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I thought the blood bag was something vaguely based around dead foetus's. And it was the best wtf segment without a doubt, which is something everyone seems to agree on, unless your brain has been turned into retard purée. Is there a thing called subjective intertextuality? I don't know, as I don't use google.
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# ? Oct 26, 2014 23:18 |
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# ? Apr 26, 2024 09:49 |
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osietra posted:I thought the blood bag was something vaguely based around dead foetus's. And it was the best wtf segment without a doubt, which is something everyone seems to agree on, unless your brain has been turned into retard purée. Is there a thing called subjective intertextuality? I was very unsettled up until the glowing eyes and Troma hand-puppet dicks.
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# ? Oct 26, 2014 23:24 |
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LeJackal posted:I was very unsettled up until the glowing eyes and Troma hand-puppet dicks.
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# ? Oct 26, 2014 23:26 |
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osietra posted:Yeah, me too! And it was still the best chapter. This guy gets it.
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# ? Oct 26, 2014 23:39 |
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The main secret is that the monster genitals reading as hands is not a mistake. They just have big demon hands for junk. If you want to point out something really egregious in the film: what happens to the third cyclist, with the red tank top?
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 00:37 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The main secret is that the monster genitals reading as hands is not a mistake. They just have big demon hands for junk. Mistake or not, it was really distracting and just plain silly.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 01:00 |
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LeJackal posted:Mistake or not, it was really distracting and just plain silly. You watched the second sequel to V/H/S.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 01:11 |
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I'm in the "the silly stuff was awesome" camp. demon dick is probably one of the funnier gags from the entire series for me and I guess I don't see it as silly and more as a legitimately funny joke.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 01:33 |
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LeJackal posted:Mistake or not, it was really distracting and just plain silly. Yes because huge exaggerated cocks and Venus fly trap pussies aren't silly otherwise.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 01:49 |
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Ghosthotel posted:I'm in the "the silly stuff was awesome" camp. You can see it as a legitimately funny joke and still think an interesting premise was mishandled.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 01:55 |
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For me personally I never really thought they betrayed the premise though, the way the whole satan universe was ramping up through out the segment it felt like a natural and really funny progression. once that ridiculous blimp with the neon inverted cross flew by I was ready for the segment to get ridiculous and it definitely followed through with that.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 02:51 |
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I've had to skim posts since the spoilers started rolling in, but where are you guys seeing this movie?
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 03:25 |
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Cole posted:Yes because huge exaggerated cocks and Venus fly trap pussies aren't silly otherwise. We should actually approach the cock-limbs with utmost seriousness, while recognizing the true joke: the way Monster Alfonso looks at the real one like "you sick motherfucker," and then shivs him in the leg.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 03:56 |
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MisterBibs posted:I've had to skim posts since the spoilers started rolling in, but where are you guys seeing this movie? I watched it on Amazon but you can get it on iTunes, YouTube, etc.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 04:12 |
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This was probably my least favorite of the three, but I still thought it owned. None of the segments are in my favorites for the whole series yet, but none of them were bad either. The real flaw was definitely that it didn't feel cohesive like the first two. That was a problem in the second as well, but it still felt like an anthology for the most part, whereas this feels like a bunch of unconnected, but good, shorts. A big part of this was probably the framing segment, which is the worst of the three. And I say that as somebody who actually really liked the first movies framing segment and still thought the second one was pretty cool. I knew going into it that it was supposed to be funnier than the first two, so that didn't bother me at all, although an extra short that was scarier would have helped the movie, I think. This does have what might be one of my favorite deaths in the whole series: When the biker gets picked up by the ice cream truck, and is being dragged around as his feet disintegrate beneath him, and then one of his feet flies off and knocks over one of the other bikers. That was really rough.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 04:44 |
