I liked Thor a lot, much more than Justice League, which I had got my hopes up for.

I keep seeing these ads on Facebook and whatnot for all these awesome anime movies coming out, and it kills me not being able to see them because I know they're probably going to be some kind of limited release nonsense.
I only saw one movie all year.
<------ You can probably guess what it was.
I enjoyed it, flaws and all. I don't care who knows.

I enjoyed both about the same, just in slightly different ways. Thor was funny and had great visuals, it was nice to see Kirby's style in live action like this. Justice League had great interactions between characters, slightly better (for my taste) ratio of serious to funny and I think I enjoyed the action sequences slightly more in JL. In the end both are good "popcorn entertainment".

Funny but i enjoyed it . And i also enjoyed Atomic Blonde .

My best friend enjoyed it too :D And on the other hand another one of my friends was almost shellshocked after leaving the theatre. What can you do, one man's food is another man's poison. I just call it as I see it.

A sidenote of sorts - I just saw Bright. It's not remarkable enough to take any best of/worst of kind of award, it's just sort of average, but I think it's interesting as Netflix's biggest attempt at making a feature movie of their own to compete with cinematic releases. It does not measure up. It's not just the problems with script, the mediocre story and mostly poor dialogue, but the whole thing doesn't really feel like a proper movie. More like a series pilot. The visuals are just mediocre, the actors other than Will Smith (in what is definately not one of his more noteworthy roles) bland and forgetable.

It's not devoid of any entertainment value, it's still a decent urban fantasy action flick, but it mostly gets by on the interesting setting (though it's a setting that doesn't make any sense at all). A pity, because there was potential here for something special. I really wish though that we could see some "box office" like figures, to see how it fared compared to big cinematic releases. I like digging into box office results of movies, and seeing how a new IP like this fares would be very interesting. Quality-wise it doesn't seem like the game changer Netflix wanted it to be, but of course it's the money that really matters (for the producers).

I'm more of the type of guy who prefers shows over movies, but here are a few that I watched this year, or to be more precise, this month:

Best Movie: The Big Sick
Kumail Nanjiani is starting to grow up in the: "keep an eye for that person" list. The movie was great from start to finish. Sure, most of the time it's a sad movie, not knowing what's going to happen, but it's also funny. Kumail's and Emily chemistry is what sold the movie for me.

Runner UP: Logan, Baby Driver, The Handmaiden All of these movies had something special that left an impression, Logan with its bleak, dark and yet somehow still hopeful future (of course Sir Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman did a great job with their roles), Baby Driver with its eclectic mix of songs (I may be biased towards this movie because it was made by Edgar Wright, knowing damn well how much I like his movies). As for The Handmaiden I'll only say this: Chan-wook Park.

Biggest Disappointment: Rogue One Maybe it was because I knew that Kyle Katarn was the first man to stole the Death Star plans, or maybe it was something else, but this movie never clicked with me. In fact, it took me nine months to actually finish this damn movie. I tried to watch it on March, but stopped at the 30 minute mark.

Although the movie itself was rather average, I loved the depiction of Elves in this movie, they actually really did seem to look and behave like a distinct race, way more than say in LOTR.

I was actually rather disappointed wth how little the various races bring to the table here. I just don't really get the setting. The idea of a classic fantasy world that evolved to modern-day is very interesting, but this is still supposed to be our Earth, but with all that fantasy stuff that's been here forever. So, we have elves, orcs, centaurs, dragons, and 2000 years ago a huge LOTR-like battle agaisnt a dark lord happened (instead of Jesus being born I guess?), and yet since then our history was pretty much exactly the same? They even mention specific events, like Alamo. How the hell does that work?

Funny, that's the only Star Wars movie outside of the original trilogy that I like. And I really can't hold the Kyle Katarn thing against them, even though I think the Jedi Knight games are a better follow-up to the orignal movies than the disney sequels. But that "stealing the Death Star plans" was just an introductory mission, not a very impressive one at that. I think the Rogue One story is actually a huge improvement over that.

Yeah, it's an interesting concept but Bright just used it as window dressing for an otherwise normal Wil Smith cop movie. When I started watching I actually thought it was gonna be like Shadowrun, where the fantasy races and magic "reawakened" in the modern era and started to be born to human parents, but no they were always here, which as you say is silly because history would be RADICALLY different with all those races and magic around. I think the movie itself is also supposed to be a metaphor for racism in our world too.

What I meant about the Elves is, they actually looked distinct and alien-like in Bright, they way they talked was weird etc. In LOTR for example Elves seem like just humans with pointy ears.

OH YES, whoever thought that ending was a good idea has to be banished somewhere nasty, where he'll never be able to meddle in any movie again! That was so, so bad!


But other that that my movie of the year is Bladerunner too. Really a worthy sequel!

One of the reasons it was so great was, in my opinion, that it wasn't really a "sequel" in the traditional sense. More of a spin-off. "Blade Runner 2" would have been a misnomer.

Oh, it definately is, and it's not exactly clever or subtle about it :P And we already had pretty much the exact same concept and metaphor done better in Alien Nation.

