Movies

[Meeplelard]

Superman and Batman: Apokolips:  Honestly, the name of the movie is an indicator of everything I find wrong with the movie...

It's clearly a movie meant to be about Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, and how she actually becomes Supergirl.  That could be actually cool, and different person to use as a viewpoint of the movie.  Except, you look at the name and you see it's Superman and Batman...and thus, the movie puts way more emphasis on those two than it should on her.  Really, everything wrong with the movie takes place in the 2nd act (we'll say that starts on Themaskura (SP?)):

I have some minor gripes before then, but once you get to the island, there's like a total disregard of Kara as a character, and she's relegated to a Damsel-in-Distress.  Oh, but that's fine, because the movie makes up for it with having most of the cast be strong female characters...no sorry, that doesn't do it, because it's not the female thing that gets me; it's that you did EVERYTHING WITH KARA off screen.  I don't mind your Main Character being turned into a DiD if it leads to legitimate development, which the movie does.  I do mind that they sacrifice like all her screen time in the 2nd act just so your BIG NAMES can get more screen time.  Two obvious examples:

-The Attack on Themaskura with ARMY OF DOOMSDAY CLONES (...which was an absolute waste of Doomsday, but I digress).  Ok, cool action scene, but wait, just a diversion for Kara to get kidnapped.  Rather than showing Kara and Harbringer fight off the Furies and failing, we just see the aftermath, because watching Superman, Batman and the Amazons fighting DOOMSDAY CLONES!!! is way more important.

-Kara's brain washing is completely off screen.  She's kidnapped, then Darkseid just goes "YOU WILL LEARN TO FOLLOW ME BECAUSE I AM DARKSEID!"  then next we see, she's dressed in BDSM and is all evil and fighting Supez.  Would it really be hard to ask to show SOME of that brain washing a bit?  Instead it's just "Shock Reveal, she's a bad guy!"

To make matters worse?  most of the Superman vs. Kara fight is OFF SCREEN AS WELL.  Instead, we get Batman vs. Darkseid and the Super Powered Cat Fight of Wonder Woman/Big Barda vs. the Furies.  Not that these scenes were bad necessarily, but again, just felt like padding to divert the focus away from anything Kara related.


Just contrast that to what Act 3 did, which is just Clark and Kara on Kent farm and RANDOM DARKSEID!  They actually get Superman out of the picture quickly, and force Kara to fend for herself against freaking Darkseid, and she even puts up a decent fight all things considered, and even though she gets overwhelmed, she still is the one who ultimately saves the day.

See, that's keeping your main character in the spotlight.  Sure, temporary deviations can exist...and should...but Act 2 just felt like it went out of it's way to try and keep Kara NOT on screen as much as possible.

Other than that...well, movie entertained me.  Not one of the better DC Animated films, though, as it's leagues behind of movies like Crisis on Two Earths.  I also need to hype Darkseid's Voice because the fact that they kept a dignified, straight commanding voice like that, and didn't try to SUPER EVIL DEMON IT UP like you'd expect with a design like his is nice.  The voice contrasts his design, but not his character, and that's a good thing if you ask me.  I know, Darkseid always has a voice like that, but this is just a good opportunity to acknowledge it.



Doctor Strange:  Mandy was watching Hulk vs. Wolverine because Deadpool, decided since Netflix was loaded up I'd watch this.

Fun little movie, if different.  They do a good job of making Strange a completely unlike-able douche early on, but at the same time, you do sympathize with the guy when something bad happens.  Also, Wong was more fun than I was expecting, capable of delivering occasionally witty lines with an absolute straight face.  Dormammu's fight was visually amusing but a little underwhelming at the same time.  Still, fun enough diversion.

[OblivionKnight]

Hey, I see these.

Transformers Live Action: Watched the whole series.  While not faithful to the original series, it's good if you ignore a lot of that.  Also, ignore a LOT of the excess stuff.  Revenge of the Fallen is the worst about it (seriously, cut out about 60 minutes of extra crap, movie doesn't change at all), but is probably my favorite of the 3.  Still, I could do without Wheelie humping Mikaela's leg...let me do it instead! 

Ahem.

Anyway, overall, it's good.  Lots of action, and the storyline is generally nothing special (with the exception of Jesus Robots in Revenge of the Fallen...ugh so stupid), but overall enjoyable as a series. 


Life of Pi: Decent movie.  Pretty faithful adaptation of the book, minus a few points.  But streamlined things well.  Overall liked it - not my favorite movie, but doesn't do anything bad.


The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Really good.  Definitely the best one I've seen this year so far.  Really love its pretty realistic portrayals of things.  Also, go Pittsburgh, yeah yeah.  Just a great movie.


Think I saw more, but that's all I remember for now.

[Captain K.]

GI Joe Retaliation:  This is objectively terrible, but hey, ninja mountain climbing.  Also they pull a Cyclops and kill the main character 15 minutes into the movie.

[Meeplelard]

Watchmen: I actually read the comic first and well, was interested in the movie because I heard outside of the ending, it was a very faithful adaptation.


And...for the most part, yeah, it was.  There were minor detail changes here and there, but nothing too big; stuff that was changed to save time, expected changes because Movie =/= Comic, so you gotta do adjustments, etc.  but overall, my sister (who also read it not too long ago) and I were able to appreciate the movie and what not.

Fun stuff, in any event, if a little too graphic at times which I didn't mind other than it felt like it was being graphic for the sake of being graphic. 

The change in the ending...well, the plan I actually thought was an improvement because it fit better with what they were talking about throughout the story.  What I felt didn't work was removing the fact that Dr. Manhattan tells Ozymandias that he hasn't changed anything, and nothing actually ends, illustrating that no, he hasn't actually solved the problem, just killed millions.  Just going with Niteowl laying on the guilt and a beat down...yeah, doesn't have the same strength.

[Cmdr_King]

I remember Grefter suggesting the film wanted to maintain some of the 'shock value' the original comic had in the 80's, which I can kinda buy but I agree, a bit heavy on the ultra violence.

[Grefter]

If it was going to be true to its roots it needed to be at or above the standards of the time.  They succeeded.

[Shale]

Wreck-It Ralph was great. Well, obviously the arcade-community stuff was a riot (everybody hanging out at Tapper's bar was probably my favorite of those), but I was prepared to be annoyed at how much time they spent in Sugar Rush. And yet the characters playing off each other, plus the constant barrage of puns, kept it fresh until the actual racing went down. And it very much felt like a Pixar movie. Good for Lassetter, I guess.

[Lady Door]

When did movies get to be so expensive?!

Andrew and I were going to go see Jurassic Park in 3D IMAX for our anniversary. Then we realized it would have cost us $35 to do so. We considered seeing The Croods instead -- we like animation, it's gotten decent reviews, could be good, why not? -- and then realized that would itself have been $23. That is, of course, before concessions (of which we usually get the kids' snack box and maybe a soda).

With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Instant Video, and DVD releases lagging only 3 months behind theatrical, I do not know that I'm going to feel like going to the movies unless there's something I really feel the need to see in IMAX. I hate 3D anyway, so it's not like I feel like I'm missing out by watching the DVD at home. It's the big & loud I go to the cinema for.

(For the record, we stayed in and watched the second half of Doctor Who, Season 3, which was a fantastic set of episodes.)

[Sierra]

Holy shit that avatar is a chameleon on a tricycle.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Wearing a top hat. Posh, ain't it?

[Meeplelard]

All Star Superman:  Well, it's Action Comic #1's 75th Anniversary, which is to say, it's Superman's 75th Birthday and I only knew that due to listening to radio on the car ride home and it popped up, so I said "I should do SOMETHING to honor that."  Not spending $60 on Injustice though, so I decided to just watch this on Netflix, because hey, based off a good comic.

