The Credible Hulk is actually not too bad, have you seen it? Edward Norton isn't a bad Banner. It's just Hulk is nailed so well in Avengers it's hard to look back.
The Credible Hulk is actually not too bad, have you seen it? Edward Norton isn't a bad Banner. It's just Hulk is nailed so well in Avengers it's hard to look back.
Scott, your taste in film defies comprehension. That being said, you seem to have a lot more fun watching movies than everyone else who is groaning their way through the show.
I'm comparing the 2008 hulk movie to Ang Lee's Hulk and the 70's show so it's not like it has awesome movies/shows to compare it with :-p There hasn't been a great Hulk film, there was an ok one and that's the 2008 one. All the others have been kinda crap. Though I did like Lee's Hulk because back then there wasn't anything to compare it to. The first X-men movie is a good example of this, for it's time it was a great Super hero film and arguably moved super hero films into the direction they are now, but it hasn't aged well or held up.
Also Kate, I wouldn't talk about taste in film :-p
In my ongoing quest of watching films discussed on "Movies with Mikey" that interest me (also catching me up on movies everybody else has already seen) I have recently watched: SPOILER WARNING
1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: I have seen this one before and I am a big fan of the book series. The movie is definitely flawed, but I think it's a decent adaptation of the source material. The biggest problem is that it is a bit too crowded. Particularly the scenes for introducing Humma Kavula are a bit out of place. Maybe that is just me being snobbish about stuff added to the source material but considering the entire subplot isn't actually resolved in the film I think it does hold true. The creature effects (courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop) are superb though and I also very much like the casting in it.
2) Zodiac: I know almost nothing about the film except the title really and from that I surmised that it would be about the infamous Zodiac killer. The killing that opens the film is sufficiently creepy and well done and after that I was interested in how Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo would interact (which is superficial I admit).
The movie is really weird since it hops from genre to genre but it somehow magically puls it off almost flawlessly. The issue with the film I heard about was that it lacks a real conclusion. Unlike Hitchhiker's though I can't see this as an issue here. The movie behaves almost like a dramatized documentary. Of course the filmmakers could have added stuff out of whole cloth but they didn't (for the most part) and I think the movie is better for it. It is just too easy to add an ending which undercuts one of the central messages of the film: There rarely if ever easy paths and satisfying conclusions in real life.
3) Ex Machina: Just wow. This film basically only has three and a half characters in it and spends a lot of time with establishing shots and a very slow pace. However, it never gets boring. There is always and underlying tension and I was constantly eager to find out what was going to happen next.
It is a great examination on artificial intelligence, what it means if humanity ever is able to create it, and where the border is between simply a "thing" that we created and an individual whose imprisonment is unethical, the examination of whether it is even an intelligence is downright insulting, and the destruction of which is tantamount to murder. Can even the act of creating it, and the entailed inevitability of having to scrap a prototype, be ethical at all?
Anyhow, I was particularly surprised with the small twist at the end when Ava locks Caleb inside the building. I honestly thought they would escape together. You could say that she had played me as a viewer the same way she had played Caleb. For a moment I was angry about that as well but on a real examination it is understandable because Caleb does pose a risk for Ava. It is still a risk of not outright killing him, and it is cruel to basically have him die of hunger, but perhaps Ava wasn't ready to perform such unjustified murder (unlike that of Nathan) and even such a possibility and having to examine her motivation in that act underlines that there is no more difference between AI and human as far as the film is concerned.
Also, the movie definitely deserves the Oscar it received for visual effects, even over Star Wars and Fury Road (haven't seen The Martian yet but I plan to in the near future).
I'm comparing the 2008 hulk movie to Ang Lee's Hulk and the 70's show so it's not like it has awesome movies/shows to compare it with :-p There hasn't been a great Hulk film, there was an ok one and that's the 2008 one. All the others have been kinda crap. Though I did like Lee's Hulk because back then there wasn't anything to compare it to. The first X-men movie is a good example of this, for it's time it was a great Super hero film and arguably moved super hero films into the direction they are now, but it hasn't aged well or held up.
Mud, when compared to poop, doesn't look so bad either.
It isn't that the movie aged poorly. It stunk when it was in theaters. It was ugly CG monster battles that felt endless. The plot was trite, expected, and full of holes. The dialogue was forced. While Norton is a great actor, he was given nothing to work with in that film.
