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So, the Barbie movie. It had some good moments, but overall, it wasn’t all that great. I don’t know, the mix of silliness and deep-felt emotion/politics didn’t quite work for me.
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So, the Barbie movie. It had some good moments, but overall, it wasn’t all that great. I don’t know, the mix of silliness and deep-felt emotion/politics didn’t quite work for me.
I thought it was quite fun in a very silly way, and Gosling was great in it. I just don’t think it’s a movie that supports the weight of everything that commentators have tried to place on its shoulders.
But in fairness, I’m not sure it’s trying to be anything other than a bit of light, fluffy entertainment, albeit referencing those political aspects in a broad, comical way. The commentary around it is massively overblown, but on its own terms it’s a laugh and in a lot of ways feels like a goofy 80s/90s throwback.
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Kinda sad that’s the last thing Ray Stevenson did… and he didn’t even get an “in memory of”.
IIRC, there was something like an “in memory of” acknowledgement at the end of the first episode.
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Oh yeah, I am sure that happens a lot, as well. I’m only getting second-hand glimpses of this via my kid, and Star Wars fandom seems pretty crazy.
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Saw The Creator tonight and it’s a solid sci-fi film. The guy escorts a little kid story is hardly groundbreaking, but the performances are good and it has some genuine heart to it. The big star here is the visuals. The movie looks amazing. It’s mainly on location shooting with some CG to make everything look more futuristic and it’s very impressive and really sells the huge scope of the world.
It’s a shame it hasn’t done better at the box office, but it’s still a really good one and done movie.
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I don’t know, I felt like all the boardroom politics stuff and things like the running gag about horses were still very silly and took the edge off the sections that were played a little more straight. All the feminism/patriarchy stuff was pretty simplistic, in line with the whole Barbie/Ken outlook, and even the concessions towards greater complexity weren’t exactly very nuanced.
Yeah, well, I didn’t say they were addressing politics well, just that it was a big part of the movie. The lack of nuance didn’t always exactly help as far as my viewing experience was concerned. Again, that was alright in the silly parts but in the ones that were supposed to be serious and heartfelt, it felt like a letdown that the framework was so overly simplistic.
Not that there was any way to do it well in the context of a Barbie movie, I guess. It’s all a pretty fun indictment/satire of patriarchy as long as you leave the role of Barbie herself out of it – the accusation the kid makes against her are never answered in the movie, the poor girl just ends up being dressed in pink and for some reason loving it and that’s that.
I thought they even had some good fun with the parts making light of the casting of Robbie.
Yeah, that one was great. I also loved the mansplaining bits and that they used Photoshop, the Godfather and Stephen Malkmus for those instead of some broader/easier targets.
You may be one of the few who liked it. Reviews I’ve seen have been brutal. The studio didn’t advertise the movie for shit, though. I saw a few commercials and that’s about it
Same here. I only got a few ads on social media, that was it. It looked interesting enough that I am definitely going to watch it when it comes out in streaming, but it wasn’t enough to draw me into theatres.
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Boba Fett >> Obi Wan >> Ahsoka >> Mandalorian >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Andor
This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen on this site!
He’s saying Andor is the best one by a great distance
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Boba Fett >> Obi Wan >> Ahsoka >> Mandalorian >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Andor
This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen on this site!
He’s saying Andor is the best one by a great distance
Oh yeah, those were meant to be, like, arrows, not “greater than” signs. I can see why I would be mistaken for a crazy person.
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I can see why I would be mistaken for a crazy person.
I was worried for you there.
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Heh. Last Man of Earth continues its fun tradition of introducing famous people as guest stars and then killing them off without them having said as much as a full sentence. Uh, I’m in season 4 of this now, so I’ll be finishing it soonish.
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Yeah, I laughed out loud at that bit where […] shows up and is instantly gone.
Yeah, that’s exactly the one I just saw! So great!
It was a fun show that gained an added dimension for me through watching it during the pandemic. I wish it had a better ending.
Oh yeah, watching it back then would’ve been something else… Shame to hear about the ending, I’ll sound back when I’ve seen it!
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The ending isn’t bad exactly, it just clearly wasn’t designed to end there and it feels like there could have been more story to tell.
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Also, fuck the writer for that snydercut joke, it’s been used so much it’s kinda lazy and stale at this point, that’s the most egregious thing about it…. be more creative please.
Lol.
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Well I watched Barbie… and I’m not sure what’s supposed to be the take away from it
Something to do with horses I think.
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Well I watched Barbie… and I’m not sure what’s supposed to be the take away from it… kinda felt all over the place.
I thought it was pretty focused in what it wanted to say, but it’s not like it’s something you can mentally go back to and dig deeper or anything. It is what it is.
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It is what it is.
That should have been the tagline on the advertisements for this film.
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Supernatural
And it’s the end of the line.
One of the things that just occurred to me in the wake of watching the finale is how it all goes back to Chuck / God. Why is the entirety of existence – heaven, hell, purgatory, angels, demons – such a mess? Because it was set up by a narcissistic crapbag.
