Every film you've watched in 2014


Koete

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Justice League War: It's pretty damn bland to be perfectly honest. The animation never screams awesome, Darkseid is just a heavy in everything, and some of the voice acting is pretty average. I will say that Sean Astin as Shazam is the highlight. So is Wonder Woman. Outside of that, so skippable.

JLA Adventures Trapped in Time: This is the one that should have came off as a quick throwin for money. Instead, I like it. It's kinda goofy fun, never very deep but it has a few good action scenes and some pretty good voice acting. Like a ton better than War. One of the problems with a lot of the direct to dvd films is that they concentrate on getting name actors. When you get people who are superstars in voice acting, the film is just so much better.

High School Musical: This is like the whitest thing ever!

The Wizard of Oz: A classic. I watched it with the recent Rifftrax. Outside of some of the obvious jokes, still funny and while they never really go into full on mocking mode, it's still a good job.

Direct to DVD Films: 2

Rifftrax Assisted Films: 2

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Superman: Man of Steel-I need to clean and fix my guitar so I have to put on a popcorn movie, he said. You don't want nuance when you're putting elbow grease into wiping off sticker residue with Goo Gone, he said. I've got those great italian crime Blu Rays, but I definitely don't want subtitles when I'm doing this, he said. Ugh...I went into this positively because I don't agree with most when it comes to comic movies, but this movie is bullshit. I'm not even talking about the destruction of Metropolis, because people who are bitching are simply ignoring the fact that the same thing happened in Avengers. The movie is boring! Super boring. Cavill looks good and could be a good Superman with a script not written by a teenage boy. Amy Adams is cute but "they say it's downhill after the first kiss" she said standing on the edge of the world's greatest tragedy. Fuck. So dumb. Michael Shannon was a waste. Russell Crowe was in WAYYYYY too much of the movie. I literally hated this movie.

Feature Films: 16

Documentaries: 4

Shorts: 1

Edit: 2 1/2 hours long! They could have cut 40 minutes from that without worrying about affecting the story in the slightest. NOT EVERY MOVIE HAS TO BE MORE THAN TWO HOURS LONG!!!!!!

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Unexpected day off means I can finally watch some movies that have been laying around for weeks. Lucky me.

Shock Treatment - This was a mess. While Rocky Horror is not a good film (it just isn't), I love the thing to death. This 'sequel' tries to recreate it, but just fails on every level. The songs suck, the story sucks and the lack of Tim Curry is glaring.

Graffiti Bridge - 0/2 on sequels to movies I love. This is just a mess. The plot is weak and the narration just reminds me of The Crow. Purple Rain was straightforward, but had hidden depths if you pay attention. This was not subtle at all. Worst of all, this was not a good time for Prince musically. I was never a fan of the New Power Generation and The Time didn't add anything either. Give me The Revolution, "The Bird" and Prince in puffy shirts.

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Saw: I remember first seeing this like 6 or 7 years ago and thinking, "I don't hate it but I don't love it." Since then, I find a new thing to hate about it every time I see it. Just a vile and repugnant movie and hateable for more than just sucking. It did help usher in the last decade of gore porn that we had to deal with and have just recently started to get around. Just fucking terrible.

Films: 1

Direct to DVD Films: 2

Rifftrax Assisted Films: 2

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I still stand by the first Saw as being decent.

The Boss: This is the third disc in the first volume of the Fernando Di leo's Italian Crime Collection. It is a pretty convoluted story of corrupt cops corrupt politicians and judges and the mafia families that dance for them. It is ridiculously over-plotted and about 20 minutes too long. It is also not as sexy of charming as the first two. Not having Mario Adorf will do that.

Feature Films: 17

Documentaries: 4

Shorts: 1

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Batman/Superman: Public Enemies: not among the higher echelon of DCAU stuff but somewhere around the middle. Better than New Frontier and All-Star Superman, but still nowhere near the heights of Under the Red Hood. I was bored of the voice cast. I felt like it was uninspired to use mostly the same cast as the JLU DCAU show. If you're doing a different style, it's time to move past that. Ed McGuinness's art style looks far better as animation than it does as comic art. The script was poor. Not even 70 minutes, I feel like there could have been a couple passes on the script to make it a little smarter.

Coma: Watched it with Darryll for an upcoming DM

Feature Films: 20

Documentaries: 4

Shorts: 1

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Gammera, The Invincible: I'm assuming there's a Japanese original that's great, because I just watched the Americanized version that was still pretty good.

Feature Films: 18

Documentaries: 4

Shorts: 1

I really love Gammera. It helps that that kid in the first one is so goddamn annoying and is a great target of any riffing.

The A-Team: Funny, not incredibly deep and barely even felt like the series it was a remake of but as something of an origin story, it worked. That said, Liam Neeson. Just fucking Liam Neeson in anything. It really was his movie.

Films: 2

Direct to DVD Films: 2

Rifftrax Assisted Films: 2

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Roxanne: Despite some moments that dragged, things that you could only get away with in the 1980s, and Chris being utterly inconsistent, this movie holds up very well. It surprised me how much chemistry Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah shared, too. From the start I bought them as fast friends and would-be lovers. Also, the bar scene is the best comedy scene ever.

Feature films: 7

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Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines-This documentary explores the female superhero in culture from the emergence of WW to modern day. Unfortunately it completely disregards comic book characters after Wonder Woman. They talk vaguely about movements but only go in-depth on TV and movie stuff. Gloria Steinem, Lynda Carter and Lindsay Wagner are all great, but Trina Robbins - who I've met and can confirm she was not putting anything on - is delightfully kooky. Not the best doc, but still pretty good.

Feature Films: 20

Documentaries: 5

Shorts: 1

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Robin Hood: The animated Disney version. I loved it as a kid. It's the first film completed after the death of Walt Disney and you can kinda tell but it's not super noticable. There's just some cheapness to it. For example, Little John's character model is wholesale just a recolored Baloo with clothing (doesn't help that they use the exact same voice actor). Ditto with Lord Hiss for Kaa. There are also scenes where it becomes obvious that they reused animation frames over again but, the biggest example, is during the song "The Phony King of England" when just about everything showing people dancing, if you watch enough Disney, was obviously animated using frames from other films. The Jungle Book is the biggest example but there's some Aristocats in there. Still, all said, it's got good music and mostly good voice acting with some fun villains in Prince John and Lord Hiss. The ending is kinda weak, especially if you see the deleted ending but oh well.

Films: 3

Direct to DVD Films: 2

Rifftrax Assisted Films: 2

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We had a mini-Gen X evening last night.

Chasing Amy (1997) - God, this movie gets shittier every time I see it. When I first saw it, I was in a preview audience in an indie theater on the Boston University campus. I had been anxiously awaiting the release of this movie for months, and upon that first viewing, I generally enjoyed it until the very end, where the ending was so stupid, so insulting, and so mind-numbingly awful that I got angry. Now, seventeen (!) years later, the rest of the movie is more than enough to do that for me. This is the product of a very young man, someone who has A) clearly never been in an adult relationship and B) just met his first gay person. The depths of terribleness this movie aspires to never ceases to astound me. And worst of all, it's just not funny. Some decent performances are wasted here, in no small part by Smith's insistence on casting his girlfriend, a black hole of charisma, in the lead (see also: Schwalbach, Jennifer). Also, just so it's on the record, unless you're fourteen, your new girlfriend or boyfriend has probably been in a relationship before getting around to you. Get over it.

Singles (1992) - I had to put this in the player to wash the taste out of my mouth. This is my mid-life crisis movie.

First of all, I am not under the impression that this is a great film. It's okay at best. However, it's a very personal movie to me. It came out in September of 1992, when I had been in college for about two weeks. Eighteen is a very special kind of exciting, and eighteen in 1992 was even more so. Your life is changing, you're taking your first steps toward independence (although you're nowhere near as independent as you think you are), and you have a nearly infinite number of chances and opportunities before you. When you're eighteen, you're going to be a great writer, or a director, or a musician, or anything else, or all of those things. All you have to do is decide which one and start down that path. Life suddenly makes sense, or you know it's about to.

