TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

Horrible Bosses 2. It was amusing.

Not as funny as 1 IMO.

[katmai]

Horrible Bosses 2. It was amusing.

Not as funny as 1 IMO.

Yep.

[viper37]

It has already been done successfully.  Remember that great scene in ET where the kids were playing the game?

do you know how old I was when that movie was in theaters?
No, I don't remember at all

[Josquius]

Reminds me of when I went to see the SouthPark movie and there were loads of families with their kids in attendance, which walked out at about 15-20 minutes in.

SP was a very niche thing when the film came out, so a lot of people just saw an animated movie with some cute kids in it.

That's amazing. It was pretty big in the UK at the time.

[The Minsky Moment]

I recall liking Face/Off less than Broken Arrow, but I like Broken Arrow a real awful lot, to the extent I'm probably literally its biggest fan, given I've never heard anyone else even say something nice about it.

Face/off is definitely the superior of the two, because of its willingness to self-satirize.  As I fan of the Flash Gordon movie I would have thought you would have sympathy (despite the otherwise huge stylistic differences).  Broken Arrow was just a mess.

[The Minsky Moment]

No i just don't drink the I wish I was Alfred Hitchcock but instead I'm hack Brian DePalma kool aid.

Second that motion.

[frunk]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wYtG7aQTHA

[Malthus]

Continued my '90s Luc Besson kick by watching the 1990 movie Nikita (aka La Femme Nikita).

Spoilers Below!

One note: holy crap, but this thing has been remade/adapted enough times! Not only was there an American movie remake (Point of No Return), but there has also been not one, but two, TV series based directly on it (La Feme Nikita in the late 90s and Nikita in the late 00s). I never saw any of 'em.

I enjoyed it well enough, as a sort of 'My Fair Lady with Assassins'. It didn't resonate with me as much as Leon - The Professional (the latter, BTW, only suffered one remake - in Bollywood, of all places - a movie entitled Bichhoo which is supposed to be quite, quite bad).

Both Leon and Nikita are both action movies and love stories, and therein lies the difference - in Nikita, I never quite bought either of the relationships (that of Nikita and her "handler", or that of Nikita and her fiancee). The reason is that I felt the audience was never given any particular reason to care about either of her possible love interests. What makes Leon more engrossing, is that I could buy the relationship between Leon and Mathilda - even though, in many ways, it is a supremely fucked up one (how could it not be, given that it is between an apparently semi-autistic forty year old professional killer and an abused twelve year old?). 

This is something of a reversal - the love affair in Nikita between her and her fiancee is portrayed as totally socially normal - sure, she's a bit of a maniac pixie girl, but it's sweet (though every once in a while she takes a call that makes her "work late" ... killing France's enemies). In contrast, the love between Leon and Mathilda is, quite intentionally on the part of the director, squirm-inducing. At first, it would appear that their relationship is nothing more than that of a (very reluctant) mentor/mentee, but as the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Mathilda is in love with Leon - and not in a platonic way. She outright tells him she's in love with him; she tells the hotel clerk, who is under the impression Leon is Mathilda's father, that Leon is in fact 'not her father, but her lover' (which gets the pair thrown out); she tries to kiss Leon in a restaurant, and when he tells her to knock it off, she gets deliberately drunk and causes a scene; and finally, she outright propositions him for sex. Leon, on his part, finds this increasingly disturbing. He is continually deflecting her advances, but at the same time, he clearly *does* grow to love her - only, not sexually. [All of this apparently proved too much for US test audiences as sailing too close to pedophilia, leading to large chunks of the movie being cut (though later added back in to the "international edition")]

Why does this relatonship make dramatic sense? Because we are shown just how lost and damaged these two people are. Both have personalities defined by trauma. Leon has never gotten over the murder of his GF as a teen - he fled his hometown after that, and he also fled basically having any emotional growth - as he says, he's 'grown older, but not up'; aside from killing people for his surrogate father/boss, he has no life. Mathilda is clearly an abused little girl - her low-life drug dealing dad slaps her around, as does her older sister - and the only input she has concerning loving relationships is cuddling with her baby brother on the one hand, and observing her dad screw her prostitute stepmom on the other. Other than that, she has read up on matters sexual in her horrible sister's magazines and in movies. No wonder, then, when someone she looks up to is actually nice to her, she immediately assumes that sexual love is appropriate: it's the only pattern for a positive 'adult' relationship she has.

Essentially, the more messed-up relationship in Leon is also more fully-developed, and grows more from the development of the characters. In Nikita, I got the impression her fiancee was basically a one-note plot device: we know very little about him, other than that he's a nice guy.

[The Brain]

The Twilight Samurai. I kind of liked it.

[lustindarkness]

I forgot to mention here. I watched Southpaw yesterday, its good, and no, I was not crying, I had eye allergies.

[Eddie Teach]

I forgot to mention here. I watched Southpaw yesterday, its good, and no, I was not crying, I had eye allergies.

[Ideologue]

If I don't get around to reviewing it, know that Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941) is fantastic, a nearly-perfect blend of humanism, humor, and class war.  I like how John Sullivan gets out of jail for nearly killing a man pretty much entirely on the basis that he was rich and famous.   I really need to watch The Lady eve.  9/10

Sav, didn't you watch this lately?

[Eddie Teach]

I thought he got out of jail on the basis of being innocent, rich and famous.

[The Brain]

That's something I can't understand: how he could nearly kill a man?

[Josquius]

Sense8- I don't know. The core idea is cool. Some very nice sequences, such as one where the transexual is running away with everyone's help, but... Yeah. Some of the stories feel so disjointed. Things skip ahead sometimes. I guess it's a bit like cloud atlas in that.