Seen any good films lately? [3]

I am indeed. - Eldo

  Well I may as well stop hiring those goblins to whip the NotP staff then.


reminded me a bit of firefly.- Norc

High praise indeed.   

I am sorry that I'm not gonna be able to pop on here (much) on my birthday. I've long had mixed feelings about my birthday for a number of reasons, but the forum celebrations and chiefly the NotP are always great and one of the high points of my last several birthdays.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:
reminded me a bit of firefly.- Norc

High praise indeed.   

oh but it deserves it

If it makes me crabbit now Norc- Im blaming you (and sending you a bill for the cinema ticket)   

fine.

And I'll be billing you for the cost of posting you the bill too!

fine.

This is no fun if you dont at least get annoyed about it!!    

Norc - 1, Petty - 0

my crabbit has been thwarted.   

Ringdrotten wrote:Norc - 1, Petty - 0

eheheheh

Norc wrote:SEE THE GODDAMN GUARDIANDS OF THE GALAXY MOVIE! I MEAN IT! it is what every space-action-thing-movie should be! it's fucking awesome!

Yes! Everyone should go see it! I want to see it again!   

I finally got to see Guardians of the Galaxy when we went to the movies during the Delaware trip. It was a really entertaining movie and I'm glad I got to see it, though I'm afraid I might have let my expectations get too high. Or it might have been that I was hoping for a straight-up comedy based on the trailers, and for as good as the comedy was, the dramatic moments could be pretty heavy (Quill's mother dying, Rocket's horrifying backstory and resultant existential crisis). I wasn't really prepared to make the jumps in tone along with the movie, so the comedy was a bit blunted for me at times, despite generally being really good. The action was more than a little overblown in the third act, too. But the characters were entertaining and well-drawn, the soundtrack was a stroke of genius and executed amazingly, and the film left me curious to see more of these characters and their setting. So all in all I'd call the film a success, though not one that elevates the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the level of pop art or anything.

Glad you enjoyed it, Eldo.

Speaking of that GIF, the second post-credits scene made me laugh like an idiot. I was not expecting that particular cameo.

There was a second one? FUCK i had to pee so barely i missed it!!

Yeah, it was like The Avengers, one after the first minute or so and one at the very end. I don't think it's online anywhere, unfortunately.

I was really surprised by it. And I didn't know that property was a Marvel invention.

Funnily enough, it was actually the first ever Marvel movie (not counting old serials). Them and Lucasfilm.

I decided to rewatch Alien Resurrection after it came up in discussion on here, and to see if it was as bad as I remember.
The short answer is yes and no.
So I feel a longer answer is probably required to explain the short answer, and so here it is.
(Spoilers will inevitably follow)

For once I am going to start by being positive and talking about the things I did like about the film.

First and foremost is how its shot. It was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet who was already a favourite director of mine having directed City of Lost Children, which is a visual treat for the eyes and likewise Delicatessen. So it comes as no surprise that the film has some beautifully crafted camera work and some truly beautiful shots in it.



The next thing to praise is the design of the mainstay parts of the Alien franchise, ie the aliens, the face huggers and the eggs. All have had a bit of a redesign and whilst they don't stray to far from the original design they do improve on them in many ways, giving them more life, more movement and simply more believability as living creatures. And all credit here must be given to Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis who began their stint making Aliens on Aliens working under Stan Winston.





The cgi used, when it is, is also of a considerably higher standard than the rather awful cgi of Aliens 3, and is used wisely here, mixing it up between physical props, man in a suit and cgi where necessary- a valuable lesson here I feel for directors who go the full cgi route. It simply is more believable when you don't know if what you are looking at is physical or not.
Cgi is also used to great and subtle effect on many other aspects that are so seamless you don't even consider what you are watching cgi until you stop and think about and realise it had to be. A great example of this comes in the transition between the young Ripley to the older- where the young version is actually a full body sculpture. The blending and transition between it and the real Sigourney is simply faultless.
There is however one rather obvious Alien shaped elephant in the room when it comes to the monster effects in Alien Resurrection however, or perhaps an Alien in the ointment as it were. But I will come back to that later.

Also worthy of mention is the elaborate to create and impressively done underwater sequence, at least it is impressive from a technical standpoint.



And that rather neatly brings me into the things I did not like.

I mentioned I loved how it was shot- but I am really talking aesthetics here. But when it comes to the action sequences they are lacking something, and its hard to say exactly what as they look superb. Yet someone how they don't feel threatening, the tension is never ratcheted up. The entire film seems to hold a single note from start to finish and there is no sense of increasing peril or tension.

Part of this has to come down to the script. And a major problem with the script is that there is no one to root for.
There are people to dislike, humans and Aliens alike, but no one the audience will ever care enough about to give a damn what happens to them.
I am not even sure who the audiences sympathies are meant to lie with.
Ripley is quite a different proposition in this film, being as she is a sort of human/alien clone. And Sigourney Weaver plays this very well, particularly in how she alters Ripley's physicality and movements. But she is also by virtue of this a bit alien, a bit odd, a bit distant.
The character of Anallee Cal, played by Winona Ryder, is a more likely candidate for the person we should be rooting for. But she too is not quite human enough, and this makes sense when it is revealed that she is a synthetic. But as one character puts it 'she is a toaster oven', and its hard to care about a toaster oven or what happens to it, and as I personally feel Winona Ryder delivers her lines not unlike if they had been delivered by a toaster oven there is not a lot to care about.

Another problem with the script is that, surprisingly for a Joss Whedon script, there is no personality in the characters. Everyone feels flat two dimensional or even cartoonish at times, especially the haplessly evil scientists and the alien fodder military personal.
And we have the usual contenders, such as a double crossing Burke type from Aliens, and it's hard to avoid the sense that the characters have been recycled in a kind of Alien film pick and mix.

