I found that the human characters dragged down Godzilla vs Kong as well as King of the Monsters for me. I didn't feel the same with the 2014 Godzilla, where I felt more strongly that the irrelevance of humanity was a feature. I liked Kong: Skull Island well enough, but with the two films that followed I would've preferred human-free edits.
I didn't like the 2014 Godzilla, but I did get what they were trying to do with it. It wasn't what I was wanting from a Godzilla movie and I didn't really think it worked, but they were definitely going for a certain type of monster movie. The human plot in King of the Monsters was just the worst though.
I thought it improved on 2014's in two key ways:
-The characters involved are more directly entwined with the plot
-and we stay with the same one for the whole film. They knew better than to pull another Bryan Cranston.
That might have worked for me if I hadn't found the characters grating and annoying and badly written and I wanted all of them to leave me alone *right fucking now*. I'd rather have no characters than *those*, and I pretty much felt the same about Godzilla vs Kong.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I actually preferred the human story in king of the monsters, because instead of being hugely boring, it was worse to the point that it looped around a little bit and became entertainingly bad. It felt like it was a reference to the brain dead human plots in 60s godzilla flicks.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
We watched Spectre last night, grand rewatch complete, ready for No Time To Die. It managed to climb up to surpass Quantum of Solace in my estimations, but it's still pretty fuckin' rough. The intro song is a weird tonal mismatch with the movie and the Lea Seydoux relationship is still gross; shoulda been Monica Belucci to finally lock Bond down IMO, you gotta swap like 3 lines around to make it work, she can be Mr White's widow and it's way less creepy.
All that said! I really love the modern, realistic take on the self destructing villain lair - the condemned SIS building is an inspired setting.
(Super weird timing / editing issue there though, Bond gets a 3 minute time limit and somehow manages to run back to the entrance and then back up to M's office with 1:40ish left on the clock? Eh!?)
Oh brilliant
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I found that the human characters dragged down Godzilla vs Kong as well as King of the Monsters for me. I didn't feel the same with the 2014 Godzilla, where I felt more strongly that the irrelevance of humanity was a feature. I liked Kong: Skull Island well enough, but with the two films that followed I would've preferred human-free edits.
I didn't like the 2014 Godzilla, but I did get what they were trying to do with it. It wasn't what I was wanting from a Godzilla movie and I didn't really think it worked, but they were definitely going for a certain type of monster movie. The human plot in King of the Monsters was just the worst though.
I thought it improved on 2014's in two key ways:
-The characters involved are more directly entwined with the plot
-and we stay with the same one for the whole film. They knew better than to pull another Bryan Cranston.
That might have worked for me if I hadn't found the characters grating and annoying and badly written and I wanted all of them to leave me alone *right fucking now*. I'd rather have no characters than *those*, and I pretty much felt the same about Godzilla vs Kong.
GvK tried the whole "let's have the human story be a non-factor", and it didn't work at all for me. I'd rather have them be interwoven into the story, as long as they're engrossing, which I felt KotM's were. Otherwise you wind up with silly drek like Final Wars. (I get that's more faithful to the kaiju scene, but I was way more interested in a compelling story.)
I'm really struggling with people directing any positive adjectives towards KotM and GVK human sub plots.
Unredeemable dreck.
2014s bait and switch reeks of studio meddling and I suspect had it been done a decade earlier we'd have been saddled with Sam Worthington to the same effect. Literally every other introduced character would have been more capable of carrying on the narrative burden.
Skull Island does the best all around job but Ken Wantanabe and Cranston tease what could have been
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
Officially kicked off October spooky marathon season with Halloweentown and The Sixth Sense. Not going to comment on Halloweentown, it's a movie obviously aimed at children, if I grew up with it and had some nostalgia for it I might appreciate it more, as an adult watching it for the first time there's just really not much to say. The Sixth Sense on the other hand, is an actual horror movie, and it holds up quite well! I haven't seen it since I was 13, when it was one of the first horror movies I ever watched and it scared the bejesus out of me. It's not very scary in retrospect, but I did appreciate that the jump scares are not very "jumpy" i.e. there's not a loud musical sting whenever something scary appears, sometimes dead people just quietly but suddenly appear in the frame, which is far more effective. It's a weird movie to watch again because the twist seems very obvious in retrospect, all of the scenes with Bruce Willis' wife where she doesn't acknowledge his presence at all should've been a dead giveaway (pun intended lololol). I forgot how good Haley Joel Osment was in this, I feel like his performance got reduced to a meme, but he really pulls off the awkward sensitive kid just fully terrified of the world around him.
