I saw the trailer for Gran Turismo and I thought it would be an interesting story showcasing e-sports at the highest level.

Halfway through the trailer the gamer is competing against real drivers in a supercar. I don't care if it's plausible or not, the transition from video games to actual sports made me lose interest entirely.

Aug 10, 2023 22:33:54 GMT Emperor said:

I saw the trailer for Gran Turismo and I thought it would be an interesting story showcasing e-sports at the highest level.

Halfway through the trailer the gamer is competing against real drivers in a supercar. I don't care if it's plausible or not, the transition from video games to actual sports made me lose interest entirely.

It’s based off the real life story of Jann Mardenborough.

Meg 2: The Trench: The plot is pretty basic, but it absolutely delivers as a popcorn flick. Anyways, it's a pretty good follow up to the first movie IMO.

Oppenheimer: I'll be honest, you definitely feel every minute of that three hour run time. The Wife ended up falling asleep watching this, with that said, I did like the movie (although I probably won't watch it again, but worth the one time viewing).

2023 Films Seen

SPOILER: Click to show

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Cocaine Bear
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
Fast X
Flamin’ Hot
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
John Wick: Chapter 4
Knock at the Cabin
Legion of Super-Heroes
M3GAN
Meg 2: The Trench
Missing
Murder Mystery 2
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Peter Pan & Wendy
Plane
Scream VI
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shotgun Wedding
The Magician’s Elephant
The Mother
The Pope's Exorcist
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Unseen
Your Place or Mine

Meg 2 was an amazing popcorn flix. Meg 3 is rumored to be the fourth book, Hell's Aquarium, which will be bonkers if turns out to be the case. About making an aquarium with all these ancient creatures.

Champions: The Wife wanted to watch this, as it was filmed right here in Winnipeg (Mick Foley-style cheap pop), the highlight of the movie, was seeing the hotel (Canad Inns - not the location Foos always go to), that we spent our honeymoon at in the movie. With that said, I really enjoyed the feel-good story this film told, it’s definitely worth a watch if you are into sports movies.

2023 Films Seen

SPOILER: Click to show

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Champions
Cocaine Bear
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
Fast X
Flamin’ Hot
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
John Wick: Chapter 4
Knock at the Cabin
Legion of Super-Heroes
M3GAN
Meg 2: The Trench
Missing
Murder Mystery 2
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Peter Pan & Wendy
Plane
Scream VI
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shotgun Wedding
The Magician’s Elephant
The Mother
The Pope's Exorcist
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Unseen
Your Place or Mine

Aug 13, 2023 2:51:50 GMT c said:

Meg 2 was an amazing popcorn flix. Meg 3 is rumored to be the fourth book, Hell's Aquarium, which will be bonkers if turns out to be the case. About making an aquarium with all these ancient creatures.

Cool.

I'm def looking forward to more Meg movies.

X and Pearl were both pretty entertaining, only problem is I messed up and watched Pearl first so I knew the deal with X right away, only found out the association after Pearl, I knew it was the same maker are star, didn't realize they were directly connected.

Also watched Men, which was...a movie. I was interested as it was going but it just kind of meanders more and more into the finale, which I ended up fast forwarding when it got the repeated birthing scene, not disturbed, just redundant. Wasn't bad, but didn't go anywhere for my liking, nothing I'd watch a second time.

Aug 17, 2023 9:37:16 GMT RagnarokMike said:

X and Pearl were both pretty entertaining, only problem is I messed up and watched Pearl first so I knew the deal with X right away, only found out the association after Pearl, I knew it was the same maker are star, didn't realize they were directly connected.

Also watched Men, which was...a movie. I was interested as it was going but it just kind of meanders more and more into the finale, which I ended up fast forwarding when it got the repeated birthing scene, not disturbed, just redundant. Wasn't bad, but didn't go anywhere for my liking, nothing I'd watch a second time.

I thought you were using drastic name shortenings for all those movies and that "X" was "Fast and Furious X" or something. But no, those were all the actual movie names. Including a movie actually just called "Men".  I assume "X" is a documentary about the making of what was formerly known as Twitter.

