The Fifth Element

"The Quick and the Dead" = Sharon Stone at her finest!

Such a fun movie. It’s one of those movies that whenever Khajiit sees’s it on TV he has to watch it.

Ditto! I've seen it at least a hundred times, and could watch it a hundred more!

I loved that movie! It is a ton of fun!

I just finished The Huntsman: Winter's War. It is not an especially good movie. But wow, the costumes are gorgeous! This movie made me fall in love with Emily Blunt.

Emily Blunt is attractive, fo sho.

The trailer made me want to watch it! What was bad about it?

It just doesn't seem inspired. It lacks a certain, something. It is more fun to look at - especially Emily Blunt - than anything else.

Did you ever see the first one?

It most definitely looked interesting to look at, but I do know what you mean about that feeling of inspired. Like when they do sequels they tend to be just trying to push quickly to catch the audiences that were excited still from the original (which actually was inspired) and milk as much money from them as they can before the viewer realizes (they are just riding the hype). So they throw some awesome graphics in to make up the deficit. (example: Jaws, Jurassic Park, etc). (or worse yet, D & D off GRRM's inspired story).

I did see Snow White And The Huntsmen. It was decent. Charlize Theron was amazing in it. Too good in fact. Because I was rooting for her instead of Snow White. She was just a much more interesting character, and Charlize is such a better actress than that Twilight chick who played Snow White. Chris Hemsworth was fun. He was fun in Winter's War too. He is a cool guy to just watch. I think he'd be a fun to just hang out with.



That is kind of it. It's like Jaws 2, or Jurassic Park 2, or Iron Man2. It just falls short somehow.

Understood. I really dread sequels, but always end up seeing them anyway if I loved the original; and usually come away with the same feeling of "... it was okay, but ..."

Just finished watching Blade Runner 2049. Such a wonderful movie!

HBOZN is apparently having a serial killer movie mini marathon. Just watched Silence of the Lambs and now they are playing From Hell. Khajiit won’t be going to sleep for another couple of hours!

If I watched it, I wouldn't be sleeping for a month!

Lol, oh they aren’t that bad.

Honestly, Khajiit has never found Hannibal Lecter all that creepy. Dangerous yes, but he’s really straight forward. The creepier things in SotL didn’t really involve him. Like Agent Starling’s boss at the FBI, Mr. Crawford. The way that guy looked at her and acted was just creepy to this one for some reason. Though it may have been because of the habit of the camera doing close ups on people’s faces during conversations that came off as weird.

The biting the face off of that guy still haunts me; but the worst thing to me was how he so slickly brought Agent Starling into trusting him to the point that she endangered herself despite all the warnings she had. He became so likeable that it blurred the lines and made him such a gray character that the evil in him was completely undescernable until he actually acted, and then it was like: "GAAAAAAH!"

I thought Hannibal was one of the best written bad guys in Hollywood; and even based the antagonist in my fic on him (Dagoth-Malan).

I think the boss kept looking at her like that because he could see she was falling under Hannibal's spell and ignoring all the warnings of known stuff about him, but I thought he couldn't tell if she was putting on an act to get Hannibal to trust her (as she was instructed to do) or if she was actually trusting Hannibal and going against all her FBI training in ignoring the protocols she was given for handling Hannibal. (at least that is what I thought was going through his head, but I could be wrong).

I don't like horror or thriller type movies because if they are good enough to scare me, I may not sleep afterward, lol. But the reason I ended up watching the Silencing of the Lambs was because Jodie Foster was in it. Jodie Foster has always been one of my all time favorite actresses, and if she is in something I will usually watch it; and haven't been disappointed yet. Her eyes are spectacularly expressive, and they make every role she plays feel believable. The chemistry between her character and Hannibal in this movie made the movie greater than it might have been with another actress that couldn't bring us through her inner turmoil as thoroughly as Jodie Foster was able to. (imho).

I agree, Hannibal is a very interesting character and Jodie Foster did a really good job (especially like when she is stumbling around in the dark at the end. The terror was real.)

Have you ever seen Taxi Driver with Robert Deniro? That movie featured a young Jodie Foster playing a jail bait prostitute

I saw A Quiet Place last night. I was disappointed, because the monsters were weak. The whole premise of the film is that monsters have wiped out the world, and just a few scattered survivors are left. The monsters are blind, and instead have hyper-hearing (though as it turns out, not hyper enough to hear someone breathing who is a few feet away). If someone makes a loud noise, any monster nearby comes barreling in and kills them. This is something they demonstrate early in the movie.

That got me thinking. Why not just dig a pit, fill it with spikes, and put a radio in it? The monsters would just run straight into it and impale themselves. Or why not just go to the side of a cliff, and do the same? They would all just run over the edge?

For a while I thought that the monsters might be bullet-proof. But at the end one is killed with a single shotgun blast (looked like a 12 gauge). So thinking conservatively, probably two or three 5.56 would put one down. Or one .308. And old Ma Deuce, well that would clearly rip them up just like a human. That is not even getting into 20mm gatling cannons, napalm, and 500 lbs bombs.

So how is it that these monsters wiped out most of the planet? I am not going to accuse the military of being a bunch of geniuses. I am pretty sure the US Army's first idea when faced with any threat is "shoot it". Turns out, that would work great! And the more noise you make doing it, the more monsters it would bring. This is very convenient, since you don't even have to hunt them down. They literally come running to their deaths like lemmings. There are not enough of them to simply overwhelm you with numbers, like zombies or xenomorphs do. There were only 2-3 of them in an area of several square miles in the film.

So I just could not take the movie seriously, since the monsters were just no threat. I could have wiped out all the ones in my city in just a few hours (longer if I took the time to dig some pits and sharpen up some stakes).

Yes, I think she won an award for that. But my favorite movie of all of hers was "Contact."




This had me in hysterics, boy would I love to watch a bad movie plot with you and hear your comments throughout! Your idea about the pit was spot on, I really wish the person who wrote the thing could hear you saying that, it would probably be like: "DOH! Why didn't I think of that?"

I don't know if the IQ ratio in Hollywood has declined or if they just think the public is so stupid they can't see plot holes a mile wide, but this movie could be a monument to either one, lol. Thanks for the review, that made my day even though I've never seen the movie, lol.

Yeah Khajiit remembers thinking that movie looked dumb when they were running trailers for it constantly when it was released. As for the military not being able to stop the monsters from wiping out most of humanity, this one can only assume the numbers of these things were ridiculously huge and they just “Zerg rushed” the world’s militaries. Some background would’ve been helpful

I have been watching (along with reading) The Terror. I am only two episodes in, but it is really good. Like the novel, the tv shows' attention to detail is fantastic. You can see the Preston Patent Illuminators built into the deck (basically little windows that project light down to the deck below). Everyone wears the Welsh Wigs (woolen caps), and so on. There are a lot of characters, and aside from the big three leaders it can be hard to keep track of who is who. Especially when they are bundled up in their outside slops.

The arctic looks amazing! It is the extra character in the show. Persephone would love it there. Cold, desolate, beautiful, and utterly unforgiving. The show really carries across how much the place does not want people to be there.

I really enjoy the whole man against nature presented here, and I remind myself that they had literally sailed off the edge of the map. They were the first Europeans to ever see this part of the world. They had no idea of what might be ahead of them. Except that somewhere out there was the fabled Northwest Passage, a way to sail to the Pacific. If they could escape the ice. The real world situation itself makes for an excellent story.

I am just getting to the actual Terror itself. Not the ship, but the thing on the ice that is hunting the crews of the two ships. So far it is vague, and horrific. It might be a white bear. But in the book it is plainly more than that, and so far the tv show has had a couple of supernatural elements already, with seamen seeing what appear to be ghosts. They have met the Inuit Lady Silence and her father, who seem inextricably tied to The Terror. Whether they are its enemy or ally remains to be seen. It is still very early yet, but it feels to me like The Terror is the rage of the Arctic itself. Incensed at the human interlopers, and relentlessly intent upon their extermination.

What was that, AMC?

It was on AMC back in the spring. I bought it on blu-ray a few days ago.

I am about half way through The Terror now. I think I am seeing the gist of the relationship between the Terror - which is called a Tuunbaq - and Lady Silence and her father.

Ok Khajiit thought he remembered that airing on AMC. This one had planned on checking it out but never did.

