I understand that LOTR used a lot of cgi. But not on all the closeups of orcs and uruks. Hobbit feels like a seperate universe in ways. And the extended cartoony action scenes. Bleh. This feels like maybe it should have been two movies instead. And i was a person happy they were making 3. The movies have great moments. Then a dwarf does a spin attack in a barrel and leaps like a jungle cat and I groan.
But then they dump 50 tons of Molten Gold on a dragon and I smile.
Smaug looks great.
Even with the things that bug me I am very much looking forward to the 3rd movie.
I wouldn't mind so much if Hobbit was consistently cartoony. But you have Wacky Barrel Antics and then brutal violence and a dozen people being decapitated and the movie feels really schizophrenic. I basically can't watch the films with my kids because they find the violence really disturbing. I'm not sure the film knows what audience it's aiming for.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
OK Sabotage made over 5 million, not less than 2, over the weekend. Still a failure sadly. I think Arnold should just go ahead and make that last Conan film before it's too late.
It also came out the same weekend as Noah and Winter Soldier (overseas, at least); that's stiff competition.
A large portion of the LOTR films are spent explaining the high stakes involved. Each movie (and usually many times during the movie) we are told how important the Ring is, and why Frodo needs to destroy it. It's a simple concept for the characters and audience to get behind. The Hobbit never really invests the audience in why they should give a shit if a shorter than average man gets to live in his treasure filled cave palace again. The Hobbit is not LOTR but that's how it's been made and sold.
I think The Hobbit films have failed on a basic level in this regard.
I'm going to always remember The Hobbit Part II for one scene, that might go down in history as one of the most startlingly dumb moments in cinema history.
So, that liquid gold scene...
I was a little annoyed that we had to have a big action scene with all the dwarves inside the mountain because it seemed pretty obvious that they had no chance of beating the dragon back. With film being super literal, it's very hard to suspend disbelief and imagine Thorin putting a sword in this thing whose ankles he can't reach. In other words, there seemed to be no real narrative tension because failure, immediate or delayed, was pretty obvious.
But, Thorin's got a plan. He's going to lead Smaug down into the forge where we see water. I mean, Smaug's a fire dragon, so naturally water is going to be their greatest weapon - and one that wouldn't require brute force to deploy. Just some cunning and teamwork. This is the point where I get a little excited because I think the film is going to surprise me with a crafty solution to a major problem, which might even give some dimension to these characters in the planning and execution of it. They're going to try to drown him. The gears click for me, and I'm 100% on board.
And then something happens. The water pouring out startles Smaug, and he backs off, unscathed. The film gives us evidence that he's really quite repulsed by the stuff. Here, I would have expected someone to say something like "Damn! That water was our best chance! Now what?" But no...the scene plods on. Their plans are apparently way bigger. And what are they?
Almost the exact opposite. We're going to kill Smaug....referred to by name as "the fire drake"....with the hottest liquid the Dwarves can muster, delivered in a form that wasn't even precisely liquid in the first place. They were actually going to fight fire with fire, utterly ignoring how that saying is normally deployed before someone does something really fucking dumb / pointless.
Help me out if I missed something in all of that, which somehow reveals that this wasn't just astonishingly stupid.
I think the water repulses him / makes him uncomfortable, but is no real threat. They were hoping that the plan would actually do harm to him.
Sort of like how the Ring is forged in Mount Doom, and can be destroyed there.
I do think that's the idea they were trying for, both in fact and in theme - that he could be undone by what he is / loves best.
What undermines it so utterly though is that the audience is (seemingly unintentionally) given so many cues to think that not only would such a plan not work, but that another one that the characters don't voice at all, pretty clearly might have.
I think the molten gold thing was just there to remind lovers of the book that there is no god.
Ignoring that, just between the super overuse of CGI and the shots of orc heads flying at the screen or whatever just there to pimp 3d, I pretty much hated the second Hobbit movie.
I just want them to use all the extra time that 3 movies has given them to have more story. I really enjoyed the scenes with Bilbo and Smaug before it got back to "lol dwarfs fly into mine carts and do crazy shit".
I guess my issues boil down to what I feel is an overuse of CGI and silly stupid stunt scenes that do nothing to enrich the story.
I though some of the Legolas scenes in the LOTR movies were ridiculous but the stuff here is bugging me a bunch when I watch them
Can I talk about the Hobbit movies here? Because I have watched the two out so far...and...Wtf with the CGI. I know it was used a lot in the LOTR movies but except for some obvious spots didn't feel as ridiculous or unneeded like it is used in the Hobbit. Why the fuck are most of the Orcs and Goblins mostly CGI now...
They aren't bad but Peter Jackson seems to have developed a case of the george lucas'. Like, it feels he is taking a great story and doing his best to shit it up. I wonder how it would have gone if Del Toro had continued on with it. Better I think.
CGI was used pretty extensively in all of the LOTR films. Other than the big fight at the end of Fellowship most of the orcs and goblins in the series are CGI. There are a few people in makeup for close-ups and then ten thousand cgi extras.
The Hobbit certainly has a more cartoony feel to it overall, but given that it's much more of a children's book than The Lord of the Rings is I'm inclined to let that slide. So far each series has strengths and weaknesses. I'll just say that I like all the characters more in the Lord of the Rings, but I feel like the world as a whole is more complete in The Hobbit. Fellowship Extended is still the best out of all five films though.
The cartoony look is exactly the problem and it's largely caused by the overuse of CGI in The Hobbit compared to LOTR.
It's definitely leaning towards Lucas territory. The Hobbit films are giving in more and more to excess as they go on.
imdb says the second movie made a quarter of a billion dollars. CGI must be what people want.
Transformers 3 made over a billion.
Shit must be what people want.
Either that or box office return has no connection to quality.
Can I talk about the Hobbit movies here? Because I have watched the two out so far...and...Wtf with the CGI. I know it was used a lot in the LOTR movies but except for some obvious spots didn't feel as ridiculous or unneeded like it is used in the Hobbit. Why the fuck are most of the Orcs and Goblins mostly CGI now...
They aren't bad but Peter Jackson seems to have developed a case of the george lucas'. Like, it feels he is taking a great story and doing his best to shit it up. I wonder how it would have gone if Del Toro had continued on with it. Better I think.
CGI was used pretty extensively in all of the LOTR films. Other than the big fight at the end of Fellowship most of the orcs and goblins in the series are CGI. There are a few people in makeup for close-ups and then ten thousand cgi extras.
The Hobbit certainly has a more cartoony feel to it overall, but given that it's much more of a children's book than The Lord of the Rings is I'm inclined to let that slide. So far each series has strengths and weaknesses. I'll just say that I like all the characters more in the Lord of the Rings, but I feel like the world as a whole is more complete in The Hobbit. Fellowship Extended is still the best out of all five films though.
The cartoony look is exactly the problem and it's largely caused by the overuse of CGI in The Hobbit compared to LOTR.
It's definitely leaning towards Lucas territory. The Hobbit films are giving in more and more to excess as they go on.
I disagree that it being cartoony is a problem.
Sure, you can enjoy it. I guess.
But it's a rather large departure from the LOTR trilogy and their look and feel. The Hobbit is like someone looked at the green wave of death from ROTK and thought "This, this is what we need to copy for the next trilogy!"
I think the molten gold thing was just there to remind lovers of the book that there is no god.
Ignoring that, just between the super overuse of CGI and the shots of orc heads flying at the screen or whatever just there to pimp 3d, I pretty much hated the second Hobbit movie.
I think it's there to pad out the length of the film and cram in some sort of action beat to the abrupt and out of nowhere end to Pt 2.
I had nothing at all to do so I had a few beers and watched Noah. Better than I expected.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited March 2014
Snowpiercer, it's a bad movie that you have to watch with others but it could have been so good. From beginning to end it feels like it's terrible, then interesting, then a disaster, then a beautiful disaster, and ultimately shits itself. I don't want to use the obvious pun that it falls off the tracks because trains m i rite?
So in the future global warming abloo abloo and then everyone disperses this coolant in the atmosphere which freezes the earth, and everyone's dead. But there was a train made by a billionaire to travel the world and is divided into different class systems all with complete stereotypical fashion with the front being rich and the middle being workers and the tail being those who jumped on the train last minute and who seemingly don't do any kind of work at all, which kind of poles a hole in the bare minimum they live in because they kind of are freeloaders. And it's here that Captain America with his Sunshine beard leads a rebellion to take over the train with the help of Mr. Vengeance and we see how society works as told by a first year college student. Along the way more about this world (which has been going on for 18 years) is revealed, secrets are shown, and every train set from every film ever seems to have been used.
It's a movie which borrows a lot from Bioshock and even Sunshine, both in overall atmosphere and even gameplay, because it's pretty linear as you see all the different worlds. But every time it could offer something new when presented a fork in the road, it wusses out and chooses the easiest option, which really detracts from anything new and noteworthy. It really feels like a movie with so many investors or people to bless the final product (worldwide cast but funding from South Korea and some investment companies and even Chan Wook Park's film company) it never makes anything stand out. Tilda Swinton is probably the best in the cast at being believable, and Kim Pine has a very nice cameo that she hams up but it feels like the director wanted it to be intentional, but everyone else seems to act like they were doing it for a paycheck. It also doesn't really know how urgent this rebellion needs to be, since half the people act like it's no big deal to have the lower class rise up, nor are we told how big this train is, which is something you have to do for this type of world building. We're led to assume it's hundreds of cars, so long that no one has ever walked the whole distance back to front, but the tail end people seem to live in only two cars in the back, one car which is the greenhouse seems to be enough, it's all very scaled down to a point that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. When your water supply and meat train is all the way next to the aggressors, for lack of a better word, and yet the party club car is right near the engine room, something's messed up, yo.
There's a twist at the very end that makes no sense at all which comes after a very ham fisted monologue in a last ditch attempt to show why this rebellion needs to happen, and even the ending is one of those trying to connect with similar post apocalyptic films but can't deliver due to very little foreshadowing.
The guy who directed this also direct The Host (which people like but I didn't care for), Mother (which was great), and Barking Dogs Never Bite (very good black comedy), and this film simply feels like he tried too hard to make a Chan Wook Park film, but as anyone who's seen Korean films knows they work best when using modern, very focal character driven pieces.
I actually enjoyed Snowpiercer a fair bit, but I know it's not for everyone.
Imagine what a Korean director would make of a script based on a French graphic novel using mostly English actors.
Visually, it is great, and there is plenty of absurd stuff in there that is clearly lifted from the comic and suits the director's style. All of that is wonderful and makes it fun to watch.
And then the characters start talking. At first, it's not so bad, and fits the ridiculous tone and setting of the movie, but by the end it's painful. The dialogue is so obviously lifted from the page and then translated poorly, so that there is a lot of repetition, and maybe the director's unfamiliarity with English made it difficult for him to catch how off the rhythm of the monologues were. It also has that graphic novel feeling where many of the characters exist only to be plot points or plot reveals.
However when the movie isn't trying to explain things it is pretty great.
Plus, the main heavy looks like the Russian thug version of Christopher Hitchnes, which adds that extra layer of absurd charm.
It also has that graphic novel feeling where many of the characters exist only to be plot points or plot reveals.
Octavia Spencer to a T. Or O. Never enough to be sassy black lady, never given enough to be anything more than woman who had a kid. And hardcore parkour guy.
Can I talk about the Hobbit movies here? Because I have watched the two out so far...and...Wtf with the CGI. I know it was used a lot in the LOTR movies but except for some obvious spots didn't feel as ridiculous or unneeded like it is used in the Hobbit. Why the fuck are most of the Orcs and Goblins mostly CGI now...
They aren't bad but Peter Jackson seems to have developed a case of the george lucas'. Like, it feels he is taking a great story and doing his best to shit it up. I wonder how it would have gone if Del Toro had continued on with it. Better I think.
CGI was used pretty extensively in all of the LOTR films. Other than the big fight at the end of Fellowship most of the orcs and goblins in the series are CGI. There are a few people in makeup for close-ups and then ten thousand cgi extras.
The Hobbit certainly has a more cartoony feel to it overall, but given that it's much more of a children's book than The Lord of the Rings is I'm inclined to let that slide. So far each series has strengths and weaknesses. I'll just say that I like all the characters more in the Lord of the Rings, but I feel like the world as a whole is more complete in The Hobbit. Fellowship Extended is still the best out of all five films though.
The cartoony look is exactly the problem and it's largely caused by the overuse of CGI in The Hobbit compared to LOTR.
It's definitely leaning towards Lucas territory. The Hobbit films are giving in more and more to excess as they go on.
imdb says the second movie made a quarter of a billion dollars. CGI must be what people want.
Transformers 3 made over a billion.
Shit must be what people want.
Unless they don't want shit. Avengers,The Dark Knight and Iron Man 3 made over a billion each, too. But that requires intense skill, imagination and vision, much simpler to create shitty movies then reproduce those results from good movies.
Either that or box office return has no connection to quality.
I saw Noah and while its not bad, its probably Darren Aronofsky's worst movie or at least the least Aronofsky-ish. Where his other films made me feel something (Black Swan was incredibly intense, The Wrestler was incredibly depressing, The Fountain was confusing but visually very impressive (this is one I should probably rewatch and shouldnt comment on because I dont think Ive seen the whole thing in its entirety in one sitting), etc but Noah made me feel nothing. Its not a film that asks many questions, and while theres a slight environmentalist/vegetarian theme throughout it doesnt really ask you to question eating meat.
I also found the The Watchers interesting, but the fight scene as the floods began was ridiculous, I felt like I was watching the storming of Isengard.
That said, the film is well acted (Ray Winstone is great and Russell Crowe at times made me wonder what happened to Russell Crowe) and Anthony Hopkins' character was very enjoyable. There are some glimmers of the Aronofsky I was expecting though, and those glimmers are really pretty great. I just wish it was more Aronofsky-ish.
Maybe my expectations were too high, and I say that as someone who was ambivalent about seeing it because normally Bible/religious movies arent my thing.
Man, I love movies that use a foundation of religion, then just go off in their own direction. The Prophesy is probably my favorite movie, ever. Apocryphal stories are crazy weird and intense; seems like Noah is surprisingly right up my alley.
Can I talk about the Hobbit movies here? Because I have watched the two out so far...and...Wtf with the CGI. I know it was used a lot in the LOTR movies but except for some obvious spots didn't feel as ridiculous or unneeded like it is used in the Hobbit. Why the fuck are most of the Orcs and Goblins mostly CGI now...
