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There were enough genuinely good bits in RE1 that I'm able to overlook the bad and legitimately enjoy the movie. (I remember cringing at Alice's outfit and the bad licker CG even as a 14 year-old girl in 2002.) But! - The Hive lockdown in the beginning was engaging and appropriately hopeless. - Alice's wordless intro was effective. You meet her character's level of confusion, exploration, problem-solving and unease. - I love Michelle Rodriguez. - The laser room hit the same elements of Alice's intro and upped the ante by adding hope into the mix. That's why the last pass is such a gut punch. You're watching a man outmatch an AI as the clock ticks down and it looks like he might succeed until you're reminded that no, this is not just a defense system, this thing absolutely wants to kill him. - Speaking of which, I like the overriding the Red Queen scene where all the doors unlock. There's an absence of human presence during the sequence which really digs into an agoraphobic edge, wherein you now know the danger can come from everywhere. Also in this part, and what I was speaking of which-ing, is something that makes no goddamn sense: Where did all the body parts in the laser room get off to? The brain is key in this movie, so the only one who should've zombified was the bisected dude. I get the game reference gag, but it makes no sense in-world. - The zombie intro scene with the scraping fire axe is also a great moment of suspense! You're in the denouement of chaos from the first attack when the relief is interrupted by the sound of dragging metal. It's a great cue. - This movie just does confusion and panic well. - The possibility that "a scratch" might be enough to infect you underlined how hosed Rain was, but I liked the reluctance of the characters to accept it. Even up to injecting her with the anti-virus, essentially wasting a valuable resource. Her turn was also a great moment. - The ending with Alice wandering through the aftermath of the lab's outbreak marks my favorite scene that's in any zombie media: I love it when a character arrives in the absolute silence after a violent event. It's like coming home at night and finding your door unlocked. Your mind immediately starts racing through explanations, trying to piece together a narrative and all the while wondering if someone has entered your house and oh god, are they still here? Do they know you're here yet? What's waiting in the dark? - And as was mentioned, excellent soundtrack. I like this movie! I'm pretty sure I've seen all the rest, but all I remember is Alice's outfit in... 3, I think? Goddamn, that's a great outfit! I wanna low-key steal that poo poo!
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Feb 20, 2019 14:42
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Alhazred posted:The last one is basically Mad Max with zombies and it's still a bad movie. The Third movie is just the Road Warrior and its, I feel, the best movie in the series by far. The last one doesn't have enough coherence to have an arguable inspiration
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Feb 20, 2019 16:06
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Das Boo posted:- I love Michelle Rodriguez. There is this amazing moment in her career, the opening of Fast & Furious (4) where she just starts showing off this amazing smile. Like, she'd grinned previously but she looked so goddamned joyful in those scenes. And then she kept smiling like that in everything since and I've just adored her even more. It's like her agent told her it was okay to show how happy she was and that she didn't just have to be the tough chick persona she'd become known for.
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Feb 20, 2019 17:22
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Michelle Rodriquez always struck me as a person who saw Vasquez in Aliens and was like "I want that to be my entire career"
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Feb 20, 2019 18:13
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Michelle Rodriquez always struck me as a person who saw Vasquez in Aliens and was like "I want that to be my entire career" That's fair. She was the hardass tough girl for a very long time. I like watching her now because there's a joy in her acting that didn't seem to be there before. There's a great story how she was in the theater watching Fast Five and had no idea she was being brought back yet, like they hadn't even reached out to her agent. So when that files opens at the end she was sitting in a crowd of people and just flips her loving lid. I love that and wish it was something we could have seen.
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Feb 20, 2019 18:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Michelle Rodriquez always struck me as a person who saw Vasquez in Aliens and was like "I want that to be my entire career" She has also said that if you don't want to be the love interest basically the only parts you get are "the though chick that dies".
