Archive for 2020
142 posts from 04 January to 21 December 2020.
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The Thing, but on Mars was already done by Carpenter himself as Ghosts of Mars, but this adds 28 Days Later zombies too. Worthy for having Olivia Williams bossing everyone around like a queen.
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This is the quintessential “modern” reboot of an older IP which was radioactive as fuck. Who’s you gonna bore? Ghostbusters. I ain’t afraid of no repetition.
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Jacques Tati goes crazy, with massive sets of massive office buildings, where masses of people mask their major mental disorders, and must make merriment in manic restaurants. I liked Trafic better.
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Man is the real monster, and moving from the big city to bumfuck reveals the seething problems lurking beneath the veneer of respectability.
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A slow Crash, out of a gun battle. It’s really all about the heists.
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Can you do a zombie film without zombies? Yes, but it’s just The Happening with less killer trees.
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This is… Wow. Puts the Cold War in perspective, in this particular case, the Walter Sobchak’s perspective.
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The protagonist is fucking in heaven. Fucking, and fucking, and fucking in heaven. I want to fuck more, I want to fuck more…. Beware of the unsimulated fellatios…
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There can be only one Queen-scored film, and this ain’t it.
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Cloudier Atlas. The same story, slightly tweaked through the ages, entwined between themselves.
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Clip show with some of Clouseau’s best gags, with a timid test for a female version played by Joanna Lumley. It might have worked, but they got cold feet, probably.
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The godfather, fantastique. The “bimps”, always the “bimps”. The Hong Kong stuff is ridiculous.
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Still Bourne. Ripoff in the worst possible way from specific Bourne films. The climatic music is a naked ripoff from 28 Weeks Later. Not even worth to waste time on the credits.
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I like this “modern” The Outer Limits adaptation, it’s very old school.
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Conan does The Hidden Fortress, while being driven by a girl, and hearing the lamentations of that woman.
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More Closeau antics, female cat burglars and Dreyfus losing him mind.
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This is more Austin Powers than caper films.
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The horrible horror retelling. Poor Joel Schumacher, his film was put under and never came back, the weight of all the sins dragged this to the abyss of generic jump scares and power failures.
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That’s just, like, your opinion, man. The Dude abides. Nobody fucks with the Jesus. This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass! You human paraquat!
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I’m pretty sure H. G. Wells didn’t write a book discussing eugenics (the latest scientific theories at the time) with the intent of having so many people wrestling with tigers, lions, and bears. That part completely overshadows the rest of the plot about the modern day Prometheus.
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Tati 4 life. One of the best road movies ever.
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Even mainstream Aronofsky is great. The classical themes of Christianity and Environmentalism are always present.
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Nem mau nem bom, antes pelo contrário. How does this win so many awards?
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Strange for cops to murder black people on a random traffic stop? Over spurious reasons, for nothing? Yeah, the good old 90’s…
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This is really a retread of older films, adapted to differing realities. Sadly this is something so taboo, most American actors ran away from this like the plague, it seems.
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Fucking A, this is a riot. The sparse orchestral score is the cherry on top. Not to be confused with Blackbeard, Bluebeard, or any other colourful facial hair.
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The Macbeth adaptation, more “theatrical” than other Kurosawa films. “Something wicked this way comes”, “out damn spot” and other Shakesperean lingo doesn’t translate so well.
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300 nicer plots squandered to focus on the bad parts. Holds up visually, as most Tarsem Singh films.
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Not a bad riff on the Ocean’s Eleven genre, with a great cast to boot. I find it most ironic that main cast’s salaries are similar amounts to what they are allegedly stealing, but they don’t split it equally. Life imitates art, badly.
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The origin of Monsieur Hulot, vacationing in a small beach hotel, failing to attract the attention of Martine. She is pushed towards that intellectual twit, but rebuffs him too. That love triangle is a pure sideshow, the star as the many very funny visual gags.
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A higher-brow Porky’s (with Kim Catrall too, sadface), still very unfunny. Aged very badly, but I think it was already bad when it came out. Still not much copaganda…
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For something completely different, Kurosawa does a bunch of smaller stories on a lively slum. Not one is resolved in any way, thus was a just sneak peak into their lives.
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Secret royalty passes through blockades with the help of trusted samurai and unwitting peasants. No, not Star Wars, this is fun and poignant.
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Amateurish sanitised Yojimbo remake, with the humour replaced with protracted gun massacres and grumpy men. Makes getting shot in the heart a nice activity.
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Quadrilaterally fantastic. So close to you, it’s like it lives on your nose and wants to get back home.
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Unemployed rent-a-cop/hitman wanders into town, pits two gangs against one another, comes out on top-ish. The Japanese Man with no Name.
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On the Mud-Caked Precipice of Greatness.
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How to steal a newspaper from your wife between World Wars: force abortions in excess of 5 maids and assorted visitors, then accuse her of hysteria when she absconds with the driver.
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The Night Manager with nicer effects and less fucking. A Memento of Nolan past. Is this the end of his career, or just the beginning. We live in a twilight world. Cells, interlinked, within cells, interlinked, within cells, interlinked within one stem. Laputan machine.
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Even unabashed Trump supporters are people, easily swayed from their world of racist hatred by poontang and a couple of deaths. I still don’t get the point of that imagined(‽) pussy eating session…
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The granddaddy of all zombies film not just includes all the elements of the genre, but also includes others that further films abandon. The ending absolutely kills it. It’s like a very souped up Outer Limits / Twilight Zone episode.
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Totally rad, man. It’s John Wick meets Fury Road, in the style of the cover of a metal band album. “Psychotic drowns, while mystic swims”.
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Classic review of how crap the Cold War was, Creature From the Black Lagoon or not. You can tell by the first minutes on the bath it’s really a treatise on fucking. Fucking, and fucking, and fucking in heaven.
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Misunderstandings the lead to Total War: The Film. Surprisingly nice Tolkienesque prequel to World of Warcraft.
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Another Uncharted live action “adaptation”, Indiana Jones is too old fashioned now. It’s not even on the same league as the Stephen Sommers films.
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This is scary as fuck. The protagonist is always on edge, even on the quiet bits. The final police car is the linchpin of the whole thing, and it falls into the wrong side of the tracks. The non-supernatural elements are scary enough, but I guess there’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner for that?
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What the fuck is this? What the fuuu… No, life is too short.
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Starts silly, crosses the line into absolute bonkers, crosses the line twice into batshit insane. Better the The Dictator, but still not that good.
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An ad for a jewellery store? A treatise on the deleterious effects of high-end prostitution on personal relationships? An acknowledgement that Sugar Mommies exist? All this and much more in this classic story.
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Two guys roam around America and see all that is, was, ever will be. Lives which are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Finis coronat opus.
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Rorschach’s Journal: I’m a depressed and paranoid voiceover, giving up the correct film noir vibes, and setting up the transitions between scenes, while the main character taxies around. Maybe I should not blame the plot for such an escalation in cruelty that numbs me, but it’s stronger than me.
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Oh my. The pretend edgy stuff. The pseudo-Robin Hood shtick. The cars wrecking cardboard boxes. The fade to black, oh god, so many fades to black.
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Another take on The Thing / Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but without communists. A man-made fake happiness creator, must be Instagram.
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The classic tale of moronic criminal pals going down on account of their lack of smarts. Pure 100% dumb American fuckers.
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What the fuck is this? Why does all young adult fiction must be post-apocalyptic? A crazy setting for such anodyne film. This is similar to The 5th Wave, but the core of the film is sexy people sexying it up, and not the end of the world as we know it. No gun worship either.
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Life and love of white trash in Sunny Florida. Love doesn’t prevail, crippling healthcare-related debt conspires against that. Fuck that shit.
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A serious and complex plot, cut down into a high-octane action flick. Works better as a potential script. The ending is just toothless.
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Clint Eastwood pulls a Ron Howard in the Obama years. It’s incredible that the director of this hagiography of Mandela, pacifism and race relations is the same guy that spoke to an empty chair. Schizophrenic.
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A classic, from the Director of Rambo.
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This is very different from what I expected, compared to the Steve Martin version. It’s quite raunchy, Closeau is an almost tragic figure, not a mere cuckhold.
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Crew Expendable.
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A bog standard horror film, but with Florence Pugh. Indistinguishable from any other.
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Yet another piece of naked copaganda. The phrase “Thin Blue Line” is uttered unironically. During a voiceover.
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So that’s where Alejandro came from. The Juarez cartel and him go way back. He got the baseball field for kids at last. I prefer the other film named Trafic
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A complex story of moral turpitude against the square-jawed personification of justice and valour. Such is the moral righteousness, it sways even a lonesome skiing photographer.
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What a fucking mess, Jarhead mixed with Transformers. It zigzags between “serious” piece of American propaganda on the first Gulf war, and a regular action flick with shit blowing up and people firing guns behind their back.
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This boy needs therapy (purely psychosomatic). What does that mean? You’re a nut! You’re crazy in the coconut.
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The intro is pretty Z-list, with a exposition filled backstory generation, but the cast saves this from total boredom.
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A Tom Clancy novel directed by John McTiernan. I’m surprised more shit doesn’t blow up. It’s as batshit insane as The Sum of All Fears, but this is a better film.
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Bumbling fool or truth-telling jester? Does the line between the two cuts through a man’s heart? Was our protagonist born on the wrong side of the tracks, or his he just a manipulative bastard scheming to obtain quick fame? If so, he failed completely.
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Mixed Metaphors: The Movie. Sympathy for the Devil you know from childhood, since you brutally slaughtered baby rabbits with the future Wolfman.
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A fantasy story about a land far, far away, where massive organised protests leads the President of the United States of America to sign a law re-guaranteeing the right to vote to all people. Imagine what could happen if a black president was elected and on his watch there somehow a rollback of these protections, the riots would be immense.
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Silly people, worried about scripts written by AI, a random walk over random words. This is done here with the gall of having credits for “writers”. Words without meaning, effluvia of thought. Nearly as annoying as the reviews.
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Atomic Blend of John Wick and First Blood (by the jingoism). Atomic Bland exploitation of such a rich time. Atomic Bleat of the greatest hits of ‘89. A tonic bomb, every character is a functional alcoholic.
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Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. He’d kill us if he got the chance.
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Impeccable spook story, even when typed by a big budget instead of the handwritten like El laberinto del fauno. Lacks no romance, on the two small chapters.
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Weird comedic take on the romance genre, but it’s not really a romantic comedy. Just a weird doppelgänger love quadrangle between themselves…
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This is not very funny per-se, and it gets even worse the more you analyse it. The incredible part is how a satire of the Rodney King case can make it to the screen with such a budget. This could be easily recut into a grimy and gritty cop show about police brutality.
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A pox on all these people. Trump-era plot where Islamic terrorists are coming through the Southern Border, leaving prayer rugs lying around? Alejandro is now a good guy and the spook has feelings? Just no.
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Wow, Michael Pitt is a psycho killer? Who would have thought? Funny how he plays Games with everyone…
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The Cliff’s Notes version. Über-depressing, almost makes you weep for idle rich aristocrats.
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#HimToo. Gossip is fun! I mean, it’s just words, right?
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Shane Black writes La Femme Nikita sequel? Sign me the fuck up. The only way this could be improved was to replace some explosions by quips and comebacks between characters. My favourite Christmas movie.
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A miscast ruins a cool high concept film. This is ripe for a (re-)remake. The comic relief was unnecessary, this is a hardcore treatise on life, death, sacrifice 😂🤣. Either there are serious horror films, or spooky jokes. It’s impossible to be both.
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Fucking hell, another “Estado Novo“-adjacent film with main characters who do no speak Portuguese? Dubbing a General who had such charisma that he forced the regime to rig elections against him, and then bury him in a shallow grave? Enough with the dubs already!
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After being politically pressured into deviating the focus of his radio station from sensitive subjects to light and positive themes, the programming head sends a team to Portugal during April 1974, to report on the great Swiss cooperation. Little do they know there will be a coup d’etat followed by a revolution.
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One of those alleged faithful recreation betrayed by amateurish production values. There’s way too many boom mics appearing on the shot.
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Yes, this is a run of the mill 90’s anti-hero, with mild The Exorcist flavour. But I still love it, Holy Wars have never been so snarky.
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The French version of Carnation Revolution. The director is Portuguese, but it’s completely French. The main characters are played by foreign actors and dubbed by Portuguese actors, without lip sync. That’s just folly.
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The 2004 remake. Why don’t you play a little solitaire? A sole political scion, shielded from the world by his mother, the heir of a political dynasty. They should name him “John Fitzgerald”, or “Chelsea”.
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One of Clancy’s roman à clef.
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Twilight of the Hillbillies. Goddamn preppers with their Gun worship and Government mistrust, and then the main theme is love. And out freaking nowhere, comes a Edward Cullen to tempt the protagonist and spread the seed into possible sequels that never materialise.
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Dayuum, ‘em popos be trippin’ after this OJ shit. This is a very funny buddy cop film without cops, but Chris Tucker overshadows everyone, always, and in every single scene. It’s his thing.
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The index film for the COVID-19 generation. Wicked sick.
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Sometimes you do a film for the greatest hits, with a central conflict of pride, competition, and revenge. Then you nail in Rodrigo Santoro with a message of peace, forgiveness, and selflessness.
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Goes from tasteful Bildungsroman to generic Young Adult big budget conspiracy way too fast. And the body count is way too high to be for kids, there are scenes of literal war where some of their buddies are killed horribly.
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Dumbass Moses achieves his personal objectives by a Deus Ex Machina, leading to many pointless suffering and death, over sheer pride. Pointless sentiments condemn thousands to more death and suffering, because one guy hears golden advice from his would-be wife and lover, and dismisses it. Fuck patriarchy!
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A fitting end to the series. Telenovela bullcrap with our “strong female lead” turns into a midwife, rejecting all responsibility except the higher one: the classic nuclear family, communing with nature and rejecting all Fascism, Cultural Revolutions, and Great Leaps Forward.
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Scream, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. None of you are safe!
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Confucian aliens arrive to koan us into nirvana. Timeless Knowledge is Bliss.
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A bizarre mix of risqué soft core T&A, long and drawn out shootouts, and Reaganist politics. Even weirder is the Philippines setting with cowboys and loads of country music. It’s like a Jackie Chan film without the good parts.
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The sub-rosa raises above the roses. The Mao Tse-Tung followers assemble in the ruins of a nuked District 13.
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An above average cop thriller, slightly dinged by too much activism in several fronts. On one hand they follow the “show, don’t tell” maxim, but then try to cram two separate scourges of society in a single plot.
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The rabble demands panem et circes. They can eat brioche, but plenty of circes to go around. The emperor tries to kill two mockingjays with one arrow by having the old tributes fight to the death, again. Our heroes falls from a cliffhanger unto another.
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Push, push, give me yeyo… Baby’s first X-Men. Ends with a sequel hook, just to crap all over the already mediocre plot. Did not see that coming…
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How ironic that this title leads to a resolution is where the protagonists do not eat something. Also, a film for “kids” featuring literal bloodbaths.
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Filipe Melo does an Americana short. It deals with the fact that the death penalty is as American as apple pie.
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Fuggedaboutit, Johnny. It’s Vegas with no name. Yup, it’s a film noir disguised as a Western, and vice versa.
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127 Hours of Jaws.
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A metal re-imagining of Ghost Rider, without paying the royalties. Metal to the core, y’all are not metal enough for this.
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Daugther of Sam. Naomi Watts in an apartment being the self-destructive writer. Good prevails, somehow. Not much to do with the similarly named Bergman film.
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Pretty face reporter and her activist cameraman accidentally runs into a major accident at a “nukular” power plant, followed by a cover up, the classic money trumps safety. She is brushed aside, since her brains were not why she’s there, while the cameraman is just an independent contractor.
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Mentally unstable news anchor talks smack on live TV. Self-Destructing behaviour ensues. Released in 1976. Damn.
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So much modernity in ‘83. Radio-activated garage doors. 20 years old cars are “classics”. Self-Driving cars, powered by soul-sucking entities that demand you change your personality to conform to their ideals. A bit more bodycount than the Tesla “Autopilot”.
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Uncharted: Matt’s Deception. The reason why there’s no Uncharted film (yet) is because this exists.
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Brian seems to be bad part of Neveldine/Taylor. This is execrable bullshit.
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I’m Jack’s complete lack of pacing. It’s as if someone saw The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and though: we should have more battle scenes.
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The eventual depressing sequel to Saving Private Ryan. A top-down fretting of the generals over thousands of dead, massive collateral civilian damage, and chaos; just a regular war. 3 hours of relentless defeats, failure and waste of effort.
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Better title: Black Bloc: La prochaine.
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Ironic that an “adult” film about discrimination and police violence contributing to a never ending circle grief ignores those themes for cheap gags. It was if The Big Sleep had an happy ending. The gags are very funny though.
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A high budget remix of all other Bourne films, for the money. It gets better on the second viewing. A great cast, not so silly plot (with parental bullcrap, but eh) and high octane action sequences.
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Star Wars with more dick jokes, but much less scantily clad woman and incest. How naïve were people to laugh at “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money”, it’s not even a joke now.
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Middle aged guy lusts for hot PYT, but others bang her hard. Misunderstandings lead to death. The ending is hilarious, just like most of the others scenes.
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A loose remake of the previous film, but more a spunkgargleweewee, silly sex scenes and a different ending. From meh to yuck.
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Charles Bronson is the gentleman hitman, almost a cat burglar who kills people Rube Goldberg-style. He takes a young apprentice and outwits him beyond the grave.
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Landlubber Ephraim Winslow and old sea wolf Thomas Wake heave their belongings to the rock, eagerly waitin’ for the two fortnights of their shift. Two man in, how many men out? The sea. Sums. Dichotomy between good and evil.
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The film that better captures the green movement and its surrounding politics. It might seem to be about an humanised super pig, but it’s all a ruse.
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A fine drama, buried beneath mountains of makeup and special effects. It’s really just technical muscle flexing.
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The old Gibsonian universe in a nutshell (with different names): Keyboard Cowboys; 320GB of hot RAM; Street Samurai; Muscle for the Yakuza; Ono-Sendai decks; Tessier-Ashpool corporations; AI with Swiss citizenship.
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The flip side of Back to the Future, yet another 80’s film set on the 50’s. It might look like an American Pie, but it’s barely about sex. There’s also less T&A than the average daytime reality show.
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Cry me a frozen Massachusetts lake. An upbeat Civil War-era story. Too many flash back and forth. Sadly, the plot clothesline where to hang the contemporary elements turns into a straightjacket.
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Roman Polanski tells the Dreyfus story, making it about himself twice. The second one is to cast Emanuelle Seigner as the hero’s wife. Still worth it, though.
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Joaquin Phoenix does his thing and the mainstream goes wild! Welcome to the fan club.
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If the first 30 min doesn’t discourage people from wars, what does? The rest of the film is just underlining the same points. If this is the continuation of politics by other means, it’s worth to keep the current means.
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One of the stupidest Mad Max ripoffs I have ever seen. Completely ridiculous. Set in the “future” year of 2017.
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Not the best “fake” single shot film, perhaps the most expensive one. Utøya: July 22 was more intense.
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Paul W. S. Anderson cuts his teeth on he does best: silly videogame adaptations with atrocious CGI and Z-list actors. The only film involving Traci Lords where people get to keep their clothes on (except Blade?).
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Complete and utter dross. Main Plot points are launched and abandoned from the start, alleged romance happens.
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I will deny in a court of law this timid and formulaic BBC biopic is a masterpiece. I’m not libelling Rachel Weisz plus supporting characters for this easy paycheck.
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Ridley Scott’s Provence holiday. That mix between Provençal real estate ads, eulogising sociopaths and casual chauvinism bordering on assault.
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Jeunet (and Marc Caro) plant the seeds of The City of Lost Children. C’est magnifique…
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Meh, overplays its hand for such formulaic script.