Rate The Last Movie You Saw

A collection of movie clichés told along with some pretty pictures, Dandelion is less than the sum of its parts.

KiKi Layne is very good in the title role, and she seems to have a nice singing voice (I'm being generous and assuming there wasn't a lot of electronic enhancements made to her singing).

But the whole story is one cliché after another about the life of an up-and-coming performer and the mistakes they make along the way - especially of the romantic variety.

The whole cast is very good, and they deserved a better movie.

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

1st Rewatch...Despite some logistical issues, this film is still worth watching for the thunderous performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

2nd Rewatch...This nail biter about a divorced mom and her daughter being terrorized by three thugs as they lock themselves in their new panic room is well worth the time thanks to David Fincher's direction and the performances of Jodie Foster, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam.

For Those in Peril, 2013

Aaron (George MacKay), is the only survivor of a disaster at sea that killed all of the rest of the crew of the boat he was on, including his older brother, Michael (Jordan Young). Living with his bereaved mother, Cathy (Kate Dickie), Aaron becomes obsessed with the idea that his brother and the other young men were taken by a sea monster from local folklore.

I was really pleasantly surprised by this movie. Between the performances and the way it unfolds its story, it had me fully engaged beginning to end.



FULL REVIEW

I cannot believe you didn't mention Kristen Stewart!!

Never heard of it, but it’s in my watchlist now. I do recall singing For Those in Peril on the Sea in our English grade school.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes follows the growing tension between the surviving humans and the increasing and evolving ape community led by Caesar (Andy Serkis). Set 10 years after the events of Rise, it follows a new group of humans led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) and Malcolm (Jason Clarke), both of which have differing views about how to handle the apes pushing them to decide between conflict and war, or a tense truce with the "animals". Meanwhile, Caesar also has to deal with unrest within his own group.

This is probably the third or fourth time I watch this, and I've always held it up as the best of the trilogy. A recent rewatch of Rise closed the gap, but this one remains the superior one. Even though we have to acclimate ourselves to new human characters, Clarke, Keri Russell, and especially Oldman do a great job. However, it is the wonderful job of Serkis and the VFX team what keeps pushing that through line of apes being much more than "animals". The "humanity", for lack of a better word, with which they imbue these apes is stellar.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Between a recitation of "Do Not Stand by My Grave" and "For Those in Peril on the Sea", this movie had quality lyrical gravitas. And I respect that they included both pieces in full (I think) and not just the old "someone reads the two most famous lines and that's all the audience has patience for."

T.I.M., 2023

Abi (Georgina Campbell) is a prosthetics engineer who relocates to the countryside with her husband Paul (Mark Rowley) in order to work on a problem facing a tech company’s new android product, T.I.M. She and Paul, reeling from Paul’s recent infidelity, are given their own TIM (Eamon Farren) for routine tasks around the house. But before long, TIM seems to have formed an interest in Abi that’s far beyond his intended programming.

Predictable and frustrating, this is an underwhelming entry in the “technology run amok” horror subgenre.



FULL REVIEW

South Pacific (1958)

My Spy: The Eternal City (2024) Watched on Prime. This isn't as good as the first one, but I still liked it. Chloe Coleman is quite charming and does a wonderful job here. She looks even prettier than ever. She has good chemistry with Dave Bautista, who is also effective. The rest of the cast is mixed, with a couple performances falling flat and others being decent. The story is the typical family friendly action comedy, not groundbreaking but still serviceable. There are a few laughs and a couple entertaining action sequences, as well as some sweet, heartfelt moments towards the end. I would be down for a third My Spy movie.

Bay of Angels - 7/10
Good movie about addiction, but also how people use each other.

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Stingray Sam (2009) I appreciate the creativity and ambition of this unusual film. Not everything works and sometimes it just feels weird for the sake of being weird. However, there are some delightfully quirky moments that are enjoyable. The songs are hit and miss for me. The performances are definitely interesting. Worth checking out for the oddness of it.

These days, I was watching some high-quality anime spinoff movies.

Date A Live Mayuri Judgement (2015) 6/10



A movie of the popular harem franchise, Date Alive, it is set between the 2nd and the 3rd season of the TV series. In this movie, they introduce a new character; however, she has almost no personality as she is basically a ghost who is supposedly the amalgam of the spirits of the other girls of the franchise. The art and animation were nice, and I really liked the visual style of Date Alive, but the execution was not very good.

Date A Bullet: Dead or Bullet & Nightmare or Queen (2020) 8/10


Now, this movie was so much better than the previous one. It's an original story that uses one character from the Date Alive franchise, Kurumi, who is the most interesting of all the girls in the franchise: she has a very cool personality and is a villain/anti-hero character in the original anime show. In this movie, they let her be the main character, and the quality of the art and animation has been upgraded greatly over the previous installments of Date Alive.

ARIA The BENEDIZIONE (2021) 7/10


This is a very nice movie; despite being a spinoff story from the Aria franchise, it suffers from being highly derivative of the franchise. Yet, since Aria is among the greatest manga/anime franchises out there, with amazing world-building and characters, I would rate this movie 7/10, mainly because the TV anime is 10/10. However, this movie has superior art and animation, especially because it was made 15 years after the TV show and features better technology.

ARIA The CREPUSCOLO (2021) 8/10


Released in the same year as BENEDIZIONE, CREPUSCOLO is another Aria movie directed by Junichi Satou (he directed most seasons of Sailor Moon back in the early 90s). I liked this movie even more than BENEDIZIONE, mainly because I like the characters this movie focuses on a bit more, as well as their own particular struggles. Although both Aria movies are too derivative of the TV show from the mid 2000s, they might serve as a good introduction to the franchise to people who do not have time to invest watching over 50 episodes of Aria.

Watching the latest anime reminds me that I prefer the art style of circa 2010 anime over the 2020s because the latest anime tends to have such a high level of detail that the characters look artificial, like porcelain dolls, instead of cartoons, which hurts my immersion. This problem was present in the two Aria movies, although I didn't have that problem in the Date A Bullet movie.

Let's get the kink going!

Motel
I like documentaries like this.. I've even stayed at a place like this for a while.

Twisters is one heck of a wild ride.

Ingeniously retrofitted for the 2020s, the standalone sequel pretty much gets everything right, starting with the choice of director: Lee Isaac Chung, whose previous movie was the wonderful Minari.

It's also a movie that has been perfectly cast; Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell have charisma to spare and great chemistry. The great supporting cast also includes future Superman, David Corenswet, Katy O'Brian and Anthony Ramos.

But more importantly, the VFX are absolutely outstanding, and best enjoyed in a premium format like IMAX.

The Last Stop in Yuma County -

This thrilling throwback neo-noir proves that Jim Cummings deserves to be a household name. I would go so far to say that his performance as an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation recalls how Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogart played roles like this. It also proves that veteran character actor Richard Brake should be a household name if he is not one already. Besides making his bank robber look like one scary dude, I love how he makes every word send a chill down your spine and not just the profanity. Okay, enough about the acting, especially since the whole cast shines down to Barbara Crampton's witty police secretary.

If you also love this genre, you undoubtedly love the ones mostly set in one place. This one's sun-drenched, barely functional to the point of dangerous diner is one I'll always remember. To make its uncertainty all the better, it's more prison than eating establishment thanks to the gas station's pumps being empty and the fuel truck being late. Luckily, in addition to all this suspense and dread, there's just the right amount of quality comic relief. If it's not Nicholas Logan's hapless muscle to Richard Brake's brains, it's Crampton and the rest of the adorable police station that reminded me of the one from Twin Peaks.

This movie succeeds at doing what my favorite noirs and neo-noirs do: showing what happens when you do what the devil on your shoulder suggests. It's not perfect, but the few issues I have with the movie are nitpicks. Is period accuracy that important? Probably not, but it was still hard to determine if it takes place in the '60s or '70s despite a memorable movie name drop. Also, bad decisions are what this genre is all about, but a few of them are of the convenient variety. It still remains a likely candidate for my top ten of 2024. It's also one of the more impressive directorial debuts of this decade so far.