Caltrops - Deleted Posts





	[quote name="I need clarification"]I've seen <strike>three</strike> two and a quarter movies so far this week, and here I am to tell you about them. <b>Mystic River </b> Every time I hear that title I think of a Robbie Robertson song, but I think that was "Somewhere Down the Crazy River." Anyway, by now I'm sure most of you know this movie is great, because your friends with taste mentioned it to you while you shoved french fries into your mouth long enough to shut up about Alien Vs. Predator. Well, don't believe the hype, believe INC. This is a very, very good movie. It's good for you. Stop just eating the sci-fi and Tarantino candy and try something of substance for a change. I think earlier in this very forum many of the retards were commenting on how bad an actor Sean Penn is. This goes right along with the same Caltrops mentality that allows posters to declare they are smarter than NASA, better programmers than John Carmack, and how they would kick Kirsten Dunst the fuck out of bed WITHOUT fucking her first. Suffice to say he's great in this film, which would make it an average film for him. It just so happens Tim Robbins is even better. Both of these guys are so good you don't even realize they're acting. This is the difference between Penn and Robbins and a guy like Tom Cruise, who really lets you know when he's going for that Oscar. Too bad he will LOSE again, even if his movie "How Far a Man Will Go For Some Slant Poon" is a big hit. Which it won't be. Also good in this flick: Kevin Bacon, Marcia Gay Harden, and even Laurence Fishburne. More on that guy later, sad to say. And of course it all comes down to Brian Helgeland and Clint Eastwood. They've taken a story that could have been extremely hokey on the big screen and actually made it pretty real, with only a little bit of hokey-ness present in the ending. Eastwood just has a way with actors and environments. The Flats neighborhood of Boston is a character in this film as much as anyone else, and Eastwood isn't dismissive of anyone in it. He's equally at home in the urban sprawl of the east as he is in prairies and Badlands of the west, and really I think his point is that we're all alone no matter where we are. I hope he keeps making more movies like this one. Bonus: he gives a little shot to his ol' spaghetti buddy Eli Wallach. I wonder if Wallach called him "Blondie" on the set. <b>Alien: The Director's Cut </b> In space no one can hear you scream. O_o That is a slogan so good I bet former advertising creative Ridley Scott wishes he'd thought of it himself. Or maybe he tells everyone he did. Also, in this movie you hear everyone scream, even Yaphet Kotto and a robot. This was Scott's second movie and arguably his best. Sorry, "Gladiator" fanboys, your favorite movie sucks shit. Watch "Alien" again and you'll see that like Lucas and Spielberg, Scott also seems to have lost whatever it was that made him a good director for a while there. I'm not even sure what was added to this to make it the director's cut, but I'll take his British word for it. To his discredit, he kept in the part where Ripley goes back for Jonesy. :( This movie couldn't have cost more than $10 million to make, and that's both the best and worst part of it. The best part is it forced screenwriter Dan O'Bannon to take his "Dark Star" script and pare it down to the bare essentials. And the essentials are so great: a surly group of space-laborers, sick of their mission, each other, space, and space food. Petty bickering over money, rank, decision-making, and expendability never ceases, even in the face of obscene danger. Before Scott's dystopian vision was realized in such a big way in Blade Runner, it manifested the relatively small environment of the massive space freighter these poor fuckers are trapped in. And I'm not even talking about Giger's idiotic "art," I'm talking about everything else in the movie. Gone are the gleaming white interiors of 2001's Discovery, replaced by the dingy, dripping, well-worn hallways of the Nostromo. No fancy lightsabers and blasters, this crew must fend for themselves with homemade flame-throwers and a jerry-rigged motion sensor. The cramped quarters of the Dark Star, with Boiler and Pinback going at each other's throats and the countless porn magazine cut-outs on the wall are transferred directly to the crew's quarters of the Nostromo. The dialogue is tight, the suspense taut. Everything works. Unfortunately, this same budget constraint forced visual design consultant Dan O'Bannon to re-use a lot of the crappy stuff he did in "Dark Star." These few instances (the ship's explosion, the whole robot head thing) really stand out. Fortunately, these are few and far between, and even they show some amount of creativity, a trait sadly lacking in our final entry... <B>Matrix: (Low) Resolutions </B> This is what happens when you have a lot of money and zero ideas. The Wachowski brothers, put in the apparently horrible position of having to make not one but two sequels to a movie they never intended to visit again, decided instead to make the same movie twice. The only difference this time is I was able to fall asleep much more quickly whenever someone opened their stupid mouths to spew more stupid shit they already said in Matrix: Reloaded. I could break down this film minute by minute and point out every flaw in it if I'd paid enough attention to do so. Luckily for all of us, I didn't have to. The Wachowskis tip their hand early that they're not interested in making a good or even entertaining action movie when the following dialogue takes place: French guy: (Something to the effect of) "What are you doing in my club?" Morpheus: "We just want to talk." Now, even a director of "A-Team" episodes knows that line is the cue for massive amounts of bullets, explosions, tearing of bodies in two, etc. To the Wachowskis, it is a statement of fact, and goddamnit, those characters are gonna have a conversation. A long one. A boring one. Well, I assume it was boring, who can say really. I doubt anyone in the world knows what the hell anyone in this movie is talking about, which is because they're not really talking about anything. They're just talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. Another telling detail of this little piece of garbage is that the only characters allowed to show any emotion at all are the computers. Or software, I guess. Whichever. The humans all act like automatons, delivering their lines in a flat monotone which I guess is supposed to convey some sort of calm menace but instead gives the distinct impression everyone in the movie has just been hit on the head with a polo mallet. If they wanted to go with calm menace, they should have asked Eastwood what to do. This movie functions more accurately as a barometer of our culture than it does as an actual entertainment. In the 80s, when the blockbuster action film genre first exploded (DISCLAIMER (and bragging): led by Matrix producer and my former employer Joel Silver), critics decried it as the end of American cinema. Story was dead, they said, and so was character. All that was left were bullets, explosions, and car crashes. At the time, it seemed right. But Silver and the Polack brothers have proved how wrong everyone was. Debased as American cinema may have been by the late 80s, it was nothing compared the vacuums that are the Matrix (and Terminator) sequels. "Rambo" and "Commando" may have been about absolutely nothing, but that's all they ever claimed to be. You know how many long speeches "Commando" had? Zero. You know how many "Rambo" had? Okay, one, but that was AFTER "Rambo" had killed about 8 billion Vietnamese, 12 Russians and some computers, and it was all about how the Vietnam veterans felt neglected. That's still more important than anything anyone had to say in all the Matrix and Terminator movies combined. Machines are people, too, and humans and machines should get along, is I think the message of both of these movies. In other words: nothing. And a LOT of nothing. If the Wachowskis were thinkers, then maybe it would be okay for them to make "My Dinner With Android" (man, I love that joke), and if they were action directors then maybe it would be okay for them to make "Karate Robots Underground Deluxe." But they're neither - they're just two guys trapped by the success of a film they didn't give a lot of thought to originally, and now they're trying to get out with as much money and as little responsibility as possible. Worst of all is what they're doing to their audience. Just look at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040305024100/www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&sid=1&pid=25526">this post</a> by laudablepuss. In the course of three movies, they turned him from someone with some amount of critical judgement to a lump of flesh who is content to sit back and try as hard as he can to enjoy whatever small amount of nutrients they're giving him. In fact, laudable is IN the Matrix. I guess that makes me NEO. :([/quote]