Watched the Ultimate cut of The Watchmen (3h35 mins). Not sure if it’s really worth it compared to the Director’s Cut because all it adds is the Tale of the Black Freighter, and it kinda breaks the rhythm of the movie. The Director’s Cut is definitely an improvement compared to the theatre version, though.
Yeah, the Director’s Cut is a great film. It also holds the dubious honor of the first film I have ever vomited while watching. (Carsickness.)
Watchmen gave you carsickness?
No, watching Watchmen on a tiny iPod touch while driving on a windy mountain road gave me carsickness.
Oz the Great and Powerful… im disapointed
Godzilla, the recent one set in NY.
It’s pretty hilarious watching the US military repeatedly blow themselves up trying to kill Godzilla. They’re so wildly incompetent in this movie that it has to be intentional.
the pervert’s guide to cinema
basically it was like watching three david lynch lynch films and five hitchcock films simultaneously, while this corpulent slovenian guy with a beard pokes you in the ear with a phallic object talking about “incestuous energies” and “paternal impotence”, quoting Freud and Lacan and saying “and so on and so on” and sometimes talking about Marx or orgies or hegelian dialectics or “the mortification of the woman” in male sexuality
actually it was that
slavoj zizek fuckyes. fascinating stuff
yah dude owns. they made a sequel called perverts guide to ideology but i havnt managed to internet it yet.
Finally watched the Hunger Games. It feels like it was made specifically for people who have read the book. I didn’t really get to know or care about the characters, the backstory makes no sense, and the ending was unsatisfying. The only thing it did well IMO was making me feel uncomfortable watching kids murder each other.
I saw Taken 2. It was okay, but not particularly attention-grabbing or anything.
Skyfall, finally. It was very good, though a bit dark (poorly lit). I enjoyed it.
I didn’t think that Skyfall was that dark, at least in the literal sense. I could definitely tell what was going on.
If anything, the lighting was probably an artistic choice, so things like the big displays during that skyscraper fight or the burning mansion would stick out.
Finally got around to watching Army of Darkness completely, with a couple of friends.
It was fun.
Oh, I understand why they did it. I just don’t care for it. I like to be able to see the depth of field during action scenes. It only marginally detracts from this movie. I would still give it an 8 or 9 of 10.
Spoilerish discussion of Skyfall below
I think I need to watch Skyfall again. Overall I liked it pretty well, but the first time I saw it, I got a partly negative impression because of Silva. I cringe most times anyone in a movie is described as brilliant, simply because Hollywood as of late has an irritating inability to actually write a brilliant character, so they simply make them nigh omnipotent, or they make their plans hinge on incredible luck. So I was quick to label Silva as one of these villains, but after I thought about it a while I began to wonder if maybe his plan was better thought out than I initially believed, and maybe it only required a little bit of a gamble and just a lot of good timing.
I was also thrown off guard a bit by what’s-her-face. Silva’s girl. I was expecting her at first to be the love interest for the film but then…well you know. That was unexpected for me. I guess in retrospect, after Casino Royale, it should be obvious that Bond is never going to be seriously attached to a girl again, but still. It felt to me like that was going somewhere other than that.
The one part I really liked was when Bond goes to Shanghai. The music during that scene is very reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid, and I thought it was a cool piece to put in a Bond movie.
Just saw “Oz: The Great and Powerful” today.
Spoilers and plot points in the near-invisible text.
At first, James Franco as the eponymous character was, at first grating and completely unlikeable to me, but by the time that [COLOR=’#151515’]he came to “China Town” to help fix the little china doll, he started to grow on me. Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz as [COLOR=’#151515’]the Wicked Witches of the West and East, respectively, worked very well in my opinion until [COLOR=’#151515’]Mila Kunis’s character becomes the Wicked Witch of the West in full get-up and green skin. They were trying to emulate the Judy Garland version with the beginning in full-frame 4:3 aspect ratio and starting off in sepia tones before transitioning to full color and widescreen, and they picked someone like Kunis to be the WWotW. Her face is just the wrong shape for the Margaret Hamilton version of the WWotW. Further, whenever the characters would [COLOR=’#151515’]interact with the china doll such as picking her up, it’s evident that the actors were not actually holding her but that the special effect was added later; the actors’ fingers didn’t quite interact with the doll as she moved. She was still impressive, though.
The positives of the film, however, were that the [COLOR=’#151515’]flying monkeys, really baboons, were quite vicious and scary, I loved how they brought back the Munchkins and the Winkie guards. I absolutely adored Tony Cox’s Knuck! And the finale with the Wizard of Oz being “killed” and then his resurrection as the giant floating head…wow.
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The subway escape relied too much on luck. Bond should have shot him the moment he reached for his radio, and what are the chances of a train car coming through at that very moment? Other than that, well planned could be made an argument for (and poorly planned sentence on my part 
).
^ Yeah. The crux of Silva’s plan was that not only would his entire jail cell be controlled electronically, but that one of the world’s foremost technical geniuses (Q) would be so retarded as to hook Silva’s laptop directly into MI6’s intranet.
You could explain it as being the fault of the writers, but still…
The point was that Q never expected that. He wasn’t retarded, he was arrogant.
Then that raises the question of how Silva knew the new Q, or at least knew enough about his psychology to exploit his arrogance.