What movies made in the last five years are worth watching?

Stormtrooper Syndrome sucks.

 

Yeah. I somehow managed to forget that the bots all looked like they were carbon copies of Star Wars Storm Troopers.

 

Was all of the classic early 90s cheese removed from the new total recall? I don't know if I could handle my TR srs beanz.

 

That is a very tough question to answer. I would say it is more cheesy simply because they made it even less believable. It was like watching G.I. Joe being a spy for a day or something.

Spoiler: To spoil it all...

The scene was the not so distant future, and after a series of global wars devastate most of the Earth. The two remaining livable areas are somehow "The United British Federation" and "The Colony" (Australia if I remember correctly.) And they could not travel anywhere else due to leftover chemicals used by the wars. To traverse the two, they went through the middle of the Earths core. Yeah. I may as well say they did this on the back of magical flying pandas too. Watching the film made my brain cry out for death.

 

The Sherlock Holmes movies were both very good

 

...though neither compare at all to the raw, unadulterated GENIUS that is the BBCs new series 'Sherlock '.

 

Yep, Sherlock was great. And looks like there's going to be a series 3 (or so it says on IMDB). The star of it, Benedict Cumberbatch was also very good in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", although I still prefer the old Sir Alec Guinness miniseries.

 

There is, but it won't be until 2014.

 

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6822676/sherlock-blues-clues

 

I just wanted to point out that The Super Mario Bros Super Show is now on Netflix.

 

OH GOD NO!!! Don't tell my son. I already have enough emotional scarring from that show. Especially the end theme song. Swing your arms from si...NOOOOOOOooooooooo......

 

Come on. This stuff is only slightly funny, and there is a much better thread for that too.

No harm so far, but I can see this getting out of hand if we keep it up. Bring it over to the Funny Pictures thread and go for it if you want.

 

This evening, after I purchased my new watch, I went to see "Django Unchained".

I really enjoyed the movie. If you like Quentin Tarantino at all, you probably will like this also. Like others of his movies, the violence can be a bit over the top, so if that bothers you, obviously, this isn't for you. I have to admit that there were one or two scenes where I cringed. But overall, I loved it.

Jamie Foxx and Christopher Waltz play the principal heroes -- Foxx plays an ex-slave being mentored in the Bounty Hunting business by Waltz. They have very good chemistry together, and Waltz shows that he can play a hero (as opposed to his previous villain role in Inglorious Basterds). As is usual in a Tarantino movie, the soundtrack is pretty off-beat, which I expected. But some of his choices, I felt, didn't work as well as others.

I don't think it's a perfect film, and it starts out a bit rough, imho. But once it starts to get going, it's pretty darn close to perfect. There's a scene with a lynch mob (kind of KKK-like mob) discussing the pros and cons of wearing a hood, with Don Johnson and Jonah Hill (among others) that alone is worth the price of admission.

Anyway, go see it. It is a lot of fun.

 

If you haven't watched them, two of my favorite films are Good Will Hunting and Dead Poet's Society. I really like Robin Williams in (mostly) serious roles.

Also, if you want to see something a bit different, take a look at a couple episodes of Zatoichi.

(I know that you said you wanted recent stuff but I really don't care much for TV or movies at all - haven't owned a TV since 1989 and might see 4 movies a year)

If you know and like the Incredible Hulk comic book character, the Avengers was a pretty good movie. They finally got the Hulk almost perfect.

 

Good suggestions. Robin Williams, despite some not-so-great roles, has done some really good stuff. In addition to the movies you mentioned, I'd like to recommend "The Fisher King", "One Hour Photo" and "Insomnia".

I THINK I've seen all the Zatoichi movies that have been available on Hulu. That's basically where I discovered it. I won't say that any of them are great movies, but all of them are fun to watch. The premise is that Zatoichi is a blind swordsman/masseur/gambler/cheat traveling around Japan during the days of samurai. He's something like James Garner as Maverick (if you are old enough to remember that). I'm not sure which came first, but I wouldnt' be surprised if one inspired the other (westerns and samurai films have a long history of each copying the other). Essentially he's a dishonest man, but with a code of honor. Just like Maverick, he gambles (and cheats). But he also protects the innocent, keeps his promises, etc. And it has a great sense of humor (people often underestimate him because he's blind).
/edit I just checked -- Maverick first appeared in 1957, and the first Zatoichi movie ("The Tale of Zatoichi") was in 1962, so if there's any influence there, Maverick came first -- I'm not saying that there is, just that there's some similarities).

The Avengers was a fun film. It's not my favorite comic book movie in recent years, but it was still very entertaining.

 

On a plane I finally watched Inception, Batman Begins and Dark Knight Rises. And The Prestige. 4xNolan - you get to see some of his recurring themes, lol.

I enjoyed The Prestige the most, Inception was decent, and BB and TDKR were both great, especially considering the effect of the entire series.

 

ParaNorman.

Yeah, ParaNorman, definitely. Great film. If you watch carefully you can see tiny details in the faces change as they swap them out.

 

On Batman: I very recently saw the second part of a 2-part animated film (part 2 was recently released -- it's the movie version of the graphic novel "The Dark Knight Returns" (no relation to the Nolan films, other than the fact that both are kind of dark).

If you liked the graphic novel, the movies are pretty good. Not great (at least not as great as the reviews say they are). I thought the voice acting could have been a lot better. But other than that, it's pretty faithful to the graphic novel (or at least my memory of it lol).

The concept (of both the movie and graphic novel) is that Batman has been retired now for years, and he's gotten old, Consequently, Gotham has been going to pot. The streets are pretty much menaced by gangs of hoodlums. Meanwhile the U.S. has been ruled by President Reagan for many years (note, this is fiction, The story is political, I'm not lol), the Soviet Union never fell, and the cold war is still going strong, and is threatening to turn hot.

As far as The Prestige is concerned, there's a movie that came out around the same time that had a similar subject. I thought the Prestige was pretty good, but it suffered because of the comparisons. The film was "The Illusionist", and it starred Edward Norton, Jessica Biel, and Paul Giamatti. The Prestige was clever, but I thought The Illusionist was simply wonderful (and that's a word I don't use a lot).

BTW, there's also a French animated film ALSO called The Illusionist that came out later, and it's also very good lol. But it's nothing like either of the other two films.