ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
I'd recommend most of the ones you'd be able to find. I'd give a special shoutout to Prisoners and Enemy. They're both films from before he got to be a huge name with Arrival and Sicario.
I'd recommend most of the ones you'd be able to find. I'd give a special shoutout to Prisoners and Enemy. They're both films from before he got to be a huge name with Arrival and Sicario.
ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
Dune (2021)
This film is a glossy big budget love letter to Dune fans. The film looks fantastic, everyone is well cast, it follows the spirit and letter of the novel only making a few small changes and it has plenty winks and nods for fans of the books. I do appreciate the film deciding to excise the Baron being a sadistic gay. He's still plenty sadistic, but I don't need to see him torturing barely legal lovers. This film is everything a Dune fan could ask for. Which is why it is a shame the film is dreadfully dull. I won't pretend Lynch's Dune movie wasn't objectively worse in almost every way, but I'd rewatch the Lynch film before I ever revisited this one. Actually, I think the miniseries is still the best version of Dune put on screen even with it's budget limitations.
This movie is so glossy and slick because it skimmed over or didn't explain a lot of the weirder edges the books had. What we're left with is a dull two hours of obtuse world building and a half hour of actual plot. The plot as taken in this film is a generic chosen one plot
This film reeks of hubris. It functions as a two and half hour prologue to a story that might be interesting in the next movie.
The sandworm was rad as fuck though. Just a giant beautiful sandy butthole.
This film is a glossy big budget love letter to Dune fans. The film looks fantastic, everyone is well cast, it follows the spirit and letter of the novel only making a few small changes and it has plenty winks and nods for fans of the books. I do appreciate the film deciding to excise the Baron being a sadistic gay. He's still plenty sadistic, but I don't need to see him torturing barely legal lovers. This film is everything a Dune fan could ask for. Which is why it is a shame the film is dreadfully dull. I won't pretend Lynch's Dune movie wasn't objectively worse in almost every way, but I'd rewatch the Lynch film before I ever revisited this one. Actually, I think the miniseries is still the best version of Dune put on screen even with it's budget limitations.
This movie is so glossy and slick because it skimmed over or didn't explain a lot of the weirder edges the books had. What we're left with is a dull two hours of obtuse world building and a half hour of actual plot. The plot as taken in this film is a generic chosen one plot
yes, I know the books subvert this, but I am not sure any of that is ever going to get adapted.
The sandworm was rad as fuck though. Just a giant beautiful sandy butthole.
Vega
Well-Known Member
I actually found myself pretty drawn in and engaged throughout, but I can see why that won't entirely work for some considering that as you said, it's more or less a two and a half hour prologue. When part two comes out I'm curious as to how people will judge it as one big movie.
As much as I bash Lynch's Dune (and would pick Villeneuve's version over it any day of the week even in it's current partial form), it's definitely memorable with how wild it gets at times. Who can forget that crazy cat box contraption? And to be fair the Lynch version did get some specific scenes right on occasion. Ever watched the "Alternative Edition Redux" fanedit? Nearly 3 hours but I remember liking it more than the Theatrical and Extended cuts, and how it incorporated some of the deleted scenes back into the movie.
It even gets rid of that bizarre "Paul makes it rain water on Arrakis" part of the ending and replaces it with a deleted scene that was closer to how the book actually ended.
Vega
Well-Known Member
ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
Let's hope that Stilgar can keep the DILF energy going in the second movie.
Claptrap
Database Moderator
i uh, watched dune
tbh i got the sense that while it didn't really do anything wrong it wasn't quite for me - i think if i hadn't been in a theatre i wouldn't have finished it
it's not that it's really bad persay... but i feel there wasn't much interiority to the characters and i'm quite a character-driven drama guy, so, it could get a bit..................................... *ba dum tish* DRY for me
ha
tbh i got the sense that while it didn't really do anything wrong it wasn't quite for me - i think if i hadn't been in a theatre i wouldn't have finished it
it's not that it's really bad persay... but i feel there wasn't much interiority to the characters and i'm quite a character-driven drama guy, so, it could get a bit..................................... *ba dum tish* DRY for me
ha
Rascal
Gold Supporter
I also watched dune. it had the pacing of a TV show which was weird because it didn't really ever feel like it was building to anything, even though... it's a movie. And of course my suspicions were confirmed when it ended and nothing had resolved at all. So I'll reserve judgement on the story until i see the second movie. But of what I did see, I'd put it at a 7/10. It was good, but yeah i didn't end up feeling much for the characters except for the guy played by the actor who played kane in annihilation. I felt something
That's another thing, lots of characters just die before we really get a chance to know them. Like...
