Beyond The Stars
Sci-Fi / English / 1980

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Yet another 80s sci-fi movie with an epic poster it couldn't possibly live up to.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Aaand I take that back. Why isn't THIS movie getting a remake!?

Set on some backwater planet, a group of diehard pacifists find themselves besieged by man in a giant spaceship with an army of mutants who decides to warn the planet that he's going to enslave them all before ****ing off for some reason that is never fully explained.

He leaves Mutant Senior Rapes-A-Lot and Mutant Mr. What-Were-Our-Orders-Again behind to guard the planet despite being confident to the point of argument that this civilization has no means of escaping or means to get help from outside their planet.

The pacifists decide that their aversion to violence is so restrictive that they are all incapable of emoting and can only speak in the flattest of expositional exchanges before the most virginest of all the virgins agrees to fly the planet's one ship (also clearly designed by starved virgins) out to go seek help from the most violentest of violent people he can find.



And so concludes one of the worst movie setups I've ever seen. Fortunately the movie significantly improves afterwards as the Big Bad's offscreen business serves to give our hero, Shad, the time to round up a small militia to fight back.

One of the best things about Battle Beyond The Stars is that it has absolutely ZERO interest in wasting time. Shad manages to gather up around 6 different party members by the halfway point of the movie and every single one of them have unique personalities, reasons for helping, and all seem reasonably convinced that his offer is in their interests.

The movie obviously suffers from the trope that Space Is Small and so it's convenient that nearly everyone he meets agrees to help, but that would bother me significantly less than if each of these characters felt rushed, but they didn't. They felt BRIEF, I mean after wrapping up a conversation with one guy it's a quick wipe transition into the next encounter, so by the end it's like, "Cripes! I didn't think it'd only take 40 minutes to convince over half a dozen people to risk their lives for me! And without pay too!"

One would hope that the first half being setup would mean the second half was all action, but no, I'm afraid it's not. There are strange clumps of inexplicable downtime when I guess the Big Bad's ship is just floating in orbit and no one's attacking him because... reasons?

Oh well, I still give a lot of credit to this half of the movie due to the MAJOR CHARACTER DEATHS, WOW. I'm sorta split on how they approached these though.

On one hand, I'm glad that they were comfortable killing off major characters, but on the other hand, I'm annoyed that once I noticed the trend, that I was able to accurately predict exactly where they'd stop.



Alright, Female Lead #1, we're going down the cast list right now and deciding on people to kill off. Do you have any qualifications to live?

I... I'm a human character.

Sorry, that won't cut it. Space Cowboy here's a human too and he's due a "Remember the Alamo" line. What else you got?

Umm... I uh... I'm wearing... pink?

That's not good enough either, Valkyrie Overboob's a bigger stereotype than you and her death is even being foreshadowed. Do you have anything at all?

Oh, uh I- well... uh... I can be a... flaccid love interest?

OH REALLY? Do you have any throwaway lines to guarantee your Plot Armor?

Umm... how about, "I’ve scanned information about mating. Does your species have kissing?"

That pisses me off. Alright, you can live.


Final Verdict:
[Pretty Good]
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Barbarella
Erotic Sci-Fi / English / 1968

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's commonly considered to be a cult classic 60s sci-fi movie. Also this poster.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I wish Barbarella was a comedy. It TRIES to be, but it takes itself far too seriously besides.

How can I take this movie seriously, though? We're talkin' about a movie where the protagonist gets sexually assaulted with a piano.

THAT'S REALLY WEIRD.



It's tough to know where to begin with Barbarella because it's just so much ******* WTF, I don't even know.

Why is her ship covered in ****in' fur? That's like if I carpeted my walls.

Why does every time that Durand Durand guy politely asks her to follow him or go this way or do something, even though he's CLEARLY A BAD GUY, she just goes along with it instead of whipping out her friggen' hand cannon? By the third time I'm like, "WHY ARE YOU LISTENING TO HIM!? RUN AWAY!"

