LTT Movie Club!

[Crunchy Dragon]

17 minutes ago, WildDagwood said:

Thus, the cycle of IPs being ruined continues.

I think they'll be out of IPs to ruin after the unnecessary Indiana Jones sequel.

 

I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I did also just watch a video talking about why Dreamworks villains are so much better than Disney villains, and it was pretty eye-opening even if the presenter was a little annoying(also reminded me of possibly a cousin of Mark Rober, funnily enough).

 

[WildDagwood]

8 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I think they'll be out of IPs to ruin after the unnecessary Indiana Jones sequel.

 

I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I did also just watch a video talking about why Dreamworks villains are so much better than Disney villains, and it was pretty eye-opening even if the presenter was a little annoying(also reminded me of possibly a cousin of Mark Rober, funnily enough).

 

Proper, fleshed out antagonist, with understandable, and at times relatable motivations is soooo important.

 

In a lot of ways I'd say the hero is the driving force of a movie, but the villain needs to be the anchor for why everything is happening. Hard to get on board if you think they lack character and their motivations don't make sense.

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, WildDagwood said:

Yeah, basically the same for myself.

 

Disney is more concerned with pushing their own characters, rather than relying on any form of source material. They should write their own stories if they want to push characters and stories that are contradictory to the original, but I think on some level they know they need the name value as a crutch, and hope they can transform the character perception into what THEY want it to be.

 

Thus, the cycle of IPs being ruined continues.

I don't want to come off slagging Disney and being anti-woke, etc, but it really pisses me off when a filmmaker takes a well-known character/franchise, and tosses everything out in favour of their "vision" for said franchise/character. I'm not a huge comic book fan, but I liked the initial Marvel hero films well enough, but Disney just couldn't keep their "vision" off of them, and now...well there are better films to spend my time seeing.

[Crunchy Dragon]

3 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

being anti-woke

It's not even about woke or anti-woke for me, although I won't deny that it plays a part.

 

Disney just doesn't produce good content anymore.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I don't want to come off slagging Disney and being anti-woke, etc, but it really pisses me off when a filmmaker takes a well-known character/franchise, and tosses everything out in favour of their "vision" for said franchise/character. I'm not a huge comic book fan, but I liked the initial Marvel hero films well enough, but Disney just couldn't keep their "vision" off of them, and now...well there are better films to spend my time seeing.

I think everyone is in agreement that most of the modern movies with "woke messages" have nothing to do with the story, or are condescending. 

 

When @Crunchy Dragon finally watches alien (because idk why he hasn't seen it yet) I think he along with the rest of us will think Ripley is a cool person. 

I can't say anything else without introducing spoilers because I think alien & aliens deserve zero knowledge going in if you haven't seen them at this point in time somehow.

 

And alien movies could be considered to be quite woke. 

SPOILERS! Like... Major major spoilers for alien series movies. 

Spoiler

Ripley is a female lead. 

Ripley is a confident individual.

Ripley is least likely to do something incredibly stupid. 

 

In the sequel "aliens"

The trained military commander in the car is a bumbling idiotic man. 

Ripley takes leadership and does the objectively correct thing and tells the soldiers to GTFO. 

A trained special forces soldier breaks down saying "it's game over" but the 8 year old girl and Ripley female lead don't. 

 

Maybe some other stuff in the first two and potentially anything in the sequels but the first two alien movies are kinda the only ones that count. 

So... Yeah...

You can argue my points and I would accept them because aliens isn't condescending and uses its characters properly. 

[Spotty]

Speaking of movies with aliens in them I watched "The Arrival" (1996). I'm sure it will come as a surprise to everyone but the 90s movie about aliens staring Charlie Sheen isn't great.

 

Spoilers for the movie...

Spoiler

An astronomer listening to radio waves observes a short burst of what he believes to be alien communications. He reports it but he gets fired and begins to suspect that it's a conspiracy to cover it up after his research is seized and his associate is killed.

 

It turns out the aliens are already on earth and what he observed was actually communications between the aliens in space and the aliens already on earth. The aliens have taken the identity and appearance of humans and are trying to keep their existence a secret while they terraform the planet with global warming (remember the whole hole in the ozone layer from CFCs in the 80s and 90s).

One of the plot points of the movie is that the aliens don't sweat because they're used to a much hotter climate. To show that the main character is a 'good guy' he is constantly profusely sweating. It looks like he's just run a 30 mile marathon every time he's on screen. It is an interesting way to hint to the audience who is actually a human and fits with the plot but they overdo the sweating so much that it's not a subtle hint but a giant disgusting sweaty billboard.

Movies like The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers were more tense and suspenseful because you didn't know who was an alien and who was human.

 

-----------------------

 

 

 

I also watched Violent Night which is about an apathetic Santa Clause going Die Hard on a group of thieves that have taken a rich family hostage so they can steal their money. From the opening scene of a drunk Santa vomiting on an admirer it sets the expectations pretty low for the rest of the movie.

One of the big action/fight scenes of the movie took place in a garage/barn where Santa fights off about a dozen armed mercenaries. Santa enters the barn and then the group of mercenaries follow him in where Santa picks them off one or two at a time mostly with a sledgehammer. It makes absolutely no sense that there's a dozen mercenaries that enter a barn and get picked off one by one in gruesome, violent manner screaming in pain within feet of each other and the other men are still just slowly looking around trying to find Santa unaware that the others have been killed. If there were a dozen men in the same room as you being violently beaten to death you'd notice it.

 

There's also a really stupid scene where the kid is hiding in the corner and a bad guy is pointing their gun at the kid about to shoot them. The camera is positioned behind the bad guy looking towards the kid.

From out of frame Santa attacks the bad guy from the front hitting them in the chest. Meaning that Santa would have had to have been standing in between the bad guy and the child, or slightly off to the side

I mapped out what it would have looked like with the grey lines being the line of sight for the camera. This is the most favourable map conceding that Santa might have been off to the side and not directly in front of them.

 

Both the kid and the mercenary are caught by surprise that Santa is there and it's the big "The hero saved the day just in the nick of time" moment but it makes no damn sense that neither the kid nor the mercenary would have seen Santa standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM! You would notice a 6'3" man dressed as Santa standing in front of you swinging a sledgehammer.

 

Stuff like this just makes action scenes far too unbelievable and stupid. I would take one well choreographed one on one fight scene like something out of Jason Bourne any day over "Hero beats up 30 men at once while they each take turns getting their ass kicked" cliche.

Could have just had Santa fight one or two guys in the barn, catching the first guy by surprise and then having to fight the second guy as well. He finishes them off and then moves on. Believable and interesting. Having an endless wave of guys that each get caught off by surprise in the same room is just lazy writing. If you wanted Santa to come in at the last second to save the girl you could have shown him attacking from behind where they wouldn't have seen him, but I guess that wouldn't be considered heroic to attack somebody from behind off guard even though he just did that exact thing to a dozen men in a previous scene.

[Crunchy Dragon]

3 hours ago, fpo said:

When @Crunchy Dragon finally watches alien (because idk why he hasn't seen it yet) I think he along with the rest of us will think Ripley is a cool person.

Ripley and Sarah Connor are set apart from Captain Marvel and Rey because they're well-written female leads.

 

Modern female leads tend to follow the trend of the stereotypical strong female character - they're smarter than their male counterparts(for no apparent reason), they're sassy, they're powerful by nature, rarely needing any kind of mentor if at all, there's no real struggle to their character development. Most importantly, the 100 pound 5' 0" woman is able to throw around a 250 pound 6' 4" man like it's nothing. I don't want to talk about the live action Disney remakes in this regard, partially because I haven't personally seen any of them, but...Mulan. Beauty and The Beast. The Little Mermaid(which suffers from many other issues beyond poor character design).

 

When the strong female character defeats the villain, it's not a satisfying payoff because the strong female character was strong and powerful from the beginning, she didn't need anyone to mentor or teach her and the villain is just naturally weak by comparison. It's more satisfying to watch the hero get ran over by the strong villain, learn to be better and get some life lessons along the way, and rise to the occasion to defeat the powerful villain, proving themselves more powerful in doing so.

 

Rants about modern movies aside, I watched I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. I've seen clips of this movie here and there over the years but had never sat down to watch the full thing. There were a couple things I could have done without, but overall it was pretty good.

[Spotty]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Modern female leads tend to follow the trend of the stereotypical strong female character - they're smarter than their male counterparts(for no apparent reason), they're sassy, they're powerful by nature, rarely needing any kind of mentor if at all, there's no real struggle to their character development. Most importantly, the 100 pound 5' 0" woman is able to throw around a 250 pound 6' 4" man like it's nothing. I don't want to talk about the live action Disney remakes in this regard, partially because I haven't personally seen any of them, but...Mulan. Beauty and The Beast. The Little Mermaid(which suffers from many other issues beyond poor character design).

