I Just Watched (Films)

[Achtung Englander]

American Graffiti (1973)

This is a real love letter to the 50s, cars and girls. The entire film has an ongoing soundtrack, its awsome. This is when George Lucas was a really good director and it was great to see Harrison Ford's first movie. Everyone looked so young. Its a great story that is essentially about nothing more than cruising at night, picking up girls. It has some superb jokes and wonderful characters.

8/10

[Sly Boots]

American Graffiti (1973)

This is a real love letter to the 50s, cars and girls. The entire film has an ongoing soundtrack, its awsome. This is when George Lucas was a really good director and it was great to see Harrison Ford's first movie. Everyone looked so young. Its a great story that is essentially about nothing more than cruising at night, picking up girls. It has some superb jokes and wonderful characters.

8/10

One of my favourite films. I actually picked one of the songs from it as the first dance at our wedding, I Only Have Eyes For You.

[Raid]

Wrath of Man

Wow, I wasn't expecting a Guy Ritchie film featuring Jason Statham to be this dreary. There's precisely zero humour to it, not a single character worth caring about, basically no entertainment value whatsoever. There's some gruff men shooting at other gruff men. Even the soundtrack is just the same repetitive few bars.

Are we absolutely sure Guy Ritchie was actually involved in this? Snatch is one of the finest organised crime films ever made, but this is one of the most boring films I've ever seen. Was he seen on set? Did he direct via Zoom? I had to check the spelling of the director's name just to make sure it wasn't someone else.

[Rusty]

Yup, Wrath of Man was dire.

Machete Kills
From Dusk till Dawn

Watched these two with my lad. I'd forgotten just how way out there they both are. Great fun was had by all

[Raid]

Starship Troopers

I love Starship Troopers, I've probably seen it four or five times, but to be honest I'd forgotten exactly how good it is. I keep thinking it's a fairly cheap B-movie, but it's much better looking than I thought. Considering it's almost a quarter of a century old now, the CGI isn't actually that terrible, partially because what they don't try to render anything too ambitious - the generic Arachnid soldiers have lots of moving parts but they're not all that complex visually.. they just render an awful lot of it. The miniatures work is superb (and I love the design of the Federation capital ships), and while the acting is a bit wooden, there isn't a performance in it I didn't enjoy.

And all of that and I haven't even mentioned how ridiculously over the top everything is, and I love it. Man gets his hand skewered by his teacher to show him the utility of a throwing knife, people routinely get entire limbs bitten off, there are at least three brutal decapitations (one of them is only half of one I suppose - the man's head is simply sliced in half instead), limbs dissolved by fiery acid, brains sucked out, people bisected by emergency shutters... I seem to remember the gore was a major selling point when the film came out (probably because I was 12), but you forget sometimes what Verhoeven films are like.

It's bloody brilliant.

[Sly Boots]

Yeah, I love it too, watched it again last year I think, and still find it endlessly entertaining.

Forget where but I read someone somewhere being really dismissive of it recently, which annoyed me

[Animalmother]

It's one of my favorites as well. Watched it last year and was glad how well it's held up. If I remember rightly it had a huge budget and the effects were some of the best at the time. Shame it didn't review very well.

[Animalmother]

The Hunt for Red October
Here's something I haven't seen in about 20 years and couldn't remember if I'd liked it or not. Turns out it's pretty great and has held up very well. The sets for the submarines are amazing and the miniatures work really well for the exteriors. The only bad effect is the terrible blue screen bit at the end which is really jarring compared to the rest of the film. Acting is top notch all round with Connery not even bothering with a Russian accent but he's great so it's forgiveable. Half the American's seem to be wearing Deirdre Barlow glasses which is hilarious. Well worth a watch.

[Wrathbone]

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

I was so bored after the first of Andrew Garfield’s outings as Spidey that I hadn’t bothered with the sequel until now. I mostly wish I’d kept it that way because so much of this film is a dumpster fire. The scenes where Spider-Man is doing Spider-Man things (i.e. the things you came to see) are good, and Garfield is allowed to show some of the character’s irreverent side, making quips to villains and giving them a fair chance at a peaceful resolution before humiliating them.

But then he takes the mask off and good web-slinging Jesus, what a mess. Garfield spends 90% of the film blubbing, working that bottom lip wobble like he was training it for the olympics. Peter Parker is outright miserable, and while Tobey Maguire’s performance was hardly cheerful, at least he wasn’t openly weeping at any given moment.

