That movie about James Brown .. hollywood needs to make more movies about him his life and music were inspiring. Loved it. Someone took a shit in my bathroom haha

[Edited 1/7/15 18:39pm]

Deux Jours, Une Nuit - 8/10

I watched this (released under its original title, The F Word, here) 'cause it was set in Toronto.

How much did I hate this movie? Let me count the ways...

On second thought, why waste any more time on this drivel?

1.5/4

Foxcatcher (2014) - The greatest Olympic Wrestling Champion brother team joins Team Foxcatcher led by multimillionaire sponsor John E. du Pont as they train for the 1988 games in Seoul - a union that leads to unlikely circumstances.

Well done--especially Steve Carell's performance, but the entire story was very unsettling.

not sure how to rate this one.

okay this is a must see, especially considering recent hubbub over the seth rogen movie. turns out, kim jong un has been publicly propagandizing fantasy images of missiles striking new york city, as well as vilifying america to the point of producing mass hatred of all things USA in NK's populace. so where the hell does kim jong un get off criticing the rogen movie when he has long been brain-washing his subjects to cheer for the total destruction of america? and how many chins does one man need, when there are orphan children begging and starving on the streets of NK?

a japanese filmmaker uses secret footage smuggled out from NK and interviews defectors as to their horrific experiences under kim jong un's regime/dictatorship. highly recommend

[Edited 1/10/15 10:17am]

Life Itself (2014) - The life and career of the renowned film critic and social commentator, Roger Ebert.

Funny and during his final days in the hospital, difficult to watch. 1/2

thekidsgirl said:

Birdman I love how it was filmed, and the overall pace of this. The story was good and Michael Keaton was great... The ending made me feel cold, but I give it 4/5 stars

Sounds like we have similar tastes!

Ace said:

Citizenfour (2014) - A documentarian and a reporter travel to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with Edward Snowden.

It confirms what most people already suspected I think.

[Edited 2/5/15 9:54am]

thekidsgirl said:

Ace said:

Sounds like we have similar tastes!

Agreed That being said, I'll definitely pass on that What If Being Friends blah blah blah movie

I give it five of these:

The Imitation Game (2014) - During World War II, mathematician Alan Turing tries to crack the enigma code with help from fellow mathematicians.

Benedict Cumberbatch really shines in this moving biopic.

2,5/ 5

not a horrid mess like the SW prequels or Matrix Revolutions, but certainly a misguided, overblown, chaotic mess; Peter Jackson has lost it; if the Silmarillion is ever turned into a movie trilogy adaptation, I want him to stay the fuck away from it...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? 5/5

The Big Lebowski 4/5

Fargo 5/5

I've been on a Coen Brothers kick the last few days.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) - The spoiled young heir to the decaying Amberson fortune comes between his widowed mother and the man she has always loved.

It's a shame the original cut no longer exists, but the edited version is still very good.

sexton said:

Foxcatcher (2014) - The greatest Olympic Wrestling Champion brother team joins Team Foxcatcher led by multimillionaire sponsor John E. du Pont as they train for the 1988 games in Seoul - a union that leads to unlikely circumstances.

Well done--especially Steve Carell's performance, but the entire story was very unsettling.

my husband said this was fantastic, but i nodded off after 10mins.. borefest for the ladies

the film was utter tosh, but i endured til the end as max irons was very nice to look at.

I finally got to watch "The Equalizer" last night. Wow, did Denzel Washington equalize the bejeebus out of everyone!

He equalized the holy hell out of a bunch of Russians. My favorite equalizing was one they didn't show. It was the one at the restaurant, when Teddi had brought in the 'big" muscle from Russia to find Denzel. Dude say his people will find Denzel, and then he leaves. One minute later, here's Denzel with dude's broken glasses. "He won't be coming back" is all he says. Awesome! That line is Schwarzenegger-esque!

I wish they had shown him equalizing the morons that robbed his store. I thought for a second he was going to equalize that dude right then and there, but I guess that would have given away that he was an Equalizer, and not just some middle-aged Home Depot stocker.

I was saddened to see that Hollywood movies are still accepting product placements for Marlboro cigarettes. I guess their feeling was, if we're going to show a bunch of guys getting killed via equalization, what's the harm in showcasing a product that actually murders people in real life? Cigarettes need to be equalized. They have no place in our world.

But I digress, for the 3-second placement of Marlboro Death Sticks is but a small part of what is otherwise one of the best movies about equalizing I have ever seen. Pretty much non-stop equalizing, and everyone that needs to be equalized gets the crap equalized right out of them.

Did anyone else think the dude that played Teddi bore more than a passing resemblance to Kevin Spacey? And he is a very good actor, just like Spacey. I liked how when he got equalized by the nail gun, Denzel didn't copy Danny Glover and say "Nailed him".

Bonus for me - I came into the movie what I thought was five minutes late, right after Slavi and his buddies had gotten equalized. So I really didn't know the backstory of their equalization (stupid mountain-top Dish TV doesn't have a DVR, and you can't order stuff on demand. You have to watch it when it comes on). So I thought, "Well, I'll watch the first five minutes of it when it starts up again".

