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Blade being a being a mix of hyper violent action flick and blaxploitation movie, and that it was made in the late nineties, is total lightning in a bottle. It's no surprise that comic books movies became a thing not long after.
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Jul 6, 2015 02:02
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Immortan posted:Blade isn't a blaxploitation movie. I did not say that it is, but that elements of the genre are in there. It's a movie about a guy whose career is being the ultimate badass by selling stolen watches to fund his personal kung fu war against a council of ineffective, blandly dressed white guys in a board room obsessed with racial purity.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:27
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An interesting bulking up of a then much lankier Snipes even in body armor. In Blade III they got their wish, he weighed enough that he was even bigger in just a shirt.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:46
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I'm sure it was a pretty easy shoot for him if even half the stories about it are true. The best unfounded one though is that supposedly at some point he read off a ton of dialogue in an impersonation of Jerry Lewis instead of his normal voice before cursing out the director and walking off into the night. I would kill for raw footage of that.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:19
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Yeah it's a thing that could have potentially been cool but the CG effects and stuff for it are just bad, and they were wise to keep it to just the CGI blood pulling him back together.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:38
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The CG is fine. If anything it only falters when they linger a bit too long on the puppets and stuff that have CG involved also like when Frost blows up at the end or when Udo Kier enjoys a beautiful sunrise. None of them are particularly bad and I think they hold up waaay better than other films of the era attempting similar visuals like Hideaway.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:46
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Tezcatlipoca posted:It would loving suck and take all the style and interesting parts of the character out so they could sell toys to (man)children. Agreed, though I would kill for like a separate ultra violent MCU they can use for Punisher/Blade/Ghost Rider/whatever. Of all the many things wrong with Blade Trinity, the most perplexing is that the first ten minutes ape Norrington's style, then Del Toro's. Like with Cameron doing Aliens a consistent but gradual shift is set up from a very stylish director's style into David S. Goyer's. But then the rest of the movie looks hyper bland. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 01:52
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They did that awful Man-Thing direct to video movie too which I believe also used the Marvel Knights imprint. But man I would have loved if they kept doing DTV Punisher flicks every couple of years, even if they had different actors/etc. doing them. Make me nostalgic for the 90s when you could go into the video store every week and rent the raddest movies with Billy Blanks or Don Wilson or whatever. Bloodfist series.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKjzBFMF1w Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 02:02
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The smile when he first pulls out the boomerang is the best. Like Blade says later in the film, he's basically only "happy" when he's killing vampires. I remember in the letter section of every Marvel comic a few months before it came out Stan Lee was like flipping out about how amazing the Blade movie will be. You could tell it wasn't general "of course he has to say it's good" speak he would just write these rants about how Blade is an unstoppable vampire destroying juggernaut, how badass Wesley Snipes is, etc. he was legit thrilled. After seeing the movie on opening day, he was definitely right.Lotish posted:But the blood inflation explosion was ugly and bad. Like they ran out of budget for the big pay off. Would have looked better if they just painted Dorff's face on the back of a swollen tick and injected it with hydrogen peroxide. They need to use this as an effect in a future Ant-Man film. The CG dissolving skeletons were awesome at the time, everyone was hype at that. Tons of vampire movies came out before but the level of ferocity happening over and over again with how they're killed in Blade was unheard of. I think that at the time too even the Frost exploding wasn't seen as bad just because the amount of hype you were at when you watched that movie for the first time in 1998 was unstoppable. It's a great effect because, on a technical level, it is dated, but the speed it happens at and the way they're shown is so perfect. I remember they made a point of improving it though in Blade II, though I think the reality was more that the effect happens less there in general and more to major characters since so much more of the cast Blade is interacting with instead of immediately killing are vampires compared to Blade 1. They tried to sell a different take on it as an improvement. In the end, while I love the look of Blade II, it really put some of the weaker effects in the spotlight. 
Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 15:09
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space-man posted:i agree with you 100%.
