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[MOVIES] NOVEMBER 2018 DISCUSSION


GuerrillaMonsoon

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Thanksgiving was Make My Filmstruck Membership Count day. 

Chungking Express was not WKW's best by any means, but undeniably his. Faye Wong was a better manic pixie dream girl than anyone else who's been thought of that way in the last 25 years. Feels like, if anything, WKW might have circled the drain a little bit with movies like 2046, which retreads the same themes less artfully. 

Dead Ringers is probably my favorite Cronenberg now that I've seen it, and Jeremy Irons turned in one of the 4 or 5 best acting performances ever committed to film. This felt a lot like Audition in the sense of "oh shit this is too creepy to rewatch but too good and thought provoking not to rewatch".

Three Colors: Blue was, somehow, more what I was in the mood for than the other two films. Probably because it's about grief.  It helps that Juliette Binoche can do more acting with 1 facial expression than practically anyone else, though. Fairly beautiful, and I'll probably tackle the other two parts before the weekend is over. 

And maybe some Ozu and a rewatch of Citizen Kane.

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I'm not saying I watched Chungking Express a lot back in the day, but I can still remember most of the lyrics to Dreams in Cantonese. It's like the intervening 25 years never happened.

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I really liked Creed II, even if its parts are greater than its sum. There are some wonderful, powerful individual scenes, but in a larger narrative sense they just found cute spins on various pieces of the franchise. You can really tell that the broad strokes in the screenplay (and most of the very fine Rocky stuff to be fair) are Stallone’s, and that making it all work was left to Juel Taylor. It’s still way better than I expected, and there’s no shame in not being as good as Creed. 

I popped for

Spoiler

Brigitte. When the Russian oligarchs presented the case to Victor Drago, I thought for a second it was going to be a replica WBC title and we’d get him doing a real world’s champion promo.

The most unexpected thing to me was them taking Drago, the most one dimensional character in the franchise, and giving him one of the most satisfying emotional payoffs in the entire movie. I don’t know where they go from here with a sequel since they burned through rehashing Rocky II-IV, but maybe it’s for the best that they’ve already plundered just about everything they can and have to move on.

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If the next thing they do is take a cue from Rocky 5 and bring in a Tommy Gunn character, but instead use inspiration from Tommy Morrison's actual life story, that would be something. Although I can see why they wouldn't want to do that with your actual main character. 

Hey, is it true that the whole Rocky saga is free on YouTube in America now? Because they're still £2.49 each on YouTube onDemand over here.

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Ralph Breaks The Internet was excellent, to the shock of nobody.

I literally cried laughing at

Spoiler

The Princesses rescuing Ralph. "Quick, girls! A big strong man needs our help!" I marked at their theme snippets too.

Stay through the credits.

 

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The Take (2016) formerly known as Bastille Day* is your basic 'Die Hard in a whole city' movie, like Die Hard 3, only it's set in Paris not New York. It stars The Next James Bond alongside The Other Next James Bond but they're both playing Americans for some reason (there's nothing the CIA do in this movie that MI5 couldn't have done just as well. Richard Madden with his American accent reminds me more of Daniel Radcliffe being American in Horns, than he reminds me of an actual American person for some reason. Idris Elba is your actual John McClane for this movie, although he's kind of challenging the later, indestructible version of McClane rather than the scared, desperate, hurt human being from the first movie. Madden's character is in the overawed but capable role. Overall, it's pretty good if you like that sort of thing, but the fights are a bit shakycam and the plot twists are the kind of twists where... you can kind of tell there's going to be one in a minute, and then sixty minutes later something that would have been unexpected is revealed, but it wasn't unexpected because they signposted "Unexpected Revelation Ahead". But yeah, s'alright.

* until it was changed because there actually was a terrorist attack in Paris on Bastille Day

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23 hours ago, Ace said:

Ralph Breaks The Internet was excellent, to the shock of nobody.

I literally cried laughing at

  Hide contents

The Princesses rescuing Ralph. "Quick, girls! A big strong man needs our help!" I marked at their theme snippets too.

