I watch a lot of movies, mostly kids’ movies and Hollywood action blockbusters, but in principle I’m willing to watch anything that isn’t horror. I’m keeping a list of the movies I’ve seen. Read these posts for my reactions and plot summaries, many of which are in the form of a beat sheet as described in Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
Nearly ruining his driver’s chance to qualify for the Trans-France Race, Herbie falls in love with another race car in Paris, one driven by a woman who resents discrimination against female racers. Meanwhile, Herbie is being chased by two bumbling diamond thieves, who have hidden a fist-sized gem in Herbie’s gas tank.
There’s a fight scene in the Alps that reminds me of the one in Speed Racer, though this one involves fewer people than that one; the diamond thieves have brought a helicopter to intercept Herbie and they hold the driver and his mechanic at gunpoint to try to get the diamond back. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking…
In this sequel to The Love Bug, the characters are totally different, except the car himself. The settings overlap, though: Herbie’s owner, a delightful little old lady played by Helen Hays (who I recognize from the Disney movie Candleshoe), still lives in the same house in San Francisco.
The plot revolves around whether the house (what the Chinese call a “nail house”) will be torn down so that an insensitive rich guy named Mr. Hawk can build a huge, H-shaped skyscraper on the site. Everything nearby has already been demolished. In Hollywood, the underdog wins and the wealthy antagonist loses; private property rights are upheld. (In China, sadly, that’s not always how the story goes, though supposedly things are improving.)
In part because the connection to racing is lost, in part because the real-estate developer is so explicitly Machiavellian, and in part because the lead male is pretty dopey, I liked this movie less than the original. That’s normal for sequels, though, and it was still cute.
The best part of Dead Men Tell No Tales was the hilarious dry-land bank robbery scene. The runner-up was the failed-execution scene, which was also, notably, a scene on dry land. The CGI was impressive and all, but the ocean consists of entirely too much water, albeit fake water, if you ask me.
This is a tough movie to summarize in that there are five main characters, all with their own goals and conflicts. It’s an easy movie to summarize in that the whole plot is basically just “get control of the magic stick”. (It’s best not to think too hard about how the magic stuff works.)
Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
When I was little, I loved movies where stuff moved by itself. I loved animate inanimate objects like Herbie the VW Beetle, talking animals like the cat in The Cat from Outer Space, and people who could do telekinesis, like the siblings in Escape to Witch Mountain. These days I enjoy racing car movies, like the Fast and Furious series, Speed Racer, and even Death Race, despite how bloody it is. The Love Bug is a family comedy that features a racing car that moves by itself. What’s not to love?
I watched it with the audio commentary on this time, so rather than hearing the film’s dialog, I was hearing comments from the three main actors years after the filming.
One thing the commentators pointed out was the matte backgrounds. I tend to think of fake sets as being CGI and very artificial, but movies have been artificial a lot longer than computers have been around. The methods we use to trick the eyes have changed, but the effect is the same. A backdrop created with pixels isn’t necessarily more beautiful or realistic than a backdrop created with paint. The actor who was describing scenes set in foggy San Francisco couldn’t remember, and couldn’t reliably discern, which scenes were filmed on location and which locations had been painted in.
The movie is more impressive if you think about how many of the simple-looking special effects had to be done in real life with physical tools and props, such as the scene on the DVD cover where the car is bouncing across the surface of a pond. They had a plastic car on wires attached to poles on either side of the pond, and they bounced the car on the water. It’s much simpler, and much more complicated, than it looks!
Memorable moments in the movie: Herbie getting drunk on Irish coffee with whipped cream, which I don’t think I understood very well when I was a kid; a phone in a car, which must have been devilishly expensive at the time; diverted race cars zooming through a mine, and then Herbie getting in an elevator sideways to exit the mine at the top of a hill.
For like the first third of the episodes, there’s a guy (Ghost Rider) who’s possessed by some kind of devil. What happened to science? The show is usually focused on superhero powers deriving from inhuman DNA being acted on by some kind of material transforming agent. Being possessed by a being from another dimension for no particular reason doesn’t fit very well with the science that gives everyone else weird powers. Also, how is it that his car can burst into flames and not burn? Did the car make a deal with the devil, too? Whatever.
Then Ghost Rider pretty much disappears, and we’ve got an android (AIDA) who has some powerful AI and also an evil magic book that looks like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer prop. Is the android the primary antagonist in the season, or is the primary antagonist the man who created her? There’s a lot of back and forth on that issue; I won’t give away the ending.
There’s a digital world called The Framework that’s suspiciously like the one in a certain movie I keep comparing everything to. It was created (with the help of the ridiculous-looking evil magic book) for a specific set of individuals to live in. In The Framework, one major regret was erased from each of those individuals’ lives. I object to the use of the word ‘regret’ in this context because the thing that changed wasn’t something that the individual was responsible for; it was just something that the person wished had been different. That confused me for a while.
