Movies

[The Duck]

Taken 2: Well that was lame. It's a stripped-down version of Taken without the globetrotting, or Liam Neeson really hunting anybody down, or much of anything beyond a minimalist retread of the first movie (the daughter gets a few badass moments but then gets thrown onto a shelf before the climax). There are bad guys, they fuck with Liam Neeson, Liam Neeson shoots them all in the most rote way possible. Liam Neeson.

The scene where Liam Neeson tells his daughter to throw a grenade out the window so he can hear it, all so she can draw circles on a map to locate him is the dumbest thing I saw all of last year.

[superaielman]

I take it you did not watch Dexter then.

[Sierra]

Saw Captain America 2. Good times. More of a direct action thriller than a superhero movie (I was genuinely surprised to see normal dudes getting straight up shot so much so early) but works very hard at being an action movie with beeeg plot twists. I appreciate a work of fiction sneaky enough to use obvious plot twists to distract from more important ones. Story felt pretty self-contained in the way of not obviously suffering from contortions to fit future Marvel movie developments (I think Iron Man 2 suffered the most from this) while still dropping bombs that will obviously affect other movies. Feel they didn't necessarily do as much with Cap adjusting to modern world as they could have, but all in all quite satisfying as a piece of entertainment.

Random great stuff:

-Cap's to-do list.

-WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME

-Namedroppin' Dr. Strange? Aw yeah.

-There's a Shield agent named Sitwell. He is completely hairless. (I understand some AD alumni are behind this movie.)

-I'm told there's a wicked visual reference to another movie in the last scene, but I don't like said movie (Pulp Fiction) enough to personally verify.

Spoilery stuff: I'm glad Evil Bucky got to walk away at the end. While suitably menacing as an adversary, the actor himself didn't get a ton to do and it would've felt like a waste having him get unmasked just in time to die again. You get the impression they do have more planned for him, which is nice.

Kinda split on the Hydra reveal. I love the manner in which it was presented, but making today's problems be active agitation from yesterday's villains is kind of a pat way of absolving responsibility for today's problems. I'd be more okay with it if the actively douchy Shield members didn't genuinely know they were really working for Hydra, and their agenda had simply shifted so far in that direction that the difference was imperceptible.

Did not recognize the baddie in the post-credits sequence, but the twins were obvious enough.

[Meeplelard]

-There's a Shield agent named Sitwell. He is completely hairless. (I understand some AD alumni are behind this movie.)

First off, the connection never occurred to me, but that is indeed awesome now that you bring it up.

Secondly, he's actually a recurring character kind of like Coulson, only less significant.  His first appearance was in Thor, I believe, just being some random guy who popped up to tell Coulson something.  He was later used in some of the one-shot shorts (which I have to get around seeing), and made a few cameos in Agents of SHIELD.  In fact, latest episode has him saying he's been relocated to some ship, which from my understanding, is a blatant Captain America 2 tie-in where early in the movie, we see he's on said very ship.

...and yes, the fact that you didn't realize he was a recurring character shows just how "significant" he actually is (contrast to Coulson who is pretty memorable, even before Avengers/Agents of SHIELD)

[superaielman]

Blade Trinity: Even more amazing than I remember it being. Plot that makes no sense: Check. Stilted dialog that ranges from awful to hilarious: check.An excuse for the two young (at the time) supporting characters to run around in revealing clothes: check. Pro wrestler vampire: check!

Basically everything I hoped for, and more.  Also rewatched half of bad boys 2 before falling asleep, because Bad Boys 2 is our generation's citizen kane.

[Cmdr_King]

Captain America- Y'know... I'm honestly pretty okay with Zola being behind most of the 20th century.  i just wish it had been more "Haha, the names may have changed, but I think you'll agree that HYDRA has indeed triumphed.  Heil HYDRA!!", rather than the SHIELD folk literally being all HEIL HYDRA and shit.  I guess they want to have HYDRA's other schemes be the cornerstone of other movies, so maybe have Pierce be in on the Hydra aspects, but have folks like Sitwell and all them just be "no, Fury is naive, we must ensure peace at all cost".

Cap himself I like in this though.  I feel like his arc is more split up than some other characters, so his first movie is just establishing his character, while Avengers deals with him questioning if he has a place in the modern world.  Then this movie moves on to him debating how he can live up to his own standards and do what he thinks the world needs him to do.  Presumably in the next movie we'll believe that a man can fly.

[Meiousei]

A few things about Cap America.

Given how they did everything, and how the comics have treated "it" in other universes, I'm thinking the movie is actually setting up AoS with their main villains. If AoS gets renewed for a second season, I forsee there's going to be more of the character crossovers (maybe even the more "famous" ones) due to the effects of this.