It was a decent watch.
Also, cant believe drax from guardians of the galaxy's evil clone was in this movie. crazy.
when he died for some reason.
That's another thing, lots of characters just die before we really get a chance to know them. Like...
jason mamoa's character just dies there? Alright? I thought he'd have a bigger role. And that guy mc kept seeing in his future sight stuff, the guy who's like "i will show you the ways of the desert"... he just gets killed at the end so what the heck, what happened to those visions.
Also, cant believe drax from guardians of the galaxy's evil clone was in this movie. crazy.
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Vega
Well-Known Member
Been on a bit of a movie binge lately!
Hellraiser
Never seen it before and the only thing I knew about it was Pinhead, so when it was the first movie that came up on Amazon Prime when I looked for horror movies I decided to watch it.
There was a lot of crazy gore effects too, I miss those good ol' days of practical effects. Pretty solid!
Hellraiser 2
A few friends of mine had good things to say about the sequel and it was also on Prime so I watched it too. It was for the most part better than I expected for a horror movie sequel from this time period but I think I prefer the first one. There's bits and pieces that I liked, like that crazy-looking staircases part of the Cenobite dimension and the gore effects are once again awesome stuff but sometimes it felt like things were a bit all over the place.
I get the feeling that the rest of the sequels probably suck. Space? The internet? Those are probably hilariously bad ones in particular, and I just picture Pinhead going on AOL trying to sell his box to people for that internet one.
Prisoners
As I said before Dune made me want to check out Villeneuve's other work and this was the first one that I found. This was really fucked up and a surprisingly realistic example of why vigilante justice can be a bad thing.
Despite how bleak it was this was a good one.
Enemy
Ended up being the next Villeneuve movie I watched since it was a 99 cent rental on Amazon. Another good one with a massive dose of "WTF" moments like something out of a David Lynch film. I mean that in a good way of course! There's this extremely uncomfortable dread the whole time and the most uncomfortable moment of all had to be
Quick question for anyone who's been to both a Marcus Theaters Ultrascreen and IMAX, is there any difference between IMAX and the Ultrascreen? I know both are large screens, but I've been curious because of Dune really pushing for IMAX and I wasn't able to see it in IMAX.
Hellraiser
Never seen it before and the only thing I knew about it was Pinhead, so when it was the first movie that came up on Amazon Prime when I looked for horror movies I decided to watch it.
Wasn't expecting it to be about a woman luring lonely men to her house so she could "resurrect" her lover by killing said men. Then the last half hour goes into full blown cosmic horror story mode and I wonder if Kentaro Miura was inspired by this movie when he made Berserk. That Cenobite with the sunglasses looks a lot like one of the members of the God Hand.
Hellraiser 2
A few friends of mine had good things to say about the sequel and it was also on Prime so I watched it too. It was for the most part better than I expected for a horror movie sequel from this time period but I think I prefer the first one. There's bits and pieces that I liked, like that crazy-looking staircases part of the Cenobite dimension and the gore effects are once again awesome stuff but sometimes it felt like things were a bit all over the place.
Also that revelation that the Cenobites were once human was a nice touch (not to mention further fuels my speculation that Kentaro Miura got inspiration from this). My biggest complaint really is that the final scene is kind of dumb. If it just ended with Kirsty and Tiffany walking away it would have been fine but that pillar thing made me go "wait what?"
Prisoners
As I said before Dune made me want to check out Villeneuve's other work and this was the first one that I found. This was really fucked up and a surprisingly realistic example of why vigilante justice can be a bad thing.
