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

Balrog scene: great scene or greatest scene?

mtagge wrote: Sorry for the confusion earlier Jackwraith. The film trilogy is still a masterpiece to me. I get emotional when Gandalf confronts the Balrog everytime. I'm one of those guys who never read the books precisely because of the "laborious" language. Tried reading the Hobbit and gave up after he talked about giant bees or such for a full page.

No problem. And I totally get it; both attachment to the films and, uh, struggle with the books. Sorry, Sag, but Tolkien is the baseline of modern fantasy for a lot of reasons, but it's not because everyone likes taking a hiatus in the middle of a 300-page novel so he can ramble on about this or that aspect of Gondolin or when he commits a few dozen pages to an encounter with Tom Bombadil. As always, you like what you like and if that's why you''re into Middle-Earth, more power to you. But there is no writer on so high a pedestal that he/she can't suffer the slings and arrows of people that their stuff simply doesn't speak to.

BTW, mtagge, I understand the game stuff, too. I still have a copy of War of the Ring. I will never part with it. I haven't played it in years and I don't know when I will again because some of its flaws have become so apparent over those years. But I'm still a fan of the setting and it was the best game of its kind when it was released and, without question, the best rendition of the world in the gaming sphere to that point. It'd be great to put on the table tonight, but I'm confined with two non-DoaM players so that ain't happening...

RobertB wrote: But as a prose stylist, Tolkien couldn't carry Gene Wolfe's jock.

Wolfe is another great prose writer who is widely admired by other (genre) writers. My only complaint about Wolfe is that he usually fails to nail the ending of the story. Or maybe I'm too stupid to appreciate his endings. He did get better with endings in the 21st century, but he will never be compared to O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe.

I watched Color Out of Space recently and Nic Cage's performance was off-putting and distracting and it consistently took me out of the movie. I couldn't get a handle on what he was doing and it all seemed like Cage doing his weird Cage things where none of it added up to a cohesive character. The cosmic horror was really well-realized, including some truly disturbing body horror near the end, but this seems like the sort of movie I'll watch again in spite of Cage's performance, rather than because of it.

Contrast that with Mandy, which I rewatched recently, and his off-kilter acting choices seemed much more in tune with the director's vision in that film, as opposed to whatever he was doing in COos.

HERESY!

I didn't say he was a tight writer, I said his use of the English language is unmatched. Yep, he spends 40 pages on what is largely a board meeting in The Fellowship but he pulls it off with élan. You don't read Tolkien to get to the end. If you do you're doing it wrong.

There's no way that kind of writing can translate to film. Same thing happened to Rowling, and really to Stephen King as well. Most of the films made on his (very successful, well-regarded) novels are pretty ordinary.

Sagrilarus wrote: There's no way that kind of writing can translate to film. Same thing happened to Rowling, and really to Stephen King as well. Most of the films made on his (very successful, well-regarded) novels are pretty ordinary.

I've long-contended that what Stephen King really needed was a tougher editor. I think his best work has always been his short stories and novellae. His novels run too long and lose some of the dramatic tension that I think is necessary for horror. The shorter stuff stays on point the whole way through. I think it's notable that the best film that came from his work is the one based on a novella: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Jackwraith wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: There's no way that kind of writing can translate to film. Same thing happened to Rowling, and really to Stephen King as well. Most of the films made on his (very successful, well-regarded) novels are pretty ordinary.

I've long-contended that what Stephen King really needed was a tougher editor. I think his best work has always been his short stories and novellae. His novels run too long and lose some of the dramatic tension that I think is necessary for horror. The shorter stuff stays on point the whole way through. I think it's notable that the best film that came from his work is the one based on a novella: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

I should probably hold my tongue because I have an unopened dvd case in my collection that contains The Shawshank Redemption. But I have already read the novella, and it was not even remotely close to my favorite work by King. I expect I will probably enjoy the movie more than the novella, but I keep watching other movies instead. But I'm going to go ahead and say that all the other movies based on short stories by King have tended to suck to the same degree as the movies based on his novels. Because most King movies suck, aside from my favorite, The Shining.

Maximum Overdrive sucked. Children of the Corn sucked. Lawnmower Man was a wild deviation from the original story by King, and I still didn't enjoy it. The Running Man movie also took great liberties with the source material, and was bad enough to nearly mark the end of Schwarzeneggar's run as an A-list actor. I don't remember much about my single viewing of The Mangler, which means it probably sucked. Same goes for Graveyard Shift. But these were all decent stories, except for Lawnmower Man. It might just be that Hollywood isn't often great at translating good horror stories into good horror movies. It's even more dire when you look at movies based on the writing of Poe or Lovecraft.

