HUNTER HUNTER - Camille Sullivan, Devon Sawa, Summer H. Howell, Nick Stahl.
A total waste of 1 1/2 hrs. Camille drabbed up (she's usually gorgeous)out in the Canadian wilderness, husband Sawa goes wolf hunting, ends up dead, Stahl arrives, whoa, Camille does a butcher job on him and they still don't catch the wolf! I've seen Camille in Vancouver several times, liquor store, race track etc. This gets a 1 3/4 on the Moizmeter.

MUNCHHAUSEN (1943) Huge Agfa color extravaganza made by UFI to celebrate their 25th anniversary jubilee. In the flavor of Korda and other early fantasy spectacles and including fantastic cinematography inspired by Menzies work for Gone With The Wind.

Venice sequences for an 18th Carnival were filmed on location in Venice in 1942. The Terry Gilliam movie owes a lot to this one which in many ways is superior.

Though produced in Nazi Germany Goebbels meant this film as pure escapism and any politics is kept in the 18th century setting with Catherine the Great, the Turkish Sultan and the Doge of Venice.

As a German film it was not held in by the Hollywood Hayes Code so surprisingly the uncut domestic version has navels and female breasts.

It's on YouTube and worth seeing if you love old pre digital fantasy films. With today's effects this art of filmmaking is nearly forgotten.

THE GUILTY - Jake Gyllenhaal, and an unseen cast of many. Jake is a former cop who now takes 911 calls from greater LA area. Over 1 1/2 hrs of this and I couldn't make head nor tail of anything. I like Jake so he gets it a 1 on the Moizmeter.

KNOCK KNOCK - Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo, Ignacia Allamand. Keanu's wife and kids are away and that night a terrible rain storm brings 2 crazy women, Ana & Lorenza to his door looking for a phone. Poor Keanu lets them in and they almost kill him and make a huge mess of the home, altho I had no idea why or what for. A 1 3/4 on the Moizmeter.

bravo1102 wrote:
MUNCHHAUSEN (1943)

OK… I didn't realise that version of the story existed O_O

moizmad wrote:
KNOCK KNOCK - Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo, Ignacia Allamand. Keanu's wife and kids are away and that night a terrible rain storm brings 2 crazy women, Ana & Lorenza to his door looking for a phone. Poor Keanu lets them in and they almost kill him and make a huge mess of the home, altho I had no idea why or what for. A 1 3/4 on the Moizmeter.

That was a really icky movie :(
Icky!!!!

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I saw Free Guy on Disney plus the other day.
It was fun- it's one of those movies where most of the action takes place IN a computer game, in this case it's an NPC getting awareness… which goes back in a long line of films to Tron and probably before.

Anyway, Ryan Reynolds is good as the hapless boob Guy. Interesting to see Jodie Comer from killing Eve staring in this too, not looking as giant and terrifying as she does in that series XD

It was a very fun, very enjoyable movie. It was bright and happy and colourful which was lovely to see since digital colour correction started to be widely used 80% of movies and shows became super drab because editors are uncreative lemmings and just copy what everyone else does.

I felt the film suffered in the last quarter and the ending in that it went from an interesting and creative game based story to inserting and relying on very old and tired conventional tropes-



–Spoilers–
Those tropes are a love plot between the two main programmers, the baddy physically destroying servers with a fire axe, and people all over the whole world watching the in-game action on TV. And other things.
–Spoilers–

It was a fun film but the ending was a bit floppy.

For some reason I decided to rewatch How I met Your Mother…
I gave up on the show in about 2010 I think, because I got tired of waiting for the next season and finding streams was annoying. But I liked it back then. It was just too much work to get back into it.

Now I'm watching it all again from the start so I can catch up and finally finish it!

