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While this doesn't ruin Alien for me, it does ruin the intensity of a very intense scene. When Dallas is in the shaft looking to drive out the alien, and can't tell which direction it's coming from, the buildup is really intense and atmospheric. You've got the foreboding music, the blip of the tracker, the cramped set piece of the vent shaft, the crew monitoring the motions around him, and you know Dallas is a goner. He moves down one level as the alien's closing fast, turns around, and you get a well-placed jump scare with the alien coming out of the darkness at him. It's tense, and the reveal should be really scary. And it is...  ...except for those goofy rubber costume hands, and the motion it makes. It doesn't lunge at him, it doesn't protrude its inner mouth, and it doesn't really attack. Instead it's literally a monster going "RARRR!" and spreading its arms out in a scary monster motion. If it was just the alien's head or its huge form hurling out of the dark, it would be scary as poo poo, but the easily-spotted rubber costume hands just take me right out of it. It looks like it's yelling out "TA-DA!" and it's a very human motion for a horror monster, which defeats the purpose of the thing behaving completely... well, alien.
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Sep 7, 2011 21:28
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Turk February posted:Whenever something happens to an innocent bystander or other type of "extra", I always start wondering why nothing is ever done about repaying or fixing what was just hosed up. That poo poo would be addressed in an instant in the real world, why the hell must they leave me wondering about the poor gently caress whose car you just sideswiped while chasing down those bank robbers? You'd think the highway would be clear behind the big car chase, but no. They swerve through traffic and knock cars around, then everything behind them is fine. Traffic still moves at a perfectly normal pace just behind them and traveling at the same speed across all lanes, not at all affected by the fact that A) two or more cars just ran straight through them and knocked poo poo all over the place, and B) these drivers are watching them cause all sorts of damage just ahead and are unfazed by this. I seem to remember Bad Boys 2 and I, Robot being particularly egregious, and now I notice it in everything. Some of the Bourne movies should result in complete downtown gridlock. Speed is one of the few that actually addresses clearing the highway.
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Sep 14, 2011 06:50
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Nope. The point of that film is to feel as helpless and as horrible as the family. Haneke's criticism is that audiences get too much pleasure from slasher films and tried to make one in which there is no joy or pleasure gained at all. Unfortunately this flew over the heads of the target audiences, who simply get frustrated at the film for not "following the rules". Essentially the film was supposed to torture morons and I wish it had succeeded because I completely understand where Haneke is coming from. Right. It's satire. It examines how people think it's all "fun and games" watching families get tortured (hence why Peter and Paul refer to each other as "Tom & Jerry" or "Beavis & Butthead" throughout). Until the rewind, all of the bloody violence happens offscreen. Then after the rewind, they nonchalantly toss the supposed protagonist off their boat, mid-conversation about non-reality in movies. There's no way for the good guys to win because [plot device], just like the majority of horror. I say "supposed protagonist" because the bad guys are really the protagonists, as they're the ones you want to see in every scene and, much as you'd like to not admit it, are rooting for by virtue of simply watching a horror flick. It's not great as a cinematic narrative I'll admit, but as a statement, I quite like what it has to say.
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Sep 15, 2011 01:59
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steinrokkan posted:I'm getting so loving tired of the "It's just Dances with Wolves with Smurfs, mmmmkay?" attitude. I think my issue with Avatar wasn't necessarily that it was Dances With Wolves, but that it was Dances With Warcraft's Night Elves. I know the noble savages thing is pretty prevalent, but even discounting the Native American allegory it's ridiculous how similar they are. When the Warcraft movie gets made, I wonder how many critics are going to say they're a ripoff of the Na'vi. RagnarokAngel posted:It's really hard to see why a tonal shift might bother people? People hate deus ex machina for a reason, if a story is grounded in reality and then turns supernatural in the last 10 minutes it's not what you signed up for and takes you out of the film. Working in reverse it'd be like if the last harry potter movie ended with a mundane method like Harry decking himself out with AKs and just plugging 2 rounds in Voldemort's head. Funny yes but not what the people watching the film (or reading the books, but this isn't about books) signed up for.  because this film always sparks debate, I think this is a pretty rational gripe, but if you don't, chalk it up to being the Irrationally Irritating thread.The Prestige sets itself up purely as historical fiction and takes that narrative very seriously up until the twist. I love sci-fi, but it's a complete genre shift. Yeah, there's foreshadowing with the hats and Michael Caine talking to the judge, but there's no reason to trust that at the very start of the film because of how it sets itself up. Technology was magic to everyone at the advent of the electric age. The twist is supposed to get a jaw-dropping reaction, but my first thought was "They better not end this with magic clones, that's lame as hell" (I even liked the second twist with Borden's twin). I've had people tell me I don't "get it". But I really do understand the film's points and metaphors, I just hated the twist. It's quite literally a deus ex machina: a machine that plays god.
