Recently watched movies!

[Hybrid Gojira]

Godzilla vs. Megalon (MST3k Version) - This has always been a bottom tier Godzilla movie for me. Despite being a kids movie, I feel like a lot of people offer that up as a defense for what is a bad movie with a few fun moments. The dam sequence is good, and I get a few kicks during the monster battle. I would still place still in the bottom of my Godzilla films, and it probably slid down a few after this latest viewing. At least the MST3k version made me laugh a bit. 4/10.


Godzilla (2014) - I rewatched this for the first time in about 6 months. It was probably the most I've enjoyed it out of any of my viewings. I think it benefited from adjusting my TV brightness (my TV picture is kinda off anyway, so I tend to run it a little bright) and I could see things a lot better this time around. It's on par with a lot of Toho Godzilla films that I would consider to be in the "good" category. 7/10.

[lhb412]

[klen7]

On Her Majesty's Secret Service - This finishes off the 60's for Bond flicks. Lazenby is fine as Bond (i might prefer him to Roger Moore, who's tenure went on far too long). From a story perspective, this falls between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice despite cinematically being released last of the three. Theres some continuity issues that arrive from not adapting the film as such. It's interesting because there's a lot of elements introduced in this film that become staples in the series and even come back in the Craig era. I found a couple shots very striking from a cinematography perspective, especially the skiing and helicopters. It was also kind of odd to see the fast cuts introduced into the fight sequences.

[lhb412]

Deadpool

It's weird that the family friendly turn that blockbusters have taken in the past decade has made something rude and crude so refreshing! This is weird, right? Highly enjoyable romp, the characters are good (especially the two X-Men, Colossus and Negasonic), and the lower budget cuts the bloat the plagues most blockbusters.

[Hybrid Gojira]

Pacific Rim - This is such a fun movie. Idris Elba is awesome. The effects are beautiful (and this was also my first time watching it on Blu Ray). For comparison's sake, I think it's an overall better movie than G14, but I think G14 has some bigger wow moments...still a 7/10 overall.

[Rody]

After all the hype that Mad Max: Fury Road got last year, I figured I should catch up on this franchise, so a couple of months ago I watched the first three films.
Mad Max was an interesting sort of character study: a man fighting for his sanity against a violent world, only to finally succumb and become the meanest of them all.
The Road Warrior was pretty cool. This movie looks so different from the first it's downright jarring, but I can see how it became so iconic.
Beyond Thunderdome was - disjointed? It started off and ended well enough, but the story felt a little forced, maybe, and the style - which made the previous film - feels a little lacking.

This brings me to today, when I finally watched Mad Max: Fury Road. It was VERY cool. Fury Road sort of feels like The Road Warrior, but where the older film seemed a bit rough around the edges, the newer film goes all-out and it totally works. I find it interesting how Max's character almost feels like it has come full circle now: a madman who regains his humanity in spite of the cruel world he lives in. Perhaps my biggest issue with The Road Warrior, as well as Beyond Thunderdome, was how Max ended up being forced into helping the other characters, so his own character didn't really develop at all. in Fury Road, assisting Furiosa starts out as necessity, but over the course of the film, we see Max bond with her to the point that he wants to save her and everyone else by the end. Amidst all the crazy action & violence, it's nice to see there was time for the characters to be characters.
That's not to say I'm criticizing the crazy action & violence. I was delighted by the intensity of each sequence (and a bit surprised it wasn't more bloody than it was), and thoroughly impressed by the scale of it all and level of stunts & other special effects achieved in the film, polished off with some very nice CGI moments (that sandstorm was truly awesome). All in all, Fury Road was a blast. I didn't love it the same way many others did, but I was certainly impressed, and I certainly get the hype.
B+/A-.

[The Shadow]

[Mac]

[klen7]

i didnt even get a glimpse of that. i'll have to watch it again with that in mind

[Mac]

To elaborate more, the first film is a cute little tokusatsu homage about a beta-male type using an obscure little show to empower and improve his life. The second is, what happens when an entire nation internalizes and celebrates Zebraman? The property (both fictionally and meta) gets whored out, and is used as an excuse for hyper-violence and sex. It's condemning the adults who cosplay skimpy outfits of 12 year old characters, and revolve their lives around super-heroes.

[Psycho Soldier]

Super Inframan - It delivered what I expected. The script is shallow, but the excessive explosions, ridiculous action scenes, and '70s aesthetic kept me entertained.