I finished The Terror book and tv series earlier this week. Each was good in its own way. The book was written ten years ago, before the Terror and Erebus (ships) were discovered, so some things in it do not match up with what we now know to be reality. The tv show took into account the fate of the vessels, so it is more up to date in that respect.

The book jumps around in time a lot in the beginning, which I did not like. I sometimes got confused by all of it. The series OTOH, was linear throughout, which made things a lot clearer.

My guesses about the monster - The Tuunbaq - turned out to be almost entirely correct. Except the whole were-bear possibility. Other than that, it is as I guessed.



All in all, I really liked the whole mythology and motivations behind the monster. But the trouble with it is that it often forgets that it is supposed to be the monster in a horror story. What I mean is that it is often absent for huge stretches of time. It just goes on vacation from killing or something. In most horror movies or novels you only get a few rare glimpses of the monster in the first third of the story or so. Once the second Act gets going it finally appears full on, and the story turns into a race between the monster killing everyone, or someone escaping/finding a way to defeat it.

But that never really happens here, in the book or show. The monster turns up for a few minutes here and there, and then vanishes for long stretches between (in the internal time within the story, months would go by without it being seen).

Both the book and tv show try to make up for this by filling up the rest with two other antagonists. The first is the simply the danger of the environment (which to be honest, is more than enough to kill people with ease). The second it the evil of humanity. I really liked the whole Man vs Nature parts. I think just it alone would have made for an excellent story. The Evils of Man part I was sort of iffy about. Mainly because the author naturally chose a gay person to be the big evil human (we know he is evil right off, because he is gay after all!).

Both book and show slightly offset this by also presenting a gay couple who are not evil. But they of course never act gay (kiss or anything else). Because that would be evil after all. The show does not even acknowledge that they were lovers. They just have a few knowing looks, and once in a while their hands brush against one another when passing a book between them. The book comes out and says they are gay, but they stopped having sex together years before and would never do so again. So that made it safe.

But OTOH, neither source really makes a big deal out of the gayness either. There is only one scene where the evil gay guy and another are caught inflangrante. Then we never see anything else. So you could almost forget he is gay. TBH, he might not even be gay, but pansexual. Or even aesexual. He strikes me as someone who would do anything to get what he wants, and anything to manipulate people.

In the book there is not really too much too him. The tv series did a lot more with him and the whole Evil of Man theme. By the end I could see that the real monster was not the Tuunbaq, it was the explorers. I don't want to give more spoilers, so I won't go into details about how it turns out. But both book and show had good and bad points to their endings. I think the show's end was more dramatic. But the book's was more satisfying (and long and drawn out, but it ends on a good note, and explains the Tuunbaq). The show never really explains the Tuunbaq. It evens embraces its ambiguity by having one character say to another that they were not meant to understand the mythology of it.

All in all it was a good book/show. But I think would have been better without the homophobia that the author seemed to feel was necessary.

I bought all the Jurassic Park/World movies on 4k. So I have been working my way through them. I had a lot of second thoughts about buying this series on 4k, because of the cgi. 25 year old special effects tends to look bad in 4k resolution. But so far so good.

I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom yesterday. I am pleased to say that rather than just being a rehash of the earlier movies like Jurassic World, this one finally started to think creatively about what a world with dinosaurs means. It does have a few homages to earlier films, but in this case it was just that, a clever tilt of the hat. Where in the previous film those parts were the only things good about the movie. It is a good watch.

I started watching the original Jurassic Park last night, and am almost done with it. This is the one I was most worried about appearance-wise, since it is the oldest movie. The parts where they used animatronics still look really good in 4k. The pure cgi parts do stand out, especially when creatures are in motion. But it is not as bad as I feared it might be. That is really saying a lot. Of course the normal scenes of just people and the landscape look fantastic! So it works on 4k.

It is still a good movie. But there are some really bone-headed things in it. Like Tyrannosaurs not being able to see you if you don't move. How do they keep from running into trees? RL T-Rexes had incredibly good eyesight, better than hawks. Almost all predators do, they need it to catch prey. They also had an extraordinary sense of smell. Dr. Grant and the kids should have been dead half way through the movie. I guess that is right up there with Indiana Jones jumping in the fridge to survive a nuclear bomb.