Stay through the credits.

 

The WHOLE credits, although the music credits kinda give the gag away. 

And yeah, I left really wanting a Disney Princesses team up movie. 

Excellent movie though, and about the best way you could do a sequel to Wreck it Ralph. 

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Really enjoyed Creed 2.  If I was ever a badass professional boxer or mixed martial artist, I would love for my ride or die pop diva hot wife to croon my entrance music live as I walked to the ring.  That was fire.

I also marked for what (BP) marked for.  WHAT~??

My only minor nitpick with the ending of the movie is that I think it would've been good for Creed to go over give Viktor a bro hug or at least touch gloves with the man in a display of sportsmanship.    I think it was a missed opportunity to show that Creed had truly left everything in the ring that night.

Other than that, million billion stars.  I was kinda bummed that Adonis moved up a weight class, but all was forgiven when the title fight in Russia went down.

By the time there is a sequel, Pretty Ricky Conlan should be out of prison in the Rockyverse.  BOOK THE REMATCH~!

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I was thinking more about The Take, and even though it nicks certain plot twists from the first Die Hard (they're not Terrorists they're Thieves) it really is more similar to Die Hard 3, in that you have the grizzled vet crime fighter who knows all the tricks paired with a skilled but naive sidekick who can't believe what he's seeing. But it's not even the first Die Hard 3 copy set in Paris, because there's From Paris with Love with Johnathon Rhys Meyers and Stone Cold John Travolta (and yes, he does order un Royale avec Fromage at one point), and there's also Safe House with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, which is in another European city I don't remember.

It also set me off playing the unconnected sequel game, where you pretend that one actor is playing the same character (with name changes, fake deaths, and lookalike descendants as necessary) in multiple unconnected movies. To whit, Samuel L Jackson is playing the same person in Sea of Love, Die Hard 3, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and all 3 XXX movies. He gets arrested at a fake autograph signing, does his time, gets out & goes straight by opening a shop, is caught up in John McClain's game of Simon Says and so impresses the CIA that they recruit him. Due to his age he is moved into a supervisory role, where he ends up running Agent Charlie Baltimore ... But after that debacle, he persuades the top brass to start recruiting people from a non traditional law enforcement background, like Skateboarders. Because that makes perfect sense to him, after the life he's lived.

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4 hours ago, J.T. said:

Really enjoyed Creed 2.  If I was ever a badass professional boxer or mixed martial artist, I would love for my ride or die pop diva hot wife to croon my entrance music live as I walked to the ring.  That was fire.

I also marked for what (BP) marked for.  WHAT~??

My only minor nitpick with the ending of the movie is that I think it would've been good for Creed to go over give Viktor a bro hug or at least touch gloves with the man in a display of sportsmanship.    I think it was a missed opportunity to show that Creed had truly left everything in the ring that night.

Other than that, million billion stars.  I was kinda bummed that Adonis moved up a weight class, but all was forgiven when the title fight in Russia went down.

By the time there is a sequel, Pretty Ricky Conlan should be out of prison in the Rockyverse.  BOOK THE REMATCH~!

Did he move up in weight class or did they just go with heavyweight for II with the idea that most people wouldn't remember the last movie was based in the light heavy division?

With the numbers Creed II did this weekend there's most likely going to be a III.

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3 minutes ago, happjack said:

Did he move up in weight class or did they just go with heavyweight for II with the idea that most people wouldn't remember the last movie was based in the light heavy division?

That sounds like the same thing. 

The movie takes place three years after Creed's fight with Pretty Ricky Conlin and makes no mention of Creed going on to win the Lt. Hvy title, so I can only guess that he moved up in weight and went after the title his father once held and that's what put him on a collision course with Drago.

A believable explanation for "we don't think anyone remembered that Creed was a Light Heavyweight."

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1 hour ago, Raziel said:

Well, I'll fight for it, and defend Tomb Raider (2018) as an entry into Video Game movies that don't suck.