Singles was the first movie that I had seen which took people my age and had them in the adult roles. There had been a thousand Gen X teen comedies and dramas, but here, the characters in this movie were a couple of years older than me and they all had jobs, and apartments, and relationships, and actual real lives. A couple of years later Friends would come along and codify this, but this was like a bolt out of the blue to me; I was maybe two years away from getting there myself, but Real Life was in sight. Melodramatic, sure, but again, eighteen.

Now, all that said, the movie itself is okay. Kyra Sedgwick is at least five (probably closer to ten) years too old for her role. Jim True and Sheila Kelley disappear when it becomes clear Cameron Crowe has no idea what to do with them anymore. Campbell Scott is kind of a tool whose big idea to make Seattle residents use public transportation is to serve coffee and pipe in music on the trains, and he's treated like a messiah. However, Matt Dillon is amazing in his role as that asshole musician we all knew back then who had no idea how utterly mediocre he was, and is easily the funniest thing in the movie, and Bridget Fonda was about as adorable as could be.

The real star of the movie is 1991 Seattle. Filmed a year before the huge grunge explosion (and released after the fact to capitalize on it), Crowe tapped into a fascinating city with a vibrant youth scene. The film boasts live performances by Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, with Pearl Jam in a cameo role as the rest of Dillon's band, and the rest of the soundtrack (Paul Westerberg, Smashing Pumpkins, Screaming Trees, Chris Cornell, nearly all pre-fame) is fucking amazing.

I watch this movie every few years when I want to feel old. As soon as I pop it in, I'm back in my Bert and Ernie striped shirt and black rope necklace, tucking my hair behind my ears so it doesn't hang in my eyes, wasting an entire day in the campus coffeeshop because I don't feel like going to art class, dammit, scribbling notes for my magnum opus.

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Incident at Loch Ness-I think I get it. This is a found footage film for movie buffs. A fucking great one too. Werner Herzog is one of the most captivating people on earth and he's amazing as himself in this movie. Zak Penn is pretty clearly lampooning movie producers VERY HEAVY HANDEDLY but does so in such a delightful manner (from the perspective of a screenwriter turned producer) that it works. It's amazing to watch the lines of reality bend in this one. It is ENDLESSLY quotable and intelligently funny, but Herzog saying something along the lines of "this is the most chaotic film set I have ever been on...and I've worked on some difficult films!" is so delightful to me.

Feature Films: 21

Documentaries: 5

Shorts: 1

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The Wolverine: A really great example of a Japanese crime film mixed with a modern American thriller that gathers so much good faith in its viewer before driving it all off of a cliff into the sea of boring with half an hour to go. Super disappointed.

Feature Films: 22

Documentaries: 5

Shorts: 1

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Chasing Amy (1997) - God, this movie gets shittier every time I see it. When I first saw it, I was in a preview audience in an indie theater on the Boston University campus. I had been anxiously awaiting the release of this movie for months, and upon that first viewing, I generally enjoyed it until the very end, where the ending was so stupid, so insulting, and so mind-numbingly awful that I got angry. Now, seventeen (!) years later, the rest of the movie is more than enough to do that for me. This is the product of a very young man, someone who has A) clearly never been in an adult relationship and B) just met his first gay person. The depths of terribleness this movie aspires to never ceases to astound me. And worst of all, it's just not funny. Some decent performances are wasted here, in no small part by Smith's insistence on casting his girlfriend, a black hole of charisma, in the lead (see also: Schwalbach, Jennifer). Also, just so it's on the record, unless you're fourteen, your new girlfriend or boyfriend has probably been in a relationship before getting around to you. Get over it.

This, minus the indie theater in Boston.

Feature films: 8

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Mitt (2014) directed by Greg Whiteley

Very interesting film about Mitt Romney and his family's experiences leading up to both elections. It was much more focused on their personal journeys than the political aspects of the story which I was okay with. While I certainly didn't agree with his political ideas, after this film I do have more respect for him as a person, so I'll give it props for that.

Manhattan (1979) directed by Woody Allen

Probably my favorite Woody Allen film that I've seen. Although in light of recent events it was a bit unsettling to see the middle aged Woody Allen dating a 17 year old girl.

Strangers on a Train (1951) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Enjoyed this film quite a bit. Out of all the Hitchcocks I've seen this one was probably my least favorite, but it was still masterfully made and a delight to watch.

Feature Films: 4

Documentaries: 2

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