Board 8 > General Movie Discussion Topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Next month is going to be the 20th anniversary of American Beauty. I might watch it for the first time, since I've wanted to for a while.

In before people claim the movie is ruined because of its lead actor.
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the movie is one of the greatest of all time
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Watched Brightburn last night and I thought it was pretty damn good.
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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Next month is going to be the 20th anniversary of American Beauty. I might watch it for the first time, since I've wanted to for a while.

In before people claim the movie is ruined because of its lead actor.

American Beauty: Cinematic Gold or Pretentious Toss?

Board 8, weigh in on this!
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Hardcore_Adult posted...

Cinematic Gold

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Wondering if I should bother with Angel has Fallen...
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I'd lean toward pretentious toss on that one, but it's interesting enough to watch once

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Hardcore_Adult posted...

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Next month is going to be the 20th anniversary of American Beauty. I might watch it for the first time, since I've wanted to for a while.

In before people claim the movie is ruined because of its lead actor.

American Beauty: Cinematic Gold or Pretentious Toss?

Board 8, weigh in on this!

Well, it definitely sucks ass.
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saw aladdin two days ago and far from home yesterday.

aladdin was pretty good! yeah, the original was better and will smith is no robin williams, but i loved how colorful it was and how great agrabah looked. and obviously it was a nostalgia trip. i thought the added jasmine "I'M A STRONG WOMAN I WILL BE SILENCED NO LONGER" song was too blatant, though. i get that it's 2019 and they can't do the traditional disney princess thing anymore but they could have been a little more subtle >_> also, as a song, it wasn't that great.

far from home was also pretty good but there was a bit too much stupid stuff that made no sense in it. of course you always have to suspend your disbelief with these movies but i couldn't always suspend it THIS much. and mysterio was pretty wasted. he had one really cool scene (you know the one) but come on, one cool scene is all we get from him? after the amazing visual effects in doctor strange i expect more. homecoming was better and spider-man 2 is still the best of the live action ones.

j. jonah jameson was awesome though
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The only thing that let Aladdin for me was Jafar being a bit flat in comparison to his Cartoon self.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKYeAN-_wFI" data-time="

hell yes Dunkey likes Damien Chazelle

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Good video.
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I've been continuing to go to 2 movies a week, here's my current rank for the year:
https://letterboxd.com/foolfantastic/list/2019-ranked/detail/
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Saw Die Hard with A Vengeance yesterday, for the second time (first time was back in January 2015). Not nearly as memorable as the original but still enjoyable on its own merits. Samuel L. Jackson and director John McTiernan are probably the MVPs of the movie, and Jeremy Irons makes a fun villain. The script feels like little more than a way to drive the heroes from setpiece to setpiece, perhaps not surprisingly for a writer whose future credits include Jumanji and Armageddon, so I can see how this film didn't get such great reviews on release. On a scale of 1-10 I give this movie a 7, but very close to an 8, so around the same rating I'd give to Avengers: Endgame.
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^ It's better than that shitshow 4.0!
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For my two movies this week, I'm catching It: Chapter Two and some Chinese animated film named Ne Zha that for some reason is #9 at the worldwide box office? Did something happen in the Chinese film industry recently? This and Wandering Earth both were big enough within China alone to reach numbers usually reserved for worldwide blockbusters and I'm not sure why there has been a sudden change.
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Hardcore_Adult posted...

^ It's better than that shitshow 4.0!

Never seen that one. Was mostly interested in seeing the third one again because of the director. Been considering seeing Predator and The Hunt for Red October again for the same reason.
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Mr Lasastryke posted...

i thought the added jasmine "I'M A STRONG WOMAN I WILL BE SILENCED NO LONGER" song was too blatant, though. i get that it's 2019 and they can't do the traditional disney princess thing anymore but they could have been a little more subtle >_> also, as a song, it wasn't that great.

Wasn't that the song that the Greatest Showman team was involved with?

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Hardcore_Adult posted...

^ It's better than that shitshow 4.0!

I liked 4 actually. If they hadn't cut it back a little to make it PG-13, it might've been on par with 3

1>3>>4>>>2

never bothered seeing 5
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Llarian posted...

Mr Lasastryke posted...

i thought the added jasmine "I'M A STRONG WOMAN I WILL BE SILENCED NO LONGER" song was too blatant, though. i get that it's 2019 and they can't do the traditional disney princess thing anymore but they could have been a little more subtle >_> also, as a song, it wasn't that great.

Wasn't that the song that the Greatest Showman team was involved with?

Yeah, I'll agree with that. Adding a new song to a 25-year-old musical is risky enough, but on top of that it's not particularly well-written, it completely breaks the pace of the movie in a really awkward way, and it just doesn't fit the tone of the film at all, like it's trying to be a hit modern pop song instead of a part of the movie (which I absolutely assume is the case)
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CasanovaZelos posted...

and some Chinese animated film named Ne Zha that for some reason is #9 at the worldwide box office? Did something happen in the Chinese film industry recently? This and Wandering Earth both were big enough within China alone to reach numbers usually reserved for worldwide blockbusters and I'm not sure why there has been a sudden change.