Once he’s gone? Jack sets things as they should have been and it works so damn well as a series finale.
Also looking back at the general landscape for US TV over the last 3-4 years, it has been a slaughterhouse. Series axed all over the place, plot lines never to be resolved.
They did an absolute conclusion. Likely as the series was to end at 5, didn’t and kept going. Short of a definitive end, there would be the temptation to somehow do a season 16. They were smart enough not to do that, instead doing an episode that paid off 15 series extremely well.
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njerry wrote:
Christian wrote:
It is what it is.That should have been the tagline on the advertisements for this film.
Unfortunately Popeye had the trademark.
No, Popeye’s tagline is “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam (says Popeye the Sailorman)”
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why are 99% of your posts doubles?
The only thing I can think of is you’re going “back” after you post, and that’s the cause.
Or you love Satan, but who am I to judge?Feels like we haven’t had an “it can be two things” in a long time.
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I won’t rehash examples, but we know of movies that bombed so badly and it
ruined the careers of the actors involved.Do we though? I mean, I am sure there are examples of that, but off the top of my head, I could probably only give examples of actors who were on a downward slope anyway, and maybe one movie that broke the camel’s back, as it were. What examples can we think of where one movie destroyed an actor’s up to this point flourishing career…?
but what was that? I’m not quite sure…
Patriarchy = not great
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My local cinema always does a themed horror season in October and this year it’s 70s. So while stuff like Exorcist, The Omen, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the like are going to be on around Hallow’een it’s kicked off with more outsider, oddball and obscure stuff. With that in mind I’ve been to the cinema a couple of times this weekend!
On Friday night I saw The Brood, an early Cronenberg movie that I’d been meaning to check out for ages. And well, when you learn that he had gone through a messy divorce just before making it a lot of things fall into place. The plot centres around Frank and Nola, a recently separated couple with a young daughter. Nola is undergoing a controversial form of therapy and while she’s in seclusion in their facility, her daughter is brought to visit her each weekend. And after one visit Frank discovers bruises on the daughter’s back he starts to look into what’s happening in the facility she’s being kept in. And then after a traumatic therapy session, a small humanoid creature breaks into Nola’s mother’s house and kills her while Frank and Nola’s daughter is in the house. The violence escalates as Frank discovers more strangeness to do with the therapy centre and Nola’s sessions bring up more trauma, leading to a suitably Cronenbergian conclusion.
It’s a very interesting movie. I jokingly said to Laura as I was heading out to the cinema that I was expecting weird sex, body horror and lots of gore, and there’s not much of any of these things in the movie. There is a weird sexual frisson going on between Oliver Reed’s Dr. Hal Raglan and pretty much everyone he interacts with, especially his patients so we can check that off at least and the one body horror moment is quite gross so it does still fit the Cronenberg wheelhouse. Reed and Samantha Eggar as Nola are fantastic, very much the standout performances in the movie and while the other actors range from good to very good, these two are basically in their own little film and it’s way better than the main one. Overall it’s weird and very personal in a way Cronenberg usually isn’t and it’s pretty good.
Then last night I went to see Blacula, a classic Blaxploitation movie. After a very interesting start – the titular character is originally Mamuwalde, an 18th Century African prince visiting Castle Dracula with his wife Luva to attempt to gain Dracula’s support in curtailing the slave trade only to discover that Dracula is perfectly happy with things as they are and Dracula goes on to make a pass at Luva, which ends up in a fight. Dracula reveals his true nature and to punish Mamuwalde turns him into a vampire, locks him in a coffin and then seals the coffin and Luva in a secret room and leaves them to rot, dubbing him Blacula and leaving him with the knowledge that he’ll live forever, trapped beside his doomed wife.
Fast forward to 70s LA, a pair of interior designers have bought up the assets of Castle Dracula and inadvertently release Mamuwalde who promptly drinks their blood, and in short answer encounters a woman named Tina who looks identical to Luva and begins to pursue her romantically. At the same time her sister’s boyfriend is an LAPD pathologist who figures out something is fishy with the deaths of the two designers and as a result he and Mamuwalde are on an inevitable collision course.
I’ll admit I was a bit surprised at how conventional the main story is. The opening section is an interesting twist to add to the vampire milieu and has a nice vein of African heritage and nationalism to set it aside from other vampire romps, but once it reaches the present day Mamuwalde pursues his love, drinks some blood, turns some people into vampires and his opponents slowly piece together what’s going on. It’s pretty funny how fast Mamuwalde and Tina fall in love via some hackneyed conversations and how matter of fact everyone accepts the truth of Vampires being real when confronted with one. As Blaxploitation movies go it’s worth checking out but like, watch the classic crime ones like Shaft and Foxy Brown first because they’re really good movies on their own rights while this is more of a good one which is more worthy for its place in cinema history than for it’s own qualities. It is pretty cool that the first two characters in the 70s section are an interracial gay couple that are only partially played for laughs, and the audience reactions to characters using words for black and gay people that are far less acceptable today amused me.
