There have been eighteen prior Marvel Universe movies since 2008. These have introduced a large number of characters, i.e. heroes, most of which come together in this movie to fight a single enemy named Thanos. Previous movies hinted at infinity stones being powerful and dangerous, and the need to keep them from evil. It turns out Thanos is getting his hands on these stones and has an agenda that involves wiping out half the life in the galaxy. Why? His world collapsed due to overpopulation, so he takes it upon himself to solve this problem for everybody else. If he gets all six stones he could kill every other person in the galaxy with just a snap of his fingers.
There have been a number of good Marvel movies in the last decade and many of the stories pick up in Avengers Infinity War from where they left off. The action gets started early and almost never lets up. One might think that this would be bad, but the action is done so well and the characters are so good that the movie feels like something truly special on a grand scale. Never have we seen so many different stories and characters woven together so seamlessly. This isn't just a movie, but an event a decade in the making.
We see more of Thanos than we do any individual hero, making him in effect the main character. This is as much his story as it is anybody else's, and he is played wonderfully by Josh Brolin.
With so many actors and effects, it is not surprising that the movie cost $360 million to make. They got their money's worth. Some have compared the film to Star Wars in terms of entertainment value, which is not a bad comparison.
Avengers Endgame is 3 hours well spent. It is the worthy sequel Avengers Infinity War. Both movies are the conclusion to 11 years of Marvel movies leading up to this one story. Infinity War was one of the best movies I have ever seen. Endgame is not quite as good, but it is close enough.
The movie 1917 is likely to be one of the best movies I will see this year. It follows a pair of World War I soldiers on a time-critical mission to get a message to another unit so as to avoid an attack that will end in disaster. This is based on a real story told to writer and director Sam Mendes by his grandfather.
The movie is filmed in such a way that it appears to be one continuous shot, except for a couple of obvious breaks. There are continuous shots that last at least 40 minutes. The camera follows the soldiers through long trenches, across fields, into farmhouses, rivers, underground bunkers, and troop transports. This is like another character because I spent the whole movie wondering how on earth did they film this? It is technically very difficult to have everything properly lit while the camera follows the actors through miles of territory.
The movie creates a suspense that is perfect. There is not much direct combat, but the horrible aftermath of combat is everywhere in this movie. On the journey, the soldiers are constantly passing dead bodies and destruction. The way the movie is filmed gives it an extra sense of realism.
The movie is rated R for war violence and a few swear words.
Rating: A+.
This might be the movie of the decade, but since it had a limited release in late 2019, I'm not sure which decade. 😀
I rewatched "Contagion" after seeing it in the theater when it came out in 2011.
I have never seen a more prophetic movie in my entire life. At least 80% of the film seems applicable to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest difference is the deadliness of the disease, which instead of being about 2% for known cases is around 25%. But detail after detail comes up that I only recently learned about during the COVID crisis.
The movie has an 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although not all the critics were equally enthusiastic. The audience score is only 63%, so I suspect that the subject matter might have turned off some people. Rotten Tomatoes describes it as, "Tense, tightly plotted, and bolstered by a stellar cast. Contagion is an exceptionally smart -- and scary -- disaster movie." I agree. It tells a fantastic story. My favorite movie critic, Richard Roeper, gives it 5 out of 5 stating, "Contagion" is a brilliantly executed disease outbreak movie."
The film puts much emphasis on how easily disease can spread and this adds to the tension.
The ending is great, giving a nice emotional catharsis followed by a revelation about how the pandemic started.
Zombie Land is comedy about 4 people trying to survive a Zombie Apocalypse. I was a little put off by the gory opening sequence, but this movie is not as gory as other zombie movies and once past the beginning, the movie is in full comedy mode. There is a surprise cameo in the middle of the movie that is absolutely brilliant.
I am bumping my rating of this movie to 4 stars. Why? It is clever and witty in almost every scene, which makes it incredibly watchable. There is enough here to keep me entertained through at least 3 or 4 viewings.
Rating: A
I enjoyed it much more than Shaun of the Dead (* * *), which is another zombie comedy that I liked.
Other more serious zombie movies that I liked are ...
