Recently watched movies!

[Dr Kain]

Black Christmas - Not the greatest horror movie ever, but it is an enjoyable one that gets better with each viewing. 8/10.

[jellydonut25]

[eabaker]

[Dr Kain]

[eabaker]

[klen7]

[eabaker]

[Dr Kain]

I won't argue that as I haven't watched the movies in years and haven't missed them.

A Christmas Story - What would a Christmas season be without a viewing of this fantastic film? 9/10.

[lhb412]

[O.Supreme]

[Dr Kain]

[jellydonut25]

The Last Jedi - uneven and long. Great stuff rubs against insanely stupid stuff, and then it just kinda...ends... 3/5.

[Dr Kain]

The Last Jedi -It was good. There were a couple things that felt off, but god damn was it good. On par with The Force Awakens, yet just misses being as good as Rogue One. Still a fantastic movie nonetheless. Although, I still say Phasma is Boba 2.0. Overall, I need to see it again, but I'm giving it a 9/10.

[Dr Kain]

A Christmas Horror Story - Enjoyed it even more than I did when I saw it last year. I still think the Changeling story is the weakest, but god damn is the Santa story even more badass after knowing the twist. Great stuff all around, even if it isn't perfect. 8/10

[canofhumdingers]

The Force Awakens - still really enjoy this. The story is obviously too derivative of the original film in many ways, but the wonderful characters, great performances, and solid writing go a very long way to ameliorating the problems with the story. I really like Kylo Ren as a villain. As Kain said, he is very similar to what Anakin SHOULD have been like in the prequels. But he’s also got the very unique trait of WANTING to be bad, but feeling the temptation of the light side. Rey is a great lead and Finn and Poe are very fun and engaging supporters.

There are a few technical things that always bug me because I’m a nerd and can’t ignore them. The way the gun turret in the Millennium Falcon operates in this movie is entirely different from how it works in the original. It’s too nitpick and detailed to go into here, but it’s something that has been done in a lot of old expanded universe material and has now found its way into an actual film. The bottom line is, as far as I can tell, people don’t seem to understand how the turrets were originally designed to operate and they try to make them move in ways that are contrary to how the guns are actually built and mounted. And the gun’s laser sound effects are totally different for no apparent reason.

Also, Finn activates Luke’s old lightsaber by mashing the big red button near the top when it’s always been the big rectangle in the middle that acted as the power button.

Yeah, like I said, hugely nerdy nit picky details that just bug me for some reason.

But overall this movie was a huge return to form after the miserable prequels. Can’t wait to finally see where The Last Jedi goes from here when I see it Monday!

[Dr Kain]

Do you suffer from a wild case of insomnia? Well I've got the cure for you! It's called Valerian and the City of a Thounsand Planets! It features the terrible actors you might remember from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad, both of whom have absolutely no chemistry together and sound as bored as the script they are reading from. With a generic, one dimensional plot that makes no sense, pointless scenes, likes to drag out other scenes unnecessarily, and no humor whatsoever, even the most die hard insomniac will find themselves dozing off. Add to it creatures that are clearly not there as the cast struggles to pretend to be amazed by what they are looking at to characters that are standing switch positions between camera angles, and you have yourself one the worst comic book adaptation since Jonah Hex, let alone one of the worst movies of the year. How the hell this was done by the man behind The Fifth Element bewilders me, but he was clearly bored and needed a paycheck. I give it a generous 2/10 stars and that is because the soundtrack did have a few decent tracks to it, I think.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - Hilarious movie that gets better each year I watch it. That is all. 9/10

[Dr Kain]

The Shape of Water - The best sequel The Creature from the Black Lagoon never had! Although, it is not without its flaws as it isn't a horror movie at all, it's romance that has a monster in it. That doesn't make it a bad thing as it is well written, with great characters, and the visuals are gorgeous. Doug Jones is phenomenal as the Not-Gillman. Still, it lacked any sort of suspense and some of it plays out the way you would expect it to. A must see nonetheless, just not the masterpiece some make it out to be. I give it a 9/10.

[canofhumdingers]

The Last Jedi - huh.

[Dr Kain]

So we kind of watched A Christmas Story Live today. I saw kind of because we ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it as it was down right atrocious. First off, whoever decided to turn this into a musical was "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!" !!! That person ought to be fired! Next up, everything was way too damn clean. One of the things that makes the the movie work is that everything looks old and run down as if the neighborhood is not of the highest income. Here, everything and everyone looked like they were millionaires. Following that, the dude who played the dad must have never watched the movie in his life as he was way too cheery. As if that wasn't enough, scenes didn't even work like Randy falling onto the ground and not being able to get up as that was supposed to happen on their walk to school, NOT in the playground. I did like that the kid they got to play Scott Farkus looked quite accurate, but they diminished his role by only having him in two scenes (and he didn't even actually touch any of the kids nor pelt a snowball at Ralphy, meaning nothing set him off for the laughably fake fight scene).

