The economy, ticket prices, and quality of movies are the 3 main things to blame. Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, and probably The Avengers will all make shitloads of money next year no matter what though.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited December 2011
2010 was kind of a huge year, anyway. Some more than others, but... 2010 had a Harry Potter, A Shrek, An Iron Man, a Twilight, AND a Toy Story movie in it. AND Inception. And that's just in the top ten. Tron came out. Predators. Black Swan. Machete. Jackass 3. (Your mileage may vary, but these were all huge movies with big respective audiences). Social Network. Let Me In. The Town. True Grit. Hell, Avatar got a re-release in August of 2010 also.
2011 kind of had to be a smaller year, in comparison.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2011
So, I've been watching some Resident Evil movies.
Degeneration, the CGI anime one, is horrible. No redeeming qualities whatsoever. The CG is bad, the writing is bad, the direction is bad, the acting is bad. It's got enough anime melodrama bullshit to drown seven families. One particularly bad scene occurs where Leon and Claire are talking about some zombie environmentalist crap and the camera just randomly cuts to a truck that belongs to the evil WilPharma corporation. The shot stays there for a good ten, fifteen seconds. The next shot is the corporation fat cat and his evil, fat politician friend looking at Leon and Claire talking. This shot also lasts ten to fifteen seconds. It's completely baffling.
Resident Evil Extinction resumes the proud tradition of W. S. Anderson's "Resident Evil in name only" action movie series. Not that I mind terribly, I'm not married to the Resident Evil lore. Besides, an action movie featuring plenty of zombies is always fun, doesn't really matter if the characters share names with characters from a video game series.
Anyway... There's a bunch of really lousy drama, most groan-worthy shit being Alice, the genetically engineered psionic ninja main character of the franchise, getting all emo and clichéd about everyone being better off without her around because it's not safe for people near her and blah blah blah. A lot of people die in this movie. Too bad none of those characters have any kind of personality and we can't really feel bad for any of them. Johnny Cage is in the movie and he dies oh no
The biggest problem with Extinction (and Afterlife) is that they feel like cheap episodes of some low quality sci-fi TV-series. The acting is bad, the direction is mostly bog standard (there's a few good shots here and there but nothing truly noteworthy) and the writing is, of course, terrible. Even the action scenes, which you would think are the main focus of these movies, aren't particularly good or impressive. Both Extinction and Afterlife suffer from lazy, non-physical action, but I'll get to that a bit more later.
Extinction ends with Alice having a psionic ninja duel with a Tyrant in a secret Umbrella base. In that base we discover dozens upon dozens of clones of Alice and are left at a cliffhanger. This is where Afterlife picks up. After a pretty good credit sequence of a confused-looking Japanese girl standing in the rain (surprise, she's a zombie and attacks someone), the army of Alices attacks Umbrella's main headquarters in Japan. Wesker is there, played by someone untalented. There's a lot of really bad action and then explosion and Wesker injects Alice with something that makes her lose her psionic ninja powers, then the plane they're on crashes and Wesker dies and Alice, who just lost all her super powers, walks away unscathed.
Now, the problem with the Resident Evil movies is the aforementioned lazy, non-physical action. It's significantly worse in Afterlife than it was in the previous movies. There's no weight to anything, no momentum to movements, no sense of urgency or danger. Milla Jovovich wields her sub-machine guns like all she's holding in her hands are weightless props. At no point do you believe that a single muscle is exerted as she jumps about unloading infinite amounts of ammo into the scenery. Things get worse later on when a huge hulking giant comes into the picture, wielding a giant mace the size of a car. Again, no momentum, no no effort is being put into it. "Hey, he's super powerful, right? Maybe he doesn't need to use effort". Well, considering how everyone in the movie does it, I don't think it's a conscious choice. I think Anderson just doesn't know how to instruct his actors. Either that, or the actors are just bad. Making your body do things is part of acting and everyone in these movies fails at that.
Also, the CGI is terrible, especially during the beginning with multiple Alices. Things couldn't look faker even if they tried.
