The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies - 8.5/10

X-men: Days Of Future Past - 8/10

 

Unfriended- 4/10. Liked the premise, but the execution should've been ALOT better.

 

It's not by Dreamworks, it's by Blue Sky Studios.

Monkey Kingdom - 8/10

Beautiful, informative, and amazingly shot but the narrative hampered it a lot.

 

Furious 7 8/10 a good action movie all the way through. It also had a good tribute to Paul Walker at then end which was worth giving it 1 extra point for.

 

Thor- 5.5/10

The movie has it's moments but overall I just find it to be kinda lackluster.

Between this and Iron Man 2 I'm starting to have a little regret over this marvel-thon though things should get better with the next few movies.

 

Run All Night - 7/10

 

Completely disagree. Thor is one of the best Marvel movies.

 

Agreed. However, I would at least give this film at least a 6 or a 6.5. Chris Hemsworth is a fantastic Thor, the Destroyer and Loki are great, and the rest of the cast is pretty good, but I find myself bored through most of the movie.

IMO Thor: The Dark World was somewhat of an improvement.

Hopefully, Ragnarok is great.

 

The movie gets worse as it goes along. It starts off really cool with all the stuff on Asgard and some good drama, then some good humor on earth but then I started to get bored of New Mexico, Loki's motivations become ???, the battle with the destroyer was trash and the climax was weak as hell.

 

See, I thought it got better. Sure, compared to Avengers, Guardians, and Winter Soldier it isn't as good anymore, but compared to the Phase 1 stuff leading up to Avengers, I think it is the best. It has amazing visuals with incredible costumes, it is a big budget movie that deals with Norse mythology (yes, it isn't accurate, but I'll take it over more bastardized Greek mythology movies), has excellent actors, has the perfect balance of comedy and drama, and develops them nicely. The only oddity is that it is under 2 hours when everything else is more.

Unfortunately, Dark World failed to be as good as the first one, which is a shame.

 

It's not that bad.

 

Iron Man 2 - 7/10

I'm mixed on IM2. I like that this is where things are starting to expand for the MCU as a whole, but IM2 sacrafices quite a bit of it's story for making room for all this. For one, a lot of new characters are introduced. One major problem was the main antagonist; Whiplash. He has a pretty good modernized background that ties himself to Tony's story, but he's not really much of a threat after Monaco and Whiplash's final battle was pretty shitty. The secondary antagonist isn't any better, as Justin Hammer was a total imbecile and did nothing for the story other than be Tony's foil. I would've much preferred a more closer comic adaptation of Hammer to present a true threat. Then there's Black Widow who was a waste of time as she has no character development and was just boring eye candy every time she was there IMHO. Her only purpose was to tease her character in preparation for The Avengers.
There is one major positive that balance things. Rhodey is much more mature and a good counterpoint to Tony's reckless personality. Watching their friendship deteriorate was very engaging. Replacing Terrrence Howard with Don Cheadle was an excellent choice and gave more seriousness and believability to Rhodey's character compared to how much of a joke he was in the first Iron Man film.
Looking at the advanced technology being showcased, including the new armors Tony made, and all the action sequences were all amazing and intense to see. The suit case armor transformation was the major highlight and was really cool to watch in action. The drone assault at Stark Expo was pretty exciting to follow right down to the showdown at the Japanese garden dome.
While the special effects and action scenes are impressive and will made, the story and characters take a huge hit and lack the compelling elements that make the first Iron Man film so successful.
Upon repeated viewings, watching IM2 in conjuction with The Avengers is the only thing that would make IM2 turn out to be actually excellent. By itself in the Iron Man trilogy it suffers a lot.

 

Every part of The Dark World that takes place AWAY from Earth, is pretty damn good. It is my sincere hope that Thor: Ragnarok takes place across the Nine Realms, except for Earth.

 

This^

 

Men In Black
8/10

 

Great casting, good direction, great artistic design, terrible, terrible script.


For myself...

A Boy and his Dog (1975): 7/10

This is one of those 70s "post-apocalyptic" dystopian movies like The Omega Man, that I had never heard of previously. It's about a young man and his dog who is, for some reason, telepathically linked to him and hyper-intelligent. This is also a movie that pulls no punches in how outright awful a post-apocalyptic scenario like it sets up would actually be, and if anything, wallows in it in a way that is somewhere between dark comedy and horror. It must have really pissed off some censors back in the day.

 

I think Loki's ambiguous motivations are kind of a reflection of his personality now. He was clearly setting up for the Avengers movie, but then when you consider the belief that he knew he couldn't win, it almost makes him more mysterious. I think he knew the entire avengers film that there was no way his army would win against that team. I think the only real oversight/mistake he made was in underestimating Kurse would kill his mother.

Then again, he needed his mother dead. She would have easily known he was impersonating Odin. And if he has the ability to sideline Odin off screen, I can't imagine Thanos would be too difficult to control/manipulate/sideline. I like not knowing what motivates Loki, I think it makes his character far more interesting than anyone else in the MCU.

 

Avengers 2

<5/10

 

Stitch! the Movie- 6.5/10

Watching the original recently made me wanna watch this since I hadn't seen it since about 2005. The movie is clearly straight to video quality but I found it entertaining. As a kid I was a huge fan of the TV show that followed.

 

FMA: Conqueror of Shamballa.
Best. Film. Ever.
I'm giving it a 20 out of 10.