A few films recently watched.

I would also recommend Lake Mungo, very understated but effective, great acting too.

  On 8/9/2012 at 12:51 PM, Terpentintollwut said:

However, I stumbled upon a relatively unknown gem last night - an Australian 2008 thriller/ghost/suspense type film called "Lake Mungo"

 

 

The film is shot like a documentary, not Blair Witch style but interview-style with a family retelling the events after they had happened. It doesn't take away from the suspense though and it's beautifully shot at times. This is the first film that gave me the chills since Session 9 (which I first watched over three years ago)

 

Oh, one interesting fact about the film: It features music by Fernando Corona aka Murcof pretty much all the time and in a lot of scenes, mostly material from Remambranza, which is used quite appropriately. Nice surprise for me.

Sold.

Hope you'll like it, don't go in expecting too much after what I wrote (just like I did, I didn't expect anything) so you can only be positively surprised!

@topic: just got back from seeing Prometheus (3D ... ) in cinema with the lady ... more on that tomorrow or some other time.

The Way, around 6/10.

Didn't really do anything wrong, but not too much spectacular either. A bit of humour, a bit of tragedy, a bit of landscape.

Have to add that I had to watch the dubbed version though, a lot may have gotten lost.

  On 8/9/2012 at 7:18 PM, Atop said:

looks like Naked Lunch, dood

Lake fucking Mungo....

Battleship - pretty cool six pack of beer/10 lol at ironic song at the end credit for the wtf.

  On 8/10/2012 at 2:08 AM, lumpenprol said:

looks like Naked Lunch, dood

yeah them's mugwumps.

^ was that an outtake scene? I don't remember anything like that.

I saw Lake Mungo about a year ago , even thinking about it now still creeps me out. Great film.

Prometheus

I went in being quite optimistic, but in the end, I'm gonna have to say: Meh. Ridley Scott went down the James Cameron road as I had feared deep down.

Sometimes I wonder if blockbuster-movies back then were only good because director's didn't have the money and technology to make them shit.

Be warned, spoilers ahead, but I won't put them in spoiler tags as they aren't one-word-spoilers. You should only be reading this after watching the film.

So the film starts out with these great shots of some spooky looking planet surface and the 3D actually looks good for once, although I thought about how exactly the filmmakers thought it would make sense to have an entire planet to be a 3D floating ball in front of a skybox - how would a human being with eyes that are like 5 cm apart receive a different image for each eye of an entire planet? Ever looked at the moon and saw a particular star formation behind it only with your right eye? But anyway ... it's 3D after all, so they were going to use the effect where they could, which is alright I guess. But the point I knew the film wasn't gonna be the real deal was only about 2 minutes in, when the creature standing atop the waterfall showed up and hence revealed one of the biggest mistakes today's big directors love to make: Computer generated humanoids.

Don't get me wrong, I like CGI when it's done subtly, or used in a way to achieve something that couldn't have been done otherwise but can't be spotted... it's a great tool that offers new possibilities to filmmakers. I have no problem with a spaceship being a 3D animation, it's not 1979 anymore after all ... But a humanoid creature with emotions we are supposed to read and with facial features we are supposed to relate to is pretty much the worst thing you could do to a movie - Nobody cares about fake rendered emotions of a creature that obviously never existed in the real world, no matter how advanced the render-technology is. Why do you think Avatar was just a pile of shit (besides the fact that it was a lame-ass rip-off with a bullshit storyline) - There's some blue big things with cat eyes that live in harmony with nature on some planet? Well, they're not real, so who cares, bomb that shit! If these Avatar guys had been played by actors, it may have taken a totally different turn. When I'm playing a videogame or watching an animation-film, I know I am dealing with something that has a certain visual style and I can care about CGI creatures. Hell, James in Silent Hill 2 brought me close to tears and he was nothing but a few pixels! But when I know I'm watching a movie that has real people in it and is set in my dimension where things look the way they do, an animated creature will always stick out like 2D-cartoon-characters in films like Roger Rabbit or Space Jam. Actually, those were even better because they weren't even trying to fool me! Not to mention the other creatures, that worm-thing (I see what you were trying to do there, artwork-team - H.R. Giger used sexual imagery in his original creations, so you tried to adapt the idea and went straight out and made something that is both a dick and a vagina ), it all moves so smoothly and ideally, which is fine for a graphics show-off, but not a something that wants to scare somebody. The original Alien had a tall African man in it and was made from plastic bags and it still haunts my dreams to this day!

So enough about that. I thought it was a letdown to explain the space jockey. Space jockey was creepy because you didn't know where he came from, where he was headed, what he was doing. Now he's just a helmet. Here goes my fantasies. But okay, they headed out to explain the background story behind Alien, so they had to come up with something (wasn't space jockey like 4-5 meters tall in the original Alien...?). But he brings me to big mistake no.2 - when you have your main characters explore an ancient tomb at the end of the universe, from a suspense-building-perspective, how on earth (or not earth) does it make sense to have holograms running around before you show the creature? I felt like ... oh look, now I don't need to imagine the things that went on here but I get shown a lite-version of what might happen later on. How nice of you, Mr.Scott, I would have gotten creepy ideas otherwise, but this way, I can focus on my popcorn, thanks!

