Actually watched something in the cinema this month: Joker. I wasn’t originally sure if I wanted to see it, I wasn’t hyped for it at all in the months prior. But as the showing date came nearer, there was a lot of buzz around it so I decided to go anyway. I don’t feel like it lived up to the hype and the warnings about promoting incel stuff, but at least it’s one of the higher-grossing DC movies, so maybe we’ll have more to come in that vein.
I finally got around to watching X-Men Dark Phoenix which I skipped when it came out mainly because (a) poor reviews, and while normally I’d have watched it anyway since I have not missed any of the X-Men movies in the cinema, not even the horrendous Wolverine Origins, there was also to consider that (b) I was in the US at the time and was only willing to spend my precious dollars on one expensive American cinema and Spider-man Far From Home won out.
Hmm, surprisingly I haven’t watched too much stuff this month.
Eigasai I watched a Japanese film at Eigasai in UP Diliman for the first time ever, upon the invite of some friends. We saw One Cut of the Dead a comedy zombie film. It was great and it was hilarious, although you must make sure not to lose patience with the first thirty minutes. I went in blind not knowing anything about it other than “Japanese comedy zombie movie”, so you should too!
I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven’t been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we’ll see.
Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards.
I know I already made a whole post about the MCU after Endgame came out, but after the MCU Phase 4 announcements this past weekend at SDCC I was a bit hyped. I thought it would be fun to look back at the past 10 years of MCU Phase 1-3 and see what I wrote about the movies.
Iron Man (2008)
Surprisingly, I had written nothing about watching this film at all, and I don’t remember going to the cinema to watch it.
First, the spoiler-free review, then more spoilery stuff afterwards.
I watched Far From Home while I was… far from home. great movie, lots of fun, and the stakes are a lot higher than the Vulture just stealing some tech off Tony Stark basically a story of Peter Parker the high school student trying to juggle his Spider-Man problems with his high school life, which was one of the best eras of comic book Spider-Man the movie gives us a look at what the world looks like post-Endgame and how weird it is for everyone if you’ve seen the trailers, you know who the “villain” is and you have certain expectations coming in.
The big TV thing of May 2019 was of course, the much maligned finale for Game of Thrones. I’ve written about that separately here.
Most of the US TV series also ended their runs in May. Arrowverse show seasons were littered with poor writing as usual. I rank the seasons in this order:
best is Legends of Tomorrow season 4. The reason Legends is the best is that they’re not afraid to be outrageous.
I’ve already written extensively about Avengers Endgame, but there are other things I watched this month too.
Shazam came out early this month, and while it was unfortunately sandwiched between MCU blockbusters, it was a fun adventure romp and surprised me in a few ways. I wrote a short spoiler-free review over on Tumblr.
TV-wise, I’ve been on a rewatch binge of 30 Rock that unfortunately started with season 4 due to Amazon Prime’s weird way of presenting things.
I already wrote about Avengers Endgame a bit in yesterday’s post, but that was a bit rushed and I had more thoughts, so here we are. I figured I might as well get everything out. There will be unmarked spoilers for Avengers Endgame and Agents of SHIELD.
Before even going into the movie that was seemingly sold out everywhere despite being on almost every cinema screen in the Metro, I was thinking to myself what a phenomenon.
Two endgames to discuss in one post! MTG War of the Spark and Avengers Endgame spoilers ahoy!
Endgame #1: War of the Spark
The latest Magic set has been a home run in terms of lore and flavor and storytelling, bringing the last three years worth of MTG lore to its conclusion as the villainous dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas aims to complete his plan to achieve omnipotence over the multiverse. The set is packed with planeswalkers summoned to Ravnica by Bolas’s schemes, which means mechanically that a lot of new planeswalker design space is being explored.
- I liked this movie, it had good heart, fun kid-friendly humor, and a strong message about family- basically the story of a kid with a messed up life being stupid and trying to be better- john glover is here! does he now hold the record for portraying the most number of parents of bald supervillains? that’s not a spoiler right? - this movie is kid-friendly, aside from the violence and the occasional swear word- there is a mid credits scene and the post credits scene.
