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NEW: List some movies you've watched recently. Theatre, rental, TV... and give a */10

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MrSquished said:
I'm just not ready to commit three hours to it tonight.
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Trust me, unless you have incredible patience, it won't be three hours.

It will be one hour at most and then you start skipping ahead and spend some time tolerating some painfully amateurish "this could be the end of the world" scenes near the end while waiting to see more of what happens in the sky.
 
Busboys

Starring and written by David Spade & Theo Von. For some reason I had fairly high hopes for this. I loved Spade in Joe Dirt, and Theo says all sorts of hilarious shit on his podcast. But when's the last time David made a good movie? And I've never seen Theo do anything besides a podcast.

This movie was terrible, but maybe so bad it was almost decent? After watching it, I went on RT, 250+ audience 71%. 71%'s not exactly good, but it seems incredibly high for what I watched. It did have a few really funny parts, but the fucking plot was so damn stupid. Spade & Von clean shit out of septic pipes, and Spade's GF is stolen by a waiter at a restaurant while they're out on a date. Spade vows to get her back, and his plan is to become a waiter. So him and Von become busboys at a Mexican restaurant in hopes they will get promoted to waiters so he can win his baby back.

There are a few good cameos, MMA fighter Nate Diaz has a couple scenes, and he's basically himself. It needed more Nate for sure. And Chris Elliot was good and weird as always, Bobby Lee was Bobby Lee, and Trevor Wallace was obnoxious as ever. And there were 3-4 guys who did stand up on Kill Tony.

I don't know how this got greenlighted to be released to theaters, this is a direct to cable movie for Tubi or something. I'm not gonna lie though, the curveball at the end was actually not bad.

The 1st bad sign, I walked in about 1 minute after it started to hear Kid Rock's Cowboy playing. I should have turned around before I got to my seat and left at that moment lol.

This was no Joe Dirt though.
 
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It was 1992, and audiences were howling with laughter.
On screen, Joe Pesci stumbled through an Alabama courtroom as Vinny Gambini—a Brooklyn personal injury lawyer who'd failed the bar exam six times, never tried a criminal case, and showed up wearing a maroon velvet suit that made the judge's face turn purple.
It was a comedy. A farce. Entertainment.
Nobody expected law schools to start teaching from it.
But that's exactly what happened.
Within a few years of My Cousin Vinny's release, something strange started appearing in law school syllabi across America: a comedy film listed alongside Supreme Court cases and legal textbooks.
Criminal procedure professors assigned it. Evidence courses screened it. Trial advocacy instructors made it required viewing.
Because buried inside this slapstick comedy about an incompetent lawyer was something almost impossible to find in Hollywood: perfect legal procedure.
The discovery happened gradually. A defense attorney watched it on cable and paused mid-scene. "Wait—that cross-examination is actually correct." An evidence professor noticed the impeachment technique was textbook-accurate. Trial lawyers realized the expert witness sequence was flawless.
By the late 1990s, legal scholars were writing academic papers about it. The American Bar Association was recommending it. Judge Joseph Bellacosa of the New York Court of Appeals called it "particularly rich in its use of the Constitutions, rules of evidence, civil and criminal procedure."
A Joe Pesci comedy had become the gold standard for courtroom accuracy.
Here's why that's remarkable:
Most legal dramas sacrifice accuracy for drama. A Few Good Men features a climactic speech that would get you disbarred. The Verdict has procedures that make real lawyers cringe. Even prestige courtroom films choose compelling storytelling over legal reality.
My Cousin Vinny did both.
The plot seems simple: two college kids are wrongly accused of murder in rural Alabama. Vinny Gambini—their cousin who just passed the bar after six attempts and has never set foot in a courtroom—shows up to defend them.
He's a disaster. He insults the judge. He doesn't know basic procedure. He wears ridiculous outfits. Every scene suggests his clients are doomed.
Then the trial actually starts, and something shifts.
The prosecution presents two eyewitnesses who claim they saw the defendants' car fleeing the murder scene at high speed. In most movies, the hero lawyer would give a passionate speech about reasonable doubt.
Vinny does what real lawyers do: he destroys their testimony using physical evidence and logic.
The first witness claims he saw the car while cooking breakfast. Seems solid—until Vinny cross-examines him about the grits. How long were they cooking? What type? Instant or regular?
Through relentless, methodical questioning, Vinny establishes that regular grits take twenty minutes to cook properly. The witness's timeline is impossible. He couldn't have seen what he claimed.
The courtroom erupts when Vinny asks: "Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?"
It's hilarious. It's also perfect impeachment technique—using specific details to expose impossible testimony.
The second witness is an elderly woman who claims she saw the car clearly. Vinny doesn't call her a liar. Instead, he establishes through gentle questioning that she needs thick glasses to see distances, wears them inconsistently, and couldn't possibly have identified a speeding car from her window at that distance.
He uses her own testimony to destroy her credibility. No drama. No shouting. Just methodical cross-examination.
Then comes the sequence that law professors obsess over.
Vinny calls his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito, as an expert witness on automobiles. The prosecutor immediately objects—she's not qualified.
The judge demands her credentials.
What follows is two minutes of textbook-perfect expert witness qualification. Mona Lisa lists her father's career as a mechanic, her childhood working in his shop, her training, her certifications, her specific expertise in American automotive engineering from 1963 to 1972.
It's exactly how expert witnesses establish credibility in real trials.
Then Vinny examines her about the tire marks at the crime scene. He asks open-ended questions. He lets her explain the technical details. He builds logically to the conclusion: the tire marks physically could not have come from his cousin's car—the vehicle lacked the mechanical specifications to make those marks.
When the prosecutor tries to cross-examine her, he fails spectacularly. She knows more about cars than anyone in that courtroom, and it shows.
Legal experts point to this scene as a masterclass in expert witness examination. The qualification. The direct examination. The failed cross-examination. All of it tracks exactly how real trials work.
Even the comedy comes from accurate legal procedure. Judge Haller holds Vinny in contempt repeatedly—for inappropriate clothing, for addressing the judge incorrectly, for procedural violations. This isn't exaggerated. Real judges enforce these standards exactly this way.
The voir dire sequence where Vinny questions potential jurors? Accurate. The discovery violations? Correct. The objections and their legal basis? Precise.
Screenwriter Dale Launer wasn't a lawyer, but he spent months researching. He interviewed defense attorneys, studied trial transcripts, consulted legal experts. He wanted the legal framework to be bulletproof so the comedy could work.
He succeeded beyond imagination.
Marisa Tomei won an Oscar for her performance. But the film's legacy extends far beyond entertainment.
Today, it's cited in legal journals and continuing legal education seminars. Harvard Law School has screened it. Trial advocacy courses use clips to demonstrate proper technique. The National Institute for Trial Advocacy references it in training materials.
A 2008 survey of lawyers ranked it the seventh-best legal film ever made for accuracy—ahead of prestige dramas and documentaries.
Because My Cousin Vinny understood something most legal films miss: real trials aren't won by dramatic speeches. They're won by mastering procedure, understanding evidence, and methodically building a case.
Vinny Gambini looks like a buffoon in his leather jacket and attitude. But watch carefully, and you see him doing everything right: he studies the evidence, he identifies inconsistencies, he prepares his witnesses, he follows proper examination technique.
The joke isn't that he's incompetent. The joke is that everyone—including the audience—assumes he's incompetent because he doesn't look like their idea of a lawyer.
Thirty years later, law students still watch Vinny stumble through that Alabama courtroom, laughing at his mistakes—until they realize he's been building an airtight defense the entire time using flawless legal strategy.
It's a comedy about an underestimated lawyer who wins through actual competence.
And accidentally, it became the most legally accurate courtroom film Hollywood ever made.
 
