Umm... I'm fucked up. I didn't know the movie has been screened or that Ian Fleming is alive. I'm fairly sure my TARDIS has a hot English girl behind the controls. It's a tradition.

Uhh, I wasn't talking about James Bond, obviously?

While I liked Spectre, it marks the 3rd Bond film in a row with a mediocre/unimpressive villain for me. I guess the current series will never top Le Chiffre or Mr. White.

Is Christoph Waltz actually capable of an unremarkable role? Or was it more the script's fault?

Aaaaaaaaaaaand here comes the Green Hornet movie to rear its ugly head.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. Who would have thought...

Rewatched Casino Royale after seeing all this Bond talk. It's an alright flick, better than any of the Brosnan ones in my book. Really could have lived without the last half hour though. Movie should have ended with the phone call with M explaining what happened, instead of another action scene happening with bad guys I didn't care too much about. Ending with some mystery about who the deal brokers were would have been fine with me, even if they weren't returned to in later movies.

http://newhive.com/allmymovies/?&no_paging

Maybe after the marathon Shia LaBeouf will realise he doesn't need to be a pretentious arrogant child... Or maybe not.

Saw Circle (2015). The movie at first is kinda vague and a bit stupid but the end... the guys went full retard mode with a plothole that made the movie unwatchable.

Predestination is one of the better one's I've seen recently, from Heinlein's "All You Zombies" short story.

Sarah Snook makes me MELT, Ethan Hawke more or less said the same thing as her co-star.

Yeah, for some reason I didn't really expect the short story to translate well to the screen, but it was ably done all around. Not bad at all.

Speaking of time travel stuff, has anyone seen Time Lapse? Not really travel as such, but it's a solid premise and does some cool things with it. Well-plotted small-budget flick and keeps you interested throughout, I honestly don't really understand its relatively low score of 6.4 on IMDb.

^Eh it was boring for one and wasted a interesting concept with a small bubble scope, lazy editing, I can't remember if there was even a score it was so dull, actors were unconvincing and characters rarely acted rationally. Pretty big factors in something that's trying to win at a "what if" concept. I've seen probably 10 or so low budget sci fi/(semi)time travel films since the boom of Looper and all are atrocious with B actors trying to do A grade roles, usually with a half baked concept desperately trying to be Primer.

So the Prometheus sequel has been given a release date in October 2017. It's called "Alien: Covenant." Also, Neil Blomkamp's sequel to "Aliens" is off. Kind of a bummer, was interested in seeing that.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/11/p ... -synopsis/

Oh, and it's not mentioned there, but Ridley Scott has said he wants there to be three or four Prometheus films.

Was only excited for Neil Blomkamp's sequel. Don't care about Prometheus 2 whatsoever, and that's coming from someone who enjoyed Prometheus at the cinema and didn't go on an essay tirade about plot holes and having everything neatly spelled out.

As fantastic as District 9 was, both Elysium and Chappie effectively nullified any hope I had for a proper Alien/s revival from him.

Haven't seen Chappie as it seems too much like a sob story, same reason I haven't seen 'Her' by Spike Jones (completely). I genuinely thought Elysium was fine, a good triumphing over adversity story, but we've already discussed this and are going around in circles.

hm, I didn't find it boring at all and the small scope was kinda refreshing. *shrugs*

One of these days I should try to finally get through Primer, I guess.

Sorry if these have already been discussed; I lost track of this thread for a while.

Stake Land - Given its 75% Tomato-meter, I actually expected a bit more from this. Maybe I'm a little burned out on vampires and post-apocalyptic drifters, but this felt like a few episodes of The Walking Dead condensed into a 100 minute movie. The main characters have a general idea where they're going, they fight some monsters, they meet other people who sometimes get added to the group, and sometimes are hostile.

But the new friendly characters didn't add much. Danielle Harris felt especially under-used, and the ex-military guy was just there to say "The rest of the planet went to hell, too. Also the President is dead." And the idea that (mild spoiler) has been covered quite thoroughly by TWD. So I found this watchable, but a mild disappointment.

Starry Eyes - This is about an aspiring actress and how far she'll go to get her big break. It might be the best low budget horror movie I've seen in years. I found it disturbing and uncomfortable in a way that horror flicks rarely manage to be these days. By the second half, when (again, mild spoiler) it doesn't feel "cheap" at all, it really seems like the movie was building to that. Great performance by the main character as well. Recommended!

Starry Eyes was great, yeah.

Harbinger Down was pretty patchy and cheap. I really wanted to like it, and it's far from the worst I've seen, but the story was cliche and the cool effects couldn't save the rest of the movie from its boredom. The characters were a little better than the average ones in these movies, but they were pretty annoying at times, too. The setting was cool though it had been done before, and there were some sweet effects, but overall it was passe and not really that exciting.

