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I'll never understand why studios give "writer"/directors massive budgets to make loud disaster movies without considering that these guys are good at disasters but poo poo for writers. How they manage to not bring in people with some science backgrounds to make these things even slightly more plausible.....or even a half-witted TV writer to touch up the abysmal dialogue is beyond me. Just watched 'Moonfall'. The movie didn't need to make a ton of sense or even be entirely coherent for that matter. But to scatter it with cliched dialogue and bad jokes/gags is a total mindfuck. Who could have possibly expected this movie to be well reviewed. "Wait....what!? How was this movie a box office bomb? Guess we'll need to make the explosions bigger and louder." - clueless studio executives
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Apr 9, 2022 17:26
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Make better movies idiots
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Apr 9, 2022 17:58
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Does Moonfall count as a studio film?
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Apr 9, 2022 18:56
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live with fruit posted:Does Moonfall count as a studio film? Maybe not? Either way.....a $150 million budget is big. And my god....the car chase scene. 0_o Edit #2. I wrote all this before the movie was finished and have a few more thoughts. Roland Emmerich is gaslighting everyone now. He knew that this movie was going to be an audaciously idiotic mess. This makes 2012 (also an Emmerich movie) look tame by comparison. And that movie was ridiculous in a bad way. I just wonder if the backing companies giving him huge budgets realize this. RestingB1tchFace fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 19:05
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Payndz posted:Norris himself is someone I've never understood the appeal of. Maybe in Wanker, Texas Ranger he displayed some actual personality and charm RON HOWARD: He didn’t.
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Apr 9, 2022 20:35
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I watched The Commando with Michael Jai And Mickey Rourke last night. Terrible
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Apr 9, 2022 21:53
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Norris did a good job as the heavy in Way of the Dragon.
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Apr 9, 2022 21:57
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RestingB1tchFace posted:I'll never understand why studios give "writer"/directors massive budgets to make loud disaster movies without considering that these guys are good at disasters but poo poo for writers. How they manage to not bring in people with some science backgrounds to make these things even slightly more plausible.....or even a half-witted TV writer to touch up the abysmal dialogue is beyond me. Just watched 'Moonfall'. The movie didn't need to make a ton of sense or even be entirely coherent for that matter. But to scatter it with cliched dialogue and bad jokes/gags is a total mindfuck. Who could have possibly expected this movie to be well reviewed. People really don’t care and want to see city go boom
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Apr 9, 2022 22:14
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Also the real reason is bc their last movie made money. That’s all they care about.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:15
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Payndz posted:On a whim I picked up Invasion USA from eBay. I'd forgotten the 'joy' of seeing the Cannon logo at the start of an action movie. Your seal of quality! You + folks ITT might like: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08WS4N7DN/  I read through it last month and enjoyed it a lot.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:31
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NoneMoreNegative posted:You + folks ITT might like: I wish there was a book like this for PM Entertainment.
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Apr 9, 2022 22:37
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NoneMoreNegative posted:You + folks ITT might like: Just struck me that Invasion USA and Commando came out in the same year. Commando is not a good movie, but it's a great movie, and it's because it knows it's insanely OTT and runs with it. IU on the other hand has no self-awareness, and the limit of its humour is that one clunky Norris one-liner about being hit with so many rights you'll beg for a left and the Dirty Harry ref of the kids singing on the school bus. (Which is not played as a gag, so maybe it wasn't even intentional.)
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Apr 9, 2022 23:24
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Invasion USA does have Richard Lynch Dark Knighting a metal coke straw into a woman’s nose and then shooting her boyfriend’s dick off.
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Apr 9, 2022 23:30
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Lumbermouth posted:Invasion USA does have Richard Lynch Dark Knighting a metal coke straw into a woman’s nose and then shooting her boyfriend’s dick off. 
