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Random movie thoughts

MusicEd921

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Just saw this movie over the weekend after it had been sitting in my Netflix list for a while:

poster212x312.jpeg


Not a bad flick! Definitely seemed unsure if it wanted to be a comedy or an action movie, but the surprising thing was that it was written by Luc Besson. I think it had some potential to be better and maybe an edit could help with that, but it is something to maybe check out if you want to see an older Costner in a Liam Neeson type role.

Here is the trailer:

 

Brumous

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Brick (2005) was on my list for a long time and I finally got to see it. It's a noir detective movie set in a sunny California suburb and all the main characters are high school students. It was like setting a Shakespeare play in a modern setting, it had that same feeling of dislocation and artificialness. It had some weird made up language of 1930s slang too. The plot was ridiculously complicated.

So it had flaws, but I liked spending time in the weird little world the movie put together. The director did Looper and he's writing and directing Star Wars 8 and 9. I'm more hopeful about Star Wars 8 and 9 now, I mean Brick was more interesting than anything JJ Abrams put on screen.
 

matrixgrindhouse

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So... Tom Yum Goong 2. Or The Protector 2. Or The Warrior King 2 (which is not about a warrior king).

What happened? The first movie was one of the best action flicks of the 2000s. Simple plot allowed for a focus on outstanding action scenes that used the bare minimum of CGI and wirework. It felt like a 90's Jackie Chan movie with its environmentally-resourceful martial arts scenes, and jaw-dropping stuntwork. It's best known for an elaborate continuous-take fight scene.



Where do I begin with what went wrong with the sequel? Shooting in 3D made the composition of a lot of shots look incredibly awkward in 2D. Lots and lots of stuff flying at your face, Friday the 13th Part 3 style. There's tons of obvious CGI everywhere. And while I'm more than happy to suspend my disbelief for such things, it does distract from Jaa's martial art mastery. It's all so much less impressive. Fight scenes are filmed very close, with lots of cuts. It isn't the hyperactive editing of the likes of Quantum of Solace or Die Hard 5, but long gone are the smooth shots of the original. That one let the choreography speak for itself without attempting to jazz things up with special effects. The resolution of several action scenes (bike chase, fire fight, building fall) are completely baffling, if not downright incomprehensible. I often found myself pondering, "How?!" and "Why?!" at the conclusion of various action beats. The plot is beyond convoluted. We have a murder setup, identical twin masters of throwing darts and sparkplugs (?!) seeking revenge, M. Bison looking dictators from fictional countries, assassination schemes, interpol corruption, a secret order of martial artists dedicated to advancing in rank... it's a mess, with almost nobody getting enough time to have their intentions made perfectly clear. Worst of all are the reasons for the elephant abduction this time.


Initially, we are led to believe this was part of a plan to rope Tony Jaa's character in to working for the assassins. But as it turns out, that's all moot, because the contingency is to - I'm not making this up - plant explosives inside the tusks, meant to detonate at the moment of the signing of a peace accord, wiping out both sides.


It's one of the most drastic cases of a sequel being made with next to no understanding of what made the original work.
 

ssj

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Harry Pot and the Sorcerer Stoned
 

Gaith

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Hey everybody, I found it!   :)


... So I decided tonight I wanted to find out, after untold years of wondering, what that one painting from The Mummy Returns was. You know, from when Hafez confronts Jonathan in the manor:

image.jpg



There was a chance it was just some random anonymous painting, of course, but with that level of detail evident even in the screencap, odds were it was a legit work of art that had been professionally photographed and printed onto canvas for either the prop archives generally or TMR specifically.

Well, a simple google search yielded no answers, so I had to flat-out search "shipwreck paintings"... which led me to one Claude Joseph Vernet, who'd made several very similar works to the one above. A bit more "Vernet painting" image searching, and...

cms_upp0037.bro


It's a Bingo!!!  :-D


... If that's not an exciting Saturday night here at the Naval Air Station, well, I just don't know what is. :p
 

TM2YC

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Shout! Factory have some amazing looking retro Collector's Edition Blu-Rays this year...

Today: Escape From New York
Today: Breakin' / Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo [Double Feature]
May 5th: Mad Max
July 7th: Robot Jox

...I must have them all! :) As far as I know it's the first HD release of Robot Jox and as one person says in the comments section for this trailer "Greatest movie of all time" :p...

 

TM2YC

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Despite the widespread critical-acclaim, multiple Oscar and Bafta nominations (and an Oscar win for the script) there was something about the trailers that put me off seeing 'The Imitation Game' (I almost, almost, went to see it). I'm glad I didn't waste my money on it because I recently viewed another person's copy and it's really and truly terrible, at best... and a f**king travesty at worst ;-).