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why are 99% of your posts doubles?
Must be a glitch in the Matrix
I did tell the powers that be about it, but so far…
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It’s a weirdness when you hit submit, basically. I find it happens to me if I accidentally double-click it like this
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t’s a weirdness when you hit submit, basically. I find it happens to me if I accidentally double-click it like this
So… double clicking is the culprit.
My Windows habits…Many thanks @lorcan_nagle
A gentleman and a scholar as always————-
I’ve been checking out the Donner cuts of his Superman 2
When it came out it wasn’t like this huge debate like now of Snyder cutsWhen Donner was let go, apparently a lot of the Brando footage went as well.
The Superman 2 in the theatres was decent, although some of the scenes (like that wind tunnel) was stupid
Some of the Donner scenes (like when he went back to regain his powers) worked better.
It is 43 years old after all.Best thing to do is splice some Donner scenes together with the main movie and whatever works for you is your “real” movie
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Bodies
Know you are loved.
First, the usual rule of time travel stories apply – don’t think about it too much.
With that in place, what unfurls is a pretty good murder mystery across three time periods, of the same body. What it becomes is a very effective rejection of utilitarianism. Of the idea that any atrocity can be justified for “the greater good”.
It then goes step further by having its prime advocate finally accept that it was all lies. Killing half a million people didn’t help him. Gaining wealth in the past didn’t. He was not loved. And as his worldview crumbles, he seeks to undo the atrocity a prior version of him created.
Episodes 1-5 were best, ep 6 predictable, ep 7 a bumpy recovery, with episode 8 really nailing the landing.
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Our Flag Means Death
Truthfully, Todd, I couldn’t even get through the first episode of Season 1. I tried it because of all the good reviews it got here and from other friends, and because I generally like stuff from Waititi…but this one just seemed to be trying too hard, and it just didn’t work for me.
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Our Flag Means Death
Truthfully, Todd, I couldn’t even get through the first episode of Season 1. I tried it because of all the good reviews it got here and from other friends, and because I generally like stuff from Waititi…but this one just seemed to be trying too hard, and it just didn’t work for me.
I felt the same. It just didn’t land for me.
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I really want to check this out, but the streaming service that has it in Germany for the time being is one that doesn’t do original language and only shows their shows dubbed (as I had to find out when I tried to watch Peacemaker there). Motherfuckers.
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Bodies
Know you are loved.
First, the usual rule of time travel stories apply – don’t think about it too much.
With that in place, what unfurls is a pretty good murder mystery across three time periods, of the same body. What it becomes is a very effective rejection of utilitarianism. Of the idea that any atrocity can be justified for “the greater good”.
It then goes step further by having its prime advocate finally accept that it was all lies. Killing half a million people didn’t help him. Gaining wealth in the past didn’t. He was not loved. And as his worldview crumbles, he seeks to undo the atrocity a prior version of him created.
Episodes 1-5 were best, ep 6 predictable, ep 7 a bumpy recovery, with episode 8 really nailing the landing.
I just finished watching this and enjoyed it too. A decent limited series with some good actors and a fun intricate detective plot that takes place across four different eras, and which works well knowing as little as possible about it going in. It’s not perfect but I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I never read the comic it’s based on but I’ll pick it up out of curiosity – I can imagine the story working quite well in that medium.
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njerry wrote:
Christian wrote:
It is what it is.That should have been the tagline on the advertisements for this film.
Unfortunately Popeye had the trademark.
No, Popeye’s tagline is “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam (says Popeye the Sailorman)”
No, that was Gloria Gaynor.
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So, a couple of weeks ago I see the following line in my local cinema’s newsletter: “Emma Seligman’s highly anticipated Bottoms finally punches its way on to the big screen.”, so I click though, and the description looks odd and interesting so I look up the trailer:
And it made me laugh a lot so I kept an eye out for when it opened. And then it sold out over the weekend and I caught the evening showing last night instead. And it’s fucking hilarious.
The plot is incredibly by the numbers – PJ and Josie aren’t hated because they’re lesbians, but because they’re untalented and they’re desperate to get laid before they start college so when a minor altercation with the school’s star quarterback coincides with them sardonically saying to a friend that they were in juvie over the summer break, their sudden attention leads them to start a self-defense club to try and attract the cheerleaders they fancy, and insanity follows. And that insanity is what makes the movie great while the story unfolds exactly as you’d expect it.
The humour is brash and uncompromising, there’s so much weird shit happening in the background in the school scenes. It takes all the tropes of the teen comedy and ramps them up to ludicrous levels and had the whole audience in the cinema laughing all the way through. The people I was sitting beside were repeating their favourite jokes before the credits have finished rolling. It’s also a very good example of how comedy can be absolutely filthy and still staunchly feminist, pushing back against the bizarre narrative that feminists are scolds about this kind of content. Well worth checking out, it’s already hit streaming in the US as it came out there in August, but will probably be in cinemas on this side of the ocean for another week or two.
