This conversation made me want to watch Romancing the Stone again... except it doesn't seem to be available from any of the standard streaming sources.  Bummer.

So instead, because I gave it such a hard sell over in the Three Defining Movies of Adolescence thread but hadn't actually watched it in ages, I took another look at Harold and Maude.

By the way, I have never seen a Harold and Maude poster or cover that was anything other than hideous - clearly no marketing department has ever had a clue as to how to portray this flick, and rightly so.     This one is the least objectionable of the bunch...

So anyway I gave it a rewatch (hell, it's 90 minutes long and $3.99 to outright buy it on iTunes, why the hell not?) and... sweet jeezus I still love every second of this movie. 

For some reason my usual hatred of whimsy in movies doesn't seem to get triggered by the occasional whimsy in this one.  Well, maybe there's a little bit too much in the Tom Skerritt scene (his first movie role, I think this was).  Possibly because the whimsy is leavened with sprinkles of comedy that's blacker than the beasts in Attack the Block.

Anyway, if you haven't seen Harold and Maude, I'm not even going to try to sell it to you - if you give it a shot you'll probably know within the first five minutes if it's for you or not.  If it IS, then strap in.     

And take special note of the ending, which takes all the plot that movies today would probably make their third act and gets it done in five minutes.  And most of those five minutes consists of a montage which is still my favorite montage in any movie ever.

Side note: Ruth Gordon was a fascinating lady - if you know her at all, it's probably from Rosemary's Baby - but she lived one hell of a life.   Check out her Wikipedia page for a picture of her as the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl... in 1919.  Lordy.

Punisher was one of the two Marvel comic books that appeared in Poland in 1991 (Spider-Man was the other one... we also got Batman and Superman from DC that year). I owned a few Punisher issues and liked them, although Batman was my favorite. Today I decided to check out the 2004 film adaptation and... oh boy.

It's a simplistic revenge movie that reminds me of low budget Michael Dudikoff stuff. Absolutely unremarkable, bleak and uninteresting. If you want to see a gritty comic book adaptation done right, watch the Nolan Dark Knight Saga instead.

Of course not

The movie has a lot of admirers on IMDb (and a lot of haters too). Looks like it's one of those heavily contested flicks, just like Scott Pilgrim. And like Scott Pilgrim, it just didn't work for me.

Nicholas Cage as the Punisher?

I'm not a fan of that Punisher movie, or of Thomas Jane's interpretation. Frank Castle isn't the sit around and mope type of character, which is what he does for most of the movie, and he's certainly not a stand around and watch criminals raping women and beating up children kind of character either.

For me, the best Frank Castle is the Garth Ennis in Punisher Max.

Glorious

Okay. What do you have to say about those movies?

KUNG FU HUSTLE
Lots of fun, altho it's a bit confused about who it should be following. A street punk tries to join a gang which is having trouble with a rundown tenement called The Pig Stye. Kung Fu masters are basically treated as superheroes, and if you can get past that, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

JCVD
Van Damme plays himself, more or less, as a hard-up actor who gets involved in a post office robbery. It's shot terrifically, plotted really well, and acted fantastically. Van Damme has never been better, and it's NOT an action movie.

Last edited by Zarban (2013-09-09 23:07:04)

From the description, that first one is clearly a Katherine Heigl rom-com.

World War Z (2013) - 5/10

This gave me the same feeling as when I watched Oblivion. We've seen it all before, and better. This film was alot dumber than what I was expecting. Terrible CGI zombies are used in the larger scenes, and pretty much ruin the immersion, and most action scenes are so chaotic you don't really know what is going on geographically, so there is no build-up of tension at all as the scene progresses. The plot in general just moves too quickly, at one point someone seems to set off a nuke while the main character is airborne in a plane, and they show it for like 3 seconds, and while I was sitting there wanting to see what just happened, the movie just suddenly moved forward to another location. I've never seen a nuke be treated so unimportantly. That was a great opportunity to take 10 seconds and let the severity of the situation sink in, but they just brush it off and move on.

Also the passage of time, and the time of certain incidents, is not mentioned. It seems like the Zombie outbreak spreads very quickly, like a matter of weeks, yet Israel has time to setup a huge wall around themselves. It looks like it would have taken a few months to build atleast, but in the movie some characters seem unaware it is even there, yet they've been watching news reports up until just days before. I don't know if the movie tries to sell me a completely implausible build time for the wall, or that the main characters didn't notice it for months and months.

Most scenes seem lifted directly from Dawn Of The Dead, The Invasion, 28 days later, Starship Troopers, and other films. And most of the action is just throwaway. Brad Pitt goes somewhere, gets some info, and oh no, he has to escape for 10 minutes as the movie kills some time.
It has some tense scenes as it calms down towards the end, but again, it is mostly forgettable once it's over. Pretty much lowest common denominator stuff, or rehashing ideas that others delved into alot further before, and they just gloss over pretty much everything that is brought up.

Last edited by TechNoir (2013-09-08 22:49:27)

Yeah, and it's just random chaos, almost nothing establishes character once the movie goes into action scene mode. You could literally go and fry some eggs and come back and not have missed anything of consequence.

5/10

My wife wanted something "light" and this is what we settled on. Bland, flavorless little film. Unremarkable in every way. I laughed two times, I think.

What I did like about it were the cameos. A lot of comedians I like are in here. Unfortunately, they just have nothing to do.

But what I liked best about it was that it was about a friendship between two women, who were the main characters. Yeah, they saddled in a romance but that was secondary to the main story. I dug that. A Hollywood film that's about two women who are friends and are intelligent that doesn't rely on gross out humor and allows the chemistry between Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to happen naturally, which is SO DAMN REFRESHING for Hollywood.

What I disliked about it: everything else.