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Headshot This movie was mentioned a few times in the streaming thread, but there wasn't anywhere else where it was going to naturally come up in conversation. Do you like The Raid and it's sequel? Well, this is very much along the same lines and stars Iko Uwais loving up a whole bunch of people in his Silat style. The camera work isn't as good, the director here has more of a kinetic style than Evans, which I guess is a nice way of saying he likes shakey cam. But don't let that put you off, it's only distracting in a small percentage of the scenes. Best part is that this movie is available on Netflix! Also, don't sleep on The Accountant. Yea it's Ben Affleck starring in a movie and he does play an accountant, but this is actually a pretty legit action flick. John Bernthal co-stars and he's awesome as usual.
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Jul 21, 2017 20:30
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I didn't like Headshot, and right when it got to the scene with the bus I turned it off. It simply took it's "these are real bad guys doing real bad stuff" shtick into pointless nihilism way too quickly. No thanks. I can understand that, but at the same time you turned it off before any of the real action scenes got going. The reckoning as it were.
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Jul 21, 2017 20:39
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Is that the last of that sort of pointless slaughter scene? If so, I'll get back to it. I mean, the movie itself is very graphically violent, but yea as far as random innocent people getting slaughtered that's really it. That's the scene where Uwais kinda snaps and decides that he's gonna mess these people up real good, so I guess that's why they made it so horrific.
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Jul 21, 2017 20:44
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MrBling posted:On the main topic of this thread, I would like to recommend that people watch The Trust with Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood. It was released last year and I was very pleasantly surprised by it. Cage is his usual masterful self and Elijah Wood really brings it for what is essentially a pretty lowkey DTV movie. Trust is a solidly entertaining movie, but I wouldn't call it an action movie. There's barely any action in it at all, the trailer is a bit deceptive.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:08
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Escobarbarian posted:Yeah style-wise Atomic Blonde rules, but the plot is a whole bunch of hot nonsense. That fake one-shot is loving incredible. Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "nonsense"? I only ask because a lot of people would probably call the plot of John Wick 2 nonsense but I absolutely love the insane world of that movie. Is it along those lines, or more of just a completely nonsensical plot that's impossible to even follow?
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Aug 11, 2017 16:26
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John Wick 2 also smartly followed in the footsteps of James Bond and the Mission Impossible series by taking the action to exotic locations. People underestimate how great looking locations and competent cinematography of those locations can really lift an action movie to the next level. When Chapter 3 comes out I'll be of course looking forward to the action first and foremost, but then right below that I'll be hyped to see some really nice cinematography, which is a crazy thing to be able to say about a series created and directed by a stunt guy.
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Sep 5, 2017 19:40
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Lobok posted:Dredd's visuals really helped set it apart from The Raid, which was shot well but had an oppressively ugly and bland colour palette throughout. The Raid's non-stop action trumps Dredd imo, but you're right that Dredd is more interesting visually. That's why I love the John Wick movies so much, I get to have my cake and eat it too with those. Taking a look at Stahelski's wiki page I'm kinda worried that he's become too popular to do another John Wick sequel. He apparently signed to do a whole trilogy of rebooted Highlander films. Maybe his partner(David Leitch ) will come back to do Chapter 3.
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Sep 5, 2017 19:49
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muscles like this! posted:Pretty sure Stahelski said he was coming back for JW3 shortly after the release of 2. Yea but that may have been before he got the Highlander offer. His schedule may have become a lot more packed after making that statement. And if it's not him or his partner doing it then I would worry about a lovely Chapter 3 ruining what could potentially be the best action trilogy ever made.
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Sep 5, 2017 20:00
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I would assume the guy knows why he's famous, and is prioritizing the thing that made him famous over something that's pretty likely to bomb. Would that it were so simple
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Sep 5, 2017 20:33
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DivisionPost posted:I think that we can assume, at very little risk, that John Wick 3 is a thing that's pretty deep into pre-pro at the moment since 2 made bank and Lionsgate is going to want that poo poo ASAP, while Highlander is just a thing that's being bandied about at the moment and can almost certainly wait its turn. I'm like an addict who's being told that there's a 99.8% chance that I'll get my next fix. Gotta freak out about that .2%.
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Sep 5, 2017 20:54
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Neo Rasa posted:Oh my God Laurence Fishburne's homeless people god/game show host performance in John Wick 2 is incredible. This movie rules almost as much as the first one. Certainly better in some ways. The locations are bigger(I suppose it's debatable if that's a good thing but I love it), the villains are better, especially the addition of Common, and Keanu's choreography is even I think improved over the amazing stuff they did in the first one. Some people like a simpler revenge story though, which I can understand, and the original is very streamlined in that way. I also think the soundtrack is slightly better in John Wick 2, which maybe puts me in the minority? I know the music playing in the Red Circle is great in John Wick, but I think the sequel's is more consistently great throughout.
