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I have to admire Christoph Waltz for adhering to the Bond movies' most sacred tradition, that the best Bond Villain actors end up in the absolute worst Bond movies. He can take his place alongside Walken and Lee.
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Mar 19, 2023 22:47
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The Room was a real lightning in a bottle situation. You can't recapture it. Wiseau hasn't been able to, skilled comedians trying to do jokes on it haven't been able to. Even the recreated footage in the Disaster Artist wasn't as weird as the original despite copying it frame for frame. It simply exists. I wouldn't even put it in the 'so bad it's good' category, since it's not so much bad as on an entirely different wavelength to every other film ever made. It came through the cracks in reality from another dimension where films are made very differently. It's so bizarre, but so incredibly consistent in how bizarre it is. No one will ever recapture that.
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Mar 25, 2023 00:53
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The Menu is a really good dark comedy that was marketed as a horror movie. Ghost Leviathan posted:Filmmaking is literally the art of smoke and mirrors, and you use whatever tools are available and seem to work the best for a particular shot. All those blooper spotters point out a lot of places where props are swapped around between scenes, as well as stunt doubles and so on. I rewatched the Replacement Killers recently and there's one henchman who I swear buys it in at least three of the film's many shootouts.
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Mar 28, 2023 22:45
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Alan Smithee posted:https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1640770371698696224?s=20 It's largely been remixes of his biggest hits, which is fine since he's earned it, but that's what he's been up to.
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Mar 28, 2023 23:08
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The only thing I've seen of the Pentaverate is the bit where someone in a shrek costume saves him and then music plays and everyone starts dancing. I cannot imagine any show made in the light of god leading up to that scene.
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Apr 1, 2023 02:34
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Hakkesshu posted:I've never heard anyone say one good thing about that King Arthur movie. I thought the trailer looked pretty cool though, is it at least worth it for the visuals? That shot of Jude Law making his army kneel as he waves his hand over them has weirdly stuck with me. It can't decide what it is. Arthur spends most of the movie as a street fighting cockney urchin character (which is cool since it's the part of the Arthur story that's usually skipped, his time before being crowned) and also leans on the idea that he'd be a good king because he understands the underclass. He's got connections through the city and specifically is good at conflic resolution by finding common ground. But also every resolution comes from him having magic royal blood and thus superpowers which allows him to win the Dark Souls boss fight final duel and also summon a giant snake to kill a smal army of henchmen. It's pretty entertaining but there's a reason it was forgotten five minutes after it came out. It was less coherent than the gritty robin hood reboot that came out soon after.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:36
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High Warlord Zog posted:Speaking of Mosfilm has uploaded 4K versions of Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace quartet I rewatched that recently and holy poo poo that is a gorgeous set of films. It's like nothing else. Such a great marriage of old school big movie splendour with experimental, impressionist approaches.
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Apr 7, 2023 04:42
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Grendels Dad posted:I know that boring humans and their boring plot are kind of a staple of the Godzilla franchise, but yeah. If you get Charles Dance to be a bad guy in your movie and I don't remember a single loving line he said, you done hosed up. He doesn't monologue at all. A twist villain does. Over a zoom call. It's one of the stupidest things I've seen in a big budget film. That was not a good one. G vs K, Skull Island and the 2014 Godzilla were all good though, in very different ways.
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Apr 20, 2023 23:37
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Rochallor posted:I'm not going to bother posting it because I hate when people post Chat GPT poo poo, but I told the bot to generate a three act plot for a Marvel movie starring Nova with Thor as a guest star, and the Russos might be out of a job soon. I gotta say, I'd be a little curious to see it.
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Apr 26, 2023 03:58
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Payndz posted:That looks fairly decent for a cutscene... wait, it's an actual movie? Got some bad news man, you're old. If you start comparing CGI to video game graphics, you're old. Those are the rules.
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Apr 30, 2023 05:24
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Taika's really good at his thing, but it's really one thing. When he tries to do other stuff, you get, well, 95% of Jojo Rabbit, which has two really good scenes that make you forget that the rest of it is 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas but worse somehow' Incal is a terrible fit for him, but there's a bunch of super goofy sci fi comic properties he'd do something cool with. Scud the Disposable Assassin or Sinister Dexter would be great. I think you need to start at a goofy idea rather than taking a serious premise and have him, presumably, subvert it. People act like Thor Ragnarok was a real shift in genre but the best bits of both the prior Thor movies were comedic.