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Feb 20, 2019 18:18
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Oh yeah I am not saying it as an insult, its just that she found a character role that works for her Like, sometimes when I think of Vasquez in Aliens I find myself accidentally replacing the actual actress with Rodriguez
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Feb 20, 2019 18:20
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I'm shocked she hasn't played a Colonial Space Marine.
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Feb 20, 2019 18:23
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I also love Vasquez and the camaraderie she has with her unit.  Honestly, one of my favorite things about the Alien films is that they write their women as characters instead of "female character." Well, the first two. I've seen all of them except Covenant, but they're muddled. Like my memory of RE films! Brought it back around!
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Feb 20, 2019 18:35
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Seeing all these Mr X memes on the net has increased my desire to see a proper Tyrant in a film. The reboot will be a success if it's as fun as this film, but I want some real heart pumping action.
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Feb 20, 2019 18:46
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Das Boo posted:I also love Vasquez and the camaraderie she has with her unit. I love Covenant but I found Waterston’s Daniels pretty cool. She’s no Ripley, but she’s the one who loses the most early on, the one with actual reason to say “yeah let’s get out of space” but still she’s like “uh let’s not go to the weird planet. We don’t know what the gently caress is out there.” She’s pretty cool. Plus she kicks the Alien’s rear end twice in both fairly cool ways. I hope they bring her back.
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Feb 20, 2019 21:50
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Given what happened to the last female lead in an Prometheus movie, she'll return in pieces.
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Feb 20, 2019 22:09
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Azubah posted:Given what happened to the last female lead in an Prometheus movie, she'll return in pieces. I was more bothered by that than I was Hicks and Newt.
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Feb 20, 2019 22:34
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Yeah that was sad. I really wanted that short film they made to be the sequel. But I also love the direction Covenant took so I’m not sure. Very mixed. I loved Shaw as well. She was a very sweet, optimistic person in such a pretty dark movie.
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Feb 21, 2019 01:12
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Also while it won’t get made because Fox and people suck, Waterston I think was talked too to maybe come back. She’s game for it but doesn’t know anything. Honestly I think having her and McBride lead a resistance team on the Covenant while David keeps making crazy monsters would be dope as gently caress. And then having The Engineers show up to take down David? I need that movie.
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Feb 21, 2019 01:13
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All I will say about Covenant is that it is filled with the dumbest people on earth and between this and Prometheus I am not sure Ridley Scott knows how humans work anymore
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Feb 21, 2019 01:17
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He does. He just has such contempt for them and enjoys them dying, while is awesome angry robot creative runs amok trying to make cool poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2019 01:18
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Mel Mudkiper posted:All I will say about Covenant is that it is filled with the dumbest people on earth and between this and Prometheus I am not sure Ridley Scott knows how humans work anymore Honestly, I'd say he does, based specifically on this. The thing is, he and Cameron have basically opposite opinions of human competency. Cameron is someone who thinks that expertise and knowledge will always triumph; Scott is someone who thinks that expertise and knowledge lead to fatal hubris, especially when messing with things outside your lane. If you look at Prometheus and Covenant from this perspective, everyone's behavior makes a lot more sense: they're experts at Their Thing, but complete dinguses otherwise, and the former blinds them to the latter.
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Feb 21, 2019 01:24
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See the problem with that argument is that the biologist sees a space snake for the first time and tries to pet it
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Feb 21, 2019 01:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I hope part of my goal in this thread is to convince you otherwise I'm going to sit here like a Greek philosopher in my toga and listen to your treatise
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Feb 21, 2019 02:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:See the problem with that argument is that the biologist sees a space snake for the first time and tries to pet it He's also stoned off his rear end. 
