Let's all go to the movies~

[Friday]

The one constant in the universe is that people will miss the point of anything that's even vaguely not perfectly literal in as many possible ways as are... well, possible.

[Thad]

I watched the trailer for Bloodshot. It looks like a pretty straight-across adaptation of the 2012 comic, but the trailer gives away some pretty major twists so I don't recommend watching it if you haven't read the comic.

I also noticed they seem to have changed the name of the paramilitary org that Bloodshot works for; it's Project Rising Spirit in the comics. I thought they were going for a shared Valiant Cinematic Universe here and, if so, PRS should presumably play a major role bridging Bloodshot with the upcoming Harbinger movie. Maybe the PRS name will come up later in the movie or something.

I think Vin Diesel is a good casting choice and it could end up being a pretty good movie, though I'm more of a Harbinger fan. (And as you may have noticed, my favorite Valiant comic is Quantum and Woody, which, last I heard, the Russo brothers were developing for TBS.)

[Thad]

Per this interview, Harbinger is at a different studio now, so the Valiant shared universe may not be happening.

Dinesh Shamdasani (the former head of Valiant who's no longer with the company) seems pretty frustrated by this.

[Büge]

[Niku]

NIKU'S MOVIE REVUE:

Everyone I went to see The Lighthouse with pretty much hated it except for me, so your mileage will vary. Robert Eggers follows up The VuhVitch with another period tale of unintelligible dialogue (seriously, either hope you end up in a theater with a good sound mix or just wait to be able to watch it with subtitles on), but while it has the droning fog horn tension and slow creeping madness of a good horror thriller the film is really best enjoyed for what it actually feels like: a screwball odd couple comedy. Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are fucking fantastic as an apprentice lighthouse keeper and his mentor Captain Horatio McCallister as they bitch and squabble and fart at one another in an absolutely gorgeously shot black and white nightmare of a movie. I really, really liked it, but three out of four movie goers disagreed in my sample size.

Doctor Sleep ended up being a crowd pleaser with the same group on the other hand. Mike Flanagan is a director who I'm pretty much in the "can do no wrong" camp with these days, and he manages to thread an impossible fucking needle of doing a direct sequel to both Kubrick and King's The Shining all in one story. I haven't read the source material, though the lady's reading it right now and tells me she preferred this adaptation so far. Ewan McGregor gives a fantastic performance as a grown up Danny Torrance (and it feels like he spends much of it very subtly folding in Jack Nicholson's vocal tics in a way that feels natural for a son to have picked up from his father without devolving into schtick), but Kylie Curran just about runs away with the movie as the new kid with a powerful shine and Rebecca Ferguson chews up the scenery as the villain. It's still (as the only thing I ever heard people say regarding the novel) a weird fucking sequel about an RV full of hippie vampires eating people with the shining, but the movie works shockingly well. We watched the original the night before, which will do a lot to help you appreciate the parallels, though it will also make it slightly harder to lose yourself against the re-cast characters like Wendy and Halloran who split the difference a little between playing the characters and imitating the actors they're reprising.

And then there's Knives Out and I will personally kick everyone who does not go to see this in the theater if it means that I never get another Benoit Blanc movie. Benoit Blanc is Daniel Craig's southern-fried take on Hercule Poirot here in Rian Johnson's 2019 version of an Agatha Christie novel, taking all of Christie's heightened archetypes of then-contemporary murder suspects and transplanting them directly into our modern concepts of privilege and politics. You've got the flighty GOOPy liberal wellness guru (god I love Toni Collette so much), the soft spoken racist who's just concerned about his legacy and culture (a very against type Michael Shannon), the iron-fisted eldest sister become de facto matriarch (Jamie Lee Curtis), the shitty little troll boy on his phone all the time being a Nazi (one of the kids from It), the super bad boy with the slicked back hair who mutually hates the rest of his family (Chris Evans back in full on smarm-mode) -- there is basically not a single thing subtle about the entire movie, especially not Craig's ludicrously fantastic accent. Blend all of these personalities and more into a drawing-room murder of the family's patriarch, add in large sums of inheritance and several good motives, and then twist the whole thing around with Johnson's love of being very Clever, and you get the most fun damn thing I've seen in theaters in quite a while. Is it better than The Brothers Bloom (my personal Johnson gold standard)? I'm still chewing on that one, and probably not, but it comes close.

[Thad]

Agreed on Knives Out. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

[Thad]

Also, Alamo ran this before the movie



and he's right, The Last of Sheila is grossly underrated.

