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  1. #2806
    j7wild Guest

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    The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036868/





    After the end of World War II, 3 U.S. servicemen from the same small town return home to find irreparably changes in the families and loved ones they left behind 3-4 years prior.

    There is Fred: a U.S. Army Air Corps B-17 Bombardier and decorated Captain who is married to Marie, a woman who no longer loves him. She has also become a very materialistic gold digger while working in shady night clubs during the years of his absence.

    Fred also can't find a decent paying job and he is forced to go back to his low paying pre-war time job of soda jerk:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_jerk

    which causes financial difficulties and disagreement with his wife who wants to go out every night to nice restaurants and night clubs and party all night.

    There is Homer: a U.S. Navy Petty Officer. He is in love with his childhood friend and neighbor Wilma and she is in love with him too. He told her he will marry her when he returns home after the war but that was before he lost both hands from burns suffered when his ship was sunk in the Pacific, and now uses mechanical hook prostheses. She still wants to marry him no matter what but he is pushing her away: he doesn't want her to end up with him - a disabled helpless man.

    There is Al: a U.S. Army platoon Sergeant and a banker by trade before the war. After returning home, he is offered the job of Vice President in charge of small loans by his old employer, a bank President who doesn't want his bank to make G.I. Bills loans to veterans.

    Al's 20's something daughter Peggy is also in love with the still married Fred.

    Al doesn't approve because no young woman her age should go around making a man divorce his wife even if they no longer love each other.

    Clocking in at almost 3 hours, this is a very moving story about how not all of the 16 plus million American men and women who served in World War II returned home to happy lives after the war.

    The movie was quite controversial at the time for 2 reasons:

    1. it didn’t fit the Government and Media narrative of the victorious heroes coming home from the war to continue life the American way, happily ever after;

    and

    2. it was also one of the first times a Hollywood movie dealt emotionally and deeply with what was then the controversial and forbidden topic of Divorce.

    Intelligently written with smart dialogues, strong characters and many tear jerking scenes, this film won an Academy Awards Oscar for Best Picture of 1947.

    It also won 7 other Oscars including Best Director, Best Actor and a never before done nor repeated since:

    2 Oscars for Best Supporting Role and Honorary Award to Harold Russell, the only actor to have received two Academy Awards for the same performance.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Russell

    Russell is a real life World War 2 veteran who lost both of his hands in a training accident and had them replaced with hooks.

    This film was also the highest grossing film of the time since 1939's Gone With The Wind, selling over 55 million tickets in the USA and over 20 million tickets in the UK and other countries, which equaled to a gross of over $44,309,982.

    Adjusted by inflation, that will be the equivalent of over $573,618,848 today and it still remains one of the top 100 grossing films in U.S. history.

    5/5

  2. #2807
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    A Simple Favor (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7040874/

    A good thriller is like courting. When you court someone, you don't want to be direct and you want to go slow. Over a period of time, you lay suble clues, visual hints, while being mysterious at the same time to the person you are longing for and when the moment is right, you make the big reveal, the big proposal.

    Same for a good thriller: the hidden clues, the visual hints, the red herrings, the twists, the back stories, slowly building up a crescendo until it's the right moment for the big reveal - these are all techniques that have been used very effectively by a few directors in some of the best thrillers ever filmed on celluloid - directors like Orson Welles, Carol Reed, Alfred Hitchcock and John Dahl.

    The problem with A Simple Favor is its director Paul Feig and the film's very thin script.

    He is previously known for several comedies - most of them starring Melissa McCarthy, and Feif is definitely not Welles, Reed, Hitchcock or Dahl.

    I am sure Feig's intentions were good when he made this movie about the mysterious Emily (played by the always stunning and perfect looking Blake Lively) who befriends Stephanie (played by the always cute Anna Kendrick), the mother of one of her grade school son's classmate.

    One day Emily asks Stephanie to do what she has always done: pick up her son at school because she is tied up at work in a work emergency.

    That was the last time Stephanie hears from Emily and after that, everyone wants to know where Emily disappeared to.

    The movie is divided into 3 acts.

    In the first act there is a bit of Hitchcockesque going for it but that tension and mystery is constantly interrupted by Stephanie's character, who as a single mom, spends a great deal of time on a parenting Vlog and while doing so, she updates her viewers on the ongoing investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Emily, who is her best friend and also the only friend she ever had.

