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    #51
    Originally posted by Benjm View Post
    I don't like Studio Ghibli productions.
    Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
    That's a banning.
    I'm with the Snake.

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      #52
      Anything by Nicolas Winding Refn.
      Loathsome director. Blind, brutal, senseless sex and violence.

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        #53
        Adaptations of Ian McEwan novels.

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          #54
          Originally posted by Disco Child Ballads View Post
          Adaptations of Ian McEwan novels.
          The Cement Garden was good.

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            #55
            Originally posted by EIM View Post
            Why?
            Because I found I, Daniel Blake very upsetting. It made me sad and angry.

            Comment


              #56
              Originally posted by diggedy derek View Post
              Loathsome director. Blind, brutal, senseless sex and violence.
              I'm not a fan but would quite like to see the episode of Miss Marple that he directed between Valhalla Rising and Drive, just out of curiosity.

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                #57
                Originally posted by TonTon View Post
                Dumbo was my fillum as a kid. But fuck me, it's long, and bits of it are really, really boring.
                With you on the boring bits but it's only about 65 minutes - maybe "slow" or "drawn out" would fit better than "long".

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                  #58
                  Originally posted by Reginald Christ
                  The "War is Hell... for American soldiers" war film subgenre. Saving Private Ryan, We Were Soldiers, The Deer Hunter. Reminds me of the Frankie Boyle joke about how one of the worst things about the US military waging war on your country is that in 20 years they'll return to make a film about how killing all your children made their soldiers feel sad.
                  I saw him do that joke too. That is a valid criticism of the American perspective on Vietnam overall*, one that is starting to be remedied more recently with the availability of more interviews, etc, from Vietnamese. But calling PTSD "feeling sad" is a damaging lie and not a funny joke.*

                  But, yeah, I saw Platoon and don't need to see it or anything else like it again. I've never seen Full Metal Jacket and don't plan to.

                  The best American Vietnam war movie is, of course, Apocalypse Now, which isn't really about Vietnam specifically.

                  Oliver Stone actually did a better job of showing the Vietnamese perspective than most. He made Heaven & Earth, which hardly anyone saw, which may be why there aren't more English-language movies from that perspective. But even that shoehorns in a PTSD subplot with Tommy Lee Jones' character that isn't in the book/real life. Letters From Iwo Jima, a pretty decent attempt by Clint Eastwood to show a Japanese perspective on that conflict, didn't do well in the US commercially and neither did its US-perspective counterpart Flags of Our Fathers . Realistic and nuanced portrayal of war is not really what people want to see on a Friday night. And I don't think they'd line up to see a movie about children being killed by American bombs. (Though, perhaps surprisingly, that is a subplot of Amazon's new Jack Ryan series.)


                  Saving Private Ryan is kind of overrated. The opening scenes are very well done, of course, and do a great job of showing that "war is hell" and not at all cool or exciting, but the rest of it follows a very conventional WWII war-movie narrative that doesn't offer much. Fury did that just as well, if not better, and didn't get anywhere close to as much praise.
                  Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 06-11-2018, 17:03.

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                    #59
                    Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                    Because I found I, Daniel Blake very upsetting. It made me sad and angry.
                    Well yeah. There was that too. But I still found it clunky, poorly acted and gratuitous in places.

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                      #60
                      Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                      I saw him do that joke too. That is a valid criticism of the American perspective on Vietnam overall*, one that is starting to be remedied more recently with the availability of more interviews, etc, from Vietnamese. But calling PTSD "feeling sad" is a damaging lie and not a funny joke.*

                      But, yeah, I saw Platoon and don't need to see it or anything else like it again. I've never seen Full Metal Jacket and don't plan to.

                      The best American Vietnam war movie is, of course, Apocalypse Now, which isn't really about Vietnam specifically.

                      Oliver Stone actually did a better job of showing the Vietnamese perspective than most. He made Heaven & Earth, which hardly anyone saw, which may be why there aren't more English-language movies from that perspective. But even that shoehorns in a PTSD subplot with Tommy Lee Jones' character that isn't in the book/real life. Letters From Iwo Jima, a pretty decent attempt by Clint Eastwood to show a Japanese perspective on that conflict, didn't do well in the US commercially and neither did its US-perspective counterpart Flags of Our Fathers . Realistic and nuanced portrayal of war is not really what people want to see on a Friday night. And I don't think they'd line up to see a movie about children being killed by American bombs. (Though, perhaps surprisingly, that is a subplot of Amazon's new Jack Ryan series.)


                      Saving Private Ryan is kind of overrated. The opening scenes are very well done, of course, and do a great job of showing that "war is hell" and not at all cool or exciting, but the rest of it follows a very conventional WWII war-movie narrative that doesn't offer much. Fury did that just as well, if not better, and didn't get anywhere close to as much praise.

                      watch "full metal jacket"

                      also "paths of glory" from an earlier era.

                      Best war film ever is elim klimov's "come and see"

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                        #61
                        Come and see is terrifying, the most draining thing I’ve ever seen.

                        The second half of Full Metal Jacket just seems a bit shit for me.

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                          #62
                          Originally posted by Reginald Christ
                          I'm broadly in agreement with everything there, Reed. Boyle's not known for his subtlety but I think the point he was trying to make is valid - that we hear far too much about how American wars badly affected the troops who fought in them but we hear nowhere near enough about the victims or the "other side", to use a cliché. PTSD's not a joke and I don't think he'd seriously claim it is.

                          None of the films you mentioned did well commercially in America but I think that's more a depressing comment on the conservative nature of mainstream cinematic tastes. Film-makers ideally should pay no heed to that. wingo, in his guise as The Reaper, wrote a superb evisceration of Saving Private Ryan, for anyone who's interested.
                          Yeah, but I get annoyed whenever a comedian goes for applause from a self-selected audience rather than a laugh or trying to make people actually see something in a new way.


                          I think a lot of people weren't thoroughly impressed with Saving Private Ryan, but most of the critics either reviewed the movie in their head that they wanted SPR to be or found the technically and viscerally impressive bits enough to overcome the lack of imagination in the rest of it.

                          For example.
                          "Time Magazine's Richard Schickel wrote "A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground."

                          Umm, not really. It has parts that seem to be doing all of that, but then goes out of its way to not transcend simplistic morality by tacking on those bits of the old guy with his family at the memorial. And it has that bit where the bad-ass baptist sniper shoots a Nazi sniper right through his sight. That was a needless bit of Tarantino-esque "war is cool" shit. There are a few bits like that.

                          On the other hand, the only non-positive review IMDB has is this one.
                          Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Nothing that suggests an independent vision, unless you count seeing more limbs blown off than usual..."

                          Well, it's a bit better than that. All of the technical elements are outstanding and all of the acting - especially the chronically underrated Jeremy Davies (a guy I used to always mix up with Henry Thomas) - is very good.

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                            #63
                            None of the films you mentioned did well commercially in America but I think that's more a depressing comment on the conservative nature of mainstream cinematic tastes. Film-makers ideally should pay no heed to that.
                            I don't think its necessarily so depressing. At least not in the way it's usually expressed, which is "it's depressing that the mass audience isn't as sophisticated as I am." I'm not accusing you of saying that, but it's not an uncommon sentiment.

                            I don't think the audience's taste is necessarily the main issue. It may be easier to get people to see unchallenging movies, but the bigger issue, I think, is that it's also a hell of a lot easier to make unchallenging movies that are, at least, somewhat entertaining than to make a worthy film about real human emotion or slavery or Vietnam or whatever. Sure, Marvel movies et al cost a lot, but in most cases they can probably spend their way into near complete certainty that the film will at least be somewhat entertaining and sellable to small kids around the globe.

                            But making a proper film about a proper grown-up subject is more of a crapshoot. A bad film about giant robots throwing cars still has the merit of having giant robots throwing cars. And bad comedies can cram the five good jokes in the whole film into the trailer and at least sucker people into seeing it opening weekend. But a film that's supposed to be about real human emotions and problems and fails is just boring. Or worse, a films trying-but-failing to be an intelligent comedy is just painful. Nobody sets out to make movies like that. It just happens. Even to directors and writers who have succeeded in the past.

                            And therefore, while horror, broad-comedy, and action movies are largely critic-proof, movies about real life and so forth that get a yellow score on Metacritic are, I suppose, DOA commercially. It's easy to mock Hollywood for being so conservative, but that's easy to say when it's not your money. Even cheap movies cost a lot to make. And by the time it's clear that it's not working, it's too late to unspend the money. Which is all the more reason why Hollywood looks for stories that have already succeeded in other, cheaper, mediums - novels, graphic novels, TV, film shorts, video games, etc.

                            I don't think the American audience is especially dumb or conservative in it's taste so much as it is conservative in it's film-going choices. Those are not the same thing. Because what we say we like after we've seen it and what we're able to find out about and then decide to invest time and money into are not the same.

                            In the "good old days" when, according to old critics, films were made for adults, most people had access to at most three black-and-white commercial-lousy TV channels on a small screen and maybe only a few theaters in town each showing one movie at a time and going to the movies was an event regardless of what was showing. So to some extent - or at least, a lot more than now - studios could make whatever they wanted to and people would see it. Or, at least, they'd know it was out because it would be advertised in the only paper they got and on the marquee of the only theater in their neighborhood. And even if the film sucked, at least the theater was air-conditioned.

                            Now we're all bombarded with options, people have really nice screens in their living room which is exactly their preferred temperature, etc, etc, and every new movie or show that comes out is competing for people's time with almost every movie or TV show ever made. Even people in the industry who are taking up a lot of their time and effort to try to see everything good that is produced cannot see it all. And people who aren't, like me, spending hours a day on IMDB figuring out what to see next - i.e. 99.99999% of the population, I'd guess - aren't even going to be aware of all the stuff out there that they might like. People have jobs and kids and hobbies.

                            To get people to even stop searching Netflix or Amazon and hit "play" - let alone go to the hassle of going to a theater* - you need to give them something in the description that makes them say "I understand what this is about, I think, and feel reasonably confident it's worth my time." That's obviously a lot easier to do if it's a sequel to something they already like, or a remake of a film they liked, or based on a comic book that they at least heard was good, or has actors and/or a director whose previous work they like.

                            Can anyone honestly say their brains don't work like that? Who is this fantasy audience out there that is willing to risk the time or money to see a film about something they know nothing about with people they know nothing about when there's a million other more sure-fire options out there. The only people who do that are critics. And, maybe, film students. Or people who want to pretend to be like film students.

                            And those of us who are old enough to have jobs, mortgages, maybe kids, an awareness of all the pain in the world, etc. are not, by and large, going to relish the idea of coming home from work and watching something about the holocaust. Critics do that because they see everything anyway. And some scholars to. And students do that sometimes because for them thinking-the-big-thoughts about important things is still new and exciting. But for most of us, life is exhausting and we'd rather turn our brains off for a bit.

                            The one exception to all of this, at least for me, is if the film is getting a lot of really good reviews.** Because I know that, even if I hate it, it will be interesting and I'll be able to talk about it on OTF. Indeed, I suppose hating a film that all the critics like is more interesting than something that is universally loved. But otherwise, I'd rather just watch Almost Famous or Fargo or Star Wars or The Twilight Zone or f'ing garbage like Riverdale. At least I know what I'll be getting with those and it won't make it hard for me to sleep. I don't think I need to apologize for that.

                            Sorry for the long post, but it's a fascinating topic that I spend way too much time thinking about. Because I'm not married.


                            *According to some data I just found, the average American only sees five films in the theater a year. And, I suspect, a lot of those precious trips to the theater are taken by parents taking their kids and all their kids friends to see something only kids will like. Hollywood people who spend every night going to one of LA's cool old theaters that shows restored prints of brilliant-but-obscure French films and what not, and then lament that the theater experience is dying, do not live in the reality of the rest of us. As it is, going to a first-run movie in my town on a non-Tuesday or matinee costs $11 and if I want something to drink while I'm watching (which I do) It's another $5. And we don't have any theaters downtown any more, nor to most places, so you have to drive. In big cities, the prices are much worse, of course.

                            **This is also why, despite all of their problems, the Oscars still serve a vital purpose. Just being nominated gives a film such a publicity and credibility boost that a lot of those kinds of prestige films probably would never get made if they didn't have a shot to ride the awards wave.
                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 06-11-2018, 20:23.

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                              #64
                              Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                              To get people to even stop searching Netflix or Amazon and hit "play" - let alone go to the hassle of going to a theater* - you need to give them something in the description that makes them say "I understand what this is about, I think, and feel reasonably confident it's worth my time." That's obviously a lot easier to do if it's a sequel to something they already like, or a remake of a film they liked, or based on a comic book that they at least heard was good, or has actors and/or a director whose previous work they like.

                              Can anyone honestly say their brains don't work like that?
                              Uh. Genuinely, the only thing in the above list that might draw me in is the director, and even then there are only a handful of directors of whom that's true. I really don't care about the actors (apart from a few names that I actively avoid), and a film being a remake, sequel or adaptation is more likely to put me off seeing it. I tend to go by the reviews of a few trusted critics whose taste I know more or less matches mine, I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

                              Comment


                                #65
                                Originally posted by 3 Colours Red View Post
                                With you on the boring bits but it's only about 65 minutes - maybe "slow" or "drawn out" would fit better than "long".
                                Fair

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                                  #66
                                  the average American only sees five films in the theater a year.
                                  That sounds like a lot, to me.

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                                    #67
                                    Has somebody slagged off Ken Loach on here? (I seem to have read, can't be bovvered to retrace my reading steps). Bastards.

                                    Just for Land and Freedom you should genuflect in front of Loach's effigy and crawl in repentance until you choke in your hate-filled bile you bunch of fucking glaikit blundertards.

                                    That film also deeply resonates with me as my (late) grandparents on both sides fled pre Franco’s Spain (to Algeria, which was French at the time), during what’s known as the Restoration (1871-1931), they fled with their parents when that other Spanish fascist Miguel Primo de Rivera was in power, just as he died in 1930 (then there was the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, very short lived, 1931-1939, a sort of interim period as Franco’s Nationalists seized power just before the start of the Spanish Civil War, or thereabouts, I remember the sequence of events from my grandparents & parents from years ago but I must say I haven't rechecked the exact dates as I'm typing this). Anyway, my grandparents were fleeing both fascism and poverty, which usually goes together of course.

                                    I haven’t seen much else from him, apart from Bread and Roses (can't remember much about it TBH), and Looking for Eric, which I thought was very pedestrian, not my sort of film anyway. (picked up the DVD for 20p in a car boot sales IIRC, with another batch).

                                    Loach was on regional (North East) TV about 2 weeks ago shooting his latest film on Tyneside (Sorry We’ve Missed You, on the casualisation of work). Plenty of Loach fans on here so here is the clip: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/what...ction-15151111

                                    I like that sort of social film engagé, only if it’s well made as it can really grate if it’s not.

                                    In 2016, French MP François Ruffin (La France Insoumise) released a great documentary film called Merci patron !, it’s similar in spirit to what Ken Loach and Michael Moore do. It was quite a box-office hit in France, really great film, watchable on DVD (unfortunately, no English subtitles).



                                    Similar and recent (2015) La Loi du marché, excellent, with the great Vincent Lindon (but all the other actors are ordinary people/workers).

                                    If you understand French this is a good review:

                                    Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 06-11-2018, 21:16. Reason: wroing loink for Merci Patron !

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                                      #68
                                      Originally posted by TonTon View Post
                                      That sounds like a lot, to me.
                                      Me too. But it's an average. The mean is probably lower.

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                                        #69
                                        You are looking for the Peterloo thread, PF

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                                          #70
                                          Oh thanks ursus, I'll have a look. I was actually reading a review of that film at the weekend.

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                                            #71
                                            Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                            You are looking for the Peterloo thread, PF
                                            Not just there... I've hinted at my displeasure of those earlier in the thread and I'm not the only one either.

