Omni's Random Video Noise [Archive] - Page 4

Omnizoa

09-27-16, 02:41 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27257&stc=1&d=1474954854

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Action / English / 1996

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

Occasionally appears in lists featuring female action leads.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"He's been licking his ******* for the last three straight hours. I submit to you that there is nothing there worth more than an hour's attention. I should think that whatever he is attempting to dislodge is either gone for good, or there to stay. Wouldn't you agree?"

Christmas, Horses, Rice Crispies, Dogs, Cookies, Goats, Meat Slabs, Kissing, I can't even be bothered to organize these, this movie SUCKED and there is one DAMNING SCENE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgdJeMd8R1YThat guy's last moment was apologizing for a drunken breast grope. Grieve for him.

This is the sort of scene that reminds me of those kinds of people in the school cafeteria who sidle right up next to me offering me part of their burger or popcorn shrimp and go "MMMMMM YEEEAAAAAAHHHH GOOOOOOOOD MEAT!" completely unaware that I know where they live and that by morning they won't wake up for the bloody hole I'll have made in their throat and stuffed full of lettuce like some vigilante vegan bandit.

Seriously, the fact that it looks like they used both a real deer and then shot an EXTENDED sequence of some cracked out freaky puppet flailing the **** around in the windshield like some sort of nightmare before the protagonist snaps it neck, ALMOST CERTAINLY out of some extreme confusion over what it takes to remain tonally consistent and endear us to a protagonist...

There aren't enough middle fingers in the world.

And I would have stopped there, BUT it seems that "that wouldn't be an adequate review of the movie" even though my intention is obviously NOT to clearly review the entirety of each and every movie I see and the totally undue weight placed upon vague yet loaded terms like "review"...!!!

Pardon, but I think that's pretty ridiculous.
BUT NOT AS RIDICULOUS AS THE REST OF THIS MOVIE!!
Which I watched, so congratu****in'lations, enjoy even more bitching.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27256&stc=1&d=1474954649

Samuel L. Jackson is about the only redeeming quality in this movie, the rest is stock standard if not worse and his charisma goes a LONG way to bandaging the various festering sores that infest this bloody mess.

First off, the entire plot revolves around amnesia, which is great, cause now we can trope the **** out of that, except no, we're cross-polinating here, cause as Main Girl gets her memories back we go full on Split Personality which always one of the most difficult to sell mental disorders, AND THEY DON'T SELL IT. Frumpy Mom goes full-on Stone Cold Bitch with barely a flicker in-between, even going so far as to tell her daughter that "life is pain" which is apparently so significant it gets a callback during the climax. Wow, I couldn't take it seriously before, I almost could the second time.

Another frustrating thing is that when her old personality flairs up and then returns to Frumpy Mom she totally forgets what just happened. You forgot what you remembered? That makes sense.

There isn't even any indication of when or why this stops happening, she just sort of gels into one person, which again is one part deerkiller and one part nihilist slut, so yeah, I LOVE THIS CHARACTER.

Logical blackholes just riddle this movie, how is it that a fragmentation grenade will explode outward with a wall of fire? Grenades don't work that way, my classmates would know.

When she gets captured and trapped in the walk-in freezer, what in the hell is this McGyver scheme she concocts?

Retainer + Doll Pee + Meat Hook = Explosion WHAT!?

The retainer seems completely unnecessary, I find it pretty hard to believe that you can create sparks by banging a metal hook on a metal floor in -60 degree temperatures, and... Doll Pee? As in urine from the a doll???

Let's BREAK THIS DOWN:

HOW DO YOU KNOW the doll has that feature!? That was never foreshadowed!

HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW that it's not regular water!? Most pissing dolls are! AGAIN, my unfortunate classmates would know this!

AND HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW that this non-water false urine substance is even remotely flammable!? Why would they sell dolls full of volatile liquids!?

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27255&stc=1&d=1474954626

That explosion works and it immediately creates an entirely new mystery wherein it blows Samuel L. Jackson backwards out of the window, while he's tied to a chair, SEVERAL METERS, into a tree, into the snow, and mere SECONDS later he's able to recover fast enough to grab the knife, which survived the explosion stuck to his chair, and lands a perfect throw into a nearby baddy's throat before telling Main Girl that he's gonna go out guns-a-blazing because he wants to be good for something, implying that he sucks at precisely the thing he just did.

Why are the villains even villains in this movie? I know they want to detonate a chemical bomb, naughty naughty, but there's literally NO GOOD REASON for this movie to exist. The villains plans get destroyed PURELY and UTTERLY because they antagonized a woman they had left for dead and had evidently forgotten about them and/or LEFT THEM COMPLETELY ALONE for 8 years.

8 YEARS! You're trying to kill someone who's been a total non-obstacle to you for 8 YEARS! And she's literally the ONLY THING that ****ed you over! You completely sabotaged your own plans!

Merely torturing her despite her demonstrable ignorance about your plans MADE HER REMEMBER and even if she didn't remember she's certain got a bone to pick with you NOW! SHE KNOWS YOUR ******* FACES AND NAMES NOW YOU THICK ****BUCKETS!!

Jeez, even the climax isn't safe, the police refuse to approach the truck to save her daughter even though they have no known way of knowing that the truck is a bomb LET ALONE how much time they have before it goes off, so Main Girl just shrugs off a gunshot wound to the chest before we callback to that "die screaming" quote which fails to be satisfyingly reincorporated and the movie ends reminding me that Geena Davis is a lot like Kristen Stewart, their lips just hang in a perpetual state of gum circulation.

****... this movie.

I'll grant it's not THAT bad, but it's bad.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Omnizoa

09-27-16, 07:27 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27258&stc=1&d=1474970115

Above The Law

Action / Chinese / 1986

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

After Yes, Madam, I had to look for more Cynthia Rothrock movies and this is one of her biggest ones.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"I don't like whiteys, especially female ones."

Hamburgers, Chicken, something meaty I'm sure, also Powdered Wigs.

1986's Above The Law, not to be confused with 1988's Steven Segal movie of the same name and also known as Righting Wrongs, is easily one of the better martial arts movies I've seen and it's not simply because it's got exceptional fight scenes, they are good, but it actually has a pretty decent story too.

Yuen Biao, who I've increasingly come to appreciate in movies like Project A and Dragons Forever, stars alongside Cynthia Rothrock in a movie that's much more than just a buddy cop movie.

Biao is a vigilante prosecutor who's become disillusioned by the justice system he works for when he sees bureaucracy pardon bad guys and Rothrock is a police officer on his case, convinced that he's a wanted murderer, unknowing that it is in fact the police superintendent whose committing the killings.

The movie begins with a rather subpar opening which slightly less 80s than Yes, Madam, remarkable mainly for how overkill it is, the assassination target is loaded with bullets and bullets even after he's assuredly dead and when Biao manages to flip the baddies car, he's not done until he's ignited the ****ers on fire.

DANG, well it feeds into his character, so it may seem extreme at first, but it makes sense in retrospect.

The movie doesn't fall into the same trappings of Yes, Madam by being 70% gag dialog and sadly there is no Mr. Tin equivalent. If it did this would simply be THE BEST FRICKEN' MOVIE EVER.

I'm gonna repost that video because I couldn't help doing the Mr. Tin laugh all throughout this movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk-Q-OmQuqE

Man, if that was in this movie, 5 OUT OF 5, I'm tellin' you.

Anyway, instead of talky goons we actually get plot and plot healthily interrupted by regular fight scenes which are all pretty good, Cynthia Rothrock in particular was friggen' sick in a couple of her scenes, particularly against the female assassin where she gets to throw in some wicked gymnastic ****.

She even gets a fight against Biao which was a pleasant surprise too. Eventually the characters figure out that Mr. Superintendent is dirty and corner him in an airplane hangar.

Up to now the movie's basically climaxed with the death of a couple characters, most notably a kid who was the inadvertent witness to Mr. Superintendent's crimes and serves to bring Biao and Rothrock's characters together after a whole lot of melodramatic finger pointing. Really, this kid was a throwaway character, I didn't really care about him, he's really just there to get the characters to argue meaningfully over their conflicting approaches to justice.

Humans and animals are different because humans don't have tails!Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, you're gonna have to do a whole lot more than thaCYNTHIA ROTHROCK NO!!!

Doooooohhhhh, gaaawwd, the bastard stabbed her in the throat with a hand drill and LEFT HER HANGING!!! NNNNOOOOOOOOooooOOOOOOoooooooo, YUEN BIAO KICK HIS FRIGGEN' ASS!!!

What kind of monster are you!?
*tutututututu* We're not in court Mr. Prosecutor, I'm not on trial. Let's face it, we're both killers! You maintain that you kill for the sake of justice and just consider me a common criminal. Whatever the motive of the murderer, the murderer should be held accountable under law! But then, no court will try us... we've placed ourselves ABOVE THE LAW!

OOOOHHH!!! The movie's gotten smart on me and the fricken' TITLE DROP AAAAAAHHHHH

This movie rocks.

REWATCH UPDATE:
Sadly how good I remember this movie being doesn't really hold true through a second viewing. It's certainly decent and most of whatever standout flaws I can catch are largely negligible (offscreen ramps prop a compact high enough off the ground to drive over another car, how in the hell could you do that otherwise), but in retrospect it seems to me that I'm eager to latch on to this movie mainly because it so clearly rises above the competitors in it's genre. And let's be honest, most martial arts movies are pretty ****. Even Jackie Chan movies are hard to impress with all they get padded with.

So it really is a credit to the movie that it has a relatively decent story to pick it up in between the fights, but really, after rewatching it, it really feels like it takes a while to pick up, and it's not really altogether clear really really why really it has to really drag it's really ass really really really fo sheally.

*ahem*

It takes a while to really get into the gear and the first few fights are fairly mundane. Even the final showdown itself is best highlighted by Rothrock's character dying, a few lines of dialog, and a pretty overdone hangin' off a propeller plane stunt. I dunno. The fistfight in the first Indiana Jones was better and that wasn't even the climax.

Altogether it's a good movie, nothing really really really to write home about, but surely a short peak among martial arts movies, if not in Cynthia Rothrock's acting career.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Clazor

09-27-16, 08:11 AM

This is the sort of scene that reminds me of those kinds of people in the school cafeteria who sidle right up next to me offering me part of their burger or popcorn shrimp and go "MMMMMM YEEEAAAAAAHHHH GOOOOOOOOD MEAT!" completely unaware that I know where they live and that by morning they won't wake up for the bloody hole I'll have made in their throat and stuffed full of lettuce like some vigilante vegan bandit.

Red this, pictured the scene with your old purple haired anime girl avatar doing the throat stabbin and lettuce stuffing. And yet again...

*Two minutes of silently shaking with laughter because can't get enough air*

Omnizoa

09-27-16, 08:51 AM

Red this, pictured the scene with your old purple haired anime girl avatar doing the throat stabbin and lettuce stuffing. And yet again...

*Two minutes of silently shaking with laughter because can't get enough air*
*changes back*
http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27259&stc=1&d=1474977052

Clazor

09-27-16, 09:09 AM

YAAAAAAY!!!

Omnizoa

09-27-16, 09:11 AM

YAAAAAAY!!!
I wanna make that avatar now. I don't know if I'll finish it, but I'm gonna start that right now.

Clazor

09-27-16, 10:20 AM

I wanna make that avatar now. I don't know if I'll finish it, but I'm gonna start that right now.

*Laughs out loud* Awesome:D:up:

Omnizoa

09-27-16, 11:41 AM

*Laughs out loud* Awesome:D:up:
There we go.
http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27260&stc=1&d=1474987243

Clazor

09-27-16, 03:34 PM

OH HOLY CRAP IT'S ADORABLE!!! You got to send me a couple of still, one where the knife is raised and another when it's stabbing and the blood's spraying. Then I'm gonna print those basterds and turn them into a framed mini comic and hang on my wall. I'll call it Vegan Vengence or somthing.

Omnizoa

09-28-16, 11:01 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27265&stc=1&d=1475071250

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Western Action / Korean / 2008

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

Because I am the sort of person who would see the Korean gag adaption before the original movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Horses, Cows, Sheep, Dogs, Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Camels, Elephants, even a butcher's shop, because why not.

The Good, The Bad, and irritatingly absent of the conjunction "and" The Weird occupies a perplexing area.

On one hand it's a western, unfailing to live up to the genre's failings; Non-humans are all over this movie and horses in particular are ****ed up and down.

In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification ordered five seconds of cuts to the cinema release due to scenes of horse falls judged to be animal cruelty that violated the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937.

Yeah, that's probably because they did stupid **** in it like get horses to fall over, bowl them over with explosions, and even hit one with a ****ing truck. I'm tempted to say that's exceptional cruelty, but let's be honest, this isn't even remotely unusual for the genre or even movies in general, The Wild Bunch and 13 Assassins were setting animals on fire.

It's sense of humor, if it's sense of normality wasn't already a **** in my cereal, also leaves something to be desired.

I really don't think I needed to see The Weird stab someone in the anus with a knife and then kick it deep enough to kill. TWICE.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27264&stc=1&d=1475071212

Good god. Those two things, the abuse and the crude humor are more than enough to earn my wrath in any movie, but I'll be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the rest of the movie.

Sure it's got some slow sections and I was disappointed as soon as I realized the awesome opening train sequence wasn't here to stay, but the cinematography combined with the environmentally aware gunfights, the varied action that climaxed in chases reminiscent of Fury Road, and the thematic distinctions between the three main characters were very pleasing, SO pleasing in fact that I'm actually rather skeptical that The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly could actually do it justice.

I just find it very satisfying that
The Good survives as the winner, without any treasure,
The Weird survives via plot device, to find an alternate treasure,
and The Bad just dies,

each of them visibly distinct from one another and each uniquely armed. The Weird even occupies a relative moral grey area if you completely ignore the fact that the majority of the cast has enslaved horses which I could, but I won't, so I don't.

Truth is, if the movie managed the same task without the human superiority complex, I'dve probably forgiven the butt stuff.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

09-28-16, 08:14 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27271&stc=1&d=1475104422

Drunken Master

Martial Arts Action / Chinese / 1978

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

I think I've only seen Drunken Master 2.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Chicken, Eel, Duck, Sparrow, Pork, Goose, Shrimp... "Gruper"?

The first Drunken Master is unusual because it actually shares a lot more in common with Snake in the Eagle's Shadow than Drunken Master 2, mainly because it's largely the same cast in largely the same roles, only this time instead of learning Snake Fist, it's 8 Drunken Gods. The reason for the similarity can probably be attributed to shared director Yuen Woo-ping who worked on Snake in the Eagle's Shadow the same year prior.

I said previously that I think think Yuen Woo-ping is someone to keep watching given that he directed Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, Wing Chun, and was even fight choreographer for Fist of Legend, all of which I've given a 4 out of 5, and the trend holds true here.

Drunken Master has a SLAMMIN' 12 fight sequences, all of which are unique and quality fights (except for maybe the bald guy fight, that was kinda stupid) which make regular use of slapstick, weapons, and props. I daresay the movie is probably more fight that not and it's hard to complain when I've spent so long watching Jackie Chan try to force large quantities of drama into hour and a half movies.

I really can't complain, especially given the return of Beggar So who flawlessly kicks ass with the nearest prop on hand at any given time...

...at least until that one scene where he goes for a couple minutes without his booze and he starts getting the shakes and I begin to wonder whether he has a crippling addiction.

The movie's not without it's flaws, that's for sure, it's sadly not as cheesy as one would hope, and by that I am not counting instances of obviously cartoony moles, drawn freckles, and fake overbites.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27270&stc=1&d=1475104404

There is one cheeky bit of cheese and it's when Jackie's trying to dry his pants over the fire and the Big Bad walks up and picks a fight with him, kicks his ass and then offers to give him his pants back before tossing them in the fire. Queue string section. I don't know what it is about Chan's movie's that have him always running away in tears, but that was the most dramatic and heart-wrenching death of a pair of pants I've ever seen.

There's also this one moment where I see Jackie Chan strung up to the ceiling in a compromising position and I begin to get the BDSM thoughts.

Despite not being anywhere near as annoying as the drunkard he plays in Drunken Master 2, Chan's character isn't especially likable in this one given his casual attempts to lie his way out of a restaurant bill only to then call someone else a swindler in another scene. ****in' hypocrite. He's also pretty sexist too because when it turns out the 8th Drunken God style he needs to master is a Goddess he bitches out not wanting to learn "sissy" stuff. Go **** yourself, Wong.

And that's how he turns tables on the Big Bad too, with a falsetto and hipchecks. >_>

Anyway, despite a wealth of complaints and a small zoo of animals that somehow still manages not to irk me as much as Drunken Master 2 did... and I'll even concede flat out that there are better fights in both Drunken Master 2 AND Snake in the Eagle's Shadow...

Drunken Master is jam-packed with martial arts goodness, it's varied, it's impressive, and it's creative enough to distract from it's occasional moments of self-mutilation, like when Jackie Chan farts in a guy's face and then drops him in poop.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27272&stc=1&d=1475104439

Coulda done without that.

REWATCH UPDATE:
It's been over 2 years since last I saw Drunken Master and it's interesting to how my opinion hasn't changed much.

Again, I find it difficult to complain about a movie comprised almost entirely of Jackie Chan's trademark prop martial arts comedy, it deserves high ranks for that reason if for no other, but that's still not to say that doesn't still annoy in other ways, particularly Jackie's character being a blatant thief in one scene, pointing fingers and calling shame down on another person for scamming people in the next, and then ostensibly stealing again in another scene soon after.

His chauvinism is also tiring, when the 8th drunken god comprising the Drunken Master martial arts style is a woman, you'd think he wouldn't be so dismissive, especially when out of the 3 characters he loses a fight to in the whole movie is a woman and she's the only one who remains undefeated by the end.

I was amused to see that the same fight stuck out to me this time as it did before even though I had completely forgotten about it:

(except for maybe the bald guy fight, that was kinda stupid)The guy who's fighting style consists of constantly attempting to headbutt his opponent was ****ing dumb, and they really made it into a cartoon with his huge eyebrows and the bumps they plaster onto his head to make it look like he failed to catch Roadrunner.

Something interesting that stood out to me is how the movie tries to explain that Jackie's torturous physical training isn't pointless; how you need to "learn how to fall". It's a total throwaway line you would think, but there's actually a lot of sense behind it. So much of the movie consists of Jackie Chan on the ground, usually rolling away, around, or through enemies when he doesn't immediately flip himself back up into a standing position or use the ground as a place to counterattack from. If he were a D&D character he'd basically have dumped all of his skill points into Tumbling.

Considering Drunken Master style frequently involves stumbling around or appearing fall over only to turn the tables on their opponent, it only makes sense that this be incorporated as an important skill to master, not to mention this isn't unique to Drunken Master but martial arts in general, the term "ukemi" (albeit a Japanese, not a Chinese term) is often used in video games to refer to a timing mechanic allowing you to quickly returned to standing position after being knocked down. This is often coupled with similar alternative solutions including the "Emergency Roll", indeed even across fighting games, learning how to fall is critical to maintaining the flow of combat and avoiding getting your face stomped in.

If there's one thing I want to draw more attention to this time it's the English dub, because so much of it consists of Chan's voice actor making whinging moans anytime he gets hurt and he's such a whiny bitch in the movie, there's no shortage to his wailing. The falsetto he puts on during the final battle because he copped out and never learned the 8th Drunken Master stance in a lame attempt to imitate a woman is quite simply balls. It is objectively balls. And it spoils an otherwise solid end to a largely plotless movie.

By the way this movie has a plot.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

09-29-16, 09:25 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27277&stc=1&d=1475151889

Iron Monkey

Martial Arts Action / Chinese / 1993

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

Watching this one purely on Yuen Woo-ping's directorial credit.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Shaolin punks."

Monkey, Crocodile, Lizard, Scorpion, Viper, Centipede, Sparrow, Chicken, Duck, Sharkfin Soup, ehh...

I'd really like to say that Iron Monkey also keeps up the winning streak with another [Pretty Good] from me, but I'm gonna play bad guy here.

Donnie Yen brings a small splash of charisma this time and while he's generally an unlikable father, he gets the smallest pittance of character development as he's tasked by the corrupt local authorities to hunt down doctor-by-day, vigilante-by-night, Iron Monkey at the cost of his son.

The story's not especially interesting, even with a humorously cheeky disguise sequence in which Iron Monkey pretends to be a bigwig minister, and sadly, while the fight sequences are yet inventive, they take the goofy moves of Wing Chun and crank 'em up to full. It's not as absurd as House of Flying Daggers, Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Buttplug, but then it also has an obvious sense of self awareness those movies completely lack.

Wirework is much more subtle (a it ought to be) and ridiculous defiance of gravity is fairly abstracted out by it's vaguely cartoonish exterior.

Even then, there's not much helping the abundance of crude wire moves and even less rubber staves.

"Poison Palm" is literally a poisonous flat-handed punch. What nonsense is this.

The emphasis on food and herbal remedies like crocodile (because crocodiles are herbs of course) is also grind on my patience.

Overall, this is easily an above-average martial arts movie in my book, but it's missing that X factor to stand out. And no, the showdown on the burning poles just doesn't cut it, not with all the quick-cut rampant fakery.

Oh, and the kid grows up to be Wong Fei-Hung? Does every friggen' martial arts movie gotta be about Wong Fei-Hung?

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

09-29-16, 10:06 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27280&stc=1&d=1475197604

Iron Man

Superhero Action / English / 2008

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Action Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46011).

Incidentally unrelated to Iron Monkey, this is reassessment time and this will probably be my last watch before finalizing my list for The Action Movie Countdown.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Tony Stark was able to build thiiis in a caaave with a box of scraaaps!"

Kissing, Goats, Cheeseburgers, Ice Cream, Pizza. A very American selection of food on display here... seems a little pandering if I can be a bit pedantic.

First, the flaws. Tony Stark is difficult to like, not just because of his character flaws which are reasonably intentional, but also because of his character flaws which are unreasonably unintentional. I really don't care to hear dialog wasted on the above unmentionables and these issues compound with his playboy persona which manifests at worst with "Ms. Berkley" a reporter who hounds his ass for moral atrocities and then ****s him at the drop of a hat before immediately resuming her interrogation.

Wow, you're like, the worst person imaginable. She doesn't even say anything particularly offensive, she's just a raging hypocrite.

"Look, I agree Hitler, is a ****in' shitstain of a human being, but DAT ASS THO."

So she's terrible, but she's in a very small minority of the movie which soon turns on her and even Stark becomes relatively likable by the end with no small help from Pepper Potts who produces an excellent callback with the decorative arc reactor.

Robert Downey Jr. has the charisma to wheel his way through scenes too, even the sad ones, and while the scenes between him and Pepper shift wildly from cute to cringe-inducingly awkward, it ends with a spirit of clear self-awareness as their status within the genre.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27279&stc=1&d=1475197553

The superhero origin arc itself as it appears on offer here is about on par if not better than Batman Begins, DC's own iteration of the not-so-super superhero who's main power is seemingly infinite money and a toolbox.

A key difference here is that while Iron Man almost cynically advertises how aware it is of it's main character's quote "laundry list of character defects", it at least never verges on the Arkham City brand of superhero qualifications whereas a Batman is an equally competent ninja, detective, bodybuilder, inventor, genius, etc.

As I said before, I like my superheros with weaknesses and that doesn't have to end with personality flaws, I really liked the idea that Tony begins this saga as a high-life weapons manufacturer and learns the hard way how his products are used, provoking him into action after a life experience that sets up the arc reactor in his chest.

Guy's gotta live off a car battery to avoid a slow death before he resumes with a giant brightly lit off switch in his chest.

Which reminds me that Jeff Bridges is pretty solid in this as well, even if he is fairly formulaic. The "you ripped out my targeting system" line was the eyeroll of the century, but it's a negligible dent in a movie that keys the rock music and drums it's way through the creation of the Iron Man suit all the way up to it's first badass battle.

I said before, about Appleseed how much I liked seeing CG animators take to complex machinery and this movie does not disappoint, from Iron Man's little optimization montage to that little moment that just sticks with me where Obadiah jumps in the air with the new suit and his boot thrusters kick off small jets to keep him oriented, I love that.

Credit roll to Iron Man by Black Sabbath and you've got what is surely one of the best comic book superhero movies yet. This movie just barely misses a 5 out of 5 from me, but I keep watching it, so time will tell if it winds up in my personal collection.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Gideon58

09-30-16, 03:46 PM

Omnizoa

10-03-16, 08:47 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27317&stc=1&d=1475538331

The Magic Crystal

Sci-Fi Martial Arts Action / Chinese / 1986

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Cynthia Rothrock of course.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Planes never fall down."

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/NTqGXA7.gif

It's a shame that Cynthia Rothrock never took off because now well past her prime her filmography pretty much comes down to Yes, Madam, Above The Law, and Undefeatable, ALL OF WHICH she only co-stars in. She's virtually always a sidekick in these movies and on the rare occasions she's starring, it's in some cruddy Z-grade femsploitation movie.

And if you're REAL lucky, you'll see her in a Frankenstein beast like this.

Scallops, Beef, Chicken, Eggs, Ham, Ice Cream, The plot to The Magic Crystal involves the extreme tonal clash of a serious 80s martial arts cop vs. gang movie with a just-for-kids Saturday morning Disney Channel movie dialed WAY THE **** BACK on it's budget. This reminded me of early Power Rangers that's how goofy it was.

Basically, an arbitrary mess of somewhat related characters, all of which, save the comedy relief, know kung fu (obviously), are hunting down a gang which is attacking them in attempt to retrieve a precious stone from them which one of their nephews discovers is a sentient talking alien robot magic jade rock.

It's silly enough when the high pitched voice from the rock sounds like the narrator who politely asks the children to sing along with the puppets so that they can remember that the colors blue and red make purple (only to resume a vicious coke addiction offscreen), but the level of casual whimsy on display here dives headlong into unintentional horror territory.

"That's a good deal Mr. Rock, here, let's shake fingers on it."

*break*

"WAIT A SECOND...YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FINGERS! Ha ha ha."

*rock grows finger*

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/hC2SRIP.gif

"What happened to him Mr. Rock?"

"I gave him a terrible vision!"

"The man witnessed a woman peel her face off and plummeted
over two stories to the ground, I think he's had enough."

"Great! I'll re-arrange his body for 24 hours!"

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/1TdHj1y.gif

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27316&stc=1&d=1475537870

Wow. Yeah. That happens.

Anyway, the movie's stupid. Just generally stupid. Not even gonna bother listing all the plotholes or needless pointing out that I once again have no clean grasp of the relationships of these characters.

That villain... jeez. Guy says "abusive language is unethical" one moment and in the next he says "Anyone refusing to cooperate with us will suffer more than an AIDS victim."

This while an elementary schooler is learning to stand up to bullies and making friends with a magic talking rock. The ****.

This'd easily make my bad list if not for the fact that the fight scenes, particular the first 2-4, are pretty damn good. It's a massive waste of talent if you ask me.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

CosmicRunaway

10-04-16, 02:08 PM

Even though I have no idea what that movie is, I appreciate the Jontron gifs. 👍

Omnizoa

10-04-16, 07:54 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27335&stc=1&d=1475621613

Under Siege

Military Action / English / 1992

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen a Steven Seagal movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Cheeseburgers, Eggs, Chicken, Shrimp, Pies, Meat Carcasses, Meat Slop, really just guys cuttin' apart chunks of meat and throwin' 'em at people to messily eat, it's a fantastic little quirk of the movie. Also kissing.

Die Hard on a boat!
Die Hard on a boat!
It'saStevenSeagalmovie,butit's
Die Hard on a boat!

Actually, that's a bit over-complimentary. It's missing much of what made Die Hard great including the radio conversations, reincorporation, and whatnot, but the bare premise is the same. Guys take over a boat and neglect to concern themselves with the fact that they just inadvertently burnt Badass #1's pies, and burnt pie makes Badass #1 angry.

It features much of the resourcefulness we saw from John McClane which makes for quasi-McGuyver moments (even if some of them like using a microwave as a timed detonator don't make any fricken' sense) and most of the banter comes from between the three main villains including Colm Meaney who's underplayed as usual, Gary Busey, who blesses us with some exceptionally inappropriate drag, and Tommy Lee Jones who mugs the **** out his scenes, especially near the end when he goes off the deepend singing and babbling.

I think the formula is done a disservice in two major respects. First one being the female lead who set up to be a Model Girl who after some token "I'm for women's lib" dialog she utters the phrase:

I have a little rule about killing people.

Well, ma'am, I'm afraid that's the stupidest rule in the history of the universe because you're trapped on a boat surrounded by people WHO WANT TO KILL YOU!

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27336&stc=1&d=1475621633

And she does, but fortunately not before Seagal gets in the most drearily cynical line he could could muster:

I'm thrilled to death to hear that.

I've never seen a Steven Seagal movie before, but I'd have to possess a profoundly suicidal inability to learn if I couldn't predict that he'd snog her face by the end of the movie. And he does. **** you.

At least McClane had a relationship with the face he was snogging.

Secondly, there's this bizarre lack of punch to the whole movie. Violence just comes and goes with nary a whisper of concern and I'm not sure if it's partly Seagal's general Badass Ambivalence that fails to sell the impact of killing someone or what, I'm inclined to think it's editing. When Seagal manages to stab Tommy Lee Jones in the skull and stuff him in a monitor you'd think that'd be a pretty big moment, but it feels to casual like, "Welp, done that, time to finish the movie".

There's not much in the way of a musical sting or lingering camera or even decent one-liner to cap off the moment. The Big Bad just dies and the protagonist walks away. *shrugs*

Yay.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

10-08-16, 10:29 AM

*notices Paranoia Agent was mislabelled as a movie*

The Nightmare Before Christmas
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Ink
Mad Max: Fury Road
Paranoia Agent +6
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind -1
12 Angry Men -1
Aliens -1
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children -1
Dark City -1
Hook -1

Omnizoa

10-08-16, 02:37 PM

Gonna tank a few more Action movies, but I'm gettin' burnt out, gonna start back into my usgh (however you'd spell that) and dip into some Sci-Fi with special priority given to the following:

The Thirteenth Floor (part of an either/or choice way back)
Akira & Blade Runner (rewatch, been years, barely remember, [Meh...] towards both)
The Matrix (rewatch)
Metropolis (rewatch)
Repo!: The Genetic Opera (rewatch)
Ex Machina

Omnizoa

10-08-16, 06:34 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27372&stc=1&d=1475962156

The Dark Crystal

Puppet Fantasy Horror / English / 1982

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Sister movie to Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal is the darker fully-puppeted movie to precede it.

I've seen it many times before, but the last was probably over 10 years ago so I barely remember it. I recall it being both a source of fascination and disturbance.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"This won't hurt. We just want to drain your LIVING ESSENCE!"

There's one scene in this movie where Kira and Jen ride Landstriders into a group of Garthim and they both get killed (the Landstriders I mean). Given the ambiguity of their relationship I'm going to give this movie the benefit of the doubt and a total 100% pass in the vegan department. :up:

THE DARK CRYSTAL is an exceptionally strange movie. In a good way. I think.

Pitching the idea of movie consisting entirely of puppets and animatronics, completely detached from any pre-existing franchise like Sesame Street to give it some credibility must have been a feat then and probably remains a feat now. Telling people they should watch Dark Crystal probably ain't easy, especially if they can't get past the extraordinarily by-the-book opening narration and the eventually realization that our main protagonist is precisely the face that they pin next to the term "uncanny valley" in the dictionary.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27374&stc=1&d=1475962207

Every single other significant character looks great in this movie, but the Gelflings, Jen and Kira are distracting as all hell because they look too human, yet don't look human enough. Their puppet animation and barely articulated mouths don't help at all. They also look like they're made of felt unlike the rest of the major characters. And they're the least interesting.

Basically the main characters suck. They're not terrible persay, but they're largely undeveloped, cliche to the point of boring, and generally unappealing to look at.

EVERYTHING ELSE is solid. It's bizarre that a movie that's so narratively derivative (much like Dark Crystal) still manages to be so unique in it's style and presentation. A good fraction of the movie is just Jen pointing at something and going "What's that?" and Kira saying "Oh, that's Fizzgig/A Landstrider/Podlings/A Buttplug" and it really is interesting to see so much detail put into world-building. I'd credited Star Wars and the like for having exceptional world building, but this blows the rest of it away in my opinion.

Something as simple as Kira breakin' out her Deus Machina WINGS and Jen asking "How come I don't have wings?" and Kira just shrugging it off with "'Cause your a boy" before cutting away... whoa HOLD ON, we just got a crucial glimpse of what distinguishes Gelflings biologically. That's friggen' neat. And it's all over this movie.

It really does seem pretty connect-the-dots as it goes, but when a scar on one of the Skeksis appears on one of the Mystics you find out this movie is a mark more clever than you think.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27375&stc=1&d=1475962428

By the way, those Skeksis. Freaked me the hell out as a kid, but DAYUM, those guys are awesome. Aughra is awesome too, mainly due to a combination of her design, uncertain use of animatronics, and refreshingly boisterous charisma.

Charisma is a big thing going for much of the actors in this movie (beyond the two protagonists that is). Everyone gets in their gravelly grumbles, choking screams, and various ambient squeaks, though I must admit I was never a particular fan of Fizzgig who reminds me somewhat unpleasantly of Gurgi from The Black Cauldron which, now that I think about it, shares a fair amount in common this movie thematically.

I wanna watch that again now.

Anyway, the voice acting is supported by strong sound design which in turn is supported by a memorable soundtrack, which TOGETHER cements some strong moody vibes, particularly at the open and close of the movie.

I could complain about a number of things like the fact that once you get over the cool design of the Garthim, they're very transparently two legged and dragging loads of extras to obscure the fact.

I could also wonder how it is that Aughra suddenly knows who Kira is and that she can summon "animals" to her call. It would make sense for her character if she had ESP or something, but that's never established.

Also, the New Guys at the end, why do they take credit for breaking the crystal, which presumably fractures them into Skeksis, but it's a Skeksi in the shard that breaks it?

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27373&stc=1&d=1475962183

I think the biggest reason this movie freaked me out as a kid was just how macabre it is. The Skeksis are elegently designed, but also intentionally twisted looking, and seeing them weeze over a cute little doughy guy before stuffing him into a chair, clamping his neck in place and forcing him to gaze headlong into the void which DRAINS THE LIFE OUT OF HIM... I dunno, just the idea that they're literally juicing people to make slaves kinda got to me. That's horrific dead stare into your soul doesn't help much either.

I actually really like watching the Skeksis eat too. Yeah, they're eating poor critters, but they're not real and the Skeksis are evil so NOMNOMNOMMNOMNOMNOM

I gotta admit, I'm big on this movie. I've seen it many times now and I can't help but think that I'll want to see it many more, if only for it's genuinely creative twist on a classic tale.

Strongly recommended.

Final Verdict: rating_5 [Friggen' Awesome]

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 11:32 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27386&stc=1&d=1476023424

Repo!: The Genetic Opera

Sci-Fi Horror Musical / English / 2008

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Sci-Fi Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46957).

Repossessment time.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Say that you once bought a heart or new corneas, but somehow never managed to square away your debts,
he won't bother to write or to phone you, he'll just rip the still-beating heart from your CHEST!"

Blood, Bugs, Kissing, Marriage.

In a world ravaged by disease, corporation GeneCo rises out of the ashes, offering life-saving transplants. Winning sway over the people through a combination of surgery-as-fashion propaganda and an addictive painkiller, their monopoly manages to install a legal policy of organ repossession.

This sets up a four-way story involving Shiloh, a motherless and sickly girl, daughter of Nathan, a secret Repoman, whose wife was secretly killed by Rotti, who subjugates both him and "Blind" Mag, all of whom were intimate friends with Shiloh's mother. Rotti also has 3 children that he's ashamed of an the occasionally Narrator, Graverobber, wanders between scenes into offer a bit of worldbuilding and a couple songs.

The story is rather difficult to summarize without explaining all the little details, but it's very digestably presented in brief but solid chunks of exposition, delivered in a comic book format at periodic intervals to cast light on each characters' background as they know it. As we reveal each character, their relationships to each other becomes clearer and the ensuing drama becomes reasonably potent.

Okay, enough of the sterile crap, THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME, or I would really really really like to say that if not for a couple niggles that get to me.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27387&stc=1&d=1476023476

#1 is obviously the gore, there's at least 3 scenes of substantial gore and there's an excessive spot of blood and corpses throughout so if you're squeamish this movie isn't going to go far with you. Frankly, it's just the few instances of disewboweling characters that I really didn't need to see and even the movie's not-entirely-serious undertone which comes out with Rotti's cartoonishly evil kids and silly sound effects does little to cushion scenes of graphically cutting skin and pulling peoples' spines and organs out.

Easily the biggest strike for me.

Following that would have to be two songs which I simply don't like:

Mark It Up, which takes the silly evil to an unpleasant level (singing about stabbing new holes into someone to **** isn't especially tasteful) and really it just feels out of place with the rest of the movie.

Also Seventeen, which despite offering a surprise(ingly appropriate) cameo by Joan Jett, really just encapsulates the biggest issue with the songs, which I believe is Alexa Vega, from Spy Kids fame, who simply lacks the range and... maybe the charisma that made questionable/bad singing easy to overlook in Willy Wonka. She also doesn't have another better singer to hide behind since it's a solo, and when the song revolves entirely about her indignance at being denigrated as a 17-year-old and is just some plot-irrevelent rebellious teen song, I can't help but appreciate that it ends with her getting slapped in the face.

Both of these songs are entirely unnecessary to the story and they don't speak well of the rest of the tracks which are by and large phenomenal. It's a refreshing splash of symphonic metal that kicks in at the 60 second mark, careens through numerous memorable and catchy plot-driven songs all the way into a clever medley that resolves in a piano finish. It's some sick **** that I really can't do justice without a video, so allow me to give you a taste of the most popular of it's songs, Zydrate Anatomy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVTAf4FAXaU

That's some Nine Inch Nails type stuff you got there, and Terrance Zdunich as Graverobber has a surprisingly sexy voice for a career comic book artist.

His pleasing rumbles are echoed by Anthony Head and Paul Sorvino who play Nathan and Rotti respectively, both with some truly rockin' solos including Legal Assassin and Things You See In A Graveyard.

Those aren't even my only favorites either, 21st Century Cure is super fun to sing along to and Chase The Morning is a earwormy-break from the metal format.

I can't help, but think that metalheads and B-movie horror fans are missing out with this genre mashup.

I DON'T much like the horror elements, but I'm partial to the punk aesthetic and I really do think it's an interesting story told through some exceptional music and singers.

I was really disappointed to see people raise up The Devil's Carnival (made by the same guys) above it, when it's music is a far and away inferior to Repo, but either way I find myself in the unique position to say that as much as I enjoyed singing along to Repo!: The Genetic Opera, it only gets a 4 out of 5 from me.

THE SOUNDTRACK, HOWEVER... 5 out of 5. Non-deluxe version.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzgpU25C6fg

CosmicRunaway

10-09-16, 11:43 AM

Other than the aesthetic, Zydrate Anatomy was the only part of that movie I really liked.

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 11:52 AM

Other than the aesthetic, Zydrate Anatomy was the only part of that movie I really liked.
Aw, really? It's hard to pin you down, Cosmic. I can't figure out where you draw your lines.

CosmicRunaway

10-09-16, 12:10 PM

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 02:54 PM

Well I don't like musicals (other than Willy Wonka and Rocky Horror). I watched it because I liked Anthony Stewart Head and the setting/visuals seemed interesting, but other than that one song I didn't particularly enjoy it. I like the idea of it, just not the execution.
Well damn, I'm not sure what I could say to that. I was thinking of that while watching it this time, "I wonder why it is people can't suspend their disbelief for musicals?". Movie musicals are pretty much dependent on the audience's acceptance of that kind of abstraction. It's one of those rules for observing the world, sorta like the transformation sequences in anime, you just accept that what we're seeing isn't beat-for-beat what's happening in reality otherwise the bad guys could interrupt the good guy's flashy intros.

But then I also liked most of the soundtrack most of which was along much of the same lines as Zydrate Anatomy so I dunno.

I get the impression that anyone who sees the kinda things I pick at should be able to get a pretty good idea of what I would like. I still have trouble nailing down your +s and -s.

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 02:55 PM

Rewatched Metropolis. Expanded review here (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=1445692#post1445692).

CosmicRunaway

10-09-16, 04:03 PM

I was thinking of that while watching it this time, "I wonder why it is people can't suspend their disbelief for musicals?". Movie musicals are pretty much dependent on the audience's acceptance of that kind of abstraction.
My biggest problem with most musicals is that I don't like the music, and that's a huge barrier to cross. But even if I don't mind the style of music, if a song serves little purpose other than to kill time, then it really irritates me. Repo! doesn't really have that problem, but I really hated the songs in Sweeney Todd because they'd just repeat a line of dialogue over and over, and it all felt completely pointless.

But then I also liked most of the soundtrack most of which was along much of the same lines as Zydrate Anatomy so I dunno.
There was one other song I didn't mind, but wouldn't say I really liked. I can't remember what it was though. I thought it was something from Blind Mag, but I can't seem to find it (or I like it even less now and thus don't recognize it). The problem was that I didn't like anyone's voice other than Graverobber. I do recall Blind Mag being occasionally decent (which is why I thought the other okay song might've been from her), but overall I wasn't a fan of the vocals.

I still have trouble nailing down your +s and -s.
There are films that I should probably love (based on my other interests) that I actually hate, and films that are nothing like my normal cup of tea that I really enjoy, so I don't even think I could nail down what styles or aspects of filmmaking or storytelling that I'm liable to like or dislike, so maybe don't worry about it too much haha.

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 04:13 PM

My biggest problem with most musicals is that I don't like the music, and that's a huge barrier to cross. But even if I don't mind the style of music, if a song serves little purpose other than to kill time, then it really irritates me. Repo! doesn't really have that problem, but I really hated the songs in Sweeney Todd because they'd just repeat a line of dialogue over and over, and it all felt completely pointless.
Sweeney Todd didn't catch me for a variety of reasons.

There was one other song I didn't mind, but wouldn't say I really liked. I can't remember what it was though. I thought it was something from Blind Mag, but I can't seem to find it (or I like it even less now and thus don't recognize it). The problem was that I didn't like anyone's voice other than Graverobber. I do recall Blind Mag being occasionally decent (which is why I thought the other okay song might've been from her), but overall I wasn't a fan of the vocals.
Well I thought Nathan and Rotti were great, they had a huge degree of range, I wish I could do that. I also have a lot of fun mimicking their growly bits. "It seems the man that cured the globe, cannot stop his own extinction!"

Mag's got two songs, she's got one where she's not even singing in English called Chromaggia I believe and this one I mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkLOWgag06c

There are films that I should probably love (based on my other interests) that I actually hate, and films that are nothing like my normal cup of tea that I really enjoy, so I don't even think I could nail down what styles or aspects of filmmaking or storytelling that I'm liable to like or dislike, so maybe don't worry about it too much haha.
Sounds like INCONSISTENCY to me!

CosmicRunaway

10-09-16, 04:27 PM

Mag's got two songs, she's got one where she's not even singing in English called Chromaggia I believe and this one I mentioned:
I came across Chromaggia before, and that didn't sound right. That one you linked to isn't it either. Maybe I imagined this other song.

Sounds like INCONSISTENCY to me!
Yeah, inconsistent seems like a fairly accurate description of me. :cool:

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 04:29 PM

Yeah, inconsistent seems like a fairly accurate description of me. :cool:
I'm afraid it just wouldn't work out between us. :tsk:

CosmicRunaway

10-09-16, 04:38 PM

I've never really thought about it before (I just said that as a joke), but I do have pretty inconsistent taste in movies and video games. Or I'm just a bad judge of what I would or wouldn't like, which is probably worse.

As an actual person, the best description of me is actually "heartless bastard", based on a recent poll of my friends and family members. That's only partly a joke haha.

Omnizoa

10-09-16, 06:03 PM

I've never really thought about it before (I just said that as a joke), but I do have pretty inconsistent taste in movies and video games. Or I'm just a bad judge of what I would or wouldn't like, which is probably worse.
I try my best to discover and articulate the specific causes for my like or dislike of different things.

As an actual person, the best description of me is actually "heartless bastard", based on a recent poll of my friends and family members. That's only partly a joke haha.
Whereas I make a show of being concerned about morals, but in reality I just want to talk about eating babies.

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 12:44 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27393&stc=1&d=1476071039

The Thirteenth Floor

Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 1999

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
For the Sci-Fi Movie Countdown (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=46957).

I've had The Black Hole on DVD for many years now, but I've never gotten around to watching it. I think I've seen The Thirteen Floor, but I don't remember anything about it. I think The Thirteenth Floor is supposed to be the better film though, so it might be a decent choice.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"They say that deja vu is usually a sign of love-at-first-sight." *smooch*

If I... stab you... do you promise to die?

You know that one plothole in Matrix Reloaded? You know, the really big one? The one so big you gotta be blind not to see it? So blind that your ability to fairly assess narratives goes entirely to **** if you fail to recognize it?

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27391&stc=1&d=1476069436
Yeah, that one.

I'm sure the smart alecs among you are pretty proud of yourselves for having "solved" this scene, "It's just Inception, Omni, it's a Matrix within a Matrix".

Congratulations numbnuts, you just put more thought into the movie than the writers were willing to because your theory is thoroughly ignored throughout the rest of the movie and it's sequel. There's no spinning top this time, folks, no lampshade to hang, no subtlety to unmask, this was a plotbeat with an immediately obvious payoff that never pays off. This is worse than a Sad Chekov, this Deus Ex Machina at it's worst. BOOM, unexplained superpowers, the day is saved.

Now that's pretty bad, but what if I told you that this exact same reveal was performed successfully already 4 YEARS EARLIER?

The Thirteenth Floor is that movie.

The Thirteenth Floor, despite shooting itself in the thigh at the midway point and failing to keep it's mouth shut the second time when the audience can figure the implications of a given scene, does what the The Matrix failed to do by introducing us to simulation, taking us out of that simulation, and then revealing that that too is a simulation.

The rules concerning the simulation in the movie are consistent which is the most important thing this movie needed to get right and it does that to a T, people temporarily inhabit the bodies of AI inhabiting the system and if they die in the system, they're ejected and the AI assumes their real bodies.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27392&stc=1&d=1476071012

There's a missed opportunity to really talk about the ethics of dealing with sentient AI, but that moment when all of the disparate mysteries culminate in a single person in the real world affecting that bi-polar amnesia that has become a gradually established symptom of body occupance only to lead wordlessly to Main Guy mimicking Mr. Bartender's description of the letter and driving off the game map makes for a fantastic twist to the story and really just leaves movies like Matrix Reloaded looking like a whipped bitch by comparison.

WHAT? You couldn't have NOT known better, you just didn't want to alienate your dudebro viewers with more skeptic talk even though that's one of the only things that keeps your movie relevant today.

Now granted, Thirteenth Floor lacks the stylish action, the biopunk aesthetic, and the cyberpocalyptic setting that plays out in Matrix's corner. It's also far weaker when it comes to the dialog and performances, you'll get nothing on the level of Mr. Smith as much as Mr. Smith would probably improve any given movie he appeared in.

Even admitting that though, this was a nice tight little thriller. Not as deep and insightful as something like Looker and not as memorable as The Matrix, but as a demonstration of the skeptically-charged premise, it's a fair recommendation.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 12:49 AM

Which should I watch?
Bound?
~ OR ~
Blue is the Warmest Color?
You decide!
I haven't seen either.

Camo

10-10-16, 01:44 AM

Blue Is The Warmest Colour. Not seen Bound but it looks bad.

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 03:02 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27397&stc=1&d=1476079270

Secret Life of the Human Pups

Documentary / English / 2016

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Sheer sickness of the mind.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Some people drink, there's drugs, I mean, I would never do those things."

AH GAWD ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. ****. The ****. Why ****. ****. ****in'. ****. ****. ****.

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/tumblr_static_filename_640_v2.gif

You know, I was the goober that thought there was some worthwhile discussion to be had over one guy's arrest over possession of cannibal fetish fan-fiction.

THIS earns no such good will from me.

You can... pretty it the **** up with everything from gut-spillin' monologues, soft piano music, and a concerned narrator, but this doesn't rub me any different than that old German ****er who abandoned his wife and kids to live as a 6-year-old girl. This identity **** is gettin' way outta hand.

And you know what, if it was just one or two people who inexplicably had this really bizarre hyper-specific fetish in common, OKAY, FINE, GO BE WEIRDOS TOGETHER, but this entire documentary plays SUPER HARD into the whole "this is a community" thing, and the "this isn't about sex" thing, and the "this will always be a part of my soul" thing and GO **** YOURSELVES.

I imagine it's pretty easy to call me out as the bad guy from an extremely liberal perspective, but it doesn't take a whole lot of reasonable skepticism to start catchin' whiffs off these latex doggy gimp suits.

The documentary is profoundly inconsistent on a variety of points SUCH AS...

Despite Spot's ex explicitly stating that his "transition" is what ended their relationship (which why in the **** would I care about that), they keep flipflopping on the reason as if it's uncertain.

Their emphasis that it's "not about sex" also doesn't stand up to the open admission that it's born out of BDSM and their feeble backpedaling trips over the professed "feelings of pleasure" they get for obeying their master, and need I REALLY draw attention to the guys at the end with buttplugs for tails at the end? Spot even says he didn't win the stupid competition because everyone else was doing raunchy stuff and he wasn't "hard" enough. YEAH, Spot dressing up as a dog is just a gateway to harder roleplays, next time we see him he'll be taking whips as a ponyslave.

I can't even remember what else was inconsistent, I'm trying to block it out. I'm just incredibly suspicious of this instantly platonic defense, you got all these guys, men mostly for some reason (some offhand remark about women beings cats seems to assert gender roles upon the two entirely unrelated species) who belt up to do some of the most shockingly dull activities on the face of the planet like eating without their hands, pressing on squeaky toys, and playing fetch all with the convenient supervision of "handlers" who repeatedly insist that they don't do any of the dog stuff, they just "care" for the dogs.

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27396&stc=1&d=1476079241

I think you mean "ENABLE".

And in the case of the "sexual handlers", literally get off on torturing submissives.

WHY? Why just dogs? What is it about dogs? I didn't see anything demonstrated here that was natural to dogs, and in fact given that dogs are an almost universally domesticated animal EVERY SINGLE THING on display here were simply qualities we, as humans, have ascribed to dogs:

Playing fetch.
Wearing a collar.
Eating out of dish.
Sleeping in a cage.
Walking on a leash.
Obeying commands.
Chewing squeaky toys.
Pissing on lampposts.
Anal ****ing, gay sex isn't even unique to dogs.

These aren't qualities unique to dogs, these are qualities unique to our subjugation of dogs. And given my bleeding heart veganism, I can't help but see this entire fiasco as anything short of the canine equivalent of BLACKFACE.

Except now it's a "MOVEMENT" and a "COMMUNITY" and an "IDENTITY" which "SPEAKS TO PEOPLES' SOULS" and ****.

God, can you imagine if after slavery was abolished African Americans had to deal with people who've passionately assumed the identity of "black slaves" and who insisted on not being allowed to vote, drinking from "black only" water fountains, sitting at the back of the bus, getting roundly beaten by their masters, and forced to pick cotton by hand?
BECAUSE IT TURNS THEM ON???
OR MAKES THEM FEEL SPECIAL?????

The ****in' indignity of it all. That this got a sentimental documentary disgusts me. Bring back Cannibal Cop.

Oh, and now Youtube is recommending me Secret Life of Living Dolls and ****, THANKS. THHHHHHHHANKS.

Final Verdict: rating_1 [Irredeemably Awful]

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 03:04 AM

This review warrants a return to Nagato.

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 03:08 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27398&stc=1&d=1476079663

Meow.

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 03:10 AM

God, can you imagine if after slavery was abolished African Americans had to deal with people who've passionately assumed the identity of "black slaves" and who insisted on not being allowed to vote, drinking from "black only" water fountains, sitting at the back of the bus, getting roundly beaten by their masters, and forced to pick cotton by hand?
BECAUSE IT TURNS THEM ON???

Hilarious.

I would not be surprised if there's someone out there living this way already.

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 03:12 AM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27398&stc=1&d=1476079663

Meow.
You sir, have earned a second rep. +1

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 03:13 AM

You sir, have earned a second rep. +1

Awwwwww. I'm very flattered.

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 03:16 AM

I took a picture of it:

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27400&stc=1&d=1476080203

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 03:25 AM

I took a picture of it:

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27400&stc=1&d=1476080203
I only give out rep when someone really makes me laugh.

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 03:27 AM

I give out rep constantly because I'm just used to it.

Clazor

10-10-16, 01:24 PM

*reads the review*

Chuckle to myself.

*reads the final lines*

Oh, and now Youtube is recommending me Secret Life of Living Dolls and ****, THANKS. THHHHHHHHANKS.

And for the third time (I think you're just trying to kill me now, Omni)

*Two minutes of silent laughter because can't get enough air*

Clazor

10-10-16, 01:28 PM

Also, saw thirteenth floor on tv years ago, but couldn't remember a title. Have been looking for it for at least five years, stumbles over it here...and finds it's out of print. Can't be bought except for at ludicrous prices from a-holes at auction sites. Where did you get a copy Omni?

Gideon58

10-10-16, 02:00 PM

I've never really thought about it before (I just said that as a joke), but I do have pretty inconsistent taste in movies and video games. Or I'm just a bad judge of what I would or wouldn't like, which is probably worse.
[/SIZE]

I've seen what you've been repping on my Mel Brooks list and you definitely have taste where movies are concerned.

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 02:22 PM

Miss Vicky

10-10-16, 02:26 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27397&stc=1&d=1476079270

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27396&stc=1&d=1476079241

This ***** is the stuff of nightmares.

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 04:04 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27406&stc=1&d=1476126205

The Life of Adèle: Chapter 1

Erotic Romantic Drama / French / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"It's me, but it's not me."
"It's a sketch."

THERE, 1 hour, 30 minutes, 4 seconds, that's exactly HALF of the movie and the movie is divided into two chapters so I can review THE FIRST CHAPTER. I DON'T CARE IF THE NEXT SCENE IS HOT LESBIAN SEX, I'M DONE.

This movie...

Dude...

This movie...

Bring back the doggy gimp suits.

Milk, Waffles, Crepes, Gyros, Chicken, Ham, Shrimp, Oysters, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, Kissing, I DON'T GET ANYTHING OUT OF THIS KISSING BUSINESS! STAWP IT!

It's even worse when you attach dramatic weight to it too: Bait & Switch (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchLesbians) kisses Main Girl, Main Girl kisses her back, Bait & Switch says she wasn't serious, Main Girl cries.

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/chandler-bing-friends-joey-tribbiani.gif

And look, it's not like I don't know what they're trying to do here, they're trying to portray angst with some subtlety. Main Girl is plagued by the gay dreams and feels isolated thanks to a combination of blowing off the one guy who liked her (pun acknowledged) and social stigma, so when a random girl says she thinks she's really cute she goes all stupid and throws herself at her.

I get that, 'cept I don't get that.

I don't like this character. That behavior does not reflect well on her and what behavior that's already been assigned to her I don't like.

She's in high school still yet she smokes, boozes, eats her feelings, ****s guys after one day (awesome job getting pregnant dipshit), visits bars, ****s girls after one day, is just generally a wet towel of a person, and has some of the most intellectually fulfilling dialog I've ever heard:

Philosopher, prophet, same thing.Where the **** are you learning that ********? OH YEAH, her teachers:

What we have here is a perfect example of tragedy. Tragedy is the unavoidable. It's what we cannot escape no matter what. It concerns eternity. It concerns what is timeless. It concerns the mechanism, the essence, of mankind.WHAT ARE YOU ON, LADY???

We're just tryin' to read a book here, why do pretentious filmmakers always gotta get all existentialist on us? It's fricken' dumb! NOTHING you are saying tracks reality in the slightest!

You're better off tellin' all these kids they got **** friends, cause save for the one Gay Guy ('cause all straight kids are evil, you see), Main Girl's friends are just THE WORST kind of people.

"Did you have sex?" :)

"What?"

"You had sex." ;)

"What? No."

"I can smell it on you." :)

"Why are you smelling me?"

"She ****ed, I can smell it." :D

"We didn't have sex alright? It was just an afternoon date."

"Afternoon sex?" :)

"NO."

"I don't believe you." :nope:

"Whether you believe me or not, doesn't change facts."

"I saw you walkin' with that blue-haired girl. Kinda dyke-y, huh? You **** her?" :indifferent:

"No, I didn't."

"Are you a lesbian?" :|

"No."

"You're a lesbian." :|

"Why are you even asking?"

"You've slept naked in my bed, you like pussy and asses DON'T YOU!?" :mad:

God in heaven, I ask you grant me a bazooka with which to punch a gory hole in these invasive prying catty bitches' faces.

Not like they weren't transparent unlikable to begin with, as soon as the movie drops us in to their conversation and they're poking and POKING AND POKING at Main Girl to shack up with Nearest Penis I already knew I wasn't going to like these characters.

On would hope that blue-haired "Bull Dyke" would offer an appreciable character to the proceedings, BUT NO, she's nearly a caricature. She's an artist who plays way too ******* coy to serve as anything other than the viewer surrogate's ideal lesbian fantasy. She's not even likable and there's no given reason why she, with nothing in common with Main Girl (save an interest in rugmunching), even likes her beyond some shallow plot to "break in the virgin".

And that DIALOG reaches it's zenith.

I love it. I eat all the skins. Rinds too. As a kid I even ate my own scabs. I loved them.You're funny. So you're really into eating.You can't imagine. I eat everything. I could eat nonstop all day. It's scary. Even when I'm full. Everything but shellfish.Really? That's what I like most. I love oyster.Really? The texture alone grosses me out.That's the best part.They're like little snotballs. Big snotballs.They remind me of something else. *sex scene*That was supposed to be romantic.

SLAY ME NOW I CAN'T GO ON.

*1 gay pride parade later*

*60 seconds of continuous facesucking in the park later*

*at the oyster dinner with Bull Dyke's parents*

It's alive.It has to be alive. Don't eat it otherwise.

Well that was HELLACIOUS.

Couldn't possibly get worse, BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!

The film generated controversy upon its premiere at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and before its release. Much of the controversy was centred around claims of poor working conditions on set by the crew and the lead actresses, and also the film's raw depiction of sexuality.
Yes, this movie was TOO SEXY, that was it's problem.

Themes and interpretations
Oh, this is gonna be gold.

Lesbian sexuality is one of the strongest themes of the film, as the narrative deals mainly with Adele’s exploration of her identity in this context.
I hate that word. It's a dirty word. You dirtied it. Now they're gonna remake The Bourne Identity and Jason's gonna find out he's a puppy trapped in a man's body.

However, the film's treatment of lesbian sexuality has been questioned by academics, due to its being directed from a straight, male perspective.
Not that that IN ANY WAY should discredit the movie, but it's pretty obvious that this is pretty underbaked for such an overdone concept.

One recurring thematic element addressed by critics and audiences is the division of social class...

The reference to social class is juxtaposed between the two dinner table scenes in the film, with Adèle's conservative middle-class family engaging in discussion over comparatively banal subjects to Emma's more open-minded upper-middle-class family, who focus their discussion primarily on more existential matters
They're both fricken' boring. Just soft talking about NOTHING. Nothing consequential or literal nothingness, either way it's still boring and it's not "social class".

The film portrays Adele and Emma's relationship with an overarching sense of realism.
They really are dull ****s.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour is also filled with visual symbolism.
Oh god...

For Adèle, blue represents an envoy of curiosity, ecstasy, love and ultimately, sadness.
It's almost as if you can assign any color any meaning without any degree of consistency or inferrable explanation. This is Schindler's List all over again! HOW IS THE COLOR RED SUPPOSED TO TELL ME TO DESTROY TRAINS?????

Kechiche explores how food can evoke varying levels of symbolism
DONE.

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 90% based on 167 reviews and an average score of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus is: "Raw, honest, powerfully acted, and deliciously intense, Blue Is the Warmest Colour offers some of modern cinema's most elegantly composed, emotionally absorbing drama."Eat a dick.

Final Verdict: rating_1 [Irredeemably Awful]

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 04:35 PM

Which should I watch?
Near Dark?
~ OR ~
An American Werewolf in London?
You decide!
I haven't seen either.

Sexy Celebrity

10-10-16, 04:38 PM

I have to say I'd rather read your Near Dark review. I think it's an overrated movie.

Clazor

10-10-16, 04:57 PM

You can watch it on Youtube (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Td2AYIFIiw).

Thank you! I remember liking it, so I really wanted to see it for the Sci-fi top 100. Will ad it to my ever growing list

Omnizoa

10-10-16, 08:10 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27409&stc=1&d=1476140992

Holy Motors

Art / French / 2012

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been on my watchlist for a good while.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Dogs, Apes, Creme Puffs.

*open mouth gibbering* Duh duh duh duh duh huhwut?

What in the HELL did I just watch? This sets a new standard for whatthe****ery. This is like Eraserhead, if Eraserhead was interesting.

This is probably the weirdest fricken' movie I've ever seen in my life.

Guy wakes up to find a movie theater hidden in his wall, we never see the screen.

Cut to Main Guy in a limo who gets driven around to different "appointments" where each time he exits the vehicle in a different disguise and pretends to be someone pre-established in that setting such as an old beggar, a tantric mocap actor, some crazy sewer leprachaun-type dude (soak up all that full frontal nudity), the husband to a family of apes, I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

As the movie goes along it drip-feeds the very smallest of clues as to what's going on when Main Guy meets and kills his multiple doppelgangers, miraculously survives gunshot wounds, various people around him seem to be trying not to break the fourth wall, we talk about performing in front of cameras that have become too small to see if they exist at all, and you get to wondering if we're watching some whacked out version of The Truman Show, but hey, we'll find out soon enough given that we are in fact learning, albeit slowly, what's going on.

The Limo Driver drops Main Guy off with a family of apes (because seriously, WTF) and drives off to a facility labeled "Holy Motors". A-ha! So HERE is where we're gonna learn what this big weird thing is all about!

Limo Driver parks, puts on a mask she pulls out of her ass, and walks away at which point all of the limos in the garage start WHISPERING TO EACH OTHER.

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/wtf.gif

WHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT THE FUG.

All we learn from this scene is that the limos are invisible. Credits.

What. The. BABALOOMALOTKAPOWSKAWTIZSHLIEZAH!!

Let's look for an explanation online or something, ah, here's an interview of the creator:

It's no secret that you aren't crazy about doing interviews and especially loathe being asked to interpret your work. But "Holy Motors" is a movie that forces people to try to understand it.

I mostly don't submit to talking about my work because I would like another talk about real life. I don't think men were meant to be interviewed.
*blink* :shifty: DUHHH... what would you suggest be interviewed? Women? Elephants? Plants? Do you just disapprove of interviews in general? Why? That answer doesn't make any sense.

But men have been talking about art ever since they created it.

Men talk about art, and artists make art, but should artists talk? *eye twitch* ...you're differentiating men and artists... men can be artists... artists are implicitly "men"... are you contrasting talking artists with talking men? Are you suggesting that it's only an artists's business to make art, not talk about it? If the question is if they "should" that's clearly an unwarranted imposition.

You know, we're here to ask if you can contribute anything that could make your movie worth a damn, but I can already see this isn't going anywhere.

When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and that I knew how to make films, but I had no proof. I was lucky to find people who believed in me. Very few filmmakers are good at talking about their work, very few artists are good at talking about their work.
Wow, so... outright lying that you're competent in the industry and then generalizing about people who actually are. And they do a better job explaining their intentions behind different aspects of their movies than you're doing now.

Still, it's impossible not to feel the need to interpret "Holy Motors" and get the sense that it's being fueled by big ideas. When you watch it, are there ideas that speak to you that you feel are worthy of analysis?

I spent so little time imagining the film. The whole thing took two weeks. It was a race. I didn't watch my dailies, I didn't read exactly what I was doing. I only went over it at the editing table.
You're saying this movie was rushed???

No. I just thought, "There's really nothing I can do right now."
You spitballed this entire project. Can't say I'm the least bit surprised.

Although I don't make films for anybody, I do make films, therefore I do make them for someone: I make them for the dead. But then I show them to living people that I start to think about while I'm editing — who'll watch them? So I start to get more reflexive at the editing table. Why did I imagine this science-fiction word? I did invent a genre that doesn't exist. But I don't have the real answers.
This man is insane.

But what does the totality of the film say to you?

In this world I invented, it's a way of telling the experience of a life without using a classical narrative, without using flashbacks. It's trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day.
The whole range of human experience includes talking cars, invincibility, and a caveman who kidnaps models to eat their hair?

I don't know, I'm not a cinephile.

I can't say I know much about any genre in particular.

It's hard to call myself a filmmaker.
Ah, but you're an "artist", GOTCHA.

Well, there you have it. This movie was just a cluster**** of ideas thrown together in under a month.

At least it was an interesting cluster****.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

10-11-16, 08:16 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27424&stc=1&d=1476225852

Near Dark

Horror Drama / English / 1987

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I have to say I'd rather read your Near Dark review. I think it's an overrated movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"We keep odd hours."

Mosquitoes, Horses, Cows, Milk, Ice Cream, Steak, Chocolate Bars, Kisses.

When the movie opened up to "co-written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow", I was optimistic. I liked Point Break, I liked Hurt Locker, and I liked Strange Days, I was pretty confident that this female written vampire story would be far and away superior to Twilight at the very least.
And it's true, Twilight's got nothing on this movie, but I was pretty disappointed with it overall.

Firstly we set up an Overnight Romance between an ironically predatory Main Guy and secret Vampire Main Girl before he gets bit and we blunder headfirst into the age-old problem: Vampire Syndrome or what I think I'm going to start calling Vampire Hedonism. You can't make a protagonist likable if they prey on innocent people.

Fortunately this movie avoids total amorality by not insisting that Main Guy's new condition actually warrants killing and he refuses to kill at every opportunity, however we fall way short of the likes of Blade and Vampire Hunter D when he still thinks he can get in good with his confusing new vampire clan just by helping out and leeching on the blood they steal from others.

What we have is not a perpetrator, but an enabler, and that's hardly an improvement.

He also fails to establish any sort of cognitive dissonance between the killing he doesn't want to be a part of and Main Girl who's been doing this for years. That she kills people or even helps killing people never infiltrates his radar, even when he's demonstrably cured of vampirism by the almost insultingly simple solution of a transfusion, she still backs out, apparently preferring the company of killer maniacs over the virtuous Love Interest.

Why did you leave?
Dude has a little sister and dad he wants to see again, you socially stunted shrew.

What I don't get is how or why undead Bill Paxton (whose easily the best part of the movie) and his little crew are SO ******* OBSESSED with getting back at him for leaving.

WHY IN THE **** did they need him anyway?

He saw their faces? SO WHAT? Nearly everyone you meet you kill anyway, you change vehicles every day, Main Guy's been living peacefully alone on a farm for days and there's no evidence that the police have been after you and yet these guys literally kill themselves in attempt to get at him. Where's the cost/benefit analysis in this stupidity? How did he cross them?

This on top of baffling plotbeats like when Main Guy takes a bus home and turns around to go back to the vampires for no ****ing reason as well as just general contrivances like broad daylight popping right the **** out of nowhere don't help carry what is otherwise a very tired and uninspired love story involving redneck vampire ********.

At the very least it kept me engaged, again, Paxton was fun and the effects used were kinda neat, but this movie's already got one foot in the grave.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

10-11-16, 08:36 PM

Which should I watch?
Gothika?
~ OR ~
Girl, Interrupted?
You decide!
I haven't seen either.

Sexy Celebrity

10-11-16, 10:57 PM

I haven't seen Gothika. I'm not really interested in seeing Girl, Interrupted again.

Near Dark made the '80s Countdown. I hadn't really heard of it until then. I was very irked that it made the list -- over so many other great '80s horror movies. Very irked after I actually saw the movie. For some reason, these people have a Kathryn Bigelow fixation. I didn't understand why Point Break made the '90s list. I liked that movie more than Near Dark, after I watched that one after the '90s Countdown, but still.

Omnizoa

10-12-16, 11:46 PM

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h33/RegalNightmare123/Tifa.gif

Dead Fantasy

Martial Arts Fantasy Action / English-Japanese / 2007

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I noticed it's on TMDb and I haven't actually seen all of it. Way past time to rectify that.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

There's this idea called "remix culture" wherein it's considered generally acceptable to take other peoples' ideas, change them, or mix them together, to produce something new, different, or even better.

This says nothing of the problems inherent to charging people for such experiences, given that the brunt of work can be absorbed by a creator, and the brunt of the profits absorbed by a remixer, but in a free and open melting pot of ideas, I wholly and sincerely support remix culture, especially in an era in which an industry like video games is utterly PLAGUED by developers poaching consumers for pre-orders and then shoving an utterly garbage product full of lies out the door, padded with paywalls, and bandaged with Day 1 Patches.

This is a world in which a developer will sink millions of dollars into making and selling a product that is fundamentally broken if not for that one single person who hacks their game and redistributes a copy that they managed to fix in a matter of hours.

It's ILLEGAL, but it's DAMN WELL JUSTIFIED.

Take this for instance, EA shoves out SimCity 2013, insists that it can ONLY run online, that it's so designed that it's literally inextricable from being played online, it's just won't work otherwise. COMPLETE ****ING LIE as it turns out (http://www.geek.com/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-1542922/).

And in that vein I find no end to difficulty in rationalizing companies like Nintendo who pull copyright and monetize or outright take down peoples' videos just for talking about their games, even when they have nothing but good things to say about them, literally promoting their product (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz09W2Z6OOU).

You know, if you're gonna take your ideas and selfishly squirrel them away into a vault somewhere to rot for decades on end, I don't feel too bad about stealing them.

And so here we have Monty Oum, an incorrigible insomniac geek animator who, after making a splash with epic crossover fight animation Haloid (Halo vs Metroid), he made Dead Fantasy, which is a series of videos in which a select cast of Dead or Alive characters battle it out against a select cast of Final Fantasy characters.

Why?

Because why the **** not?

These videos, perhaps more than any other, seem to really reflect Monty's interests and the combination of the complex and fast-paced fighting of Dead or Alive with the superhero-level abilities of Final Fantasy makes it more than a treat to anyone whose enjoyed either series, or simply likes fight animations along the lines of old school web classics like Xiao Xiao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao_Xiao) (god, those were the days...).

There are a LOT of creative liberties taken with the source material and it certainly doesn't stay contained to the two eponymous franchises, but it's divided into 6 parts, so let's just get into it.

Part 1 (4 out of 5):
The scene opens up to an old ruin somewhere where X-2 Yuna encounters Kasumi and they start fighting. Why? I believe you have this confused for an actual plot, we're here for the fighting, son.

And the fighting's pretty good, especially given that X-2 Rikku and Ayane swing in the crank up the action. All of the characters, with limited exception, have a fairly specific range of abilities. Everyone is circumstantially limited to the creative boundaries that their personal weapon(s) allows; Yuna dual wields pistols for gun-fu (never reloading unlike what we saw in Haloid), Rikku is armed with unique daggers, Kasumi has a katana, and Ayane uses a... "two-sided beam staff", but in addition, Yuna and Kasumi can be timely use of a charge shot and short range teleport respectively which spices things up while still keeping in line with their characters.

It's all pretty well done with a lot of complex character intermingling, environmental traversal and destruction and it all ultimately ends with a tease of Advent Children's Tifa stocked up to the brim with materia (you're gonna become increasingly confused at this point if you don't know what that is).

