Recently watched movies!

[O.Supreme]

[jellydonut25]

Watched Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy over the weekend.

Oldboy is my favorite. I think it's flawless.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance I'd probably put next. Though it's the most emotionally detached of the three, it's also the one that does the best job of throwing actual sympathy around for everyone involved. Nobody in this movie deserves what they get...except maybe the organ thieves.
Lady Vengeance I'd put last, but that's not meant as a slight....just that it's the least awesome. It's probably the most stylish, and being the most straightforward lends itself to frequent rewatching a tad more, though it's a heart-wrencher and probably still not something I'd reach for overly often. Its biggest weakness though is an ending that goes on just too long.

[Dr Kain]

[lhb412]

Watched The Return of Godzilla again in oh so many months. Ever since the Blu-Ray came out I've been toying with the idea of watching all the Heisei films in order, and I might do that from here - or I may chicken out before Godzilla vs. Mothra.

[O.Supreme]

[lhb412]

^ Personally, the entire Batman/Joker hate/love symbiotic relationship stuff has been soooo overplayed for the last decade or two that I'd be disappointed if Lego Batman didn't lampoon it.

[lhb412]

One Million Years B.C.

Kino's Blu-Ray is beautiful. Really makes the terrific locations pop.

Honestly, this isn't one of my favorite Ray movies. It's got some awesome stuff in it (I especially like the pterodactyl and allosaurus sequences), but I think Ray's animated sequences in Gwangi are far superior and I find Hammer's wackier follow-up to this film, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (with Jim Danforth animated creatures), to be more entertaining. Of course, without Raquel Welch in a fur bikini the world would be a far poorer place (or at least numerous walls through the decades would be poorer for lack of a poster).

[Dr Kain]

[O.Supreme]

[lhb412]

^ I'm guessing your family isn't big on Ru Paul's Drag Race?

PS - I forgot to mention how great the music in One Million Years BC is.

[O.Supreme]

[Dr Kain]

[O.Supreme]

[jellydonut25]

[lhb412]

People putting their personal ideas into movies is often a key ingredient to them being great (whether you agree with them or not).

[klen7]

I agree to an extent, but i also agree with a sentiment O.Supreme brings up that if you're making a movie for kids, maybe you can do without a sexual subtext (I think the Shrek films went a bit too far in this regard). I never thought watching a PG movie with a 4 year old would result in me trying to explain what the holocaust is or why it happened.

[jellydonut25]

[lhb412]

Funny thing is that the opposite complaints are often made: that there's too little adult content in movies because they're all out to please the family audience and are afraid of the limiting nature of an 'R' rating.

[O.Supreme]

[jellydonut25]

I think there's actually a plethora of good stuff out there it's just harder to find because the big studios pay more to shove their mediocrity in your face. Even Netflix, I don't have a clue what is actually on there, I feel like it's just constantly recommending stuff I've already heard about. It's become easier than ever for big studios to reach you in all kinds of different ways and make you think they're the only things out there, but the reality is that there are SO MANY relatively undiscovered gems out there, you just gotta look. My top 2016 list was almost devoid of blockbusters and big studio stuff because it was a really bad year for them. Good year for independent and horror though.

[canofhumdingers]

Explorers - I've been on a bit of an 80's nostalgia wave recently. But not exactly revisiting things I know so much as seeking out new (to me anyway) material that fits with my memories of what was awesome as a young kid in the 80's looking up to all the cool big kids (you know, the 10 and 11 year olds). As an example I've been totally hooked on pandora's synthwave radio station. I think this wave hit me before Stranger Things, but that show definitely solidified it into something more solid than a fleeting phase.

Anyway, my wife found this on hulu and thought I'd like it. It's a coming-of-age adventure in the vein of The Goonies or E.T. directed by Joe Dante. It's not as good as either of those films but it was still worth a watch. It's a fun story and has some pretty good practical effects from ILM. There's a really cool stop motion mechanical spider thing at one point.

But then there's the aliens. Oh, the aliens! They're AWFUL. Their design is incredibly stupid, the animatronic bits of their faces need some Ritalin because they can't stop wiggling at obnoxiously high speed, and they're personalities are just intensely annoying. Especially the male.

I would've really liked this movie. In fact, I did. Until the aliens. They almost completely ruined it for me. They're THAT bad.

[lhb412]

^I remember reading a review of Explorers where the reviewer said he was thinking "why isn't this considered an '80s classic?"... until he got to the part with the aliens.

I saw the movie on the Disney channel back in the '90s. I remember the aliens as annoying, but everything else being very cool: the kids figuring out how to make the force field bubble thing (the knowledge is beamed into their heads and they have these shared dreams, right?) and building the spaceship around that. It certainly was an unconventional, original approach that stuck in my head. I'll always associate it with Flight of the Navigator, Cloak and Dagger, and DARYL (which terrified me); all kids' genre movies shown on the channel back then.

[Psycho Soldier]

[lhb412]

[Dr Kain]

Ghostbusters Extended Edition - Good god, there was not a single additional scene that added one thing to the narrative. Even the big dance number that was teased and suddenly cut in the theatrical cut turned out to be pointless. In fact, the additional scenes made the movie even worse than it already was. Kate McKinnon is hands down the only person in this movie that was even trying as she is reacting to the situations on hand. Everyone else was mediocre at best and highly unfunny. I wish I didn't give this version a chance because it soured the stuff I did like from when I saw it in theaters. I'm dropping my original score of 7 to a 6/10.