What was the last movie you've seen?

[Markies]

The Man Who Invented Christmas. I still have Christmas

I saw that during Christmas and I loved it. Really restores your faith in the holiday and is perfect if you love Victorian settings as well!

[MrPopo]

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - OH MAN, this movie is every bit as stupid as everyone says it is and I LOVED it. What impressed me was the gothic mansion setting for a large portion of the film! It's like the original Resident Evil and Dino Crisis had a baby and that baby became a movie. If you like dinosaurs and super-dumb horror movies, you'll probably like this. I can't wait for the next one!

See, I found it to be stupid in a really bad way. Like, a series of people making obviously bad decisions and then being surprised when said decisions go bad. They really should have found a different way to go than "Let's remake Lost World". At least Jurassic World's "Let's remake Jurassic Park" had some internal universe logic to it; the original Jurassic Park was sabotaged, and that's why it went bad. If you can prevent the sabotage then theoretically a dinosaur park could work. Then man falls victim to hubris again with the Indominus Rex.

[Pulsar_t]

A Quiet Place

Or as I'd like to call it, Signs 2

ie an overpowering enemy with an obvious Achilles' heel

. The suspense in the second half is pretty decent, but there's not enough to elevate this above being average.

[Ack]

A Quiet Place

Or as I'd like to call it, Signs 2

ie an overpowering enemy with an obvious Achilles' heel

. The suspense in the second half is pretty decent, but there's not enough to elevate this above being average.

I mostly agree with this. I believe I feel it does better with its suspense than you do, but the premise falls apart quickly under scrutiny. I liked it well enough for its human moments.

[fastbilly1]

I preferred A Dwight Place:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1oQ_IC3pds

[REPO Man]

Kamen Rider J, via a Blu-Ray sourced fansub from TV-Nihon (who also did ZO and Shin KR, as well as the reboot duology, to name a few).

[NotLuke]

Don't mention the Brachiasaourus.

[samsonlonghair]

Don't mention the Brachiasaourus.

Oh god, I choked up just a little bit.

[pierrot]

I rectified a couple of situations over the last few weeks. Most recently, I finally watched Perfect Blue. I'm a huge fan of Kon Satoshi, but had never had the gumption to actually watch his first crack at a feature length film. As a really young person, the movie kind of terrified me, from what I had heard of it. That was also well before I really knew who the director was. In finally watching Perfect Blue, it's not at all surprising to me that I never entirely wanted to watch it, before; It's pretty uncomfortable in a number of places. It's almost a bit amazing to me how much lighter, in terms of violence, Kon's later works became. I started to follow him after Sennen Joyuu, and while I hope it's not some form of recency bias, I think Paprika might have been his magnum opus, but despite the general creeping, crawling sensation I got from watching dudes get an ice pick to the eye(s) and/or groin, I did enjoy Perfect Blue. The subject matter just happens to be the most unpleasant of any of Kon's works, but all of his style and nuance is there; Maybe it's even his best work in terms of 'cinematography.'

I've been a little math starved lately, so this next part might be more of a reflection of that than anything, but the editing in Perfect Blue made me start to consider the events in terms of discontinuous functions. The early part of the movie gives relatively continuous sequences, as functions of time, with the typical Heaviside-d nature of film. As events progress, they become more noisy, and possibly random; Some moments start to feel like Dirac delta impulses. I think I was able to work out a decent filter to eliminate a couple of the largest sources of noise (particularly with respect to a very early character). Stepping back a bit from the math bent, the progression of the film really felt like it mirrored Mima's (the "main character") mental state, and while it felt like a convolution of multiple stochastic processes (sorry, more math) in the moment, some reflection gave me little hints of correlation, which is really the most invigorating thing about Kon's work, I feel. Perfect Blue was certainly the most traumatic of his visions that I've had to wade through, though.



I also got around to watching Blade Runner 2049, and I thought it was fairly good, but I was kind of disappointed with how forthcoming the entire film was about a lot of its central mysteries. It felt like 2049 was a lot more candid about its world, and its characters than than the original Blade Runner. Although:

I'm still not totally convinced that Decker actually knows he's a Nexus-6, and isn't just delusionally predisposed to thinking that he is.

Anyway, I was actually a little surprised that Ridley Scott didn't direct 2049, because it felt so similar to the original Blade Runner, from a visual standpoint. The cinematography was definitely well worth the run-time (which I was not expecting from a non-Russian film), but the plot felt just a tad asinine to me. It also felt like there was just one extra scene tacked on at the end, that really had no business being there. I mean, it still would have been a pretty obvious conclusion without it being spelled out so plainly. Really, it's not even the scene; Ryan Gosling had just one too many lines. That seemed a little weird to me. I've been thinking about giving it another spin soon, but it's kind of interesting that Perfect Blue and Blane Runner 2049 have somewhat similar story telling ethos, but Perfect Blue has so much more to give to the audience than 2049 did, I feel.

[REPO Man]

Rewatched Kamen Rider ZO last night.