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Best moment in Cobra is when the Night Slasher grabs a standing woman by the throat while he's hiding under a bed. Or the police firing range being separated from the squad room by a glass partition. Or Stallone using shears to cut his pizza.
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Jul 27, 2017 12:51
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X-Ray Pecs posted:The Raid has better action scenes, but I think Dredd's the better film. Its simple, brutal fights compliment the nature of the Judges, their power and iron rule. I also think Dredd's smarter and has more to say about fascism and state violence than The Raid does. I love Dredd and it's probably my favorite movie so far this decade. (Although the city's been devastated often enough in the comics that the Judges are close to losing control there too, now.)
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Sep 9, 2017 09:52
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I hadn't seen the car chase from the Italian/Canadian Dirty Harry knock-off Blazing Magnum before, and I'd highly recommend it. (It's on YouTube.) It's a weird mix of good stuntwork (it was done by Remy Julienne, the stunt driver of The Italian Job, a bunch of Bond films and many, many more movies with car chases), low-budget corner cutting (done an impressive stunt? Now show it all over again from several different angles!) and the "eh, whatever" attitude of a lot of exploitation cinema (awkward camerawork, reactions and blocking in the pre-chase confrontation, and just drop in some funky elevator muzak at random points in lieu of a score). But the best thing is that it epitomises the 1970s car chase: two huge wallowing barges with ludicrously large engines smashing the crap out of each other on grimy, run-down streets while tyres scream and innocent bystanders get their cars flipped over.
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Nov 23, 2017 21:47
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Neo Rasa posted:From 1991 to 1996 there was a rise in white supremacy movements (and of course the wave of black church arsons from 94~96-ish) and I think that definitely effected movies because we had this brief time in the 90s where the neo Nazi and white supremacy groups, Aryan Brotherhood, sovereign citizen types, etc. are action move villains more than before or since. Timecop was dopey fun from the days when even third-division chunkheads like Van Damme and Seagal had decent amounts of resources put behind them. I miss the days of "high concept" action cinema.
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Dec 2, 2017 21:39
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X-Ray Pecs posted:It’s that very specific balance where the good Indys and Lethal Weapon 1 (haven’t seen the rest so I can’t comment) are chock full of jokes, but they’re written and edited in such a way that it never feels like the jokes are slowing down the action scenes, and instead add to the rhythm and conflict of the scenes.
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Dec 28, 2017 19:51
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Wheat Loaf posted:There was a TV show from the early 80s created by Donald P. Bellisario (I think it was his first follow-up to Magnum P.I.) called Tales of the Gold Monkey which aimed to cash in on the popularity of Raiders. From what I understand, it was a live-action version of TaleSpin with humans instead of Jungle Book characters. I've never seen it but it's been on my list for a while. It's also a bit problematic now as the star (Stephen Collins) has been exposed as a paedophile.
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Dec 29, 2017 16:57
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I now can't read the name Wild Wild West without mentally prefixing it with "a wicky wicky". God drat you, Will Smith.
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Dec 29, 2017 22:05
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm hard-pressed to think of many big-budget action movies worse than Wild West West. Battlefield Earth, I suppose, but even Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has more so-bad-it's-good, or at least holy-poo poo-they-did-that, moments. Wild West West just makes everyone in it look bad.. Banderas should stay away from movies where he plays an assassin fighting another assassin, because he's zero for two.
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Dec 30, 2017 09:41
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Hat Thoughts posted:Here's the scene for anyone curious That's why I remembered it as being boring - there's so much slo-mo that the scene moves like treacle.
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Dec 30, 2017 14:31
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I feel the same way, action films celebrate and glorify violence for the entertainment of the audience. Applying that same genre descriptor to something like Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach scene weirds me out. Now something ahistorical and cartoony as Where Eagles Dare, I have no problem calling that an action movie, but a film based on real events where people actually died can’t really glorify that death for me.
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Jan 4, 2018 17:42
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Basebf555 posted:Yea I guess like any other genre a discussion like this is going to really depend on the definition you're working with. Raiders of the Lost Ark didn't come immediately to my mind because I think of it more as an adventure film, but it's action scenes are all time great and I can't really argue with someone who wants to label it as action. Same with westerns, or samurai films. I tend to lump them all together in their own category, but some are more action oriented than others.
