Vic Sage

Saw the sneak last night. I was dreading this retread of one of my favorite film series, but George Miller rediscovered the energy and intensity of ROAD WARRIOR II and electrified it with a hot shot of adrenalin and steroids.

screw AAA. He can draw walks so that apparently makes him a useful major league RFer right now.

my son and i loved it. The best superhero movies are about relationships, just like good non-superhero movies. Here, when the team is working together, or when they bicker, or are just hanging out, you have a real sense that they're real people with these real lives. That's one of Whedon's best talents, to take the fantastic and make it feel natural. Alot of good stuff in this one with Hawkeye, and i liked the Widow/Hulk romance... it makes Hulk's presence on a team a bit more plausible. Pietro and Wanda could've used some more time, but what was there was solid. And The Vision was terrific... both the role and the performance. And Spader as Ultron pretty much steals the movie. The numerous action scenes were well choreographed and exciting. CGI? yeah, i didn't notice a problem with it; it looked fine to me. I'm seeing it again on Sunday, so maybe i'll have some other thoughts after that.

Surprisingly good. While i hated the characters, the story had great tension and haunting images (particularly at the end).

loved it

you forgot the 14th thing to think about: "Why am I watching this mediocre movie again?"

i've got that 1-sheet lovingly framed, and though sentimental, schmaltzy and dated (many of Ford's films are all of these), i've watched it many times over the years and it never fails to delight. THis is the movie that made me fall in love with redheads.

Gilliam was only responsible for the first monkey; the other monkeys just saw and did. He currently has a sequel in the works... 13 MONKEYS. As you can see, he plans to have one more monkey. If he can't get that extra monkey, he's going to go with a courtroom drama remake... 12 ANGRY MONKEYS. He's also considering another version, in light of the success of 50 SHADES OF GRAY, called SPANKING THE MONKEY. Or, in deference to last year's Oscar winner, 12 YEARS A MONKEY. He thinks it'll be real Oscar bait.

i haven't seen it since its initial release, but i remember it fondly, for whatever that's worth. And i thought at the time that the HEAVEN'S GATE-like response to it was entirely disproportionate to its alleged aesthetic sins. But just remember, i liked NATE & HAYES.

CIVIL WAR makes more sense for SPIDER-MAN than INFINITY WAR. He is not particularly relevant to that storyline, and is in no way a "cosmic" character. He's a street-level crimefighter.

Sandler, like Jim Carrey, has a few films in which he steps outside his comic persona to, you know, act. He's not bad here. And Don Cheadle can make almost anything watchable. This is a case in point.

