I Just Watched (Films)

[Animalmother]

John Wick 4
That is one of the most ridiculous films I've ever watched and it's so much better for it! Massive gun battles in public places and literal piles of bodies littering famous landmarks. It is stunning looking in places, scenes framed and bursting with colour in ways that Oscar winning cinematographers could only dream of achieving.
The action is relentless , a 15 minute action sequence then spills straight into another more insane one followed by several more. Fights are up close and messy, Wick beating the bejesus out of dudes with nunchucks is hilariously brural. There's a top down sequence with dragons breath shotgun shells that looks like Hotline Miami and it's fucking amazing!! Car chases, boss battles and gun fights, it's a live action video game.
At 3 hours it's a bit exhausting, cut down from 4 hours apparently. So many characters and the lore is utterly ridiculous. But if you can ignore all that it's a pure blast to watch.

[Hatredsheart]

Just finished watching this myself and agree totally, definite 4k purchase in June although after your comment I may wait in case there's a director's cut in the future.

[Alan]

Wick 4 spoilers

Spoiler

I really really hope they go all in and make a final Wick where he’s fighting his way out of hell to get to his wife and dog in heaven. Like a badass what dreams may come.

Of course it will just be a bait and switch rubbish instead.

Evil Dead Rise
I actually really liked it! I was expecting dogshit but was pleasantly surprised. It has a lot of the spirit, gallons of blood and pretty good practical effects (a few dodgy cg too). It also has one of the nicest late title cards I’ve seen in a while.

The missus did not like it though (“well I’m not adding that to my letterboxed”) so take from that what you will! (She loves blood and guts horror soooo… ahunno!)

[Animalmother]

Wick 4 spoilers

Spoiler

I really really hope they go all in and make a final Wick where he’s fighting his way out of hell to get to his wife and dog in heaven. Like a badass what dreams may come.

Of course it will just be a bait and switch rubbish instead.

Evil Dead Rise
I actually really liked it! I was expecting dogshit but was pleasantly surprised. It has a lot of the spirit, gallons of blood and pretty good practical effects (a few dodgy cg too). It also has one of the nicest late title cards I’ve seen in a while.

The missus did not like it though (“well I’m not adding that to my letterboxed”) so take from that what you will! (She loves blood and guts horror soooo… ahunno!)

John Wick 4

Spoiler

Constantine crossover?

Is Evil Dead Rise anything like the Evil Dead remake from a few years back? It was a good film but I found it genuinely unpleasant to watch.

[Raid]

A bunch of recents:

Tank Girl - A low-mid budget, anarchic, post-apocalyptic film based on a a comic, filmed in the 90s. I was expecting this combination of factors to mean it would be astonishingly bad, but it was surprisingly entertaining. I remember licensed 90s films having only the barest of resemblance to their source material, but this is filled with full-screen artwork sequences that, at least to someone unfamiliar with the original, lend it some credibility. I love Malcolm McDowell when he's really hamming it up, and he's at his scenery-chewing best in this.

The Furnace - An Australian western. I remember liking it at the time, but I can barely remember a thing about it. It was good, honest, I just can't remember why. I was going to cheat and use Eny's review to remind myself, but he didn't post anything about the content either.

The Suicide Squad - This is probably the most entertaining superhero film (maybe one of the most entertaining films outright) I've seen since Endgame. I haven't been much of a fan of whatever DC is calling its cinematic universe, but this is so much more Marvel-like (has humour that works, doesn't take itself too seriously) that it doesn't really feel part of it anyway. The main characters are just so much more fun than the po-faced DC superheroes, particularly as it's made fairly clear that they aren't exactly the best people in the world to be doing what they're doing. I particularly loved King Shark, whose entire appearance and personality was far more shark than man, making him a dumb, ravenous, tank of a character that made me laugh all the way through. The plot goes from vaguely sensible to bouncing-off-the-wall silliness in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre on the other hand feels like a film where they bought the screenplay by weight, rather than quality. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it's coherent. It's film-by-numbers. It's phoned in. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd told me someone had stuck the screenplays of ten films in a blender, liquidised it, and then filmed it by reading the mush. It's about as average a film as I can think of. It's like they cast it with each character in isolation, with no thought given as to how they'd work together. Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza, playing the type of character they're already known for, just do not work together.

[Alan]

Is Evil Dead Rise anything like the Evil Dead remake from a few years back? It was a good film but I found it genuinely unpleasant to watch.

A lot of horrific stuff happens but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as focused on the pain as the remake was. It’s not as slapstick as ED2 by any reach but I’d say the violence is way into the silly camp. There is, for example, an eyeball sent flying through the air.

