Movies: What did You Watch Last Night?

[japes]

Forgot to mention I saw Jason Bourne a few nights ago. It was OK. I'm a big Bourne fan so I enjoyed it but I can see it had it's flaws. Mostly in editing. I don't think there was a single shot that was presented to be longer than 3 seconds. At one point there was a 6 second section of a man walking down the sidewalk that had 4 cuts. My wife was a little motion sick half way through but she ended up fine.

[Agent Minivann]

Watched Eddie the Eagle last night. I really enjoyed it. Good underdog story about an interesting character.

[Hahma]

Watched The Revenant today. Enjoyed it. Very beautifully shot.

[lefton4ya]

Watched the new Ben-Hur last night. I never did see the original, or if I did it was so long ago I forgot, so no basis for comparison, but I liked the new one. Pretty good story of someone who went from up on hi to down low and was living on revenge for awhile. Only a few intense action scenes, but they were intense and somewhat unexpected. Not as good as like Gladiator, and of course Jesus is the backdrop might offend some, but overall a good movie. Too bad they will not make their $100 million budget back.

[japes]

Originally Posted by lefton4ya

Watched the new Ben-Hur last night. I never did see the original, or if I did it was so long ago I forgot, so no basis for comparison, but I liked the new one. Pretty good story of someone who went from up on hi to down low and was living on revenge for awhile. Only a few intense action scenes, but they were intense and somewhat unexpected. Not as good as like Gladiator, and of course Jesus is the backdrop might offend some, but overall a good movie. Too bad they will not make their $100 million budget back.

Not sure if you have kids but what age would you say it would be ok for a kid to watch. My son is almost 9 and he just recently saw the phase 1 Avenger's movies this summer (as in we finished Avenger's two weeks ago) but he LOVES everything Roman. Just curious as to how intense it was. He saw the preview and was interested.

[Rich10]

I saw Suicide Squad over the weekend. If you don't spend any time thinking and just go with the story, it's a fun movie. I thought that the characters of Deadshot, Harley Quinn and Waller were well played. The rest of the actors had relatively flat roles that they couldn't do that much with. I particularly didn't like Jared Leto's Joker, although it is hard to follow up on Heath Ledger.

DC just doesn't do fight scenes as well as Marvel. The fight scenes in Civil War were fantastic. The latest DC fight scenes are very weak by comparison.

If you start to think about the movie, it falls apart quickly.
SPOILERS FOLLOW:
If the villains could be taken out by a relatively small bomb, why didn't the government just bomb them? Of course, if it only took a couple of hellfire missiles, it would have been a very short movie.

After Flag removes his ability to kill the members of Suicide Squad in the bar, there was no development on why some of the members (Killer Croc and especially Boomerang) continued on the mission.

What happened to the rest of the Justice League? Batman and Flash have cameo appearances.

Why is Harley Quinn on a team of metahumans. I know that Avengers has a similar issue with having Black Widow and Hawkeye on the same team as Thor and Hulk, but at least Black Widow and Hawkeye have some special abilities as opposed Harley. Harley is a crazy and very attractive young lady with a baseball bat. Would she really get drafted for this team?

[Tornado]

I believe she is supposed to have above human endurance and agility.

[lefton4ya]

@japes - Nine might be a bit young but if he saw Avengers it should be OK, some blood but not too gory. It does get a little "slow" a times which I personally prefer over non-stop action, but it did keep me interested the entire time - just for a 9 year old it is not as ADD/spastastic as modern animated movies, but similar to the pacing of something like Gladiator or the Hobbit movies, but again not as much action/gore.

[japes]

Originally Posted by lefton4ya

@japes - Nine might be a bit young but if he saw Avengers it should be OK, some blood but not too gory. It does get a little "slow" a times which I personally prefer over non-stop action, but it did keep me interested the entire time - just for a 9 year old it is not as ADD/spastastic as modern animated movies, but similar to the pacing of something like Gladiator or the Hobbit movies, but again not as much action/gore.

We will wait for Bluray so he will probably be closer to 10 by the time it comes around. Thanks for taking the time.

Speaking of I just realized I never posted my 2nd time around review.

For everyone else...Over the summer my wife finally gave in and allowed my son to watch the first phase of the Avengers movies. He had seen Captain America just after Spring Break and loved it so after a few months of begging she gave in. We watched them in "order" after that and I realized I had not seen most of them since my original watching. There were times I was tempted but by then I figured it was best to wait until he could watch them. Watching them in close succession was interesting and pretty enjoyable. We averaged one movie about every 10 days. Here is my summary of my sons findings.

There may be spoilers ahead if for some reason you haven't seen these.

Iron Man: He loved it. After Captain America this was his favorite.

Hulk: This was the one my wife was most worried about. She thought it would be scary for him so we watched it during a "boys night" when mom was gone because she didn't want to deal with the late night. Funny part was that when Abomination was first shown (the scary part) he looked at me all excited and said..."He looks AWESOME. They did a great job making him." Also due to his studying of C3G cards the first time he heard the name Blonsky he knew he was Abomination. From my view, I didn't remember some of this movie and picked up on a few things that I completely overlooked the first time...such as Samuel Sterns.

Thor: My wife thought this one was boring the first time around so we watched this one without her as well. I enjoyed it and he liked it a lot...other than the kissing. Seeing a real life version of Thor was quite the experience for him. He's aware of most of these characters through cartoons and C3G so it was cool watching him realize different characters.

Iron Man 2: I had forgotten how much Black Widow was in this one so I enjoyed it more this time that I did the first. My son LOVED it. He seemed to like the Iron Man movies a lot and enjoyed the scenes where Black Widow kicked butt. Especially the one where Favro takes out his guy and notices she's already taken out the rest. He found that hilarious.

His rankings...
Captain America - 10
Iron Man - 9.9
Hulk - 9.8
Iron Man2 and Thor tied for 4th with a 8.5 to 9

Then it was on to the grand finale.

Avengers.

We watched it and he seemed to enjoy it and there were parts that I could tell he loved. Afterwards I asked him what he thought and where he ranked it and he hesitantly said last. I though he was being silly and so I prodded him a little figuring he loved it. This is where he started showing his sophistication..."It was fun and there were a lot of funny parts, but I just didn't understand the plot. It was really hard to follow and I don't think it was thought out all the way." In my head at this time I'm thinking...you're 8 years old. Thor fought Iron Man, Cappy beat people up with his shield, Hawkeye (his favorite avenger) shot a lot of cool arrows at aliens, and Hulk pounded Loki...how could you not love it. This movie was make for the 8 year old in all of us...Then I remembered he's smarter than the average 8 year old, he reads a lot with his mom, and you know...he's probably right. He still gave it an 8 on his scale of 1-10 so that's not too bad.

[Tornado]

That is some pretty good insight.

Your son should start a blog.

Seriously, I have never heard of anyone so young discussing plot complexity.

[japes]

Originally Posted by Tornado

That is some pretty good insight.

Your son should start a blog.

Seriously, I have never heard of anyone so young discussing plot complexity.

I believe it started because last summer they read the first 3 books of Harry Potter and we followed each up with the movie so he discovered how much "more and better" plot elements the books had. This summer they did the 4th book/movie. He's learned to enjoy the movies but he understands they can't be a good as the books.

[caps]

Started Silver Linings Playbook with my wife a week or so ago, but then the kid woke up and we didn't feel it was appropriate for him. We were an hour in and still haven't had a chance to finish it, but it was looking promising.