1,176 Reply by bullet3

(62 replies, posted in Episodes)

I don't know, I fall more into the nostalgia camp, than not (which is weird cause I'm barely in my early twenties). You put on a Sergio Leone western, or something gritty from the 70s, and there's just this great "look" to it that I really love, that just screams cinema. All the modern digital movies I've seen (including Fincher's stuff) just look so damned "clean" and crystal-clear sharp that it ironically kind of takes me out of it a bit, some of the magic is lost . Like, Zodiac is probably my favorite Fincher film, but man I wish it was shot on film, because the digital look just gives it this fake glossy sheen that always kinda bugs me (especially given that it's supposed to be a period piece).

Now, obviously there's cinematography choices at play here as well, but I'm not convinced you can replicate that vintage look properly without a ton of work in post, it's just not the same (look at Planet Terror, despite all the scratches and stuff, it still doesn't look properly vintage to me, I can tell it's digital).

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1,177 Reply by bullet3

(19 replies, posted in Episodes)

Well I liked this ep a lot. I have no problem with recent movie discussions, it's always fun to listen to you guys, though I wish the episodes were longer (I love 2-3 hour movie podcasts personally). I think if I had to criticize, I'd say you could use a bit more structure, look at how FilmJunk and Slashfilmcast do it, I think that's a good model to follow.

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1,178 Reply by bullet3

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

1. How do you talk? Fast? Slow? Loud? Quiet?
Loud-ish, normal speed.

2. What's your accent?
American

3. Are you most comfortable playing serious, pissed, wacky, annoyed, funny? If you'd rather do something specific like this, let me know, otherwise you'll just get a part and do your best.
Probably quiet/serious, bored/non-chalant

4. Do you have specific car limitations? Like, no back seat?
No limits!

5. Problem with profanity?
Not especially, probably wouldn't feel natural going crazy with it though

6. Pick a movie you love. Doesn't have to be your favorite, but one that you just freaking love.
Apocalypse Now, a man can drown in the pure cinema dripping off that masterpiece

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1,179 Reply by bullet3

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

I'd be down for a smallish part, not heavy on speaking is better probably, but you know, someone obliviously working/playing games on their laptop/listening to music/head-out-window, or the aforementioned being moody and/or contemplative in the back-seat would be fine.

I like the multiple cars idea, though that gets tricky to manage and might be more trouble than it's worth.

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1,180 Reply by bullet3

(2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)

I think it'd be awesome to get Eddie on a commentary about The Raid when that hits video. That's a text-book perfect example of fight choreography, staging (continuity of cuts/motion, movement of camera to accentuate impact while keeping the geography and fighting clear), and action-movie pacing. I can't think of a better movie to have all those discussions on.

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1,181 Reply by bullet3

(47 replies, posted in Episodes)

^^^ I think we can discuss this later at some point in a different thread, but I thoroughly disagree with you guys. I think The Grey is the closest movie I've seen to having the awesome character dynamics of Jaws in a survival type situation. I felt all the survivors were both realistic and likable, and I really liked that the movie never really fell into typical jump-scarey horror movie territory (it does for maybe 15 minutes after the crash, after that it goes back to being an absolutely brutal character drama).

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1,182 Reply by bullet3

(47 replies, posted in Episodes)

^^ Also totally horrifying and possibly the most brutally atheist movie ever made

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1,183 Reply by bullet3

(24 replies, posted in Off Topic)

clap

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1,184 Reply by bullet3

(24 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I really don't get these "Young-Adult" phenomenon's. I guess it's better then Twilight, so hooray, but I really kind of despise this whole "genre". As a teenager, I didn't need a fucking classification of books that were targeted at my age range, I'd just read, you know, books. Don't tell me a 12 year old can't read Asimov, or Heinlein, or Clarke, or any other real sci-fi author out there. Everything about this series looks so "sci-fi lite" to me, and as Dorkman pointed out, mentions ideas instead of exploring them.

Just from the trailer, it's already apparent that the entire premise is a cop-out from the get-go. The whole thing that makes these reality-tv, people fighting to the death movies interesting, is that we can imagine them as an extension of our existing culture, which forces us to examine where we are as a society. So what do they do? Instead of making it a relate-able world, it's set in this really abstract, fantasy-type world, with crazy costumes, and that has no bearing on the real-world. (compare this to The Running Man, which has a disturbingly accurate portrayal of American game-shows)

How much more interesting would it have been to see modern-day kids in a world we can recognize, having to kill each-other (Yes, this is basically Battle Royale at that point, but I think it would be interesting to see it done with the culture of modern-day American teens)?

