I Just Watched (Films)

[Alan]

Theres a small rope, how would you be able to?

[Wrathbone]

The Spy Who Dumped Me

I've seen a fair few fish-out-of-water spy action comedies in recent years and this is by far the worst. As an action/spy film it's mediocre and predictable but watchable enough, and they really should have doubled down on that because the comedy aspect is bad. Didn't laugh once, barely even raised a smile. Which is a shame, because Mila Kunis is usually good, but Kate McKinnon inevitably drowns everything in her tiresome "look how weird I can be" attempts to be funny. If they replaced her with someone NOT trying to be funny, I honestly think there'd be a semi-decent film that could emerge.

The core of it is still unambitious and not especially interesting, though, and the concept has been done far better by the likes of Date Night and Central Intelligence.

4/10


As an aside, the only I reason I bought this was because I'd bought another film from HMV for £19.99 and you get free delivery for orders over £20, so I bought the cheapest blu ray they had (which worked out cheaper than paying for delivery). Not sure it was worth it.

[Stormbringer]

This week I watched (with my wife):

An American in Austen

An American woman in her mid-30s wakes up inside the novel of Pride & Prejudice, where she almost derails the plot and learns important life-lessons in the process.

The main character was a little soulless, but the actual P&P actors were great; I would actually like to see a proper P&P adaptation with those people. There were some funny moments, particularly with Darcy himself.


A Little Chaos

A film directed by the late Alan Rickman about an older King Louis XIV (played by Rickman himself) commissioning a massive landscaped garden project in his palace of Versailles. His chief garden designer, André Le Nôtre (played by Matthias Schoenaerts, who I think would make a great young Vladimir Putin), hires a very clever woman (Sabine de Barra, played by Kate Winslet) to help him build a particular feature in the gardens.

It's primarily a romance, really, and not my thing, but it was nice seeing the garden project come together, turning chaos into order, despite setbacks and despite the ultimate purpose being a vanity project for a decadent king.

[Rusty]

Clown in a cornfield

As good as it sounds (not very).
No fun deaths. Not really scary. Doesn't even make sense most of the time.
Oh well.

The Amateur
I thought this would be good as Rami has fun in his roles. This is just dumb through and through.
Again, nothing appears to be logical in any way.

[Wrathbone]

Captain America: Brave New World

A bland mishmash of MCU leftovers. The sad fact is that Anthony Mackie is not Captain America, as much as the MCU wants to insist otherwise (they've spent a whole TV series and a movie trying to hammer it home and I'm still no closer to accepting it). It's a cursed role for anyone other than Chris Evans, because he was so perfect for it that anyone else has an impossible standard to be measured against, and it doesn't help that the Sam Wilson Cap is basically Falcon in a more spangly outfit. If instead they'd had Sam realise that he should stop trying to be someone he's not and follow his own path, it might have worked.

Harrison Ford plays Harrison Ford, to the surprise of nobody. The baddies are not interesting, nor are they fleshed out. There are some bizarre callbacks to previous MCU films that go nowhere (notably The Eternals, which I'd thought and hoped everyone had quietly swept under the rug). It's a dull, meandering wet weekend of a movie that seems to give zero fucks whatsoever about consequences:

Spoiler

After Harrison Ford has gone full hulk and demolished half the White House, assaulted a crowd of people and taken a chunk out of the Washington Monument, a newsreader cheerfully declares that the country looks like things are back to normal. The fuck?! The president was secretly a rage monster who tore up the capital the day after the military were involved in an attack on Japan's air force, but everything's cool now that he's resigned? And the brain monster who was mind controlling people into causing international incidents is under arrest, so that's all fine too? Nobody has any questions or concerns? Nope, everyone's good...?

Not a disaster so much as an existential question for the MCU.

5/10

[Raid]

I'm absolutely with you on Sam Wilson being a poor substitute for Steve Rogers. I know it's not unusual in superhero fiction, but passing along a superhero name to a successor doesn't really feel right to me. Captain America is a character, not a title. Sam Wilson does not have superhuman strength and can't do this all day, and he can fly. That he can use the shield in exactly the same way that Steve Rogers could doesn't make any sense at all unless the shield itself has been doing that stuff all this time.

