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General Dog posted:The Giver is too bland to be memorably bad, but it's a pretty textbook example of an adaptation where the tone it aims for is completely wrong for the source material. The book was kind of poo poo to start with, so that's fine.
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Oct 24, 2019 23:59
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Sleeveless posted:Mute was such a wet fart of a movie after almost a decade of buildup, it's insane that Duncan Jones entered this decade a promising up and comer and wound up making a blockbuster that made almost half a billion dollars and his blank check weird Russian sci-fi movie and both of them were disappointing and forgettable. Yeah, what the gently caress was up with Mute? It was an amusement park ride, hinting at half a dozen other, more interesting movies that we're not watching. And then the resolution comes out of loving nowhere.
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Oct 25, 2019 00:24
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Tart Kitty posted:Terrifier is a solid pick. I'm a horror gal through-and-through but that movie is straight smashed assholes. exquisite tea posted:How should we film this grandiloquent, sweeping epic told across three decades of turmoil and civil unrest in 19th century Paris? I know, let's hold the camera five inches away from everybody's sweaty face at all times. ruddiger posted:It was easily one of the most evil moves in modern movie marketing and way worse than some fuckin' rad music video.  Egbert Souse posted:I will say, though, everyone needs to watch the entire 9-hour making-of documentary. It might be accidentally the greatest look at filmmaking. It's like 8 1/2 if Claude Lanzmann had directed it. Watch Peter Jackson go from spry to gray-haired, haggard, and unhealthy-looking. Ian McKellan has a nervous breakdown from spending a day acting alone in a greenscreen room. The entire sound team stays up for 24+ hours to deliver the final sound mix for the first movie.
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Oct 30, 2019 02:38
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One I'd like to put forward is Mary Magdalene from last year. It's a film for absolutely no one. It's not that it's a religious film, it's just so dull on every level that I cannot imagine anyone getting anything out of it from a film making, historical or religious perspective. Oddly, I can remember it extremely clearly because i've never seen a film so dull, but so aggressively so.TrixRabbi posted:It's hard to really articulate how black the hearts of those filmmakers are. Like, this movie -- made by military bros who wanted to see military and gun culture depicted accurately on film -- ends with a potshot making fun of veterans with PTSD with a joke about one of the characters "isn't a pussy afraid of fireworks on the 4th of July." I think these guys also make Youtube videos named things like 'If veterans were in horror movies' where they just shoot everyone, missing the point of most horror movies. It's that 'Abed writes a horror movie sketch' but for gun loving bros and without any charm and far, far longer.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:56
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Gripweed posted:Please tell me they did one for The Babadook I only managed about 15 seconds of one before seeing the video was 15 minutes long. So...maybe?
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Oct 31, 2019 01:04
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General Dog posted:Pretty rich that Pfister dropped that sick burn just as he was getting started on Transcendence, which I have not seen but is, by most accounts, pretty goddam terrible. Is it bad the same way that Avengers is bad? because otherwise it's not really very rich.
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Oct 31, 2019 23:30
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mobby_6kl posted:Gonna nominate Jack and Jill although I haven't seen it entirely. But from what I have seen, its just an extremely unfunny trainwreck designed to get as much product placement money into the hands of Adam Sandler and his buddies. gently caress it. we did get that great essay about it, though.
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Nov 1, 2019 09:49
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General Dog posted:Which one is that? It was the result of a mod challenge https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3750431&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=8 the now Youtube famous Hbomberguy thought about Jack and Jill way harder than any of the people who made Jack and Jill. If you don't have archives, let me know and i'll copy paste it because it is well worth reading.
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Nov 2, 2019 04:59
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exquisite tea posted:Man I loved Alien Covenant, even more than Prometheus which I thought was very flawed. There's a nastiness and pessimism to Ridley Scott's sci-fi that I don't think many contemporary directors really have anymore. There's not a lot of mainstream directors making films with the message 'the universe is cruel and random because god hates you, specifically' It's kind of bold.
