TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

I'm gonna have to buck the crowd and say that after two episodes I find True Detective a little arty farty for my tastes.

It's also monumentally unfair that Woody Fucking Harrrelson gets to bang both Tits Girl and Bridget Moynihan.

[Queequeg]

Luckiest man in human history.

[Eddie Teach]

The chick he married on Cheers wasn't too shabby either.

[katmai]

I'm impressed he's banging Tom Brady's ex since she ain't in the show.
And not surprised you wouldn't like it.

[Iormlund]

I'm a bit baffled as to why someone would want to remake RoboCop. You can put it on today and it really is just as relevant as it was 20 odd years ago. Like Terminator you can still show it and it measure up. There is no pressing need to re-image it to make the story relevant or important to todays young'ins. The Special Effects were top of the line then and with the exception of the killer mecha none of the special effects were cgi, they were physical effects and as such were perfect and always will be.

Actaully, the ED-209 was a physical construct animated using stop-motion. Which is why it still looks great over 25 years later.

[Admiral Yi]

I'm impressed he's banging Tom Brady's ex since she ain't in the show.
And not surprised you wouldn't like it.

Tom Brady used to have a wife named Tits Girl?

[Eddie Teach]

I think the nickname "tits girl" does her ass a disservice.

[celedhring]

Hollywood is an extraordinarily risk-adverse industry, that's why you see recycled IPs over and over with a "proven" audience they can rely on and market to. When I tried to sell a script there, the agent was always instructing us to tell the producers how stuff in our film would be exactly like films that they had seen and had been successful.

[Josephus]

Luckiest man in human history.

Yeah he does well in this.

[Viking]

Hollywood is an extraordinarily risk-adverse industry, that's why you see recycled IPs over and over with a "proven" audience they can rely on and market to. When I tried to sell a script there, the agent was always instructing us to tell the producers how stuff in our film would be exactly like films that they had seen and had been successful.

most movies are commodities scripted to fit beat sheets and named or associated with some known property or franchise. If you are going to dump 200 million dollars into a movie you have to have a star or a franchise and everything else needs to be predictable and conform to expectations. That's why its just so boring and thats why franchises have taken over everything, it's the only passion to be found anywhere related to any film.

[celedhring]

Hollywood is an extraordinarily risk-adverse industry, that's why you see recycled IPs over and over with a "proven" audience they can rely on and market to. When I tried to sell a script there, the agent was always instructing us to tell the producers how stuff in our film would be exactly like films that they had seen and had been successful.

most movies are commodities scripted to fit beat sheets and named or associated with some known property or franchise. If you are going to dump 200 million dollars into a movie you have to have a star or a franchise and everything else needs to be predictable and conform to expectations. That's why its just so boring and thats why franchises have taken over everything, it's the only passion to be found anywhere related to any film.

Aye, one of the problems with Hollywood is that the "middle of the road" movies have almost disappeared. It's all megablockbusters or underfunded small movies (which end up being the more interesting ones). 100m+ budgets force producers to reduce risk as much as possible, going with bland "proven" formulas and recognizable names. You no longer get genre stuff like say, Aliens, Predator or Robocop or a lot of good movies from years past that didn't have huge budgets but enough to be ambitious but at the same time could be original.

[Syt]

Wolf of Wall Street. Not bad, but I liked it better when it was called Casino and was about Las Vegas instead of stock brokers.

[Josephus]

Wolf of Wall Street. Not bad, but I liked it better when it was called Casino and was about Las Vegas instead of stock brokers.

Someone on my Facebook feed said the same thing...
....wait!

[Syt]

 

[Savonarola]

Nomads of the North (1920)

Set in the treacherous world of the Canadian north, Betty Blythe plays Nell Nannette, a woman with whom every man is smitten including Dudley Do-Right Corporal O'Connor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Snidely Whiplash Buck McDougall, heir of a fur trading company and the most villainous snake to come from Montreal.  He once clubbed a man to death with a hockey stick; just to watch him die.  In any event Nannette's heart belongs to Raoul Challoner, played by none other than Lon Chaney.

Nell's father has the frosted lung (the most dreaded of Canadian illnesses.)  He's been living off the charity of Snidely's father; but when Nell refuses Snidely's offer of marriage he threatens to throw him out into the unforgiving Canadian wilderness.  Nell agrees to marry him only once it's proven that her long absent Lon is dead.  Snidely is selling whiskey to the Injuns, and convinces one of his smuggling associates to tell Nell that he saw Lon die.  Lon though is returning home with his pet bear cub and puppy.  He saves Nell at the altar, but that night Snidely and his associate jump Lon, and Lon accidentally kills Snidely's associate.  Lon and Nell get married and flee to the wilderness.  Dudley is given the order to find Lon and the mounties always get their man...

When Dudley is taking Long back to civilization (after three years of pursuit) he brings Lon, Nell, their infant daughter and Lon's now full grown bear and guard dog; but only Lon is restrained.  I don't think Dudley was in the gifted class at Mountie school.

The film is a terrible waste of Lon's talents.  Throughout the film I was expecting him to become mutilated, or to mutilate someone, but that didn't happen.  Betty Blythe is a large woman, and not at all what you'd think of as a 20's era starlet; but she was famous for wearing revealing costumes early in the decade.  (She does have hips well suited for child-bearing, which is undoubtedly why her character was being pursued by so many French Canadian men.)

The studio recreated the Canadian wilderness in a studio in California.  The panoramas look like a model rail set, but the close ups are well done.  There's a forest fire at the end of the film, Betty, Lon and the Mountie were almost burned to death in the scene.