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MOVIE COMMENT CATCH-ALL THREAD


jaedmc

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We can't just be talking about Upcoming movies, can we?

Watched Singin' in the Rain last night. Holy shit that's good stuff. Gene Kelly is unreal. I wonder how much Jackie Chan is inspired by him, because they're very similar.

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Just rewatched catch 22. I bet people would have liked it more if it had not come out the same year as MASH.

Arkin is so good in the movie.

The DVD also has a commentary with Mike Nichols and Soderbergh analyzing the film, with Nichols fully explaining all the things he did wrong.

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The Gotta Dance/Broadway Melody Sequence felt like it didn't fit in the movie, but it was so beautiful I didn't really care. That bit with the flowing fabric that wraps around Kelly as the woman walks away is incredibly beautiful. And the way he and Donald O'Connor is light on his feet, it looked like he was on a wire rig. It's really a great spectacle, made more impressive by the fact that they're just human beings. Incredibly gifted human beings.

In Jean Hagen is a scene stealer. I'm so glad I finally watched this.

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Just rewatched catch 22. I bet people would have liked it more if it had not come out the same year as MASH.Arkin is so good in the movie.

 

Alan Arkin's such a great actor. He made Catch 22 watchable to me. Loved his performance in Glengarry Glen Ross as well.

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Man, I really wanted to come on here last week and rage about how godawful Man of Steel was.

I was already a bit cautious after it did so poorly on Rotten Tomatoes, but never did I imagine it would be this terrible.

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Alan Arkin's such a great actor. He made Catch 22 watchable to me. Loved his performance in Glengarry Glen Ross as well.

Arkin's a dude that is finally starting to get his due after years of being forgotten/misused. He even makes junk like Stand Up Guys watchable while he's onscreen.
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Oh, man, last weekend I watched a crazy romance double feature: RUBY SPARKS and UPSTREAM COLOR.

RUBY SPARKS really surprised me. I could have done without the last scene, but I liked it, a lot. It was a pretty clever refutation of the manic pixie dream girl archetype and the men who write them.

I...guess I liked UPSTREAM COLOR. Carruth clearly improved as a director between PRIMER and this film, but I think he maybe crawled a little too far up his butt on the writing end. PRIMER was difficult to follow because of the dense technical jargon and the complex time travel mechanic. But if you could get your head around that, the story flowed pretty clearly from there. In this thing, what's going on is FAR less complicated than time travel, but Carruth is about a hundred times more obtuse in telling the story.

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After reaching the end of Geoff Johns and company's 8 1/2 year run on Green Lantern, I popped in the GL blu-ray for the first time despite having got it like a year and a half ago on sale for 8 bucks.

 

I watched the extended cut (which really only adds one thing in, Martin Jordan's death playing out in full in chronological order, instead of just during the flashback, which is still there) and it's just there as a movie.  It's not bad, really, it's not good, at all.  I will never understand why they did the movie they did, instead of going with "Star Wars meets Training Day."

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Really?  This was not restarted yet?  But I need a place to dump junk!

 

Good old Epix Drive-in has added a tasty slice of 80s pulp to it's lineup.  It is on right now, and I am watching it as I google all these people, so don't count on this for, like archival purposes:

ZOMBIE HIGH (1987) weirdly starring Virginia Madsen as a high school student, despite the fact that she is about 27 years old and the year before had played a washed-out baseball groupie in the underrated made-for-HBO BULL DURHAM ripoff LONG GONE with William Peterson at his scruffy best.

Sadly it mostly lacks the dark humor of its contemporaries like RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, REANIMATOR, TERRORVISION, or even THE BLOB remake.  But it does fit right into that 1987-ish obsession with revisiting and paying homage to the tropes of 50s "the-adults-are-all-pod-people movies...that weird way in which the Reagan 80s are the re-animated corpse of the LEAVE-IT-TO-BEAVER 1950s, but with a tad more self-awareness.

But that's kind of all it has going for it.  It is cheap in that way where everything is shot in tight cloesup, or with everyone grouped together to save on set dressing and lighting or whatever...

But the best thing about it is that one of the costars is Paul Feig...creator of FREAKS AND GEEKS playing...you'll never guess...a geek, and is a joy to watch as essentially a kid improvising whatever lines he thinks Woody Allen would say if he were in ZOMBIE HIGH, but trying to adopt the voice and mannerisms of Jack Benny.  The end result is that he lands sadly around Eddie Deezin.  If there was a Jewish holy trinity, that would be it.  

 

Posted Image

This man is an A-lister now.