Barbie
Excellent movie. I loved it. Ryan Gosling is hilarious and the plot of the movie is surprisingly poignant for a cash grab based on a popular doll. I shouldn't have doubted Greta Gerwig though.

I especially liked how they didn't try to make anything about Barbie being real plausible. They're just like "yeah Barbieland is a place that exists," and everyone just accepts it. There's always some weird explanation in movies like this that involves magic or some kind of real-world reason to make the viewer believe it could happen and Barbie is just like "you roller blade then you take a boat then you take a rocket ship and you're there! Easy!"

X and Pearl were great. Cannot wait for Maxxxine.

Barbie was great too. Took a lot of what made Life in the Dreamhouse great and adapted it for mainstream fun. And most importantly, made a film that was fun as the goal.

Crazy Greta is going from this to writing Snow White. Had no interest at all in the adaptation until I saw Greta was writing the film. Marc Webb who did Amazing Spider-Man is directing, which also got me interested.

Strays:

As if Beavis and Butthead wrote a movie. Just incredibly stupid and gross out homour…which I laughed at quite a bit of. Though like the Jackass films don’t plan on eating much while or after watching this 🤢.

Asteroid City

If you like Wes Anderson films you’ll like this. Bright, colourful and whimsical even when dealing with heavy topics. The setting of watching a televised play takes place still gets you invested as much as you’ll get reminders it’s a play. Very interesting concept but I can see some getting frustrated with it. Only 4 of us in the showing and one walked out.
For me personally I loved it though

So I ended up watching a few movies, over the past week on Netflix.

- Heart of Stone
- The Out-Laws
- We Have a Ghost

Out of the three movies, Heart of Stone (starring Gal Gadot) was easily the best one, although still a subpar Mission Impossible-style film. The other two movies, weren't really all that great either, outside of a joke or two in each respective film, which is a shame as they both had good casts attached to the projects.

2023 Films Seen

SPOILER: Click to show

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Champions
Cocaine Bear
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
Fast X
Flamin’ Hot
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Heart of Stone
John Wick: Chapter 4
Knock at the Cabin
Legion of Super-Heroes
M3GAN
Meg 2: The Trench
Missing
Murder Mystery 2
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Peter Pan & Wendy
Plane
Scream VI
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shotgun Wedding
The Magician’s Elephant
The Mother
The Out-Laws
The Pope's Exorcist
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Unseen
We Have a Ghost
Your Place or Mine

Sound of Freedom

Solid film, much like Spotlight it’s not an “enjoyable” film considering the circumstances but an interesting film worth a watch. Probably could have trimmed 15-20 minutes out of it though.

Blue Beetle: So this is easily the best DC film of the year, and the second-best comic book movie of 2023 so far. It’s a shame, that most people won’t give this a chance due, to recent drama concerning the DCEU, as it really was an enjoyable movie IMO.

The Flash: The best parts of this movie easily featured Batman, and to a lesser extent Supergirl. As far as the titular character goes, I wasn’t super big on the double Ezra scenes especially when it was just him (x2).

TMNT: Mutant Mayhem: We took the kids to go see this for National Cinema Day, they loved the movie and I enjoyed it as well.

Both Blue Beetle and Ninja Turtles make my top ten list of 2023 films.

2023 Films Seen

SPOILER: Click to show

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Blue Beetle
Champions
Cocaine Bear
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
Fast X
Flamin’ Hot
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Heart of Stone
John Wick: Chapter 4
Knock at the Cabin
Legion of Super-Heroes
M3GAN
Meg 2: The Trench
Missing
Murder Mystery 2
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Peter Pan & Wendy
Plane
Scream VI
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shotgun Wedding
The Flash
The Magician’s Elephant
The Mother
The Out-Laws
The Pope's Exorcist
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Unseen
We Have a Ghost
Your Place or Mine

Top Ten Films of 2023

SPOILER: Click to show

10. M3GAN
9. Creed III
8. Cocaine Bear
7. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
6. TMNT: Mutant Mayhem
5. Blue Beetle
4. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
2. Scream VI
1. John Wick: Chapter 4

Flash would have been a better movie without the Flash IMO <.<

For Blue Beetle that is the first Gunnverse movie. That shit is cannon moving forward. Seems like Gunn went to bat hard for Ángel Manuel Soto, stopping the film from getting cancelled, moving it from streaming to theaters and now putting it before his film as the first Gunnverse film. Gunn is also said to be very high on Jaime Reyes and will use him elsewhere.

Also turns out the master cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski was on it. He did Hereditary and Midsommar.  A lot of the crew was Ari Aster guys.  

Not seen it yet as I am waiting for a non-blurry copy to make bootleg sites. From everything I heard it is a great latino film. Which works for me. Also it is filled with easter eggs the director hide, as he wanted it to be part of the larger universe, but some things like Lexcorp where no there yet so he was asked not to use them. Instead he did things like hide oreos in shots, Bruce Wayne being mentioned in a news cast or green light shining.

The Equalizer 3

A tourism ad for Italy disguised as a film, when the action actually takes place it’s good but it’s far and few between instead you get to watch Denzel enjoy a cafe instead. Riveting.

Trading Places (John Carpenter, 1983)

A harrowing psychological horror starring scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. The premise is a sadistic experiment in which two extremely wealthy sociopaths (Duke & Duke), to whom humans are playthings, ruin a middle class stockbroker's life and put a homeless person in his place.

Both men are stripped from their natural environment and placed in completely unfamiliar settings, with no smooth transition period, causing intense mental trauma. The wealthy man is framed for possession of drugs, forced to spend time in jail during which he is beaten up and degraded, and placed in a situation where his loving girlfriend dumps him in public. The man is mentally broken, his poverty driving him to desperate crime and suicide, in a heartwrenching scene.



On the surface it doesn't seem so bad for the homeless person, given the effortless life of the wealthy, but in fact this creates a mental schism so strong that he suffers equally immense trauma. On the surface he succeeds in his new life, but at the cost of his entire sense of self. I mustn't forget to mention the brutal depictions of racism.

The two men discover the ruse laid upon them and seek vengeance on Duke & Duke. Their revenge is ghastly, even more horrifying than the events that preceded. Through a nefarious trading scheme they put the two men out of business, an event causing such great stress that one of the Duke brothers immediately suffers a near fatal heart attack, the other instantly losing his sanity and screaming incoherently. The worst punishment, however, was dealt to the criminal Beeks, who oversaw the role-switching operation. He is tied up, forced into a gorilla costume, and locked in a cage with a real male gorilla. Bestial rape is heavily implied, and one of the final scenes of the movie suggests he will be stuck in that cage forever.

No harm befall Jamie Lee Curtis' character, further establishing her stature as the ultimate final girl, in one of the most frightening horror movie of the 80s.

Rewatched Joe Dante's Matinee, his film essentially about William Castle (played by John Goodman). Think it is his masterpiece. Gremlins and Howling were great, but this was a love letter to 70's horror gimmicks and a great period piece. Also a super cute film in the end. Real sad seems to be tending towards forgotten film territory.

TMNT: Mutant Mayhem was alright, hate Donny's voice, didn't like their Splinter, April was a dumply little hipster, in general I found most of the characters shit, and the human designs was some of the worst I've seen, terrible aesthetic choice. But the turtles themselves worked (Donatello's voice aside), the soundtrack hit, the action was solid, and the story was decent enough.

Red Notice (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2021)

One day I was browsing Netflix and a little known film called Red Notice captured my attention. An action jaunt starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. My intuition directed me well: the film is an absolute riot and one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in a long time.

The plot centres around art thieves competing to obtain Cleopatra's three eggs, a trio of dazzlingly beautiful MacGuffins. This quest takes the elite cast to many lovely locations where they engage in all kinds of hijinx.

The script is magnificent, with twists, turns and double crosses every step of the way. Some twists are predictable, but intentionally so, misdirecting from the big reveals, which are all fantastic. The writing rivals the great detective stories and murder mysteries in how everything fits together.

The dialogue is top notch, witty and meaningful, never a wasted word. Ryan Reynolds is in his element as the devious conman, who hides his mental machinations behind layers of wisecracks. He has a great time with the script, but not more than Gal Gadot, who thrives every second she is on screen. She's having the time of her life, radiating energy and personality. She's not as omnipresent as Johnson and Reynolds but always steals the show.

