General Movie Discussion 3.0

Like as far as "Oh I think I heard about that, maybe." movies of 2014 go, The Guest is the best. Do yourself a favor and rent/download it without watching any trailers or reading any reviews. It's a fun ride saturated in style, often feeling like a homage to certain genre.

Interstellar>

I actually LOVED American Sniper, unlike some people.

Jus gotta throw this out there...I personally think The Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King is the Greatest Movie ever made. I consider the trilogy the best trilogy ever made. It has everything I love about movies: terrific acting, a deep plot and full of awesome morals to learn about, the best visual effects ever put to screen, incredible scores that I put up there as among the best ever made, awesome directing and three of the best battle sequences ever made.

Yeah...I am a big Middle Earth Fan. lol

What's a classic movie everyone should see?

Nightcrawler was amazing. It did an incredible job capturing the vibe and picturing the characters. It build up perfectly and kept me entertained, but most of all interested throughout. I recommend it dearly

Shooting my next short film this summer. It's about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and how mainstream media can condition an entire populace into thinking a certain narrative. Going to shoot the Iraq scenes in Morocco:

@TM22 thats awesome, hope it goes well

Watched Old Boy a little while ago. I'm not sure I'd call it good but at the least it's an entertaining film with some twists.

I'm liking birdman, it just seems a little artsy for me, watching the rest of it tonight

Jupiter Ascending was good and succeeded at what it set out to do, weak points were when it tried to do things it didn't want to do but had to (attempts to invoke pathos). Jarring tone shifts suggest a lot was left on the cutting room floor. Lots of threads that suggest a response to the narcissist's fantasy playing out in The Matix. Really hoping for a director's cut.

 

The most fair and insightful review I've read:

Almost two decades ago, Warner Bros took a chance on The Wachowskis; more specifically on an insanely ambitious, bizarre, high-concept sci-fi pitch called The Matrix that turned out to be one of the biggest game-changing blockbusters of all time. Since then, "high-concept" pitches have been the siblings stock in trade; and while they've never exactly landed a Matrix-sized smash since then, what they've offered has been consistentlybold, brave, brilliant and BIG.

Jupiter Ascending is their latest offering in that vein, a big-budget, galactic-scale space opera that's finally coming out after a six month delay. All that time, I've been anxious to see what these mad geniuses have come up with this time; and having now finally seen it... I'm still anxious to see it.

What I mean is that its extremely clear that - regardless of why it took six extra months of work - the film now playing as Jupiter Ascending does not represent the whole of what it was intended to be.

What happened isn't clear, but whether by mandate of the studio or by resigned decision of the filmmakers, it feels very much like something that's been mercilessly trimmed down from a film of big ideas and meticulous worldbuilding to mainly focus on the action setpieces. It's gorgeous looking, inventive and fun in its current form; but one can't shake the sense that we were meant to have - and are being denied - something more in every respect.

The premise finds Mila Kunis' Jupiter Jones as the adult child of a large Russian immigrant family who is discovered to be the exact genetic reincarnation of, effectively, the Queen of The Universe; which entitles her to leadership of a galaxy-spanning industrial empire that involves (among other things) ownership of Earth and thousands of other, similar "primitive" planets. The three feuding children of the deceased queen, in no mood to lose portions of their inheritance, all have separate plans to strip Jupiter of her birthright by treachery; which leads to her being protected by Channing Tatum as a human/wolf hybrid space-soldier named Caine.

The "big idea" at play this time - apart from the human-animal hybrids, robots, rocket-boots and other sci-fi ephemera tossed into the stew - is that our space-lord big-bads here called "Abrasax Industries" are effectively God... and God is a galaxy-scale industrial farming outfit. Abrasax is in the business of "seeding" habitable worlds like Earth with human populations, which they let grow to the point of overpopulation and then wipe them out in order to harvest biological material used as life-extending biotech currency among more celestially-aware worlds - and with Earth teetering on the brink of unsustainability as it is, Jupiter finds herself in position to possibly prevent her homeworld's culling.

And, yeah... you'd be right to assume that this sounds very much like a deliberate updating of the Matrix premise, once again involving an otherwise ordinary person discovering that Earth and everyone on it are just an unwitting supply of clueless, ready-to-slaughter cattle except for themselves who is actually unique and destined for glory and awesomeness; the difference being that this time these revelations are filtered through the viewpoint of a mostly well-adjusted (if jaded) grownup rather than an angsty self-involved teenager: Unlike Neo, who had already always suspected that he was a special-snowflake surrounded by mindless sheep who didn't know or care that they were just cogs in The Machine and couldn't wait to be told exactly how and why he'd manifest as the most important and meaningful person on Earth... Jupiter has no pretense to exceptionalism or interest in royalty and mainly wants to protect her family from planned extinction.

The other difference is that action scenes are clearly of secondary concern: There are fistfights and gunfights and chases, and they feel pushed to the foreground in this version, but they're perfunctory: The real interest was clearly in building an original universe that owes a heavy debt to everything from the 80s FLASH GORDON toBRAZIL to FUTURAMA and digging into a broad metaphor for industrial capitalism as a (literally) dehumanizing consumptive machine... but, like I said before, it feels like the film released has flipped those priorities in reverse...

...which means we get action beats that are cool and pretty but not especially involving breaking up dramatic, comedic and even occasionally satirical scenes that feel gutted of their intended weight and stripped from their connective tissue. There's an extended riff on bureaucratic absurdity that's a genuine delight but doesn't seem to fit with anything else anywhere else in the film, tonally. Jupiter's family are meant to be core to our understanding of her personality and decision-making but we barely spend enough time with them for them to be more than broad sitcom caricatures. Everyone from Jupiter to Caine seems to get onboard with big reveals, character-revelations and even major double-crosses way too quickly.

This is best illustrated by the film's confounding story-structure, wherein Jupiter is introduced to an Abraxas sibling, taken on a brief tour of their side of the operation, almost tricked or forced into signing some kind of bad contract only to be rescued by Caine at the last possible moment on three separate occasions, one right after the other. The repetition is too blatant not to have been intentional, perhaps part of a rhyming set of sequences meant to represent the gradual but deliberate reveal of both narrative and message in a tone-poem sort of way... but without any meat on the bones of the movie, none of it really sticks.

In the end, Jupiter Ascending just doesn't work... and it's the hardest kind of "doesn't work" to acknowledge because so much thought and attention went into it, even as something clearly went wrong along the way. You can't say it doesn't try, but sometimes effort just isn't enough.

Reviews of Jupiter Ascending, including the one davo posted, are making me sad in my pants.

Still seeing it anyways.

Ive never watched the Dune that got made cuz well.. always heard it was shit but since seeing jodorowsky's Dune I have been curious to what its like. Is it worth fucking with my book-world for? / interesting or good in any way?