It does a decent job of adapting the comic.  Cut out a bunch of arcs, but to be expected; putting all 12 issues into one movie is what Watchmen did, and that was 3 hours long, and they clearly didn't want that, so yeah.  I do question having the Not!Zod arc though; everything else seems to fit, but that just felt like "we need to kill 10 minutes of time, shoe-horn in one of the random issues."  Personally, I'd have chosen the "Supermen from the Future" arc since it'd fit in better with the ending, the earlier mention of descendants, etc.  Plus the gravestone scene wouldn't feel as tacted on.

But what they did show was pretty much spot on with the comic, and that's enough.  Made me appreciate it more in some regards, since there were plot points I missed the first time around that the second established was actually there.

[DjinnAndTonic]

To be fair, Jurassic Park was a freakin awesome. I literally hadn't watched the movie since it first came out in theatres and it gave me nightmares about Raptors opening doors in my house.

Watching it again as an adult, I got that nostalgic feeling, but I felt like I was watching a whole new movie. It's actually a pretty fucking amazing film.

<RestoftheDL> Welcome to the 1990s, Djinn. Also, Citizen Kane is a great film.

[AndrewRogue]

Jurassic Park really does stand up amazingly well. I'm still somewhat impressed by the CG these days.

[Meeplelard]

It depends in what way you're talking about Jurassic Park.

The "spectacle" shall we say as a loose catch all for Non-writing related things?  Yeah, can't argue that.  It's a fine case of "early CG DONE RIGHT" and especially impressive when you see all the 90s CG that looks awful by today's standards and came out years later.   Oh sure, looked great back then because "wow, so real!" but then you see it now and go "man, that looks awful."  Jurassic Park doesn't have that; the dinosaurs still looked damned good.
Also, I believe the movie wasn't afraid to use Life-size Models/Machines for some of the effects, so at times, there was something actually there on screen, which never hurts!

As far as non-spectacle related things go?  The movie's plot was always kind of weak,  and there really wasn't much there.  I can't imagine this holding up because, you know, the movie wasn't good in this regard when it came out.


That said...I am totally on board with saying "The movie is fun enough to watch just because dinosaurs that I can overlook it's weak points."  Fun flick, to be sure.

[Idun]

Saw a lot of movies, too many to include in a lazy post:

Hobbit, 3/5. Best thing were all the British actors I've seen from Being Human, Sherlock, etc.

Helvetica, 5/5. Eponymous user handle. 5/5 not for "cinematography," or anything other movie critical observ. More: "Wow, I never thought about typography having a critical and crucial place in mid20th c modernism." Great interviewees and a good pace, not too much ken burns.

Beautiful Losers, 3/5. Art film. Ha ha, Shepherd Fairey, pre-lawsuit.

Our City Dreams, 4/5. Art film. Fan of all the artists; women seem to have a better acumen towards talking about their work. <3 Ghada Amer. Ana beHeb Masr.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, 3/5. Should have covered biennial responses much more. I like his work, but the more I learn about Weiwei and 20thc Chinese art, the less I think of him as an artist.

Poliwood, 2/5. Poli 2008 docufilm on election and celebrities. Eh.

Night Catches Us, 4/5. Life of a few Black Panthers in the aftermath of a symbolic "Huey." Kerry Washington, don't really enjoy her acting, but she did okay in this film. I enjoy anything related to the Black Panthers; I could see myself supporting them in another life back then.

Casa de mi Padre, 3/5. Good film; okay drama.

Portlandia (entire show): Great first three episodes; hipster jokes falter from episode 4 and on. The only continuity I see is finding humor in the possibility that people are as they depict (PS, lesbian bookstore owners, TOTALLY encountered people like them!)