He’s a pretty great actor.
Also what is Halloweentown? People keep talking about it on social media and I dunno wtf it is.
It's a Disney Channel movie from like '99 about a girl who discovers that grandma is secretly a witch and she is also a witch and together they have to save Halloweentown which is like an alternate dimension where all of the monsters live in peace? It's very Disney Channel. It reminded me of the made-for-TV Babes in Toyland with young Keanu Reeves, where they also get transported to a magical town full of quirky characters and have to save it from some evil guy. Again, if I had nostalgia for it (like I do for Babes in Toyland) that would be one thing, but watching it for the first time as an adult, alone, in the dark, with a cocktail, I was like "Oh, this is not for me".
+1
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Don't get me started with whatever drugs they were on when they cast Binoche and Cranston, and then ditched both of them to have us follow boredom incarnate around for the rest of the film.
The adults' plot in GvK wasn't utterly horrible. It setup the final fight and I generally enjoyed everything with Kong. What was miserable was the Millie Bobby Brown plotline, which was bad on all levels. It was also superficially similar to the Russian base section of S3 of Stranger Things, but with boring characters I didn't care about.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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AbsalonLands of Always WinterRegistered Userregular
Oh heck yes Amazon made The Night House available. Been looking forward to this.
“To me, horror clarifies what is truly important in our lives by stripping away the unnecessities. I love stories with simple yet imaginative premises that are approached in grounded, authentic ways. I especially loved the idea of playing with sound – I’m always particularly impressed by films, especially horror, that aren’t afraid of silence.”
I rewatched Gremlins 2 for the first time in like 20 years. I recalled it being a wacky live action cartoon of a film. I did not recall it being the dadaist masterpiece that it is.
When
Gremlins destroy the actual film you're watching and it gets replaced with vintage softcore porn until Hulk Hogan appears and threatens to beat up the Gremlins if they don't give us the movie back
I realized I was watching something special.
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.
Gremlins 2 is what happens when you ask a director to make a sequel, he says no because he considers a sequel unnecessary, so you offer him triple the budget and complete creative control.
+7
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
Gremlins 2 is what happens when you ask a director to make a sequel, he says no because he considers a sequel unnecessary, so you offer him triple the budget and complete creative control.
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
+12
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Gremlins 2 is what happens when you ask a director to make a sequel, he says no because he considers a sequel unnecessary, so you offer him triple the budget and complete creative control.
"Now was that civilized? No, clearly not. Fun, but in no sense civilized."
I also realized today that a little baby Benicio Del Toro (okay, he was like 20) was in License to Kill. I love finding dudes in bit parts in old movies.
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.
I'm doing a run of the Craig Bond movies, and I found QoS much less terrible than I remembered. Definitely not good - it was boring in large stretches and a lot of the action was incoherent - but at least watchable.
Though I tried watching the 4K version on Prime and almost every action scene was so badly artifacted you often couldn't tell what was going on. (I assume it was a 4k thing, because I usually have perfectly decent video quality on Prime and on other services.)
The experience was so bad that I bought a 4k disk version of Skyfall, because I'll be pissed if a bad stream fucks up an actually good movie.
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.
I'm doing a run of the Craig Bond movies, and I found QoS much less terrible than I remembered. Definitely not good - it was boring in large stretches and a lot of the action was incoherent - but at least watchable.
Though I tried watching the 4K version on Prime and almost every action scene was so badly artifacted you often couldn't tell what was going on. (I assume it was a 4k thing, because I usually have perfectly decent video quality on Prime and on other services.)
The experience was so bad that I bought a 4k disk version of Skyfall, because I'll be pissed if a bad stream fucks up an actually good movie.
The opera sequence continues to be one of the better, or at the very least unique, sequences in all the Craig bonds
+8
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
The talk of Romancing the Stone got me to watch it this evening. I had completely forgot about one thing in the weed smuggling plane wreck, Douglas reading the magazine:
"Ah, man! The Doobie Brothers broke up, when the hell did that happen?!" *check date in the issue of Rolling Stone*
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Re: Gremlins and Gremlins 2: it's literally been decades since I watched both of them, but I never warmed to the first film, and it's the Santa Claus story that did it. It gave the whole film a mean-spirited flavour for me that kept me from enjoying the rest of it. That one time when I caught Gremlins 2 on TV, however, without expecting anything, I loved it for its anarchic inventiveness.
