Jingus
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Posts posted by Jingus
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Under Siege's awesomeness is directly proportionate to the amount that you're able to ignore just how blatantly they're ripping off Die Hard, which does all the exact same stuff but does it all better. Of course, it is the BEST of all the Die Hard ripoffs which flooded the cinema for about a decade, so at least there's that.
Action films aren't COMPLETELY dead, though: check out Turbo Kid, which I just saw today, and can be succinctly described as "Robert Rodriguez directs Cormac McCarthy's script of Kick-Ass Beyond Thunderdome... music by John Carpenter, makeup by Tom Savini". It's like the greatest movie that Golan-Globus ever made, right down to having no less than Michael Ironside as the villain. And it's also got probably the funniest, least forgiving take on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype (although I'd argue that what they eventually did with that character felt rather pointlessly cruel and nihilistic for such a goofy flick).
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I'm just surprised we got any votes for Into Darkness,let alone two of 'em. Even among people who liked the dubious-at-best reboot, it seemed pretty much everyone hated the sequel. We've already had Wrath of Khan, what's the point of having the junior-high cosplay version?
The most succinct description I can give of Lincoln is that I MIGHT have voted for it... but I honestly don't remember offhand if I did or not. Like all post-millennium Spielberg, it's pretty damn good, but still not as inspired or unforgettable as much of his earlier work.
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It's kinda cheating to include jukebox soundtracks like Awesome Mix in the same discussion with original compositions like Tron: Legacy. Two completely different things.
And if you think Lethal Weapon 3 is mighty stupid... well, have you ever seen part 4? Even as a 17-year-old, I damn near choked on my popcorn when the reflecting-laser gag happened.
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13 hours ago, Raziel403 said:
Wait wait wait, are they in the fucking NX-01??
And why are they wearing Cool Leather Jackets, which doesn't fit the history of any Federation uniform ever?
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13 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:
I think most of the people complaining about Go are ones that were kids when the old sore was on.
Yeah, that's the impression that I get. Which is a really petty thing to get hung up on. I loved the G1 version of Transformers when I was a kid, but I have no problem admitting that Prime is a better show.
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1 hour ago, odessasteps said:
Didnt see the whole thing on youtube, but still my favorite titans episode (but admittedly havent watched the doom patrol stuff since it aired).
That was one I saw. Like a lot of the show, I thought it was artistically well done (the psychedelic, almost The Thief and the Cobbler-esque chase scene is the best part) but in hindsight it made NO sense. As cool as it was to have Malcolm McDowell voicing Mad Mod as the deranged headmaster of a torturous boarding school... uh... why was he doing this? The episode literally gave no explanation whatsoever for what his motivation was, or what goal he was trying to accomplish. We don't know who he is, why he kidnapped the Titans, why he tries to hypnotize them, what "lesson" he's trying to teach them. The show didn't even try to explain what he was doing or why. That's bad writing, and it's hard to ignore even when they're trying to distract us with the legitimately funny running joke of how Beastboy is so dumb that he's instantly hypnotizable in less than a second.
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I've repeatedly stated my love for the brilliant, hilarious, irreverent superhero parody Teen Titans Go! And I have consequently endured LOTS of whining (some here, more elsewhere) about how badly this new version ruins the original Teen Titans cartoon. I never saw much of that show during its original run; I caught a couple of episodes, but it never really caught me back.
So, finally, I sat down and watched the whole first season. My verdict: I was right in the first place. The comedic Go! version is the better show, period.
First of all: lots of the bitching I've seen about TTG is how much goofier than it is than the original show. Problem is, it's not THAT much goofier. In this season I've seen endless toilet humor gags, and a lot of weird anime-style bizarre character drawings such as "the Titans are now portrayed as literal weeping toddlers to get across their emotional state at the moment". The original show is, like, about 75% as wacky as Go ever is.
And frankly, the stuff which Go DOESN'T do is the worst part of the original show. Holy fuck, SO MANY FIGHT SCENES and most of them are just the same old shit over and over again. The interminable chases and fights seem to make up literally half the running time of the show, and it doesn't help that so many of them look like we're watching an action scene which is practically identical to the last one. (Not helping is how bad the Titans really are at their job; over and over again, they get the living shit beaten out of them by opponents they have outnumbered and outpowered.) As for the show's supposedly "serious teen drama" streak? Frankly: fuck it. I don't like it, period. The "but we're not getting along, guys!" moments are my least favorite part of the whole thing. It reminds me of the very shittiest moments of any given Whedon show, those "our main team members get into a pointless butthurt shouting match which turns into our Angst Of The Week to overcome".