I'm finding it pretty hard to get through though. Ted Moesby is such an awful character, at least in the episodes I'm watching now in the first season. He's such a wimp as well as being so sickly obsessed with marriage and “the one”.
The whole show is about elevating meaningless transient relationships to the status of a search for “true love” and deeper relationships are elevated to a sort of sacrosanct, holy and unassailable purity status. While Barney who is a silly sleaze is the other extreme, who has an endless series of meaningless liaisons.

It only offers these two crazy extremes. The focus on love lurv looooove loOVE LOVE is a bit much but I'll stick with it.

Binge-watched Squid Game due to the hype. The hype is justified, there were parts of that show which were intense. I ended up binge-watching it in one night (and well into the early AM). The filming and set was also amazingly well done, plus the music. Super creepy and unsettling. It was fascinating to see the main character turn from a loser to a hero in just a few days.

The squid game is in the style of dark gameshow animes that've been popular for a few years. They're extremely brutal and all follow the same formula… so I know that show is not for me. Too dark.

——

Speaking of formula… I watched Piccalilli Jim the other day, it's a 2004 comedy movie staring Sam Rockwell and set in the 1930s.
The action is divided between London and New York. There's a bit of 30s fashion on show, great outfits and design, as well as Rockwell's awesome dancing.
The story is pure vintage 1930s formula farce, which was weird in a movie from 2004- it involves a playboy falling in love with a feisty woman who hates him but has never seen him so he pretends to be someone else, meanwhile his father is pretending to be a butler so he can escape his controlling wife… and other farce staples.

It was a fun little film and I'm surprised it exists. Very weird and anachronistic.

NIGHT TEETH - Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Debby Ryan, Lucy Fry, Raul Castillo.
Jorge is hired to drive to crazy vampire women to various locales one night.
He falls in love with Debby and bottom line of story: if you can't beat ‘em, join ’em! A 1 on the Moizmeter.

HYPNOTIC - Kate Siegel, Jason O'Mara, Dule Hill, Lucie Guest. Kate has suffered loss of baby, and boyfriend in coma, goes to Jason to get hypnotised to feel better, doesn't know he's a nut case looking for women to replace his dead wife, and Kate is perfect. But she resists his advances and goes to police. Supposed to be in Portland, Ore. but filmed entirely in Vancouver, BC. An almost 2 on the Moizmeter.

I watched “Surf Party: summer Unleashed”
It soooounds like one of those stupid sex comedies from the 80s. It wasn't, though it thought it might be, I think it had a bit of an identity crisis.

What it turned out to be was a movie about the memory of an incident that happened one day in summer.

It starts out showing a surfboard being made and showing scenes of surfing. We get an intro to some of the protagonists during their high-school graduation, all told from the point of view of one of them-
So it starts off like an old sex comedy AND we know it's all from the point of view of one person. Also it's set in the 1980s.

These people are friends who live in Ventura California and like to surf. They hate “the Valley”.

The main protagonist picks up the surfboard that was just made for him. He goes surfing with it. It flips away from him and he loses it. He looks everywhere but it's lost…
It seems to shape up to be a “dude, where's my surfboard” sort of thing. But it turns out that a Valley kid stole it and the gang has to go on a road trip to get it back.


———-

What was set to be a sex comedy turned into an extremely facile coming of age story with a bit of roadtrip thrown in. It's not a very good movie. All up it's dull and doesn't really know where its focus is.
I only mention this film AT ALL because it occurred to me that it's the exact equivalent of all those nostalgic sex comedy/coming of age stories that were made in the late 70s and early 80s but set during the 50s and 60s (Porkies, Stand by met etc). It feels really weird that they're STILL making that genre and have updated it to a time when I remember being a kid, haha!

I just watched Disney's Jungle Cruise.
It's trying for a Mummy/Pirate's of the Caribbean thing. It really is. It's going for exactly that.

Does it succeed? Maybe. It's as formulaic as the first Pirates' Film, but no where near as good as The Mummy.

