You leave Lord of War outta this! One of few non laughable great Nicolas Cage performances. S1m0ne though.. That was basically the big drop off point for Al Pacino, nothing but misses and trash, 88 minutes anyone

I took it as simple willpower being able to overcome any supposed genetic imperfections. If you believe it, you can do it. Which goes with the overall message of the film.



Messages don't need to be original, and rarely will they ever be. The dialogue was great, the sibling rivalry was touching, and the romance brought a tear to my eye. Haven't seen any of his others, aside from The Truman Show, which was also fantastic.

Sure, but where does willpower come from? Why does the main character (apparently) have more of it than anyone else? Is it non-genetic in origin, then? If so, how did he come by it? These are the questions the film should have been answering, rather than focusing on its rather anticlimactic murder investigation and the romance. "If you believe it, you can do it" is just a really shallow, uninteresting theme. The movie is just telling everyone what we already believe - unless its intended audience is a shadowy cabal of geneticists bent on creating a race of supermen. In that case, maybe it will provide them with some food for thought.

I didn't mind this one. I agree that it does seem to be aimed at children or tweens (mostly), but I thought it was entertaining enough.


This one was disappointing because the premise of the movie was really fresh, but the execution was off.

It might be a shallow theme, but that to me is perfectly okay. It's a movie. It's not meant to be changing your entire way of living, just to let you get engaged in an interesting biopunk story and also get a feel-good message in the process. In a world where you are told that you are only as good as your genetic engineering, he was able to believe in himself despite his supposed imperfections and rise above all that, achieving his dreams. He was using willpower and stores of adrenaline—fuelled by him knowing he'd exhausted his energy and would likely die if he didn't keep pushing forward. That's what I took from it, and sometimes the best questions are the ones left unanswered, as you're able to draw your own conclusions.

Mad Max The Road Warrior was really good. Cool fable-like wrap around storytelling looking back at the past, giving Max this mythology-like mystique. Great action, really cool atmosphere and cool settings and props. Healthy dose of cheese, too, with that dude with the knight mask and the speedo on - that guy was killer. I also liked that it wasn't some oppressive regime that they were fighting; it was more on equal ground, which gave things a more desperate, ragged kind of tone. I can see why everyone liked it; glad I finally saw it.

Also saw Babel - like 21 Grams, this was interesting and skated on the edge of being compelling, but I wasn't really sure what to gain from it. Alejandro Inarritu's films usually seem to focus on giving us this "life is powerful, mysterious and coincidental" message, with lots of storylines converging and lots of weird happenings that come together at dark points in these characters' lives. I thought this was a bit pretentious and long-winded, and maybe it thought it was saying more than it really was. Overall it came off as just a movie about random peoples' lives affected by coincidence and chance, which isn't really a very deep message. But I liked the characters and the different stories, and I wasn't bored with this.

^That's a good one; a well deserved classic. The first in the series is very good too, though I wouldn't recommend Beyond Thunderdome. The new Mad Max was indeed mighty well done too. I'm not sure it deserves *quite* the hype it's got, but it was very well done and enjoyable. I've been a fan of the series since I was young so it's fun to see it rebooted and done right.

Haha, Babel is one one of my absolute least favorite movies though. "Pretentious and long-winded" begins to describe it... I put it on par with Crash (NOT the David Cronenberg film - the other one that won best picture which is why I have so much disdain for the Oscars hahaha).

I watched Slow West the other night. It was decent. You could tell it's by a talented director though one that's not that experienced. I'd bet his movies will ultimately be very good once he's got a bit more experience under his belt. The ending of the film, while different (which I applaud), just didn't seem to fit. And when...

I just didn't think its pretentiousness necessarily meant completely devoid of worth. It still had enough interesting things in it for me to like it.

And yeah, still gotta see Thunderdome, but so far Fury Road is my favorite Mad Max. Just so unrelenting, blisteringly fast paced and kinetic.

Saw Splice; now there's a piece of trash movie. Really fucking dumb. It seemed to think it was saying all this meaningful things about where science is going, etc but it was just full of idiotic scenes and characters making choices for no reason other than to further the plot. There were numerous plot threads brought up and killed, never mentioned again. The characters were set up for development and then nothing was ever explained. Things just keep escalating and getting progressively dumber as it goes along, and mostly it was all style and no substance, just an excuse for silly action scenes in the climax. A miraculously idiotic movie.

The best way to watch Beyond Thunderdome:

[quote="Empyreal"]Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 5+/5

This is brilliance at it's finest. Dramatic, emotional, deep and at times even hilarious, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind dazzles the viewer from start to finish. Jim Carrey delivers what is perhaps his best performance ever, and Kate Winslet is also quite believable - and quite a looker, too. This film will hit hard in spots where most other romantic dramas only dabble, and its portrayal of a realistic middle-class couple is only the least of its many wonders. Truly a masterpiece.

Friday the 13th - 4/5

Everyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 30-odd years knows this one. It isn't the best of the Friday movies; that honor goes to the epochal 4th installment, but it is quite a spectacle in itself, and a whole lot of fun, too. If you're in the mood to turn your brain off and watch a good old 80s slasher, this is as good of a pick as any.

I completely agree with you about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotlees Mind. In my personal opinion, one of the deepest characters ever played and also one of the best acting performances from Jim Carrey. It is deep, confusing; yet. interesting and catching. Also the romantic story portraits a deep relationship in which you, somehow, will identify that feeling of I don't want, but I do want at the same time.

How to train your dragon. I, II 5/5
Changing the subject, I highly recommend How to Train your Dragon both the first one and the second one. These movies are mainly aimed for youngers and teenagers; though, they show some really mature topics. Most of them only reserved to adults. Both movies show the importance of friendship and how it helps to make grave changes. They also include topics such relations of power, dominance, sociocultural changes and their importances in history. If what you want is to relax and just have a great time enjoying some great movies, these are some great movies for you.

You make a good point. I love Wes Anderson's films and they're about as pretentious as it gets. I suppose it just comes down to personal taste from there and Babel didn't do it for me.



Agreed in full. It had such great potential I thought too but WOW was it terrible!

Seeing The Green Inferno tomorrow night. I'm genuinely excited for this and really, really want it to be as awesome as the promotional material makes it look. Eli Roth does not have a good track record by any stretch of the imagination (Cabin Fever was actively offensive to my intelligence, Hostel 1 was almost as terrible in the first half and then just the bad kind of uncomfortable in the second half, and Hostel 2 was exactly the kind of mindless, idiotic gore flick I expected it to be, only not anywhere near over the top outside the Bathory scene to make it a fun repeated watch), so hopefully I'm proven wrong here and he's finally made something actively good. His other new movie Knock Knock looks pretty good too.

Isn't Cabin Fever the one with the kung fu kid who yells about waffles* and bites people?

*Nope, pancakes. It was pancakes.

^ That's the one.

I don't see why The Green Inferno wouldn't totally suck.

FTFY

Terminator: Genisys isn't vital to the franchise, but I will say where the movie works is when it goes back to the Terminator 3-levels of ridiculousness. I like the whole messing with time travel concept just for something different, and Terminator 1-styled Arnie looks pretty good, minus the hair, and only when he's stoically, slowly walking. As seems traditional with this series, the ending kind of undoes the entire movie in a way, (not that I necessarily expected the franchise to end).

I also appreciated the more traditional-sounding Terminator theme at the end. I think the Terminator theme is probably one of my favorite movie themes ever. Terminator 2's intro is to blame for that.

So yeah, enjoyable and really stupid movie, but not exactly fantastic in context of the originals or even vital.

I'm just curious where the franchise goes from here. We've already done the whole T1 / T2 thing again, the start of it all if you will; and after the apocalypse wasn't exactly great. Maybe finding a way to tell moody, slower stories like the first one could be a potential way to go. I just can't see every movie ending with, "we gotta stop everything!" being where the franchise longevity is, because beyond the first two, the franchise has been struggling both from a story perspective and a critical perspective.

Also, if you're curious why this warranted a stupid-long response, I grew up with the first two, so the franchise is pretty near and dear to my heart. I'm curious what everybody else thinks.

Oh yeah, I looked that up and I remember seeing a trailer now; looks fucking awful. Definitely not gonna see that.

My bet if Batman V Superman does well which it should is RoboCop Vs The Terminator (based on the Frank Miller comics). But this is Hollywood so they could just churn out a direct remake of T2.

Nope. Two paragraph thoughts and a couple of sentences are too much for people?

Saw The Green Inferno tonight, as I said I was going to. Some bullet points:

-Lorenza Izzo and Sky Ferreira are pretty goddamn bad line readers, and the latter is just a straight up awful actress. The rest of the kids are fine, with the kid from Spy Kids being the best of the bunch.

-The gore, when it happens, is really, really good. Greg Nicotero is Tom Savini levels of awesome.

-Love the setting and cinematography. Eli Roth may suck at characterizations and dialogue, but he's a great visuals guy. To quote Brad Jones, he knows where to point the camera.

-The best actor in the movie is that tribe leader lady with the chain in her nose. The movie was at its best as straight horror and tension whenever she's onscreen.

-Was it really necessary to have a scene of audible diarrhea that goes on for more than 30 seconds? Really?

-Love the Cannibal Holocaust homage near the end. If you've seen the movie, you know what part I'm talking about.

-Female circumcision sucks.

-Eli Roth does not understand subtlety at all. That's great when it comes to the violent parts, but awful when it comes to getting to know the characters. He's so on the nose with these college kids that it's actively annoying, as if he's screaming at the audience "THESE ARE DUMB MILLENNIALS AND YOU SHOULD KNOW HOW DUMB THEY ARE!" It got tiresome very early on.

-What a dumb ending. No human being that goes through what Lorenza Izzo did here would do what she did at the end, even if it involves a nice child of the savages.

-Vague sequel hook post-credits scene is vague.

Overall, there were moments where The Green Inferno was just as awesome as I wanted it to be, but there's a lot of typical Eli Roth dumbness to go along with it, although it's still leagues above Cabin Fever and the Hostel movies. Easily his best movie so far, although that really isn't saying much.

Just saw Sicario. To describe it in one word would be "gritty." Quite a powerful film with a real dreary and hopelessness tinge. Definitely worth seeing, although not on a first date.

Hahaha, what the fuck. Her entire career makes no sense.

Hey guys.
I have seen that the machinist is a movie that a lot a people on this thread talk about.
As many of you have said, i think is a very not-common kind of movie, twisting minds of old and traditional points of view, with a very pack of subtle actuations and not much blood leaking or guns shots...

But in this moment i'm looking for another point inside movie.

Maybe some of you can help me.
I would want to know about a song that is on the movie but is not on the Roque Baños's soundtrack.

Focus on minute 45:32... when Reznik is getting inside the bar for second time, looking for the guy that "was involved" on Miller's accident.
What kind of music is that? Which bands plays that genre?
I'm sure that i have heard that kind of sound in an other ocassion but i cant give a situation to it.

hope you can know something about.

List of songs used in the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/sou ... t_ql_trv_7

The Visit was an insane disaster of a film. Friends and I expected it to be pretty bad in a silly way, but it went above and beyond that in terms of complete horridness. M. Night Shyamalan has lost his mind, and this is by far the worst thing I have seen from him. There are numerous scenes of the little brother character in the movie rapping, for one, and it's cringeworthy to watch. There's a bunch of forced "subtle" dialogue like when one character says "nobody cares about integrity in movies anymore" when they're making their found footage documentary thing - and, oh yeah, it's a found footage movie, with very flimsy excuses for why the camera is always on. Bad dialogue all around, tons of goofy inconsistencies with the story and a mindnumbing story about grandparents who everyone just shrugs off as "oh, they're senile" as if that's an excuse for all the really bizarre, creepy stuff they do. You could never tell what you were supposed to laugh at and what was supposed to be scary. Nothing about it worked. It seemed like an almost self-parodic work, as if Shyamalan were making the movie that critics THOUGHT all his other flops were.

Shyamalan lost his mind, and the plot, about 15 years ago. Dude is trolling Hollywood big-time and somehow still gets away with it.

I choose to believe he's earnestly trying but just has a very childlike understanding of the world and therefore keeps trying to do the one thing he did that made his parents laugh over and over and over again and has no idea why it isn't working anymore. I don't think I've seen one of his movies since The Village, which was so egregiously terrible and indicative of every problem of his that I swore him off for good. According to critics and moviegoers, every other film since then has been exactly what I thought it would be. I don't understand him at all.

I hadn't seen any Shyamalan films in years except Unbreakable which I missed when I was younger. I remember really not liking Signs or The Happening, but those were nowhere near as excruciating to watch as The Visit. I skipped Lady in the Water and The Village though, probably fortunately.

Gnu: Indeed. I wish I had seen that, so at least I would have been sort of prepared.

I really don't get all the intense dislike for Signs; parts of it may have been a bit heavy-handed but it was an enjoyable romp on the whole and the entire sequence where they board up their house and wait is incredibly claustrophobic.

I saw it back in high school, and I remember really hating the hackneyed and forced message about how "things happen for a reason." I just found that so insanely dumb and yet pretentious at the same time.

Just got the BluRay edition of Prometheus and the deleted scenes help A LOT to enjoy the movie. What I don't get is why in hell those are unable to be played with the movie as a sort of Director's Cut. In fact, one of the most stupid scenes (the biologist playing with the snake-like alien) has some sense if they what happened before, when they find some inoffensive alien larvae and they get excited about gathering/finding life in another planet. Same goes with David vs the Space Jockey.

Unbreakable is a comic/superhero like movie that is really well done. The acting, pace and script are all good. The Village was fine when I saw it but it's a movie that you can only watch once.

^ I have the same issue with Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003. The DVD and BD both have the deleted scenes that were edited for the R-rating, yet there's no way to integrate them into the main film. I really don't see why they couldn't just released an unrated version like they did with the prequel.

Don't forget that Signs is one of the most plot hole-ridden movies of all time. That's the primary reason I dislike it myself, as the plot holes just make it impossible for me to enjoy anything in the movie.

I really wanted to like Signs, even if just because aliens. But the obnoxiously unsubtle way the halfassed spiritual stuff was shoehorned in there just ruined it. I also had serious trouble liking any of the characters.

The Happening was too preposterous, even for me. But none of y'all say shit about The Village! The moment when the secret is revealed, and everyone lists the crimes that caused them to withdraw from modernity into the village... That's heartbreaking stuff right there.

I really liked The Village. I thought the twist was quite clever, and while I see a lot of people rail against

I agree with the general consensus that The Happening is possibly the most unintentionally hilarious movie of all time. From the patently absurd premise, to the actions of the characters, to the amazingly terrible acting, to Betty Buckley being completely fucking insane in her few minutes of screentime, to just how absurd and unrealistic the general reaction of every single human being on the planet to what's going on is, it's impossible to watch that movie and not gasp for breath from a laughing fit at least two or three times.

At least it's a more entertaining, and somehow better made, movie than The Last Airbender, which is easily the worst TV-to-film adaptation I've ever seen, as well as being one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's one of those rare times in a movie where everything that could possibly go wrong does, only it's not hilarious like something like The Room or Birdemic or The Happening. As a diehard fan of Avatar and the various media surrounding that show (including the fucking AWESOME sequel series The Legend of Korra), that movie made me angry in ways I had not been angry at movies before. You know that clip of Roger Ebert shouting about how he "Hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED" the movie North? That's how I feel about The Last Airbender. Complete and utter cinematic garbage, and it should be studied as both how not to adapt a TV show to a movie and just generally how not to make a movie.

Yep, never seeing this film. The rapping almost sounds like

Most of the theater walked out during that scene, yeah. Awful stuff. My best friend pointed out how much product placement was in all of the rapping, which I didn't notice as my jaw was just on the floor from the rapping as a concept. I mean, holy fuck.

Saw Black Mass last night, that was pretty damn good. Reminded me of Goodfellas. Really black-hearted, nihilistic, violent shit, and Johnny Depp was absolutely magnetic as Whitey Bulger. Definitely going to be a contender for some End of the Year best lists.

Nice. I'll be seeing that for sure when it gets released on the 8th. About time Johnny Depp stopped playing such overly eccentric/drunk off the wall characters and got back to something simple akin to Donnie Brasco. The guy is a truly captivating actor, so it's as a shame he pissed it away for a good decade with his one note Pirates/late-Tim Burton roles. His last really good role was The Ninth Gate?

Fear and Loathing was magnificent fun, and he was really good in it. And I remember Ninth Gate being solid detective/horror stuff...but yeah, shame about the last decade or so from him. I hope Black Mass is the start of more really good ones for him.

I saw this today. I have been burned by Shyamalan many times in the past (fuuuuck The Village - one of the worst pieces of shit ever), and, against my better judgement, I went to watch this.

The movie is being universally criticised (yet making a killing at the box office), and I liked it more than you're saying. I agree that the found footage is suspiciously clear, but overall I found the movie enjoyable enough. Shyamalan must be severely closed off from the world, though, because this movie, even for me, straddles the line between good and bad. Luckily for myself, I enjoyed it, but I can totally see where you, and just about everyone on IMDB, didn't.