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X-Ray Pecs posted:Wasn’t De Niro putting on 50 pounds for the end of Raging Bull a big deal? And also didn’t Rock Hudson beef up after it came out that he was gay? I'm pretty sure it didn't come out that he was gay until after he died
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Jan 12, 2018 23:11
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Wheat Loaf posted:I know one of the expectations about contemporary action movies is that the lead will get into really good shape for it to the point of physically transforming themselves (Exhibit A: Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy) but are there any examples of action leads who either wouldn't or couldn't get into shape? I remember something about Benicio Del Toro being really difficult about training for the movie 'The Hunted' Halloween Jack posted:I don't know what movies or serious movies were the ones that changed the game, but it's only recently that guys like Arnold, Stallone, and JCVD aren't exceptions anymore. Bruce Willis and Nicholas Cage are some others who rarely or never got really jacked up for their roles. I don't remember Matt Damon being in ridiculous shape to do the first Bourne movie, but then of course he was jacked up by the last one. (Granted, even in that, it's not like he went all the way to a bodybuilder physique.) quote:When it comes to martial artists, Jackie Chan was extremely cut when he was young, following Bruce Lee, but size wasn't a big deal. Now he has no need to put his body through that. Donnie Yen didn't bulk up until he did a movie with Vin Diesel. Chuck Norris was always in shape, but he looked like a normal human being. sean10mm posted:I think you see the transition to making normal actors get jacked for action roles in the early 2000s, give or take. Like Hugh Jackman in X-Men was just a ordinary looking fit dude, but by X2 in 2003 he's huge. It was more that he'd never really worked out hard before, and he was cast late in the process for the first X-Men (poor Dougray Scott) so he got huge through the course of the movie, so much so that the cage fighting scene and the scene after he wakes up at the X-mansion, which were shot at very different times in production, border on being a continuity error. Meanwhile, for X2, he had three years to get in shape. Neo Rasa posted:Uh, Arnold? I'd throw in Stallone as well. He started out in pretty good shape, but looked like an action figure by Rambo 3. X-Ray Pecs posted:Wasn’t De Niro putting on 50 pounds for the end of Raging Bull a big deal? And also didn’t Rock Hudson beef up after it came out that he was gay? de Niro also had a couple of actual boxing matches. I'm not sure if they were pro or amateur. Daniel Day Lewis went on to do that as well.
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Jan 13, 2018 00:26
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A while ago I mentioned how much I dislike the dvd covers for classic movies using really boring photos instead of something approximating classic painted movie posters and I think I've found a new champion: This is one of the most "direct-to-video in 2006" one of them all. 
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Jan 13, 2018 01:05
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Snowman_McK posted:Chan is an outlier, because, while he is an absurd super-athlete (even now) he didn't play super athletes, he played determined guys with a bit of luck. And so he wears loose fitting clothing, de-emphasising his physicality. His body posture has a similar effect. Maybe not super athlete but usually some flimsy reason as to why he might have some physical prowess. And there was often at least one point in a movie where you'd see how in shape he was. The guy was topless in scenes even as late as the Shanghai Knights movies.
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Jan 13, 2018 01:30
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It occurs to me that I've only seen one Jackie Chan movie in the cinema, and it was The Tuxedo.
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Jan 13, 2018 02:34
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Oh my god some of the best theatre experiences I ever had were seeing whatever new Jackie Chan movie was out. I'll always remember seeing Drunken Master 2 and this one guy way in front of me getting up and yelling "rewind that poo poo!" after Jackie did something especially awesome.
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Jan 13, 2018 02:46
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I've never had the chance to see any of Jackie's earlier stuff in the theater but I did see Rush Hour, which at the time seemed pretty great. He brought a completely new element that I hadn't seen in a buddy cop movie before.
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Jan 13, 2018 02:49
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Lobok posted:Oh my god some of the best theatre experiences I ever had were seeing whatever new Jackie Chan movie was out. The thing I remember about seeing DM2 in the theater is that people could tell it was an older film, like obviously from the early 90s, yet no one cared because the action was light years ahead of anything going on in American action films at the time. One of the only action films I'd seen at that point where people just stayed through the credits.