A few annoying things:
All the comments on the female protagonist's trousers, as if it waa unusual for a lady to wear them. In the time the film is set it was completely normal for a woman to wear jodphurs while working or adventuring. No one would think it was worthy of comment. They were unisex.
Straight trousers would have elicited comment.

Her brother is careful about clothes, being clean and looking good and he doesn't know how to do physical things like drive boats etc and he's gay…
I see that they really want to be inclusive and forward thinking by including a gay person but that is a moronic stereotype. They should have made the Rock's character gay instead.

All in all this is a formula retro adventure move with waaaaay too much CGI. The writing was dull and I found the movie uninteresting. It was not a bad film though and I hope they make it into a franchise like The Pirates series because I think it could get better with iterations on the idea.

YouTube has the 1960s Godzilla movies for free(with ads) in Japanese and wide-screen and the original Japanese plots.

Even one with the little kid was tolerable! The effects and Godzilla becomes campy by the 1960s and it some fights have slapstick bits. But hell of a lot better than the cut, dubbed ones of my youth. But then I like silliness.

I saw Babylon AD the other day, staring Vin Diesel.

One of those overly violent action movies staring an invincible muscleman…

The name reminded me suspiciously of a 90s anime… There were animes with “AD” in the name and “Tokyo Babylon” etc.
And it was a VERY 90s anime premise and plot!

Vin is a super mercenary who's stuck living in a dystopian poor future Russia. He gets picked captured by a mercenary army and taken to a huge APC with a turret on top. He gets forced inside and all that's in there is a fat Russian mob boss wiith what looks like his wife and daughter I think. They're all relaxing on couches that surround the sides of the thing, it's all upholstered in deep furs, and there are TV screens surrounding all the walls showing what's happening outside so it's like looking out of a glass car…

Very anime!

There are so many anime type touches like him being transported to the job they want him to do in a limo slung under a hind gunship that flies him to his destination. Also a pseudo Christian cult that wants to take over the USA (the theme of every second 90s anime), refuges being transported on a giant Russian Akula class submarine, having to transport a psychic girl…

I'd be surprised if it wasn't adapted from an anime.

It was ok. Too violent for me really. The ending was lame.

Started watching “cowboy bebop” the live-action series. The sets, props, and costumes are a lot of fun to watch. The stories and characters are pretty much forgettable.

All the Showa era (1956-1977) Godzilla movies are free on YouTube. Some are even in the original Japanese.

Coming Home In The Dark - Daniel Gillies, Matthias Luafutu, Miriama McDowell, Erik Thomson and a few others. Started OK with family on a field trip, beautiful scenes in NZ, but then the bad guys show up and movie drags on, what are they doing this for? Well much later we see it goes way back and the main bad guy holds a big grudge to the family's father. Think almost everyone ends up dead. A 1 1/2 on the Moizmeter, mainly for the scenery.

My husband has never watched Stargate SG-1, so I am re-watching (and he is watching for the first time) all the episodes. It is almost like new for me since I don't remember all the episodes (at least it's been like 15 years since I watched it :o).

L.C.Stein wrote:
My husband has never watched Stargate SG-1, so I am re-watching (and he is watching for the first time) all the episodes. It is almost like new for me since I don't remember all the episodes (at least it's been like 15 years since I watched it :o).

That's a great felling :D

———–

I'm watching Scrubs. I never really watched it when it was first on, only a few episodes here and there. I'm enjoying it after a fashion. I reminds me a lot of the stories my Ex would tell me about her work in the emergency department at the hospital.

THE GRUDGE - Andrea Riseborough, Jacki Weaver, Demian Bichir, and a cast of….never mind, ridiculous story of some horrible disease? that eats people up? Andrea is a detective investigating a horrifying find and story goes back to Japan where disease? started and was brought over to States. I love Andrea so she gets movie a 2 on the Moizmeter.

