Abt_Nihil [..] wrote:
I should add that I think the Milius/Schwarzenegger Conan wasn't Robert E. Howard's Conan as well, but at least the movie was good on its own.

Yeah it was a real pastiche with a LOT of liberties, but they got the "feel" right even if all the details were wrong, and that's prolly the most important part.
 
I think I may have to see the new version now, not to see how bad it is, but just to see if they get the "feel" of the character/story close to Howard's originals. Might be an interesting experiment from that point of view

Love and other Drugs. It was about love... and other drugs.

Maciste in Hell (1926) it was even better than I remembered.  Excellent effects for 1926 and a flying dragon that looked better than the one in Neverending Story sixty years later.  At 95 minutes this is the edited for the USA version even though the bikini wearing female demons are in full view.  Imagine belly buttons in a movie before 1960! There is a two hour version but that is presumed lost.
 
 

X Men Origins, or is it Wolverine Origin? I dunno...
 
Anyway, this one was a lot more solid and better filmed than the first one, better story too. And very good acting from everyone, apart from the Sabretooth guy.
 
Criticisms -
 
- Too much silly wire-foo.
 
- Too many repeats of the same helicopter shots of the same sorts of "pick-up truck" going over the same sorts of country road. I think that was in at least 3 different scenes.
 
- Too many... I dunno how to describe it, but basically when it would be logical for a character to kill another character because that is where their story motivation took them, they ALWAYS changed their minds at the last second. WTF?
e.g. Wolverine vows to kill Sabretooth several times and yet whenever he gets the chance he never does.
He doesn't even kill the evil Colonel any of the chances he gets and nor does his "girlfriend"... And so on.
 
So that part of the writing seemed very awkward. It makes you question whether the Logan character is actually sincere about anything. It makes him seem much weaker than he should be, since he doesn't spare these people for the sake of mercy, it's just because "something else" comes up.
 
And that's all. As I say, it was pretty solid all up.

ozoneocean [..] wrote:

Abt_Nihil [..] wrote:
I should add that I think the Milius/Schwarzenegger Conan wasn't Robert E. Howard's Conan as well, but at least the movie was good on its own.
 Yeah it was a real pastiche with a LOT of liberties, but they got the "feel" right even if all the details were wrong, and that's prolly the most important part.
 
I think I may have to see the new version now, not to see how bad it is, but just to see if they get the "feel" of the character/story close to Howard's originals. Might be an interesting experiment from that point of view 

I think the problem with the new version isn't so much that it doesn't have a REH feel, but that it doesn't have any feel...

I haven't watched any movies lately, but I've been re-watching Dexter.
 
I'm not sure how it's possible but I hate Lila more every time I watch season 2. I guess that's good writing?

aah - Dexter!  I love that show, but since season 3 (I think - maybe 4?) it's either subscribe to Showtime (nix for me) or buy DVDs (nix two).  *shakes fist at Showtime*
 
---
 
Watched X Men First class and really liked it, altho I'm still puzzling out the casting choice of Kevin Bacon.  He wasn't bad -- just didn't seem as spot on as the two leads

I saw two movies I was quite surprised by.
Last night I watched the Smurf movie.
Despite a few glaring flaws (mostly towards the end) and Neil Patrick Harris having the same facial expression throughout (Seriously, it was a mix between sad, warm and worried. He didn't need to change it!) it really wasn't as bad as I expected. I wouldn'tve paid money for it (And didn't) but it was still mildly good as a watcher of the show as a child.
The night before I watched Kung Fu Panda 2.
I thought the first movie was a solid "meh". So I figured the series could only go down in quality. But I'd definitely say that it's a visual spectacle and even though it rips a little bit of shots from the Lion King it is still a very engaging and solid animated film for fans of the medium. The story adds a lot to what was there before and I actually shed a tear at one point. It's part of a growing collection of evidence that (in my opinion) proves Dreamworks is getting it's act together and producing quality along with it's quantity. They're sure past the Bee Movie and Shrek 3 part of their history.

Elizabeth: the Virgin Queen  A magnificent cast of Cate Blanchett, David Eccleston, Geoffrey Rush et al but distorted history and absolutely awful direction.  Stop moving the camera so much I'm getting vertigo and stop hitting me over the head with the blatant to the point of worthlessness color symbolism.
 