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Jan 13, 2018 02:53
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The thing I remember about seeing DM2 in the theater is that people could tell it was an older film, like obviously from the early 90s, yet no one cared because the action was light years ahead of anything going on in American action films at the time. One of the only action films I'd seen at that point where people just stayed through the credits. And back then seeing a Jackie Chan film, or probably any martial arts film, was like going to a midnight screening: the people in the theatre were there because they were fans.
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Jan 13, 2018 03:06
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and can we get a subtitled version of DM2 already?
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Jan 13, 2018 03:24
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a good, American martial arts movie. The set pieces don't approach Jackie Chan movies but the rooftop-antique store fight had a similar feel.
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Jan 13, 2018 03:49
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Lobok posted:Maybe not super athlete but usually some flimsy reason as to why he might have some physical prowess. And there was often at least one point in a movie where you'd see how in shape he was. The guy was topless in scenes even as late as the Shanghai Knights movies. True, but there's a gap between that and, for instance, the constant focus on Bruce Lee's physicality. He was more inclined to fight in a tracksuit than a tank top. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The thing I remember about seeing DM2 in the theater is that people could tell it was an older film, like obviously from the early 90s, yet no one cared because the action was light years ahead of anything going on in American action films at the time. One of the only action films I'd seen at that point where people just stayed through the credits. It still is light years ahead. I mean, everyone's imitating the Raid, now, but no matter how much money they throw at Whichever Chris/Hemsworth is there, they're a long way behind a bunch of mad Indonesians, and even further behind Chan. Lobok posted:And back then seeing a Jackie Chan film, or probably any martial arts film, was like going to a midnight screening: the people in the theatre were there because they were fans. I saw Raid 2 the Streets on opening night, and it was me, my girlfriend, a couple of morbidly obese white guys and a gaggle of drunk Indonesians. Turns out that's who goes to see martial arts movies on opening night.
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Jan 13, 2018 03:50
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I convinced my brother to see Rumble in the Bronx with me in the theater (I had already gotten some VHS rips of Operation Condor and Wheels on Meals from LA Chinatown so I was fully in the Cult of Jackie) and he gave me a big ration of poo poo at the beginning of the movie because it was typical Jackie mugging and cheeseball humor. But he hung in there and when he had the big fight at the gang lair he totally loving lost it, he grabbed my shoulder and growled "HOW IS HE DOING THIS?!?!??" in a sort of tonal combination of "gently caress yeah!" and total astonishment. From then on we never missed a movie (until after Rush Hour 2)
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Jan 13, 2018 04:20
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Snowman_McK posted:True, but there's a gap between that and, for instance, the constant focus on Bruce Lee's physicality. He was more inclined to fight in a tracksuit than a tank top. Best example of this is when he gets a tear in his shirt in Enter the Dragon and so he tears off the rest of his shirt entirely.
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Jan 13, 2018 04:43
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poo poo, I think the first Jackie Chan movie I saw was fuckin' Operation Condor.
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Jan 13, 2018 15:22
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sean10mm posted:poo poo, I think the first Jackie Chan movie I saw was fuckin' Operation Condor. Is that the one where Hitler shows up at the end in a wheelchair? Snowman_McK posted:It still is light years ahead. I mean, everyone's imitating the Raid, now, but no matter how much money they throw at Whichever Chris/Hemsworth is there, they're a long way behind a bunch of mad Indonesians, and even further behind Chan. The fight on/under the train against the loving DIRECTOR, Lau Kar-Leung, is like the 4th best action sequence in the film and to this day blows away practically any fight scene in any American action film. HUNDU THE BEAST GOD fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jan 13, 2018 |
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Jan 13, 2018 16:52
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Is that the one where Hitler shows up at the end in a wheelchair? And the "Superman!" fight at the end in the wind tunnel. Speaking of that fight, I feel like I haven't yet reached galaxy brain-level appreciation of Chan unless I watch Buster Keaton films. I never have. I know I should watch them for their own sake but to really get an artist it's good to appreciate their influences.
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Jan 13, 2018 17:39
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Lobok posted:And the "Superman!" fight at the end in the wind tunnel. Keaton's films own. They're very experimental and ambitious, there's never any slack or downtime in any of them (as compared to Chaplin, say, who was big on sentiment). Not until Bugs Bunny would you really see films racing from joke to joke like that.
