Planes, Trains and Automobiles

A classic holiday comedy with Steve Martin and John Candy. It never gets old.

Just finished the Die Hard series. A great set of Xmas movies that everyone should enjoy at least once in their lifetime. Only the first two are set during Xmas though, so the next three are optional.

Brilliant! film. :)

Martin and Candy in the motel, and have to share a bed for the night...

Candy: where are your hands ?.

Martin: Oh!, between the two lovely soft pillows...

Candy: THOSE ARE NOT PILLOWS!

Both swiftly exit the bed doing light exercises, shaking themselves, and coughing in a very manly manner... :D

Jungle Cruise

I'm a sucker for this kind of pulp "lost treasure" stuff, and even I was barely entertained by this. For one thing, I'm not really a fan of Dwayne Johnson, and Emily Blunt I outright can't stand. But worse is just how cliched and cartoonish everything is in this film. It's overstuffed, with too many characters, too many villains, too fast editing, and pointless action scenes with no weight or sense of urgency to them. It's just stuff happening, the movie jingling keyes in your face. Worst of all, the CGI is just terrible. I honestly don't understand why these huge budget movies so often look this bad. There are movies from decades ago that look fantastic. There are new movies made for a fraction of a fraction of this budget that look amazing (just look at the Green Knight). Hell, there are some movies from the 50s with special effects that still make me go "how did they make this?". And here you can't even believe for a second that the freaking jungle is actually there.

But what gets to me the most is that there's actually potential here for something good. The backstory of the cursed conquistadors (when you hear all of it later in the film) is actually really good and tragic. It could have made for a very personal, dramatic conflict with one of the main characters and a good, character driven film. The sequence that presents the story is actually really well done, with good music and finally some sense of drama. But it doesn'tr eally go anywhere. It feels like a movie that could have really been something, but it had to be turned into this bland Disney CG fluff because that's what a blockbuster has to look these days.

The original Jurassic Park

Still a classic after all these years. I wonder if I should perhaps make time to read the book as well. Better late than never I suppose.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001).

I'm doing a Harry Potter movie "marathon", watching one movie every night. Fantasy movies and tv-shows today feel more like Gossip Girl in cosplay. I miss these lighter and more entertainng Fantasy stuff.

I still like this movie, it's a nice feel-good adventure movie with a fun mix of characters. I find the pacing really good as well. Obviously parts of the visual effects feel outdated, but most of it doesn't. The main actors' and actress's inexperience shows, but I still think they hold things together well.

Tonight ti will be the Chamber of Secrets and perhaps even the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Hello Matewis!

It is funny. I rewatched it and its first sequel a couple of days ago, too! And I still love it!

I watched it so frequently, that I can quote almost all dialogue scenes, and could identify many of its editing or internal logic errors by myself. It is hilarious how many errors are in the final film material. However, I adore the movie nonetheless and will continue to revisit it every now and then.

The original "Jurassic Park" (and to a degree its initial sequel "The Lost World") captures the sense of adventure on an island full of creatures out of a child's dream. It further ignited the curiosity of what else (than the dinosaurs) might be possible both with CGI in upcoming movies and new wonders in scientific breakthroughs.

A couple of decades later, and I have to admit that I am disappointed with how things turned out, though.
Nowadays, I am more looking forward to films that do not utilize CGI or keep its use at least to a minimum. What was new and exiting back in the nineties became something so common and mostly overused that it lost all its wonder for me.
Or maybe it is often used with too few creativity... I do not know.

Kind regards,
foxgog

It really is something special :)

Film wise I'm also not that much impressed with what came after 2 either, but at least on the gaming front it looks like there's been interesting development.

And yeah, CGI needs to be incorporated correctly otherwise there is very little payoff for even the flashiest action sequences. This was made painfully clear for me with Transformers. Michael Bay actually made me question whether I was getting bored with the action genre. But then George Miller's masterful combination of CGI and practical effects in Mad Max cured me of that silly idea.

I always feel kinda bad when people gush about Jurassic Park, since most love it so much and I was never a fan. Maybe it's because I didn't see it in a move theatre, only later on TV, which back then meant a small screen and the visuals couldn't properly wow me. But that's also how I first experienced Indiana Jones and Star Wars films and those I always loved. Jurassic Park on the other hand was probably my first experience of being disappointed with a movie focused too much on special effects, without characters and story good enough to back it up.

