The Movie Preview, Review, & Recommendation Thread pt. II

Freaky Tales is a fun and campy set of vignettes that all intertwine into one meta story, deeply immersed in the retro vibes of 1987. It’s silly, it’s funny and it’s fun. Worth catching on a streaming service for some light entertainment 7/10
 
No Hard Feelings. I never watched Hunger Games so I probably watched a few movies with Jennifer Lawrence but never really noticed her.

Here she plays a down on her luck woman who inherits a house in Montauk, drives Uber and works hospitality for the posh crowd. Uber is over so she answers an advert to help a pair of helicopter parents orchestrate their only son coming into his manhood. The only problem is they asked for early to mid 20s and she is 32 and the boy is your typical nerd who volunteers to help animals, plays piano, bound for Princeton and has a lot of friends but they are all online.

She needs to sleep with him to collect the final payment which is a Buick. Of course like all rom coms she starts falling for the boy and then he finds out she is paid. Interspersed are full nude shots (she had a baby that year...), her crashing some high school party to find the boy and being called a mom. Someone should tell the boy that it's all good to hook up with an older woman until she hits menopause and you're quite a ways from it.

Cute movie. It could have been ridiculous but Lawrence keeps it grounded and genuine. Oh, and Matthew Broderick has graduated into the I am the older father supporting cast member now.
 
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Back to Action. Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are retired CIA and also parents to two kids in their own witness protection personas.

The kids don't know their parents are spies until the daughter catches on when they catch her attending a night club underaged. They beat up some guys and make a mess and the kids start thinking there is more to mom and dad. Then they get the "one last job" offer and their kids are kidnapped. Glenn Close plays Diaz's mother; strangely as a Brit.

As usual Netflix didn't spare any money in filming this although the boat action scenes at the end in London seemed fake. It's a bit like True Lies, Mr and Mrs Smith, and Spy Kids all mixed into one. I read this was one of Diaz's highest paid gigs. She still looks good for a woman in her 50s.
 
Thunderbolts is the best Marvel movie in ages says the local paper.
 
About My Father. It’s another De Niro movie where his kid (this time a son) wants to marry someone and the two sets of parents and family must meet. Like Meet the Parents except two decades later. I had no idea who Sebastian Maniscalco or Leslie Bibb are but they are less charismatic than Ben Stiller and Teri Polo so you end up not really rooting for them. Maniscalco comes off annoying like Stiller but at least you sort of felt sorry for Stiller.

De Niro is getting old. In one scene at the beginning he is in short sleeves and you can tell he is having issues keeping weight on in his arms and upper body.
 
I watched Conclave on streaming last week.

It was much better than I expected and as an ex altar boy a frequent winner of the Religious Prize at school I can vouch for its basic accuracy.
 
The setting and the process?

Or the fact that fictional Pope had tabs on everyone for every stereotypical Catholic church transgression & caricature?
 
I wanted to get into Another Simple Favor on Amazon Prime. But then I realised I should watch A Simple Favor.

First thoughts - Anna Kendrick is too young to be a mum on screen no? Then I realise she is 39 and the last movie where she was with that stalker she did have crow's eyes. Blake Lively looks a lot better (assuming pre baby) in the first movie than the second one.
 
A Simple Favo(u)r is basically a con woman's movie with Blake Lively faking her death and a widowed Anna Kendrick shacking up with the surviving spouse Henry Golding. Then Lively starts making phone calls and mystery visits to her and Golding's kid from the dead and it goes from sad romance to Nancy Drew mode. Kendrick seems the best in this role.

Finally there is the I will record you and guns are drawn to force a confession.

Lively disappears for part of the movie. In Another Simple Favo(u)r it seems she is much more in the forefront. Haven't finished the sequel yet.
 
I watched The Life List on Netflix. It's a movie about a single mother who dies and the kids deal with the inheritance. Sofia Carson, the daughter, and the closest to the mother as someone who works for her mother's company and confidant ends up losing her job and getting a bucket list of things her mother wants her to do. Through a series of videos recorded on DVDs by her mother she starts going through things from get a tattoo to find true love. After completion of every item she gets another DVD from the executor, a junior lawyer with a law firm her mother contracted to execute the will.

I thought the movie wrapped up a little too neatly especially with the true love part but I liked Sofia Carson and will see another movie with her in it.
 
I finished Another Simple Favo(u)r. In short Blake Lively gets to play another sister as the dead triplet turns out not to be dead but raised by another con woman. This time the aunt is played by Allison Janney (whom I will always associate with The West Wing).