Of this bunch, I prefer 28 Days Later (* * *.5), because it shows the Zombie Apocalypse being caused by a virus; No dead people crawling out of their graves. It also has a reasonably good sequel.
That is the limit of my experience with zombie movies, but along comes a new TV mini-series about zombies called The Walking Dead. At this point I was wondering why do we need yet another show about a Zombie Apocalypse? You would think that with the dozens of zombie movies out there that this genre would be beaten to death. The answer is that The Walking Dead is extremely well written, or at least the first part is because that is all that has aired so far. The characters in this show feel very real.
The Walking Dead is excessively gory, which I don't like, but the story and the characters are so good that it kept me interested.
It is rare that I applaud at the end of a movie, but when I do it is because I have just experienced something special. I knew that my 3 hours was not wasted. I felt that I had just lived through something and not just watched a story. I noticed that only a couple of other people in the crowded dollar theater also applauded, but to be honest, this a highly complex movie that might go over many people's heads.
Cloud Atlas follows 6 very different stories, each taking place in a different time period, but with the same actors playing different roles, races and even genders in each time period. Most of the stories are in the past, but a couple are in the distant future. Watching this film is like watching 3 different episodes of LOST all at the same time. The movie switches between stories somewhat seamlessly with the idea that they are all connected, as are the characters who seem to have reincarnated from one time period to the next.
The movie's philosophical bent seems to be one of reincarnation and karma.
The themes of this movie include karma, love, oppression/slavery, violence/murder, rebellion and hope. The central idea is that we are all connected and events that happened long before we were born affect our lives and our lives will affect others long after we are gone.
Year 1849: Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) is a lawyer crossing the Pacific in a ship who is involved a a business deal involving slavery. He befriends an escaped slave (Keith David) while a greedy doctor (Tom Hanks) tries to poison him. He is saved by the escaped slave and is able to return to his wife (Bae Doona) and confront his father in law (Hugo Weaving) over the issue of slavery.
Year 1936: Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) is a bisexual musician who goes to work for a famous but aging composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) and then develops an affair with the man's younger wife (Halle Berry). Vyvyan tries to blackmail Robert, so Robert shoots him and then is on the run from the law. He hides in a hotel where he is then blackmailed by the owner (Tom Hanks). After barely finishing his musical masterpiece, Cloud Atlas, Robert kills himself.
Year 1973: Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) is a journalist investigating an unsafe nuclear power plant run by a corrupt oil company. (No agenda there.) She is befriended by an engineer (Tom Hanks) and a security guard (Keith David). She is then pursued by a hit man named Bill Smoke (Hugo Weaving) hired by an oil executive (Hugh Grant). Along the way she hears the music Cloud Atlas for the first time but somehow recognizes it.
Year 2012: Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) is a publisher who has a windfall when his gangster author (Tom Hanks) commits murder at a party. Other gangsters come after him so he flees to his antagonistic brother (Hugh Grant) who tricks him into permanently checking into a retirement home where he is abused by a sadistic female nurse (Hugo Weaving). From there he plots his escape with other retirees. This is the only humorous sequence in the film.
Year 2144: In a dystopian future, Sonmi-451 (Bae Doona), is an artificially created slave clone who simply waits tables when one of her fellow clones fights against being abused, but as a consequence is executed. She is then recruited by a rebellion officer (Jim Sturgess), who she falls in love with, and a rebellion general (Keith David) who want to use her to broadcast a message of truth to the whole world. Once the rebellion is crushed, she is interrogated by a not so friendly Asian inquisitor (Hugo Weaving).
Year 2321: 106 years after the fall of Earth, Zachry (Tom Hanks) is a primitive tribesman living on the Hawaiian islands. His tribe is often attacked by cannibals, and Zachry often has visions of the Devil (Hugo Weaving) taunting him. His people believe that the Devil lives on top of a mountain. These people also have a myth about Sonmi-451 being a goddess. The island is visited by Meronym (Halle Berry) who belongs to a small group of people who still have technology. She tells Zachary that the Earth is dying and that they must travel to the top of the mountain, where there is a giant transmitter, so that they can send a request for help to humans on another world.
This last sequence uses a degraded form of English that is full of odd expressions like "true true." It makes the speech harder to follow but I was able to keep up. When the movie comes out on DVD on 2013-02-05, I suggest turning on subtitles so as to better follow the dialogue.