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Nov 9, 2017 14:51
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X-Ray Pecs posted:First Blood is a great movie, but not really what I’m looking for. I guess I want to know what the patient zero is for action movies becoming huge, absurd spectacles a la Commando or Rambo: First Blood Part II. I think the answer really is Arnold to be honest, and Commando may be the first one where he took on that specific persona. I'm not sure, but I don't think anyone was making that type of action film until Arnold came along.
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Nov 9, 2017 15:05
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Commando and Rambo: First Blood Part II (the Rambo naming scheme is so dumb I have to use the full name every time) both came out the same year, there must have been something in the water. The funny thing about Commando is that’s the public perception of Arnold, but his most famous role is completely different, the Terminator (especially in the first movie) is loving chilling, while in the rest of Arnold’s famous roles, he’s way goofier. Yea his Terminator 2 performance has basically overwritten what he did in Terminator in pop culture, people are always surprised when they go back after many years and watch it again, just how scary he is in that movie. It's really a brutal film. Neo Rasa posted:Actually I agree with all of this and I hope Common is back in Chapter 3. But I feel like the plot kind of goes off the rails very slightly towards the end which "lowers" it to me regarding it as highly as John Wick 1 instead of better. Specifically, after he completes the job and ends up back in NYC, it did feel like they had to kind of stretch things a bit to get the homeless folks army to help him out at all. Like why do they give a poo poo who has a seat on the table or whatever? Like yeah Santino betrays John personally but was he really some super devious evil guy compared to like, anyone else that would have been running things in that position? It just felt weird because the movie actually brings this up but it ended up not mattering. I don't know, it made it feel like they somehow did not enough world building but too much world building at the same time compared to how the first one. I can agree with that. Having watched the movie several times it's clear they're trying to establish that Santino is a loose cannon with huge ambition compared to his sister, who is a competent and shrewd leader. So I guess the idea is that if Santino gets a seat at the table he will own New York and that will be very, very bad for anyone else who has a stake there. But they cover that so quickly with like 3 lines of dialogue so it's really not established well enough or sold to the audience properly. And I like Santino as a sniveling rear end in a top hat villain but he doesn't really come off as a guy who could take a whole city by storm and rule over people effectively.
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Nov 9, 2017 15:35
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X-Ray Pecs posted:There’s a reason I watched it for the October Challenge thread, it really plays out like a slasher movie, but with action setpieces instead of chase scenes. Arnold’s just so goddamn big, he’s incredibly menacing. The T-1000 was scary when I was 10 years old, but now looking back he's more of a goofy sci-fi villain compared to how Arnold was presented in the original. The original Terminator had no fancy tricks to ooh and ahhh at, he was a shabbily dressed behemoth that just walked in and put a shitload of bullets in you, end of story. T-1000 has a little bit too much personality to be the same kind of scary, but of course I still love both.
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Nov 9, 2017 15:47
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I'd also argue that Sarah Connor is a scarier character in T2 than the T-1000. The scene where she tries to assassinate Dyson is really very intense and disturbing.
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Nov 9, 2017 16:31
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ynohtna posted:I'd say one of the prototypical roots of the 80s action movie are those over-the-top, cartoonish war adventure films starring crowd-pleasing larger than life characters dodging ridiculous quantities of blanks (before they die nobly in order of ascending fame). You're not totally wrong, but those films were always more about a team of heroes all pitching in to win the day, whereas Arnold and Stallone ushered in the whole One Man Army era of over the top action movies. The Expendables series is definitely an homage to those though, moreso than Rambo or Commando.
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Nov 9, 2017 16:47
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ynohtna posted:Yeah, absolutely. Oh yea, all of these subgenres have mixed together over time and you can see elements of them in the others. The lone hero who's just passing through but decides to help people in need is probably one of those timeless stories, but the earliest version of it on film that I can think of is Yojimbo, and then Leone adapted that with Eastwood for his Man With No Name. I think what made stuff like Commando and First Blood II different is the military aspect. These super elite soliders are products of the best military in the history of the world, the infallible perfect USA. Which of course makes First Blood II pretty funny because First Blood was like the polar opposite of that but it's not the first time the tone of a sequel was changed to fit the tastes of audiences.
