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2021 MOVIES DISCUSSION


RIPPA

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On 10/15/2021 at 1:51 AM, DreamBroken said:

Guilty pleasure favorite and it's soundtrack. Now watch the sequel, Teen Wolf Too! ?

“SHOOT IT, FATBOY” Is often quoted by my brother and I over the years. I know in my ❤️ neither are good movies, but I’ve seen them both roughly 500 times ?

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I just watched Dune … (1984)

That was positively one of the absolute worst movies I’ve ever seen!

99% inner voice, constant saying and not showing 

plot points happen without explanation motivation

time jump

nonsensical payoffs 

it was like only watching Game of Thrones season 8 condensed into 2 hours

i liked this back when I was a kid WTF

Can't wait for the remake

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I just got back from seeing Dune (first time I've been to a theater since covid) and it totally lives up to the hype. The set and costume designs, cinematography, and sense of massive scale were all excellent. The cast was one of the most fitting I can think of (I was a bit iffy on Jessica's casting as Rebecca Ferguson isn't old enough to be Paul's mother and she looks it) and the score is some of Hans Zimmer's best work. The story did the novel justice and wasn't so convoluted that those non-familiar with the source material can follow it. I hope it does enough business with the general public to get the sequel.

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3 hours ago, HumanChessgame said:

I just got back from seeing Dune (first time I've been to a theater since covid) and it totally lives up to the hype. The set and costume designs, cinematography, and sense of massive scale were all excellent. The cast was one of the most fitting I can think of (I was a bit iffy on Jessica's casting as Rebecca Ferguson isn't old enough to be Paul's mother and she looks it) and the score is some of Hans Zimmer's best work. The story did the novel justice and wasn't so convoluted that those non-familiar with the source material can follow it. I hope it does enough business with the general public to get the sequel.

The score was nuts. Just weird, ear-splitting orchestral prog rock. I really dug it and didn’t realize it was Zimmer.

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8 hours ago, odessasteps said:

I thought Dune was fine but slow at points, but that might just the source material. 

 

I haven't seen the movie (I do want to at this point, just not sure when/how) but yes, the original first novel starts with a metric fuckton of info dumping as Herbert sets up the universe he's writing and gets the background so that the betrayals and such that happen later make sense. That's always been the problem with the translation to screen: what's the bare minimum you need to  know to make the story move along, and what's the best way to present it for people who have never read the book.

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On 10/23/2021 at 10:01 AM, EVA said:

I really like what Denis is doing with DUNE, and I hope he gets to make part 2, but this did not work as a stand-alone movie.

That's the issue with only doing half the book.  There was no resolution.  There was a better place to split the movies, but it'd probably have added another 30 minutes to the run time.  

I'd have felt better if they made both parts concurrently or if it was straight greenlit already.  This was too good to only end up half a movie.

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2 hours ago, JLSigman said:

I haven't seen the movie (I do want to at this point, just not sure when/how) but yes, the original first novel starts with a metric fuckton of info dumping as Herbert sets up the universe he's writing and gets the background so that the betrayals and such that happen later make sense. That's always been the problem with the translation to screen: what's the bare minimum you need to  know to make the story move along, and what's the best way to present it for people who have never read the book.

It’s not slow due to exposition, though: in fact, I’d say the filmmakers tried to overcorrect from Lynch’s version and erred on the side of “the less said, the better.” No explanation for what a mentat or a Suk doctor is, or why there’s no computer technology, etc.

It’s slow because its world building is done almost exclusively through audiovisual design.

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Dune Act One is fucking beautiful and the cast is entirely on point. The story flows well even when weighed down with Herbert's pseudo religious babble.

I wish that Denis had been given the green light to shoot everything all at once and then release the second and third acts in three or four month intervals.  We should not have to wait eons for another installment.

Edited by J.T.
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Good news is that it seems to be slightly outperforming expectations at the box office, which I think is a first (or at least rare) for these same-day HBO Max releases. So it seems a little more likely that we’ll get the whole thing.

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Hey, everyone's got opinions about Dune and I have opinions about what's better than Dune! Day 102 (and counting) of Some Movie Crap I'm Doing, Evil Bastards Edition

(Only 9 movies listed because 1 is my HALLOWEEN HAVOC pick, and you can read about it there whenever RIPPA actually posts it)

Hot Garbage

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane - No.  Just no.  I like Jodie Foster, and she was good even at a young age, but this whole movie is preposterous and shot like it's an episode of Diff'rent Strokes or something.  Martin Sheen plays a pretty good creep, I suppose, but he's another guy with "Go away" heat as far as I'm concerned.  It's weird that I can recognize that his kids aren't better actors but I would rather see his kids try to act (though Emilio was pretty great in Repo Man).  Anyway, this is shoddy 70s thriller bullshit with a gratuitous nude scene of what is supposed to be a 13-year-old girl (it's actually Jodie's older sister for anyone feeling icky about that; it's still gross even knowing it).  90 minutes of my life I'm not getting back.

