Rewatched Jurassic Park (it’s roughly its 30th anniversary) … that shit holds up well, better than I expected and I’m a fan. I don’t think I’d watched it all the way through for quite a long time, but I saw it in the cinema as a kid, it thrilled me then and was awesome again now.
Sometimes you forget how “woke” some older mainstream media is/was. Like there’s vegetarianism, anti-capitalism, feminism “humanity is the real monster” and environmentalism in that film. And cool dinosaurs too.
Yeah, I watched that a while ago, and damn the CGI contractors must have been abused and underpaid or something. Some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in years. Stuff from 15-20 years ago was more convincing. I don’t blame the artists at all, I doubt they would choose to release something like that if they had any real power over their work.
I actually laughed out loud at the Babies in Danger^tm scene. I'm not sure it was supposed to be THAT funny, but the CGI was so awful you couldn't NOT laugh at it.
I think they blew the budget on making the two Ezra's look decent.
But then Blue Beetle comes in with 1/2 the budget and blows the roof off the joint.
There were parts of it that were well done. Having the two Barry's, one older, one younger, was absolutely believable. Later adding Dark Flash also worked. Michael Keaton Batman was fantastic. As you say, Supergirl was excellent.
But the only way to enjoy it is to look past the really awful VFX shots. I give them total props for putting in George Reeves, Adam West, Christopher Reeve, Helen Slater, and freakin' Nicholas Cage fighting a giant spider... but man... the shots were plastic. Some kid could have done a better job with action figures.
Even if you want to argue that the Time Bubble/Cross Universe stuff is supposed to look distorted, that still doesn't excuse the Babies in Danger^TM sequence.
I just dived into some Linklater too! I watched Before Sunrise and Me and Orson Welles. I love Linklater's portrayals of youthful optimism. They make me excited for the future.
I watched Amsterdam, a 2022 comedy/mystery set in the 1930s, starring Margot Robbie and Christian Bale and a big cast of others including Mike Myers, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro and Chris Rock.
It is loosely based on The Business Plot, an actual political conspiracy in the US in the 1930s. I'd never heard of this before.
It was an interesting and 'different than the usual' type of movie. A lot of the focus was on the witty dialogue between characters. Pretty nice movie visually too. Overall I enjoyed it and would give it about 7/10.
Babylon is infinitely better and better executed though they might seem similar. I was put off by the trailer for Babylon just seeming like a big ensemble cast and 1920s extravagance movie but I loved it and showed how shallow Amsterdam was IMO.
Watched "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)". An artist’s tough life growing up in rural American in the 50s, and her raise to fame living in New York. Her life story is told as back drop to her fight to have the Sacklers' (family behind the marketing of Oxycodone as a "safe" drug and resulting opioid epidemic) name removed from Art galleries around the world.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It certainly stayed true to its roots, maybe too much so (it took a long time to get where it was going, just like most late 60s movies). I would've said the movie was meandering and meh but the last 10 minutes were my favorite 10 minutes in any movie this year.
I just finished Destination Wedding and I should've hated it. I thought it was going to be a sunny, goofy romcom but instead it was like the poor man's Woody Allen. Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder were playing way far against type, seemingly miscast. But I enjoyed seeing them in such different roles playing relentlessly miserable weirdos. Their sex scene was the best at being the worst.
It’s a satire about a young artist coming to terms with major societal changes after a semi-benevolent alien invasion. And do yourself a favor: don’t watch the trailers. Drop into this one cold.
I finally watched Freeway 2: Confessions of Trickbaby. I loved it even though its pretty offensive for also being super progressive for its time. Totally not what I ever expected either.
It's a big deal to finally watch it because it was one of those VHS covers I would see at the rental store growing up and I was dying to see it but there was no way my mom was going to let me watch a movie that was rated R. So it was always a mystery what the movie was for a long time and I really only knew that it had Natasha Lyonne in it who at the time, I had a crush on.