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I saw the new Taika Waititi movie, Next Goal Wins, based on the documentary of the same name. I loved Taika’s early movies, and didn’t hate Love and Thunder, but wasn’t a fan of this at all.
It feels like Taika has forgotten how to do anything in an understated way. Everything in this movie is dialed up to extremely goofy levels, in a way that’s unnecessary. All of the American Samoan characters act like naive country bumpkins. Taika himself only has a cameo, at the very start of the movie, but every character we meet has the same voice and mannerisms as him, with the exception of the handful based on real people.
One of the real people the movie adapts is a trans player on the team, and the only way Taika has to do that storyline is to make Fassbender a massive unsympathetic transphobe, until she can forgive him and then she just exists to be the one person he can talk to.
Another example of the unneeded goofiness is in the stakes of the movie. The team can’t just have only ever won one game, they have to have never scored a goal ever. Losing the big match can’t just mean they stay at the bottom of the world rankings, it has to mean the team will be dissolved. And the executive who levels this threat can’t just be some asshole, he also has to be sleeping with Fassbender’s wife.
Elisabeth Moss plays Fassbender’s wife, and I have no idea why she’s in this movie. It not only feels like a complete waste of her time, it’s a waste of her time twice as almost every scene she’s in is with Will Arnett, who replaced Armie Hammer for reshoots three years after the movie was originally filmed.
There are a few funny moments in there, but the tone of it is all over the place in a way that made it hard for me to care when it wants to be a standard underdog sports movie.
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I watched the first couple of episodes of the Scott Pilgrim anime on Netflix. It’s an enjoyable show and definitely captures the vibe of the comics while also doing some things differently. The voice cast (from the movie) are decent and the animation has lots of fun little anime touches. Looking forward to watching the rest.
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Yeah, I’m on episode 6 of the show right now, and it goes places. It’s very interesting.
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Yeah, I’m on episode 6 of the show right now, and it goes places. It’s very interesting.
I’m watching it with my son who hasn’t read the comics or seen the movie, and I’m finding it… maybe not the best place to start for him? But for me it’s an inventive reworking that has an interesting relationship with the original(s), moreso than most adaptations.
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Enjoyed the first two episodes of Fargo a lot. The last season had some good moments but didn’t work; this is a clear attempt to go back to everything that worked in the early seasons. As such, it feels a bit too familiar, with all the over-the-top accents, snow, clueless characters, etc.
Jon Hamm, Juno Temple, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the lead roles make it work though.
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I just watched an old TV movie that scared the hell out of me as a kid: I, Desire. It stars David Naughton as a law student working as a coroner’s aide who gets involved in a strange case involving a vampire posing as a prostitute. It wasn’t as scary as I remembered it, but then again, I was seven when this movie first aired.
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I watched A Haunting In Venice last night, the latest Branagh Poirot. I really liked the first one of these movies, the second one was OK, and this was slightly diminishing returns again.
But like pizza, even a mediocre Poirot is still pretty good, and this is an enjoyable mystery with some nice little horror touches in the direction.
It lacks star power compared to the previous two films, and there’s also a slight monotony to the location – it’s not as glamorous or globetrotting as the other movies – but I still enjoyed it as a fun little whodunit with some decent twists.
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The first two Branagh films did OK in terms of casting, but I get the feeling that they wanted to keep the budget in check here. Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh are both in it though, and are pretty good.
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I’ve been watching the third season of My Life Is Murder, a show that continues to be very good but also almost as interesting on its production side as anything else.
For those that don’t know it, season 1 was made by/for an Australian network and starred Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a widowed former police officer who spends her days making bread for a local cafe and working as a consultant on murder cases for an ex-colleague/sort of love interest guy, with the help of Madison, a police techie. It was set and filmed in Melbourne.
Season 2 came post-2020 and the show relocated to New Zealand. Alexa, despite a s1 episode showing her at school in Australia, is actually from New Zealand! She up-sticks and moves back there, Madison following along, where she starts making bread for a local cafe and consults on murder cases for local detective/potential love interest guy. It’s impressive how brazen it was in just porting the whole thing over and it worked well.
Season 3 has been on Alibi the past couple of months (I think probably aired in NZ last year maybe) and stays in NZ. But there are more interesting changes. First off, the design and costume departments have suddenly gone big on fluorescent colours. Pretty much everyone wears bold, flat colours, sets are dressed in them, as many props as possible are. Last episode I watched had someone in a livid pink leather jacket. Another had quiet cash payments being made in envelopes that were a not-so-subtle fluoro blue. It’s not a problem by any means, but it is such an odd, bold choice. It’s like they’ve decided to try and single-handedly make fluorescence happen.
Some examples.
The other odd thing is casting. Madison is present in the first episode, then only on zoom calls for the next few episodes. This absence is half-explained in the show as her being in France (no reason is given). I assume the actress either had Covid or was tied up filming something else. As the show has done before, a blatant stand-in is introduced: Beth, an impossibly young ex-Navy intelligence officer. She’s passed off as a friend of Madison’s and fills her function for a few episodes until Madison returns. So far, so TV. Except, Beth doesn’t then disappear, as you might expect. She hangs around on the periphery of the rest of the season, appearing in most episodes to help out in some small way, in scenes that largely feel unconnected to the rest. Sometimes it feels like they’ve just given her a few of Madison’s scenes and changed the names. I quite like Beth as a character, so it’s nice having her stick around, but it is odd given she’s fairly superfluous once Madison is back.