    The second act, the big mystery into Emily's disappearance is revealed and usually if I am watching a well made thriller, I would had said:

    "WOW! I didn't see that coming!!"

    But unfortunately this is not a well made thriller:

    there were no hidden clues, no visual hints, no red herrings, no twists, no back stories, no slowly building tension and crescendo.

    So no, I didn't say that.

    Instead I said:

    "Man! What the Heck is this? This makes not one bit of damn sense!"

    Then during the final act, you pretty much don't even care anymore since you have already been disappointed by the lackluster content of the big reveal.

    Lively tries to be a Femme Fatale likes Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammel in Basic Instict, Linda Fiorentino's Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction, Lara Flynn Boyle's Suzanne in Red Rock West, but she fails to be any of them and in her defense, she is not given much of a very good scripted character to begin with.

    Kendrick tries to be the naive single mom who truly wants to know the whereabouts of her so called best friend but she is just too cute to be convincing.

    As a dark comedy, this movie fails.

    As a suspense thriller, this movie fails.

    Even as a comedy which the director has had previous commercial success with the genre, it fails.

    The only thing this movie had going for it are the pretty artistic posters,



    and several well made trailers:

    https://www.movie-list.com/forum/showthread.php?34970

    I also want to know why so many critics gave this movie so many favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes that it earned an 85% Fresh Tomato rating:

    https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_s...favor/reviews/

    Were everyone of them who wrote a positive review drunk or high or brain dead on the days they wrote them?

    1.5/5

  3. #2808
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs up

    Halloween (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1502407/





    In 1978, a little independent horror film made with a measly budget of roughly $300,000-325,000 by an unknown filmmaker named John Carpenter, went on to become one of the most successful independent films of all times.

    It sold over 30 million tickets and earned over $70 million worldwide in that year alone - the equivalent of over $271 million today.

    It made its main star Jamie Lee Curtis, at the time an unknown actress, a household name.

    Curtis will subsequently appear in a Halloween sequel in 1981 along with roles in several others horror films - making her the new scream queen of the 80's.

    Halloween also gave a rebirth to the slasher films: a genre first gained commercial success in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho.

    The success of Halloween resulted in an almost never ending slew of slasher films being produced and released between 1979 and the mid 90's including several commercially successful franchises like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Child's Play and Scream.

    Halloween also gained its own film franchise: it was soon followed by 7 sequels and 2 reboots but none of them were as satifying as the original.

    Now 40 years later, the original producer of the 1978 film, John Carpenter, returns to produce a direct sequel to the original Halloween that will forget anything and everything that happened in the 7 sequels.

    The result is a movie that is much better, superior and more satisfactory than any of the 7 sequels.

    It's good to see Jamie Lee Curtis again as Laurie Strode confronting Michael Myers but this time she is no longer his helpless victim:

    40 years of women empowerment and feminism and preparation has made her a very tough cookie.

    There are many nodes and "Easter Eggs" to the original film and several twists and revelations which I won't give away.

    Is this closure for Laurie Strode?

    Is this the end of Michael Myers?

    Before this film was released, John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis has said this was their final Halloween film and they will never make another one but you know what folks say:

    Never Say Never!!

    After all, not only did this movie still left a couple of 40 years old questions unanswered;

    the ambiguous ending also created some new questions.

    4.5/5

  4. #2809
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    The Domino Principle (1977) aka The Domino Killings

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075950/





    Tucker is a maximum security inmate with still 15 years left to serve on his murder conviction sentence.

    While still in prison, one day he is called to the prison Warden's office where he is approached by outsiders, identifying themselves only as being members of "The Organization", to do a job in exchange for his guaranteed freedom, a new identity and promise that he will be reunited with his wife he hadn't seen in 15 years.

    It's never mentioned specifically but we can all surmise "The Organization" is a shadowy agency like the CIA or some rogue Government assassination group.

    The job he is asked to do is never mentioned but it's clear they want Tucker to assassinate someone.

    The movie runs 1 hour and 41 minutes including opening and ending credits.

