2016 movies!!!

[TM2YC]

I went to the new 'Magnificent Seven' remake on Sunday. There have been some pretty lame cash-grab remakes of late but I figured it'll be an entertaining couple of hours at least, the reviews were above-average and how bad could a movie be with Denzel in the lead?

So I was pretty staggered with how truly fantastic this movie was! Again with the wrong expectations... after seeing the trailer and knowing the glitzy Directorial style Fuqua had used in his last movie I was expecting a modern Pop update of the genre. Not a bit of it, this a classic, very traditional Western. Well written and well acted fallen-heroes trying to do one last good deed to redeem themselves. The showdowns and gunfights were tension-filled and thrilling as they should be. Check it out.

Whisper it... I think this is better than the original.

Fanediting wise... it was a real shame they didn't use the famous 'Magnificent Seven' theme. Also while some of the score really soared, some of it was just so, so. It did it's job well but nothing more. I'm only guessing but I suspect the soaring moments were down to the late great James Horner and the rest was down to his stand-in. So lots of score replacement would be a bonus (If a clean center channel is available).

Oh and remove the shot where Vincent D'Onofrio is reciting "Into the valley of the shadow of death..." whilst walking into battle. It really stood out amongst the other great writing and witty dialogue as being horribly cliched. Er that's about it I think.

EDIT: Oh, it was written by the guy who wrote/created 'True Detective'.

 

[Gaith]

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping - 2016 - 7/10

100 mph comedy, hitting you with joke after joke. None overstay their welcome and most of them work well.

Seems like the premise of a sketch but works for 90 minutes. SNL movies take note.

I think the character works as a forgivable idiot with enough charm. They hit the requisite plot points wasting as little time as possible and trying to make them weird. Love of Hot Rod or Incredibad would be a good indicator. Really smart to center a movie around pop music, since The Lonely Island are really good at writing funny pop music. Mona Lisa remains my favorite tune on the soundtrack.

This was a really fun movie. 4 out of 5 balls.

I also enjoyed this, and laughed out loud throughout. That said, I didn't really care about the characters, so I doubt I'll be inclined to revisit it much if at all, whereas I would happily watch Hot Rod just about anytime. And apart from "Bin Laden", I didn't find the songs as memorable as that of the best Lonely Island tracks, but that's to be expected given their story purpose. I concur with Neglify; 4 out of 5 wooden Poppies, or A-.

 

[bionicbob]

I went to the new 'Magnificent Seven' remake on Sunday. There have been some pretty lame cash-grab remakes of late but I figured it'll be an entertaining couple of hours at least, the reviews were above-average and how bad could a movie be with Denzel in the lead?

So I was pretty staggered with how truly fantastic this movie was! Again with the wrong expectations... after seeing the trailer and knowing the glitzy Directorial style Fuqua had used in his last movie I was expecting a modern Pop update of the genre. Not a bit of it, this a classic, very traditional Western. Well written and well acted fallen-heroes trying to do one last good deed to redeem themselves. The showdowns and gunfights were tension-filled and thrilling as they should be. Check it out.

Whisper it... I think this is better than the original.

Fanediting wise... it was a real shame they didn't use the famous 'Magnificent Seven' theme. Also while some of the score really soared, some of it was just so, so. It did it's job well but nothing more. I'm only guessing but I suspect the soaring moments were down to the late great James Horner and the rest was down to his stand-in. So lots of score replacement would be a bonus (If a clean center channel is available).

Oh and remove the shot where Vincent D'Onofrio is reciting "Into the valley of the shadow of death..." whilst walking into battle. It really stood out amongst the other great writing and witty dialogue as being horribly cliched. Er that's about it I think.

EDIT: Oh, it was written by the guy who wrote/created 'True Detective'.

I was going to post a review too but I see you beat me to it! LOL

Totally agree with most of your assessment.   This is a fantastic old fashioned western adventure!!!
 
It sort of reminds me of when Tombstone came out... there was a lot of apparent behind the scenes problems and there was not a lot a buzz about it (not too mention Costner's Wyatt Earp was coming out too)... but it turned out to be this awesome throwback western adventure.   I probably watch it at least once a year or more... pure entertainment.   And that is how I feel about this remake, it was not getting a lot of buzz and the studio did not seem to be doing any over the top promotion, all of which made me wary... but WOW!  Fun movie!   Even though a remake, it felt very refreshing after a somewhat disappointing summer of lack luster blockbusters.

I don't think it is better than the original but its shooting-tooting close.  Definitely one of the best rounded casts since the original or the tv series.  The other sequels, while entertaining, only one or two the seven were ever magnificent or memorable.... lol.

 

[TM2YC]

The cinematography on this looks stunning...

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

Just watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 .... as a fantasy kung fu flick I found it enjoyable though a bit predictable.

But as a sequel, it is a very pale shadow of the original.  It lacks the beauty, depth, heart and poetry of the Ang Lee masterpiece.

I just watched CTHD 2 and I completely agree with this. If you can remove it from the original, it's not a bad movie. But the original is a masterpiece, in my opinion, and this comes nowhere close to capturing what the first film did. It's just an okay fantasy kung fu movie.

