The only thing better than Wishmaster is Wishmaster 2.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 4.5/5

This is the best of this series of Marvel movies except for The Avengers. I thought this was a great fuckin' action movie; easily a contender for best of the year in the action genre already. The fight scenes were top notch; intense, fast paced and brutal, the way I like them. The characters are good enough for what the story needs, and I really thought all the actors, including Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson who have been background characters in the other films, stepped up and delivered pretty awesome performances. Chris Evans as Captain America, while not an Oscar winner, is about as good as you will ever get for a superhero leading role - he carries the movie really well. What really sealed the deal was the greater care in making the story complex and multi-faceted. It's a typical superhero spy story about government corruption on the surface, but it's layered with commentary on the NSA scandals from last year as well as delving a little deeper into the repercussions of Cap, a 1950s soldier, trying to make it in the 2010s world. It still isn't anything too mind boggling or original, but the filmmakers, writers and everyone obviously put a lot of work into making this so good. It does everything better than your usual film of this kind.

Out of the Furnace - 4.5/5

Very somber, sad film akin to a dark country song - Christian Bale is this guy who gets arrested for accidentally killing someone while drunk driving. When he gets out, he has to save his brother from an underground fighting ring run by a ruthless kingpin. Bale is solid if not amazing as the lead, but the film really shines in the palpable sense of sorrow and revenge it has. These themes bleed from the film like from fresh wounds. It's a very low-key, subtle film that shows a man learning to take responsibility and control his life. As dark as this film got, I was really captivated by it and found it engrossing in that darkness - mostly for the performances of Woody Harrelson as the villain and Casey Affleck as the brother.

You must watch The Raid 2...

I will. I still didn't see the first one. For some reason I assumed they were shitty video game to movie versions.

Barring any surprise, Oculus may get horror movie of the year too - fucking outstandingly good compared to the competition. I was actually freaked the fuck out. Intriguing mystery, well done atmosphere and incredible scares. Really enjoyable flick for its genre. A few minor cliches prevented me from enjoying it quite as much as the director's previous film Absentia, but it's still really, really good. 4.25/5 or 4.5/5, between there.

I've been meaning to see that, actually.

You'll probably like it. It's got the typical white collar family setting, but it does everything so much better than any other movie the last few years. Grisly, violent and brutal as fuck horror.

I actually enjoyed The Lords of Salem quite a bit. I loved the whole imagery and the story wasn't that bad, it reminded me of those 70s pagan/witchery movies. The film had its moments and visually Rob has some kind of talent at evoking old school type of ambience and scenarios. If you happen to like T.L.o.S then watch Witching and Bitching (Las brujas de Zugarramundi) by Alex de la Iglesia.

The last scene with the baseball bat made me bust out laughing. I hate that it only got a one week release.

Just got back from Oculus. That movie was fucking awesome and anybody who even remotely considers themselves a horror fan needs to see it. I haven't been that freaked out by a horror movie in a long time, The Conjuring included.

The Wolf of Wall Street - I liked Boiler Room better.

Apparently you only watched the first hour of... both films? While I too felt almost deja vu at first (the instructional phone sales pitch sections were almost identical, right down to the 'lewd gestures juxtaposed against stoic and somber voices' trope), they veered off in wildly different directions for their second act (Boiler Room just kinda did more of the same, while Wolf-y went all multi-faceted grand-scale epic fused to some of the finest slapstick this side of Vaudeville). And while they did kind of end similarily (as these sorts of "meteoric rise to power, titanic fall from grace" biopics must always always go), it felt so much more earned in Wolf than in the entirely made-up Boiler Room. They're still both quality films, though.

That said, NEITHER movie can compare to Glengarry. But that's kind of an impossible and unfair standard.


Anyway, can we now all start talking about how American Hustle is one of the most overrated and shitty Hollywood movies of the past decade, and how David O. Russell should be fired from writing movies?

Oh I promise you, I sat through all 3 hours and 569 F-bombs in TWOWS. BR was just more emotionally engaging to me; even knowing Wolf was based on a true story, I often had a hard time caring about its main character either way.

Re: David O. Russell, he sort of reminds me of your other favorite director, Darren Aronofsky. Each has that one sports-themed movie I really liked (The Fighter, The Wrestler) but also others I found severely overrated (Black Swan, Silver Linings Playbook).

This weekend's movies:

Inside Llewyn Davis was...pretty good. There's a definite pattern emerging with Coen Brothers movies lately where they seem to pretty much alternate their bigger movies with smaller, lower-key ones, and this fits squarely in that latter category. Other than a few key parts ("Where is his SCROTUM?") there wasn't really a whole lot of really Coen-y stuff in this one, which was strange considering the lower-key Coen movies I just mentioned tend to have lots more of that stuff than their bigger movies, lately. Anyway, the music in this was pretty great, and I think I'd have liked it more if it wasn't so goddamn depressing pretty much the entire time. No light at the end of the tunnel, and the funnier stuff is just sort of a different take on the hopelessness/despair rather than true comic relief.

Snow White and the Huntsman was surprisingly watchable, but I probably made a big mistake watching the extended edition because I definitely started to fade in and out of consciousness during the the movie's very draggy second half. There were some pretty decent fight scenes and generally it looks really good (a hell of a lot better than Tim Burton's heavy-handed camp goth horseshit he slathers every single one of his movies in, and this could've been along the same lines quite easily). There are some glaring plot holes, such as Bella from Twilight supposedly being the fairest one of all and fairer than Charlize fucking Theron, but oh well. Not a great movie, but a lot better than I was expecting based on...well, pretty much everything about it.

.

It's an excellent movie for sure, though I don't see why it would make sense to compare it to The Wolf of Wall Street or vice versa, excepting that both are about fraud in some fashion.

New blog post on the film Prisoners and crime movies in general. Lot of shit I really have been itching to say for a while about these sorts of movies.

I haven't read your post yet but I watched it last month and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Best crime movie in years does sound very apt.

I wanted to say "in a decade," but then I remembered Zodiac came out in '06, so it wouldn't be accurate. Pretty tough choice between the two really.

I don't do snowflakes or stars or number ratings or any of that. I'm not a dude who's seen enough good film to believe he has a real opinion. But I still would like to say that Grand Budapest Hotel is really, really good and I would be sad if people didn't watch it because oh man it is so good.

Sin City 2 trailer:



Hell to the yes.

It looks good but I dunno how will it fare against the first movie. For now my emotions are pretty much "Yay for JGL and nay for Alba".

Yeah, I don't really think it can be any better than the first one, but I've been waiting for years to be able to watch this, so it's fair to say I'm pretty hyped up

Honestly, I'm more distressed about the absence of Clive Owen than about Alba's reappearance, but the movie deals with the arc where Dwight got his face surgery, so..... We'll see what's what.

I watched 47 Ronin today. I must say I enjoyed it quite a bit even though the CGI had its iffy moments. The story revolves around a half-breed warrior on whom the impetus lies to save the honor of his dead master and also to save an entire village from the tyranny of a new ruler. Phew. Anyway, the fight scenes were good and not half-assed. The story made for an engaging watch, it was good enough to last two hours without making me feel weary or distracted. Not too many filler/useless scenes too. All in all, it's a decent samurai-action movie with a bit of fantasy if you like that kinda thing.

I watched Wrong Cops today.

Gravity - 1.5/5 Visually looks magnificent but lacks anything else. I never cared for the character of Ryan and I found it far fetched she never would have have done crisis situation training, as evidenced by her complete emotion breakdown when the inevitable shit hits. George Clooney playing George Clooney was tiresome as you'd expect, and the CGI of people looked rushed and very elastic, which was a little odd considering everything else looked flawless. I simply don't see why this movie received rave reviews and beat the likes of Prisoners for top spot as it's honestly nothing special, there's almost no story and there's long pauses of people simply floating because visuals, not to mention it's vastly predictable. The movie often seems merely an excuse to flaunt the virtual experience of being in space. It's so dull in fact that I'd rate Mission to Mars a better watch.

Well, yeah, it's a visual trip. It's like a roller coaster ride and a pure atmospheric experience. I thought it was fantastic.

Rites of Spring - 2.5/5

Retarded. This had the right idea at first, with nice visuals and a pretty pulp ritual sacrifice story. But mixing that up with a random heist storyline and then shoving them both together awkwardly like two separate movie reels accidentally mixed together wasn't the right route to take. The mystery and intrigue in the first 10-20 minutes was nice, and the film at least tried, but its best efforts weren't good enough.

Gravity I felt was quite good and very mesmerizing to watch, but the hype that had been placed on it was so ridiculously high that it could never reach it. It was a solid A-, but not the gangbusters revolutionary film of the century like a lot of critics said it was. Still, when it comes to super arty movies of that sort, Gravity was certainly leagues above something like Tree of Life if by sole virtue of having a decipherable, legitimate narrative. It wasn't nearly as hopelessly pretentious as that movie either.

When I saw Gravity on DVD, the opening few minutes turned me off so thoroughly I was convinced I'd hate the entire movie. I kept asking "Is this dialogue supposed to be audible? Do I really need to turn my volume up to 80% when most movies are fine at around 50 or 60? Is the first loud sound effect going to make me go deaf?" Then I figured, this must be one of those movies that only works in a theater.

The rest of the movie completely won me over, though. Even that piece of info they revealed about Sandra Bullock's character that's designed to make you root for her even harder - sure it was manipulative, but it worked on me.


I don't think Quentin Dupieux / Mr. Oizo will top Rubber unless he gets another idea as insane as "tire comes to life, kills a bunch of animals and people, and falls in love with a woman."

Homefront - Worked on this one. Actually turned out pretty awesome. The Statham/Franco clash was definitely new and the rest of the cast elevated the fairly traditional. Plus - Frank Grillo is such an awesome scumbag.

Bullet to the Head - Typical latter day Stallone with a "WTF?!?!" type of story. So incredibly stupid at parts. It could have almost been a direct sequel to Cobra. In fact, he almost gives the same speech about America's justice system. The big fight at the end is also an axe fight. Which was....uh....different.

Blood Diamond 3.5/5
This extract from the Empire Magazine review sums up the movie with the same thoughts as me.


The romance brewing between Leo and Connelly felt unnecessary to me and I would have preferred if this was not an action/romance movie. It was obvious from the beginning that something would develop between the two. The movie was placed in a political framework with a strong anti-conflict diamond agenda but I didn't like the way they did this. The whole big budget Hollywood blockbuster theme got a little much at times, particularly during action sequences, and the ending had to wrap up a lot of things quickly and like the Empire review said, just too feel good. It was too cliché, particularly with Leo developing the conscience right at the end and finally putting someone elses needs over his own. The phone-call in particular at the end made the ending feel bloated and too neat. Otherwise it was an excellent movie with great acting and did a good job of representing all the violence that Sierra Leone went through during the civil war, and the main story was an interesting one.

Not sure if Oculus has been brought up yet, but it was fucking awful. No matter how decent the performances of Amy Pond (stripped of her accent, of course, because this is 'MURCA) and Starbuck were, nothing could compensate for the witless, dreary screenplay and completely directionless plot that goes approximately nowhere ever. I'm blinking in disbelief at the apparent 104 minute runtime, because this shit felt at least three times longer.

So why SHOULD you watch this movie? If you like framed narrative/flashback ("non-linear," if you're a ponce) structures that make up for their lack of motivated conflict with hopping between points in time whenever the surroundings start getting a little boring (which is of course constantly), if you distrust institutions which heal people's minds (whoops I mean "program us to not believe in the totally real and not fake paranormal!!!!!111"), and if you like it when films pretend to set up a bunch of semi-cool albeit preposterous 'rules' and then ditch them in order to make the proceedings more "scary."

Utter dogshit. Worst film I've seen this year, and I've seen that Need for Speed movie. Avoid at all costs, and if you need to see it, for gods sakes at least don't pay for it. Don't let Oculus be the next Paranormal Inactivity franchise (because you just fucking know that's exactly what the creators of this film had in mind when they ended it in the most obnoxious way possible).

It's actually a great horror film. The script is very orthodox for the genre, but the execution is where the real genius of it lies. It had a lot of real tension and atmosphere to it, and despite the fact that we've seen the dark lighting in a nice looking house before, it felt fresh, foreboding and even terrifying at times. The surreality and dreamlike nature of what's going on made the flashback stuff work really well. Lots of great, fun scares. It was a genre film, not rising above that at all, but it did everything better than the norm.



What? Karen Gillian's character was saying a lot of that shit, but it doesn't mean the movie was advocating it. A character can say something independent of the overall meaning and point of the film or the film's writer. I mean in the end it's not like the mental institutions lost out or anything - going down the road the main characters took proved to be a horrible idea for them and it would have been better for them to ignore the existence of the paranormal after all.



I don't see how this is supposed to be a strike against the film either?

I'll have to concur. Oculus was pretty damn intense, and I love those kind of movies where the difference between perception and reality are blurred to the point of gibbering paranoid madness. Also, "directionless plot"? What? I never once felt that the film deviated from its course, and it was sprinting to reach the finish line. More than anything, I love the ambiguity of the film--is the mirror actually evil/demonic/whatever and only a handful of people realize it, or are these characters just cat-in-oven insane and the mirror's presence is merely coincidental? The best part is, there's a mountain of evidence for both conclusions. And the symbolism of the eyes in this movie! (Hint: They're not actually glowing white.) They say a person's eyes are the mirrors to their soul, and they took that to heart in Oculus. I love it!

Don't you know? Actors aren't supposed to act!

Yeah, it was a lot of fun that way. Most supernatural horror films try those tricks, but Oculus took it way further and had a ton of fun just amping it up to 11.

The plot in the flashbacks was also just really good. Classic styled horror story. I dunno, I felt the terror those kids did.

Oculus was one of those rare modern horror movies that threw everything at the wall and 95% of it stuck. It was well made, very well acted, freaky as all hell, and downright scary. The few moments of gore are really well done too, especially the extended apple scene from the trailer. It's just a great, genuinely fun horror movie.

As someone mentioned earlier I'd also add that I found American Hustle overrated. Although I wouldn't say it isn't worth a watch at all, but Bale is on auto-pilot for the duration and Amy Adams sticks out like a sore thumb. Jennifer Lawrence is just unconvincing (her acting fine, her character not so), which is funny because she serves most of the heavy-handed comedic moments, which come off as weird and awkward more than funny. I have to admit the guy from The Hangover; Bradley Cooper, delivers the most and one-ups Bale and the cast several times. Basically I found the oddball humour to be Hustle's undoing, if it were played straight I'd have been far more in engrossed and wouldn't have felt so removed from the characters. I'd give it about a 3/5.

Oculus was god damn amazing and darkeninday is afraid of himself. The acting, the pervading dread, the very talky yet snappy nature of the scripts, the bending memory and reality. I loved it.

I don't think I can disagree with anything you said here, because you didn't actually say much of anything at all. "Tension, atmosphere, foreboding, terrifying, sureality, dreamlike, etc..." are useless descriptors if there's nothing concrete to back them up; outside of an ooky soundtrack that did a decent job juxtaposing Psycho-lite chamber strings against bellowing Lustmord-y synths (with the occasional Inception bwaaaaaaaahh because this is 2014, dammit), there was........ none of that. The film jettisoned pretty much every last potentially not-shit thread and character arc for the dubious purpose of "scaring" the audience. This to me is unacceptable. It's cool that you can look past that and simply take its scares at face value as you would a jaunt through haunted house, but for me? Nope. I expect more than parlor tricks from a movie.


The film is a blatant cash-in on the people who watch Ghost Hunters and buy ESP detectors, not at all unlike Paranormal Activity but possibly even more insidious. The super-wrong pop psychology from a licensed professional at the beginning is a great indicator of that; the movie strawmans the scientific world PRIMARILY to make the scares later in the film more real, but at what cost? Pissing me off, that's the cost. Also being ludicrous and laughable in doing so.

And wait a sec, are you trying to imply that had they followed mean old Mr. Science and pretended that the (actually existent) magical mirror ghost didn't exist, they would've been better off? Is that really the take away message? And come to think of it... what the fuck even was the point of this? That scary things are scary? Because that's literally the only thing the movie seemed to be saying, at least to me.


It's a one-trick pony, and that's NOT NECESSARILY a completely terrible thing; the trouble comes when the film tries to give itself some depth. Amy Pond is a strong willed, driven woman who has clearly gone through a lot since the whole, yanno, flashback incident, only for the film to pull out the rug and shout, "Fooled ya! There was no point to any of this after all!!! Here's some jump scares and 'atmosphere' instead of a compelling conclusion where character arcs are tied up and the thesis of the movie is achieved."


Surely you're familiar with the "accent gentrification" (my term; Google won't help you) that's been going on in Hollywood since forever, right? Ever wonder why the acting in Xena and Hercules was so awful? It's because they're told to adopt American accents because otherwise the powers that be are worried audiences will distrust their heroines and heroes. It's yet another contributing factor towards American exceptionalism and I will never not be annoyed by it, especially when it's completely unnecessary like it was here.


And precisely where was it going? Care to elaborate on that?

And the film wasn't ambiguous in the slightest. "Shared delusions" are just as fictional as mirror ghosts, Zel. It would make even LESS sense if there was no actual supernatural presence. And it's "The Eyes are the window to your soul." It's a great--albeit often misunderstood and misquoted--biblical passage. I'm sure someone said mirrors and one point, but it's definitely not the household maxim.

Please realize that most modern ghost movies are pretty much all made by the same production team - usually under the umbrella of Blumhouse Films or associated with it. Paranormal Activity, it's sequels and spinoffs, Sinister, Insidious, Conjuring and now Oculus and Mike Flanagan's upcoming Diver. Then I think there's the James Wan produced Demonic this year too.

It's a nice little cottage industry they've got.

So today I learned that movies set in America either A) should not have actors don fitting accents, or B) should not cast British actors at all, regardless of how well they do the part.