First, let me say that Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Alan Turing is fantastic, which makes the surrounding catastophe all the harder to stomach. The main problem is down to the "Oscar-winning" script. It's the kind of drivel that a child would write and far from being an "about time!" recognition of Turing's life and work (FYI: He only helped invent computers and save the world from Hitler), it's an insult to his memory. We have dialogue so unlikely that your jaw will be on the ground at points, plot points so contrived and ill thought out that it's astonishing and characters that convey their subtle emotions by punching each other in the face?!? The addition of many clearly fictional elements of false jeopardy are really annoying, especially as one would think the ever present threat of the Nazi's and the lives at stake was jeopardy enough? The worst element of this script is that 50% of it focuses on a wildy inacurate and inflated character played by Keira Knightley. Clearly Alan Turing wasn't interesting enough to have the film about him... be about him.

The frequent use of sub-standard CGI is an additional irritant, especially as this wasn't set in space in the far-flung future, it was set in England, in the recent past. Last time I checked, England still existed in the real world and could easily have been filmed live with some minor set dressing. This combined with the laughable script and agressive unreal colour-grading gives you the feeling that this is taking place in some kind of fanciful themepark version of WWII.

This film made me really cross :mad:.

Could it be fanfixed? I'm not sure, maybe. You'd have to cut a lot. But I'd like to see someone try, as Alan Turing deserves better than this doggerel.
 

Gaith

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^ Interesting; I've been dithering about watching it for pretty much those reasons. Are you really honoring Turing if you take an affable, well-liked historical hero and gratuitously turn him into another Cumberbatch weirdo? And entirely falsely portraying that he protected a Soviet spy is really "the outside of enough", as my old man would say.

I'm curious, TM2YC, have you seen Enigma? At the time of its release, it was criticized for not mentioning Turing (and kinda-sorta fictionalizing him as the straight protagonist), but I watched it for the second time a few years ago, and find it pretty damn good. It's not a Turing documentary, but at least it doesn't pretend to be, and it's a pretty nifty yarn to boot.
 

TM2YC

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Gaith said:
have you seen Enigma? At the time of its release, it was criticized for not mentioning Turing

I saw it when it came out and that ^ was one of the reasons I didn't really care for it. Coming just a year after the near-international-incident that was 'U-571'...

Wikipedia said:
The anger over the inaccuracies (In 'U-571') even reached the British Parliament, where Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that the film was an "affront" to British sailors[SUP].[/SUP]

...I was hoping it would set the record straight. 'The Imitation Game' gets a lot closer to the truth than either of those movies, to be fair.

IMO, the life of Alan Turing is a story so astounding, dramatic and historically significant (For many reasons) that only a tenth-rate writer would think that it needed embellishing.

That article you linked to was interesting thanks. It seems the inaccuracies that annoyed me were only the tip of the iceberg. They couldn't even get the years in which things happened right :?. It's not that a film can't tweak or cendense a few facts to fit a 2 hour running time (It's required) but this movie centers huge swathes of the plot around entirely fictious elements. I'd go so far as to suggest that there probably isn't one of the primary plot threads, which are based on solid fact.

It's a similar deal with the far superior 'Foxcatcher', which I really loved. I only found out afterwards that most of the core plot arcs are fictious, or highly distorted. But it was based on real people who I didn't know of, or care about, so it didn't bother me one bit. Is that hypocritical? Yeah probably :p.
 

Gaith

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'The Imitation Game' gets a lot closer to the truth than either of those movies, to be fair.
Well sure, but in fairness, Enigma wasn't trying to be historical in its narrative. The story of Bletchley Park is an amazing one for sure, but from what little I know of it, things went pretty smoothly throughout its operation. So maybe an ideal dramatic treatment would be a modest miniseries observing its day-to-day life, but the setting is so wonderfully ideal for a spy/psychological thriller that I can hardly blame the movie and its novel for inventing one. Then there's that wonderful John Barry score! ;-)
 

Gaith

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^ Okay, watched Imitation Game last night. Boy, were you not kidding about the shitty writing! Some American a-hole won an Oscar for this crap? Jesus Christo. The gags about Turing not grokking jokes and figures of speech were beyond trite, Knightley was woefully miscast in a misconceived part, and, no disrespect to people whose autism really does make them deeply awkward and socially challenged, Cumberbatch's historically unfounded Rain Man routine was just painful to watch. And though I can see people disagreeing with me on this point, I would have really appreciated some Beautiful Mind-style visual interpretations of Turing's mathematical thought process. (I really liked said surreal touches in The Fifth Estate, an underrated and much better film with a much better Cumberbatch performance.)

To be fair, I briefly found the final scenes, with Turing hobbling and afraid during the persecution phase, quite powerful, though the effect quickly wore off with the eye-rolling end titles, and Mark Strong was the only one not to embarrass himself at all.

