Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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The Creator - (2023)

I have a lot of admiration and respect for what The Creator does, framing the topical A.I. debate in relation to the more primal and savage laws of evolution, competition and extinction. It does this by making this film more or less resemble one about a new species, and our antipathy towards what's different similar to a racial issue. In a very believable future, three decades from now, the United States military are on a mission to wipe out all forms of A.I. after the nuclear destruction of L.A. - purportedly carried out by anti-human A.I. entities. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) is working undercover, close to the spiritual leader and lead architect of all A.I. on Earth, Nirmata, when an overzealous chain of command ends up killing his pregnant wife using NOMAD - a Death Star-like orbiting platform capable of search and destroy missile launches. 10 years later he's called upon again, reluctantly at first, to infiltrate an A.I. base and obliterate a new weapon they're developing which will turn the tide of the war. He agrees more readily when he finds out a woman bearing the exact likeness of his dead wife is working on the weapon. The weapon itself turns out to be a mysterious young boy. I have to say there's not much in this film that I haven't seen many times before - but The Creator is so well thought out and interesting that I didn't care. It's very nice looking at the same time, with modern technology so very pleasing to the eye. It's one of the first science fiction films I've seen where A.I. is seen from a more sympathetic standpoint, and will have you seeing the debate from a quite different angle. Not a movie I'd see many times, but one that's definitely worth seeing.

7.5/10


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It's Complicated - (2009)

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) and Jake Adler (Alec Baldwin) have been divorced for 10 years when, during their son's graduation ceremony, they start having an affair. It's complicated due to the fact that Jane has just started dating her architect, Adam Schaffer (Steve Martin) and Jake is married to Agness (Lake Bell). I have to admit that this was fun. There are a few riotously funny jokes that pop along when you're least expecting them, and the likes of John Krasinski making the absolute most out of a relatively small part - that of future son-in-law Harley. Streep and Baldwin seem to have been picked to play this from their comfort zones - so Streep does a typical 2000s Streep character and Baldwin does pretty much the same, accentuating their spritely, at times goofy, energy (the same can't be said for Steve Martin however.) It's a movie that had me on it's side for 2 hours, with it's good-natured probing of middle-age relationships and regression. A bit of a surprise for me. It feels like something that was meant to be seen at cinemas on release, liked, and then discarded - never to really be fodder for film buffs and cinephiles - but it's another movie I was happy to see once.

6/10


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Cruel Intentions - (1999)

I guess a lot of people look back on their college days with fondness - but it's a fraught time in a person's life that can turn into a nightmare. There's sex, drugs and bad people - a volatile mix. Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) - step-brother and sister - come from a wealthy family and play with the lives of new, naïve students for sport, or as wagers. When the wicked Sebastian falls in love for the first time in his life, he at once realises that his wayward ways have doomed any path towards happiness that might have been with Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon) - the subject of a wager between the incestuous, evil pair. Cruel Intentions is based on old French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, which has been adapted to film as Dangerous Liaisons a few times. You need a strong stomach for how icky it's two protagonists are (Sebastian comes of as an antisocial psychotic in the film's first scenes, which always made me question his sudden turnaround) and how icky the film as a whole is - but the great soundtrack and strength of it's ending earns it points with me. This has turned into something of a cult classic.

6/10


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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - (2009)

These Ice Age animated films are all getting a bit samey for me - but this one does have the requisite amount of funny Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) moments in it, and that's all I'm asking for really. I think I'm watching the whole series just for that one character. His yearning to be a parent - to the point of adopting three eggs, and seeing everything through even when they bizarrely turn out to be dinosaurs - was a gas, and I liked it. Everything else in the film : eh.

5/10

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The Expendables 2 (2012)

Action packed but loses its grip and starts getting into parody terrirory, but thats okay because its done by all the big action stars so it doesn't get bad. This seems to be under the surface like an excuse to have a good time and not take action too seriously since all the biggest stars are in it together. Hopefully though #3 doesnt take this further because I like a good real action movie. Take my statements on #1 and add "all-star" and "light parody" to it.

You'll laugh and be happy to see all of them on the screen together, duking it out.

