Last movie watched...

[I, Cosh]

Don't worry Prof, I loved the Rambo computer game too and I admire your willingness to fly in the face of received wisdom here.

I have to assume a man of your sophistication has already seen Flooding with Love for the Kid.

[Professor Bear]

Rambo 3 - top film.  I remember not being too impressed the first time I saw it because there wasn't enough kung fu in it, virtually no-one got stabbed, and there was a clearly missed opportunity for a good fight on a moving tank during the gulag rescue scene before they get into the helicopter and start blasting Russkies into jam-like splats on a wall, but time has been kind in retroactively turning it into a feminist commentary on the cyclical and fruitless nature of conflict as an expression of the dominance of the male ID, a legitimate concern in the cinema of the period, though now seen as somewhat redundant even when many films cannot pass a simple evaluation like the Bechdel Test.
On the surface it was a film about John Rambo clotheslining Soviets so hard in the film that it knocked them out of Afghanistan in the real world, but now it is a story about a private war far removed from civilised eyes where men can find true expression of their natures and all manner of brutality plays out on their battlefields and civilian casualties are numerous and terrible.  All those who practice violence in this strange and alien place devoid of women are ultimately affected by it and become its victims to the point that when one character sees another is alive and well after a huge explosion, he actually looks disappointed that his friend is not dead.  At the end when Rambo and Trautman drive away and the orphan boy asks Rambo if he might stay, Rambo looks lost because he doesn't know how to express that he's ruined this place for him and others like him in bringing peace to it - there is no war here and so he cannot stay.  As he leaves this place, his only friend in the world chides him for showing weak female emotion, however momentary, and off they go to war again, to surreptitiously propagate conflict far from the civilised eyes of the society from which they have ostracized themselves.
The bit where Rambo explodes the giant Soviet after a big fight is awesome, as is the fight at the end where he teams up with the Taliban for some reason rather than just run everyone down in a tank all on his own even if they're in a helicopter, but it does still feel a bit slow and the center portion of the film where he travels through what's left of Afghanistan and finds that when removed from the openly emotional and civilising presence of women all they have left is to assert their manliness to one another through pointless acts of animal cruelty and corpse desecration, that bit's a bit of a bummer and could have done with maybe a gunfight to liven it up a bit, but instead we get depressed-looking old men sitting around a table lamenting that the deaths of their women and children has committed them to accepting short lives of unending violence, but like I say, a gunfight or someone running away from an explosion would have perked this bit right up.
You can tell it was made after the cartoon show as some of it is over the top, but all in all I think this was a good laugh.

[JOE SOAP]

It is an oddly moral film, however, that doesn't equate murder as a proportionate response to oppression, with Rambo going off in chains at the end to take his (hopefully literal) medicine rather than go out in the blaze of glory one would expect.

They toyed with him getting executed but 80's America said no.

[SuperSurfer]

He would've made a good Dredd.

[Recrewt]

You take that back!

[Sideshow Bob]

Saw World War Z at Cineworld, Falkirk yesterday........£9 for a ticket......
That's getting to be a really expensive day out if you have a family with you....

Anyway........In Summary...
Not too bad and fairly enjoyable.....Not movie of the year stuff,  but perfectly acceptable for an evenings' entertainment.......Mr Pitt does an admirable job throughout,  and the whole thing moves along at a fairly brisk pace......CGI effects are ok as well, although with the speed the Zombies move at,  it's difficult to get 'close ups' of the action.....
[spoiler]A fairly unbelievable escape from a crashed aircraft, everyone dies apart from [/spoiler] Mr Pitt and his Israeli companion, but within the confines of the story...( He is a really tough customer and hardened investigator )...so I was 'kind of' prepared to go along with it...
No real answers to how it all started, or how it's going to end but that's the point I suppose, and it differs in content from the Max Brooks' novel....
Must say though, it is the most bloodless Zombie movie I've seen, obviously to get its' 15 certification, and anyone seeking 'gorier type' stuff should stick with The Walking Dead on TV....
I'd give it about 6.5 / 7 out of 10......

[Sideshow Bob]

Sorry Guys,
Didn't see there was a separate 'thread' for World War Z.....

[Richmond Clements]

My Neighbour Totoro in the cinema. It is a perfect film.

[Hawkmumbler]

My Neighbour Totoro in the cinema. It is a perfect film.

Word. Divine is to short a statement to describe it.

[Richmond Clements]

My Neighbour Totoro in the cinema. It is a perfect film.

