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In case anyone was wondering, Outside The Wire is 50% normal-rear end DTV and 50% super weird because it occasionally turn anti-narrative and there's basically no reason to have robots in it? Why are there robots??? Mackie plays the robot as a dude who's vaguely interested in trolley problems.
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Jan 16, 2021 06:42
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CPL593H posted:Robots are cool. You’d think that, but the robots in Wire are the lamest to come out of the Bigdog/Petman trend since it was established by Blomkamp and Liebesman. Turns out that having OK robot design doesn’t compensate for every other possible shortcoming. It’s just annoying that a mash-up of Universal Soldier: Regeneration, Ex Machina, and Elysium/Chappie is this dull.
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Jan 16, 2021 22:54
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porfiria posted:I think MGS IV started the leggy robots. That’s certainly one of the big ones, but Blomkamp’s “Tetra Vaal” short film (which would become Chappie) was released 2004. That signalled a major shift in how these things are depicted. Like, contrast the doofy mech suits in Avatar with the one from District 9 at around the same time. They make Cameron’s thing look positively antiquated. Shortly after that, Battle: Los Angeles is the first movie I can recall where it’s explicitly a reference to the BigDog robot; the alien tech in that movie is mostly based on real-world experimental US military drones. Then you have Elysium the next year, and that kind-of solidified things. Robocop, Kill Command, Code 8, ReVolt, etc., that are all clearly Blomkampian. Outside The Wire is the first I’ve seen that’s just kinda... eh. The only interesting concept is that its robo-soldiers are stupid, mute, and easily spooked - so their ‘personality’ is like somebody gave a horse an assault rifle, and even the guys on their own team are nervous around them. But that’s just one sentence, when the movie’s over an hour long.
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Jan 17, 2021 04:27
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Ok we really need a name for these Chappie films. Dronesploitation? After Outside The Wire sucked, Monsters Of Man looked a little more promising. And it does turn out that that’s the actually-good version of the same film. It seems like it flew under the radar, since it came out a month ago, but MoM is basically Robocop 2014 or Chappie if they went full action-horror with it. It’s consequently not as tight as those films, where like every single scene is illustrating some hard-sci-fi concept, but that’s to make room for a bunch of good suspense sequences. It’s pretty easy to trainspot the influences: Rambo 4, Bourne movies, Predator, etc. - but it totally comes across as it’s own thing. Though it stays within pulpy genre territory, the tone approaches gun-horror like Ti West’s The Sacrament. So yeah, big recommendation. It’s the best thing I’ve seen recently.
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Jan 19, 2021 20:39
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FunkyAl posted:Is Ex Machina a chappie film? Ex Machina absolutely isn’t. josh04 posted:Is RoboCop (2014) a Chappie? It is, but it’s more specifically a proto-Chappie, along with such as Elysium and Iron Man 2. Chapsploitation proper begins with Juarez 2045, where the entire selling point was that this piece of poo poo movie has some chappies in it. But since then, we’ve had some really good examples like: Kill Command (evil Chappie) Code 8 (X-Men vs. Chappie) Monsters of Man (Rambo vs. Chappie) Also Chappie-adjacent films like the Ghost In The Shell remake.
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Jan 20, 2021 01:17
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Basebf555 posted:I still don't get what it means to "strike, like Thunderball". Someone tried to explain it to me in another thread but I still don't get it. ‘Cause it’s one, two, three strikes “yer out!” at the ol’ thunderball game.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:30
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"There’s a thunderstorm coming. It's the only time we can play [vampire baseball, aka thunderball]. You’ll see why.” -Edward Cullen, Twilight (2008, d.p. Elliot Davis)
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Jan 20, 2021 22:46
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"Selling out" seems inextricably linked to the idea of selling of one's labour-power to an employer - if not synonymous with the concept. So the whole notion expresses a disdain for the working classes. e: on a completely unrelated note, 2010: The Year We Make Contact is some pretty wild stuff. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 23, 2021 05:20
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:2010 is both much better and significantly worse than its reputation would imply. It's mostly the score. 2010 is an extremely dope horror movie about soviet cosmonauts facing cosmic terror, but the score is inexplicably set to "spiritually uplifting". It's totally dissonant with what the movie's actually about. (That, and it's got that voiceover narration. And pretty much everything on Earth is whack.) Nonetheless, I love how the production design is this transitional form, gradually morphing 2001 into Alien.
