Sounds interesting, I hope it's not anywhere near that fucking god-awful television movie Cyberbully.

I pretty much wrote off A Serbian Film a long time ago and I am not convinced I'm really missing out on anything. Maybe sometime when I have a lot more free time on my hands I'll see it, but yeah, really doubt it's going to provide me with anything worthwhile.

Re: Ryan Gosling, yeah, he is awesome. Drive was really good, with a ton of style and a great performance from him, and Ides of March was also really good - great political thriller with awesome acting all around.

Of course, 'Drive' can mean a whole lot of other things but that was my first reaction. Apart from the music, did you also notice the 80s styled font in the opening and the credits sequence?

Thanks for those recommendations, I just read the blurbs on both of them and they sound good.

The first Ryan Gosling movie I ever saw was The United States of Leland. Quite a movie.

Yeah, the 80s vibe was cool. There is a photoshopped picture of the 80s inspired poster made to look like an old VHS tape sleeve floating around the net.



I really wanted to like the movie because its "cool factor" but the over-the-topness of the second half just really turned me off. I don't know, it just felt like a different movie at that point.

I actually hated the 80s pop soundtrack, but it did serve a purpose in making that older vibe come through. I didn't find the over the top factor bad actually, all the crushed in heads and what not are extremely brief due to how blunt and direct the action is.

Just watched the 2011 Conan the Barbarian. Went in there expecting a shitty remake and was very pleasantly surprised. Not sure where all the hatred for it came from, though it could be that I've read most of the original stories and this film certainly resembled the source material more than the Arnold films, which in turn allowed me to enjoy it more. I found the story and narrative better than the '84 film, as well as the action scenes (the swordwork in particular was very cool). I also liked the way Conan was portrayed, less bumbling, very quick on his feet and in some cases, more calm, closer to the original character (except for the youth version, man the kid that portrayed him sucked. A prime example of overacting that badass deathstare).

The '84 film certainly had its superiorities though, the music being the most notable. The soundtrack in the modern film, while competent, was never all that strong and powerful like the first films was. The '84 film was almost like a long music video in places, where the music spoke the words. Also, the first movie had a more mysterious, magical atmosphere which this one lacked and Conan's new companions cannot reach the levels of awesome that Subotai, Valeria and Akiro did.

Overall, I thought it was pretty damn good. I was interesting in learning what the general opinion was on M/A, since everywhere else I've seen people trash the film to hell and back.

Haha haven't watched this movie in years but any time I make copies at work I think about that scene where LL Cool J interrogates the girl about "dupin" and when he comes out of the couch. Best camouflage.

Fede Alvarez, the director of the Evil Dead remake, made some comments in an interview last week suggesting that the movie could also be viewed as a sequel to the original movie as well as a remake. What he said is below.



http://www.aintitcool.com/node/60243

Okay, I need this to be real.

Total Recall, the twenty-twelve version is a goddamn tragedy.

It's a PG-13 remake of an R-rated classic. There was no other way it was gonna turn out.

Yup, it was a weak remake. Just because one can enhance the CGI of the movie, doesn't mean it can be watchable.

Totall Recall is really awful and it was definitely a contender for worse 2012 movie I have seen.

Then I saw Alex Cross a few days ago.

Why would you do that to yourself?

Alex Cross has one very, VERY good thing going for it: Matthew Fox as the bad guy. He is fucking amazing as the villain in this, to the point that he genuinely feels out of place. Tyler Perry brings it down HARD though, as Tyler Perry both cannot act (or do much of anything related to anything, for that matter) for shit and he is completely unbelievable as an action hero.

Believe it or not, the name Tyler Perry didn't ring a bell for me. I checked his filmography later and understood the errors of my way. The person I was with chose the movie and I didn't know what it was so I didn't veto it.

I don't watch previews either because I have a feeling this one would have set my alarm off.

It so, so bad.

Because I know y'all care:

Mean Streets: Early Scorcese and doesn't feel dated... Much. Though I suppose later directors taking cues from him being a major reason why this feels more contemporary than it perhaps is. There's a certain lax attitude to it, there's really no goal that the movie is going towards and makes it feel more like a lengthy episode of a (contemporary) tv-series (think... well, any of the organized crime-themed shows of today). But really, it's more like a more down-to-earth and 70s Goodfellas.

Death a Funeral (UK): Meh. Supposedly funny, but it was really contrived jokes and low brow humor. Don't think I laughed once.

