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BrawlMan

BrawlMan

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Agema said:
don't know that's really true
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It is you just don't care or don't want to believe. Take whatever pick.

Agema said:
that it is true mostly in the sense that in its ongoing creative bankruptcy, Hollywood has increasingly latched onto games as a way to boost sales off existing IP, s
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Just so we are clear, I'm not making any excuses nor and out for Hollywood's creative bankruptcy. That said there's more than enough good out there now.


Agema said:
you know how many adaptations of computer games are great films? Zero. Period.
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To you and your overly cynical opinion.
Plenty of great or good adaptions made to tv or film format.

  • Almost anything Sonic aside from Sonic X and Sonic Underground. Sonic 1 film is just average though.
  • Mortal Kombat 1995
  • All 3 of the R-Rated MK Animated Films
  • Warcraft
  • Two of the anime Fatal Fury adaptions.
  • Both Castlevania shows
  • Season 1 of TLOUS. i still don't care about it.
  • Street Fighter II: Animated Movie
  • Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist
  • Rampage (2018)
  • Both Mario animated movies. We already know Galaxy is gonna be in do great. I don't care what you say.
  • Prince of Persia. It's good enough, but it is still pretty average overall. Still an enjoyable film.
  • Double Impact. This one is technically not an adaption, but the people behind this movie are closet Double Dragon fans. There's too much there to be coincidence. Still a better Double Dragon movie than the official movie.
  • That one anthology show on amazon prime? Level Up with most of those shorts. Sifu animated short is still the best though.
 
Agema

Agema

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On a slightly different topic...

I was reading that apparently One Battle After Another has lost money at the box office, made for about $150 million with only a touch over $200 million in takings. And I couldn't help but wonder... what lunatic gave an arthouse director like Paul Thomas Anderson $150 million to make a movie?

Don't get me wrong, Anderson is a genuinely superb director who has enriched the art of cinema and (by all accounts as I haven't seen iy) One Battle After Another is a very good movie. But he's not exactly bankable. Whilst I'm sure a few have, I wouldn't be surprised if none of his movies made their money back at the box office. Of course most will be profitable with video/streaming, etc. eventually.

I am also struck that very few people I've read are using the sort of word that would normally be handed out to a film this expensive that didn't break even: "bomb". If this were a Disney animation or Marvel/DCU production, there'd be blood in the water. It's sort of hypocrisy, but then I thought, maybe not? Maybe what happened was that a studio exec knowingly handed an arthouse director a licence to make the most blockbustery, action-centric arthouse movie ever, which is to say it was going to be one of the most massive arthouse movies ever, yet still like most arthouse movies struggle to make its money back.
 
BrawlMan

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Agema said:
what lunatic gave an arthouse director like Paul Thomas Anderson $150 million to make a movie?
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An out of touch rich idiot exec.

Agema said:
this were a Disney animation or Marvel/DCU production, there'd be blood in the water. It's sort of hypocrisy, but then I thought, maybe not?
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You are not wrong. That is the grifters bread and butter. Notice how that it's a white male director. So the racist and sexist grifters aren't either gonna go as hard, or will completely ignore it for the sake of the narrative. I have nothing against the actual director and I usually don't want moves that fail, but sucks, it failed to break, even or barely broke even. I still blame the dummies with too much money on their hands and in charge.
 
Casual Shinji

Casual Shinji

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Agema said:
I was reading that apparently One Battle After Another has lost money at the box office, made for about $150 million with only a touch over $200 million in takings. And I couldn't help but wonder... what lunatic gave an arthouse director like Paul Thomas Anderson $150 million to make a movie?
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Don't think I'd describe Paul Thomas Anderson as an arthouse director. The fact that One Battle After Another had trailer showings before commercial movies (I saw one when I went to see Fantastic Four) means that he is very much a commercial director. The Master and Phantom Thread might lean more toward arthouse, but the majority of his filmography doesn't. He's in the same vein as the Coen Brothers, David Fincer, and Martin Scorsese; "auteur" filmmakers, but still commercial. The reason P.T. Anderson got 150 million is because he has a pedigree in Hollywood. If Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch (RIP) had come and asked for 150 million for their next movie they'd get laugned out of the building.
 
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Agema

Agema

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BrawlMan said:
Plenty of great or good adaptions made to tv or film format.
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This depends on what you mean by "good".

If a person enjoys something, they can subjectively call it good, but don't think such a subjective definition of "good" is useful for anyone else.

There are lots of other ways you can think of what "good" means. To take '95 Mortal Kombat, the plot is almost nonexistent, the acting poor, the characterisation laughable, sets cheap, the cinematography undistinguished. It also entertained me. A bunch of characters turn up and fight each other, the action is handled well, it is fun: it was good in the ways that mattered most for what it was. Yet because I recognise that in many ways it is also a bad movie, it doesn't make much sense to call it a good movie. That's why I'd use some description like "high quality B movie", or "good for what it is".

Or to put it another way, imagine we ranked films, and to make it more simple, action films. So near the top we might have classics like Aliens, Enter the Dragon, Terminator 2, Hard Boiled, Die Hard, etc. At the bottom we have virtually any movie with Steven Seagal in. Where does Mortal Kombat sit in this ranking? Well, it's really not around the top, is it? It's probably sort of mid-range. So it doesn't make sense to call it "good" by that method.

