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The [movies] thread: It’s pronounced Furi-OH-sah, not Furio-SAH
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
I guess Vanilla ate the old thread? Pour one out for a real one 🫗 🫡
Anyway
Dune 2 is out in, like, a week! It’s reviewing better than buttered sex! And that’s butter AND sex!
Hot take: We shouldn’t be shooting in IMAX format if we’re not going to release those films to purchase! It’s important to be able to see films as directors intended!
Anyway
Dune 2 is out in, like, a week! It’s reviewing better than buttered sex! And that’s butter AND sex!
Hot take: We shouldn’t be shooting in IMAX format if we’re not going to release those films to purchase! It’s important to be able to see films as directors intended!
Atomika on
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lol I think those reels cost thousands of dollars each
Holy shit! I didn't know Josh Brolin was Texiken!
I also got started on Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, to complement the recent Kubrick season where we saw all of his films, and other than as a reminder of the great films I'm finding it quite dull. It's not just that everyone gushes, it's that a lot of the gushing is kinda generic. You get the odd talking head that stands out for having a personality, e.g. Scorsese and Spielberg, but overall the documentary seems like a comprehensive but rather shallow look at Kubrick and his career. Here's hoping that the bits beyond 2001 will prove more interesting.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Do you think a hypothetical blank slate person could watch Dune 2 without seeing part 1 and enjoy it as a complete story?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm kind of hoping that Dune 2 can artfully dodge referencing the first film. Is that even possible?
The style of Villeneuve Dune seems to be very minamalist. And it's really a trip to see such a complex plot crafted into a simple design philosophy. It's very Zen.
On to The Green Knight now.
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Watched Oppenheimer. Not terrible, didn't really do it for me.
1. Seems like you could cut an hour out of this film and not really lose anything.
2. RDJ really has a talent for playing assholes.
3. I feel like the out of sequence story telling has overstayed it's welcome. Shooting some of your scenes in black and white does not make it any less tedious.
4. Oppy does not hang dong.
One thing I really hated about Dune pt 1 was how Arrakeen appeared to be a sculpted slab, rather than a bustling city. That was something I thought the TV adaptation did incredibly well - it did that with the Fremen sietches too, but for new Dune obviously that's had to wait for Dune pt 2.
Dune pt 1 definitely underwhelmed me outside of Villeneuve's talent for shots of stuff at massive scale, but I'd decided to reserve judgement until part 2 was out to judge it as a whole. I loved BR2049 so was more than okay with giving it another chance in that sense.
For all its flaws I love how weird Dune '84 is. It really leans hard into it and just says "we're going for a ride", and it has one of the most stacked supporting casts ever as well. And the production design is just amazing after awesome after what-the-hell-was-that, it's gorgeous.
All three versions definitely seem to have different strengths.
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Really the first half of Dune(the book) is nothing but establishing shots. It's just introducing so many concepts and people and places. Part 2 was always going to be the one that gets thrown on and rewatched cause that is where so much of the stuff happens.
minor Dune spoiler
Obviously that’s not something that’s present in the book, but who cares. The book is kinda unique in that it gives away all of the early plot twists from the outset, and by the first few pages you learn that Leto is gonna bite it and Paul’s gonna become something unintended.
But yes, focus more on Leto and his relationship with Jessica, and maybe not even change that much that the movie does, just add an extra 10-15 minutes. Honestly I think Pt 1 would have been improved by being 20-30 minutes longer. Get more time and focus on Leto, develop Yueh better, put the Margot Fenring subplot back in, get more footage of the Harkonnens, show Thufir getting captured….
Frustratingly, a ton of that stuff was actually shot! Release the wormhole cut, WB!
Because rat milk. Cat milk? IDK, whichever; that whole pile of shit was dumb as fuck and is better gone, and includes most of the really fucked up pederasty from the book/Lynch movie. (Yes this is technically a spoiler, but one of the sorts you're better off not being surprised by, because good god.)
(On the flip side, Gurney's CombatPug or riot.)
Also the Lennon movie should just be "Yellow Submarine". The original one. No changes, just the OG, nobody says a damn thing about it.
