Movies

[superaielman]

The World's End: awesome. I didn't like it quite as much as Hot Fuzz, but it's up there with Shaun of the Dead. Very funny, lots of well managed chaos, and an ending that feels a little clunky but also puts a nice philosophical capstone on the Cornetto trilogy. And the cast is fantastic, of course.

Yep, what everyone else said. Really falls apart at the end but hey, still lots of fun.

[superaielman]

Frozen: This may be the filthiest disney movie of all time, or I could just be a filthy mouthed, corrupted shell of a person. That said, it was lots of fun. Great musical stuff and the art direction was fantastic. There are plot holes a mile wide in the story but whatever.

[Captain K.]

Godzilla (2014):  Too much Ken Watanabe staring off into space, not enough giant monsters kicking the fuck out of each other.

[superaielman]

FF7 AC- Plot was as terrible as I was lead to believe. The stuff with Zack and Aeris was good enough (Cloud having survivor's guilt makes too much sense) and I liked the scene with Marlene and Cloud before the big battle in Midgar. Everything else, *flush*. Oh, I suppose Reno and Rude were decent enough, even in a pretty whitewashed comic relief role.

The action was pretty at least! That said, There are too many breaks in it for exposition and new characters we don't care even slightly about (That male kid). The film didn't know if it wanted to be a character piece or action flick and both parts of the film suffered for it.

So yeah, pretty but ultimately pretty bad film.

[Shale]

REASONS TO WATCH FF7: AC
1) The fight scenes
2) The remixes of FF7 songs
3) Loz's ringtone
4) If somebody was threatening to murder you for not watching it, or something
. . .
204) The plot and pacing

[NotMiki]

You forgot the Turks' facial expressions.

[superaielman]

2 Guns- Denzel Washington and Mark Walberg shoot the shit for two hours, and also shoot shit. There is an attempt at a snappy plot, but no more than that. The film is about the two stars doing badass things and playing to typecast (Washington as the world weary veteran, Walberg as the idealistic one). Good popcorn flick.

[Captain K.]

The Maze Runner:  Nice visuals and the acting was pretty good from the young cast (other than token female who is there just to be a female).  Way too much stuff left unanswered though - if it doesn't get a sequel there's just not enough resolution for this one to stand on its own.  Compared to, say, the Hunger Games which works just fine as a standalone.

[Captain K.]

Between Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves, the Russian mafia is having a very bad year.

[Fenrir]

Interstellar was really, really fantastic. Hard to recommend though. It got ... weird.

[Captain K.]

Big Hero 6:  A little slow for the first half of the movie, but it ends strongly.  I would prefer the rest of the team get more screentime - it's very Hiro-centric.  Baymax fist bump for the win.

[superaielman]

Maleficent- Fun film. Predictable but hey, Jolie makes it work.

[Cmdr_King]

The sad thing about that film is that it's easily at its best when Jolie gets to play a fairly straight villain role.

Y'know, in the movie she's the heroine of, because the main conceit is that Maleficent wasn't especially villainous.

[Shale]

It's a freaking gorgeous movie and Jolie has fun in the role, in straight-villain and antihero modes. My main complaint is that they didn't go bigger for the ending; the overgrown ruined castle would have been an amazing setpiece with the film's aesthetic sense and production values.

Big Hero 6: So much fun. So much damn fun.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Went out and watched The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies today in my yearly pilgrimage to give Peter Jackson money. It's much like the other Hobbit movies -- not great on the level of Fellowship or Return of the King, but it was a fun romp and I didn't regret seeing it.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Battle with the Five Armies - See Ciato pretty much. I definitely do think it's the best of the three Hobbit movies, in large part because Thorin is well-acted and fun to watch. Like most of the Peter Jackson movies I would have traded some of the action sequences for more character stuff but so it goes, at least the titular battle doesn't drag like mad the way Helm's Deep did (probably because we are actually invested in the characters involved).

