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Can anyone explain why we need a new King Kong movie?

 

Because people have no short time memory anymore. Just wait, soon we're going to have a new Godzilla every two years with slightly updated CGI. 

Edited by Woldan

I gazed at the dead, and for one dark moment I saw a banquet. 
 

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Can anyone explain why we need a new King Kong movie?

 

Response to the popularity of Godzilla perhaps? Though I don't know whether it was a success at the box office or not.

 

Edit: Ninjitsu of fearsome potency, bows.

Edited by Nonek

Quite an experience to live in misery isn't it? That's what it is to be married with children.

I've seen things you people can't even imagine. Pearly Kings glittering on the Elephant and Castle, Morris Men dancing 'til the last light of midsummer. I watched Druid fires burning in the ruins of Stonehenge, and Yorkshiremen gurning for prizes. All these things will be lost in time, like alopecia on a skinhead. Time for tiffin.

 

Tea for the teapot!

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Saw Lucy, that was a waste of time.

Why has elegance found so little following? Elegance has the disadvantage that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

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The Lego Movie. Watched it with my son twice this week.

 

The best film of 2014, bar none. We've been Lego crazy building stuff off the back of it. And doing Batman quotes.

 

9/10.

 

Edit - how in the name of phuck did they line up all those IPs? I note some were missing (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones) and others had to be re-badged (Middle Zealand haw haw) but bejaysus all those other brands?

Edited by Monte Carlo
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What a sad thread. It's like reading twitters of completely random people. They say what they've eaten today and nobody cares and nobody comments, nothing to discuss. What a sad thing. I'm out of here.

 

WTF is this Twitter thing of which you speak? Is it that limited word count app for morons?

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Heh, okay, I just had to share this reviewers take on both Lucy and Hercules..

 

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/lucy-and-hercules-movie-reviews

 

 

Two of this this weekend's new releases are based on popular mythology. One of them takes its chosen myth completely seriously, doubling down on it all the way to the end, and never leaving anybody convinced. The other one throws stones at its myth for pretty much the whole movie, but at the end you really want to believe.

 

I saw Lucy last night with Sandra. I had hoped that the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth bandied about in the trailer might be something they refuted in the film, but if they didn't I figured I could just treat it as a superhero origin story starring Scarlett Johansson. Unfortunately that is not how it went down. Morgan Freeman lectured for several agonizing minutes on the subject, and even though his lecture was interspersed with some cool imagery and tense plot-advancement, the effect was that Morgan Freeman was talking during a movie I wanted to watch.

 

Who doesn't love listening to Morgan Freeman talk? His voice is delightful. Which is why any movie that makes me want Morgan Freeman to JUST PLEASE STOP TALKING has gone tragically astray.

 

Public Service Announcement: We use our whole brains. Getting smarter is not the process of unlocking unused brain cells. It's the process of activating unused hours of your day, with studying, problem-solving, socializing, and hundreds of other varieties of focused thinking. And understanding this simple principle is the first key to actually getting smarter. If you believe you can strengthen your brain, you are more likely to stretch yourself and actually do it. 

 

I could have rewritten the central conceit of the film pretty easily. Luc Besson was already committed to very hand-wavey science, so I'd just invoke a little bit of brain chemistry terminology, and posit a drug that accelerates certain chemical reactions. Sure, real neuroscientists would cringe, but this film is already lost to them. I could have saved it for the rest of us. 

 

There were other problems, though. All the murderous villains were Korean*, which gave the film a seriously racist ring. Yes, ethnic gangs exist, but they can be portrayed better than this. Also, our heroine was very morally ambiguous, but the film failed to properly explore that. The one guy who called her on it didn't try hard enough. Missed opportunity, at best.

Hang on, though: I had fun! The action sequences were great, the tension during our inciting incident was delicious, and throughout the film we were treated to genuine on-location filming and a broad diversity of background players (even if pretty much all the evil ones were Asian.) It wasn't the same old places and faces we're used to getting from Hollywood, and I loved that.

 

But doubling down on a disproven, debunked, and potentially damaging myth? Really annoying. I guess the movie was a little bit like being at a fun family picnic while there's a nail in your foot. "This potato salad is delicious, and it's wonderful to see all of you, but there is a nail in my foot." Lucy failed to clear the Threshold of Awesome. I'm putting it just below Transcendence, because that one did the future of human evolution much more convincingly.

On to Hercules.

I went to this show just to clear my palate of Lucy. A dumb, fantasy-mythological action flick seemed like just the thing.

You know what? This may be my favorite cinematic treatment of Hercules ever. I was surprised. I had one moment of action-movie fatigue during the first big battle scene, but then the story of the battle advanced a bit, and I got back into it. The battle was not a montage of crunching. It had tactics. Some good, some astoundingly bad, some competently depicted, some utterly ridiculous, but there was a STORY in that fight. And in the other fights. In almost all the fights, now that I think about it.

 

Hey, Hollywood! Put more stories inside of fight scenes! I can totally take it.

You know all those "Labors" scenes from the trailers (the lion, the boar, the hydra, etc), the ones that look totally over-the-top fantastical? Yeah, they were done in the first three minutes, at which point our first reveal was that Hercules is, at least to every measurable outward appearance, a man. Oh, and he has some really cool friends with whom he adventures. At that point (five minutes in) I felt like this movie maybe had a story to tell that I could get into.

 

Yes, the Amazon archer's "armor" was one of those ridiculous bare midriff outfits, and the film had plenty of other problems, but I still had a great time. 

 

This Hercules film is loosely based, with no small contractual dispute, on the comics created by the late Steve Moore. The saga in which comic book creators lose any rights to  their creations, and somebody else gets rich, plays out yet again. As a comic book creator it frustrates me. It might frustrate you enough to stay home, and I won't blame you for this. But if you do go, I think you might enjoy the movie. Hercules clears my Threshold of Awesome.

(*Note: Regarding the race of the villianous mob in Lucy, Choi Min-sik, the leader, is Korean, and I'm told that the language they were all speaking was Korean, but the only English identifications of foreign language in those scenes led me to believe they were Chinese. I don't know for sure.)

 

 

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"Cuius testiculos habeas, habeas cardia et cerebellum."

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The Lego Movie. Watched it with my son twice this week.

 

The best film of 2014, bar none. We've been Lego crazy building stuff off the back of it. And doing Batman quotes.

 

9/10.

 

Edit - how in the name of phuck did they line up all those IPs? I note some were missing (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones) and others had to be re-badged (Middle Zealand haw haw) but bejaysus all those other brands?

 

Indiana Jones appeared in the background.

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Bummer, the previews looked entertaining. Can you [spoiler tag] for me what powers she got when she reached 100% capacity?

 

 

She can give a man a boner from 100m away.

 

 

Wait never mind, she can do that in real life.

"because they filled mommy with enough mythic power to become a demi-god" - KP

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Expendables 3. Similar to the other two. Some actors have too short a screen time though. And Harrison Ford is looking really old now. Can't wait to see him in Star Wars 7 and how he's going to look like as Han Solo.

 

Video Games: The Movie. Disappointing they focused mostly on consoles and seem to not mention anything about computers. They didn't mention anything about computers like the C64, Amiga, Atari ST and very little on PCs. When they went from the Atari 2600 to NES to SNES, I was like hang on, what happened to one of the most popular games computers in the 80s being the C64? And no mention of the Amiga. Felt really incomplete.

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Lucy -

 

Thought it was a fun film - its like Luc Besson decided to meld a 70s sci-fi movie with his own earlier action films.  Enjoyment may be muted if you can't get past some of the initial wonky science.

I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must - but I cannot! ~ Ro-Man

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Bummer, the previews looked entertaining. Can you [spoiler tag] for me what powers she got when she reached 100% capacity?

 

 

She hits 100% of her brain and disappears, then apparently becomes God or something as she sends "I AM EVERYWHERE" to the cop who's been helping her's phone. At 99% she rewinds time up to the birth of the Universe (via hand flip gestures too)

 

 

Why has elegance found so little following? Elegance has the disadvantage that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

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Meet The Millers.

 

Silly comedy. Made me laugh all the way through, which was surprising. Jennifer Aniston is a good comic actress, but gets some awful scripts. But give her something sweary and dark and she gets better, it plays against her natural demeanour which is very sweet.

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"This video contains content from FOX, who has blocked it on copyright grounds"

I'd say the answer to that question is kind of like the answer to "who's the sucker in this poker game?"*

 

*If you can't tell, it's you. ;)

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What a sad thread. It's like reading twitters of completely random people. They say what they've eaten today and nobody cares and nobody comments, nothing to discuss. What a sad thing. I'm out of here.

 

WTF is this Twitter thing of which you speak? Is it that limited word count app for morons?

 

 

#proudmoron

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Scorpion King 3 was kind of boring.

I like bad films, but don't be boring, that's the worst thing you can do.

Edited by Amentep
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I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must - but I cannot! ~ Ro-Man

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