Hot Takes

Call me crazy, but American Beauty is only a good film, not a great one. This is kind of hard for me to say given that I loved it for a long time, but I rewatched it recently and found it a little lacking. As a sort of dark comedy I think it works really well, and I love Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, and Chris Cooper, but all the material involving the teenage characters strikes me as weak. Whenever they're the focus, I just kind of wait for the movie to get back to the goods. You can tell the film was written by a middle-aged dude because the adult characters are way more nuanced and interesting. Ricky especially bothers me, particularly how the film treats everything he sees as brilliant poetry.

Yup. American Beauty is a GREAT comedy. Cooper is looking at it from the wrong point-of-view. All the characters are ridiculous but they have a psychological reason for being over-the-top as opposed to being strictly for laughs. 

Do people still think that Blade 2 is better than Blade 1? I understand the appeal, but I think Blade 1 has a better balance of story and action. Blade 2 feels excessive to me. Combine that with Guillermo Del Toro's visual indulgences and I have to wonder if the script was longer than 30 pages. I'm not hating on Blade 2. There's a lot of awesome things about it. It just doesn't flow as well as the original. And it doesn't have any iconic scenes either. The opening club scene from part 1 is the highlight of the series.

Same here.

That club scene is really cool, but the first movie just kind of turns into a fairly run of the mill late-90s comic action movie from there.  Blade 2 on the other hand is just so jam-packed for of interesting (and yes, indulgent) ideas that it makes up for it and I think the distribution of action and quality coreography is more even.  That having been said both movies have their flaws and there are probably more sort of groan-worthy misfires throughout the second movie.  IDK, I wouldn't hold up either film as a classic or anything but the Del Toro-isms make 2 stand out more.

Sweeney Todd holds up better than I expected. If you can get past the main actors not being great singers, it's actually a pretty good movie.

Love that song.

I haven't watched Jacked Brown in a long time. Maybe I should go dust it off.

Always cause for celebration.

Preposterous.

That said, both movies were way below what you'd expect from a Wolverine movie.

I quite liked the second Wolverine movie. The first one was total trash man. You ARE crazy.

I never saw Origins and don't intend to. The Wolverine was pretty pointless but not a bad movie.