On a different note: my favourite cinema just started a Wong Kar-wai month, so yesterday we went to see Happy Together. I didn't know anything about it and as a result was somewhat surprised to find Tony Leung starring in a film that tells the story of a homosexual amour fou, but I wasn't surprised that he was excellent in it. It's a fascinating film, endlessly stylish but always in service of the story and characters, and in some ways a good companion piece to In the Mood for Love. Very much looking forward to catching some of the other films by the director over the next few weeks.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I think QoS definitely benefits from watching in close conjunction with Casino Royale, as it's basically a continuation of the same story not normally seen in Bond
I've posted about the Gremlins Santa scene in the past. I don't think people realize how necessary it was. Gremlins is a comedy horror that, up to the Santa speech, was not funny. The gremlins are just murdering folks in terrible ways. It's a horror movie. What Kate does is tip the scales. It's like a telling of the Aristocrats. It's so far past the mark that it becomes absurd, it becomes funny.
I can accept that this is the intention behind the speech and that it works as this for some, perhaps even many. For me, it didn't work. I found what had gone before funny enough, because these characters are all clichés, so the whole thing comes across as a black horror comedy in the comic book vein. The way that Cates delivers the Santa speech, however, always struck me as earnest and genuine, and as a result, while the story itself is absurdly over the top, the moment still rang true, and therefore the moment had the opposite effect on me from what you describe.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Posts
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
All that said! I really love the modern, realistic take on the self destructing villain lair - the condemned SIS building is an inspired setting.
(Super weird timing / editing issue there though, Bond gets a 3 minute time limit and somehow manages to run back to the entrance and then back up to M's office with 1:40ish left on the clock? Eh!?)
GvK tried the whole "let's have the human story be a non-factor", and it didn't work at all for me. I'd rather have them be interwoven into the story, as long as they're engrossing, which I felt KotM's were. Otherwise you wind up with silly drek like Final Wars. (I get that's more faithful to the kaiju scene, but I was way more interested in a compelling story.)
Unredeemable dreck.
2014s bait and switch reeks of studio meddling and I suspect had it been done a decade earlier we'd have been saddled with Sam Worthington to the same effect. Literally every other introduced character would have been more capable of carrying on the narrative burden.
Skull Island does the best all around job but Ken Wantanabe and Cranston tease what could have been
Come Overwatch with meeeee
It's a Disney Channel movie from like '99 about a girl who discovers that grandma is secretly a witch and she is also a witch and together they have to save Halloweentown which is like an alternate dimension where all of the monsters live in peace? It's very Disney Channel. It reminded me of the made-for-TV Babes in Toyland with young Keanu Reeves, where they also get transported to a magical town full of quirky characters and have to save it from some evil guy. Again, if I had nostalgia for it (like I do for Babes in Toyland) that would be one thing, but watching it for the first time as an adult, alone, in the dark, with a cocktail, I was like "Oh, this is not for me".
The adults' plot in GvK wasn't utterly horrible. It setup the final fight and I generally enjoyed everything with Kong. What was miserable was the Millie Bobby Brown plotline, which was bad on all levels. It was also superficially similar to the Russian base section of S3 of Stranger Things, but with boring characters I didn't care about.
Narrow
Edit: I didn't realize Vimeo embeds! hooray
When
~ Buckaroo Banzai
"Now was that civilized? No, clearly not. Fun, but in no sense civilized."
I also realized today that a little baby Benicio Del Toro (okay, he was like 20) was in License to Kill. I love finding dudes in bit parts in old movies.
Though I tried watching the 4K version on Prime and almost every action scene was so badly artifacted you often couldn't tell what was going on. (I assume it was a 4k thing, because I usually have perfectly decent video quality on Prime and on other services.)
The experience was so bad that I bought a 4k disk version of Skyfall, because I'll be pissed if a bad stream fucks up an actually good movie.
The opera sequence continues to be one of the better, or at the very least unique, sequences in all the Craig bonds
~ Buckaroo Banzai
On a different note: my favourite cinema just started a Wong Kar-wai month, so yesterday we went to see Happy Together. I didn't know anything about it and as a result was somewhat surprised to find Tony Leung starring in a film that tells the story of a homosexual amour fou, but I wasn't surprised that he was excellent in it. It's a fascinating film, endlessly stylish but always in service of the story and characters, and in some ways a good companion piece to In the Mood for Love. Very much looking forward to catching some of the other films by the director over the next few weeks.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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