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 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Blue Beetle

We wanted to like this one, but oof. The family are drawn too quickly and too broadly, coming cross as stereotypes that border on obnoxious. And they’re the best part of the movie. Susan Sarandon does a great job as “character you want to see get punched”.

Yeah, the family was as close to Skids and Mudflaps, of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen infamy, level cringe as I have seen in awhile.

Don’t Breathe

In which naughty burglars get more than they anticipated when invading a blind veteran’s home.

The naughty burglars are all quite young. And for the life of me, I don’t know why the other two hang around with the tallest one. He’s a total doofus. In our opening “oooer, they are awful!” scene? Blonde Girl and Shaven Headed Guy are mostly business. Get in, pinch stuff of value, get out. Tall Bloke? Oh I’m not actually going to steal owt. I’m just going to smash things and then wee on the floor.


Though Blonde Girl does change her top whilst stealing, and then lay on the bed. I too have long hair, and let me tell you, us humans shed. So, between her and the other doofus weeing on the floor? Way to leave DNA evidence.

Kind of like the Wet Bandits. Only somehow much, much dumber.

Tall Guy is basically just a total tool, and I can’t wait for him to get his comeuppance. Oh, apparently he’s called “Money”. Which frankly, tells you everything you need to know about him.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Way to leave DNA evidence.

Oh this was another house. One they raided at the beginning.

Importantly though, Money doesn’t last long.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh this was another house. One they raided at the beginning.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. Still weird they tried to make the Lang's character into a hero in the sequel.

They’re interesting premises, but the sequel just didn’t land for me.

Another of those “I know I’ve seen it, but couldn’t tell you a bloody thing about it”, which frankly is a pretty damning indictment.

I think “Money” annoys me so much because he’s such a lazy stereotype. Wannabe gangster talking “all hip”, whilst being a paper tiger the second anyone stands up to him. His entire purpose seems to be “total phallus the audience want to see jobbed”.

 Ahtman wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh this was another house. One they raided at the beginning.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. Still weird they tried to make the Lang's character into a hero in the sequel.

I don’t believe that they ever planned on a sequel when they wrote the first film and then when it did well enough that the studio wanted the second film they may have dictated that their star be a little more likeable.

You are lucky to have the cops do any investigation on a burglary much less DNA forensics. Especially, in a "rough area".

Leo

An Adam Sandler movie where Adam Sandler and Bill Burr play a talking iguana and a talking turtle. It’s …surprisingly decent. Some jokes land pretty hard, the characters are mostly likeable, the writing is coherent and not just cynical garbage, the lessons the characters learn are mostly good. I’d rank it higher than You Are So Not Invited and Hubie Halloween, although that is admittedly faint praise. If you’re looking for an animated kids movie, you could do a lot worse.

Lethal Weapon

An 80's classic I hadn't seen until now.
It's surprisingly good considering there's not all that much to the film, I think it's all down to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover really nailing the whole mismatched buddy cop thing.

 aku-chan wrote:
Lethal Weapon

An 80's classic I hadn't seen until now.
It's surprisingly good considering there's not all that much to the film, I think it's all down to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover really nailing the whole mismatched buddy cop thing.

IMO, it was the movie that sort of "started" the mismatched buddy cop movie genre. Sure, there'd been buddy cop movies before, but the 2 parts of the cops were generally fairly similar. Lethal weapon turned that on its head by making the 2 mains quite dissimilar from each other.

It worked so well that there's been a number of movies since that have tried to capture that.

Yeah, certainly took it to new levels and made the format really, really popular for years to come. What I like about Lethal Weapon is that it's a christmas film, but barely tells us.

In the Heart of the Sea(2011)

I had forgotten I had seen this before, but the movie’s image on Max looked awesome and so I clicked.

A stacked cast of Chris Hemsworth, Tom Holland, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson and more familiar faces in this story of survival on the seas in what inspired the novel Moby Dick. Kind of an uneven movie. Wish they had spent more time getting to know the crew, so that when the behemoth bull sperm whale kills a great deal of them, its a bit more jarring.

Found myself rooting for the whales to be honest. That industry was so cruel.

I’d give it a 7/10.

Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins

Possibly also known as Dragon Ball Ultimate Edition.

Look. I’ll be straight with you. Whilst aware of DBZ via cultural osmosis, I really don’t know a huge amount about the series. But this 1991 movie, unlicensed and unofficial, Taiwan effort popped up on my Prime recommended, and I just had to give it a shot.

So what follows isn’t a particularly informed opinion, and I can’t say if it’s true to the lore.

Initial impressions? Suprisingly Not Cack. The costumes and effects are nothing if not competent. And hey, I can tell who Goku and Gohan are. Or at least who’s meant to be them. Even the 1991 CGI is….surprisingly alright!

Definite Power Rangers vibe though. Now I consider that a good thing, but will of course let you be informed by that as you see fit.

Anyways, off to watch the rest and will sum up later.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Some good and bad.

Good

This is a pretty older kid safe slice of Kung Fu. Better than Power Rangers. Only older kid safe due to some language being dodgy (for instance, one character is a perv, and refers to another as a Segs Maniac. Pretty sure a quick re dubbing would sort that out though!

This definitely had a budget behind it. Not a massive one, but it is there and it is noticable.

It is genuinely funny. Goofy, yes. But actually funny.

[b]Bad[/i]

There’s a moment where a fight cuts to “Reboot” style CGI. For no readily discernible reason. It doesn’t last long, but it’s definitely jarring, not least because the actual Kung Fu is otherwise perfectly competent.

That. Sodding. Sidekick Parrot. Kids might love it, I loathe it. Like Alpha-5 bred with T-Bob, and someone extracted all charisma from it.

The dubbed script keeps changing Eastwood to Westwood.

The unlicensed knock off is an inspired way to introduce yourself to Dragonball; I salute you.

If you want a quick*, fun way to experience Dragonball Z, I highly, highly recommend Dragonball Z Abridged on YouTube. The first two or three episodes are awkward and edgy as they find their style, but the series really elevates once they reach Namek, and their Cell saga is better than the original.

They did a few “stand alone” movies for Dragonball Z Abridged, but there are so many running gags** that I’m not sure if they’re a good place to start.

*Okay, there are 60 episodes, so not that quick. But at about 10 minutes they fly by.

**Some of the most notable are Gohan’s inability to DODGE, Future Trunks not knowing things, death being a minor inconvenience, and former demon Piccolo being more of a father than Goku. The Broly movie and the Android 13 movie are some of their funniest work.

It sags a bit when they hit the island, but the finale is pretty cool!

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The Broly movie and the Android 13 movie are some of their funniest work.

The Dead Zone and World's Strongest abridged too.

Fortunately most of the series running gags are either unique to the series or come from memes (over 9000) that even non-fans probably know about. What few deep cut jokes they make are so deep even knowing about DBZ wouldn't help. Stuff like their various jokes and sly references to different dubs of the show are so obscure I didn't know about them until Kaiser Neko or Lanipator explained them in commentary.

Most of them are still funny just because they are amusing, even if you don't know the joke.

What they did with The World’s Strongest was brilliant. As a subversion of the DBZ formula, I don’t know how accessible it would be to newbies.

As someone who grew up with the Japanese version, I love their jokes about how cool-yet-unpronounceable the special attacks are and how lame they become when translated.

No Retreat, No Surrender

Hey look! It’s Rocky The Karate Kick-boxer IV! Or at least it desperately wants to be.

You want standard 1980’s not-very-good martial arts? With a training montage? And Jean Claude Van Damme!

You got it! Not that Jean Claude is in much of it, but he is playing the villain. Or at least the villain’s main henchman. I dunno. It’s not clear and frankly I don’t particularly care.

Now, if bin raking the leavings of other, far superior movies wasn’t enough? We gots ourselves some unsanctioned grave robbing! Because our hero is instructed by, and I kid you not…the ghost of Bruce Lee. A character portrayed by a not very good look-a-like.

There are however some sort of redeeming features. They by no means outweigh the awful but the fight scenes aren’t entirely awful. And there’s an out of the blue surprisingly half decent break dancing/body popping scene.

In summary? Not a dead loss, but not something I’d ever recommend unless I really, really wanted to annoy someone.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
No Retreat, No Surrender
....