 

When the strong female character defeats the villain, it's not a satisfying payoff because the strong female character was strong and powerful from the beginning, she didn't need anyone to mentor or teach her and the villain is just naturally weak by comparison. It's more satisfying to watch the hero get ran over by the strong villain, learn to be better and get some life lessons along the way, and rise to the occasion to defeat the powerful villain, proving themselves more powerful in doing so.

Looks like somebody has been watching The Critical Drinker recently. This is pretty much exactly what he discussed in one of his recent videos.

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

32 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Looks like somebody has been watching The Critical Drinker recently.

Recently?

I've been following the Drinker for almost a year now, haha.

 

That said, it definitely helps my post if you read strong female character in the reverb Drinker voice.

[Spotty]

Are there any upcoming movies people are excited for?
Oppenheimer is really the only upcoming film I can think of that I am even faintly interested in. I feel like it has been a while since there's been any movies that I've been hyped to see.

 

I'm sure @Crunchy Dragon is probably pretty excited for Extraction 2 later this week. I haven't watched the first Extraction movie yet so I might watch that this weekend.

[Tan3l6]

Knives Out is remarkable movie from my recent history. 

The "sequel", Glass Onion was enjoyablem, but as not as intricate imo...

 

Go watch "Coherence" instead.

[WildDagwood]

12 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I don't want to come off slagging Disney and being anti-woke, etc, but it really pisses me off when a filmmaker takes a well-known character/franchise, and tosses everything out in favour of their "vision" for said franchise/character. I'm not a huge comic book fan, but I liked the initial Marvel hero films well enough, but Disney just couldn't keep their "vision" off of them, and now...well there are better films to spend my time seeing.

Wouldn't call it anti-woke or anything either. They're objectively disregarding the spirit of the characters they ruin for their own ideologies. The thing is, people don't tune into entertainment to be lectured or force-fed someone else's ideologies and "modern day issues". You watch entertainment (in a lot of cases) to escape from things and go on a mental adventure.

 

I don't have an issue if they want to make a "woke" character/story, but if you want to take an existing character/IP, deconstruct them, and turn them into a shell to push their own ideologies, I'll take issue with it. What's worse is they focus on this aspect of the development process more than the actual story and characters themselves.

[Crunchy Dragon]

38 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Are there any upcoming movies people are excited for?
Oppenheimer is really the only upcoming film I can think of that I am even faintly interested in. I feel like it has been a while since there's been any movies that I've been hyped to see.

 

I'm sure @Crunchy Dragon is probably pretty excited for Extraction 2 later this week. I haven't watched the first Extraction movie yet so I might watch that this weekend.

Oppenheimer is definitely the big one. I do still plan to see the upcoming Mission Impossible movie, although I'm not sure if I'll venture forth to a theater for it.

 

I am excited for Extraction 2, but not excited enough to give Netflix my money. Might see if I can borrow a friend's password.

[WildDagwood]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Ripley and Sarah Connor are set apart from Captain Marvel and Rey because they're well-written female leads.

 

Modern female leads tend to follow the trend of the stereotypical strong female character - they're smarter than their male counterparts(for no apparent reason), they're sassy, they're powerful by nature, rarely needing any kind of mentor if at all, there's no real struggle to their character development. Most importantly, the 100 pound 5' 0" woman is able to throw around a 250 pound 6' 4" man like it's nothing. I don't want to talk about the live action Disney remakes in this regard, partially because I haven't personally seen any of them, but...Mulan. Beauty and The Beast. The Little Mermaid(which suffers from many other issues beyond poor character design).

 

When the strong female character defeats the villain, it's not a satisfying payoff because the strong female character was strong and powerful from the beginning, she didn't need anyone to mentor or teach her and the villain is just naturally weak by comparison. It's more satisfying to watch the hero get ran over by the strong villain, learn to be better and get some life lessons along the way, and rise to the occasion to defeat the powerful villain, proving themselves more powerful in doing so.

 

Rants about modern movies aside, I watched I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. I've seen clips of this movie here and there over the years but had never sat down to watch the full thing. There were a couple things I could have done without, but overall it was pretty good.

Basically, everything you laid out is why they're unrelatable and no one likes them as characters. There's nothing to identify with, and you already know they're going to Mary Sue their way through the story with conveniences and undeserved powers or abilities. God forbid a male character help them achieve anything other than comic relief either (comedic part is debatable).

