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I really enjoyed Starship Troopers 3. After the bad 2nd film. It was fun again. And kinda badass. And it had Casper van Dien again. All well.

On a whim I watched Onyx Equinox. It's a Crunchy Roll original based on Mesoamerican mythology and I have found myself very very pleased! I like Dragon Prince as a successor to Avatar, but honestly I think this series is a much more worthy spiritual successor particularly in it vividly depicts some of the same themes.

It's only 12 episode thus far, but another season is confirmed to be on the way. It uses higher quality animation, which I consider a major bonus after a few years of western funded shows uses cheap looking CGI. It can be a bit generic at times. Really only the art of the gods and some vistas really stands out but attention to detail is amazing in some areas. The series references real world cultures with a clear eye for their differences (Zapotec vs Maya vs Aztec for example), and the use of a Mexican-American development team really pays off in some of the details like Tezcatlipoca's left leg, Quetzlcoatl's big good nature in a cosmology dependent on human sacrifice, and even an eye for more obscure cultures like Classic Veracruz peoples! If you like Mesoamerica, the series is great just for how it rewards you for knowing what's what, but also manages to be coherent enough that anyone unfamiliar will probably be thrilled by the setting's novelties.

Character development is a bit spotty, but I see room for improvement in a second season.

Be warned that it plays Mesoamerican myth fairly straight, human sacrifice and blood hungry gods and all. I consider it a massive bonus. The series isn't afraid to show gore, body horror, or nudity but never feels gratuitous! It's all measured with a respect for the source material that I think would be really hard to replicate.

That sounds awesome.

The Man who killed Don Quixote (2018)

Wow. Well, most of us will have heard of how this film came to be and how many times it almost did not come to be. As far as I know two documentaries were made about the production of this film.

Aaaaanyway. The plot revolves around a jaded advertisements director played by Adam Driver who's ordered to make a film about Don Quixote in Spain, but not caring about it at all. He remembers back to when he was a student and made student film about the same topic many years ago, also in Spain. And it goes on from there. It's really hard to give a plot synopsis as not to spoil anything and also because I probably couldn't comprehensively recall it just now. It can be said that a lot of things happen, and it's quite a romp.

There's a lot of things going on in these 120 minutes of this film. Many will find it too long, I assume. And I assume I wouldn't appreciate this film quite as much without the faint idea I got of the production issues of this film in the back of my head. But I did. It messes with the perception of reality and dream/delusion as Driver's character more and more has to give in to the delusions of "Don Quixote".

It's just amazing that a film like this can still be made. It looks so great. Especially the last third or quarter takes place in this lavish half-world, full of costumes and contraptions and scenery. It's a cinematic film. The casting is impressive - great character actors all around.


Watch It. Simply because it's unique and a film that stands by its own.

40 Year Old Virgin

I have not seen this since I initially saw it and had good feelings about it. Here are some random things I noticed:

1. Kat Dennings is in this?
2. Having worked at a big box Electronic Store like the one in the movie, they nailed the atmosphere. It was exactly like that.
3. The movie features two scenes of painting miniatures.
4. I forgot that in the end the main character sheds his "Nerdiness" to become a married, non-virgin man. Lame.
5. I had forgotten all the great actors that were in this film.


Machete Kills

It had been a long time since I have seen Machete. However, in the tradition of all solid grindhouse fare, it doesn't matter at all!

It is a classic grindhouse style movie with over the top violence where that is the gag! This movie also features a ton of well-known actors in very clever cameos and roles. It reminds me a lot of films like Black Dynamite, Undercover Brother, and Austin Powers. Not as obviously funny though, just its very earnest OTT nature is what makes it funny. A love letter to B-movies for sure.

There is an amazing fake trailer for Machete Kills..... in Space! By the gods, I want this movie to be made.

About halfway through the live action Titans show and...

Well the Doom Patrol have been on screen for half an episode and they're already more interesting then any of the Titans characters.

I'm finishing up my HBO trial with Ad Astra.

Not worth it. It's slow and dull. The characters are all morons, the plot is preposterously overly sentimental, and the film is driven predominantly by author fiat rather than anything that actually makes sense. It's got a bunch of musings in it too, but I'm pretty sure none of it means anything and is just a case of someone thinking a lone character talking forlornly at the audience is 'deep.'


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
About halfway through the live action Titans show and...

Well the Doom Patrol have been on screen for half an episode and they're already more interesting then any of the Titans characters.

Yeah, I found the Titans TV series to be incredibly uninteresting which is kind of amazing really. It was boring throughout the first season and its boring in the second season.

Young Justice the cartoon is greater than Live action Teen Titans. Fact!

 Easy E wrote:
Young Justice the cartoon is greater than Live action Teen Titans. Fact!

Young Justice is DC's only consistently good TV/film property (currently). Doom Patrol was a little too erratic for my tastes, but I can see why others might prefer it to various films and shows.

We should get season 4 this year, too. 22 of 26 episodes were fully recorded back in november. Just on HBO Max rather than Netflix.
The thing I hope they fix this season is that they don't simply ditch some of the more interesting side characters like they did from seasons 1 and 2.

Speaking of DC Cartoons;

Justice League vs. the Fatal Five

I think DC's animated film franchise has been massively better than their live action films, but this one really blew me away. Does anyone else miss the old DC cartoons from the 90s and 00s? The ones that started with Batman The Animated series and ended with Justice League Unlimited?

Well you should probably watch this movie! It uses the same animation style, and even brings back the old voice actors fro Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman from the animated series of old! It doesn't seem to be set in the the universe, but the sheer fact it has the animation style and old voice actors made me geek out when the movie started. It also features Mr. Terrific, Miss Martian, Jessica Cruz, and Starboy. The plot is solid and fun, with great character work and a simple plot, but in a way where simple and fun totally works. There's a subtheme of coping with mental illness and trauma to the film, which maybe doesn't reach for the heights it could have but I think it makes the movie better that it didn't try to go past what it could grasp.

Highly recommended for anyone who misses the bygone era of DC's classic animation franchise!

Soul was amazing. Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey knocked it out of the park with their banter. I wouldn't put it quite on par with Coco, but it's pretty damn close.

Mirror Mirror

Nice costumes, when do the musical numbers start?
Cool cast, when do the musical numbers start?
Lily Collins is cute, when do the musical numbers start?
Oh, one song, over the end credits.
Should've been a musical.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Bit late to the party on this one but it's a bit sappy but the cast sells it and Ms Plaza .might be the new best thing ever

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Started ok but slid into the usual CW format depressingly quickly, the alt universe was kind of fun, especially the authenticley rubbish Salem puppet and og Aunt Zs snarky description of every CW show ever

I just watched several 'select, pivotal' episodes of the 70's japanese spiderman live action series.

Think spiderman by way of voltron.

Spiderman is a japanese guy given a sipder costume and gadgets by an intelligent spider from another planet who's peaceful race was destroyed by evil alines now coming to earth.

He fights the aliens with various spider powers provided by his suit, and a 150' tall giant robot spiderman he pilots against the giant monsters the aliens send to destroy tokyo over week.

Yeah, my brain kinda melted too.

An honest trailer review.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5NCSx5HF8c

 Matt Swain wrote:
I just watched several 'select, pivotal' episodes of the 70's japanese spiderman live action series.

Think spiderman by way of voltron.

Spiderman is a japanese guy given a sipder costume and gadgets by an intelligent spider from another planet who's peaceful race was destroyed by evil alines now coming to earth.

He fights the aliens with various spider powers provided by his suit, and a 150' tall giant robot spiderman he pilots against the giant monsters the aliens send to destroy tokyo over week.

Yeah, my brain kinda melted too.

An honest trailer review.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5NCSx5HF8c

The weirdest part of this series's existence is that they were the first Japanese TV show to mix the superhero and the super robot.

Japanese Spider-Man created the Super Sentai/Power Rangers genre.

My Filipino friend told me about this when I was kid. I didn't believe him.


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Terminator 6 - Grrl Powrr

Found this on Amazon Prime for free. So far it's better than Terminator 4 - Terminator vs Batman, Terminator 3 - Terminator vs Girl Terminator and about even with Terminator 5 - Terminator vs Daenerys Targaryen. But with 90 minutes to go still plenty of time to F it all up.

Whatever happened to Moon Bloodgood anyway?

EDIT

Finished it tonight and it was a perfectly cromulent Terminator film. The double terminator was cool, Carl more or less worked. Not sure why they needed to have a different evil AI, I mean just call it Skynet 2, and the revelation about Dani was necessary, the initial assumption seemed a stretch and no need to hide that information but whatever. Like I said cormulent. Not nearly as painful as the reviews seemed to imply.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Finished it tonight and it was a perfectly cromulent Terminator film. The double terminator was cool, Carl more or less worked. Not sure why they needed to have a different evil AI, I mean just call it Skynet 2, and the revelation about Dani was necessary, the initial assumption seemed a stretch and no need to hide that information but whatever. Like I said cormulent. Not nearly as painful as the reviews seemed to imply.

I am unreasonably fond of this movie, more so every time I see it, and I'm very grumpy it won't get a sequel because I think it was lining up some really interesting stuff it won't get to dig into now. The future war stuff we see here hit my "Preposterously Doomed Imperial Guard Last Stand" receptors exactly, and I would watch a hundred more movies of that Sarah Connor. I think Mackenzie Davis is 1 movie away from being huge, too.

For what it's worth though, I am very firmly convinced the reveal about Dani wasn't meant to be a reveal at all when the movie was shot, I think somebody decided to make it a reveal around the test screening stage, through the magic of a half assed reshoot and a lot of editing, and it came at a cost to her character and the movie generally. Which is a shame.

I think the problem is the movie we WANT to see, (and should have gotten with Terminator 4-Terminator vs Batman) is the future war against the machines.

As nice as car chases in modern America are, I want to see 2 hours of scruffy norms dressed in rags fighting off invincible killing machines with weapons made from the debris of civilization.

I want the film where it's Return of the Jedi and we're the damn ewoks. It's the Vietnam war and humanity are the Vietnamese farmers trying to fight supersonic jet bombers. And somehow they do, and somehow they win.

Hollywood give us that damn movie.

I think the idea of a 1980s Future War movie is very much a careful-wish-for case tbh. I don't think it can sustain a whole movie, and I don't think it's just run of bad luck that nobody can make an adult John Connor work for more than 5 mins at a time.

I'm not against hard sf war movies but it's not the appeal of Terminator for me and I don't think the specific elements of the Terminator future we get can be glued together coherently for the length of a feature. I think they're like old showstopper White Dwarf covers, they look amazing for the second you're looking at them, but if you saw them in live action you'd realise they make no sense.

I’d love to see the movie hinted at in the meeting of the machines—a time war for causal supremacy between multiple possible futures. Skynet vs Legion vs humanity vs ...?

The story could be simple and straight forward: a time soldier comes back to a devastated future, his family wiped out. His mission: go back and kill some machines.

There are a lot of simple stories that could be done.
Even a simple 'escort the civilians' mission, or a squad trying to get to (apparent) safety in the face of machine assaults, or a raid on an important facility that goes awry.

Part of the franchise's problem is it constantly tries for too big and too 'epic,' when it needs to focus on the small stuff. There's plenty of room for good 'future war' story. Especially for something as easy as a feature length film. Personalize the small group of protagonists, make the audience care if any are lost along the way, set up a climax and a spot of resolution. About 105 minutes or so.

Agree that small stories set in a larger universe can be very effective. We need more of that.....

Searching for Bobby Fischer
A young boy is very good at Chess, and his father sets him up with a strict Chess teacher and starts taking him to Chess tournaments.

That is the story in a nutshell, but there is so much more going on here. This movie has layers of subtext, and tells a lot without telling the audience explicitly what it wants to tell them. Of course, it is all wrapped up in a standard sports cliche movie so it can be easy to overlook all that other stuff.

The movie has a ton of great character actors, and they are all delivering. This is a very strong film. When I think of this compared to other, more modern films; it is easy to recognize the strong writing and crafting that went into this one. Very enjoyable to watch and appreciate the craft of making movies.

Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Do you like the Nutcracker but wish it didn't have all that dancing and music and stuff but instead took a deep dive into the lore and mythology of the greater Nutcracker Cinematic Universe? When you see a ballet dancer dancing with snowflakes do you need someone to explain to you that this is about the realm of snowflakes?

