What have you watched lately?

[Tom Foolery]

Five Nights at Freddy’s. Both my kids and my wife are of the age where they watched a lot of Let’s Play video channels on youtube. The FNaF fanbase is HUGE. I’ve been in the room enough times, that I have a passing knowledge of the lore, having watched Markiplier play all eight or nine games at one point or another. The movie itself isn’t that scary for a horror movie. It’s not very well written. But it’s faithful to the games and the fan service is on point. I wouldn’t say I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it enough to appreciate that its fans got it made. And it blew up at the BoxOffice with the sixth highest opening weekend of the year behind Barbie, Mario, Guardians, Ant-Man and Oppenheimer.

[vynsane]

Cocaine Bear. why? just why? talk about anachronisms. the kid saying "that bear is fucked" just stuck out at me as something no one said in the 80's.

[Tom Foolery]

The Mummy. The critical and commercial flop with Tom Cruise that killed Universal’s grandiose plans to have a Monster-Verse before they even got started. They threw a lot of money at this movie and it just feels…empty. Like, who cares? Russel Crowe as Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde is just a weird thing to stuff into the middle of a Mummy movie. I don’t think 15% on rotten tomatoes is justifiable(a movie has to be unwatchable dogshit to be that low) but the entire movie was emotionally irrelevant.

[Tom Foolery]

Took my parents to see Killers of the Flower Moon. Well acted, and plenty of wonderfully framed shots. But very dour. And didn’t need to be 3 1/2 hours long. The Irishman was also overly long, so apparently studios like Apple and Netflix don’t know how to tell Martin to tighten it up. Or fuck it, maybe he’s earned the right to make meandering films. And Scorsese didn’t know how to end the film, so it concluded with this strange Radio Production that would’ve been black title cards in other movies. He was also the final speaking part, which I think is the first time he’s even been in one of his own movies?

[jjreason]

I just watched Wolf of Wall Street to kinda whet my appetite for Killers, but it didn't really do it. I think The Big Short was a much better non-Scorsese Scorsese movie than this one. I think I'll just wait until I can watch it in chunks at home.

[Ran]

Die Hard. Yeah. It has been a really long time since I've last seen it. It was funny seeing the principal from The Breakfast Club, Peck from Ghostbusters, and Genghis Khan from Bill & Ted. Oddly enough, they were all basically the same characters from those movies in Die Hard.

I don't think Die Hard has aged well. It is kind of a sum of everything that bothered me about action movies from the late 80s and into the 90s. Endless ammo, actions that just don't make sense, guys who are "dead" but come back, etc. Yes, it is a Christmas movie, but it just isn't that good.

[vynsane]

we had chinese take-out and watched GotG Holiday Special and vol. 3 back-to-back yesterday, since we hadn't seen either yet. it was a good way to distract us from the fact that my mom wasn't with us for christmas.

[Tom Foolery]

High-Rise. From 2013. Tom Hiddleston plays a doctor that moves into a new high-rise apartment building in the 1970’s and acclimates to the social hierarchy of his fellow residents and then…..what the fuck did I just watch?? Based on a novel from 1975 that they’ve been trying to film for decades.

[Diabolical]

High-Rise. From 2013. Tom Hiddleston plays a doctor that moves into a new high-rise apartment building in the 1970’s and acclimates to the social hierarchy of his fellow residents and then…..what the fuck did I just watch?? Based on a novel from 1975 that they’ve been trying to film for decades.

I bought it on DVD at the dollar store a while back, but I still haven't seen it.

[Tom Foolery]

Assassin’s Creed. The 2016 film with Michael Fassbender. I rented it when it first came out and was very underwhelmed by it. But I saw it in the $5 bin at WM like five years ago and bought it with the intention of rewatching it. I JUST got around to opening it and giving it a second viewing. It was marginally better the second time, but it’s still not as good as it could have been. The jittery camera work and the dustiness in the “past” scenes detracted from the cool parkour action scenes. And the infodump of the lore of the games slowed down the pace in the present. The movie fell victim to setting up future installments that never happened instead of just rocking ass in the first film.

