What wuz the most recent movie(s) you have seen?

[j7wild]

Hereditary (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7784604/



After the death of her elderly mother, a grieving woman (Toni Collette - who deserves an Academy Awards nomination for her acting in this film),
her husband and her children begin to experience troubling incidents in their lives.

When I saw this movie's preview trailer for the very first time, I knew this was going to be good.

After a long string of PG-13 horror wannabes containing cheap thrills,
the horror genre has finally gotten its well deserved and long overdue R rated entry.

Watch this in a pitch dark room but don't watch it alone!!

If you don't get one bit scared while watching this, it means you are already dead.

4.5/5

[j7wild]

Went to see

The Meg (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4779682/



Not much to see here unless you really want to see what kind of crappy CGI a $130 million budget buys.

The only character in it that does anything is Jason Statham and the Asian lady - she is in it because this is another Hollywood Made In China movie.

The other characters are just there to fall in the water and swim in panic while The Meg is chasing them and maybe they will get to safety before they are eaten.

There are 2 other women characters in it: Jessica McNamee and Ruby Rose.

One plays Jason Statham's ex wife and the other is the designer of the underwater marina station and they both don't do much besides again, swim, swim, before The Meg eats them.

Watch (or rewatch) Jaws 1975 instead with NO CGI and a mechanical shark that was way ahead of its time.

2.5/5

p.s.

If you don't know what Hollywood Made In China is:

http://chinafilminsider.com/book-rev...made-in-china/

https://www.businessinsider.com/holl...excerpt-2017-1

[j7wild]

Smokey And The Bandit (1977)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076729/



Can't believe this was the 2nd highest grossing film of 1977, earning $300 million: second only to Star Wars and ahead of the 3rd highest grossing film of that year, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

The stars admitted later that many of the scenes were improvised and you can tell.

There are scenes that just felt out of place or not part of any continuity and that they were just thrown in as filler to make a movie.

Sally Field invented camel toe long before there was even a word for it.



2.5/5

FYI:

In honor of Burt Reynolds, Smokey And The Bandit is back in theaters in the USA starting this Friday and through September 20th.

How were they able to dig up a clean negative copy, remaster it to today's audio and video standards and quality and make multiple prints of them and get them in theaters in a week?

[j7wild]

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3778644/



The origin story of Han Solo: where he comes from, how he met Chewie and Lando, how he became a double crossing women chasing scoundrel, smuggler and the best pilot (in his own mind of course) of the fastest piece of junk spaceship in the galaxy.

This movie's intention was good but unfortunately because of issues during production, it resulted in a very poorly executed and put together final product.

The original directors, yes, directors! There were 2 of them working together, were fired after having filmed 70% of the film based on one script.

After they were fired, Ron Howard was brought in to reshoot the film and while doing so, he made changes to the original script by omitting parts in it that were already filmed and needed to be reshot but Howard chose not to do so.

He also added new things to the script that had no continuity or relation to the original script.

So there were things in the original script that were already filmed that needed to be reshot that were left out; there were things in the original script that were not filmed that needed to be filmed that were left out; there were new things added to the original script that no one bothered to check for continuity and adherence to the original script; there were things in the original script that would had helped the storyline that needed to be filmed and Howard also chose not to do so:

in other words, the Final Cut of this movie is a Big Hot Mess.

This Big Hot Mess costs $300 million dollars to make and translated into a box office failure earning only $382 million dollars domestically and internationally.

One of the other times in film making history something similar happened was during the production of Superman II which was filmed by Richard Donner.

He was fired when the movie was nearly completed.

The movie was almost completely reshot by a new director Richard Lester with scenes that were already filmed in Donner's version that needed to be reshot, featuring big cast members like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackmanm that ended up being omitted when the actors refused to show up for the reshoots.

I have seen both version and frankly, Donner's version is better.

So originally Disney was planning on making 3 Han Solo origin films including this one and a Jabba The Hut origin film.

After the dismal box office performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story, those plans are now on hold.

GOOD!

The actor that plays a younger Han Solo in this doesn't even come close in charisma and character to Harrison Ford's Han Solo.

It's as if he didn't bother to prepare for the role by watching the 3 original trilogy Star Wars film.

Even the actor who plays the young Lando Calrissian is not convincing in his role:

Billy Dee Williams' Lando Calrissian is cool and aloof and charming.

