[A Demon Llama!]

Django Unchained was pretty good. And yes, Christoph Waltz' did an awesome job once again.

Also just saw Cloud Atlas. I was a bit skeptical about the movie, with all of the negative opinions I've heard but I really enjoyed it. Left me in a good mood.

[Abyss]

McLovin, on 30 December 2012 - 04:07 PM, said:

Saw THE CAPTAINS, William Shatner's interviews with all the other actors who've played the Captain on a Star Trek series (Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, and Chris Pine). Cheeseball in an Inside-the-Actors-Studio way, but oddly fun to watch. I had no idea Avery Brooks was a tenured professor at Princeton.

The problem i had with this was that no matter how interesting any of the actors were, the Shat kept turning the conversation back to how wonderful he is.
I mean, yes, he's The Shat... but this felt like self-funded vanity project masquerading as documentary in a totally bad way.

[QuickTidal]

You people need to go see LES MIS.

No seriously.

Just do it.

[Abyss]

THE DARKEST HOUR

...basically a frivolous 'attractive cast on the run during alien invasion' flic set in Moscow, but while it drags at points, as such films go it wasn't bad.
Neat enough aliens, doesn't overthink the science, decent action and tension, tho it's fairly obvious who is about to die. Massive plot holes if one actually gives it some thought, but i try not to do that.

Better than SKYLINE, not nearly as fun as BATTLE LA.

[QuickTidal]

Since I received the INDIANA JONES BluRay boxed set for Christmas, I decided that the first one I'd watch wasn't any of the original 3 (as I KNOW they all still rock!), and instead decided to give KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL another shot (I've not seen it since being rather disappointed by it in theaters).

It's...still pretty rough. It's got some absolutely charming, perfectly laid out and shot moments and script beats near the beginning (Indy at home in the same home from RAIDERS talking about his fathers and then Marcus' deaths, talking with the Army base guys about his time as a spy, and even the warehouse scene where they are finding the Roswell box), but the majority of the second hour is still REALLY, REALLY rough. I mean, even the dig site/temple at the Nazca Lines is too open to be as undiscovered as they try to make it out to be and the inside of the temple is too ...easy...to find the skull ect. And don't get me started on the natives who apparently just seal themselves up inside statues to WAIT for people to happen along so they can break out and attack them. No matter how hard he tries, the Beef as a co-conspirator with Indy can't TOUCH companions like Short-Round, Young Marion, or Connery. Like can't even get close to their acting abilities. Indy seems to be walking through the whole thing. I'm still of the mind that they SHOULD have played him off like Connery was in the 3rd film. An aging, but devoted man helping someone younger find the treasure. I still think casting the Beef was the second biggest mistake they made (the first mistake was allowing GL to script it), as he just doesn't have the chops...when the fedora rolls towards him at the end I always cringe thinking of him as the next guy...the next guy needs to be someone with Ford's charisma (Josh Harnett always comes off as a young Harrison Ford to me) and that's hard to come by...but I think if they move forward with a 5th film, that Mutt...or Henry Jones Jr. Jr. ....needs to stay the eff away.

Oh and Multidimensional Aliens....still totally fucking annoying as a macguffin plot point in an INDY film (leave alone the fact that the actual Crystal Skulls were debunked YEARS ago as a hoax)...history is FILLED with historical artifacts and stuff with a million times better meaning without the need to resort to ANY kind of "aliens".

So yeah, I gave it a fresh go, and it's still quite, quite bad.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 02 January 2013 - 05:53 PM

[D'rek]

QuickTidal, on 02 January 2013 - 05:51 PM, said:

Since I received the INDIANA JONES BluRay boxed set for Christmas, I decided that the first one I'd watch wasn't any of the original 3 (as I KNOW they all still rock!), and instead decided to give KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL another shot (I've not seen it since being rather disappointed by it in theaters).

It's...still pretty rough. It's got some absolutely charming, perfectly laid out and shot moments and script beats near the beginning (Indy at home in the same home from RAIDERS talking about his fathers and then Marcus' deaths, talking with the Army base guys about his time as a spy, and even the warehouse scene where they are finding the Roswell box), but the majority of the second hour is still REALLY, REALLY rough. I mean, even the dig site/temple at the Nazca Lines is too open to be as undiscovered as they try to make it out to be and the inside of the temple is too ...easy...to find the skull ect. And don't get me started on the natives who apparently just seal themselves up inside statues to WAIT for people to happen along so they can break out and attack them. No matter how hard he tries, the Beef as a co-conspirator with Indy can't TOUCH companions like Short-Round, Young Marion, or Connery. Like can't even get close to their acting abilities. Indy seems to be walking through the whole thing. I'm still of the mind that they SHOULD have played him off like Connery was in the 3rd film. An aging, but devoted man helping someone younger find the treasure. I still think casting the Beef was the second biggest mistake they made (the first mistake was allowing GL to script it), as he just doesn't have the chops...when the fedora rolls towards him at the end I always cringe thinking of him as the next guy...the next guy needs to be someone with Ford's charisma (Josh Harnett always comes off as a young Harrison Ford to me) and that's hard to come by...but I think if they move forward with a 5th film, that Mutt...or Henry Jones Jr. Jr. ....needs to stay the eff away.

^^Yup

QuickTidal, on 02 January 2013 - 05:51 PM, said:

Oh and Multidimensional Aliens....still totally fucking annoying as a macguffin plot point in an INDY film (leave alone the fact that the actual Crystal Skulls were debunked YEARS ago as a hoax)...history is FILLED with historical artifacts and stuff with a million times better meaning without the need to resort to ANY kind of "aliens".

So yeah, I gave it a fresh go, and it's still quite, quite bad.

^^Nope.

Isn't every indiana jones movie a search for so-and-so magic macguffin, which at the end kills the evil guys but not the good guys for no apparent reason?

[Magic box = holy spirit = kills everyone who looks at it] seemed just as random as [Magic skull = alien dudes = dimensional kill nazi lady] to me.

[Abyss]

Leaving aside all the flaws with SKULL that i agree with QT on, the 'problem' with the Crystal Skull as the plot widget lies in it's relatively current and/or obscure elements... the Arc of the Covenant... all good and if i'm not mistaken Hitler's search for it was even something that actually happened... the Shiva stones built on an existing fascination with India and a near complete lack of actual information at that time... and the Crusade focused on the Grail, which is pretty engrained in the zeitgeist even if we can mostly blame Monty Python for it... but these are all earhtly and mythological things. Sure, ancient aliens are a staple with the conspiracy theorists, Luminattii-hunters and the flat-earth-crew, but they lack the level of impact on the collective moviegoing consciousness of the plot-devices in the first three flics.

That and the movie just sucked monkeyballs.

[QuickTidal]

Abyss, on 02 January 2013 - 06:26 PM, said:

Leaving aside all the flaws with SKULL that i agree with QT on, the 'problem' with the Crystal Skull as the plot widget lies in it's relatively current and/or obscure elements... the Arc of the Covenant... all good and if i'm not mistaken Hitler's search for it was even something that actually happened... the Shiva stones built on an existing fascination with India and a near complete lack of actual information at that time... and the Crusade focused on the Grail, which is pretty engrained in the zeitgeist even if we can mostly blame Monty Python for it... but these are all earhtly and mythological things. Sure, ancient aliens are a staple with the conspiracy theorists, Luminattii-hunters and the flat-earth-crew, but they lack the level of impact on the collective moviegoing consciousness of the plot-devices in the first three flics.

^^Yes, this is what I was getting at. All three of the previous macguffin's are thins that may/probably existed in some form...and though the "magical" elements of them are invented, there is a holiness, or a spirituality attached to them that allows them reverence from the audience that get hushed "awes" when they appear (even in the case of the Indian Chankarra Stones, tho for TEMPLE'S money I liked the ashes of Nurhaci at the beginning and would have loved to have seen how Indy got his hands on them)...meanwhile the Crystal Skull is a proven fake, with nothing to attach hushed awe to it, and attaching the aliens to it made it even more silly than it already was.

I'd love to have seen Excalibur, or Atlantis, or something along those lines. Something that is unexplained, and existed but is truly mysterious.


Put it this way, both NATIONAL TREASURE films have better treasure hunts and temples than INDY 4 did. Which shouldn't have been the case.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 02 January 2013 - 06:51 PM

[worry]

Those of you who don't understand the mystique of the crystal skull have apparently never seen the masterpiece House II:

This post has been edited by worrywort: 02 January 2013 - 10:46 PM

[HoosierDaddy]

Django Unchained was great. Loved watching it at the theater. Tarantino almost at his best.

8.0/10

[Traveller]

Abyss, on 02 January 2013 - 06:26 PM, said:

That and the movie just sucked monkeyballs.

Yep. That was without mentioning the lengthy car chase through jungle with no roads, or the beef actually being able to catch up with them by swinging on vines.

Anyone seen the South Park where they keep having visions of Indiana Jones being raped by George Lucas? That kind of sums it up for me really.