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Apr 10, 2022 02:14
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I forgot it was Billy Drago! https://youtu.be/t5deIF1Pe3k
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Apr 10, 2022 02:27
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Lol incredible
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Apr 10, 2022 02:29
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watched Ambulance very middling I have to say even for Michael Bay he even puts a The Rock convo in it like Fred Durst does with Limp Bizkit in The Fanatic just to let you know it's all downhill from here good thing I bought a ticket for Everything Everywhere using A List since they could use it more Alan Smithee fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 09:42
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I watched SPL:Sha Po Lang/Kill Zone and while the second one is perhaps objectively better in every way, it only dares to dip its toes into the absurd melodrama that #1 revels in. The end of act 2 is one of the most darkly comedic things I have ever seen. And the whole thing is on youtube. I continued on to #2 only to realize I had already watched it, and I can only assume the reason I skipped the first one is because someone on these forums said to do so because the second one is Very Good, but shame on whoever that was If you are confident you will never watch it just go to 56:36 and watch intently for the next five minutes e: as this is the action thread I should also clarify that this is reflected in the action as well, such as when the boring protagonist attempts to settle things six minutes into the movie by car-dueling main bad guy Sammo Hung, who dresses well in every scene except this one where he is dressed like if Eminem tucked in his pants for some reason and who makes a counter-offer of a golf club duel, or during the final battle when actual protagonist Donnie Yen triple-kicks Sammo Hung directly backwards so hard that he falls straight down SPL loving rules, in fact I take back what I said about 2 being better VROOM VROOM fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 10:41
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Sammo Hung rules. If you have the "Hi Yah" Channel on Amazon check out The Bodyguard, has some great Sammo action. Also if you like action movies that channel is only 1.99 a month and has a pretty sweet collection of movies. Just watched "The Swordsman" and the latest Donnie Yen movie Raging Fire rules and is there as well.
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Apr 11, 2022 15:04
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Payndz posted:Norris himself is someone I've never understood the appeal of. Maybe in Wanker, Texas Ranger he displayed some actual personality and charm, but in every movie I've seen him in he's an unexpressive slab of gristle with a face like an alien prosthetic from Deep Space Nine with a beard stuck to it. Iirc he did a couple of movies with Louis Gosset Jr. where he was passable. I was very young when I saw them, but I remember liking their banter and friendship in Firewalker. This could be 100% LGJ carrying him, though. I haven't seen the movies in literally over 30 years. Also Killzone and Killzone 2 are indeed incredibly dope. If not for Killzone 2's inexplicably weird ending it would be a perfect late 80s/early 90s HK movie updated with some modern elements. You know you're in a a great action movie when the elegant guy in the tie and vest combo reveals that he's a grade A asskicker! This rule has never failed me but I'm sure some of you will find an exception.
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Apr 11, 2022 15:44
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Firewalker indeed owns, i also kind of like lonewolf mcquade. I have seen some other movies of his but can't really remember which ones were good in at least cheap 80's action movie way.
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Apr 11, 2022 17:58
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RestingB1tchFace posted:Maybe not? Either way.....a $150 million budget is big. And my god....the car chase scene. 0_o
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Apr 11, 2022 17:59
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Chuck Norris is an interesting case because he never really did have a chance at breaking through as a major action star the way guys like Van Damme and Seagal had. When you look at his filmography, all of his "hits" are movies that have budgets of like less than $10 million and then they were profitable because they made something like $15-20 million. In fact Invasion U.S.A stands out because it's one of the highest budgets he ever had at $12 million.....and it only made $17 million so probably wasn't considered as successful as some of the others. Compare that to Seagal who made 3 or 4 films for modest budgets but then by Under Siege he's all the sudden working on movies with budgets like $35 million(Under Siege), $50 million(On Deadly Ground) and then $60 million for Under Siege 2. Van Damme had a similar trajectory where he made some stuff that was low budget, then transitioned pretty quickly to where the budgets were consistently around at least 25-30 million. Chuck Norris only had one or maybe two films that had budgets of more than 10 million, then his career fizzles out and he goes to television for Walker Texas Ranger. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 18:32
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You can't make a straight-across comparison between Norris and Van Damme or Seagal, because his career got going about a decade before either of them, and budgets jumped dramatically during the 80s. The budgets of B-movie studios was steadily climbing, too, until there was a domestic industry waiting to fill the gap by the collapse of the Italian exploitation film industry. How many American "action stars" were there in the 70s? Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Bruce Lee, and Chuck. Kinda drops off a cliff after that.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:50
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True, it seems like by the time Van Damme and Seagal entered the picture there was this next level that was attainable for them that didn't seem to exist for Norris. Norris had deals with some major studios, but there was never that moment where one of them said "ok Chuck, we trust your ability to sell tickets so we're gonna bump the budget of this next movie up to 25 million or 30 million. They just kept pumping out the low budget stuff.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:59
