Rate The Last Movie You Saw

SF = Zzz



[Snooze Factor Ratings]:
Z = didn't nod off at all
Zz = nearly nodded off but managed to stay alert
Zzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed
Zzzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed but nodded off again at the same point and therefore needed to go back a number of times before I got through it...
Zzzzz = nodded off and missed some or the rest of the film but was not interested enough to go back over it

By http://www.impawards.com/2015/avenge...ron_ver11.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45669453

Avengers : Age of Ultron - (2015)

The set-up had me salivating. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) creates a revolutionary new Artificial Intelligence to help protect the world - and keeps it a secret from all the other Avengers apart from Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) - it wakes up, becomes self-aware, and becomes a kind of unstoppable force in the guise of Ultron (voiced by James Spader). When Ultron arrives on the scene, a little shakily at first, but with obvious powers, this Avengers film hadn't put a single foot wrong. After that, the imagination of Joss Whedon seems to have hit something of a wall, and everything is handled in a kind of rote manner. Action scenes seem to be choreographed for all of the characters to handle with ease, and I don't think they were challenged enough in this film - I never felt that they'd been pushed beyond their limits. I would have liked to have seen some characters on the verge of losing or giving up. At times, during the first Avengers movie I was really on edge when events seemed to be beyond everyone's control, but during this film's final climax I simply felt CGI overload and a little burn-out. The good MCU films don't feel like they're following a formula, feel like they have real stakes involved, and handle action in an exciting manner. This one had an awfully good beginning, but squandered a lot of that. There's one hell of a lot of action, but little excitement.

Still - you can see that half-billion dollars up on the screen.

6/10


By http://www.impawards.com/2015/ant_man_ver3.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40434292

Ant-Man - (2015)

I'm catching up! Captain America : Civil War after this. Origin stories try my patience a little after having to endure so many, but the second half of this little Marvel side-show was pretty good, and surprisingly inventive. I still don't understand how Scott Land (Paul Rudd) survived the quantum realm (he puts something in his belt? Something he'd been given previously?) Also, I was disappointed by the quantum realm reveal - it should have been much weirder, and not just similar to the molecular realm. Since Ant-Man's suit makes him small enough to break into places covertly, the team behind this film have decided to make it like a heist film, and I thought that was a good idea to differentiate it from other Marvel films. Scott Land's specialty is cracking safes and breaking into places, so he's the right match for the powers Ant-Man has through this miniaturizing suit. There's some half-decent comedy, good action and overall a pretty tight screenplay. Nice.

7/10

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<RATING>4</RATING>, but use [ ] instead of < >.

[ ]RATING[ ]4[ / ]RATING[ ]

That doesn't work either.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

This post from @Miss Vicky should help.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

The Whistleblower (2010)

Pretty staid biographical drama about people-trafficking in the balkans with the dependable Rachel Weisz. She plays an American cop that sees an opportunity for furtherment by becoming part of a private security force in Bosnia following the war. It's a pretty slow burner but an intriguing (and tragic) tale nonetheless.

Comparing it to the first, it's not as mature and the cast and characters are a little bit of a step down. On its own it's still plenty entertaining.

Glass Onion is the sequel to the ensemble whodunit Knives Out. Rich influencers, as well as Southern dandy detective Benoit Blanc, are invited to an eccentric billionaire's private island for a murder mystery party. Of course, what starts out as a game turns into a real life-or-death scenario.

I'm a big fan of Knives Out and, unfortunately, the sequel Glass Onion is a complete disappointment. The mystery takes a few interesting turns, but the cast of unlikable characters makes it hard to care about any of it. The party of "disruptors" are crude caricatures of modern wealth, which would be fine if they were written in a clever or funny way. Instead, NFT jokes and people saying "sh*tballs" is what passes as humor in this movie. And like a lot of the recent anti-rich shows and movies, Glass Onion harshly criticizes billionaires, while it also loves to show off their luxurious lifestyle.

The main thing that's missing here is an emotional core. In Knives Out, there was the sweet relationship between Marta and Harlan. The protagonist in Glass Onion has a fine motive for investigating the party, but the only relationship they have is with Benoit Blanc. It doesn't help the matter that Benoit has a lot of eyeroll-inducing dialogue and isn't nearly as charming as he was in Knives Out.

Without heart or humor, all that's left of Glass Onion is a bland mystery that you can solve by looking at who's in the cast.

