What is the latest movie you watched and what did you think of it?

[IdolEyes787]

Idol, the Wicker Man is another movie I enjoy and knowing that it was a Hollywood remake of a classic british film with Nicholas Cage as the star, the only way I will watch it is if someone nails me to a chair in front of a screen and tapes my eyelids open.

Edward Woodword is pure class while Nic Cage is pure something else.Anyway for English language films nothing tops the Brits for being able to create an underlying but undefinable sense of dread.
Ok maybe hillbillies /southern gothic hence probably the relocation of Straw Dogs from Cornwall to Mississippi.

As for Lost in Space and Starsky and Hutch I totally agree.Lost in Space was just ridiculous and turning Starsky and Hutch into a comedy was just a bad idea which the casting only made worse(see Green Hornet).

I didn't hate Miami Vice even though it basically missed the entire point . There were still some nice bits though like the scene with Gina facing down the Aryan which is an obvious homage to Don Johnston's "Maybe you won't even twitch". That and Edward James Olmos' Lt Castillo was sorely missed but then again Phillip Michael Thomas not so much.
Btw PMT gave one of the most regrettable quotes ever when flush with the initial success of the old series he bragged how he was going to win an Emmy ,Grammy ,Oscar,Tony ( the laughable EGOT) in the next few years.

[Artemis]

Another tidbit about Phillip Michael Thomas, during production of the original series, in which he always stressed he was a ladies man, he announced that he wanted to release a line of designer womens lingerie, the idea never came of anything probably because he wanted his initials to signify the brand and a woman wandering around with PMT on her jim-jams wasn't ever going to go over well....

[username-]

Contagion. 5/10
I thought it was going to be awesome! So maybe I hyped myself up too much for this one.

And Kimjongilia - 8/10
Very interesting.

[clocker]

Transformers: The Dark Side of Nimoy.

It all boils down to this...
How does a film with an unlimited budget depict Washington DC so inaccurately?
I'm not being a curmudgeon on this seemingly trivial point, I think it's the underlying problem with the whole movie.

It was a given that Transformers was going to be a CGI sausagefest and huge swaths would be pure imagination...we all knew that going in.
This sort of digital wizardry works best when tethered to a recognizable reality (for example, think of the opening scene of Star Wars and the "apes in the trees" from Rise of the Apes...both amazing visuals but the apes seem "real" while the spaceships are "cool", you know they're fake) and the imagineers of Transformers are too lazy to make DC even remotely realistic, so their chances of making the major CGI plausible were slim.

Basically, none of the big action setpieces make any more sense than the Bizarro world Washington DC.
Of course, the nonsensical CGI pales before the conundrum at the heart of the franchise...how does Wit(less)wicki manage to get these smokin hot girlfriends?
Related question: who in Hollywood decided that Shia LaBoeuf was an action hero/franchise star?
Because really, he isn't.

[zigzagon]

3:10 to yuma
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381849/
nice movie
8/10

[mjmacky]

Meet Bill 8.5/10

Aaron Eckhart first got my attention in Thank You for Smoking (which I give a 9.5/10). I found it strange that a movie this good with a cast of actors & actresses I enjoy, like Olyphant (Justified), Wiig (SNL), and Alba (google image search), somehow managed to slip my attention for several years. I happened to catch the title and synopsis while browsing Hulu's movies. It's for the most part a comedy, about a guy having a bit of a crisis (identity crisis?). Sometimes I really enjoy movies that just drag your mood down with them (Everything Must Go), but this stays pretty light, and things don't actually get that bad for him... so it's actually nothing like those types of movies.

[iLOVENZB]

Company Men // 2010

A socialistic view about corporate businesses during the economic crisis. Ben Affleck went from dropout construction worker (Good Will Hunting) to a successful Sales position for GTX (Company Men). The plot is as follows (quoted from RT):

Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is living the American dream: great job, beautiful family, shiny Porsche in the garage. When corporate downsizing leaves him and co-workers Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) and Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) jobless, the three men are forced to re-define their lives as men, husbands, and fathers.

Bobby soon finds himself enduring enthusiastic life coaching, a job building houses for his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner) which does not play to his executive skill set, and perhaps the realization that there is more to life than chasing the bigger, better deal. With humor, pathos, and keen observation, writer-director John Wells (the creator of "ER") introduces us to the new realities of American life. -- (C) Weinstein

I hardly noticed any of the plot in the film, if it was it was watered down to the point you didn't notice it. The plot jumped from place to place without finishing events. For instance, Bobby being redefined as a "good" father is shooting a hoop (literally) with his son.