Btb, did anyone watch the after credits? I have a feeling there's at least 2 more Cap movies coming out to deal with these issues.


And yes, I know the "twins" are part of the Avengers storyline, but what Strucker said in the post-credits was that he had other ways to distract the heroes, which hints that there may indeed be more to do with trying to summon something with Loki's staff. Or worse.

[Grefter]

Given how they did everything, and how the comics have treated "it" in other universes, I'm thinking the movie is actually setting up AoS with their main villains. If AoS gets renewed for a second season, I forsee there's going to be more of the character crossovers (maybe even the more "famous" ones) due to the effects of this.

So we can hold out for some Power Man and Iron Fist on prime time TV in a few years time?

[Sierra]

CK: yeah, that was exactly my response.

Apparently there was a second post-credits sequence that I didn't stick around for. Doesn't sound like anything huge though. Presumably No Longer Evil Bucky touring the Smithsonian exhibit?

[Meiousei]

I wouldn't be surprised. They had Nick Fury appear in one of the first episodes of AoS. And a minor character from one of the other movies to appear in the episodes. If they are going to keep an inter-connected universe and they want newer fans, they are going to make an effort to bring more characters (C-list and D-list) to the small screen. Hence the mini-series on Netflix we discussed a while back.

And I saw both parts of the post-credits. I ended up awkwardly standing in the hall, waiting for the credits to end, due to the Avengers having 2 post credit endings.It was setting up for him to start to figure out who he was, or who he was before. I think there was a huge arc in the comics after Winter Soldier was freed from Hydra that Captain America went after him, to help his friend. Hence why I said there's at least 2 Captain movies after this at least.

[Captain K.]

Captain America:  loved it.  Arnim fucking Zola.

[metroid composite]

Captain America

Today I learned that the patriot act was secretly written by Hitler.

[SnowFire]

Captain America 2: Good movie that is less than the sum of its parts.  The good guy characters are all great, the Winter Soldier is great, and lots of the scenes are snazzily written & genuinely fun, but the overarching villain plot and its implications...  bleh.  See CK, basically.  They had a sort of daring / gutsy idea (SHIELD is the real villain?!) but defanged it by making lots of SHIELD, not just Robert Redford, *actual* Nazis.  Which...  retroactively makes all sorts of characters less sympathetic than I suspect they're supposed to be; for starters, Nick Fury needs to be sooooo fired.  It kind of reminds me how some people give Harry Potter book 4 crap because the series tries to simultaneously sell the fact that Dumbledore is a badass, yet Book 4 relies upon him not noticing a Death Eater literally under his nose, a fair complaint.  But hey, at least that was just 1 spy, and 1 spy who laid low most of the book.  Nazi-SHIELD has explicitly NOT laid low and been doing random evil shit this whole time, and is composed of a lot more than 1 dude, so, um, either Fury is complicit and agreed with the assassinations & the like, or even he doesn't know what his own agency is doing.  I doubt that either of these implications are intended!

Also, there's a certain amount of "it's a movie" suspension of disbelief I can give to various incidents where the villains get to cheat & have weirdly loyal minions & do stuff with less repercussions than there really should be, but CA2 definitely jumps that rail.  The shoot-out in the DC streets is a HUGE incident, and Fury definitely killed or at least wounded some of the fake cops!  What happens when they show up at the hospital?!  Fine, the Nazi part of SHIELD takes over the investigation, but it's literally impossible to cover this up - I'd buy it more if they somehow blamed the real good guys off a faked confession from their own fake cop or something.  And the final showdown sure makes it seem like the Nazis were a huge proportion of SHIELD.

I'd rather they either:
A) We want Cap fighting Nazis, fine.  Robert Redford is a Nazi, he can order the Winter Soldier around, but the mooks to beat up during the movie come from scattered Hydra cells who are basically a big distraction and an excuse to launch Project Insight - it's supposed to be a "wipe out Hydra forever" plan.  Of course Redford plans to reprogram it to make himself Emperor or something.  Cap can fight Nazis most of the movie - who are now more realistically in the shadows, because HORDES OF NAZIS IN A GOV'T AGENCY WAT - and the plot still basically works.
B) We want Cap fighting a morally grey SHIELD.  Well...  go with the original intent of Project Insight, then!  Security is too important to wait for human confirmation, so we're going to power Project Insight with Zola's algorithm because we should trust uploaded Swiss Nazi scientists.  Redford is a villain not because he's actually a member of Hydra, but because SHIELD is drifting too far on the security side of security vs. freedom and is willing to trust a computer program to run the world.  He doesn't pick a fight with Cap, Cap picks a fight with *him* over it, while Nick Fury is in the middle.
Both of the above options would allow SHIELD's better half to still hold up as the sympathetic force we were supposed to expect from the earlier movies, too....