Looking forward to this on a rainy afternoon for a bit of whistfulness.

Despite having been a big MCU fan up through Endgame, after the rancid recent offerings from Marvel accentuating the decline that their products have been in since Ant Man & The Wasp, through the fairly terrible Black Widow and Shang Chi, and culminating in the abominable Eternals followed by the confirmatory Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Thor: Love And Thunder, I was loath to ever watch another Marvel movie.
But the allure of Wakanda and fond memories of Coogler's first film, combined with a random afternoon off while workers were at my house, led me back to the theater for one more shot.
And it was an interesting experience because of the highs and lows on display here. The film is certainly "better" than Marvel's last few outings... but really on average. The trick here is that the highs are high enough that they pull up the lows which are the same as all the recent fare has been. As rushed and pitiful as the villain and new secondary character introduction was in DSitMoM (Wanda and America Chavez), Wakanda Forever is every bit as bad if not worse with Namor The Expositionist (whose every word is exposition) and Ironheart... seriously, you idiots tried to shoehorn Ironheart into this already absurdly bloated thing?!
Yes, not only did Marvel try to use the Black Panther name to bring yet another origin story of a major character and world into the MCU, despite having the entire Death of the Black Panther/who rules Wakanda/what is Wakanda's place in the World thing to address, they actually brought in a new super-hero origin as well, awfully ret-conned in a "well, our audience will literally accept anything at this point" kind of way in Ironheart, in the middle of everything they already had on their plate.
So the film is a bloated mess with little thought or care to how any of this plays.
Except that it also has some of the best personal drama in the MCU in years. Honestly, some of the character scenes almost seem like they're too good for the MCU and belong in an indie film. And then more fish-people come and attack a giant CGI battle-barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
Really, the emotional journey of Shiri almost makes this film worth seeing and Laetitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita N'yongo, and Winston Duke make you not wanna get up and walk out when they're on-screen...
But on the whole, I gotta be honest, these dramatic highs simply can't drag up burden of lows this large and bloated.
Even though there was a lot to like, this will be my last Marvel film for the foreseeable future.

I've been reading up on some of Phase #whatever the MCU is currently on and it just doesn't sound interesting in the least. One of the few things they got going for them is their dogmatic fanbase. People will keep throwing money at them but I think Marvel's heyday has passed. They've had their moment in the sun but will continue as the default front runner because DC is such an ongoing poopstorm.

The thing is, I'll tell you from someone who was a big fan, the quality has dipped so precipitously I can't wrap my head around it.
They were making pretty enjoyable movies with the likes of John Favreau and Joe Johnston and now they're making absolute garbage with the likes of Taika Waititi and Sam Raimi. That's a pretty crazy trick to pull and an indicator that something is rotten. Waititi made, arguably, the pinnacle of the MCU and somehow his second outing, despite adding Christian Bale as the villain and a should-have-been-funnier guest-appearance from Russell Crowe, a nice, big shit-burger came out. What gives? It's that Marvel has stopped caring altogether about script and character (with the exception of Wakanda, and even there all the new characters are shit) and have basically become DC/Star Wars because that's all you have to do to make money.
I don't know what's happened to Feige, but in my book, he has betrayed the fans, not just MCU fans but Marvel fans, period.

The Changeling (1980, Peter Medak)

Having heard about this being one of the best ghost / haunted house movies ever, the opening thirty minutes or so were underwhelming — the film felt old-fashioned, with too much score, and lacking a creepy atmosphere. Frankly I wondered what the big deal was. But as I watched on, I got more and more drawn in— not so much by the amount of "horror", but by the plot and the detective element of it. Beautifully understated display from George C. Scott in the lead role, and Melvyn Douglas as Senator was outstanding. That second half really changed my opinion of this film, very much for the better. The ending was excellent imo.

Not as a Stranger (1955)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, 1971

This docu-drama follows Daniel (Bernd Feuerhelm), a young gay man who arrives in Berlin. While he initially gets into a conventional romance with Clemens (Berryt Bohlen), their relationship stalls out and Daniel is seduced away by an older, wealthier man. Daniel soon finds himself drifting through various subcultures, until he meets Paul, who educates him about the way that social oppression has shaped queer subcultures for the worse.

This was certainly an interesting film, at once highly critical of the superficiality of most gay subcultures while also being sympathetic to the way that the development of these cultures comes out of the shame and violence that most gay men encounter in the society around them.

