Movies you've just seen III

[Nerdanel]

just watched sunshine. a horribly bad film, i have to say. i should've guessed, since the film takes place in 2057 and the sun is dying, so they have to send a fission bomb to the sun. with 8 astronauts. they seem to have forgotten that 1) it'll take about 5 billion years until the sun dies and 2) when it does, it'll first become a red giant and fry the planets in the solar system. also, 3) there's fusion, not fission, in the sun.

even after this i continued watching. i thought, maybe it'll be a somewhat intelligent film about something. anything! psychology? instead it turned out to be a horror movie. not even the beautiful cillian murphy could save the disaster that is called sunshine.

[Gwaimir Windgem]

I see your Cillian, and raise you a kitten.

[Valandil]

Over the last two nights I watched the 1964 movie, Becket ... interesting! Peter O'Toole plays Henry II, and he also plays him in the 1968 Lion in Winter (which I've seen a few times). I hadn't seen Becket before though.

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Haven't seen the old, but the new (starring power duo Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart) is a wonder.

[GrayMouser]

Yeah, Becket was good, but not as good as The Lion in Winter- Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn- one of my all time favs

[GrayMouser]

Haven't seen The King's Speech yet- or a lot of others since our only theater burned down a few years ago - but came across this by Christopher Hitchens:

http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/

And the follow-up- dying of cancer hasn't mellowed him out any:

http://www.slate.com/id/2285695/

Which leads to the question how important is historical accuracy in a movie.

I tend to be a stickler on this- if something's not known, you can make stuff up to fill the gaps, or if there are questions of what actually happened or differing interpretations it's okay to take sides, but known facts should be absolutely respected.

[Nerdanel]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

Yeah, Becket was good, but not as good as The Lion in Winter- Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn- one of my all time favs

agreed. the lion in winter is a great movie that i can watch over and over again. i also quite enjoyed becket.



and GW, i know.. that's the film i'll watch next.

[Valandil]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

Yeah, Becket was good, but not as good as The Lion in Winter- Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn- one of my all time favs

Yes - and the others in supporting roles, many of whom I think were (at least relatively) undiscovered at the time: Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton... Nigel Terry (who played John) also played King Arthur in Excalibur.

GW - I haven't seen the new, but I suggest you try the old one as well. I'd be interested in hearing your comparison.

[Rían]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

Which leads to the question how important is historical accuracy in a movie.

I tend to be a stickler on this- if something's not known, you can make stuff up to fill the gaps, or if there are questions of what actually happened or differing interpretations it's okay to take sides, but known facts should be absolutely respected.

That's why it was so upsetting when the LOTR movie was different from the book!





Just saw Unknown - it was a great premise, but it had periods of boring times, like they had a must-achieve quota of car chase and fistfight screen time ... ("OK, just one more punch - we have 30 seconds left in our quota!" )

And one gets tired of the curious absence of police during things like extended car chases, esp. when they're doing things like driving on sidewalks.

[Valandil]

Originally Posted by GrayMouser

:
:
Which leads to the question how important is historical accuracy in a movie.

I tend to be a stickler on this- if something's not known, you can make stuff up to fill the gaps, or if there are questions of what actually happened or differing interpretations it's okay to take sides, but known facts should be absolutely respected.

YES! I watch a re-telling of history and expect it to be historical. I watch historical fiction, and I expect the setting to be true to history. I watch the movie and get interested. I do research into the history - and am inevitably disappointed!!

Two that I can think of (one of each) were Braveheart and Gladiator.

For the former - once I read the life story of William Wallace, I thought it would have made a better movie than the one I just saw. And... the twist at the end where he had fathered a future king of England... impossible, because that child was born 5 years after he died.

The latter - I don't remember everything now, but one funny thing: while Commodus was made out to be such an awful emporer - he really was pretty bad from what I read - after he was killed, things got infinitely WORSE!

It goes on and on. Kids - don't get your history from the movies. Get it from books!

[Gwaimir Windgem]

I'm not really terribly bothered by historical inaccuracy. If it's a matter of flagrantly exploiting a historical setting or story for kicks, okay, yeah, but if there's a rough correspodence, at least, I don't let myself get too bent up about it. I'm basically looking for a story, not factual presentation.

It is not the business of Art to simply reproduce reality, but to improve upon it, to pull it together, to weave it into a tapestry, which inevitably ends up fudging some facts.

Once upon a time, even histories quite unabashedly played fast and loose with the facts, in the interest of creating narrative or constructing a portrait. It seems strange to expect more veracity than that from what is an essentially artistic endeavour, not a scholarly one.

But maybe I'm just too much of a postmodern classicist.

[Tessar]

I saw Avatar the other day... I wasn't very impressed, which disappointed me because I figured I would probably love it. I just thought it was meh digital environments, the acting wasn't very good, the dialogue was cringe-worthy, and I thought the alien race was really boring. It just reminded me of the Peter Jackson King Kong... obviously expensive, and I'm not unhappy that I saw it, but I don't think I'll see it again or buy it.

At least Sigourney Weaver was there. She was, in my opinion, the redeeming feature of the movie.

[BeardofPants]

^wot he said

[BeardofPants]

Originally Posted by Valandil

It goes on and on. Kids - don't get your history from the movies. Get it from books!

Books often-times aren't that much better.

[Tessar]

Huh, I watched the new Robin Hood tonight and I enjoyed it despite the fact that I wasn't expecting to.

At points it tried waaaay too hard to pander to our modern sensibilities, but given that the whole thing is a fairytale anyways I thought they did a beautiful job. The costumes were just drop-dead fantastic, the music was beautiful, the scenery was gorgeous, the fight scenes were exciting without going on-and-on-and-on...

Very enjoyable. I would highly recommend it.

[Nerdanel]

watched source code last night. i heard it got a loooot of good reviews, which either means it's complete crap or it's good. it was the former.

maybe i've watched too many independent sci-fi movies that what's called 'intelligent' in hollywood seems to completely lack any degree of intelligence. primer, for instance, is intelligent and actually requires the viewers to think.

and i really can't stand that patriotic army masturbation stuff in movies like these.. i'm surprised the 'terrorist' wasn't an arab; that's the level this movie was on. the characters had no depth whatsoever, there had been no thought put into the motives of "the bad guys", there was the classical evil scientist, who, of course, was proven wrong by the end of the film, and the hero of the movie very quickly accepted his situation (which wasn't nice) and went on with anything "for america". the plot itself wasn't really thought-through (or will viewers just turn their brains off if they're required to think? i don't like it when movie makers do that), it had a lot of holes in it and the idea was very simple (but not in a good way). i figured out the whole plot of the movie within the first 5 minutes of it, but i was hoping that there'd be something more to it. there wasn't, and i wasted almost 2 hours of my evening on that. i should've just turned it off.

i guess this is why i don't watch hollywood movies anymore...

evengroundhog day seemed intelligent after that..

[mithrand1r]

True Grit
(2010) was a good remake of the original.

I think it can stand on its own as a movie western.

I am still partial to the Duke and Kim Darby from the original film. I also like John Fielder as lawyer Dagget.

The ending of the 2010 version seemed a bit more realistic than the original.

[b.banner]

Thor, it was awesome! I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good time!

[BeardofPants]

If I want a good time, I go down to Fort Street!

[GrayMouser]

Caught "Idiocracy" on the tube the other night.

Suddenly the whole Sarah Palin thing makes more sense.