And why do two consensual sex scenes take place immediately after Barbarella's still bleeding all over from being savaged by parrots and dolls no-wait WHY WAS SHE EVEN SAVAGED BY PARROTS AND DOLLS!? THOSE SCENES DON'T EVEN MAKE ANY ******* SENSE IN CONTEXT!



There are moments when Barbarella can be intentionally funny, like when she has hand sex with that one guy, her hair curls, and she lets go before he's finished. That was kinda funny because of how it can be interpreted, but there's hardly anything like that in this movie.

The special effects are stupid fake, the story is nonsensical plotbeat after nonsensical plotbeat, and a lot of that 60s charm is flushed away with Fur Guy.

~ GROOVY INTERMISSION ~

I read somewhere that Barbarella should be considered a feminist icon given the time and context it was released in.

I don't know what to say about that except: Typecasting actors by race isn't a commendable step above having that race predictably die before anyone else in the movie.

Barbarella's a walking centerfold with occasional bursts of initiative. If that's impressive by 60s standards then go back to the 60s and be impressed.


Final Verdict:
[Just... Bad]

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Looker
Sci-Fi / English / 1981

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
One of the few movies that might come up if you dig a little deeper into 80s cyberpunk movies.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Well it's NOT cyberpunk, despite what the promotional material might suggest, but certainly echoes some of those themes.

Actually, that's not what I'm thinking when I'm watching this. What I'm thinking is WHY HAVEN'T I HEARD OF THIS MOVIE BEFORE!?

In the first 5 minutes of Looker I knew I was in for something special because it opens up with a terribly cheesy perfume commercial before cutting to one of the models for those commercials being questioned why on earth she would want plastic surgery when she looks beautiful already, citing that she wasn't "perfect". We time-lapse past her surgery and follow her home where apparently we aren't the only ones and she's stalked and killed in her apartment in a scene that is legitimately tense.

The rest of the movie follows her plastic surgeon named, OkayIAdmitIDontKnow, as after a police investigation he follows one of his patients home only to witness her get killed in a similar fashion. He discovers more than one of them have a company printout for desired facial changes to the millimeter and the rest of the movie follows his trip into the darkside of the corporate monster known as Dot Matrix.

While nothing is ever explicitly said about any of the topics the movie presents, it criticizes superficial cosmetic surgery and presents commercial marketing in perhaps the most amusingly cynical of views imaginable.



Dot Matrix is developing a zombie commercial. You know, the kind of marketing drek so bad it melts your brain and all you want to do is buy the product? Yeah, that fun stuff. Well, part of that plan involves focus testing their commercials so hard that they're literally adjusting their models' appearances to the millimeter to keep your eyes on the brand and once their models are "perfect", they're slotted into a 3D camera so that they can be recreated digitally to reliably perform to the standards their computer spits out for them.

Actually, it's that same just-barely-beyond-the-realm-of-possibility sci-fi that made Jurassic Park work so well, and hey, Looker ALSO happens to be a Michael Crichton story. HMMMM...

I've got my complaints. As always, but they're pretty sparse here. Some eggs here. Some slowdown there. I don't know any of the characters names after having seen it and one guy who I was certain was secretly a bad guy just up and disappears after a mere two scenes. What's the deal with that? The one hospital assistant with a mustache who says, "You do her and I'll take her out"? TAKE HER OUT? AS IN KILL HER? You lead me on, movie!

Also have to mention the limp romantic subplot which only really serves to undercut the otherwise fantastic ending where... oh boy I'm gonna use a spoiler box for once!

WARNING: "Looker" spoilers below
The main bad guy gets blasted through the collarbone and while he falls down dead and bleeding, they overlay an upbeat cheesy ad for "Spurt" toothpaste. It's BRILLIANT.


Looking up this movie now, WHY HAS IT GOT SUCH BAD REVIEWS?

6.1 on iMDB?
29% on Rotten Tomatoes? Are you kidding me?

That's less than half the score of The Hunger Games! You people are MAD!


Final Verdict:
[Pretty Good]


REWATCH UPDATE 8/15/22:
I have nothing of substance to add, it's still a good movie, I'm just going to dock it half a point as I adjust my rating process.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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Tombstone
Historical Western / English / 1993

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I don't like westerns.

