[Malankazooie]

This is a pretty neat time waster. Google 'Thanos', then click the Infinity Gauntlet on the right. Sit back and enjoy. Click again once it's done.

[worry]

QuickTidal, on 17 April 2019 - 12:45 PM, said:

Watched BLACKkKLANSMAN last night and REALLY enjoyed it.

I've never seen John David Washington before, but he was incredible throughout, and Adam Driver proves once again to be a phenomenal actor.

And I'm hit and miss with liking or dis-liking Spike Lee joints, (DO THE RIGHT THING, MALCOM X, and INSIDE MAN are amazing, but SUMMER OF SAM, HE GOT GAME and his remake of OLDBOY not so much)...but this was peak Lee for me. He deftly takes a really visceral subject matter, doesn't shy away from the disturbing and prevalent shitiness of the era...but then makes it into a procedural, with a lot of humour and team dynamics as well. And what I thought was REALLY great were the not-so-subtle jabs in-story to the Trump Administration (It being posited to Ron that one day people like David Duke would lead to people in the hallways of power acting just like Duke behind the shield of politics and his disbelief that his country could fall so far)...and to cap the whole thing off by showing the Trump-era shit in the news (to show how far we still all have to go as a society) was the perfect coup de grace.

Wonderful and poignant film. Probably one of my fave Lee films ever.

Just watched this (it's on HBO right now), and I agree with your review (except I liked He Got Game, even if it's not top tier). Washington doesn't necessarily look like his dad too much, but he sounds almost exactly like him, which is kind of distracting in a funny way. And speaking of funny, this movie is very funny, very often -- sometimes lol funny, and sometimes very uneasy laughs. It's full of really well-cast minor characters too -- every single person with a speaking role pops off the screen, and it's remarkable -- one of Spike Lee's greatest talents. Going into it, I knew there were some critiques out there about making a movie about race in America where the police were the protagonists -- and there's certainly validity to that -- but after having watched it I think Spike Lee was aware of that tension and it suffuses the story without any pat answers, even by the end. So it doesn't shy away from that conversation, and it doesn't sugarcoat it either.

[worry]

The Oath -- Ike Barenholtz & Tiffany Haddish are a married couple in a slightly-alt-world America where the president devises a loyalty oath that Americans can 'voluntarily' sign to show their patriotism. The deadline is Black Friday, and Ike & Tiff are hosting Ike's more conservative family for Thanksgiving this year. Tension & hilarity ensue.
Not great, but pretty good. It's on the same wavelength as It's A Disaster a few years back (that dark comedy disaster movie with David Cross & America Ferrera), especially because it feels like a bottle episode in movie form, but I found it mostly funny and savvier than expected.

[worry]

Dang, RIP to John Singleton. Only 51 years old. Had a stroke last week, passed away after being taken off life support today.

[Morgoth]

I watched BlackkKlansman yesterday, and really enjoyed it. I dunno, it might not be popular in the US, I don't fully understand the nuances of what's good or not in the American social discourse, but I thought it was poignant and deeply disturbing. But also very funny, which was needed considering the brutal theme of the story.

Washington was incredible, but I was also deeply impressed by Adam Driver.

[Malankazooie]

Ok, I need your guys' help. So, I've only seen a smattering of the Marvel movies. I don't want to reveal which ones, but I will say I haven't seen any of the Thanos movies. So I need your help in lining up the ones (correct order) to watch so I can enjoy the latest film. Please help your uncle Malankazooie, he is woefully behind the hip and cool (in the know) feelz that y'all are having. The water cooler talk at my work is such a presence of stress for me because I can't talk with my co-workers about anything relative to Avengers Endgame. I have to pretend I'm 'that guy' and put of the facade that super hero movies are just not my thing. FOMO is destroying my life! Please help!

[D'rek]

Malankazooie, on 02 May 2019 - 09:17 PM, said:

Ok, I need your guys' help. So, I've only seen a smattering of the Marvel movies. I don't want to reveal which ones, but I will say I haven't seen any of the Thanos movies. So I need your help in lining up the ones (correct order) to watch so I can enjoy the latest film. Please help your uncle Malankazooie, he is woefully behind the hip and cool (in the know) feelz that y'all are having. The water cooler talk at my work is such a presence of stress for me because I can't talk with my co-workers about anything relative to Avengers Endgame. I have to pretend I'm 'that guy' and put of the facade that super hero movies are just not my thing. FOMO is destroying my life! Please help!

Avengers 1, Thor 2, and GotG in any order, then Thor 3 then Infinity War, then Endgame would be the minimum. Adding Doctor Strange, Avengers 2, and Captain America Civil War, before Thor 3 would also be beneficial.

[Slow Ben]

This guy here is dead!

Cross him off then...

[Illuyankas]

I tried watching The Wandering Earth, based off the book and newly out on Netflix, which got steadily dumber and dumber until I had to turn it off less than 10 minutes in.

