What Was The Last Movie/Anime You Watched?

[weirdfeline]

keeping up with watching every Jack Quaid movie this year I just watched Neighborhood Watch and it has strong early 2010s vibes, I feel like that doesn't really make much sense but it reminds me of the movie Holy Rollers for some reason. anyway it was a decent, quick watch. the humor is a little out of place with serious subject matter but it's fine. not really something to recommend but it wasn't bad. looking forward to Heads of State!

[kamikazekeeg]

My Hero Academia: You're Next - The last of the MHA movies before the end of the series and it was okay, all three of them have just been okay, having moments of good stuff happening, a cool finale, and that's what you usually expect for most anime movies for tv shows.  I thought I was kinda lost on the timeline placement, along with kinda being lost on certain characters around, but realized it was just me forgetting the story of the past season of the show lol

A lot of it feels very re-used to me, because there's a character with quirk booster quirk, so like Erie, who is being abused by a crime family for her ability, like Erie.  There's a guy pretending to be a new version of All Might, earning the name "Dark Might" and it's kinda just like a lazy version of Goku Black in a way, though I mean the idea of an "evil version of the hero" is a very standard trop...It's not the best setup, though I thought Dark Mights abilities, sorta how he faked being All Might, was kinda cool.  His goons were just complete nobodies, which kinda sucks, because you want more of the new cast to stand out to help this new plot, but it's just Dark Might, the quirk booster girl, and her servant who is trying to help her and that's it for the new cast that matters.

Overall if you are fan, it's a decent enough watch for what it is, a little bit of extra fun before the final season happens.

[Cartagia]

Heretic - Hugh Grant is incredible in this, but it's also too long and way too overwrought with pretty underwhelming ending.

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 - This cast is ludicrous.  Shatner and Curry know exactly what movie they are in, and Kathy Ireland is shockingly good.  Emilio's fine, but when his brother shows up, even for just a cameo, you kinda wish he was the lead instead.  It's not quite as good as Hot Shots, but it's close.

Hour of the Gun - I've always thought the weakest part of Tombstone is the last act, and lucky me, this is basically a whole movie about that last 30 minutes!  All about the legal ramifications of the gunfights and goes even further into the lengths Wyatt went to in order to get revenge.  Very cool stuff! Tombstone cribbed a ton from this one, too.

[weirdfeline]

drop is a fun little thriller

[Cartagia]

Captain America: Brave New World - It's not that bad.  It's aping The Winter Soldier, but without really understanding what makes that movie so good. It has a total lack of identity and style, but considering all the behind the scenes drama, it came out about as good as can be expected.  Marketing did it a huge disservice in revealing Red Hulk, as you basically know going in what the big bad's plan is.  As a major plus, Carl Lumby is legitimately great.

Thunderbolts - Surprised by how good this is.  Great action, good performances (Florence Pugh is a GOAT), real themes, and humor that is derived from the characters and not just from a quip generator.  It's Guardians of the Galaxy with broken human mercenaries instead of broken alien weirdos.

Armour of God - Doofy road trip comedy stuff doesn't really work and outstays it's welcome, but it's still got that sweet Jackie Chan action.

Southern Fried Lies - Fascinating small town criminal conspiracy stuff, but I did not need to listen to that remorseless narcissist yammer on for 50% of the runtime. I don't care how charming her accent is. There's no telling what else she's gotten away with in that town.

[weirdfeline]

fight or flight is so fun - action movie that basically becomes a slasher movies with it's kills - great fight scenes and interesting premise

[Cartagia]

Mission: Impossible - Charmingly lo-fi considering where the rest of the franchise went, and what this one would have looked like had it only been delayed by a year or so.  Shame they never went quite this nitty gritty on the day-to-day spycraft again and there's a nervous almost boyish edge to Cruise here that we won't see again.

Mission Impossible II - It's the worst of these, no question, but once it actually gets to the fireworks factory and actually becomes a John Woo movie its pretty fun.

Mission: Impossible III - This is Abrams best movie, and Tom's best outing as Hunt performance wise.  I think there's also a good argument to be made that Hoffman's chilling villain is even more responsible for the franchise resurgence than Cruise.  He's just phenomenal here.

[bikingjahuty]

I've been in the middle of completing a bucket list goal of mine I've had since I was a young adolescent. I got super into Dragon Ball Z back in the late 90s thanks to Toonami. And when I say I was really into it back then, I actually mean I was OBSESSED with DBZ from the time I was about 12 until I was 15 or so. Unfortunately during this time, the US hadn't even got the whole Frieza Saga yet, which for those that don't know is not even halfway through the series. By the time I started getting into DBZ, Japan and various other countries had already got all of Z and GT at that point. I both was tortured and hyped beyond belief to see pictures, short video clips, and screen captured images of these yet to be officially released DBZ and DBGT episodes and it just fed my obsession even more. Unfortunately DBZ in the late 90s and early 2000s was released at a snails pace. By the time my DBZ fandom had started to falter, the Buu Saga episodes hadn't even been released officially in North America yet, and the Cell Saga was barely up to the Cell Games. It was beyond frustrating, but eventually I sort of got out of DBZ and anime for the most part by 2003 or so.


Fastforward to the early 2010s and I started buying the DVD box sets for all the DBZ and DBGT episodes and was finally going to watch all the episodes I longed to see when I was a 13 year old kid. It literally took me a decade to finish all 291 episodes of DBZ, and about a year and a half ago I started watching DBGT, a show I never got to enjoy when it was first coming out. I'm only a little over halfway through DBGT, but I have some thoughts.


It has really been a rollercoaster in terms of subjective enjoyment of GT. Unlike a lot of fans, I actually enjoyed most of the Dark Star Dragon Ball Saga where Goku, Pan, and Trunks travel across the universe to collect the scattered balls. It gave me massive Dragon Ball vibes, but on a much grander scale. Unfortunately these early episodes were a big reason why DBGT was almost cancelled and the whole Baby Saga was created in order to save the series and also make the show more like DBZ instead of Dragon Ball. This transition has some of the worst writing and editing I've ever seen in an anime. It's like reading a book that's missing random pages and chapters and you literally have to piece together those missing parts to create a cohesive story. Also around this part in the series, the action and some of the ideas start to get really, really good. The crappy part is as soon as I feel like the show is starting to get really good, it takes me out of it again by getting really terrible once more. There are so may great ideas in GT, but the execution on most of them is flawed at the best of times, and absolutely awful at the worst. DBGT also does the opposite of Z where things happen way to quickly, leaving no time to develop anything naturally and everything just feels super rushed. Compare that to DBZ taking three episodes of almost nothing happening before a little bit of something occurs. A healthy median would be nice. But overall, I'd rank DBGT a 4/10 series so far. I still have to get through the Super Android 17 Saga and the Shenron Saga, which I've unfortunately heard mostly negative things about, but then again the whole series is generally despised. What's funny, and a little sad is I've actually enjoyed GT more than everything in the Buu Saga after Majin Vegita dies while fighting Buu. Let's see if I still feel that way once I finish DBGT. At the very least, I'm very happy to finally be watching a show I probably would have killed someone if it meant I could own and watch DBGT back in the late 90s lol.

[Cartagia]

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - It's the most Bond like of these with regard to gadget use, which kind of makes it the silliest.  Also seems to have the least individual identity, although that doesn't stop it from being agood time.

[kamikazekeeg]

Look Back - Didn't expect going into this one and getting a tearjerker, but it was a good watch, beautiful animation, not too long, it's not a full length movie, it's just under an hour, but it's a generally sweet story about two younger girls and their love art, who come together to draw manga and even gain some notoriety because of it, before their lives take different directions.

Kind of a funny note, some things I saw in it, I thought were just fun little nods to Chainsaw Man, but it turns out, that the mangaka of Chainsaw Man wrote the original manga this is based on (And the director worked on designs for Chainsaw Man), so that was fun to see.  It's a real love letter to art for sure and I would definitely recommend it.

[Cartagia]

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation - This one is kinda like Teflon for me.  Probably doesn't help that the "big stunt" is in the cold open, making everything afterwards pale a little in comparison.  It's not bad at all, and is still miles better than the second, but other than getting major bonus points for bringing in Rebecca Ferguson (and Sean Harris, too, really) its towards the bottom of my MI list.

Final Destination Bloodlines - Might legitimately be the best film in the whole franchise, but I'm definitely surprised at the overwhelming critical success.  Found myself legitimately moved by Tony Todd's scene, and, in a franchise first, I think I liked pretty much all of the characters?  The effects are a bit overly polished with CGI, making them all feel pretty samey, which is unfortunate because elaborate set-ups are all pretty good.  Also, I didn't really understand how a compound that looked like an elaborate death trap was supposed to be the "safe haven."

Mission: Impossible - Fallout - I don't think it gets mentioned enough how great the pacing is here.  Almost two and half hours long, it goes by in a flash, and doesn't even feel as long as the original, which clocks in at barely over a buck forty-five.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Yeah, the AI bullshit weighs this down, but the set pieces and performances are just too good.  I've been a Hayley Atwell fan since the first Captain America, but man she's just phenomenal here.  And that train... hoo boy that train.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - It's a mess.  An entertaining mess, but a mess nonetheless.  Weighed down by all of the nonsensical "Entity" stuff in a way that Dead Reckoning managed to overcome.  Total clunker of a first act and a retcon I did not care for.  The underwater setpiece is phenomenal, but the finale is just Fallout again, but worse.  Would easily be the worst of these if not for the black sheep second entry.

[Cartagia]

Robocop 2 - Bigger and more action-packed than the original, but without the same level of visceral violence.  The satire of the original isn't gone, but it is far more broad, in almost a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way.  Some really great practical effects also make the generally inferior package go down super easy.

True Grit (2010) - Westerns just hit different since I turned 40.  It's just DNA, I guess.  Moved it up several spots in my Coen ranking.

[kamikazekeeg]

Sunshine (2007) - A random watch I decided to check out after I saw a clip as it's a space flick I never saw as far as I can tell, which is kinda surprising as I thought I had had watched most of the big ones really, I've always really liked stuff like this, from the more realistic "The Martian" type stuff to more out there ones like Event Horizon.  This one? Honestly feel like it sorta fits inbetween those as I felt like it was tonally two different types of films.  I won't say too much, but I think overall it's decent.  It's one of those movies you go back to and you notice it's pretty packed cast wise with people going on to do big things like Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Hiroyuji Sanada, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh, and even some other recognizable faces. I'm really surprised I haven't seen this as it's directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland and this was a few years after 28 Days Later, another movie they did together. 

It's a good watch if you like the "Space mission gone wrong" genre of movies.

[Cartagia]

Got a free month's subscription to Crunchyroll.  Checked out the the Junji Ito Collection and dropped it after two episodes.  Dull and shoddily animated.