What Was The Last Movie/Anime You Watched?

[bikingjahuty]

Glad to hear its good, don't think it showed up near me as the anime releases can be very hit or miss (Got One Piece and DBZ, but no Your Name or A Silent Voice).  Definitely seemed like a "Best of Studio Ghibli", but I'm fine with that, plus someones gotta be "Studio Ghibli" if Studio Ghibli isn't going to be doing it as much anymore lol

Exactly. I feel like Ponoc definitely carried the Ghibli torch into its own work and definitely owns it. It will have to be seen if they do stuff that is a bit more mature and nuanced like much of Miazaki's work which I love, but for a first attempt they definitely hit a home run. It isn't nearly as good as Princess Mononoke or Howl's Moving Castle, but it is on par with movies like Castle in the Sky or Nausicaa, at least in terms of how these movies typically rank. They certainly are not trying to reinvent the wheel and are using their past with Ghibli to help sell movie tickets, but it is done in a way that doesn't come across as a knockoff or they are trying to copy what has already been done by Ghibli.

[kamikazekeeg]

I was initially pretty interested in the movie, I love mixing fantasy and modern day together, the idea of vastly different societies living together, struggling, I remember it from older shows like Alien Nation or more recent stuff like District 9.  Much like with Star Trek, it's usually good for talk of race, differences, all that stuff.  Then I heard it getting critically slagged and avoided it till now. 

I think the movie is alright.  That first quarter of the movie is rough.  It's the most blunt, non-subtle, hammer in your face, talk about race and the police.  Racial slurs, diversity hire, people hate the police, yadda yadda.  I'm not one who can have a discussion on race relations very well, but I can tell when this stuff gets awkward.  It makes Zootopia seem subtle lol

That was starting to turn me off the movie, till we hit the 1/3rd mark of the movie and the bigger plot kicks in and then it gets better.  It turns into an actiony cop drama, just with a different flavor to it with all the talk of magic, and Orc rituals, and Brights (Basically people that can wield magic wands).  The tone and dialogue is pretty awkward a lot of the time though, especially with characterization.  Its written like it thinks its really smart, it's being hardcore and edgy, like it was the new Training Day or any other hard R action cop movie, but stuff that would be character building just feels clumsy and drawn out a lot of the time.  If we just swear all the time, that means we are real! Tonally it feels like it's trying to dance between Bad Boys and Training Day (I'm not harping on that movie, I'm just spacing on other Hard R crime/cop drama movies right now lol), but not being enough of either to give you something to truly latch onto.

I kinda like everything to do with the setting though, it just needed more, because Orcs feel abit half-baked visually.  What they are is fine, but they have no cultural aspects to them, which I'm sure could be explained away from how they are treated in society, but that's just seems like a lazy excuse.  More with the other races would be better too as you only see Elves, Humans, and Orcs, with two glimpses of Centaurs, and talk of Dwarves, and there are more, but seems like there should've been more to really flesh out the world more.

Overall, watchable, but a clumsy movie that gets better later on.  I feel like the sequel could do a lot to remedy the issues they had.

[bikingjahuty]

Hype for a movie can be a dangerous thing; it can either make an otherwise bad or mediocre movie seem great, or at the very least it can make it hard to see a movie's true value and faults because of emotions clouding your judgement. The latter was what happened when I first saw Alien Covenant in the theater.

I really enjoyed Prometheus and thought it was a very well written and thought out movie that had a ton of potential for a sequel to help bridge the gap between it and the Alien franchise. I thought that I'd be getting the same quality of movie since much of the same writers and directors behind Prometheus made this movie including Ridley Scott, the man who brought us Alien in the first place. Perhaps there was a lot of studio meddling when this movie was being written and pitched, maybe Scott just decided he didn't give a shit and pushed out the script for Alien Covenant at the last minute, but whatever the case I knew after watching this movie for the first time last Springs that it was not nearly as good as Prometheus. Watching it a second time, my opinion of it is even less favorable.

Alien Covenant is probably the most poorly written Alien movie, including the AvP films. It tries to take itself seriously throughout yet completely fails when characters make just flat out stupid, unbelievable decisions over and over again, while making teens in a slasher flixs look intellectually gifted by comparison. The writing is also sloppy in terms of plot and how everything sort of plays out in the movie with many things that just don't make sense with the already established Alien mythos. I am also not a fan of how this movie treats things that were set up in Prometheus, some of which seem as though Scott forgot what he had written and put to film in Prometheus. The whole movie is a mess with entertaining bits here and there, but overall there is no denying that this is a bad movie.

Perhaps the worst part of this movie is the rushed, partially incoherent explanation of how David the Android created the Aliens when not only does it do away with the lore behind the Xenomorphs in comics and films, but also ignores the progression of how the Decon Xenomorph came to be at the end of Prometheus. Again, I have no idea what Scott was thinking or if he was even fully coherent when he wrote the script for Alien Covenant.

Sadly I will remember 2017 as the year some of my favorite movie franchises were flushed down the toilet.

[kamikazekeeg]

Ridley Scott just clearly doesn't want to make Alien movies, he wants to make scifi movies about androids and have philosophical discussions about life and all sorts of other whatever he wants to go on about.  What's worse about this movie, is that this movie stopped Neil Blomkamp's Alien movie he was working on that would've likely been an actually good Alien movie.  That pisses me off the most about Covenant.

[burningdoom]

[bikingjahuty]

LMAO!!!!

[bikingjahuty]

After over a month of needing to take a break from Star Wars as part of recovering from the colossal disappointment that was The Last Jedi, I finally decided to pick up where I left off in rewatching all the Star Wars films again.

I have long considered Revenge of the Sith to be my favorite, or at least my second favorite Star Wars movie of all time. It is by far the best written, most entertaining of the prequels and still to this day has the best lightsaber battle of all time between Obiwan and Anakin. However, what really makes this movie incredible is the last third of the movie following Anakin's fall to the dark side. It is very tragic how everything plays out in him becoming Darth Vader and is written in a convincing and almost poetic way.

This movie is definitely not perfect though. Of course everyone cites Hayden Christianson's acting and the copious CGI as reasons why this movie bad, but the movie is so good otherwise it is easy to forgive the various stinkers that come from various characters or the outdated look of the CGI in specific scenes. On a personal level, the internet has somewhat ruined part of this movie for me due to all the dank memes that this movie has inspired; I can't help but laugh at certain scenes when I think of all the hilarious memes that mock them.

Overall, I love Revenge of the Sith and I feel like as time has progressed many people have come to realize how good it is when before it was guilty by association of being "one of the prequels." The writing it top notch, the action and great, and some of the performances are the best in the franchise (no Christianson is not one of these, but I will give him credit for not being as terrible as he was in attack of the clones). I know my praise of this movie is not popular, but for me this movie never disappoints.

On a side note I have something special planned for when I watch episodes IV, V, and VI and will being a doing a lumped review for the occasion. I do not want ti spoil why it will be special, but it's something that I'm pretty sure nobody else has touched on here yet. I really can't wait!

[kamikazekeeg]

Impressively, JJ Abrams stealth released a brand new movie in his Cloverfield series.  The first one had a kinda mysterious campaign for it, though I didn't really like it at the time.  I just remember the found footage motion to be kinda obnoxious to watch, especially with a lot of the dark scenes, but I wanted to like it for the monster material.  I'm actually planning to watch it for the first time since the theater to see if it's any better on a TV with HD quality.  The second movie was completely different and I won't spoil anything, but I really liked it.  It's a more scaled down, intense thriller, with a fantastic John Goodman performance.

This new one takes the series for an entirely different spin than the previous ones, releasing out of nowhere (I had only heard inklings of it even existing before now) on Netflix the same day it's announced.  I absolutely love that.  Again, without spoiling anything, we get a scifi setting of a crew on a space station trying to solve the energy crisis on Earth, when something goes wrong.  The writing is abit underwhelming towards the beginning in a couple parts, but overall its a good watch. I love this world Abrams has created and if he just keeps doing these, exploring this setting in different movie styles, I'm all for that.

[ignition365]

Just watched Kakegurui on Netflix over the weekend.  Pretty good show, definitely leaves room for a season 2.  Show is nuts.

