Batman Ninja is gorgeous, but I ended up not liking it or enjoying it at all. The movie is just a mess. They tried to do WAAAAAY too much, and as a result, the movie suffers from a lack of focus and a completely nonsensical plot. Also, I was not a fan of the seemingly arbitrary shifts in animation styles.
Finally, MILD SPOILER WARNINGS: Giant transforming castles in feudal Japan are just dumb.
Pom Poko/Grave of the Fireflies double feature, for a double dose of whiplash feels. I hadnāt seen either. The English dub of Pom Poko has some odd linguistic choices, with ātanookiā as āraccoonā and also āpouchesā. Kif is the narrator. And Grave at least sets things up so you know where theyāre going, emotionally.
Oh no! I was looking forward to Batman Ninja. I think Iāll still watch it for the visuals, but thatās pretty disappointing.
Story-wise, I really enjoyed Gotham By Gaslight. Honestly, I think I like it more than The Dark Night (which I re-watched recently and boy is there some shoddy plotting I didnāt notice when I saw it originally).
I could say a counter point and claim, that in my mind Batman Ninja was stupid, nuts, and way awesome. The switching artstyles didnātā bother me, it looked overall quite pretty. Giant robots are always cool, animal thing was the dumb part.
Also, apparently the script was rewritten in the English dub so Iām going to, at some point, watch it again in Japanese to see how the original version was. Although I do think that most important stuff came through from the visuals.
Gotham by Gaslight was based on a comic by Mike Mignola, so of course itās going to be good. Batman Ninja, by contrast, was a hodgepodge of cool visuals thrown together and then a plot bolted on afterwards to try and give context to it all. There really isnāt a comparison between them storywise.
I agree that the art and visuals were gorgeous, but I couldnāt get past the nonsensical plot. Also, I love me some giant robots as well, but why bother setting the movie in feudal Japan if youāre going to add them in? That doesnāt make any sense. I completely agree with you that the animal stuff was dumb.
Thatās interesting about the script being rewritten in the English dub. I donāt know if I care enough to watch the original, but that just further proves to me that this was a vehicle for the animation, and the story was secondary to that.
Obviously, this is all just my opinion, and thereās plenty of things to like if you turn off your brain, but as I said to another friend, the closest analogue to this movie, for me at least, was Zack Snyderās Sucker Punch, which also had amazing visuals, but I also hated.
Deadpool 2 is a bit slow at first, but ramps up the action, fun, stupid, feels, and meta as it goes along. A good date movie.
The Greatest Showman is terrible on so many levels, but still isnāt completely unwatchable.
The Bruce Willis Death Wish movie is essentially the blank slate isekai protagonist for average joe white dude imagining how badass they could be if someone would just give them a reason. āHeās totally rich and highly respected and does the best everything, but then someone hurts his wife/girlfriend/daughter and now heās going to go John Rambo vigilante and even the cops are going to be OK with it cause heās just such a great white guy.ā
On the other hand I guess John Wick has sort-of the same plot, but it just feels way less creepy. Do I find it better because the premise is that he was a hit man? Or because someone hurt his dog? Or is Keanu and the project better? Maybe because it was just lessā¦ pandering.
I think the difference is that Wick is not just a hitman, but heās someone who escaped that life, and came back to it. Itās clearly established that the people heās going after are in the life, as he is, everyoneās on equal footing. The violence is glorified, but itās not fetishised, and itās clear that everyone involved is bad people, or at best morally ambiguous - John is not a hero because heās doing what heās doing, or at all, heās just a guy doing what he knows best to fulfill a personal need. Itās explicitly laid out as a world with itās own rules very early on.
Death Wish is almost the exact opposite. Itās still a roaring rampage of revenge type story, but the violence is almost fetishised, and they draw the big hard line that Paul is the capital G good guy doing nasty things to bad people, the real hero of the piece, because heās taking justice into his own hands. It glorifies murder, rather than treating it as a fact of the setting, and itās made clear that it is meant to be our world, not a separate shadow world with itās own rules.
TL:DR - John Wick is a revenge movie set in another world next to ours, Death Wish is revenge pornography explicitly in our world.
The first hour of The Mummy (2017) wasnāt good, but it wasnāt as bad as Iād heard the movie to be. Some fun action, fun adventuring, fun plane crash, fun monster stuff.
But then Russell Crowe turns up, and while he didnāt single-handedly ruin the movie, his appearance marks the turning point to make this the WAAAAAY worse than Iād heard. Just utterly, profanely bad. And weirdly creepy and misogynistic in a way I think I heard mention once, but didnāt remember correctly or understand at the timeā¦ but WAAAAY worse than that too.
And Russell Crowe is terrible! I canāt get over how bad he is at accents. And in this he has to do two different accents for his two different characters. Neither of which needed to be in the movie at all, and only made the movie worse.
