Last movie watched...

[Ghost MacRoth]

Exactly, it's subjective.  And my opinion of John Carter is......

Well, we already know that one eh?  But pointing out one example to cite against another is far from incoherent, it's simply underlining an opinion.

[Jim_Campbell]

No, it's not. You understand neither logic nor basic argument. I'm unconvinced by your grasp of English, too. Welcome to the Internet. You'll do well here.

Bah.

Jim

[Ghost MacRoth]

LMAO!

So let's recap,  I don't like a film, and you do.  I say it's 'Pish' you say I can't make an 'absolute judgement' without then becoming incoherent.  This is of course AFTER you have made an absolute judgement (if we are to use your definition of my opinion as a model) on my opinion, in that it is 'incoherent toss'. 

You can't see how an example of two things I hold an opinion of are an example of how some folk like what others don't as anything but a further attack on your opinions (which as stated, I was unaware of regarding those particular examples, and could care less about!) and get all huffy, and pull out the 'I'm dead smart and you am dumb' card.  And I'M the one who doesn't understand communication??  Ha ha!! Well sir, I applaud your 'victory' in this thread, but just remember one thing.....



Fuck you very much for your input.

[Professor Bear]

I thought John Carter was alright, but don't understand why it was so expensive.

A Town Called Panic - after being mentioned a page or two back in the thread, thought I'd check it out and was glad I did.  Very, very funny, and unusual in how lacking it is in mean-spirited jokes, with even two characters' nicking someone's tractor to take it on a joyride played as their being harmless jokers rather than hateful arseholes.

The Last Stand - is far too long and criminally lacking in focus.  The main plot McGuffin is a dude driving an experimental one-of-a-kind supercar that is essentially a rocket from one point to another, yet it feels like it takes forever for him to get where he's going, and when he gets there there's another car that's just as fast just parked by the side of the road.  It also has those mondo title credits that are all the rage at the minute but serve no thematic purpose so people just say they're "70s inspired" or something because the colour scheme on some of the pics looks a bit like the Dirty Harry poster.
It's not that Arnie himself has slowed down and this affects the rest of the film as he's played a lumbering hunk more than once in the past in some great movies like the first Conan (where he was hardly jumping about like a spring chicken), the script is just plain flabby - I have nothing against Johnny Knoxville, but he is completely superfluous here, as is anything to do with the FBI characters, the romance between a deputy and her old flame, Arnie's backstory, the waitress who gets a lot of screen time yet whose character goes nowhere, and so on - and the direction is pedestrian and lacking in any flair or inventiveness that might disguise that we're back in "shake the fuck out of the camera until you can't tell what is actually happening" territory, but I suppose that's just karma for all those years action movie fans like me were bitching about directors like Deran Serafian directing action scenes by pointing the camera and turning it on.

[M.I.K.]

I liked John Carter as well. It had a six-legged dog thing and giant yeti-molerats in it.

[JOE SOAP]

I thought John Carter was alright, but don't understand why it was so expensive.

I think this statement from Andrew Stanton encapsulates the problem:

That's all we do at Pixar. The truth is, we rip down and put up our movies a minimum of four times over four years. How I learned to make a movie by shooting it four times. That's how me make them.

People wonder what the magic elixir of Pixar is. It's this: we shoot the movie four times!


Personally I think the intrinsic problem with John Carter - as a film - lies in its total imbalance between story-telling and drama i.e. it favours the technical aspects of relating a complex story over any drama, making it a far duller affair than it should be. Similar to Lynch's DUNE, the film has about 3 prologues and it really only starts when he gets to Mars, but shouldn't the audience really only get to see Mars when Carter gets there, so we discover it with him? Cart(er) before the horse, so to speak. The exposition is the priority and it comes before the drama. This story-telling philosophy is throughout the film and even though the spectacle carried them through, I think most audiences just zoned out.

Whether getting the balance right would've improved the financial success of the film I don't know since there are many reasons why it could fail but its length and lack of interest in how to engage the audience in what the film is supposed to be about didn't help.

I know, it's a huge a presumption for a nobody to say PIXAR can't tell stories, but I think they got everything arse-about-face with this one because they tried to transpose their working methods in animation over to film and got bogged down by the expense and time-pressure of live-action film-making. They tripped over themselves because with less time and the expense of live-action they couldn't keep remaking/refining the film the way they're used to with a bunch of animators and animatics.

Referring to his statement above: the thing Stanton doesn't seem to grasp is that film-makers do make films 4/5 times: first it's written/re-written, then storyboarded/pre-vized, then directed and shot, and finally edited. Over the course of that process (which can involve re-writes during each step) it should be refined until it works the best it can. It seems Stanton's philosophy is that you shoot a first draft, see what's not working, then go back and shoot it again and again until it's right. No wonder John Carter cost $300 million.

[Professor Bear]

I am not saying it wasn't an expensive film, nor that there weren't expensive reshoots - I'm just saying that I can't shake the belief that a lot of that money went up someone's nose.

[JOE SOAP]

I can't shake the belief that a lot of that money went up someone's nose.

That's a lot of powder for one man.

[Hawkmumbler]

That's a lot of powder for one man.

