Topic: The Movie Thread

@RogerRoger maybe our dads are just going senile?

@RogerRoger erm... possibly, somewhere, maybe.... I certainly wouldn't pay to watch it myself.

Still haven't seen Solo - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hate it given the conversations I've had about it.

@RogerRoger Just needed to edit that response to make actual sense...

I’m anxious to see Solo again. I watched it in the theatre and I believe I posted my comments here. But I found that I actually enjoyed Infinity War much more than I expected to on the small screen for the second viewing. I wonder if Solo will be actually better seeing it from the couch.

@Th3solution @RogerRoger Well, I thoroughly enjoyed Solo! Wish I'd managed to catch it on the big screen.

I'm aware that the film did badly and there were many reports of behind the scenes issues - but it is actually great slice of Star Wars - far more so than TLJ could ever hope to be.

The films holds to a pretty blistering pace and the not insignificant runtime does seem to fly by.

I had reservations about Alden Ehrenreich given some of the reporting on the film, but he's actually pretty charming in the role; some parts of the intended comedic scripting fall a little bit flat, but generally the script and performances range from solid to great. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was great as expected (if you've seen any of Fleabag) and even perennially badly miscast/not very good Emilia Clarke puts in a decent turn.

There's a great amount of fan-service here too, some subtle, some not so subtle (and one that is probably the most specific expanded universe reference that most people won't get I've seen in a film in a while) but all handled very well.

Congrats to Ron Howard really. Great fun.

EDIT: I forgot to mention Paul Bettany. What a fantastic villain he makes!

@Kidfried I really enjoyed DBC. Certainly a moving and well crafted piece of film.

I personally don't have an issue with the artistic license - the contrived parts around the truth of the story make for a better film, while still highlighting an historical issue most people watching may well have been ignorant of.

I was certainly left curious enough to look in to the film and the reality after watching it.

Why don't you think you'd like Solo?

@RogerRoger it's a pretty good film. It's a genuine shame it did so badly for whatever knock on effect that had on Disney's plans.

The reference I mentioned was so very unexpected. I properly laughed. You'll get it, probably some others here might too, but I can't imagine even many Star Wars fans would unless they've been gaming for a while.

Hey did you hear the latest rumour, Henry Cavill is OUT as Superman in the DCEU movies and the entire thing might be cancelled after Wonder Woman 1984

https://screenrant.com/dceu-reboot-movies-warner-bros/

@Kidfried @FullbringIchigo NOOO! I like the DC movie universe. It has so much promise most of the movies are pretty good. Suicide Squad in particular. I hope they don’t. It’s because of this, copy My marvel, and stuff like a random Joker movie they have issues. If they just did their own thing it’s be great.

@FullbringIchigo I really, really detest WB sometimes.

They're so utterly reactionary when it comes to the DC movie slate.

Cavill is easily their best deployable asset. Wonder Woman was great, and Gadot is great, and I'm sure the sequel will be great - but there's very little to say when you start off a cinematic universe in a very particular style but bottle the follow through (as if MoS didn't actually make money) and insist on what you believe to be the best chance at quick cash.
Just make a Superman film. The brief glimps of a heroic, iconic Superman in JL is the best part of the whole thing - yet still they won't make a proper sequel. Urgh.

@Jaz007 @KALofKRYPTON yeah i think he was a great Superman and WB really have messed up the DCEU, they needed to take time to build up the characters and world before jumping into the team up but they just tried to catch up to The Avengers because they saw it make a boat load of cash, the thing is The MCU EARNED that film because all the main characters had already had themselves established by then

@Kidfried yeah they should have concentrated on making good films instead of just looking at Marvels money train and trying to chase it

@FullbringIchigo 100% agree with ya. Plus I don't think there has been a decent villain in DCEU film yet. Something needed to be done as even there best film was way behind some of Marvel's big hitters.

@RogerRoger you know Aquaman and Shazam look like they will be good films

and yeah i don't get the hate either as i enjoyed both BvS and JL and i really liked Cavills Supes and Affleck BAtman because you see for me i like characters not publishers although with the MCU Marvel has been able to make EVERY character they base a film on likable even some of the more obscure ones like Ant-Man for example but all DC /WB had to to was take their time and establish the characters before jumping to a big team up event but they didn't and it came back and bit them in the butt

@JohnnyShoulder yeah i would say the villains have been pretty bland over the DCEU and that's probably part of the problem although even with a bland villain they could make a good film just look at Wonder Woman, great film but a pretty bland baddie

Went to watch the new Predator movie and thought it was rubbish. I wasn't interested after seeing the trailers but my dad wanted to watch it.haha

@WanderingBullet Nothing in the trailers has made me want to watch it.

I know some folk who've loved it and others who said the same as you.

I actually detest the idea of the 'better' predators if I'm being honest. It annoyed me watching Predators and it just reeks of a notion that escalation must equal better in all things.

Even from the trailers and previews I read that the special forces dude sends evidence of a crashed alien to his son through the post is one of the dumbest set up ideas going!

