TV/Movies Megathread

[garbon]

On Marvel, first review I've seen for The Marvels is one star:

To say The Marvels is hard to watch would be to risk understatement. It's not just that it's not very good. It is hard to watch in the sense that a tree is hard to defibrillate.

I've seen reviews all over the place.

[Barrister]

On Marvel, first review I've seen for The Marvels is one star:

To say The Marvels is hard to watch would be to risk understatement. It's not just that it's not very good. It is hard to watch in the sense that a tree is hard to defibrillate.

It's running at 62% fresh on Rottentomatoes.  Some reviewers seem to like it.

Problem with reviews for this movie is going to be a loud dedicated minority who will hate it no matter what for being too "woke" because it has female leads in a superhero movie.

[Admiral Yi]

On a lark I started watching 16 Candles on Netflix.  I am blown away by how narcissistic and self centered the Molly Ringwold character is.

[HVC]

On Marvel, first review I've seen for The Marvels is one star:

To say The Marvels is hard to watch would be to risk understatement. It's not just that it's not very good. It is hard to watch in the sense that a tree is hard to defibrillate.

It's running at 62% fresh on Rottentomatoes.  Some reviewers seem to like it.

Problem with reviews for this movie is going to be a loud dedicated minority who will hate it no matter what for being too "woke" because it has female leads in a superhero movie.

Hard to take review aggregate site for movies like this serious. People review bomb it, and others leave fake positive reviews to try to counteract that. Best to take the views of a critic you trust.

[HVC]

On a lark I started watching 16 Candles on Netflix.  I am blown away by how narcissistic and self centered the Molly Ringwold character is.

So a teenager

[celedhring]

Fun fact: Captain Marvel (then Miss Marvel) was the last superhero comic series I ever bought, back in the 2000s.

I have always been an X-Men fan, and Marvel had this universe-wide event where the Scarlet Witch created an alternate version of the world where Magneto was the sole ruler (fun bit: the artists borrowed the king of Spain's formal attire to draw him). Anyway, in this reality Miss Marvel - which was very much a third tier character back then - is the world's most admired superhero. When finally the world went back to normal, she was one of the few that remembered the altered timeline, and decided to try to live up to that idealized version of herself, something that she struggled to.

I thought this was a somewhat compelling concept, so I bought Miss Marvel comics for a while. But they weren't too good and that angle was dropped quickly.

The first movie was pretty bad though. One of those movies where they follow the joke-a-minute Marvel formula even when it doesn't make sense for the story they're telling.

[Barrister]

On Marvel, first review I've seen for The Marvels is one star:

To say The Marvels is hard to watch would be to risk understatement. It's not just that it's not very good. It is hard to watch in the sense that a tree is hard to defibrillate.

It's running at 62% fresh on Rottentomatoes.  Some reviewers seem to like it.

Problem with reviews for this movie is going to be a loud dedicated minority who will hate it no matter what for being too "woke" because it has female leads in a superhero movie.

Hard to take review aggregate site for movies like this serious. People review bomb it, and others leave fake positive reviews to try to counteract that. Best to take the views of a critic you trust.

Rottentomatoes isn't too bad.  The Tomatoemeter is an aggregation is specifically ID'd movie critics from more-or-less reputable sites and newspapers, so that does prevent anonymous review-bombing.

Where RT is lacking is it takes each individual, nuanced review and summarizes it into a "fresh" or "rotten" label, then smashes all those reviews together.  So a reviewer saying "This is a fantastic movie: A+" gets counted the same as someone saying "Meh, it's allright: C+"

The audience score, which is more susceptible to review bombing, curiously comes in at 85%.

[celedhring]

On Marvel, first review I've seen for The Marvels is one star:

To say The Marvels is hard to watch would be to risk understatement. It's not just that it's not very good. It is hard to watch in the sense that a tree is hard to defibrillate.

It's running at 62% fresh on Rottentomatoes.  Some reviewers seem to like it.

Problem with reviews for this movie is going to be a loud dedicated minority who will hate it no matter what for being too "woke" because it has female leads in a superhero movie.

Hard to take review aggregate site for movies like this serious. People review bomb it, and others leave fake positive reviews to try to counteract that. Best to take the views of a critic you trust.

