Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

Gamera Guardian of the Universe on Blu-Ray, still looks great!
The girl who plays Asagi is a cutie, of course the "bird specialist" is no slouch either.

Spider-Man Homecoming - 10/10

Sailor Moon SuperS - 7/10

Sailor Moon SuperS Ami's First Love - 10/10

Saw "A Wrinkle in Time" over the weekend - damn!!

As a school kid in the 1970s, this was the hip thing to read. I found the whole thing rather meandering myself. When I first heard about a film adaption, my thinking was that it could not hurt. How wrong I was about that!

Not only did I find the story still meandering, but it was not very interesting either. An episode of "The Twilight Zone", or "Outer Limits" or "Land of the Lost", has more charm than this film. But my biggest compliant is that they should have hired relative unknowns for the three magical beings, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. Instead, all I saw was Oprah, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling in costume, and basically could not get past that.

Using Leonard Maltin's rating scale, I give "A Wrinkle in Time" *1/2 stars.

^ i thought it was a real mess of a film, makes me worried for The New Gods

Watched the other 2 '90s Gamera movies as well.
Attack of Legion & Revenge of Iris.

Still really good movies.

Will be seeing Captain Marvel sometime early next week, so I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

Brotherhood of the Wolf - This is an old favorite of mine, but i haven't seen it in many years. Between this and Silent Hill i feel robbed that Christophe Gans hasn't made more films. He has such a great visual style. I love all the camera movement and transitions. If you haven't seen it, you probably should, Universal did a surprisingly good job with the dub. The fusion of french period piece, martial arts and creature feature stands well enough on its own, but again the visuals and smart use of special effects make me love this flick

lhb412 might be interested to hear that Gans has been attached to an adaptation of Corto Maltese

^ Yes! I'm tentatively excited for Corto Maltese! It's such a fabulous comic it deserves a top class adaptation.

Audition

Loving the new Arrow Blu-ray.

I really adore this movie. I know some find it far too extreme and hard to take, but I don't take it that way. Maybe if the extreme elements had seemed tacked on, but that isn't the case here: the hideous violence is dictated by character and theme. It needs to happen in the film in accordance with the story and characters that have been set up.

Although the torture sequence is much-hyped, I find the flashbacks / visions to be equally memorable and possibly more disturbing.

Captain Marvel - Pretty good, but what you expect to see from a super hero film and that's cool since it's not boring. It does suffere from Prequel-Itis though, the music feels out of place, and Larson continues to be as wooden as always. I do love the Skrulls in this movie.

I haven't seen Captain Marvel...but have people who criticize Brie Larson for movies like Skull Island and Captain Marvel seen her in movies like Short Term 12 and Room?

I'm not saying she's the best actress (though the Academy did), but she CAN be good in things.

Really random Redbox night.

First was Bohemian Rhapsody, which was really good.

Then we had Overlord, which was pretty weird.

^ What? She was killer in her short role in Scott Pilgrim. It's a role so different from what she usually plays that for the longest time I didn't realize that that was her.

Sorry, but I really don't like her enough to go out of my way to watch a movie I have no interest in just to see if she can actually act. If she can't act in Endgame with the Russos in charge, then she is worthless to me.

Your loss, I guess.

Just don't expect people to take you, of all people, at your word when you say she "sucks" when you haven't seen the movies where her performance is the most acclaimed.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

Okay, finally back on my re-watch. Despite the drubbing this film often gets now that the original is widely available I still get a kick out of how clever it was to sell a Japanese movie to American Audience essentially by hiding a Japanese movie inside of an American movie. However, I must admit that by cutting so much of the Japanese cast's material they're much flatter characters. I noticed myself zoning out during many of their scenes in this version, which doesn't happen in the original because there's a lot of depth and nuance to them, and that's so noticeably absent for me now that I'm so familiar with the original version.

The Lego Movie 2 Watched this last night with the family. It was OK, a few good one liners but nothing spectacular. I understand the point it was trying to achieve, and it wasn't a bad one, it just seemed to fail to execute and stand out the way the first film did. It's odd because as soon as the first film came out, everyone I know was excited for the sequel. But when it finally came out last month, the numbers were OK, not great. I think this was one of those unique cases where 5 years in between actually hurt it, instead of helped. Had this been released at the 3 year mark (say in 2017 instead of 2019), then it may have fared better, but then that's when the Lego Batman movie came out, and that of course was successful. While I commend all involved in taking an idea very few people had faith in (a movie about toy bricks) and making a pretty imaginative story, I think in short order, it has run its course. They were smart not to end Movie 2 on a cliffhanger, so there are no immediate expectations. If they do come up with a good enough idea in the future, they can move forward, but if not. It can be left 2 and done. Should have had more raptors, they were the best part . Also the "Marvel's not calling us back" line was pretty good. In this day and age however, even though the movie was somewhat bland- having a kid-friendly movie without any objectionable content I guess is an achievement in and of itself. 6/10

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Man, Sekizawa is just such a master in these scripts. The first part of this movie is so silly and fun and yet you're getting all this exposition and set-up and none of it feels like homework. I do feel that the story gets a bit looser as it goes along and that's to the detriment of this movie, but this is the first of the '60s Godzillas and it's really setting all these precedents that would be refined in the subsequent ones. Sometimes it feels like a practice run for the far more polished Mothra vs. Godzilla two years later.

My favorite parts of this film are the solo bits of rampaging and military interaction that Godzilla gets to do. I think they're the best staged action sequences of the film and I love the Godzilla suit and the miniature environments. The model buildings get a lot of good press but I'm just as appreciative of the really well-done model landscapes, such as the fields and mountains Godzilla stomps through here.

Hereditary (2018) - This has been a dynamite decade for horror films. Annihilation and A Quiet Place were two standouts of 2018 for me and now I can add Hereditary to that list. It's a brutal examination of the different ways that people cope with loss. Like a lot of great horror, I think it benefits from knowing as little about the plot as possible going in. It's very effective.

The Man Who Knew Too Much - I really like it, but I can see why Hitchcock chose to remake it as the acting is quite stiff in parts. The shootout scene at the end is excellent. Unfortunately, I feel like Peter Lorre is just playing his character from M over again. Still great nonetheless, so I give it a solid 8/10.

So The Satanic Rites of Dracula is probably the worst Hammer Dracula movie, and yet it's maybe not as bad as I had been led to believe. People always talk smack about this movie! As it is, both Lee and Cushing are good. At one point Dracula pretends to be German and then Cushing pulls out the smallest gun in existence from his coat. You know, fun! This one gets points for trying to break from the usual formula and do more of a modern procedural thing, but it meanders a bit and even though all the previous movies are repetitive they repeated a formula that worked really well, and this one might have has use for a bit more of those cliches.