Still a thousand times better than the 2011 The Thing though.

Finally got around to watching Inside Out. While I kind of with the movie spent less time with exposition and more time showing rather than telling, I still really, really liked it. A movie's done a great job of connecting with the viewer on some emotional level when it's got you thinking about your own life, memories and mental state rather than just tugging at heart strings connected to characters on the screen.

They're making a God's Not Dead 2...

...how? Hopefully they'll get M. Night to write and direct and we can get the perfect most completely unpredictable twist ending ever: God actually *IS* dead!

Next up on my list of big 2015 movies to knock out was Terminator Genysis. I'd heard basically nothing good at all about this movie but considering how important the first and especially second movies were to the formation of my opinions on good action movies, I felt compelled to see what Terminator's like these days.

Well, shit, it turns out I can't completely hate this movie. Yeah, it's got a lot going against it - the casting was pretty miserable for everyone except Arnie and J.K. Simmons, the constant fanservice regurgitation of not only catchphrases but shot-for-shot scenes from previous, better movies, a really dull new Terminator model that didn't really shine at all and came across as a shittier T-1000 until the very final fight - but having actual old Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie again helped a lot. I wish there had been a more visceral chase scene (helicopters are no substitute for trucks) but some of the action was pretty OK. I'd rate this as absolutely better than the miserable Terminator 4 and about on par with or maybe slightly better than T3. I think they should've just ended with this movie though, as there's no way the planned trilogy is going to get better than this and we'll be stuck with the same ho-hum cast throughout.

I agree on all of what you said here. Amazing movie. Glad you liked it, too.

Taken 3 - 2/5 It's dull and makes Taken 2 seem like masterclass in action cinema. Something of brain scratcher that the director from Taken 2 and the writer of all could drop the ball and fail so hard. 'Fugitive meets Taken' sounds like a neat concept but the execution is Bourne on roids (editing every 3 seconds and 20 camera angles every scene) and everything is a leap in logic, from the villain to the chases to the 'braniac' ideas of Bryan Mills. There was zero suspense because Bryan Mills is some unstoppable superhero now and no shits given when the big death happens. Can't think of a reason to recommend this to any Taken fan, stick with 2 if you want a different spin handled far better.


Spectre - 3/5I had a choice between seeing this movie and Hunger Games Catching Mockingbird part 3, suffice to say I went with the former. Had the lowest expectations and even after the awful obnoxious music intro I still came away not hating it, actually enjoyed far more than Skyfall or Rogue Nation. Bautista played a formidable bad guy, Christopher Waltz was sensational and vastly better than Javier Bardem's Joker-light, Craig was boring however and seemed on autopilot minus a couple scenes. I feel it fails to achieve the heights of Casino Royale due to poor editing, poorly structured action scenes and brief moments of awkward/misplaced tone. There was a vastly more interesting movie here if the mystery element had been furthered instead of a brief obstacle.

Spectre - 4/5 I like this movie than previous bond movie. Daniel Craig improve his acting in this movie than skyfall.

I need to sit down and re-watch Terminator 3 because I don't remember much about its quality. The bit I do remember is mostly blah aside from that one awesome chase scene with the crane. It's hard to imagine there being a lamer terminator than the dominatrix from T3 though, and like you said she mostly just comes across as a shittier T-1000. Sure she can make a laser gun, but how is that better than just stealing an assault rifle? I don't remember her doing any of the cool stuff the T-1000 did in T2, such as slipping through prison bars or masquerading as the floor, but then I haven't seen it in a while.

What really hurt it was the backlash of the PG-13 rating, but it I dont think an R wouldve been necessary. The really annoying thing is how hollywood is so greedy that they dont think it made enough money, even though it made a profit. Thats the shitty thing about planning for a trilogy, is that there's too many unanswered questions.

The chase scene with the crane was pretty great, and I love the use of the DVD commentary "wall to wall...stall to stall...we just destroyed this *entire* bathroom" quote that I guess really has very little to do with the actual movie. But yeah it had the one cool chase scene and a couple of other OK action sequences with a tired plot and dull characters/shit casting, which is basically the same with the new one. It was alright to watch but pretty unmemorable overall.

Summary: Watch the first two.

I'm super happy it failed in the eyes of Hollywood, may the franchise kindly stay in the rubbish heap for many decades. I've seen all movies in the cinema minus T1, only Genyshit made me embarrassed to be in attendance, to have initially got my hopes up after the T-800 fight and thought it would have been better than T3.

