Conan

Apr. 7th, 2025 07:19 am
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
Pulling from my watcher's notes...

I can't believe I'm writing that there's a movie Jason Momoa can't save, but it was definitely Conan.

I love Jason Momoa! He's a beautiful man inside and out, but I moved on after about half an hour.

Honestly, the movie lost me in the first few minutes when baby Conan is born during battle (get it???). His mother is a warrior and wants to see her son before she dies. Her husband takes her knife, does a 2-second C-section, and lifts baby Conan to her so she can name him, and then she dies. It is the most ridiculous thing! I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things, but not that😄

The first part of the movie is brutally hard to watch (get it???), toned almost entirely blue and black where we see young Conan as the best of the best! He can finish his chores and have time to participate in a young warrior's marathon, where he single-handedly takes down a group of baddies that made his companions flee. Ugh.

After a battle where Conan is orphaned, it moves to the present day in full colour (get it???) where Conan and his companion free a group of slaves. Conan later spots someone who ransacked his village and gets arrested so he can get closer to the man. I gave up when Conan stuck his finger in the man's missing nose.

Although this movie is in no way related to the Arnold Schwarzenegger films and is a new interpretation of the books--and not having read the books, I don't know how faithful either adaptation is--the original Conan movie is so good because the characters have so much depth. The film is as disciplined as Arnold's workout routine and every time I watch it I enjoy the storytelling and cinematography so much. It's not easy to take pulp content and make it a action masterpiece.

This Conan movie is sadly kind of cheap and visually messy. A terrible movie can still be enjoyed if it has some redeeming qualities--but I knew after half an hour this movie was not one of them.



Spellbound

Mar. 21st, 2025 10:31 am
calzephyr: (MLP Blossom)
I watched Spellbound without watching the trailer and it was absolutely delightful! All your favourite fairy tale elements are there, but with a big twist--a topic that even Sesame Street couldn't tackle for children. I wondered why this movie wasn't on the big screen, but I can see why...it's got great animation, great voice acting, great everything...but that twist...is well done, but a big screen release would attract criticism IMHO. Watch it regardless :-)



calzephyr: Starship Enterprise (Star Trek)
I love Tubi! It has so many movies and old TV shows I never thought I would watch, including Westworld's sequel.

Honestly, this is not a great movie, nor better than Westworld. Even though it stars Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner, the pacing is slow, the acting is terrible, and the plot predictable, especially since the trailer gives away the whole movie!

However, it's still notable because...


  • the language for science fiction films in 1976 wasn't quite there

  • the moviemakers try hard to problem solve for technology that doesn't exist...

  • ...and SFX that didn't exist either

  • the idea of theme parks and leisure was still pretty new

  • the plot is pretty standard, but with a 70s twist (and lots of fashions)

  • it speaks to the 70s disaster movie genre plus the intrepid reporter trope



Futureworld doesn't feel super futuristic compared to say, Logan's Run, but 70s movies like this crawled so we could watch our favourite sci-fi movies in the 80s soar!



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THe other day, in desperate escape from my phone and our current deep freeze, I looked up movies on Tubi and thought King Solomon's Mines sounded interesting, if extremely campy. It looked somewhere halfway between Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, so I hit play.

Eeeek...I can count the number of films I've stopped watching after about 20 minutes on two hands and this is definitely one of them!

To back up, the movie is based on the 1885 novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard and this 1985 movie is not the first or last big screen adaptation.

Featuring Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone as leads, I couldn't tell if this movie was supposed to be as bad as it was--and Wikipedia said it was supposed to be poking fun at Indiana Jones, but the bad acting, African stereotypes and out loud racial slurs just had me going Nope! Calling a racialized person a towel head is not heroic behaviour :S The acting was just bad too. Sharon Stone chewed the scenery and although there were a number of gags that should have been funny--the timing was really off.



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Canada also observes Black History Month in February! I highly encourage anyone interested in Black history or Canadian history to watch this great documentary about a famous Alberta cowboy--John Ware. I love that someone did a deep dive into his life--Alberta has a lot of invisible Black history.



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We watched Hidden Figures last night and hubs enjoyed it more than me. I just didn't find it all that engaging--maybe because it wasn't all that new to me or I didn't need reminders of working in a male-dominated field. The performances were great, but the most interesting part of the is the first ten minutes because the visual styling is so well done and then never happens again.

My favourite character, Dorothy, and her story were the most interesting to me. After being repeatedly turned down for supervisor, she takes it upon herself to master the new IBM mainframe.