Then, in episode 8 (of a 10 episode season) suddenly a hitherto unknown cute kid sidekick is introduced in the form of Alexa’s niece, Olive. She’s the daughter of Alexa’s ex-con brother Will (who has been showing up since s2) and a rare example of this kind of character that kinda works. She doesn’t feel like she’s dragging down the show at least and the actress is good (always a gamble with child actors). But it’s such a strange addition to make. It feels more like a staple of failing US shows, where they want to soften the characters or tilt the audience demographic or replace ageing teen characters in a sitcom. It’s especially strange to do it so late in a season, out of nowhere, when there’s already one extra character just hanging around.
It’s to the show’s credit that it’s still good despite this. There are decent mysteries every episode, nice characters and I’m often not ahead of Alexa in solving them, which is always a bonus to murder mystery shows.
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(Though the only one I can specifically point to is Up in the Air, in which I thought she crapped out).
Ironically, her performance in that film is the ONLY time I enjoyed Anna Kendrick in a movie.
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So what happens when a load of writers looks at The Boys and concludes that it is far too tame? You get Obliterated. A Netflux miniseries that makes Team America: World Police look restrained.
Violence, some gore, numerous dick jokes, and a good few on display, including one that gets drilled – yes, really. A smattering of piss takes on the action genre, US agency turf wars, and quite bit more.
Yet, somehow, it kind of works. It also resists the last minute cliffhanger for the inevitably cancelled second series too.
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I reread all of Scott Pilgrim last week (holds up surprisingly well!) ahead of watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I’m only one episode in but I’m surprised by how much it’s deviated from the comic. I’d only seen the trailer, not read anything else about it so had expected it to be just a more faithful adaptation than the movie was, but I guess not.
I’m enjoying it, mind. The animation’s fun, though it definitely has that ineffable feel of a dubbed anime (rather than an original English production) which is also surprising. I thought it was going to be “anime”, you know?
Also, while some of the changes are… interesting. Scott not considering Knives to really be his girlfriend for one. Wallace having a completely different vibe is the big one for me. I liked that he was supportive of Scott in the original but he just seems a negative dick here.
The big surprise is that Cera is pretty good as Scott though. Conversely, Mary Elizabeth Winstead feels really flat as Ramona
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I reread all of Scott Pilgrim last week (holds up surprisingly well!) ahead of watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I’m only one episode in but I’m surprised by how much it’s deviated from the comic.
If you think the first episode deviated a lot, I’m not sure what you’ll think of the rest (aside from occasional references, the first episode is the only one that contains any material from the comics, the rest is all new).
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I reread all of Scott Pilgrim last week (holds up surprisingly well!) ahead of watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I’m only one episode in but I’m surprised by how much it’s deviated from the comic.
If you think the first episode deviated a lot, I’m not sure what you’ll think of the rest (aside from occasional references, the first episode is the only one that contains any material from the comics, the rest is all new).
Ah interesting. I’m definitely going to watch more.
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I bought the Rogue cut of X-Men: Days of Future Past the other week so I thought I’d rewatch the X-Men movies. Probably not all of them (I can’t be arsed with Apocalypse and still haven’t seen Dark Phoenix or New Mutants once) but certainly the early ones.
Started with X-Men (obviously) tonight, which I’ve not seen in an age and a day. I think it’s aged pretty well actually.
The cast are pretty great – even Halle Berry, who I remember not liking, was good as Storm (I think it was Last Stand that put me off her) and the story’s decent. It does feel very beginner’s level super-heroes, which is perhaps the most dated element. Well, that and the fact it’s only an hour and forty minutes long. Focusing on Wolverine works here, even if it set off a string of unintended consequences across various media that we still haven’t escaped. That short run time does actually stifle it a bit in places – the romance sub-plot between Jean and Logan is very sketched in – but that’s fine, frankly.
It was an odd choice to fill a small cast of characters with three and a half whose powers include “moving things around without touching them”. I would have taken TK away from Xavier and left it to Jean (who doesn’t get a lot to do) and had Jean fling Wolverine up to save Rogue at the end instead of having Storm summon a wind that was magically strong enough to lift the man with a metal skeleton but controlled enough not to throw anyone else about.
One complaint that modern super-hero movies, especially the MCU, gets is that they’re all very sub-Whedon quippy in the dialogue, but I think it’s fair to say X-Men tries that as well, to a degree (with some lines even from Whedon, IIRC, like the leaden lightning and toads line). The difference is that X-Men a) mixes its quips with a lot of portentous dialogue about “a war coming” etc (which is very of the time) and barely disguised exposition and b) its quips just aren’t very good. They’re not bad enough to feel like they’re failing at humour but there are various moments where there’s some perfunctory line of dialogue and you’re left thinking “was that meant to be a joke?”.
But it’s pretty well shot – with clear action, which is nice. From a special effects point of view, there’s only one shot that really stood out to me as looking a bit rough (the x-jet landing in the water). Beyond that (on my DVD copy at least) it all looks fine, especially the death of Senator Kelly, which works within the limits of its technology to create an effect that holds up.
So yeah, I enjoyed revisiting that. It feels a bit embryonic and conservative, but it’s a solid, fun film.
Oh, also still wild to me that it was written by the voice of Solid Snake.
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X-Men 2, sorry X2: X-Men United (can you believe they thought that was a good name?)
I remember the general consensus at the time was that this was bigger and better than the first film – which how I felt – and while it’s certainly bigger, hitting 2hr 10m, I don’t think it is better, really.
Part of that is that it doesn’t use that extra run time to explore any of its characters in extra depth, it just bulks out the section at Alkali Lake beyond all common sense. (I was about ten minutes into that bit, checked how long was left and was astonished that there was over 40 minutes still to go). Various characters exist here only to be walking powers really – Storm is in a lot of the film but not much to do beyond use her powers and talk to Nightcrawler; Nightcrawler has a bit of personality but a facade of a character arc; Cyclops is completely wasted; Pyro’s arc doesn’t really amount to much; Rogue takes a backseat to Iceman, for some reason. And then there’s Jean, who still doesn’t really have much chemistry or plausible romance with Wolverine and gets to do a weak, sketched in Phoenix plot thread.
And I think that last bit is one of the problems with this film twenty years(!) on: how weakly it adapts its source material. The first film is quite tentative about doing that and works well for it. This one is full of geek-bait references (Stryker’s PC has a list of mutants from the comics in its files etc) that I’ll admit at the time I thought was really cool. But the way it actually adapts the source material is quite bland.
Take Lady Deathstrike, who is changed from a vengeful cyborg ninja into just a mostly silent femme-Wolverine. Ok, that fight scene is pretty cool, but the character is lacking. Same with one of the half dozen kidnapped students being an Asian girl in a yellow coat. At the time I was all “OMG, it’s Jubilee!” but now it just feels pointless. She’s a glorified extra who does nothing and the coat is literally all there is to characterise her as anything, let alone Jubilee.
Having Jean sacrifice herself doesn’t really work here because – despite a lot of screen time – she has little agency in the plot beyond an accessory to Wolverine. In 2003, the hints of Phoenix Force stuff gave that a pass, but now (and not even taking into account how much that flopped in the next film) it just doesn’t work, it feels limp and half-hearted. If they’d paired her up with Cyclops rather than Storm, they’d have been able to actually bolster both that and the love triangle plot thread by having Cyclops notice and talk to her about her expanding powers more, but as it is, you just get that one line early on.
And why the hell does she have to be outside the plane to levitate it anyway? And if Stryker has his knock off Cerebro and Xavier to kill all the mutants, why does he raid the school for mutant kids to hold? You could argue for bargaining collateral, but the mind control juice obviates that entirely.
All that said, there are decent bits. The cast are generally good, even if they’re largely not given much to work with. The action scenes are all well shot (from a time before shaky cam became the norm). The jokes are better. But I don’t think it really hangs together well as a story and as an adaptation of its source material.
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As soon as I saw the first trailer, I was hyped for Godzilla Minus One, and Mark and I went to see it last night (real conversation two weeks go: “It’s opening on the 15th, right? And it’s on in the Lighthouse? And you’re going then?” SPOILERS: It didn’t disappoint.
The movie is centred on Koichi Shikishima, a disgraced Kamikaze pilot who works on a minesweeper in the aftermath of WWII and Noriko, a young woman who moves in with Koichi after a chance encounter in a market. Their lives improve as Japan recovers, but… well Godzilla is in this movie. Koichi has encountered the monster before – the airbase he landed at after feigning an equipment failure during his Kamikaze mission was attacked and almost everyone there killed in part because he was struck by a panic attack, but now Godzilla has been mutated by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests and is ready to do some serious damage. And maybe Koichi can redeem himself in fighting this monster.
So there’s a common maxim that human plots in Godzilla movies are a distraction from the good stuff (I disagree, there’s a few decent human arcs in there), but instead here we get a pretty good drama that touches on post-war tension, found families, and mental health, which serves to enhance the monster mayhem. And dear Bob, that mayhem.
This is the first time I have felt tense watching a Godzilla movie, the attacks are vicious and brutal and showed at a human scale – but not in a way that obscures the scale or intensity of the damage. It’s a very impressive balancing act. Compare the use of Godzilla’s atomic breath here to Shin Godzilla. In both cases it’s a central setpiece moment of the movie that leads to massive damage. But it and the aftermath are like a scar on Tokyo. Here it’s centred on how it affects the characters while still being devastating to the city in a very similar way. It’s easily the best-looking Godzilla movie, with major improvements to the CGI even over the already impressive Shin Godzilla.