Alright, I watched San Andreas. I'm typically pretty critical of the whole, "we're still doing ________ in 2015?" line but it very much applies to this movie. We're still doing disaster movies in 2015?

Basically this movie is stuck in the uncanny valley of disaster movie shittiness where it's too outlandish to be believable but too realistic to be cool. Hint: if you have all of your movie earthquakes way inland, a tsunami will not come *toward* California. The destruction stuff looked alright as you could probably imagine, but basically you get some 7.whatever or 8.whatever earthquakes, then Paul Giamatti tells us that these are just the tiny little foreshocks of the real big one or whatever, then when it finally comes it's a 9.6 (so the strongest ever recorded, but only barely) and not even all the buildings fall down or anything. I was hoping to see California fall into the sea or some damn thing but the "big one" wasn't really all that impressive. Coupled with the expected lazy writing and heaps of cheese and this was just pretty meh. You could do worse if you're just looking for a popcorn movie but you could also do way better.

^ San Andreas wasn't too bad, since it kept me entertained throughout, but I agree with its downfalls. A little too cheesy and predictable but I didn't hate it.

Well I didn't really find any good aspects about the movie. It didn't have any good story to tell, none remarkable play. Though I have to admit it has some good Vis. Eff. It just didn't catch me. I just had a normal time watching it and it didn't change nor touch me.

I think this era needs deeper movies, ones that tell you a story, ones that move you, that make you rethink your thinking.

^ Everyone tries to think highly of San Andreas, like trying to find artistic merit in an enema painting.

Watching The Road...very bleak, depressing movie.

I didn't think San Andreas was 10/10 or anything like that, but I did like it despite all the obvious cliches in the movie.

I think it's a really tough thing to make a disaster movie. The concept is good since natural disasters affect every person in the world, but the movies tend to fall short. Maybe less on the emotion and more on the actual disaster itself would work, but even then that's hard to ration.

If you have likable, believable characters played by actors with a good script then I'm fine with some emotion in a disaster film, and in fact prefer it. If not? Then I just want to see all the characters get brutally dismembered by the falling buildings or exploding volcanoes or ripping tornadoes. Afterwards I want the surviving unlikable characters to walk amongst the ruins and human viscera in a daze before getting eaten alive by escaped zoo animals.

Yessss. Completely agree. This is why Roland Emmerich movies reign supreme over most others of its type. I think I've shared this like five times before but I'll do it again, my favorite review ever and written by my semi-longtime semi-friend and one-time trip buddy Mary HK Choi on Roland Emmerich's 2012: http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/flicked-o ... an-suck-it

I've been on a bit of a Kevin Smith kick as of late. In the last week I've re-watched Clerks (not really laugh out loud funny, but it feels incredibly real and it captures the boredom and insanity of working a dirt cheap minimum wage job perfectly), Clerks II (his best movie out of what I've seen, and one of the most consistently funny movies I've ever seen. Every single scene has something hilarious in it), and Red State (lame and boring first half outside of Michael Parks being Michael Parks and the church people doing some rather nasty things with plastic wrap, then it turns into an awesome action movie with John Goodman in the second half before the movie-ruining ending does precisely that), and I watched Chasing Amy for the first time (really doesn't kick into gear until Alyssa's lesbianism is revealed to Holden, then it gets awesome and stays awesome until the end, plus it has Smith's best written speeches ever with Holden and Alyssa in the car and Silent Bob's Amy story). I read the first quarter of his script for Superman Lives too. I wish that movie had gotten made based on what I read.

Also, Tusk looks incredibly fucking stupid, but at least Smith himself acknowledges that it's inherently really stupid and he just made it to say he made it.

I actually like Kevin Smith less as a person after seeing Tusk. Wretched garbage. Red State was really bad too and I didn't think it could get worse, but I was wrong with Tusk, holy shit.

I saw Before Sunrise recently, really great movie. Amazingly captivating when all they do is just talk the entire movie - but you're hooked to the screen. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are fucking outstanding, and the settings are fittingly wistful and fantastical, or they feel that way when the movie is in gear. They talk about big things and small and the grasp on character is really good. There's a poetry about this, and every scene is instantly memorable, coming alive with the extremely varied dialogue and the powerful acting. Just so good.

Also watched Star Wars Episode IV for the first time since I was a kid. Pretty great...just one of those super balanced, enjoyable movies. I found myself really loving the grimy, dirty settings. The chemistry on screen between the three leads was fantastic and vibrant, and the action was light-speed good. It basically had everything.

Your arguement is...



But I get what you are saying. For farks sake, it's just modern cinema. No one even goes to the movies anymore, they just take photos of themselves.