|
May I suggest... 1941  I have a bit of a soft spot for this movie. I'm actually proud to own the monstrous, four-platter LaserDisc package and would gladly shell out money if it ever came to Blu-Ray. Let's get one thing out of the way first; this is a flawed, flawed film. The gags are very hit and miss, Spielberg is focused too much on characters who don't drive the comedy forward, and there's a disjointed feeling to the whole picture. But there are some incredible gags, some of the best visual effects ever committed to camera (the miniature work here is stunning), and some jaw-dropping set pieces. Also, it has Christopher Lee as a Nazi and Toshiro Mifune as a Japanese submarine captain. And a cast that includes John Candy, Ned Beatty, Nancy Allen, Slim Pickens, Dan Aykroyd, Robert Stack, and Warren Oates. If you've got patience and a fast-forward button ready, give it a whirl. Also, here's an awesome teaser with John Belushi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJzKZ3CuBrc WebDog posted:All this and World War II Y'know, this would have been an OK idea had it been 20 minutes max. As it stands, it's too bonkers of a concept, and has too much of a potential for tastelessness at 90 minutes. I can't believe I've actually seen it all the way through. If you want to see stock footage used well, watch "Atomic Cafe". Parachute posted:The next year she starred in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" which is definitely a pretty awesome 90's action movie imo. This is very true. Second best $5 I've ever spent. Robert Denby fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Sep 22, 2011 |
#
¿
Sep 22, 2011 02:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:28 |
|
|
Elliot Goldenthal's "Sphere" score is pretty drat good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQF-0jw1wU
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2011 04:43
|
|
|
I've shown "The Happening" to quite a few people with Rifftrax, and they've always asked when the old lady shows up, "Is the twist that she's the one controlling the plants?"
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2011 17:43
|
|
|
doctor 7 posted:Apparently I should watch it again with RiffTrax though. Definitely do this. It's one of their finest moments. Moving on, here's one that a lot of people outright think is as big of a travesty as the "Star Wars" prequels that I will defend passionately. Alien 3  ...more specifically the 'Assembly Cut' version made in 2003. During the 1992 L.A. riots, David Fincher, fresh off the nightmare that was directing his first film, and subsequently shut out of the post-production process, dryly commented that the rioters were close to the warehouse 20th Century Fox was storing film material, including the camera negative of "Alien 3". He remarked it might be a good thing if the place burned to the ground. After a grueling, hugely-expensive pre-production process that saw several vastly different scripts and dozens of drafts thrown around as a potential sequel to "Aliens", 20th Century Fox went with a very odd script set on a space station that functioned as a monastery, described as a 'wooden planet' by the writer. Sets were built, Renny Harlin was selected to direct, and just a few weeks before cameras were set to roll, Harlin dropped out, the script changed radically to be set on a desolate planet formerly home to a steel mill retrofitted as a prison, and David Fincher, primarily known for music videos and commercials, was placed in the director's chair. Production went about as you'd expect. There was constant studio interference, the script was being rewritten daily, and Fincher was at his wits end. After delivering a workprint of the film to Fox, the studio decided to boot him off the project and finish it with their own people, reshooting quite a bit of footage (notably much of the opening) in the process. What hit theaters in 1992 can be described only as a problematic film. Long story short, there's a shitton of plot holes, most notably a seemingly important character who the film spends a lot of time introducing, only for him to vanish entirely out of the film in the second half. Reception was mixed. Everybody praised the expansive set design and music score by Elliot Goldenthal, but found the movie unsatisfactory, relentlessly grim, and weird. To this day, fans go into a frenzied rage over the opening scene, which off-camera kills both Hicks and Newt, two beloved characters from "Aliens", essentially forcing Ripley to start over from square one. Cut to 2003, when production is underway for a special edition box set of the "Alien" franchise, and Charles de Lauzirika, producer of the DVD, takes up a massive effort to reconstruct the workprint that Fincher delivered before his firing by Fox. Running 30 minutes longer (a robust 145 minutes to be exact) what is invariably called either the 'Assembly Cut' or 'Special Edition' of "Alien 3" has a lot of the problems that were inherent in the 1992 theatrical release (most notably, concepts being brought up only to be dropped later, a side effect of the constant rewrites), but is at the very least an emotionally stunning piece of work. The visuals of the steel mell/prison are at once awe-inspiring and nightmarish, with smoke-choked sets that seem to go on forever; the music by Elliot Goldenthal is easily one of my favorite film scores - big and operatic one second, an industrial-tinged crawl through hell the next; Fincher's camerawork, especially showing scenes from the alien's POV as it runs up and down corridors, is dynamic to say the least; and last but not least, the acting is really quite impressive. Sigourney Weaver does anguish remarkably well, Charles S. Dutton is perfect as the spiritual inmate, Paul McGann is nicely creepy as a deranged prisoner, Charles Dance rescues what could be a very soap opera-y character with his performance, and Brian Glover gets in some particularly memorable dialogue scenes as the warden. OK, so I just slathered on the rapturous praise... but there are two things that I still balk at with this movie. The special effects vary in quality dramatically from shot-to-shot. In attempting to make the alien more mobile, a puppet was shot in front of a bluescreen and composited onto the scenes for much of the climactic chase scene. It looks abysmal, like a big dark green blob darting around on top of live-action footage. Also, this cut makes a big change to the ending which I find baffling. Originally when Ripley jumps into the furnace, the alien bursts out of her as she falls, but this cut removes those shots and just has her fall straight in. Fincher's (and Weaver's) intention with this was to say to the audience, "There. It's done. There never has to be another one of these loving 'Alien' movies." It's a pretty gory way to send out Ripley, but it works. Seriously, check this out. I know a lot of you out there probably have that monstrous box set on DVD or Blu-Ray and this is on there. It's kind of a tough sit at 145 minutes, but it's worth a second glance, and needs serious reappraisal. I'm in the minority here, but in it's Assembly Cut form it holds as much of a place in my heart as the first two movies.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2011 04:14
|
|
|
Vagabundo posted:I think people also found the almost oppressive grimness of the movie to be off-putting. [...] this movie really did turn the dial up to 11 when it came to grim-dark. I briefly touched on this, but yeah, it's extremely dark and disturbing, especially Newt's autopsy, which I still find difficult to watch, and have had a few people tell me they've skipped when they watch the film. penismightier posted:The alien POV shots were particularly bad. They felt like a violation of the series, because they were the first thing to turn the alien from a weird inscrutable menace to some slasher villain you could cheer for. I love those. Then again, I don't think you're supposed to be happy everyone was getting killed (this isn't like a standard slasher movie where the filmmakers went out of their way to make the victims absolute shitheads). The use of the shots are at times a little misguided (most notably Pete Postlethwate's death), but there's this momentum to those shots that reminds me of what Abel Gance was doing with something like "Napoleon". For the record, and I should have mentioned it in my wall of  , I really don't like "Resurrection".
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2011 05:21
|
|
|
OneThousandMonkeys posted:I'm going to do something with Dreamcatcher just because it's so flabbergasting. You might want to consider doing it on a double bill with "Lifeforce", another critically maligned science fiction/horror movie that needs to be dragged out of obscurity for all to see as the masterpiece of mind-blowing insanity that it is.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2011 05:54
|
|
|
Payndz posted:Lifeforce is one of those movies with an interesting core concept, executed really badly. It often feels like pages were randomly torn out of the script during shooting to save money... oh, wait, it's a Cannon production. There you go. I heartily disagree. Like OneThousandMonkeys said, "Lifeforce" is legitimately awesome. With as many genres and moods as the movie tries to tackle, it seems like it's about to go completely off the rails at any given moment... but it doesn't. It remains coherent, even with all the craziness, and keeps topping itself. There's not a dull moment, and the surprises really don't stop. It's one of the very few Canon pictures that legitimately works on a level other than 'hilariously bad'. Goons, do yourself a huge favor and watch it. After you're done, go over the movie again in your head and mentally list out just how many genres you saw at work. I agree about "Invaders From Mars" though. That one sucks. Madkal posted:RoboCop 2. I saw this for the first time a couple of years ago and it's every bit as bad as it's reputation suggests. Instead of having focus, the movie is a string of sub-plots that lazily flow together, there's a ton of corny jokes, and the kid. The loving kid. This is a character put in purely for shock value who is a 10-12 year old boy, a drug dealer's right hand man, who not only shoots and kills people, but also garrotes Nancy Allen, while saying, "I hope you choke, bitch!" Not even Uwe Boll's "Postal" stooped that loving low. It's a mean, repulsive movie. I will say this... the stunts are alright, the stop-motion is good on it's own, and it does have that single funny scene with the failed Robocop replacements, but other than that it's an unpleasant mess. Oh, and Irvin Kershner went on record as saying it's the reason he never directed another movie. Robert Denby fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Sep 28, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2011 03:32
|
|
|
There was also a highly-publicized incident where he tried to build a massive golf course on land sacred to Native Americans.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2011 17:11
|
|
|
I'm interested in discussing more of your 'assumed to be terrible movies noone has seen' picks, stuff like "Cutthroat Island" and the like. If you want, I'd be up for defending a few more reviled films.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2011 03:19
|
|
|
"Silent Hill" is also way overlong at 130 minutes. It does sport great cinematography, production design, and make-up though. And to answer someone's question from earlier, Sean Bean was indeed cast in the movie because they realized that there was literally no male speaking role without him.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2011 04:09
|
|
|
OldTennisCourt posted:
Yes. It's nothing but a fake snuff film, with no substance to speak of (see also, "A Serbian Film"). Even movies as repulsive as "Irreversible" and "Salo" at least had something to them, some vague reason for existing, or had genuinely unsettling moments that hit you on a level other than "Hey, here's some violence for you to look at!" Literally all that happens in "I Spit on Your Grave" is the woman gets graphically gangraped several times, goes to a church, then graphically kills the men who raped her, one of whom is mentally disabled and in one scene egged on by his buddies into raping her. foodfight posted:Can someone do Frank Miller's 2008 flop The Spirit? This movie looked interesting when it came out (mostly just the shots of Sam Jackson eating scenery) but was absolutely killed by the critics. Its currently at 15% on RT. I'm not sure I have the stamina to sit through it. I caught this on TV a while back and barely made it through half an hour of it. If there was ever a movie that deserved the 'in name only' moniker, it's this. A friend of mine forced a couple of the Will Eisner comics on me back in high school, and I thought they were pretty good. However, Frank Miller just turned this into "Sin City But Inexplicably Called The Spirit", and gave us his usual deep view of women to go with it, plus a baffling 'goddamn Batman' treatment of The Spirit character. The performances are robotic, and it's amateurishly directed. Miller seems to know absolutely nothing about basic shot composition, dialogue flow, comedic timing (just look at how indifferently every 'funny' line of dialogue gets uttered), or action. It's almost as badly-directed as "The Last Airbender", and definitely deserves the "Batman and Robin" comparison for just how tragically wrong it got it's source material. foodfight posted:I did just happen to watch Punisher: War Zone because of the How Did This Get Made? podcast and I can tell you it does not deserve the 27% it has on RT. The movie is over the top absurd violence, but as a fan of the Ennis run of the Punisher comic, they nailed it. Its really one of the better comic movies of the past ten years. Saw it for the same reason. I enjoyed it, but it still had it's problems, mostly the paint-by-numbers dialogue that seems to pervade action movies in general, and that the widow of the guy the Punisher accidentally killed was an abysmal actress. Still, it baffles me that more critics didn't get what it was going for. I usually go to the prestige awards movies around Christmas, and it would have been a treat to see something like this in order to get an experience as different from that as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2011 19:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:28 |
|
|
All I remember about that movie ("Poltergeist III") is the ghost grabbing the psychic lady who promptly turns to stone. That and nothing making sense.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2011 22:14
|
|