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I had to show the trailer to my older cousin (he's around 56) just for the line "No woman can truly love a man who listens to Phil Colins." To be fair, Genesis did some bad albums around that time (as well as some great ones ^_^)
I had to show the trailer to my older cousin (he's around 56) just for the line "No woman can truly love a man who listens to Phil Colins." To be fair, Genesis did some bad albums around that time (as well as some great ones ^_^)
Don't know if this belongs over in "Dubious musical taste", but I wouldn't even go that far. Some not great songs maybe, but Duke through the self-titled '83 album are pretty solid. And this is just an amazing song. He's not responsible for what happened afterwards.
I remember recommending the movie to my parents based on the video. They hated it 
I'm torn. I really don't have the stomach for slasher stuff, but I really want to see Patrick Stewart play a really bad guy
Saw this Korean movie, Veteran.
Every now and then there's a film that makes me angry. It's not because it's a badly made film, it's because the story, characters, or themes provoke an almost primal response. I fucking hate the bad guy in this movie. He's a total shit in every sense of the word, and I found myself wishing his comeuppance would be the most painful thing ever devised. I wanted our hero cop who's chasing him down to break his legs and fuck him up.
I'm not going to say anything more about the story, as I believe Korean movies especially function best without any foreknowledge going in. Anyhow, the film is well made, has some interesting and varied characters, is actually quite funny at times, has some great fight scenes, and is surprising and unpredictable (like many Korean films).
But I'm not sure whether I liked or enjoyed the movie. Or rather, I should say that I'm not sure whether I enjoyed being manipulated to feel anger to such a degree.
Oof.
In the year and a half since I discovered Paul Thomas Anderson through Inherent Vice, I've been watching his films in reverse chronological order. He's become my favorite director (neck and neck with the Coen Bros.), with Inherent Vice and The Master occupying spots 11 and 12 on my list of favorite movies, and one of the things I love about him is that his films have been on a pretty consistent upswing. Boogie Nights upsets that somewhat, coming in just behind IV and The Master, but otherwise, everything from Magnolia to the present has just been a continuously ascending climb in excellence (I'd call Punch-Drunk Love a more perfect film than There Will Be Blood, but the highs of the latter are stronger).
So I went into Hard Eight knowing it would probably be my least favorite PTA film, and I was okay with that. After all, of the six I had watched over the last eighteen months Magnolia was my least favorite and is still a wonderful film. But as I watched the film, I found myself frequently checking the timecode on the DVD player after a while and felt a glum sinking feeling descend. Yep, this is the only PTA film I haven't loved. And worse than that, it's not a particularly *good* movie, either.
As ever, the performances are the strongest part of the film--Philip Baker Hall has a wonderful dignity about him, and Sam Jackson is in full motherfucker mode. But they can't compensate for a plot that's too ludicrous and patchy to buy (the Vegas wedding between Clementine and John I can buy, but add to that
So, yeah. Inherent Vice and The Master get five stars, Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love get four and a half, There Will BE Blood and Magnolia get four. Hard Eight gets two and a half, as much as it pains me to say.
Last edited by Abbie (2016-06-12 05:03:47)
I think Boogie Nights is the only one I particularly enjoy. 
Somewhat ashamed to say that I haven't seen Boogie Nights, either.
Dude, watch it. It's a really compelling story.
@Squiggly, I'll have to rewatch his films with an eye for your scene analogy.
For me, his films are just such treats to get lost in. The Master and IV especially could've been four hours and I would've gladly sat there in the theatre drinking it all in. The performances, the cinematography, the dynamism of the camera are all so commanding of your attention. And he's excellent at constructing tone too, and then inverting that tone for a gut punch.
It's funny, the endings may be something I consider a weakness of his. Not always, to be sure, but the endings of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood kept the former from being five stars and the latter from four and a half for me.
+1
I definitely agree that the fuck-it insanity is the only way to end it, I just wish we'd had more buildup to it. If we'd had a Magnolia-length cut of three hours Anderson could have given us another half hour showing Plainview's disintegration from highly disturbed man to the gibbering freak we see at the end; instead, we just time-jump hard from one point to the other, and you feel the lack of a transition. If we'd had even a five-minute montage to link the two I'd love the ending unreservedly.
just watched Almost Famous for the first time. It was bloody good!
Yes it was, Martin. Yes it was.
+1
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but what entrancing sound and fury. Also, it's a joy to see Keanu Reeves apparently having the time of his life playing probably the least wooden role in the film.
Also (minor spoilers),
Ten claps and a handjob for the artist of that poster.
If the artist is a woman, handjobs can be traded in for games of badminton or whatever it is that girls like.
+1
I think it's nail painting, Teague. Better practice.
ID4 2: Resurgence
I'm one of those people who doesn't much like the first one, though I can see its appeal. It has its moments, but it feels like a movie too much. Emmerich's films almost all feel like the sort of thing you see in movies when they're watching a movie inside of the movie. Really corny and over-the-top with very obvious attempts at emotional manipulation. I just don't like em, and I don't like how they keep doing the obvious shit all the fucking time. They wouldn't be so bad if I didn't already know exactly what was going to happen in any given situation. Sometimes the beginning of a scene can catch you off guard, but the way any scene plays out is almost always exactly what you think it's going to be.
ID4 2 is no exception. It's a Roland Emmerich film. People will probably like it a lot, though it is clearly lacking in a lot of the moments that made the first one very popular. There's not as much cornball humor and the one-liners are not as punchy. The people delivering them aren't nearly as charismatic as Will Smith, either.
The sequel is almost a beat-by-beat clone of the first one, and I do mean that quite literally. There are very few scenes in this movie that don't have an equivalent scene in the first. He also recalls a couple of scenes from 2012. I think the guy may have just taken the scripts for those two movies and shuffled the pages together and then rewrote it as one movie. So you get to have a movie where there's an "assault on Area 51" scene AND a "flying a plane through a city as it gets destroyed" scene.
I didn't really give a shit about any of the characters, so almost none of the events had any sort of emotional tug. In the first film there are at least a couple of scenes where they do that with some effectiveness. In this movie I don't give a shit about the fact that guy's mom dies or that kid's parents die or that maybe generic character A will never see generic character B again. There's never any doubt about anything.
Also, the craft on display is pretty bad, just on a basic "how do we shoot this" level. There's a perfect example of how badly this film is shot at the very end. There's a character who asks a girl for a kiss, even though earlier in the film she wasn't interested in him. So he asks, but then looks down cause he knows she'll probably say 'no'. This is shot flat, directly facing the character. Cut to reverse and she's flatly shot directly facing camera and says "how about dinner first?" Cut to previous flat shot of the guy directly facing camera as he brightens up with this "FUCK YEAH, I'M GONNA GET LAID" expression on his face.
Aside from breaking the 180 rule (which I don't give a shit about, honestly), that could have just been one shot. Just have it be a tracking shot as they're walking away, and you get an angled view, with the guy furthest from the camera. Guy's all "hehe, I'd like a kiss or whatever playful banter teehee!" and girl's delayed reaction casuses him to go sour for a second. Same shot. Keep tracking. Then she's all "We should try dinner first" or something. Guy lights up all excited and stops. Camera holds for him while she just continues to walk off screen. Guy snaps out of it and runs off frame while spouting some kind of dialogue. I dunno. Camera doesn't follow him for that movement.
At that point you can either cut or - fancy! - you can pan the opposite direction to reframe on something else in the background that you then cut to. IE, reframe the camera for an establishing shot in the same shot as the entire previous dialogue exchange.
Things like that I would be mildly impressed with in a schlocky action flick. This flick cuts exactly on dialogue. Someone finishes their line, and cut. A lot of the framing is flat-on perpendicular shots of something. Hangar doors. Windows. Lines of people. Text on a wall. It's not really every shot or anything, but it's definitely a lot of them. Any time someone's about to say something dramatic, they cut to a flat wide shot of something. The film is visually boring to watch when the camera isn't flying all over the place and throwing explosions and laser beams at you.
Everything is locked down and presented, with little re-blocking of shots or anything. They just cut a bunch of static, boring shots together for the actor scenes and then let the animators go hog wild with the battle parts. But then, the first one isn't so great about that, either. The first one at least had more interesting scenes where you were shifting focus and the actors had some actual presence.
I dunno. I didn't like it, but I didn't like the first one. If you liked the first one, you'll probably agree that this one isn't nearly as good, but you might enjoy it.
One problem for me is that they shaved 30 minutes off the running time but with just as much plot, characters, relationship arcs (if not more) than the first one, so everything is thinly sketched.
Hemsworth has to have a bromance arc with his wing-man plus a girlfriend arc plus a frenemies arc with son-of-Will. And that's just one character. There's dozens more. Goldblum is alright and lands the best jokes, but 75% of the other gags fall flat.
Too many characters for the screen-time: Jeff's dad and teens, warrior warlord and some nerd, salvage crew on a ship, Will's wife, Goldblum's new squeeze, wacky scientist and his dad, Prez & ex-Prez, and so on. Shouldn't there be some POP-UP in Final Draft that says "You have too many characters for the pages."
Then there's an entire first-half subplot about seeing visions of a circle (Close Encounters) which doesn't really go anywhere or make much sense, and wastes a lot of screen time.
Who's the main character anyway? Choose a main character and flesh him/her out more
Improvements: cut the visions, cut the Africa detour, and warlord mentor arc and his nerd wannabe, cut Hemsworth's offsider, have the Chinese Angelbaby (is that her real name?) end up with son-of-Will, cut the school bus kids, cut all the stale jokes.
Then use the 45 minutes you've just saved to (1) have more of an adventure-exploration sequence inside the big ship, and (2) give the Queen Alien more of a Third Act encore once she emerges from her armour.
Squiggly, the way I interpreted that 'Dinner First' scene was that both of them were facing forward at the same time as they emerged from their fighters, but I may be wrong.
Not worth seeing again. 3/10. Only worth it if you want to see terabytes of CG porn where Earth wears a hat. The best VFX sequence for me was the moondust vortex where the other alien iSphere (iBall?) emerges and checks out the moon base.
I have similar feelings on ID:R.
All the Alien tech and stuff they gave the humans just deflated the tension for me. I'm not really interested in seeing a future earth battle aliens. I want to see current earth with the limitations we have fight aliens.
Plus I don't buy the fact that, supposedly, humanity, in just 20 years, were able to allocate huge R&D resources, break down and reverse engineer the alien technology, and manufacture working helicopters, space ships etc.
All this while most major cities in the world were blown to pieces, probably crippling manufacturing and infrastructure.
I thought about what I would like to see, before even seeing the film, and where I would take the 2nd installment if I had to brainstorm a bit.
What I came up with was probably too close to "District 9" or "Battle Los Angeles" to be worth doing, but I think the best way to make a 2nd ID film would be to set it as us fighting the aliens that would presumably be left alive on earth. This aspect I was surprised was actually dealt with in the movie, but those aliens were either just rounded up easily and held in a prison of sorts, or we saw skulls from ones previously exterminated, and it didn't really make any difference to the plot.
I would have wanted a still crippled earth, as we still would be exploring and finding out more about the aliens, to find there is still a threat from aliens left on earth. You could still have a queen alien, if you wanted that, emerge from a bigger ship that landed in a distant area on earth that we didn't hear about in the first movie, and revelations could be made about plans the aliens have to finish the job, or do something else. I think that basic framework is much more interesting and the earth being still very crippled would be interesting to see.
There's hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. And there's Roland Emmerich.
Emmerich's idea of a relationship arc:
Set up: I haven't had time to look at the house listings you've sent me.
Pay-off: I've now had a look at the houses.
Or...
Set-up: You're a pussy.
Shoots aliens later on.
Pay-off: Now you have the heart of a warrior.
Probably takes 10 seconds for the set-up and 10 seconds for the pay-off and that's supposed to induce an emotional reaction in the audience. I've seen it done better in trailers.
How many other billions of other planets out there must have molten cores and no life to threaten the acquisition of that core? Also, what exactly do they do once they've gotten to the core? Suck it out with a giant straw? The molten core of the earth is made mostly of iron. Are they looking to boost their steel industry? I guess if they're making ships that big they'd need a lot of raw material, but in that case, why are they going after such puny little planets? I doubt the earth has enough raw materials to make even one of those giant ships. Wouldn't it be a better idea to find some giant, uninhabited planet to suck the iron and nickel from?
From the second interview here with VFX supervisors, Emmerich don't give two fucks about science, physics, 'n shit.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/fxpo … esurgence/
You wouldn't be able to call it "ID4", but I think a theoretical movie about an alien invasion where you spend the entire thing with an old guy and a bus full of now-orphaned children trying to survive could have been a far better movie.
I haven't seen ID4:R but what you described sounds like it'd be at home in Lucifer's Hammer.
Saw the 3-hour Ultimate Edition of Batman punches Superman, which adds half an hour of (what passes for) character development. While the theatrical release was trashed by everyone, this extended cut has been given lukewarm reviews (i.e. it doesn't entirely suck).
Obviously DC fucked up by not having solo movies first for the Justice League (or at least the main ones) before they assemble. Even better would be to follow on from the Nolan's trilogy (he is Exec Producer on the Snydner ones afterall) but dunno if it was a rights or cast issue, so they had to reboot with Batfleck.
The movie follows on from the punch-up ending Man of Steel, which sets up the plot which seems the same as Captain America punches IronMan and even recent Bond instalments: the government is shutting down vigilante violence. "Collateral damage is unacceptable, except when we do it" (e.g. end of Avengers 1).
Most people like the Marvel version, and I recognize they set up their franchise less clumsily than DC. But I enjoy Snyder's idiosyncratic style, channeling Miller's graphic novel aesthetic.... backlit rain, ultra slow-mo close-ups, stylized violence (like Watchmen, 300, Sucker Punch), and the portentous brood-a-thon tone that pervades DC's films (I think there's three jokes in the entire three hours).
Lots of flaws of course: Amy Adams is a charisma vacuum, Lex Luther's motivation makes no sense and his portrayal by Eisenberg put most people off, there's too much plot for even three hours, the many dream sequences only make sense for hard core fans (and maybe not even then), more than 90% of drama in movies would be avoided if people just talked more, the now infamous Martha pivot, alien ship security seems extraordinarily lax ('warning, we can't grow this abomination except if you want to'), Diana Prince isn't given much to do in the first 2.5 hours, why does Supe's mom still have to wait tables and run a corn farm.... I could go on.
Some positives: Batfleck was acceptable after the initial casting controversy. The onus was on Ben to prove us skeptics wrong and he did. Gadot was intriguing, leaving us wanting more. Snyder continued Nolan's modernist architecture for Wayne's accommodation. The VFX were fine (burning through a quarter of a billion dollars with all those collapsing buildings). The Zimmer score was okay and more memorable than the Marvel equivalents.
Purists won't like that Superman and Batman kill shitloads of people, but not having read any comics, I don't really mind. It's a messy world. What I didn't like is that the movie tries to get an emotional reaction by portraying Superman as dead not once, not twice, but three times! This is a problem with franchises - no one major dies, so STOP PRETENDING they are dead. We know they can't die. It's not emotional. It's not tense. It just wastes time. The upside is that gives it Zimmer another opportunity to insert one of his customary crescendos. But even he's now sick of scoring superhero movies and has announced 'no more'. So I wonder when global cinema audiences will finally get superhero fatigue because there ain't any sign of it yet. It was predicted a decade ago, but each one of these installments, whether from Marvel or DC, still earn around a billion dollars-ish.
Also saw HIGH RISE, which is just a montage of debauchery.
Is that image from the porn parody?
Is that image from the porn parody?
I would hope so. Though the production design on those things looks to be getting a lot better, unless this still is not indicative of the actual product.
I've only seen the Ultimate Edition. If that's supposed to be the better version, I don't wanna see the worse (theatrical) one.
The movie is a mess that unravels like some fanboy's drunken first draft. Zack Snyder was clearly going for a Watchmen feel without having the one element that made Watchmen so great: a very strong story. Why did nobody see that this script simply wouldn't work? Zack may simply suffer from the Tim Burton illness (can't tell a good screenplay from an awful one), but he probably wasn't the only person who could've vetoed this abomination (where were you, Chris Nolan?).
the many dream sequences only make sense for hard core fans (and maybe not even then)
Their weirdness and incomprehensibility reminded me a lot of Sucker Punch.
Watchmen remains my favorite comic book movie of all time, but after BvS: Dawn Of Justice I have to conclude that Zack may be following in the footsteps of Richard Kelly, M. Night Shyamalan and Neill Blomkamp. He could still turn a good script into a good movie (Ridley Scott pulled off The Martian after some stinkers), but he has to recognize a good script first.
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