movies

Put the world to rights here (off-topic discussion)
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gavdann
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Re: movies

Postby gavdann » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:19 pm

Revenge of the Sith is easily the best of the prequels for me.

A little early to decide where Last Jedi fits so..

ANY or ESB
ROTJ
RO
TFA
ROTS
TPM
.
.
.
.
AOTC

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Soze
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Re: movies

Postby Soze » Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:07 pm

Empire
Star Wars
Return
I'm not sure where to put The Last Jedi yet, need to see it again. It's not as much fun as The Force Awakens but I have spent more time thinking about it and I like that it somewhat subverted expectations. So it could sit anywhere amongst the new three...but at the moment I'd probably go TFA, R1, TLJ.

...and then the prequels, the best of which is Revenge, the other 2 are pretty horrible for the most part but Phantom is better than Clones, which is virtually unwatchable.

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Re: movies

Postby Soze » Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:11 pm

...and films of the year list, UK release dates

1. The Death of Stalin
2. Blade Runner 2049
3. mother!
4. The Handmaiden
5. Dunkirk
6. Logan
7. Thor: Ragnarok
8. It
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. Get Out
11. Raw
12. War of the Planet of the Apes
13. Trainspotting 2
14. Guardians of the Galaxy 2
15. Prevenge
15. Spider-man:Homecoming
17. Paddington 2
18. Wonder Woman
19. Baby Driver
20. Lucky Logan

Couple I haven't seen, notably The Disaster Artist and The Philadelphia Project.

Worst movies were The Mummy, The Dark Tower and Ghost in the Shell. I found Moonlight really dull as well but intend to give it another go.

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Re: movies

Postby Gandalf the Red » Wed Jan 03, 2018 6:16 pm

Soze wrote:Empire
Star Wars
Return


Correct order and the proper title as well. None of this "A New Hope" nonsense that appeared years later.

From IMDB

When the film was originally released in 1977, it was simply referred to as "Star Wars"; though supposedly, George Lucas had intended to include "Episode IV" and "A New Hope" in the opening crawl, but Twentieth Century Fox did not want Lucas to do so because they thought it would confuse audiences, since there were never any other episodes released before it. After the commercial success of the original Star Wars, Lucas was able to continue with the multi-film epic he originally envisioned. The first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, was released in 1980 and bore the full title of "Star Wars, Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back" in the title crawl, although it was referred to only as "The Empire Strikes Back" as the title of its commercial release. It was the "Episode V" appearing in the opening crawl which originally confused those members of the audience who had not been made aware of what Lucas was explaining, that the original Star Wars was now to be understood to be the fourth part of a nine-part series. The original Star Wars was re-released in 1981 with a new title "Star Wars, Episode IV, A New Hope" in the title crawl. This title appeared on all subsequent re-releases and versions from then on (though the original version was released on DVD in 2006, which shows the title crawl in its original form). All subsequent Star Wars films have followed this new naming structure, although "Star Wars" often refers specifically to the 1977 film.
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Re: movies

Postby Thrash Bandicoot » Wed Jan 03, 2018 7:11 pm

I will clarify for my list that I have only seen The Last Jedi the once, will rewatch when it comes out on DVD more than likely.

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Re: movies

Postby Gandalf the Red » Wed Jan 03, 2018 7:23 pm

To be honest I haven't seen the recent ones.

I've seen the prequels and thought they were fine. Not classics, but entirely watchable as long as you don't compare them against the originals. I didn't even dislike Jar Jar Binks as much as I thought I would.
“He likes having the ball, playing football, passes. It’s like an orchestra. But it’s a silent song. But I like heavy metal more. I always want it loud.” - Jürgen Klopp

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Re: movies

Postby Ghost » Wed Jan 03, 2018 11:00 pm

Preferred the last jedi to the force awakens. Probably because the force awakens felt like a remake, last jedi felt quite new. There were some actual moments where things happened that I didn't expect ha ha. Could of done without all the rubbish forced humour though.
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Re: movies

Postby some_thing_wild » Thu Jan 04, 2018 5:04 pm

I've stated before on here that Revenge Of The Sith is the best one.

I stand by that statement
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Re: movies

Postby Ghost » Tue Jan 23, 2018 8:30 pm

About to watch Shin Godzilla.
I see the bad moon arising.

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Re: movies

Postby Ghost » Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:44 am

Watched a dark song. Nice little slow burning horror. The ending kinda ruined it though.
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Re: movies

Postby Darkweasel » Sun Jan 28, 2018 3:57 pm

DUNKIRK

First off, I have to say I am completely neutral about Christopher Nolan. He's made some great films, he's made some decent films, and he's done some shit. I have no agenda against him and I'm not a frothing fanboy who explodes into a rage if anyone dares impugn his all powerful name.