Rottentomatoes isn't too bad.  The Tomatoemeter is an aggregation is specifically ID'd movie critics from more-or-less reputable sites and newspapers, so that does prevent anonymous review-bombing.

Where RT is lacking is it takes each individual, nuanced review and summarizes it into a "fresh" or "rotten" label, then smashes all those reviews together.  So a reviewer saying "This is a fantastic movie: A+" gets counted the same as someone saying "Meh, it's allright: C+"

The audience score, which is more susceptible to review bombing, curiously comes in at 85%.

That's why I like Metacritic the most - they do average grades instead of RT's binary approach. The movie has a mediocre 51% there.

[garbon]

I watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
Had no idea what this film would be about but absolutely did not expect this David Croenenberg horror piece.
Family friendly this is not.
It's... Meh.
I like the low stakes but... They're not really are they. Seems caught between episodic content and being something big.
Is there a commentary on how awful mid 20th century urban design is or am I misreading it?

Watched it too a few days ago.
Found it to be a decent enough time-waster. Nothing special, even in the genre. Nice send-off for the crew.
But nothing more than that.

I just watched this and I'd give it about a 70 out of 100. Dark animal torture plot felt a bit outside of the general fun vibes of that series. Though it did remind me of some of the dark plots of childhood films like The Brave Little Toaster. Otherwise utterly forgettable.

[Josquius]

Disney plus has started ads

I really need to find time to investigate this pi  hole business I frequently hear mentioned.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Disney plus has started ads

I really need to find time to investigate this pi  hole business I frequently hear mentioned.

Try stremio, it's probably a bit easier to use but you're limited to the different p2p networks. So if no one is sharing...
Edit: but for the recent stuff it's generally great

[Threviel]

I use Pihole and it doesn't really work with video. It's glorious with ads, especially those inside apps on the phone, but streaming media is difficult due to Pihole working on the IP-addresses and ads often stream from the same ip as the film I want to see.

If you know how to set it up I heartily recommend pihole.

[Savonarola]

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

There wasn't an (enforced) Production Code at this time and a lot of directors were still trying to come to grips with sound, so the late 20s-early 30s saw some really wacked-out movies, especially in the horror genre.  This is one of them.  The movie is based on "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by HG Wells (Wells hated the adaptation since it focused on the horror rather than the philosophical themes of the book.  Tellingly Wells's most direct work on a film was "Things to Come.")  Richard Arlen (Edward Parker) is trapped on Dr. Moreau's (Charles Laughton's) Island, where the Doctor has turned beasts into men.  At first Moreau wants to see if Lota the Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke) will fall in love with Arlen and produce offspring (FOR SCIENCE!).  That's weird enough, but when Arlen's fiancee shows up with a ship's captain, Moreau decides letting one of his beast-men abduct and rape her (FOR SCIENCE!) is good enough.  The film ends like a parody of Frankenstein, where the beast men all grab torches and burn out Dr. Moreau.

Bela Lugosi has a small, but memorable part as the Sayer of the Law.  (Devo would crib "Are we not men?" from his lines.)

This film notoriously ran afoul of the British Censors, and couldn't even be shown in the UK until the 50s (with an "X" rating even after edits.  I think it's had a PG rating since the 70s.)

In the bonus features they had two of the surviving members of Devo discuss the film.  They were college students at Kent State and, massacres aside, there wasn't a lot to do in Akron Ohio in the early 70s.  So they would watch the "Friday Fright Night" style movies and they were really into masks.

They also included Devo - The Complete Truth About De-Evolution an experimental film which won the Ann Arbor film festival in 1975.  (Do I really need to warn you that it's weird?  It's Devo and it won a prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, of course it's weird.)  Iggy Pop (who is from Ann Arbor) and David Bowie became aware of Devo from this film and helped them get a record contract.  Consequently the version of Jocko Homo in the film is somewhat different than the album version.

[viper37]

Gladiator 2 is coming, with Denzel Washington starring in it, apparently.

Speaking of the devil, he'll play Hannibal in an Antoine Fuqua led movie.  A movie that was for a long while rumored to star Vin Diesel.  Vin Diesel might have looked the part better in hand to hand combat, fist fighting his opponents on the battlefield, but Denzel has the acting skills.  It's a toss up, really.

Link

[Jacob]

Are Carthaginians Black in North American pop-culture?