Okay, so, the driving force in this movie is getting to Arcadia. It's some safe place the survivors heard about in the last movie and they're trying to get there. After the opening scene where all the Alice clones got murdered in a horrible explosion (good job using your sisters as nothing more than expendable meat shields, Alice; you're a real hero), she flies to Alaska where she encounters Claire (she was in the previous movie) being mind controlled. After the mind controlling device is removed, Claire now has amnesia oh no! Everyone in these fucking movies has that.
There's no Arcadia in Alaska, so Alice flies to Los Angeles. There they find this movie's crew of survivors. They're hiding in a prison. The only noteworthy people in the group are famous basketball guy (who gets a fake out death scene but survives for happy ending!) and sleazy movie producer guy (who betrays the group, shocking). Everyone else is stupid and dies. Oh, and I guess Chris is there too, locked away for some reason. He has a "touching" scene with Claire, but she doesn't recognize him because of the amnesia and neither one of them knows how to act anyway.
Wall zombies attack! Yeah, uh, so they're like the parasite head guys from RE4 except they can burrow through anything, including the prison walls and floors. I don't know what the fuck. This is also when the giant guy I mentioned earlier shows up. There's a ticking time bomb situation where they have to get out of the prison, then some action scenes and shit. Hey, remember how Alice's psionic ninja powers got erased? Well the film makers sure as hell didn't and she keeps on matrixing all over the place. Except against the giant guy, she gets knocked out easy and Claire ends up killing that guy. Well, except not, because Alice gets the last shot. Also, for some reason all her guns shoot coins? No idea if that was explained or not, I wasn't paying attention.
So they escape, they make their way to the Arcadia (which, as it turns out, is a boat) where they find that IT'S A TARP!!! All the other survivors have been brought there and they're in stasis or something with mind control devices on their chests. Okay.
Hey, Wesker survived. The worst action scene I've ever seen ensues where Wesker beats the crap out of Chris and Claire while Alice just kind of watches. Okay, so there's a zombie dog in her way, but come on, she's killed dozens of those by now. Anyway, Chris and Claire get their asses kicked at which point Alice finally remembers that she's in the scene too and kicks Wesker's ass. They leave, Wesker wasn't dead after all, he escapes on a heliplane and activates the ship's self-destruct thing except ha ha, Alice put it in the heliplane and Wesker blows up.
For our cliffhanger ending this time we get a bunch of Umbrella's heliplanes showing up, filled up with Umbrella troops and RE5 blonde Jill Valentine in what is the most horrible and cheaply made cosplay outfit I've ever seen.
All three of these movies are terrible, but only Extinction is terrible in a way that I was expecting it to be. It's a cheesy stupid action movie in a post-apocalyptic desert with zombies and shit. Afterlife is just plain garbage and Degeneration is an awful pile of anime ass anime. If, for whatever reason you were planning on watching Afterlife and Degeneration, just don't, you'll live a happier life.
RE2 was absolutely terrible. They even managed to completely ruin Nemesis who was basically a shoe-in for a great movie monster. At least they got Wesker completely right (aside from mouth tentacles) in RE4.
I own Degeneration on blu-ray as part of that "5 for $20" deal all summer at Blockbuster Video but I haven't watched it yet. I bought it mainly because reviews said the CGI was aces, I wanted something pretty to demo, and I was really interested at the time in finding any CGI movie that wasn't marketed to kids and/or made to sell Happy Meals. I'm sure it falls under the same category to me as Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, because I have no idea what's going on in that movie but it sure is fun to stare at.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Advent Children is orders of magnitudes more beautiful and more competent as a movie than Degeneration.
Eh, "beautiful" is subjective, by nearly all accounts the video quality on both films is described as being outstanding. I'm just tired of CGI only being used for kids movies.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2011
Anyone who describes the quality of the CGI in Degeneration as any flavor of good doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. It looks cheap and low grade.
eh, read the blu-ray reviews, I haven't seen anything less than 4.5 stars for video on any of the major sites. The AVS community has it at Tier 1.5 Gold which is just barely off from picture quality reference material.
