For the first hour,
Prometheus was shaping up to be a super cool movie. By the end of the second hour, it ended up a big fat turd.
Flem, you've always called the ending of
2001 a cop out, but you know something,
Prometheus, now
that's a fucking cop out.
Ridley Scott spends all that time building up that shit with the Engineers, spends all that energy devoted to questioning the origins of humanity, and then it turns out that's just a MacGuffin and it's nothing more than a less-than-thrilling "end of the world" thriller? Newsflash about MacGuffins: They're not supposed to be important. Nobody gives a shit about microfilm when Cary Grant is running away from airplanes and scaling Mount Rushmore, but Jesus Christ, you're leading up to providing answers to all of life's unanswerables and then you just leave it hanging like it's as insignificant as a wine bottle with plutonium?
Could've been an epic sci-fi saga but instead it turned into a stupid and boring movie with nothing to show for it by the end except a baby alien that just leads to a mediocre film franchise.
Did you actually like
Prometheus,
Flem, or were you just curious what I'd think?
off the top of my head , the top 10 would be:
Inception
Looper
Inglourious Basterds
3:10 to Yuma
Let the Right One In
Kill Bill
Kill Bill 2
Cloverfield
...and then it would stop being off the top of my head.
I know we both dug
3:10 to Yuma, but damn, I didn't know you thought
that highly of it.
The idea was that it was Penn's character reflecting on his life after the anniversary of his brother's death.
That structuring principle never even crossed my mind. Too little of it made sense for even the stuff that should've been clear to make any sense :redface:
All I really care about is the family stuff in a vacuum. I just ignore everything else.
Again, haphazard structuring. Malick should've focused in on one single strand: Either we're telling the story of a kid experiencing life in a highly flammable family environment courtesy of his volcanic father, or we're telling the story of a man who's life is full of regrets who doesn't know how to see the potential for greatness in his family rather than his own failures, or we're telling the story of a woman having a crisis of faith as she is forced to acknowledge the fractured status of her fantasy of domestic bliss, or we're telling the story of a man late in his life reflecting on his childhood in an effort to make the most out of what time he has left with his father and/or mother, or we're telling the story of the evolution of the universe and how cosmic and/or divine forces function in the spinning of the universal story of Life.
All of that shit randomly bouncing around inside of one two-and-a-half hour movie bubble is like that bouncy ball scene in
Men in Black, it's just pure chaos and everything gets destroyed.
can you recommend me a good historical film?
The Killers was fantastic.
Glad you found another classic you enjoy. I was surprised myself when I finally got around to it just how awesome it really was, very high up on my list of
films noir.
M (1931)
Surprisingly, I liked this even more than The Killers.
Great film, no denying that, but pretty low on my list of Fritz Lang movies.
Metropolis,
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,
Fury,
Hangmen Also Die!, and
The Big Heat are all better, IMO, though that's not really a criticism of
M so much as it is an indication of just how great Lang is and how many great films that man made in his career. Even his "lesser" films like
Sigfried,
You Only Live Once,
Man Hunt,
Ministry of Fear,
The Woman in the Window,
The Blue Gardenia, and
While the City Sleeps are all great, too.
Surprised you didn't like this one. A really marvelous exercise in
noir filmmaking, IMO, and another showcase for Welles' genius.
While The Maltese Falcon and The Killers get confusing at the end, this stayed confusing throughout.
Funny enough, I think the script is the best part and Welles' greatest achievement was not only having so much going on, but making sure it was easy to follow and it all came together in the end. And a word of warning: If you thought
Touch of Evil was weird and confusing,
The Lady from Shanghai will
really throw you :icon_chee
On one hand Orson Welles is doing this fantastic job of acting like a complete scumbag, on the other there is this totally difficult-to-buy romance between Leigh and Heston.
That juxtaposition worked perfectly, the lovey-dovey shit sets the audience up for both Heston (by virtue of his working with Welles) and Leigh (by virtue of her being dragged into that world by being Heston's wife) to experience the horrific underbelly of humanity. Leigh's terrifying ordeal in the motel is made all the more terrifying because it contrasts so sharply with what we'd seen previously.
I could see the elements of greatness, but on the whole I didn't enjoy it very much.
It's tough to "enjoy" in the same way as one enjoys something like
The Maltese Falcon since Welles dwells so deeply in the morass of mankind and the aesthetic is so grimy and bizarre, but I definitely enjoy Welles' craftsmanship.
I hate this movie. Wait until you see
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, then you'll see how that movie was supposed to be done :wink:
Well, I'm not sure my stance has softened after your response, but I do appreciate your taking the time to address my critiques.
I didn't mean for that to sound like I was setting out to make you change your mind. I was just pointing out that I understand where you're coming from because I had a friend who had a similar response.
My whole issue was that when everything political is put aside, the Bane-Batman rivalry comes down to one thing - sheer physicality. I really was disappointed that THIS was how Bane was "superior" to Batman at the start of the film, and was eventually how Batman defeats Bane. Again, I'm comparing it to TDK, and perhaps unfairly, but in Nolan's world I preferred the idea of an intellectual or philosophical basis for enmity.
You're criticizing the lack of a philosophical basis in
The Dark Knight Rises when the philosophical basis is the reason I think
The Dark Knight Rises is so fantastic!
With Batman/Bane, it's MUCH more than just a battle of physical wills, it's a battle of
spiritual wills. I mentioned earlier how Bane served as a doppelganger, but even more to the point, Bane is sort of a cautionary tale. From the mask to the dark avenger persona to the traumatic past, he
is Batman, only as he says in the beginning, Batman only adopted the dark, whereas Bane
is darkness. What Batman needed to do was stop dwelling in that dark place Bane calls home (and that Lacan would call "between-two-deaths") and learn to (re)embrace the light, the light of life (which Lacan would call the "death drive").
Battling Bane on his level, clinging to death, clinging to hopelessness, allowing anger to fuel him, that will lead nowhere but the grave, and only at the depths of his despair does Batman learn that's
not what he wants. At the beginning of the film, that's all he seems to want, just waiting to die and content to waste away, but then he accomplishes the step Bane never accomplished and finds the way to overcome Bane physically, and that's to overcome him spiritually, to embrace hope and life, and only then does he have the power to conquer Bane's physicality and, metaphorically, his overwhelming darkness.
That's MUCH more compelling for me than a knucklehead in make-up running around making up ethical games for Batman to play, but that's just me.
It was so attractive in TDK to know that, very much as the Joker put it, nothing to do with Batman's strength could scare him.
That's why I didn't much care for that rivalry. All Batman had to do was kill him---and there was nothing the Joker could've done to stop him---and the movie would've been over and all the trouble that he caused would've been avoided. In
The Dark Knight Rises, even if Batman wanted to kill Bane, he couldn't, which made everything about him that much more terrifying. Not only does Batman have to play his games because of his "code," but even if he abandoned his code, which he could've done at any point with the Joker, it still wouldn't have helped him against Bane, who posed a much tougher challenge for Batman because he had to use everything he could muster up not just intellectually, not just physically, not just ethically, but spiritually, as well. So much more was at stake and so much more was required of Bruce/Batman in
The Dark Knight Rises, which made for more entertaining and enthralling viewing for me.
I'm sure you're right. As long as you knew what I meant.....
No worries, I got it.
Well, TDK was not initially made viewing it as the second in a series of three, so I'm not sure I agree with this
I thought he viewed it as a trilogy, if not from the start then at least around the time of
The Dark Knight? Am I wrong on that one?