I was thinking about Strange Days today, it's time for a rewatch.

The Boys should probably have been a season shorter, but shit is happening this season, and as much as it's easy to say it's repetitive in just showing the absurdity and lunacy of the right wing cult, I mean, we are still experiencing that on a daily basis, so it's been going on a really long while too, but then a Boys episode completely predicted the future
- it's just like yeah, the show is still good and just reflecting our society.
 
Wrecked - 5.5/10 - Starring Adrien Brody

Adrien Brody gives an amazing performance but the movie just wasn't that interesting and I was perplexed by his inability to find his out faster.

Brody wakes up in car that careened off a road and he is now trapped in a car with a broken leg under the dashboard and is unable to free himself. No cell phone, no idea where he is as he suffered a major concussion, and the story begins to unfold as his memory comes back...

Can he exit the car, who else is in the car with him, where is he, and of course he descends into madness...
 
The Offer (2022) - 7.5/10

Entertaining mini-series about the production of The Godfather. Mostly historical, but they took some liberties with the mafia parts.

Interesting thing is that user reviews for this are much higher than critical reviews. I think users have it mostly right. But now I'll need to re-watch the Godfather trilogy.
 
manly said:
But now I'll need to re-watch the Godfather trilogy.
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I have increasingly started avoiding gangster/drug cartel/mafia movies because I cannot believe that society lets them exist in this day and age and instead the world lets innocents be slaughtered under the guise of ensuring security and worse, when the leaders of the two nations involved are no different than gangsters desperately trying to stay in power.
 
i was hoping to watch something decent, and instead i wound up watching

Absolutely Anything - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1727770/

which is, essentially, Britain's version of The Greatest American Hero.

Simon Pegg is a schoolteacher who thirsts for Kate Beckinsale. There's also John Cleese and the rest of the Pythons, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard, and it's directed by Terry Jones.
The production is overcomplicated, and the entire film is a constant series of the same exact joke; Pegg gets these superpowers, but is an idiot and still manages to complicate his life with them.