Maybe you watched the DVD or on cable?
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited December 2011
Nope, blu-ray.
Also, I'm talking about the CGI, not "picture quality", since there seems to be some unclarity on this.
this looks like the RE5 Wesker fights, but completely terrible
I'm kinda weirded out by how it looks like sometimes he's a real actor and sometimes the other people are in a choreographed scene with a CGI guy. They must've had to digitally graft his head on some stunt guy for some reason at one point.
Never thought I'd see the day someone would bother to rip off Agent Smith's entire act.
So I think I liked Aliens better than Alien. Does that make me a bad person?
I think most people would agree with you. I personally didn't much care for Alien. This spaceship full of space truckers is eventually picked off one by one by a scary monster. Well, no shit... they're a bunch of hapless space truckers, of course they're gonna get eaten. They barely had any tools to defend themselves. Plus... the personalities of the first film, the characters... they all suck, except for Ripley. Ripley is the only one in there with anything to latch onto, the rest of the crew might as well be extras. I felt nothing for them. Whereas in Aliens, there are so many great personalities that you grow to love. Vasquez, Bishop, Hicks, and of course Hudson... they're all a bit larger then life and you really get a sense of who they are. With Alien, it was... uh, the black guy who seems to want to talk about money, and then that chick with the bad haircut, and uh... that first guy who gets chestbursted, and that guy with the trucker hat who jokes with the black guy, and uh... there's just not much there.
Also... uh, little bit late to the party, but I finally finally got to see Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh virus film. And man, it was great. I really needed something like this. And by that I mean... something the exact opposite of Outbreak. Man, I fucking hated Outbreak. What an embarrassment of a disease movie that was. It was just so silly and overblown and ridiculous. Here, Soderbergh shows how to really deliver a dramatic and, more importantly, realistic movie about diseases. It's a very measured and clinical take, and I'll admit that that won't be for some people, but goddamn it was for me. The entire film echoed a lot of what I really enjoy about plague fiction, like the first half of Stephen King's The Stand, which I feel is the best portion of that book. The way society gradually starts to grind to a halt and disintegrate before our eyes, that sorta thing just felt so true and right and I ate it right up.
I view Alien as a horror/thriller film and Aliens as an action/horror film, so I tend to evaluate them in distinct categories. Both films are pretty great. But If I HAD to pick one, it'd be Alien, because seeing it first is pretty amazing. If you go into it already having an idea about the xenomorphs in general, I think Aliens stands as the best movie of the series.
I couldn't really call Alien a horror film per se. For me it was more like a monster film. I first saw it when I was about 9, and it didn't scare me one bit. But holy shiiiiiit the alien was cool!
Still, it's one of my favourite movies ever, for nothing other than the atmosphere and that damn alien...
Aliens is fun, but I'm definitely an Alien man. I need to be in the right mood for Cameron - when he's good, he's a great action director, and he subverts the heavy testosterone oorah! stuff in Aliens nicely, but for me there isn't anything that compares to Alien's:
- the alien's birth
- Ash's "There is an explanation for this, you know." and the scene that follows
- pretty much every death scene
- the scenes on the planet where they find the ship, the space jockey, the eggs
Alien isn't perfect; for every scene where the alien is used to great effect, there's another where it looks like a guy in a costume, and there is something silly to how the final confrontation makes sure that we get to see Sigourney Weaver in her undies often enough. But the film has a fantastically chilling quality - and it isn't as overbearingly eager to please us as Aliens often is. (Edit: in terms of characters/characterisation, Aliens is pretty much a comic book done well, with everyone larger than life and pretty much done in primary colours. That's not a criticism, by the way; for the purpose of the movie, it works very well. My preference for the more realistic characterisation in Alien is just that, a preference.)
Oh, and while I agree that the Aliens DC does makes its themes more explicit, I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. The DC is somewhat heavy-handed and renders the film flabby, making it less effective IMO - and the scene with Newt's parents is cheesy and looks like shit.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
RE2 was absolutely terrible. They even managed to completely ruin Nemesis who was basically a shoe-in for a great movie monster. At least they got Wesker completely right (aside from mouth tentacles) in RE4.
This is the exact same fight from one of the games, except somehow worse
I saw Aliens before I saw Alien so Aliens will always be my preferred version. It was an amazing experience the first time I saw it too. Few other movies are as entertaining.
Alien is really really good as well even though it has a completely different atmosphere
That RE scene is pretty awful. It's not interesting, exciting, scary or anything, really. It's like an action scene shot by a committee of people who've never seen a film before, only cut scenes from video games.
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Detective Dee is a really good chinese film, it is basically chinese Sherlock Holmes in 700 AD with a bit of Indiana Jones mixed in, in that it isn't accepting things as magic but there are a few bits where reality isn't quite so literal. If you've liked the RDJ Holmes movies this is right up your alley. The action scenes are good and has a nice way to have a sword fight play out that I haven't seen before, but because Sammo Hung is the action director it's a little over the top with some of the wire walking. A guy just can't jump up some scaffolding, he has to do that 10 foot jump where he kicks his feet in the air like he's swimming up, etc.
And I saw this film mentioned here and some other good things about it, Margin Call is a very good talking people film. And it's an ensemble cast that works well and isn't smugly thrown in your face like New Year's Eve was. It's incredibly interesting, and for the most part is played pretty objectively about the financial crisis. There are only two parts that felt forced; Jeremy Irons has a speech at the end that felt like one of the writers couldn't pass up this opportunity to kind of get his own views in, and the ending is pretty over the top with the imagery.
Kevin Spacey is actually digging his own grave in the business sense, get it? It's right there we're so clever!
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JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
edited January 2012
so I realize that b grade genre films are what they are
but seriously
I just watched hellraisers V, VI, and VII
man that is like getting kicked in the dick. And it pisses me off on multiple levels. How can you like something enough to get a film made of it - which is hard, hard to stick out, pull off and pay for - and fundamentally misunderstand so much? I mean, I'm willing to forgive the shit they get RIGHT - creepy cenobites? Check. Everybody who has made a hellraiser movie has thought of some cool new cenobites.
But the shit they get wrong? Are essentially fixable, simple writing issue things - the longer the series has gone on, the more it has degenerated from "I am on a lovecraftian quest to research this occult item and it ends with more than I bargained for, as beings from another dimension take my issues and perversions out beyond the pale" to "I picked up this gewgaw, I touched it, barely TOUCHED it, and now it opens itself and these guys just do random stuff to me till I'm dead"
And I have never SEEN a set of movies so. fucking. obsessed with dream wakeups, dream sequences, it was all a dream cuts, it was all a hallucination cuts, etc. By the end of one of these things you no longer even care what happens. I tried drinking a shot everytime someone woke up from a dream in hellraiser V. It took me two more movies to be able to type this.
It's the fact that there WAS some craft and potential in them that makes them terrible. A piece of shit you can just turn off, but a trainwreck that just needs one or two small steering corrections? Murder.
Why is good horror so rare?
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pleasepaypreacher.net
Ah, so it's Obama's fault.
Well were there any movies in which old white people saved the day with tax cuts? ITS ALL OBAMAS FAULT!
pleasepaypreacher.net
2011 kind of had to be a smaller year, in comparison.
Not exactly but we did get Atlas Shrugged pt. 1
I'd forgotten about that.
There is just something profound about an Atlas Shrugged movie failing to break even, on a relatively small budget no less.
fuck the box office and everything they represent.
Well, I like it when movies I like do well at the box office, because it means I might get to see more movies like that.
Degeneration, the CGI anime one, is horrible. No redeeming qualities whatsoever. The CG is bad, the writing is bad, the direction is bad, the acting is bad. It's got enough anime melodrama bullshit to drown seven families. One particularly bad scene occurs where Leon and Claire are talking about some zombie environmentalist crap and the camera just randomly cuts to a truck that belongs to the evil WilPharma corporation. The shot stays there for a good ten, fifteen seconds. The next shot is the corporation fat cat and his evil, fat politician friend looking at Leon and Claire talking. This shot also lasts ten to fifteen seconds. It's completely baffling.