    It starts out well with the interview of Tucker by "The Organization", the subsequent discussion of their offer although rather vague and sketchy, then the set up but then once he was out of prison, it starts to change the pacing and fall apart:

    at 1 hour and 18 minutes into the movie, not only nothing has happened, the job they want him to do is not even talked about in detail.

    This is supposed to be a paranoia filled political conspiracy thriller, one of the many movies with the same topic that were made and released by Hollywood in the 70's like Klute (1971), Executive Action (1973), The Domino Killings (1977), Winter Kills (1979), The Conversation (1974), Marathon Man (1976), The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President's Men (1976).

    Yet there is nothing thrilling, paranoid, tense, nor suspenseful about this movie.

    Supposedly there were over 3 hours of footage that was filmed and when the final cut was put together, the studio balked at its length and made director Stanley Kramer excise over 1 1/4 hour of it - thus resulting in a mess that makes no sense and containing no excitement whatsoever.

    This movie is also Kramer's biggest financial and commercial failure and his penultimate film. It's a shame a great director such as Kramer who gave us epic cinema classics like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), The Defiant Ones (1958), Ship of Fools (1965), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), On the Beach (1959) and Inherit the Wind (1960) had to end his career with such a low point movie such as this one.

    It's also been reported that Gene Hackman, who had also admitted to it himself, made this movie for money.

    At the time he was offered other roles in movies such as "Jaws" , " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ", " Close Encounters of the Third Kind ", "Apocalypse Now" and " March or Die".

    Hackman agreed to appear in this film instead because he was offered a bigger paycheck if he accepted the role for this film.

    Finally it's a shame that this movie turned out the way it did because it had a cast taht featured some of the more notable stars of the time: Richard Widmark, Mickey Rooney, Edward Albert, Eli Wallach, Candice Bergen, Ken Swofford and even the actress who is best known for the voice of Federation Starship U.S.S. Enterprise computer.

    I really wanted to like this movie and Gene Hackman is a great actor and he is also one of my favorite but unfortunately there was nothing in the movie that gave me reason to like it or enjoy it and the blame is not on Hackman or on the rest of the cast or even on the director:

    they did a hell of a job and gave it their all.

    The blame for this unfortunate cinematography failure falls only on the studio.


    1/5

  5. #2810
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs up

    Incredibles 2 (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3606756/



    14 years ago, a Pixar animated movie named The Incredibles defied all expectations and odds and pre-release criticism by earning critical accolades, breaking box office records and making the other studios' animated departments stand up and take notice.

    The movies watching public wanted more. The critics wanted more. The studio wanted more. They all kept asking for an Incredibles sequel.

    The film's director Brad Bird said he will do a sequel when he felt the moment is right and not one minute sooner.

    After 14 years of unabated anticipation, the world has finally gotten its The Incredibles sequel and what a sequel it is.

    Where most sequels today have failed to capitalize on the quality and freshness and originality and success and discovery of the original films it follows, sequels such as Taken II, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Independence Day: Resurgence, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Batman v. Superman, Thor: The Dark World. The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Incredibles II has surpassed the original.

    It's exciting, fun, family oriented and heart warming.

    To say any more is to give the movie away which I won't.

    I do want to say that the film is rated PG:

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3606756/parentalguide

    there are some parts that I don't think are completely suitable for children ages up to 13 but those parts may just fly over the head of the youngest of those children without them noticing or comprehending what is going on and the older of those children may just shrug it off and have a couple of chuckles about it.

    5/5

    p.s.

    How well was this sequel received by audiences?

    It was released about 5 months ago in June and it has already earned a combined domestic and worldwide box office of $1.235 billion !!

    Last edited by j7wild; 11-02-2018 at 04:05 PM.

  6. #2811
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs up

    Peppermint (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6850820/



    One of the better "Revenge/Vigilante" movie in the same league as Kill Bill, Death Wish 1974, Taxi Driver, Taken and John Wick.

    Jennifer Garner holds up her own as an action heroine out for revenge after members of the Mexican cartel murders her daughter and husband.

    The movie dwells a bit on the right and on the wrong part and whether she has the right to take the law in her own hand.

    Fortunately it doesn't get too preachy.

    The ending makes me thing this may become a movie Franchise for Jennifer Garner - which by the way this film is from the same director who gave us Taken.

