Future releases [2]

Or anything wherein Sean Connery attempts to change his accent.
I guess Highlander really doesn't count, as his "Egyptian" accent is Scottish.

malickfan wrote:About time! My namesake is finally releasing 'The Voyage of Time', looking forward to this:

http://collider.com/voyage-of-time-release-date-2016/#more-331616

Oh! I always wondered where your name came from.

Forest Shepherd wrote:The musical accompaniment for this trailer has been lifted directly from the post-torture rooftop scene in V for Vendetta.
A la Man of Steel, this trailer has taken the music of a far better film to sell itself.

It's a bit cheesy, I'll agree, though in this case I'm not familiar with the music so it didn't jump out as weird like the Man of Steel trailer.  But it's very common for trailers to borrow music or have original compositions that are not found in the film (the latter being where Inception's famous BWAAAAM came from).

I mean, thanks for PotC, the first film was mostly admirable, and Rango was pretty good, but you don't make Michael Caine change his bloody accent for any film, especially not one that stars Nicholas Cage. I mean, she was only sixteen!

I won't hear a word against the first two POTC films, and Rango was one of the best animated films of the last several years.  Gore Verbinski is the bomb (even if The Lone Ranger was ... also a bomb).

Also, my first thought on seeing that clip was that it was suspisicously similar to Dumbledore's "what is right and what is easy" speech from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but according to the dates on Wikipedia, the two films came out only a couple of weeks apart, so it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

I love that bit of music from V, its a great piece of film score on its own, but the place and manner of use of it in the film elevates it even higher.

love V. still not sure about Natalie Portman though.

I am a big fan of V. But there are some things Im not so keen on, she is one of them. And changing her character to being older and working at the news station, rather than her being a desperate teenage prostitute.

But my biggest single gripe is making V more a freedom fighter and a lot less an anarchist.

Having said that however the changes they make are at least entirely consistent with the story they tell and do not jar within the context of the film or conflict with other parts of the story or events.

it depends on whether her character has been changed too much from the original, it sounds like its a different person.

There is not a massive difference in what happens to her but there are personality differences mainly down to the age difference. (and they did at least cast someone who can look younger- so scenes like the one with the paedophile priest still work even if they have maybe less impact than when she is 14.)

Making her part of the tv station lets them draw together several different story lines into one place and a single narrative strand, so I can understand the choice.
And its unlikely she would have such a job if she was a 14 year old prostitute on the streets so the changes to her flow from the changes made elsewhere.

Eldorion wrote:
It's a bit cheesy, I'll agree, though in this case I'm not familiar with the music so it didn't jump out as weird like the Man of Steel trailer.  But it's very common for trailers to borrow music or have original compositions that are not found in the film (the latter being where Inception's famous BWAAAAM came from).

I certainly did not mean to suggest that the trailer was cheesy in any way. I thought it was a good trailer for what it was about, even if it did suggest that most of the film would take place on earth instead of in space. I actually liked the trailer for Man of Steel that used the FotR track as well. For a brief moment I thought I was watching a trailer for something based on Tolkien. Anyway, lots of films do that nowadays.
I mean, par example:

Spoiler:

Eldorion wrote:
I won't hear a word against the first two POTC films, and Rango was one of the best animated films of the last several years.  Gore Verbinski is the bomb (even if The Lone Ranger was ... also a bomb).

Also, my first thought on seeing that clip was that it was suspisicously similar to Dumbledore's "what is right and what is easy" speech from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but according to the dates on Wikipedia, the two films came out only a couple of weeks apart, so it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

So I draw the line at the first Pirates film, and you draw it at the second. The difference is merely a matter of degrees.
The fact that the entire series has taken a Shyamalan leaves it working as a litmus test for the ability in viewers to hold on to a dying idea. I did enjoy a lot of Dead Man's Chest (most notably Bill Nighy), but the first film is far better.

To me the only thing that kept the first Pirates film from being absolute perfection was when Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly start shouting orders to the hired pirate crew as if they understand sailing better than people who spent their lives doing it. Stupid "our heros gotta always save the day" crap.   

Other than that it's precisely everything a fun film should be.

Forest Shepherd wrote:So I draw the line at the first Pirates film, and you draw it at the second. The difference is merely a matter of degrees.
The fact that the entire series has taken a Shyamalan leaves it working as a litmus test for the ability in viewers to hold on to a dying idea. I did enjoy a lot of Dead Man's Chest (most notably Bill Nighy), but the first film is far better.

In my opinion, the first Pirates film is one of the all-time great adventure films.  It's the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" of my childhood.  I have of course seen Raiders and it is also amazing, but I put Pirates ahead mainly out of nostalgia.  Even without that, it's a great film.  Dead Man's Chest is a very good adventure movie, though not up to the measure of the first one.  I think it has been unfairly maligned, probably in part due to the cliffhanger which leads into....  The third film, which has a lot of good moments (Jack in limbo is a highlight) but falls apart because it abandons the adventure in favor of LOTR-esque epic battles and a half-baked political message about freedom (but only the freedom to murder and pillage, not to live in peace, apparently).  The script doesn't manage to juggle the pile-up of plot twists and double crosses and it all falls apart by the final battle/wedding scene, though I did like the epilogue.

The fourth movie was made with a different director, mostly different cast, different filming locations (Hawaii instead of the Caribbean) and is one of the more obvious cases of tacking-on to a (sort of) satisfyingly concluded series. It doesn't even have any sea battles, which was apparently a budgetary decision.  I acknowledge its existence, but prefer not to think about it too much and don't let it tint my perception of the first three films.

