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I like it when a film changes gears, but the pieces work better when they fit together--the stronger the divide, the worse the film, generally, because genres work with certain structures and it's very difficult to make the first half of one structure fit the second half of another. From Dusk Til Dawn, The Birds, and District 9 all suffer from this issue. From Dusk Til Dawn's first half is spent developing characters and a situation that gets thrown out the window in the second half--which introduces themes and action beats that weren't set-up earlier. District 9's dramatic first half is let down by its action second half, and arguably its action second half is lessened by its dramatic first half; "everything 'splodes" is a cop-out answer to the (very interesting) questions the movie had been asking, and if everything's going to 'splode in my movie, I prefer a lot more 'sploding throughout.
The movies that do this well do it so subtly it's harder to argue that they do it at all--Vertigo is a romantic ghost story followed by a romantic tragedy but both sides are of a piece with one another, with visuals, lines, and score deliberately echoed back and forth across the line. Psycho effectively sets up its horror story in its red herring crime story, which transitions gracefully into a mystery plot during the horror back-half. Zodiac swaps protagonists halfway through and goes from construction to deconstruction, but it's all the same story...
Anyway, the trick is having a story that actually is (or can be manipulated into being) a story that begins in one genre and ends in another, and then finding ways to use the first half to set up the second and the second to pay off the first. If you don't do that, you might have two good halves that could each have been better without the other.
I think there are a few weirdly ambiguous or non-starter elements like that in the movie that Lynch probably should have excised if he wanted to fully commit to the logic of the new story he ended up telling, but I can't really blame him for leaving it in, because it's a fantastic little freaky tone poem of a scene just on its own, even if it goes nowhere.
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You make sense. I felt Hugo had a pretty seamless shift in story focus with two halves that totally complimented each other. We need more wonderful movies like that.
Batman starring Ryan Reynolds and not directed by Nolan is going to be a thing.
Edit: Haha, fuck me and everything I know. I was pranked by the internet.
Like pseudonyms? Like they don't exist?
Alan Smithee has an pretty impressive body of work
Only for directors and (screen)writers.
Theoretically Evil
Will Navidson, the director from House of Leaves
John Sullivan, director from Sullivan's Travels
Donald Kaufman, screenwriter from Adaptation.
Joe Gillis, the screenwriter from Sunset Boulevard, and his love interest Betty Schaefer (who works with him on a script).
Barton Fink, the screenwriter from the film of the same name.
Max Castle, the director from the (truly excellent film-history-as-horror-story) novel Flicker.
The directors from 8 1/2, Day for Night, Contempt, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Francis Ford Coppola's cameo as a film crew director in Apocalypse Now could count
Half the characters in the Player
Martin Blower in Hot Fuzz, director of a horrid version of Romeo and Juliet
Abed from Community
Homer and Mel Gibson in the Simpsons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_directors
http://www.listal.com/list/movies-about-movies
Theoretically Evil
I can't think of any off the top of my head, but some of my favorite acting performances have been from actors (Oldman) whom are compelling to watch think.
the production values look as bad as they did in promos, everything looks tacky, plastic and fake (the non-new york sets and costumes)
its a fun ride but dont go believing this is better than the dark knight, its up there with the first two spidermans and first two x-men's and its better than rest of the marvel movies at least.
Whom says?
I meant to relay the information that great actors do a really good job of making their thought processes on camera extremely compelling to watch, and that Oldman is a good example of this. Other similar performances stick out to me, but I can't remember any off the top of my head at the moment.
I think I need to see it again. It was solid, but it moved so damn fast. I almost think a couple of slower points in the movie could've helped it. Also, the brother's secret getting exposed seemed to happen entirely too quick for my tastes. I thought we barely had time to appreciate this new difficulty in the mix with all the more conventional problems of not getting slaughtered, getting to the bad guy, and getting out alive, when suddenly it was already done. I would've liked if that could've been hanging overhead for a while longer before it came down.
But again. I will see this movie again. But I think it happened too quickly, there are definite points in it where stuff should've lingered a little and didn't, and that worked against the strength of the movie overall.
Makes me want to play 'Hulk: Ultimate Destruction' again.
Whom was improper there, it should have been who. "Some of my favorite performances are from actors who are compelling to watch."
Yeah, I didn't really like it. Sad George Clooney was great and all, but everything else was so freaking meh. Very forgettable. I can't believe this was nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Actor. olol Academy and all that.