It's easy to sympathize with Keller because he just wants his daughter back and is understandably frustrated with the whole police process, but when he takes matters into his own hands it makes you almost instantly question if he's really doing the right thing here, and he isn't. Ultimately he wound up torturing someone who was just as much a victim as his daughter was and in the end he gets the crucial information he needs about his daughter's whereabouts from another source. All the while the investigator is doing his best to help... man this movie was soul crushing. At least Keller and his friend's daughters are both safe, but it's definitely no happy ending since Keller is most definitely going to prison.
Enemy
Ended up being the next Villeneuve movie I watched since it was a 99 cent rental on Amazon. Another good one with a massive dose of "WTF" moments like something out of a David Lynch film. I mean that in a good way of course! There's this extremely uncomfortable dread the whole time and the most uncomfortable moment of all had to be
when the "twins" swap places as a result of one intimidating the other and they each proceed to have sex with the other's partner.
Quick question for anyone who's been to both a Marcus Theaters Ultrascreen and IMAX, is there any difference between IMAX and the Ultrascreen? I know both are large screens, but I've been curious because of Dune really pushing for IMAX and I wasn't able to see it in IMAX.
randomredneck
Well-Known Member
3 is alright. They kind of turn Pinhead into a basic slasher baddie, but it's watchable.
4 (AKA, Bloodline) is a what-could-have-been story. The studio meddled with that film to Hell and back, pun intended. They gutted it so bad that the director went all Alan Smithee in the credits. It's not terrible, but it had the protentional to be a way better movie. The real sad thing is that it was Kevin Yagher's first trip to the director's chair. He was a special effects guy who finally got his shot, and they overruled him everywhere. He hasn't directed again since.
Anything after 4, don't. Clive Barker has no involvement past 4. The ones past 4 are just different horror premises that sprinkle in Pinhead, usually at the tail end. Though fun fact, Superman himself Henry Cavill has an early role in #8.
And some fun general trivia: Julia was actually intended to be the big bad of this franchise, ala how Jason's mom was the original killer. That's why they killed the Cenobites in part 2. But Doug Bradley stole the show, so it became his franchise.
And Pinhead himself was actually fairly minor in the original book. The fat Cenobite acted as the leader. But since he couldn't see out of his makeup, Chatterer couldn't see or talk and the Female had really restricted motion, he got moved up to leader and bam, horror icon.
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ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
If Dune taught us anything, it's that we still don't deserve a planet made of magic space cocaine.
ZetsubouKaiji
Well-Known Member
For
Duncan Idaho dying is like his favorite pastime. Prolly because some jokester named him Duncan Idaho.
Taek
Well-Known Member
Dune Part One
Loved it.
I can completely understand why some people wouldn't like this though, it is basically 2 and a half hours of set up with a few big happenings in-between, but I still just loved everything I saw.
Maybe that's coloured by the fact that Part Two was announced before I saw it, because I think watching this without that knowledge could definitely make you think "if they don't continue this, it will be shit".
This plays into a form of science fiction that I really love, I'd call it space fantasy rather than science fiction to be honest, this feels like it has more in common with Lord of The Rings style of world building than it does Star Trek just as an example. The lack of computers I know is a big thing within Dune Lore, but it makes for a far more interesting world. The world building just feels big and vast and real, The Imperium is basically just late-stage capitalism, Spice as a concept just feels too real, an indigenous cultural artifact being harvested and used for insane amounts of capital, and although the film hasn't gone too deep into the Imperium and the Harkonnen, what we have seen has been great. One of the best visual scenes was
. It adds to the world building without being full of exposition, as well as adding to the atmosphere of the film.
I was really impressed with the performances in this too, particularly Oscar Isaac and Stellan Skarsgard as head of The Atreides and The Baron respectively. Also love that Skarsgard was in full prosthetics rather than CGI. If there was any weakness in the movie, I feel it was Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya. Paul (Timothy) is basically a chosen one, or at least he's being played as one currently there's some interesting stuff playing out with his visions and whether they actually mean anything, and how much of his chosen one status is just manipulation by the Bene Gesserit, I'm hopeful that the second film will give us a really interesting take on this. Zendaya didn't get a great deal of screen time, but the short amount she did, she just felt out of place among the Fremen and how all the others spoke and behaved.