Telling the story of the evacuation of the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, the film uses a non-linear method of storytelling to keep the tension at its highest. Unfortunately, after about an hour it becomes clear that the reason for doing this is because if the film had been filmed in standard, chronological order, the results would have been dull bordering on tedious.

Focusing on a number of characters rather than one or two, the film is castrated by its own fragmented style resulting in a complete lack of depth and the audience being unable to create an emotional connection to any of the more central figures. When you feel the same for Michael Caine's voice on the radio as you do for the more major characters, then something is amiss. There is no sense of danger as Tom Hardy takes to the skies in his Spitfire because he's Tom fucking Hardy, and the trailer managed to conjure up more of a feeling of dread as the German bombers fly over the heads of the English soldiers on the beach than the actual film. Oh, and the appearance of Kim Hartman (Helga from 'Allo 'Allo) at the end was a peculiar casting choice at best.

The acting is good (even One Direction's Harry Styles doesn't embarrass himself), some of the sequences are superbly shot (from the claustrophobic panic of being below decks as a torpedo hits to some of the aerial dog-fights), and Nolan's refusal to overuse CGI has to be applauded. However, as is mentioned in the film, there were around 400,000 troops on the beach waiting to be rescued, but even taking into consideration that those numbers were probably a total over a few days, and likely only half that number were on the beach at one time (and even after comparing it to actual photos) it looks like Nolan only managed to scrape together about 50,000 extras at the most. It's also recorded that were between 700-900 small boats which came to aid the rescue, but again there only looks to be about a total of fifty, all of which leaves a supposedly big budget film looking more like a BBC dramatisation in places.

Cowardice seems to be the main motivational force for many of the characters. Nobody wanted to see a jingoistic USA! USA! type spectacle, but only Mark Rylance's character shows any true heroism. Also, a couple of aeroplanes aside, the lack of having an actual enemy present on the screen is baffling, but one I can overlook in terms of originality. The Germans here are kept as an unseen force and are probably scarier for it.

As a piece of film making, Dunkirk is excellent in many different ways, but if you want a film where you can engage with the characters and feel their horror and fear (not even the drowning pilot evoked any real sense of danger), then this isn't it.
7/10




VICTOR CROWLEY
aka Hatchet 4

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Although it wasn't entirely accurate, sci-fi nerd lore held (at least for a number of years) that every odd numbered Star Trek film was a miss while all the even numbered ones were hits.

Well, meet the opposite to Star Trek.

It might have only been a bog standard stalk and slash film, but the original Hatchet movie was a great bit of extremely gory fun. Using barely any CGI, the film excelled with its clever use of prosthetic and practical effects, had some reasonably entertaining characters, and also featured a quite wonderful pair of tits (anyone who remembers Harmony from Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel really needs to check those bad boys out).

The second Hatchet, however, was nothing short of dire. A succession of badly written in-jokes with only one notable death scene in the entire film.

The third one was a welcome return to form, featured some great kills, had several genuinely witty moments, and succeeded in making the series fun again.

This one - the fourth in the series - is shit. Shit from the moment it starts and shit to the moment it finishes. Dreadful actors play dreadful characters who spend most of their time in the cheapest sets ever constructed. Other than the obviously hilarious gag of "Youtube woke up Victor Crowley", there is absolutely nothing worthwhile about this film.

Actually, hang on. There is one moment. And it would very probably have been a genuinely shit-your-pants scary moment too, if the silly fuckers hadn't included it on the trailer so you knew it was coming.

So, if you do decide to waste eighty minutes of your life watching rubber bodies filled with sausages and garden hoses that spew fake blood, then make sure you don't watch the trailer first.
And then don't watch the film.

I like the director. Adam Green seems to be a genuinely nice guy who loves horror movies, and as he's shown in the past with Hatchet 1 & 3, and Frozen (no, not the Disney one), he's not entirely untalented either. However, if this series is to continue (which it looks like it is), he really needs to hand it over to someone new.
2/10




THE POST

In the early seventies, the US government tried to block The Washington Post from publishing The Pentagon Papers, a series of documents which included top secret information about the government's involvement in the Vietnam War. Steven Spielberg directs Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in this adaptation of the story, and not much actually happens.

After a tightly shot opening fifteen minutes, the wheels soon fall off and the film ends up dragging itself along for the next hour like a sloth shot in the arse with a tranquilizer dart, and the only interesting way to pass the time becomes playing another round of the popular "Hey, Isn't That Him/Her Out Of...?" game.

