Movie Reviews 2.0

[Malo]

I'm going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy now, watched Need for Speed yesterday and actually came away really impressed. Way better directing and script tyan such a silly movie premise deserves.

Agreed, surprisingly good movie and even felt like being in the middle of a NFS game.

 

[Rurouni]

Well if anyone here is old and European enough to have been a fan of Saint Seiya, I just found out and obviously watched the CGI movie that was made not long ago, called Saint Seiya Legend of the Sanctuary.

Very much a FF: Advent Children reworking of the anime but, unless my memory fails me, not quite the same quality of CGI.

Anyway, if we ignore the questionable design choices, the questionable story changes, the questionable everything... I'll take anything to take me back to this legendary franchise, my favourite ever, which will always have a place in my heart until I die.

I haven't watch it. It did have a showing on the theatres. Basically I didn't have the time and since the reviews said it wasn't good then I lost the incentive to watch it.
Otoh, I do watch another Manga-ANIME based CGI movie. It was Doraemon - Stand by me. Overall it was good. It is definitely for children, but the story is actually very nice, better than your typical kids movie and can be appreciated better by adults. My biggest problem is most of the characters are very annoying and that's include the main human character (Nobita). Of course he was always annoying, but seeing it on the big screen made the annoyance bigger

I also have watched the Hobbit and it was definitely the best out of the three. It wasn't a masterpiece, but lots of entertaining fights. I do wish we move on from 24fps so that my eyes and brain don't hurt so much from long panning sequence. Whomever thinks that 24fps is needed for the movieness must be subjected to seeing a movie with nothing but panning sequence for the whole duration of the movie, preferably a 3 hours movie.

 

[Arwin]

I saw The Hobbit at 48fps in 3D

Guardians of the Galaxy was a lot of fun by the way, nicely done.

 

[Rurouni]

Btw, do all 3D showing of the Hobbit are 48fps or it must be specifically said that it is showing at 48fps?

 

[Arwin]

Btw, do all 3D showing of the Hobbit are 48fps or it must be specifically said that it is showing at 48fps?

The cinema has to support it (has to have the right equipment). Over here only about 10 cinemas supported this back when The Hobbit 1 came out two years ago.

 

[Rurouni]

Do the cinema advertise it? Because I never see it (Hobbit@48fps) advertised in here... Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Basically, is it possible that I go to watch the Hobbit in 3D and being treated with 48fps without the cinema advertising the 48fps?

 

[Pressure]

I'm pretty sure the cinemas advertise it with 3D HFR.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I hated the new Hobbit movie. It was just plain bad and really fucking boring. A 150 minute effects show reel (which at no point looked anything but utterly fake) filled with unnecessary, unrelated fanservice, wile e coyete levels of physical slapstick humor (literally every scene with Orloondo Bland in it), and some of the most cringe-worthy lines I've heard in movies all year - "The bats. They're bred ... for WAR!" Or how about that laughable sequence where are the old human ladies picked up weapons, yelling "girls can fight too, because equality and stuff!", only to vanish from the film entirely from that point on. Even my gf who's all about female empowerment was rolling her eyeballs to hard I could hear them rumble in their sockets. The only good things in the movie were Martin Freeman and Smaug, and both of them were barely even in it. It's unfortunate that the Smaug part suffered tremendously because it took me at least 30 minutes to adjust to the bloody 48-frames-made-for-tv look of the thing.

 

[orangpelupa]

its the opposite for me.

i watched hobbit 2 in 48fps and its awesome, the picture looks crystal clear. Then hobbit 3 in 24 fps full of blurry double judder stuff in (it have many) panning scene.

about the story.. Basically i tell my brain to go to sleep and enjoy the show. Unfortunately my brain wake up again when the elf vs orc battle in crumbling tower then bridge happened. bah! brain.. please.. just stop thinking for a while.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Thing is, I do not want to tell my brain to just sit this one out. Even more so since the 3 Hobbit movies were far and away the most expensive movie going experiences I've had in my life so far. Plenty of big, splashy summer movies don't come with this kind of requirement after all. Guardians of the Galaxy, The Winter Soldier and Planet of the Apes were all perfectly engaging. Heck, even the slighly leaden Godzilla had the good sense to deliver some lovely payoff sequences every now and then. It's not like the action was particularly well staged or inventive either. Just hyper active for the most part. 2.5 hours of visual noise, but whereas the first and second movie all had their little highlights (namely Gollum and the Cumberdragon), Five Armies had nothing besides endless large scale CGI battles I've seen hundreds of times before. Only this time they involved some of the silliest looking creatures (baby giants) ever commited to the frame. Movie didn't even have the balls to give the evil comic relief character his comeuppance (oh look, he's dressed as a woman. That is so funny!)

