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Current Releases "Eh, what's that? You want to let the girl go back in time? Nah, nah, we can't do that! Everybody knows women can't be time travellers on accounta their uhh... y'know, their period cycles. Yeah, ladies go through time and their bodies get all de-synched and it's just a mess, you gotta just send Wolverine, leave the phasey-girl at home, it's for her own good. We put that in a movie, girls are gonna try time travelling themselves, and that's dangerous." - Harold Gorman, Hollywood Foreman, reviewing an early draft of this script - There's a bizarre running theme of problems in the world not mattering until the exact moment that the American military starts to take notice. This would read as satire, but the bizarre message that comes through is that the country is failing to connect to its masculinity because it has collective daddy issues. Put your faith in God(zilla) and the world will find balance. If this movie is to be believed, humanity is just trying way too hard. Ultimately, Godzilla is just another movie for men with daddy issues. It's like The Lego Movie all over again, mistakenly reappropriating a cultural phenomenon or national mood for a need in all men to reconnect with a previous generation of men. Women are forgotten about in this movie; wives and children are there to be protected. The relationships men need to focus on are the broken ones with their reincarnated dinosaur dads. - Spider-Man is a time capsule of a film that has not aged well. Particularly embarrassing is the incredibly ugly and silly-looking first fight scene between Spider-Man and the Goblin in Times Square. It's poorly shot, filled with silly-looking CGI, and contains absolutely no tension at all. Of course, when you line that up against The Avengers' NYC fight scene, you will realize that we have learned basically nothing. We've swapped out our Damsels In Distress for Women In Refrigerators, but if anything that feels like a step backwards. Still, there's enough charm to Raimi's first film that I can't completely condemn it, and in my mind it basically exists so that we could get Spider-Man 2. That one contains 100% less Chad Kroeger. - With all of that in mind, it is hard to figure out just who this movie is for. It seems uninterested in garnering the attention of a young audience, unconcerned with branching out to a non-male, non-white demographic and weirdly unprepared to broaden its horizons beyond America. There is a recurring joke about Europeans having long lunch breaks and paid vacations, but who's laughing really? I can just imagine Bobin and Stoller sniggering about the NHS. "Hahaha, they all get health care no matter what. How amusing and un-American." - History aside, these issues deeply affect the film's structure. Sometimes it feels like everyone is in such a rush to get through the plot that they can't be bothered to stop and smell the roses. At other times, there is so much arbitrary rose-smelling that you just wish they'd get a bloody move on. We could do with spending more time early on focussing on our lead character, Ôishi, rather than watching Kai struggle with alienation, desperate for approval and falling in love with Mika. Oh, the struggles of the white man! Before the film even gets going, we have to sit through an interminably long and dense prologue that throws characters, conflicts and dilemmas at us and takes approximately thirty minutes just to set up a simple, dull, damsel in distress/revenge scenario. It's a massive buildup to a terrible, lazy payoff. Once Ôishi emerges from the pit, we think we're in for a good action romp as we look into the eyes of Hiroyuki Sanada, hell bent on bloody vengeance. Finally, this thing is settling down into a rhythm, we think. Our hero is going to go and kick some smug villain arse. Well, no. Because 47 Ronin still hasn't decided if it wants to be Pirates of the Carribean, 300 or The Seven Samurai and keeps trying to juggle all three. This is never clearer than in the third act where Kai's climactic battle with the unnamed witch stomps all over Ôishi's final act of vengeance again the smirking Kira, reducing it to a footnote while Keanu gets to take all the glory and rescue the princess. The result? Extreme dissatisfaction. The third act is robbed of any and all potential power. Structural issues aside, there are yet more problems in 47 Ronin. You may have noticed already that the only two female characters are an evil, seductive witch and a damsel in distress. In fact, the main point of tension in the film is that the titular ronin must stop Kira before he marries Mika. Because, as we all know, once a woman is married she immediately dies. It's a shame, because they assembled an excellent cast of Japanese stars to perform this rubbish. Hiroyuki Sanada carries the film wonderfully, or would if he were allowed to room to. Pacific Rim's Rinko Kikuchi is excellently hammy as a nameless, problematic