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2019 Q3 MOVIE DISCUSSION


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Watched Dune the other night for the first time. I absolutely hated it with a passion. I could not understand what the fuck was happening. Wait... Scratch that. I did understand one thing. At the beginning when Virginia Madsen is explaining the world she says something like “The Spice lets you travel to distant worlds while standing still”. After she said that, I was like “Okay, Book Writer + Acid = Dune”.

The movies costumes, and practical effects did look fantastic at least. I’ve forgiven many Sci-Fi films because of how gorgeous they look(Prometheus, portions of Blade Runner), but I didn’t like anything outside of the visuals. The characters, the plot, the acting, etc... All that was a slog to watch. I hope Denis Villaneuve can bring to what he did to my favorite movie this decade, Blade Runner 2049, and make this watchable. 

Edited by LoneWolf&Subs
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Have you ever seen Jodorowsky's Dune? If not, WATCH IT. Seriously, you will flip your wig at what was possible there. 

As far as the other Dune goes, I've never read the books and have nothing to be particularly pissed about, so every time it comes on TV I just laugh my ass off.

Edited by Curt McGirt
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12 hours ago, driver said:

That looks fucking awesome. I tried reading Dune in 10th grade and tapped out after five pages.

I nearly tapped out until it dawned on me that Paul is a drug kingpin and then the book suddenly got interesting.

Edited by J.T.
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Two completely unconnected movies I watched this weekend. Everly (2014) and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). 

Now reading the plot synopsis for Everly (Yakuza sex slave takes revenge), you'd think it was a gritty action movie with a traumatised hero, like a distaff Taken. But it's actually a played for laughs comedy action, and Salma Hayek is your Latina John Rambo, racking up the body count like nobody's business. She,looks great, too. Even though she was 47 or 48 when she filmed it, you'd swear she was early 30s at the oldest. Good action and plenty of gore, but it's oddly misogynistic for a film you'd expect to be about female empowerment and the cruelty of evil men. Still, not the movie I thought it would be, and probably better for it.

Bohemian Rhapsody however is a giant missed opportunity. With musical biopics, you only really get one shot at them, because who has more than one biopic* (John Lennon doesn't count; Neither Nowhere Boy, The Hours and the Times, nor Backbeat were biopics. They were stories of brief moments in a life full of incident)? Rami Malek was great in the movie (he's better in Until Dawn though, if you ask me), but the movie is kind of a stinker. You've got a great story to tell, and a great set of tunes to tell it with, but it's just a clunky mess. And oddly homophobic for a movie about a gay icon, so I have found a thematic link between the two after all. Spends  quite a lot of time on his love affair with Mary, and then his life as a gay man consists entirely of walking into nightclubs in slow motion. Who knew you could catch HIV from walking into some rooms? This movie! All things considered, if you haven't seen the film and think you might like it, put on Queen's greatest hits album, close your eyes and imagine how the movie might go. Whatever you envisage will probably be better than the actual cinema release.

* nb: The Hendrix estate are idiots, refusing his songs to the Andre 3000 movie because they want to make their own, then it bombs and now no studio will make another Jimi film because they made one and it bombed. It's actually alright as well. Hayley Atwell is in it.

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The other thing that seemed unusual was the number of times they'd be onstage playing, and Brian May would gaze adoringly at Freddy, awestruck by his amazing charisma and talent. Fairly sure the real Brian didn't do that.

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Overall, I felt Bohemian Rhapsody was a good movie, however I was struck by and completely taken out of it by how historically inaccurate everything was. I mean, a few little things here and there are usually changed around for these types of movies and that is understandable, but pretty much every single major beat in the plot was completely wrong. It's takes me out of it. But, again, I still feel like it was a well made and well done film and I enjoy watching it. So.....sort of like Braveheart, where I love the actual movie itself as a well made film, but is practically complete fiction from what it is supposed to be based off of.

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Hey Hollywood, steal this idea from me! 

There should be a film that is a parody of those Taken rip-off movies that are still the rage. But instead of another old actor starring in it, it’s instead starring a current young actor pretending to play an old actor with shitty make-up on going through all the tropes.

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16 minutes ago, LoneWolf&Subs said:

Hey Hollywood, steal this idea from me! 

There should be a film that is a parody of those Taken rip-off movies that are still the rage. But instead of another old actor starring in it, it’s instead starring a current young actor pretending to play an old actor with shitty make-up on going through all the tropes.

