Found at random via Facebook recommendation, hosted by the DUST page. Poses a good question, but I wouldn't look too deep. There's at least one big plot hole, namely that the guy knows she has a knife but is oblivious to her attempts to get it out of her purse.
It's OK. Watch for Patrick Stewart, I guess, and shake your head at the Michael Bay-style explosions.
At least it's more realistic than Con Air (1997).
I simply don't understand why this has such low ratings everywhere except Rotten Tomatoes. It's absolutely hilarious!
Kind of pushed on through just because it was too late in the evening to quit and pick another movie. While I enjoyed some cameos, and some small moments with the protagonists, most of this was a yawn-fest.
Is Dick cute? At times, yes. But I remain unconvinced by Dan Hedaya's portrayal of Nixon, and by Dunst & Williams' portrayals of airheaded teenage girls. The humor is both predictable and unfunny. The film's primary redeeming quality, though it couldn't make up for the lackluster script, was the setting. That was done well, especially in the soundtrack and set dressings.
Sometimes one plays the lottery, choosing a film at random from those available in a particular environment (in this case, the comedies provided via free Showtime on-demand at our hotel), and loses.
Watching this would be a great excuse to start the TV series, except that the series is incomplete on streaming platforms. Sigh.
Note to self: Split almost exactly 50:50 between tonight and previous evening.
Not sure why Yuimetal is credited. She mysteriously didn't appear at this concert. It was a hint of things to come, when Amuse formally announced that she was leaving the band a year or so later.
Got through just over two hours of this in 48 hours total because of family dynamics, people not being willing to sit and watch the whole thing at once. YouTube rentals apparently really mean that you have 48 hours to finish once started. Doubtful that I'll ever bother going back to finish the last ten minutes, but I also won't rate or review without having seen the whole thing.
Petition to wave some magic wand and make the world think this is Cats (2019). :clipboard:
Holy crap, that Kami-Band reveal.
26 minutes on YouTube (the archival version I found), but 27 minutes as listed on IMDB/TMDB. I suspect PAL/NTSC shenanigans.
I'm such a sucker for big infrastructure projects, especially when they're carried out with little to no impact on ongoing services.
When playing e.g. supply-chain/logistics games (Factorio or similar), I often try to make improvements in the same manner: Plan ahead, build or change whatever I can, and interrupt the existing flow of items as briefly as possible.
I'm such a nerd. :grin:
25 minutes as seen on YouTube, 26 as reported by IMDB/TMDB. Perhaps the runtime data was added to the database(s) by someone who watched an NTSC conversion? YT stats showed 25 fps, and the runtime difference is exactly explained by calculating the slowdown one might see if watching the same content at 24 fps instead.
In any case, it's an interesting blast from the railway (and film) past. I say it shifted from color to monochrome at just the wrong time—leaving the audience to watch technicians observing colored signals without being able to see the colors ourselves—but I bet the monochrome camera was much more compact than a color one, and might have been chosen so as to interfere as little as possible on the overnight job site. Perhaps the available light also came into play.
Ambiguous endings… They're strange animals. One can come off as a stroke of genius; another, all but identical, can fall flat.
And then there's the surprise twist ending. Same deal—you love one, hate another just like it, for no apparent reason.
Ask Me Anything has an ambiguous surprise-twist ending. It didn't work for me.
I must have dropped this onto my watchlist after I watched the season of Under the Dome where they wrote Britt Robertson out of the cast, but it was a nice surprise to find Christian Slater and Martin Sheen here too. Unfortunately, the cast was what I liked most about this film. Actually, the writing and characterization was…fine…until the aforementioned ending.
Truly, I couldn't critique any of the actors' performances. All of their characters rang more or less true-to-life. But that ending felt like a genre bait-and-switch, and a pretty unforgivable one. Katie/Amy disappears and the audience is left with no reasonable clues why? Please.
This obviously happened over 6 years ago, and Yui is fine, but I still got really worried when she disappeared in the middle of "Headbangya"… Both Yui and Moa had pretty close calls in this performance. Imagine being in the crowd, though…
Or maybe [tinfoil hat on] latent injuries from her fall off the stage eventually led—years later—to Yui's vague health issues and absence from BABYMETAL performances, then her departure from the group? [tinfoil hat off]
If you don't take it too seriously, it's good. The story is clearly exaggerated; that's the point of this satire.
YouTube release from the production studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh3Yz3PiXZw
I feel Anderson's plight in my soul.
Currently available at YouTube on the director's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Note to self, and anyone who's interested: It looks like this is available on YouTube at time of writing.
As soon as I saw Poe, my first thought was, "Is that an older Rico [from Suite Life]?" And it is! Had absolutely no idea that Will was played by one of the Sprouse twins, though.
Oof. Ultimately it's a cheesy, sappy romance story, but there's a punch to it. Slight spoiler below explains part of why I found it a 10.
Stella's obsession with Abby's last moments is entirely too relatable for me, especially combined with the fact that I've also lost both a sibling and a best friend. The circumstances aren't quite identical, but still.
It's… OK. For a shmup, at least. The "Will Smith vs. Will Smith" VFX are mostly good, at least.
Some egregiously bad CGI in this one, mostly in the form of unrealistic physics.
This movie made me hungry.
There's no accounting for popular opinion on this one. Most people who bothered to write reviews on IMDB loved it, or at least liked it, and yet the average rating is just 6.8. Ramen Shop is a superb visual experience, and the plot—while heartwarming—is kind of secondary. Eric Khoo knew exactly what he was making: a love letter to Singaporean cuisine.
I like the premise of video game characters hopping between arcade machines, but can't shake the feeling that I should have watched this before seeing its sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet. Neither film has an "amazing" plot—both are standard Disney formula—but contrary to the rating averages I thought the sequel was slightly better written and had better complexity of character development. (Both, however, have over-the-top climactic battles.)
Granted, I watched this in Japanese on a transatlantic flight for the lulz, but the subtitles were clearly the original dialogue and not a translation from Japanese. (When "Sugar Rush" played—a song sung in Japanese—the subs read "(SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)"…) Doing so robbed me of hearing Alan Tudyk's voice as King Candy, so I'll probably have to watch this again in English for completeness. I have a free copy in English on Google Play from some giveaway years ago, anyway.
Despite a moment or two that I felt strained my suspension of disbelief, and wishing the musical moments would let the "real world" show through intermittently instead of only at the end, I think this movie deserves the "Totally Ninja!" rating.
If a film can keep me glued to the screen like this one did, it can't be anything less!
Had a heck of a time finding this on Trakt. Delta Airlines listed it as "Can't Stop Dancing"; the on-screen titles in the film itself said "Can't Stop the Dancing" (emphasis added); IMDB, TMDB, and Trakt all have it as "Dance With Me"…
I couldn't quite follow the non-linear storytelling along the way. Eventually I got it, kinda, but the details are hazy. For this one, I don't even have the excuse of being half asleep—it was the first movie I watched on a 13-hour flight, after a (mostly) full night's sleep.
Takashi bothers me, maybe because of that one scene where he basically forces himself on Tsuno. Even without that, it's really hard to relate to him, and I'm not sure why.
I already knew who "Shirano" was by the ¼ mark, but this was pleasant to watch. One cannot expect Holmesian mystery from a Japanese romance film, after all. It's only meant to be cute and fun.
Not sure where the extra few minutes went—Trakt says it should be 105 mins, and IMDB lists 106, whereas I have 102.45 written down from my viewing on a transatlantic flight—but I guess there's always a slight risk of things being trimmed out when one watches movies on an airplane.
This was good enough. It couldn't keep me awake on my Intercontinental flight, though. I had to pause and finish after taking a nap. (Admittedly, I had gone about 48 hours without sleep by that point.) But I still like Hakkaku.
At this point, I've watched and enjoyed so many of these blatant attempts to tug on the viewers' heartstrings that I can only conclude that I'm a hopeless romantic.
Not sure if the airplane I watched this on (why am I always half-asleep for these?!) had a cropped master, or if the director used cutting off the characters at the edges to make a statement about their lives and relationships to each other.
That cliffhanger ending though.
I kind of cared a little about the characters by the end. Sort of. A bit. I think I'd need to watch it again while fully awake to pick up the character moments I missed, so I'm not going to rate the movie this time. (Though I understand that there's a fair amount of consensus—if two out of two total reviews counts as such—among IMDB users that this movie's characters are just unredeemable.)
This film's Trakt page was open in my browser from I don't know when. No idea how I came to it any more, but usually when I leave something open it means I wanted to get back to it.
Not sure about the pacing. It feels like a lot of exposition, followed by pretty quick climax and (pseudo) resolution for each character.
Odd that the version on Amazon Prime (US) is 91 minutes, exclusive of the logos at the beginning, but IMDB insists the movie is only 85 minutes long. Even if I cut out the credits, it's not quite that short (87 minutes).
Amazing! You have to see this for the interviews alone. That the documentary's structure flows so well is just a bonus.
Since I harped on the importance of character in two of my last three reviews (see list at the end of this comment), it's only fitting that I finally found a film worthy of praise for how well it paints its characters!
While they aren't all fully rendered, the inhabitants of Where I Belong's world at least seem like real people. And speaking of painting, just look at the country landscape those people live in!
I'm glad this was the last of the four (!) films I watched on my ten-hour flight from Warsaw to Chicago today, because it was easily the best. Always good to end on a high note, even if it was interrupted several times in the last 15 minutes by pre-landing announcements.
This was easily the best of the four (!) films I watched on my flight from Warsaw to Chicago today. My comments on the lot, in order:
This is a good premise with a solid execution. Not mind-blowing, but good. It was interesting enough that I didn't keep checking the playback progress on an international flight (ten hours!) where this was one of four Japanese films (three I hadn't seen) offered.
Rated 7 instead of 8 because, well, I saw too much of the story coming. It was practically telegraphed in advance. The movie should give you a good dose of feels, nonetheless.