Where something like Battle Beyond The Stars already appeals to me on a surface level, Tombstone has already stuck one stirruped foot into the grave by the time it gets to me.

If offered the choice I will always take the fantasy movie over the historical drama, no question.

So to say I'm not judging Tombstone purely on the merits of it's story, presentation, acting, and action is correct. However my judgment will reflect not just those things, but also all the distracting STUPID **** in the background.

In this movie, Kurt Russel plays Wyatt Earp by putting on a silly mustache and acting so intense that after a while you stop wondering whether it's real or not. From here on out I will refer to him as Wyatt Kurt.

Wyatt Kurt rolls into Tombstone with his similarly aged brother, Bill-Paxton-with-a-fake-mustache, and his dissimilarly aged brother, Sam-Elliot-with-a-real-mustache. Apparently Tombstone is a lawless town and somebody's gotta clean it up, but Wyatt Kurt's over that now, he's a retired cop, he don't run around with guns no more, BUT HE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DO IT.


"NOOOOOOOO!!!"

We get a Sam Elliot voice over telling us about The Cowboys being "the first organized crime in America" and over the first 50 minutes all we really do is flip back and forth between The Cowboys being ******** and then idling around cementing our protagonists as hard as possible to the point I'm like, "I get it, Wyatt Kurt's gonna fight 'em, get on with it".

It's at this point someone might argue that "Well, that setup is part of history, we shouldn't leave that stuff out" to which I say, "Boring history makes boring movies". Besides, we glamorize the Old West plenty as it is. I don't see any band marks on their foreheads when they take their hats off THIS MOVIE IS TOTALLY UNREALISTIC!

Anyway, after those first 50, The Cowboys finally butt heads with Wyatt Kurt and until the hour and 30 minute mark they make passes at each other all with the obvious goal of killing off Wyatt's brothers and bringing us to the last half hour where Wyatt goes stone cold cheese on everybody, culminating in The Cowboys suddenly suffering from Stormtrooper Arthritis just in time for the hilariously dramatic "NO" scene where he kills the Cowboy leader who's totally Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters.



I'll be honest, the action sequences are really good and they tie in perfectly with the dramatic uncertainty that comes with each character's decisions. The showdown, Bill Stacheton getting shot in the back, and... other less memorable scenes are all pretty fun and for the most part the intervening drama is appropriate.

For the most part.

I like the conflict between Wyatt Kurt and his brothers and Val-Kilmer-with-a-fake-mustache as Doc Holliday (one of extraordinarily few character names I can remember and that one's only because they actually spelled it out for me at the end) and I even think The Cowboys had an appealing level of personality to them. ...that's it though.

Literally any other scene I don't give a crap about and that includes every single scene where any female character had even the slightest hint of focused screentime because you get **** like this:

Originally Posted by Some Broad
I wanna move and go places, never look back and just have fun. Forever. That's my idea of heaven. I need someone to share it with though.
Originally Posted by Wyatt Kurt
You mean, Behan. Well then, why are you with him?
Originally Posted by Some Broad
Because he's... handsome, he's... charming... He's all right. For now. Oh, I know, don't say it, I'm rotten. I try to be good, it's just... boring.
You're awful.

All of these scenes are awful. But what's more awful is the fact that as a western Tombstone subscribes to the philosophy that it's okay to **** with horses just because. The worst scene in the whole movie is this bit where Wyatt Kurt interrupts a man whipping a horse:



*brain aneurysm*

Look, I know what they're doing here, they're trying to establish Wyatt as being the sort of person who would go out of his way to correct injustices, but there are SO MANY LEVELS OF WRONG to this, I need a checklist.

POINT NUMBER UNO:
Wyatt Kurt doesn't logically follow through on his appeal to empathy.

So he's against horses getting whipped because they don't like it. Unlike WHAT!? Saddling them up, stabbing them in the sides with stirrups, and running them into gunfire purely because it suits your interests? You don't stop any of the carriages that pass you by whipping the horses pulling THEM. **** you, Wyatt!

