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Post by Zarnium on Apr 15, 2017 21:12:11 GMT -8
I will probably never watch The Boss Baby, and here's why: I cannot stand either the art style of the cartoon babies or the focus on predictably baby-related humor in all its forms. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've cringed through every single trailer I've had to sit through, and I don't think I've ever seen anything on film or TV that has dredged up the feeling of primal revulsion that this movie has. I dunno, I guess no part of me wants to see an ugly naked baby wearing nothing but a diaper drooling on a cookie.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Apr 15, 2017 21:24:54 GMT -8
Power Rangers (2017, dir. Dean Israelite)
Literally The Breakfast Club with robots.
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Post by Jeremy on Apr 16, 2017 5:22:37 GMT -8
I was truly surprised by the sort of jokes this PG film was able to get away with, simply because they fell under the banner of "juvenile humor." One early gag involving a pacifier had me cringing.
To give you a better sense: There were a couple of girls sitting next to me who couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 years old. At one point during the film, one of them turned to the other and whispered, "This is so immature."
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Post by guttersnipe on Apr 21, 2017 10:57:17 GMT -8
So during Oscar season I made a couple of posts about the magnetising effects of awards hoovers, stating that my local arthouse had a second run for La La Land, the schpiel for which which emphasised its award-winning prowess. Well, I got the new brochure through this morning, and they're only screening it again along with a bunch of other similarly-laureled pictures: moar liek blah blah land LOOOOOOOOL
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Post by Jeremy on Apr 21, 2017 13:07:29 GMT -8
Passengers
I'll be brief, since most of you know the deal with this film. I'll say that - apart from the disturbing implications of the plot, what killed this film for me was the dialogue. It's no surprise that the film's first half hour is its best - there's barely any talking, apart from some humorous man-vs-computer trade-offs (during which one side is meant to sound stilted). But once Lawrence's character enters the film and starts conversing with Pratt, the writing just turns bland and lifeless. The two leads have chemistry, but the script does very little to capitalize on it.
I agree with most of the general complaints (including the disappointingly routine action climax), but I did find some of the special-effects (like Lawrence in the water bubble) to be pretty cool, and Michael Sheen supplied a few chuckles. Not offensively bad, but I don't expect to revisit this one.
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Post by ThirdMan on Apr 21, 2017 16:03:20 GMT -8
moar liek blah blah land LOOOOOOOOL This comment would fit in perfectly on the now-defunct imdb message boards.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 21, 2017 20:39:30 GMT -8
moar liek blah blah land LOOOOOOOOL This comment would fit in perfectly on the now-defunct imdb message boards. Don't worry, the IMDB message board may be gone, but the comments on Funimation.com have you covered. Perhaps the most troubling part is not the message itself, but that one person "found this helpful."
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Post by guttersnipe on Apr 30, 2017 13:38:16 GMT -8
So I watched Donnie Darko today on the big screen for what must be the first time in ten years, and even if he downed tools immediately after, Richard Kelly really ought to pinch himself everyday that his debut's elements work even half as well as they do. Outstanding.
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Post by Jay on May 22, 2017 18:39:36 GMT -8
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Recently, in the build up to the release of a new entry into Ridley Scott's most successful franchise, there have been attempts to reevaluate Prometheus as something other than hot garbage. These often touch on familiar tones of faith and the pursuit of knowledge and tend to elide material like, oh, the biologist is scared of everything but a penis snake, or this spaceship is rolling in a pattern that might easily be dodged if only Charlize Theron knew how to strafe. I'm not eager to try to revisit that movie's aggravation but I will point out a few things that do work in its favor, areas that Alien: Covenant fails at. I come here not to praise Prometheus, but to bury it.
If I wanted to tell you what the original of the prequel franchise did right, the list would be rather short. One would be that it established the characters in a set environment and then subjected them to variables. It was one of the things that the original Alien did right in small doses, showing the crew at work as equals and then as unequals in a capitalist hierarchy. You don't know the whole crew in and out, but you get the dynamics sufficiently for it to work and feel betrayal in the reveals of exploitation. This was something that Prometheus at least tried to recreate in its atmosphere by having a fair amount of movie take place before landing on an alien planet. You figure out what the characters deals are, then you get them to do stuff. The second thing Prometheus did properly was the novelty of the pathogen. Eggs and chestbursters are established commodities, but black goo atomizing and getting inside people left us with less predictable effects. It wasn't Xenomorph territory, but it was at the very least novel to not know how humans would respond to it. Someone had it slipped into him like a mickey and another faceplanted into it for a long period of time. Would the doses matter? What kind of reaction would take place? A dovetail third point would be the non-Fassbender highlight of the movie, which is to say that you're not going to find too many people that don't think that the C-section scene was great. The C-section scene was great. It also played well with the motherhood/creation thing that was part of Shaw's character being infertile etc etc and sure that wasn't subtle, but it did work.
Alien: Covenant doesn't have any of these things. In fact, if you watched a single preview, you already have seen the movie. Whoops. One of the conceits of this new journey is that everyone aboard has already coupled. The best thing that comes of this is that James Franco dies within minutes, although not without flashbacks to follow. The initial disaster and subsequent disasters want you to emotionally project upon the film something, except that they happen so quickly and with so little base establishment of the characters, their roles, and relationships- beyond broad stereotypical strokes- that a lot of the deaths (each new film in the franchise kills more, with less individual meaning) feel, well, whatever. Characters might be dead. They might not be dead. I mean, they are dead, but there's no follow-up, so what does it matter? This also feeds into one of the film's crutches, in that someone's spouse is perpetually in danger and in need of rescue by their spouse and so everything gets rather rapidly mucked up and we excuse the bad behavior because gosh, everyone's all emotional and married to each other.