    4/5

  7. #2812
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    Venom (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270797/



    If you search online for the definition of Hot Mess

    You will get many results but mainly, you will get several similar results including these two:

    1. ...refers to when a "person's appearance is in a state of total disarray while still maintaining an undeniable attractiveness & allure."

    Hot messes' are appealing for a variety of reasons, most notably because they're generally unexpected, capricious, & agonizingly provocative. Additionally, numerous contingent factors make duplication rare and continual repetition virtually impossible.

    No one set of guidelines can perpetually determine what distinguishes a "hot mess" from an above-average train wreck. Regardless of the circumstances, you know it when you see it; because they are typically conspicuous, and obviously they are always awesome."...

    2. ...A disheveled or unbalanced person, particularly one who is nevertheless — or therefore — attractive...

    That is exactly what Venom, the latest film based on yet another Marvel Comic is, a:

    Hot Mess

    Venom is also the first film to be produced by Sony under the Sony's Marvel Universe, not part of the long running 20 films (and counting) Marvel Cinematic Universe produced by Marvel studios.

    Originally Sony wanted to make this an R rated film and decided to make it a PG-13 film for the obvious reason:

    it will sell more tickets at the box office.

    The result is a movie that should be dark horror film but it doesn't work because it had to meet PG-13 rating guidelines.

    Tom Hardy and Michelle Williams do their best with their roles but for the entire film, they are mostly just window dressing.

    The ongoing plot with Carlton Drake, a multi-billionaire modeled after Elon Musk (?), who has his own spaceships that will make NASA green with envy is just absurd and unbelievable.

    For a movie with a nearly $116 million dollars budget, the CGI looks like it was made in the 90's using computers before computers had Windows and Pentium and AMD and ATI and 3dfx.

    This movie feels like one of those horror B-movies from the 90's.

    It's not fun, it's not exciting, it's not suspenseful, it's not thrilling.

    The only reason it's doing so well at the box office is

    1. because it's another Marvel comics based movie so naturally everyone from age 5 to 30 will run to see it

    and

    2. because it's a

    Hot Mess

    I can't recommend this movie one bit.

    1/5

  8. #2813
    Join Date
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    823M and still counting, not bad for a hot mess IMO.



    I can't see through walls, but I can kick your ass.

  9. #2814
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    Hunter Killer (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1846589/





    Gerard Butler saves the same U.S. President twice in Olympus Has Fallen and then in London Has Fallen.

    Next he will save the U.S. President again in Angel Has Fallen in August 2019.

    But in the meantime, Butler has decided to join the U.S. Navy and save the Russian Federation President while at the same time prevent the USA and Russia from slugging it out in a full scale World War III.

    This movie feels like a hybrid of between The Hunt For Red October, Crimson Tide and just about every recent actioners involving Navy Seals and Special Forces - from Act of Valor to The Expendable series.

    But don't worry, this film boasts a total of 27 producers, co-producers and executive producers behind it, one of them being Butler himself, so you know with all that producing talent, it got to be good, right?

    NOPE!

    The acting is laughable, the story is ludicrous and the action sequences are... well, let's just say that I've seen better action sequences in those cut scenes that are shown in between levels of many X-Box and Playstation FPS games.

    2/5

  10. #2815
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6628394/





    The El Royale hotel, located off the beaten path, built right on the California/Nevada border with its main lobby, lounge and restaurant spanning each side of both States and with rooms located in both Nevada and California, was during its heyday in the 1950's the go to place for the wealthy and powerful and famous.

    The movie opens in 1959 with one solitary man checking into one of El Royale's rooms.

    Most folks when they first walk into a hotel room, they make sure that there are plenty of towels, that the TV works, that the bed is not too hard and there are plenty of pillows on it:

    this unidentified person does something completely different, opposite, very strange and unconventional which I will not give away.

    Fast forward 10 years to 1969, the El Royale has lost its luster and most of its rooms have fallen into disarray. Very few people even know it exists and its rooms have not seen any guests in a long time.

    4 strangers arrives at the hotel at almost the same time: a priest, a down and out back up singer dreaming of becoming the next big act in Reno's finest casinos, a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman, and a foul mouthed young woman.