Things picks up for a while around the hour mark, but the whole thing is strangely lop-sided, focusing on boardroom grumbling, and some fairly inconsequential family issues (typical Spielberg tbf), but casually and far too swiftly glosses over many of the legal details of the Supreme Court case in about one and a half minutes as it rushes towards its inevitable Hollywood ending.

The film is littered with cliches (just how many more films about the news have to show newspapers being printed, loaded onto the backs of lorries and then driven off?), features a speech so desperately dramatic that I just wanted to hand the woman saying it a massive US flag to wave and be done with it, and with Streep's character being the lone woman among a sea of powerful men, the film also fits in nicely with the female empowerment message the Oscars has acquired this year. Although the sequence where she walks through a crowd of wide-eyed and adoring women is perhaps a little too on the nose, even for them.

Also, as disguised as they are with historical subtext, there are some brutally heavy-handed digs at certain other administrations (*cough* Trump *cough*).

I hate to use the term "phoning it in", but Spielberg could have directed this in his lunch hour, and Hanks never gets out of first gear. Streep does her job well, but its mainly the likes of Matthew Rhys (The Americans), Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad) and Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad), Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), and Bruce Greenwood (Gerald's Game, American Crime Story) who actually put the effort in, even if their parts aren't very big.
5/10


PIRANHA
(1978)

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A school of genetically modified, extra nastified piranha are accidentally released into a US river system by a local recluse and a female skip tracer as they try to track down a pair of missing hikers. Killing anything unfortunate enough to venture into the water, the fish head downstream towards a summer camp and a new holiday resort as they head towards the open ocean.

Directed by Joe (Gremlins, The Howling) Dante, Piranha is gory, suspenseful, fast paced, and loads of fun, with characters you actually care about as well as those that you can't wait to see chomped into tiny pieces.

Seen as a blatant Jaws rip-off at the time (which of course it was), the film's producers, Roger Corman's New World PIctures, were actually sued by Universal until Steven Spielberg intervened, getting them to drop the lawsuit because he enjoyed the film so much.

"Sir, the piranhas"
"What about the goddamn piranhas?"
"They're eating the guests, sir".
8.5/10


PIRANHA 2 - FLYING KILLERS
aka THE SPAWNING
(1981)

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Relocating the action to a Caribbean holiday resort, Piranha 2 is a semi-sequel which sort of carries on from the original but tweaks the back story to suit its own needs (the son of the two main characters may or may not be a young boy seen in a throwaway ten second scene at the summer camp in the original). This time, a batch of piranha have been gene spliced with flying fish to make the resulting monsters into an aerial threat as well as an aquatic one. Why exactly? Because it's the 80s and you don't need to ask those kind of questions.

Anyway, divers get munched on a regular basis, Lance (Aliens, The Terminator) Henriksen scowls a lot, there's some naked underwater fun which ends exactly the way you'd imagine, some gratuitous nudity courtesy of the lovely Carole Davis, all performed by a supporting cast made up of heroically untalented actors.

Known primarily as the first feature film to be directed by James Cameron, the truth is that Cameron only worked on the movie for a couple of weeks before he was fired. Although he distances himself from it at every opportunity, the experience certainly left a mark on him, as he ended up naming Van Leuwen, one of the bureaucratic suits from Aliens, after one of the film's female producers, and after a bout of food poisoning, had a dream which resulted in him coming up with the idea for The Terminator.

It's all utterly ridiculous or course, with flying piranhas attached to fishing wire attacking people while they run around screaming a lot, and maybe I enjoy it more than most because of the certain nostalgic feeling it gives me, but Piranha 2 is just cheap, silly harmless fun.
6/10


PIRANHAS
(1995)

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A completely pointless remake of the original, everything about Piranhas is awful. The gender swapping of some of the characters in the name of political correctness simply doesn't work. In the original, Mr Dumont, the head of the summer camp, is a misguided, obstinate hardass, but doesn't go out of his way to upset people. However, his female counterpart in this remake is just an absolute bitch, and makes you wonder how she got a job in a children's camp in the first place.

Also, turning Dr Hoak (a brilliantly manic performance by Kevin McCarthy in the original) into a woman throws the entire dynamic of the fight scene in the control booth off completely, as you simply cannot show curly headed nice guy William Katt (a friendly, amiable writer rather than Bradford Dillman's grumpy alcoholic in the first one) slapping a woman into unconsciousness.

Lines are recycled, actual footage from the original is continuously recycled with absolutely no interest for continuity, the piranhas make a stupid screeching noise while attacking (the bubbly attack noise of the original films wasn't perfect, but it didn't sound terrible) and the whole thing just reeks of cheapness.