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Feb 21, 2019 03:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:See the problem with that argument is that the biologist sees a space snake for the first time and tries to pet it He’s not stoned, and also Steve Irwin
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Feb 21, 2019 04:27
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cool i can post my rant about how Paul WS Anderson is a genius again. Vulgar Auterism is the best. Of the Andersons, one name is worth study. And it's not the lightbox-diorama designing Paul Anderson or the insufferably twee affectations of Wes, but grindhouse-derived Paul W.S. Anderson that deserves our attention. Everyone likes to treat Event Horizon as Anderson's only good movie. I posit that not only is it not 'his only good movie,' but in fact isn't even his best movie. But first we need to understand why Anderson is dismissed as one step above the Brett Ratner for-hire guys. We'll start with Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat opened at #1 at the box office, dethroning the (at-the-time white-hot) Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and stayed there for three weeks, while other contemporary video-game movies (and indeed most VG adaptations since) were critically panned and bombed. Laura Evanson praised "superb, imaginative production design, which combines Thailand exteriors with vast sets that recall the barbaric grandeur of exotic old movie palaces and campy Maria Montez epics," and I want to drill down on that comment. Anderson knew he couldn't make the hard-R blood-and-guts movie the material provided (having to keep it PG-13 in a time when Jack Thompson roamed the Earth) and instead opted for a campy throwback to fighting-tournament wuxia, which itself (specifically Master of the Flying Guillotine) is the basis for most fighting video games. Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, who is usually the best part of anything he's in, leads a troupe of campy, over the top characters through this goofy but unrelentingly fun (and beautifully designed) world. This movie had every reason and excuse to bomb worse than Van Damme's Street Fighter, which had star power and the entire Thai military on screen as extras - yet it did phenomenally well and resonates today as a trashclassic and cult film. But the movie that made me ask the question "Are you a genius?", is Soldier, the 1998 Kurt Russell action flick that was betrayed by its advertising. With a poster promising future-war and a trailer that totally betrays its premise, the movie was doomed from the start. But it is perfect and compelling in a way that hinted at the sort of deconstruction MAD MAX: FURY ROAD would give us 18 years later. Soldier goes out of its way to subvert the paradigm of what action movies mean at every chance. It's low-key, quiet, and surprisingly action-sparse (the space combat in the trailer isn't in the movie). The movie instead presents us with the hosed-up idea of raising child soldiers, and instead of doing the old trope of "they are expendable because these gene-soldiers are better" except the gene-soldiers have no heart/ethics/soul, the gene-soldiers totally are better in every way. Period. The community TODD finds himself in initially try to integrate him, but when it becomes apparent he cannot be rehabilitated into society (suffering immense and untreated PTSD, a concept that hadn't really entered public consciousness in 98), he is cast out. But not in a hacky, angry mob pitchforks-and-torches Frankenstein trope. Rather, he is cast out lovingly, with the well-wishing of the community. It's a touching moment that subverts your expectations. I don't want to spoil the movie, because the ending is fantastic and earns all the action bona fides it builds to, but I do want to mention that the hero does not get the girl, even though her husband is fridged, because the movie isn't about everything being fixed by shoot-mans. How was Paul W.S. Anderson able to do something this subversive? Even more subversive is his 2008 offering, Death Race, which reimagines the Corman B-movie nonsense splatterpunk 70s cult classic as our worst natures given perfect, prescient implementation. The Death Race is run by cons, in private prisons, on PPV, for profit. Hal Douglas announces the PPV advertisements and women are brought in as navigators to get some T&A on the PPV. It's crass, over-the-top, and entirely plausible. It also features Machine Gun Joe, a character who is ambiguously gay but is not defined by that characteristic, which is remarkably forward-thinking in 2008, a time when Ellen wasn't a 'safe' daytime host and Will & Grace still had Sean Hayes camping it up as a mincing stereotype. The Resident Evil movies are at this point reliable cash-cows and clearly done because Anderson and his wife Milla Jovavich just felt like having more money, they are still somewhat interesting in that instead of hewing to the game plots, the RE movies have spun off into their own canon that is its own brand of batshit crazy that only works because of its low-grade, grindhouse schlock nature. Understand that this is not a beseeching of CD to "just shut your brain off and enjoy the explosions," because that criticism is hollow. My question is this: When are we allowed to acknowledge that some directors take on genre films but still have artistic chops and something to say? Paul W.S. Anderson makes immensely enjoyable, visceral films that 'play within themselves' while still being able to be analyzed and hold up to rigor? Are we living in a time when the best Anderson working in film today isn't making overwrought big-drat-dramas or hipster nonsense, but Resident Evil sequels? Shrecknet fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 04:46
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Also I saw one of them (the one where they were locked in a hotel with pyramidhead) in D-BOX and it loving owned These movies are essentially long theme park rides so just lean into it, right?