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Jan 5, 2018 15:59
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Wheat Loaf posted:I understand its origins are that Stallone was offered Beverly Hills Cop but didn't like the script, so he rewrote it to remove all the humour/make all the humour really bad, then departed from the project and used his rewrite as the basis for Tango and Cash. It's exactly like "What if Lethal Weapon but not funny or charming?" He renamed Axel Foley to Axel Cobretti, as well.
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Jan 8, 2018 14:58
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On a sidenote, watching a load of awesome Jackie Chan fight scenes led me by the wonder of YouTube algorithms to the T-1000/young T-800/old T-800 fight from Terminator Genisys (my phone's autocorrect loving hated that last word), and god drat, the CG was weightless and lovely. I know it's almost a lame old-man cliche to criticise CGI, but the acid-damaged T-1000 looked like Gumby, and having the endoskeleton flail around like a skip-framed ninja did the exact opposite of making it more scary. Why are there so few directors able to go "y'know, heavy stuff has momentum. We should maybe simulate that?" Also  at them burning every scrap of flesh from the 'young' T-800 in about five seconds flat so they didn't have to spend any more time and money on their CG Arnold.
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Jan 13, 2018 23:30
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M:I1 is more about tension and suspense until the finale on the train, which actually stands up really well even today because A: DePalma knows what he's doing, and B: it was heavily dependent on CGI at a time when ILM had to work really hard just to make the shots possible (as in T2, Jurassic Park and the other early, ground-breaking stuff they did in CG), so put in a massive amount of effort to polish them. I'll brush over that as a fan of the original show making Phelps the loving villain rather pissed me off at the time. M:I2 is overlong and if anything too Woo, almost to the point of self-parody, but hey, it's still John Woo cutting loose with a mega-budget. And Cruise had a real knife less than an inch from his eyeball (on a safety wire, but I sure as hell wouldn't chance it). M:I3... eh. Everyone has different tastes, and I just didn't like it. You could tell JJ Abrams was coming from TV even if you didn't know anything about him - the action is too small, for want of a better word. It's also a precursor to a style of modern storytelling that as a writer I loving despise: the 'mystery box'. A Macguffin is one thing, but hanging your entire movie on something that the hero never learns what it is, the audience never does either, and the writer/director never bothered to think up because he thought it would be oh-so-clever to keep it hidden is lazy and insulting. M:I4 - if I didn't like the first one so much, this would be the best of the series. As a former animation director, Brad Bird basically treated his action sequences as if they were being planned down to the frame, and it works fantastically. It's not until the very end that it starts to feel like cartoony overkill, but the ride to that point has been so much fun that he gets away with it. M:I5 is... just sort of there. I honestly can't remember too much about it, except that the gag where Cruise and Pegg's car keeps flipping over and over and over went on way too long, without going all the way around to the other side like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:21
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Fart City posted:There is a scene at the end of Batman Begins where Batman fights a group of ninjas, and it is so utterly impossible to follow that I wouldn’t be surprised if Nolan handed the camera to an amature skate video director. Also, Batman fought ninjas at the end of that movie? Christ, I must have excised the second half from my mind, because I don't remember that at all. And I own it! I've watched it on DVD more than once! Actually, a problem I had with all Nolan's Bat-films is that they were all so loving sterile. It's summed up by an early scene in the last one where Gordon and co are going down a manhole in an alley - except the alley looks like it's just been scrubbed and steam-cleaned, with no dirt or garbage or anything to suggest this is a bad part of town. Gotham became a bland concrete and steel Anywheresville, USA.
