Topic: Movie thread.

@Tasuki Yes! Love The Crow, fantastic atmosphere and performances, (so many quotable lines), and a killer soundtrack to boot. I usually try to watch it on Devil's Night (Oct.30th)

Smile 2 should have been called Jump Scare 2. Just like the original, this movie relies way too much on them. There are a couple of scenes where genuine tension and dread are build, but the payoff is always one of those annoying jump scares. I hate them.

The acting and production design were very good, but other than that, there's not much positive I can say about this sequel. It's too long, repeats the same scares over and over again, and becomes so overwrought by the end I stopped caring altogether.

The Apprentice chronicles Donald Trump's life during the '70s and '80s. We learn how he got to know his wife Ivana, his lawyer-confidant Roy Cohn, and how he swindled his way to fame and wealth.

While the movie is certainly well acted and directed, it didn't offer enough new insights for me. Trump's life has been spread out by the media so many times by now, and we've seen the guy's behavior on big stages equally as much, that few scenarios in this movie came as a surprise to me. Trump's relationship with Roy Cohn wasn't well known by me, and the movie did a fine job in showing how he taught Trump to be so successful at lying, but that was the most I took away from it.

All-in-all, The Apprentice is a fine movie but nothing special.

I was bored so my brother and I decided to watch all the Marvel movies and then it was like "wait this is too much" so we condensed it to:

· Captain America: The First Avenger
· Iron Man
· Iron Man 2
· The Incredible hulk
· Thor
· The Avengers
· Thor: The Dark World
· Iron Man 3
· Captain America: The Winter Soldier
· Avengers: Age of Ultron
· Ant-Man
· Captain America: Civil War
· Black Widow
· Black Panther
· Spider-Man: Homecoming
· Thor: Ragnarok
· Ant-Man and The Wasp
· Avengers: Infinity War
· Avengers: Endgame
· WandaVision
· Shang-Chi
· Spider-Man: Far from Home
· Spider-Man: No Way Home
· Hawkeye
· Moon Knight
· Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
· Echo
· The Marvels
· Thor: Love and Thunder
· Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
· Avengers: Secret Invasion

I am excited for Echo cuz I heard it is about a Deaf girl and she uses ASL! Oh, and we skipped the R rated ones and TV shows, as well as the GotG movies, though we might add those back in.

I already posted this on a Pure Xbox thread, but I thought I’d share what I recently watched, including some movies I did talk about here before. YouTube has a lot of movies available to watch for free with ads (or without ads if you have Premium) and the selection is a bit random with a few iconic movies and gems included in them, so a lot of the films I watched are super random. I did slightly edit a bit of what I wrote.

17 Again - It’s pretty much your standard 2000s teen comedy film, and is about a middle-aged man being magically transformed back into his 17-year-old self and reenrolling into his old high school and trying to fix his relationships with his soon-to-be ex-wife and estranged children. I’m not really into watching comedy films, but I did enjoy this one.

I thought a lot of moments in the film to be funny (Ned was by far the best character in the film) and the ending was super heartwarming, though some of the scenes and moments, knowing the context and what was happening, did make me feel very weirded out and uncomfortable when watching it at times. Unlike most of the films I watched recently, I saw this movie on HBO Max/Max rather than YouTube Movies.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie - YouTube has a pretty decent selection of movies that you can watch for free on there without having to buy or rent. I have watched some VeggieTales media before, including a few Netflix shows and another film called The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie. I have seen Jonah, but I didn’t remember a lot of it besides the opening scene before I watched it. The film tells two stories; one being a car mishap with a group of vegetables and an adaptation of the Biblical story of Jonah, with the two seemingly unrelated stories having a connection with each other via their themes of mercy and forgiving people.

Although this movie is aimed toward younger audiences, I really enjoyed this one a lot! For an early 2000s movie, the animation is really impressive and holds up well by modern standards, usually CGI films around this time had animation that was stunning for the time but didn’t age well visually (with a few exceptions).

The songs were pretty catchy and I liked the themes and humor they put into the stories, and I will say that the way Jonah’s story ended shocked me quite a bit with how he refused to forgive the Ninevites despite learning about forgiving people and having a song sung to him about second chances when he was in the stomach of a whale and how Khalil and Jonah’s own camel abandoned him in the desert in the end.

Poupelle of Chimney Town - Did I forget to mention that YouTube also offers free anime films? Poupelle is animated in 3D unlike the other anime films I watched, and I did also like this one. Like the previous film, this is also aimed toward kids, and the film is about the friendship between a young boy and a man made of actual garbage. I really thought the premise was interesting. I really liked this one, mainly from its story and the visuals and setting. The story is pretty heartwarming, deep, and all about accomplishing your dreams and believing, and I did find the moments midway and nearing the end to be very bittersweet and beautiful.