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Jan 13, 2018 17:43
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Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head. It’s completely insane. I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite Chan movie, but any of them with the Biao and Hung are really high up there. Dragons Forever might be it. The original Drunken Master is really good too if you don’t mind be more deliberate old style kung fu movie choreography. Chan had a knack for picking the best dudes as villains and then didn’t mind letting them cut loose and overshadow him.
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Jan 13, 2018 18:12
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head. More insane is when you watch the credits and see he did it 3 times! I have recommended it in the Kung Fu movies thread before, so here's my recommendation to watch Shanghai Express/Millionaire's Express. Absolutely packed full of stars (even Cynthia Rothrock gets a good fight scene) and stunts
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Jan 13, 2018 18:53
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Cynthia Rothrock should have been big in the 80s. Obviously she had credibility as a martial artist and I don't think she was a bad actor. I guess it was Hollywood sexism keeping her down. It's a shame. I wonder what the first female-led action movie was. The only one that occurs to me which might have been (because I haven't seen it) was the Zorro serial Zorro's Black Whip from 1944 which starred Linda Stirling as "the Black Whip" / Zorro: 
Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 13, 2018 |
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Jan 13, 2018 19:23
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She was in low budget American action films, and that was the problem. Awful choreography, over serious plots, a dull, cheap looking world of mediocrity. It's why you can't go back to watching Chuck Norris movies the same after seeing, say, Police Story.
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Jan 13, 2018 19:27
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head. If I remember right he did the same homage a second time in Shanghai Knights. Though I'd wager that was not Jackie's idea but was in the script from the get-go since the story is set in London and you just don't pass up an opportunity to do the clock face homage when you can do it with Big Ben.
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Jan 13, 2018 19:34
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head. Yeah, that's a Harold Lloyd deal.
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Jan 13, 2018 19:39
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brocked posted:She was in low budget American action films, and that was the problem. Awful choreography, over serious plots, a dull, cheap looking world of mediocrity. It's why you can't go back to watching Chuck Norris movies the same after seeing, say, Police Story. She did Hong Kong movies too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh8KnmRvqd0
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Jan 13, 2018 21:30
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head. Chan says that clock tower stunt was one of the two that came closest to killing him. He cracked his skull. Then cracked it again in jumping to a tree in Armour of God.
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Jan 13, 2018 21:33
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Is that the one where Hitler shows up at the end in a wheelchair? Condor was apparently the Apocalypse Now of kung fu movies. It had a really long, strained production that ran massively over-budget while shooting on location, and Chan had a bunch of affairs, including with his co-star. And yeah, Drunken Master 2 has at least three scenes that would be the absolute pinnacle of literally anyone else's career (the axe gang fight, the drunken street fight and the finale), and I'm not even sure you can definitively say that they're the best of Chan's career. poo poo, the smaller fights he has as a warm up for the finale would be genre topping if the rest of Chan's filmography didn't exist.
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Jan 13, 2018 21:37
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On a sidenote, watching a load of awesome Jackie Chan fight scenes led me by the wonder of YouTube algorithms to the T-1000/young T-800/old T-800 fight from Terminator Genisys (my phone's autocorrect loving hated that last word), and god drat, the CG was weightless and lovely. I know it's almost a lame old-man cliche to criticise CGI, but the acid-damaged T-1000 looked like Gumby, and having the endoskeleton flail around like a skip-framed ninja did the exact opposite of making it more scary. Why are there so few directors able to go "y'know, heavy stuff has momentum. We should maybe simulate that?" Also  at them burning every scrap of flesh from the 'young' T-800 in about five seconds flat so they didn't have to spend any more time and money on their CG Arnold.
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Jan 13, 2018 23:30
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The same thing happened in Salvation, where it was this huge reveal when the T-800 comes out at the end... and then it's immediately immolated because every second you got a computer animated Arnold on screen you're burning through money. But to your first point, a lot of director's don't seem to realize that weight is a huge factor in making CGI characters feel "present" in the scene. Neil Blomkamp and Guillermo del Toro seem to be pretty okay with it (in regards to District 9 and Pacific Rim, specifically), but almost everyone else seems to equate slow = to weighty, as opposed to actually making the characters appear weighty through how they actual move.
