Movies

[Polehaus53]

Ah, yes, the movies topic has been revived! In recent years, I’ve been becoming more interested in film, something I’ve started researching for fun. It’s an interesting area. Although there’s a lot of movies I have not seen, I do keep up with what’s currently being released and what movies are easily available to watch. I have a list of films that I need to watch that is growing longer all the time.

I recently watched Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman for the first time some weeks ago, which was interesting. This week I watched the short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I thought was pretty good.

[Patterson]

Ah, yes, the movies topic has been revived! In recent years, I’ve been becoming more interested in film, something I’ve started researching for fun. It’s an interesting area. Although there’s a lot of movies I have not seen, I do keep up with what’s currently being released and what movies are easily available to watch. I have a list of films that I need to watch that is growing longer all the time.

I recently watched Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman for the first time some weeks ago, which was interesting.

Yes! Glad this topic was revived too.
My grandma has a huge collection of classic movies but I haven't had the time to watch them with her lately. At least some classic movies occasionally make it onto youtube movies. The last one I watched was The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye. It was really fun!

Another one I highly recommend is 1963's The Mouse On The Moon. A great little british comedy that pokes fun at the space race.

Haven't seen '89 Batman, but I saw a couple of it's sequels a few years ago. Batman and Robin was not a good movie by any stretch, but it made me laugh. All those ice puns. Ahhh!

[Polehaus53]

I’ve been watching a few films lately since my last post here.

A bunch of the DC films were made available on Amazon Prime Video and Netflix a while ago, so I watched a good amount of those for the first time: I watched Shazam! which I really liked! Very fun movie and story. The second one, Shazam! Fury of the Gods was pretty good, but I think the first one was better. Watched Wonder Woman and Man of Steel which were fine. I know that the Wonder Woman movie received very positive responses upon its release in 2017 and did well in the box office, but I personally was underwhelmed. So many similarities to Captain America: The First Avenger
Then I watched Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and was really not very impressed. To me it seemed like so many elements were squeezed into it. I couldn’t help making comparisons of it to how well the Marvel universe had done Civil War. After that, I watched Justice League, which was decent. Then I watched The Flash, the new 2023 one. I enjoyed it and really liked how the film had Micheal Keaton reprise his Batman character from the 1989 Batman movie! That was fun to see. Somewhere in there I also saw Black Adam, which I liked and thought was really fun.

So, overall, I can’t say I have been impressed with the DC films. However, I generally enjoy watching superhero films, so I still want to continue watching the DC franchise as I am already fairly familiar with and have seen all the Marvel movies. There are still other DC films (including Wonder Woman 1989, the Suicide Squad movies, and the 2022 The Batman) which I haven’t gotten around to watching which I hope to see soon.

I watched Ladybug and Cat Noir: The Movie some time ago. I have never watched the show that the film is based on, but I think the film was a good standalone movie and is something that has actually made me interested in checking out the show. I thought the movie was a good story with good characters.

I watched Inception for the first time a few months ago. I thought it was a cool concept, but very complicated.

There are still a lot more movies that I want to see. I’ll post about the next bunch I watch.

[Pound Foolish]

Oooh, I see the film topic is still clawing at life, at least, if only just barely. Well, I just came from The ToO where I ranted about Wish. I shall voice my ranting here as well because why not. This movie left me with so much to say.

The goat is unfunny, the songs are forgettable, the animation is muted and dull... It's like Disney just forgot how to movie, it's a headscratcher, it's their Earwig and the Witch (Studio Ghibli released a cg movie Earwig and the Witch, it was bad, nobody watched it). Even Strange World had an imaginative world and good-looking animation, this is just nothing, it's a towering pile of absolutely nothing. If you're going to celebrate the great tradition of Disney, then why not bring back someone who'se part of that tradition? Why hire pop-song writers you've never worked with before!? Why not bring back Lin Manuel Miranda, or Alen Menken, (why do they never work with Menken anymore?) Or Richard Sherman? Why did Disney animation not seem to know, while this film was in production, Sherman, one of the greatest parts of Disney's legacy, was still alive and could still write them a song? Heck, why not have Miranda, Menken, and Sherman all write songs TOGETHER how epic would that be? Instead, we get this horrid nonsense. "I let you live here for free, and I don't even charge you rent!" Those mean the same thing! Also, like Doug Walker/Nostalgia Critic pointed out, they don't really even need the book to possess King Magnifico and make him evil because he's flown off the handle! His people just ask him perfectly natural questions and he goes beserk for no good reason! So... why have him be made crazy and evil by the Big Book of Badness? He's already crazy and evil without the Big Book of Badness!

Asha is a boring protagonist. Back in the comments on a reaction to the Wish trailer video before the film even released, I mentioned what the internet is now calling the "adorkable" problem, which there's so many Yotube videos on now Wish has come out. I said, "Asha feels like just another goofy, perky, semi-awkward, woman protagonist, which is pretty much Disney's stock-character at this point (Mirabel, Anna, Moana, Mulan, etc)." Well, now all of Yotube is talking about it because everyone is tired of it. What's worse, Asha is only awkward and silly in the beginning of the movie. Once she starts singing the Wish song, she suddenly becomes reasonably well-poised and remains so for the most part for the rest of the movie! Um. Where did her character go!? And speaking of characters, the side characters, the seven dwarfs (nobody remembers their names, they're just the diet-7-dwarfs) are mildly amusing but they have barely any reason to be here and barely any character. Stanford made a very good point on the Talking Disney Podcast when he said we don't know any of their wishes in *a movie about people's wishes*. what the heck!

Goat-character is obnoxious. The break-dancing chickens seem like a fun idea, I guess it should've been fun. Why wasn't it fun? If the muppets did break-dancing chickens I'd probably think it's hilarious, here I'm just bored. The song the animals sing about being a star is bland and obnoxious pop. I love pop, good pop not spineless pop with messy lyrics including a deer singing "here I are" instead of "here I am" in order to rhyme with star! In the same song, they recite you the cliche, "You're a star" and then have the nerve to ask, "Did I just blow your mind?" I could go on and on. But I've rambled enough, I'll wrap it up. This movie is boring. It is RIDDLED with plot-holes and character-issues and it doesn't work. This is DISNEY, Chicken Little is years and years in the past they make movies like Wreck it Ralph and Enchanto and Tangled and Frozen and Big Hero 6 now, what happened!? But still, this is the company that made Snow White, and with it began one of the greatest traditions in all of art and entertainment, the animated film. And so, I hope they turn this around. Because if we keep getting movies like this... woof. Disney ain't going to be around much longer. You can't bomb forever.