I will say that this part suffers from occasionally cracked momentum between shots, but most of all it plays at an unfortunately safe speed, this seems like the speed it would play it at if you were demoing it in the client window, so it's not quite hit it's pace.

Part 2 (5 out of 5):
THIS is where Dead Fantasy hits it's pace.

Corrected for speed and featuring an edit of Tokyo Drift by Brian Tyler, it just gets sick. Tifa is immediately the most OP character on site, but she's paired with Hitomi who lacks her super powers, but matches her blows. FF team, now outside and on the top of the ruin (which I'm guessing is from a game I just don't recognize) are just wrecking face, but when Ayane is cooperatively smuggled away to safely ninjitsu the **** out of the building (which some neat deterrence thanks to Kasumi's teleport) resulting in what I think is the Crowing Moment of Awesome when the battle is taken vertically as all 6 characters battle it out while sliding down the side of the ruin at terminal velocity.

Tifa whips out numerous powers including Firaga, Blizzaga, Stop, Thundaga, Gravity, Hastega, ALL of which are recurring FF abilities (apparently tied to her materia) and after Rachel from Ninja Gaiden comes out of nowhere with a battleaxe to shift the battlefield once again to a platform on a river of lava, Tifa even gets an awesome Drunken Master moment when Yuna tries to recoup her with a couple potions.

The insanity doesn't end and I do think the excitement wanes at this point when they're cast off into the lava and saved by Rinoa (making that 3 different Final Fantasy games we're drawing from), decked out in angel wings and two of the most bizarre weapons in imagination alongside Kairi from Kingdom Hearts armed with keyblades, which are also incredibly bizarre weapons.

There's a pretty cool tornado fight to follow that unfairly promises resolution in the form of multiple one-on-one showdowns, but I think I should mention at this point that all of the characters are a collection of directly ripped character models (as in DOA) or made-from-scrap replicas (as in Tifa and Kairi). There's a plain effort to make them appear consistent with one another, but it's also noticeable that some of the characters just don't actually have appropriate rippable 3D character models.

It's distracting, but it's one of pitifully few nitpicks I won't even bother bringing up. This was friggen' cool. If the rest of the videos maintained this peak it' be an easy 5 out of 5, but their quality seems to vary experimentally.

Part 3 (4 out of 5):
Tifa duels it out with Hitomi in this one alone and it seems like an unfair fight given Tifa's materia advantage, but as demonstrated, the DOA characters have been massively beefed up to be a fair contest.

Opening, excellently, to Devils Never Cry (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GZUN89RaP60) from Devil May Cry 3 (indicating yet another source of badass inspiration, GO PLAY THAT GAME) the two throwdown in a burning building and when Hitomi gets blinded by blood, she goes all Sight Unseeing on us and manages to punch the materia out of Tifa, steal them, and turn them back on her.

There's no indication that this is ever possible, but whatever, it makes the fight way more interesting and actually ends with Tifa losing, surprisingly.

Part 4 (3 out of 5):
Following the trend that will end, X-2 Yuna fights Kasumi who's backed a legion of Alpha clones which triggers her to revert back to X and summon the big 5 summons from that game to wreck face, Valefor, Ifrit, Ixion, Shiva, and Bahamut (love Bahamut, too bad he gets zerged right away). It quickly builds up to the close and personal showdown Summoner Yuna isn't suited for when CLOUD kicks in...

...and it just ends.

WTF!? You introduced Cloud and he only gets a single swing in? That's it!?

This one was really short, and it's way overly dramatic intro actually highlights a somewhat annoying attempt to mimic Kingdom Hearts' intros which just don't work in this context. Kingdom Hearts has always been partly metaphorical, but even then it wouldn't pull that stuff in the middle of a story, especially one without any regular dialog.

Helena shows up in the previous part too, but her purpose seems purely to serve as some voiceless supporting character involved in the machinations contriving the battle. This is just insinuating a narrative without actually writing one.

Part 5 (4 out of 5):
Things change up again when we return to Tifa, now materia-less as she's dogged by Hayate and what must be some incredibly incompetent ninja (they circle around from behind her just to approach her from where she can see them).

Unlike the rest of the series which is as bloodless as Soul Calibur (which may well have inspired the staff sequence in this part), this one gets bloody as hell as Tifa dukes it out in a garage going full-on Boromir, and dismembering ninjas with the swords she pulls out of herself.

It was cool, Monty obviously really likes Tifa, but I will admit that I thought the train was a wasted opportunity and I am utterly baffled why it is that Hitomi, who had just previously tried to kill her, slaps Hayate for almost doing so.

Part 6 (4 out of 5):
I don't think this is even an official Part 6, but an similar-in-length teaser for the next part of the series. It features Ryu and Momiji from Ninja Gaiden turning on Kairi who inexplicably transforms into... Namine? And Namine's got a cast of keyblades that she can manipulate almost identically to a Murkamuo Unit from BlazBlue (all kinds of cross-references!) save her inexplicable ability to spam lasers and turn the into guns (an idea which Square Enix is now stealing BACK from Monty).

It's easily the most visually impressive of the series and the sudden reveal of Vincent and abrupt cliffhanger ending lends the series back to history.

Some compilations of Monty's Dead Fantasy series on Youtube include a hilariously abrupt transition to some of his unrelated dance animation videos which include many of the same characters that appeared here just shaking booty to a song.

I think it's actually very appropriate in a way given how clearly it telegraphs Monty's interests.

Hyper intense and creatively complex fight sequences are obviously a huge interest of his, and it's the defining recurrent theme across all of his major work, but two other interests I can't help but recognize and share with him is his appreciation for syncronizing music with action, and body art, specifically the attractive ways in which the human body can be animated.

Now, you could just look at his videos and conclude that this is just some geek who found his favorite video game characters, stuck them in provocative outfits and had them shake their ass cause it turns him on (and I won't even try to argue that that wasn't a contributing factor), but it really doesn't seem that way to me. I truly believe that there's an element to movement that he finds enjoyable, because I find it enjoyable too, it's that really difficult to describe sense of... "kineasthetics".

That moment in Part 2 where time slows down, the camera zooms in, the frame lightly vibrates, and Ayane drives her fist into the ground just as the music climaxes, or that moment when Tifa takes Ayane aside in profile and rhymthically juggles her into the air with a flurry of kicks like an anime fighting game. It's really satisfying and I honestly don't think dancing is that far off, it's why I really like watching martial arts movies that incorporate breakdancing like Raging Phoenix, THAT'S JUST SO PERFECT!

So you can brush it aside as fan fetishism if you want, but I think it's very telling how big a fan of Dance Dance Revolution Monty Oum actually was (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzxjxGUIA0) in real life.

And yes, I said WAS, because if you're not aware, after the amazing work he did on Haloid and Dead Fantasy, he was hired to do action sequences for Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue series and after earning a name for himself professionally he was encouraged to finally put forward his own original web series RWBY, which continued to climb in quality and popularity into it's 3rd season before he suddenly died at the young age of 33 from a severe allergic reaction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SACWLDJkY4U

Celebrity obituaries get regular threads on these boards, but if there's any creator I've been genuinely sad to hear died, it's little-known Monty because he was a honest inspiration to me and I'd have watched anything if his name was on it. :(

Such an promising career cut mercilessly short. If you haven't seen Dead Fantasy, do yourself a favor and watch Part 2 here (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c-rTM9qOasQ).

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]
Final Verdict (Part 2): [Friggen' Awesome]

Omnizoa

10-24-16, 10:04 PM

Rewatched Fury Road. Updated review heaw (http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=1468630#post1468630).

edarsenal

11-18-16, 11:56 PM

http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=27406&stc=1&d=1476126205

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 90% based on 167 reviews and an average score of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus is: "Raw, honest, powerfully acted, and deliciously intense, Blue Is the Warmest Colour offers some of modern cinema's most elegantly composed, emotionally absorbing drama."

Eat a dick.

After going so hilariously ape ***** crazy at how much you hated this movie, THIS is such a fantastic ending and final insult on SO many levels!

I'll be back to read the other reviews

Omnizoa

03-22-17, 11:01 AM

Wanting to do some movies again, trying to get some tech stuff sorted.

Omnizoa

03-24-17, 02:56 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29510&stc=1&d=1490374663

The Look of Silence

Documentary / Indonesian / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It was recommended as part of an interview with the director in one of Sam Harris's podcasts.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Past is past."

Chickens, Ducks, something else, I forget.

The Look of Silence is the aptly titled follow-up documentary to The Act of Killing, which I haven't seen. Both are centered around a different person, in this case 44-year-old Adi, as they one-by-one confront the "heroes" of the Indonesian military coup of 1965-66.

At the time, the military overthrew the government and enacted a campaign of slaughter in the name of eradicating "communists" which were thought to be guilty of irreligion and sleeping with each others' wives (fairly low bar for evil here, all things considered). Wikipedia puts the death toll between half a million to a million or more dead, with the movie stating around 500 to 600 being outright executions taking place at what it referred to as "Snake River". Adi's older brother, Ramli (whose deafblind father is now so old he can't remember), was one of the victims at Snake River.

Today, it is relatively peaceful, the old guard of the military are now retired heroes and the government ensures that children are taught as much in school, that the communists were so evil as to pluck out your eyes if you disagreed with them. In the spirit of reconciliation and returning a degree of truth and regret to these old men, Adi visits them one by one, anonymously, and under the ruse of a glasses salesman, to ask them questions.

The responses are mixed, self-contradictory, and thematic consistent.

Those who are not plainly disturbed by the questions are forthright if not enthusiastic of explaining in detail or even re-enacting the method of killing "communists", how it was all in defense of the state, how you had to do what you were told, and how they lead people down a bloody path to Snake River where they gruesomely killed them and dumped their bodies.

Two of them re-enact in video, specifically Ramli's death, who after being stabbed repeatedly, escaped home only to be recaptured by the military to "take him to the hospital" which meant dragging him to the river, slashing his throat, spilling his intestines, and finally castrating him before dumping him into a river which would become so polluted with dead bodies that people wouldn't even fish in it anymore.

Adi describing how his older brother was killed to various members of the death squad including it's leader, it's commander, and the legislature that covered it up all get a somewhat similar response:

"You can only cut humans once." *throat slit motion*

"But, that woman you described, whose breast you cut off, that was two cuts?"

"Two cuts yeah, well they were bad people, bad people you can hack to pieces."

"But Islam is against killing."

"Yeah, Islam is against killing, Muhammad never killed... but killing your enemies is okay. Why so many questions? You ask too many deep questions. Too deep. Always politics. I don't like talking about politics. Everything is safe now. Past is past. Luckily I drank blood so I won't go crazy."

"Past is past" is the most common excuse to get out of the conversation, but "politics" is as well which the legislator describes as something to the effect of "doing what is necessary to achieve your ideal" before contradicting himself by saying he never intimidates his voters immediately before threatening Adi with a repeat of history.

The main commander himself, after backpedaling and outright denying credit for the murders, in turn accuses Adi of being a secret communist. "America taught us to hate communists."

Not before it ends do we see the news broken to several of the children of said military members who react with the ever-present and awkward "look of silence" the movie is titled for.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29511&d=1490374675

My thoughts on the movie are 2-fold:

First, it's not quite as was promised. As a sociological phenomenon it's certainly interesting. Once-sung heroes, now disarmed in an era of peace, are confronted with the crimes of their past and asked to look past the rose-colored glasses which have worn into their face with age. Those who are not blatantly detached from the tone of the ideas they're discussing are visibly agitated and uncomfortable by the questions. There's a lot of nervous twitching. But alas, little to nothing appears to come from the movie and the creators themselves do little else but ask what happened, say what happened, and wonder aloud if there are regrets to be had. None are had, and I was disappointed that the moral quandary wasn't explored in the movie, let alone as deeply as it was in the podcast (https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/the-moral-gaze-a-conversation-with-joshua-oppenheimer).

Secondly, whereas others may feel intellectually stimulated by the movie audibly absent of these ideas, I was left bored. There's very little interconnecting the majority of the conversations, and it has the style of presentation where it would rather show you a landscape shot or an extreme close-up of something completely unrelated to the tune of dead silence before cutting to another conversation or some other innocuous interaction intended, I would assume, to contrast with it's mood.

I dunno, it was hardly the striking contrast you got with Denethor during the siege of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings, it's all just talking after the fact. The conversations can get a little tense, but there's nothing in the way of actual physical intimidation to really set the stakes against Adi, nothing beyond a whisper of the idea that they might poison him with a drink or want to know where he's from so they can find out where he lives.

It was pretty dull. I've seen better documentaries. There's certainly an interesting discussion to be had on the topic, it's just not in this movie.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

03-24-17, 05:02 PM

Rewatched Above The Law (not that one, the other one). You can find my revised thoughts right dippity-do-diddly here (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=1585091#post1585091).

Omnizoa

03-25-17, 09:19 AM

Tiebreaker, anyone?
Which should I watch?
Gothika?
~ OR ~
Girl, Interrupted?
You decide!
I haven't seen either.

Omnizoa

03-26-17, 09:20 AM

29537

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Fantasy Comedy / English / 1975

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
'Tis a silly place.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"See the loveli lakes
The wonderful telephone system
And mani interesting furry animals
Including the majestik moose"

This movie is terrible.

We apologize for the fault in the review. Those responsible have been sacked.

This movie is terrible to review.

We apologize again for the fault in the review. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.

This movie is terrible to review because I've seen it so many times that other people have seen it so many times that to judge it and it's use of comedy objectively is difficult. The movie itself has become a joke.

29535

Not just around D&D tables, but elsewhere as well, it's the first thing people think of when someone says "Monty Python" and the same goes for me, even though I personally prefer And Now For Something Completely Different and have enjoyed The Meaning of Life in the same vein.

Arthurian Legend is now permanently tainted by this wave of pop culture, but as much as I may like the old stories, I can hardly complain too much, The Holy Grail is to comedy what I think Star Wars is to Sci-Fi.

As I explained in my review of Monty Python's previous movie (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1537932-monty-pythons-and-now-for-something-completely-different.html), the whole "British Humor" argument doesn't make any ******* sense, ESPECIALLY when this movie is set IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. What does this appeal to some ridiculous stereotypes people have in their head about how British people are always running around with swords and ****? No, I think there's a pretty obvious contrast between the two movies that can explain the void in popularity.

1.) It wasn't produced by Playboy, which restricted it's availability and creative license.

2.) It has a singular theme, not being a mishmash of television sketches better serves the medium of movies.

It's still has the same sort of jokes, but provided a bigger audience and the fact that it was created from the ground up to serve an actual story, introduced to that audience in chunks of increasing absurdity, it's no surprise that more people gravitate towards it.

Also Medieval Europe is a cool period in history.

Anyway, as far as the comedy is concerned, I felt that Holy Grail verged on being slightly cruder than ANFSCD. They deliberately try to show filthiness and it doesn't shy away from the low-brow when it comes to the "French taunting" and eventual dumping of feces on people.

Granting that, it's never graphic, even what I would otherwise condemn as Blood Geysers are permissible because the movie is a comedy and every sequence involving them are deliberately and ridiculously fake.

29534

That much I can give a pass, and I can even give a pass to the regular animal abuse jokes which range from not having enough budget to afford horses so they clack coconuts together and mimic riding everywhere to beating an obviously fake cat against a wall because that serves some sort of ambiguous purpose to peasants (why are they out in a field collecting mud slop?)

I spotted Chickens, Ducks, Doves, a Cow, a Horse (they could afford a single horse for approximately 1 second of footage apparently), a Rabbit, and of course a [probably real] Herring. Putting aside, once again, the probably endless amount of actual fur and leather that went into costume design, this movie is surprisingly below-par when it comes to trashing animals in movies. I thought it would be higher, but they often don't appear or are implied to exist. The scene in which animals like a cow and sheep are thrown wholesale over the castle wall down at Arthur and his knights are clearly fake mock-ups, but there are clearly real chickens or ducks to help sell the idea.

This displeases me.

This rewatch I also paid fairly close attention to the jokes in general, and a few of them were pretty dumb. Arthur confusing the number 3 with 5 is just part of some nonsensical overarching gag of misunderstanding each other for no explicable reason. The entire scene in which Swamp Castle King has to explain to his guards how guarding a room works is really only amusing with respect to the degree to which it's taken, there's really no good reason for it, Guy A says one thing, Guy B repeats same thing back only wrong. That's not funny and there's really no justification for it, it's not like what Guy A says could be comedically misinterpreted for the purpose of some sort of word game like you'd see left and right in the movie, Clue, it's just nonsense for nonsense sake.

...and that's fine, I just... would prefer funnier jokes.

Not that it doesn't deliver of course, the "Not Quite Dead" running gag does wane a bit by the end, but it's certainly charming and genuinely well acted. To say nothing of the absolute laundry list of funny quotes starting with the opening credits of the movie.

But I guess that's also sort of the problem with reviewing something you've already watched to death. I never really got a kick out of the anti-climax ending, but then I didn't even laugh at any part of the movie just cause I could probably parrot it word for word. Guess you could chalk that up to being memorable at the very least.

I still enjoy the movie, I think it's great. And in some ways I do think it's an improvement over the first (fewer WTF Terry Gilliam animations for one).

I give it a 4 out of 5, but it certainly earns a place amidst my personal collection, if for nothing else but for how it's inspired my own sense of humor.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

CosmicRunaway

03-26-17, 12:34 PM

Arthur confusing the number 3 with 5 is just part of some nonsensical overarching gag of misunderstanding each other for no explicable reason.
I actually get 3s and 5s mixed up sometimes, but only because if I'm writing quickly, they somehow end up looking very similar. As does the letter S.

Omnizoa

03-26-17, 12:44 PM

I actually get 3s and 5s mixed up sometimes, but only because if I'm writing quickly, they somehow end up looking very similar. As does the letter S.
I've said "Green" when I've meant "Orange" for years. No idea why.

Ms. M

03-26-17, 12:48 PM

Tiebreaker, anyone?

Let me help You... Both! Honesty. Such a choise, isn't choise at all.

Omnizoa

03-26-17, 12:58 PM

Let me help You... Both! Honesty. Such a choise, isn't choise at all.
No one can watch every movie. Every opportunity taken is an opportunity lost.

Ms. M

03-26-17, 01:03 PM

No one can watch every movie. Every opportunity taken is an opportunity lost.

That's true:(, but sometimes it's impossible to choose.

Omnizoa

03-27-17, 10:05 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29556&stc=1&d=1490616553

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Horror Comedy Musical / English / 1975

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been long on my watchlist, plus certain people around here seem to think I'd have an affinity for it. I wonder why.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Come up to lab, see what's on the slab."

Kissing, Marriage, Meat Slab.

This was way more head****ery than I was prepared for. I probably underestimated the sort of source material they were going out of their way to parody here, but taking it for what it is, I'm pretty underwhelmed.

There are moments throughout where I feel like I get what they were going for (such as when Frank N' Furter elucidates the purpose of Rocky Horror in song), but then there are others that just completely lose me (like the end when Frank N' Furter de-petrifies everybody into white face, corsets, and fishnet garters to perform a song everybody just goes with for some reason).

Since his youth, O'Brien had loved science fiction and B horror movies. He wanted to combine elements of the unintentional humour of B horror movies, portentous dialogue of schlock-horror, Steve Reeves muscle flicks, and fifties rock and roll into his musical.

Oookayyy... I think you succeeded in doing that... I'm just not all that impressed with the final product.

For one thing, what's the purpose of the Narrator? He's not funny, he adds virtually nothing to the movie, and in fact he chops up the movie's pacing which already suffers from stop-and-start by forgoing the continuous soundtrack and rhyming-out-of-song options.

Musicals live and die by their songs and I can see the appeal in Sweet Transvestite and The Time Warp, but those are very shallow peaks to me. Most of the songs barely registered to me at all and a lot of them suffered from poor clarity in delivery, especially with respect to Riff Raff who I can barely understand. I probably missed most of the lyrics because of this reason, some combination of goofy voices, chorus, echo, and sound leveling made it all disappear into the background.

That and I'm not especially fond of 50s style music, if that's even what you could call what this was.

Tim Curry is obviously solid in this movie and it's cool to see him slip into such an unconventional role (I think he pulls off fishnet garters quite well), but it's definitely not my favorite role he's played and frankly, having him sing throughout most of his screentime removes much of the opportunity he has to show much of his reactionary wit. There was one instance of it when WhatsHerFace describes Rocky Horror as "okay" and it stops the train of compliments dead which gives him a deathly slow headturn, and THAT'S great, I just wish there was more of that.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29557&stc=1&d=1490619766

Please stop. Too far. Go back.

I also stress a distinction one may not recognize in musicals and that is the function of the songs. In Nightmare Before Christmas you can point to multiple occasions in which the song serves to develop the characters involved, transitioning them from one behavior to the next such as Poor Jack (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXXOO3Wd_5Q), in which Jack begins the song thoroughly defeated by his ambitions before resolving by the end to go back to what he's good at and not let it get him down.

Compare this to Willy Wonka, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or even Rocky Horror Picture Show in which the songs revolve around simply describing a plotbeat. There's A Light is probably the most glaring and unforgivable of these, because it incessantly repeats the same point over and over "there's a light in that mansion over there, someone there might be able to help us", but even in-movie it doesn't make any ****ing sense because even if you were to abstract out the fact that the characters are singing the plot, they're still either walking slowly or or standing stock-still in pouring rain in slack-jawed discovery "OMG A LIGHT, LET US STOP WALKING, LOOK INTO EACH OTHERS' EYES MEANINGFULLY, AND SING ABOUT HOW WE SEE A LIGHT FOR SEVERAL MINUTES WHILE WE NARRATIVELY JUSTIFY THE OTHER CHARACTERS STEALING OUR CLOTHES LATER".

That doesn't even make any sense either if you think about it.

"Would you look at that we got a flat tire."

"I saw a mansion A FEW MILES BACK, I'll just walk over there in the pouring rain and ask for help."

"Oh I'll come with you cause I'm jealous that you'll abandon me in a broken down car in the woods in the rain for a random women who may live there."

"Sounds good, why don't you take a newspaper? That'll keep you dry."

****ing lunatics.

Nevermind the literal non-reaction to the resident transvestite scientist axing a guy to death, no it's the singing and dancing that are really terrifying. Oh, you want my clothes? I see no issue with that, see I only wanted a phone, but it looks like I'll be staying for a while because reasons.

Frankly, if they were going for "unintentional comedy" you can't really do it intentionally unless the parody is clear. Rival Scientist Guy expressing some sudden and profound familiarity with the technobabbly trans-whatever device I get, but even that wasn't funny, so what exactly am I missing besides the absurdity of it all?

Better songs would have gone a long way.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Gideon58

03-27-17, 11:58 AM

[CENTER]https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29556&stc=1&d=1490616553

[The Rocky Horror Picture Show[/COLOR]

I really enjoyed reading your review of this film and understand a lot of your feelings regarding it. A lot of your feelings are probably legitimized by the fact that when this film was originally released, it DIED at the box office. The movie only gained recognition as a midnight movie house phenomenon where the audience actually participates in what is happening onscreen. This is how the film gained the cult following it developed, not the quality of the film. I saw the movie dozens of times at a midnight movie house before actually renting it one night and watching it by myself alone...it was like night and day and I, too, saw a lot of the things you mentioned in your review and didn't enjoy the film nearly as much as I did at the midnight movie house. As it stand alone as a movie, I think "meh" pretty much sums it up...it's the experience of seeing it at a midnight movie house where the audience yell things at the screen, throw rice during the wedding scene and squirt water guns during the rainstorm that made this movie the near classic it now is.

Omnizoa

03-27-17, 01:12 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29560&stc=1&d=1490629320

Drive

Crime Drama / English / 2011

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Highly recommended everywhere I see, even the artsy crowd seem to like it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Chicken Chow Mein, Peking Duck, Crabs, EverythingYouWould ExpectToFindFromAJewish-ItalianMafiaRestaurantFront, and Kissing.

The "Action" crowd like this movie because it's a crime movie, it has stupid CG blood effects, a completely unnecessary topless scene, Breaking Bad Guy, Hellboy Dude, and and Ryan Gosling as a loner with little to say, but asses to kick. Plus cars. Because cars = sex.

The "Artsy-Fartsy" crowd likes this movie because it unfolds slowly, there's a lot of quiet talking, a lot off attention is paid to shadows, and a general focus of city nightlife combined with an ambient 80s-tinged soundtrack makes it stand out when it's marketed with neon colors.

Drive had been shown at a number of film festivals, including the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it was praised and received a standing ovation,

I was bored.

There's so little plot in this movie and every character is paper thin that when they drag out EVERY

SINGLE

INDIVIDUAL

SCENE

it's like they're pulling teeth just to get the editor to cut to the next shot. There's no reason the movie needs to be this long, here lemme try to summarize the plot as succinctly as possible:

Dude is a getaway driver by night, stunt driver by day.
Meets neighbor whose husband is in jail, gets mushy on neighbor.
Husband comes home, needs help paying off protection debt.
Dude helps husband, husband gets shot, Dude takes revenge.

Like, the central conflict of the movie is when Husband gets shot and Dude needs to make things right so the bad guys don't come after Neighbor Lady and her kid, I think, and yet this happens, what, over half way into the movie?

What, is there some floating assumption that my level of caring rises in proportion to the characters' literal screentime? Cause I genuinely don't give a crap.

Most emotional moment for me was seeing Bryan Cranston get punked out when you know how close he was to getting away, and sure enough after a murder that slick you can't help but facepalm as Ryan Gosling's character goes "oh yeah, the million dollars is in my car, here let me turn my back to you, I'll walk within arms reach and lead you to it" *gut stab*

Gosh, couldn't have ****in' seen that comin'.

Not as pretentious as what you'd get with Kara No Kyoukai (that'd be sickeningly impressive), but it is nonetheless boring. It is less plot and character development than an average CSI episode stretched to fit a movie's running time and the blood effects look like they were borrowed from The Walking Dead.

As a character study, Drive examines themes of "loyalty, loneliness and the dark impulses that rise up even when we try our hardest to suppress them."

What a complete load of ****.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

03-27-17, 05:54 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29561&stc=1&d=1490645988

Dog Day Afternoon

Crime Comedy Drama / English / 1975

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
What is it with all these movies from 1975?

Been recommended around the boards, has an potentially interesting concept, and directed by Sidney Lumet of 12 Angry Men. Let's check it out.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Dog, Yogurt, Pizza, Hamburgers.

Dog Day Afternoon is the tragic tale of a young Al Pacino as he discovers how **** he is as robbing banks.

At first there seems no shortage of confidence here, but the degree to which the robbers take insults from their hostages, perform petty tasks to keep people happy, and eventually even just GIVE THEM THEIR GUNS to hold onto is just ridiculous, it inexplicably verges on comedy in a manner that cannot be true to the real life events it's trying to portray, and yet sure enough people get shot by the end of it and you don't even get a hard cut to credits.

It's just "here is this terrible bank robber, here's how he drew out a hostage situation to a ridiculous degree and here's how he inevitably ****ed it up".

There's like 3 hostages with time-bomb style crippling illnesses for some absurd reason (THANKS AMERICA) and for some reason I don't even understand he started shouting "Attica" at the cops which got the crowds cheering for him?

The Attica Prison riot occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, United States in 1971. Based upon prisoners' demands for better living conditions and political rights, the riot was one of the most well-known and significant uprisings of the Prisoners' Rights Movement. On September 9, 1971, two weeks after the killing of George Jackson at San Quentin State Prison, about 1,000 of the Attica prison's approximately 2,200 inmates rioted and took control of the prison, taking 42 staff hostage.

Oh, okay... so it was a social justice thing... what does this have to do with the hostage situation exactly? Does Al Pacino's character want better rights for being an armed bank robber imprisoned in a building?

During the following four days of negotiations, authorities agreed to 28 of the prisoners' demands, but would not agree to demands for complete amnesty from criminal prosecution for the prison takeover or for the removal of Attica's superintendent. By the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, state police took back control of the prison. When the uprising was over, at least 43 people were dead, including ten correctional officers and civilian employees, and 33 inmates. Only one death could be attributed to the prisoners.

Whaaaaaaaat, so let me get this straight, people are harshing on the cops responding to a bank robbery because many people died when police tried to retake control of a prison a year earlier?

DO YOU EXPECT THERE TO BE NO CASUALTIES FROM THAT?

What, was it just the police's inability to save the hostages because BELIEVE IT OR NOT, that's not always an option, you people shouldn't be putting that much faith in cops to begin with.

And yet, when the robbers and hostage leave the bank in the limo the crowd is suddenly upset with them?

WELL WHAT THE **** DID YOU PEOPLE WANT!? These guys busted into a bank to steal money from people like YOU, what's your major malfunction, here, huh???

The guy even went to prison in the end anyway, how does that click with your "Prisoner's Rights" ********?

After being apprehended, Wojtowicz was convicted in court and sentenced to twenty years in prison, of which he served six.

Okay, that's really annoying, why even do you set a mandatory minimum sentence length for crimes if you're just gonna let people off for little more than a quarter of the usual punishment?

According to Wojtowicz, he was offered a deal for pleading guilty, which the court did not honor, and on April 23, 1973, he was sentenced to 20 years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, of which he served five.

Wait, FIVE!? Get your story straight, Wikipedia, and why in the **** is prison even a thing? Some scumbags would be better off dead, but instead you want to make them a tax burden on the entire population, that's really ****in' smart, why don't you institute penal labor so criminals can work off their crimes and actually pay back something to society, yeah? Would make those 5 years a hell of a lot more reasonable.

And don't give me that "slavery" bit, what, do you think I'm crazy? Here I am arguing with people from nearly 50 years ago who have nothing to do with this movie over their flawed prison complex and here you are calling me crazy, WELL I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW SOMETHING, I just have nothing interesting to say about this movie! This movie is more interesting than what I have to say and what I have to say is marginally more interesting than shopping for vegan butter which I am EXTREMELY familiar with so you'd best take that as sage advice.

The movie's decent. Chugs a bit. Goes off on weird tangents. Rather anti-climactic.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

edarsenal

03-28-17, 12:08 AM

ahh, you demented derelict, you

WELCOME BACK!!

Omnizoa

03-28-17, 12:10 AM

ahh, you demented derelict, you

WELCOME BACK!!
Thank you, and thank you for reading. ;)

Sexy Celebrity

03-28-17, 12:11 AM

As it stand alone as a movie, I think "meh" pretty much sums it up...it's the experience of seeing it at a midnight movie house where the audience yell things at the screen, throw rice during the wedding scene and squirt water guns during the rainstorm that made this movie the near classic it now is.

I'd rather watch the movie without people squirting water guns at the screen. Just me.

gbgoodies

03-28-17, 12:17 AM

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Horror Comedy Musical / English / 1975

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been long on my watchlist, plus certain people around here seem to think I'd have an affinity for it. I wonder why.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Come up to lab, see what's on the slab."

Kissing, Marriage, Meat Slab.

This was way more head****ery than I was prepared for. I probably underestimated the sort of source material they were going out of their way to parody here, but taking it for what it is, I'm pretty underwhelmed.

There are moments throughout where I feel like I get what they were going for (such as when Frank N' Furter elucidates the purpose of Rocky Horror in song), but then there are others that just completely lose me (like the end when Frank N' Furter de-petrifies everybody into white face, corsets, and fishnet garters to perform a song everybody just goes with for some reason).

Oookayyy... I think you succeeded in doing that... I'm just not all that impressed with the final product.

For one thing, what's the purpose of the Narrator? He's not funny, he adds virtually nothing to the movie, and in fact he chops up the movie's pacing which already suffers from stop-and-start by forgoing the continuous soundtrack and rhyming-out-of-song options.

Musicals live and die by their songs and I can see the appeal in Sweet Transvestite and The Time Warp, but those are very shallow peaks to me. Most of the songs barely registered to me at all and a lot of them suffered from poor clarity in delivery, especially with respect to Riff Raff who I can barely understand. I probably missed most of the lyrics because of this reason, some combination of goofy voices, chorus, echo, and sound leveling made it all disappear into the background.

That and I'm not especially fond of 50s style music, if that's even what you could call what this was.

Tim Curry is obviously solid in this movie and it's cool to see him slip into such an unconventional role (I think he pulls off fishnet garters quite well), but it's definitely not my favorite role he's played and frankly, having him sing throughout most of his screentime removes much of the opportunity he has to show much of his reactionary wit. There was one instance of it when WhatsHerFace describes Rocky Horror as "okay" and it stops the train of compliments dead which gives him a deathly slow headturn, and THAT'S great, I just wish there was more of that.

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Please stop. Too far. Go back.

I also stress a distinction one may not recognize in musicals and that is the function of the songs. In Nightmare Before Christmas you can point to multiple occasions in which the song serves to develop the characters involved, transitioning them from one behavior to the next such as Poor Jack (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXXOO3Wd_5Q), in which Jack begins the song thoroughly defeated by his ambitions before resolving by the end to go back to what he's good at and not let it get him down.

Compare this to Willy Wonka, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or even Rocky Horror Picture Show in which the songs revolve around simply describing a plotbeat. There's A Light is probably the most glaring and unforgivable of these, because it incessantly repeats the same point over and over "there's a light in that mansion over there, someone there might be able to help us", but even in-movie it doesn't make any ****ing sense because even if you were to abstract out the fact that the characters are singing the plot, they're still either walking slowly or or standing stock-still in pouring rain in slack-jawed discovery "OMG A LIGHT, LET US STOP WALKING, LOOK INTO EACH OTHERS' EYES MEANINGFULLY, AND SING ABOUT HOW WE SEE A LIGHT FOR SEVERAL MINUTES WHILE WE NARRATIVELY JUSTIFY THE OTHER CHARACTERS STEALING OUR CLOTHES LATER".

That doesn't even make any sense either if you think about it.

"Would you look at that we got a flat tire."

"I saw a mansion A FEW MILES BACK, I'll just walk over there in the pouring rain and ask for help."

"Oh I'll come with you cause I'm jealous that you'll abandon me in a broken down car in the woods in the rain for a random women who may live there."

"Sounds good, why don't you take a newspaper? That'll keep you dry."

****ing lunatics.

Nevermind the literal non-reaction to the resident transvestite scientist axing a guy to death, no it's the singing and dancing that are really terrifying. Oh, you want my clothes? I see no issue with that, see I only wanted a phone, but it looks like I'll be staying for a while because reasons.

Frankly, if they were going for "unintentional comedy" you can't really do it intentionally unless the parody is clear. Rival Scientist Guy expressing some sudden and profound familiarity with the technobabbly trans-whatever device I get, but even that wasn't funny, so what exactly am I missing besides the absurdity of it all?

Better songs would have gone a long way.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

I really enjoyed reading your review of this film and understand a lot of your feelings regarding it. A lot of your feelings are probably legitimized by the fact that when this film was originally released, it DIED at the box office. The movie only gained recognition as a midnight movie house phenomenon where the audience actually participates in what is happening onscreen. This is how the film gained the cult following it developed, not the quality of the film. I saw the movie dozens of times at a midnight movie house before actually renting it one night and watching it by myself alone...it was like night and day and I, too, saw a lo of the things you mentioned in your review and didn't enjoy the film nearly as much as I did at the midnight movie house. As it stand alone as a movie, I think "meh" pretty much sums it up...it's the experience of seeing it at a midnight movie house where the audience yell things at the screen, throw rice during the wedding scene and squirt water guns during the rainstorm that made this movie the near classic it now is.

I have to second what Gideon said about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not a fan of the movie, but if you watched it alone, without the whole audience participation experience, you missed out on what made this movie the cult classic that it is today.

As a stand alone movie, this is one of the dumbest movies ever made, but if you see it at a midnight showing with hundreds of people who've seen it more times than they can count, you'll have an experience that you'll never forget. (Just don't tell anyone there that it's your first time seeing it at a midnight showing.)

Omnizoa

03-28-17, 12:19 AM

I have to second what Gideon said about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not a fan of the movie, but if you watched it alone, without the whole audience participation experience, you missed out on what made this movie the cult classic that it is today.

As a stand alone movie, this is one of the dumbest movies ever made, but if you see it at a midnight showing with hundreds of people who've seen it more times than they can count, you'll have an experience that you'll never forget. (Just don't tell anyone there that it's your first time seeing it at a midnight showing.)
I guess that's something that doesn't come up in reviews.

Gideon58

03-28-17, 10:43 AM

I'd rather watch the movie without people squirting water guns at the screen. Just me.

They don't squirt them at you, they squirt them at the screen.

cricket

03-28-17, 07:56 PM

I'm also not a fan of Rocky Horror as a movie. However I have had a lot of good times going to the midnight show in Harvard Square with the audience participation. Still, when it's 1am, The Time Warp and Sweet Transvestite are over, and I've finished my bottle of whiskey, I'd be ready to get the f**k out of there.

Omnizoa

04-03-17, 01:11 PM

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Tremors 2: Aftershocks

Monster Horror Comedy / English / 1996

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been sitting in my backlog. Time for RRRRReassessment time!

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Ostriches, Deer, someother taxidermied thing.

"I FEEL I was DENIED some CRITICAL NEED-TO-KNOW INFORMATION."

Once again the redneck saves the day as we return to the graboid dilemma, except this time the movie basically assumes you've seen the first one, understand the basic concept, and essentially writes off hunting graboids shortly into it as a relatively easy way to make money up until the series makes it's Aliens-style sequel-justifying deviation; the graboids are merely a larval form from which approximately 3 smaller monsters hereby referred to as "shriekers" are born from.

Shriekers, being that they are much smaller than the monster they came from are a pretty anticlimactic step up, but I can appreciate the deliberate lampshade they hang on the moment of reveal, if anything to drive home the confusion of the situation. It would seem, provided the later movies, that the graboids develop new (or just previously unknown) developmental stages in response to their environment. I can appreciate this as a rationalization for sequels (as everything after Aliens was pretty much a rehash), but I do feel the shiekers are pretty dull monsters.

They at least retain a gimmick to them, here being that they can sense heat, which, putting them a couple feet above the ground, allows them to deal with humans who may otherwise be safe from regular graboids, although this eventually returns to people just climbing out of the way again to high ground.

The story itself is pretty predictable (especially romance-wise, take a long hard look at them thar denim ass), and the return of Earl's character (in the absence of Kevin Bacon) plays second fiddle to Burt's character, who also returns as the humdinger of a paranoid redneck ol' huntin' man. He's definitely the highlight of the cast, but apart from standing out he's doesn't seem unnatural among the rest, everyone pull their weight here.

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There's not all too much to say about this movie. The first half of it is really just refamiliarizing with the predicaments of the movie before it, and the second half is really just the first half of every other monster movie, that is the attempt to slow burn reveal the monster, dripfeed the characters' it's apparent strengths and weaknesses, and eventually finagle everyone into a narrative position to foil it. Not much beyond that other than the occasional bad CG (but most of the time, the practical effects are pretty solid).

I enjoyed it for what it's worth, but I think the original got more creative with it's central gimmick.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

04-05-17, 01:17 PM

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Ex_Machina

Sci-Fi Romance Mystery / English / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been on my watchlist since I heard about it, but didn't expect much since it seemed like the sort of movie that would rather ride on the coattails of it's mo-cap CG artists.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Fish, Kissing.

This movie's strange, there are moments of genuine tension throughout where that electrical hum kicks in and I'm reminded of what I wanted Beyond The Black Rainbow to be, but those moments are too few and and what moments there are are shrouded in confusion or even ambivalence towards the characters.

Best character by far is Inventor Guy, portrayed by Oscar Isaac, simply because he's the best acted, has more presence than every other character, and more than every other character he's the only one who I felt provoked to look for any level of depth in. Besides him you Main Guy and Robot Girl. Main Guy is painfully awkward and the transparency of his lies make him hard to appreciate. Robot Girl, who I guess is supposed to be the highlight here, is just altogether underwhelming.

The first half of the movie fails the second of it's two prerequisites: 1.) It manages to have CG that never looks like CG (credit where it's due, though it doesn't really resemble much that exists in the real world), and 2.) It manages to make talking to a robot-passing-as-human interesting. I don't think it does this.

Really what you have here is a rather peculiar conundrum which becomes all the more apparent when Robot Girl puts on clothes and barely any CG becomes involved. You just have a guy and a girl getting to know each other past a pane of glass. I imagine how much more interesting this would have been had Main Guy actually been a prodigy or something so he and the walking search engine could verbally spar over what does or does not constitute one or the others' sentience.

Add onto that the disparate pace at which the movie seems to expect the audience to follow along (not inferring that Inventor Guy's servant is also a robot, but making the sudden leap to MAYBE HE'S BEEN A ROBOT ALL ALONG!!!!) and you got a slow clunky movie.

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Finally it rolls around to the end and Main Guy decides Robot Girl is actually sentient and erasing her memory (as is the plan) would be unethical and so plans to escape, but not before Inventor Guy rolls up with a laundry list of entirely reasonable counterarguments to doubt his own conclusions.........!..........run-on sentence.

Suddenly these two guys are plays SEVEN DIMENSIONAL XANATOS SPEED CHESS. It's fricken' ridiculous, and would make a whole lot more sense had the plot not backed out on the idea that our protagonist was actually the mental whip it pretended he was.

Mull over the cringe of that nice and slow knife smoothly sliding in and out of Inventor Guy's chest, wait as the movie takes it's sweet time ending, and then leave the theater before realizing that Inventor Guy's Dark Knight-style cellphone gambit doesn't make any ****ing sense the more you think about it.

It's a serviceable idea, but it's payoff isn't worth the build up.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

04-07-17, 02:17 PM

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Chained Heat

Erotic Drama / English / 1983

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
After watching Savage Streets and wanting to see more Linda Blair, I realized she stars in The Exorcist.

So I watched this movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

A Roach.

About as plain and transparently marketed as you can get, it's Linda Blair in a Women-In-Prison movie and all said it's about as middle of the road as I expected. A lot of nudity. A lot of not-quite-sex. A lot of implied rape. Bitches knifin' bitches. Wholesome stuff.

Linda plays Main Girl, or in this case Prison Virgin who accidentally killed a man and she's awful sad about it and to be honest it's kind of hard to watch sometimes because she genuinely looks like she's on the brink of tears most times. She doesn't overdo it either, but that level of acting doesn't extend far to the other cast, nor does it really have to.

The movie makes a point of setting up how the corrupt-as-**** Warden is selling dope amongst the prisoners (somehow) and that there's a competing better dope distributer in the ranks answering to his second-in-command and her two-timing prison doctor boyfriend both with respective slutty snitches (who are bitches... itchin' for some stitches) and allies who get killed for threatening the economy or lookin' at each other wrong. At first I worry it's going to get over-complicated, but no, sure enough, it mostly resolves into "what's that? one of the inmates got a glasglow smile? eh, rape her" and that's pretty much the movie.

At least there's a black vs. white subplot that resolves all roses and sprinkles, nothing brings races together like throwin' bitches off buildings and stabbin' rapists in the throat.

Yeah, I know that one of them tried to rape you and killed multiple other inmates, but stop, we're havin' a moment here.

The physical acting is really off, especially when The Nicest Slut In The World gets killed. Like, what happened? One second Guard Lady is holding her up against the wall with her nightstick pressed in her mouth, cut away, now she's dead. How'd she die? Better Google it.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=29763&stc=1&d=1491585360

I'm sure I'm not on a list anywhere.

Anyway, it was an okay movie. Nothing great about it, but surprisingly little to complain about either.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

04-07-17, 06:01 PM

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Hellraiser

Erotic Horror / English / 1987

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I DON'T ****IN' KNOW, DON'T ASK ME.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Maggots, Roaches, Rats, Monkeys, Snakes, Birds, Crickets, Variousotherpetstoreanimals, Down Feathers, and Kissing. Not ****in' cool.

And the rest of the movie's not ****in' cool in general, it's deliberately grotesque and gory, apparently ripping peoples' skin off with hooks is just what kids were into back in the 80s, I dunno, I must have missed that fad and I'm rather glad for it.

AT LEAST I will go so far as to say that the movie doesn't eroticize gore in quite the same way as something like My Bloody Valentine 3D did, there's something lost between the two. Hellraiser at least seems to understand that pleasure is the entrypoint and the thrill of danger is what follows, for some people that involving pain, and so the idea is they take that to it's logical extreme by supposing a Lovecraft-esque hammerspace in which individuals have ascended into a sort of purgatory where they chase the most extreme highs in the form of self-inflicted tortures (all the "Cenobites" here having various body mutilations to distinguish them).

The gore really isn't appealing at all. But why would it be? Perhaps I'm trying to rationalize a distinction that doesn't really exist, but modern horror movies like My Bloody Valentine 3D and the Saw sequels and whatnot seem to make a money shot out of how graphically they can kill characters off, as if that itself is the appeal (and for many who aren't me, for some blisteringly insane reason, it is). Hellraiser seems far more intent to disturb with it's gore within the context of pursuing something ostensibly erotic, so to that end it doesn't quite gross me out like in other movies where the violence is shot like a porno.

The gore is pretty over the top and unrestrained from the word go so, frankly, to that end, it actually bothered me considerably LESS than a movie like Ex_Machina where the violence is isolated towards the end and sickening realistic.

Also, you gotta try and imagine that sort of... what was it? Saving Private Ryan moment where a knife just slooooooooowy slides into you, that's some skin-tingly **** right there. Hellraiser is just goofy by contrast and I dunno what it's deal is with chains, hooks, and blood. It's a theme I guess.

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No Blood Geysers at least, though hammering someone in the head 3 times still leaves a ridiculous amount of blood on the hammerer.

I find it interesting, the route the story took, didn't really expect a story about a horny Step-Mom who tries to revive her dead **** of a boyfriend (heh, dead ****) by luring men to her home so he can steal their blood.

There's a frustratingly obvious diminishing return on each body though, Frank never gets his body back even though all it took was Mr. Dad to cut his hand once to give him a functioning head, arms, torso, and crippled legs. Another body and he can stand. Another and he can... taste? Another and... he's slightly more red? This sacrificial thing feels like a jip, how many more guys I gotta seduce and hammer in the back of the head before you have a penis and I can stand to look at you in dim light?

The end of the movie's just ****in' bizarre too. Main Girl uses the puzzle box to banish 3 of the 4 Cenobites, the last one shows up behind her boyfriend with a knife (um, what happened to your magic chainhook powers?) and he just gets clobbered by falling debris.

Oh, well that's approximately the same as zapping the other 3 magic reality phase shifting demons out of existence, I'll just leave this hyper dangerous demi-god of sadomasochism under these planks of wood and walk away, I see no further danger here...

OH ****, THAT WEIRD SCORPION MONSTER THING! QUICK! PLAY CUP SHUFFLE WITH THE PUZZLE BOX TILL WE CAN ZAP IT!

Oh thank goodness that's over with. Oh, thanks for the jacket, Chad, you're taking this sudden and unexplained exposure to extradimensional monsters suddenly trying to kill us extraordinarily well, you haven't asked any questions at all!

*creepy hobo walks up, pulls puzzle box out of fire, burns away to reveal winged bone demon and flies away*

STILL NO QUESTIONS??? Gosh, he's a keeper.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

04-07-17, 06:24 PM

You have to watch Hellbound: Hellraiser II since it's basically Volume 2 of this movie.
I shall consider it.

Omnizoa

06-25-17, 12:25 AM

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The Red Pill

Documentary / English / 2016

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Has become really popular for really topical reasons.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"We're not blaming men, we just named everything bad after them."

Welcome to your clash of narratives.

The Red Pill is a movie (with obvious reference to The Matrix and by extension Alice in Wonderland) about your average ordinary everyday mainstream feminist who stumbles upon the A Voice for Men website and decides to continue her documentary career on the topic of "those damned evil Men's Rights Activists". Little does she know, but she's about to get de-programmed hardcore.

Now, to anyone like myself, this movie is 90% old news. We've been through the phase of calling ourselves feminists, realizing it's a misplaced label, and moving on as egalitarians. Both genders have problems.

Simple facts. Both have perpetrators, both have victims. Both have advantages, both have disadvantages. Are they equal? Ideally. But as the movie says itself, you can't really quantify the wealth of possible gender disparities in America when Women earn some 70% or so of what Men make on the aggregate and Men live 5 or so fewer years than Women do. It's hard to say it balances out, is likely to, or ever really should balance out. You gonna pay Men less than what they earn or kill Women to live similar lifespans to Men? No.

That's equality of outcome ********.

That's Affirmative Action.

That's garbage.

We, over here in the real world, want equality of opportunity, such as equal opportunity for fathers to see their kids, or women to see prison, or, ya know, babies not to have part of their dick lopped off.

Simple things.

Really this movie isn't meant for the Redpilled like me, it's meant for the Bluepilled, those people in first-world countries who are always so ashamed of their "privilege" and, dare I say, anyone who thinks they're standing up to "The Patriarchy" by putting "#Resist" in their Twitter bio.

You people make my spine crawl.

If that's you, then please watch this movie. Unfortunately, if that's you, it seems far more likely you're one of the raging ****waffles standing outside a local movie theater showing this movie and protesting it, fulfilling the very stereotype of the outraged echo chamber this very movie criticizes in the end. **** you, by the way. :)

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The movie spends a lot of time on rehearsing well-known and well-ignored statistics, tackling domestic abuse, child custody, and just unilaterally taking a hacksaw to the most basic and therefor most commonly subscribed to assumptions about the role men play in society, all giving us short emotional stories told by the not-quite-literally-Hitler characters behind the Men's Rights Movement, revealing many of them to be former feminists themselves, not denying the hardships of women, but wanting to bring equal and pressing attention to the hardships of men as well, whether it be as victims of violence, victims of prostate cancer, or simply equal treatment under the law in general.

Really.

It's a big problem.

Why has no one questioned the obsession with breast cancer over other cancers? Why has no one questioned why cancer rates are higher in nations where processed means makes up a larger percent of caloric intake? Why aren't you vegan bro? TAKE THE RED PILL.

No, but seriously, this is newb-level stuff to me. That a documentary like this is at all necessary only goes to show that people unfailingly refuse to heed my advice.

QUESTION EVERYTHING.

That would probably be my biggest criticism of the movie, it's well shot, it's as far as I can tell accurate, it's got a solid biographical angle of discovery to go along with it as our feminist narrator records her increasingly conflicted thoughts and feelings between exchanges with MRAs... but... ya know... it doesn't quite go far enough. I could probably fill in the blank space at the bottom of the paper with 2 or 3 more movies. If you see this movie and you feel your mind opened a bit, go here: LINKAPOCALYPSE (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM9L2W5aOI_0qf2nl9UC0ku7IzmHc7Dry)

But I suppose for normies this doc gets the job done.

Erin Patria Margaret Pizzey (born 19 February 1939) is an English family care activist and a novelist. She became internationally famous for having started the first domestic violence shelter in the modern world, Chiswick Women's Aid, in 1971, the organisation known today as Refuge.Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally capable of violence as men.No chewing. Swallow.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Iroquois

06-25-17, 10:57 AM

Question everything, huh? Okay, then - why is this documentary necessary? If this documentary is so entry-level, why would you recommend it to the people who would protest it while working off a similarly basic understanding? Why assume that feminism (or "calling ourselves feminists") is just a "phase" that people go through? Does this film actually investigate the reasons for claims such as men generally dying sooner than women or is it just context-free point-scoring? Is the "red pill" community any less of an echo chamber for setting up their opposition as "bluepilled"? Does its questioning of assumptions about men's roles in society reflect back on toxic ideals of masculinity or is it all focused on blaming The Feminists? How does one distance themselves from feminism and also acknowledge women's hardships? Does the film do anything to acknowledge the Red Pill's toxic public reputation or the negative connotations it creates for legitimate men's-rights concerns? What exactly makes Sargon worth listening to? If questioning everything is so important, then how much did you question what this film was doing? I don't think I've questioned everything, but it's a start.

seanc

06-25-17, 11:25 AM

I will read your review after I watch it. Never heard of it, sounds both frustrating and interesting.

Omnizoa

06-26-17, 08:13 AM

Question everything, huh? Okay, then - why is this documentary necessary? If this documentary is so entry-level, why would you recommend it to the people who would protest it while working off a similarly basic understanding?
I was only half-serious, no one so blinded by ideology would take my recommendations anyway. That said, I DO think those people are the ones should see it most. So, Catch-22.

Why assume that feminism (or "calling ourselves feminists") is just a "phase" that people go through?
I didn't quite mean it that way. I certainly feel that there are merits to feminism, but, unfortunately in first-world countries such as yours and mine, pushing equality from only one direction eventually crosses the event horizon and things get all outta wack. Sorta like when you're trying to create a character in Fallout 3, you can't touch one slider without a bunch of others clicking out of position. Getting perfect uniform equality is difficult if not impossible.

I was speaking more to the "redpilled" like myself, just many of the people featured in the movie previously considered themselves feminists before they too separated from the movement.

And spoiler:
The narrator does too.

However that is not to impugn the work of people like, say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who I believe more accurately describes the problem being not the idea of feminism itself, but it's modern first-world third-wave incarnation.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31889&stc=1&d=1498473100

Does this film actually investigate the reasons for claims such as men generally dying sooner than women or is it just context-free point-scoring?
Good question. To be honest I wish it had gone more in depth, but the main point of bringing up deaths per capita is mainly to contrast with the mainstream narrative, that being that men have it so good, women are treated like second class citizens, patriarchy, patriarchy, rah-rah-rah.

Is the "red pill" community any less of an echo chamber for setting up their opposition as "bluepilled"?
Another good question. The movie focuses on MRAs which mainly refers to people who advocate reforming the law insofar as it stops discriminating with men. In fact, the movie's opening is couched in the negative publicity of what amounts to an in-joke on the central website, A Voice For Men.

Near the end the movie does distinguish between 3 different "men's rights" communities, that being general MRAs (want to change the system), MGTOWs (want to escape the system), and the, admittedly confusingly named "RedPills", in reference to the r/TheRedPill Reddit board (want to exploit the system).

I follow a couple self-described MRAs online and at least one of them, while generally quite sensible, does occasionally go off on a tangent about how there has never ever been anything redeemable about Feminism. You make a distinction comparable to the above between oldschool Suffragists and Suffragettes.

Is there echo-chamber-y behavior going on? Yeah. Isn't there always?

Does its questioning of assumptions about men's roles in society reflect back on toxic ideals of masculinity or is it all focused on blaming The Feminists?
Personally, again, I think the movie would have benefited by going more in-depth on this, surely it's not TOO MUCH to admit Men had it pretty solid prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Mainly what it does is draw attention to the biological predisposition of men as "producers" and women as "reproducers", reflect on how it's resulted in a few of the disparities we see modern feminism trying to resolve, and then criticizing how feminism has overcorrected.

How does one distance themselves from feminism and also acknowledge women's hardships?
You know, Iro, I'm getting the distinct feeling that this movie is for you. ;)

Does the film do anything to acknowledge the Red Pill's toxic public reputation or the negative connotations it creates for legitimate men's-rights concerns?
When you say "the Red Pill" are you referring to the movie or MRAs?

I would say it does pretty heavily lampshade the kind of behavior that got it protested, but if you're talking about MRAs, again, the movie opens up by specifically drawing attention to their negative public image. MGTOWs and r/TheRedPill aren't addressed much, but they're either not engaged in the conversation or actively trying to take advantage of a bad situation. There are parasites on the underbelly, but they're not representative of the majority.

What exactly makes Sargon worth listening to?
Well, he's been engaged with this issue for years, he was part of GamerGate (which is a WHOLE 'NOTHER MOVIE, that's a fun story, do recommend), he's been following this morbid social justice phenomenon into the new cultural marxist media machine it's become and he was recently the subject of a study (https://www.reddit.com/r/jfg/comments/6gi7c6/report_on_the_methods_used_by_sargon_of_akkad_in/) attempting to determine his credibility as a political commentator:

I have collected all objections about his methods and errors, which boiled down to the list of 10 cases we have covered here (you can refer to other cases in the comments section if you have more). I conclude that 7 of these cases were unsupported. I conclude that in more than 5 years of public life, counting more than 50,000 tweets, participation to more than 1,500 videos that have generated more than 300 million views, in addition to more than 300 livestreams, Sargon has committed a total of 3 minor errors. In one case, he misused quotes in a tweet. In a second case, he failed at providing the contextual definition of the legal concepts clearly delineating the meaning of the words he was using. In the third case, he misspoke and used the word 'probably,' when the best description would have been 'possibly.'

I conclude that every day, billions of people listen to other people whom they consider authorities, and who have demonstrated a much higher rate of error than he does. The retraction rate of Sargon, per volume of statements, does not seem to be higher, and if anything could be argued to be lower, than that of major news media and scientific articles published in peer-reviewed publications. This is quite impressive considering that he is under much tighter scrutiny than the average peer-reviewed scientific journal. Millions of eyes have crossed his content, while many scientific papers went unread by anyone on the shelves of our libraries. Perhaps even more impressive is that Sargon has been systematically acknowledging the existence of these errors and recognizing his errors on the public space.

TL;DR

Sargon is a decent human being. There is no evidence of intellectual or academic misconduct on his part.

Jean-François Gariépy, Ph. D.

If questioning everything is so important, then how much did you question what this film was doing?
I feel like I do that plenty for B-movies. I take notes, often unhelpful as they are when my opinions come tumbling out. I feel the movie could've been longer, gone more in-depth, but as a post-release Q&A video I've since seen demonstrates, there are topics that the creator wanted to address in more detail, but opted to cut for the sake of digestability, which contributes to why I say this is pretty "entry-level". It's not a huge info-dump of a movie, like the review I intend to post after I'm done responding to this post. :)

To be honest though, maybe I'm just not describing it well. It told me a lot of things I already knew, so not a whole lot jumped out at me as new or challenging information.

I don't think I've questioned everything, but it's a start.
YOU should watch the movie. You've got the inquisitive mind.

Omnizoa

06-26-17, 08:20 AM

I will read your review after I watch it. Never heard of it, sounds both frustrating and interesting.
Do tell me your thoughts.

Iroquois

06-26-17, 08:35 AM

We'll see if I do end up watching it, though if I don't it'll be out of lack of availability more than anything.

Omnizoa

06-26-17, 09:29 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31890&stc=1&d=1498476209

What The Health

Documentary / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
> Trump wins election
> Clinton blames Russian hackers
> Seth Rich gets mysteriously shot in the back
> KimDotCom claims Seth Rich was the DNC leaker
> Conspiracies theories flying every which way until suddenly:

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/877484233953918978

WHOA. Now hold on. Clinton kills a newborn baby every other day, this dilemma can wait, let's take a look at a REAL CONSPIRACY.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Hope you liked that Red Pill, cause I got a bigger one and it's gonna be a little bit harder to swallow.

But you gotta do it.

Cause drugs are bad for you.

...

That makes sense, I swear.

HERE, we have another documentary, this time about a dude who goes "WUT, MEAT CAUSES CANCER?????" and starts looking into the health problems associated with the modern American diet. It's not pretty. Which, I expect anyone to know by now given that one of the most popular stereotypes of Americans is that they're obese.

So, with this movie I'm left a little skeptical because LAST TIME I watched a health movie, Michael Moore spent the better part of two hours lying by omission.

So I feel I'm a little bit more on edge this time, because lying about what's good for you is like America's second favorite pasttime. Also, I'm woefully uninformed about health, as this movie promptly makes me feel better about by candidly admitting that neither do doctors.

Oh, they know how to TREAT conditions, but how many of them have actually studied nutrition?

Admittedly, the human body is an extraordinarily complex organism, I wish I understood it better, and this movie encourages me to, which I take to be a point in it's favor.

ANYWAY, here's the long and short of it, I cross-checked nearly all of the studies referenced in the movie (all but one was freely viewable online), compiled the most important ones, and will now show them to you, THAT IS...

...if you can stand to have what is an extremely important movie spoiled for you.

Here's my position: Go vegan. You don't need the health argument.

It's simple. It's straightforward. Just go vegan. It's the ethical thing to do and in over 25 years not a single meat-eater has forwarded an argument in anyway justifying our treatment of non-human animals.

It's disgusting.

AND EVEN if you can't PHILOSOPHICALLY justify it, you can LOGICALLY justify it. Just be consistent with your morals, THAT'S ALL.

If you wouldn't want it done to YOU, don't do it somebody else.
It's Kant's Categorical Imperative,
it's Rawls' Original Position,
it's the GOLDEN RULE.

Just don't be a dick.

Ya dick.

And if you're think I'm equating micro-bacteria to human beings... ya bein' a dick.

STAWP IT.

Stop.

...

Stop.

...

...

SO ANYWAY, let's assume, for sake of argument, you're sociopathic and only care about yourself. "MUH HEALTH" you might whinge into the bathroom mirror as you lament your bad skin, your recent illnesses, the handful of drugs you have to take, and your unhealthy weight that makes it tiring to even stand up and look yourself in the eye.

I think we have a problem here.

Now it could be that you just have a crippling genetic disorder, you were born with that harlequin disease or some ****, in which case, I'm sorry, you're ****ed. I hope you at least enjoyed reading my reviews before your untimely death.

However, odds are, that's not the case for you. You're just a regular old everybody who thinks they do a pretty reasonable job eating meat and sugar in moderation, you pound your milk for them strong bones, and you pay lipservice to breast cancer awareness (:rolleyes:).

Well... have you ever wondered why food commercials appear alongside heartburn medication? Why drugstores appear alongside fast food restaurants? Why vegans DARE judge your dietary choices?

Consider the following:
https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31891&stc=1&d=1498478416

Here we can see the US federal government's dietary advisory council and 4 of the nation's biggest health organizations... flanked by their sponsors.

Hmm... that's a little strange innit? A little uncouth perhaps? Looks almost like a sort of...

CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

Hm. Well that's cute, but I'm sure there's nothing menacing about that. I mean, these organizations have a VESTED interest in our health, right? So OBVIOUSLY they're gonna prescribe us good foods.

Consider the following:

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31892&stc=1&d=1498478437

W-well that doesn't look quite so good. It seems like... like uh...

They're POISONING US!

Wow. That's uh... umm... NOT GOOD? Per-say?

Ya know, actually, that's pretty devious that these foods companies lobby to feed us lies, that's, I daresay, awful, actually. In fact, it seems particularly egregious that millions and millions of taxpayer dollars are literally going towards subsidizing the very companies that contribute to our two leading causes of death: heart disease and cancer.

That's... pretty despicable. I don't much like that. BUT YOU KNOW, I just can't go vegan, because of the most obviously self-contradictory reason in the world, it's too expensive!

I'm spending all my money on drugs right now, cause I got all these unrelated illnesses... I'm kinda fat. Got asthma. And my doctor tells me I'm gonna need to take like 57 different vitamins so I don't puke a lung, slip a disc, and die by the end of the week.

Consider the following:

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31893&stc=1&d=1498478455

WELL THAT'S JUST MEAN.

You're telling me drug companies are paying doctors to lie to me so I'll eat food that will make me sick so I can spend the rest of my increasingly short life paying tithes to the government which still haven't banned these obviously unethical practices?

Well GOLLY-GEE SHOOT ME NOW.

This is supremely ****ed. And it's nothing NEW, this information has been circulating for years and the evidence has been right under our noses. I noticed it at a young young YOUNG ****in' age because I was raised vegetarian and yet CONSTANTLY TOLD to remember the food pyramid.

Another failure of the public education system. And another crippling failure of government, too. @Yoda (http://www.movieforums.com/community/member.php?u=1), I hope you can appreciate what I mean when I take more than your average axe-swing of criticism at the current establishment. They are guilty for INDOCTRINATING, POISONING, AND KILLING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF CHILDREN WILLINGLY AND WITH MALICE OF FORETHOUGHT, to say nothing the non-humans we slaughter in the planet's biggest holocaust barely anybody ****ing talks about.

STOP. FUNDING. THIS ****.

And people have the ****ing gall to call vegans extreme, YOU'RE NOT MADE TO EAT MEAT!

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31894&stc=1&d=1498480081

And you're not made to suck on cow **** either! You're just weird!

I'm the normal one! I AM!

Final Verdict: rating_5 [Friggen' Awesome]

seanc

06-26-17, 08:18 PM

Do tell me your thoughts.

You are much more plugged in to these social movements than I ever plan to be. I think I agree with you about the overall effectiveness of the doc. The Film makers verdict seems to be that we all have battles we need to fight and it turns out women and minorities aren't the only ones who are and feel marginalized. Listening and understanding are more productive than trying to drown each other out. Pretty basic stuff. So yeah, the MRA has valid opinions but it doesn't appear they are any better at listening to feminists as feminists are to them.

The most apt opinion in the film is the metaphor about the snow drift. It applies to everyone in every walk of life. Life is never going to be an even playing field but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be working to achieve that. All our problems are nuanced and we should take a nuanced approach to them.

The film maker takes a very pragmatic approach and that in and of itself was refreshing. It would be nice if we all could learn to listen to each other instead of constantly trying to one up each others social problems.

I am glad I watched this but it definitely wasn't life changing, and I won't be joining either movement anytime soon.

Guaporense

06-26-17, 08:44 PM

Omni, how do you get your fill of B-12 vitamin?

Because a family member of mine tried to go vegetarian and got cancer because of immunodeficiency from lack of aminoacids and B12 vitamin. Hence, I dont think its natural for people to get cancer.

Also, food companies like MacDonalds exist in every country of the world, in Japan there is about as many MacDonalds per capita as the US and in Japan obesity is almost inexistent, as result their life expectancy is 5 years higher than in the US. Clearly the food company conspiracy with the healthcare industry does not exist in there. Well, such a conspiracy is similar to conspiracies about UFOs and similar silly things.

Omnizoa

07-02-17, 10:09 AM

You are much more plugged in to these social movements than I ever plan to be. I think I agree with you about the overall effectiveness of the doc. The Film makers verdict seems to be that we all have battles we need to fight and it turns out women and minorities aren't the only ones who are and feel marginalized. Listening and understanding are more productive than trying to drown each other out. Pretty basic stuff. So yeah, the MRA has valid opinions but it doesn't appear they are any better at listening to feminists as feminists are to them.

The most apt opinion in the film is the metaphor about the snow drift. It applies to everyone in every walk of life. Life is never going to be an even playing field but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be working to achieve that. All our problems are nuanced and we should take a nuanced approach to them.

The film maker takes a very pragmatic approach and that in and of itself was refreshing. It would be nice if we all could learn to listen to each other instead of constantly trying to one up each others social problems.
Well said.

I am glad I watched this but it definitely wasn't life changing, and I won't be joining either movement anytime soon.
You really don't have to. There's a fine line between "being part of a movement" and agreeing with that movement's founding principals.

One might consider me both feminist and an MRA, but an easier way of saying that is just "I'm egalitarian".

Omnizoa

07-02-17, 11:12 AM

Omni, how do you get your fill of B-12 vitamin?
http://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=26681&stc=1&d=1471607068

Getchu some vegan cereal and milk son.

Because a family member of mine tried to go vegetarian and got cancer because of immunodeficiency from lack of aminoacids and B12 vitamin.
Yeah, if there's anything I would warn people about it would be B12. A lot of people have this misconception that B12 is unique to animal products, but it's not. It comes mainly from a bacteria found in soil that grows into our plants, the only reason it's an issue now is that we sanitize our food.

https://twitter.com/Omnizoa/status/861254368674316290

Hence, I dont think its natural for people to get cancer.
I think it's debatable whether cancer is "natural" depending on what we mean by the word, but I understand your point. B12 deficiency is not good and I hazard to imagine how many would-be vegans gave up because they were uninformed about it.

But if you wanna talk about veganism and cancer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTIrmOdmil4

Also, food companies like MacDonalds exist in every country of the world, in Japan there is about as many MacDonalds per capita as the US and in Japan obesity is almost inexistent, as result their life expectancy is 5 years higher than in the US. Clearly the food company conspiracy with the healthcare industry does not exist in there. Well, such a conspiracy is similar to conspiracies about UFOs and similar silly things.
It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. There isn't quite the same marketing powerhouse pressuring Japanese people to eat steak or beef, but they do have an approximation of the food pyramid, in reverse, ironically:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/9e/27/b5/9e27b5eb8f2ae5900767d222b824f6db.jpg

While fruit may be at the bottom, so is dairy, and it's worth noting that, and as I'm sure you're aware; Japanese dishes consist of a much larger variety of raw foods. Whereas the American diet may regularly consist of heavily processed meats and cheeses, cheese is relatively uncommon in Japanese foods and meat often consists of fish before it gets anywhere near a processing plant.

https://res.cloudinary.com/simpleview/image/upload/crm/frisco/Sushi0-380f05265056a36_380f06be-5056-a36a-073ed8db1c463d56.jpg

In the grand scheme of animal products, fish are probably the least worst to eat. It's why meat-eaters will regularly make reference to the Eskimos because despite intestinal worms and food being shipped to them, reducing their cholesterol levels, they don't live that much shorter lives than your average American.

HOWEVER, it's actually pretty funny that you point to Japan as a counterargument, because one of if not the longest living populations on the planet are Okinawans, and their health has only recently gone downhill with the appearance of... KFCs.

Okinawa had the longest life expectancy in all prefectures of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefectures_of_Japan) for almost 30 years prior to 2000. The relative life expectancy of Okinawans has since declined, due to many factors including westernization. In fact, in 2000 Okinawa dropped in its ranking for longevity advantage for men to 26th out of 47 within the prefectures of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefectures_of_Japan). Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan) has the highest life expectancy of any country: 90 for women and for men, 84. Compare this to America where the average life expectancy for women is 81 years old, and 76 for men.
There are more than 400 centenarians in Okinawa. Although there is a myriad of factors for differences in life expectancy, a large factor is the cuisine. People from all around the world have tried to emulate the "Okinawa diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet)" to reap its health benefits, believed to be because it is nutritionally dense yet low in calories. This is also true of the Mediterranean diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet).The traditional diet of the islanders contains 30% green and yellow vegetables. Although the traditional Japanese diet usually includes large quantities of rice, the traditional Okinawa diet consists of smaller quantities of rice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice); instead the staple is the purple-fleshed Okinawan sweet potato (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato#Asia). The Okinawan diet has only 30% of the sugar and 15% of the grains of the average Japanese dietary intake.
The traditional diet also includes a tiny amount of fish (less than half a serving per day) and more in the way of soy and other legumes (6% of total caloric intake). Pork is highly valued, yet eaten very rarely.

High intakes of extra virgin olive oil (as the principal source of fat), vegetables (including leafy green vegetables), fresh fruits (consumed as desserts or snacks), cereals (mostly wholegrains), nuts and legumes.
Moderate intakes of fish (especially marine blue species), seafood, poultry, dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt) and red wine.
Low intakes of eggs, red meat, processed meat and sweets.

All of this tracks with the facts: Humans, like apes, are frugivores:

Their diet is best described as frugivorous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frugivorous) and folivorous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folivorous), consisting mainly of fruit, nuts, seeds, including grass seeds, leaves, and in some cases other animals, either hunted or scavenged, or (solely in the case of the humans) farmed—along with anything else available and easily digested.
If hominids would supplement their diet at all, it would make sense that, of all things they've evolved to most readily consume, it's small fish, due our ability to use tools with relatively little risk to ourselves.

https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-tool-use-fishing.jpg

Guaporense

07-02-17, 03:17 PM

Cool. That explains how so many people in India manage to live without eating meat.

STOP. FUNDING. THIS ****.

And people have the ****ing gall to call vegans extreme, YOU'RE NOT MADE TO EAT MEAT!

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=31894&stc=1&d=1498480081

And you're not made to suck on cow **** either! You're just weird!

I'm the normal one! I AM!

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Final Verdict: rating_5 [Friggen' Awesome]
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Not really. Read this:

Humans are Omnivores

Adapted from a talk by John McArdle, Ph.D.

