Movies (and occasionally face slaps) (Part 1)

Arts & Entertainment
10192

That’s one of my favorite movies!!! And it’s just so obv in hindsight why it’s so good. Tony Gilroy doesn’t miss.

image

Hard to believe Charlize Theron was THAT young when she was just starting out with this movie.

The movie, believe it or not, was in developmental hell until the OJ trial reinvigorated public interest in trial-based dramas.

Can you believe Keanu Reeves passed up Speed 2 so he could be in Devil’s Advocate lol that man had a sixth sense.

I begged my professor in film history to let me do a presentation on it linking the book and film adaptation with a deep dive into Paradise Lost, but he shook his head until I agreed to do the Coen brothers and No Country for Old Men instead lol

1 Like
10193
10194

Yeah I can totally believe he passed on Speed 2 after the Bill & Ted sequel plus he was getting to star alongside Al Pacino. Actually seems like an obvious choice based on his career at that point.

1 Like
10195

Long and good write up of Barbie

1 Like
10196

Read an interview today where Nolan says Oppenheimer has zero cgi shots!

1 Like
10197

Very few of his movies will have them.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of vfx.

10198

Barbie and Oppenheimer delivered

2 Likes
10199

Plus, like, IDK if you saw Speed 2, but one look at the script and I’d have maybe run too.

Reeves said he just didn’t connect with the script, and I’m not saying his presence would have made the movie GOOD, but the movie kept virtually every callback reference to Jack and even some of the original cast, so by having Jason Patrick as the lead, it loses any emotional resonance that might have carried over from seeing Jack and Annie go on a presumed honeymoon–only to get caught in a reprise of how they met that makes them question whether they really ought to be together. That could have been great!!!

Reeves originally didn’t like the script for Speed 1, either, and he only got fully on board once it got a rewrite from a young Joss Whedon. For all his flaws, Whedon outshines almost anyone with his dialogue.

Jan de Bont brought in Joss Whedon a week before principal photography started to work on the script. According to Yost: “Joss Whedon wrote 98.9 percent of the dialogue. We were very much in sync, it’s just that I didn’t write the dialogue as well as he did.”

One of Whedon’s contributions was reworking Traven’s character once Keanu Reeves was cast. Reeves did not like how the Jack Traven character came across in Yost’s original screenplay. He felt that there were “situations set up for one-liners and I felt it was forced—Die Hard mixed with some kind of screwball comedy.” With Reeves’ input, Whedon changed Traven from being “a maverick hotshot” to “the polite guy trying not to get anybody killed,” and removed the character’s glib dialogue and made him more earnest.

Yost also gave Whedon credit for the “Pop quiz, hotshot” line.

And then there’s this juicy bit about Cameron/Connor.

Another of Whedon’s contributions was changing the character of Doug Stephens (Alan Ruck) from a lawyer (“a bad guy and he died”, according to the writer) to a tourist, “just a nice, totally out-of-his-depth guy”.

And then it turns out that Jeff Daniels was originally going to be revealed as the villain :thinking:

Whedon worked predominantly on the dialogue, but also created a few significant plot points, like the killing of Harry Temple. Yost had originally planned for Temple to be the villain of the story, as he felt that having an off-screen antagonist would not be interesting. However, Yost recognized that there was a lot of work in the script to establish Temple as this villain. When Dennis Hopper was cast as Howard Payne, Yost recognized that Hopper’s Payne readily worked as a villain, allowing them to rewrite Temple to be non-complicit in the bomb situation.

2 Likes
10200

Alright, I caught up and saw Spiderverse. It’s good. But if I’m right that the consensus is that it’s noticeably better than the first, I don’t think I agree upon first impression. That said, this also felt quite confusing at times despite me watching the first and remembering the major plot points from it, so maybe over time I’ll change my mind. I guess in general I’m less effusive about this little trilogy than many seem to be, but still my bottom-line reaction to them is: both are good movies, will look forward to seeing the third installment.

10201

Am I the only one who thinks TV’s Frank has The Killing way too high in this list??

IMG_5515
IMG_55151290×1734 83.1 KB

10202

I don’t totally hate it, tbqh. The Killing goes so hard.

1 Like
10203

It’s a fantastic film I agree! But no universe exists where it is ahead of Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, 2001 or even Barry Lyndon

10204

“People say, ‘Why don’t you guys do ‘Back to the Future Part 4′?’ When they say that, they’re saying, ‘I want something that makes me feel as good as the original did.’ That’s what this is. That’s the feeling you’re going to get here when you see this show,” Gale told Variety. “There’s no need to go back to that well. You’ve seen too many people go back too many times. As I’ve said many times, the characters in ‘Back to the Future’ are my family, my children. You don’t sell your kids into prostitution.”

Bob Gale, who wrote the original film trilogy with Robert Zemeckis, wrote the musical’s book, and original composer Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard handled the music and lyrics. The musical kept the rock ‘n roll influences from the original movie, but Silvestri and Ballard wrote more than a dozen new songs and incorporated hits like “The Power of Love” and “Johnny B. Goode” into the musical.

10205

Yes, and most of the vfx workers get uncredited, cf the link below (although it seems to be more of a Hollywood general problem than a Nolan specific one)

Thus, Universal and Christopher Nolan excluded over 80% of the film’s vfx crew from the credits. Why? Who knows.

Not crediting the vfx crew is actually fairly common practice in Hollywood, and because vfx artists aren’t unionized, there is no recourse for the worker and no penalty for the studio when credits are omitted or misrepresented.

Oppenheimer is yet another example of how live-action filmmakers like Nolan denigrate and misrepresent the work of vfx workers to the media, and then add insult to injury by not even acknowledging them in the credits.

Also a little bit of detail on what they did on this movie

Almost all the VFX shots in the movie were recreated using only real elements combined together. Chris Nolan was determined to keep the VFX grounded in reality and maintain the raw feeling of the actual footage.

10206

Should be booking work soon.

Woke Hollywood is nothing if not forgiving for exonerated defendants.

10207

One of the real pitfalls of attempting to do this is that it will necessarily force me to indulge the acclaimed battlefield-heavy war films more often than I otherwise would, as they bore me at a disproportionate rate. The extended opening to Saving Private Ryan is elite, but most of the time extended sequences in the field lose my interest rather quickly.

Anyway, on that note: The Thin Red Line is a fairly dull affair. It has certain merits and I’m not at all inclined to call it a bad movie or give it an underwater rating, but I felt like it was a relatively generic effort at getting over the same message that the totality of other war movies I’ve seen had probably already done better. And it was long. 6/10.

To be clear: these don’t all underwhelm me. I thought Hacksaw Ridge, which to my recollection was also heavy on battlefield sequences, was great. It’s just really not a favorite subgenre. I’ll wait a bit before the next visit to it.

10208

This is the one that stays with me. The slow agony as the blade descends one inch, then another, until finally, it has descended to the point of death.

Do you normally enjoy Terrence Malick movies? This was considered one of his most accessible and commercially successful (don’t ask Adrian Brody), but I think Malick is a definite taste and if you don’t like him, he will bore you to tears.

If you like his stuff, though, Tree of Life is what people were referring to when they said the final trailer for and first half of Man of Steel made them think it was made by Malick.

10209

Not too familiar, honestly. Looks like this is the first I’ve seen of his directorial works. I see he had a screenwriting part on Dirty Harry, which I did like. But he’s uncredited for that, so it looks like he may not deserve a ton of that credit.

1 Like
10210

We must go on.

10211

Agree so much on Saving Private Ryan. That killing really haunted me. I’m not easily affected by violence but that shit did me in.

1 Like