Kate, I said the movie was not bad.. That's not saying it was good :-p
It was bad. Just because other movies are have been worse does not make it "not bad." Also, taste is totally objective, my opinions are always correct, and my excrement smells of roses. ^_^
We skipped The Incredible Hulk and went right on to Iron Man 2.
This one was new to me! I hadn't watched it before because I heard it was bad. As a stand alone movie, I can see this being pretty disappointing.
However, as a setting-up movie for later entries into the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, it works pretty well. I wasn't disappointed that Nick Fury didn't get more time, or that the villains were a bit naff. Instead it was quite exciting to see all the references that would have meant nothing to non-comic-book-readers at the time, but now, having seen all the other movies, are interesting puzzle pieces.
Examples: the location of the Stark Expo being referenced in Captain America, along with more Howard Stark stuff, Cap's shield, Thor stuff, etc.
Also it was interesting to finally see Black Widow's and War Machine's introductions. I'd not made the connection that Don Cheadle was the same character as the guy in the previous Iron Man, played by a different actor. That makes more sense now.
Main bad guy: same powers (weapons company CEO) but in a bad person.
Other main bad guy: same powers (building stuff in montages) but in a bad person.
Comments from Juliane: "Of course, the women are just there to be annoying and to be rescued."
Stan Lee cameo line: no line, just appears on a red carpet
Bonus cameo: Elon Musk is in this one?
Overall: pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as shit as everyone else had said.
Re-watch order: on to Thor next, which follows right on from the post-credits skit of this one.
@Luke Burrage your recap of the marvel movies is a nice read keep on posting them. Also I really like Edward Norton's Hulk, it was a shame he didn't do it outside of the first movie but it was a nice one to watch.
Saw the recent TMNT movie last night. It's a legitimately good Turtles movie, especially if you're a fan of the old cartoon series. It avoided the traditional pitfalls of "A movie about humans that has Ninja Turtles in it." and "Our focus group of robots though these jokes would be funny for small immature humans."
Michael Bay's Transformers movies are the only films that truly enrage me, and I passed on the first Bay-produced TMNT remake. So I went into this movie extremely leery. Megan Fox is not one of my favorite actresses, but she's not shot like a car pinup model. (There is a scene in the opening movie where she does the slutty schoolgirl act to pick a pocket, but I was getting popcorn so I missed most of that scene.)
Loki is a really interesting villain. No wonder he became the main bag guy in the Avengers movie, and this role launched the movie career of Tom Hiddleston. Thor himself isn't very interesting, but he's surrounded by interesting-ish people. The love story isn't very strong, but whatever.
It felt slower and more measured that the previous movies.
Good references to other movies I didn't pick up on when I watched this as a standalone movie: "Is this one of Stark's?" Oh yeah, Hawkeye is in this one. Thor seems very eager to sign up with Shield without ever really having any of it explained to him. Shield seemed like an antagonist in this movie, which I think confused me the first time.
Main bad guy: opposite powers! Brains not brawn, though he puts up a good fight at the end. The Destroyer is fucking badass.
Comments from Juliane: "Why didn't he lead with that?" "His hammer is going to fly over to him now, isn't it... yeah."
Stan Lee cameo line: rips the back of his truck off
Overall: another movie which is just fine. The dodgy special effects don't stand out as much as those in Captain America, mainly because that was ostensibly set in the real world, and Thor was getting up to no good in magical realms.
Re-watch order: Last chance to watch The Incredible Hulk before Avengers, or straight on to Avengers?
Re-watch order: Last chance to watch The Incredible Hulk before Avengers, or straight on to Avengers?
The Stinger for Hulk doesn't make too much sense without watching a secret clip on Youtube. There are a couple of references made to the Hulk movie in Avengers, but the re-castng made the Hulk movie largely irrelevant.
Thor always has gotten higher marks because it was fine and not absolutely terrible. It was so crazy that they didn't make that film suck that it actually gets graded on a curve.
A post-credits scene (also called a tag, stinger, credit cookie,[1] or coda[2]) is a short clip that appears after all or some of the closing credits of a movie, TV series or video game have run. It is usually included for humor or to set up a possible sequel.
The animation is great, the story and characters a likeable.
Has a slow down in the middle and I felt as if there was a bit edited out in terms of Hops moving back home.
The race relations was right in your face and became centre stage pushing away or kind of not melding well with "You can do anything you set your mind to".
