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Slowhanded posted:Like I said, I'm not sure how many people that constitute that average moviegoing populace agree with you on that. I was addressing the guy who said his tastes don't lean toward big crowd-pleasing movies. The average moviegoer is wrong about a lot of things anyway.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:09
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Spectacle is definitely significantly lessened at home, especially for the people who cheap out and don't get a fancy sound system (which is a lot of people).
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Jan 20, 2016 07:16
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Snak posted:Conan The Barbarian is every bit as serious as Lord of the Rings, but it's also a good movie. I love how seriously the love scenes are treated, they really are given equal weight to Conan as the revenge scenes, so it's a real tough choice for his character.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:19
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:The average moviegoer is wrong about a lot of things anyway. Yes, but their dollars do make the bulk of revenue for Hollywood and the various distributors — hence why I pointed out the inertia going the other way.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:22
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computer parts posted:Spectacle is definitely significantly lessened at home, especially for the people who cheap out and don't get a fancy sound system (which is a lot of people). I wonder what the actual numbers are for people that buy anything extra for their TV audio system. Picture seems like the important factor obviously, but I don't really know anyone that has bought so much as a soundbar, let alone a multi-speaker setup. I'm just as guilty as well; I love a big, crisp picture, but I don't give two fucks about the audio. They could switch all movies to mono for all I care.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:31
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Slowhanded posted:Yes, but their dollars do make the bulk of revenue for Hollywood and the various distributors — hence why I pointed out the inertia going the other way. I wasn't disputing your facts or the logic of your argument, but rather challenging the mentality that only big-budget maximum-sensory-experience movies are worth seeing in the theater. That is certainly the prevailing attitude among the general public, but smaller, less-intense movies still experience profitable theatrical runs because there are a lot of people who don't subscribe to that mentality.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:33
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I have a sweet, huge TV with a kickass sound system. Watching spectacle movies at home is no problem for me, but I still kind of prefer seeing them in theaters because I (somewhat masochistically) enjoy the experience of the crowd.
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Jan 20, 2016 16:21
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ALFbrot posted:I have a sweet, huge TV with a kickass sound system. Watching spectacle movies at home is no problem for me, but I still kind of prefer seeing them in theaters because I (somewhat masochistically) enjoy the experience of the crowd. Why is being around people masochistic? Are you thinking of the time you saw Dancer in the Dark and then had to ride home with your brother and his friend for like half an hour and everyone had to pretend they didn't cry in the finale when Björk sang her last song. Or is it the popcorn noises. I mean, we all have our things. I shouldn't pry.
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Jan 20, 2016 16:39
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Aw poo poo I have to see DitD tonight. I've gone and wrecked myself.
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Jan 20, 2016 16:40
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syscall girl posted:Why is being around people masochistic? I will never pretend to not cry at Dancer in the Dark. It's just that crowds are a double-edged sword. For all the positive vibes and feeding off of the energy of the room, there's just as many dickheads shining their cell phones, kicking seats, bringing babies, etc.
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Jan 20, 2016 17:29
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ALFbrot posted:I will never pretend to not cry at Dancer in the Dark. Oh yeah. Those things take you out of the experience
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Jan 20, 2016 17:37
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SubG posted:I get what you're saying, but I don't think there's really a '70s/'80s distinction to be made here. Like what are all of the '70s high fantasy films that you're saying Dragonslayer is a late example of. Ok, I reread my original post and I phrased it badly. What I should have said is that it's right at the end of 70s-style movies, and is heavily influenced by art from the era. There absolutely is a distinction between the 70s and 80s because the 70s were immersed in Watergate and Vietnam and the 80s went full-throated Reagan American Exceptionalism and it shows in the film(s) of the era. I mean, for goodness sake, Dragonslayer features a clear Vietnam parallel in the form of the lottery that drafts young people to be sent to their death. The entire movie glares a gimlet eye at any kind of authority figure - the king is corrupt as hell. Wonder is leaving the world. It's a very dour film and again I have to stress that it's not "cheesy" at all unless you are using the word to mean that it contains fantastical elements that couldn't quite be realized with technology of the era. Regarding the 70s/80s divide, you can look at Beastmaster and Krull and see that the protagonist is of noble birth, he's singled out for greatness and destiny, and that the evil forces in the movies are completely external to society. Dar's father is shown to be a good king and Krull's protag is also a handsome, kindly prince. Dragonslayer's dragon is only part of the menace of the film; a major plot point is that Galen's love interest pretends to be a boy so that she isn't thrown to the dragon as part of her society's disgusting lotto system. You'll notice I'm studiously avoiding mentioning Ladyhawke, which actually is a lot like Dragonslayer thematically. Do you know why? Ladyhawke was written in the 1970s, pre-Reagan. Donner shopped the script around for over half a decade. The 70s/80s divide is very real.
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Jan 20, 2016 17:40
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SubG posted:Also, Dragonslayer is cheesy as hell. It's just earnest about it, like all Disney genre films, e.g. The Black Hole (1979). It's amazing The Black Hole even exists. What a weird time for Disney.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:35
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Dr Monkeysee posted:It's amazing The Black Hole even exists. What a weird time for Disney. When I heard they were looking at remaking it, and trying to find a new bad guy, I said out loud "Wait a minute, Max Von Sydow isn't dead, just get him again. He already knows all the lines!" Then I realized it was Max Schnell and felt awful.
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Jan 20, 2016 21:03
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Dr Monkeysee posted:It's amazing The Black Hole even exists. What a weird time for Disney. I absolutely loved The Black Hole as a kid, and looking back at it a couple decades later I still love about half of it, but for every amazing practical effect, beautiful matte painting, or interesting plot element it seems to have a huge helping of stupid and/or cheesy. Compared to the annoying and cheesy looking R2D2 ripoff Another Disney movie that I loved as a kid (and I still love the first half) is Flight of the Navigator. With the interesting time travel setup, and the scenes where NASA is looking into the mystery of what happened to the kid, finding star charts stored in his brain, etc the first half really holds up well today even for adults. Once he gets on board the ship and starts flying around with Pee Wee Herman there are some cool parts but also a lot of dumb stuff. I honestly think if they had just released it under the Touchstone label or something instead of Disney and the second half had kept the same serious tone as the first, it would be among the best sci-fi movies of all time but since it was after all a Disney movie it automatically had to have a 'cute' kid-friendly robot.
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Jan 20, 2016 22:13
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Black Hole, much like Tron, is a matte-lover's dream.
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Jan 20, 2016 23:23
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:You'll notice I'm studiously avoiding mentioning Ladyhawke, which actually is a lot like Dragonslayer thematically. Do you know why? Ladyhawke was written in the 1970s, pre-Reagan. Donner shopped the script around for over half a decade. The 70s/80s divide is very real. Tonally, when you think about '70s film you're probably thinking about the so-called New Hollywood movement. The traditional fencepost films for the era are Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). But that's a simplification: the commercial failure of Coppola's One from the Heart (1981) was almost certainly more consequential and came later, and box office failures like Scorsese's New York, New York (1977) had something to do with it. But the major reason for the end of New Hollywood was the huge success of Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977) (and to a somewhat lesser extent Halloween (1978)), which gave Hollywood a new model for how to make money. So when you look at the career of, say, Peter Yates, you see Bullitt (1968) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), which both have quintessentially New Hollywood sensibilities---introspective mood, conflicted and ambivalent protagonist, and so on. And then in the early '80s he makes Krull (1983). If you want to get to the bottom of why Bullitt looks the way it does and Krull looks the way it does, despite coming from the same director, you really, really have to start jumping through a bunch of hoops to come up with any answer other than Star Wars. And Dragonslayer is cheesy in the sense that a lot of fantasy films of the era are cheesy: the carefully circumscribed, pat way their genre conceits are packaged. Specifically in the case of Dragonslayer a lot of the cheesiness is obscured by the durability of a lot of the trappings. And once something worms its way into the cultural background we have trouble looking at it with clear eyes. But, to pick a different but relevant to our discussion example, when Luke destroys the Death Star after receiving the ghostly admonition to `Use the Force, Luke,' this is a deeply, abidingly cheesy moment. That's not to say it's bad. It's a great sequence. But the Force is pure loving cheese. The fact that it's called the Death Star is pure loving cheese. Star Destroyers, light sabres, half the loving names. Cheesy as gently caress. That's more or less the entire aesthetic.
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Jan 21, 2016 00:04
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Oh you know about New Hollywood! That's excellent. Yes, I would say Dragonslayer is largely a fantasy New Hollywood movie. That's why it's worthwhile. Also I disagree with you 100% about cheesy, which is what I figured.
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Jan 21, 2016 00:12
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Oh you know about New Hollywood! Ahahah
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Jan 21, 2016 00:17
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Uh I don't know if you're aware of this but a lot of people don't know poo poo about what they are discussing. SubG knows what's up, we both agree to disagree, it's actually a nice end to the conversation I think.
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Jan 21, 2016 00:20
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It's just funny because SubG is one of the most well-read people in Cinema Discusso.
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Jan 21, 2016 00:36
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Well then I'm the guy who doesn't know poo poo!
