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Schubalts posted:Bulletproof clothing exists, and it only kept him from immediately eating poo poo when he got shot. The bullets still impacted his flesh and bruised the hell out of him. Hell, when fighting off hordes of enemies Wick GETS SHOT several times, which puts it way up over the traditional action movie cliché. And they even make nods towards getting medical care in both films after heavy fighting. Sure, recovery time and the logical level of impairment afterwards get handwaved, but how often do they even consider little logical bits like that in action films? Which works well with the film since it helps upsell the danger when even the faceless mooks have the ability to do damage (and Wick has to react accordingly) and his actual peers are even scarier. To springboard to something on topic, Wick also illustrates avoiding one thing too many action movies irritate me with, the pointless fight. Getting into a battle just to pad out the running time gets old fast, most of the good action movies know you have to have an actual story/logic behind the fight. Seems like action film 101; have some goals/tactics/character development in the scene rather than just "look how cool the violence is".
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Sep 3, 2018 09:50
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Wasabi the J posted:I wish they could convey the concussiveness of gunshots with more bass punch. I feel like it would drive home to more people how powerful and dangerous they can be. Heat’s famous shootout scene owes a lot of its amazing to using the actual firing noises of the guns I think; the massive echoes of the gunshots really sold how dangerous all that automatic rifle fire was. I’ve always felt one of the signs of how good a job it did at establishing verisimilitude was the action scene almost felt like a horror scene, which is what it really would be in an actual fight like that. John Wick has that same attention to verisimilitude really, the whole “society of assassins” thing is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unrealistic things in the films but they play it as earnestly straight as possible they make it easy to buy in, and where they can make nods to reality they do so to make it even easier. You can argue the bulletproof suits thing (although as noted they do exist even if possibly not as effective as shown), but how many action movies have heroes who even bother wearing body armor for anything beyond a “not actually dead” psych out moment? And he gets a drat lot of use out of it, and not just against his “peers”, even the faceless mooks he takes out like mad manage to score hits on him and he reacts like somebody actually shot even with armor (i.e. catching a solid blow that hurts like hell and leaves bruises) and tends to grab medical attention when he can (not nearly enough, but again how many nods in that direction in action films?). By making it obvious being a badass doesn’t except him completely from reality, they sell John Wick as being even more impressive. Of course the real reason most movies don’t go for that kind of feel is it takes an amazing amount of real training and work to get people at that level, and I imagine most projects don’t have the funding or enthusiasm needed to pursue it.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:12
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Panfilo posted:The Mystics are really passive, that's their whole thing. They'll spend their whole existence navel gazing while the world burns down. Kind of like how the Ents were before Treebeard got pissed off. Yeah, the whole thing is all their passion went over to the Skeksis with the split, so they can barely manage to resist as is. Pretty sure the movie has them only start travelling to the castle when the Crystal starts calling them. Going by how easily they got in, they could have gotten Jen right to the Crystal but they literally didn't have it in them to pull it off and they knew it. By definition all their resistance was passive, they couldn't DO otherwise. Cowslips Warren posted:The Archer isn't like that though. I mean, admittedly we don't see him in the movie so presumably he dies at some point, but he's active and out in the world and isn't hiding. If nothing else, he could have gone to the others and killed them, then himself, so now all the 'dark halves' are loving dead and genocide done. Killing yourself is a hell of a lot easier to do than slaughtering a whole bunch of innocents to get the "bad guys", I can see him motivating the one but not the other.
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Sep 7, 2019 23:03
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Strom Cuzewon posted:IIMM for Krull - the glaive does diddly poo poo! He kills a few goons, breaks into the evil dudes lair, and promptly gets it nicked. It's supposed to be the fabled weapon to defeat the dark Lord, and it's a glorified can opener. He actually defeats the dark Lord By remembering that married couples can shoot fireballs from their hands Thing that always got me was Liam Neeson’s character supposedly had wives all over the place according to an earlier scene, how the hell would THAT work with the marriage flamethrower? Wouldn’t he have like a fusion flame he could shoot or something? quote:callback at the end with "but only the king and his lord Marshall have this key" is flawless though, and well worth the price of admission. I rather respected that the movie gave the epic quest a pretty epic casualty count, which fits given the stock enemy goons had basically laser rifles vs. swords and it only went downhill from there for the good guys.
