Jingus
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Posts posted by Jingus
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Really, all the non-theatrical-cut versions are pretty similar. Just go with the Final Cut, it's basically the director's cut with a few old visual mistakes and obvious goofs that've been subtly corrected in a seamless fashion.I haven't seen Blade Runner in 15-20 years. I've been wanting to revisit it soon but am unsure of which one to check out. Sounds like each version has its problems.
EDIT: and oh yeah, you wanna know how to do a REALLY good "special edition" with a bunch of re-edits and new effects? Look no further than the director's cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It's the polar opposite of the Star Wars OT special editions: all the new special effects are pretty hard to spot (unless you've just memorized what all the old ones looked like) and generally look better and more believable than the original effects. And even though it's a few minutes longer, there's been a bunch of fiddling done with the pacing so that it doesn't feel so bloated and endless as the theatrical "Motionless Picture".
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I don't care what Ridley says: Deckard ain't a replicant. The movie never puts any weight or effort into saying he's a robot. There's basically three seconds of the most tenuous circumstantial evidence to even suggest that he might be, and all of it could easily be interpreted in other ways. And it not only opens up a million new plot holes if Deckard is a robot (why would they give him human-level strength and endurance, handicapping against the other robots he's hunting?), but it completely ruins his entire plot arc and all his relationships with all the other characters. The movie doesn't make sense if he's not human.
All that being said: the theatrical narration fucking sucks. Badly written, terribly acted, totally unnecessary. It makes the movie actively worse, ruining the beautiful dream-like atmosphere with this clunky repetition of exposition that we're already getting elsewhere.
As for the Alien series: I mostly like the theatrical cuts better, mostly.
-Alien's "director's cut" was superfluous tinkering in the first place, since Scott said that he was perfectly happy with the theatrical version. The only major thing it adds is the deleted scene with Dallas in the alien's nest. That one should've STAYED deleted; not only is it a direct contradiction of how the aliens work in subsequent films, but it's just poorly handled with ambiguous visuals and Tom Skerritt maybe giving the single worst bit of acting I've ever seen him do, I literally can't understand most of what he's saying. AND that scene also works to throw a speedbump into the otherwise brutally-tense third act, stopping the movie dead in its tracks and deflating a lot of the final momentum. All the other changed were completely inconsequential stuff, adding in an extra shot of nothing-happening here or taking our a bit of random dialogue there. The DC isn't superior to the theatrical cut in any meaningful fashion, the original edit was already perfect.
-Aliens is a tough case, because there's two deleted scenes which absolutely should've stayed in. The one where Ripley learns her daughter is dead is what forms the entire motivation for her character in the second half of the movie, it's the core of why she is so desperately obsessive to save Newt (even if it's at the cost of literally everyone else's lives). Cutting that one was unforgivable. And then we have the sentry-gun sequence; it's a brilliant bit of smoke-and-mirrors tomfoolery, getting an entire nail-biting action scene out of little more than people watching an LED readout counting down from 500 to 0. It also serves as a better explanation of why the aliens took so long to invade the compound, in that big gap of time between the marines getting decimated and the aliens' final assault.
But then... there's that fucking terrible scene at the colony before the aliens attack, showing us Newt's family. It's awful. Just awful. Some of the worst shit that James Cameron has ever made (outside of Piranha 2, anyway), a terribly written and terribly acted piece of garbage which actively sabotages the tension in the later scenes when the marines arrive. It's way creepier to see the colony for the first time when it's ruined and empty, than to see it after we've already watched a bunch of shitty actors feeling like fake people on the same sets. In a perfect world, we could have a DC of Aliens which ditches this scene but includes the other two; sadly, in our imperfect world, I call it a draw between the theatrical and director's cuts.
-Alien 3 is one where I would actually argue for the theatrical version being superior. For one main reason: the assembly cut is unfinished. Not only do many of the new special effects just look fake as hell, but there's something terribly wrong with the sound mix. Much of the re-added dialogue is muffled to the point of being inaudible or unintelligible. That's enough to make watching it a chore, but there's a few scenes which I thought were simply done better in the reshot versions in the theatrical cut: the alien's much more horrifying birth, or the extended version of Ripley's final martyrdom. And really, considering how relentlessly grim and hostile an experience Alien 3 is, do we really need it to go past two hours in length?
-Alien Resurrection has a special edition which is mostly the same as the shitty original, but all the deleted scenes are nice little character moments which help the story in little ways and really shouldn't have been cut out in the first place. (Except for the godawful opening nonsense with the soldier and the bug in the straw.) So this is one where the DC is absolutely better.
