Recently watched movies!

[Dr Kain]

[jellydonut25]

[Dr Kain]

I wish I could say I agree, but the horrific crap called music completely pulled me out of the immersion from the movie so I could not even enjoy it right from the get go. It sucks to because when I first saw the trailer before Prometheus it looked incredible. The costumes were gorgeous. It had some really good actors in it. And most of all, it looked different. I had never heard of The Great Gatsby before and was looking forward to it all year to the point that I avoided everything about the movie to ensure I did not spoil myself. Then I go to see it and two minutes in that god awful banging on the trash can started and completely threw me out of the movie, proving that once again rap music does NOT belong in everything.

Now I do also remember the editing being horrible during the first hour or so of the movie. It was like they hired someone with ADD to stitch the movie together as the camera could not say focused on one shot for more than like three seconds and it had to cut to another angle, then another, to another, etc.

[eabaker]

[klen7]

^ this.

Occasionally it works. I really liked the Cat People song in Inglorious Basterds...but there is probably a Bowie bias at play there on top of a Tarantino bias for me

[eabaker]

^Tarantino has a certain panache with regards to densely latered semiotic Frankensteining. Luhrmann has his moments as a stylist, but is not nearly as clever a storyteller.

[Dr Kain]

Halloween III - I liked the idea of them wanting to do an anthology series of Halloween movies yearly, but this movie was just not that good for a starter movie. I liked that they wanted to do something different, but the execution was poorly done. The movie's best sequence was its first 10 minutes as it really set an interesting mood that the movie just could not follow for its remaining 90 minutes. There was nothing suspenseful or truly horrorfying at all in this movie. The story is boring. The characters are bland. The music is the best part of the movie. Overall, I give it a 5/10 stars.

[lhb412]

The African Queen

I'm so used to old Hollywood pictures being shot on sets that seeing this one shot entirely on location is kinda crazy. Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn are in a boat and Africa, and not a fake boat with a green screen: they're really on a boat in Africa!

[XvGojira]

[canofhumdingers]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) - the Alamo Drafthouse screened a 35mm print to a sold out house last night! And the event included an all-you-can-eat pizza party! It was great fun to finally see this in a theater, especially with a great, enthusiastic crowd. The majority of people there (including myself) had at least a ninja turtle t-shirt on, and some people even came dressed in costume (Casey Jones in particular was a popular guise). And I can only assume the print was an original release print from 1990 as the MC introducing the show said it was over 20 years old. It was certainly showing its age but it was still great to actually see it on film with real grain, gate weave, scratches, and all the wonderful organic things you only get watching real film projections.

The event was so popular that at the end they announced an impromptu encore screening in a few days!

As for the film, as far as I'm concerned this is THE perfect Ninja Turtles movie. I can't think of a single thing I would change about it. They nailed it perfectly on the first try! No need for Mr. Bay....

[Dr Kain]

[lhb412]

[canofhumdingers]

How exactly do the Turtles' original personalities differ? I grew up on the cartoon and movies and have, sadly, never actually read a turtles comic. (Something I intend to remedy one of these days...)

[lhb412]

[klen7]

I recently revisited the comics with the IDW rerelease and it hasn't held up to my memory of the series.

[lhb412]

^They're not the greatest comics, but they're fun. Usagi Yojimbo, which came out around the same time (still going) and has been linked to the TMNT at various times, is a whole lot better.

[Dr Kain]

We watched The Thing and Cabin in the Woods today at a friend's parents' house on their 92 inch screen. It was amazing. I'm not going to go into details of the movies again, but Cabin is an 8/10 and Thing is a 10/10.

[XvGojira]

[Dr Kain]

[XvGojira]

[Dr Kain]

Halloween 4 - This movie was not terrible but rather extremely predictable. It was not scary at all. The deaths were expected and gone are the unique camera angles and such that made the original great and were still somewhat present in its two sequels. Here, it is just your average run of the mill slasher movie that feels more like a Friday the 13th movie than a Halloween movie. However, the scene when Michael managed to sneak under the truck and then kill each redneck without the others 2 inches away from them knowing it has made me come up with a great new video game franchise. I call it Metal Myers Solid. :p Overall, I give the movie a 5/10 but I hate that they just pretty much killed Curtis' character off screen.

Halloween 5 - Ugh... again, not down right dreadful, but about 15 minutes too long and the movie just leaves off on a cliffhanger out of the blue. I did not like how they cheapened the ending to the previous movie, but my god, what is with the looks of Loomis and Myers in this movie? It seems like Loomis' scars shifted around from where they were in the last movie while Myers' mask looked down right terrible. Killing off Rachel would have been fine had more come out of it. After all, Jaime finds her body at the end and then nothing is ever spoken of it again. And WHY did they not kill off Tina? She was such a worthless selfish character that she truly deserved to die!! Anyway, I give this movie a 4/10.

Halloween 6 - What the **** did I just watch?! Sure, I know many have told me this movie is atrocious, but seriously, what the hell did I just watch? So Myers is now part of some cult that made him kill his sister as a boy? HUH?! And Jamie suddenly aged like 15 years in 6? The fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...? Oh, and the house changed again. In the last movie it had a Victorian-like tower to it and now it does not. Loomis' scars are gone. And his friend has been part of the cult all along? And then Myers decides to just kill the cult. Jesus christ, was this movie written and edited by an 8 year old with ADD? It made absolutely no sense nor does Myers' actions. He leaves the house to kill some radio talk show host and then goes back to the house to kill more of the Strode family. Why? What did killing the talk show host do? How was he in any way related to the Strode family that he needed to die? What was up with that ending? Loomis says he has unfinished business and then we just see Myers' mask and knife. IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!!! I'm giving this movie a 1/10 and that is only because it had an idea in there that might have worked if they let a professional actually write and edit the movie.

[jellydonut25]

^SOME of that movie's faults are due to excessive reshoots, and SOME are due to Donald Pleasance passing away during production...but MOST of them are a result of poor filmmaking.
45 minutes of footage was left on the cutting room floor.
The director and producer didn't care for the original script and haphazardly rewrote and reshot various scenes on the fly.
The originally recorded ending had the curse of Myers being passed on to Loomis, but tested so poorly that they rewrote the ending, but by that time, Pleasance had passed and there was no way to reshoot any of the Loomis scenes.

After reading up on it more, I wonder if the original script had something along the lines of Loomis intentionally taking on the curse, in order to be able to stop Michale once and for all. The director didn't like that though, so changed it to be accidental...audiences hated that then and it was changed again.

Either way, 11 script re-writes, directors changing scenes on the fly, and multiple reshoots are basically the ingredients for a terrible film.

[Silver Kamen]

Just watched Lost In Translation, which was written and directed by Sofia Coppola. And it has to be one of my favorite movies of all time, no contest.

[lhb412]

Casablanca

One of the all-time Hollywood greats, and one of the most crowd-pleasing movies ever (watching this in a theater last year really sold me on that fact - so many great lines!). Of course, this film was famously being written and re-written as it was being filmed. It just goes to show that back then the people making movies were so professional, had the sense of good storytelling so deeply ingrained, that you wind up with a brilliant movie.

[lhb412]

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

This film gets a bit more flak than it should because it's not as good as the best episodes of the series... which is a real crazy standard considering the quality of said show! A solid 'standard' episode of Bebop at feature length isn't something to sneeze at!