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Most of us know about the Arnold Schwarzenegger super smash hit holiday classic Jingle All the Way, but how many of us know there was a direct-to-dvd "sequel" Jingle All the Way 2, starring Larry the Cable Guy? I really should sit down and watch it some day, but according to Wikipedia, the plot is almost exactly the same, except the villain is an ex-wife's new husband instead of the neighbour and a random mailman. If I didn't have to keep studying for courses over the next couple of years (and that I want to actually catch up on good movies), I'd sit down once a week just to drunkenly watch movies like this. I downloaded this gem: Christmas with a Capital C, starring Married... with Children's Ted McGinley as a small-town Alaskan mayor who goes up against his old high school rival, played by Daniel Baldwin. He's the cold-hearted big-city atheist lawyer who's come in to be a Grinch and knock down all of the town's Christmas decorations, and replace them with... "Happy Holidays".
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Aug 16, 2019 15:30
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:58 |
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Anything from PureFlix is my loving jam. If you like that I encourage you to watch God's Not Dead asap and report back Oh, that's definitely on my list. Kevin Sorbo as the militant atheist college professor strawman sold me as soon as I heard of it. Also, isn't Dean Cain in it? From what I remember reading, he's also some kind of atheist businessman trying to convince someone to turn away from God.
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Aug 17, 2019 17:45
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Nothing like limiting human contact during a pandemic to make me want to resurrect this thread because I just watched a bad movie. I looked through Netflix one day, and I couldn't believe my eyes. It can't be. Why would they have this? Don't they know it's awful? But I did it. I finally sat down and watched Battlefield Earth. I know a lot has been said about it, but it is aggressively awful. The worst offender really is the plot, but somehow every single other part of filmmaking in this movie just amplifies the awfulness. The acting is hammy, the production design is just nasty, and the movie is just really, really slow. It takes at least an hour before we get to the actual plot, and it's so bizarrely simple that it really doesn't match the scale of the movie. I'll give it two credits: one, there's an interesting idea that an alien occupation of Earth is a capitalist/colonialist one and not a strict military invasion like, say, Independence Day. Two: the first fifteen minutes of the movie are OK. Cheesy and ridiculous, sure, but they wouldn't be out of place with any other similar cheap sci-fi movie. That all changes once John Travolta shows up. My touchstone for enjoyable awful movies is The Room. How this movie differs from that is that Battlefield Earth is at least competently made by professionals and no one ego took over. The Room at least is awful in a way that is fascinating, in that it gives us an insight to the amazing world of Tommy Wiseau, and it's at least less ambitious in its production. Travolta, on the other hand, said that he wants Battlefield Earth to be the new Star Wars. Which is wrong on multiple levels, but the main one being that Star Wars' plot is at least internally consistent, and characters are fun to watch. Battlefield Earth has no joy. There's no central theme or reason why anyone would want to tell this specific story. At least if it had tried to be fun, it would've had some level of camp value. But it isn't even that. It's just dreary. Again, I know a lot has been said about this movie, how its plot falls apart at any basic level of critical thinking (most of the IMDb Goofs page lists plot holes. No, really), how it's almost all canted angles for no reason, how the actors somehow are in good enough aesthetically despite being "almost an extinct species," etc. If I was a real film critic, I would've been kicking myself for not taking notes, because there are so many moments. One last thing I'll say is that the scenes in Fort Knox (how invading aliens never discovered it at all) is that they at least learned from what officials said about its depiction in Goldfinger and made the individual stacks of gold smaller. I don't know why I noticed that, but I did. All in all, this wasn't a bad experience. I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to do this again next week, and with which movie. I found a few copies of various Siskel & Ebert worst of the year episodes on Youtube, and it's been putting me in the mood to do this again.