I downloaded a few movies onto my Kindle for a long plane trip. One of them was Terry Gilliam's last, THE ZERO THEOREM, which made the trip so much longer. It got me thinking about the peaks and valleys of Gilliam's career, which is unusually steep in both the ascent and the descent thereafter. He is, like Ridley Scott, an extravagant visualist with only a passing relationship to coherence. An animator before he became a Python, sustained narrative is not really in his wheelhouse. But Gilliam is a Quixotic poet of the imagination, often balking at studio control, known at least as well for his many projects that were scrapped or mangled as he is for his successes. Gilliam is wildly inconsistent, but when he's good... Anyway, here's a Terry Gilliam film festival. Anybody who could sit through all of it unscathed gets... well, whatever one can imagine. 1) Shit & Armor: * MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1974) - His first feature, Gilliam co-directed it with fellow Python Terry Jones, and co-wrote and performed it with the troupe. It is the essence of Python and a cultural touchstone for a generation. My son and his teen pals even quote it still. * JABBERWOCKY (1977) - Gilliam forces some Grail-type knights through Carroll's looking glass in this Arthurian-era fantasy of heroes and monsters. It looks like it was shot through a feces-smeared lens, but begins his life-long tribute to the power of imagination. Actually interesting only in conjunction with GRAIL. 2) Python's scribe: * MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) - Gilliam penned Python's most coherent feature, directed by Terry Jones, a blackly funny attack on political and religious doctrinism. * MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE (1983) - Gilliam wrote and co-directed (with Jones again) this anthology of sketches, with some hits and misses, like the original TV series. 3) Through the eyes of a child: * TIME BANDITS (1981) - A British lad leaves his stultifying suburban family and follows a gang of dwarves through holes in time and space, landing in different historical eras before meeting god and the devil. BANDITS is funny, ascerbic and fantastical, with some great performances (Sean Connery, David Warner, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm), but its episodic nature works against its narrative (as Gilliam's films usually do). Still, I've watched it many times and it continues to hold up. Acting as a co-producer, too, it's one of Gilliam's most accessible, successful movies (co-authored with Michael Palin). George Harrison was another of the producers and he wrote the final credits song. Some critics see BANDITS as the beginning of Gilliam's "trilogy of imagination", followed by BRAZIL and BARON MUNCHAUSEN, as we see characters escape into their imaginations... first a boy, then a middle-aged man, then an elderly man. But that could describe any Gilliam film, so i don't buy it. * TIDELAND (2005) - Gilliam's story follows an abused young girl escaping into solitary imaginings while enduring a horrible life on a Texas farm. This barely released feature garnered strong reaction (mostly negative). 4) The Dystopian trilogy: * BRAZIL (1985) - Gilliam's blackly funny rif on Orwell's 1984 is among the best works of his career. Presented in a style he called "retro-futurism", he created a future that looks like the past... or rather a future that might have been naively imagined in the past, like Menzies' THINGS TO COME and Lang's METROPOLIS. Jonathan Pryce is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious as the doomed everyman destroyed by soul-killing bureaucracy, with DeNiro great in a cameo as a revolutionary air-conditioning engineer. But this film marked a new low in Gilliam's relationship with a film studio taking over his film. Like BLADERUNNER a few years earlier, the studio wanted the film cut shorter and with a happy ending, which he resisted mightily. Gilliam's version was released successfully in Europe and, when he screened it privately for film schools and critics, it ended up winning the LA film critics award for best picture. The studio relented and allowed him another cut, making it somewhat shorter but still with its dark ending. The film has gone on to be ranked among the greatest SF films of all time and, as a progenitor of the "steampunk" scifi aesthetic, one of the most stylistically influential. * 12 MONKEYS (1995) - Bruce Willis is a haunted hero in this SF time travel tragedy, written by David Peoples (BLADERUNNER, UNFORGIVEN) as an adaptation of the French short film, Chris Marker's LA JETEE. Gilliam was brought in to helm it and created one of the biggest commercial and critical successes of his career. He's working with his typically dark dystopian themes and devices like retro-futurism, nonlinear storytellng, a haunted (and possibly insane) hero, and a hopeless finale. Brad Pitt was nominated for his supporting performances as a whacked out revolutionary. One of Gilliam's more grown-up and serious (some would say humorless and grim) films, but still very watchable. * ZERO THEOREM (2013) - Oscar winner Christoph Waltz stars in this final chapter of Gilliam's Orwellian SF trilogy. Waltz is an emotionally damaged computer programmer given the job by "management" (Matt Damon) of solving the "Zero Theorem", a mathematical proof that life is meaningless. Meanwhile he waits, like Godot, for a phone call to come and tell him what the meaning of his life is. His monomaniacal obsession with his wait for the call ends up rendering his life otherwise meaningless, thus proving the theorem. It sounds better than it is. It's got a kind of goofy, amusing energy and tone early on, but just devolves into Gilliam's typically meandering self-involvement until it is finally unwatchable. 5) German Whimsy: * THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988) - Gilliam's sumptuous (if inert) rendering of the tall tales of a German nobleman during the Ottoman War, is a story within a story, once again about the power of imagination. The film went over budget and the production was known to be a nightmare. The studio dumped it upon its release, despite Oscar nominations for its visuals and design and mostly positive reviews (a bomb here, it was subsequently successful in Europe). Like most of Gilliam's films, it is episodic in structure and meanders without any narrative energy. The film's whimsy is leaden, but Robin Williams gave a great supporting performance as the King of the Moon, which is worth seeing if just for that, and the film is a treat for the senses. * THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) - Gilliam's adventure fantasy features Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as the noted German brothers, whose lives are depicted as a fictionalized fairy tale. More leaden whimsy, more going overbudget, more fights with a studio, another bomb in the US that did well in Europe, but unlike some of his other similar misadventures, this movie just sucks. 6) Fantasy & Reality: * FISHER KING (1991) - Gilliam's best movie... a moving, funny depiction of the tenuous hold we have on reality. The great script by Richard LaGravanese providing a strong narrative to ground Gilliam's flights of fancy, and the performances by Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges provide a stronger anchor than is typically found in a Gilliam film (great supporting performances, too, by Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruhl [who won an Oscar], and the late great Michael Jeter). Like Gilliam's first film, this is a Grail quest, but this one is not about jokes and gags, but instead about the damage done to the human heart and its ability still to heal. * FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) - And there he goes, over the deep end. Once again straining at a barely there grip on reality, Gilliam filmed the unfilmable Hunter S. Thompson novel, a fictionalized autobiographical descent into a drug-induced hell of his own devising. Depp's Thompson imitation is spot on, including Hunter's incomprehensibility, but there is a reason the book (one of my all time faves) was deemed "unfilmable", and it should have remained so. Tedious, meandering, plotless, hallucinatory... a titanic disappointment. But this one wasn't entirely Gilliam's fault. The project had been in development for years before Gilliam was brought in. It wasn't really his project, but he imbued it with all his worst attributes (which i suppose is the same point that Las Vegas serves in the book... America at its worst). 7) Production Catastrophes: * LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002) - This documentary tracks the implosion of Gilliam's film project, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, which he started to film in 2000 and then had to shut down. Financial problems, script problems, weather problems and illness of his leading actor all conspired to destroy the mad director's attempt to tell the story of the mad knight. Evocative of similar docs about Coppola making APOCALYPSE NOW and Werner Herzog's FITCARRALDO, both eerily similar in their depictions of mad directors telling stories of mad men despite overwhelming obstacles. Unlike them, however, Gilliam didn't get the movie made and is, in fact, STILL trying to get it done. It's now scheduled to shoot this year with John Hurt as Quixote and Jerry O'Connell as Sancho. But i'll believe it when i see it. Still, its in his very effort that he embodies his protagonist, a Gilliamesque figure who insisted on the power of his delusions to change the world. *IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS (2009) - This time, the death of his leading man didn't derail the production. Gilliam replaced Heath Ledger with not one but a trio of actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell), who became Ledger's character in turn, adding another layer of insanity and incomprehensibilty to this typically Gilliamesque story of the power of imagination. Great performances by Christopher Plummer as the titular doctor, pre-Spider-Man Andrew Garfield as the young hero, and Tom Waits as the devil. For some reason, i love this movie. i can't for the life of me tell you why, which is how i feel about much of Gilliam's oeuvre. A uniquely visual satirist and a clumsy storyteller, Gilliam is at least an artist in a dialogue with his time, making his failures as interesting as his successes. Worth a discussion at least... and not many filmmakers today are.