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As many of you probably know, I've pretty much a huge cheerleader for this series. Still, I did not have high hopes for this one. It was better than I was expecting but it was the worst of the series by a large margin. The first segment was so silly that I couldn't help to like it but man it was badly put together. It couldn't decide if it was a documentary, or a found footage movie or pretty much anything. There were just shots where it was unclear why there was a camera there. As a found footage movie it was just lazy. It also just didn't fit in with the format of the series as a whole. I feel I should dislike it more but as I said, it was so silly I couldn't hate it. The second one owned. It had an extremely unsettling buildup and managed to end somewhere actually pretty unsettling (though silly). Easily the best in the movie (though it still doesn't stand up as well compared to most of the other series segments). I thought the filmmaking on the third one was strong and I really liked the first half. I like playing with the idea of skate cams and the characters were douchey in a very genuine way. Still, the payoff just didn't deliver. The fight just sort of went on and the end felt like a cheap play to half heartedly imitate the end of Safe Haven. The wrap around segment is the worst movie I've seen all year by alot. It makes the other wrap around segment seem like Safe Haven. Every thing about it was just loving awful: the constant glitching, the senseless trying way too hard narrative, the badly done homage to Cloverfield to try to get us to care, the awful Mexican stereotypes...I could go on. Just loving awful and having it end with it just leaves a bad taste. If I had the same expectations for this as I did for S-VHS, I would have been horribly let down, but overall I thought it was alright...I guess.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 05:12 |
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:BONESTORM flows seamlessly into its action; it's a movie about skateboarders freestyling on death cultists. Where is the turn that's losing people? It's not so much that it doesn't work in theory, it's just in practice it goes on kind of longer than it should and just sort of feels redundant after awhile. I have no problem with it becoming an action sequence but it's not the best made action sequence and it just sort of lost me, regained me whenever a skeleton jumped out and then lost me again. Also I regret not jumping in this thread earlier because I really do like posting about how much the other V/H/S movies own and how everyone that disagrees is wrong.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 05:23 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:We should actually approach the cock-limbs with utmost seriousness, while recognizing the true joke: the way Monster Alfonso looks at the real one like "you sick motherfucker," and then shivs him in the leg. axleblaze posted:The first segment was so silly that I couldn't help to like it but man it was badly put together. It couldn't decide if it was a documentary, or a found footage movie or pretty much anything. There were just shots where it was unclear why there was a camera there. As a found footage movie it was just lazy. It also just didn't fit in with the format of the series as a whole. I feel I should dislike it more but as I said, it was so silly I couldn't hate it. I mean, gently caress's sake. We see Dante in his green room, setting up a camera, then we see security footage of that room of him setting up a camera. I don't give a gently caress if that movie was saying things to make sense in the wraparound, because you don't make your anthology part to explain the wraparound. You just make a good loving movie, and The Magician was a filler episode for a late-season Supernatural knockoff on SyFy. I loved Bonestorm, and I really liked Alfonso's Magical Wishing Cupboard Of Horrible Genitals but the awkward wraparound and horrible Magicians make me really fuckin' angry.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 06:40 |
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I can 't disagree with most of that but the magic fight and the use of stage magic concepts to kill people was just do silly and done so gleefully that I just couldn't hate. i mean yeah as a found footage film it was incompetent and contained many terrible decisions because the filmmaker obviously had no faith in the genre, but still it made me smile.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 06:49 |
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axleblaze posted:i mean yeah as a found footage film it was incompetent and contained many terrible decisions because the filmmaker obviously had no faith in the genre, but still it made me smile.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 06:58 |
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Whalley posted:The first segment loving sucked. Not because it was silly, but because V/H/S is a found footage horror mixtape, not a "low budget cameras I guess" anthology. One of the only things you need to do in a found footage film is give us a reason why this is being filmed, or at least, who is filming. The cameraman is a character in found footage. [...] There was occasional lines like "Dante needed an audience" that made me think they'd do a Chronicle-esque shot of him controlling some cameras, something to make sense of why there was these camera angles, but nope. Nothing. I have no reason to give any kind of poo poo about who the gently caress was filming, and the quarter second of time we see as actual found footage at the very end was godawful. It is found footage. The creator of the footage is the cloak, and its reason for filming is to empower Dante. The basic premise of the short - the same as in Grave Encounters and its sequel - is that real magic is indistinguishable from editing trickery and 'bad' special effects. You're not just seeing film editing; reality itself is being edited and manipulated by the cloak. For example: the trick where Dante escapes from the police car in front of the big crowd. He's locked in the back, the camera pans away for a second, and he's vanished. In real life, we know how this was done: the police officer is an actor, the crowd is made up of extras, the cuffs are fake, the door wasn't actually locked, blah blah blah. Diegetically, however, the only reality is what we see. The cop is a real cop, the crowd is a real crowd, and Dante is a real magician. When Dante is offscreen, he literally ceases to exist until he reappears onscreen again. The entire short functions according to this logic. Cameras are manifested out of nowhere, editing teleports people from place to place, etc. It's found footage of real magic.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 08:13 |
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axleblaze posted:I thought the filmmaking on the third one was strong and I really liked the first half. I like playing with the idea of skate cams and the characters were douchey in a very genuine way. Still, the payoff just didn't deliver. The fight just sort of went on and the end felt like a cheap play to half heartedly imitate the end of Safe Haven. Why douchey?
