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Ben Affleck was really good in this.

Yes, I’ve been watching that a little at a time for the last two weeks. I really like it so far, not quite at the half-way point yet.

Also, I finished watching Hotel Transylvannia 4. I’m not sure what else Sony Animation makes, but I like the Hotel Transylvannia series of movies. They’re surprisingly funny for adults, and this one was the first animated movie that had my son riveted to the screen.

He looked very scared at times though. (One of the good guys transforms into a monster and gets progressively scarier). So I’m not sure if those parts will give my son nightmares now.

Into the Spider-Verse, and Mitchels v. The Machines were both Sony. They are arguably doing the most interesting stuff in movie animation at the moment.

Oh yes! You’re absolutely right. I love those two. So yeah, Sony Animation knocking it out of the park!

For some reason I always thought the Transylvannia movies were from Dreamworks until I saw the 4th one.

Tender Bar. Affleck is kinda great. As are most really. But the whole thing seems very oddly edited. Scenes just pop up and end. They sort of have a bit of ambiance and feel to tie them to the actual story, but they don’t really hold together as a strong narrative. Not to mention that about 10 - 15 years takes place (maybe 20, hard to say) and very little seems to have changed. The scenes that should be taking place in the 90s (if I remember correctly) look/feel like they were also in the 70s like the first scenes.

But by about halfway thru, the odd structure mostly disappears and it ends up being a pretty good flick.

I thought The Tender Bar was mediocre. As with a lot of movies based on “true stories” there wasn’t much of a character arc. And that’s a thing that drives my wife batty. Was nice to see Christopher Lloyd as the grumpy grandpa (though his part made no sense), and I liked Affleck in it. But I didn’t find a whole lot to recommend about the movie. It’s pretty standard coming of age fare and I don’t think anything happens that you couldn’t see coming from a mile away.

Can’t argue with any of this. And I think the fact it was based on a memoir is why it was so oddly put together storywise. Still, I enjoyed the acting. Now, if I had paid to see it at a theater, I’m pretty sure my feelings would be much less enthusiastic. It probably shouldn’t be that way, but in this case it is.

Recently saw this movie, has a few big hitters in it: Keaton , Maggie Q, Samuel L. I enjoyed it.

I just randomly watched this movie “Encounter” on Amazon prime, and it was different from what I expected, but ended up being pretty good.

Reviews for it aren’t real great, so I might be an outlier, and I admit I like weird stuff, but I did like this.

Nice! Time to marathon some of the old, good ones. Hell, maybe I’ll even try to get through Casino Royale again.

It’s on my backlog, because it was recommended by I think Jason Mantzoukas, whose tastes generally align with mine, but I haven’t got round to it yet.

After Yang just popped up in my feed and was free to watch on Prime. Lovely little film. Also got me interested in finding out more about a documentary called The Burden of Dreams, after I detected what I was sure must be a Werner Herzog impression in an early scene with Colin Ferrell, as he quoted a line from that film.

It’s just on Showtime, right? I’ve been waiting for a chance to see this!

If you liked this, you might like Kogonada’s previous film Columbus (unless you were particularly into the sci-fi premise).

Released on Showtime, yeah, but also available on a few streaming services including Prime and Hulu.

Looks like it’s only Showtime in the U.S., yeah.

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Is this based on a book because I would swear I’ve read a book with this plot

It was originally a spec script, got adapted into comics in 2014, and is now actually coming out as a movie.