Then this is the movie for you!

I saw it on a flight and still walked out on it.

 Easy E wrote:
Agree that small stories set in a larger universe can be very effective. We need more of that.....

Searching for Bobby Fischer
A young boy is very good at Chess, and his father sets him up with a strict Chess teacher and starts taking him to Chess tournaments.

That is the story in a nutshell, but there is so much more going on here. This movie has layers of subtext, and tells a lot without telling the audience explicitly what it wants to tell them. Of course, it is all wrapped up in a standard sports cliche movie so it can be easy to overlook all that other stuff.

The movie has a ton of great character actors, and they are all delivering. This is a very strong film. When I think of this compared to other, more modern films; it is easy to recognize the strong writing and crafting that went into this one. Very enjoyable to watch and appreciate the craft of making movies.

Did this deal with his future mental issues? He was a sad example of the truism "Never was there born a genius who did not know at east a touch of madness." EDIT Never mind, i never saw it, just looked it up, it wasn;t about bobby fischer actually. A movie about him could have been interesting.

Army of Darkness
It’s pretty much a live action cartoon built onto a horror franchise. In terms of wacky horror sequels it’s somewhere between Gremlins 2 and Freddy’s Dead.

Ghostbusters 2.
It isn’t a classic like the first movie, but it’s still a fun ride. There are no boring scenes or character actors. My wife thought the Statue of Liberty seen was a shark-jump, though.

Interesting you mentioned Army of Darkness. I just started watching Starz Ash vs The Evil Dead.... too early to tell, but it seems like they did their homework on style. My wife said, "It's like a cartoony Supernatural."

War Horse

Entirely improbable storyline (I am waiting for someone to now link to the actual true story to show how probable it was!) of a horse who lives through WWI and the boy who loves it.

The horse's journey is a great way to capture vignette's of various smaller stories set in WWI from 1914 to the end. Things like the loss of innocence, the dawning horror of industrialized warfare, the impacts on the non-combatants, the influence of militarization, and other topics to try and capture the humanity and brutality of it all.

A decent watch.

Never seen the film, but I did see the creepy robot horses they built for the film back then.

The American President

A Rom-Com from 1995 written by Alan Sorkin and starring.... a lot of big name people! The President of the US is a widower. He decided to date a lobbyists. Politics ensues.....

I have seen this movie dozens of time, just like I had watched Sabrina dozens of times. I still enjoyed it, BUT it just felt really different watching it this time. In a way, it felt really quaint, like a throwback to a simpler time and more innocent politics. You can never go back....

This exchange struck me deeply as still relevant today. Lewis is played by Michael J. Fox while the President is Michael Douglas:

Lewis Rothschild : [in the Oval Office] You have a deeper love of this country than any man I've ever known. And I want to know what it says to you that in the past seven weeks, 59% of Americans have begun to question your patriotism.

President Andrew Shepherd : Look, if the people want to listen to...

Lewis Rothschild: They don't have a choice! Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking! People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd : Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.

It (1967)

Another graduate of the "Horror movies that tried to look, sound, act and feel like a Hammer movie" school of film, this features Roddy MCdowell as a british version of Norman bates who discovers a strange statue that was just brought into the museum he works in is actually the legendary Golem. (It looks radically different that the silent movie version, and is actually pretty striking)

McDowell's character having been beaten down, abused and exploited all his life and suffering serious mental issues is quickly corrupted by the power he now has, but even has he is he realizes what he's done and seems to regret it, in one scene he even takes steps to protect others from being corrupted by the golem's power and to keep the golem from being used by others. Also he seems to be trying to explain himself to the golem, and even in a way apologizes to it for misusing it. This was pretty much te best scene in the movie and McDowell makes is plain his character regrets in some ways what he's done and is doing but just can't stop himself after a lifetime of being stepped on.

McDowell's acting really carries this movie, as as far far british horror goes its a welcome change from the endless vampire/Frankenstein movies hammer was churning out. Recommended.

McDowell as he begins to realize the "statue" has changed position slightly.

Nice, I want to track that one down.