I watched Avatar again last night. It bugs me that a film can be have so much going for it, but still fail on some major level. I like the setting, the tech, the blue alien design itself, and the fact that the main guy has lost the use of his legs and gets a new life.

But a lot of the animals, like the wolf-things, just look like 3d realisations of the sort of monsters you sketch when you're a kid. The blue alien race has this terrible unecessary similarity to native American culture, to the point at which it ceases to even be alien or original. And there are so many plotholes and badly thought-through story elements it's just unreal.

Like the fact that with all that tech Sam has lost the use of his legs at all, or not been fixed up. Or the point of a diplomatic science mission on an alien planet to move the locals, when they were going to blow it all up anyway. Or why, having swapped sides, Rodriguez paints her 'copter thing so it can be easily picked out from the others and shot down, instead of blending in.

I sort of want to like it, and I do like a lot of it, it just seems to be almost trying to look dumb.

This post has been edited by Traveller: 06 January 2013 - 09:29 AM

[Illuyankas]

Well, Dances with Smurfs (Tolkien would say Smurves) is almost the platonic ideal of style over substance, it couldn't get any more heavy handed if Cameron had paid Greenpeace to parade outside theatres with signs. I'm not even going to touch on how dumb the Na'vi are, but Michelle Rodriguez either 1. has a clause in her contract stating she has to die in every movie she's in nowadays (known as the Sean Bean Clause) or 2. felt her character would rather die after the (thankfully cut) sex scene between her and the supernerd guy.

[polishgenius]

Illuyankas, on 06 January 2013 - 03:10 PM, said:

Well, Dances with Smurfs (Tolkien would say Smurves) is almost the platonic ideal of style over substance,

The sad thing is that it's not even that stylish. I mean the CG and that looks great of itself but it's not presented with a great deal of grace.




My favourite part was how in all their history no Na'vi ever thought to jump on top of the big thing from above (and how did such a stupid creature evolve, anyway).

No wait, my favourite part was where the plan at the end involved letting the bomber get so close to its target before attacking it that bringing it down almost crashed onto said target.

No wait, my favourite part was how the forest creatures fighting in a forest thought the best way to beat a bunch of heavily armed marines with guns would be to charge them in a straight line.

No wait, my favourite part was how they edited out apparently important scenes in favour of keeping some glow-in-the-dark frolicking so later on we got references to key plot events that we'd never actually seen.




Anyway, I watched Killer Joe yesterday. It was pretty good. But it made me feel dirty.

[QuickTidal]

PG hated AVATAR y'all. I think...

I was a big supporter of the film when I saw it...but strangely have never been compelled to re-watch it.

I suppose that says something.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 06 January 2013 - 10:06 PM

[worry]

Never saw it in the theater, but after the first home viewing I would have rated it average (for high highs and low lows, not a plateau of average from start to finish). Then I watched it again with RiffTrax and realized I never want to see it again.

[QuickTidal]

Yeah, I thnk it's one of those films that I came out of the theatre thinking "I enjoyed that!"...but never having been compelled to rewatch it shows how it's a one-off with no re-watchability like Cameron's other work (ABYSS, ALIENS, TRUE LIES ect.)...so I guess I only sort of liked it.

[polishgenius]

QuickTidal, on 06 January 2013 - 10:06 PM, said:

PG hated AVATAR y'all. I think...

Does it show?


Oddly enough, as I watched it I actually didn't (although I can't say I liked it either, I did enjoy parts of it). It was only when I gave it half a second's thought that it started to wind me up.

I like films objectively similar in (storytelling) quality too - like Chronicles of Riddick. Just something in Avatar struck a wrong chord.

[Traveller]

Same here, I thought it was ok when I saw it at the cinema, but didn't really have any desire to see it again.

It was on tv the other night though, so I gave it another go. And I can see why I didn't now.

[QuickTidal]

polishgenius, on 06 January 2013 - 10:37 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 06 January 2013 - 10:06 PM, said:

PG hated AVATAR y'all. I think...

Does it show?


Oddly enough, as I watched it I actually didn't (although I can't say I liked it either, I did enjoy parts of it). It was only when I gave it half a second's thought that it started to wind me up.

I like films objectively similar in (storytelling) quality too - like Chronicles of Riddick. Just something in Avatar struck a wrong chord.

CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK rules.

[amphibian]

Avatar is the worst movie ever to be a smash hit.

What part really gets me about the movie is that the hero supposedly creates a lifetime bond with that one little dragon and then promptly abandons it for a bigger, better version. "Hey buddy, I'm just using you to get at the upgrade. I don't really care about your devotion to me and/or your courage in going up against the apex predator of the Avatar universe to deliver me safely to its back."