Movies Seen In 2022

[Trekker4747]

I just watched "Don't Look Up" and while I get what it is saying and doing and in the wake of things like Climate Change and 2-years of COVID, dammit, if so much of this doesnt feel real to show our society behaves and reacts to crises, the execution just feels... Sloppy.

Particularly given this cast: Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill there's a solid cast here but it just feels like they're almost phoning it all in.

I dunno... A C+?

 

[thribs]

Uncharted.
That's it so far. Seeing the Batboy movie in 2 weeks.

 

[Starbreaker]

Watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Scream this morning. An intentional comedy and a parody.

 

[tomalak301]

The Last Duel - B-
Tick Tick... Boom - B-

Encanto - B

The music and the animation made this movie. I actually thought Surface Pressure was the best song and the Bruno song was just decent. I did like how upbeat most of the songs were though. Good Disney film.

 

[Danny99]

Don't Look Up - D-
Red Notice - A
Clifford - B
Free Guy - A
The Marksman - B+
A Wrinkle In Time - A-
Penguin Bloom - B-
The Ice Road - B+
The Adam Project - A+

Yes, I am a Ryan Reynolds fan and this movie did even more to cement that. He had his wise-cracks, but he hit every emotional note perfectly. Walker Scobell, who played the younger version of Reynolds' character, was another star of this movie. Reynolds was himself, which I think means Scobell elevated his performance to match him and did a hell of a job, especially with the heavy stuff. This was also the first time I actually liked a Zoe Saldana performance.

I was also surprised to see how well the de-aging programming worked on the younger version of Catherine Keener, which just goes to show had badly it was used on Brent Spiner in season one of Picard.

The last scene with Ruffalo, Reynolds & Scobell drew tears from me, something that a movie has never done (to my recollection). The movie earns those tears.

 

[thribs]

I did not like a Wrinkle in Time. That story was not told very well.

 

[tomalak301]

The Last Duel - B-
Tick Tick... Boom - B-
Encanto - B

The Batman - C+

I forgot to add a movie to the list that I had seen in the early part of the month. The Batman was decent, but very long and it felt long.

 

[Random_Spock]

Just rewatched Runaway Bride. It still holds up. It's such a good movie with good cinematography, acting and a nice soundtrack. It gets an 8/10 from me.

 

[The Knappos]

Ambulance. I wish I hadn't

 

[thribs]

Secrets of Dumbledore.
I don’t get the hate the critics are giving it. I thought it was pretty good. Easily the best of these new movies. 7/10
Not a film for animal lovers though. They might have a bad time.

 

[Danny99]

Don't Look Up - D-
Red Notice - A
Clifford - B
Free Guy - A
The Marksman - B+
A Wrinkle In Time - A-
Penguin Bloom - B-
The Ice Road - B+
The Adam Project - A+
Reprisal - D-

IMDB has pieces of trivia that this movie was done for the producer to pay off their debts and that the lead actor Frank Grillo admitted he only took the job for the money, which he used for his garden. It shows in how bad this movie is.

Bruce Willis is in a handful of scenes with barely anything to say, which takes on a whole inflection with his recent diagnosis.

The script is absolutely horrendous:

The family talks about "struggling" financially and that they might have to cut back the housekeeper hours just to make ends me. Find me the world's smallest violin.

Willis & Grillo have zero chemistry. They manage to piece together all the evidence they need in a five minute montage, even though the FBI has been working the case for months.

We see two minutes total of the antagonist's father, who is mentally declining. You could infer he is doing it to put his father in better care, but accordingly to the dialogue he only visits once every couple months, but it is not picked up in any of the dialogue that this is actually the case. There is also a throwaway line about the family warehouse had failed, but again, nothing concrete as to motivation. He just seems to love doing it because he can.

Willis' character has no reason to get involved. They are friendly neighbours. He has some PTSD, but other than that, that zero chemistry doesn't give them any reason to team up.

The antagonist gets so mad at the pair's interferes that he completely deviates from having a precision plan that he has been flawlessly working to kill an FBI agent, kill a surviving witness and kidnap Grillo's family. He can hit another bank, another jewellery store, but he remains fixated on this. Again, no explanation.

Willis ends up taking credit for the end of the antagonist at the end, but somehow Grillo claims the FBI reward.

This was like watching an action movie written by an algorithm. It has the basic elements of action: guns, car chase, kidnapping, but it can't lace them together in any kind of reasonable fashion.

 

[somebuddyX]

Best film I haven't seen before so far this year was "Freaks of Nature". Just super dumb but imaginative. Also "Vice" and "The Death of Stalin" were pretty funny. Worst was probably "Alien Nation" or "Moneyball". I just turned them off halfway through.
Best I've already seen was "Gravity" and "Die Hard with A Vengeance".
I'm just happy I'm actually I'm watching stuff to find out whether it's good or not instead of wondering.

 

[Br3adfanV14]

I've seen Batman this year..it was ok, nothing special (hyped up if you ask me). Guy who plays Batman is wrongly cast in my opinion. Also seen Morbius which was terrible.