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Sep 24, 2019 15:28
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christmas boots posted:At the risk of giving the movie too much credit, I think the fact that these arguments don't come up is at least somewhat intentional (except for the vice president plotline which I think they just forgot like we did). Honestly I like the fact that really until the very end nobody really wanted to fight each other over all this (the airport fight it was pretty obvious minus T'challa who was in vengeance mode they were trying to pull punches where they felt they could), it took Tony basically being driven berserk by finding out Bucky killed his parents and that Steve didn't tell him for those two to go all out, and even then I didn't feel like Tony honestly wanted to kill Steve as part of killing Bucky. Was glad the movie ended with Steve apologizing to Tony for the lying part, since no matter where people fell on the Accord business that was an obvious wrong by him.
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Mar 4, 2020 17:39
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Tenkaris posted:Uhhhh I didn’t come to this conclusion Yeah, the Deckard question works best when the answer is deliberately vague, they even brought it up in 2049 and his answer “I know what I am” is perfect. The answer to what is Deckard is “he is a person” and really the human/replicant question is irrelevant in the face of that fact. No answer to human/replicant works best because it deliberately blurs the line between them and points out it’s the more important question “are replicants just things?” that’s worth paying attention to. Making him definitely human or definitely replicant screws the whole thing up really.
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Jun 20, 2020 19:08
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Memento posted:Yeah Asimov specifically hated that trope. His works were more about the human response to robots than the robot response to how humans programmed them. I always thought most of the Asimov robot stories (at least the Susan Calvin ones and the stories with the two "field techs") was basically how GIGO would result from feeding real world situations into the Three Laws really. Like one of the stories with the two techs I mentioned; they were on a base on Mercury and one of them sent the advanced robot they were testing to get some resources (out in direct sunlight, so dangerous for humans to get) they needed for life support. Unfortunately his phrasing of the order didn't put special priority on it, and going to get the resources in question was theoretically dangerous for the robot; this was an issue since the Laws are supposedly mathematical balancing instead of straight priority logic (so you can't casually order a robot to suicide because the Second Law part of the equation wouldn't have enough priority to override the massive Third Law prevention of the act). So the upshot was the robot basically hit the point around the resources where the order's strength was equal to the risk and then went into a perpetual circle at that distance around the resources (acting generally crazy as well given the stress the Law conflict caused on its mind). Add in the only other robots available were old ones designed to only work when mounted by a human out of a idea they were so primitive they needed constant supervision, and the techs were in the jam that formed the basis of the story. Not because of the robot per se, but because of human error and poor design choices.
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Jul 6, 2020 19:37
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Crowetron posted:This does bring me to a movie irritation: whenever a movie decides to lean into the monster look for vampires, they always default to that dumb gargoyle face from Buffy. Vampires are fake, get creative with it, movie people! At least From Dusk Till Dawn went with a weird snake theme. Darkest Dungeon used mosquitoes as the theme for their vampires, that was really brilliant (and honestly scarier than gargoyles or snakes, especially if you draw on the “spread disease” aspect of the wretched things).
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Aug 23, 2020 17:17
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Len posted:I haven't watched it yet but Tremors 7 is out and according to spoilers they kill Burt That's 2020 for you.
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Oct 31, 2020 22:47
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SimonChris posted:But saying "dodge this" takes way longer than the travel time of a bullet, so the agent should have plenty of time to step aside. It would have been much more responsible to shot him in the head first, and then say "dodge this". Pretty sure the agent DID start to move too; he went from her pointing at the back of his head to facing Trinity when it went off. OK, to be honest I'm pretty sure that's just them screwing up the continuity of the scene during filming, but I kind of liked the idea he was spinning to face her when her bullet hit.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:52
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christmas boots posted:Lmao if you think Sam was actually his gardener and that wasn’t just a cover to explain to the remarkably (even for the time) homophobic hobbits of the shire why Sam was always over at his house Films anyway it's pretty clear Sam is at best weakly bisexual (with a high het bias) given how much he pines after Rose, much to the disappointment of Frodo who is still gay even in the films (I mean, he winds up on a cruise with his confirmed bachelor uncle, Ian McKellen, and a bunch of fairies, it's not even SUBtext at that point). You can see it when they get out of Mount Doom; Frodo's all getting close to Sam until he mentions Rose then Frodo is obviously disappointed. I assume the real reason he sails to the West is to get over the heartache even more than the Ring.
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Jan 3, 2021 05:14
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Casnorf posted:Not saying you're wrong at all but a lack of ambition would allow you to turn down the ring, too, and would have nothing to do with class stuff. I tend to suspect Frodo (and pretty much anybody else who could have tried, no matter how unambitious they were) fell eventually because he started wanting to be free of the suffering caused by the Ring, so basically he succumbed because no longer being able to resist was the best way for it not to hurt any more. But since that was about all he actually wanted he lasted longer than poor Boromir or Galadriel or Aragorn or Gandalf would have, who all had various plans and goals and such that could be easily swayed by the Ring to its own ends. And since Sam didn't have even the "I'm tired of this burden" to work with the Ring had nothing to twist into desiring it then. Most of the people who did resist the Ring in any fashion did it because it had nothing that they wanted really. sassassin posted:But some toff might write about how you were the best butler ever, carrying all his poo poo across a continent, petting him when he's feeling down, deciding to die at his feet as it's where you belong, never ever considering owning land of your own... Doesn't that just sound grand? Doing everything just out of love for your master? What a wonderful example Sam is to the common man. To be fair there are people who get off to that kind of experience, so perhaps we shouldn't kink shame. Wouldn't shock me if there's a lot of BDSM slash fic about the two of them (though for the sake of my sanity I refuse to check, thank you).
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Jan 5, 2021 23:17
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SiKboy posted:Oh, I thought you meant "the baddies wouldnt have found the tomb without her going", which is pretty true, but is also true of... Most? All? indiana jones films. Meh, Indiana Jones may not stop the main bad guy plot (though I think there's an argument he managed that in Temple of Doom) but he is pretty good at keeping them from running over innocent people in the process. If he hadn't been involved in Raiders, I suspect Marion would have died in her bar even if the Nazis still got melted, and as mentioned his father would have been SOL if he hadn't come. Even if "victory" was inevitable, he still managed to do some good that wouldn't have otherwise happened. And at least in Raiders the Ark gets moved someplace where it won't get messed with again rather than sitting somewhere in Nazi storage where who knows what idiots might repeat history (hell, the Bible mentions it killing a guy who accidentally touches it, Indy was probably lucky he didn't stumble at the wrong time and left it in its crate mostly). Really, the thing belongs in a warehouse  .
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Feb 14, 2021 20:56
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Pope Corky the IX posted:During the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica you could actually hear them throwing poo poo at the wall to see what would stick. And here I thought that was just the sound of dropping things into soup!
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Apr 29, 2021 18:31
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DrBouvenstein posted:I've never seen the Disney version all the way through, but I do remember the version from the 80's anime Grimm's Fairly Tales that aired on Nickelodeon. Probably use distaff and spindle like they did for generations before spinning wheels, I suspect. Though making all the women go back to that for 16 years seems a worse curse than the sleep bit. quote:I also got freaked out by the scene of a random knight trying to get to the castle to save her and getting killed and turned into a loving FLOWER: Well, THAT definitely is freaky enough to fit the original fairy tale (although considering the original tale involved a rapist prince, perhaps we shouldn't mourn that knight's fate...).
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May 7, 2021 22:51
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FreudianSlippers posted:The original Caribbean zombie myth was invented by slaves with the general idea being that the zombie itself wasn't scary as it was mostly harmless but the scary thing was becoming a zombie because that meant that even death wasn't an escape from slavery. Now THAT'S a timeless horror idea really.
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May 13, 2021 22:56
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Sand Monster posted:I don't remember that being all that traumatizing for me, but I was super freaked out by that giant guy who kidnapped the kids' parents. I just remember them killing the entire family off except for the little girl at like the start of the second Ewok movie, that seemed pretty messed up as a kid even if it wasn’t on screen death per se (think little girl had some sort of wrist device with a light for each living family member in range, and the lights went out…). Not exactly “watch Optimus Prime bite it” levels of childhood angst, but definitely unexpected for a Star Wars movie aimed at kids.
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Aug 10, 2021 19:41
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Alhazred posted:No one really believes everything in the bible absolutely. Like Megillah Gorilla points out it's just too contradictory, they just believe the parts that justifies their opinions. I have been occasionally fascinated by the historians who have pointed out how things in the Bible could match known history at least. If you go with Ramses the Great as the pharaoh Moses liberated the Israelites from (Ramses does apparently commemorate a victory over the Israelites on a monument, so they were around by then), then Joseph would have brought them into Egypt originally when the Hyskos were in Egypt. Serving people apparently painted as “foreign conquerors” by later dynasties would certainly explain why they went from advising the pharaoh to slaves by the time of Moses. Also got kind of a laugh about the suggestion I heard for the “Nile ran red with blood” thing; when the Nile does its yearly flood it drags a bunch of red mud with it, so it routinely “runs red”. Accurately stating when that happens is a neat trick admittedly, but it makes sense the Egyptians might dismiss it as “lucky guess”.
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Sep 17, 2021 18:47
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SimonChris posted:My main problem with every single Dune adaption so far is that they all have the Baron Harkonnen floating around in the air like an idiot. The Baron Harkonnen does not float! The suspensors simply decrease his weight enough for him to walk. Nah, that’s one change that works better I think. A, if it’s non-noticeable it’s kind of pointless to include it in a film. B, the new movie in particular makes it very clear the Baron uses that to look down on everybody, it’s a clever way of characterization. And C, you can’t tell me most people, especially anyone lazy and fat, wouldn’t just outright float and let the machine do all the work rather than keep having to walk around? The Baron is just the sci-fi version of those aggressive scooter old people really.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:10
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Megillah Gorilla posted:I was greatly amused by two of the Avatar's group, Suki and Sokka, who were obviously in a sexual relationship and it was played for laughs and the whole thing would have gone right over most kids' heads. I do love after a pretty obvious scene where Sokka and Suki were trying to get it on but were getting cockblocked by Zuko (at least until the scene changed) Sokka was making a flower necklace the next morning, as a subtle cue he got lei’d:D.
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Nov 22, 2021 17:36
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christmas boots posted:Only cops read those Cops can read?
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Dec 11, 2021 22:26
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Cowslips Warren posted:Literally all they needed was a year tossed on when the time changed. Oh this is in 1940, so this is before the last few scenes we saw in 1950. Or whatever kind of year calendar stuff is in the Witcher. I swear the Witcher 3 game had some remark about him "being in his 50s, looking like he's in his 30s, and acting like he's in his teens" that I thought was a nice swipe at it.