You can tell this is a Denis Villeneuve film, it just looks like one of his, his use of colour, use of the camera, use of music, and how he uses all three together to build atmosphere. I'm glad that despite this being a massive hollywood film, you can still see him in it.
I feel like a good comparison to this might be Fellowship of the Ring, which is also a film that basically sets up the next two movies, but there is more to the story in that one film than there is here, mainly because the cast is bigger in FOTR, here we only really follow a small cast that go from event to event, it does have a decent pace, particularly in the second half of the film, but if you do think about what has actually happened, everything basically only gears up for Paul to be among the Fremen at the end.
Either way, none of that bothers me. I loved it. 4.5/5
Loved it.
I can completely understand why some people wouldn't like this though, it is basically 2 and a half hours of set up with a few big happenings in-between, but I still just loved everything I saw.
Maybe that's coloured by the fact that Part Two was announced before I saw it, because I think watching this without that knowledge could definitely make you think "if they don't continue this, it will be shit".
This plays into a form of science fiction that I really love, I'd call it space fantasy rather than science fiction to be honest, this feels like it has more in common with Lord of The Rings style of world building than it does Star Trek just as an example. The lack of computers I know is a big thing within Dune Lore, but it makes for a far more interesting world. The world building just feels big and vast and real, The Imperium is basically just late-stage capitalism, Spice as a concept just feels too real, an indigenous cultural artifact being harvested and used for insane amounts of capital, and although the film hasn't gone too deep into the Imperium and the Harkonnen, what we have seen has been great. One of the best visual scenes was
the lines of sacrifices being bled into troughs so that the witch women can paint the Sardauker with blood
I was really impressed with the performances in this too, particularly Oscar Isaac and Stellan Skarsgard as head of The Atreides and The Baron respectively. Also love that Skarsgard was in full prosthetics rather than CGI. If there was any weakness in the movie, I feel it was Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya. Paul (Timothy) is basically a chosen one, or at least he's being played as one currently there's some interesting stuff playing out with his visions and whether they actually mean anything, and how much of his chosen one status is just manipulation by the Bene Gesserit, I'm hopeful that the second film will give us a really interesting take on this. Zendaya didn't get a great deal of screen time, but the short amount she did, she just felt out of place among the Fremen and how all the others spoke and behaved.
You can tell this is a Denis Villeneuve film, it just looks like one of his, his use of colour, use of the camera, use of music, and how he uses all three together to build atmosphere. I'm glad that despite this being a massive hollywood film, you can still see him in it.
I feel like a good comparison to this might be Fellowship of the Ring, which is also a film that basically sets up the next two movies, but there is more to the story in that one film than there is here, mainly because the cast is bigger in FOTR, here we only really follow a small cast that go from event to event, it does have a decent pace, particularly in the second half of the film, but if you do think about what has actually happened, everything basically only gears up for Paul to be among the Fremen at the end.
Either way, none of that bothers me. I loved it. 4.5/5
HasseRovdjur
Breast Claw
I've forced @Zed to be cultured and watch some olden time films with me instead of some shitty anime du cour or playing that Genshin Impact dross he likes so much (Childe is shit).
In the Heat of the Night
As a murder mystery, this film is both too straight-forward, but also full of metanarrative hoopla. They forget about the victim for about half the film and then the ending reveal relies on a bit scene and some tortured explanation. There's not even a Scooby-Doo type reveal!. It was thematically appropriate and whatnot, but eh, this isn't why you should be watching this film.
It's actually pretty good as a film experience about asshole cops being accosted by racist asshole cops and general hate and stupidity and clammy-looking dudes in a gross diner. Poitier does a good portrait of a know-it-all who hates personal space, and the others sell their hick characters relatively well (I haven't ahd the displeasure to meet a lot of racists from the US South, but i reckon they're like our southern racists except slightly less inbred). Some cool swinging sixties music in there, too.