Finally: motherfuck Slade. Terrible villain. I've heard for years how awesome he was, and now that I see him... he's just some generic guy whose scheme is never even explained. No identity, no motivation, no powers, no explanation for how he can repeatedly get the better of an entire team full of heroes with godlike abilities (imagine trying to buy a scene where Nick Fury singlehandedly beats up ALL the Avengers). They never even bother to specify WHY he wants Robin to be his apprentice or what he hopes to accomplish with that. Slade is literally nothing more than a completely regular guy... except he's only got one eye, so he should be even easier to sucker-punch than a regular guy. And finally they stick him such a flat and monotonous vocal performance that I can barely even believe that it's actually Ron Perlman who's sucking this hard, just to make REALLY sure I couldn't possibly give a single shit about this guy.
So, yeah, it's powerfully overrated. It's not a BAD show, but it's not a great one. And don't gimme that "but wait until season 4, it gets so much better!", it's already had an entire season to draw me in and it never did that. I'm not gonna bother watching any more. Meanwhile, you better believe I'm gonna be watching every single episode that Go! ever produces.
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Something just occurred: if Idris Elba is now Roland, does that mean they're gonna have to completely rewrite Odetta's entire part on the beach in The Drawing of the Three? A big part of that whole conflict was the fact that she didn't trust Roland and Eddie because they were white.
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Did we miss a scene where Dany secretly soaked the entire floor with lighter fluid before the meeting? She knocked over a couple of torches and suddenly the entire ground burst into flame.
Also, I wonder what the Dothraki who couldn't see her in the doorway were thinking about everyone else. "Uh, hey guys, why are we all kneeling?"
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58 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:
Most boring slasher film of the OG era ever besides the incredible effects. Goddamn did Savini try and save that movie's bacon, just without trying and being himself.
Eh, there's much worse out there, various forgotten flicks which didn't even have THIS much staying power. Joseph Zito is at least mechanically competent at staging the violent scenes, and he's better at framing a shot than your average 80s horror hack.
But FUCK YES SON those effects! I didn't even notice Savini's name in the credits, and the first kill at the beginning is fairly generic (ripping off the same impale-the-lovers kill that F13p2 stole from Twitch of the Death Nerve) and not terribly bloody, so I wasn't expecting much from the rest of the film. But then you get that truly disturbing kill where the guy has a seizure while he's being stabbed in the brain, and it just goes on and on and ON in a manner which can be called "nearly unwatchable" in the best meaning of that phrase, and then immediately afterwards you get the most unnervingly realistic-looking "person is impaled by a pitchfork" effect I've ever seen (and it's happening to a naked girl in the shower, the ONLY nudity in the movie, just to make things even creepier) and I sat right the fuck up and paid a hell of a lot more attention for the rest of the film. Sadly it never quite recaptures the shocking brutality of that moment, although the assault in the pool and the shotgun climax are both at least attempting to do that.
So, damn shame about that plot. I guess we're supposed to infer that Killer Guy was the unnamed Dear-John-letter'd soldier from the beginning, but they never actually came out and told us that was the case; not helping one bit is how the actor they picked didn't even look like he was old enough to have fought in WWII. (Also: like sadly far too many slashers and giallo flicks of this era, that character seemed way too sane to be a psycho killer until the final unmasking.) And if they were trying to build towards some kind of conspiracy theory involving Laurence Tierney and his creepy obsession with his dead daughter, then I dunno what they were even TRYING to accomplish; especially since Tierney's character DISAPPEARS RIGHT OUTTA THE ENTIRE GODDAMN MOVIE after we see him peeping on the teens fucking in the basement, we never see him (or those teens!) again. And it's not even a "they probably died" moment, it's just "where the fuck are those people?" once the movie is over.
And the final scene: weak attempt to rip off the jump-scare-epilogue from Carrie, or WEAKEST EVER attempt to rip off the jump-scare-epilogue from Carrie?
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I still don't understand how the Doomsday idea fit into the rest of Lex's plans. He hates Superman because Supes is a godlike being who is so powerful and uncontrollable that Lex feels threatened and emasculated by the man of steel's mere existence. So, his brilliant Plan B is to... create an even more powerful and uncontrollable monster and then just cross his fingers and hope for the best? Seriously, what was Luthor's next move if Doomsday HAD succeeded? He would've just replaced Superman with something even worse. It's like trying to stop Godzilla by creating Ghidorah, there's just no way that it's gonna end well.