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Jan 16, 2018 23:55
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Die Hard was based on a novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, that was a sequel to The Detective (filmed with Frank Sinatra). Sinatra turned it down, which led to it becoming a standalone movie, although for a brief period it was considered as the basis for Commando 2. Die Hard 2 was based on a completely unrelated novel by a different author, 58 Minutes. Beyond the basic 'bad guys take over an airport' idea, the final movie doesn't have much in common - unlike Die Hard, which follows NLF so closely at times that the script is basically transcription. Die Hard 3 was a spec script, Simon Says, that was McClaneised. Die Hard 4 was, bizarrely, based on an article in Wired about cyber-warfare. Die Hard 5 was the first time a script was specifically written as a Die Hard movie... and was a pile of poo poo with literally no redeeming features. BTW, I know a writer who was commissioned to work on a Die Hard 6 draft - his brief was "only have Bruce Willis in a framing story, because it's about young John McClane's first big case." He thought that was a poo poo idea, but still took it because, y'know, money. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 18:06
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Lifeforce is just... a hell of a thing. Where else could you see Patrick Stewart be possessed by a naked space vampire lady, vomit out gallons of blood and then explode? Fun fact: they had to redesign and reshoot the alien spaceship halfway through production, because it looked so much like an umbrella that everyone who saw it started humming 'Singing in the Rain'. What, someone's planning a new version of The Avengers? Historically that's never gone well, and I'm not just talking about the  Fiennes/Thurman/Connery movie. The people who made the original show couldn't even restart it successfully after only about six years. It was so of its time that either you end up just parroting what's already been done without understanding why it worked (as per the movie), or you 'update' it (as per The New Avengers) and change it so much it ceases to be The Avengers at all. I actually kind of like some of TNA, but the Cold War spy stuff and the gritty Sweeney/proto-Professionals action really doesn't fit with what they seemed to be aiming for at all.
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Jan 26, 2018 22:25
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Wheat Loaf posted:As noted, Shane Black and Fred Dekker apparently want to do it for TV as a mid-60s Swinging London period piece.
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Jan 26, 2018 23:56
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Incidentally, any Silence/Lecter who hasn't seen the Hannibal TV series really ought to. It sounded like a disaster in the making - "Let's retell all the Hannibal novels for television, but without Clarice Starling because we couldn't get the rights!" - but turned out good-to-great. Overall, I'd rate Mads Mikkelson a better Hannibal than Hopkins; he's more insidious, charming on the surface but a merciless, calculating monster beneath. Seeing him work as a shrink who's superficially helping his patients but is actually gradually tearing them apart psychologically purely for his own sadistic amusement is an aspect barely touched on in the films. Bringing this back around to the subject of action movies, it was surprising that the TV series was if anything more gory and violent than Silence, which at the time was considered utterly shocking and horrific. Now we get graphic autopsies over dinner thanks to CSI and the like, while movies seem to have gone the other way so they can get that financially beneficial PG-13 rating. Granted I haven't seen many new films in the past few years due to having a kid, but the days of visceral violence in big action movies - the first two Die Hards and Lethal Weapons, Paul Verhoeven's Hollywood oeuvre, stuff like Commando and Cliffhanger and Under Siege 2 - seem to be long gone. Dredd was the last time I remember coming out of a cinema thinking "gently caress, that was pretty intense." (Things like the church scene in Kingsman, while fun, are more cartoony and piss-takey than anything.) Can anyone recommend something recent (and good) that would satisfy my itch for some 80s/90s-style squib-and-bloodbag action, preferably with a lone hero facing a small army of bad guys?
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Jan 28, 2018 23:24
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Well, I think a big part of the character is the self doubt and the making mistakes. Him screaming "come the gently caress down here and arrest me!" and "I'll kiss your fuckin' dalmatian!" really sells the idea that he's in WAY over his head, this is not your Arnie/Stallone macho action guy.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:28
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Yeah one of the smartest things about Die Hard is they find like 10 ways to convey an idea. McClane isn't just out of his depth, the poor fucker isn't even wearing shoes! "I'm on vacation!" is the catchphrase of the man who went to Moscow to watch his son be put on trial for murder. 
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Feb 1, 2018 21:47
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Snowman_McK posted:The extended car chase is pretty cool, but it's wrapped in an awful movie. It's utterly numbing, because it doesn't build in intensity as it progresses - it's just full-on SMASH SMASH SMASH from start to finish, with really obnoxious shaky-cam that, unlike how Paul Greengrass used it in the Bourne films, doesn't lead the eye to what you're supposed to be looking at from shot to shot but instead fills the screen with tons of slate-grey clutter. I also discovered from a related video that a surprising amount of it was either entirely CG or pretty much everything on screen bar a couple of vehicles was digital. Which means it was designed to be that lovely and confusing. And McClane is in a truck which barrel-rolls four or five times as it crashes - then he gets out with barely a scratch, is hit by a car, steals someone else's SUV and carries on the chase, ending up deliberately crashing and rolling again without giving a poo poo. It's not the sequel to Unbreakable, for gently caress's sake. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 22:25
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I kind of liked the sheer balls of dismissing Neo's transcendence in Reloaded with the line "Huh, upgrades" before getting back to the kung-fu.