Yes, the movie is no doubt closer to the historical truth than the overtly fictional Enigma, but though it's been a few years, I feel absolutely confident in calling Enigma the far better film. My recommendation to anyone interested in the real story would be to read a book and watch Enigma if they like, but definitely and skip this lousy movie entirely. Ugh. :p

D+
 

TV's Frink

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I've somehow never seen Natural Born Killers, and I had no idea that the Nine Inch Nails song "Something I Can Never Have" is in it. Today I'm watching the movie, and I get to the scene with the song, and suddenly I recognize all the dialogue. I think, "oh, so this is the random dialogue in the song I always wondered about." I pause the movie and load up the song (from Pretty Hate Machine) on my phone...but there's no dialogue from the movie.

There must be some extended/alternate version of the song I heard once (many?) upon a time, such that it stuck in my brain. Maybe from the movie soundtrack?

Side note: NIN has never topped PHM.
 

ThrowgnCpr

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TV's Frink said:
I've somehow never seen Natural Born Killers, and I had no idea that the Nine Inch Nails song "Something I Can Never Have" is in it. Today I'm watching the movie, and I get to the scene with the song, and suddenly I recognize all the dialogue. I think, "oh, so this is the random dialogue in the song I always wondered about." I pause the movie and load up the song (from Pretty Hate Machine) on my phone...but there's no dialogue from the movie.

There must be some extended/alternate version of the song I heard once (many?) upon a time, such that it stuck in my brain. Maybe from the movie soundtrack?

They put that edited version on the soundtrack, and it probably got air time on the radio



TV's Frink said:
Side note: NIN has never topped PHM.

I don't really know what to consider NIN anymore, but I love Ghosts I-IV. That was more of a Reznor/Ross side project though, like their recent soundtracks.
 

Captain Khajiit

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Vinterberg's adaption of Far from the Madding Crowd was a wonderful Sunday treat. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend seeing it in the cinema.

On a separate note, I recently saw a glorious print of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. The colors were wonderful, and while the film had quite a cool look, the reds were rich and dark, without the orange look that they had on the Blu-ray. It was a privilege to see it.
 

TM2YC

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I've had the Matrix Trilogy Blu-Ray boxset for a few years but I only got round to listening to the "Critics Commentaries" this week.

Respect to the Wachowski's for including this thing. It was a bold move, as the three critics involved do not hold back on how bad they think the two sequels are. They go into a lot of detail about why they think the dialogue, plot, pacing, editing, characterisation etc got it so wrong. Food for thought for Matrix faneditors and a lot of fun to listen to generally.
 

TM2YC

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I didn't even realise the 'Sharpe' TV series had been remastered for Blu-Ray from the O-negs a few years ago! It looks stunning...

4119_3_large.jpg


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The great cinematography and fantastic costumes look beter than ever. Somebody hide my wallet :oops:
 

dangermouse

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TM2YC said:
I've had the Matrix Trilogy Blu-Ray boxset for a few years but I only got round to listening to the "Critics Commentaries" this week.

Respect to the Wachowski's for including this thing. It was a bold move, as the three critics involved do not hold back on how bad they think the two sequels are. They go into a lot of detail about why they think the dialogue, plot, pacing, editing, characterisation etc got it so wrong. Food for thought for Matrix faneditors and a lot of fun to listen to generally.

They're much more entertaining than the movie itself! :)
 

Captain Khajiit

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TM2YC said:
I didn't even realise the 'Sharpe' TV series had been remastered for Blu-Ray from the O-negs a few years ago! It looks stunning...

Indeed! The reframing was, for the most part, done well. Aside from a tiny amount of ugly-looking upscaled material, the series looks better than ever.
 

TM2YC

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Captain Khajiit said:
Indeed! The reframing was, for the most part, done well. Aside from a tiny amount of ugly-looking upscaled material, the series looks better than ever.

Yeah, just watched my old DVD of the first 1993 Sharpe movie (Still fantastic entertainment) and realised, hang on this isn't 16:9? But it isn't oldskool TV 4:3 either, it's much closer to 16:9. I did a screengrab of one of the same shots I posted above...

17574179641_bec8314fdc_b.jpg


Wow :shock:.

Sometimes when you go back to old DVDs, after seeing a new HD version, it's hard to remember the days when I thought DVDs were the sh*t ;-). Although part of the image has been cropped for the Blu-Ray, there is also extra information to the left and right. For example...

17574269315_04b49c4b23_o.jpg


On this evidence I'd be happy to upgrade to the Blu-Ray. I can live with slight crop on the strength of the huge image upgrade. Plus for this shot at least, the composition is better in 16:9 IMHO.
 
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