Recently watched movies!

[Dr Kain]

Just like a few other movies this year, I'm going to miss PR in theaters just due to bad timing. Not sure if I'm going to get to see Ready Player One neext weekend either. We've got a local anime con this weekend and then we have one in MN the first weekend in April.

[jellydonut25]

[jellydonut25]

[canofhumdingers]

[jellydonut25]

I also enjoyed when Batman said, "If there's even a fraction of a chance..." because he apparently forgot how unbelievably wrong he was the last time he said that.

[DannyBeane]

As a person who generally enjoys most movies he sees, I'm going to agree with Jelly. Justice League was terrible. So terrible it becomes good in an ironic MST3k sort of way. It's still a giant wet turd though,

[Dr Kain]

[canofhumdingers]

[lhb412]

"Looks like Power Rangers" is an annoying refrain often said in response to Pacific Rim or just toku stuff in general, so what better way to prep for PacRim2 than with...

Power Rangers (2017)

This finally popped up on Amazon Prime. Didn't see it last year and I gotta be honest with you: I'm surprised by how much I dug this movie. Sure, there's parts of it that don't work, decisions that may have been... eh, miscalculated, but I think it mostly works. "What if The Breakfast Club, but partway through they become Power Rangers" is a solid pitch, and the movie follows through with that. The kids are all good, and they have chemistry together and that's like 80% of the movie. Could there have been more Rangers in-suit and Zord action? I thought the Zord stuff got just about the right amount of screen time it should have at the finale (btw, like that they fought in the individual Zords before forming the Megazord), but I certainly would have appreciated just a few minutes more of them in action in their suits.

BTW, there seems to be a scene either deleted or not filmed for budget or whatever because at the end everyone knows about the Rangers, but the townspeople never really got a good look at them in the battle so I suppose the scene involved them appearing in front of a bunch of people?

[O.Supreme]

I saw JL in the theater, and haven't watched it again yet. I plan on purchasing the film eventually, yes I did like it enough to want to have it in my collection, unlike Suicide Squad (blech). However I guess I didn't have as many problems as other people did, but I do hear and understand the criticisms. It was fine, serviceable, and I guess that was the problem. If DCU and the MCU had been on even footing, and JL had come out in 2011, it would have been much better received IMHO. Unfortunately it did not. Although I am fairly even in my *liking* of Marvel and DC comics overall, I have to admit at my core, I am more a Justice League fan, than an Avengers fan, because that is what I grew up with. The Justice League's core characters were around decades before the Avengers. It's just sad that such legendary characters cant get the justice they deserve (no pun intended), on the BIG screen. Some of the criticisms I do find odd though, You have to watch other MCU films, to understand what's going on in the current one, so why is JL singled out for this? I think Screen Junkies HT summed it up best. JL is NOT a horrible movie, its an average movie, but when you are dealing with some of the greatest comic book characters of all-time average isn't anywhere near good enough.

[canofhumdingers]

I think that’s a much more fair and balanced assessment. As I mentioned originally, I’m not blind to the film’s flaws. I just don’t mind them and (much like pretty much all of the Godzilla series...) I love the movie despite those flaws.

And fwiw, while I thoroughly enjoy Marvel, DC is where my heart has always been. Marvel feels more like real people with real world problems that just happen to also have incredible abilities. DC heroes feel more like legends from ancient myth happening in the modern world which just appeals to me more fore some reason.

Also, Batman. Nothing and no one beats Batman. Ever. For any reason. Because Batman.

[eabaker]

[Dr Kain]

American Made - A pretty enjoyable somewhat based on real events movie. This is probably Cruise's best movie since Edge of Tomorrow and one of his better movies overall. It had suspense, some good action, great character moments, and the story as a whole was just interesting. Gleeson was as great as he is in everything else. It's definitely worth a one time viewing, so if you haven't watched it yet, check out it. 8/10.

[lhb412]

Pacific Rim

Probably the biggest disservice I can give to Uprising (which I'm seeing tomorrow!) is to watch its predecessor right before - but I don't expect it to be anywhere as good as the first movie. Realistically, I don't expect any of Legendary's kaiju movies to be as good as this one because this one is just the best!

There's just so much detail that GDT put in this movie, and all of it's so satisfying - especially the satisfying 'clunks' made when monsters a robots bop each other. As close as CGI can come to replicating the tactile joy of monster suits colliding.

[klen7]

Sherlock Gnomes - better than Gnomeo and Juliet, surprisingly most of the cringe worthy content is in the trailer.

Annihilation - Not sure where I fall on this yet. If it is just a mystery box for the sake of being mystery box, then I don't care for it much. If there is a reason behind all the directorial choices then i can appreciate it a lot more. I felt it was thematically a very dark movie. Also, seeing it again may help because i did have some baked in expectation because of the book and spent a portion of the run time wondering they when they would get to the tower (a major portion of the book) only for it to not be included at all.

Monster Trucks - Better than i expected. Family friendly film with plenty of plot holes, but it has a monster and was fun enough I will probably watch it again at some point.

Sexy Rangers - Amazon Prime has a tokusatsu parody from Godzilla concept artist Shinji Nishikawa? This is pretty much a super sentai parody that spends as much time as possible lingering the camera at cleavage. The final fight is competently shot in a traditional sentai style.

[O.Supreme]

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle -Rented this at the Red Box, mostly for the kiddo's. But honestly, after watching it, I'm wondering how this became a *global phenomenon*? The movie currently has nearly 945M worldwide box office sales, which places it at #5 for 2017 (The top 4 were all Billion Dollar Movies - SW:TLJ, Beauty & The Beast, F&F8, DM3) . Admittedly I have little nostalgia for the first film, I may have seen the entire film once at a family gathering years ago, but have only seen bits & pieces since. Duane Johnson, Kevin Heart, and Jack Black were ok, I have no idea who the female lead was, but it all just seemed so juvenile and pointless. My kids laughed a few times, but honestly I never did. The idea of updating the board game to a video game was novel enough (I guess Jumanji 3 will be a Mobile app?) , but nothing about this really held my interest. What is it about this film that made audiences worldwide want to see it, repeatedly it seems? It was just dumb. Not dumb in a fun way, just plain dumb... 3.5/10.

[jellydonut25]

I thought every nerd knew Karen Gillan.

[O.Supreme]

[lhb412]

[O.Supreme]

[Dr Kain]

Yeah, Jack Black was easily the star of the show. This movie was so damn fun and I went into it expecting to hate it. It made fun of every video game trope imaginable. As a gamer, it was a great movie.

The only issue I had was Kevin Hart was just playing himself.

Oh, and I don't think the original movie is all that great. This was the better movie.

[lhb412]

The Seventh Curse

This '80s Hong Kong film seems to be an answer to Hollywood films of the same period, mixing adventure and comedy with the supernatural and some outrageous gore effects (Temple of Doom feels like a large presence), mixed in with the prerequisite gunplay and martial arts. Dr. Yeun is a playboy adventurer who, after a prologue where he helps the cops fight a bunch of terrorists, discovers he's under a curse that will kill him in a few days. Said curse stems from a previous adventure he'd had in Thailand a year earlier where he saved a girl from being sacrificed to an evil skeleton puppet that turns into a xenomorph dragon thing - so it's back to Thailand to get this mess sorted out! Chow Yun Fat shows up occasionally to be badass.

Maggie Ching plays the comic relief, and her character is so clueless and careless she's constantly almost getting everyone killed. She's like a cross between Mr. Magoo and Death in the Final Destination movies.

The sequence where they scale a giant Buddha statue and fight a bunch of monks on it is my favorite part. There's a lot of really cool elements to this movie, but I'm not sure it all comes together in an satisfying way.

[klen7]

Ferdinand - I didn't care for this much at all. In fact when I went to look it up on Rotten Tomatoes I was shocked to see this had 71% while Sherlock Gnomes (which i did enjoy) had 17%. Maybe its the subject matter that gets it a pass, but anything redeemable is from the 25 page children story and not all the content added to pad this short story out to almost 2 hours.

[Dr Kain]

Ready Player One - It was actually fun. 9/10.

[Dr Kain]

Batman Subzero - I haven't watched this movie since 2002. It isn't as good as I remember, but still an enjoyable movie nonetheless. I also like how the BD includes the 4 episodes that featured Freeze. Overall, I think I give the movie a 7/10.