My rankings compared to the final rankings: 30) DeGrom +1 29) Duda -1 28) Murphy = 27) Lagares = 26) Niese +1 25) D'Arnaud +2 24)Wheeler -2 23)Granderson -1 22)Wright +2 21)Famiglia = 20)Colon -2 19)Torres +2 18)Gee = 17)Tejada-+1 16)Mejia-3 15)Niuehenheis+1 14)Flores-1 13)Edgin+1 12)EYoung+1 11)Recker+2 10)denDekker+3 9)Carlyle+1 8)Eveland+4 7)Campbell-3 6)Black-7 5)Herrera+2 4)C.Young-2 3)Abreu+2 2)Matsuzaka-3 1)Montero +1 My rankings included the same 30 players, with all of them ranked within 2 slots of their final positions, except for the following outliers: over-ranked 8)Eveland+4 [4] 10)denDekker+3 [7] under-ranked 6)Black-7 [13] 16)Mejia-3 [19] 7)Campbell-3 [10] 2)Matsuzaka-3 [5] Eveland and Black were my biggest outliers. Apparently i overvalued Eveland's quality innings and undervalued Black's trip to the minors and Mejia's loss of the closer roll. Perhaps i just undervalue RPs generally. And i flipped the utility guys, Cambell and denDekker, perhaps because Cambpell's late season ineffectiveness weighed more in my recollections.

its on the top of my netflix queue.

Here are the top 10 golden globe nominees (winners marked with *): ***Birdman - (7) ***Boyhood - (5) **The Theory of Everything - (4) *Selma - (4) *The Grand Budapest Hotel - (4) *Big Eyes - (3) The Imitation Game - (5) Gone Girl - (4) Into the Woods - (3) Foxcatcher - (3) honorable mentions: *Whiplash *Still Alice *How to Train Your Dragon 2 Annie - (2) St. Vincent - (2) Other nominees (1 nom each): Big Hero 6 The Book of Life The Boxtrolls The Lego Movie Nightcrawler Inherent Vice Cake Wild The Hundred-Foot Journey Maps to the Stars A Most Violent Year Pride The Judge Noah The Hunger Games: Mockingjay � Part 1 Interstellar 2015 golden globes results: Best Drama Winner: Boyhood Foxcatcher The Imitation Game Selma The Theory of Everything Best Comedy or musical Winner: The Grand Budapest Hotel Birdman Into the Woods Pride St. Vincent Animated feature film Winner: How to Train Your Dragon 2 Big Hero 6 The Book of Life The Boxtrolls The Lego Movie Director Winner: Richard Linklater, Boyhood Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel Ava DuVernay, Selma David Fincher, Gone Girl Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman Screenplay Winner: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, Birdman Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl Richard Linklater, Boyhood Graham Moore, The Imitation Game Actor, drama Winner: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything Steve Carell, Foxcatcher Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler David Oyelowo, Selma Best Actor, comedy or musical Winner: Michael Keaton, Birdman Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel Bill Murray, St. Vincent Joaquin Phoenix, Inherent Vice Christoph Waltz, Big Eyes Actress, drama Winner: Julianne Moore, Still Alice Jennifer Aniston, Cake Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl Reese Witherspoon, Wild Best Actress, comedy or musical Winner: Amy Adams, Big Eyes Emily Blunt, Into the Woods Helen Mirren, The Hundred-Foot Journey Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars Quvenzhane Wallis, Annie Supporting actress Winner: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game Emma Stone, Birdman Meryl Streep, Into the Woods Supporting actor Winner: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash Robert Duvall, The Judge Ethan Hawke, Boyhood Edward Norton, Birdman Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher Original song Winner: John Legend, Common, Glory (Selma) Lana Del Rey, Big Eyes (from Big Eyes) Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Mercy Is (Noah) Greg Kurstin, Sia Furler, Will Gluck, Opportunity (Annie) Lorde, Yellow Flicker Beat (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay � Part 1) Original score Winner: Johann Johannsson, The Theory of Everything Alexandre Desplat, The Imitation Game Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Gone Girl Antonio Sanchez, Birdman Hans Zimmer, Interstellar Foreign film Winner: Leviathan Force Majeure Turist Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem Gett Ida Tangerines Mandariinid

