Let's all go to the movies~

[Grath]

Directed by
Cathy Scorsese

Well yes. The surprising part is that's Martin Scorsese's 51-year-old daughter directing a terrible indie superhero movie, not the 16-year-old one.

[Mongrel]

I love the the cinematography is so so so much visibly worse than the mediocre effects, such that it manages to reeeaaaaallly look like like a student film.

[Büge]

This looks enjoyable.

[Grath]

This looks enjoyable.

You mean, racist because it depicts a Polynesian demigod as overweight?

[Thad]

[Thad]

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.

[Mothra]

JET JAGUAR and ANDROID M-11 are BACK! Robert Scott-Field (M-11 in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah) stars in Jet Jaguar: Project M11, a new short film by Shingo Maehata, director of Zella: Monster Martial Law. The short will screen at G-Fest XXII later this month!

Oh my stars and garters.

[MarsDragon]

That....that's a shop, right?

[Mothra]

That is as REAL as it GETS.

(Pretty sure it's just a short film by a young aspiring director, but dang, new costumes and designs and everything)

[Mothra]

Ghostbusters waaaas okaaaay

As feared, it's got a really by-the-numbers action movie plot that regularly interrupts the fun character moments and general around-fucking. The banter is definitely the highlight, and the sole source of good comedy, since all the setpiece gags are just really safe and boring (with the exception of the ghost-on-the-shoulders bit).

McCarthy was easily the funniest, so, a lot of your enjoyment will come from how much you like her delivery. This movie is basically at its best in the low-stakes middle, where they're just working out the basics of bustin'.

The climax is compleeeete shlock, with like zero jokes and lots of slow-mo spin-pans as all four fire proton beams into oncoming warrior ghosts (not kidding). It is awful. Also, worth noting that the CG in this is distractingly bad, particularly everything involving slime.

Sooo, yeah, not really worth seeing in theaters, but it's perfectly enjoyable until the shlocky ending.

Way more of this please. Less stock action shlock and way way way way more fucking around.

[Thad]

Well, at least they've changed it up. I like the backing vocals. The instrumentation's good in places (I like the horns) but too simple and repetitive for most of the song.

Less copy-and-paste than I expected, so that's good, but it's still not exactly blowing me away.

[Büge]

everyone saw the GOTG2 trailer already, right?

[Thad]

I don't know what's going on here, but it's got Kevin Murphy in it.

[Thad]

I wrote about Wilson back in 2011. I admit some skepticism to adapting it as a film, because its format is arguably more important than its story. (The comic is split up into one-page gag strips, six or seven panels each; Clowes changes up the art style throughout.) I feel like there are an awful lot of Clowes comics that are better suited to movie adaptations, that wouldn't lose their essence in the transition in the same way that Wilson must.

On the other hand, this looks pretty good. It's got a great cast, and even if it loses the newspaper-comic-strip feel of the source material, Wilson's character, the self-absorbed, insecure, misanthropic fuckup, definitely shines through.

[Büge]

And then your next post in that thread is about Axe Cop. When are they making a movie about that?

[Grath]

So Doctor Strange was good.

[Mothra]

[Thad]

So Doctor Strange was good.

Yeah, I liked it. The visual effects were impressive enough that I could see my way toward going to see it again, this time at the 3D IMAX.

It's a good cast. The story's pretty stock but it's one of those great ironic 1960's Marvel origin stories. I'm not the first person to observe this, but it bears noting that Marvel's superhero boom in the 1960's followed years of the same writer and artists doing horror, science fiction, and monster comics in the 1950's, and there's a real infusion of that style of storytelling once they switched to superheroes. Sims has observed more than once that Spider-Man's origin story is structured more or less like an 8-pager from Tales from the Crypt, with an arrogant protagonist and a twist ending where his selfishness comes back to haunt him in an unanticipated way. Strange is much the same, of course, though less likable and relatable than Peter Parker, even at the outset.

(And I know I'm not the first person to make this observation, but man, Cumberbatch's American accent sounds exactly like Hugh Laurie's.)

The post-credits scene was a little rough. I feel like it would have worked better as the first scene in a sequel than the last scene in this movie. I mean, I think most of the audience could have foreseen Baron Mordo becoming a bad guy, even without knowing the comics; his name is "Mordo" for God's sake. We didn't really need to close the movie out by having him cripple and possibly kill a guy.

And what is it with villains not getting to have titles anymore? It's not Baron Mordo, it's just Mordo; it's not Baron Zemo, it's just Zemo; it's not Professor Zoom, it's just Zoom; it's not Captain Boomerang, it's just Boomerang. Meanwhile, Strange still gets to be a Doctor, and America still gets to be a Captain.

(I guess Cold does, too, but he kinda became a good guy so I'm not sure he counts.)

[Sharkey]

FIGHTING FISTS OF SHANGHAI JOE
AKA: My Name is Shanghai Joe/To Kill or to Die/The Dragon Strikes Back

Shanghai Joe is a Chinese immigrant and martial arts master who heads to America looking for work, and ends up in the heart of the old west. Forced to deal with the intolerance of racist gunslingers, it’s only a matter of time before he unleashes his fists of fury on their hillbilly asses. When Joe frees some Mexican slaves, a group of knife throwing bounty hunters are sent after him (including a creepy Klaus Kinski) and an evil kung fu master sets out to track him down. Featuring wild fight scenes, over-the-top violence, and an excellent spaghetti western soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai.

There's a nifty beer and pizza theater out here that digs up 35mm kung fu movies (Tarantino loans a bunch from his collection,) and they were running this last night. Weirdly timely after this fucking week, and it'd be perfect Outer Heaven fodder. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Mongolian chop.

[Mongrel]

Hahahaha Klaus Kinski, what.