Joined Dec 2005
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Forum Thread
A "Hey I just watched a movie" thread
April 23, 2010 at
06:49 PM
One of the other forums I go to has one of these threads and I've been turned on to some good movies that other regulars just watched. I was kind of surprised not to see a similar thread here (at least not that I could find.) 
I just rewatched "Kinamand" - a cute drama about a Danish plumber who gets involved in an arranged marriage with a Chinese illegal. Good stuff (Netflix instant.)
So what have you folks watched recently?
April 15, 2011, 3:13 am: System Notice: This thread has been automatically renewed after reaching a post limit. Most of its content has been moved to this thread for reference purposes.
I just rewatched "Kinamand" - a cute drama about a Danish plumber who gets involved in an arranged marriage with a Chinese illegal. Good stuff (Netflix instant.)
So what have you folks watched recently?
April 15, 2011, 3:13 am: System Notice: This thread has been automatically renewed after reaching a post limit. Most of its content has been moved to this thread for reference purposes.
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Winter's Bone - 2.5/5 - This movie was like a white trash documentary.
Thor - 3/5 - Not as good as I was expecting. Started good, established Thor as a badass warrior, he gets exiled, loses powers, kinda dull as a mortal, predictable ending.
Conan the Barbarian (2011) - .5/5 - I just could not get into this movie, weak plot and story. Fight, travel, fight, travel, ... I actually watched it twice, because after the first time, I thought to myself, "that movie can't be that bad, can it?" A good example that you just shouldn't remake a classic movie.
Rango - 4/5 - Fun for kids and adults.
Iron Man 2 - 5/5 - Good movie, the big battle at the end was great, especially when they showed a behind the scenes segment showing how the scene was all motion capture and CGI.
Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon - 4.5/5 - Very enjoyable. I also thought the new girlfriend was hotter than Megan Fox.
The Lincoln Lawyer - 2.5/5 - Seems that most of the legal processes I've learned from Matlock re-runs contradict many of the legal processes in this movie.
Captain America - 4.5/5 - I liked it, but I wish they had given Capt. more missions and a different ending. Still got me excited for The Avengers movie.
while spending time with family this weekend, we had a time where all the kids had gone to bed and we wanted to watch something that wasn't animated/made expressly for kids. even though we had 400+ to choose from, someone had gotten War Horse [imdb.com] from RedBox, so we put it in. based on the handful of previews i had seen, it seemed like a pretentious, cheesy, predictable, badly-acted piece of tripe, and it delivered this and more; i think this is the worst full-length feature film i've seen since Dumb and Dumberer, [imdb.com] which i normally cite as the worst actual movie (AKA, not TV/SyFy/old) i've ever seen.
i hate to break into list format, but it will help to save space.
- plot/story: just the cheesiest, most predictable story they could have dreamed up. as soon as someone says the horse can't plow the field, you know the horse is going to plow the field. as soon as the owner makes a special whistle for the horse, you know there's going to be a scene at the end where it's used for dramatic effect. you never once think there's a chance that either the horse or protagonist might die. i was not surprised once during the film.
- accents: with a production budget of $66 million, you'd think they'd spend a few bucks on a couple speech coaches to help the characters get the accents down. they range from simplistic/stereotypical to just plain wrong (one of the Germans ends up sounding far more French).
- dialogue: again, cheesiness galore. nearly every person who comes in contact with the horse calls it something like "magnificent," "miraculous," or "amazing." apparently 99.9% of people living in early 20th century Europe could be brought to the point of fawning by a farm animal. attempts are made at humor from time to time, and all fall flat, especially the wire cutter gag. every supposedly meaningful moment has a stereotypical and groan-inducing "profound" line.
- lighting: in sunny outdoor scenes, the horse's coat is nearly always lit in a way to make it shine. this is fine if you've got a small light for just this and pay attention to how it's used, but they apparently had a huge light bank, and it's pretty distracting. there are shots where the sun is supposedly behind the characters, but the shine light is beaming and making shadows on even the actors' faces, so there are two "primary" sources of light in an outdoor scene, which just looks weird.
- acting: you know you're in trouble when the two best actors in the movie are ones you're supposed to hate (the landlord, the local privileged youth) and they get a total of about fifteen minutes of screen time. the protagonist overacts almost as much as the Romeo in my high school's rendition of Romeo and Juliet; lots of wide eyes, shouting, and looks of awe.
- characters: every character but the father is one-dimensional. the father is both a drunk and an ashamed war hero, but everybody else is exactly who they appear to be at first glance: an idealistic teenager, a fawning mother, a loyal friend, an impudent child, etc. the only character who shows evidence of change is the privileged youth, and that is only mentioned near the end as part of the protagonist getting the horse back, not shown by the character himself.
- sets: all the farm shots are obviously on sound stages; the lighting is overdone, the stone/moss is obviously fake, and the green screen behind it looks very flat. the artillery guns are obviously cheap sheet metal and don't have mud on their tracks, even when being pulled through the mud. the no-man's-land shots are worse than the farm scenes; they don't even bother with a background half the time (smoke), and never once did they approach the realism of the forest scenes in Band of Brothers, which was made more than a decade ago.
- length: at 2:26, it's about half an hour too long. in the long list of people who interact with the horse only to die, the German deserters could have easily been removed and saved a good fifteen minutes without affecting the movie at all. we also could have lost a lot of the scenes at the farm with the girl and her grandfather without losing much. the wire cutting scene was about five minutes longer than it needed to be.
- ending: at the end, i thought something like, "well, i've slogged it through over two hours of crap with this horse, but at least we'll get a touching scene where the son and father come together over their shared wartime experiences and signal the son's passage into manhood." instead, we get a silhouette shot of them shaking hands with no dialogue and a closeup of the horse. WTF.
this is already far too long, but i could go on; my wife and i discussed it both after watching and on the way home, and we kept remembering additional things that sucked. the only way we could justify it is if this was meant as an homage to old movies; obvious sound stages, overly dramatic dialogue, ham acting, and unrealistic plots were fairly normal in the early days of cinema. if this was the case: good job, but it sure makes for an unwatchable movie.rating: 1/10
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
I noticed that the filming locations are all in the USA, a rarity these days as a good chunk of Hollywood movies are filmed in Canada these days. We keep saying the rest of the world is going to start thinking that all of America is covered in pine trees. DH and I have a game going when we watch TV shows or movies these days...spot the buildings/landmarks/geography we know are in Vancouver.
Hey, two Whedons in a row
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On a related note: I just watched the Avengers this weekend. It was great! It sounds like the Hulk had some of the best scenes. Joss Whedon does a great job at everything! Everybody had their own great scenes.
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