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I completely agree that the thing with the aliens in Sign wasn't a twist, and neither was the whole "everything happens for a reason" message since the entire movie had been building to that naturally. The problem is that it was presented like a twist, complete with the music building to a huge crescendo, a close-up of the sudden look of realization of Mel Gibson's face, and flashbacks to everything that lead up to this moment. I find it hard to blame people for saying Signs had a twist ending when it was directed and edited the same way as the revelation in The Sixth Sense.
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Sep 23, 2011 19:09
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ComposerGuy posted:That's fair I suppose...but I loved the music there anyway. Oh, I know what it was meant to be, I just don't think Shyamalan thought to shoot a scene meant to be a revelation for the main character any differently than he'd shot scenes meant to be revelations for the audience. So it was easy for the audience to conclude "Shyamalan tried another twist and failed" rather than "oh, now Mel gets it."
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Sep 23, 2011 19:50
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If it wasn't an Alien film I doubt people would have been as willing to deal with the almost complete lack of characterization anybody gets in that thing. It's Ripley and a bunch of interchangeable bald meat puppets. Combine that with a tone that never varies and you've got a big monochromatic blur of a movie. The only reason I like it at all is due to the residual good feelings I get from seeing Ripley do her thing.
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Sep 24, 2011 05:19
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Jeunet just doesn't have the kind of sensibility for an Alien movie. He was a completely bizarre choice for a director, given that he's mostly known for childlike whimsy with streaks of dark comedy and a love of Rube Goldberg machines. I still find the movie more interesting than Alien 3, though, entirely due to how ridiculously miscalculated it was from beginning to end.
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Sep 24, 2011 06:33
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Going back a bit, but...OneThousandMonkeys posted:This horrible character needs its own exhibit in the Hall of lovely Movies. Lee plays Beaver, a tactless, juvenile moron who attempts through the course of the movie to make "gently caress me Freddy" a catchphrase with the audience. He eats peanut butter out of the jar with his fingers. He drops infantile curse phrases like "bitch-in-a-buzzsaw" and other things that would be cool if you rode a skateboard and were in dire need of being shot in the head. This sounds surprisingly accurate to Stephen King's usual "folksy" bullshit. Coming up with bizarre curses that nobody anywhere has ever actually said is practically a pastime of his, and it's usually one of the first things to get cut out of his film adaptations.
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Sep 27, 2011 23:25
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's just regular bad. If you watched it while having a beer and some pizza, you'd be entertained. The hyperbolic 0% "what is this BULLSHIT" score comes from the utter weariness you might expect from critics having to sit through yet another bottom of the barrel J-horror remake. The worst you'll feel about it is that it wasted your time, basically. For contrast, something like Mirrors or, I don't know, Undead are a million times stupider and more likely to draw your ire. It earns its 0% rating by being so boring that nobody was able to muster up the enthusiasm to give it a positive review. Mirrors is terrible, but at least it makes some kind of an impression.
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Oct 7, 2011 17:18
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Vanilla Bison posted:Chris Sims and David Uzumeri from Comics Alliance have a two-part review of Batman and Robin that breaks down why it's a more consistent and enjoyable movie than its three predecessors. It's more consistent than the previous three movies, that's true. That doesn't inherently make it better. Consistently awful is still awful.
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Oct 27, 2011 04:41
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Super Ninja Fish posted:Common Sense Media doesn't just rate movies bad because they're not for kids. If they did, it would be ridiculous to have them as a part of rottentomatoes's average. But Clockwork Orange was given three stars and Fight Club was given four stars. Hardly kids movies. The list is some of the content in the movie. The bolded part is their commentary on that content. They're not saying it's bad because the list of horrific stuff exists, they're saying it's bad because the list of horrific stuff serves no purpose other than basic exploitation. Whether or not you think that's a fair criticism, it's not just "this is bad because bad stuff happens."
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Nov 10, 2011 05:46
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Battlefield Earth is one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen. Every time I watch it I see something new and horrible that I hadn't noticed before. It is to filmmaking gaffes what Airplane! is to sight gags, and it makes me laugh just as hard.
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Dec 3, 2011 16:37
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lizardman posted:The Last Airbender reminded me A LOT of the Star Wars prequels. So I guess if you managed to enjoy those you'd be alright with Last Airbender. The Star Wars prequels are far, far more competent than The Last Airbender. They're garbage, but they're presentable garbage. The Last Airbender feels like it's bad on purpose, because I don't know how anyone could work as a director for as long as Shyamalan has and still crank it out by accident.
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Dec 4, 2011 05:25
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FordCQC posted:While I didn't see it, so my assessment may be way off-base, I like the idea of turning a story like Red Riding Hood into a sexually-charged Gothic horror. I think the problem with this is that, much like making a "dark and ker-azy" version of Alice in Wonderland, it's a concept absolutely done to death because it's just taking blatant subtext and making it text. Of all the ways to interpret such a culturally-ingrained story, it's the least interesting.