Overall, I think I still prefer Shin Godzilla, there’s more of a narrative drive and Anno had some very specific things to say about Japanese culture and directly criticised the handling of the Fukushima disaster, while Minus One’s writer/director Takashi Yamazaki touches on Cold War tensions to a degree it feels a bit hands-off. He’s crafted a very good Godzilla movie, probably one of the most accessible yet to someone who’s not a fan of the franchise or familiar with Japanese politics, and one that’s well worth checking out.
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X-Men 2, sorry X2: X-Men United (can you believe they thought that was a good name?)
I remember the general consensus at the time was that this was bigger and better than the first film – which how I felt – and while it’s certainly bigger, hitting 2hr 10m, I don’t think it is better, really.
Part of that is that it doesn’t use that extra run time to explore any of its characters in extra depth, it just bulks out the section at Alkali Lake beyond all common sense. (I was about ten minutes into that bit, checked how long was left and was astonished that there was over 40 minutes still to go). Various characters exist here only to be walking powers really – Storm is in a lot of the film but not much to do beyond use her powers and talk to Nightcrawler; Nightcrawler has a bit of personality but a facade of a character arc; Cyclops is completely wasted; Pyro’s arc doesn’t really amount to much; Rogue takes a backseat to Iceman, for some reason. And then there’s Jean, who still doesn’t really have much chemistry or plausible romance with Wolverine and gets to do a weak, sketched in Phoenix plot thread.
And I think that last bit is one of the problems with this film twenty years(!) on: how weakly it adapts its source material. The first film is quite tentative about doing that and works well for it. This one is full of geek-bait references (Stryker’s PC has a list of mutants from the comics in its files etc) that I’ll admit at the time I thought was really cool. But the way it actually adapts the source material is quite bland.
Take Lady Deathstrike, who is changed from a vengeful cyborg ninja into just a mostly silent femme-Wolverine. Ok, that fight scene is pretty cool, but the character is lacking. Same with one of the half dozen kidnapped students being an Asian girl in a yellow coat. At the time I was all “OMG, it’s Jubilee!” but now it just feels pointless. She’s a glorified extra who does nothing and the coat is literally all there is to characterise her as anything, let alone Jubilee.
Having Jean sacrifice herself doesn’t really work here because – despite a lot of screen time – she has little agency in the plot beyond an accessory to Wolverine. In 2003, the hints of Phoenix Force stuff gave that a pass, but now (and not even taking into account how much that flopped in the next film) it just doesn’t work, it feels limp and half-hearted. If they’d paired her up with Cyclops rather than Storm, they’d have been able to actually bolster both that and the love triangle plot thread by having Cyclops notice and talk to her about her expanding powers more, but as it is, you just get that one line early on.
And why the hell does she have to be outside the plane to levitate it anyway? And if Stryker has his knock off Cerebro and Xavier to kill all the mutants, why does he raid the school for mutant kids to hold? You could argue for bargaining collateral, but the mind control juice obviates that entirely.
All that said, there are decent bits. The cast are generally good, even if they’re largely not given much to work with. The action scenes are all well shot (from a time before shaky cam became the norm). The jokes are better. But I don’t think it really hangs together well as a story and as an adaptation of its source material.
Good review of X2, thanks.
I agree with a lot of this. It probably won’t happen but I would love it if the MCU X-Men is actually a Disney+ TV show rather than a movie series. It would allow for sufficient time to flesh out the many, many characters that they have and their relationships with one another. Cramming something like the Phoenix story into one or two movies simply doesn’t work all that well but if it played out over a couple of TV seasons then it could. Throw out some standalone Wolverine action movies if something is needed for the cinema release schedule but keep the soap opera stuff where it will be most effective.
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Yeah, it’s one of the reasons why Spidey would make a great TV show too. Obviously there are budgetary reasons why not, but the movie versions of these franchises often skimp on the kind of soap-opera character developments that were a big part of what made the comics so fun to read.
I always felt like Buffy was very X-Men and Spidey-inspired in that way, and showed how well it can be done in a longer-form TV series.
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X-Men: The Last Stand
This was immediately written off as being the worst of the X-Men films when it came out and look, I’m not here to tell you it’s great or anything. But I am going to say it’s equally as bad as X2, just in different ways. It’s back down to a lithe 1hr 40m odd, which is nice. But it tries to do too much in that. Adapting the then-recent Cure storyline from Astonishing X-Men? Fine and it does it fairly well. Adapting Dark Phoenix at the same time? A terrible idea poorly executed. And then it also tries to crowbar in a love-triangle between Kitty, Rogue and Iceman, which doesn’t work at all, not least because you don’t see any of them for about 45 minutes after they’re introduced. And that’s before you factor in that it tries to use Angel as well, which is a complete waste of time. Literally any character could have been in that role – many would have made more sense, given Angel’s mutation isn’t really that bad – and it’s hilarious that he basically has one line with any of the X-Men.
