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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It’s a kid reviewer. Cut him some slack. He hasn’t seen good movies yet.
I am with you on this, getting this false cause and effect backward is slightly more annoying one way than the other, though both are insufferable.
Bad - “I am intelligent so I can be an asshole”
Worse - “I am an asshole so I must be intelligent”
However, I am still using these excuses whenever anyone calls me out on being an asshole.
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Neither The Taking of Pelham One Two Three nor Unstoppable take place entirely on a train.
When I chat with one particular friend of mine we always comment that we both know who the smartest man in the room is, but we choose not to be so gauche as to say who it is out loud. It is our convenient fiction.
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No. This is worse. At least in theory, the person should know better.
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A co-worker once told me (seemingly completely out of the blue, I had no idea what brought this on), “You’re a real asshole.”
I responded by saying, “Finally, I have achieved authenticity!”
This didn’t really help the situation…
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I’ve defended some changes Jackson made to the LOTR, particularly giving Arwen an active role. I didn’t like how Legolas was amplified to an absurd degree, and Gimli reduced to comic relief – the impression we get in the novels is that they’re supposed to be perfectly equal and foils to one another. But on the whole, I thought the LOTR movies were excellent, meeting fan expectations while judiciously adapting the story.
The Hobbit movies, by contrast, I found to be utterly awful. I’ve only seen the first two, but Desolation of Smaug was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Honestly, Tolkien was already over-the-top at many points in the original story, but Jackson takes it to nearly Dragonball-Z absurdities, only without being funny.
I’ve seen a lot of movies, and by no means would I say that the Hobbit films are the worst things I’ve ever seen. At their worst, they’re still a fun spectacle, beautifully shot, in gorgeous surroundings with top-notch effects. But if you’re a Tolkein fan, or enjoyed the bittersweet quiet storytelling of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, there’s stuff in the final Hobbit film that will make anyone cringe:
- Alfie, the assistant to the Master of Laketown, getting extended scenes of just being a douche to people and capering around like Snidely Whiplash
- Tauriel’s endless scenes of mooning over Kili
- Legolas (who could nearly qualify as the main character) Jedi-leaping and climbing rocks falling in mid-air
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