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Feb 1, 2018 22:50
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Wheat Loaf posted:I suppose there's always Michael Bay. But his movies have made a quadrillion dollars even with all the screaming comic relief characters and pee-pee jokes, so what do I know?
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Feb 4, 2018 22:57
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The Rock had a huge number of uncredited writers and script-polishers, as well as having Bay's fairly obvious fingerprints all over the minor characters, and was IIRC Don Simpson's last hands-on project before his OD. So it's amazing it works at all, never mind as well as it does. (Mind you, Simpson was obsessive about story in a way that Bruckheimer never was - in early drafts Ed Harris's character was a straight-up villain holding the city hostage purely for money, and it was Simpson who gave him a more sympathetic motivation.)
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Feb 5, 2018 23:06
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Penpal posted:Is Air Force One more an action or thriller? I haven't seen it and if it's Die Hard on a plane I'll watch it tonight. I could care less if it's good or not, I only just realised it's flown under my radar Oh, man, that last shot of the 747. Not-quite-there-yet CGI right at the climax of the movie, you gotta love it!
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Feb 9, 2018 23:11
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Wheat Loaf posted:It's kind of like how Speed has two climaxes because they can't get off the bus and beat Dennis Hopper at the same time. It's a bad film, but in retrospect I think it could have been saved if they hadn't been so goddamn lazy. If Keanu Reeves backs out, then don't just do a find & replace of 'Jack' to 'Alex' throughout the script and add maybe two lines for Annie that they broke up. Instead of Alex being a Jack clone (they're in the same SWAT team! How could Annie not know what he did for a living?), maybe make him a traffic cop or a Santa Monica cycle patrolman or a lifeguard - something where he feels like he doesn't match up to Annie's superheroic ex, and has to step up to the challenge and prove himself through the film. Bam, character arc, done. As for the rest of the movie, I once edited the ship crash in iMovie to get rid of most of the comedy moments. Funnily enough, the scene's excitement rises in inverse proportion to the number of wacky sight gags and cast members saying "Oh poo poo." There are some thrills there, but DeBont did a Bay and smothered them under jokes. Mancina's score is probably the best thing about the film as it stands. It got chopped up on screen, but 'Escape' is a brilliant action track - I often play it when I'm writing to pump me up. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 09:02
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CelticPredator posted:Mencia’s scores in general seriously kick rear end. Every time I go to Florida to visit my folks, I blast the Bad Boys theme the moment I get off the plane. It’s dope.
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Feb 11, 2018 12:15
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Accident Man review: Bit of info: Accident Man the comic was written by Pat Mills, who was the creator of 2000AD and (as editor, so he went uncredited because he's heavily into creators' rights) was hugely involved in the genesis of Judge Dredd. For some reason - probably because of Mills's massive anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-religion, pro-class warfare streak that runs about a tenth of a millimetre beneath the surface of all his work - nobody's filmed any of his literally dozens of other series. But because of Accident Man, a couple of days ago somebody on Twitter suggested that Duncan Jones (Warcraft) would be perfect for a movie of Mills' ultraviolent Celtic barbarian character Slaine. Jones himself read this, contacted Mills saying "holy poo poo, are the rights to Slaine available?", and when Mills said yes Jones got right back to him with an 'I'll be in touch' message. So that could be interesting.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:09
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Neo Rasa posted:Daylights and License both have a some legit awesome stunts involving planes too. The plane fight in TLD was the first time watching a Bond film in the cinema that I felt genuinely on the edge of my seat. The Bond films are a bit weird in retrospect, because they're action movies where a lot of the time the action is pretty pedestrian. There are plenty of cases of someone doing their own version of Bond that's actually more exciting than the real thing: Spielberg with Raiders or Cameron with True Lies, for example. Martin Campbell is the only Bond director who really tried to amp things up throughout - the fight between Bond and Trevelyan in Goldeneye was another of the few edge-of-seat sequences from the entire series.
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Feb 24, 2018 17:13
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I think I said it upthread, but I'll reiterate my opinion that the Raiders truck chase is still the single greatest action sequence ever filmed. It's seven minutes long, but it's a mini-movie in its own right: not a shot is wasted, it constantly escalates and continually tops itself, the peril Indy is in keeps rising - and bar one miniature and one matte shot, it was all done for real. The stunts, the camerawork, the sound effects, the editing, the music... it's pretty much perfect. Hell, I'm going to watch it again right now just because I can.
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Mar 8, 2018 13:20
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Narzack posted:I think I agree. I can't think of anything that tops it. He doesn't have a word of dialogue after "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go", just grunts and gasps and little "nrruh" noises. His acting is entirely physical, but it's great - everything is conveyed by his expression. He starts out frantic, begins to get into the thrill of the chase once he gains control of the truck, gets cocky - and is then shot. After that, it's all rising desperation and panic and sheer Nazi-hating fury until he finally wins out. It's brilliant, and again it tells a mini-story by itself.
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Mar 8, 2018 22:24
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Incidentally, if you want some old-school automotive destruction on a Michael Bay scale, check out the German TV series Cobra 11 (random collection of spectacular crashes here ). The show's been running for ages, is now literally made by the stunt team, and has had some genuinely movie-level stuntwork and explosions. I can't find the clip (they're pretty proactive about taking them down), but I saw one where they tried to recreate the Golden Gun corkscrew jump with an 18-wheeler, and drat near succeeded.
Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 23:22
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Snowman_McK posted:True Lies is a really good, cartoonish action movie that history and politics make kind of vile retroactively. Like, it's not a serious movie about terrorism at all (the terrorists in the movie don't actually kill anyone in the whole movie) but, with how the world has gone since 2001, it's a little harder to watch. (He was great to interview, BTW. It was meant to be 45 minutes, but we ended up talking for 90 because we started geeking out about technical stuff and submarines. I wish he'd do more movies, and I don't just mean 27 Avatar sequels, because he's still one of - if not the - best action directors ever.) Wandle Cax posted:Also the raid 2 is great but the car chase is probably the weakest of the action scenes Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Mar 10, 2018 |
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Mar 10, 2018 08:51
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Narzack posted:I mean, the first Bourne was okay, because, though it wasn't great camerawork and editing, enough room was given that Damon could show off the moves he was actually doing. Compare that to Supremacy and Greengrass' spastic camera and editing, where you can't see poo poo. You just have to hope and trust that something cool is happening on screen. Totally frustrating. Something I find way more obnoxious is shutter-fuckery to give a strobing, no-motion-blur effect, as popularised by Ryan and Gladiator. Thankfully the fad seems to have passed, but there was a period when action sequences all looked like second-rate stop motion. Combine with shakycam and Bay-style choppy editing and you get a recipe for nausea.
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Mar 11, 2018 20:55
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muscles like this! posted:Its a weird movie because at times it feels like a science fiction movie what with all the stuff about genetic engineering. Probably the biggest issue with the movie is that the plot comes to what is basically the end but then the movie continues for another 15 or so minutes with another action scene that feels completely pointless.
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Mar 12, 2018 22:00
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Wheat Loaf posted:I haven't seen any Bourne movies In hindsight, it's weird now just how much of an underdog Identity was; "Good Will Hunting as an action hero? Directed by the Go guy? With a ton of reshoots? Whoop whoop, bad movie alert!" Yet it turned out to start probably the defining action series of the '00s. Rewatching Identity, it's striking that even though Bourne is obviously troubled, he's also charming, talkative and almost goofy at times. Compare that to the taciturn grieving rear end-kicking machine later on, which was taken to a ridiculous extreme in Jason Bourne, where he's about as chatty as the Terminator from T1. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 09:01
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Wheat Loaf posted:The one I always see is Brendan Fraser.
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Mar 14, 2018 21:13
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At one point Arnold is thrown out of a plane without a parachute. He not only manages to obtain one during the fall, but takes on the plane with a handgun as it comes back to finish him off. And yes, railguns. Arnold dual-wields railguns.
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Mar 18, 2018 20:38
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The Lambert/Rhona Mitra Beowulf, Warlock and Space Truckers: three movies I'm pretty sure I've seen, but am damned if I can remember more than the odd tiny snippet about. (I think Space Truckers used NASA stock footage of a shuttle launch for its future spaceship taking off, which is a cheap/lazy bugbear of mine.)
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Apr 7, 2018 07:56
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