[Thad]

Managed to catch Anna and the Apocalypse in the theater.

The elevator pitch is "Shaun of the Dead meets High School Musical". I assume. I've never seen High School Musical.

Anyway, watch this musical number and it should serve as a pretty fair indicator of whether this is a movie you want to see. I enjoyed the fuck out of it and I believe I will be adding it to my Christmas canon.

[Blossom]

[Mongrel]

In a similar vein...

[beatbandito]

Parasite was quite good. I think "zany" is the word I would use to describe what it was more of than I expected, but it made me feel things and I appreciated the whole experience up until the letter at the end which I still feel like kind of adds in more than is necessary in a very active climax with almost no falling action as it is.

But, if you did like the message of the movie, maybe you should play Star Fetchers, you incredulous fucks

[beatbandito]

Birds of Prey and the Hastily Added 'Harley Quinn' Subtitle was pretty good. It was fine. The beginning was really painful. Not just because Harley is still almost entirely the Suicide Squad character (still part of the point is her outgrowing some of that shit) but there's a lot of the same trailer house editing style with unnecessary narration that kills the mood.

The best parts of the movie are general kenobi showing black canary his art collection and the 15 minutes at the end when all the main characters are together and not fighting anyone.


...on to Sonic now.

[beatbandito]

no one warned me about the giant owl and echidna ninja in the beginning of Sonic: The: Hedgehog. Other than that it was absolutely a movie. A big range or weird and vaguely inappropriate jokes, but who even knows what the audience for this one was. Definitely less respect for existing characters than Bird of Prey, and doesn't even follow through on the rules of its own mcguffin.

There were exactly two moments that made me laugh and I already forgot one. There were two very direct advertisements. So I guess it breaks even and this movie does not exist.

[Thad]

Definitely less respect for existing characters than Bird of Prey

I'm thinking there are probably some circa-2000 Batgirl fans who would debate that assertion.

[beatbandito]

I mean, that was more a knock against whatever the fuck Sonic's new backstory which is one I'm not aware of from the many weird comics I've read.

Cassandra Cain, as I'm guessing you're alluding, is certainly the worst offender in BoP. No OCs allowed in the cinematic universes has some dumb examples in marvel, too. But I guess no one cared about the original Negasonic.

[Thad]

I'd say the difference is that Sonic never really had much of a consistent canon. In the '90s we had two completely different and wildly contradictory cartoon series running *at the same time*, for God's sake.

Sonic gets a new origin and new powers? Sure, why the hell not. I remember this one time he was a prince who played in a band with his brother and sister, the time he was a lab animal transformed by a mishap involving a Chaos Emerald and a rotten egg, that time he had to save the President's daughter, and that game where he turned into a werewolf.

[Brantly B.]

The only thing I thought weird about movie Sonic was his constant naivety. It makes perfect sense in the context of this particular character, but it's something that pretty much every other iteration of Sonic is pointedly not. It's a welcome change, actually; I think the fact that he's usually a cocksure cleverer-than-thou little gremlin is what rubs a lot of people the wrong way, so having him be kind of vulnerable is probably a good thing. But it is kind of odd to see if you've spent the last 30 years getting used to Sonic the Perfect Hog.

[Thad]

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is really quite bad.

But I still would have finished watching it if I weren't experiencing excruciating neck and back pain. What else am I gonna do?

(Note: If you recognized that "What else are we gonna do?" is a line from Mallrats, then you are the target audience for this movie. Which still doesn't make it funny, but at least you'll understand why so many lines of dialogue have the number "37" in them.)

[Thad]

I watched the last hour and I'm willing to upgrade it from "really quite bad" to "has its moments." It never really reaches the level of good, and it never stops being a self-referential fanwank, but I was surprised to see how much better it got once Harley Quinn Smith entered the picture. The kid's pretty good. (She can't handle her one dramatic scene, but she's charming and funny for the scenes where she's not trying to pull off weepy.) And I admit to laughing at the part where Ben Affleck can't remember the name of Bruce Wayne's mother.

I don't want to oversell it and suggest that it's good or anything. But the last hour is significantly less dire than the first 45 minutes.

[Mongrel]

The whole interview is some highly entertaining lunacy. It turns out that the man everyone remembers as a pretty-boy vampire is a real-life (mostly-benign) Chaotic Neutral.

Now I wanna see this motherfucker play Loki.