Not really an arc, just tying up some loose ends the film never gets around to. At the end of Part One we have no idea what happened to Gurney or Thufir. It’s not, like, vitally important, but it’s weird the film essentially forgets about them once Arrakeen is attacked.
I have some minor beefs with Part One, mainly that we had to lose some exploration of Mentats, and also I would have liked to have seen a lasgun/shield interaction to really drive home exactly why the speed of light and a speed-blocking barrier don’t mix. Gurney gets a bit shafted in favor of Duncan Idaho, and I swear to God directors never know that there is no such things as too much Oscar Isaac.
I love love LOVE Villeneuve’s visual style. Not as much as Oscar Isaac, but close.
I also completely forgot that Brolin and Bardem faced off in No Country for Old Men, which coincidentally is on YouTube free with ads if anyone needs to catch up on why those two are so fun.
Eh, I'm fine with "if the characters don't know, we don't know" for things like this. Obviously not as a blanket rule, otherwise there'd be no opportunity for multiple POVs/scenes/etc, but I've never been a fan of having everything explained. There was an attack, we know they went to fight, etc, etc; I feel it adds a pleasant impact to the resolution when we find out the same way the characters do. We got a little with Idaho meeting them in the desert, and then he got to explain how it happened; I'd not have felt the same if we'd just seen it then he showed up.
In fairness, that weird-ass garbage with the cat was for the movie. From the book, they put an invisible chain on Thufir in an actually subtle way: they put an additive in his food that is totally harmless unless he doesn't get it and then he dies. No poison to find because there is no poison, they just trick his body into killing him instead if he escapes or turns on them.
The place is a bustling city, it's just heavily heavily protected from the sun. Arrakis isn't just a nasty desert, it's borderline uninhabitable for humans and we only see the city at basically two times: the middle of the day when everybody is inside or under cover (which is normal for cities in desert areas) or at night (when we only see fortified area). Transporting anything to the planet is hideously expensive, so they aren't going to cover the city with sheets that get shredded in the first dust storm. They're gonna put metal covers over all the streets and everything to give everybody shade and keep the city cooler at the times when everybody is doing stuff.
Not to mention we're seeing everything from the viewpoint of the family and they aren't going to be out cruising the streets window-shopping. For the sake of safety, the closest the public gets to the family is when Paul is out looking at the trees and we see everybody packed together watching them get watered. Which I'm betting is a deliberate visual statement that will be directly contrasted in the second film, with Paul milling around with countless unknown and common Fremen with a safety unknown the royal houses.
EDIT: And even in the book, the Atreides were extremely isolated from the public while in the city. All of them are only ever around guards and servants, just like we see in the movie, so they don't ever see the metropolis aspect of the city either.
Yeah but all they needed was a single line.
“Duncan, what happened to Gurney and Thufir?”
“Don’t know. Dead, I think. Or captured. I saw the Harkonnens dragging Hawat away,”
That’s all it would really take
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Also, seeing a severed head on display was not on my bingo card. Talk about metal.
Also also, of course that was Sean Young, no wonder she stole the show.
Yellow Submarine feels more like a George movie to me. Really, each Beatle already has a movie. A Hard Day's Night is very Paul. Help! is obviously Ringo. Yellow Submarine is George, and Let it Be feels like the Lennon movie.
I was put off by the Filmcast discussion but maybe should watch it.
It's months? All sorts of stuff around spice production and pressure from the... the large civil and commercial powers in the universe. uh Lanstrat and Crom?
There's definitely room there for more of something. It's not like Dune has visually distinct seasons, but show them slowly getting the place as homie as a giant hunk of rock can be. something.
They lowered the 100 ton stone shade windows and grumbled about how water is so great. That's homie enough.
Okay, that works. The other movies do make a good case, yeah.
It's incredible, easily the best movie that year.
It was very good, but I don't know if I would go this far. It's still based on an old story that is a bit on the strange side in the first place. But the movie is visually stunning, and the cast is great.
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Even based on what is in the book, I feel like it's no more than maybe a week or two? The Atreides are moving a lot of pieces on the planet well before they land and stuff like Paul selecting his room happens the day they land. The Duke is out inspecting equipment and receiving the Fremen certainly in the first week, if not the first couple days. They really only have long enough to move in their shit, get the soldiers in the barracks, find out how bad the equipment situation is, and then just begin to realize how powerful a resource the Fremen could be when the Harkonnen attack happens.
