Watched Journey's End on Amazon Prime a couple of nights ago. It's a WWI drama set in the trenches. It's from a play and very much has the feel of a play with a very limited set and more focus on dialogue with very little action. Pretty good. It does give a good sense of how important and stifling British reserve can be in the face of the insanity of war. The budget on this might've been limited so it doesn't have the expansive feel and impressiveness of a movie like 1917 and the little action there is comes off poor compared to what we've come used to in war movies. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3780500/
Smile - not bad, it definitely had a Ring-type feel to it like someone else mentioned. I thought the lead actress did a good job of slowly slipping into madness. Worth watching just for her performance IMO. X - this one was pretty silly, but if you take it for what it's worth (a fun throwback to 70's slasher movies) it was actually pretty good. Plus it was nice seeing the redhead from Pitch Perfect's boobies.
Since the new series is coming out. I have been wanting to watch some Hellraiser movies that I have not seen or forgotten about, I tried to watch Hellraiser Deader and bailed after 20 minutes the acting was that terrible that I never even made it into the plot.
Glass Onion. 8.5/10 Four of us went to a theater and really enjoyed it. A good mystery and funnier than the first one. We'll watch it again when it's on Netflix.
Wife and I enjoyed this quite a bit as well. The characters are all cartoonish but the actors are having a good time playing them. Craig is really having a ball in this role. A-
Amsterdam was such a disappointment. Interesting story, great cast and director, stylistically the movie looked great, but the script/dialogue was a totally muddled mess.
Bullet Train - 6/10 Entertaining with good visuals and characters. Story wise it was meh, had the potential to be a lot better.
Yeah I am up for it,I just need to be in the mood its hard for me to sit through movies these days I start getting distracted.
Wife and I caught Spielberg's The Fablemans last night. We both really enjoyed it, might not be for everyone since it moves a very slow pace. That being said the story and performances are excellent. Gabriel LaBelle and Michelle Williams are both really good in it. Its sweet, nostalgic and surprisingly funny in parts. A-
watched Emancipation yesterday and wanted to sleep on it before saying anything about it. Kind of mixed feelings about this: first it is brutally hard to watch for the first hour and 45 minutes. I kept pausing it to simply take a break from it. Will Smith is an incredible actor. He may be a lousy human being (I've got no opinion on that) but he is truly great in this. It's filmed a bit like an action movie or a horror/suspense movie, which in fact it kind of is. The alligator scene is too fantastical; honestly they didn't need it. Very Hollywood. Still, the escape which spans that hour and 45 minutes is a 10/10, despite being hard to watch. I've seen comparisons now to Schindler's List (film-wise) and I think that's accurate. Not sure the last half hour holds up. Seems tacked on; to have equalled the first 3/4 of the film the ending needed another 10-15 minutes of explication that isn't provided. No context for the military situation is given, and in my mind I kept comparing it to Glory and it seemed to fall short. I probably need to rewatch it now that I've read a bit more about the Siege of Port Hudson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege...ntry_attack_on_the_Port_Hudson_fortifications Finally the reunification of the family (spoiler alert, sorry) at the end is perhaps needed for a Hollywood production, but historically questionable. Doesn't really affect my judgment of the film overall though. Definitely worth watching. Not a 10/10 overall. 8/10 seems low, 9/10 seems about right. That might tick upward a bit if I watch it again.
Blonde 3/10 What a complete and confused mess, and I probably don't have the complaints you would expect. I was actually into the beginning: arty, dark, with Julianne Nicholson and the little girl version of Monroe playing their parts perfectly. Showing what a shitshow this person's childhood was. (Love the scene of them driving into the wildfire and the cop turning them around.) Then Ana de Armas enters the picture and... okay she's pretty... but she doesn't look much like Monroe and she can't help but speak her english lines with a spanish/cuban accent or something. Just totally weird. I don't see how the other actors could even stay in character with that. We turned it off b/c it wasn't quite bad enough to be funny.
I watched that over Thankgiving after hearing that it was good, and it made zero sense, I have no idea what they were trying to say. I kept waiting for some other bad person to emerge, yeah it was just terrible.
Watching Man on Fire — for like the 29th time. I hate Dakota Fanning (and all child actors) but this is one of my favorite movies. Denzel and revenge movies are the best. I watched both Equalizers this weekend.
Hellraiser(new one) 2/10, painfully unpleasurable. You can't be using the lament configuration as a weapon to stab whoever just because you're a coward to face your fate. It takes away the curiousity and the human impulse when people who have no idea what the puzzlebox summons are the ones getting punished.The real Pinhead would be insulted just like he was when the mofo shrink tried that in Hellbound. What's the point of even solving the puzzle box. Uncle Frank knew what he was getting into and once he saw that the cenobites weren't sexy he wanted out. That's how it should be.
watched the Banshees of Inisherin last night. Incredible film. Colin Farrell is a revelation in this, Brendan Gleeson is also excellent. I'm a big fan of Seven Psycopaths but don't know or remember In Bruges, which I'll go back and watch now. But this movie is just really something. 10/10
