I Just Watched (Films)

[eny]

Kelly's Heroes is fun too...

[Wrathbone]

Yeah, not one I've seen as much but certainly entertaining! Donald Sutherland is great.

[Animalmother]

Kelly's Hero's is excellent

[Alan]

Been looking forward to Candyman and The Many Saints Of Newark. Both are bad

Saints is just pointless. It meanders through stuff we already mostly knew trying to tug on nostalgia and then it ends without much of an ending. You get more out of flash back in the tv show.

Candyman is just a mess. Nothing works. There’s some sound clips off Virginia Madison which only makes you wish you were watching the original. The shadow puppet things were nice at least.

[Snowy]

I went to see No Time To Die with my dad on Tuesday - as a family we have always done Bond films together, so this was nice.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have struggled with the Daniel Craig Bond films up to now, finding them a bit fragmented. This one had some similarities, the plot is a bit all over the place and extremely far fetched (it is a Bond film, this was expected), but I enjoyed it more than I have the others. I may go back and give them another watch.

There are some lovely nods to past films throughout, plus a couple of funny moments which are a nice departure from the other rather po-faced films that Craig has done.

It is nearly 3 hours long, and I went into the cinema with a due sense of dread, but actually it didn't feel it outstayed it's welcome too much. It starts extremely well, plateaus a little in the middle, then the ending is very big. The end goes on a bit but not for no reason.

Well worth a watch.

For any car nerds like me, I am a huge fan of the Smith & Sniff videos and podcasts. The pair of them were lucky enough to be invited to the premiere and made a video about the day, which I thoroughly enjoyed. You might too:

[Animalmother]

Starship Troopers
It's 24 years old now and I haven't watched it in a very long time so was curious to see how it held up. When it came out first it looked pretty impressive, I think it cost over $100 million to make in 1997 which was an insane budget back then.

It's aged ok I suppose, looks more like a high end early 2000's TV show now rather than a big budget film. The acting wouldn't be out of place in Beverly Hills 90210 and half the cast look like they belong there too. It's the practical effects and mindless dismemberment that's really aged very well. Paul Verhoeven knows how to make fantastic violence look like art. The space ships, while very detailed models, look exactly like very detailed models on a blue screen, all a bit TNG I suppose.

The battles are wild with literally 100's of costumed extras charging around and firing guns which is very rarely done anymore. The arachnid soldier bugs still look amazing and seeing them pouring out of caves in vast swarms never gets old. There are zero tactics on display, it's just stand still and hip fire with wild abandon

Still worth a look but if you haven't seen it in a longtime be warned that's it very much starting to show its age now but it's still great cheesy fun. You can also see how it influenced games like Quake 2, the Halo series and possibly the Imperial Guard from 40k.


Fantastic music as well..

I watched approximately 3 minutes of the straight to DVD sequel before turning it off...ufffff

[Wrathbone]

The acting wouldn't be out of place in Beverly Hills 90210 and half the cast look like they belong there too.

I think that's intended as part of the satire, isn't it? Paul Verhoeven's films all have that similar acting feel, somewhere between comic book and melodrama. I guess it's a signal to the audience not to take it too literally. For what it's worth, I think Starship Troopers holds up really well - fantastic film.

[Hatredsheart]

The Many Saints Of Newark

Really enjoyed that, not sure I'd enjoy it as much if I'd never seen The Sopranos and gone into it cold. A lot of my enjoyment came from knowing the characters and seeing their younger selves and incidents mentioned in the series.

[Achtung Englander]

Brawl in Cell Block 99

This is a really fun film. If you like John Wick, you might get a kick (get it) out of this. Uber violent where all the bad guys get their faces smashed in. I loved it. Vince Vaughn is perfect for the role. Funny and bulky.

7/10

[Achtung Englander]

Nashville (1975)

At first, this film feels a little scattershot. The theme of the film is the spirit of Nashville itself and how music and entertainment are used by politicians to curry favour with the electorate. Over 20 characters are connected to each other just by the fact they live and work around the same places but there is no meaningful depth to their interaction. They are just people getting on with their lives. It all coalesces at the end when they are all together at a political rally.

What makes this film exceptional is that the film stays with you long after the credits roll. Altman was trying to say a lot about American culture and human beings. What makes us tick, what we look to our music stars and what we project on them for inspiration when these people are just as broken. The ending of the film is perfect. Not being a fan of Country and Western I was shocked by how good and meaningful the music is. I recommend you turn the volume up when you watch it to get the most from the music. The Blu Ray quality is exceptional.

This is a masterful film because it says so much and lets you do all the work in understanding the subtext.

8/10

[Raid]

Black Widow

This is available on Disney Plus without paying extra now. It's decent, but not really as good as I was expecting. Captain America: Winter Soldier showed that the franchise was capable of doing a really involving spy thriller, and the plot in this latest entry just doesn't measure up. The characters all have suitable motivations, but it's just all so basic feeling and while it tries to throw in some higher stakes at the last minute, I don't think it ever really feels like a Marvel story. There's also a really ham-fisted line about exploitation that could have landed an emotional punch, but it's just so hugely obvious that the writers were going for that that it loses its impact and instead sounds silly.

It's certainly not all bad, with the exception of Ray Winstone (who is either phoning it in or incapable of hiding his real accent), the cast are brilliant, with real chemistry between the "family" members, and David Harbour is particularly entertaining. The set pieces are fun, if really stretching the believability for a superhero without any actual superhuman abilities.

I think it's a missed opportunity. I can't say I've ever been that interested in Black Widow as a member of the MCU, but her back story had real potential, and this doesn't really satisfy as an exploration of that.

[Wrathbone]

With the best MCU films, I find myself thinking about them long afterwards, speculating on future plot developments or considering how they fit into the bigger picture. In the three months since I watched Black Widow, I don’t think it’s entered my mind once. It’s unique in the MCU in that it’s essentially a standalone film, and sadly I don’t think that works in its favour. It may have been stronger if it had appeared in phase 2 or 3 and been tied closer to those events, but instead it’s just inconsequential - little more than a box-ticker to say they did a Black Widow movie and a launch pad for several new characters. The story is so disinterested in Natasha that she didn’t need to be in a lot of it.

[Raid]

Yeah, that's a pretty valid point. Doing a Black Widow film at this point meant that it had to be a prequel, and as such it couldn't really have serious ramifications for Natasha going forward, so they seemed to have taken it as an opportunity to introduce characters they could use later. I didn't dislike those characters, in fact I think there's a lot of potential with them (the end credits scene suggests at least one of them is going to be an antagonist in future). I think it's a damned shame they didn't do much with Romanov's backstory before Endgame, as it could have made that event so much more meaningful.

And indicative of the lack of effort they seemed to put into this one, it didn't even have one of those beautiful graphic design credits sequences that (I think) every Marvel film since the Avengers Assemble has had. It just skips straight to the black screen text scroll. Even the TV series get those.

[Rusty]

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Still trying to fill in the gaps of my sons filmic list. We've enjoyed all these, I think especially as they all hold up well today. The effects in some are really obvious but don't detract from the usually excellent acting.
I'm now trying to think of other older classics we might both enjoy.

[Achtung Englander]

this channel will help

https://www.youtube.com/c/TBRSchmitt/videos