[Hybrid Gojira]

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah - I finally picked up the Blu Ray and I must say, the subtitles helped flesh out the story and provided a little more detail than we get in the dub. This was my first time seeing it subbed, so it was a fun experience. That being said, I'm really torn overall because some of the movie is awful. All of the dinosaur scenes and M-11 stuff looks terrible. I don't mind the ideas, the wonky time travel, or even the Ghidorah furbies (horrifically executed), but it looks so bad. Despite that, Shindo is an excellent character and his relationship to Godzilla and subsequent death is really well done. Yoshio Tsuchiya plays two of the best characters in the series between his role here and Controller of planet X, and he is the best thing about the entire movie (with the exception of the Big G).

This Godzilla suit happens to be my favorite ever, plus his entrance has one of the coolest shots as Godzilla is wading through the ocean with a lighthouse on a cliff. Heisei KG is ok, but pales in comparison to the original. The execution is just kinda bland, though I do like the overall design. Plus, take a few moments to compare the city destruction scenes from Ghidrah and then watch KG's rampage in this and tell me which has more flair, more charm, and is better executed - as a fan of the Heisei series (well...some of them), the original KG basically unbeatable.

And Teresawa gets the biggest Heisei douche award for basically ignoring his girlfriend the entire film in order to spend all his time with a girl he ends up being related to.

Despite all of the negative stuff, I really really like the good stuff....so I'm going 6.8/10.

[lhb412]

... the guys in Heisei films... do tend to be kind of douchey, don't they?

[Benjamin Haines]

[Hybrid Gojira]

[Dr Kain]

Austin Powers - After watching every Bond film last year it was interesting to refresh my memory on this movie with all of its Bond references. It's not the greatest movie in the world, but the majority of the jokes work and its plot is done well. I give it a 7/10 stars.

[The Shadow]

For comparison's sake, I recommend checking out AIP's spy-spoofs Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and it's sequel Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (a co-production with Italian International Pictures).

I've seen most of Austin Powers years ago and when I saw the Dr. Goldfoot movies on TCM sometime in 2015 ( or maybe late 2014) it seemed to me that the Austin Powers movies drew as much influence from these movies as they do from the Bond films. I believe around the same time TCM also ran Our Man Flint (1966) and it's sequel In Like Flint (1967), again here they seemed to be equally influential on the Austin Powers movies -- if you're interested you may want to check them out too.

A few short clips from Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine -- this video was put up on Youtube by Salli Sachse who had a short acting career and was one of the golden bikini clad girls. (And yes, that is The Supremes you hear at the beginning of the video, they performed the title song)

[sentaison]

Watched the latest Fantastic Four movie. Good lord it sucked! Why can't ANYONE get it through their heads that Doctor Doom is a brilliant scientist and inventor? Why the "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!" do they have to give him powers and/or turn him into a monster?

Josh Trank should be dumped into the Negative Zone.

[Dr Kain]

The Big Heat - Another excellent Film Noir that went places I didn't expect it to. It was well worth the wait for it to be reissued on BD. I give it an 8/10.

[EricDent]

I rented several movies in the last month via Redbox.

Fantastic 4: dull, lifeless, and just plain dumb until like the last 5 minutes. Then the action kicks in, and it's OK at best.
Kinda wonder if Trank will ever get work again, I thought Chronicle was great.
Though it could be a case of too much "trying to control things" by the studio?

LEGO Justice League vs Bizarro League: fun, kinda silly, and has a good message.
Of course it's made for the kids, so it's pretty tame.
My favorite thing was Batman was always thinking everybody was gonna turn evil any second.

LEGO DC Superheroes vs The Legion of Doom: another amusing movie about the formation of The Legion of Doom.
The best part was when Deadshot aces the obstacle course.

The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials: Nit as interesting as the first one, and again I didn't really care for any of the characters & if they lived or died. They were just so generic. The main guy seemed to be a bit too hot-headed and made snap decisions based on gut feelings rather than plans.
Plus of course it ends with a rather large cliffhanger...

Hitman: Agent 47: Never really played the Hitman games, but this was a pretty cool action type movie.
Lots of guns, fast cars, cool fight scenes, and of course slo-mo stuff.

The Good Dinosaur: Cute, fun, and a bit sad. The world looked great, the characters were good, and the story was done well. "Spot" was cute & funny.