This actor (whom I've only previously seen once in The Martian as some NASA whiz kid) has the personality and emotional maturity of a rotting and stinky dead sardine.

Furthermore, both of the aforementioned actors can't act their way out of a paper bag if their heads were stuck in one and they were suffocating to death from lack of oxygen.

Then there is the female lead which is the same high school age kid looking Emilia Clarke actress from Terminator Genisys who I see that 3 years since that film was released and she was criticized for her poor acting, still has poor acting skills.

Did she not bother to improve her skills by taking acting and speech classes in the past 3 years?

Finally one complaint I have which is the same as many Star Wars fans had after watching Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.

Directors and producers for Disney's Star Wars films: leave your personal political agenda and social warrior justice liberal politics out of the script of these Star Wars films!!

That is another reason why Solo is the first movie in the Star Wars universe to fail at the box office.

The Star Wars fans revolved and boycotted Solo after The Last Jedi's director Rian Johnson bombarded the film with his own social warrior justice political messages turning it into what many Star Wars fans felt was a social justice liberal propaganda piece.

Sorry Mouse Company but I can only give your latest installment in the "Let's milk the Star Wars cash cow name for every dollar we can because we need to recover the $4 billion investment we paid to George to buy the Lucasfilm and Star Wars trademark" film franchise a:

1/5

[j7wild]

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052474/



Not sure what was the point of this movie.

I didn't much care for the story.

The 2 things I came away with after watching it which I've already knew beforehand:

do not work for the U.S. Government's C.I.A.

To them you are nothing but an expendable asset.

When they don't need your services anymore, they will murder you or abandon you to a death situation that's very difficult for anyone to get out of alive.

The CIA has done so many times in real life:

it's not something that's made up in the movies.

Also do not work for the Mexican Cartels.

Their employee's retirement plan is also like the CIA's: not very attractive.

2/5

[j7wild]

The Predator (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3829266/



This excruciating slow burn torture stinker takes its place among the ranks of some of "the most anticipated sequels which became some of the worse sequels ever" with plenty of other sequel stinker fails to keep it company.

Stinkers like Independence Day: Resurgence, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Another 48 HRS., The Matrix Revolutions, Jaws The Revenge, Terminator Genisys, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spider-Man 3, Batman & Robin, The Godfather Part III and Robocop 3.

The story is confusing and the intention and motive of the new Predator is never fully explained.

The acting by every actors and 2 actresses (Olivia Munn, Yvonne Stravoski) sucks. But you really can't blame them 100% for it. They didn't have much of a script to work with.

The dialogue was so dumb, I would bet $1 that a retard wrote it.

The action sequences were uninteresting and unexciting.

Every character was just window dressing put in place for The Predator to slice, dice, decapitate, maim, pull apart in two or three pieces and gored a 1000 ways by a multitude of alien bladed and laser weapons.

One of the first ideas for this film was to bring back Arnold but for whatever reasons, the studio decided to shelve it.

My only explanation for that is they didn't want to pay whatever salary Arnold commands.

Big mistake!

You want a movie that brings in big box office returns, you have to pay for the big star!!

You got to spend money to make money!!

Very strange that this is written by Shane Black, the same acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter who wrote 4 Lethal Weapon films, Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Last Boy Scout;

and he also played one of the members of Arnold Schwarzenegger commandos team in Predator 1987.

Considering that it's been 8 years since the last entry in the Predator franchise, there is absolutely no excuse for the way this movie turned out.

Twentieth Century Fox and their powers that be had plenty of time to put out a quality product and they failed.

2/5

[j7wild]

The KGB has been using honeypots for decades to seduce, compromise and blackmail foreign diplomats, intelligence officers, armed service personnel and businessmen and long before Jennifer Lawrence trained to become a honeypot in Red Sparrow, there was this:

Secret Weapons (1985)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089983/

the KGB trains a sexy young spy-trainee to become an "all-American" temptress capable of seducing the secrets out of many US officials and businessmen. She will then use the resulting information to blackmail these men into serving her government.

Featuring a very young Linda Hamilton and Geena Davis too!!

[j7wild]

The Double Man (1967)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061594/



A complicated cold war espionage thriller set in the Austrian Alps involving CIA and Russian agents.

If the sweeping aerial snow capped, snow laden skiing sequences look somewhat familiar, it's because the cameraman for this film is also the same cameraman who would go on to film the skiing sequences in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).

