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Wheat Loaf posted:I'd heard that Die Hard 3 began life as an attempted Lethal Weapon script. So the myth goes but I looked it up and apparently it was going to be a Brandon Lee film and after he died there was an attempt to buy the script to retool for Lethal Weapon but it didn't go through.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:09
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Fart City posted:That’s always fascinated me, movies rewritten to be franchise pieces. I’d love to see a list of that. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights started as a serious drama about the Cuban Revolution.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:10
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People talk about Colm Meaney's inscrutable accent in Con Air but him doing a generic Received Pronunciation English accent in Die Hard 2 is never mentioned despite being much stranger.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:11
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights started as a serious drama about the Cuban Revolution. That information is extremely my poo poo, and just opens up an entire football field of questions about how its development cycle went down.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:12
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Lobok posted:I missed the word "fight" originally and was gonna say "Oh yeah, back in the 90s when action films still did sex scenes." JCVD has never done a movie where he's in the middle of a furry gangbang. He did do one where he just walks around a hotel room naked for several minutes. That's when I turned off Pound of Flesh. Not that he's gross or anything, I hope I look that good at 55
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Jan 17, 2018 17:24
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Basebf555 posted:To be fair, Die Hard was never really about being trapped with terrorists, it's about McClane saving a bunch of hostages from terrorists. It's not like he couldn't have probably figured some way out of the building if he didn't give a poo poo about saving his wife or the other hostages. You're right, "trapped" isn't really the right phrase but describing the first two Die Hards should convey somehow that it's not some negotiator or hero assigned to the task of infiltrating a place and saving hostages the same way Rambo or Chuck Norris goes in to free prisoners but that McClane is caught up in the situation because he was in the place at the wrong time and the movie never moves beyond the original setting. In Die Hard With a Vengeance he does have a personal connection to Simon but is otherwise is in the same boat as any other New York cop or law enforcement agent (and the movie also ends in Quebec...). And in Speed, Reeves has to find and board the bus. It would feel more Die Hard-ish if he had already been on it, like Snipes in Passenger 57. Edit: "Die Hard-ish"? C'mon, Lobok, clearly it should be Die Hardy. Lobok fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 17:26
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Fart City posted:That information is extremely my poo poo, and just opens up an entire football field of questions about how its development cycle went down. Peter Sagal (of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) wrote a script based on an NPR producer’s life in revolutionary Cuba, and it sat on a shelf until a studio executive sent it through multiple rewrites.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:30
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The best example I can think of is the Albert Pyun movie Cyborg having been, at various points in its development, a sequel to Masers of the Universe and Cannon's ill-fated attempt to make a Spider-Man movie.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:47
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Oh poo poo, I thought they were just reusing props and sets from Masters of the Universe to save money. It's official. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is set in Middle-Earth.
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Jan 17, 2018 17:59
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Die Hard was based on a novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, that was a sequel to The Detective (filmed with Frank Sinatra). Sinatra turned it down, which led to it becoming a standalone movie, although for a brief period it was considered as the basis for Commando 2. Die Hard 2 was based on a completely unrelated novel by a different author, 58 Minutes. Beyond the basic 'bad guys take over an airport' idea, the final movie doesn't have much in common - unlike Die Hard, which follows NLF so closely at times that the script is basically transcription. Die Hard 3 was a spec script, Simon Says, that was McClaneised. Die Hard 4 was, bizarrely, based on an article in Wired about cyber-warfare. Die Hard 5 was the first time a script was specifically written as a Die Hard movie... and was a pile of poo poo with literally no redeeming features. BTW, I know a writer who was commissioned to work on a Die Hard 6 draft - his brief was "only have Bruce Willis in a framing story, because it's about young John McClane's first big case." He thought that was a poo poo idea, but still took it because, y'know, money. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 18:06
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Fart City posted:I never saw White House Down. Is it worth a watch? Since you didn't get an answer to this: no, it's poo poo. "President Jamie Fox fires a bazooka from the presidential limo" is fun to type, but it's definitely better in your head than what the actual movie delivers.
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Jan 17, 2018 21:41
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24 Hours To Live was a pretty solid popcorn action flick but more in spite of Ethan Hawke than because of him. One of the smarter decisions they made was to give like half of the John Wick style action stuff to an unknown Asian actress that was way better at it than Hawke is. Picture a scene from John Wick, so every shot is a headshot and guys are dropping left and right, except instead of the uber confident and streamlined movements of Reeves, it's a guy who's never done this before bumbling around waving the gun haphazardly with almost no technique to it. To be fair, there's a reason for that kinda built into the story but it didn't make up for the fact that the action just wasn't nearly as "believable"(as weird as it might be to use that word in relation to John Wick) as Wick's.