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Nov 4, 2019 05:30
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Gripweed posted:I'm not gonna say that Carol Danvers is a very interesting character, but I liked at the end how she refused to be judged by male standards. Jude Law was all, "You have to beat me on my terms for it to count" and she just said gently caress that and lasered him. I thought that was a genuinely feminist moment in a genre where feminism usually just means women can punch and kick good. That's a pretty standard thing, where the male impulse is to beat the villain on their terms, while the woman just shoots them. It goes back, at least, to Elmore Leonard's 'Gunsights'
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Nov 4, 2019 23:21
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OpenSourceBurger posted:Another choice here: Megan is Missing. You've got to tell us what the exchange is now. Those are the rules.
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Nov 7, 2019 05:01
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OpenSourceBurger posted:It's loving gross. The two girls are talking via webcams and IIRC they are discussing sexual experiences. Meghan (who the movie shows is the ~BAD GIRL~) describes (in very graphic, gross detail) being molested by a family friend. Her telling of those story is insane because she's talking like it's a joke, but the more insane part is her friend reacting by giggling and finding it hilarious. It's a completely out of nowhere scene and literally the only reason it's in the movie is for shock value. Wow. I had no idea what the answer would be. This made me remember Gringo, which is a baffling, extremely dull movie. Watching it, you can kind of guess what the first draft might have been like, and that that might have actually been interesting and funny. What got made, though, is something aggressively generic and dull. Of all the weird decisions in the film, like how characters get told things, and then are surprised by them later (presumably late rewrites or something) there's one that stands out. Charlize Theron's sleazy ammoral business lady is discussing a merger with someone, quite late in the film, and we get this long, bizarre scene where she talks him into taking his dick out in the middle of a bar, with the merger between their companies depending on whether he has a good dick. loving hell what a terrible film.
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Nov 8, 2019 00:10
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God Hole posted:why did spike lee make this film. it's real obvious he didn't give a single poo poo about this story. kind of seemed like he may have even actively hated it A lot of films get called pointless or unnecessary, but Oldboy really was. Spike Lee, as a film maker, has never been particularly interested in vengeance, so it's weird that he'd adapt one the best films on the subject. If he'd actually adapted it, and proceeded to do his own take on it from the ground up instead of rehashing Park's film, he might have done something good with it, but he didn't seem to care enough to do that.
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Nov 11, 2019 23:57
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BiggerBoat posted:I don't know about that at all but I'll assume you're making the (important) distinction between "vengeance" and "justice" at least. In a lot of his films, his message can still come off as quite vengeful viewed through a particular lens. Fair point. I guess Oldboy is more about vengeance as a cinematic and narrative device. The trilogy it's part of (of which, impossibly, Oldboy is probably the weakest) is all a meditation on the pointlessness of it and a deliberate denial of catharsis. It's about vengeance films as much as the actual concept. Whereas Lee has never really been interested in the kind of meta-commentary that defines oldboy. Again, i'd love to see his take on the emptiness of revenge if you let him build it from the ground up, with only the most vestigial remnants of the original, like 'The Thing' and 'The Thing from Another World'
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Nov 13, 2019 01:44
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Inside Man has a pretty good revenge element Nah, that's the least interesting element. Inside Man is a legitimately excellent movie with a weak loving punchline.
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Nov 15, 2019 02:27
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Gripweed posted:Oh god, that reminds me. Mortdecai. We did get that great breakdown of its mystifying ad campaign out of it, so it wasn't a total loss.
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Dec 6, 2019 05:40
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That's the one. It doesn't mention that there were 7 or 8 other Mortdecai films in development at the time, and they were all scrapped the moment the first one flopped as badly as it did.
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Dec 7, 2019 05:09
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I Before E posted:Juno was a very annoying phenomenon in that mid 2000s wave where an independent comedy could have a big theatrical run(Juno made $230M theatrically on a ~7M budget, which is wild to think about now) and make waves culturally, but it did lead to Young Adult and Tully, much better Reitman/Cody collabs, so I'd say it's redeemed itself. Young Adult was so loving good. It's a movie that never makes the less interesting choice that you might expect.
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Dec 13, 2019 01:42
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Cemetry Gator posted:My biggest problem with American Sniper is that Clint Eastwood made a horrible mess with the movie. This is a good post. The movie depicts Kyle's PTSD as a worry that he didn't save enough people. That he hates war, but was really good at it and he could save people. the real guy fuckin' loved war and loved killing. That's how he dealt with what he'd been through, by falling in love with it. If you've read any book by american special forces guys, they're not big on self awareness or reflection. This is even worse than usual on that front. The horrifying truth of Kyle is that he's not really an aberration, that's how the system is supposed to work. There's roughly a bajillion interestng angles you could take with him. You could make him an unreliable narrator who sees enemies everywhere. You could show the disconnection between how his PTSD is manifesting and how he expresses it. You could explore how awful it is that he's praised for what he does. You could explore the fog of war. They hint at that last one, actually, as he's told a city has been evacuated, and he immediately sees bunch of civilians. Instead, it's about as interesting as as Jarhead's straight to video sequels. American Sniper is hateable not just for what it is, but for what it could have been. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Dec 17, 2019 |
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Dec 17, 2019 04:34
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BigglesSWE posted:I was super into the old Midway movie as a child, for some reason. Just one of those weird fixations. I was the same for Tora Tora Tora. Did a grandparent put it on for you? That's how i got there.
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Dec 18, 2019 21:54
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BigglesSWE posted:Nnnooo I was just sort of into WWII stuff as a child (think a lot male history buffs start out there, but fortunately I moved on before I became obsessed with tank statistics). One day it was on the television; I saw enough of it to pester my dad about buying it from Amazon which he eventually did. Still has the DVD back home somewhere. Me too, though i did briefly fall into the tank stats trap. My grandma, who struggled to relate to me as a child, knew i liked battleships and so put it on rather than sit through another transformers episode.
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Dec 18, 2019 22:24
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Jestery posted:I really got the impression Disney want to clean slate the entire thing and kind of do their own original trilogy, as far as setting up a villain ,a cast of lovable rogues, and cutting some old ties I think it achieves that much. I'm not saying it's great, just functional and could have led to better films. I didn't have a problem with TFA when it came out. Sure, it played it really safe, but it was fun, kept moving, and looked pretty nice. It was a new film that was seen to be getting the series back on track, playing it safe and keeping to the familiar seemed like a good choice. That that has been all they've done since (some interesting choices in TLJ aside) has been a shame. It reminds me of a friend who wasn't bothered by the standard, unadventurous nature of Avengers, sure that they would take more risks later on, unaware that no risks was the SOP.
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Dec 30, 2019 08:09
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Blood Boils posted:You're gonna be disappointed if you ever give the book a reread, only like 4 of them have any personality or distinguishing traits or individual lines of dialogue. the book takes about as long to read as it does to watch one and a bit of the movies, so it's less of an issue.
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Jan 23, 2020 06:22
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Jestery posted:I just found the Dwarven design to just not be compatible with suspense or action I think that's part of it. They're from a goofier universe than the ones from Lord of the Rings, but the film doesn't lean into that. SMG made a good comparison, pointing out that the sense of aesthetics is much closer to 300 than Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings did everything it could to make sure the world felt grounded and real, not just the costuming, but the film making itself. Everything felt like it could actually exist. Most of the time, the camera moved like a real camera, even in ridiculous scenarios and virtual shots. The Hobbit frames itself as a crazier thing, a product of it being a story Bilbo is telling Frodo, but it doesn't do enough with it. We whiplash between a semi grounded LOTR take and a much more fanciful version, without ever really choosing. We see little hints of the craziness, like Legolas killing 100 while upside down hanging from a bat, but it needed to take it much further.
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Jan 23, 2020 23:25
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