Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Spoiler

This is just how to the starwars universe is, its not just the film, its been like this within the lure for thousands of years.

 

Spoiler

I think the only "massive" change is the Star-Killer. That seems to be a technological marvel. But yeah, largely the tech seems the same. I'm wondering if that was a stylistic choice on the part of the creators to keep the 'feel' the same. Some stuff changed though, X-Wings for example, and the radar disk on the Falcon was square not circular, so maybe that had some upgrades..

 

Over the Garden Wall 10/10
The perfect miniseries, together about the length of a film (~110 minutes). Perfect mood, look, sound, animation, story, length, humour and voice acting (especially Samuel Ramey's deep voice for the Beast is spot on). Can't think of a single thing I didn't like.
It's interesting how well naive absurd humour and a dark, weird, supernatural atmosphere with a few horror elements work together. It also reminded me of another animated series I really liked, Mushishi, but this is much more coherent and consistent in tone.
Will definitely watch again.

 

Spoiler

The Falcon has a square dish because the round one got smashed off inside Death Star 2.

On a more prosaic note 30 years ago the primary combat aircraft of the USAF were the F-15 C/D and the F-16 A/B. Now it's the F-15 C/D/E and the F-16 C/D with a small number of F-22 As. It's one of the more plausible things to me that thirty years after Return of the Jedi both sides would be using the same fighters but with major upgrades.

I'm hoping for a super A-Wing to appear...

 

Star Wars VII - 8/10

Well, fuq it, everyone else has had a say..

I'm a fan of the series - well, some of it - and made my kids sit through IV, V and VI over the last few days before taking them to the cinema to see VII this afternoon.

I really enjoyed it. It deserves better than the dreaded 7/10 but isn't quite good enough for a 9/10. Some of the bad guys were cardboard cutouts and the pacing is all over the place, but I liked the new leads and I thought it was in keeping with the feel and look of IV and V (I wasn't hugely enamoured with Return of the Jedi).

Worth watching, even if you're not heavily invested in the franchise.

Also, I saw the trailer for the new Star Trek film. It looks sh!t, IMO.

 

I saw it again today and its really pleasing to come back to my original thoughts on it posted minutes after first seeing it and find I had done the film justice in acknowledging the need to give it time.

I'm a massive fan of the Star Wars story (films specifically, never given much time to the EU etc) and now I know where this film and the new characters go I liked it so much more this time round. Bar a couple of lines of dialogue I'm not entirely comfortable with, Rey is nigh on perfect as a new character to lead Star Wars through this new trilogy. I love her like my own friend/sister/daughter already.

For someone as heavily invested in the Star Wars story as me, I never expected this new generation could live up to what has gone before, but now I'm beginning to allow myself to consider that perhaps it could.

I think if you focus on the meta plot of good fighting evil then there's not much to get excited about cos it is more or less just a retelling of the original, but if instead you focus on the characters and the cross-generational saga then, depending on how the next film carries things forward, The Force Awakens could turn out to be a very satisfactory re-entry point, and once you know what happens in the film, every subsequent viewing is shrouded in emotional gravitas, for me at least, in a way that no other film in history can touch.

 

Carry On Cabby......channel 5

All the usual carry on team.......still funny.

 

Wreck-it Ralph - ▲ ▲ ▼ ▼ ◀ ▶ ◀ ▶ B A /10

 

I managed to go to the cinema for the first time in four years.
Since I have a "home-cinema" I hadn't been.

Peanuts 3D 7/10

Quite amusing, a "normal" Charlie Brown story with great little bits of Snoopy and Woodstock in between.
-1 for useless 3D

 

Child 44 7/8
A heavy, slow film. still i enjoyed watching it, well acted.
A bit strange at the end, but this is explained in the book (ot the wikipedia brief)
They appearently scrapped a scene or two in the beginning but forgot to take out the references in the end.

Pixels 6/8

We've talked about going into a movie with high expectations and then beeing disappointed, here it was the other way round.
I went in expecting pure rubbish, and found myself well entertained.
Adam Sandler movies are usually well filled with "cringeworthy-naked butt-crap-ooooh missus" moments, but this one shows him from his good side.
Is there anything believable? Absolutely not. Was it fun anyway, yes!

Probably rated it too high anyway

Homesman 5/10
Another heavy, dark one.
Well acted, but I couldn't really make sense of the story

Lilyhammer Season one 7/10
An entertaining little gem, fast paced with a lot of humour.
Looking forward for the next season.

Notable: 8 50 minute episodes on ONE bluray, don't know how they managed but wow!

