Search options (Page 1 of 3)

I'm geeking out watching two people with whom I have 'saber dueled finding themselves in an adventure.

See: Legend of the Guardians.

I'm going to skip over my repeat viewing of Beyond this weekend and mention last week's random decision of Ben-Hur. I've never seen much of the original, but I thought this new one was really good. A little non-traditionally structured, as in unafraid to spend more time on things it finds interesting instead of just "the main arc", but very enjoyable.

Plus:

Can I offer anyone a man-crush?

My g/f informed me that the book was entitled "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ" and we couldn't stop laughing at the suggestion of a Bible Cinematic Universe.
"This is a race, isn't it? I'm a racist."

First Class isn't J-Law's best moment, she's still a little rough around the edges. Silver Linings Playbook is what really got me hooked on her, though I guess Hunger Games and First Class kinda pointed me in that direction.

IIRC she was pretty good in DofP, but she is not the part of that film that's been playing on repeat in my mind.
(Yeah, it's the ice slide. Seriously, YEARS I've been waiting to see that. Decades even, if you count pre-movie times!)

"I am sick to death of superhero franchises. We need to put a stop to them, and quickly."

Well, I can't accept the premise of your review, so... 

***Spoilers***

It did feel flat, I'll give you that. The future prologue just jumps in and exists only as a reason for Wolverine to exist in the past. In the comics, Kitty 'phases' her mind back, which kind of made sense with her powers in the way that people shooting kinetic energy from their eyes makes sense, but they didn't really explain that here, or how she does it to others. From the trailer, I thought it was going to be work from Prof. X and a machine, or in conjunction with someone else's powers. Kitty just learning how to do it is pretty weak.
However, with her being able to do this, nothing in the future bore any suspense. I knew how this film was going to end back when I saw the first trailer, and that nothing that happened to anyone in the future would be permanent. Storm's death wasn't shocking, nor upsetting. It's Storm. They weren't going to let that stick, even though they didn't see fit to give her anything to do except use her powers.
The other X-Men did get some pretty gruesome deaths at the hands of the Sentinels that were a little tough to watch, but none of them carried any weight and I didn't buy into the tension the finale was trying to build. In that regard, I was disappointed.
The only difference is I assumed Wolverine would get trapped in his younger mind and he would be the reason the events of the trilogy get changed, rather than them simply playing out differently because of the events of this film. Him 'snapping to' when he reaches the future seems kind of lazy, it'd have been far more interesting if he had gotten to consciously relive his life. I am happy they un-killed Jean and Cyclops, for what it's worth, but it's a shame that this so suddenly rewrites whatever canon the previous films had. This ending just turned First Class into a reboot rather than a prequel.

However, in terms of adapting "Days of Future Past", the film did a great job. The major details are still there. As a stand-alone, this is pretty cool. It plays out much like one of the recent Marvel/DC straight-to-video animated features would. As a sequel to X3, it makes very little sense. There is a huge leap it makes from X3's ending to DofP's beginning. If you shove The Wolverine in there and kind of accept that the world started ending while Logan was in exile, it helps, but eh. You can tell there wasn't a plan.
As a sequel to First Class, it works a little better, but with all the time used explaining why Wolverine is here, we don't get the same focus on some of the characters that we did. Aside from Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and Beast, everyone else was killed off between films. Well, Havok was a cameo, which was disappointing. It's neat that he learned to control his powers and all, but showing him (and Quicksilver, for that matter) and then dumping him once his scene is over is the main problem X3 and Origins: Wolverine had.
The end of First Class shows Magneto and the Hellfire Club ready to go kick some less-evolved ass, and we get to see none of that. Skip to Magneto in jail and they're all dead? Come on. Fassbender's Magneto is still amazing, and I was left feeling like we got to see him in full form, but his actions in the past really didn't do anything that made us relate him more with McKellan's version.
"So, you were always an asshole." Pretty much.
However, I did really enjoy Xavier and Mystique's arcs. The allusion to drug addiction rocked my world, and giving Raven a time-travelling revenge intervention was pretty interesting. Her moment of discovering that Trask was responsible for the experimentation, torture and death of her friends(?) is exactly the kind of moment we needed to explain how we get from Lawrence's Mystique to Romijn's. Killing Trask was the moment that made her "evil", and seeing her standing on the edge before they pulled her back was great. Hopefully we will see some ramifications of that in Apocalypse.

Anyway, if you haven't read X-Men comics and you thought it was difficult to make room for all the characters in the films, oh boy. Outside of major events, you can have multiple plots running for issues that only peek in on what someone is doing until the one or two-parter comes where their plot is finally resolved. Even some main characters can be absent for long periods of time. Outside of the core roster, there are so many characters and most of them are boiled down to 'this guy has that powers so he can do this for them'. There's no time to flesh everyone out, but they do try to give most of them a decent story or scene when they can.
I'm amazed the films managed to show us as many characters as they did, even if the bulk of them are glorified cameos.

But hey, we got to see a proper Iceman, finally. So that was pretty cool.

X-Men needs to be a series. It's too big for this formula.
"Heroes" actually did a better X-Men than X-Men, in some ways.

He's not wrong about the writer's strike, TF2 was not the only victim of it. I don't see anything in this article that isn't true, and the corrections he made between films seem in line with what was said here, so I don't have a problem with accepting his word as genuine. You know you don't always end up with the film you set out to make.
There's a difference between shitting on your past movies (See: Shia) and recognizing their flaws, and this article reads like the latter. (To me, anyway. It's possible I'm too nice.)