-And with both of the Alien vs Predator movies, the Unrated versions are pretty much universally superior to the theatrical ones... if anyone actually gives a shit about those movies.
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I've managed to get through a couple of Joyce's short stories, but his novels are absolutely fucking incomprehensible. Every couple of years, I pull out my copy of Ulysses and try to read it again. Every single time, I quit within two or three pages. Fuck a buncha that. It's like trying to read any of Mark Z. Danielewski's non-House of Leaves books, it's just way way WAY more effort than it's worth. EDIT: and oh yeah, I've had "A Rose for Emily" at least a couple of times in school, it's good stuff.
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I'd go so far as to say it's my favorite DiCaprio-Scorsese collaboration (ironically, for practically everything BUT Leo's underwhelming performance as a Hamlet surrogate). But, best Scorsese ever? From the man who made Taxi Driver?
Like in the main movies thread, speaking of opinions you've never heard before...Gangs of New York is still my favorite Scorsese movie.
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I still think she looks and acts more like Sheri Moon in House of 1,000 Corpses than anything which is supposed to be even remotely connected to the traditional Harley character.
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If it's supposed to be anti-torture, then that's the weakest fucking attempt at a pacifist message that I've ever seen. In this movie, torture works, with a 100% success rate. Every single bad guy who's tortured gives up crucial information in response. Furthermore, it only shows bad guys getting tortured in the first place; the movie deliberately tells us that each prisoner we see getting abused is totally a terrorist who was concealing important intel. There's not even one case of ambiguity, of a guy who might be innocent or might know nothing. It's the Jack Bauer version of torture, where it only happens to people who deserve it, and always has a happy ending.
And what's the only downside we see about the entire process? The TORTURERS feeling bad about it afterwards. All the negative side of the process is "Jessica Chastain is clearly uncomfortable doing this part of her job", despite the fact that she keeps doing it non-stop. There's never a single moment in which we see the long-term effects of this shit on the prisoners, or on our policy, or our international reputation, or any other possibly negative side effect.
In comparison: today I watched Argo, which had better politics (although it still had a bad case of "every foreigner is an untrustworthy animal" syndrome) but wasn't as good a movie or as an authentic-feeling historical document. Oh, it was still pretty damn good; but Affleck is still not yet Bigelow when it comes to milking the tension out of the various tight spots which his characters find themselves in. The lingering stench of phony Hollywood bullshit did waft in during the contrived finale; upon doing some reading afterwards, I was thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the real-life events were nowhere near that dramatic. It could end up on my list, I guess; but I wish it had focused more on the Arkin/Goodman bits.
In comparison, Hot Tub Time Machine has absolutely no chance of going on my list. It's never a good sign when any comedy features two different scenes of people being covered in human waste within the first ten minutes. Combine that AND blatantly ripping off your entire premise from various other stuff (especially an episode of Family Guy which sees Peter going back to the 80s) is guaranteed to make me grumpy.
So I was already in a foul mood when I realized that this fucking movie is one of the most sexist, self-indulgent, Male Gaze-y sex comedies in recent memory. Hey assholes, just because your movie is mostly set in the 80s doesn't give you the right to present the gender politics of Police Academy as if they're appropriate for the 2010s. Literally every single female character in this movie is presented ONLY as a hookup for the various male heroes. Well, Lizzy Caplan gets a little bit of "personality" which boils down to standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl nonsense; but for the most part, every woman's entire function in this movie is solely to hop onto a penis. For all the shit that the Apatow comedies get, movies like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up still managed to pack quite a bit of genuine character onto their female co-leads, but that's apparently beyond HTTM's capabilities. It even exhibits the single laziest trait of shitty modern R-rated comedies: the only tits we see are anonymous tits. The naked women are characters who don't even get named; they show up for one scene, strip, and then disappear right the fuck outta the movie afterwards. It's the laziest, most contemptuous way you can possibly shoehorn some nudity in your movie, and it's always a blatant giveaway that the filmmakers either don't know any better or simply don't care.
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Yeah. Also, we don't get too many super-grim nihilistic Westerns these days. Well, I mean, half the Westerns we DO get tend to fit that description, but we don't get that many Westerns at all.
Zero Dark Thirty: yeah, probably somewhere in the bottom half. It's an effective procedural, doing a heck of an efficient "this thing leads to that thing" job of summarizing the hunt for Bin Ladin. Kathryn Bigelow can get more tension out of someone walking up a flight of stairs than most directors can get out of showing you a ticking bomb. It rockets by in a shockingly quick fashion, for a movie which is closer to three hours than not. And Jessica Chastain gives such a tightly-wound performance, matching her character's tendency to shut everyone out, that it makes me want to see her in other stuff where she's given more time to let loose.
