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This movie is a giant piece of shit. Like the last time I was this disengaged and bored by a blockbuster was one of the Transformers movies. Who gives a shit about any of these characters? Why is their mission so poorly defined, to where the movie feels like nothing is happening for 90 minutes. Then they stage this big battle sequence, with mostly anonymous good guys and bad guys you don't give a damn about.
Between Force Awakens being forgettable and this being out and out terrible, I feel everyone owes Lucas an apology.
It's a cruel game playing with our emotions like this...
What kills me about the Ep 7 score, which is indeed crazy forgettable and lame, is that there's multiple opportunities where the movie would be like 10 times better if you were to just use some of the old themes.
Like, how do you not use the Han/Leia theme when Han gets killed. I just do not understand the decision. As it is, Han's death feels so underplayed and unimportant....this should arguably be the biggest moment in the whole series! I understand producer meddling, but you'd think J.J would have the weight to say "Guys, this moment NEEDS this".
As for "replacements", the only one I could offer is John Powell, but it sounds like he's been sticking to animated movies specifically because he got burned out dealing with the generic studio scoring requirements. At least in animation he's allowed to write a fucking melody.
Still need to see The Revenant and Anomalisa, either of which I could see stealing the top spot.
Those notwithstanding, it's easily Fury Road, with Mission Impossible as a really solid #2.
Creed, Ex Machina, and Inside Out are my other standouts.
Sicario is over-rated, cinematography not-withstanding.
Hateful Eight I literally have no idea how I feel about, and will have to see it again.
It could be Tarantino's worst, could grow to be one of his best.
Snoke is fucking stupid and lame, John Williams phones it in, the 3rd act is lazy and the lightsaber fight feels like a weird cheat because these characters should not be able to hold their own for more than a few seconds with 0 training. Also there's way too much crucial backstory that goes unexplained (It really takes the kick out of the Han Solo death when you have no idea why his son turned evil, who the fuck Snoke is, etc).
Other than that, the movie's pretty awesome, great new characters, Harrison Ford crushes it, cinematography and vfx are great, good pacing and action sequences.
Life is cruel and short and everything you love eventually dies 
Zarban was how I found DIF in the first place. Now DIF and Zarban are gone too, and a long chapter is closed.
To be honest I can sympathize, I don't listen to fan commentaries anymore either, too busy focusing on my own projects. I suppose that's what growing up is all about.
Godspeed Zarban.
I dunno, I remember seeing that finale from Rambo in a packed theater when it came out, and it was incredible. The audience lost their minds. You're focusing on the gore aspect, but the awesome thing about the Rambo finale is just the degree to which it stacks multiple levels of violent action. You've got this squad of ultimate badasses, and they're all bloodily scraping by fighting for every inch, and it's all happening very fast and cross-cutting. No slow motion, as soon as one of them takes down an enemy, they're diving behind cover and taking the next guy down, and it's relentless. I don't think it got enough credit for how fresh that was, certainly no american action movie had done anything like that off the top of my head, though admittedly you did see that stuff in Korea and HK.
The movie as a whole is too bleak and exploitative in my opinion, but the last half an hour kills. It's kind of disappointing though that he rehashed basically the same ending/editing-style/concept for all 3 expendables movies' finales, to diminishing and increasingly watered down results with each.
A big problem is that small-to-mid-range genre movies don't exist anymore for the most part, which means up-and-coming filmmakers don't have a chance to hone their craft and develop a voice.
James Cameron didn't jump straight into mega-budget filmmaking, people forget he started on Piranha 2, then Terminator, then Aliens. It wasn't until the Abyss he was really working at a scale comparable to a modern-day blockbuster (even that was only 70 mil, so about 140 mil today, not even on the higher end of a lot of these movies).
If he jumped straight from Terminator to T2, or Titanic, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as good
Genisys is like a really bad youtube fan film. Looks like garbage, the writing/acting is bizarrely trying to be Whedony-self-aware which is like the worst idea on the planet for a terminator movie. Not a single memorable action sequence, and the first hour is largely people standing around giving boring exposition. I don't even feel comfortable calling it a movie. Like, it makes Terminator Salvation look good, and that movie is a total piece of shit.
T3 looks downright great by comparison now. I'm also thinking we need to step back and stop giving popular tv directors big franchise movies, because if Alan Taylor is anything to judge by, these guys have no idea wtf they're doing.
I wish Emilia Clarke wasn't terrible and completely miscast
I considered walking out of the movie and skipping it, that's how terrible that LAVA short is. One of the most insufferable things I've ever seen/heard. Thankfully it won't auto-play on the blu-ray, so you can just jump right into the movie.
So you missed the part where after the climactic destruction battle of Chicago, the movie decides to migrate to China and has ANOTHER SOLID HOUR of destruction action scenes for no reason.
What I'll say in its defense, is it does have the most coherent action of the series, and it also has the least amount of obnoxious humour. Still as incoherent as ever story-wise, but it would be kinda watchable if it wasn't THREE HOURS LONG
This is full on Pixar back at the top of their game. I'm not ready to say it's their best, because the Incredibles exists, so that would be a foolish statement, but it's easily the best since Wall-E, maybe even better.
The amount of subtle setups and payoffs all over the place, the amount of awesome throwaway clever ideas, the lack of pandering to children. The movie doesn't dumb itself down, and in fact probably plays better to adults (or teens) than to kids.
Also, I'm on record as really not being into Giacchino, but his score for this movie is absolutely terrific. I guess Pixar brings out the best in him.
Ya I've been pretty on board with most of the book to show changes, but this one feels like character assassination. There's just not nearly enough time devoted to it for Stannis to make that choice. It's clearly meant to parallel The Illiad, where the king sacrifices his daughter to the gods for favorable weather so they can sail to and attack Troy, but it feels like it comes out of nowhere on the show.
