What film did you watch last night?

Spider-Man : No Way Home 9/10
The emotional pay offs in this movie are absolutely on the nose. Andrew Garfield in particular gets a few moments that make you choke up. Wihtout a doubt the last great MCU movie, GOTG 3 was good but not great. Even on re-watch this is a great movie that really uses it's premise to the best effect. For me only Captain America : Winter Soldier is better in the MCU although it can only be a tiny bit ahead of Infinity War and Endgame. The returning villains, Defoe and Molina in particlaur are perfect and teh film nails its ending. This is peak super hero for me, on a par with Spider Man 2 which is a very very high bar.
 
Matrix Reloaded - 8.5/10

This might lead to some discussion :D

I think Reloaded is much better than it's given credit for. I'm going to start with the cons to get them out of the way. The CGI is quite immersion breaking. the techniques to digitally replicate actors were in their infancy and it shows. Any time Neo does a move that a human can't replicate or there are multiple Smiths doing likewise it is a very jarring effect. Unfortunately it's just a product of the time and it's far from alone in that. The second big con is that it is not really a stand-alone movie. It suffers from being essentially part one of a two-parter (and part two was much weaker) The third con is just the rave/sex scene at the start, it's just terrible, goes on too long and completely ruins Morpheus' kick ass speech just before it.

So what are the pros? I love how the film expanded on the universe. It actually answers questions like what do machines/programs actually do? Exiles are a really interesting concept and add a lot more depth to the world. I think the Merovingian was a really interesting character (who was cruelly used in the latest film) of a program that doesn't give a **** about the war and just develops their own powerbase. Similarly the idea of the older predecessors to agents being the supernatural monsters that humans fear was a neat idea. Zion is really well done and just showing us other captains and more people make the world feel more important to the story. I think the character development in the second film is really strong. I love Morpheus adherence to his faith in the face of opposition (and then that to be almost shattered at the end), and then on the other side you have Neo who is dealing with two sides of his path, the people who don't believe he is any different and the people that almost worship him (which includes Morpheus) Smith too has a really interesting story arc and the contrast of him becoming less machine and Neo becoming less human is a strong core concept for their opposition. I only wish they'd given Trinity more, she really suffers in the both Reloaded and Revolutions from being little more than Neo's love interest (and in the end dies to help motivate him) She has a couple of cool fight scenes but she deserved more imo. Which leads us to the next pro! Choreography. I think the fight scenes in Reloaded are brilliant, the CGI is rough but when it's not being used the choreography is absolutely fantastic, the chateau atrium fight is one of my favourites of the series. Burly Brawl suffers the most from over CGI but the bits that aren't are also great and the freeway sequence is still as great today as it was then.
 
Shadowness said:
MockingJay - new one.

Too bloody long! No movie needs to be almost 3 bloody hours long!!
Click to expand...

Ha, that's wholly an issue with genre more than length. It's like saying no pop song should be over 3 mins long........but a symphony, well that is something else entirely.

Kingdom of Heaven, Director's Cut, is a great example of a film that was deserving of its 190+ mins extended length and should have been that as the theatrical release from the start.

Totally agree on your hunger games conundrum though.

Anyway, I rewatched Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman which in both the context of current movies and as a retrospective, especially Marvel and DC ones, are total masterpieces.

The more I watch MoS the better it gets. Easily a solid 9.5/10 now. BvS is up to a 9/10 too for me.

Were far too ahead of their time. I'm glad we have such a good back catalogue, especially against the latest offerings.
 
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Leave the World Behind 2/10.

They need to stop making films with dreadful scripts. It's a 'well produced' film with an interesting premise but the film makes no sense whatsoever, the character behaviour makes no sense whatsoever and the film presents a lot of questions and never bothers to answer any of them. Film was also way too long. Avoid.
 
Matrix Revolutions 6.5/10 maybe

It's fine. As an ending to the story it is fine. I felt like it got wrapped up alright but it's not really a very good film. It suffers from not really having much of what made the first two films good. There are basically no good fight scenes. There is a little scene that is clearly meant to be lobby scene 2.0 but falls well short and the final Neo vs Smith fight is pretty underwhelming (although I do like the way they used the water effects) Barely any of the film takes place in the Matrix and large portions of it (Zion) mostly don't involve the characters we've grown attached to so feel very underwhelming. Remember how I said Trinity was heavily underutilized in Reloaded? Well she is again and this time Morpheus gets to join her! He's basically a background extra for large portions of this film and both have no character development at all. Trinity gets what feels like the longest death scene in history. That's right, after Reloaded made the who reason Neo was fighting was to save her she gets killed to give him the motivation to continue urgh LAAAAAAZY writing. Even interesting character like the Merovingian seem like pale shadows of the characters in Reloaded (and Persephone I'm pretty sure has one line, other than she is just there to have bewbage it seems) We didn't even get to see Seraph fighting to survive against Smith. Which brings us onto the next problem, Smith is crap in this film. His lines are very underwhelming, the scene where he takes over the Oracle in particular is absolutely laughable. Only his dialogue right at the end with Neo is any good.

There are the odd highlights, the Zion defense while having problems is pretty impressive visually and the Hammer racing back ahead of the Sentinels was pretty cool. I also liked the scene at the beginning with the train station. Also the soundtrack is exceptional.
 
I just watched the film silent night on prime. the weirdest Xmas film I have ever seen. meant to be a black comedy but bloody hell it was brutal. The wife was not happy about the Xmas movie choice
We should have stuck with krampus :D

i would not know where to start on a rating.. it's a very odd film.
 
Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2 (on Amazon Prime). I watched the first one many years ago, This second part was refused a video certificate back in the late 80's. I turned it off 40 mins in - basically a big recap of the first film. It's awful

I have the dvd box set of Parts 3, 4, and 5. They definitely got better after the second installment, but it's not saying much. Part 4 was originally called Bugs in the UK, whilst Part 5 was retitled The Toy Maker. Part 3 'You Better Watch Out', was never released back then although I'm not sure if it eventually was.
 
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Rebel Moon

Ponderously slow. Almost completely lacking in original ideas. Poorly written, with shallow, unexpressed characters that its hard to care about. I realised I remember the name of just one character in the whole movie; that's how badly it puts them across. The visual design is poor, made worse by constant smears of overdone lens flare, and apart from a couple of flashes of inspiration in the "not the Mos Eisely Cantina honest would I lie to you" scene heavily derivative. Like, maybe a decade ago it'd have seemed visually impressive but not it's just a slew of things you've seen before. The fight scenes are all utter garbage, not even reaching the kind of pretty-but-dumb you expect from Snyder.

I don't have anything positive to say about it really, but it's not actually terrible, but it sort of skirts along at just that level where you think it might, maybe, rise to being something worth watching at some point but then never gets there which is almost worse. It's infuriating to see such a big budget sci-fi movie get made and then be such drekk. It's just so incredibly generic that there's not even fun to be had laughing at its stupidity as with movies like Jupiter Ascending, the other terrible big budget sci-fi movie it reminds me of.

4/10. Save yourself the hours.
 
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