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Roth posted:There's a prequel to The Thing? You might as well watch Thing 51 and get a different take on the same source material.
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Apr 21, 2018 23:07
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Congo is a great 'bad' movie. It's self-aware, but not in a cynical way - it's happy to be a good old-fashioned goofy adventure romp with modern trappings. And it's got a great supporting cast: Winston! Mitchell! Ash! Dr Frank-n-furter! Just a shame the male lead was such a wet blanket.
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May 5, 2018 21:20
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Hudson Hawk has a very bad reputation that it doesn't really deserve. It's not good, but it's certainly watchable and fun in a  way. It's basically a Bruce Willis vanity project based on an idea he'd had for years (a master cat-burglar who times all his heists to songs), that had the bad luck to be released at the exact moment people were starting to get sick of him and decided it was time for some tall poppy cutting. (See also: Arnold and Last Action Hero.)
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May 12, 2018 13:40
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If a fight is shot undercranked by as little as 1 frame per second (at 23fps rather than 24), that'll end up on screen as roughly 4% faster and make quite a big difference to the scene's pace and punchiness while being barely noticeable. Editors will quite often skip single frames to increase the impact of certain moves as well. Example: Die Hard, when McClane kicks Karl in the head as he comes through a door. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. There was once a whole movie (I'd like to say it was Deepstar Six, but I'm not completely sure) shot at 23fps so the whole thing moved faster, even in dialogue scenes. If the audio was pitch-shifted back to normal I doubt anyone would even have realised. Edit: if you ever watched a PAL videotape or DVD, you got the 4% speed increase for free! Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 20:40 on May 17, 2018 |
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May 17, 2018 20:37
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Lobok posted:I wonder how much of the decline in star power is due to the saturation of action movies that can deliver big budget spectacle year-round. Like when I was younger there was this sentiment of "oh drat, a new Cruise/Arnold/Whoever movie is coming out? That guy always delivers the huge explosions!" but now other than the death-defying stunts of Cruise in his Mission: Impossible series people seem to only get excited about plot or character developments. I think about all the visual effects of the recent Star Wars movies and how it's all taken for granted. When Battlestar Galactica was first airing I remember thinking "drat, a TV show can do this now?" Ditto with recent seasons of Game of Thrones. The memorable effects of Star Wars lately have been BB-8 and the wonky CG faces of dead actors. Whatever you want to do in a movie, you can, and you don't need Will Smith to guarantee a return on investment to justify a big effects budget. The dude from Parks & Rec is fine.
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Jul 10, 2018 22:31
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Wheat Loaf posted:It's sort of quaint in retrospect that the first movie that cost $100 million to make was True Lies of all things. Now, I think all that money absolutely shows on screen, but if you'd asked me before I looked it up I'd have guessed Jurassic Park or something. drat, you forget just how big a deal Arnold was back then.
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Jul 10, 2018 23:07
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Back to awards talk, remember when the lead of a sci-fi action movie was nominated for an acting Oscar? Sigourney Weaver, for Aliens. Lost to Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God.
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Jul 11, 2018 15:57
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I actually thought The Raid was at its best before everyone lost their guns and went full martial arts. Sure, the fight scenes were good, but the main characters were having their heads repeatedly smashed into concrete with enough force to burst their skulls open like watermelons, only to shrug it off and keep fighting. I know, suspension of disbelief and all that, but it took me out of the movie considering how brutal and lethal the rest of the action was.
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Jul 13, 2018 11:57
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Taintrunner posted:Virtuosity is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s drat ridiculous and I adore it.
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Jul 13, 2018 23:03
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Fart City posted:MI: Philip Seymour Hoffmaguffin M:I3 bugs the poo poo out of me, because it's the epitome of gently caress-you-audience writing. Want to know what the all-important Rabbit's Foot is? gently caress you. Want a tense and exciting sequence like the CIA vault from the first movie as Hunt steals it? gently caress you. Want a satisfying final confrontation between hero and villain? gently caress you. I always picture Abrams and the other writers chortling to themselves about how clever and transgressive and expectation-defying they were, but M:I Alias isn't even a joke - it's what we got, right down to the lazy TV-style in medias res opening followed by a flashback and Mystery Box horseshit. It's by far my least favourite of the M:I movies, and that's despite the fact I can remember literally nothing about Rogue Nation's actual plot, just occasional snippets of action. 4 > 1 > [2 or 5] > 3.
