Topic: The Movie Thread

@LN78 @BearsEatBeets I'm not sure if Romulus will ignore Prometheus and Covenant or not, but I do know that the series will. It's being shepherded by Noah Hawley and he's stated that he will pretend the sequels doesn't exist (he will more or less take his cues from Alien and Aliens only). A great article with lots of promising details on the show can be found over at The Playlist (link)

@LN78 Agreed! I remember liking Alien Resurrection when I saw it at Oslo Filmfestival back in the day, but upon reviewing it a little under a decade ago I realized that it was probably a false memory, because... whoof...
Thinking about it, after Alien 3, I think I would point to the first AvP as the best of the sequels and that is very telling of how I feel about the others

@FuriousMachine I had totally forgotten about the AvP movies.... the second one is especially bad. Christ these movies have been on a bad run. Hopefully Alien can have a redemption story like Predator with this latest film.

@JohnnyShoulder Yeah, the second one was atrocious. I didn't mind the first one all that much, to be honest. Didn't love it, but didn't hate it either. If the new Alien movie lands in the vicinity of Prey, quality wise, I would be very happy indeed.

@FuriousMachine i've never been some huge Alien fan as I've only seen the first movie, but getting Noah Hawley on the show is probably a best case scenario to revitalize the franchise quality-wise at least. That man knows how to adapt a property and turn it into its own thing, so far to often incredible results like with Fargo and Legion. The one thing I'd have reservations with with him is how he tends to be on the less commercial side in terms of the appeal of his storytelling. That said, I'd be surprised if Disney would let him get too crazy with the property.

Romulus looked quite promising as well though. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for that one. It's always interesting to see streaming movies get promoted to cinema releases.

@Tjuz 100% agree re: Hawley. I would love to have seen what he would have done with the Doctor Doom movie he was working on prior to the Fox/Disney buyout, but alas... I've also read one of his novels, Before the Fall (Goodreads page) which I liked quite a lot as well, so I'm definitely excited to see what he'll do in the Alien universe.

@FuriousMachine Thanks for the link, he says a lot of good things. Interesting point about maintaining the 'dated' look of the future. Still curious how it will work being set decades before the first film but I am starting to think that info I saw on IMDB might be wrong.
Despite getting some entertainment from watching Prometheus and Covenant, I also consider Alien a 2 film franchise. Same for the Terminator.

saw Ghostbusters 4 Frozen Empire earlier today. I enjoyed it. Nice to see the return of Slimer even though he napped under a pile of junk food the whole time. and Peck being Mayor

cute and funny for a post credit scene of the little mini puft marshmallow men stealing a truck with the logo of Stay Puft Marshmallows.

On the Waterfront really is very good. To be honest most ‘good’ movies from ages ago usually live up to their reputations, the art of the review was far more serious back then and was as much of a craft as the movies themselves. I guess I wasn’t quite expecting it to resonate with me in the way that it did. Never been like a huge Marlon Brando fan (apart from Guys and Dolls in vein of Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia) but I sort of get why he was such a big deal now.

@LN78 I'll be giving that a wide berth, seeing as the last Ghostbusters film I thought was a waste of time. I'll stick with the first two films which I have on blu ray.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Cinema) - Maybe it's just because I wasn't expecting much from it, but I actually enjoyed this a bit. It does seem a tad bit moodier than previous outings, but it's still very much comedy first, horror second. Now, a lot of the comedy comes in the form of standard "sitcom family" jokes amongst the core cast/family & nostalgic call backs to the classic films (& it appears they've decided that the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men from the last one are a permanent fixture, taking on the role similar to Despicable Me's minions, goofing around the lab(s)), so the quality in that department is up for debate, but my theatre seemed to be into it. Without getting into spoilers, the thing that seemed most out of place to me was the subplot involving a friendly ghost who just acted like a regular person.

the Departed (Blu-Ray) - a young cop with a troubled past becomes a police informant embedding himself amongst the Boston Mob (with the boss being Jack Nicholson), but things aren't as easy as first seemed because an all star cop amongst the force is himself a mole in service of the Mob, and both are soon in a race to find out who the other rat is. Picked this up thrifting, and it ended up being a pretty fantastic movie. Really gripping.

Otaku no Video (Blu-Ray) - Really interesting insight into Otaku culture of the 80's & 90's. It follows a young college student who falls in with a crowd of otaku & you can see how becoming a shut in affects his personal life & relationships (of course, being an anime film targeted directly at the otaku audience, things end up much happier for him, as he gets the last laugh against society). Still, it seems like there is some truth to it's depiction of otaku culture of the era, given that it's very loosely based on how Studio Gainax (it's animation studio) was founded. Also had fake live action "interviews" with former/closeted Otaku which made me a bit self conscious about my anime figure collection, lol.

Summer School Teachers (Tubi) - 70's B-comedy that follows a trio of aspiring Midwestern teachers who head out to California for a shot at education careers out on the coast, but these free spirited young women are going to have to win over their conservative/old timey colleagues in order to make it. Pretty poorly made & had a few tonal inconsistencies (the science teacher's storyline felt more serious & drama-ish compared to the comedic tones of the other two stories), but it had a charm to it & had a few laughs.

@LN78 I’d probably get shanked by a group of nerds like The Ides of March but I’d easily say Ghostbusters 2016 is better than Afterlife and that new one (dragged to see it by deadbeat dad stuck in the 80s). It’s obviously terrible in many ways but at this point I’ll take a million female-led reboots of existing franchises over bringing back ancient actors to half-arse their roles for a paycheck. Ghostbusters is ultimately a film that just doesn’t work outside of the 80s. I’m gonna guess that Beetlejuice 2 meets the same fate.

