Office Space

1999. The year we learned all about the Phantom Menace, Y2K, and goddamn PC load letters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hF_RhD-xE

Just watched Drive.

Exactly the kind of movie I needed to watch atm, dark yet very "chill".
Great cast, great soundtrack, nice story and photography, and quite graphic on the little violence that it has, kinda got me surprised haha, but didn't detract at all.

Overall really cool movie. :)

Also, yesterday I've watched Frida. It's alright, I mean, Frida itself is great and a particular inspiration, but I think that the movie was too "easy to swallow", too condensed. But it's good overall (and the allusion to her paintings on various scenes and characters was a nice touch).

I´ve just watched "The Magnificent Seven". I went without expectations because I didn´t even knew what the movie was about until I was seated on the movie theatre.

Birdman.

Not sure what to think. The film-making part was great, those really long single-scene takes.

Kinda funny watching it with my wife and mother-in-law. Haha - way too much swearing for the old gal. Not sure they got it. Hell, not sure I completely got it, either. But still I enjoyed it a lot.

I think it's good, but overrated. While very well acted and well made, it's not nearly as smart and great as wants to be, and as most critics make it out to be, And much as I like Michael Keaton, I actually thought it was Edward Norton who really stole the show.

I've just finished the first season of "Billions".

Corruption, lies, hatred, ambiguity, drama and... kinky sex.
Fun for the whole family.

Really good, loving the characters and the story. Giamatti and Lewis killing it, I can't get enough of both.

I'm hooked, season 2 can't come soon enough!

Just watched 47 Ronin

Nice movie, nice adaptation of the tale, a tad "hollywood" in some aspects.
Acting kinda "meh" and Keanu Reeves playing Keanu Reeves as usual. :p
Some nice special effects here and there.

And in all, entertaining. :)

To be fair, the entire thing is about the film industry, so I imagine it has a much deeper meaning for you if you work directly with films, like say, having a job as a film critic.

Just watched Killer Joe.


It's uhhhhh...
...
peculiar.

Maybe I should dive into the genre first to make a proper statement.
Acting was alright though.

Don't know if I recommend.

Ghostbusters, the remake.

Mmmhyeah. Wellwell hm. Was super excited for its awesomeness to crush the sexist twats who had decided it was the worst movie ever as soon as they heard about the cast, but, yeah, I guess the sexist twats will kind of get away with it this time. Beh.

It's... no classic. It's no ghostbusters, men in black, galaxy quest, or mystery men. If it was the first lasers-versus-ghost action comedy ever, well, it would probably have stayed the only one. There would probably have been no ghostbusters franchise based on that film. And, if not just a wink, the post-credit announces a sequel (or a re-remake). Well, I find it a bit optimistic.

I enjoyed a couple of jokes, and the general inversion : it's super sexist-in-reverse, which I found refreshingly feminist-militant, like watching an old james bond movie from the opposite perspective - but that's amusing because it's kind of isolated on the background of mass media history, and it's semi-courageous because we're already in the epoch (aiming at balance and parity) that makes this joyous retaliation thinkable. Beyond this fun aspect, hard to judge it on its own merits : I was expecting the tone and quality of Ghostbusters, this made the badass shooting scenes offputting, made the everybody-is-peter-venkman dialogues awkward, and made the quirky quirks a bit too slapstick. Plus, fart poop lol. Sometimes felt like a ghostbuster remake with jim carrey in the four roles, not the movie I was looking for.

So. Forgettable. Forgotten. Hellboy movie category. And just as for Hellboy, part of my disappointment is due to beeing familiar with the original source's precious tone.

But yeah. It felt like a defeat.

I didn't really liked it and that long single-scene takes are the only interest from this movie IMO. :)

Just re-watched "Oldboy" and "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" back to back. Two of my all time favorites for direction and cinematography. Park Chan-wook is a genius, and I just realized that he made some new films that I have completely missed over the past years.

I've just watched Westworld. It has an interesting premise, but it's just not a very good movie.

It has a pacing problem. It's 90min long and the robots only start attacking in the last third. I know that you might want to save the big conflict for the climax of the movie, but if you don't pace yourself you just end up with very long scenes of people essentially frolicking in Westworld, intercut by a minute long scene of a scientist asking "Is something going wrong?", rinse and repeat for an hour. Even when shit does start to go down it's not much better, because it's just a half hour long chase scene, and not a very exciting one at that. It's like it had a three act structure, with the 1st act setup being going to Westworld, the 3rd act climax being the robots going haywire, but the 2nd act instead of having meaningful conflict is just the main characters enjoying themselves.

Add to that a couple of plot holes or things left unexplained, never bothering to really explore the morality of it all, and a very obnoxious soundtrack, I would consider it quite forgettable and mediocre. I do not recommend it.

It is indeed an interesting premise though, this is the exact type of movie that deserves a remake. I'll watch the first episodes of the TV show now, and I'm curious to see if they do something more interesting with it.

Just watched the first episode of HBO's Westworld. Gotta say, it's much better.

Contrary to the movie, the guests are mostly background, the robots and the staff take center stage. It has a much better build up to the robots malfunctioning, as well as a much better explanation for it happening. The whole affair is a lot more tense. Plus, we see a bit more of the guests treating these very lifelike robots with complete disregard, and how amoral Westworld can be.

Music, to my pleasant surprise, was great. I hate how soundtracks nowadays are just a series of ominous sounds, it's the philosophy of "the soundtrack must not be noticed, it will take people out of the movie", I'm afraid my last post might have looked like I was advocating this. Not at all, the soundtrack in that one particular case just happened to be bad. In the show, they use old timey intrumental versions of modern songs to give it a slight anachronistic feel. The highlight being a shootout with an orchestral version of Rolling Stones' Paint It Black. If you don't know the songs it will just sound nice to you, but if you do, you'll get an extra kick out of it.

I watched Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (based on a book series, 3 books so far) and it was both different and exactly what I expected/wanted. It's about a boy who's looking for the home mentioned in the movie title after his grandpa is murdered by a monster. Peculiar in this context are children who have special abilities which makes them unfit to live in the normal world. When bad people come after them they have to work together to stop them.

It might sound generic, but saying more than that would spoil certain things. The children in miss Peregrine's home work together to defeat the villains in smart and creative ways, which makes the movie better than most in this genre of teenage urban fantasy. Also Samuel L Jackson is great as the main villain, quite funny for a person with such a disturbing history.

The movie has not been all too successful, but better than Ender's Game (sci-fi with kids) which had the same budget and also starred Asa Butterfield. It's uncertain whether there will be a sequel, but luckily the ending brings you closure.