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 12:41 |
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axleblaze posted:It's not so much that it doesn't work in theory, it's just in practice it goes on kind of longer than it should and just sort of feels redundant after awhile. I have no problem with it becoming an action sequence but it's not the best made action sequence and it just sort of lost me, regained me whenever a skeleton jumped out and then lost me again. I thought there was so much character in it that it I found nothing in it redundant. The whole segment trades on style and I don't mean that dismissively - it starts off with horror antics and turns into a skate video, complete with post-hoc editing. It's a much better example of the Viral tag than the wraparound, which is explicitly concerned with that.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 16:04 |
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There was a 4th segment that was all about a serial killer being watched ,but it got cut which is kind of disappointing. I thought the first two segments were great, kind of sort of enjoyed the 3rd. Hated the wrap around.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 17:07 |
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I thought there was so much character in it that it I found nothing in it redundant. The whole segment trades on style and I don't mean that dismissively - it starts off with horror antics and turns into a skate video, complete with post-hoc editing. It's a much better example of the Viral tag than the wraparound, which is explicitly concerned with that. Again, it's is extremely well-written. The first three stunts establish a pattern - they want to do cool tricks, Camera Guy is exploiting them, and The Man says they're not allowed on the roof or in the streets. Things expand a bit when they're attacked by US Marines (???) while Camera Guy hits on the indifferent hot chick, but they still get kicked out of the skate park. And all of this comes back in the ditch in Tijuana - the indifferent chick, the dumb lackeys, everything. Gas Money serves as a warning of what happens to them if they fail. The turning point comes when they smash The Man in the face with a skateboard and turn their music back on.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 17:58 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
One hundred percent exactly this.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 19:05 |
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It's a good rhythm of three.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 19:13 |
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Glad to see lots of people enjoyed it. I appreciated the comedy immensely, but I understand the sentiment that it would've been cool too see a more ambitious approach to the horror. I think the thing really really suffers from losing its 4th segment by virtue of each segment taking on a greater % of the viewers' overall scrutiny. For example, I think the haunted eyeball segment from 2 is just as low-rent as Magician's, but the latter is getting crushed while the former is largely ignored other than the sex scene. I'm intensely curious what happened re: the serial killer segment and whether or not it will see the light of day. Also, I totally just took the wraparound segment at face value and chose to see it as some sort of crossover between the first two wraparounds and Twisted Metal. All this magic AI stuff might make some tenuous sense but at the same time, it just doesn't feel worth it to GO DEEPER.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 19:45 |
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I didn't even understand what it was supposed to be at face value, anyways I really liked Viral because each short was something that I would've thought was the coolest poo poo on earth at some point in my life.