7 "They call me Mr. Tibbs" out of 10.
Blazing Saddles
Some of it didn't land at all (the German musical bit was the biggest snoozefest), but it has a lot of legit laughs, especially in the beginning. Brooks and company knew comedy and this film has some neat subversions of expectancy and sight gags. Little and Wilder are relatively constrained , so it's the supporting cast that provide the zany crap, with Mel Brooks and Slim Pickens leading the pack.
It's sometimes fun and all, and I bet it was edgy in the seventies, but it sure lost steam in the last half hour. Everything takes too long and it's all pretty tame. Still, it pretty much killed the white hat Western genre, so kudos for that. Rest in piss, John Wayne.
Also jfc the horse stunts in this film, man. I bet a few of them got sent to the glue factory after this.
6 knuckle-dragging YouTubers whining about how we can't say the N-word these days but please give to their Patreon out of 10.
In the Heat of the Night
As a murder mystery, this film is both too straight-forward, but also full of metanarrative hoopla. They forget about the victim for about half the film and then the ending reveal relies on a bit scene and some tortured explanation. There's not even a Scooby-Doo type reveal!. It was thematically appropriate and whatnot, but eh, this isn't why you should be watching this film.
It's actually pretty good as a film experience about asshole cops being accosted by racist asshole cops and general hate and stupidity and clammy-looking dudes in a gross diner. Poitier does a good portrait of a know-it-all who hates personal space, and the others sell their hick characters relatively well (I haven't ahd the displeasure to meet a lot of racists from the US South, but i reckon they're like our southern racists except slightly less inbred). Some cool swinging sixties music in there, too.
7 "They call me Mr. Tibbs" out of 10.
Blazing Saddles
Some of it didn't land at all (the German musical bit was the biggest snoozefest), but it has a lot of legit laughs, especially in the beginning. Brooks and company knew comedy and this film has some neat subversions of expectancy and sight gags. Little and Wilder are relatively constrained , so it's the supporting cast that provide the zany crap, with Mel Brooks and Slim Pickens leading the pack.
It's sometimes fun and all, and I bet it was edgy in the seventies, but it sure lost steam in the last half hour. Everything takes too long and it's all pretty tame. Still, it pretty much killed the white hat Western genre, so kudos for that. Rest in piss, John Wayne.
Also jfc the horse stunts in this film, man. I bet a few of them got sent to the glue factory after this.
6 knuckle-dragging YouTubers whining about how we can't say the N-word these days but please give to their Patreon out of 10.
randomredneck
Well-Known Member
Vega
Well-Known Member
Watched Arrival yesterday. Not a bad movie by any means though I was a bit bored. I really liked the reveal
Even though I didn't care for this movie that much, it was definitely really well shot to the point where I wish I was watching it on a giant theater screen or was able to have the proper setup in my house.
Man I wish I had the right setup for watching both Dune parts at home. I won't miss the ear destroying sound levels but it's going to feel so weird on a smaller screen.
that learning the alien language causes you to experience time non-linearly and how it was foreshadowed in a bit of a brilliant way.
For months I was essentially preparing myself for the possibility that Part Two wouldn't get made just in case. When I reread the book not too long ago I knew that at the very least we were going to have a really good first half and the movie certainly delivered for me. Evenmoreso now that Part Two got announced! To be honest I wasn't expecting this movie to be doing as well as it has, I was bracing for a potential box office bomb so seeing it actually exceed expectations in a pandemic environment is nice to see!
Man I wish I had the right setup for watching both Dune parts at home. I won't miss the ear destroying sound levels but it's going to feel so weird on a smaller screen.
Zed
Database Moderator
Blazing Saddles got a few legit good gags out of me, but the unfunny gags really stand out. The movie could be a lot better if you cut out things like the Hollywood fight bit that lasted 5 times as long as it needed despite not being funny one bit. Same with the german chick. The movie is certainly a zany experience, when it's good it pops really good, I adore the villains somewhat, even though they had quite a few annoying moments themselves.