General Movie Questions (and hopefully answers)

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SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Snak posted:

The best thing about Krull is how much of a blatant Star Wars ripoff it is, down to having a trash-compactor scene.

Ladyhawk is pretty great. I mean, I'm sure it's terrible, i haven't seen it in over 10 years...

The best blatant Star Wars ripoff is Fukasaku's Message from Space (1978), which is also the third best Star Wars film.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 23:18

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 11:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Dragonslayer isn't very cheesy at all and it's really poor analysis to compare it to Beastmaster, which I would say is the first of real 80s fantasy films (Conan the Barbarian straddles the line nicely) featuring an oiled-up chosen one fighting an evil wizard. Reminder: Dragonslayer features Professional Beta Peter MacNicol getting clowned by almost everyone, including the dragon, who he doesn't even directly defeat. At the end he rides off wondering if the age of fantasy is over. It's much more of a downbeat than your typical 80s power fantasy.

Ladyhawke is pretty good but listen to this track from Dragonslayer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnGypprUsbY) vs. Ladyhawke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi87Y8o33uI especially at the one minute mark) and tell me it belongs in the 80s.

Dragonslayer is dirty and nasty and disempowering in ways that 80s fantasy films weren't.

Also Willow owns.

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. Bakshi's animated Tolkein films and Wizards (1977)? Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)?

The '70s, if we really want to think of this in terms of decades, was a pretty slow period for fantasy, and it wasn't really until Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons rekindled interest in the genre that we start seeing a lot of fantasy films. If you want a real transitional fossil here, it's probably Clash of the Titans (1981), connecting with the Harryhausen adventure fantasies of the '60s but having a zany robot sidekick.

Also, Dragonslayer is cheesy as hell. It's just earnest about it, like all Disney genre films, e.g. The Black Hole (1979).

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 00:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Jack Gladney posted:

Conan is the most amazingly bizarre thing. It's not at all what you think it will be.

Milius is hit or miss as a director but he's solid as gently caress as a screenwriter.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 01:31

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

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.

Like I said, I get what you're saying but I disagree. The reason Donner couldn't make Ladyhawke in the '70s and could in the '80s is because in the '70s nobody would make it and in the '80s roughly anyone would. Same reason why Roddenberry started shopping around scripts for a Star Trek film in 1968 and finally got in made in '78 and released in '79. Nothing to do with Reagan, and everything to do with Star Wars opening the doors in '77.

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.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 00:04

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

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.

Like I said, I understand what you're getting at, but really disagree.

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.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 03:47

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

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.

There were several. The writing was really on the wall in the Summer of 1977, when Star Wars (released in late May) went from being a more or less literal B-movie (many theatres only ordered it because Fox made it a condition for getting The Other Side of Midnight (1977), which was expected to be the big Summer hit) into being a phenomenon where huge crowds were waiting hours to see it. This in opposition to the costly flops of the same Summer---notably Scorsese's New York, New York and Friedkin's Sorcerer (both released at the end of June).

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.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 06:34

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

piratepilates posted:

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!

I think my favourite example of this is the fantasy novel Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell: `Thus it was that Jurgen and the Centaur came to the garden between dawn and sunrise, entering this place in a fashion which it is not convenient to record.'

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 02:11

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Skwirl posted:

Aren't dawn and sunrise the exact same thing?

No, they apparently have a garden between them.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 03:37

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

computer parts posted:

Yeah, I'm sure the dastardly Chinese are the reason why we've never had a lot of black leads.

Check out the mainland Chinese poster for The Force Awakens (2015).

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 02:47

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

computer parts posted:

I'm sure that's why the Oscar nominees didn't include any minorities.

That's bad. But, as a basis for comparison, in China the official State censors are known to block anything that portrays people of certain ethnicities and nationalities in too positive a light.