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Sep 15, 2011 23:01
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DrBouvenstein posted:Yeah, it shows her contempt for the Terminator. There's a deleted scene in that same garage where the T-800 (?) says he has to have a switch on his CPU turned on so he can go into "learning mode," or something, and Sarah agrees to do it, and almost smashes the CPU with a hammer when she has it removed from his head, but John stops her. They should have left it in, because again, it really shows her hatred of him, despite knowing deep down that John is right and they need him. It also makes her speech towards the end when their on the farm about how the Terminator would make a better father than anyone else more poignant...she's accepted him as more than a protector. The mirror Sarah's using to do robot brain surgery isn't a mirror: On one side, Linda Hamilton cuts the chip out of an Arnold dummy's head. On the other side, James Cameron cast Linda Hamilton's identical twin sister Leslie to mimic her, while working on the real Arnold's head. Bonk has a new favorite as of 22:26 on Sep 18, 2011 |
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Sep 18, 2011 19:44
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Razorwired posted:Maybe all movie bars serve Beer brand beer The worst offender is Clerks. There's an entire subplot revolving around selling cigarettes, yet all anyone ever asks for when they walk in is "a pack of cigarettes". Holy poo poo, Kevin Smith, it would've taken 3 seconds to make up a brand name. Carthag posted:That is literally the case with every Die Hard movie though. As for the others, Simon Says would've starred Brandon Lee until he died filming The Crow. Then they briefly considered making it another Lethal Weapon sequel. WW3.com was based on a 1997 Wired article about cyber-terrorism, and was shelved after 9/11 until they revived the script to make it a Die Hard movie. Bonk has a new favorite as of 21:03 on Sep 21, 2011 |
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Sep 21, 2011 20:58
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Dissapointed Owl posted:I thought his reaction was pretty appropriate. The reason he reacted the way he did was because Oedipus stabbing his eyes out for loving his mom = Oh Dae Su cutting his tongue out for loving his daughter. Note the similarity of the names.
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Sep 24, 2011 03:06
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The upcoming movie Real Steel, and the robot fistfights in the Transformers films, bug me for one reason: There are always a bunch of people watching, and nobody seems to care about their well-being. There would be an astounding amount of shrapnel flying around if two big hunks of metal were bashing each other up. In Real Steel especially, why would you want to be in that audience, much less a trainer or referee? Battlebots had a thick pane of Plexiglas surrounding the arena, and that was just little wedge-bots colliding. But in Real Steel there's one arena with a grid of chains with gaping wide spaces between them, and the rest are just like normal boxing arenas. In Transformers they're rolling around a crowded downtown city street. Humans are soft and squishy. A spectator sport would be a bloody mess. Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:or that one complete loving retard who was so far into the god damned "friend zone" that he spent the entire loving movie whining and trying to find his ex "almost girlfriend" cause if he found her and saved her, he might actually prove that a nice guy doesn't have to finish last. Bonk has a new favorite as of 22:38 on Sep 26, 2011 |
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Sep 26, 2011 22:35
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Patattack posted:This is one of my biggest movie irritants. Want to have a bomb with a timer on it? Or your character has to catch a plane that's about to take off? Or, really, any plot device with a timed element? Go for it! That ticking timer, literal or not, adds a good amount of tension to the climax of the film. Then the bomb disposal guy (Terry O'Quinn), apparently undercover as part of the conspiracy, takes a seat and just watches it until it explodes. No big speeches, no defusing "Cut the red wire!/They're ALL red wires!" faux tension, just "Welp, time to blow up."
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Sep 30, 2011 05:31
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Something I've noticed a lot in "epic" films like LOTR and Harry Potter, but they do it in video games a lot too, is that things that are supposed to be black really aren't. They're always either a sort of charcoal grey, or a very dark brown or purple. Especially when surfaces are supposed to be black stone or black metal on some kind of evil structure, it's like solid black doesn't exist. Is this an aesthetic choice or does it just not show up well in film? Agnostic watermelon posted:For content I hate it when they show fake computer programs in movies (especially anything that has to do with police work). It bothers me beacuse Programs do not look super fancy like that and they vastly exaggerate what we can currently do.  was the worst offender I've ever seen. It's in real-time, which means that somehow during a commercial break, someone coded a shiny, polished interface for this very specific problem that they just found out existed.
Bonk has a new favorite as of 23:19 on Oct 8, 2011 |
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Oct 8, 2011 21:15
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When someone's driving and something either cracks up their windshield or splashes across it and makes it unable to see through, the driver always swerves uncontrollably and looks straight forward. This is often accompanied by screaming at whatever landed on their hood and/or spinning out into a screeching powerslide, which forces them into a tree/guardrail/oncoming traffic, if not flying off into a ravine somewhere. Why does nobody ever just hit the BRAKES? Symphoric posted:In the 20% of shaving scenes when the dude doesn't cut himself, he will instead be interrupted in the middle of shaving, at which point he will pick up a towel and just wipe the shaving cream off his face with it.
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Oct 9, 2011 04:14
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Adus posted:I always felt the exact same way. I didn't buy them being in love at all. It's hard to explain exactly why but I guess that's what makes it irrationally irritating. Probably because Keanu Reeves hasn't had real screen chemistry with anybody since Alex Winter.
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Oct 30, 2011 21:44
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DrBouvenstein posted:My beef with Fallen is how he can suddenly infect a cat...there was never any indication that he can infect anything other than a human. I mean...why stop at a cat? Couldn't he have gone into a mosquito, fly, squirrel, or something else there was bound to be within the "one breath" limit, or whatever it was? My irrational beef with Fallen is that it's still Denzel narrating when he jumps to the cat. Logically, the narration at the end should be "MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MRRRROWWWRR MRRRRR MRRRR MROWR MEOW MEOW MEOW".
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Nov 13, 2011 19:41
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It occurred to me today that none of the three main characters in Ferris Bueller's Day Off know that driving backwards to get mileage off a car doesn't work, until the very end when they actually try it. Their whole plan with the car was predicated upon this idea.
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Feb 7, 2012 07:04
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