Legendsofanus

This is not a historical movie, this is a fantasy movie with little to none characterization, some great visuals and a long run time that just kept dragging on.

The Last Legion is about a child emperor named Romulus who somehow survives the fall of the Western Roman empire and flees with his guards for a new place to seek sanctuary in, for reasons I have already forgotten they go to Britannia! oh wait...yes I remember now, they go to find the titular last legion....which has no characterization, no flavour, no feeling that it's even a legion of real warriors and somehow we are supposed to root for them in the final battle when they come to save the day!

That's the whole movie basically, so much of it is comprised of events: betrayals, murder, narrow escapes, romances and revelations that feel completely unearned. It's as if the movie just unoriginally takes plot beats from hundred other medieval movies and tries to make it work in this one without caring if it fits within it's story. From unrequited sexy female warrior to shamefully unearned moments of courage, this movie shouldn't be so proud of itself for being so unoriginal in it's execution.

The story is wild though, especially the ending. During the ending all I could do was yell, "why? how?" while witnessing some...well I can't spoil it.

Thing is, if you look at the poster or read the plot and think you'll like this movie then let me assure you, you probably won't. You have seen a dozen other films like this one that are better than this, or If you haven't you should go and watch them. Also it never feels like there are any real stakes in the film, any real danger and the lack of blood and violence just supports that. A disappointing film 5/10

The Big Short is basically a story about a bunch of hedge fund traders and some other banking guys that nobody ever notices who see that the economic market is going to crash very very hard in 2007-08. It is a biographical movie based on a book and it's shot in a varied meta-documentary and comedy-drama style with frequent fourth-wall breaks and comedy. Yes it's about the finance industry and some bank shit but it's also really really good and If I understood (or guessed) what it's about then you can probably do that too so go watch it

Surprising, hilarious and utterly brilliant. The Big Short feels more cinematic than an MCU film, more thrilling than any crime drama and more earnest than any other film I have ever seen. It's the movie's subject that makes it so, the trading and finance part of the world that makes so little sense to all of us and the way this film actually takes time to inform you about what's going on, using these humorous celebrity cameos that allows it to feel so real while never being boring. It's like a biblical tale, a peak fictional novel about how some misunderstood lowkey guys got wind of a coming economic collapse and it's all real

The editing, the music and there's just this fervent energy and vibe to the film that keeps it moving, like an Edgar Wright film, it never stops on a scene to long and cuts back and forth really fast and it's just all so good

I have never seen an Adam McKay film before but now I'm a fan. And what a dream cast too, seeing Steve Carrel walking around with a camera jerking as it follows him felt like I was watching a dark episode of The Office or something

10/10 Weirdly, I saw The Wolf on Wall Street twice and never understood the stocks stuff in it. That was a few years ago tho so maybe it's time to visit it again but yeah, if there's a genre of movies like The Big Short then please let me know

It actually took me three days to finish this movie because I kept falling asleep, I don't know if it was because of the movie or because I was tired but I'm pretty sure the movie didn't help.

The Wiz is an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that basically changes the fantasy setting to one of real-life Harlem and follows an adult this time, Dorothy, a kindergarten teacher who is unsure about herself, and her dog Toto. I assume the plot stays the same because although I didn't ever finish the book (I have actually borrowed it from my library after finishing this movie) it did seem to me that many of the plot elements were familiar. The film however doesn't fully embrace the modern design and theme, the fantastical elements are there, they just look modern and "realistic" now.

Sometimes funny, and occasionally veering into the visually insane territory with it's distinctly industrial modern but fantasy style, The Wiz however failed to grab me or surprise me on any account at all. I thought the main actress who played Dorothy didn't do such a good job, because she played her in such a one-note key. Maybe that was because of the script but I found her portrayal of a 24-year Dorothy just annoying. The dog was great tho! And honestly, so was the rest of the cast. I like how the whole film doesn't really take itself seriously and thus it allows the performances to turn goofy and funny.

The music was pathetic, I haven't heard a song that will stay with me for more than a few days (and that's only Ease on Down the Road) and it didn't really elevate the emotions or whatever was happening in the scene. I think all of these things that I didn't enjoy about the movie come out because of a lack of charm. It's no longer Dorothy the child going through a fantastic world but rather an actual adult who is getting transported to the slums and then going to New York City which is the Emerald City of this setting. It's all very straightforward, basically a dressing of fantasy elements onto Black America instead of adapting itself to it. Which is why the flying monkeys have bikes now

It's also a huge film, I think it's 2 hours and 14 minutes and that's a lot of time to spend with a property that we are very very familiar with and not do something actually cool with it.

Overral: 5/10, some of the things I really enjoyed were the ridiculous performances, the visual identity of the film and that it did make me laugh due to its silliness a few times haha. Mostly though I was just really uninterested and bored

"I think they were robots..."

The immediate thing that registered when I started watching Westworld, the basis of HBO's hit tv show Westworld (2016), was that Michael Crichton wrote and directed the film. Which is pretty cool because Westworld in many ways mirrors and seems birthed out of the well of ideas that gave us Jurassic Park. However the thematic impact was not the same for me, while in Jurassic Park we have people talking about dinosaurs, a long tease at the start, learning theories of chaos and actually spending time with characters who we start relating to, Westworld opens with a marketing commercial!

The movie then puts us on a ride with two characters who are terribly boring in my opinion - one of them is less boring than the other though - as we follow them into....Westworld. But what is Westworld? Well, Westworld is part of a resort where you can give 1000$ a day (something like 7200$ today) to spend your vacation in three of the realistic man-made depictions of old times, all filled with era-authentic environments and robots playing and acting as people of those times. There's Romanworld, Medievalworld and of course, Westworld. The movie's name suggests that most of the time will be spent in the later and indeed that is so, though for some reason Crichton employed the use of some side characters that sometimes have the same depth of characterization as the main characters (which means none) to show us what's going on in one of those other resorts.

That's the general premise and this film has basically two frames of references from this point: the western world of the resort with everything that might be in a western and played out in a loud stereotypical fashion to the benefits of the guests and the other clean, office-like interiors of Delos, the company behind these resorts. All of this turns out into a fun back-and-forth of what's happening behind the scenes and what's happening down in the resorts as the machines start to behave differently and experience failures. Visually it's awesome and the shots and framing do feel really authentic to not only it's sci-fi setting but the western as well.

Okay, now... Let's talk about Yul Brynner. He was one of the reasons why I wanted to watch this film as he was one of my favorite parts of the film "The Magnificent Seven", his portrayal of the strong silent character from "Seven Samurai" was so good and he brings all of that silent strong game, albiet with a villain twist, in Westworld. He just dominates the scene as one of the robots programmed to be a gunslinger who is reset each day but remembers that he has to hunt one of the main characters. The presence of his menace starts growing more pronounced until the last 25~20 minutes of the movie which reminds me of so much of the villain Terminator in T2 years later. It's straight up without dialogue, one man running from a robot who wants to kill him. It does drag for me a little bit because I don't really care about the character, which is one of the things this movie does.

Westworld ultimately a fun, sci-fi action movie about robots looking like humans and starting to kill humans. It's not as imaginative as Jurassic Park and definitely not as iconic in it's direction but what it is is a loud, action-filled movie that can provide a little bit of imaginative sci-fi. What I really don't like here are the characters and writing, as it doesn't really have a strong narrative and it's more about Westworld the place and feel than any one character. It genuinely feels like there's half a movie missing from it because of how events progress into chaos, often at a whim. The action scenes feel unimpactful mainly because while they look fine and cool, I can't really give a shit

6.5/10

"It's gonna end in the average way"

How come I haven't seen more modern movies that are about serial killers? I mean, the last movie I saw was The Batman which is about a serial killer but I mean more...normal serial killers, not villains. Trap is about a man who is "trapped" in a concert with his daughter and is unwittingly in the dead center where the cops want him. The only problem is, they only know he's attending the concert and nothing else.

From there starts a thrill ride of close encounters and some lucky saves and while Trap directed by M. Night Shyamalan ultimately comes out as a predictable tale, it's not one without it's styles. Huge production values with an actual concert set and Saleka Shyamalan singing in character, a large amount of extras and the color palette of a concert really make this film feel exciting and bold, confident at the start.

This is also the first M. Night Shyamalan film I have seen from start to finish. So I don't have an on-going string of disappointments with him but I know that this movie like many of his other recent ones was getting middling reviews and so I was caustious about the fact that if it was gonna be any good or not. I was overall, optimistic though.

Trap ended up working for me because it's one of the few recently released original films I have seen that doesn't hesitant in what it's trying to achieve, even from the opening of the credits you can tell it's being directed by someone who is confidently handling it and that transpires in a momentum for the film itself. Trap establishes itself slickly and efficiently, within like 10 or 15 minutes you know what the premise, the problem and what the motivation of the main character played, very well, by Josh Hartnett. What this leaves the viewer with is ultimately to sit and watch it play out and a movie like that would only work if I wanted to watch it play out the sequence it set up, right? I did, I was curious and intrigued from the start.

The thing about Trap that stops it from being really excellent however, is that it's after all the story is done, an average film. It doesn't shatter your expectations, it doesn't move you or really even exploring it's "trapped" theme in the second half. Sometimes that's okay though, and it's not overall a bad thing. I think it's still a fun, fun movie to watch

It also has a ton of original songs, the direction as I said has a lot of confident momentum in it and just a lot of clear great camerawork and a somewhat annoying but ultimately believable acting by Ariel Donoghue as the teenage daughter of our main character.

so overrall, I give Trap a 7/10 and I definitely recommend it to anyone who still wishes to watch an original movie that's not based on a book or any material, a movie that as soon as you press play you are left in the cold and just being guided by it. Had a lot of fun

"It wasn't fear anymore, it was madness. And when you're mad, you cease to exist."

The Last of Us, Limbo, Inside, Bioshock: take all these games with amazing stories and you'll find that video game storytelling works hand in hand with superb gameplay design. From Inside's simple 2D platforming forcing you to act like a puppet to Bioshock's main power-up gameplay system showing you memories of residents of Rapture, all of these games have a story that feels satisfying because it ties back to gameplay. I think that sort of storytelling is why some narratives can only be experienced in video games and why those games and more like them are so good. But they're not the only games with a good story.

The Town of Light is a first-person walking simulator game about a mentally unstable girl named Reneé and the journey we go on with her, exploring her past and present through her memories and experiences at a mental asylum. From the beginning it reminded me of Benoit Sokal's Syberia and this "other type" of games with a good story. I mean games that are so focused on their presentation that either their gameplay is too simple (like Syberia) or genuinely simple gameplay designs are not present in them and this makes the whole experience suffer.

Case in point, The Town of Light is a beautiful game and it's one of the best depictions of the on-goings and effects of being held up in a mental asylum in any media I have ever experienced. The game really manages to create an authentic immersive mental asylum in Italy through the various hospital documents, posters of fascist Italy, pictures of Mussolini and through it's dialogues and story accompanied in each of the game's fifteen chapters by an animated sequence of what is going on with Renee. What I adored even more is how the developers actually went to a real life mental asylum and recreated it in-game, highly recommend to check out the live-action trailer after finishing the game.

It seems to be that the whole purpose of this game's existence is to make you realize how fucked up these asylums were in real life and it really commits to that which is awesome. There are even branching chapters that you can get based on multiple choices you can make during the game which seems to really unlock different parts of the story. Unfortunately, while the presentation really gets fully realized, the gameplay and feel of the "game" aspect of it is actually annoying. I don't know how common it is for games like these but having unskippable cutscenes is always lame, the fact that my character can't run is stupid. The game was also very fond of crashing on my system even though it's built on Unity and I expected that would mean it would be pretty stable.

Overrall: The Town of Light is absolutely worth one playthrough atleast if you can look past the gameplay issues I mentioned and it's really a very unique and one of a kind presentation in gaming because of the themes it deals with. 7.5/10

(Read through CloudLibrary)

“Are you happy here?” I said at last.

I felt a little spoiled when I was reading this book, primarily because thrillers are some of my favorite types of books and I have read some that have twists on every page and then here was The Secret History, starting with the death of a main character, telling you who did it and then rewinding the clock and through the whole book showing us why it happened the way it did.

In that context, it seems fairly understandable to think that I should not be comparing this book to the fast and forgotten triumphs of Dan Brown but more meditative, characteristic journey of people who are friends. Normal teenage people just living life really, attending college, falling in love, studying haha

To me that feels like Harry Potter, Tolstoy, it feels like warmth and love. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of tension in this book and the characters are for the most part not likeable because they are rich assholes but compelling because of how truly Donna Tartt embraces her characters and lets them be as they are, she lets them run around in circles doing their own little things and because the writing is so good, you engage with their actions and want to follow them wherever they go.

This is a book built on great pacing and rigid structure, there are only eight chapters and they are really big ones. The shortest is like 19 pages and the big ones are 82. What it allows the book to present to the reader is a story told in stages where each stage is a mood, a haze, a drunken splendor of amazing writing and aesthetics that put shame to anything Instagram can create; each stage being able to stand out distinctly meanwhile living cohesive with the others.

That can sometimes backfire and it does, sometimes you have no idea what happened just twenty pages before, only because most of the text feels like you're in a trance, drunk and moving through the motions of life. That's probably my only complaint about the book aside from Donna Tartt showcasing large sections that read as Islamophobic but not having the gall to use the word Islam instead using the fiction term isram which is just confusing, especially when one of her principle character's whole mythology is built around meeting people that actually existed in real life, like George Orwell!

Overall: I really adored the book, the vibe it brings and just how beautiful the writing is. While I understand it feels like not much happens in the story itself, that does not take away much from the book because it was never going to play that card anyway, from the moment we see Bunny falling down that cliff to it's last sci-fi/afterlife reunion.

(Couldn't find a better poster that would upload)

This is a well-crafted movie starring Adam Sandler who I haven't seen in a long time, it's sentimental to it's fault and wears it's optimism on it's sleeve. The only way I would judge the success of a movie like this is asking if it succeed in making me feel for it's characters, humanity and for myself. The answer is yes, it did.

Adam Sandler plays a cosmonaut alone in a spaceship on a mission to collect data from a strange cloud that is passing from the Solar System and he does brilliantly here. I love the way how nuanced his portrayal of fear and uncertainty is, it's not loud or sensational, he has this face of a person who is not terrified but shaked by the reality of what he sees and has to cope with. His desperation and loneliness is pathetic and even pitiful, I completely bought all of that and though I kept disliking his character as the movie goes on, the movie also reminded me in the end of his humanity and redemption.

Paul Dano plays a CGI monstrous spider onboard this lonely vessel who can communicate to Sandler's character and read his thoughts. The two go together on a sort of psychiatric session where this creature visits our main character's life, his regrets and hopes through intermittent flashbacks.

The visuals are spectacular especially the explosion of colors during the end of the third-act. The movie looks absolutely gorgeous when it finally comes out of it's bounds and lets loose.

There is nostalgia, feel-goodness, and sentimentality and it might feel like it's not being totally realistic in regards to it's characters but I think that's because it just has one purpose and is focused on that, crafting a maybe dumb plot point here and there notwithstanding.

7.5/10

Deadpool & Wolverine is a very popular movie and sometimes I just don't like those, it's been a long time since I have seen a modern superhero movie and I wasn't ready to break that streak for multiple reasons. Superhero movies can be a bit bland, be a little too thin on character and just over-indulgence on visual effects and "comedy" which is what Marvel Studios does.

But this one, oh man. I really enjoyed it and laughed out loud on certain moments and I like that the movie is a homage to all the Fox superhero movies that came before it. Essentially though, of course it's a movie that doesn't make much sense and that is something you have to accept. The physics are inconsistent, sometimes characters look cartoony and ragdoll around and sometimes you get these hyper-intense closed-up action sequences which didn't mesh with me very well. Also the plot is really really dumb and doesn't explain a lot of the story-beats that it sets up in the first 20 minutes and it's predictable as all hell. Plot points are circumstantial and rarely earned, like for example the villain learning about what the heroes plan is or well, I can't spoil.

The thing that works though, like yeah they did write a serviceable plot but they wrote the characters very well. The way Deadpool is written and his whole arc of "wanting to matter" plus Wolverine and his shame, all of that is done beautifully. The action sequences are really great too, lots of gore and the film leaning into that and still finding inventive new ways to kill bad guys is just awesome and I think a cut above the other Deadpool films.

The sound and songs used are hilarious and weird but fit the moment exactly. This movie feels like a road-trip rom-com at times and it works because it can be so charming in those little moments.

I was initially going to give this movie a 7/10 because of the little inconsistencies but watching that mid-credit tribute scene made me really happy as someone who always appreciated the X-Men movies more than the earlier Marvel movies even some of the Phase 3 ones and then watching the commentary or listening to it by Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds made me appreciate the scale of it and all the practical effects they did and the set design, which like- I thought all of it was CG. So yeah, because of making me more appreciative of this film and wanting to rewatch it sometime in the future, I give it a 8/10

The best Marvel Phase 5 movie, and it's the only one I have seen too.

The Dark Crystal is the precursor to Jim Henson's cult-classic Labyrinth, which I saw first before coming to this movie. It's about a young hero who sets out to bring a shard of the Dark Crystal to heal it and restore the world. I always thought The Dark Crystal would be a different watch because even though the director is the same for both movies, they have a very major difference in my opinion. That difference is the lack of any humans whatsoever in the movie. You see, The Dark Crystal is a high-fantasy type of film, set in it's own world and mythology and history. That alone makes things difficult for me, because I have never been able to watch LOTR: TFOTR without falling asleep and sure enough, I yawned through the entire third act and actually closed my eyes and half-slept through the brief credits before realizing the movie was over.

The presentation aspect of this is much more focused than Labyrinth's, while the later movie feels grander simply because it leads through many different looking places and settings, The Dark Crystal feels better realized and just as well good because the one setting it primarily uses, the forest, is beautifully made with a lot of absurd and weird looking creatures. It's a classic visually insane film, aside from a few VFX shots that look dated as hell.

The second thing that I really enjoyed about this is the world-buikding, while the setup is the most basic of "Hero's Journey" stories that we have been getting ever since LOTR ig, the movie atleast earnestly makes up for it with a very unique world and mythology where the whole concept of quality is seen as actually being fractured from a single whole. This speaks to a very Buddhist mythology and theme which the film comes back to again and again, I really enjoy new world-building that is not obese with over-exposition and The Dark Crystal rarely says anything about it, preferring a visual presentation more.

The story, the acting, the direction everything is great. The puppets are amazing, they're so very expressive and fun to look at and there are more serious depictions of adult themes like slavery than in Labyrinth. During the start of the third-act, there is a very minor ass-pull that felt like I was cheated as an audience member but aside from that everything was fine.

The soundtrack doesn't really play an important role in the film but the sound design of all the different creatures and the world is atleast there to make up for it.

7.5/10 Again, It's not that I didn't like it. I do have opinions about it's aspects and how it's made and everything, it's just that I think I didn't enjoy it as much as Labyrinth which I gave a 9.5/10

Everyone knows Godzilla and his myth/story etc, but there are many of those people who haven't seen the original one or even the first King Kong. As someone who lost interest in the newer Godzilla x Kong films as soon as I saw both of them running together like a bunch of wanna-be-avengers kids, I really really adore these older films. They're classics for a reason and they still hold up pretty well.

While I can't confidently say which one I like better, that is because both of these films are important in different ways. While the older King Kong (1933) is a more brutal film with a lot of action and creatures and death and heroism, Godzilla is a somber yet nuanced monster film that doesn't pride itself at the chaos it's eponymous monster causes but rather showcases it brilliantly and beautifully so you can't look away from it. It has a lot of symbolism about nature, Godzilla is completely without a personality here to the point that it could've been a raging wave coming from the ocean, brought by our mistakes. Most of my favorite moments in the film are from people behaving in certain ways because of the hardships and cause and destruction that they face. There are moments in this film where it doesn't tell you what's happening right away but merely drops hints and those moments, particularly one involving a child reduced me to tears.

This is of course a very important film as well, it's much more closer to Jurassic Park than it is to King Kong with the way it's narrative is structured. You know how in so many monster films there's a scientist who explains what the monster is and gives a history lesson but nobody pays him any attention? Yup, that. That is Godzilla. It also for me atleast showcases the point where filmmakers went from puppets to costumes in monster films, also not to mention making most of japanese costume superheroes appear on tv-screens.

Takashi Shimura plays a miserable old man once again and is brilliant as the main conveyor of this film's message and everyone else does a great job as well especially Momoko Kōchi as Emiko. The soundtrack and the main theme is one of the best musical scores I have ever heard in a monster film. It effectively highlights the film's themes while driving the tension and melancholy in different parts of the film, honestly I feel like it would have been a very different film without it's soundtrack.

An interesting piece of TV film history, Gargoyles is perhaps the most intriguing monster film I have ever seen. That is not to say it's good, the amount of runtime that the film goes in slow-motion whenever one of the Gargoyles are on-screen is too much for me to ignore and caused more than a couple of yawns from me.

Still, what is here is credible. Gargoyles starts with the story of the devil being banished to Hell and promising that if not him, his children the gargoyles will rule the earth. That's a very interesting premise to start the film and certain the impression is carried on by the amount of real-life gargoyle statues and paintings we see in the start. The story then moves onto the Arizona Desert where it stays there for it's brief 72-minute runtime.

The film can be called a monster movie that is just for entertainment but I like the way it approaches it's monsters. It humanizes these....old enemies of mankind by showing the Gargoyles who are just coming to life from their eggs and are weak. The lead Gargoyle played by Bernie Casey is shown as a leader who cares about his race while being sure that asking for mercy from humans will not work. In that way, the movie creates an interesting dilemma: if they let the gargoyles live because they are so weak then they will eventually erase humanity but if they kill them then these intelligent beings will painfully die. I have seen movies where the filmmakers attempt to humanize their monstrous subjects but seeing a Gargoyle reading a book is a charming sight that one doesn't see often.

For that matter, the costume work is elaborate and expressive and it imparts information to the audience (or at-least it did to me) without saying anything to our faces.

The human cast acts well enough and there is an ensemble cast with characters having their own quirks and it all works well for me. One complaint I have is that Scott Glenn deserved a lot more to do in the script than just carrying cans of gasoline...I mean, the guy is an action hero. However awful The Challenge was, it made me damn sure of that.

So, to wrap it up....watch Gargoyles. It's very short and may or may not end in an unsatisfying fashion and the way it's shot is damn near awful on the eyes but it's got that Star Trek feeling with the way it deals with the question of what a monster is and I like it for that. A most surprising film