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Nov 9, 2017 17:11
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X-Ray Pecs posted:How many people were in Where Eagles Dare? Because iirc it’s about only 3 or 4 people destroying a German castle and village, all without ever reloading their assault rifles. I remember it being fun, and it’s probably where the Wolfenstein games got their cable car fights from. It's funny when you think about it, the subgenres within the action genre can almost be broken down into categories based just on how many people there are in the "crew". One Man Army is like it's own subgenre, then you have Buddy Action, then after that a small group of 3 or 4 is often a Heist or Escape film, and then larger groups are usually more in the War movie mold. I'm just making all that up but it seems to work for the most part.
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Nov 9, 2017 19:39
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Brawl in Cell Block 99 was extremely entertaining. Surprisingly, Vaughn is perfectly cast. It's easy to forget how big he is.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:16
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Tarantino's the kind of guy who will probably be fine just saying openly "hey I'm going back on what I said because I want to keep making movies for a while longer". I mean, he'll say it in a much more assholeish way than that but I doubt he'd retire just for the sake of keeping his word.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:21
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Halloween Jack posted:The real lovely part about this isn't even the slo-mo per se, it's that almost all of the action is filmed as shot reverse shot. I just rewatched Bronx Warriors 2 and it's not that cheap. That was a huge eye opener when I watched the movie for the first time after I'd grown out of the phase where Boondock Saints was cool. It's just not a technically well made movie, and as you point out the action is filmed in the cheapest, most amateurish way possible. The performances are solid, that's really the only thing that makes it watchable today.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:15
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've never seen Boondock Saints. I always thought it had something to do with the Aaron McGruder comic strip and cartoon The Boondocks. It's basically a teenager's fantasy of being a badass vigilante but also if that teenager was the director of the movie and didn't really know what he was doing.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:58
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It tries to have its cake and eat it too in terms of the Tarantino influence. Like, in a Tarantino movie a guy shows up to kill someone with his badass uzi with the huge silencer....and unceremoniously gets killed because he had to take a poo poo. In a Tarantino movie the slick hitmen quip back and forth and they're really clever and then one of them accidentally blows a dude's head off and they're both completely grossed out by it. Tarantino subverts expectations in those scenarios, so much so that a new Tarantino paradigm began where new clichés were created due to all the imitators. Boondock Saints has the badass hitman falling through the ceiling and bumbling through the whole thing...but all their bullets seem to find their mark and they kill their target fairly easily. Then all of the real goofy poo poo is cordoned off over here with this idiot character, so as not to taint the pure badass exuding from Reedus and Flannery at all times.
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Jan 2, 2018 22:12
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Is Mel a producer or anything on Blood Father? I'm just wondering how much he benefits if I spend money to rent it.
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Jan 3, 2018 22:14
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I'm really hesitant to criticize a director for graphic violence, but I will say that the scene in Hacksaw Ridge where the dude uses a torso as a shield was one of the more unnecessary scenes of violence I can think of just because of how much the tone of it clashes with everything else around it. It's a scene that would've been right at home in that Rambo remake that Stallone did, which is really the kind of movie Gibson should make if that's his thing.
Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jan 4, 2018 |
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Jan 4, 2018 02:45
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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. It's always an interesting conversation(it comes up in the horror thread too), at what point does violence, if you're portraying real life events, cross the line into exploitation and become distasteful? Like, for instance, the murder scenes in Zodiac. Fincher filmed them with complete accuracy in mind, almost obsessively so, and he would tell you that he did that in order to respect the horrific nature of the crimes and to make sure he was presenting only the facts of what happened and nothing more. And I tend to agree with that philosophy, but what about the portion of the audience that watches something like that more for titillation? People that have a morbid fascination with these topics and, for lack of a better word, "get off" on feeling like they're watching the murders exactly how they went down in real life. Should someone like Fincher consider those people when he makes a film about a real crime? I don't think so but it's a pretty complicated issue. I think Spielberg would say the same thing about Omaha Beach, that he felt the need to show it in all it's horrific glory, because to do otherwise would be to disrespect the gravity of what actually happened. But of course inevitably you have people going "holy poo poo dude, how crazy was it that that one guy was walking around with his own severed arm!!!", but I'm not sure you can worry about that when you're a filmmaker.
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Jan 4, 2018 15:54
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sean10mm posted:Who invented the movie quip? They are worse than Hitler. Maybe John Wayne? Dunno, probably someone was doing it before he was.