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Jan 21, 2016 01:02
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Oh you know about New Hollywood! That's excellent. Yes, I would say Dragonslayer is largely a fantasy New Hollywood movie. That's why it's worthwhile. From the creative end, the quintessentially New Hollywood experience was what John Milius described as going into a swamp until you went crazy, then you made the movie. Of course that wasn't unique to New Hollywood, but was also part of what was considered serious/dedicated/whatever filmmaking at the time---sure inside Hollywood you had Coppola doing that sort of thing, but you also had things like Werner Herzog's experiences with Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Ruy Guerra (who appears in Aguirre) making Os Deuses E Os Mortos (1970), and so on. And from the audience end, New Hollywood was pretty squarely aimed at the young cognoscenti---people who were around draft age in the late '60s/early '70s and were in the market for big-budget arthouse films about tits and violence. When we look at films like Easy Rider (1969), Mean Streets (1973), or Nashville (1975), there's a lot of variation in tone, subject matter, and so on, but they're unified in being about the alienation and ambivalence of the young and politically conscious. Of course not all films considered to be part of the movement have all of these components. But when you look at Dragonslayer, it doesn't have any of this. Most people comment on it being dark for a Disney film, but I really think that's mostly because people underestimate how `dark' Disney historically was. But at any rate on the creative end it doesn't really come from the whole big budget New Wave guerrilla filmmaking sensibilities of New Hollywood, and it's squarely aimed at the preteen and adolescent demographic of 1981---a demographic more worried about playing D&D than getting drafted. I mean yeah it's got an interesting edge to it and it's a film that deserves to be watched. But not because it's part of some imagined '70s fantasy film tradition that never actually existed.
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Jan 21, 2016 03:47
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Smilin Joe Fission posted:Another Disney movie that I loved as a kid (and I still love the first half) is Flight of the Navigator. With the interesting time travel setup, and the scenes where NASA is looking into the mystery of what happened to the kid, finding star charts stored in his brain, etc the first half really holds up well today even for adults. Once he gets on board the ship and starts flying around with Pee Wee Herman there are some cool parts but also a lot of dumb stuff. I honestly think if they had just released it under the Touchstone label or something instead of Disney and the second half had kept the same serious tone as the first, it would be among the best sci-fi movies of all time but since it was after all a Disney movie it automatically had to have a 'cute' kid-friendly robot. I was about the same age as David (the protagonist) and absolutely enamored with Sarah Jessica Parker for the way she flirted with him so I guess I'll always have a soft spot for this film.
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Jan 21, 2016 06:07
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I'd love to see a film or a book about what an alternate universe would be like in which Heaven's Gate either had never been made or had been made by someone other than Cimino. Maybe the timelines would diverge during the making of The Deer Hunter and somehow it wouldn't be successful, or maybe there was an absolutely huge wave of kids and dumb adults killing themselves via Russian Roulette inspired by the movie and Cimino is vilified to the extent that he never gets to make another film. Maybe the backlash against this vilifies not just Cimino, but Hollywood itself to such an extent that Reagan would be completely unelectable. If Heaven's Gate had been made within a reasonable time frame at a reasonable cost, it would probably be regarded as a decent film that turned a small profit and then quickly faded into obscurity. I love the way Heaven's Gate looks and the world would miss out on that, but United Artists may still exist as a separate studio today, or at the very least would have survived for much longer under Transamerica ownership and likely would have released some great films during that time that were never made in our timeline. On the other hand, it may have been inevitable that some other director and some other film would eventually come along to teach the same 'lessons' to Hollywood both for better and for worse. Maybe the more conservative politics of the 80's would have doomed New Hollywood anyway, or maybe it was already doomed by the late 70's. It's safe to say that changing any big event in history would have all kinds of unpredictable consequences that would ripple outwards. It's almost certain that some influential and great movies we have would never have been made, or would have been made in a different way by different people. We would also almost definitely have some great films in the alternate timeline that we don't have in our own. Maybe the survival of "New Hollywood" to the present day actually leads to an increased level of power and control by major studios, with fewer original and 'risky' movies being made since it provides just enough outlet for ambitious and unique film makers within the system that the rise of indie film making happens to a much smaller extent. Obviously there are no real 'answers' to what would actually happen but I've got alternate history on my mind as I've been watching The Man In the High Castle. Smilin Joe Fission fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 06:09
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syscall girl posted:I was about the same age as David (the protagonist) and absolutely enamored with Sarah Jessica Parker for the way she flirted with him so I guess I'll always have a soft spot for this film. I've always thought it's too bad that Joey Cramer, who played David hardly did anything aside from Flight of the Navigator. He obviously had some talent and it's too bad that he either didn't pursue acting further or maybe he actually tried and couldn't make the jump from child to adult actor for whatever reason.
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Jan 21, 2016 06:12
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Smilin Joe Fission posted:On the other hand, it may have been inevitable that some other director and some other film would eventually come along to teach the same 'lessons' to Hollywood both for better and for worse. And even ignoring them, later there was the spectacular failure of One from the Heart (1981), which more or less bankrupted Coppola (who had already borrowed money from Lucas after the success of Star Wars to finish Apocalypse Now (1979)). Even if Heaven's Gate was never even conceived, One from the Heart's failure would have been a major turning point.