Although, to reopen an old debate: yes, this movie does seem rather depressingly pro-torture. And the Muslim populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan are pretty thoroughly "othered"; except for our government's translators, pretty much every brown person in the movie is seen as part of a faceless mass of possible threats... at best. Which makes it so weird in the final scenes during the raid on the house, when suddenly Bigelow seems to remember "oh yeah, I'm NOT Michael Bay, I actually have problems with the ridiculous macho shenanigans displayed by men with guns" and sticks in all those weeping women and shrieking children to remind us of the human cost of the war. Hey, maybe we could try that in any scene besides the climactic one where Osama himself is getting smoked?
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The scene at the end where Cruise is lecturing the emperor of Japan on the inner meaning and true importance of his own nation and people was offensively terrible, it literally felt like a Kirk Cameron sermon. And then they stop the villains by having the emperor basically say "hey guys, quit it"; why didn't you do that shit two hours ago?!
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I've never really understood the 'why has DiCaprio never won an Oscar?' talking point - he's never been brilliant in anything, he just always seems to be playing 'Leonardo DiCaprio in a great film' and never really adds much to them and always lost out to the better actor.
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He wasn't even nominated for that one, which is imo his most brilliant and least-Leo-like performance ever.
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The Imitation Game: no. God save us from middlebrow Oscarbait which is so damned convinced of its own monumentally important message. This movie's real story (its "white-hot center", as writers say) is obviously about Alan Turing's attempts to build the world's first computer and crack the infamous Enigma code; sadly, the movie chooses to ignore that plot at every possible turn, and is pathetically scanty on the details about how it actually worked. You'd learn more about mathematical theory by watching A Beautiful Mind than you would from this flick. Instead, the movie devotes at least half of itself to the "Turing is an autistic homosexual who has no idea how to deal with society" storyline, and oh my lord is it incredibly fucking dull. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is way too much of a retread of his Sherlock Holmes, and the way the movie haphazardly jumps back and forth between three different time periods feels utterly arbitrary and pointless.
Burke and Hare: ugh, no. It's depressing to think that this piece of shit was made by John Landis. A great ensemble cast is utterly wasted in this unfunny comedy, a botched attempt to make a goofy lark out of the infamous 19th-century body-snatching murder duo of William Burke and William Hare (Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, both utterly lost at sea). Shrill, obnoxious performances mix with a juvenile obsession with gross-out humor and it all ends up as just the worst thing it could've possibly been. The best part of the movie is a Christopher Lee cameo which is literally nothing but twenty seconds of him yelling incomprehensible gibberish. Go watch I Sell The Dead instead, it did all the exact same shit as this movie and did it infinitely better.
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I still mark for Jacklyn Hyde... le sigh.
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Aside from the Fredo stuff and a rare chance to see Lee Strasberg chewing scenery, the uncomfortable truth is that a whole lot of the 1950s bits of Part 2 are really fucking boring. All that bullshit involving a bunch of people in dark rooms holding quiet conversations about the Senate and Cuba, that's all just as lame as any of the convoluted Vatican conspiracies in part 3. Part 2's real power has always rested in the Young Vito scenes, which blow away the 1950s stuff without even trying.
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If I had to rate, it would go something like this:
1. Cap: Civil War
2. Daredevil s2
3. Deadpool
4. X-men: Apocalypse Soon
5. Bats vs Supes
6. Peggy Carter s2
7. Suicide Squad
8. fuckin' huge empty space
9. Gambit
10. Dr. Strange
11. Agents of SHIELD
12. Gotham
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The Wind Rises: nah. Which hurts to say, considering that it's probably Hayao Miyazaki's last-ever work. But I thought it was also his worst work that I've ever seen, dull and slow and almost willfully ignoring the hard questions about its story and its characters in order to spend vast amounts of time just gawking at the pretty scenery. The protagonist, loosely based on the real-life guy who designed the Japanese "Zero" fighter plane, is such a goddamned perfect saint that it made my skin crawl. Seriously, he's got NO flaws, and truthfully no depth either. His entire character arc can be summed up as "I want to build planes" and "Yay, I'm building planes!". In a subplot right out of 19th-century opera, he falls in love with a girl he keeps running into... but she's dying of tuberculosis, of course, and their entire relationship is basically treated as a distraction from his plane-building (and not even an effective one; the wife is just as saintly as the husband, and gladly sacrifices her own health in order to help keep his mind focused on his job) but the scenes with the wife are so separated from the scenes designing planes that they're practically happening in different movies. Some bits are so under-explained that it actually pissed me off; exactly why was the Secret Police after the main hero, and why couldn't they find him at his regular job where he apparently showed up every day to build planes, not to mention sometimes offering demonstrations to the freakin' military? Give me SOME explanation, for god's sake; but no, the movie seems like it completely forgets about it.