Turturro first dropped the term in TF2, can't think of another instance. Marky Mark's use of it surprised me too, though I'm glad they're not trying to dust public awareness under the rug again. That was one of 2's biggest mistakes. 

lol. That's one of the parts I can't stand. You can skip over the job hunt and go straight to the Malkovich interview and the movie doesn't lose anything. The film took too long to warm up. It repeated the info from the prologue in the narrative, focused too long on characters that didn't end up mattering, things like that.
Actually, thinking about it, all 3 films are guilty of this.

Tried multiple things, Teague, including dropping the "s". I can't get a consistent fix whenever I post one, so I just said screw it.

I understand peoples' viewpoint on the action for the first film, which is a style they may not like, but the ground-level and shaky was all part of showing it from the human perspective. Some people also see that perspective as a flaw, but for the first film I ate it up. It continued too strongly through the series though, as it became evident we were going to get little to no real personal story on the characters everyone showed up to see.
However, in my opinion Dark of the Moon had the best and most coherent action of the series. It's my favorite film of the trilogy, despite it's first act. On top of that, the freeway chase and Optimus vs. Sentinel were among my favorite action set-pieces of the year, but getting people to actually watch them with an open mind doesn't happen. Still, once the action starts in DotM, the camera backs up and focuses on the Transformers more than the people, which is something it's predecessors insisted against. That's what has me interested in the action this time, it has evolved and in the right direction.

I honestly do agree with the Dorkman's 'insulting garbage' standpoint, as far as the sense of humor is concerned. The Bad Boys grotesque, racist slapstick is out of place here, and the major downside I've had to tolerate with Bay being at the helm, but I've been willing to because omg, ILM. Part of what's got me interested for #4 is that Bay has said he was dialing back the humor this time around.
Then again, the guy also said he was done after 3, so grain of salt.

And then there's a giant metal dinosaur. So there's that. (I've never liked the dinobots.)
Actually, what really interests me is the "We found a Transformer!" plot. It's nice and simple, like 'a boy and his car', let's just see if they can get more than just that right. Until now, these have been playing out a lot like disaster films, with the Transformers taking the role of the twister/volcano/etc, so it'd be nice if they could make something a bit more personal on the side of the title characters. DotM got close, but it was still more about Sam & Co. than it was the Autobots. We don't know anything about Optimus' personal history, other than he's from a war-torn planet and that was rough. Even one of the humans sitting down and having a heart-to-heart with him would be great. "So how'd you end up here?", something.
The rare scenes of just Transformers talking among themselves are always a pure joy, it's a shame we can't get a whole film that way.

It's a complicated interest I have in these films, lol. Love/hate, something. Too damn cool to ignore, too ridiculous to state a serious defense. People like them or they don't, but given how much hate there is, I'm left wondering just how they're making so much freakin' money. 

Actually, they have been. The first two sampled bits and pieces and took a ton of liberties, but DotM was based on the G1 arc 'The Ultimate Doom', and did a fine job of adapting it (story-wise). I was surprised when I stumbled across those episodes afterward. I've been getting into TF: Prime since the Superbowl trailer hit, and there is definitely some good stuff there that these films will likely never touch. The show didn't start getting good until the children became the backdrop rather than the focus, and I don't see that happening just yet.

Heh, until I got into the films, I actually had the same problem with the show, on the rare occasion I'd see it. "Wait, who is he again?" Aside from the main 3-4 characters, I never knew which robots were who. 
That was probably indifference more than anything though.

Agreed. Big, chunky, simplistic slow things. The movie, ugh, but now those were some robots.
I was super fond of Real Steel's bots as well, though that only skimmed the surface of robot/human allegory. I don't think we've yet seen a live-action film that is actually about robots. Wall-E knew what's up.

Aside from the Emmerich one, I don't believe I've ever seen one of the old ones in their entirety. Definitely seen parts, really, really tacky parts from the many sequels.
Looking forward to that original cut hi-def version coming out soon, I'll definitely sit down and watch that.

EDIT: Boy, was I on the wrong page when I clicked 'Reply'. Bear with me.

Plus, destroying a city is kind of the whole point of Godzilla. He was destroying cities before destroying cities was cool.
It was mostly cuz of wars and nukes and stuff and people didn't really enjoy that so much.

Also, let's keep in mind... it's a movie about a giant lizard destroying a city. It ain't gonna be Inception.
I'm just hoping they find something new to discuss. The bit about nuclear tests being a coverup is a good start, not bad as historical retcons go. If Godzilla had helped mankind advance their civilization or was hidden on the moon this whole time, I wouldn't even rent it.

Oh come on, Resolute was awesome. Dark/gritty/realistic is cool and everybody knows it.
Besides, how else would you do a film like this nowadays? PacRim did the colorful/dark thing of the early 00's that was all *thought* was realistic (Oh, Spider-Man), but it did not go over well.

The latest news I read said it's still Terminator 5.
It's all wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey at this point, who knows what they're trying to do.

[crosses fingers]

I guess I always reacted to coding the same way I do when someone says a 555 phone number. Usually it flashes by so fast, the shot is there to say "they're coding", it accomplishes it, and we move on.
If you've got a consultant on board who wants to whip some up, sure, but it's a detail I've never focused much on.
Except Hackers. Their cute little backdoor hacking apps are hilarious.
And I've often wondered just how one reads Matrix code (is a blonde a stream of symbols or just one character on the top of a stream?), but w/e.

No, it doesn't.
And I call analogy shenanigans. For example, I highly doubt that Guardians watered down Drax so pro-wrestler Dave Bautista could play the role. They said "Hey, we need a big tough guy" and so they found one, but I'm certain he still had to audition and they picked him from any number of candidates.

Prior to that, I think everyone assumed it'd be the Rock or Vin Diesel. Funny how that worked out.