The Body (2012) aka El Cuerpo

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1937149

A detective investigates the husband whose wife's body is missing from the morgue after she dies of a heart attack.

Sound simple enough, isn't it? 

It isn't!!

By the time this made in Spain movie reaches the final frame, I didn't correctly predict any of the final revelations and twists that were shown.

A chilling thriller very worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

4.5/5

The Alamo (1960)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053580/

Produced and Directed by John Wayne, starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett.

This movie is a joke.

For being a movie about a historical event, it never explains the cause of the Texas Revolution and why the Battle of the Alamo took place.

The running time is 2 hours and 47 minutes. 

The actual total running time for the  battle sequences is about 12 minutes.

Most of the rest of the movie is John Wayne's dominating the screen time and being comical or preaching his personal and political views and beliefs that have nothing to do with the history of the Battle of the Alamo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alamo_(1960_film)#Politics

An insult to everyone who fought and died on both sides at the Alamo and in the Texas Revolution.

This movie is evidence what happens when movie studios give an over-rated second rate actor who thinks he is an A-list actor (John Wayne) too much artistic and creative Carte Blanche!

I can't believe this insulting trash was nominated for Best Picture!!

I did some research:

the defenders at the Alamo were outnumbered 10-1.

Their weapons were gun powder muskets and gun powder handguns and a few cannon.

In 1836, when this event took place, the following weapons were not invented and/or available yet:

the 6 shot Revolver that used a  self-contained metallic cartridges rather than loose powder, pistol ball, and percussion caps (1854), the Winchester repeating rifle (1866), the Gatling gun (1860), the Howitzer cannon (1859).

If the Alamo defenders had those weapons then, it would had been a different story for the Mexican Army.

1/5

King Kong (1933)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024216/

Version watched:

the full 104 minutes restored uncut version in 1080p, which includes the following scenes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_(1933_film)#Re-releases,_censorship_and_restorations

I have never seen this.

The first time I've heard of King Kong was in 1976: the Dino De Laurentiis remake starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange and Charles Grodin.

People were fascinated with Jungle movies and movies depicting Apes and Primates back then? Really? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_(1933_film)#Background

Amazing what they were able to do back then with movie making still in its infancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_(1933_film)#Production

This was made PreCode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

and it was one of the last PreCode films:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood#Beginning_of_Code_era_(July_1,_1934)

Fay Wray was definitely the original Scream Queen:

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

Produced on a budget of $687,000 ($12 million by today's dollars), it set a record of grossing almost $90,000 ($1.7 million by today's dollars) in its first 4 days of theatrical release, with ticket prices ranging from 35 cents to 75 cents.

It went on to earn $2 million ($38 million by today's dollars) total in its first theatrical run.

This film is often credited for saving R.K.O. Pictures from bankruptcy and R.K.O. Pictures re-released in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952 and 1956, each time with financial success.

In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

5/5

I've just watched Thor Ragnarok -- After seeing the first two Thor films, I didn't expect much from this one, but what a surprise that it was actually fantastic! There's some good laughs in there, with some referencing back to the previous films as well as The Avengers, and visually it's gorgeous. It's also a bit of a lead in to Infinity War.

Really enjoyed this one -- 4.5/5

I am with you, Morphie.

I didn't care for the first 2 Thor movies but I was pleasantly surprised and entertained by Thor Ragnarok.

Continuity and/or Plot hole in Wonder Woman?

The Germans pursue Steve Trevor to the island which is cloaked.

You can see soldiers on 6 wooden boats heading for the beach and a large ship behind it.

You can also see the only Germans on those boats are Army soldiers.

Also the ship seems to have run aground in shallow water and starting to list to one side.

Wonder Woman and her Amazon sisters fight off the Germans who landed on the beach and that was it?

Where are the rest of the Germans that were on the ship? Surely there are sailors on there and maybe even more soldiers.

Just because their ship have run aground, they can still get to the island by more boats or lifeboats?

Also does the island cloak interferes with radio waves? I doubt that.

