The Ultimate Movie Thread of Ultimate Destiny

They also turned the black american badass colonel into a middle aged white guy with a brush mustache and a southern accent...
 
That X-Files movie is really bad. Frankly, with one or two exceptions, the entire half of the series that's devoted to alien conspiracies doesn''t hold up very well. The individual monster episodes are still pretty great though.
 
well I guess a lot of movies based on some series ride on the hype to get the viewers and attention. Or the standart was very low when the X-Files hit the cinema. No clue. For example for me the Serenity movie was really just mediocre. But a friend of mine absolutely loves it, but he is also a fan of the series Serenity, and he agrees that the movie was more or less a fan-service. One exception might be Star Trek, some of their movies are really good.
 
Yeah, I wasn't a Star Trek fan at all and I really enjoyed The first, second and sixth original star trek movies. And the search for spock and the voyage home weren't that bad either.
 
yeah, but you can avoid most of the movies about Star Trekk : The Next Generation, the series was pretty good, I watched all episodes, but the movies about it? Pretty mediocre.
 
Just came back from Guardians of the Galaxy. A perfect popcorn movie if I ever saw one. The only caveat being that you can really use knowledge of the marvel cineamtic universe to help orient yourself when a bunch of names are being thrown around as ithe story sets itself up.
 
Akratus said:
Just came back from Guardians of the Galaxy. A perfect popcorn movie if I ever saw one. The only caveat being that you can really use knowledge of the marvel cineamtic universe to help orient yourself when a bunch of names are being thrown around as ithe story sets itself up.
Click to expand...
I saw it yesterday and liked it. The place names weren't a problem for me, other than that they were funny and failed to be as ominous-sounding as they were probably supposed to be. Most of the jokes worked. That adds a lot. I guess my biggest qualm is that The Collector was built-up a fair amount, and then he really wasn't part of the story for very long. What happened to him after the plot moved on? He was still alive, but he just sort of disappeared. This suggestion is probably anathema to Marvel fans, but they could have cut him out entirely without altering the story much. Still, like you said, a good popcorn movie.

I re-watched the first Coen brothers movie, Blood Simple, from 1983, a couple nights ago. It was probably 20 years ago I watched it the first time. It's darned good. Those guys had talent right from the start.
 
Actually the collector appears at the end being helped by Cosmo the Psychic Cosmonaut dog and Howard the Duck.
 
Walpknut said:
Actually the collector appears at the end being helped by Cosmo the Psychic Cosmonaut dog and Howard the Duck.
Click to expand...
I missed that. Why is there a Howard the Duck reference in the movie? Not that I'm against that in any way.

All I'm saying is, they built-up The Collector, and he was actually an intriguing character, but he served no story-purpose beyond briefly explaining the MacGuffin. He should have had a more significant role to play.
 
Recently watched several movies

Inception, it was cool, in that classic "nail-biting" way, although I didn't bite my nails over it. David Lynch is better at portraying dreams or paralel realities, this was not dreamlike, it was just, a whole bunch of James Bondy action, with some gravity-glitches here and there. In all, a good action-flick, however -
I have never liked ambigious endings very much. I want a movie, not homework, and definitely not ambigious, open-ended eternal homework that will never be graded. It is also pointless, it means nothing, did he finally get home to his family? If so, happy ending, but why make us doubt? Why should we doubt? What do we gain from doubting that the poor dude finally saw his kids again? The camera focuses so hard on the spinning thing, it WANTS us to doubt hard, it steeers us towards the possibility, almost the fact, that he is still dreaming, because it deliberately depraves us of the final evidence (the top stop spinning), so it is all very deliberately annoying, and I feel like I haven't done anything to deserve that kind of treatment :(
There are deeper analysis, that the spinning top is the womans thing not his, and that his is his ring, and that the ring is on during dreams and off during reality, but then what? The top keeps spinning, and the movie deliberately shows it spin untill the end. ARGH.
And sedatives inside a dream inside a dream? I can vouch for dream-drugs not working as intended.

Shaun of the Dead, one from my list. I laughed! Which is the point! In a time where big movies have become the expectation, it felt perhaps a bit.. small. But who cares, it was funny and I like the cast. Mildly annoyed with the mother tho.
At one point I was muttering to myself "Yeah, mummy, why don't you just help ALL the zombies out of their houses!"

watched
Frozen quickly followed by Brave. Frozen made very little impression on me. Big visuals, little story, less sense. Brave was actually quite funny, and the character designs were well done, and watching the two so consecutively made me realize how sexualized the Disney characters were, compared to Pixar's (I know the latter is owned by the first, but they are still different studios. In fact, in the "Disney Princesses", Disney disnified Merida, and made her, well, sexayer, to everyones dismay)
I liked Brave, although this one was also a bit of a small story. It could have been bigger.

Godzilla, not bad. Monster flick with a good build up.
I keep seeing people annoyed at Godzilla being kept back for so long, and all I can think is.. children. Give them a lollipop. Let the grownups enjoy a nice, patient build-up, we all know what's coming, and there is no need for it to come right now.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, I liked it. It has a calm pace, a modest story, but tells it well, with fun details. I chuckled!

Shutter Island, also a good one. Ol Dicaprio deserves the praise. Now, this ending - is it ambigious, or is it clear cut?
I believe it is pretty clear cut, for a simple reason: If he really was a police officer, it means his partner is still missing, or still betraying him, and he would not be so casual around him as he is on the stairs at the end. The only reason he IS that casual, and not asking him what-the-goddamn, is because he has indeed re-set his hallucination.
 
Last edited:
I recently watched the second Hobbit movie, Desolation of Smaug. Compared to the first one, it rubbed me wrong.

It has a great beginning, and sets the story off nicely. I guess mainly what got to me what the build-up to Smaug, and then when you finally get to him, he was a bit of a let-down. And the way they end it felt more like where TV shows would have a commercial brake in place, but not end the show (even if there was another part coming the next week).
 
I agree on the ending, but aside from no front legs, Smaug was perfect, in my humble opinion.

Also, I don't get how you like this less than that first its-good-in-hobbiton-and-then-it-turns-into-a-orange-and-blue-cg-goblin-fest of a movie..
 
Probably because the escape from the goblins and getting cornered on the edge of a cliff and getting stuck up in burning trees before being rescued by giant eagles DID happen in the book. Meanwhile getting muddled in with a giant conspiracy in Laketown before venturing off to have a lengthy battle with Smaug where his "desolating" dragon fire didn't so much as melt ANY of the gold coins he was sleeping atop never happened in the book at all. Even for moviegoers who never read The Hobbit, it's rare for ANY filler to be so well concocted that nobody can ever tell that it's filler, because it reeks of fluff and insubstantiality. Spending the majority of 2 films building up how terrifying of a threat this dragon is, only for them to have a silly bout with it for half an hour really undermines how epic Smaug was supposed to be, not to mention the fight itself was just ridiculous.

Personally I was ecstatic about the films when I first heard about them, I enjoyed the first film greatly, I enjoyed the second film a lot, but the time to retrospect has left me more critical of the second film than the first. Both were still enjoyable, but "the seams" showed in Desolation of Smaug WAY more heavily than they ever did in An Unexpected Adventure. I'll still go in to see the third and final film this winter, and I anticipate "enjoying" it, but I have no illusions that I'll walk away thinking it was flawless, let alone continue thinking so months later...
 
well I think we all can agree that Both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have been trimed more for comercial success. I havn't red The Hobbit so far, but Lord of the Rings, maybe I should read the Hobbit one day. I think we all have been there already, and most people agree that while both LotR and The Hobbit are impressive, they really gain their value more from the visuals then Tolkiens message. Scenes like characters interacting at the camp-fires, Sams awe at finally meeting Elves and Tom Bombadil simply give the story in the book a much different pacing compared to the movie, I always had the feeling that the story was moving much much faster forward in the movie compared to the book. Maybe its just me, but I also have the feeling there was way to much slap-stick thrown on the Hobbits in the movie compared to the book.

But well Tolkien has spend half of his life thinking about it, making it the story he loves, as movie director you have to please a different expectation, I mean, after all many people thought it was impossible to make a movie out of it, and movies are a visual medium. But I see the middle earth in the movie an the books almost as 2 different worlds. The whole mythology of middle earth is a bit lost in the movie if you ask me. But you really have to read about the backstory of Dragons, Melkor, Sauron and a few other characters to get in to that I guess.
 
Trimmed for success? Ha. The Hobbit movies could've use a good trimming, that's for sure. I don't think I'll ever watch the extended versions of these.
 
Agreed, The Hobbit movies suck arse. Some original concept from books has been left behind, replaced with silly and weird action-packed stuff. Thorin running with a cart while fighting Smaug cracked me up.
 
The hobbit wasn't trimmed Cnri, it was padded to hell and back.... The original books didn't have half of the stuff in the movies.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top