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I watched this movie late last year and it ranked in my top 3 favorite movies of the year, if I remember correctly. The movie was so good that as soon as it ended, I considered firing it up again and immediately watching it one more time. That NEVER happens with me with movies. I didn't watch it again, but instead decided to wait a few months to give it another shot. See if I would like it even more with it being not so fresh on my mind.
Turns out that may have been a bad mistake. This is still a great movie, but that sense of wonder and "wow did I just see that?" which I experienced the first time around was not present on my second viewing. I had a hard time getting into it, I thought things moved a little too fast. I wasn't as enchanted by the world of Mad Max as I was the first time. In fact, I hate to say this, but I pulled my phone out about 10 minutes into the movie and started playing games. No, Dan! Noooooo!
But luckily I pulled my head out of my butt, and I put the phone away and started paying attention during the second half of the movie. It may have been too little too late though. While I did enjoy the second half, and I started to notice things I hadn't the first time around, it was really like I was only watching a half of a movie. I tend to zone out everything around me when I am playing on the phone. Which is a shame because this is an amazing movie, and as a result of my foolishness it may miss out on cracking the top 5 for this month. I haven't made up my mind yet though. Let's see how these other movies stack up.
I've been on a big Stephen King kick lately, and when I noticed that this short story from Full Dark, No Stars had been made into a movie, I had to see it. This is by far the story from Full Dark, No Stars that stood out to me the most. It is about a female author whose car breaks down while returning from a book signing. A good Samaritan stops to help her, but quickly things go wrong and she finds herself raped, beaten, and left for dead in a drain pipe. When she wakes up, she goes on an epic quest to find her rapist and would-be murderer and track him down to kill him.
There are twists and turns along the way, but I won't spoil anything if you haven't seen or read the story. The movie does change some things from the book, but I actually liked the changes here. This is a very worthy movie version of a very disturbing short story. Even though it is only a made for TV Lifetime movie (which I didn't realize until after watching this), it was still quite good.
I'm a fan of the Maze Runner books, but the first movie was only just okay by my standards. I had heard the second film was good, so I decided to give it a shot.
It turned out to be true that this film is better than its predecessor. It is sleek and beautifully filmed. Great action scenes, nice looking scenery. It is fast paced, it is intense. And it has a lot of really great appearances from actors from nerd shows that I like to watch. Want to see Littlefinger square off against Gustavo Fring? You have come to the right place.
I really, really wanted to love this movie. But it turns out I only just liked it. While it is true that the film is very well made and is infinitely better than the original, there is just something about it that screamed forgettable to me. Once again the urge to pull out my phone and play games in the middle of this turned out to be too strong to resist. I don't know what is wrong with me. I am either playing games while watching movies or falling asleep. I wish I could just enjoy things like normal people do, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me.
It may still make my top 5 for the month, just because I realize how well made the movie is. I liked it enough to revisit it at some point later on in the year, so it has that going for it.
I've read the book version of the Martian. While it is funny and has some really tense moments in it, there were quite a few pages filled with boring techno babble and science chatter. While it made the book seem scientifically accurate, like the events in it could have actually happened, it also was enough to bore me from time to time.
I figured the movie version of the Martian would play out very similarly, and I was not mistaken. Visually the movie is a masterpiece and one of the best looking films of all time. I like the cast, I like the characters. I am not a huge Matt Damon fan, but he was great in this, as were all of the supporting characters. Ned Stark is a bad ass here.
The problem I had with the movie is the same problem I had with the book. It tends to drag in parts and get bogged down by scientific gobble degook. If you have ever seen Apollo 13, this movie is very similar to that one. Except instead of 3 guys trapped in space, it is 1 guy trapped on Mars.
Despite the lulls in action, I still enjoyed myself. I think it could have been a little better, but overall it is a really solid movie. And the end made me tear up a little bit, so it has that working in its favor. Usually I don't cry in movies, so when a film can elicit such a reaction from me, it has done a good job.
I had heard this movie was terrible, so I had very low expectations for it. I came in expecting it to suck, but at the same time I was prepared for the chance that I would like it. I think my low expectations actually served in my favor here, as I truly did enjoy the movie.