I'm not entirely sure that I entirely bought all of the psychological analysis of the behavior of the different gay subgroups. The film asserts, for example, that participation in the leather/S&M cultures are an indicator of gay men trying to reclaim a masculinity that they don't feel they have because of their sexuality. But . . . that subculture also exists in lesbian and non-queer spaces, and also both men and women can be on both sides of the S&M dynamic?

More convincing is the idea that gay people being shamed has steered the gay community in a direction of secret, quick dalliances instead of long-lasting, deeply personal relationships. If the only expression of your sexuality has to be something you can do in 10 minutes in a public bathroom, yeah, it's going to tend toward focusing on sex and not on long conversations and deep connections. And in a subculture driven so much by sexual desirability, a huge emphasis is placed on appearance and the ability to be instantly attractive. This isn't to say that deeper or long-lasting gay relationships don't exist, just that they are not the norm in most of the subcultures. At the same time, I'm not sure that the film fully unpacks the degree to which some of these dynamics come about from being relationships between two men. It can't just be about being queer, because lesbian subcultures to not exactly mirror gay male subcultures.

The film is largely dominated by a voice-over narration, which alternates saying things that are adorable and incredibly harsh. In one sequence, the narrator says that men want to find someone who is kind and fun, "like a German shepherd." LOL. And yet moments later the narrator will tell us that gay men are shallow and superficial. The film drops some pretty blunt, brutal opinions about the subjects it's examining, but because the main assertion is that these behaviors are the result of social oppression, it doesn't feel like an attack so much as mourning the way that a community has been distorted by outside malicious forces.

In terms of the content that it shows, I thought that the film walked a really nice line between not being exploitative and not hiding from its subject matter. We see men in the film kiss and have encounters with some nudity. There's no prim turning away of the camera, but neither does it feel like it's exploiting the men on screen. In a film that's largely centered on the way that male attractiveness and sex are central parts of the subcultures Daniel explores, it seems to hit just the right notes.

I think that enjoyment of the film requires accepting that the film is a political statement. This becomes very clear in the final 10 minutes, where a nude symposium takes place in Paul's apartment and the men discuss the need to unite the different subcultures (one of my favorite lines was "we need to end the war between the Fairies and the Leather Men") and even partner with other social movements like Black rights and women's rights. The film is basically saying that the gay scene in Berlin and elsewhere is very toxic and demeaning, but that solidarity and openness would allow the gay population to be more free and authentically themselves. And it's not about merely imitating straight culture, but finding a new and different way of being.

This was an interesting look at a perspective on the dynamics of gay life in the 1970s. While it doesn't have the same pop as something like Paris is Burning, its assured, blunt voice and point of view make for involving viewing.

Interesting. I would definitely be interested in seeing that.

Isn't it funny how the dark haired actor resembles Andrew Garfield.

I think highly of director Paul Thomas Anderson and consider him a must see director, even though I don't think all of his movies are home runs. This was at least a triple, just good vibes and feelings all around.

By http://www.impawards.com/2016/captai...war_ver15.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48646207

Captain America : Civil War - (2016)

This one goes on the 'good' pile along with The Avengers, Captain America : The Winter Solider and Guardians of the Galaxy. I really enjoy watching these films when they have screenplays as good as this - an intelligent reflection of the ramifications the real world and Avengers would face if all of this really happened. Without oversight or with oversight - both options for the Avengers have advantages and disadvantages, especially when you stand back and examine the weak points of the United Nations. Apart from that, the personal stories of some of the characters come into play, and they have a huge impact on the Universe that has been constructed for these films. Wasn't Tom Holland funny as Spiderman? I had a great deal of fun with the introduction of this incarnation of the webbed crime-fighter. There was a good balance of everything - not too much comedy, and not too much action. High stakes, and a great ensemble of performers gather now to kick these blockbusters off.

7.5/10

I watched a very nice print on YouTube. The resemblance to Garfield is really only in profile. But the actor who played Paul reminded me of someone and I can't figure out who!

Agreed. For a brief period this was my favorite Marvel film (even though I felt the stuff with Bucky and Tony's parents could have been handled a little more dramatically as well as clearly). It would still be Top-5, I'm sure.
The scene with Tony's VR about his last day with his parents would never make the cut in the Phase Four and beyond MCU, which is why it now sucks abysmally. Moments like that and the film ending with a fistfight between two friends that severs their friendship instead of a city dropping from the sky killing millions is why the MCU used to be good.