Jingus
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Posts posted by Jingus
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I bet that came from some executive seeing How to Train Your Dragon and then going "hey, what we need to do is make OUR OWN movie with a dragon which is totally like a giant cat... just, like, different enough that they won't sue us".
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On 4/14/2016 at 8:52 PM, piranesi said:
If nothing else it is instantly my favorite Nicole Kidman movie.
I wish I could say that about the movie I'm watching right now, Queen of the Desert. This is a crushing disappointment: it's written and directed by Werner Herzog, but it shows absolutely none of his personality. His first fictional movie since 2009's brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done has turned out to be the most anonymous, dreary, generic piece of Hollywood boilerplate imaginable. Like, remember when you saw Benjamin Button and you were all like "how the hell did David Fincher make THAT sappy bullshit"? Same deal here. I've spent what feels like the past nine hours watching Kidman and James Franco simper at each other, like they're both half of a manic dream pixie which has been stretched out to form two sullen brooding misanthropes. They're the sort of pretentious "intellectuals" who flirt by exchanging shallow anecdotes about exotic foreign practices. And all of this is scored with an intrusive soundtrack which is so blatantly thieving from the music for Lawrence of Arabia that it feels downright insulting. What the HELL, Werner?! I expect more out of the artist who is possibly the world's greatest living filmmaker. This run-of-the-mill pablum is making the mediocrity of Rescue Dawn feel like the obsessive genius Fitzcarraldo in comparison.
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More perplexed than anything else. From what I've seen, the second season's premiere drew lower ratings than any episode from the first season.
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I wanted that one too, as long as they figure out something interesting to do. They can't just repeat the first movie's gimmick, obviously.
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56 minutes ago, Dolfan in NYC said:
that no one requested?
I requested them
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8 hours ago, tigertooth said:
Percentage-wise, it'd be tough for it to beat Terminator -> T2. (around 1600%)
Blair Witch Project is probably the undefeatable champion in this particular category. It's about a 25,000% increase from the first one to Book of Shadows.
Another one with a possible asterisk would be El Mariachi. Its original budget was about $8,000 while Desperado clocked in at around $7,000,000. But the studio did spend five or six figures monkeying around with (mostly inconsequential) tinkering and remastering before Mariachi was released, so it's hard to say exactly what the official number should be.
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5 hours ago, Niners Fan in CT said:
Then you have other sites like IGN, Uproxx, shit like the Daily Beast. These aren't actual film critics. They are bloggers on websites whose opinions on film hold no value.
That's exactly why whenever someone brings up RT it's an eye roller. These aren't film critics.
Oh gee, if only they made some kind of distinction between the internet bloggers and the professional critics. Like the TOP CRITICS button which narrows the reviews down to only the professional critics and cuts out the amateurs with a single click of the mouse. Come on, Niners, stop saying bullshit which simply isn't true. And the entire point of RT is that it's an aggregate collation of the overall consensus of all critics, and it's pretty damn good at achieving that goal.
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1 hour ago, J.T. said:
With The Town and Argo under his belt, I am thinking maybe they should've given the chair to BvS to Affleck instead of Snyder.
They should've given it to him after Gone Baby Gone alone. Affleck proved in his debut movie that he's a much smarter director than Snyder could ever dream of being.
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Yep. Fuck a buncha Namor, give me SQUIRREL GIRL.
(Sadly I'm not even kidding.)
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Haven't seen it, so I didn't even know that one had a Vietnamese protagonist. The ads were all "Another Vietnam movie from Oliver Stone, starring Tommy Lee Jones!".
It does seem odd that, for such meaty subject matter, there have been so relatively few movies made about it which didn't fall into the same basic pattern. Everything from Platoon to The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket are almost the exact same story: "Whitebread American kids join the army, go to The 'Nam, find out that this pointless war is pure hell, see a bunch of atrocities, and lose at least a little bit of their humanity." Even fuckin' UWE BOLL made a movie which fits that exact description with his bewildering opus Tunnel Rats, which seems like it was his awkwardly sincere attempt at telling a gritty serious story (but eventually turns into a demo reel of showing how many different ways you can kill people inside a claustrophobic tunnel).
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(reading IMDB) Jesus FUCKING Christ, they seriously gave this piece of shit fifteen episodes for its second season?! I can't believe the ratings for this awful, hacky, third-rate bullshit were THAT good.
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1 minute ago, Casey said:
You know the first episode of S2 was last night, right?
goddammit
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I finished Fear the Walking Dead. I immediately regret that decision. It finally goes to a situation which is legitimately fresh and interesting: the day-to-day life in a relatively safe neighborhood, when the military is keeping things more or less under control in this safe zone. That could be fascinating; I don't think I've ever seen a zombie show which took place in that setting. So of course the goddamned morons in charge of this asshattery decide to speed through that scenario in the space of a single episode, and immediately zoom into the inevitable "military dictatorship turns abusive" and "then the zombies just burst in and fucking kill everyone anyway".
This fucking show is like the world's shittiest remake of Planet Terror. I refuse to believe that Kirkman had anything but the most token involvement in writing this glum glacially-paced garbage, it doesn't have an ounce of the personality and spark which infuse the main show or even the comics. The characters are uniformly hateful, all a bunch of shallow selfish dipshits whose only notes of individuality is whether their psychosis takes the form of being a naive manchild or a sociopathic killer. Over and over again, they break the needle on the "Don't Go In There" Meter, with characters constantly wandering off alone and unarmed to go poke around in dark scary buildings as if they were TRYING to get eaten by zombies. Sadly, such eating never seems to fuckin' happen; this has got to be the lowest body count of main characters of any show which is nominally about dead things that walk. Even when the show finally gives us some action scenes in the finale, they're very poorly done, amateurish and clumsily staged and badly paced.
Worst of all is how the show's moral messages are genuinely offensive: it starts off with a bet of "all soldiers are bloodthirsty fascists", then raises with "all immigrants are war criminals who cannot leave behind the barbaric ways of their third-world homelands", then finally calls with "even the BEST human beings are perfectly willing to commit deliberate mass murder of every man, woman, and child within their line of sight if it means having even a slight chance of keeping their own family safe". Fuck you, show. Fuck you so very much. In the hopefully-unlikely event that this damn thing gets renewed, I won't be there to watch the next season.
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4 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:
After watching the recent Tony Bourdain show on Vietnam it'd be interesting to see something in the same manner done from the POV of the Vietnamese. Actually, there just needs to be any Vietnam War film done from the Vietnamese point of view period which is a historical mistake in and of itself.
...shitfire, you're right, I don't think I can even NAME a single movie about that war which takes a Vietnamese point of view. That's kinda weird, isn't it? The closest I can think of is some stuff where it took the POV of some Chinese guys who happened to be down there, like Bullet in the Head or A Better Tomorrow 3.
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So they're really going to wait THAT long on a Punisher series? That seems like a mistake. I can't imagine the larger fanboy audience clamoring for a Iron Fist solo program over the frakking Punisher. Not to mention putting Jessica Jones off for that long before her second season.
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14 minutes ago, TheVileOne said:
Whitney Frost on Agent Carter was a shitty villain.
I thought she was an interesting idea, performed well, but handled poorly in the individual plot beats. We didn't find out until MUCH too late that she was bulletproof; why didn't the Illuminati guys just fuckin' shoot her when she was slooooooooooowly vaporizing them one-by-one?
Ultron I thought was almost the opposite: a goddamn boring idea for a villain (he's just the millionth Evil Robot Out To Kill All Humans and absolutely nothing more), who was saved by just how weird and personal Spader's performance was.
And Niners, for fucksake, quit turning everything into a "you're just biased towards Marvel/against DC!" accusation. Especially when my all-time favorite comic-movie villain was LedgerJoker, who was easily better than any bad guy in any Marvel-adapted movie ever. (Including the ones at Sony and Fox.) Quit saying asinine things based on pure assumption.
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Because I've got nothing better to do with my life at the moment, I decided to tackle Fear the Walking Dead. Three episodes in: holy shit, this is just the dullest nothing-happening garbage. It's like someone said "hey, let's take the first 30 minutes of Every Zombie Outbreak Movie EVER, and then stretch that out to four fucking hours! (Also, make sure the main characters are a bunch of entitled jackasses who all hate each other and conveniently refuse to discuss important plot points.)" I can appreciate the back-to-basics idea of looking at how a zombie apocalypse first starts to break down society, if that hadn't been done SO many times in so many zombie movies from the original Dawn of the Dead onward. And FtWD adds absolutely nothing new to the formula, presenting the exact kind of cliches which Shaun of the Dead was gleefully mocking, except doing so with the straightest of faces. In a post-Max Brooks world, this tired old shit feels downright remedial. We've seen it all before, and seen it too many times, and seen it executed much much better than this.
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Yeah, it does seem to be forgotten. I've never heard anyone but Quentin Tarantino talk about it in over twenty years now. Although I wouldn't classify it as "great", it's not on the same level of Apocalypse Now or the first half of Full Metal Jacket. It's a Brian De Palma movie, which comes with its own inevitable level of bombast and a certain lack of subtlety or nuance. He's not a Spielberg who can bring a certain timeless, classical touch to dead-fucking-serious historical material. De Palma's a exploitation director at heart, a guy who's much better at crafting a thrilling Mousetrap of a sequence than he is at trying to delve into the innermost heart and soul of humanity.
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I don't remember the last time I saw a standalone video store or rental place which only did videos. The only ones still existing are all attached to other stuff, like combined with a bookstore or a used videos/music/games place.
Only a couple of decades too late, I finally got around to seeing Casualties of War for the first time. Now THERE'S a movie to ruin your whole day and just make you despair for the human race. Especially since it's all pretty closely based on a true story, and in real life the guilty soldiers actually got less jail time than they did in the movie. If nothing else, it's an acting clinic, with Sean Penn turning everything up to 11; and it provides a shockingly strong dramatic debut for both John C. Reilly and John Leguizamo in their first-ever starring roles. (Unbelievably, looking at his career, Reilly really hasn't been known primarily as a comedy actor until the last ten years; before that, stuff like Boogie Nights and Chicago were the rare comedic islands in an ocean of straight dramas.) One little flaw I do think they had was refusing to give the kidnapped Vietnamese girl ANY personality at all; she was seen purely as a symbolic character, nothing but a screaming crying babbling Other whom the movie never lets us get to know even a little bit.
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If nothing else, this is some ammo against the trolls who keep whining that nobody is going to see the new Ghostbusters movie. Even all by herself and in a movie which looked like shit and had zero preexisting fanbase, Melissa McCarthy is still a Draw with a capital D.
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Marvel hasn't been great with the villains, but they've done enough to have some decent ones. Loki and Kingpin are the obvious ones, but of course Thanos has been built up as THE unstoppable badass. And there's others; Thunderbolt Ross has been used pretty well, and Hydra and Roxxon have both been kept (relatively) strong in the multiverse of several different projects. Even random one-offs like Justin Hammer, the Collector, and Ultron were pretty memorable and entertaining in their limited parts.
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"Protected" is a great word for Dany, because she's nowhere near as badass as many people pretend. Has she even killed a single person with her own hands? No, seriously, has that ever happened? Because everyone else from Catelyn to Tyrion to Arya to that little bitch Joffrey to even freakin' Samwell have had to get their hands dirty at some point or another. Not Dany, however; she ALWAYS has someone else do it for her. Her enemies are always dispatched by one of her fanatically loyal bodyguards, or her army of perfect clone-troopers, or she simply has her dragons nuke the site from orbit.
You know who Dany is honestly most similar to? Sansa. Both are the (seeming) last scion of a formerly royal family, now fallen upon hard times. Both are in way over their heads, and are incredibly naive about the sinister machinations of the people who surround them. Both are constantly pursued by a long line of suitors, who want to use the young lady's name/power for their own ends; and there's also a whole bunch of lecherous creeps who just want to fuck the noble brains right out of these jailbait girls (both characters were supposed to be like twelve years old when the series started). The only difference between them is that Dany was handed a bunch of fireproof dragon-controlling superpowers and entire armies of rabid henchmen, while Sansa has spent the entire series locked in a large number of small rooms and hopelessly wishing for the sweet release of death that never comes.
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I think they're like most shows, they tend to shoot a surprisingly short period of time before they air. The beginning of the current season (or half-season) often airs while they're still shooting the later episodes.
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Finally catching up: the only thing that genuinely pissed me off about this season was that bullshit copout. Fuck a buncha that. Have the goddamn balls to just end on the death of a first-tier main character and not artificially delay the payoff until next year. And there's plenty of people who besides Glen who could've worked in that spot: Abraham because he's already dead before this point in the comics, Eugene because he gave Rick the instructions on how to make bullets, Michonne because she suddenly started a not-in-the-comics boink session with Rick and is thus that more emotionally important, or even Maggie just to totally rip everyone's hearts out with some "goddamn, Negan's last name must be fuckin' Lannister" level of coldest-shit-we've-ever-seen-in-our-life.
But ending in a Who Shot Mr. Burns? cliffhanger was really insulting, it felt like the most cynically manipulative thing they could've possibly done. That's not the type of cliffhanger this show usually uses as a season finale, which tends to be a What Happens Next? sort of teaser for the next season. I mean, even season 4 at least showed them ARRIVING at Terminus and what happened there, rather than fading to black as they walk through the front door.
Other than that, I didn't really have any problems with this season. Well, I thought they could've gotten a lot more mileage out of poor Rookie Doctor Lady than they did, she seemed like way too interesting a character to cut down that quickly. But aside from THAT and the usual "we didn't see the body" fake-kills they do every single season, everything was pretty solid here. I liked them having to deal with another mega-swarm, and deciding to do things differently than they had in the past when they pretty much just ran away. I actually enjoyed the subplot with the Wolves, it was a nice inclusion of something new which wasn't in the comics; and the whole "everything goes to hell in the time it took Carol's cookies to bake" sequence was excellently handled in its outta-fuckin-nowhere brutality. The finale's buildup to Negan's appearance was downright brilliantly done, with every new roadblock just driving a stake deeper and deeper into the heart of Rick's confidence, until at the end he's literally shivering in fear. And although I must mourn the fact that the radiant and amazing Alicia Witt didn't last beyond a single episode, she fucking killed it in said episode, a really awesome demo reel of that sadly underutilized actress's formidable talents. So I do think the overall positives far outweigh the negatives, and don't see at all the same level of sucking which is having other people making these grand "I'm done with this show" proclamations. If THAT'S what it takes you to be done with a show, y'all never would've lasted past the first season of Lost or True Blood or various other shows which constantly did cliffhangers just like this one.
Joan "Chyna" Laurer (1970-2016)
in The PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
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How about splitting the difference with "while I did thoroughly enjoy that second Playboy feature where she had a buncha slavegirls, we should also mention that she was an underrated worker and a lot of her matches have aged shockingly well"? Seriously, go back and rewatch the stuff she was doing with Jarrett and Jericho and Guerrero, she filled that role really well and for a time was probably the third-most over performer on the whole roster, only behind Rock and Austin.