MOVIE COMMENT CATCH-ALL THREAD

[elizium]

Blue Lagoon is on TV. How did this thing get made, why did Brooke Shields handlers let her do it? It's not a terrible movie, but the whole creepy underage sexualization thing is just bizarre. What was the intended audience? Hormonal 15 year olds and their creepy uncles.

 

Don't answer that.

[piranesi]

Rounding that turn out of the 70s, a lot of weird shit seemed to make sense that actually didn't make sense.

[J.T.]

Young Jae thought those character motivations made total sense.

 

Admittedly so does Old Jae.

 

"We are probably going to die on this fucking raft so I may as well look at her boobs one time."

 

Flawlessly logical.

 

That scene makes a lot more sense in the short story.

 

SK doesn't come out and say it, but the blob in the water has some sort of psychic power that it uses as a hunting mechanism.  That's why the mousey girl got all mesmerized and just stuck her hand in the water and got eaten.  The blob make the dude fondle the girl because it wanted him to position her near the cracks in the boards of the raft so that it could get to her the same way it did the football guy

 

The Raft was okay until it bitched out and didn't go with King's original kickass ending.  Always alter the ending of any adoptation of King's novels but never fuck with the endings of any adoptations of his short prose.

[elizium]

Hmmm...out of curiosity, what is the ending in the original story?

[Tabe]

Blue Lagoon is on TV. How did this thing get made, why did Brooke Shields handlers let her do it? It's not a terrible movie, but the whole creepy underage sexualization thing is just bizarre. What was the intended audience? Hormonal 15 year olds and their creepy uncles.

 

Don't answer that.

It's not even the creepiest movie Brooke had made to that point in her career.  That would be Pretty Baby where, at age 12, she played a 12-year old prostitute, complete with nudity.

[elizium]

Oh I remember that one, all the Susan Sarandon nudity in the world couldn't make up for the creep factor. That was the one where the photographer is obsessed with her, yeah?

 

Basically, Brooke Shields parents were suitcase pimps then?

[Burgundy LaRue]

 

Blue Lagoon is on TV. How did this thing get made, why did Brooke Shields handlers let her do it? It's not a terrible movie, but the whole creepy underage sexualization thing is just bizarre. What was the intended audience? Hormonal 15 year olds and their creepy uncles.

 

Don't answer that.

It's not even the creepiest movie Brooke had made to that point in her career.  That would be Pretty Baby where, at age 12, she played a 12-year old prostitute, complete with nudity.

 

 

And whose character's virginity was sold to the highest bidder as her first trick.  Good movie, but really uncomfortable to watch.  With Pretty Baby, Blue Lagoon, and Alice, Sweet Alice under her belt, it's a testament that Brooke Shields turned out pretty normal.

[Curt McGirt]

Hmmm...out of curiosity, what is the ending in the original story?

 

Here's the whole story. http://www.scribd.com/doc/94719409/The-Raft-Stephen-King I really need to read that again, because the film ending may be more engrained in me than the story's! Skeleton Crew is such a grim collection...

[J.T.]

Hmmm...out of curiosity, what is the ending in the original story?

 

Here goes:

 

After the blob eats the second girl, it spends the next day tormenting Randy.  Randy stands on the boards of the raft so that the blob can't get to him.

 

The blob responds by slowly drifting away from under the raft and quickly repositions itself under the raft everytime Randy tries to rest. 

 

As night falls, Randy figures out that eventually he will get tired enough to make a mistake and sit down and he knows he's not a strong enough swimmer to make it to shore before being caught, so he stares at the blob and allows it to mesmerize and him and mentally force him to touch the water's surface like it did with Rachel, the first girl. 

 

He hopes that the hypnotic stupor works like animal venom and he won't feel anything as he is being devoured. If he doesn't struggle like Duke and the second girl, maybe it won't hurt so much.

 

That ending fucking ruled.

[SovietShooter]

Blue Lagoon is on TV. How did this thing get made, why did Brooke Shields handlers let her do it? It's not a terrible movie, but the whole creepy underage sexualization thing is just bizarre. What was the intended audience? Hormonal 15 year olds and their creepy uncles.

 

Don't answer that.