Then there's the fact that I have read a half dozen works about this part of Elizabeth's reign including novelizations inspired by this movie that hewed to the history and were far superior.  Why make Cecil avuncular and Walsingham slimey when both were really slimey.  Cecil was complex being both a kindly second father to Elizabeth and a slimeball.  (she called him spirit because he was her conscience) It was Cecil who met Marie de Guise and probably had her poisoned.  Elizabeth didn't shave her hair and put on tons of make-up until she was far older because she was very vain and suffering from thinning hair.  She loved her long thin fingers (even though a habitual nail biter) and long copper colored hair.  And Dudley's simpering waif-like wife was far from a court secret. 
But I loved Anjou.  He really was like that too.  lol!

Gosford Park
 
Not a big Robert Altman fan, altho I did like The Player and this one.  As usual with Altman, an amazing cast, and a tight constancy of mood and character - and this one had a logical storyline.  
 
But I need to watch it again to figure out how the characters were related to each other.  Some movies should come with cliff notes.

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
X Men Origins, or is it Wolverine Origin? I dunno...
 
Anyway, this one was a lot more solid and better filmed than the first one, better story too. And very good acting from everyone, apart from the Sabretooth guy.
 
Criticisms -
 
- Too much silly wire-foo.
 
- Too many repeats of the same helicopter shots of the same sorts of "pick-up truck" going over the same sorts of country road. I think that was in at least 3 different scenes.
 
- Too many... I dunno how to describe it, but basically when it would be logical for a character to kill another character because that is where their story motivation took them, they ALWAYS changed their minds at the last second. WTF?
e.g. Wolverine vows to kill Sabretooth several times and yet whenever he gets the chance he never does.
He doesn't even kill the evil Colonel any of the chances he gets and nor does his "girlfriend"... And so on.
 
So that part of the writing seemed very awkward. It makes you question whether the Logan character is actually sincere about anything. It makes him seem much weaker than he should be, since he doesn't spare these people for the sake of mercy, it's just because "something else" comes up.
 
And that's all. As I say, it was pretty solid all up.

1. It's Wolverine Origins, I think.  It wasn't about the Xmen.
2. WO was terrible.  I'm not speaking from the POV of a Marvel fan -- I'm not.  I'm speaking from the POV of a writer and movie watcher.  The first Xmen was a much better movie.
3. And yes, Sabertooth was terrible in this movie.  And the script is a complete hack: Sabertooth is not related to Logan, even I know that.  Not every villain needs to be the main character's brother/father/friend/former colleague.  I'm seeing that way too much in the Marvel movies.
4. And yes, if one superhero movie could do with zero wire fu, it'd be a movie about Wolverine.
5. Even though the movie completely butchered the comic book canon, and has no relationship to its supposed X-men "sequels"... it still could not break from comic book mantra and KILL OFF CHARACTERS.  Why didn't Sabertooth die?  It's not as if he's the Xmen movie Sabertooth.  Why didn't Deadpool die?  As if they can do anything in the future with the dead-end they wrote this Deadpool into?  The movie has no redeeming value for me.

 And yes, Sabertooth was terrible in this movie.  And the script is a complete hack: Sabertooth is not related to Logan, even I know that.  Not every villain needs to be the main character's brother/father/friend/former colleague.  I'm seeing that way too much in the Marvel movies. 

I thoight Liev schrieber  was excellent as sabretooth.  well excellent as you could expect from such a weak script anyway.  okay excellent is not the right word but the wrestler from the first x-men was terrible as sabretooth, LS at least did well with the material he had.

mlai [..] wrote:

Not every villain needs to be the main character's brother/father/friend/former colleague.  I'm seeing that way too much in the Marvel movies.

 

That's the thing that bugged me most about the Spiderman movies.  It seems like everyone in Parker's small circle of acquaintences turns out to be a villain.  Was Aunt May next?

  

 

Batman: Year One, I thought it was pretty good. A bit short though.

Dead Snow -  zombies.. nazis...zombie nazis and snowmobiles. Would recommend.
   
Paranormal Activity 3 - They are getting gradually less scary/more OTT and literally none of the cool stuff from the trailer is actually in the film! Still can't complain, I love anything with ghoulies in. 
 
