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

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Hawkmumbler


Professor Bear

#1021
In my Bond marathon I've reached Licence To Kill, the gritty and more realistic Bond movie in which Bond does wheelies in an oil rig, hijacks planes in mid-air using a helicopter, fights ninjas, and narrowly avoids being shot in the face by a laser hidden in a camera.
Like a lot of the 1980s Bonds, the action sequences in this have become retroactively more impressive because of the lack of CGI and occasionally journeyman direction that lets it sink in just how epic some of what goes on actually is, like the ludicrously large explosions at the end that you realise someone actually made happen in real life rather than on a computer in post production.
I sort of see why people didn't take to Dalton's version of the character as he plays it quite cold, though this is deliberate, I think, and it otherwise can't all be laid at his door as there was clearly a paradigm shift in the way the films were made that happened when he took over the lead.  There's the odd moment when he really nails it for me, like the end of LTK when Bond has killed the baddie and he just slumps, and it becomes clear from Dalton's expression that the character takes no pleasure in it and you remember earlier in the film when there's a reference to his late wife and how he never found any fulfillment when he killed Blofeld for her murder in Diamonds Are Forever and For Your Eyes Only, and in fact he actually dissuades someone from setting out on revenge in the latter - Dalton plays it at the final hurdle as a man who already knows revenge is hollow and has simply done what needed to be done according to his own brutal and practical view of the world, but it's a brief and passing moment before the facade goes back up when he's rejoined by his latest bedwarmer.  There are other little touches, especially the constant re-use of "Universal Exports" to reinforce that this is a man playing a carefully-crafted and maintained character at all times just so he can better go about his business of killing people and the James Bond characters meet is a bluff on them but also a bluff on the audience, as the whole premise of Licence To Kill is that Bond goes rogue seeking revenge when he's more likely just seeing an end to the job he started.
But it's also a damn good mid-80s actioner in its own right.

Spikes

At the piccies, watched and enjoyed Rise of the planet of the apes ....... and last night on dvd, Dawn of the Dead '78 (again)

willthemightyW

Conan the barbarian. I've tried slamming my head on the key board until something interesting to be said about this movie would come out. It didnt work. I then tried slamming my head on my desk hoping to forget the last 112 minutes of my life (although it's more like 140 now, I've literally just come back from the cinema). It didnt work.
However, a couple of days before this I had the pleasure of seeing rise OF THE planet OF THE apes.
I thought that was great, especially [spoiler] The little snippets we saw on various tv screens about a mission to the dark side of mars in a ship called icarus (the ship from the original) had gotten lost, and a cleverly edited clip of Charlton Heston in a space station or something, obviously just edited stock footage of him. These were blink and miss 'em moments though.[/spoiler]
They say you need to spend money to make money, well I've never made any money so by that logic I've never spent any.

Keef Monkey

Just watched Going To Pieces - The Rise And Fall of The Slasher Movie, wasn't a brilliant documentary and most of the insights and anecdotes will be pretty familiar if you're already a big fan of horror, but was pretty good fun as a bit of a nostalgia trip through stabby movies.

I, Cosh

#1025
Wolfhound, a pretty entertaining Russian fantasy effort which could make for a half decent entry in the 100 movies starting with W blog. Nothing much unexpected happens (young boy sees his whole village massacred, is sold into slavery, grows up to be hard as nails with a burning sense of what's right and comes looking for the bastards responsible) but it's done with fair amount of verve and ingenuity and the central relationship between our man and the inevitable princess works well enough to offset some ropy CGI backgrounds.

Probably better than the new Conan and, at two quid from Fopp, I was able to justify buying a copy on the grounds that it was cheaper than renting it.

Oh, and he has a pet bat, but it's not really like Beastmaster or anything.

During the week  I caught Last Year at Marienbad, a film so willfully open to interpretation that interpretation should be wary of going off with something so desperate. Nothing is properly explained, multiple potential histories emerge. Visually it alternates between long shots of elegant hallways receding away into the distance, mirrored salons and uncomfortable tableaux vivants. Scenes are repeated from different perspectives; present and possible pasts are deliberately confused; one incident is described in voiceover while another unfolds on screen only for the first to be played out later; narration obscures what characters are saying and there are frequent scenes where it seems that not all the characters are aware of each others presence.
After putting all that down, it sounds great to me. Sadly, the cumulative effect was one of overwhelming tedium.
We never really die.

Hawkmumbler

Captain America: The first Avenger
It's not as funny as the 99 movie, but it's probably one of the best marvel movies I have ever seen [spoiler](That can easily be achieved by not having the Director of Evil Dead introduce a dance scene with an emo Peter parker)[/spoiler].