Adding to that, WHY THE "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!" IS THERE A SINGING SCENE OF HUGH JACKMAN AND THE CAST OF "THE GREAT SHOWMAN" IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS MOVIE????? That made absolutely no sense.

Then there is the fact that we never actually got to see the school, the Chinese dudes at the end did not sing in Engrish, there is no suspense when Ralphy comes down wearing the bunny outfit, the black santa had no charisma (they should have casted Uncle Ruckus' voice actor and had him act like him in it) and he was too far away to put his foot on Ralphy's forehead to kick him down the slide, but most of all, NONE of the dream sequences had Ralphy with his gun ONCE! That is the entire point of the story. Also, since when is Ralphy going to dream in some big Broadway musical production? He's a kid. No kid dreams like that!

If I were to rank this in movies released this year, this is without a doubt the worst movie of 2017. Not just that, but it is the worst remake ever!! That's right, Psycho has been subdued but this utter piece of "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!". In fact, this is one of the worst movies ever made! Take that The Room!!!

[jellydonut25]

[Dr Kain]

[Benjamin Haines]

Power Rangers - I really liked just about everything about this film except the Zord action scenes. The ensemble cast is terrific and the movie is funny. They picked the perfect actors for these Rangers, and it's great to have Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston and Bill Hader in supporting roles. I like how the backstory of Zordon, Rita and the Rangers is depicted. I could have done without the pointless stop/start moments during the action scenes but that seems to be happening in everything these days. It's the Zord action where this movie comes up short. The CGI is a mixed bag and the digital compositing of the Rangers into the Zords just looks terrible. The action itself is also really predictable, as if the combined Megazord is supposed to be a surprise. Of course, this being Power Rangers, the Zord action is the third-act climax and it ends the film on a really unimpressive note. It's not hard to see why this didn't catch on with moviegoers.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - An epic space opera and the best of the Disney-era Star Wars films. Avoid all spoilers for this one.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Brutal. That is the word to describe this, the best film of 2017 that I've seen. It's piercingly real, bleakly funny, and very human, with career-highlight performances from Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell, and an equally talented supporting cast. Highly recommended.

[eabaker]

Saw The Last Jedi yesterday. Easily the best post-OT Star Wars movie, to my sensibilities, and quite probably the most thought-provoking and discussion-worthy Star Wars movie ever, which is why I'm mostly going to avoid discussing it on-line, where nuance goes to die.

[lhb412]

Pan's Labyrinth

"Have you seen my mother. Isn't she beautiful? She's sick with baby."

Ophelia is a young girl who loves fairy tales and she accompanies her pregnant mother to her new stepfather's home in a mountain village. The stepfather in question is Captain Vidal, a brutal enforcer of the new fascist Spanish government, stationed in this remote location to wipe out guerrillas hiding in the woods. It's a terrible place, but Ophelia does feel a bond with the housekeeper Mercedes, who Ophelia almost immediately overhears is aiding the guerrillas. One night, an insect comes to Ophelia, turns into a fairy, and leads Ophelia into a Labyrinth where a magnificent (and imposing) faun tells her that she's not a human being, but the reincarnation of the princess of the underworld, and she can leave this horrible mortal world behind and return to her true home... but, in true fairy tale fashion, she must first pass three tests.

This, along with it's companion movie The Devil's Backbone, are just about perfect to my eyes. I can watch them over and over and my enjoyment and appreciation just increases. As a monster kid, I appreciate the Faun and the Pale Man, but they're really just the exclamation points that make the movie, full of other virtues, work. I believe my art teacher would call that "the bleeding heart of Jesus," the bold choice in a work of art that pulls everything together and brings the work into focus. No doubt the movie could work somewhat without the creatures, just as a lot of the plot of Backbone might proceed with the ghost of Santi, but these supernatural storylines so effectively highlight everything else. They may be movies about the war and fascism that only seem like monster movies, but you could't have told the stories as effectively without monsters.

btw, how great a character is Mercedes? Her and the doctor are great (as is the old doctor in Backbone) because they're GDT's statement on actual heroes: people who work hard in the muck but have integrity and when they make the hard (but right) choices they're more likely to suffer than anything.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

This was just a tremendous amount of fun. I was worried, with TFA being so much like a cover of an old standard and Rogue One being a side story reliant on out previous knowledge and associations that the new Disney/Lucasfilm would only turn out variations on those two things, but The Last Jedi is a new Star Wars movie: it feels 100% like Star Wars, but it's a new movie, a Star Wars movie I hadn't seen before. Action was good: great lightsaber/close quarters battles and the ship to ship battles were easy to follow and had a great geography, i.e. I knew where things were in relationship to each other (this is apparently the hardest thing to do in movies). The entire movie had good geography: I knew where everyone was and what they were doing. Even the edits between the storylines were wonderfully handled.