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Apr 19, 2020 03:54
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nonathlon posted:Most "bad" films are just bad and boring, not in any entertaining way, despite the hyperbolic efforts of various podcasters to play them up: "ohmigod this movie was INSANE!" That was pretty much my thoughts, too. Battlefield Earth is bad in almost every conceivable way, and it's even worse because it tried to be so ambitious. The Room is just weird. It's more technically incompetent, but the level of filmmaking was never there to begin with. It's fascinating because of that window into Tommy Wiseau's mind. I've read The Disaster Artist, and the behind-the-scenes of making it are really fascinating. I mean, the movie is what it is, but there's a whole extra layer of fascination once you find out, for example, that Wiseau didn't know that most productions rent equipment, and not outright buy it. Or don't shoot both film and digital for a reason. Or build sets if they have locations they can scout. Or the other things that actual experienced professionals told him that you don't do. I can't imagine a similar scenario with Battlefield Earth. It's like the difference between a car that was produced and failed because multiple people didn't see or didn't care about an engineering fault, versus a car that was specifically designed by someone who had remembered the fantasy car they imagined as a kid and really wanted to build that. For better or worse, you can tell Wiseau wanted that in his movie. Ghost Leviathan posted:Funny thing is that Cowboys and Aliens has the same premise. Holy poo poo, I'd forgotten about that. I saw it in theatres and thought it wasn't bad and delivered what it promised up until that reveal. Most resources that you can find on Earth should be much easier to obtain on, say, an asteroid (unless it's unobtainium or something). Twitch posted:I gave up on the book after the point where the movie ends because it grinds to a halt, but at least in the book instead of old fighter jets that mysteriously still work, the humans use the alien learning machine thing to teach themselves how to fly stolen alien fighter crafts. Like, it's a pretty terrible book, but it's way more coherent than the movie. Agreed. Again, they could've used the colonialism argument and said that humans aren't actually stupid, but have been denigrated by aliens over centuries to believe that, after they learn to use the alien weapons against aliens. Terl somehow keeps talking about "man-animals" and them being too stupid to train, and yet he somehow knows about the library in Denver and man's great accomplishments and technologies. There are a few interesting nuggets of commentary that are just lost in this cloud of poo poo.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:32
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rydiafan posted:The one legitimately good moment in battlefield Earth is when the aliens see the main character eating rats out of desperation, and then they assume that he must really like rats, so they try to bribe him with dead rats later. Right up there with Travolta bragging about how he was the best marksman in his class AT THE ACADEMY! and shoots off the leg of a cow. And then continues firing willy-nilly. The scene is supposed to imply that he's such a good shot that we only need to see the results, but the acting is so awful, he's just convulsing with his gun. Also, why were there cows in a pen like that? Somehow I doubt humans have the ability to cattle ranch, and I doubt the Psychlos give a poo poo about cows.
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Apr 19, 2020 15:36
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:58 |
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Continued spending my Saturday night during this lockdown with a good one. I decided to pick 1994's On Deadly Ground, the first and so-far only directorial attempt by Steven Seagal. Maybe it's cheating to pick an action movie directed by a man most people don't take seriously in the field that made him famous anyway, but I disagree. If anything, what makes this movie so good is you can tell Seagal slapped his trademark sense over it: it's self-indulgent, grandiose with his character, makes no attempt to go past one dimension for any of its characters, and technically incompetent from a filmmaking perspective as it is. The one good thing I'll say (other than the so-bad-it's-good value) is that there are a lot of explosions. They're not quality explosions, but they're there. I think the only reason anyone agreed with having it be about an oil rig in Alaska was they could find any excuse to blow something up. So what's the plot? It doesn't really matter, but Seagal works for an oil baron named Jennings, played by Michael Caine. He finds out that the initial fire and explosion on a rig that claimed four men was intentional by the corporation and its owner (CEO? they don't mention what he is. Just that he's the boss). The reason Jennings' company is being sloppy with getting a new rig running with obviously-faulty parts is so they can keep a lease on oil fields so they don't revert back to the Alaskan natives. Why they waited so long before the deadline to get it going is never said. I'm pretty sure a super-rich oil tycoon's company isn't going to get a rig going right before a deadline. Have there been tons of cases of corporate ineptitude and outright malice just to save a buck? Oh, absolutely. But "We need to get this oil rig going within 13 days, but the good parts don't come for 30" is too much for a project that took at least a decade (or 3 decades. I forget). Now, I know Michael Caine is no stranger to stinkers purely for the money (cf. Jaws: The Revenge), but you can tell he went for the paycheque for this one. He really hams it up as the evil oil baron. Now that I write this, I'm starting to think that the plot isn't set up because of ineptitude or greed, but because Jennings has an addiction to rage. He yells at everyone when he can. It's my belief that he set up this entire stunt just so he could go off on everyone around him: on his staff, on his henchmen, on Seagal, on TV reporters, and even the director of the commercial that is supposed to protect his public image (a perplexing cameo by actually-decent director Irvin Kershner). He's the kind of man who wishes he had had a son just so he could yell, "I don't have a son!" at. And then there's his entire look: he's an oil baron, so of course he needs a bolo tie, a horrible black suit (I know it was the '90s, but COME ON), and a cowboy hat. Unfortunately, all background stops there. Sometimes you can hear a Southern drawl come out from him. Sometimes you can't. He really, really doesn't stick to one accent. He does, however, stick to one jet black dye job. In a better movie, an obvious dye job would be a signal to a character's vanity or that he's uglier on the inside than he is, but in this case, I'm willing to bet it's some kind of unintentional metaphor for his love of oil. The plot then goes awry when they discover Seagal on the trail, so they send him into a booby-trapped rig where they try to blow him up. Seagal magically survives being thrown far away by an explosion, and they magically don't see his body being thrown clear to check (which they later realize they should). He's then found by a local Inuit tribe, nursed back to health by the chief and his daughter, and is spiritually reborn as a "bear" (there's a whole long hallucination, I guess, where he imagines all of this while told a creation story about how a bear was created so man would have something to fear as it rapes and pillages mother earth). It takes at least an hour of the movie to get from that basic setup and rebirth before he starts his plan to blow up the oil rig. He finds the cabin owned by his whistleblower friend who told him about the faults, and it's been ransacked by Caine's goons, led by John C. McGinley. McGinley has a ridiculous goatee and round sunglasses that are just plain goofy. I like to think he actually survived the movie (we never see his body hit the rear rotorblades of the helicopter) and discovered he can do more damage as a corporate consultant, because it's almost exactly the same look he sported (including the villainous upper lip sneer) as he did in Office Space. He then flees to his cabin in the mountains, with a shitload of explosives. It's never explained why he's hoarding explosives for a war, other than he was a soldier or something. It was never hinted that he had a problem with the company until now, so why? He's such a skilled martial artist that he should be able to just punch the oil rig to explode in exactly 3 minutes. There's absolutely no tension in any of the fight scenes because he always kicks everyone's rear end handily. R. Lee Ermey shows up halfway through the mayhem as an "independent contractor" by McGinley to kill Seagal, has a shotgun on him at point-blank range, and Seagal still disarms him and shoots a giant hole through him almost immediately. So he takes all the tools he needs, rigs the cabin to blow up and take a pursuing helicopter down with him, outsmarts the henchmen on horseback, and then eventually blows up the rig. We know this. It's tedious. The entire sequence of him figuring out a way to take down the rig would be appreciated in a better movie, since there's seemingly a method, but since other moments are peppered with ridiculous moments that would rival a horrible Batman script, we just don't care. The henchman start to discover after a while that Seagal is a formidable force because the hired guns discover that he has blanks in his employment from before. They deduce he's some kind of former high-level special government agent. Then again, that might explain via paranoia what's with all the explosives and firearms in his cliffside cabin. Incidentally, the character's name is Forrest Taft. It doesn't really matter what his name is, other than it came out about 5 months before Forrest Gump did. I only mention this because it's interesting. I'll still be referring to his character as "Seagal" because he only really plays one kind of character: himself. I realize I'm meandering here, so I'll try to wrap this up by talking about the ending. After all of this, he shows up to the Alaska State Legislature, and live-narrates a documentary about how awful pollution is and that the oil industry is guilty of crimes against humanity. OK, I'll bite. He then mentions something about alternative energies with goofy-looking cars and carburetors that give you 100 miles per gallon of gas (I assume that's a lot. If that's anything like 100km/L, then yes). It's so self-indulgent that I am absolutely not surprised that test audiences had to sit through an 11-minute long speech and was forced to cut it down. Even if all of this were absolutely accurate and doable, it really rings hollow from a character that just killed untold amount of people and caused untold amounts of destruction, not to mention from a movie that had him convalesce and become entwined in Inuit spirituality, but then give a speech about how it's actually bullshit and he needs to kill the bad guys because the gods won't. I even howled at the earlier scene where he defends a Native man' s honour by fighting the redneck rig pigs abusing him and finishes it with a quasi-spiritual quiz about what it takes "to change the essence of a man?" and the guy who just took multiple gut-punches and an even worse ego-thrashing by saying that he needs more time to change. Basically, the movie is a mess. There's a lot of action, but it takes a while to get there after the initial fire and explosion meant to kill Seagal. Some of the shots of snowscape are nice to look at, but other than that, it's not really much. Even past the screenplay level, the fight choreography is a joke (as I mentioned), the special effects aren't anything really, and the plot serves just for the needlessly-violent action scenes. At least making it an action movie saved it from being an even-worse feature-length bullshit documentary directed and narrated by Steven Seagal.
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Apr 26, 2020 22:49
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