Movie Reviews 2.0

Yep. Seems like they're making a bit of a comeback now. Still, most of these are fairly small in scale. Certainly not comparable to the likes of Total Recall, T2, Starship Troopers or the first 3 Die Hard movies. These were all amongst the most expensive, if not the most expensive movies when they came out.
 
The action movie wasn't new by the 1980s of course, but it evolved into this new form, sometimes with talented young (at the time!), daring directors.

Of course not, it was the replacement of western genre. And boy, they did a fine job.
There was many bad movies at the time that we tend to forget, but were many good ones and a few exceptional. But nowadays, it's as many of more crap ones, much less good ones and nearly nothing really elite level.

Cutting, pacing... The best '80s classics were all very tight and smooth-flowing, with hardly a frame wasted on fluff or boring filler scenes. And yes, some of today's action movies are too long, granted, and some of yesteryear's shorter action movies were fucking awesome, that doesn't mean shorter automatically means better though. Several of James Cameron's oldest movies are noticeably better in their extended version, Aliens and The Abyss in particular.

Well pointed, not wasting frames is one of the things that separate the trully talented directors from the hacks.

I haven't seen any attempts at looking at action movies from some kind of scientific point of view; do people like me love '80s action movies because that's when I was a teenager and I'm overly nostalgic and sentimental about them and their accompanying time era, or do I love them because they're genuinely great, awesome movies? Not sure!

Someone should screen some of the best '80s stuff to teens of today and get them to rate it all. Hopefully without them getting too hung up on lower quality special effects... :p

Nah, it's because there was a proper environment to produce these kind of films, (or even good movies after all) like the pgr Sigfried mentioned or the things you mentioned and a generation of great directors to produce them.

Think of the period between 1987 and 1990. Mctiernam was on fire doing, maybe the two best films of his carrier, the Pred@ator and Die Hard. On back to back years. Verhoeven did two of his best movies with Robocop in 1987 and Total Recall in 1990. Donner making Lethal Weapon in 1987 and it's sequence in 1990. You can even put the original sympathetic TMNT movie here and I am sure I am forgetting a lo of stuff stuff.

It was a truly great era. And today we have real life Star Wars on Hollywood, with Disney being the empire, the countless marvel film directors are the imperial destroyers, spraying bad movies all over Hollywood, commanded by that hack of Abrams, and it's awful movies and reboots being the symbol.

I would say that the decline of the action and blockbuster movies (or even overall decline) started about 20 years ago or so, between 1995 and 2000, and it stepped up in the last ten year. With many of these directors retiring or way out of their prime.

Oh and Dreed is really good, far better than that Stallone's stuff.
 
Verónica (horror genre). The plot revolves about the events that come after a young girl, Verónica, plays with a ouija. It's not the classic rehashed ouija premise, IMO. I don't claim what happens in the movie is true (since I don't believe in this stuff), but it is based on the only documented police case of (allegedly) paranormal phenomena in Spain.

Usually, I don't like Spanish movies, but this one is good. It felt so natural to empathise with the main character. The storytelling is quite good, as well as the filming and the photography.

I truly recommend it.
 
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I came across "gone baby gone" the other day. It's a 2007 film directed by Ben affleck, with Casey affleck in a lead role along with Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman.

It's a damn decent thoughtful film that engages from the start. If like me, you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it.
 
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Dumb question but...

Has anyone ever misread The revenge of the Sith as The revenge of the Shit? I have. In fact, I just have mistyped it while writing this message, so I had to correct it.
 
Nah, can't say I ever have, honestly. It's a pretty crappy movie overall though! It doesn't even match up established lore, where Leia has memories of her mother, but in Revenge of the Shit, Padme dies in childbirth.
 
Even though I liked the movie (I know, I know... ¬_¬), I considered that as an inconsistency. Later I thought that maybe those memories were of Breha Organa, and Leia doesn't know that Padmé was their mother.
 
Also, don't you think that Anakin is different in Episode II and III in comparison with Episode I? Of course, he's older, but in the first episode he is a very intelligent kid, way more mentally advanced/capable than the other kids his age... he was almost on par with adults. In episodes second and third he looks kind of dumb, don't you think? In the first episode he looked like an all-in-one kid, superclever and physically capable, and in the second and third episode he looks more of the "fighter with no brain" kind... :-S
 
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:

Juvenile, entirely forgettable, and in fact downright boring. Full of epically bad dialogue; the movie essentially has no story to it whatsoever. What is there is just tacky sludge to glue together each occurrence of overly and ridiculously gratuitous computer-rendered special effects and explosions. Michael Bay would be envious, in GoGv2, even stone can explode!

Even the 1980s nostalgia is overloaded, and reaches into facepalm territory when a giant yellow rock pac man wakka-wakkas across the screen in the final battle sequence. Sound effects included, ludicrous but true!

I did not care for this movie at all, I thought it was dumb and stupid and boring. It's so juvenile, and anyone juvenile enough to laugh at its many unbelievably juvenile "jokes" is a dumb and stupid and boring person. Marvel cinematic universe just jumped the shark as far as I'm concerned. Or maybe they did it already with Deadpool, it's about 50/50 whichever of these two movies I like the least.
 
Well I saw the new IT yesterday and it's easily, hands down, the best horror movie and one of the scariest films I've seen in my life. While at the same time very funny and simply brilliant.
 