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May 3, 2023 01:16
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Anchorman 2 is a good hour and a half movie crammed into two hours. Everything just takes way too loving long.
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May 4, 2023 22:00
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The thing that struck me about Mulan was how small it felt. The animated film is great at creating a sense of scale and anything involving ancient China lends itself to grand, sweeping events. Even their thousand episode historical TV dramas tend to feel huge, while Mulan was small. The Hun invasion seemed to involve about ten people and one small village.
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May 14, 2023 23:14
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Baby Driver was good, you absolute weirdos, even if two of the cast turned out to be sex pests, which does make it a little hard to rewatch. A few years back, I got to interview Debbie Evans, one of the OG stunt drivers in Hollywood. She's currently Michelle Rodriguez's stunt driver, but she was also Trinity's and Sarah Connor's long before that. Anyway, I asked her what film had stunt work that really impressed her recently and she said Baby Driver had some stunts even she'd never seen before. I figured she was probably just being hyperbolic until I watched it. The chases in that are loving crazy. Neo Rasa posted:That is interesting now that you mention it and reminds me of why what I saw looked so bad, it had this real feel of like "we're imitating lower budget costume TV dramas because that's what China watches without understanding that they look like that to stay in budget" like oh hey here's that cheapass exterior corridor wall with only two people along the entire length for a secret conversation that's in every single historical show. There's one on Netflix I got really into called 'Kings War' about the collapse of the Qin and the establishment of the Han. It's mostly what you're talking about : small cheap sets and costumes with about ten people at most. Every now and then, though, they cut to these elaborate battle scenes that were clearly filmed by someone else somewhere else and with a lot more money. They reuse shots every now and then as well. It can be pretty jarring (especially since I was marathoning it instead of watching it week to week) but it does help the series feel bigger in budget and scale than it actually is. Anyway, Mulan doesn't do this. It cuts from conversations with ten people to battles with ten people. Also, dubbing Jet Li was probably one of the weirdest choices I can remember in a big movie.
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May 15, 2023 23:50
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Who's the second sex pest after spacey in baby driver? Egort. It started with 'he was dming underage girls' and ended with a pretty credible sexual assault allegation.
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May 16, 2023 01:37
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Hot Fuzz is two thirds to three quarters of a perfect movie but by god the 'doing michael bay but ineptly' third act drags so extremely much for me. I think that's why I appreciated Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver so much: Wright realising his blind spot and going to action movie school. World's End also shows a real effort to improve as an action director and is really creative at times.
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May 16, 2023 21:58
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High Warlord Zog posted:Brexit has coloured the ending in a really unfortunate way. what?
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May 17, 2023 01:51
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Goddamn they're trying to reboot Hellboy again. It's remarkable which IPs are never allowed to actually die.
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May 19, 2023 01:22
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Pirate Jet posted:This list does not include Hellboy. Well, sort of. The first two were very moderate hits but also their totals wouldn't have even been impressive opening weekends for a comic book film. They were pretty niche despite presumably eventually being profitable. Yet they cannot let the series die. This is the second reboot attempt. We've all memory holed the one with David Harbour from a couple years back
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May 19, 2023 22:59
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That's loving awful. Stevenson was terrific. Just a worker of an actor, with a remarkable capacity to project being a real tough guy but one who regreted what he was. He should have lived long enough to get to do an arty western where he's the old gunslinger looking back at his legacy, wondering where it all went wrong even as violence continues to follow him. He'd have loving nailed it and we'd all have gone 'wow, who knew he was this good?' even as he brought a similarly excellent energy to everything he did, even total nonsense like Accident Man (they're great action films and he's much better in them than he needs to be)
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May 22, 2023 22:50
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High Warlord Zog posted:Here's another entry in the "leads do not appear to have been on set at the same time" cannon. If Jackie Chan could time travel from the late 90s and make this with current John Cena, I'd be excited. As it is, it looks like some producer saw Fury Road, went 'I want to do a thing like that' and worked backwards from there as other producers yelled out films they liked. Also, yeah, Expendables 4 is due out this year, nine years after the last entry in the series. The guy also directed 'Act of Valor,' an impressively uninteresting action film who's gimmick was starring real life Navy SEALs. I only remember it because it was, absurdly enough, part of a political awakening for me.
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May 31, 2023 23:37
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dr_rat posted:The lead didn't know they hadn't finished filming because they'd stop shooting for months and he hadn't heard anything from the producer director about any more shooting being intended. It was perfectly reasonable to just assumed they'd finished. This is way funnier. Codependent Poster posted:Ben Affleck in Justice League is good too. His hair completely changes from shot to shot. He also gains weight between shots. Weirdly, you can see the same thing happen to Sam Shepard in Black Hawk Down.
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Jun 4, 2023 00:50
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fun fact about the Thing: Carpenter himself said he has no idea exactly who got taken, when, and in what order. That's part of the reason it works so well. I mean, Nauls straight up vanishes halfway just before the third act, completely unaccounted for
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Jun 5, 2023 03:45
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None of those words are in the bible.
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Jun 5, 2023 23:32
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Timby posted:Yeah, Simon Kinberg had to step in to ghost-direct X-Men Apocalypse's last month or so of filming because Singer just disappeared and stopped returning anyone's calls. He also disappeared while Superman Returns was filming to go to Mardi Gras in Sydney.
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Jun 7, 2023 03:10
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Simplex posted:I don't remember much about part 3, but I do remember there was explicitly a pass the baton to a younger generation theme. No, it didn't really make much sense. Number 3 was extremely bad. Like, genuinely loving terrible and pleasing no one. Banderas nearly saves bits of it via sheer enthusiasm and Snipes via weirdness, but it's bad. Every element of it is so completely free of style, flair or talented execution. Even the action isn't great. 87 Eleven are doing their best but you kind of get bored around the 80th wave of identical masked dudes in a grey battleground. Cool little bits, like Ronda's fights (which are surprisingly good) and Statham/Snipes knifing dudes, just blend in with whole platoons dropping dead in impressively forgettable ways. In answer to your question, yes, there was a 'younger generation' and they sucked, their introductions sucked and none of them got to do anything cool. Glen Powell is somehow boring in it. Expendables 3 is impressive for setting a very low bar for itself and still failing to clear it. It's very fitting that it came out the same year as The Raid 2 and the first John Wick. AceOfFlames posted:How the gently caress is this even possible? The CGI in that movie looks like utter GARBAGE. Is Hollywood just a massive embezzlement scam now? How can more and more money be spent on movies that keep looking worse and worse? Along those lines, all the Pixar movies have extremely round budgets of 200 million. I have a feeling that a lot of other costs (CGI RnD, for instance) get rolled into those budgets simply because they know they'll make a decent amount of money, with very few exceptions. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It's why movies from 2013 had better VFX than now. The people doing them were actually better artistically. The computers and tools may have improved but the actual hands guiding them are substantially worse or just not given enough time to excel. This is a phenomenon in a lot of industries, it's called 'institutional amnesia.' When a lot of people quit or leave a business or industry in a short space of time (it's hit hospitality over the last couple of years, the Australian public service inflicted it on itself) a lot of knowledge is lost, especially knowledge that is acquired, rather than learned. It would not surprise me that, even outside of the increasingly awful conditions, the new people simply haven't had time to learn their craft and there may be no one to teach them.
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Jun 8, 2023 22:27
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:That's very interesting, thank you for posting! I had seen this first hand when I worked adjacent to the manufacturing industry and watched everything go overseas and all the plant managers get new jobs in different industries and now America has great difficulty making things, but I did not know there was an actual term for that. Should have suspected their was. Anyway, thanks again for the info! Laura Tingle wrote a whole essay on how it happened to the Australian public service (a conservative government scrapped huge chunks of it and replaced those chunks with consultants) which was my exposure to the term. You've undoubtedly seen it happen in particular places of work (I briefly worked in a bar that had such a high turnover that no one actually knew how to properly operate or clean the coffee machine anymore) and it can happen to entire industries as you've observed. RBA Starblade posted:Expendables 3 more or less peaks with the train intro and the whole joke about Snipes' character being in megajail for tax evasion The first one really only works thanks to Mickey Rourke. It's a by the numbers plot with a weak script and then Mickey Rourke delivers a really good growly, drunken monologue that somehow pulls the whole thing together and gives it weight that it has, in no way, earned.
