I haven’t seen either movie, but, judging by the commercials, I would have pegged “Planes” as being everything that sucks about movies these days, over Elysium.
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That’s just stupid. It’s just amazing that people consistently miss the point of sarcasm.
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My favorite is “Adamantly opposes copyright extension and despises aggressively sanitized/inoffensive culture, but fawns over anything made by Disney.”
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I don’t have any problem with violence in movies, or even really with revenge as a theme, but what really bugs me is the “hero doesn’t kill the villain, villain dies anyway” trope. At its worst, the hero has the villain at his mercy, delivers an ostentatious line/speech about being too good to kill him, and then the villain attempts to stab the hero in the back and promptly trips into the acid pit/loses his grip on the rope/falls on his own sword/whatever. The moral seems to be (a) killing is wrong and (b) bad guys deserve death, which is spectacularly incoherent and drives me up a wall. Bonus points if the hero has massacred his way through 500 workaday mooks on the way here before deciding that only the villain needs to be spared to achieve the moral high ground.
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The racing snail movie looks terrible to me too. The one that really bugged me was the constant barrage of ads for Mars Needs Moms.
Yeah, I liked “Pacific Rim” too – people who haven’t seen it may lump it in with “Transformers” and the like, but it is far more intelligently done. The only thing that was a bit weak were the comic relief characters like the black marketeer and the feuding “odd couple” scientists.
Ahh, now I remember what this reminds me of:Ebert’s review of The Raid: Redemption from last year.
There’s obviously an audience for the film, probably a large one. They are content, even eager, to sit in a theater and watch one action figure after another pound and blast one another to death. They require no dialogue, no plot, no characters, no humanity. Have you noticed how cats and dogs will look at a TV screen on which there are things jumping around? It is to that level of the brain’s reptilian complex that the film appeals.I wonder if this is one of those things where we can find a similar quote from a prominent critic every year going clear back to Scarface in 1932.
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I’m still interested in seeing Elysium, though I suspect I’ll probably end up agreeing with Colin Berry on many of his points. I loved District 9 and I liked what Blomkamp was doing with his Halo shorts while that movie was still a looming prospect, and honestly I’m fully aware that being a dyed-in-the-wool genre fan almost requires me to be a Pollyannaish optimist to even bother seeing anything at all in theaters. You really have to enjoy the hell out of rare triumphs like Attack The Block in order to roll the dice and sit through the endless stream of craptastic (though occasionally blockbuster hit) creative failures.
But I’ve seen this happen before. Neil Marshall wrote and directed Dog Soldiers, which for my money is the single greatest werewolf movie in the history of cinema. He followed that up with The Descent, which is nearly as good. Both those movies were made for around $5 million each.
Well, then he made Doomsday for around $30 million. And even though I, the easiest audience in my neighborhood, kinda enjoyed the movie, it was still undeniably dumb as a bag of hammers. It was meant to be derivative, sort of an homage to films like 28 Days Later and Escape From New York and the Mad Max movies. As Marshall himself put it,
Right from the start, I wanted my film to be an homage to these sorts
of movies, and deliberately so. I wanted to make a movie for a new
generation of audience that hadn’t seen those movies in the
cinema—hadn’t seen them at all maybe—and to give them the same thrill
that I got from watching them.
So I wasn’t expecting it to be particularly original or mindblowingly inventive. But it would have been nice if a bit more thought had gone into it. Unsurprisingly, it tanked. I dunno if Rogue Pictures was to blame. They were responsible for Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, so at least they allowed Edgar Wright to do the job he wanted to do. But then again, they also released Balls of Fury and last winter’s critical triumph Movie 43 (which the Chicago Sun-Times dubbed “the Citizen Kane of awful”), so Pixar they ain’t.
Anyway, I’ve seen low-budget filmmakers get creatively paralyzed when faced with a big budget and ballooned expectations. Sam Raimi and James “Piranha 2” Cameron handled the transition with relative aplomb, but if Blomkamp has made something woefully conventional this time, that’ll be a disappointment. I’m just another old guy, but I too am kinda tired of seeing the same old shit regurgitated at a slightly higher bitrate on today’s screens. I enjoyed Pacific Rim well enough (and my wife, generally a classy lady who prefers realistic character dramas akin to We Need To Talk About Kevin as well as the addiction/dysfunction dramas that I generally call “the cinema of squalor,” loved Pacific Rim with a squealing joy I’ve not seen her display for any movie since Annie came out when she was ten), though I had to groan at a couple of the dustier old cliches (like the way Raleigh had to crawl his way to Gipsy Danger’s nuclear overload “self-destruct” switch when the remote switch failed). For the most part, I thought Pacific Rim turned out a lot better than any Giant Robot movie had any right to. Really, del Toro has a talent for making things cool and amazing and eye-popping without resorting to making them incredibly dumb or incoherent. The man does not waste his opportunities with budgets big or small.