They aren't bad but Peter Jackson seems to have developed a case of the george lucas'. Like, it feels he is taking a great story and doing his best to shit it up. I wonder how it would have gone if Del Toro had continued on with it. Better I think.
CGI was used pretty extensively in all of the LOTR films. Other than the big fight at the end of Fellowship most of the orcs and goblins in the series are CGI. There are a few people in makeup for close-ups and then ten thousand cgi extras.
The Hobbit certainly has a more cartoony feel to it overall, but given that it's much more of a children's book than The Lord of the Rings is I'm inclined to let that slide. So far each series has strengths and weaknesses. I'll just say that I like all the characters more in the Lord of the Rings, but I feel like the world as a whole is more complete in The Hobbit. Fellowship Extended is still the best out of all five films though.
The cartoony look is exactly the problem and it's largely caused by the overuse of CGI in The Hobbit compared to LOTR.
It's definitely leaning towards Lucas territory. The Hobbit films are giving in more and more to excess as they go on.
imdb says the second movie made a quarter of a billion dollars. CGI must be what people want.
Transformers 3 made over a billion.
Shit must be what people want.
Unless they don't want shit. Avengers,The Dark Knight and Iron Man 3 made over a billion each, too. But that requires intense skill, imagination and vision, much simpler to create shitty movies then reproduce those results from good movies.
Either that or box office return has no connection to quality.
... They still have one problem with the Veronica Mars character: they want to make her complex and ambiguous, but they like her too much to fully commit to her darker side. For all her voiceovers about addiction, the film desperately *wants* her to give in to Logan, Neptune and being pulled back in. So do I, to a large extent, but then don't spend several minutes of voiceover giving lip service to how this might actually not be such a good thing after all - and if you have the voiceovers then don't drop the ambivalence quite so easily. It feels like the film wants to have its cake and eat it, and it doesn't quite pull this off. (The AV Club has a flawed but interesting article that touches on this: http://www.avclub.com/article/veronica-mars-purgatory-how-we-keep-punishing-our--202354.)
I think it strikes the right balance. Of course she and the audience want her to give in to her addiction. That's why it's an addiction. Cause it's addicting and compelling. They clearly give her alot to blow up when she decides to go back to Neptune and also emphasize the danger both to her health and to any future prospects when she does so.
I always wonder if this reaction is because some people, for some reason, don't like Piz. She basically throws Piz to the curb in a truly brutal way and just ignores it because she's gotta feed that habit.
I think that's it for me, though: the audience (and Veronica, arguably) gets all of the enjoyable, exciting side of addiction, none of the negative side. That's what I meant by paying lip service: there's no personal cost for Veronica. She can drop her boyfriend of X years and feels bad exactly for the duration of the phone call. The film may claim that her return to Neptune may be ambivalent, but it doesn't do so with any conviction, because in the end this is what Veronica wants, this is what we want, so everything's okay. Which is fine - I don't want Veronica to be a lawyer in NYC either - but either commit to the ambivalence or drop it, at least in my opinion. Don't go, "Yeah, this is kinda, sorta like addiction, y'know, and addiction isn't altogether good, is it - but really, she can totally handle it, and so can we! Addiction, shmaddiction!" Obviously the whole film is predicated on fan service, but this is where I think they could've handled this with a bit more ambiguity.
On a different note: did the film ever address that at the end of the series Logan was basically a dead man walking?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I think what I liked about Noah, and whats going to make Moses a harder sell for me, is that its set in such a mythological time and space. Like nothing about it screams "THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENED", its such a strange and unique landscape in the film, earnest, but clearly mythological. I would say its Aronofsky's weakest film, but at the same time the subject matter is such a hamstring, and yet he made it his own. Its like, he purposely challenged himself by approaching material everyone is familiar with, with all the expectations and strictures that go along with it.
Also what I LOVED was that he avoided the usual beats of the Noah story; the building of the ark, god, the animals, all of it is brushed past to get to more interesting things like humanity, responsibility, the good and evil in all men, and some great little musings on the responsibilities of caring for your family vs the responsibilities of caring for your neighbour
Whereas Moses will have Egyptians enslaving the Jews to build the pyramids, which, is just gonna be a mental stretch for a history buff like me.
How does the film depict God? Does it do so directly?
I guess I should be spoilering, although the director has already said this in interviews
no direct depiction. Aranofsky himself has said he took inspiration from the original Jewish languages which translate "speak" as closer to "dream", so god just sends Noah visions, with no direct voice or dialogue. Also it's never referred to as god, but "the creator"
Man, I love movies that use a foundation of religion, then just go off in their own direction. The Prophesy is probably my favorite movie, ever. Apocryphal stories are crazy weird and intense; seems like Noah is surprisingly right up my alley.
This is what I was expecting and I was disappointed, so...
The film is more The Road meets Lord of the Rings meets Waterworld than anything else.
