Jingus
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Posts posted by Jingus
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His rookie run from Carrie to Blow Out was mostly good stuff too. Let's not oversell the shittiness of the guy's career to the point of ignoring the legit body of quality work that he's accomplished, Travolta's been in far too many damn good movies to just dismiss as some talentless hack.
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On the "is Stark right?" thing, it's important to remember one thing: nearly ALL of Tony's enemies were originally created by Tony himself. It was his technology that was stolen by Stane and Vanko, his bahavior that led to Hammer's shenanigans, his snubbing of Killian which directly caused the whole "Mandarin" deal, his weapons which compelled Wanda and Pietro to volunteer for mad science experiments, and oh yeah he single-handedly created the entire Ultron genocide in his LAST attempt at controlling all the super-problems in the world.
Meanwhile, who else on the pro-registration side in a governmental capacity has ever done any good? Thunderbolt Ross has never done anything but make things worse. SHIELD caused at least as many problems as it solved. And let's not forget how easily THEIR previous attempt at controlling all the super-problems in the world was so thoroughly corrupted and sabotaged.
Meanwhiler... when has Cap ever been disastrously wrong? He never causes problems, he only fixes all the disasters which came from other people's fuckups. He's the guy whose entire schtick is that he's always right, that he's the most ethical and philosophically wise person in the entire MCU. The only time I can remember when he had a hand in a complete FUBAR situation was when Loki tricked them into his plan to raid the Helicarrier... and that was entirely caused by Rogers listening to Stark and letting others give the orders instead of taking charge himself.
And yeah, Bucky's a former enemy... AND THEY READILY ACCEPT FORMER ENEMIES ALL THE TIME. Literally every single one of these heroes have been designated "the bad guy" by the authority at some point or another. Iron Man was once an illegal criminal. Thor was once an illegal criminal. The Hulk was nothing BUT an illegal criminal, constantly hunted by the government. Ant-Man is a convicted felon. Captain America went AWOL at least a couple different times. Hawkeye got mind-controlled (much like Bucky) and turned evil for a while. Black Widow was a freakin' Soviet agent. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were both Hydra agents. Vision was basically Ultron's clone/son. Hell, Thor even decided to trust Loki again the last time they showed up. And Nick Fury constantly lies to absolutely everyone about everything at all times, yet they still let him tag along and listen to what he says. Compared to all that, how does Bucky (who was, remember, a loyal American soldier back before he got brainwashed) somehow qualify as being completely out of the question for rehabilitation?
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Look upon his volcano set from You Only Live Twice, ye mighty, and despair!
That ain't a model. Those people aren't dolls. There's no compositing, no matte painting, and of course no CGI. That entire thing is real.
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Upon finishing the first season of Black Mirror: good god almighty, has there ever been any show which had such a VAST dropoff in quality from the pilot to the subsequent episodes? The first episode (yeah, the one about the pig) was some of the most brilliant, fearless, transgressive television I've ever seen. It took the most absurd situation imaginable, and made it completely realistic and let us utterly empathize with everyone involved. It was a masterpiece of storytelling, period. But what the FUCK happened with episodes 2 and 3?! Generic future-dystopian bullshit about the very worst kind of people, either the world's weakest and most passive victims or its loudest and most obnoxious assholes; and, spoiler, the assholes win. What a bunch of horrifically disappointing navel-gazing nonsense, it's like the dynamite first episode isn't even from the same show as the other two. Should I even bother watching the second season, or is it just more of the same?
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No no no, that's Hedley.
THIS is Hedy:
She was an Austrian Jewish actress who became notorious for doing nude scenes and having the first ever on-screen orgasm in a legit non-pornographic film, the European arthouse hit Ecstasy, way back in 1933 (and at the ripe old age of 18). She married one of the wealthiest industrial magnates in all of Europe, but eventually found him to be an abusive, controlling man; she fled him (and the Nazis) and was eventually re-discovered by Louis B. Mayer and put to work in Hollywood. She's probably best known for playing the titular temptress in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah.