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Jan 17, 2018 22:25
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What's Reeves's background in martial arts? I know he studied Brazilian jiujitsu for John Wick but what was he on in Matrix?
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Jan 17, 2018 23:05
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Sir Kodiak posted:Since you didn't get an answer to this: no, it's poo poo. "President Jamie Fox fires a bazooka from the presidential limo" is fun to type, but it's definitely better in your head than what the actual movie delivers. Something I found weird about White House Down is the scene near the beginning where Channing Tatum is pretending to be cowering in fear on the bathroom floor and uses this opportunity to shoot a bad guy. It came across as really odd and a bad look for the character.
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Jan 17, 2018 23:23
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Wheat Loaf posted:What's Reeves's background in martial arts? I know he studied Brazilian jiujitsu for John Wick but what was he on in Matrix? No serious background but he's a huge life long fan of martial arts films. He directed one in 2013 that I thought was pretty drat good, Man of Tai Chi. Here he is geeking out about meeting Sonny Chiba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iLMELzA6j8&t=57s And as far as weapons training goes, Reeves is just more experienced all throughout his career, he's been playing characters that handle guns since the early 90s. Ethan Hawke looked more amateurish than Speed-era Keanu Reeves, and obviously Reeves has had many more action film experiences since then. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jan 17, 2018 |
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Jan 17, 2018 23:45
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muscles like this! posted:Something I found weird about White House Down is the scene near the beginning where Channing Tatum is pretending to be cowering in fear on the bathroom floor and uses this opportunity to shoot a bad guy. It came across as really odd and a bad look for the character. Pfff that's just improvising when the odds aren't in your favour
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Jan 17, 2018 23:46
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It takes a lot of work to look good with a firearm. I love Face/Off but Nic Cage Gun Face is a real thing.
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Jan 17, 2018 23:46
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Wheat Loaf posted:I'm not sure what my favourite Die Hard rip-off is. Probably a toss-up between Cliffhanger and Air Force One. The Rock. Come on guys. Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Everyone hates Ayer now, probably due to Suicide Squad (which I hated too, mostly as a fan of the original comics) and Bright. But he has written and/or directed some good movies too. I personally love Street Kings, which is more "crime" than "action," but a lot of people slept on it when it came out. It is written by James freakin' Ellroy, maybe the best living crime/mystery novelist, and it has a stacked cast: Keanu Reeves, Hugh Laurie, Forest Whitaker, Chris Evans, Terry Crews. Also Fury. Fury is dope. It's three quarters serious, grim war film, and then in the last act it turns into John Woo's Windtalkers with nazis and a better DP. Also, he gets a legitimately really good performance out Shaya Aboof. Suicide Squad was weird, and apparently editorially gutted at the last minute. Wheat Loaf posted:The best example I can think of is the Albert Pyun movie Cyborg having been, at various points in its development, a sequel to Masers of the Universe and Cannon's ill-fated attempt to make a Spider-Man movie. Albert Pyun's filmography is amazing. Nemesis, (which is a pretty good cyberpunk movie) has a sequel that crams about four movies worth of material into the opening narration. The further sequels just turned into soft porn with a lady bodybuilder. Wheat Loaf posted:What's Reeves's background in martial arts? I know he studied Brazilian jiujitsu for John Wick but what was he on in Matrix? He apparently has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and followed up with a lot of training with Yuen Woo Ping's team. Basebf555 posted:24 Hours To Live was a pretty solid popcorn action flick but more in spite of Ethan Hawke than because of him. One of the smarter decisions they made was to give like half of the John Wick style action stuff to an unknown Asian actress that was way better at it than Hawke is. Picture a scene from John Wick, so every shot is a headshot and guys are dropping left and right, except instead of the uber confident and streamlined movements of Reeves, it's a guy who's never done this before bumbling around waving the gun haphazardly with almost no technique to it. There's a dreadful Brazilian film on Australian Netflix called 'Special Operations' (I'm not going to butcher the Portugese spelling) about a young woman who joins the civil police and shoots a lot of drug dealers. It's basically a lovely recruiting movie, in the vein of 'Acts of Valor' and you can see that everyone did a bit of weapons training, but it's still filmed so very badly (seriously, on a fundamental, it's one of the worst shot movies I've ever seen) that everyone looks like poo poo. Reeves gets a lot of credit for his work on Wick, but it's also that he's shot in such a way that makes you realise just how impressive it is. muscles like this! posted:Something I found weird about White House Down is the scene near the beginning where Channing Tatum is pretending to be cowering in fear on the bathroom floor and uses this opportunity to shoot a bad guy. It came across as really odd and a bad look for the character. Reactions like this are really funny and remind me how strict the unspoken rules of the action movie are.
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Jan 17, 2018 23:49
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Snowman_McK posted:The Rock. At the very least, probably the best movie in Sean Connery's late career revival as a leading man (toss-up between that and Hunt for Red October). Does The Rock have the most sympathetic (for the most part) action movie villain? It's got to be up there. Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 00:01
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Wheat Loaf posted:At the very least, probably the best movie in Sean Connery's late career revival as a leading man (toss-up between that and Hunt for Red October). Somebody on here described it as a movie about war criminals trying to stop another war criminal from committing war crimes by committing more war crimes with an illegally detained political prisoner. It's a pretty accurate summary. I liked it. The Rock rules (tm)
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Jan 18, 2018 00:27
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XXX: The Return of Xander Cage proves once again that Vin Diesel is an expert at James Bond parody. Hopefully there will be another sequel with Donnie Yen as 100% part of the team like they did with The Rock in The Fast and Furious franchise.
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Jan 18, 2018 17:19
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A few years ago, Nathan Rabin did a series of articles for the Dissolve called "Forgotbusters" about movies that enjoyed great popularity in their day but didn't have longevity commensurate with their immediate success. The original xXx was one of them and its basic thesis was that it "tried to make James Bond irrelevant" in the same year that Die Another Day came out, but failed largely because of the other "game changer" spy movie that came out that year: The Bourne Identity.
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Jan 18, 2018 17:40
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Wheat Loaf posted:A few years ago, Nathan Rabin did a series of articles for the Dissolve called "Forgotbusters" about movies that enjoyed great popularity in their day but didn't have longevity commensurate with their immediate success. Avatar is probably going to be the king of this if/when Avatar 2 craps the bed.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:22
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The Pirates movies were successful, but don't seem to have inspired a new wave of adventure films. The few films that come to mind were flops, like John Carter and I guess the new Mummy movie.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:29
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Hell, I’d say Avatar is largely forgotten about even now. It never shows up on best movie lists, and rarely has any reflective pieces written about it. It was like the world’s most expensive bag of cotton candy: colorful and sugary, but dissolved away completely after a few seconds.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:29
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Started reading the Forgotbusters and it is already losing me. Golden Child completely not funny? This is fuckin' preposterous. It's mostly not funny.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:32
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Halloween Jack posted:The Pirates movies were successful, but don't seem to have inspired a new wave of adventure films. The few films that come to mind were flops, like John Carter and I guess the new Mummy movie. It seemed pretty clear to everyone right from the get go that the Pirates movies were only going to be successful because of Depp. Jack Sparrow puts asses in the seats, other than that I think most people could take it or leave it. Even now, with a good number of people completely sick of Depp's act, a new Pirates movie still brings in close to a billion dollars. Other movies have tried similar things with Depp, like The Lone Ranger, but if they could get a way with it somehow they'd probably just use Jack Sparrow in as many different projects as possible. A whole Jack Sparrow cinematic universe.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:33
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sean10mm posted:Avatar is probably going to be the king of this if/when Avatar 2 craps the bed. Avatar is that even without an Avatar 2. There's been a lot of thinkpieces in the nine (!) years since Avatar came out about how it's technically the biggest movie ever but it left almost no cultural footprint whatsoever. It's not like Titanic, which was around in theatres forever (it was still in playing theatres when the home video was released) and you have the Céline Dion song, like "I'm flying!", "I'll never let go, Jack", "I'm the king of the world!", the nude drawing scene, "Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight" etc. I'm pretty sure Avatar became as big as it did because of its visual spectacle, which was most effective in 3D, which meant the tickets were twice as expensive, which meant it made twice as much money.
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Jan 18, 2018 19:34
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Ok this review of the Golden Child is loving insufferable.quote:Informed that a woman he has been speaking with is 300 years old and her mother was raped by a dragon, he responds with a joyless, “Does that happen a lot where you’re from?” There's literally nothing about the scene that's "joyless", one of the entire premises of the movie's comedy is here's this guy that doesn't take all this mystical poo poo seriously and just sort of deadpans his way through it. Does this remind anyone of another movie, perhaps? Big trouble in Little China? Imagine if I said "After being blinded by the spirit of a centuries old Chinese warrior, Jack Burton joylessly whines about his missing truck," because that's the exact same level of analytical effort that this dude is putting in. This is another "justification pretending to be criticism" article. (btw, Golden Child is a massively lesser version of Big Trouble but pretending that Eddie Murphy is lifeless in it is bizarre. He basically saves the movie with his shtick and charisma) Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 19:40
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There's this new Tomb Raider movie and it doesn't look terrible. It got me thinking about the original Tomb Raider; I've never played any of the games but I do remember that first movie being everywhere when it came out (I kind of like it even though it's not brilliant; the sequel with Gerard Butler as the sidekick isn't good). Was its success attributable more to the Tomb Raider name or was it mainly Angelina Jolie?
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Jan 18, 2018 21:05
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Wheat Loaf posted:There's this new Tomb Raider movie and it doesn't look terrible. It got me thinking about the original Tomb Raider; I've never played any of the games but I do remember that first movie being everywhere when it came out (I kind of like it even though it's not brilliant; the sequel with Gerard Butler as the sidekick isn't good). Was its success attributable more to the Tomb Raider name or was it mainly Angelina Jolie? It was a bit of both, she was really hot at the time but people were definitely excited to see Lara Croft in a big budget movie. Maybe they'd have been less excited if Jolie didn't seem like such a perfect casting though, so it's hard to separate the two.
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Jan 18, 2018 21:08
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Ok this review of the Golden Child is loving insufferable. yeah, you're starting to see the problem with Nathan Rabin. he's incapable of liking individual parts of a movie he, on the whole, dislikes; a movie's either Good or Complete Hot Garbage, with literally no in-between, and if he's decided a movie is the latter he will twist every possible positive aspect into actually being lovely. he will also refuse to say why he thought something was bad, instead treating it as self-evident and calling people who disagree idiots.
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Jan 18, 2018 21:17
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Basebf555 posted:It was a bit of both, she was really hot at the time but people were definitely excited to see Lara Croft in a big budget movie. Maybe they'd have been less excited if Jolie didn't seem like such a perfect casting though, so it's hard to separate the two. The main thing I remember about the second one was the trailer, because I think it might have been on my Digimon: The Movie dvd. 
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Jan 18, 2018 21:20
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:yeah, you're starting to see the problem with Nathan Rabin. he's incapable of liking individual parts of a movie he, on the whole, dislikes; a movie's either Good or Complete Hot Garbage, with literally no in-between, and if he's decided a movie is the latter he will twist every possible positive aspect into actually being lovely. he will also refuse to say why he thought something was bad, instead treating it as self-evident and calling people who disagree idiots. He's goddamn awful, is what he is.
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Jan 18, 2018 22:28
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Basebf555 posted:It was a bit of both, she was really hot at the time but people were definitely excited to see Lara Croft in a big budget movie. Maybe they'd have been less excited if Jolie didn't seem like such a perfect casting though, so it's hard to separate the two. Video Game movies were a big deal, because back then you were turning some colored blobs into an actual person. It was a huge deal to see sub-zero move in more than two dimensions. That's just faded, since games are now capable of looking loving amazing. I mean, playing out a battle in the Total War games doesn't look that much worse than watching a big budget battle scene in a movie. Shogun 2, for instance, looks absolutely spectacular, even in close up.
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Jan 18, 2018 22:54
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Basebf555 posted:It was a bit of both, she was really hot at the time but people were definitely excited to see Lara Croft in a big budget movie. Maybe they'd have been less excited if Jolie didn't seem like such a perfect casting though, so it's hard to separate the two. I've never played a Tomb Raider game or even seen the Jolie movies, but after seeing her in Doomsday, I always thought Rhona Mitra could have been even better casting. I always wondered why she didn't become a big star, after Doomsday and especially Boston Legal.
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Jan 19, 2018 00:01
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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:I've never played a Tomb Raider game or even seen the Jolie movies, but after seeing her in Doomsday, I always thought Rhona Mitra could have been even better casting. Rhona Mitra was the model and voice for Lara Croft between 1997 and 1998. I've seen her in a few things but I think the first was the Underworld prequel movie. And the most distracting thing about that movie is shirtless action hero Michael Sheen because he's best known for playing Tony Blair in biopics. Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jan 19, 2018 |
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Jan 19, 2018 00:14
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Wheat Loaf posted:Rhona Mitra was the model and voice for Lara Croft between 1997 and 1998. Weird! I've never seen any of those Underworld movies either, but I know Michael Sheen best from playing dickhead sex researcher Dr. Masters on Masters of Sex, and Liz Lemon's most obnoxious love interest, Wesley Snipes (his real name), on 30 Rock. Neither role screams "this guy should play an action hero."
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Jan 19, 2018 00:23
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Wheat Loaf posted:Rhona Mitra Everyone in this thread should watch Doomsday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJMjiCxHLdg
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Jan 19, 2018 00:34
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I just started watching the first Mission: Impossible movie. Immediate first impression: I think this is the first movie I've seen - at least the first movie I've seen adapted from television - where the opening credits have been consciously designed to resemble those of a tv show. It's an odd effect. I'm trying to think of the other big tv-to-movie adaptations which preceded it like the Fugitive and the Addams Family and I don't think any of them it. It's a bit of a novelty.
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Jan 19, 2018 00:46
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