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Jan 4, 2018 18:45
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Enter the Dragon, Lethal Weapon, a bunch of Arnold movies, then more recently I'd throw Bad Boys and Rush Hour in that category, and then Fury Road, The Raid and it's sequel, and John Wick. Bad Boys and Rush Hour aren't necessarily great but this is more about what the public was into and those movies were really popular at the time. Also, I'm not a huge fan but Ong Bak and The Protector were a pretty big deal. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 00:49
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Wheat Loaf posted:I'm not 100% on Lethal Weapon. I think it's probably the best buddy cop action comedy movie (well, maybe Lethal Weapon 2 is better) but wouldn't stuff like 48 hrs. and even the first two Beverly Hills Cops be more "important" on those terms? I'm going more on the track of a "touchstone" which to me means you have to take into account how popular the movies were, and the Lethal Weapons were huge hits. As were 48 hours and Beverly Hills Cop, but you'd already mentioned 48 hours so I was just trying to add to your list. So if anything I'm probably overestimating the popularity of Ong Bak, The Raid, and even John Wick. But the whole landscape is different now with so many huge franchise blockbusters coming out, it's really hard to get to Lethal Weapon level popularity with a straight-up buddy cop movie.
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Jan 5, 2018 00:58
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Lethal Weapon 2 and 3 were both the highest grossing movie for adults in the years they came out. They both lost out only to like Disney movies, Indiana Jones, and Batman(both times). You really don't see that anymore outside of I guess The Fast and the Furious franchise.
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Jan 5, 2018 01:11
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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 15:44
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Payndz posted:If I was going to pick one thing as 'the greatest action scene of all time', it would be the Raiders truck chase. It's eight minutes of a filmmaker (and the second unit, and stuntmen, and editor, and composer, and and and...) at the absolute top of their game. It's definitely up there, no doubt about it. Kurosawa is often credited with innovating the way action scenes are shot, and Spielberg and George Lucas were known to be two of his most devoted followers. Spielberg once called Kurosawa the Shakespeare of our time. So the scene in Raiders definitely has lots of Kurosawa DNA in it.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:13
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X-Ray Pecs posted:You know what, gently caress, we didn’t mention either Mad Max or Road Warrior as action touchstones, almost every cinematic car chase since has tried to copy those movies. Funny because I mentioned Fury Road, I guess I just wasn't a Mad Max guy so they didn't come to mind. But yes they really were extremely influential.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:18
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Neo Rasa posted:It's true, Hanzo the Razor is played by THE Zatoichi, Shintaro Katsu himself. I figured that guy never had time to take any other roles, it seems like he had a Zatoichi movie to film like every single year for 20 years or something. He has to have the record for playing the same character in the highest number of films.
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Jan 10, 2018 15:31
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Steen71 posted:Fun fact, Shintaro Katsu was supposed to play the lead in Kurosawa's Kagemusha, but his ego was apparently insufferable, and Kurosawa had to replace him with Tatsuya Nakadai before filming even started. Sounds like a funny story, according to Wikipedia Katsu brought his own film crew to the set and was gonna make like an unauthorized Kurosawa documentary and I guess he just assumed Kurosawa would be totally cool with that? Hard to imagine Kagemusha without Nakadai though. I saw Sword of Doom for the first time a few weeks ago and that's fantastic as well.
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Jan 11, 2018 19:15
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Assuming Odenkirk is physically capable of performing the necessary action choreography, he would be absolutely perfect for a movie like this. He'd have been a much more inspired casting decision for the Death Wish remake now that I think about it. The choreography is key though, that was a big part of what made casting Keanu such a great decision. And even he had to then go off and do intensive weapons training in addition to his previous martial arts experience.
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Jan 12, 2018 16:05
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Wheat Loaf posted:If Colin Firth could pull it off for Kingsman... Definitely, I'd have said the same thing about Firth and he definitely pulled it off. So I have high hopes for Odenkirk and obviously we know that he can handle whatever the acting demands are.
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Jan 12, 2018 16:13
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Cage is an interesting case because he broke through in action movies in The Rock, where he's not the stereotypical action hero character at all. He's a nerdy scientist guy who is thrust into a situation he isn't prepared for and he becomes the hero over the course of the movie. He really only became "action hero" Cage for Con Air and really he never did that again. He did a car movie with Gone in 60 Seconds, and Face/Off where he's the villain(his body is at least), 8mm which is just a detective noir story with very little action, etc. etc.
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Jan 12, 2018 16:50
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Bale's transformation from Patrick Bateman, to The Machinist, and then back to huge for Batman was influential as well. I think a lot of actors saw that and were like "poo poo, I gotta up my game."
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Jan 12, 2018 16:57
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The Craig thing was 100% about his hair, people flipped their poo poo that James Bond was gonna be a blonde guy. It was pretty dumb.
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Jan 12, 2018 18:04
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