What was the last movie you've seen?

[REPO Man]

Just finished The School for Good and Evil.

In this excellent fantasy romp, two girls from an unremarkable medieval town are whisked away to a magical school where future fairy tale heroes and villains learn to play their respective roles. For one girl she wants to be a fairy tale princess while her friend just wants to go home. But when they're dropped off at the wrong school, the former embraces the villain lifestyle but soon things take a twisted turn that threatens not just their friendship but may change the world of fairy tales. But will this change be good... or bad?

Sophia Anne Caruso (Beetlejuice: The Musical) shines as good girl gone bad Sophie in this excellent fantasy film on Netflix, whose supporting cast includes Charlize Theron, Michelle Yeoh, Laurence Fishburn and a brief appearance by Broadway legend Patti Lupone.

[Raging Justice]

So after watching the awesome RRR last year (which I suggest that everyone go see if you haven't already), I knew that at some point I wanted to check out some more movies from India. I very recently stumbled upon something called the YRF Spy Universe, which is basically like the MCU, but for spy movies....from India. Yeah, basically that. I had heard of the movie War (2019) being this fun, big budget, action movie that is part of this interconnected universe. I wanted to start at the beginning though, so I checked out:

Ek Tha Tiger



This is the first movie from this universe, it's about a Spy from India who is sent on a mission to observe a scientist who is suspected of providing weapons information about some missile defense system to Pakistan. His code name is Tiger. This movie focuses a lot on political tensions between India and Pakistan and the movie establishes early on that each country has their own spy agency, which not surprisingly factors into the plot later. I just couldn't help but think of:



Tiger meets this girl, and he ends up needing her help in order to get close to this scientist. The scientist keeps blowing him off whenever he tries to see him (Tiger pretends to be a writer and says that he wants to write an article or a book or something on this scientist). The girl knows this scientist, so the idea is that maybe she can convince the scientist to stop ignoring Tiger.

Now fair warning, I'm getting into some spoiler territory now, but the movie telegraphs some of this stuff in pretty obvious ways. Tiger falls in love with this girl, only to later discover that she's an enemy spy and what happens after that...well, I'll leave it to anyone who wants to go see the movie.



This is basically a summer movie blockbuster type of film, with shades of James Bond and some added quirky elements that are typical of some movies from India. What do I mean by that? Well, there's a song and dance number at one point in the film that feels like something out of a Disney musical. It's pretty well done, but I think stuff like this turns off viewers who aren't accustomed to seeing that sort of thing in movies outside of India. I mentioned RRR earlier, one of its most memorable scenes is also a big song and dance number. There's a certain region of India that is known for having this sort of thing in their movies. They call them "Bollywood" movies. I won't say more than that as I am by no means an expert on Indian culture or their movie industry.

Music plays a pretty big role in this film. As silly as it may sound, it really gives this movie its "soul". There's an eclectic soundtrack in this movie that is pretty great, and aside from that "musical" scene there is also a long montage later in the movie set to some pretty great music. Some of the more poignant moments in the film are also accompanied by some nice, emotional, music cues.



Oh, and on that note, romance plays a big role in this movie. Some of what happens is pretty cliche and tropey, some might even say sappy, and melodramatic. It kinds of goes into romantic comedy territory sometimes too. This might turn people off who just want to see things blow up and people getting their asses kicked. I will say that the two leads have great chemistry, and the movie does a good job of creating some sincere feeling, poignant scenes. I'd argue whether or not you get invested in this romance will largely determine if you like this movie or not and care enough to see it through to its conclusion. This seems like a good couples movie. Its got romance but if that bores you just be patient until the movie gets to the ass kicking and shit blowing up

For those here for the action, the movie delivers. There's plenty of kickass, fun, and inventive action on display here. The end of the movie in particular feels like a nonstop thrill ride. Over all this is may be best described as a summer popcorn flick. It's not deep, thought provoking, or particularly original, and it's not a classic, a must see film, or a masterpiece. Having said all that though, I enjoyed myself. It's not a bad way to kill two hours. It's got some funny moments (particularly whenever the movie deals with the difficulty of Tiger ever having a normal life), the action is great, the performances are fine, and cliche as it may be I got invested in the little love story of the two leads. I'm a bit of a softie though. I am curious to see the interconnected universe that spawned off of this film much like how Ironman and Tony Stark kicked off the MCU. I get the impression that these movies are probably all just big blockbuster, action spectacles which I don't mind if they are done well.