Document Sections:
Introduction
Confusion between Taxonomy and Diet
Omnivorism
The Great Apes
Evidence of Humans as Omnivores
Archeological Record
Cell Types
Fermenting Vats
Jaws
Salivary Glands
Intestines
Conclusion
APPENDIX: Other Thoughts
For Questions or Comments
Introduction

There are a number of popular myths about vegetarianism that have no scientific basis in fact. One of these myths is that man is naturally a vegetarian because our bodies resemble plant eaters, not carnivores. In fact we are omnivores, capable of either eating meat or plant foods. The following addresses the unscientific theory of man being only a plant eater.

Confusion between Taxonomy and Diet

Much of the misinformation on the issue of man's being a natural vegetarian arises from confusion between taxonomic (in biology, the procedure of classifying organisms in established categories) and dietary characteristics.

Members of the mammalian Order Carnivora may or may not be exclusive meat eaters. Those which eat only meat are carnivores. Dietary adaptations are not limited by a simple dichotomy between herbivores (strict vegetarians) and carnivores (strict meat-eaters), but include frugivores (predominantly fruit), gramnivores (nuts, seeds, etc.), folivores (leaves), insectivores (carnivore-insects and small vertebrates), etc. Is is also important to remember that the relation between the form (anatomy/physiology) and function (behavior) is not always one to one. Individual anatomical structures can serve one or more functions and similar functions can be served by several forms.

Omnivorism

The key category in the discussion of human diet is omnivores, which are defined as generalized feeders, with neither carnivore nor herbivore specializations for acquiring or processing food, and who are capable of consuming and do consume both animal protein and vegetation. They are basically *opportunistic* feeders (survive by eating what is available) with more generalized anatomical and physiological traits, especially the dentition (teeth). All the available evidence indicates that the natural human diet is omnivorous and would include meat. We are not, however, required to consume animal protein. We have a choice.

The Great Apes

There are very few frugivores amongst the mammals in general, and primates in particular. The only apes that are predominantly fruit eaters (gibbons and siamangs) are atypical for apes in many behavioral and ecological respects and eat substantial amounts of vegetation. Orangutans are similar, with no observations in the wild of eating meat.

Gorillas are more typically vegetarian, with less emphasis on fruit. Several years ago a very elegant study was done on the relationship between body size and diet in primates (and some other mammal groups). The only primates on the list with pure diets were the very small species (which are entirely insectivorous) and the largest (which specialize in vegetarian diet). However, the spectrum of dietary preferences reflect the daily food intake needs of each body size and the relative availability of food resources in a tropical forest. Our closest relatives among the apes are the chimpanzees (i.e., anatomically, behaviorally, genetically, and evolutionarily), who frequently kill and eat other mammals (including other primates).

Evidence of Humans as Omnivores

Archeological Record

As far back as it can be traced, clearly the archeological record indicates an omnivorous diet for humans that included meat. Our ancestry is among the hunter/gatherers from the beginning. Once domestication of food sources began, it included both animals and plants.

Cell Types

Relative number and distribution of cell types, as well as structural specializations, are more important than overall length of the intestine to determining a typical diet. Dogs are typical carnivores, but their intestinal characteristics have more in common with omnivores. Wolves eat quite a lot of plant material.

Fermenting Vats

Nearly all plant eaters have fermenting vats (enlarged chambers where foods sits and microbes attack it). Ruminants like cattle and deer have forward sacs derived from remodeled esophagus and stomach. Horses, rhinos, and colobine monkeys have posterior, hindgut sacs. Humans have no such specializations.

Jaws

Although evidence on the structure and function of human hands and jaws, behavior, and evolutionary history also either support an omnivorous diet or fail to support strict vegetarianism, the best evidence comes from our teeth.

The short canines in humans are a functional consequence of the enlarged cranium and associated reduction of the size of the jaws. In primates, canines function as both defense weapons and visual threat devices. Interestingly, the primates with the largest canines (gorillas and gelada baboons) both have basically vegetarian diets. In archeological sites, broken human molars are most often confused with broken premolars and molars of pigs, a classic omnivore. On the other hand, some herbivores have well-developed incisors that are often mistaken for those of human teeth when found in archeological excavations.

Salivary Glands

These indicate we could be omnivores. Saliva and urine data vary, depending on diet, not taxonomic group.

Intestines

Intestinal absorption is a surface area, not linear problem. Dogs (which are carnivores) have intestinal specializations more characteristic of omnivores than carnivores such as cats. The relative number of crypts and cell types is a better indication of diet than simple length. We are intermediate between the two groups.

Conclusion

Humans are classic examples of omnivores in all relevant anatomical traits. There is no basis in anatomy or physiology for the assumption that humans are pre-adapted to the vegetarian diet. For that reason, the best arguments in support of a meat-free diet remain ecological, ethical, and health concerns.

[Dr. McArdle is a vegetarian and currently Scientific Advisor to The American Anti-Vivisection Society. He is an anatomist and a primatologist.]

APPENDIX: Other Thoughts

The following information is taken from The New York Times, May 15, 1979. According to Dr. Alan Walker, a Johns Hopkins University anthropologist, Homo Erectus, the species immediately ancestorial to our own Homo Sapiens, had evidence of an omnivorous diet. Every Homo-Erectus tooth found was that of an omnivore. However, a small sample of teeth from the human-like species during a 12 million year period leading up to the Homo-Erectus period, indicates the earlier species may have been a fruit eater. Even if this species, way before our own, lived on a fruit diet, they probably would not have consumed what we consider typical fruits. Hundreds of plants produce fruits that are tougher, more substantial foods than what we eat today.

Quoted from an editorial by William Clifford Roberts, M.d., Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Cardiology:

"When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."
Quoted from "WHAT DID OUR ANCESTORS EAT?" in Nutrition Reviews, by Stanley Garn, Professor of Nutrition and Anthropology, and William Leonard, Assistant Professor of Human Biology:

"These people of Upper Pleistocene, and later those of the mesolithic, were our immediate ancestors, no longer hunters exclusively and with whole-grain products and a variable amount of roots, fruits, leafy vegetables and nuts in their diet. We must grant them a mixed diet, with animal fat providing a smaller proportion of their food energy than was probably true for the Neanderthals."
For additional information, please see articles:
What killed Neanderthals? Scientists blame those rascally rabbits. (NBC News Science; 03/06/13)
Analysis of ancient poop shows Neanderthals ate plants, not just meat
Do chimpanzees fight wars and kill? (BBC; 08/11/15)
National Geographic Society Encyclopedic Entry Omnivore
First pots for cooking plants found (BBC; 12/19/16)
This article was originally published in the May/June 1991 edition of Vegetarian Journal, published by:

The Vegetarian Resource Group
P.O. Box 1463
Baltimore, MD 21203
(410) 366-VEGE

Omnizoa

07-05-17, 07:26 PM

Not really. Read this:
Debunked here (http://www.ecologos.org/mcardle.htm).

Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQyQS3d86BA

Omnizoa

07-05-17, 07:39 PM

Incidentally, I would philosophically disagree with Laurie here:

The "ethical" argument is totally bogus, since there is no objective set of ethics to which one can compare to determine what is more, or less, "ethical" than what. That is, individuals just make up their own ethical standards to suit their purposes of the moment.
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Omnizoa

10-24-17, 01:20 PM

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Vice Squad

Crime Drama / English / 1982

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Someone recommended it here, I forget who. Supposedly has an over-the-top villain. It's been on my watchlist for a while.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"No one wants to have straight sex anymore."

Marriage, Hotdogs, I'm deliberating on keeping these parts in the reviews.

Yo. I'm back, and and to kick it off we're hitting up some 80s B-movie sludge.

This honestly wasn't quite as campy as I expected, but it's a little bit quirky in it's own way. The Hollywood Vice Squad is out and about and comes across the body of Main Girl's BFF, an obvious victim of the notoriously violent sexual abuser and psychopath "Ramrod". Vice Squad offers Main Girl a deal to round off some drug charges by offering herself as a prostitute to Ramrod to help in a sting operation.

It's kind of a weird setup here and it's not altogether clear who our primary protagonist is for several minutes and by the time Ramrod is captured and escapes setting off the chase that makes the majority of the movie, I feel like a good chuck of it's already elapsed. Part of that could probably be blamed on the false opening in which Main Girl is portrayed as an upperclass privileged woman who for reasons I couldn't glean must sobbingly pass offer her daughter to her housekeeper/servant/friend/token black maid and then totally break character revealing herself to be a prostitute in butt**** Hollywood. Okay. This ability to act recurs later in the story, but this bit of plotting seems needless all things said.

While Ramrod's a step behind Main Girl and Vice is a step behind Ramrod, we follow their effort to catch up to their marks while Main Girl goes on a vaguely amusing sequence of hookups where she either outright blows off the person she's supposed to blow, or knowingly indulges her clients' peculiar circumstances or fetishes. She seems to gravitate to your slightly desperate watersports enthusiast or foot fetishist before noping out on a guy trying to deliver "a whole convention". Still, she crosses the line when she's elaborately escorted to a manor, put in a wedding dress, and then jumpscared by an old man in a coffin with some shrill ****awful voice who apparently thinks it ruins the mood when SHE speaks. Righto grandpa.

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I kinda wish she gave a little more consideration to the polite butler's clumsy attempt at a rebound **** though.

ANYWAY, Ramrod eventually shows up and he's beaten a few people and castrated a pimp on the way there, he takes Main Girl to a warehouse, straps her to a bed, starts tying up a wirehangar and makes to whip her in a manor that somehow killed Main Girl's friend at the beginning of the movie? I dunno how that works. I get the genital mutilation bit, that's explicitly stated, but whipping her with a wire hanger seems pretty tame when he's the sort of nutjob to tear through a backdrop and greet you with a literal noose.

Ramrod was easily the most interesting character in the movie, just cause he's so constantly intense, but he lacks the REALLY out there mannerisms that would push him into full on cartoon.

Cops show up, Ramrod dies, it's pretty anticlimactic honestly, the whole movie feels like a stock episode of CSI: Miami or something, but without all the forensic stuff.

Overall, the movie was pretty meh.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

doubledenim

10-24-17, 02:31 PM

*Wads up missing persons report.*

He shoots! He scores!

Omnizoa

10-24-17, 03:27 PM

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Jeepers Creepers

Horror / English / 2001

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Saw it in a Top 10 list somewhere I think.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Cats.

The first, I dunno, 20 maybe minutes of this movie are solid. The setting and characters are relatively realistic and the event which kicks off the rest of the horror movie; driving past what appears to be a murderer dumping his bodies and promptly being chased down, are plausible circumstances for a real-life thriller.

After the first 20 maybe minutes though, our narrative quality takes a sharp downturn. Mystery Man runs Brother and Sister off the road, but neglects to turn back and ensure an end to their prospective meddling. Brother and Sister then take this opportunity to GO BACK TO THE CRIME SCENE even though Mystery Man could return at any time and they're currently at the disadvantage of a wrecked car. They also know the bodies were dumped into a pipe, no information how deep the pipe is, so it's entirely possible (and as it so happens is true) that they could be wasting their time or possibly trapping themselves in the pipe.

That exactly happens, they find a ceiling carpet of bodies, pushing by suspension of disbelief to near breaking point, and they leave, with nothing to show for it. Exactly as they started. They contact the cops, the murder house is set aflame offscreen, never to be seen again, and sudden Mystery Man appears on top of the escort police car and bodily drags both cops out to kill them. Suspension of disbelief shattered, we got a magic baddie only to be later confirmed that it's some sort of organ stealing monster with wings and some lady who gets hardly any attention at all for what's essentially the tertiary protagonist winds up being some random prophet of events to come.

Put aside a completely random run-in with a shotgun-wielding Cat Lady you got a showdown at the police station in which the ****** looking monster is revealed and Brother is kidnapped to be the eyeless husk at an early end credits. Mm. Lovely.

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So, in short, the tone, characters, story, bad guy, all pretty much get shot to hell by the second and third act. Just like a Final Destination movie, absolutely nothing of consequence is explained, the monster is some lame amalgamation of horror baddy costume ideas, the Fortuneteller adds absolutely nothing to the movie besides the completely disposable stinger ending, and the tie into the song "Jeepers Creepers" is a profoundly under-utilized asset I can only think either sounded clever to an amateur writer or was decided on as some thoroughly cheap marketing tool to chuck in the trailers and make this movie is some way memorable.

The gore we get is certainly macabre, but... it feels like they played it safe with that too. Not that I'd want it, but this strikes me as the sort of movie that had maybe a couple creative guys on it, but was possibly derailed into some dullard's attempt at "marketability". Virtually everything intended to look horrific is cast in near pitch black rooms. Maybe that would have been the best time to sneak in those garbage cuts to what's obviously supposed to be the same shot, but it's clearly from a separate part of the recording.

To be honest, it wasn't awful, in fact the beginning was pretty interesting. But it quickly became boring and just as quickly ended with plenty of loose ends and an all around, "Hrm. K. Watched that now." feeling.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Omnizoa

10-24-17, 03:27 PM

*Wads up missing persons report.*

He shoots! He scores!

Yo, how's it goin'.

TheUsualSuspect

10-25-17, 05:43 PM

I liked Jeepers Creepers when I was younger and I hated the sequel. Even back then, I knew the decision to go back and "try to help" was a bad and half baked excuse just to get them back there.

After repeat viewings, I know it's bad but enjoy the cheese factor more.

Joel

10-26-17, 08:36 PM

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Vice Squad

Crime Drama / English / 1982

[/CENTER]

Glad someone reviewd this. Now I get to watch it after years of only hearing about it and wanting to see it. I'll read your review as soon as I do that.

Omnizoa

10-31-17, 05:51 PM

I've been suspended from Twitter for suggesting people unglue their noses from the media's butts and consider due process instead of lynching Kevin Spacey for "coming out as gay as a means to distract from accusations of sexual assault" for which there is literally no evidence and the only "apology" I've found attributed to him is explicitly predicated on the assumption that it did in fact happen which he hasn't conceded to and claims not to remember.

So while I sit in Twitter jail waiting for Twitter's mods to get around to my scathing indictment of their automated moderation process which has previously suspended me because some *********** decided to report one of my posts in which I ask them for evidence in support of their claims... I might as well watch a couple movies.

Omnizoa

10-31-17, 09:05 PM

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Krampus

Horror / English / 2015

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Well because it's Halloween, so obviously I'm going to a watch a Christmas movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Why do we have to put up with their crap just because we share DNA?"

Dog, Garbage Food, Some Taxidermy Thing, the usual ****.

This was fun. In a weird way.

Krampus almost verges on comedy at moments, and it's self-awareness earns a few knowing eyebrows, but there's a degree to which the movie feels lazy. I dunno if I'd count the CG snow, the CG gingerbread men, or the somewhat CG(?) clown worm thing, but I do count the story in that because it's about as formulaic as it can get.

Estranged family is socially pressured to have Christmas together. Son is essentially bullied for still believing in Santa Claus and has his embarrassingly insightful letter read out at the dinner table (good parenting by the way), he temporarily loses his faith in Santa, shreds the letter, this summons Krampus, there's a period in which characters are picked off but the cause is not commonly accepted to be supernatural, something almost supernatural happens they all witness and then we have Knowing Old Woman deliver a "way back when on a night such as this" speech and yada yada yada, my eyes couldn't roll harder.

I grant the movie credit for at least subverting my expectations on a handful of occasions, such as not taking a jumpscare opportunity where I would expect a lesser movie to, and for the most part the movie's... not even a "slow burn", let alone scary I think. You expect creepy ****, that's a given, and you get it, but perhaps because the plot is so bog standard I wasn't really invested to the point of the movie getting to me. The characters are all either A.) blank slates, B.) ********, or C.) so neurotic and wound tight that I hadn't really much sympathy for when they overreacted to mildly offensive behavior on part of the other characters. The Dorothy character (I think her name is) has her well metaphorically poisoned from the outset by outright apologizing for her presence in the movie, essentially promising that she's some unforgivably ugly character, but really she just comes off as bluntly honest, if a bit insensitive at times.

Basically, I didn't really care who died and I wasn't terribly surprised by the order in which the go (although I didn't expect the kids to be so disposable).

Really, the shining light of this movie is more the concept and execution of that concept, the movie does a good job of portraying Krampus and his myriad Christmas-themed minions to be more of a presence than an individual, he's more of a force of nature than a killer and I liked that obfuscation of fantasy.

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Check out "The Art of Krampus" by the way, cool stuff.

He does run headlong into a plothole regarding the Santa Clause-esque conditions under which he appears, if all it takes is for someone to lose faith in Santa Claus, then shouldn't the rest of Son's family have dealt with him already? Does Krampus really meaningfully distinguish between someone losing faith in Santa and ******** who would freely debauch the holiday and might never have had faith to begin with? I'm not a fan of the faith gambit anyway, whether we're talking Tim Allen or not.

Anyway, I like that Krampus's minions are increasingly grotesque perversions of established Christmas tropes. Krampus himself remains suitably unrevealed throughout the majority of the movie, seen only as a big hunched cloaked figure with awesome horns, and while I was at first hoping that they wouldn't reveal Krampus up-close and ruin the mood with a Jeepers Creepers type monster face, I was pleasantly surprised that they maintained the theme thus far and showed Krampus to be a desiccated Santa equivalent beneath the hood. He looks really freaky and it's difficult not to favor this design (with all the chains and bells and Bing Crosby substitute for Jeepers Creepers as "inappropriate stalking music") over the alternatives you're likely to find on Google Images.

Cool monster design.

Not one I would expect a child who still believes in Santa Claus to try and talk down with a straight face, that kid was NOT written realistically.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

11-16-17, 09:03 AM

Suspended from Twitter again for hate speech. No evidence, just an another automated response email flatly denying my appeal offering zero justification for punishing me. That's the third strike on my account and I haven't broken a single rule.

Guess I'll watch a movie or something...

Velvet

11-16-17, 10:27 AM

my moms been vegan for like 6 or 7 years and even though I know its probably the best option i cant push myself to make the change

Omnizoa

11-16-17, 12:31 PM

my moms been vegan for like 6 or 7 years and even though I know its probably the best option i cant push myself to make the change
I can't imagine what I could say other than to call into question your priorities.

Omnizoa

11-16-17, 12:47 PM

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Beverly Hills Cop

Comedy Crime Drama / English / 1984

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I believe it was nominated in the Action Movie Countdown, though it's probably been on my watchlist longer.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"By the time the average American is 50, he's got 5 pounds of undigested red meat in his bowels."

I think that quote will suffice in place of the usual.

This was hardly an action movie. There's a shootout near the end, but it's in no way representative of the rest of the movie. The rest of the movie is more of a mildly upbeat cop drama starring Eddie Murphy AS THE RENEGADE COP WITH NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. WHEN HIS BEST FRIEND IS BRUTALLY KILLED BY A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION, AXEL FOLEY MUST GO BEYOND THE LIMITS OF HIS JURISDICTION TO BRING VENGEFUL JUSTICE AGAINST THE UNTOUCHABLE CRIMINAL SCUM, it's really a very formulaic setup.

Really the movie I think most resembles Fletch, and the best parts are when Eddie Murphy gets what he wants by lying on the spot to somebody's face. There was nothing in it that made me laugh, but there were some notable actors throughout and I was spared a traitor cop narrative in lieu of breaking some hard-nosed by-the-book-ers into more likable characters (I still would prefer cops not drink on the job though).

I don't really have much in the way of outstanding complaints, Eddie Murphy was a really weird sounding laugh, but he otherwise steals the screen as you'd expect. The supporting cast is interesting, though the villains are pretty flat, but altogether the brisk pace, upbeat soundtrack, and occasional quote-worthy moments kept my attention throughout. It's pretty decent flick. The low-end of "good" I'd say. Nothing it'd hurt to miss, but not a real waste of time either.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Velvet

11-16-17, 01:20 PM

fun movie

Omnizoa

11-16-17, 03:53 PM

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Bound

Erotic Crime Drama / English / 1996

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I don't remember what I was searching to get this, it's a well known lesbian movie, hopefully it's better than Blue Is The Warmest Color, not that that's a difficult bar to clear.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I'm a little disappointed that I can't knock Secretary down with this one too, with a title like "Bound" you'd hope a little rope-a-dope would find it's way in here somewhere, you know, aside from when the girls get tied up for practical reasons.

The first 15-25 minutes is some of the thickest sexual tension I've ever seen, Girly Girl meets Bulldyke in an elevator and they drag the camera and orchestra along by the dick all the way until they have sex and then their relationship serves as the totally platonic catalyst for a crime drama.

...okay.

Basically Girly Girl's presently shacked up with Mafia Dude played by Joe Pantoliano, who inexplicably seems to get more screentime than Bulldyke, and after finding himself with 2 million dollars to hand off, our Thelma and Louise decide to escape together with the money by hatching a plan to fool Mafia Dude into believing he's been set up by an archenemy who's stolen it behind his back. Basically the movie establishes their sexual chemistry, Girly Girl tells Bulldyke she wants to leave, Bulldyke comes up with a plan, and then she spends an extraordinary amount of time just listening to the movie progress next door.

The original plan is for Mafia Dude to find the money stolen and then decide to flee, but he doubles down on proving his innocence and showing up his supposed enemy up by challenging him at gunpoint, that and he questions Girly Girl's alibi. Ultimately Mafia Dude shoots Mafia Supervisor and then he has bodies to a account for when both the police and other Mafia Dudes come investigating.

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The story gets a little complicated, but nothing that can't be followed, and there was little in the way of plot holes as far as I could tell. You might wonder why if they were going to shoot Mafia Dude in the end anyway why they didn't save themselves an entire movie by doing that in the first place... but you know... maybe they didn't WANT to kill anyone...

There were a couple vaguely amusing moments throughout the movie and some of the camera shots throughout were actually kinda cool. I didn't even realize this was a Wachowski Brothers (Sisters?) movie until the credits rolled, but the influence makes sense and Joe Pantoliano, who played Cypher in The Matrix, pulls a similar intensity into this movie, ironically making him more interesting to watch in the end than either of our leading ladies.

In the end it was a solid flick, kept me interested in what would happen next, even if I am a little disappointed that the drama drifted away from our main characters.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

11-19-17, 04:42 PM

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It Follows

Horror / English / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I thought I'd done an It Follows review, but I guess not. This is actually my first rewatch of the movie, encouraged by my rewatch of Cinema Snob's Midnight Screenings review (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DCyjv1ZRVvA) of the movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Ice Cream, Bacon, Pancakes, and a Sandwich I will bet hard money isn't vegan.

It Follows is the sort of send-up gimmicky horror movie I should enjoy, the premise here is that the Death By Sex (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathBySex) trope is unironically played straight to a T, in that the monster in this movie literally preys exclusively on the most recent teenager to have sex in a mysteriously sourced chain of sexual transmissions, if it finds you it ****s you to death and then turns on the person who gave it to you. Basically the worst kind of STD that isn't a straight-up flesh-eating disease.

The trick here is that while it always knows where you are, it only ever pursues you at a walking pace, and only those who've been infected can see it, although it always assumes the shape of a regular person, be it someone they know or someone random to blend into a crowd. It's a pretty neat and creepy idea to suppose yourself into a crowd of people and imagine for a moment that a single person in that crowd is slowly approaching you with the intent to kill at all times and they could be anybody. That's really cool. And I like that they made the creature fallible too, so they may assume shapes of people who look out of place in the area they're in.

I should also offer props to the audio and visuals, the music has a thick 80s synth style soundtrack that, perhaps on some days I might overlook, but I do appreciate in contrast to the usual fair. The camerawork, although a bit excessive with the pans at times does a great job of providing wide shots and the composition is great, especially with how it keeps the characters largely in focus, but still draws your eye to the background where you'll occasionally see the fixed pace of someone approaching, implying The Follower is near (I'll just call it The Follower).

It's an enjoyable slow burn of a movie most of the way until it peeters out near the end and a bit of retrospect really spoils what I think otherwise would be a solid movie.

Firstly, the concept alone, while cool, immediately runs into a rock and a hard place. The problem here is that either the movie simply becomes a chase movie or we attempt to resolve the conflict by one of two options: killing Boyfriend in revenge for infecting Main Girl, or letting Main Girl infect other people.

While I might have gone the path of petty vengeance, Main Girl decides to take the path of the destroyer by spreading the ****ing disease to other people. Thanks, Main Girl, I will from hereon refer to you as Douchebag.

Douchebag first infects Boyfriend #2, but he gets killed, so she then infects Boyfriend #3 before a hard cut to black raising questions about whether or not they die. I have a number of problems with this.

Firstly, who the **** would knowingly have sex with Douchebag? Okay, so Boyfriend #2 spits out some disposable dialog about how he doesn't believe it, okay that's fine, but Boyfriend #3 has no excuse! He broke a chair over the thing while it was invisible! He knows it killed Boyfriend #2, why would he sign on for that??? Not only that, but Boyfriend #2 doesn't really have an excuse either cause if he doesn't believe her, then he's literally sticking his dick in crazy and you know you're not supposed to do that dude.

Let's also consider the wisdom of training Douchebag to fire a gun who you believe to be crazy and thinks people who look like her friends and family are out to kill her. THAT CAN IN NO WAY GO WRONG, CAN IT?

Okay, so we've established that the only people who would propagate this garbage are either suicidal, or ********, so you're not really hitting me in the sympathy department here, movie. Also where are these kids' parents? Did they die? Was that their dead parents the monster was representing? **** if I know, all of the characters in this movie have this remarkable ability to all speak in Generic Low-Key Well-Adjusted-Upper-Middle-Class-Teenager-Talk so my eyes just glaze over every time one of them talks. One of them even reads a book on a hyper-anachronistic e-reader thing (wtf was that?), not that I remember what the book was called or about or cared. And that kinda sucks cause the movie ends on one of those lines so...

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That sorta compounds with the rather crap ending the movie gets, and I know some people like how it ends, it's been compared to the Inception ending, but I gotta disagree. Firstly, while we can only confirm two sex scenes in the movie establishing transmission, it's heavily implied, in what would otherwise be a completely worthless scene, that Douchebag found some no name characters out on a boat and infected them offscreen. This would mean (possibly, depending on unknown rules of infection) that she did not infect Boyfriend #3, but lost her ability as a carrier if No Name Boat Guys became the new carriers. Boyfriend #3 is also shown to drive past prostitutes while he is infected. The ending shows a person following both Douchebag and Boyfriend #3 at some distance before a hard cut to black, so at the very least we have several possible canon endings, and this is assuming that The Follower only targets those in the direct chain of transmissions, and not tangential transmissions (meaning you can't **** multiple people and force The Follower to hunt and kill every one of them before it gets to you, it only cares about the first person you have sex with):

1.) Boyfriend #3 is infected and being followed.
2.) Boyfriend #3 is infected, and No Name Prostitutes are being followed.
3.) Boyfriend #3 is not infected, and No Name Boat Guys are being followed.
4.) The Follower kills No Name Boat Guys offscreen, and is following Douchebag.
5.) The Follower kills No Name Prostitutes offscreen, and is following Boyfriend #3.
6.) The Follower is following somebody else entirely.
7.) The Follower is dead.

The Follower is dead is a controversial ending because while it seems to be implied with the long unresolved delay following the pool trap the kids set up, we've established that The Follower can withstand not just a bullet to the neck, but bullets to the head. The only difference between shooting it in the head on both occasions was whether it was submerged in water. Why should water deter it's ability to immediately recover from a gunshot wound to the head? The only foreshadowing of this I can think of is that it doesn't immediately enter the water upon reaching the pool, and instead attacks Douchebag indirectly by throwing things at her. If there were some other nod to this earlier in the movie, that water is somehow it's kryptonite like in Signs or something, but I can't think of one.

Frankly, the ending just comes so abruptly and with no apparent wind-down, the twist being literally the same question that kept the rest of the movie on slow burn in the first place: "Are they being followed?" Good ****in' question, lemme just back you up and hour and the start the movie over again for you because we're back at square one in terms of narrative development. Literally all this movie is is a random cross-section of a supernatural event. We don't know how it starts and it doesn't conclusively end. It just happens, and some forgettable jagoff teenagers are involved. Whoop-di-freakin'-doo.

Also, let's me just unironically mention how I won't bring up that totally not immersion-breaking moment early in the movie where we've established that The Follower isn't dumb, but it will gladly assume the shape of a ****ed up looking lady (their dead mom???) in their kitchen, scaring away it's target immediately on sight, even though they're mere feet away and a more innocuous disguise would have probably elicited enough pause to grab her, kill her, and end the movie prematurely.

Like, how much credit should I be giving this monster? Enough to envisage and disguise itself as your family members just to mess with you, but also simultaneously too dumb to know that doing so when they're vulnerable is just a giant ****in' waste of an opportunity?

I dunno, cool monster. Disappointing ending, painfully mundane and stupid characters. Meh.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

11-19-17, 08:12 PM

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Murder on the Orient Express

Mystery / English / 1974

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
A remake of Murder on the Orient Express is out and the original has been on my watchlist for a while. We're talkin' about Sean Connery and Michael York trapped on a train in a classic murder mystery directed by Sydney Lumet, of 12 Angry Men. It's gotta be good.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

The most enjoyable mystery stories are those featuring a closed circle of suspects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_circle_of_suspects), these are the stories where the murder takes place at a location or time which limits the possible perpetrators to relatively small group of people, making the investigation into evidence largely secondary to taking and cross-examining testimony. These are the mysteries which fuel the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Clue, Case Closed, and the Ace Attorney series, all well known for creating suspenseful mysteries and challenging the reader, viewer, or player to solve the mystery before the detective does. It's extremely tempting to draw parallels to Sydney Lumet's 12 Angry Men here because both involve seeking justice through the cross-examination of information from a limited number of diverse and dubious characters. Taking on the elements which made 12 Angry Men great and elevating them from the deconstruction of evidence to the reconstruction of a crime sounds like a truly fantastic idea.

Sadly, this is where I sideline my optimism for an actual review.

The reason the movie Clue has 3 endings is transparently simple: They had at least 3 endings they really liked and they couldn't pick just one so they went with all of them. It's easy to imagine the difficulty in choosing between a murder mystery in which 1 person is responsible, really forcing the viewer to narrow their considerations down and commit to one suspect, win or lose, versus a murder mystery in which everyone is responsible, providing a clean narrative with no lose ends at the expense of that viewer participation. When everyone is equally credible as the murderer and no hard evidence damns any one person, the audience can't come to it's own autonomous conclusions.

While I totally understand the desire to have all of your fun characters ultimately the murderer in an OCD kinda way, in doing so you deprive the audience of what should be the biggest central selling point of your movie: solving the mystery yourself. Sure, the movie sprinkles evidence all over the place for you to form your own conclusions, but when the cups are lifted and the balls revealed, it's like finding out it was a dream all along. Nothing mattered. Your speculations and conjecture were a waste of time because everything was orchestrated from the beginning.

Granted, a third of the Clue's endings is this ending, but Clue was also a comedy, so it had that going for it much of the way. Murder on the Orient Express plays it's murder mystery straight, which forces me to compare it to other like mystery stories such as Case Closed. Case Closed is a seemingly endless anime and manga series with each installment featuring a different closed-circle mystery and a range of suspects each with their own alibis and possible motives. Most of the time, only one or two people are responsible for the murder (or faked suicide) and the series gives you most of the information up front for you to solve it. Consider for a moment what it would mean for a series like Case Closed to feature a mystery in which every suspect was in fact the murderer.

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That would end the series. Or at the very least it's a gambit you couldn't pull twice without seriously jeopardizing interest in your stories. Why read when you have no incentive to try and pick out the murderer?

Now, you might argue that MotOE gave you enough information to solve the mystery and thus isn't quite the cop-out I take it to be, but really consider the leaps the movie goes to in order to draw it's conclusions. For you to solve the mystery you'd have to, independently, be familiar with the Russian alphabet, accept that "lawyers" is an Americanism for "solicitors", and apparently need only a fraction of a name on a burnt piece of paper to conclude that the person who burnt it is in fact operating under a false name and secretly a mafia gangster and murderer of the person who's name is on the paper.

Unless of course I missed something which is entirely possible because the main character speaks rapidly and in a thick accent throughout the entire movie so I pick up, what, 70-80% of the dialog?

Honestly, by design, you can't really incriminate everyone unless you specifically propose evidence suggesting that it could only have been done with everyone else's mutual knowledge. You might as well ask who DIDN'T kill the guy because you have approximately as much wiggle room to make such assertions. I mean, imagine if Poirot illustrated his second solution, accusing everyone on the train of complicity in the murder and there's like ONE GUY he's accusing who was completely in the dark. Seems totally possible to me.

I will grant that Sydney Lumet does manage to distinguish these characters similarly to how he does in 12 Angry Men, but many of their personalities and mannerisms never really manifest in the proceedings and the likes of Sean Connery and Michael York get precious little time onscreen to flex.

Honestly, if I were to point to any one particular thing I liked about MotOE it'd be the setting. Not the atmosphere, but the setting, something about an intercontinental locomotive and that time period, with all the smoke and suave suits, the bitter luxury... ah. It gets me. I wish I could've been in that time.

Though I hear Scarlet Fever wasn't too fun, so maybe not.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

11-20-17, 07:08 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38251&stc=1&d=1511217613

The Babadook

Horror / English / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
If there were two critical favorites in the horror movie genre in 2014 they were It Follows and The Babadook, with The Babadook represented as the indie film here to take the horror genre back to basics and prove just how scary you can be without constant jumpscares or explicitly revealing the monster. I wasn't looking forward to this movie largely because I don't like horror movies as a general rule, but I felt I ought to give it a try.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

The Babadook is a truly remarkable movie, in that I don't think I've ever seen a movie in which one of the protagonists is scarier than the monster itself.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38252&stc=1&d=1511217645

Take a look at this child. Just IMAGINE the sheer pants-****ting horror of sitting in the same vehicle as this little piece of ****. Screaming, kicking the back of your seat, would you believe me if I told you this elementary schooler is ****ing ARMED?

Yeah, apparently this kid puts Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone to absolute shame for the amount of weapon engineering he's mastered in his single-digit years on earth. He personally built a shoulder catapult, owns a literal crossbow, and has the inexplicable ability to acquire white doves and explosives offscreen. He disrupts his classes, he breaks the noses of neighbor kids, and he disobeys his mother on a regular basis because she's just a massive ****ing floormat.

The basic premise here is Single Mom and Child From Hell discover a mysterious book which essentially threatens it's readers with vivid horrific popouts and descriptions of what The Babadook will do to you, and sure enough after reading the book it begins to haunt their home to harass them. It's decently creepy for maybe half the movie until it's "revealed" to be a solid black stop-motion paper thing that makes generic stock monster sounds before outright possessing Single Mom, totally eradicating any tension the movie had because now your villain is front and center on the screen in bright light.

Not only that, but it's a breath of relief when The Babadook turns her into a sour bitch that isn't afraid to verbally abuse her ****awful son. Granted, she snaps the dog's neck (sorry, DoesTheDogDie.com (https://www.doesthedogdie.com/items/3144), that would be a confirmation), but that's about all she does before her kid inexplicably traps her in the basement, frees her, and after some totally vacuous showdown her son is "reformed" only to saddle her with another uncooperative screaming monster of a child, The Babadook, in her basement.

Well that's just swell. This really does seem like you've worked through your problems for no reason whatsoever.

"People don't like me cause I'm weird."
"Sometimes people say things that aren't true."

No, Mom, stop treating him like a special ****in' snowflake and tell that little **** that he IS weird, he's a violent little troll that got kicked out of school by his own ****in' fault, all your friends hate his scheevy little guts, and he's got no friends because he's an annoying little ****bag who nobody wants to spend time with for good ****in' reason. Stop reading him books, stop stuffing him full of ice cream, and stop apologizing for him, BE A PARENT, put your foot down, or shove it up his ass, whichever keeps him from putting glass in your food and breaking other childrens' noses.

This movie's pretty cliche too, I mean seriously, you're gonna give us the whole doubletake-cause-you-see-something-in-the-background-but-it's-gone-now-oh-well-let's-forget-that-happened schtick? Shove off.

The best thing about this movie is the creepy art in The Babadook book, and that's not worth the price of admission.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Dani8

11-20-17, 08:33 PM

I ******* LOVE YOUR REVIEW OF THE BABADOOK!!! Now keep in mind I love the ******* child although my husband felt exactly the same as you, although he changed his mind halfway through (but I'll check when I speak to him today - I think he was passed the point of no return with the reveal. You know the point where you ******* loathe a character so much there is absolutely no way of going back? That was him.

One of my favourite 'horror movies' of all time, although I dont really think of it as horror. More psychological drama/thriller, but I dont get into that argument with horror genre. Unless you want to have an argument and then we can punch it out... maybe.

OK loved that review so much I shall read the previous one if it doesnt have spoiler (havent seen it yet and I read the book as a kid but cant remember the reveal).

Omnizoa

11-25-17, 12:10 PM

Dani8

11-25-17, 04:11 PM

I think if I read the book, I'd like the overall story a lot better, but it would be a shame to miss out on Bale's performance, he looks like he had a lot of fun.

I couldnt handle the book. I meanI finished it but it goes on for what seems like chapters just on business cards or suits or metrosexual beauty products. Just really shows up how vacuous these kind of people are.

As for Bales looking like he's having a great time - sure does.

Dani8

11-25-17, 04:20 PM

All my reviews come with spoiler warnings, I suggest checking the OP for movies you've seen or don't plan to see if you're interested.

Yes thanks for spoiler tags.

Getting back to Mr D, he said he got to the point of no return but I always felt protective of samuel. I felt he was really misunderstood by her and his self absorbed auntie. Just a little kid trying to understand why his mum kept pushing him away (especially in the masturbation scene. ofcourse he didnt understand why she pushed him away in that one but what a creepy scene initially). And I probably dont need to tell you which scene made me scream.

I watched this one 4 times in a weekend to try to get different PoVs (it was like watching 4 different movies). I've only ever done that with one other film, I think.

Omnizoa

11-26-17, 06:54 AM

YJust a little kid trying to understand why his mum kept pushing him away
I saw a fairly persuasive video suggesting that
Mom has disassociative identity disorder and The Babadook is one of her alter egos undisclosed to the audience which explains a number of throwaway lines and the Son's seemingly erratic behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q--z2EKrma0

It softens me to the movie somewhat, but the movie failed to convey this clearly itself and it doesn't make the kid any less unbelievable or annoying.

Omnizoa

11-26-17, 12:10 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38499&stc=1&d=1511712620

A Cure for Wellness

Psychological Thriller / English / 2016

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I saw the trailer for this circulating and thought it looked interesting, if a bit predictable.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Interesting. But a bit predictable.

ACfW offers an odd pairing of beautiful landscape shots and cinematography with some really sceevy ****. I mean, you see a tube forced deep down a guy's throat moments before a dirty jar full of leeches(?) are poured inside him.

I mean, on one hand I'm thinking, "Wow, that's my fetish.", but on the other hand I'm thinking, "Wow, this movie looked really pretty before."

Premise is this: In the world of Matrix Vision, dude at a scummy company is pressured into retrieving an employee from a rehabilitation center out in the middle of nowhere in order to scapegoat his own failures onto him. Turns out the place is just a teeny bit too clean and a teeny bit too happy and a teeny bit too obviously a cult and- you know what? Let's just leave.

Doop-dee-doop-dee-doo-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgdJeMd8R1Y

Oh ****, now I got a broken leg and a physical representation of my inability to leave, who could have possibly forseen this? Let's heavily emphasize all the water people are drinking with lingering shots and passing comments about how we should drink more water, HOLY WOW I'm feeling sick all of a sudden, I wonder why? You know what, let's just sign ourselves into the clinic here I can't imagine that coming back to bite me in the ass later.

I was never really frustrated watching this movie, but perhaps that's because I was quelling the constant plot contrivances with a more pressing worry that the movie would go all Shutter Island on me.

And Shutter Island sucked. Just sayin'. That ending is so cliche I find it ridiculous that it got the critical appraisal it did. Must be cause it's a Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

Anyway, ACfW never goes full Shutter Island, but it repeatedly reminds us how much it would love just to take all it's clothes off and disappoint us, so the main character, after stupidly signing into the clinic in the first place, is not only persuaded that all the bull**** conspiracy stuff is a figment of his imagination ONCE, but TWICE, and seriously? Really? Ya ****in' kidding me with this?

We get this whole elongated backstory about "the Baron wanted to marry his sister who was infertile, but not, so the townsolk burned down his castle and killed her and her baby, but didn't, which was deformed, but wasn't" and really all of this elaborate MASSIVELY expensive rehab treatment facility **** was all for the sake of this Baron guy who's still alive after 200 years and wants to **** his tween(?) daughter and everyone is totally on board with that because reasons.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38500&stc=1&d=1511712643

Okay, LOTS of questions, but HOW exactly is he even alive? They never explain this. Obviously he lived through the arson, but how did he live beyond that? We keep drawing attention to this "vitamin" stuff we eventually find is squeezed out of people filled with leeches or whatever, but what does that do? Did EVER establish what that stuff even is or what purpose it serves? I think it's only ever used by Main Guy, Big Bad, Incest Daughter, and the staff, so what does it do? Does it extend their lives? Does it prevent them from becoming de-hydrated and losing their teeth because drinking the water with leech stuff in it somehow drains them? Was THAT ever established?

Are they even leeches in the first place? They look like eels! Eels are not leeches! What is even the life-cycle of these Eelches, you drink them when they're microscopic in your water, pee them out still microscopic offscreen, and so they grow in your toilet, except they don't cause that's just a recurring hallucination AND WHY WOULDN'T YOU LIFT THE TANK UP AND LOOK INSIDE THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE THE TOILET HANDLE JIGGLING!?!?

I dunno somehow, "Surprise, I'm a 200-year-old blood puritan who's been experimenting on hundreds of people under the facade of a professional medical facility just so I can have bondage incest sex with my 200-year-old underage daughter next to the eel bath" is a bit of an anti-climax.

Was gonna call this "Meh...", but no way does this movie hold up in retrospect.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Dani8

11-26-17, 05:08 PM

Omnizoa

11-26-17, 05:14 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38513&stc=1&d=1511730041

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Action Science-Fiction / English / 2016

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
A spin-off movie detailing the events of the "many bothans died" line in the now 40-year-old original Star Wars movie? It may sound silly to some, but ****, sign me up.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I saw zero bothans. Am disappoint.

Rogue One I think is helped by framing itself as a deliberate spin-off of the main series which allows it the creative liberty to really branch out and explore new concepts such as new planets, new aliens, new technology, but really the best part of the movie is seeing how it, like 2011's The Thing premake, pays hardcore nerdy homage to the original movie.

Whereas you could fairly complain that The Force Awakens retreads old territory narrative-wise, Rogue One takes old characters and casts them into a new story, specifically all of those side characters whose names you don't remember, but have seen Star Wars so many times that you instantly recognize like "Oh, **** THAT guy! I remember that guy! I don't remember his name, but he totally had like 1 or 2 lines in the original movie!"

Most of these characters are surely just reenacted by lookalikes, and they mimic their counterparts serviceably, but there are at least two characters in particular who are so major in New Hope and have such distinctive faces and are now dead that they had to be recreated in CG.

The CG is really good, and I'm sure that there's other characters that probably fooled me, but when it comes to Tarkin and Leia, there's just no way I'm not going to immediately recognize that they're CG, since they both seem veeeeeeery slightly off. Not that I'm really complaining though, I'm glad they're in the movie, they both really run home the idea that this all takes place hot off the heels of the first movie and I like that concept, it's what made Halo: Reach and interesting setting for a game: "Let's tell the untold story of those guys who died offscreen in their epic last stand to set off the events of the main story."

It's a cool idea, and all those teeny tiny cameos of side characters sprinkled throughout the movie, not in-your-face, but actually playing their roles like they belong? I liked that.

That said... I found this movie very boring. I know people have been saying this was better than Force Awakens, but I disagree, it's a fresher story, yes, but Rey, Finn, and Kylo were way more interesting co-protagonists and villain than Main Girl, Main Guy, and Tarkin's Bitch in this movie. And you know, I thought Rey was pretty flat in Force Awakens too, that ****ing sucks dude, I've been wanting to see some really kickass leading ladies with a rockin' personality to boot. At least Rey has unchecked force powers to show off with, Main Girl here just seems like a walking plot device.

She immediately gets orphaned after being given a necklace (Which is super cliche already, but what is it made of, one of those saber crystals? Wouldn't that have been cool for her to have used that for something?), she avoids the Rebellion, but gets roped back into it by chance, she doesn't want to cooperate then she does and then we're supposed to feel really proud of her for having transitioned from zero to hero despite there being nothing to justify that character arc beyond a video recording from her Dad which is WAY too conveniently addressed only to her even though it wasn't sent to her and they haven't seen each other in over a decade so...

Main Guy's even worse. They set him up as an ******* and make a big thing about how even The Rebellion has done awful things, but then he's just super nice and helpful throughout the rest of the movie like he's drunk the "I gotta make the audience like me now" potion offscreen.

Best characters are easily K-2 and Donnie Yen, because apparently the best written Star Wars characters are robots now and Donnie Yen is a blind martial artist in Star Wars and how can you NOT just imagine how that board meeting went down:

"We wanna make a spin-off Star Wars movie, but who do we cast?"
"Make Donnie Yen a blind dude who sees **** with the force and beats the **** outta some stormtroopers."
"YOU MOTHER****ING GENIUS, yes let's do that, who else?"
"Ehh... I dunno throw Forest Whitaker in there, **** if I care..."

Also Vader's in the movie, cause why not. And he gets the most ridiculous onscreen killing spree of I think any villain in the series to date. Good stuff.

But really, the movie focuses much of it's time on our main characters and they're just uninteresting and the plot that unfolds is oftentimes inarticulate and largely just seems like a road map of "okay we've talked to this guy, now we gotta go here...", I dunno, I see a crew of badasses on the poster and I sit and watch the most of the movie just kinda drive by, not even really developing it's characters, until it finally gets around to the big heist at the end and I can't help but just shrug as everybody dies.

Okay. So that was a thing.

Really feels like a waste considering everything the movie had going for it. I dunno.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38514&stc=1&d=1511730057

...you know? Browsing Google for images to add to this I think it occurred to me what this movie was missing. You pitch this movie like we're gonna be getting the Rebellion's most daredevilish black ops team of characters in for a suicide mission to save the galaxy, yet it's just a mish-mash of characters mostly not even related to the Rebellion where only 2 or 3 of them feign any level of chemistry up until some sort of rallying speech in the third act from our main character who we've only just recently established doesn't even want to be a part of any of this.

It feels really forced, and considering the fact that the Halo series was never particularly strong in it's narrative or characterization department yet it outclasses Rogue One here? That's unacceptable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJklKkv9ksQ

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Dani8

11-26-17, 05:31 PM

I saw a fairly persuasive video suggesting that
Mom has disassociative identity disorder and The Babadook is one of her alter egos undisclosed to the audience which explains a number of throwaway lines and the Son's seemingly erratic behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q--z2EKrma0

It softens me to the movie somewhat, but the movie failed to convey this clearly itself and it doesn't make the kid any less unbelievable or annoying.

I swear to dog i responded to this about stupid o'clock, had a coffee then fell back into slumber, but alas.

First thigk I remember thinking was that woman has the most annoying voice I have ever heard and I almost turned it off. I trundled on.

Initially I also considered the idea that she had DID as well, but changed my mind because nothing in the movie indicates she had a severe emotional trauma as a kid, however, I like the idea anyway so will have a rewatch with this in mind and see if I enjoy it as much. Also, it made me think about the masturbation scene. To me her reaction was a bit more than just a bit over the top for a little kid walking in on her - what do you think? - although everything she does is OTT, so maybe Jennifer was basically saying that all of Amelia's strung out reactions are not just that her hubby died the night her kid was born and just looking at him reminds her of hubby and how he died, but thatmaybe she had sexual trauma as a child.

Thoughts? Am I stretching it a bit too far the way angry hipsters do when sitting on an uncomfy milk crate eating 20 buck smashed avo on toast and drinking soy decaf latte made by south americans being paid developed country award wages, and making sure they dont waste anything or that might indicate severe trauma as a toddler?

My response at stupid o'clock was nothing like that but I cant remember it. Must have been a dream.

Omnizoa

11-27-17, 02:10 AM

nothing in the movie indicates she had a severe emotional trauma as a kid,

maybe she had sexual trauma as a child.
Why must it have been as a child, why not just when her husband died?

Dani8

11-27-17, 04:18 AM

Why must it have been as a child, why not just when her husband died?

What I read about it indicates the disorder stems from childhood trauma but I am by no means an expert by any shot. I thought the 'disorder' was actually highly poopooed in the field (probably why they keep changing names). I have a few shrinks in the family so will ask next time i see one...if i remember with my current goldfish brain.

I am really kean to watch this again from a new pov. If ever you're stuck for a movie and you have this 'bad book' hanging around and nothing else to watch I recommend a rewatch. Now that you have the reveal I'd be interested to see if your opinion of samuel changes.

iank

11-27-17, 04:45 AM

Good grief. That constitutes being sent to coventry? I dont use twitter so hadno idea how strict they are.

You will not question Big Brother. You will not argue with Big Brother. Big Brother is always right.

:eek:

Dani8

11-27-17, 06:30 AM

You will not question Big Brother. You will not argue with Big Brother. Big Brother is always right.

:eek:

I noticed he said in another post he said a few more things that'll do it every time. Some people get report happy.

Omnizoa

11-27-17, 07:22 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38533&stc=1&d=1511781587

Bloodsport

Martial Arts Action / English / 1988

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
One of several entries from the Action Movie Countdown I haven't got around to watching. Figured I was especially obligated considering I'd never seen a Jean-Claude Van Damme starring film and it's considered one of his best if not the best.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Bloodsport is an extremely simple film in concept, Jean playing as Frank Dux, grows out of a poorly dubbed child actor with a thick accent into a martial arts extraordinaire with a thick accent, seeking to redeem his sensei who's lost his blood lineage by carrying on his teachings and proving their worth in a martial arts tournament.

After the hilariously bad first impressions of his backstory, most of the movie is sadly just a hash of pretty sub-par fighting clips between the contestants of the tournament. The Tournament itself doesn't seem to make much sense either. Firstly, it's supposed to be illegal, and yet they have nothing in the way of bouncers to prevent reporters, police, or foreign military personnel just strolling onto the property. Secondly, it's a full-contact sport where risk of dying is advertised up front and yet the entire audience and rank of judges turn their backs on Big Bad for killing a competitor? This is some weak criminal ****, man.

Jean's "death touch" is drawn attention to at the start of the tournament too, but it's never called back to again.

Why even are foreigners allowed to run around the streets of Hong Kong tazing people either? Isn't that against the law?

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38532&stc=1&d=1511780768

Oh hey, Forest Whitaker is in this movie too and he instantly has more personality, weird that.

In fact, the interpersonal drama between the characters in this movie is WAY better than in Rogue One, that's fricken' ridiculous. Frank and Best Friends Forever hit it off immediately and you get a sense for their camaraderie really quickly, and even though Frank and Reporter Girl jump in bed way too quickly, and she then betrays him way too quickly, and she then flashes him the smile-of-complete-innocence after that way too quickly (develop your female characters, for ****'s sakes), I still get more of a sense for how distinct each of these characters are, either from the main three protagonists, their manager, the two guys chasing them, and the Big Bad at the end than I did for the entire Rogue One crew and Tarkin's Bitch.

Not that that means a whole lot, it's mostly just padding to prevent the movie from going full Drunken Master on us, not that I would mind that, Drunken Master was awesome, but Drunken Master was also way more varied in it's combat scenes in more ways than one.

The main selling point of this movie is obviously the image on the tin, you wanna see Jean-Claude Van Damme roundhouse kick a mother****er and go ****ing ape**** on people (basically crazy-mugging like Bruce Lee did), and he does, but that really doesn't happen much till the final fight where Big Bad throws dust in his eyes and you get that absolutely ludicrous overreaction of a bloody Frank screaming wide-eyed into the middle distance before pulling a Donnie Yen and beating the guy blind.

Overall the movie kept my attention, but it wasn't anything too terribly bad or special.

Oh, what's this? This was based on a true story? The dude went over 300 matches undefeated before retiring with 4 world records? Wow.

In 2012 Sheldon Lettich, co-writer of the film Bloodsport based on Dux's "Kumite" claims, dismissed those claims and others Dux had made as being completely false.

Oh. Okay then.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

11-27-17, 09:05 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=38568&stc=1&d=1511831073

Carnival of Souls

Horror / English / 1962

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
To give an impression of just how massive my watchlist list is, this was 7 months ago:A heads up: I've already got Carnival of Souls on my watchlist.

I love the idea of a carnival-esque underworld, Devil's Carnival incited the itch, but it seemed a pale follow-up to Repo!: The Genetic Opera. A brief search and Carnival of Souls is invariably one of the first movies to pop up. Will it scratch that itch?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

No. Predictably, Carnival of Souls spends far too much time dancing around the concept than really indulging in it and by the end of it seems like an especially sub-par Twilight Zone episode.

Basic premise is Main Girl is a passenger in a car, the driver gets into a street race and runs off a bridge into river. She escapes well after you'd expect someone to have drowned and she goes about her life only to find herself stalked by the visage of a mysterious man and compelled to visit an abandoned bathhouse/carnival where I guess Spirited Away is taking place offscreen.

The movie starts off brisk, but after a while the pace slows to a lope while she just goes about her daily life with near constant and increasingly annoying organ music in the background.

A recurring subplot throughout the movie is this scumbag she's sharing a building with who is just the walking embodiment of the sort of person you should never interact with. Sight unseen this guy hits on her and needs to be talked down and told "no" like 5 times before he gets his intrusive ass out of her door. She indulges him in some attention the next morning, but it's transparently obvious that this guy just wants to have sex with her. All she does is give him an increasing laundry list of reasons he shouldn't be interested and turn his attention elsewhere, but he desperate falls all over her like a puppy in heat and for ****'s sake I would hate this guy in real life.

Amid some totally erratic sequences of "Wow, nobody's paying attention to me like I'm a ghost or something, HMMMMMMMM" we take some time setting up the overacting therapist who conveniently explains that he needs to turn his back to her to write down what she says, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, and eventually she gets fired from her church organist job because she's playing heretical music, HMM- wait. What? What was heretical? Was that fancy organ stuff just the slightest bit too cult-y to your ears, Minister? It's an organ. Or was she playing this offscreen?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNYhDkc71Bs

Man, that would've been a ****ing amazing break from the movie.

Been listening to a hell of a lot more metal since that Metal Song Tournament we had in case you can't tell. Sick ****.

Anyway, she eventually returns to the carnival, finds it populated by creepy people who swarm her, investigation finds she mysteriously disappeared, and of course they finally pull her car out of the water and HOLY GEE WHIZ SHE WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME!

I am absolutely stupefied by this ending, I did not see this coming at all. Completely stunned and shocked that the creators had such vision, such unparalleled craft to end the movie that way. Truly a marvel of it's time that has aged like fine wine.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

12-11-17, 12:11 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=39076&stc=1&d=1513008613

Re-animator

Horror / English / 1985

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Campy 80s cult classic mad scientist movie? I'm game.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I was hoping for campy more along the lines of Return of the Living Dead, but that'd be a bit too good to be true, huh?

Re-animator is weird in that the character on the cover is surprisingly neither the protagonist nor the antagonist, but a prevalent side character who sets the events of the story into motion. This guy is just deliberately creepy in such a way that it's ridiculous that any of the other characters give him the time of day. At least he seems creepy up until he starts having what seem like regular conversations with people and then the villain, our "teacher?" character gets even creepier by drawing out his sentences and staring wide-eyed out into the distance which affects other people like he's performing hypnosis or something even though this is never established and appears to work inconsistently because it doesn't seem to affect Re-Animator Guy who reasons that are also never established.

The movie doesn't shy away from gore at all, and I know I must be pretty de-sensitized to a lot at this point, but gross as it was, it never really bowled me over with anything, not that I'd want to watch it again. Especially since the movie drifts into gorn territory where it looks like Main Girl is gonna get eaten out by a decapitated zombie.

I really gotta wonder why anyone even bothers with that ****. Seriously, why do horror movie makers insist on adding nudity and sex alongside blood and guts? The blood and guts do not ADD to my experience, movie, they're pretty fricken' distracting. Anime's the same way; if a girl's about to get raped, she's going to get raped by the most unsexy disgusting monstrosity of a creature the creators can imagine.

You know what turns me on? Jabba the Hutt with no jaw, 3 rows of teeth, and visible stink lines. Mmmmmm... do me now.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=39077&stc=1&d=1513008643

Let's just leave aside the complete nonsense of a zombie scientist getting off from groping a pair of breasts when his dick and hands aren't even attached to him.

I will offer credit to one scene where Main Guy and Re-Animator Guy are chasing the zombie cat around the basement with only a hard light swinging overhead and a moving growling sound to indicate where they should direct their swings. It's pretty obvious there was no puppet in those shots, but they did a good job illuminating the action while sufficiently hiding the supposed location of the cat. I appreciated that, good job movie.

Also, if nobody else, Re-Animater Guy was interesting and there was a decent little arc for Main Guy to follow regarding his "optimism" with saving lives. Overall though, it was a pretty blegh movie. The plot wasn't interesting, but they managed to make the reanimation goo glow nuclear green which'll look great for marketing.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

12-11-17, 03:40 PM

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The Box

Psychological Thriller / English / 2009

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've been meaning to see this ever since the trailer. A couple receive a box with a button in it. If they press the button, they receive a million dollars. The catch is that somebody they don't know will die.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Beyond the premise, this movie falls short on what it promises to deliver. Sure enough it's revealed that accumulation of the results of these kinds of tests result in some sort of "altruism coefficient" which determines whether some unseen alien race terminates the planet, but this information comes very late in the movie and it's never expanded upon, ultimately leaving more questions than were answered. Really, this movie sounds like the plot of a Twilight Zone episode, but never really evokes the sort of thoughtfulness you'd expect from one.

Oh. Wait. It was a Twilight Zone episode.

Hold on, I'm going to go watch that.

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Okay, well that was mildly entertaining for how ridiculously over-acted it was, but ****ing seriously, the Twilight Zone episode is basically the first 15-20 minutes of the movie. The package arrives, it contains the "button unit", it says wait till 8 o' clock, Main Girl waits and talks to G-Man alone who says she'll get 200,000 dollars if she pushes the button, and someone she doesn't know will die. She and her husband argue over it and her husband, as in the movie, opens the thing and reveals there isn't even anything inside to suggest that pressing the button will have a real-world effect on anything. Eventually Main Girl presses it on impulse, G-Man shows up, hands over the money and leaves, saying he's going to reprogram it and give it to somebody they don't know under the same conditions.

In terms of concept, the Twilight Zone episode is superior, if only for the fact that it ends on an anti-climax, but with fridge logic reveals that the "somebody they don't know" conditions implies that they too can be victimized by somebody else in the same way, implying a Golden Rule-style morality lesson.

According to Wikipedia however, the original short story both the movie and episode were based on ended still differently:

In the original short story, the plot is resolved differently. Norma presses the button, and receives the money—after her husband dies in a train incident where Arthur is pushed onto the tracks (the money was the no-fault insurance settlement, which is $50,000 instead of the $200,000 in the Twilight Zone episode). A despondent Norma asks the stranger why her husband was the one who was killed. The stranger replies, "Do you really think you knew your husband?"

Now why didn't either end like that? If the episode had seeded some doubt as to the nature of the husband's behavior, like suggested he'd been cheating or gambling or concealing something from his wife, we needn't really really have seen what that was to get a payoff from it, here being to have the viewer question what constitutes "knowing" somebody. I think that would have been a much better ending, ironically even more befitting for The Twilight Zone than what was actually made into a Twilight Zone episode.

The movie honestly seems like the worst iteration of the three because it spends a grotesque amount of time having the characters investigate the G-Man revealing him to be some NSA guy involved in a lightning strike that gave him super powers for some completely unnecessary reason. That, on top of some ridiculously convoluted plot jumps involving some entirely unexplored teleportation system involving water which is lampshaded to not even be real, WHAT EVEN is the point of setting up some "pick one of three doors, one leads to salvation, two lead to damnation" bit when you've already established that this couple pressed the button? Is this not the sole means of determining the altruism coefficient, or is this really some entirely irrelevant sideplot about seeking the afterlife through this alien technology?

And you know, really, when it comes down to presenting this test as a reliable metric of whether someone is moral or not, why in the **** do you allow the characters in both the episode and the movie to open up the box and show it to be empty? Doesn't that further call the entire idea into question? Isn't this all pretty dubious to begin with anyway, I mean G-man does absolutely nothing to suggest what he's saying is true and only in the movie does he reveal the cash on him to show how serious he is.

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EVEN THEN though, it's not as if you could be held accountable for murder in such a situation, if these guys have inexplicably decided to shoot some random person depending on whether or not some random other people press a completely unrelated button, how can you genuinely hold those people accountable, PARTICULARLY when the entire prospect seems absurd and is entirely unsubstantiated on it's face.

The only way I can conceive to rationalize this concept realistically, is if pressing the button would leave a finger print which the bad guys would then be functionally paying for to frame their pre-determined murders, BUUUUUUT even then, why pay to leave a fingerprint at all in the first place? And on top of that, why leave evidence that could be traced back to people who witnessed you?

As ridiculous as this is, even this makes more sense than the mindboggling scenario in the movie where the presumed deaths are apparently caused by COMPLETELY unrelated scenarios going on simultaneously; one guy shooting his spouse in the chest for pressing the button which somehow saves their child, which then somehow then serves as the first death caused by Main Guy and Main Girl pressing the button which, for reasons undisclosed, blinds and deafens their child, only to be resolved by a second deal which involves Main Guy shooting Main Girl which serves as a death caused by pressing the button by AN ENTIRELY UNRELATED COUPLE...

IT MAKES NO ******* SENSE.

Pressing the button in the initial deal seems to do nothing but coincidentally line up with the time of death cause by killing one's spouse as part of an inevitable follow-up deal. THAT. MEANS. NOTHING. Pressing the button does nothing! Whether you press it or not, that same person will still die because it's predicated on entirely different characters making entirely different decisions!

This movie is crap!

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

CosmicRunaway

12-11-17, 05:24 PM

Re-Animator is legitimately one of my favourite films. It's campy sci-fi horror comedy at its best. I can definitely see why it would turn some people off though haha. Jeffrey Comb's performance as Herbert West is really the highlight of the film for me. I actually got to meet him at a convention a number of years back, which I think may have made me love the film even more haha.

Joel

12-13-17, 07:46 PM

Re-Animator was very cutting edge when it came out. It was well written and very funny. I suppose a lot of the humor can be sneaky, though. The hypnotism subplot was further developed in scenes that are on the releases that have them. For time reason they were cut from the film. Never bothered me, though. I just went with it. But I'm old fashioned. I like my horror with a little blood and boobs.

Omnizoa

01-19-18, 04:02 PM

Just dropping by to update my thread header. Bye now. Hope Sexy Celebrity is back.

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Omnizoa

08-18-18, 07:49 AM

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On The Waterfront

Drama / English / 1954

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I was watching Razorfist's video on why Hollywood Was Always Red (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo), a video debunking the myth of McCarthyism, that the threat of "reds under the bed" was not merely empty fearmongering, but substantiated by the counter-cultural popularity of Socialism, a persistent fact in America which, Razorfist argues, goes a long way to explain the exceptional efforts by California legislators to rigorous control the economy, leading it to become one of the most expensive places to live and, by ironic extension, a source of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) wealth inequities in America.

This is particularly pertinent to me considering certain literature I've read concerning the topic of wealth inequities in the California area, but it also echoes a glaring opinion in my own periphery of political discourse; the blatant denial that "Cultural Marxism" is even a thing. On multiple occasions I've been accused of parroting "nazi propaganda", that because Nazi Germany at one time said something that means it's not true. Curiously, Nazi Germany and Hitler himself were fond of the ideals of socialism, going so far as to call themselves "National Socialists", and while they may, economically, have shared little in common with the USSR, they can be easily cited parroting the ideals represented by socialists on multiple occasions. Even were that not true though, the fact remains that the denial is simply a flat contradiction, an association fallacy, whereas I can point to pervasive evidence that the idea of Cultural Marxism is staggeringly prevalent, and California is a hotbed for it in fact.

In his video, Razorfist explains that On The Waterfront was conceived as a response to the unspoken prevalence of communistic thought in Hollywood, and considering that it was a name of a popular movie I recognized and featured Lee J. Cobb of 12 Angry Men, I decided to watch it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"I coulda been a contender."

On The Waterfront takes way too damn long to make explicit the actual relationships between characters, but it eventually makes sense even if some things are too ancillary to leave an impression. As a result, I don't know any of the main characters' names, but secondary and tertiary characters whose names are mentioned repeatedly I do remember. Provided you know what a union is, it's easy enough to deduce the general plot of the movie by about the halfway point, but very little if anything goes into talking about the relationship unions generally have with businesses, why they exist, or how they're supposed to work in theory.

As far as the movie is concerned, it's at least taken for granted that unions are intended to work peacefully and democratically, however it deliberately subverts this expectation by presenting the union here as a top-down hierarchy, where the boss, played appropriately by Lee J. Cobb, is in the privileged position of dispensing Waterfront work according to favoritism. The main character is ostensibly the younger brother of Charlie, an elite goon in Cobb's union, and by this connection it's shown that he receives preferential treatment in stark contrast to some employees who are literally assassinated to preserve the scheme. The trick, as tends to be the prevailing criticism of unions in general, is that money which goes towards supporting the union and "justly" distributing work and pay, instead coalesces in the hands of a few.

One would like to believe that socialists, ever the enemy of hierarchies that they claim to be, would be receptive to this concern, but if Stalinist Russia is any indication, loyalty to the party is an absolute condition, and so, in objection to the "capitalist hierarchy" of traditional business models which absorb the profit margins off the top of each employee's paycheck, the employees seek safety in the form of a union which does exactly the same thing.

This seems more than enough reason to be vehemently reject any calls SocDems have made in recent memory for fighting "right to work" legislation, which essentially forbids unions from mandating membership. It's bad enough that the economy is so that you're forced into the labor market to work at whatever pay can be spared on your miserable ****ing life, but now you're being forced into a union to tax your paycheck even further. Thanks, Socialism.

Anyway, the movie is fairly predictable as it goes, the guy is stuck in the middle of this scheme and while he obviously has misgivings, he sticks by his "D&D" (that he should be "deaf and dumb"), rather than "stool", which I take to be an abbreviation of "stool pigeon", which is a euphemism for "tool", which is a euphemism for tattling to the cops that your union is embezzling money and killing anyone with loose lips.

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The "stool" bit seems a little on the nose considering there's an entire pigeon subplot in which Main Guy ends up taking care of the pigeons (by "taking care of" I here mean "needlessly entrap") left behind by the guy he inadvertently helped get murdered at the start of the movie, probably out of some more subtle nod to him eventually confessing to the local pastor out of guilt.

A much better subplot involves a seemingly pointless diversion from the story to discuss Main Guy's past as a prize fighter. This serves no purpose in the moment when it's mentioned which sucks, but it's reincorporated in two ways later on in the movie: not only does he ultimately get into a fight with Lee on the Waterfront, forcing him to call in his friends to gang up on him, but his career as a prize-fighter is referenced earlier, pointing to the fact that he took bets to fix a match rather than fight clean.

This roughly parallels his attitude towards work in the union, taking the easy way out rather than the honest way out. Favoritism pays off in cash and easy work, but it does little for his character and comes at the implicit threat of worse conditions should he fail to tow the line.

Overall this movie really does appear to be a veiled strike at radical leftists, the tendency of fringe socialist organizations is to compel complicity and burn traitors (not all that different from what I would call the extreme right; monarchy). Whether or not it resolves into a despotism as in the case of our union here, silent uniform obedience to the motion is what gives the monster it's momentum, and as the movie shows, that momentum easily reverses with collective effort. The eternal problem is getting that collective effort, even democratic states are prone to mob rule, in this way, enforcers of the status quo are just the new conservatives.

I like some of the ideas expressed in the movie and I like how a couple scenes are played out cinematically (particularly when Main Guy admits to Main Girl his role in the death of whats-his-face), but there's a lot of empty dialog early in the movie, there's a pointless romance, Main Girl has difficulty acting at times, Lee Cobb doesn't do nearly enough finger-pointing and yelling, and the music is awkward when it's not forgettable. But then maybe I'm spoiled on 12 Angry Men.

If nothing else, this movie makes me want to watch more 40s-50s black-and-white pieces, cause I dig the atmosphere they occasionally bring, I really gotta find a movie more symptomatic of the times.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

10-13-18, 06:14 AM

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Lean On Me

Drama / English / 1989

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've been wrapped up in a research project and the educational deterioration is a central theme. I'm sure I've seen it before, but I'm certain it's been over a decade so I don't remember if it's ideas of reform are relevant to the subject I'm researching.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"You smoke crack don'tcha!?"

Morgan Freeman's character, who, as the reluctant principal of a ****awful school charged with turning its grades around for a basic standards test, is partly enjoyable and partly irritating, but not significantly in either direction. Per his character he's frustratingly brash, arbitrarily assertive, and has a tendency to monologue because he's Morgan Freeman.

On the other hand he's Morgan Freeman.

Personally the charm wore off pretty fast for me, I can pinpoint the moment when he finishes giving an over-the-top speech about education and then it cuts to him giving another over-the-top speech at an emergency parent-teacher meeting, complete with clapping and cheers, as when I knew this movie wasn't going to rank high with me. A stilted pace with forced plot beats can really ruin the tempo of your movie and that's not really helped when you immediately run into the ground your character's central eccentricity which is to walk into any given situation, point at the nearest person, yell in their face, and then leave after making some grand proclamation about what will be done differently from now on.

One of these things is asserting that every student should memorize the school song. Apparently "school spirit" and the football team are exceptional weak points in the school so naturally Morgan "Joe Clark" Freeman must divert his time away from correcting teachers and reforming the curriculum, two things which could have a tangible impact on test scores to focus on them, but **** that the kids need to know how to recite a stupid song, in chorus, on command.

To be honest, Lean On Me almost feels like a social conservative power fantasy. Guy roles in in a suit, smacks kids across the head, tells them to jump to their deaths if you smoke crack, publicly humiliates students for their choice of clothes, insists that test scores are relative to character and the best way to build character is to be patriotic towards your school.

I hate that "school spirit" ****, honestly, but moreover the problems that resulted in this school being a ****hole in the first place were not even resolved by the end of the movie. The premise is that Eastside is a city public high school, not to be confused with a private high school. The characters bitch that "the state" will come take their school away if they fail to pass the Minimum Basic Standards Test and in that moment I was taken back to George W. Bush passing the No Child Left Behind Act.

You remember that act? It has one of those sceevy scum**** names like "Black Lives Matter" which sounds unobjectionable, but in reality it's a hellacious nightmare of unspeakable evil. But hush, you're not supposed to say that, because if you do you'll offend all the political ignoramuses who can't be bothered to read past pretty names.

Or headlines.

So yeah, in actuality "the state" already runs the school, the state just happens to be a city run by a mayor and school board. They're weeping into their cereal because a bigger more encompassing state is setting quotas. And further they're complaining that they can't meet those quotas because an even bigger state than that, the Federal United States, won't give them enough money to buy security alarms for their exits or afford regular teachers.

So to clarify, a state is the government of a given area; Eastside High School is a product of a tertiary state, the city it resides in. That tertiary state is subject to a secondary state, the "state" the city resides in. That secondary state is also subject to a primary state, the federation of "states" the city resides in. All in all this school had 3 separate governments sticking their fat ****ing fingers into the gears trying to get it to work and failed.

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OOH, but ONE MAN, one special dictatorial man has the experience and the willpower to march into that school, point his fingers every which direction and FIX EVERYTHING.

Nevermind the literal cronyism that orchestrated to put him there and take him back out in the first place. See, this is where your "modern liberal" just blows my ****ing mind because this platform of "we the people" and "democracy" just evaporates out the window when it comes to government intervention. You could even say that Morgan Joe Clark is a quaternary form of government, how did we solve this terrible education dilemma? WE JUST NEED THE RIGHT KING OF COURSE! One with an iron fist that won't take any ****!

This exact same model is what failed your school in the first place and you think the problem is solved by swapping out bad people for better people? You're delusional. Literally as delusional as every single revolutionary regime in history.

I refer you to TVTropes' wonderful page on "Full-Circle Revolution" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FullCircleRevolution):

They call it a revolution for a reason.

This trope refers to when a revolution loses revolutionary zeal and appears to just repeat the pre-revolution business as usual, via bureaucratic inertia (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ObstructiveBureaucrat). Names and rhetoric change, the injustices stay the same (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StatusQuoIsGod).The beginning of the movie, set 20 years prior, the school is shown to be relatively well off with the teachers bitching about the budget.

And by the end of the movie, the school has apparently recovered from it's obscene descent into chaos and anarchy, the school is shown to be relatively well off with the teachers still bitching about the budget.

What has the changed? The only difference is the guy the state happened to appoint to the position. They could just as easily have appointed someone else or yet appoint someone worse after Clark leaves. What is to stop the school descending back into the mess it fell into?

A traditionalist, a social conservative might argue that it's merely a matter of having the right person, but that assures nothing, and there is no legal mechanism to ensure that you have the right person even if it did.

A progressive, a New Deal liberal might argue that it's merely a matter of having enough money, perhaps to hire the right person, but that also assures nothing, and there is no legal mechanism to ensure that you hire the right person even if it did.

Firing the old guard and throwing money at the problem solves ****ing nothing because the problem is endemic to the way the system is organized in the first place, there is no mechanistic cause in the bureaucratic machine that makes it spit out quality schools, money and job candidates are not mere ingredients for "good schools", that assumes that the government is a blackboard on which you can scrawl whatever you aspiring little heart desires on it so long as you have tax-dollars to do it with.

It's not, that's utopian command economy bull****, if they didn't want the state ****ing with their school, they shouldn't have opened a public school in the first place. **** public schools, a private school is under a constant market pressure to offer a quality education at an affordable price under conditions that are voluntary.

If you can't afford to send your kid to a private school, then teach them yourself. What the **** are these parents doing going to a parent-teachers meeting and calling Morgan Freeman a fascist cause he expelled their scumbag drug-dealing son? **** you, bitch, take this time you're wasting telling us how how to educate your damn kids and educate them yourself.

I don't see your son with you now! Whose watching your son? Whose dropping the ball right now, MOM?

And on a funny, if slightly irrelevant note, the child actor who Morgan Freeman verbally abuses and tells to kill himself for doing drugs has been arrested multiple times (http://www.tmz.com/2011/12/15/lean-on-me-actor-jermaine-huggy-hopkins-marijuana/) since for exactly that.

Seems not even Morgan Freeman can save these kids. Case in point.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

11-20-18, 05:18 PM

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Night of the Comet

Thriller / English / 1984

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
A classic example of an obscure 80s B-movie, featuring about what you'd expect.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"My parents told me never to breathe anything from strangers."

Night of the Comet is a pointless movie with promotional artwork (https://assets.bigcartel.com/product_images/189038684/Screen_Shot_2016-11-23_at_5.24.14_PM.png) far cooler than it deserves.

I say it's a pointless movie because very little comprises the middle area between the setup and the ending. A comet is set to fly by the planet one night and an unrealistic amount of people decide to go outside to see it. Boom, rapture.

Everyone who isn't instantly reduced to dust is inconsistently afflicted with a disease which reduces them to dust zombies at an inconsistent rate.

After the grief has quickly come and gone, a gratuitous montage of Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun plays as our two main heroines try on clothes and bide time waiting for "The Last Man On Earth" to return to them only to then be jumped by some sadistic dudes who are just a tinge too creepy to be wasting a bullet killing them both. They get saved by a research crew who have somehow been researching this dust disease thing, Alpha Bitch acts all heartless about wanting to save kids and the research crew splits up our two heroines only for Alpha Bitch to euthanize one of them, ostensibly to save them from the disease.

BUT LO, as it turns out, it was all a ruse, for Alpha Bitch kills herself for real(?) shortly before it's revealed that the injection given to our heroine was fake! Turns out the research crew is evil and trying to capture people and harvest their blood in an attempt to find a cure to slow the disease. "The Last Man On Earth" returns for a timely rescue and all of the characters who matter make it out alive just to return to the same "yay for us, we're all alone again" montage.

On retrospect the plot raises some bizarre questions. Firstly, if Alpha Bitch gave Heroine #2 a fake lethal injection just to fool the one research crew guy there to make sure she does it, why did she immediately kill him afterwards? Like, it's even implied that she might go for her gun afterwards, but she still outdraws him. Pretty dumb.

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Second, the serum is never found and all the researchers are dead. Soooo... does the dust disease really kill them in the 36 hours after the movie ends? Cause that was a mighty happy ending for what should be a real tonal dissonance. I'd like to emphasize that there's nothing in the way of the sort of subversion we got in Looker, where we played upbeat television jingles to people dying, it's just a generic running off into the distance credit roll with the same sort of music that's been playing throughout the rest of the movie.

And that is to say that the "horror" genre that this movie is so often tarred with is wildly ancillary to the proceedings. You get maybe what, 3 total "horror scenes", each accompanied with a score designed specifically to spoil the jumpscares before they happen? Like there's one scene where Heroine #2 is stripping in a dark bathroom and the soundtrack just starts bleeding strings into the 80s pop.

Are you serious? Girl stripping in front of a mirror with high strings playing in the background? Thanks to for warning me that something's going to pop-up behind her. I realize this is an 80s movie but really, if the purpose was to scare, how do you accomplish that by wildly telegraphing that something scary is about to happen?

Maybe I just answered my own question there.

Anyway, the "zombies" are so fringe to the movie they're virtually non-existent. The plot could just as easily function without them. There's a grand total of 2 of them in the whole movie with 1 scene each, not including the 2 bad guys who are shown with eye makeup seconds before they both die.

In terms of a sort of 80s period movie (if you could call it that) it has some shots in the radio station building that look kinda cool, but most of it comes from the big hair and interchangeable pop soundtrack.

Distinctly inferior to the likes of Adventures in Babysitting.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

11-21-18, 10:40 PM

Rewatched Drunken Master, you can find my updated review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1585742-drunken-master.html).

Omnizoa

01-08-19, 01:15 AM

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Action Adventure Horror / English / 2018

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I saw some gameplay of the Jurassic World: Evolution park simulator game and felt inspired.

NOTE: Beginning with this review my scores will be measured on a 10-point scale, rather than a 5-point scale. All previous reviews can be considered -0.5 popcorn for conversion.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"You exploited a living thing in a cage for money."

What to say about this movie... Immediately I can say with complete confidence that it is an overall better movie than the first Jurassic World. The endlessly insufferable and contrived romance is virtually non-existent here and the annoying kids are thankfully replaced with significantly less annoying teen/young adults here. That alone spares this movie the worst of it's predecessor, but it also goes without the best of it's predecessor too as the ending here in no way lives up to the awesome climactic multi-dino-brawl of the first movie.

That's not to say we don't get some solid action sequences, and just in terms of dinosaurs, this really is a movie for dinosaur geeks. All previous movies have always felt, and been deliberately written to emphasize, a very narrow pool of dinosaurs. Not only is this narratively justified by the fact that only so many dinosaurs were made up to the point in time the movie takes place, but it undoubtedly saved the effects budget to segment parts of each movie for featuring one type of dinosaur at a time. Here, it's as if the brakes are off, because we repeatedly see a wide range of different dinosaurs embroiled in the proceedings. Whereas in the first Jurassic Park, your dominant predators were limited to just the one T-Rex, here, not only do you get the T-Rex, but you also get the Carnotaur, the Allosaur, and the Spinosaur. Truly, the dino geeks among us can appreciate the cameos.

So what really happens? Well, the movie opens with Clare, our Lead Bitch from the first movie working for the "Dinosaur Protection Group", which involves soliciting donations and begging the federal government to fund their wildlife preservation project.

Right off the bat, totally prepared to get to know this character all over again... I dislike her. Almost immediately she sees the news on TV that the island of dinosaurs is going to be left victim of the active volcano on it, some nameless politician just straight up gives the rational economic justification for it: "The government should not be subsidizing a private business."

Of course they slip some throwaway line about "leaving them to God" in his dialog just to further stir up our inner raging liberal, but seriously, the government should not be in the business of handing out money to people who beg for it, especially for species preservation.

Our protagonist hangs her head in a sad moment and says "NOBODY CARES..."

Bitch, you're part of an organization that exists specifically TO care, but hey, I'll take you at your word: NOBODY CARES. Nobody gives a **** that these dinosaurs would prefer to live free of human interference, you and your ****ty organization just want to continue rationalizing your selfish ****ing attitude. "BUT YOU'RE WRONG, IF WE DON'T DO SOMETHING THE DINOSAURS WILL DIE IN THE VOLCANO!"

And your alternative is what? To enslave them? To force them to breed and play with their lives for entertainment? That's what you were doing before and I have to admit there's certainly was a financial incentive for it! I hate that the movie portrays the environmentalists as the downtrodden good guys here, cause they're only marginally less *******-ish than the cigar-chomping military dude who rips the teeth out of the dinosaurs while their still awake just so he'd have a sadistic trophy before they're sold off.

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Did I mention how this is basically just Lost World?

Jurassic World is to Jurassic Park what Fallen Kingdom is to Lost World. The similarities are numerous:

1. A friendly-seeming organization contacts one of the survivors of the Park incident, claiming to have totally 100% legit reasons to go back to the ruins to recover something.

2. The character is reluctant, but ultimately agrees when it's revealed their love interest got strung along behind their back already.

3. They go to the island with a bunch of their suicidal "save-the-dinosaur" hippy friends.

4. They're forced to work alongside a bunch of armed mercenaries who are also totes-on-the-level man.

5. The movie uses multiple setpieces from the previous movie to show decay and the passage of time at familiar locations.

6. SURPRISE! The mercenaries are here to capture dinosaurs and bring them back to civilization for money! Greed! Profit! Muwhahahaha!

7. In the process of escaping the hippies set a bunch of dinosaurs loose which has predictably disastrous consequences.

8. The bad guy gets absolutely destroyed by a T-Rex for karmic justice.

9. Queue nightmares about large carnivorous dinosaurs outside your bedroom window.

10. Jeff Goldblum monologuing.

Yeah, so this movie really is just The Lost World except with Jurassic World's cast and frankenstein twist.

This time, instead of the Indominus Rex, you have the "IndoRaptor" which is immediately less intimidating considering it's much smaller. However unlike the Indominus, it doesn't have some bull**** magical invisibility powers. It also appears much later in the movie with much less mystery surrounding it; it's specifically a blend of the Indominus and Blue, the "friendly" raptor from the first movie. This is rationalized in that it has all of the ferocity of the Indominus, but with Blue's domesticated streak which, I guess, instead of translating into being more peaceful, results in it being capable of taking commands with a laser pointer and sound gun, a Chekov's Gun which sadly gets little payoff by the end of the movie.

I will say though, that they do manage to make this creature much more frightening than the Indominus. It's much easier to recognize by it's eyes and glowing stripe, it's mouth opens criminally wide, and it's got long arms with which to reach out and grab you with. Easily the best moment in the movie, for me, was seeing the IndoRaptor hunt down the Little Girl across the roof in the rain like Krampus. That one shot of it slowly descending upside down into view of the bedroom window is not only creepy, but it's plausible while also being something I'm confident is beyond the physical abilities of the other dinosaurs.

I do have a couple grievances with how it was handled though. First off; dumb**** in charge finds the thing upset in it's cage, tranqs it twice and then OPENS THE CAGE to go inside. At first I'm wracking my head wondering what in the ****ing hell would compel this stupid **** to OPEN THE ******* CAGE when the stupid dinosaur is obviously CONTAINED. It only really makes sense in retrospect when you consider he's trying to collect teeth from all of the dinosaurs he sees, but really? At a time like this? I'll grant the rationalization that he's a cocky hunter who wants a trophy, but **** was it stupid to do that. Perhaps it just seemed far too obvious to me that the IndoRaptor was only pretending to be dead knocked out. We played up this thing as one of the most intelligent things on the planet, genetically engineering for combat, it gets hit with two tranqs and all dramatically falls over? Puh-lease.

Also, what's with the brainiac plan of escaping the IndoRaptor by turning the lights off? You're not nocturnal. You know this thing more than likely is. Way to handicap yourself.

Round of applause, once again, for the villains, who for the second movie in a row just straight-up explain how stupid the other characters are. "What's that, protagonists? You want to ****in' moralize to me after you ran a ******* zoo into the ground and released countless bloodthirsty genetic abominations into the environment killing untold numbers of people and animals, then started lobbying for government subsidies to sustain the lives you condemned to the private death island you enslaved them on AND I'M THE BAD GUY?"

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

02-27-19, 10:07 PM

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Ram-Leela

Comedy Romantic Drama / Hindi / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Someone posted an animated gif of the above image to a vegan subreddit with the caption "when you bring hummus to the party", the image was sourced to this video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sIooFGRBZJY) which I watched once and IMMEDIATELY had to see the entire movie it was from.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"A man with a hairless chest cannot be trusted."

So the movie opens up with some Indian guys sitting around the black market where they casually remark upon the fact that guns are illegal, ubiquitous, and used to arm both the Rajadi and Sanera clans who've been feuding for generations and are tempted to wipe each other out every single day. What could go wrong, right?

Well, just such a fight breaks out and in the heat of bullets and broken clash, someone mentions Ram, the only guy who preaches peace and love. Queue the viral Youtube video linked above. Ram rolls in, posing horizontally across his motorcycle, chest out, aviators on, taking a selfie, as the music kicks in, he jumps off his motorcycle and leads a synchronized dance sequence involving stripping, hip thrusting, and muscle flexing, all to lyrics explaining how this man is a God among men, an Adonis whose mere gaze can turn straight men gay and lesbians into jelly.

This opening sequence is hilarious and weird and unfortunately the high point of the movie because it gradually goes downhill from here.

This movie is portrayed as a modern Indian version of Romeo and Juliet, but, given it's musical stylings, shares more in common with West Side Story. There are roughly 5 song-length dance sequences in the movie all with their own choreography. Most of these are forgettable, but they do have an odd tendency of splashing in some truly ridiculous looking dance moves. Not impressive, just ridiculous.

Basically, Ram is son of the Don of the Rajadi clan, and Leela is the daughter of the Don of the Sanera clan. Both appear to operate outside the law, but this fact is never explored or really expanded upon. Essentially they have their own monopolies that they don't like the other infringing upon and both have a nasty predisposition towards violence.

Naturally this begs Ram and Leela to unite the two, but, really, they do pretty much **** all throughout the whole movie. By the 30-minute mark, they've already kissed and had that whole love-at-first-sight bull**** and barely one apart from their closest friends sympathize at all with the politics of their situation. Everyone's either "damn those Rajadis", or "damn those Saneras" and that really never changes until the Don of the Saneras totally breaks character and gets all weepy about violence after we've already seen her endorse extortion and personally chop off her daughter's ring finger to avoid spoiling the arranged marriage she set up for Leela. She's a pretty contemptible bitch to pull this heel-face-turn on us and we don't really see that development.

Speaking of development, the characters who we should really be seeing development from, Ram and Leela, offer virtually nothing. Leela doesn't appear to have much of a personality apart from being Ram's feisty significant other, and Ram appears to have ridiculous mood-swings.

Ram tries to play peacenik with both sides, but eventually plays along to both sides target shooting at each other. ****ing shocker when his brother gets shot, WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT FIRING GUNS AT PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES???

This isn't really played off as a joke either, but it sure comes off as unintentionally funny when Ram the pacifist takes his dead brother's gun and fires scattershot into a crowd of people.

Boom, suddenly both Ram and Leela's brothers are dead, now they hate each other. They elope together, but they're at each other's throats with the same old prejudicial bull****, these characters were supposed to be above this and they're not. Eventually schemers on both sides of the fence play them against each other, they return to their respective factions and get nonsensically promoted to Don.

NOW can they have their happy ending?

No, they have to have a passive aggressive negotiations session where Ram's just a puddle of tears and Leela's a vindictive bitch for no reason. It ends when Ram forcing out a selfie with the two of them that looks like they're going to double-suicide.

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And that's what they do. Not right away, annoyingly, no they gotta jerk the audience around by the dicks some more, fooling you into believing they may actually, eventually, have the happy ending you expect is coming, but instead they shoot each other in the guts seconds away from learning that peace has been made between both factions without them and they have a totally unrealistic parallel fall backwards into the garden pond.

So, the movie's overall plot is just crummy, but it's not all bad. Ram's initial portrayal as a stud-muffin is immediately contradicted by reference to the fact that he sells stolen cars, porn, and hits on girls with a water pistol, but he manages to be an amusing and charismatic character besides, at least when he's not dropping a metric ton of pick-up lines on Leela.

There are some pretty good lines of dialog in the movie too, the Don of Saneras is a woman named "Baa", and when a sexual assault fiasco ultimately lands both sides with rape accusations, the old Rajadi insult "I thought there were no men in Saneras" becomes "so there are no men in Rajadi after all" which Ram pitches back to Baa by challenging her to prove he's not a gentlemen by starting a relationship with him.

Given the political context here where both sides are at each others' throats, this is a FANTASTIC line that could lead both sides towards a peaceful co-existence. Unfortunately Baa organizes a hit on Ram in retaliation for this slight, which for no explicable reason winds up getting her shot, which puts Leela up as the Don... and it just seems like we're in the perfect position for a happy ending at this point and the characters just screw it the **** up for no reason.

It reminds me of Code Geass's ending, which is not a good thing.

There are a lot of terms used which I never learn what they mean, but the plot is still coherent despite this. Characters will frequently shoot bullets into the air if only to emphasize a point which seems to me a massive waste of ****ing money. There's a part of the movie where Ram is seen smoking and they seriously needed to add a label to the bottom right corner of the screen saying "cigarette smoking is injurious to health". No ****, India. You know what else is injurious to health? Driving a motorcycle with your feet. Shut the **** up.

I also have to credit the movie for reminding me of Dragon Tiger Gate because Ram goes on a rampage in the third act where he starts kicking guys across the room and bouncing them off the concrete. It's great. I wish there was more of that.

Overall it's a mildly amusing movie with a dumb plot, one ridiculously awesome dance sequence, and enough color, charisma, and music to keep you engaged the rest of the way.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

05-16-19, 07:51 AM

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Avengers: Infinity War

Superhero Action / English / 2018

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've become increasingly intrigued by the villain of Thanos who's been hyped up to be one of the arch villains of the Marvel universe. I've never been a fan of the superhero genre and remember watching the first Avengers, liking it, and learning second-hand that the character teased during the credits of the first movie was some bigwig. I just thought he was another instance of "OMG NOSTALGIA", but the more I learn about his whole arc around collecting some 6 "infinity stones" which govern the universe and would confer upon him the power to snap life out of existence, the more I want to see him be a great villain.

I had no interest in Age of Ultron so I skipped that, and I didn't see Captain America: Civil War either which I understand to be like an Avengers 2.5. The only Avengers: Infinity War related movies I've seen up to this point are Iron Man 1 & 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, and The Avengers. Also The Incredible Hulk, but I barely remember it. I've read zero of the comics.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"We're in the Endgame now."

If I had any outstanding criticism for The Avengers, it would be that too much of it is occupied by characters just standing around talking. Not being superheroes, just being boring. At it's peak, it was solid popcorn entertainment, Loki acts like an irrepressible douchebag throughout the whole movie and gets his **** pushed in by the Avengers just being your friendly neighborhood superheroes. Queue Tony Stark quip, queue Captain America being an uptight melodramatic dick. You win some, you lose some.

Infinity War smashes this fault to pieces by consisting almost entirely of setpiece action sequences, and even when the action dips the dialog and plot development is fast and informative enough to keep us up to pace with just enough room to breath before plunging us back in for more. Immediately as the movie opens, we're greeted by the big purple villain himself as he beats the **** out of Thor, Hulk, and straight up kills Loki. Just having seen the first movie is enough to cement him as a threat and that major characters can die in this movie, and that's no great farce, Loki isn't sacrificed for a mere hook, Thanos kills multiple major characters throughout the movie, death is real insofar as he wills it.

I was hoping he'd have more depth as a character overall, but Thanos, lacking the distinctive voice or personality of noteworthy villains like the Joker or Darth Vader, is helpfully supported by a decent script which gives him some reasonably appealing lines, and it's good that they exist because the only things really holding him up are is design concept and his dialog. His motivation is about as bog-standard as it comes for universe villains; "I must genocide trillions to preserve balance". He delivers some thoughtful points on unchecked population growth which reminds me of Thomas Malthus (given the other economic references he's been memed into), but overall his evil plan is as bland as a superhero origin story... which is why I didn't watch all the garbage they shoved out in preparation for this movie.

Most of the major characters in these movies have origin stories, but if you've seen Iron Man, and you've stomached Avengers, and didn't put a bullet in your brain already for the number of times "I am Groot" has already been uttered in the English language, then you'll be fine watching the movie with at least a peripheral understanding of everyone's roles and relative capabilities. About the only character that really threw me off was Vision, who apparently is introduced in Age of Ultron. I hope he's not a worthless damsel in that movie cause he sure felt like it here, it's like every other scene he's in he gets stabbed in the gut by a spear. It gets ridiculous.

I like that Doctor Strange featured heavily, which is one of the few Marvel origin movies I actually had some interest in seeing, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Spider-man, who I forgot appeared in Civil War. Spider-man probably being top of my list of tolerable superheroes. But it's not just Spider-man, it's IRON SPIDER-MAN, out of nowhere, Stark just had an Iron Man suit made for him which gives him robot spider-legs and ****, and Iron Man's suit is made of NANO-MACHINES now...

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This movie had a lot of WOW moments for me. Perhaps it was because this new stuff wasn't spoiled for me in previous movies, but not since Final Fantasy VII Advent Children have I been satisfied seeing normal-sized people beat the **** out of each other with skyscrapers, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

The best fight scene in my opinion was when Stark, Strange, Spider-man and the Guardians team up to ambush Thanos. It sounded like a ****ing retarded plan,

"Thanos can't get the Time Stone!"
"I've got an idea, let's go to Thanos."
"Okay sure, let's do that."

...and it was, but it opens with Iron Man dunking a ******* spaceship on Thanos head and the whole fight exploding into a cluster**** of lasers, energy beams, telepathy, webs, gunfire, anything to incapacitate Thanos and keep him from manipulating the Infinity Gauntlet. Course, it's all Starlord's fault that they didn't totally subdue him cause he couldn't keep his emotions under control. The consequences of that punch to the face were untold.

Something I also appreciate from this movie is that they very explicitly set up Thanos goal to rid the universe of half it's life, that if he had all 6 stones that he could do it with a snap of his finger.

And he does. It's a slow build-up to Thanos acquiring all the stones, I think they could have done a much better job highlighting each little step towards the end, but when he finally gets there he literally evaporates half the life in the universe. Boom, half the cast of supers is reduced to dust. Vision's girlfriend, yeah okay, a bunch of Wakandan warriors, yeah okay, but Black Panther? The Guardians? Doctor Strange? SPIDER-MAN?

Sure, most of the big players like Stark, Thor, and Hulk remain intact, I wouldn't have it any other way, but these are still BIG character deaths! This single movie puts a canon end to more spin-off franchises than anything else I can think of.

And it ENDS that way. Thanos wins. End credits.

The ******* balls on that writer. I can't help but respect this movie not just for neatly assembling the stars of well over a dozen other superhero movies with merits in their own right, but throwing them together in such an explosive team matchup against the comic-book equivalent of Toguro from Yu Yu Hakusho, and then killing half of them off, including multiple fan favorites.

Bravo. I don't even care that they lost, I'm just happy to have seen it happen.

What I wasn't happy to see was the after-credits scene which obviously teases Captain Marvel coming in to save the day in the sequel. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were unforgivably plagued by race and sexual politics. I can forgive Black Panther's presence in this movie because the topic isn't brought up at all and he serves as a sort of ambassador to a nation with technology ostensibly powerful enough to be plot critical. That's fine, I have no issues there, he's still stupid caricature of a superhero, but he blends in with the rest of the cast well enough. Equality, that's all I want.

But now, Captain Marvel's supposed to swoop in, with what is perhaps the worst superhero name and the most Mary Sue (or shall I say "Superman"?) of superpowers to save the day, Miss Smash-the-Patriarchy herself?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I like strong female characters, it's part of why I like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, it's part of why I like Charlize Theron in Fury Road, they're badasses and still human in their own way, in an industry that normally suffocates the genre in big burly dudes. Well here I am rooting for the big burly dude, because I have no interest in such a cheap political character being the convenient foil to fly in during the final act to ruin the fun because "**** you, girl power".

I'm not convinced Endgame can live up to Infinity War, the central stone collection arc is over, creative options have been explicitly reduced due to major character deaths, and here, before the end at least, there was still some semblance of the goofy old Marvel comedy bristling around the edges to keep things light. A darker finale with fewer likable characters, no pre-built-to-break plot pressure, and a cheap Mary Sue ready to swoop in and girl power all the bad guys away?

It looks bleak, but I'm more interested than I was before.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Great]

Omnizoa

06-15-19, 07:36 AM

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Hardcore Henry

Sci-Fi Action / English / 2015

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It was marketed as an entirely first-person action movie featuring parkour. Sounds cool, let's check it out.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Hardcore Henry is an extraordinarily perplexing movie. At it's peak it's a deliberately cheesy action movie romp with a fun quirk of the protagonist essentially smack-talking the other characters through body language like a self-aware video game. At it's depths, it's a gratuitously gory story about spilling as much blood and breaking as many bones as possible to defeat a guy with telekinesis (for some reason) and stop his cyborg mind-slave army.

Whereas I might immediately compare it to Maniac for it's camera gimmick, as the movie goes on I end up reminded of the more unpleasant mutilation scenes from that movie instead. But more than that movie, I'm reminded of Turbo Kid, because just like that movie, it appears to excel when it's tone is that of the more family-friendly/PG-13 genre it wants to glorify, but gets dragged down by an unhealthy obsession with gore.

In Turbo Kid I witnessed a bicycle being used to crank someone's intestines from their body. In Hardcore Henry, Henry literally pulls his own eye out of his head, wraps the cord around the Big Bad's head, and bisects the lower mandible from the rest of his skull.

I hadn't really considered that Henry's eyeball could be used as garrote wire, but there you have it. Apart from being absolutely ridiculous in the moment, I don't really get anything out of that, and the movie's not consistently ridiculous enough for it to feel appropriate. The trailers portrayed this as a conventional action movie with the flare of a first person character gunning down baddies from atop speeding vehicles. I'd call that quality entertainment, but whereas the first half of the movie verges on Jason Bourne in terms of narrative sincerity, the second half collapses into a mad spectacle of setpieces and intentionally goofy character moments, and ultimately culminates in visuals that don't resemble anything I would have expected or wanted out of a movie with that trailer.

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The movie seems self-aware enough to splice in a Wilhelm during one of it's more on-the-nose action sequences, it mocks the notion of an epic horseriding sequence by having Henry bucked off, and it even plays Queen during the climax of the movie, but in the moments where there really isn't any subversive context to the scene, these elements just fall flat and out of place. I remember another obvious stock scream effect show up in one of the later fight sequences and just being taken aback because there really isn't anything silly going on beyond Henry being "Hardcore" and shooting lots of guys.

The main character apart from Henry is this British Guy who appears to show up in multiple outfits and personalities despite dying in previous scenes. I wasn't sure what was going on, but the protagonist doesn't have the voice to question it and the movie takes it sweet time getting around to rationalizing it. Henry's back-and-forth with British Guy however forced it feels at times is the only sign of humanity we really see in this movie, and it feels good when British Guy compliments Henry on murdering everyone in the room and Henry simply whips him an OK sign. That's cute, I like that, I wish more of the movie was like that.

But by the end we have a villain who, despite looking silly, doesn't really act silly enough to turn the movie into the satire it desperately wants to be. We establish we got cyber prosthetics so Henry can take a few more bumps that ordinary goons, but then out of nowhere, like in Looper, we have a telekinetic villain just flying into the air and throwing dead bodies around.

It might have been one thing if this movie tried to thrive on constant brutal intensity which movies like Speed and Fury Road did so well, it even sits itself up in this manner, literally telling Henry that he'll die in 20 minutes just as the movie begins to rev up, but that conflict is shortly resolved, we go to a whorehouse so British Guy can snort a line of coke and shoot guys in his underwear and the viewer can see women touch his crotch and... just like that the charm has totally worn off.

I credit the movie for some moments of complex choreography that they pull off and some understated CG that must have been necessary to pull certain stunts off, but just as the tone is inconsistent, so is the CG, as certain scenes just look like total trash out of nowhere.

It was an okay movie, and I'm sure you can have some spirited arguments with friends over how bizarre and ridiculous it gets, but while the package remains a mixed bag, I can't honestly recommend.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

06-30-19, 03:35 AM

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Enemy at the Gates

Historical War Drama / English / 2001

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I was reminded of it in a recent critique of Battlefield V I rewatched. The criticism followed that instead of inventing nonsensical war scenarios just to insert playable female protagonists into these settings, game developers could and should draw from actual history, such as Lyudmila Pavlichenko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko). Focusing on legendary World War II snipers has already made for successful movies, such as Enemy at the Gates.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"The essence of class struggle."

I don't know if it's simply that I haven't watched any war movies in a long time, but the first 30 minutes of Enemy at the Gates is great and I think I can only attribute it to the intensity these films bring out. While movies like The Hurt Locker do a fantastic job of conveying high-risk intensity, it mainly comes out of the premise of bomb disposal, apart from that, the setting of American modern warfare is relatively sterile. Not only are the weapons scaled up into killing more enemies at further distances, but culturally, the concept of wartime is quite apart. Now you can usually be discharged for all manner of reasons, whereas in the setting of Enemy at the Gates, you may very well find yourself conscripted into the lunatic Communist army of Stalin and forced to run headlong into your death at the point of a gun.

Before we ever see the battlefield, the reactions of soldiers reluctant to depart the train they arrived in telegraphs just how miserable a situation they're getting into which is only reaffirmed when our hero learns that only half the soldiers are even getting guns and the ones that do are more or less expected to die.

With the inclusion of older slower weaponry, the concept of a drawn out sniperfight between two marksmen dug into the landscape and using every element of the environment to their advantage is excellent. Before a third of the way through the movie though, I was beginning to lose interest though.

The applauded sniperfight actually takes place throughout the majority of the movie across multiple encounters. Most of the encounters are great, but the ending honestly felt abrupt. Up until then we really don't see Bad Sniper Guy just walking around in the open, we've constantly had to assume that he sneaks away off camera between bouts, but of course the one time he pokes his head out he eats a bullet in the face, and this is after he's foiled multiple fakeouts by Main Guy. Not big on that.

A subplot surrounding Main Guy's apparent friend Jewish Guy starts with propagandizing his exploits in the field. The "tell don't show" rule is in full effect here and it's about at this point I knew the movie was beginning to wane on me. Jewish Guy also serves as a third wheel to Main Guy's overnight romance with Main Girl who only becomes relevant halfway through the movie. Again the audience is informed that they have a romantic relationship offscreen before anything of the sort is conveyed onscreen, and when they DO decide to show it onscreen, it's a wildly inappropriate drawn out sex sequence in which Main Guy uses his sniper stealth to conceal the fact that he's having sex. It's funny in a bad way; I don't know how self-aware the creators were when they decided to do that scene. If it was intentional, it was stupid, if it was unintentional, it was stupid.

Jewish Guy catching this affection offhand and deciding to turn his propaganda around into a scathing indictment of Main Guy to such an extent that we'd expect Main Guy to be arrested and executed on this information, seems like it would be a big turning point in the movie, but it's never resolved and seems more like a big intake of breath they want to knock out of you when they kill off Main Girl, which gets absolutely no emotion out of me cause she's a useless romantic interest.

This drives Jewish Guy to suicide on Bad Sniper Guy to close out the movie, but SIKE Main Girl's not dead and the two hook up, what a waste of a character arc.

Ed Harris does a good job of playing Bad Sniper Guy, he's great at exuding presence in the scenes he's in. It seems only appropriate for him to hang Stupid Kid offscreen as bait for Main Guy too cause Stupid Kid was getting on my nerves with his double agent dumbassery.

You would think that if Stupid Kid is regularly interacting with both of these legendary opposing snipers on what seems like a daily basis that one or the other would stop trying to get information on the other's military schedule and just hide in the kid's closet or something and shoot the other when they come to visit. I don't know why this simple and decisive strategy never occurred to either of them.

Also I was disappointed to hear almost no Russian accents throughout the entire movie. I'll compromise on them speaking English for the sake of the movie, but give me HYEAVY RHOUSHIN ACKSCENT COHMRRAD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM

Overall, it makes me want to match more war movies, which is a positive in my book.

It also makes me want a movie about Nikita Khrushchev, who despite being played by a fun actor and being a really interesting figure in history, has very little show in this movie.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

06-30-19, 10:09 AM

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Durak

Drama / Russian / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I don't remember what about it appealed to me, but some aspect of what I read or watched about it persuaded me to put it high-up on my watchlist.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"We live like animals and we die like animals
because we are nobodies to each other."

Durak, or "The Fool", is one of those rare movies with a core message which it manages to consistently expand up from title to the final shot. Before the major (or superficial) conflict of the movie, the collapsing building, is ever presented to us, we're exposed two families; one in which a drug addict brutally attacks his starving family members over a money dispute only to have the cops ignore his crimes due to their financial dependence on him, and another in which our protagonist is lectured by his mother at dinner, complaining endlessly about her do-gooder son's construction aspirations and pointing to her husband's reluctance to steal as evidence of failure. In this way, both Main Guy and his dad are "fools", moralizing in the face of cold and uncaring circumstances, unperturbed by their simple desire to do the right thing.

Personally, I would have to note the size of this woman. They are all sitting at a table eating only bread and soup and this gargantuan bitch takes up half the table. I can very much see she takes for herself, whether that was a deliberate idea the movie was trying to convey or not. Simply put, she's a reprehensible human being, and this is after we've already seen a drunk junkie beat the **** out of his wife.

After we've lamented on the fact that times are tough and Main Guy and Main Guy's Dad are decent despite all disincentives, Main Guy receives the call alerting him to the collapsing building.

Roughly half of the movie is dedicated to Main Guy gently trying to persuade the local authorities to evacuate the 800+ people in the building. Given it's not his professional field of expertise, everyone is drunk and would rather celebrate the Mayor's birthday, and his direct leads are defacto guilty of the exact mismanagement which caused the building to be in such a state to begin with, everyone in administration is resistant to the information. To make matters worse, relocating the people within a reasonable amount of time would nearly double the current deficit, because of course the entire administrative board is disgustingly corrupt. Nepotism is on full-display, bribes are casually acknowledged, and much dirty laundry is aired to the effect of what each member has done to secure their comparably luxurious lifestyle, albeit under the direct thumb of still more corrupt bureaucrats so far up the chain it goes offscreen.

Eventually, we're left with this:

When did you start worrying about the people? Only when 800 of them might perish at once? Were you worried about them when they were dying one by one? When you took a piece for yourself out of every line in the budget? The roads are ****, one pot-hole on top of another, accidents every day. The people drinking themselves to death, killing each other, because there are no decent jobs here and the wages wouldn't suit a beggar. Kids are wasting their lives shooting up in basements. The schools are a mess; teachers and doctors can't afford to buy food. Old people and the disabled are better off dying. [...] There's not enough of the good life to go around. Divide it evenly, and nobody will get anything. Everyone will be equally poor.And here we have what might be the most decisive summary our economic issues I've ever seen in a movie; Socialism would just spread the poverty around, not solve it, while our current remedy is damaged by politicians "washing each others' hands", handing down crumbs from a ladder of less and less accountable authorities so that poverty and wealth consolidates regardless of merit.

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And Durak subtlely, but well conveys that merit is out of the question here when the tacitly corrupt politicians frankly dehumanize the tenants of the collapsing building, degrading them for their squalid lives and referring to themselves as "normal". The patent irony is that these ******** are morally condescending to people they're in no way above. Their evil manifests differently only due to their socioeconomic circumstances, they still steal, they still kill, they still get wasted like the paupers in the concrete slums, they just wear suits and wear a veil of legitimacy when they do it.

There's no noble proletariat caught under the boot of the insufferable bourgeoisie, there's only mere human fallibility, scrambling to satisfy it's wants and urges at the expense of all the "nobodies".

It's a very compelling message the movie sends, it's more introspective than raw political critique. That said, I feel the movie falls down in a small handful of ways.

Firstly, I felt far too much time was spent dealing with the administrative people. I didn't expect so much of the movie to be spent away from the collapsing building in question, and not even directly talking about the collapsing building.

There are also two or three scenes in the movie that seem to exist for no other reason than to just hold a shot on our main character much much MUCH longer than it has any business being. It reminds me of Kara No Kyoukai when it does that. One scene is literally just two continuous shots of Main Guy walking, profile, down the street as music plays. You couldn't have interlaced some establishing shots? Give us a peek at the awful neighborhood? Wrecked cars? Dying street lights? Trash in the street? In no way can I believe that that wouldn't have been objectively better than what you chose to show on screen.

Finally we get a montage of Main Guy running through the building alerting the tenants to the imminent structural threat, leaving behind his family, under a reliable threat of death by his employers, and with zero credibility that what he says is true... only for him to get absolutely mobbed upon exiting because he only appears to be wasting their time. CREDITS.

No resolution. Does the building collapse? Do 800+ people die? Probably. It doesn't pay to be a fool.

Needless to say, painfully bleak and realistic as it may be, it's an extremely dissatisfying ending. If the guy had died in the collapse trying to save everyone, or everyone died except him, or he saved one single person, there would be some semblance of hope in the movie. Futility would still be a significant theme, but nothing says "give up" like curbing stomping the only good guy in the movie (apart from the Dad who's revealed to be a fatalist by the end) and undoing all of his efforts to be a selfless person.

It's as Jewish Guy in Enemy at the Gates said, "There is no 'New Man'. Man will always be Man."

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

11-25-19, 03:42 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=58492&stc=1&d=1574707984

It

Horror / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I recently saw Epic Rap Battles do The Joker vs. Pennywise (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R2WxaeIJcqY) and while I was impressed by the Joker impersonation, the Pennywise one seemed super weird to me because my only familiarity with him is Tim Curry's version. Considering how well ERB generally manages impersonations, I decided to see for myself what the It remake was all about.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"And look at this mother****er!
He's leaking hamburger helper!"

Now I've never seen the original It miniseries, but I feel that I've seen sufficiently thorough video reviews to have a general impression of Tim Curry's Pennywise performance and the movie(?)'s narrative focus.

This is plainly a very different take on the concept and with, perhaps, a very deliberately different impression of how to present a movie with this concept.

Perhaps because of Stephen King's intimate involvement with his own miniseries, they seem to have an agonizingly persistent emphasis on the recurring themes in his books, including violent bullies, drunk dads, accosted writers, and Maine. All of the adult drama that seems to exposit on these mostly unnecessary themes is practically non-existent in favor of focusing on the experiences of the kids central to the story.

This makes a lot of sense for keeping an audience engaged, however the remake clearly struggles with this because the kids onscreen roughly half the time sound nothing like kids this age would talk in real life. These kids look like they're in middle school and one of them just straight up is a research expert on the town and actually begins sentences with "So, according to my research" with seemingly no self-awareness.

Perhaps the most realistic one is the comedy relief who bombards the other characters with immature opportunistic jokes about dicks and "your mom". This character could easily be very annoying but they come off as a legitimate personality one of these kids could have and at times manage to be just a little bit amusing. I think part of the reason this works is because it's all directed at his friends and not as some heavy-handed wink to the audience, and even his friends have little patience for his ****.

One of the kids that simply didn't work for this movie was Token Black Kid. At first I wondered whether they could succumb to or subvert the trope of The Black Guy Dies First, but it takes an unusually long time for him to even join "The Losers" and even when he does he never develops any sort of relationship with the other characters, unlike Main Girl, and yet he arrives armed with a boltgun when they return to confront the clown when Main Girl goes missing even after literally saying "I should stay an outsider". Clearly something is missing here.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=58500&stc=1&d=1574710818

I don't even understand what the deal is with Main Girl. They heavily imply that she's sexually abused by her dad, if only to reincorporate him as one of Pennywise's shapeshifts later, but after saying she's had one kiss before she gets two kisses from two different characters on two separate occasions. The first which was setup as a blossoming romance and culminated in a rescue scene, and the second which closed out the movie but with no reconciliation between these two potential love interests.

Also have I said that kissing is stupid and that I have no sympathy for any character that boltguns sheep?

Token Black Kid's slaughterhouse subplot seems to exist for no reason other than to imply the presence of cruelty early on and I see no merit whatsoever in any of this "Oooooh, that middle school kid totally kissed that adult trying very hard to be a child actor!"

...okay I just looked her up and apparently she was 15? when she was in this role? She looks far and away older than the rest of the cast in my opinion and it was very distracting. I think those scenes with the boys oggling her wouldn't be quite so weird if in the back of my head I wasn't thinking "Gotta wonder what that 24-year-old is doing in her underwear with a group of tweens."

Also, HUGE thing that goes completely overlooked: Comedy Relief goes on a whole spiel about the risk of AIDS and the movie ends off with every character slitting their palms open and holding hands.

Yeah, just get all that blood up in my open wound. I don't know if they all cut the same hand, but that immediately what I was thinking when I saw that scene, and I might not have thought about it had you not mentioned AIDS earlier in the movie. Also, ritualistically slitting your palms open with a piece of broken glass to emphasize a promise is really ****ing stupid. Honestly. Just immediately drops my opinion of every character's intelligence by a good margin.

Finally, let's talk about Pennywise.

Pennywise isn't scary. The whole movie isn't really what I would call scary. Creepy, yes, but I didn't get that insufferable horror vibe I get from most horror movies, which is to this movies credit, I feel. Now, I really like Tim Curry, and it's hard to outdo Tim Curry doing Tim Curry, but for the purposes of this movie, I think the new Pennywise was a far better monster. Part of it is certainly just the personality going into it, in this case, Pennywise is considered to be just as childish and fear-prone as his victims, so when he's defeated by a group of kids ganging up on him, it feels less contrived.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_k89Zm6O_TI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k89Zm6O_TI)

His manner of speaking felt very inconsistent too, and while in part it was because he was imitating his previous victims, it still at times felt like his candence would shift unusually, and not even in a way that would serve the character as being unsettling.

Beyond that, he's definitely helped by a significant dose of special effects which allow him to bend, morph, and contort in disturbing ways. Seeing the scene in which he unfolds out of a cabinet to then tauntingly dance over to one of the kids was what sold me on seeing the whole movie. It's definitely a movie to see for the villain performance if nothing else.

My grievances beside cannot be assuaged though, however a certain Chapter 2 may manage to improve.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

12-23-19, 04:43 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=59163&stc=1&d=1577088178

Avengers: Endgame

Superhero Action / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I liked Infinity War.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"You could not live with your own failure.
Where did that bring you? Back to me."

Endgame is utterly inferior to Infinity War.

Now that doesn't make it a bad movie, I wouldn't even necessarily call it a bad sequel, but it fails to deliver on the previous cinematic powerhouse.

Like it's predecessor, it's highlights are it's action sequences, but unlike it's predecessor, most of it's action is confined to the last 3rd of the movie. The first two thirds are mostly sluggish exposition on where the Avengers are now, how society is managing in the wake of what I'll call "The Snap" and whatnot. It's largely boring, I'd say, and mustering the remaining heroes for another go at Thanos is a predictably weak exercise in feigned futility.

But once they do they get going, boom, Thanos is just suddenly decapitated, it's discovered that the Infinity Stones were destroyed offscreen and it was all futile in the end anyway. Fast forward 5 years.

Whoa, really? What the ****? That's such a muddled rush to a climax. It throws me off, and since I know that can't be the end it just bothers me that they wasted a Thanos death scene and comeback one-liner on it. Now it's gonna affect me less when actually does die. That kinda deflates my sails, movie. So anyway, it's 5 years later and out of the blue Antman (a movie I haven't seen) shows up and just proposes time travel I guess. Suddenly it's "Let's Kill Thanos Again" time and the movie basically repeats again.

Perhaps the only mildly acceptable sticking point here is Tony Stark who managed to start a family with Potts in 5 year timeskip, but you know he's gonna sign off on it anyway and it's at least reasonable that regrets over Peter Parker drive him to into irrevocable consideration.

So boom, they got a time machine, and instead of time traveling to when they were fighting Thanos in the last movie to literally double their numbers, or even to a period before Thanos decided to get the Stones to stop him then, they go on this whole spiel about how they can't do this or that because "time travel isn't like in the movies". They even refer to Back to the Future being wrong, but then proceed to explicitly follow Back to the Future's time travel logic with ultimately no explanation as to how they can't do what is being proposed.

Clearly the writers had a specific solution in mind and they weren't overly concerned with exploring time travel seriously, as Back to the Future did, but they clearly aware of the rational objections enough to give it a backhanded reference. Kinda ****ty writing if you ask me.

And sure enough, deciding to seize the Stones during altercations in the previous movies ended up being extremely costly, it attracted Retro-Thanos' attention and he ended up with them again anyway.

Of course, the ultimate villain isn't defeated without an ultimate hero, and Captain Marvel shows up to make small change of a number of obstacles. Not having seen Captain Marvel, I was resistant to seeing the character be the insufferably cocky jerkass I expected her to be and she initially was. By around the final battle when she's single-handed destroying Thanos' mothership I have a moment of appreciation, where I consider her to be the Badass Action Girl #1 she should have been.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=59164&stc=1&d=1577089816

BUT THEN, the movie literally frames her in a group shot with all of the female superheroes. ******* IT, you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? You couldn't just have a cool sequence in which a cool female character does something cool, you gotta highlight the moment by throwing every diversity token onscreen at the same time to virtue signal to us, huh? UUGGGGHHHHHH!!!! I hated that.

Most of those characters have only peripheral roles to the overall story too, so you're basically begging the audience to notice how heavily sidelined the female cast has been!

And that's fine, the superhero genre is dominated by male characters and that's fine... but when YOU have an issue with that, stop beating us over the head with it, especially when you're guilty of the very thing you're advertising you're so heavily against!

And by the end of the movie Thanos dies, as you'd expect, by a Deus Ex "I grabbed all 6 Infinity Stones when I grabbed you" move that immediately set off my bull**** detector, sooo CRUMMY checkmate move there.

Thor begins and ends the movie as an unattractive fat ****, because that's what I wanted one of the main characters to devolve into for this movie, a shut-in with a beer belly who literally plays Fortnite... I cannot imagine how many groans that got out of audience members when they saw that ****.

And then it all ends with, what I can only assume is one big reference to one of the Captain America movies which I didn't see because a superhero based on American patriotism just makes me gag.

To be fair, Captain America: Civil War is basically an Avengers movie, and it introduces Spider-man, but really there are so many references to other movies here I don't expect the majority of viewers to know who even half of these characters are when they show up.

So the ending was wasted on me, because I didn't see what is in all likelihood one movie among literally dozens that have been released in this setting. So yeah, an anti-climactic ending with a completely unnecessary closing monologue by Tony Stark, a sluggish beginning that's only marginally more interesting than the first Avengers...

This is definitely the most anime I think I've ever seen western big budget animated action movies, but, the high points, I feel, don't sufficiently outweigh not just the negatives, but the failure to maintain the momentum and intensity of the previous movie.

EDIT: I'd also like to state that as the highest grossing quadrilogy of movies to date, I think OG Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are far more deserving series.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

12-27-19, 03:18 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=59247&stc=1&d=1577429500

Non-Stop

Action Thriller / English / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I saw the DVD cover a long time ago and added it to my To-Watch List.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Am I in your way?"

Basic premise is Liam Neeson is an air marshall, boards a plane, and becomes entangled in a hijack attempt set up to frame him.

At first I thought "Non-Stop" was going to be a movie in the style of Speed, but it's more of a mystery thriller. The problem with that is that while it misses the opportunity to be a high-octane constant-instensity typo action movie, it simultaneously misses the opportunity to be a whodunnit.

A handful of clues lead Neeson's character to suspect multiple people on the plane, and there are obvious attempts to subvert audience expectations by emphasizing a conspicuous token Muslim character, but past all the twists all conspiring to condemn Neeson as the apparent hijacker to all observers beyond the audience, there really aren't any solid clues to lead the audience to figure out who the real perpetrator is. It's kind of a "Psych! It was me the whole time!" twist ending that you can't see coming and could just as easily be any other possible character.

It makes the story feel a lot more shallow when the secret bad guys just end up being random characters.

Beyond that, Fridge Logic kicks in when you realize that the antagonists go out of their way to help Neeson multiple times in his pursuit of them for literally no beneficial reason. They could have simply denied being able to do or refused to do various things which enable Neeson to defeat them. It makes sense if you're trying to subvert an audience's expectations, but as a terrorist attempting to remain anonymous, it doesn't.

Further, the entire justification for a hijack attempt is flimsy as hell. The 150 million dollar ransom would have been just fine as a reason to turn hijacker, but the whole "I'm protecting my country by exposing the frailty of airline security" bit is ****ing stupid.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=59248&stc=1&d=1577431083

The Big Bad even explains how public bloodshed and martyrdom is the only way to create change and the movie repeatedly references 9/11, apparently failing to realize not even an event like that apparently managed to beef up security enough to make a difference to this movie's villains. So major nationally recognized and memorialized security incidents didn't make a difference, what makes you think killing yourself on a smaller scale will? As though the fact that you're framing an Air Marshall would make any sort of difference in the grand scheme of things.

I'd also like to point out that the movie skims through TSA security and never mentions how someone manages to get a suitcase containing cocaine and a bomb onto the airplane.

The movie also concludes in a terribly rushed resolution wherein people are still being lead off the plane on stretchers while Neeson is alone, receiving a phone call from a federal agent saying he's off the hook with no apparent confirmation that he ISN'T the hijacker in question. Dude should be cuffed, swarmed by cops, and in the middle of an interrogation by federal agents, but the most you see at the eventual crash site is a few cop cars. Neeson saves the day, gets the girl, the end.

Also also also why on earth does everyone instantly believe him when he tells his sob story about his life when everyone on the plane has been turned against him by fake news?

Also also also also why on earth does everyone instantly shut up when he promises free international air travel year-round for every passenger? What kind of idiot would believe that? That's 150 passengers given 365 days to take any flight for free. That could easily usurp the 150 million dollar ransom the hijackers were asking for.

Also also also also also "We do not negotiate with terrorists, but the 150 million dollars is in your account, Liam Neeson, who we do not believe."

Overall, it's a thoughtless action flik. Didn't irritate me, but wasn't anything remarkable either.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

07-10-21, 03:14 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=79276&stc=1&d=1625895177 Enemy of the State

Action Thriller / English / 1998

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Was lent to me by a co-worker.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

It's been a while since I've done a review, and in all honesty this isn't the first movie I've seen that I've failed to stop by and review, nor is it the first movie lent to me by this co-worker that I could have reviewed. However it is the first movie in a while that's reminded me exactly why I love movies.

Nowadays people can film themselves vertically performing some detestably acted farce about cooking hacks or pranks or contacting the dead or some other nauseating **** that leaves no surprises that the political scene is as ****ed as it is nowadays and they get 48 million views worth of ad revenue to line their pockets with. Meanwhile I struggle to think of the last real movie-going experience since Inception that really erased any doubts that filmmaking is a craft worthy of appreciation. I didn't think there was any reason to doubt, but I haven't felt much motivation to check out the latest Disney cash-grab to pollute the marketing space. Oh what's that? Disney+ shows aren't getting physical releases? And Disney is more or less the final boss of copyright totalitarianism? Certainly internet pirates have their work cut out for them.

What I mean to say is that sometimes I look at my shelf full of my favorite movies and question whether they were disposable experiences, just this increasingly stale waft of cinema captured in a jar that I keep trying to inhale with diminishing returns, and I get to the point where I don't even watch them. Even today I had these movies on my desk and I was tempted to watch old Youtube videos instead.

Thankfully I watched Enemy of the State and I had... a completely serviceable experience. Unlike the disgustingly low standards of videography that permeates places like Youtube, Enemy of the State has 3 simple goals and it accomplishes them well:

1. Be a fast-paced action thriller.
2. Have the premise be a social commentary on state surveillance.
3. Give us the turn-around, have the bad guy invade and ruin everything in our protagonist's life and then when he's driven into a corner, give him a taste of his own medicine.

Right out of the gate we establish our villain as the stereotypical deep-state politician with the resources to assassinate his opposition leaving only circumstantial evidence for the libertarian conspiracy theorists.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=79277&stc=1&d=1625897664

Next we have Will Smith, playing Will Smith, being the guy in the wrong place in the wrong time, ending up with the only known evidence of one of Big Bad's hits. Queue endless Seth-Green-at-a-computer-saying-addresses-superimposed-by-fake-software.

Not just Seth Green either, but Jack Black, and even Jason Lee get in on the action. It's cool to see recognizable faces. I don't really have an issue with the acting from any of them, although the writing, while unsubtle in it's political message, is most annoying when it gives Will Smith dumb lines, like his correction about being called a "scheister". Oh man, you really showed that mobster by correcting his casual usage of the word "scheister".

I can appreciate new-future technology and fortunately most of what's shown for surveillance in the movie is at least plausible from a 90s perspective. The government's definitely not so capable that is can tap literally everything, like the movie would like you to believe, but the real bull**** moment is when they're reviewing some restaurant's external cameras and rotate the camera 90 degrees around it's subject in pre-recorded video.

That got a laugh outta me, but fortunately they backpedalled almost immediately and said that what was shown was only what the software "hypothesized" may be seen in a 3-dimensional space. Nice save.

The 3D mapping of the bag in that scene, to determine that something was slipped inside of it, is only barely plausible now considering it takes days for machine learning programs to memorize a face with far more than a few seconds of footage to build a 3D profile from.

Overall there's not much to say, while not a classic itself, it is an example of now-classic 90s action thriller sensibilities. Constant tension, a very focused plot development, easy to like smart-alleck protagonists with love-to-hate big bads bound for their karmic comeuppance. I miss it. I wanna watch more movies.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

07-22-21, 03:27 PM

I have rewatched Dark City and amended my rating:
https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1529075-dark-city.html

Omnizoa

08-03-21, 10:33 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=79918&stc=1&d=1628040753
Mercury Rising

Action / English / 1998

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Was lent to me by a co-worker.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Mercury Rising is noteworthy for about one reason:

It's evidence that Bruce Willis used to have an acting career.

He's not bad in it and he can definitely emote a lot more than his grizzled post-Die Hard persona. Alec Baldwin is instantly personable too, although his villainous motivations are sterile and boring.

"I am a patriot. Do you know that this uncrackable code is protecting undercover agents in Saddam's inner circle? Lives are on the line, that's why we need to slaughter anyone and everyone even tangentially related this barely coherent autistic 9-year-old American boy who cracked a cipher in a puzzle book. It's the American way."

Queue NSA-are-the-bad-guys trope.

And that's more or less the whole movie in a nutshell. Parents of McGuffin Child die, McGuffin Child is revealed to be the target of a failed assassination, escape-from-the-hospital sequence, return-home-to-reveal-answers-to-the-mystery sequence, inadvertently trigger oops-bad-guys-expected-that sequence. It's all very predictable.

The subplot of exploiting the good intentions of the random woman Bruce Willis coerces into protecting "Simon" (which reminds me of Simon Birch and I Am Sam) is one kiss scene shy of the worst Overnight Romance I've seen a while. There wasn't a payoff to the "I'll make this up to you" line, despite being a stalker wanted by the FBI and showing up to your apartment at night wanting to enter your home. Does he ever even give her his name? I remember her giving him her name, but he doesn't reciprocate, unless I missed it.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=79919&stc=1&d=1628040765

There's really not a lot to say about this movie. The kid is hard to like. He's directed to be difficult and screamy and the "autism" is overacted well beyond anything I'd ever recognize as autism.

I know autism used to actually mean something when it wasn't DSM'd into the special snowflake spectrum it is today, but that something never, to my recollection, involved constantly staring up and to the left away from everything you're focusing on. I think they're confusing the habit of kids who easily get distracted by staring off into space and maybe mumbling to themselves, just constantly busy with a pre-existing thought, as the movie even suggests, but the acting is just this kid silently staring fixed into the upper left corner of his vision for no apparent reason and seriously slurring his speech at times. Also he will bee-line for the nearest oncoming vehicle if given the chance.

I think your kid has way worse issues than autism at that point.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

08-06-21, 03:24 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=80008&stc=1&d=1628272794
The Andromeda Strain

Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 1971

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been meaning to watch it and it's on a lot of MoFo lists.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Surprisingly boring.

The Andromeda Strain is one of the oldest fictional outbreak movies before zombies took off and it makes me wonder whether the term "Operation Wildfire" is inspired by anything before it because that seems to be the go-to nickname for any fictional spec intended to combat a viral infection.

I'd also like to credit this movie with the amount of thought it put into it's multi-tiered sterilization procedure, from blasting the characters with radiation, killing their outer layer of skin, burning their clothes, and even putting them on a diet before giving them robot arms to play with.

There's some interesting editing choices with respect to showing shots alongside other shots, such as when the two characters are searching the town and we're given an image of the scene they're witnessing without actually following them through the windows or doorways.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=80009&stc=1&d=1628274117

All that, however noteworthy, did little to invest me in this movie. Dr. Forehead is strangely forgetful of important concepts regarding the self-destruct sequence, Mr. Exposition is bizarrely dissonant between his adamant defense of a hypothetical bio-weapons project and otherwise cheerful and over-informative demeanor, and finally Ms. Secret Epileptic's behavior and comments are confusing up until the epilepsy reveal but even then it's such an underwhelming payoff. There's definitely not a 4th even less memorable character of the main cast I'm forgetting.

Also big shock that A NUCLEAR DEVICE WILL ONLY GIVE THE VIRUS MORE POWER!

It's like this movie is trying to go for a slow burn, but it really only occasionally manages it and even then only briefly.

The ending is less impactful than your average Stargate episode and I'm inclined to recall even WarGames, as disposable a movie as that was, did a better job of emphasizing that a worldwide crisis was averted.

Overall it was too long for too little. Watch Sunshine or something instead.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

09-12-21, 12:22 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=81209&stc=1&d=1631413895
The Wolf of Wall Street

Drama / English / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I recently dipped my toes experimentally into stocks and have been binging content about stock fraud and scammers. This movie comes up a lot and I've even seen people post memes unironically idolizing the main character who's supposed to be psycho.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I've seen very few Martin Scorsese movies and despite those few being considered some of the greatest movies of their time, none of them have managed to impress me.

The Wolf of Wall Street is no exception.

Wolf of Wall Street may even be the worst of those movies if we're judging in terms of what it manages to do with it's runtime, cause this movie is way too long and spends what seems like 80% of it annoyingly dragging out conversations into dull irrelevant banter. The characters will be talking about a plot development and the conversation skews off into hiring midgets. And it's not even a funny conversation. Deadpan comedy is already a challenge to get right and this movie seems to think that inserting low-brow vulgarity into white collar crime is a multi-million dollar opportunity.

If you would pardon me to stoop to it's level, this AIDs-riddled whore of a movie blows it's load in the first few minutes by introducing us to Leonardo DiCaprio's first job and the stockbrokers he meets are swearing up and down more than I do (which is somewhat impressive). Suddenly he's sitting down to a very public lunch setting surrounded by people at other tables in suits and Stockbroker McConaughey is very visible just snorting cocaine.

And talking about snorting cocaine.

And recommending Leonardo DiCaprio snort cocaine.

And then he starts beating his chest like a gorilla and grumbling like he's trying to summon rain.

And nobody reacts.

And Leo's just like, "I see that I've joined the right company". And boom, just like that, we've entirely nuked a potential character arc.

Already we've established that Leo's character is a twisted ******* and we've pushed the envelope of absurdity so far that the later scenes of midgets, orgies, and rampant drug abuse just aren't surprising. In fact the movie spoils all of this right away with Leo winking and nodding to the camera.

At this point I look at the progress bar and I'm like ****, there are 3 hours of this??

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=81210&stc=1&d=1631414187

It really doesn't improve past that, it's just scene after scene of swearing, taking drugs, having sex, and the whole time it struggles to seem in any way believable. This movie is about a stock fraudster getting caught and ratting on his associates, but that's just the packaging for a degenerate ****show. I would LIKE to have seen more about how close he came to getting caught, or what all the things he did that tipped authorities off, but all of that is glossed over and multiple times throughout the movie Leo is monologuing to the audience about what exactly he's doing to scam people...

...but then he cuts himself off and goes all "NAH, you're too stupid to understand all that stock mumbo jumbo. Point is I'm filthy rich."

Why would you do that? I wanted to know this stuff, I wanted this world to be grounded in reality a little bit, but no, the audience just wants to see more ****.

The entire experience was just these people ****ing around and acting like psychos until the anticlimactic ending where the morally bankrupt main character goes back to the hustle. This movie is basically Lord of War... but worse. A Leonardo DiCaprio movie did a Nicolas Cage movie worse.

I can't help but think back to Catch Me If You Can, which was another movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a conman, and that movie was so much more enjoyable.

Another thing that bothered me was the music choices, so often they seemed totally inappropriate for the scene. Sure, Everlong by Foo Fighters was released around the same time as when these events took place, but are you trying to evoke the 90s rock scene with Leonardo DiCaprio on a ****ing yacht?

At least Sir Mixalot's Baby Got Back was more appropriate, but that should really tell you how seriously this movie takes itself.

I got one or two amused grunts out of this. Leo's done much better elsewhere.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Omnizoa

11-07-21, 08:45 PM

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A Quiet Place

Monster Horror / English, Sign Language / 2018

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I don't remember, but I stumbled on a clip for Part 2 and decided to check it out.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Who are we if we can't protect them?"

This is another gimmick monster movie, this time with the not-so-original theme that the monsters are blind, but very good at hearing.

It seems a little bit on the nose for one of the main characters to be deaf, but I suppose it gives the cast an excuse to communicate in mostly sign language which leaves me confused about what is going on because I don't know sign language.

Right off the bat we learn that there's some sort of conflict between Deaf Girl and Office Dad where Deaf Girl's not allowed in the basement where he's working on hearing aids and she's also not allowed on trips out to catch fish (which is also a strike against the movie).

Right about when we FINALLY hear some actual dialog out of the characters' mouths during this often silent movie, Son #2 asks Office Dad directly why she couldn't leave with them and he doesn't answer the question. The movie eventually ended and I never figured out why she couldn't be in the basement either. And what tragedy of ironies it is that OF COURSE as soon as she enters the basement she figures out the monsters are weak to audio feedback.

Seems really ****in' cheap. I might reason that feedback itself is the main reason she wasn't allowed in the basement, but she straight up refuses to wear a hearing aid in the one scene they're offered to her, and we learn later that the one she was given straight up doesn't work. So Office Dad can't even test his homebrew inventions and for whatever reason she doesn't want to wear them anyway!

This movie also suffers from what I will now title:

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Apocalypse Mom Syndrome

This is a disorder affecting women in apocalypse films, where it's clearly established that the environment is unsuitable for children, but the bitch gets pregnant anyway. This is proven by the movie repeatedly stating that this is over 400 days into the "apocalypse" (which is a word I feel we're abusing at this point).

This is especially obnoxious when the scenes of her youngest son getting eaten and her giving birth in a tub with monsters outside the room are among THE scenes most heavily circulated as marketing material. And then of course we get a scene where the newborn baby's cries attract the monsters too. You realize lives could have been saved if you kept your ****ing legs together?

Not like Office Dad's out of the marshes either, he's clearly got a role to play, and I'm still baffled as to why he had to die. He clearly has time to usher his kids off to hiding places, but then he just stands around in the open waiting for the monsters to come to him.

This movie wasn't AWFUL, but so many different components are done so much better in other movies. I don't know why Metropolis is so much easier to understand when the characters are flailing concepts at each other, but it is. And finally, in terms of the central gimmick of the movie... Tremors did it better.

Tremors had a third dimension to the monsters being that they're limited to movement underground and only anything immediately accessible through bare earth. It was also a fantastic excuse to show the monsters very sparingly. The sequels expanded on this too, but giving the monsters varying "lifecycle stages" similar to xenomorphs.

It's an okay movie, and credit to Office Dad for being able to act beyond just Office Jim, but I don't see a reason to watch it ever again.

EDIT: Oh and the corn silo scene was fricken's stupid. I dunno, I'm feeling generous.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

12-12-21, 12:45 AM

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Tremors

Monster Horror / English / 1990

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
A Quiet Place seemed to me to be an inferior attempt to do what Tremors already succeeded at nearly 30 years previously. Does it still live up to my memory?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Yup.

I seemed to have reviewed Tremors 2 on here, but dunno if I ever reviewed Tremors 1 and can't be bothered to look for it so here goes:

Tremors is by no means a masterpiece, I think it would have to be a very different sort of movie if it wanted to be that, but that movie appears to be A Quiet Place, but that movie is no masterpiece.

Basically none of my problems with the previous movie are present here. About the only thing A Quiet Place managed to do was work in a narratively convenient deaf character to add a relevant new perspective to the concept of the sound-based monster movie, and that ended up about as subtle as Signs having that one character who has the bad habit of not finishing glasses of water in the movie about monsters that are weak to water.

At least in AQP's favor, it wasn't an Autistic Savant-style superpower and an actual detriment to the character in question, but nonetheless, it was to every character's advantage to be able to communicate in sign language, so it's still kinda the same ****.

Tremors dispenses with the pretentiousness of a pseudo-silent film and goes about as B-movie cheese as you can get without being a straight comedy. We follow two characters with reasonably distinct personalities; divided by age, united by job and cynicism. Just two ultra-small-town hicks tryin' to make their way and just as they become fed up and try to leave the aptly named town of "Perfection", victims suddenly start popping up and the monster is gradually revealed, trapping them in the middle of nowhere.

I said before that the series added dimensions to the monster by having it underground, but I entirely forgot that the initial reveal of the monster was a fakeout and what they thought was the killer turned out to be one of three tongues of the killer.

Resourcefulness plays an important role in this sort of movie, what would YOU reach for if the floor suddenly became lava and anything that made noise became a target for the monster?

Can't mention this movie without Redneck Man and Redneck Woman who are both just a couple generations of inbreeding shy of being too cartoony to take seriously. Fortunately the town of Perfection is populated by these two mega stereotypes: Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist Guntoting Preppers. Defacto Libertarians. Go figure, when the **** hits the fan, they just happen to be the best people to turn to. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Anyway, they're both fun, and clearly I'm not alone, cause they got the guy to come back for multiple sequels as the main protagonist.

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There are 2 characters I got slight issues with though. One is Main Lady. It never occurred to me before, but Main Lady is chronic case of the Captain Carters, meaning she exists for no reason other than to be the standalone girl geek character, rabidly espositioning her guaranteed-to-be-true theories and confusing the less-that-thoroughly-educated characters for laffs.

Kevin Bacon's character has an Overnight Romance with her and it's complete trash as you'd expect. The movie opens with him disappointed to find her, a seismology geek of average attractiveness, and it ends with him laying into her with a kiss... with zero chemistry or actual scenes of mutual interest leading up to it.

There's also Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf, which is exactly that character, and is exactly as sympathetic as that character. Why he didn't die, I have no idea, even the smallest possible character arc for him would have been better than **** all.

There's also Pogostick Girl, who I don't really have a problem with as a character, but she literally only seems to exist to wear headphones and play around on a pogostick, making her a glorious target for the monster in that one scene. After that though, she seems to virtually disappear from the movie. She's still there... I think... but she never gets any lines, any action, any camera focus, I completely forget about her as soon as she falls in with the rest of the survivors.

Overall, it's really hard to complain about much in this movie. It was creative, thoughtful, funny, and engrossing. The practical effects were great. A classic modern monster movie.

I'm inclined to think that some aspect of the presentation or soundtrack could have really sent this over the edge. Maybe if they had somehow made Perfection with very clearly defined features and partitions for the characters to work around, rather than "Oh can we run for that bulldozer off in the distance?" that would have made for more interesting setpieces.

Either way, real solid.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

01-02-22, 10:27 PM

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Stalker

Drama / Russian / 1979

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I don't remember, it's been on my watchlist for forever. I just looked it up and it says it's a psychological thriller with sci-fi elements, that'll probably do it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

2 hours of my life gone for nothing.

From the very start of the movie you can tell this movie's going to be slow and it is. The only positive thing I can say is that it has a few interesting shots... but those shots drag their ass back and forth across the screen before anything happens.

It takes a while before you can glean any concrete info from the world, but eventually we learn that Mr. "Stalker", living in a black-and-white dank industrial hellscape, abandons his wife and child to escort two others into some place called "The Zone".

The movie, being divided into two parts, doesn't even tell you why this is happening until the second part. The first hour is comprised of the three sneaking past some non-specific institutional security (graduating from the Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship) to pass a gate, jump on a minecart, and roll out of town.

The "Zone" is identified by the movie shifting to color and it's characterized as being an unoccupied forested area in the middle of nowhere that's "dangerous", so much so that the characters throw metal nuts with cloth tied through like the boots in Cube.

Stalker is called "Stalker" apparently because that identifies him as one of the sort of people that escort people into the Zone. He's SUPER panicky about the danger of the Zone, but his clients are reasonably skeptical because there is NOTHING to substantiate his claims about it.

One of them eventually gets fed up and decides to walk off on his own, but is terrified by a scary wind sound and decides to follow Stalker.

End of Part 1. That is a basic summary of 1 hour of bull****tery. The camera loves to be either too far away from the characters to distinguish them or to superglue itself to the back of the character's skulls precisely when we should be getting wide shots of the environment. The characters themselves either have nothing to say or have some navel-gazey nonsense to wax poetic about.

One dude randomly says he's morally torn between believing the world should be vegetarian and his personal craving for meat. Sure, yeah, okay, that's potentially relatable and important... nothing comes of it though.

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Part 2 finally drops in some overdue backstory to say that the group are searching for "The Room", which is supposedly a place in "The Zone" capable of granting wishes. The Zone was created by a crashed meteorite, and the wish-granting rumors were enough to persuade the government to block the area off.

Stalker insists that The Zone is ever-changing, but he immediately contradicts this and contradicts this repeatedly by naming multiple locations in the Zone he's been to consistently. He describes traps and says detours are safer than direct paths, but the characters NEVER encounter ANY danger AT ALL, there's even a hallway that the movie dwells on trying to convince us and the characters that it's supposed to be scary, Stalker even hides behind one of his clients, calling out to usher the one guy he coaxed into drawing a long straw into going down it alone...

...and only after they all pass it without any issues whatsoever does he go "THAT WAS THE 'MEAT MINCER'". WOW, damn, the "Meat Mincer" was sure scary. That Hallway with literally nothing in it in which literally nothing happened was definitely terrifying.

The ****ty part is the movie isn't even edited in a way to be scary, it's just the characters insisting that what's happening is intimidating.