It has a great cast, a fun story line. And it is a story line I can relate to, growing up hanging out in video game arcades and playing a lot of the same games that these guys did. Pac-Man, Centipede, Millipede, Defender, Space Invaders... hell yeah! If aliens ever invade Earth using characters from these games as their attack vessels, sign me up to fight them off!
I am sure that by no means is this a world beating film. I am sure that, watching this in a different context, the sappy love story and outrageous plot would have put me off to the film. But I don't know, I just had fun watching this. It's not meant to be an award winning film, it is meant to entertain kids, families, and people like me that grew up with these kind of games. I liked it a lot.
And visually it is really stunning too. I wouldn't be surprised to see this make my top 5. Which is funny when you consider how critically bashed this film is, and you compare it to the heavyweights it is up against.
I referenced in my Big Driver evaluation that I've been on a Stephen King kick lately. One of the reasons I am so into his work again all of a sudden is partly because I have recently read 11/22/63 and watched the Hulu miniseries. The story is about a man who goes back to save JFK, and it really got me thinking about the assassination and all the conspiracy theories.
When I saw this on Netflix, I decided to give it a chance. This is a documentary that deals with JFK's last day alive. Why he is in Dallas, what he did leading up to the assassination, and the assassination itself. This was a nice little miniseries, but it was nothing earth shattering for me. This didn't dive into any conspiracy theories, didn't speculate much on why it happened. It was more of a fact based narrative explaining the events of that fateful day.
It was good and I enjoyed myself watching it, but it left something a little to be desired for me when I was done with it.
After watching the Day JFK Died, I was still starved for more information on the Kennedy assassination. Searching for JFK on Netflix, I found this documentary as well. This is more of what I was looking for in the first place.
Why was Kennedy killed? Who could have done it? Who had a reason to do it? Why was the trajectory of the bullets so screwed up if they were fired from 1 gun? Why did people on the street smell gunpowder if the shots were fired from such a high vantage point with the wind blowing out?
This was the documentary that dealt with all the conspiracy theories regarding the assassination. Some of these theories were pretty interesting, some were stupid. I thought the theory about him being accidentally shot by a Secret Serviceman going for his weapon was an interesting theory, especially since it was backed by a ballistics expert, but I have read about this theory since watching this documentary and it has been proved false.
I enjoyed this a lot, and it really got me thinking as to what could have happened back on November 11, 1963. It is a mystery that may go unsolved in our lifetime. If it ever gets solved.
I watched this movie last year, in 2015. I fell asleep about halfway through it and missed a good chunk of it, but I still ranked it on my list. I believe it got a somewhat middling ranking if I remember correctly.
I decided I owed it to this movie to go back and watch it again this year, while attempting to actually stay awake for the whole thing. I succeeded in my goal, but I didn't really enjoy the movie as much as I thought I would. Sure there are some genuinely scary events in this movie. It is rare when a film can scare me or creep me out, and this one was able to do it on a few occasions.
I just think that knowing the twist of the film, plus having seen most of it so recenty, kind of ruined it in my mind. I wasn't able to get into it like I was hoping I would be able to. I kept pausing it and doing other things, and I think it took me over 3 hours to finish a film which really isn't that long to begin with.
I gave it a chance. I do like the film, but it is too similar to other things I have seen to really stand out too much in my mind.
I've always been intrigued by the premise of this film. It has Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is a big plus. It's about zombies: another plus. But for some reason I had my doubts.
Just because Arnold is in this doesn't mean it is an action movie. In fact, it is far from it. The film is mainly a psychological drama. Arnie is dealing with the impending death of his daughter, who has been bitten by a zombie. There is no cure for this. She is going to die and there is nothing he can do about it.
Usually when I watch movies like this where there is this kind of impending shroud of doom surrounding the characters, I get really into it. But for some reason I just wasn't feeling this movie. It's not the characters, it is not the acting. As far as I can remember the movie seemed to be pretty well made. I just couldn't really get into it, and now that I think back on it, I can barely remember anything about it. Maybe I just wasn't in the proper mood to watch it.