So I look upon the world of computer game adaptations and think "how many of them are great movies"? What I liked, what they do well with all the criteria of what can make a film good - bearing in mind my substantial limitations in understanding filmmaking, how much respect they have from people who know better.

And it seems to me there are clearly no great films that are computer game adaptations, and barely any good ones.
 
BrawlMan

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Agema said:
This depends on what you mean by "good".
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I'll be frank with you.I've already had this conversation on a different forum, and most people seem to agree with me. Don't get me wrong, you have those that share a similar or exact opinion as yours, but they tend to be a bit more open minded about this. Whatever you believe I don't care. The results already speak for themselves.

Looking forward to that new Street Fighter movie too. Similar to the Mario movies, it's not afraid of the source material and is intentionally goofy.
 
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Agema

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Casual Shinji said:
Don't think I'd describe Paul Thomas Anderson as an arthouse director. The fact that One Battle After Another had trailer showings before commercial movies (I saw one when I went to see Fantastic Four) means that he is very much a commercial director. The Master and Phantom Thread might lean more toward arthouse, but the majority of his filmography doesn't. He's in the same vein as the Coen Brothers, David Fincer, and Martin Scorsese; "auteur" filmmakers, but still commercial. The reason P.T. Anderson got 150 million is because he has a pedigree in Hollywood. If Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch (RIP) had come and asked for 150 million for their next movie they'd get laugned out of the building.
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Sure I get what you're saying, and I don't entirely disagree, but I don't entirely agree either.

Firstly, I think "auteur" is potentially misleading. My view is that's more about film-makers who have very strong themes or styles to their work and usually exercise unusually high creative control over their films. However, it doesn't necessarily impinge on how commercial they are (although it's nature might tend more towards art over commerce). You could call both Christopher Nolan and David Lynch auteurs, for instance, but the former is extremely commercial and the latter not. Or Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is I think we're really talking about a spectrum, and it's where they are on the spectrum. Lynch and Jarmusch are very much the art side. Anderson I think leans art, if less heavily than them. The Master, Phantom Thread, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, Licorice Pizza. These don't feel to me like films that were going to do really major box office business, they're too offbeat. I do however absolutely agree that they are a very substantial step up from the likes of Lynch and Jarmusch in popular accessibility.

I think probably the sort of director I would suggest really straddles the art-commerce borderline would be Scorcese. I think he's got that distinct element of art about him, but films like The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Color of Money, Casino are films vastly easier for people to grasp as mass market entertainment than pretty much anything Anderson has done - except of course One Battle After Another.

* * *

As you say, R.I.P. David Lynch. It seems a terrible waste he made no films in his last 20 years, although he did give us Twin Peaks season 3 (much appreciated) and kept himself busy with other artistic projects.
 
Gordon_4

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Agema said:
What lunatic gave an arthouse director like Paul Thomas Anderson $150 million to make a movie?
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Well, see this is one of the things that bothers me about the outside looking in of film making. There are some loud voices that - not unreasonably - ask why truly artist driven directors don't get their shot with big budgets for their passion projects.

And then something like this movie happens.
 
Casual Shinji

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So it looks like we're getting an TV series adaptation of Baldur's Gate 3. Not entirely shocking, but still kinda surprising. However, it is being done by HBO and headed by Craig Mazin, so... a lot of overeager Game of Thones vibes and "funny" dialoge? 😬
 
BrawlMan

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@MeltWithU 2 weeks ago (edited)
You have to ask yourself… Why Prince had fentanyl in his system, when he just came from the pharmacy from picking up legal prescribed pain medication? Then they found prescription bottles in his home full of fentanyl. Yet that isn’t what was prescribed on the bottle. Just days before his death, he had an overdose on his jet and was found unresponsive for which, they made an emergency landing and took him to a hospital.

The hospital wanted him to stay, but he checked himself out. Only to go home and pass away from the same on his elevator. During this time, he was in a heated battle with Jay-Z, who was streaming his music illegally on his service. Prince only authorized the streaming of one album. Prince came out to the public and told everybody what was going on, exposing the services, small print that essentially allows them to steal any artists catalogue who signs up and agreed to the terms of service.

Prince, like Michael Jackson, was very powerful and posed a huge threat to the entire music industry because he owned his own studios and produced everything he wrote, playing every instrument, not only for himself… But for hundreds of other artists. He wrote a ton of hits for other people. He could, and he talked about, starting his own record company and streaming service where it would be a fair split between the Service and the Artist, cutting out the middleman.

Because he saw the deals that the record companies were making with the streaming services and whether you were a hugely successful international artist or you are an independent artist, record companies were getting a large cut of your money. Even if you weren’t a part of their catalog. Once again, something you agreed to in their terms of service. So not only was Prince taking control of his own music and catalog, he was planning on starting a new distribution system that favored the artist and cut out the record companies. So there were a lot of people who were very unhappy with him.

Michael Jackson, Prince, George Michael, etc… all spoke out and all died fairly young. All of them were very powerful in the industry. Now imagine if they would’ve all banded together to change the industry for the better. Definitely makes you think.
 
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