 

Enjoy glorious Schtick at 2:23


 
 
...and and Sherilyn Fenn, two years older and hotter than she was in JUST ONE OF THE GUYS.

...and Coach's daughter from COACH!

The evil Dean of the school creating an army of student zombies in order to syphon their life energy??????(honestly I still have no idea.  First there were crystals, but then there was a drug, and then there was music controlling people...first the zombies were students, but then, like, the president was a zombie...and I don't know why this would reach that high if it was all just being run by the dean of a high school...he might be an alien, maybe?  like in THEY LIVE?  Or they were just really old?  So, they got youth from the students?  Or from the drug...then why control the students?  You know what, FUCK THIS MOVIE) is Kay Edwin Emmert Kuter (that is four names, maybe one of which comes anywhere near a normal name word), another "Guy Who Was Never Not Old" who played the ambassador in THE LAST STARFIGHTER.  You know the one:

Posted Image

He is old as Jesus here in 1987, but was somehow still acting as late as a few episodes of CHARMED and was a voice character in GRIM FANDANGO!!!!!.  

The ending plays on the same "classical music is for squares" and "Rock is for freedom!" that provides the basic plot arc for many candy commercials where the mean old librarian is like "Sssssshhhhh" and then Randy Savage bursts through the wall and screams "FUCK YOU OLD LADY>...ROCK AND ROLL SKIIIIIIIITTTTTLLESSSSS!!!!! TASTETHERAINBOWMOTHERFUCKERS I SAID TASTE THE FUCKING RAINBOWAREYOUTASTINGTHATSHITTTTTTT!!!!!??????" and starts playing air guitar.

You see, Mozart is being piped across the city to keep the zombies alive??? (please, just accept this).  So when Virginia Madsen breaks into the music room???? and replaces the classical cassette with an irreverent Rock song, all the Zombies grab their heads in pain and disentagrate.  It's just like that scene in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION only in reverse and better.

 

The song is a hilariously inept attempt to sound like The Beastie Boys, LICENSE TO ILL, so you should be able to chant along with this without hearing the music, complete with chanting chorus at the end of each line.  These, I shit you not, are the lyrics.

Yeah!
Kiss it!
You get up in the mornin' and you clothes don't match your hair!  (you're guess is as good as mine here)
They say "maybe you should wash 'em" you say YOU DON'T CARE!
They're screamin' in your ears 'til their FACE TURNS BLUE
You turn around and say KISS MY BUTT! (no rhyme in English for the word "blue" apparently)
You got to tell 'em fella KISS MY BUTT (Sheamus approved!)

Mom say "take the trash out" Dad say "MOW THAT LAWN!"
They're knockin' on your door sayin' "TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN!" (down does not rhyme with lawn)
You're climbin' out the window, you got to get away!
You turn around instead and say...KISS MY BUTT!
You got to tell 'em fella...KISS MY BUTT!!!

There is then a "talking break" like in (You gotta) Fight...where the band members each get to say something about the stifling society that forces them into uncomfortable race and gender stereotypes,...I'm just shitting, they take turns burping and shit...and screaming for someone to kiss their butts.

Awesomely, the cover of the Cinema Home Video Release has the following as a review blurb:

 

 

"Entertaining..." New York Post.

 

Thank God for ellipsi...ellipsises...

...and for the New...York...Post.

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Just watched GOD BLESS AMERICA and it's a really awesome dark comedy. Bobcat doesn't fuck around within the first five minutes (won't spoil it for some people) as it really is a crazy way to tell the viewers, "After this, either you're in or you're out." Strong movie.

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Shit.  I didn't see this thread.

 

I blame Jae for changing the name from the RANDOM MOVIE THOUGHTS!!!!!! to something with, like, a gerund, a hyphen and three adverbs.

 

Branding, man!

 

Can someone, maybe get rid of the sad alternate I accidentally started and move my one sad post over to here?

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The Lone Ranger is unwatchable for me, even though as a Dutch person I'm used to a shitload of casual racism.

 

Saw Three Women on a big screen yesterday. The first time I saw it was actually only a little over a month ago (on a laptop in Azerbaijan, which was interesting), but when I saw that my friend was screening it downtown, I had to go. So worth it. This is one of my favorite movies ever. It's so nice. It's so rewarding to watch a second time (and probably deliberately made to be), and I still feel like I'm not done. Not in the "I have to know exactly what happened and what everything means" kind of way, just because it's so nice & I'm sure there's even more shit I haven't noticed yet.