So I watched a gob of movies on vacation, and I thought I'd post little rants about them, in descending order for favorite to least favorite.

The Incredibles 2 - The biggest surprise for me. What a fantastic little movie! This goes more interesting places than the original, and continues with that film's family-friendly superhero deconstruction storyline. The family drama is well-written, the writing is often surprisingly intelligent, the action is engaging, the social commentary and metaphor is certainly there, but handled with a measure of grace, and I actually really liked the villain. The setting, again, is interesting: what people might have thought the future would look like decades ago.
Score: 9/10

Black Panther - I'm not sure I'm fully on-board with the racial politics of this film, but it's an intelligent, interesting, well-paced action movie and I enjoyed watching it. Reminds me of the original Iron Man in certain ways, actually.
Score: 8.5/10

Solo: A Star Wars Story - OK, whatever, yes, the way Han gets his last name is stupid. No argument here. It's sad that this film bombed like it did, though, because it was incredibly charming. Great performances all-around. It's a fun blockbuster with a very classic and time-worn plot, but it WORKS, and, to be honest, this is tied with Rogue One as my favorite of the Disney Star Wars films. These prequels are way more fun than the mainline SW films. If it suffers from one problem, though, it's that, like a lot of modern blockbusters, it can get way too loud and chaotic at times. Still a good time, though.
Score: 7.5/10

Coco - A predictably written but unsurprisingly emotionally resonant film. This is polished Disney being polished Disney. I still think Book of Life was a more interesting take on Mexican mythology, though. The film is gorgeous in 3D, too.
Score: 7/10

The Nun - A big disappointment after the surprisingly scary Annabelle: Origins. The atmosphere is on-point near the beginning, but the film doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the monsters near the end are straight up ridiculous. Not quite as bad as The Conjuring 2 or the original Annabelle, but still not great.
Score: 4.5/10

Thor: Ragnarok - WHAT A MESS! Seriously, this film is a total mess. It wants so hard to be "cool" and "funny," but it just comes off as cringe-inducingly flippant. The film just... does stuff, and you watch, flabbergasted. I will give it this, though: it's more fun to watch than Infinity War, and it's hilarious to see Jeff Goldblum not even bother acting in his role. He doesn't act! Half the time the man is wearing an expression that might be read as "I can't believe they're paying me tons of money to sit in a chair and just be Jeff Goldblum!" The bad guy is Thor's sister, and she's apparently very powerful, but there's no logic to who is so powerful, and why some characters become more powerful. Force of will, I guess. It's like watching Dragonball Z.
Score: 3.5/10

Avengers: Infinity War - A loud, mindless, and sometimes frustratingly poorly-written action movie. The whole plot is a dull McGuffin hunt. The film is filled with long, tedious fight scenes, because there's really no plot here: just a premise ("Bad guy want to get stones to kill a bunch of people") and characters reacting to that premise ("We gotta stop bad guy from getting stones!"). No time is spent developing Thanos at all: he utters some vague Malthusian logic to justify wiping out trillions of lives throughout the universe, and... HE'S OFF. Why is his design so boring, by the way? He looks like one of the random aliens you kill in the Gears of War games. Anyway, the stakes are apparently high, but this doesn't stop the characters from acting incredibly stupid throughout so that they can justify drawing this out for far longer than it should, and even setting it up for a sequel! Some of the character moments are fun, but this is a surprisingly bad film. Oh, and can we talk about the edginess of this film? This is a very edgy Marvel film. Lots of suffering and talk about genocide. It's all treated in such an adolescent manner, though. I refuse to believe anyone other than a teenager experiencing a rush of hormones wrote this script. Finally, I don't appreciate the writers clearly trying to milk drama by killing characters you know they won't even leave dead. This film won't even have the decency to accept the consequences of its events, marks my words.
Score: 3/10

Thor: The Dark World - I couldn't follow this. I hate this movie. It's boring. The characters are all non-entities. One of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Score: 1/10

@KALofKRYPTON Yeah, the movie was pretty dumb. Also, it's more action/survival/comedy than action/survival/horror.

@RogerRoger It's kind of you to dignify my little rants that way.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed Solo. It's a shame a film like this practically flops at the cinema while TFA and TLJ and, heck, Infinity War smash box office records left and right.

@RogerRoger Good analysis. I imagine those factors did play heavily into Solo's lack of box office success.

Have you seen Transcendence? That's another film I enjoyed that... almost nobody else did. It got horrendous reviews. It was a decent sci-fi film.

@Ralizah @RogerRoger I think Solo took the heat of TLJ to be honest. That combined with awful production reports; from the first directors being fired, heavy re-shoots leading to a character being cut, and even Aiden Ehrenreich needed acting lessons on set(!) really set the market and fan base against it.

Rogue One suffered many of the same issues, but I'd say it wasn't really hobbled with the same bad taste that TLJ left for so many people, coming off the back of the perfectly enjoyable TFA set it in a better position than Solo.

Transcendence is little more than an OK passing of time. Utterly predictable though. Johnny Depp doesn't help it along in the slightest and the script is shocking.