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Jul 9, 2015 20:20
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The CG was "better" in some ways but revisiting it, it reminds me of rod puppet in Alien 3, like something is off with the lighting of the sets vs. the CG itself so it looks really weird. At the time it worked for a lot of people (myself included) because this was before Underworld and Matrix Reloaded and a lot of similar stuff came out, so just actually seeing these super powered characters cut loose on each other at the end was enough. I feel like it's aged worse than Blade 1 which is basically a film without a flaw. I liked the costumes and stuff in Blade II. They were really simple but worked, those two assassin vampires, Asad and Nyssa (sic?) especially.
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Jul 9, 2015 23:56
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Shame too because the makeup is awesome and the sets were cool but oh hey a CG Castlevania monster doing a flying elbow drop from fifty feet. More so than the CG spotlight ninja fight that scene really should have been done with stunts and wires.Rap Record Hoarder posted:Serendipitous timing: http://deadline.com/2015/07/wesley-snipes-blade-comic-con-interview-blade-the-player-1201472733/ 
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Jul 10, 2015 02:06
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The script wasn't too helpful either. THESE PEOPLE KNOW NOTHING OF HONOR OR LIVING BY THE SWORD!! *dangles a recently kidnapped infant off the side of a buiding* NOT LIKE YOU AND ME BLADE! *runs away like a punk because they need to fill 45 more minutes*
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Jul 10, 2015 16:11
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Alhazred posted:Basically, Blade Trinity could've been a decent movie if it hadn't been for the script, directing or acting. There was a lot of demand for it too. There would be articles in magazines constantly like "where is Blade III? What is going on with Blade III?" From like a year after Blade II came out until Trinity was released. All the concepts they were talking about sounded way cooler than what we got though. At one point it was going to be in a Terminator-esque future war setting where vampires rule the night and humans can move about a bit in the day time like The Omega Man. One was going to have Blade be waaay older in it and have it straight up be in the future, etc.
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Jul 10, 2015 16:49
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"You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar coated topping. There is another world beneath it: The real world. And if you want to survive it, you better learn, to pull, the trigger."
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Jul 12, 2015 23:05
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Left out the immortal "Blade II will kick your rear end and eat out your girlfriend's pussy."
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Jul 20, 2015 01:45
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The jump of him waking up is pretty well earned too since the character's actions and the way it's shot is just textbook autopsy scene enough and so casual. I mean of course it's not Exorcist III hospital but it's pretty cool for a late nineties action flick. Speaking of the film constantly toying with the idea of where life and dead end and begin, the slow motion of Blade meditating and then destroying his shrine, followed by him cutting the roots of the plant he had growing before rolling out for the final battle is amazing.
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Jul 22, 2015 16:14
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revdrkevind posted:I forgot Udo Kier was in this! "YOU bore me."
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Jul 22, 2015 17:18
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Snowman_McK posted:Somebody summed it up in a Photoshopped poster many years ago. "When Christopher Walken just isn't European enough, Udo Kier is...The Creepy Foreign Guy." revdrkevind posted:I forgot Udo Kier was in this! Between these comments he may be the least understood actor of our time.
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Jul 23, 2015 04:19
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Rhyno posted:Snipes was supposed to star in the show like up to the week before they started shooting. Sticky was like an emergency drop in replacement. What happened? Was this when he got busted?
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Jul 26, 2015 15:21
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Yeah this is awful, much like Blade III's script and direction.
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Jul 26, 2015 20:49
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Yeah I love it, and it's perfectly in place because it tells us not so far into the movie that Blade gives zero fucks about anything that doesn't involve killing vampires or getting revenge on his mom's killer.
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Jul 27, 2015 21:34
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Passenger 57.  I love New Jack City.
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Jul 31, 2015 03:43
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Elizabeth Báthory: "I told you so!" http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/04/can-we-reverse-ageing-process-young-blood-older-people
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Aug 5, 2015 22:36
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Darko posted:Taken 3 is pretty much exactly the same movie as U.S. Marshalls. You just summed up the exact way to make me never even consider watching a movie.
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Aug 6, 2015 21:40
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Alhazred posted:Sanaa Lathan probably reached her high-water mark of her career with Blade though. As terrible as it was, she did star in AvP and was about as good as one could be with such mega horrible material.
