What Was The Last Movie/Anime You Watched?

[kamikazekeeg]

Smokey and the Bandit - Odd movie moods lately, going from space/scifi to war films to late 70's/early 80's car films lol Smokey and the Bandit was one of the many old flicks I'd watch with my Dad on a weekend afternoon if it was on a rerun, just goofy car chase nonsense.  I funnily thought it had Dom DeLuise in it, of which I know he's in Cannonball Run with Burt, a movie I like more, but apparently I was remembering Smokey and the Bandit 2 lol  Silly old movie, definitely a product of its time for better or worse, but overall it's just a goofy light watch.  No real story to it, just a long car chase that I forgot that  the plot hinges on Burt and his buddy smuggling some crappy cheap beer across state lines lol  Stuff like this has abit of a soft spot for me.  Gonna watch the sequel next.

[wolff242]

Smokey and the Bandit - Odd movie moods lately, going from space/scifi to war films to late 70's/early 80's car films lol Smokey and the Bandit was one of the many old flicks I'd watch with my Dad on a weekend afternoon if it was on a rerun, just goofy car chase nonsense.  I funnily thought it had Dom DeLuise in it, of which I know he's in Cannonball Run with Burt, a movie I like more, but apparently I was remembering Smokey and the Bandit 2 lol  Silly old movie, definitely a product of its time for better or worse, but overall it's just a goofy light watch.  No real story to it, just a long car chase that I forgot that  the plot hinges on Burt and his buddy smuggling some crappy cheap beer across state lines lol  Stuff like this has abit of a soft spot for me.  Gonna watch the sequel next.

The theme song pretty much tells you the story, lol. I loved that movie back in the day.

[Cartagia]

Fast Times at Ridgemont High - Never actually watched this before. Liked it, didn't love it. Like a more unfocused Dazed and Confused.

Captain Ron - Hadn't seen this in like 20 years. Kurt Russell is great, but the rest is kind of a waste.

Hell Comes to Frogtown - Well this was weird as hell.

[kamikazekeeg]

The theme song pretty much tells you the story, lol. I loved that movie back in the day.

lol I meant it more like there isn't much that happens as a regular story would, you get like your beginning, middle, and end, just more of a beginning and sort of an end, which is totally fine, it's fun.

Smokey and the Bandit 2 - This was what I was remembering a little more with Dom DeLuise in it and gotta say...not as good as the first movie lol They ramped up the "wackiness" for this and I never thought it worked.  The story I joked about with the first one is certainly here, but it suffers because of this.  The first one was built around the delivery, and it's one long wild romp for the most part, compared to this one, where they keep having stops and there's Bandit trying to mend his relationship with Frog, and Bandit is dealing with his waning popularity, despite still tons of people willing to risk life and truck for him lol Dom Deluise is nice to have here as a bonus, but I don't think he adds as much to the film compared to them together in like Cannonball Run.  It also just ends? Sure Bandit and Frog are back together, the Elephant isn't delivered to where she was supposed to, but it kinda just waves away the whole point of the delivery, like they should've had a whole section where the two from the beginning are upset at Bandit not delivering and then go after him, but nope, just ends, happy ending...Kinda boring, big pass on this one.

I was actually going to watch Cannonball Run next, but it's not on a single streaming service.  Crappy digital age.  Tempted to buy it on Blu-Ray as it's an old favorite, but not sure right now.

[Cartagia]

Say Anything - Far more just plain cute than I was expecting.  Excellent teen romantic comedy, and a far better film, overall, than the other Crowe written 1980s hit - Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell - Overall I didn't like this series quite as much as I expected to, but still they average out to a pretty solid six movies.  I appreciate the focus of this final installment, especially since feeling too disjointed and sporadically paced were the main issues I had with earlier films. Also very into the fact it started leaning more supernatural.

Quigley Down Under - Tom Selleck is a US cowboy hired by Australian cattle baron Alan Rickman. "Hired to do what?" You might ask. Well, based on the jaunty score and his adorable shenanigans filled relationship with "Crazy Cora" you sure wouldn't guess indiscriminately murder the local indigenous population.

It's a decent enough movie, but man the tonal inconsistencies hurt it. They don't sink it, but they keep a good movie from possibly being great.

Yes, Madam! - Rides that balance of screwball comedy and action far better than many other films of the genre and era while actually lampshading the creepy sexuality present in contemporaries like Wheels on Meals. Excellent picture. Hell of a time. Endearingly cheap.

Royal Warriors - This totally whips. Way more brutal than Yes, Madam. I just wish the pacing post-nightclub to the finale were a bit better.

Dr. Giggles - Hadn't seen this since the 90s.  Campy fun, but not much else.

