I’ve seen six Spider-Man movies in the last week. Here is my ranking:
Big gap between my 3 and 4, I liked Spider Man and thought Amazing Spider Man was not great. Both my 5 and 6 were very bad IMO, but I still think Spider Man 3 was worse.
No Way Home tomorrow.
This is pretty much the correct ranking (though I personally have 3 ahead of the two Garfield films)
As a Crusader Kings player watching The Last Duel, I’m really impressed with how good Ben Affleck is at playing this game. He’s got this powerful vassal with a low stewardship stat. I always just live with it or try to assassinate the guy in this situation, but my man Ben straight revokes his title and gaslights Adam Driver into becoming mortal rivals until Matt Damon is more angry at Adam than his obviously tyrannical liege. I wish I could goad my vassals into killing each other over titles, what a great way to take pressure off the king. Worst case scenario is Matt Damon wins and you grant him the title and try to smooth things over. Matt’s got no heirs so that property is going right back to the crown in a few decades (or earlier if Matt runs into an accident of some kind, hmmm…).
Anyway, this movie is maybe my second or third favorite video game adaptation. It’s not really great, though. Ridley is both a great director and one of the best Metroid bosses, but the visuals are so bland and over-filtered. The royal court of medieval France should be colorful, in the movie everything indoors is a drab light orange. Everything outdoors is extremely blue because that’s what olden times looked like?
Most people are going to watch this movie and decide that Ben Affleck is a dumbass partyboy, but I think CK players can appreciate my interpretation that he’s actually an extremely savvy medieval ruler who is playing his powerful vassals against each other like a fucking pro.
Also, I keep saying this, but god I hate how color filters have destroyed modern movies. We’ve come to a point where the backstage photos look much better than the finished product. Look at this backstage shot, it looks like a real medieval world, the armor looks shiny and great, the blood and bruises look real. The red and blue is an interesting contrast against the grey-white castle walls.
And then we get this overp-rocessed de-colorized mess. He looks like a zombie with dirt or chocolate sauce on his face?
I mean, look at this shit. The red/blue colors of the uniforms ought to pop out and provide interesting contrast. Instead it’s just this oppressive blue soup. It’s two zombies dudes fighting on a blue alien landscape somewhere. There’s no human world that looks like this.
I would pay actual money to watch a re-colorized version of this movie.
It’s like, what are we even doing here with these blue/orange color filters. Nothing looks real and the whole world is laughing at us. Every Hollywood these days movie takes place on an alien blue/orange world.
Recently watched Taking of Pelham 123 and Across 100th street. The color palate is drab and no one would accuse these movies of being colorful, but these movies make NYC look like a real city where actual humans exist. It’s effortlessly gritty.
Meanwhile every shot of NYC over the past 10 years makes it all look blue and antiseptic for some reason. It’s a boring, uninteresting world and I don’t care about the things that happen there.
Yeah it seems as given now that there’ll never be more than one color on screen at a time in movies…Best you can hope for is that at least it not be the same one for the whole running time (as in “dune”'s yellow on yellow for 2+ hours 
)
It’s done too much but sometimes it’s integral to the film as well.
A bigger issue is how boring all Netflix originals look. The Netflix mandated specs means all their films look like shit.
The Lost Daughter
Representative gif but I loved it.
The Green Knight
7/10
The trailer looked amazing, but I hadn’t been able to see it until now. I liked the idea of it. A coddled young guy who does something rash and reckless to prove to himself and others he’s brave and has to go on a hero’s journey where his brashness and coddledness gets stripped away. I don’t mind the oddness either. Medieval and earlier storytelling wasn’t economical where every part of the story has a purpose and is efficient, but the oddness in this doesn’t congeal into something. The twist at the end, the difference in the movie and the legend was interesting but then it just stops and left me wanting more, but not in a good way.
Why? I’m open to the idea that there were a few (okay, more than a few) things I didn’t “get”, but I thought that screenplay was a mess.
Acting was top notch though,
Pig (2021)
This has no right to be great but it is great. What a weird movie but wow I loved it. Might be the best food movie ever made and it doesn’t really have much food.
Grade: A
It is very oddly structured but I think on purpose. It’s meant to keep the viewer off kilter. It’s like a horror film, but instead of a chainsaw maniac it’s one’s offspring. I can certainly see it not being everyone’s thing but I found it really effective.
On a whim I was looking through the RT reviews of Starship Troopers and saw this.
Imagine having written this. My God. How do you not just kill yourself?
Might be one of the worst film takes of all time.
She’s right - only because that movie should have been filmed as a mockumentary by Werner Herzog.