The end credits show pictures of all the different roles that each actor plays, many of which come as surprise. Sometimes the makeup is so heavy that you cannot easily recognize the actors. This would be a fun movie to watch repeatedly so as to pick up on the different actors.
I highly recommend watching the eye popping trailer. This is a film where the ideas are slightly better than the execution of the story. I give this movie a great deal of credit for being different, daring and innovative. In terms of acting and cinematography, the movie is a triumph. The fact that a movie of this scale was independently made is astonishing. This movie only has a 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I think that the complexity of the movie lost some people. I wager that over time the movie will gain more acceptance and be considered a great film.
I would rather not give away what "Attack the Block" is about, except that it is aptly described by the movie poster as "INNER CITY VS OUTER SPACE". What that doesn't tell you is what a great action picture this is, and how great the characters are. At times it is scary, occasionally funny, but overall it is exciting with some good social commentary thrown in.
If we measure a movie by it's ability to take us to another time and place, then "Good Night and Good Luck" is the best example that I can think of. The movie is relies more on atmosphere than plot, but that atmosphere feels like we are ease dropping on the real events as they are happening. It is interesting how the camera will follow people around. It creates a slight sense of confusion, but adds to the "we are there" feeling of the movie. By cleverly showing us archival footage on television screens, we feel like the events are happening right now. The movie never bothers to explain anything at all; it assumes that we are smart enough to keep up. Since the film is mostly people having conversation, it adds to the feeling that we watching real events, but a few of those conversations might try people's patience. Which is why on Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of the critics liked the movie, but only 73% of the audience liked it.
I was worried that the movie would hit us over the head with a political message about McCarthyism, as other films have, especially since it was written by the left leaning George Clooney who also gave us politically slanted duds like Syriana and Michael Clayton. (The latter is not terrible but stretches believability.) But if there is political bias in this movie, it is subdued and overshadowed by a very intelligent script that is just trying to present events as they were. At one point the movie is smart enough to ask "What if we are on the wrong side?", which is an interesting question since some people today still defend McCarthy in his hunt for communists. But I find myself not caring if the movie has a political message, because it entertains so well.
My one nitpick is that too much attention is spent on a Jazz singer who is completely unrelated to the plot. Her singing is there just to set the mood.
Almost all the actors in the movie are television actors, many of which I have seen in some of my favorite programs. Even George Clooney is a former television actor, so I thought that maybe the movie is trying to make some subtle point about television, but it might have just been a matter of budget. This movie was made on a shoestring budget, but it gets its money's worth. It is very well acted. David Strathain blew me away with his portrayal of Edward R Murrow.
There are some movies that have so much stuff in them that I can watch them five times and enjoy them all five times. Riverworld (2010), Monsters versus Aliens, Tangled and all the Star Wars movies are films that I enjoyed over and over. (It is probably no coincidence that those are all sci-fi or fantasy films.)
Hereafter is a movie that seems to subscribe to the theory that "less is more". The movie effectively uses emotion and relationships more than plot to advance the story. It is not the kind of film that I would watch repeatedly, but it pulled at the heart strings so well that it felt like a deep emotional experience. At its core are the fundamental human questions about life and what might come after. It is the sort of gentle and subtle treatment that you would expect from director Clint Eastwood. It might be one of his better movies.
Hereafter is the story of a man who believes that he can communicate with the dead, along with the stories of two other people who all come together at the end.
Much of the emotion of the film comes from human response to tragedy. There is ample tragedy in this movie. At one point there is a terrorist bombing that I found jarring even though it was shown at a distance. The opening sequence involves people caught up in a tsunami, and it is an amazing spectacle to behold. We are used to seeing special effects in movies, but nevertheless I find myself wondering how they pulled off this sequence. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
One might think that the movie is exploitative because it takes advantage of our fears of current events by showing a terrorist bombing and a tsunami. Maybe it is exploiting our fears, but it does so in a gentle and reassuring way. I can't imagine any other movie having such a soft touch and pulling it off.