Hat Thoughts fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Oct 27, 2014 |
# ? Oct 27, 2014 20:07 |
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By face value I meant scary ice cream truck drives around, crazy stuff involving videos ensues. That's about as far as I explored things.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 20:22 |
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saulwright posted:Glad to see lots of people enjoyed it. I appreciated the comedy immensely, but I understand the sentiment that it would've been cool too see a more ambitious approach to the horror. The problem is that the previous two frame stories withstood scrutiny and successfully set a tone that elevated the weaker entries. Vicious Circles, which sets the tone of Viral, is easily the worst short of the series thus far. Clinical Trials may have been kinda dumb in some ways (he has a microphone installed in his eye), but it was internally consistent, and had a strong thematic throughline ("and if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee"*). Even if you didn't like it that much, it was just a tangent from the main story. To get what's wrong with Vicious Circles, understand that its plot and themes are almost exactly those of the 28 Days Later films - smarter, better-made films from roughly a decade ago. *"Another way to make this point is to say that the Greek Gods appear to humans in human form, while the Christian God appears as human TO HIMSELF. This is the crucial point: Incarnation is for Hegel not a move by means of which God makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which Gods looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective: 'As God manifests himself to his own gaze, the specular presentation divides the divine self from itself, offering the divine the perspectival vision of its own self-presence.' Or, to put in Freudian-Lacanian terms: Christ is God’s "partial object," an autonomized organ without a body, as if God picked his eye out of his head and turned it at himself from the outside. We can guess, now, why Hegel insisted on the monstrosity of Christ. Kino-Eye /Kino-glaz/, Dziga Vertov's Soviet silent classic from 1924 (one of the highpoints of revolutionary cinema) takes as its emblem the eye (of the camera) as an "autonomous organ" which wanders around in the early 1920s, giving us snippets of the NEP ("new economic politics") reality of the Soviet Union. Recall the common expression "to cast an eye over something," with its literal implication of picking the eye out of its socket and throwing it around. Martin, the legendary idiot from French fairy tales, did exactly this when his mother, worried that he will never find a wife, told him to go to church and cast an eye over the girls there. What he does is go to the butcher first, purchase a pig eye, and then, in the church, throw this eye around over the girls at prayer – no wonder he later reports to his mother that the girls were not too impressed by his behavior. This, precisely, is what revolutionary cinema should be doing: using the camera as a partial object, as an "eye" torn from the subject and freely thrown around – or, to quote Vertov himself: 'The film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the hands to the feet, from the feet to the eyes and so on in the most profitable order, and it organises the details into a regular montage exercise.' We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when, all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation, 'our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer looking at ourselves.' It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship. When we see ourselves 'from outside,' from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, which observes me from the outside, which, precisely, means that my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me. There is a relatively simple and painless eye-operation which, nonetheless, involves a very unpleasant experience: under local anesthesia, i.e., with the patient’s full awareness, the eye is taken out of the socket and turned a little bit around in the air (in order to correct the way the eye-ball is attached to the brain) – at this moment, the patient can for a brief moment see (parts of) himself from outside, from an 'objective' viewpoint, as a strange object, the way he 'really is' as an object in the world, not the way one usually experiences oneself as fully embedded 'in' one’s body. There is something divine in this (very unpleasant) experience: one sees oneself as if from a divine viewpoint, somehow realizing the mystical motto according to which, the eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees himself. Something homologous to this weird experience, applied to God himself, occurs in the Incarnation." -Slavoj Zizek, "Only a Suffering God Can Save Us."
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 22:00 |
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Clinical trials in V/H/S/2 is so close to being good and it makes it all the more annoying. I mean the whole eye concept is great and it's executed pretty well, the basic story is good and I also really like the story that's going on that it never comes out and tells you. The thing is, it's just not scary. The scares in it and the way they are executed just feels very stale and generally uninteresting. The sex scene, while explainable, also kind of destroys any tension that might have still been there. On paper it's an excellent short and in execution it's still not awful it just has some major missteps that hold it back, that aren't helped by how good the other three shorts are.
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# ? Oct 27, 2014 23:59 |
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Hmmm...I think this might be the most consistently 'fun' movie of the series. None of the shorts felt like a complete drag (although the final fight scene in Bonestorm could have been cut by 5 minutes). All 3 of them succeeded in making me want to see them as full length films. The wraparound story was pretty horrible and the shorts/wraparound felt even less thematically connected than they did in V/H/S 2. Overall I'd say it was the worst in the series but I still really enjoyed it. bowser fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Oct 28, 2014 |
# ? Oct 28, 2014 01:26 |
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If you watched it without knowing what genre it was supposed to be would you say it was better or worse? E: play this game with all movies.
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 01:43 |
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axleblaze posted:Clinical trials in V/H/S/2 is so close to being good and it makes it all the more annoying. I mean the whole eye concept is great and it's executed pretty well, the basic story is good and I also really like the story that's going on that it never comes out and tells you. The thing is, it's just not scary. The scares in it and the way they are executed just feels very stale and generally uninteresting. The sex scene, while explainable, also kind of destroys any tension that might have still been there. On paper it's an excellent short and in execution it's still not awful it just has some major missteps that hold it back, that aren't helped by how good the other three shorts are. It's a different sort of bad. Like you said, Clinical Trials is decently written and conceptually sound, but they do the bare minimum to put the concept onscreen. There's a camera held at eye level, and there are some grey people. Everything about it is professional and adequate. Vicious Circles has a similar competence at first, but plummets at pretty much exactly the point that the protagonist leaves his house. When he's outside, he inadvertently films a bunch of other onlookers: three cyclists, the girl getting into the cab, and a dude in pajamas holding a camera. Of these five characters, the red cyclist and the bathrobe guy completely vanish from the film. The other three each get a death scene, so it's pretty clear this scene was setting up an 'everyone is connected' sort of deal - like everyone the protagonist films ends up dead. But something went awry. The red cyclist's disappearance is easy to explain. In the death-by-dragging scene, he vanishes, and the protagonist is suddenly much further away from the truck than in prior shots. The character's death, which delayed the protagonist, was obviously edited out of the film for some reason. As for the bathrobe guy, the safe bet is that his scene was cut entirely, and the Mexican barbecue was added in reshoots to replace it. This raises the question: what could have been so bad that the barbecue scene was considered a better alternative?
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 03:05 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It is found footage. The creator of the footage is the cloak, and its reason for filming is to empower Dante. And gently caress, that didn't come across as "the cloak" either - we see directly, before the cloak even existed in the reality of the film, that he loved to walk around and film himself and get the attention of other people. Besides; the cloak had no reason to film the SWAT crew opening up a wall safe that we were explicitly told existed, nor did it spend time filming itself away from Dante. The shot where Dante has just finished having sex with his assistant would have been greatly improved if the camera has been hovering above while he slept, then the cloak fell on him and woke him up, only to see Dante act as a willing slave to the cloak's needs. It would have given those allusions you talk about. It was just full of hosed up, lovely writing and terrible concepts. It was full of early comic book "character says the thing while doing the thing" instances, and ended with one of the most embarrassing deliveries of one of the most embarrassing lines I've heard an actor say in years.
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 16:48 |
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Whalley posted:Nothing in the short even remotely alludes to this. If that was the intent of The Magician, they didn't have to go as far as Chronicle literally having a character tell Andrew "you're just using that camera as a shield," but they could have at least attempted it other than having a one-off line saying "Dante needs an audience." The entire short is spent establishing how the magic works, and then lets loose with it. You have to pay attention. The cloak created such things as the man-on-the-street interviews and the historical footage to sell the reality of the illusions. Brisk editing and constant voiceover distract you from basic questions like why the documentarians put murder footage in their film, and how they accessed the woman's webcam. That's sleight of hand. And Dante, you'll recall, was not the only one to use the cloak. Both characters are shaping reality into competing magical narratives.
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 17:50 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Brisk editing and constant voiceover distract you from basic questions like why the documentarians put murder footage in their film. Faces of Dante
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 18:44 |
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I wonder if a Director(s)'s Cut of this will come out at any point. There are definitely some things missing from the wraparound, and the 4th segment is conspicuous by its absence. Some people are wondering why the cameras were filming in the Dante segment, and why it steps out of found footage: It doesn't. There's very clearly a part where the documentarian tells his cameramen "Keep filiming" when the SWAT team comes in and the subsequent confrontation starts between Scarlett and Dante. The cuts and the non-handicam looking footage are because there are several cameramen around the stage area wearing steadicams. So yeah, it looks professionally shot, because it is. And it's being filmed because there are people there who were instructed to film. But it's still literally "found footage" because it's footage that was found and compiled. sticklefifer fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Oct 28, 2014 |
# ? Oct 28, 2014 18:53 |
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# ? Apr 26, 2024 09:49 |
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Hat Thoughts posted:Faces of Dante That's exactly it. The entire short is a magic show, and the allegation that Dante has actually been sacrificing women is the number one thing that sells the illusion. The cloak includes the graphic death footage in order to enhance Dante's mystique. That's why Dante is forced to film himself murdering the women.
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# ? Oct 28, 2014 19:51 |