Favorite movies as a little kid - Babe - Little Rascals - The Land Before Time - Honey I Blew Up the Kid - The Never Ending Story - Jumanji There are a lot more than that, but when I think of movies that were in constant rotation, those come to mind.
The Land Before Time Little Rascals The Brave Little Toaster Homeward Bound The Never Ending Story Look Who’s Talking Jumanji Hook Just off the top of my head.
The Sandlot was my most watched home video. When Mean Girls came out, I got my parents to order it for me like six times on pay per view
see i rewatched neverending story the other day and, i dont want to say it didnt hold up (because how many of these silly kid movies do)... but i always had this vision in my head that NE Story was a masterpiece. Like, the ultimate kid adventure, with a lot of time and care that went into it. And it sorta is... but it's also kinda just a mish-mosh of Atreyu in various settings throughout Fantasia. Like, Artax dies SO damn early! I didn't remember that. I also assumed Falkor was in it more, but again, nope. i hadn't seen it in its entirety since I was 7 and growing up I remembered pretty much all of my scenes. Even deeming some of them my favorite
Never Ending Story is great, but it has some classic 80’s cheese and some real bad acting from the lead. But “these look like good strong hands” will always be one of the greatest scenes in a children’s film. I put that and the missile scene in The Iron Giant on the same level.
Two nights ago I watched Jack Reacher 2 on Hulu so then last night I rented the first one from Amazon. I liked the second one more, but I thought both were kind of anticlimactic. Neither had a super strong antagonist. I think Rosamund Pike is the better actor, but I enjoyed Cobie Smulders performance and character more. Now I feel myself going on an action movie kick.
Justice League was fun. It scrambled to introduce and develop the new characters, so having the solo films first would've helped. The villain never seemed like much of a threat even before they brought back Supes. Like, even Ultron was a more interesting villain. Kind of thrown off by the closeups of Gal Gadot's butt (and the changes to Amazonian costume design). But yeah, it was fun.
Dunkirk was okay. As an action movie, it more or less contains itself into what you would come to expect from the drama. Nolan has always had issues with shooting action, but here it works to his advantage because most of the time the attacks are coming from the sky and out of sight, so it adds to the confusion. There is a really weird decision to pace the multiple story arcs at different speeds, so you get things like a pilot shooting down a plane, followed by a captain dodging the fire from the plane before it was shot, and then the beach watching that same plane sink. It would seem like a bad editing job on something like The Room, but apparently it was intentional. On a larger note, it is disappointing how little Nolan decided to use his massive platform to tell a deeper story. He arguably has the biggest pull as a mainstream big budget director than anyone since Steven Spielberg, and he decides to use that pull to make a brainless, loud, inconsequential genre film. This is a larger problem with World War II and Holocaust films; directors love to use the setting because our knowledge of history does most of the work for us. You don't have to explain that Hitler is bad or that the Allies are the good guys, and we don't necessarily have to see the Nazis lose to know what is coming for them in the end. However, as we rapidly reach a point where none of these people will be around to tell us their stories, we are taking their trauma and pain and making films that are closer to Transformers than to something like Schindler's List. Inglourious Basterds, despite an outward appearance of being the sillier film, is much deeper than Dunkirk. For one, there are actual German characters. The only time you even see Germans in Dunkirk, they are deliberately out of focus. The film stays with the soldiers at Dunkirk and shows how they were often just scared kids, but that is exactly what the German soldiers were. Inglourious Basterds creates shades for multiple German characters, and it also asks a deeper question of whether or not someone can truly leave behind their actions after a war, summed up in Aldo Raine's decision to carve a swastika in the head of his enemy so that they cannot simply take off their uniform. Nolan could never make a film like that, though, but he can make a film closer to Saving Private Ryan, which has a lot of problems but does try to talk about things like survivors' guilt, the morality of revenge, and how the lowest classes of the war end up being sacrificed for the nobility and honor of higher ranking officers. If Nolan just wants to make popcorn films, that is fine, but he is continually touted as a Very Serious Director, both by critics and by Nolan himself. It went so far as critics suggesting that the film was reminiscent of silent film, which means that anyone who said that had never seen a silent film before. The film in no way compares to works like The Thin Red Line or Schindler's List, but in fairness it does not try to do that within the film itself. However, we were probably better off when big-budget action films were about aliens attacking Earth or a meteor had to be stopped.
Jaws* - 10/10 Jaws 2* - 7/10 Jaws 3 - 4/10 Jaws: The Revenge - 0.5/10 Storage 24 - 3/10 A Christmas Carol (2009) - 5/10 Blue Collar - 9.5/10 Speed* - 10/10 Due to time constraints I can't really do my usual summary of the week but holy hell Jaws: The Revenge really does have the stupidest plot in a film that isn't intentionally being dumb that I have ever had to endure. Never mind the production issues, piss poor special effects, laughable script, poor pacing and wafer thin characters.
The Big Sick was good. I love Kumail but felt a little bit emotionless towards he/Emily’s relationship. I wish they spent a but more time building up her character before she gets sick. Don’t Think Twice was super bland. I don’t know if the improv characters were intentionally irritating throughout the entire film, but for a cast made up of people I love, I didn’t really like any of them. With my MoviePass finally here, I’m hoping to get out to Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, The Florida Project and Three Billboards before the holidays
Nocturama was a welcome change of pace after Dunkirk and mother!, and an encouraging sign that this year might have more than a handful of good films. Just like his previous film House of Pleasures, Bonello is focused on the moments between action rather than the act itself. The set up to the terrorist attacks is much longer than the attacks themselves, even though we are not clear what they are up to, and the time spent in the mall afterwards indicates their youth and lack of proper planning. It is a better version of Reichardt's Night Moves.
I still haven't seen Edge of Seventeen. Just add that to the million other movies I still need to see. I find that I have a real hard time watching a movie at home.