Orgy Porgey Filtch and Fun.

I watched the decompressed version of the ITV 1979 series Quatermass. Not what I was expecting and a damn creepy, unnerving creature it was. Very well made considering its probable low budget and rather scary to boot. Terror is what you cant see, rather than what you can.

[Theblazeuk]

I watched all of The Fades. Daniel Kaluuya stands out of a great cast as the lead's best friend, shame this didn't get renewed. Was refreshingly horrific and visceral, despite a plotline that seems - on paper - to be sub-supernatural teen drama. And then the school gets turned into an abbatoir for human meat, you find out the dead are rapidly filling up the world due to there being no exit for lost souls, and it gets very very dark indeed.

Shame they kill the girlfriend though, and frankly the lead character Paul is a complete muppet. At least 20 people die directly due to his indecision.

Now I've got the ms on to misfits which she is loving.

[Charlie boy]

The Mist. Always enjoyable and my favourite out of Darabont's trilogy of sorts (it is only Shawshank, Green Mile and this he's done King-wise, isn't it?). Still to see the black and white version my brother has on his DVD. The end is always a shocker but my favourite part will always be watching it with my friend who has a nut allergy (and can see the humour in her allergy) because I'll never tire of turning to her [spoiler]during the scene where a bug stings a girl in the neck and her face and neck go all swollen and excitedly shouting "I bet that's what you look like when you accidentally eat a peanut!"[/spoiler]

[Dark Jimbo]

The Creeping Flesh, after a recommendation here a few weeks ago by Professor Bear. Good call, Prof!  Peter Cushing is a driven Victorian scientist who returns from foreign climes having dug up an eight-foot tall sub-human skeleton which he believes may hold the key to mankind's salvation. Christopher Lee is his sketchy younger brother, who runs the local sanitorium wherein Cushing's debauched wife is confined. Worried that his daughter will sooner or later inherit her mother's madness, Cushing decides to use the discoveries the skeleton has been unlocking to safegaurd his beloved daughter against evil forever. Needless to say, it goes horribly wrong for all concerned...

The film drags a wee bit in the middle, and the depictions of Mrs Cushing's supposedly 'lunatic' behaviour are hilariously quaint, but otherwise it's hard to find anything to fault with this film. The cast is a great one and give it their all; Cushing and Lee are both superb leads (always a given with Cushing, not always the case with Lee) who totally buy into their respective roles as earnest workaholic and stentorian arsehole. A great period atmosphere is conjured up and I finally understand what Oddbod and that stuff with his regenerating finger were all about in Carry On Screaming! All that, and Michael Ripper's in it, too! Instantly a favourite in the 'Brit Horror' canon.

To continue a theme, I also watched Hammer's The Mummy for the first time. Like much of the studio's early output they haven't yet locked down that unique Hammer 'feel' and it's more like watching a reserved '50s melodrama at times, but enough of the key components are in place for you to feel at home. Everyone knows the story by now - it's the same as the Boris Karloff film right through to (if you must) the more recent Brendan Fraser effort. Suffice to say that Cushing anchors the film with his always reliable performace, and Lee really plays a blinder as the titular Mummy - given that he's mostly acting with his eyes and has next-to-no dialogue, he does an admirable job of conveying the creature's helpless rage at his undead predicament. Michael Ripper gets a more substansial part than in Creeping Flesh as a google-eyed poacher (hooray!) and all the cast, in fact, are on good form - biggest surprise for me was that Cushing's wife is by no means the shrieking, swooning waif that one might expect from such an era, but a genuinely plucky sort.

Negatives? Well, it can look a bit cheap and set-bound (though classy for all that), and even though it's barely an hour and a half certain stretches can drag - the flashback scenes to Ancient Egypt in particular really slow the film down without adding a great deal. I very much enjoyed it but can't see myself in a hurry to rewatch it in the way that I do a lot of Hammer's later output.

[JamesC]

I wish people wouldn't use that 'Special Olympics' thing - it's horrible.

My last film was Paul about 2 sci-fi geeks who meet an alien. It's a fun film and generally quite good natured which is why the heavy handed digs at religion feel a bit out of place. I'm not religious myself so they didn't offend me - just seemed a bit unnecessary.
I was glad to watch it again though - it was actually funnier than I'd remembered it after seeing it at the cinema.

[TordelBack]

I wish people wouldn't use that 'Special Olympics' thing - it's horrible.

Agreed.  If Roger got banned for a Goatse*, and the Underware [sic] thread went the way of Benny Hill, then using that image and/or 'joke' has to be worth a very stern warning.  I know which I find more offensive.  Does Rebellion really want to be associated with that type of humour?



*I'm not arguing the toss.

[Richmond Clements]

I wish people wouldn't use that 'Special Olympics' thing - it's horrible.

Agreed.  If Roger got banned for a Goatse*, and the Underware [sic] thread went the way of Benny Hill, then using that image and/or 'joke' has to be worth a very stern warning.  I know which I find more offensive.  Does Rebellion really want to be associated with that type of humour?



*I'm not arguing the toss.

Agreed here too. And removed.
And while it is true I have god like powers, I cannot see everything, so feel free to message me or report anything you think is out of line.