I am watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in years. The music is really sticking in my brain. It the same music from the original Star Wars film! I know John Williams did both. But in some places the scores are almost exactly the same, which just a few notes slightly changed here and there.

I like Marion Ravenwood. She’s fun. Also....

I used to love that movie; haven't seen it in forever, though.





The first (and imho the best) "Face-Melting" scene EVAH!

I am watching The Predator. The original. Funny thing is, the guy playing Hawkins, with the glasses, is the same person who directed the new Predator movie (which I understand is not very good). He wrote and/or directed a lot of other films, like Lethal Weapon.

I remember back when this came out, I thought that the actor playing Billy - Sonny Landham - would have been perfect to play Wolverine. This was of course over a decade before Hugh Jackman.

Get to da choppa!!!

Stick Around!

Bahahaha!

I watched Predator 2. Boy, that movie was awful. All the worst things in an 80s movie - stock, cardboard characters, excessive gore instead of a story, every handgun has some sort of scope or light attachment on it that makes it look like a toy. I am glad that is done with.

I am now watching Predators (the third film in the franchise). Much better. This time out I am recognizing a lot of the actors, who were not famous at the time. Of course there is the ugly guy in all the Roman Polanski movies - Adrien Brody. Him I knew. And there is no mistaking Danny Trejo or Laurence Fishburne. But now I recognize Walton Goggins from The Shield. Mahershala Ali from House of Cards and Luke Cage. And Topher Grace from lots of stuff.

I watched Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator 2 over the last few days. When I first heard about AVP I rolled my eyes at how cheesy it sounded. But I was pleasantly surprised at how perfectly the two franchises mesh together. I love the hand to hand Predator against Xenomorph battles. They are gods and monsters. Literally, as the first movie revealed.

Today I finished As Above, So Below. It turned out to be a delightful indie horror movie about an incredibly cute red-headed tomb raider archaeologist seeking the Philosopher's Stone. Most of it takes place in Paris' catacombs. We don't really see much of the real catacombs, with all the walls lined with skulls. It is more just underground passageways. But I don't mind, as it fits the story. They area they went into was specifically off the beaten path, where no one went (and ever returned from). That said, it is a neat underground ghost story. More of the characters survived than I expected too (rather than just the Final Girl as in most horror stories).

Look what just came in the mail today! I might start watching that. Or I might binge on the Alien movies, to make a Predator / Alien vs. Predator / Alien franchise trifecta.

Khajiit first became aware of AvP back in the 90’s when he played the AvP arcade game. It was a fun side scrolling “beat’em up” and you could play as either a Predator alien or a human. This one remembers chuckling to himself and thinking “What lame-o would actually choose a human?”

I saw the new Doctor Who. It was good. Really good. Jodie Whittaker was fantastic! She really nailed the Doctor right on the nose. The story was a pretty standard Doctor Who tale. Aliens on earth, causing a ruckus. The Doctor on the way to try to fix things. A pack of possible companions is gathered along the way. Someone dies (which happens a lot in the rebooted series) which kind of brings it all down to earth.

All in all well done. Watch it.

Glad to hear it...How's the new intro?

You know what, there was no intro. I kept expecting it to kick in after a few minutes, but it never did.

I haven't watched a feature-length film in forever. I did, however, recently view this short compilation of scenes drawn from a variety of movies and TV shows.

Season 3 of the Amazon Video show The Man in the High Castle.

I still have not gotten around to watching that, or Handmaid's Tale. The problem of being on Amazon, so I never think of it.

HBO’s Rome and I, Claudius.

Rome: Total War got me feeling like I’m an ambitious Roman nobleman out to conquer whole swathes of foreign land to support my political habits. Figured I’d watch these to learn a thing or two from the best.

#HouseBrutii #MeanAndGreenFightingMachine #LiterallyTheSupervillains

Titus Pullo!! Frickin’ punches his Centurion in the face during a frickin’ battle and lives to have great adventures. Just awesome.

This vid was hysterical! I couldn't stop watching it, it had me in stitches!!! Awesome find, Decrepit!

"The Dog", a Russian series, on Amazon. And also on Amazon, "Jack Ryan".

Just finished watching Gravity. Awesome movie.