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Aug 8, 2015 20:07
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Alhazred posted:Not being terrible (and its not like she pulled a Raul Julia and acted her rear end off either) in a lovely movie isn't the high water mark in anyone's career (or at least it shouldn't be). The same could be said of her in Blade. :P
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Aug 9, 2015 00:50
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Fat Lou posted:
TheFallenEvincar posted:
This is because Udo Kier improvised the "You bore me *strolls out*" in the movie too.  In the script Dragonetti is much much more shaken and intimidated by Frost, he stays in the library, completely cowed as Frost walks out self satisfied with his reveal of having made actual progress translating the scriptures. I think this is because the conversation between Frost/Dragonetti/etc. in the board room earlier in the movie is very different in the script. Frost isn't called in to be scolded about his night clubs, but rather he enters the meeting uninvited to talk about how they need Blade alive.The argument isn't about pure blood/turned but rather about how Dragonetti wants to focus on killing Blade while Frost wants to take him alive for the ritual. The ritual/etc. is spoken of much less vaguely throughout the movie, with Dragonetti being so immediately shaken and defeated because he knows Frost is right about everything. Blade's "Motherfucker are you out of your god drat mind?!" was improvised too, that entire scene played without dialogue until N'Bushe Wright says her shoulder is dislocated after her and Blade exit the scene. She doesn't even cure herself either at first, having to rely on Whistler's medicinal prowess regarding removing rattlesnake venom or whatever. Basically David S. Goyer's career exists because of repeated fortune of working with directors and casts who would take the skeleton of what he wrote and add some actual meat to it. Less related, Quinn is waaaay more feral in the script, described as being massive, covered in "tribal, Maori-like" tattoos and having a huge jaw that could separate out almost like a shark's. So this makes me wonder, looking at that Udo Kier interview, if his decision to play it like a stock broker ended up having way more effect on the film than one would think. Note how the board room scene is about business, exposure and keeping connections with the police in line rather than being about assassinating Blade or the ritual. And how Quinn instead of being a straight up monster (which I believe is what N'Bushe Wright's ex-boyfriend would eventually become, I think they were implying that sometimes you become a bit crazier/animalistic like what Quinn would have been) and Frost are like a drunk and his douchebag finance bro best friend. I think it's also why there's a bit of a flip with how the hierarchy works in Blade II, in that movie the older the vampire is, the more powerful it is, period, until they create the Reapers. But because of how Blade I goes down we see the opposite, where the impure turned vampires can do stuff like be in the sunlight for limited amounts of time and there doesn't seem to be a disparity in physical strength, etc. I think it's because while the changes are generally more interesting (like I and you and everyone has said, the racial purity obsession of the vampires makes it more interesting, Frost himself, is obsessed with racial purity in how driven he is well), it's still on the skeleton of a script with an ancient order of vampire godlings secretly ruling the world from behind the scenes. The script expresses this in a flowery way, with Dragonetti speaking in terms of "for thousands of years we've excelled in the shadows" or whatever. But Udo Kier talks in a much more modern way, in terms of public exposure and deals with the cops. Blade II follows the more fantastical approach, possibly because Goyer's script is more intact, but I haven't compared in a long time. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 04:30
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that reminds me
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Rhyno posted:Didn't White Wolf sue over the similarities? They couldn't touch Blade because how do you touch one of the raddest movies and, the basic idea of vampires running things from behind the scenes isn't new. They did sue Sony over Underworld though. I'm sure someone else can give details but long story short Sony tried to claim that the makers of Underworld had never heard of World of Darkness or White Wolf and that any similarities (even in some of the terminology used) are a coincidence because of course it's a story about werewolves and vampires so it will seem similar but come on, it's not like White Wolf invented vampires and werewolves. But then White Wolf presented footage of some of the people behind Underworld from a con where they straight up talk about how important White Wolf is and how much influence it had on their ideas for Underworld so that basically ended it. EDIT: I feel like Underworld is waaaaay more blatant in its imitation, but besides that, the Blade comic character had been around since 1973. Even if White Wolf thought Blade was too close I'm sure they figured with that long of a run pretty much any incarnation of "overlord vampires" was covered in the comics somewhere. The other big difference in that the actual abilities the various vampires use are often very similar to how vampires can act in the White Wolf games, while in Blade there's the more basic being killed by prolonged sunlight and being able to regenerate, which has been around forever. It seems like a thin line but Underworld very clearly imitates Vampire in the terminology used for its groups, the way the social order is structured, etc., while Blade does its own thing. Finally, regarding Blade and Vampire: The Masquerade, vampires and vampire hunters roaming from city to city until one is picked clean of the other? Ancient blood gods with secrets revealed via forbidden scriptures? Very limited walking around in daylight for vampires that have less pure blood? All of that stuff is in the White Wolf book Guide to the Sabbat, from 1999. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 05:52
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nm
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Aug 11, 2015 00:32
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Fat Lou posted:
The city in general is very white and sterile looking and the music matches it. This changes noticeably after Blade has the "You better wake up..." dialogue with Karen. The score is generally Carpenter-esque but from that point on is much more sinister and urgent. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 04:35
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Gilok posted:Also, while Guide to the Sabbat was released in 1999, the Player's Guide to the Sabbat, for an earlier edition of Vampire, was released in 1992. I personally think it's pretty likely that V:tM was a big influence on Blade's vampire culture, which is a good thing because it's cool. I'm sure there was some influence, but the specific examples I mentioned IIRC didn't appear until the 1999 guide. But in general yeah I'm glad Blade took it in a different direction and made it less gothic and more smarmy. Either way unlike with Underworld (that's crazy that they straight up ripped one of the novels that blatantly) I think Blade does more than enough to differentiate itself.
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Aug 12, 2015 01:04
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That would mega own. They tried to play up Drake in Blade III like he was going to have crazy abilities like that but, uh...
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Aug 13, 2015 01:37
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Grendels Dad posted:On the other hand, "villain is/turns into a cloud" has been done before in comic book movies. I agree that it would be amazing if it were something akin to the ending of new Evild Dead, but I'd expect Rise of the Silver Surfer before I'd expect Evil Dead. Plus wasn't a lot of new Evil Dead's final struggle done with practical effects (save the hand/etc.) anyway?
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Aug 14, 2015 15:52
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To his credit, maybe he meant "stopping power" like in Blade the bullets don't knock him back or dramatically make him fly away like in some movies.
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Aug 22, 2015 15:30
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http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/markcassidycbm/news/?a=124384
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Aug 25, 2015 19:06
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Grendels Dad posted:You mean midway through the film. I like Blade 2 quite a lot, but it suffered heavily from del Toro "introduce insanely cool characters to have them die five minutes later without them seeing much action" syndrome, just like Pacific Rim. At least Blade 2 kept Ron Perlman around longer. This was the dumbest thing in Blade 2 because the make a big deal about how they all have these UV guns and stuff that will completely own the reapers/vampires and then they just stroll into that sewer and get completely clowned anyway because they decide not to use them for no reason at all.
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Sep 5, 2015 14:36
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Plus look at Blade's childhood. He was an orphan and when Whistler found him he was basically a cannibal teen runaway. I think we can assume that a similar fate befalls this situation most of the time, and it's only relatively recently that the vampires have such a solid hook up with the police/politicians/whatever that they would even be able to care or try to keep tabs on one. Frost is actually kind of right in that meeting scene earlier on, in that they're able to drawn in and go on the offensive with Blade because they're operating more openly, making him do the same.
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Sep 9, 2015 17:13
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We see this carried out in Blade II anyway where they attempt to create a more powerful vampire and it completely backfires.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:52
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Snowman_McK posted:Nah, they get clowned because Lighthammer turns and Chupa is an idiot. Also, there's way more of them than they anticipated. Honestly, Del Toro's pretty good at letting you understand why fights turn out particular ways. How can there be more than anticipated when the head vampire guys give them a seminar on how fast they multiply and how many there will be? They say this new weapon vaporizes vampires even reapers instantly, equip everyone with it, and no one thinks to use it until the very very end when it's time for the scene to end so Blade sets off some UV grenades and takes care of the entire infestation singlehandedly.* I love Del Toro a lot but that entire scene is dumb filler. *While shouting "You have no idea who you are loving with!" which they chose to use in the film's tv spots, changing the loving to "messing." Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 19:51
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