Spoilers galore

Spoiler

OK so the Sun is about to go red giant within 100 years, about 5 billion years early, that's fine. Solar System engulfed in 300 years, also reasonable. How are they going to try and save some of humanit-

Spoiler

BUILDING GIANT ROCKETS ON THE EARTH AND FLYING IT FOUR FUCKING POINT TWO LIGHT YEARS AWAY TO THE NEXT SOLAR SYSTEM!??!?!?!?!!?!?!

Spoiler

Right so let's say they actually do form a real World Government flawlessly with no arguments or jockeying for powers, let's just let that slide; how are they going to find the resources to build the several hundred 11 kilometre tall rocket engines covering one hemisphere of the world, let alone power them for the 2,500 year flight time? How are they powering them to provide 150 trillion tons of thrust or whatever? Especially for two and a half millenia? What purpose does the space station serve? How will it spot threats early enough for the fucking planet Earth, the entire 5842 quintillion ton fucking place, to turn in time? How are they compensating for the lack of magnetosphere after stopping the Earth rotating? What are they going to do about the oxygen freezing out of the atmosphere? Why are they building all the underground cities directly below the giant fuck off rocket engines!? What did they do with the Moon!?! There are plenty more problem but it's such an incredibly dumb concept.

That said, the absolute rock bottom worst thing that made me immediately stop the movie and turn off Netflix was after the protagonist type rebellious teenager who breaks his girlfriend out of school to go on the surface with him and is planning to run away, has traded some items to borrow two thermal suits for them both from someone who is clearly a black market dealer, the dealer says bring them back tomorrow to which the protagonist replies yeah sure BUT THEN his girlfriend says 'I thought you weren't coming back' WHILE THEY'RE STILL IN THE FUCKING ROOM

THE FUCKING WORST

Also the subtitles and the dubbed script were clearly taken from at least two different versions of the script and also the lowest bidder

It's shit, don't even fucking bother

[Aptorian]

But you only watched 10 minutes. Maybe the other 90 minutes is award winning cinematography.

You should watch the rest and report back otherwise I can't take you seriously.

[polishgenius]

Yeah I read somewhere that it's a few days delayed in the US, should be out in the next couple of days.

In any case I'll probably give it a try but I'm not that surprised there are dumbnesses in it because Liu's Three Body Problem was, despite being fun and having some nice ideas in it, amazingly dumb. I'm hoping it'll annoy me less in a cheesy Armaggedon-ish blockbuster than in a book that was somewhat presenting itself as hard SF.

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 04 May 2019 - 07:41 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

Yes. Yes I am watching the Baywatch movie. I'm enjoying it immensely but I think Zac Effron has had his face grafted onto someone's body. Or they have painted his abs on. It's really weird looking.

[Slow Ben]

Mezla PigDog, on 04 May 2019 - 09:21 PM, said:

Yes. Yes I am watching the Baywatch movie. I'm enjoying it immensely but I think Zac Effron has had his face grafted onto someone's body. Or they have painted his abs on. It's really weird looking.

I thought that movie was great popcorn fun for about 60ish%, then it completely falls apart.

This post has been edited by Slow Ben: 04 May 2019 - 10:11 PM

[worry]

The Predator (it's on HBO!): not great. Its about as dumb as a Gears of War game, which tbh could be very appealing in a Predator movie, and some parts of it coast on that level satisfactorily, but it also whiffs as often as it succeeds. And there's also insanely stupid and retrograde gay panic jokes and stuff like that, that shouldn't have been there in the 80s let alone survived them.

Any scenes where the alien is killing people are pretty good. It does not shy away from their super-efficient, but sometimes cat-and-mouse playful, killing machine nature. (Except when it inexplicably spares people).

On the other hand, the lead (some dude named Boyd Holbrook, who's what you get if you photocopy a photocopy of a photocopy of Charlie Hunnam) is a black hole where leading man charisma goes to die. Fortunately some of the supporting cast chew the scenery in fittingly dumb-fun ways. Sterling K Brown & Keegan Michael Key especially. The last third of the movie is super chopped up and feels like it -- IMDB trivia suggests a lot of it was reshot and a whole storyline with Edward James Olmos was cut out -- and it's a frustrating mix of cool Predator stuff and barely-followable action.

Rating: 2 out of 5 predator dogs (oh yah there are predator dogs).

[polishgenius]

I watched the Indonesian action film Headshot on Netflix. It's not exactly subtle and it's absolutely bruuuuuuuutal but I enjoyed it a lot. Fight choreography (co-ordinated by Iko Uwais himself which makes me like him more considering how much shit he allows his character to take) is excellent, it squeezes some nice story touches into most of the action scenes too, and it has one of the most preposterously, enjoyably evil villains I've seen in time. Good stuff for those who like that kind of thing.

[QuickTidal]

Watched EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL, AND VILE on Netflix, which is the Zac Efron-starring Ted Bundy drama. As someone who enjoys true crime, this flick does only one thing well (show how some killers don't look or sound like monsters)...but in doing that it does a disservice to every one of Bundy's victims. They go out of their way to frame the first hour+ of the runtime never showing Bundy's activities beyond getting traffic stopped with some paraphernalia in his car...and attempt to make him sympathetic in the "I didn't do this" mold. You never see him doing anything that can even be construed as a Red Flag. Now, we all know who we are watching, but this tact of showing the criminal as an "I was framed, this isn't me" would only really work in fiction where you don't know the outcome. So here we are watching Ted fucking Bundy (one of the worst serial killers in history, who was a goddamn necro to boot) being played as if he's the victim of a smear campaign for an hour. Even in the second hour when the court proceedings are occurring we are meant to see a grandstanding guy who "might" have made a good lawyer (another weird point the movie makes) and not a criminal scrambling and trying to keep his ass out of the chair. The final few minutes has a confession about a decapitation of one girl that allows the female lead to see him for who he is...and then a single shot of a list of the victims names and then credits.

Joe Berlinger attempted to be stylistic in this. Try to show us how nondescript, charming, and disarming Bundy was to not only his victims, but a number of women at the time who followed the case and could not convince themselves this good looking (I don't see it frankly) guy did these heinous things. Berlinger tries to put us into that slot of unawareness...but the problem is that we are all MORE than well aware. It's been more than 40 years and this guy has been a true crime staple for most of that time because of how prolific and high profile this was...so as a result the attempt to unseat us like the women in the case were lands with a massive clunk.

Bottom line: Disrespectful to the real victims, and pandering to some audience that really doens't exist of people entirely in the dark about Bundy. It also gives Bundy more of what he wanted in life....press.

This is twice Berlinger has done this, as he also did the Bundy Tapes Doc on Netflix as well and it basically revolves around Bundy's own taped confessions and gives little (if any) time to the victims.

So swing and a miss twice. But then, this is the guy who fucked up the Blair Witch sequel all those years ago, so....I'm unsurprised?

Anyway, it's a waste of time.

[Salt-Man Z]

Drek, on 02 May 2019 - 11:45 PM, said:

Malankazooie, on 02 May 2019 - 09:17 PM, said:

Ok, I need your guys' help. So, I've only seen a smattering of the Marvel movies. I don't want to reveal which ones, but I will say I haven't seen any of the Thanos movies. So I need your help in lining up the ones (correct order) to watch so I can enjoy the latest film. Please help your uncle Malankazooie, he is woefully behind the hip and cool (in the know) feelz that y'all are having. The water cooler talk at my work is such a presence of stress for me because I can't talk with my co-workers about anything relative to Avengers Endgame. I have to pretend I'm 'that guy' and put of the facade that super hero movies are just not my thing. FOMO is destroying my life! Please help!

Avengers 1, Thor 2, and GotG in any order, then Thor 3 then Infinity War, then Endgame would be the minimum. Adding Doctor Strange, Avengers 2, and Captain America Civil War, before Thor 3 would also be beneficial.

Briar King, on 03 May 2019 - 12:41 AM, said:

Need Spider-Man, and atleast probably Ant 2 in there as well.

Civil War is a must imo as is Black Panther.

I'd probably lead off with Iron Man 1 and Captain America 1. I have a tough time recommending Thor 2, but it does introduce an Infinity Stone and get strong callbacks in Endgame.

I'd say Ant-Man & The Wasp is more important than Doctor Strange (most of what you need to know beforehand about Strange you get in Ragnarok) and I agree Civil War is a must, but you get enough with Spidey there that Homecoming isn't really necessary. Black Panther and Cap Marvel are both great, but not required to understand their place in Infinity War/Endgame. (The most important part of Cap Marvel in that regard is the after-credits bit.)

[Aptorian]

Just saw Avengers Endgame. Loved it and hated it.

As always when watching these superhero films and shows, I have a hard time divesting the image I have from the comics from the on screen story.

There's so many things about the way they write the characters and present them that just doesn't agree with me. It's a light product, watered down for as broad appeal as possible.

That said I think Endgame is a tribute to ten years of movie history. There's so many nods and callbacks to new and old stories, it's impossible to not get swepped away at times.

I was surprised by how final some of the farewells are in this film. Obviously they'll try to make another generation of Marvel films eventually. I was expecting then to do some actor swaps and handwave it with reality hijinx.

[Gorefest]

Soooo.... with both Decetive Picachu and Sonic lioned up for release soon, is this Nintendo's version of Marvel's 'Phase one' and are we working towards a Smash Brothers franchise...?

[Gorefest]

Briar King, on 09 May 2019 - 02:56 AM, said:

Is anyone actually going to watch Tolkien or just wait for tv screen?

Saw some awful reviews for it, so I might just skip it altogether.