EbonHawk

What was the last movie you watched?

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I watched Elf last night.  This was the first time, and there will likely be more.  Not a fan of most Christmas movies, but this one was a lot of fun.

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I saw A Star is Born last night with a few old schoolmates. Far darker than I expected, but Lady Gaga was great.

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Mary Poppins Returns, there were a lot of good things here, the cast, the sets and location, the brilliant 2D and 3D animated sequences. The songs were good, but a lot of them weren't as catchy as the originals. But still a solid film.

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The ghost of st Michael's. It's a 1941 Ealing comedy thriller staring Will Hay as an incompetent teacher hired by a boy's school evacuated to a remote Scottish castle, said to be haunted by a murderous ghost. Then the killing starts...

 

My late grandmother saw it new when she was a 14 year old evacuee, and recommended it to everyone in a letter we recently discovered. To me, the biggest surprise was seeing an early role of John Laurie, who spoke exactly like his later Dad's Army character. 

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Saw Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, and loved it. Easily one of the best films I've seen in awhile, and the best Spiderman movie ever. I might honestly like it more than Avengers: Infinity War. It's going to be hard to beat this film in terms of sheer entertainment.

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Just saw Bumblebee.  Certainly a major improvement on the previous live action Transformers films, and I would like to see more movies under this new direction.

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In the past week I've seen:

The House with a Clock in its Walls: I liked it. I'm a professed Jack Black aficionado though, so if you're not, maybe YMMV. I also read John Bellairs when I was little, and thought this had a good amount of creepy horror stuff while still being suitable for kids. Also, that scene-stealing Cate Blanchett strikes again!

The Dark Knight: well, half of it. (Feel free to skip ahead if you want to avoid reading my heretical views) After seeing it in theaters back in '08, I didn't care if I never saw it again, but it showed up in my Netflix queue and...here we are. I still don't care for it. While Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne is one of the better portrayals of the character, his Batman is sorely lacking. Some aspects of the movie are quite good, but so much of it is clunky or ill fitting, or poorly written/choreographed/shot. One of my biggest pet peeves is how it insists on delivering the audience this kind of gritty realism but then tears that down with illogical plot and character contrivances (granted, this trait is distinctly Nolan). Also, bad sound editing, another Nolan hallmark. Not Inception or Interstellar levels of bad, but bad.

I loved Batman Begins, which had the same issues, but I felt (feel) like in TDK they are too numerous and major to forgive so easily. I'll probably finish the movie anyway, but I still don't understand why it's so highly rated.

And finally, Mortal Engines. I wanted to like this one, I really did. I enjoyed the book immensely, and the high concept is definitely appealing, but other than the visuals (which were beyond any doubt remarkable, eye popping, memorable, maybe even near perfect? Definitely worth the price of admission), the movie was frustratingly bland. Not bad, just..flat. Granted, there was a lot to do, building up a future fantasy setting and then laying a complicated plot structure within that, but in trying to do so much, the story leaps along in a way I'm not sure I could have followed if I hadn't already been so familiar with it. It's one I'll see again, probably, but mostly just for the visuals.

Coming up I've got Aquaman and Spider-verse in my sights. Probably not this week, but soon.

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I got around to seeing Aquaman today. The jokes about it being "Wet Thor" or "Hydro (Black) Panther", I say they are not completely wrong. Then the choices to cast Michelle Pfeiffer and William Dafoe, makes me wonder if they were the best choices (not that they were bad doing their parts). Because Pfeiffer played a similar part in Ant-Man and the Wasp. As for Dafoe I was kinda expected him to pull Green Goblin out his back side at some point. And then Randall Park seem to get a "big credit" at the end of the movie and basically he just had a glorified cameo. What is up with that? 

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Just now, samurai-turtle said:

 Then the choices to cast Michelle Pfeiffer and William Dafoe, makes me wonder if they were the best choices (not that they were bad doing their parts). Because Pfeiffer played a similar part in Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Michelle Pfeiffer wasn't in Aquaman - it's Nicole Kidman. Though yes, the parts are quite similar.

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16 hours ago, Clone OPatra said:

Michelle Pfeiffer wasn't in Aquaman - it's Nicole Kidman. Though yes, the parts are quite similar.

Woops... I guess it shows how similar the parts are, I can't keep who is who straight. 

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Just saw Aquaman today. I know lots of people liked it, but I thought it was a disaster. I did like some of the action, and Jason Momoa was pretty good. Everything else is a complete mess. The plot is very boring and predictable, I was never ever engaged with what was happening on screen. Anytime the film tried to be emotional, it fell flat and was hilarious. Though I liked some of the visuals, there was just way too much. I felt like I was watching a video game instead of a movie, and that's not something I should say about a big budget film like this. The acting was on the level of a middle school play, even from good actors! No one sounded like they believed what they were saying, everyone talked like they were in a movie or play. There is lots of talking in the movie, so for the most part the acting was very, VERY distracting. I usually don't discuss music in movies but here I will because it's terrible. It sounds like stock music. The music with lyrics is even worse. Pitbull - Africa, need I say more? Oh yeah there's a romance in the movie, of course it was set up with the same amount of thought as a child cares about the importantce of filing taxes. No thought, none. Its just there cause it needs to be. Honestly I thought we would have moved on from this cliche by now. I give this film a 2/10. Sorry to go on a rant there. 

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Bumblebee, it did not dissapoint. :laugh::thumbup: 

Although I would've liked to see some more of those 'cybertron' scenes; "Decepticons, attack!" :pir-oh:

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I watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure for the first time in well over a decade, maybe 2.  It was fantastic!  I love this movie!

Be excellent to each other.  Party on.

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Dragonball Super: Broly- was a great movie. The fights were the usual amazing spectacle DBZ fans are used to seeing, but the attacks were bumped up thanks to the top notch animation of it all. 

I hope the success of this, and its predecessors, will bring more anime movies here on a more regular basis. 

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Disney's Ralph Breaks the Internet and the DCEU's Aquaman.

Last year's sequel to Wreck-It Ralph kinda gave me not much more than what I already saw in its trailers, so it didn't offer many surprises. That is, save for a hilariously unexpected musical number than I can best describe as Grand Theft Auto meets Disney Princesses (sort of), so I can say it was absolutely worth checking it out for just that alone!  

As for Aquaman, well, I pretty much felt the same way about it as I did for its trailers. For me, I'm just not that welcoming of the DCEU's jarring change in tonal direction, but that's only in aesthetic. I thought its story was fine, one that was well structured and easy enough to follow; but, it was its all-out goofy depiction of Atlantis that I thought reeked of desperate overcompensation. For me, the film's Atlantis was the polar opposite of the DCEU'S Krypton. While Krypton in Man of Steel was novel-looking, it could've used less of a "Lord-of-the-Rings" hue, if you know what I mean. Atlantis, on the other hand, just felt like the most cliché depiction of such, being a mash of Greco-Roman ruins, Buck Rogers-like raygun zaniness, and marine life inspired design motifs. I don't know, I guess I personally prefer depictions of Atlantis suggestive of its place as a "mother civilization" so to speak, tastefully blending a plethora of ancient cultures together for a distinct look. :def_shrug:

Edited by Digger of Bricks

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