Samwise Gamgee is very clearly the heart and soul of the franchise. And is actually a value-add to the group!
Merry and Pippin tag along, their first act is to get Frodo stabbed and nearly turned into a ringwraith by lighting a fire on the mountain that alerts to the other wraiths, “hey, over here, come stab our friend!” Then Pippin wakes up a damn balrog in the Mines of Moria and seemingly gets Gandalf killed but for whatever magic ends up keeping him alive.
The second movie comes around, and three highly valuable party members, Aragon, Legolas, and Gimli, have to set off an entire side mission to try to rescue them. I’d like to think there’s an alternate cut where Aragorn explains that they’re trying to find their friends, gets asked why, and responds, “I don’t fucking know, man. It’s just how they wrote the script.”
Saw Blues Brothers this weekend and it is still a fun movie to watch, if for no other reason than to realize how many extras were wrangled for the movie and how many cars destroyed. I doubt anyone would want to go to the trouble to make it again.
They literally recruited an army of trees that completely fucked up the #2 supervillain. They also saved Faramir and inspired him to stand up and deal with his abusive father, what else do you guys want?
Final Reckoning on tap for our Tuesday night movie. Hope we enjoy it.
Saw The Phoenician Scheme last week. Im not generally an Anderson fan, but really really enjoyed it. Just a lot of fun and Del Toro is the absolute perfect casting.
I often go to late night movies (starting around 10p). The popcorn is stale half the time, makes me so mad. It’s so cheap to make and they stop making it hours early and keep serving it I assume. Need to complain to the theater I guess.
Say something! It would be like if you went to a 24 hour McDonald’s and got old fries that had been sitting under the heat lamp for hours.
My dad used to do landscaping for a movie theater, and one of the perks was that they’re hand him the giant bags of leftover popcorn at the end of the night. Theater was just throwing the stuff away. It was sometimes stale but quite a treat for us kids.
He had the same arrangement with a donut store. My god, I ate so many donuts.
With 28 Years Later coming out tomorrow, I made myself finally get to this one, plopping down the $4 or whatever it was to rent it. I’m not hugely drawn to zombie stuff and tend to like the idea of post-apocalyptic stories more appealing than the actual experience of watching them, so this was never a slam dunk for my tastes, but I was really impressed. Immediately one of my favorite examples within both subgenres.
Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris were really good, and their respective character arcs were really well-written to support what they brought from an acting standpoint. And I was so blind on this one that I didn’t realize I was going to be treated to a Brendan Gleeson performance. He certainly made the movie better as well.
The rough visual resolution was naturally something I bumped on, but honestly I accept Danny Boyle’s rationale for going that route, and it did end up occurring to me several times throughout the movie that I didn’t really wish for this ugly premise to be gussied up by a visually beautiful appearance. All in all, I don’t hate the choice to shoot in digital.
I do think the last five minutes are an unfortunate misfire. However, where some endings really gnaw at me, I shrugged at this one pretty quickly. There was too much other good stuff on display here.
Since the follow-up, 28 Weeks Later, is poorly received and not a Danny Boyle film, I’ll just take a pass and move straight ahead to watch the new one. Fingers crossed that I can like it as much as I liked this.
I can’t promise to consider it, but I’ll consider considering it.
The reviews aren’t outright awful or anything, so if I actually got hooked by the first act then I’m probably strapping in for the whole thing. Bailing mid-movie is uncommon for me.
Well as I said, I liked it. The Filmcast had a pretty good discussion of it on this week’s What We’ve Been Watching segment. I think their criticisms are valid, but I still thought it was a great time. And oh boy that ending!
Out of curiosity, did you like the ending of 28 Days Later? I guess I haven’t really seen reactions to that, but I have to think my bump against it is somewhat common.
I enjoyed the ending. I don’t know what to tell people who didn’t like it. It’s also VASTLY superior to any of the alternate endings they filmed. Tho I admit that’s not the same as being a good ending.
Could you explain more why you felt it was a misfire? Spoilers of course.
It sounds like one of the options was to simply cut it at the crash point, which easily would have been better IMO than whatever that was we got.
I guess a person not liking it would seem kind of self-evident in its likely reasoning to me. Absolute tonal disconnect from the rest of the movie and no clear explanation of why Cillian could simply survive a gunshot wound in a world where the party didn’t have a doctor, everything is dirty, and capable medical care was not on offer. I guess I can accept that they plowed through the fence, but the rest of it is truly odd. And was basically Boyle and Garland going “fuck off with your desire for an explanation as to how we just broke out of the corner we just wrote ourselves into.”