[Luther Lansfeld]

Maleficient - An interesting movie, Angelina Jolie is pretty fab but it is a little disjointed at points.

[Captain K.]

Ender's Game:  caught this on cable.  Never read the book, but found the movie pretty enthralling.  The young man playing Ender was quite good.

[Sierra]

Apparently there is never a time when movies are not on at the parents' place. This is the selection of holiday viewing I hadn't previously seen (so about half of it; everything else was Bond movies or Marvel movies):

Oblivion: Kind of a neat little movie. It's probably the cinematography that won me over here--the movie spends a fair amount of time letting the landscape and future tech speak for it (and someone definitely had fun designing sci-fi gadgets), which is an attitude much more suited to my nature than LOUD NOISES. I appreciate the deliberate approach and it almost feels antiquated in that way (genuine action sequences are infrequent). Probably there's a lot of plot points that fall apart on extensive reflection, but I'm not usually one to have serious problems with logical errors that aren't likely to occur to your brain when a movie's got more important things to do, like look and sound great. And I think a lot of that can pretty easily be handwaved on grounds that Not!GlaDOS didn't need a sustainable plan that could withstand the scrutiny of generations because it was going to move on once it had what it wanted anyway; the clones were obviously mentally modeled on the original models so it's not too much of a stretch conclude maybe this process isn't perfected and that's how some actual memory slipped through. Actually the most glaring one to me is probably just that hey, if you just need water, you do realize Europa's a giant block of ice and it's right down the street, right? Perhaps it's just easier to get in liquid form...after...blowing up a moon to wipe out the indigenous population. Yeah, I dunno. I guess there's no movie in exploiting a probably-lifeless planet instead. And again Kosinski picks quality musical accompaniment for his sci-fi eye candy. I think I like the guy; he's not a great storyteller, but he's solid enough on the fundamentals of film that I'm interested to stick around and see if he improves.

Edge of Tomorrow: Tom Cruise might be kind of crazy and maybe not that good an actor, but he does have a knack for picking intriguing projects. This was pretty fun, if less well suited for my tastes due to the often frenetic pacing. Really tightly edited; the extended sequence of Tom Cruise getting shot in the head is really one of the best training montages. I'm pretty sure other people raved about this already, so I guess I can leave it here? It's a cool movie, if not one I personally feel the inclination to watch repeatedly.

Maleficent: I keep wanting to type that Malefficient because that's how it sounds in my head. Man this was so clearly a vanity project. Still, it got dark pretty early with the drugging and made a reasonably good effort at staying there, at least until the probably inevitable mega-happy ending turned up with jarring suddenness. Mildly diverting movie but somewhat less than the sum of its parts. I should be more engaged by a movie about a fabulous fairy queen, but somehow I mostly couldn't be. The fairy godmother trio also landed squarely in the uncanny valley with the adultish faces disproportionately large on tiny bodies thing. Yeesh. I was obviously happy with the alternate definition of true love, though!

Rush: I was more invested in this than I expected to be with a movie about racing. Like, I thought I was going to just read through the thing but wound up actually watching it after all? Ron Howard movie, it turns out; I usually find that his movies stop some ways short of greatness, but I can't say any of them I've watched were outright bad either. This one is mostly sold by the leads, who each ably embody a different national brand of overconfident douchiness. I am not sure whether I have seen another movie that more deliberately pushes the notion of Frienemies. Also there's shirtless Chris Hemsworth, if you're into that kind of thing. It's worth a watch.

[Dark Holy Elf]

X-Men: Days of Future Past - Watched this with some of my extended family. None of us had seen First Class (which was probably a mistake, since the movie made frequent reference to it), but it was decided that the DoFP trailer looked cooler so we watched that instead. Anyway, it was pretty enjoyable. I haven't watched an X-Men movie since the first two and compared to those I certainly missed Patrick Stewant and Ian McKellan who make everything better. But it was still a pretty fun movie; not too actiony like I feared (and much of the action is just Quicksilver/Magneto/Mystique using their powers to be cool, which works for me). The scenes in the sentinel-future were largely boring but I guess they wanted you to feel the threat of the Sentinels, which is fair. Xavier was probably the best character, but that's probably not too surprising, and as always I appreciate the moral ambiguity X-Men brings to the table in the form of Magneto and Mystique.