Napoleon Dynamite - First time watching in about a decade.  Still delightfully off-kilter, but not in an obvious try-hard-ish kind of way.  Endlessly quotable.

In the Line of Duty 3 - I hadn't even heard of Cynthia Khan before I bought this box set, and here we are with this movie that completely outshines Yes, Madam and Royal Warriors. And now you're telling me Donnie Yen is in the next one? Heck yes.

In the Line of Duty 4 - Directed by Crouching Tiger and The Matrix's Yuen Woo-ping, this was definitely the most well put together of the series, and Donnie Yen utterly kicks ass.  Been so impressed by these D & B productions I went ahead and order the Tiger Cage trilogy.

[kamikazekeeg]

65 - I thought I had an idea of what the setup for this might've been for the trailer, but I was kinda way wrong on that apparently.  It is a survival story set on an old Earth, but not the setup I was expecting.  I don't think I liked that setup a ton, bit strange, but the movie itself is okay.  It's a very basic, pretty stripped down, survival setting, crash landing on Earth, Adam Driver and a girl are trying to escape, while fighting off dinosaurs.  Honestly, could've used more dinosaurs, I feel like they are used sparingly maybe.  I didn't mind anything going on other than the setup, it's a decent time and a great positive, that might not initially sound like a positive, is this movie is a tight hour and a half. 

It does not drag, it's not burdened with unnecessary plots and exposition.  This era of movies are overloaded with films that all feel like they need to be "epic" and so many are 2 hours, 2 and a half hours, sometimes longer (I'm looking at you, Avatar 2...I'm gonna get to you this weekend) and so to get like a nice, clean, normal movie length with decent effects and a reasonably paced story is nice.  If the basic premise interests you enough, it's worth at least a casual watch.

A Quiet Place: Part 2 - I was wrong about this film.  I kinda skipped it because I wasn't sure we needed a sequel, the first one is a very simple premise that was executed pretty well and I had seen the bit of them showing what happened at the start before it all went bad in the trailer, so what I had thought was that they were gonna continue the story, while doing flashbacks, but they only do it once.  I don't think Part 2 would've been as good had they done that.  They keep true to the original movie while continuing the family's story and it's very solid.  It also had Cillian Murphy in it, I didn't know that and he's good of course.  I'm actually very interested to see another one in this series after the first two were so solid as I feel that would allow them to wrap everything up with the family.

[Cartagia]

Bull Durham - It's funny and cute (and raunchy - God bless the 80s), but it's also little overwritten with only Susan Saradon having a total handle on the material out of the three leads.

The Last of the Mohicans - Makes me wish that Michael Mann tried his hand at more genres.

[weirdfeline]

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Quite an overrated movie.

Pros:
The animation is still impressive and impressed me more than I thought it would since I already saw it the first time.
The Spot is a cool villain that would make for an interesting video game playing as him.
Some cameos were cool.
I still wanna see the next movie.

Cons:
The story was bad.
The new Spider-Society characters did not feel important like the ones from the first and kinda just felt tossed in.
Having every Spider-Society character know what needs to happen and no one telling him just made me hate them all? Not sure why no one else seems to feel this way but it made them all look bad.
It doesn't have its own ending even though they scrapped the part one from the title which still appeared on some of the toys released.
Most of the time spent in Brooklyn with Miles's parents was largely unnecessary.
It did not justify the runtime.


Uncharted - I can't think of anything I liked about this movie.

[Cartagia]

The Super Mario Bros. Movie - Really nice to see a video game adaptation that isn't ashamed of the fact it's a video game adaptation.  Great call making Luigi the damsel in distress and giving Peach so much agency.  Pacing isn't great and there a few voice performances that are wanting, but hey, it's a Mario movie that pretty much gets it right.

In the Line of Duty 5: Middle Man - Easily the weakest of these so far, but still a fun watch.

[jipsy]

I recently went and saw Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Honestly ever since they kicked Michael Bay off the movies they have been considerable better. The script and acting wasn't great but they are definitely hitting more on the nostalgia value now. Lots of characters from the original series designed very similarly to their original versions. Overall I enjoyed the movie.

I also went and saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and can I just say that these Spiderman animated movies blow me away. No matter how many times I watch either of them I find something new that I missed on previous viewings. Plus there is a single scene in the new one that took them 4 years to animate!

[Cartagia]

Oblivion - Man, I wish this script went through a couple more drafts, because on a technical level it is just great, but the dialogue and storybeats are just so generic dystopia.

The Debt Collector - This was fun as hell, and absolutely would not work if not for the chemistry between Adkins and Louis Mandylor.