Bonnie & Clyde: Dunway and Penn as the romanticized criminal duo. I'm not really sure what to say about this except that it was very underwhelming. Nothing about it really kept me glued to the screen. Things just happened and the characters were extremely annoying.

Badlands: This one was a double-feature with the aforementioned B&C on the national TV. Another film depicting a couple going on a crime spree for self-justified reasons and where - speculatively - the woman was controlling the man, but he committed all/most of the atrocities. Again a very dispassionate depiction, but so is the acting. The characters seem more like they are inside a shell, not caring what goes on in the world. You know it's all going to end badly, but you want to see where it all ends. Considering all the horrible things the man (Martin Sheen really looking like Charlie) does, it is funny how charismatic, charming and nice he is portrayed at the end. It's not a very gripping film per se, but it does keep you at its grasp through the lulling mayhem of the middle.

Robots: Silly romp. Didn't pay too much attention, but really rather simplistic and straightforward. Since it's directed at children, probably shouldn't pay so much attention to the faulty logic sometimes followed in these things.

Cast a Deadly Spell: An HBO film from the beginning of the 90s, lead character is H.P. Lovecraft. Takes place in the noir of the forties with magic being a commonplace thing in the world. Lovecraft is a private dick who gets caught in the world of Lovecraftian things. But it's all played for a lot of laughs and cheap effects, so the horror aspect isn't really there. David Warner is the old professor, but having recently played Baldur's Gate 2 again, I couldn't help but imagine him as Irenicus due to his voice acting being exactly the same on the film as in the game. Rather silly really.

The Next Three Days: A wife gets convicted for murder and the husband (Russel Crowe), having exhausted every legal way to get her off, starts planning an escape. Shortly into the movie he consults an escape artist (Liam Neeson in a bit part) and the artist tells him that if he wants to spring her, he'll have to be able to do terrible things on the run, be ready to abandon anything, even their kid. He plans, makes preparations, loses everything in his life for the escape. She tells him that she actually did it, but he doesn't believe her. He puts all his life and faith into his wife. At a pivotal point there are stupid decisions made and the film undermines all it has built for in terms of themes, even though it still poses some interesting questions regarding morality, priorities of life and the lengths one could, should go for the things that matter most.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: A coming of age film that's been getting a lot of good things said about it. While it is a nice depiction of a somewhat charming yet unorthodox way of life in the coast of Louisiana, I'm not sold. It is all rather cliché in terms of theme and plot. It hits the same spots as these kinds of films always do. The aurochs are impressive and a nice twist on the theme, but in the end they're just a cool sideshow.

Recount: About the Bush vs. Gore elections and the muddy circumstances in Florida. An alright, but unfortunately hollywoodisized depiction of the things happening down there. A bit skewed for the Democrats, but what would you expect really.

I wasn't impressed with him. I think actors get automatically revered the minute they go through a physical transformation for a role. I felt Matthew Fox was overacting and was a borderline caricature. It reminded me a lot of Stephen Lang's character in The Hard Way. Except The Hard Way is a 1991 comedy. Being over-the-top in that context worked. Here, in a supposedly dark film it didn't.

I appreciate how Fox trained for that part. It's really impressive. But the character was lame, and that,s also the fault of the writing as well as director Rob Cohen because it doesn't look like anything was directed. Not the actors, not anything else.

I'm withholding longer reviews in favor of saving the bulk of 'em for my big Best/Worst of 2012 post coming up in a few weeks, but...seriously, The Possession was bad. Really fuckin' bad. I rarely ever really wonder who the audience for a movie was, but I did here. Terrible generic, laughable horse shit.

I wasn't really referencing that. I think the first hour or so of the movie is awesome, really atmospheric and well-realized science fiction setting, but I could see the cracks. I saw the cracks where the movie wanted to go off the rails and really start toying with the whole mind-fucking subplot. They toy with that stuff in the beginning, like when his black co-worker is all, "you're still in the chair, you must shoot her to get out." That stuff is really awesome, but then the movie just goes, "oh no, he's really just this dude and there's nothing more interesting going on here even though we really wanted to go that route." That's the frustrating part. Is I can see the movie trying to do that, but it just plays it totally straight and the movie doesn't do anything special at all. And the end fight is hilarious. One reviewer put it perfectly: it's like some dude beating up his old dad.