10 hours ago, Matt D said:I like shitting on this movie as much as the next guy but did you really need Doomsday to be a kryptonian superweapon or something? When he showed up in the comics he was unstoppable, with no backstory, just a walking fight scene plot device.
Changing the heart of a character or their role bugs me. "Clone of Zod" seems as good as anything else really. That seems to fit Doomsday for the fairly appropriate way they used him fine.
I would've had less of a problem if they just didn't pretend it was even supposed to be Doomsday. It's like "Deadpool" in Wolverine Origins or "Baron Zemo" in Civil War; if you're gonna make him THAT different from the original character, why even bother calling him the same thing? Just have Luthor create some different monster, I'm sure there's dozens of "manmade rampaging Frankensteiny thing" characters in the DC canon which would've been closer to what the movie character ended up being anyway. They could've claimed it was Bizarro and it would've been just as close to that guy as it was to Doomsday. Hell, they could've just made it Kryptonite Man and done the exact same stuff with the character; it arguably would've been even more fitting, because then Superman would really NEED Batman and Wonder Woman's help in beating the one guy he couldn't possibly beat alone.
18 hours ago, MonteCarl said:The films that have followed this idea for the most part have been the more successfully and critically acclaimed of the past decade and a half (X-Men, Dark Knight, Marvel) and the ones that have strayed have done poorly (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Catwoman).
To be fair, Daredevil was pretty faithful to the comics, arguably moreso than the Dark Knight movies were. It just had OTHER reasons for sucking, chiefly a lot of bad casting and goofy handling which couldn't decide if they were doing Batman Returns or The Crow and then just decided to try both.
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I know it's a new continuity, but still, my point is that Kong has always been portrayed as being way smaller than Godzilla in every single non-Japanese version of the character. It just seems a lot harder for me to buy a 500-foot-tall primate than it is to buy a 500-foot-tall dinosaur. And if you make Kong big enough to face Godzilla in a match of fisticuffs, then it means you've made him way too big to do his usual emotional bonding with shrieking blonde humans.
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Having just watched Joseph Zito's The Prowler: good gawd almighty, this might win the Vince Russo Award for Most Loose Plot Threads To Get Dropped, Abandoned, And Forgotten Within A Single Film. At least four or five different main characters literally just vanish right out of the picture after the first half, never to be seen or heard from again. And even though we know exactly who the killer is, we're forced to try and guess WHY he's killing based on some thoroughly incomplete scraps of circumstantial-at-best evidence.
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Honestly, Crowe's singing was just average. He only stood out because he was in a cast full of really good singers who were all better than him. And he ACTED the part of Javert better than anyone else I've ever seen in the role.
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I don't see how a Vs. King Kong picture can possibly fit into the new Godzilla franchise. The entire point of Kong is that he's small enough that he can interact with a human; this was re-emphasized in Peter Jackson's film, where they shrunk him a bit from the original 30s version, to keep him more physically plausible. But the Gareth Edwards version of Godzilla is literally the size of a 50-story building. The size disparity is ridiculous. And you could get around that if this was a particularly goofy series, but the whole thing is presented with such dead-serious attitude that "well, Kong ate some radioactive mutagen and grew ten times his size" is simply not gonna cut it. How are they gonna explain their way around this?
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I dunno why you need to put them in quote boxes, those posts are the main reason we're here.
Fish Tank goes on My Big To-Watch List simply on the basis of "directed by Andrea Arnold". After the difficult, challenging Red Road (like a version of Haneke's Cache for people who don't like their movies to be aggressively hostile to the audience) and the tactile you-are-there brilliance of her Wuthering Heights (finally starring an actual black guy as Heathcliff!), I'm already on the bandwagon for pretty much anything she does.
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"Only good thing"? Sure, if the show also didn't have Jarvis, Howard Stark, Dottie Underwood, the Howling freakin' Commandos... I even argue that Whitney Frost was an interesting character, just used poorly. Also, the show's gorgeous retro-art-deco feel would count as another good thing.
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Is everyone forgetting that the Wildling army had the Watch INCREDIBLY outnumbered? Even after Stannis joined them, the crows were facing such overwhelming odds that a prolonged war would have inevitably seen every single one of them be slaughtered. Joining forces with the Wildlings was pretty much their only option besides oh-so-noble suicide.
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Well that looks turrible. We're really going back to 1990s-style paranoid thrillers about the dangers of The Information Superhighway, complete with websites that talk with robotic Speak-N-Spell voices? From the makers of Paranormal Activity 4, just to spice things up.