That said, it was an enjoyable movie, mostly since the good guys are still tons of fun.  It'd have been awesome without the over-the-top villain aftertaste.

[Sierra]

Arnim Zola is happy that you remembered his proper nationality.

Grand Budapest Hotel: Just saw this. Lots of fun once you're past the like three different narrative framing devices and in the actual movie. Wes Anderson somehow just keeps getting more Wes Andersony with each Wes Anderson movie. It's amazing. Goldberg device escape sequence? Goldberg device escape sequence.

Signs I never expected to see in a movie: SKI LODGE FOR CLERICAL USE ONLY

[Shale]

Captain America 2: There's some stuff I really liked, mainly the three main characters (Chris Evans is still the best casting choice in a superhero movie since JK Simmons), but on the whole, what a friggin' disappointment. Echoing SnowFire on a lot of basic believability/consistency stuff, but also:

The fact that both the big plot twist and the villains' ultimate scheme are both revealed via infodump is really, really clunky. The fact that Arnim Zola appears in pitch-freaking-perfect comic form, and then gets one scene where he does nothing but deliver the backstory, followed by him exploding and never coming back (no backups? Seriously?) adds insult to narrative injury.

Compounding this is the fact that Pierce isn't really a Cap villain - he's a Nick Fury villain, and to a lesser extent a Black Widow villain. Which is why they're the ones who take him out, so I guess that works, but it leaves Steve with no victory to win other than to punch his best friend a lot and bring down another evil plane (why does Captain America hate planes so much?). I really really really wish they'd had Zola as the active leader of HYDRA, and Pierce as either a well-meaning law-and-order hardliner or a second-in-command. As it is it feels like they wasted Zola both as a character and as an opportunity to give Cap a full-on supervillain to foil.

Also, I have one major problem with the ending, namely that the loyal elements of SHIELD are totally useless. One of the overriding themes of the Cap movies is that Captain America inspires ordinary people to become heroes. Which works great with Falcon, but less so when he gives that rousing speech over the Triskelion PA system that gets tons of people killed without actually helping a damn thing. Cap and Falcon have to be the ones who stop the helicarriers, so in the name of plot contrivance every single good-guy mook who tries to stop HYDRA gets unceremoniously murdered. Steve's inspiring moment makes things worse for everybody and causes meaningless innocent deaths. That shouldn't happen! And the annoying thing is that there are three helicarriers, so it's not like it would have wrecked the climax for SHIELD to ground one on their own. Give the ordinary joes a win and that whole final sequence would go down a lot smoother.

On the whole it was fun, but it's the first Marvel movie in a while that I feel no desire to rewatch; the plot has too many wasted opportunities and the action's good but without any really fun setpiece that would make me want to come back to it. Probably the second-worst in the franchise, ahead of Iron Man 2?

[Meeplelard]

Saw a bunch of stuff, too lazy to mention until now.  Will be brief!

Great Gatsby: At first, I thought this was really odd and surreal movie...then I realized that was entirely the point since it's from Nick's perspective, so of course crap is going to be blown out of proportions into extremes, so the "Good" becomes "Great", the "nice" becomes "Grand", the "bad" because "awful" etc.  and that made it work better because it helped remind us "This is one guy's perspective, it is going to be biased."  Certainly made use of the narrative more so than most where it's just one guy talking and we see scenes allegedly exactly as they happen.

Pacific Rim: Believe it or not, I wasn't super hyped about this movie, and honestly, I didn't think it was THAT amazing.  The fight scenes were kind of disappointing compared to the kind of stuff I've seen in the Heisei Godzilla and Gamera films, and it doesn't help that the Kaiju designs are just so BORING.  They have a bunch of neat Jagers, then kill 2 of them off in one fight scene, just so the main one can look more awesome when it takes down the two things single handedly?  Yeah, sorry, that's just cheap; if you make awesome looking robots, MAKE USE OF THEM, don't just make them to job to the uninspired giant monsters.

American Hustle: Well, it kept my attention, but I wouldn't call it WOMG AMAZING!!! like some claimed.  Mother claims movie is better on a rewatch when you pick up things you didn't notice the first time which...maybe I can see.  It's not bad, but yeah.