[Grefter]

Warm Bodies - Saw this last weekend but wanted a while to stew over it.  It is a pretty good movie.  It does a ton of things right but isn't 10/10 MOVIE OF THE YEAR GO WATCH THIS NOWOWWWW like the normal thing I come back from not picking bits here and there at.  I don't think any way I could describe it does it justice and even worse anything I try to describe it with will make it sound even worse.  The way it is marketed as a Zombie Romantic Comedy put me off it at first, it sounds like a fucking terrible idea where people are just jamming zombies into everything.  It got good reviews though and its time slot fit what I was after.  So it got a watch. 

So read this next bit where I make it sound like a total pile of wank with a grain of salt, it is actually really cool about it.  The marketing does not even remotely do it justice.  It is not really a Zombie Romantic Comedy so much as Romantic Comedy with zombies as metaphor.  At no point is it even really a zombie flick, mostly since the lead is one of the zombies (which I know makes it sound OH SO WITTY).  It takes the concept of a romantic comedy structure, casts the male lead as a zombie and sets it post zombie apocalypse.  It isn't a deconstruction, it isn't a pastiche, it isn't a satire.  I don't even really know what to call it  (Post Modern?  That makes it sound even wankier).  It isn't even a comedy first, but when it is funny it is pretty great at it.

I don't really know how to describe it properly, it just does a lot of things right.  It isn't an amazing movie, it is just a good solid movie.  I would recommend seeing it at the movies if you get a chance at an okay price.  I would highly recommend seeing it when it makes DVD/Netflix/whatever your convenient easy way to see movies is.  I worry that it is kind of going to slip under the radar because it isn't an earth shattering movie, it isn't a game changer at all and it is crossing over a niche (although one of growing popularity) of a Zombie flick and is being touted as a romantic comedy which is probably just going to turn off both those genres normal target audience.  So try to keep it in mind and watch it.  Spread the word a little because I think it is going to need some love.

[Shale]

Skyfall: yeah, that was completely awesome. It's basically the marriage of Gritty Bourne-Era Craig Bond and Joyfully Goofy Connery/Moore Bond, and they pull it off beautifully (favorite part of that: Bond says "we're going back in time,"  and then hops into a 60s sports car with machine guns in the headlights and an ejector seat, which is kind of an obvious tribute but still fun, before defeating the bad guys with the power of Scottishness, complete with his friend, a bad ass old Scott who is coincidentally about as old as Connery). Bardem owns as the villain, Eve is a great foil for Bond, the action sequences are really fun, and Q is a trip (and looks scarily like Matt Smith, which would have been fantastic).

Oh, and I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is amazing. Cid, you need to get your ass over to Ashburn while they're still running their preview week. $2 tickets and half price food (which is served to you while you watch the movie). They're playing Ghostbusters!

[Sierra]

I saw Ghostbusters on the big screen when the local theater ran it last October. Have I mentioned this is one of my favorite movies? This is one of my favorite movies, so that was cool. It's pretty great still hearing modern kids crack up at it.

[metroid composite]

Iron Man 3

This was written by someone really clever.  Tony Stark spends about 90% of his time outside of his suit, inventing stuff.  And you know how some movies you're like "why don't you just do X???" or "If I was a mad inventer I'd just make X." well he does.  Repeatedly.

I'm not enough of a biologist to know how reasonable the mad science was--what I did understand sounded like they did their homework.

[Meeplelard]

Iron Man 3:

They clearly paid attention to the complaints about Iron Man 2 as this movie is not like Iron Man 2 much at all.  It's also a better movie for it!  That said...

