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The Film Thread


DeadlyDirk

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Just watched "The Father ", my God, what a difficult watch, but an absolutely astounding performance by Hopkins, in his portrayal of an elderly man slowly succumbing to the despair of dementia. For me, it is head and shoulders above his performance in SOTL. I thought Olivia Coleman was terrific also as the caring, put upon daughter. 

The best depiction of dementia I've seen, undoubtedly. 

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4 minutes ago, ender4 said:

Why?

Because they played song 2 in the trailer and it was bad ass

But seriously I'm not sure why, it's cheesy as ****, not particularly well acted scripted or directed, it doesn't get any of the themes from the book right... Yet at the same time it just seems like a perfect action film, loads of shooting, loads of violence, loads of gore, when it wants to it looks great, maybe it was just me being 13 when it came out* more than anything else it's just a fun film 

I'm sure I read somewhere it set a record for number of bullets fired in a film

* for the same reason I'd list austin powers as one of the funniest films I've ever seen, pretty much every joke landed on 13 year old me 

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Just watched the Mortal Kombat reboot.

It's not bad. It's not all that good either, but it's not bad. I kinda unashamedly like the original movie (the second is an abomination that should be scraped from the earth), for all it's campiness and awful CGI and being er, liberal with the source material, so this basically only had to be passable film with better CGI to win me over. Lo and behold, it is. It's not much more than that, but never mind.

It's kinda funny how much the script feels like it's been made by an algorithm. Like, the whole thing is basically the first act of an MK origin story comprising about 10% of the overall MK story, with an audience POV character chucked in to let them establish the world, and a few weird story curves that don't really do much beyond tape over the holes of the rest of the story. You could quite literally take the prologue of MK9, delete most of the fluff, intertwine a new character with the name 'Audience Surrogate' through it and fill in the holes with cement called 'Subplot' and you'd have the script for this film.

Which is fine. At the end of the day, I'm watching a Mortal Kombat film to see characters I know doing things I know brought to life. In that, this is basically successful. There's not really much more than that. It has moves and even fatalities from the games brought to life faithfully, the costumes are mostly fine, it has some nice action, it's even funny in places. You can see the budget and the seams in places - the opening scene has some badly done gore CG, there's some fake environments that aren't at the standard we expect (though not terrible even then). 

Perhaps the biggest failing in the whole thing is the main character, our newly created character, is rubbish. Thankfully it's the kind of rubbish that comes from the character being a complete non entity rather than actively ruining anything. And even then the entire film is stolen by Kano anyway, who is a character bigger than this from deserves.

Perfectly fine fun. It's short, stupid, and does everything it needs to.

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12 hours ago, Chindie said:

Perhaps the biggest failing in the whole thing is the main character, our newly created character, is rubbish. Thankfully it's the kind of rubbish that comes from the character being a complete non entity rather than actively ruining anything. And even then the entire film is stolen by Kano anyway, who is a character bigger than this from deserves.

Perfectly fine fun. It's short, stupid, and does everything it needs to.

Spoiler

A bad MMA fighter who becomes good when given literal plot armour. Can't believe he kills Goro. 

Scorpion is very good and deserved more screen time. 

 

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Reminiscence - I liked the SF element of it - using tech for people to re-visit old memories and 'storing' them, and there was the potential for it to be a really good neo-noir type film, but it is let down by dialogue and performances a bit, but most of all the use of a voiceover which worsens it's value as a piece of film by approximately 2000% It draws attention to how cheesy the artifice of it is, reminds you of actual good noirs film and books, and involves aforementioned risible dialogue. Most infuriatingly it is completely unecessary exposition. Show don't tell is the aphorism which it resoundingly ignored.

Honestly without that one stylistic choice alone, I'd say it's a perfectly solid 6.5/10 film with a few issues anyway, but yeah, damn what a daft choice that was. 

 

So I re-watched Bullit  tonight instead, forgot it almost goes the other way on the spare dialogue and minimal use of sound, but when it does very effective. Good old Steve McQueen. 

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On 03/09/2021 at 13:12, Chindie said:

Dune reviews are out.

Masterpiece, generational movie, echoes the feel and impact of the Jackson LoTR films.

Hype.

As a lover of the book series I will be there the first night! The spice must flow!

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36 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Just abut to settle down to SAS who dares wins, but noticed Cobra Sylvester Stallone on ITV4. Ahh, it's only the celebrity one anyway.

Crime is a disease, meet the cure

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On 01/09/2021 at 10:15, Wainy316 said:

26 years late but finally watched Heat.

8/10.  Would bang.

The gentle fade in of Moby's God Moving Over The Face Of Waters at the end is I think, for me, only beaten in the breathtakingly-perfect-use-of-music-in-film stakes by Tears In Rain (and admittedly it's the on-screen stuff doing the heaviest of the lifting there).

There's an X-Files episode that uses My Weakness to similar effect. Good stuff.

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1 hour ago, foreveryoung said:

Just abut to settle down to SAS who dares wins, but noticed Cobra Sylvester Stallone on ITV4. Ahh, it's only the celebrity one anyway.

Cobra has got one of the best action movie quips of all time, right at the beginning when Sly walks into a shop rigged to explode, the baddie threatens to pull the trigger...

"Go ahead.  I don't shop here."

Poetry.

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On 03/09/2021 at 18:12, Chindie said:

Dune reviews are out.

Masterpiece, generational movie, echoes the feel and impact of the Jackson LoTR films.

Hype.

If it lives up to the hype then for me it confirms Villeneuve as the best director in the world currently.

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"People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan" last week for me.

Very funny. Doesn't quite live up to the early seasons of the show but a big improvement on the later series. Chabuddy G the star of the show as usual

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