 

they should reboot the ghoulies films...

A trio of Val Lewton horror flicks on TCM on Halloween week.  The Isle of the Dead and Bedlam with Boris Karloff and The Seventh Victim. 
 
Isle of the Dead is a classic set during the Greek war in 1912, Bedlam was a great slice of 18th Century England and the Seventh Victim was a very layered story that ended up being a little confusing because of the Hayes Code as it dealt with suicide?
 
All well written with moody direction as expected from a Val Lewton film.

Die Another Day

Heavy Metal 2 (FAAK2)
 
This was NOWHERE near as bad as people said it was. It was actually pretty decent. Michael Ironside was brilliant as Tyler, he's got a fantastic voice and he voice-acted the part really well. Julie Strain was perfectly ok as Julie, her voice acting was fine, Billy Idol was ok as the priest- a real actor would have done better but he was convincing enough in his part. The story was ok, it fit together well, the dialogue wasn't too bad either.
The animation was simplified, but it worked really well, the characters looked great!
 
Bad points:
- The CGI 3D elements were crappy. Just low quality, simplistic stuff, even by 2000 standards, definitely not movie quality. They didn't intrude much but they were used everywhere right at the end and that was tacky- they probably ran out of money and it was the cheaper option.
- The music generally sucked, especially considering the quality of the stuff in the first film. They went from first rate metal in the original to 4th rate grind-core shit in this one. SOME of it was ok, since the heavy bass added to the atmospherics of scenes, but generally all it did was obscure the dialogue. The only decent track was Idol's theme song in the end and that was just average.
 
- Now this is tricky... But the game that was based off the film was so much more than the film was. I don't know if I can blame the film for not being up to the standard of the game but I think I should.
In the game the character designs were WAY out there compared to the film. They had some really creative stuff happening and a lot of the dialogue and character interactions were trippy and cool, plus the bad guys were WAY more intimidating and scary looking in the game, even their voices and sound effects were eerie. All the environments and worlds were also better realised in the game... In fact they'd have had a better film if they just used the game engine and assets!
 
But it's not really fair to criticise something for not being what you'd prefer it to be. It was what it was, and as a movie it was perfectly fine. I see no grounds for the hyper-negative criticism it received.

"Drawn Together" the movie.
 
I like a cartoon that makes fun of all those silly cartoons we've always seen as well as putting the characters in the sexy situations you've always wanted to see them in :)
 
The movie was a "tie up the loose ends" sort of thing for fans, to address the show's cancellation, which it did in a lovely, fully knowing, breaking the fourth wall sort of way.
 
One of the key things was this theme that the show knowingly went beyond "being offensive, but still making a clever moral point" (because frequently they just "forgot" to have a point), and this became the salient point of the movie. This was deliciously and ludicrously addressed in the form of an evil, dangerous terminator type mecha that hunted the cast relentlessly through the show:
 
It was named "I.S.R.A.E.L.", and frequently the characters would have conversations with it such as "Some people think I.S.R.A.E.L. is part of the problem and things would just be better if I.S.R.A.E.L. didn't exist"
And it would reply "I.S.R.A.E.L. has a perfect right to exist, people who don't like I.S.R.A.E.L. can just move to some place I.S.R.A.E.L. isn't!"
 
...and so on. Basically a completely deliberately, blindingly obvious and simplistic  commentary Middle East debate to parody the idea of doing the "point" thing that shows like South Park try and justify themselves with.
-One of the characters seeming allies (actually really in league with the key villain), was based on South Park,

The way back.
It's about a group of men that excape from a gulag in siberia and walk all the way to india. Very good film but very sedate, not for adrenaline junkies. 

Heh, sounds like "the wayback"
I get visions of that cartoon wayback machine, zapping people back in time for a comedy escapade with some historical event or other :)
 
------
Tenacious D, the Pick of Destiny.
 
I watched this a couple of weeks ago on DVD, but also just watched one of the commentaries all the way through last night.
It's a glorious musical, very funny. The only fault is that it wasn't nearly long enough. With comedians like Jack Black and Kyle Glass they're much funnier when you give them lots of space to run on and fully play out. The format of the film was too tight and punchy for them to properly shine.

The Black Hole.
 
