Be Excellent To Each Other

And Spidey 3 is ace, except for not using Venom enough and the segue from act two to act three, which simply doesn't work.

I quite liked MI3, actually.

:tumbleweed:

You all missed the bloody point about >$100m and mediocre and instead focussed on the films you quite like and took it personally. Tsk.

Hey guys, they cost an obscene amount of money and they're boring. If I was throwing that kind of money around at an exciting blockbuster extravaganza the first thing I'd want to be is entertained, not going ho-hum, wonder when I can leave.

You're still broken.

So what you're saying is that it's Ace apart from one film ruining flaw and not enough of another character. That = shit to me, but we've long established that you are particularly forgiving of certain genres. I'm talking objectively here. I thought 2 was brilliant. 3 was a HUUUUUUUGE let down with a risible script and what felt like a car crash between too many story lines and not enough film.

Xmen 3 was shit. It would have been more forgivable if it had cost $40m but it probably cost four times that at least.

I'm not a film Snob Rev, I just cannot forgive these films for costing a fortune and failing to work in the particular genres. They're not thrilling, exciting, funny or enthralling, they're just HUGELY costly exercises in franchise maintenance.

I DO have a slipped disc, so I'll concede on that point. You, however have piss poor taste in movies, which seeing as you started this thread probably means that it should puff into nonexistence right about now

It's not my fault that you and one or two other people can't see the sheer brilliance of PotC 2. Presumably due to being old, or something.

Or your taste is "immature"

I don't care how much a film cost to make. I just care whether it was entertaining. X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 both entertained me - Spidey 3 being the better of the two. It's got flaws, sure, but they don't amount to much compared to the good stuff in the film and none of them are film-ruining for me. When I watch it I have a good time and laugh a lot.

(But Spider-Man 2 pisses all over Spider-Man 3, yes.)

I assumed it was down to poor hearing and eyesight rather than being a big fuddy duddy (or "mature" as some would put it), but, y'know, that too.

X-Men and (especially) X-Men 2 were both good fun popcorn flicks that looked fantastic in places, had intermittantly excellent characterisation and generally romped along in perfectly crowd-pleasing fashion.

X-Men 3 was a stodgy, confused mess that introduced a million billion new characters that you were never given time to give a toss about, threw them all into one big badly-choreographed fight scene then kicked you in the crotch and ran away laughing.

God knows I went into the cinema wanting to like it, but it was fundamentally unlikeable. The Last Stand? The Last Straw, more like.

Spider-Man 3 looked like the aftermath of a 3-plot pile-up on the M1. Recognisable bits and pieces were scattered randomly here and there, but basically you're looking at complete carnage.

I liked the Saturday Night Fever pastiche, though.

Wot? Four pages in and no one has mentioned Roadhouse? possibly the best 'worst' film ever. Starring Patrick Swazey at his acting zenith as Dalton ('I thought you'd be taller) the best cooler in the in the business.

(Oh and Spiderman 3 is a terrible film...duller than a wet afternoon in Dullstown).

...and on further investigation it was nominated for five awards.

1. Worst Actor
2. Worst Director
3. Worst Picture
4. Worst Screenplay
5. Worst Supporting Actor

Truly a masterpiece of the art.

I'm afraid I must also profess a liking for PotC2. 3, on the other hand, was risible shit.

See also: Matrixes 2 & 3 - so bad they managed to ruin the genuinely good feelings I had for the original.

I thought the second Matrix film was pretty good. Well, a mix of great and rubbish that ended up okay.

The third, though, oof! That one's a stinker!

I'm struggling to imagine how bad it must be to make the Rev think it stinks

POTC was aces. POTC 2 was fucking shit. POTC 3 was mediocre.

HTH!

Everyone bangs on about Depp in those PotC movies, but while he was good, it was Geoffrey Rush as Barbosa that did it for me. He was ace!

Man, the ban-list come the revolution is getting longer by the day.

I had no idea we had so many philistines visiting this place.

Punisher was a massive disappointment. There was no real Punishing, for one. It was entirely absent horrible gore and sadism, which is what makes the Punisher the Punisher.

Stupid cocks.

Xmen 3? was that the one with Phoenix? That was just confusing and I knew what was going on from the comics and cartoons.
The problem with these book/comic to film conversions is that (nowadays) there isn't enough scope in a film to give depth. You can't have extended monologues, etc describing what someone is thinking, why they are doing something, so you lose the depth and history of a chracter, meaning you have little connection with them. When a director does attempt to provide some depth the movie is invariably shite, or really long. Or even worse, the depth which is added is pointless to the plot of the film, which is down to poor directing/screenplay.

I watched Outpost* last night; the very definition of entertaining shite, I would've thought.

* starring TV's Ray Stevenson, soon to be seen as Frank Castle in Punisher: War Zone

But that is part of the problem. A director could add depth, but it would make a long, probably tedious film. See Hulk, it was attempted to be like a comic, but was generally slated for being dull, because people wanted an action film with a big green monster smacking people's heads in. Whereas what they got was a rather sad story of mankind attacking that which it doesn't understand, and the desperate desire of a lonely person to be accepted. If that had been an art house film in French with subtitles about a mime in 1920s Paris, it would have been lauded.

Tchaw, I quite liked it. It was silly and had done what better books and films had done before, but I found it quite endearing.

Plus, it had blimps and art deco.

I LOVED the Saturday Night Fever pastiche. Evil Parker was the best bit of the film, and I felt like punching those idiots who complained everywhere on the net that Evil Parker wasn't a brutal emo vigilante smothered by guilt.

The rest of the film, well, loved the Thomas Haydn Church stuff though he was unfairly sidelined, liked the James Osbourne redemption idea (though it was appallingly executed) and found the cast as likable as usual. It was just so muddled, overlong and muddy. *Sigh*

Spiderman II is awesomeness.

Yes. If they'd done a proper adaptation of the Garth Ennis run on the comics it'd be the best (and more sadistic) film ever.

Spider-Man 3 suffered because (IIRC) Raimi was forced to use Venom for commercial reasons, but really wanted to do Sandman, hence the unsatisfactory combination of both. Shame, as the first two films are splendid, especially the second.

Given how they decided against a screen adaptation of Preacher, I'm not surprised they bottled on doing Punisher properly.

It still didn't do anything at all to warrant being an 18 though, to my mind.

PotC 2? As a huge fan of the first one, I have to say that it is soul-crushingly bad. Really bad. And you could drop the bit on the island and not lose anything.

So bad I haven't seen the third one.

Plissken cover your eyes!

I LOVE Escape from New York, but Escape from LA was... borderline switch off. Only the odd bit like the surfing kept me going. I so wanted it to be better than it was.

A TV Miniseries and a Hollywood blockbuster are wildly different beasts though. You have to be a lot more careful not to upset middle class USA with your TV, because you want them to keep watching your channel, whereas no-one chooses what films to watch based on which studio produced them.

The original is a pile of pants. It has Marilyn Manson on the soundtrack, which is a really good mettyfor for the whole thing.

Because Manson has built a career on deliberate controversy and stompy singalong music. Nothing wrong with that, except you can adequately sum it up as "70's Alice Cooper updated for 1999". Stylish but hollow and has been done before. That is The Matrix.

The films try to cover this hollowness by trying to be deep and meaningful by throwing in references to culture left, right and centre. However, when all that falls apart, its time for guns. Lots of guns. The core concept that the universe we experience is not what we think is dealt with in 45 minutes in the ST:TNG Holodeck. It is also done better in 20 seconds as a throwaway joke at the end of Men in Black.

The "science" doesn't add up. A halfway smart computer wouldn't use humans as batteries, it would use cows or something. When Morpheus is revealing all this (thanks to yet another steal from Alice in Wonderland) I wanted to shout "Come on, that's horseshit!" I didn't know anything about the film before going in but I was still two, three steps ahead all the way. When Smith is giving his big speech to Morpheua, I whispered to my mate "He's going to call humans viruses". At the end, it comes down to choice. 9 hours of gun-fu and it is because "humans have free will and can adapt". Well, like, duh. Terminator, anyone?

It is a shame because I want so badly to like the films. They occasionally do something breathtaking (that freeway chase is immense for all sorts of reason and how can you forget Monica Belluccis tits?) but they are far, far too clever for their own good and think they are smarter than they are. The Matrix is a bad sci-fi novel written by a 14 year old who still shows flashes of talent.

No, I agree with you to an extent. I like EfLA for a number of fanboy related reasons which aren't immediately obvious.

The whole film is an inversion of the first (Snake turns from rescuer to killer, wrestling/basketball, even the life clock is a reversal). The stuff like the Surgeon General is very funny and it makes a number of very smart political points. However, it is a bloomin' mess in places and is a series of set-pieces that don't fit together well.

I forgive it for all its flaws, but there are a lot of flaws!

And now you've equated Manson with Cooper. Man, this thread is full of ban.

Ignoring any good/bad preference, there is nothing wrong with saying that all Manson does is exactly what Alice Cooper did with "Schools Out" et al. Pre-packaged shock tactics.

Except that Manson is entirely talentless and relies entirely on trading on the fact that he's clearly edgy because he looks like a cock.

Cooper had some decent tunes, at least.

I can't, no matter how hard i try

I quite enjoyed the first Matrix, and Equilibrium. They were silly fun, loud and quite stylishly exciting. And while they weren't exactly toweringly intellectual there was a teeny bit to think about in them, even if you though about it and went 'yeah well, it's shit/corny/whatever'. I can see why people don't like them though.

Judge Dredd was on telly last night. That wasn't a particularly good film but I still stayed up to watch it even though I was originally planning on having an early night.

(Did I mention the happening in this thread earlier? I'd almost forgotten how shit it was until reading Lave's posts. I wonder if anyone likes it.)

I still need to see The Happening, The Village and some other M Night Shamalalalaamnon films. I know full well they're garbage but I still want to see them.

Has there been any series of films where the sequels have plunged the shite depths deeper than Police Academy?

I quite liked 'The Village'.

I like all the M. Night Scaryman films I've seen. Which I think is everything from The Sixth Sense to The Village.

Oh! Except for the end of Signs, which made we want to slap people.

The Village is absolutely identical to an episode of Mutant X, to the point that I'd figured it out within the first ten minutes.

The Matrix I felt was a muddled mess... while the gunplay is obviously very cool (though I can't understand why he can't just give his guns unlimited bullets, as opposed to having to carrry 20 around and just dispose of them once they run dry) all the other shite about the story was hideous. And just when I was getting over having to see Keanu's ass in Devil's Advocate, now I have to see it again here, grinding against the horrendous thing that the gods dubbed 'Carrie Anne Moss' as they cast her to earth. The length speechs (the Architect in particular) smacked of angsty nerds-cum-goths sitting around slathering on their Clearasil, masturbating to OVAs, smoking weed and trying to explain, through ridiculous wordplay, how they might get girls to talk to them if only they could dodge bullets.

The Animatrix told far more interesting stories than the actual Matrix films.

Had to suffer my way through 'Hancock' the other week...

'Nuff said.

I thought Hancock was fun. Did exactly what it said on the tin.

I actually quite liked Hancock...

its ok till the obvious twist, and then the rest of the film is proper tosh.

I don't think Hancock did what it said on the tin at all. The tin said amusing movie about a homeless superhero. However in actual fact we got a limp drama with superfluous comedy bits because it had been butchered by censors. Not that I necessarily think the original sounded all that good actually.