I'd argue that with Bay's Transformers the problem, unlike something like Jungle Cruise which I just talked about above, is mostly with bland, boring designs, rather than CGI being technically bad. I mean, if you watch something like Jungle Cruise, Maleficent 2, even some Marvel films like Black Panther, you'll see what really bad, I mean laughably fake CGI looks like. I really don't understand how movies that cost 200 million and more can look so bad. There are fan films out there with better production values.

Tropic Thunder. Absolute classic. Even funnier because I watched Infinity War and Endgame a couple weeks back and I just can’t believe it’s Robert Downey Jr. sometimes.

The Last Duel (2021)
The latest film of Ridley Scott, narrates the story of the last duel on France of the 12th century. Like Rashomon from Kurosawa, tell the story through the perspectives of the characters, but this time it's not so ambiguous, the events are clear and show how the mediaeval society treated women.

I've always thought it was an excellent film 'objectively' speaking, but I'm never sure how to articulate something like that properly. I think I would probably make a pretty shit movie reviewer if I had to work for some publication :) I do know that each time I watch it I am enamored with its atmosphere, in no small part because of the John Williams excellent score.
However I should admit that Jurassic Park was probably my very first blockbuster film theater experience, and made what will probably be a very long lived impression on me. I remember seeing it for the first time at 9 years old, and having my little mind thoroughly blown!

Yeah, what I meant with Transformer is that the CGI is actually pretty good, but I'd go even further and state that the designs are pretty good too. To me the transformers look great for the most part. So it looks good, the CGI is great, but the action sequences still end up feeling boring. So I think it's more of a poor directing issue there. Though to be fair, the first Transformers does have a genuinely masterful sequence - the searching for the grandpa's glasses bit. Of course that part's not an action sequence.
Perhaps I have a little bit more stomach for bad/strange cgi if the underlying film is good / to my liking (e.g. Beowulf, Monster House, Land of the Lost or even Wing Commander). Even Jungle Cruise looked like it could be fun with its weird visual look, but reviews such as yours have made me wary - except I will always like Emily Blunt because of Edge of Tomorrow ;) If the film isn't actually good, and the cgi is bad on top of it all then it's just a mess. A pretentious mess on top of it all if it cost 200 million.
Of course phenomenal cgi, and especially cgi+practical effects can elevate an already good film to legendary status (PotC: Dead Man's Chest, Fury Road). Possibly the latest Dune as well (pending a rewatch)

My problem with the designs was that all the Transformers kinda looked alike (except for maybe Bumblebee), a gray mess of cogs and gears, During the action scenes it was sometiems hard to tell what's going on, who is doing what, because they weren't distinct or memorable enough - it was all just a mass of samey gray metal.

I don't think Beowulf had bad CG - it definitely shows its age, but at the time it looked pretty good, and today it definitely holds up better than Monster House or Polar Express. Very good film in my opinion, I still like coming back to it. And at least when a movie is all CG, there are no jarring "actor against obvious green screen" moments.

The biggest problem with the bad CG in Jungle Cruise is that... well, if you call your movie Jungle Cruise, it would be nice to have some jungle there. But here the green screen is so obvious all the time, there's never any "sense of place" in the film. It never feels like they are outdoors, not to mention in some exotic location. If it was just that the CG jaguar and undead conquistadors are bad, I'd be way more forgiving. But the "we never left this room" feeling that permeates the film is what kills all sense of adventure.

Never-left-this-room feeling? That's an impactful way of stating it and I can totally get how that might ruin a film experience. Can't recall if I've ever experienced that in a film before.
I've kind of lost all interest in the subsequent months to go and see Jungle Cruise. I find it hard these days to become excited about new films. At least Dune and Ghostbusters:Afterlife was an exciting breath of fresh air. Venom 2 looked like it could be as well, but sadly I missed that.

By the way if you want an actual Jungle cruise film that genuinely feels like it's taking place in a jungle, and is some nice dumb fun, then how about Anaconda?

I read the book some time before the movie was released, so it's not fresh in my memory but I remember it being a lot of fun and generally better than the movie. The movie is good, but it's definitely a Spielberg film in how it emphasizes the kids and makes Hammond a bit more cuddly than Crichton's version, who was more like a very unflattering satire of Ted Turner. Another thing is that a major theme in the book was the idea of corporations causing inevitable havoc because of industrial espionage, which is certainly a factor in the movie's plot but the sequels (and Crichton's cash-in book sequel) never really did anything with it. It seems like the rest of the franchise always comes back to the idea of just getting people to the island(s) so they can be eaten, instead of companies around the world doing all sorts of crazy genetic engineering with dinosaur DNA.