Let's all go to the movies~

[Mothra]

Blomkamp to direct Robocop movie. Screenplay is by Ed Neumeier, who co-wrote the original.

Course, don't take for granted that this is going to happen until they actually start shooting. I'm still bummed Blomkamp didn't get to make that Alien movie he was working on.

Fuck yesssssssssssssssss

[Brantly B.]

Kubo and the Two Strings is my favorite movie of the year. It has some jaw-dropping action sequences that leave me thinking, "how the fuck did they do that?"

Stay through the credits, because, like Boxtrolls, there is a short segment that shows you how the fuck they did that, at least for one really impressive setpiece. (It involves a huge mechanical puppet with a camera circling it.)

I've never seen a bad Laika movie. Go check this one out. It's not as much fun as Boxtrolls or ParaNorman; in fact it's a pretty somber story. But it's got levity too, and action like I've never seen in a stop-motion film before.

Finally managed to see this. Boxtrolls was a miss for me, but Kubo's a grand fucking slam; it's a better Disney Renaissance film than most actual Disney Renaissance films. So of course, it's the one that got to be marked as racist and practically evaporated.

[Brantly B.]

For context I managed to watch this directly after Coco which on the flipside felt like Scrooge McDuck swimming through a money bin full of self-enforced stereotypes. Is everybody in Mexico really either a shoemaker or a mariachi?

[Büge]

Some of them are grandmas, Brentai, jeez

[Thad]

oh my god

EDIT: Just a reminder!

You know what I just thought of that I can't get out of my head?

How much I would have loved to see Ditko review Man of Steel and tear Snyder a new one for being a bad objectivist.

I'm not sure he would have objected to the neck-snapping*, but he would have hated all the moping and the uncertainty and the bad "maybe don't save that bus full of kids" advice from Pa Kent. It was a movie with a gray palette and what Ditko liked to call gray morality. Anti-life, anti-reason, anti-hero.

I also suspect he would have been less than pleased by the B-story about a dogged reporter tracking down the private personal information of a man who just wanted to be left alone. Though he might have liked the ending where she chose not to publish any of that stuff and just let the man's public deeds speak for themselves.

* Ditko made it very clear in his writing that he thought it was morally acceptable for a superhero to kill a villain so long as the villain was the first one to initiate the use of force. Indeed, that's the entire premise of A Right to Kill, which, for my money, is the best Mr. A story. Mr. A shoots the villain and then delivers a monologue about how the initiation of force is always wrong, but the use of lethal force against someone who initiated force is justified. Ditko wasn't big on subtext.

Ditko preferred to cut away or go abstract with the depiction of violence, so he might have objected to the neck snapping on aesthetic grounds. But I don't think would have criticized the movie for being too violent; he wrote an oft-reprinted essay titled Violence: The Phony Issue, where he argued, once again, that it's the initiation of force that is wrong, and that focusing on violence rather than the initiation of force that leads to it is a distraction.

[Thad]

...you know what, I take it back. Actually I think the best Mr. A story is the one with the ex-con who goes straight. It's the only Mr. A story that has even the slightest bit of complexity to its morality. (Basically, the moral of that one is that the scales can be balanced and redemption is possible. There are other Ditko stories and essays that deal with that premise -- scales were one of his favorite symbols to draw -- but I don't think there are any other Mr. A stories that do.)

[Thad]

Jurassic Park 5 is exactly what you expect from a Jurassic Park movie at this point: some pretty cool dinosaurs, surrounded by a bunch of dumb bullshit.

Chief among the dumb bullshit: not one single thing that happens during this movie makes any sense if you remember there is a second island full of dinosaurs. And if you think "Well, maybe the second and third movie aren't canon anymore, maybe Isla Sorna doesn't exist" -- no. Sorna is mentioned in dialogue, in the first act. The movie acknowledges that there was a second island full of dinosaurs, and at no point does it follow up by asking "So why don't they just go to that one instead of the one that's on fire?"