 

I didn't see Blue Lagoon until I was well into my 20s, and I thought it was a fantastic movie, albeit a bit on the creepy side.  It isn't a movie about two kids stuck on an island, as much as it is about being all alone when your body starts making you feel funny inside, and kinda not knowing what to do.  The climax of the movie (harhar) is when they figure out physical love... not getting off the island. 

[Zero]

Can anybody tell me if the Chiba' Street Fighter movies are worth checking out?  

[J.T.]

Can anybody tell me if the Chiba' Street Fighter movies are worth checking out?  

 

FUCK YEAH~! 

 

The first one is the best and it is one of my favorite movies.  The next two entries kinda wanna be Bond movies and the plot muddles but it's all in good exploitation fun.  Besides, you're not watching these sorts of movies for the storyline; you're watching to see how many times Chiba can punch a guy in the throat before he dies.

 

The Sister Street Fighter movies are okay if only because Etsuko Shihomi was REALLY CUTE back in the day and she is a fucking tornado in a choreographed fight..

 

The Executioner is also worth watching as a spirtual sequel even though Chiba plays a decendant of Sasaki Rokkaku (founder of the Koga ninja) and not Takuma Tsurugi.

[jaedmc]

YES. 

 

The first one is one of my favorite movies. OF ALL TIME. Fight scenes are awesome and Chiba does a great job conveying a dirty fighter with his physicality. I've watched that movie a million times. My little sister, who was four around the time loved them too and would mimic his breathing technique where he pulls his fingers down in front of his face before charging me. In retrospect it's probably weird that I let a four year old watch that movie. But...you know...whatever. Anyway, watch that shit. And if you fall in love with Sonny Chiba get SAMURAI RESURRECTION too! 

[Burgundy LaRue]

I haven't watched them all, but the Sister Street Fight movies are enjoyable.  There's a collection of them out there, but it may be out of print.  But I doubt it would cost much, either way.  My copy was less than $10 used a few years ago, IIRC.

[Curt McGirt]

If you don't watch the first two Street Fighters you are fucked.

[Neil Koch]

Street Fighter has Sonny Chiba ripping off a would-be rapist's nutsack.  And it shows said sack.  That's all you need to know whether you would enjoy the movie or not.  The later movies aren't as over the top or gory, but they are still fun 70s martial arts cheese/sleaze.  You can get all of the movies dirt cheap, either stand-alone or in those 50 movies on 4 DVDs packs in Wal Mart bargain bins.

[caley]

Man Rope is a particularly dark piece of business.   Gay couple John Dall and Farley Granger (They're not actually "gay", but all the 1940s signs are there: co-habitation, vaguely effeminate mannerisms, planning their lives together which makes it all that much sillier and of its time that it's off-handedly mentioned that Dall used to date one of the women) kill a friend of theirs just to prove they can, then have a dinner party, inviting the deceased's parents and girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend and a professor from college and serve the food off a chest containing the friend's body.  This was Alfred Hitchcock's experiment with long takes and if one were particularly wrapped up in the story, it would be fairly easy to convince yourself the entire thing is one take (The cuts are quite neat where a character walks in front of the camera and it goes completely dark).  But, it's very stage-y but becomes totally engrossing when Jimmy Stewart shows up as the professor and proceeds to ask questions and play a cat-and-mouse game with the two young killers.  An entertaining film that is completely Stewart's show.

[S.K.o.S.]

I haven't been able to get around to writing up anything on the Toronto Film Festival, but among the 20 movies I saw, one of the best was Joe.  David Gordon Green directs Nicolas Cage, and you don't necessarily know what you're going to get from either of those guys, but here, you get really good versions of both of them, and a movie that would fit in right alongside All The Real Girls, Shotgun Stories, or Mud.

 

Well, I just saw this story about one of the leads being played by a legit homeless guy, who basically drank himself to death earlier this year after filming finished.  He looks super rough in the movie, but I had no idea he was the real thing.

 

http://ca.movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/homeless-scene-stealer-honored-nicolas-cage-joe-204516162.html

[odessasteps]

Man Rope is a particularly dark piece of business.   Gay couple John Dall and Farley Granger (They're not actually "gay", but all the 1940s signs are there: co-habitation, vaguely effeminate mannerisms, planning their lives together which makes it all that much sillier and of its time that it's off-handedly mentioned that Dall used to date one of the women) kill a friend of theirs just to prove they can, then have a dinner party, inviting the deceased's parents and girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend and a professor from college and serve the food off a chest containing the friend's body.  This was Alfred Hitchcock's experiment with long takes and if one were particularly wrapped up in the story, it would be fairly easy to convince yourself the entire thing is one take (The cuts are quite neat where a character walks in front of the camera and it goes completely dark).  But, it's very stage-y but becomes totally engrossing when Jimmy Stewart shows up as the professor and proceeds to ask questions and play a cat-and-mouse game with the two young killers.  An entertaining film that is completely Stewart's show.

For those who don't know:1. It was based on the Leopold and Loeb case, which audiences in 1948 would have known better than a modern audience.2. Rope was a play written in 1929 by Patrick Hamilton. It was filmed in 1939 by the BBC, also using long takes.

[S.K.o.S.]

So, good things I saw at the Toronto Film Festival:

 

I've already mentioned Enemy and Joe.

 

12 Years A Slave: This won the People's Choice award, so that already puts it in the company of movies like Slumdog Millionaire, King's Speech, Precious and Silver Linings Playbook.  I can't really say it'll win an Oscar before I know what it's up against, but it certainly had the look of a movie that wins a whole bunch of Oscars.  Surprised me that it actually had some loose horror elements - there are jump scares (mostly people yelling suddenly) and moments where you know something bad is coming and the Hans Zimmer score goes all droning and menacing.

 

Why Don't You Play In Hell?: This was my personal favorite.  The fifth Sion Sono movie I've seen, easily the most fun (although not as jaw-dropping as Love Exposure), and gleefully violent.  Think of the Crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill, but with more characters you care about.

 

Omar: Palestinian movie.  A small group of Palestinian boys form a resistance unit against Israeli occupiers, and three of them kill an Israeli soldier by sniping him from a distance.  The Israelis want to know exactly who pulled the trigger, and things go bad for the boys from there.  If I were to describe this movie in one word, it'd be "unfuckwithable".  The plot gets surprisingly complex considering there's only three boys, but you won't get confused, and there's hardly a moment to catch your breath.

 

The F Word: If you're going to watch a romantic comedy, you could do a whole lot worse than this.  Dialogue is very sharp, very crude too, but realistic.  If all kinds of people are crushing on Aubrey Plaza, then way more people should be crushing on Zoe Kazan.

 

And a couple that were not as good as I was hoping for:

 

The Sacrament: Not a bad movie by any means, there was a lot of edge-of-the-seat tension, but I kept waiting for a curveball that never came.  When you're telling a story that's as familiar as this one, you gotta put some kind of a twist on it.

 

Proxy: A lot of people really, really hated this movie.  I think the writer-director Zack Parker has a lot of interesting ideas, and wears his influences on his sleeve (DePalma here), but he appears to be clinically depressed or something.  This movie and his previous one are just such downers.  I will probably keep watching his stuff and being disappointed over and over.

[Elsalvajeloco]

Did you get a chance to see Devil's Knot? From what I've heard, it wasn't good. That may be why it doesn't have a distributor.

[S.K.o.S.]

I did not.  Paradise Lost is still on my to-see list, so I figured I should get to that first.

 

List of everything I saw is here, plus I got a last-minute ticket to Heart Of A Lion.

[Elsalvajeloco]

 

List of everything I saw is here, plus I got a last-minute ticket to Heart Of A Lion.

 

I just watched the trailer for the movie Unbeatable. It was not good until the very end when the guy does the Showtime Kick. That redeemed it.

[J.T.]

Eli Roth's homage to 70's Italian cannibal exploitation movies, The Green Inferno, (like there needed to be a tribute to Cannibal Holocaust...) has now got a distributor and should see a wide release.

 

Hurry up and make Thanksgiving already, Eli.

[Tabe]

it was dollar night at the discount theater last night so my nephew treated me to Pacific Rim.  There are major plot holes, things that just don't make any sense (these gigantic robots that must weigh millions of pounds can be flown by 8 helicopters?!?!?!), and so on, but it's still a lot of fun.  The effects in general are excellent, the monsters and robots generally look cool, and there's plenty of fighting.  As a 2013 American Godzilla movie, I thought it worked just fine, especially for a buck.  6/10.