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DECEMBER 2015 MOVIE DISCUSSION


RIPPA

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For some stupid reason, I watched the second Matrix movie over the weekend.  What a pile of dog shit. 

 

When Morpheus is giving his big ridiculous speech to the assembled dirty hippies in Zion, I kept waiting for him to punctuate a statement with CAAAANN YOOOU DIIIG IIIIIIIIIT!?

Matrix 2 has a bunch of really great action sequences, but it's really hard to enjoy them because of all the terrible pretentious other stuff in between them.

 

Of all things the MTV Movie Awards did a pretty terrific job at taking the starch out of that movie.

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Speaking of Stallone, I just finished an old 1980-ish cop thriller he made called Nighthawks. It's... meh. Rutger Hauer is a box of dynamite as the evil terrorist villain.            

 

Don't bother with this one unless you're a HUGE fan of Rutger, who really is the only thing worth seeing here.

I probably haven't seen Nighthawks since it made it's initial HBO run way back when, but I remember liking it a lot. Probably because I went through a Soldier of Fortune magazine  phase as a teenager.  There were always articles about Carlos the Jackal, which the Hauer role was obviously based upon. Thankfully I grew out of my dreams of the mercenary life and my desire to join the French Foreign Legion and my three year stint in the U.S. Army provided me with enough of the military life to last me forever.  If Nighthawks doesn't hold up, I think The Dogs of War probably does.

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For some stupid reason, I watched the second Matrix movie over the weekend.  What a pile of dog shit. 

 

When Morpheus is giving his big ridiculous speech to the assembled dirty hippies in Zion, I kept waiting for him to punctuate a statement with CAAAANN YOOOU DIIIG IIIIIIIIIT!?

That would have made the movie MUCH more interesting. . . .

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Saw Creed yesterday.  Even though I feel long takes are getting a little overdone nowadays, that single-take fight is still pretty amazing.  I was originally planning to leave a few minutes early because I had an appointment to get to, then they had that press conference scene for the final fight and I was like nope, not going anywhere now.

 

Also I completely missed

Adonis being tapped on the back of the neck so he could tell how many fingers the ring doctor was holding up.  I had no idea how he was doing that.  Only thing I could think was that he was opening that swollen eye through sheer force of will.

 

Did you know Stallone is the same age now (69) as Mickey was in the original Rocky??

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I liked Creed. Stallone was flat out amazing, and the rest of the cast delivered.

But man the back half of the movie just tracks the plot of Rocky a little bit too closely for my tastes. Especially since no one remarks on it.

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Was kinda disappointed by 'Furious 7'.  I've thought the last two movies were the best in the series, but this one didn't do a lot for me.  For one thing, it's just so stupid.  Like, I under the FF films are all fairly stupid, but this one reaches some new levels: the weird mid-movie commercial for Corona (If you haven't seen it, Kurt Russell is talking about how awesome the belgian ale is and Vin Diesel says "I prefer Corona" so Kurt Russell picks up a pail of Corona which he just happened to have chilling behind the table with a big 'Corona' logo on the bucket and puts it right in the center of the screen, then some 10-30 minutes or so later Russell tells Diesel "If you pull this off, I just might make that switch to Corona" and Diesel replies "You'd be doing yourself a favour!".  I half-expected everyone to pick up Coronas, bad guys and good guys alike, hold them up in a toast and go "Coronas are awesome!"); Jason Statham's innate ability to get into places that are said to be completely secure and the FFers have to come up with elaborate plans to get them into and he just wanders in and you're supposed to accept it because he's black ops; the insane final sequence where a foreign warlord flies a militarized helicopter and drone in downtown LA and there is no military response within the half hour or so he's attacking.  Like, I've always kind of rolled my eyes while enjoying FF movies (Like Vin Diesel leaping from highway to highway and catching a woman in mid-air, crashing onto a car and being okay in FF6) and the stunts are ridiculous 

when a movie has sequences with characters skydiving in cars and it's NOT the most ridiculous stung well...

but I'm able to suspend my disbelief on those things.  But there's just so much non-stunt stupidity in this one that it just took me out of the film entirely.  Also the movie really suffers for not having

The Rock in it save for the first and last 10 minutes as he is such a great presence in these films

That said, it's still worth a watch for the Michelle Rodriguez/Ronda Rousey fight which is really well done, Tony Jaa being king-sized as a bad guy; and Nathalie Emmanuel in a swimsuit (I can't lie and pretend like that wasn't my favourite scene).  Also the ending is pretty well done.

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I didn't think it was quite as good as the previous two either but still damn enjoyable. The ending was so perfect. I think the deal with The Rock was scheduling conflicts. Hopefully he's a main star in the next one, they'll need more of him with no Paul. 

 

Also, the Corona thing is definitely absurd but it at least does make sense because Dom and his crew have always been huge marks for Corona. Going back to the first Fast movie way back in 2001 Dom invites Brian back to the house party after dealing with Johnny Tran and Dom's like "you can have any beer you want, as long as it's a Corona"  lol

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I've grown less patient as I get older. Used to be, I'd force myself to finish watching every movie I started, in its entirety. Now? It only took me five minutes to decide "man, The Beastmaster is a dumb piece of shit" and turn it right off. Bad dialogue, bad acting, Rip Torn looking visibly embarrassed to be there, weak stupid heroes who hand-deliver their own heads on platters directly to the villains, and somehow the entire story is a complete ripoff of the Perseus myth while also being a complete ripoff of Conan the Barbarian at the same time.

The most ridiculous part: the villainous wizard straight-up tells the king that the wizard is going to murder the king's unborn son and sacrifice it to his dark god. I think "okay, why doesn't the king just fuckin' kill him right now?" The king actually SAYS "I could have you killed for this!" and then... does nothing at all. Somehow the wizard makes the king afraid by ordering his own evil henchmen to commit suicide. I get the point, this is supposed to be like when Thulsa Doom showed off his power by making that one chick jump to her death. But the specific setup of the situation ruins it; Doom was entirely surrounded by his armies, dealing with just Conan (who had no power beyond the swing of his sword). In Beastmaster, Torn's wizard just made his ONLY henchmen kill themselves; he's now alone in the room with the king (whose baby son he just promised to rip out of the queen's womb) and the king's several guards. And then the king just lets the guy go, for no fuckin' reason, and of course the villains massacre the shit out of the king and queen in the very next scene. Come on. I can take a goofy 80s fantasy movie insulting my intelligence, but this one is shrieking that my intelligence's mother is a skanky disease-riddled whore.

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I can totally say that, cuz I never saw them, the whole "turned it off in five minutes" bit. Before shutting it down, I did skip far enough ahead to see 1.the hero's adopted parents killed when the bad guys burn down his village (fucking seriously?) and 2.then also saw and laughed uproariously at the incompetently-photographed scene where a five-pound bird somehow picks up a fifty-pound child and flies away with it, which looked SO terrible that I can't see how anyone could possibly take this seriously. And then also 3.the bit where our hero turns into a total perverted predator and sexually harasses the living shit out of those poor women in the lake, which was the very definition of Dude, That's NOT Cool. After all that bullshit, fuck yeah I turned it off without a single regret and shall never bother repeating the attempt to watch this garbage ever again.

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I don't want to live in a world where I am such a jaded movie enthusiast that I can't sit down and enjoy a deliberately dumb sword and sorcery movie. 

 

I am going to break out Hawk The Slayer and The Sword & The Sorcerer this Sunday afternoon when I get back from my kid's birthday party.

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So I'm watching Wild Things (1998) with Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Denise Richards, Neve Campbell, and... holy fuck, I'd totally forgotten Bill Murray is in this movie! This is awesome!

 

Terrible soundtrack though.

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I don't wanna live in a world where (insert a whole lotta things that happen in this world), but this is what we're stuck with anyway.

I can enjoy any dumb movie if I think it's done well. The original Conan wasn't exactly attempting to be an elegantly subtle character study, it was just an awesome kick-ass flick. Kinda dumb yet awesome. Meanwhile, the sequel and the remake show what happens when you keep the dumb but drop the awesome.

And yeah, I know I'm naming the high-water-mark of the entire genre by praising that one, but there's plenty of others I've liked. Willow will always be one of my favorites. Lucio Fulci did a tremendously atmospheric sword-n-sorcery flick called Conquest which has remained unfortunately obscure. There's all those great Harryhausen fantasy flicks, which kinda run together in my memory but were all quite entertaining. Come to think of it, even something like Army of Darkness would count as fitting in this category. And hell, I'm even the one guy on the planet who actually loved Your Highness.

But then there's other individual films I don't like. (Actually, Hawk the Slayer is another one; I HATED that comic-relief dwarf, he was like the 80s equivalent to Jar Jar.) Beastmaster pissed me off right from the start with people who had personalities that I didn't believe, making decisions that I didn't buy, and executing all of the above in a manner which I found to be crappy and often bewildering.

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Your Highness is going to go down in history as the movie people watch to spot Game of Thrones locations (and cast members). Which is better than going down in history as the movie where Natalie Portman wore a thong, I suppose.

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Never thought I'd do this, but in defense of Jingus I have also noted that some of the dumb movies I thought were totally awesome at one point have had their stock slide upon recent viewing. 

 

The worst Star Wars clone out there really is Starchaser:  Legend of Orin.

 

Even Starcrash had the self awareness to dress Caroline Munro in as little fabric possible and let The Hoff chew on scenery.

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Yep, it comes back like a bad penny.  It came on IFC a week ago and I was like, "This is one of the worst cartoons ever.  How did I sit through this?" 

 

Starchaser makes any episode of Street Sharks or The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack look like Frozen.

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Can't believe I've never seen Conquest, especially being the Fulci fan I am. Here's the trailer:

 

EDIT: NSFW

 

 

and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube as well if you want. Gotta do that sometime. 

 

While we're on the topic of sword and sorcery, just how bad are those Ator movies? Is it like Luigi Cozzi Hercules level so-bad-its-good or truly truly I want to claw my eyes out bad?

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I've grown less patient as I get older. Used to be, I'd force myself to finish watching every movie I started, in its entirety. Now? It only took me five minutes to decide "man, The Beastmaster is a dumb piece of shit" and turn it right off. 

You know I've always wanted to watch 'Beastmaster' but it's surprisingly hard to track down chez nous.  I always have memories of TBS running 'A Very Beastmaster Christmas' where they just showed Beastmaster movies over and over on Christmas day.  If I'm not mistaken, they even had their own jingle for it, but that could just be wishful thinking.  Man, I miss the old days of TBS when they would just throw hours worth of movies on and 'Movies For Guys Who Like Movies'.  Our cable provider took away TBS a few years ago, now we get Peachtree TV...I've never felt like that was a fair trade.

 

And hell, I'm even the one guy on the planet who actually loved Your Highness.

 

 

 

I thought I was the only one who enjoyed Your Highness!

 

Make it three of us!  In fact, I think I'm going to watch it tonight!

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