For many years, China's box office has been growing steadily at a rate of ~20-50% per year, to the point where it's gone from a minor consideration 10 years ago to almost as large as the US now. 2019 is actually the first year where Chinese box office growth has slowed practically to a halt (and down in terms of admissions). Despite that, and even though censorship has snipped away several major contenders, ten Asian movies have exceeded $100 million in China this year alone. Another major peculiarity: even though the market's typically frontloaded, if a movie (Ne Zha in this case) has excellent word of mouth, it will run for weeks on end and often turn into a huge blockbuster even without an incredible opening. There's also the fact that ticket booking fees are lumped onto the box office starting early last year, further inflating it by a good 10-15%.

I think the deeper Chinese film industry situation would be a whole other interesting discussion of its own; this is just my attempt at appraising you of China's box office situation.
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Watched Gods Own Country and it was really good!
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Johnbobb posted...

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Hardcore_Adult posted...

^ It's better than that shitshow 4.0!

I liked 4 actually. If they hadn't cut it back a little to make it PG-13, it might've been on par with 3

1>3>>4>>>2

never bothered seeing 5

The really dumb thing is that both Siskel & Ebert felt Die Hard 2 was the best of the first three, when it's typically considered to be the weakest of them due to being too similar to the first one. Gene even named Die Hard 2 one of the 10 best films of 1990 (one spot ahead Dances with Wolves no less!), and then was very disappointed in the third film. For reasons that I do understand.

Also Die Hard 2 has some glaring plot holes, and yet I've never seen someone criticize Die Hard 2 on that basis. I think people are just willing to pass off the planes not heading over to Andrews Air Force Base or something as action movie logic.

Come to think of it, even the best action films of the era had some glaring logic errors. For example, a lot of time travel shenanigans in Terminator 2 make no sense when you think about them, and yet thankfully the people who pick up on this are typically huge fans of the film. That kind of makes me interested to see how James Cameron might justify some of those "problems" in the new Terminator film.
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PG or no PG, I just could NOT Invest in Die Hard 4.0

The only reason I have it is I bought the Quadrology on Boxing Day 2014.
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Do y'all go out to the movies on a regular basis? I admittedly go mostly for the popcorn and also the experience.

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Yeah

Had moviepass for a while , then Sinemia after moviepass tanked, and then Sinemia tamked so I have the Regal Unlimited Pass
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Also I watched The Last Man in San Francisco last night and cried for like 2 straight hours
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Llarian posted...

Do y'all go out to the movies on a regular basis? I admittedly go mostly for the popcorn and also the experience.

2-3x a month if there's things I *want* to see. I normally smuggle Candy/Drinks in from the Supermarket/ shop. Will pay for Booze (A Number of UK screenings have a liqour license) if it warrants it. Plus the ones I go to are decidedly cheap 5.99-6.99 on Tickets.

Sometimes of a weekend I'll do a Double feature.
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Oh also I smuggle in candy and drinks in my girlfriends purse.

No way I'm paying $5.50 for a water bottle
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I go to the theater at least a couple of times a month - more than enough to justify AMC A List - but honestly I'm kind of growing to hate theaters.

Concessions are so ridiculously overpriced and I feel like the audience negatively influences my experience far more often than not. Plus I'm very picky when it comes to visuals and audio and if there's some kind of imperfection it really bugs me to know that I could have done better at home.

Honestly if movies hit the internet the same time they hit theaters I'd probably go once a year if that.
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You just need to pick your screenings.

In most cases, Opening Night isn't always the best night. Learned that to my cost when I (against my better judgment) went to see BVS on Good Friday '16. Annoying kid, crowded, Uncomfortable seat, didn't help that the film was ass and overlong!

On the other side of the Coin, I went to a packed Late Night Casino Royale showing on opening weekend and enjoyed it (No brats!)
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Yeah, I go to the cheaper/older theatres because I like to support them, so I don't mind buying concessions there because I'm not also paying $15 for a ticket. I don't need a brand new, state-of-the-art theatre like AMC, but I also won't turn it down if someone wants to go there.

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Llarian posted...

Do y'all go out to the movies on a regular basis?

i've been trying to go pretty regularly lately but there's not always something i want to see playing.

right now i kinda want to see once upon a time... in hollywood. i don't expect it to be as good as tarantino's best stuff, though.
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Llarian posted...

Do y'all go out to the movies on a regular basis? I admittedly go mostly for the popcorn and also the experience.

Yeah I've been going once or twice a month this year and have generally had a really good time. There's an AMC nearby and they do $5 Tuesdays which I've been taking advantage of.

Johnbobb posted...

Oh also I smuggle in candy and drinks in my girlfriends purse.

^yeah, I also sneak stuff in or eat/drink beforehand, usually

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Fun fact about Die Hard 3: since I live in Ireland, I got to see the Cinergi logo at the beginning of the film after the Fox one, indicating that DISNEY distributed this movie internationally. And now Disney owns the whole franchise. What a coincidence.

I'm halfway through Armageddon (the team has landed on the asteroid), and I'll come back with more after I finish the film. I'm basically watching the film out of boredom, and it's keeping me occupied but honestly, it's pretty dull.
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So I finished the movie. I remembered it being hilariously bad (saw it last almost exactly five years ago), and I felt similarly about Bad Boys when I watched it for the first time last year. I still stand by enjoying Michael Bay's films ironically because of how much they do wrong, but now this movie just comes across to me as being somewhere between average and awful, probably slightly closer to the former. It's not nearly as much of a trainwreck as Wild Wild West, and nowhere near as depressing - in fact, I actually laughed at some of the jokes in Armageddon! - but it's still really bad.

The biggest problem with this movie is that the script feels like it suffers from ADHD just as badly as the editing, if not even worse. There's too much going on in any given 10-minute timeframe, which is about what you'd expect from a simple premise stretched into a 2.5-hour plot. Roger Ebert was probably right on the money that any four minutes of the film could make a trailer from that perspective. The story feels like it just HAS to do everything it can and take its goddamned time doing it, with the rapid edits, noisiness, and melodrama trying to mask this by making the viewer think it's more fast-paced and eventful than it really is. Complain all you want about the leave-the-camera-running scenes in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, but at least those movies were more honest and upfront about being a slow burn. It gets even worse in the last half of the film, when the team lands on the asteroid and then things constantly go wrong just to pad out the film's running time. At least the infamous space chase in The Last Jedi had some kind of narrative arc to it: here the script just throws clichs into the plot for the sake of it.

In the past year or so I saw three movies I felt suffered from a script going through the motions to varying degrees - Willow, Con Air, and Captain Marvel. Of those movies Willow was the biggest offender since it felt like it constantly dragged, but Armageddon is probably even worse for the reasons I outlined above. It reminded me of how Con Air would throw in some similar plot points to Die Hard and then not inject any meaning to them: that was this whole movie.

Thankfully, it wasn't all bad. This movie actually probably deserves all of its Oscar nominations. "I Don't Want to Miss A Thing" was the perfect note to start the credits with, and the visual effects actually hold up much better than you'd think - almost certainly because priority was placed on practical effects! I also really liked the casting, with particular praise going to Billy Bob Thornton and Liv Tyler for being able to commit to this crazy movie. I also enjoyed some of the other actors' snarks, with Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare being the big winners here. I was also surprised to see Keith David here, since now I recognize him from The Thing and Platoon. Bruce Willis was kind of on autopilot though, and I have two more points for the casting:

-Liv Tyler played what I felt was the most "human" character in the film, and she had good chemistry with Ben Affleck, but the romance should have either been expanded on or left out entirely.

-The presence of Buscemi and Stormare brought back fond memories of Fargo, but as Patrick Willems pointed out, there's some odd overlap between the production posses of Bay and the Coens. For example, The Rock re-united Nicolas Cage with his Raising Arizona co-star William Forsythe, and also The Big Lebowski's Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, and John Goodman all in Transformers 5. Interesting.
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Saw Angel Has Fallen yesterday, Enjoyable enough. Better than I thought it would be, even though I worked out WHO was setting up Banning very early on, shit, a 5YRO coulda worked it out!

Still was an enjoyable picture, sometimes on a Saturday Night you wanna see a good old-fashioned shootout on the big screen!

Nick "48 Hours" Nolte totally steals the show as Daddy Banning. He and Butler bounce play off each other pretty well.

Oh, Yeah. Morgan Freeman makes a great POTUS. Then again he has a knack for playing leaders (He was Understated yet somewhat Electric in Invictus as Mandela)
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I'm going to see the Fathom 40th anniversary showing of Star Trek:The Motion Picture tonight. Yes, I know it's boring.

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Waiting on that damn Will Smith vs Will Smith movie, I don't care what people say, It looks decent. Now for the proof to be in the pudding... 3 more weeks away from a release here.
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I saw Once Upon A Time in Hollywood last week. Overall I liked it but it was a clear triumph of characters and setting over plot. Not one of Tarantino's best.
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*pulls up beside you in car* Oh, LMS....

I Disagree!

*drives at away at 90mph*
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Bumpo.
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Saw three movies last weekend: Ad Astra, which I'd say is the best movie I've seen so far this year, Bohemian Rhapsody, which was probably a step above average, and the first Iron Man which was impressive in a lot of ways.
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I've been slacking off with my reviews but still going to the movies - I've essentially been refocusing all that time on writing a novel, which I hope is a better use.
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Do you spend that much time on your reviews? <_<
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CasanovaZelos posted...

I've essentially been refocusing all that time on writing a novel, which I hope is a better use.

Original work is a more noble pursuit, I'd say

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Waluigi1 posted...

Do you spend that much time on your reviews? <_<

Like, usually more than one but less than two hours for each?
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Geez, yeah its probably better to spend that time on a novel. Or anything else really lol.
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His reviews/write-ups are generally quite good though

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Saw The Front Runner. It's pretty good, especially JK Simmons.
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