I really wish that talent weren’t so rare.
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a movie can still be a great movie and not pass that test. It's just not AS great a movie because it doesn't.
There’s plenty of movies that couldn’t be made greater by manipulating it to pass the Bechdel test for the simple reason that movies without women fail the test by definition. And there are plenty of situations where it would be implausible to have women: films set in the trenches of WWI, or in a male prison, or in a catholic monastery, to give some obvious examples.
True enough, I didn’t state my case quite precisely enough there.
The Iron Giant?
I think it was renamed in the US so they didn’t have legal problems with Marvel. Ted Hughes’ book was called The Iron Man (I had to check - that’s why my comment was edited!).
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I really liked that line, too. It confirmed for me that this reviewer makes a living on knocking over cliches, too.
There is no such thing as GMO popcorn. Popcorn is an entirely different seed from what we generally refer to as corn, and there is no fertilization potential between the two. It’s a sterile relationship, just like the one between the reviewer and his audience. I’ll take my chances with Elysium, moreso having muddled through this review.
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I read the review of the film Elysium entitled ‘Elysium: everything that sucks about movies these days’ and, I have to be honest, I found the entire review to be incredibly bitter in tone. It felt as though I were reading something written by an author fueled, in some perverse manner, by the frustrations of his own unrealized artistic ambitions. It was apparent that he was less concerned with reviewing the film on its own merit than he was about making a grand social statement built upon the decline of film-as-high-art at the hands of the corporate studio system. And, while the author may have a valid point regarding the damage done to film-as-art by the need to generate profit, I also feel he should probably consider shutting the fuck up about that and just sticking to a review of the film Elysium. If I wanted to read a review about the ills of society through the lens of blockbuster motion-pictures, then I would probably do so by looking elsewhere. Now, as the author of the review goes on to point out that he is not in the target demographic of the film, I can only infer, based on how much of a pretentious douche he appears to be as communicated by his own writing, that he is, quite possibly, outside the target demographic of any film not directed by an art-house auteur who’s name is familiar only to a small handful of people, who only works on micro-budget films and vociferously shuns all things ‘Hollywood’ in the name of artistic integrity. I might suggest, were I given any sort of authority on the matter, that ‘Elysium: everything that sucks about movies these days’ itself be held up as proof of the decline of Western Civilization in that we are surely headed toward a societal breakdown if the author of said review is being paid for the reviews he has been tasked with writing.
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So predictable that people who like this sort of movie can’t handle someone suggesting that it sucks.
My mistake! Carry on! ; )
So because popcorn isn’t “corn,” it’s therefore not GMO?
While this review won’t stop me seeing the film, I do agree that’s there a dearth of quality, high-budget sci-fi cinema out there. Will Smith and Son had a go with After Earth (snore), then came Specific Rim- er, Pacific Rim… Monsters… Smash!
But it seems to me that film producers are so afraid at taking risks they’d prefer stick to formulaic and cliché-ridden plots than go looking for ideas in the tons of sci-fi lit out there.
Ender’s Game might surprise us though. Let’s hope so. I won’t be reading this author’s review however. Ee already have an idea of the baggage he’s bringing into the cinema.
Well, I’m feeling a bit encouraged about Elysium today. I was listening to Filmweek on AirTalk on my local NPR affiliate, a weekly film-review roundtable that this week included critics Tim Cogshell, Henry Sheehan, and Charles Solomon as well as host Larry Mantle. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear what these guys had to say about Elysium. The consensus seemed to be that Blomkamp has a habit of presenting characters and situations in a surprisingly sensitive and humane way… well, that’s not the right way to put it. Essentially, though the body-count is pretty high in Elysium, you are made to actually care about the deaths. He puts a real human touch on the characters, no matter how evil or minor, so they’re not just pixels in another enormous CGI explosion. This was one of the things I liked best about District 9, the fact that a science fiction movie can still have brains and heart.
The broadcast isn’t archived online yet (maybe it will be later today, I don’t know their schedule for that), so I don’t think you can listen to it yet, but it’ll eventually be here: http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/#archive
I’m looking forward to this movie.
Try Cloud Atlas. It was fucking amazing, and no one went to see it.
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