I mean I don't want to downplay the level of institutional racism in Hollywood (and the rest of America). But in China in many cases the level of casual racism simmers along just this side of ethnic cleansing.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 05:32

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

It isn't particularly uncommon for a teaser trailer to be produced for a film that isn't subsequently completed, or for films to be completed but never find a distributor.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 03:55

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

effectual posted:

How often to projectionists have to clean those windows? Do they just use windex?

Frequency depends on the place, type of glass, environment, and so on. Usually no more frequently than weekly and no less frequently than monthly.

Commercial Windex is fine for most kinds of port glass (or at least it used to be---I don't know if poo poo needed to be changed recently because of 3D projection becoming a thing), but some goofy coated glass requires special treatment. Which is usually just denatured alcohol.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2016 06:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:

How is the original Alien said to not be a great financial success at the time despite making $104.9�203.6 million on a $9�11 million budget?

Hollywood accounting. It is, and at the time was, generally recognised as a commercial success, and Fox's spinning it as a net loser was and is generally understood to be Fox being a bunch of lovely icepeckers.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 08:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Surely it's made it up on home video??

I'm not quite sure what question you're asking. By most estimates it made a net profit of somewhere around US$90M in the year following its theatrical release (about US$100M at the box office against a budget of around US$10M). At the time, Fox claimed it instead lost about US$2.5M because of advertising, distribution expenses, and miscellaneous other bullshit. The production company, Brandywine, started making noise about getting hosed out of their share of the profits. At which point Fox decided that maybe the film had actually made US$4M up to that point. At which point Brandywine sued. This bounced around for a couple of years and was eventually resolved not by Fox coming clean on the accounting but instead by putting up money for a sequel. Which ended up making about US$180M on a budget of about US$18M. At any rate, the books for Alien (1979) have never, as far as I know, been made public.

RandomPauI posted:

Yeah. This is a gross simplification but a conglomerate which owns a movie studio can order the studio to buy their goods and services from other businesses owned by the conglomerate, even at an inflated cost. Which means of course renting a billboard is going to cost at least $2500 when the market rate is $1,500 and each peanut butter sandwich is going to cost $10.

I don't know why this isn't illegal.

A more obvious, and common, example is advertising costs being subtracted from a film's take even when the advertising dollars are paid to a division of the same parent company that owns the film. So a film from 20th Century Fox gets advertised on the Fox Network and it's actually just News Corporation shuffling money from one end of their books to the other, but that money is just gone as far as anyone holding a percentage of the film's profits is concerned.

In this example I just used Fox because we were talking about Alien, but it's worth pointing out that it was released before News Corp. bought 20th Century Fox and built all the related Fox brands. So poo poo like that presumably happened (but we can't know for sure exactly what because the books are still closed) but it couldn't have been exactly that in that case.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 22:16

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

cheerfullydrab posted:

No one likes opening credits, even when people were "trained" to be used to them. Give me my movie, give it to me now.

Somebody needs to watch Goldfinger (1964).

# ¿ May 30, 2016 04:52

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

EL BROMANCE posted:

One of the questions in our weekly trivia was 'Which movie sequel has the tag line "The Adventure Continues"?' Which none of us could put a finger on. Turns out the answer is 'The Empire Strikes Back', but I'm not surprised we couldn't recall this as 'The Star Wars Saga Continues' is the one used on every poster I can find.

IMDb and wiki quotes and places like that state 'Adventure' was in fact used, but I can't find it anywhere official. Anyone with massive Star Wars knowledge ever seen it? This is pure curiosity - we won regardless, not trying to claim back a point in a really tedious way!

They're obviously confusing it with Kenny Rogers as The Gambler: The Adventure Continues (1983).

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 08:22

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 11:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Snak posted:

I'm pretty sure her eyes follow you, too.

More or less. Giant supernatural heads are apparently at increased risk for nystagmus.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

Anyone know of any horror movies that involve (literally) giant, scary faces?

Poltergeist (1982).

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 10:37

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > General Movie Questions (and hopefully answers)

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