Yeah i really wouldn't recommend this. IF you are a fan of Beckinsale, she looks better here than she did in that vampire movie, but the film itself is really poorly made. The script goes nowhere, it sets itself up for a very easy resolution from basically the first 20 minutes and then just never gets there, but just crams these idiotic jokes in over and over again. How many times can you laugh at the "djinn misunderstands a command" joke?

5/10
 
The Infidel - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424003/reference/

Very tame comedy about a bri'ish muslim who finds out he was adopted .. and jewish. It's kinda variations on the same joke throughout, not as much as ^ Absolutely Anything, and occasionally funny, but lead Omid Dijadi is funnier as a stand-up comedian and doesn't translate well to the long format of a film.

5.8/10 ? yeah.
 
Clerks 2 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424345

The not-as-horrible-as-Clerks-3 one, but also the nowhere-near-as-good-as-Clerks-1 one.

Essentially it's a thin-veiled romance involving chubby Brian O'Halloran and hot 27yo Rosario Dawson, with a coat of paint provided by the vulgarities of Jeff Anderson ("Randall"), and has none of the genius of the first film. Even Jay & Silent Bob are bad.

6/10 which is probably too high, but you'll likely want to see with your own eyes once you watch the original.
This film has a HIGHER score on IMDb than the first film.
 
Saw 3 movies at AMC yesterday

Fuze - About a bank heist, where they use a huge bomb to have the city shut down. It had a good story, a bunch of plot twists and well acted. The ending was weird but I enoyed the movie.


The Evil Dead 45 year re-release. I saw this decades ago, but I sure as shit don't remember it. The low budget early 80s FX's that look exactly like claymation are so fucking great. This is a classic, terrible acting and all. And every horror cliche is in effect here. I especially laughed when Ash's GF got a #2 Pencil shoved 2 inches into her heel by their friend who was flying around the room like a demon. Then what couldn't have been more than an hour later Ash goes in the room to check on her and she's sleeping peacefully. If I'm in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and in the middle of the night I hear "come and join us" out the window the last thing I'm going is going out the backdoor and trying to find who was saying it. With the WTF stupidness of all his friends, they all deserved to die. Bruce Campbell's awesome here, his extreme over acting's perfect. It was so much fun, and when it was over almost the whole theater was clapping. I go to AMC about 4 times a week and people almost never clap after a flick. I think OBAA is the last movie I remember cheering when it was over. This is a top 10 best worst movies ever.


Fight Club 4k re-issue - I'm probably one of the only 50+ year olds who hadn't seen this. I didn't like it at 1st, but it really grew on me and I ended up loving it and the plot twist was holy shit perfection. Maybe I missed some of the signs, but when I realized what was actually happening it caught me completly off guard. I'm sure there were some small clues I just didn't notice. Oddly, nobody clapped when it was over. After I was left really pondering the whole movie and what the message was for a few hours. As opposed to Evil Dead where I just thought about how cheesy it was.
 
Watched Project Hail Mary last night shortly after finishing the book.

Good movie, same general tone as The Martian in that it was a generally light hearted, positive movie with some intense moments (which tracks given the same guy wrote both books).

Standard non-Imax theater in a dead mall was surprisingly populated, other theater that we planned to go to sold out seating. So this one is getting butts in seats despite not being a kids movie, which says something.

General premise is that the Sun is dimming because of an extraterrestrial single celled organism that feeds on sunlight has taken up residence near our star. Humans discover that every star system around Sol is experiencing the same issue except the neighboring Tau Ceti system. A mission is put together to go to the neighboring system and discover why that star is not infected while every other one is.

One place where the Book (and The Martian) do a better job than PHM is getting the science for why any of this works into the screen. Ofc TM is a lot more grounded so the science doesn't get as weird as it can in PHM, but the movie definitely glazed over the more complicated stuff from the book for the sake of viewability, but it did rob something from the film.

If we're going to watch competence porn of some guy science the shit out of impossible situations, I want to see some of the science and thought process, not just the procedural stuff.

Ryan Gosling also plays the main character a bit more slapstick than Matt Damon in The Martian, despite the fact that they're both effectively the same character with some minor changes in background. I personally found the character and their thought process more calm and logical in the book, but again for a visual medium Gosling's performance works pretty well.

I can say that I appreciate that the movie had a willingness to be uncompromising with the ending. No ambiguity, no hanging plot threads, no "leave it to the viewer's imagination" BS. The movie ends with some finality for the characters and I didn't realize how badly I needed that.

Anyhow, I don't want to ruin anything for anyone that might be going to see it, but it's worth watching either in theaters if you miss the solid spectacle/group experience or wait for streaming in which case it's a no brainer.
 
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The wretched.
A supernatural horror movie. Had quite a few good moments of feeling horror.

The NUN II
Very good movie.
I have the first movie on DVD.
Supernatural horrormovies with a religous context can be good for an evening of fun.


Good story. Good effects. Good acting.
 
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