The Films You Watched Thread V: Dead Men Watch No Movies

[Yakumo]

I've been on a Arnie binge recently. Today I'm watching Last Action Hero. I've never seen it before due to all the bad press and comments I read. How full of crap those people were. This movie is excelent. It's so self aware that anything goes.
If you've never seen this movie I suggest that you do.

[randombs]

It’s great, isn’t it?

Is that the woman whose number begins with 555?

[charlesr]

I've been on a Arnie binge recently. Today I'm watching Last Action Hero. I've never seen it before due to all the bad press and comments I read. How full of crap those people were. This movie is excelent. It's so self aware that anything goes.
If you've never seen this movie I suggest that you do.

Yeah, cool film. Not sure why anyone would pan it. Maybe the 15 rating was too high.

[Atticus]

I don't think anyone got it when it first came out.

[charlesr]

Me and all my friends saw it a few times in the cinema. It was always fairly packed even at the late show.

Just started watching Triple Frontier on Netflix. 10/10 for Metallica in the opening scenes.

[Atticus]

Been on a bit of a John Carpenter binge and watched Christine last night. Managed to find the rather splendid 2-disc Powerhouse release in CEX ... perfect condition too. Not seen it since I was in my mid-teens and it's just as great as I remember

[Team Andromeda]

Been on a bit of a John Carpenter binge and watched Christine last night. Managed to find the rather splendid 2-disc Powerhouse release in CEX ... perfect condition too. Not seen it since I was in my mid-teens and it's just as great as I remember

A classic and underrated film. I remember watching it at like age 7 when my grand rented it from the local video store (the owner knew that I loved horror and I had Chickenpox at the time so was housebound ) Little did my gran know what the film was about lol

[teddymeow]

Not a fan of being the 'but the anime' guy, but they're very different beasts to me.

The original does have some amazing action scenes that were super high concept at the time, but whenever I watch it I'm far more caught up in the mood the whole thing creates - its pace can be very slow at times, and there's a lot of downbeat, melancholy scene-setting going on that I love. The way it's scored goes with this beautifully. It doesn't have answers, but it prompts questions about the relationship between one's humanity, and technology.

The remake does a good job of recreating a lot of the famous scenes, and even has a few of its own really great ideas. I remember there being a fixed-frame scene shot from above where some soldiers are piling through a door? That was great! But on the whole, it has the subtlety of a brick through a window. Minutes into it I had my head in my hands, with the opening dialogue being a clumsy mess that assumed that "ghost" and "shell" were too abstract for the audience to understand, and also that they needed explaining RIGHT AWAY before they lost interest. Fitting the whole story around the origins of the character made it a different story entirely. I don't outright hate it, but I wish they'd just made their own movie rather than riding off the back of something they clearly didn't feel was entirely appropriate for their audience.

Totally agree with all this.

[Dogg Thang]

I watched Avengers Age of Ultron yesterday. Hadn’t seen it since it came out and it was interesting to see it now with the context of the films since then. I felt it was a disappointment and not a brilliant film overall the first time around and, yeah, I still think that although its not bad at all. One thing that bugged me back when it came out was that it didn’t really follow the development of the other films, especially Iron Man. All his character development was undone for this film and the main plot is him starting having done something stupid that he had decided not to do at the end of Iron Man 3, then he does something else stupid and it goes horribly wrong and then he does it all over again. It could have been called The Stupidity of Iron Man. I felt it was like they forgot what happened in the previous movies.

But what’s interesting seeing it again is that it happens the other way too. Like a reverse time ripple, working backwards this film basically repeats beats from Civil War but in ways that aren’t all that smart. In one direction, it robbed Stark of his development and, going the other, it robs Civil War of its development by preempting story points without actually taking advantage of them. Had the film led to a stronger rift and gave a slower build to Civil War, it might have worked but while the plot of this film is referenced later, the character stuff exists in its own little bubble. Which is a shame because I think Civil War is weaker as a result.

I also watched The Purge: Anarchy. I enjoyed it. It delivers on the premise in all the ways I expected the first one to but didn’t get. It’s not a fantastic movie by any means and I think it could have done with either more tension or more shocking violence (not often my thing but would have been very relevant in this context). So I think it could have been pushed much further but it’s a pretty good film and explores several aspects of this concept. Stuff I had often considered since seeing effectively the same premise in an old Star Trek episode when I was a kid. So yeah, it’s a good watch.

Edit: “Start Trek”... jeez. I have been typing on an iPad since they came out (must be close to 10 years now) and still can’t get through a sentence without a load of typos. Physical keyboards will never be replaced.

[Atticus]

Brawl In Cell Block 99 - brilliant turn from Vince Vaughan and a genuinely good watch. And there's some proper ott violence

[Anpanman]

I've been on a Arnie binge recently. Today I'm watching Last Action Hero. I've never seen it before due to all the bad press and comments I read. How full of crap those people were. This movie is excelent. It's so self aware that anything goes.
If you've never seen this movie I suggest that you do.

Me too to some degree, Film4 had a recent run of his flicks (Commando - ace), Last Action Hero is a really good film, even if you don't like Arnie, the Hollywood jokes (like the '555' area code) are clever and of course Arnie and Stallone sending each other up is wonderful.

I've read more than once (this is years ago, before the internet) that some people in Hollywood had grown tired of Arnie's success and the knives were out for him so hence the not so great reviews.

[QualityChimp]

I'll be honest, I don't think Arnie really understood the joke either. I remember the publicity when it came out and it consisted of him bragging that he was doing Shakespeare.
"To be, or not to be?"
BANG
"Not to be."

[MENTION=3144]Dogg Thang[/MENTION], Marvel really don't know what to do with Stark. He seems stuck in a loop and after making real character development in Avengers and Iron Man 3, then seem to keep making him reset to an arrogant douchebag in Civil War, Homecoming and Infinity War.

That streak of humility made him an excellent character for a short while.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, it’s a real shame they just reset him after what was a pretty great character journey.

[prinnysquad]

I quite like his arc and feel it’s quite progressive, even though it’s based around his obsessive arrogance with tech.

In Iron Man, he realised that his tech was used for nefarious purposes, and promised to keep greater control over it.
After Assemble, he had PTSD.
This reached its apex in Iron Man 3, where he realised he fixated on things that weren’t as important in life, i.e., tech over Pepper.
However, in Ultron, he exhibits the same obsessive behaviour towards tech. The lifelong desire to indulge in it, yet with an acute need to have control over it and use it for good. As such, the Hulkbuster is used as a countermeasure to protect civilians, as is the thinking behind Ultron itself.

Those fail. Hulkbuster is one of the contributory factors towards the accords. Ultron is a major factor. Due, Stark believes, to his obsession with his desire to control his tech and use it for good backfiring wildly. He’s still tech obsessed, but wants to use it ‘lawfully’ to alleviate the guilt.

In Homecoming I would say that once again, he’s trying to show how his tech is powerful when used for good, and uses a proxy/ward to demonstrate this. Trying to mould a hero, improved by tech, but not allowed to fall into the pitfalls he did. He’s indeed arrogant in the film. He places the father figure with the arrogance of someone who isn’t happy with they way they’ve turned out and wants to help someone else become better.

So, as a character, he’s retained the arrogance of faith in his technology throughout, even when its resulted in PTSD, acute guilt and a need to distance himself from the fallout of its failures. He wants to use his creations for good, and can’t deal with the fact they’ve resulted in bad - a theme since the first film. He’s an addict who can’t shake the habit. At one point in Ultron, Banner even mentions Stark’s inability to learn from mistakes.

[Dogg Thang]

I don’t know. The big problem for me there is exactly where Ultron kicks in. As you say, he comes to a big realisation in Iron Man 3, going so far as to destroy his army of suit robots. Then we open Ultron with a whole new army of suit robots and yet with no reasoning as to why or how this follows his realisation from Iron Man 3. It’s like that movie, which exhibited the most growth, didn’t happen. And after that, I’d struggle to see much by way of growth. Ultron is especially frustrating because he makes the biggest mistake in the movie and creates the problem (something he realised he had done before right back in Iron Man as an arms dealer) and then later fights his own teammates in order to do literally the exact same thing. It showed no growth within the movie itself and a big step backwards from the character we know by the end of Iron Man 3. I’d be with QC in feeling he just goes into an arrogance loop, something that his journey across the three Iron Man movies beautifully showed him growing out of.

If he’s an addict who can’t shake his habit, that’s just a loop but it’s also not really what we see in that Iron Man/2/3 progression. If Banner says he can’t learn from his mistakes, that’s not progression. That’s a statistic character.