POINT NUMBER DEUX:
The creators don't logically follow through on their appeal to empathy.

Could you BE anymore disingenuous? You want to act like you a have some sort of standards, but you're LITERALLY WHIPPING A HORSE IN THAT SCENE, JUST SO YOU CAN SAY IT'S BAD TO WHIP HORSES. That's like shooting someone in the face and going, "Okay, that's bad, right? I shouldn't do that. Now you know that I know that it's bad to do that." You're still subjecting horses to the rest of this ****ing movie! **** you, Hollywood!

POINT NUMBER 三:
The uploader of this video doesn't know how to recognize self-contradicting examples.

The video description reads:
A Demonstration of the Virtues of Violent Resistence to Animal Abuse
By 'virtues', this video is obviously being taken to mean, "**** yeah! That's what you get for abusing animals!" when the video itself was only made BY abusing animals. This isn't an effective demonstration of justice when it requires creating injustice to demonstrate! That's literally feeding directly into the scheme where the villain causes a problem and makes themselves look good by solving it. **** you, attacksquirrel1982!

POINT NUMBER चार:
The one commenter on this video is an idiot.

It reads:
PETA could learn a thing or two from this transaction.
Are you kidding? PETA's been pulling this **** for ages. Them and the American Humane Association, the same dickwhistlers who gave movies like Tombstone that "No Animals Were Harmed In The Making Of This Movie" pass which has NEVER ACTUALLY MEANT ANYTHING EVER.

Stop calling them 'animal actors'. 'Actors' suggests an intention to deceive and 'intention' implies consent which is most definitely not what this is.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]

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THREAD UPDATE:
I know I've been saying these aren't reviews, but considering the fact that I still can't seem to help rambling overlong and some of my posts well outstrip the length of other user reviews, I've decided to go back and flag them on a case by case basis. I'm also going to avoid starting new one-off review threads since this one's turned out to be longer than I expected and it helps to keep everything in one place.

Anime reviews will still be kept separate for now.





Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Musical Comedy / English / 1971

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Roald Dahl's dead, Mel Stuart's dead, and Gene Wilder just died and there will never ever ever, in the rest of the recorded history of the world, be a better excuse to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."

Candy, Cream, Centipedes, Mink, Antlers, Bees, Geese, Chicken, Roast Beef, and Bratwurst.

It must seem somewhat hypocritical to praise Willy Wonka after condemning Tombstone when both movies feature on-set animals and Willy Wonka is ostensibly all about that kind of stuff.

However, to be fair, a large degree of it is abstracted out (giant intelligent geese that lay chocolate eggs?) and little is actually seriously said about anything to do with the production of anything coming out of the factory. Obvious disdain goes to the "Creepy Tunnel Scene" which nobody likes anyway despite having grown on me still features a chicken getting beheaded, I mean what the actual **** was that about? Wonka, get your **** together.

I'd like to think they used stock footage, but I can't really be sure and all it would have done is make a terrible scene slightly less terrible.

Even so, at least it wasn't played for laughs like that ******* scene in CHARLIE and the Chocolate Factory.


It's funny because animal abuse is funny.

All that crap is in a sharp minority to everything else in the movie though, there aren't horses in the shot every 10 minutes and the movie isn't trying to make some sort of false moral distinction about what it's doing. And because of that, I can mostly focus on the story and still appreciate the characters.

REWATCH UPDATE:

I used to think that I don't watch very many old movies, but it never really quite occurred to me that the VHS tape I would pop in regularly was made in the early 70s and based on a book even older.

I had read the book, always stopping at the sequel where the Great Glass Elevator takes Wonka into space to fight meat monsters (yes, that actually happened) and it reminds me that Dahl never actually liked this movie and that maybe Dahl's exact vision wasn't exactly the most compelling in the first place.

It's also curious to consider the shocked response The LEGO Movie received when it, at base, is a marketing vehicle. Willy Wonka did it too, and it's an utterly perplexing paradox where the most standard movie has all manner of creativity sucked out of it in the raw spirit of greed only for it to fail when the most blatant of product placement movies are born passion projects and become cult classic staples of cinema. How in the **** do we let this happen?

