Film/Video Discussion Thread - The Bear and Badger

davyK

Unlikely wrote:

Avoid the director's cut.

Amazon Prime version I watched - no mention of that so I'm assuming it's the original.

Rarely is a dir cut better. Bladerunner is an exception to that and maybe Cinema Paradiso but what usually happens is you get hit over the head with a sledgehammer so that all nuance and ambiguity is removed.

Unless there's extra monsters.

The Daddy

Aliens, but not Alien.

davyK

Apocalypse Now Redux was just too indulgent. The Playboy pets scene helped but nothing else.

There's a small scene that was added to the Exorcist in which the two priests have a conversation on the stairs that improved the film a bit but nothing else helped it.

davyK

Films are longer now anyhow. So a "director's cut" is becoming more prevalent in cinema I expect. With extended editions on DVD/Bluray for fanboys only.

b0r1s

davyK wrote:

b0r1s wrote:

Donnie Darko Hadn't seen it before. Quite something.

Amazing film that gets better with repeat viewings.

I can see that. Better than a typical twist ending one like Sixth Sense that's worth a 2nd viewing as it can be fun to spot the cues - Darko seems to have more than that.

There's something in the quality of it that gives it a unworldly feel throughout.

The DVD has the book mentioned in the film on the extras and you could, just about, read it. Worth a look as it adds a bit more to the story, if you can find it online.

Kow

davyK wrote:

Apocalypse Now Redux was just too indulgent. The Playboy pets scene helped but nothing else.

There's a small scene that was added to the Exorcist in which the two priests have a conversation on the stairs that improved the film a bit but nothing else helped it.

I liked the crab walk scene.

Unlikely

The Secret Life of Pets 2 was scarier than I was expecting.

Lord_Griff

Donnie darko is all about Gyllenhaal.

regmcfly

Saw Booksmart. It's like Superbad but with girls and 12 years later. If that sounds like your bag,as it does me, you'll enjoy,as I did.

jdanielp

Lord_Griff wrote:

Donnie darko is all about Gyllenhaals.

Especially when they are arguing at the dinner table.

davyK

Kow wrote:

Apocalypse Now Redux was just too indulgent. The Playboy pets scene helped but nothing else. There's a small scene that was added to the Exorcist in which the two priests have a conversation on the stairs that improved the film a bit but nothing else helped it.

I liked the crab walk scene.

I'm in 2 minds about it. The intention was to prompt ignoring medical explanations and go to a priest for an exorcism. I suppose it does that OK!!

Yossarian

Ready Player One: what a steaming pile of shite that was.

Kow

Yar, a turd. Hard to believe it was Spielberg. Not that I'm any Spielberg fan but you can generally count on him to be at least coherent.

Yossarian

TBH, I found it very easy to believe it was Spielberg as it hit every single beat that Spielberg has ever reused in the past like some sort of parody.

Kow

Except Spielberg is usually watchable at the very least.

davyK

Ready Player One was pretty but lazy.

The big fight at the end looked good though. esp. the 2 on 1 - the legal team should have won an Oscar for the licence wrangling they must have done.

Yossarian

I was thinking that, then I remembered that most film IP is owned by a handful of mega corporations and was less impressed. Warner alone probably accounted for somewhere between a third and a half of all the references in the film.

davyK

I watched the original Godzilla this evening - the b&w one from the 50s. This was the original JP cut with subtitles. There is a US cut with Raymond Burr spliced in but I can't imagine it being anywhere near as good as what I watched.

I've always associated the series with big daft fights and a sense of the ridiculous but this was by no means anything like that. I was aware that Godzilla is a metaphor for a nuclear strike but this film really doesn't hold back on that.

Watching the attack is actually pretty grim when taking that metaphor on board. You see the heat blast hitting buildings and people first (the breath attack) which is effectively done using white-out at times - then the shockwave as the creature piles in behind it. The post attack scenes showing children crying over their parents' corpses while been shown to be riddled with radiation themselves by the crackling of a Geiger counter and a shake of the head from a doctor is genuinely harrowing.

Of course the creature presentation is limited by the tech of the day but there's only one or two places where it looks a bit daft. Most attack scenes are placed at night which covers up the joins - but on the whole the scenes actually look pretty good. There must be bits where it's a man in a suit but it doesn't look like it really.

The miniature work is top notch too - the building demolitions are handled extremely well. There are one or two scenes that show their age but on the whole it is extremely impressive.

The end of the film when the creature is killed is actually very low key - a new weapon of mass destruction is used against the creature and the scientist who dreads his invention (maybe a reference to Oppenheimer?) commits suicide and takes the secret of the weapon with him. These scenes are accompanied by a slow sombre soundtrack and it is really well done. In other places the soundtrack and effects are excellent and embues a real feeling of dread.

The acting is pretty good too - with a lead played by Takashi Shimura who did a lot of work with Kurosawa. I had to look his name up but I recognised him from Seven Samurai.

A real surprise this. Totally out of character with films that followed.

Tempy

The following Godzilla films were campy and ridiculous but it didn't mean they weren't political or addressing themes such as outsiders, racism, pollution, war and all sorts of other things. They just weren't as portentous as Godzilla. Godzila himself tends to represent different things, and then you've got stuff like Mechagodzilla representing Japanese re-armament.

SCAP really put a dampener on anti-american/anti-nuke attitudes in cinema, 'Zilla avoided that by being in 54, after the taboo was lifted, but even Rashomon has a nod towards the bombing - the gate at the start and the rain are directly referencing the state of Hiroshima after the attack. There's the argument that all Japanese cinema after the bombing is utterly in thrall of it, and even if it seems largely academic and sometimes spurious, it's hard to avoid. Very few things really match it in terms of an event. You see it kicking off the Yakuza - men needing familial and patriarchal bonds in a time when there was no military, spawning around Hiroshima markets in general, represented through some of the most popular films of the time.

It also follows through in plenty of Horror films. Sadako in the ring is an obvious name call to a famous child who was 2 when the bombs hit, the way her eye is framed is reminiscent of the pika of the bomb (see how eerily similar it is to the blast in Akira) and Pulse as an off the cuff example (and Kiyoshi's films in general) pore over the dilapidated ruins of suburban Japan, with Pulse specifically having ashen shadows of humans as an effect of the films techno-horror plot.

Random fact about Otomo's illustration of the explosion that engulfs Tokyo that doesn't really translate well to animated version: The actual black of the explosion isn't as simple as him colouring it in, he took days drawing it as it's made of thousands of tiny little lines all layered on top of each other, as a way of trying to conceptualise the horror and the lives lost in the bombing. It's sort of clear in any decent high rez version of the image

djchump

davyK

Tempy wrote:

Random fact about Otomo's illustration of the explosion that engulfs Tokyo that doesn't really translate well to animated version: The actual black of the explosion isn't as simple as him colouring it in, he took days drawing it as it's made of thousands of tiny little lines all layered on top of each other, as a way of trying to conceptualise the horror and the lives lost in the bombing. It's sort of clear in any decent high rez version of the image

Wow.

RedDave2

davyK wrote:

I watched the original Godzilla this evening - the b&w one from the 50s. This was the original JP cut with subtitles. There is a US cut with Raymond Burr spliced in but I can't imagine it being anywhere near as good as what I watched.

I've always associated the series with big daft fights and a sense of the ridiculous but this was by no means anything like that. I was aware that Godzilla is a metaphor for a nuclear strike but this film really doesn't hold back on that.

Watching the attack is actually pretty grim when taking that metaphor on board. You see the heat blast hitting buildings and people first (the breath attack) which is effectively done using white-out at times - then the shockwave as the creature piles in behind it. The post attack scenes showing children crying over their parents' corpses while been shown to be riddled with radiation themselves by the crackling of a Geiger counter and a shake of the head from a doctor is genuinely harrowing.

Of course the creature presentation is limited by the tech of the day but there's only one or two places where it looks a bit daft. Most attack scenes are placed at night which covers up the joins - but on the whole the scenes actually look pretty good. There must be bits where it's a man in a suit but it doesn't look like it really.

The miniature work is top notch too - the building demolitions are handled extremely well. There are one or two scenes that show their age but on the whole it is extremely impressive.

The end of the film when the creature is killed is actually very low key - a new weapon of mass destruction is used against the creature and the scientist who dreads his invention (maybe a reference to Oppenheimer?) commits suicide and takes the secret of the weapon with him. These scenes are accompanied by a slow sombre soundtrack and it is really well done. In other places the soundtrack and effects are excellent and embues a real feeling of dread.

The acting is pretty good too - with a lead played by Takashi Shimura who did a lot of work with Kurosawa. I had to look his name up but I recognised him from Seven Samurai.

A real surprise this. Totally out of character with films that followed.

Thanks, you've sold me on a movie I never would have probably checked out. Watched it last night and was quite absorbed. Much more serious tone than I had expected.

davyK

I have had it on DVD for ages. It's a rather nice BFI release in natty packaging etc. It had been packed away and I had forgot about it.

Gremill

Shazam! Best DC film by a mile, in that it didn't make me want to gouge out my eyes and stick forks in my ears.

Entertaining, funny and light hearted.

Moot_Geeza

The last DC film I saw was BvS, which was impressively dodgy, but I still rate Man of Steel. Definitely one of my favourite superhero films.

Kow

One of the worst films I've ever seen.

davyK

I'm done with superhero films for now.

I liked the X-Men series and the Avengers series. End game was a satisfying conclusion.

I see X-Men is getting relaunched but for now I've had enough.

Moot_Geeza

The trailer for the most recent X-Men film looks bad. Might watch it at some point, but I think I have one to catch up on anyway. I don't fancy what looks like an entire film of 'we know you're in there somewhere, we're your friends, please stop being evil!'

nick_md

Kow wrote:

nick_md wrote:

Kow wrote:

Rambo has that brutal attempt at an emotional speech by Stallone at the end. Laughable stuff. I don't think I even enjoyed the film when I was 13, which is saying a lot. James Cameron was on scriptwriting duties, which just cements my opinion of him as a total hack.

Cameron co wrote the screenplay for II, not First Blood. You're also wrong about Stallone's speech (y)

Rambo is II. As in the film I was talking about, not First Blood.

Ah fair play chief, I can't remember the speech in II.

Kow

2 pages back.

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