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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)


Mr. Breathmask

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Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises is a pathetic joke. For some reason it changes from a city with a coast to Pittsburgh and doesn't try to hide the fact the coast disappeared. It's just to use their football stadium for the explosion sequel, which doesn't belong. Then pay attention to how many streets in the final chase sequence are used repeatedly. Really bad editing in the final overlong movie. 

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Isn't Gotham supposed to be spread over several islands? 

 

Also, where does the monorail disappear to? It's kind of an important part of Begins.

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4 minutes ago, Bilbo Skywalker said:

Isn't Gotham supposed to be spread over several islands? 

 

Also, where does the monorail disappear to? It's kind of an important part of Begins.

 

It blew up and they decided not to rebuild? 

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No Batman movie really followed the previous movie's look for Gotham. I kinda wish the Anton Furst's designs for Batman 1989 would be done using today's techniques. Easily the best conceptualization of Gotham I have ever seen:

 

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That's true, Gotham changed alot between Batman 89 and Returns as well.

 

I haven't seen Forever since the theater and still haven't seen & Robin...

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When I watch Nolan's Batman movies, I don't really think of the city places depicted as being Gotham. More just, 'generic US city'. Paul Verhoeven's Detroit had more character.

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I think Batman Begins had a cinematic, comic-book-y feel.  The two sequels, though, yea, totally agreed

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Batman Begins had a great Gotham.

 

I agree though Jay, it just became generic US cities after that though. The second two films are just trying too hard not to be comic book movies. Dark Knight has enough of strengths for that not to be a problem but Rises... maybe I'll give it another shot tomorrow night!

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Batman Begins was mostly set and involved the "slums" of the city. Dark Knight was more in the business district side of things, but the real answer is that it's just Chicago. Rises is a bit more sprawling but I haven't seen it enough to have a clear image of how the city is laid out in that film. 

 

The monorail is in Rises. 

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This turn of discussion reminds me of a fascinating piece I read on Nolan's Batman trilogy and its representation of cities. Check it out.

 

Quote

The world wanted an adult crusader, and Hollywood obliged with dime-store Jung (“I want to be be a symbol!”) and Oprah’s-couch Freud. Christian Bale, reliably great, dug deep to deliver something of a demented sequel to American Psycho: Here was (Patrick) Bat(e)man, after enough therapy to have lost all humor and gained tedious introspection—but a few sessions short of actually quitting the maniacal nighttime S&M sprees. Critics toasted the psychological acuity of Nolan’s reboot.

 

If The Dark Knight was an infinitely better film than Batman Begins—and it was—might even NYC fanboys now admit that the improvement was because of Chicago, not in spite of it? Yes, we can. Riffing off canonical urban-crime dramas (Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, Heat), Nolan’s second entry found a specific key for unlocking his absurdly broad (and just plain absurd) remit to ground Batman in realism: In the real world of big cities, the scariest crimes happen in broad daylight, with banks open, children in school buses, and hospitals packed.

 

Aesthetically, this meant the first modernist Gotham City. In The Dark Knight, bright, bland expanses of glass and steel ironize the deep, unrelenting opacity of civic disorder. To great mordant effect, the city’s heroes face down the pitch-blackness of Jokerian terror from glass houses of the International Style. Harvey Dent, Jim Gordon, and Mayor Garcia govern from sun-drenched offices in Gotham’s civic center (the former IBM Plaza by Mies van der Rohe). Bruce Wayne broods in the open-plan top floor of his company’s HQ (the Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago’s actual civic center) and the open-plan penthouse duplex of a gleaming condo tower (Mies’s 111 East Wacker and nearby Hotel 71). With Wayne Manor burnt down at the end of Begins, Batman roosts in a downtown bunker that's more subterranean art gallery or brutalist parking garage than any cave found in nature.

 

 

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgga3b/the-problem-with-christopher-nolan-hes-fundamentally-uninterested-in-cities

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Big Game - eh, this Samuel L Jackson actioner was a passable enough timewaster for a Friday night. But I'm glad it was free on Film 4 as opposed to having to pay for it, let's put it like that.

 

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Adventures of Don Juan (1948)

 

3.5/5

 

Sometimes I really love the simplicity of these old Hollywood movies.  The straightforwardness of basically "Let's put on a show!"  Errol Flynn is great fun.  The Swedish lady who plays the Austrian queen of Spain is hot.  Steiner's score is basically the 3rd lead.

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

 

It's really not a bad movie, lots of cool stuff there.  Redmayne is just such a black hole of suckitude at the center he nearly ruins the whole thing.

 

First time seeing the movie since the theater and I still love Newton Howard's score but it's very unfocused thematically, especially in-film.

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Image result for x-men apocalypse

 

 

 

X-Men: Apocalypse

 

Wow.  I knew this was supposed to be bad, but this was truly, really bad, in almost every way.  I could go on and on about how little it makes sense (most notably the character/actor ages), how repetitive and redundant it is (its the same recycled plot and character good/bad flip flops as most of the other films in this series), and how bad the special effects are, but really the biggest problem with the film is that its simply just boring.  Its very long, and very little happens before we get to the big series of battles at the end, and those are not even done well when we finally get there.

 

It's almost hard to believe this is directed by Bryan Singer, who has directed many good films, including all the good films in this series.  It feels more like some studio assembled thing put together by some director for hire, there's nothing here that shows any signs of the good and interesting things he brought to other entries, not at all.  What a total waste of time.

 

Also, Sansa is just as unconvincing as Jean Grey as Daenrys was as Sarah Connor, both of them were completely miscast and really stunk it up in their major mid-GOT breakout films.  Either that, or they aren't very versatile actors (they are both completely fine on GOT, yet completely terrible in these movies!)

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Bad films have good scores all the time

 

And really?  I was never bored in Days of Future past, and thought it was a lot of fun!  This one, the exact opposite!

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Just now, Jay said:

Bad films have good scores all the time

 

Sometimes but not all the time.

 

Just now, Jay said:

And really?  I was never bored in Days of Future past, and thought it was a lot of fun!  This one, the exact opposite!

 

Sure Apocalypse might be objectively "bad" and DOFP might be objectively "good", since that seems to be how most people have reacted to them. But I just enjoyed Apocalypse more.

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2 hours ago, Sally Spectra said:

 

Sometimes but not all the time.

 

 

I'm sure some people are wondering why all these great movies have bad scores.

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Ouija: Origin of Evil

 

Premise that's been done to death. Has one original idea where huckster mother uses her psychically talented youngest daughter as part of her struggling medium business, but that goes nowhere as it descends into conventional demonically possessed girl flick. I'm running out of patience with these sorts of movies.

 

Notable for being a Panavision Anamorphic film theatrically exhibited at 1.85:1. You can tell by the oval shaped bokeh. I have no idea why, but I'd guess it was a stylistic choice to make it look like a pan and scanned VHS tape from the 1980s, since it uses the old Universal logo, and those cigarette burns appear in the corner every so often.

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I also liked Apocalypse more than Days Of Future Past. 

I know the timeline/continuity in the X-Men movies is famously fucked-up, but it still bothers me that in The Last Stand Trask was a big black guy and in Days he's ... Peter Dinklage. 

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2 hours ago, Sally Spectra said:

Ouija: Origin of Evil

 

 

20 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

 

E.T: The Extra Terrestrial

 

 

Oddly enough, Elliott from ET is in Ouija: Origin of Evil.  I haven't seen the Ouija sequel yet but I remember it was surprisingly well-reviewed by critics.  Many praised it as significantly better than its prequel.

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Ah. And Lin Shaye cameos after the credits. I wonder what that's all leading to?

 

 

Bad Girls

 

Never seen this before, but I was surprised by how fun it was. Essentially a chick version of The Magnificent Seven. The ladies are all beautiful. Nice to get a glimpse of Drew's sideboob.

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A truly awful flick that was.

 

'Amistad', by chance on tv. A glorious textbook example of the strengths and weaknesses of a film director exquisitely rolled into a 2,5-hour motion picture that, sadly, for long stretches lacks any motion. There is cinematic genius at play whenever we see physical (lack of words, finally!) action - the harrowing incidents at the spanish slave ships, especially the gripping drowning sequence that still feels like a firm, uncompromising gut punch - but Spielberg wants more and he hopes to find it beyond the images he is so adept at creating, namely in words - mind you, not any words but significant, weighty words and nothing less than the constitution will do.

 

So we are in for deadening scenes of legal pleadings and soporific sermonizing that run forever because the director seems to think he's made a movie for wide-eyed aliens from a faraway planet that will look with amazement at a thorough lesson on god's own nation's frame of government. But while Spielberg seems fascinated by the legal technicalities to the point of paralyzation, we see all the arguments to be made in court far ahead (it doesn't take a genius to figure out the legal implications of the case) and whenever a flashback like the mentioned above or the liberation of Lomboko, the slave fortress, gets the pulse going, prepare for another stuffy gentleman explaining them again in great detail to the court. Yuck.

 

The movie still aspires greatness in unexpected places: the difficulties of reaching an understanding between the two different cultures are cited again and again and depicted very elegantly. Together with the brutal slave ship incidents they point to a better, shorter movie, one that should have left out rose-growing John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) who is given the thankless task of playing the Spencer Tracy role right out of those old Stanley Kramer movies without having Tracy's knack for humble peasant delivery, which would have drastically shortened the leaden finale (a wordy summation, as you already may have guessed).

 

Taking its cue from Schindler's List, 'Amistad' has its own deadly 'I could have done more' scene in what seems Spielberg's eye-rolling idea of rousing up the dusty courthouse scenes: after having learned a few words of english, the leader of the africans, Cinque, first whispers, then silences the court with the just, repeated outcry 'Give Us Free', complete with Williams hamming it up with uplifting wordless choruses. It's a scene so painful (and unearned) you'd guess Louis B. Mayer personally forced it on the director who left the studio in enraged protest, but alas. 

 

As for the score, it shines and stinks in the same places as the movie. I wish Williams would have gotten more opportunity to delve into 'authentic' african music, as the parts that deal with the african's fate are harmonically interesting - much more so than the over-familiar americana toolkit - and warrant a score of its own. I'm not a fan of the 'Dry Your Tears' jubilation (edge-smoothed Hollywood pap) but pieces like 'Cinque's Memories of Home' or indeed 'Cinque's Theme' are great additions to the Spielberg/Williams catalogue.

 

Still, for all its drastic shortcomings, the movie's worth watching though it might benefit from one of those Youtube edits where it could act as great 50-minute show reel of brilliantly staged individual scenes (in search of a movie).

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

 

Probably my favorite movie. The ending is a little rushed and feels shoehorned in, but the first time I watched this movie was probably one of my favorite movie watching experiences ever. I love the visual storytelling. The world is pretty darn cool too. I should probably go read the manga sometime.

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It really is. The more I watch the less I rely on the subtitles and the more I can pay attention to the finer details. It's awesome. Something funny I noticed this watch through was when Asbel first appears in his gunship, Nausicaa gets up and yells gunship in english, but with a fairly standard japanese accent. Sorta Gunshipu! I thought it was pretty funny.

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*shrug*  Just my personal preference.

 

For all other foreign language films I would never watch a dub.  Something about the style of performance for Japanese anime has always rubbed me the wrong way.  Miyazaki is very much an anomaly for me.  I fucking hate anime mostly.

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I've never watched any other anime either, well, until I watched Ghost In The Shell earlier this year

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Oh yes!  Takahata is wonderful!  Grave of the Fireflies left me a twitching puddle on the floor.  I really liked Only Yesterday as well.  I own the blurays for Pom Poko and The Tale of Princess Kaguya but just haven't gotten around to watching them yet.

 

If there's more like that out there, stuff that doesn't have the usual risible cliches of anime, I'm totally game to give them a shot.

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