Surprise: The actors were good! The female lead (was she the lady from the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?) was simply adorable and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her puke in her first shot. But apart from that, she's a good actress. So his Fassbender and so is the Asian guy who's also on a space mission in Danny Boyle's Sunshine. If only Mr.Scott would have allowed them to make use of their talents. Alright, the android role couldn't really have been done any better. But the rest could, also they could have been characterized a little more. Out of all characters, I only really cared about the one who said he was a Geologist, because I knew he was a Geologist. That gave him some character. Why exactly he became a jumping space monkey later on, I don't know. Didn't his helmet just melt from the acid? Did that give him superpowers? Maybe there was a whole other type of infection/species that does that sorta thing to people that wasn't explained. Talking about the characters, I wonder how exactly the team of that mission was chosen if, after two years of hypersleep, they first hear about what they're gonna do and why in such a high profile mission, there's room for a rebellious teenage-type person like the Geologist who goes in with a mindset of "But moo-oom, I don't wanna clean room!". The old man character with his old man mask reminded me of Biff from Back To The Future when he's all old and wrinkly. It makes sense there, because it had to be the same actor, but here? Did the budget not cover for an actor that was actually old? Damn, it could have been Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad with wheelchair and bell and everything! I also positively recall the old man in "Relic", the scene in which he finally meets the creature the studied half his life, knowing it will kill him, but he stares at it with fascination in his final moments ... that was emotional right there. But instead we got Biff. And Biff didn't even seem to be all that amazed when meeting his maker. Thinking about it, it does kinda make sense for Biff to be involved in this type of stuff. Another thing ... if this is a quasi-prequel to Alien ... were there no records of an exploration crew going to that particular planet (or moon)? Why was the crew of the Nostromo not familiar with anything ... the cute Swedish lady could have been so nice and send out a warning, too. But then again, I think I shouldn't be mixing up these two movies too much anyways.

Prometheus could have been good, real good even. The landscapes were beautifully shot/rendered, some of the ideas were nice, the actors were good ... the artwork I personally didn't think fit the Alien universe as it reminded me more of Resident Evil than of Giger, but that's just my taste ... but in the end, the film was a waste of potential, like most modern films that make it to the cinema. An entertaining waste of potential nonetheless! But relying on CGI, film score and trickery to do the job for you is a temptation no big-name director seems to be able to resist these days.

I feel this text needs to end and I wanna get out out and do stuff. One last thing I want to write about is the ending. I got a feeling in the original version, everyone died, but the studio or whatever didn't want to go through with it, so somebody came up with the idea of there being several ships and improvised the "happy" ending and the sexy redhead lady and her robot-head fly away on an insect-shaped spaceship ... wait a minute, where have I heard that before?

  On 8/10/2012 at 2:49 PM, RadarJammer said:

^ was that an outtake scene? I don't remember anything like that.

me neither when i think about it but i haven't seen it for ages... i just recognised the mugwumps.

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:39 PM, Terpentintollwut said:

I feel this text needs to end and I wanna get out out and do stuff. One last thing I want to write about is the ending. I got a feeling in the original version, everyone died, but the studio or whatever didn't want to go through with it, so somebody came up with the idea of there being several ships and improvised the "happy" ending and the sexy redhead lady and her robot-head fly away on an insect-shaped spaceship ... wait a minute, where have I heard that before?

 

 

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mugwump jism

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:40 PM, keltoi said:

  On 8/10/2012 at 2:49 PM, RadarJammer said:

^ was that an outtake scene? I don't remember anything like that.

 

me neither when i think about it but i haven't seen it for ages... i just recognised the mugwumps.

Yeah, that is the end scene.

I am thinking most people do not make it all of the way through Naked Lunch,

the book or the film.

This could be why it looks unfamiliar.

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:52 PM, RadarJammer said:

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:39 PM, Terpentintollwut said:

I feel this text needs to end and I wanna get out out and do stuff. One last thing I want to write about is the ending. I got a feeling in the original version, everyone died, but the studio or whatever didn't want to go through with it, so somebody came up with the idea of there being several ships and improvised the "happy" ending and the sexy redhead lady and her robot-head fly away on an insect-shaped spaceship ... wait a minute, where have I heard that before?

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

lol

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:39 PM, Terpentintollwut said:

Prometheus

 

I went in being quite optimistic, but in the end, I'm gonna have to say: Meh. Ridley Scott went down the James Cameron road as I had feared deep down.

Sometimes I wonder if blockbuster-movies back then were only good because director's didn't have the money and technology to make them shit.

 

 

Prometheus was not very good, but I don't see what the similarity to James Cameron is. Let's just get one thing straight here, James Cameron is a genius and I really don't think I have to explain why. Look at his resume for gods sake. Even if you don't like his films you have to respect his work ethic, ingenuity, and the enormous chances he takes getting his projects off the ground. Also, Avatar is like the prototype for blockbusters that nobody else has taken the time to put their own spin on. Yes, the story is formulaic but you really can not reinvent the wheel when you're making the most expensive movie of all time. Why does no one understand this? And to top it all off, it's not as shallow as Prometheus was, which I never would have expected in a million years. The problem with Prometheus is that it feigned intelligence but was just as dumb as your average teen slasher movie.

  On 8/10/2012 at 7:11 PM, Atop said:

  On 8/10/2012 at 5:40 PM, keltoi said:

  On 8/10/2012 at 2:49 PM, RadarJammer said:

^ was that an outtake scene? I don't remember anything like that.

 

me neither when i think about it but i haven't seen it for ages... i just recognised the mugwumps.

 

Yeah, that is the end scene.

 

I am thinking most people do not make it all of the way through Naked Lunch,

 

the book or the film.

 

This could be why it looks unfamiliar.

Prob read the book 3 times and seen film 2 but loooong time ago. Shit memory.

  On 8/10/2012 at 9:36 PM, Candiru said:

The problem with Prometheus is that it feigned intelligence but was just as dumb as your average teen slasher movie.

spot on

problem with all the movies nowadays...

and movie critics

the only problem with movie critics is that abortion is not allowed...