Captain America: Winter Soldier: Honestly, I don't agree with the complaints in this topic. I found it fun from start to finish with a good core cast, and a plot twist that was unexpected; the only problem was Agents of SHIELD is too tied into the movie and I couldn't continue watching that until I saw this, DARN YOU CINEMATIC UNIVERSE!  I will note that like I have heard, yes, the Winter Soldier is highly underutilized and feels like a needless thread for the movie, only tossed in because "We need a Super Villain who won't get curb stomped by Captain America because climax."  The climax did go on a little too long though; I mean, what was there was fun, but the movie was already getting lengthy and they could have cut that down by 10 minutes...actually, when I think about it, if they cut out all the Winter Soldier related stuff and just made it "Cap and Widow vs. the World", the length complaints would have gone.

Frozen: Finally saw this and...well, for the most part, it lived up to it's hype.  That's all I'll say about it because I don't think there really needs much else to be said...no, I am not leading up to a pun regarding a certain song either (that last part came to me last minute and went "no, I am totally NOT doing that, screw you!")

[The Duck]

Everyone should watch the Raid and the Raid 2.

[Grefter]

Yessssssss just off the strength of The Raid.  That had some of the best knife violence I have seen in ages.

You saw Dred right Duck?  Similar but different.  Way better than a 2000AD property film has any right to be.

[The Duck]

Yessssssss just off the strength of The Raid.  That had some of the best knife violence I have seen in ages.

You saw Dred right Duck?  Similar but different.  Way better than a 2000AD property film has any right to be.

The Raid 2 has excellent baseball bat and hammer violence. Critics are actually docking it for having too much plot (it's two and a half hours long), which I can see but I thought it was fairly unobtrusive and it at least sets some stakes even if it was done in a dumb and clumsy way. Still, the last hour has action scenes that are unlike anything I've ever seen before, and the impact from the hits and cracking of the bones are just as visceral than the first, if not more. I had never exclaimed aloud while watching a violent action movie before watching this series. It is wonderful. PS - On my first viewing, I watched the first Raid without subtitles and it didn't matter.

I wasn't in love with Dredd, in part because I had watched the Raid just before it and didn't really dig the hyperstylized slow motion stuff. It was kind of cool for the first scene but I was primed with the way action was shot in the Raid, which didn't rely on any tricks like quick cutting or shaky cam but instead shot the action scenes in a really fluid way. The base stories of the two movies is similar as well but I liked the action in the Raid quite a lot more. Apparently, Dredd's 3D was something special but I wasn't able to see it in that format.

[Grefter]

I can't do 3D (dat vision impairment) but there is distinct sequences that are pretty in 2D that are very clearly made for wow factor in 3D (ie anything on Slow-Mo).

They would definitely hurt each other to watch super close together.  Where Raid is about delicious violence, Dredd is really much more about better quiet moments I think.  The "I am the law" sequence, the bits with the corrupt judges, when he finds a way outside and runs into the kids on the skate ramp and of course any time a fight has been won and people get thrown off things.

Raid's quiet bits are sometimes intense (like when he hides in between the space in the walls), but pail in comparison to dudes just completely destroying each other.

[Cmdr_King]

Amazing Spider-Man 2- Well, contrary to the implication of the previews, this is not in fact a Sinister Six storyline.  Thank god.  (spoiler: they ARE kinda going that direction though.)  Otherwise its strengths are as the last movie: Andrew Garfield is a pretty good spidey, and is better here really as he's clearly more straight up superhero than vigilante, and Emma Stone is a delight.
Okay.  So... they go through with the Death of Gwen Stacey with only the minor change that the Green Goblin is already Harry Osbourn and he's not dead.  I will grant, yes, those are some fine balls you have Sony.  But you realize that the main reason I, and probably most of your audience, are on board with this movie is because of Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, and the chemistry between them, and you just killed two of those three reasons, yes? 

On the whole, enjoyable.  Still would rather have Marvel making these.  Although they can keep the cast, they are swell.

[Shale]

Amazing  Spider-Man 2 - good as long as you don't think about it too much. The fights are well done, the one-liners are snappy, and the main cast all have great chemistry with each other. Reflect on it afterward and you start to realize that nobody's motivations make a whole lot of sense and Peter himself never actually grows as a person, plus there's a while bunch of bloat in the script (amount of mattering Peter's parents do: zero) that could have been used for actual themes. Still, it's a fun popcorn movie.

[Captain K.]

Days of Future Past:  It's excellent.  The ending had me in tears.

Wait until you see Quicksilver.   

[Hunter Sopko]

Days of Future Past: Very good. Not perfect, but easily the second best X-Men movie after X2. Suffers from a few moments where it dips a bit too deeply into corny and heavy sentimentality to where it affects the dialogue, but thankfully they're few and far between, overall easier to stomach than the montage part of First Class. As Captain K notes though, the emotional payoff at the end is very well earned. Quicksilver is also possibly the best part of the movie.

[Captain K.]

No. the best part of the movie is

that it retcons X-Men 3 out of existence.