They can also call for reinforcements on their radio and send out the last position.

Also Trevor took off from Europe in a stolen German airplane.

How did the ship purse him to the island?

Radar was non existent back then. No GPS. No Satellites. No tracking systems.

How did the Germans knew the position of his airplane to be able to purse him?

Even if the crew of the ship just randomly spotted him and were able to identify the aircraft as the one Trevor was in, they still can't catch up with him.

The plane albeit slow at those times , the one Trevor was in was a Fokker E III Eindecker with maximum speed of 87 mph,  the ship still won't be able to keep up navigational speed to keep it in sight to catch up to it.

nice graph

A very fitting graph! Haha!

Especially in the documentaries and foreign language and short films categories.

Where does one goes to see those nominated titles?

2 hours ago, j7wild said:

Especially in the documentaries and foreign language and short films categories.

Where does one goes to see those nominated titles?

Maybe at Mattressfirm. 

What, Sir Tom???

Mattress Firm?

What does that mean?

You can sleep through the films lol

Hahaha! 

Unfortunately, it is nearly always films that deserve some real recognition that don't get any.

Yeah I agree with you. There are so many we never get to see.

7 hours ago, Tom@LCO said:

You can sleep through the films lol

LMAO!

I was actually very surprised that Logan had a nomination -- it would have been a great win!

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023238/

Another Hollywood PreCode production, starring Fay Wray (King Kong 1933) and based on an award winning short story by Richard Connell.

Filmed on the same jungle movie set that was later used for King Kong 1933, it tells the story of a self proclaimed Count living on a desolate Pacific Ocean island who hunts human beings as they were wild animals.

Leslie Banks as the Count is creepy looking and he reminds me of an early cross between Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi and Count Dracula.

A creepy, macabre and eye opening view of human nature and how the line between our nature as civilized man and our animalistic instinct to kill is very easily crossed.

This is the first and indubitably the best of numerous film adaptations of the story which include the 1956 Run for the Sun with Richard Widmark, the 1993 John Woo's Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, 1987 Predator and 2010 Predators, Battle Royale, Westworld, The Hunger Games and The Running Man.

The story was also inspiration for TV episodes of Get Smart, Lost In Space, Gilligan's Island, Fantasy Island, Bonanza, The Simpson, Law and Order: SVU, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Game Of Thrones and many others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game#Television

5/5

This movie's copyright lapsed into public domain in 1960 before it was renewed for home video in 1999.

Therefore it is legal to view full copies of it on the internet:

 

 

LOL

You all live in the USA and complaint about not  having access to movies. . . .   I think you have it good over there.

For example

On Amazon, I can see loads of movies with Submarines featured in them, I like Submarines, so i try to order like dozen DVD/Blurays Submarines. Only one of them was licensed for shipping to Australia. All the others had rights holder restrictions and could not be shipped here. 

Now Netflix, it had 10,000+ shows/movies in the US region and only a few thousand here in Australia.   Same with Prime.  We have to pay extra for a VPN/DNS to get around the regional barriers, then i can see the order of magnitude better selections you guys have.

A new release movie here cost $39 bucks and is released months/year after it is there.

I could rav on for hours,  but i will stop.

BTW,  the problem is not that we live all the on the other side of earth or the we have a smaller population. Its that are two media owners that own most of the movie distro channels here, they also own most of the TV stations and news papers, have politicians in their pocket. The biggest communication company is in partnership with them too, so our internet have not very good until recently.  (although it on average cost 9 times more then the rest of the world).  We have the same issues with all books, parallel importation restrictions and its the same to nasty media owners influence here too, not wanting anything competing with their almost complete ownership of the Entertainment Industry here. 

 

 

The Hurricane Heist

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5360952/

This felt very much like a 90's action flick.  It wasn't't the greatest,but it was not the worst. 

3/5

 

 

Annihilation (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2798920/

Most of the positive reviews I've read online about this movie have one thing in common: it's visually stunning i.e. as in pretty but pretty does not make a movie good.