The big one this month was Captain Marvel. I posted the usual spoiler-free review over on Tumblr, but I have some more spoiler-y thoughts over here:
Click to toggle spoilers While I thought the movie was ok, I was underwhelmed by the third act and specifically the lack of any serious threat for Carol to defeat towards the end of the movie. As this tumblr post explains more clearly than I ever could, perhaps the issue is that the narrative is not something targetted towards me as a man, who has not experienced the emotional gaslighting IRL that many women are exposed to.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I watch a lot of TV shows, rarely on TV itself though. I outgrew scheduled television maybe more than a decade ago. I’m reminded of this because I was going through some old disks and found burned episodes of stuff like Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons, various anime, and so on.
Those were from the days before streaming though. These days an abundance of content is available online via the streaming services, no need to store all those episodes yourself.
Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow:
I watched Alita: Battle Angel, with the friend who introduced me to the series in the first place. The movie looked fantastic and the fight scenes were great. Plot was supercondensed, several books’ worth of story combined into one. Ended in a weird place, kinda? Easily the best western live action anime adaptation by far.
HEY!! /2019/02/1093511237898448896/ On 7 Feb 2019 at 2:06pm I wrote: Watched Alita: Battle Angel earlier today.
The quote is from the 1980s cult classic Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I didn’t include this movie in my top 10 movies post, but it and the sequel Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey are still among my childhood faves. These wise words are give by the Wyld Stallyns band composed of the epnoymous Bill and Ted, and form the philosophical basis of the future utopian civilization inspired by their music.
Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow:
Bumblebee only came out over here in January (thanks to the usual MMFF shenanigans), and I decided to watch it on a whim. Pretty decent soft reboot, read my spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr
The first half of Young Justice Outsiders is out, and it’s pretty good. Focus is back on a smaller group after the larger team in YJ season 2.
The first trailer for Spider-Man Far From Home dropped last week. I used to pretty hyped for superhero movie trailers, but I haven’t bother watching this one yet. MCU still has two more movies coming out before this one, and I’m already hyped enough for those, I don’t think I have hype to spare for a third one.
My brother was complaining to me about the trailer, saying he was spoiled about some elements.
Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow:
I very much enjoyed Elseworlds, the Arrowverse crossover this year. I mean sure, a lot of it didn’t make any sense, but it was like a love letter to DC fans. I actually consider myself more of a Marvel fan than DC, but I still loved it! I wrote a spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr.
Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow:
For some reason, I watched two biopics this month. The first one is Hidden Figures, about three black women who were instrumental during the early days of NASA leading up to the Friendship 7 mission piloted by John Glenn. The movie is fairly interesting if you are even remotely interested in either the challenges faced in black history or math and science or the early days of the space program competition between the USA and Russia.
Some things I’ve been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow:
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (on Amazon Prime) – surprisingly good, even if I’m not too familiar with the Jack Ryan stuff. I only know John Krasinski from The Office,
Spoilers for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan:
Click to toggle spoilers - The story starts with Ryan tracking down Suleiman’s network via financials, but they never follow-up on who was financing his group - I’m not sure what was the point of the whole drone pilot side story (including the weird trip to the casino and the night with the couple), although it was admittedly kind of entertaining Daredevil season 3 (on Netflix) – I enjoyed the season a lot.
This started as one of those silly Facebook memes where you post one thing every day and didn’t have to explain and you tagged other people and they continued with the meme. I was very bad at following the meme instructions, but I did find the exercise interesting. I found it difficult to identify 10 specific movies, and since I didn’t explain during the FB posts, I thought I’d make a blog post about them instead.
When Game of Thrones entered its sixth season in 2016, it was true spoiler territory for those of us who had read the GRRM books before HBO’s TV adaptation turned the property into a worldwide phenomenon. Due to the author’s glacial writing pace, at this point the TV series went past the point that the novels had reached. Thus nobody – book readers or tv viewers – knew what events would unfold in the story.
Last weekend I watched Aureus Solito’s movie Pisay at the UP film center with a couple of friends (both of whom were my Pisay batchmates of course).
For the uninitiated Pisay is the nickname for our beloved _Philippine Science High School. _It’s a system of government-run schools with a special focus on science and math subjects. There’s a highly-competitive entrance exam and we’ve always been told that students who make it in are considered the “cream of the crop.