As far as biographical dramas go, it just felt like this one checked a bunch of boxes--but if you're under 40 or playing it for kids, it would be a good conversation starter about how history is packed with untold stories which take too long to see the light of day. That "computers" were real people and not machines would surprise a lot of younger folks. The movie never gets into the why of institutionalized and systemic racism either. The movie left me wanting more and it felt very "safe" and non-confrontational.



Sing

Nov. 23rd, 2024 09:24 pm
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I've been wanting to watch Sing for years and finally crossed it off my watchlist tonight. It was cute, but just didn't resonate as much with me as I thought it would. The stakes were really low in the plot and there were a lot of characters. YMMV!




Scream

Oct. 29th, 2024 10:29 pm
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LOL I watched Scream for the first time and all these years I avoided it because I don't like legit horror movies. However, it was...funny??? I was so confused! I laughed more than I expected. Maybe it's because I'm not a 14 year old, LOL!



Se7en

Oct. 28th, 2024 07:07 pm
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
Not to sound like a broken record, but there's a whole swath of 90s movies missing from my personal catalogue because I was either too young or too broke to watch them. It's hard to spend $8 on a movie when you're only making $7.28 an hour part time!

I didn't know much about Se7en before I watched it on Tubi this afternoon except that it starred Brad Pitt and was about a serial killer working through the seven deadly sins. I didn't even know it starred Kevin Spacey or Morgan Freeman! Sometimes the less you know about something the more wonderful the surprise is.

Freeman and Pitt play a pair of mismatched detectives in this, suspenseful, neo-noir thriller. I really enjoyed the orchestral soundtrack and colour grading as well as the pacing. I find too many movies these days are a blur as they hop from scene to scene, so the story's slow unfolding was very enjoyable as well.

Now, this is a very squishy and dark movie and I feel it dances slightly into horror territory. It's such a visual feast though with the constant rain, grittiness and practical effects. Definitely one I would watch again since it contained so much detail.



Dredd

Oct. 28th, 2024 06:57 pm
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
Our new TV has been such a blessing since the old one couldn't do the fancy digital channels. I caved and started watching Tubi. It's so hard to get the movies you want in Canada, plus the the "leaving this month" email motivated me to take a look.

Dredd definitely had the feel of a comic book movie as well as a video game inspired one as well. I forgot how saturated movies from this time where--it's either painfully blue/orange or red/green in places--but the ripping soundtrack and action sequences were great! This is a very squishy movie with some flashes of sexual assault and definitely not for younger viewers in more ways than one. It's such a bleak version of the future that I hope doesn't come true!



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All caught up on Jurassic Park movies! I really enjoyed this movie most out of the three Jurassic World movies. It felt closer to the original Jurassic Park movie, even if the original cast members didn't return. Movies in a series can always be tricky, because usually the first movie is good, the second one is painfully in the middle and setting up for the next movie, which is what I think happened here as well. There were a lot of fun low-key thrills and jump scares, so it was the right blend of action, adventure, suspense and scary moments :-)

I only have two complaints about it--everything else was awesome. One, sometimes the action scenes felt over choreographed and too perfect, but Colin Trevorrow did a good job of emulating Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas' styles. Second, Dr. Sattler rips into Henry Wu for creating an ecological disaster, when, ahem, it was Maisie who let the dinosaurs loose in the previous movie. Like seriously, she created a bigger ecological disaster than Dr. Wu.



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Holeee cow, was it almost ten years ago that Jurassic World came out? Because I thought it was more like five :-D I swear my brain is still stuck in 2020 sometimes, which is why I had trouble believing Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom came out in 2015.

I wish I hadn't missed it on the big screen because so many scenes were meant to be viewed that way. It was a decent movie but it didn't really pick up the pace (for me) until way past the midpoint, and then I was glued to the screen as the dinosaurs caused havoc and mayhem :-D



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Apparently we've been behind on a lot of Godzilla movies :-D

The documentary style of Shin Godzilla was neat and Godzilla had way more screen time than Godzilla Minus One. It was really enjoyable, but could have easily been a half hour shorter. In trying to show all the departments responsible for an emergency response, the movie felt too spread thin and without any focus. There was also a lack of urgency and the scoring was inconsistent, but it was neat to see how it wasn't a typical Hollywood disaster movie either. A Hollywood movie would have a handsome action man and at least once romance ;-D



calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
If you like your Godzilla movies campy and silly, this is not your Godzilla movie! I was disappointed by how little screen time everyone's favourite stomping sea creature got in Godzilla Minus One and it took a while to mentally switch gears that this was a rather serious movie about an unsuccessful kamikaze pilot overcoming shame and building a new life in post-WW2 Japan. The effects were amazing, but it just lacked the creature feature vibe some of us love so much!