It's the story that makes a movie good and the story in this movie is asinine right from the beginning part where the government send Natalie Portman and 4 women (a psychiatrist, a physicist, a geomorphologist and a paramedic) to go into an anomaly not from this world and investigate it.

Now keep in mind that several fully trained military teams have entered that same alien anomaly before and only one soldier have returned barely alive at first and now in a coma nearing death.

So here we have 5 women, one of them with prior military training having served in the U.S. Army for 7 years and the rest, well no military training at all - and they are all given firearms but not given any military escort or any transports.

The anomaly covers a land mass area of several 100 square miles and these 5 women [and all the teams before them] entered it on foot. Where the APC? The military Hummers? Or even a couple of chopper!

Plus one of them is a paramedic and how is a paramedic qualified to investigate and research something that's not of this earth?

The rest of the movie just makes no sense. It's supposed to be a sci-fi movie but there is nothing sci-fi about it.

Furthermore the movie ends with nothing explained: what was the anomaly? why were the aliens here? why did they mimic everything they touch? what did the aliens want?

Then there are the plot holes, so many of them you'd wonder whoever wrote the script didn't bother to have anyone read it and check it for continuity and mistakes and logic before the actual filming began.

Some of the reviews online said: amazing, thought provoking, unique.

What the heck? Were these reviewers paid by the studio to said those things?

Yes, it was amazing. An amazing waste of Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Yes, it was thought provoking. It provoked me to think the many different ways the 5 characters on screen could hurry up and die so the movie would hurry up and end.

Yes, it was unique. A unique piece of stupidity that should never had been made.

I can't believe this is from the same director who gave us the great film Ex Machina in 2015.

It's easy to see why this was released to Netflix: the audiences at test screenings didn't like it. The studio wanted the final cut changed with reshoots and rewrites and a new ending. The producer and director refused. 

The studio, Paramount, decided to not take the financial risk to give it a wide domestic theatrical release and gave it to Netflix after it was in a limited number of theaters for only 2 weeks.

This movie also reminds me of another recent aliens coming to Earth movie that had gotten good reviews but was actually another piece of you know what.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

2/5

Tomb Raider (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1365519/

Nearly 14 years and 8 months after Lara Croft, portrayed by Angelina Jolie, last appeared on the silver screen, the Tomb Raider movie franchise has been rebooted with new actress Alicia Vikander taking over as the world famous Tomb Raiding Adventuress.

This is the origin story of how Lara Croft became a Tomb Raider.

There are scenes that looked like they were lifted frame by frame from the 2013 Tomb Raider video game reboot and its 2015 sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider.

It's easy to see why. This movie is co-produced by the same publisher of those 2 video games: Square Enix.

Miss Vikander bring a level of freshness and youthness into the character of Lara Croft and she does a decent debut as Lara Croft.

She is very athletic and physical like Lara Croft is in the video games. There were 2 scenes that left me breathless after watching them: I felt like I just ran the triathlon or I just spent a whole hour on the lifecycle at the gym.

As far as the story goes, there were a few familiar set pieces we have seen before in a Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, National Treasure and Mummy movie.

But hopefully the next installment will feature a bigger, more daring, more adventurous, more polished story allowing Miss Vikander to grow and mature into the role of Miss Croft.

The ending left the door open for a sequel but of course wether there is a next movie or not, it all depends on how well this film does at the box office domestically and internationally.

3.5/5

Edited March 19, 20188 yr by j7wild

Good review thanks!

Forgot to specify the version I've watched:

XD Luxury Lounger RealD 3D Dolby Atmos

It was also available in IMAX but only in IMAX 2D. 

The producers chose not to film it in IMAX 3D.

I saw Tomb Raider on Saturday -- I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised and I really enjoyed it. I also don't think the trailers do it justice (or is it that trailers usually give too much away these days?).

As far as the story being 'based on Tomb Raider 2013', I would say that it's very loosely based on it, and has a little bit of Rise of the Tomb Raider mixed in there too...but spins a different take on it.

I agree with 3.5/5