The 1994 hand-drawn animated version of The Lion King is nearly perfect. The animation is beautiful, with most of it having a 3D look. The characters are great and the voice acting by Matthew Broadrick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Nathan Lane, Ernie Sabella, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cheech Marin all give those characters a very distinctive sound. The music, which effectively pulls at our emotions, is so wonderful that it is like another character in the movie.
The only part of the original film that I did not like as much is the musical number "I just can't wait to become King." This sequence is drawn in a 2D style like a classic Saturday morning cartoon. Although it isn't a particularly bad sequence, its target audience seems to be just for kids.
The 2019 remake has many of the qualities that made the original good, but it also is lacking in many areas. The insistence that everything be photorealistic means that the movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at, but it also means that the characters are far less expressive than their hand-drawn counterparts. For example, the character of Scar had charisma in the original, but in the remake he just comes across as mean. I don't think that the voices are as stylish either, although Seth Rogan does a good job as Pumbaa. Why they didn't use the original cast? Only Jame Earl Jones reprises his role.
The music had a powerful impact on the original. It is strangely more subdued in the remake. The star of the new movie, and by far the best reason to see it, is the computer animation. It is a sight to behold.
Hand-drawn animation is expensive, so the original at 88 minutes feels slightly too short. It is a very compact movie with scenes and dialog taking no more time than they need to in order to convey the story. The remake is 30 minutes longer, with extra and more mature dialog everywhere. Many of the scenes are longer. Some of this is nice, but parts of it also feel unnecessary. The final confrontation with Scar is too long and gives the impression of being more violent.
There are little things done in the original that weren't done in the remake, like Pumba picking up Simba with his horns, or Pumba getting stuck under a tree root while being chased by Nala. I found myself wondering if this was just a technological limitation of the computer animation?
Should you see the 2019 remake of the Lion King? Absolutely. It is a wonderful movie to look at. At times I felt like I was watching a beautiful nature show that just happens to be The Lion King. However, the original is a better overall experience.
Rocketman is probably the best movie that I will see this year. It starts with Elton John checking himself into rehab around 1990, whereupon the film shortly breaks into song. This is surprising, but it seems appropriate, if not downright brilliant, that a biopic about a musician should be a musical. The movie has a habit of breaking into elaborate musical numbers when you least expect it, like when Elton John tries to kill himself. However, for a musician as flashy as Elton John, this is the perfect way to tell the story. I just kept thinking about how brilliant this all was.
In rehab, Elton John tells everyone just how very screwed up he is, and then he recounts the story of his life telling how he got that way. This is where the movie shines, showing his boyhood living in public housing and his troubled relationship with an uncaring father and somewhat distant mother. The young Reginald Dwight (his real name) quickly learns that he has a talent for the piano and is showing great musical prowess by his teens. In the 1960's he struggled to make a living as a musician, but things begin to improve when he meets and teams up with Bernie Taupin, who was his lifelong collaborator and wrote most of the lyrics to Elton John's songs. However, in 1970 he makes an appearance at the famous West Hollywood nightclub, the Troubadour, which he was almost too nervous to do. There Elton becomes a huge hit and his career immediately takes off.
All this success doesn't make Elton John any less screwed up. His drug and alcohol problems get worse until finally, his close friends are urging him to get help.
The movie doesn't shy away from Elton John's homosexuality, depicting his relationship with his lover and manager John Reid.
My one complaint is that the end of the movie shows Elton John doing a music video post-rehab. The movie plays loose with the facts, because the music video, "I'm still standing", is actually from 1983. The only problem here is that the music video looks fuzzy like we are watching it on a television set. This takes us out of the moment.
The film fails to tell us very much about Elton John post-rehab. It is like the rest of his life is encapsulated into a minute of text and pictures at the end of the movie. This misses out on possible dramatic moments showing how much better his life was after recovery.
Prior to the fuzzy music video, I was going to give the movie an "A+", because it is that brilliant. In addition, the film could have given us more, if not a great deal more, about Elton John's life. It is not like his life ended when he got out of rehab.
Sonderkommando were Jews who were forced to work in the Nazi extermination camps. Their primary duty was to dispose of the bodies. In 1944, a group of Sonderkommando staged a violent revolt at Auschwitz that was put down by the Nazis. The Hungarian film Son of Saul takes place during these events.