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Saw some movies

 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was awful. Downey blathering away forever as narrator gave me PTSD flashbacks to Iron Man 3. Super Val couldn't even save it. I remember something about a dog eating his finger, and not much else. Terrible shit.

 

The Rules of Attraction was weird. I didn't like it, but I didn't dislike it. I can't give a strong opinion because I have none. Van Der Beek maybe was the issue here.

 

Spy Game was awesome. I feel like I'd already seen it but Redford owning everyone consistently and constantly was tremendous. The running "how many wives has this guy had?" joke paid off well too.

 

Friday Night Lights was ok. I knew I'd seen it before, but I totally forgot about Boobie Miles early on. Good stuff, and BBT was on point as usual.

 

Guess Who? 60 POUNDS OF SHRIMP! DON'T MAKE ME RAISE MY VOICE NOW, YOU GON' FORCE ME TO USE THE MUSCLE. Mac is amazing as ever, Kutcher is totally out of his depth. Fuck I miss the Mac Man.

 

Hannibal was awful. I liked it when I first saw it years ago but it's just camp and shitty and Hannibal himself is a cock.

 

Blow was like a shit version of a biopic in which the main character is an idiot who gets busted constantly. Didn't really enjoy it at all.

 

Annnnd Coffee Town was awesome. Howerton not being a dick in it was awkward, especially when his role was taken by Clyde from House of Lies, but it had a good heart and a good story and was just enjoyable all around.

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Will anyone else admit to watching THE LONE RANGER?  It was an odd film.

I saw it last week. It wasn't a bad movie to me. Very weird? Hell yeah. Offensively bad? Not close.

 

The Lone Ranger would have been a movie that fit in great with Disney type movies from 1994 or 1995. They tried to make a PG-13 movie with content that should be R rated. I didn't expect it to be as violent as The Wild Bunch, but the premise of The Lone Ranger film should have made it more violent. They just decided to rid the film of seriousness despite people slaughtering Native Americans and the villain eating a heart. Also, it didn't help that James Badge Dale's character tells Armie Hammer (his brother in The Lone Ranger) that his wife loved him more as he lays dying. That's just too LOL to ignore. If you want a fun, brainless formulaic movie to see though during the summer, this one is it.

 

 

 

Blow was like a shit version of a biopic in which the main character is an idiot who gets busted constantly. Didn't really enjoy it at all.

 

I like Blow even though it turns into Casino, part II when Penelope Cruz becomes a bigger part of the movie. Another problem is that I was more interested in Jordi Molla's Carlos Lehder inspired character and Cliff Curtis as Pablo. That's like making a movie about Pete Best and then have a secondary storyline with the actual Beatles.

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We can't just be talking about Upcoming movies, can we?Watched Singin' in the Rain last night. Holy shit that's good stuff. Gene Kelly is unreal. I wonder how much Jackie Chan is inspired by him, because they're very similar.

 

Jackie has said in interviews that he was pretty influenced by Gene Kelly, particularly the way he incorporated normal objects like chairs into his dance routines.  If you haven't seen Miracles, it's Jackie's favorite film that he has done and is a homage to 30-50's Hollywood musicals (it's a loose remake of a Frank Capra film).

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I saw it last week. It wasn't a bad movie to me. Very weird? Hell yeah. Offensively bad? Not close.

The weirdness with The Lone Ranger, to me, is that when told to remove the werewolf element for budgetary reasons, it seems like Gore Verbinski literally just took out the werewolves and kept the rest of the movie how it was originally.  90% of the movie points directly to the main bad guys transforming during the moonlight attack.

 

Instead they slotted in a surprise Army regiment to mow down the Comanche and then gave Disney the finger by doing a straight '50s version of the Ranger for 10 minutes, before heading back to the original script where silver is needed to cover up the uppermost villain so he won't come back from the dead after falling 80 feet on top of a train.

 

Had the werewolves been left in Tonto would have been vindicated and thus less of a joke.  Without the werewolves I'm not really sure what to make of the movie.

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I don't think I could have handled the werewolves anyway. When you have Johnny Depp in heavy makeup, you're already sniffing Razzie territory as is. It just seems to be a movie that veered too much into the R-rated lane without explaining why the audience should care about John Reid and Tonto finally coming together after putting their differences, John's philosophy on justice, and Tonto's past aside.

 

We had

  • Slaughtering 
  • Treason
  • Political corruption
  • Cannibalism
  • Property destruction
  • Murder of Law Enforcement

And most of that was in the first 45 to 50 minutes. Now, the audience has to care about The Lone Ranger and Tonto's friendship and John trying to bang his brother's widow.

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