Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler So what are you watching tonight?

Oh, I watched it a handful of times growing up. I remember my dad liked it a lot. He liked a lot of bad movies.

So bad they are good.


Yeah, I watched it a bunch as a kid too. I don't think I had developed any kind of taste when I was a kid. I watched anything.

I like Disney movies, too. I was glad to see a return to hand drawn animation with The Princess and the Frog. Saw it in the theater!

Same here. I still exercise bad taste, but usually it's for the sake of good audio. Speaking of which, I still have to watch my copy of U-571. I watched the depth charge scene, and that's all.

If you drop the movie in the toilet you get a gross approximation of a depth charge?

Close-Up Magic Week on the Late Show has been entertaining. I wish I could believe the magicians weren't performing real magic, but unfortunately I'm simple-minded and can only see their direct link with Satan.

I just watched the Blu-ray of “A Bug’s Life.” Surprisingly I had hadn’t seen it yet. Equally surprising it just never got out of the chalks for me.

First off the video quality was superb. Colours are vivid and the look is sharp and clear though it’s seems quite dated compared to something like the new Tinker Bell movies.

The audio quality was also outstanding. Everything was crystal clear with pretty good LFE and excellent discrete surround effects. It defaulted to DTS-ES for playback which I later read was because it was matrixed 6.1. I tried several other surround modes including DSX and PLIIz but found the DTS-ES sounded the best. The other surround modes lost some of the surround effects sounding front heavy.

Overall the movie just sort of fell flat for me. Typically I would really like this sort of movie. It even got 91% on the Tomatometer (95% from the pro critics). I think it was the voice of the main character that did it in for me. There was just nothing there making me want to cheer for him. OTOH many of the supporting characters were enjoyable making the movie passable for me but overall I despite being about a 90 minute movie it seemed more like 2 hours. Worth watching but I can’t see wanting to revisit it.

Knowing

I can see why it got mixed reviews. Personally, I thought it was poorly conceived and poorly executed. Consider me not a fan of Alex Proyas.

As for A Bug's Life, I liked it back in the day, but I still haven't watched more than a couple scenes from my Blu-ray copy of it. I also didn't have a problem with Dave Foley's voice. Of course, I already liked Dave Foley. I would agree that the movie seems longer than it is, though.

Just watched the Blu-ray of “Inglourious Bastards.”

This is a great movie visually. Colours seem very natural and blacks are quite deep which helps bring out the contrast quite well. Despite being a “war movie” there are a wide range of colours especially in the variety of Nazi uniforms depicted.

The audio quality is also great. Gunfire, though limited, is very sharp. The surround channels don’t call attention to themselves but add nicely to the ambience of the various scenes.

This is a movie I both love and hate. When it’s working it’s great like in the opening scene but when it’s not working the scenes drag out becoming tedious. Sadly some scenes, had another director made them, might have worked better for me because of their ending twist, but come up short here since the “payoff” is predictable Tarantino. Even some of those scenes would have been worth the “payoff” had they just been shorter.

The movie does have two saving graces for me. The surprise one is subtitles. I hate reading subtitles but here they are on the screen more than long enough. So long in fact that they often allowed me to fast forward through some of the tedious dialogue while still being able to read them. The other real pleasure is the performance of Chistoph Waltz. Were it not for his portrayal of Colonel Hans Landa I would be saying how much I hated wasting my time on this movie.

Time and schizophrenia are IMO the movies two biggest problems. Many of the scenes drag out way to long loosing their dramatic effect. Also the multifaceted story line just doesn’t weave together for me the way it does in “Pulp Fiction.” This would have worked much better for me if it had been made into two movies instead of one. This is a movie I would love to watch again but only if I could edit it down to my own taste. Worth watching once IMO but no repeat value here.

Invictus

Enjoyable enough movie. Clint Eastwood does a solid job, as usual. I like the texture and color of the film. There are even some decent bass moments involving planes and some slow-motion rugby sequences.