Failure to Launch - 90 more minutes of my life I'm not getting back.  That's the one thing about this whole idea that works well for me: if I'm going to watch shit once in a while, I can at least prioritize the blessedly brief shit.  Stuff like this makes it all the more interesting that McConaughey ever figured out what he was doing in front of the camera.  I don't know how anyone watching this thought this was the movie they should make, when Zooey Deschanel steals the whole entire thing and they could have written something for that character instead.  There's also one shockingly poignant scene with Kathy Bates where you remember, "Oh yeah, there was a time when she deservedly won an Oscar and she was good, instead of just collecting paychecks as someone's put-upon mother."  Otherwise, please succeed in launching this into space, Jeff Bezos.

Angel Heart - Get out your torches and pitchforks, guys, but you may be watching this with some Lisa Bonet goggles on.  I like Alan Parker as much as the next guy, but this just doesn't work.  The noir stuff is super dull - it made me think of Rorschach's section of Watchmen in a bad way - the spooky stuff is cliched and racist, and Bobby Paycheck is hamming it up something fierce.  The only legitimately good things about this are the way the horror elements are edited (aside from the dumb yellow eye crap) and Mickey Rourke's performance in the last few scenes.  Otherwise...ugh.  I mean, it's a movie with the most obvious twist in Hollywood history, where dudes are threatening to kill him for "finding"...himself.  I mean...really? 

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Ugh.  I hate to say I kind of liked season 1 of the Amazon show, but they really, REALLY need to quit making this rah-rah America crap.  They should've quit making it after Red October, honestly, since that's the only start-to-finish good Tom Clancy-based movie.  I'm not sure this is necessarily the worst entry in any of these films, but it's gotta be up there.  Keira Knightley is really miscast and does a weird American accent, Kenneth Branagh is boring (and I now realize his Tenet character was just a crazier version of this one), and the only remotely bright spot is Kevin Costner mean-mugging his way through the movie.  I hope they paid Chris Pine a ton for this, but however much he made, it wouldn't have been enough to get me to play the role.

Acceptable

Jolt - I wanted to just hate the crap out of this, since the first 3 minutes feature tedious narration and Charisma-as-a-Dump-Stat-on-Legs, Jai Courtney, but then the movie becomes very self-aware of how ludicrous it is and it leans HARD into laughing at itself.  I mean, any movie where a suspect flees through a maternity ward by throwing babies at the cops chasing her is actually pretty funny.  Most of the rest of it is dumb bullshit, but it at least says to you, "Hello, I'm Dumb Bullshit - come have fun with me!"  And so you do. 

The Lair of the White Worm - Any fleeting worries I ever had about my appearance are now and forever gone due to the knowledge that Hugh Grant once bore the Brow.  But this is actually pretty good.  Amanda Donohoe is pretty unforgettable in this, and I was surprised that Sammi Davis, who plays Mary, was believable and genuine throughout much of the film.  You could almost watch it as a straight movie rather than a B-movie comedy until close to the hour mark.  It's really that big, ridiculous leap where the mom gets cut in half that signals to you that things are only going to a silly place from now on.  Even then, it's a decent enough silly place, and the hallucination scenes are some pretty crazy stuff, right up there with Altered States.

Awesome

Island of Lost Souls - Talk about crazy stuff; this is what makes that Criterion Channel membership worth it.  I think I've seen chunks of the Michael York Dr. Moreau, and of course I've seen the disastrous Brando/Kilmer version, but this just steps all over all of those, and probably any other adaptation that will get made.  I think the old-time practical effects make it even creepier and more bizarre than it would have been, had they tried to do something like this today.  Kathleen Burke is pretty great as Lota, Charles Laughton is absolutely revolting as Moreau, and the whole film is shot through with so much unsettling weirdness that it's hard to stop thinking about it.  That Devo drew so much inspiration from it is just icing on the cake. 

Dune - Spoilered just because.

