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


Mr. Breathmask

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On 5/10/2021 at 3:13 PM, May the Force be with You said:

Yeah sorry. Very Bad Cops is the french title of The Other Guys. Sometimes I do forget that the french-english title might be totally different from the actual title.

We've weird stuff like that where movie are retitled with other english titles like:

  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse became Spider-Man: New Generation
  • The Hangover became Very Bad Trip
  • The Post became Pentagon Papers
  • The Take became Bastille Day
  • The Nightcrawler became Night Call

and so on...

 

Here in Brazil The Hangover is known as "Se Beber, Não Case!", which roughly translates to... "If you drink, don't get married!". 

 

Other weird translation for movies found in Portuguese are:

  • Home Alone -> "Esqueceram de Mim" (They Forgot about Me)
  • Jaws -> "Tubarão" (Shark)
  • Despicable Me -> "Meu Malvado Favorito" (My Favorite Bad Guy)
  • Unbreakable -> "Corpo Fechado" (Closed Body)
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The Fury -> Teufelskreis Alpha (Vicious Circle Alpha)

Taken -> 96 Hours (yes, that's the German title) (never seen it, but for years I thought those were different films, and that Neeson had done even more of that revenge stuff than he actually has)

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Home Alone - "Burglars Beware!"

 

They did something interesting with Alien- "The Eighth Passenger: Death"

Then they rolled with it:

Aliens - "The Name of the Planet: Death"

Pretty meh.

Alien 3 - "The Final Solution: Death"

Holy shit that's dark. I love it.

Alien Resurrection - "Death Comes Back to Life"

Yep, fittingly dumb.

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Home Alone -> Maman j'ai raté l'avion (Mum, I didn't catch the plane)

Deep Rising -> Un cri dans l'océan (A Scream in the Ocean)

Die Hard: With a Vengeance -> Die Hard : Une Journée en Enfer (Die Hard: A Day in Hell)

Chain Reaction -> Poursuite (Pursuit)

 

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Alien in Hebrew is HaNoseah HaShmini (הנוסע השמיני) - The Eighth Passenger.

Aliens is Shuvo shel HaNoseah HaShmini - The eighth passenger return.

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3 minutes ago, May the Force be with You said:

Same in France we call Alien, Alien the Eight Passenger and Aliens is  Aliens, le Retour (Aliens, the Return)

Exactly the same in Spain.

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Presumed Innocent – Reel Film Reviews

 

Presumed Innocent

 

Decent little 90s legal thriller; They don't make that many of these kinds of movies any more, at least not with big Hollywood actors as a mainstream release.

 

Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Greta Scacchi, Raul Julia, Brian Dennehy, and Paul Winfield were all good - Raul Julia was especially impressive as I really only knew him from Addams Family films and Street Fighter lol.

 

The only bummer is that the OST album's track list completely gives away the entire plot - what were they thinking with that track title?  Why not just call that track "The Confession" instead?  Even still, the guilty person is fairly obvious anyway, my wife even predicted it not very far into the movie. There's really no other person it could have been....

 

The score by Williams was interesting.  From what I recall, every single cue in the movie featured the same theme!  Interesting choice.  It was good though, I liked every cue as they came on!  Now to check out the OST album again....

 

It's free on HBO Max

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23 minutes ago, Jay said:

The score by Williams was interesting.  From what I recall, every single cue in the movie featured the same theme!  Interesting choice.

Not the first time that's been done by him!

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26 minutes ago, bruce marshall said:

I really like " The Eighth Passenger"!

 

Yeah, it sounds appropriately creepy, I suppose.

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It's a great name for that one movie, but hard to turn into a name for the franchise!

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It was on the Belgian poster but none of us really paid it any attention to it. To us the movie was called Alien. We never used the Flemish or French titles, which we thought 'De 8ste Passagier' probably was.

 

 

 

1979-original-alien-belgian-movie-poster-the-8th-passenger-20th-century-fox.jpg

 

Belgian poster

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Pale Rider - a mysterious stranger (possibly some sort of supernatural entity) moseys into town and helps the good, honest, hard-workin' townsfolk to resist and overcome the forces of oppression ... hold on Clint old son, isn't this High Plains Drifter? Ah well, I guess he's entitled to rework his own back catalogue and it was no less enjoyable a Western for it.

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On 5/11/2021 at 11:11 PM, bollemanneke said:

He (Pitt) is also pretty bad crying/shouting at the end, though he has his moments.

I was very disappointed by the finale, when I saw the original version for the first time. The German dubbed version features a much better voice actor for Pitt than he himself could ever be.

 

On 5/12/2021 at 3:01 AM, Edmilson said:

Jaws -> "Tubarão" (Shark)

It's The White Shark in German and The Teeth of the Sea in French.

 

On 5/12/2021 at 6:13 PM, Marian Schedenig said:

Taken -> 96 Hours (never seen it, but for years I thought those were different films, and that Neeson had done even more of that revenge stuff than he actually has)

Same here.

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1 minute ago, Brundlefly said:

I was very disappointed by the finale, when I saw the original version for the first time. The German dubbed version features a much better voice actor for Pitt than he himself could ever be.

 

Disagreed. Not only because I would generally disagree on that topic (even the handful of good German dubbers are not "better" than the original), but also because I will forever remember a bit from the commentary track, where they point out that the dialogue in the last car ride (before the finale) is unlooped because Pitt was too spontaneous in the original take for them to manage to capture the same spirit in the ADR sessions. And when you pit them against their German dubs, even the most "scripted" ADR scenes seem natural in comparison.

 

I know of only one English language live action film that can claim to have a good dub in German, and that is Life of Brian (and "good" doesn't mean that I would recommend it over the original audio, just that it's an acceptable alternative if you're already familiar with the original and want to mix things up a bit).

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Greg Kinnear - CBS News

 

Sabrina (1995)

 

Continuing to catch up on Williams-scored flicks I've never seen, we checked out this ... I guess rom-com, though it didn't have a lot of romance or a lot of comedy.  It does have a lot of plot.... a lot of plot in its 2 hours + runtime.

 

It's really a throwback to a style of film they don't make any more.  I haven't seen the original version from 1954, but I wouldn't be surprised if very little was changed from the original story outside of updating it to a 90s setting.  On that end, some of the tech shown was hilarious, from giant cell phones with huge collapsible antennas, car phones, or even this macguffin that's a flat screen TV that can't be broken even with a sledgehammer.

 

From a 2021 perspective a lot of the character development is pretty dated; Harrison Ford spends most of the film gaslighting Julia Ormond, who has almost no agency in anything she does, spends most of the movie fawning over a dope and/or doing whatever anyone tells her, and not really active in ever telling anyone what she wants or taking charge of her life much at all.

 

But somehow the shallow plot and characterizations don't drag down the effect the overall film has, with its excellent cinematography of nice looking Long Island and Paris locations, terrific acting, and wonderful music.  

 

About the acting, I had to look up Julia Ormond because I didn't recognize her and it turns out I've literally never seen her in anything else before.  I don't know if she was considered a big name or a up and comer at the time, but she was really good and I'm surprised I had never come across her before now!  Greg Kinnear was his usual great self, Ford was good, and Nancy Marchand was really good in a mother role completely different from Tony Sopranos mother.  Even Paul Giamatti is in this!

 

About the music, the film does a pretty cool thing where music is almost never heard whenever we are inside office buildings or places like that, but then almost constantly runs the entire time otherwise.  There's not only a lot of original score by Williams, but lots of diegetic music too, especially during two extended party sequences at the Long Island mansion.  Both types of music are really wonderful and function together to really define the tone of the film and keep it moving forward even when the characters are doing things slowly.  The original song by Sting is good too.

 

Off to listen to the OST album!

 

The film is free on Amazon Prime

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19 minutes ago, Brundlefly said:

You're opinion on dubbing is very prejudiced and narrow-minded.

 

How so? It's based a) on experience of the quality of dubs (German dubs are better than most, but that's mostly an indication of how bad most others are) and b) on the fact that any translation is a distortion of the original, and when it's not just the text that is being replaced but the actual performance, the effect is far greater still. The original actors spent weeks, often months, inhabiting their roles, learning the script, discussing their interpretation with the director and their cast members. The dubbers get a translated script that's often already a gross distortion of the original, no insight into the mindset of the original performers, and far less time to come up with an interpretation, even if they wanted to. English language audio is also usually much more "natural" than the German dub even attempts to be. Add to that that most dubbing voice actors just give lousy stereotypical performances that sound the same for any film and any actor they dub, with clearly no regard to the original performance whatsoever (there's such a thing as dub typecasting, where e.g. a dubbing voice gets assigned to a "comedy actor" early in their career and still dubs them the exact same "comedy style" way in serious roles 20 years later). A few of them are good actors: Peter Matić, who was Ben Kingsley's dubbing voice (among others) was an excellent actor with a fantastic voice. His dubs were usually "good", probably about as good as they could reasonably be - but they still were, by necessity, a lesser distortion of the original performance.

 

In Austria, they play custom radio stations in supermarkets, made up of some "shopping friendly" songs and commercials, including film commercials, i.e. "audio trailers" consisting of sound clips of dubbed films. From them, I found that I can reliably recognise a German film dub within seconds simply based on the speakers' performances.

 

Ever since DVDs became widely available, and original audio versions of films with them, I've been avoiding dubs like the plague. And whenever I come across one (more often recently because several German Blu-ray releases insist on playing un-skippable German dubbed trailers when loading), I find, again and again, that dubs aren't just as bad as I always say they are, but worse.

 

I'd wager that in at least 90% of all cases, a poor performance by an original actor is preferable to the dub, based on just the vocal performance. And for at least 90% of the rest, the weak original performance will still be more "correct (i.e. true to the rest of the film) than the dub.

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Screenshot_2021-03-28-19-50-13.png

 

On 5/12/2021 at 9:13 AM, Marian Schedenig said:

 

Taken -> 96 Hours (yes, that's the German title) (never seen it, but for years

 

 

I thought those were different films, and that Neeson had done even more of that revenge stuff than he actually has)

 

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2 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

I know of only one English language live action film that can claim to have a good dub in German, and that is Life of Brian (and "good" doesn't mean that I would recommend it over the original audio, just that it's an acceptable alternative if you're already familiar with the original and want to mix things up a bit).

 

German dubs from the 50's to 70's often feature *better* voice/ensemble performances than many originals, if just because highly trained actors i. e. from Berlin's Schiller-Theater, often elevated mediocre star performances. You generally betray a poor/biased knowledge on this particular topic. I'd rather say there were some obvious misses for very specific reasons (dialects and such), it's only from the 90's onwards that there really was a noticeable drop to the artifice you cite.

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Ok, the "artificial vs natural" argument may not apply so much to older films. I also disagree that first rate dubbing actors "elevating" original performances is faithful to the original version, because chances are that they are still at odds with the actors' "visual" performances, with which the "lesser" originals are naturally in tune. Staying with the Pythons, their Biolek-produced German Flying Circus episode with the Pythons speaking barely understandable German themselves is still far superior to any German dub of any Flying Circus sketch I've encountered.

 

But it's just one aspect of the whole mess anyway. And I didn't even mention one of the crucial points: Grammar. Not only are German words and sentences generally significantly longer than English ones, they also usually have different word orders. That's not such a big issue when you're translating prose texts (poems are a different matter, and I would definitely argue that even a well translated poem is significantly different than the original). But for films, where you already have original actors speaking the text in the original language, it doesn't just mean that you lose any chance of approximate lip syncing, but also that whenever an actor's facial expressions emphasise certain words, they'll be completely off a significant amount of the time. I'd go so far as to call that an insult to the original actors, because it "inofficially" but significantly changes their performance beyond their control. And that's pretty much unavoidable even under the best circumstances (excellent translations and excellent voice actors) - which I'm convinced rarely happen anyway.

 

And if things have gotten worse post 2010, that would be beyond anything I have described above, which is mainly based on films I've watched in the 80s and 90s. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of the worst dubs, and that's from the 70s. Why worst? Because besides from the voice actors, the entire script was mutilated. For example, songs (that are funny) were replaced by "jokes" (that aren't funny). Going back to the 60s, you get a similar thing with The Hallelujah Trail, where the original dry solo narrator gets a "funny" companion that makes "funny" comments on the narration and is completely absent from the original version. And then you have situations where the translators didn't even understand what they were doing, like with the infamous The Simpsons and Futurama dubs that distort many jokes beyond recognition (when I did still watch them on TV, I used to translate them back to English in my head to understand some of the broken jokes).

 

In short, I'm very much convinced (and have been for a long time) that a) it is theoretically almost impossible for a film dub to be faithful to the original even under the best circumstances and b) on top of that, the quality of most dubs ranges from lousy to laughable. The second point is arguably more subjective, but nothing I've experienced has made me doubt my view on it in the last 20 years, and in any case I'd argue that my first point constitutes a hard limit on how appropriate a dub *can* possibly be.

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Those are a special kind of problem, of course, though it's hardly related to whether they're English or not. In all likelihood, any possible version of them is "compromised" to some extent, which is why I'm not a fan of that concept. If the principal cast spoke one language, that's the version I tend to go with.

 

I watched Fitzcarraldo a while ago and had a really hard time deciding which language track to pick. The film was "conceived" in German but shot in English, then dubbed in German, with at least Klaus Kinski dubbing himself. As far as I could find out, Herzog's own preferred version (and thus the most "authoritative" one) is the German dub, and Kinski's performance is also considered better in the dub. His English (supposedly Irish, no less) in the "original" audio is not convincing, also his initial performance is apparently not valued highly - his own German dub is wildly different in parts. I switch back and forth for a while, but ultimately settled on the English version, because whatever its shortcomings, at least the spoken sound was consistent with the visible acting, which the German dub in many places certainly wasn't. Kinski's German performance may be "better", but it struck me as decidedly unauthentic.

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5 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of the worst dubs, and that's from the 70s. Why worst? Because besides from the voice actors, the entire script was mutilated. For example, songs (that are funny) were replaced by "jokes" (that aren't funny). Going back to the 60s, you get a similar thing with The Hallelujah Trail, where the original dry solo narrator gets a "funny" companion that makes "funny" comments on the narration and is completely absent from the original version. And then you have situations where the translators didn't even understand what they were doing, like with the infamous The Simpsons and Futurama dubs that distort many jokes beyond recognition (when I did still watch them on TV, I used to translate them back to English in my head to understand some of the broken jokes).

 

I agree to all those examples, but that's about as good an argument as saying Beverly Hills Chihuahua or Meet the Spartans prove that all Hollywood movies suck. Especially for those challenges you cite i was often amazed at how good of a job german translators and (older!) voice actors often did, i. e. (to cite two positive examples) The Court Jester or Judgement at Nuremberg.

 

Of course, you have to leave the 'faithful' hat at the door (it's an argument that popped up endlessly on those old dvd forums) and see it as another option, which in case of George Lazenby meant that his german dubber (they just used Connery's old voice) made the flat performance come alive.

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4 hours ago, bruce marshall said:

What about post- synced non- English  international films where there really isn't an " original " version?

 I'm referring to European productions that have multi-lingual casts, primarily non- English speaking.

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is a good example.

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Rosewood

I've never heard of this story before and I really find they did a great job here. The actors are all very good. I've really liked the photography which offers some really nice shot especially at the end of the movie.

About the score well it's simply brillant. I loved the Lookdown Lord song, which has such a powerfull effect on the each scenes where it appears.

One disappointment though, like with Presumed Innocent the OST titles reveal a bit too much of the plot.

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8 hours ago, publicist said:

I agree to all those examples, but that's about as good an argument as saying Beverly Hills Chihuahua or Meet the Spartans prove that all Hollywood movies suck. Especially for those challenges you cite i was often amazed at how good of a job german translators and (older!) voice actors often did, i. e. (to cite two positive examples) The Court Jester or Judgement at Nuremberg.

 

I've never seen Judgement in German. I imagine it could be "good" (and I expect Schell dubbed himself) - but I can't imagine Spencer Tracy's final verdict having the weight or honesty of the original, even in an ideal dub.

 

8 hours ago, publicist said:

Of course, you have to leave the 'faithful' hat at the door (it's an argument that popped up endlessly on those old dvd forums) and see it as another option, which in case of George Lazenby meant that his german dubber (they just used Connery's old voice) made the flat performance come alive.

 

I still think the "faithful" argument is relevant, and an original performance would have to be pretty horrible and damaging to the film for me to prefer an "improved" dub in another language. And I'm quite convinced that many German-speaking viewer have distorted impressions of English actors and their performances simply because they never thought to separate the actor from the voice (if they have even ever experienced an original non-German performance).

 

A slight tangent: I understand the German release of Inglorious Basterds had the English parts dubbed in German. A film where Tarantino deliberately used (at least) three main languages (English/German/French) and used English subtitles for the original English audience. That was an artistic decision that was obviously disregarded by the German distributors. Doubly hurtful because I've always felt that all three different settings in the film felt very authentic to their respective language and country, i.e. the German parts felt like parts of a German film, and the French parts felt French (based on my limited experience). I'm sure the film would have lost that quality if Tarantino had decided to dub everything in English for the original release.

 

8 hours ago, bruce marshall said:

 I'm referring to European productions that have multi-lingual casts, primarily non- English speaking.

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is a good example.

 

As I said, I'm not a fan of the concept. The Leone trilogy is why I pointed out that it's not related to the specific language. In the end, Eastwood speaks English, dubs himself, and gives the central performance in the film, so the English version still seems to be the least intrusive one. It helps that there's not that much dialogue in the film.

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One of the few films that I've watched in a version dubbed into English is Truffaut's Day for Night, which was shown in such a vandalised form on UK television in the 1990s. Coincidentally, the film itself has a very funny reference to dubbing when an actor on the fictional film set, after repeatedly being unable to remember her script, suggests "I'll just say numbers like I do with Fellini. Twenty-two eighty-three sixteen seventy-two..."; the director responds "No, in France we have to say the lines!"

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If the main actor is American, I insist on the English version.

I can't imagine watching QUIMADA^BURN and not hearing Brando. Same with THE LEOPARD.

 

Aren't all Euro films post dubbed till this day?

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If you mean ADRd/looped, I don't know. It's still not uncommon in US films, is it? If you mean filmed in multiple languages and then "re-dubbed",  I think that still happens, but certainly not for every film (why would anyone do it for a national production where everyone speaks the same language)?

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I mean shot without sound ( MOS).

AT least for location work.

This started as a Euro tradition because GOOD sound recording - I.e. dialog  - on location is difficult to achieve.

You can tell a professional film from an amateur/ low budget film by the quality of sound. Cinematography can be high quality in any types of films.

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17 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

And I'm quite convinced that many German-speaking viewer have distorted impressions of English actors and their performances simply because they never thought to separate the actor from the voice (if they have even ever experienced an original non-German performance).

 

So what? It's not their obligation to do so. It's just movies, some of them great, most not so much and such pedantic points of view are the luxury of the age of plenty (everything is released in dozens of languages, even streaming these days). But who but the purist really cares if the actor has a higher-pitched voice than his german voice actor or speaks in an (intranslatable) southern drawl? Just watch the original instead (which can ruin the experience by having to read subtitles along, especially when actors mumble a lot).  A ruined joke is of course always regrettable, and it's the one point of criticism i follow.

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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

 

Jaws, Star Wars, E.T., Raiders, Hook, Home Alone, Jurassic Park... Since the 70s John Williams scored a movie that made millions of children fall in love with his music. Well, for me and for countless kids born on the 90s, that movie was HP1. Williams' score works like gangbusters in the movie, the perfect marriage between images and sounds with that special magic that only Williams can bring to a movie like this. The movie gives plenty of opportunities for Williams music to shine.

 

The movie? Oh, I was surprised to know that the movie is still pretty good. It was interesting to see that there was a lot of pratical effects in the movie, with gives it an old-fashioned charm. The CGI (which wasn't very good in the early 2000s) is used just for the more fantastical creatures, like the troll and Fluffy. It's not the best Potter movie, but is still an enganging movie for kids and adults. Can't wait for my son/daughter to be born so that I can watch it with him/her!

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1 hour ago, Edmilson said:

Can't wait for my son to be born so that I can watch it with him/her!

I hope you don't plan to show it to him/her when he/she will be born, it might be a bit hard... :lol:

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The Dark Knight

 

Actually saw this on the big screen again since summer 2008. The plot largely still holds up, Bale's deeper Bat voice still annoys, Pfister's lensing is still impeccable. Zimmer reusing his material doesn't bother me the way it did when it first came out. The ending is just as cathartic and beautifully cinematic.

 

And Ledger... it's crazy how he was in the film for only 20+ minutes but he OWNED each scene he was in. And his last scene is just haunting. I am honestly curious, had he not died, whether he would've appeared in TDKR.

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I don't recall exactly how it was suppose to be down but if I recall correctly Joker was suppose to be back in the Arkham Asylum and he might have face the Sphinx and Batman in the sequel but Ledger's death ruined all thoses plan of a possible comeback.

Too bad because there was a rumour about DiCaprio playing the Sphinx which would have been nutts!!!

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The lovely bones. Well, I was going to say it was pretty good, except for the supernatural crap, and most of the songs and score were great, but then the extremely unrewarding ending came. They should definitely have chosen a different actress for Susan as well because this one’s whispered narrations got on my nerves pretty quickly. Weisz, Tucci and Richie are fantastic, but I’m tired of Wahlberg and if your plan is to kill a girl, maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t leave a notebook with sketches containing labels such as ‘hatch’ lying around? And maybe you shouldn’t bring that notebook up at all if you’re then completely going to discard that whole plotline? My name is Vincent and I wish you all a long and happy life.

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