Well it happened, and to be honest, while this movie naturally appeals to me as a musical for it's catchy songs and strong deliveries, it's also a comedy.

But I never really found it to be terribly funny.

Frankly, I'm not sure I ever even really laughed at the movie.

I'm noticing a very BIZARRE trend with my favorite movies. They're not exactly movies that seem like they would appeal to me.

I don't drive vehicles, yet I love Mad Max: Fury Road.

I don't celebrate holidays, yet I love Nightmare Before Christmas.

I don't even eat chocolate, yet I love Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Weird.



Anyway, despite numerous jokes in the movie, I don't think it's charms end at the punchline so much as the jokes it chooses to the tell and the way it attempts to deliver them. I'm not saying they're bad, though I might concede that many of them are weak, it's really the really the characters that are fun to watch interact with each other.

Charlie is about as easy to root for as you would hope for (even if he does have that one really off moment where he punks his whole family that he found a golden ticket, that was a pretty dick move) and Grandpa Joe is a classic archetype played to a T. He has his opinions, and he's rather stuck in his ways, even literally so, but lines like "when a loaf of bread looks like a banquet, I have no business buying tobacco" and then later dissolving suspicions of that claim really goes to show he's more 3-dimensional than he may initially appear. He's not just Charlie's hanger-on, he's a doting grandfather, he likes to live vicariously, and his relentless optimism has a tendency to manifest itself in negative ways.

The other kids, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Mike TeeVee, and Violet Beauregarde play the spoiled foils to Charlie very well and so do their walking doormat parents. Although Augustus gets comparably little screentime compared to the rest, they all seem rather distinct despite sharing space beneath the same umbrella. It's especially easy to hate Veruca who gets her own entitlement song "I Want It Now", but the movie mercifully grants us the mental image of her burning to death in a garbage furnace so that's nice. Good family-friendly fun here.

Naturally the star of the show is, perhaps unintentionally, Willy Wonka who steals his way into the title of the movie by virtue of the Vietnam War at the time (way to pussy out, guys). Wonka, who was at one point considered to be played by one of the Monty Python crew (can't you see an Eric Idle Wonka?) is played by Gene Wilder and he's just great at it. Gene's since ceded much of his comedic acting to good writing, but it's hard not to credit him for bringing a lot of life to this character.

Eccentric is the key word here. Wonka may not be funny in quite the way I that makes me laugh in other movies, but he's very eccentric and acts much as I would and do... or maybe I act that way because of this movie? I dunno. But I do know that it's easy to find a good bit of myself in Wonka's mix of passion, cynicism, wisdom, and random deadpan whatthe****ery just to see how people react.

Randomly speaks in different languages? Check.

Makes concerned references to Noodle Incidents? Check.

Casually shrugs off the probable violent deaths of children?



He's just fun to watch and contributes the vast majority of memorable quotes.

It's really just the same tone from his first appearance to last save for the ending when Charlie is denied the lifetime supply of chocolate and when Grandpa Joe inquires he totally flips his ****.

Originally Posted by Willy Wonka
You STOLE Fizzy Lifting Drinks! You bumped into the ceiling which now has to washed and sterilized so you get NOTHING! GOOD DAY SIR!
It's Charlie's predictable humility that gives us the happy ending, but I have to admit, I've always been a bit down on the ending, the Great Glass Elevator always did feel a bit anti-climactic, especially that "he lived happily ever after" line. Pfffft.

Altogether it's not really the story that pulls it altogether, and it's not even entirely the themes that I enjoy, though I do enjoy them.

It's the fact that this really heartfelt magical movie will stop dead as some bug-eyed creeper with a cart full of knives will suddenly sneak up behind Charlie to monologue about "fear of little men" and "nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out" before menacingly squeaking away that gets me. WHAT THE **** WAS THAT!?

What is this movie? What this beautiful movie that gives us a creepy man with a throaty German accent saying the phrase "bring it to me so I can find the secret formewlah", that's fantastic.

