The Last Movie You Watched

[Phoque]

Watched Bird Cage.

Quite a few jump scares, and quite gory in places. Thought the ending was a bit predictable though. Overall it's worth a 7/10.

I think you mean "Birdbox." I say that because unless you mean chowder becoming peasant soup is gory... "The Birdcage" is about two men whose son is getting married.

[onlinebiker]

Watched Bird Cage.

Quite a few jump scares, and quite gory in places. Thought the ending was a bit predictable though. Overall it's worth a 7/10.

I think you mean "Birdbox." I say that because unless you mean chowder becoming peasant soup is gory... "The Birdcage" is about two men whose son is getting married.

With a fantastic performance by Robin Williams.

[Brian37]

I just watched last night, "Independence Day, Resurgence", <------ IT SUCKED!

To be fair, While the first one was good, even it doesn't age well and looks cheesy now.

[Yonadav]

I just watched last night, "Independence Day, Resurgence", <------ IT SUCKED!

To be fair, While the first one was good, even it doesn't age well and looks cheesy now.

Oh, it was cheesy then.

[FatAndFaithless]

Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse.

Fantastic!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Watched 'The Hustler' and 'The Color of Money'.  I've seen them both before, but this is the first time I've watched them back-to-back.

Newman should have gotten the Oscar for 'The Hustler'.

'The Color of Money' has one of the few Tom Cruise performances that doesn't make me want to punch his lungs out.

Boru

[veoli]

Avengers Infinity War 8/10
Black Panther 7/10

[brewer]

I love you Alice B Toklas, 1968. Peter Sellers, pretty funny if you like hippy movies.

[Yonadav]

Just watched Fyre Fraud, a documentary about the Fyre Festival scam. It was also a criticism of our modern culture, obsession with celebrities, vanity, and devotion to shallow social influences. I liked it. It was pretty well done.

[Rev. Rye]

All right, here's Movie #4 in Rev. Rye's "Deep Hurting Project": Jem and the Holograms

I'm not very attached to the original Jem series. In fact, I only watched one episode ("Alone Again," to be specific), but I can guaran-goddam-tee that about the only thing this movie has in common with the actual show is the character names. None of the cheesy Eighties shit that the show is famous for is in the movie, except, of course, for the clips of random YouTubers talking about how much they loved Jem (the series, not this one, and you can tell because you see several of them in outfits that look show-accurate but never look like anything that she wears in the film. Also, they're edited just enough that you almost think they're talking about her, but it's clear from context. At one point, we even have a character dance in front of a TV playing the animated intro.) There are a lot of random clips of YouTube videos interspersed throughout the film, and they may or may not be related to anything in the show, including a waterskiing squirrel and, during a tense moment, video of some random dancers rehearsing a stomp dance routine.

There's so much bullshit in this film, from the opening scene where Jerrica chides the viewer for thinking that a house filled with girls is a disaster because that's just sexist, and then the next fucking scene has her sisters arguing about fashion, which one would think to be pretty sexist, especially as a character establishing moment. They keep pushing a "be yourself" moral when literally everything about it undermines it, from the fact that it's a by-the-numbers up-and-coming-band plot that ended up being the big detriment to Bohemian Rhapsody (except this time we don't have the awesome music to back it up, and also Rami Malek does an infinitely better job being Freddie Mercury than Aubrey Peeples does at being Jem), the whole idea of doing a "be yourself" story when you're just taking a random property and tacking a whole new bullshit identity onto it, the fact that you're doing so with a pre-existing property that was already focus-grouped to shit by Hasbro in the Eighties, and the climax having Jerrica say "we're all Jem!"


There's an overabundance of talk about social media platforms, and I'm honestly not a big fan of putting them into movies specifically because it dates the movie instantly. If the Soviet Bloc computer in Dekalog I detracts a bit from the only film great enough that Stanley Kubrick chose to speak ex cathedra about it, how the fuck do you think it detracts from this horseshit? At several points, we have scenes where they use Google Earth as a substitute for establishing shots. At one point, they don't even bother to edit out the logo.

See this picture I took from my TV (click for a closer look that might not be much higher def because I took it with an iPhone camera off my actual TV screen.)



Honestly, I kept listening to the dialogue and scenes and I kept thinking of much better music I could be listening to. And it's really damning that, at one point near the end, I heard Jerrica talking about "who I really am" and started to think "I could be listening to Nickelback right now." This may very well be the worst film about music I've ever seen.

Also, the plot about Synergy makes no sense. Somehow he only works when they go to LA, and then they lead him on this treasure hunt for missing parts that leads to it turning out that it exists only for Jerrica's dead dad to create a message about how much he loves her. Why couldn't he have done this in a less needlessly convoluted way? Like, say, putting this message on a DVD-R?

And honestly, the most damning thing about this film to me is the fact that it had to be pulled from theaters after two weeks because it was making so little of its $5 million budget. Why does this gall me so much? Because two years later, Danny Boyle released T2: Trainspotting, the Certified Fresh sequel to one of the most iconic films of the Nineties. When the time came to release it stateside (at least if its release in Chicago was any indication), it was only in theaters for one week. ONE FUCKING WEEK because I can only assume that Boss Baby, Smurfs 3, and Kong: Skull Island really needed all those theaters. Christ, even Century CineArts in Evanston didn't bother to show it.

So, enough ranting. Is there anything good about it? Well, I like the mood lighting. And you know your film is shit when you realise that easily the best performer in the film is Ke$ha, and her contribution is pretty much limited to her writing around what I think is fsociety HQ and reciting the Misfits' lyrics from the theme song. Also, how the fuck did the name The Misfits get past legal, especially since there was already a band in the 80s with that actual name, and yes, they hit it big before the show started. You know what, fuck it. This film lacks any appeal to any audience: the built-in fanbase hates it because they took the show they loved and took away EVERYTHING about it, and everyone else hates it because, well, 





Next week, I'll be looking at, well, I don't know yet, but I fully intend for it to be a horror film. I'm cycling genres for this project, so it looks like now that I've gotten an Action/Adventure film, a "Comedy" , and a Drama out of the way, Horror is next, and there's plenty of options, with 10 to choose from on my list (plus Exorcist II and Piranha 3DD.) The only category with more films is Youth. Now, I'm off to listen to this song from The Misfits: