Last movie you watched......

Great movie.

 

Saw Spectre last night. Thought it was plodding, with lots of long, unnecessary scenes. While the previous Daniel Craig Bond movies kept you on your toes, this one welded itself back to many typical Bond conventions and was perfectly predictable from the get-go.

Plus, it's funny that he can cause a building to blow up, practically wreck a train in a drawn-out fight, and that never seems to draw the slightest interest from the authorities.

 

Have to agree with you, Ace. I didn't hate the film, but it certainly left me wanting more, 'Bond'. I did like some of the nods to the Bond of yesteryear.

 

Shaping up to be a movie night for me and my daughter.
Even she doesn't want to battle the crowds for "Hunger Games" so I suggested "Spotlight" and she is interested.
Got high recommendations from several of my friends still in the media.
I told my daughter it was like "All the President's Men" but she hasn't seen that.
We'll probably give it a look.

 

The Martian is my favorite movie in a decade or more.

It was just great at what it wanted to be -- a simple ode to the wonders of humanity and our species' ability to cope, work together to overcome huge obstacles, and to explore.

No fuss, no fake storylines, no melodrama. Just a fun, thoughtful movie that really needs to be seen on a big screen.

 

It's plain-out awesome. So well done.

I enjoyed Spectre, but it wasn't as good as Skyfall or Casino Royale.

Saw Mockingjay over the weekend. This genre is not my cup of tea (and frankly I'm not the target audience) but I thought it was pretty entertaining even though it was a little long.

 

I liked "The Martian." I definitely didn't love "The Martian."

SPOILERS AHEAD

It is what you guys say it is: An ode to problem-solving, essentially. And I appreciated that. Narratively, though, it's "Castaway" on Mars, and less compelling. It doesn't have much heart, for one thing. Is there a core human relationship here? Watney-Martinez? Watney-Chastain (her character's name escapes me)? I don't recognize one, and it makes the movie feel emotionally flat. Compare to, say, "Interstellar." Love-conquers-all as a theme was cheesy in its own right, but there was at least something to latch onto with the father-daughter relationship. In "The Martian," we barely see these people together before he's left behind.

Also, the plot became pretty contrived about halfway through what I guess would be the second act, when the Magical Negro/deus ex machina showed up out of nowhere to explain to everyone that they could just send the Hermes back to Mars. But not before the asshole bureaucrat tries to stand in the way, temporarily.

It's also at least 20 minutes too long. And the expository dialogue gets to be too much at times: "I know what he's doing! He's ...!" They got way too far into the weeds at times on some of the science. I would have probably let him get pretty geeky about the botany, for example, and asked the audience to take it on faith that he was figuring out how to make batteries last without painful dialogue or monologue to slow down an already bloated script.

 

Your notes are spot on, but, for me at least, your conclusions aren't -- the fact that it was just science-science-science and not full of flashbacks to the daughter on Earth he'll never see grow up, etc. -- is exactly what I also liked about it. Sure, it's more of a documentary than a drama, but I'm AOK with that.

 

And I think that's fair, and I think that you can screw up the movie by throwing in the token father-daughter relationship. I found it intriguing, actually, that they had the guts to give Damon basically no back story, other than that he went to the University of Chicago and was a botanist. But I wanted something to invest in, and I don't know that I got that. In fact, I think the movie tried too hard to shoehorn that in with the crew not knowing he was safe and the flare-up between the director of NASA and his assistant who undermined him. It was unearned. Having the crew return like that felt really forced and from a different movie.

 

The Martian is a movie for our times. I'm not sure that says a lot about our times, frankly.

At this point, Jessica Chastain is kind of an irritating, preening actor, as well. Anne Bancroft didn't get that way until after The Graduate.

 

As a big fan of the book, I also was stumped by the casting of Jessica Chastain as the mission commander. She comes across as an older, experienced military commander type in the book; in the movie, she looks too young to have the authority/respect her character requires.

I mean, she needs to be at least 45-50 to have liked ABBA and 1970s TV shows!

 

This strikes me as extremely nit-picky, but to each his own.

I did have the thought not long into it that it carried the Castaway story arc. Castaway meets Apollo 13 (meets Saving Private Ryan). I thought it had more "work the problem" than Castaway, and I really enjoyed that. I thought there was enough emotion involved in rescuing a stranded man, and enough emotion in his efforts to survive. Plus, the development of another emotional back story would have made the movie even longer.