Oh, and I also want to note that I enjoyed how the movie shifts from one location to another, providing for some nice cinematography as you take in the sites and cultures (and of course music) of these different locations. Visually, the movie stays interesting with new locations and things to see throughout its run time.

[REPO Man]

I really need to get back into Bollywood films.

[Raging Justice]

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant



So this is a post 9/11 war movie about US soldiers fighting The Taliban. I won't say much more as to not spoil anything. The title of the movie has great significance to the plot. This is a great movie full of tense moments and a story that I got very emotionally invested in. There's a montage sequence at one point in the movie that is absolutely amazing.

Don't go into this just expecting an action movie, as it has a great story that is really the driving force of the film with the action being in service to it.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim are both awesome in this.

This is another one in my list of great 2023 movies along with Extraction 2 and John Wick 4

[Raging Justice]

I don't tend to agree with Angry Joe on a lot of things, but the review by him and his buddies of The Super Mario Bros Movie is pretty spot on. It points out some of my issues with Peach on my first viewing, and other issues I had with the movie on a second viewing.



That said, a lot of people are staunchly defending the movie and love it, and that's fine. He acknowledges that some people will like it, which is obviously true.

I just find it interesting that this movie has been rather polarizing versus the original Mario movie that I think was universally hated.

On another note, I watched Tiger Zinda Hai, the sequel to Ek Tha Tiger

It's okay. In a lot of ways it's kind of a formulaic summer blockbuster action movie with familiar cliches and tropes (like a character death you see coming a mile away), and some parts of it are kind of cheesy (lots of pointless slo mo, a no shirt wearing, ripped looking Tiger mowing down baddies while none of them are able to shoot him back even though he's not moving or hiding behind cover, a really long scene involving him fighting a pack of wolves that feels in no way realistic). It has some interesting elements though.

We have the political tensions/hostilities between India and Pakistan like the first movie, and the US gets thrown into the mix too. The movie's portrayal of the US feels a bit negative I have to say, which might turn off some people. There's a nice theme running through the movie about people putting aside their differences for a greater good. In this case, the spy agencies of Pakistan and India working together to save some nurses from both countries being held hostage in a hospital. I believe this was actually inspired by a real life hostage situation which is also interesting (I think someone did a documentary on it). Tied to the whole unity theme seems to be a message about the pointlessness of wars and hostilities between nations, which was kind of true in the first movie too. One guy calls it "business", which definitely alludes to the idea of the Industrial Military Complex. Again, there's a particular focus on how the US plays into this soooo...just throwing that out there.

There's also a female empowerment element in this movie that it is not very subtle about (one character outright spells it out for the audience in one scene). This largely is conveyed through Tiger's love interest from the first film, who gets a lot more badass action scenes than in the first film. Her actions are key to Tiger's success in this movie. Ironically though, our symbol of female empowerment eventually gets captured and becomes the classic damsel in distress. In the movie's defense though, there's an earlier scene where she saves Tiger's ass, so it sort of balances out I guess.

The performances are all over the place. Many of the main characters (and there's more in this one than the first movie) are fine, while other characters are not so great. The new main characters are cool, but none of them stand out as particularly memorable.

The movie has some decent action, and the story has some nice elements to it, but overall nothing about the movie is amazing. I had hoped this movie could outdo the first one, but I think I actually preferred the first one's focus on Tiger and his girl and the challenges of them falling in love as enemy spies than I did this movie's focus on this whole hostage situation and tensions between all of these countries. There's less decent comedy in this one too, while I did chuckle at a few things in the first movie.

The movie is by no means bad, but it's not great. It's a decently fun popcorn flick that you'll forget about a few months after seeing it. It probably doesn't help that I watched this after seeing Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, which is a movie that I would highly recommend to anyone. I'm not really sure if I'm going to continue on with the YRF Spy Universe. My initial interest in it was due to a website's glowing review of the movie that follows this one (War), but I've since seen some pretty negative reviews on it and am having second thoughts. I'm on kind of a movie watching binge right now if it hasn't become blatantly obvious, and I want to weed out anything that isn't likely to be great so I can make time for the stuff that actually will be. There's some recent stuff I want to see and some older classics that I probably should have already seen long ago. Here's a list of stuff I'm planning on checking out in the weeks to come and may make future posts about:

Blade of the Immortal
Dog Soldiers
Heat
Se7en
Demolition Man
The Fifth Element
The Pope's Exorcist
The Black Phone
The Menu
Boiling Point
Equilibrium
Fall
Ford vs Ferrari
Starship Troopers
Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio
The Last Unicorn
Joker (Can't believe I still haven't seen this)
Only God Forgives
Oblivion
Paths of Glory
Speed Racer (I've heard people say it's underrated)
Sunshine
The Long Kiss Goodnight
The Night of the Hunter
Train to Busan
The Whale
The Prince of Egypt
Bullet Train
Battle Beyond the Stars
The Grey
Eega - A weird movie by the same guy who did RRR
Master and Commander The Far Side of the World

and some others too, but that list (and my entire post) is long enough

[Golgo 14]

Has anyone else seen Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse? We saw it in a theater, and it was stunning. Perhaps the most gorgeous animated film of all time.

I... thought it was okay! I was kind of surprised because I loved the first one. It was probably my favorite movie of 2018. The new one looks as good if not better, but I just felt like I'd seen it before and I'm not sure if I really need to see Part 3. Still, I recommend seeing it while it's still in theaters, especially if you haven't seen the first one.

I also saw No Hard Feelings (funny but forgettable) and The Blackening (funny but forgettable).

Last night I went to a screening of 1985's Clue. I thought it was just all right which is the same opinion I had of it when I watched it on VHS sometime in the late 80s. There was a good crowd though and they were really into it, so that was fun.

The best movie I've seen recently is Past Lives. I've been excited about that one since I saw the trailer a couple months back. It's a slow burn for sure, so much so that it has continued to work on me days after seeing it. I was just a little teary at the end of the movie, but it's had the power to make me emotional just thinking about it in retrospect. Strange. Anyway, I like romantic movies in which nobody gets laid. It's comforting to me somehow lol

[Raging Justice]

Speed Racer



So, Speed Racer is something of a cultural icon, so I'm familiar with him. However, it's been ages since I've seen the anime and don't remember much beyond his cool pose and that super catchy theme song. So this take is not one from a massive Speed Racer geek or anything like that. Anyway...

Don't know that I've ever seen a better example of a comic book style movie. I swear 90% of this movie feels like you're moving from panel to panel like in an actual comic book. The way the movie transitions from scene to scene or even from multiple elements WITHIN a scene is pretty amazing. Heavy emphasis on visual story telling. Sometimes the movie has you going back and forth from different moments in time and it does these cool transitions that feel like you're watching two or three events happening simultaneously. You're watching a race, then a flashback, then the race again, then another flashback. The movie is always trying to be visually interesting in some way, whether it's a scene where live action transitions into animation, or a scene where Speed Racer is on the ground and he looks up at Trixie who is shown to us upside down in the frame to reflect his perspective, to a scene where some doodles on a note book turn into actual cartoons. There's lots of visual creativity on display. All of this visual wizardry can feel like a bit much at times though and can get exhausting as there are times where the movie keep frantically going back and forth with different shots and transitions like an over caffeinated kid. It feels like the movie is trying too hard sometimes.

The races are crazy and over the top. They are not remotely realistic and make Fast and Furious movies look tame. Now is that good or bad? Depends on your perspective. I might have liked something a bit more grounded in reality, but this is based on a manga/anime after all. Just know that you're gonna see a lot of CGI (and some obvious green screen), not real people doing real stunts in real cars. Speed racer melds live action with CGI cartoon and I gotta say everything is so goddamn colorful. As a kid I would have loved that. It's like playing an old school platform game with how bright and colorful everything is. Another thing I love is the extreme sense of speed during all of the races and the action happens so fast you can blink and miss something. Everything happens at breakneck speed and the movie doesn't care if you can keep up. This is a movie where you can re-watch the races and will spot something new each time. It's like a video game with a metric TON of vehicular combat going on, like Twisted Metal, Rock n Roll Racing, or Mario Kart. Made me think of Wacky Races a few times too. If there is one thing I need to make clear about this movie, it has ZERO restraint from all the visual craziness to the chaotic, crazy races. Speed Racer goes big ALL the time and doesn't seem to ever want to go home.

Now, Speed Racer is also kind of a kid friendly movie, for better or for worse. There's one fight scene that is so silly it just felt kind of dumb. Spritle and Chim-Chim get WAAAAAAYYYYY too much screen time. They grated on my nerves after a while, but I can see kids loving these two. I feel like every two minutes the camera is on that kid. It drove me nuts. He's always making jokes and most of them are aimed at children and children only. You'd almost think he's the star of the movie the amount of screen time he gets.