Spoiler

Whew, what to say about this.  First, it's good to know that in the process of doing this adaptation, so much of the flab was cut out.  As @J.T.rightly pointed out, the Baron is absurdly over-the-top in the worst ways in the book, but a lot of the piling-on Herbert did - and the godawful Big Bad Exposition chapters - are chucked in favor of letting the visuals tell that part of the story.  And if anything, I think it's good that there aren't explanations for things like the Butlerian Jihad or Yueh's training, because it would just bog down everything else that can be told with a picture.  You don't need to get a sense of scope of the Bene Gesserit, for example, after Charlotte Rampling uses the Voice on Paul.

And stuff like the Voice...good God.  If this movie doesn't take home a barrel full of technical Oscars, especially for scoring and sound design, I don't know what to tell you.  In a standard theater, it was actually hard to hear the dialogue, but when I saw it in IMAX, the levels popped a lot better and the dialogue came through much more crisply.  This works as much as it does because it frankly assaults you with sound when it wants you to feel something.  Try - no, really, I dare you - not to jump during the tent scene when Paul unloads on his mother, for example.  The rest of you have already raved about it; all I can say is, strong agree.

And I don't need to tell anyone around here that nobody does this sort of stuff better than Denis Villeneuve.  It's like every time he takes on a project, it's bigger than the last one, and he keeps pulling it off.  What's next, a movie about that EVE Online incident where someone blew up a few 100K worth of ships?  A movie adaptation of No Man's Sky?

That said, this isn't nearly as good as Arrival, and it's probably not as good as Blade Runner 2049 or Prisoners, either.  But it's just a bit under those.  I think what it's mostly lacking is a really home-run acting performance: Arrival had Amy Adams, BR2049 had Ana de Armas and Sylvia Hoeks, and Prisoners had Jackman and Gyllenhaal.  I don't think anyone here rises to that level; Rebecca Ferguson might come the closest, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster is a welcome gender swap of Kynes, but everyone else is what you expect them to be, even when what you expect is very, very good.  Plus, for as much as it wants to praise environmentalism and excoriate capitalism, this is still absolutely slathered in the archly conservative viewpoints of its source material, and I really wonder if that's going to change with part 2; it could, depending on how they choose to portray Fremen societies, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Last Duel - Also spoilered, just because. 

Spoiler

I've been waiting for Ridley Scott to make another great movie, and it only took him about 30 years (or longer, depending on what you think of Thelma and Louise, because let's face it, Gladiator ain't great).  The first part of the film is...clunky.  It's very, very clunky, clunky to the point that you wonder if everyone involved with the film has lost a step or five, but when the second section starts, you begin to see *why* it works that way.  Every section flows with not just the told narrative but the *capacity for perspective* of its narrator.  So, you realize the first part seems boring because, big surprise, Matt Damon's character is illiterate and boorish, so, yeah, he'd tell you a story that reflects his limited ability for expression.

The rest of the movie follows from that, and it's as icky, unsettling, fucked-up, and terrifying as you'd expect.  Some of the time, you think to yourself that you're lucky you don't live in that world, but just as often, you realize we still do, because, as much we like to believe we've made strides, the core tenet of human nature is that the powerful will do anything to continue wielding power over the powerless.  This is, if anything, simply a more extreme and more honest assessment of that trait.

Adam Driver is great in this, Jodie Comer is great in this, but the real surprise is Ben Affleck, who probably does his best work ever here.  Of course, that's not entirely out of left field, since no one cashes in harder on his reputation as a sleazeball, and he is the consummate sleazeball in this movie.  This isn't an all-time great kind of movie, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised at all if this ends up in the Best Picture category, or if it wins.

Edited by Contentious C
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On 10/24/2021 at 2:54 PM, odessasteps said:

I guess after Blade Runner and Dune, his next movie will be to remake Lawrence of Arabia. #sand

He's signed on for a stand-alone Star Wars movie that explores Anakin's time between Episodes I and II.  It'll focus on why exactly he came to hate sand so much.

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Wife really wants to watch Dune too and we feel more confident going to a theater after me and the kids ended up diseased but I can't imagine when we'd actually fit 3 hours+ (2.5 with trailers and drive time and whatever else) right now. We're weighing the convenience of that with actually seeing it on the big screen with being able to have subtitles at home. I'm actually betting "at home" is going to win.

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For the foreseeable future, the only thing getting me to a theater will be Wes Anderson. 

Edit: coming to Wilmington, so won't have to go out of my normal routine to see it. 

Edited by odessasteps
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On 10/24/2021 at 12:37 PM, J.T. said:

I wish that Denis had been given the green light to shoot everything all at once

He sat down with James Cameron and during their interview he stated that even if he had the green light there was no way he could film both at once.  it took a lot out of the cast and crew and it even took months over storyboarding to get it off the ground.   

Happy he will be able to finish the project Part One was excellent. 

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