The biggest mistake was shooting this in English. It just feels like a dub, even though it isn't. I tried sampling it with both Cantonese and Mandarin tracks, but they were really distracting.

Additionally, the editing seems really off and choppy. There are some cool scenes and some fantastic acting (Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen are always wonderful), but they are slapped together in a way that prevents the viewer from really getting an emotional connection to the story.

Worth a watch I guess, but keep your expectations as low as possible.

 

[ssj]

The biggest mistake was shooting this in English.

agree. CTHD2's english dialogue totally takes me out of a certain time and place. imagine if kurosawa's samurai epics, often set in the late 16th century, were conducted in english. or even weirder: if kurosawa had made a two-part serial, the first being in japanese, the second in english.

i joked to my wife while watching CTHD2 that fantasy british (mostly human, maybe a few elves and hobbits) had abruptly colonized the land between the first film and the second.

 

[TM2YC]

I'm hard pressed to find a negative review of 'Arrival', or even find one that dips below the level of raving about it's utter cinematic genius... so I was bit surprised to find it a bit drab, predictable and tedious.

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The performances are uniformly good but the characters are so lifeless and the script is entirely devoid of humour and anything memorable. The rogue-soldiers subplot was telegraphed so heavily that it came as no surprise what so ever.

Overt Vis-FX are kept to a minimum which was wise because the ones we see in full effect are quite poor. The one time we see the alien clearly, it looked like CGI from the 90s (again wisely 99% of the time they are hidden in mysterious smoke). Looking the film up now, I see the budget is very small for a film that wants to operate on this world-wide sci-fi scale. The sequence where Adams meets the Aliens fully, has her hair done with CG for no apparent, which was incredibly distracting (I could barely tell you what happened in that scene). Hair is the one thing that even on the biggest budgets, CG struggles to achieve. What were they thinking!?

If you are going to make a film on this subject you need some awe inspiring FX... to inspire awe. '2001', 'Close Encounters', 'Interstellar' etc. One half-decent shot of some rolling clouds isn't going to cut the mustard. If you are going to make a proper sciencey-science movie then it doesn't have to be boring. Science can be exiting. 'Contact' for all it's problems was a masterpiece compared to this. At least it conveyed the thrill of scientific discovery. Everybody in this seemed to be depressed... and as it turns out in the end, for no particularly good reason.

After an intriguing first part, I spotted the twist halfway though because they really lay it on with a trowel. Sadly the entire second half of the movie is just revelling in the genius of the twist they had created. It ends with a seemlingly 10-minute long silent montage revealing the twist. So from my perspective the film ended after the first hour and the rest was just wasting my time.

Oh and the score is quite bland too. I want my money back :dodgy: .

 

[DominicCobb]

Well I quite disagree. Thought Arrival was a fine bit of filmmaking.

After a hit and miss summer, it's nice to finally see some great movies coming out. Of those that I've seen so far, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight, Nocturnal Animals, and Hacksaw Ridge are at the top of my list.

 

[thecuddlyninja]

I still have to collect my thoughts on Arrival but I really liked it.

I didn't like the CG hair but saying you can't remember what happens in that scene pains me, TM2YC. I think it was the pivotal moment in the film makes the "reveal" possible, and I thought it was quite beautiful. Agree on the score, though it still roused proper emotion from me. It felt as if it was trying very hard but barely worked. Adams was brilliant and Renner was very good with a smaller role. I also liked that there wasn't a budding romance during high stress times; it bugs me when movies do that because I find it very unrealistic.

 

[TM2YC]

Another thing that irritated me about Arrival that I forgot to mention...

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...from very early on in the film it's established that the aliens open the giant black Pringle at exact 18-hour intervals. The filmmakers don't seem have twigged that this formulaic "ticking clock" plot-device demonstrates that the aliens already understand the human method for describing and measuring time and therefore our numbers, our maths, and ultimately our language. Considering this was introduced in maybe the first 15-minutes, it irritated me for most of the movie. That's not even factoring in that if the aliens experience time in a non-linear way, understanding our clock would be the most baffling part of communicating with us... and not the first thing they'd learn.

Also, it becomes clear that our human written language is infinitely less complex than the aliens language. So why the hell do the aliens never make even the slightest effort to use our language. Clearly verbal communication would be difficult, if not impossible but they have a highly developed written language. Couldn't they have just easily learned and written our alphabet, or our numbers with that squid ink stuff? Drawn a human face? Just reproduced what was on the white boards? Come on, meet Amy Adams half-way guys.

This all leads me to the conclusion that the aliens were obstinate a**holes who were capable of understanding us but choose to be difficult. Such miscommunication leading to one of them dying in an explosion... good.

 

[judgmentalpigeon]

Another thing that irritated me about Arrival that I forgot to mention...