They even encounter a black dog, one of the only living things we see in The Zone. The image of a black dog gets so much mileage in just one of the Harry Potter movies as a dark omen or sign of imminent death, but the characters virtually don't even acknowledge it's existence.

There is zero supernatural phenomenon throughout the first 99% of the movie, that you have no reason to believe any of this crap by the time they get to The Room. And when they get there, one of the clients changes his mind and questions Stalker who has never entered The Room himself, and the other guys just whips out a ****ing BOMB. "Yeah, it's just 20 kilotons." This dude's been walking around the movie this whole time with a nuke in his pocket and the reveal is so underwhelming. Apparently he reasons that if The Room can grant wishes that eventually a bad guy will get his wish granted, and that probably explains this plague, or that war, or any number of bad things that have already happened, so he wants to blow it up.

But then over the course of a few minutes they reason that everything they've heard so far is 100% hearsay anyway, and Stalker admits he's never even seen a happy person come out of The Room, even though that's ostensibly the purpose of bringing people here, cause he wants to make people happy. "Before you enter you have to believe." Oh, yeah that's real persuasive, definitely not some self-reinforcing bull**** going on there.

SO THEY JUST LEAVE. And the movie still takes an eternity to end!

Eventually the movie ends on a shot of his daughter who supposedly lost her legs to The Zone by some arcane means, even though we see she has legs and just uses crutches, she's revealed to be using some kind if telekinesis on a couple glasses.

And that's the movie. WHY did I need to watch that?

What does her having magic powers add to the rest of the story? That what was said about The Room was true? Did they ever even mention his daughter having anything to do with The Zone besides? The Room, let alone? We never even SEE The Room beyond a painfully dragged out scene in which we watch rain come and go over the flooded floor just inside the entryway. Literally what value did that add to the story or my viewing experience?

AT LEAST there was some kind of pay off and it doesn't just leave the entire story ambiguous, but it's just a worthless payoff, unexciting and adding virtually nothing to the rest of the story.

You just dragged your ass across my face for 2 hours and then told me that you MIGHT have deigned to plant a shiny nickel on my forehead with your buttcheeks. But I'm feelin' up there and I'm not finding it!

The only possible explanation I can think of for this movie is that it's a religious analog. One-off characters near the beginning of the movie are complaining about the cultural absence of God and then our protagonists get strung along for a familiar pilgrimage to a magical site said to grace them with their heart's desire, even though there's no evidence that it's real and the character's literally say that they have to give up empiricism for what they're doing. You have BELIEVE for it to work, but if you already BELIEVE then it's already worked.

This would be a fine narrative agenda, but the movie does **** ALL to even keep that one-time dialog fresh in my mind or consistently relevant to the random bull**** these characters spout over the course of the journey.

Bottom line, this movie is boring as sin and it doesn't suddenly become enjoyable or fascinating or engrossing to watch a camera pan for 7 ******* minutes by granting that that was the central conceit of the movie. If that is the point this whole movie could have been done WAY better than it was. It could have been shorter, punchier, more meangingful, actually emotional (and not just the characters insisting on the emotions I should feel), and a 20-kiloton bomb in somebody's pocket in the third act could actually not be a complete joke of a plot device.

Very close to giving this an Irredeemably Awful rating, but for mostly boring me to death I give it...

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Omnizoa

01-23-22, 03:18 PM

REWATCH UPDATE!
I rewatched A Better Tomorrow. You can find my updated review here:
https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1573617-a-better-tomorrow.html

Omnizoa

03-07-22, 01:31 AM

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Snowpiercer

Action Sci-Fi / English / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I was aware of this movie back when I was more active here in 2015, but never saw it and nowadays I keep hearing references to it. I really enjoy a game called Frostpunk and I've noticed that fans have said they would like to see a crossover with Snowpiercer, which is about as good a recommendation as I've heard yet.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Let's start with the positives, I think the concept is cool.

Now that that's out of the way... THIS MOVIE WAS STRAIGHT GARBAGE.

I'm really going to struggle to squeeze every criticism I have into this review because it was a constant barrage of dumb shit as I watched it.

Even from the opening credits, I'm left perplexed. They show off the various production companys' credits twice for no reason and they do some weird transition with the movie logo and I couldn't figure out what effect they were trying to accomplish.

Right away we open on the "lower class" citizens of the Snowpiercer which serves as the setting of the movie. It is The Day After Tomorrow outside, and everyone's cooped up on a train that is constantly moving for no adequately explained reason. They briefly mention that the front of the train collects water from the ice it breaks through? But how does that sustain a train? Why is that the only means by which you can collect water? How is this train even fueled? Never answered. And the more you notice the lack of beds and storage and other inessential amenities in the rest of the train the more you realize the writers just didn't give a shit.

So the lower class is heckled by Hunger Games-style villains, which is my way of saying they are too unrealistically evil and cartoony to take seriously. I will say that I appreciate the minimal creativity they took to have an organic means of punishment, whereby they grease up the arm of a misbehaving passenger, fit him with an arm size washer, and seal it outside of the train through a hole until it freezes. That's pretty plausible, I like that.

That said, it takes 30 minutes of melodramatic ******** for the "siege" to kick off where the people at the back of bus say "**** this" and decide to push on through the train to get to the mysterious conductor "Wilford". Once again, I'm momentarily re-engaged by the creativity of having the characters construct a long line of tubing and quickly wheel it through a serious of timed doors to wedge them open, I didn't how they were going to clear that 3-4 second window, and that surprised me, so again, props.

But this is where props end because after this point I am just flabbergasted at everything that happens. The pacing is CRAP. I feel like it takes 30 minutes for the movie to rev up and it only lasts a couple minutes before it smashes to a halt again for them to drag out a LONG character introduction of some Korean dude who doesn't have subtitles and only occasionally uses a translation device. This culminates at the end of the movie in a looong monologue, in Korean, complete with flashbacks, that I cannot understand at all.

Was I supposed to get anything out of that? Because I didn't.

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The real question, once the lower class people at the back escape their cots and steady supply of water and "protein blocks", is what are in the cars ahead of them? How does this quasi-religious noble class live and how are they situated as compared to the engine, or the "water room", or the inevitable armory where all the security guys work?

Well the first couple cars seem to just be security checkpoints and some beds, so I guess that's where the security guards at the back sleep? Then that's, for some reason, bookended by "protein block" car where it's discovered that they're grinding up a massive supply of beetles to make the protein blocks. Where do these beetles come from? Never explained. Also **** you for asking questions.

You don't ask questions around here. This is a serious movie. How dare you rub two brain cells together and even suggest something here may be silly?

So anyway, the next car is entirely empty except that it's full of guys, all wearing eyeless balaclavas, holding axes, and trading around a single fish to wet their axes on to look threatening.

It is at this point that the movie completely jumps the shark and continues to jump the shark over and over again.

NO explanation for why they're wearing eyeless balaclavas, or can still see, OR how they have this sudden supply of fireaxes... WHO CARES they're going to stand there and menace you with a fish for a bit before they start hacking.

It is around this time that I notice that the choreography isn't good enough to communicate how the main character ever manages to get a nightstick or axe, but he does. Also the Korean dude has a daughter who's clairvoyant for literally no reason. It only comes up a couple times, it has ZERO payoff, and it needlessly introduces the only supernatural element there is into this movie.

So there's a big axefight going on, it's all in slow-motion, and that makes it all the more jarring when a hit obviously doesn't connect and the inappropriately stereotypical meat-slapping and SHING sounds effects kick in.

And you're TRYING to stay immersed in the movie, you're TRYING to ignore the fact that all of the bad guys have purposely blinded themselves with eyeless balaclavas, but that's when the main character SLIPS ON THE SINGLE ****ING FISH. The one and only fish that existed for literally no other reason than for the bad guys to pull out of their ass and bloody their axes with!

How can I NOT laugh at that!? That is so unintentionally funny! This clearly isn't meant to be a comedy but it's so ******* stupid!

Eventually they do some darkfight shit and the main character manages to get the Bitch-In-Charge as a hostage. Then it transitions to Ollivander from Harry Potter walking through and bemoaning all the dead people before cutting back to the main character who doesn't have the lady hostage anymore!

How do you just ignore where she is!? She's important!

Next they find a greenhouse car, which makes sense, then an AQUARIUM TUNNEL, yeah sure. Why the **** not. And yeah, let's have a sushi bar at the end. Let's also insult the audience by poorly explaining the concept of a closed ecosystem.

We KNOW it's a closed ecosystem, we also know the TRAIN is a closed ecosystem, but that only begs the question how you manage to have an entire SLAUGHTER CAR full of dead chickens and what looks like cow! Where did they come from, genius!? This train has been running for 17 years and they're still here?

Then of course we have the SCHOOL car, you know, for elementary school, where the teacher shows way too much gum and is way too excited to indoctrinate kids into hating poor people and worshiping the "Divine Wilford". Real subtle.

Then some dude rolls in with a wheelbarrow full of eggs.

...where the **** are we getting eggs from now, Mrs. Closed Ecosystem?

But just as you're distracted by all the bright colors, smiles, literal song and dance, they suddenly WHIP OUT UZIS FROM THE EGGS AND START BLASTING!!!

https://c.tenor.com/v_h7ocKTs_QAAAAM/i-started-blasting-so-anyway-i-started-blasting.gif
I could not make this shit up if I tried. This is the worst Easter ever.

Apparently amid this sudden gunfight the same thing happens to the crew at the back of the train, which reminds me: Why in the actual **** did half a dozen people go alone instead of which the numbers they started with? Was this ever explained?

Also, why was anyone left alive between the forward group and the back group? Why was anyone left with weapons? WHERE DID THE EGGS COME FROM???

Somehow, after the axefight, the characters separated along a linear span of train cars and inexplicably several people managed to sneak in between them with GUNS SMUGGLED IN A WHEELBARROW OF EGGS. This is complete and utter clowshoes at this point.

The kids in class magically disappear during the shootout and you never see them again. We see exactly ONE cabin that may be considered a living space after this, but that is it.

Finally we see the rich people sitting around and nothing happens.

Next is the SPA car. Which serves only as a shootout with one of the bad guys that got behind them with a gun somehow. The main thing that bothers me about this scene is they totally rip the knife scene straight from Saving Private Ryan. That's a memorable haunting death scene, and they squirt out a flippant copypaste of it here.

They pass through the Rave Car and the Drug Car. You really gotta wonder how they manage to keep peace on the train when seemingly ALL of the security is at the back of the train with a literal kid's classroom between them and the drug addicts. This "closed ecosystem" really doesn't make any ******* sense.

Now at this point basically every other notable character except the main character and Korean #1 and #2 have been shot or stabbed to death. And I am so beyond caring. NOTHING they could do could surprise me at this point.

So naturally this is when the main character confesses to the Korean guy that he's a cannibal and he thinks babies taste best.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MaleUnpleasantAlligator-max-1mb.gif

Not even kidding, what a great main character.

What's even weirder is his backstory where he explains that he was about to eat a baby when another character stopped him, cut off his own arm with a knife and said "eat this instead". How on earth does this interaction even happen? You can just whip out a knife and lop your arm off willy-nilly, which is why I can't help but imagine the unfathomably bizarre and awkward pause between the main character goin' "Imma eat this baby", and the other guy saying "hold that thought" then standing there as he takes 20 ****ing minutes (or however long it would take) to carve through all the muscle, cartilage, and bone in his own arm, only to hand it over and say "eat this instead".

Right, yeah. That definitely happened.

Finally they make it into the engine room, Korean Guy just wants to bail the train for whatever reason, Wilford apparently toils away at a grill with no indicate that he even sleeps anywhere. They have a lazy-ass "wow, you know I intended for you to die, but you really impressed me, so why not be a bad guy like me" monologue, they spend way too long teasing the possibility that the main character would do it, but no, the cannibal is righteous man, he'd never do that.

They finally find one of the kids security took working away under the floor panels and the main character decides to rip his arm off by reaching directly into the gears to... touch him? "Timmy" is clearly intact where he is, I should think you try and remove him by the same means he entered, which evidently doesn't require sacrificing an arm.

There's a lot of people losing arms in this movie.

So after the Cannibal monologue, after the Korean monologue, after the Big Bad monologue and all that ********...

...suddenly the ravers from the previous car show up to pick a fight! WHERE THE **** WERE YOU!? We literally walked right past these ****ers and they waited nearly an entire 3rd Act to go "Eh! Let's kill those guys!"

BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH, Big Bad's final words are "Nice", train crashes and omigosh a polar bear there is life outside after all!

Credits.

What a ****awful movie.

You know I could easily see a movie like this done well, maybe in the style of Speed, where the lower class at the back of the train need to fight their way to the front to learn the train is only sustainable by child labor by design. Like, there could definitely be a good movie in that. This is not that. This is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory level ********.

((I wrote this before I realized there are literally Willy Wonka crossover fan theories for this movie, what the ****.))

Just some hilariously tone-deaf screenwriting, some totally underwhelming twists, and for a movie that seems most appreciated for it's setting, has completely nonsensical worldbuilding.

I had no idea this was going to be so bad. Please do not put this garbage in Frostpunk. Trains are cool, this is not.

Final Verdict: rating_1 [Irredeemably Awful]

Omnizoa

05-15-22, 01:21 AM

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Ocean's Eleven

Heist Comedy / English / 2001

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Ocean's Eleven is considered a bit of a modern classic and I have a bit of professional interest in casino security. I've seen this one before, but it's been a while.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

It's a solid movie, though definitely unconventional in my experience.

The first two thirds of the movie are setup for the heist that's supposed to go down, which sounds pretty boring, but fortunately the movie manages to be just engaging enough to drag me along.

Part of the conceit of Ocean's Eleven is that it's vague about exactly how it intends for it's characters to go about burglarizing the casino. We get what seem like substantial bits and pieces of certain characters' roles in the heist and a particular thing they're expected to do, but more often than not it turns out to be only a fraction of the masterplan and the movie introduces various twists and turns in the third act that develop the sequence of events you expect to see.

We know that Asian Guy is supposed to be smuggled into the vault in a storage container, but we don't know that he's supposed to blow the door.

We know that Matt Damon is supposed to cozy up to impersonate someone, but we don't know that he's pretending to be a "gaming commissioner" to Benedict.

We know that Simon Phoenix is supposed to blackout Las Vegas with an EMP bomb, but we don't that it's because Clooney and Pitt need to zipline down an elevator shaft full of lasers.

This results in the movie being surprising and interesting, and ultimately the biggest reveal is how exactly they intend to "walk out with the money". I do feel though that many of the steps in the process end up feeling convoluted or Xanatos Gambit-levels of convenient, and at times I really couldn't figure out why certain things had to happen. Like why did they need to smuggle a suitcase into the vault if they were already smuggling a whole guy with items separately? There are also other things that are easy to forget, but in the moment I couldn't help but question what grand purpose they really served.

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Speaking of lasers, the security obstacles in this movie range from plausible to unrealistic. The dispatch center looks like it's out of a sci-fi movie, and there's really no reason to riddle an elevator shaft with lasers when a single one will do. It's just there to sense the elevator, right? If not, then why don't they have floor sensors like in the vault? There's also a moment where 2 guys are impersonating security, walk up to security, and go "oops I forgot my card". Why wouldn't security be alerted to these guys? You're going to all these other lengths to protect the casino's assets, but they can't be asked to familiarize themselves with the staff in their own department? Is turn-over that bad?

Ocean's crew also leaves evidence all over the place. Brad Pitt leaves a cell phone with his fingerprints on a random table, and security already knows that someone on a phone in that area of the casino is attempting to steal from them. Reviewing cameras and finding this guy would be a definite priority. Also the impersonators who dress up as security leave both of their waiter outfits in the elevator. That's a pretty big red flag. You walk into a customer-facing elevator and find two full employee uniforms ditched in the corner?

Romantic subplot between Ocean Clooney and Julia Roberts is weak as you'd expect. She's completely cut him out of her life after he got arrested and sent to prison, he comes crawling back saying Casino Boss Benedict is an ******* and she's not convinced. Then at the end he gets her to see video of him admitting he'd trade 160 million dollars for her and she's suddenly in love with him all over again.

Like, what? Was this not your biggest heist yet? You got sent to prison for theft before, doesn't that mean you essentially forfeited her once already for less money than that? I mean as long as we're measuring love in dollars... but whatever I guess she decided to wait for him this time, whatever.

Definitely strikes me as one of those movies that's a lot weaker once you already know what happens. The acting was competent, the occasional jokes were... jokes... Meh.

They coulda made Benedict easier to hate, but most of his role as the antagonist is just exposition.

It's a fine movie and I liked it, but it doesn't go too far for me.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Swan

05-15-22, 04:42 AM

Hey, I remember you.

Omnizoa

05-15-22, 06:52 PM

Hey, I remember you.
I'm still around.

Omnizoa

05-15-22, 07:33 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87187&stc=1&d=1652653579
The Messenger

War Drama / English / 2009

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Premise is a guy joins Woody Harrelson as a "casualty notifier" who visits the homes of the family members of people who have died while in military service and informs them of their loss. Honestly seems like a great premise for a movie so it's been on my watchlist for a long time.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

"Anybody watching would say that you're a lowlife trying to take advantage of my grief and I'm a slut who's not grieving."

This movie had the bare minimum of what I expected from it, but it did not capitalize on it's premise in any way I appreciated.

Early on I missed some dialog establishing that Main Guy's girlfriend is marrying someone else and he's low-key upset about it, this is for some reason supposed to establish his headspace as he gets reassigned to become a "casuality notifier", informing the next-of-kin that their spouse or family member has died.

As expected, the movie takes the opportunity to portray a variety of situations that could plausibly develop from this scenario, which I was looking forward to, but unfortunately I was never emotionally invested in what happened.

Part of the problem here is that I'm experiencing this through the perspective of Main Guy as he develops a work relationship with Woody Harrelson, but I don't even like Main Guy or Woody Harrelson. Woody's character acts bipolar where in one scene he's the by-the-book straightedge guy who's seen too many broken hearts that he's become cold to his job. But then in the next scene he's drinking his ass off and porking a prostitute. What does this add to the movie? What does this add to his character? How does this endear me to when he puts on a straight face and delivers soul-crushing news to the next random person who's family member was killed in .

Main Guy's even worse, he's got a case of the "Vindictive Ex", and his character is seemingly split too thin across all of 4 competing subplots, where in one he's the former soldier trying to clamp down on his grief for being inadvertently responsible for the death of a comrade, he's the ex-boyfriend to a girl who's giving him the cold shoulder and he's really broken up about it, he's the new "casuality notifier" to work with Woody and he's simultaneously learning to do the job and maintain a healthy work relationship with his pseudo-boss, AND he's the creepy stalker of one of the only person he ever "notified" and is trying to jump in her pants, true Overnight Romance style.

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And that last subplot dominates a good chunk of the movie. It's SOOO hard to watch. The last third of the movie doesn't even really feature them delivering "casualty notifications" (I keep putting that it quotes because it's the dumb term they keep using) and instead just becomes [I]really cringey, with them crashing Main Guy's ex's wedding, randomly showing up to Widow Mom's home uninvited, and getting into fights with jet skiers.

I wouldn't think a movie about telling family members their son or husband died would have this much sex, but it does and it seems incredibly tasteless.

Woody's reveal that he's never seen combat doesn't add anything to his character, Main Guy's reveal that he inadvertently killed a friendly doesn't add anything to his character, explaining how he almost killed himself doesn't add anything to his character. It's just exposition. They drink, they laugh, they scream, they cry, and I'm just bored.

Main Guy falling for one of the woman he's "notified" shouldn't have even been part of the movie, it's just a massive distraction to what could already make an engaging and emotional journey for a character experiencing other's grief by proxy. Like this is such a great concept for a movie and it feels so wasted because they tried to cram in so much stupid shit.

Like I can imagine a version of this movie without the prostitutes, without the estranged ex, without creepy stalker vibes, where this guy's just such a hardass from field duty, that he's reassigned and forced to take another look at the whole picture. Someone dies in war and they're glorified as a hero, but at home people aren't so fond of their friends and family getting chewed up and spit out by the military industrial complex.

I can see that being a real punchy story where eyes are opened on both sides, even for Woody's character, who's essentially a pencil-pusher and personally ignorant of the horrors of war, having never been "baptized" as he says.

Main Guy's eyedrops are a constant foreshadowing for a reveal that we never even needed the emphasis for, a random cop is easily persuaded out of a traffic stop which he had good reason to make, and it's such an anticlimax that he gets some vague affection from Widow Mom who's moving away at the very end.

I was hoping for a really solid movie, but I got a boring cringey mess that kept trying to get away from that golden opportunity as much as possible.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

05-22-22, 09:07 PM

REWATCH UPDATE:
I rewatched In The Mouth of Madness, you can find my updated review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1500293-in-the-mouth-of-madness.html).

Omnizoa

05-22-22, 11:39 PM

REWATCH UPDATE:
I rewatched Locke. It made me cry 6 years ago, can it do it a second time? Updated review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1467574-locke.html).

Omnizoa

05-24-22, 03:18 AM

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Dunkirk

War Action / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's a Christopher Nolan movie and I've been on a little bit of a war movie kick recently.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Pretty underwhelmed.

This may actually be the most uninteresting Christopher Nolan movie I've seen. Not the worst, mind you (I think I'd give that to The Dark Knight Rises), but nothing to write home about, which seems kinda shitty cause the historical event itself sounds like it would be a solid movie concept.

The premise is it's WW2 and British (and French) soldiers have been driven to Dunkirk and they need evac. Tragically, despite England being literally within sight across the English Channel, some geniuses decided to spare their air and sea forces to protect England from the inevitable assault, which history shows didn't happen until a week after the evacuation. This resulted in hundreds and thousands of soldiers being stranded at Dunkirk at the mercy of bombers, subs, and encroaching ground troops.

If you can imagine what that would look like in a movie, you basically got Dunkirk, which sounds good, but it's just not executed very well.

Right off the bat we're introduced to a character who doesn't speak, who runs into another character who more or less doesn't speak, and they come across like they're deserters as they make repeated attempts to escape on a number of boats before their turn either by finding a guy on a stretcher they can use as an excuse to get boarding priority, or by hiding under the dock so they can stowaway on a boat as it departs. Eventually they run into a third guy who more or less doesn't speak, and at this point it's very easy to lose track of who's who and you really just stop caring about them cause it's like every boat they get on sinks, and they find another boat and it sinks, and they find another and it sinks, and... okay. Cool. This is kinda silly.

Eventually there's a """big reveal""" that one of the characters we've been following might actually be a "Jerry", a German spy, but it's revealed he's French and... I guess that's just as bad? **** everyone who's not my nationality, am I right? Haha. Haha. Ha. Weren't there supposed to be Nazis somewhere in this movie?

You never see any. They're always offscreen. Or flying some plane you can barely discern the markings on most of the time.

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Perhaps the most interesting part of this movie, if any, surprisingly enough, are the dogfights. We follow the perspectives of the trio of troops at Dunkirk, a family of civilians who are recruited to evac soldiers on their private boat, and a couple fighter pilots.

I think what interests me about the dogfights is that it's old technology, it's not just fancy virtually sci-fi WOOSH PLANE GO PEW PEW BOOM!! So it's really just one guy trapped in a metal coffin suspended in the air trying to put more bullets in the other guy's coffin. Just the simple little addition of the fuel gauge breaking and forcing the pilot to scribble in his remaining fuel and time on the dash adds so much, you have so little resources available to you, you'd have to do something like that, but it's not something I really would think someone might have to do.

The civilian boat that goes to Dunkirk features the most amount of drama in the whole movie. I don't want to go over the whole thing, but the entire subplot of the soldier panicking and shoving one of the boys down into the boat so hard that it blinds him and kills him is... I dunno. What was that supposed to add to the story? Was there a purpose to that? We don't even see him fall, we just cut to him on the ground groaning and we're supposed to infer he hit his head really hard. I appreciate the little amount of worldbuilding the father adds by his practical knowledge of various little military things, but I don't feel like I got much more than that.

Probably the oddest choice was to present this story in 3 parts non-chronologically. I realize now, that given where the characters were it makes no sense for the day and night shots to shift so radically as we switch perspectives, but it seriously took me over 40 minutes to realize they were telling the story in non-chronological order, cause that's when we first see Scarecrow before and after his rescue.

At the very beginning they preface each set of characters with "One Week", "One Day", and "One Hour", obviously alluding to... what? When the Germans attack? When they... leave Dunkirk? The weird part is these timelines all eventually overlap so we're seeing time progress disproportionately fast for some characters, but not others. It's like Inception, but... why make it like Inception? Inception had a whole thing about the progression of time in dreams and you had a lot of creativity liberty to flex with that premise, but here it's just kind of unnecessary and needlessly complicates the sequence of events as they're presented in the movie.

Overall, I was just never invested in any of the characters (and they barely had any character), the environment looked bland and boring, the action was kinda meh, the Churchill speech at the end didn't feel like a satisfying capstone to what I just watched. Watching it just made me think about how much I'd rather watch Saving Private Ryan or Titanic.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

05-24-22, 02:20 PM

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Predator
Sci-Fi Action / English / 1987

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Predator's considered a Scharzenegger classic and it's been a real long time since I've seen it. How does it compare to Commando?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Predator's a cool movie, but I mean that in the mildest of ways. There's something about the gratuitously cheesy one-liners of Commando and the running theme of Arnold being a one-man war machine that's just too perfect an encapsulation of what made his old school movies great. Predator doesn't really tap into that quite so well, despite the likes of "get to da choppa" and "I ain't got time to bleed" transcending space and time.

Instead there's some Aliens-esque betrayal subplot about the true intentions of Arnold's troop that ultimately endangers the whole squad, it's much more gory, it's much more serious, and silly Arnold-isms are hard to come by.

It's revealed that some terrible special effects are hiding an alien that hunts the party from the treetops. We get brief glimpses of it's true nature, it's strange technology, it's resourcefulness, and it's signature trait as a trophy-hunter. The music definitely feels more appropriate in this movie than in Commando, whose leitmotif gets old pretty quick, but ends up being more memorable.

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As expected, Arnold's crew gets picked off one-by-one and you would have hoped they'd deduce some creative way of tracking the Predator, but instead it seems to take them way too long to figure out it travels the forest through the trees, even though they literally found 3 people already strung up and skinned way up in the treetops.

Suddenly this new revelation of looking up reveals the Predator's shitty active camo and bad habit of purring near their victims. The concept of Arnold getting covered in mud and making him functionally invisible to the heat-seeking Predator is very appropriate, but it's also not surprising, possibly because this concept ended up spawning a bunch of copycats who more of less lifted this same twist for their own story, like how in The Walking Dead, the survivors can hide their smell from the zombies by covering themselves in viscera.

Again, credit to the little things like presenting the Predator as unusually intelligent for his ability to detect and sidestep multiple traps set up to catch it, but overall it's a pretty predictable affair.

The Predator's appearance was obviously spoiled for me by this point and I still can't say that I like it. As Arnold says, he's one ugly mother****er.

Just kind of a bog-standard monster-of-the-week style action romp. Not bad by any means, but certainly not what I would think warrants a franchise of sequels, unlike Predator's sister series, Alien. And Alien didn't have the benefit of Mr. Olympia chewing the scenery.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Good]

Omnizoa

05-24-22, 03:41 PM

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Greyhound
War Action / English / 2020

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I was intrigued by Tom Hank's Bridge of Spies, which I never saw, but it turns out he went and wrote a screenplay to an entirely different wartime period piece, this time as a naval captain embattled with enemy submarines. I like Tom Hanks, I'm interested in war history, let's do it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I don't know what it is about ships and trains, but these huge, relatively slow, often claustrophic, and generally archaic forms of transportation are just very interesting settings to a tell a story. The concept of a closed eco-system developing on a moving train as in Snowpiercer definitely had potential, it's just a shame that movie sucked. In a similar vein, movies like Hunt for Red October and Greyhound are interesting because, as in Dunkirk, the characters are effectively trapped in a relatively fragile metal coffin above or beneath the waves of an ocean that doesn't care about your god, and you have what little fuel, ammunition, morale, and intel to maneuver through hostile territory before meeting Davy Jones.

I read that this movie had "little character", but was brisk with the action, and that is definitely true. About the only character we spend any meaningful time with is Captain Tom Hanks himself, playing the man who refuses to sit or eat until he sees the job safely done.

The job here being the lead military escort of a convey of supplies through submarine-infested waters without valuable air support. True to the promise, the action comes on fast, and like a ship breaking on the waves, it bops with each encounter with enemy vessels. Unlike Dunkirk, it doesn't dwell for long stretches of time, it doesn't tell an anachronistic story, or try to engage me in dog-eat-dog drama. It's just, someone calls out a contact off the starboard bow AND WE'RE ALL IN BABY, LET'S DO THIS.

Now if I have any grievance with the action, it's going to be that it ultimately amounts to a lot of Tom Hanks running back and forth from opposite sides of the bridge to look out at waves of nothing with only the hint that a sub may be there. It's still exciting, but it does get little bit tiring, especially at the beginning before the fleet of subs emerge into view. Much of the dialog is communication between the ships protecting the convoy, the sonar guy, Capn' Hanks and his immediate staff. They convey a lot of information very quickly, and if you're unfamiliar with some of the naval lingo, it's easy to lose track of where the subs are purported to be. I appreciated one character's translation of "screws" to "propellers", which helped establish that when the sonar guy said "too many screws" he meant he was getting interference from the sounds of propellers in the vicinity, which inhibited his ability to clearly articulate the sounds of hostiles from friendlies. Other elements like the exact quantity of subs they were detecting was also fuzzy because of this dialog, but a rewatch may clear that up.

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I liked the increasingly overt theme of the submarines representing a "wolfpack", trailing and picking off vulnerable members of the herd over time. They really come off as an invisible predator of their own, eternally deadly, because their torpedoes are only barely visible and provide a damningly small amount of time to turn such a big target out of it's line of fire. It's surprising to me that a ship like the Greyhound would even plausibly be able to take on a sub, but maybe I'm just operating by Advance Wars logic. I'm thinking of these ships like Battleships when I should be thinking of them like Cruisers.

The sound design of this movie was strange, but I also liked it. They have a pumping action-horror soundtrack and the subs are accompanied by what I can only describe as a cross between a prolonged orchestral sting and and a whale sound. It's some awful artificial scream that further makes these ships seem like animals, and I liked the mood that they added, however distracting I imagine their inclusion would be for anyone actually experienced in naval combat.

The CG was noticeably aggressive in this movie which is a definite strike against it which I wouldn't give to Dunkirk. And that seems to me to be a particularly rough aspect to stumble over considering this is marketed as an "Apple Original Movie", a company which prides itself on the visual fidelity of it's products. The motion blur during panning ocean shots seem to be the worst offender here.

I didn't care for the religiosity of Hanks' character, but it was thankfully brief, and not to crap on Hanks by referring to his character as Hanks, I genuinely do appreciate that every movie I see him in, no matter how recognizable he is, he manages to slip into the role and come off as somebody distinct from Woody from Toy Story, or Viktor from The Terminal, or Miller from Saving Private Ryan. Even if his character isn't wholly fleshed out as in those other movies.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about Greyhound is it makes me want to read the book it's based on, cause I imagine a lot of the minutae about operating the ship and locating and combating the subs was glossed over for the purposes of the of a standard runtime.

I really did enjoy this movie and I think the only thing I wish I got more of was the specifics about operating the ship. I imagine it sort of in the vein of Treasure Island, which, for all of it's adaptations, often obfuscates the worldbuilding that was present in the book and consequently popularized the pirate genre.

I may give this a better rating on a rewatch, but for now I think it deserves a solid

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Good]

Omnizoa

05-27-22, 02:40 PM

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1917
War Action Drama / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Just another war movie, except this time it's a faux-longtake.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Longtakes are generally impressive spectacles even as one-off scenes in movies. Most commonly a rare feature in action movies such as Hard-Boiled's hospital scene or The Protector's restaurant scene, these serve to not just immerse you in the action, but also to sell the stunts involved. But sometimes you'll get a whole movie which it's just one longtake with maybe 2-3 breaks cleverly hidden between shots with the intent to simply bake the viewer into the world as we watch it live and breathe, such as Russian Ark.

1917 is set to accomplish both of these tasks, but rather than immersing me or impressing me I just found it continually distracting.

The first issue I have is not that it isn't a true single longtake, multiple longtakes stitched together can still be impressive, but the longer they are, the more impressive they are, and the point is to conceal the cuts between shots, generally by brief dips to black or passing an object across the entirety of the camera's field of view. In Russian Ark this was done incredibly sparingly and I may have only noticed 1-2 instances tops where a cut could have been snuck in. It's even easier if you have the camera on a track and can pass it over a benign static background and it would be impossible to tell if a cut had occurred. But multiple times over the coarse of 1917 the camera very obviously pans across trees or other objects in the foreground, at least twice it cuts to black, and there was one shot where the camera moves our protagonist offscreen and when they return to the shot they're in a position that they couldn't reasonably have reached in the short amount of time we didn't see them.

When I start noticing things that make me think the actor, who's portraying a soldier that's just been concussed by a severe head injury for literal hours, is having to jump up and sprint around offscreen so he can be in position for the next shot... I'm definitely not immersed.

The camerawork should be the best thing about this movie, but it's not. The sudden shift from steadycam to handheld is noticeable and jarring, there's multiple gratuitous 360 shots that just seem like counterproductive attempts to show off and here's the deal:

Russian Ark is impressive because the movie is saturated with actors moving about the entire set. The set's not going anywhere, the set doesn't need to act, or keep in character, or do anything other than look like it's an NPC stuck on an animation loop. They got hundreds of people to appear in that movie to make it feel like a real place, where real people are walking around and having conversations, that they have some place to be.

But 1917 consists mostly of just our two main characters. Pulling out to a super wide shot only serves to emphasize how big and empty the environment is. Wide open fields of nothing. The closest we get to anything on the level of Ark is when we follow the protagonists through the trenches and we see all manner of soldiers posted up, sleeping, having conversation or various other things. But even then, the area being recorded is incredibly confined, and the soldiers around them don't have to do a whole lot when half of them are sleeping.

Beyond that, I drifted between forgetting this was a longtake movie because nothing interesting was being accomplished with it, and being unpleasantly reminded of it because of the cinematography. The success of your longtake comes down to the cameraman's ability to run in front of the actor as he approaches the camera over the span of a football field's worth of dull environment, I don't really care.

Anyway, the movie's about a couple WWI soldiers being charged with bringing unwelcome news to the platoon of one of their brothers that they risk getting killed in an ambush preying on the misconception that the Germans are retreating.

Dude #1 is all gung-ho about it cause it's his brother, and Dude #2 isn't so cool with it because the intel about the retreat could be wrong and they're being asked to sneak through occupied territory. Immediately you start feeling bad for Dude #2 who I immediately wrote off as dead because the first thing he does is pierce his hand on a barb wire fence and then immediately dunk that fresh wound into the rotting exposed contents of some dead guy's abdominal cavity. And remember this is World War 1. My first thought is this guy's gonna get ill and die from infection. But surprisingly he doesn't, and shortly after he dunks the same hand in muddy corpse water and the movie just kinda forgets that might even be a problem.

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Okay so Dude #2's day is already starting off pretty bad, but then the two find the German trenches abandoned, and in one of their tunnels they find *SHOCK AND HORROR* CG rats.

Definitely the most horrifying thing we've seen yet and I know that would ruin my day, but wait until the CG rat sets off a trip-wire burying Dude #2 in stone who becomes blinded with dust and is forced to flee the collapsing tunnel.

Okay, WORST. DAY. EVER. No doubt. He's probably got a different plague in each individual finger at this point, he took an explosion to the face, and now his eyeballs are filled with chalk. Definitely making us for bad for Dude #2 right now.

Which is why this is a fantastic time for Dude #1 to die less than halfway through the movie. Wait, what?

Seriously, these guys are conveniently present when a German plane gets shot down on top of them, they try to be nice and save the guy from the fire, but he wheels out and stabs Dude #1 right in the stomach. Prop for the blood effects in this scene, I'm awful shrewd about that stuff and they seemed to pull it off quite well here.

So Dude #2 is all on his own now, except that this is conveniently when an entire caravan of friendlies drive up in perfect silence to bring him some of the way. He becomes reinvested in completing the mission for his late friend and their brother and lah-di-dah eventually gets to sniper town.

Sniper Town, as I'll call it, is the exact point in the movie where you expect snipers to be posted up, but it is also when Dude #2 decides to be as unsubtle as possible by crossing a broken bridge by walking along it's metal railing. This after it's been visually established he could wade across and his boots are slippery as hell. Naturally he starts getting shot at, somehow he seems to tag the guy back with a practically blind shot into a window, enters the building directly (again, no subtlety), and walks directly into the soldier firing at him.

It seems like he gets shot in the chest at first, but when he recovers he only appears to have head trauma, so apparently the gunshot just startled him, he tripped backwards, split his skull, and nearly died from blood loss? That's ****in' lame.

The next sequence have him running around Sniper Town at night where fires and weirdly constant flares illuminate and eerily darken the vacant landscape. If there's any part of the movie where the camerawork makes sense, it's here because character stumbling around, suffering from a blood loss and a concussion while the lights shift all around him, make the constant floaty camera movement communicate a sense of surrealism, like this could easily be a nightmare he's having as he's unconscious on the stairs.

But no, no such luck. He's just running around a supposed military occupation but he sees like 4 guys maximum.

He jumps off a bridge, falls down a waterfall, climbs over some more bloated infected corpses, and automagically winds up where's been trying to get to. He tells runs past a bunch of fake explosions and soldiers running in one direction (we don't even see the enemy or any gunfire exchanged), he tells the general what he's supposed to, there's no fanfare, he finds Dude #1s brother, has a sad moment delivering the news, he flops down at a tree and credits roll.

The characters aren't engaging in any sense of them being interesting or enjoyable. Their conversations don't add up to anything meaningful... I mean it feels pretty cheap when you have exactly one scene where Dude #1 tells an unfunny story and Dude #2 laughs and that apparently serves as the entire foundation for describing him to his brother as though he's a regular comedian or something.

At least they tried to make me care? That's more than I an say for Dunkirk. They established personalities and a relationship between the main characters, but that's a pretty low-bar to clear.

When over half the movie's just a chopped up longtake of one character running and frowning though a landscape of nothing full of nobody... I just don't get much out of it.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

05-27-22, 03:55 PM

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The Hunt for Red October
War Drama / English / 1990

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I thought I'd reviewed The Hunt for Red October, but apparently not.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
A submarine thriller with a star-studded cast including Sean Connery, Alex Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, and Tim Curry? Sounds fantastic.

Alas, I found it underwhelming. Despite all the talent a movie budget could buy, this movie doesn't lean too heavily on the "acting" side of things. Not that it isn't there or the characters don't emote, but it's very very subdued. Comparing the naval encounters side-by-side with Greyhound, despite sharing the same lingo, there is much less intensity and much less technical concern for the small moving parts of the equation that keep that fragile chain of command one game of telephone away from killing everyone.

The only way I can think to describe it is it's way more "Hollywood"; the protagonists verge on that too-cool-for-school level of concern you expect Scharwzenegger or Stallone to show with a slow-motion explosion going off behind them. About the only concept really introduced is the idea of a "caterpillar drive" that allows a sub to operate virtually silent, thus allowing it to deliver a nuclear package practically undeterred. When Connery, the ship's Russian captain appears to go rogue, you have the premise of the movie, where Baldwin plays the CIA submarine nerd tasked with convincing the US military to risk the opportunity to attack the sub on the belief that Connery's actually defecting, which he is.

This whole plot about Sean Connery's character defecting to the Americans and America questioning whether he can be trusted is honestly such a dull concept. This absconds with the notion of submarine battles (except for the couple brief encounters they have with Russians trying to stop them) and this isn't even the sort of drama where you can expect some incredibly tense exchange of hostages or something.

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No, it's just a sub full of incredibly fluent English-speaking Russkis that are just way cool about going to America and experiencing capitalism, man.

The atmosphere isn't there, the action isn't there, the drama isn't compelling... It's just a bunch of solid actors standing around expounding on their characters' goals and speculating about other characters' goals and... that's about it.

The Sonar Guy stands out because he seems to be personally interested in investigating and tracking the invisible new sub. He's also the one who ends up explaining some of the more interesting features of sub combat, such as how they have to be cautious going dead to pick up noises because even stopped, the sub could drift into the enemy revealing their position, or even worse, revealing their awareness of the enemy.

Meanwhile Baldwin's playing the whole "I know this Connery fella, I'm basically married to him. I have physically subsisted on his thoughts and dreams for twelve millennia so trust me when I say I know his motives.".

Fortunately, the only thing that stretches plausibility for me is Baldwin's trope of a role.

I do appreciate the jab at the end where the President(?), probably knowing full well that a Russian sub was lead to torpedo themselves, goes "you lost ANOTHER sub?" When it's brought up.

Overall, Satisfactory Movie terms like "funny" and "exciting" and "cool" never really came up when I watched this. I actually think I saw this fairly recently but genuinely forgot everything about it. Everyone I recognize in this movie has been in far better films.

I'd rather watch Under Siege.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

05-27-22, 11:29 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87338&stc=1&d=1653704882

The Wolf's Call
War Drama / French / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Basically just binging "best submarine movies" at this point. This one's a French one from the perspective of the Sonar Guy.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Right off the bat I'd like to say that there's a definite line between fiction and reality when it comes to these movies, and I don't know how thick or thin that line is. Some movies, like Greyhound (which is my definite favorite of the bunch so far) bring you in close to communicate some of the minutae of combating submarines. Others, like The Hunt for Red October, obfuscate much of this for grandiose setpieces, and when the gimmick is "this is a new never-before-classified submarine threat" there's the creative liberty to embellish on some of the technology present, especially if the setting is anything even remotely modern.

Much like how early sci-fi movies presented some of the absolute worst examples of what future space travel would look like, whereas period pieces bend over backwards to present true-to-the-time technology and culture.

In this movie, we see a lot more of the screens that Sonar Guy deals with, and they look very different than what we saw in Greyhound. The premise remains the same, in that they are effectively using directional echo-location to find and determine the behaviors of potential threats around them, but not only is the technology far more ambiguous than the relatively simple waveform and headphones we saw before, but Sonar Guy is presented as something of a hearing prodigy.

Now obviously it takes a degree of skill or experience to decipher the cloud of noise you might hear, let alone project it's distance, it's direction, and whether they're moving, fast, slow, or not at all...

But when Sonar Guy is like, "I hear 7 propeller blades, must be Iranian", I raise my eyebrow in a bit of skepticism.

This movie has exactly 2 combat encounters. The opening scene where we establish Sonar Guy's job and abilities. And the closing scene where, like a Castlevania protagonist, he's returned at greater than full power after being punked out shortly after the beginning of the game.

I don't like Sonar Guy. He becomes so fixated on identifying a mystery submarine that he sneaks into the Admiral's office (who just got done telling him to lay off and mind his own business), guesses his login and finds absolutely nothing of value.

Then he breaks into some records storage area (which he also knows the password to somehow) and determines the sub was some ancient Russian vessel that was believed to be discontinued. He's caught and told he's arrested, but then we do the whole "so yeah I only now just decided to check your homework and you're right so I'm going to waive all of your punishments and put you back to work immediately".

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87339&stc=1&d=1653704906

Sounds like karmic justice, right? Well Sonar Guy instantly fails his drug test. ****in' genius is a pothead. Brilliant.

The literal only time we see him smoking anything is in one scene with the Librarian who we have a heinously typical Overnight Romance with, complete with sex and *smoky kisses.* Mmmm...

You know I've always been pretty on the fence about kissing conceptually, but now that I know that the French will suck up a doobie and burp it into their partners' mouth? Damn, I'm sold.

You know I honestly thought there was going to be some reveal that the Captain or whoever falsified his drug test results out of a personal vendetta because there's one guy that's constantly mean-mugging him, but nope. I guess we're just honestly supposed to believe that Sonar Guy bathed in that shit before the biggest job interview of his life.

I genuinely hate the smell of weed. I'd never known what it smelled like before because I don't associate with those kinds of people, but ever since the crime rate spiked like hell and public transit took an absolute shit, I smell it on people all the time. It's so ****ing gross.

I'd rather live with a chainsmoker.

I've cleaned up vomit that smelled better than weed.

I have visited an online seller's home that reeked of literal cat piss, and I'd sooner visit them again than willfully enter the home of someone who regularly smokes pot.

CHUNKY SOLIDIFIED MILK that has been left in the sink for days... like, I should not be putting coagulated stagnant dairy products on the same level as something people deliberately imbibe to feel good.

I wouldn't care if smoking a joint gave me the same experience as a 10-minute sustained orgasm, I'd be too distracted by the smell. To say nothing of how bad it must taste.

All this is to say that I should not be associating the protagonist of a war film, ultimately responsible for saving the entire planet from nuclear armageddon, with the filthy creepshows who love to sit next to me on transit and whip out the tin foil and lighter.

DON'T. STOP. CEASE.

Thankfully the other characters rail on Sonar Guy hard, but when they decide he's the best pothead they have access to at the moment, it becomes a reluctant sort of "well I can't in good conscious put the lives of my crew in the hands of a weedlord guilty of compromising national security, but we need your stupid ****ing ears to find a stupid ****ing submarine SO I GUESS YOU'RE NOT BEING DISCHARGED".

I mean, you're basically communicating my own opinion back to me. I'd LIKE to have a competent protagonist who isn't randomly a druggie offscreen just to drive the plot into a ditch, BUT I GUESS THIS IS WHAT WE'RE STUCK WITH.

The whole drama about him being arrested by trying to find out about the Russian sub is entirely wasted anyway because the twist is the US sold such a sub to Jihadists, who are using the sub to fire blanks, provoking a nuclear conflict.

This creates one of those dumb**** military procedural rabbitholes where a sub is dispatched to nuke Russia on orders so secret that they go silent mode and close all communication, assuming any interference to be a threat.

Queue the winging about firing on former friends and all that. Seems awfully convenient that when both subs take a torpedo hit, exactly EVERYONE except the three main characters die instantly. That's just good writing.

Also the Face-Turned-Heel looks like French Gilbert Gottfried.

This movie was lame.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Weak]

Omnizoa

05-28-22, 10:09 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87347&stc=1&d=1653786449
K19: The Widowmaker
Military Drama / English / 2002

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Rounding out my submarine movie marathon we have an early-2000s box office bomb starring Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford directed by the woman who brought us The Hurt Locker and Strange Days. I'm pretty optimistic for this one.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It's easy to forget that while I really like Strange Days and The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow is also responsible for Near Dark and Point Break, neither of which I was terribly fond of.

K19 easily goes in that latter category of movies, unfortunately.

Rather than getting a Cameron-esque Hurt Locker-style slow burn submarine thriller, we get kind of a historical shitshow with, yet again, some extremely fluent, occasionally Russian-sounding, English speakers. It's odd to hear Ford put on the Eastern Bloc growl, but weirder to hear Neeson shift from literally growling to no accent at all.

The accent stuff is pretty easy to dismiss though, as long as the movie is great, it's totally forgivable, but this is not a great movie.

Simple premise being that rather than watching Ford and Neeson chew scenery as rival sub captains trying to obliterate each other underwater in a nailbiting thriller... we get Neeson getting demoted to XO in exchange for Ford who takes exception to Neeson's soft attitude towards his crew as they're assigned to conduct a training mission on the world's worst submarine.

No, it's not the world's *best* submarine... it's no Red October, it's in fact a giant piece of trash kept together by tape.

It leaks,
there are no radiation suits,
the onboard doctor got run over by a truck,
the nuclear reactor wasn't completely installed,
and Moscow's cheaping the **** out on everything in sight.

All this and more on top of the fact that Neeson apologizes and takes responsibility for all of his crew's ****-ups including when they injure themselves and are found drinking on the job. It's called the "Widowmaker" because everyone on board is going to die.

That's a pretty bad situation and the sub hasn't even ****ing launched yet.

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This is when Ford shows up to oust Neeson as captain and proceed to put his foot up the collective ass of the communist crew by running constant fire and flooding drills while they dangerously send the sub down to crush depth which manages to impact the hull of the sub.

Great job Cap'n, you successfully damaged "the finest submarine in the world" despite the explicit advice of the former captain. I'm sure the gulag would love to have you.

Naturally, Ford plays the hardcore by-the-book patriot and this undermines his relationship with the crew eventually stirring up feelings of mutiny. There in fact eventually IS a mutiny which puts Neeson back in charge, who after abandoning his post once already and contradicting Comrade Ford at every turn suddenly goes, "Alright, cool, you are arrested for mutiny."

Ford asks him why and he goes "because it was wrong".

THIS after the nuclear reaction starts going into meltdown and Ford's already damned several crew members by forcing them to irradiate themselves to repair the ****ing thing. All of which are confirmed dead by the end of the movie.

So Ford, despite being offered alternatives, is directly responsible for ordering the unnecessary deaths of several members of Neeson's crew, and when faced with the prospect of EVERYONE ABOARD DYING because Ford insists on sacrificing as many people as possible so long as "we don't abandon ship" and "we don't accept the enemy's help", Neeson says mutiny at this point... is "wrong".

In what possible situation could it be right? They even established that there already exists acceptable procedures for the Political Officer to reassign command of the sub.

If the Political Officer is convinced they can abandon ship with the endorsement of Moscow, I'm not sure the Captain needs convincing.

Somehow this gesture of Neeson freeing Ford from the cuffs completely changes his perspective on the crew and all of a sudden he reverses his stance on abandoning ship and seeking help and even expresses compassion to the people who he condemned to death.

WHY? This Heel-Face-Turn makes no sense. There's no development here.

At the end he shows up to a funeral where the crew is mourning the dead and they look all happy to see Ford and Ford goes on commending them as war heroes.

YOU KILLED THEM. YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR DEATHS.

And this would be bad enough, but this was all for a ****ing TRAINING MISSION, with no combat whatsoever! They were supposed to park their ass in Atlantic, shoot a test missile, and then sit on a nuclear payload in case America fired on Russia. THAT IS IT.

All of the conflict arose entirely out of a coolant leak in the reactor (and that didn't start until halfway through the movie!), so "war heroes"? Really? For throwing themselves into lethal radiation on the whims of a partisan military ****stick?

ALL OF A SUDDEN the potential explosion is grounds to abandon ship because it could catch a nearby US destroyer and trigger armageddon. At what point was that NOT a plausible outcome BEFORE the mutiny, genius??

This character arc is so stupid, and he doesn't deserve the smiles and validation he gets at the end. Just straight Looney Tunes.

It is enough of a joke for the movie to point out that "the crew was sworn to secrecy for 28 years".

Sworn to secrecy? Over some epic military conflict in the Atlantic? NO.

The Soviets nearly NUKED themselves because they're cheap incompetent bastards and they virtually fed their crew members to a nuclear reactor just to save the metal they already invested!

So ******* dumb and the movie takes itself so seriously.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Weak]

Omnizoa

05-29-22, 05:49 AM

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Das Boot
War Drama Thriller / German / 1981

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I have discovered to my misfortune that it seems I would be remiss to conclude a submarine movie marathon without Das Boot, a movie which clocks in at over 3 hours, reputedly because it's also a slice-of-life film. I'm not optimistic.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"To be heading into the inexorable, where no mother will care for us, no woman crosses our path, where only reality reigns, with cruelty and grandeur."

3 hours is brutal for any movie, Metropolis and Lord of the Rings included, I really don't think it needed to be that long to communicate the passage of time and frequent boredom experienced by submarine crewmen.

Having established that, Das Boot is the closest to Greyhound in terms of being a technical representation of submarine combat, and it takes place at the same time; during the Battle of the Atlantic.

Main difference here being that we exclusively follow the occupants of a U-Boat this time, it's much smaller and less sophisticated than the subs in Wolf's Call or Red October, but consequently we get a much stronger sense for it's workings, it's layout, and the general sense of claustrophobia it brings. We become familiar with the control room, the engine room, the torpedo bay, the crew quarters, and the tiny area the officers eat at, half of whom have to stand up for anyone to get to the opposite side of the sub.

Despite us following a Nazi U-Boat, I appreciate that the movie didn't condescend to finger-wag at the audience to remind us that Nazis are bad guys (something that wouldn't fly nowadays), and instead focuses almost entirely on moment-to-moment drama aboard the U-Boat, regardless of the crew's motivations, allegiances, or political ideals.

In at least one point the Captain insults one of the officers, essentially for shaving and eating food with a knife, calling him a "Hitler Youth", but it comes across much more as a general cynicism that could be plausibly developed by any military veteran who's come to accept that the real people in charge have little concern for the lives they put at risk under the ocean.

In terms of the dilemmas encountered, thankfully we're spared any drama about mutinies or defection, or fearmongering about some brand new Deus Ex Submarine with a caterpillar drive or some shit, and instead we get quite the breadth of problems that could conceivably plague a U-Boat.

And I'm not talking Widowmaker-type problems, the sub in this case manages to survive an incredible amount of damage, and the crew scrambles to address each individual threat to the sub's integrity as soon as possible.

We get a shooting bolts from water pressure, we get a fire on-board, we get various leaks and flooding, they get attacked by a destroyer, they get attacked by a plane, they get attacked by an STD, it's wild... and it all culminates in numerous vital parts of the submarine getting damaged resulting in the sub going far beyond crush depth, colliding with the ocean floor, and refusing to rise, even as the water pours in and the oxygen runs out.

They're definitely interesting dilemmas, and you get a greater sense of the resourcefulness these characters have to exercise when they're trapped underwater with only so many tools to work with.

What I didn't like was... the general attitude of the crew. The movie opens up with them all throwing a real Nazi shindig where everyone but the Captain is drunk as could possibly be, and just straight up pissing on their car as they drive by.

That's a fantastic way to make me instantly hate everyone involved in this movie. Imagine having to be the Captain to some degenerate **** who brazenly pisses on your car at the first opportunity and yucks it up.

I understand that we're supposed to appreciate the change in tone from before they set to sea and after they've returned, but that's sufficiently communicated by the characters growing beards, looking all solemn and shellshocked, and appearing completely out of place when a fresh new batch of dapper Nazis salute Herr Fuhrer.

I also think I just have an irrational hatred for this character:

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87350&stc=1&d=1653812965

I hate looking at him. I hate his ugly ginger neckbeard face. I hate his Owen Wilson-style pout. I kept struggling to figure out why he's even in the ****ing movie, the camera keeps fixating on him and I wish it would stop!

Apparently he's some propagandist whose job it is to get into actual crew members faces with a camera to take money shots? ACTUALLY **** off. I did not like this character, I did not want to see his experience on the sub, I did not want to see him go all "I'm the king of world" on us, I wish he got shot.

Meanwhile I keep looking at the Captain and, knowing this is a German movie, thinking "gosh that guy sure does look like Sutter Cane from In the Mouth of Madness".

Jürgen Prochnow (German pronunciation: [ˈjʏʁɡn̩ ˈpʁɔxnoː] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Standard_German) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Loudspeaker.svg/11px-Loudspeaker.svg.png (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GT_J%C3%BCrgen_Prochnow.ogg)listen (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/GT_J%C3%BCrgen_Prochnow.ogg) (help (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_help)·info (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GT_J%C3%BCrgen_Prochnow.ogg)); born 10 June 1941) is a German film, stage, and television actor. His international breakthrough was his portrayal of the good-hearted and sympathetic U-boat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat) Captain "Der Alte" ("Old Man") in the 1981 war film Das Boot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Boot).[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Prochnow#cite_note-1) He is also known for his roles in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Honour_of_Katharina_Blum_(film)) (1975), Dune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)) (1984), Beverly Hills Cop II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_Cop_II) (1987), In the Mouth of Madness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Mouth_of_Madness) (1994),Oh, I actually got it right, that is him. Holy shit.

If I had never seen him before the beard I never would have guessed. I mean French Gilbert Gottfried wasn't actually Gilbert Gottfried, so can you blame me?

I don't know what to feel about this movie. At the best of times it was fun, I feel like I learned about what it might have been like to live on a WWII submarine, got some action, got some thrills. It's good.

But it's also a bit of a chore to watch and I'd really rather penises and sex not have been brought up as much as they were. I did not need to see a row of drunk ******** pissing into the camera within the first 2 minutes of the movie, and I did not appreciate knowing that they went on to give each other ****ing crabs.

That is a level of realism I would have been quite content without, and constantly showing me ginger-neckbeard-man is not improving my opinion.

Also the ending is weirdly anti-climactic with the crew getting Pearl Harbor'd last second during the return celebration. Okay then.

I really don't want to rate this movie the same as the others, but my complaints with it are ultimately much less serious or irritating than the issues in those other movies. Consider this one a [Meh...] and both Widowmaker and Wolf's Call docked half a point each.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

06-21-22, 12:35 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87629&stc=1&d=1655779889
Bridge of Spies
War Drama / English / 2015

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Tom Hanks is recruited to be the unlikely negotiator of a prisoner exchange between America and Soviet Russia.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
The biggest twist in this movie was finding out Spielberg was the director. I realize he got a bit of a reputation (like 20 years ago) for making sappy family movies, but I dunno, I've really never connected with his more serious dramas.

You gotta be a certain sort of guy to make Hook, and Bridge of Spies doesn't share that distinction.

Bridge of Spies isn't a bad movie by any means, I really struggle to fault it in any major respect, but two things really hold it back for me:

One being that it's called "Bridge of Spies" and billed as being about this prisoner exchange between Cold War superpowers. I can't really say it's false advertising, the movie concerns what it says on the tin, but this is like ordering mac-n-cheese and getting the macaroni and cheese separately. Any movie that concerns spies I would hope to see some thriller elements in it, but there are none here, this is just pure bureaucratic drama. That, and the prisoner exchange in question is only foreshadowed until an entire hour into the movie. The first half of the movie is just about the Russian Spy guy being put on trial and Tom Hanks representing him.

Why again is Tom Hanks representing him? He's a private citizen, an insurance lawyer... the US couldn't find one mother****er in their whole ******* budget to provide public counsel?

The second and arguably bigger issue is just the movie's pacing. It's not the worst by any means, but it immediately shatters expectations by making me think I misunderstood what the movie was supposed to be about only to skim through the court proceedings. It's an hour's worth of movie, but that hour timeskips huge parts of the trial.

Entire interesting movies have been made just about one court battle, but this movie decided to cram in two and a prisoner exchange on top of it.

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Once it shifts into the prisoner exchange arc the whole tone of the movie shifts too, it's like we've frontloaded it with all these really shitty examples of America. We deal with CIA guys casually shitting on the Constitution, a corrupt judge whose mind is made up about the case before he even sees any evidence, soldiers being commanded to kill themselves before they're caught, kids ritualistically saluting the American flag in class (which I sincerely hope isn't still a thing), and all these other people fearmongering about nuclear armageddon, or attacking Tom Hanks' family because he's representing a foreign spy.

It is some of the most sickening hypocrisy to see people go all Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, simultaneously enraged at the right to due process afforded to someone in their country, while supposedly oh-so patriotic to it because of the values it represents.

Do you actually care about American values or does the Star-Spangled Banner just make your dick hard?

There's just an endless string of criticism that could be leveled at this attitude, and in a better movie, like 12 Angry Men, we might have explored those attitudes. But here it's just a bump in the road, just one more thing we should include in the movie for reasons not altogether conducive to the actual story. Like, does Tom Hanks getting his coat stolen by an East German gang actually add anything? Is this a significant plot point that we need to refer back to? Was this one of the most memorable aspects of the real historical account that this movie says it was "inspired by"?

When you say the movie is "inspired by real events" I take that to mean you'll be taking some creative liberties, so did you just forget that aspect, or is Tom Hanks getting his coat stolen an embellishment, one of a couple little moments we took to go "oh by the way, the communists are bad too, look, they took his coat".

I really don't like the "happy ending" either. It's strongly implied that the Russian spy may be killed after the events of the movie (which they took a good amount of time to make an sympathetic character), but then Tom Hanks relives his moment on the bus where everyone is staring daggers at him for representing the dude and now one of the ladies who was giving him nasty looks before is smiling at him for negotiating the return of an American spy.

**** YOU lady, all that scene serves to do is remind me how unreasonable and shitty people were and how easy they are to manipulate with a ****ing headline. All of a sudden one person turns a frown upside-down because the paper implies Mr. Hanks ain't such a bad guy? Screw off.

If this was Spielberg's trademark saccharine contribution, I could have done well without it.

Overall, it could have done a lot better if it focused on just one of the two arcs instead of both and maybe actually did something with all of the psychotic American bullshit it started with.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

06-21-22, 01:08 AM

Just tried watching American Sniper, but I got 16 minutes in before it became too cringe.

Every bad vibe I got from the reception of this movie was justified threefold within the first few minutes. It plays like a Christian propaganda film.

Omnizoa

06-21-22, 03:14 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87633&stc=1&d=1655789904
The Wall
War Thriller Drama / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
John Cena is a sniper.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I was pleasantly surprised when I figured out this was actually a high-concept film about a single sniper v. sniper encounter in the middle of Iraq. "The Wall" refers to the place they believe the enemy sniper is hiding until shortly after when it becomes where the protagonist is hiding.

We drop-in, 20 hours into a standoff between our protagonists including John Cena as the good guy sniper and a potential sniper whose whereabouts among the destroyed infrastructure in the middle the desert are unknown.

Cena gets impatient (understandably) and decides to venture out into the open where he is promptly shot and almost immediately taken out of the movie.

Welp, so much for John Cena the sniper. The movie immediately shifts focus to the spotter who's wounded in the leg, his antenna's broken, and his water bottle's been shot through, which we're later lead to believe were deliberate shots when he was zigzagging to avoid being hit.

That's very hard to believe.

We find this out because when Spotter tries to radio for help he gets suspicious of the person's he's talking to and it's revealed to be the sniper who has a lock on his hiding place and continually goads Spotter into talking on threat of shooting Cena in the head (who's maybe dead from a gunshot to the abdomen?).

The movie heavily downshifts into this WAY less interesting plot device where Spotter is struggling not to bleed out and to locate the enemy sniper with his extremely limited resources. Too often this just ends up being Spotter laying on the ground and calling the sniper a "gay hadji". The movie doesn't feel like it progresses in any meaningful respect even compared to other relatively minimalist survival movies.

There's a point where he runs out of cover to grab a new radio, but it doesn't work.

There's a point where he creates a decoy to bait out a muzzle flash but it doesn't work.

There's a point where Cena wakes up and shoots blindly into a trash heap they think the sniper's in, but then he gets shot in the head, because of course he does. We established early on this is not a "John Cena is awesome" type of movie (which, to be fair, isn't what i wanted anyway).

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Eventually it's revealed that Spotter keeps his former partner's scope because he feels guilty for shooting him in the back on accident. This is the same shitty reveal as in The Messenger. Why does the soldier have to have some secret burden about killing somebody with friendly fire? Let alone someone we've never seen at all. I really struggle to imagine any kind of movie-going audience who would get emotional upon discovering that.

OH NO, he feels bad cause he shot some guy we don't know years before the movie! That's turrible!!!

Spotter also determines that this guy is some kind of legendary sniper who's killed a ton of US soldiers. Implying that he makes a habit of impersonating troops calling in for support is a smart move, it implies the setting of the movie and rationalizes why he might have a disproportionately high kill count (so it's not just godly aim).

The movie ends very abruptly when Spotter recovers Cena's rifle, takes a shot at a muzzle flash, and it's left questionable whether he took the sniper down before he's loaded into a helicopter and the helicopter is shot down. Smash cut to black and butt rock.

This is not the sort of movie where a smash cut to butt rock feels appropriate. That's like a Return of the Living Dead thing, maybe if this really was a John Cena suckfest, it'd make more sense, or if the movie put more emphasis on this particular sniper being the ultimate big bad who no protagonist can survive... maybe it would have felt more appropriate, but it's just weird when you've spent so much of the movie dwelling on the minutae of Spotter getting water, eating Skittles, bandaging his wound, cutting out the bullet, trying to radio for help, and not even getting heckled by the sniper most of the time, but being asked for his life story...

I can imagine a much more tonally consistent movie where the sniper aggressively heckles them or causes situations that put them in more imminent peril, basically anything that can justify an ending that wouldn't feel out of place in Final Destination or Saw.

There was a lot of potential in this movie, but it was pretty squandered.

I'm not at all of the opinion that a movie headlining former pro wrestlers can't be decent. The Condemned was basically The Hunger Games, but not complete shit.

This movie was just... unacceptably boring for it's premise.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

06-21-22, 06:13 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=87634&stc=1&d=1655802633
Snipers
Historical War Thriller / Chinese / 2022

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I tried watching Battle for Sevastopol which seems to be a popular sniper movie presented from the perspective of this person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko), which sounded like a cool concept. But it immediately invoked the "suckfest" vibes I talked about with Cena's The Wall, the English voice actors weren't just dubbed in, but then they had translators dubbing the dub on top of that. The subtitles sucked also and just skimming through the movie I realized it was one of those tonally schizophrenic fliks where it wildly shifts back and forth chronologically between the downtime away from the war and conflicts in the war. It also came off like a Russian G.I. Jane if G.I. Jane had no subtlety.

So I dropped it. And decided to watch this instead. It's a Chinese sniper movie from this year.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Snipers, is about what The Wall should have been.

It also centers around a single encounter, but rather than being reduced to just two characters in the first 10 minutes, this is the story of a spartan squad of Chinese snipers who've been baited into a showdown with a much better equipped American sniper squad during the Korean War.

Unlike The Wall and so many other military movies, there's no commentary at all about the circumstances of the war, who's the good guys, who's the bad guys, or anything. "5th Squad" at one point sing a song about "evil Americans", but it's only to wake their dying friend.

There's plenty of motivation for the Americans to be portrayed as excessively cruel, and I know where I come from there seems to be every reason for anyone fighting on the side of North Korea to be the bad guys, but this movie makes an effort to humanize both sides. Not so far as to make everyone sympathetic, but the movie, though mainly from the perspective of the Chinese snipers, presents a healthy amount of screentime focusing on the American troops as well as their own dilemmas.

Put another way, this is no propaganda piece. Easy though it would be, it doesn't have an agenda to push, despite the fact that Wikipedia says it was funded by China's Propaganda Department (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Film_Administration). It's just this one combat encounter between competing sniper squadrons.

Which is great because this movie delivers far better on the action, pacing, and even technical aspects of sniper warfare than the other movies I've seen (and skipped).

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The main conceit here is that the "Chinese Reaper" Sgt. Liu gained a bit of a reputation and American snipers have been dispatched to capture him alive for political clout. While the American snipers have the gear, Liu and 5th Squad do not. None of their snipers have scopes, Liu alone has the only pair of binoculars, and instead of parascopes, they have big spoons.

This aspect serves to make their kill record more impressive, but it also strains the suspension of disbelief when anything other than explicit "covering fire" is a perfect bullet to the dome. They also do that Sniper Elite slow-mo killshot stuff which is unnecessarily silly.

I think my biggest problem with the movie would just be the excessive amount of crying. "Stop crying" is a repeated line in the movie because at minimum one character's eyes gets all watery each time one of them dies and the overtly sad music they play is a tad overbearing.

That said, what happens in the movie is definitely hard to watch at times, and it feels more appropriate when by the end Liu himself is struggling to keep the tears back. It's much more emotional than, frankly, most of the war movies I've seen recently.

I don't know what it is about Russian movies that keep turning me off, but I can at least say that the Chinese film industry is perhaps only second in maturity compared to Hollywood. They got the talent, the experience, and the budget to make a decent flik.

I liked it.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

07-21-22, 05:18 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88045&stc=1&d=1658391431
Godzilla
Kaiju / English / 2014

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Friendship ended with sniper and submarine movies.
Kaiju movies are now my best friend.

Seriously though, it occurred to me that Godzilla vs. Kong is a literal movie that exists and that I haven't seen it, so I'm like "damn, I should see that", but then I found out the director is the guy who did the Death Note Netflix adaptation and I'm like "oh, well maybe I should kill myself instead".

I decided to revisit the Godzilla franchise, which is apparently the longest running movie series of all time? Thing is, I've been pretty underwhelmed by everything I've seen so far. My first exposure to Godzilla was the American version of Godzilla 2000 which was released in a VHS combo with the 1998 American Godzilla.

Watching these two movies side by side without having any attachment to the original monster movie left me with the extremely unpopular opinion that the 1998 Godzilla was the better movie. Granted, Godzilla 2000 features what is probably the most iconic version of Godzilla to date, but watching him move in what is obviously an extremely movement-restrictive costume rips me out of the movie at every possible opportunity. It's very hard to appreciate the character of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, when he's being puppeted in an obvious suit knocking down obvious props.

One of the most amusing things I've seen was one scene in which Godzilla gets blasted in the face by a giant space rock and flies backwards off his feet. It looks so ridiculous, and I'm all too aware that even sillier things take place in the less mainstream movies. For instance, I tried revisiting the series before by watching Godzilla: Final Wars, a movie which promised an all-out slugfest between Godzilla and many of his classic foes including the popularly hated "Zilla" from the 1998 American movie.

It is one of the dumbest ****ing movies I've ever seen in my entire life.

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Not just because Godzilla chews through each monster like they're a punchline, but the human characters are batshit insane and hilarious for the worst possible reasons.

You know that trope of the "fair fight", where the bad guy agrees to duel the protagonist handicapped out of pride? This movie has the best example of this that I've ever seen where some dudebro American dude in a trenchcoat and katana get confronted by some sci-fi yakuza with an uzi, he puts the sword down, and the yakuza guy instantly throws the uzi backwards over his shoulder.

IT'S SO UNBELIEVABLY DUMB and none of it should be in my ******* monster battle movie. And those are basically my two biggest issues with Godzilla movies: The suits look fake as shit, and the human characters won't stay off the ****ing screen.

However, it must be noted that we are living in a post-Pacific Rim world. The untapped potential of kaiju movies is real, and while I could try to stomach the terrible effects of the older films, there are now many new English and Japanese reboots of the franchise that promise Godzilla with all the magic CG can offer.

So how does this movie handle it?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I completely forgot that this movie came out and was heavily advertised to star Bryan Cranston at the height of his popularity, but I only needed to wait long enough for this movie to put The Wall all over again and kill off their biggest talent only a short ways into the movie.

And that's honestly disappointing, because while I was on guard for mediocre human drama getting in the way of the monster throwdown, Bryan Cranston's just genuinely a solid actor and I got invested in him having his wife die through the door he closed on her to save everyone from succumbing to radiation. It's ****in' sad and it's so hard to imagine how I would feel if I were forced into that situation.

But then the movie timeskips 15 years and a completely different family has taken over the drama and I'm supposed to care just because you force in some obligatory "I love you, by the way I going to buy cigarettes, I'll be right back, I swear" bullshit? No.

The only other recognizable actor in this movie is Ken Watanabe, but his entire role is the embarrassing job of maintaining a tortured look on his face the entire movie as he baselessly pathologizes the monsters, just another Asian dude victimized by his own brilliant insight nobody else understands. It's dull as hell and adds nothing to the movie, nor does his female sidekick who seems to exist just to shovel his dialog when he's too busy opening his third eye to speak.

In this movie there's an XCOM style organization that secretly knows about and conceals the existence of Godzilla, while monitoring another monster, which is later revealed to be two monsters referred to only as "the MUTO". I appreciate them establishing a bit of biological significance, such as the male MUTO being small and winged and the female MUTO being much larger, but landed.

The MUTO feed on residual radioactivity long enough before waking up and finding the next source to hibernate around, whereas Godzilla is presented as a sort of apex predator who futzes about on the ocean bed absorbing radiation from the planet's core, but arises for epic monster combat should an actual threat arise.

