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hotseatgames wrote: I watched the new Mission Impossible on Amazon Prime. It's 3 hours, and is part 1!
If you like these films, and I do, you'll like this. I don't come to them expecting top tier writing, but they deliver top tier spectacle. The stunts in the last act are amazing. Say what you will about Tom Cruise as a person, but as an actor he always delivers, and his stunts are crazy. This is the one in which he jumps a dirt bike off of a mountain.
I felt "Stunt fatigue" in MI 7 (8?). The car chase and especially the train sequence were just exhausting. I think they could have shaved 40 mill off the budget, lost 6 minutes of that stuff, and had a better film for it. The much ballyhooed bike jump was another "cool that he did it, but couldn't we have done this in a wind tunnel for 10% of the time and effort?" sorta thing. I like stuff done practically, i.e. involving real people even if its with wires and stuff, but don't necessarily need the stunt done FOR REAL.
The actual plot is....whoa. Like we have a superAI thats gonna wipe our database so our option is to have GIANT rooms full of people manually typing out our records? Ever hear of a xerox machine? I think they lost sight of the prize about halfway through. All they really needed was a scene with Haley Atwell swimming laps in a bikini while Cruise explains the plot to her and we would have all been fine
While the movie was an enjoyable watch, I think the film suffered from overexposure leading up to its release - practically the whole plot was laid out in various promos. There's no doubt Cruise lays it out on the line in filming these , but the AI plot was muddled , kind of reminded me of the Mcguffin back in the first MI film.
Regarding stunts in Mission:Impossible, I initially didn’t realize the HALO jump in Fallout or underwater sequence in Rogue Nation were actual stunts. There’s obvious CG in the clouds and lightning and spinning death arms such that I assumed the whole sequence was made in a computer.
It’s kind of a bummer that I disregarded spectacular work like that because the director wanted to amp up the real danger in post.
The following user(s) said Thank You: hotseatgames
ChristopherMD wrote: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Hadn't watched this movie in a long time. I've seen it enough at release to shut off the subtitles a few minutes in. I didn't know what they were saying in every scene but I know what the story is so could follow well enough to enjoy. It's held up really well. The fight choreography is still top tier even when they're not doing the gravity-defying stuff.
In the off chance you haven't seen Hero with Jet Li, I think it's even more amazing in the visual dept. (though not so much in the plot). Every fight seen, which are many, is like it's own individual work of art. Still my favorite in this genre. Yimou Zhang knows how to create some cool visuals, even The Great Wall looked amazing, albeit a bit cheesy.
cdennett wrote: In the off chance you haven't seen Hero with Jet Li, I think it's even more amazing in the visual dept. (though not so much in the plot). Every fight seen, which are many, is like it's own individual work of art. Still my favorite in this genre. Yimou Zhang knows how to create some cool visuals, even The Great Wall looked amazing, albeit a bit cheesy.
"A bit"??? Isn't that the flick with Matt Damon fighting ghouls or demons trying to get over the wall? So ridiculous, totally preposterous, not a scrap of historical accuracy at all!!
Watched a mediocre movie with an interesting cast that included Christopher Plummer, Kim Cattrall, Christian Slater, and Curtwood Smith. It was Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country (1991). Truth be told, most Star Trek movies are mediocre, aside from Star Trek: the Motion Picture (terrible) and the first two Star Trek movies featuring Chris Pine as Kirk.
Guilty confession time: I never saw any of the Godfather movies, until now. I was too young to see them when they first came out, and then later annoyed by all the ethnic stereotypes about Italians that were inspired by these movies. I did read the first book, but I was still pretty young at that time, maybe 14 years old. But I have been hearing for decades about how great the first two Godfather movies are, so I finally watched them.
The Godfather (1972) deserves the reputation. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen for a moment, despite the long run time. Marlon Brando delivers an absolutely iconic performance as Don Corleone. James Caan is good, and Al Pacino is great. The story is good, and has a nice pace. More importantly, the storytelling completely avoids exposition and tells as much as possible with the visuals.
The Godfather Part II (1974) is a bit overrated in my opinion. It's still a great movie, but runs a little too long. De Niro does a good job, but toggling back and forth between his time frame and Al Pacino's time frame somehow detracts somewhat from both stories in a way that toggling back forth between New York City and Sicily did not detract from the first movie. And the betrayals become repetitive and a bit tedious, with only Fredo's betrayal really carrying any emotional weight. Without Pacino and De Niro ever sharing a scene, we are left with two great stars interacting with a variety of lesser talents.
I just got back from watching Megalopolis in Imax. It was like an art movie had a $100 million dollar budget and two hours of old guy legacy wisdom to share about art and collapsing society. I am not sure that, in this movie, Adam Driver has a face made for the IMAX screen. There are Weimar Republic levels of debauchery, an Atlas Shrugged battle for the soul of the city, and a lot of Gotham Magical Realism that reminded me of Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale. It also reminded me of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, with all the perching on tall buildings and pontificating.
The movie looked cool, the dialogue felt sort of stilted and semi-Shakespearean. Laurence Fishburn, as the chauffeur-narrator-chorus kept telling us exactly what everything meant. The love of a beautiful young girl redeems the tortured male genius. I didn't hate it, and enjoyed talking about it. I want to analyze through the lens of James C. Scott flavored anarchism, and my son wants to use his weird mix of authoritarianism and populism with a dash of Tankies-flavored communism.
Nathalie Emmanuel did a good job. I still think that Coppola should release all of the footage and let the internet create fan edits, the best of which will show up on the extras DVD. I don't think it deserves a 5.1. Everyone in the audience was under 30, mostly men. It's like I was watching The Joker or that Napoleon movie again. Is the common thread a love of strong authoritarians?
Coppola pretty much ignores all the downsides of a Platonic Utopia/Republic, albeit one enabled by magic golden legos. Philosophy undergrads are going to picking this apart forever.
One thing that felt like a throwback was the notion of a society shaped by great architects, who have largely been replaced by huckster silicon valley billionaires.
Shellhead wrote: Watched a mediocre movie with an interesting cast that included Christopher Plummer, Kim Cattrall, Christian Slater, and Curtwood Smith. It was Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country (1991).
If you had seen it when it was released, I'm betting your reaction would've been different. None of the Star Trek films are high art, but that one was so timely, with the recent crumbling of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet state that it perfectly fit the zeitgeist. It also has 1) the best dialogue of any of them ("There is an old Vulcan proverb: 'Only Nixon could go to China.'"), 2) a wealth of material for those of us who were embedded in international relations/power politics of the time which none of the rest of them address properly, and 3) the best Sulu scene in any of the films or, for that matter, the shows ("Fly her apart, then!") A few of the scenes aren't great (mostly the ones centered around the asteroid) but, overall, it's simply the best story of any of the Original Crew films (I've seen only a couple of the Next Gen ones and was sufficiently unimpressed to pass on the rest of them.)
Shellhead wrote: Watched a mediocre movie with an interesting cast that included Christopher Plummer, Kim Cattrall, Christian Slater, and Curtwood Smith. It was Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country (1991).
If you had seen it when it was released, I'm betting your reaction would've been different.
Agreed. Saw this in high school and it was LEGENDARY at the time. Of course my school had a ridiculously high percentage of nerdy trekkies so I'm a bit biased but WOW we talked about the film for a looooong time.
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