Meanwhile, she found the life of being a movie star to be so fucking banal and boring that she turned to scientific studies just to have something to keep her occupied. She co-invented the concept of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum, an innovation which allows a single broadcast to constantly change frequencies while maintaining the coherence of the signal. She'd intended this to be used on WW2-era torpedoes in order to avoid enemy jamming of their targeting radar, but the idea proved to be so far ahead of its time that it wasn't adopted for military use until twenty years later. Today, it's still used in practically all wireless technology and every cell phone in the world.
And despite brains like that, when she applied for membership in the National Inventors Council? They turned her down flat. Said her time would be better spent acting as a celebrity mascot to sell war bonds, and sent her on tour. So yeah, not only did TV's Whitney Frost completely rip off Lamarr's remarkable life, but so did the MCU's Captain America.
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Having just marathoned through the second season of Agent Carter: I'll miss it too, although it's a bit harder to lament when so much of the show felt so frustrating. Except for Jarvis and Howard, pretty much all of Peggy's male colleagues were either passive simpering love interests or conniving macho sociopaths. That's a combination which gets really fucking old in a real fucking hurry. Character motivations turned on a dime, people switching wildly back and forth between face and heel with no rhyme or reason, with people making murderous betrayals in one episode and being immediately forgiven in the next. "This gangster is such an evil piece of shit that he'll happily murder his own henchmen on a moment's whim... but it turns out he's buddies with Howard, so we should forgive him" and other horseshit like that was just awful.
And while I liked the idea of Whitney Frost (basically, "what if Hedy Lamarr was a supervillain?") and appreciated the go-big-or-go-home enthusiasm of Not Christina Applegate who played her, TVO was on the money about her never doing anything. She was like Adam in season four of Buffy, an incredibly powerful enemy who rarely ever used their power, and a brilliant intellect who frequently acted like a total idiot.
And HOW MANY TIMES does Peggy have to save the entire fucking world before ANYONE she works for ever believes a single word that she says?
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I've mostly been reading a bunch of books about wars and murderers. It's been... depressing.
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I'd love to hear some studio executive explain why this isn't a valid option. Especially after Simmons now has more street cred than ever with his Oscar win. Especially especially considering there's precedent in a major successful action franchise, with the Bond films keeping Judi Dench after the reboot.Or, ya know, just cast J.K. Simmons again.
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Weird, I also thought that's what she said. But go back and listen again, she actually says "the power of Patty compels you!" (Jones's character is named Patty) and then I became a sad panda because that's a much less funny line.By "THE POWER OF PAIN COMPELS YOU!" I was all in.
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To reinforce my earlier point about the Ghostbusters trailer being a poorly made teaser, as opposed to the "garbage in, garbage out" assumption many people are having about the entire movie: just watch this fan-edited recut of the teaser and see how much better the exact same footage can look when presented in a different manner.
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I have a hard time listening when he goes all melancholy and starts monologuing about how terrible all the old-timers are doing nowadays. Terry Funk even called him on it: "Well goddammit Ric, do you have any good news?!"
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I found myself utterly unable to care about the "Steve is old now" storyline. Some of his writers still had him kicking people's asses anyway, despite now being an elderly man with zero superpowers, which is a nice way to make the whole thing feel completely meaningless.
And the comics industry nowadays is so bad with their This Will Change Things Forever (but it'll be completely forgotten within two years) retcons that, as soon as I heard about Rogers aging, my very first thought was "huh, how long will they stretch this out before taking it all back and making him young again?". It's especially galling with this specific character, considering that Cap's "death" somehow managed to blatantly rip off the details of BOTH Superman and Batman's fake death storylines.
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I blame it more on Hollywood than on her. How many tasteful, intelligent comedies does anyone ever make starring a fat chick? Or a fat ANYONE really, but "fatty go boom" humor does seem to be even more obnoxiously prevalent when it's a female comic lead.
I'd just assume that anyone who can't correctly write the phrase "just as soon" is someone whose intellectual opinions are likely to contain a dearth of merit. And he can't blame it on Autocorrect, that would've flagged "un quote" as being improperly written.Sure enough, his post on Facebook:
I'd just assume rather watch a bunch of PeTA's animal slaughterhouse videos than watch the new quote un quote "Ghostbusters" trailer.
And on Facebook, I've seen countless fucktons of people who violently object to the whole "they're all girls" aspect of it in a really disgustingly misogynistic manner. It ain't just the "all remakes suck!" crowd (although they're out in full force too), but a disturbing quantity of guys and even some gals who seem to regard the mere concept of a gender-swapped reboot as being morally offensive. Or even aesthetically offensive, I couldn't begin to guess how many "LOL those women are ugly" jokes I've seen written about McCarthy and Jones.
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Adam Green did pretty much exactly that with Digging Up the Marrow. It's a mockumentary from the humans' point of view, starring Ray Wise. It was... okay.Although I wasn't a fan of the movie itself, I loved the concept of Nightbreed and I'd love to see a remake.
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Upon first learning that Sonny fucking Chiba starred in a Golgo fucking 13 movie back in the 70s, my first response was "why the fuck haven't I heard about this before?!" Unfortunately, having now watched Golgo 13: The Kowloon Assignment, I know the answer. It's just not very good.
It tries to be a jack of all genres, master of none. Is this a "police chase a criminal" procedural in the style of Le Samourai? Is it a whiz-bang high-tech spy movie? Is it a sleazy brutal Sonny-Chiba-in-the-70s affair which makes you want to take the hottest of disinfecting showers afterwards? The sad conclusion I came to is that the movie tries to be all of the above, but in a rather half-hearted manner. The movie actually spends more time focusing on the police who are trying to catch super-assassin Duke Togo than on the man himself, to the point where Golgo 13 almost feels like a special guest star in his own damn franchise.
It doesn't help that the movie's got a lot of sloppy fight choreography, with too many obviously-whiffed airballs among the various strikes thrown. And the action in general feels parsimonious and perfunctory; it's clearly supposed to be fun movie carnage, but it's doled out in awfully small portions. The 70s Sleaze Factor also feels begrudgingly tacked-on; there's a little bit of bloodshed and a tiny amount of the usual misogyny you'd expect in this time/place/genre, but not much. (The standard-issue "thuggish hero rescues a prostitute and acquires her as a trophy girlfriend" subplot makes a cameo here, but the movie seems to literally forget about her after a certain point.) If you edited out a couple of headshots and all ten seconds of nudity, this would easily get a PG-13 rating today. Add on some bad dubbing (but not bad enough to be funny) and a total lack of colorful characters besides Togo himself, and it's sadly easy to see why nobody ever mentions the one time that Sonny fucking Chiba played Golgo fucking 13.
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Yarp.so let's say March 27th.
Does this sound like a fair date for everyone?
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Don't ya just hate it when you're watching an otherwise tolerable movie, but there's this One Damn Thing that's driving you crazy? It's not a big thing. Not a major part of the film. In fact, it's a small thing, which happens and then is done with in mere seconds. But that One Damn Thing is almost enough to drive you away from the movie entirely.
Welcome to me watching The Barbarians. Considering that this is an Italian sword-and-sandal released in 1987 (long after the fad had peaked), starring a couple of bodybuilding non-actors, while being produced by Golan-Globus and being directed by Ruggero Deodato... I mean, one must be forgiven that assuming the movie would have a large chance of sucking very hard indeed. But it's surprisingly not a bad movie at all; it's more about comradeship and familial love than it is about hacking people up with broadswords, and despite some terrible punchlines the film actually manages to have a pretty good sense of humor. There's a tongue-in-cheek feeling of "yeah, we know EXACTLY what this is" which is contagiously amusing. Even the infamous Barbarian Brothers, despite being nobody's idea of a pair of great thespians, manage to hold their own.
But that One Damn Thing! You see, despite the Barbarian Brothers looking completely identical, the movie oddly tries to give them kinda different personalities. Let us call them "the Leonardo" and "the Michaelangelo". And, for some fucking reason, the Michaelangelo has an unusual catchphrase: when especially amused or upset, he starts braying like a donkey. LOUDLY. And it is the worst sound I have ever heard in my life. It's like some drunken fratboy has this one thing he does at parties which makes his buddies laugh, and he won't stop doing it. Although Barbarian #2 has only made this sound maybe three or four times in the entire movie, I live in constant, cringing, paranoid terror that he might do it again at any moment and that blood might begin spurting out of my ears. For the love of God, man, STOP DOING THAT!
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I never realized it either.
"William, there's a Nazi here to see you!"
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Ah, okay. Yeah, it's still stupid, but at least it lowers the level of stupidity from an 8 to about a 4 on the Tommy Wiseau Scale. This one sounds more like some Werner Herzog self-challenge austerity: "film an entire documentary about ancient cave paintings with 3D cameras... which take forever to set up for every individual shot... and we're doing so inside a cave where we're only allowed to shoot for three hours per day".
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I also went back and listened to some of them. Fuckin' terrible. Did the polar opposite of aging well, especially "License to Kill" being some easy-listening bullshit.
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Spotlight joins an exclusive yet dubious club: Least-Winningest Best Pictures. Not since 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth has the Best Picture only managed to win just one other award. EDIT: and holy shit, I forgot it was made by the same director whose previous film was The Cobbler, aka The Worst Film Ever Made By Adam Sandler.
Nah, I actually went back and sampled that one and "Die Another Day" to see if my memory was messing with me. It wasn't. "The Writing's On the Wall" is the single worst Bond theme song since the Timothy Dalton era. It's absolutely incomprehensible that this managed to win, while "You Know My Name" wasn't even nominated in a year which was equally weak for classic soundtrack tunes.Well, since that Alicia Keyes/Jack White disaster at least.
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"The Writing's On the Wall"? Fucking seriously? Admittedly the whole category was pretty much a total write-off this year, but still, that's the WORST Bond theme song in several long years.
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I know that, on this board, I am being incredibly late to hitch a ride on this particular movie's bandwagon. But holy shit, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is just the greatest thing ever. It's like a 15-year-old Stephen Chow got hopped up on a marathon of 1970s prison exploitation flicks and Sonny Chiba karate movies, and decided to make a fanciful X-rated mashup of all of the above, with the child who writes Axe Cop providing the script. It is fucking awesome, to the point where the movie's ridiculous ending (one of those "why didn't the hero just do that at the START of the movie, if he was capable of that the entire time!" deus ex machinae) got me to laugh with it rather than laugh at it. Even the production design is oddly effective, creating a sort of environment which gives the odd feeling of being slightly futuristic despite not actually showing a single overt sci-fi-ish element.
The weird thing is, I'm not much of a fan of MODERN Asian splatter films of the past dozen years or so. More often than not, they just come off as sadistic and gratuitous and gross (looking at you, Machine Girl!). But the violence in Riki-Oh is so goddamn goofy, like watching a live-action version of Itchy & Scratchy. And it probably helps that the gore effects are so obviously phony-looking too, it adds a sense of humor to the proceedings which might be lacking with more grimly realistic blood and guts.
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It took me all of five minutes to decide The Grandmaster wasn't for me and turn it right the fuck off. This is one of my least favorite ways to film a fistfight: everything is so stylized, so precious, oh-so-carefully lit and with SO much goddamn slow motion. The camera angles are smacking you in the face with how Innovative~! they are. "Anyone can film a spinkick, but only WE can put the camera thirty feet up in the air, pointed straight down at the actor forming a glorious Yin-Yang symbol with the curvature of his body, and of course it's all in extreme slow-motion and in a heavy rainstorm!" Fuck you. Just film the goddamn fight and let us watch your stuntmen doing cool moves that regular people can't do. I've come to have very little patience with this House of Flying Daggers style of bullshit.
Frozen: no, not THAT one, the other one. The one with the people trapped on a ski lift. Probably won't make my list; which is a shame, because it feels like something which SHOULD make my list. It's made by Adam Green, a fellow whose work I'm usually quite fond of; and it was filmed under appallingly rigorous conditions. There's no studio set, no greenscreen; those actors were legitimately sitting on a real goddamn ski lift in a real goddamn winter, fifty real goddamn feet in the air above a real goddamn mountain. The whole thing was filmed through long zoom lenses, with the director and DP sitting in the next cable-car on the line. The cinematography is beautifully stark, the concept is horribly bleak, and even the overachieving score feels like it's something more suited to an Oscarbait period piece rather than a grimy little horror flick. It's told with absolute sincerity, and is basically the answer to the question "what would Open Water be like if it didn't suck?"
So it pains me that the overall results left me cold. (Mwa ha ha C Wut I Did Thar!) The movie doesn't really make any mistakes per se; well, aside from the wolves, anyway. They acted like generic horror-movie-monsters, you could've replaced them with acid-spitting alien xenomorphs or jungle cannibals or anything else and their scenes would've still happened pretty identically. Really, the concept itself is terrifying enough without them; much like when a gigantic deformed necrophiliac serial-killer suddenly invades the house in Gerald's Game, it's a feeling of "oh, come ON, you're trying too fuckin' hard". The movie could've done entirely without the wolves (what the hell is a feral pack doing on a heavily-populated commercial ski slope, anyway?) or at least used them better.
But really, it comes down to the characters. While they're not as awful as the jackasses in the aforementioned Open Water (who made me actively cheer for the sharks), it's hard to identify with these bastards. They're utterly self-entitled Ugly American Tourists of the highest order, who never would've even gotten into this trap in the first place if they hadn't REPEATEDLY broken the rules and insisted on going where they knew damn well they shouldn't go. (And really, you're gonna cast the guy best known for playing Bobby ICEMAN Drake as one of the lead heroes in your snow-based movie called Frozen?!) The only time I was entirely on their side was during the girl's monologue about her dog, and honestly it made me care more about the dog than it made me care about the girl. And when the horrifically gory parts inevitably happened, it just left me more bummed out and feeling queasy in general than feeling bad about these specific individuals in this specific situation.
Although, I will say one thing: fuck all the haters who claim "well, I would've just Done This and gotten down easily!". Horseshit. There's no fucking way that any average joe could've just magically gotten off that chair without any problems. Y'all are NOT David Blaine, Spider-man, or any of the three people who've ever won Ninja Warrior. Even the simple act of climbing the cable was shown to be nearly impossible, and they had absolutely zero special equipment to help them with any of that, and they weren't goddamn MacGyver who could taken his underwear and his wallet and somehow made a bungee cord.
[TV] MARCH 2016 DISCUSSION THREAD
in MOVIES & TV
Posted
Ditto. I fully expected it to get cancelled; I mean, it's pretty much the lowest-rated show on the CW, even though it deserves the polar opposite of that. I'm still just stunned that the "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" chick has an entire broadcast TV show devoted to doing her bizarre geek-fueled metanarrative musical numbers about crippling neurosis and chronic personality disorders. I think I've watched "I'm The Villain In My Own Story" from the last episode maybe a dozen times over now, it's just absolutely brilliant and hilarious shit.
Two long decades after it kick-started the entire HBO one-hour-drama genre, I'm watching Oz for the first time. It's pretty damn good, exceptionally well acted, and surprisingly not-wholly-nihilistic for a gritty cable show about maximum security prison. But the most interesting part is just watching HBO's original dramatic prototype trying to figure out the whole tone and style of storytelling which would come to dominate the hour-long programs on that network. Oz is a bit goofier and more flamboyantly melodramatic than the later dramas would be; all those segments where Harold Perrineau is narrating the show from his weird spinning glass cube are certainly not the type of thing you'd come to expect from HBO, it's more like a 90s indy film combined with off-off-Broadway performance art. And holy shit, but J.K. Simmons is the man on this show. He plays the most despicable character in the entire cast, but does it with such effortless and creepy charm that he's immediately the head-and-shoulders-above standout in a really competitive ensemble cast.