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Feb 21, 2019 05:23
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I am always one for appreciating schlocky film makers but I think your argument is confusing reference with satire. Like, I do not get how the elements of Death Race work as satire when nothing is done to speak to the imagery as much as just including it. Like with the sexy co pilots. For it work as a satirical critique, it would need to at some level speak to the fact the attractive co pilot is there for the film audience as much as the audience of the "race". And I am not seeing that.
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Feb 21, 2019 05:56
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Rhyno posted:There is this amazing moment in her career, the opening of Fast & Furious (4) where she just starts showing off this amazing smile. Like, she'd grinned previously but she looked so goddamned joyful in those scenes. And then she kept smiling like that in everything since and I've just adored her even more. It's like her agent told her it was okay to show how happy she was and that she didn't just have to be the tough chick persona she'd become known for. Did you just write "she should smile more" in earnest? Alhazred fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 06:51
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Easy Diff posted:Are we living in a time when the best Anderson working in film today isn't making overwrought big-drat-dramas or hipster nonsense, but Resident Evil sequels? No
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Feb 22, 2019 07:22
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Alhazred posted:Did you just write "she should smile more" In earnest? Oh jesus, that's what it looks like. Oof. No, just that I'd never seen her in a role where she played a non gritty person. It was a shock to see her flip the switch.
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Feb 22, 2019 10:43
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Alhazred posted:Did you just write "she should smile more" In earnest? whats wrong with smiling more?
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Feb 22, 2019 12:16
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chesnok posted:whats wrong with smiling more? It's a handbook criticism of actresses and holy gently caress do I come off terrible for posting that without being clear on what I meant.
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Feb 22, 2019 12:48
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To be fair, talking about the kind of characters a woman got the opportunity (in poo poo-rear end sexist Hollywood) to play is really different from trying to police her personal behavior.
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Feb 22, 2019 14:03
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Das Boo posted:I like this movie! thank you for this post, reading it (while that main theme was playing in another tab) brought a big dumb smile to my face.
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Feb 22, 2019 15:37
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am gonna have to look into the commentary track because I never heard of it It's Jovovich and Rodriguez making jokes about Milla's blatant nude shots while Anderson and another guy try desperately to explain how they made the movie . It's great. They, probably wisely, made three separate commentaries for Apocalypse so Milla' could make all her jokes and be silly with Carlos' actor while the director and producer and stuff got their own commentary to tell us how the movie was made. It's still great because in that actor commentary, Jill's actress talks super seriously about how she studied the Resident Evil 3 game intently to get Jill's movements and mannerisms down perfectly. Then it cuts to Jovovich and Carlos' actor just laughing at everything. I love these movies. Well, I love all the Anderson directed ones. He did not direct Apocalypse or Extinction and I actively dislike Extinction. But with Afterlife I got back onboard. It's very fitting that movie Resident Evil 4, much like game Resident Evil 4, was when they stopped all pretenses of being horror and just made everything wacky. Also while RE1's score is rightfully praised here, I loved the music in all the movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxDOpxI051I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubGmxdAJ6i8 NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 02:24
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tomandandy did some really good work for those movies, yeah. I've always found them kinda underrated, but I also really like weird electronic film music.
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Apr 23, 2019 02:39
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I completely forgot I made this thread
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Apr 23, 2019 14:54
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