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Jun 9, 2023 00:53
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Baron von Eevl posted:I heard a story that the monologue was all Rourke's doing, and he came to Stallone with all these ideas for his character and developing pathos and Sly was like "you get 90 seconds." He was only available for 48 hours. We were in the middle of the Rourkessance and so he was filming Iron Man 2 at the same time, took some time off to show up and save the Expendables. Codependent Poster posted:The only thing I remember from the Expendables is Terry Crews and his awesome shotgun. Even by the time of Expendables 3, it was no longer a priority for him. He's only in the first 30 minutes and was busy with Brooklyn 99 the rest of the time. But yeah, the harassment and assault was a loving horrible story. Crews ended up testifying in front of either congress or a committee about the incident and attempts to silence him. 50 Cent made fun of him for it because 50 Cent is an rear end in a top hat. He got his reward, though, a role in Expend4bles, which is a great price for your soul. Even if the last one hadn't been poo poo and this one didn't look like poo poo there's already plenty of reasons to miss it.
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Jun 9, 2023 01:27
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I feel like this is also one of those situations where, like the US military procurement and intelligence services, there's no incentive for even basic competence when you're working for people who obviously don't care or even comprehend the quality of the result. even if they wanted to be competent and get it right, having to redo it and change it constantly is going to prevent that. The main tool to get CGI right seems to be time, like a lot of other art forms. You polish, you communicate with the other members of the team and polish some more. It's the root of every 'it'll look better in the finished film' discussion about trailers. When it's been true (one of the Transformers movies, for instance) it wasn't a massive difference. It was a better integrated smoke effect, an improved patina of dirt on the robot. It's the little things, fine tuning. A bunch of stuff that you don't really notice when it's there but you sure as poo poo miss when it isn't. Neo Rasa posted:Yeah what we saw of 1 was noticeably like, joyless? Maybe that sums it up best, not that it should be lightheartede in tone but just the whole look and feel of the flick felt like it was almost looking bad on purpose, as a joke. Nah, that's reasonable. Mickey Rourke's monologue (which is genuinely good and a great summation of what Mickey Rourke can do that no one else can) is memorable at least partially because it's one of the only scenes with a clear tone that it actually nails. Every other scene is just kind of flat. You recognise that they're trying to make the villains menacing, or trying to have a bit of funny banter between the team, but it's just bad. So much of the dialogue feels like placeholder dialogue, or what a censor might come up with for the film's TV edit. Rollie Fingers posted:Re: the discussion about the quality of VFX. This was interesting, thanks very much. I feel like there's quite a few CGI artist goons. Maybe even enough for a CGI industry thread because there definitely is a noticeable trend of CGI getting worse.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:17
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Alan Smithee posted:yeah but Predators didn't make anything big And also only came out a month before the first expendables.
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Jun 11, 2023 01:27
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Cormac McCarthy, passed away at 89. It's something that could be adapted but probably shouldn't be. The film could turn out well, maybe even very good, but the book is something of a singular piece of genius that works primarily because it's a novel, because switching prose styles in the middle of a scene or paragraph is a big part of what is so memorable and it would take a very confident and creative and skillful director to pull of something like that.
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Jun 13, 2023 23:07
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Chairman Capone posted:Someone should adapt the Space Trilogy instead, or at least the first one. Still Christian but at least there are some giant space otters on Mars. They wouldn't be space otters, then. They'd be Mars otters. Think these things through.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:08
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Isn’t this basically what Tubi is? Tubi fuckin' rules. It's full of genuinely excellent old films who's ownership rights are expired and runs the gamut all the way to total loving poo poo that is several notches below straight to dvd. Like, home movie level stuff. It's the last streaming service that's actually more fun to browse than it is to watch stuff on and that's a compliment. Also, it's crazy that, of all these lovely services, somehow Amazon Prime seems to be the least cynically run. That is loving amazing.