First off, the biggest complaint I have is Mandarin.  On one hand, yes, it's Mandarin, you gotta have him, he's Iron Man's arch nemesis.  But the way they handled him by making him just some lackey of another guy, being an actor and face of the terrorist organization, and not the actual Magical Powered Ring Super Villain that people were psyched to see feels like a slap in the face.  To be fair, it didn't come off as sticking it to the fans like, oh, Spider-Man 3 Venom, but still a huge "lame" moment.  That said, the actual character and actor who played him were spot on, so I can't complain about that, and the plot twist with him was cleverly handled.  Had they called him something other than "Mandarin", it would have been better.  Call this a nitpick, but when you hear "Mandarin" you expect "Science vs. Magic, EPIC BATTLE! EXTREME!!!! *explosions*"

The good...everything else?  Seeing Tony outside of the suit a lot got the point across that this movie is about Tony Stark, not about Iron Man, and by doing so, forces the focus on Tony Stark...by which I mean Robert Downey Jr....by which I mean THE REASON YOU WATCH THE IRON MAN MOVIES (and ONE reason to watch Avengers).  There were a number of cases where I thought the movie was going to go in a direction I was thinking "No, please don't do this!" and...they didn't.  They just kept on a straight path of putting him into what seemed like an unwinnable situation and showed how he can rise to the occassion.  Also, Metal Gear Stark was a fun scene.

The main big thing, besides remembering "right, more RDJ = Good!" compared to Iron Man 2 is the movie has one focal plot point.  It doesn't have a million and one little subplots that somehow work together for an ultimate big climax.  Just one main plotline that gets developed, and thus the main story is that much easier to remember, the plot points, little nuances, etc. don't feel as forced, and most of the "Chekov Gun" scenarios are handled in a small enough time frame that they're still fresh in your mind.

So yeah, competent movie and worth seeing.  Not sure if I can say it's better than the first, but it's significantly better than the second.  The main thing it has going for it, as I said, is it took pointers from Iron Man 2 on what NOT to do, and went back to a more conventional story with just the stakes being raised because "potential finale, make sure we have something big to end on just in case we don't make more" though still ends in a way that says "We can make more without it being forced."

[Grefter]

Iron Mang 3 - Playing with expectations is good.  Solid.  Do recommend.  I watched the credits and came out of it stunned that there was no Matt Fraction involvement.  The humor is amazingly spot on, the comic is compelling story with Tony not in the armour for the vast majority of it and it is all things told quite intelligent.  Then that ending credit sequence.  No Matt Fraction?  Wow.  They hit a lot of the same beats I associate with him.  I see a nod to Warren Ellis in there (amongst others) in the special thanks, so they clearly had some good comic scene input, just not the one I expected to see.

[SnowFire]

Having just returned from it, I agree that Iron Man 3 was good, if not as good as Iron Man.  (I skipped Iron Man 2.)  My biggest problem was that this is a very humorous movie, which is good, except the framing plot is just too dang serious.  Terrorism & the like is actually a more serious plotline than the alien invasion of the Avengers (even if in-setting, alien invasions are worse); Iron Man treated the issue of "Tony Stark running off to go kill dudes in Afghanistan" with a certain amount of respect for the implications of the idea.  The terrorism plotlines in this movie are just...  why.  The good parts of the movie would have worked equally well with really any excuse for deaths & explosions; make it something more connected to Stark, like hostile raids on Stark Industries for its tech, rather than something that by all rights should have the military handling it all.

mc: Agree that lots of Robert Downey Jr. outside the suit (if for slightly overdramatic reasons at times) was pretty cool and doin' it right.  The trick at the end was also kind of an obvious thing that seems like it should have been done a long time ago, but glad they showed it could be done (even if they then pointlessly threw it away before more aliens could even invade).