[Glod]

The latest film was Star Wars: A New Hope, which I had not seen since early childhood. A friend recommended that I revisit the original trilogy, so I am doing so. Unfortunately, most of the characters are shallow archetypes; Han Solo as the dashing rogue, C-3PO as comic relief, etc. Backstory was minimally provided, and every attempt at instilling some sense of purpose to Luke Skywalker's decision of assisting the rebels fell flat. I mean, the film only lingered for around 5 seconds on the smoking, skeletal remains of his parents before moving back to Luke, who seemed mildly irritated. The whole premise struck me as absurd, and characters are pulled along on strings to suit the overarching plot, which is equally ridiculous. Don't even get me started on the dialogue, which was cringe-inducing and could have been written by an 8-year-old. Humor has its place, but casual jesting while stormtrooper rifles are sending laser pulses 2 inches from your face doesn't strike me as realistic in the least.

The only redeeming quality is the Star Wars universe itself, which is filled with breathtaking settings, a plethora of alien creatures, and varied worlds spanning across an entire galaxy. If only the characters who populated it had convincing motives and were part of a coherent story.

[IdolEyes787]

Two words,space opera.
There is science ,there is fiction and then there is science fiction.Fine you didn't "buy into it" I can live with that but lambasting a movie especially a sci-fi one for being "unrealistic" is just silly.

On another wholly opposing note I believe that the characters are what carry the film and your criticisms speak only to the now dated nature of the movie and not to it's initial quality.
( An exceedingly small) Part of what was bad about the ensuing series(ie Episodes 1-3) is that unlike the original(s) the characters were basically unlikable and consequently no one ended up caring in the least about them.

[Artemis]

The latest film was Star Wars: A New Hope, which I had not seen since early childhood. A friend recommended that I revisit the original trilogy, so I am doing so. Unfortunately, most of the characters are shallow archetypes; Han Solo as the dashing rogue, C-3PO as comic relief, etc. Backstory was minimally provided, and every attempt at instilling some sense of purpose to Luke Skywalker's decision of assisting the rebels fell flat. I mean, the film only lingered for around 5 seconds on the smoking, skeletal remains of his parents before moving back to Luke, who seemed mildly irritated. The whole premise struck me as absurd, and characters are pulled along on strings to suit the overarching plot, which is equally ridiculous. Don't even get me started on the dialogue, which was cringe-inducing and could have been written by an 8-year-old. Humor has its place, but casual jesting while stormtrooper rifles are sending laser pulses 2 inches from your face doesn't strike me as realistic in the least.

The only redeeming quality is the Star Wars universe itself, which is filled with breathtaking settings, a plethora of alien creatures, and varied worlds spanning across an entire galaxy. If only the characters who populated it had convincing motives and were part of a coherent story.

While a little less harsh about your summation than my mildly irritated Canadian friend (he still hasn't recovered from his trip to the woods), I think you need to take classic movies at face value for their time in order to enjoy them. Society has changed a great deal in the last 3 decades since the original Star Wars trilogy was produced, particularly morals and how people actually interact with one and other. For it's time Star Wars was cutting edge in so many ways and in terms of the acting the actors were actually far more emotional than in a lot of 70's and early 80's movies, where most of the time dark and brooding and saying not very much was a sign of being 'cool'. If you go back and look at most of the classic Sci-Fi movies from the 70's (which reminds me, time for me to review a classic) the acting did seem 'wooden' by modern standards and alot of the motivations are left unexplained.

This is as much to do with the style of movies being produced at the time as it does with the quality of the acting, and I would hardly say that Sir Alec Guiness and Harrison Ford are exactly slouches as actors. Also Star Wars was the first time that a robot was ever really imbued with a likeable personality for a movie, yet this was such a hit that many other movies within a few years had tried to emulate this feat (Black Hole, Buck Rogers etc.) so the character development overall (for the time) was far more in depth that we see from alot of movies from that era.

I find in general, in 70's movies that alot of motivations are simply left unexplained, I often find myself going huh ? but have accepted that this seems to be something to do with the style of the era in general. Charles Bronson made a massive career in the 70's out of wasting entire gangloads of baddies, while saying very little, looking deeply and smoulderingly around at every one, and with little or no dialogue as to why, the same with Chuck Norris. In these movies there is one or two cruel acts perpetrated on the good guy by the baddies, then he snaps and goes on a murder spree which we are supposed to cheer, while showing little emotion and explaining himself (themselves) not one jot.

Pithy witticisms were also par for the course for alot of movies of this time, once again Arnold Schwarzenegger made as much of a career out of pithy one liners as he did with his huge muscles dispensing hundreds of bad doodz in a single sitting.

I believe in general to truly enjoy movies from these era's you have to move past your preconceptions, and take them for the classics that they are, far more inventive and capable of transporting us to another world more easily and believably than the current crop of schlock, that is simply trying to out effect each other in a 'my one's bigger than your one' contest while sacrificing any real character development or depth and layering to the movie.