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Old 01-02-2018, 06:53 AM  
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downsizing

Downsizing and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets have been my two favorite movies of 2017. Both of them were beautiful, creative and entertaining and had stories I hadn't seen before.
I saw Downsizing on New Year's Eve. It was an older audience, probably because it was R-rated, but there is no bloody gore in it, although there is some cursing and use of the F-word. This is the tale of a man (played by Matt Damon) who is shrunk to 5 inches tall and goes to live in a community in New Mexico designed for all the people who have had themselves made smaller. The premise is that they are using fewer resources, but of course there is more to it than that, as he learns.
The movie is advertised as a comedy but it isn't, although there are a few funny scenes and lines. It's definitely science fiction/fantasy, but doesn't have magic or aliens shooting at each other.
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Old 01-24-2018, 05:15 PM  
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The Post

My sister and I were very impressed with The Post. Although it has a slow and somewhat confusing and complicated beginning, it eventually gets your interest and you will get very involved in the story.
This is the tale of The Washington Post's decision in 1971 to print the thousands of top-secret pages that the US government had created over the decades about its involvement with Vietnam, and how the government lied saying it would never go to war in that country.
The plot of the movie is already well-known so I won't go into detail about it. I would like to instead tell you what the movie made me feel. The Post looks very reminiscent of All the President's Men, and it is considered a prequel to it. In fact, The Post ends with the Watergate break-in. Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the editor who was portrayed by Jason Robards in President's. The Post also reminded me of Lou Grant, a forgotten TV series which I loved and miss.
Mainly it reminded me that I still sometimes miss working for a newspaper, although I haven't worked at one for years and the journalism business is very different (and much less-respected) than it was up until the 1990s.
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Old 02-03-2018, 08:14 AM  
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Did anyone here see What Happened to Monday? It's not an amazing film, but it's a nice attempt at story driven dystopian sci-fi. If you like the genre, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
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Old 02-11-2018, 09:22 PM  
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winchester

I loved Winchester, the new Helen Mirren movie. It was unfortunately advertised as a gory horror movie, but fortunately it is not. It's rated PG-13, not really scary but definitely creepy, has no sex or nudity or swear words, and should be considered a Gothic thriller.
I had heard about the Winchester House years ago but didn't know what it looked like. It's a real mansion in San Jose, probably the funkiest house ever built. The film takes place in 1906 with Mirren's character of Sarah Winchester being evaluated mentally and physically by a physician hired by the stock owners of Winchester Repeating Arms Co. I don't want to go into much more detail but I thought it was a physically attractive film and it actually has a somewhat happy ending.
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Old 02-28-2018, 06:30 AM  
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the greatest showman

The Greatest Showman is a sleeper hit. It got bad reviews by the critics but the public (aka adults who don't go to superhero movies and sequels) have loved it. The local multiplex is no longer showing the current Star Wars movie but Showman is still there, and both began playing at the same time in December.
My sister and her friend and I loved it. Even though it was a Tuesday night and the movie's been out for two months, the theater was more than half-full. What a physically beautiful movie! The songs were great and very toe-tappable (is that a word?) and I will have to buy the soundtrack. Have any of the songs been released as singles (if there still is such a thing as singles)?
As for the plot, PT Barnum gets very wealthy, but loses his money again and again with his ideas. One warning: there is some political commentary in the movie.
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Old 03-09-2018, 01:14 PM  
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hostiles

Hostiles is the sort of movie that's just okay when it wants to be great. It's a western that takes place in 1892, although I don't know how many months the storyline takes.
An Army captain in New Mexico, Joseph Blocker, is assigned to take a dying Cheyenne chief and his family to their ancestral home in Montana. Problem is, they had met each at a battle in Wounded Knee and each of them had several of their friends die there. A team is assigned to accompany the captain. The trip takes weeks on horseback.
Along the way they pick up a woman named Rosalie whose family has been killed by Comanche, and later an Army prisoner. The travelers also meet up with Comanches who had killed Rosalie's family, some fur traders and a bigoted white family who now lives in the Indian territory in Montana.
A slow movie, and very violent.
Hostiles was on its last day of showing at a second-run theater, so I paid only $1 for my ticket!
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Old 03-28-2018, 10:05 AM  
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the 15:17 to paris

I don't know how you can make a story about an attempted train hijacking boring, but The 15:17 to Paris did!
This is based on the true story of three young American men (two of them in the military) traveling on a train between Amsterdam and Paris who stopped an armed terrorist from killing many people on the train. What's unusual about the movie is that the three guys who did this play themselves in the movie as adults.
Their acting is fine, but the movie takes too long in telling their life stories, beginning with how they met in sixth grade. It gets confusing in the middle as to which guy is doing what in the weeks and days before the train trip.
The one detail which I found disturbing was that even as middle-schoolers, the three boys were fascinated by war and guns.
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Old 03-30-2018, 06:05 AM  
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisNukemYJ View Post
Seems like all the new movie ideas these day come from a trip to the movie rental store.
Lol, Chris... Your signature got me laughing uncontrollably
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Old 04-08-2018, 04:11 PM  
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a wrinkle in time

My friend and I were both disappointed in A Wrinkle in Time. Although the producers kept the names of the characters and planets and the basis of the plot, the characters and the scenes look nothing like I had imagined in the umpteen times I've read the book.
The most annoying difference is that I had always imagined Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which as looking similar to bag ladies. And since they were billions of years old and had previously been stars that had exploded, there was a glow about them. Mrs. Which looked too much like an armored warrior in the movie and the other two were ridiculously overdressed.
Some major characters weren't even in the movie: Sandy and Dennys, and Aunt Beast, who got a very brief mention but the entire plotline involving her (her planet and story were my favorites of the book) were entirely deleted. Yet there were characters added to the story, mean girls who bullied Meg, and one of them became part of the plot.
The one part of the movie that looked exactly like I had imagined was the bouncing ball scene on Camazotz.
If you've not read Wrinkle, much of the movie plot won't make sense since some of the planets are combined and others have scenes that take place way longer than they do in the book.
A big disappointment. I suspect that's why author Madeleine L'Engle never let anyone make a movie of Wrinkle all these years, because the producers would change too much.
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Old 04-27-2018, 06:33 PM  
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i feel pretty

I Feel Pretty is a dramedy about a plain, somewhat overweight woman who hits her head when she falls off an exercise bike at a gym. When she awakens, she is convinced she is beautiful and becomes much more self-confident, and eventually arrogant and annoying.
We've seen this ugly duckling story before, most notably in Ugly Betty, but also in, to some extent or another, in The Devil Wears Prada and numerous TV movies, not to mention Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. The concussion storyline is from What Women Want.
The title is a song from West Side Story. Although it is mentioned in the closing credits, it is never in the movie, and I wonder if there was a scene cut from the film.
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