|
Post by theycallmemrfish on Aug 31, 2024 7:17:37 GMT
No joke, I hit play and 30 seconds in is a falsehood.
|
|
|
Post by theycallmemrfish on Aug 31, 2024 7:23:58 GMT
I promise, I won't spam this, but Cate (as Lilith... a young vault hunter played by someone in their 50s...) just said the line, "I'm getting too old for this shit."
|
|
|
Post by theycallmemrfish on Sept 8, 2024 15:19:00 GMT
So a week ago I watched Borderlands and I hated it and I wanted to throw elbows and I knew I would hate it and I'm continuing this awful run on sentence because I want to emphasize a point: I watched it AGAIN! But this time, I took notes! (literally, I'm actually looking at my notepad and believe me writing in the dark is harder than it seems).
I'm going to ignore most plot inconsistencies between games and movie, barring egregious ones. I know damn well there is no true 1:1 translation between mediums and I truly don't expect it. One of my favorites ever is the exclusion of Tom Bombadil from LOTR... I hated that segment of the book and him not being a part of the movies changed NOTHING. Anyway, I only included that because I'm angry that Jamarr Chase won't be starting at the moment and needed to add some anger to this.
Let me start with the GOOD (believe it or not, there was some!): - Including the exploding barrels. Even if it's only a thing in the first gunfight, I'm happy as an avid player that they were even there. - Whoever it was who played Marcus was so fucking good at it! Easily the best translation from game to screen of the film. - I wasn't a fan of Jack Black's performance, but he did nail the whole Claptrap is fucking annoying... and that is to be expected if you ever played the game. The "scanning, scanning, scanning" scene had me actually laughing... and not at the movie.
Now off to the much bigger column of my sheet, THE BAD: - If your film has a "I'm too old for this shit" moment in it, and you aren't Danny Glover... maybe just don't. Also, don't have one of the main characters from the first game of the series constantly say, "I'm not a vault hunter" when the very essence of the games are... *checks notes* HUNTING VAULTS! - Horrible SFX. Terrible. - Really bad Fury Road wannabe car chase scene. I rolled my eyes the first time, I did the same the second time too. - Claptrap timeline is all fucked... I'll excuse it, kind of, since it was a DLC where it's all hashed out... buttttttttttttttttt... - Why Krieg? Why? Of all the characters, they decided to use him. He's not even from the OG Borderlands 2, he's from a DLC (or at least from the GOTY edition). Then they have him and Tina having the relationship that she has with Brick and Mordecai in the games. BOTH of which are more interesting characters who speak actual words and have a face you can see! But hey, what the fuck do I know? - Tiny Tina's background. There's a whole series of missions in 2 that gives you a good deal of backstory as to what made Tina, Tina. Instead, this makes it seem like Atlas... you know what, you need to watch it. I'm not going to talk about the cloning, the false fatherhood, the... YOU JUST HAVE TO WATCH IT! - Patricia Tannis... I KNOW I ranted about this casting like 4 years ago when it was announced, but dear god it was worse when they changed everything and I would really go into it further but it's still a new movie and it would be a major spoiler. Long story short, in games: young grad student... in movie: old, matriarch-esque and a shitty performance. - This will be a hot topic here because it has to deal with a *gasp* gender swap! DUN DUN DUNNNNN! And to be honest, I wouldn't give one iota of a fuck because both of the characters I'm about to talk about are meaningless over the course of the games' series. But why make her General Knox, who in the games is a dude in giant armor... which she doesn't have at all and spends most of it driving a hover bike thingy. When you could have easily made her into Commander Steele, who is the main antagonist of the first game! Knox is from a DLC! You have a main game antagonist and instead you go, nah we're instead gonna do Knox, but totally not Knox, but also Knox just different. - Ewok ending. I'll let you figure that one out for yourselves...