Henry Golding - not sure how much he was paid but basically shows up drinking non stop at the wedding in a cameo. Elizabeth Perkins who was the mother to the Blake Lively triplets also is piss drunk most scenes and then conveniently killed off in her room watching TV in Italian she can’t understand.

Less Nancy Drew this time for Anna Kendrick. I don’t see how they can crank out a third movie unless they want to do Blake Lively undercover mafia woman.
 
Nonnas. Vince Vaughn's mother dies with her son acting as caregiver and he decides to open a restaurant using old family recipes and enlisting some nonnas that were her mother's friends. To my surprise Vaughn is a pretty subdued guy. Doesn't even raise his voice or do something stupid in the entire movie.

I also got an introduction to a bunch of women I had no idea were Italian. Susan Sarandon? Okay. Lorraine Bracco looks almost unrecognisable compared to the woman Tony Soprano was banging two decades ago. And Talia Shire, aka Connie Corleone, shows up as a woman who answers Vaughan's advert for a chef. I didn't even know it was her until after the credits rolled.

The movie is predictable. He struggles to open the restaurant. When it opens there aren't any patrons. He finally convinces a critic to write a review about how this isn't just a restaurant but a sharing of family history through these amateur cooks. These days you just engineer a TikTok or Insta moment to get people to come. Or you make youtube videos like Pasta Grannies. That part feels dated.

Linda Cardellini is the high school sweetheart who got away and of course helps him out and they fall for each other.

Drea de Matteo also shows up. Who's who of American Italiana except those 70 something year old women who I struggled to identify except for Susan Sarandon who looks like Susan Sarandon.
 
I’m half way through Sinners. I deliberately went onto this knowing nothing about it other than it received good reviews. So far it’s a fun period piece about African-Americans in 1930s Mississippi establishing a blue juke joint. There may also be vampires - I don’t know where that subplot is going.
 
You make it sound like the Wayan brothers. But I saw on TV this was the one where the lead actor plays two roles.
 
The local paper is not complementary for the new Mission Impossible calling it a colossal wreck. It ranks it 2nd last only beating out MI 2 (year 2000).

Surely this must be the last one for Tom Cruise who has been working the series since his 30s till ...well, almost a senior citizen.
 
The Fountain of Youth (2025)

Guy Ritchie trying to be less edgy and more Indians Jones/ Dan Brown. It’s ridiculous, but watchable. Portman delivers a good performance and my god Eiza Gonzalez is beautiful!

Some nice clothes, with the main character looking tweedy without wearing tweed.

6/10
 
Why does Disney keep issuing live human versions of old cartoon movies? Lilo and Stitch being another example.
 
28 years later. Don't the zombies all starve and die when there aren't any humans left?
 
Dropbear said:
But the virus is still around to infect new people, right?
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A few of them look scrawny in the trailer. I'm just surprised regular humans can survive 28 years. Your average elite soldier or super suvivalist would have aged and lost their edge by that time.
 
Fwiffo said:
A few of them look scrawny in the trailer. I'm just surprised regular humans can survive 28 years. Your average elite soldier or super suvivalist would have aged and lost their edge by that time.
Click to expand...
Didn’t they basically contain them to some parts of England in the last film?
 
Dropbear said:
Didn’t they basically contain them to some parts of England in the last film?
Click to expand...

I used ChatGPT to save myself some hours of inane screen time:

Aspect​
28 Days Later​
28 Weeks Later​
Humans LeftVery few survivors; mostly dead/infectedHundreds at first, but most die or turn
Safe HavenA farmhouse at the end, not well-guardedU.S.-controlled safe zone (fails quickly)
Arms/DefenseMinimal; some weapons from soldiersU.S. military is heavily armed

It looks like you picked the right country if you needed to survive zombies.
 
I never watched The Wolf of Wall Street. After Di Caprio sets up his own boiler room it seems it is a repetitive cycle of drugs, women, money and booze. I am 2 of 3 hours in and I think I already know the ending.
 
Finally finished it. There was one segment that probably encapsulated the entire movie for me. Di Caprio and Hill overdose on quaaludes and Di Caprio says everything slowed down for him. He is driving, running at super slow speed with slurred speech to get Hill to stop talking over the phone because his phone is bugged by the feds. The sequence is so drawn out and over the top it's actually painful to watch two adult men reduced to mental capacities of a 3 year old but functioning like 95 year olds. And that felt like the entire movie because it was endless episodes of getting high and drunk and then weird sh*t happens, you have stories you can tell later and somehow you get past the episode, make more money and get high and drunk again. How this became a 3 hour movie I have no idea.
 