I think this is a good way to justify keeping Godzilla as an ambivalent force in the world. He's a tangible threat to humanity while he remains in proximity, but he's also the hero because he takes out the monsters that more immediately endanger them.

Naturally this movie falls to the same trope as all previous movies I've seen (excepting the 1998 movie with Broderick, I think) by fixating heavily on human drama. I didn't show up to see humans squabbling over family members or reacting to damaged infrastructure, I showed up to watch a giant atomic lizard beat the **** up out of another abomination of nature, leave me alone.

But unfortunately, they really couldn't do the monster fights justice. Repeatedly they clip the fights so that it's happening offscreen or obscured by a cloud of debris. There's value to be had in not always showing the monster, especially if it's a brand new Godzilla redesign you're hyping up. But it takes an hour before we get a full view of Godzilla and it's another hour after that before I get to see him rompin' around and putting those terrible old costumes to shame.

AND EVEN THEN, they butcher the fights by constantly muting sound effects and audio, so that inexplicably monsters can silently appear and disappear around skyscrapers in a manner not all that different from the hide-and-seek nonsense of the 1998 movie. Except that movie actually had sound effects for Zilla moving around and didn't distractingly silence entire audio layers for dramatic effect.

I can see what they were going for, but it's the sort of thing that only works in moments of poignance, not your whole ****ing fight scene.

And what may make it even worse is Godzilla ultimately kills the female MUTO by prying it's jaws open and just puking atomic breath how it's throat.

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It's ****ing awesome, and I'm disappointed that this is the finale to a series of encounters that I was repeatedly unable to SEE and unable to HEAR. I also had it spoiled for me in promotional material when this movie was new.

And thus, is my rating:

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

07-21-22, 07:58 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88050&stc=1&d=1658401050
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Kaiju / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Sequel to the 2014 reboot, but a box office flop. Better?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Yes, it is a better movie, for a few pretty big reasons.

Firstly, we're spared the melodrama that polluted the first movie, the monsters are now front-and-center, and the human element is is purely to narrate a select few characters attempt to survive the devastation as well as their role to play in awakening the "titans" in the first place.

We eventually learn that Mom is pulling a Thanos and deliberately waking the titans with the help of eco-terrorists and a McGuffin that uses sound to way-too-easily control the monsters' disposition. There's no real tidy conclusion to the plot other than that the "this is bigger than just us" line eventually heel-face-turns into "I won't lose my daughter again" and suddenly we're just supposed to forget that one of these characters is guilty for attempting to kill millions of people.

Unlike the first movie we're also treated to a host of classic Godzilla foes including Gidorah, Rodan, and Mothra. I'm not attached to any of these monsters, but I definitely appreciate seeing some of the major icons that shaped the series.

The weird audio bullshit is virtually non-existent, as I said they should have reserved the use of silence during action scenes for poignant moments and they do that in one major scene and that's it.

Rather than waiting to see Godzilla until halfway through the movie we get pretty consistent action, at land, at sea, and air. Godzilla is also much ore firmly established as a "benevolent" force, and his convenient interference in monster attacks eventually woos our skeptical protagonist as well.

Our skeptical protagonist here is established as a guy who made the McGuffin. And that's it. He made a device that broadcasts a frequency. That's apparently all that qualifies him to make military decisions and dictate to the other characters how the monsters behave.

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Ken Watanabe has a much bigger and more respectable role in this movie, he's clearly very biased in favor of defending the monsters from military strikes, but by the end of the movie he sacrifices himself to nuke Godzilla even though I don't think it's ever made clear that the characters have realized that nuclear weapons will only make him stronger. He has much more, and more varied, dialog this time around, but he still has a ridiculous habit of randomly asserting the motives and relationships of the monsters with LITERALLY no evidence whatsoever. It's really annoying.

Much as I appreciate more action, more monsters, more Godzilla, I will say that some of the charm of that first reveal is gone because they already left that first impression to die in the first movie. Godzilla suddenly tail-whipping the MUTO into a skyscraper was a cool way to end a fight, but we don't really get that here. Godzilla also Kamehameha-ing down the other MUTO's throat was also really cool, so him beating Gidorah with a couple shockwaves and stepping on him isn't quite as visceral and satisfying.

That's not to say that seeing Godzilla drag Gidorah underwater wasn't cool, or that Mothra v. Rodan wasn't cool, or basically any scene with Gidorah wasn't cool... he's a giant three-headed wyvern that manifests a hurricane around him and breathes lightning, that is a level of power visually conveyed in a way that could NEVER compare to the original movies' practical effects.

It's a shame this movie was a box office bomb because despite it's flaws I do think it's a much better kaiju movie than it's predecessor. I'd say this is the best Godzilla movie I've seen, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Rockatansky

07-21-22, 12:41 PM

The monster stuff in KotM is amazing. You gotta tune out the shitty human parts, but that's a small price to pay. Much better than something like Shin Godzilla, which is shrill on both fronts.

Omnizoa

07-24-22, 01:52 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88077&stc=1&d=1658636618
Shin Godzilla
Kaiju Drama / Japanese / 2016

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The monster stuff in KotM is amazing. You gotta tune out the shitty human parts, but that's a small price to pay. Much better than something like Shin Godzilla, which is shrill on both fronts.That's not encouraging.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Throughout this entire movie I could only think of two words:

Kaiju Prodecural.

What kind of movie would you get if you took Godzilla and presented it, realistically, entirely from the perspective of the Japanese government as the bureaucratic machinery sluggishly struggles to reconcile the political landscape in view of a giant radioactive lizard tromping around downtown?

Well, you'd get this movie. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather take a concept like this over Godzilla: Or How I Learned How To Cram A Romance Into a Monster Movie, but this somehow accomplishes the rare feat of being a fairly fast-paced movie... but also boring.

All of the characters you only ever gain a superficial familiarity with, it's basically just the PM, some other assorted people with vague government roles, and one of them is a sort of quasi-protagonist, because of course, just like the other movies, there has to be one insightful dude who somehow knows exactly how to respond to every conflict that arises because reasons.

The editing is very over-the-top with constant 4th wall camera shots of characters looking directly into the camera as though it were 12 Angry Men or something. But rather than serve to insert me into the room and help me to imagine if I was one of the characters being spoken to, the editing here is just really distracting with odd camera shots, rapid-fire scene cuts, and a LOT of information being communicated very quickly.

This is not aided by the CG, which unlike the MonsterVerse reboots, looks pretty trashy at times. Extreme closeups on Godzilla or vehicles like tanks and trains look awful when they're moving. Ironically this means Godzilla looks better over the course of the movie because they have an "evolving" gimmick where he quickly comes ashore malformed and develops into a much slower, much stiffer monster more resembling the flexibility and posture of the original movies' costumes.

I really don't think that improved my experience. Even before watching the movie when I saw the poster (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/02/Shin_Godzilla.png) it looked to me as though Godzilla was just this giant static prop, as though he really were a guy in a costume, and in the movie it's almost exactly that, with the exception of a giant wiggly tail.

One of the THE biggest benefits of doing Godzilla in CG is being able to portray him as a realistic creature, to show him moving and behaving as an animal would. They started with something resembling that, but as soon as he "evolves" into Godzilla proper, suddenly he has fixed T-rex arms, he stands upright, and basically zombie-walks everywhere. Apparently there are already action figures of this version of Godzilla and I guarantee the toys are more flexible than what he see him do in the movies.

This is also probably the ugliest design I've seen for Godzilla yet.

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I legit laughed when I first saw it, and was sure that it was just one of the monsters that Godzilla would later show up to fight, but nope, that's Godzilla. The King of the Monsters is a giant bug-eyed dopey mouthbreather. It's an insult to say that "Zilla" from the first American adaptation was a betrayal of the monster, when this shit passes for a first impression in an actual serious movie that isn't trying to cram in jokes. Granted this is like his "larval" form, or whatever, but he still never blinks throughout the entire movie and just giving him a shark mouth full of random spikes for teeth just looks unattractive. His mouth also splits open like Predator when he goes nuclear which is also a design decision I didn't appreciate.

Speaking of his atomic breath, I will at least credit the movie for presenting Godzilla in the most destructive version of him I've seen yet. There was a nice touch to show him initially breathing fire before it seems to funnel into a controlled laser and then sweeps it across the city wiping out several districts at once. That's pretty incredible, I liked that.

It seemed a bit convenient that air attacks were so easily thwarted by Godzilla then shooting lasers out of his back and simply shifting back and forth to perfectly eliminate literally every single missile and drone in 3 ******* waves... Then his TAIL starts shooting lasers... I mean come on. It's like you got one trick here, guys.

The movie got another laugh out of me when in Japan's last gambit to stall Godzilla long enough to administer a blood coagulant that would nullify his nuclear energy(?) they're like "send the train bombs" and INSTANTLY there's like 20 ****ing trains uppercutting into his face. It was beyond silly. And it was already silly to think that they would be able to maneuver however many of these vehicles they had to even reach Godzilla after they deliberately blow up 4 skyscrapers on top of him.

And all of that assumes they even needed to wake him up in the first place. The dude was SLEEPING, you're telling me there was no part of this entire monsters' body that you could approach and inject with coagulant other than his mouth? I don't believe that.

All of that is critiquing a relatively small part of this movie's total 2 hour runtime. The vast majority of the movie is just people debating the issue in offices, and NO, this is not anything even remotely on the level of 12 Angry Men, and that's not what I wanted in a Godzilla movie anyway.

Apparently this movie got great reviews in Japan, but I don't understand it. The twist at the end that shows people sprouting from Godzilla's tail makes no sense (I think they mentioned earlier he has a bunch of human DNA for some reason?), and there's a Japanese-American character who's supposed to be a politician planning to become the US President at some point, but she's clearly not a native English speaker despite the fact that they got native English and German speaking characters for other roles in the movie?

Ah, t'would seem they hired her for her star power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satomi_Ishihara), rather than her believable portrayal as an American politician.

This movie did way too much to be as boring as it was.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

07-24-22, 04:54 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88079&stc=1&d=1658649186
Godzilla vs. Kong
Kaiju / English / 2021

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
And now our feature presentation.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I read that this movie was probably going to be the best of the reboots because, per what I read, it featured the least human drama.

I wouldn't say that that's strictly true, but the conflicts immediately facing the human characters are definitely de-emphasized this time compared to the Godzilla v. Kong throwdown.

Now I didn't watch the King Kong movies because there's not a whole lot you can do with a giant monkey that thrills or surprises. That said, both of these monsters have legendary film histories (pun unintended) and it's absolutely appropriate that they should get a Versus movie.

Something I picked up on right away was that both Godzilla and Kong are considered "hero" monsters, they're the on-again, off-again, saviors of humanity when they're not an imminent threat to it. So not only do the creators not want to bias the outcome of their fight by just having one win and the other lose, they want to give both monsters a chance to shine, so they "both win" in a sense.

This was a accomplished in Batman v. Superman by introducing Wonder Woman, and she was definitely the highlight of that movie. So I immediately wondered what tertiary threat they could introduce that would have both Godzilla and Kong team up to fight? It would have to be a pretty significant foe with a history of their own, and I guessed Mechagodzilla.

I was totally right, and I'm not even upset.

The movie pads out it's runtime by trying to prove insinuations in the previous movie that in this universe, Hollow Earth is real, and is the ultimate origin of all Kaiju. This is eventually proven to be the case and it's claimed that Kong and Godzilla's ancestors are ancient rivals... which is not quite the sort of worldbuilding I had hoped they would go for.

I did question how Kong would be able to toe the line with Godzilla given he's just an ape (and doesn't have a hyper beam), but this is rationalized by him being far more dexterous than Godzilla and inventive enough to use tools, as an ape would, recovering an axe comprised of a Godzilla scale WHICH I KNEW at some point would be used to block a hyper beam and it was. That bit was honestly way too predictable.

It would have been better if Godzilla's atomic breath actually had a cooldown and he wasn't spamming it for much of the fight. Kong does get hit by it once and it's like a Stargate character getting a blaster in the back.

There's 3 bouts, Godzilla v. Kong on the ocean, which obviously goes to Godzilla cause it's his natural habitat. Credit for the creative environment; having Kong have to jump between aircraft carriers to tussle with Godzilla.

There's Godzilla v. Kong in the city, which I feel like is probably the most protracted fight of the series so far. I appreciate that, seeing them throw each other into buildings is exactly what I showed up to see. Kong... wins? And then loses... but I guess Godzilla doesn't finish him off out of some inexplicable respect? I don't get it. It'd make more sense if they better emphasized that Godzilla just was more focused on Mechagodzilla, who was the bigger threat.

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And then there's the three-way, which consists in large part of Mechagodzilla beating the absolute **** out of Godzilla with missiles and rocket punches. Multiple times he just picks up Godzilla and rams him headfirst into a building, it was pretty good. And it makes sense that Kong would get the final blow in the end by ripping Mechagodzilla's head off, although I still don't think anything will beat barfing a nuke down the MUTO's throat.

The CG in this movie is so much better than Shin Godzilla and the main lizard himself is way more flexible, aesthetically pleasing, and even emotive. But there's also way more going on in King of the Monsters, with more enemies, more surprises, and more encounters to get creative with. If the human involvement in that movie was toned down to the level of their involvement in this movie... that movie would be way more enjoyable. Especially since this movie doesn't seem to take it's human characters too seriously.

We follow the daughter of the Evil Mom character in the last movie with her geeky friend as they go to meet up with some wacko conspiracy theorist who's ultimately proven right about the Hollow Earth and his company building something malevolent (Mechagodzilla) behind closed doors.

They could have made them way more funny, I can imagine a cast of quippy characters along the lines of Guardians of the Galaxy, just playing straight and leaning on the 4th wall as they spectate the events of this movie... but the writers are so much more invested in talking up their whole Expanded Universe lore involving Hollow Earth and the psionic powers of King Gidorah's skull to telepathically operate Mechagodzilla. Did you seriously pull that with a straight face?

Overall, it was nice, probably the least objectionable one of these movies I've seen, but also missing some of the best moments of the others. The best thing I can say about it is it occasionally hits moment like where at the end of Jurassic World, the Raptor and T-Rex corner the Indominus Rex only for it to be completely bodied by the Mosasaur they foreshadowed long enough ago for you to forget about it.

That's some golden moment stuff. Not that either of these movies maintain the thrill of that climax, but I was positively reminded of it while watching Godzilla vs. Kong.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

REWATCH UPDATE 3/20/24:
It's been much longer than I thought since I first watched this movie and evidently the human characters never mattered to me because I completely forgot about two of them who star in Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire.

I'm watching this immediately after New Empire for comparison's sake.

The main thing I noticed rewatching this is that while there are 3 main fights throughout the movie, it takes 40 whole minutes to get to the first one, and the second one begins 40 minutes after that, which then transitions directly into the third fight.

So despite being engaging and featuring "less drama" than the previous movies, there is still a tremendous amount of time burnt just building up to these fight scenes.

This isn't unique to this movie of course, but it really is the same problem that faces most martial arts movies. Just a lot of ****in' about that the audience has to sit through just to see the cool shit.

I don't give TV shows the time of day if they can't hook me with the first episode, and they've got a strict broadcast slot they have to write the entire show around. So honestly, where do movies get off wasting over half an hour of our time not selling us the title of the movie we paid to see?

I'm sure there's some people that believe the medium of television is just antithetical to telling a good story, but as someone who frequently harps on pacing, TV show writers, so long as they're not dragging shit out across multiple episodes, often put movie writers to shame.

Granted the "conflict" is established early enough in this movie, but the actual crisis that comes of it takes too ******* long.

The initial battle on the freighter and carrier ships in the ocean is honestly a really great fight, it's a creative environment that clearly slants the fight in favor of one of the monsters, and they still manage to force a "draw" by the end of it, but that's the sort of fight that should have opened the movie.

Like yes, please do establish that Godzilla is still at large and Kong is in captivity, and we want to bring him to Hollow Earth... and that's why we're transporting him on this freighter and that's when Godzilla attacks.

We don't need 40 minutes to set that up, and we don't need 40 minutes between that fight and the next either.

Conspiracy DJ and the kids really don't serve a purpose in the overarching story here other than to provide a villain-side perspective on where Mecha-Godzilla comes from, cause the rest of the cast has no idea and evidently the writers couldn't figure out how to write his origin into their perspectives for some reason.

I do appreciate that they used the anti-gravity craft as reincorporation to clutch defib Kong, that's significantly better writing than the Deus Ex Robot Glove that Kong gets in New Empire, although I'm sure the medical realism of defibbing Kong as his heart is slowing is fuzzy at best.

I know a lot of times when defibrillation is considered, the device will warn "no shock advised" because defibbing should really only be used under very particular circumstances. I wouldn't be thinking about this because it's just a dumb action movie, but once it's between established that Kong is dying, his heart rate is slowing, and we're considering defibrillating, this is the absolute WORST TIME to have one of those dramatic pauses between the human characters.

Shut the **** up and go zap the giant monkey!

Still good, just not as good as it should be. I'm not changing my rating.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

08-07-22, 12:14 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88288&stc=1&d=1659841957
Saving Private Ryan
War Action / English / 1998

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Back to war movies. I wanted to rewatch this and I realized I didn't have a review for it already.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"FUBAR."

I didn't expect it to, but Saving Private Ryan has joined the elite few movies that have managed to get me tearing up by the end.

I was struggling for a bit to articulate what I liked about this movie, or what is "good" about this movie, I'm well aware that it is popularly considered one of the greatest, if not THE greatest war movies ever made, and I really wanted to come away with a more than shallow perspective on it.

I think this movie sticks out among most American war movies because most of them usually fall in line with a variety of subgenres:

Patriot Porn: This exists to be a *********** tribute to the state by glorifying war and the military.

Patronizing Pacifism: This exists to click the collective tongue at any form of violence at all by demonizing the state and acting as though war in and of itself can wished away with sunshine and rainbows. It's just male bravado that causes all these problems really...

War Epics: This exists just to tell a story and uses the war and the military as the backdrop and/or props to tell a greater narrative about... saving the world, or some shitty romance, or maybe the creators really want to bring some historical event to the big screen.

I don't feel like SPR falls into any of these categories. It doesn't comment on the circumstances of WW2 or the politics, it doesn't even really concern itself with the relationships between it's characters, the violence is neither glamorized or overly dramatized, it's just sort of presented as is with an intimate peak into the human element at ground level.

It really seems to be that if Saving Private Ryan is about anything, it's not about Private Ryan, it's not about Captain Miller, it's not about the battalion he leads, their successes or their failures... it's really just about trying to the makes the losses they do suffer worth something.

And I think that's communicated in the one title drop they do in the movie:

Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess.****ed Up Beyond All Recognition is also a recurring acknowledgment in the movie. We're taking for granted that the situation, whoever you might like to blame for it, is a catastrophe.

It's ****ed that Nazi Germany tried to take over Europe, it's ****ed that the US drafted citizens and basically threw them to their deaths on the beaches of Normandy. It's ****ed that certain people get special treatment because of circumstances that were never in their control.

But amidst all of it and the deaths that resulted, things being as they are, what can one do to so that the horrible choices we made amount to something good at the end of the day?

It's not, by any means, a rosy picture this movie paints, and while it absolutely excels it's depiction of violence, for better or for worse, I think the real touchstone are all the little moments of human fallibility that intermingle with it all:

War crimes committed out of impulse,
tunnel vision from the senses being overwhelmed,
being seized with fear and unable to do what needs to be done,
and the high of life-or-death adrenaline coming to a crushing stop as the traumatic realization of what just happened floods you with grief.

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The characters in this movie make mistakes. Deadly mistakes. But they all make sense, they're mistakes anyone could conceivably make, and in the end they should be considered in the context of not just what was lost, but also in what was preserved or achieved. It's not always worth it, but it may be all you have left.

The cast was excellent, and I do believe star-studded in retrospect. I even recognized a number of faces I didn't remember were ever in this movie like Vin Diesel.

The editing really takes the cake here as it I feel like it appropriately shifted tones and adjusted it's pace where necessary to compliment the mood of any given moment. We have moments of shellshock where background noise is repressed to telegraph the characters' tunnel vision, we even downshift the framerate to communicate moments where things are unfolding imperceptibly fast, and multiple times the viewer is grounded in an expectation only to be rugpulled with a surprise.

If there was any CG in this movie it was probably limited entirely to aircraft or matte paintings because the practical effects are top-tier and on full display. Blood is present and appears to flow realistically from wounds (as opposed to spurting everywhere like a horror movie), the sets look real, the costumes look real, the weapons look real, and no punches are pulled when it comes to showing casualties, whether we're talking about the main cast or the supporting cast.

It's already so well-known it's been parodied, but the "knife scene" is still incredibly difficult to watch. It's just an all-too-intimate view into someone slowing dying an incredibly painful death and in a way that's too easy to imagine. It's the one scene you just don't want to experience again, but you know you're signing up for it when you watch this movie.

We get solid payoffs to foreshadowing, it's engaging to watch the resourcefulness of the characters, and the entire movie, even it's moments of tension release, are just short enough to keep my attention because it all still ultimately relates to prospective deaths of these characters, the losses they've suffered, and the possible futility of their hopes that it wasn't all in vain.

There's still a lot that can be said about it, but it's doubtlessly been said before, and to a much more exhaustive degree than I ever could.

Other than my personal discomfort with the knife scene, I think only two brief moments out of the whole movie could have been done better: 1.) is Matt Damon whinging in the fetal position at the end of the movie, (that just seemed out of character and unintentionally silly) and 2.) the moment where the squad is sharing looks with Capt. Hanks because his hand is shaking even after he looks down and realizes what's causing the stares, he looks back at them and makes what was meant to be a genuinely awkward but heartfelt moment an unintentionally funny moment. That one extra exchange of looks just ruin the whole moment for me.

Overall, I can easily say I like this movie, because it's an excellently produced experience with a lot of heart... BUT it's hard for me to say that I enjoyed it to a truly exceptional degree because of how brutal and somber the experience is.

It's sort of like Durak in that sense, where I really appreciate what it was trying to do, but I can't honestly say that I "had a great time" by the end of it, since the actual content of the film is largely crafted with the purpose of bringing the audience into a horrible situation.

So I can't really call it a favorite, but it gets mad props from me.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

08-07-22, 08:42 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88294&stc=1&d=1659915650
Platoon
War Action / English / 1986

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another oft-cited war movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Platoon falls doubly into the categories of being an anti-war movie, as well as a story focused on inter-character relationships.

Here we have the Vietnam War, which was already a very popular war to hate, and Platoon takes an incredibly weak and self-contradictory attempt to validate those opinions.

On one hand it wants to be an introspective thought piece on the futility of war and the oppressive ladder of power that continually jogs it into motion. But at the same time it wants to be a conventional action movie where one of the Sergeants is just evil.

And Charlie Sheen is an honestly terrible foil to his character, particularly because before the scene in which Sgt. Barnes is witnessed shooting a civilian, Sheen's character was busy shooting at and threatening to kill a half-blind one-legged man for absolutely no reason.

At first I thought I was supposed to sympathize with the fear-of-the-unknown that motivated these violent impulses, but then when that scene flows right into the the next scene and Sheen is suddenly so compassionate for the poor Vietnamese civilians... it just comes off as complete bullshit.

Unlike Saving Private Ryan, this movie attempts to characterize it's characters, but there's nothing of substance to go off of. Most of the black characters are predictably preoccupied with the fact that they're black characters, John C. McGinley is just playing Perry from Scrubs, everybody else is presented as weathered-by-war hardasses, and the only seemingly likeable character, is surprisingly Willem Dafoe, who not only plays the "good" Sergeant but is actually the guy who famously appears on the movie posters and cover. I had no idea.

But even HE has a scene in which half the cast is drugged the **** out, disconcertingly looks directly into the camera, holds the barrel of a gun to Charlie Sheen's face and invites him to smoke his pre-smoked cigarette from the end of it.

How about NO?

I understand that this is the late 60s, and people are supposed to be idiots about drugs and all, but that's a whole 'nother level of retard.

The movie concerns itself with one sergeant shooting some random lady in the head, but the "good" sergeant just about shot his own officer's head off trying to mouth-feed him drugs.

That scene, unfortunately, seriously tainted the rest of the movie for me, because it's hard to sympathize with or for characters that unfathomably stupid. Not to mention, it's a tent full of sweaty guys who haven't bathed so the body odor must be terrible, they're smoking hash so you got the smell of rotting burning garbage on top of that, AND THEN you have the privilege of the tasting the inside of Willem Dafoe's mouth.

I think I'll pass.

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Gosh, I sure hate war. Would be a shame if this movie were to completely ignore the context of it. Oh, look at that, it did.

Even Saving Private Ryan featured an arc in which the choices of the soldiers influenced somebody to become an enemy combatant later, the soldiers in Platoon straight up massacre a village and the consequences of that decision are never represented by anything the Vietnamese do, it simply a plot device for us to shake our fist at the Sgt. Barnes character who seems to represent the United States military for some vague reason.

The action never really engaged me like SPR did, the messaging is weak as hell, the acting consists almost entirely of angry yelling and braggadocio. Again, I don't give a shit about any dialog whinging about "dem white honkeys" or how much this or that character desperately wants "pussy". You're just making me hate the cast.

There isn't even any effort to humanize the Vietnamese, everything shown to be awful that's done to them seems to exist for no other reason than to develop Sheen's incredibly rushed character arc. Like when Sheen and Keith David are shown to be all buddy-buddy as though they have this strong relationship, it comes out of nowhere! We've been doing timeskips to Charlie Sheen narrations and all of a sudden I'm supposed to appreciate the bond these two characters have developed with the all of NOTHING screentime they've shared together?

But, okay, it's time to spill the beans, I'm just talking about all this to distract from what is actually the most important part of the movie, and that is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRCubAtPiKg

I have 100% heard Adagio for Strings before. And I immediately recognized it when Platoon opened with it.

I recognized it again when they played it the second time.

And the third time.

And the fourth time.

And the fifth time.

And the sixth time.

AND THE SEVENTH TIME!!

This stupid ****ing song is like the only ******* song in the whole movie and it's always played from the beginning, so it's not even like this is a leitmotif that the movie revisits that much more clever films will use to subtlety pair scenes... it's just A SONG that they play AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN.

And of course it's one of those overly-saccharine songs like Woe is Me that honestly carry this movie's anti-war vibes harder than the actual script does.

I realize that I'm perhaps biased because this song maybe wasn't too frequently sampled prior to Platoon, but even accepting that it is WAY too repetitive for any music track in a movie and I cannot think of another movie I've seen that has run a single song into the ground so many times as Platoon did with Adagio for Strings.

I was not impressed.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

08-07-22, 11:39 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88296&stc=1&d=1659926305
Speed
Action Thriller / English / 1994

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
One-half of two movies that together make Mad Max: Fury Road. Been meaning to revisit it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It's a solid action movie. Genuinely hard to complain.

Speed is noteworthy for perhaps one reason alone and that is that it is constant action all the time. Keanu Reeves and Dumb & Dumberer are LA Bomb Squad and we get a prologue mission about a bomber holding people hostage in an elevator for money. The plan is foiled, but this sets the stage for our movie: a city bus is rigged to explode with civilians aboard, where driving over 50 mph arms the bomb, driving under 50 mph detonates it. And so you have the improbable pretext for an action flik that literally won't slow down.

It is constant intensity the whole way through from Reeves getting onto the bus while it's moving, to discovering the bomb, navigating unpredictable traffic conditions, attempting to disarm the bomb, and eventually saving the people aboard, finding the guy, and putting an end to his schemes.

It's never quite as clear-cut what the solution is as a large number of answers fail due to the Big Bad's contingency plans. It never feels quite Xanatos Gambit level of forward thinking, but it gets pretty close.

Numerous little touches also help elevate this movie too, from a passenger shooting the driver believing Reeves is trying to get him, Sandra Bullock being on the bus because her license was revoked for speeding, the guts to kill Dumb and Dumberer when he's supposed to be on light duty, and even after the passengers are saved, the bus explodes, and everyone's okay, the twists don't end.

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There are some bits that I don't care for:

Snooty Guy has some lines which are supposed to be funny but don't land at all, even when it's supposed to be an awkward moment it just feels like a pointless inclusion.

The line about "shoot the hostage" is foreshadowed, gets an almost immediate payoff and is never brought up again.

The big freeway jump makes no sense because something clearly pops the front of the bus into the air like they went off a ramp or something, but no ramp is shown in the preceding scenes.

We go through all this effort to save a bus full of people only to blow up an airplane, which potentially killed even more people. There are a handful of issues there: The plane is connected to a tug which means the ground crew is right there, planes don't get tugged unless there's a flight crew or maintenance on board at a minimum, so they all died... ALSO we hype up this bus's bomb by saying it can put a hole in the city, but it didn't just explode, but it ran into an AIRPLANE presumably full of fuel!

It was still a big explosion I guess, but again we're supposed to believe that these circumstances and the deaths they would have caused are necessarily better than the deaths of people who were on the bus.

I liked the cast, Sandra Bullock was likable, the "regulars" she interacted with were likable, the Police Chief was likable, the Big Bad was kinda silly, and Reeves was just playing Neo again.

Overall the movie reminds me of Die Hard with a Vengeance, except without Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. I think I prefer that movie just because of the personalities they bring. There's a bit of wholesome comedy here which I appreciate it and the Overnight Romance between Reeves and Bullock, while still a movie-making sin, was done about as tastefully as could possibly be done.

Easy non-controversial popcorn movie that does more than enough things right. It's a definite example to follow when it comes to action movies, but it also doesn't aspire to be anything more than that.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

SpelingError

08-07-22, 11:47 PM

Still need to watch that one of these days.

Omnizoa

08-08-22, 07:08 PM

Feeling like it's high-time I revisited my Top 10 list.

Omnizoa

08-09-22, 04:53 AM

I've tried to adjust my Top 10 in relation to their ratings and I've adjusted their ratings a bit. Some of these already have updated reviews by me.

Revised Top 10 List (2022):

1. rating_4_5 Ink [+2]
Additional thoughts: Some dialog seriously drops like a lead weight and it overlaps a bit with a small handful of scenes that seem to drag. That said, Ink is still a very brisk story that keeps me engaged all the way up to the gutpunch ending and consistently pokes me in both my sadness buttons every time I watch it. I really can't imagine a Top 10 list without it.
2. rating_4_5 The Nightmare Before Christmas [-1]
Additional thoughts: I'm not big on a lot of the character designs and they seem to add little to the movie beyond set dressing. Their unconventional priorities and grotequeries really only seem to normalize Jack's motives, and while he still remains front-and-center they are a recurring presence both in and between the songs. This is easily the most consistent movie on my Top 10, but while it's valleys are arguably the least shallow, it's peaks aren't nearly as high as others on this list.
3. rating_4_5 12 Angry Men [+3]
Additional thoughts: Every other movie on this list was shot in color, had a strong soundtrack to grease the emotional wheels, and didn't recuse themselves to a high-concept premise with a setting as sterile and uninviting as the American justice system of all things. But despite that, it is harder to fault this movie than any other movie on this list. I love a great debate and the battle between human fallibility and a rational conception of justice are the centerpiece of this one, as so often seems to be the case. I still entirely credit @Yoda (http://www.movieforums.com/community/member.php?u=1)'s own debate skills for even motivating me to see this. 4. rating_4_5 Mad Max: Fury Road
Additional thoughts: By no means is this Tom Hardy's best performance and I still feel like this is Charlize Theron's movie. That probably contributes to the prologue feeling like the weakest (and least memorable) bit of the whole show. Still, this movie meets and exceeds every goal an action movie should strive for: It's intense, it's over-the-top, it's silly, it's quotable, it's got an awesome soundtrack, and it's a ride from beginning to end. Pure metal. Well worth the 2 hour runtime. This is a movie I judged conservatively when it was new, but it's retained it's strong impression on me.
5. rating_4 Hook [+4]
Additional thoughts: The definition of a guilty pleasure movie, Hook is almost certainly the worst reviewed movie on this list, but if the Rotten Tomatoes dichotomy (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hook) is anything to go off of, I'm not alone, and as time goes on I meet more and more people that loved this movie. John Williams composes and Steven Spielberg directs two of the biggest actors of their time... and Julia Roberts I guess, who cares. It's whimsical sentimental gook like any Disney adventure comedy, but here Robert Williams gets to be kind of an ******* for once and Dustin Hoffman gets to chew scenery in a wig and mustache. You can't lose with that formula. The worst thing to come out of this movie was a single by Skrillex.
6. rating_4 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory [-4]
Additional thoughts: It takes literally half the movie to even get to either Wonka or The Chocolate Factory. I can appreciate that the setup seems to go by quickly, but it leaves a good chunk of the movie significantly less memorable than the rest of it.
7. rating_4 Aliens
Additional thoughts: James Cameron's only appearance on this list, he's one of the few directors whose work I seem to consistently appreciate, at least up until he decided to make Avatar his entire career. More of an action spin on the Ridley Scott horror classic, this movie also boasts a lot to like, particularly with regards to it's theming and creative (though disgusting) approach to the Alien. That said, it really only has one memorable backing track and it also takes about half the movie to get up to speed, which hurts a bit more when it's almost 3 hours long.
8. rating_4 Greyhound [New]
Additional thoughts: Believe it or not, ever since I watched this movie recently I've rewatched it several times. I just like Tom Hanks as an actor, I think submarines are cool, the constant intensity is great, and it's somewhat validating to see that even real life admirals credit this movie for it's realism despite obvious creative liberties they took. It's just an all-around solid movie. My biggest gripe is that there isn't a physical release since it's an Apple TV exclusive. **** Apple.
9. rating_4 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind [-4]
Additional thoughts: There's a lot I like about this movie that's difficult to elaborate on. I like the 80s-esque soundtrack that almost confabulates nostalgia, I like how it gets all psychedelic around the jungle or the insects implying their alien and toxic nature, the cel animation has clearly aged but the quality shines through, and the message is agreeable without coming off as directly preachy. However it's noticeably only a fraction of a greater narrative and the breaks it takes to worldbuild and develop it's lesser characters do hurt it's pacing when compared to movies higher up on this list.

X. rating_4 Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children [Removed]
Additional thoughts: This was always the most questionable inclusion to me. Were I to rate it PURELY on the Sephiroth fight at the end, it would be a top-tier favorite, no question. It is a textbook example of what I call the "hyper action" genre and with Nobuo Uematsu doing the score and Tetsuya Nomura directing, you know you're in for a treat, but this movie puts a lot of it's weight on it's pre-established universe and does not endear me to it's new characters. Sacrilege though it is, I have never been a fan of Final Fantasy VII, the original game was infuriating and the remake didn't engage me long enough to get more than a few hours in, and having never played Crisis Core I am simply not the target audience for this movie. So every scene that isn't action nerd eye candy is just boring, and that's why I find myself continually resistant to rewatch it.

10? Nothing yet.
I've decided none of the movies I currently own deserve the final slot of my Top 10 and will be rewatching some of my highest rated movies to determine which, if any, make the cut.

The movies I'm looking to see again are:

Appleseed
Casshern
Drunken Master
Edward Scissorhands
Gremlins
Inception
Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
Looker
Strange Days
The Dark Crystal
Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures

Omnizoa

08-10-22, 03:09 AM

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Gremlins
Christmas Horror Comedy / English / 1984

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's the "family friendly" horror comedy that teaches us that Santa isn't real and to exterminate the ugly.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Dogs, Cats, Chicken.

This movie may have one of the most earwormy theme songs of any movie from the 80s and the movie's pretty memorable as well.

Some inventor with no substantial relevance to the story buys his son a "Mogwai" as an exotic gift from a half-blind mystical salesman in Chinatown (as you do). The Mogwai is basically a furry baby Yoda, but it comes with the caveats to keep him away from bright light (sunlight can kill him), don't get him wet (water causes him to multiply), and don't feed them after midnight (this begins a metamorphosis that changes the mogwai into a gremlin).

I've always questioned the rule about feeding after midnight. The "evil" mogwai that spawn from Gizmo (the original mogwai) are shown to scheme amongst each other, enough to deliberately sabotage a clock so Billy is fooled into believing it's before midnight when he feeds them. If they're intelligent enough to do that, why even go through the trouble? Can't they just legitimately ask for food, keep some of it around until Billy goes to sleep (as he does anyway), and eat it after midnight?

I suppose there's no reveal showing how intelligent they can be in that case, but it seems like a plothole.

Billy's mom also whips out the knives and starts stabbing awfully fast once she sees what the gremlins look like. She kills 3 of them in a row and the most they've done is eat cookie batter and throw a couple plates? Evil Makes You Ugly (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilMakesYouUgly) is played awfully straight here.

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Before long gremlins are rampaging the town and we see them doing all sorts of absurd and dangerous things, from smoking and shooting guns, to 80s workout routines and crossdressing. There are a lot of cartoon stock sound effects which I don't think are necessary to soften their antics and the visual gags don't really make me laugh or anything. They would eventually go overboard with this is Gremlins 2.

Ultimately this movie excels in it's creature effects. The mogwai are presented to be cute like Furbys, but their transformation process shows little furballs growing and pulsating before turning into big slimy green cocoons that put the Alien facehugger eggs to shame.

The end result are bigger, creepier, cackling little monsters that cannot help but **** with every electronic that they can stick their claws in. It's all practical effects and puppetry from beginning to end and it's incredibly impressive, even today, despite the occasional bad shot where you can see Stripe on a skateboard or something.

After the initial fight at home, the escape to the YMCA where the lead gremlin Stripe jumps in he swimming pool, and a montage of the resulting gremlin invasion taking over the town, we have a scene where the protagonists blow up most of the gremlins in a movie theater then track down Stripe to a department store.

The department store fight is the most memorable to me, mainly because this where the creature effects become the most horrific and the creatures themselves are shown to be the most violent. Stripe throws a saw blade, shoots Billy with a mini crossbow, shoots at him with a gun, and even runs out of nowhere with a revving chainsaw, cutting almost entirely through a baseball bat to get to him.

That's some scary shit where you're a kid.

But it's also a fun watch, and even though the plot beats seem too-brief as I describe them, the whole movie is paced really well. Introducing Gizmo, showing the consequences of not following the rules, and even the subplot about the Gremlin who escapes the science lab at school (which I don't think is ever resolved) ties the whole experience together in a coherent developing narrative which peaks with some of the most gruesome practical effects and violence.

I consider it a classic, albeit not a favorite. Very good movie.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

08-10-22, 09:19 AM

REWATCH UPDATE:
I've updated my Strange Days review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1487001-strange-days.html).

Omnizoa

08-11-22, 02:54 AM

REWATCH UPDATE:
I've updated my Inception review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1538204-inception.html).

Omnizoa

08-12-22, 10:10 PM

I wrote up a Panic Room review, but then Firefox crashed, nuked everything I wrote, and didn't recover any of the text.

So, no Panic Room review.

Omnizoa

08-14-22, 02:39 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88412&stc=1&d=1660455346
In the Shadow of the Moon
Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Was browsing IMDb for psychological thrillers and saw this trailer. Looked genuinely interesting.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"Some people aren't happy unless they're mad."

Pigs, as well as other shit. Which is extremely ****ing ironic considering the message of the movie.

There are movies like Get Out, which I hear the buzz around, skim over a synopsis, and conclude "this movie wants to beat me over the head about racism and is probably written by vehement racists itself", so I don't watch it and move on with my life, content that I did not end up watching a movie with a scumbag political agenda which casts villains as good guys.

THIS is that movie, and I'm ticked the **** off right now.

I was promised a crime thriller about a possibly supernatural serial killer.

INSTANTLY my mind goes to Paranoia Agent and Death Note, fantastic ****ing works of fiction, and not ones necessarily without a message or an opinion.

Death Note presents the serial killing from the perspective of the villain himself and we get his moralistic perspective and the god complex that comes with it.

Paranoia Agent is eventually revealed to be partly a commentary about the social consequences of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The law enforcement response in both series is front-and-center of the story and so too is this the case in In The Shadow of the Moon...

...but this is so far below those movies.

We open on near-future bomb site and flashback to 1988 where we see a string of random people suddenly die by having their brain melt out of their skulls.

The first hint we get as to the motives of the killer is that the bus driver victim is shown to have a book about Thomas Jefferson.

It's eventually deduced that the killer is a young mulatto girl in a blue hoodie with a bandaged hand, and the cops looking for her coincidentally run into her and chase her into a subway where she makes cryptic comments about the future before getting obliterated by a train.

WELP! Case closed. We found the murder weapon, the suspect died, the killings stopped... that's it I guess!

Well fast-forward 9 years later and there are George Floyd-style protests in the street and eventually vandalism over this nameless woman who was never identified and the public has never seen.

I've seen some pretty desperate excuses to crusade around the streets with signs, but this is REALLY stretching it. Somehow 9 years later enough people to form a street demonstration care enough about this literal nobody that was only referred to in press releases as a serial murder suspect? You ******** got nothing better to do with your lives?

Naturally this is when the killer appears again, with no apparent change to their age. This time one of the victims is shown to have a book about Andrew Jackson.

OH NO.

I just knew it, in that moment, I was on the hook for a political agenda. I hoped, I really hoped that I was wrong, but by the end of this movie I was proven right.

So HERE'S the deal: The killer is going back in time to prevent a bombing that would start what is implied to be a race war (supposedly a race war bad enough to "end the world", as in Strange Days). So the killer is essentially fulfilling the thought experiment about unmaking Hitler by preventing the sequence of events that would lead to him, BY GRUESOMELY KILLING anyone consuming the ideas that would result in the bombing.

This heinous forbidden knowledge includes writings about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, and strongly implied that this includes any "ideas" that could have manifested in the American Civil War.

Well, The American Civil War was over state's rights, which is ultimately a debate over democracy... but I have absolutely no doubt that the writers believed the Civil War was purely about racism... which doesn't even make any sense, because to prevent the Civil War is to prevent the United States from becoming a federation that BANS SLAVERY, so what the actual **** are they on about!?

And I'm confident that this movie is trying to lowball racism into all of this because the protests in the movie are shown to be racially motivated, Main Guy's partner is black and makes racially charged comments, the killer is revealed to be Main Guy's granddaughter before revealing his daughter's relationship is interracial.

The killer is targeting political writers with early American flags on their walls and people reading books about early American figures who owned slaves? Subtlety is out the window here.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88413&stc=1&d=1660455364

So my impression is that some boogaloo boys blow up some random building and the entire nation devolves into chaos because idiots on both sides of the conflict are literally incapable of peacefully coexisting like Main Guy and Maddox, his non-white law enforcement partner.

It's not enough for the literal racists, the dumbest ****ing people on earth, to see that the guy accused of killing this mystery martyr in the subway has absolutely no racial animosity towards his coworkers?

Like, it would seriously make so much more sense if our protagonist was shown to be racist! To any extent at all! But he's not! There's no redemption arc for him, where the killer is revealed to be his granddaughter and she's like a serial killer of racists or something, and his personal bias changes his attitude towards her killings or something completely retarded like that, THERE WOULD AT LEAST be some sort of rationalized character development there, but NO!

She kills in 1988, kills in 1997, 2006, and finally in 2015, all in line in the moon phases or some shit that's barely explored...

She goes, "I'm your granddaughter actually, here's evidence, also you change your mind about me, and I'm still gonna die from that train eventually cause time travel" and he lets her go.

What in the actual ****, SHOOT HER.

No, instead Main Guy gets all mopey and eventually goes to see his daughter giving birth to the future serial killer in the hospital and it's ALL A HUNKEY DOREY HAPPY ENDING.

DON'T BE WRONGTHINKING, OR YOU DESERVE TO HAVE YOUR BRAIN LITERALLY MELT OUT OF YOUR FACE!

What an absolutely abominable ending to a movie that actually started out pretty interesting!

Like the acting was fine, the aging makeup looked pretty good, I genuinely liked learning that Main Guy was an officer, then a detective, then eventually a PI, I really wanted to see him get the killer! This dude has sacrificed 27 years of his life trying to hunt down this time traveling piece of shit, and it turns out it's his future granddaughter trying to execute anyone who reads anything even distantly alt-right-related?

That has got to be one of the most ****awful endings to a movie I've seen since Out of the Blue and The Chumscrubber, and those are two of the most dogshit movies I've ever seen in my entire life.

And to make this movie even worse... the scenes involving the police are handled terribly. They draw their weapons and move within arms reach of the killer just to be disarmed, Maddox ****ing dies because he doesn't shoot the killer in the back when she's plainly pointing a shotgun at his partner, Detective Guy even has to use Maddox's radio to call "officer down" because HE doesn't have a radio for some reason and Main Guy didn't do it for some reason!

Also, immediately after the killer gets run over by the train Main Guy is going to see his wife in the hospital and INSTANTLY another cop is claiming that they completed bullet ballistics for a bullet found in her hand and it matches his gun. Literally when!? How!? That's not how any of this works!

Also also, other times I'm just waiting for them to update dispatch on where they are because they're chasing the killer alone in an unknown location! The radio chatter is just fake as hell, and maybe that's because I'm used to hearing police radio chatter, but this movie was pretty bullshit in almost all aspects related to policing... which is no surprise if the writers really are as politically skull****ed as they seem.

Martha from Rotten Tomatoes has my back on this:

I didn't realize, when I started watching this pathetic little propaganda film, just how low it would sink. The final premise of the film, is that a "hero" goes back a generation to assassinate political dissenters. Warped, sick, immoral and stupid. Do not waste your time.

I will benevolently grant this movie half a point for decent acting and for keeping me engaged, but any movie deserves it's brains to melt out of their face when the unironic happy ending is to assassinate wrongthinkers.

Final Verdict: rating_1_5 [Bad]

Omnizoa

08-14-22, 10:59 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88417&stc=1&d=1660528645
Cube
Sci-Fi Thriller / Japanese / 2021

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
In my perusal of IMDb I discovered that there was a remake of Cube. I'm sure somebody considers that blasphemy, but I am 100% game for a remake of Cube, I think there are a lot of ways it could have been improved, namely by deepening the investigative process of the characters and cutting back on the gore a bit, though being that this is a Japanese remake, I'm not too confident about that.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"I hate adults."
"I hate young people."

We are not spared gore in this version of the story, unsurprisingly, though thankfully it's about as graphic as the original and not moreso.

To quickly summarize the original Cube: Multiple characters wake up in a series of cubic rooms all connected by doors on every face. Each room looks identical save for the lighting, however some rooms are trapped and those rooms are identifiable by the prime numbers found in the coordinates inside each door. The characters begin by "booting" each room, throwing boots into rooms to trip any possible traps before eventually discovering the traps can be noise sensitive too.

While the relationships between the mutual strangers becomes worse and worse, one of them is found to be an autistic savant who can calculate 3-digit prime numbers in his head and this is used to determine the first room of the building and find the exit. As tensions heighten and people kill each other, only the Savant makes it out alive, or so we guess. We never see outside the Cube, we never learn who made the Cube, why it exists, or why anyone was placed inside.

It's a big cliffhanger ending and as a high-concept psychological thriller, it works.

This is... similar, but different in some good ways and mostly some bad ways.

On the positives side, the characters are shown to be more resourceful with what they have, they not only use their boots to test for traps, but they use their shirts to make a rope ladder and even use the buttons on those shirts to write out equations on the surfaces in the rooms.

It's worth noting that given the mystery of the Cube, a remake has a lot of wiggle room to take creative liberties, though hopefully not so much as to totally expose everything about the Cube as the sequels did. One way in which the story is changed is the twist ending in which it is revealed that Main Girl is a robot of sorts who exists to secretly observe the other characters. I appreciate this twist especially because when we're shown her reintroduced into the Cube and happening upon another group she demonstrates an artificial series of blinks directed at every individual character, clearly registering each as a "player". If you restart the movie and watch her initial appearance again you can see that it's edited in a way that makes her appearance seem much more natural.

I think that's clever and I genuinely don't dislike the idea that one of the group is secretly an aspect of the Cube itself spying on them, like the cameras they assumed must exist.

What I don't like about it is while her behavior is eventually rationalized in this way, until that reveal, she just looks like a terribly written character. She doesn't emote, she's rarely the focus of anything that's happening, and when the characters are having an audible fight to the death in an adjacent room with an open door, she's just conveniently offscreen doing ****all.

It may be an unpopular opinion to take, but if your movie's plot is indistinguishable from shit writing, then your twist could use some work.

A couple more things I'll add is that the musical flavor is good, it's not all doom-and-gloom, but it's very synthy and moody, I like it. Also this movie seems to have more of a budget, so we get a greater opportunity to showcase some of the mechanisms of the Cube when the characters find the outside of it.

It's been a while since I've seen the original Cube, but I'm going to venture to say that about everything else was worse in this remake.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88418&stc=1&d=1660528673

1.) There's some dumb lines like "who is Hiruto" after it's been established by honorifics that Hiruto is Main Guy's brother.

2.) The death of Psycho Guy looks retarded cause he's killed by some ludicrous telescoping metal tree thing that turns him into a scarecrow.

3.) When Psycho Guy tries to strangle Main Guy it looks like the laziest attempt to choke someone I've ever seen.

4.) Psycho Guy's heel-turn is stupid as shit because the rationalization is that he works at a convenience store and hates getting bullied by middle schoolers, so he wants to kill himself, but he can't kill himself for whatever reason therefor he wants to kill total strangers. WHAT.

5.) This movie inserts several lines needlessly making generational hatred a theme of the movie, where the Not-Austistic Savant Kid claims to "hate adults" while Grandpa says "I hate young people". This never amounts to anything whatsoever.

6.) Psycho Guy even says he "hates adults" and kills Grandpa then rejoins the group and says "children shouldn't get in the way of adults" to Not-Autistic Savant Kid. So you're an adult when it's convenient?

7.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid isn't autistic or a savant, he's just a kid who knows how to calculate prime numbers and he's not the only character that can do that. So instead of getting a genuine, but annoying, autistic character (who served as a danger to the group and therefor a moral dilemma), we get an amateur child actor.

8.) Grandpa's a constant ******* throughout the whole movie, there is no development of his character. He complains, he insults, and he contributes nothing. He even makes the other characters haul him upward through rooms with their shirts rather that climbing himself.

9.) The reveal that traps can be determined by prime numbers is decided after only two cases and "proven" without booting the room. The characters are very bad at booting rooms even after deciding to go purely off the prime number theory and even when it's revealed that sound can trigger traps they never conduct sound checks on rooms again.

10.) One room is trapped with lasers and forces the characters to dodge incoming laser shots and this is done by character after character grabbing each other and slow-mo pushing them out of the way AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. At what point do you realize YOU should move your own ass?

11.) There's some early drama directed toward the Ide character for being gruff and insensitive despite the fact that he's been surviving longer than anyone and is the one who taught everyone else how to boot rooms. Needlessly antagonizing this character, more than any other character, is a ****ing stupid idea.

12.) Multiple traps make no sense when you remember that there are doors on every face of each room. A ceiling fan trap and random cage bars appear out of the floor/ceiling and we conveniently never see how these things are sprouting out of the doors.

13.) Traps will just activate with no provocation. The telescoping tree trap only shows up when it's dramatically convenient, gas starts filling one of the rooms only when the writers can't figure out how to justify moving the characters into the next room, and the cage bars don't seem to serve any purpose other than to separate the characters for no apparent reason. Traps in the original movie are shown to be predicated on different sensors and learning what those sensors could be were important plot beats we entirely skip in this movie.

14.) Main Guy has some dumb backstory about his brother committing suicide played back on a screen which ends up being the only part of the movie in which we see outside of the Cube complex. This ultimately accomplishes nothing.

15.) When Main Guy is too slow to escape the telescoping tree room we get an extraordinarily confusing edit in which Robot Girl is shown to be comforting the now safe Not-Autistic Savant Kid intercut with a similar shot of Main Guy doing the same thing... which makes absolutely no sense. This also never amounts to anything.

16.) Not-Autistic Savant Kid is shown to be happy and understanding when Robot Girl casually questions his intent to leave when they reach the exit and it's made clear that she has no intention of leaving. Nothing in the movie suggests that he ever knew that she was a robot or had an reason whatsoever to stay behind.

Phew. There are way too many problems with this movie, and that's a real shame cause there was genuine opportunity to expand on, refine, and improve the original experience.

The original experience was more about the characters' attempts to divine the nature of the Cube, it's purpose, and figuring out how to navigate it together without chewing each others' heads off.

This movie is just characters bitching at each other, whining about boomers or zoomers, and two of them can't or won't act like a normal human beings while a third has one of the dumbest motives to kill I've heard in a real long time. I bet I could pull a random drug addict off the street and ask for them to give me an excuse for why they might kill someone and get an answer that makes more sense than this movie.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Weak]

Omnizoa

08-15-22, 01:13 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88420&stc=1&d=1660536705
Radius
Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another IMDb thriller which promises a dude who discovers he radiates death.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
A variety of wildlife and livestock.

This movie is basically what I wanted The Happening to be. Out in the rural midwest a mysterious force is killing people, what could it be? A virus? A terrorist attack?

In this movie it's an Aura of Death which Main Guy discovers he has after a car crash. Main Girl eventually stumbles on him, another victim of the same crash, but with the power to negate Main Guy's aura while she's within it.

The negation part isn't communicated terribly clearly and Main Guy is way too assertive about the properties of his Aura. At first it just seemed plausible that it only works during the day time, or so long as you have direct line-of-sight, so I don't think he should have been all "trust me, you won't die" when he knows practically nothing about it.

I do appreciate that it doesn't take him forever to figure out the cause of death is him and it's not unbelievable that he'd figure it out as quickly as he does with the evidence presented.

So the movie starts out briskly and continues apace. Main Guy discovers the Aura, is horrified, then discovers it doesn't work around Main Girl and the inevitable tension results. Police start a manhunt for both of them and naturally they're not going to listen to Main Guy explain the means by which he kills people, because that would make too much sense. I also don't think he does a good job even trying to persuade the police that "hey, YOU WILL DIE unless you listen to me" which they should be all ears for because the cause of all the death is totally unknown.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88421&stc=1&d=1660536733

Both characters have amnesia prior to the car crash and we get insubstantial glimpses that eventually culminate into a greater narrative predicating the events of the movie.

The main conclusion is that there was a cosmological event that struck the two and knocked them out, somehow giving them these strange properties. The big twist ending is that, and I predicted this: Main Guy is a serial killer.

Main Guy just picks up a grieving suicidal woman on a bridge and offers to take her to his secluded CABIN IN THE WOODS. Gosh, it'd be awfully thematic if it turns out the guy with the Aura of Death kills people normally... and that's exactly the case.

I'm disappointed that I predicted the ending, but I really can't be upset because that's the sort of twist I would have went with.

Thankfully, because he is presented to be a moral character (towards humans ONLY), he kills himself instead of continuing to spread death. Which... isn't exactly guaranteed to stop anything, for all he knows everyone in that hospital room drops dead regardless of whether he shoots himself in the head. It's a cosmological event that imbued your body with certain properties with no apparent regard for your mental faculties.

Anyway, the movie stayed interesting, did basically what I wanted it to do, but it didn't really go beyond that. Decent budget high-concept thriller.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

08-15-22, 09:30 PM

I rewatched Looker, didn't have much to add. Still decent.

Omnizoa

08-15-22, 10:18 PM

I tried watching Death by Hanging per recommendation (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2325770), and it was awful. I only got 30 minutes in before I skipped to the end for some sophomoric bullshit about nationalism and executioners being equally criminal.

Omnizoa

08-16-22, 01:01 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88439&stc=1&d=1660622418
Coma
Sci-Fi Fantasy / Russian / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Yet another IMDb result, this one is about a world only accessible by coma patients.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Weirdly, both this movie and Durak feature Russian protagonists with a background in building construction.

Though this movie did not exactly knock it out of the park, I think I can comfortably say that it is the most enjoyable Russian movie I've seen so far. At least it has by far the most potential as a new IP.

In this world, coma patients find themselves as amnesiacs in a shared mind space consisting of their past memories. This clash of different ideas creates a massive sprawling chaos-scape which honestly looks really cool. It's 100% the sort of movie that NEEDS CG, or at least some incredible matte painting, but also risks going overboard with it.

Fortunately, the CG doesn't come off as too gratuitous save at least one scene where the main character creates a small structure with his mind, another character reaches out to touch it, and it's clearly not a real prop. You couldn't hire like one guy to make a shitty white plaster prop for that shot? Come on.

I'm also not a fan of the "Reapers" which are the roving threats that exist in this world. They walk around like they're on three stilts and the constant liquid trailing effect they have looks tacky and cheap. There's exactly one scene in which the Reapers are explained and I still don't know what the hell they are. One character gets cut by one and turns into a Reaper by the end of the movie, yet somehow that simple concept was not communicated in the one scene whose job it was to communicate it.

Also, the characters are fully aware that this guy was injured, why are they not going full zombie panic mode and debating on whether to euthanize him?

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88440&stc=1&d=1660622441

Anyway the setting aside, the premise is Main Guy wakes up in the world of "Coma", and he meets up with a group of other coma patients who each have developed unique powers in this new world. Main Guy, being a former architect basically gets the power of pure creation, which I think is a shitty power because it's totally uninteresting.

Not to make constant references to byronic heroes, but think of Lelouch from Code Geass. He had the power to command somebody to do one thing once, and only once, and he had to secure line-of-sight to do it. There's SO MUCH you can accomplish with that power, but it's also incredibly restrictive. This is what provokes creative thinking and strategy and all the shit that makes these stories great.

But Main Guy in Coma can just build whatever he wants. That's pretty underwhelming. Everyone else gets niche utility powers too.

Anyway the group is lead by some dude who has "awoken" from Coma before, which is certainly a questionable statement we don't explore, and says he intends to find an "island" isolated from the Reapers for people to live on.

There are other characters, one is set up as a butthurt antagonist and another has a BRUTAL Overnight Romance with Main Guy. This is rationalized later by them actually having a relationship prior to the incident that put them both in comas, but it's still incredibly dumb in the moment. Main Guy is also unreasonably flippant about the dead woman in his dream car and this is only so the movie can have a reveal later that it is in fact this girl he instantly romanced.

Blahblahblah, Main Guy wakes up and, as it's been teased throughout the movie up to now, he was actually in an artificial coma as a result of the group leader who is actually "The Teacher", a cult leader using religion as a veil to collect guinea pigs to test out his new technology which allows people to voluntarily enter the coma world, and he wants Main Guy to build his island.

After this it ends exactly as you'd expect it too, the Reapers are only reincorporated so Butthurt Guy can be redeemed for killing Teacher in the end.

The whole movie basically meets the absolute minimum threshold of what qualifies for a passable sci-fi fantasy movie.

That said, I think the premise is FANTASTIC. The concept of a real world kool-aid drinking cult luring people into this coma hivemind universe where entirely separate lives are lived out is pretty cool. I can totally imagine a D&D campaign or something where it's revealed the characters are all secretly victims of the cult in the real world, and they're just playing out this little fantasy adventure in their head. That's just brilliant material and there's so much room to expand on this concept, like there could be different iterations of this world in different chapters of the cult around the globe and stuff...

I really just want to see someone else take this concept and go further with it. For now though, it's an adequately engaging movie.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

08-18-22, 09:56 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88478&stc=1&d=1660870549
The Trial
Drama / English / 1962

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Orson Welles directed film adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, which he apparently considers his best movie. This was also recommended to me in that thread over there (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=66686).

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
There's a term called "kafkatrapping" I really like. It describes something pieces of shit like to do, which I for many years have lacked the vocabulary to name. Basically it's when somebody asserts something in such a way that any attempt to refute it can be construed as evidence of it being true.

For example:
"You're always negative."
"No I'm not."
"See, there you go again, being negative."

I don't know much about Kafka, but he has an encouraging reputation for considering conventional things in unconventional ways and expressing skepticism towards certain institutions we take for granted.

A movie like this, which explores these ideas sounds like it would be up my alley, especially if it's delves into the "coherent surrealism" I've sought after since Ink, Imaginaerum, and Paranoia Agent.

But this movie was actually kinda garbage.

Main Guy is awakened by spooks in his room and neighboring apartment just being spooky. He assumes they're police, which they never confirm or deny, and they casually begin kafkatrapping Main Guy into a narrative before stating that he's "under arrest" for a crime they never specify.

Main Guy asks an officer what he's charged with and he says only the Lead Investigator can say, so he asks the Lead Investigator who goes "so you're saying you're innocent?"

This entire scene goes nowhere and, stupifyingly, it concludes with the "police" leaving and Main Guy disappointingly resigned to the fact that he's "under arrest".

So here, "under arrest" doesn't even mean detained. It doesn't even mean the police will impede you in any way whatsoever. "Under arrest" literally means ACTUALLY NOTHING because it amounts to ACTUALLY NOTHING the entire ******* movie, and yet Main Guy dwells on this repeatedly, across multiple scenes, in which he's at work, or talking to a neighbor, or doing some other random shit which entirely begs the question what "under arrest" even means if he's free to do whatever the hell he wants.

I'm inclined to guess that this is some kind of sloppy metaphor I'm just not getting, but regardless of what that metaphor could be, you've literally turned the entire conflict of the movie into one person moping about a literal non-issue.

It's like if I pointed finger guns at a child and said, "pewpew, you're dead", and they burst into tears and spent the next 2 hours whinging about how I killed them and they're "dead now" or some equally retarded shit.

How does this not instantly trivialize your movie? How does this not reduce the conflict all the way down to the level of a Teletubbies episode? Teletubbies makes more sense than this bullshit movie.

So Main Guy goes tromping around whinging to different people about being under arrest and at least 3 different girls get in opportunities to snog him for absolutely no reason. The club dancer is actually the most believable of the 3 because she initially rebuffs his advances then orders him to leave her apartment when she hears the dreaded "I'm arrested" news.

Another girl who has less than a minute of screentime comes back and says:

“Am I such a nothing in your eyes that you won’t stay a little while longer when I ask you?”BITCH, I DON'T KNOW YOU.

Then later she says:

“I’ll go with you wherever you want and you can do with me whatever you like. What’s wrong, don’t you believe me?”That has got to be one of the fastest Overnight Romance speedruns in any movie I've ever seen. This character comes out of the ******* blue and acts like she's got every man's cock in her hand, what the ****??

There eventually IS a Trial, and it's literally one scene in the first third of the movie. Main Guy just gets directed to some random building where he gets shut into a room full of people. He jumps up to the podium and starts lecturing everyone in the room about how innocent he is and then he leaves. Some "Trial", it's like Welles has never even seen a courtroom before in his life.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88479&stc=1&d=1660870579

For the rest of the movie he's just walking around and other people are commenting about his "case" which is somehow ongoing? Once again, there is no tangible consequences to him having "a case" or being "under arrest", it's just a meaningless concept.

And if it's not already clear, the dialog throughout this whole movie is godawful. It's like Welles (or Kafka?) has ADHD. Characters regularly talk over each other, get constantly sidetracked into brutally irrelevant conversation, and Main Guy just straight interrogates random people for no conceivable reason I can think of.

There's a lot of bizarre shit that never amounts to anything, like when Main Guy accuses officers of taking bribes at the trial he finds them being whipped in a broom closet for some reason, so he offers to bribe Whip Master who then says he doesn't accept bribes.

Okay, so that accomplished... nothing at all.

There's like 3 co-workers of his who showed up at the investigation at his home who just hover together in a couple shots and they accomplish nothing at all.

Main Guy repeatedly visits a bed-ridden attorney who despite being worshipped by his other clients also accomplishes nothing at all.

I was genuinely falling asleep halfway through this movie.

Finally, at some point near the end after Main Guy gets into a series of run-on arguments with various people and the sets become somewhat abstract and disconnected... two of the officers show up, grab Main Guy, drag him around the world in 80 days, find a randomass ditch and puts him in it.

They wait for him to yell at them then they enter the ditch with him, lay him down, then begin menacingly passing a knife back and forth over his body multiple times before leaving. He yells at them to kill him and they chuck dynamite at him.

BOOM, credits.

What in the actual bloody Christ did I watch?

One of the worst endings I've ever seen to any movie in my entire life was Out of the Blue, and this the closest any movie I've seen since has gotten to Out of the Blue.

I can't even really call it a nonsense movie because there's a roughly coherent narrative beneath all the dialog, but so much of it is unimportant sidetracking bullshit. I didn't even realize "The Advocate" was supposed to be an attorney, let alone Main Guy's attorney, he wasn't even at the ****ing Trial! Why did the Trial END before the halfway point of the movie called THE TRIAL???

In no other movie I've ever seen have I ever noticed a double continuity error, where they rapidly cuts between 3 shots and each one failed to face the character the right way around to match the previous shot.

What was the artistic vision there? Where did that factor into Roger Ebert's 4 out of 4 stars?

Kafka was a box office bomb and it's far more serviceable than this drek.

Final Verdict: rating_1_5 [Bad]

Omnizoa

08-21-22, 01:39 AM

I tried watching The Hourglass Sanitorium and got an hour in before skipping to the end. The set design was great, but it's another boring nonsense movie. If there was any substance beyond rambling about boring random shit I didn't see it. It's a shame because the concept and twist ending were cool.

Omnizoa

08-21-22, 04:38 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88509&stc=1&d=1661067339
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoeisie
Drama / French / 1972

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It was recommended (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=66686) as a surrealist movie. I was skeptical, but the Wikipedia summary seemed promising.
The film's world is not logical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic): the bizarre events are accepted by the characters, even if they are impossible or contradictory. Buñuel plays tricks on his characters, luring them toward fine dinners that they expect, and then repeatedly frustrating them in inventive ways.

They bristle, and politely express their outrage, but they never stop trying; they relentlessly expect and pursue all that they desire, as though it were their natural right to have others serve and pamper them. He exposes their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption.WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Not even gonna bother with the list of animals they butchered and exploited for this movie.

This movie sucked, and what pisses me off most about it is A.) the claim that it is a "surrealist" movie, and B.) that any of the above Wikipedia quote is anything short of pretentious butt-huffing bullshit puffing up this vacuous ****ing movie.

The basic premise of "rich people go to dinner, dinner is ruined, go to next dinner, repeat ad nauseum" is exactly as promised, but at no point does this movie spin this theme in creative or funny ways. This seems like a goldmine foundation for a comedy, but this movie isn't a comedy whatsoever. What's FUNNY is it's frustrating insistence on inserting shots of the cast walking down a rural road for literally no reason and random military or law-enforcement people interrupting dinner with entire flashback sequences to some ****off dream they had, or some department legend about a sergeant who electrocuted people with a piano.

There is actual dialog in this movie that goes:

“My own childhood was tragic. Shall I tell you about it?"

NO. In almost any context imaginable, if a character in a movie suddenly introduces themselves and says this phrase, my answer is NO. But sure enough, here, some random soldier invites himself to the Rich People Table and describes how he poisoned his father's milk, presumably killing him and then leaves. That's all that happens. The subplot is never reintroduced into the story.

Some messenger delivers news to a cavalry regiment that interrupts one of the dinners and they go "Oh no! The Green Army is attacking! But before that, the messenger had a dream last night, let us all listen."

And queue instant flashback to a visibly budget dream sequence with some of the worst delivered dialog in the whole movie.

With a movie about "Bourgoeisie" and a plot about rich people struggling to have dinner, I 100% expected by the end of the movie people just to bust through the door and gun them all down, and that's EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS but they don't even have the BALLS the stick with it because it's just a ****ing dream sequence!

The end of the movie is just one of several dream-within-a-dream sequences all presented as though this were some foreign language Inception-inspired bootleg of the movie Clue, except they had no idea it was a comedy.

This movie goes a entire ******* HOUR before there is any hint whatsoever that the events we are seeing aren't real, and that just so happens to be when this movie shifts from insufferably boring to mildly interesting!

Dinner gets interrupted by the walls falling away revealing the cast on a theater stage, WHOOPS can't be doing anything surreal in this movie, *poof!* it was all just a dream.

Dinner gets interrupted by one of the characters killing the host out of anger, WHOOPS can't be having any consequences can we? *poof!* it was all just a dream.

Dinner gets interrupted by the main cast getting arrested for drug trafficking! Wow, actual reincorporation! WHOOPS that was an old draft of the script, how do we fix that? *poof!* it was all just a dream.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88510&stc=1&d=1661067378

So much shit happens in this movie that amounts to absolutely nothing.

The cast hires a priest as a gardener, who's called away to a man who he learns murdered his parents and he shoots him. Doesn't matter.

Wife #2 is secretly cheating on her husband with Cocaine-Smuggling Ambassador Guy. Doesn't matter.

The Cocaine-Smuggling subplot doesn't even matter either because everyone gets released from jail both in-dream and real life.

The "terrorist" subplot that also disproportionately fixates on the Ambassador character doesn't matter either.

I'm trying to make sense of this bullshit summary of the movie and it's just not working out.

The film's world is not logical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic):FALSE! The world is perfectly logical, all of the events, even those that interrupt the dinners are entirely explicable by in-universe logic. Every single moment that drifts away from logic is immediately revealed to be a dream!

they relentlessly expect and pursue all that they desire, as though it were their natural right to have others serve and pamper them.The characters passively say some awful things on occasion through the movie, but if this movie's point was to present the cast as irredeemably evil they ****ing failed. And if the movie's point was to deliver some satisfaction to the audience by inconveniencing these irredeemably evil people they ****ing failed.

I can easily see this movie done again in the style of Death at a Funeral or Waking Ned Devine, where the purpose of the script is to present the cast as being actual bastards and ****ing with them actually being entertaining, but this is not that movie.

He exposes their sense of entitlement, their hypocrisy, and their corruption.I want to slap the person who wrote this across the mouth because it's some of the most insultingly pretentious apologism for a movie (that does NONE OF THAT) I've read since Eraserhead. I should have taken the hyperlink to the Wikipedia page on LOGIC as a glaring red flag.

This movie does nothing to "expose their sense of entitlement", let alone anything else. There's one scene near the end of the movie where one of the women get up from the table, goes to the kitchen, appraises the chicken, hands it to the maid who's already preparing it, and then the maid brings it to the table. WHY COULDN'T YOU WALK IT TO THE TABLE YOURSELF?

The movie doesn't even draw attention to this, nothing so subtle as a side look by the maid, an emphasis of the camera, a line of dialog, nothing! Just me sitting there thinking why this is even a scene, because it adds nothing! The only thing I got out of it was what appears to be a flaw with the script because her doing what should be the maids job invalidates the purpose of the maid! What are you paying her for!?

Are you even paying her enough!?

There are so many opportunities this movie could have taken to be this this clever class commentary you wanted it to be, but it ISN'T because it's DIDN'T so it's NOT.

It's just a boring slog of a movie.

I'm sure there's some sort of brainless dipshit out there who read "bourgoeisie" and immediately all blood rushed to their cock and they were sitting at the edge of their seats waiting for that scene where they all get shot to death, but even that person would realistically be disappointed because guess what? *poof!* It was just a dream.

And you know what? Now that I have the opportunity, can I kindly ask what the actual **** is wrong with French people? Movies popular in France are some of the most dreadful pseudo-intellectual bullshit ever to hit the silver screen and their movie posters ****ing SUCK (https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88508&d=1661067268).

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Weak]

Omnizoa

08-21-22, 03:37 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88513&stc=1&d=1661106960
Paperhouse
Fantasy/ English / 1988

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Came up in Bestsimilar.com (https://bestsimilar.com/) search results when I entered Ink. Never heard of it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It is immediately apparent to me, after watching The Trial and The Discreet Charm how much an actual soundtrack elevates my viewing experience.

I was immediately engaged by this movie's broody whimsical score and I was carried from beginning to end by an appreciably brisk plot, which is always a plus in my book.