7 hours ago, J.T. said:Now Kevin just makes mean spirited movies that say out loud what he's thinking in his head without the levity of comedy to balance things. Tusk is nigh unwatchable because it is just a brutal movie full of dark jokes that only Kevin would laugh at. The torture and disfigurement that Kevin makes Wallace endure are the things he like to do to his critics. Hahahaha, that's really funny ~!
The thing is, that's simply not true. I laughed at plenty of the jokes in Tusk. And there's plenty enough lighthearted and goofy shit, especially the Johnny Depp parts. You've seen at least one or two entries in the Saw series, right? That's what I'd call a truly brutal movie full of torture and darkness, not one which involves the main character jerking off a petrified boner, or two glorified Peter Sellers caricatures having an absurd conversation about hockey and outhouses.
As for the character of Wallace: that's not supposed to be his critics, that guy is a barely-veiled expy of Kevin Smith himself. I mean, c'mon: a professional podcaster who makes lots of Nazi jokes, is generally oblivious to the real world around him, has somehow managed to marry a hot chick who is improbably out of his league, and the guy is even turned into a big fat walrus.
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1 hour ago, Mistah Na1m4rk said:
Stannis is the de facto babyface because he is the one true king of Westeros. Those of you who throw your lot in with the usurpers tend to forget this.
The only reason that Stannis was even in the line of succession was because his brother usurped the throne from the reigning royal family.
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2 hours ago, Dolfan in NYC said:
I always find it funny when Smith complains he can't find funding for distribution for his blatant nepotism project, and then the trailer comes out and everyone's like... oh...
To be fair, he couldn't secure proper distribution for his last two films either. It really tells you all you need to know, that the same studios and theaters which were happy to put their names on some boring junk like Jersey Girl and Cop Out were then too chickenshit to try some genuinely different and challenging material like Red State and Tusk.
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Okay, time to switch up whoever is making Kev's trailers, because that was awful. Like someone just picked footage at completely random and then edited together in no order whatsoever. It managed the impressive feat of spoiling way too much while still leaving me with practically no idea as to what the film is actually about.
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Which sounds more to me like "I can't particularly find fault with any of the specifics of your argument". This show simply does not give us viewers any big generic Righteous Hero Ethically Kills A Villain Who Had It Coming moments without intentionally crafting the scene to still make us feel like shit anyway.
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Almost all of those still involved some level of the show deliberately sabotaging the "fuck yeah!" factor through the way the deaths were handled.
-Joffrey died in the arms of his sobbing mother, damn near making the moment sympathetic. And Sansa and Tyrion were immediately blamed for it; the episode ended not with Joffrey's death, but with Cersei pointing at her brother. Meanwhile, the actual culprit was Littlefinger, arguably the worst piece of shit on the entire show, who killed Joffrey for purely selfish political reasons.
-Tywin died by his own son's hand, while taking a shit. Not exactly a heroic comeuppance. And he showed zero no fear, no guilt, no acceptance of his own responsibility in any of his evil bullshit even at the end. He stayed smug and stoic even after the first crossbow bolt went into his gut.
-Arya didn't look like a righteous avenger with Trant, she just looked like one sociopath ambushing another sociopath. It was less "hell yeah, he had it coming!" than it was "goddamn, that girl has issues". And then she's immediately punished by having one of her trainer-friends killed for her actions, and also being struck blind.
The closest example was Janos Slynt, but even he had mitigating circumstances. His turn into a whining blubbery mess at the end made it more of a comedic scene than anything else, and his sudden execution was one of the many actions that pissd off Jon's men and helped him eventually get assassinated.
[Best Of] Top 110 Movies of 2010 - 2014
in MOVIES: BEST OF...
Posted
Actually, looking it up, you're shockingly right: it's got a dumbfounding 87% score on RT (higher than Cloverfield, Mission Impossible 3, and even Super 8) and scraped together a not-inspiring-but-still-respectable five hundred grand in worldwide sales, which adjusted for inflation puts it 4th out of 12 in the Trek franchise. I find that surprising, because of the massively negative response I heard from, well, pretty much everyone I know and the small number of critics I pay attention to. And I largely agreed with them, aside from a few admittedly badass moments like Khan just straight Hulking Up out of the Vulcan nerve pinch.
...just a guess, but you've never seen much of the works of Jim Jarmusch, Bela Tarr, Yasujiro Ozu, Wim Wenders, or Andrei Tarkovsky, have you?