 

The irony is these "strong female characters" exhibit all the traits of what people would call toxic masculinity. They're undeservedly confident (other than "they're awesome, just cause"), brash, talk down to others (especially males), etc. They're literally toxic females, but apparently, Disney can't tell the difference. There are past examples to take inspiration from, and the video @Spotty linked gives a bunch, actually, so I'm not sure why some people act like this is unexplored territory for women in theatre and couldn't be done until now. Hell, Jennifer Laurence was narcissistic enough to even claim she was the first female action lead in Hunger Games (lol).

 

In a lot of ways, it seems like Disney (and others, frankly) is alienating its male audience and leaving nothing admirable for its female audience to look up to.

 

Movies I'm looking forwards to: Mission Impossible (series has been enjoyable enough for me), Deadpool 3 (found the others humorous), The Equalizer 3 (Denzel is one of the GOATS, imo, and the others were pretty good). Maybe some others, but I don't track movie releases like I used to. Been out for a while, but I heard that Jolt movie with Kate Beckinsale is decent, so I was thinking of checking that out soon.

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 hours ago, WildDagwood said:

Jennifer Laurence

Ain't she the chick that invented everything?

[Radium_Angel]

13 hours ago, fpo said:

Major major spoilers for alien series movies. 

Alien3 the Assembly cut is a fantastic film. The theatrical release is a mess. Alien 1/2 of course are fantastic flicks. Near perfect. I waffle on Alien Resurrection. And there is a new Alien film coming out (whether to the big screen or direct to video is currently unknown) and the oldest cast member was born in like 1996. Not a great sign. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

Alien3 the Assembly cut is a fantastic film. The theatrical release is a mess. Alien 1/2 of course are fantastic flicks. Near perfect. I waffle on Alien Resurrection. And there is a new Alien film coming out (whether to the big screen or direct to video is currently unknown) and the oldest cast member was born in like 1996. Not a great sign. 

I think alien died when Prometheus disappointed most audiences. 

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, fpo said:

I think alien died when Prometheus disappointed most audiences. 

I love the alien franchise so much, I went to see that miserable movie.

Twice.

(I hoped it would get better on repeated viewing)

The sequel was even dumber, if that was possible.

[Guest]

51 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I love the alien franchise so much, I went to see that miserable movie.

Twice.

(I hoped it would get better on repeated viewing)

The sequel was even dumber, if that was possible.

We'll always have the alien vs predator games. 

[Radium_Angel]

41 minutes ago, fpo said:

We'll always have the alien vs predator games. 

A solid option (I liked AvP1 the movie) but sadly, I'm not much of a gamer.

I'd love a turn-based game set in the alien (or predator or AvP) universe. But I don't think such a thing exists.

IIRC a long time ago, there was such a thing in Flash format. But my memory is fuzzy on that

[Spotty]

Not movies but I watched two episodes of the latest Black Mirror season last night. Oddly both episodes relate to a fictitious version of Netflix (called "Streamberry" in both episodes). The first episode is about a woman whose life is turned in to a Netflix drama, the second follows some film makers creating a documentary for Netflix - the streaming platform is a theme featured pretty heavily in both stories. Seems like Netflix is jerking themselves off a bit by making the episodes centre around a fictional Netflix and all the meta references they make to Netflix. Hopefully the other episodes aren't also about Netflix.

 

There was a plot hole I was annoyed by in the first episode "Joan is awful".
SPOILERS:

Spoiler

In the episode Netflix is using a quantum AI computer deep fake mumbo jumbo to create a TV show about a woman's life without her consent. The show is near perfectly mirroring her life and is revealing all her secrets. What she does in real life ends up on the TV show portrayed by an actor (Salma Hayek). She watches the show based on her life and her life starts to fall apart, which is then mirrored by the fictional version of herself in the TV show watching a fictional version of her fictional self (Cate Blanchette playing Selma Hayek playing the character of "Joan"). Since each fictional version watches a fictional version of their own show a new fictional version is created.

Anyway, "Joan" goes to Netflix to destroy the magic bullshit computer that is creating a deep faked version of her life for a TV show.

The plot hole is the computer is guarded by Michael Cera who explains to Joan that she is not the original Joan and she is herself a fictional version that is acting the part of the real Joan and mirroring the real Joan's actions. There's an infinite number of fictional Joans who are all acting out the events of the real Joan's life. The Michael Cera character and explanation should not exist at all because in the real version there would not have been somebody telling the real Joan that she is not the real Joan.

