TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

Gung Ho-  Thoroughly mediocre. One or two funny moments but generally it seems like made for TV rubbish. Maybe its that its outdated that spoils it? Also I've never got the whole glorification of the American working class as the underdog thing...the US is anything but the underdog

Sometimes you say some really bizarre shit Squeeze. 

[Barrister]

Only watched about 60% of it, but saw Goon.  Only turned the TV on for some background noise while I cleaned the room, but kept watching it until the baby cried.

Pretty damn funny, I must say.  I'm jonesing to try and see the whole thing. 

The bonus points though - the damn thing was shot in Winnipeg!  The early give away was seeing MLCC (Manitoba Liquor Control Commission) ads on the boards in some of the shots.

But when they had a whole extended scene at very obviosly displayed Kelekis Restaurant (although bizarrely described as "middle eastern cuisine, complete with the "owner" offering "Donairs for everybody!", despite the fact Kelekis is a burger and "chips" shop) just about had me on the floor.

[Barrister]

Holy Shit!  I thought I recognized him, but wasn't sure.  The hockey announcer in the movie was Jets 1.0 legend Curt Kielbach!  The dude has some acting chops!

[viper37]

yeah, it's a funny movie.  I watched half in french, half in english, it almost had the feeling of slapshot
I liked the scene in Quebec city

[Ideologue]

I'll watch it. And the Anchorman sequel too. Am I: part of the problem? 

No.  Die Hard and Anchorman sequels absolve you from Hollywood knuckleheadedness.

Die Hard 5 ohboyohboyohboyohboy

  You saw the fourth one, right?

***

The Hole (limited theatrical release some time ago, wide video release 2012).  Joe Dante's return to feature-filmmaking, I really got my hopes up for a horror movie version of the Explorers.  Sadly, Ethan Hawke is nowhere to be seen, but the movie is still really good.  Our voyeuristic hero and his kid brother move to Main Street USA where they find, in order, the female protagonist--whom the male lead spends a good deal of time creepily staring at before being introduced to her, and so did I, so it's good she was over 18 at the time of filming--and a hole in the bottom of their new house's basement.  The girl is basically alright, but the hole is a essentially doorway to Hell, presenting the trio with physical manifestations of their worst fears.  Naturally, they must overcome said fears and in the doing is where the movie badly trips up.  Not to spoil, but the second of the three individual trials undermines the sense of menace achieved by the rest of the film so badly that it really hurts the effectiveness of the movie as the whole, and particularly the climactic scene following it, the last of the fears to be faced.  This last scene is, however, in and of itself very well done, with a very inventive visual styling: [spoiler]the male lead's fear is his absentee, abusive, imprisoned father, and he has to go into the hole itself to confront him; once there, he finds himself in his family's first house, proportioned to have the same sense of scale to his adolescent body as it did to his body as a young child, so the rooms and furniture and the clothes in the closet in which he used to hide, as well as the father himself, are all gigantic in comparison to him.  This is a fantastic idea for presenting a childhood memory angles of hallways and such are also very askew, which was an addition I feel was a mistake--the oppressive hugeness of his childhood home would have been enough without sub-Cagliari set design, and as such it's distracting and totally unnecessary.  Nonetheless, it was still creepy and really good visual design.[/spoiler]  All in all, it is a lot like The Explorers, with an ending that doesn't quite match the build-up; unlike The Explorers, the The Hole's build-up isn't 100% perfect, so it's more of a problem when the ending doesn't live up to it.  Still, pretty damned good.  B+

Note: No spoiler tags for movies that have been out for over ten years or for movies so horrifically terrible you should never under any circumstances watch them.  I have one of each!

Battle Royale (2000).  In this vision of a dystopian nonsensical future, the Japanese Parliament has decreed that in order to teach juvenile delinquents a lesson, a class of schoolchildren nominated by their own teacher will be carried away to a remote island to do battle until only one survives.  They are given random weapons (some of which are awesome, like Uzis, and some of which are inutterably lame, like a pot lid) and are fitted with exploding collars that prevent them from attempting escape or from refusing to fight, since they'll explode at the end of three days if more than one of them is still alive.  There may be some sort of satirical point to this, maybe about how Japanese parents are assholes, but far more importantly is the fun this movie has with its premise.  Wonderfully paced and with a consistently darkly humorous tone, the kids keep dying in new and inventive ways right up till the end.  I really like the part where a guy gets his head cut off, a grenade stuffed in his mouth, and his head gets thrown through a window to blow up some other guys.