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Jan 21, 2016 06:34
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The Bourne Supremacy was on TV last night and I turned it on when Bourne confronts a former Treadstone agent in the guy's house in Munich. In all three movies we're constantly hearing how Bourne is the perfect killing machine, how he doesn't make mistakes, etc. So why does he restrain his fellow trained killer with his hands in front instead of behind his back? Naturally the guy starts fighting and handles himself pretty well even while restrained this way.
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Jan 21, 2016 17:00
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Sand Monster posted:The Bourne Supremacy was on TV last night and I turned it on when Bourne confronts a former Treadstone agent in the guy's house in Munich. In all three movies we're constantly hearing how Bourne is the perfect killing machine, how he doesn't make mistakes, etc. So why does he restrain his fellow trained killer with his hands in front instead of behind his back? Naturally the guy starts fighting and handles himself pretty well even while restrained this way. And why doesn't Gandalf ask the giant eagle to fly him over the volcano and drop the ring in?
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Jan 21, 2016 17:21
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Sand Monster posted:The Bourne Supremacy was on TV last night and I turned it on when Bourne confronts a former Treadstone agent in the guy's house in Munich. In all three movies we're constantly hearing how Bourne is the perfect killing machine, how he doesn't make mistakes, etc. So why does he restrain his fellow trained killer with his hands in front instead of behind his back? Naturally the guy starts fighting and handles himself pretty well even while restrained this way. It's pretty arguable that Jason Bourne has never been a perfect killing machine and constantly makes mistakes because he's constantly emotionally compromised by having empathy. Except for that time he jumps on a dude's head mario-style from the roof of a building for the darkest yet most comedic kill of the series.
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Jan 21, 2016 18:24
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Sand Monster posted:The Bourne Supremacy was on TV last night and I turned it on when Bourne confronts a former Treadstone agent in the guy's house in Munich. In all three movies we're constantly hearing how Bourne is the perfect killing machine, how he doesn't make mistakes, etc. So why does he restrain his fellow trained killer with his hands in front instead of behind his back? Naturally the guy starts fighting and handles himself pretty well even while restrained this way. Wants to be able to see the guy's hands, maybe? Like, he knows he can't restrain him forever no matter what, but isn't planning on killing him. What I never got was why the german forced a fight, but there must be a bounty out on Bourne he wants to collect.
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Jan 21, 2016 18:44
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Snak posted:Except for that time he jumps on a dude's head mario-style from the roof of a building for the darkest yet most comedic kill of the series. Not a kill per se but surely his fight against an assassin using a rolled up magazine has that title.
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Jan 21, 2016 18:49
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EmmyOk posted:Not a kill per se but surely his fight against an assassin using a rolled up magazine has that title. That was not nearly as funny. edit: how in the gently caress is my avatar broken?
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Jan 21, 2016 21:11
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Sand Monster posted:The Bourne Supremacy was on TV last night and I turned it on when Bourne confronts a former Treadstone agent in the guy's house in Munich. In all three movies we're constantly hearing how Bourne is the perfect killing machine, how he doesn't make mistakes, etc. So why does he restrain his fellow trained killer with his hands in front instead of behind his back? Naturally the guy starts fighting and handles himself pretty well even while restrained this way. He made the guy restrain himself with a zip tie, something I think would be close to impossible to do behind your own back so tight you couldn't slip out and Bourne didn't want to get close enough to do it himself, because obviously then the guy would try and fight more immediately.
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Jan 21, 2016 22:55
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Jack Gladney posted:And why doesn't Gandalf ask the giant eagle to fly him over the volcano and drop the ring in? Because the Eye of Sauron was endlessly watching the skies and Sauron had an air force of nigh-unkillable wraith lords riding dragons?
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Jan 21, 2016 23:21
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Because the Eye of Sauron was endlessly watching the skies and Sauron had an air force of nigh-unkillable wraith lords riding dragons? Yeah why isn't this brought up every time some wise-rear end says that? At least Boromir's plan made sense...
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Jan 21, 2016 23:23
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Snak posted:At least Boromir's plan made sense... The catapult??
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Jan 21, 2016 23:30
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:The catapult?? That's the one.
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Jan 22, 2016 00:00
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Because the Eye of Sauron was endlessly watching the skies and Sauron had an air force of nigh-unkillable wraith lords riding dragons? The real question is why is that's always forgotten.
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Jan 22, 2016 00:03
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It's stuff like that that make me wish movies just used the phrase 'science device' whenever there's a magic device that does some science thing instead of giving it an actual name. But wait a minute, in Batman Begins they use a microwave device to enact their masterplan, but won't a microwave end up caus--NOPE, the villains are using a science device to do their plan, it works because it is a science device that is doing science to cause mayhem and mischief. Can't fault a science device!
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Jan 22, 2016 00:14
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