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Well I saw the new IT yesterday and it's easily, hands down, the best horror movie and one of the scariest while at the same time funniest and brilliant films I've seen in my life.
Fuck... Yesterday someone told me that it was one of the crappiest movies of all time... And she was pretty excited to see it.

Should I take the balloon or shouldn't I?
 
^I talked to her again, and she said that it all was a misunderstanding and that she loved the movie. :D I will see it. TY.

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I just watched King of Thorn, an anime movie (I will post this in the anime thread, as well).

There's a virus called Medusa which turns people into stone. A scientific corporation offers a new cryogenic method to preserve people in capsules so that they can wait until a cure is found. Some people pay for it, but some others are randomly selected. The main character is a young girl who lives with her twin sister; they lose their parents to the virus.

It all turns into a weird nightmare when she wakes up and sees that all the compound is covered up in thorns (as in Sleeping Beauty) and populated with lethal monsters. She and other survivors will try to find out what happened...

As always with animes: twisted Japanese way of telling a story, which becomes exquisitely confusing, profound and apparently senseless.
 
Logan:

Pretty OK. Not like, awesome perhaps, but...pretty OK. The scenario it raises, where mutant fertility has been eradicated through a quiet, under-the-tables strategy, and the only new mutants born are slaves to a corporation is pretty frightening and has some sociopolitical parallels to our world and what's happening in it, but the story itself kind of fails to deliver I feel. It's like, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, only Max
dies
at the end of the movie. And it doesn't take place in australia. And there was no nuclear holocaust... :p
 
Went to see Aronofsky's newest film Mother! (the exclamation mark is well earned) yesterday. I really enjoyed some of his past work. Black Swan was excellent, and Noah was basically a 150+ million dollar art house movie. Mother was something else entirely. Hated it with a fiery passion and couldn't wait to leave the theater. The trailers suggested a spooky mystery thriller. Maybe even an old fashioned haunted house flic. It' wasn't either of course, and this much I expected. I just didn't expect that. The film only begins to make the faintest sort of sense if you regard it as a metaphor right away. There's no superficial, reasonably entertaining story holding the whole thing together. Or rather what's there just makes no sense at all. The layers of meaning which usually bubble under the surface, begging to be peeled away by those willing to do so, is the entirety of what this film has to offer. Maybe that wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been so insufferably boring and smug. I was basically sitting there, going "movie, whatever it is you want to tell me, I just don't give a fuck." It's Daronofsky's own Lady-in-the-Water moment. The filmic equivalent of jerking off in front of a mirror.
 
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Also, don't you think that Anakin is different in Episode II and III in comparison with Episode I? Of course, he's older, but in the first episode he is a very intelligent kid, way more mentally advanced/capable than the other kids his age... he was almost on par with adults. In episodes second and third he looks kind of dumb, don't you think? In the first episode he looked like an all-in-one kid, superclever and physically capable, and in the second and third episode he looks more of the "fighter with no brain" kind... :-S

Lucas apparently wrote himself into a corner with his choice of starting with Anakin as a kid, but then feeling obligated to make him somehow effectual in a conflict with magical space knights and starfighters. Underpinning that was one part of trying to match dialog from the original trilogy (Obiwan stated Anakin was already an accomplished starfighter pilot when they met) and perhaps a second obligation created from making Anakin/Darth Vader so totally important to everything in the plot/universe.

That, and an apparent lack of review of the original writing and overriding desire to hit every merchandizable demographic left everything far too weak to recover from some pretty brutally challenging starting conditions.
The foregone conclusion of the prequel trilogy and various weaknesses in the creation process also led to the other problem, Anakin as a kid may have lived up to the level of adults, but that was in no small part to the writing requiring most adults to be very stupid a lot of the time (or the writing never being improved enough to get many intelligent characters). Outside of set-piece scenes where a CGI pod racer or spaceship the movie arranged outside actors to make Anakin pilot, or C-3PO that he built off-screen (for some reason), Anakin was just a kid reacting to stuff he didn't understand.

The time skip with Episode II sort of did a partial restart of the story, since it needed to reintroduce an effectively different Anakin and had to retread/forget some of the framework from Episode I. However, after all that there was still the problem that the ceiling for what adults could do was still low. There was nowhere to improve from a kid who could build droids and single-handedly destroy battlefleets, except in the realms of beating down on stuff and forcing creepy romance.
 
Lucas apparently wrote himself into a corner with his choice of starting with Anakin as a kid
I was never one of the "Anakid" haters, because I always enjoyed Jake Lloyd's performance; I thought he was great for his age, with great facial mimicry. In the extended cut of the movie he emotes far more with his face during the pod race as he struggles to fix his crippled racer than many grown action stars could ever hope to. :D

Still, the character is just way, WAY too young for the shoes he's supposed to fill. He's a natural-born mechanic, pod racer and builder of droids......at age SIX. That's simply beyond the realms of credibility "force prodigy" or not. Then he's supposed to be an accomplished starfighter pilot too, only he hasn't ever sat in a fighter by the time Obi-Wan meets him in Episode 1, making Obi of Episode 4 a doddering misremembering old fart. :p

...And the Jedi of the prequels are nowhere near a religious order, as suggested by dialogue in episode 4. Rather, they simply seem a very highly technically advanced law enforcement agency.

Lucas dropped the ball on so many levels with his shoddy writing, it's really sad. :(
 
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