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Best of Half-Decade: Pimping, Shilling and Bribing Thread


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Sabotage: fuck nah. Easily the worst of Arnold's comeback films. Is there anything more depressing than a movie that begins okay, but keeps getting progressively worse as it goes along? Things starts promisingly enough, promising a dirty little thriller about a semi-corrupt police strike team which is the dimestore version of The Shield; but then the movie bizarrely tries to turn into a slasher-horror flick in the second act, and then spends the third act trying to be some Michael Mann-style Epic Saga Of How Crime Ruins People and this movie absolutely doesn't have the chops to pull that shit off. It's dour, downbeat, confusingly complicated, gratuitously violent in a bad way, and is wasting some damn fine effort from a lot of good actors. Like, Olivia Williams' detective character could be a great anchor for a much better movie, but here she's merely a highlighted sidekick to the glum and unlikeable main players.

And, side note: how does Sabotage's cowriter Skip Woods still have a goddamn career? This is the BEST movie he's ever made. His other writing work includes Die Hard 5, Wolverine Origins, Swordfish, and both of those fucking terrible Hitman adaptations. Won't somebody STOP this man?!

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The Secret World of Arrietty: yeah, why not... I guess... maybe? I dunno, man. Studio Ghibli movies are, all too often, things that I admire more than I enjoy. I feel like I should adore these things, just as hard as I fell in love with Princess Mononoke way back when I saw it during its initial theatrical run. But something about them just underwhelms me, and I couldn't even tell you exactly what. Arrietty in particular doesn't help by being a bit of a downer; it's a story about loss and regret and the inexorable march of time, peopled mostly with selfish characters who don't trust each other at all, told in pokey slow-moving style without much actually happening. (Such a familiar plot certainly didn't help, either; it's based on the children's book The Borrowers, which has had plenty of previous adaptations, and was ripped off by seemingly half the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s.) Thank god I at least happened to catch the version with the British voice cast; looking down the roster at the insanely miscast American actors, I can't imagine them doing nearly so well in the same parts. And of course it's got the gorgeously detailed, fussily animated style of watercolor eye-candy which is Ghibli's traditional house style. I didn't feel like I wasted my time watching it, at least. Considering how fucking thoroughly I felt my time was indeed wasted at the end of the LAST movie I saw, it does make Arrietty look like a masterpiece in comparison.
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21 Jump Street and Rango: yeah probably to the first one, yes definitely to the latter. You gotta admire Gore Verbinski for being one of the very few, incredibly-rare directors who can work equally well in live action and animation. And any children's Western which is willing to slow down for great big homages to Chinatown, The Road Warrior, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is A-okay with me.

 

I’m sure Rango (2011) will make my list too...

 

Ride of the Valkyries cracked me up. As a big fan of Clint Eastwood and the Dollars trilogy showing up in Rango, terrific!

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Avengers Assemble (2012). Avengers Assemble is a terrific film for the performances particularly Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Hiddleston and Chris Evans, the interactions between the characters, the humour and the action. Avengers Assemble had big expectations because of the films leading up to it and the standard of most of them. Avengers Assemble succeeded and then some. I laughed frequently at it, Hulk using Loki as a ragdoll is probably the most I’ve laughed in a cinema.

 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Since the subtitle to Captain America: The Winter Soldier was revealed at San Diego Comic-Con 2012, it was the film of any I most looked forward to. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is great: the best Marvel Phase Two film, the best Marvel Cinematic Universe sequel and one of Marvel Studios best films in the top tier with Avengers Assemble/Iron Man.

 

The film is a political thriller mixed with a comic book film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier addresses themes of security with those in power, how far is too far etc. The fallout with S.H.I.E.L.D. is a big development for this film and the MCU. My main complaint about the film is not having more Winter Soldier screen time. I’d have liked to have seen more of him, his creation and his previous actions.

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Splitting my movie-viewing time between this and stuff from 2015.  Out of what I've seen and haven't posted about, Animal Kingdom has the best shot at making my list.  It's kind of funny, Jacki Weaver's Oscar nomination is a borderline spoiler at this point, because her character does next to nothing for the first 80 minutes.

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Splitting my movie-viewing time between this and stuff from 2015.  Out of what I've seen and haven't posted about, Animal Kingdom has the best shot at making my list.  It's kind of funny, Jacki Weaver's Oscar nomination is a borderline spoiler at this point, because her character does next to nothing for the first 80 minutes.

I've been reminded recently of how awesome that movie is while watching the Netflix series 'Bloodline' (in which Ben Medelsohn is king-sized!) and remember how, somehow, the filmmakers of 'Animal Kingdom' were able to turn 'All Out of Love' by Air Supply into the creepiest thing EVER!  I'm overdue on a rewatch for this one.

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Watched Meek's Cutoff tonight and it was...interesting.  I mean, I dug the various western vistas, and

Michelle Williams pointing the shotgun at Meek and saying "I'd be wary" is super badass

but that ending puts the open in open-ended.  It's not even really an ending.  It almost plays like they ran out of film and just arbitrarily said "Ah I guess that's as good a place to end it as any".

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Red Tails: nah, probably not. The aerial dogfight scenes are fun, but the movie grinds to a fuckin' halt every time it touches the ground. The talky scenes remind you "oh yeah, this IS a George Lucas production" with clunky laughable dialogue and stilted wooden acting. The characters are all the most tired old cliches out of every war movie ever, with the only innovation being "and oh yeah, these ancient stereotypes just happen to be black guys". Also, geez, that's just one of the worst orchestral scores I've heard in a long time, intrusive and overly bombastic and seriously made my head hurt.
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The Town that Dreaded Sundown remake/sequel/reboot thingy: nope. It starts out promisingly enough, with cinematography which is practically 70s Coppola-esque by the filthily degraded standards of modern slasher films; and having a cast chock-full of damn fine character actors is always a welcome touch. But unlike the hauntingly nihilistic original film with its "we'll never know the truth..." atmosphere, the new movie is structured like every other generic Whodunit-style slasher ever. Once we actually get the reveal of the killer's identity and motivation, it's such a godawful cheat that I wished I could reach into the screen and slap the screenwriter across the ear. (Scream 4 did the exact same shit as this movie and did it all better; and I say that being one of the larger detractors of that entire franchise.) Seriously, motherfuck that ending, it takes a halfway-decent movie and completely ruins the entire thing in hindsight. And having this slick, decently-budgeted modern take on an original film which had a budget of approximately five bucks just feels wrong, the same way that the recent Star Trek movies completely betray the lo-fi spirit of the original show.

EDIT: and oh yeah, who the hell were they trying to fool with Not-Danielle-Harris as the final girl? Did they really want Harris but couldn't get her, and so replaced her with a girl who looks literally identical?

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I think that MEEK'S CUTOFF really suffers from having come out just after A SERIOUS MAN, since both are so thematically fixated on uncertainty (but A SERIOUS MAN does it much better). Even the open-ended ending of MEEK'S CUTOFF is somewhat comparable to the ending of the Coen Bros' flick.

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I watched Elysium last night and I dug it.  The Jodie Foster character was basically superfluous to the plot (Well, let's be honest, most of the characters were superfluous to the plot) and I'm pretty sure I saw an anime once with the exact same plot (dystopian future where the elite live in a city above the earth while the poor toil back on Earth and dream about getting there) but there were some good action sequences, some pretty staggeringly good effects and that's all I've ever really wanted out of a Neil Blomkamp film.  So, dunno if it'll make my list, but, truthfully, I probably liked it more than 'District 9'.

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The Wind Rises: nah. Which hurts to say, considering that it's probably Hayao Miyazaki's last-ever work. But I thought it was also his worst work that I've ever seen, dull and slow and almost willfully ignoring the hard questions about its story and its characters in order to spend vast amounts of time just gawking at the pretty scenery. The protagonist, loosely based on the real-life guy who designed the Japanese "Zero" fighter plane, is such a goddamned perfect saint that it made my skin crawl. Seriously, he's got NO flaws, and truthfully no depth either. His entire character arc can be summed up as "I want to build planes" and "Yay, I'm building planes!". In a subplot right out of 19th-century opera, he falls in love with a girl he keeps running into... but she's dying of tuberculosis, of course, and their entire relationship is basically treated as a distraction from his plane-building (and not even an effective one; the wife is just as saintly as the husband, and gladly sacrifices her own health in order to help keep his mind focused on his job) but the scenes with the wife are so separated from the scenes designing planes that they're practically happening in different movies. Some bits are so under-explained that it actually pissed me off; exactly why was the Secret Police after the main hero, and why couldn't they find him at his regular job where he apparently showed up every day to build planes, not to mention sometimes offering demonstrations to the freakin' military? Give me SOME explanation, for god's sake; but no, the movie seems like it completely forgets about it.

And that's not even factoring in how little time the movie spends on stuff actually happening; remember the parts from American Beauty where the movie stops dead in its tracks to admire a windblown plastic bag? Welcome to fuckin' half of the running time of The Wind Rises. The movie would be maybe an hour long if you cut out all the bits where it spends oceans of time reminding you that airplanes sure are things that exist, observing them in endless flight scenes that brought back bad memories of the parts in 2001 watching spaceships do boring shit for minutes on end. Worst of all, the movie never DEALS with the fact that these planes are WARPLANES, designed to kill people; in real life this designer was a pacifist who felt incredibly torn about his work and was riddled with guilt over all the carnage he helped to cause. Absolutely none of that makes it into The Wind Rises, where this guy seems like he never even realizes that he's basically designing better weapons to slaughter countless men.

John Wick: maybe. If it made my list, it'd be down near the bottom. It's a good action flick, sure, but it's really nothing more than that. I'm surprised by the sheer amount of hype this one got. Aside from some nifty fight choreography and an oddly sympathetic villain (the dad, not the son) it doesn't have anything I've never seen before. Drive did a similar story and did it better, as did several of John Woo's 80s flicks, and damn near half the Jason Statham catalog of revenge films. I thought Keanu Reeves was actually giving a below-average performance by his standards, at least in the department of line readings. And christamighty, was anyone else rolling their eyes HARD at Wick's seemingly-infinite number of old buddies and henchmen who were all too happy to do half his work for him? But still... that was some really nifty fight choreography, with John's constant headshots serving almost as a running joke (in a good way). And the deeply overqualified cast certainly didn't hurt at all. EDIT: and oh yeah, I almost wanted to put my fist through the screen when Kevin fucking Nash showed up as a Russian henchman and STILL got a countout loss instead of doing a clean fuckin' job.

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The Imitation Game: no. God save us from middlebrow Oscarbait which is so damned convinced of its own monumentally important message. This movie's real story (its "white-hot center", as writers say) is obviously about Alan Turing's attempts to build the world's first computer and crack the infamous Enigma code; sadly, the movie chooses to ignore that plot at every possible turn, and is pathetically scanty on the details about how it actually worked. You'd learn more about mathematical theory by watching A Beautiful Mind than you would from this flick. Instead, the movie devotes at least half of itself to the "Turing is an autistic homosexual who has no idea how to deal with society" storyline, and oh my lord is it incredibly fucking dull. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is way too much of a retread of his Sherlock Holmes, and the way the movie haphazardly jumps back and forth between three different time periods feels utterly arbitrary and pointless.

Burke and Hare: ugh, no. It's depressing to think that this piece of shit was made by John Landis. A great ensemble cast is utterly wasted in this unfunny comedy, a botched attempt to make a goofy lark out of the infamous 19th-century body-snatching murder duo of William Burke and William Hare (Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, both utterly lost at sea). Shrill, obnoxious performances mix with a juvenile obsession with gross-out humor and it all ends up as just the worst thing it could've possibly been. The best part of the movie is a Christopher Lee cameo which is literally nothing but twenty seconds of him yelling incomprehensible gibberish. Go watch I Sell The Dead instead, it did all the exact same shit as this movie and did it infinitely better.

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Meek's Cutoff: Reichart is a director who does not seem concerned about pacing. Between Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, she lets the viewer exist in her setting. Once past the discomfort and perception of non-progression, one can really appreciate the craft at work here. The pre-1950s aspect ratio along with Reichart's choice to tell this story from the women of this Oregon Trail's point of view adds a claustrophobia to the film that helps put this film into perspective. Paranoia, desperation, uncertainty, cultural and language barriers combined with a longing for leadership and quest for water allows Reichart to render this period of American history. One could argue that it is the most accurate portrayal of the Oregon trail ever captured on camera.

 

I think that may make my list, but I will probably give it another viewing just to make sure, as I was a bit distracted for the first 30 or so minutes.

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Why is everybody watching Meek's Cutoff?

 

It's been on my watch list for 5 years now, and it is held in high regard in many critical circles. Plus, this board has never been shy about its love of Westerns.

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Yeah. Also, we don't get too many super-grim nihilistic Westerns these days. Well, I mean, half the Westerns we DO get tend to fit that description, but we don't get that many Westerns at all.

Zero Dark Thirty: yeah, probably somewhere in the bottom half. It's an effective procedural, doing a heck of an efficient "this thing leads to that thing" job of summarizing the hunt for Bin Ladin. Kathryn Bigelow can get more tension out of someone walking up a flight of stairs than most directors can get out of showing you a ticking bomb. It rockets by in a shockingly quick fashion, for a movie which is closer to three hours than not. And Jessica Chastain gives such a tightly-wound performance, matching her character's tendency to shut everyone out, that it makes me want to see her in other stuff where she's given more time to let loose.

Although, to reopen an old debate: yes, this movie does seem rather depressingly pro-torture. And the Muslim populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan are pretty thoroughly "othered"; except for our government's translators, pretty much every brown person in the movie is seen as part of a faceless mass of possible threats... at best. Which makes it so weird in the final scenes during the raid on the house, when suddenly Bigelow seems to remember "oh yeah, I'm NOT Michael Bay, I actually have problems with the ridiculous macho shenanigans displayed by men with guns" and sticks in all those weeping women and shrieking children to remind us of the human cost of the war. Hey, maybe we could try that in any scene besides the climactic one where Osama himself is getting smoked?

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For some reason, I never bothered to see 'Zero Dark Thirty' for the LONGEST time.  I even got the movie for my birthday that year, but just sorta left it on the shelf and finally watched it last summer and LOVED it.  I always like movies of experts/journalists digging through information to find solutions to problems ('All The President's Men' etc.) so this was right up my alley.  Myself, I never felt like the movie endorsed terrorism such much as it presented it as "Well, this is how it happened, so to cut it would be disingenuous" kind of way.  Not sure on the veracity of everything, in particular that friend of Chastain's who allows the guy to drive right into camp seems pretty stupid on her part, but lots of stupid things happened during this campaign so I wouldnt be surprised to find out it was true.  But as a film that offers an entertaining look at how things happened, I think it's a resounding success while also occasionally stopping to remind us the human cost in what could have been a truly dreadful chest-thumping piece of propaganda.  Short of an European director tackling the same project without American backing and being allowed to really poke the bear, I feel like this is as even-handed and thoughtful of a film on the subject as is possible.

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I always felt that Zero Dark Thirty neither condoned nor dismissed torture. It just took an objective view of it. I think the right views it as anti-torture and the left views it as pro-torture, but I think the honesty of the thing is what makes both sides uncomfortable. If anything, the opening segment may be the one instance where you get a sense of how far these guys go to get the information and is intended to make the viewer question the necessity of it.

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If it's supposed to be anti-torture, then that's the weakest fucking attempt at a pacifist message that I've ever seen. In this movie, torture works, with a 100% success rate. Every single bad guy who's tortured gives up crucial information in response. Furthermore, it only shows bad guys getting tortured in the first place; the movie deliberately tells us that each prisoner we see getting abused is totally a terrorist who was concealing important intel. There's not even one case of ambiguity, of a guy who might be innocent or might know nothing. It's the Jack Bauer version of torture, where it only happens to people who deserve it, and always has a happy ending.

And what's the only downside we see about the entire process? The TORTURERS feeling bad about it afterwards. All the negative side of the process is "Jessica Chastain is clearly uncomfortable doing this part of her job", despite the fact that she keeps doing it non-stop. There's never a single moment in which we see the long-term effects of this shit on the prisoners, or on our policy, or our international reputation, or any other possibly negative side effect.

In comparison: today I watched Argo, which had better politics (although it still had a bad case of "every foreigner is an untrustworthy animal" syndrome) but wasn't as good a movie or as an authentic-feeling historical document. Oh, it was still pretty damn good; but Affleck is still not yet Bigelow when it comes to milking the tension out of the various tight spots which his characters find themselves in. The lingering stench of phony Hollywood bullshit did waft in during the contrived finale; upon doing some reading afterwards, I was thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the real-life events were nowhere near that dramatic. It could end up on my list, I guess; but I wish it had focused more on the Arkin/Goodman bits.

In comparison, Hot Tub Time Machine has absolutely no chance of going on my list. It's never a good sign when any comedy features two different scenes of people being covered in human waste within the first ten minutes. Combine that AND blatantly ripping off your entire premise from various other stuff (especially an episode of Family Guy which sees Peter going back to the 80s) is guaranteed to make me grumpy.

So I was already in a foul mood when I realized that this fucking movie is one of the most sexist, self-indulgent, Male Gaze-y sex comedies in recent memory. Hey assholes, just because your movie is mostly set in the 80s doesn't give you the right to present the gender politics of Police Academy as if they're appropriate for the 2010s. Literally every single female character in this movie is presented ONLY as a hookup for the various male heroes. Well, Lizzy Caplan gets a little bit of "personality" which boils down to standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl nonsense; but for the most part, every woman's entire function in this movie is solely to hop onto a penis. For all the shit that the Apatow comedies get, movies like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up still managed to pack quite a bit of genuine character onto their female co-leads, but that's apparently beyond HTTM's capabilities. It even exhibits the single laziest trait of shitty modern R-rated comedies: the only tits we see are anonymous tits. The naked women are characters who don't even get named; they show up for one scene, strip, and then disappear right the fuck outta the movie afterwards. It's the laziest, most contemptuous way you can possibly shoehorn some nudity in your movie, and it's always a blatant giveaway that the filmmakers either don't know any better or simply don't care.

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Because it's leaving Netflix, I subjected myself to Compliance. I was well aware of the story before I saw the movie, but I still found it to be an uncomfortable, infuriating sit of a film. Even though it should not, I find myself amazed that common sense did not prevail at any point during this scenario. For this, I can see why some reviews were a bit vitriolic towards this film, as you have to question Zoller's motivations for telling this story.  I am happy I saw this, but I am not sure it makes my list.

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Because it's leaving Netflix, I subjected myself to Compliance. I was well aware of the story before I saw the movie, but I still found it to be an uncomfortable, infuriating sit of a film. Even though it should not, I find myself amazed that common sense did not prevail at any point during this scenario. For this, I can see why some reviews were a bit vitriolic towards this film, as you have to question Zoller's motivations for telling this story.  I am happy I saw this, but I am not sure it makes my list.

It's an odd one, for sure.  Like it seems completely insane that all this took place, then you look it up and it really does.  In scenes where they're showing this girl being exploited, I kinda felt like the actress, herself, was being exploited in said scenes.  I kinda feel like if they had no nudity whatsoever, shot from the side or back, so that there's no confusion that the girl is naked to those watching, but not us the viewers, it would have made it a little more squirm-inducing and uncomfortable for the viewer, but casting an attractive model-esque actress in the lead, and having her be frequently naked/almost undressed comes across almost like they're trying (excuse the word choice) tittilate the viewers, rather than make them uncomfortable.  I dunno.  I can't say I really liked, or even appreciated the film all that much.  But I can't say that it was all that bad either.

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Compliance is something that could sneak in at the very bottom of my list, just because it gets a reaction.  It's nearly impossible to see it and not want to talk about it with someone afterwards.  I saw it in a theatre, and I remember seeing one person just completely give up on the movie (not walk out, but have a "gtfo" reaction).  I'm not sure they knew it was a true story.  Even I came out thinking "Well, it says based on a true story, but clearly some of this was just made up," and then, yeah, looked it up and that's how it happened.  If I'm remembering right, the movie actually made an effort to make things more believable by having the husband be drunk.  Oh, and the movie also threw in that the young girl hates her boss, so I thought there was a very slight implication that the girl might have gone along with things at that point to break up her boss' marriage.

 

I thought the actress had breast implants, which kind of took me out of the moment, because I don't think they're too common among high school students.  Anyway.  :/

 

There's a totally unrelated French movie called In The House about a high school student in a creative writing class who's writing stories based on his real life.  At one point his teacher criticizes one of the student's stories, saying it's not believable.  The student says "But it really happened," and the teacher shoots back "Doesn't matter, it's not believable."  I'm not sure I agree with that standpoint, but it makes you think.

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I rewatched The Ides Of March.  That's very much making my list.  I think it's really underrated - critics liked it, but to me it's an easy top 20, it should be high visibility given its cast, and it never gets brought up all that much.  Maybe it's because it's not all that nuanced.   For the most part everyone is very (almost weirdly) open about their intentions in the third act, and Gosling in particular completely wears his heart on his sleeve.  But that's nitpicking.  If you haven't seen it, please make time for it.  It's on Netflix.

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