Here's the thread where we list our top 10 for the year. I don't get out to movies much anymore, except with my kids, but I'll start: My Top 10 Guardians of the Galaxy Birdman Into The Woods Grand Budapest Hotel Interstellar Lego Movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Snowpiercer 100 ft. Journey Under the Skin Honorable mentions: X-Men: Days of future past Hobbit Edge of Tomorrow Big Hero 6 How to Train Your Dragon 2 Lucy Cap America 2 Movies appearing on various top 10 lists that I'd like to see: Boyhood Whiplash Nightcrawler Gone Girl Top 5 Inherent Vice Babadook American Sniper Unbroken Only Lovers Left Alive Obvious Child Jodorowsky's Dune Selma Imitation Game Calvary

yes, i too finally caught up with this one and was glad of it. loved the structure of the storytelling, the design, the performances. The film is both unique and totally Andersonian. Even my wife liked this one, and she hates his films. I'm not sure how the young Indo-Asian lad grew up into F. Murray Abraham, but it's a small quibble.

DeGrom Duda Murphy Lagares Niese D'Arnaud Wheeler Granderson Wright Famiglia Colon Torres Gee Tejada Mejia Niuehenheis Flores Edgin EYoung Recker denDekker Carlyle Eveland Campbell Black Herrera C.Young Abreu Matsuzaka Montero

in a universe with a magical "force", these sorts of questions become moot, don't they?

ditto.

avi

he's not worth investing that much of time in... i just thought the double features would suffice, in terms of giving some broad strokes about his career. But if you want my top 10 (in chronological order): (1983) Risky Business (1986) The Color of Money (1988) Rain Man (1989) Born on the Fourth of July (1992) A Few Good Men (1996) Jerry Maguire (1999) Magnolia (2003) The Last Samurai (2013) Oblivion (2014) Edge of Tomorrow And ranking my top 5: 1. The Last Samurai 2. Magnolia 3. Rain Man 4. Risky Business 5. Jerry Maguire

oh my, i am sporting quite a chubby.

Tom Cruise film fest -- 14 weeks of Cruise control! Adolescence (supporting): 1981 Taps 1983 The Outsiders Adolescence (lead): 1983 All the Right Moves 1983 Risky Business Hustlers: 1986 The Color of Money 1988 Rain Man Men of action: 1986 Top Gun 1990 Days Of Thunder Oscar nominations: 1989 Born on the Fourth of July 1996 Jerry Maguire Lawyers: 1992 A Few Good Men 1993 The Firm Tom & Nicole: 1992 Far and Away 1999 Eyes Wide Shut Bad guys: 1994 Interview with the Vampire 2004 Collateral MI series: 1996 Mission: Impossible 2000 Mission: Impossible II 2006 Mission: Impossible III 2011 Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Supporting roles: 1999 Magnolia 2008 Tropic Thunder SF lit: 2002 Minority Report 2005 War of the Worlds Military history: 2003 The Last Samurai 2008 Valkyrie Alien invasion: 2013 Oblivion 2014 Edge of Tomorrow *Better off forgotten: 1983 Losin' It 1985 Legend 1988 Cocktail 2001 Vanilla Sky 2007 Lions for Lambs 2010 Knight & Day 2012 Jack Reacher 2012 Rock of Ages

i had absolutely no desire to see this movie.