Too many things felt contrived in the second film, I didn't even watch the next two.  Or maybe I watched the third but it felt even more contrived than the second, so I merge them together into the substandardness that followed the near perfection of the first.

Though Johnny Depp's "Why is the rum is gone?" scene is a classic.

Now, see, my problem is that the trilogy itself was tacked on.
The first film stands alone perfectly. It is tremendously satisfying (Will is a prat, but oh well), and all parties have pleasant and suitable endings.
The death of our beloved Hector Barbossa is also an excellent end to his story. Geoffrey Rush delivers his dying line with the perfect mix of relief and sorrow: relief that the curse is finally lifted, and sorrow that he now will die. "I feel... cold."
It gives me chills, it's great.   

But to the point, the second and third films are also tacked on. They exist because of how incredibly successful the first film was. The problem with them, especially with the third, is that they gradually drift away from the original setting.

The first film is action comedy with a satisfying ghost story contained inside of it.
It follows typical character arcs, but the performances of Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, and Kiera Knightley are developed and entertaining enough to make up for the presence of cliche.

The second film delves into heavy-handed global themes of colonization and monopolization.
It does introduce the unsettling Davy Jones theme, which expands the universe of Pirates enough to justify a second film. There is no Geoffrey Rush this time, but Bill Nighy compensates for that. While there's still enough fun in the movie to make it worth watching, it is a step-down.

The third film just goes all bloozy-blithery with, like you said, the completely idiotic idea of piracy as freedom for the masses and the English government as persecution of the masses.

That actually makes the film more plausible sounding.
But you know what I mean, killing off all those "pirates" at the beginning was thematic moronicy. It just went too far. If we could have somehow gotten the interesting bits with all the doldrums cut out, it would have been worth it. But I grow, more and more, to resent the drawing out of the franchise.

I don't appreciate that the character arcs all went crazy in the second and third films either. It was badly done.

halfwise wrote:Too many things felt contrived in the second film, I didn't even watch the next two.  Or maybe I watched the third but it felt even more contrived than the second, so I merge them together into the substandardness that followed the near perfection of the first.

Though Johnny Depp's "Why is the rum is gone?" scene is a classic.

That's from the first film. The motif is brought back for the later films. Even by the second film the line is being bastardized for the sake of self-reference.

Was that the first film? Yet another decent scene that doesn't exist in the following films.

The first one was great, very entertaining. Liked it a lot.
In the 2nd and 3rd films I got a bit tired of Jack & co, its just the same stuff repackaged.

Forest Shepherd wrote:Now, see, my problem is that the trilogy itself was tacked on.

Arr, you caught me there.

Really though, the first film is the best in the series by a notable margin, but I don't think that DMC is an unworthy sequel.  The structure of the series is sort of a throwback to an earlier time in Hollywood history, or maybe just the last hurrah of such things in the early 2000s.  It used to be the norm for original IPs to get a stand-alone movie, with sequels being non-guaranteed even if the film turned out to be a success.  You see this over and over again throughout the '80s and '90s: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park were all absolutely massive series, but they all started off as stand-alone movies with no initial plans for expansion.  It wasn't until the early 2000s that the idea of constructing overarching plots spanning the entire series, pre-conceived from the beginning, began to really catch on.

Turning the focus back to POTC, I think the biggest difference between films two and three and the post-trilogy installment is the continuity of cast and crew, which led to continuity in visual style and story as well.  As big as he ended up, it can be easy to forget that Jack Sparrow was a supporting character in the first film.  As the wacky guy, he doesn't work without a straight man (Will) to play off of.  There's also a fairly sizable cast of supporting characters, many of whom are memorable in their own right (Anamaria, Gibbs, Norrington, Governor Swann, and the two comedy duos stand out).  Most of these returned for the first two sequels.  I've heard a lot of people complain that there was too much Will and Elizabeth in the sequels, but I've always maintained that they were crucial to the trilogy and it wouldn't work without a relatable human story at the center.  POTC4 tried to replace that with the mermaid thing, but it had to share time with a ton of other stuff and didn't have the groundwork to be interesting.

Anyway, I largely agree with your thoughts on the series.  It's actually really gratifying to meet someone who wants to break down Pirates in a discussion like this.

Recoveryanonymous wrote:http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-transcendence-and-the-amazing-spider-man-2/

They put it on Youtube now   

Might see Godzilla tomorrow. I'm afraid I'll be bored.

Reactions to Godzilla seem to be really polarized so far.  It sounds like the trailer was somewhat misleading, though.  I was trying not to read too much about the film but Box Office Mojo's weekend report had some fairly big revelations:

Spoiler:

I don't want to spoil it, so I'll have to pass on reading about it until I've seen it.

I was a little bothered that BOM dropped bombs like that in an article, but they were relevant to the box office discussion so whatevs.

I am tempted to see Godzilla, though.  It's just a shame that so many people are like "finally a monster movie that isn't shit like Pacific Rim". >: (

I like Pacific Rim.

{{{I actually re-watched it last week. }}}

Me too.

http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t73p915-seen-any-good-films-lately#91492

You summed up what I love most about Pacific Rim quite well.

Eldorion wrote:Somehow, Guillermo del Toro convinced a movie studio to give him $200 million and then make a giant robot movie with absolutely no pandering or fucking around. I still don't know how he did it. It doesn't try to hit multiple demographics and doesn't have any elements clearly forced in by a worried marketing department. It is giant robots distilled to their essence and then lovingly refined and perfected.