 

[Sigfried1977]

Whomever thinks that 24fps is needed for the movieness must be subjected to seeing a movie with nothing but panning sequence for the whole duration of the movie, preferably a 3 hours movie.

That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You shouldn't do pointless panning shots and corkscrewing camera flights for 3 hours no matter the tech at hand. So far all that new liberating technology has done for Peter Jackson is expose him for a self-indulgend technophile who's seemingly forgotten how to make a good film as a result. A few limitiations aren't necessarily a bad thing.

Besides, the whole 48 frames thing really wasn't my biggest gripe about the movie. Not by a long shot. It was distracting at first, but I kinda got used to it after a while. Unfortunately the tech enabled the director to handle his camera like a hyper nervous child without running into some of the usual issues, and the end result was a movie that felt disorienting and claustrophobic when it should have felt majestic and imposing like the Lotr movies did. We're basically back in annoying pop-out-3d-effects territory all over again.

 

[orangpelupa]

at least you watched it in 48fps... i watchet it in 24 fps blurry juddery crap

 

[Sigfried1977]

A movie that's been recorded at 48 fps is probably extra juddery if you watch it at 24 too. Unless the director implements some funky extra motion blur to the 24 fps version in post that is. No idea if that is even feasible.

 

[tuna]

It's unfortunate that the Smaug part suffered tremendously because it took me at least 30 minutes to adjust to the bloody 48-frames-made-for-tv look of the thing.

What exactly is it about 48 fps that gives the movie a "made-for-tv look"?

 

[London Geezer]

What exactly is it about 48 fps that gives the movie a "made-for-tv look"?

It's a framerate our brain has grown to associate to TV broadcasts, through years and years of watching. Whereas it recognises 24fps as 'movie' as that's what we see when we go to the cinema, or when we watch Bluary movies at the correct fps.

So when we see a movie at a higher framerate, our brains think 'TV'.

I blame the parents. They gave us brains.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

A movie that's been recorded at 48 fps is probably extra juddery if you watch it at 24 too. Unless the director implements some funky extra motion blur to the 24 fps version in post that is. No idea if that is even feasible.

I'm not that adept at film camera tech but I recall that shooting at 48fps with a certain shutter setting will generate the proper amount of motion blur at 24fps too. So the normal version does not suffer from the higher recording frame rate.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

As for the CGI in the Hobbit movies, keep in mind that this kind of movie making doesn't really work, the same way it didn't with the LOTR sequels.

Sure they shoot most of the material at once in the beginning, but the actual editing process is where the movie itself comes together. It's possibly an even greater part of the creative process than the actual shooting. So there's very little done for the sequels until the previous movie has been completed and that cuts down the post phase significantly on its own.
Also, action sequences are usually not thought out fully in the script, but they aren't fleshed out during the post of the first movie either, so there's a lot of creative work left to do.
The second problem is that Peter Jackson likes to add significant changes to the original script in editing. Completely new sequences are added which require pick-up shoots that can only happen after they've been written and pre-visualized.

The result is that a large amount of the VFX work can only start a few months before the release of the movie which is very little time to complete complex CGI. Some examples from the LOTR trilogy are the complete redesign of Gollum for The Two Towers, which only started around the spring of 2002; or the siege of Isengard which was only told by Pippin and Merry in the books and it was decided sometime in the autumn that it should become an action scene. On the other hand, Fellowship had enough time for everything (even though it had only about 600 VFX shots, compared to some 1400 in ROTK) and so the effects work is usually much more polished.

In the case of the second Hobbit, the entire sequence with Smaug and the dwarves in Erebor was completed in something like 6 weeks. In this latest one, the actual battle of the five armies was also completed on a similarly short schedule. This will inevitably affect the quality of the CG work - just look at Avatar or Apes to see how well Weta can do if they are given enough time.

I don't really understand why they've decided to go with this approach, especially considering the issues with the LOTR sequels. Even the new Star Wars trilogy is handled as three separate movies with their own schedules - although they will take two years each, compared to the yearly releases of the Middle Earth trilogies...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Well, some more fun stories about LOTR and post:
- The group of elves helping out at Helm's Deep was actually lead by Arwen and she also fought in the battle and rode out with Theoden and Aragorn. She was erased in post.
- In the last battle at the Black Gate, Sauron itself came out in full armor and fought Aragorn. He was replaced by the huge troll in post.
I'm sure there were a few other but I can't recall any more...

I actually did a mini-marathon of the extended editions during the holidays. I still believe that Fellowship is one of the best fantasy movies...

 

[Sigfried1977]

And in the end none of it really mattered because the movies were fantastic

 

[Squilliam]

I thought The Exodus was pretty terrible. Had to see it as Big Hero 6 was sold out (wtf?), and it was on at the same time. i couldn't decide whether it was a pro or anti christianity movie.