I'd never heard that title, so I had to look it up and realized that that one's Karate Tiger, as it's called 'round here. A classic, which I, as I have to admit, never seen.

The Franco-German culture tv channel recently aired a biography on JCVD. Interesting stuff.


Last night I watched a total of 5 seconds of Hereditary, but got too scared and watched half of the Matrix (good) and all of Deep Blue Sea (less good) instead.

I do like watching cash-in knock-offs, because they serve as useful context for understanding why you can’t just take bits from a successful and popular movie, and expect success. And in doing so, understand why some, such as Karate Kid, end up head and shoulders above their competitors and impersonators.

Absolutely, And it's especially interesting with such sub-genres which emerge and are rather hot for a while. Bloodsport-style films are just such a fun genre, but there are some bad ones as well. Same with Barbarian films and such. Odd little occurances.

I do not like Dragon Ball Z at all.

I love Dragon Ball Z abridged. Sometimes I just throw on the 3-part episode 60 just for fun, as it's amazing.

Vegeta is the best character, followed by Perfect Cell. So many lines in that series are just amazing.

"That's it! Killing you both!"

"Did he just remember he can do that?"
"Your father's an idiot."

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Look, I spent £3.50 on Highlander 2!

Get a refund.

And then sue for damages.

Episode 60 had so many incredible payoffs.

Piccolo: “Gohan! Do—. Oh.”
Kami: “You must be so proud.”

DBZ is a major reason I struggle with Anime in general.

Around…2001-2002? My mates were obsessed with it. And it’s all they’d watch. All I saw was maybe a few seconds of actual dialogue, with several minutes of yelling and powering up. Endlessly powering up.

And my tastes have never really recovered from that.


Please note I’m not saying DBZ or its franchise am therefore a big smelly nappy full of Jared Leto. Just that it’s not for me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Anyways! Adventures in seemingly lesser known if the transfer is anything to go by Kung Foolery!

Shootfighter

Evil wicked bad “fight until someone has done a ded” underground martial arts are doing a real! And naturally the hero is ‘Murican!

So far? This is not bad at all. Not great. But far from crap. The fights are genuinely really well choreographed. Never mind the plot. Nobody is here for the plot. The fights are decent enough.

But bonus points? It’s Bolo Yeung!

Triple Score Bonus Points? Bolo Yeung is one of the good guys! Yeah. Now you understand the triple score!

Possible bonus points? The knobhead villains of Karate Kid also star! With the sensei once again being a villainous knobend.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just that it’s not for me.

It's not for me either. I don't like DBZ or anime in general.

DBZ Abridged is different though.

Yeah, DBZ Abridged is…abridged. 90% of the yelling and powering up is removed, with (well-written) humor added. The characters and plots are more fleshed out, with efficiency.

A few years late to the party, just watched Tenet. It had some neat ideas, but was ultimately hard to follow due to the ever increasing trend of quiet dialogue with loud music in the background.

It also came across as a film that was trying to be far more clever that it actually is. It was delivering the story with a deliberate obtuse slant in the hope that it would give it more.

Still enjoyable, and would be better I think if I could hear what people were saying.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
DBZ is a major reason I struggle with Anime in general.

Around…2001-2002? My mates were obsessed with it. And it’s all they’d watch. All I saw was maybe a few seconds of actual dialogue, with several minutes of yelling and powering up. Endlessly powering up.

And my tastes have never really recovered from that.


Please note I’m not saying DBZ or its franchise am therefore a big smelly nappy full of Jared Leto. Just that it’s not for me.

Despite the time it took to make an animated series back in the days before everything was done by computer, the series that were based on manga often ran out of material while waiting for the manga creator(s) to catch up. So instead of shutting down production, a lot of the animation studios created whole seasons of non-canon filler material because if you're off the air, you're out of the viewer's mind. Dragon Ball sort of got around this by padding the episodes like they did. It was either have a lot of yelling and powering up or switching to a completely different storyline for the next sixty or so episode.

Halloween. The original.

This was a good, suspenseful horror movie. It suffers a bit from John Carter syndrome, but still an enjoyable watch.



Freddy Vs Jason

This is a good Freddy movie, a good Jason movie, and a good action-horror movie.