Sigh.....at least we're improving from Twilight. Maybe after another 3 more of these stupid teen phenomenons, there'll finally be one that results in a good movie.

P.S. Jennifer Lawrence basically ruined X-Men: First Class, so I kind of really wish she would just go away.

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1,185 Reply by bullet3

(13 replies, posted in Off Topic)

For recent techno-driven scores, people should really watch/listen to Hanna by the Chemical Brothers, that was my personal favorite soundtrack last year:

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1,186 Reply by bullet3

(13 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Props on the Alexander Nevsky shoutout, it is indeed a wonderful score (I had the pleasure of seeing the movie with a live orchestra playing with it once, was awesome).

I'm a big James Horner fan myself, so Wrath of Khan and Aliens are personal favorites. Independence Day/Stargate are great. Hanz Zimmer's Broken Arrow and Crimson Tide. Obviously pretty much anything John Williams has ever done. EDIT: Also John Powell's Face/Off and more recently How to Train your Dragon are amazing.

As for least favorite/most disappointing, I have to say I continue to be utterly amazed that people love and recommend Michael Giachinno's work. That man can't write a good memorable theme to save his life, and every time I give him a shot again I'm profoundly disappointed. He did a great job on the Incredibles and the Medal of Honor games, but that's about it as far as I'm concerned. His Star Trek score is one of the biggest wasted opportunities I've heard. Edit: That comes off a bit harsh. He's not a bad composer by any stretch, but I think he shouldn't be scoring "epic" movies, his strength seems to be in mid-level thriller territory

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1,187 Reply by bullet3

(11 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Not if its small enough. The lowest end ones I've seen (granted, those couldn't hold the weight of a camera probably) are 100-200 bucks, and I'm pretty sure they fall under the category of remote-control toys. You can fly toy helicopters with pretty large blades with no problem, so I don't think these would be an issue, as long as you aren't doing something crazy like flying it through a shopping mall or something.

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1,188 Reply by bullet3

(11 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I've definitely seen drones like that used on movie behind the scenes. The specific example I'm thinking of is John Woo's Red Cliff. You actually see one of those things crash and get completely destroyed on the making-of (that whole making of is really depressing like that, it makes me want to give John Woo a hug and tell him it's gonna be all right)

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1,189 Reply by bullet3

(11 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I would never trust my piloting skills enough to put a thousand dollar camera on one of those things.

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1,190 Reply by bullet3

(3 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Funnily enough I've always felt this way about Escape from New York as well. Everyone screams about how great the movie is but I really think it's quite dated now and the things you mentioned really drag it down (and this is coming from a huge Carpenter fan). I'm in the vast minority that actually prefers Escape from LA for its all out craziness, you should definitely watch that one next.

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1,191 Reply by bullet3

(9 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Ya, wtf, how did I never hear of this? There's been like 0 mention of it anywhere, and it looks HUGE in scale. I know hollywood is scared of religion bashing movies, but damn. I mean Kingdom of Heaven got made/marketed, and that's a movie where all the protagonists are basically agnostics/atheists trying to stop the religious extremists (to be fair some of that stuff is only in the director's cut).

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1,192 Reply by bullet3

(2 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Oh dear god, I watched the first episode, that's the hardest I've laughed in years. Like seriously this might be my new favorite show.

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1,193 Reply by bullet3

(27 replies, posted in Episodes)

Also Groundhog Day

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1,194 Reply by bullet3

(27 replies, posted in Episodes)

Thinking about it, a lot of John Carpenter movies fit this model too. The Thing, the characters are living their normal lives (granted it's cold, but this is their job by choice), have to battle this creature, and in the end its not clear they've been successful, they're all dead and no-one from the outside will ever know what happened.

They Live, very similar (shockingly so, thinking about it, characters dead to save the world, no one will ever know it was them).

Big Trouble in Little China also fits the bill to an extent. I suppose Jack Burton's friends know he succeeded, but to the rest of the world he's just a crazy guy broadcasting on his CV radio. That one is a worse example probably, since he doesn't grow as a character (and continues thinking he's the hero instead of the sidekick).

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1,195 Reply by bullet3

(27 replies, posted in Episodes)

Ok, that was an awesome intermission. I'd never thought about this concept but I think it totally makes sense, very illuminating.

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1,196 Reply by bullet3

(43 replies, posted in Episodes)

I also dislike Source Code, and am totally perplexed by the overwhelming critical praise.
It's an OK movie, but very forgettable in my book. The multiple universes stuff is the most interesting element, and they leave it off for the last 5 minutes and don't really explore it.

Much more interesting to me would be if they revealed the multi-universe thing early on, and had him have to figure out how far he can stretch the rules of the Source Code device.

Oh well, I hope this one enables Duncan Jones to work on more substantial/interesting sci-fi in the future, I loved the hell out of Moon for what it's worth.

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1,197 Reply by bullet3

(69 replies, posted in Episodes)

Here's the thing with the Dark Knight. I really like the movie, but I think that quite honestly, if you cut the last 40 minutes out, and ended it with batman standing over the destroyed ruins with Rachel dead, it would be an absolute, bonafide great movie. It would take extreme balls to do this, and I understand why they didn't go that way, but I think you have a perfect 2 hour batman/joker film in there, and then instead of a perfect ending, we suddenly restart and its like a two-face short-film attached to the end.

I don't buy Harvey-Dent's transition, they do as much as possible to set it up throughout the movie, but there simply isn't enough time because they're trying to do too much, and as a result I don't really buy the turning point hospital scene.

I also really, really don't buy the Ferry sequence. The first half of the movie works so hard at being grounded and realistic, yet this whole situation just comes out of no-where, and its incredibly contrived. How did the joker get all those explosive barrels on those Ferry's un-noticed? Why is Gordon stupid enough to decide to move all the prisoners? He gives a half-assed justification that makes no sense. You're worried the Joker might try to break them out, so instead of leaving them in the highly secured prison, lets start transporting all of them to god-knows where, even though the Joker just ambushed a prison transport literally yesterday.

The cell-phone bat-vision system kind of arrives out of no-where. I think its a stupid thing to introduce in the first place, and while I like that they address the privacy issues of it, batman is breaking so many laws already, you have to wonder why he wouldn't just keep that thing around. The movie is basically saying "Well, it's ok to wiretap the city, as long as we just do it this one time", and I don't know that I buy that argument. Either don't use it to begin with, or keep it running so you can stop the next villain from coming along.

I do really like the final scene with Gordon/Batman/2-face, I think it works really well, and is a quite powerful, I just feel like it would work better as the end of a 3rd batman movie that was a sequel to Dark Knight.

Also, someone brought up how the Dark Knight basically endorses the ideas/policies of the Neo-cons. I agree, but I actually have zero problem with that, because the entire idea of a vigilante super-hero like Batman is inherently Neo-con, so I think its very unfair to criticize the movie for political reasons. Conservative values make good action/adventure stories (see most of the 80s/90s action classics), that's an inherent fact, so I don't think its an issue.

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1,198 Reply by bullet3

(56 replies, posted in Creations)

For clarification, what's 2000 EST?

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1,199 Reply by bullet3

(25 replies, posted in Episodes)

Seconding the vote for Man with No Name trilogy. That was my gateway drug into westerns and showed me I could love the genre, I really think that's a great starting point for people unfamiliar with the genre. If you're a fan of Inglourious Basterds, then it's really an easy jump from there into something like The Good the Bad and the Ugly, though I'd recommend starting with a Fistful of Dollars.

Once Upon a Time in the West is a goddamned masterpiece, but you can't watch it as your first Western, you need to work up to it to be able to appreciate it's brilliance (and tolerate the running time, Sergio Leone's movies grew exponentially in length as he got older).

Red Sun is one I'd recommend that not a lot of people have seen. It's like a combination of a Western and a Samurai movie. Charles Bronson teams up with a visiting Samurai (Toshiro Mifune) to recover a sacred artifact stolen from the Japanese ambassador's train. The bad guy is played by Alain Delon, so its like a big badass trifecta. It plays almost like a buddy cop movie, think Rush Hour as a Western.

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1,200 Reply by bullet3

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

I still defend MI:2, but I'm a Woo apologist. I really like the idea of having completely different directors bringing their vision to that franchise, and while Woo's vision is definitely retarded and crazy (also compromised as fuck by the PG-13 rating and the studio), its at least memorable. Whatever you call that movie, you don't call it generic.

That's why I kind of like MI:2 more than MI:3, even though 3 is obviously better as a cohesive movie. I just find the 3rd one really, really forgettable (like most JJ Abrams movies), and it doesn't really bring anything new to the table (the team stuff is better in the 1st one, the action is better in the 2nd one). MI:2 I can at least remember lots of cool images from it, and the awesome Hans Zimmer score.

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