Resident Evil Extinction resumes the proud tradition of W. S. Anderson's "Resident Evil in name only" action movie series. Not that I mind terribly, I'm not married to the Resident Evil lore. Besides, an action movie featuring plenty of zombies is always fun, doesn't really matter if the characters share names with characters from a video game series.
Anyway... There's a bunch of really lousy drama, most groan-worthy shit being Alice, the genetically engineered psionic ninja main character of the franchise, getting all emo and clichéd about everyone being better off without her around because it's not safe for people near her and blah blah blah. A lot of people die in this movie. Too bad none of those characters have any kind of personality and we can't really feel bad for any of them. Johnny Cage is in the movie and he dies oh no
The biggest problem with Extinction (and Afterlife) is that they feel like cheap episodes of some low quality sci-fi TV-series. The acting is bad, the direction is mostly bog standard (there's a few good shots here and there but nothing truly noteworthy) and the writing is, of course, terrible. Even the action scenes, which you would think are the main focus of these movies, aren't particularly good or impressive. Both Extinction and Afterlife suffer from lazy, non-physical action, but I'll get to that a bit more later.
Extinction ends with Alice having a psionic ninja duel with a Tyrant in a secret Umbrella base. In that base we discover dozens upon dozens of clones of Alice and are left at a cliffhanger. This is where Afterlife picks up. After a pretty good credit sequence of a confused-looking Japanese girl standing in the rain (surprise, she's a zombie and attacks someone), the army of Alices attacks Umbrella's main headquarters in Japan. Wesker is there, played by someone untalented. There's a lot of really bad action and then explosion and Wesker injects Alice with something that makes her lose her psionic ninja powers, then the plane they're on crashes and Wesker dies and Alice, who just lost all her super powers, walks away unscathed.
Now, the problem with the Resident Evil movies is the aforementioned lazy, non-physical action. It's significantly worse in Afterlife than it was in the previous movies. There's no weight to anything, no momentum to movements, no sense of urgency or danger. Milla Jovovich wields her sub-machine guns like all she's holding in her hands are weightless props. At no point do you believe that a single muscle is exerted as she jumps about unloading infinite amounts of ammo into the scenery. Things get worse later on when a huge hulking giant comes into the picture, wielding a giant mace the size of a car. Again, no momentum, no no effort is being put into it. "Hey, he's super powerful, right? Maybe he doesn't need to use effort". Well, considering how everyone in the movie does it, I don't think it's a conscious choice. I think Anderson just doesn't know how to instruct his actors. Either that, or the actors are just bad. Making your body do things is part of acting and everyone in these movies fails at that.
Also, the CGI is terrible, especially during the beginning with multiple Alices. Things couldn't look faker even if they tried.
Okay, so, the driving force in this movie is getting to Arcadia. It's some safe place the survivors heard about in the last movie and they're trying to get there. After the opening scene where all the Alice clones got murdered in a horrible explosion (good job using your sisters as nothing more than expendable meat shields, Alice; you're a real hero), she flies to Alaska where she encounters Claire (she was in the previous movie) being mind controlled. After the mind controlling device is removed, Claire now has amnesia oh no! Everyone in these fucking movies has that.
There's no Arcadia in Alaska, so Alice flies to Los Angeles. There they find this movie's crew of survivors. They're hiding in a prison. The only noteworthy people in the group are famous basketball guy (who gets a fake out death scene but survives for happy ending!) and sleazy movie producer guy (who betrays the group, shocking). Everyone else is stupid and dies. Oh, and I guess Chris is there too, locked away for some reason. He has a "touching" scene with Claire, but she doesn't recognize him because of the amnesia and neither one of them knows how to act anyway.
Wall zombies attack! Yeah, uh, so they're like the parasite head guys from RE4 except they can burrow through anything, including the prison walls and floors. I don't know what the fuck. This is also when the giant guy I mentioned earlier shows up. There's a ticking time bomb situation where they have to get out of the prison, then some action scenes and shit. Hey, remember how Alice's psionic ninja powers got erased? Well the film makers sure as hell didn't and she keeps on matrixing all over the place. Except against the giant guy, she gets knocked out easy and Claire ends up killing that guy. Well, except not, because Alice gets the last shot. Also, for some reason all her guns shoot coins? No idea if that was explained or not, I wasn't paying attention.
So they escape, they make their way to the Arcadia (which, as it turns out, is a boat) where they find that IT'S A TARP!!! All the other survivors have been brought there and they're in stasis or something with mind control devices on their chests. Okay.
Hey, Wesker survived. The worst action scene I've ever seen ensues where Wesker beats the crap out of Chris and Claire while Alice just kind of watches. Okay, so there's a zombie dog in her way, but come on, she's killed dozens of those by now. Anyway, Chris and Claire get their asses kicked at which point Alice finally remembers that she's in the scene too and kicks Wesker's ass. They leave, Wesker wasn't dead after all, he escapes on a heliplane and activates the ship's self-destruct thing except ha ha, Alice put it in the heliplane and Wesker blows up.
For our cliffhanger ending this time we get a bunch of Umbrella's heliplanes showing up, filled up with Umbrella troops and RE5 blonde Jill Valentine in what is the most horrible and cheaply made cosplay outfit I've ever seen.
All three of these movies are terrible, but only Extinction is terrible in a way that I was expecting it to be. It's a cheesy stupid action movie in a post-apocalyptic desert with zombies and shit. Afterlife is just plain garbage and Degeneration is an awful pile of anime ass anime. If, for whatever reason you were planning on watching Afterlife and Degeneration, just don't, you'll live a happier life.
Extinction is okay.
Extinction was kind of fun.
Afterlife was the best RE since the first and most of it's bad parts were redeemed by this awesome scene:
RE2 was absolutely terrible. They even managed to completely ruin Nemesis who was basically a shoe-in for a great movie monster. At least they got Wesker completely right (aside from mouth tentacles) in RE4.
See also: Terminator 3, that Converse commercial with Will Smith, and any number of other monster/robot movies.
Maybe you watched the DVD or on cable?
Also, I'm talking about the CGI, not "picture quality", since there seems to be some unclarity on this.
this looks like the RE5 Wesker fights, but completely terrible
Also I hope after the end of that clip, one of them said "what the hell is this, some kind of tube?"
I'm kinda weirded out by how it looks like sometimes he's a real actor and sometimes the other people are in a choreographed scene with a CGI guy. They must've had to digitally graft his head on some stunt guy for some reason at one point.
Never thought I'd see the day someone would bother to rip off Agent Smith's entire act.
The Director's Cut of Aliens is superior, however, for making explicit the themes of motherhood which drive the story.
I think most people would agree with you. I personally didn't much care for Alien. This spaceship full of space truckers is eventually picked off one by one by a scary monster. Well, no shit... they're a bunch of hapless space truckers, of course they're gonna get eaten. They barely had any tools to defend themselves. Plus... the personalities of the first film, the characters... they all suck, except for Ripley. Ripley is the only one in there with anything to latch onto, the rest of the crew might as well be extras. I felt nothing for them. Whereas in Aliens, there are so many great personalities that you grow to love. Vasquez, Bishop, Hicks, and of course Hudson... they're all a bit larger then life and you really get a sense of who they are. With Alien, it was... uh, the black guy who seems to want to talk about money, and then that chick with the bad haircut, and uh... that first guy who gets chestbursted, and that guy with the trucker hat who jokes with the black guy, and uh... there's just not much there.
