The Movie Thread

Thought it might be interesting to try an ongoing thread 'bout movies. (Most everybody loves flix, don't they?) So if you've seen something you really love or hate, post some comments about it. Try to say something other than simply "Wow, this was so awesome, ya gotta see this!" or "Such and such sucked!" Everybody has different tastes, there is no right or wrong, so try to tell us why you liked, loved, or loathed it. You don't have to be Roger Ebert to critique a movie. Or list your fav movies of a certain genre - The best thrillers, or westerns, or actioners, or comedies, or whatever... But please always try to add some comments to justify your opinions.

Harold

 

"Unleashed"

I love a good action flick and Jet Li has done some excellent ones in the past, so this wknd I watched Unleashed, aka Danny the Dog. The fight sequences were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the same guy who did The Matrix and Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2. Unfortunately it was written by Luc Besson, who usually directs his own stuff, and is a very hit or miss writer. Some of his movies are good dumb pulp action - The Transporter movies, La Femme Nikita, The Professional, while others are so bad as to be pretty much unwatchable - The Fitfh Element, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Subway.

Most of Unleashed belongs in the latter category. It starts off well enough, the premise is unique, the fight scenes are fun if not spectacular, and Jet Li is always great at this stuff, but the whole middle section of the movie, when he's "adopted" by a family consisting of Morgan Freeman and his step-daughter, and learns the "meaning of family", is so bad, so cloyingly sentimental as to be vomit-inducing. These people are so innocent, so good, so forgiving, so kindly, I just hoped they would suffer horrible deaths at the hands of the bad guys, if nothing else to stop their sickly cornball sweetness. It's a bizarre movie, as if the family from some bad '50's tv sitcom like the Nelson's or The Beaver had been dropped into the middle of a modern martial-arts gore-fest. Freeman is a great actor but even he can't pull off the Blind Piano Tuner w/a heart of gold. And the actress playing the daughter, Kerry Condon, who even has braces to make her more "vunerable" and "adorable", gives the single most disgustingly cutesy-poo performance I think I've ever seen. I couldn't watch anymore of her after a while, I ended up fast-forwarding thru her scenes so I could make it to the last act, when of course the bad guys come after Danny and his new-found family. This is one of the rare films where one wishes the family would die, the sooner the better.

That last act does indeed have some incredible action scenes, including a funny, thrilling sequence that takes place between Danny and his opponent in a bathroom so impossibly small that they're literally fighting nose-to-nose and don't even have room to fully pullback their punches. That scene is a classic of the genre. Unfortunately one has to endure the rest of the movie to get to it.

Harold

 

One of the best movies of all time will come out in just a few months.

After directing Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky has put all of his time into The Fountain for the past five years.

Combine Aronofsky, a $40 million budget, and a sci-fi plot spanning a thousand years (1500 AD to 2500 AD), and you get a movie so great, I'm even willing to endorse it in advance.

 

Something similar could have been said about David Lynch's Dune before it came out.

But seriously, Requiem was my favorite film of that year and can't wait for his next.

 

jarhead sucked.

 

Did you notice some of the subtle and not so subtle similarities to Platoon and Apacolypse (s?) Now? The scene from boot camp; the scene burning shit; the somewhat crazy soldier (shot the camel); helecopters with music (The Doors). Yea, it was a little disapointing. The monologue at the beginning talked about how your hands never forget the gun, but he never fired a shot in combat.

 

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

I never camped outside of a movie theater for a month waiting for the opening of a Star Wars movie, but I was a fan of the original trilogy, especially the first 2 films, now called Episodes IV and V, so I had high hopes for the prequels. But I barely made it thru the first 2 new films, Episodes I and II, and I certainly have no desire ever to see them again. I thought they were to the originals what Godfather Pt 3 was to GF Pts 1 & 2, namely an abomination.

Episodes I & II are a perfect example of a filmmaker believing all the hype he's been reading about himself for years and years and puffing his ego up so he thinks he's a "important filmmaker". Lucas, who also made the classic "American Graffiti", apparently came to believe he really had made "great films", rather than the silly fun, well-crafted B-movies w/lots of cool FX that they actually are. At the end of Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader says "Luke, I am your father", it was a great moment in film, not because it was profound, but because it was so perfectly foolish; we didn't recoil in horror, we smiled at the audaciousness of it: A B-movie w/a touch of Greek tragedy thrown in for a great laugh; it was like a parody of "the plot thickens..."

I really don't remember much about episodes I & II, there was so much blah blah about political intrigue and the characters and plots were mostly boring and flat. They looked great, but there was nothing to watch except the "sets" and the FX, and any hint of humanity that the first trilogy had was trashed. It seemed all backstory, exposition, to setup the payoff that we'd already seen 20 yrs ago.

So I was suprised that Sith was so enjoyable. Lucas finally stops just giving us "filler" and has a genuine plot that moves forward at a lightning pace toward its inevitable conclusion. The characters' relationships actually develop and go somewhere, as does the story and the FX and battle scenes are fun and exciting. This was obviously what Lucas was aiming for all along, and it pays off nicely, especially in the latter scenes of the movie when we finally get to see how everything that sets up the original gets to that point.

There is one major flaw in the trilogy that carries over to even the last episode, the casting of Anakin Skywalker. Actor Hayden Christensen is a pussy, he comes across as a petulant, spoiled brat. The actor simply doesn't have the charisma or power to pull off the character, it's more like Darth Vader as a kid that no one understands. As a result, when he dons the costume of DV at the end of the film, one has a hard time matching Anakin the whiny troubled-teen w/the person he's supposed to become, Darth Vader, the Most Evil Person in the Universe, w/the deep menacing voice of James Earl Jones, and it's not believable for a minute.

Some of the other actors finally get to have some fun, especially Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine, he revels in his evil, as does old B-movie actor Christopher Lee. Young Natalie Portman is already a great actress, but she's given nothing to do here except wring her hands and moan and be a plot device. I thought Ewan McGregor did an excellent job channeling Alec Guinness as the young, betrayed Obi-Wan.

Harold

 

Some soldier is claiming most of the movie is a rip off.