Movie, TV, Web Series, and Music Hot Take(s).
- Thread starter BrawlMan
- Start date
Haven't watched it myself but doesn't District 9 skip all the actually interesting parts of that storyline and is just a thinly veiled allegory for a real world event? Apartide or something.
Nominally, but having seen it they sorta then skip all that and make it about generic evil capitalists and CGI action.
I saw District 9 a few times, and found it just to be alright, but @Thaluikhain is dead on correct about the movie turning in to standard evil corporation, and the Apratide parallels are mostly background noise and are barely used. Niell Blomkamp became a one hit director. Elysium is a 6/10 movie that has the bad shaky-cam/quick cut action. This movie is even more obsolete because the live-action Battle Angel exists now and is so much better. Chappy I deliberately chose not to go see, and still have not watched.
Breaking Bad was a solid show but not great or greatest show ever. The show had an air of pretentiousness to it like the scenes in Spanish didn't have subtitles and the one season always opened with some artsy shots of a stuffed animal in a pool but the event that caused that really wasn't some major thing anyway. I recall thinking the ending was fine but nothing great, I feel like the show could've ended a season sooner (but it's been awhile and don't remember too much now). The wife was so horribly written and couldn't stand her.
Movies need to stop doing low-volume conversations then cutting to helicopters. I've noticed it more and more during late-night sessions where I have to jump and get the controller to turn the volume down. I understand wanting to change the tone from scene to scene, but does it have to be so jarring? I'm more interested in where the characters are going and less interested in how they're getting there. Less helicopters. That's not even a hot take, just me b*tching.
Yeah, I can't stand how movies are mixed. At least in video games you can adjust music and sound effects and whatnot as I always lower that stuff to be at least half of what the voice volume is in pretty much every single game.
Isn't that less to do with mixing and more to do with things like speaker placement? Like when 5.1 systems started becoming popular the prevailing wisdom was that rear speakers were for dialogue and they should be the ones closest to where you're sitting and all the gunfire and explosions and shit came (mainly) out of the front and centre speakers which would logically be further away from you.
Without looking it up, I'm not sure. I thought voice is for the center speaker most of the time at least. I'm pretty sure the volume levels are mixed to make the loud stuff loud.
Oh I'm sure they are, but I was always under the impression that was because those speakers were further away. Maybe we can ask Ezekial, he's into the home cinema thing.
Who considers it a bad movie, other than stuck up critics? Not my favorite science fiction movie, but it is good. It's the best unofficial prequel to The Matrix ever made.
Main issue I have with I, Robot is its title. If you take it as a standalone movie, it's a decent, if mindless, action movie. But if you claim to be an adaptation of a story (supposedly, it is primarily based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" out of the anthology I, Robot), you need to have more in common with the original than (kind of) the title, and the name of one of the characters (who went from an older man to a middle-aged woman in the movie). It also takes the Three Laws of Robotics concept that was key to the anthology and...well...does the OPPOSITE of what the Three Laws were meant for.
Isaac Florentine is one of the best action directors a our generation, and I do not want Hollywood swooping him up. He's not an expert storyteller, but he knows how to keep it simple and straight to the point. Florentine has done well successfully, and I would never want him to get worse quality work, but if he wants to move up I don't blame him. But I prefer he stay in the street to DVD or streaming market. That way his vision won't ever be compromised or barely messed with by studio interference.
I have seen the Starship Troopers movie, and that one is...a bit different in that it is actively subverting the book, rather than simply ignoring it. It's a fine movie, and a terrible adaptation, but it was designed to be a terrible adaptation because Verhoven (I think that was the director of Starship Troopers, right?) thought the book's "rah rah military" attitude was almost horrifying, and set out to skewer that perspective as much as he could. Keeping the title was just rubbing salt in the wound.
With adaptations like I, Robot, you get the sense that the screenwriters maybe read the blurb on the back of the book, and that's it. With Verhoven, he definitely read the book, he just decided he didn't like it to the point where he wanted to do everything the book didn't.
With adaptations like I, Robot, you get the sense that the screenwriters maybe read the blurb on the back of the book, and that's it. With Verhoven, he definitely read the book, he just decided he didn't like it to the point where he wanted to do everything the book didn't.
Verhoven didn’t even read the book. He, supposedly, skimmed the first two chapters and called it a day.
He couldn’t have actively adapted or deconstructed a book he didn’t even read.
From what I gather the movie started as its own thing under a different title until they got the rights to ‘Starhip Troopers’.
Starship Troopers will forever remain a mystery to me. It's so bad, but so many people run to its defense as a great tongue-in-cheek nod to bad movies. I mean, since when did Hollywood think it was a good idea to make bad movies on purpose? Too much of the film is not self-aware enough to have been done purposefully. I watched it once, and even that was too much. But then we also have Once Upon A Time In Hollywood which shamelessly wasted everyone's time and still got Oscar nods, so maybe my cinematic palette isn't sophisticated enough?