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Jan 4, 2022 09:01
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Cowslips Warren posted:Count Dooku was a Jedi with maybe the worst name ever. Not by Star Wars standards, unfortunately. quote:stopped being a Jedi. Walked away after presumably years of service/training. Uh, the Jedi don’t get to rule the Republic with an iron fist, torture/imprisonment is a little outside their power. Also, it’s not like he chucked his old lightsaber at them and pulled out a red one while cackling evilly, he didn’t SAY he was jumping to the Dark Side on his departure. In fact, his public reason for leaving (and maybe even a real one at first) was out of ethical disagreement with the Jedi and Republic for their fuckups (which he kept publicly claiming was the reason he led the Separatist forces in the Clone Wars); going full Man in the Iron Mask on him then would have been hilariously stupid politics even if the Jedi or Republic had the legal authority to do it. The Jedi don’t keep their members in by force (no pun intended), it’s just that for obvious reasons the people literally raised in the organization don’t generally want to leave. Considering Dooku was a Jedi master when he left, they probably assumed he wouldn’t go Dark Side after decades not doing so. Which turned out to be a mistake but not a wildly dumb one.
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Jan 22, 2022 20:03
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A Festivus Miracle posted:Zombies don't interest much nowadays because the collapse of society isn't novel; I'm loving living it. Yeah, the take home message from Covid has been literally every single stupid thing you've seen people do in a zombie movie is exactly what would happen.
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Feb 8, 2022 22:00
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Jedit posted:It was never meant to have sequels. At the end of the book Trautman kills Rambo (who has also offed a lot of cops including the sheriff). They were originally considering that ending in the movie too, but I understand it was quite rightly argued in development that a film about traumatized Vietnam vets that ends with the moral "they're so broken the only solution is euthanasia" was a VERY bad message to send and they switched it.
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Jun 4, 2022 19:29
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tribbledirigible posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5N1Aukm4Bo Did it earlier in the movie too; opening with the plane the bad guy shoots the gauges to "wreck the controls" (which leads to the awesome skydive fight, so I forgive them for that one at least).
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Jun 9, 2022 02:38
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oldpainless posted:I have said before that for a world full of assassins and murderers, they all seem to think you have to walk right up to someone in order to shoot them. Honestly considering how many run around with pistols, that's really the best range to be shooting those for reliable accuracy, especially if you're dealing with body armor like Wick is smart enough to wear.
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Sep 4, 2022 06:51
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thatbastardken posted:they're probably transferring patients away because there's a loving cannibal killing doctors upstairs. Boy, imagine waiting three hours in the ER and getting bounced to a different hospital with a “Sorry, a bloodsucking creature of the night devoured our attending physician!”; having the drat thing smash into the roof as you’re being driven off is just insult to injury at that point.
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Oct 18, 2022 00:15
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is on me.
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Torquemada posted:“THE BOX. YOU TRIED TO OPEN IT. WE… we. No. No, orange two clicks right. YOUR right, idiot.” Honestly anything worthy of the name “Lament Configuration” should be more of a bitch to solve than the movies show. As for those theoretical persons who have trouble, I guess if you can’t solve the thing the Cenobites accept your confused aggravation wrestling with the box as sufficient suffering for their purposes.
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Oct 18, 2022 14:44
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Beef Jerky Robot posted:Doesn't he get changed by Leviathan? I assume thats how all true Cenobites are made. I think it adds a certain additional horror if you can not only get tortured for all eternity, but get transformed into a torturer yourself. Besides, it would remove "And to think... I hesitated" as a line, that alone probably justifies making turning into a Cenobite forced instead of a choice.
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Nov 2, 2022 00:22
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There definitely is a point where it's basically just Changeling The Lost. Or vice versa. Well, "abused becoming abusers" isn't a new idea in fiction, I suppose. Also, MAN Hellraiser in Changeling as fae is a disturbingly fitting idea (if probably a little beyond most people's squick line in an RPG).
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Nov 2, 2022 08:35
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Captain Monkey posted:Works better as a True Fae from Changeling the Lost. Strange puzzle being solved means you get stolen from the world, and remade. Yeah, that was what I meant, not Dreaming, though with the newer edition of Lost they probably work better as Huntsmen for a True Fae Leviathan (converted from less fortunate changelings who didn’t escape).