Some other day, some other time, perhaps.
This isn't typically my kind of movie. FBI vs drug cartel. Lots of shootouts and elaborate scheming.
But I had read in the Entertainment Weekly that this was supposed to be a really intense, hardcore movie. I like Emily Blunt. I like movies that put me on the edge of my seat. Why not give it a shot?
The movie gets off to a really good start. The FBI raids a drug house, they find dead bodies in the walls. People are shaken, they puke. A sense of dread and foreboding settles in. I am like - okay, this is gonna be good.
Unfortunately the rest of the movie doesn't hold up to the strong beginning. Emily Blunt's character is drawn into some kind of a plot to battle the Mexican cartel. There is a lot of elaborate scheming and double crossing going on. Benicio Del Toro's character is a double agent, or something. There is a big conspiracy uncovered at the end. Emily Blunt's facial expression never changes.
I just felt very "eh" about the whole movie. This is a subject that doesn't particularly interest me. I kind of got bored after a while. I started doing other things and only half paid attention. The movie didn't grip me like I had expected it to. I recognize that it is a well made movie, I just wasn't feeling it for some reason or another.
That's several movies on the list now that I have recognized as well done films, but for some reason or another I haven't been able to get into. I think its an attention span problem on my end, but who knows?
This is something I have wanted to see for a long time, if only because it stars the actress who plays Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones. In this movie, she travels to Japan to track down her sister, who has vanished into the "suicide forest" thing they have over there.
The movie delivered some legitimate scares. Just the whole forest thing itself was creepy, not to mention the fact that the whole movie takes place in a foreign country where nothing is familiar. That makes the whole thing just a little bit more unsettling.
I really liked the movie, although I did think the ending was kind of stupid and didn't make a whole lot of sense. If it doesn't make the top 5 for this month, you can blame the ending.
I was surprised to see that this movie got harsh reviews from the critics, because I had a good time. My tastes are weird. I like Pixels and the Forest which everyone seems to hate, yet I didn't really care for Sicario, Maggie, The Others, etc.
The last movie I watched in April!
I came into this movie not really knowing what to expect. I knew that the trailers for the film looked good, but as far as its actual story line, I had no idea what it was about. Something with ghosts.
The story revolves around a girl named Edith. She sees ghostly visions of her mother warning her of a place called Crimson Peak. Some of these ghost scenes are kind of creepy. Again, I don't scare easily but some of the scenes put me on the edge of my seat a little bit.
She meets some dude played by Loki from Thor - you know, the guy that all 20 to 30 year old chicks seem to go nuts over. Turns out he and his sister are running some kind of black widower scheme where he marries women with money and then they take the money and share it between the 2 of them. The sister gets upset because Loki is falling in love with this woman, and that's not part of the script. Edith finds out that the place where she and her new family are living is called Crimson Peak.
Fights break out. Stuff happens. You are led for most of the movie to believe that ghosts are the main antagonists in the film, but they aren't. It was a good movie. Not sure if I liked the very end, but I think the movie as a whole was solid enough to earn an entry into my top 5 for the month, especially seeing as how I watched a ton of movies I couldn't get into.
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It's a tough call, but I must choose only 5 from the list to make my ultimate year end ranking.
The 5 moving on are:
Big Driver
The Martian
Pixels
JFK: The Smoking Gun
Crimson Peak
It was a really, really tough call. I wanted to include Mad Max. I really did. I also wanted to include the Forest. Even the Scorch Trials probably deserved to move on. But 5 and only 5 were selected.
4 months into the year, and here are my top 20 movies so far, based on me pulling 5 each month:
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Cake
American Sniper
Predator
Friday the 13th Part 2
Cake
American Sniper
Predator
Friday the 13th Part 2
Locke
Evil Dead
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Elysium
Snowpiercer
Room
Manson Family Vacation
Deadpool
Goodnight, Mommy
Unforgiven
Room
Manson Family Vacation
Deadpool
Goodnight, Mommy
Unforgiven
Big Driver
The Martian
Pixels
JFK: The Smoking Gun
Crimson Peak
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