Nightcrawler did go a bit far to drive the whole sensationalism point home, but yeah, Gyllenhaal's performance was remarkable. For some reason he's always been one of those actors who I roll my eyes at (I literally don't know why, but you know there's just some actors you simply don't like for no logical reason) but that's the movie where I had to hand it to him and admit to myself that he's great. I'm probably going to pass on Southpaw though since it doesn't look good and I've only heard bad things.

Nightcrawler wasn't really trying to be realistic. It was a satire - watching it, I was like "what the hell, no news organization would act like this," but then at the end it was clearly an over the top barbed satire against the sensationalism and voyeurism of modern media - unsubtle but it worked and didn't try to be too serious or annoying with the message, rather choosing the road of black comedy instead. Incredibly funny dark humor. The fact that it initially had me in shock wondering why the news station was acting that way, was part of the ingenuity of it. I got fooled.

Identity sucked ass. That was definitely idiotic "pop psychology" type drivel - Enemy wasn't anywhere near that kind of thing for me. I never got the feeling Enemy was trying to "wow" me with its intellect or drive home some sort of "deep" point about psychology or the mind (which, yeah, would have made it a bad movie for me too). It was just a really engrossing trip. Just this slow, dreary, dark trip through a fucked up place, nothing else.

Dan Gilroy, writer/director of Nightcrawler wrote about his film:

In the same interview he goes on to talk about how maintaining realism was one of the most important factors of the film. Which was obvious. I'm honestly perplexed anyone could've missed this because, as I said, the film was predicated on realism and being realistic. That was the whole point.


Identity was indeed "pop psychology type drivel" hewn from the same stone as Enemy. The difference was, it was actually vaguely entertaining and didn't repeatedly whack its audience in the face with its giant but totally fake dick.

Yeah, I also didn't see Nightcrawler as a black comedy. Which parts were supposed to be funny? I don't think I laughed once during the film, nor do I think I was meant to. Sure, I get your point, darkeningday, about how it touted itself as being ultra-realistic but actually wasn't but Jake's character was so intriguing and his performance so good that I still really, really liked it.

Yeah! Gyllenhaal created something really unique character-wise. I'm usually the last person to give a fuck about actors, but Jake was just head and shoulders above everything else. Although really, all the acting was good. Paxton and Russo were solid, but my favorite supporting role was the assistant.

I thought Nightcrawler was realistic enough. The network Lou was selling to was in trouble and desperate for ratings, and given the dubiously-legal nature of how the footage was acquired, it's totally plausible that the news networks would prefer not opening themselves up to direct liability by having their own people go out and get it. Do you guys know how every major news network in the country does business? Unofficially, at the top levels? I sure don't.

The ending gets sensationalistic of course but that's exactly the point - Lou has become more than an impartial observer, he has become an actor, an agent of sensationalism - and the movie demonstrates this perfectly by itself becoming sensationalistic. It really couldn't have ended any other way, and still made the point it was trying to make.

Also, the movie was definitely hilarious in parts - Lou's word-for-word regurgitation of the corporate business-speak he absorbed was just amazingly funny, although not in a way that made me take him less seriously. Patrick Bateman wore the shallow 80s "power tie" corporate culture as a mask, Lou wears the modern-day corporate newspeak as his mask. He embodies perfectly how big businesses use language that sounds professional and dispassionate but is of course 100% bullshit to justify whatever awful policies they want. Read about how huge places with massive profits justify unpaid internships. Heck, if you work for a place big enough to have one, please read your employee handbook - it's full of that shit.

I didn't find Nightcrawler 'funny', it was uncomfortable viewing which as the director said was the point. Whereas something like American Psycho is so over the top and anal retentive there is legitimate dark comedic laughs. Plus there's no inner monologue to Lou's views. Nightcrawler has odd moments of awkwardness but they came off mostly as disturbing.

Is it really hard to believe no news show would act like that when you have Fox News existing, Bam Margera being interviewed at Ryan Dunn's crash site and so on, news media mostly have no moral compass or notion of respect. The best camera shots and the first reporting are all that matters.

Hmm, I really like the Pat Bateman comparison, and yeah, I can buy it. I'd actually like to rewatch the movie after this discussion. It deserves a rewatch.

I'd like to add that I find real-life corporate doublespeak of that nature to be hilarious, so my sense of humor predisposes me to find Nightcrawler funnier than other people might.

Fair enough about the intentions with the realism, I never read any of that - I mean, I can see it, sure...it's intentionally trying to talk about how we view news today, right now, so I can see it. FSM pretty much nailed it on the humor - I wouldn't say it's laugh out loud I guess, but I fucking loved that bit where he's regurgitating the business talk was great, and the more insane the movie got, the more enjoyable it was. It was definitely funny in its own way. Maybe not quite as good as American Psycho, but yeah, that is a good comparison. As someone embroiled in the news all the time, I find it a cathartic breath of fresh air, is all.

Mission Impossible 5 was a blast, go see it on the big screen, guys. Nothing else to say except that Rebecca Ferguson is absolutely gorgeous.

Have you guys heard about the new Fantastic Four movie? There is a massive review embargo currently withholding opinions of any kind, and the film hasn't even been screened to the film's cast, and it comes out in THREE days. I guess it's shaping up to be the worst thing ever, though that shouldn't surprise anyone given how fucking torturous the original movies were.

Paper Towns was absolutely brilliant - a great, fun flick full of wonderful acting, great characters and a sobering but also uplifting message about how we idolize others but can learn from it. I love the book and this was a really good adaptation, keeping the spirit of what it was about and also adding its own flavor through a few changes. Like The Fault in Our Stars last year, the actors really make this movie come alive, as they are instantly likable. It's a gem of a movie.

Saw the original Mad Max too, pretty good. It was a pretty basic cop/revenge type story, but done up with the unique setting and the post-apocalyptic vibe - I liked that they didn't go all out with making this world a dystopia and instead just made it a sort of normal society teetering on the edge of something worse. The action was pretty cool and overall it was an enjoyable, dark ride, if nothing all that spectacular or amazing. Can't wait to see the two sequels finally.

And I also saw a movie called The Little Death, a sort of anthology about married couples' sex lives and fetishes that ultimately had more to do with their characters than anything else. Funny stuff, some good jokes and it kept me entertained, though it never really hit on a truly brilliant point - rather choosing to stick with basic, slapstick enjoyment. But it was well done for that, despite a rather trite ending.

I'm looking forward to this movie as much as I am towards getting internal hemorrhoids. Even if the movie is watchable, it's not Fantastic Four. Perhaps the only way to get a Fantastic Four movie done right is to get John Byrne to script the damn thing, because facts are facts - Lee and Kirby aside, Byrne's run on FF was the best there's ever been, and looking at the way things are now at Marvel Comics, the best there ever will be.

Fantasic Four seems to never be done right, my opinion they need to set it in the 60's in black and white, go for that classic b-grade sci-fi style that it so obviously draws upon.

They'll fuck Dr Doom up yet again. Here you have one of the coolest villains in comic books, and they'll fuck him up as they have before. It's awful.

It was fucking wonderful, most enjoyable big-budget action movie I've seen in yeeeears. They even got Tom Hollander to play the PM (which is hilarious but only to brits Brits, since Hollander is typecast as a spoiled member of the Royal Family in TV and movies and things there, which David Cameron is regularly compared to)! Seriously, I have no idea how they could've made it more perfect. Total stunner for me too because I couldn't even finish Jack Reacher.

I'll write a lengthier review so I can legitimize another recent "big" action movie I saw that was unmitigated horseshit.

The most amazing thing about Mad Max is the budget. Something in the ballpark of $300,000, and that's Australian dollars too. The sequels had about 10 times the budget and the action is scaled up accordingly, but they definitely don't capture the knife-edge tension of the original. The second one is more of a high-speed chase/action flick - Fury Road is closer to this than any of the others - then the third starts out as an expansion of the post-apocalyptic society before deviating into an ill-advised trip down Disney lane in the second half.

The Road Warrior is still tops..by far. Best action film ever made imo. My preteen nephews absolutely loved Fury Road but even they think Road Warrior is superior. Hell, even the youngest of the two liked Thunderdome better.

I agree, it was perhaps the best movie of the series since #2? The action was great, acting was solid (seriously, Tom Cruise is a pretty damn good actor and for a 53 years old, he's in top shape, I'm looking forward to MI 10 in 20 years) and the plot was interesting.

I saw Ex Machina recently as well. A great movie about AI with some super great acting from Oscar Isaac (this guy rocks!) and Alicia Vikander. Pretty cerebral movie with an intimate and lo-fi feel.

Have you watched MI:2 recently, though? I liked it a lot when I saw it as a kid too but my god, it hasn't aged up well. Most of the action was the sort of solid gun-fu one's come to expect from John Woo, but the script, written by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore of all people, was just totally stupid. And not even fun-stupid like Roger Moore-era James Bond, but just annoying-stupid like Star Trek: Nemesis.

Saw MI:RN last night. Fun movie, though the plot felt like a generic james bond movie. Wouldnt surprise me if FF got leaked, as it's getting ripped into and more than likely will flop(ahem, expendables 3).

No surprise there, he's in target age group for that one I'd rank them as such: Mad Max 2, Mad Max, Fury Road.......................


.........Beyond Thunderdome.

I didn't realize from seeing Fury Road first that the postapocalyptic world would just get worse and worse as the movies went on - for some reason I had the idea it'd just start out like Fury Road. The idea of the Fury Road world starting out so innocuously as the original film was striking to me. Yeah - I'm definitely interested in Beyond Thunderdome from you guys' descriptions.

Yeah, that was a huge part of the appeal of Fury Road for me. Things had progressed to such a fucked up level from the "recent apocalypse" of the first movie that it was awesome to see where they'd take it further down the timeline.

Don't write it off before you see it. Haven't seen Thunderdome for at least a decade but from memory it had the best apocalyptic atmosphere of the three. I didn't see what was wrong with the second half at the time and thought it was a pretty bold attempt to close out the trilogy, whether or not it was a successful one is another matter. The fact that the other films had minimal contextual narrative didn't help it.

Not writing it off at all, I look forward to seeing what it's like. chaossphere's description sounds bizarre and intriguing.

And yeah - I just liked the vibe and atmosphere of a society crumbling but not gone yet, sort of half and half between the old world and new. That was the best part of the first Mad Max for me, though the whole thing was entertaining.

I just got the first 4 movies and I plan to watch them all again. Yeah, a big part of what I like from MI:2 is nostalgia, the plot is sort of dumb but the action sequences were cool as fuck and I remember a very melodramatic feel, I'm sure I'll still like the movie though! I'm not even sure I've seen MI:3 with Phillip Seymour Hoffman haha so I'll watch them all again. Also, Simon Pegg is awesome as hell in the series, it just adds a sense of fun to them and doesn't make them overly serious.

Also, yeah, the plot was very James Bond-y, especially Goldeneye or Skyfall since these two also involved ex-agents turned baddies.

I'm surprised at the praise for the original Mad Max. I thought it was very, very rough with low-budget exploitation cracks at every turn, and didn't really get good until the end. There's some creepy, unsettling nature to the scenes, but some of it just goes too long or doesn't have much point beyond padding out the run time. Frustratingly uneven to say the least.

It's fun to see young Mel Gibson zipping around though.

Well yeah, it feels low budget because it is low budget. When you take that into consideration, and the fact it was made by medical students with very little filmmaking experience, in a country with no film industry support (at least none that was willing to get involved with something so brutally exploitative), it's quite amazing that they managed to make it as cohesive as they did.

I get that, but I don't really see how "Well, it was low-budget" makes it a better movie in general, to the point where people here are putting it above Fury Road and even Thunderdome.

There's no accounting for taste now is there If Beyond Thunderdome was actually a cohesive film it'd be great, since the first half of it is easily on par with Mad Max 2. As it is it's half a great film which then devolves into lightweight nonsense. Fury Road is great fun but 2 hours is just too long for that sort of thing, it could have easily been pared down to 95 or 100 minutes and would be better for it. Not to mention it has too much of something that annoys me about recent action movies - people routinely surviving all sort of brutal crashes and near-misses with barely a scratch on them. The original Mad Max presented Max as a very real, very human character who was just as easily injured as anyone else, and Mad Max 2 still has him as a very mortal hero who ends up battered and smashed by the end. Fury Road is just too far fetched and every character should have been dead within 45 minutes, but instead they all seem to be either indestructible or lucky to the point of absurdity.

Today a Jumanji remake was announced for Christmas next year.

Quick, Robin Williams' corpse hasn't reached Dry decay yet.

Too soon man, too soon.

Is it nonsense because it is lightweight, or what? It's the only time throughout the three films that tries to develop a broader context and significance to the story. I can't help but feel if they'd thrown in a couple of dozen car chases during the second half the criticisms of Thunderdome would be a lot more lenient.

But then, Ewoks never bothered me either.

You mean, if they'd replaced the boring, stupid, slow-paced, out-of-nowhere second half with something exciting like car chases, people would have liked it more? YOU DON'T SAY

Mad Max needs context and significance like grindcore needs neoclassical cello interludes and autotuned rapping.

Every movie needs context and significance. If you don't think Mad Max has any (it does) I have to wonder why you watch it.



Who said replaced?

You mean, if they'd replaced interspersed the boring, stupid, slow-paced, out-of-nowhere second half with something exciting like car chases, people would have liked it more? YOU DON'T SAY

It has plenty already, that's the point. It didn't need some half-assed "Max become the messiah to some lost kids" ending, especially one that takes up the entire second half of the movie. If it had been a much quicker coda-type ending after a huge chase/battle sequence it could have worked, but the way they did it is literally the most anti-climactic end to any series in the history of cinema. It's like if Rambo III suddenly had Rambo getting lost in the desert and ending up becoming a Muslim goat farmer.