I think this is the first time they've blown one of their season enders. Shoulda budgeted for the dragon FX, it's super weird when you follow up an episode that would look great as a feature film, with FX that would barely pass muster on network TV 10 years ago. Very disappointing
It's actually not even particularly reference heavy, mostly the references to the originals are just in terms of film-technique stuff. The use of under-cranking in action scenes, white flash frames on hits, a face-close-up flash-frame on car impact.
The story, world-building, and aesthetic are completely different from the originals, aside from tiny things like the use of telescopes and binoculars, and awesomely weird character names. I would say in many ways the originals feel like a dry-run for what he actually wanted to accomplish, and this is the realization of that vision. Aside from Road Warrior, I don't think the originals are particularly worth watching, except as a curiosity.
Busy this weekend, but I plan to see it at least a couple more times while it's playing. We've grown so used to mediocrity, that really flawed but sorta fun movies like Guardians of the Galaxy get hailed as classics (or worse, derivative cookie-cutter shit like Pacific Rim gets held up as some bastion of originality).
This is the rare case where we're dealing with a genuine classic, the kind that comes along once every 10 years maybe. There's no doubt in my mind this movie is going to leave a massive cultural imprint, much like The Matrix did in its time. So I have no problem going back and enjoying it multiple times.
It'd be like Star Wars coming out for the first time and deciding to wait and see it on VHS, it doesn't really make sense.
By the way, this movie gets better on every viewing. Seen it 3 times now, and could literally go again tomorrow.
It's so perfect from a story structure and filmmaking standpoint, and so dense with character quirks and world-building, that it doesn't get old. Action flows better every time too, since you know what to look out for. It's downright overwhelming the first time, but on repeat you can just appreciate the incredible juggling act of mini-setpieces and how they flow in and out of eachother within each sequence.
So, according to this writeup, the ending guitar/steering wheel crash elements were practical too (flung into the camera on bungee cords): http://www.fxguide.com/featured/a-graph … fury-road/
I'm glad it's bringing people joy, and I respect the work that went into it, but to me it typifies what I don't like about the internet and meme culture in general. We're drowning in irony and wink-wink bullshit, and I think it's an extremely lazy shortcut that lets creators off the hook from having to take the effort of making something good that can stand on its own. Community and Edgar Wright's films are 2 examples that do this sort of thing right, where the characters and worlds feel consistent within themselves and played straight, despite all the crazy references packed in and general madness.
And anyway, even in the context of dumb 80s retro-nostalgia, this was already beat to the punch by Hotline Miami and Far Cry Blood Dragon, both of which did this sort of thing better (sincere instead of pandering), and did it 2 years ago.
I hate to be a downer on this kind of thing, because it's obvious a lot of heart and work went into it, but the whole "crazy 80s nostalgia" thing really really needs to stop. No actual 80s movie was like this, these are bad winking at the camera parodies that bear no resemblance to the actual thing, existing purely on a heightened nostalgia for something that never existed. I honestly think this type of ironic spoof cinema might be the worst thing to come out of this generation of youtube filmmakers. Way easier to wink at the camera at how clever you think you're being than to try to make something that can stand on its own as a piece of narrative. I'm half convinced the people making these things weren't even alive in the 80s, or their only reference point for that stuff is other spoof videos. It's insufferable.
Ya it was clearly Hardy. Him and Theron allegedly didn't get along during filming, and he publicly apologized to George Miller at Cannes after seeing how awesome the finished movie was. I can kinda sympathize though, shooting essentially 2 second chunks of action scenes for months on end has gotta be frustrating as hell
BTW, in case people haven't watched this yet, this 2 hour talk with the cinematographer is extremely illuminating about the craziness of the production: https://vimeo.com/127381179
No script, only storyboards (until the studio demanded a physical script).
Stunts were all of course real, but anything to do with lighting or color was a matter of "we'll fix it in post". They also allegedly only shot the middle of the movie, not the Citadel stuff, counting on the fact that Warner Brothers would fund re-shoots to add that stuff back in as the movie clearly wouldn't work without it. Extremely ballsy gamble to trick your financiers.
avatar wrote:Writhyn wrote:The world-building without exposition was by far far far my absolute favorite thing about it!!!
That the characters just did stuff and behaved in such ways that we were expected to observe and figure things out...it made me wholly engage with the characters. I bought every one of them and their turnarounds and motivations just by paying attention.
To be fair, it got away with avoiding exposition because it appropriated the existing Mad Max franchise, which is well known, so it had less world building to do. Had it been an original stand-alone movie called 'Furiosa', we would have been subjected to the standard opening titles montage of news reports, headlines, mushroom clouds, etc and more of her backstory in flashback.
I also wonder what the box office would have been had it NOT been a Mad Max movie. We fans complain endlessly about sequels, remakes, reboots, etc, but when there are original new movies like Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, etc, they hardly break even.
I disagree. I would say it's so thoroughly different from the original films, both in terms of specific mythology and visuals, that there's pretty much no cross-over. Also, I would guess that 3/4ths of the audience watching this has never seen the original films.
Plus they do have a voiceover up front in Fury Road to setup the world, so its clearly meant to work for people who know nothing about the series.
Ditto. Basically everything I always complain about and wish movies would do, this does effortlessly. Visual storytelling, simplicity of plot/complexity of themes, character through action, continuity of motion in editing, world-building without exposition, gender equality, sympathetic villains (what other blockbuster dares to humanize religious extremists).
Think about how rich this movie is in thematic ideas and memorable characters, with barely any dialogue. It's enough to make you disgusted at how lazy every other modern studio movie is.
"Hope is a mistake. If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane". What a great thesis statement, and it's conveyed in under 15 words.
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