Everest: Yeah, no way in heck I would EVER try to climb that mountain.
Basically shows that if you commercialize stuff that's really hard to do, you might mess up big time.
Not sure what went wrong, but it obviously proves that lack of cooperation isn't a good idea on that mountain.

Been going through my collection a lot as well:

Hellboy 2, Ghostbusters, The 5th Element, King Kong vs Godzilla, and several others.
Most of those were upgrades to Blu-Ray.

In the theater I saw these recently:

The Martian: cool as heck, and gives hope for the future of space exploration.
We might want to start seriously thinking about it, unless you want to swim everywhere in about a hundred years...

Deadpool: AWESOME in every way! Only weird part was having little kids in the theater for this movie....
Not sure if the kid knew what was going on, but I'm surprised he didn't ask "daddy, what's that girl doing on top of that guy?" There was actually a lot of people that stayed till after the end credits, which was weird cause usually everybody leaves...

[Hybrid Gojira]

Iron Man 3 - It happened to be on, so we watched it. I still think the 1st is the best of the Iron Man flicks, but this is a fun action movie if only because Robert Downey Jr. is hilarious per the usual. 6.5/10.

[Hybrid Gojira]

The Good Dinosaur - This was my first time watching this...and it's awesome. It hit every heart string along the way - charming, witty, and just enough laughs to balance the more emotional parts of the film. This is also probably the best looking animated picture I've ever seen - from the lavish landscape to the stunning water scenes, it's really breathtaking. 8/10, with a 9/10 experience overall because I really enjoyed it more than I think most people will.

[The Shadow]

I watched The Good Dinosaur recently too, definitely a great movie. I was a bit unsure about it at first because the trailers don't do the film justice.

I also watched R.I.P.D. thanks to FXM's OnDemand offerings. I liked the movie on the whole and found it a fun film to watch. R.I.P.D. is based on Peter Lenkov's comics of the same name, and according to Amazon reviews the first issues of those were published in 1999 via Dark Horse. Parts of the movie seemed a bit formulaic, such as when Walker first arrives at the RIPD much of the scene could have been lifted from MiB, and the idea Ghostbusters meets MiB is a fair description of the movie (I wouldn't be surprised if that was used to sell the movie to Universal).

Some looking online indicates that the movie changes some things from the comics, so those formulaic portions could be right of Hollywood's How to Write a Movie Script toolbox. Which is unfortunate because I believe the "bones" of the R.I.P.D. story are pretty good (what can be seen in the movie) and had the story been allowed to shine for what it was rather then being forced into a mold Universal might have secured a sequel or two.

[Dr Kain]

Zootopia - Another hit for Disney is upon us. It is a fantastic social commentary and does it in one of the most intelligent ways possible. As to be expected, the voice acting is top notch and the animation is gorgeous. The story is hilarious and full of fantastic homages to everything all around. The DMV scene may have been shown for the trailer, but it is still an excellenty crafted sequence that nails the DMV in the real world to a T. If anyone is offended by that moment, then maybe they should actually do their jobs properly!! Beyond that, there is so much more that I can not go into detail on as it needs to be seen. Overall, a 9/10 stars and Disney has already bagged the next year's Oscar award.

Avengers - 8/10

The Devil's Carnival - It gets better with each viewing. It's not the best movie ever, but it does have a sense of style and uniqueness with it. As such, I give it a 7/10. Some of the songs kick all kinds of ass.

TDC2 Alleluia - Pointless, only half of the songs were good, and the story made little sense. They did a better job when they didn't have a budget. The first song was easily the best song of the movie, which is not really a good thing. There were some fantastic pieces in the middle and end of the movie, but as a whole, there wasn't much music in its 98 minute run time. I give it a 6/10.

[Dr Kain]

Where the Sidewalk Ends - No where near the best of the Noirs I have seen, but still an enjoyable one nonetheless. 7/10.

Captain America TWS - Still the best Marvel movie to date. 9.5/10.

Little Shop of Horrors - Man, that kind of sucked. First off, the audio was out of synch with the video and even though it came out in B&W, they put it under Extras and had the colorized version as the main choice. Also, the case has Jack Nicholson's face plastered all over it and he was in the movie for like 2 minutes, if that. Anyway, there were some funny moments and the chase scene was cool, but overall, a lackluster movie that I'm not sure whether it was intentionally trying to be bad or if it was just flat out bad by accident. I give it 5/10 as I have seen worse.