I guess so, though on the other hand the "elftown" district was surprisingly boring. It's just a rich neighborhood. Nothing elvish, magical or alien about how it looks. I was expecting huge trees instead of skyscrapers... something.

I haven't seen a lot of movies lately, mostly because most movies tend to suck so bad I turn them off after 10 minutes.
The biggest surprise for me was Valerian And The City Of Thousand Planets though, I really enjoyed that one, it's a bit like Avatar but not as boring and it was refreshing to see a movie that doesn't take itself so bloody serious all the time.
I also didn't understand the critisism about the lead roles because I thought they were played very well, Dane Dehaan is a pretty good actor for instance, just watch (the also surprisingly entertaining) A Cure For Wellness.

Postscript: Blade Runner 2049

Quite watchable in an inoffensive and unremarkable kind of way. On a purely technical level, it is commendable: Long takes, no shaky cam shit, mostly unintrusive special effects. For the most part, it doesn‘t feel like cheap fan service. It does rub your face in how VISIONARY it thinks its visuals are - however, I have to admit they do serve their purpose by managing to draw you into the film‘s world. The - thankfully rare! - action scenes teeter dangerously close to the average Hollywood schlockbuster in that they are choreographed and edited with little elegance. Similar to Dunkirk, this makes use of a minimalist soundtrack that seems to consist entirely of different kinds of fart noises. The closest thing to actual music is a well-known Vangelis-theme getting recycled. Audiences in China hated this film and it‘s not hard to see why: Not only is this not mindless popcorn fodder, there are some rather subtle allusions to the original - which no one here has really seen or cares about - and if you don‘t pick up on those, you‘re screwed. If you‘re unfamiliar with this particular piece of music, chances are you won‘t even know what‘s going on in this pivotal scene.

I don‘t have access to youtube here, so I‘m curious: How many Blade Runner 2049 montages with Nightcall playing in the background are there? Ryan Gosling plays literally the exact same character from Drive - the brooding, silent autist who is prone to violent verbal and physical outbursts. Come to think of it, the whole thing feels like Drive: a mood piece. It doesn't have an exciting story to tell nor does it have anything interesting to say. It works purely on an aesthetic level. There‘s nothing of real interest underneath the shiny surface. The story doesn‘t really go anywhere new or interesting. While the 160 minutes went by like a breeze, I couldn‘t help but feel that something was missing. That certain spark that would have kicked it up from pretty ok-tier into the genuinely great-tier. When the credits rolled it felt like "Wait, that‘s it?" There was literally a world of untapped potential here.

The characters are largely forgettable. I criticised the writing of the original in an earlier post for being unremarkable, but at least it had loads of memorable side characters: Roy Batty, Leon, Gaff (an unforgettable character in the original, who gets a completely forgettable cameo in this one), Bryant, Holden, Tyrell, JF Sebastian, Pris... This film, however, I‘d be hard-pressed to remember even the names of any of the characters. They mostly don‘t do anything interesting and are disposed of after a scene or two. The only fleshed-out characters seemed to be K and his holographic waifu. Deckard being a hew-mon makes the theatrical cut of the original film canon and is thus putting an end to Sir Ridley's oh-so-clever post-production-induced brain fart of Deckard being a replicant. I can appreciate the irony of that. While on the subject, I also appreciate that it is made clear from the start what Gosling‘s character is. They don‘t try to be ambiguous and they‘re not saving that for some attempt at a plot twist half-way through the movie. They used that gimmick for the first one - and it was expanded from a gimmick to a crucial storytelling element in the game - and it‘s nice to see this one not just repeating what‘s been done before.

The writers try their damndest to give some substance to Harrison "Bet you didn't think you'd be back for a second one 35 years later, did you?" Ford‘s Deckard, probably in the hopes he doesn‘t half-ass his performance - to some success. He‘s about as compelling as you can expect a 75-year-old to be in a part like that. Actually, strike that. That‘s underselling it, he‘s got a pretty impressive screen-presence for a 75-year-old and can hold his own in the action scenes. The complete opposite would be true for characters like Jared Leto's evil Tyrell 2.0. One of the things that made Tyrell compelling was that he didn‘t seem to be a stereotypically evil villain. He was just this eccentric genius who couldn‘t quite grasp the misery he brought upon his creations. Tyrell 2.0 on the other hand doesn‘t seem to have motivations other than greed and no redeeming qualities. He‘s just an evil dude who shows up in 2 or 3 scenes to do evil stuff and the film can‘t be bothered to come up with anything interesting for him to do or say (save for some rancid pseudo-philosophical gobbledygook). And that‘s how it goes for pretty much all the characters. They show up, serve their purpose for the plot and are never seen or heard of again. No interesting dialogue, no character ark, no emotional involvement for the viewer.

But it *is* pretty to look at.

Again, the question remains: did we really need it? In that regard, it is very much like T2 - not bad, not great either. Blade Runner gets a pass for sequelitis, because it's a household name and studio bosses would want to milk it sooner or later. Trainspotting on the other hand is more of an arthouse cult movie that REALLY didn't warrant a sequel - financially or creatively. Blade Runner 2049 is about as good as you could've hoped it to be. And that‘s no faint praise in an age of Alien Covenant, let me tell you!

Ok for what it is/10