character. Even Keanu Reeves does his best to elevate the slim material he is given, having apparently wandered into the wrong movie by mistake and being allowed to stick around. Nothing can save this mess of a film, though. - Non-Stop makes the reverse move; turning the money-craving opportunist into an actual terrorist with a political agenda, albeit one that doesn't make much sense. One could almost understand the wrong-headed reasoning of our mysterious terrorist buddy, rebelling against the American culture of anti-terrorism by validating it with an act of terrorism on a British airliner headed for London, when you see that it maybe is a result of PTSD compounded by already-existing mental issues and can be treated with methods other than being shot in the face by Liam Neeson. There's nothing inherently wrong with alienating your audience -- I do it all the time, after all -- but you can't expect to keep an entire multiplex audience, especially an international (read: non-American) audience interested when you make a bizarre political statement through movie violence. Even more so when you seem to be trying to vindicate racial profiling and an over-zealous obsession with national security. - The female planes are apparently designed by someone who has no idea what a female plane would look like. The idea of introducing gendered identities to normally non-gendered objects so often treats the familiar as inherently masculine. Female planes are painted hot pink and granted the enlarged, fluttery eyelashes so often used to distinguish women from men in lazily drawn cartoons. "Look at that propellor," declares Dusty and he gets a look at one of the ladyplanes' rear end. In one scene, the film even eroticises the tilting of wingflaps for a disturbingly long time. You could argue that it is a joke. I would argue that it enforces the idea of objectifying women to all the five-year-old boys in the audience by applying it to literal objects who have gender but no sex. Gotta start them off early, after all. In a film so concerned with class division, racial stereotypes and gender-inequality, it seems odd that the heavy-handed "moral" of the story would be that Dusty's success is an inspiration to all the little guys who were designed to be less but who can learn to try to become more somehow. It's like the persistent right-wing (ha) argument that minorities already have equality and that by insisting that they do not, these groups are merely seeking to gain an upper hand. The belief is that these people are naturally unequal and can only be considered equal in legal terms, because the truth as they see it is that anyone who is not society's favourite is only in a marginalised position because they can never aspire to truly be more than they are allowed to be. - I'll get my complaints out of the way now, so I can end on a positive note: Amber Heard's character is just& just ridiculous. For about five seconds, you think that she might not be an action star femme fatale using sex as a weapon because of EMPOWERMENT, but of course she becomes that, because that's one of the only three types of women Luc Besson knows how to write. (The other two are Sexually Curious Naive Angry Teen and Leeloo Dallas Multipass) Zoey, of course, plays the SCNAT role here, and she fares far better, as the story is opened up to allow a growing father-daughter interaction. However, while I applaud the film for not going the full-Taken route and having Zoey wind up kidnapped and at the mercy of the bad guys, it still takes a brief terrible turn and puts her in an attempted gang-rape situation so that Ethan can save her, which is immediately glossed over. Four hours later, he's teaching her to ride a bike. As a reminder, last time I watched a Besson movie, we were graced with the Mafia's apparent Wife-Rape rule. The dude has some issues when it comes to women. - and everything in these: http://www.somethingawful.com/current-movie-reviews/amazing-spider-man2/3/ http://www.somethingawful.com/current-movie-reviews/need-for-speed/2/ http://www.somethingawful.com/current-movie-reviews/man-of-steel/2/ There's probably way more but I already spent eight minutes finding these
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May 27, 2014 03:44
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 18:57 |
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There's a...front...?
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May 27, 2014 03:45
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For someone who dislikes it so much you sure 
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May 27, 2014 03:45
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BASF posted:There's a...front...? not kidding i had actually genuinely forgotten that
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May 27, 2014 03:46
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I like the rating system, its very off the wall, nay, zany.