Watched TMNT 1 and 2 this weekend. Holy shit they aged very, very well. The second one had me cracking up like I was a kid again.
When Mikey gets jumped by like 5 Foot Soldiers and then they're all attacking him and he slips out while they're still punching something never fails to make me laugh.
Watched TMNT 1 and 2 this weekend. Holy shit they aged very, very well. The second one had me cracking up like I was a kid again.
When Mikey gets jumped by like 5 Foot Soldiers and then they're all attacking him and he slips out while they're still punching something never fails to make me laugh.
You watch the first movie and you go "wow, a lot of people gave a shit about doing something here"
Just FYI they're both on Amazon Instant if you want to watch them. Free for Prime users.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Movies from the past week!
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The Happening. Evil plant pheromones are making people commit suicides, oh no. You could make a creepy movie out of that premise, and the movie does start out with that tone, but by the time our valiant heroes are being menaced by wind, we're well on our way to pants-on-head retard land. Characters come and go, but our brave heroes Mark Walhberg and Zooey Deschannel and random child actor make it all the way to the end! Before they heroically realize that the crisis is over, they are menaced by a hermitty old woman who meets her end by banging her head at a wall.
The general stupidity of the movie isn't its big downfall, nor is the weird tone change from creepy to Adventure! to creepy again. The absolute worst thing about the movie is Mark Wahlberg's acting. He's supposed to be a biology teacher, but he acts his role as if he's an innocent little boy. The weirdly sincere childish delivery of every line is horrible distracting and I have no idea what the hell is going on with it. Every time he says something it's with starry-eyed wonderment of a child and the one time he gets angry it's a very childish tantrum-style of angry. Why would Wahlberg do that, and why would Shyamalalman let him do it? It is the biggest mystery of the movie. D-
Zombie Apocalypse. A SyFy/Asylum movie about a bunch of people, including a black woman with a katana, surviving in the zombie post-apocalypse. The movie manages to be just entertaining enough not to feel like a complete waste of time, but it's nothing special. The Final Boss Battle against
two zombie tigers
is a poorly coreographed bad CGI laughfest of the characters waving their weapons at the conveniently out-of-frame menace. C
Feast. A surprisingly well-made, fun and clever monster slasher gorefest horror comedy. The movie succeeds at being both a good monster slasher movie as well as poking fun at the various aspects of these types of movies, something that a lot of movies fail to do. "Oh hey look, we did boring horror movie cliche and had a character comment on it, aren't we clever"... well, no, because you still had the boring cliche in your movie, but not so much for Feast. There's several clever genre and trope subversions throughout the movie, including somewhat less predictable than usual lifespans for the various characters.
Speaking of the characters, this is more or less where the movie shines (awesomely gross monster effects aside). Each character is introduced with a silly little screen listing their generic information: name, occupation, life expectancy. The names are less names are more "bro", "bimbo", "action hero" type archetypes, but the characters are all well-acted and written. Where the Marys and Marks and Sues of regular horror movies end up being bland one-character-trait stereotypes, the characters of Feast are generally interesting and diverse enough that you can tell them apart and understand their character, motivations and group dynamic with ease.
Feast is all around a well made movie and I heartily recommend it for monster movie fans. A+
The two sequels aren't as good.
World War Z. Brad Pitt survives the zombie apocalypse and travels the world finding a cure or clues for what started the whole mess. Doesn't have anything to do with the book of the same name, and instead of slow plodding descriptions of how the world handled the zombie menace the movie elects to go in full-on action mode. Plenty of guns are fired, lots of people die, the zombies are goddamn fast and menacing. Just about every scene involving zombies is top notch and the movie really sells the idea that this kind of zombies could fuck up the whole world.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of scenes where there are no zombies. People talk and ponder and dramatize and it's not particularly interesting. The investigative parts of the movie, which veer closest to the source material, are just a goddamn bore. Who gives a fuck how the zombie plague started, that's not what's interesting about these kinds of movies. The interesting part is people dealing with their loved ones turning or being trapped or having to deal with the worst parts of human nature when society gives in. Dryly talking to people about where an imaginary disease started is difficult to pull of right and World War Z most certainly doesn't do that, On the other hand, the zombie parts of the movie are, as previously mentioned, top notch. B-
Insomnia. Al Pacino is a famous police man from LA who arrives to Alaska with his partner to solve the brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl. Instead of just a straight up murder mystery, the movie also brings in the heat on Pacino's character from the higher ups in the Internal Affairs Department wanting his head on a platter for various violations he's committed during his long career. The movie also features Robin Williams playing a skeevy mystery novel writer who may or may not have had an affair with the victim. The movie focuses on Pacino getting deeper and deeper in a web of deception and slowly starting to lose his gnards due to the titular sleep ailment. A well-acted, tightly scripted little movie that kept me interested throughout, though the ending was less than stellar. A-
Thanks in no small part to this thread, my brother and I actually pulled up Hansel and Gretel on Netflix this weekend.
and goddamn if it wasn't actually kinda fun. How did that happen?