The situation is rushed because it's intended to be rushed.
The Duke even has a similar idea in the book. While the Baron is lining up his invasion, the Duke sends a strike force to destroy the immense spice stores the Harkonnen had stolen away as a reserve against the insane cost of the invasion and the following squeeze on spice. The raid and the invasion happen almost at the same time. The raid actually fucks up the Baron's plans considerably because now they need spice production to be successful or the family will be out of money and the Emperor will come after him.
And since the Angelina Jolie movies are for no good reason always available on the iPlayer I thought I'd re-watch them and see if they're still, you know, bad.
The short answer is yes, they're both fairly bad, the second more so than the first.
The long answer is also yes, but they're not entirely without enjoyment. The main thing about them is that they're both very dumb movies. People act in dumb ways, wild leaps of logic are made (a clock starts ticking and with no other information Lara Croft decides it must be related to a planetary alignment), barely anyone has an identifiable character outside of one, maybe two broad traits.
But the action and effects are sometimes decent (though too choreographed and desperate to be cool), especially in the first. Watching an attractive lady dual wield pistols while running at full pelt is a fun thing to watch. Watching someone jump off a skyscraper in one of those flying squirrel suits is cool.
The big sets in the first one are great: a huge Cambodian temple and a giant, moving astrolabe demonstrate just how awesome big sets with big practical stuff in them are, and how much better they are than a giant CGI room where the actors are looking at green walls and saying "Wow". And the movies are lit well and things look appropriately expensive and flashy. They spent money!
And hey that's Daniel Craig, looking only slightly less cut than in Casino Royale, sporting a not great US accent (whereas Angelina Jolie's English accent is entirely passable), as the love interest! And Iain Glen as the baddie, though they've made him look almost exactly like the Amazing Randi (google at your peril). And Chris Barrie as the butler! And dear old Leslie Phillips! A decent cast for the first one. Ciaran Hinds is the baddie in the second but we've got the downgrade of Gerard Butler as the squeeze.
And there's Angelina Jolie herself, of course, looking in every shot so absurdly beautiful it seems like a special effect. Genuinely ridiculous. She's given barely anything to actually do other than make a frowny face about her dad and rattle off boilerplate action movie protagonist bullshit, but she makes a paper-thin character at least partially interesting.
So, no. Not really worth bothering with, but they're interesting historical evidence for how beautiful a human being can be, a sort of yardstick for future generations to look back on and then bite clean through their retainer in innocent thirst.
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It was gorgeous but I ultimately felt like it was empty and over long.
I do recall seeing it and thinking holy shit how did they make a low budget movie look so fucking good. Oh right they actually shot in real places instead of spending $100 million dollars on greenscreen
It was very soon the full house of atradies arriving. The harkonnen wanted to hit them before they had any chance to really get fully set up. I am not sure there was a time line but it was not more than months they were still moving into their quarters while rooting out random assassination attempts and still in the move. The whole move was a trap and to wipe them out leto knew that but thought they had some more time.
The absolutely ridiculous bungee sequence in the first one will always be an enjoyable piece of cinematic... Cinema. IIRC she did that stunt herself, and let's be honest, who among us wouldn't jump at the chance to flying-squirrel around on a bungee cord/trampoline combination and get paid for it?
First one was alot like the Matrix - in that if it remained a standalone, we wouldn't have lost anything. But everyone wants to make a franchise out of movies these days, so of course sequels were in the works. They weren't bad per se, but really dug deep into the mythology the first one only sparingly laid out. And sometimes a little too deep. The second one more so than the 3rd, I believe, but #3 was ridiculous all on its own.
At first I thought "great locations and great fight coreography". And that is still true, but at some point #3 jumped the shark. It was too much of just killing random mook after random mook.
I haven't heard that much good things about John Wick 4, so I am a little wary watching it, but I will watch it sometime in the coming weeks.
Maybe studios should be less afraid to let a good movie stand on its own. Not everything needs endless sequels and prequels and TV shows and so on and so forth. It was true for the Matrix and its true for John Wick.