... and for the life of me I'm not sure why some fans are mad about. Seems like a classic crowd-pleaser to me?

[jellydonut25]

I've watched a TON of movies recently...so just some of the highlights:
A Dark Song - A woman goes through dark magic rituals to try to meet her guardian angel in order to ask it for an ultimate favor (revenge for her son's death, in this particular case). It's a slow burn, but it's really good. 4/5

Wind River - A tracker gets pulled into an FBI investigation surrounding the rape and murder of a Native American girl. Another fairly slow one. It gets a little too over the top out of nowhere at the end, but another really good one. 4/5

Creep 2 - If you liked the first one (on Netflix, it's a 3 or 3.5/5), you might be like me and REALLY like this breezier, funnier, all-around more well-characterized sequel. It's pretty lacking in scare factor, but still enjoyable. 3.5/5

Berlin Syndrome - Kidnapping and psychological torture. It's really slow, but the ride is overall worth it. It can be refreshing when a movie has dramatic things happen without over-dramatizing them. 3.5/5

Hounds of Love - Kidnapping and psychological torture. Less slow, a little more dramatized, WAY more messed up in the head. 3.5/5

Super Dark Times - Like Stranger Things if the kids were all a little annoying and then one killed another and things got WAY too real. 3.5/5

The Discovery - What if science proved the existence of the afterlife? According to this two things: 1 - massive increase in suicides. 2 - take the next logical step and try to find out WHAT the afterlife is. It's certainly more drama than sci-fi, but it's interesting and unique. Somewhere on the spectrum of Source Code. 3.5/5

mother! - an interesting film, and not just when it goes off the rails and becomes a stream-of-conscious decent into hell. Talking too much about what it is gets into spoiler territory, especially since I came into this movie cold, knowing only that it was an Arronofsky film, Jennifer Lawrence was the star, and for a brief period, before we all (myself included) acted like Star Wars was anything other than a soulless franchise sucking our money with as much fervor as possible, people were talking about this movie. It was supposedly controversial, with arthouse people calling you dumb if you like it and blockbuster people calling you pretentious if you like it and had some huge shock value moments and was called one of the most hated movies of the year.
The message is decidedly mixed, as the lead, title role of the film is left the most ambiguous, with Jennifer Lawrence's character acting as a potential stand-in for at least two different "people," but I think sometimes you have to just roll with what a filmmaker is trying to do and say symbolically and not get bogged down in the details of how those symbols fit reality. Granted, it's not easy. Even saying that, I still feel a nagging pull of being bothered by the ways mother played a little too fast and loose with its allegory, and how some of the on-the-nose symbolism ultimately took away from the shock of certain scenes. I feel like the scene that caused certain people to revolt and call it a disgusting shock piece in particular has a lot of its oomph sapped away by the film having tipped its hand well before that point.
Still, mother! scratched an itch I haven't quite felt fully satisfied yet this year: the small-yet-big filmmaker-driven movie that's big on ideas and has a clear vision. It's not quite up to the level of something like last year's The Handmaiden, but it's that KIND of entertainment for me, where I'm appreciative of everything happening because the care gone into it is obvious. Also, Javier Bardem is really good.
4/5

Brawl in Cell Block 99 - AMAZING. A prison-set exploitation fighting movie from the director of Bone Tomahawk. It's got heart and character, and BRUTALTIY and VIOLENCE and Vince Vaughn's best performance EVER. This is flirting with a perfect score for me, but there are just a couple little nitpicks, and limitations given that it's pretty much an exploitation film and makes no bones about being one. 4.5/5


Leatherface - Not really "good"...but not bad. Enjoyable if you can just kind of approach this from the mindset that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise should have ended after the second film anyway and it hasn't done anything remotely good since then, so at least look for the series trying to do something, ANYTHING kind of new. Leatherface is a little clichéd and has some fan service moments but I was able to mostly enjoy it. 3.5/5.