Still not sure about this.

Also, a comic book movie being released in December?

Has that ever been done before?

 

Looks good.

If they are underwater creatures like Mermaids, why do they have legs anyway when they are underwater?

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

I agree with John!

LEAVE "Little China" alone !!

It doesn't need a sequel and it also doesn't need to be rebooted or remade!!

http://www.darkhorizons.com/carpenter-unhappy-with-more-little-china/

What! Is this actually going ahead? 

Big Trouble in Little China is a classic! I'm so sick of these rubbish Dwayne Johnson wannabe ripoff action flicks!

Stick it to them Carpenter!

5 hours ago, Morph said:

What! Is this actually going ahead? 

Big Trouble in Little China is a classic! I'm so sick of these rubbish Dwayne Johnson wannabe ripoff action flicks!

Stick it to them Carpenter!

You tell them, Morphie!

Go Morphie, GO!!

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6394324/

Just watched the premiere episode.

It sucked.

It's very feminist:

all the males of the human species are evil.

It also spends more time trying to convey political messages and opinions which I presume belong to the writers and the executive producers own political views - who by the way happen to be all female.

This is the 2nd reboot of a classic TV series that I've seen this year that has ruined the legacy of the original by being feminist and political.

This is the Political Correct version reboot with one actress that is mixed African American, one that is mixed Puerto Rican and one that is Mexican and two of their characters (the ones played by the Puerto Rican and the Mexican actresses) are supposed to be biological sisters - and no they are not adopted and their mother only married once? 

How is that even possible!

Edited October 15, 20187 yr by j7wild

That is exactly why I don't watch many TV shows anymore, James. It's either politically correct, ridiculously feministic or masculist, and/or packed with views of the show creators. What ever happened to telling a story?

The only shows that really have my attention anymore are Game of Thrones and Supernatural.

Edited October 15, 20187 yr by Morph

I've mostly stopped watching TV shows and movies because nobody has any ideas anymore.  All they can do is remake what has already been slapped on a DVD or TV screen.

And the remakes end up having exactly what you two have mentioned; or some director wants to use fancy CGI and better equipment to "enhance a classic" when the classic version is fine as is.  I don't know how many times they do a TV show or a movie and grandma and mom go "I saw that when I was young/a child" 

Remaking Steel Magnolias (2012) pissed mom off royally, and the magnum remake pissed off grandma. Ghostbusters remake irritated my stepdad as he said "cult classic should stay untouched".......though I thought the latest one was pretty good imho.

 

But Overall: I agree with you both.   I say they should leave stuff alone.  Who cares if this generation that never looks up from a damn phone screen has not seen X from Y yester-year.

 

But everything us three have mention will keep on.  All because as my parents say "The world has run out of ideas. Hollywood is lazy. Politics are bullshiz"  

And to go On-Topic....I loved the original charmed, the remake can kiss an ass :l

Edited October 15, 20187 yr by Big Tyler 08

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

I have 5 children, 3 girls and 2 boys, with the 2 oldest already in 6th grade.

NONE of them have cell phones and if Andrea and I can help it, they will never have them until they are 18 and on the way to College.

Unfortunately, I bet they will be asking for cell phones long before they even ask for a car!!

After viewing this movie, Andrea and I, we can already see this is what we have to look forward to as parents in this age and times.

Things were much simpler when I was in Middle school and High school.

Edited October 15, 20187 yr by j7wild

Boycott the movie First Man, its actor Ryan Gosling and its US born French director, Damien Chazelle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Man_(film)#American_flag_controversy

They say they show the flag in the film just not the planting of it.

I've seen Apollo 13 and such so many times I don't need another film.

If you need a good film about space watch The Martian. 

The Martian was a pretty good film I thought. And I usually don't care for Matt Damon films

I will go watch The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 again!

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

That's ^^^ Nicole Kidman????

WOW!

Destroyer (2018)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7137380/

 

From the lady director whose prior credits are a segment in a 4 horror short stories movie, Æon Flux and The Invitation (2015) plus a few episodes of TV series like The Man in the High Castle, Halt and Catch Fire and Chicago Fire.

And the Oscars for Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actress go to...

Edited October 18, 20187 yr by j7wild

They did her just as good as that Charlize movie, Monster.  You never said Nicole Kidman, I would of never known.

YES PLEASE!!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4575512/

It's been almost 3 1/2 YEARS already and we all suffering from withdrawal!!

I didn't much care for the reboot (obviously will never hold a candle to Mel Gibson) but a sequel to Fury Road should be interesting

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 Hell 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 2 well made trailers:

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_simple_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

Edited October 19, 20187 yr by j7wild

Triplets

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334867/

How is this ^^^ even possible?

Look at the screenshot!!

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

Edited October 21, 20187 yr by j7wild

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

Edited October 25, 20187 yr by j7wild

I have been watching the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House.

That's the kid from E.T (1982).

He plays the father of the family in The Haunting of Hill House.

I haven't seen him in anything since he was in Cloak & Dagger, 2 years after he was in E.T.