7/10

I wanted to explain that I'm rating modern action movies against Olympus Has Fallen as that seems to be the best of the modern action films I've seen yet. It wasn't perfect but it was sure damn good.

Last day I watched star wars. Star Wars is my favorite. The Force Awakens. It was the greatest part of star wars for me because of Harrison Ford. I liked his acting and character very much. Moreover, I was amazed by the proffie lightsabers used by the characters. This is what makes this movie more exciting and phenomenal.

No One Will Save You (2023)


I really enjoyed the first half of the movie building suspense, but things got a little off the rails once the action picks up. I had similar criticisms of A Quiet Place. The ending drags on a bit too long as well...

Some of my favorite modern action movies:

Mad Max Fury Road
Dredd (2012)
The Raid
The Raid 2
John Wick 1-4

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This Happy Breed (1944)

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This is pretty good in a very talky, but quiet, British, reserved way - Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in The Dig, on Netflix. Set in 1938 in UK, an archeologist begins excavation of the Sutton Hoo site, a treasure trove of dark age Anglo-Saxon artifacts including an entire wooden ship that was buried there. It's sooooo English, done with minimal FX, just acting and props and lots of accents that I don't recognize, various sub-dialects of rural English English. It's full of cloudy, muted colors and quiet, rural scenery of the 1930's..... - IMDB - "There is a lot I can say about this film, but I'll keep it short. If you love simple stories being told in a beautiful and clear manner, and if you like Archaeology, then this is the film for you. All of the actors have done a wonderful job."

The Expendables 3 (2014)

That was an awesome gritty movie. They layed it on thick with the ending sequences. I would say the best of the three. The amount of action and stunts and expert fighting they crammed into the action scenes is amazing. Not a lot of deep dialogue but the line, "You ffkd up and I'm wearing it." struck a nerve.

9/10

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Fantasia 2000 - (1999)

With what I've seen in animation over the years, I have to say that Disney's follow-up to Fantasia didn't quite live up to my expectations. The best segment is, ironically, the one carried over from the previous film - Micky Mouse and his antics in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but one other segment had me glued to the screen - the 1930s New York animation set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The rest is all pretty abstract, with the next notable an animated piece based on "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" by Hans Christian Andersen scored with a Dmitri Shostakovich concerto. There's Daffy Duck as Noah, fire birds, whales and all kinds of imaginative dreamlike imagery - but somehow I expected a little bit more. I'd still go see this in an IMAX theater for the full effect though - which I figure might transform my experience significantly - it's the way it's meant to be seen.

6/10


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Bill On His Own - (1983)

The last we saw of Bill (Mickey Rooney) in 1981 telemovie Bill he was working at a coffee shop on a college campus after being befriended by novice filmmaker Barry Morrow (Dennis Quaid). In this sequel, a very young Helen Hunt (she was 19 or 20, but already a television veteran!) features as a student named Jenny Wells, who wants to teach Bill the basics of reading, adding and using the telephone - writing up the results for her sociology course. Harry Goz and Quaid return with small roles in this, but it's Mickey Rooney's performance as loveable scamp Bill that makes this tolerable. Hunt is very energetic and is also a commanding presence. At the end of the film we're informed that the real Bill died in 1983, the year this was made and broadcast, which is a bit of a dampener on our fun. Nothing like bursting into the room when we're all happy and saying "He just died."

5/10


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Ice Age : Continental Drift - (2012)

I'd just like to say title-wise that in Australia, the Ice Age films are numbered. So, the last one was Ice Age 3 : Dawn of the Dinosaurs and this one Ice Age 4 : Continental Drift. Anyway - we're getting far, far too many characters now. They're accruing as we go along - remember that in the first Ice Age we had our group of three protagonists, a human baby macguffin, and a group of saber tooth tigers on the periphery. Now the number of protagonists has swelled to seven, and the villains are more pronounced - including a star turn from Peter Dinklage as Captain Gutt. The story is the usual - escape the predators and find a safe home. But absolutely none of that matters - I only want to know how much Sid the Sloth is in this - and it's not enough. This is a bright, if crowded, entry into the series - but setting aside how great the original is, the third film is shaping up as my favourite out of the sequels. This one, the least.

4/10

I bailed out. Found it to be dull.

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Quite good.



Bailed out the first time, but did finish it this time. Flagged big-time halfway through & I may have fallen asleep. Woke up & missed most of the plot points by that time. Then suddenly out of the blue appears Hillary Swank totally wasted in a tiny cameo. Ditto Katherine Waterston.

LOVED Rachel, Rachel

I can see why.

Yup, yesterday was a two-fer! (Thank you, Marcus Theatre's Value Tuesdays.) I couldn't make up my mind which one I wanted to see, and I had enough time in the day to see both Saw X and The Creator. All things are not equal, however, and I found one viewing experience to be vastly superior to the other.

You know... Once any horror movie franchise starts to get several films deep, the question of whether the latest entry in the series is any good or not actually becomes irrelevant. Rather, the important question becomes (at least from a corporate standpoint): What sort of crazy twist or plot development can we introduce to keep the ball rolling? The ultimate case study in this phenomenon is the Friday the 13th series. You never go to a Friday/Jason film expecting anything resembling good cinema (with the arguable exception of Part VI: Jason Lives), it's just that you're morbidly curious to see exactly how they're going to defibrillate the hulking, homicidal, machete-wielding dead guy in the hockey mask this time around. (I've actually got the Scream Factory Blu-ray box set, so I guess I can't really be too much of a snob about it!)

The Saw films, however, are actually extremely unique because of their extremely fluid, back-and-forth timeline in which later films can revisit the events from earlier films in order to discover the fates of surviving characters (the way we catch up with I's Cary Elwes in VII), or to set up exactly when a character we're first introduced to in later films actually entered into the story from a chronological standpoint (such as Costas Mandylor, who's introduced in III, whose role and function is established in IV and whose involvement in the continuing storyline is established in V as having begun before the events of I... I think!). Confusing? Yeah, I know. I was kind of racking my brain figuring out how to phrase those last couple of sentences. Saw X, the tenth and newest entry in the series, was directed by Kevin Greutert, who not only also helmed VI and VII but was the editor of I-V. You know, I guess it's really not all that hard to jump back and forth in time within a series when your former editor has such a hands-on role in the creative process.

Anyway, the events of X take place in between the events of I and II. In this movie, we discover that the nefarious Jigsaw, a.k.a. John Kramer (Tobin Bell) isn't completely infallible, and that he certainly can be taken for a ride. But those that try, certainly do so at their own peril. Kramer, as we all know, is dying from terminal brain cancer, and here he is offered a lifeline. He finds out about an experimental drug treatment program run by Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund). Her clinic supposedly was started in Norway, but has to pick up and move around from time to time and is currently stationed in Mexico. Anyway, our man John undergoes the operation, but eventually finds out that Pederson and her associates are complete and total frauds. Upon which point, Hell is unleashed and one by one, Pederson and her ne'er-do-well accomplices are rounded up and captured by Kramer and his accomplice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) to serve as players in his lethal games.

This one was actually pretty decent. The first half-hour or so of the movie starts out as mostly a rather straight drama, with John Kramer coming to terms with his impending death and finding out about the experimental clinic through a man claiming to be a fellow cancer survivor (Michael Beach) (a character who one feels throughout this movie has a lot of explaining to do and whose fate you will discover partway through the end credits). The straight dramatic mood of this first act is broken up only by one horrific trap sequence, a gag involving broken fingers and eyeball suction, which one feels had to have been shoehorned in just to remind audiences that they were, in fact, at the latest Saw sequel and not wandered into some dramatic tearjerker starring Tobin Bell by mistake.

But things eventually do get bloody and once Cecilia and her cronies are captured, events unfold pretty much as one would expect and all the major players in the game have to go through some gruesome grand guignol self-extrication from their respective traps. The most gruesome bit involves the use of a Gigli saw, and is actually one of the few scenes in the entire series which I had to force myself to look at and not avert my eyes! (I am for the most part a hardy soul when it comes to visceral on-screen horror.) Then, towards the end, there is an apparent setback when the evil Cecilia (with the aid of an accomplice) manages to (apparently) turn the tables on John and Amanda and force John into one of his own traps. Cecilia also, quite refreshingly, calls John out for his own moral hypocrisy, throwing his own words from an earlier scene back in his face. But John Kramer is a cagey cat, all wheels within wheels and contingency plans afoot, and his ultimate survival (well, until the end of III) is a foregone conclusion.