I’ll also add my mate hated it too so I may be on a shrinking island here

[Raid]

One I forgot:

Ant Man: Quantumania - It's above average as far as recent MCU films (ie: anything since Endgame) are concerned, but considering the series as a whole it's definitely closer to the middle. It's presumably going to have enormous ramifications for the continuing storyline because I get the feeling they're trying to position the villain here as the next Thanos, but Quantumania is very much a self-contained adventure.

While the film itself is fairly average, it's astonishingly good looking. The sheer amount of creativity in the character and environment designs alone almost make this worth watching. This is one thing I feel MCU films have always gotten right, only improving as the technology has done likewise, and it's one of the sticking points I've had with the DC equivalents which I think look horrendous.

[Wrathbone]

Your review spurred me to catch up with MCU films tonight, so I did a doubleheader.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Total bag of balls. A navel-gazing, dreary, glacial waste of time dressed in competitive mourning over Chadwick Boseman. Yes, it’s tragic that he died - this felt like a tacky tribute at best and at worst, monetising his death. I’d say this is the second worst MCU film after Eternals.


Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Night and day to the above - loved it! I’m conscious that my enjoyment of it was probably artificially heightened having come straight off the back of the awful previous film, but this is easily my favourite Ant-Man film and the best since Endgame (at least on a par with No Way Home). A fun adventure with plenty of humour and some actual substance that finally moves the wider story arc in a direction. This is the first time post-Endgame where I’ve felt at all invested in the big picture and it’s encouraging. If all MCU films were of this quality now then things would be looking up. I fully expect my hopes to be dashed though.

[Animalmother]

Master and Commander
I'm pretty sure I saw this a couple of years after it came out but remember very little about it. It's set during a period of history I have little interest in so wasn't expecting much. It's really good, for a film set on a sailing ship it moves at a cracking pace. The opening scene of the ship getting shredded is amazing, either it's exceptional 2003 CGI or there's a fuck ton of balsa wood flying about the actors heads. The opening tracking shot that moves through the sleeping ship is great and seems to be a long single take. Entertaining story and great acting make the 2 1/2 hours flow along.

I wonder if there's 2 versions of the film as I (maybe wrongly) remember it being a lot more gruesome during the battles. For all those splinters flying about there's very little blood. Fun film all the same.

[Raid]

I thought the same about the lack of obvious CGI when I re-watched it last year, it holds up really well for a film of that era.

[Raid]

Avatar: The Way of Water

I just don't get it. Why does James Cameron want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, creating entire ecosystems and species, rendering human actors entirely as alien bipeds... only to tell the most mundane stories? I had exactly the same issue with this as I did the first; it's very pretty, but the narrative is just so dull. It's 50% high-school drama and 50% done-to-death "family means everything" nonsense.

I didn't even find it uniformly impressive, visually. Some shots looked incredible, and I found the sea creatures entirely believable (although I feel that's almost cheating as even Earth's ocean life is alien looking), but every now and then there was a shot where it felt like the characters weren't lit properly, or otherwise looked detached from their environment. And the environments that feature through most of the film aren't nearly as impressive as those from the first, with it looking distinctly more terrestrial as a result. I didn't notice any differences in framerate as I think people who saw it at the cinema reported (I watched it on Disney+, which published it in 4k Imax format). I still find the Na'vi both impressive and unsettling to watch. I feel elongating an actor's movements to match a species that's a good three or four feet taller than a human, but otherwise similarly proportioned just does not look appealing. I'm not sure you can call it uncanny valley, given that they're not supposed to look human, but it's a similar sensation.

But the worst part about it is the script. It's awful. The Na'vi kids keep calling each other "Bro" and I'm pretty sure the word bitch was used a few times as an insult - why would you write a script like that when you're putting so much effort into creating an alien world?! It's juvenile and utterly jarring. The militaristic invaders sound like they were written for a Michael Bay film, but at least that sort of language felt appropriate for them.

I don't really get what the aim is with these films. It's like Chat GPT wrote a teen drama screenplay, and then just changed the setting to a lush alien paradise. It's at least 90 minutes too long and I was bored by the halfway point.

[Wrathbone]

Sometimes when I feel like I’ve had an unproductive day, I console myself with the fact that James Cameron spent over a decade pratting about with Avatar 2.

[Raid]

I find that fact quite entertaining too. Every time it's been brought up over the last decade I've been wondering if anyone besides Cameron actually wanted an Avatar 2.

[Hatredsheart]

I find that fact quite entertaining too. Every time it's been brought up over the last decade I've been wondering if anyone besides Cameron actually wanted an Avatar 2.

I certainly didn't, pointless exercise.
What I would really like him to spend his time on is a proper 4k transfer of The Abyss.

[Wrathbone]

And True Lies.