 

Star Wars VII
8/10
Not going into details about this at all (too many serious SW fans in the world, which I am not particularly), but it was good fun.

Scream Queens Season 1
Not-really-a-film-but-still-7/10
The humour and amount of fan service in this series is spot on, if you ask me... though there were one or two episodes that could be culled without missing anything at all.
I'd say this is a good watch if you're into the old slasher films and have some time to kill.

 

I have watched Star Wars Despecialized edition. Did any of you remember Star Wars the way it was before the 1997 Special Edition Sabotage? I do, how many times did I watched 'The Return of the Jedi' on my Betamax player? At least twice a week (Not even kidding). I remember it without the garbage CGI, without Sarlacc added tentacles, I remember it the way Lucas don't want you to remember it. The Despecialized Edition is how 1997 Special Edition should have been, what Lucas failed to do.

 

The Martian

8/10

I can't help feeling I've seen this film before, only in less detail and a lower budget- that was the first thing that sprang to my mind, Mission to Mars, and the parallels are... too many. That said, this was a great film with a decent run time, though there were plenty of clichés and lots of predictable moments caused by.. clichéd dialogue and story telling. The rescue scene again borrowed heavily from Mission to Mars, only with a happier outcome, and better mathematics ( inertia- something the MTM writers forgot about in their version of that scene ) but still equally improbable.

Definitely worth seeing though- I haven't read the book but I am aware that it is even more sciencey, books rarely translate well to film if you want to keep in the same level of detail.

Why couldn't Prometheus had been this good and enjoyable, damn you Ridley Scott...

 

This is really annoying!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/35233612

 

ARGH! Would like to say they should pay for all their Unlimited card holders to see it somewhere else, but that'd be hoping/wishing for too much...

 

Exactly!! I was telling the Mrs we'd have to watch Mission to Mars and then by end of this I said we'd actually just watched it!

I did really enjoy the Martian a lot and made me want to rewatch Mission to Mars now

 

The November Man 5/10

Huh? A 2014 spy-actionthriller with Pierce Brosnan that I've never heared of? Why?
Well it's utterly mediocre, that's probably why.
Not that anything is particularly bad, but nothing is outstanding either.

 

Totally agree the chopped bits at the beginning ruin the flow of an otherwise good film, Tom Hardy has never been a favourite actor of mine but he played the lead well and Gary Oldman looked perfect as a soviet General.
Overall its a solid 8/10 would have been higher if they had included the extra scenes at the start.

 

funny you should say that http://dejareviewer.com/2015/10/20/movie-matchups-the-martian-vs-mission-to-mars/

 

Since all has been done recently, i've been able to watch a few movies recently, some old and some new:

Falling Down 7/10

I never saw this movie until now and I quite like it. At first it came across like a black comedy, a man who's being pushed a bit too far. But as the plot progresses, it becomes much darker and you see that it becomes a man who is alienated by the social conventions; then it becomes a different story entirely. It tells you a lot and it makes you think. You start to realise that it's not a good guy versus a bad guy - it's about how there are no real good guys and bad guys, everybody's version of justice is different.

The characters are a little bland. Michael Douglas is a fantastic lead and he plays his character really well, but it's one of those cases where the supporting cast just doesn't measure up as well. Robert Duvall plays the good guy detective but he doesn't deliver it all that well - I can see the script is probably the problem. It's good, but it descends into melodrama slightly with a whole damsel in distress thing. The pace of the whole film is all over the place as well.

Avengers: Age of Ultron 6/10

I thought it was okay.

It's big and it's loud and it has superb CGI effects. The interaction between the team can be light-hearted and it makes for a believable relationship these superheroes are having. I'm a massive fan of James Spader and his voice just makes the sinister, satirical, sarcastic Ultron.

My problem is that it is shallow. There's no suspense, no real emotion or depth in it. Nobody believes for a moment that any of the main characters are in any danger, they're the good guys, how could they? It doesn't really surprise you in anyway. I liked the film as a fan of superhero movies and the acting was relatively decent, but I didn't find it anything more than a mindless action movie with some nice effects.

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I've also been watching some of the Winter 2016 anime that have just started and one of them jumps out at me, I can see it having quite the following, if anyone is into anime here - Boku dake ga Inai Machi. It's about a highschool student and aspiring artist who has an ability to relive scenes a few minutes into the past, in an attempt to change them - think the butterfly effect without the selfishness. He can feel something bad happening and then attempts to change it; a car accident, a kidnapping, etc. It's started off really well and it translates nicely from the manga.