And that's not even factoring in how little time the movie spends on stuff actually happening; remember the parts from American Beauty where the movie stops dead in its tracks to admire a windblown plastic bag? Welcome to fuckin' half of the running time of The Wind Rises. The movie would be maybe an hour long if you cut out all the bits where it spends oceans of time reminding you that airplanes sure are things that exist, observing them in endless flight scenes that brought back bad memories of the parts in 2001 watching spaceships do boring shit for minutes on end. Worst of all, the movie never DEALS with the fact that these planes are WARPLANES, designed to kill people; in real life this designer was a pacifist who felt incredibly torn about his work and was riddled with guilt over all the carnage he helped to cause. Absolutely none of that makes it into The Wind Rises, where this guy seems like he never even realizes that he's basically designing better weapons to slaughter countless men.
John Wick: maybe. If it made my list, it'd be down near the bottom. It's a good action flick, sure, but it's really nothing more than that. I'm surprised by the sheer amount of hype this one got. Aside from some nifty fight choreography and an oddly sympathetic villain (the dad, not the son) it doesn't have anything I've never seen before. Drive did a similar story and did it better, as did several of John Woo's 80s flicks, and damn near half the Jason Statham catalog of revenge films. I thought Keanu Reeves was actually giving a below-average performance by his standards, at least in the department of line readings. And christamighty, was anyone else rolling their eyes HARD at Wick's seemingly-infinite number of old buddies and henchmen who were all too happy to do half his work for him? But still... that was some really nifty fight choreography, with John's constant headshots serving almost as a running joke (in a good way). And the deeply overqualified cast certainly didn't hurt at all. EDIT: and oh yeah, I almost wanted to put my fist through the screen when Kevin fucking Nash showed up as a Russian henchman and STILL got a countout loss instead of doing a clean fuckin' job.
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There's been quite a few that just had two black people somewhere in the whole movie; even several entries in Friday the 13th managed to grab that particular low-hanging fruit. But two black MAIN characters who were present throughout the majority of a 1980s horror movie? I'm having a hard time thinking of any, ever. Even Day of the Dead only had one prominent black guy, and in between the Blaxploitation phase and the Tony Todd Revolution there was a glaring lack of color in American thrillers. The closest I can come up with is Black Devil Doll From Hell, and that's a crying shame, considering it's a zero-budget "movie" that was shot on video, back when that REALLY meant something.
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The Town that Dreaded Sundown remake/sequel/reboot thingy: nope. It starts out promisingly enough, with cinematography which is practically 70s Coppola-esque by the filthily degraded standards of modern slasher films; and having a cast chock-full of damn fine character actors is always a welcome touch. But unlike the hauntingly nihilistic original film with its "we'll never know the truth..." atmosphere, the new movie is structured like every other generic Whodunit-style slasher ever. Once we actually get the reveal of the killer's identity and motivation, it's such a godawful cheat that I wished I could reach into the screen and slap the screenwriter across the ear. (Scream 4 did the exact same shit as this movie and did it all better; and I say that being one of the larger detractors of that entire franchise.) Seriously, motherfuck that ending, it takes a halfway-decent movie and completely ruins the entire thing in hindsight. And having this slick, decently-budgeted modern take on an original film which had a budget of approximately five bucks just feels wrong, the same way that the recent Star Trek movies completely betray the lo-fi spirit of the original show.
EDIT: and oh yeah, who the hell were they trying to fool with Not-Danielle-Harris as the final girl? Did they really want Harris but couldn't get her, and so replaced her with a girl who looks literally identical?
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Red Tails: nah, probably not. The aerial dogfight scenes are fun, but the movie grinds to a fuckin' halt every time it touches the ground. The talky scenes remind you "oh yeah, this IS a George Lucas production" with clunky laughable dialogue and stilted wooden acting. The characters are all the most tired old cliches out of every war movie ever, with the only innovation being "and oh yeah, these ancient stereotypes just happen to be black guys". Also, geez, that's just one of the worst orchestral scores I've heard in a long time, intrusive and overly bombastic and seriously made my head hurt.
