Sabotage

Look at that still above. Look at how awesome Arnie looks in this. That is a great action hero look. As it happens, everyone in the movie LOOKS authentically badass and memorable. All the ingredients are right there.

Just one problem - Written by Skip Woods.

Between Wolverine, A Good Day to Die Hard, and now Sabotage, I'm convinced Skip Woods may be the worst writer on the planet. It just boggles my mind at how he's able to take what should be a great movie and make it into an incomprehensible mess.

This movie is kind of fascinating, in that everyone involved EXCEPT for the writer seems to be on their A-game. Schwarzenegger shows he can totally handle a modern-day gritty action role, Olivia Williams is awesome as a hard-boiled southern cop, even Sam Fucking Worthington gives a solid performance here.
On top of that, this movie is unapologetically balls-to-the-wall brutally violent and hardcore.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that nearly every 30-seconds there's either an f-bomb dropped, tits on screen, or someones head getting shot point-blank. This is Crank levels of excess, including multiple civilians violently splattered in the cross-fire.

And yet it all ends up mostly wasted, because the script is kind of a clusterfuck, 3 completely different movies very awkwardly sandwiched together. The movie opens sort of like Predator, with a team of badasses who take down cartels. This could be a great movie on it's own, but instead, the majority of the runtime plays out as a DEA version of 10 Little Indians, but not very interesting. Then, when it feels like the movie has ended, it suddenly starts back up again for a 15 minute epilogue revenge mini-movie. Just baffling story structure choices throughout.

Still worth a watch as its a pretty interesting misfire all things considered, but it's a bummer to see so many good elements get fumbled.

What's really cool is allegedly how they shot a lot of the scenes of her picking up/stalking guys by having her actually just walk into a bar and filming real people and their interactions. I'm wondering how much of that comes across in the finished product.

Was doing some long travelling so I've been catching up on 2 flicks I meant to see last year.

Prisoners - Amazing execution of a kinda contrived and manipulative script. Performances are all great, the lighting by Deakins is some of the best I've ever seen (Fincher ain't got nothing on this), but ultimately the movie feels very pointless to me. "Why did you tell me that story?" was my ultimate feeling on it.

American Hustle - Fun in stretches, and the 1st hour in particular is great, but this is really all over the place, unfocused, and tonally confused. The movie should be building to a tense conclusion, and that tension is almost completely absent. A lot of the characters feel caricatured, and Jennifer Lawrence in particular is grating as hell, and I have no idea why the hell she is even in this movie. You could cut her scenes in half and lose nothing. The "trying way too hard to be Goodfellas" comparison is very apt here.
Still, all that being said, it's not a bad movie at all, definitely watchable and pretty fun, just feels like it could've been something great with some revisions.

I don't get it either guys. It's like the Lost crowd suddenly seized on this show as the next big "answer to everything in the universe". I think that approach to storytelling is frankly the worst, it leads to pulpy, shallow material that's all about concocting mysteries instead of telling a good story about people. That kind of bad tv writing was a plague throughout the 2000s and I'm glad we're finally starting to get weaned off it as a society.

Love the optimistic note at the end, a much better and less cynical version of the SEVEN closing narration.

I think they stuck the landing for the most part, really happy with the season as a whole.

Vern's bewildered take-down of the 1st movie when it came out is still my definitive go-to on why these movies are absolute garbage, on how the entire "but it's dumb fun" argument is complete bullshit trotted out by people who've allowed lowered standards to gradually deteriorate the quality of summer blockbusters: http://www.outlawvern.com/2007/07/03/transformers/

I love the quiet conversation between Rust and Marty about what they've been up to, where you get the suggestion that

Or maybe some of us just have the patience to stick with a movie for 90 minutes and see where it's going before declaring it "too boring, not enough exposition dialogue". It's the most pleasantly re-watchable movie of 2013.

Rewatched The Insider again, as I try to do every year.

Still a fucking masterpiece and possibly the crowning achievement of the 90s as far as I'm concerned. This time in particular I noticed how amazing the cinematography is, the way Mann uses his edits and frame compositions. Stylistically, it really is one of the most powerful examples of filmmaking talent I've ever seen, taking a totally un-cinematic story and making it extremely tense and compelling.

I disagree, I think you greatly over-estimate people's cultural familiarity with Godzilla. My guess is 90% of US audiences have never seen a Godzilla movie, except for maybe the shitty Emerich version. They'll be far more open to a grounded, scary-movie tone than to a silly Pacific Rim-type approach.

Of course, we know that Godzilla fights other monsters in this movie, so audiences (myself included) might still hate it.

We focus so much on Ghostbusters, but for me, Groundhog Day is the real unsung masterpiece of his career. It's like a beacon of the type of accessible, brilliant comedy that does not get made anymore. We're mostly stuck now with either super-dumbed down awful slapstick movies for the whole family, or R-rated comedies that rely on being as raunchy as possible for laughs.

His influence is deeply missed.

It's hateable for how boring and generic it is, though it's true that it doesn't really do anything egregious. The panel didn't really get into this, but I'd forgive the confused lame storytelling choices if the action delivered, but it's an utterly lame action movie. It's like Blomkamp thought he was making an "important" movie so he didn't want it to be too action-oriented, so you get the worst of both worlds.