Paperhouse doesn't waste any time setting up the central conceit of the movie: A schoolgirl doodles a house in class and shortly after succumbs to a series of fainting episodes attributed to "glandular fever". When she sleeps or falls unconscious she wakes up in the world of her Paperhouse and discovering this she begins drawing new things to introduce into the world including a sad boy at the window who we discover to be an analog to a real boy named Mark we never see.

Despite an off line about not playing with boys, Anna begins an in-dream relationship with Mark and as her health and relationship with her parents deteriorates, Anna experiments with adding different things to the drawing including her dad, but upset with how the drawing is turning out she scribbles out their faces and crumples it up to disastrous consequences.

Mark's real world equivalent is revealed to suddenly be dying of a chest infection and Anna's dream father is turned into a blind malevolent force which she struggles to awaken from.

This culminates in her dream father destroying their means of escape and beating her chest in what is predictably revealed to be life-saving chest compressions.

At this point we hit a crossroads where Anna is distanced from her now-introduced real world father while Mark is believed to be dying, kept alive only by what Anna can draw for him.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=88514&stc=1&d=1661106995

It's not a happy ending that comes next, but I will admit that this movie started getting to me near the end. I was fondly reminded of King of Thorn, which I would love to see more stories done in the style of.

And having said that, I literally just learned that King of Thorn got an MOVIE! Holy shit, I had no idea, I gotta see that.

Anyway, I thought this was a really solid movie. Anna is presented as pretty bratty at the start of the movie, which is somewhat acceptable considering her age and it makes sense that a kid who wants to go outside and play doesn't want to admit they're sick. The shitty attitude doesn't carry throughout the entire movie thankfully.

That said, Anna's actress is not exactly stellar. She does a passable job, but she really doesn't emote enough in my opinion. I think I'd say that's probably my biggest complaint, if she had turned in a really good performance that would definitely have raised this movie just a little bit more.

It's never explained why drawing Mark standing doesn't allow him to walk, we never see what she does draw that allows him to walk.

Honestly, there's not a whole lot else to criticize. I think Mom's a bit of a **** for smoking in the car with her kid and littering out the window, but this is also an 80s movie and I'm kinda nitpicking at that point.

In terms of whether this movie hit the style I was looking for: Sort of?

Dreams in and of themselves are functionally throwaway plots in movies like The Discreet Charm where they don't impact the real world or have to share logic with it. But the dreams in this movie reflect the events of the real world and even influence it in small ways.

I feel like the main difference is that the events at the Paperhouse are just direct Stranger Than Fiction-style fantasy consequences of choices made in the real world, which isn't quite the level of visual metaphor I'm looking for.

Even Ink plays with dreams, but things like the clock rumbling on the wall aren't simply an earthquake happening in real life, it's symbolic of the time John has remaining to before he either attends the big meeting or saves his daughter. I want stuff like that.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Great]

Omnizoa

09-03-22, 01:49 AM

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Downfall
Historical War Drama / German / 2004

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Working on a WW2 project and this was one of the bigger war movie recommendations I've seen. Only aware of the memes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I was fully prepared for this to be a boring movie, and at 2-and-a-half hours, it really wasn't enticing to sit through that much just to see the ending that's already been mocked and parodied up and down the internet.

But surprisingly, that scene actually takes place in the first third of the movie, and as a glimpse into the Fuhrerbunker in the final days of Nazi Germany, this movie was actually really interesting.

There's no overt score, there's little you could call character development, and it's not as though a cast of Nazis is especially endearing to begin with, so I can really only credit my engagement to the quality of the acting, which is not a topic I tend to critique too closely.

It's typical of Hollywood and video games to paint the Nazis as 2-dimensional cartoons to be shot at, but even moreso than Das Boot, another German WW2 Nazi "slice of life" movie, here we see some genuine humanity among our Schutzstaffel cast.

Maybe it's just my exposure to the telephone game of time and pop culture that has lowered my standards for historically accurate representation, but I am once again thankful that somebody took an effort to get some things right.

Hitler's an obvious stand-out with the actor using a lot of body language to present Mein Fuhrer as the ailing, increasingly unreasonable dictator directing a war of fantasy from his concrete prison.

That said, for all of the horrible things Hitler says, and all of the insanity his subordinates ascribe to him behind his back, and even the dormant supervillain of Goebbels or his wife who lies to and poisons all of their kids because she's an abominably callous ****ing monster... Eva Braun is the scariest character in this whole movie.

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She just has this totally psychotic wide-eyed half-smile at all times, just blissfully unconcerned with anything that could damper the mood, like a real life yandere character. She freaked me the **** out with her performance. Like, even if hypothetically you agreed with the National Socialist ideal, it's hard not to imagine any of these inner circle guys looking at Eva Braun and getting some SERIOUS ****ing doubts about their line of work.

I'm not sure how accurate that was to her real life personality of course, but in terms of how deranged someone would have to be to marry Hitler 2 days before they kill themselves, she certainly fits the bill.

Everyone else smiles like they're trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Eva Braun smiles like she keeps a dead dismembered Jewish child in a suitcase to pleasure herself with offscreen.

I also appreciate the gradation of reasonableness among the Nazi staff members. Some are hopeless and realistic, others are hopelessly unrealistic, and some are weirdly in the middle, agreeable in some respects and disagreeable in others. And they argue with each other, as they would, because they're all trapped on a sinking ship with a gun to the back of the first person who jumps.

Thoughout this movie I found myself repeatedly pausing it to look up various details about the different characters and the things they did. Like, I didn't know Hitler's body was set on fire, let alone outside the Fuhererbunker.

But consistently each time I looked up a detail, it appeared to be corroborated in some way by witness accounts of the events. And each of the characters in the movie genuinely LOOK like the people did in real life. This is also a German movie, so I didn't have to concern myself with bigwig Hollywood inserts like Liam Neeson putting on a shitty accent.

Beyond the acting, I think the biggest point in favor of this movie is that it really is presented, not as any sort of hero narrative or other typical plot writers like to wring out of history, but as a narrow sequence of events at one period in time that's genuinely just fascinating in it's own right. This movie really seems like it was made by people who just thought this moment in history was really interesting and would make a good movie.

And I think those are the best events to adapt to screen. If you're going the route of non-fiction, pick some non-fiction that's already a good story, not one you have to shuffle around and diminish or embellish to fit a conventional narrative format.

If you entirely ripped out the historical context and all of the names and places were fictional instead, this would still be a neat movie.

That said, while this was definitely engaging, and I think the actors were great, and yadayadayada... this really isn't my preferred flavor of movie anyway.

I liked it, and really do struggle to fault it with much, but it's also not the sort of experience that I can see myself eager to rewatch.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

xSookieStackhouse

09-03-22, 06:13 AM

Omnizoa

10-23-22, 10:16 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89537&stc=1&d=1666573804 Halloween
Horror Slasher / English / 1978

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's October, I've been playing Dead by Daylight against my better judgment, and I've never seen the granddaddy of slasher movies. Might as well. All I know is Michael Myers is a slow-moving stabby killer with an obsession with Laurie Strode for some reason.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
“It was the bogeyman.”

There seem to be two types of John Carpenter movies; the first type are campy fun (The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness), and the second type are astonishingly bad (Dark Star, Big Trouble in Little China). Halloween is the latter of those two types of movies.

For movie that is often credited as pioneering the modern horror genre, I suppose I really shouldn't be too surprised it's awful, but I expected a bit more than this!

Right away Halloween makes a disasterously awful first impression with it's opening """scare""", wherein we see a young Austin Powers dress up as a clown, grab a knife, put on a mask, and stab his mom in a fashion so insultingly unrealistic that it screams parody.

The camera is from his perspective, and when he puts the mask on we can only see through the eyeholes, we can see the knife never goes near his mom, his arm just smoothly waves back and forth completely betraying any "stabbing" going on, and to make it extra hilariously stupid, in case you were a rational human being and didn't quite get what this awful effect was trying to accomplish, Michael even turns his gaze up and to the right so that the motion of his hand with the knife going up and down is clearly in shot.

Cause you know, Michael's a special little boy, sometimes he forgets where he is and needs to look at what his body is doing sometimes to figure it out. OH I'M STABBING SOMEBODY, WOW OKAY, I THOUGHT SOMETHING WAS KINDA WEIRD. WELP, MIGHT AS WELL GO WITH THE FLOW, SORRY MOM!

Fastforward 15 years as Michael is presumed to be in a "high-security" mental hospital which he casually escapes from because the staff apparently let the patients out into the rain at night with only chest-high fences to keep them on the property. Michael magics himself onto the hood of a car in a feat of athleticism that will not be demonstrated at any other point in the movie.

Dagnabbit! Michael Myers is free! Someone stop that definitely psychotic child we didn't develop any character for!

Michael goes home, and Laurie Strode wanders up to the house because of some plot point we'll never revisit and BOOM, Shrek is obsessed. He then proceeds to stalk Laurie well beyond the point she should be contacting the police, but of course she never does cause she's a dumb**** kid and definitely not an adult Jamie Lee Curtis failing to pull off looking and acting younger than she actually is.

Over half the movie passes and all of **** all happens. Michael persistently stalks Laurie until he randomly takes offense to one of the lamest "jokes" ever to be referred to as a "joke" in a movie and starts stalking Laurie's friend.

He dickteases this kill across multiple scenes until finally Laurie's friend hooks up with a guy and naturally because this is a slasher movie, they have to have sex, so that the liberals in the audience can see **** and the conservatives in the audience can have the satisfaction of seeing liberals die.

The sex is incredibly fake too, there isn't even any thrusting, just two people squirming on each other until the dude rolls over revealing there was a healthy amount of bedsheet between them the whole time.

Dude walks away, is lured to an open door, pokes around and gets jumped by Myers who chokes him, lifts him into the air, and stabs him in the stomach.

...then the camera switches to a wide shot and I lost my shit because he's apparently suspended in the air by a butcher knife that plainly cannot pass through his entire body, let alone enough to pierce the closet behind him and suspend his entire body weight.

Myers strangles the girlfriend, and at about this time, the Doctor, whose car Myers stole, realizes his car has been sitting across the street from him for what seems like several hours he's been standing outside Myers' home.

All the while this guy is apparently just standing out on the street, Laurie crosses the street, apparently never even crossing paths with him, and investigates her friend's house. She also never turns on any lights. Multiple characters conveniently ignore the lightswitches on the walls in multiple scenes.

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Eventually she finds the bodies of her friends, gets jumped by Myers and runs out of the house, finally aware she's in danger... and proceeds to run to the house immediately next door.

When they don't open, she runs back across the street, notices she somehow lost her keys, and decides to shriek at the kid she's babysitting to come downstairs and unlock the door... as Myers is casually pacing toward her.

Laurie has an awful lot more time in these scenes to do what she does than would realistically have if Myers didn't stand around and take his sweet-ass time getting everywhere.

He chases her up to the kid's room where Laurie proceeds to run into the closet and bind close the door, rather than do literally anything to the BEDROOM DOOR WHICH ALSO CONTAINS THE KIDS. How do you **** up that bad?

Of course, Michael can break through that shit, so he does, Laurie pokes him in the eye with a hangar, he drops one of several knives he pulls out of his ass offscreen and she stabs him in the chest.

GOOD, he's dead. Or is he? We've seen him get up after being knocked down before. Oh well, Laurie, why don't you just throw that knife on the ground within arm's reach of him and turn your back? You weren't a dumb enough character already.

Of course he gets back up, the Doctor conveniently shows up last second with barely any justification, shoots him several times and he's dead.

O R I S H E ? ? ?

Disappears offscreen for sequelbait and Laurie breaks character to utter the most embarrassing line in the script: "It was the bogeyman."

What an awful movie. Nothing supernatural is ever established in this movie, so we're supposed to believe that Michael took a large knitting needle to the neck, hangar wire to the eyes, a butcher knife to the chest, 3 gunshots center-mass, AND fell off two-story balcony and still manage to run away when his average top speed is walking pace.

I simply cannot watch this movie as anything but a movie because everything from Curtis looking too old, to the kills looking faker than the stupid shit I put in my high school video editing projects totally divorces me from any immersion.

It's also just not scary, if you care about that sort of thing. Which I don't.

But apparently someone did because this became a massive movie franchise for no conceivable reason I can think of. Nothing this movie did was innovative or interesting other than presenting the killer as something other than a monster-of-the-week, which isn't exactly new. Is it cause it's set in the suburbs?? Were moviegoers so sheltered that that's what pushed it over the edge? Home invasion??

Wikipedia says this movie was inspired by Psycho. What exactly did Psycho do that persuaded John Carpenter to make this? Ambiguously wave a butcher knife at a naked lady until they """die"""?

Reading Roger Ebert's review of this movie is utterly baffling with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-1979

This movie was obviously bad, but it wasn't really funny bad or even frustratingly bad, just boring bad. The only good thing about it is it's theme which quickly becomes repetitive, albeit not to the same extreme as Platoon, which is an infinitely scarier prospect than anything in this movie.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Just... Bad]

Omnizoa

10-24-22, 03:47 AM

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It: Chapter II
Fantasy Horror / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
While my review for It (2017) wasn't stellar, I did consider the remake of It to be on the better side of horror movies, so I might as well see the sequel.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
“Just trying to add some levity to this shit. I’ll go **** myself.”

Without reading through my review of the first movie and without trying to be too consistent with my judgment of it, my memory of the first movie (which I apparently saw in 2019) was that it was an adequately creepy movie, which some pretty cool effects, a couple funny moments, and an especially charismatic clown antagonist.

Seeing Pennywise chew more scenery seemed like a good enough reason to see this one, but it was not the reason I enjoyed it.

Again, going off of memory, I feel like the previous movie was overtly preoccupied with setting up the characters, building up the friend group, and ****in' about with Stephen King tropes, like Main Girl's alcoholic abusive dad.

This movie, by contrast, seems eager to jump us right back into the hallucinatory terrain that comprises the creepy setpieces, but it also has to juggle this with the bold task of reintroducing the cast in the form of different actors, while also making their individual personalities and mannerisms natural and distinct enough for us to go, "OH, THAT'S THAT KID BUT 27 YEARS OLDER, WHOA".

I'd LIKE to say that it succeeded because by the end of the movie it was clear to me who was trying to be who, and each version of the characters share enough of the other's personality and look that the new casting seems pretty solid. This of course is helped by an abundance of seamless flashbacks to scenes of the original child actors between the events of the previous movie and this one, but I would be lying if I wasn't pretty confused out of the gate by who was supposed to be who.

It would probably help if I had watched both movies back to back, but I didn't.

I feel like it's enough to say that each of the characters had distinguishing personalities since that's a pretty tall order normally for horror movies, but they were pretty likable too. If the previous movie's humor has carried by the comedy relief character, it feels much more organic here, where it's more about the character's personalities bouncing off each other, as any good ensemble cast should.

It also helps that the writers are clearly self-aware since they went so far as to squeeze a "HEEERE'S JOHNNEY!" meme in the middle of things. I appreciate it, but it really did feel like the plot took a couple trips and falls around the middle bit.

In particular, once the characters are prescribed the contrived solution to their clown problem of collecting a "token" for each of them, a requirement that came with virtually no rationalization, it seemed like we'd get to see each of the characters experience their own little unique trial tailored to their character.

That would be cool and that seemed like the direction they were going before they bailed out of that idea super hard. Main Girl digs out a postcard that was meaningful to her from the wall of her old home only to have the current resident creepily veer into a Monster Boob Lady...

That set the bar pretty high. The tone, the thoughtfulness, the slow burn into the freaky shit, it works.

But then Comedy Relief gets his scene which involves remembering he used to play Street Fighter, buying an arcade token, and then flashing back to getting chased by a giant woodsman mascot before fast forwarding to a much better less stupid scene where Pennywise just taunts him about "knowing his secret", which doesn't seem to be anything the movie ever reveals.

Main Girl's token was so personal, and the setting was important to the previous movie. Comedy Relief just has a stupid coin because "bro, video games".

This tonal inconsistency continues long enough for me to wonder whether everyone just forgot they were supposed to collect a token each to begin with.

When they finally decide to go have their showdown, they have their epic "let's go kill his ****ing clown" moment, but then bring FEWER weapons than they did 27 years previously.

AND they split up exactly as they did before and get jumpscared by fridge again, only this time it's the spider thing from The Thing inside, and not a cool body contortion effect on Pennywise.

Finally they're like "everyone present your tokens" and Hypochondriac Guy tosses in his inhaler. Yeah, okay, we're not even trying here. They even toss in a shower cap for the one character that killed themselves in a flashback to a throwaway joke that wasn't even in the original movie.

There are a few funny moments throughout, but I think the best bit is the moment when Comedy Relief gets insta-hypnotized by "The Deadlights" mid-monologue during the final showdown.

The final showdown overall is honestly underwhelming. Pennywise finally takes the "true spider form" as represented in the original miniseries, but it feels like it takes forever for the characters to remember he feeds off of fear and that he's completely powerless if you just bully him. Killing him when he's deflated like a balloon is appropriately thematic, but it's also anti-climactic.

The movie after being far too unsubtle about wanting a stupid romantic subplot between Main Girl and Formerly Fat Kid gives them their underwater kiss scene that was so necessary for no reason, we get a fluffy monologue about nothing and the movie ends.

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Overall, I'd say the strongest part of this entire movie, surprisingly, are the transitions. CGI occasionally fluctuates from very good to noticeable, therefor bad, but there's also a decent amount of practical effects... which only seem to show up on the tertiary monsters.

What the hell is a mummy doing in this movie anyway?

But no, the transitions are frequent, creative, and not obnoxious. For instance, there's a pan up to the sky, which zooms into stars which are revealed to be the underside of a puzzle being completed, that's pretty cool. I've definitely never seen any movie do that before.

Just for the sheer abundance of quality scene transitions, I would recommend this movie alongside Cloud Atlas because it does one moviemaking job really well. But otherwise don't watch Cloud Atlas.

It: Chapter II on the other hand pretty good at the best of times. It's spooky, but also intermittently funny, has some neat special effects, and the cast is actually a genuinely good likable cast, which you almost never get in horror movies.

I do think overall the setpieces revolving around Pennywise are weaker than in the first movie though. He's given less time to monologue and serve up the creep and these scenes will not be as memorable as those in the first movie.

My BIGGEST qualm with the whole movie, is the opening kill.

For literally no reason at all, the writers of this movie decided to that Pennywise's big "I'm Back" moment would be taking a bite out of a flamboyant gay guy.

Which doesn't seem so bad, I wish all horror movie victims were flamboyant gay guys because those people are so unbelievably ****ing annoying. But no, the reason why Pennywise kills the gay guy is because he's spotted kissing his boyfriend by Stephen King-style tryhard bullies who are momentarily distracted from posting alt-right memes on /pol/ long enough to Brokeback Mountain his ass until they run out of blood squibs and attempt to murder him by dumping his body off a bridge.

And these characters (and themes) are never reincorporated back into the story in any way whatsoever.

Compare this to Georgie's death scene, that was the impetus for the entire plot of the first movie. But here they're just like "we need Pennywise to kill someone, but as long as we're killing someone, let's cram in a little elbowing about how gay people are such an oppressed minority that intolerant dudebros will kill them in the streets". As though they didn't push the setting of this movie up to the year 2016, the year progressives where so unbelievably out of touch with reality that they inadvertently got Donald Trump elected.

If this released in 2020 you can bet it'd be another token black character getting beasted by evil police officers for crime of existing.

Ironically, Token Black Guy seems to have received the least character development of anybody in the main cast. They constantly refer to some subplot about him being accused of arson from the first movie, but I don't remember that ever being resolved in the first movie either. Didn't they casually insinuate that his family were drug dealers, presumably because he's the token black character from the token black family?

Also isn't Main Girl fresh out of an abusive relationship with her dad and now suddenly in an abusive relationship with a spouse she only just decided to leave because she got a letter about some bullshit in Maine? Everyone else received an equitable amount of bullying, but she's privileged with having both a traumatic backstory and frontstory. And it's really just a coin-toss in the end that she ends up with the Fat Kid and not McStuttersalot.

Stephen King cameos in this movie, so I assume his seal of approval is on this, but if so, what is the value in dramatizing the struggles of token women, black, and gay characters if you're really not going to do anything meaningful with them? Just sounds like you needed a plot device and decided you could virtue signal at the same time.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

10-25-22, 02:37 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89565&stc=1&d=1666676197
Ring
Horror / Japanese / 1998

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Same reason as Halloween. In Dead by Daylight, Sadako is one of the cooler killers with an interesting aesthetic and game mechanic of "spreading her message" and using TVs to teleport. The closest to anything I've seen of Ring was The Grudge, which is awful and I hate it, and Scary Movie 3, which is awful and I hate it for different reasons.

I'm hoping Ring is able to deliver on it's high concept as a slow-burn thriller, rather than as a conventional horror movie.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
So to summarize the whole backstory and conceit of this movie very briefly:

People are found dead of heart attacks with terrified expressions on their faces and it rumored that they died after watching a strange VHS tape. After watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call of someone saying they'll die in 7 days (which never actually happens in this movie), and they do. The whole climax of this event is a ghost named Sadako Yamamura appearing in the video to climb out of a well and out of the television to attack the viewer.

Sadako was the daughter of a renowned psychic who was assassinated by the media along with the doctor who risked his career to prove her abilities were real. Somewhere along the way, Sadako's mom throws herself into a volcano and the doctor (who's maybe her father?) chucks Sadako down a well, the shape of the well being the eponymous "ring" from which she emerges to kill viewers on tape.

The movie NEVER rationalizes why Sadako might be possessing VHS tapes, especially well after a period of time where they more than likely did not exist, so we're just supposed take that little leap for granted.

The characters, who are roped into investigating this narrative after seeing the tape themselves (and proving it's veracity by the apparent tendency that victims appear smeared in photographs) speculate about the relationship between Sadako's mom and the Doctor, but both of these characters appear only very briefly in phantasmal flashbacks the victims experience for some reason and don't ultimately matter.

All that matters is Sadako's upset because you didn't respect the "be kind, rewind" policy.

It's unfortunate because so much of this movie is dwelling on these possibilities, whereas in conventionally shitty horror movies like The Grudge, there's at least a haunting going on. Only rarely do the characters experience weird phenomenon over the course of the 7 days.

On one hand, that means it's not a constant jumpscare ****fest, but on the other the movie is mostly without a backing score.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89564&stc=1&d=1666676191

When the movie deigns to turn up the creep there's some neat feedback-style production sounds they use to make things seem ominous and impending, but when they DO decide to do something sudden that's meant to be scary, like revealing a dead body, they orchestral string section goes completely nuts.

The volume level of these strings is WAY above appropriate because the rest of the movie is so quiet otherwise, even ordinary dialog, while fine on it's own, sets an expected volume level that these orchestral stings violently defenestrate. It's not exactly scary because the scares are kinda predictable, so the audio choice just sounds jarring and takes me out of the moment.

Speaking of audio choices taking me out of the moment, by far the worst part of this """serious horror movie""" was the part where I burst out laughing at Sadako's "death scene".

Basically, Sadako's not even lured to the well or anything, she's just derping around the lip when the Doctor guy comes out of nowhere *BONK*s her on the head with a hilariously stock punching sound effect.

All of the other audio effects in this movie sound original which makes me wonder whether this sound is originally from Ring, which makes me question whether I only find it funny because the sound is so overused.

But then if you really try to listen to it in context, it just sounds like Master Chief punching a Grunt.

The actors were passable at a minimum, with the exception of Main Girl's son who unpleasantly reminded me of the boy in The Grudge. Whether intentionally so or not, they both have this uncanny wooden performance that makes them seem unnecessarily creepy, but more than likely is simply the result of a stupid kid with zero acting experience being pushed in front of a camera and fed lines which they can't deliver with even an ounce of emotion.

I think the one thing I didn't know about this movie and liked was the ending, where even after trying to find Sadako's body at the bottom of the well and thinking all's well and good, Sadako kills Main Guy anyway because Main Girl copied the tape and showed it to him. So her solution to saving her son who also watched the tape is to curse even more people.

This justifies the mechanism of Sadako wanting people to spread her "message", which is a similar sort of supernatural infection to that of It Follows. But that movie makes a little bit more sense because it's a quasi-parody wherein the monster is a manifested STD.

Still, I really like the concept of this movie, but it really didn't deliver it in a satisfying way to me, despite, like Halloween, spawning a huge franchise and movie trend.

Will look into it's remakes.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

10-25-22, 05:28 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89566&stc=1&d=1666686474
The Ring
Horror / English / 2002

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Maybe an American remake can do a foreign language film justice.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it … spread it like sickness."

I'm pretty mixed on this one. It's apparent that this is the movie that popularized the version of Sadako that appears in media like Dead By Daylight, being what seems to be the first movie to heavily associate Sadako with water and to demonstrate her ability to teleport in the form of video skips.

However she's also not "Sadako", she's "Samara Morgan", and she doesn't even have black hair as is insinuated by the movie.

It'd be easier to tell that if the whole movie wasn't tinted blue for some reason, but that just seems to be an unfortunate fad among early 2000s Hollywood movies.

Let's start off with what I appreciated:

I like that Main Girl goes to see the the hospital patient who survived "The Ring Tape", this was a plotbeat that was mentioned once and immediately forgotten in the original, which for as far as the characters went to investigate the whole thing, for some reason didn't do that.

I like that Main Guy is more incredulous towards the idea of The Ring Tape and is eventually persuaded by seeing his face distorted in live video. The original 1998 character didn't confirm this aspect of the curse at all and instead put all the weight on the existence or non-existence of a subsequent phone call.

I like that the phone call at least said "7 days", the original didn't even bother with that.

I like that the 7 days thing is rationalized as being how long American Sadako was alive at the bottom of the well.

I also like the cabin setting where the well is located. The original just looked like a beautiful public mountain lodge, but this place looks exactly as ****ing cursed as it is.

I like that The Ring Tape showed more things, in particular things that were yet to happen, further lending credence to the curse being true.

Finally, I like that this movie had a bigger budget, it was thoroughly scored throughout as opposed to sparingly, which helped maintain tension, it featured some more intimate camera shots of things, and it even had a cool scene of nails slowly lifting themselves out of the floorboards, causing the television to fall and throw Main Girl down the well.

The characterization was noticeably different. There was more humanity in each of the characters' performances which was good, but the wooden child acting continued to be an issue and in this movie they were given much more dialog wherein they hold borderline unrealistic conversations.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89567&stc=1&d=1666686480

I do have issues with this movie too.

Horses, and horseback riding, definitely did not need to be a plotpoint (or in this movie). They took Sadako's mom character, turned her into Sadako's killer, and insinuated that this was all because Sadako was somehow scaring horses into drowning themselves in the ocean.

This conflicts with the leftovers of the doctor plot which we are also presented parts of, in which Sadako is experimented on for upsetting her mom. This part of the story is relatively unexplored, yet it seemed central to the concerns of the characters in the original movie.

Sadako was the daughter of a psychic who inherited a power which she would demonstrably use when she became angry.

Now, "Samara" is the daughter of a horse breeder who is infusing her rage at her own death into video tapes, AGAIN, something we do not justify in this movie. That is so much dumber than it was.

To make matters worse, this movie reveals Sadako's face, which you never see in the original movie. The classic shot is of her hair parting and revealing her looking down and killing her victim with her gaze. But this movie shows us what she looks like before her death and even gives us an ugly full face shot after the fact too.

I would appreciate knowing why the technology of VHS is so integral to this stupid curse, but I have to admit there are aspects of this movie that would be better left ambiguous, including Sadako's face.

This movie even pulls The Grudge thing, where Main Girl just starts pulling Sadako's hair out of her mouth. That's not scary, that's just gross and stupid. The Grudge is basically personified by being the stereotypical Japanese ghost girl shrouded in black hair, but Sadako's got so much more going for her.

It also sucks that when Main Girl finally discovers Main Guy is dead, they chose to use a take where her crying looked bogus as hell.

There's a line in this movie where one of the characters analogize journalists (which Main Girl is) to spreading tragedy "like a sickness", which is EXCELLENT symbolism for what Sadako does and perfect foreshadowing for what Main Girl ultimately decides to do at the end of the movie.

But they spoil this great line of dialog by repeating it at the movie's finale, just in case you missed it!

They also take the effort to spell it out for you that Main Girl intends on showing the video to more people, rather than that being the obvious implication of learning that making copies is what spared her life.

This is a great example of why "show, don't tell" is a thing. It's also another scene in which the kid is unnecessarily inserted so that he can have a bizarrely adult conversation with his mom about the two of them going out to curse people.

And my last bit of grief: The sound design of the original, as I said, was generally too quiet, the stings were too loud, and Sadako's death was unintentionally hilarious. That said, I really did like the particular ambience they added with certain tones and feedback noise to make scenes eerie.

They changed that in this movie to oscillate between just shitty white noise and a new sound loop they created just for any time the tape is being played. I appreciate the addition of a full score, but I am otherwise displeased with the sound design stylings they went with.

They pushed the concept farther, which I like, but they also took creative liberties I didn't like, like blue-toning scenes with a small brunette child named "Samara Morgan", randomly kicking her down a well, and then pretending that this otherwise emotionless kid is suddenly the enraged black-haired spirit of Sadako Yamamura!

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Meh...]

Yoda

10-25-22, 11:11 AM

All reasonable gripes, but my review of The Ring is just that it scared the ever-loving piss out of me, so I can't really critique anything else about it with any force.

rauldc14

10-25-22, 12:42 PM

It's one of my favorite horrors of all time, remake or not.

Omnizoa

10-25-22, 08:40 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89570&stc=1&d=1666741125
Scream
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 1996

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been a while since I've seen it. I already know how it ends, but I've forgotten the journey it took to get there. He's also playable killer in Dead by Daylight.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Wes Craven was something of a horror geek god, not just for creating Nightmare on Elm Street, but also Scream, which sets itself apart from other slasher movies by virtue of it's explicit genre savviness.

It immediately opens on a girl home alone who receives a creepy phone call from a guy who goads her into talking about scary movies, immediately referencing Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, and even spoiling that movie, before it turns serious and the threat of home invasion becomes real when a guy with a combat knife and a Spirit Halloween costume runs in to start stabbin'.

This trend follows throughout the entire movie with numerous references to movies, tropes, and even one character just standing up and deconstructing the modern horror genre into it's most popular cliches.

It runs an extremely fine line where it wants viewers to know that it's smarter than your average horror movie, but it also doesn't condescend to it's audience. A general tone of self-awareness and genre subversion is prevalent throughout a majority of it's setpieces, and so too is a thin veil of black comedy.

The Ghostface Killer never speaks full lines while onscreen, so he has moments where he's given amusing body language to communicate and in action scenes where he's trying to kill someone, as anyone would notice, his hits and falls are a soundboard shy of slapstick.

Even when he's talking on the phone, the voice actor playing him is enjoyably campy and the two characters eventually revealed to be the dual identity of the Ghostface Killer bring their best performance, be both believable and entertaining psychopaths.

I knew Shaggy was up to no good.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89571&stc=1&d=1666741156

The reveal of the Ghostface Killer is also pretty central to this movie since it quietly lays the foundation for a whole NEW dimension to this movie: the whodunnit mystery.

Names are cast about, shade is thrown, and tiny little lingering camera moments give you just long enough to question whether, "Wait a minute! That cop was wearing boots! The killer was wearing boots too!"

Scream never leans heavily enough into the whodunnit aspect of the movie to make you seriously suspect anyone other than the characters most frequently appearing onscreen, but this movie manages to subvert even that;

Typically there's only one guilty party in a whodunnit.

In an effort to avoid this expectation, some whodunnits pull the "everyone is guilty" card, such as in Murder on the Orient Express,

Short of that, while still wanting to be surprising, whodunnits will implicate characters outside of the realm of reasonable culprits. For example if there's a locked room mystery, and there are 9 people at the hotel, they'll produce all sorts of evidence to implicate any or all of them, but then pull a 10th person out of their ass at the last second and hang it all on them, despite there having been no evidence, or even poor evidence that they were the killer.

This is worst of all because it completely defeats the point of a whodunnit, which is enjoyable in large part due to the viewer being given the opportunity to speculate who the culprit could be.

This movie not only implicates one of it's killers early on, exonerates them, then throws them under the bus again, but rationalizes this 180 by presenting a second killer, which explains discrepancies in the theory that implicated him. That's a pretty cool ending... even if I wasn't given much evidence to make a strong determination.

Scream runs at a refreshingly brisk pace, and even the occasional filler dialog bridges the gaps between setpiece moments with an odd, yet pleasing combination of period pop rock music and atmospheric score.

I can't really think of too many things this movie could have done better with what it was going for. The ending where the movie geek goes "be careful, this is when the bad guy suddenly comes back to life", just as I was thinking about that, then plays it straight by immediately shooting the dude in the head was... how you hip young 90s kids might call "choice".

I think the thing I would want most out of any of the sequels is more thoughtfulness. I really want to be given enough evidence to confidently point a finger at one of the characters and be proven wrong because the plot is secretly much more clever than it seems.

Time will tell.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

10-26-22, 11:33 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89587&stc=1&d=1666837900
Scream 2
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 1997

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Cause the first movie was decent, but now it must combat sequel tropes, how will it fair?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"I hope that was an off-the-cuff remark that holds no subtext whatsoever."

I have seen this movie before, but I don't remember any of it, so here's my own genre-savvy assessments of killer likelihood considering a whodunnit is now a viewer expectation:

1. Deputy Dewey, has an identifiable limp that could cause us not to suspect him, limp is questioned by other characters, delivers the "trust no one line" twice, displays aggressive behavior for the first time, appears in places without justification, asks about Sydney's security detail, is referred to as a "good guy" by other characters, Randy lectures him on horror movie tropes (he lectured the previous killers), defends Gale's character, objects to breaking and entering... VICTIM
2. Cotton (Falsely Accused Killer), obvious revenge motive, present during a death threat, wayyy too forgiving, wayyy too pushy, attention-seeking, already scrutinized by the police, self-implicates twice, accused of being the killer... HERO
3. Gale Weathers, shade thrown, attention-seeking, actual piece of shit... VICTIM
4. Joel (Gale's New Cameraman), implicated by movie's emphasis on "white male suspects", self-implicates... BYSTANDER
5. Derek (New Boyfriend), previous boyfriend was the killer, shade thrown, implicated by one of the killers... DIES
6. Hallie (Sydney's Roommate), shade thrown, implicated by movie's emphasis on "white male suspects", argues against revealing Ghostface's identity... DIES
7. Mickey (Random Friend), conveniently unavailable during a Ghostface attack... KILLER
8. Randy (Movie Geek), shade thrown, comedy relief... DIES
9. Debbie Salt (Reporter who hounds Gale), literally nothing to implicate her except the "white male suspects" line... KILLER

My Theory: Dewey was one of two killers, and to distinguish from the previous movie, the killers would have separate motives this time. PARTIALLY TRUE

As you can see, there was quite a lot of reason to suspect some characters more than others, it almost seems like the movie set up Derek and Cotton as the two obvious in-universe suspects, while also sneaking enough little details in to implicate Deputy Dewey for the lifeless smartasses like me.

While I appreciate being wrong in my prediction, I do not appreciate that this falls victim to one of the shitty outcomes of whodunnit movies I described previously. In this case, both killers were characters with virtually no screentime and neither were given any substantial reason to be the killer apart from one of them not being present at a single time they were expected to be.

Part of the fun of these movies/episodes is when the audience is given all of the information to guess the killer, but the information is often is often glossed over or misrepresented. In this case, "Mickey" is revealed to be the killer to fall in line with the theme of "movies are bad influences" which is referenced multiple times. His goal is to murder and blame movies because... that's the perfect defense I guess??

Mickey is called crazy by "Debbie Salt" who no one could have possibly suspected because her motive is concealed by the fact that nobody knows she's secretly the mother of the previous movie's killer.

Naturally it makes sense to tie it all back in to the first movie in some way, and this DOES partially justify the repeated insistence on "white male suspects" that gets hammered on about, but this is still completely out of the blue.

It doesn't seem fair when the answer to the question was never really on the table, which is true for both of these movies, because neither of these movies concern themselves with the hard facts of individual incidents, all they do is build distrust toward certain characters and pull the rug out. I really don't like that approach to whodunnits because that ruins my favorite part about them.

Speaking more generically about Scream 2, I am much more conflicted about the introduction this time. I like that it effectively retells the events of the first movie by presenting an in-universe movie called "Stab" which virtually parodies itself, presenting me the same thing with gratuitous nudity, broody characters, and and even more obnoxious score definitely pushes it over the edge into funny bad territory.

It also justifies Ghostface being able to kill in plain sight because he's popular now, everyone's pretending to be Ghostface. The costume isn't just easy to get ahold of, but his portrayal wouldn't look amiss at a movie theater premiere.

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However this movie also opens with the line "the horror genre is historical for excluding the African American element" which instantly made me roll my eyes so hard I gave myself a headache.

They push this character's "polite" racism so hard and she's so ****ing annoying. I'm glad they made her out to be a reluctant horror movie fan before doing the only thing a movie like Scream should do in this situation, and that is to kill her and her boyfriend. Because they are the token black characters and the token black characters always die first.

...but, almost as an apology for this scene, they also include 3 other black characters with speaking lines in this movie. Which I think makes 5 more than there were in the previous movie... so it kinda seems like the creators actually felt bad the previous movie wasn't more """diverse""", but also wanted to rationalize it by repeatedly harping on the "white male suspect" line, which wasn't a sticking point in the previous movie's numerous allusion to "scary movies".

In fact, mentioning this when your earliest references were Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th kinda makes no sense, because in Halloween the threat had already been identified as Michael Myers, in Nightmare on Elm Street the killer is a dream monster, and in Friday the 13th the killer is Jason's mom.

So what movies is this movie trying to take after now with this line?
The laundry list of Z-Grade slasher fliks Randy lists off?

Honestly disappointed Randy died, the comedy relief is one of the few characters deserving of plot armor because his existence makes your movie better.

Also mentioning sequel tropes in your first of multiple sequels kinda sets your 3rd and 4th movies up for failure.

A lot of the dialog in this movie was annoying. I didn't mention it before but Gale was a gargantuan bitch in the previous movie and I don't want to be endeared to her. Seeing her relationship woes with derpy Deputy Dewey also does nothing for me. I don't like either of these characters, I don't want them to get together, and I don't want to watch anything about them getting together.

Seeing Gale get punched in the face or harassed by reporters herself is a nice dose of medicine, but when her character doesn't change that doesn't suddenly make me like her.

There's also an unforgivably stupid moment where Sydney scares herself off of revealing Ghostface's identity when he knocks himself out, and OF COURSE that's when he escapes. That's really ******* annoying.

I also don't know why Debbie didn't jump off the stage during climax when Sydney is attacking her with stage props. It seemed as though she was intimidated by the Ghostface mask on the floor??? Like, as though getting off the stage would maybe magic her fingerprints onto the mask and implicate her?????

That's my only read of how this scene is edited, it honestly makes no sense while watching it.

There's not a whole lot else to say. I can't really say I'm disappointed because I didn't expect much and I didn't get much, so there you go.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Weak]

Omnizoa

10-27-22, 09:46 PM

Tried watching Sadako 2019 and bailed halfway through. Skipped to the end and nabbed this terrifying screenshot of Sadako killing with her Inexorable Stare:

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89597&stc=1&d=1666917941

EDIT: I don't know why this was flagged as review, that was not my intention.

Omnizoa

10-27-22, 10:17 PM

Literally just found out a new Sadako movie releases tomorrow. Will see how difficult it is to get ahold of.

Gideon58

10-28-22, 08:25 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89587&stc=1&d=1666837900
Scream 2
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 1997

WHY'D I WATCH IT?

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Weak]

This was my least favorite of the four movies.

Omnizoa

10-30-22, 11:04 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89614&stc=1&d=1667181753
Scream 3
Horror Comedy Mystery / English / 2000

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Scream 2 kinda sucked. Maybe this is one of those Devil May Cry style sequels.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"I'm not happy that I'm 35 playing a 21-year-old. I'm not happy that I have to die naked. And I'm not happy that my character is too stupid to have a gun in the house after her boyfriend's been cut up into fish sticks."

A dog, marriage.

Let's go over my predictions once again:

1.) Detective Kincaid, borrows Dewey’s phone, Sydney is contacted by the killer for the first time, presses Dewey for Sydney’s whereabouts, Dewey confirms he has Sydney’s number, implicated by Dewey, appears to like movies, says he “knows his way around the studios”, says “Hollywood is about death”, the killer claims to have killed Sydney’s mom so could have known her from the Hollywood scene, says “my life” is his favorite scary movie, absent during a Ghostface attack, the killer survives gunshots to the chest w/ bulletproof vest x2, VICTIM
2.) Angelina (Sydney’s Actress), implicated by Dewey, shade thrown by Dewey, found hiding in the bathroom with a Ghostface costume and cell phone, Sydney immediately grants her credibility and is attacked immediately after separating from her, questioned by Detective Wallace, unsettling acting, implicated by found Ghostface costume/cell phone/voice changer, aware of secret passages in Milton’s Mansion, DIES???
3.) John Milton, Lance Henrickson!, produced the Stab series as well as movies featuring Sydney’s mom, implicated by suspicious promotional photos, admits to keeping the connection a secret, implicated by the killer pretending to be Sydney on the phone, has secret passages in his Mansion which the killer is aware of, DIES
4.) Dewey, “if I thought like a homocidal maniac…”, fires shots at Ghostface who rolls out of view and claims Ghostface is gone after checking alone, the killer survives gunshots to the chest w/ bulletproof vest x2, Dewey still has a noticeable limp, present during a Ghostface attack, BYSTANDER
5.) Jennifer (Gale’s Actress), implicated by Dewey, implicated by suspicious promotional photos, implicated by Dewey again, Roman dies when the two of them are in a group, present during a Ghostface attack, DIES
6.) Roman (Stab 3 Director), implicated by suspicious promotional photos, implicated by found Ghostface costume/cell phone/voice changer, DIES, KILLER
7.) Detective Wallace, probably shares access to information Kincaid has, the killer survives gunshots to the chest w/ bulletproof vest x2, BYSTANDER
8.) Tyson (Randy’s Actor), implicated by found Ghostface costume/cell phone/voice changer, DIES
9.) Bianca, Carrie Fisher!, implicated by Dewey, Sydney’s Mom was secretly an actress, BYSTANDER
10.) Sarah (Candy’s Actress), implicated by Dewey, DIES
11.) Scream 1 Killers, take credit for killing Sydney’s mom like the Scream 3 killer, DO NOT APPEAR
12.) Stone (Jennifer’s Bodyguard), Patrick Warburton!, DIES
13.) Gale, present during a Ghostface attack, VICTIM
14.) Tom (Dewey’s Actor), DIES
15.) Martha (Randy’s Sister), BYSTANDER
16.) Sydney’s Dad, BYSTANDER
17.) Cotton, DIES
18.) Jay & Silent Bob, BYSTANDERS

My Theory: There would be one killer this time, to undermine the consistency of the previous movies each featuring two killers. Randy's post-mortem suggestion that the killer would be "unkillable" would hold true because Ghostface survived multiple gunshot wounds. This is possible with a bulletproof vest which would strongly implicate anyone affiliated with the police. PARTIALLY TRUE

While this movie was quick to get back into the thick of things it felt like it took a while for it to really turn into a whodunnit. I think maybe a third of the movie passes with multiple casualties before the characters start seriously dropping hints about who the killer(s) could be.

This movie, unlike Scream 2, does a much better job at dispersing doubt amongst the cast, and there are far more characters to consider suspects this time since all major characters in the series have in-universe actors performing their roles in the fictional Stab 3 movie.

And this time they really drum this one up as the finale of a trilogy. The first time around we had two killers who took credit for Sydney's mom's death because they're psychos. The second time around we had a dumbass who wanted a censorious lawsuit and a mother of one of the previous killers wanting revenge. This time we have Sydney's surprise half-brother revealing themselves as Stab 3's director as part of a master plan to kill Sydney's mom and her, all because Sydney's mom ****ed around to get into Hollywood and he... somehow was born and abandoned and now wants to take away what was taken from him.

Flimsy though it sounds, it feels like a very appropriate villain motivation for once. Not just being psychotic, not just wanting revenge, but a little of both in a way that actually ties into the themes of moviemaking and Hollywood tropes.

I am disappointed though, this time, that I was once again wrong about who the killers were, because not only was Roman shown to be dead, and apparently confirmed to be dead, but there was extremely little circumstantial evidence to implicate him.

And AGAIN, this movie does not live up to the standards Case Closed has set for whodunnit mysteries, because all we get are suggestive camera shots, whataboutism, and rarely hard evidence.

In fact, looking it up now, I realize there's actually been a Case Closed film series from the late 90s up to now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Case_Closed_films#Film_series) which probably puts this mystery writing to shame. I should check those out.

The hardest evidence we get is against Angelina who Sydney finds plainly hiding in a bathroom stall, in killer boots, with the Ghostface costume, and a cell phone... and when she appears to be killed later the knife is parallel to her body and she's dragged out of shot so nobody can confirm she's dead.

She HAS to be at least one of the killers, but no, she's just a casualty. And in fact, this movie makes a point multiple times of confirming different characters are dead, and one of them turns out to be the killer!

I'm also frustrated because Detective Kincaid would have been a perfect killer if they just eased up a little bit.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89615&stc=1&d=1667181846

It's nice of them to bring back Randy because he really was important to previous movies. It seemed kinda crappy that he didn't implicate anybody on the spot in the video he recorded before his death, but if you consider the points characters make about trilogies wherein "anything goes" and "the killer is supernatural" because "he can't be stopped by knives or bullets", that low-key suggests that he's wearing a bulletproof vest which is a HUGE point against Detective Kincaid!

Another huge point against him is that he borrows Dewey's cell phone. Only after this is Sydney contacted by the killer for the first time, and it's only LATER shown that Dewey does have Sydney's number despite claiming to not know where she is. This detail goes largely under the radar by most of the cast, but it makes such a relatively strong case against Kincaid that I wanted it to be him! I wanted the movie to validate my attention to detail!

Good whodunnits do this, but Scream 3 doesn't!

Where the **** did Roman get a bulletproof vest? Not that he can't buy one, but I wanted the killer's first use of a bulletproof vest to carry some indication of who it was!

Thankfully, there is one scene in which the camera pans to a rack of vests before cutting to Sydney stealing a gun out of the detective office (which seems to be an awfully dangerous place to leave an unsecured handgun alone with an unstable civilian), but of course the literal one time Sydney brings a gun to an encounter Ghostface forces her to discard it with a metal detector.

BUT THEN SHE HAS A SECOND GUN! ON THE SAME ANKLE.

When the **** did Sydney get a second gun?
Has she always had a gun?
Why'd she bring two?
In case Ghostface screens her with a metal detector for the first time in history?
For the first time he's ever wearing body armor in history?
So that he can steal it and shoot her revealing her ALSO wearing body armor for the first time in history?

Talk about a roller coaster, holy shit.

I am glad she actually took the vest. If she didn't I would be forced to compare this to the painful chainsaw scene in the Evil Dead remake.

Sydney stabbing the killer twice in the back and then finishing with "Stab 3, right?" was honestly a great line and in tradition with the movies so far he gets cartoonishly turned into cheddar when he jumps back up and screams bloody murder.

Other times though, the lines were just terrible. Ghostface starts faxing the characters a script as he's stalking them and one of the girls goes "I wanna know what happens, I wanna know what happens!" as though this was Unfriended. Part of the script he sends says he "will grant mercy to whoever smells the gas" the literal moment the entire house explodes.

First off, you evidently killed the only person who noticed the gas, secondly, to blow up the entire house that gas has to be so thick in the air that the characters would be coughing.

Other lines seem poorly delivered, which is weird because this movie seemed to have significantly more star power behind it, but they had such minor roles. I mean you put Kronk in the movie and he wasn't given a single funny line of dialog. That is a bigger travesty than every other sin this series has committed combined.

And that includes the return, for the third time, of Dewey and Gale's romantic subplot which I never cared about, still don't care about, and won't care about when I see the fourth movie either. SHUT UP, Dewey's a cringey idiot and Gale's a perma-bitch. Let it go!

OVERALL THOUGH...

...despite my own bitching...

...I agree with Gideon, this movie was better than Scream 2. It takes longer to get me invested in trying to figure out who the killer is, but when it does it does a much better job at distributing suspicion across the suspects. The movie's dialog is also significantly less annoying this time around.

My biggest gripe is just that this series has failed to do any justice to whodunnit mysteries.

You subverted my expectations, good job.

As a parody of slasher films that's the MINIMUM I expect from you. But as a whodunnit mystery in addition to a slasher parody, I would like my efforts to be rewarded or at least met with "you were wrong, but because of this evidence, this is why".

It's been 3 movies in a row and each time the killer(s) have been picked off of a dartboard and I feel like I've been scammed.

I'm coming to this movie, as I would any whodunnit, hoping to be given the means to figure out who the killer is so I can feel like an awesome genre savvy moviegoing genius, but when you go "THE BEDROOM LAMP WAS THE KILLER ALL ALONG! AND THE REFRIGERATOR WAS IN ON IT!" then I just want to throw up my hands and give up.

And for that reason I will not be taking the same amount of effort to keep track of characters' names and the cases against them for Scream 4, however I will offer a prediction:

The killer will be someone we already know, perhaps a recurring cast member or somebody who's died in a previous movie???

...that's my guess.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

11-06-22, 12:16 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=89690&stc=1&d=1667704408
The Thing
Monster Horror Thriller / English / 1982

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been a while since I've seen it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
A dog.

My opinion on this movie has remained pretty much unchanged throughout the years, and that's that The Thing is a very simple, but very effective monster movie.

I know people want to credit John Carpenter with big braining this whole production, but I've seen the sorts of movies he makes and The Thing isn't nearly as polished as you think it is.

If you don't already know the premise, it's that a Norwegian Antarctic installation chases a husky onto an American Antarctic installation and die when they crash their helicopter and open fire. It's eventually revealed however that they were trying to kill "The Thing", which is an alien they unearthed with the ability to absorb and perfectly mimic any person given enough time and privacy. Once this is revealed, the conceit becomes discovering who is the sussy imposter.

My biggest issues with this movie are that 1.) the cast size is about on-par with 12 Angry Men, but only about half the cast get even a fraction as much time to distinguish themselves from one another, so it's hard to become invested in anybody but Kurt Russel's character, 2.) this exacerbates the fact that it's never made quite clear what the sequence of infection is. It's eventually established that as much as a particle of The Thing can infect you, but given such an incredibly low standard for infection, this makes it virtually impossible for the movie not to be able to rationalize any deus ex machina. Finally, 3.) I'm just not a fan of the monster designs.

I know this is perhaps the biggest sticking point between this movie it's 2011 "premake", but I genuinely have never found the monster designs appealing. They're made to look gross, which, congratulations, you succeeded in that, but I'm also watching a screen and am supposed to be enjoying what I'm looking at. Gratuitous gore and body horror is almost as far as you can possibly get from something appealing to watch.

This is a big reason why a lot of what's taken for granted with modern horror just does not fundamentally work. Because scaring the viewer and making them ill is honestly the opposite of how I want to feel watching anything.

Not that The Thing is scary, but it sure is strange that I can find stuff online suggesting that Carpenter wanted to make a monster movie that deviated heavily from the "man in a costume" concept that comprised the original Thing From Another World, yet ironically this movie succumbs to it's own ridiculously dated effects.

The scene in which Palmer bites Windows' head, lifts him bodily off the ground, and flails him around is peak cartoon violence in this movie. It's absolutely absurd to watch. Much of the blood is plainly jam, several effects are only possible with reverse shots, and it's very apparent when you're looking at a mold versus a monster prop meant to be moved.

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That's not to say that all of the practical effects are bad, I'd say they're pretty decent overall, especially during the autopsy scenes, but the worst of them date this movie harder than anything else and again, the monster just isn't appealing to look at. Compare this to another classic movie monster, the Xenomorph from Alien, that monster was also about changing forms and ripping through peoples' bodies, but it looked cool.

There's a decent amount of other bullshit in the movie like how they find one of the Norwegian guys that killed himself... somehow by slitting both wrists... while his neck has been half severed... and his blood freezing mid-flow. How in the **** did that happen?

How also did Blaire get a computer to simulate the speed of a global infection AND determine the % chance that anyone on the base is already infected?

The nice 75% is especially convincing, definitely didn't script some bullshit command line program in a few minutes for that one.

The cast use flamethrowers liberally to burn bodies, even indoors, and somehow the whole base never catches fire? We know that they use fire extinguishers, but they're not always shown and this includes scenes where most of the cast is tied up, and an entire wall got torched.

Better yet, what even do these characters DO around here?

We got a doctor... we got a pilot... and some other guys... but we literally only see them drink, play pool, and smoke weed. What are their actual jobs? It seems like Garry is supposed to be some sort of deputy or something, but he's got some of the worst trigger discipline in the world.

There's lots of random shit like that, but at least the movie trades away character development for plot development. Not that that's very deep either of course, but the movie's immediately engaging and a solid popcorn flik from beginning to end.

Thinking back on the Halloween theme and how it was better than Platoon, I kinda feel like The Thing was a bit too reserved with it's theme. GRANTED it's just a couple isolated beats, but it's such a great tone-setter. The slow-pan to the dog when everyone's forgotten about it and the theme kicks in? That's great.

It's also an excellent touch to queue it up when MacReady passes the booze off to Childs after he says "let's wait and see what happens". We don't know that MacReady was ever infected, but we DO know that he alone was told that people shouldn't share food, so passing the booze could be seen as extremely malicious.

It's a nice little open question ending, and it's a fun sit, but I still can't really call this movie a favorite. It just doesn't put itself over the edge by doing anything other than what it advertises on the tin, and the tin doesn't go into much detail, list the ingredients, or even include a contact number so that I call the manufacturer to complain.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

Omnizoa

01-01-23, 04:12 AM

REWATCH UPDATE!: I have revisited Pitch Black. You can see my updated review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1458291-pitch-black.html).

Omnizoa

01-01-23, 02:39 PM

REWATCH UPDATE!: I have revisited my second-ever review, Dragon Tiger Gate. You can see my updated review here (https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/1455360-dragon-tiger-gate.html).

Omnizoa

01-06-23, 05:41 PM

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Friday the 13th
Horror Thriller / English / 1980

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Haven't seen it. Probably the slasher movie icon I'm most surprised is not already in Dead by Daylight, probably because they already attempted to release their own asymmetric horror survival game based on it.

I already know the twist going in.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Killing a live snake on camera, very nice.

Before talking about this movie, I'd like to describe a nightmare I had his morning. "Describe" is a bit generous in this case because, as is the case with dreams and nightmares, it's easy to forget details.

The important part is that I was imagining myself coming home in the dead of night only to discover that my home had been trashed. Drawers pulled out, stuff scattered all over the floor, clearly I had become the victim of a burglary. Already a bad feeling. But then, and I don't remember what it was, something subtle about the environment clued me into the certainty that the person who was in my house was still there, and in that moment, standing in the middle of my living room, I realized I was not alone.

A terrifying feeling and enough to jolt me awake into the real world once again. I can't even think of the last time I had a nightmare so unsettling.

THE POINT is to say that the random nightmare I had was scarier than this movie.

Let me see if I can summarize this in a way any seasoned moviegoer can understand:

This is a 1 hour and 35 minute movie,

and it takes 1 hour and 10 minutes for any of the characters to find out they're being killed.

That is probably THE most boring execution of a slasher movie I can imagine, shy of the entire cast being oblivious for the entire length.

This movie has a simple premise: Camp counselors are getting ready to reopen the camp after being closed following a slew of mysterious deaths. Somebody doesn't want that and picks them off one by one.

Which is honestly a great thing because these counselors are apparently all immature sex-brained potheads, a wonderful standup crew I would trust to take care of my children in the isolation of the woods in the middle of nowhere!

Apparently Mrs. Vorhees agrees, mother of the series killer, Jason, who is revealed to be the murderer... in the last 15 minutes of the movie. Jason drowned offscreen because the last rash of weed-breathed dry-humping wannabe natives left him to die.

I can get behind this revenge mission, kill 'em all I say. After all, Mrs. Vorhees is the most entertaining performance in the movie, it's only right that she assert her dominance by erasing the rest of the cast. Though I do find it frustrating that only after she's revealed, having killed several men and women alone, she manages to somehow be less coordinated than Ghostface.

The twist ending is after she's run through, Jason jumpscares the last girl by jumping out of the lake. You never even see the hockey mask that later became his signature look.

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I appreciate that they tried to make the relatively mild irresponsibility of the counselors part of the point as to why they were being killed, Vorhees could have gone further about them being busy having sex or something, but the truth is the vast majority of this movie is just these characters fussing about and Mrs. Vorhees supposedly behind a handheld camera sneaking up on people to perform a hit-or-miss practical effects shot.

The orchestra exclusively follows her too, so all of the strings and "ch ch ch ch hah hah hah hah" stuff only supplement the movie when there's an impending death scene, robbing much of the movie of it's surprise.

The way the score is mixed into the movie is also kinda distracting, this isn't something I normally complain about but I feel like the ambiance and orchestral stings are much too close to the microphone as compared to the rest of the scene. It just sounds like I got a passive aggressive violinist huffing in my ear for some reason.

Another thing that completely took me out of it was the Kitchen Lady. She's supposedly one of the counselors on her way to the camp, except she's hiking with an enormous pack of travel gear and she's just alone walking about with a big smile on her face for no reason at all.

When she's alone, when she's petting a dog, when she's talking to people, when she's hitchhiking, she's just got a constant innocent smile on her dumb face... right on up until she gets killed off super early, which was surprising to me because she got more establishing shots and dialog than any other one character up to that point in the movie.

Everybody else including Kevin Bacon exist to do nothing but act immature, have sex, and get killed. Just a totally vapid cast all the way around.

It wasn't fun, it wasn't scary, it wasn't engaging, I couldn't even get any catharsis out of seeing the characters get killed because they're not big enough ********.

For a movie inspired by Halloween, it at least managed to not be so hilariously stupid, but even then I think Halloween had more going for it.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Weak]

Omnizoa

01-09-23, 04:58 AM

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The Indian in the Cupboard
Modern Fantasy / English / 1995

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I honestly think I may have seen this movie all of once or twice in my entire life and while not totally memorable, it's always left a big impression on me and I've long wanted to see it again.

All I remember is a kid finds out toys he puts in his cupboard come to life and there are disastrous consequences for his actions. At some point he takes the "Indian" to school and bad things happen.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Basic premise is thus: Main Kid is gifted a toy """indian""" and a random cupboard for his birthday. Using a key left over from his grandmother he discovers that when the toy indian is placed inside, the door closed, locked and unlocked, he becomes Little Bear, an actual Native American plucked from history.

At least the idea that he's plucked from IRL history is questionable, we later see Darth Vader and a dinosaur come to life too, and we all know those aren't real.

Naturally, Little Bear is terrified to find himself the tiny victim of a modern day child, but thankfully he speaks fluent English and Main Kid means well.

By "means well" I here mean he's a giant oppressive bigot, which is my classy way of lampshading the current year interpretation of a white male taking advantage of an indigenous minority only to then flip it on you to once again draw attention to extreme double standard in which this same character kicks a rat down a flight of stairs and needlessly animates a deer for the sole purpose of Little Bear hunting and killing it.

I understand part of the point is to highlight the dangers of playing god, but this is seriously undermined when the same character you trust not to hurt the miniature Native American man casually punts a helpless animal down a flight of stairs just to spite his brothers. Also the deer? And let's not even get into the arranged marriage this character seriously considered before Little Bear was like "Whoa, whoa, hold up, brutalizing and slaughtering helpless animals is all well and good, but can we get a little women's rights up in here?"

Of course the closest this movie actually gets to seriously thinking about any of these things is when Main Kid calls both the Cowboy and Indian "old-fashioned", which I can't say is any worse than if this movie actually had an agenda to swing around, which if it were made today, 100% would have.

This movie's a lot like Toy Story, but it's much darker. Little Bear is attacked by a pigeon very early on and to treat his wounds Main Kid animates a world war medic who describes the awful warzone he was just ripped out of. The second time it happens it sounds like he was about to die, and considering it's never known how the time interaction works, the second time he's de-animated, he may well have been killed. I don't know how that's supposed to be reflected in the toy, can you animate a historical figure at a time in their life when they died?

On at least one occasion we see Main Kid animate another "Injunn" to yoink his bow, but they die of fright, and presumably they de-animate in a dead pose?

Anyway, "cupboard logic" isn't a focus of the movie, and provided that it's dismissed as "magic" and it does nothing to contradict the rules governing this "magic", then it's as acceptable as the dream device in Inception as far as I'm concerned.

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Main Kid discovering the magic of the cupboard is cool in every way a little childhood imagination needs it be and I was personally surprised, for a movie this old, that the visual effects to make Little Bear appear tiny actually aged incredibly well. He's basically greenscreened into the scenes and they did an excellent job to make the lighting on him match the background and his movement across it appear natural with the often uneven terrain, like fabric. There are a lot of little touches that they did to sell this miniature person and it's great and of course it makes me want to rewatch The Borrowers.

While the visual effects may be solid, I'm a little bit put off by the cinematography. Really for no other reason than because while the extreme close-ups are necessary for some of the to-scale shots, you also have a dopey-looking mouthbreathing kid with an overbite that the camera cannot leave well enough alone. Nothing against the kid of course, the more vulnerable he looks the more you sell the child wonderment angle, but let's be real, nobody wants to see a low-angle shot of this face engulfing your screen.

Beyond that, the only other thing I can think to add would be that while Main Kid's friend gifted him the indian toy, he was infuriatingly irresponsible with both him and the cowboy he insisted on animating too. Dumb little shit has no concept of any consequences beyond stroking his ego. I honestly would have stopped being friends with him after the shit he pulled in this movie.

Overall, while there are some pretty ugly ethical quarrels this movie casually overlooks, overall I really like what it does. There's something about a mysterious C.S. Louis-esque cupboard and a special skeleton king that can realize the lives you imagined for the cheapo little army figures you had growing up.

I also like that this isn't a conventional conflict for the main character. It isn't really just about concealing their existence from those that could harm them, it's also about having a dependent, taking responsibility for a life you brought into the world, and the consequences that can come from having that kind of power.

It sort of feeds into that "it's desirable because you can't have it" sort of thing where in the end, having a real life tiny indian village in your bedroom sounds frickin' cool, it's also totally ethically prohibitive.

Better for that imagination to stay where it is, lest there be consequences.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

01-10-23, 04:59 AM

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Halloween II
Horror Slasher / English / 1981

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I guess I was just curious how a sequel could shake out.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
You ever wonder what happened during the events of Halloween? What's that? You've seen that movie? No, I mean do you ever wonder what happened on Halloween night in Halloween? No?

Oh, I see how you might misunderstand, you see Halloween only presents the events of the beginning of Halloween night, you didn't see the whole night, right? So yeah, whereas the previous movie covers the whole day, Halloween 2 covers the rest of the night where Myers continues his murderous rampage and finds Laurie Strode in the hospital.

I really don't know how necessarily all of this was, our only takeaways at the end of the day are:

1.) Laurie is Michael's sister.
2.) Michael Myers is dead.
3.) Michael Myers can't die.

Laurie's role is to be pretty much a potato through 70% of the movie up until the moment she realizes Myers has found her in the hospital. Thankfully, rather than pull a Friday the 13th on us, the rest of the cast is on the hunt for the masked serial killer.

This results almost immediately in the one of the first and funniest deaths of the whole movie: A police officer mowing down a child in their cruiser, slamming them into a van, and EXPLODING.

Never mind that it was a drunk teenager wearing a mask that gives him tunnel vision, that officer was speeding through a suburban neighborhood looking to kill some kids.

The police and security are pretty much a showcase of ineptitude throughout the movie. We get an unarmed security guard who irresponsibly hands his walkie talkie off to a nurse and blatantly refuses to explain how it works, resulting in preventable deaths. We get a sheriff who repeatedly gets within stabbing reach of a supposedly dead Myers who is plainly still armed and makes no attempt to disarm him, basically inviting Michael to tear his throat open... it's not a great showing by law enforcement in this movie.

Most of the movie surrounds the events at the hospital following Laurie's arrival and it's mostly pretty boring. Speaking of bad showing, our hospital staff are made to look pretty shitty too, literally sneaking off during work, while they have patients, to have hottub sex which the hospital has for some reason. Naturally they die, but why must it always come to this? Why can't people keep their **** to themselves for one horror movie? At least you'd have a decent shot at surviving...

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Maybe, I dunno, Michael really does kill like 90% of the cast in this movie.

Although they don't do themselves any favors either, there's literally a scene where one of the hard-up paramedics discovers a body bled out on the floor and with no provocation slips in the blood and knocks themselves out.

This is literally ATM level slapstick. You remember ATM? That awful slasher movie about a killer who spooks some randos into trapping themselves in an ATM booth, lights a fire inside, gets them to climb up on top of one another to set off the fire sprinkler, and in that moment of glorious victory dunks themselves headfirst into a countertop.

Nothing has ever beat that in my mind, not even the girl from the Another anime who inexplicably impales themselves Final Destination style on their own umbrella. One way or another, when you're talking about a horror setting where it's already somebody else's job to kill you and you manage to kill yourself by tripping over your own two feet? Man there's something special about that.

Not too much special about this movie though. It was mostly pretty boring, I don't get anything out of seeing innocent people graphically slaughtered because I'm not a twisted freak.

One little point of credit I'll give this movie though, Mr. Sandman is a solid track inclusion. As Gremlins can attest, there's something about repurposing pleasant-sounding 50s tunes and presenting them in a far more sinister context that never gets old.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Meh...]

Tugg

01-10-23, 05:12 AM

So, are you not watching Scream 4 5 and soon 6?

Omnizoa

01-11-23, 09:04 AM

So, are you not watching Scream 4 5 and soon 6?
I'm procrastinating.

Omnizoa

01-15-23, 01:17 AM

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Sunshine
Sci-Fi Thriller / English / 2007

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another movie I've seen, but never reviewed.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"So if you wake up one morning and it's a particularly beautiful day, you'll know we made it."

Let me start off with the worst part about this whole movie:

The butt rock during the End Credits.

Now that that's established, let's talk about what this movie does well, which is most things.

A minor league cast of characters including Captain America, Scarecrow, and Wing Chun are scientists on the second and final voyage to detonate a payload in a dying sun in an attempt to save Earth from the next Ice Age.

The premise is simple enough, however small complications escalate into big questions and once characters start pondering which of them should die for the sake of the mission, a killer is introduced into their midst and the mission is not on their agenda.

It begins with the discovery of Icarus 1, the first vessel to make the trip and stop short of it's destination and the decision to collect a second payload for a second attempt to save Earth.

Changing trajectories causes inadvertent damage to the solar panel shield which needs to be manually repaired. To repair it, the Icarus 2 must be tilted even further, exposing part of it to the damaging rays of the sun. At first this is believed to only destroy a couple comm towers which the crew can live without, but for some reason we casually ignore that this hits their oxygen garden and now all of a sudden the crew's lives are on a timer, and that timer ends before they can complete the mission.

Connecting with Icarus 1 becomes a top priority, but rather than salvaging anything of use, they set loose the religious psychopath Captain, responsible for the sabotaging the original ship and killing his crew, and after 7 years has no plans to change.

I like that they use camera and post-production effects of obscure the appearance of The Captain, because he's portrayed as being sunburned from head to toe, and his religious dialog accompanying his obscure, but ghastly figure helps sell him as this strange cosmic threat.

The CGI overall in this movie is fantastic, not once did anything look unreal to fit. Perhaps the couple shots of the payload room were a bit reminiscent of Cube, but that's a very small minority of shots in a movie that otherwise features a lot of CGI.

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The tension felt appropriate, the dilemmas were reasonable, you're basically talking about a crew that knew they had signed up for a potentially one-way journey, so discussing the possibility of killing crewmates in the course of serving out the mission definitely makes sense... HOWEVER, I really would have liked there to be a much more substantive through-point about "saving humanity, but at what cost"? Like, okay, we decide to viciously murder someone we falsely suspect of sabotage because we can't all live off the remaining oxygen anyway, but if that's the sort of values that carried humans to this point, what value is there in keeping humanity going?

There's also a bit of a theme about the dissolving chain of command, wherein we begin by deferring all decisions to the captain who delegates certain decisions, but when he dies the next captain is basically ignored, and attempts to secure unanimous decisions democratically are undermined by dissent, and we return to anarchy.

There is one frustrating choice in this movie that irks me and that's when Scarecrow is informed that there's a mysterious 5th person aboard the ship and they're in the observation room, but rather than inform the other 3 people, he decides to go there alone, resulting in multiple unnecessary deaths. These seem like deaths that are much easier to blame on him than the deaths following the journey to Icarus 1 which he is blamed for merely because he concluded it was the wisest course of action... which it probably was.

Also, if you're the captain, and your subordinates are volunteering each other for dangerous tasks out of spite, what the actual hell are you doing by not stepping in?

Overall, the music was solid, the pace was good, the conflict was appropriate, and it's one of those movies that acknowledges and dwells in that enormous feeling of cosmic unimportance. That in the vastness of space, in it's endless collision of unstoppable forces, your existence just a tiny tragedy at the edge of a great tapestry.

I really liked it, but I don't think it will ever quite reach that threshold of entering my Favorites.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Pretty Good]

SpelingError

01-15-23, 01:52 AM

Sunshine is the film which got me into movies. Though I don't love it as much as I used to, I still think it's very good. Also, unlike some people, I like the final act quite a bit.

Omnizoa

01-15-23, 03:46 AM

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Jacob's Ladder
Psychological Thriller / English / 1990

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Considered a pre-millennium classic by some, Jacob's Ladder is one of the most popular recommendations when it comes to psychological thriller genre, and I've seen it cited as inspiration for other well known properties like Silent Hill.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I expected there to be a big reveal by the end of this movie, but I didn't expect it to be that "Jacob's Ladder" refers to a drug. While clearly it also carries a double meaning for whether Jacob is going to heaven or hell, it's a bit bizarre.

Basically, Jacob is a Vietnam vet who experiences inordinate flashbacks to a battle in Vietnam is struggles to remember, but also experiences increasingly horrific visions in his day-to-day life, suggestive that he made have some sort of mental illness.

Frustratingly, the trailer for this movie explicitly spoils the surprise and the movie itself doesn't take too long before also asserting that Jacob is indeed dead. Supposedly he died after having taken a rage-inducing drug which caused his platoon to kill each other... but also he's invented an entire narrative where he came back home, was resuscitated by a chiropractor, got divorced from his wife (before or after the military? I don't know), and hooked up with an entirely new love interest.

At the 45 minute mark we completely shift gears to his pre-divorce life, before one of his sons is hit and killed by a car, but then we shift back to the present(?) and I'm a bit lost at this point.

Again, I don't really understand the full sequence of events, whether this is a life he lead prior to the military, or whether he entirely manufactured this new relationship. Thankfully it doesn't convolute the plot much farther than that and the movie manages to stay mostly coherent despite it's anachronistic structure and casual bleeding of flashbacks and hallucinations.

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Eventually it is confirmed that Jacob is indeed dead when he returns home and only finds the son who died to greet him and bring him upstairs into the light, it couldn't be much more blatant. The only thing the closing scene adds is the background tune which sources a song that Jacob sings on a couple occasions throughout the movie, perhaps representing the earliest evidence that he's actually dead.

There are some cool ideas in this movie and it's presentation I can definitely see inspiring other works, but on it's own I feel like there are things it did that it didn't need to do.

I really don't know why the chiropractor needed to exist as a character, unless the intention was for him to be a literal angel to Jacob. I suppose his role makes sense if we're providing that, but even so his scenes are given such an uneven weight and they contribute nothing significant to the movie overall.