Yeah I was actually curious how they were going to finish the movie around that point. Then when they revealed the smoking gun I immediately pieced together the rest of the plot haha.
Warcraft is the most inconsistent movie I've ever watched. It's bad, but moderate-to-good by video game adaptation standards. I went so many times from liking it, to being bored, to hating it, to laughing hysterically at how stupid it got. I forgot how bad the original Warcraft series was at having characters who change their values and allegiances at a dime. The special effects are pretty good but the acting as a whole is mostly terrible, especially Llane, Medivh, and Garona.
The movie definitely feels like there has been an hour cut. I know the games, but I can easily see someone unfamiliar with Warcraft watching this and having no idea what is going on or who is who. Every fight scene is this movie is caught in terrible flux between brutally real or cartoonishly fake. I laughed almost every time a character died because they tried to play the very contrived, silly deaths as the most overwrought, important things ever.
And I stick by this statement after watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie yesterday. Mario is much worse, yet it is consistent as a drug-fueled oddity even for Hollywood. I have no idea what they were thinking making that movie other than they wanted to rip off every shot and plot point from popular movies from the last 5 years.
Comments
Also Kate, I wouldn't talk about taste in film :-p
1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: I have seen this one before and I am a big fan of the book series. The movie is definitely flawed, but I think it's a decent adaptation of the source material. The biggest problem is that it is a bit too crowded. Particularly the scenes for introducing Humma Kavula are a bit out of place. Maybe that is just me being snobbish about stuff added to the source material but considering the entire subplot isn't actually resolved in the film I think it does hold true. The creature effects (courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop) are superb though and I also very much like the casting in it.
2) Zodiac: I know almost nothing about the film except the title really and from that I surmised that it would be about the infamous Zodiac killer. The killing that opens the film is sufficiently creepy and well done and after that I was interested in how Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo would interact (which is superficial I admit).
The movie is really weird since it hops from genre to genre but it somehow magically puls it off almost flawlessly. The issue with the film I heard about was that it lacks a real conclusion. Unlike Hitchhiker's though I can't see this as an issue here. The movie behaves almost like a dramatized documentary. Of course the filmmakers could have added stuff out of whole cloth but they didn't (for the most part) and I think the movie is better for it. It is just too easy to add an ending which undercuts one of the central messages of the film: There rarely if ever easy paths and satisfying conclusions in real life.
3) Ex Machina: Just wow. This film basically only has three and a half characters in it and spends a lot of time with establishing shots and a very slow pace. However, it never gets boring. There is always and underlying tension and I was constantly eager to find out what was going to happen next.
It is a great examination on artificial intelligence, what it means if humanity ever is able to create it, and where the border is between simply a "thing" that we created and an individual whose imprisonment is unethical, the examination of whether it is even an intelligence is downright insulting, and the destruction of which is tantamount to murder. Can even the act of creating it, and the entailed inevitability of having to scrap a prototype, be ethical at all?
Anyhow, I was particularly surprised with the small twist at the end when Ava locks Caleb inside the building. I honestly thought they would escape together. You could say that she had played me as a viewer the same way she had played Caleb. For a moment I was angry about that as well but on a real examination it is understandable because Caleb does pose a risk for Ava. It is still a risk of not outright killing him, and it is cruel to basically have him die of hunger, but perhaps Ava wasn't ready to perform such unjustified murder (unlike that of Nathan) and even such a possibility and having to examine her motivation in that act underlines that there is no more difference between AI and human as far as the film is concerned.
Also, the movie definitely deserves the Oscar it received for visual effects, even over Star Wars and Fury Road (haven't seen The Martian yet but I plan to in the near future).
The lack of a conclusion is an attempt to be ambiguous. To say to the audience "what now?". What happens to this new 'life form' among organic life.
But really, it does a very poor job of setting you up for that ambiguity, because it's main focus was to deliver the twist, to add some shock.
I agree this film deserves recognition, for it's minimalistic aesthetic and lack of substance.
If you want a sci-fi that delivers the aesthetic but with the substance, watch the Black Mirror episodes.
It isn't that the movie aged poorly. It stunk when it was in theaters. It was ugly CG monster battles that felt endless. The plot was trite, expected, and full of holes. The dialogue was forced. While Norton is a great actor, he was given nothing to work with in that film. Hold up, Girlfriend! While there are many terrible movies that I have enjoyed, I never claim that they are good.
Now I want to double up contractions. I've'nt seen anyone else do that though.
Googling, I mostly see "I've nt" in the context of someone who looks like they can't type or are typing poorly on a phone.
But then I found this wonderful gem of a site.
http://www.naijapals.com/?L=confess.index&cid=51050
Kate, I said the movie was not bad.. That's not saying it was good :-p
Wouldn't've found that without googling weird multi-contractions.
There was a time when "shan't" was often written as "sha'n't"; it is, after all, a contraction of "shall not"; there's also "wo'n't" and "ca'n't".
This one was new to me! I hadn't watched it before because I heard it was bad. As a stand alone movie, I can see this being pretty disappointing.
However, as a setting-up movie for later entries into the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, it works pretty well. I wasn't disappointed that Nick Fury didn't get more time, or that the villains were a bit naff. Instead it was quite exciting to see all the references that would have meant nothing to non-comic-book-readers at the time, but now, having seen all the other movies, are interesting puzzle pieces.
Examples: the location of the Stark Expo being referenced in Captain America, along with more Howard Stark stuff, Cap's shield, Thor stuff, etc.
Also it was interesting to finally see Black Widow's and War Machine's introductions. I'd not made the connection that Don Cheadle was the same character as the guy in the previous Iron Man, played by a different actor. That makes more sense now.
Main bad guy: same powers (weapons company CEO) but in a bad person.
Other main bad guy: same powers (building stuff in montages) but in a bad person.
Comments from Juliane:
"Of course, the women are just there to be annoying and to be rescued."
Stan Lee cameo line:
no line, just appears on a red carpet
Bonus cameo:
Elon Musk is in this one?
Overall: pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as shit as everyone else had said.
Re-watch order: on to Thor next, which follows right on from the post-credits skit of this one.
Michael Bay's Transformers movies are the only films that truly enrage me, and I passed on the first Bay-produced TMNT remake. So I went into this movie extremely leery. Megan Fox is not one of my favorite actresses, but she's not shot like a car pinup model. (There is a scene in the opening movie where she does the slutty schoolgirl act to pick a pocket, but I was getting popcorn so I missed most of that scene.)
Loki is a really interesting villain. No wonder he became the main bag guy in the Avengers movie, and this role launched the movie career of Tom Hiddleston. Thor himself isn't very interesting, but he's surrounded by interesting-ish people. The love story isn't very strong, but whatever.
It felt slower and more measured that the previous movies.
Good references to other movies I didn't pick up on when I watched this as a standalone movie:
"Is this one of Stark's?"
Oh yeah, Hawkeye is in this one.
Thor seems very eager to sign up with Shield without ever really having any of it explained to him. Shield seemed like an antagonist in this movie, which I think confused me the first time.
Main bad guy: opposite powers! Brains not brawn, though he puts up a good fight at the end.
The Destroyer is fucking badass.
Comments from Juliane:
"Why didn't he lead with that?"
"His hammer is going to fly over to him now, isn't it... yeah."
Stan Lee cameo line:
rips the back of his truck off
Overall: another movie which is just fine. The dodgy special effects don't stand out as much as those in Captain America, mainly because that was ostensibly set in the real world, and Thor was getting up to no good in magical realms.
Re-watch order: Last chance to watch The Incredible Hulk before Avengers, or straight on to Avengers?
Thor always has gotten higher marks because it was fine and not absolutely terrible. It was so crazy that they didn't make that film suck that it actually gets graded on a curve.
The animation is great, the story and characters a likeable.
Has a slow down in the middle and I felt as if there was a bit edited out in terms of Hops moving back home.
The race relations was right in your face and became centre stage pushing away or kind of not melding well with "You can do anything you set your mind to".
Flash is a boss.
The movie definitely feels like there has been an hour cut. I know the games, but I can easily see someone unfamiliar with Warcraft watching this and having no idea what is going on or who is who. Every fight scene is this movie is caught in terrible flux between brutally real or cartoonishly fake. I laughed almost every time a character died because they tried to play the very contrived, silly deaths as the most overwrought, important things ever.
And I stick by this statement after watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie yesterday. Mario is much worse, yet it is consistent as a drug-fueled oddity even for Hollywood. I have no idea what they were thinking making that movie other than they wanted to rip off every shot and plot point from popular movies from the last 5 years.