Anora won Best Picture? Really? I thought the plot was pretty simplistic and other than Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov no one’s character evolved or grew in the story. Some of them were sympathetic to Madison in the end but they all said Mark Eydelshteyn’s character was a dick and that was consistent.

Also I wasn’t entirely sure why cast Madison who doesn’t look Russian and Russian people are outright racist against anyone with asiatic or Caucasian features.
 
A biography of Lee Miller and her time as a war correspondent. It starts of with a current interview as she describes her past starting with the interwar period where she had a circle of friends on the continent including Picasso. The rise of fascism and Hitler changes the narrative and she turns into a war correspondent for Vogue.

You had the war. The battle for Britain. She moves to the front lines after the D day landings. Witnessing what the locals did to collaborators. Then on to the extermination camps.

There is a plot twist at the end. At the beginning of the movie I thought it was interesting they took an older actress and made her younger in the historical parts of the biography. In other movies they take a younger one and make them older to tell the story. Then during the credits I figured out the woman was Kate Winslet. Holy sh$t. Maybe she should have given up the fags earlier.

On the other hand Marion Cotillard I did recognise because she looks very French (to me). Both the same age.
 
Joy Ride. It stars Ashley Park. You know, Lily Collins’ sidekick in Emily in Paris. Park is adopted by white American parents and works her way up in a law firm. Sign one more deal in China and she gets made partner. She doesn’t know Mandarin so she takes along her school friend Sherry Cola. In Beijing she meets her uni roommate Stephanie Hsu who I guess is her on the ground translator in case the flaky artist Cola falls through. She is a big movie star in China.

It’s basically one long road trip movie where she gets into a drinking game with the client played by Daily Show anchor Ronnie Chieng. She embarrasses herself and promises to bring her birth mother to Chieng’s mother’s party to make up. Except she now has to find her birth mom in China.

Her Chinese friends can’t tell her, hey you don’t like Chinese. You’re Korean. Chieng and Cola’s movie star boyfriend Desmond Chiam are supposed to be from China but clearly look they are from Singapore/Malay/Indonesia/etc, not China.

Anyway, lots of booze. Lost passports. Lots of coke and Molly. Lots of road trip escapades. Live streaming. At one point they impersonate a K pop band and do a music video. I almost thought when the movie ended in Paris that Lily Collins would make a cameo.
 
Jurassic World. Rebirth. Are they cranking one out every year now?
 
Trainwreck. Mayor of Mayhem. I lived through this. Why would I want to watch it again?
 
Holy sh*t. It's the final Downton Abbey movie! 15 years and Maggie Smith is dead and no more Downton Abbey...
 
I finally watched Warfare on Amazon Prime. I don't get all the hype about the movie. Yes, the cinematography is great. The cameras are super sharp in clarity. The special effects like the jet doing the low fly by are amazing. But the movie is pretty one dimensional no? Troops go in, troops get stuck, troops request support, some people get injured, troops then escape and leave with the help.

On the other hand, Blackhawk Down had a few story lines going in parallel that more or less ultimately merged back together.
 
Why do I think the original cast of I know what you did last summer were more attractive than the 2025 people?
 
Deep Cover. Sean Bean is a DS who recruits Bryce Dallas Howard, an almost unrecognisable (to me) Orlando Bloom, and Nick Mohammed who will forever in my brain be the kit man to Ted Lasso. The movie is like a light hearted spoof of Guy Ritchie type British gangster movies...which in turn I guess was a spoof of actual Brit gangster movies. Less gore, but some humour moments and a predictable ending because the good guys all live.
 
I’ve never seen a John Wick film but thinking of watching Ballerina tonight, mostly for AdA. Is it a whole universe thing I need background in or does this work as a stand-alone film?
 
Rambo knows best.

I saw the first one. It was a lot of shooting, explosions and people dying against impossible odds where somehow John Wick survives. Not really sure you need the ‘back story’ if the others have been the same.

It’s not Underworld.
 
The Amateur was fun 8/10

Ballerina makes sense without seeing the other films, but it’s a simple revenge story 7/10
 
Starting to watch Head of State. Only because it has Priyanka Chopra...oh and Idris Elba and John Cena as the PM and President. How Cena is equivalent to Elba I have no idea.
 
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