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Jul 6, 2023 02:20
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Shageletic posted:Apparently the pilot of Wheel of Time had 10,000 notes by Amazon producers. They have like policies that state you need an action scene within the first min of a new show, cliffhangers, etc doodled out by software execs who have no experience with being creative. Oh, I meant purely in terms of their catalogue. There's tons of great poo poo on there that no one could care about, that an algorithmic approach like Disney's or Netflix's would have memory holed years ago, but that Amazon just leaves there. Masses of old kung fu movies, forgettable but kind of interesting 90s thrillers, zero budget sci fi films, classic westerns. I have no doubt that working on their mega budget shows is as miserable an experience as it is everywhere else. There's some comparable horror stories from their lord of the rings show.
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Jul 6, 2023 23:14
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:People gotta eat, her leading roles started drying up when the 90s ended and she dared to hit her mid30s. She was one of the many actresses labelled 'difficult' by Harvey Weinstein. If memory serves, she was up for a role in lord of the rings before Weinstein vetoed it. Peter Jackson talked about it.
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Jul 8, 2023 06:26
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Nemesis kind of rules and is the Syndicate movie I wrote at age 7 after renting Syndicate wars. 
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Jul 9, 2023 01:15
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Albert Pyun movies are generally kinda bad, but the man absolutely knew to make every single action scene incredible in some way. Having seen a lot of his films, no, he didn't. Every now and then he nailed it, though. Nemesis was one of those times.
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Jul 9, 2023 02:42
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I AM GRANDO posted:Tekwar? The kids have to learn about the Tek War sooner or later.
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Jul 10, 2023 01:03
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Professor Shark posted:I watched World War Z almost a decade after first watching it originally and it was still pretty bad. I read the novel yesterday and sort of wish it was a limited series. The book was pretty loving bad too. The battle of Yonkers is still one of the stupidest things I've read and I spent a chunk of my youth reading Warhammer 40k novels.
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Jul 13, 2023 00:18
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Beachcomber posted:On the other hand, you're wrong. I don't know if it's a reading comprehension thing, but it's explained pretty clearly as a total fuckup from top to bottom, and the reasoning that allowed it to occur. The fact it was so stupid is the most believable thing about it. It's not a reading comprehension thing (gently caress you) it's just not a very good scene. Zombies always require an enormous amount of contrivance to be a threat and the battle of yonkers features a massive, massive, massive amount of contrivance. There's 'the military makes non ideal decisions under pressure' and there's 'the military makes the worst possible decision at every single point.' It also brings to the fore that Brooks never quite decided if the zombies were magic or not. Artillery being ineffective against them for instance, because it didn't score direct headshots or couldn't achieve the 'blood balloon' effect. The blast and shockwave of artillery liquifies muscle and pulps bone, to say nothing of what it does to the brain itself. They can't 'drag themselves forward' if they no longer have limbs or bones attached to each other. Also, something that has to drag itself forward on its arms is a slower, less effective enemy than something with legs. "soft infantry in the open" is something that artillery has been extremely effective against for several hundred years. Unless, they're magic and thus completely pulping the bodies isn't something that kills them Also, 'literally thousands of infantry with scoped rifles' is something a zombie army couldn't get past. Back in WW1, it was estimated that a group of riflemen attacking another group of entrenched riflemen would need a twelve to one advantage. That's infantry, who can run forward, take cover, occasionally fire back. Not a shambling, slow moving horde of soft targets. Rifle rounds kill tissue they pass through (there's some absolutely horrifying stories from the various mass shootings in the US about what 5.56 does to tissue) and, so, even non headshots are killing muscle, destroying nerve connections, breaking bones. Unless, of course, the zombies are magic. It's a blend of 'here's some actual research I did on how the military might react' mixed with arbitrarily deciding why that wouldn't work. The idea of the military reacting exclusively with Cold War era tactics ten years into the war on terror is it's own problem. Essentially, there's a reason why zombie movies either skip the part where the zombies overcome the military or end with the military showing up and restoring order. Because as soon as you try to explain why 'hordes of soft targets overcome machine guns' you end up with something dumber than galactic wars being settled by sword fights.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:02
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