Movie Reviews 2.0

How to train your dragon 2

Have to watch it again, because I can't decide which one is better, the first or this.

The only thing I'm sure of is that both are excellent. Much better than Pixar's recent movies.

 

Yes what is going on with Pixar? They made some of the best and my favourite movies ever, at one point releasing one classic after the other, and now they seem to be tugging along with mediocrity and relatively happy with it?

 

I fell HARD in love with the first one.

I am not sure how I feel about the second one and I have seen it twice.

The second one has a lot less humor, the musical score is good, but the script seems to be missing something. Not sure what.

 

If it's giant and you can see it in it's entirety there shouldn't even be a 3d effect. Even for stereo it should effectively be 2d.

 

I think 3d suffers from this odd miniaturisation effect rather frequently.

 

Indeed. Maybe they're trying to simulate the vision of a dude who's eyeballs are 50ft apart?

 

Bought Edge of Tomorrow blind on Blu-ray, based on the strength of the reviews. Glad I did, great fun movie.

 

I enjoyed it. Would recommend it to pretty much anyone looking for a fun sci-fi action sequel to Groundhog Day.

 

Wife and I watched Edge this Monday and enjoyed it. Its ending feeling a bit like the result of test audience feedback would be my only niggle at it.

 

Yes that smacked of similar ending changes like done with I Am Legend. Otherwise a very fun movie.

 

Bought the latest X-Men, as well as Edge... today, they're still waiting in the bag to be watched. Will maybe happen tomorrow, because I still had Die Hard in my PS4's drive.

My DVD has the Spanish title printed on it in addition to the original. "Jungla De Cristal", what the hell does that mean? (Jingle Bells? Jungle Crystal? Errr...) I plugged it into Google Translate, and lo and behold, it spat out "Die Hard" at me. Somehow, I doubt it really is an accurate word-for-word translation.

Gods, that movie has aged, hasn't it? Well, the action is still great, maybe greater in some respects than even way back then, because movie directors are so tempted these days to just way overdo everything either because of old movies like this one, thinking that they have to dream up something even bigger and more outrageous to outcompete everything that went before them, and also simply because they can - with computer graphics there's no limits anymore. Die Hard had some bluescreen stuff and that was it. Everything else was done as practical effects, on the set, which somehow makes it more tempered, more grounded in reality, even though some of the stunts look a bit dodgy and lame by today's standards.

The view of society you get through this movie though, jesus. Things really have moved on in some respects, for the better, in a quarter century. Women in the workplace for instance, it's no longer quite so outrageous and controversial that a wife is more successful than her husband. There's the yuppie executive who snorts cocaine, hits on the good guy's wife and is generally sexist and obnoxious... Lol, what amazingly terrible stereotypes we had in the 80s! There's also some incredibly ancient and outdated rap music on the soundtrack (though I guess some, more versed in this genre than me, would call it "classic"?)

All that said however, Alan Rickman still is as delightful a badguy as he was so long ago now. That does not need changing. Oh, and German, non-nazi badguys (even those with fake accents), why don't we see more of those in action movies?

 

Hans Gruber will probably remain one of my all-time favorite movie villains. That was the first time I saw Rickman and I fell in love with his performance.

 

Even though I liked Rickman very much in Die Hard, I am always a little baffled when a professional actor thoroughly mangles every single one of his remarkably few foreign language lines both grammatically and phonetically. But then maybe he wasn't supposed to speak proper German at all, but rather the cliched version of the language the audience came to expect after movies like Indiana Jones. (on the other hand, some of his fellow "terrorists" very much do speak properly)

 

Yes, he wasn't supposed to be German, he was supposed to be an American audience's expectation of what a German terrorist was supposed to be like. Just like in "Robin Hood Prince of Theives", Rickman was there to "chew on the furniture" as a caricature of a bad guy, because that's what was wanted for the movie.

Must have been quite difficult for him to play a German character with a bad accent in turn putting on a bad American accent.

 

Especially since the rest of the movie is surprisngly bereft of that very distinctive corporate stink of your usual giant tentpole studio production. It felt surprisingly intimate, playful, clever and character driven, and whereas the marketing promised us an alien invasion movie, the primary interest of the film makers was clearly its groundhog day conceit.

Either way, it was this year's biggest surprise hit for me. It also further cements my opinion on the "Cruise Missile". I don't care whether he's a bit of a nut job in real life. He's whip smart when it comes to career choices. I've yet to see him in a movie I'd consider properly bad.

 

I seriously doubt they needed a test audience to determine the original ending wouldn't fly ... frankly I find such endings just pretentious grasping for respectability, but maybe that's still a holdover from forced high school literature and it's seemingly endless litany of tragic endings being forced down my throat. Or maybe it's just too DEEP for me.

 

Expect it wouldn't have been pretentious at all. It simply would have made a lot more sense. I felt the ending we have now is sort of breaking the rules the movie's laid out for 2 hours for the sake of harmony.

 

I disagree ...

Spoiler

The whole "we both started to act like antenna's" is hardly a natural extension of the rules, it's simply one possible extension necessary for the tragic ending ... but it's all just a pile of bullshit, who's internal consistency is a mirage created by hindsight. Hell why does killing the nexus with two (human) antenna alive not work but with one it does? Because is not a bad answer to that, but it does limit the pretension to it having a greater internal consistency than less tragic alternatives.

 

^that's really not what I'm talking about.

Spoiler

Both Cruise's and Blunt's characters apparently died defeating the Omega. Except Cruise got one more convenient alien juice injection and reversed the day again. Oddly enough, when he woke up, the Alien Invasion had apparently ended, even though he had not yet taken the necessary action at that time. I mean, the Omega should have been alive again too then, shouldn't it? Or didn't he absorb the juice from the alien right away, but after having been afloat in the water for at least 24 hours, thus only resetting the time until right after the death of the big boss monster? Awfully contrived really (even for a movie with so many contrived rules) And even if that was the case, Blunt should have still been dead)
Maybe I just missed someting crucial, but to me the film makers seemed to bend the rules for the sole reason of ending the movie on Tom Cruise's trademark shit eating grin. I didn't even dislike the final scene, by the way. I like the relief on Tom Cruise's face when he realises the woman he fell in love with was still alive. The scene just didn't make much sense to me

 

I think MfA is talking about the novel's ending

Spoiler

where the Rita character realizes that she also has to die as she'd reset the loop as well - and so there's no way of saving her. The protagonist then takes over the red painted armor and battle axe to keep up her legacy and keeps fighting on in the next battles, as the war does not simply end there.

Or maybe I misunderstood something here...