Or Roger Rabbit

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Bohemian Rhapsody is just a bad film. I'm not sure I've ever felt an Oscar was less deserved than it's Best Editing win. I mean, it's shockingly badly edited. The script is basically all about the surviving members picking a bone with Freddy for having his own life (like, that scene about him deciding to do a solo album being a betrayal of the band literally chronologically had to happen after Roger Taylor's first solo album, and around the time he was working on his second), it was homophobic, and it was just fucking boring whenever Queen lipsynch wasn't propping it up.

Now to mention their big reunion after "we haven't played together in years" actually happened half a year after they finished a world tour, and there was literally no point in time they were broken up. 

Fuck that movie was bad.

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And speaking of Taken rip-offs, the new Rambo is really weirdly structured. The first half is basically Taken, but the movie is also structured like First Blood, where the first half or so is a drama and only the end stretch is actually an action movie. So when you put those two things together, you get the weirdest knockoff of Taken possible for 45 minutes.

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Just came here to say, if you have any reverence for the last Rambo ended, do not go and watch Last Blood as it pisses all over that.

It's the most thrown together feeling film I've seen in a long time and it's impossible to get emotionally involved in any characters due to said plotting. Then in the second half it basically turns into Adult Home Alone/Don't Breathe with a piss poor attempt at an emotional narration/justification at the end. Literally no redeeming features

Edited by BurningBeard
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On 8/29/2019 at 1:25 AM, Curt McGirt said:

This DVR sure is coming in handy. Among the gems I've scored already is To Live and Die in LA by William Friedkin. It's pretty much Manhunter (Kinda) Works for the Secret Service. William L. Petersen, playing one Dick Chance (heh), is a not-so-ethical SS guy whos partner gets whacked out raiding a counterfeit money operation by a very, VERY seedy Willem Dafoe so him and his reluctant new partner get locked in a full-bore run at getting revenge. They do all kinds of perjurous shit, from stealing from a crime scene to an operation involving another theft that goes extremely wrong and ends up in a car chase to rival Friedkin's other classic in The French Connection. It's the film's centerpiece -- like Connection's was -- and how they pulled off multiple cars chasing one car through LA's film-famous drainage basins and up the freeway going the wrong way with a thousand wrecks occurring is beyond me. You can kind of grasp how they pulled off Gene Hackman chasing that train but this one is mind boggling. Aside from that the plot is complex but reasonable and the goings on are nice and sleazy, plus there's some welcome gore; Friedkin's a fan of people getting shot in the face apparently. Roger Ebert actually gave this four stars when it came out. I wouldn't go that high but it's a solid, very '80s noir.

Rick Masters had to have been an influence on the Joker in The Dark Knight. He went through the trouble of retrieving some of his counterfeit money after a job was botched, only to immediately throw it in the fireplace afterwards. He burnt his own paintings. 

Spoiler

Hell, he was even mesmerized at the exact moment he realized he was going to burn to death. 

"Some men just want to watch the world burn." Indeed.

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38 minutes ago, BurningBeard said:

Just came here to say, if you have any reverence for the last Rambo ended, do not go and watch Last Blood as it pisses all over that.

It's the most thrown together feeling film I've seen in a long time and it's impossible to get emotionally involved in any characters due to said plotting. Then in the second half it basically turns into Adult Home Alone/Don't Breathe with a piss poor attempt at an emotional narration/justification at the end. Literally no redeeming features

It's basically Taken, with Skyfall's last act.
 

I definitely didn't think it was good, but I didn't find it actively terrible. There was some fun gore if nothing else.

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On 9/23/2019 at 5:31 PM, Brian Fowler said:

Bohemian Rhapsody is just a bad film. I'm not sure I've ever felt an Oscar was less deserved than it's Best Editing win. I mean, it's shockingly badly edited.

Apparently that Oscar was given just in recognition of the editor salvaging something of a film after the shitshow that was its production.  Like, "yes, we recognize that it's a shit movie, but it was better than no movie and it did make money."

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Really? 2 has a fun second half and III has some fun gore gags; the guy dropping down that line and blowing up is choice. For my money Rambo (4) is actually the best one next to First Blood (which is a legit classic and so many leagues above the others it's ridiculous). I had a blast getting drunk and seeing that one at the theater, such a glorious splatter ending. 

Edited by Curt McGirt
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9 hours ago, driver said:

My biggest complaint about Last Blood is that Stallone looks bored. Also I've never seen Pts. 2 & 3.

I could skip 3, it starts off okay but then turns into this weird buddy-cop film once he rescues Trautman.

2 ends with him walking off into the Thai jungle and 4 picks up with him living in the jungle in Thailand so synchs up pretty well, so if I was going to watch them now I'd go 1, 2, 4 and ignore the others

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