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Jan 23, 2021 07:53
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I have to say this looks actually-promising, in that "Godzilla vs. Kong" seems to refer an aesthetic conflict between those two films. I also appreciate that there's hardly a trace of Godzilla 2 in there.
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Jan 24, 2021 22:10
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I prefer whiskey, but I find that a decent-quality tequila is usually the smoothest experience.KVeezy3 posted:As someone who's only experience of kaiju film is Pacific Rim 1, is there a good place to start? The question people have skipped is: what did you like about Pacific Rim, if anything? ‘Cause, like, one thing to keep in mind is that Pacific Rim does not really resemble most kaiju films at all. (‘Mecha’ stories where they face off against monsters are almost exclusively a television phenomenon.) The movie that Pacific Rim is almost directly ripping off, for example, is Godzilla x Mechagodzilla (2002) - but that‘s a slightly ‘meta’ film that relies on you having seen both Godzilla 1954 and Mothra 1961 to make sense.
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Jan 26, 2021 05:00
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KVeezy3 posted:Also, I forgot to mention that I did see the Colossal film starring Anne Hathaway as well. I didn’t really like that film either, but I’m not sure that really counts as a kaiju film. The kaiju references in Colossal are pretty much totally parody, so you're right there. From a historical perspective, the two most 'important' kaiju films are the original King Kong (which holds up extremely well because of its bluntly problematic racial themes) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (which is solid 1950s sci-fi, with top-notch effects). Those two are like the rosetta stone of the genre. Godzilla 1954 remains the best example of kaiju as apocalyptic horror, for example - which is why it's a good recommendation - but it's effectively a direct ripoff of Beast. So it may help to know that the genre originated in 1950s sci-fi and earlier 'jungle adventure' movies. The animals just got progressively bigger and more surreally metaphorical, while the films gradually incorporated more pulp pseudoscience and conspiracy theory elements (psychics, aliens, etc.). Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe is one of the best films in the genre but, by 1995, the fact that the giant dinosaur-creatures are psychics that hail from Atlantis is just part of the genre vocabulary. Consequently, there's a whole spectrum of kaiju films, like how superhero films can range from Death Wish to Aquaman. Even nowadays, the genre is still roughly split between apocalyptic horror (e.g. Cloverfield) and 'lighter' sci-fi adventure (e.g. Rampage). Pacific Rim is where it gets really decadent and divorced from the more interesting stuff, imo. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 18:17
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Basebf555 posted:20 Million Miles to Earth(1957) is another Harryhausen that feels like it fits the mold of a kaiju film. 20 Million Miles is dope but, although Harryhausen obviously deserves recognition, I like to note that the directors are often kaiju auteurs themselves. 20 Million Miles' Nathan Juran also did Deadly Mantis and Attack Of The 50-Foot Woman, while Beast From 20,000 Fathoms' Eugene Lourie also did Giant Behemoth and Gorgo. Ghost Leviathan posted:Pacific Rim is more a Hollywood attempt at a giant robot movie that happens to use kaiju as the names for the monsters they fight. The themes get very different when the kaiju are explicitly the antagonists fought on equal level by the protagonists, rather than nigh-incomprehensible forces of nature. (Evangeleon is probably the main outlier here, but that does a lot of things differently) At that point that you introduce mechs, you've introduced a society that's organized around the production of mechs - which means you're doing Starship Troopers. Even Evangelion is basically just doing the Starship Troopers thing, and the best mecha film (Robot Jox) is a satire in the same vein as Death Race 2000. What the comparison to GxMG illustrates is that Pacific Rim is best understood as the 30th installment of some ancient franchise that never actually existed. Like if the first Bond film was Die Another Day.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:02
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ruddiger posted:Where does Frankenstein Conquers The World fall in your ranking of kaiju movies? It seems hugely underrated; people seem to hype the sequel (War Of The Gargantuas), but Frankenstein is way better. There’s just more interesting stuff going on in how it uses the Frankenstein mythos, and I love Baragon as a monster.
