Recently Watched Movies

Not at all.

Money Plane. Kind of cheesy, but Adam Copeland does a decent job as the main protagonist.

Con Air, 1997.

Broken Arrow, 1996.

The Running Man, 1987.

Spiderman: No Way Home (2021)

I wanted to hail this as the next great trilogy; I really did.  But, this thing jumps the shark from the first 15 minutes and clears the shark further than Fonzi's wildest dreams of waterski jumping in a leather jacket. The first two films are wild and fantastic tellings of high school life and coming of age.  As in the comics they are loaded with bits of humor along with the action like when Spiderman gets slammed into a school bus by Keaton's Vulture bursting through all the metal of the bus winding up under one the of the seats.  Does Spiderman say 'ouch' or check for injuries? No, he finds some fresh bubblegum too close to his face and gets grossed out...

Alright, so yeah, the first two are great with the brilliant character arc of Mysterio and Keaton pulls off a didactic performance of the swell dad and the maniacal scoundrel.  In this one we're introduced to the great Dr. Strange soon into the film and we know this will not be just another Spidey vs. Rhino (pick your minor villain) mono-e-mono.  Spidey gets ahold of one of Strange's artifacts to get out of a predicament of everyone knowing his identity and uses it as a djinni bottle to grant him his wish of everyone not knowing his identity.  Things go very wrong as he's interrupted during the spell then all these multiverse portals are opened with the villains from the other movies coming through to get back at him.  And by 'other movies I don't mean the first two of the 'Home' series I mean the ones from the Tobey Macquire series like Wilem Dafoe as Green Goblin as well as bad guys from The Amazing Spiderman with Andrew Garfield.  A fantastic idea to be sure and it would even be better if those spiderman's showed up as well, right?  Well, it is a mixed bag to say the least.

  First off, Spidey gets another chance at redemption from Dr. Strange to send the multiverse villains back, but he pulls off an unbelievably stupid move to keep the villains here rather than send them back to their world where they are all dead, so that he can "cure" them.  To pull off such a feat, he has to interupt the spell again AND defeat Dr. Strange in his own imagined world where he is master of his domain, since Strange is not going to let him use the artifact again for that purpose.  In the upside down world, Parker is able to defeat Strange in a bout a span of less than 5 minutes by performing an incredible math formula (no chalk & board needed) involving moving objects and stringing them together to trap Dr. Strange in a complicated web.  Sure enough, it works to perfection and my eyes have never rolled deeper into the back of my head.

Thus Peter Parker is a 'Mary Sue' - a character who is unmatched in every aspect that can be measured.  He can make massive math computations with the blink of an eye and create gadgets that can psychologically cure the dark psychology of villains all this as a high school science student.  Of course he also has the powers of a spider, which is to be expected.  But defeating Dr. Strange? - naaaaaaaaaaah. 

Peter's gadgets of psychosis curing work at first then go awry and all blazes let lose with the Green Goblin getting back into his suit.  Eventually, more multiverse portals are opened, and, you guessed it, the other Spidey's show up from previous films.  They try to give you those warm fuzzies that the down-to-earth, genuine Tobey Macquire delivers in all his on screen performances.  Garfield is a little more jagged and, at one point, the other Spidermen call him 'amazing' and you get a good laugh. There are laughs to be had here - some land, many don't.  This film also has the longest death scene I've ever encountered and tries to milk the audience of all the sadness for all that its worth.

No Way Home goes double or nothing when they really didn't have to.  And, sorry to report, they go broke when it could have just been a nice spidey vs. rhino with interesting charater arcs.  Instead, Marvel must continue to shoe-horn the multiverse concepts into its films.  It was annoying in the Avengers, but it still worked successfully and in the end, was forgivable.  Here, they force fed it into the script (heck, it is the script) and its too big for the britches that the small world that Spidey dwells in.  We have so many mawkish scenes that draws out the run time, thus killing any momentum that the film had and makes watching the film seem like a marathon.  2 out of 5 expensive stars.

Run Hide Fight, 2021.

The remake of The Fall Guy
Quite surprised that a movie that I enjoyed garnered a high 7.3 rating at IMDB and 83% at Rotten Tomatoes

The beginning of the summer movies has kicked off and we are half way through Spring, LOL

House (2008)
Not terrible, but the book was miles better.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace


The re-release in theaters this weekend caused it to be in the top 50 highest grossing movies AGAIN

It grossed over $1B back in 1999 (1.8B adjusted for today's inflation)

oldschooldoom wrote:Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace


The re-release in theaters this weekend caused it to be in the top 50 highest grossing movies AGAIN

It grossed over $1B back in 1999 (1.8B adjusted for today's inflation)

Gets too much hate. I feel like people wouldn't hate it as much if it wasn't connected to the OT.

I have 1-6 on bluray coming soon. Phantom Menace rocks.

Hackers. Johnny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard.

BaleMaster wrote:I have 1-6 on bluray  coming soon.  Phantom Menace rocks.

I have all Star Wars movies on DVD but nothing like re-watching them in the theater with the Titan Deluxe experience

Maniac Cop.

Maniac Cop Deux.

LotR: Fellowship
My best friend's first time seeing it

Deleted because repeat

Panic Room. Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, Dwight Yoakum, Kristin Stewart.

Frequency. James Caviezel, Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre Braugher.

Red Dawn. Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey.

Point Break. Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey.

Men at Work, 1990. Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Keith David.

Reign of Fire. Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey. All right, all right, all right!

The Brave One, 2007. Jodie Foster, Terrance Howard, Naveen Andrews.