Would you say you would be... DISAPPOINTED?

 

Ah, see I think early career tim burton could've made a great Wonderland movie, but what we ended up with was just so flat and dull. Those CGI backgrounds look like mud.

 

Final TENET trailer is here.

And unless there's been fresh news, it says it'll be releases on September 3 wherever theaters are open.
That... makes me a little sad, cause theaters are still closed in Bangalore. I even had a full PPE Kit prepared just for this. :/

So I guess I'll have to wait a few months more.

Oh yeah, I guess there's the new Batman as well....

 

I definitely recommend Tenet to anyone who enjoyed Inception. I'm fresh after the first viewing so I won't make any judgements on where it stands among other Nolan films, but I can say that once you've seen Inception and Interstellar, you kinda know what to expect from Nolan. Tenet doesn't have the huge "WOAH" factor Inception did simply because Inception came first, but it's a film worth seeing. Super slick action-thriller with just enough technobabble to tickle the elitist intellectual in you.

Also, maybe the impression was magnified after stepping foot in a movie theater for the first time in months, but damn, the sound design in action sequences was baller and the theater spared no expense on the bass. If you can, do yourself a favor and see it in a theater just for the sound alone. The opening scene was spectacular.

Spoiler

I got the impression that the film in general was devoid of like, human emotion. With a few exceptions, everyone is cool and composed for most of the runtime, no matter if they're walking or pulling off a heist.

With the plot being what it is, fun stuff about time reversal, much is left unexplained until late in the film, so if you're unattentive in a key moment, you might end up coasting through an hour of action without really knowing what the fuck is going on except that it looks cool. Key dialogue was also not clearly audible, so some bits didn't make sense to me until the last scenes of the film. Noland definitely relies on the audience being halfway clever, but imo on several occasions he leaned too much into it.

Action in the final big sequence was confusing as fuck, Nolan went pretty Michael Bay there, which wasn't helped by the pre-mission briefing being rushed through to get it the fuck outta way.

There are some holes remaining after the credits roll, like did Neil live in reverse for years to meet The Protagonist? Less can be more, but imo there was a bit too little there. I could've done with 5 minutes less of action and 5 minutes more of exposition. Though the reason they kind of get away with not setting it all up too much is because it all comes from the reversed future, in a way. Clever to take advantage of that.

Weak villain. I wasn't impressed by Kenneth Branagh's Russian Oligarch Bond Villain and I didn't buy his motivation, which was only briefly set up in a throwaway line that one could easily have missed.

Relationship between The Protagonist and Neil was essentially nonexistent, so I thought the bro moment at the end of the film was kind of unearned.

I think the film will benefit from a repeat viewing, though I don't feel compelled to see it again right away.

The opening action sequence and the big heist mid-movie are the door stoppers here. Tenet is very well put together. Must-see for fans of Christopher Nolan.

The video is spoilerific, so be warned. I'm linking it because I agree with almost everything the guy says.

 

Just seen Tenet, can't say I enjoyed the film at all, entirely because the sound mixing was terrible. Not only in action sequences but in scenes with a fair amount of exposition the dialogue was continually drowned out by either music or background noise. It was bad anough that I basically stopped listening about an hour from the end.

Apparently this has been a pretty common complaint, and is in fact a stylistic choice by Nolan. If I see it again it'll be with subtitles, because I couldn't review any other aspect fairly with such a glaring flaw.

 

Yeah, I have no option to watch non-dub without subtitles here and they actually helped for once.

 

I don't want to die to watch a movie, or worse, kill someone else by accident.
Streaming everything or bust.
(At least here in USA)

 

Final trailer for No Time To Die. Looks like a hot, beautiful mess.

 

Saw a Mulan review.

Sigh.

Looks like 'Inferior to the original in every way,' should just be plastered on these remakes as subtitles.

Slight spoiler but one I think ruins the whole movie for me and will stop me from watching it:

Spoiler

They basically made Mulan a Jedi in this movie. Overflowing with Chi ever since she was a child, taught to repress it in case someone finds out and brings her trouble. Find a man, become a respectable woman etc etc. In the end she unleashes it and runs into battle sans armour and wrecking fools like a Jedi...

Yay, don't conform. Inner beauty matters, don't let what other people think dictate how you see yourself blah blah blah blah blah...

That message is all well and good if you're a space wizard with magical powers. I fucking hate the direction they took. The original Mulan was so admirable because she worked harder than her male peers and busted her ass to be as good as she was. Hard work and dedication win the day and overcame adversity.

Maybe I've finally grown into my porch rocking chair so I can start yelling at the kids on my lawn, but that's the kind of message I want told to my kids. Not ones that alienate because they don't have magical powers and aren't chosen ones...

Whatever. The original still exists.

 

Is The Jungle Book going to end up being the only one of the live action remakes that is as good as, or better, than the OG?

 

Seems that way

 

I'm expecting Sword and the Stone and Snow White to be better than the OGs. As much as I love both of them for their cartoony humor, neither are particularly good movies in terms of plot/music/production value, at least not by modern standards.

 

So I just got back from watching New Mutants, in a lovely theater that could possibly seat 40 people with just two other people fr company. A grand turn out for a grand movie. Now I only saw one trailer way back last year and only heard how this was pushed back. In my opinion that should have pushed more.

This was a bad movie. But also entertaining in the worst the way.

Spoiler: Spoilers

New Mutants has a massive tonal problem and awful script, jumping from serious moments to romantic to teen comedy. There are scenes implying awful child abuse that cut to a reaction shot of a guy making a joke for the audience. The story isn't very interesting and incredibly predictable, so much so that I thought we were going to get a twist at the end. Nope just ends.

The characters are not great they feel very two dimensional and its lot of very unsubtle story telling. Save for one guy (Kentucky) who seemed to have an arc. The acting isn't okay, sometimes.

Writing is pure cringe, I was getting second hand embarrassment for this movie.

New Mutants is a couple of different movies crammed into one, and none them are horror.

 

Despite how many times New Mutants has been delayed, they still haven't managed to spell the creator's name correctly in the credits https://bleedingcool.com/comics/new-mutants-co-creator-bob-mcleod-name-misspelled-movie-credits/

 

The movie was clearly not given a once over.

 

I saw Tenet yesterday.

I agree with everyone that the sound mixing was horrible. I missed 75% of the dialogue and I was lost for most of the movie. I didn’t know why any character was doing anything aside from Kat and her husband, and whenever Kat wasn’t on screen, I was just sitting there and watching interesting visuals.

The plot summary on Wikipedia was cool, however. I wish I could have enjoyed it in the moment, though it’s not engaging enough for me to want to see the movie ever again.

Do not see this movie without subtitles. The only good thing out of my viewing is that I could warn my dad, who loves these sort of movies, to wait until he could get subtitles.

Movie: 3/5.
Experience: -12/5, due to the sound mixing issues and the popcorn giving me food poisoning.

 

I'll be sure to crank up the center channel when i stream it in a few months at home.

 

Went ahead and watched Mulan after my sister and her spouse who share my account offered to go halvesies.

On the whole, it's pretty meh, trending towards bad.

There were some good aspects, but they were outweighed by some truly awful decisions.

The good:

Spoiler

1)There were several excellent martial arts sequences. Watching Liu Yifei and Donnie Yen swing swords around at the speed of light is a delight.

2)The acting is also a small step above what we've gotten from most of the other Disney remakes.

3)Visually, it's very pretty.

4)Ming Na Wen's cameo right at the end was a nice little nod of respect and filled me with heartwarming fuzzies.

The bad:

Spoiler

1) Seems like they just couldn't resist throwing in a handful of the physics-defying floating leaps that plague every bad kung-fu movie.

2) Not a single one of the changes they made to the characters or story improves upon the movie.

Li Shang is renamed Honghui and instead of the leader of the army he's just a grunt. Shan Yu is now Bori Khan and his eagle is now a magical kung-fu chi witch. There is this random fucking pheonix flying around Mulan instead of Mushu.

And on that note, why did they get rid of musical numbers and the ancestor magic aspects for the purpose of realism, if they were just going to turn around and add in a magical pheonix and a magical flying kung-fu chi witch?

3) Magical flying kung-fu chi witches. Every scene where the eagle/sorceress makes an appearance is patently ridiculous. They made Mulan into a magical flying chi warrior to match up, and tried to do the whole "we are the same; two oppressed peas in a pod who don't fit the feminine mold' schtick. To be quite frank, it's awful.

4) Messaging problems. In the original movie, Mulan starts out as a sort of clumsy hot mess, who then trains hard and earns every ounce of respect she gets. The core message of the story is that with hard work, discipline, courage, honor, and inner strength, even the most unexpected person can become a hero. In this film, they've blessed her with 'chi powers' from birth, which seriously undercuts that original message. They instead doubled down on "be yourself" themes. It's still a positive message, sure, but I don't think it's quite as powerful as the former.

 

It's a positive message if you have superpowers.

 

Mulan is a disaster of a Disney movie. It's a fine movie, I guess, if you're interested in shitty fight choreography, bland acting, and dialogue that feels like it's a shitty fan translation.

It's a disaster of a Disney movie because there is no romance, no comedy, no fun, no Eddie Murphy or sassy af dragon. It hits super off-beat with its message of female empowerment... because she's a fucking alien who has superpowers. Yeah lemme go strapon my chi and I'll be like Mulan, hurrah!

It's a movie for a Chinese audience, first, foremost, never intended for the Disney market. If they advertised this movie as anything but a adaptation of the Disney movie Mulan, it would be fine. Instead it's shit.

Don't watch this crap. Don't even watch it for free.