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[Cthulhu]

I watched John Wick 3.  It was bad, but entertainingly bad.  There's a fourth coming out next year, and a fifth already confirmed, they will definitely be bad.

The franchise is increasingly about this ever-expanding continental assassin universe which becomes more ridiculous and unwieldy every installment.  It was fun in the first movie, but now it's like every single person on Earth is a member of some secret society or another that serves the High Table.  There are four or five scenes where John Wick is walking somewhere and it cuts away to shady dudes watching him pass.  There are three separate scenes where John Wick comes up to some underworld figure and hands them some kind of token and persuades them to honor it and help him out in some way.  Four or five maybe, depending on how you count it.  There are three scenes where the adjudicator meets and punishes said helpers for helping him.

The rest of the movie is just ridiculous over the top action scenes.  With each movie the action feels less personal and intense, more indulgent.  The final bad guy of this one is just some guy.  There's a scene in the continental (where he can't kill John Wick cause assassin's creed laws) and he sits uncomfortably close to John and starts gushing about how excited he is and how John is his personal hero and shit, which is kind of funny but also the only characterization the guy gets, and he's the final boss of the movie.

In the penultimate fight scene the Continental is deconsecrated and a High Table kill team comes in with magic body armor and the continental loyalists, who all know that they have magic body armor, run out with regular pistols anyway so they can die and establish the threat.  John himself uses a 9mm carbine, again just to establish that these guys are really tough and to make it more exciting when he runs back and gets an armor-piercing gun, even though he already knew they had armor before he picked the carbine.  He just did it for movie reasons.

It kind of sucks, but the action is still good, and the increasing insanity of the series is still funny.  I don't think that'll hold up for another movie though.

[Yoink]

...one of my closest and oldest (oldest as in length of time being friends, not age - I have at least one comparatively ancient friend whom I love dearly) friends purchased a lifetime, premium Plex membership recently, which allows others to remotely stream things once he creates a user for them. He also set up a dedicated server to host his whopping great media collection from. Many a good time has been had, hanging out down there with the gang and watching weird and wonderful shit from said collection (when we couldn't get it on VHS, anyway).   

Yesterday he offered me an account for a small fee, which is fair enough considering the expenses involved in setting all this up.   
On the fence, I asked if he had Apocalypse Now. Sure enough, he does. Sold. Now I feel so high-tech and "with it". Although so far my enjoyment of this setup has been limited to going through looking things up to see if they're on there, feeling smug if they aren't or excited if they are. I'm easily amused, sometimes. Also neat were at least a couple of titles that I strongly recommended to my friend and wasn't sure if he'd listened to me about.   
Funnily enough, most of the things I thought off off the top of my head were on there, but as soon as I cracked open my IMDb watchlist, barely any were. There is some mighty obscure stuff that has accumulated on said watchlist over the years, most of which I don't remember adding. And of course, said list swelled considerably during the course of all this searching.   

Maybe today I'll actually fire it up and watch something. Eeeeee.

   
Oh yeah, and Come and See is on there, too. I didn't even look for it since I would have figured it was way too obscure, but there it was, the cover art staring at me with haunted eyes. Maybe I'll watch it and my eyes will look that way as well!   

[WealthyRadish]

I watched Come and See after seeing it mentioned here recently, and it messed me up. I don't want to color your expectations if you haven't seen it, though, you should probably go in as blind as possible.

[Starver]

Not sure where else to put this, as we don't have a dedicated Obit thread in here, so I'll be blunt...

RIP Sean Connery
- the best Egyptian/Lithuanian/Irish-American/Postapocalyptic-Brutal ever to have a Scottish accent.

[Uthimienure]

I watched Come and See after seeing it mentioned here recently, and it messed me up. I don't want to color your expectations if you haven't seen it, though, you should probably go in as blind as possible.

Shit, I'm sorry for mentioning it, WealthyRadish.  Hopefully you won't have long-term scars from it like I do.

[scriver]

From the movie with that title I assume all puns are intended

[WealthyRadish]

I watched Come and See after seeing it mentioned here recently, and it messed me up. I don't want to color your expectations if you haven't seen it, though, you should probably go in as blind as possible.

Shit, I'm sorry for mentioning it, WealthyRadish.  Hopefully you won't have long-term scars from it like I do.

Oh, no, I meant it as a good thing.

[IronyOwl]

The Beyond (2018) is a scifi movie that's awful in the preachy pretentious way rather than the fun everyone dies way. I should have known better than to watch something listed as scifi/thriller, because that usually means nothing happens. Lo and behold, it's one of those trying-to-be-suspenseful things about first contact and personal feelings, done mostly via interview format. I applaud their slavish devotion to not spending any money and their unwavering support for screaming cyborgs replacing humanity, but nothing else.

Spoiler: Spoilers but really there's nothing to lose don't watch it (click to show/hide)

The basic plot is that there's a weird aurora-thing in orbit and nobody knows what it is, so they try to find out and then it starts spawning giant cloud-spheres in the planet's atmosphere. Probes reveal the glowy thing may be a wormhole so they wanna send humans, but humans are squishy so they contact the military's Transhumanism Department to use Humans 2.0, which is where they shuck a guy's brain out of his body and into the robot.

Oh! And the process involves slowly killing the patient before shucking the brain, so technically they're undead cyborgs. Anyway, to everyone's great surprise the first one dies in transition and the second one screams uncontrollably upon awakening, so you know the undead cyborg vision of humanity is just going great. This bit is probably the only genuinely entertaining part about the movie.

Anyway after ten years of going through possible candidates and everyone's feelings and the big top guy being a dick for no reason, they also just include a military cyborg we know nothing about. At all. Not even his name. Then he gets shunted out an airlock and his arm explodes during the mission, which we only find out about after the pod comes back with just the scientist in it. Time apparently moves differently on the other side of the wormhole, with the craft experiencing years of wear and the passenger gaining years of memories despite only being gone 5 days. Which is super weird, because this affects nothing and is never brought up again. She doesn't know shit about the aliens other than that they talked to her through the dead guy who tried to become a cyborg before her and that they're here to help or something.

This is not years worth of first contact. This is a scifi trope done because it's spooky and they have nothing else to do.

Anyway then the solar system explodes. I wish I could explain this better but they just give a little message saying "this time lapse footage was recorded from the planetary observation probe" and then they have Saturn and its moons breaking apart or something? Or a bunch of different planets exploding? I don't know what I was supposed to be looking at, but a bunch of debris from that rockets towards Earth and a voice is counting down how close stuff is getting... fifty meters... ten meters... five meters... three meters... and then the smoke-globes spread out and up to form a really dramatic shield protecting Earth from space debris that I guess was three meters away from the surface at that point? The atmosphere? There were visuals making it look like it was coming right down to the surface, those dumb orbs were lurching well up into space, and the voice was claiming three meters. I don't know.

Anyway, cue long, long winded tirade from main narrator-chick about how we never thought anyone would help us and isn't life beautiful and killbot-chick remembers the hard drive with a bunch of footage of humans smiling on it somehow convinced the smoke-aliens (did I mention they look just like the orbs but smaller?) humanity was worth saving and oh isn't it all just so beautiful. And of course all the paranoia was wrong and the military is bad and the entire solar system has been completely remade including a sister planet in Earth's orbit that's perfectly habitable and did you think the monologue was over yet? Nonono, we also have to get into how much she hopes humanity avoids the mistakes of the past in colonizing this new world and our current world is running out of resources and so on and so forth.

Then we have another time lapse about sending only brainbot cyborgs to the new planet to prepare it for actual human colonization, and the smoke aliens saying hello to the cool revenants humanity can produce which is really just fantastic. Nice going guys, not going to result in an alien-sponsored cyborg rebellion at all. Again, this hilarity is the only serviceable part of the film.

Anyway that's how I spent an hour and a half making myself really angry.

[Egan_BW]

And then humanity became exclusively insane screaming undead cyborgs. I see this as an absolute win.

[King Zultan]

Who knew insane screaming cyborgs were the next step in human evolution, and we can only get better from there, makes me wonder what our final form will be.

[scriver]

I just saw the newest Hellboy movie

Jösse Krist

[RoseHeart]

Spoiler: Spoiler Review: Netflix's Stowaway (click to show/hide)

This movie blows.

It feels like half a story.

The resolution is literally, sacrifice one of the crew, to allow for the stow away. Get 3 from 4. 4 - 1 = 3. Profound.

The end dialogue felt like a circle jerk for actress Anna Kendrick.


It definately looked like it was building to something much more meaningful/satisfying. Perhaps the stowaway comes up with the solution!

He literally is pursuing a Masters in engineering.

What a fucking disappointment. There was no point to this film. This is isn't a story. This is just a factual record, something bad happened, the end. What the fuck, fucking art piece, self righteousness bs. I hate it.

[Vector]

^ Recommend you watch Sea Fog.

[nenjin]

Meanwhlie we watched all the Warlock movies this weekend.

Warlock 1 is still great. I'm kinda amazed how well it holds up. Great villain, who gets to be a real villain while being both powerful and vulnerable. Interesting story, cool magic, a real witchey Satanic vibe to the whole movie, fun characters and real heart in the writing.

Warlock 2 kinda blows. The villain goes from a villain to a Terminator-esqe monster minion despite being the same character. His personality becomes completely placid. His big line when he kills people is "Thank you very much." The movie is dragged down by shitty leads and a dumb story about druid powers. It plods and plods and plods along with too much exposition and a twist that isn't interesting other than it means the hero and heroine are actually committing incest?

Warlock 3 is just a stupid haunted house movie featuring a pack of unlikeable college kids, a Warlock whose ultimate aim is to summon a demonic girlfriend for themselves and painfully awkward T&A scenes. His magic is stupid, almost everything is about manipulating stupid college students in the lamest ways psychologically and emotionally, and honestly....the worst part is THE ONLY PERSON THAT ACTUALLY DIES BY THE END IS THE WARLOCK.

edit

After confirming with my colleagues, the druids in Warlock 2 are not brother and sister, and while you only see one of the college kids die in Warlock 3, she does leave the house alone which implies they all actually died.

[RoseHeart]

Spoiler: Follow up, had some time to think about it... (click to show/hide)

STILL 100% TRASH

There is...no meaning to the ending. No really, what happens isn't even a choice, just a response. They have no choice but to go back for the air tank. Logically, the stowaway would be the most expendable, but he can't climb the cord. The next most expendable is the botanist who lost his research, but, he can't he isn't very good at the pole and would probably fail too. So they have to kill the doctor as she's the most capable on the pole, and the captain is mission essential.

I mean, there could be some risk taken with the others or something, but it makes sense that really, it had to be her.


And what about the doctor's story?

How did that play in at ALL? They waited, and didn't find a solution, the end. Fuck off.


I mean, this movie is like a luxury train ride that ends in it going off a broken bridge. My rating isn't going to be good for the train ride, and the prompt service and comfortable seats don't weigh much when that's what happens.

Stowaway was a great actor, so was the botanist. Others were fine. Just all seems to not matter when it's a baaad movie. What. is. the fucking. point.


I honestly feel the moral of the story of this movie was supposed to be, "be touched as a rich white girl sacrifices her life for a poor black man."

It's a white guilt pat-on-the-back.


Disclaimer: I am white. I am coming at this from a "I am embarrassed for this shitty shallow message, when the black man could have been meaningfully empowered" perspective. And he should have been.

Because regardless of his race, it would have just made a far better story.