In short, it's not the greatest entry in the Saw series, but it's certainly not the worst either. (After the 2004 original, the two best in my opinion are the grim and claustrophobic III and the social commentary of VI, while the two worst for me would VII in 3-D and failed stylistic departure of eighth entry Jigsaw.) I guess I would put it in 5th place after I, III, VI and II.

(You know, it's really hard to believe - as well as kind of funny - that something so convoluted and non-linear could possibly originate from what was basically just a "two guys trapped in a room" scenario. )


The Creator, on the other hand, is probably one of the best movies I've seen so far this year! In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that this is the type of science-fiction epic that Ridley Scott, James Cameron and the Wachowskis used to be able to make in their sleep! Set in the year 2070, fifteen years after a nuclear warhead destroys Los Angeles, the story deals with the power struggle between humanity and artificial intelligence. This type of AI is mostly represented by humanoid simulants who in actuality are more "human" than the humans, and they are at war with a very powerful high-altitude aerospace platform called the USS NOMAD which is capable of locating the AI's hiding places and launching missile strikes against them. John David Washington (who greatly impressed me in both Spike Lee's BlackKklansman and Christopher Nolan's Tenet) plays special forces operative Joshua Taylor, who is recruited by the U.S. government to track down and destroy an AI superweapon capable of shutting down and controlling human technology, something that would greatly shift the balance of power. Taylor leads a special team behind enemy lines (somewhere in New Asia, where AI hasn't been outlawed), where the superweapon is ultimately discovered. The catch? It's a child! The rest of the story details Taylor's attempts to protect this child (a very good Madeleine Yuna Voyles) from anyone who would seek to destroy or capture her for destructive purposes.

In addition to just being a great sci-fi epic, it's also a terrific character study. Joshua Taylor is actually a very tragic yet ultimately redemptive character, who starts out as a soldier working undercover and doing his duty battling a potential threat to humanity but at one point early in the story (ten years after the nuking of L.A. but five before the main body of the action) he ends up losing his wife and unborn child in the process once he's revealed his true intentions. There is a great deal of religious allegory and talk about Heaven in this picture, and even the very title of this movie reminded me of the plight of the space probe V'Ger in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, who is also looking for its "Creator."

The Creator was directed by Gareth Edwards, whose previous directing gigs included the 2014 remake of Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from 2016. While I thought Rogue One was okay (not being overly impressed with latter-day Star Wars), there was nothing in that movie to prepare me for what Edwards did with this picture. The man has certainly given himself a tough act to follow, and I'll be very interested in what he does next. In short, The Creator is definitely one I'll get the 4K + Blu-ray set for!

1. Vampires (1998/Netflix)



For the first movie in my annual October horror marathon, I decided to watch John Carpenter's Vampires. The generically-named film follows Jack Crow and his team of vampire hunters, who end up crossing paths with Valek, the first ever bloodsucker. Valek is searching for an unholy relic that will increase his power, but can Crow and company stop him before he attains it?

This had been on my watch list for years, so I decided to finally pull the trigger. I enjoyed it. It doesn't stack up to Carpenter's earlier work, but there's a lot to like about it. The fight scenes are enjoyably violent and bloody. James Woods isn't the prototypical action star, but he's fun to watch as Jack Crow. And I thought it was creative how the vampire hunters use a tow to drag the vampires into sunlight, which causes them to explode into flames.

Overall, Vampires isn't a revolutionary vampire movie, but it's worth a watch.

2. The Exorcist (1973/Theater/Rewatch)



I was terrified of The Exorcist as a kid, but have learned to really appreciate it as an adult. It manages to make each of its characters compelling and then weaves their stories together into a really satisfying conclusion. I saw it in a theater for the first time and the big screen audio really added another dimension to it, which made me give a lot more credit to the great sound design.