THE UNFORGIVABLE - Sandra Bullock, Vincent D'Onofrio, Viola Davis, Jon Bernthal, Richard Thomas. 20 years ago, Sandra is charged with killing a sheriff who came to evict her and her little sister. Altho the little sister actually killed the cop, Sandra takes the fall and goes to prison. She gets paroled, works 2 jobs but still has the cops sons after her. One wants to kill her and the other wants nothing to do with that. Eventually Sandra finds her now grown up sister and movie ends with their loving embrace. Confusing with all those flashbacks, are we now or then? A 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

THINGS HEARD & SEEN - Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, F. Murray Abraham, Natalia Dyer, Alex Neustaedter, Jack Gore, Karen Allen.
Amanda & husband James move from Manhattan to a house in upstate NY, where hubby has a teaching job altho all his credentials are phony. Amanda soon discovers the house is just slightly haunted as a murder took place there many years ago, and F. Murray is going to blow whistle on James. He won't have that and kills him and gets even nuttier finally killing Amanda. A 2 hour waste of time for me, a 1 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

Ayo I just watched the new Spider-Man Movie. As much as I'm not hype for the mcu or any of that, there is genuinely no movie.. or probably any other form of media that's managed to pull off what this one did at the scale that it did. I don't want to spoil for anything but sheesh I left the theater a couple hours ago and I can't stop thinking about it. Though I must admit, I have as much issues with it (in the larger context of the state of cinema) as I have praise for it (as a damn fine work of art).

_____________________
The Exam

HUSH - Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr., Samantha Sloyan, Michael Trucco, Emma Graves. From 2016, Kate is totally deaf and living alone in an isolated house, gets a visit from friend Samantha who was being followed by a nutcase John, who then brutally murders her right outside Kate's window but she doesn't hear, then killer turns his attention to Kate. I couldn't understand why he doesn't go in as there are hundreds of windows begging to be smashed in, but no he stays outside and then murders Samantha's bf who shows up. Oh well, Kate will figure out her defense, ya think? A 2 on the Moizmeter.

Atm, I'm tryna get through the new Witcher season, and the Gintama anime. If anyone's got any recommendations that would be great. A bit stuck on what to watch next!

CollierShoot wrote:
the Gintama anime. If anyone's got any recommendations that would be great. A bit stuck on what to watch next!

Gintama is great but sooooo long. Easy to get fatigued. Hard to find good streams for it too :(

Watch Scrubs and Community and Farscape. They're all brilliant!

——————————–

Ron's Gone Wrong was pretty decent!
It's a Pixar thing I think?

The story is that this big tech company called “Bubble” (basically and Google/Apple stand-in) has made little personal assistant bots for kids. They act as smartphone robots that follow people about and post to social media for them…
-Interestingly Tannith Lee wrote about that in her 1976 book Don't Bit the Sun, but was a lot more clever and futuristic… Compared to that this movie isn't as farsighted, it's just based on a simple extrapolation from current trends with the yoth culture in isolation, while Lee's book was about how the whole of society would be changed.

The protagonist is poor and doesn't have a bot. And because of that he doesn't fit in or make friends etc… His dad and Granny get him a damaged one for his birthday. AT first he doesn't like it because it doesn't work correctly and connect to his social media, instead acting more like an actual friend who's interested in him rather than what he wants to project.

Eventually that changes how the other bots work too and everyone gets ones like his.It's a bit of a muddy social message (actually being friends is better than a social media popularity contest), but it's a but it's a fun film and makes you feel good.
comfort food for the brain.

I really liked that the company CEO was sort of based on Steve Jobs… with a bit of Larry Page and Bill Gates. Bill Gates head and Steve Job's turtle neck. But I think it was more Jobs because of the subject matter (the bots are basically the original iphone), and the fact that the real inventor of them (and previous CEO) is sort of pushed out and all this guy supplied was his garage for it to be built in and he just did the business stuff -(ie Jobs with the Lisa and Macintosh etc).
Big jabs at Google because the kids are just seen as data to use to sell to advertisers… which was a big reason why Android was free to put on phones… But then Apple and Microsoft and everyone does this now anyway.

MARY - Emily Mortimer, Gary Oldman and a bunch of no-names. Couple buys an old wreck sailboat and rebuild it. Their 2 kids, along with 1 bf, and a friend of Gary's, set sail for Bermuda? Things quickly go wrong, boat seems to be haunted. The bf attacks Gary and is taken to hospital on some island. He soon kills himself. Then the friend goes crackers and Gary gets killed by some ghost? Emily gets the 2 girls off and she is arrested for murder? A 2 on the Moizmeter.

THE HOLE IN THE GROUND - Seana Kerslake, James Cosmo, Quinn Markey…Seana and her young son are renting a remote house in the middle of nowhere. There's a huge sinkhole in the forest near their house and soon Seana starts to think her son is not the same anymore. He's been replaced by a ghoul but can't tell unless you see him in a mirror. After a long crawl in the sinkhole she thinks she's saved her real son. They move to the city and new place is full of mirrors. Does she see anything weird? Guess not but goofy end when she takes a photo of her son riding a bike, and he's out of focus??? Have no idea what this meant, a 1 on the Moizmeter.

moizmad wrote:
THE HOLE IN THE GROUND - Seana Kerslake, James Cosmo, Quinn Markey…Seana and her young son are renting a remote house in the middle of nowhere. There's a huge sinkhole in the forest near their house and soon Seana starts to think her son is not the same anymore. He's been replaced by a ghoul but can't tell unless you see him in a mirror. After a long crawl in the sinkhole she thinks she's saved her real son. They move to the city and new place is full of mirrors. Does she see anything weird? Guess not but goofy end when she takes a photo of her son riding a bike, and he's out of focus??? Have no idea what this meant, a 1 on the Moizmeter.

Had to watch that with my ex because horror films were the only ones she'd really like (I do NOT like horror films), but it looked quirky and interesting enough to explore.

It had promise but it didn't really get there…
It was like a crossover between horror and fantasy- or like a fantasy concept but a more “realist” horror interpretation.
Basically it's a doppelgänger theme.

It would probably have been better if they went more full on fantasy or more full on horror.

“Don’t look up” on Netflix.
It uses the old trope of an asteroid on a collision course with earth to make a hilariously damning indictment of American society and politics. Not only that, but it also uses the analogy of the falling comet to riff on the comedic aspects of global warming.

Spiderman no way home. Easily the strongest of the Spiderman films with Tom Holland even though it was very much a spectacle and barely slowed down through its entire runtime the plot and character work was really well done. Although it does rely on viewers being fairly up to speed on MCU movies and older Spidey movies, they do a decent enough job to stop it from being too inaccessible. Far better than I expected it to be.


Also watched black widow the other day… Quite full really, one of the worse MCU movies for sure.

Also watched Encanto the other day. And my opinion is almost exactly the same as Ozones, which is it's pretty and emotional and well done but also very shallow.

Oh and I watched the Hawkeye series which was pretty solid, far better than the black widow movie.

Witcher season 2. Definitely a step up from the mixed bag of season 1. I really enjoyed it.

Something I have more to say about any of the others though is…

The wheel of time.
I love the books, I've read them all several times. For those that don't know it's a huge series that makes the lord of the rings look like a pamphlet. Safe to say making a TV series is ambitious, but the author was one for giving a lot of detail and quite repetitive, realistically cuts could be made without damaging the story.
Ultimately the end result is a mixed bag. Some of the changes make sense either story wise or how times have changed since the 90s and modern tv sensibilities, but others… Hard to say. The worst part is they've had to cram the first book in to 8 hours when the story could really do with 10 or 12 Hours. Most of the SFX are well done except the season finale has some very wonky shots. The sets look great and the main cast are solid, overall I like it but not as much as I'd hoped to. Then again a lot of shows have wonky first seasons.