At this point, were I following the Prometheus recap that I led up with, I might go into the neomorphs and finally a xenomorph because hey, it is here. I really don't know what to say, considering, because the backburster was all over the previews and I don't feel like there's anything to add. While it's a novel way of exploding a human into meaty kibble and an angry byproduct, you lose the pregnancy aspects that made the original interesting. This assumes that you've seen a commercial for the movie, leaving me with little to explain, but even if you don't see the movie, there's not much more to be said. The first character to be infected is a cipher. The second character to be infected is one of the gay characters, which may be roughly the equivalent of the crime shoot-'em-up where the veteran, African-American police officer is killed early on, the day before retirement, merely to up the ante (MENDOZA). Oh, and then there's an egg or six. Gosh, what ever is going to happen with those eggs?
There is no great individual scene within Alien: Covenant which parallels to the C-section scene. It just doesn't happen. There is no motherhood vibe in the film at all. Instead, its concern is for the relationship of creation and the created. The guy who takes over for the deceased James Franco (James Franco died in a movie, you guys) claims that he was spurned from the original selection of captain because he is "a man of faith." So, you might expect to hear about that at some point, except you don't, beyond his re-hashing of the same point and that sometimes he responds impulsively claiming a higher intuition. Later, he refers to having met the devil once as a child, but no elaboration, no description of the mechanisms in place, what codes of conduct have emerged or even scriptures quoted, he just gets to be a man of faith and Michael Fassbender gets to be a robot who quotes Shelley and Milton.
I came here to bury Prometheus, not to praise it, and I seem to have done more of the former than the latter for Alien: Covenant. Between the two of them, I would say Covenant has a far more competent execution, and you don't tend to worry about plotholes in the same way that's unavoidable for Prometheus. New Zealand is pretty when it needs to be an alien homeworld, and space is space and full of fire and whooshing sounds despite the protests of Tyson, and the characters get themselves ensconced in situations that look peaceful and make a hard turn for the violent. Covenant is the better popcorn movie, with fewer groanworthy actions, but it also leaves its characters without much of a raison d'etre, not much to hold on to as a larger purpose for being there that could be or not be at odds with their stated objectives. It also doesn't yield many surprises in terms of the threat presented, and doesn't bother to answer for planet's de- and re-population or the fact that an intelligent spacefaring culture decided not to bother investigating a massive attack on what I guess was its homeworld. If you want to see an Alien movie with blood and violence and stuff, there's not much to say about it to dissuade anyone (I also can't emphasize enough that James Franco dies). But if you are expecting it to be more than a mere space slasher, whoops, better luck next time. Sucker.
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Post by Jeremy on May 28, 2017 15:36:44 GMT -8
So, in case you haven't heard, a theater here in Brooklyn has announced that next week, it will have a number of special screenings of Wonder Woman... for female audiences only. No men will be allowed in.
Predictably, the Internet has reacted in its usual polite and completely understanding way.
Now, on the one hand, I'm not thrilled that a public theater has decided to capitalize on the gender divide through a comic-book film. Because now the loudmouth fanboys are protesting about the PC culture, and the media is in turn writing long articles "proving" that male comic book nerds are all a bunch of sexists.
On the other hand... this is actually a brilliant marketing strategy. Suddenly, the loudmouth fanboys want to see the film, now that someone has given it a "Girls Only" label. Any bad blood left over from BvS and Suicide Squad has been washed away. When DC tells us not to see one of their movies, we want to watch it more than ever!
Anyway. I'll try seeing Wonder Woman once it premieres. (At a screening that allows men, of course.) I really hope it finally breaks the DCEU curse.
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Post by ThirdMan on May 28, 2017 16:16:55 GMT -8
I don't really have a problem with women-only screenings, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that folks wouldn't throw up a fuss if, say, female moviegoers and critics were denied access to the first round of screenings for something (ostensibly) male-oriented. That said, women were, and still are, prevented from entering certain "male" establishments, which is wrong, and whatever, it's a flippin'movie that will be readily available to everyone within a week.
BTW, Warners has moved up the reviews embargo on the movie, and whether the reviews, overall, are negative or positive, I certainly think they'll be better than those for BvS and SS, because it seems more lighthearted in nature, and doesn't appear to contain any of that "toxic masculinity" some folks get all worked up over.
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Post by Jeremy on May 28, 2017 17:14:57 GMT -8
Yeah, I'm not sure how great the film will be, but I feel pretty confident it will at least be better than the last two DC films. It helps that Wonder Woman herself was my favorite thing about BvS. (She was pretty much the only character interested in having fun.)
I'll try catching it next week. I'll also try to check out Captain Underpants, which I hope is better that DreamWorks Animation's last few films.
Meantime, I think I'll avoid the new Pirates of the Caribbean. Three boring and overcomplicated sequels are enough, thanks.
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Post by ThirdMan on May 28, 2017 17:22:03 GMT -8
Hey, I'm just shocked that the new PotC isn't 3 hours long. But yeah, I'm not interested either.
The summer movie season isn't grabbing my attention whatsoever these days, though I will try to check out GotGv2 and WW at some point. Hopefully there are some smaller, more interesting multiplex items in August, not unlike Edgar Wright's The World's End from a few years ago.
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Post by Jeremy on May 28, 2017 18:06:17 GMT -8
I've come to accept the "check your brain at the door" disclaimer of many summer films, but not a lot is grabbing my attention either. Most of the forthcoming animated films look pretty lame, and the action films look pretty... loud. But I'll try a sampling of them over the summer. Who knows, maybe there'll be a hidden gem along the way.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on May 28, 2017 18:20:59 GMT -8
I'll try catching it next week. I'll also try to check out Captain Underpants, which I hope is better that DreamWorks Animation's last few films. Tell me how this goes. I need to know if my childhood was ruined or not.
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