It's a great Scifi film from 1979. I haven't seen it again for years... Anyway, it's still big and atmospheric. I think it stands up well, in spite of the limitations of older movie technology.
 
Where it's let down are in two main areas: lighting and editing.
The way the actors are lit is usually too bright and "universal" for the scenes they're in so there's no natural shadowing to help them fit in, it makes them seem apart from their surroundings. And often certain elements are lit too brightly and vividly so that they clash too much with the rest of the scene- Bright red flaming meteorites for example.
The editing gets way too choppy towards the end so that scenes sometimes don't flow or fit will together. The biggest issue with the editing is that special effects scenes with miniatures and projection often look quite dodgy and a little badly done- when in reality the projection and miniatures were done extremely well (as good as most modern digital effects), but because of very bad editing they don't fit in well with the full scale live action.
 
The end is a little flubby too, with Hans Reinhardt merging with his satanic robot Maximilian and reigning over all the souls of his dead crew in hell- it just fits a little oddly with the SciFi theme.
 
All in all though it's still an impressive film and it would be good to see a re-make of this some time- with hopefully more emphasis on the monster black hole lying in wait out there.

So me and my friends decided to go and see Human Centipede 2 (we actually did that also for the first movie so it's turning into a tradition)

It mananges to do what the first one didn't accomplish... being genuinely scary and gross. The choice of keeping the film in black and white actually made it more grittier and besides the antangonist being creepy and scary in this one, he's not as "villainy" like the Doctor in the first one.
But the film kind of left the feeling that I had lost all faith in humanity, and come to think of it it's sometimes disgusting, but not the gore stuff in it though.

finally saw Saving Private Ryan.  (I wait quite awhile before viewing sometimes when I know there will be impact - still haven't seen Apocalypse Now yet)
 
Very impressed with the beach invasion.  But tho a solid movie, it still shrieks Speilberg. Yeah, Speilberg has some very solid films, but I don't seem him as an auteur, more of a craftsman.  His films seem to be bundled just so, very few unraveled threads, so there's no escaping The Message.  I had an English teacher who once advised that if someone has a message, just send a telegram.

double post -- dun dun DUN
 
But this one is a RAVE:  The Fighter (2010).  Only positives come to mind - pitch perfect casting (including Amy Adams playing against type); great pace; and the DVD includes a "making of" feature that's a must see if only to marvel at what Christian Bale achieved.

Stake land.
It's like a vampire version of the road but not as good.  It's not a bad film but lacks direction.  The overall plot is sort a father son thing, even if they aren't actually father and son, y'know the passing of the torch that sort of thing, but what happens in between doesn't really go anywhere or have much resolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFYLFql-ts4

I saw Zoolander, finally, the other day.
 
So many cameos of fashionable 90s personalities. I can't help thinking that it would've been better if I'd watched it when it came out because a lot of those celebs just aren't as current anymore now and their appearance in the film has the exact opposite of that intended:
 
ie. it's meant to make things look hip and current and funky, as well as be unexpected and funny, but now those cameos just make an otherwise pretty decent film feel really dated and stale. They're like mould all over a piece of bread.
 
Apart from that it was reasonably funny, but Stiller wasn't really firing on all cylinders like in his later films and the same with Will Farrel: they had some real moments of glory, but they're still a little restrained for most of the movie.

Green lantern.
A lot more enjoyable than I expected.  It's not a classic but as an action blockbuster it certainly does the job.

Green Lantern? That's the movie with Ryan Reynolds right?
Why do I hate that guy so much?
 
I saw Harold and Kumar go to White Castle and Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay (Ryan Reynolds was in the first one grr).
I appreciate what those comedies are doing with pointing out stupid racism and getting back at stupid racists in a genuinely funny way, but the crude dick bum shit piss etc humour sort of really turns me off. It's only funny when it's the exception, not the rule.
And all the stuff about marijuana is a little lame... Sure, legalisation is a good idea, but the whole thing is dealt with so childishly, like teenagers sneaking their first drink.
 Hooray for the bottomless party scene though, that was gold!
  
...Yeah, so basically they deal with racism in a funny way, and their style is based on the form of 1980's road trip sex comedies.
 
Anyway, now I know why Kal Pen's (Kumar) in How I met your Mother... Neil Patrick Harris is in Both H&K films.
Ah well, I saw them and they were reasonably funny.