I actually tried to write a review for CA:BNW a couple of weeks ago when I watched it, but found myself so utterly disinterested in the content that I couldn't even drum up the enthusiasm to write about it. It wasn't nearly as bad as The Eternals, but it did absolutely nothing to reel me back into the setting. Honestly my write-ups for MCU stuff are starting to feel like the problem the series itself has; I'm saying the same thing over and over and there's no momentum to it - get a multi-film story going for goodness sakes.

[Rusty]

I've watched and couldn't tell you a thing about it. It was that good (not).

Deja Vu

A Denzel Washington flick that I can't believe I missed from 2006. It's got it all, sci fi bits, action and a modicum of story.

Not the best ever but I do like the unwritten and unspoken rules of time travel, won't talk more about it as most of it is spoiler territory

[Wrathbone]

Honestly my write-ups for MCU stuff are starting to feel like the problem the series itself has; I'm saying the same thing over and over and there's no momentum to it - get a multi-film story going for goodness sakes.

I had to find a list of phase 4/5/6 MCU films to remind me what there's been and how many of them I actually enjoyed. I was shocked by the numbers (13 films!) and my general feeling on them:

Good - 2
Mediocre - 3
Bad - 6
Not seen - 2 (Deadpool & Wolverine and Thunderbolts - the former because I've not seen Deadpool 2 yet and the latter because I wait for Disney+ now)

In my head, most of the stuff post-Endgame has been average with some good and bad outliers, but it turns out I actively dislike more than half of what I've seen. It's crazy how far the MCU has nosedived.

Comparatively, my numbers for phases 1-3:

Good - 18
Mediocre - 3
Bad - 2

[Raid]

I think I'm a little more forgiving, but I'm equally surprised to hear quite how many there've been. I couldn't tell you the plots of half of these.

Black Widow - Fine
Shang Chi - Bad
Eternals - Bad
No Way Home - Good
Multiverse of Madness - Fine
Love and Thunder - Bad
Wakanda Forever - Bad
-
Quantumania - Good
GotG v3 - Good
The Marvels - Fine
Deadpool & Wolverine - Good
Brave New World - Fine
Thunderbolts - not seen

4 Good, 4 Fine, 4 Bad. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

I'm likely judging on quite different criteria, I've found myself increasingly swayed by aesthetics in the last few years, and a film with a ton of creativity and effort poured into the visual work (Quantumania was a notable example) is likely to win me over even if the story's lacklustre (though that wasn't an issue with Quantumania).

I will say the ones I've marked as "Fine" were just that; acceptable, didn't make me actively dislike them. They're still not good films in the wider context, and just felt like something they made to fill a gap in the release schedule. They didn't really add or take away anything from the setting, but they did contribute to the overall lack of momentum and purpose.

[Animalmother]

Predator: Killer of Killers
Really enjoyed this, its great fun. A collection of short stories in different eras where a Predator appears. The animation style is beautiful, same as Arcane I believe. Each Predator has a unique style and weapons, all very creative and brutal. The first two stories are excellent, the third gets a bit silly but is still good. The Predators are just massive assholes, sticking their snouts into other peoples affairs and just fucking shit up

I really hope they make more of these as there's a near bottomless well of stories and conflicts they could explore.

[Wrathbone]

Witness

I saw this many years ago and remembered almost nothing except it being good, and I was wrong - it’s great. Not necessarily my favourite Harrison Ford movie, but I think it might be his best performance. It somehow manages to be both a nail-biting thriller and kind of a heartwarming romcom at times. The only weak point is the soundtrack, which is conspicuously awful and I think holds it back from being one of the all-time greats.

9/10

[Animalmother]

28 Years Later
Trying to describe this film is like trying to explain colour to a blind person, you really have to see it to understand. Its fucking mental. It has the most WTF ending I've seen in a film for some time. Everyone in the cinema did a double take

It is very enjoyable though and some of the kills are hilariously brutal. Definitely recommend if your a fan of the originals, plus there's 2 more filmed and coming out next year I think.

[Stormbringer]

Twenty-Eight Decades Later and Twenty-Eight Centuries Later?

[Animalmother]

Twenty-Eight Decades Later and Twenty-Eight Centuries Later?

Most certainly

[Alan]

28 Movies Later: The Heat unDeath Of The Universe