The only thing of note is that it happens to be the film debut of Mila Kunis, who plays the extremely blonde William Katt's extremely dark haired and dark eyed daughter.

Fucking terrible.
1/10


PIRANHA 3D
(2010)

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Not a remake but a complete reimagining, the piranha this time are dino-fish trapped in an underwater cave, released after millions of years by a subterranean earthquake just in time for Spring Break.

There is literally no fucking about here, with a streamlined ninety minutes filled with virtually nothing but jiggling tits and extreme gore. The cast is quite impressive too, with Elizabeth Shue playing the local Sheriff with Ving Rhames as her no-fucks-given deputy. A pre-Parks and Recreation Adam Scott plays a marine biologist, and Jerry O'Connell is brilliant as the sleazy porn producer. There are some nice cameos by Christopher Llloyd, Richard Dreyfuss and Eli Roth, while Porn stars Gianna Michaels and Riley Steele show off their chests in glorious 3D, the latter even engaging in a brilliantly gratuitous five minute nude diving sequence with Kelly Brook for literally no other reason than it looks fucking spectacular.
7.5/10



PIRANHA 3DD
(2012)

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With half the budget of Piranha 3D, it was obvious that the sequel wasn't going to be anywhere near as good, but it does try its best with some lovely tits and lashings of blood. David Koechner (Champ from Anchorman) plays the sleazy owner of a water park where one of the featured attractions is an adults only pool where female nudity is pretty much compulsory. Pontins was never like this when I was a kid.

The effects aren't as good, the acting certainly isn't as good, but it's fast paced, short, and there are some welcome returns for past characters, as well as cameos from Gary Busey, Christopher Lloyd again, and (the director's father) Clu Gulager. Plus David Hasselhoff gets to play an ageing David Hasselhoff. And of course, tits.

"Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina".
5/10




Oh, and it's

Star Wars
Empire
Jedi
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Darkweasel
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Re: movies

Postby Darkweasel » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:22 pm

BRAIN DONORS
(1992)

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Back in 1992, when video rentals were a thing, it seemed that every film released by Universal had a trailer for Brain Donors before the main feature. It looked like fun, so I waited patiently for either of my local video shops to get it in. It never happened. No video ever surfaced, and as time went by, the film slipped from my memory like the last time Liverpool won the league

So, what happened? With Pat Proft, the writer of Police Academy and co-writer of both Hot Shots films and The Naked Gun, and the Zucker Brothers, who co-wrote and directed Airplane, and Top Secret (and also producing them), Brain Donors was predicted to be another surefire hit. However, straight after completing Naked Gun 2 1/2 with Proft, the Zuckers reduced themselves to Executive Producer roles and left everyone to it.

Universal lost faith in the project, and left Proft, and director Denis Dugan (better known as an actor at that time, appearing in The Howling, and Parenthood) to pick up the pieces. Withdrawn from a widespread cinema release, it disappeared without a trace until it showed up in a handful of video shops nowhere near me a few months later.

Basically a contemporary Marx Brothers film with more than a few liberal splashes of Abbott and Costello and The Three Stooges, the film's scattershot style means it hits as much as it misses, but due to its quickfire wit, if one joke falls flat then you only have to wait two seconds for the next one. The clever sight gags, pinpoint accurate comedy timing, and general stupidity, all play second fiddle to the performances of the cast - John (The Big Lebowski, Millers Crossing) Turturro in particular, who puts in one of the most underrated comedy performances of his career. Mel Smith, John Savident (A Clockwork Orange), and Nancy Marchand (The Sopranos, The Naked Gun) all ham it up completely, virtual unknown Bob Nelson (Kindergarten Cop) brings the physical comedy, and the whole thing culminates in probably the best ballet sequence ever filmed.


"And that spells cash with a capital..."
"K!"
"You should go back to school".
"I hated teaching".

7.5/10
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Re: movies

Postby Darkweasel » Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:16 pm

Flatliners
(2017)

An utterly lifeless, insipid, grey retread of the original.
Still starring Keifer Sutherland somehow,
3/10
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houston4044
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Re: movies

Postby houston4044 » Fri Mar 02, 2018 11:26 am

Was dragged by the other half to see The Shape of Water, knew absolutely nothing about it going in and came out of it thinking it was alright, not the classic it's being bigged up to be (though doubtless will win awards regardless) but could be worse I guess? Spent most of the film trying to remember where else I had seen the actors/actress' though.

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Re: movies

Postby Haldamir319 » Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:41 am

Saw Prevenge the other day. Bonkers film. I did really enjoy it, though I imagine it will be a marmite one for people.
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