Went to see it again this morning. I don't think it is physically possible to see this movie too many times.

[johnnystress]

Just watched The Iron Giant--- how have I never seen it before? I even have the video/toy robot package  here on my shelf but never got around to watching it

Finally, a movie featuring Vin Diesel that I'm not ashamed to like

[Richmond Clements]

Just watched The Iron Giant--- how have I never seen it before? I even have the video/toy robot package  here on my shelf but never got around to watching it

Finally, a movie featuring Vin Diesel that I'm not ashamed to like

Good, innit?

[HdE]

Watched a handful of movies over the weekend with the old man.

He'd been keen to see The Expendables for ages, and finally spalshed out on it in the Tesco sale. I do not say this lightly, but I thought it was utter crap.

Thankfully, he also picked up Men In Black 3, which I initially watched under protest. Glad I DID watch it, though, because it's proabably the best of the three movies! Brilliant to see Jemaine Clement (From Flight Of The Conchords) get a big screen role.

We also sat through Hollywood Homicide - a very silly, but pretty fun little movie.

[Professor Bear]

Gangster Squad - goodness me, this wasn't very good at all.  The best way to describe it would be to ask you to imagine that Brian DePalma's Untouchables was coming out this year instead of in 1987 and that the Asylum decided to do a knock-off called Uncorruptables or something like that - it really is that terrible, and the only thing that disguises this is the fact that a lot of money has been thrown at it and the actors are actually pretty good even if all they have to do is chew scenery.
I did like some things about it, like the fact that when the supercop is assembling his team of Uncorruptables he basically recruits Cat's knife-throwing alter-ego from that western episode of Red Dwarf and Doc fucking Holliday from the movie Tombstone, but let me be clear about this: when I say he recruits Doc Holliday, I mean he actually does recruit a man (played by Robert Patrick) who carries revolvers in hip-mounted holsters, is a crack shot, wears a stetson and spurs, has a silly mustache, and has pulp adventures written about him within the fictional universe of the film story, which we know because at one point supercop's wife holds up a pulp magazine and points at it saying "you need this guy on your team" so supercop goes out and finds him - in a cowpoke bar, naturally.  This, I will admit, is fantastic, because if you do not know already, Gangster Squad is a story about the downfall of the Los Angeles mob in 1949.  Sadly, there is very little of this kind of ludicrous invention elsewhere and the film is just a parade of Untouchables rip-offs right down to the nerdy one kicking the bucket and a climactic shootout against the background of some huge steps, so on balance I would have to say it is just competently made shite.

Unlike Atlantic Rim, which is incompetently made shite.
The Asylum have balls making a brand name out of this kind of mockbuster cash-in rather than just changing their name to a different company with each movie so there's not that huge "an Asylum film" caveat for the wary buyer on all their dvd covers, and by statistical probability they've knocked out the odd amusing timewasting effort like Nazis at the Center of the Earth, but on average their films are brutally awful and devoid of redeeming qualities and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, and Atlantic Rim is why.  No part of this makes me think that anyone made any effort or enjoyed themselves making it, and I cannot understand how someone working in genre film couldn't find anyone interested in making a western kaiju flick, as the genre has a lot of fans in film production circles to the point that even tripe like Reptilian, Godzilla In Name Only, Power Rangers: The Movie, and King Kong Lives have high points.  This is just a collection of scenes strung together with nothing to make them make sense in relation to each other to the point that even I had to admit that three giant robots having a pagga with a dinosaur in Times Square was just cheap-looking and obnoxious rather than exciting and awesome, and don't even get me started on the dubious racial politics going on in the central love triangle plot that is so slight that I couldn't even get offended at its "bros before hos" payoff.
COMPLETE shite, and I don't mean "so bad it becomes amusing at some point" shite, I mean "zero budget, no ideas, and even if it was made in someone's backyard and the dvd fell out of a Christmas cracker I would still have no goodwill towards it" shite.

[Sideshow Bob]

Atlantic Rim, which is incompetently made shite.
COMPLETE shite, and I don't mean "so bad it becomes amusing at some point" shite, I mean "zero budget, no ideas, and even if it was made in someone's backyard and the dvd fell out of a Christmas cracker I would still have no goodwill towards it" shite.

Good reviews, Prof.... ,
I've heard several differing reports on Gangster Squad, some favourable and some not so.....so will give this a try on DVD (or Sky )....
Atlantic Rim.....reckon I might give this one a miss then......