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Jan 13, 2018 23:37
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Snowman_McK posted:Chan says that clock tower stunt was one of the two that came closest to killing him. He cracked his skull. Then cracked it again in jumping to a tree in Armour of God. Yea, the Operation Condor one apparently caused blood to shoot out of his ears and left him with a hole in his skull. For whatever personal flaws he has you can’t fault the man for his dedication to getting things just right.
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Jan 14, 2018 00:34
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Fart City posted:The same thing happened in Salvation, where it was this huge reveal when the T-800 comes out at the end... and then it's immediately immolated because every second you got a computer animated Arnold on screen you're burning through money. Same when Dracula turns into a huge monster in Blade trinity, you know they're not going bother choreographing a proper fight with their elaborate and difficult to fix prosthetic. I mean, that was a dreadful movie, but that was one of its many flaws. YOLOsubmarine posted:Yea, the Operation Condor one apparently caused blood to shoot out of his ears and left him with a hole in his skull. Chan is a lunatic perfectionist. There's a stunt in 'The Young Master' where he spins a fan through the air, then catches it. He says it was the hardest thing he's done. 140 takes.
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Jan 14, 2018 01:12
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Snowman_McK posted:Chan is a lunatic perfectionist. There's a stunt in 'The Young Master' where he spins a fan through the air, then catches it. He says it was the hardest thing he's done. 140 takes. He apparently has mild ocd, which is not at all surprising.
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Jan 14, 2018 01:20
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YOLOsubmarine posted:He apparently has mild ocd, which is not at all surprising. The surprising part is the word 'mild'
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Jan 14, 2018 01:26
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Fart City posted:The same thing happened in Salvation, where it was this huge reveal when the T-800 comes out at the end... and then it's immediately immolated because every second you got a computer animated Arnold on screen you're burning through money. The word you're looking for is inertia.
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Jan 14, 2018 01:33
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Tezcatlipoca posted:The word you're looking for is inertia. Yeah a lot of it isn't just speed it's setting up and editing everything wisely. A good 80s examples is at the end of the original Terminator. Technically I know some dislike the stop motion, and the full size body is only barely articulated. But the brief shot where it slams into the doors of the factory right as they close completely sells it. The part where he gets thrown from the motorcycle and is sliding along the ground sparking the same way at the same speed as the motorcycle is awesome too.
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Jan 14, 2018 03:42
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Tezcatlipoca posted:The word you're looking for is inertia. Yes, all-CG creations are frequently terrible with inertia. And it's really not a flaw of CG itself as a method, but I think rather a generation of directors and animators that have come up with much less practical effects experience and who rarely do their due diligence in studying physics and kinematics to effectively simulate large masses in motion. Neo Rasa posted:Yeah a lot of it isn't just speed it's setting up and editing everything wisely. Yeah the foley work on the endoskeleton's interactions with the pavement, the door and Reese really sells its hardness and mass too.
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Jan 14, 2018 22:53
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Tell me about the Mission: Impossible movies. I've never really watched any of them. I saw a little bit of MI 2 many years ago because it was one of the first movies my dad owned on DVD around the time it came out, but I haven't really bothered with it. Is it worth watching? (I mean, it's been successfully releasing movies for 22 years at this point, so it must be doing something worthwhile.) It's a bit odd looking on Wikipedia and seeing that it seems to change directors, screenwriters and even most of the non-Tom Cruise cast every movie. Does Tom Cruise own it and just pick whoever he wants for it? Must be a unique situation for a big Hollywood franchise if that's the case; I don't think there can be many where the star would have that level of control.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:27
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Yeah, it's actually a cool series in the sense that the first 3 or 4 movies are very stylistically different from each other. It makes sense that it's Tom Cruise's pet franchise, because until recently he seemed to be all about working with a wide range of filmmakers and rarely repeating. But to your question, it's a series worth watching. The weakest one is probably the most recent entry, Rogue Nation, and even it has some standout action set pieces. I used to be pretty down on M:I 2, but I liked it a lot more when I recently rewatched it. The biggest selling points of the series are Tom Cruise giving it his all and an impressive supporting cast.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:35
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I really dig the third film. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in an expectedly awesome performance as the big baddie, and it's got some pretty decent action set pieces.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:38
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Yeah, PSH was a shockingly good heavy.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:45
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