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Jul 20, 2018 12:15
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LesterGroans posted:I definitely thought they were trying to twist some of the things we've seen before, which Ghost Protocol also does, but I didn't think it was done in a malicious sense. That feels like projecting. On a sidenote, it's interesting that not a single one of the films has had the IMF pull off a plan without at least one massive catastrophic gently caress-up and/or traitor. Jim Phelps - the real Jim Phelps, not the obvious fake using his name - would be turning in his grave. (Assuming he hasn't faked his own death...  )
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Jul 20, 2018 14:34
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Wheat Loaf posted:I have no doubt that older fans disliked it - I know Payndz, who sometimes posts in this thread, was a fan of the original run and has said he doesn't like the first movie because he isn't a fan of Jim Phelps's characterisation. The thing is, we didn't have all the social media and so forth we have now in 1996. I don't dislike M:I1 at all; it's my second-favourite of the series after Ghost Protocol. But making Phelps the villain, while a good twist, was a bit of a kick in the balls for fans of the show. It'd be like doing... I dunno, a Knight Rider movie and making KITT the secret bad guy. But it's clearly not the real Phelps, anyway. His hair's not even white!
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Jul 23, 2018 17:51
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got any sevens posted:Woah you finally changed your avatar? To elastigirl...with polka dots? Going back to Die Hard, it's bizarre how the first of the movies actually to be written as a Die Hard movie, A Good Day To Die Hard, is the least Die Hard-like of them all. For a start it's poo poo, but even if it wasn't it would stand out because McClane is utterly invulnerable and acts accordingly throughout. Deliberately crash a truck? Leap off multiple tall buildings? Walk into loving Chernobyl, which is in a completely different country? No problem, no fear, no shits given (by character or audience). As for "I'm on vacation!" - no, you're there to watch your son's murder trial, rear end in a top hat! And what the gently caress was Jack's original plan to get Komarov out of the courtroom before the bad guys turned up, anyway? Considering how ultra-tight the script for 1 was, 5 being such a sloppy, half-assed mess (where the director admitted that they made up the big twist about Komarov during shooting) almost retroactively taints the original. Almost.
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Jul 23, 2018 22:05
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. Soon as it was mentioned at the start I knew it would be used.
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Wheat Loaf posted:I have been meaning to read your books for a while but just have so much else to get through.
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Jul 23, 2018 22:38
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MeatwadIsGod posted:The Bourne trilogy is damned great, but I leave it there. But Jason Bourne was a big disappointment because it was so obviously a "poo poo, we burned through all the existing plot threads, what are we gonna do now?" case of plot desperation. Bourne's dad founded Treadstone but was murdered by the same previously unmentioned super-assassin who's now after Bourne himself? 'Kay... It suffered from sequel bloat as well; everything had to be the same but bigger, so Marie in a chase became Nicky in a riot, the big car chase lays waste to half of Vegas with massive collateral damage, Bourne falls from even taller buildings, the CIA is even more cartoonishly evil and treacherous, and so on. All I wanted was Matt Damon moving purposefully for two hours, but they made Bourne so broken and empty that it became depressing. Stealing a line from Rifftrax, it turned a beloved movie trilogy into a generally well-regarded quadrilogy. So yeah, I only really think of the first three films as well. Also holy poo poo, when did Tommy Lee Jones turn into a reanimated corpse?
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Jul 27, 2018 22:54
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Raccooon posted:Fallout felt like they were transitioning Hunt into a international figure. Like talking about what the Americans want in third person. Maybe that was how the IMF referred to the CIA?
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Jul 28, 2018 22:42
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It's odd to think that the classic Mission: Impossible theme was originally only written as a piece of incidental music for a scene in the pilot episode. It was rejigged to become the main theme after show creator Bruce Geller heard it, loved it and wanted more. It's also kind of funny that it ended up spawning a dance version (the Clayton/Mullen track released alongside M:I1), because Lalo Schifrin specifically wrote it so it couldn't be danced to; he said something like "you could only dance to it if you were an alien with three legs." Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Jul 31, 2018 |
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Jul 31, 2018 11:48
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Wheat Loaf posted:Today I learned that the late Mary Ellen Trainor, who played the newscaster who interviews the psychiatrist about Stockholm syndrome in Die Hard, played the same character in the Denzel Washington movie Ricochet (the one where John Lithgrow tapes books to himself as armour while he swordfights a Nazi in prison). (Die Hard was at one point being considered as the basis of Commando 2, which would make for a weird alternate timeline where Bruce Willis was still best known as "the guy from Moonlighting".) Things I didn't know until today: there's a genus of spider named after the cast and characters of Predator.
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Aug 6, 2018 15:46
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Haha, the message at the end of Wolf Warrior 2 with the flag isn't subtle, is it? "China's coming, gently caress with us and you'll regret it." The tank sequence was good fun (if surprisingly goofy at times), though considering how China has memory-holed Tiannenman Square, I wonder how many of its home audience would even realise the irony of a lone man staring down a bunch of armoured vehicles.
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Aug 12, 2018 10:03
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Fart City posted:It's a really freakin weird movie, between that and the surprisingly graphic violence in the third act.
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Aug 26, 2018 07:32
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Wheat Loaf posted:Out of curiosity, has anyone ever watched The Detective with Frank Sinatra?
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Aug 30, 2018 20:39
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garycoleisgod posted:the scene with the kiddy fiddler that got cut 
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Sep 14, 2018 14:58
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High Warlord Zog posted:Re-watched Where Eagles Dare. I keep forgetting how much fun this is. Obviously Clint Eastwood duel wielding machine pistols against endless Nazis inside an exploding castle is awesome. But the caper-ish stuff holds up too. The big midpoint misdirection set-piece where Richard Burton talks circles around the bad guys is wonderful. It's all very Mission Impossible: WWII and I'm surprised that a remake hasn't been floated yet.
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Sep 19, 2018 14:03
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I saw the fourth Rambo in a cinema, and there was a group of teens (boys and girls) at the front who started off loud and boisterous and "yeah, let's watch some action!" They went very quiet after the first few minutes, there were some walkouts, and I'm pretty sure one of the girls was crying when she left. (Can't imagine she was happy with her date.)
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Nov 12, 2018 22:31
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Cobra has so many great/bizarre touches. • The guy in the suit and tie at the serial killer meeting. "Coming for a beer, Bob from accounting?" "No, I'm, uh... meeting my mom. With these axes." • Stallone's car going as fast backwards as forwards. • The Night Slasher grabbing a nurse by the throat while he's still hiding under a bed. • The random steel mill in the middle of an orange grove. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 09:36
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I've been watching various Seventies movies recently, in part for the retro pleasures of watching chases involving cars the size of boats wallowing around on suspensions apparently made from sponge. It prompted a couple of thoughts: firstly, would films like The French Connection, the Dirty Harry series and their numerous 'tough cop' ripoffs ("Mitchell!", McQ, The Seven-Ups, etc) count as 'action movies' by modern standards? They've got action in them, but it tends to come in short bursts or one big car chase, rather than massive escalating setpieces. Secondly, it shows how much the stakes have had to increase over the years to keep audiences interested. In 1971, the big stunt climax was Clint Eastwood jumping onto the roof of a bus. By 1988, Bruce Willis had to jump off the roof of an exploding skyscraper. Now, nobody even looks up from their phone for anything less than an entire city blowing to bits as Vin Diesel surfs a plane through a fireball.
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Dec 11, 2018 15:38
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Gravy Jones posted:On a tangent, Dirty Harry (the film and the character) is actually far goofier than I expected in the first movie, simething they moved away from in the sequels I just thought to compare the Dirty Harry series with the Die Hard series, BTW. Dirty Harry/Die Hard: the groundbreaking original which inspires dozens of imitators Magnum Force/Die Hard 2: the sequel that ups the stakes for violence and action but is a lot more straightforward and less smart. The Enforcer/Die Hard With A Vengeance: a change of tack into a 'mismatched partners forced together' story where the plot is just an excuse for running around a photogenic city wrecking stuff. The fairly nuanced hero of the original is now a quip-spouting violent cartoon. Sudden Impact/Die Hard 4.0: throws the hero into a new 'fish out of water' environment. Feels disconnected from the rest of the series as a result. The Dead Pool/Live Free Or Die Hard: any pretence at realism or social commentary goes out of the window for overblown and goofy action sequences, dumb gags and a hero who can literally be caught in an explosion without a scratch. The series has become a parody of itself. That said, at least The Dead Pool is watchable, unlike LFODH which was an inane and hideous pile of poo poo.