One thing I did find a bit odd was that part of the theme of the movie was to avoid having Mystique "fall" by taking a life. This is a noble sentiment and one I can get behind, even if grittier realists probably roll their eyes at it some. But... it's a bit of a stark contrast with how Wolverine murders three people near the start of the movie (and he really didn't have to!). There's probably some lesson there about how Wolverine is already kinda "ruined" and maybe I would need to watch the three movies I missed to really appreciate what they were going for there, but since Wolverine is otherwise portrayed as unambiguously good in this movie (moreso than Mystique), the contast was a bit jarring.

[Grefter]

That is he difference between a woman and Hugh Jackman.

I assume part of it is playing up the way Mystique was played up in First Class where she is pretty great and is a story of her falling.  Her story arc is about how she has to hide her "real" self at all times by shape shifting and she won't ever fit in as her real self.  It is a pretty amazing use of the mutant allegory which the movies generally aren't great at leveraging (I understand this is similar to early use of the Morlocks in the comics, they are a bunch of mutants with physical altering mutations and live in the sewers.  They greatly resent the X-Men in part because they mostly can pass as human).

[Meeplelard]

X-men Days of Future Past: Saw it.  It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but still decent.  One problem though was the Bluray we were watching it on (or maybe it's the player; hard to say) had moments of skipping so we missed some segments of dialog.

I think the logic with Wolverine is that he's already got his hands dirty and there's no erasing that.   He's been in multiple wars, so he's doubtless taken many lives.  Raven, by contrast, as they said never took a life, so she's still "innocent" which is the difference.  Also the whole butterfly effect situation, yada yada yada.  Additionally, the other movies do demonstrate that he is kind of a low life, but he's got some sense of morality. 

Also possible the guys he killed he remembers killing in the past anyway, and he did try to avoid it, but eh, so it goes.


As far as seeing other X-men movies go?  First 2 are worth watching (or re-watching if you want to remind yourself?), as is 1st Class.  X3 is bad, and DoFP really comes off as "excuse to delete X-men 3 from the continuity because we did a lot of unrepairable damage otherwise!" to give you an idea of the kind of errors that movie has.  Even ignoring the continuity thing, movie is just all over the place with idiot plot syndrome at times, and even things like "we're introducing this plot element and character! ...now it's dropped until the very end because shut up."  Origins is pretty much awful after the first 40 minutes which are good but not excuse enough to watch the movie.  The Wolverine, by contrast, is "Good but skippable."  The movie was clearly made as a fun hold over until DoFP came out, and it succeeds at that, while having some surprisingly good character work at times (though does seem to have this issue of "Oh crap, we went 10 minutes without a fight scene, FIX THAT NOW!" and yeah, the movie does suffer.)

[Shale]

First Class is really good, especially if you liked Xavier and Magneto's past selves in DOFP and would like to see them carry a movie with no Wolverine to steal the spotlight.

Coming from the comics, I thought orienting the plot around Mystique's "fall" was a nice way to adapt the original story (where Mystique is still the killer, but as a hardened villain).

[Cmdr_King]

Well, there is a difference.  Wolverine gave his foes a chance to retreat, and only attacked after they shot him, saw it did nothing, and still tried to stop him.  Mystique in every confrontation would have been shooting an unarmed man.  Two very different things philosophically that would affect them very differently.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Into the Woods - Went into this movie not knowing anything about it other than that my friend wanted to watch it. It's alright, but it's far too long, has way too much singing (I'm not a big fan of non-animated musicals -- I think it seems just a little too corny), and is a bit disjointed. It has some pretty good prince satire though. "I was raised to be charming, not sincere!" The guy who played him, Chris Pine, is pretty damn hot.