Another night of movie selections provided by the wonder YIFY service (combined with Pirate Bay’s amazing service. If you do still buy DVDs, please use our links and help keep us online. If you can’t afford to buy DVDs, torrent on!
Kingsman Golden Circle (2017) Dunno where this came from, has Channing Tatum, Lucy Lui and other stars in supporting roles and gives the starring one to some guy I never saw before. Pretty good action movie, interesting, interesting fights and action sequences, script beyond suspension of belief but not convoluted at least. And of course it had the obligatory traitor in their midst. Score: 4 liked it
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Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Pretty good but what is with Scarlet Johansson playing all these cyberdolls? Isn’t this like the 4th or 5th one? At least she’s not just a voice this time but spends a lot of time in a nippleless skinsuit and riding on a motorcycle like The Bride kicking ass and shooting people’s heads off. Nice visuals, incoherent story, what I did get was another one of those ‘we snatched you out of your old life, gave you false memories and made you into a fighting machine for our evil goals’ type bullshit, so get past that and enjoy the action scenes. Score: 3 Keep but not enthusiastically
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Book of Henry (2017) File this under “I didn’t see that turn coming” as this is not what you think it is, then it’s something else, then it’s back to the original thing (sorta) but still entertaining. This while having a precocious kid who’s not completely annoying, a little kid who’s not sickeningly kid actor, inept single mom who defies the trope, her slutty alcoholic friend (Sarah Silverman) who is totally on-type (can’t have everything) and prince charming doctor as the Mom’s love interest. Without spoiler, there seems to be some ethical questions here but let it go. I always like “mission impossible” type crime countdown plans, even narrated, and this has that. Still watching it so don’t know if it will ultimately disappoint, but according to common movie tropes this can only go one way, so I doubt it. There is some comfort in tropes, they resolve things nicely. Good movie Score: 4 (hey, it’s no GWTW, I don’t cheapen the 5) well-acted, nicely plotted and scripted, nice resolve. Liked it.
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Maudie (2017) Charming little biopic about the British Gramma Moses, beguilingly untalented and lame, but one of those ‘outsider art’ things where if you do it for 60 years it becomes art even if it sucks balls. This movie hints at it, but it seems like her life must have been pretty much hell with the jerk she married to rescue herself from the abominable homelife she suffered. This lady’s life was no picnic, all crippled up, brutalized, abandoned, reviled, insulted. Mercifully, she finally dies. But she did seem to get some joy from painting before the torture of her arthritis made that a torture as well, so I guess death was a release from pain and suffering. Real happy-time datenight film. Still, Sally Hawkins is great, as usual, love her. Ethan Hawke a bit miscast, Colin Firth, their first chance, would have been much better, but you can’t have everything. Score:3 for Sally alone
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Last Ounce of Courage (2012) I get where this movie is coming from, there are so many America hating, religion hating and military hating movies from the uniform lefties of Hollywood that when you finally get a contrary movie made you want to bang all the gongs and ring all the bells, but it just seems excessive and over the top. Fred The Hammer Williamson as the baddie Johnny Cochrane/Jesse Jackson far left ideologue is a nice touch, but then they had to have a black janitor with a heart of gold to balance him out. A lot of what the white protagonist says to the Hammer, an ALCU lawyer, is borderline racist, at least in today’s world where attacking a black leftist for being a leftist is seen as attacking him for being black. Not well-acted, stilted script, self-righteous teenagers and a disappearing mystery man who is a stand-in for Jesus, but I still give it a kudos for standing out of the crowd. Was savaged by critics, if they reviewed it at all, must have been an indy religion financed movie to have gotten green-lighted. Score 4 for heart
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I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) Quirky little movie, funny in part, satisfying in that revenge is settled in the end, so that’s good in the days of ‘the bad guy always gets away’ although some innocents get caught up in the carnage as well, some real psycho douchebags get killed gruesomely so there’s that. The male lead is disturbingly like Kip of Nap Dynamite, if he butched up a bit and actually could pull off the crap he claims with Karate and what-not. Score: 3 held my interest