Racer X on the other hand, is very cool. The way the movie handles his identity is great. He has one of the best action scenes in the movie and it's not on a race track. It's a scene where he battles an armed enemy vehicle full of gun toting thugs. There's lot of bullets, missiles, and super cool looking shit before it's all said and done. This scene could have fit just as well in some kind of Spy Hunter movie.



Another amazing scene is a big melee battle later in the movie that feels straight out of a comic. It made me think of everything from Adam West Batman fights, to that church fight in Kingsman, or that epic hallway fight in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, just crazy, hyperkinetic, awesome action with a little bit of humor.



This is the kind of stuff that makes the movie worth seeing. Everything has such visual pizazz. I wish I had seen it in a theater. It's kind of like how some people hate the avatar movies for bland characters and generic stories, but others love them for the amazing visuals (particularly in 3d). To Speed Racer's credit though, it has some cool characters and a decent story, unlike Avatar. Can't stand that dumb kid and his chimpanzee though. Speaking of characters...

Great performances. John Goodman is always perfect in a dad role. Christina Ricci is fun as Trixie (and kind of hot). Roger Allam is wonderfully smarmy. Scott Porter and Mathew Fox are both great and there's a reason why I mentioned them both in one sentence...

So, I think this movie got panned by critics. Since then, it seems to have gotten a bit of a cult following with some calling it underrated. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. There's a lot I like about it, but I can see why it's not a movie for everyone. It seems geared more towards kids and hardcore Speed Racer fans. If you press me though, I'd probably give the movie a thumbs up. The visual elements alone make it worth a watch.

Anyway, my next post will probably be about Blade of the Immortal, which I already started watching, and Supercop 2 a.k.a. Project S, the spinoff of Police Cop 3 starring Michelle Yeoh. Took me forever to get a decent copy of this seemingly overlooked film. I wanted to see the original, unedited cut of the movie like I always do with these old, martial arts movies.

[REPO Man]

Just watched a horror classic with two of my nieces for my (belated) birthday:



It was (AFAIK) their first R-rated horror film. My eldest niece, who wasn't there, saw Halloween Kills in theaters back in 2021.

I figured that since the boys and the babies weren't able to show up I'd throw on a horror movie. And since we didn't have enough time to watch the first Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films and they weren't ready for anything more gory or naughty, I went with what nowadays might be considered a good starter slasher. TBH, if they CGI'd bras onto all the exposed tits, this would DEFINITELY get a hard PG-13.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of their horror education... that will continue with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street box sets I got them as (very belated) Easter presents and with the novels of Christopher Pike.

[Raging Justice]

Oblivion



Good sci fi movie with a really good story that keeps you guessing and wondering what's going on. It's maybe a bit slow paced, but the story ultimately rewards you for sticking with it.

Yet another good movie involving Tom Cruise, the guy's resume is pretty amazing

[Raging Justice]

I'm in the mood for horror. What should I watch first?

The Pope's Exorcist
The Black Phone
Dog Soldiers

I think someone said some good things about The Pope's Exorcist in this thread

I watched Speed Racer again and I'm actually digging it even more after a second viewing. I forgot just how silly the original cartoon was and I may have been in a bit too serious of a mindset on my first viewing. You know a lot of adaptations try to alter the source material a bit to make it more palatable to a broader audience. Speed Racer doesn't give a fuck, and fully embraces the ridiculous nature of its source material and I kind of respect that. If you go into the movie expecting a certain level of cheese and silliness and embrace it, the movie becomes even more fun to watch.

And I alluded to it earlier, but again the stuff the movie does visually with the edits, cuts, colors, etc. is really mind boggling. I'm appreciating some things even more after a second watch. And the blending of amazing visuals with pure, unadulterated SPEED in some scenes is awesome. There's a bit where the cars go into this cool, sinister looking, ice cave that is candy for the eyes and you add to that the sensation of speed as they're blazing through it with all of the colorful neon trails and it's just awesome. There are moments in Speed Racer that are worth re-watching even if you're not in the mood to watch the entire movie ever again.

And just to add an extra note on my thoughts on Tom Cruise's Oblivion. The soundtrack is great and the cinematography is great. The locations just look amazing in this movie. I don't want to say too much more about it. It's one of those movies where I think the less you know the more you'll enjoy it (just like The Covenant which I talked about recently)