A nerd’s 12 best and worst films from 2014

Sorry - good point - altered post to be less spoily.

I have more than one hobby.

When did you get hired by the ATF?

Guardians of the Galaxy can. Marvel’s adaptation of the quirky space-travelling superhero comic is a clusterbudget of a movie, with a freak show of a cast, ranging from Chris Pratt (of Parks and Recreation) and pro wrestler Dave Bautista to Vin Diesel, John C. Reilly, and Benicio del Toro

Zoe Saldana was part of the “freak show” of a cast. C’mon, let’s not forget Zoe.

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Because {spoiler}

Do you suppose you could leave some details out for those who have yet to see the movie?

Do you just want to say you disliked it? You did that. Is it your intent to wreck something for others, just because your taste is different? that’s what you’re on the verge of.

 

I know! it failed!

test

See!

Pretty much agree with every word except for Guardians, which, though perhaps predictable, I found delightful from beginning to end.
And now I have to find and watch Under The Skin because I can not resist Scarlett no matter what garbage she is in.

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I did like the movie. That aspect of it took me out of it and nearly killed it for me, though. The fact that the movie actually had something to say brought me back in. So I guess we mostly agree.

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Great Post you really captured the wierdness and wonderful filmwise 2014.
Maybe you did not gush over Intstellar enough!

Off topic, but I’ll reply. Given the reaction to my comment, I wondered the same thing. I think my vitriol was from Overton shift after visiting a defunct troll site yesterday which I usually limit to Fridays only. Also the only movie I watched this year in theater was LOTR, sigh. Which I had to see out of diligence for understanding the genre. I would probably watch the alien doppleganger Natural Instinct thing but it seems too scary.

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Lucy: not as good a Nikita…

I think it’s more that your posts on this thread, while fascinating, are chock-full of inscrutable phrases, like randomly referring to Janis Joplin as “refuse” while talking about computer graphics, explaining your dislike of the movies on this list as “Overton shift”, or mentioning a mysterious alien movie called “Natural Instinct”. It’s also a little weird that you’ve decided that all of these movies on the list “suck” even though you admit to not having seen many of them.

Watching the trailer for The Imitation Game, all I kept thinking was, "Why does every movie about genius lately seem to want everyone to be Doctor Gregory House? I fear a generation of people are growing up to think that being an asshole is synonymous with being intelligent. I do recommend A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines as a good fictionalized account of him as an alternative.

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Dude… you mentioned the… P… p… p… p-word…

By Natural Instinct I was referring to Under the Skin.

I’m skitzo by the way.

I should have looked up the title. Sharon Stone movie Basic Instinct. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103772/

I’m waiting for the Tolkien-only fan edit. Hopefully I won’t have to do it myself.

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I came across this suggestion for how to edit the movies down to a single approximately two-hour version. (Not fully “Tolkien-only”, in that it cuts some Tolkien-derived stuff and leaves in other Jackson-created stuff, but an attempt at least.) I’d be curious to see if someone could actually do it and if it would work still be coherent, without too many obvious cuts and splices

With you there until the end. I never much liked any of those songs in the 70s, and don’t care much for them now. I was waiting for this amazing wash of nostalgia I’d been told I would experience due to the soundtrack, and it never came.

But yeah, I didn’t dislike the film but I was checking my watch a lot, wondering when it got interesting. Pro tip: If your big climactic thing at the end involves a guy getting his ship back, it might be good to spend some portion of the movie beforehand establishing his affection for his ship. I felt like much of the film was the last 3rd of resolution around various plot points that had never adequately been set up, and I was just supposed to… retroactively confabulate them or something?

Implausible action sequences make us doubt the most basic physics of Jackson’s world.

That’s putting it lightly.

The problem with making your baddies so improbably fierce - sheets of pot metal armor actually EMBEDDED IN THEIR FLESH! machete-wielding killing machines as far as the eye can see! - is that it becomes so incredibly absurd that all the “good guys” aren’t wiped out within moments that I can’t actually enjoy the film. Either the orcs in that film are even worse with their aim than Stormtroopers, or every single human, dwarf, and elf should be suffering compound fractures and crushed skulls if the orcs get anywhere within arms reach of them.

The un-armored Erebor dwarves in particular - is it just me, or does it seem strange to have a “dwarves raid the ancient armory, dwarves show off the bad-ass armor of their forebears” scene, right before they all apparently say “no, just kidding!” and go into battle wearing the same clothes they’ve worn the whole film?

And somebody tell Thranduin and Dain to put on some bloody helmets (the humans too - even a pot on the head would be better.)

Also: DROP BEARS.

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God, yes.

And finally, what about teamwork? The best problem-solving comes from
smart people working in a team, not from a brilliant dude and his
sidekicks. Science relies on lots of trial and error, not on intutition
and flashes of brilliance, and it’s nice to see that reflected
occasionally in our pop culture. I’d like to see smart people bouncing
ideas off each other, instead of just one smart person dominating the
conversation. Just every once in a while, it would be a nice change.

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