With the exception of Gwen Stacey (who is fine and the only character with something resembling a human personality), everyone is horrible. Aunt May is a complete cow, twisting Peter’s desire to learn the truth about his father against him and inexplicably making it about why she deserves more credit for raising him. And then there’s a subplot about her hiding that she’s become a nurse, because… Spider-Man hates nurses? Who knows. Harry Osborne is fucking awful, a waste of both space and time. Electro is halfway to being a decent villain, except his motivation makes no sense and he starts trashing New York ostensibly because electricity makes him angry. And let’s not forget that Peter’s relationship with Gwen is outright stalkery. He comes across as a total creep.

The one good thing that came out of watching this is that it reinforced just how good Tom Holland is as Spider-Man. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea and that there are some disturbingly hardcore Maguire fans out there, but at the very least he gets that Peter Parker’s tone works best when it’s vulnerable, not miserable. I don’t know how much of Garfield’s performance came from direction or his own volition, but it just doesn’t work here.

4/10

[Sly Boots]

Maybe it was filmed on a Monday. Garfield hates Mondays.

[Raid]

I watched it a few months back. I think it had so little impact on me that I forgot to review it here. I remember not thinking it was very good, but honestly I can't remember much of it. I don't remember whether it was worse than Spiderman 3 (the only film where I ever considered walking out of the cinema halfway through)... which I also re-watched in the last few months and forgot to review. I may be watching No Way Home this evening (before sodding Youtube thumbnails of all places spoil anything more from it), so I guess we'll see whether I just have a block for reviewing Spiderman films.

[Wrathbone]

Maybe it was filmed on a Monday. Garfield hates Mondays.

For what it's worth, it's not worse than Spiderman 3. I rewatched all the Maguire films before this and 3 remains exactly as bad as its reputation.

Also, No Way Home is not just the best Spiderman film, it's one of the best comic book films ever made.

[Pew-Pew]

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Garfield spends 90% of the film blubbing, working that bottom lip wobble like he was training it for the olympics. Peter Parker is outright miserable, and while Tobey Maguire’s performance was hardly cheerful, at least he wasn’t openly weeping at any given moment.

[Raid]

Also, No Way Home is not just the best Spiderman film, it's one of the best comic book films ever made.

I think I largely agree; it's the best of the live-action Spiderman films. I don't think it quite has the emotional range of Enter the Spiderverse (which remains one of my favourite films from the last ten years), but there are several gut-punch moments in there that make you happy to have been watching Spiderman films for the last couple of decades.

Spoiler

I am really quite annoyed that I got this film's main hook spoiled by a thumbnail that randomly popped up on my Youtube viewlist for the blooper real from this film. I'd managed to avoid knowing that it had both Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire in it until a few weeks back, and from that it wasn't difficult to deduce that it was combining the three separate live-action Spiderman franchises. The reveal of Garfield's Spiderman pulling his mask off would have been just an amazing moment in what was a film of amazing moments.

It's weird that the biggest of those emotional gut punches I mentioned came from The Amazing Spiderman 2; a film that we've rightfully maligned. Garfield's Spiderman saving Holland's MJ from a fall remarkably similar to the one that killed Garfield's Gwen genuinely made me tear up. It was the one thing I could really remember from TAS2, and Garfield played that realisation absolutely perfectly.

And I can't believe I didn't see Holland's May's "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" line as immediate foreshadowing from her becoming Holland's Uncle Ben. The realisation dawning on me was a surprisingly powerful moment. I mentioned back when I reviewed one of the other Spiderman films a few months back that the MCU Spiderman films lacked the pathos that both the Sony and Columbia ones had, and while it maybe wasn't as key a part of No Way Home as in the other two, it feels like a worthwhile inclusion.

There was really only one thing missing, and that was the Enter the Spiderverse characters. They practically mention Miles Morales in passing, and I was expecting either Spider Gwen or Miles to show up in the post credits scene, but the inclusion of Hardy's Venom instead was almost as entertaining.

And one last note; I'm about to start playing a D&D character that can't quite get tenses right due to chronological nonsense. Discussing this film and having to clarify which bits belong to which franchise feels like appropriate training.

I loved this.

[Pew-Pew]

Tbh whilst I enjoyed No Way Home, it just felt like 2 hours of fan service to me. It didn't feel like a 'good' film that exists beyond the novelty of... well, you know.