Giant Mechanical Man (2012) Quirky indy rom-com, worth a watch. For all the crap about rejecting capitalism and materialism these people still have to pay their bills and reach happiness when the girl gets a job lucrative enough to support his useless art. They do a couple of these indy quirky romances a year, this year’s is The Big Sick which was about the same calibre.Score: 3 worth a watch
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Heartbreak Kid (2007) This new one has no depth of emotion the first one did. Schiller is not the actor Grodin is and the script is a raunchy rom-com. It remains a warning against marrying in haste, however. I can’t seem to avoid this Malin Ackerman now that I’ve noticed how cow-headedly unattractive she was in 27 dresses. Score:3 it is what it is
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Z for Zachariah (2015) Good movie, but slow and depressing and finally pointless. The movie is good though. Weird, huh? Score: 4 might watch again
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Heard about this many times, never saw. Reasonably funny, but another one of those where this dweeby guy gets all this model-class pussy. I mean, ome on. He’s pudgy, he’s a beta male and he has a little dick (which unfortunately you get to see several times, while never seeing any naked women. One of Judd Apatow’s bullshit equivalencies I guess, he made this and that’s why it’s so beta malish. The only alpha male is that Brit “comedian” guy who would believably get pussy, and he’s made out an idiot and bad person, I guess? Get a clue, in the real world beta males don’t get ANY pussy, let alone the babes in this movie. Unless they are unbelievably rich or powerful or both, which this asshole is not. I guess girls might like this movie, which is demasculating, but as a non-beta I spit on it. Score: 2, watchable but disposable. Once was plenty
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Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby Her (2013) This is the Her part, and it can be boiled down to “everything is men’s fault, it’s men’s responsibility to fix fucked up insane women’s broken psyches while paying all the bills so women can wallow in their own crepulence. I’ve lived this (minus the dead kid) so it didn’t appeal to me to watch it fictionalized. Rich young women with priveledged upbringings who are constantly whinging and blaming their shitty lives on others really gets old, but not as old as those who coddle them (Jeff Bridges as her doting dad is particularly bad. He should have told her to get off her fat ass and get on with life. But no, he enables her bullshit by bankrolling it, like the crappy college course with some black woman ranting stupidly as it’s main coursework. Score:1 BELETED
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Lucky Them (2013)
Boring stupid pointless Rolling Stone type journalist searches for supposedly dead rock star she used to date accompanied by the guy who was Sandman, something Church. Really dreary, then they find him (Johnny Depp cameo) but out of some misplaced sense of honor she doesn’t report it. So what was the point? She’s old and not good looking btw but young rock guys seem to adore her and not only fuck her (which might be plausible) but get with her as a life-partner (not going to happen IRL). Just pointless and dreary getting there. Score: 2 minus meh
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Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) Just as dumb as I remembered it, I didn’t remember it was that late in the ’80s when it came out, it is so OF the ’80s, the music, clothes and attitude. But then Hollywood always late to the party. Score: 4 good for what it is, and it has Carlin without the politics
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Coneheads (1993) See above. I’d a bet a dollar this was from the ’80s, wonder why it took so long to get made, nearly 15 years after the original skit. Some great gags, Micheal McKean and David Spade (who wouldn’t have gotten the part had it been made in the ’80s) and Phil Hartman and Dave Thomas, who would have. It even has Sinbad. If that ain’t ’80s I dunno what is. Score: 4 delivers as advertised
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I Tonya (2017) I always did have sympathy for Tonya, and this plays it up for all it’s worth. Her cohorts are just as stupid as they are in real life. The only quibble is Tonya was a tiny thing and the girl from Suicide Squad (Margot Robbie I find out now) is a great big beast with a fact more like Nancy Carrigan, sharp and driven, than Harding, who was waifish and soft. It gets tiresome about the time of the assault because I was alive then and it was on TV constantly so you knew the whole thing going down. At the very end there’s an incongruous minute where she says you can’t ban me for life, it’s not fair, they only got 18 months, blah blah. But really, how could they ever have allowed her to skate again, knowing about the attack beforehand and not reporting it. By that time in the film they do admit that, but earlier they cloud it to make it seem like the bodyguard’s idea. Anyway, rough justice for a rough little girl, I guess. Life ain’t fair.
