Controversial movie/TV opinions

[Kuetsar]

For me it depends on the movie. Marvel movies and LOTR/Hobbit? They could make it 4 hours and I'd love it. On the other hand, based on the last batman movie(and TDK to a certain extent), they could easily chop 30-45 minutes of a chris nolan movie and I wouldn't even notice. . .

[Jingus]

For me it depends on the movie. Marvel movies and LOTR/Hobbit? They could make it 4 hours and I'd love it. On the other hand, based on the last batman movie(and TDK to a certain extent), they could easily chop 30-45 minutes of a chris nolan movie and I wouldn't even notice. . .

Exactly.  Laurence of Arabia and Das Boot never felt like they could stand to lose a single frame.  But you watch Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, and you realize why even the greatest writer's greatest play doesn't NEED to be spoken uncut.  

[Niners Fan in CT]

I didn't mind Scarface being three hours because I'm a fan of the 80's Miami coke scene... I love the clothes, I love the music and I get a kick out of Pacino going to war with South American drug dealers big and small.

 

Is that so wrong?

[Elsalvajeloco]

As a black person, I am not allowed to hate Scarface.

 

But I basically view Scarface in the same light as Carlito's Way. Pacino was hacky in both, but it's something about the goofiness in those films that is endearing to me. Like the scene with Viggo in the wheelchair trying to be Hispanic is one of the funniest things ever. If you can't laugh at that, you have no soul in my eyes. With something like the remake/prequel of Carlito's Way (one of the worst movies of all time) and Savages, they're trying to be dead fucking serious. Salma Hayek was showing her titties in bad B movies at one point and that was all she was known for. She ain't fucking Griselda Blanco reincarnated. But Oliver Stone believes she is.

 

Since ID4 was brought up, someone needs to round up Roland Emmerich, Oliver Stone, and Michael Mann and take them back to the 90s where their hack premises and substandard scripts were tolerated.

[Cliff Hanger]

I think I actually prefer Justice League Unlimited to Batman: The Animated Series. Some of that is probably just a feeling that superhero stories benefit from serialization that BTAS was denied, part of it is a feeling that the sprawling cast makes the whole thing more immersive than BTAS (which only really has two chars who are in nearly every ep, Bruce and Alfred).

[Niners Fan in CT]

Roland Emmerich, Oliver Stone, and Michael Mann and take them back to the 90s where their hack premises and substandard scripts were tolerated.

 

Heat is still amazing though.

[odessasteps]

I think I actually prefer Justice League Unlimited to Batman: The Animated Series. Some of that is probably just a feeling that superhero stories benefit from serialization that BTAS was denied, part of it is a feeling that the sprawling cast makes the whole thing more immersive than BTAS (which only really has two chars who are in nearly every ep, Bruce and Alfred).

jLU also has the benefit of Timm/Dini/... making shows for 10+ years to evolve their craft and learn from missteps made with BTAS and STAS.

[Execproducer]

Personally, I love hacky Pacino. I love Pacino doing Shakespeare. Sea of Love, Donnie Brasco, Devil's Advocate? What is not to love? He is one of those balls out performers that can make pretty much anything watchable.

[Cliff Hanger]

I feel it's really weird to lump those 3 directors together. Emmerich is an unabashed lowest-common-denominator guy, Stone and Mann try to make commercial art (for lack of a better description) but have very different definitions of what that entails. I think I have enjoyed MANHUNTER and HEAT more than anything by Stone; Emmerich doesn't feel like he belongs in the same conversation as the other two.

[Elsalvajeloco]

I feel it's really weird to lump those 3 directors together. Emmerich is an unabashed lowest-common-denominator guy, Stone and Mann try to make commercial art (for lack of a better description) but have very different definitions of what that entails. I think I have enjoyed MANHUNTER and HEAT more than anything by Stone; Emmerich doesn't feel like he belongs in the same conversation as the other two.

 

Emmerich, before he went back to end-of-world flicks, showed he could make a good film if you had the performances. Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger carried The Patriot like Ric Flair carried someone to a four star match in the 80s. The cannonball to the head is up there with the guy's head coming apart at the beginning of Glory.

 

Mann obviously didn't have preciptious drop like Stone, but it has clearly unraveled now. Manhunter era Michael Mann would made something like Public Enemies work just because it should work. It felt like he was trying to remake Heat but with the 1930s flare. In the 90s, he would have had a certain leeway just because of the cast and his critical acclaim rep. In 2009, it was just a movie that happened.

[Jingus]

What was wrong with Public Enemies?  I mean, aside from the liberties taken with actual events.  I thought that movie was pretty goddamned amazing.  It seems to be popular to hate Johnny Depp now (which I really don't understand) but this was a great performance out of him, completely different from his usual scenery-chewing.  It's a subtle, restrained portrait of a shallow man.  The cinematography was beautiful, the music was awesome, the gunfights were MICHAEL MANN GUNFIGHTS~!, and it had an amazing cast (Marion Cotilliard! Lili Taylor! Stephen Lang!  Don motherfucking Frye!  Channing Tatum getting shot dead in thirty seconds of screentime!).  A lot of really snappy dialogue, too.  What's not to like?  It seems like everyone overlooked this movie, or just barely glanced at all its awesome shining merits and went "...meh".  

 

I like Carlito's Way better than Scarface, actually; and it works as a spiritual sequel.  Imagine if Tony Montana had been imprisoned instead of dying, and had been smart enough to feel bad for all the shit he'd done.  Never saw the prequel, because it's a fucking prequel and I'm sick and fucking tired of prequels.  

[Elsalvajeloco]

What was wrong with Public Enemies?  I mean, aside from the liberties taken with actual events.  I thought that movie was pretty goddamned amazing.  It seems to be popular to hate Johnny Depp now (which I really don't understand) but this was a great performance out of him, completely different from his usual scenery-chewing.  It's a subtle, restrained portrait of a shallow man.  The cinematography was beautiful, the music was awesome, the gunfights were MICHAEL MANN GUNFIGHTS~!, and it had an amazing cast (Marion Cotilliard! Lili Taylor! Stephen Lang!  Don motherfucking Frye!  Channing Tatum getting shot dead in thirty seconds of screentime!).  A lot of really snappy dialogue, too.  What's not to like?  It seems like everyone overlooked this movie, or just barely glanced at all its awesome shining merits and went "...meh".  

 

I don't hate Johnny Depp at all. Sleepwalks through most of his non-makeup performances now, but I don't hate him. But Public Enemies felt like a bunch of great actors playing dress up in a shoot up em film. Stephen Graham was awesome, but playing an old timey gangster is kinda what he does. It felt more like Gangster Squad than say...err.... Road to Perdition. You probably don't even have to go that far up the ladder. If you had a gun to my head now and forced me to choose between Public Enemies and let's say Hoodlum, I choose Hoodlum every fucking day of the week. Not even a contest for me. Larry Fishburne and Tim Roth smoked it. They had way more on screen chemistry than Depp and Bale. Shit, Bale didn't have a quarter of the chemistry Depp had with a far-from-his-prime Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco. It didn't gel like I expected it to when the news of the casting came out some years back. I was so fucking amped for that.

[Brian Fowler]

B:TAS is definitely better artistically than JLU, but the latter is just so great if you're a lifelong DC fan like me.

Did I really see someone praise The Patriot?

[Elsalvajeloco]

Want to fight about it?

[Brian Fowler]

No... I can't imagine anyone caring enough about that movie to fight over it.

[Elsalvajeloco]

Wimp!

[Brian Fowler]

Anyway, now that I finally have some time, The Incredible Hulk and why I dislike it:

 

The stakes of the story are so very rote, by the numbers, "this got old in the comics before I was born" shit of "Bruce looks for a cure."  Liv Tyler is absolutely unconvincing as Betty.  Ed Norton (an actor I generally love) made basically every wrong choice possible in how he played Bruce Banner.  I never once got a sense that this was a guy fighting to contain his emotions, or that had a dangerous temper.  Compared to the repressing that Bana brought to the role (possibly because he lacks the ability to emote, I admit) or the joking to cover the turmoil approach of Ruffalo, I just got...  nothing from Norton.

 

Here I pause for some praise:  Tim Roth was incredible, and the scene where he, after getting the (presumably) Super Soldier Serum (and I love that they've never spelled it out, yet First Avenger explains what happened anyway) tries to go one on one with Hulk is spectacular.  Herein ends the praise.

 

I want to criticize the pacing of the movie, except it doesn't have a pace.  It just kinda meanders along.  I know a LOT of people find Lee's Hulk boring, but this film actively drives me out of the picture.  It just has the most pedestrian lighting, editing, transitions, script...  It just kind of happens for two hours, with absolutely no forward momentum whatsoever.  Lee's film had so much personality, so much ambition, so much life to it.  This one's ambition seemed to be "the most generic superhero film ever made."  Which, to be fair, if that was it's ambition, it hit a grand slam.

 

It's not even bad in a fun terrible way, like Spirit of Vengeance.  Or in a completely inept way that is easy to mock like Catwoman.  It's just terribly generic and off-the-rack and fuck it forever.

 

As for why AvP is better than AvP:R no, strike that, we can't praise it that way.  Why AvP:R is somehow, someway, even worse than AVP.

 

Two things:  First, AvP had an absolutely terrible premise that even the best possible version of it would have sucked.  AvP:R had a decent premise, and completely squandered it.  That's much more infuriating.

 

Second, and much more importantly, AvP:R is visually incoherent due to the literal worst lighting I have ever seen in a movie.  It's not dark in an atmospheric way.  It's dark in a "we hired a first year film student to shoot it, but he got sick and his roommate, who is a philosophy* major came in instead" kind of way.  There is so much where I literally cannot tell what is happening that drags it down.  I honestly cannot figure out how it even got released.  One look at the dailies should have had the cinematographer and director both shit-canned and replaced.  Fox should be fucking embarrassed they let such a poorly made film out the door.  So, yeah, if AvP:R had been made with a modicum of talent, it might have wound up better than AvP but it wasn't, and it isn't.

[Reed]

I didn't mind Scarface being three hours because I'm a fan of the 80's Miami coke scene... I love the clothes, I love the music and I get a kick out of Pacino going to war with South American drug dealers big and small.

 

Is that so wrong?

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with seeing it as a fun movie. I mean, Pacino going crazy on South American drug dealers is never not going to be entertaining.

 

But it is held up as this great, classic film, when it's really just a cartoon that borders on self-parody at points.

[JRGoldman]

I was working at a CD/Game Exchange on the East Side of Cleveland during a time when Scarface was out of print on DVD. Whenever someone would trade in a copy, it would sell again in less than 24 hours for more than $100. You could get $50 easy out of the VHS. When there was a DVD rerelease, it was like Christmas. We got in close to 120 copies for that first day, and they didn't last till 3 PM. While I like Scarface (I don't love it), I think people who maybe grew up in a culturally different area don't quite grasp it's importance and presence as a rite of passage and cultural touchstone. I think also it's a story that has aged relatively poorly. We have consistently gotten better and better drug epic/mafia films and shows that have shown protagonists that are clear sociopaths but also have redeeming qualities or at least shades of gray. As Jingus pointed out, Tony doesn't really have that, and yet we are supposed to like him anyway. Call it the Tony Soprano effect. I think when you watch Scarface now, especially if you didn't see it first during more formative years, it's easy to judge it as a strictly worse version of something we routinely get now, instead of an 80s period piece.

[Jingus]

Anyway, now that I finally have some time, The Incredible Hulk and why I dislike it:

 

The stakes of the story are so very rote, by the numbers, "this got old in the comics before I was born" shit of "Bruce looks for a cure."  Liv Tyler is absolutely unconvincing as Betty.  Ed Norton (an actor I generally love) made basically every wrong choice possible in how he played Bruce Banner.  I never once got a sense that this was a guy fighting to contain his emotions, or that had a dangerous temper.  Compared to the repressing that Bana brought to the role (possibly because he lacks the ability to emote, I admit) or the joking to cover the turmoil approach of Ruffalo, I just got...  nothing from Norton.

 

Here I pause for some praise:  Tim Roth was incredible, and the scene where he, after getting the (presumably) Super Soldier Serum (and I love that they've never spelled it out, yet First Avenger explains what happened anyway) tries to go one on one with Hulk is spectacular.  Herein ends the praise.

 

I want to criticize the pacing of the movie, except it doesn't have a pace.  It just kinda meanders along.  I know a LOT of people find Lee's Hulk boring, but this film actively drives me out of the picture.  It just has the most pedestrian lighting, editing, transitions, script...  It just kind of happens for two hours, with absolutely no forward momentum whatsoever.  Lee's film had so much personality, so much ambition, so much life to it.  This one's ambition seemed to be "the most generic superhero film ever made."  Which, to be fair, if that was it's ambition, it hit a grand slam.

 

It's not even bad in a fun terrible way, like Spirit of Vengeance.  Or in a completely inept way that is easy to mock like Catwoman.  It's just terribly generic and off-the-rack and fuck it forever.

So basically they weren't trying hard enough for you?  Oh well, I still liked it (of course, I'm still a big fan of The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, so my tastes are admittedly wacky).  But I don't see how you can watch the scene where Rickson fuckin' Gracie is teaching Bruce some meditation techniques and say that Norton gave you nothing.  And I said before that Liv Tyler is a step down from Jennifer Connelly, but what specifically did she do wrong in the part?  This isn't like some "Tara Reid is a brainy scientist with glasses in Alone in the Dark" level of bad acting going on here, but you phrase it as if that were the case.  And, I do agree with every single word you said about Tim Roth.  Lee's film had ambition, sure, but I think it failed said ambition.  

 

As for why AvP is better than AvP:R no, strike that, we can't praise it that way.  Why AvP:R is somehow, someway, even worse than AVP.

 

Two things:  First, AvP had an absolutely terrible premise that even the best possible version of it would have sucked.  AvP:R had a decent premise, and completely squandered it.  That's much more infuriating.

 

Second, and much more importantly, AvP:R is visually incoherent due to the literal worst lighting I have ever seen in a movie.  It's not dark in an atmospheric way.  It's dark in a "we hired a first year film student to shoot it, but he got sick and his roommate, who is a philosophy* major came in instead" kind of way.  There is so much where I literally cannot tell what is happening that drags it down.  I honestly cannot figure out how it even got released.  One look at the dailies should have had the cinematographer and director both shit-canned and replaced.  Fox should be fucking embarrassed they let such a poorly made film out the door.  So, yeah, if AvP:R had been made with a modicum of talent, it might have wound up better than AvP but it wasn't, and it isn't.

You've gotta get over the bad lighting, man.  Yes, it sucks that they did it that way.  Try to meet the movie halfway: jigger the settings on your TV to make it as bright as possible.  There's a lot of really good content which was unfortunately, literally overshadowed by the shitty cinematography.  

 

In both cases, it sounds like you came in expecting a miracle-perfect movie.  Shit happens.  Can't we be happy with what we got?  I'd rather have those movies than NOT have them ever been made in the first place, certainly.  Fallible humans are gonna fuck some shit up sometimes.  

[Brian Fowler]

Trust me, I had the brightness all the way up. Still couldn't figure out what was happening.

I definitely did not expect them to be perfect. But entertaining or interesting or not terrible would have been nice.

And I'll grant Liv Tyler want quite Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist level bad, but she wasn't much above it. I'm pretty resolutely not a fan of her's though.

[Niners Fan in CT]

I don't get that criticism of Scarface. I don't think Tony needs to have redeeming qualities. It works for Breaking Bad but most drug dealers are going to be pieces of shit. Does that make for an interesting story? I don't know.. I think it's fine because again I'm not expecting him to have a warm and fuzzy side. He's a fucking asshole going to war with other assholes over drugs and money. Pretty realistic take. It's kind of the same complaint people have had about Game of Thrones and yet we LEARN to love all of these assholes. Charles Dance being the perfect example of this.

[driver]

Red Heat is the hidden gem in Arnie's filmography and it is Jim Belushi's "Citizen Kane". Also "Dead Heat" deserves more love because Joe Piscopo was never better and Treat Williams was only better in "Prince Of The City" and "Things To Do In Denver...".

[Reed]

I don't get that criticism of Scarface. I don't think Tony needs to have redeeming qualities. It works for Breaking Bad but most drug dealers are going to be pieces of shit. Does that make for an interesting story? I don't know.. I think it's fine because again I'm not expecting him to have a warm and fuzzy side. He's a fucking asshole going to war with other assholes over drugs and money. Pretty realistic take. It's kind of the same complaint people have had about Game of Thrones and yet we LEARN to love all of these assholes. Charles Dance being the perfect example of this.

 

I don't think it's so much him being an irredeemable asshole, it's how over-the-top and melodramatic it comes off, especially the ending. Which, while iconic, is also pretty damn preposterous. It's a cheesy attempt to be Shakespearean, IMO.

 

Interestingly, supposedly when David Chase was writing The Sopranos finale, the last thing he wanted to do was the Scarface ending (a big bloodbath where everyone gets murdered) and many have seen that show's final scene as his responsive to its cartoonishness.

 

Regardless of what you think of the ending Chase turned out, I get where he was coming from. Would Tony Soprano going out (on screen) in a big shoot out with the Feds/other crime family members have actually meant that much beyond an initial thrill? Probably not.

[The Comedian]

Also "Dead Heat" deserves more love because Joe Piscopo was never better

 

C'mon son, Johnny Dangerously