[kamikazekeeg]

Avatar: The Way of Water - It's about what I expected.  Gorgeous visuals, cool scifi stuff, pretty basic story and plot.  It's right in line with the first movie.  I'm not sure I would put one over the other from a story point of view, I think they both have kinda ham-fisted story telling where it's all on the nose with a "Nature good, Humans only destroy", sort of stuff, very cliche, hitting all the tropes.  The movie sorta feels like they are just rehashing stuff from the first movie too, like Cameron couldn't come up with enough new plot elements, so ends up bringing back the Colonel as the main villain, and there's another new special Pandora product, this one being a serum that stops aging, but they only bring it up once, like 2/3rds of the way through the movie, like its an afterthought.

They also gave the Colonel a kid he left behind when he originally died, which was never a thing in the original that I remember, and there's no talk of who the mother was, the kid was just abandoned as a baby because babies can't go into cryosleep, so couldn't leave with the humans back to Earth.  Felt a little forced just so they could do family drama stuff later.

There's nothing I would point to as being bad or particularly poorly done, like I said, it's basically the first movie where it had a kinda generic, but serviceable plot, surrounded by really great visuals. 

[kamikazekeeg]

John Wick: Chapter 4 - It's crazy how good this series has been.  Not a single one I'd point to as bad or even lackluster, the action is always intense and on point and while Chapter 4 was definitely hitting a point of turning into a video game, it never full goes overboard.  It's not like Fast and the Furious, where it's like Loony Tunes logic with what they do with cars, it comes right to that line.  There's even an action scene that feels like I was watching Hotline Miami or something lol It's like the 3rd one, where they are almost getting absurd with the fights, but still manage to keep it grounded JUST enough, even if some things are definitely absurd, like John walking off multi-story falls or that he has a magic suit that is impenetrable to nearly all bullets lol

All the action is awesome here, it never gets old, despite it being 3 hours long, and every action scene is different, the camera work is impeccable, it's always wild.  Like this is a perfect action series as it is.  Even the one spinoff, Nobody, was good.  I know there's more stuff coming with the series and it's spinoffs, which isn't really needed, but I can say I'm interested if they keep the action good.  These are action set piece spectacles that very few movies are matching up to, because the people involved really understand action scenes, camera work, stunt choreography, and how to tie it all in together. 

Definitely recommend this movie, it's probably the best one, I think it's peaked action wise and it is amazing, but I think a part of me still likes that first movie more purely for the story and simplicity of it, but there's not a bad flick in the lot at all.

[Cartagia]

Debt Collectors - Not as much of a pure action brawler as the first film, but it is better movie overall. Terrific follow-up.

Extraction 2 - Immensely crafted brutal action that goes bigger and badder than the previous film. Horrible computer effects, a cheap, sanitized look and an overall lack of personality keep it from being truly great.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Masterpiece.

Polite Society - It wasn't quite what I thought it would be, and then about 2/3 through started match up more with my expectations. Not sure it nailed that transition. Still loved the overall energy and vibe, though.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - I don't know how much of it is just nostalgia, but I always have more fun watching this than Raiders. Sure, that's a better movie, and this one has issues, but this has the Club Obi-Wan sequence, the mine carts, and hearts being straight up pulled out of chests.

The Kid Who Would be King - Spiritual successor to all those 1980s kid power adventure movies. Shame this didn't do better at the box office, because I think it really hurt Joe Cornish's potential career.

The Street Fighter - Less philosophical and more brutal than Bruce Lee, this is a nasty little film that gets by on sheer force of will.

Driven - Yowza this sucks. Atrocious script, epileptic editing, terrible performances, awful soundtrack, and worst of all, it is just boring. I mean, damn.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - My favorite of the series and one of my Top 5 favorite films.

Avengement - Pretty easily the best of the Scott Adkins led movies I've watched.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - I didn't hate this at release, but I kept expecting it to lose me this time, and it never did. Most of the setpieces are strong (especially in the first half). It's biggest sin is that it looks like shit, especially the CGI. John Hurt is wasted here, Shia is kind of a non-entity, and I have no idea what Cate Blanchet is doing. Third act is very messy, and it drags the whole thing down.

[Cartagia]

Twins - Aggressively 80s.  The crime caper stuff is fun, but the actual family drama is pretty bland.

Renfield - Complete waste of the premise.  Might be worth a watch for Nic Cage and Ben Scwartz.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - I'm sorry, but has anyone saying this worse than Crystal Skull watched that movie lately? This succeeds in pretty much every way that movie failed, and succeeds where that movie also succeeded. Sure, it's not Spielberg, but it addresses Indy with some actual pathos while being a mostly engaging action-adventure movie. Biggest faults are a couple of spots of shaky effects, bad green screen in a couple of places, and, as is the case with practically every big studio release these days, about 15-20 minutes too long.