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Faceplams: Agreed! Film full of great actors acting great in a dull DULL movie.Originally Posted by GulDukat
This Cannot Continue
Agreed! Film full of great actors acting great in a dull DULL movie.
Active Member
I liked the movie, but it just wasn't THAT great. It was overly long too. There are movies that are longer, like Casino or The Godfather, but every moment is engrossing, American Hustle just seemed to go on and on.
Active Member
Forrest Gump is a decent movie, but there are way better Tom Hanks movies.
Active Member
Brad Pitt was better in Ad Astra than in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Active Member
Starship Troopers is one of the best movies of the 90s.
she/her/hers
i agree and i also loved seeing it live with rifftrax. the best riff was "paul verhoeven's: A Bugs Life"
Active Member
Hereditary was the one of the most boring horror movie I've ever seen. It did a good job in terms of creating an uneasy atmosphere, and Toni Collette provided a great performance. But the plot, the ending, was nothing special to me. Saw Midsommar also, it was more interesting, but still not that big of a fan of it. I loved it visually though given the fact that it used bright colors as opposed to just being dark the whole time.
This Cannot Continue
That's not controversial, that's just fact!
Throbbing Member
Watching Roma (2018)... Children of Men and Gravity are just amazing 10/10, but what was this, trying to win "the most boring movie of the year" award?
Active Member
Yeah I feel you. Roma is a good movie and has some relatively good payoffs later on, but maaaaaaaan it is super slow for most of it.
Active Member
I guess you guys never saw the films he made before he made it big.
Active Member
if there is no Mushu / Cricket in the Mulan movie then what was the point.
Active Member
Casino>Goodfellas
she/her/hers
FATUM NOS IUNGET
Active Member
Can't disagree there. It's good, hilarious, absurd compelling & eye opening, but A) it didn't need to be 7 episodes & B) it's getting all this hype/meme treatment etc. b/c most of the planet has nothing better to do.
I still applaud the guy behind it. It looks like an absolute monster amount of time & effort went into this thing. True dedication on his part.
Stubby Member
Marvel movies are for children. Change my mind.
Active Member
I would say they are for children AND adults. Some more than others.
Active Member
she/her/hers
the plots are generally simple enough that children can follow them, superheroes in general have always been for all ages (as they're meant to inspire the goodness within people), and something being "for children" doesn't make it inherently bad or less worthy of someone's time/attention. i think your attitude is kind of condescending. if you said "i don't enjoy the marvel movies" that would be one thing, but saying they're for children as if that's some failing in them seems bitter. but i could also be reading your statement wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Behold the morning star
I won’t lie, the memes have put me off on seeing this.
As much as I love Arnold and love everything he does, True Lies was his last great film. Shame that shit is not in HD on home video.
Last edited by Conan The Barbarian; 04-06-2020 at 08:05 AM.
she/her/hers
true lies is such a good movie. even tom arnold is fantastic in it. and bill paxton is just...perfect. not to mention jamie lee curtis, whose character is one of my favorite accidental heroines ever.
Active Member
That was a fun movie. I miss those original, quirky action movies.
she/her/hers
long kiss goodnight, if you haven't seen it, really holds up. i watched it twice in the last year and it's just so fucking good.
Active Member
Oh wow, yah. Forgot about that one.
Throbbing Member
Generally I think "it's for kids" is a weak way to put something down - technically Batman: The Animated Series is "for kids" and that didn't stop it from being one of the strongest, most intelligent and frequently most mature takes on the character attempted thus far (Mask of the Phantasm is quite possibly the best Batman film ever made). But as far as the MCU goes, with few exceptions, I think the whole swath of those movies generally represents pretty empty, hollow, junk-food style entertainment.
EDIT: WARNING- Marvel Spoilers follow.
It started out better than it should have. The first Iron Man was a good flick (Stark actually had a moral arc in it - after that, he basically devolved back into the scummy douche he was at the start of the first film), the first Thor worked way better than it should have, and the first Avengers being really fun and not a total mess was an impressive follow-through on what should have been a very difficult ask. I remember actually being excited when they teased Thanos at the end of it. And then they fell into a holding pattern, where individual movies just became space fillers to string along audiences until the next team movie, and even the team movies became space fillers to pump up EVEN BIGGER!!! event movies (Age of Ultron was just treading water and just bleh even besides that). And then we came to Infinity War / Endgame, which completely broke the continuity and robbed these movies of any remaining sense of stakes that they had.
It was a classic case of "we want to have our cake and eat it too." Infinity War tried really hard to play up the intensity and drama and stakes of what was happening, wiping out half of their characters and ending with the villain seemingly triumphant. But it was an obvious gimmick, and the only people fooled into thinking any of that would last were the crying kids (technically the target audience) who watched Spider-Man disintegrate. Then came the even worse Endgame, a hollow greatest-hits medley that undid the mass casualties of Infinity War while expecting new major character deaths to have any emotional impact. The whole thing just felt really hollow and tiring, and when major character deaths and half the world's population being dead for five years were little more than glib punchlines to open the most recent, cringey Spider-Man movie with, it just confirmed these movies were little more than empty fluff playing at being anything more at this point.
Not to mention that by the time they finally got to him, Thanos, frankly, sucked as a villain. He was the right character to pick as a major threat, and absolutely the wrong character to try and make at all sympathetic. Instead of tying his obviously abusive relationship with his daughters to his larger plans - he tells Gamora that all the terrible things he did to her made her stronger, so why not make his plan wiping out half the life in the universe to make all that remained 'better' and 'stronger'? - they went with a half-cocked 'overpopulation is destroying everything so I'm going to wipe out half the life in the universe to save it' bullshit that was earnestly played as somewhat rational (and even sympathetic), to the extent that Captain America positively notes its effect on animal life in the first half of Endgame. Overpopulation is a cop-out excuse for eugenicists who are willfully or deliberately ignorant to the fact that staggered, unfairly distributed resources - not the lack of resources themselves - are the root of the problems that Thanos claims to want to address, and even if lack of resources was the problem, you have the Infinity Gauntlet. You could just, uh, make more resources with it?! His agenda needed to be backed by an ideology that was warped and evil, not idiotic, and so Marvel's ultimate big bad was an utter failure in my book.
Also, as charming as Tom Holland is, I hate his Spider-Man. He's basically Stark Jr, a defense department intern with a high-tech, AI powered suit that consistently fights threats that Tony Stark created. Vulture was the rare good Marvel villain in Homecoming, a dude screwed out of his job by Stark's dispassionate, careless monopolizing and left with little choice but to turn to crime. He kills one person in the movie, a fellow criminal who threatens to rat him and his crew out, and even that is accidental. And yet, Stark is never directly confronted with how his actions led to this - just more "okay Mister Stark!" idolatry from Peter. A movie that should have ended with him telling off Tony ended with him politely declining an Avengers role. And then Far From Home...oof. Remember when people thought The Dark Knight, in which an invasive spy machine (which is always treated as wrong and morally suspect) is innovated to find the Joker and then is promptly destroyed to stop it from being exploited and becoming a permanent surveillance apparatus, was apologia for the Patriot Act and the Bush administration? In Far From Home, Tony Stark wills Peter Parker a satellite system with worldwide surveillance capabilities that can deploy drones to kill anyone across the planet (Peter almost kills his romantic rival for MJ by accidentally deploying it), and the movie has no problem with that - just with the fact Peter lets the wrong person control it. The themes that do squeak by in these mostly frivolous movies and their ceaseless deification of Tony Stark are a little much for me to stomach.
They have a handful of strong films, like The Winter Soldier, Black Panther, and Civil War (which comes closest of any of their movies to justifying the "cinematic universe" approach as anything other than a moneymaking gimmick), but those films have consistent advantages that set them apart from the others - chiefly, a) the supporting casts in those films are engaging and actually have shit to do in the story other than play up the 'cinematic universe' angle, and b) the antagonists in those films are nuanced, interesting, and have important role in the stories other than being the bad guys. Marvel generally has real problems with villains, or seriously investing in characters who aren't intended to be in more than one movie, because marketing and 'what comes next' dominates these movies to the extent that the individual pieces have less value than the grand design. That's my biggest problem with 'cinematic universes' - when what comes next is always bigger and more important that what you're working on now, what you're working on now ends up being half as interesting and worthwhile as it could or should be. That's what I respect, warts and all, about Christopher Nolan's Batman films. He treated each one like it could be the last. They deliberated having Harvey Dent be in Batman Begins but decided that it wouldn't do justice to his character, to include him just as a thread to follow in a potential sequel, and even the Joker card tease was less a 'what happens now?!' cliffhanger than it was establishing that the familiar Batman status quo had been reached. It could have been the last film and it still would have worked as an ending. Same with The Dark Knight's ending, and for all the shit The Dark Knight Rises took at the height of Marvel's popularity, it was a film dedicated to seeing the characters and story had closure and an ending that was final, disallowing any real chance for it to be strung along for an indefinite number of follow-up sequels. It was the anti-Marvel approach, one of many things I think made those films more artistically and emotionally rewarding than nearly anything Marvel has produced.
Damn this post was longer than I intended but give me a break, Marvel has been crapping out movies for over a decade now!
Last edited by Deacon Blackfire; 04-12-2020 at 12:45 AM.
Active Member
You had me and you lost me and you had me again. I appreciate you took the time to write those thoughts out.
Bored
I don't agree with some of what you have written but I do appreciate that you obviously put a lot of thoughts into this and that you did not take a trollish approach to this subject but instead put out a well written, well detail post.
And for that, you have my respect.
Throbbing Member
Thanks for the nice comments! Always looking for conversation and not arguments here. I totally get the broad appeal of the Marvel films. My father grew up loving their comics and characters and so a world where they get their own blockbuster movies is like a dream to him, and regardless of what I feel about the movies I've had a lot of great times with him watching them.
In unrelated controversial cinema opinions, I thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was garbage. One of the most superficial films I've ever seen, a glut of nostalgia porn and "oh those were the days" crap. The lead characters are uninteresting, unsympathetic douchebags whose "struggles" were not worth caring about (love that Pitt's character probably having murdered is wife is apparently not supposed to make him repellent), and Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate is basically a vacuous Barbie doll with no role as a character other than to dangle the thread of the Manson family killings, which the movie really has nothing to say about anyway. In fact the only role of the Manson family in the film is to operate as disingenuous stand-ins for hippie culture - "dirty hippies" who in the climax Spoiler: are righteously dispatched by Hollywood's old guard. Obviously fuck the Manson family but this movie's imagined conception of history is fictitious beyond its own intent. The whole thing is super masturbatory and regressive, imo.
Active Member
I respect your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more on just about every point.
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