Reveal message

...from very early on in the film it's established that the aliens open the giant black Pringle at exact 18-hour intervals. The filmmakers don't seem have twigged that this formulaic "ticking clock" plot-device demonstrates that the aliens already understand the human method for describing and measuring time and therefore our numbers, our maths, and ultimately our language. Considering this was introduced in maybe the first 15-minutes, it irritated me for most of the movie. That's not even factoring in that if the aliens experience time in a non-linear way, understanding our clock would be the most baffling part of communicating with us... and not the first thing they'd learn.

Also, it becomes clear that our human written language is infinitely less complex than the aliens language. So why the hell do the aliens never make even the slightest effort to use our language. Clearly verbal communication would be difficult, if not impossible but they have a highly developed written language. Couldn't they have just easily learned and written our alphabet, or our numbers with that squid ink stuff? Drawn a human face? Just reproduced what was on the white boards? Come on, meet Amy Adams half-way guys.

This all leads me to the conclusion that the aliens were obstinate a**holes who were capable of understanding us but choose to be difficult. Such miscommunication leading to one of them dying in an explosion... good.

Wasn't that the whole point though.

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The alien language, and the mastery of it was what allowed her to understand the uniform nature of time. It was in learning their language, learning to think like them, that allowed her to shift backwards and forwards.

Anyway...

I thought the movie was a little to busy. It has some usual sci-fi dressing, but tries to have its themes of communication and disconeect intertwined with basically a family drama. One of those things is bound to hurt the other, and it does. The same as in Interstellar, the human element feels weaker, and the movie is more interested in the technical aspects -here, exploring the nature of communication. The film is emotionally distant, which comes across from the score, and the visual blandness. I kept wondering at the beginning why everyone was out of focus except Amy Adams. The way it informs the movies themes is really offset by how alienating it was.

What I was most surprised by was

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how similar this was from a plot perspective to slaughterhouse 5. The aliens explaining to billy pilgrim that time is relative, and him coming unstuck in time. Although in that book, it is just a metaphor, knowing that really made the movie suffer in comparison.

 

[ssj]

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

watched this one with several cheeldren who love the Harry Potter books but thought the HP movies merely OK. and we all found Fantastic Beasts to be tedious.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

I saw Fantastic Beasts this afternoon, and I liked it. As an ecologist, I got the warm fuzzies inside when Newt argued for the protection and study of the creatures. Many of the beasts reminded me of:

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When God gets drunk and starts making new animals

Quite different than the HP movies, but I thought it proved that there was much more that they could do with the universe. We'll see where they go from here.

 

[DominicCobb]

Saw it last week and while I liked it I'm sort of in the tedious camp. Wish they spent more time with the central characters and beasts than with the largely unrelated sequel-building world around them.

 

[ssj]

the beasts were more interesting than the humans, fer shur.

the messy, soulless CGI pyrotechnics at the end (this ain't a spoiler; it's blockbuster ritual) reminded me of the climax in ang lee's the hulk.

 

[emphatic]

Too much Ace Ventura antics.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

Too much Ace Ventura antics.

What? What scenes or moments from Fantastic Beasts could you possibly liken to Ace Ventura? Not that Beasts is without fault, but if anything, it was probably too reserved on amusing creature moments compared to serious and outlandish action.  I can't recall a single piece of dialog that I would consider a groan-worthy one-liner or if someone said something completely silly and out of place. I mean, let's compare this to any modern fantasy or sci-fi flick. They're typically riddled with one-liners or over-the-top character moments. In fact, most of the Harry Potter movies had far sillier, and at times, moments that I would consider slapstick.

My only real complaint is:

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..that the film relied a bit too heavily on the Obscurial plot/effect. The result is a fairly simplistic story. I don't fault the filmmakers too much for this though, as I think they needed to keep it relatively simple to open the universe up to more possibilities.

The Harry Potter series worked so wonderfully in the past because it focused on endearing character relationships while set in a wildly fantastic new environment.

Looking back on the HP series, I think the filmmakers did a pretty good job translating a great set of books. The films aren't as great as the books themselves, but as far as book-to-movie translations go, they're pretty darn good.

With Beasts, the Potter story is removed so we basically have to start from scratch, focusing on the world, not necessarily the central character.  I think follow-ups will focus more on the individual characters.  In my opinion, Beasts had to take a similar path that The Force Awakens did: Create a simple story in a universe that we love to set the tone for the stories to expand in subsequent films.

 

[judgmentalpigeon]

Fantastic beasts... I was having some real fun with the screwball comedy in the movie, and watching he main characters interact. The beasts were a novel addition, and brought something new to a world with 8 movies already. But of course the depressing and comparitively boring Salem plot line takes over as the main story, with a very unimaginative ending and a ridiculous reveal. I guess it was alright, but i would have been more than happy just to hang around the world, and the beasts, rather than delving back into another dark wizard story.

 

[Gaith]

The hell is this - Assassin's Creed fails to inspire a Doctor Kermode rant?! And he actually kind of likes it (though he barely mentions, in a 6+ minute "review", if the actual movie is any good), and thinks he'll see it again? What is the world coming to?!

At least Stuckmann gave it a proper shredding...

 

[revel911]

I just want to know is Assassin's Creed fixable bad or hopeless bad?