|
|
Javi
Badass
Posts: 1,560
Likes: 1,659
|
Post by Javi on Sept 8, 2024 21:19:00 GMT
Ran (1985) - rewatch. Look, I love Welles' Chimes at Midnight to death, but this is something else. Nevermind that visually it has to be one of the 6 or 7 most amazing movies ever made (the stylistic mix of theatrical conventions and real landscapes is astonishing), conceptually it boggles the mind too. Not content with making a Japanese epic out of Lear (arguably the hardest-to-adapt of the "top 4" Shakespeare tragedies), he also chooses to bring in Macbeth. Anyone tackling those two at once and seeing if he can go beyond them should've met a colossal failure. But it works. He's introduced an element of Macbeth's Scottish savagery into Lear/Hidetora, so when the exiled Hidetora wanders into heaths and ruins he is confronting not just the elements and the meaning of what it is to be human and the illusion of kingship but his own brutality--the ruins are ruins because of him. A bunch of stones and weeds are literally (not poetically) the kingdom of his own making. Far more than is apparent in the Lear play, the past wreaks havoc on all of Ran. Only in the forgetting of the past (in madness, human frailty) there is respite, as in the scene where Hidetora is seen picking flowers with a glorious dumb smile on his face. And the present action seems inspired by Macbeth. Lady Kaede has a far better reason than Lady Macbeth to curse all possible futures: revenge for her means reverting back to the past where her family was annihilated, and to that purpose the future must be damned, wiped out. Kurosawa choreographs the cavalry, banners and armies as illusions of warfare: what they stand for is irrational bloodshed, not war. None of the battles build up to anything: they begin orderly and fall into chaos. And every little change from the source material is inspired, from using the chaos of the Third Castle battle as a stand-in for the thunderstorm from Lear (containing the most amazing images of death, culminating in Hidetora's hellish-angelic descent), to the use of the blind man in the hut in place of Edgar. The effect of Lear/Macbeth having combined forces seem to concentrate all the focus on Hidetora. There's no way back or way forward, no past or future--Hidetora shut down both. And because it's a Kurosawa movie, it has resonances that Shakespeare obviously couldn't have worked with. There's Mieko Harada, the best Lady Macbeth I'll ever see, licking and practically raping Lord Jiro in a way that might make the Bard blush. The obsession with gunpowder reappears, as it had in Kagemusha, as an intrusion from unseen modernity: as an aberration. There seems to be a hell just outside the movie we're actually watching--which is in itself Hell enough, except for the shots of sky and clouds that rhythmically make its way into the movie. There's one bit when Hidetora wakes up and can see only clouds and immensity that is pure Tolstoy. And it messes with the film and enriches it, because such a Tolstoy moment shouldn't belong here, but it does. And it's impossible to take in the mad Hidetora imagery without thinking of post-war Japan and its fall into chaos from a traditional POV. When the blind man drops the image of Buddha and stands on the cliff, totally lost, the effect is disquieting. We're used to doubt and agnosticism in movies from the West, obviously, but the effect of seeing it in a Japanese epic about the past cuts deeper. (A past, I think, Kurosawa isn't deconstructing but enriching as he sees through the cracks.) There ain't a better Shakespeare adaptation that I know of, or a better Japanese film...
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Sept 9, 2024 1:33:28 GMT
2004 Scavenger Hunt #3
G.O.R.A. (Director: Ömer Faruk Sorak) Probably the stupidest movie I've seen all year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. An enormously moronic sci-fi comedy about a guy that gets abducted by aliens and proceeds to become a hero that saves said alien planet and get the beautiful alien princess in the bargain, G.O.R.A. is completely unoriginal and revels in it. The gags are almost Airplane level of dumb (although not nearly as effective), ranging from shock troopers in their "summer outfits" -bright pink formfitting spandex - to a fancy sci-fi shower that just turns out to be a bucket of water dropping from the ceiling, to many other dumb gags that I am losing braincells recalling. It's all great fun that knows it's dumb and revels in it.