I found Hansel and Gretel to be a massive waste of potential. It was lacking in pretty much every regard - especially dialogue and acting ability. For people who are supposedly highly experienced Witch Hunters they sure were pretty shit at fighting Witches.
"Aren't as good" is a huge huge huge understatement. There is one redeeming 2 second bit in the sequals and the rest is some of the worst cinema I've ever seen.
World War Z. Brad Pitt survives the zombie apocalypse and travels the world finding a cure or clues for what started the whole mess. Doesn't have anything to do with the book of the same name, and instead of slow plodding descriptions of how the world handled the zombie menace the movie elects to go in full-on action mode. Plenty of guns are fired, lots of people die, the zombies are goddamn fast and menacing. Just about every scene involving zombies is top notch and the movie really sells the idea that this kind of zombies could fuck up the whole world.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of scenes where there are no zombies. People talk and ponder and dramatize and it's not particularly interesting. The investigative parts of the movie, which veer closest to the source material, are just a goddamn bore. Who gives a fuck how the zombie plague started, that's not what's interesting about these kinds of movies. The interesting part is people dealing with their loved ones turning or being trapped or having to deal with the worst parts of human nature when society gives in. Dryly talking to people about where an imaginary disease started is difficult to pull of right and World War Z most certainly doesn't do that, On the other hand, the zombie parts of the movie are, as previously mentioned, top notch. B-
The general stupidity of the movie isn't its big downfall, nor is the weird tone change from creepy to Adventure! to creepy again. The absolute worst thing about the movie is Mark Wahlberg's acting. He's supposed to be a biology teacher, but he acts his role as if he's an innocent little boy. The weirdly sincere childish delivery of every line is horrible distracting and I have no idea what the hell is going on with it. Every time he says something it's with starry-eyed wonderment of a child and the one time he gets angry it's a very childish tantrum-style of angry. Why would Wahlberg do that, and why would Shyamalalman let him do it? It is the biggest mystery of the movie. D-
Wahlberg's acting quality is entirely contingent on the director and the material he's given. Pair him with a PT Anderson or a David O. Russell and you get gold. Pair him with Shyamalan and you get... well, The Happening. The dude has brilliant potential, but I think he really needs to be goaded into it. In the right hands, though, he's one of my favorite actors.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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Smaug looks great.
Even with the things that bug me I am very much looking forward to the 3rd movie.
I think The Hobbit films have failed on a basic level in this regard.
So, that liquid gold scene...
But, Thorin's got a plan. He's going to lead Smaug down into the forge where we see water. I mean, Smaug's a fire dragon, so naturally water is going to be their greatest weapon - and one that wouldn't require brute force to deploy. Just some cunning and teamwork. This is the point where I get a little excited because I think the film is going to surprise me with a crafty solution to a major problem, which might even give some dimension to these characters in the planning and execution of it. They're going to try to drown him. The gears click for me, and I'm 100% on board.
And then something happens. The water pouring out startles Smaug, and he backs off, unscathed. The film gives us evidence that he's really quite repulsed by the stuff. Here, I would have expected someone to say something like "Damn! That water was our best chance! Now what?" But no...the scene plods on. Their plans are apparently way bigger. And what are they?
Almost the exact opposite. We're going to kill Smaug....referred to by name as "the fire drake"....with the hottest liquid the Dwarves can muster, delivered in a form that wasn't even precisely liquid in the first place. They were actually going to fight fire with fire, utterly ignoring how that saying is normally deployed before someone does something really fucking dumb / pointless.
Help me out if I missed something in all of that, which somehow reveals that this wasn't just astonishingly stupid.
Sort of like how the Ring is forged in Mount Doom, and can be destroyed there.
MWO: Adamski
I do think that's the idea they were trying for, both in fact and in theme - that he could be undone by what he is / loves best.
What undermines it so utterly though is that the audience is (seemingly unintentionally) given so many cues to think that not only would such a plan not work, but that another one that the characters don't voice at all, pretty clearly might have.
Ignoring that, just between the super overuse of CGI and the shots of orc heads flying at the screen or whatever just there to pimp 3d, I pretty much hated the second Hobbit movie.
I guess my issues boil down to what I feel is an overuse of CGI and silly stupid stunt scenes that do nothing to enrich the story.
I though some of the Legolas scenes in the LOTR movies were ridiculous but the stuff here is bugging me a bunch when I watch them
Transformers 3 made over a billion.
Shit must be what people want.
Either that or box office return has no connection to quality.
Sure, you can enjoy it. I guess.
But it's a rather large departure from the LOTR trilogy and their look and feel. The Hobbit is like someone looked at the green wave of death from ROTK and thought "This, this is what we need to copy for the next trilogy!"
I think it's there to pad out the length of the film and cram in some sort of action beat to the abrupt and out of nowhere end to Pt 2.
Never thought I'd see that combination of words in that order.
So in the future global warming abloo abloo and then everyone disperses this coolant in the atmosphere which freezes the earth, and everyone's dead. But there was a train made by a billionaire to travel the world and is divided into different class systems all with complete stereotypical fashion with the front being rich and the middle being workers and the tail being those who jumped on the train last minute and who seemingly don't do any kind of work at all, which kind of poles a hole in the bare minimum they live in because they kind of are freeloaders. And it's here that Captain America with his Sunshine beard leads a rebellion to take over the train with the help of Mr. Vengeance and we see how society works as told by a first year college student. Along the way more about this world (which has been going on for 18 years) is revealed, secrets are shown, and every train set from every film ever seems to have been used.
It's a movie which borrows a lot from Bioshock and even Sunshine, both in overall atmosphere and even gameplay, because it's pretty linear as you see all the different worlds. But every time it could offer something new when presented a fork in the road, it wusses out and chooses the easiest option, which really detracts from anything new and noteworthy. It really feels like a movie with so many investors or people to bless the final product (worldwide cast but funding from South Korea and some investment companies and even Chan Wook Park's film company) it never makes anything stand out. Tilda Swinton is probably the best in the cast at being believable, and Kim Pine has a very nice cameo that she hams up but it feels like the director wanted it to be intentional, but everyone else seems to act like they were doing it for a paycheck. It also doesn't really know how urgent this rebellion needs to be, since half the people act like it's no big deal to have the lower class rise up, nor are we told how big this train is, which is something you have to do for this type of world building. We're led to assume it's hundreds of cars, so long that no one has ever walked the whole distance back to front, but the tail end people seem to live in only two cars in the back, one car which is the greenhouse seems to be enough, it's all very scaled down to a point that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. When your water supply and meat train is all the way next to the aggressors, for lack of a better word, and yet the party club car is right near the engine room, something's messed up, yo.
There's a twist at the very end that makes no sense at all which comes after a very ham fisted monologue in a last ditch attempt to show why this rebellion needs to happen, and even the ending is one of those trying to connect with similar post apocalyptic films but can't deliver due to very little foreshadowing.
The guy who directed this also direct The Host (which people like but I didn't care for), Mother (which was great), and Barking Dogs Never Bite (very good black comedy), and this film simply feels like he tried too hard to make a Chan Wook Park film, but as anyone who's seen Korean films knows they work best when using modern, very focal character driven pieces.
Imagine what a Korean director would make of a script based on a French graphic novel using mostly English actors.
Visually, it is great, and there is plenty of absurd stuff in there that is clearly lifted from the comic and suits the director's style. All of that is wonderful and makes it fun to watch.
And then the characters start talking. At first, it's not so bad, and fits the ridiculous tone and setting of the movie, but by the end it's painful. The dialogue is so obviously lifted from the page and then translated poorly, so that there is a lot of repetition, and maybe the director's unfamiliarity with English made it difficult for him to catch how off the rhythm of the monologues were. It also has that graphic novel feeling where many of the characters exist only to be plot points or plot reveals.
However when the movie isn't trying to explain things it is pretty great.
Plus, the main heavy looks like the Russian thug version of Christopher Hitchnes, which adds that extra layer of absurd charm.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Octavia Spencer to a T. Or O. Never enough to be sassy black lady, never given enough to be anything more than woman who had a kid. And hardcore parkour guy.
Unless they don't want shit. Avengers, The Dark Knight and Iron Man 3 made over a billion each, too. But that requires intense skill, imagination and vision, much simpler to create shitty movies then reproduce those results from good movies.
It doesn't.
That said, the film is well acted (Ray Winstone is great and Russell Crowe at times made me wonder what happened to Russell Crowe) and Anthony Hopkins' character was very enjoyable. There are some glimmers of the Aronofsky I was expecting though, and those glimmers are really pretty great. I just wish it was more Aronofsky-ish.
Maybe my expectations were too high, and I say that as someone who was ambivalent about seeing it because normally Bible/religious movies arent my thing.
I ... I know. That was the point of that post.
On a different note: did the film ever address that at the end of the series Logan was basically a dead man walking?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Also what I LOVED was that he avoided the usual beats of the Noah story; the building of the ark, god, the animals, all of it is brushed past to get to more interesting things like humanity, responsibility, the good and evil in all men, and some great little musings on the responsibilities of caring for your family vs the responsibilities of caring for your neighbour
Whereas Moses will have Egyptians enslaving the Jews to build the pyramids, which, is just gonna be a mental stretch for a history buff like me.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I guess I should be spoilering, although the director has already said this in interviews
This is what I was expecting and I was disappointed, so...
The film is more The Road meets Lord of the Rings meets Waterworld than anything else.
and goddamn if it wasn't actually kinda fun. How did that happen?
When Mikey gets jumped by like 5 Foot Soldiers and then they're all attacking him and he slips out while they're still punching something never fails to make me laugh.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
You watch the first movie and you go "wow, a lot of people gave a shit about doing something here"
As a kid I just watched it for the quick jokes and fighting.
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The Happening. Evil plant pheromones are making people commit suicides, oh no. You could make a creepy movie out of that premise, and the movie does start out with that tone, but by the time our valiant heroes are being menaced by wind, we're well on our way to pants-on-head retard land. Characters come and go, but our brave heroes Mark Walhberg and Zooey Deschannel and random child actor make it all the way to the end! Before they heroically realize that the crisis is over, they are menaced by a hermitty old woman who meets her end by banging her head at a wall.
The general stupidity of the movie isn't its big downfall, nor is the weird tone change from creepy to Adventure! to creepy again. The absolute worst thing about the movie is Mark Wahlberg's acting. He's supposed to be a biology teacher, but he acts his role as if he's an innocent little boy. The weirdly sincere childish delivery of every line is horrible distracting and I have no idea what the hell is going on with it. Every time he says something it's with starry-eyed wonderment of a child and the one time he gets angry it's a very childish tantrum-style of angry. Why would Wahlberg do that, and why would Shyamalalman let him do it? It is the biggest mystery of the movie. D-
Zombie Apocalypse. A SyFy/Asylum movie about a bunch of people, including a black woman with a katana, surviving in the zombie post-apocalypse. The movie manages to be just entertaining enough not to feel like a complete waste of time, but it's nothing special. The Final Boss Battle against
Feast. A surprisingly well-made, fun and clever monster slasher gorefest horror comedy. The movie succeeds at being both a good monster slasher movie as well as poking fun at the various aspects of these types of movies, something that a lot of movies fail to do. "Oh hey look, we did boring horror movie cliche and had a character comment on it, aren't we clever"... well, no, because you still had the boring cliche in your movie, but not so much for Feast. There's several clever genre and trope subversions throughout the movie, including somewhat less predictable than usual lifespans for the various characters.
Speaking of the characters, this is more or less where the movie shines (awesomely gross monster effects aside). Each character is introduced with a silly little screen listing their generic information: name, occupation, life expectancy. The names are less names are more "bro", "bimbo", "action hero" type archetypes, but the characters are all well-acted and written. Where the Marys and Marks and Sues of regular horror movies end up being bland one-character-trait stereotypes, the characters of Feast are generally interesting and diverse enough that you can tell them apart and understand their character, motivations and group dynamic with ease.
Feast is all around a well made movie and I heartily recommend it for monster movie fans. A+
The two sequels aren't as good.
World War Z. Brad Pitt survives the zombie apocalypse and travels the world finding a cure or clues for what started the whole mess. Doesn't have anything to do with the book of the same name, and instead of slow plodding descriptions of how the world handled the zombie menace the movie elects to go in full-on action mode. Plenty of guns are fired, lots of people die, the zombies are goddamn fast and menacing. Just about every scene involving zombies is top notch and the movie really sells the idea that this kind of zombies could fuck up the whole world.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of scenes where there are no zombies. People talk and ponder and dramatize and it's not particularly interesting. The investigative parts of the movie, which veer closest to the source material, are just a goddamn bore. Who gives a fuck how the zombie plague started, that's not what's interesting about these kinds of movies. The interesting part is people dealing with their loved ones turning or being trapped or having to deal with the worst parts of human nature when society gives in. Dryly talking to people about where an imaginary disease started is difficult to pull of right and World War Z most certainly doesn't do that, On the other hand, the zombie parts of the movie are, as previously mentioned, top notch. B-
Insomnia. Al Pacino is a famous police man from LA who arrives to Alaska with his partner to solve the brutal murder of a 17-year-old girl. Instead of just a straight up murder mystery, the movie also brings in the heat on Pacino's character from the higher ups in the Internal Affairs Department wanting his head on a platter for various violations he's committed during his long career. The movie also features Robin Williams playing a skeevy mystery novel writer who may or may not have had an affair with the victim. The movie focuses on Pacino getting deeper and deeper in a web of deception and slowly starting to lose his gnards due to the titular sleep ailment. A well-acted, tightly scripted little movie that kept me interested throughout, though the ending was less than stellar. A-
I found Hansel and Gretel to be a massive waste of potential. It was lacking in pretty much every regard - especially dialogue and acting ability. For people who are supposedly highly experienced Witch Hunters they sure were pretty shit at fighting Witches.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
"Aren't as good" is a huge huge huge understatement. There is one redeeming 2 second bit in the sequals and the rest is some of the worst cinema I've ever seen.
I agree with everything said here. I enjoyed WWZ.
when your core movie premise is people RUNNING AWAY FROM THE WIND you may just have to go back to the drawing board
Wahlberg's acting quality is entirely contingent on the director and the material he's given. Pair him with a PT Anderson or a David O. Russell and you get gold. Pair him with Shyamalan and you get... well, The Happening. The dude has brilliant potential, but I think he really needs to be goaded into it. In the right hands, though, he's one of my favorite actors.