We Were Soldiers A bit different from most other Vietnam movies. It's not really political. It just shows a major battle from both the American and NVA perspectives. It's fairly accurate from what I've read of the Battle of La Drang Valley. This was also a very different time from today, when high ranking officers like Colonels still sometimes fought right alongside their men on the front lines. I think that's admirable. It's hypocritical to order your men into a dangerous situation you wouldn't go into yourself. 7/10
Last Days in Vietnam A pretty good documentary about the fall of Saigon and the effort by American embassy workers and American and South Vietnamese soldiers to get as many people to safety as possible, in defiance of the US government that just wanted to evacuate Americans and keep its involvement to a minimum. I didn't realize that many of the helicopters being thrown over the side of US ships were actually South Vietnamese, being flown by military pilots jacking helicopters and using them to save as many people as they could. The American ambassador comes across as incredibly inept, in complete denial of what was happening until the absolute last minute, resulting in an evacuation that was a complete clusterfuck. In general the whole thing feels like a huge betrayal by the American government. My only complaint with the documentary is that it glosses over what happened after the fact, and why it was so important to get people out. Many of the people left behind were executed or sent to concentration camps.
Piñata: Survival Island [Demon Island]... ranks 95 on the top 100 worst movies on IMDB. Not sure if that ranking can be trusted though, this has a slight so bad it's good quality to it and is certainly better than Dracula 3000 which doesn't rank at all. Full movie is on Youtube in case anyone shares my love of shitty movies!
Inherent Vice It was mind numbingly boring, had a dull and meandering plot, and everyone mumbles and whipsers their lines so you can't understand what the hell they're supposed to be saying. The narration is bad. Jaoquin Phoenix is so incoherent you'll need subtitles to know what he's saying. It has good cinematography and music, and does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the early 70s drug scene, but pretty much everything else about it is awful.
blackhat Apparently hackers are sexy men who get into a lot of shootouts and high speed boat chases, have the fighting skills of delta force, always get the girl, and their main job is to stand around with no shirt on pulling a blue steel or magnum pose. Probably Michael Mann's worst film. I think he was just way out of his element with the hacker stuff, and the dude from Thor was horribly miscast. Foxcatcher A bit of a fakeout if you don't know that backstory. This is not a feelgood sports movie. It's the story of what led a paranoid, drug addicted billionaire to murder a wrestling coach.
My god was this bad... Agreed about miscasting, this was a movie for Justin Long! Also, the whole stock market manipulation BS is so played out. It totally breaks suspension of disbelief for me. If you so obviously manipulate the market, your transaction will never clear settlement and the govt will fucking find you. Subtly is the key to white collar crime. The hacker could've just given his money to Goldman Sachs and been much better off...
Like front running the trades with computer trading algorithms, which is basically done every day of the week around the world.
I was really looking forward to Blackhat due to a few things. I really like Michael Mann movies. And this movie had popular mainland china, taiwan, and HK stars in it. It came out so bad.
lol I believe the official explanation for that is HFTs provide liquidity! Investment banks can do whatever the fuck they want, our government is basically their subsidiary. If an undesirable, say a 3rd world hacker, tries to troll their system you better believe they are going to be found and dealt with. Not a chance in hell those funds clear.
Hot Girls Wanted I really didn't see the point of this documentary. I think it's common knowledge that most people don't make it in porn, and that for most it's just short term work. For every Ron Jeremy or Jenna Jameson, you have hundreds of nobodies who only ever do a few scenes. The porn industry has a constant demand for fresh new faces. Working in porn can also be kind of gross, especially once you get outside the mainstream into the fetish stuff. It seems like the girls who were the subjects of this documentary despite being dumb and naive about life in general, had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into when they signed up to do porn. I'm not really seeing how they were exploited. It actually just seems like they're bitter that they only lasted a few months and didn't make it big in the industry, and destroyed their reputations for what amounted to chump change.
The turtles film, whatever it was called. Pretty cheesy with loads of explosions and destruction but I didn't mind it, gave me something to do for a couple of hours. Sexual tension between April and Mikey made me wonder if inter-species relationships were coming back? Howard the Duck for next reboot?
Ex Machina Starts off as a promising movie about AI and a Turing Test. Degenerates quickly into a predictable "woman finds the strength to fight back against the evil man who abuses her" female empowerment movie, where the woman happens to be a robot or AI or whatever. If the Lifetime Network made a Lifetime original movie about robots, it would be this movie.
Johnny English: Reborn It was entertaining enough. First one was better, he was smarter in this which made it worse. 5.5/10. The Rundown Still one of my favorite movies... felt a little slower than the non-stop action I remembered. But it's 12 years old. 7/10.
Inside Out It’s Pixar and it’s good but it’s not their best. 7/10 Tomorrowland I like the science fiction stuff but it got a little preachy in a weird way. 6/10.