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                                              #72
                                              Originally posted by Fussbudget View Post
                                              Uh. Genuinely, the only thing in the above list that might draw me in is the director, and even then there are only a handful of directors of whom that's true. I really don't care about the actors (apart from a few names that I actively avoid), and a film being a remake, sequel or adaptation is more likely to put me off seeing it. I tend to go by the reviews of a few trusted critics whose taste I know more or less matches mine, I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
                                              I haven't found any specific critics that I agree with often enough to trust them every time. So I look at metacritic, and not just the overall score but also how many, if any, liked the film. I'm more likely to give a chance to something that some liked and some hated than something that go universally mediocre reviews.

                                              A number of of good movies are remakes. The Maltese Falcon, Heat, Oceans 11, 3:10 To Yuma, and a few others and, as has been mentioned, there are a few sequels better than the original, though this is rare. Sequels aren't usually good, because sequels are usually made just to milk some more money out of a successful "brand." But sometimes they are good, because not every story worth telling can be told in under two hours or sometimes the writers just come up with another good idea using the same characters/setting. They tend to get a bad rap because crap ageist jokes about Halloween 19 or Rocky 15 were a staple of 80s and 90s hack comedians.

                                              If you won't see something even based on a novel or a play or true story, you're going to miss out on an awful lot.

                                              A lot is made of all the stuff coming out that started as a video game, theme park ride, twitter feed, or whatever other bullshit but, unless something has changed in the last three years, books are the most common source of non-original scripts. That makes sense. If a story is worth telling - especially if it's historical - there's a good chance it's already been told. And especially for stuff that doesn't fit into any well-worn genre, critical or commercial success in another medium can give a studio some confidence that the film will find an audience.

                                              I found some data showing that between 2005-2014, only 39% of films count as 100% original - not based on anything else, including a book, short-story, play, magazine article, etc. But, if the list of films nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar is any guide, a lot of screenplays that count as "original" are based on a lot of previously published sources. I suppose it the screenwriters put the story together from enough disparate sources, they don't have to credit any one of them in particular and call it an adaptation - Spotlight, Foxcatcher, American Hustle, are some recent examples.
                                              Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 06-11-2018, 22:26.

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                                                #73
                                                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                                If you won't see something even based on a novel or a play or true story, you're going to miss out on an awful lot.
                                                I'm not saying I would never go and see one, but I'd much rather watch an original script, though I suppose I don't mind so much if it's an adaptation of something I've never heard of. But I almost always avoid films that are based on books I've actually read.

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                                                  #74
                                                  That’s unusual, I suspect.

                                                  Most people seem to want to see movies about books they liked, if for no other reason than so they can act superior when they tell anyone who will listen that they read the book at its better than the film.

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                                                    #75
                                                    I really don't think you can lump Loach and Leigh together. Loach has had a very different committed approach to film making throughout his career, leigh has only recently started making films that could be accused of being 'worthy' or 'preachy', before that lots of lefties found him patronising in his satirising of 'ordinary' people.

                                                    On Loach, Lang Spoon has a real point about the shift towards schmaltz (and away from 'hard' politics) in the move from Jim Allen to Paul Laverty as scriptwriter, Ae fond kiss was truly terrible as was Carla's Song as soon as Carlyle got off his bus and went to Nicaragua.

                                                    But he is 100% WRONG in describing Land and Freedom as Ladybird guerra civil. Precisely because it refuses to duck the real political divisions in the Republican side and wave the romantic flag.

                                                    Me?

                                                    I avoid anything to do with the royal family (which have proliferated sinnce the King's fu-fu-fu Speech). Churchill, too.
                                                    Not a huge fan of Jane Austen adaptations or similar.
                                                    Really don't have an interest in big action blockbusters, tho I do watch the occasional superhero film.
                                                    Middle class pensioner films, which are a real bugbear at the Tyneside cinema where i have a 'friends' card: you know for a fact that the latest 'luvvies in retirement/bittersweet' travelogue will stink the place out for weeks, removing possible screenings of the European and Latin American films I don't get the chance to see.

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