I was seriously speculating that it was going to be revealed that Jacob's chiropractor accidentally killed him with a spinal adjustment, which totally could have happened.

I also don't really like the emphasis on Jacob having two separate love interests at different times. I suppose it imposes a layer of grief for Jacob to flashback to a life he wishes he still had but can't have anymore, but then we're contrasting that with this new woman who he ostensibly gets along with and... again I don't even know if she's a figment of his dying imagination or what.

It sure seems strange for "Purgatorio" to take the shape of imagining you're a mailman living out of a budget apartment in the New York slums... and all of this is downstream of some government coverup of chemical warfare experiments in Vietnam?? It's all kinda weird.

It seems like the only takeaway from this movie is that, the dead need to let go of their past to move on... but of all the ways to communicate that, this borderline horror movie really wants to make a yarn of it.

I don't how to feel about it. It's not a bad movie, but it makes me want to revisit Death Parade.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

xSookieStackhouse

03-18-23, 06:55 AM

KeyserCorleone

03-26-23, 12:09 PM

Jacob's Ladder feels like a movie built specifically for me. It's a psycho-horror/thriller with elements of surrealism and war, not to mention two of the kids share the names of my brother and I, and the main kid Gabe shares the name of my nephew, AND IS PLAYED BY MY CHILDHOOD HERO.

Omnizoa

03-26-23, 11:33 PM

UPDATE!: I've decided that I'm going to stop updating the original post of this thread and just link to my Reviews list. There are pros and cons to the two different sorting methods I was using and it's getting to the point where any day now I'm going to hit the maximum character limit, so I'm gonna cut out early.

Omnizoa

03-27-23, 12:36 AM

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My Way
Military Action Drama / Korean, Russian, German, Chinese??? / 2011

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
So you've seen the World War II movie from the perspective of the Americans (Saving Private Ryan) and you've seen it from the perspective of the Soviets (Enemy at the Gates) and you've even seen it from the perspective of the Nazis (Downfall), but what kind of movie do you get if someone with a budget and no side to root for decides to make movie from the perspective of say... a Korean?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Well, it would be a Korean, except the Korean is actually Japanese, and it's not just any Japanese, it's literally a colonel in the Imperial Army soooo.... oops?

The premise of this movie is to """retell""" the legend of the """Korean""" soldier captured in Wehrmacht gear on D-Day. Why on earth is a Korean dressed as a Nazi? The movie's glad you asked because that's the story.

Basically Korean Guy, Kim, and Japanese Guy, Tatsuo, are kids with a passion for running... for some reason, however the Japanese have subjugated the Koreans so the relationship between these two aspirational boys is a bit tenuous.

One day Kim's dad(?) delivers a package to Tatsuo's dad(?) and it's blows a hole through his chest so Tatsuo musters enough racism to impress a Schutzstaffel regiment and denounces the evil Koreans.

Not to be outdone, the Japanese become full gamers and ban Koreans from competing against them in the Olympics (because they're sore losers you see). Some bad press reverses the decision and Kim manages to beat Tatsuo but is unfairly disqualified leading to a race riot. The Koreans are summarily sentenced to conscription and you are now 26 minutes into this war film.

Naturally Tatsuo reappears as the Giga **** in charge of Kim's squad, but only after a weird diversion in which they are ambushed by a Chinese sniper who doesn't realize they're firing on Koreans. Kim begins this arc by consistently demonstrating a practically suicidal opposition to violence, which ironically gets him into far more fights than he would find himself in otherwise.

Tatsuo charges the Koreans with a suicide mission and a number of them decide to escape in the night instead. All seems to be well, they even manage to drag Chinese Sniper Girl along too, but at the last moment they see a Soviet tank platoon roll in and Kim decides for some baffling reason to run back and... warn Tatsuo? Who's sentenced him to die?

Everyone gets steamrolled, Tatsuo has a big dramatic scene where he slaughters several of his own troops for fleeing a lost battle, and just like that, Tatsuo and Kim are now Soviet POWs.

Then there's a whole new subplot involving one of Kim's friend who now goes by "Anton", serving as the "proctor" of the enslaved Asians and there's all this infighting now and Tatsuo's basically eating shit the entire time because his character is morally irredeemable.

Hop-skip-and-jump through a few predictable plot points and BOOM, Kim and Tatsuo are conscripted into the Soviet army, Tatsuo has his taste-of-his-own-poison moment and it's supposed to be really eye-opening to him, and I'm like dude, when has it ever made a ****ing ounce of sense to throw soldiers into the proverbial woodchipper for doing something as rational as self-preservation? Do you WANT to expend soldiers?

Do you WANT to lose the war?

Are you a dumbass? Yes? Good, I'm glad we've established that.

Anyway, so the Korean and Japanese guy are both Nazis now because they're on a streak of losses and they still have to top their personal best.

There's something tonally inappropriate about the big magical slow-mo running to reunite on the beach scene you see in so many movies... when it's Normandy and both characters are fresh-faced Nazis.

"OMIGOSH I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE YOU AGAIN, sieg heil, WHATEVER HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR HAIR!?"

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Anyway they get captured by the Allies, but Kim dies and Tatsuo takes up his identity as a Korean to avoid retaliation from the Americans.

The whole movie culminates in the twist that the marathon runner that's named in the opening scene is in fact Tatsuo, who murdered numerous people as a racist imperial *******.

In fact, Tatsuo (and to a lesser extent Kim) is portrayed as having killed Americans, Germans, Soviets, AND Koreans and Japanese. So the big happy ending to the movie is this dude with insurmountable blood on his hands from every side of the war masquerading as a Korean person to escape retribution during peacetime where he gets to live out his fantasy of winning marathons without his archrival alive to stop him.

Kim is the most tragic character in this whole movie, he's proven to be an objectively better runner than Tatsuo, more committed to improving himself than Tatsuo, constantly eats shit both to spite and to save Tatsuo... he's one of those unreasonably virtuous characters where he basically has no character faults outside of the fact that trying to stop violence more often than not nearly gets him killed on a regular basis.

But he dies and Tatsuo gets the happy ending? Nah. Maybe if Tatsuo didn't do what he did, and MAYBE if this movie wasn't trying to recreate historical events it'd be easier to appreciate, but on top of the bad taste in the mouth, the whole story seems like a farce.

I'm willing to believe that some Asian guy managed to get himself conscripted into the Imperial, Soviet, and Germany armies. Like, SOMEBODY has to get luck that bad sometimes...

but it's not just one guy, it's two guys,

and it's not just two guys, it's a Korean and a Japanese,

but it's not just that, the Korean is a conscript and the Japanese is a colonel,

BUT IT'S NOT JUST THAT they've also had a marathon running blood rivalry since childhood predicated on mutual racism.

Gimme a break, that's jumping a few too many sharks for me.

I'd like to point out that this movie features dialog in Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, and even Chinese and there are NO baked in subtitles. You gotta find an .srt file with all that shit in English if you want to follow along with the story at all. I did not watch the English dub (if there even is an English dub).

Overall the movie was leaning in the direction of Meh... for me. It clearly got a big budget and it was spent well overall. Acting was solid, music was serviceable, CG was only occasionally obvious.

This movie clearly does not glorify war, but nor does it really denigrate war, ironically the characters manage a peaceful 3 years as Nazis, whereas the "fight or die" turnaround time in the Soviet and Imperial armies were far shorter. It's much more interested in it's characters, which I'd be more appreciative of if they weren't increasingly obvious fictional inserts.

A quick Wikipedia search finds that the person this movie is based on isn't even named Tatsuo or Kim and it's questionable whether they even existed at all, so that kinda puts a rusty nail in the coffin of this movie's plausibility.

It was okay. I can't really see my self itching to see it again. I could never quite figure out why it's called My Way.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

03-31-23, 11:37 PM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=92244&stc=1&d=1680316537
Stay
Psychological Thriller / English / 2005

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I want every psychological thriller I watch to be the next best thing I ever see, but I don't expect much. This time we have one starring Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling both around the peak of their popularity.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
The premise is pretty straight forward. Obi Wan Kenobi is a college psychiatrist with a formerly suicidal cursed-videotape-journalist for a girlfriend who crosses paths with Driver who claims to be losing touch with reality and plans to kill themselves on Saturday.

We're initially clued in to the idea that there's more going on with intermittent flashbacks to a car crash, but also the fact that this movie has a doom-and-gloomy soundtrack and LOOOVES morph transitions. So it sounds spooky all the time and we're constantly shunting characters between shots with violent shifts in perspective and sometimes direct transformations of one person's face into another person's face.

This gradually becomes compounded when small little oddities like weather predictions and increasingly concerning levels of deja vu lead Doctor Kenobi to suspect that Driver knows more than he lets on, and eventually, when he starts meeting characters meant to be dead, his own assertion about what is real and what isn't comes into question.

This movie did a fine job of keeping me questioning and speculating up until the end what was going on, but MOST IMPORTANTLY it didn't bitch out like so many other movies do by being surreal for surrealism's sake, leaving the ending entirely open to interpretation, and effectively resolving with no point whatsoever. I HATE that, but fortunately this movie doesn't do that, and it doesn't condescend to explain it to you either, it's show-don't-tell demonstrated in the simplest sense.

We get repeated allusions to a car crash in which multiple characters are suggested to have died, the main character's girlfriend is suicidal and by the end I assumed that the entire cast was dead and they're in some sort of purgatory, but that isn't the case.

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=92245&stc=1&d=1680316573

Instead, what unfolds is a previously incomplete scene of the crash in which the alleged deaths DO occur, and Ryan Gosling's character, overwhelmed by guilt over the crash lays dying on the concrete and first interacts with the rest of the cast who have left their nearby vehicles to see what's happening. It's established that they otherwise don't know each other, and we can infer through various clues that the movie we watched was essentially a projection of a world full of the faces he saw, or is seeing as he dies.

Multiple times Ryan and Ewan's character trade places or share dialog and it communicates that Ryan imagines Ewan as the therapist he thinks he needs. We also see his crush and Ewan's girlfriend trade places, further creating a parallel relationship that only exists in Ryan's head.

His suicidal thoughts project onto her, and his view of the Brooklyn Bridge is projected into her art, emphasized by his signature eventually appearing on all of her pieces. The man who buys his painting is also the same man who aggressively tells him to stop smoking on the train (which he really should do because it's extremely selfish behavior and I genuinely ****ing hate people that do that) which is a reversal of character that's never explained, but can be inferred as Ryan just reusing the same face for multiple characters in his imagination.

Very early on he makes a comment about how Ewan has the exact same ring that he lost, which is the ring he intended to give to the waitress he had a crush on, but never did, again a parallel to Ewan never giving his girlfriend the ring.

There are lots of little insights like this that aren't spelled out, but "paint a picture" that presents the increasingly hallucinatory terrain that is this movie as his dying imagination, and I'm sure if I rewatched it again I'd find even more little hints along the way.

Near the end I was also feeling a little bit stuffy... :(

I'm not prepared to say that this was a great movie. Not that I can really fault it for much, the production quality was solid, it kept me engaged, and the payoff was pretty good... BUT it lacked a really strong "hook" for me. The acting was only serviceable, it takes a bit to get going, and once it does it just kinda blurs into that whole surrealist circlejerk where you're basically waiting for the movie to finish.

I preferred the performances and intrigue in Jacob's Ladder, but I also prefer the presentation and twist ending of this movie.

It's hard to say, I think this is one I'll have to revisit after I've given it a bit.

EDIT: Apparently this movie got kinda shit reviews for some reason?

At review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_Tomatoes), 26% of 124 critics positively reviewed the film, and the average rating is 4.66/10. The critical consensus reads: "A muddled brain-teaser, Stay has a solid cast and innovative visuals but little beneath the surface."Morph transitions are not innovative, and the cast is "solid" only insofar as they are reputable actors. No idea what makes this movie "muddled".

James Berardinelli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Berardinelli) of ReelViews gave Stay 2½ stars out of four, calling it "interesting" but finding it "hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch) devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent."Comparing this movie to anything David Lynch has made is an insult to this movie. David Lynch does not have a monopoly on surrealist fiction.

Lou Lumenick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Lumenick) of the New York Post (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post) panned the film, calling it "a trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb."It's quite coherent, if you understood what was implied by the ending. The only "pretentiousness" I could possibly read is occasional references to Hamlet and certain artists, but this isn't insufferably delivered to the audience like it is in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and it's not unreasonable to expect someone dying to recall back to notions of abstract importance, like quotes about the universe and whatnot.

Michael Booth wrote in The Denver Post, "What's this movie about?" and added, "Stay goes nowhere for far too long, then tries to go everywhere in just a couple of final moments. I can’t tell you how they try to explain it, in part because that would give away what little satisfaction the movie holds, and in part because I have no blooming idea.I really don't think the conclusion I came to is that ****ing buried or open to interpretation. There is a blind character, alleged to have died, who miraculously regains his eyesight and says "this world isn't real". It's just a question then, what sort of world are we in then?

I think the ending answers that question pretty succinctly, but maybe it's just more obvious to me than whoever gets paid to write stupid shit for The Denver Post?

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

04-14-23, 10:28 PM

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Little Miss Sunshine
Dark Comedy Drama / English / 2006

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've watched it many times before, but it occurs to me that I've never reviewed it and that I still got that itch at the back of my mind questioning whether it's anywhere near quite as good as I remember.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I have one complaint about this movie: The literally one scene featuring fried chicken. **** fried chicken. Go vegan. **** you.

Now that that's out of the way and we're conveniently ignoring that stain on these characters... allow me to now explain why I think this is unironically a really good movie.

I am already hard to impress with comedies. I'm further hard to impress with family drama. The drama is either too petty or the jokes too forced.

Little Miss Sunshine manages to sidestep these issues in several ways: by featuring characters with real character faults, multiple life-changing tragedies, undermining these characters in various small silly ways, having them NOT acknowledge the absurdity of these events, and most of all; finding a way to pull some Grade A Wholesome Shit out of it.

You'd think a movie with a cast such as Heroin Grandpa, Winning-Obsessed Dad, The 40-Year-Old Suicidal-Ideations, and Hatred The Video Game would be absolutely miserable to watch, but it's got some of the most adorable moments I've ever seen in movies.

Much of it surrounds Olive, the chubby daughter with glasses with unrealistic dreams to win a beauty pageant, but who is slated to compete regionally after a cynical technicality that ultimately ropes the entire dysfunctional family into a dysfunctional minibus for a dysfunctional trip to the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant.

For the most part, the characters bounce off each other in pairs, Grandpa is secretly teaching Olive her talent routine, Dwayne, the son, and Frank the uncle both feel like similar outcasts. And Richard and Sheryl are having obvious marital problems.

To be critical once more, I feel like Sheryl is the only character who never gets any sort of arc to her character. She's established to be a closet smoker, and looks to be on track to get a divorce given Richard gambling a lot of money on his chances of becoming a motivational speaker. But that never really changes, so far as we're aware.

The movie is very good at communicating with the characters what the audience is most likely thinking in reaction to something that happens. Richard repeatedly demoralizing Olive by suggesting ice cream will make her fat and that she's a loser if she doesn't believe she'll be a winner is greeted with exactly as many deathstares to the back of his head as I believe are warranted in that moment.

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It's established, visually, in the very first scene, the contrast between Olive and the beauty queens she idolizes that she's just not in their league, and by the time everyone gets to the pageant and the whole family sees the competition, you can tell that they realize that they've put their daughter on stage to get slaughtered, and that this whole event is actually kinda twisted, especially with the hyper-sexualized outfits and... is that guy a pedophile?

All of this is to say that not even subtle communication in this movie was used to further Sheryl's character which is unfortunate because I feel like it makes her the odd one out of the entire cast.

The entire cast is great by the way. The big names in acting aren't wasted, Abigail Breslin and Paul Dano basically got their careers start with this movie, and we even get some supporting roles from pre-Walter White, and post-Chloe O-Brien.

This movie also earns a feather in it's hat for the soundtrack which can only be haphazardly described as "indie music", but manages to consistently straddle the line between uplifting and melancholic which simultaneously makes the heartwarming scenes warmer and the gutpunching scenes punchier.

The pace is very brisk with not a single scene struggling to keep me engaged. Often, even when I think about movies I love, there might be 1 or 2 scenes I'm pretty whatever about and wouldn't mind skipping, but honestly nothing comes to mind here.

You might think that this movie would lean heavily on deadpan and awkward social interactions, but considering we're working with Steve Carrell here, The Office is 100% NOT the flavor of comedy here. It's really not trying to make you cringe into a pretzel in embarrassment, it's just pockets of absurdity and the occasional dialog where we get a face-shot of Olive in her giant dorky glasses being told she's a fatass, or Richard being unintentionally implied to be gay to other characters (which, by the way, VERY tasteful use of a gay character, thank you).

You might also feel like the movie's trying to make some sort of statement about beauty pageants and the characters practically say as much, but most of the movie doesn't really concern the events of the pageant, it's more about the journey, the tragedies, and the comically incessant minibus horn that carries these characters along the way, as well as a desperate shared interest in seeing Olive realize her dream, if no one else's.

I recommend both this movie and it's director's commentary.

Final Verdict: rating_4 [Great]

Omnizoa

04-23-23, 11:15 PM

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Take Shelter
Psychological Thriller / English / 2011

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's a psychological thriller that's been buried among the identical marketing material for other rural dramas like Gone Girl. Is it good? Other reviewers think so.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'm pretty disappointed in this movie.

Not because I expected a lot going into it, but because it raised my expectations as it went on and it failed to realize the premise summaries I was reading about it.

Basic premise is Main Guy starts having nightmares that begin affecting his day-to-day life, it's eventually revealed that he worries that they foretell a big storm, while simultaneously worrying that he's developing paranoid schizophrenia in his 30s like his mom did.

The whole issue stems from the "it's eventually revealed" part, since I was reading that he was supposed to be receiving 'apocalyptic visions', but that's not at all what was communicated to me by the movie. There's an intermittently recurring storm theme in his nightmares, but nothing's immediately to suggest that it's "apocalyptic" beyond the rain being a funny color. It takes all the way until 90+% of the way into the movie before he imagines birds falling dead out of the sky.

Most of the time he's just imagining his dog attacking him, or someone else he knows attacking him, and then he associates that with some gas phenomenon he sees on TV once.

There isn't even any reason to believe he's experiencing schizophrenia symptoms whatsoever before he's borrowing mental illness books from the library and going to consult his mother on her experiences BEFORE we're ever told she's in a home for schizophrenia. The comments she makes about believing people were out to get her are really just a confusing contrast to Main Guy's experiences, which we only know to include nightmares.

The first time he hallucinates anything at all is the day after he takes some medication to help him sleep which confounds the premise even further.

Eventually we're supposed to believe that he's gone over the edge and is convinced there's some end-of-days gas storm on the way which he's endangered his daughter's ear surgery and borrowed against his house to expand a storm shelter to protect against... but really, the only evidence we as viewers have that he believes any such thing is the choices he makes insisting such, and he barely insists at all. He's virtually stoic throughout the entire movie up until the scene where he gets fired from his job (which makes that "risky loan" he took look especially nasty) and flips out on an entire room of people insisting "THERE'S A STORM A-COMIN'!!!".

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So it's really just that sort of post-hoc "this is why the viewer surrogate is doing this" sort of thing which is just kind of frustrating to watch. This stuff can be visually communicated to me through the medium of MOOOVIES and I'm not really getting that.

The proverbial cigarette burn that seals my issues with this movie is two-fold. One; there's really only two ways to end this movie: It was all in his head, or he's genuinely foretelling disaster. Take Shelter decides they want to have it both ways by having the big reveal that he's hallucinating the big storm, but then also betraying that by having an actually big storm.

I realize that's the more negative way I could put that, but that's how I feel about when it doesn't feel like either angle was earned.

Two; The "actual" big storm that's revealed in the end seems pretty ****in' feeble. We get a wideshot of the ocean with scary clouds, a couple visible waterspouts off in the distance, and the rain is piss-colored.

Ooooh, big dramatic moment where The Wife wordlessly nods her acknowledgment that Main Guy was right all along. That's pretty worthless to me. The one wideshot shot of the sandstorm in Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie known for relatively conservative CG, would have been a better sell on an end-of-days storm.

Now I'm not all negative, I like Main Guy's actor, it's easy to engage with him, the sound design was solid, I appreciate that Deaf Daughter wasn't the brutally hamfisted plot device that they were in A Quiet Place, or the kid in Signs, whose singular quirk is the alien's weakness or whatever.

Overall all though, we're clearly building up to this moment where we're revealing one of two obvious paths and it feels just a bit melodramatic when it's just "oh, there's a storm", rush down to the shelter, "okay storm's over", "but what if it's not!?" and we basically need the orchestra to pull a lot of weight that the script is failing to muster.

I would have been annoyed by the outcome, but I would at least have been somewhat surprised, if the plot entailed Main Guy locking them all in the shelter and then destroying or losing the key. Or even what the Wikipedia article suggested, possibly locking himself apart from his family to protect them from himself, which at no point happens.

The Wikipedia article also mentions this movie "explores themes of masculinity" which is also a massive ****ing lie and clearly written by a mentally deranged butthole because that is in literally no way substantiated by the movie.

Dude pisses the bed and is embarrassed to talk about how his nightmares have made him scared of the family dog, that's nothing to do with masculinity, that's just a human being with shame. Shut the absolute **** up, whoever wrote that horseshit.

Anyway, I'm calling this one on the upper-end of Meh... but I'll give it an Okay.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

04-24-23, 02:46 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=92453&stc=1&d=1682315091 The Lighthouse
Psychological Thriller / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The Green Goblin and Edward Cullen live in a lighthouse. Wouldn't even bother if it wasn't labeled psychological thriller and it wasn't recommended by YMS (however YMS likes art films and I do not).

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"DAMN YE! Let Neptune strike ye dead, Winslow! HAAARK! Hark, Triton! Hark! Bellow! Bid our father, the Sea King, rise from the depths, full-foul in his fury, black waves teeming with salt-foam, to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs 'till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more... only when, he, crowned in cockle shells with slithering tentacled tail and steaming beard, takes up his fell, be-finnèd arm – his coral-tined trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet! BURSTING YE, a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now – a nothing for the Harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon, only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself, forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea... for any stuff or part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul, is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"

"Alright, have it your way. I like your cooking."

This is one of those movies that just throws a whole bunch of what-the-**** imagery at you and resolves literally nothing by the end.

...which is all you need to know to know that I'm going to give this movie a shit score.

I... HATE... movies that do this. Symbolism is cool! Psychological breakdowns are cool! I can even ignore the artsy-fartsy choice to film the movie in black and white and a non-standard aspect ratio, and I've even demonstrated that I have an interest in navel-themed settings.

None of that goes to solve the most basic ****ing issue with this movie, which is that it accomplishes NOTHING. It is like Eraserhead with every possible negative connotation attached; it makes no sense, there are random continuity breaks, it is needlessly gross and hard to watch, and amounts to **** all by the end.

The best things I can say about this movie is that Willem Dafoe as a crotchety former sailor is kind of entertaining and Robert Pattinson's talent was officially wasted on Twilight. But that is not to say that it was well spent here.

Honestly, if this movie was marketed as Willem Dafoe flips out on Robert Pattinson in a lighthouse, I'd be more interested than I was, but that's not even what we get at the end of the day.

Robert is presented as Willem's subordinate, both of which are assigned to lighthouse keeper duty for a month. It's rapidly established that Willem appears to do no work, and spends his time masturbating up in the beacon, where he for some reason needs to lock himself, whereas Robert is shown doing basically all of the work.

It's also immediately established that both parties should be sharing the work and should not be drinking. If both of these things were held true, none of the conflict in this movie would have taken place. So we are talking about The Chumscrubber level of writing, where the out to literally the entire plot is blatantly presented and ignored from the outset.

I don't think I've ever compared any movie to both The Chumscrubber and Eraserhead, and let me tell you, I do not have good things to say about either of those movies. Those are easily in my Top 25 WORST movies I've ever ****ing seen, so it is not a generous comparison.

Basically, we follow most of the movie from Robert's perspective, he gets shafted with all the work and threatened to have his pay cut if he resists any of the extreme unreasonableness of Willem's character. Willem's portrayed as having some sort of weird sexual ritual while he's locked up in the lighthouse, but is also presented as possibly some secret Lovecraftian nightmare creature?

Simultaneously, Robert oscillates between having weirdly aggressive run-ins with seagulls which culminates in him grabbing one out of the air and violently and beating it into a bloody pulp... after he's been warned that killing a gull is bad luck. Also he's randomly hallucinating sirens, we even get a full-shot of mermaid vag as well as Robert thrusting into it interspersed with all the usual violent penetrative imagery art films love to associate with sex for some ****ed reason.

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So basically, it seems Robert's losing his mind, and it doesn't help that Willem repeatedly gaslights him into doubting how long they've been there or who was responsible for what thing.

That would seem like a relatively straightforward Shutter Island-type scenario, but they decide to convolute matters by suggesting that Robert and Willem only get along when they're drunk, which they become many many many times, resulting in fights, crazy sailor rants, and other random plot developments like how Robert is pretending to be someone he watched die... which is relevant for some reason.

It all comes down to a big fight where Robert treats Willem like a dog, basically buries him alive, he goes to the lighthouse, then he leaves the lighthouse for some reason, gets axed by Willem, who axes him back, goes to the lighthouse again, screams into the eternal void of the beacon... for ART REASONS and then falls down the stairs inside the lighthouse... only to smash cut OUTSIDE the lighthouse to him being eaten alive by seagulls...

...and apparently the lighthouse is missing now? Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean I have no idea, there's plenty of shots in this movie without the lighthouse in the background, so how on earth we're expected to suddenly believe the lighthouse is missing from a wideshot of an ambiguous rocky surface is entirely beyond me.

This entire movie is entirely beyond me. What was the point of the mermaid sex? What was the point of the seagull smackdown? What was the point of Willem stripping naked in front of the beacon? What was the point in him turning into a octopus creature?

What was the point in him being butt-naked and staring a laser beam directly into Robert's eyes? Apparently this shot is lifted from an art piece depicting "hypnosis"? WHAT DID THAT ADD TO THE ****IN' MOVIE YOU PRETENTIOUS ****IN' DUMBASSES!? What value is it if it doesn't correlate to anything that's happening? You just decided "that's a neat shot" and crammed it into the movie with zero regard to how violently it rips me out of my experience so I can say for the umpteenth time; "WHAT THE **** IS HAPPENING???"

I don't give a shit about either of these characters, I don't care if they die, it adds nothing to my experience to watch them masturbate themselves to tears because I can find more fulfilling pornography in Sonic the Hedgehog foot fetish fanfiction.

AT LEAST there was some semblance of mystery going on, and that's the only thing that keeps me from giving this movie the lowest possible rating, there are way more infuriating movies out there, but in terms of complete wastes of time, this movie fits the bill exactly.

This is the sort of movie I imagine Werckmeister Harmonies to be, and that is why I haven't watched it.

Final Verdict: rating_1_5 [Bad]

Omnizoa

04-24-23, 03:14 PM

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The Fisher King
Urban Fantasy Comedy Drama / English / 1991

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Possible pro: It's a fantasy movie starring Robin Williams.
Possible con: It's a fantasy movie directed by Terry Gilliam.

Only thing I know is that it's supposed to be another movie that plays with reality.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Terry Gilliam's movies are very hit-and-miss in my experience. And I suppose the same could be said of Robin Williams' filmography too.

Overall, while I appreciate what this movie was trying to do, I'm going to say that it's execution has been a miss for me.

The premise is Jeff Bridges (who looks and acts like a completely different character that The Dude I associate him with) is a "radio shock jock", which from the opening scene establishes for us what that term means by illustrating him as an incredibly insufferable ********.

For some reason his extremely unlikable persona on-air has made him a wealthy douchebag and just as he's prepared to migrate to television he discovers that his comments towards a frequent caller resulted in a mass shooting that left 7 women and the caller dead. Thankfully this news immediately impacts him, he feels terrible for what he did, and his empire spirals down the shitter as he now mooches off his girlfriend 3 years later.

Fast forward and he finds himself looking to take a concrete jump into the river when he's saved from hoodlums by... a homeless Robin Williams.

Williams' character, unlike Bridges, is unfortunately his usual turbo-autistic hyper-active psychotic with-a-heart-of-gold, only now he's surrounded by other crazy homeless characters and he's filthy too!

Williams saves Bridges and tells him about his quest for the Holy Grail (in a Gilliam movie???) before Bridges discovers that Williams is the husband of one of the women he incited to kill, so now he feels like he owes something to him, but it's kind of difficult to help him because he doesn't respect money... but there is a love interest he's been stalking...

So suddenly the main thrust of this movie becomes Hitch, which I'm not a fan of. Nevermind that the girl he likes is herself an unlikable character and Williams literally trips over himself to appease her, but throughout all of this we get Williams' mad ravings, allusions to the story of The Fisher King which he wrote about when he was a teacher before he disassociated, and this hallucinatory threat of "the Red Knight" which looks appropriately intimidating, but only Williams sees it and it's not like it ever gets him run over or anything (although it gets close).

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We're also treated to Bridges' strained love life with his girlfriend which is given a entirely unnecessary slap to the back of the head when after he hooks up Williams, salvages his career, and starts feeling good about himself again, says "I think I should be alone for a while".

The Girlfriend reacts to that in typical (though not entirely unreasonable) Girlfriend ways and it's just unnecessary additional conflict.

Also Williams is attacked by the cartoon thugs he saved Bridges from and is put into a coma until Bridges actually breaks into the random home Williams decided contains the grail and steals it. He does, and of course everything just works itself out in the end for some reason, credits.

It would be a mistake not to credit the fair bit of humanizing character development Bridges goes through, particularly with regard to his attitude toward the miscellaneous homeless characters he comes across. They have their own personalities, own pasts that have hurt them, and we get some nice moments between him and them where their commentary either situates the audience, or serves to inform and enlighten Bridges.

I'm disappointed that Williams never really comes back to reality, he disassociates with his former life as a teacher with a wife, and only after re-associating does he once ask Bridges permission to love again, or something. I don't really get it, but Bridges' character is secretly crying during the scene, so it's an important moment that's lost on me.

If Robin Williams was less Robin Williams,
if Jeff Bridges' girlfriend wasn't a subplot,
if the love interest was less quirk city...

I dunno, I feel like I can imagine a version of this movie that axes the Holy Grail through-plot and isn't attempting to crowbar in some parable about The Fisher King and Bridges attempts to restore Williams' life through more interaction with the homeless friends he's made in the past 3 years, then I could see a more enjoyable movie in this.

As it is, it's just that same weird style you expect from Gilliam movies. A lot of interesting camera shots, a splash of fantastical absurdism, but intercut with extraordinarily dark and sometimes gross or gruesome imagery. And then there's just a random love story or two in there somewhere for some reason.

Not a fan. I didn't expect to be a fan.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

04-26-23, 10:21 PM

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Young Sherlock Holmes
Mystery Adventure / English / 1985

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen it many times, but not recently, and never reviewed it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Pheasant and horses.

I already have a lot of nostalgia for this movie since I grew up with it on VHS so it's naturally challenging to judge it objectively with that in mind. But having not seen it in a long time I can definitely look back on it from a more critical perspective.

The most glaring thing to me is how much this movie seems to be an amalgam of Temple of Doom, which predates it, and Hook, which it predates, all three of which are Steven Spielberg movies.

Hook's climactic swordfight seems to be lifted from this movie while Temple of Doom's iconic scene where a trio of protagonists sneak up on an ancient religion's cruel secret ritual shortly before becoming their next victims almost begs for a bingo game to be made of the similarities.

In truth, Young Sherlock Holmes is a much more family-friendly Temple of Doom movie, and I say that bearing very clearly in mind how much nightmare fuel there actually is in this movie.

This movie separately reminds me of The Rescuers Down Under insofar as it's disturbing imagery is concerned, and the fact that I'm pretty confident that it unintentionally awakened some pretty concerning fetishes in children at some point.

The whole premise is simple enough; we get a voiceover narration from the perspective of Watson presenting a fan-fictionalized account of his first childhood encounter with Sherlock Holmes, initially demonstrating his abilities and gradually working an origin story into every individual piece of his iconic outfit, from hat to pipe.

The conflict here is that they school they attend is home to a mysterious """serial killer""" who kills their victims by means of a blowpipe that induces hallucinations which cause the victim to kill themselves.

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Not by any direct or reliable means, just that the hallucinations scare them enough to do something reckless, like jump out a window, get themselves run over, or stab themselves... That they managed to intentionally kill anyone this way is the biggest mystery of this movie.

Anyway the hallucinations presented are pretty varied and at times wildly nightmarish. The opening scene involves a man ordering roast pheasant only for it come alive and start eating him instead. Truly a vegan dream come true, but alas it gets worse.

Watson himself, in an unnecessary stab at his character for being slightly overweight hallucinates a bakery which comes to life, restrains him, and forcefeeds themselves to him, all in graphic stop-motion animation. I guarantee someone developed some kind of vore fetish from that scene.

Most noteworthy of course, I must mention, is the Stained-Glass Knight who is credited in The Making Of Jurassic Park as the first ever fully computer generated character in a feature film.

Overall I do like this movie, the characters are appreciable enough, the main theme song and the "temple chant" are extremely memorable, honestly if you like both Temple of Doom and Hook, this a very similar experience, just with much lesser known actors.

In terms of criticisms, I can't complain too much. It is an EXTREMELY brisk movie, it's like 2 hours but it flies by very quickly, perhaps too quickly.

We get basically one scene introducing the characters, one scene demonstrating Sherlock's skills in a test of problem-solving, some very brief bullshit about him being good at fencing and getting unfairly expelled for cheating accusations, and then we're less than halfway through the movie and we're all-in on the Egyptian Cult Mystery.

The pre-established romance between him and The Damsel in Distress at least spares us the usual pain of courtship scenes, but that's really all she's there for, to be kidnapped and rescued, nothing more. Her makeup is also immaculate in every scene she's in, despite escaping a dusty pyramid burning the ground in which she was nearly mummified and and boiled to death...

There's some continuity errors, Watson's adult voiceover abruptly cuts in to give us the summary of what characters could explain themselves... and the all important reason why Sherlock deduces that the guy subtly named RATHE was actually the bad guy all along is conveniently glossed over in a cut between shots. That's kind of unforgivable.

Not only does this break consistency with every other time Holmes explained his reasoning, but it's a Sherlock Holmes movie, that makes it an obligatory mystery movie, but there's no mystery here at all.

Or at least there's no mystery-solving. The average Scooby-Doo episode has more mystery-solving than this movie. Case Closed, which is directly inspired by Sherlock Holmes puts this movie to absolute shame in that department.

It's got as much mystery in it as any other thriller with an unknown killer in it, they just go "oh well of course it's obviously this guy" and then never explain.

If there's any big strike against the movie it's probably that, but honestly I find it a bit difficult to believe that it was it's betrayal of genre that lead it to get lukewarm reviews. Either way, I don't feel nearly as positively or negatively toward it as I do any of the above-mentioned movies.

It's a fine movie, nothing really to write home about, and despite my nostalgia it's not about to find a place on my shelf of favorites in any foreseeable future.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

06-28-23, 11:25 PM

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Horror / English / 1974

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I saw a brief clip recently of what was Leatherface's initial reveal from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie and realized I'd never seen the original, only parts of the remake.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Various living and dead animals. :)

It's honestly strange to me that TCM is a 70s movie since it's considered such a horror staple and yet the the modern horror genre definitely owes most of it's popularity to it's rise in the 80s with Halloween.

Bearing that in mind, it definitely has it's own original idea of what a scary movie ought to be and isn't really playing from an overwrit playbook, which I imagine contributed to it's success.

Success or not, though, I definitely can't say that I like it, for many of the same reasons I don't like typical horror movies; I'm just not in it to feel bad. Thankfully, for such a macabre movie about a family of redneck cannibals, there's relatively little gore and I personally didn't even find it all that scary.

I mostly just find the premise and grim presentation very disturbing. You really just have to share some headspace with the exact kind of serial killer freaks to even make a movie like this convincing, and that's just a dreadful place conceptually. I'd much rather watch a serial killer documentary than a movie like this.

Perhaps I grant it's "convincing", but that's bare minimum for just about any role an actor has to play. I appreciate that there's a clear family dynamic between Leatherface, "The Cook", "The Hitchhiker", and "Grandpa", and the Hitchhiker in particular I enjoyed because he is immediately unsettling to look at and listen to, and because I'd seen and heard impersonations of this character before and never seen the character, so it's cool to recognize them that way.

Unfortunately, this family dynamic really only enters the picture in the last quarter of the movie and by that point all but one of the main characters has been killed off. One of my biggest grievances with this movie is that it drifts too close to what Friday the 13th did; killed off most of the cast before the main characters can even appreciate that there's a killer.

Basically every main character gets killed by mallet or chainsaw mere seconds after running into Leatherface. If the characters are our viewer surrogates, then how am I supposed to feel scared if they just blindly walk into danger and get punked out by a hammer?

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I'm simultaneously annoyed at what this movie inspired too. Having played Dead by Daylight quite a bit recently, I'm aware that both Leatherface and an off-brand Leatherface clone exist as playable killers in the game. The game also centers around sacrificing survivors on meat hooks which I have previously remarked seem to almost NEVER show up as a killing tool in any horror movie.

Well, TCM features Leatherface hanging one of the main characters on a meathook. For a few seconds. And it doesn't even kill them.

This, I take to be the direct inspiration for designing a game in which every horror movie antagonist they could license proceeds to kill every one of their victims by hanging them on meat hooks 12 times in succession. What the actual ****?

I'm also inclined to note that there's a distinct lack of a sound effect for this action, there's no suckling meat noise when Main Girl #2 gets hung up on the rack, and you never see the hook entry wound or anything, so the movie's really just relying on you being squeemish enough to hate the idea of a character being put on a meat hook.

The sound design in this movie overall is pretty strange. Even though I thought Halloween was a trash movie, I can at least grant it had an atmospheric score, whereas here it felt like mostly silence culminating in a montage of extreme close-ups of eyes and screaming, which was none too pleasant.

TCM never made me laugh or provoked me to ridicule some corny or nonsensical aspect of it, but that doesn't mean it was more engaging. The characters were virtually all flat, the girls were interchangeable, and Boy #1 looked distinctly less 70s than Boy #2. Handicapped Boy also wouldn't shut the **** up about his fascination with butchery, which is why I'm played he took a chainsaw to the stomach.

Dunno if the Vegan Girl was the one who survived (or the one who opened up with talking about the malefic phases of Saturn), the movie made little effort at all to distinguish them.

Overall crap boring movie, but could have been a lot worse.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Weak]

Omnizoa

07-01-23, 10:44 PM

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The Evil Dead
Horror / English / 1981

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've only seen the Evil Dead remake and Army of Darkness. My only knowledge of this movie is that it potentially kicked off the "Cabin in the Woods" subgenre of horror, it was supposed to be seriously, but after a sequel it completed it's transformation into a comedy. Oh, and somebody gets raped by a tree.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
If you had asked me whether I thought the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Evil Dead would be more gory, I would incorrectly suggest Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The remake is certainly gory, but I underestimated how much blood there would be in this movie. And I don't like it.

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Perhaps there's something to be said of the practical effects versus the CG of the remake, but honestly the practical effects in general were kind of bad, and overall the production of this entire movie was noticeably amateur.

Everything from the ambiguous basement light sources to the obviously polygonal cut holes in the front door of the cabin by the end of it all looked super low effort/budget, continuity errors and all.

There were also some bizarrely obvious logical errors, like Ash getting attacked through a large window, so the first thing he thinks to do is... lock the front and back doors. There's even a shot where he moves a dresser across the same wide open window to block the front door, as if it's been established that the spirits of the cabin can only enter through doors or something.

Anyway the entire plot is spirits around a cabin possessing the cast of characters and the characters have to start killing each other. That's pretty much all you need to know. There's a book that passages need to be read from to summon the dead, yada yada yada, there's a recording, blah blah blah.

Part of why I'm being very brief while writing this is that I'm incredibly distracted and annoyed at a parrot I recently adopted. It screams at such an infuriatingly ear-splitting level and somehow pattern recognition has failed to register in it's little brain that screaming gets it's cage covered.

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What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the acting is serviceable I guess? At least until anyone gets demonically possessed, then they start overacting like crazy. Also there's uber spooky voices in the darkness that start saying "Join us..." basically right away so it's no surprise Raimi would feel the need to quickly pivot to comedy.

There really isn't a whole lot to comment on about this movie since pretty much performed about as I expected, save for including a lot more blood and little more stop-motion skin dissolving animation.

Best thing I can say is it starts quickly and remains engaging, and it's not just the characters getting sequentially punked out before anybody else realizes what's going on.

I do feel like there's a version of this movie that could have been genuinely creepy and atmospheric, but this movie's about as atmospheric as a dozen fog machines.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Weak]

Omnizoa

07-02-23, 01:20 AM

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Evil Dead II
Action Horror / English / 1987

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Supposedly this movie bridges The Evil Dead with Army of Darkness tonally by being a more schlocky comedy horror movie. All I know is somebody gets an eyeball shot across a room into their mouth, complete with eyeball cam, and Ash somehow gets transported to the dark ages.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This is a markedly better movie that The Evil Dead.

Rather than being a direct sequel to The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II feels more like a remix and deliberate setup for Army of Darkness.

Ash is back with another girlfriend named Linda, takes her to a similar cabin in the woods, finds the same tape recorder, and unleashes the same wooded evil that torments the cast by possessing each of them one by one.

We basically get a super quick rehash of the first movie in the first 20 minutes of this movie, and by the 20 minute mark, it drops all pretenses and suddenly Ash is having a slapstick chainsaw struggle with a headless puppet.

Ash has more alone time in this movie since his girlfriend is possessed and killed super early on, so there's a stronger emphasis on him going mad in the presence of the evil spirits that will happily cackle at him if they can't kill him.

The family of man who owns the cabin and discovered what is only now called the "Necronomicon" eventually show up and sequentially add themselves to the antagonists' ranks and we even get some very brief flashbacks to the origin of the book that spawns this evil, so there's a tiny bit more lore in this movie for those that want it.

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The puppetry and fight scenes are pretty clownshoes early on, which is fine, and there's a fair bit less gore overall in this movie, which I appreciate (the walls spewing blood in Ash's face was pretty unnecessary and predictable though).

Ash also gets possessed twice in the movie, although both times he's inexplicably cured by sunlight and his memories of a necklace, and this principle isn't echoed any other time in the movie, so super deus ex machina bullshit. Also making any actor try to fight off their own hand is just asking them to embarrass themselves.

Obviously the main reason to see this movie is to see Ash suit up with the shotgun and chainsaw arm and start spitting catchphrases, that's definitely the highlight. Couldn't really pick out a highlight of the previous movies.

My biggest grievances regarding production quality is also assuaged here; I really didn't notice any glaring continuity errors or blatantly cheap props... although the basement still has weird light sources, it at least doesn't dwell on those shots long enough for you to notice. I wouldn't have mentioned them if I hadn't noticed it in the previous movie.

I will say, however, that the medieval armor the characters were wearing at the end did not look historically accurate. Source: I'm a geek.

Similar to the first, this movie also picks up right away and maintains a nice brisk pace throughout the whole runtime.

Overall, not scary in the slightest, but definitely a more enjoyable movie experience.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

07-02-23, 10:34 PM

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Dawn of the Dead
Zombie Horror / English / 1978

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen it. Hugely influential.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
While not the first zombie movie, this is definitely the movie that had the biggest influence I think, and that seems strange because I question how much has really carried over into other zombie properties.

Half the cast are cops, most of the movie takes place in a mall, there's an undercurrent about humans being the biggest threats after all... but some stuff about this movie was also quite a bit different than I expected.

For one, the cast are all adults, which definitely ventures away from the mall rats taking refuge in a mall idea, also while the movie overall takes itself very seriously, the soundtrack regularly undermines itself with goofy cartoon music that I guess is supposed to be an exaggerated version of the sort of muzak you'd hear at a mall. Maybe the 70s were all a cartoon? Either way, it doesn't exactly "contrast" well with the increasing amounts of gore, which oscillate in terms of realism.

Some shots just look like disrupted clay, other shots look actually gruesome. In general, the zombie makeup looks terrible, just a bunch of people with baby powder or some blue facepaint to portray them as "dead". The blood is also much too red, which I'll credit Evil Dead for getting right.

There's a lot more going on in this movie than the previous two I've watched, we're plunged into the onset of the zombie apocalypse behind two cops and television studio employees. The cops are united by one of them being black that shot another officer in the black for going on a racist rampage killing innocent people, and the other officer won't snitch on him.

I dunno why that was really necessary to establish his character, it's not as if race plays into any other part of the movie. Maybe they wanted to sneak in a comment about "other-izing" the zombies in a similar fashion? If that's the case the commentary didn't land and I don't know that any of the moralizing of talk show hosts we're occasionally greeted with really means anything, partly because it's always mid-debate and I can't entirely tell what sort of point is being disputed at any given time.

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Something I was pleasantly surprised by was the extent to which the mall was utilized. I feel like I've seen a decent amount of mall-oriented zombie media at this point, but the characters in this movie went beyond what I expected to capitalize on and prepare the mall for eventual raiders. They blocked the entrances with semis, they found an alternate vent path to their "safehouse", they obscured the hallway to their safehouse with a false wall, and this is all after finding a small room buried away in the ceiling loaded with "survival supplies".

They shop for clothes, load up at a gun store, ice skate, have dinner at a restaurant, all after locking the main doors and killing the remaining zombies inside the mall so that they're safe. So long as electricity and plumbing holds, they've got it made.

Of course until the raiders show up which goes about as expected.

The zombies were conventional "slow zombies" with the slight differences that they are afraid of fire and have a limited understanding of tools and implements.

I think the characters were decent, Peter entirely evades the 'black guy dies first' trope and becomes Main Guy by the end, and "Fly Boy" I was half convinced was a young Juror #5 from 12 Angry Men.

Anyway, it wasn't anything like Return of the Living Dead, and there was plenty of gore for gore's sake, so not a whole lot I enjoyed in this movie, although I appreciate it for perhaps doing the mall thing better than any other zombie movie or video game I can think of.

For a 70s zombie romp, I think it's aged relatively well, albeit not my cup of tea.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

07-03-23, 05:06 PM

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Rosemary's Baby
Supernatural Thriller / English / 1968

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Showed up in a "greatest horror movies of all time" list. I've heard about it, but never seen it and none of the screenshots I've seen give me horror movie vibes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Meat.

Sure enough this is not a horror movie, it's a supernatural thriller at best.

Basically a couple move into an apartment with a sordid history of witchcraft and wizardry with the intent of conceiving a baby.

Not just one baby though. Three babies. They were very clear about that. This couple who's never had a child are completely set on having 3 children "all at the same time".

I just had a parrot rescue take back the parrot I recently adopted two weeks ago because it was too much for me, but these fictional ****wits have already decided that one baby isn't enough for them.

I also love the completely insincere husband who's just constantly undermining his wife's confidence only to 180 and and go "Okay, we're having a baby. 3 of them. All at the same time. I've already penciled us in, WAPOW!" *slaps calendar* "You can fit so many babies into this ****in' thing."

"Oh, honey really? Are you sure?"

"Absolutely toots, now shut and get to ovulatin', I got a soul to sell to Satan in exchange for a role in a play you've never heard of, WAPOW!"

"What happened?"

"I raped you in yer sleep, and you can't be mad cause you're complicit and I was drunk and this will be what conceives the Antichrist, so chillax, sugar ****."

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So yeah, the whole gimmick is a series of peculiarities suggest that the other apartment tenants and eventually Rosemary's doctor and husband are in cahoots to abduct Rosemary's baby for witchy purposes. It's all very circumstantial and only very brief completely irrelevant dream sequences actually suggest anything paranormal is going on... so nothing paranormal is going on.

The strongly recommended doctor is concerningly into "natural" remedies and ambiguous herbal drinks... up until he says "take pills" out of the blue, which seems to undermine his objection to pills in previous scenes. He casually dismisses Rosemary's pregnancy pains saying they'll go away in 2 days, but they last for months and she instantly regains trust him again when they conveniently vanish.

Everybody's just a tad too invasive and controlling in Rosemary's life. Even if there weren't a coven of witches I'd say it's good enough reason to bail.

The biggest kick in the dick in this movie is the bombastic claim of "I won't take any chances with my baby's safety". This same stupid character is seen drinking, inhaling secondhand smoke, and walking into oncoming traffic.

And given that everybody else is revealed to be a corny-as-**** "HAIL SATAN!" rando in the end, it really leaves you with nobody to sympathize with. Hell, you can't even sympathize with the baby because you never see them and it's implied to be a hellspawn of some sort.

When did she's conceive? Apparently during the sailboat dream she had Satan just walked into the room and plunged his 8 foot spiked demon cock into her and spooged? And her husband just took a seat in the other room like "Yeah, I have no regrets about the course of these events."

It's just not an enjoyable movie. It's not awful, but it's ambiguity implies one of two predictable outcomes, and they went with one of those outcomes, and it wasn't even interesting. Rosemary just rips through the wall in her closet and finds a lounge where everybody's just hanging out and the only thing out of place is the random black crib with an upside-down cross hanging over it. Then everybody just starts yelling "HAIL SATAN!" over and over again.

Just the laziest most least interesting way they could have executed the idea.

A remake could definitely do this idea some better justice, but as it is, this movie just kind of struggles with the balance between creepy implications and subtlety. The neighbors making overtly anti-religious comments, the husband making a side joke about marijuana... for all I know this was some devout Christian's idea of a morality tale.

Not great cinema and in no way deserving of the reputation it seems to have.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Meh...]

Omnizoa

07-04-23, 12:42 AM

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Treasure Island
Adventure / English / 1990

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I think I've seen it before, but never reviewed it and barely remember it. The only opinion that stands out from my memory is that they didn't portray Silver the way I wanted.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Supposedly this is the best and one of the most faithful adaptations of the book Treasure Island, but having seen Treasure Planet, it sucks to know what could have been.

Treasure Planet, being a fairly standard Disney affair does indeed tell the basic story, but it also convolutes and distracts from the narrative by incorporating Goofy-like characters and forcing family-friendly comedy into the equation. The Disney stand-in for the Ben Gunn character is a disastrously unfunny "comedy relief" character and I've struggled to come into possession of fan edits that specifically edit out his involvement in the movie.

Which is unfortunate because Ben Gunn plays a significant role in the story, but more importantly, and why I feel so mixed on a more genuine interpretation of the book is how Treasure Planet handled Long John Silver.

While he is intended to be the ultimate antagonist of the story, he's supposed to be sympathetic, at least insofar as you, the viewer, come to like him as Taylor Hawkins likes him. In Treasure Planet, Silver plays the chef aboard a legitimate ship on a mission to recover buried treasure left behind by a barbarous pirate, but is eventually revealed to be a mutineer with a pre-existing interest in stealing the treasure for himself and a majority of the crew already wrapped around his finger.

This alone is the minimum you'd expect of the character, but in Treasure Planet, Hawkins, who only has a mother to speak of, looks to Silver as a father figure, and Silver's allegiances are vague and difficult to discern. This makes it a bigger gutpunch when Silver puts Hawkins on the spot and forces him to choose between the shipmate he's become friends with or doing the right thing.

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My biggest issue with this movie is that they betray Silver's motives far too quickly, and Hawkins really never develops any sort of meaningful relationship with him, other than that Silver is soft towards Hawkins for no readily apparent reason, and Hawkins in some small way plays into Silver's notion of "honor amongst thieves".

This is definitely not helped by a young Dark Knight having the same inscrutable expression on his face for practically the whole movie. It's the same pouty-lipped expression you see in his more reserved moments in American Psycho. That look that says "your business card is inferior to mine".

At least Charleton Heston, who played Silver is likeable. The Wikipedia page says his performance sucked and I know he's a beloved actor, so I really do wonder what movies I've missed that he slam-dunked so well that this passed for a poor performance.

Yes, Christopher Lee is in this movie too apparently, but I was mainly struggling to remember the guy who plays one of the dinosaur poachers in Jurassic Park: Lost World who I only just now learned died over a decade ago. I also just now learned that there are two conflicting claims on his Wikipedia page claiming two separate movies provoked Spielberg to call him "the best actor in the world".

Always nice to see Julian Glover, he can be my posh British good guy or secret Nazi bad guy any day.

There's not a whole lot else to comment on other than the fact I had to watch this with subtitles because the pirate jargon is so thick I can hardly tell what they're saying half the time if I'm not reading it.

Anyway, it's a decent movie, but nothing special.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

08-01-23, 03:46 AM

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A Ghost Story
Fantasy Drama / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Today I tried ChatGPT for the first time and asked it for some movie recommendations based on my likes and dislikes. This was the top suggestion.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
First off, I'd like to say, that I think this was a pretty solid recommendation. It definitely hits that sweet spot between surreal imagery and a coherent narrative while also trying to serve up an emotional gutpunch all at the same time. Very satisfied with the recommendation.

That said, this movie was kind of painful.

Now, overall, it's not a bad movie, the premise was a pretty solid hook. Despite looking like a horror movie from the outside, it most definitely is not one. We follow Main Guy and Main Girl who live together, but plan to move soon, shortly after their relationship is established Main Guy dies in a car crash directly outside their home. Later he awakens in the hospital as a stereotypical bedsheet ghost, invisible, silent, and can only communicate to other ghosts in subtitles. He appears to be offered a portal elsewhere, but he doesn't enter.

Main Ghost returns to his home to watch Main Girl live out her life, up to and including writing out a secret note and hiding it in a wall before permanently moving away.

We pan transition through various phases of the house and it's subsequent occupants and loosely absorb information about the extent of Main Ghost's ability to interact with the real world as well as the fact that something in his psyche must be anchoring him to it.

After what must be many years he finally manages to pull the note from the wall, but is interrupted when the home is demolished and we timeskip to a skyscraper in a city deep into the future. Main Ghost jumps off the roof and we time travel back into the distant past for some reason.

After observing some Pre-American settlers killed and decomposed we find ourselves back in the house we started in and Main Ghost starts observing Main Ghost observing Main Girl. He cuts away from the eternal viewing party to pull the note from the wall, reads it, and disappears. Cut to credits.

The WORST part about all of this is that we never get to see what's on the ****ing note.

It reminds me of The Frame, which drummed up one character's ability to play music and finally at the climax the movie is completely ****ing silent like it was hit by a Youtube DMCA notice.

This was the perfect opportunity to present something that's clever, or thought provoking, or heartbreaking, or something as unimaginatively basic as "I love you", but we don't even get that. The writer's cheap out, we never see the note, and the movie ends. I HATE THAT.

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And I especially hate it because this movie is otherwise so slow, so all of the weight that you've poured so heavily into every dragging scene just POOF!s when Main Ghost reads the note.

There are shots in this movie, mainly at the beginning, that go on FOREVER. Obviously the most poignant one is him eventually awakening in the hospital, but we also get a shot of the couple just snuggling in bed for a couple decades, and even less importantly we get a shot of Main Girl just dragging a big ****ing box to the curb which itself drags on for several thousand eons.

I deadass expected we were about to learn that she killed him and stuffed his body in the box for all of the emphasis that was put on that shot, but nope, that shot seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the movie.

Apart from stuff like that, I actually did like the editing of this movie. We get some good transitions, some excellent smash cuts without any backing track or musical stings, there were a lot of scenes that could have had music, but didn't and I don't feel like they needed any.

The presentation was kinda weird. The simple ghost costume is about as budget as you can imagine, but they manage to make it look sad rather than scary. On the flipside, this movie is cropped to nearly 1:1 and there's some bullshit explanation for it on Wikipedia about the "claustrophia of being stuck in a box for eternity", which is just pretentious nonsense. That implies that 4:3 aspect ratio movies and earlier were intended to, or unintentionally, conveyed any amount of claustrophobia.

Also, we never see him in a box, let alone the one box they show Main Girl dragging around for 17 trillion lightyears onscreen. What's claustrophobic about his existence when we see him inside, outside, and well above his house, and nowhere near a coffin?

Some of the movie logic falls apart after the time reversal too.

First off, let's assume I'm mistaken about the time reversal. Wikipedia states that the Pre-American girl is humming a song he wrote, which suggests that this is either the EXTREME deep future, as hypothesized by Random Party Dude #7, OR, even deeper, an Eternal Return phenomenon, which I find more appealing, but is less substantiated by the story.

So, if this is the future, why can he see his past self?
And if this is the past, why can he see his past ghost self?
And better yet, why did it take him years to pull the note from the wall the first time but mere seconds the second time?

Main Girl specifically painted over the crack in the wall which is what made it difficult to retrieve, did she just not do it in this timeline? Why was Past Main Ghost slower to act on that than Future Past Main Ghost?

Anyway, this is one of those movies that pours every ingredient into a big payoff ending only to shit out a "WE'LL LEAVE IT UP TO YOUR IMAGINATION!!!" bit instead.

It seriously harms my opinion of the entire movie up to now if the payoff it's been alluding to for over an hour is nonexistent, and that's why this ending is going to tank my rating something fierce.

For what it's worth though, this movie would be significantly worse if he ghost had an inner monologue.

Final Verdict: rating_3 [Okay]

Omnizoa

08-01-23, 10:42 PM

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Forrest Gump
Historical Drama / English / 1994

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's been a long time since I've seen it and I've never reviewed it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Fishin' and Shrimpin'.

If you don't already know the premise, Forrest Gump is the life story of a mentally deficient man as told from his perspective to strangers at a bus stop, recalling an increasingly fantastical involvement in various historical events from the 40s to 80s.

From inspiring Elvis's dance moves and causing the Watergate scandal, to bringing into the world who would become Sora from Kingdom Hearts.

Movie begins with an overly saccharine opening theme and Tom Hank's stuttering performance feels a bit forced at first, but over the course of an incredibly brisk 2 and a half hours, it quickly cements itself as a serious, albeit intentionally funny at times, story that contrast's Forrest's innocent and wholesome window into the world against the harsh realities of war, politics, and sexual abuse.

Hanks sinks into his role flawlessly and it's almost entirely on his shoulders that this movie rests because it is only our endearment towards his character that draws us in and carries us to the gutpunch finish line. And it also thanks to some clever writing that this movie becomes a defacto template for how to narrate over the course of an entire story.

Forrest doesn't seem particularly emotional in most scenes, but the occasional moment when he becomes rattled or panicked really punctuate those scenes, and it's a great way to represent somebody who's socially awkward, but not entirely ignorant of his surroundings.

I personally think the most heartbreaking moment in the whole movie isn't one of the many characters deaths we see, but Forrest attempting to reconcile his sudden responsibility with being a father at the end, particularly because he fears that his son could be low intelligence like him. This is the only time in the whole movie that he reacts emotionally to the fact that other people view him as "stupid", he reiterates a couple times that he doesn't like being called that, but even when it is brought up it's just something he's learned to endure.

That he extends this sympathy that few people have shown him which he otherwise hasn't conveyed actually bothers him until this moment demonstrates that it does bother him, and in that moment the one-dimensional handicapped kid at the beginning of the movie is revealed to have yet another side after what is already a movie busy with every idea and opinion Forrest shares with us over it's course.

Another character that easily stands out is Lt. Dan, probably because he is one of only three characters to really have an arc. He begins as Forrest's Lt. while they're on duty in Vietnam and after losing his legs and Forrest saving him from his "destiny", he folds into himself, denies God, and resolves to wile his pains away with drink and prostitution.

There's not a moment of screentime Dan doesn't steal with his big, cynical, and confrontational personality. We really get to see his ego get crushed and come out the other side empathizing with Forrest, who, unintentionally, seems to wind up as his only friend.
On the other hand, his arc is punctuated most blatantly by a "shrimping business" subplot for which I possess no empathy and it really takes me out of the movie.

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But what was even more impactful to my experience was the character of Jenny, who Forrest effectively falls in love with at the start of the movie.

Thankfully it's not an Overnight Romance type of deal, but perhaps even worse, it's an almost entirely parasitic relationship.

Jenny begins as a nice girl at the start of the movie and it's suggested that she's repeatedly molested by her father. This, apparently, is all sufficient justification for Jenny to become a miserable bitch for the next 30 years.

She becomes wrapped up in various abusive relationships, various drugs, various radical activist movements (which were left-wing and appropriate for the time period), and it really all just comes down to this bizarrely counterintuitive notion that getting molested by her father basically made her "damaged goods".

That certainly doesn't help the case against Forrest Gump being a "conservative movie".

I would have been content for Jenny to have personal issues she can't share with Forrest, but the fact that she basically re-enters his life once a decade just to make him feel all warm and fuzzy and make herself feel all worm and fuzzy, only to cut it off just to get into the nearest bus or taxi en route to self destruction is incredibly frustrating.

It just makes me feel like she's taking advantage of Forrest, particularly when she has sex with him in her second-to-last appearance and bafflingly gives birth to and raises his son to grade school age without him even involved. How incredibly ****ing selfish can you be?

You can't just handwave that with "I was messed up, Forrest". It's clearly and repeatedly established that he is the best guy in your life and you kick him to the curb every single ****ing time because "OH MY HIPPIE FRIENDS" or "OH MY CRACK ADDICTION" or "OH MY 70th BOYFRIEND WHO ABUSES ME". It's just so transparently ****ing dumb and they really could have put a little bow on her character at the end by really driving home how stupid she is.

Because stupid is as stupid does, and Forrest is a ******* Mensa genius compared to her.

I really don't like this narrative trope of the "Loser" character hooking up with the "Misfit Girl" only for their relationship to be toxic as ****. I'm distinctly reminded of reading The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, which started out as a pretty intriguing romance before it spun out into this awful mutually destructive relationship.

At least Forrest came out of this with his character unscathed, but I cannot watch this movie and like Jenny any more than I did decades ago when I saw it for the first time. She's just a miserable character and I don't like watching her, especially when her shitty decisions negatively impact characters I actually like.

There's not a whole lot else to say about this, it was produced well, some special effects are pretty sneaky, but some of the old film reel they edited Forrest into have some glaring issues that wouldn't pass the sniff test today, particularly with regard to the framerate disparity of Forrest and the faces they edited to react to him.

It's a great period piece, makes me wish I had a big house out in Alabama, and I will admit this movie joins the ranks of movies that have managed to make me cry.

For that alone, I have to score it pretty high, but otherwise my rating is tempered by the issues outlined above (EDIT: I'm going to give it a 3.5, I keep regretting giving out 4s.).

That said, moviegoers were pretty spoiled in 1994.

Final Verdict: rating_3_5 [Good]

Omnizoa

08-02-23, 01:22 AM

I watched Under the Skin (2013). The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)) perfectly summarizes what happens, there's nothing to add.

Omnizoa

08-06-23, 06:03 PM

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Citizen Kane
Drama / English / 1941

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen it.

Also it is widely held by movie critics to be the greatest movie ever made in the history of movies, so automatically I have to like it too, right?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Various animals that almost entirely appear only in the first 5 minutes.

Right off the bat, I have to admit I had the ending to this movie spoiled for me by Family Guy, so just bear that mind.

That being said, having now seen the whole movie and imagining what my reaction would be having not known the "twist" up to then, I have to imagine I'd be pretty underwhelmed, which was my overall experience of this movie.

The basic premise is an ungodly rich man dies and his former newspaper business eagerly tries to poach readership off of his dying word, "Rosebud" (it's his sled), and off one reporter goes to interview some of the closest people in his life to try and figure out what the great mystery was, learning about the character that was Charles Foster Kane.

It honestly could have been an interesting premise to a story, but I don't think they did very well with it at all.

The first 10 minutes of this movie are continuous annoying half-hearted radio presenter speak of the fictional newspaper article announcing Kane's death, and as though the summary of his life wasn't exciting enough, there's another 180 minutes serving to essentially repeat whatever this movie thought were the highlights of that story.

The most confusing thing about this whole movie is how Kane even comes into his fortune in the first place. It's either entirely omitted or terribly explained, but essentially some random bank BUYS Kane from his Mom and Dad and gifts him something in the way of 60 million dollars when he becomes an adult.

Why?

There's so much timeskipping around in this movie that shortly after he receives these funds, his "caretakers" die and we never see any return on whatever this investment was supposed to be.

Initially, Kane presents himself as some sort of virtuous character who decides to buy up a newspaper to inform the public about the shady deals of the marketmen he lives around, he even eventually runs for Governor under that pretense, but countless other character can see, and even the audience sees, that his "campaigns" to help the underprivileged, whatever they might have been, were more or less bullshit. He's just cares about himself, and what other people think about him.

And whatever principles he claims to have regarding "truth" go right out the window when he does a hostile takeover of his newspaper rival and converts their whole operation into a tabloid.

Even interpersonally, he's just a shitty person. He doesn't give his wife the time of day, then eventually cheats on her for another girl who he ends up controlling the life of. He builds her an opera house, and forces her to sing until she leaves him, and then he makes himself out to be a victim and throws a temper tantrum in the middle of his MegaMillions McMansion...

There are some moments where I guess we're supposed to sympathize with him, like when one of his longtime editors decides to write a scathing criticism of his wife's performance in the newspaper and he decides to finish it himself because that would be "honest"... but then he fires that editor anyway. What's supposed to be our takeaway from that scene?

When he's blackmailed over his infidelity during his election campaign he refuses to drop out, but still runs a story falsely alleging voter fraud when he loses...? Like, our main character here is not a good person.

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Am I supposed to like him? Am I supposed to hate him? I can't sympathize with him because he's a cartoon character, literally raised by a bank to be a selfish rich ****. What am I supposed to be getting out of this movie?

Ah, but of course, the missing ingredient; the surprise ending... with his dying breath he cast his mind back to, of all things... a random ****ing sled we see him playing on for barely a minute of screentime at the beginning of the movie.

Oh, how sad, poor Kane, wasted millions of dollars ruining journalism, failed to run for office with his own "Hillary for prison" arc, built an opera house nobody likes, got twice divorced, BUT IN HIS HEART HE WAS STILL A YOUNG BOY WHO MISSED HIS SLED.

...a sled which he apparently still owned and was so important to him he just never pulled it out again and buried it in all the random shit he bought.

With all the whinging about the "working class" and him being a "liberal", is this supposed to be some half-assed commentary about the decadence of the elite and materialism? Cause that's what it feels like.

I think Ink does a much better job at that.

I'm hazarding to guess what it is that people see in this movie that they think is so special... I'm sure at the time this was a pretty expensive production, the age makeup across multiple characters is decent, Orson Welles acts fine in it. There's a whole thing at the end where they emphasize that most of the cast were inexperienced, so the fact that they weren't all completely awful must mean the casting was exceptional in some way?

It definitely wasn't the music, because those big raucus orchestral strings are at complete odds with the tone of the movie.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention the completely random and unexplained cockatoo jumpscare? What actual **** was that?

I really don't know. This really wasn't a special movie to me, and like another 40s "classic", Casablanca, I'm sure I'm going to forget most of it very very quickly.

At least I now recognize the context for two more pop culture memes.

Final Verdict: rating_2 [Weak]

Omnizoa

08-07-23, 09:18 AM

https://www.movieforums.com/community/attachment.php?attachmentid=94194&stc=1&d=1691410596
Coherence
Psychological Thriller / English / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Reading the synopsis on this movie, I was expecting a pretty predictable plot, maybe something in the vein of Phenomenon, but I was mistaken.

This is one of those movies that tries to tackle some really ambitious concept like multiverse theory, but explains it very poorly and ultimately undermines it's own excitement.

The premise is that there's a house party, a comet flies overhead knocking out the lights, and in an effort to contact a nearby house whose lights are on, it's quickly discovered that the mysterious second house is a mirror of their own, and not long after that it's determined that every house in the neighborhood is a pocket dimension containing a house party of guests slightly different than we're familiar with.

The rationalization here is quantum mechanics, and Schroedinger's Cat is used as an example, but, whether intentional or not, it's immediately misunderstood.

The Schroedinger's Cat example supposes that until it enters into observable reality, the cat in the box may be simultaneously alive or dead at the same time. I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics myself, I didn't understand Primer, but it at least seems obvious to me that the example doesn't suggest that anyone caught in a "pending multiverse", or whatever you want to call it, isn't necessarily at risk of dying.

A similar example could be made of a coin flipped in a closed container, you don't know whether it's heads or tails until you open it. Schroedinger's Cat is just a macabre example of the same concept, but at least one of the characters in this movie immediately becomes a ticking timebomb when he interprets it to mean that only one or the other version of him will live.

It becomes a core conflict of the movie; speculating over whether they should go and steal a book on quantum mechanics from the other house under the assumption that depriving them of that information may prevent their alternate version of this character from coming over and killing them... then further speculating about going over there and killing them first... when nothing of the sort need be assumed at all, and in fact if the "neutral" version of this character were less presumptive, then the odds are relatively greater than his alternate versions would also be less presumptive.

So really, it's a self-fulfilling conflict, which is really stupid.

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It's also really stupid when there are not one but two infidelity subplots, just to inject some additional artificial conflict into the equation.

I honestly burst out laughing when they dropped this line:

"Do you not understand what I'm saying? This all started tonight, and if there are a million different realities, I have slept with your wife in every one of 'em."

What a dumb line, it makes a little bit more sense if it is in fact true that reality branched at the time of the comet, but that's not certain and it also undermines the other infidelity subplot because those characters also have a relationship prior to the comet.

The main point of contention here is that there is one scene where Girl #4A snogs Guy #1A, and Girl #3A witnesses it and informs Girl #1A whose married(?) to Guy #1A so Girl #1A gets upset and confronts Guy #1A, but discovers that Guy #1B is not in fact Guy #1A because Guy #1B did not snog Girl #4A, you get it?

Girl #4A I guess gets jaded as the party starts getting violent and Guy #3A gets attacked by Guy #3J, which is honestly his fault in the first place, so Girl #4A bails and visits various houses until she finds a peaceful one and isolates Girl #1Z, attacks and replaces her. Which works until the comet passes and evidence of what she did still exists and it's implied that Girl #1Z still exists.

It's pretty underwhelming because she really doesn't go through any sort of character arc, it's really just "That one psycho bitch who potentially drugged all of us told me you kissed your ex so now I'm going to go kill an alternate reality version of myself and life with an alternate reality version of you instead."

The coolest part about this whole movie is the idea that when people go outside, they enter a "roulette" that puts them at an alternate reality version of their house party and by the end of the movie, almost everyone is discovered to be from an alternate reality house party, so there's a whole "imposter" game that could have been played with in this movie, but barely gets any sort of mileage at all.

A couple characters discover that they're not originally from the house they're in and just bail after quite a bit of screentime, and yet despite setting up all these plans to try and undermine or social engineer the other versions of themselves they just don't do it, even though trying to figure out who among the cast are actually real would be SUPER ****ING COOL.

There's just no whodunnit element, no The Thing element, it's just dropped on us at the end that everybody was mixed up about where they were and came from at the end. Really wasted potential.

The infidelity subplots were bad, the explanation of multiverse theory was bad, the ending was predictable, everyone was too quick to explain what was going on, I wish the dumb drug-dealing astrology bitch got hit by a car, and what even were the value of these characters at the end?

The first 15 minutes of this movie are just these talking heads and you establish maybe one or two points of interest that come up later in the movie, what did I need all that for?

I didn't care about any of these characters except maybe Hugo Armstrong, because his voice makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but he also vaguely reminds me of Vaush and I now see his Twitter account is one of these turbo-cringe Hollywood partisan accounts.

A lot of potential wasted on this one.

Final Verdict: rating_2_5 [Meh...]