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Jan 20, 2012 22:46
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mr. unhsib posted:I enjoyed The Sixth Sense but I think Signs is his best movie. The ending gets a lot of hate, but I never had a huge problem with it (and it makes thematic sense), and there are some incredibly well-shot "creepy" scenes. I'm looking forward to his next movie, which has a script by somebody other than him (Stephen Gaghan, a pretty good somebody actually...but then I appear to be the only person in the world who liked Syriana). Given the terrible acting from otherwise-good actors and completely inept framing in some scenes in his last few movies, I'm beginning to back away from the "he should direct someone else's script" crowd. I used to think that, but honestly his direction isn't any better than his writing these days.
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Mar 9, 2012 02:22
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PostwarMutant posted:I'll stand up for M. Night's THE VILLAGE. I think the expectation of the Shyamalan "twist" really blinds people to this movie. It works as a critique of conservative baby boomer politics (the adults want to shield their society from the 'real world' and retreat into an idealized past) and shows how those politics emerge from 60s era idealistic liberalism. The movie is ridiculously heavy-handed with its message (check out those newspaper articles). Worse, quite a bit of the film only exists to trick the audience and doesn't actually make any sense in the context of the world that's been set up. Having a twist isn't a crime, and there's nothing inherently wrong with the one in The Village, but it goes through some pretty extreme contortions to both justify it and keep it under wraps that everything else suffers in the process. The dialog in particular is some of the worst I've heard in a film with a wide release. Nobody has ever talked like that, in any region or time period, and although that can theoretically be justified within the context of the plot, that doesn't make the vast majority of the movie any easier to sit through.
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Mar 18, 2012 03:15
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The Exorcist II is exactly the kind of movie you'd get if you asked the guy who made Zardoz to make a horror film. It's terrible, but pretty amazing that it manages to exist in the first place.
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Mar 18, 2012 19:14
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Infamous Sphere posted:Gus Van Sant is a strange director, on the one hand he's done really good mainstream films and a couple of really good art house films and on the other hand, he's done a film where two people walk in the desert and do nothing, and a shot for shot remake of Psycho. Hey now, Gerry is pretty drat good. It sets out to capture the feeling of being completely and hopelessly lost, and it does so perfectly.
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Mar 20, 2012 23:39
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It's really obvious that The Forgotten is a great-sounding pitch that they struggled to turn into an actual story.
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Mar 21, 2012 17:49
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Infamous Sphere posted:Even Cowgirls Get The Blues This is one of those stories that works perfectly well as a book but never had a chance as a film adaptation. It also made a hell of a lot more sense in the mid 70s than the early 90s, since a lot of it is a reaction to/commentary on hippie culture, which was a recent memory for the book and a part of history for the movie.
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Mar 22, 2012 16:58
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Jedit posted:It never ceases to amaze me how people suck Cameron's dick for Aliens when all he did was follow up one of the best horror movies ever made with a generic action movie. It's not even a clever movie. Ignoring the Aliens comment, because that's getting way off track for this thread, I'm pretty sure threads about "overrated" movies have been done before, and they inevitably devolve into people saying [well-regarded movie] sucks and then turning it into a five-page argument. It's a bad idea for a thread because there's a wealth of discussion out there for movies that are regarded as classics. Movies that are generally considered trash don't get nearly as much attention or discussion, so there's more to say. I could link seven articles explaining why Aliens is great with very little effort, but I doubt many here could do the same for, say, Predators. Which is why the former makes for a boring discussion and the latter makes for an interesting one. You already know why people think Aliens is great, you just disagree. There's nowhere to go from there. Predators... well, maybe someone can bring up a point about it you hadn't considered or heard before. There's less chance that people will be reiterating points or talking past each other.
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Jun 13, 2012 12:00
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Helical Nightmares posted:Edit: I never saw the MTV animation the movie was based on. You probably should. It's a lot more interesting that the movie wound up being. It's also way, way weirder, and has a much more lived-in world (the movie being as sterile as it was felt odd to me considering how important the grungy aesthetic was to the series).
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Jun 15, 2012 04:57
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Vagabundo posted:My criticism of it is that it felt so generic, with only token nods to the original series - orally transmitted mission briefings, crushing a fly with eyelashes, that sort of thing. Pretty much. It's like making a movie of The Prisoner starring Jason Statham as a convict inside a massive futuristic prison colony overseen by big floating balls with guns, and at the end he shoots the warden in the face and quips "who's number one now, bitch?" before getting in a Lotus and driving to freedom.
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Jun 15, 2012 05:16
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sebmojo posted:OH - I have a good one, Equilibrium. Ludicrous set up, terrible plot, hilarious low budget sci-fi action - but it sort of works, because Bale and Bean are really good. The bit where Christian Bale DISCOVERS EMOTION! (spoiler) is more affecting than it should be. I remember when people here were going nuts over that movie, to the point where I actually thought it was well-regarded in general. This was before I had seen it, mind you. Once I did, I was very confused and looked up actual reviews, where I learned pretty much everyone else thought it was a huge piece of crap. Christian Bale is entertaining, but that's about all it has going for it.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:02
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Alien 3 has some of the worst effects I've seen in a full-blown Hollywood production, and it certainly isn't helped by the fact that the blue screen technique tends to lighten the alien somewhat and it's almost always against an extremely dark background, or that it's shown on screen as often as it is. It never, ever blends in. You'd think they'd try to just cut around it and use closeups and quick shots of a tail whipping by or something, because the effects manage to deflate whatever tension the film has built up. Honestly, the best part of the movie is the documentary that got made for the Quadrilogy release and expanded for the Anthology. It's one of the most in-depth looks into the creation of a massive fiasco I've seen.
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Jun 17, 2012 13:16
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Maxwell Lord posted:Fox probably spent less because the logic was still that sequels made less than the ones before, and this was part 3, and an R rated movie to boot. Each Alien movie cost more than the previous one, with Alien 3 being the biggest leap.
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Jun 18, 2012 18:02
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Toys feels like an odd mix of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. It's an immensely cynical movie covered with a thin veneer of something that resembles (but isn't quite) childlike wonder. It's dark and zany in ways that are frequently off-putting, the characters are fundamentally broken in a whole variety of ways, and they're frequently powerless in the face of machinations larger than they could ever be. Thing is, that kind of tone is an extremely difficult one to maintain, and Levinson didn't succeed a lot of the time.
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Sep 18, 2012 04:29
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blackguy32 posted:What other people see as campy and decent, I see as cringe worthy. I agree with this. The 60s show was campy, Batman & Robin was just stupid. It's also boring as hell... yes, Arnold's puns are great, but you're better off watching a Youtube compilation of them because then you don't have to sit through Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donnell trying to out-bland each other.
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Apr 9, 2013 01:03
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Pick posted:I guess my fundamental issue is that I think Batman is stupid, so I'd rather watch a stupid movie about Batman than a... well, differently stupid movie about Batman (the rest of them). That's what Batman: The Movie is for!
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Apr 9, 2013 07:46
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Vhak lord of hate posted:My favorite part of that movie was playing "find the laser pointer"; whenever they wanted the cat to look somewhere there was always a little red dot shining on a pair of shoes or whatever. Also on scenes where the cat needed to stay in place it would magically gain a leash basically tying it to a deckchair. The plot continues to go nowhere for almost the entire duration, then the cat gets hit by a car and is almost immediately resurrected by a magic collar. The injured cat is hilariously lazy... they just kind of put some gauze on top of it and called it a day. Also, be on the lookout for cat food everywhere as well. When they needed the cat to be somewhere but not look too interested in anything, that's what they used, and it's blatant. DrVenkman posted:I don't think anyone really thinks that B&R is good. Just that there's joy to be found in its badness. Both it and Batman Forever are legitimately bad, but B&R is joyfully so - so it makes it the more entertaining watch. At least it's tonally consistent. Forever is kind of a mess in that regard: It's partly serious, partly camp and Val Kilmer being a tortured hero really doesn't work when contrasted with the fuckton of neon that Schumacher employs. sethsez fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Apr 11, 2013 |
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Apr 11, 2013 07:48
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BiggerBoat posted:Oh. I didn't mean to do that. Would it help if I said "I would have rated it 75% but it got 40% on RT and that's a big discrepancy, therefore it fits in this thread?" Sorry if I worded it wrong. The point is that "I would give this 75%" and "RT gave this 40%" are actually saying very different things, they just both happen to be measurable in percentages. Metacritic is much closer to what you're thinking of.
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May 21, 2013 20:29
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I'd take Jacob's Ladder over Ravenous, but it's definitely a toss-up. I never really got the fuss over Candyman. It's got some great moments, a fantastic score, and a setting that's incredibly compelling, but the titular character is goofy as poo poo, in the way a lot of "saying spooky stuff in a deep voice is inherently scary, right?" villains are. Then again, I feel the exact same way about Pinhead, so maybe Barker just isn't for me.
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May 28, 2013 01:19
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NarkyBark posted:I saw House of 1000 Corpses in the theater when it came out, and I thought it was so bad I swore never to see another Zombie flick again, and to this day I still haven't. Plenty of good directors have lovely debuts (I certainly wouldn't hold Alien 3 against Fincher at this point). He's gotten much, much better.
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Oct 27, 2014 03:13
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