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Jan 28, 2021 13:35
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Escobarbarian posted:Room 237 is a good documentary about smug idiots but a bad documentary about The Shining It’s not even a good documentary about the idiots, because they don’t bother to analyze the film in a legitimate way as a contrast - or to explain where these dumb ideas are coming from/why they’re wrong. The thesis ends up being this ‘creepy’ implication that maybe there is no reality??? The Nightmare has the same issue where it’s literally a full movie of random idiots telling you about a dream they had, with no particular insight into the subject. The focus seems to be on creating the ‘creepy’ implication that shadow people are real??? They’re just making lovely creepypastas, minus the part where Sonic The Hedgehog kills you at the end, and calling them documentaries.
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Feb 7, 2021 16:59
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Lifeforce bugs me a little because the big V’ger space-madness sequence was very obviously meant to be a flashback/dream-sequence later in the film Putting the big centrepiece effects sequence at the very beginning means that things don’t really escalate, and you also know - right off the bat - that these are vampire aliens, instead of having some mystery. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 16:05
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X-Ray Pecs posted:This is such a stupid hill to die on. It’s not 100% stupid, because it’s basically just saying that she doesn’t like pretentious people and racists. And, like, who does? gently caress ‘em! I myself am highly suspicious of anyone who claims that, like, there hasn’t been a good slasher since Halloween ‘78 and/or Scream. The dumb part is the implicit assertion there were no progressive politics in the entire first century of film’s existence(???). Also (and perhaps worse), she’s effectively saying that these historical films are irredeemable - like, there is no leftist solution to problematic content; we cannot appropriate a film, or read against it, or anything.
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Feb 18, 2021 04:29
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porfiria posted:I'd have more sympathy if 99% of today's output weren't soul crushingly evil. Depending on how you mean ‘evil’, I imagine it’s because the average movie today is an unboxing youtube. There are just more of them.
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Feb 18, 2021 15:16
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This isn’t a new phenomenon; Bugs Bunny was hanging massive dong before the Hayes Code.
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Mar 5, 2021 15:10
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Anonymous Robot posted:Rilakkuma and Kaoru is probably the most visually beautiful work of stop motion animation I’ve ever seen. Rilakkuma is fuckin' fantastic. Lost in Space is really good Prometheus fanfic up until they leave the water planet (you can basically shut it off at that point), and I'm the only person in the world to rep ANON.
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Apr 2, 2021 17:20
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MacheteZombie posted:im curious about what they cut of cloverfield paradox. there seems to be a decent concept buried in there somewhere It was never going to be good, but the original movie was simply about these astronauts who contact ghostly aliens. The aliens turn out to be copies of themselves from another universe where their space station suffered a catastrophic disaster. The ‘disaster’ universe overlaps with the ‘normal’ universe and causes all the weird phenomena like water appearing out of nowhere (the ‘disaster’ space station crashed into the ocean). When they decided the film would be part of the Cloverfield franchise, they changed the plot to be about evil monsters invading from billions of alternate universes. Consequently, the film no longer really made any sense.
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Apr 2, 2021 21:09
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It’s like how Twilight has both vampires and werewolves. In Dawn, the world is overtaken by zombies and Doug Henderson.
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Apr 6, 2021 19:37
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The interesting thing is that DMX (unwittingly) argues that there's no contradiction between being LGBT and being a "thug" - that the thug life is fundamentally inclusive, and this just makes him upset. And the reason X is upset is that, where other thugs view themselves as men and women, he evidently views himself as subhuman and beneath gestures of respect. Like, he straight up says that if someone offers him a hand, he'll bite it like a dog.
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Apr 10, 2021 16:06
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It’s pretty clear that we’re all unanimous in rejecting a straightforward homophobia of DMX’d lyrics, with a range of interpretations as to why it’s bad. There’s little or no contradiction between CPL’s stance, Ruddiger’s stance, and my own observations. Like, go back to the lyrics: “How you gonna explain fuckin a man? / Even if we squashed the beef, I ain't touchin ya hand” So DMX (or, the character he’s playing) is like “I’m going to kill you unless you explain why you had sex with a man” - to which the obvious reply would be something like “I had sex with a man because I am a homosexual.” In that case, X would evidently be like “oh, well, ok. But I think that’s icky.” Obviously that’s still homophobic, but it’s a very different species of homophobia. For me, it just comes across as silly because he’s trying to seem badass but his specific ‘beef’ is with straight men having gay sex. Like, very earnestly baffled: “why do all my straight friends keep sucking dick?” You really do just want to sit down with him and help solve that mystery.
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Apr 10, 2021 19:49
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The good Supermans are the Fleischer cartoons and Man Of Steel, while Superman: The Movie and Superman Returns are some kind of weirdo postmodern thing talking about the cultural impact of the Superman franchise. All these are worthwhile, but people who only watch the Donner end up with a distorted picture - in the same way that someone might only be familiar with the Brady Bunch movie.
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Apr 18, 2021 03:49
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Empress Brosephine posted:Is there any piece of media that all superman fans agree on? Superman the animated series? Smallville? Louis and clark?! Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice is Grey Edition
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Apr 18, 2021 04:01
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I'm very partial to Marjorie Prime.
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Apr 27, 2021 04:16
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JollyBoyJohn posted:Watched the 2014 Godzilla on a whim today, really enjoyed it, very unfamiliar with the series so was really thrown by the whole Muto sub plot but the visual spectacle was exactly what i wanted and there was just enough of a human touch to compliment the huge city destroying lizard. Hot Tip: Godzilla and Skull Island are fantastic, but skip the next two in the series and watch Rampage instead.
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May 2, 2021 16:51
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Shin Godzilla is one of the best kaiju films in recent years, but it's a very different animal. Rampage is a perfect middle-ground between Godzilla and Skull Island.
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May 2, 2021 17:30
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CPL593H posted:That's actually a pretty interesting concept that's probably going to have a mediocre execution and go straight to Netflix. It’s half an interesting concept, because those content-moderation businesses really do exist and they’re very hosed up. Like, it turns out that paying people a bit higher than minimum wage to absorb the absolute worst content on the internet actually causes mental illness. The companies are very covert about what you’re signing up for, but the interview process might involve such as showing the candidate execution videos to see if they can “handle it”. Then they’ll spend the workday doing that, nonstop. It’s pretty well known that people doing this job tend to become radicalized by what they are censoring: right wing conspiracy theories, white supremacist propaganda, etc. In effect, you’re getting paid not enough to endure emotional/psychological torture and brainwashing. So it’s some gross poo poo - but tacking it to a gimmick franchise and doing a “what is reality???” thing with murderous art-criminals is just lame.
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May 8, 2021 04:18
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CPL593H posted:Well that sounds horrible and makes the movie sound not cool at all. It’s totally something that you could explore, but it sounds like they’re repeating the Cam thing where they present an authentic online workplace as a setting, and then undermine it with a very half-baked sci-fi narrative.
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May 8, 2021 04:34
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CPL593H posted:I should also say that I don't think anyone is a horrible monster if they like movies with problematic elements. But I think it's okay for people to be like "No, this is not okay.". I'm sure every single one of us likes some problematic movies and I don't exclude myself. But in my case I feel like Tropic Thunder might be going too far. This is a misunderstanding of problematization, because problematization is good. The entire point is to draw attention to and question things that seem ‘natural’ or whatever. The minute that you think that you have an unproblematic film, that is when you are within ideology. The question is not a film’s problematicness, but whether it is interestingly so. Like, what precisely can we take from Tropic Thunder? How do we read the meta-blackface in context with the Tom Cruise character, or the makeup used to make the RDJ character ‘naturally’ blonde and blue-eyed? Are we not meant to notice that he’s got those tinted contact lenses that make him look like Aquaman?
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May 13, 2021 15:40
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Assuming that there are at least as many exclusions on that list as inclusions, it must be a lie. I refuse to believe that any person has watched forty TV comedy series in their entirety - let alone more than that. Just finishing The Office put me off television for years.
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Jun 17, 2021 16:31
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Ghost Leviathan posted:You drastically underestimate, or perhaps overestimate, how some people value their time. Watching the entirety of just Curb Your Enthusiam - nonstop, no pauses - would take around 50 hours. 80 hours for It's Always Sunny. 90 for Seinfeld. 100 hours for The Office. 120 for Friends. That's well over four hundred hours, to watch just five shows. And these folks are claiming to have watched roughly 8-10 times that for the list.
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Jun 17, 2021 17:47
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Samuel Clemens posted:Put it this way. 400 hours equals somewhere around 250 films. I know people who watch 3-4 times that amount a year, and they're not getting paid for it. I have no doubt some fans dedicate the same amount of free time to TV sitcoms, even if good taste says they probably shouldn't. Yeah, there's nothing the least bit deranged about watching 80 consecutive feature films about Ross getting a pet monkey. TV is bad!
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Jun 18, 2021 04:32
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Having watched a good chunk of the James Bonds, the actual reward is in finding whatever sincere value they have. Like, there’s a movie where he kills Rupert Murdoch.
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Jul 2, 2021 06:48
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The two-part Matrix sequel is curious because it isn't precisely a sequel to the first film at all. Like, it is picking up on all the unexplored implications of the first film's plot, and follows what are technically the same characters, but the narrative has almost nothing in common. In this way, it's maybe most analogous to the two-part Back To The Future sequel, where they ditch the sci-fi horror side of things and just do a bunch of time gags.
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Jul 4, 2021 14:40
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Skwirl posted:It's also just really hard to make a sequel when you defined your main character as a limitless god at the end of the last one. Burly Brawl was kinda cool, but wasn't tense at all. Nothing in the sequels felt as tense as the subway fight scene in the first one. Ghost in the Shell 2 and 2010 pulled this off by just having the transcended character haunt the film as a ghost.
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Jul 4, 2021 14:43
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Maxwell Lord posted:Yeah I like the Matrix sequels as films but there’s something about them where they don’t quite work as sequels. It’s tough to put a bead on. It's because they flip the metaphor. The first film is basically just a conspiracy thriller with time-travel elements: the present is being colonized by aliens from the future, reptilian shapeshifters control government agencies, etc. With the sequel(s), we have a perspective shift where the characters live in a postapocalyptic future-world and play fantasy MMORPGs all day. It's Ready Player One.
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Jul 4, 2021 18:41
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Based on recent discussion, I've decided to rewatch the matrix sequel(s) for the first time in over a decade. Having finished Part 1, my main takeaway is how absurdly overreliant it is on knowledge of the first film. Like, there's a random one-minute scene in the middle of the movie where Hugo Weaving picks up a telephone and disintegrates. If you hadn't seen Matrix 1 to know that digital people use telephones to enter and exit the Space Internet, it's just completely out of nowhere. Also, nearly the entire first half of the movie is some hack poo poo where this one dude's like "I am rational. I represent... rationality!" and he's one corner of a love triangle where Jada Pinkett has to choose which type of man is more attractive. Oh and then Part 2 is just a crap war movie. Why is the message suddenly "anti-war"? The whole thing about "freeing minds" has been reduced to some kind of afterthought. There isn't a single "normal person" in two movies.
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Jul 5, 2021 20:24
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