First, the spoiler-free summary (spoilers after this part):
overall a very entertaining movie to sit down and watch popcorn and to enjoy the jokes and the space battles and the different colored lights and the tiny adorable tree creature GOTG’s humor was one of its strong points and for the 2nd movie, they push the comedy up a notch, perhaps a little too much in some places. Lots of funny gags and one-liners I felt like some of the character/background development stuff was pushed a bit too hard as well the movie’s plot also felt a bit thin and straightforward.
I’m not a fan of scary movies. I don’t appreciate the idea of paying money to get surprised by jump scares or whatever.
Back when I was a kid I remember my dad watching a Betamax copy of The Gate back home and me and my younger brother were watching with him and the movie seriously creeped me out. There was this one scene where a demonic eye manifested on the lead kid’s palm and that scene stuck with me for a while.
Arrival spoiler-free review:
- first half a bit boring
- Forrest Whitaker is hard to understand
- not sure if it was just the cinema I was at, but the audio and the lighting seemed quite bad at some points
- that being said, the movie was ok. I think it’s comparable to, but not as good as, Interstellar
- if you watch it with people who don’t pay attention, you’ll have to explain stuff
Wow. Great visuals and fight-scenes, very trippy. Possibly the best fight scenes in all the MCU movies so far. You might get dizzy with all the things spinning around though
Plot is typical of a MCU origin story. Hero’s journey, some light comedy bits, etc.
I was expecting them to go a different way with Mordo (if you’ve read the comics you know what I mean), but I’m happy with how things went down
Stakes are high, but failure is not final
The actors were great; I haven’t seen a lead this good for a role since RDJ’s Tony Stark. Swinton’s Ancient One, Eijofor’s Mordo, and even Wong’s Wong were great
Doctor friends: Tell me if the medical parts were BS hohoho
Magugustuhan ba ni Mama: Probably not. She doesn’t like this kind of thing, and the dizziness thing is bad too
IMAX or not? I think the 3d parts weren’t too exaggerated or critical, but the visuals might feel a bit flat and not as impressive if you don’t go IMAX
if you are not a fan of Warcraft lore, I do not recommend watching it. It’s kind of a generic fantasy movie in that case, nothing too exceptional. Pwede nang cable
if you are a fan, go watch it. You know you want to
costumes, cgi, fight scenes fairly good. i was worried that the cgi orcs would look weird and out of place, but I actually like how they turned out
surprisingly faithful to the original plot of the source material
… which leads to a piss-poor ending for anyone just wanting to watch generic fantasy movie, because of what happens to the main characters in the source material
a lot of warcraft lore elements are introduced with minimal exposition, which would probably overwhelm a non-fan
"Everyone knows the third movie is always the worst" -- Jean still too much focus on Jennifer Lawrence/Mystique some great soundtrack choices Quicksilver scene maybe just a tiny bit too long. Tradition of defying the rules of physics continues (I hope someone does the math on how fast he was probably moving) nice 80s wardrobe lol not particularly faithful to the source material plot is all over the place, a lot of WTF moments here and there.
Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice Spoiler-Free Review:
(Edit) OK lang panoorin, wag lang magexpect na super ganda ang story. Entertaining naman mga fight scenes :p
not a fan of Affleck’s Batman. Too gun-friendly, and he doesn’t really show a Bruce Wayne persona. He’s dark and brooding and grim in and out of the suit
Jeremy Irons as Alfred was ok, but he looks like Tony Stark
Eisenberg’s Luthor is not the same as any of the previous Luthors. He’s a manic genius, closer perhaps to the Riddler
a number of plot details don’t really make any sense. Need to suspend disbelief quite a bit
Snyder is too in love with his slow-motion scenes trying to make everything dramatic
there are a number of sequences that don’t mesh well together, like Snyder is randomly jumping between scenes that don’t cohere
in fact, there are particular scenes that feel like “WTH is this scene for, Snyder is just indulging himself now”
it’s like Superman needs to realise that Lois Lane is more trouble than she’s worth
yay cameos of future JLers
the actual BvS showdown looked great, and went pretty much the way you’d expect
Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman was great
I liked the final battle sequence
many, many things pointing towards the eventual JL movie
IMAX? Probably not worth it. Not too much 3d stuff
Post-credits scene: NO. Or so the internet tells me, we didn’t bother to wait
I can see why the reviewers kind of ripped the movie apart. They definitely need to work more on tightening up the movies, but overall this was better than Man of Steel I think.
