[quote]jehovasfitness wrote:
Chronicle- 1st 20 mins was very blah, got a little interesting from there. I give them credit, seemed like an original movie for once. Overall was meh[/quote]
Watch Akira and you’ll probably like this movie even less.[/quote]
Yeah, the director said Akira was a major influence. The execution of the movie was highly original(there were brief flashes of brilliance in presenting a superhero origin as a found footage movie, especially in the set pieces, which put a lot of bigger movies to shame, despite the budget limitations), but the origin itself was nothing new. Between Akira and Unbreakable you’ll have seen it all before and better.
I think they were aiming at an archetypal superhero story, but they didn’t mine this for all it was worth. I raised a smile at the nods to Superman, Batman, and the hero/ villain dynamic, but it was an origin movie for the sake of being an origin movie. It had no identity of its own, and it would have if they’d have dedicated more time to teenagers getting lost in the power they have ( there’s far less time was spent on the lure of power than the trailer suggests). You’ll have to watch the UK series Misfits for that… And they fell foul of one movie cliche that we could’ve done without, especially when it involved the most charismatic actor in the movie.
I liked it, but it didn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It should have.
Genuinely intriguing idea with fantastic performances from all the cast; Thomas Jane standing out in particular (big fan of his since the Mist). The intoxicated scenes were quite realistic, in my opinion, and it certainly highlights both the up and downside of hard partying with long term friends.
However the second half, or last third rather, turns it round to almost being an emotional chick-flick in that we’re left with over the top, destructive, shells of people who have lost all sense of reality. I would much rather the film had handled the topic more realistically, as there is certainly enough scope within the subject without having to go to extremes.
At times it reminded me of a more modern re-envisioning of the Big Chill, but not quite as crafty or successfull a film. Substitute death of a friend with a note and you’ll get what I mean.
Overall worth a watch if you can overlook the turn it takes towards the end.
Rapt - gripping kidnap thriller about a wealthy French industrialist who’s held to ransom for a sum that his family can’t afford to pay due to a gambling habit he managed to keep a secret until his abduction.
The negotiations are very well-handled, with the kidnappers on one side, and his family, the police and the board of directors on the other. Usually this type of movie focuses on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but the inability of the ‘good guys’ to to co-operate with each other means that the kidnappers are always close to aborting the plot and killing the industrialist or sending him home in pieces. Really enjoyable.
Now I see my instinct to avoid this movie was spot on.
Ugh!
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The granny scene was great I thought. But yea, the rest was pretty pointless and unoriginal.
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The film had such potential too angels vs demons end of the world etc etc, the best part was the two angels fighting at the end.[/quote]
Prophecy was better imo.
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I strongly advise you all to avoid Gabriel then. I gave it some leeway because the budget was low (100,000 AUD) and it had Andy Whitfield in the lead (he carries it), but it pretty much covers the same ground as Legion except it’s closer to sci-fi (for example, all references to God are excised).
Now I see my instinct to avoid this movie was spot on.
Ugh!
[/quote]
The granny scene was great I thought. But yea, the rest was pretty pointless and unoriginal.
[/quote]
The film had such potential too angels vs demons end of the world etc etc, the best part was the two angels fighting at the end.[/quote]
Prophecy was better imo.
[/quote]
I strongly advise you all to avoid Gabriel then. I gave it some leeway because the budget was (low 100,000 AUD) and it had Andy Whitfield in the lead (he carries it), but it pretty much covers the same ground as Legion except it’s closer to sci-fi (for example, all references to God are excised).
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lol
Some of these movies just look like a vehicle for special effects.
Where are the stories?
It’s like they tell the writers to write them a script that allows them to use a lot of special effects.
Boring. It’s no wonder why this movie took so freaking long to make.
Aaron Sorkin who also wrote The Social Network, wrote this thing too.
I also thought The Social Network was boring.
Maybe Spoilers
The film showed too much of Brad Pitt mulling things over, sitting in one place and sighing. Hardly any baseball action outside of TV broadcasts in the background, the scenes were deliberate and felt more like little vignettes than a combined story with a narrative.
Examples:
Billy sits in the stands listening to a game
Billy has a conversation with the scouts
Billy goes to Cleveland to talk with their GM
Billy talks to Peter in Cleveland
Billy talks to Peter in an office
Billy talks to Peter in a film room
Peter does math on a computer
Billy talks to Art Howe
Billy and Peter meet with scouts
Billy picks up daughter from Ex’s house
Billy listens to daughter sing a song
Billy goes to Scott Hattiebergs house
Billy watches practice.
Oh, it keeps going.
The whole movie, basically shot from the POV of Billy Beane.
Now if they were keeping true to the book, I guess that’s ok, but it doesn’t make for a compelling story. I wanted to see more baseball action, more interraction between the players and the manager, especially as it pertained to the wacky way they were putting their team together. There had to be confusion and dissent in the clubhouse, but the players were all portrayed as static… stagnant.
I mean, you’ve got a motherfucking acting BEAST in Phillip Seymore Hoffman playing the cagey Manager in Art Howe and you don’t let him off the chain? He looked bored. Spoke softly.
Saw This Means War and Project X this weekend(fucking slow weekend)…
TMW was pretty bad. I enjoyed it but certainly not for the reasons the film-makers intended. Although I did get the impressions they were taking the piss out of the genre a lot of the time.(FTR, I didn’t know it was a chick-flick. My girlfriend chose it and I thought ‘Hey Tom Hardy is in it so it’s probably gonna be good’.
Project X was decent. Good for a few cheap chuckles and boobie-oogling. Reminded me of when I turned 18 and my last year of high-school was spent in some sort of drunken mess as there was 18th parties(the legal drinking age here) every weekend. Obviously not as crazy but a bit of a flashback for me
John Carter - the level of CGI promised by the trailers and previews was ruined by watching it in 3D. I wouldn’t watch a regular movie wearing shades, so why hasn’t anybody realized that wearing dark glasses would require some sort of contrast adjustment? For Pixar whiz Andrew Stanton’s live-action debut, the FX were disappointing, mainly because the 3D worked against the CG (having said that, the three most sympathetic characters were virtual).
Taylor Kitsch (previously best known as Gambit in X-Men Oranges: Tangerine, and before that," the surfer guy who got bitten to death while joining the mile high club in Snakes on a Plane") is a more than worthy lead. I can’t find fault with the story, but it has been “homaged” so many times that you’d be hard pressed to find anything new.
But make no mistake, this is one of the archtypal sci-fi stories. A clear creative forebear to Star Wars, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, it’s such a pity that it will be seen as the rip-off and not the inspiration.
Basically, it was made decades too late. Only the most forgiving of modern imaginations would accept the central conceit that Mars was a planet capable of sustaining life to the level shown in the movie. But then again, most sci-fi and fantasy writers felt displacement in their own lives and expressed something of themselves in the heroes they created.
…about John Carter, our entire concept of space and the future owes its existence to books like this. The problem with that…is that every movie any of us has seen has borrowed from it so much that people would see this movie as a rip off.
I haven’t seen it and probably won’t because of that. They would have had to come up with something brand new to make it work.
