Captain America :The Winter Soldier

[Bionic-Joe]

Saw it yesterday afternoon with my wife and son!!!! F'ing AWESOME!!!!!!! Just awesome!!! Has a Great Jab at the NSA and spying!!!!!

[Highlander]

We've not had a film thread for a while ...

Just watched Ender's Game and Catching Fire on DVD - thoroughly enjoyed them ...

[westen44]

It's just a TV series, but I've been watching the sci-fi show "Continuum."  It's good and just keeps getting better.  Anyone wanting to avoid spoilers might prefer to read just the last paragraph of this article.  It sums things up well without giving away anything.. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2014/03/31/continuum-finds-its-focus-in-season-three/

[gearHed289]

I tried watching Thor last night and kept dozing off. Apparently it ended, then started again at 9:30, so I was a little confused between naps.  Watched the Avengers last weekend. Trying to catch up on all things Phil Coulson related. Been into Joss Whedon's Agents of Shield....

[uwe]

Thor, the sequel, was even worse than the first one. Horrible. Captain America, the first one, was however anong the top marvel films I've seen and I've seen them all.  Now I never liked Thor much as a Marvel hero but neither did I like Captain America - too overt in his similarties with Superman -, but the film was way above "comic turned into movie" average, so my hopes are high for part II.

I saw "The Book of Mormon" for the second time in the London West End on Saturday. Hilarious, brilliantly non-pc, but with a humane message after all.





"I beleive that in 1978 the Lord changed his mind about black people - you can be a Mormon!"

[Highlander]

Ah ... sneakin' round my home turf ...

I'd be curious to hear George's view on this one ... not that I know much about this play ... other that the hordes of adverts around town ...

Anybody got any negative views of Oblivion ... ? apparently started as a draft for a graphic novel but ended up as the movie ... excellent, imho ...

Not seen either of the Capt. Am. yet, but the first is on the "to get" list ...

[Pilgrim]

I saw Oblivion....enjoyed it.  Much in the same flavor of Minority Report, with Tom Cruise as the guy who begins happy and then is thrust into a confusing position in a changing view of reality.  Worth the air time, but hardly a classic.

Cruise has made enough sci-fi thrillers (I'll include the Mission Impossible flicks) that he has become the sci-fi equivalent of Arnold as a or Stallone as a staple of blow-em-ups.

I saw the first  Captain America over the weekend and it was a darn good flick.  It had the needed air of plausibility around it.  I must say that Hugo Weaving (Red Skull in that picture) has had an interesting run of roles...from the multitudinous Mr. Smith to Elrond and Red Skull. 

[uwe]

Book of Mormon takes the piss on established religions and their incongruities - they all have them. It also points out how most religions are direct rip-offs of other religions with every new prophet adding his own inventions shunned by the older religion. Christianity is a merger of the Jewish belief and and the Egyptian Amun-Ra religion, even the exclamation "amen" might be derived from the sun god's name (whose cult fell into quick disgrace in Egypt, monotheistic as it was, the Egyptians didn't want to give up all their other deities).

But at the same time the musical doesn't bear an atheist message, it's actually a very encompassing "if religion works for you and does you good, then it's all fine". So the naive, but well-meaning Mormons on mission in Uganda end up founding their own religion (a mix of Mormon beliefs, Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and sheer nonsense coupled with African enthusiasm and a little bit of voodoo) and give an African village ravaged by aids, local warlords and general squalor something to believe in and pick themselves up with. A lovely scene is where the Africans discuss their new-found religion and one of them has doubts about it making any sense at all and they all gang up on him explaining the incongruities away with "well, that's all meatphorical, you didn't really believe that actually happened, did you, that'd be f***ing stupid!"  And of course it's also a buddy movie between the undedog jewish-looking nerd outsider kid and the WASP Mormon overachiever with hidden chips on his shoulder. Plus how it's ok to be gay - even with God, a few gays must have made it onto Noah's Ark (we'll discuss the reproduction issues they faced in another thread!). So positve messages all around, a feel-good musical.

