What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Watched Cronos last night. It's Guillermo del Toro's first movie. Cronos was interesting, and yet I feel ambivalent about it. A remarkable horror movie for a young director, focusing on old men who are willing to do nearly anything to undo the ravages of time. The only star of note is a (relatively) young Ron Perlman, but every named character in the cast turns in a decent performance. There were some original ideas, and the story was not predictable. The original score was good. And yet... I didn't quite enjoy Cronos. Maybe the leisurely pacing undermined the horrific elements. Maybe certain sets were too cluttered and it distracted from the action. One of the bonus features on the DVD was a partial tour of del Toro's Bleak House, a residence that he bought for use as a creative workspace and storage for his collections of books, movies and oddities. There was a lot of cool stuff, but the overall visual impact was of mind-boggling clutter, like a house decorated with the random contents of 200 loot crates.

Starship Troopers, that's the movie where no one in this super powered stellar army has heard of artillery.

ThirstyMan wrote: Starship Troopers, that's the movie where no one in this super powered stellar army has heard of artillery.

I try to avoid putting on my military nerd hat too often, but stuff like that makes it too easy to drag it out.

(I saw an episode of Law & Order: SVU a while back, where there was an U.S. Army SFC in the courtroom, in his Class A's. His rank was sewed on upside down; rockers on top, chevrons on the bottom pointing down. I was genuinely offended - there wasn't a person in that room that knew which way the patch points? Or did the director say, "Fuck it, who'll notice.")

ThirstyMan wrote: Starship Troopers, that's the movie where no one in this super powered stellar army has heard of artillery.

There are a few subtle hints in the movie that the bugs are not a threat to humanity and that the whole war was orchestrated so that the military could justify its continued rule. If you accept this premise (I'm not positive that I do) then many of the strategic errors make sense. The goal of the war is not to win, but to make sure it continues.

Awful hard to deliver dialogue over incoming artillery.

I'm trying to figure out if I want to watch the last 90 minutes of the upcoming Avengers movie, or just the last hour. Recommendations?

Greg Aleknevicus wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: Starship Troopers, that's the movie where no one in this super powered stellar army has heard of artillery.

There are a few subtle hints in the movie that the bugs are not a threat to humanity and that the whole war was orchestrated so that the military could justify its continued rule. If you accept this premise (I'm not positive that I do) then many of the strategic errors make sense. The goal of the war is not to win, but to make sure it continues.

I think it was absolutely a subtext of the movie. The allusions to both modern American military campaigns and scenarios like 1984 are pretty widespread in the film.

Greg Aleknevicus wrote:

ThirstyMan wrote: Starship Troopers, that's the movie where no one in this super powered stellar army has heard of artillery.

There are a few subtle hints in the movie that the bugs are not a threat to humanity and that the whole war was orchestrated so that the military could justify its continued rule. If you accept this premise (I'm not positive that I do) then many of the strategic errors make sense. The goal of the war is not to win, but to make sure it continues.

I haven't seen any of the sequels, but the bugs in Starship Troopers seemed to lack space ship technology. They were able to shoot energy blasts at ships in orbit, but if they were stuck on that planet, it would have been easy for mankind to just avoid that one planet. Or nuke it extensively.

Sagrilarus wrote: Awful hard to deliver dialogue over incoming artillery.

I'm trying to figure out if I want to watch the last 90 minutes of the upcoming Avengers movie, or just the last hour. Recommendations?

I was a big fan of the Avengers comic (except for certain creative teams) but I can't come up with a compelling reason to see the new Avengers movie in the theater. I saw the previous one, and it just barely worked as a movie despite the excessively large number of heroes onscreen. Teams seem to work better in comics than in movies, though even comics tend to struggle with huge crossover events featuring crowd scenes of heroes.

My son is going to see it Saturday night, so I'll get feedback from that.

I could have seen the last hour of the prior movie and been fine. And yeah, it's like saying that comic books don't have enough words in them. I get it. But I'm starting to get the feeling that Marvel is expecting you to come from a sunk-costs perspective, figuring we'll feel obligated to see how it turns out. The spectacle just isn't calling out to me anymore.

Marvel has kind of shifted the main storyline to the Mekgineer Thermaplugg approach ("Explosions! More explosions!") which is OK from a certain perspective, since it's supposed to be a big event (killed half the universe, controls space/time/mind/power/soul, etc.) But it tends to leave the story suffering. I thought the Infinity Gauntlet stuff in the comics was subpar for Starlin. He was much better when he was doing drugs in the 70s with Warlock and then gradually got off the drugs with Metamorphosis Odyssey (meta!) and finally wrote some solid SF with Dreadstar.

Now that Marvel films is carrying his stuff forward, I've kind of lost the shine on it, too. I watched the previous one on Amazon and was underwhelmed. But then I'd seen a few prior to that and had steadily decreasing interest. I was tickled when superhero movies started to become a thing because it was my first experience with the genre in 20 years, as I'd largely given them up when we started our own studio. Plus, the first one (Iron Man) was actually a good film, not just a good superhero film. But since then it's become increasingly Thermaplugg and I'm just past the point where SFX do anything for me. I think Shellhead's point is well-taken; that big groups of heroes are fine in comics, because you don't have to pay those heroes anything or give them appropriate screen time, like you do in movies. They can just be another face in the crowd fighting the demon hordes and you, the reader, are like: "Oh. He/she was there, too. Cool." That's one of the things about switching media, I guess.

I would love to see Metamorphosis Odyssey, The Price, and Dreadstar get some kind of movie/tv treatment. It seems incredibly unlikely, but then Guardians of the Galaxy was a not a team that I ever expected to see on the big screen. Starlin's epic Adam Warlock story is great, but the space jesus angle might make it a really tough pitch to a studio.

End game is pretty fantastic.
Non spoiler spoiler

Sagrilarus wrote: Awful hard to deliver dialogue over incoming artillery.

Strangely, directors of all known war films actually know this but still manage to equip their armies with artillery and make a cohesive film with dialogue.

I'm going to go against the grain and say Avengers 4 was mostly a slog to get through. It had its moments, but unlike the best MCU movies I'm not really itching to see it again.

Agree completely. The last hour was amazing. The two before it were not. And it had one of my most hated storytelling elements in it. Gross.