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Faceplams: I'm not really into horror movies so I thought I would take a chance on The Human Centipede. Ugh. What a disaster.
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I'm not really into horror movies so I thought I would take a chance on The Human Centipede. Ugh. What a disaster.
Bite me
Maybe I'm more of a huge Ebert fan from WAYYYY back because I'm in Chicago, I read his Sun-Times column daily, I read many of his books (including his hot pot cook book) but I still miss him a LOT. :-(Originally Posted by thevoid99
Last edited by allegro; 11-07-2014 at 11:33 PM.
Trollhunter
I think that's exactly it. He wasn't consistent. No decent critic is. See: Armond White or Devin Faraci. Both are fucking horrid to the extent where they think they're playing up their "character." Ebert was not one of these fools but also was far from perfect.
Hierba Gatera
I lived in Chicago for a few years and I still seriously disliked Ebert (and most of his reviews). Siskel, however, I respected and adored. He saw things in films that Ebert missed completely (eg., the brilliance of "Babe 2: Pig in the City.")
I tried watching "Audrey Rose" the other day but fell asleep a quarter of the way through.
Bite me
I loved Siskel, too. But I loved Ebert's writing more than Siskel's.
It sure was fun watching them fight!!
Ebert's memoir is awesome. His daily blog posts were awesome. His daily columns were awesome. Ugh, I even miss his Twitter comments. :-(
Last edited by allegro; 11-08-2014 at 12:00 AM.
tempus est umbra in mente
holy fucking hell...
The newest remake of Carrie is actually worse than the low budget one that came out a short while back... it's actually worse than the shitty sequel.
At least those movies got the fucking point. How can you have the audacity to "remake" a story if you don't even get the basic concepts of what made it work in the first place? How do these fucking people have jobs? Also, stop trying to pretend that you're reinterpreting the book... you stole the crucifixion ending from the movie, so just own up and admit that you're remaking the fucking movie.
Carrie doing her telekinetic ninjutsu in this movie is hilarious, but at what point did everyone involved stop even trying to do the story justice?
Also, fuck you, the nice friendly well-intentioned gym teacher NEEDS to die! Your story doesn't function if she doesn't die! She's the tragic consequence of trying to have good intentions! You don't throw in a stupid shot of her crying, and just completely decimate her purpose in the narrative just to make people feel good that she made it out ok.
Hamlet might as well get up at the end of the final act and say "actually, no, I'm feeling ok, I was just kind of tired there for a moment."
I'm not sure, but this may be the worst film I've ever seen.
Last edited by Jinsai; 05-03-2015 at 02:57 AM.
I was nobody. Nothing.
why is carrie being remade over and over anyway? i don't understand, @Jinsai .
i watched a movie called Shadow People today that was really awful. and i was quite excited about it. it is a very interesting subject.
Active Member
Love this movie, but it's soooooo bad.
Member
As bad as it is. It's still quite funny. Especially for Hollywood.
Active Member
Also : Carrie. Is. Not. Fucking. Cute.
Carrie's an awkward, overweight redhead covered with freckles, she doesn't know how to socialize, the guys don't look at her, the girls love to hate her, and everyone's just too happy to have that fat and ugly girl around to vent their insecurities and frustration.
If she was cute, she'd merely be invisible, ignored. She wishes she was, but she's not.
Making her a cute teen destroys the whole character.
Active Member
Very bad...like a jelly doughnut that calls for you in the middle of the night and goes right to your thighs.
she/her/hers
we watched Get Over It the other night. another in a series of late 90s/early 00s based on a famous play/piece of literature (in this case, a midsummer night's dream) that also manages to put on a ridiculous musical version of that play within the movie.
it was so goofy and hilarious and terrible and we loved it.
martin short as the flamboyant drama teacher? sisquo as one of the best friends? vitamin C in a musical number during the opening credits? shane west with an insanely terrible accent? zoe saldana as the bitchy best friend? YES PLEASE!
Vertiginous Member
AHHHH I've been trying to remember the name of that film for years. You have my eternal gratitude @eversonpoe (well, for the next five minutes, after which I will likely have forgotten).
Member
I remember that movie. I didn't like it. Shane West butchering "Alison" w/ that smug and awful accent just makes me want to beat the shit out of him even more.
tempus est umbra in mente
I'm watching some movie on Netflix called "Haunter." I can't remember who recommended this to me... but.... this movie sucks. It's a tween horror remix of Groundhog Day.
If you were living the same day of your life everyday, would you put on the same Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt every morning?
edit: actually this movie gets a lot better. My bad. It's not great, but it definitely doesn't belong in this thread.
edit2: nevermind... this sucks.... yawn...
Why do stories involving hauntings and ghosts feel the need to over-explain everything? NOBODY CARES.
Last edited by Jinsai; 05-06-2015 at 03:35 AM.
she/her/hers
hey, i liked that movie! a lot, actually. i didn't mind the over-explanation, i thought it was interesting.
Throbbing Member
Just watched Yellowbrickroad. Boy, was it a turd!
I was nobody. Nothing.
i LOVED haunter.
i just wanted it to be longer. i thought that more could have been done with it.
tempus est umbra in mente
ok... Alice in Wonderland (via Tim Burton) came on TV just now, and I decided to give it another chance, primarily because I don't remember much about the movie, just that I fucking hated it.
This is the worst movie I've ever seen. The worst. There is nothing I've seen that aggravates me more, or makes me so desperately wish I was doing something else other than watch it. I have watched shitty student films, and this piece of shit makes those look like masterpieces. This is so terrible, everyone involved should be pleading for forgiveness. I can't believe they made a sequel. They should have known they lucked out there, but I guess marketing green lighting is still stupider than you'd expect.
But seriously, I hate this movie so much I dislike people who like it.
Active Member
It came on TV a few days ago and I watched it out of curiosity, just like you, and once again I was amazed at how, with such a production, it just falls flat on its face in every way.
I love Bobby Chiu's work, and on the paper his work for Alice in the creature department is as great as ever, but it just doesn't work, the characters never really seem to live in the same world, they don't seem to have any reality, relative to each other. The environments are conceptually gorgeous, but once again they never make you feel anything, they're just being pretty backgrounds.
The story isn't engaging in any way, Depp is being Deppish, Bonham Carter is BonhamCartering away, and the rest of the cast is just forgiveable, trying to fill empty characters.
That film is filled to the brim with awesomeness, and never ever delivers, it just drags along until it ends.
It's actually impressive, in a way.
tempus est umbra in mente
especially when the "climax" involves Depp dancing around... I love the Alice books.... Especially the second.. they were my introduction to psychedelic concepts. This movie doesn't just piss on it, it does horrible things to the foundation of what it was supposed to deliver that are so raunchy and objectionable that I can't even call them out. Fuck you Tim Burton, Disney, and everyone else involved in this abomination.
Active Member
They basically treated Caroll's witty and challenging world like it was just a zany LSD-induced clusterfuck. What's weird (or isn't, depending on your opinion about Burton's filmography) is that the guy's renowned for putting a surrealistic twist on banal situations, yet he just couldn't (or wasn't allowed to ?) handle Alice's story and made that world completely pedestrian instead.
Saul Williams fan.
Speaking of Burton-bashing, I know I'm in the minority, but I absolutely despised Sweeney Todd. I get what they were trying to do, and I know that the musical is considered a classic, but I didn't even like the songs. I would have appreciated their cheesiness if they weren't presented in such a pretentious look-at-me-I'm-so-goth way. I hated almost all of the characters, and even seeing them being brutally murdered didn't do it for me. I guess I could watch one of the taped Broadway performances of the musical itself, but... eeeeh, I don't know. For all its atmosphere and gore, it eventually became a one-note movie, and one note I got sick of hearing. It was clear to me that Burton was doing "dark" and "goth" and shit just because, by that point, he was supposed to be doing stuff this way. Edward Scissorhands managed to be hauntingly beautiful without having every single frame painted in drab digital colors. I did like that one moment when Todd and that Bonham Carter character imagined a better future for themselves. I don't know. Maybe if it was more... fun? It had several attempts at dark humor, like with Sacha Baron Cohen's character, but I didn't even crack a smile.
I'd rather watch Ben Affleck, Raquel Castro and George Carlin recreate Sweeney Todd all day long. There.
Member
You know something. While I didn't think the film was that bad but.... it wasn't great either and for some reason. I have to agree with you. That little moment in Jersey Girl was actually funny and also cute in a macabre kind of way. The reaction alone from the audience made it even funnier. Wow, this is kind of controversial indeed.
Speaking of shit films. I recently watched the film version of Entourage and wow...
I used to be a fan of the show but I do think it dropped the ball at the end of the fifth season and it never became good since. The film version is just like the last season with steroids but it also has this air of misogyny and decadence that just makes me feel ill. It is like Sex & the City 2 for guys except whereas that film opens with a gay wedding. This film ends with a gay wedding and man, I really hated everything about it. Plus, what fucking studio would greenlight a passion project for Jessica Alba? She can't act for shit and, other than Sin City, has she ever been in a good movie?
Active Member
I know that I have a very hard time hating Jersey Girl because of a lot of the same reasons I have a hard time hating Kevin Smith which is that, ultimately, they both have very large hearts and you can see them both beating constantly.
There's a warmth and sincerity, or, at least, a very genuine attempt at it in that film that I really enjoy and connect to emotionally that keeps me from condemning it, really. It's Ben Affleck before he was who he is today and it has a sort of disjointed messiness about it, or, bare minimum, an honest lack of solid focus and purpose to it, but it still feels sincere. It feels like there's something there it's really trying to be or to communicate and that general sense of "it's technically not amazing but there's an honesty there that I can't deny" is a feeling I have gotten from most of Smith's films and I value that a lot more than I do technical achievement but a lack of an honest heartbeat. I still hold that his worst movie is by far Cop Out and that is very much a movie without a soul, something that, besides all else, I think most of his movies do possess, even if they can sometimes seem to get in the way of themselves (for instance a movie like Red State seemed like something got held back that prevented what could've been an honest masterpiece, at least compared to his other work, and part of that might have been the sheer earnestness of it and dying need to be the thing it wants so desperately to be).
I think Burton on the other hand has, since everything post-Big Fish, been an entirely soulless director who makes artificially pretty movies that crumble beneath any degree of scrutiny. He sells his films off as magical when for him there is clearly no magic. Big Fish has a soul and a genuine heart that lets that imagery and that magical style flourish. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure has a heart and a childlike innocence and purity to it that makes his style work, and the character of Pee-Wee provides a massive heartbeat for it. But something like ... well, anything he's done in the last twelve years is just all artifice to my eyes. That's about the worst thing any artist can be for me.
tempus est umbra in mente
I actually really loved Frankenweenie, and I thought Corpse Bride was ok. I didn't see Big Eyes but I've heard split opinions on it. At the same time, I feel like I'm the only person out there who really didn't like Big Fish. I definitely feel like he peaked with Ed Wood, which is by far my favorite movie he's made.
But now, after watching Alice in Wonderland again, I'm going to have to reconsider everything I liked about anything he's made. That movie somehow taints it all.
Active Member
I didn't see Franken (I stay away from most of his stuff at this point) but it wouldn't surprise me if it works since that was a short of his when he was younger that I know he was extremely passionate about. I remember him spending a lot of the Big Fish commentary referencing it even, which only builds my opinion on his filmography more -- when he has some heart in it he can make really engaging magical stuff, but when he doesn't it feels like wallpaper that you could poke a hole through at any moment.
tempus est umbra in mente
it's really hard to believe the same guy made Frankenweenie and Planet of the Apes. I think it was really overlooked because of Burton-burnout.
Saul Williams fan.
I think Frankenweenie was overlooked because a) it was in black-and-white (not the best thing to sell to kids) and b) it had to compete with two other Halloween-themed animated movies (ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania) and ultimately lost the battle. Still haven't seen it, by the way.
tempus est umbra in mente
Ok, and good points (and ParaNorman was an incredible movie... didn't see the other), but go see Frankenweenie. It's really great
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