That said, it has its flaws.  I was maybe a little disappointed that it didn't take the more conventional, maybe more narratively obligatory, tack of having its main characters (Light from Death Note: The Movie and some chick) become progressively badder ass as the film goes on, starting off squeamish, then having to kill some easy opponents, and finally facing what I was sure were the three clearly marked "end boss" characters: the class queen-bitch, whom it turns out is exceptionally deadly; the survivor from a previous Battle Royale whom the two main characters wind up allies with/hangers-on of; and the film's second-best invention (besides the deranged teacher who chose his class for slaughter), a volunteer for the Battle Royale who, I believe, never utters single line of dialogue, but does the thing I described above with the severed head and the grenade.  Unfortunately, sometimes going against expectations isn't good, because the queen-bitch is killed by the volunteer; the survivor from the previous Battle is a good guy after all; and while the volunteer does survive till nearly the end and serves his purpose admirably as the principal physical danger, it's the prior survivor who kills him, while the main characters themselves stay true to their nature as total pussies throughout the proceedings.  If they'd just straight-up died, I'd have been willing to give the film credit for not giving me what I thought I wanted, but as it stands their passive nature (until the very, very end), while maybe it's got some kind of point, is a little unsatisfying.

Indeed, there's an early scene detailing how the volunteer  collects all his weapons--his randomly chosen weapon was a ceremonial fan--but he still manages to kill a group of seven kids who believe they've ambushed him, very quickly.  This completely establishes his stature as a badass,  but there's an interesting shot where he's looting the dead kids' gear--an Uzi, a katana sword, grenades--and he finds a pair of nunchuks.  The camera lingers as he considers them, but decides they're worthless, and throws them away.  I said, out loud, "Those are coming back, in the hands of one of the leads, probably the girl."  Distrssingly, Chekov's nunchuks never appear again, and this made me sad.

Still, despite this reluctance to provide a fully satisfying narrative arc, it's a damn fine hour and a half of hyperkinetic ultraviolent action film.  And if you hate teenagers it's even better.  A

Black Hawk Down 2: Full SequenceBattle Royale 2: Requiem (2003).  Watched back to back with BR1, this is easily the worst sequel I've ever seen and very possibly the worst movie.  Imagine, if you will, that Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, instead of being a fanciful and hugely entertaining journey through death, life, time, and rock, was instead about how Bill and Ted became Al Qaeda-like terrorists who pontificated at soul-numbing length about their ideals while convincing others to join them, and that all of these cypher characters spend three minutes apiece dying while whispering really bland inspirational last words.  Imagine that, because that would still be more entertaining, because at least Bill S. Preston and Ted Logan being unbelievably dour would provide a few minutes' worth of laughs.  All of the inventiveness of the first film is gone; worse so is the fun; and worse still, the pacing has been replaced with tectonically slow movement from one identical fucking scene to the next.  This movie is over two hours long.

Remember the pussy survivors from the first movie?  They've become guerilla warriors fighting against Japan, and the film opens with two towers being dusted by their terrorist organization (get it? GET IT?).  So far, this could be cool--I'm up for a madcap second-half-of-Fight-Club terrorist extravaganza.  Even if in 2003 this would've been really gauche, it's 2012 now, so I can enjoy it.  This is not what happens.  And this movie is over two hours long.

So another classroom of children is sent to go kill them, complete with bomb collars and such, which makes zero sense and after about twenty of them are killed in a beach landing scene that would have been much better if they'd just used Saving Private Ryan stock footage instead of just ripping it off, they team up and wind up fighting real soldiers (who are as inept as you'd have expected the children to be).  Ultimately, some shit happens, lots of people scream at each other like in the world's most repetitive anime, and there's exactly one kill that isn't one-hundred-percent-completely perfunctory (a guy gets impaled on a pipe through his groin and looks like he's pissing while the blood flows out of him, which I admit earned a laugh).  Did I mention this movie is over two hours long?

The film also gives us a disturbing combination of anti-Americanism and the perennial Japanese lack of historical self-reflection.  There's two (Jesus) scenes where characters list all the countries America has bombed in the past sixty years.  Weirdly, Germany isn't mentioned; of course Japan is; hilariously, China is.  Here's a fun fact--the only time American weapons ever entered Chinese territory in the last sixty years was as an ally and when it was occupied by a profoundly evil foreign aggressor that enslaved its men, raped its women, gassed its cities, inflicted bubonic plague on its countryside, and wound up killing around twenty million or so of its civilian population.  I forget the name of the country, but I'm sure it'll come to me.  So it's a movie that is not only one of the dullest, but also one of the most offensive movies ever made.  Killer combo, dudes.

F minus minus minus minus

(The actual worst movie I've ever is After Last Season (2001), a film that appears to be a Producers-like scam to steal money from investors.  It reputedly cost several million dollars, and most of its interminable scenes take place either in a 1970s (no typo)-era CGI dreamspace or in the corner of a warehouse with only the most rudimentary dressings of an actual film set, like a chair and a desk.  It opens famously with a scene in a "hospital" that is clearly someone's bedroom with identical photographs of brains taped to the walls, and an "MRI" that is built from cardboard and butcher paper.  Interestingly, this movie is still probably more fun than Battle Royale 2, because its stupidity and lameness is at least amusing, whereas for the most part BR2's shittiness can't even earn laughs.  With After Last Season, if you watch it with Noah "Spoony" Antweiler's riff commentary, it's supremely hilarious; I'm not sure you could effectively riff BR2; and After Last Season is not OVER TWO FUCKING HOURS LONG.)

P.S.: It's Japan.  I knew I'd think of it!

[CountDeMoney]

Die Hard 5 ohboyohboyohboyohboy

Yes.  And in light of your recent spat of esoteric movie review navel-gazing, I've decided that I don't care what you think about it, either.

[Ideologue]

You know, I'm not saying Live Free or Die Hard is terrible.*  I'm just not sure it justifies getting excited about another bite at what's left of that apple.  But diff'rent strokes I guess.

*Though anyone giving it a pass for scenes where the Internet controls traffic lights and not giving a pass to similar dumbfuckery in other big-ticket movies, like maybe for example ones with refrigerators in them, isn't applying their standards uniformly.

[Syt]

Seedy, I normally hold your movie views in high regard, but Die Hard 4 was pretty bad. John McClane used to be the Average Joe, the underdog put in a shitty spot and winning out with tenacity and ingenuity - a guy you can root for.

In LFoDH he's turned pretty much into Chuck Fucking Norris.

[CountDeMoney]

Seedy, I normally hold your movie views in high regard, but Die Hard 4 was pretty bad. John McClane used to be the Average Joe, the underdog put in a shitty spot and winning out with tenacity and ingenuity - a guy you can root for.

In LFoDH he's turned pretty much into Chuck Fucking Norris.

There are very few aging actors I will give a pass to when it comes to an over-the-top plot and obtuse action flick absurdity.  Bruce Willis is one of them.

C'mon, man;  he totally fucked up Maddie's Beemer.

[Ideologue]

There's one other that I think I want to watch again before I write anything substantial about it, The Woman (2011).  Suffice it to say it's an extraordinarily intense and ultimately brutal film, and although admittedly I'm ignorant contenders such as The Human Centipede series and A Serbian Film, from what I understand they don't have as much on their minds.  It's also, I suspect, more subtle.  It's highly recommended, perhaps unless you have a history of abuse.  Trigger warnings are usually made by and for total wieners, but this movie should probably come with one, if purely from a products liability standpoint.  While ultimately feminist in outlook, I wouldn't blame anyone for flinching from its depiction of misogyny.  In summary, A+.

your recent spat of esoteric movie review navel-gazing

Oh, right, I meant to say: I'M TRYING TO SHARE MY ENTHUSIASM.

[Syt]

Seedy, I normally hold your movie views in high regard, but Die Hard 4 was pretty bad. John McClane used to be the Average Joe, the underdog put in a shitty spot and winning out with tenacity and ingenuity - a guy you can root for.

In LFoDH he's turned pretty much into Chuck Fucking Norris.

There are very few aging actors I will give a pass to when it comes to an over-the-top plot and obtuse action flick absurdity.  Bruce Willis is one of them.

I agree, but the Die Hard franchise is not the proper vehicle for this.

[Darth Wagtaros]

The Hole sounds like a lame rmeake of The Gate.

[Kleves]

Seedy, I normally hold your movie views in high regard, but Die Hard 4 was pretty bad. John McClane used to be the Average Joe, the underdog put in a shitty spot and winning out with tenacity and ingenuity - a guy you can root for.

In LFoDH he's turned pretty much into Chuck Fucking Norris.

This. In Die Hard, McClane gets fucked up by some glass on the floor. In LFoDH, he jumps on the back of a crashing fighter jet in midflight and survives.

Also, Ide, very enjoyable reviews, as per usual.

[Eddie Teach]

Casa de mi Padre. I did not realize when I ordered it from Netflix that the entire fucking movie was going to be in Spanish. However, Will Ferrell's Spanish wasn't as difficult to follow as most native speakers. Still, I kinda gave up on it halfway through. I don't know if Spanish speakers would find it hilarious or as dull as I did. I'm leaning toward the second.

[Neil]

This. In Die Hard, McClane gets fucked up by some glass on the floor. In LFoDH, he jumps on the back of a crashing fighter jet in midflight and survives.

The thing is, he's been getting steadily tougher.  In Die Hard, he a tough guy.  In Die Hard 2, he was a tough guy who stabbing guys with icicles and having kung-fu fights with super commandos on the wing of a taxiing plane.  In Die Hard 3, he was a tough guy who survived a devastating subway crash, a 100-foot fall onto a container ship that he was trying to climb onto and a flash flood through a tunnel.  If the lack of realism in Die Hard is your problem, you already got of the train 2 or 3 movies ago.