I am interested in seeing Top Gun though...

 

[The Knappos]

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Really good, if the third act does fizzle put a bit

 

[Danny99]

Don't Look Up - D-
Red Notice - A
Clifford - B
Free Guy - A
The Marksman - B+
A Wrinkle In Time - A-
Penguin Bloom - B-
The Ice Road - B+
The Adam Project - A+
Reprisal - D-
The Contractor - D

Chris Pine is the only thing that saves this movie. He is once again incredibly believable as the soldier who gave it all and gets pulled into the dark side. Pine is going to be the next Tom Hanks or Matt Damon: the actor of his generation that can slide into any role and make it his own.

Unfortunately, the script is a mess. The story bounces around. It gives you the touchstones of an action movie, but it lacks the clarity of a regular action movie. You have a protagonist, an antagonist with a clear mission that makes him the bad guy. You also have the twist with the terrorist that you also have in these movies. But there is no clear reason why the bad guy in this movie wants the information. You assume he's selling it to someone else, but the movie doesn't really tell you that or much about the information itself. It also keeps jerking back into Pine's character's "daddy issues," but they aren't elaborated on. The father wasn't there and when he was, he was suffering from PTSD, but it doesn't relate to the present. Pine also has a ridiculously easy time getting back on a plane to the United States and basically being a ghost right up to the moment when they attack the ranch after being tracked pretty well through Europe. The movie knows it has to get him to fight the antagonist at the end and doesn't provide a logical reason that he can simply get on a plane and make it home.

You also have Kiefer Sutherland as the bad guy, but he is on the other end of a phone in the handful of scenes he is in. Pine is being chased by a bunch of random faceless criminals and there isn't any scenes with Kiefer to help make sense of it all. And if you are going to use Kiefer, you can't have him killed the way he is at the end.

 

[Danny99]

Don't Look Up - D-
Red Notice - A
Clifford - B
Free Guy - A
The Marksman - B+
A Wrinkle In Time - A-
Penguin Bloom - B-
The Ice Road - B+
The Adam Project - A+
Reprisal - D-
The Contractor - D
Senior Year - C

Yes, I laughed at points, but there are plenty of moments that are just cringeworthy.

I give Rebel Wilson credit because without her complete buy-in to the role, the whole thing would fall flat on its face. That being said, I hope she ends up commanding some other roles because she is getting stuck playing these oddball for laughs characters that don't seem to vary much. The movie says she was picked on after coming from Australia, but the whole thing seems tacked on just to explain Rebel's accent.

Her antagonist and her ex-boyfriend, now married to the antagonist and played by Justin Hartley, are also way over the top. After twenty years of Rebel being a coma, she hasn't lightened up, at all. She never had one glimmer of self reflection that high school was high school? Some people live in the past, but I have no idea how she was so convinced that Rebel was going to change twenty years of her being popular.

The movie takes a lot of leaps without logic to get Rebel in the school setting that would never happen in real life. You really have to suspend your disbelief to believe she would be allowed to attend school and that it would take more than just the principal saying she could come back, especially given how close they were in high school.

 

[dupersuper]

Spider-Man: No Way Home
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness

 

[Starbreaker]

The Suicide Squad - B-
Eternals - B
The Requin - F
The Keep (1983) - C
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) - C
Scream (2022) - C
In Between - F
X - C+
Fresh - C+
Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers - B-
Moonfall - D
Senior Year - D+
No Exit - C
The Weekend Away- D
The Bob's Burgers Movie - B
Encanto - B-
Turning Red - B+
The Northman - A+
Alice - C
Being the Ricardos - B-
The Last Duel - B
Needle in a Timestack - D

 

[tomalak301]

The Last Duel - B-
Tick Tick... Boom - B-
Encanto - B

Updating my list with a couple movies I've seen recently

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - B

This was good, but I was disappointed the events of Loki weren't mentioned. I thought Loki was going to be the feeder into this movie and it really wasn't. I did like the effects and think this was better than the original though.

Top Gun Maverick - A

This movie was awesome. Once again, Tom Cruise shows he's still got it, and I would go see any movie he is in, despite some of his issues. I wrote a longer review about this film in the dedicated thread and on my letterboxd, but lets just say Top Gun set the bar for this summer's movies and it will be hard to cross it.

 

[tomalak301]

The Last Duel - B-
Tick Tick... Boom - B-
Encanto - B
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - B
Top Gun Maverick - A

Everything, Everywhere All At Once - B-

This movie got great word of mouth that it became a movie I wanted to see in theaters before it left. I also liked Michelle Yeoh. I feel like I was supposed to look for some deeper meaning of this movie and I just didn't understand what it was trying to say. I loved the look of the film, and I thought the costumes, especially on Joy, were great. The viceral reaction to the multiverse was also really good, much better than Doctor Strange. It's just that I left the movie more confused than I came in. I'm not sure if I'm going to see this again, but it was pretty original.