The biological mad science was on the reasonable end for comic book powers I thought (certainly better than "the sun makes my eyes shoot laser beams" or "DNA mutations give me mind control powers"), but still totally silly for actual science. (Starfish-style regeneration?  Maybe.  The ability to cook armor and get super-strength and also explode?  Yeah no.)  But I dunno about giving them credit for doing their homework.  They could have framed the entire villain plot around it, really, and they just use it as a plot device to set up why the villain is scary instead.  Most notably, this is one of those technologies that, if taken seriously for the setting (and not just an excuse to have superpowered mooks to fight), can have significant implications!  Now, of course, they're running a comic book movie, not speculative science fiction, and I respect that.  And, it did provide a rare excuse for extremely loyal villainous mooks who are willing to aid in all sorts of evil stuff without calling the cops (although really...  still not enough, but better than ye olde "paid Evil Corp. security guards.")  Still, bah, they easily could have framed the entire villainous motive around perfecting the project, now with less kabooms, and some BS excuse to need Stark's help*, coerced if need be.  And if that risked making the villain too sympathetic, to make the project doomed somehow and the villain too blind to see it, and now forging forward into crazyland.  I'd have found that way more interesting than the terrorism plotline.  Unfortunately, the movie unceremoniously offs the minor villain who cared about the "make Stark finish the project, which would have amazing implications for injured people everywhere!" motive, and the main villain seems to sort of forget that motive as well, leaving only the I WILL RUN BOTH SIDES OF THE WAR ON TERROR UH BECAUSE motive.)

* (Yes there should be other supergeniuses in the world, but whatever, it's a comic book plotline, for our purposes only Stark could do it or something.)

Meeple: I dunno, I thought the way the movie did the Mandarin was pretty great, myself.  I was expecting it to suck and it didn't!  But then I don't know anything about the comic book version of the Mandarin at all aside from "Chinese dude with magic rings that blast magic around" and that didn't sound like a very good hook to me.  (Sticking magic in a tech story is an unnecessary complication to screw up the ability to do sane plotting.  It's fine in a crossover where it's just whose power zaps the most, not so much in the main series.  Also heroes need to fight their own dark opposites somehow, so Tony Stark needs to fight technology-based opponents with ridiculous resources, just as spies face other spies, Batman faces crazy normal humans in masks, X-Men mutants face other mutants, etc. )

The movie did a very good job of setting up its Chekov's Guns, yes.  It always let you see something Iron Man has ready in an innocuous context before returning it in a more dangerous one.

[Lady Door]

The movie did a very good job of setting up its Chekov's Guns, yes.  It always let you see something Iron Man has ready in an innocuous context before returning it in a more dangerous one.

Saw Iron Man 3, liked it a lot, blah blah other people have mostly covered my thoughts. I really appreciated this part of it, though -- that it didn't shock with "omg it's future tech and OF COURSE it can do this thing that will suddenly and inexplicably solve this precise problem!" stuff.

I liked the Mandarin, and agree that it would have been unsatisfactory to put comic-book-Mandarin in this series. It does not fit with the current trend in superhero/comic book movies, which is unabashedly bro-science and humanity. (I'm ignoring Thor. Thor is always an exception. He's a fucking Norse god, alright? He just gets to do what he does.)

I did feel like the movie walked a fine line on having -all- its characters be clever. I liked it, but it very, very easily could have tipped over into being too much. The fact that it is a comic book movie, and I willingly suspend my disbelief pretty damn high off the ground to begin with, kept it safe. Still.

[Hunter Sopko]

Hate to burst everyone's bubble on The Mandarin, but a quick perusal of Wikipedia says that his rings are tech-based, not magic (they're magic in a few subseries, but his origin and most of his incarnations have the rings as alien tech). Magic does factor into some storylines, but it usually blows up in his face or ends up actually being alien tech in the end.

But I agree with everyone. The way they did The Mandarin works and was awesome. I have to wonder if Marvel's marketing department is high-fiving themselves right about now. I agree with Snow to a point, but I'm fine with the way they had the villain use terrorism as just a tool in his overall plot. That's why they're villains. They're willing to use ANY underhanded, bastardly, morally reprehensible tool or action to succeed in their plans. Killian WORKS as a modern-day Mandarin, and the nod to the old-school one is fucking fantastic. They could have done classic Mandarin, given the above info, but this is better.

[Grefter]

Sufficiently advanced tech that is functionally no different than magic.  They could have probably pushed that route if they wanted a really strong tie in to Avengers 2 or Guardians of the Galaxy, but meh, I am happier with this being more of a standalone story that so strongly gives its props to the shared continuity without being bound heart and soul to it narratively.