The movie opens with trainload of Jews arriving at Auschwitz and then being immediately sent to the extermination chambers. Against his will, Saul helps in every part of this process. The movie makes it clear that any Sonderkommando who does not do what he is told is immediately executed. Saul seems to have shut down all his emotions as a way of surviving the horror that surrounds him. Then he recognizes a boy who is killed as his illegitimate son. From this point he makes it his personal mission to get a proper Jewish burial for his son. He hides the body, and then searches desperately for a Rabbi to perform the ceremony.
This is a unique film that doesn't feel like anything I have seen before. The movie tells a very personal story. The camera almost never leaves Saul. Much of the film seems to take place in real time. We spend half of the film looking at the back of Saul's head as he moves from place to place. As Saul moves around the camp, we witness one horror after another, most of which are in the periphery, or barely offscreen. Things happen that are never explained. There is a mild sense of chaos everywhere in this story.
I find the subject matter depressing, but not the movie. The story creates a kind of suspense as Saul tries to find a way to bury his son, and as the revolt builds to fruition. The film gives us a different perspective on the Holocaust, and it is intensely personal. Many people would not be able to watch Son of Saul because the Holocaust is too horrible to contemplate, but this feels like a story worth watching.
This is an amazing biopic, but at first I couldn't figure out why I like the movie so much. The film is about 98% conversation, almost all of which is people arguing with each other. What makes the film interesting is that everything proceeds at a rapid pace, which means the audience is forced to pay attention to keep up. When the film was done, I felt like I had just seen something wonderful, but I wasn't sure why.
I doubt that any of the conversations in this film took place exactly as depicted in the movie, but the conversations serve a purpose to convey a great deal of information about people and historical events.
The movie throws technical terms around that would go over the heads of most people, but for a computer hacker like me, this was gravy. There is a certain joy in being able to understand all of this.
Really the movie is about relationships, specifically how Steve Jobs related to everyone else. The way Steve Jobs related to everyone is to be a jerk, mostly by lashing out at people, but at the same time, he seemed to draw everyone toward him with the power of his personality and his vision. Steve Jobs seemed like a man who thought that he was so far above everybody else that he didn't need to take time to be nice to people, so the key is to realize that the only thing he only cared about was is make his vision a reality. Had Steve Jobs been any different, would the world be a lesser place today?
Steve Jobs vision was always ahead of the technology of the day. All the early computers his companies created were underpowered, lacking in memory, not very useful for anything productive, and way overpriced. This is why the Macintosh and the NeXT computers were commercial failures. It wasn't until Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 that the cost of technology had come down enough to make Jobs' vision a runaway commercial success.
This is one of the best movies of the year and nobody is watching it. However, this is an amazing movie. I want to see it again.
I watched Wall-E for the third time since it came out in 2008. This is a truly satisfying movie. It starts like a silent film, with only a few rare unintelligible utterances by Wall-E. He meets another robot named EVE who only utters a couple of words. Wall-E falls in love with EVE, but EVE was sent by humans on a distant spaceship to discover if the long-abandoned Earth could support life again. Together, the pair end up saving the human race.
In the distant future, a war emerges between powerful political dynasties on the desert planet Araknis over the control of the mining of Spice, which is needed for interstellar space travel. The Atreides ruling family tries to align itself with the indigenous population known as Fremen.
I read the entire series of Dune novels in the 1970s. Since Frank Herbert tended to write imaginative, complicated, and downright weird novels, I thought that a movie adaptation might be difficult. The 1984 movie was okay for its time, but it fell flat with audiences. The film was too complex and too esoteric.
Three minutes into Dune, the title screen reveals that this 2.5-hour movie is only part 1. I was disappointed at first, but it is better this way. Dune is so complicated that you need a roadmap to keep up. The film doesn't skimp on detail. It provides a very rich story faithful to the book, which is maybe why it only covers about half of the first novel.
The script feels perfect. Parts of it drag on a bit because there is much detail to cover. The movie adds many scenes to make it more cinematic, so it feels more like a 21st-century film.
After the fall of humanity due to a man-made virus designed to cure Alzheimer's Disease, the apes made intelligent by the virus have settled into the forest area north of San Francisco. The apes believe that the humans have died out, but a few surviving humans have a small community in San Francisco. When a couple of humans accidentally encounter the apes, they become frightened and shoot one of the apes, which leads to escalating tensions. Hotheads on both sides push the two groups toward war. A few individuals on both sides want to broker a peace, but the hotheads prevail.
The computer generated apes are amazing to look at. My only complaint is that the apes facial expressions seem a little too human.
It seems obvious that the movie is an analogy for any human conflict. The conflict started because the humans wanted to restart a hydroelectric dam, i.e. the war starts over energy, or more generally, over resources. The movie shows how conflict develops from fear of "the other" or "outsiders". The fact that the two groups are so different is what helps drive them to war. This gives the movie a certain noble message that stays with you for a long time. It feels like an anti-war film that delivers its message better and more subtly than any human versus human conflict could.
This is filmmaking, science fiction and special effects at its best.
In a bleak chaotic future in which humans can no longer procreate, a government civil servant, Theo, agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to sanctuary. Initially she is traveling with a violent rebel group that wants to use the baby to promote their cause. This group has no qualms about killing anyone who might get in their way, and eventually the group starts an armed rebellion against the British government.
Initially the film presents us with a dystopian future which is depressing to look at. This might serve as a warning of things to come. We can only hope that the future is better than what is depicted in this movie. However, when the bullets start to fly and the main characters try to escape a war zone, the movie turns intensely violent in a brilliantly executed extended action sequence.
Michael Caine has a strong supporting role as an old hippie, which is counter to his usual roles, but completely believable.
The movie does a great job of exploring post 9-11 themes, as well as religious themes. The pregnant woman is essentially the mother of the entire future human race.
I had to turn on closed captioning to understand some of the British accents. The movie never slows down to explain anything, but assumes that you are smart enough to follow along. I paused the film in places to read some of the billboards, many of which give interesting insights into this future world. Rating: A
The movie is rated R for violence, language, and brief nudity.
When The Right Stuff was released in 1983 it was not a commercial success despite high praise from critics. There was maybe a sense by audiences that it was too overtly political or patriotic, which overtly it isn't. However, the movie found some success in VHS and DVD sales.
This is essentially three stories: The story of Chuck Yeager, the story of the Mercury "7" astronauts, and the story of the media and political circus over the early space program.
The film doesn't pull any punches. It likes to make fun of just about everything. The movie spends much more time satirizing Lyndon Johnson or showing the indignities the astronauts had to go through than it does any form for space exploration. This is not a film that is particularly interested in science; it is much more interested in the human drama of its characters. This combination of humor with patriotic heroism ends up being the perfect mixture. In fact, the three-hour film feels like a perfect movie and 32 years later it is just as watchable.
This movie loves trivial details which give the film an authentic feel. It could have been 30 minutes shorter, but then it would have lost some of the atmosphere it gained from focussing on minutia.
I regret waiting at least 20 years to watch it again. This is the kind of movie that would be fun to watch again roughly every 10 years.
Had I made the movie I would have put more emphasis on science, but that might have been boring to most people. Maybe future generations will wonder why there isn't more science in the film?
I just watched Star Trek for the fourth time. The first two times were in the theater. I enjoyed the movie better on video only because some later action scenes were too loud in the theater.
In case you are not aware, Star Trek is the "reboot" of the old TV series and movies into a new series of movies. It follows the adventures of the old Star Trek characters when they were younger. In this particular series, the "reboot" happens when Romulins travel back in time and change the course of history resulting in the death of Captain Kirk's father. In this timeline, Kirk grows up without a father and is more of a miscreant. A series of events propel him into Starfleet and ultimately toward leadership. Along the way he has encounters and run-ins with other Star Trek characters, most noticeably a young Spock which the young Kirk doesn't like very much.
This is nearly a perfect movie. The execution from start to finish is brilliant. Every scene and every piece of dialog serves to propel the story along at a light speed. The opening shot is a slightly surrealistic fly-by of a Star Fleet ship cleverly letting us know that reality has changed; This is not your Daddy's Star Trek. It is cooler looking and more action packed, and more fun. The movie takes liberties with the Star Trek characters, but these liberties make sense and fit well in the context of the story.
