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[MOVIES] NOVEMBER 2018 DISCUSSION


GuerrillaMonsoon

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So, The Dark Tower (2017) was clearly in development too long. Because you start out with OK, we've got this stoic, brooding hero and a charismatic villain, and that's fine. But then they outthink themselves and decide maybe the villain is too charismatic, and think they need to make the hero more relatable. So why not give him a modern, street smart, wisecracking teenage sidekick to make him more relatable (Because that's a fucking terrible idea you idiots!). And hey, why not make the sidekick actually the chosen one and only he can save the World (What on Earth would posses you to think that was an improvement on the original story?). Actually, we're really getting behind this kid now, the YA market is a strong market, we get everyone who liked the books, and everyone who watched the Hunger Games! Double audience! (Please don't make the Kid the hero and the Gunslinger into the Sidekick) Let's make the Kid the hero and the Gunslinger the sidekick! (Fuck!)

So this is a bad movie, yeah. Why is it that major Hollywood studios haven't figured out that, when adapting a popular existing work into a movie script, you should have someone in the room who responds to every suggestion with the phrase "Well, we don't want to betray the source material".

Great cast. Bad movie.

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On 11/16/2018 at 4:31 AM, Brian Fowler said:

the Coen Brothers have a Netflix Original movie now.

 

On 11/16/2018 at 5:13 AM, odessasteps said:

It could be “Ladykillers”  or “intolerable cruelty” quality Coen Brothers and not automatically “Fargo” or “big Lebowski” Coen brothers. 

Anyone give it a watch yet? Curious to see where consensus lands here. 

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I liked it, but definitely in the mid-lower range of Coen movies. Being a vignette movie, your mileage will definitely vary on how much you like each story.

The Liam Neeson and Tom Waits vignettes are the strongest. The James Franco one is okay mostly for Stephen Root ("Pan shot! Pan shot!"). Honestly the one I liked the least was the Buster Scruggs one. He's a pretty annoying character and it had a more fantastical tone that really didn't fit with the rest.

Definitely worth the watch, but don't be surprised if you drift out on stories you don't really care for.

I was also a little disappointed that the few appearances by First Nations people had them playing up the stereotypical Western trope of Native Americans as Savage Others. I was hoping that maybe the Coens would put a little more thought and care into their portrayal as something other than an attacking force.

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I tell you what else I watched this month: Sucker Punch. Yeah, because a director so stupid he was befuddled by the plot twists of 300 is just the guy to not only write an original story, but to try to make it Lynchian. Like in his mind he probably thinks "David Lynch spent a whole career trying to make this exact movie, and I just nailed it perfect first time!".

It makes no sense and not in a good way. It's basically a PG porn film. If you're looking for mindless action scenes featuring attractive young women, it's not as good as the Hunger Games movies. If you're looking for anything else, look elsewhere.

Good cast though. Emily Browning is definitely a good lead actor. When's American Gods season 2 coming out? Season one was way more than a year ago.

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4 hours ago, AxB said:

 

Good cast though. Emily Browning is definitely a good lead actor. When's American Gods season 2 coming out? Season one was way more than a year ago.

You probably don't want to see it.  Production was a shit show.  Multiple showrunners fired, actors cursing out producers because the scripts are so bad, etc.

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On 11/16/2018 at 8:16 AM, EVA said:

A Netflix film is likely going to win Best Picture this year, so I think that perspective may be in need of some adjustment moving forward.

Outlaw King is going to win Best Picture????

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On ‎11‎/‎17‎/‎2018 at 2:23 PM, AxB said:

So, The Dark Tower (2017) was clearly in development too long. Because you start out with OK, we've got this stoic, brooding hero and a charismatic villain, and that's fine. But then they outthink themselves and decide maybe the villain is too charismatic, and think they need to make the hero more relatable.

The characters are not terribly off the mark, but anyone who has dread the length and breadth of the Dark Tower trilogy knows that story can't be contained in a single motion picture.  Any announcement that did not start off with "soon to be a Netflix mini-series event" was doomed to failure.  

It is interesting how you have keenly identified that the most of the reasons why this movie is so terrible is because the people developing this thing went off searching for an audience to embrace this project and never seemed to realize that one was already there with arms wide open.

The studio tinkered with the story, the characters and the rating trying to drag in a YA audience. Why?  Dark Tower has a rabid fanbase already.  Tell the story in a format and in a manner that the loyal grognards want it told and they will love it forever, and then they'll bring casual friends in to their watch parties and those folks will love it too.

Game of Thrones and Altered Chrome have already proved that premium cable and streaming services are the new place for adaptations of long prose.  Why the folks working on Dark Tower never seemed to figure this out really escapes me.

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That really was one of the worst adaptations ever. Even if the movie had been good (spoiler: it was not) it would've been a terrible adaptation that would've pissed off people like me who have read and loved the books. 

I still wish that really ambitious idea of three movies and two or three seasons of television could've happened. But, I mean, the movie they did wasn't even really an adaptation of The Gunslinger.

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1 minute ago, CreativeControl said:

I thought it was supposed to be a continuation of the novels as Roland had... whatever he has at the end of the books. 

I had a casual interest in the film until the first trailer when it appeared to be Masters of the Universe 2K17

They definitely initially sold it that way, but even then the idea at the end of the book was that he'd just saved the horn, and was going to go through the same stuff (having apparently done so many times before) but maybe that one subtle change will make a difference.

And I remember them tweeting something implying that was where the movie would start. But, instead, it played somewhat of a remix of random scenes from several of the books, but it didn't really do anything to imply this was a follow up.

MoU is way more fun in it's glorious stupidity.

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Yeah, the notion that the Dark Tower was a sequel to what happens after the books was total horseshit. King fed into that too. 

I still hope that Netflix sees some potential in this being their Game of Thrones or, in the case of Prime, Lord of the Rings, but I doubt that happens. 

By the way, is there anything more pointless than a LotR TV series when the movies are about as close to perfect for those books as you can get? I haven't watched the movies in awhile, but none had a ton of bloat and of anything I'd want to see more of it would be the stuff with Saruman. 

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45 minutes ago, Craig H said:

By the way, is there anything more pointless than a LotR TV series when the movies are about as close to perfect for those books as you can get?

Many things would be more pointless. The Jackson films were fine films in their own right, but hardly perfect adaptations. I've long thought they were annoyingly good, in that they were good enough to discourage other people from adapting the source material, and there's a lot of things that could have been done differently. I'd like to see another creator's take.

4 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

If I understand right, the Amazon show isn't really Lord of the Rings, but rather just a Middle Earth show.

Now that sounds horrible.

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So I'm watching Star Trek: Nemesis and Tom Hardy really didn't look himself when he was young and skinny, did he? Only in this movie he's got a prosthetic nose and chin so he can play a younger clone of Jean-Luc Picard. But his character here randomly has the same backstory as Bane did in Dark Knight Rises, being imprisoned underground as a child and not seeing daylight for a decade. I don't understand the timeline, because Captain Janeway was in the movie and had been promoted to Commander, but Worf was on the Enterprise, not DS9. Anyway, I'm guessing this flopped because it was the last Star Trek Next Gen movie and the next one they made was the start of the terrible PineKirk ones.

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