[98dgreen]

Impressively, JJ Abrams stealth released a brand new movie in his Cloverfield series.  The first one had a kinda mysterious campaign for it, though I didn't really like it at the time.  I just remember the found footage motion to be kinda obnoxious to watch, especially with a lot of the dark scenes, but I wanted to like it for the monster material.  I'm actually planning to watch it for the first time since the theater to see if it's any better on a TV with HD quality.  The second movie was completely different and I won't spoil anything, but I really liked it.  It's a more scaled down, intense thriller, with a fantastic John Goodman performance.

This new one takes the series for an entirely different spin than the previous ones, releasing out of nowhere (I had only heard inklings of it even existing before now) on Netflix the same day it's announced.  I absolutely love that.  Again, without spoiling anything, we get a scifi setting of a crew on a space station trying to solve the energy crisis on Earth, when something goes wrong.  The writing is abit underwhelming towards the beginning in a couple parts, but overall its a good watch. I love this world Abrams has created and if he just keeps doing these, exploring this setting in different movie styles, I'm all for that.

The second one is definitely better. The first was alright but I wish there was no stupid shaky cam.

[burningdoom]

Watched this last night. Whether it's good or not depends on your expectations going into it.

If you're expecting something akin to George Romero's Day of the Dead, you will be sorely disappointed. It doesn't hold a candle to it. Though it does bear some similarities such as being in an army base and having a dickhead commanding officer. Despite those few similarities, it is not the same story, whatsoever. Though it's still better than that Ving Rames atrocity.

Now, if you go into just expecting what it is: a straight-to-DVD B zombie flick, it does okay as that. It's not great, but it's worth a viewing if you're just paying a $1.50 at RedBox like I did.

Having "Day of the Dead" in the title was a terrible idea, because everyone is going to compare it to the original, and it just can't hang with the original. It should have just been a standalone zombie flick, and horror fans might be a little more accepting of it.

[kamikazekeeg]

I was expecting it to be poor as you brought up the other "remake", and how stupid that was.  I guess no one wants to try and do a proper remake or "reimagining" like Dawn of the Dead as I liked that one.  It's very different, but is also one of the few Zack Snyder films I actually like lol

[burningdoom]

I was expecting it to be poor as you brought up the other "remake", and how stupid that was.  I guess no one wants to try and do a proper remake or "reimagining" like Dawn of the Dead as I liked that one.  It's very different, but is also one of the few Zack Snyder films I actually like lol

I liked it, too. Still not as good as the original, but it does a good job. The Night of the Living (1990) remake is damn good, too. It just seems the last one of the trilogy, my favorite entry, just can't be done justice.

[kamikazekeeg]

This turned out to be alright.  Sometimes these full on scifi shows never really pan out, either too cheap looking, or they don't do enough with its setting to be worthwhile.  They actually do a pretty good job of building up this world and overall I was pretty interested to see what showed up.  It's quality varies, like at certain times it feels like it could be HBO quality, something like Westworld, but then it hits points where it feels more like a Syfy show.  In particular the action gets very middling.  Earlier on, I thought that maybe this would have some intense action, particularly with one scene around episode 3 or 4 I think, having big slick gun battles or whatever, but it never hits that level again and the hand to hand combat is pretty basic.  Serviceable, but you know it when you see it.  Like when the Marvel shows kinda half-ass it.

The only stuff I kinda didn't care for was anything that involved being off Earth.  I don't know why, but all the backstory stuff never really hooked me.  Overall, it's a watchable show if you want a somewhat better than usual R-rated scifi tv show to watch.  I mean, it's on Netflix, so it's basically free if you have a subscription.

[kamikazekeeg]

Do you generally like the Marvel movies? Then you'll be fine with Black Panther.  I don't think it does anything super new, like the magical craziness of Dr. Strange or the standout humor/goofiness of like Guardians/Thor Ragnarok, but I think it's culture and tone along with the vibrant colors works enough to stand out and make it a good movie.  Everyone does a good job and Andy Serkis seems like he's having just a grand 'ole time playing Klaue.