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Started by SmallBlueThing, 04 February, 2011, 12:40:44 PM

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Smith

#12720
Ready Player One I could rant about pop-culture regurgitation,escapism,death of imagination and aso on...but it has Gundam RX-78-2 vs Mechagodzilla.All my arguments are invalid.
Apparently,Lawgiver Mark 2 is seen at one point,but I missed that.

Eamonn Clarke

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix

Fantastic. Looks great, with a story for everyone.
Personal favourite is Mortal Remains.

Funt Solo

Mommy Dead and Dearest, which is a documentary.  Warning: very hard going, but terribly compelling. Tragic, with a sort of desperate hope.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

TordelBack

Outlaw King. Someday I'm going to understand why filmmakers put a tonne of money and thought into authentic costuming and locations, hire good actors and even depict real events with reasonable accuracy,  and then go ahead and populate their stories with pantomime heroes and villains and their fantasy duels. Bit of a waste, but it did look lovely. Florence Pugh steals the show.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Surprisingly enjoyable, and a more than worthy sequel. Convincing performances from the 'adult' actors sell the idea that they are really the same kids we met at the start (one never doubts Jack Black is actually Bethany,  for example) and there's a really good running gag about penises which had my daughter in stitches. Also the Rock effortlessly commanding the entire screen as per usual.

Funt Solo

Quote from: TordelBack on 24 November, 2018, 11:49:06 PM
Outlaw King. Someday I'm going to understand why filmmakers put a tonne of money and thought into authentic costuming and locations, hire good actors and even depict real events with reasonable accuracy,  and then go ahead and populate their stories with pantomime heroes and villains and their fantasy duels. Bit of a waste, but it did look lovely. Florence Pugh steals the show.

I read up on the history of The Bruce so I could see how Outlaw/King matched up (especially after witnessing the hilariously unlikely fantasy duel).  So, apart from that, it is reasonably accurate.  What was most acute was the omission of the Harrying of Buchan , where Robert, prior to being in a position to defeat the English forces, must first cement his position at home by utterly destroying his political opposition.

In a Hero:Villain setup, the movie makers didn't want to muddy the waters by a) giving the villain a nice hair cut or b) mentioning that the hero ordered "a ruthless exercise by fire and sword which even in an age of violence was regarded as unprecedentedly savage". 

It's like the whole Churchill thing, I suppose.  It's difficult to honor your heroes when you know how flawed they are.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Rara Avis

Suspiria: haven't seen the original but really enjoyed this remake. It's quite long but runs at a decent pace and is visually delightful. Didn't find out until after that there is a post credits scene so if you go to see it then you might hang about for that.

broodblik

Ant-man and the Wasp, so this last night. It was a good sequel with some good laughs and action sequences. It is one of those movies you d not need to think to much just watch and enjoy.
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

Tiplodocus

Quote from: TordelBack on 18 June, 2018, 04:29:00 PM
Oddly I thought the opposite for certain parts of the JW2:TFK.  I thought parts of the 'haunted gothic mansion' sequences were way ahead of what I was expecting - the way the camera rotates[spoiler] to follow the Indo Raptor down over Maisie's balcony doors, the jump-scare of its face in reflection of the museum case... and the concept of Maisie herself[/spoiler].  I agree, most of it is pure predictable lowest-common-denominator, most of the return-to-the-island bits being a case in point (although I did like a lot of the volcanic effects, and the Brach vanishing into the smoke), but by the time we got to the deliciously indulgent auction, mass breakout and corridor/rooftop chases I was well into it.

Don't think I would describe myself as well into it but enjoyed it more than I thought I would. As you say, the back to island bits are terrible and obvious (apart from the opening bone retrieval which was suitably horrifying) but once it moves into proper bonkers B-movie in a haunted house populated with comic book villains at an auction the results, though predictable are fun and well delivered.

The four "heroes" are all fucking terrible people but dull as dishwasher too.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Tiplodocus

Quote from: TordelBack on 20 June, 2018, 11:19:07 AM
Quote from: SmallBlueThing(Reborn) on 20 June, 2018, 11:03:24 AM
...and James Corden...

Jesus, why?  Why do they keep putting him in things?  Does he pay them?

Amused by Nephew (about six at the time who was a big Dr. WHO fan) describing the episode with Corden as "Good but why did it have that bloke who is in everything in it?"

Also described Man Of Steel as "Good but that did have an awful lot of explosions".
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Colin YNWA

Boy childs birthday and miserable weather took us to see Ralph Breaks the Internet, as much by chance as anything else, we've not seen the first Weck it Ralph but by George this was a find. Immense fun and genuninely hilarious at times. Okay so the over blown end sequence feels a little cliche in its overblownness but I'll forgive it and it kinda works in context of the film as a whole.

Just another animated treat that almost justifies the effort in raising the small little blighters!

TordelBack

#12730
FB2:The Crimes of Grindelwald.  Funny old title, that.  Starts out as an absolute mess of a film, but it eventually settles down in the second half and manages to be pretty exciting. 

Declaration of interests: long-term Potter fan, enjoyed the first one of these quite a bit.

Visually it is beyond gorgeous: the inter-war cityscapes of London and Paris are densely worked and beautifully lit; the monsters are even more lovely than in the first one - the Chinese dragon alone is a real work of art, and the Kelpie, the Kappa and the Matagot cats are cool too.  Unfortunately the beasts are less of a focus than they were, as we move slowly out into the larger plot: Newt and the way he relates to the creatures remains the best thing about the series.

The only really disappointing visual for me was Hogwarts - again, beautifully constructed and lit to a degree not seen before, but once inside it's depressingly unmagical and small and boring.  The kids in the flashbacks (from the 1910s, I guess) look (and sound) more like the cast of Grange Hill in co-ordinated polyester jumpers than Belle Epoque wizardlings. And this is the other visual disappointment: none of the adult wizards wear robes at all, it's all standard period garb and absurdly well-tailored suits. This I really don't get.   

Casting is terrific, most of the new additions like Zoe Kravitz as Leta and Callum Turner as Theseus are really very good, standouts being Jude Law as a hunky Dumbledore and Joshua Shae as a note-perfect teenage Newt.  But dear lord this where the problems really start: there are FAR TOO MANY OF THEM. 

This film is drowning in characters, endless, endless pointless characters, many with surnames from the Potter series that distract you momentarily as you try to remember things like 'wasn't a Rosier one of the Death Eaters in the Dept of Mysteries?' just long enough to almost miss the name of the next character 'wasn't there a McClaggen in Gryffindor?' and so on... and on... and on.  Some, like Claudia Kim's inexplicable [spoiler]Nagini[/spoiler], are so bewilderingly pointless that you spend most of the movie waiting for them to so or say something relevant - but don't worry, they don't. They're just sort-of there, cluttering up the place.

And of course the worst thing about this overdose is that there are already plenty of characters in Fantastic Beasts, and most of them are pretty interesting, if only they were given five minutes to do something in between all the introductions. For just one example, my personal highlight of the previous film, Alison Sudol's delightful Queenie, previously a warm cheerfully optimistic foil to the others, shows up acting wildly out of character, giving out about an obvious segregation-analogue, mopes around Paris on her own for a bit and then does something completely bizarre: [spoiler]she joins Grindelwald[/spoiler].  The bizarre bit might have been impactful if we had the faintest sense of what was going on with her.

But we don't because now the movie has concocted this unbelievably complex dynastic mystery linking Leta LeStrange to [spoiler]Credence[/spoiler] (remember him?), herself already the centre of a love quadrangle. Leta's another interesting character, but her family history requires the introduction of another half dozen new characters, who are variously sworn to kill/protect each other, across four timeframes.   

We inevitably run out of time to solve that mystery in any meaningful way so we have a solid ten minutes of head-wrecking exposition to bring it to a confusing close, or rather to open another dynastic mystery, this one completely insoluble with the info we have at hand (and even with the info we remember from the Potter books).

And then wedged in around all this we have a very well-done alt-right rally featuring a surprisingly good Depp as the speechifying baddie who really should have been the focus of this dogs dinner of a story all along (his names in the title after all). The climax is pretty ace, to be fair, but there's a level of power on display that makes the maguffin of FB1 seem very puny by comparison. 

Holy crap, this review is already too long and complex, and I've barely been skimming over the surface of this thing!  Did I mention that there are what appear to be teams of aurors from 3 separate national ministries running about? The cool French Ministry archivist? Nicholas Flammel? The circus? The aerial chase through New York? A weird lizard thing? Some MaCUSA (they've stopped calling it that, BTW) guy who turns traitor for no obvious reason?  TOO MUCH.

I can see how this thing would work in a book, a series of largely unconnected wandering subplots and ever-expanding cast of characters and call-backs, that even if they don't resolve eventually arrive in the same place, but as a movie... sheesh! 

I confess I did enjoy it, mainly because I like Newt himself and his creatures tremendously, Law and Depp make for convincing frenemies, and the final act is fairly engaging stuff.  But it so badly needed an editor.


Jim_Campbell

Fantastic Beasts II: I agree entirely agree about all of this. There was an assumption that I'd remember a metric fucktonne of stuff from the first movie that rendered at least the first thirty minutes incomprehensible to me. Yes, it kind of settles down into something watchable in the last hour and I didn't hate it, but I thought it was very much the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest of this series.
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

Professor Bear

I only pretend to be leftwing so I have an excuse to avoid anything with JK Rowling's name on it.  There's no going back from Back To The Future: Part II The Cursed Child.

Atomic Blonde - a decent action movie, but a bog-standard espionage thriller, full of anachronisms and obvious cuts in long-take action scenes, though the action is nice and brutal.  The setting is an interesting choice, but entirely superfluous, as in practice the depiction of "1989 Berlin" seemed to be indistinguishable from the unnamed "Eastern European nation" I recently watched in John McTiernan's Rollerball remake - just some blokes with tight haircuts milling about in long coats looking menacing now and then.  There's also this really weird neon aesthetic in a lot of scenes that make them look like something from one of those CW superhero shows, only shot on film so it looks 10-15% less garish and cheap so I half-expected the ARROW opening credits to start whenever someone with a stubbly chin looked grumpily offscreen.  Continuing the theme, it also lifts the weird set design from tv shows where every room is fucking massive to the point there's a scene with Theron and Boutella in a nightclub toilet cubicle that is legit bigger than my living room.
I also appreciate that the writers/director couldn't decide if they wanted to end their movie with the Most Obvious twist ever or The Dumbest and so instead settled for giving us value for money by doing both, one after the other - thanx, lads.  Theron is great, and is clearly why Liam Neeson is retiring from action movies, though Sofia Boutella is wasted, although she does gay up with Theron if you like that kind of thing.  Which I do - again: thanx, lads.

Tiplodocus

Fast and Furious 5 - What can I say? I like superhero movies.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

JOE SOAP

#12734
Quote from: Professor Bear on 03 December, 2018, 01:22:14 AM
There's also this really weird neon aesthetic in a lot of scenes that make them look like something from one of those CW superhero shows, only shot on film so it looks 10-15% less garish and cheap

No-one shoots on film anymore apart from a few outliers and luddites like Nolan, PT anderson, and big studios for the nostalgia porn of the Star Wars saga, and serious, important DCEU films – because WB thought it would make them more like Nolan films and less like Marvel.

That's partly why a lot of TV and film can look generally the same.