[uwe]

I saw Oblivion too, it's goodish, not great, but certainly better than your standard Sci Fi and the faults of the movie do not lie in Tom Cruise's acting who acts within his own confines, but the movie "fits" him just like War of the Worlds or that Samurai epic fitted him (Cruise can play more than what he is usually typecast for, he was excellent as that hired killer with a cab driver, I forgot the movie's title ....). It's a whole lot better than Ridley Scott's Prometheus disaster, but the storyline is similar to Duncan Jones' low budget debut Moon (with Sam Rockwell) a few years ago (which had overall a smarter and more unsettling plot) with lots of expensive Stanley Kubrick esthetics thrown in. If you liked how Spielberg's A.I. looked (in itself a Kubrick homage), you'll love Oblivion. Oblivion also bows a little in the direction of Starship Troopers, but isn't as overtly satirical.

Speaking of movies, I liked The Great Gatsby (the remake with Leonardo DiCaprio), it starts as an overanimated, comic book visualized narration and somewhere in the middle of the movie turns into a chamber play. Never having seen the original film with Redford or read the book, I was unaware that it is a Steinbeck'esque drama with some real depth and a rallying call against class society. And DiCaprio is good in it. As is Toby McGuire.

The Wolf of Wall Street - Leonardo or not - disappointed me badly. It's like Scorsese's Casino fast-forwarded a few decades (even the female lead looks like a young Sharon Stone) and relocated to the East Coast - but has none of the dry drama  of Casino. It's a stretched out depiction of 80ies excesses and suicidal hedonism - I'm a great fan of Scorsese's work with or without  Leonardo: both The Aviator and Shutter Island were fine films -, but it tells you nothing you didn't know from Oliver Stone's Wall Street (as regards investment banking or peddling penny stocks) and from War of the Roses (as regards rags to riches couples and their inevitable fate). The script could have been condensed to a quarter of an hour. The sex and coke scenes overstay their welcome very quickly unless sniffing coke from a female's shapely butt is your thing over and over. Plus Leo and Margot don't really work as a couple.

[Highlander]

You're over here often enough, and enjoy theatre ... did you ever catch "The Complete Works Of Shakespeare", which was a great laugh by all accounts ... ?

Jackie and I used to go as a treat when we could but haven't been to one in circa 20/25 years ... Richard Harris in Pirandello's Henry IV, Peter O'Toole in Jeffery Bernard Is Unwell, Nigel Hawthorne in Shadowlands, go back a few and Charlton Heston/Ben Cross in Caine Mutiny ... there were quite few others, but those truly stand out ...
Big regret, and I mean BIG, is missing Jimmy Stewart in Harvey (in the 70's) and still having missed Patrick Stewart in practically anything, especially with Tennant in Hamlet (could not justify the expense), either at Stratford, or when it transferred to the West End, so settled for the Xmas special on the TV ... maybe one of his one man shows ... I was tempted by Waiting For Goddo with Stewart and Ian McKellern a few years back, but ...
Some froth too, but, for example, Blood Brothers was a pair of tickets won by my late M-in-L and they would have gone to waste - same with a Bryan Rix farce ...

Films ... loved Moon - cleverly worked - fascinating how most sinister computers have "red-eye" syndrome ... AI was more than a homage to Kubrick - "Super Toys Last All Summer Long" was something Kubrick had toyed with for decades but felt he could not take it further, so he passed the baton to Speilberg, who completed it post Kubrick's death - it works fairly well for me
Saw 2001 as a kid on release and it sure changed my brains chemical balances ... (I know, answers a lot)
I also quite liked Prometheus, especially Fassbender's character ...
Minority Report - any Philip K Dick story deserves attention... especially Do Androids ...

[LoEndMaestro]

I couldn't agree more about Wolf Of Wall Street. Just a bunch of shock value & overacting. Marty & Leo should be ashamed of themselves. It's like the movie was typed in all caps. TALKING LOUD AND SAYING NOTHING.

Awful.

[westen44]

I liked "The Great Gatsby."  The Gatsby, Nick, and Tom characters were all done well in the movie.  I found, though, the Daisy and Jordan characters to be lacking.  The movie captures the mood of the 20s, something which I believe was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's goals when he wrote the book. 

"Oblivion" is not a bad movie at all.  The excitement level isn't too high.  But it's worth seeing.