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Dec 11, 2018 23:59
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"I'm on vacation!" - catchphrase of the guy who is in Russia to see his son put on trial for murder. Did the writers even re-read their own script?
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Dec 12, 2018 09:26
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Willis appeared on the BBC's The One Show to promote AGDTDH, and although he blamed jetlag afterwards, it was obvious he didn't give a poo poo about the movie or even being there. But don't take it from me, let Charlie Brooker and co explain!
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Dec 12, 2018 15:57
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Finally saw M:I - Fallout last night. Pretty decent, though not the best of the series (that's still Ghost Protocol). I was surprised how many shots from the trailer didn't make it into the final cut, including the one they used as the climax (Hunt's chopper about to crash into a truck). Maybe it's because I'm a fan of the original show, which was played absolutely straight, but the way all the team constantly had little comedy bits undercut the tension way too often for me. It worked best when they underplayed the humour (like the colossal blood splat in the bathroom), but Hunt LaBoeufing through the helicopter chase got annoying very quickly. The bathroom fight was the high point, probably because there was no dialogue... I'll have to look for some behind-the-scenes stuff on YouTube to see how things were done; there was a weird difference between the first half of the Paris chase (on the bike) and the second (in the car), where the Cruise-on-a-bike stuff looked fake as hell and the car scenes seemed like he was having a great time trying to reenact Ronin for real. Edit: huh, he actually did do a lot of the bike stuff for real, which shouldn't have surprised me. Maybe it was the massive amount of colour grading they did to make it look sunny (the shoot was overcast) that gave it that fake feel. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Dec 15, 2018 |
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Dec 15, 2018 16:33
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Rewatching the bike chase, I realised the thing that most made it look fake was the ridiculously bright CGI headlight flare. If you're going to amp up your action with computer-generated stuff, why draw attention to it?
Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Dec 18, 2018 |
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Dec 18, 2018 10:39
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Halloween Jack posted:The Punisher one is particularly fun because the director did it because she was sick of seeing parkour gimmicks in action movies. I did like the 'ram the grenade launcher through a hole in the door and blow up the 10 guys waiting in ambush behind it' moment, though.
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Jan 3, 2019 14:36
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I noticed that the Netflix version restores some of the violence that had been cut from the UK DVD release (like Bogosian having his fingers chopped off), so if you're a Brit who wants to experience the majesty that is Under Siege 2 as it was meant to be seen, now's your chance!
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Jan 5, 2019 00:44
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Gonz posted:Oh my goodness gracious.
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Feb 2, 2019 22:18
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Man, I remember when Empire used to be good and irreverent and not afraid to pop the bubble of stars who were huffing their own farts. (It ripped into Richard Gere's diva behaviour on First Knight with an article titled "...And The Horse You Rode In On.") I stopped reading around the time of a stupendously crawling interview with John Cusack that had an extended and unironic description of the beauty of his eyelashes, and since then it seems to have turned into Superhero Movie Monthly.
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May 24, 2019 08:44
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Franchescanado posted:It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it gag. As soon as they break through the wall, you see a woman with massive fake breasts pegging a dude on a bed, they jump out of fear, and then the scene progresses as if the couple were never there.  Commando is the gift that keeps on giving.
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Sep 5, 2019 22:31
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David Morrell (Rambo's creator) hated it and said so publicly. He also said Stallone was ignoring his emails in the runup to release, so that should have been advance warning.
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Sep 21, 2019 07:52
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Blast Fantasto posted:Yeah every Rambo movie after First Blood has basically been a neocon fantasy *Yes, I know they weren't around at the time.
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Sep 21, 2019 22:22
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Blast Fantasto posted:- There’s a goddamn sequel hook
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Oct 13, 2019 23:01
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zer0spunk posted:They also stole the premise from a comic book, and it's done in a much better fashion there..no clue if anyone has noticed/cares, this film is bombing here (maybe it'll do better in china)
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Oct 17, 2019 09:29
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