Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd forgotten all about that film. It's pretty good.

I've got it on DVD (remember them?). It's very excellent much.

I watched the new Mission Impossible film the other day and it was decent; coherent enough as these type of things go and a pretty fun couple of hours. The product placement though was fucking shocking.

The amount of times the camera gave us a loving view of the Windows Phone handsets everyone was using was bad enough, though depressingly par for the course, but the Xbox One stuff was laughable. There's a scene where Simon Pegg's character is at work but he's playing a game instead of working. When he sees someone coming to his desk he hits a button to pull up his desktop instead then dumps the controller in a drawer which he then pushes shut. As all this happens you're given a much longer than usual view of the control pad (so you can see it's an Xbone controller) plus, when he drops it in the drawer, the camera zooms on the contents of the drawer and lingers for a good few seconds on the cover of the Halo box that's been so obviously arranged within the drawer.

The entire scene blatantly exists only to show off all this stuff and doesn't even entirely work because (a) he's playing the game across a three monitor setup which you couldn't do on an Xbone and (b) the guy who comes into the room has got a totally clear view of all three screens right from the start so the whole pantomime of clearing the screen and chucking the controller in a drawer is just jarringly stupid. I can't even find it in myself to be massively bothered about product placement as a concept if it's done subtly enough but this was properly laughable stuff.

I just saw MI5 today and indeed that bit of product placement was terrible. I found the film as a whole rather a waste of time. A pointless retread of everything that has gone before. No one really has much character and everyone has super human skills and the team is basically utterly invincible (Tom Cruise in particular). The F+F films are doing basically the same thing but so much better now. Ghost Protocol was great but this is just bland.

I also saw Hot Pursuit with Reese Witherspoon starring. Female geek cop has to look after a mafia wife and ends up on a road trip of hijinks with her. Comedy film obviously. Most of the jokes miss their mark but it's an amiable enough film that just about passes the time. Nothing to make it really stand out in any way shape or form with it being as predictable as a very predictable thing.

I know I'm being crap, but what's F+F?

Fast and Furious.

He could have been using the Xbone controller to play a PC game on three monitors.

I'd rather watch any of the MI films than those bloody F&F films.

I think it was Halo 3 he was playing, which presumably isn't out on the X-Bone.

'fraid it is: Halo: Masterchief Collection, init.

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The Frozen Dead is an odd film to screen on a weekday afternoon, during the school holidays, even though there was probably only me watching it.

Looks like the new Fantastic 4 movie is roughly as good as most people expected it to be (ie. not very....)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fantastic_four_2015/

The trailer really did make it look shit. Not that I want the whole plot revealed or anything but it was just a load of scenes that could've come from random different films with no real connection between them (aside from the actual actors involved obviously). Even Dr Doom was just short of shoved in at the end with no idea who he was, where he came from or what his deal was at all. If even your trailer doesn't seem to know what your film about then you're probably in trouble.

I sort of had high hopes for it. I really liked Chronicle from the same director, and the cast is pretty good.

Obviously it was one of those that could go either way though.

I didn't realise it was done by the Chronicle guy, that's a real shame it's shit then.

Aye, but Chronicle also had Max Landis on board.

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As well as having inferior screenwriters, by all accounts there was a lot of studio meddling and the director wasn't happy with it.

But that could just be him making excuses.

Josh Trank, the Fantastic Four director, briefly tweeted:



...so that's probably the end of his career, then. Rumours abound that he had huge problems with the studio (to the point where he was taken out of the running to direct a Star Wars film) and big chunks of the film were rewritten/reshot, which may be why it's so terrible.

On the other hand, it's brought us great reviews like http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/revi ... r-20150806.

Yeah regardless of the veracity of his claims, that's career suicide.

Absolutely. It's somewhere between 0 and 100% true, but it's definitely 100% unprofessional.

Oh I dunno Fincher did alright and he was fairly forthcoming about his hatred for the executives et al. at Fox, re: Alien3

was that prior to release? I dont have any memory of it.

Fincher is a genius, which helps.

Hindsight is useful here. I dont think he was in the genius category circa Alien3

Alien 3 was '92. Seven was '95, and if you don't think Seven is evident of his genius you're a wrongface.

Fincher also didn't badmouth Alien 3 on Twitter on the opening weekend. He's been very vocal about hating it and hating the process, but only many years later.

This is the main problem. He's just trashed the film as it was opening in cinemas. That's just a fool move.

He's probably scuppered his chances of working on any more big budget superhero crap but maybe he's extremely angry and not that arsed. I'm sure he knew what he was doing.

The original cut of Alien³ was far better than the cut the studio released.

They had to fight to keep the ending of Se7en that they wanted, the studio wanted it so that Morgan Freeman shot Kevin Spacey so that he wouldn't 'win' in getting all the seven sins done the way he wanted with Brad Pitt committing the final one. (Or to even not have the wife's head in the fucking box man.)

Fincher and Pitt fought that one out, Pitt properly put his foot down over it apparently.

In the end Fincher agreed to put the (slightly) upbeat speech by Morgan Freeman in right at the end, he wanted the film to just finish as soon as Pitt shot Spacey. (Cut to black, wait a few seconds, and then credits roll, for a total gut-punch.)

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Seven-En ... 70339.html

Calling Fincher a "Genius" is a bit of stretch ("Genius" may be be one of the mostly wrongly overused words today), but he's definitely a very competent director. And by the time of Alien 3 he was not a household name. He was lucky he said those things before the internet.

Fight Club was awesome

Do you assume the producers of films that aren't "big budget superhero crap" are more tolerant of unprofessional behaviour than other producers, then? The problem isn't the nature of the film. The problem is he has a big mouth.

No I assume that it's still possible to make low budget films if you're unknown or difficult or just not the safe predictable pair of hands people want to hire to make safe, predictable superhero films. I don't think he'll "never work again" or anything like it.

A statement like that during opening weekend has the potential to directly impact sales in a major way. Any film studio is going to be deeply uphappy about that.

I'm pretty certain that all the terrible reviews had a far bigger impact than his tweet. All he did was say that it wasn't his fault.

I don't know much about this, but I suspect it would've been worse in many ways if he'd claimed it was great?

Let's face it, "an artistic temperament" is surely de regueur with many film directors; you'd hardly expect these types to be reliable, compliant plodders and yes-men, would you?

Having "a big mouth" almost seems like a prerequisite requirement for this line of work; can't see too many wallflowers being able to keep the lid on a bunch of actors' egos and 'big personalities' on your typical high-pressure film set environment.

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I didn't think Benjamin Button or Gone Girl were quite up to his usual standards, and Dragon Tattoo was a pointless remake, but yeah he has a great body of work. The Social Network is great too.

Let's not get silly though, he's not in the same league as Kubrick.

I like this video analyzing his style.

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Barry Lyndon is legit. I'd recommend it.

From memory, Dragon Tattoo is close to a shot for shot remake. I don't really have a problem with remakes in principal, but they should be an opportunity to do something interesting/new, rather than just doing the exact same film again in a different language.

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Sure, I'm not going to suggest you shouldn't watch remakes. I guess my problem is that it's a missed opportunity more than there being anything actually wrong with the Dragon Tattoo remake. I guess the remake could have turned out much worse in a lesser directors hands, but for me it didn't really have that spark that Fincher's better work has, likely in part because I'd basically seen the exact same film already.

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The best remakes are:
The Thing,
The Fly,
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.


And yes, Following is excellent.

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Bad Lieutenant was only technically a remake. Werner Herzog hadn't actually seen the original, but it was the easiest way for him to get a movie studio to give him money to make the film he wanted to make, and it shares a vaguely similar premise with the original.

It's fucking incredible. If you like Nicolas Cage, it's maybe his best work. If you don't like him it's probably because you've not seen Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

"Enemy" is immensely tense and stylish.

Go see it and don't pay heed to its imdb rating. People are stupid.

FeeX

It's a well known fact that he will do any movie for the money.

Doesn't mean he isn't also amazing in many other things.

Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpBJISaI1PE