Joss Whedon himself was not happy and said this about the film-

"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

Now I don't know what Whedon had in mind here really, as it seems to me to be covering his own arse as its hard to conceive of anyone being able to deliver much of the dialogue in this film in a way that would render it any good. Blaming the actors for saying the lines wrong (with maybe the exception of Ryder) seems pretty unfair to me as there are some good actors in the mix here, but they do not have good dialogue. Its wooden and clunky, not the delivery usually, but the actual words.
I also don't know what Whedon means when he says the film is designed wrong, as the design elements as I noted above are of a high level, from creatures to sets to the lighting.

There are also incontinences in the plot- when the Aliens get loose at the start the military personnel all run away, and we see some of the escape pods successfully doing so. We are then told that the entire ship is on the move, programmed in an emergency to return to earth.
This makes no sense on a number of levels- firstly we are told its operating outside of legal jurisdiction precisely because they are conducting illegal experiments, so why would they program their ship, full of illegal secrets to go back to earth beyond to create some artificial peril for the home planet?
Secondly what about all those escape pods that left at the start- don't they have communications, would nobody come to pick them up? Apparently not as earth remains blissfully unaware of the doom hurtling towards it through space.
And in fact once the military personal are either killed or have left we hear nothing again about this supposedly massive earth military it is a part of. You would think someone in  this military would notice their top secret lab ship is on the move.

But probably the biggest problem in the film is the third and final act, in which we lose a bad guy.
The culminating defeat of the final Alien is stock Alien film- it gets blown out into space by Ripley, again, or in this case slowly and painfully sucked through a small hole into space.
Ah but there is a twist here as the final boss Alien for this film has not hatched from an Alien egg but has been birthed by the Alien Queen in a sort of human fashion as the Queen taken from Ripley has picked up human characteristics from Ripleys DNA just as she has picked up Alien attributes, like strength and acid blood from the Queen, and the resulting Alien is a sort of human Alien, with a humanish face and emotive human eyes.
It seems so out of place in an Alien film that its hard when it first appears not to laugh at it.





And this alien we are supposed to sympathise with, especially at its death- and the viewer will do, what with its big sad betrayed eyes and its sad pitiful vocalisations that Ripley, its sort of mother, would so cruelly kill it.

And this is where I have a major problem with the film.

The real bad guys of this film are the human scientists, in particular the head scientist played by Brad Douriff. And what makes him evil is that he has no compassion or empathy for the living things he experiments on to achieve his goals. He has no regard for life other than his own, if he even has that really as he doesn't seem to bothered to be cocooned up and left hanging on the wall so long as he can still observe his experiment.
But Ripleys actions at the end are no better than his, she kills her offspring for simply existing.

Add to this that the evil human scientist all disappear or are killed in the first act, with the exception of Douriff's character, who only turns up again briefly at the end long enough to get his comeuppance and the film not only doesn't have a discernible hero to root for, it doesn't have a bad guy by the end either in the traditional sense.
Everyone sucks and you are left with a vaguely sick feeling at the end about everything and everyone in it. The film has cruelty but nothing else.

Now you might be thinking that everyone, Alien and Human alike being no good is a fair point to make, and it is, its just it's at the end of the wrong film and doesn't feel like it fits the first two thirds of the film.

So sum up. The film looks good but is poorly paced, especially when it comes to the tension, relying instead on occasional bursts of outright unpleasantness to get its shocks. The character dialogue is poor and the characters not interesting enough or focused enough to give the viewer anyone to really care about and the final act is a bit of a mess with a mixed message poorly delivered.

And that is a shame because somewhere in there is a half decent Alien film struggling to be seen.

Thanks for the review. I think i won't go out of my way to see it. When you pointed out that Joss Whedon had done the script, I thought it might have some interesting characters hiding in it, and that could have made it worthwhile. But apparently not.

Has anyone seen Only Lovers Left Alive?

I, unwisely, watched it over at my elder sister's house. She hated it from the get-go and fell asleep thirty minutes in. Then again, she watches Vampire Diaries and True Blood, so perhaps she was expecting a plot to be crammed down her throat or something.

Anyway, I liked the music a lot. The ending was excellent, it had many many beautiful moments and a wonderful cast.
It was, unfortunately, a bit slow. As in, the plot was not necessarily much of a plot. It was like the beginning few chapters of a very good story that promised great things; but only if those few chapters were stretched into an entire book of their own. I really wanted to enjoy all of it, but the slowness of the story subdued my fervour on several occasions.
Still, worth watching if you can handle a slow-paced film!

Im interested in seeing that because it has Tilda Swinton who I think is an underrated actress & I love her characters shes played over the years, Orlando immediately springs to mind but shes got a very interesting CV, & then theres Tom Hiddleston, Mmm, I love his "Loki" In Thor,*ooooh*   

When you pointed out that Joss Whedon had done the script, I thought it might have some interesting characters hiding in it- David

It does, its just somehow they are not interestingly presented, and its the scripts fault.
Ryders character for example is a sort of Blade Runner type synthetic. As the film takes place 200 after the events of Alien 3 the synthetics have evolved. She is a synthetic built by synthetics, and apparently this type of synthetic brought down the whole synthetic business and only a few escapees of that generation escaped, her being one of them.

The problem is you find out all this out in one scene of some badly written exposition and that's it.
It would be like if in Firefly instead of a slowly unravelling mystery of River, revealed through actions and narrative, he had just told you everything interesting about her in one speech in one scene and then left it at that.