Shellhead wrote: It might just be that Hollywood isn't often great at translating good horror stories into good horror movies. It's even more dire when you look at movies based on the writing of Poe or Lovecraft.

Somewhere in his collection of essays, Danse Macabre, Stephen King says that movie horror is hard to do well, because the actual payoff of the horror rarely meets expectations. "A 50-foot-tall monster? Darn, I was hoping for a 100-foot one." Obviously it can be done well, but a lot of it is mediocre at best.

I love Danse Macabre. It's my favorite book by Stephen King.

Isn't Stand By Me based on a King short story? That one's pretty good.

King's right that movie horror doesn't work the same way as prose. The imagination is a powerful tool. But by the same token, jump-scares are kinda impossible to do in a book. (Personally, I despise jump-scares and think they're a cheap way to affect the audience, but I mention them just to make a point.)

Yes, the story is called The Body and is in the book Different Seasons. The book contains 4 stories, all of which have been made into movies if I recall.

Carrie (1976) is a great movie. Scared the pants out of me in the cinema especially the jump scare in the final moments.

As much as I enjoy movies, I have my preferences and my blindspots. For one thing, I generally avoid watching old movies. I've seen a few of the classics, and I found them disappointing as hell, especially Citizen Kane. I get that it was a different era, and they were only gradually transitioning away from the idea that movies should be performed very nearly like live stages performances. Minimal action, ponderous delivery, and voices pitched to reach the back rows even if the actor's cadence was phony baloney.

So it was with caution that I decided to finally watch The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965). My mother was a big fan of mysteries and spy novels, and I gradually learned from reading a few of her books that she preferred more realistic espionage over the James Bond crap. So I knew going into this movie that it might feature some of my least favorite traits in old movies.

And yet, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was not too bad. This was my first time watching an entire movie starring the legendary Richard Burton, and he delivered a good performance. The story was a very solid tale of double agents engaged in a complex intrigue. The pace was slower than I normally prefer, and somewhat more talkative as well. There was almost zero action, though there was a scene where Burton throws a couple of the weakest and most unconvincing punches that I have ever seen in a movie or tv show. But otherwise everybody hit their marks and told the story, and I even got caught up in it all for a while. The story holds up all these years later, and it did viewers the favor of letting them figure things out without getting spoonfed via exposition.

It seems like the end of one decade and the start of another can be an awkward moment from a cultural standpoint. Americans in particular are now conditioned to expect that each decade will have a distinctive cultural style, but style tends to change more organically than that.

To me, the late '80s through '90 was definitely an odd time that I do not generally regard with fondness. In particular, there was a sub-current of uncomfortable body horror at that time. Darkman. Robocop. Frankenhooker. Hardware. The creepy kids that ruined the third Mad Max movie. The whole movie Dead Ringers. Jokertown in the Wild Cards books. And also Total Recall. Why? I dunno, maybe it was pushback against the faux '50s texture of Reagan's America, or a collective recoil from the hair band metal aesthetic of the day.

I mostly enjoyed Total Recall the first time I saw it, but the body horror stuff and a couple of moments of ultra-violence spoiled it a little. So tonight was the second time I have ever watched Total Recall, a full 30 years later. Same reaction tonight. The underlying Phillip K. Dickering with our sense of reality was a cool recurring theme in the movie. But then there's the horrific mutants of Mars, Or Schwarzeneggar extracting a tracking device the size of a large marble... by sticking a mechanical device all the way up his nose. Or the vivid spectacle of Schwarzeneggar's character using a random bystander as a body shield against a heavy barrage of gunfire. The mutants in particular mostly looked rather low-budget compared to all the other effects in the movie. Still, overall it was an entertaining blend of science-fiction and action that I wouldn't mind seeing again in another decade or so.

THE THING is a remarkable work of body horror. Carpenter got a lot right in that one, and his best move was making sure Rob Bottin was his makeup artist. He also did ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL, so you're familiar with his work. Practical effects are no longer de rigeur, but there was a time when you really wanted certain artists for certain things.
Tom Savini: Zombies, generic splatter

• DAWN OF THE DEAD
• TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2

Rob Bottin: Realistic corpses, weird shit

• LEGEND
• SE7EN
• STAR WARS Cantina dudes

Dick Smith: Aging

• THE EXORCIST
• LITTLE BIG MAN

Stan Winston: Robots, slimy shit

• THE TERMINATOR
• PREDATOR
• ALIENS

Rick Baker: Apes, real-looking hair

• AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON
• GREYSTOKE, LEGEND OF TARZAN
• HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS