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I've seen people mention Star Trek Into Darkness, but I'm going to do you one better - Star Trek Beyond. I hated this film in a way I rarely hate films. The beginning of the film has a great idea - Kirk is bored and in a rut. It subverts our expectations, since we're used to being amazed, but for Kirk, it was Tuesday. And that's it. The story is averted because instead of coming up with a story with themes, they instead said "hey, let's make another tent pole action film." Blowing up the Enterprise has been done so much it's boring by now. The big bad guy wasn't satisfied with one incredibly powerful weapon, he needed two. The stuff with Spock and Uhura fell flat. Either the actors have no chemistry together, or they just never developed it. But it was hard to care about it. There's nonsensical fight scenes that are designed to look cool, but God help you if you think about them for more than a minute. Like the scene in the air filtering system - Scotty can't turn it off because there's all this security, but the big bad guy can just walk in? And there was nothing interesting about this bad guy. And in the end, Kirk decides he still wants to be the captain of the Enterprise, but I think what happened was that had two scripts. One for a potentially good Star Trek film, and one for a generic blockbuster action film, just find and replace the character names, and it can be a DC or Marvel film, and they realized that they needed to address the beginning of the film. I hated it. But let's not forget Gotti. Gotti is what happens when someone watches the Godfather and thinks "Michael Corleone, he's a good guy." I've never seen a film that actually was pro-crime, but here we are. There is very little about the film that isn't utterly incompetent. Take the son for example. The guy can't act to save his life, and they made the daring choice to have him always be the same age no matter then the film takes place. So when they cut from a man in his early twenties to show a photo of what he looked like, and you saw a guy who was pushing 50, I was confused. It also doesn't help that when we first get to really know the son, we see him killing a guy in a bar fight. Nothing like second-degree murder to really make you feel sorry that the guy was being tried for federal crimes. My favorite thing they did was having Gotti always act so strong and unwilling to back down that when his doctor suggests that he gets sedated because he's dying of cancer, he starts shaking in his hospital bed violently. And I love how the film constantly shows them discussing about something, but rarely shows them actually doing it. Finally, I submit Tiny Furniture, by Lena Dunham. The biggest crime is how cliche this whole movie is. It's the brilliant idea that every person who just graduated college has - write a story about being listless after graduating college. It's just so boring, and it feels like "oh, woe is me, I am av rich white person with a film degree, whatever shall I do." If I were being kind, I'd call it precocious. But I'm not kind.
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Dec 14, 2019 04:57
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General Dog posted:This doesn’t really say anything about the quality of the movie, which is basically fine. My biggest problem with American Sniper is that Clint Eastwood made a horrible mess with the movie. His best work is very murky, like Unforgiven, where you aren't dealing with basic good and evil. The problem was that the main character in American Sniper was literally the embodiment of "if we don't fight them over there, we'll fight them over here." He had a very simplistic world view. So the film just doesn't know what it should be. It felt, to me, after seeing it once when it came out, like it wasn't going to take a side in a story that required you to take a side. It felt like "war is bad, but soldiers are good" - the type of film you'd get if you try to appease both Frank Burns and Hawkeye. And that becomes its biggest failing, because it just doesn't say anything, or worse, it bungles anything it tries to say. The problem too was that the subject is incredibly problematic - there's a lot of just straight up lies in his book, but the movie can't deal with that. So instead of being a movie about PTSD or the impact that war has, it becomes a film about a guy who really believes in what he does, and he happens to have PTSD, and we're meant to sympathize with him and that means you can question if the film is saying that the war in Iraq is good. Eastwood was the wrong director for the film. His best work allows him to deal with complexity - but this was about a guy who saw the world only in black and white and that just isn't a recipe for success.
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Dec 15, 2019 05:38
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BigglesSWE posted:Remember that part of the movie where his terrorist radar goes haywire and he sniffs out a weapon cache? Also, remember how in the movie literally every Iraqi on screen is in one way or another shown to be an enemy of the United States? No I don't. Because I watched it once and then put it in my Passion of the Christ file for manipulative movies that have serious flaws but because of their subject matter, nobody attacks and then promptly forgot about it. This one had less slowdown, so I was tempted to leave it out.
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Dec 18, 2019 17:23
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Segue posted:I haven't seen the original Dirty Harry, but I remember someone showing me this from the fourth movie and the conservative racist fantasy kept me off of seeking any of the previous ones out. Dirty Harry is iconic, but I don't think it's really worth seeking out. In the first film, we watch him torture a guy, and the film tries to present it as a moral argument. John Millius, who was an uncredited writer is a lunatic. You also encounter the "criminals have rights? Well what about the rights of the victims" view people use to justify cruelty to the accused. It's basically an action film, Rush Limbaugh, and Nancy Grace wrapped up into a movie. Pretty much, the stuff you've heard a million times before is all you need from that film.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:12
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Its technically a short film but Cans Without Labels. My god, why on earth would you share this? I wanted to sleep eventually. There's so many problems. George Liquor's facial features shifting size inconsistently with his face during the initial zoom out. Breaking the 180 degree rule a lot. Magical shifting chairs. Nickelodeon was right to take control of Ren and Stimpy away from this hack.
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Jan 7, 2020 01:27
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