It’s great that the characters care about each other, face tough choices, and overcome tough problems, but I enjoy the show mainly because the writing sparkles with humor. Some sci-fi (*cough cough* The 100) is just too serious.
In this four-hour BBC miniseries version of Jane Eyre, there is much that’s missing; despite its length, it still felt rushed compared to the book. I’m sure the 2011 movie is even more rushed in comparison.
Baahubali 2, to an even greater extent than its wildly successful predecessor Baahubali (2015), broke all the records for Indian films in India and abroad, for both expense and box office receipts, if Wikipedia is to be believed. This lavish CGI-heavy epic was made not in Mumbai but in Hyderabad—with an entirely South Indian cast and recorded in a South Indian language (two, actually: Telugu and Tamil).
Though the name of the main character is the name of a Jain saint, and the whole thing feels like it’s based on a myth, my impression is that the story is original.
The movie is long, at over 160 minutes, and includes 18 minutes of songs that reinforce, rather than convey, the plot.
Speaking of plot: This second movie serves as both prequel and sequel to the first. I wish I knew why the story wasn’t made into a trilogy; the first part is called Baahubali: The Beginning, and the second part is called Baahubali 2: The Conclusion. (Is it just me, or is that really odd?)
I liked the first half of Baahubali 2, in which the violence is stylized and the hero is victorious, better than the second half, which is more somber and much bloodier, and whose final battle is fought by the main character of the first movie, which I didn’t see.
My favorite sequence was the big battle in the small mountain kingdom, which involved a lot of impressive if exaggerated feats of martial arts.
The scene in which the hero and heroine defend a hallway by shooting three arrows at a time reminded me strongly of the lobby scene in The Matrix. It’s the same idea (boy meets girl, boy fights enemies with girl, enemies all die); only the costumes, props, and colors are different.
Do I compare every movie I see with The Matrix? Yeah, maybe.
If you favor subtlety over spectacle, Baahubali 2 is not for you. Characters’ jealousies, realizations, and thoughts more often than not manifest in spoken words. The characters’ actions, too, are often explained in the dialog. For example, it’s not enough to succeed in framing someone for treason, you also have to tell him you’ve just framed him for treason, even if the next thing you do is kill him.
I don’t think anyone could succeed in making a parody of the movie by exaggerating its notable features; they’re already over the top. Wait, hang on, Robin Hood: Men in Tights did have Robin shooting six arrows at once… if you haven’t taken it up to eleven, there’s always farther to go.
Anyway, overall, I thought Baahubali 2 was worth seeing because it was so spectacular.
So there’s the silliness, yeah, and the comic book costumes and sci-fi setting and all, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is also about… family. There are a bunch of serious emotions in the movie, all relating to what it means to feel a sense of belonging, whether as a sister, a father, a son—or a genetically anomalous member of a tightly knit team.
Can the movie industry please stop putting all the jokes and surprises into the previews? I would have enjoyed F8 much more if I hadn’t seen so much of it already.
It was still a surprise to me, however, when the villain got away, because that sets up another whole movie, and I was expecting this to be the last one, on account of the rather final-sounding name. I’ve now realized they chose the name because this movie is the eighth, and “F8” sounds like “fate” in leetspeak or SMS shorthand or whatever. (Letters? Where we’re going, we don’t need letters!)
In the first act, the villain (a female super-hacker, yay) tries to make it sound like Dom isn’t really loyal to his team, he’s loyal to his sense of adventure, but that interesting ambiguity doesn’t last long. By the time we reach the climax, the villain is a boring cardboard cut-out who just stands there desperately gnashing her teeth, ranting at underlings on a comm system, and jabbing buttons on a control panel. I felt sorry for her.
Still, the set pieces and humor were wonderful, and although the movie’s reveal during the resolution was pretty far-fetched, I still found it satisfying. The movie lacks plausibility and emotional depth, but it has lots of antics involving bald dudes and cars. Box office receipts indicate that this suffices.
I have re-watched the 1995 animated version of Ghost in the Shell, and I stand by what I said before: the English dialog is uninspiring, both for how it sounds and what it says.
Some of the dialog explains too much, and yet the movie is still confusing. The voices are wooden sounding and incongruously American. I should maybe have watched it in Japanese, but then I’d have been dependent on the English subtitles, which are maybe just as bad at representing what’s going on.
What’s going on is some kind of conflict between two different government departments. Something to do with an AI.
The setting is amazing, and beautiful… in a dingy, dystopian kind of way. Doesn’t make me want to move to Hong Kong.
The main character, Major Matoko Kusanagi, has a robot body with no organic human brain inside, but rather a scan of the contents of one.
The theme is how we might redefine what it means to be human—or rather, sentient, since humans are biologically obsolete; evolution is moving on to the next stage.
The theme is what was most interesting to me about Ghost in the Shell, but overall I didn’t think the theme was communicated well. I enjoyed watching this insightful analysis.
