Last movie watched...

[Funt Solo]

I liked Rogue One - although, yes - the Darth Vader bit is definitely the best bit. But it's my favorite out of ... every single Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi. At least Princess Leia sort of belonged there - more than the droids belonged in the prequels, more than the Kessel Run belonged in Solo, more than Captain Phasma belonged anywhere etc.

Other fave bits for me are K-2SO's dialogue and the ground assault. It's the closest anything up to that point had gotten to telling its own story with its own characters (while recognizing that it is a prequel). Now The Mandalorian* has usurped it, but that's all to the good.

*Even here, there's no really sensible reason why Jawas on different planets have identical sand crawlers, except that it's a lot of fun to see Mando try to climb up one and keep getting knocked off. Star Wars things are always going to be somewhat derivative. Jaws movies will always have sharks.

Well, I agree with everything ContraPants said.

[broodblik]

Don’t look up – a dark satire which felt to close for comfort. This a movie about the end of the world and how stupid decisions are made along to way to facilitate that the world will end. I can highly recommend this movie, funny, witty, and yes twisted dark as well.

I enjoyed this, until I was told it's actually about global warming.

Yes, I also read that the meteorite is a metaphor for climate change. I interpreted the movie little bit differently. And this is just a rhetorical question: How happy are we with our governments, how are they making their decisions and on what do they base it on? Whom are the trying to please themselves, a lobby group, most of the people living in their country? Just my 2 cents and I still enjoyed it does not matter the interpretation of the movie. 

[Colin YNWA]

The Omen

...now onto Omen 2 which I suspect I will find a bit daft, but also suspect I will enjoy as well...

Well I finished this last night and its significently worse. While the original built a steady sense of dread as Gregory Peck got closer and closer to the truth, Omen 2 just doesn't have that cohesive progression. Its just a string of grissly deaths enacted on folks as they one by one become a potential risk to Damian. Some are effectively done, I quite like Mark (his step brother's death) and Rumpole of the Bailey's sandy drowning. Other are just a bit hmm. I was so disappoint how ineffective the lady on the lonely road crow pecking out eyes bit was. That's haunted me since I first saw the movie and watching it now it was just a bit silly.

Then the end, which at least is pretty brave in that, well none of the devil types get Hollywood punished for being bad, well except one revealed in a decent twist, just kinda happens. Empire like it is there to set up the sequel, which annoying I don't seem to have access too unless I pay... which I not sure I should as its only worth it for Sam Neill as I recall(?)...sorry getting side tracked.

Why didn't they remake this one instead of the first, there's a decent movie in here that just isn't brough out.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Rogue One...I'm no expert on SW-lore, it's nice to see a little plot-hole plugged (So that's why the Death Star had such an obvious weak point!).

I am also no expert in SW-lore, although I do enjoy the fact that wookiepedia exists, but I never considered that a plot hole. I always assumed it was just Imperial arrogance, also it wasn't an obvious weak point. They desperately needed to get the schematics to reveal it, you might have missed that because it was just a throwaway line in the opening scroll of Star Wars. Maybe that's why they made this pointless movie, in case you missed how important the Death Star plans were from that one sentence from Star Wars.

And the entire first act of Star Wars.

So they made a whole movie about a doomsday weapon, where a load of forgettable characters get slaughtered for the big pay-off of a dodgy CGI Carrie Fisher getting a USB stick.

I didn't much care for this movie. Can you tell?

The Darth Vader bit was good though.

Fair enough, each to their own. Tbh I hadn't really considered the Death Star weak point a plot hole as such and probably used the wrong term.   But I did think it was a bit weird that the Death Star would be so vulnerable and R1 went some way toward explaining it.

[Mister Pops]

Rogue One...I'm no expert on SW-lore, it's nice to see a little plot-hole plugged (So that's why the Death Star had such an obvious weak point!).

I am also no expert in SW-lore, although I do enjoy the fact that wookiepedia exists, but I never considered that a plot hole. I always assumed it was just Imperial arrogance, also it wasn't an obvious weak point. They desperately needed to get the schematics to reveal it, you might have missed that because it was just a throwaway line in the opening scroll of Star Wars. Maybe that's why they made this pointless movie, in case you missed how important the Death Star plans were from that one sentence from Star Wars.

And the entire first act of Star Wars.

So they made a whole movie about a doomsday weapon, where a load of forgettable characters get slaughtered for the big pay-off of a dodgy CGI Carrie Fisher getting a USB stick.

I didn't much care for this movie. Can you tell?

The Darth Vader bit was good though.

Fair enough, each to their own. Tbh I hadn't really considered the Death Star weak point a plot hole as such and probably used the wrong term.   But I did think it was a bit weird that the Death Star would be so vulnerable and R1 went some way toward explaining it.

Yeah, different people like different things and that's fine. I liked bits of the movie, just not the characters or plot.

I didn't think the Death Star having a single point of catastrophic failure was odd at all. Would it surprise you to learn the recently launched James Webb Space telescope has about 350? That's for something the size of a Tennis court with a limited scope* of tasks. I can totally see the Empire cutting corners with safety and system redundancies on a project that size.

*totally intended

[I, Cosh]

Don’t look up – a dark satire which felt to close for comfort. This a movie about the end of the world and how stupid decisions are made along to way to facilitate that the world will end. I can highly recommend this movie, funny, witty, and yes twisted dark as well.

I found this pretty dire to be honest. It had that effect where I could tell what the writers thought was funny about each line but it just wasn't. Every attempt at satire seemed lazy and obvious. Given how much they must have spent on the cast, another pass over the script would've been loose change well spent.

To be fair, it did improve in the second half but it's a little strange that the best least worst bit ended up being the small scale last dinner back home on the ranch.

However, a couple of days later we watched This is the End, which was truly awful, so now I'm a little bit more kindly disposed to Don't Look Up. A weird mixture of self-congratularly, faux-stoner improv horror comedy. There are a handful of laughs and a few well deployed FX shots but mostly it's just a bunch of rich dudes trying to one-up each other by talking about jizzing while they wait for the world to end.

[I, Cosh]

The Great Wall
 Or that white features a "white saviour" trope (it doesn't).
...
 a stranger in a foreign land...helps the local population against an impending enemy

I'm having trouble reconciling these two statements but it's Christmas and I genuinely can't remember much about the movie so I'll assume that it somehow cleverly subverts the trope that seems inherent from the set-up

It doesn't subvert it so much as completely replace it with a different one. My memory of the story is that the arrogant foreigner thinks he can walk in and sort everything out by himself and nearly gets everyone killed with his stupidity. Only when he is able to see past his own ego and humbly join the battle alongside the brave Chinese people as an equal, insignificant part of the whole can the evil be overcome.

There's definitely some sort of message in there.

[Colin YNWA]

Well it turns out I did have access to Omen 3 - The Final Conflicit though fair to say I almost wish I hadn't. Has there every been a film series that so defined the Law of Diminishing Returns!

A world meant to be plunging into chaos and despair that seems to be doing okay thanks. Certainly everyone still manages to drive Ford Cortina Estates.

Death as overplayed and meladramatic as we have become used to. Involving steam irons, having a bit of a tumble or being trapped a bit in a pit and not really being dead at all.

The veyr Armageddon, the final conflicit, a world shattering battle waged between the son of the devil himself and 7 dedicated, hand picked priests with the key skills to fight the almighty anti-christ, the ability to wear a duffle coat.

I mean it all really rather lacks the tension needed... well any tension really. Even the hypno-rottweiler spends a number of scenes looking pretty cute and adorable. It was as if the producers they were very carefully trying to ground this movie, drag it back to the simple crawling basics of the first. A chuffin' film about the final battle between demi-gods... I think they got the tone of 2 and 3 all topsy turvey.

The only thing to recommend it is Sam Neill's glorious over the top yet underplayed Damien.

Omen 3 - The Final Crap-pic more like.

[Richmond Clements]

Ready or Not. Great little black comedy horror on Disney+. Delightfully bloody and violent. Feels like a Blumhouse movie.

[pictsy]

The Fast and The Furious 1-8

Just been casually watching these over the holiday period.  Such an odd series of films.  It starts off as a Point Break ripoff that trades surf boards for cars and becomes some weird cartoonish action franchise with vague global threats.  It is terrible in so many varied and interesting ways.  The characters are pretty two dimensional and all in service of the power fantasy that is Dominic Toretto (or maybe Vin Diesel's ego).  The films are so incredibly dumb I cannot take them seriously, so I don't even try and I have a lot of fun watching the stupidity unfold.  Looking forward to watching the 9th film.

My favourite of the bunch is Tokyo Drift and my least favourite is 2 Fast 2 Furious.

[Hawkmumbler]

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1954)

Local indie picture house is having a season of movies written by Nigel Kneale (a few i'm skipping but being able to see The Woman in Black, Hammers The Witches, and Quatermass and the Pit on the big screen is going to be dope) and this was a considerable gap in my experience with one of the formative genre teleplay writers. It is, as one would expect, excellent, and dare I say remains probably the best adaptation of the novel on screen?

Seeing a rare, unavailable 35mm print of a 70 year old BBC teleplay in a cinema feels utterly bizarre however. Like some form of celluloid curse is being projected into my brain.

[Radbacker]

Ghostbusters Afterlife, absolutely loved it nostalgia done right.  The original Ghostbusters is one of my favourite films ever and this belated sequel hits all the right buttons for me unlike most recent late sequels (cough Matrix cough) truely feels like an earned sequel and not just a cash grab.  Being honest I really didn’t mind the reboot from a few years ago but this one shows how poor that movie was.
CU Radbacker

[Colin YNWA]

The Lighthouse

Its a very interesting piece, in some ways. Seeing there are such positive reviews here I was surprised to not enjoy it more. I certainly appreciated it as a piece of work. The performances from the two characters were magnificent. The use of black and white and the framing made it visually magnificent.

My issue was that its tight focus meant the story had nowhere to go and felt, while brillantly excecuted slight. Now I figure that was kinda the point of the piece. It did leave the story predictable and the themes readily exposed, as if it was underlining its points. I found, for a film like this it lacked ambiguity. Now this needs to be qualified - I took a very specific reading of events, the characters and their motivations. The fact that there were clear aims to make neither protagnoist a reliable narrator means that subsequent views may reveal much more but

1) I have no real desire to watch it again to do that
2) From this viewing and my reading I have no questions I feel an urge to dig into.

The prometheian ending kinda underscored the ideas firmly and left me satisfied I could box this one off. Now I might be missing things as said, but it didn't raise enough questions in my reading to make me inquisitive enough to sit through the discomfort it very purposefully created to go again to find them.

Still very glad I've seen it.

[Richard]

I've just come back from watching Ghostbusters: Afterlife, thought it was good. Very slow at the beginning, but it picks up in the second half, and the ending is brilliantly done. Finally the sequel the original deserved.

(There are extra scenes during and after the end credits, so stay for those.)

[broodblik]

I agree with Richard enjoyed the movie but the original Ghostbusters was quite unique and I do not think it will be easy replicated.