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Where did you get any of that from what I actually said? My general comment, reiterated for the record: "I have a sneaking suspicion that the hype around the new Joker is larger than his actual part will end up being in Suicide Squad." I never said I wouldn't WATCH it or that I wasn't interested. Admittedly it's near the bottom of my Must-Watch Superhero Movies In 2016 list, but that's more a case of being more actively interested in every other individual title (except for Gambit and Dr. Strange) and being very leery of anything David Ayers does after really fucking hating his work on Sabotage (which has a depressingly similar "bunch of snarling rogues and violent fuckups are stuck together on a barely-cohesive crimefighting team" plot to SS).I can't begin to understand why you, Matt and Jingus continue to comment on something you 1. Don't want to see and 2. is going to be around for the next half-decade. Example, I don't watch TNA. I don't comment on TNA.
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I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion. I'm just saying, if his total screentime in the movie winds up being about fifteen minutes, I won't be shocked.
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I'm gonna laugh my ass off if LetoJoker turns out to have nothing more than a glorified cameo in Suicide Squad, basically like Scarecrow did in the Dark Knight sequels. They've gone so far out of their way to keep from showing almost any footage of the character, which leads me to suspect that there's barely any footage to show in the first place.
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My favorite was Luke Wilson as the cornpone country sheriff in the goofy vampire episode. (Well, I assume that EVERYONE'S favorite would be two certain men-in-black in "Jose Chung", but those guys are so awesome that it's unfair to count them.)
As for the 2008 movie: if it had just been a random episode of the show, nobody would even remember it at all. The reason we all reacted to it in such a violently negative manner was basically "six long years after the show ended in such an incredibly anticlimactic fashion, we finally get a chance for a do-over and THIS no-stakes bullshit is what you give us?!". It would be as if Star Trek 9: Insurrection had been the only Next Generation movie they'd ever made.
EDIT: although even THAT's not a good comparison, considering that "All Good Things..." was such a fucking awesome finale, actually better than any of TNG's movies. Okay, better example: imagine that, instead of the epic climax we got with Joss Whedon's Serenity, we instead got some bullshit with Mal & Co. having some low-budget bumbling misadventures involving some bandits on a desert planet, aka the exact same shit we'd already seen several times even on a show that only lasted 14 episodes.
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The Secret World of Arrietty: yeah, why not... I guess... maybe? I dunno, man. Studio Ghibli movies are, all too often, things that I admire more than I enjoy. I feel like I should adore these things, just as hard as I fell in love with Princess Mononoke way back when I saw it during its initial theatrical run. But something about them just underwhelms me, and I couldn't even tell you exactly what. Arrietty in particular doesn't help by being a bit of a downer; it's a story about loss and regret and the inexorable march of time, peopled mostly with selfish characters who don't trust each other at all, told in pokey slow-moving style without much actually happening. (Such a familiar plot certainly didn't help, either; it's based on the children's book The Borrowers, which has had plenty of previous adaptations, and was ripped off by seemingly half the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s.) Thank god I at least happened to catch the version with the British voice cast; looking down the roster at the insanely miscast American actors, I can't imagine them doing nearly so well in the same parts. And of course it's got the gorgeously detailed, fussily animated style of watercolor eye-candy which is Ghibli's traditional house style. I didn't feel like I wasted my time watching it, at least. Considering how fucking thoroughly I felt my time was indeed wasted at the end of the LAST movie I saw, it does make Arrietty look like a masterpiece in comparison.
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Sabotage: fuck nah. Easily the worst of Arnold's comeback films. Is there anything more depressing than a movie that begins okay, but keeps getting progressively worse as it goes along? Things starts promisingly enough, promising a dirty little thriller about a semi-corrupt police strike team which is the dimestore version of The Shield; but then the movie bizarrely tries to turn into a slasher-horror flick in the second act, and then spends the third act trying to be some Michael Mann-style Epic Saga Of How Crime Ruins People and this movie absolutely doesn't have the chops to pull that shit off. It's dour, downbeat, confusingly complicated, gratuitously violent in a bad way, and is wasting some damn fine effort from a lot of good actors. Like, Olivia Williams' detective character could be a great anchor for a much better movie, but here she's merely a highlighted sidekick to the glum and unlikeable main players.
And, side note: how does Sabotage's cowriter Skip Woods still have a goddamn career? This is the BEST movie he's ever made. His other writing work includes Die Hard 5, Wolverine Origins, Swordfish, and both of those fucking terrible Hitman adaptations. Won't somebody STOP this man?!
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Yep. I clicked on that years ago, and never looked back. I've generally found great big sigs to be a pointless waste of bandwidth anyway.
WRESTLER OF THE DAY (Series 2) - TOSHIAKI KAWADA
in ...OF THE DAY
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And oh yeah, no big deal, but the single greatest match ever wrestled: