Good or New Movies Review

[Wizz]

Holy fuck, Shang-Chi was great. My kiddo gave it "100 out of 5."

[Arkandel]

Here's a question.

Is anyone excited about Eternals?

It's not that I just don't know anything about them from the comics (I barely knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were after all before the first movie came out) but dropping a bunch of characters on us in one movie sounds like it won't work. Or at least I haven't seen it work, even with ones I was quite familiar with (think Justice League, Suicide Squad, etc).

I'm even a fan of several cast actors, but I'm kinda ambivalent about it.

[Ganymede]

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

It's not that I just don't know anything about them from the comics (I barely knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were after all before the first movie came out) but dropping a bunch of characters on us in one movie sounds like it won't work.

Well, it worked for Shang-Chi, right?

[Lotherio]

@ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

It's not that I just don't know anything about them from the comics (I barely knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were after all before the first movie came out) but dropping a bunch of characters on us in one movie sounds like it won't work.

Well, it worked for Shang-Chi, right?

Or, Guardians of the Galaxy?

I liked the initial Avengers movies, but I think Guardians brought in more by being unfamiliar to more folks. The humor seemed to work. My worry is, its a much larger cast than five misfits.

[Ganymede]

@lotherio said in Good or New Movies Review:

My worry is, its a much larger cast than five misfits.

My worry is that the relatively-new writers and the new director. Sure, Zhao directed Nomadland, but this project looks really ambitious. And I'm not sure whether the Firpo Brothers can handle the material.

I think this may be a high drama, and that does not seem to play well to audiences, as evidenced by The Incredible Hulk.

[GreenFlashlight]

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

Here's a question.

Is anyone excited about Eternals?

I am. I'm passingly familiar with how absolutly gonzo the lore is, so I'm very curious to see how they're going to try to make that weirdness get a shave and haircut and put on a tie.

[Arkandel]

@greenflashlight It doesn't help that these guys all seem to have like a bunch of powers and don't seem that distinct. I can tell them apart only because I know what Robb Stark and Angelina Jolie look like. Will there be time to establish each of them?

Now, @Ganymede had a point that Guardians did that very well, and I could tell right away who Rocket or Groot were or what they could do. But this shit isn't easy.

[GreenFlashlight]

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

@greenflashlight It doesn't help that these guys all seem to have like a bunch of powers and don't seem that distinct.

Eh, not really. At least in the comics, they're pretty much all Superman power-wise but each one excels at a different one of his specific powers. How distinct their personalities are is down to the writer, of course.

[Kestrel]

Completely loved Cruella. This film was serving up looks like it was going out of style. It was also shot in a really engaging way and had great tunes, so considering how heavily fashion features it really delivers. Aesthetically speaking I give it a 10/10.

I liked the story though that probably isn't going to be the selling point for most people; it had a good balance of dark and edgy with fun and campy. The plot is kind of Money Heist meets Gossip Girl? Devil Wears Prada meets Ocean's Eight?

In summary if gawking at cool dresses and fierce femme fatales is your bag, you're going to like this movie.

[Lotherio]

Archive came out last year I think, I finally saw it.

I like this movie for the aesthetics. But I really like it for the five minute scene where he does into town and interacts with basically a fixer/street samurai type. For everyone who's gone wired up street samurai with about as much essence as you can give away before being no longer human, this is what you should look like (skin looks mostly dead, a few flashing lights like a walking hard drive). This scene and its aesthetics where the best part for me in what is a good film already in my view.

Ending is good too.

[Coin]

Till Death is pretty great. Megan Fox nails it.

[Coin]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage was all right. More of the same. If you really didn't like the first one, Woody Harrelson will not make enough of a difference.

That mid-credits scene, though. Oooooof.

[GreenFlashlight]

@coin Seven letters in that "oof" there. Does that mean it would need a content warning to elaborate on?

[Kestrel]

@coin said in Good or New Movies Review:

Woody Harrelson will not make enough of a difference

heresy

[Coin]

@greenflashlight Spoiler warning. Big one.

[Ominous]

DUNE

So I don't do movies much. As I have stated previously on the forum, I find most movies post-2000-ish to be crap. I really don't like movie theaters, and prefer the comforts of watching a movie at home on the rare times that I will watch a movie. So it takes a lot to get me to watch a new movie, in a movie theater, on the day of its release.

I give it a 3 out of 5, or a 2 out of 5 if they never make Part 2. They better make that Part 2, as I would give the 1984 Dune a 2 out of 5 as well, and it would be a pretty terrible if, after 37 years, they can only match it. Which is all a shame, because it had the potential to be a 5 out of 5. The acting, soundtrack, and CGI are all superb. It opens really well, and I was all aboard to love this movie.

The biggest issue is they rush things. They've already decided to split the novel into multiple movies to do it justice, so why the rush? And I got the feeling as I was leaving the theater that I'm not alone in that assessment, as a bunch of my fellow audience members were saying things that indicated that they were completely lost and confused about what they just saw.

Anyways that's all I have to say that isn't spoilery.

click to show

There is a natural stopping point for the first movie, if you're going to split the book. How does one fuck that up? How does one get to the end of the battle that upends everything, the perfect place to stop things and leave everyone breathless and on a cliffhanger and they go "Naaaah, let's drag this out for another hour and have a bunch of slow story-heavy scenes that will drain the pacing and would be better served as early scenes in a second movie"? How does one come to the conclusion that that's a good idea?

You have Lady Jessica and Paul escape from the three stooges and shelter in a tent. You have the scene with Leto gassing the room. You go back to Jessica and Paul getting out of the tent and starting their journey, playing up the 'They survived and are continuing their adventure onwards' vibe, have some heroic-ish music and shots of them moving through the desert, maybe some pans of the desert to show the adventure is just beginning, yadda yadda. Then you cut back to the gassed room with the hazmat suit guys entering and the reveal that BOOM the Baron isn't dead, Motherfuckers! Roll credits.

HOW DOES ONE FUCK THAT UP!?

Then with all the time they would have saved by not having an hour of stuff that should be in the second movie, they could have used it to spend more time focusing on the character building and world building. At no point do they explain how shields work. Hopefully you are able to figure it out from watching, but I doubt it, because it's a little vague as to why some things get through a shield and other things don't, as the things getting through seem to be moving at the same speed as things not getting through.

Whose the dude with the diamond on his forehead? Turns out he's really important, but you wouldn't have guessed that from all of the two scenes he is mentioned or shows up in before the moment he becomes super fucking important. Who are mentats and how do they work? You get one scene of eyes turned up into a skull to convey that they are human calculators and, if you don't spot the fact that he and the Harkonnen mentat both have the same taste in lipstick and turning their eyes up into their skull, you won't know that they're both from the same order.

Wait, Jessica is a concubine? We only get that revealed by a passing comment of "I should have married you" by Leto just before the attack and a comment by the Baron while he is gloating over Leto, which could leave an uninformed viewer thinking that the Baron is just slandering her by calling her a "concubine" like calling someone a "whore." Maybe we should have dived into that a bit beforehand to establish the social order a little more and explain that concubines are a thing.

Speaking of poor Jessica, I commend her actress for a good job of conveying the emotions the character is going through, but the fucking Director decided that all those emotions should be of a hysterical woman who appears to be just shy of completely losing it. Not what I would expect of a disciplined Bene Gesserit who can command the minds of the weak. How about some scenes showing how badass, awesome, and/or loving she can be to offset all of her simpering and hand trembling?

Then there's the Baron. They got Stellan Skarsgård, who does a phenomenal job, and they have a really great leitmotif for him. He just oozes villainy. So how about a little more screen time showing off him being a villain, rather than just talking and plotting and sounding menacing? In the 1984 Dune, the Baron in his first scene murders a random servant for the lulz while raping him. That's a bit much, but that at least tells you that there is a pretty high bar for awfulness that you can safely limbo under in portraying how brutal he is.

[Aria]

@ominous I would agree with all of this.

I saw it with my two best friends -- one who knew a bit about the world but had never read the books and one who didn't know anything about the world at all. They were both saying similar things to what you've mentioned above, but taking it another step or two further when it comes to exposition and world-building. Without having the context of the novels already in mind when walking into the theater, they weren't quite sure what the Benet Gesserit actually are, why Paul's birth was such a big deal, why House Atreides was sent to Arrakis, etc. -- save for when it was explicitly stated or very strongly implied. And they're both very intelligent women, one with a degree in English and one with a degree in film, so they're familiar with narrative structure and film language.

That alone is enough to tell me that the pacing was off, glossing over things that deserved greater focus in order to try and cram as much of the story as they could into the time allotted for an already long film. As I said else-thread, I think that this would have been better served with a long-form medium like a series. At the very least, a trilogy would be preferable for pretty much exactly these reasons, as well as allowing more time for what I felt were a few underdeveloped characters and relationships.

That said, I still very much enjoyed myself. I think there's definitely things that were done very well, from the cinematography to the score. And even for those who don't know anything about Dune going in, it was still engaging enough so that both of my friends want to read the novels and were talking about buying a copy in order to better understand the world.

That's really encouraging. I'm just hoping it pays off in the sequel, because I think the legacy of this film will really suffer without one.

[Ominous]

@aria said in Good or New Movies Review:

As I said else-thread, I think that this would have been better served with a long-form medium like a series. At the very least, a trilogy would be preferable for pretty much exactly these reasons, as well as allowing more time for what I felt were a few underdeveloped characters and relationships.

The problem with a trilogy is that I don't think there is such a natural stopping as the one I discussed in the spoiler for a second movie to stop at. I guess maybe "The sleeper has awakened" scene? I'm only vaguely remembering the order of things after the battle, so that might be too early or late for a good stopping point.

[Aria]

I was going to reply with a legitimate suggestion, but then this appeared on my Facebook feed and I'm laughing so hard that I'm just done for the night.

[Derp]

Tom Holland is gonna play Nathan Drake, ya'll!