This film is also actress Britt Ekland's second major movie role, she will go on to become a Bond Girl in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).



This was one of the many 60's movies that were James Bond copies and it's also one of the better ones - featuring a tight, complex plot and decent action sequences.

3.75/5

[j7wild]

Smallfoot (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6182908/

*

Cute movie that both children (and my 5 children enjoyed it) and adults will enjoy containing a message about how we should all get along and tolerate each other while co-existing together on this little blue planet of ours.

4/5

[j7wild]

Ant-Man And The Wasp (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5095030/



I enjoyed the first Ant-Man movie.

I was actually surprised by the first one not knowing what to expect.

But this one is just very weak and has a plot that I could care less about:

Michael Douglas character trying to save his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. who has been lost for 30 years.

Furthermore there are 2 recurring scenes and theme throughout the film that by the eon time they replayed it, you will be shaking your head, pumping your fist at the screen and wanting to scream:

"For the love of ...

... Enough already!!"

It was like a continuous broken record being repeated over and over.

By the way, Michelle Pfeiffer's talent and acting skills are wasted in here.

I think the whole point of this movie is so they can throw this at you during the middle of the end credit sequence:

"Hey folks! LOOK!

We have another Avengers movie coming in 2019."

That's exactly what you just sat through almost 2 hours of your precious time to find out:

to be told that there is another Avengers movie coming but most likely you already have knew whether if you saw or didn't saw Avengers: Infinity War.



2/5

[j7wild]

Hotel Artemis (2018)



https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834262/

In the two John Wick movies, there is the Continental Hotel where criminals, mostly hired hitmen, hitwomen and murderers, have a neutral place to go to recover and heal from their wounds.

It has its own set of very strict rules and any violation of them by any members will result in revocation of membership and possible death.

The Hotel Artemis is also like the Continental Hotel and it also has its own strict rules and any violation of them will also result in revocation of membership.

The concierge of the Hotel Artermis also doubles as a nurse.

She has all the medical training, equipment and medicine necessary in each room to treat whatever wounds the criminals might have incurred on the outside world prior to checking into the hotel.

There is nothing good about this movie that makes you want to write home about.

It seems like the writers and producers watched the John Wick movies, thought they could take the basic premise and concept of the Continental Hotel and give it its own separate film and that's where their creativity ends.

Wait, I regress:

their creativity never even began since they stole the premise of their movie from another movie.

Jodie Foster plays the nurse who runs Hotel Artemis and she is a great actress who has given us many great performances in many movies in the last 40+ years:

first as a child actress (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Taxi Driver, Freaky Friday) and then as an adult (The Silence of the Lambs, The Accused, Nell, Foxes, Panic Room).

But in this film, her acting is very wooden.

Her delivery of her lines of dialogue just comes across as if she is disinterested and reading directly from a cue card somewhere off screen; as if she doesn't want to be in this film and she is only doing it because maybe she needed a paycheck to buy a new wardrobe or a new car or something.

The rest of the cast, the ones who play the criminals who are the guests of the Hotel Artemis, are just paper thin including Jeff Goldblum who usually always has a great character written for him regardless of the movie, giving his 110% to the role every time but not this time!!

1.5/5

[j7wild]

Eighth Grade (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7014006/



During the final week of 8th grade, a girl named Kayla realizes that she has no friends, she is not popular, she has no self confidence, boys her age might as well be extra-terrestrial aliens to her.

She loves her dad but at the same time she doesn't want him around asking her a lot of questions when she is trying to have a social life on the internet and in school and to make things even more complicated and worse, high school is just around the corner.

A sincere and sadly at times brutally honest and harsh look at the state of today's middle schoolers and their culture today:

where most of them have cell phones and their own accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube;

and their personal struggles to survive in a digital world where every day for them is an online popularity contest among their peers.

There were even 2 scenes showing how the middle schoolers were being drilled by the police and by their teachers on what to do during an active shooter situation: it's sad that the world has come to this where an innocent child can't even be safe in school.

If 15 year old actress Elsie Fisher, who played 13 year old character Kayla, doesn't get nominated for an Academy Awards, everyone at the Academy can go to that place deep deep underground !!

This movie was rated 99% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and for once, I agree with them.

I give it a very enthusiastic:

5/5

[j7wild]

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

[j7wild]

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

[j7wild]

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