|
|
|
Post by stephen on Sept 11, 2024 2:13:26 GMT
Rebel Ridge: After the turgid dross that was Hold the Dark, Saulnier is fucking back with rip-roaring vengeance. Aaron Pierre graduates from mid-sized sedan to full-sized luxury SUV, giving a refined masterclass in smouldering minimalism that evokes McQueen and Gosling. Don Johnson excels as he always does when he plays crooked authority figures (I assume this movie takes place in the Dragged Across Concrete 'verse), and Emory Cohen must be angling to take Paul Walter Hauser's jobs because this year he is Hausering it up like there's no tomorrow. The movie does kinda waste James Cromwell unnecessarily, and while AnnaSophia Robb is fine with what she's given, I do feel her storyline kinda muddled what was otherwise a lean, mean flick.
|
|
|
Post by stephen on Sept 12, 2024 0:46:38 GMT
Firebrand: On its own it is a handsomely mounted and effective costume drama, but I can see an even better movie boiling under its surface that, if allowed, would've been a phenomenal movie: a horror film where the monster is the gruesomely decaying King Henry VIII, lurking and skulking in the shadows, looming with his fragmenting sanity. Jude Law plays this Henry very effectively when he's allowed to, and these are the moments that give the movie its thrills. Otherwise, the beating heart of the movie is in Simon Russell Beale's devious Bishop Stephen Gardiner. If the movie had leaned into a dark and brooding Eggers-esque atmosphere and tried not to do too much with thinly developed plot threads like the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, I would've loved it much more. As it stands, I did still enjoy it for what it was.
|
|
|
Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Sept 13, 2024 17:18:22 GMT
You’re Next (2011). Surprisingly very good. Decided to get a jump start on Oct viewing and dip my toe into some horror. Was expecting a basic run of the mill, by the numbers, slasher flick. But instead was pleasantly surprised with the direction it went and a protagonist with some basic intelligence. Bonus point for her actually taking the extra few seconds to bludgeon the attacker’s heads after initially knocking them down, instead of just running away.
|
|
|
Post by wilcinema on Sept 13, 2024 17:41:47 GMT
Train to Busan: Not the zombie horror melodrama! Not good though.
|
|
|
Post by themoviesinner on Sept 13, 2024 20:14:38 GMT
Stalked By My Doctor (2015) - This was some of the funniest shit I've seen in months. Absolutely ridiculous script that takes it self so seriously that it becomes comedy gold (with one of the most hilarious ending scenes I can remember) + a great Eric Roberts who totally hams it up and delivers one of the most entertaining performances i've seen in quite some time. I found this thing so entertaining that I might actually watch it's sequels (and there's four of them, lol ).
|
|
|
Post by mhynson27 on Sept 14, 2024 9:10:32 GMT
Field of Dreams
Crying in the club.
|
|
|
Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Sept 14, 2024 22:46:10 GMT
Was inspired to rewatch the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies (still haven’t watched the others) after seeing Hans Zimmer in concert earlier this week and hearing the music for the first time in a while. The first one is solid blockbuster entertainment (though the CGI skeleton pirates don’t really hold up that well now), the second one is fun in parts but is pointlessly bloated with weaker writing (video-game storytelling, annoying plot contrivances, things happening because the plot requires it but that don’t actually make sense, etc.), and the third is so mired in its own lore and mythology and muddled narrative that it forgets to be fun, and you kind of stop caring after a certain point and just want it to end already. I don’t remember if this was talked about at the time of the films’ release, but I have a theory that the originally trilogy, starting with the second film, was attempting to be something similar to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So many critics complained about the second and third films being unnecessarily long and ponderous, that it makes me think that the filmmakers were trying to create their own “epic fantasy adventure” trilogy, especially with Orlando Bloom still hot off the success of LOTR, and how much the third film in particular gets bogged down in fantasy lore (Nine Pirate Lords holding the Brethren Court, Nine Pieces of Eight required to bind/free the goddess Calypso, dead souls in the water like in The Two Towers, etc.). It’s funny I didn’t make the connection when I first saw the movies years ago, but now it seems stupidly obvious. Also was reminded of the massive crush I had on Keira Knightley when I was 13...
|
|