Professor Bear

Cowboys and Aliens, which is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, it just sort of exists.  If it had jammed in a bunch of cliches about cowboys and/or aliens in a Silverado fashion, it might have been a great romp, but as it is it comes off as a competently made SyFy movie from back when SyFy weren't just making shit like Piranhaconda and pretending it was supposed to be bad.  That probably sounds harsh but it's not meant to be - as I say, it's neither bad nor good and you'd have to be a particularly grumpy and/or snobby sod to begrudge it for moseying on into the cinema and keeping you occupied for an hour and a bit.  One thing it gets right in my book is not showing the cowboys having steampunk technology, which has worn out its welcome for me, but again this feeds back into the whole thing being unexceptional in any particular area of production.

SmallBlueThing

MONSTERWOLF

Another three quid movie from tesco and the syfy channel. Nasty oil people headed by star trek's hologram doctor reawaken a vengeful native american spirit: a massive wolluff that then kills everyone connected to the company, manifesting as either vaguely competent cgi or a comedy puppethead with snaggle teeth. Mixed-parentage lawyer girl, recently returned to louisiana to work for the oil people has to work out where her allegiances lie, before the woolluff kills everyone she loves.

Again, a likeable cast, a not too shit script and a couple of directorial decisions- including a blatantly budget saving animated segment- render it nowhere near as bad as you'd expect.

Connossieurs of not-very-special effects will enjoy the woolluff. I did.

SBT
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I, Cosh

Saw The Inbetweeners Movie this afternoon and found it to be very entertaining. Maybe two episodes worth of jokes across three episodes running time, which is pretty good going when they have to sustain the plot for feature length.

Yesterday afternoon, I didn't switch over while Charlies Angels: Full Throttle was on. I find these films silly and fun. They take the right approach to unconvincing CGI in action movies, playing up the absurdity of it rather than trying to fake realism. NB I don't really have anything against CGI in action movies, it's the "unconvincing" part I'm opposed to.

Also, the Angels look nice in outfits.

Something I forgot to mention about Wolfhound. He is so hard, he always takes a minute to tie his hair back before getting stuck into the battle, safe in the knowledge that nobody will try to fuck him up until he looks his best.
We never really die.

Definitely Not Mister Pops

Your battle with the guards was magnificent. Your skill is extra-ordinary
You may quote me on that.

Bhuna

Watched 'Watchmen' yesterday. Now there's three and a half hours of my life I'll never get back  :(
twitter.com/Bhuna1967
twitter.com/pigdogpress

Tiplodocus

Quote
Licence To Kill - I'm a huge fan of this. I like the way it applies epic Bond film values to what is essentially a television show problem.

I would have loved to have seen more of Dalton. It's often little bits of mime that show the bext bits of Bond (even Brosnan mananges a couple of nice silent tics in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies)

Strangely, it's not the ludicrous action that jars with the "gritty and realistic" bit of this for me, it's the use of women. They are written as if they belong in an entirely different movie altogether and I just cringe with embarassment especially in the coda.  Lupe, in particular, has the least going on inside her head of *any* female character ina Bond movie. No, really. 

And as mentioned, they do drop the ball on a couple of the action sequences (the shark and the warehouse could be much better) but the helicopter fishing for plane, the barefoot waterskiing escape and the completely OTT oil tankers exploding at the end more than make up for it.

The villains, despite the fact you could accuse them of being Miami Vice knock offs, are very funny - Robert Davi has some great lines.  And my hasn't Bencio Del Toro eaten some pies since making this movie.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Professor Bear

I'd argue Rosie Carver, Kissy Suzuki or Mary Goodnight were the most anemic Bond girls for various reasons, but Lupe is supposed to be pretty vacuous as she serves little purpose in the story beyond ultimately being second choice to Bouvier - who admittedly isn't particularly interesting either - and on that level she's functional as a plot device.  Though fair point as a character not so much.
It's only now I've hit the Brosnan era that I find the women to be suspiciously easy faced with Bond's charms, though at this stage the films were a little more involved in their characters so perhaps it's just that "Bond shags X girl because he is Bond" isn't a convincing argument anymore, but we get that rationale with pretty much every Bond conquest from thence onward up until Casino Royale showed him putting in a bit more effort to get his oats.

Tiplodocus

Oh I'd forgotten about Mary Goodnight. Point conceded. 

Anyway, one welcome change that came with Brosnan was the rejuvination of the opening titles.  Whether you like the songs or not is an entirely other debate but the Maurice Binder stuff had descended into a pale rip off of himself. 

But with Goldeneye and Die Another Day we get brilliant little pieces of storytelling nehind the titles.  Goldeneye in particular shows the Soviet Union coming crashing down by having scantilly clad models take chunks out of statues of Stalin and Lennin while weilding the tools of soviet industry. Just a pity about Tina Turner.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!