Also... uh, little bit late to the party, but I finally finally got to see Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh virus film. And man, it was great. I really needed something like this. And by that I mean... something the exact opposite of Outbreak. Man, I fucking hated Outbreak. What an embarrassment of a disease movie that was. It was just so silly and overblown and ridiculous. Here, Soderbergh shows how to really deliver a dramatic and, more importantly, realistic movie about diseases. It's a very measured and clinical take, and I'll admit that that won't be for some people, but goddamn it was for me. The entire film echoed a lot of what I really enjoy about plague fiction, like the first half of Stephen King's The Stand, which I feel is the best portion of that book. The way society gradually starts to grind to a halt and disintegrate before our eyes, that sorta thing just felt so true and right and I ate it right up.
Either way, both are great films.
Still, it's one of my favourite movies ever, for nothing other than the atmosphere and that damn alien...
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- the alien's birth
- Ash's "There is an explanation for this, you know." and the scene that follows
- pretty much every death scene
- the scenes on the planet where they find the ship, the space jockey, the eggs
Alien isn't perfect; for every scene where the alien is used to great effect, there's another where it looks like a guy in a costume, and there is something silly to how the final confrontation makes sure that we get to see Sigourney Weaver in her undies often enough. But the film has a fantastically chilling quality - and it isn't as overbearingly eager to please us as Aliens often is. (Edit: in terms of characters/characterisation, Aliens is pretty much a comic book done well, with everyone larger than life and pretty much done in primary colours. That's not a criticism, by the way; for the purpose of the movie, it works very well. My preference for the more realistic characterisation in Alien is just that, a preference.)
Oh, and while I agree that the Aliens DC does makes its themes more explicit, I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. The DC is somewhat heavy-handed and renders the film flabby, making it less effective IMO - and the scene with Newt's parents is cheesy and looks like shit.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
This is the exact same fight from one of the games, except somehow worse
Alien is really really good as well even though it has a completely different atmosphere
the RE5 fight scene is actually pretty good - and features Tribal Shiva
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And I saw this film mentioned here and some other good things about it, Margin Call is a very good talking people film. And it's an ensemble cast that works well and isn't smugly thrown in your face like New Year's Eve was. It's incredibly interesting, and for the most part is played pretty objectively about the financial crisis. There are only two parts that felt forced; Jeremy Irons has a speech at the end that felt like one of the writers couldn't pass up this opportunity to kind of get his own views in, and the ending is pretty over the top with the imagery.
but seriously
I just watched hellraisers V, VI, and VII
man that is like getting kicked in the dick. And it pisses me off on multiple levels. How can you like something enough to get a film made of it - which is hard, hard to stick out, pull off and pay for - and fundamentally misunderstand so much? I mean, I'm willing to forgive the shit they get RIGHT - creepy cenobites? Check. Everybody who has made a hellraiser movie has thought of some cool new cenobites.
But the shit they get wrong? Are essentially fixable, simple writing issue things - the longer the series has gone on, the more it has degenerated from "I am on a lovecraftian quest to research this occult item and it ends with more than I bargained for, as beings from another dimension take my issues and perversions out beyond the pale" to "I picked up this gewgaw, I touched it, barely TOUCHED it, and now it opens itself and these guys just do random stuff to me till I'm dead"
And I have never SEEN a set of movies so. fucking. obsessed with dream wakeups, dream sequences, it was all a dream cuts, it was all a hallucination cuts, etc. By the end of one of these things you no longer even care what happens. I tried drinking a shot everytime someone woke up from a dream in hellraiser V. It took me two more movies to be able to type this.
It's the fact that there WAS some craft and potential in them that makes them terrible. A piece of shit you can just turn off, but a trainwreck that just needs one or two small steering corrections? Murder.
Why is good horror so rare?
I host a podcast about movies.
The dog was the best actor.
good, a bit overstuffed, needed moar Noomi cause I love her
but dang the music in that is so good. and the costuming! even if they did put then in hipster scarves in a couple scenes.
To be fair, it was the Age of Hats and Scarves.
The music was REALLY cool. The kind of weird almost dubsteppy song from the scene in the woods? It had bagpipe samples.
Bagpipe.
Samples.
I host a podcast about movies.