[Niku]

they moved the entire population from sorna to help populate nublar for jurassic world's initial opening

every single dinosaur

yes that is the actual explanation

aren't you glad that it's not dumb

[Niku]

*pounding on table*

g

m

k

r

G

M

K

R

G M K R

G M K R

GMKR

GMKRGMKRGMKRGMKRGMKRGMKRGMKR

[Thad]

they moved the entire population from sorna to help populate nublar for jurassic world's initial opening

every single dinosaur

yes that is the actual explanation

aren't you glad that it's not dumb

Makes sense. Moving every single dinosaur from one island to another certainly seems like the kind of operation that would go off smoothly and successfully without a hitch.

I'll say one thing for JP5, though: there is one moment that I am almost certain is a reference to The Critic.

[Copen]

So I haven't been keeping good track of movies for like 10 years.

As someone who enjoys things like: Street Fighter (The Movie), Mortal Kombat (The Movie), Hackers, The Matrix, Equilibrium, The One, HERO, Just Any Jet Li Movie, Ghost in the Shell (American Movie), Spider-Man (newest), and Infinity War - What are some movies that came out this year that I'd like?

On the note of movies I've seen and not liked only 1 really comes to mind: Death Note (American Movie).

[Mongrel]

By the way, has anyone heard about the two big Netflix saves? (they basically threw huge amounts of money at stuff to free up two big movies from development hell)

The first is The Irishman.

It's Scorsese doing what one of the things he's always done best; mobster biopics. It stars Robert DeNiro, and Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel will play major characters as well. It's basically a one-last-hurrah revisiting of the Scorsese mafia flicks heydey.

The second is Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, Welles' last film, a monstrous satire from the 70's which only exists as 1100 rolls of shot footage with little to no editing. So someone is going to have to play Welles and stitch together the actual movie. A lot of potential there, but I think even a bad Welles' film can at least be interesting and it's something which would otherwise be lost.

I am super-excited for the first and cautiously hopeful for the second.

[Büge]

I'll say one thing for JP5, though: there is one moment that I am almost certain is a reference to The Critic.

This scene in particular?

[Thad]

That's the one.

[beatbandito]

I'm just going to imagine it's that entire scene verbatim.

[Thad]

Mission: Impossible 6 is another movie where we're deep enough into the franchise that it's exactly what you expect. There's a spy plot with a few very obvious twists along the way, and Tom Cruise does some ridiculous stunts (in this one he hangs off a helicopter). I haven't seen 5 and it feels like a part 2, so maybe see 5 first?

I might do a blog post on the series (once I've seen 5). Here are my thoughts at the moment:

1: My favorite of the lot. Twisty and claustrophobic. Prioritizes twists over coherence or character motivations that make any kind of sense.

2: Thoroughly enjoyable if you can adjust your expectations to "big dumb John Woo movie". It doesn't fit in with the rest of the series, the plot doesn't make sense, the characters' behavior doesn't make sense, and the laws of physics don't make sense, but if you want a movie where somebody jumps sideways while firing two guns and walks in slow motion while birds fly in front of him, this is a movie where those things definitely happen.

Miiii: Features the best villain in the series in Philip Seymour Hoffman. When he's not onscreen? Eh, it's okay. Generic "hero retires to settle down and get married but then gets called back into action" plot, with twists that are pretty much the same as in the first movie.

4: Really stunning cinematography; Spielberg has said that every director should be an animator and Brad Bird's work here makes that case really well. I like the spycraft in this one too, particularly the scene where they pull an in-person man-in-the-middle attack.

5: ???

6: It was fine. I might have liked it better if I'd seen 5?

[Lottel]

Five was my favourite of the lot before six because it was so fun and goofy without being a comedy.

Probably won't make it out to see six but I did see the trailer for the new Johnny English...

[Friday]

Saw Jurassic Park 5: Jurassic World 2

Here's my rundown

1. THEY'RE ALIVE. LIKE ME.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

[Thad]

I've seen Teen Titans Go to the Movies described as "Deadpool for kids" and that's pretty accurate. It's the same kind of mix of meta-humor, references to other superhero movies (including a runner about Superman's mustache) and obscure comic books (including a runner about the Challengers of the Unknown), and poop jokes. And hey, Nic Cage finally gets to play Superman.

I guess it's tautological to suggest that you will like the Teen Titans Go movie if you like Teen Titans Go, but there it is.

And if you don't like Teen Titans Go, well, you may be excited by the mid-credits scene that reveals the 2003 Teen Titans are coming back.

[Blossom]