Love and... Thunderstruck!

Hey. new Marvel, so new Marvel review!

First off, a lot has been made of this "just" being two hours, and yet... that works. It's amazing these days that you can tell a superhero movie in under ten years, but this gets a lot done in that two hours. Okay, some things are summarised or tokenised into one example scene, but mostly those are background details to get to the actual story being told.

Which is... pretty good. Thor goes on a journey to confront aspects of his past, but that could be any movie. The focus here is, of course, Jane Foster and it's great to see Natalie Portman back with something decent to do, so sure, more of that. That said, it would have been nice for Tessa Thompson to have more to do as well. I didn't even recognise Christian Bale beneath that makeup, but there's no mistaking Russell Crowe eating all the scenery.

One critique, Taika lays on the humour a little too much at times. Sure, the fun is funny but can adversely undercut some moments.

I'm sure y'all gonna go see this, but one final point of note: the running time seems to be either 119 minutes (google) or 126 minutes (imdb). As far as I can tell, mine was 119 (including credits), but maybe there might be different cuts around.

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Horseplay!

Behold the power of three people who don't have anything to do, do absolutely nothing! We wander around, sort of do something, and nothing comes of it. Although I do quite like what happens in hour two, that's something innovative that occurred to me, and it worked! Wow!

And as for my question at the end "what have we done in the meantime?" ... NOTHING! This is the third to last adventure of the season, and as yet, three years later, no more seasons have happened. Logan lost interest and that is always a sign of nothing is going to happen and if something does it'll be a brand new universe of stuff. So that might happen some decade...

It's one of those titles that just comes up without effort. It just had to be.

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Foul Sense

If you talk about movies and are a New Zealander, sooner or later you talk about Peter Jackson, and refer to his earlier works. Now, I have seen Meet the Feebles, but not his earlier pieces... until now, I have seen the first one shot over four years... and it shows.

Cannibal aliens have come to New Zealand (as they do) and it's up the Boys to put paid to them. Which involves a lot of guns, brains, and splatter.

And it starts off in Maraka Bay! Don't tell me that's not where they are, I was just there a few weekends ago... it hasn't changed much. But then they head to the hills and there are certainly plenty of them around, but I can't say I recognised any particular other locations.

This has a high splatter and gore... but I have to say I expected more. Maybe when I watch the next one. But hey, cheap budget! And as for the script... no, there wasn't one. And yeah, I can tell. Lots of random scenes that feature running around. But again, first feature. And then there is the bad audio overdubbing. Ah, the earliness of it all!

Maybe I've had this overhyped but I can't say I was that overtaken by this. Even taking the age into account. It's... fine.

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Sprig-Can!

I remember the Spriggan movie. I liked it, really good. This was way back in the day when you actually had a good chance of keeping on top of Americanised Japanese Anime Movies. There weren't many, so it was good.

I picked up the Spriggan manga, because I wanted to enjoy more. There were 6 stories in 3 volumes, with lots of different stories, but all about Spriggan trying to do something good while beating up back guys (at least, presented as bad guys). Decent manga.

And so when I heard that Spriggan was on Netflix... I just figured it was the movie finally come to Netflix. Yeah, I might get around to watching that. And then I pressed Go...

And it's the full season of anime of all the stories of Spriggan! As far as I can tell/faintly remember, this is all the six stories as what was in the manga, in 45 minute chunks (so the 90 minute movie is compressed into half the time, no bad thing really).

Go, enjoy... and let's see if they can squeeze out another season and I can return to this world again.

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Dam Dog

Hey, want a surreal movie around 30 years in the making?

We open with an excerpt from Leviticus, about god making a city a ruin... is this that city? We have an assassin going down into a place of cheap death and short nasty lifes, and attempting to do something about it. But not a lot. And he's not the only one as we see some other attempts, but the baby inside him is useful for creating monoliths and...

No, I have no idea what's going on. At least, in a metaphorical sense. I can see what's happening on screen, with various creatures moving about, but what it ultimately means, I can't really say.

This is a stop motion movie from Phil Tippert that was started a long time ago, put on hold, then brought back and successfully Kickstartered (and yes, there are Kickstarter backers). This took a long time, but... it's still very cohesive in style and story (such as one can follow it).

It's on Shudder, so you could also check out other horror movies, but yes, note that this movie does go into the gross and gory often and hard.

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Operation Mincedmeet

I was expecting a hilarious Weekend at Bernie's style romp with using a corpse to fool Hitler, not this.

The Allied Forces need to take Sicily, so the Germans had to be distracted. One option was Operation Trojan Horse, to use a dead body washed up to leak faked papers to make the Germans believe the attack was on Greece instead. This is the story of that body and the operation behind it.

Which has a bit more romance and intrigue that you might normally expect, and not just on the side of trying to fool the Germans (indeed, that part is nearly rushed through). The personal story gives the movie more personal stakes, but either the movie gets limited by what actually happens or you go on entire flights of fancy that just end up taking over everything. I suspect they err more on the former than the latter.

And quite the cast to carry it all off. Colin Firth. Matthew Macfayden. Penelope Wilton. And a rather surprising performance from Mark Gatiss, in that I was surprised to see him in a non Doctor Who / non Steven Moffat production.

Decent movie, which can easily be seen on Netflix... if possibly not New Zealand's Netflix...

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They're Bad Guys, but are they bad guys?

The latest animated feature, with an art style that seems to weirdly mix 2D and 3D,

They are the bad guys of the animal world, wolf, shark, snake, etc. But are they all bad? Can they be good? And what if they really were?

There are a lot of familiar elements here and nothing will really surprise you, but I will give that the elements are mixed together in a way I can't immediately placed as copying elsewhere, so there is that.

Sam Rockwell has the lead voice, and kinda disappointing that we don't get him dancing. There are other good vocal performances too, so much so that it doesn't feel like DreamWorks hired them because of their name, but actually because they can vocally act.

Not terrible, but I doubt anyone will remember this in a month or so.

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