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Underworld Quintology (2003-17) They are what they are, good action, ok narrative (somewhat illogical, since they try to tie 5 movies together with different directors, writers, actors 15 years apart not bad though). A movie taht is what it claims to be, and that’s enough. Score: 4 will watch them all again sometime.
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In the Loop (2009) Tedious movie about tedious bureaucratic work. Some decent acting but the subject matter is portrayed accurately, meaning it sucks ass. Note of interest, has Anna Clumsky, Home Alone boy’s love interest and Dan Ackroyd’s daughter on My Girl Score: 2 for some good dialog etc but I wouldn’t watch it again, ever.
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Letters to Juliet (2010) This is one of those ‘girl engaged to perfect guy, goes through conscious expanding event and learns another handy guy is really her perfect guy’. Hollywood is so dependent on tropes that most movies don’t even need to be watched to know what’s going to happen, you have to rely on your affinity for the actors walking and talking and doing things to make it enjoyable. While I appreciate Amanda Seigfried not playing a crazy psycho hosebeast for one movie, it wasn’t enjoyable. Score:2 well made but not entertaining
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A Monster Calls (2016) Ugh. Another of these disturbed child’s emotional baggage manifests itself in an actual monster, this one just tells tedious, boring stories. The kid acts like he’d rather it just kill him. Score: 1 just not interested in this dreck. Treeman was nicely rendered though. Should have just made a movie about him.
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For No Good Reason (2012) Johnny Depp hosted movie about Ralph Steadman. If he wasn’t such a hard-core lefty, spouting idiotic shibboleths about Western tyrants sending young me to their death (instead of accurately appreciating those who died to allow him to hold his odious beliefs: does he really suppose any of the REALLY tyrannical regimes would put up with his bitter attacks and hatred? Interesting how he does his paintings, though. A lot of them just seem like he’s throwing paint on a canvas, then trying to scrape off enough to make something out of it. Not my favorite artist, no sense of reality, anyone can doodle ‘in their own style’ that looks like nothing. His are so horrific they are recognized as art. I prefer people like Giger, whose imagination is just as good but whose technical prowess is worlds above Steadman. Also, I though it weird they didn’t mention “The Wall” at all, I have the feeling there was a falling out. They mention every little two bit mag who published his crap, but not that major project, the only realized animations of his art, high budget, high profile. Score:2 interesting painting details. Steadman, Thompson and their ilk were odious cretins and Depp is a modern-day hippie peacenik asshole, blaming the peaceful US for the belligerence of the rest of the world.
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Glass Chin (2014) Boring, pointless crime movie. Real waste of time, the performances, meh the plot ugh. Score:1 it is a movie and I did watch it all the way through
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Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
Torture porn. Seriously, you have to wonder about the sick minds of people who watch this kind of crap for entertainment. Like the Saw series, to enjoy this you can’t just be a horror movie fan, you have to get off on seeing people degraded and subjected to great pain, mutilation, sexual assault and murder. The killer is granted a god-like omniscience, where he commands the victims to do things, even injuring themselves, and he makes the decision whether or not to kill them (almost always the answer here is yes).
He sadistically frames another man for his murders, gleefully sees him executed and goes scot-free. The ending sections reveal more of his murder and torture of victims. There is no “plot”, it’s in documentary form and merely describes his crimes via talking heads and acted sequences. Who the fuck watches this? There should be men in white coats outside the theater who immediately arrest and confine anyone who enjoys this type of film. I stopped watching 5 minutes in and read the synopsis on Wiki and it was just as degrading and ignorant as I suspected. Fuck this ‘filmmaker’ and anyone who watches this crap. Score:0 didn’t watch
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Stranger (2014) I was immediately struck by the shitty acting while the credits were still rolling and then the name Eli Roth rolled across, I think as an Exec Producer or something, but his involvement was all I needed to know. No need to subject myself to any more. BELETED! Score:0 didn’t watch
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