    4 strangers who do not know each other with nothing in common and who will give new meaning to two of the many social etiquettes our parents taught us as soon as we were old enough to understand them:

    1. don't talk to strangers

    and

    2. don't stick your nose in business that doesn't concern you.

    To say any more is to spoil the movie.

    I can say that the first act of the movie where each one of the 4 strangers are introduced with a backstory and a flashback scene is the best part.

    But the 2nd act where the story tries to cohesively bring them together by finding some type of common ground among them is when the story begans to unravel and fall apart.

    Then by the time the 3rd and final act is shown, everything just felt forced, formulaic, convenient and way too clean and tidy.

    We have seen this movie many times before, there is even a genre name for it on IMDB:

    "Group of Strangers meet in a one room setting movies"

    https://www.imdb.com/list/ls066670465/

    Director Drew Goddard, famous for his directorial debut of the very successful anti-horror comedy Cabin In The Woods and for writing critical hits such as The Martian and Cloverfield, tries to take something that's been done before and elevate it to a different and better level:

    he attempts to do so by evoking narrative and exposition styles borrowed from many similar movies before it but he just can't completely pull it off.

    On IMDB, this movie has received a rating of 7.3 out of 10.0 using the mean average from a total of 381 reviews:

    65 of them gave it a 10 out of 10, calling it: A Must See, Brilliant, Great Movie!, Outstanding, Best I've seen in a long time, Awesome, Wow, They don't make it like this anymore, Best Tarantinosque movie ever, Best Movie of 2018, Favorite film of 2018, etc., etc.

    180 of them gave it an 7 to 9 out of 10 rating with equal praises to boot.

    On Rotten Tomatoes, out of 218 critics who reviewed it, 191 of them gave it a Fresh tomato rating and called it exquisite, audacious, top notch, intriguing, mesmerizing, magnificent, etc., etc.

    This must be the most critically over-hyped movie by both audience and critics I've seen this year and in the past couple of years.

    It's worth a look if you have almost 2 hours and 21 minutes to spare but by the time the ending credits start to roll, you won't even have one memorable scene from it to remember it by.

    1/5

  11. #2816
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs up

    Bumblebee (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4701182/





    Another Transformers masterpiece by Michael Bay.

    Unlike the Marvel and DC movies that are being forced down the throats of simple minded moronic movie audience every year with the single sole purpose to separate them from their money, each new entry the same as the previous ones: a banale cacophony of repetitious senseless action set pieces barely glued together to form a movie with no beginnings and no ends;

    Bumblebee is a beautiful movie about human compassion, tolerance toward another race, making personal sacrifices for the greater good of the many and the importance of family.

    Hailee Steinfeld shines as the human heroine of this film who unselfishly risks her life to do what is right and just - for humanity and mankind - and guess what?

    She doesn't possess any stupid, absurd, unrealistic comic books superpowers and she doesn't need them: her powers are her humaneness, her heart and her soul.

    5/5

  12. #2817
    Join Date
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    @j7wild

    The director is Travis Knight, not Michael Bay, that's why it's a masterpiece!!!

    I commented on that same thing back when you said Bay made that awesome TV Series you loved (Black Sails?), but he was only a producer.
    Bumblebee has no less than 12 credited producers, Michael Bay is simply one of the bunch, nothing more, nothing less.

    https://www.slashfilm.com/bumblebee-vs-michael-bay/


  13. #2818
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    Aquaman (2018)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1477834/





    Another megabudget, noisy, bloated, repetitious, protracted, gigantic CGI overload of a comic book based movie:

    all visual with no substance !!

    By the time the:

    "You have to be King. But I don't want to be King. My home is on land. It's your destiny. Only you can unite the kingdoms. Save Atlantis"

    speech and lecture were repeated for the gazillion times in the first hour of the film, I wanted to strangle someone and throw everything AND the kitchen sink at the screen.



    2/5

  14. #2819
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs up

    Polar (2019 Netflix)

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4139588/



    OMG!!

    Was this a bloody and violent movie!!

    Based on a Dark Horse Graphic Novel, it's sort of like a cross between 300, Sin City and Leon: The Professional.

    Then there is the ending which I didn't see coming!!

    I hope they will make a sequel!

    4/5


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