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May 27, 2014 03:47
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i liked david thorpe. what's that guy doin these days those old articles describing a fictional grammar were pretty great
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May 27, 2014 03:56
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i'm totally shocked that lovely unfunny mods would make lovely unfunny front page content
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May 27, 2014 03:59
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nig nog tryna get a front peezy
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May 27, 2014 04:00
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shmorky's diaper
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May 27, 2014 04:04
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May 27, 2014 04:07
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01011001 posted:shmorky's diaper Ga-ga-goink!
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May 27, 2014 04:25
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01011001 posted:shmorky's diaper lmao
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May 27, 2014 04:28
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01011001 posted:shmorky's diaper hahahah
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May 27, 2014 04:29
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Nah Current releases is pretty good, OP is a fuckwit.
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May 27, 2014 04:35
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the worst thing on SA is all the friend of the family troons
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May 27, 2014 04:37
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I actually check Current Releases before I go watch something in a theater. It's pretty good imho
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May 27, 2014 04:43
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pet island. the worst thing about sa is pet island
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May 27, 2014 04:45
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not only do a lot of the articles veer into lovely liberal arts thesis paper territory, they recommended berberian sound studio!
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May 27, 2014 04:46
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I play dance dance Karnov last winter and it was awesome
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May 27, 2014 04:50
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i like current releases and its the only movie reviews i read now that ebert is dead i mean its not great but everything else is so incredibly bad it looks great in comparison go to rotten tomatoes and click on random reviews, its hard to understand how these ppl have jobs
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May 27, 2014 04:50
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babypolis posted:i like current releases and its the only movie reviews i read now that ebert is dead p. much if you think current releases is amateur analysis check out nearly all other reviews though their comedy based "woah reviewing movies in the future/post-apocalypse/setting related to the movie, ZANY ZANY ZANY" articles are kind of the worst
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May 27, 2014 04:55
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Music/film reviews are the literal worst
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May 27, 2014 04:56
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i honestly didn't know there was still front page content
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May 27, 2014 04:57
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Back in like 09 my buddy actually had me convinced that SA was a marketing division for Logitech . Hell, at the rate I was going through keyboards (up to 5/month when the :iamafag: smily first came out), I believed him.
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May 27, 2014 04:58
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Previous Jesus posted:i honestly didn't know there was still front page content mods?
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May 27, 2014 05:06
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Previous Jesus posted:i honestly didn't know there was still front page content It isn't very good
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May 27, 2014 05:09
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who loving cares
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May 27, 2014 05:10
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i saw Godzilla at the drive-in and didn't get kicked out for shaking peoples cars during the good parts
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May 27, 2014 05:20
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wacky rating system so they can make a pretense of not being incredibly sincere and humorless
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May 27, 2014 05:20
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good feature for a comedy website: a completely serious merging of zizek and tvtropes
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May 27, 2014 05:23
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A decade ago Current Releases would have been the Awful Link of the Day easily
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May 27, 2014 05:24
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its u
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May 27, 2014 05:33
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babypolis posted:i like current releases and its the only movie reviews i read now that ebert is dead  Dr. Witherbone posted:p. much
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May 27, 2014 05:37
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Current Releases gave awesome reviews for Battleship and Breaking Dawn so they totally rule. Can't wait for the Transformers 4 review after reading the Transformers thread.
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May 27, 2014 06:12
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"The female planes are apparently designed by someone who has no idea what a female plane would look like." haha what loving retard wrote that
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May 27, 2014 06:14
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Maybe it's a coincidence but Cinema Discuso is the most worthless forum.
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May 27, 2014 06:15
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CR got me to watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and that movie rules.
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May 27, 2014 06:30
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agreed op
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May 27, 2014 06:35
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May 27, 2014 06:38
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 18:57 |
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i must compose posted:they recommended berberian sound studio! well gently caress me
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May 27, 2014 06:42
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