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This isn't completely fair. The film begins with a Texas Ranger getting blown up in a liquor store.
Just because it ends like an extended version of a Tales From the Crypt story, doesn't mean we were thrown from something nuanced into something bombastic.
I have a theory as to why this is, based on having seen both Hulk movies and having read The Ultimates. I have not seen The Avengers yet, though.
My theory is that The Hulk is a terrible character, but an excellent plot device. In his own stories, Hulk has to carry the whole thing on his own, which fails because Hulk is an exceptionally simple, predictable character whose plot-line invariably goes "someone angers Hulk, Hulk smash" and because on the other hand Banner is an exceptionally angst-filled, predictable character whose emotional through-line invariably centers on misplaced guilt and oncoming rage. Neither character has any agency (Hulk is too stupid to move beyond stimulus/response and Banner is too weak to not succumb to his disease). The story ends up being an infinite werewolf movie, endlessly regurgitating the same tragedy over and over again until it's utterly meaningless and piss-poor entertainment to boot.
As a plot-device, however, it's terribly entertaining, whether Hulk is a weapon wielded by his friends or an omnipresent threat, like a were-tornado at the dinner table. As an object, to be manipulated or dodged, Hulk is both effective and interesting. As a character he's shit.
And Avengers is the best movie Hulk so far because (I assume) they mostly just use him as a plot device, and leave the dramatic weight for the other characters.
Am I on the right track, people who have seen it? Answer in the form of something non-spoilery, please.
I'm not saying the tones don't mesh--I'm saying that outside of Harvey Keitel's character, virtually nothing that happened in the first half matters in the second half. That group of people could have wandered into the bar for a drink and the same story would have happened from that point. New characters are introduced to fight the new enemy, and we got no development for them prior to that (not in character terms, and not in action set-ups either); the new enemy comes out of nowhere; conflicts established in the first half are simply dropped (Clooney and Keitel working together), and so on.
Compare to Rodriguez's "Desperado", which takes care to establish weapons and patterns that it will use and subvert later; or to Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs", whose early character development informs its plot turns later in the film.
FDTD was basically an early attempt by the two directors to do a double feature in one sitting, but instead of giving us two movies back to back (as Grindhouse would, successfully), they give us the first half of a crime picture and the second half of a horror movie. Those genres work well together tonally, but the script doesn't do the interlacing work necessary to really mesh them properly.
Edit:
Hooray!
I should've indicated I wasn't particularly directing that at you. It's a complaint that I've heard leveled at the film, and every time it is mostly people acting as if the film bounced from Goodfellas to Dawn of the Dead instead of over-the-top crime story into over-the-top vampire flick.
It is essentially Night of the Living Dead with a longer intro. Instead of a drama about siblings not getting along it's *surprise!* a story about people (including a bunch who aren't introduced until later) fending off a horde of flesh-eating monsters.
Most disappointing part of it was the action, if you have seen the first 5 minutes of the movie that's up on youtube, congrats that was the only good action scene. It was just so bland and looking back really felt like not much actual action happened. This movie baffles me more and more on how bad it is the more I try to think about it. Ugh.
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At the risk of segueing from movies for a moment, there was an excellent Hulk storyline a few years back called Planet Hulk. Imagine if you made an adaptation of John Carter where you cast Hulk in the title role, and you've got the premise in a nutshell.
This article was fucking beautiful, and helped add a shitload of depth to vague conclusions I'd already drawn. We need more films like Mulholland Drive, but the only other stuff I can think of on that same "level" is other Lynch stuff. Oh, and Kubrick. Fucking hell, do I miss Stanley. Eyes Wide Shut pretty much converted me from being another "Turn Your Brain Off For Movies" zombie to "TURN BRAIN ON OVERDRIVE FOR ALL THE MOVIES" enthusiast.
And since my mind just jumped from Lynch to Kubrick anyway, I've been wanting to re-watch A.I., but I know that I'll just end up like a howler monkey throwing feces at my TV again like last time. Fuck you Spielburg, fuck you in your ear for taking something so haunting and beautiful and slapping that shittastic "happy ending" on it.
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Since for me the problem with the ending is mainly one of tone, rather than what actually happens, Kubrick's plans don't excuse what Spielberg did with the ending, though.
Yeah but that was good because it was it's own thing and not really part of the usual Marvel-verse shennanigans
.............which sort of proves your point. Hrm.