But guess what? I didn't miss the first 5 minutes - I had missed the first 30 minutes. So basically I just watched the whole movie again. And it stood the test of time...well, it was as entertaining the second time as it was the first! I did notice that Denzel was in the habit of timing how long it took him to equalize various people. This is something that Jack Reacher does, too. In fact, The Equalizer is basically Jack Reacher, except The Equalizer has a steady job whereas Jack Reacher drifts.

I give "The Equalizer" a sterling Five Cracked Skulls out of a possible Five Cracked Skulls.

.

[Edited 1/12/15 13:15pm]

The Imitation Game 7.5 / 10

Birdman 3 / 10

Boring.I still cannot figure out why so many people/critics like movies like this.Different strokes I suppose.

The Interview (2014)

It had the makings of a great comedy somewhere in there, with shades of Blazing Saddles, The Hangover and Duck Soup for good measure. But it wasn't quite executed well enough.


It did have one great piece of dialogue in there:

Korean Officer: How many times will America keep making the same mistake?

Franco: AS MANY TIMES AS IT TAKES!

3.75/10.

The Babadook (2014) - A single mother, plagued by the violent death of her husband, battles with her son's fear of a monster lurking in the house, but soon discovers a sinister presence all around her.

I expected to like this more after reading all the great reviews. Maybe it's because I'm not much of a horror fan.

^Wow.. you watch a LOT of movies. If I watch one a week, its a lot.

Big Eyes

lezama said:

^Wow.. you watch a LOT of movies. If I watch one a week, its a lot.

During awards season I try to average a movie a day. My goal every year is to see as many if not all films nominated for the Academy Awards.

Snowpiercer (2013) - Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges.

It looked very cool and I liked Tilda Swinton, but this movie is a lot of nonsense. 1/2

sexton said:

Snowpiercer (2013) - Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges.

It looked very cool and I liked Tilda Swinton, but this movie is a lot of nonsense. 1/2

she was good, and the part where you see through all the carriages was good, but the rest was ridiculous

The last movie I watched was "Rocky Balboa".

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT - I THINK. MAYBE IT'S JUST ME. BUT ANYWAY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

See, I never wanted to watch "Rocky Balboa" because I heard he died in that one. But he didn't! Maybe it would have been a better movie if he had, though.

I am a die-hard Rocky fan. I place "Rocky III" in my personal Top Five Movies Ever Made. I love, love, LOVE that movie. The big scene where Rocky goes from being a putz to being Rocky again is so freaking awesome that just thinking about it has made me decide to rip off 200 push-ups after I finish this review. And when Rocky tells Mr. T, "You ain't nothin'! My mother hits harder than that! C'mon, champ - knock me out!!!!" Heck - make it 250 push ups!

So I was naturally disappointed that there was no such scene in "Rocky Balboa". This movie just never got any juices flowing. The fight between Rocky - and let me say here, WTF was up with Paulie and everyone calling him "Rocko"? Rocko?!? I don't remember everyone calling him "Rocko" in the other movies.

Anyway, there was no reason for the current heavyweight champ to get worked up over fighting a 50+ year-old man, just because some random computer simulation said Rocko......errrr, ROCKY would have pummelled him. And why would Rocky take that fight? For money, sure, but they didn't make the case that Rocky was broke. He wasn't - he owned a very popular restaurant.

I was also disappointed in the relationship with Rocky's son but that did lead to that awesome monologue that some wimp-ass video game company uses in its commercials. "That's when winnin' is done!" OK, that was as close to a "HELL YEAH!" moment the movie had and frankly, that speech is more effective in that lame video game commercial.

Back to the fight. Since when are exhibitions scored by judges? And since when are titles at risk in exhibitions? If they were, then Rocky won the WWE World Championship in "Rocky III" when he got Hulk Hogan to tap out. God, what a great movie THAT was!

And the ending was supposed to make us cry because Mason Dixon now gets respect because he couldn't knock out a 50+ year-old man? WTF? It would have been cooler if Mike Tyson had jumped in the ring but that didn't happen, even though Mike Tyson was there and was yelling stuff at Mason Dixon. Dixon should have pointed at Tyson and said, "You're next".

So in summation I guess that the best thing about this movie was finding out that Rocky didn't die in it. But I kind of already knew that, since Stallone said he's thinking about "Rocky 6".

I can only give this movie two Rocky statues out of five Rocky statues.

EDITORS NOTE: I only did 167 push ups but that was because 167 gave me a total of 2,222 push ups for this vacation and I thought that was a cool number.

.

[Edited 1/14/15 17:02pm]

Big Eyes (2014) - A drama about the awakening of the painter Margaret Keane, her phenomenal success in the 1950s, and the subsequent legal difficulties she had with her husband, who claimed credit for her works in the 1960s.

It could have used more of Tim Burton's trademark quirk.

RodeoSchro said:

We watched "The Wolf of Wall Street" last night. It was great, or should I say "It was f$%@ing great!"

I give it 6,320 F-bombs out of 6,500 F-bombs.

that movie was a trip and a half! when i netflixed it, i didn't realize that it was 3 hours long, so i put off seeing it for at least a month until i took it with me to san fran for xmas and watched it with my brother. that part where leo's character is telling the audience how he made it home safely in his car after being drugged and then you find out what really happened...my brother and i were laughing so hard! classic scorcese!