I really like the songs, I have trouble picking my favorite. It might be Cheer Up, Charlie, it's really sweet.

Get it? Sweet? CAUSE IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT CANDY? HRHRHRHRHR you know I gotta say this one thing: PUNS, they're a thing in this movie and I've heard people say that puns are the lowest form of comedy.

No. Puns are not the lowest form of comedy, you know what is?

MEMES. ****ing memes.

People don't even use the word "meme" correctly anymore, it's just a catch-all term for a reference that's been repeated AD NAUSEUM to such a degree that it ceases to be a reference anymore, it exists for the sake of existing. It's funny because it's supposed to be funny.

Willy Wonka exists online most recognizably as this:



Notice how the caption is unrelated to Willy Wonka, isn't anything close to something Willy Wonka ever says, and can just be inserted anywhere irrespective of it's relevance to Willy Wonka.

It's just a random screencap that unoriginal people hijack as a vehicle for their own opinions and always in Impact font. You ****ing hacks.

That this is what kids nowadays recognize Willy Wonka for disgusts me. It's no perfect movie and I won't even hazard to say it's exceptional in any single department, but I will say that it's a joyful disregard for convention by people who know better, and they know you know they know better.

If that makes any ******* sense at all was zum teufel ist los mit peeple, das so ein guten film ist, kann ich nicht verstehen, warum CABBAGES so schwer zu verstehen, Je ne peux pas vraiment parler d'autres langues, собирается бросить в немного русский сейчас здесь, 这是真正的只是谷歌翻译, 雄大なムースを含みます, and that's just Wonka Wash spelled backwards.




Final Verdict:
[Friggen' Awesome]

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The Game
Psychological Thriller / English / 1997

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Overdue for a rewatch.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Before The Game, to me it was "Eh... Michael Douglas", but after The Game it was "Hell yeah, Michael Douglas!"

The setup here is that a man named Nick Van Orten is far too engrossed in his business-minded life as a wealthy investment banker that he's become estranged from his brother and ex. When his birthday rolls around his brother, Conrad, shows up (kinda acting like a dick) and gives Nick a certificate to a mysterious company that promises a non-descript life-changing experience in the form of a "game".

Nick is initially resistant to the idea and gets little answers when he actually visits the company location, but on a whim agrees to submit an "application" anyway despite casually assuming that his brother is in involved in some sort of Scientology-style cult.

What follows is a mysterious sequence of events that pressures Nick into paranoia, suspecting everyone around him is in on "the game" before things become deadly and he struggles to throw off his stalkers and discover the truth of the organization that manages to disappear as quickly as it appears.

There are plenty of clues as to the nature of "the game" and it's operators known only vaguely as CRS (Consumer Recreation Services), but each one pulls you in a different direction as it goes along.

Is his brother in on it?
Are they trying to rob him?
Are they trying to prank him?
Are they stealing from him or aren't they?
Did CRS ever exist in the first place, or is it all in his head?



I would argue that one of the worst parts of the movie is simply knowing the twist because knowing the answers to these questions takes away a lot of the punch of the movie. To that end, it's a movie that isn't nearly as rewatchable as other psychological thrillers so it's one of those that you just have to put on the backburner for a while before enjoying it all over again.

It's like if the everything-is-planned-paranoia theme from Cabin in the Woods met the too-proud-for-his-own-good-businessman theme from Ink.

It'd be one thing if it was just an interesting story (if a somewhat generic one) or good actors playing good characters, but a combination of excellent pacing and focus along with a very tiny dose of backing ambiance helps maintain my orientation and engagement in the movie. It even kept me emotionally engaged.

My favorite moment in the whole movie is a very small incidental diner scene in which Nick's been thoroughly beaten down and demoralized and despite being a wealthy businessman, has to beg with what little is in his pockets for a ride.

HE LOOKS SO SAD, I FEEL SO BAD FOR HIM!