Being someone that likes drawing, I really liked the art style, use of color, and the industrial look of the city they were in, and for a movie that is set in a city with lots of chimneys and highly polluted skies, there were a few shots and character designs that were funky (in a good way), colorful, and bright (e.g. the Halloween dance sequence in the beginning of the film) and I really like the mechanical and built-together design of Poupelle a lot.

Only criticism is that the animation sometimes gets choppy in a few scenes and looks unclean, and the animation sometimes swapping from 3D to 2D looked a bit off and inconsistent, but that does not really affect the movie’s quality a lot or made it any less enjoyable for me.

The House of the Lost on the Cape - Another anime film, being about an elderly woman taking in a runaway girl and an orphan in a special house but I was surprised when the film to introduce supernatural creatures and elements midway through and there being a final battle at the end with all three of them and a bunch of supernatural creatures banding against a gigantic, evil entity, and I had initially thought it was a pretty simple film from what I read about the plot and premise. I loved the film for its heartwarming story and the relationships the three main characters build with each other. It’s a bit more obscure, but I think it’s a hidden gem!

The Wonderland - This one caught my attention, mainly from a famous artist named Ilya Kuvshinov working on the film as a character designer and his artwork is so nice. It’s kind of an isekai movie, with its story being about a girl named Akane, who is taken to a fantasy land by an alchemist and his assistant, as she is the one who is capable of saving it, with Akane’s aunt tagging along for the adventure as well.

It is one of the prettiest anime films I have seen, having really gorgeous visuals and animation, and Kuvshinov’s art style is animated so wonderfully and fits the style of the film. The visuals of the world are very surreal, but beautiful to look at and very unique, and the film kind of reminded me of Studio Ghibli with some of the characters, animation, visuals, and the film being mostly set in a weird, whimsical and fantastical world, plus the main conflict being driven by environmentalism and the lack of rain. So many of the shots are beautiful (my favorites being the rain drop ceremony with the prince and the final scenes in the Wonderland), and they seem to take a lot of inspiration from Ghibli films.

Though, I think the story is kind of generic and I didn’t feel any strong connection with the main character or the cast of characters, coming from how they don’t tell a lot about their backstories or motivations besides two characters in the film (that being the antagonists Zan Gu and his assistant Doropo) but I think the film did really well in the animation and visual department. It just lacks a bit in characters and story and it isn’t memorable enough like the Ghibli films The Wonderland draws heavy inspiration from with its premise and animation.

The LEGO Movie - Don’t have much to say on this one. Seen this before and it’s a classic! Love how comedic LEGO media is and this one is still fantastic.

Oh, and a note, there were a few other movies on YouTube I was watching alongside these, that being Penguin Highway and Terminator 2, but I didn’t finish them. I stopped watching Penguin Highway very early in the movie and didn’t finish it, but I was almost done watching Terminator.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was worth a couple of laughs.

A lot of people seem to not care for how its plot turned out, but I dunno, I never really considered the original Bugdrink the kind of film that relied on the strength of its structure - it's a very "focus on the journey and not the destination" kind of movie, and that was to its benefit, which Burton, thankfully, didn't forget when helming the sequel.

Beetle 2 was a good time. A wild ride with some solid writing, a great cast all at the top of their form and some wonderful set design and practical effects on full blast. It's a film that's oozing with a lot of passion and talent behind it and in an era where it feels like most legacy franchises are getting by through reliance on cheap nostalgia - which this film does have to an extent - Beetle 2 gets by through its ideas and energy and even if I'm not the biggest Burton fan, I'd be down for more films like this from him.

Saw Return of the Living Dead for the first time.
Not a fan of "fast zombies", but this is a fun B-movie! Oh those zany punks!

And 2 movies at the theatre:

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story documentary.
You will believe a man can make you cry.

Saturday Night
Recommended if you have a love and reverence for SNL and its history.

Continuing with my Halloween type movies I started the Scream series tonight. Last time I saw Scream 1 and 2 was like in the early 2000's and I don't think I ever saw 3 and I know I haven't seen 4, 5 or 6. For what they were,.cheesy horror type movies that seemed to make fun of horror movies, they were pretty good. For some reason I remembered them to be alot more gorier, not to say they weren't but like I said I thought there was more. Over all I did enjoy the first two and look forward to watching the rest over the next few days.

I saw The Wild Robot on Saturday. I hadn't really read any reviews as such for this but had heard it was supposed to excellent - a modern classic maybe. While I did enjoy it, based on what I'd heard, I was expecting it to be better. I think the problem for me was that I couldn't shake the feeling it was like The Iron Giant meets Wall-e, but wasn't as good as either of them.

Watched Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (1980) last night. I've seen several of his movies so I kind of knew what I was getting into, but man, I think this is his goriest, grossest flick I've seen. If you're at all squeamish avoid at all costs.

Watched, The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976). Sort of an early slasher type movie based on true events. It was pretty good, the cast was likeable, and the killer was actually intimidating. I feel the sack on his head with his eyes darting around probably influenced Jason's first appearance in Friday the 13th Part 2. Also, of all the slasher flicks I've seen over the years, I can safely say I've never seen someone get offed with a trombone before.

Watched Suede Caroline https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14583044/
Very funny mickey take of large vegetable competitions in the UK, with underlying corruption of local ministers, but it is all about the Veg

Battle: Los Angeles (Blu-Ray) - Advanced alien invaders may be capable of interstellar travel, but there's no way they could ever be prepared for "the Few, the Proud, the Marines™". I didn't like it as much as I'd remembered (it doesn't have the charm of an Independence Day & it has a bit too much shaky cam), but it still has some pretty cool battle sequences, and I generally love movies where aliens are fought off with largely contemporary military abilities, so it'll stick around in my collection (maybe one day I'll do a triple feature with the aforementioned ID4 & Battleship). Unfortunately the BD I picked up thrifting skipped once or twice (small enough not to ruin the watch), but luckily I found another copy the very next day (this time in a snazzy slip cover), so I took that as a sign and grabbed it (hopefully this one doesn't have any issues).

Grumpy Old Men (Blu-Ray) - I'm probably overrating this a bit because it invokes a lot of nostalgia in me (we used to take fishing trips to Minnesota every summer, my earliest memories of which were in the 90's, so the vibe of this just hits with me. Plus, the movie takes place over Thanksgiving & Christmas, so that's a whole lot of cozy baked into it), but I really think this is genuinely enjoyable. The banter between Lemmon & Matthau is often hilarious (the guy playing Lemmon's 90 something year old dad is by far the funniest here though), and it has some good emotional beats to boot.

Spaceballs (Blu-Ray) - I've seen bits & pieces of this before, but never watched the whole thing because my dad said it sucked (to be fair, we generally have different taste in films). I seen the BD while thrifting however & figured it couldn't hurt to give it a watch, and I really ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I can totally understand why Blazing Saddles was a more important & seminal film when it comes to Mel Brooks' comedies, but in terms of personal preference I liked this more (it helps that I like future/space sci-fi a lot more than westerns).

Last night's horror movie was, The Night Flier (1997), based on the Stephen King story. Stars the douchey executive guy from Robocop, Miguel Ferrer, here playing a douchey news reporter. It was really good, definitely a unique spin on the vampire mythos. The vampire himself was both classy like Bela Lugosi, while also being a horrifying monster.

Venom 3 - story is a bit of a mess, some laughs, good acting as usual by Tom Hardy, but overall, the trilogy ends with a whimper.

Not outstanding, not terrible, but enjoyable enough.

@Tendo64 Saw it at the weekend and pretty much agree. Some weak plotting, but it was fun and I had a good time watching it. I was never bored. Much much better time than I had watching Joker 2!

I think you are greatly underestimating the importance of Scream. It was a horror movie that was...wait for it...smart, and clever??

It was the new horror standard, much like Nirvana's Nevermind album ended the era of hair metal, Scream made all the lazy, repetitive slashers feel outdated overnight.

Funny you say that. I saw The Iron Giant recently for the first time. I thought: "...this is just E.T...."

I recently heard someone (a podcast or a talk show appearance, I can't recall), say they LOVED Spaceballs as a kid, but had not seen Star Wars until years later.

It would be kind of like loving Bored of the Rings for years and then: "...what's a hobbit?"

Saw Conclave today. IMDb calls this a "thriller" but Dan Brown this is NOT! I would say it is the absolute opposite. It is 100% "palace intrigue".

You want to sit down for a couple of hours and turn your brain off and be laughing and thrilled and on the edge of your seat? Then this is not your movie. This is a brainy morality play, "who should sit on the Iron Throne?" But no dragons, no murders, just old dudes voting.

A bit more specific to the plot:
"Who would you want as Pope?" and "What would disqualify?" And it's very interesting.

It's currently 7th betting favourite for Best Picture at the Oscars.