The idea to make a shared universe where people hunt classic monsters? Fine! Iād be into it, if they were all like the first hour of this movie. But you canāt introduce the idea of that series of movies in a way that just interrupts the FIRST movie. Itās like they looked at the MCU and the DC movies, and thought āLetās do it the DC way, not like the wildly popular MCUā where itās introduced in post-credits sequences once people are already used to the style.
Whatever shared universe Kong and Godzilla are in, and movies they will share in the future? Iām into it! Because I watched two movies that were good fun, or at least I donāt regret watching them, and if in the future I get to see Godzilla and Kong fight other monsters together? Great! Maybe a Mecha-Godzilla or the moth thing? Cool.
But by ruining The Mummy (even more than it had already ruined itself) by forcing in a shared universe backstory? Makes me want to SKIP anything associated with this whenever I might see it come on TV.
Watched The Cave, last night. Good watch. Iād recommend a few netflix titles. Outsider & Mute.
Take Stalker and juice it up a bit. Thatās Annihilation.
Lost Highway rewatch, a decade later. Thereās a certain threshold of David Lynch I can stand and find enjoyable. Past that threshold, the rest is āthatās right, more dream imagery and fantastic noisesā. Lost Highway falls nicely on the enjoyable side. It also has a great soundtrack and uses its songs well.
Incredibles 2 is pretty good. Not as incredible as the first but all the superhero stuff you like about the characters, action, comedy, and score is still there in full force. Biggest problems are the villains who are much weaker and theyāve taken bits and pieces of the Randian philosophy that was there in Brad Birdās previous film Tomorrowland. It makes the discussion of superhero powers and philosophy of it very preachy at times and hurts the narrative a lot.
However, the reason to see this movie is the short before the film called Bao. Dear god, that might be the best short Pixar has ever released. Went from laughing, to crying, to in sheer dumb awe from certain actions in that short. It was so tender and warm and really gets you in the heart.
The RBG movie is just incredible. It does an amazing job of showcasing the life of one of the most important Supreme Court justices while also doing a great job of explaining the importance of her legal work, both before and on the Court.
Double feature consisting of Cliffhanger followed by Demolition Man. What can I say i was in a Stallone mood. The 90ās what a wonderful time.
I just finished watching Coco and damn that was a 9/10 Pixar. Now I want a Hector Rivera shirt.
Coco was everything people told me Inside Out was, but actually a good movie. Certainly in my top 3 or 4 Pixar movies.
Something something Trump something āSpace Forceā the other day, and I showed Juliane a tweet that said āDo you want to know more?ā
She didnāt get the joke.
So last night we watched Starship Troopers. Itās really good! I mean, itās a cheesy B-movie with a huge budget, but it works so great as satire. I remember watching it at the cinema, and walking out people were saying āWorst movie everā but I wasnāt sure if they were taking it too seriously. The line āItās sucked out his brainsā got a huge laugh in the cinema, I recall. Nobody puts a line like that into a movie by accident, so I thought they should give the director more credit.
The special effects hold upā¦ or at least all the aliens on the planets do. The hoards of bugs still looks amazing. All the ships in space look super dated though. It could do with a Special Edition cleanup where all the space stuff is updated with better compositing, but with all the planet-side material left exactly as it is.
And the battles are seriously dramatic. The fort being attacked by bugs is waaaay more interesting and dramatic than any of the army-vs-army battles in all the latest Marvel or Star Wars movies. Like the the battle in Wakanda at the end of Infinity War. That was garbage compared to the middle battle in Starship Troopers. Of course it comes down to how much planning and physical sets and preparation for the big sequences in 1997 compared to 2018. Back then it had to be good from the very start, not fixed in post production like Black Panther.
I mean, look at how the visual effects supervisor is describing the key shots they are planning while building the set. Itās so clear they all know exactly what they want here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y82Fc0bc8E
Compared to the end battle in Black Panther, which was filmed on a blue screen set, then hacked to pieces, then put together with all new land and skyā¦ and then other shit happening in the backgroundā¦ and then they replace the main thing you are looking at, Black Panther himself, with a completely CGI character that looks, well, utterly shit. Even the Jar Jar Binx battle at the end of Episode I was better than this shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-E5wDgptQA
Ha! I just scrolled to the comments on that video. Itās pretty funny to see things like:
āWorst part of the movie was the CGI, that tunnel fight was atrocious.ļ»æā
āWe ended up doing full CG replacements for the actorsā - Yeah. We could tell.
āJust came for the comments to see if anyone else thought the CG was trash.ļ»æā
āThe CGI in the third act looked like two people made of rubber fighting in a PS2 cutscene.ļ»æā
āTBH as good as the movie was, special effects and CGI wasnāt the one of itās highlights.ļ»æā
āMan that railway scenes was not that good man looka like star ship trooper the animated seriesļ»æā
āThe CGI in that final battle was horrendous, but everything else was great. Shoutout to them for making Wakanda look like a real placeļ»æā
We borrowed Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle from the library and it is way better than it has any right to be. Itās really clever and funny, subtly subverts tropes while also being goofy and over the top, and is generally just a fun time. I really recommend it for a fun date night rental.