But I guess that's just my sadistic reflex. I get a huge kick out of seeing characters go from this:



To this:



And I feel too few movies involve me to the point that I feel like I'm taking that emotional ride with the character before we exit off on a satisfying resolution.

All told, The Game, though suffering from one of the most generic titles in existence, is one of my favorite movies and an under-appreciated classic in it's genre where I hold it up alongside the likes of Inception.

If you haven't seen it, WATCH IT! IT'S GOOD! GRRR!!!


Final Verdict:
[Friggen' Awesome]

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Collection Update:



V for Vendetta
Second copy of V for Vendetta, same version so I know what I'm getting here.

Hard Boiled
Supposedly this version of Hard Boiled is visually inferior to the several-times-more-expensive Criterion Collection version, but I thought it looked better on the surface, besides the presentation's very nice and it includes a surprisingly informative commentary by a guy named Bey Logan who gives a ton of background on the movie and it's actors.

Dragon Tiger Gate
This is the second version of Dragon Tiger Gate I've purchased and it's a definite tradeoff. On one hand it's newer so the presentation is significantly better than the older version I had. On the other hand it lacks the English dub. Not that I necessarily prefer English dubs, I think Hard Boiled is great as it is, but the dub for Dragon Tiger Gate was really good and I feel like it gave the characters a little more personality especially given how it tweaks the lines here and there.
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Seven Samurai
Action Drama / Japanese / 1954

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In Raven73's Star Wars: The Force Awakens thread, Iroquois referenced his own Basically Just thread, the first page of which contains the following exchange:
Originally Posted by Iroquois
Seven Samurai
Originally Posted by Gatsby
Basically just the first erection caused by good cinema for most beginning cinephiles
I haven't seen Seven Samurai (or any Akira Kurosawa film to be honest), however I read it was a major inspiration for Battle Beyond the Stars.

How righteously overhyped is it?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
First off:



Holy **** do I feel stiff. And not the erection kinda stiff, just the ordinary haven't-moved-in-over-3-*******-HOURS kinda stiff.

There's complaint number one for ya: This movie is nearly 3 and half hours and it had no business being that long.

What happens? A villager eavesdrops on a bandit patrol and learns that their village will be raided at the end of the season and so ventures out to hire seven samurai which help organize the village and defeat the bandit threat. That's not a story that needs to be 3 hours.

To Seven Samurai's credit though, it manages to spend that time wisely building on it's characters and developing further setup without ever being too transparently expositional which means even though it was a wicked marathon of a movie, I at least never got bored or tuned out. It really just feels like a movie where the main script was exercised in it's entirety without any anecdotal scene edited out.

None of our many many characters are ever really very deep either. We have intimate moments with most of our main characters, but it's not as if development is ever taken very far beyond their archetypes. We MIGHT have been able to were there not so many characters, but because there are we end up filling time by briefly touching on only some of them (sadly, two of our seven samurai are practically indistinguishable from each other).

Still, what we get in terms of character development is significantly better than what we had with Battle Beyond the Stars. Battle Beyond the Stars was very quick with it's character introductions and very casual with it's character deaths so despite their unique qualities, there really isn't much of any reason to care.



Flipping it once again, at least BBTS didn't take an age to get where it's going. I usually give a movie 15 minutes to introduce it's main conflict and arc, but Seven Samurai takes literally twice that amount of time before "we need seven samurai" is ever mentioned. That's the length of a 30-minute TV show episode, and if this were a TV series the first episode would be extraordinarily underwhelming for all of what it accomplishes with it's screentime.

I guess what I'm saying here is there's a middle ground between Battle Beyond the Stars and Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai HAS it's development, but it could be sharply edited to include only the most crucial moments. Scenes we absolutely DO NOT NEED would include:

1.) The entire romantic subplot. Duh. Obviously. This plot goes nowhere, never resolves, and only exists to create conflict with a man who insists on disguising his daughter as a man to hide her from the fiendish samurai that would... rape her, I guess? Oh wait no, because if the dice fall right, the moons align, and just one of those seven samurai SO HAPPENS to have sex with her, she'll become damaged goods.

( -_-) Sssssweet.

At least the general reaction to this guy is upset and disgust, but it's misplaced in my opinion. For one, the response, "remember when you were younger" plainly disregards this guy's real issue by dismissing it as sex drive. For two, BRAINLESS PROMISCUITY is a pretty sickening character trait in general, so that's entirely worth criticizing. This female character doesn't have any personality to speak of, not like the guy who courts her and for all we're aware of they're only into each other for their looks. The vast majority of scenes involving them can literally be summed up as:

"I just noticed you were here."

"I just noticed you were here."

"I'm going to stare suddenly and meaningfully at you."

"I'm going to stare right back."

"I take a step forward."

"I take a step back."

"I take another step forward."

"I run away."
SCENE.

Does she even have any lines beyond wimpering, cowering, and getting beaten by her father? I SURE DON'T REMEMBER. It doesn't help matters when the samurai excuse it as being predictable given that they all might die in the morning. Umm... WHAT?

By this point the samurai have already defeated MOST of the bandits primarily thanks to the villagers spearing them left and right. What reason do you have to believe you won't just MIGHT lose, but PROBABLY WILL lose? The odds were worse yesterday!

Also, why does the concept of getting stabbed or shot to death in the near future make you horny enough to stick your dick in the nearest wet towel that screams like a Japanese girl? THERE'S NOTHING THERE, SHE'S A BLOCK OF WOOD WITH A FACE, SHE'S FLATTER THAN FLAT STANLEY!



Also double standards.

2.) The scene where Kikuchiyo catches and spears a fish. We really needed that scene.

3.) The scene where Kikuchiyo tries to ride Yohei's horse and we get the excellent line, "Yohei's going to be upset if you break it's legs". We really REALLY needed that scene. I mean, do I even need to explain?

Is it not self-evident? Do we really need an analogy?

How 'bout: "The substitute teacher's going to be upset if you open fire on all those school children."

Alternatively: "It'd be an awful shame to lose a Starbucks because you blew up an airport."

OR OR OR:


Last thoughts: It seems overacting body language is almost unavoidable in Japanese movies, I don't know why, it's probably something dragged kicking and screaming from stage plays, but at least it's relatively mild here with the main exception obviously being Kikuchiyo who's just generally portrayed to be childishly energetic.

At least we don't have the ruthlessly dead exposition that we got with Battle Beyond the Stars, which is an unfortunate result because what BBTS seemed to take away from Seven Samurai most was just the basic concept, when Seven Samurai's greatest strength is it's varied and thoughtful character interactions.

Admittedly BBTS presents it's story in a significantly more digestable manner, but the same story is told significantly better in Seven Samurai, even down to maintaining unpredictability with character deaths.

I do have one question, though: How did that first samurai die? Did he trip and crack his head or something? He sorta flops over. Was he shot? I DON'T KNOW.


Final Verdict:
[Pretty Good]

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Great job on your last few reviews. Willy Wonka is a childhood favorite for me. I really liked The Game as well, apparently a lot of people hated the ending but I thought it was really good and unique.

I thought Seven Samurai was a masterpiece, but I can see where you're coming from with your criticisms. Especially in today's age, most people don't have the patience for a movie that old and lengthy. It's still cool that you liked it though!



Great job on your last few reviews.
Thanks.

Originally Posted by False Writer
I really liked The Game as well, apparently a lot of people hated the ending but I thought it was really good and unique.
I understand the complaint, and it feeds into it's rewatchability problem, but it's worth considering the subtle note of silence in the very last shot of the movie which implies that questions remain.

Originally Posted by False Writer
I thought Seven Samurai was a masterpiece, but I can see where you're coming from with your criticisms. Especially in today's age, most people don't have the patience for a movie that old and lengthy. It's still cool that you liked it though!
I really liked Metropolis, but even though Seven Samurai is firmly grounded in reality, it didn't feel anywhere near as meaningful to me as that movie. It also suffered from significantly more frustrating tropes.



I'm going to catch up on this thread later Omni. I really like the style of your reviews even if our tastes probably won't align much. You're an entertaining fellow.
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