Joan, now knowing that she isn't the real Joan, ends up smashing the computer because that is what the real Joan would have done and she has no free will because she is just acting out events that have already happened in the real world. Then the episode finishes with seeing the real original Joan living her life.

It would have been much better if the fake "Joan" that we knew just smashed the computer - emulating what the real Joan did - and then it just cut to the real Joan and left it for the audience to come to the realisation that the version of "Joan" we knew throughout the episode wasn't the original Joan. It's really disappointing that they just had Michael Cera explain it all to the audience like spoon feeding a child. I can only guess that the writers thought the audience would be too dumb to figure it out themselves.

 

[Spotty]

16 hours ago, Spotty said:

Not movies but I watched two episodes of the latest Black Mirror season last night.

Watched episode 3 and episode 4 last night. Neither episode were a meta reference to Netflix which was a relief. 

Episode 3 was a bit slow but it was okay. Episode 4 was garbage, I don't even know why it was a black mirror episode. 

 

I had a problem with episode 3 though (spoilers)

Spoiler

There's two astronauts on a space ship. The ship is mostly automated but they need to do occasional repairs and checks. The two men spend most of their time hooked up to some extremely lifelike robotic clones of themselves that are back on Earth with the astronauts family. This allows them to live a mostly normal life with their family through the robotic clones ("replicas") and they only need to return their consciousness to their real bodies on the ship once a week to do physical exercise to keep their real bodies from deteriorating and to perform any emergency maintenance or routine system checks. 

 

The astronauts are somewhat celebrities and they often get stopped by people on the street who recognise them.

 

A group of religious hippies murder the family of one of the astronauts in front of him and destroy his replica because they view the replica as an insult to God.

 

Now he is stuck on the ship and dealing with the grief of losing his family. He's alone on the ship most of the time because the other astronaut is still jacked in to his replica living with his own family back on earth except for an hour each week for the weekly workout.

 

The other astronaut eventually offers to allow him to jack in to his replica for an hour once a week while he's on the ship doing his workout. So the astronaut does and he takes the replica body of the other astronaut and that goes about as well as you would expect it to.

 

 

 

Now my problem with all that is....

 

WHY THE FUCK DID THE PUT THE HUMANS ON THE SPACESHIP AND THE REPLICAS ON EARTH!!

 

If they could create perfect robotic replicas they can jack in to and control then put the replicas on the spaceship and leave the humans on Earth with their families. Any time they need to perform maintenance or checks on the spaceship they would just need to jack in to their replicas on the ship. Then they wouldn't need things like life support systems or food on the spaceship. You would have avoided the whole hippy murdering his family situation and he wouldn't have been stuck on the spaceship alone.

But ignoring that issue I think it was a decent story. Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett were good as the two astronauts. At 1h20m long it could almost have been a standalone movie. Flesh it out a bit more, give a bit more backstory to the astronauts and what their mission is. 

 

Episode 4 was just bad.

Spoiler

A paparazzi who can't pay her rent tries to get an easy payday by taking a photo of a celebrity who has mysteriously gone in to hiding. She eventually finds the celebrity at a posh rehab facility that has been fully booked out just for the celebrity. The paparazzi and her friends ends up sneaking in to the rehab clinic to take a photo of the celebrity and then oh no it turns out the celebrity is a werewolf and kills everyone. The end.

It was like it was written by a middle schooler for their homework assignment.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Spotty

[Guest]

Greitz grütze... Noch ein mal..

Disney, stop...

Spoiler

 

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, fpo said:

Greitz grütze... Noch ein mal..

Disney, stop...

  Reveal hidden contents

 

But will it be the same voices and writers as the previous episodes and more to the point...

 

...is there any point to reviving the series?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

But will it be the same voices and writers as the previous episodes and more to the point...

 

...is there any point to reviving the series?

I really like Futurama but I think the ending was perfect. I understand why many people think it's a stupid or terrible show, but I enjoyed it. I think I saw the whole thing like 8 times. A conditional 3/5 show. 

 

To do this is rediculous. 

Leave it be. 

Disney must really be in a panic to have bought the rights to Futurama. 

I feel like between the 8 bit guy, me, and 12 nerds that have Lego collections, no one else would care. 

 

Futurama is dead and that's okay with me. Like when lost ended, I didn't want more lost. (Uh oh... Is Disney going to reboot that too because I mentioned it?)

Spoiler

I liked lost. But to rewatch it... No... The first season is legitimately 24 hours long. Cross reference me.