*senses mention of A serbian film, thrashes angrily*

Ok so I've been sick from work all week, and I've really plowed into Netflix's instant movies. Here's what I've watched, going from best to worst.

Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury- This Kevin Sorbo movie is one of those where it's like intentionally a bad B-movie, with a documentary about the making of it mixed in. I went into this with pretty low expectations, but god damn did it make me laugh. A lot. There was lots of camp, lots of racism, and Kevin Sorbo just saying some shit I never thought I would hear from Hercules. The plot was retarded, and so were the short scenes with the "director" talking, the real good parts were the awfully insensitive dialogue during the actual movie. This movie isn't for everyone but if you're not easily offended give it a shot.

Red State- Not sure why I watched this, but I'm glad I did. A Kevin Smith action thriller that loosely parodies the Westboro Baptist Church, this movie was engrossing and had a lot of cool surprises plot-wise. John Goodman is always good, I can't remember a role I didn't enjoy him in. This movie gets a little heavy on the government conspiracy theories, but who am I to say it's inaccurate? Anyways it's a blast seeing all those fundies get shot.

Hard Target- Probably Jean-Claude van Damme's second best movie behind Blood Sport. I had seen this before, but a re-watch of this movie is always enjoyable. I guess this was John Woo's first movie or something, and the action scenes are definitely the product of a quality action director. It's about rich people paying to hunt poor veterans across New Orleans, with Lance Henrikson as the evil ringmaster. Needless to say Jean-Claude was a *hard target* for these hunters, and it's great fun watching him use his infinite ammo shotgun while wearing the fuck out of that righteous mullet.

Blood Games- This 1990 movie is about a female softball team fighting for their lives against redneck rapists who don't pay their bets. It's part of a wave of early 90's movies like this (Judgement Night comes to mind) where a group of friends fight for survival in a foreign environment, nature in this case. There was a legit shower scene and some cool deaths, the suspense was adequate and the only complaint I had was the cheesy montage of all the dead people at the end of the movie. The acting was a little sub-par but that obviously is not a big deal for me.

Iron Sky- Yeah, Nazis from the moon. I guess this was actually intended to be a comedy, and as such it really works. It not only lampoons Nazis in some ways I've not seen before, it also takes a good stab at racism in general, as well as Sarah Palin and USA/international relations. For a B-movie the CGI was excellent, and the space battle at the end was very entertaining.

Dark Side of the Moon- This horror movie was executed well in some spots, but the plot was entirely laughable. They find a way to tie the Bermuda Triangle in with the moon, and with the devil, and that's how the ship gets lost in space, and it's a big fucking mess. The main character at one point: "Computer, show me the triangle and remove all the graphics. Now give me the latitiude and longitude and remove all numerals other than 6. Oh my god... 666..." Oh and they're the 666th ship to get lost too. Oh my god! I think it was almost worth it to watch this once, I still haven't decided. Probably not. You get to see the chick from Robocop 2 topless.

Robotropolis- I had seen some other good movies before this about killer robots, like Death Machine. This movie had promise, but failed to deliver. A city run by robots goes haywire, and they start killing. The concepts were all tired, from the corporate mogul who made the robots and repents, to the news crew who puts themselves in danger to get a story. Another movie I won't be re-watching.

Lo- This ultra-low budget horror romance was not very funny and not very scary. It wasn't quite un-watchable but I'm not going to watch it again. The ritual to start the movie was kind of interesting, then it's all downhill. There needs to be more quality movies with demons as main characters.

The Terminators- This sucked even worse. Hundreds of identical human-looking artificials land on earth and try to take over. They are thwarted by a small-town sheriff who is actually a robot himself. SURPRISE! The T-5 robots were actually destroyed by unplugging a box on a wall that says "T-5 Robot Control." Yeah. Not sure what the makers of this movie were going for but they failed, nothing to see here that hasn't been done better in other movies.

Red State I enjoyed. The only thing that would've made it even better is if





You had a bad experience with it too?

I thought Red State sucked. Could've been a good premise, yeah, but it was just done so poorly...every plot element brought in was thrown out equally as fast, and that Michael Parks speech at the beginning that goes on for like 20 minutes of the movie or something? Awful. I get what it was trying to do but that didn't make me like it any better, personally.

I'm a serb so that film pissed me off for being shitty, for being created for bullshit pseudo-intellectual reasons, and for being a grotesquely stupid representation of serbian culture.

I guess I'm warming up towards seeing Zero Dark Thirty but after The Hurt Locker, Brothers, Body of Lies and The Kingdom (all borefests), I am quite disillusioned with that whole subgenre.

That eye-socket fucking scene was amazing, I must say. That movie is kind of hilarious. It didn't seem anywhere near as dark as people made it out to be. I mean yeah, it's demented in spots, but nothing that seems overtly... unwatchable. Except baby-fucking. Which is, yeah. But the version I saw chopped that scene out.

Went out of my way to watch The Avengers last night since people seemed to be frothing over it. It was just more dumb Marvel eye-candy with shitty acting and lame writing. Woohoooo

Finally got around to watching Audition the other day after hyping it up to myself for like eight years. It was a little underwhelming for me, but that's also because I already knew everything that was going to happen. If I'd wandered in blind, I'm almost sure it'd be a niche favorite for me. If you want to watch it, wait. Wait for somebody to start the movie for you before you even enter the room, the fucking poster gives away way too much of what makes it so effective.

I'm sorry but did you really expect something more than that? You can only blame yourself.

It was terrible. I vented my feelings towards that movie, the new Spider Man, and the general trend of super-hero movies as of late, quite a few pages back (like....12?) it's just the bullshit factory, where the heroes don't stand for anything, the stories are about nothing (generic "good vs. evil" is not a story...and making it "gritty" doesn't help), and the entire experience just takes away from actual heroism...

Don't expect to watch a Cronenberg or Haneke when you watch a superhero movie like The Avengers, it's an action dumb flick and nothing else and complaining about it is very useless, I enjoyed it for what it is like I enjoy drinking cheap beer and fast food.

Yeah, expecting Marvel's Avengers to have Terms of Endearment substance is just..

Not complaining that the Avengers itself is lacking substance, rather that superhero movies have all become really fucking terrible, and have no actual heroic substance, everything is just "we're good, they're bad" - hell even in Batman, which is supposed to be "darker and edgier and morally grey" ends up not being the latter.

It's kinda lame, is all. I just want them to be like comic books, probably a bad thing to want out of comic book movies...

Sorry Frog, but 'Toine is right. Yeah you can go on a rant about the general dumbing down of movies and mainstream culture, but it's happening baby. There will always be deeper and better made flicks, but blockbusters like this ain't them. And just look at how much money it made.

Marvel's Avengers is awesome. I need to buy that Blu-Ray asap.

Just because it's a superhero flick doesn't mean it has to suck balls. It could at least have decent writing and acting that's worth two shits. Or an interesting premise, imaginative characters, innovative concepts, etc. You know...something. I primarily watched it because people seemed to be saying that it was like some sort of creme de la creme of superhero cinema and I wanted to see what that could even mean, if anything. Batman movies are definitely better but still nothing to get hard over.

I remember the casual conversation about bringing some of that good old sweet tea between the Michael Parks character and the daughter during the shootout as being particularly dumb.

Is it possible you have unrealistic expectations? Not attacking you but trying to understand.

Like, when you say "superhero movies have all become really fucking terrible"... compared to when exactly? Every live-action representation of superheroes before something like 1999, on TV or in movies, has irredeemably sucked balls. They were either pure shit or just campy stuff. It just wasn't viable at all. The stuff that came closest was the Superman and Batman movies in the 80s and 90s... and that just doesn't cut it, IMO.

It's only around the turn of the new millennium (technology helping) that the tools are there to even make worthwhile attempts. It's such a recent phenomenon that cinema has not caught up to that fact because superhero movies are still listed in "action", "fantasy" or "sci-fi". Superhero universes have their own idiosyncrasies and on website such as imdb, should probably be listed as their own thing.

Also, I don't understand your other comment. On one hand, it seems you want more mature movies with grey areas, on the other hand, you wish it was like the comics. Well, all these popular superhero franchises of today draw when a huge body of work, and sometimes it was morally grey (particularly in the 90s) but overall, they became thriving franchises precisely because they were lighthearted fun with little moral ambivalence. There's been a LOT of "we're good, they're bad" stuff in those comics I can assure you. It's probably why they survived so well

I think the biggest problem some people have with comic adaptation movies is that people have built their own idealized versions of Batman, or Spider-man, Hulk, etc... based on a selective bibliography. That's really cool, but you can't really expect directors and writers to be inspired by the same selection, nor can they sum up a rich history of comic books into 2-hour films.