It debuted over the weekend on HBO so it should be on heavy rotation and on HBO Go by now.  I'll watch it again before the week is out.

Pacific Rim:  Uprising debuted the Saturday before last and should also be in heavy rotation and available on demand via HBO Go..

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15 minutes ago, J.T. said:

That sounds like the same thing. 

The movie takes place three years after Creed's fight with Pretty Ricky Conlin and makes no mention of Creed going on to win the Lt. Hvy title, so I can only guess that he moved up in weight and went after the title his father once held and that's what put him on a collision course with Drago.

A believable explanation for "we don't think anyone remembered that Creed was a Light Heavyweight."

Spoiler

Stuntman Wheeler was supposed to fight Conlan in Creed but got hurt in the press conference brawl and that's who Adonis beat for the belt at the start of II. That means both would have moved up to heavyweight, which is plausible but they most likely made the switch to heavy due to the size of the actor playing Viktor along with going away from whatever Coogler originally laid out for the sequels.

 

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A bit late to the party, but I LOVED Bohemian Rhapsody. I know they played a bit fast and loose with the timeline, but I found Remi Malek mesmerizing as Freddie, and the guys they casted to play Queen all did yeoman's work around Malek, as I imagine May, Taylor, and Deacon were doing around Mercury during the band's heyday. Also, the unmitigated balls it took to cast Mike Myers as essentially the world's greatest inside joke of all time was fantastic. Also, the first time John Deacon appeared on screen, I accidentally said out loud "Big Tim, the human piece of toast." I regret nothing. The ending 20 minutes at LiveAid were goosebump inducing. Great film. Not perfect, but the casting was really great and I thought it was shot and edited well, too. And of course, the soundtrack was bonkers.

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So I watched a couple of movies in the bizarre "Dead Spouse Returns from the Grave" genre close together. Now as far as I'm aware, this whole thing started around like 1990 with Ghost and the far superior British Truly Madly Deeply, which was suffocatingly middle class, but Alan Rickman was always and forever a better romantic lead that Patrick Swayze, and Juliet Stevenson's performances aren't tainted by the overwhelming vanity and egotism that Demi Moore's are. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that 2013-2015 period that bought us Warm Bodies, Nina Forever, and Life After Beth.

Warm Bodies (2013), which I actually haven't seen for a while, that's just someone doing a Zombie Apocalypse movie, with the twist that the lead girl character's boyfriend gets his brains eaten by a zombie who then absorbs that brain's memories and thinks he's in love with her. It's alright, as I recall. Seemed to lose it's way.

Life After Beth (2014) stars Aubrey Plaza and is about a boy who's girlfriend dies, so he forms a close friendship with her parents, and then suddenly she comes back to life and it's all confusing and traumatic for everyone. Again, it sort of loses it's way towards the end and drifts into being another Zombie Apocalypse movie, just with a longer, slower build and some gratuitous weirdness to throw you off. Good cast though. Anna Kendrick's got a small role in it.

Nina Forever (2015) is the smallest of the three, but also the most interesting. Rob's girlfriend Nina dies in a car accident and he unsuccessfully attempts suicide. So he forms a close friendship with her parents, and tries to move on with his life... and ends up dating Holly. But whenever Rob tries to have sex with Holly, Nina returns from the grave and starts making sarcastic, mocking comments (and leaving massive blood stains all over everything). So Holly tries to initiate a necrophiliac threesome, but that doesn't work because dead people can't feel pleasure apparently. It's one of those movies with loads of nudity and sex that isn't really titillating at all, unless you're a major league sicko. But it keeps things on a small scale, these are our characters we're telling our story about level, it doesn't go off and save the World or end it. What effect do these events have upon these people. And it's much more Holly's story than Rob's or Nina's, she's a main character.

Oh, and I'm posting in the movies thread rather than the Horror thread because Nina Forever is the best one and it's really not a horror film at all. It's a Romance that happens to feature a talking bloody corpse as one of the main characters.

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