Things software development projects can learn from “The Martian” (maybe spoilers lol):
If you rush things, you might leave something behind that will cost you a lot more later
You need to have buffer in your schedule for the inevitable disasters
If you have impossible deadlines, limited resources, overworked staff, and decide to skip testing to meet deadlines, don’t expect things to go smoothly
If your stuff doesn’t work, see if there’s some Chinese alternative. Or look for some sort of coffee-powered genius to come up with a miracle solution
If you make a unpopular decision, your staff might go off on their own and risk their lives trying to complete the mission
Problems will occur at almost every step, be prepared to make stuff up as you go along
Solve one problem at a time until you get to go home
Ant Man spoiler-free review: The first half felt a bit off, with some exposition coming off as forced and the pacing a bit awkward. Things picked up later on and while the plot was not entirely unpredictable there were a number of fun and surprising tangents. Overall a fun and entertaining movie with enough stuff for comic book Marvel fans to enjoy, probably close in quality to the first Iron Man movie, if not better
Couldnt get a ride so I decided to watch Kingsman. Fun movie although I must note it’s very violent. I haven’t read the source material, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect of Mark Millar
This bus is showing a b movie about some college students vacationing in a cabin in the woods and being attacked by some sort of demonic beavers. Identify the movie
Big Hero 6 spoiler-free review: Fun, light-hearted feel-good romp. Lots of good physical comedy with Baymax. Predictable plot (hey, it’s a kid’s movie, k?). There is a post-credits scene for some reason.
Interstellar spoiler-free review: Entertaining movie if you have a good suspension of disbelief and accept the science at face value. Some of the science and timelines are questionable (or maybe I missed some details possibly because I was talking Doctor Who with someone at the same time - some things might clear up on rewatch). Most of the black hole and relativity stuff was well-executed though. The twist at the end I could pretty much spot coming a mile away. CASE and TARS are very entertaining; I wouldn’t recommend the movie to my mother, for pretty much the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend Inception. Interstellar might be harder to grasp than Inception overall. Explores themes of relativity and human loneliness. Some surprise actors appeared! Very much a Nolan movie
So Metro Manila is at the peril of heavy rains, flooding and traffic again (as often happens this time of the year) and I thought I’d do some actual blogging for a change.
I didn’t want to brave the rush hour traffic last night so I finally got around to watching X-Men First Class (luckily it was still showing at Mega). I had actually seen Green Lantern first despite X1C showing two weeks before the DC movie.
I had actually read the much-acclaimed graphic novel only last year. And while I found the story decent enough, I wasn’t sure whether to like it or hate it. Undoubtedly it was an important point in the history of “superhero” comics, but I was never entirely sure about it’s point.
So of course I saw the movie, and it had remained roughly 85-90% loyal to the source material, which made it a bit boring for me since I generally knew what was going to happen most of the time (except for you know, that thing about the bad guy’s master plan… ).
I had time to kill before going to see my brother’s art exhibit at megamall, so I went and watched Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.
It was so bad. I could’ve been able to forgive the fact that they roughly 80% of the story shied away from Street Fighter canon, had the movie’s storyline actually been good. As it is, you can expect short, unsatisfying fight scenes, ridiculous background stories, disjointed plot/scenes (reminds me of Smallville and/or Heroes writing =/), terrible wigs and the ridiculous sight of Michael Clark Duncan getting beaned by a pineapple.
On a whim, my brother and I went to Trinoma to see Eagle Eye, barely catching the last full show (including the trailers of course, we love watching trailers). Our mom had said we’d like the movie and she still owed us one since it was her fault we watched Big Stan. So we’re giving her a chance to redeem herself.
The spoilerless review:
Since Eagle Eye trailers seem to be everywhere, you probably have some idea of at least the start of the story.
I caught Groundhog Day for the Nth time today on HBO (N roughly around 50). My father claims it’s his favorite movie of all time; high praise considering he watches every movie that comes out EVER. I’m not actually going to talk about the movie; it’s awesome, if you haven’t seen it, you should. You’re missing half your life.
If you had one day of eternity, what would you do?