@nessisonett I think you are spot on re: should have stayed in the 80s. That being said, I actually enjoyed Afterlife more than I did the 2016 reboot, and I think that was down to expectations. Let me say that I find Melissa McCarthy somewhat... hmm.. I don't know, but I'm not much of a fan (fell in love with her in Bridesmaids, but then I felt that she just capitalized on that for a long while and it got tiresome and by the time Ghostbusters came along I was a little bit worn out by it). That said, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Kristen Wiig? The Holy Triumvirate of Awesome Funny Women from SNL (TM, I'm sure)? How could it go wrong? Well, felt it was good, but kind of lackluster. Upon second viewing, I was kind of bored.
Afterlife? Had a good time with it when I expected to hate it. Second viewing? Still entertained (though not worth getting on physical, so not over the moon). Skeptical about Frozen Empire; some people love it, some hate it, but I read somewhere (and I think it might have been on this very thread) that it is paradoxical that one makes a movie that should be squarely aimed at younger audiences yet works so hard at satisfying the 40 and 50 year old dads (like me) that it almost alienates younger audiences the movie should appeal to. Not having seen the movie I can't speak to it myself, but I suspect that this is the case. I call it "Stranger Things" syndrome. Whereas the first season worked on many levels, as we got into season 2 it was basically "nostalgia p0rn" where you couldn't go two minutes without a forced reference to an 80s movie, toy or band.

I fear you may be right about Beetlejuice 2. Would love for it to be a good movie, but I'm not hopeful.

@FuriousMachine I loved Melissa McCarthy in Gilmore Girls which is peak nostalgia for me as I watched it pretty young. Everything afterwards though, she just isn’t my kind of comedy. In fact, that entire group of them from Ghostbusters 2016 just aren’t my kinda thing, I’m not sure if SNL’s comedy doesn’t really translate to a British audience but I always found it a little cringey. That’s the thing, Ghostbusters 2016 isn’t good. Not at all, I just think it’s inherently less cynical than these later ones and at least it went for something rather than being happy to cash in the nostalgia bucks. Like they had to know it was going to be a controversial movie, although I guess they probably didn’t see the levels of vitriol coming, so part of me admires their willingness to stick to their guns.

I'm currently off as I'm getting a new bathroom fitted. Which leaves me plenty time for catching up on some movies. So far this week I have watched American Fiction which is one of the funniest films I've seen for some time (other than Poor Things). Shin Ultraman was last nights movie and l loved it!

My birthday is on Friday so going to see the latest monsterverse flick. Looks like silly fun.

@nessisonett That is a very good point, GB2016 took a swing whilst Afterlife played it mostly safe. Afterlife felt, to me, like a genuine effort rather than a cynical cash-grab, albeit a not entirely successful one (I still kind of like it). That the legacy characters' appearance amounts to little more than cameos also works in its favor. I'm still going to see Frozen Empire to make up my own mind, but I'm wary of it and is not a priority for a trip to the theatre.

I enjoy SNL for the most part, though I find it quite uneven. The alien abduction bits with Kate McKinnon is pure comedy gold for me and whenever she or Wiig appeared in a sketch it was, for the most part, quality fun. Lesley Jones I prefer when she's being her exuberant self over her acting, but love her overall. So everything was in place for me to really love GB2016, but alas...

@MightyDemon82 I have American Fiction on my list, just bumped it higher now
Hope you'll have an excellent birthday with Godzilla and Kong tomorrow! I'm heading to IMAX in just a couple of hours to see it, so I'm quite excited about that.

Spoiler-free post
As mentioned above, I saw Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in IMAX today, and boy was that a lot of fun! Light on plot but heavy on monster action, this is the opposite of (the superior) "Godzilla Minus One", but succeeds in what it attempts to do. Whereas "Godzilla Minus One" understood how to tell a deeply human story in a kaiju film, "Godzilla x Kong" has realized that the humans are secondary characters in its universe and makes no attempt to tell a compelling human story in a movie that just wants to be a monster brawl. And man, what a brawl it is
It's competing with "Kong - Skull Island" for the spot as my favourite "monsterverse" film, and that is down to Kong himself, again.
Before this series, if you'd ask me if I'm team Kong or team Godzilla, I would have sang "Go-Go-Godzilla" as loudly as I can, but the amount of personality they managed to give Kong in this series has put me firmly in Kong's corner. That's not to say the Big G isn't great, it's just that think Kong is even better.
I've not noticed this with the other movies in the series, but this one also works very well for the younger monster fans out there. My screening was full of kids that were having a blast as well, so worth considering bringing the "younguns" if you think they might enjoy a little monster mayhem.
I thought director Adam Wingard did a good job with "Godzilla vs. Kong", but I feel he almost knocks it out the park with this one. It moves along nicely and doesn't overstay it's welcome either, clocking in at just under 2 hours.
Great fun!

I watched The Goonies the other day on HBO Max and it was such a fitting movie to watch in between the serious TV shows that I'm watching now. It's just a chill and goofy 80s family movie, kinda like Home Alone. They certainly don't make movies like that anymore. I enjoyed it a lot!

@FuriousMachine We had a great time watching New Empire tonight. Went tonight instead and had a lovely Thai meal beforehand. Some fantastic action sequences and plenty titans featured. If they do another one I've no idea what else they could do to keep monster brawls fresh!