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There's a big gap in my animation watch list and it's embarrassing to say I've never watched a Studio Ghibli movie from start to finish until recently, except for Pom Poko. Fortunately in today's world, that's easy to fix.

The main thing I noticed about both films, and I'm sure I'll continue to notice, is how unique the character designs and storytelling are. One would be hard pressed to find a squirmy, worm infested boar in a Disney or Pixar film. There's a layer of authenticity and creativity which is so refreshing for me as a viewer. The movies are definitely for older children and up--both of these would have scared me as five year old.

There's also a sense of characters "just as they are". For example, in Princess Monoke, there are many groups and individuals all with different goals and sometimes good intentions. I was sure Lady Eboshi was the villain, until I discovered that she rescued women from brothels and was kind to lepers. I'm so used to the good/evil binary that I found myself thinking deeply about struggles the characters faced in the movie.





Spirited Away, as a newer movie, had more polished animation and again, I fell in love with the different character designs of the monsters and spirits young protagonist Chihiro encounters. Simply being spirits does not make them "bad", although they are kind of jerks to Chihiro. Most child characters in movies have something going for them like smarts or charisma, but Chihiro has neither. She's just a ten year old girl doing what ten year olds will do. She makes mistakes and learns from them. Her capacity to care for others and determination to help those she loves carries her throughout her journey.



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We finally watched the semi-autobiographical movie about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game. It didn't strike me as amazing. It couldn't decide what kind of movie it wanted to be. It would have been more cohesive to focus on one or two aspects of Turing's life or even one time period instead of jumping around three different timelines--his youth, his time as a codebreaker and his post-war activities. I really wanted to see some in-depth tinkering and discovery, not cliched arguments and conflict.



Dune (1984)

Mar. 9th, 2024 05:13 pm
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
We watched the original Dune this past week and after 2 hours, we had no idea what we had just watched :-D.

It was the first time watching it for both of us--and neither of us have read the books. The movie was released when we were far too young to watch it, and now I wonder how many people did see it as children because their parents thought it would be like Star Wars. Star Wars it's not!

In hindsight, it's a testament to George Lucas how easily read Star Wars is compared to Dune. One might think Hollywood just didn't have the visual language for science fiction films, but that's not true, considering how many memorable sci-fi films were also released in 1984. There were times when the movie, with it's lush sets and fantastic wardrobe design, wanted to be an epic, but the severe editing and voiceovers were too apparent and jarring. The whispered thoughts sounded harsh and I thought Patrick Stewart would have a larger role.

One odd thing I particularly appreciated was the pug that appeared throughout the movie showed up at end. Thank goodness someone had the foresight to show a child holding the pug or I would have been forever wondering if the pug made it :-D



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Some books and movies are so commonplace or cemented in culture that sometimes we skip over them because we think we know the story. I realized I had never ever watched It's A Wonderful Life, so we caught it on Plex Sunday night after dinner. I assumed it would be more like A Christmas Carol, but it wasn't. I kept waiting for Clarence to show up and he finally does about three-quarters through the movie! I cried at the end because the idea that we all matter and touch so many lives in our own way really resonated with me.



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I'm unsure how we missed The Equalizer in theatres or didn't know it had a couple of sequels, but we really enjoyed this action-packed thriller starring Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a man who embodies "be the change" even if it means taking down Russian gangsters in your neighbourhood.

I used to watch the original TV show starring Edward Woodward back in the 80s and I always hoped it would make a comeback--fortunately it works really well on the big screen!



The Craft

Dec. 2nd, 2023 09:36 am
calzephyr: Scott Pilgrim generator (Default)
I crossed another 90s movie off my watch list recently. I was either too young, too old or too poor to watch a lot of movies when I was younger, so there's a lot to catch up on!

The downside of watching a movie like The Craft when you're old is knowing how much you would have appreciated it when you were younger ;-D Seriously, younger me would have been OOOOH and running off to the library to read about witchcraft. However, I was surprised by how much edge and darkness it had for a teen movie of the time. Basically, friendship goes from magic to tragic as the four main characters fail to respect the power of the spells they create. At first they work, and work a little too well as the girls discover the consequences of their actions. In some ways the movie is close to Mean Girls.

There's some cringey stuff in The Craft that also raised my old lady eyebrows, such as an attempted sexual assault and one of the girls pretending to be another girl in order to seduce her old boyfriend. That was especially icky. Overall the movie has some jumbled pacing and too many characters, but if you have nostalgia for it, you would probably enjoy it quite a lot :-) A sequel actually came out in 2020, but I have no desire to watch it.



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