TV/Movies Megathread

[Neil]

I wonder how San Francisco gets hit so much, it's not as if *that* big. Being iconic has its drawbacks, I guess.

The Golden Gate bridge is the most significant landmark on the West Coast.

[Ideologue]

I wonder how San Francisco gets hit so much, it's not as if *that* big. Being iconic has its drawbacks, I guess.

The Golden Gate bridge is the most significant landmark on the West Coast.

Not the Hollywood sign?  But that's more trite to blow up; can't do battle on it so readily.

[Liep]

I was expecting the 100 to be awful, but it's really fucking awful.

[celedhring]

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/map-how-hollywood-has-destroyed-america-1542969906/@sarah-hedgecock

Thanks. I was wondering if they went back to the golden age of B-movies in the 30s and 50s, which would produce a lot of hits. Seems they have. 189 is a bit short for the sheer amount of disaster movies you can find if you dig well enough, but as they say it isn't an exhaustive list.

No Terminator though? I guess it fails under their "doesn't happen onscreen" clause but [spoiler]T3 ends with the Doomsday at the very least[/spoiler]. What category would it fall under though? Mankind since Skynet is man-created?

[The Larch]

I never realized how often those B sci fi movies of the 50s hit California. 

The Monolith Monsters   1957   San Angelo, CA   Lone Pine, CA
The Monster That Challenged the World   1957   Salton Sea, CA   
War of the Colossal Beast   1958   Los Angeles, CA   
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman   1958   Tarzana, CA

[celedhring]

I never realized how often those B sci fi movies of the 50s hit California. 

The Monolith Monsters   1957   San Angelo, CA   Lone Pine, CA
The Monster That Challenged the World   1957   Salton Sea, CA   
War of the Colossal Beast   1958   Los Angeles, CA   
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman   1958   Tarzana, CA

They were B-movies for a reason. The least they moved away from Hollywood for location shooting, the better.

[Valmy]

I think it is hilarious how poor New York gets destroyed every single year in a movie.  I wonder if British movies torch London every summer like we do to New York.

[Ideologue]

Tangentially, The Monolith Monsters is actually a very cool little film.

[Ideologue]

Sisters (1973).  Brian De Palma directs this biopic of Margot Kidder, an unaccountably French-Canadian model who may or may not have a sister that murders her lovers.  Initially a solid enough thriller, the cartoonishly phantasmogoric ending--if promising enough filmmaking--is also terrible.  More Spellbound than Psycho, I assure you.  But is there splitscreen?  You better Goddamned believe it.

C

Obsession (1976).  In the same year he made Carrie, De Palma made this all-too-slow, only occasionally visually brilliant picture, a loose riff on Vertigo that has its heart in the right place--its reveals are not vomited all over the audience halfway through--but which fails entirely to rise to its level of craft, pace, character, acting, etc., and attempts to outdo the Hitchcock classic with [spoiler]a twist ending stolen from the future, namely from Oldboy, without a single long-take fight scene to spice it up or a hypnotism subplot to at least make it seem less overtly retarded.  Oh, and is John Lithgow a villain?  HOW DID I GUESS?[/spoiler]

C+

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).  Fucking loved it.  Will likely write it up, but suffice it to say Rooney Mara blasts unaccountably-successful terrible actress Noomi Rapace out of the water with her layered yet direct, damaged yet powerful, borderline autistic yet altogether more human performance as Lisbeth Salander.  Also, this isn't so punishingly obviously a TV movie made for 500kr in Soviet Socialist Sweden.  With its bleak ending being more personal than apocalyptic, it's nonetheless the Chinatown of our time; or at least our Two Jakes, with fully twice as many characters experiencing difficulty sitting down as in the Jack Nicholson classic.

A

[Ideologue]

Oh, and I bought Snake Eyes.

[jimmy olsen]

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).  Fucking loved it.  Will likely write it up, but suffice it to say Rooney Mara blasts unaccountably-successful terrible actress Noomi Rapace out of the water with her layered yet direct, damaged yet powerful, borderline autistic yet altogether more human performance as Lisbeth Salander.  Also, this isn't so punishingly obviously a TV movie made for 500kr in Soviet Socialist Sweden.  With its bleak ending being more personal than apocalyptic, it's nonetheless the Chinatown of our time; or at least our Two Jakes, with fully twice as many characters experiencing difficulty sitting down as in the Jack Nicholson classic.

A

What have you done with the real Ide!?

[Ideologue]

Look, I'm not saying it's not a great place to live.  I'm saying they don't fund their movies sufficiently to afford things like "camera movement" or "second takes" or "actually editing a film about people staring at computers and old newspapers into something watchable by cognitively normal humans."

I'm actually going to give it another try to do a back-to-back comparison; and perhaps the other two as well, because I have some desire to see what happens with Lisbeth, even if she's portrayed by an anti-actor and shot under the stylistic guidelines of the Ministry of Television.

To fully disclose, I tried watch the 2009 Dragon Tattoo back when I could just stop watching something I didn't like, so I bailed on it after like an hour.  But that hour was nearly pure oblivion, excepting only rape scenes, which at least had some inherent drama that even Oplev couldn't destroy.  But maybe the last fifty hours get better?

[celedhring]

The Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a great TV-movie (rather, a miniseries). I think you're being unfair by asking stuff from it that a TV-movie can't provide.

[Ideologue]

Breaking Bad and Hannibal are visually interesting works.  That's still probably an unfair comparison due to the larger budget and competitive advantage America has in making motion pictures of all stripes, though.

[celedhring]

Breaking Bad and Hannibal are visually interesting works.  That's still probably an unfair comparison due to the larger budget and competitive advantage America has in making motion pictures of all stripes, though.

An episode of Breaking Bad cost twice the amount of a Millenium episode, while also being half as short.

You could say there was a missed opportunity there to produce it as a proper film, with a more ambitious style. The theatrical cut made a killing abroad, most certainly.  But as a tv mini-series in a language with not too many speakers (which makes funding more difficult), it is very well done.