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Here's a reference point that I like to use because it's easy: Chuck's first big starring role was arguably Good Guys Wear Black, with a budget of about a million. Looking at the top-grossing movies that year, most were made for $6 million or less, with Superman as the most shocking outlier at $55 million. Compare that to Bloodsport in 1988, where the cheapest top-grossing movies cost $7-10 million, and most were either dramas/comedies that cost somewhere around $12-15 million and the rest are $20 million and up. To be fair to JCVD, he also made movies for under $3 million that made amazing returns, even bigger than Chuck's. A lot of that probably has to do with distribution.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:15
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Yea Van Damme had Bloodsport and Kickboxer which were budgeted around the same level as the typical Chuck Norris film but they both made something like $50 mil which is way beyond anything Chuck ever did. So you can kinda understand why Van Damme was considered to be bankable enough to invest higher budgets in. Seagal is really weird because he was basically plucked out of obscurity by one of his aikido students and pretty much immediately he's working with $10+ million budgets. He never had to carry a $500k or $1.5 mil budgeted film on his shoulders like the other two did.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:25
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I've listened to three different podcasts do a "deep dive" on Seagal, and they're all fun to listen to because each one digs up some outrageous lies and horrifying sex crimes that the other ones missed. But yeah, he was strapped to a rocket and then sabotaged the rocket. Had a 30-year career that peaked around the fifth year.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:36
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Hiekkakauppias posted:Firewalker indeed owns, i also kind of like lonewolf mcquade. I have seen some other movies of his but can't really remember which ones were good in at least cheap 80's action movie way.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:38
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Halloween Jack posted:How many American "action stars" were there in the 70s? Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Bruce Lee, and Chuck. Kinda drops off a cliff after that. The interesting thing is that a lot of the guys we think of as the biggest "action stars" (Clint, Burt, Arnold, Sly, Bruce, Vin... weird how you only need the first name to know exactly who they are) managed to have pretty varied filmographies. Clint's redneck monkey comedies were massive hits, for instance, and he was also quietly building his skills as a director between the shoot-'em-ups. The second-stringers like Norris, Van Damme, Lundgren and Seagal never really broke out of the pure head-cracking genre.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:44
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I've been doing a ton of catchup on old Sly, Kurt Russell, (watched tango and cash today) JCVD etc stuff I've never seen and while it's all really fun, I just watched police story 3: supercop and holy gently caress that finale sequence. The outtakes are unreal , i cannot believe someone was like 'yes we should do this'
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Apr 11, 2022 21:02
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If you're going to compare the career trajectory of old action stars, Michelle Yeoh was jumping on trains in the 90s and stars in the best movie of 2022. Just slightly ahead of Seagal, I'd say.
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Apr 11, 2022 21:12
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I hadn't seen Supercop in years, so watched the finale again.  "Yes, let's take the biggest movie star in Asia, dangle him from a helicopter at 500 feet, smash him into a building or two, then fly him head-on at a moving steam train. And while we're at it, let's have his co-star jump a motorbike onto said train, for real."
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Apr 11, 2022 22:00
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Goddamn Supercop loving owns
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Apr 11, 2022 22:29
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Supercop doesn't have a proper final fight with the main heavy but it contains like three other sequences that are top shelf even for Jackie Chan films of that era so it's fine.
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Apr 12, 2022 00:42
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I'd love to see Jake Gyllenhaal does a few more Michael Bay flicks. Like Nick Cage and Will Smith he really keys into the Bay frequency and sells the poo poo out the material.
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Apr 12, 2022 03:50
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Watched Cobra today, it was legendary and lived up to the expectations I had for it. Just a nasty version of the worst excesses the 80s had on offer. there wasn't even a shootout in the robot fashion show scene. Then watched Yes, Madam to continue with my michelle yeoh kick and it was an awful slog til the last ten minutes. I'd seen the Rothrock scenes (she was great) but Yeoh held her own and this was just great https://thumbs.gfycat.com/SinglePastIriomotecat-mobile.mp4 followed by a dropkick where she leapt down at least a dozen stairs. fantastic stuff
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Apr 12, 2022 20:58
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Yeah the "comedy" parts of Yes Madam are tough but at least you're rewarded with the action parts
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Apr 12, 2022 21:51
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mastershakeman posted:Watched Cobra today, it was legendary and lived up to the expectations I had for it. Just a nasty version of the worst excesses the 80s had on offer. there wasn't even a shootout in the robot fashion show scene. It makes me profoundly sad that there's no real way to see the proposed two hour long version of Cobra.
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Apr 13, 2022 00:21
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I don't think Cobra has enough ideas to sustain another half-hour. It would probably just mean every action scene wearing out its welcome. I mean, I guess you could devote a half hour to trying to rationalize the nonsensical murder cult, but they wouldn't do that, would they?
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Apr 13, 2022 00:32
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