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Nov 3, 2022 17:11
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Morpheus posted:Hell, I only watched the movie and I thought it was wild that they shut down the whole program, given the number of lives it saved. It needed an overhaul, especially when it came to punishments (locked up for life, rather than rehabilitation, is p. dumb). Offer, like, a life to the precogs and a choice while researching getting more, etc. Yeah, they were originally going to have a little caption at the end mentioning “the next year there were (X number) of murders in Washington DC”, I’m kinda annoyed they chickened out of that. I still can’t fault dumping the drat program though, it was demonstrated how anybody with enough access (meaning: government) could abuse it to get away with murder and it depended on stealing kids away from their parents (as opposed to the original story’s engineered brain dead precogs) and keeping them in a coma watching murders all day. Add in Cruise’s character straight up showing the predictions can be defied and you just don’t have enough reason to keep the program.
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Nov 7, 2022 19:01
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Armacham posted:I prefer this interpretation Bah, stories that end with "It was all just a dream" or the equivalent are lame, turning your movie into the worst kind of shaggy dog story is just wasteful. About the only example I can think of that worked for me was the Newhart show playing off the series as a dream from his character in his earlier show, and that was primarily because it was funny so it didn't have to make sense.
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Nov 9, 2022 19:04
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MariusLecter posted:That was the whole point of it tho. Hmm, that is probably an important clarification; if "It's all a dream" isn't a wild twist ending it works better. In the case of Jacob's Ladder the ending fits with the rest of the movie since the whole thing was kind of operating under dream logic the whole time in some respects.
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Nov 9, 2022 23:37
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FreshFeesh posted:As usual there’s a great Overly Sarcastic Productions video about this very trope, and the different ways it could be used to good effect… but usually aren’t. Huh, missed that one, and it does jump to the heart of the issue that you’re attacking the audience’s suspension of disbelief if you do it wrong. nesamdoom posted:Does this ending count? Based on the bit above, I’d say this one is OK because there’s no real suspension of disbelief because the song is inherently silly. The ending is just more silliness not a sudden change. Also, I continue to be horrified at what human imagination can come up with.
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Nov 10, 2022 18:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:More movies should use the Pulp Fiction briefcase method. OK, a couple pages back we had this: Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Elora is a weird macguffin in the original movie. There's a prophecy that says a baby will be born that will overthrow Bavmorda. So Bavmorda does all this stuff to stop the prophecy that ensures the prophecy will be self fulfilling. And Elora is basically a living breathing case from Pulp Fiction whose smile is the shining light. So, by transitive process, does this mean the suitcase in Bullet Train should have contained a prophecy baby?
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Dec 5, 2022 18:19
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FFT posted:The framing I recall is basically a warehouse of people suspended in clear plastic bags, it could be that. Original Blade had suspicious bags being wheeled around in the background as the guy was heading to the vampire club; there was also a deleted scene where Frost was showing how he had a bunch of humans in a setup like you mentioned as a explanation why turning lots of people into vampires (which was the original plan for the final threat) wouldn’t have them starve from lack of prey.
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May 15, 2023 13:37
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Enderzero posted:
Of course even that plan wasn't perfect. One thing they dropped in the movie but had in the novelization was the Terminator checking to make sure it killed the right Sarah Connor by cutting open their legs to look for a pin in her leg bones medical records said she had, but she didn't actually have the pin until after she was injured by the Terminator in the ending. So if the plan had gone flawlessly the Terminator would have killed every Sarah Connor and never realized it got the right one. And to go back to the "why do Terminators throw people?" thing a few pages back, I did find it amusing the Terminator Resistance game had a DLC playing as a Terminator where one of your moves is, in fact, to grab and hurl people. I appreciate their willingness to lean into the franchise's tropes even if it is objectively stupid. Also supposedly how Skynet learns Sarah's name to begin with; said Terminator is the one that finds the intel.
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Jul 7, 2023 09:03
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Even a throwaway Most likely answer honestly.
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Nov 16, 2023 01:01
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