Like the other films, Last Stand tries to cram in too many characters and yet paradoxically runs out of X-Men halfway in. You have Logan, Beast and Storm discussing whether to shut down the school or not and for some reason Kitty and Bobby are included in that conversation because there’s literally no-one else left around (except Colossus, who is meant to be an X-Man in training same as them). It’s clearly the fame of the actors over-riding the story sense, but also – how is that school going to work with one actual teacher, one distinguished alumni and Logan? They really needed to just throw in some more teacher characters. Or not fuck over Cyclops again, though I guess Marsden going off with Singer to make Superman Returns forced their hand there.
And you get yet more name-only adaptations of characters, like Psylocke, where they really shouldn’t have bothered.
Yet, the film is kinda fun in places. The action’s good and still clearly shot. Vinnie Jones as the Juggernaut – that one line aside – is more entertaining than I remembered. Storm gets to have a personality this time, almost out of necessity, and Grammer is fun as Beast.
It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s not as bad as the fan consensus deemed it at the time.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
This, meanwhile, is every bit as bad as its reputation. My expectations were in no way high, but when it started, I did think “wait, is this – shorn of the expectations of continuity and whatnot – going to be at least fun?” Because it succinctly does Origin in about three minutes and the pre-title montage sequence of Logan and Victor in various wars is smartly done. Unfortunately, that’s where smart ends and everything else about the film is increasingly crap and dumb. Even when you think it can’t get any dumber, the film manages it.
This is the X-series at its worst for gratuitous, poorly translated, fan service characters too. Was Gambit a worthy addition to this film? Arguable. Was Cyclops? No. Was Emma Frost? Absolutely not. Were those old farmers in anyway the Hudsons? No, be serious.
It’s also where the VFX department starts to bite off more than it can chew. There are lots of background explosions for Logan to walk or drive away from that feel like they’ve been borrowed from a different film series entirely, while Logan’s metal claws are largely CGI and look infinitely worse than they did in every previous movie (where they’re largely prop ones). And it surely would have been cheaper to just use prop ones?
This is an absolute disaster and there’s really nothing worth going back to it for beyond those opening few minutes at best.
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As soon as I saw the first trailer, I was hyped for Godzilla Minus One, and Mark and I went to see it last night (real conversation two weeks go: “It’s opening on the 15th, right? And it’s on in the Lighthouse? And you’re going then?” SPOILERS: It didn’t disappoint.
I am so glad. I will see it eventually but I am so far (sofa king 🤣) behind. I still want to watch the Shin movie from a few years ago.
I’ve seen the American Monsterverse, but I must defer to the Japanese movies.
You can legally watch Shin Godzilla on the Internet Archive:
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Fuck me, but The Dial of Destiny is one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen. I’m still mad with myself for not turning it off after the first hour.
While I hated Crystal Skull this was just meh, which feels somehow worse.
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So I’ve reached the end of my small X-film rewatch
First Class
This is fun, with some really cool elements, like Magneto as a Nazi hunter, but also some rubbish ones. Darwin’s death is particularly stupid and did no-one seriously stop to think how it looked that the only non-white recruits either died or defected?
I’d have hacked out the entire bit in the CIA compound and got them straight to the school. And cut down the stuff in Cuba a bit. This didn’t need to be 2 hours.
The Wolverine
This was a pleasant surprise. I remember it being ok, but I really enjoyed it. I think it helps that it’s adrift from pretty much everything else in the increasingly convoluted and contradictory x-continuity.
The setting is lovely, the action good, the characters good and the plot solid. The best one since X-Men 1.
Days of Future Past: Rogue Cut
So as nice it was to see Rogue in this, I can see why they cut her out of the theatrical version. She doesn’t really add much and instead detracts from the tension of Kitty’s injury.
The other additions are good though. Admittedly I’ve not seen the original cut since it was in the cinema, I think, so I can’t remember it entirely, but nothing else here stands out and being unnecessary or extraneous.
The film hangs together really well plot-wise, with both sets of cast impressing. The period trappings are cool but what I really like is that this is the first film to treat its supporting cast with respect. Instead of shit like “there’s a random background mutant with purple hair, we can call her Psylocke” you actually get genuine, accurate adaptations of characters like Bishop and Warpath and Blink. Blink!!
This extended version hits nearly two and a half hours, but it actually feels worthy of that.
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Just watched the Ghosts Christmas special. It was a nice ending and I admired their restraint to tell a relatively simple and heartfelt story and close the show out elegantly in the finale, rather than going for a big twisty or surprise ending.
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I saw The Boy And The Heron today. I loved it – despite a slow start it becomes increasingly engaging and fairytale-like, with some fantastic visual concepts and wild ideas and lots of references to other stories (and animes). The story is really touching in places too. If it’s Miyazaki’s final film then he’s gone on a good one.
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I saw The Boy And The Heron today. I loved it – despite a slow start it becomes increasingly engaging and fairytale-like, with some fantastic visual concepts and wild ideas and lots of references to other stories (and animes). The story is really touching in places too. If it’s Miyazaki’s final film then he’s gone on a good one.
I’m hoping to see it tomorrow.
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