What about The Rock? Dwayne is straight as an arrow, often the butt of Reynolds' antics, getting frequently outwitted. Dwayne's characters rarely get any egg on their face, but he plays the role expertly, remaining straight faced but likeable and competent, hanging in there with the rapid fire witticisms of Reynolds and Gadot.

The set pieces and choreography are outstanding. It all starts with an inventive chase sequence in a museum, involving some scaffolding antics, and never stops. The action scenes are truly dazzling and Reynolds is a master of using anything in his environment to his advantage. Gadot's one fight scene is gorgeous to watch.

10/10, 5 stars, Red Notice is going high on my favourite movies list.

Aug 19, 2023 2:25:08 GMT Lony said:

Out of the three movies, Heart of Stone (starring Gal Gadot) was easily the best one, although still a subpar Mission Impossible-style film. 

'

I watched this one on the weekend, and was mildly entertained but thought it got worse and worse as it went on. She carried this to being halfway passable, but I don't really think Gal Gadot is that great, I find her acting fluctuates in quality from scene to scene. Sometimes she feels natural but a lot of the time it's a bit stilted and she just doesn't have the je ne sais quoi to deliver those Bond-esque one liners.

Might be one for Emperor though as he's clearly a fan!

je ne sais quoi

soon as I saw it, I knew. That's a like.

Gran Turismo: The wife and I went and saw this in theaters last week, in the D-BOX seats. It definitely added to the experience and IMO made watching the movie even better.

The Little Mermaid (2023): This finally made its way to Disney+, so we gave it a watch for our family movie night. It was pretty much what one would expect with these live-action adaptations* of classic Disney movies.

*The Lion King is still my favorite.

2023 Films Seen

SPOILER: Click to show

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Blue Beetle
Champions
Cocaine Bear
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
Fast X
Flamin’ Hot
Gran Turismo
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Heart of Stone
John Wick: Chapter 4
Knock at the Cabin
Legion of Super-Heroes
M3GAN
Meg 2: The Trench
Missing
Murder Mystery 2
No Hard Feelings
Oppenheimer
Peter Pan & Wendy
Plane
Scream VI
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shotgun Wedding
The Flash
The Little Mermaid
The Magician’s Elephant
The Mother
The Out-Laws
The Pope's Exorcist
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Unseen
We Have a Ghost
Your Place or Mine

The Nun 2

If you’ve seen any of the films in the conjuring universe, you’ve seen this

Jul 27, 2023 15:28:22 GMT System said:

Talk to Me:

Fantastic Australian horror film, sound design was awesome and very full frontal at times.

Just watched this tonight, great film.  Completely originally film, like handcrafted for the tik tok generation.  Scene when the film turns was super intense as well.  Rest was your typical hollywood style horror, but at a fraction of the budget.

Def a team to be keeping an eye on.  

Blue Beetle:

Atrocious, feels like something pulled out of the mid 90s with its production value sans any of the charm. This opened late in Australia so I knew the writing was on the wall but I still didn’t expect it to be THAT bad.

A haunting in Venice:

This was surprisingly really good, I didn’t like Death on the Nile but I liked the approach they went for in this one.

I'm 10 years late but I watched "Joe" for the first time. I laughed, I raged, I cried - excellent film. Basically gothic Gummo with an actual story to tell.

Nicolas Cage is a true national treasure; it takes a lot of unique talent to be able to laugh at and with someone at the same time. Nothing touches Con-Air obviously, but this one came damn fucking close, son.

Rewatched The Batman. Still one of my favorite takes on the Batman universe. Really excited to see what Gunn does with this elsewhere world as there is so much potential here for pitch black techno noir stuff. Also since it will not connect to the main universe do not need to worry about making a traditional Batman or Bruce at all. Pattinson is just amazing in this role too.

Fantastic action film, my local cinemas almost never play foreign language films so could tell this was going to be good when they made an exception.

The Creator

Good not great sci-fi film, the robot and human characters have about as much depth as each other. Very gorgeous and ambitious film just wasn’t a great execution.