Blackmoor Vituperative

Recent movie viewing…

Ghost In The Shell (1995)

“Ghost In The Shell” is pretty famous, but I’d never seen it. The first half hour is really good. I really liked the story, the characters (if not the English-speaking voice actors), and the animation. It starts to bog down at around 30 minutes, when two characters woodenly recite some Philosophy 101 blather for a few minutes. After that, every ten minutes or so the movie grinds to a screeching halt for more “what does it mean to be alive” blah blah blah. It’s the sort of tedious philosophical crap that seems deep when you’re 16; after you take a couple of philosophy courses, or read a few books, or get some life experience… not so much. Aside from that, and the English voice actors in the dubbed version being really just terrible (don’t judge me for watching the dubbed version), I thought it was okay, but I expected it to be a lot better.

The Sand (2015)

In “The Sand”, a half-dozen attractive young people in bathing suits wake up after a beach party to find that they are stranded in the middle of a stretch of beach that eats anything living that touches it. The premise sounds horrendous, but the performances and the variety of ways the characters die really raise the quality of this. The cast is surprisingly good, and the movie held my interest the entire time. The special effects are very good at the beginning (both the gore and the monster), but get more cheesy and less convincing as the film goes on. But at the beginning, they really are quite good. Overall, this movie exceeded my expectations, and even surprised me a couple of times.

Nudist Colony Of The Dead (1991)

“Nudist Colony Of The Dead” sounds like it will be awful, and it is. However, it’s not what I expected, and it’s actually somewhat amusing. For one thing, it’s a musical. The songs are terrible, but the tunes are kind of catchy. Second, it’s a satire of late-1980s Americanized Christianity, along the lines of “Saved” (2004). It’s not as funny as “Saved”, but they do try, and it’s definitely a step above painfully unfunny “comedies” like “Bridesmaids” (2011), “Jack And Jill” (2011), and “Hot Pursuit” (2015). Finally, I was surprised at just how little nudity there is. I was expecting a cringe-inducing, wooden parade of naked bodies, but there’s more nudity on an episode of Game Of Thrones (the first season, anyway: I stopped watching shortly after Sean Bean died). Heck, “Ghost In The Shell” probably had as much nudity (although those were robots, so I’m not sure that counts). So while I wouldn’t call this a good movie, if your expectations are as low as mine were, you might find it okay, or even mildly amusing. But it’s no “Zombie Strippers” (which is fantastic, aside from the tedious framing scenes at the beginning and the end).

Tonight’s Cult Movie Night was “Interview With The Vampire” (1994) and “Queen Of The Damned” (2002). “Interview” is definitely the better film, but the cast in both is really quite good. And Aaliyah was just pure magic in “Queen”. She steals the movie, even though she only has a few scenes.

Twitter is the very worst of humanity, delivered 140 characters at a time. It is the untreated sewage of the Internet.

We watched a fun movie this evening: Bullet to The Head (2012), with Sylvester Stallone, Sung Kang, Sarah Shahi, and Jason Momoa. The villains in this movie, particularly Momoa, really made it worth watching. My only significant complaint about the Wonder Woman movie is that I wish it had better villains.

Speaking of the Wonder Woman movie, it’s really good, and you should see it. Gal Godot makes a great Wonder Woman, and the Amazonian cast was excellent. I also liked the small squad she was with in Belgium. I kind of wish there had been other women in that group, though (there easily could have been, without breaking historical authenticity). Baby steps, I guess. Overall, it was really quite good. I hope the Justice League movies follow this example.

“The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that ‘Star Trek’ has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities.”
— Gene Roddenberry

From the files of… IT’S THE SAME GUY! We bring you the case of David Krumholtz and Oscar Isaac. We saw ONE of these men tonight playing a small part in a Seth Rogan comedy, This Is The End (2013). Which of them was it? YOU make the call!

We enjoyed Alien: Covenant. Horror movies should be rated “R” (if we must suffer under these infantile rating systems at all). I also learned several things from the Ridley Scott School Of Space Exploration.

• Embrace the weather! When landing on an alien planet, find the worst storm you can, and land in the middle of it. Why wait for the storm to end? You have a planet to explore!
• Take a walk! If there is a specific location on the alien world that you want to see, land five miles away from it, and walk there.
• Immerse yourself! Don’t use drones or remotely operated vehicles to explore. Pull on your space-galoshes and tromp around the alien biosphere.
• Breathe it in! Don’t wear a space helmet, or even a hard hat. Stop and smell the flowers (or alien fungus pods). Inhale deeply of the space exploration experience!

But we really did have fun. 🙂

Have I mentioned how much fun we had at Guardians Of The Galaxy 2? We really enjoyed it. I think it’s probably the funniest comedy I have seen in ages. Some of it was in-your-face and obvious, but some was pretty subtle, like how a character named Ego has life-size dioramas of scenes from his life in his house. Because of COURSE he does! I am laughing just thinking about it.

“And this was when I bought my first car. It was a blue 1973 Chevy Vega with a Kraco tape deck. The eject button was broken, so all it ever played was Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ album.”

The drinker’s version of “Let It Go”. I’d like to hear a mashup of this and “Let It Go”, actually. 🙂

My current favourite television show is Death In Paradise. The setting is a beautiful place, and the main characters are basically happy, decent people. Bad things happen, but they are always wrapped up by the end of the episode, and the bad people are brought to justice. And the episode usually ends with friends sharing a drink and laughing.