Heat. Michael Mann’s epic crime saga. One of my evergreen rewatchable films. Fun fact I was unaware of until this viewing; Heat is a “remake”. Mann originally pitched the idea as a TV series. When that didn’t pan out, he reworked the script into a TV movie called L.A. Takedown that came out in 1989.
It’s a shorter version with a much much much smaller budget, but the characters and story are all the same. He used the TV movie as a beta test to see what worked and what didn’t when he made Heat six years later.

[Tom Foolery]

Basic. A military whodonit from 2003 starring John Travolta and Samuel Jackson. To date, this was John McTiernan’s last film. He had a fucking rock solid resume in the 80s and 90s. Predator, Die Hard, Hunt For Red October, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Last Action Hero, Thomas Crown Affair. Even Medicine Man, although cheesy, wasn’t bad. His last couple films weren’t memorable. This one started off well, a rashomon style series of flashbacks to a training excercise that goes wrong. But the screenwriter was so intent on “fooling” the audience, the twist at the end made the entire movie shitty.

Shaft. The newest sequel with Sam Jackson and Richard Roundtree playing the grandfather and father to Jesse Usher’s JJ Shaft, who does NOT follow in his dad’s footsteps. It’s half sequel, half parody of the Shaft films. I was entertained.

Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I had NEVER seen this movie. Holy shit, this movie might need it’s own topic. It’s been living in my head for the last few days more than it should have a right to. Given the cast, I feel like this movie was a wasted opportunity for something with so much potential. But at the same time, it’s cemented as a well deserved cult film. Just…wow. And the end credits are like….every movie should end exaxtly like that from now on.

Reacher. The Amazon Prime series based on the Lee Child books. I really enjoyed the first Tom Cruise movie, but Alan Ritchson is physically a better match for the character in the novels. I’ve only read one of them. I binged the first season in one day and enjoyed it.

[Ran]

Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I had NEVER seen this movie. Holy shit, this movie might need it’s own topic. It’s been living in my head for the last few days more than it should have a right to. Given the cast, I feel like this movie was a wasted opportunity for something with so much potential. But at the same time, it’s cemented as a well deserved cult film. Just…wow. And the end credits are like….every movie should end exaxtly like that from now on.

It has been decades since I've seen it, and at this point, I am getting it a bit mixed up with Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. I should probably rewatch both.

[Tom Foolery]

I saw Remo on one of the streaming services and was also gonna rewatch that. I feel like they tried to turn Remo Williams into a TV series at one point, but I feel like it had a different name and didn’t last very long. To the internet! EDIT It was a Pilot that didnt get picked up for series. So I remember watching the TV pilot, but not the original movie.

[Ran]

My grade school let us watch Buckaroo Banzai, Remo Williams, and Condorman in class towards the end of the school year. It seems like Condorman is mostly forgotten about other than there being a glider in Disney Infinity. Maybe it wasn't any good.

[Tom Foolery]

Remo Williams:The Adventure Begins. This was a pretty subpar generic “action” flick from the 80s. NYPD cop Fred Ward dies under ridiculously stupid circumstances, but he didn’t die. Instead he’s given facial reconstruction surgery without his permission and recruited without his permission into a special anti-bad-guys-who-get-away-with-stuff organization. Organization is a very loose term, because it’s just the one armed black guy who he woke up to in the hospital, and Wilford Brimley as the computer guy in a run down office. His first “job” is to go kill this guy, but wait! Its a test! The guy is…a white actor made up to look like an old Korean guy. Does that sound incredibly cringey? Well it gets better/worse. The Oscars nominated the movie for Best Makeup(it lost to Mask with Eric ‘Im not Marty McFly’ Stoltz). Which means Hollywood collectively said ‘Damn, that is some solid yellowface cultural appropriation, yo. We should give that guy props.’ Anyway, the Korean guy trains Remo(his new identity after the surgery. Also he’s named after the bedpan in the hospital.) to be the master of a made up martial art so he can fight a defense contractor who’s bilking the govt of billions with a non-working Star Wars defense satellite prototype. Which is the b-plot of the movie. The main thing that takes up the movie is the horrible stereotyped ‘Korean’ guy training Fred Ward to dodge bullets and walk on telephone lines while giving all this confucious-esque wisdom in a horribly racist accent, which would’ve been bad even if they’d hired an actual Korean actor, but it’s SOOOOO MUCH WORSE because it’s a white guy with make up on.

In conclusion, this movie should not be confused with Buckaroo Banzai.