The son of "What the hell are YOU staring at?"

[Warren]

I'm five minutes in the sequel to Goon, and I'm throwing in the towel. That's got to be a new record.

[Andrew]

I'm five minutes in the sequel to Goon, and I'm throwing in the towel. That's got to be a new record.

Goonies has never done much for me, either.

[dbcooper]

I'm super amped to watch Mandy. As soon as the Blu-ray is available I'm gonna buy a new TV.

[Warren]

I'm super amped to watch Mandy. As soon as the Blu-ray is available I'm gonna buy a new TV.

You are "super amped" to watch a Nicolas Cage movie?
Some people juggle geese.

[Jennifer]

Red Hook Summer is hands-down the worst Spike Lee movie I've seen. Feels like two different movies mashed together into one -- with several key pages missing from the script of the first movie.

[JD]

Last night I watched the 1971 Lake of Dracula. The interesting thing about LoD is that it's essentially a Western-style vampire story, but made and set in Japan. It has a lot of 1970s horror movie cheesiness, but it's actually not bad. Still, I would probably only recommend it to real vampire-movie completists. (I went to see it with my friend Heath, who has seen almost every vampire movie ever made, and I was astounded to find that it was one of the very few he'd never seen.)

[Jennifer]

I did not know that last decade, someone made a movie out of "A Sound of Thunder," starring Ben Kingsley as the corrupt head of Time Safari Inc. Watched it last night -- holy crap, it was terrible. They kept the original premise of "company sends people back in time to kill dinosaurs just before they die, some guy steps on a butterfly, hilarity does NOT ensue in the future," but they added all this extra weird stuff that makes no sense at all: the dead butterfly causes ripples in spacetime, so because of that butterfly volcanoes erupt earlier than they're supposed to and creatures from the past scurry through holes into the present and I don't know what else. Pfffft.

Also, according to the movie, the reason hunters go back to dinosaur times in the first place is not because they want a bigger thrill than what today's (2050s) big-game hunting can offer, but because today, ALL animals have gone extinct. Which is only mentioned once and never again.

[Hugh Akston]

Free State of Jones is probably the most libertarian movie I've ever seen, and not just because it's structurally kind of a mess.

[Eric the .5b]

Also, according to the movie, the reason hunters go back to dinosaur times in the first place is not because they want a bigger thrill than what today's (2050s) big-game hunting can offer, but because today, ALL animals have gone extinct. Which is only mentioned once and never again.

Philip K. Dick did a lot more with that idea in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

But yeah, I vaguely remember seeing the trailer for that movie and going, "Nope."

Mind you, I only heard a few weeks ago that they apparently remade The Computer Wears Tennis Shoes back in the 1990s. I think I might be able to live without hunting that one down.

[Warren]

Mind you, I only heard a few weeks ago that they apparently remade The Computer Wears Tennis Shoes back in the 1990s. I think I might be able to live without hunting that one down.

!? I mean Kurt Russel owns that role.

ETA
The 1995 remake was a 'made for TV' movie. There's a possibility it achieved MST3K levels of cheese.

[Eric the .5b]

Mind you, I only heard a few weeks ago that they apparently remade The Computer Wears Tennis Shoes back in the 1990s. I think I might be able to live without hunting that one down.

!? I mean Kurt Russel owns that role.

ETA
The 1995 remake was a 'made for TV' movie. There's a possibility it achieved MST3K levels of cheese.

Oh, that's even worse than the straight-to-video I was imagining.

[JD]

I finally got around to watching Interstellar last night. Man, that movie was a mess. I wanted to like it - an SF movie that's not about ray guns and killer aliens? - but the storytelling was a trainwreck. There's a global crop blight and a little girl visited by "ghosts" and a top-secret NASA program and time dilation and a murderous evil astronaut and family drama and a secret within the top-secret NASA program and time travel and... I felt like if big chunks of the movie had been axed, it would have been stronger. (For example, the drone scene early on. WTF was that about? What did that have to do with anything?) I'm kind of amazed it got such good reviews. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't that great either.

I see that a bunch of physicists praised the movie for its scientific accuracy, which kind of surprises me too, although I think maybe the makers were just trying to cram so much stuff into the movie that all the explanations flew by at a million miles an hour. One thing that really bugged me was the water planet. There's a massive, massive tsunami (at least two of them, actually) that just seems to travel along forever without breaking, despite the fact that the water is apparently knee-deep everywhere? AND gravity is stated to be 1.3x Earth-normal, meaning that it would take even more energy to make an enormous wave.

[Painboy]

I finally got around to watching Interstellar last night. Man, that movie was a mess. I wanted to like it - an SF movie that's not about ray guns and killer aliens? - but the storytelling was a trainwreck. There's a global crop blight and a little girl visited by "ghosts" and a top-secret NASA program and time dilation and a murderous evil astronaut and family drama and a secret within the top-secret NASA program and time travel and... I felt like if big chunks of the movie had been axed, it would have been stronger. (For example, the drone scene early on. WTF was that about? What did that have to do with anything?) I'm kind of amazed it got such good reviews. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't that great either.

I see that a bunch of physicists praised the movie for its scientific accuracy, which kind of surprises me too, although I think maybe the makers were just trying to cram so much stuff into the movie that all the explanations flew by at a million miles an hour. One thing that really bugged me was the water planet. There's a massive, massive tsunami (at least two of them, actually) that just seems to travel along forever without breaking, despite the fact that the water is apparently knee-deep everywhere? AND gravity is stated to be 1.3x Earth-normal, meaning that it would take even more energy to make an enormous wave.

Not that I know if any of it is possible but wasn't that due the influence of the black hole? Hence the time dilation too?

Also I agree with the whole anti-space travel propaganda thing. It was weird and didn't really seem that necessary. It's just there to artificially up the stakes I guess.

[lunchstealer]

Yeah it was fine. I liked it. The whole ghost in the singularity thing was dumb, but eh. The drone thing seemed to make sense at the time, but by the end of the movie I'd been so psychically battered by LOUD ORGAN CHORDS that I couldn't really say.

mrs lunch hated it, and I couldn't exactly argue with her reasons, but eh, it was fine.

[Jennifer]

The Mystery Science Theater 3000: Live show (at Atlanta Symphony Hall) was very funny. Jeff actually laughed hard enough to hurt his sides. The movie they riffed on was Deathstalker 2, which was cheesy even by MST3K standards.

[tr0g]

Binge watched 'The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell'. It's quality food porn for goths. I am never going to make any of that stuff, but it looks damn good.

[Kwix]

Binge watched 'The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell'. It's quality food porn for goths. I am never going to make any of that stuff, but it looks damn good.

I watched the first episode of this a couple nights ago. Nifty but a lot of "look at what I did" not so much "and this is how I did it." In particular how to actually construct that house would have been handy.

[JD]

Saw Annihilation. It was good but not great. I think it's really hard to write an ending to a movie like that, because you either try to explain everything, and risk either it sounding dumb and ruining all the mystery or just being a big clunky infodump, or you try to preserve the mystery, and leave the audience frustrated that nothing ever got explained.

[Painboy]

Saw Annihilation. It was good but not great. I think it's really hard to write an ending to a movie like that, because you either try to explain everything, and risk either it sounding dumb and ruining all the mystery or just being a big clunky infodump, or you try to preserve the mystery, and leave the audience frustrated that nothing ever got explained.

That was the sense I got with the book as well. When you build something up so much it's almost always going to be a let down info dump or not. Partly why I didn't feel much need to see the movie.

[Hugh Akston]

I wanted to get a horror movie for Halloween, but the It remake turned out to be a kids adventure story.

[Pham Nuwen]

I wanted to get a horror movie for Halloween, but the It remake turned out to be a kids adventure story.

They won't show children being murdered. It was great for what it was.

[Andrew]

I wanted to get a horror movie for Halloween, but the It remake turned out to be a kids adventure story.

You should've gone with Dead Ringers.

[Hugh Akston]

I wanted to get a horror movie for Halloween, but the It remake turned out to be a kids adventure story.

You should've gone with Dead Ringers.

I've always been pretty meh on Cronenberg tbh.

[Andrew]

I wanted to get a horror movie for Halloween, but the It remake turned out to be a kids adventure story.

You should've gone with Dead Ringers.

I've always been pretty meh on Cronenberg tbh.

Now your Halloween will consist of dbcooper hunting you down.

[dead_elvis]

Free State of Jones is probably the most libertarian movie I've ever seen, and not just because it's structurally kind of a mess.

I watched that a while back in a double bill with No God No Master. Free State of Jones was the far superior movie; the politics in No God No Master seemed like a series of vaguely connected lefty talking points and little real examination of anarchism, and the movie itself was a fairly humdrum period procedural. Free State managed to make good political points in an entertaining drama.