Last Movie Watched

I saw The Fifth Element for the first time this year. It's good if you can ignore the Luc Besson of it all.

Glad I'm not too late for the James Cameron discussion. Aliens is good. Titanic is flawed, but it succeeds in what it sets out to do. Terminator and Terminator 2 are masterpieces. Before I insult Big Jim, it's worth noting that Cameron has done a lot of good. He pushed the industry forward, proved movie theaters were still viable, and helped rescue Guillermo del Toro's father.

That said, I just rewatched True Lies for the first time in 20 years. Phew. While Cameron purports himself a feminist because of Sarah Connor, True Lies is strong evidence to the contrary. Given its 1994 release date, it's far more misogynistic than you'd expect. I think of the height of toxic masculinity as the early aughts. The Schwarzenegger-Tom Arnold-Bill Paxton dynamic is enough to make me reconsider. Cameron, the feminist, is revisionist history. Given his ego, it's not surprising that he warps reality to embellish his legacy.
 
Ahahaha so I just went and saw Die My Love by myself while my wife was at rehearsal.

. . . wow, man. That is a *stressful* fucking movie. Still processing. Woof.
 
The one I'm looking forward to right now (outside of Predator: Badlands, and Die My Love, and so on) is Keeper. Tatiana in a horror flick. I'm so ready for it.
 
Damien said:
People keep saying that, but it's bullshit. PJ -chose- to sign on to do those films. He wasn't contractually obligated to do it. He wasn't forced at gunpoint. He was convinced by money on the table. That's it. He made a bad series of films due entirely to greed and apparently none of the people good at telling him some of his ideas sucked came along for the ride.
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My understanding is the studio mandate was to push it into a trilogy, causing all the garbage filler. That mandate came after he'd signed the contract, afaik. And I'm thinking his motive for accepting was rooted more in the artistic integrity of not wanting another director like Uwe Boll to tarnish what he'd done with LotR; then got ambushed into doing the tarnishing himself with the mandate to cram more filler in.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
Glad I'm not too late for the James Cameron discussion. Aliens is good. Titanic is flawed, but it succeeds in what it sets out to do. Terminator and Terminator 2 are masterpieces. Before I insult Big Jim, it's worth noting that Cameron has done a lot of good. He pushed the industry forward, proved movie theaters were still viable, and helped rescue Guillermo del Toro's father.
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100%
But again, when we talk about why Cameron is great, we're ALWAYS referencing 30-40 year old movies. For a guy that is still active today. This isn't a guy that died in '99 and we're talking about how his greatest works were in '95. This is a guy that released movies throughout the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s and we're... still saying the only movies he made really worth watching were in the early '90s. That's a fucking problem for the narrative that he is amazingly talented versus just being lucky with a few good ideas.


adrienveidt said:
My understanding is the studio mandate was to push it into a trilogy, causing all the garbage filler. That mandate came after he'd signed the contract, afaik. And I'm thinking his motive for accepting was rooted more in the artistic integrity of not wanting another director like Uwe Boll to tarnish what he'd done with LotR; then got ambushed into doing the tarnishing himself with the mandate to cram more filler in.
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Artistic integrity is a really bad copout 'reason' to make a shitty series of films. Like 'only I can fuck it up, no one else.'
Also, Peter himself has said that making three films was largely his decision. It was going to be two, but then, apparently, he realized he had enough meat to get three films out of it. And the studio was THRILLED to oblige, of course. Every shitty subplot, every scene and character created solely for the film that had no reason to exist, every deviation from the source - it was all PJ. People can blame the studio all they want, but the studio didn't make the movies and, from even PJ's own lips, did not interfere with the script. HE wrote that absolute fucking garbage.
Because PJ isn't as good as anyone thinks he is and NEEDS people around him to push him toward smarter choices, just like they all did in LotR. I would bet my LIFE that if PJ had been left to do LotR exactly as he wanted with no input from anyone, they would have been straight up bad movies. Not just worse than they are, but actively bad and remembered for being bad - just like The Hobbit. And I wish people would stop giving him a pass on everything by blaming the big bad studio.
 
All I know is I saw the first of Jackson's Hobbit movies and noped out after that. I thought it was so awful that I had no interest in subjecting myself to two more films of that garbage. Just pure, unadulterated sewage as far as I'm concerned.
 
TheGillMan said:
All I know is I saw the first of Jackson's Hobbit movies and noped out after that. I thought it was so awful that I had no interest in subjecting myself to two more films of that garbage. Just pure, unadulterated sewage as far as I'm concerned.
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But remember.. LotR is 'proof' that The Hobbit is somehow 100% not Peter Jackson's fault.
 
The Hobbit is probably my favorite book ever. I first read it in second grade and I read it annually. Sometimes semi-annually.

I did not see any of the movies at all based on word of mouth from people I trusted. When the third one came out, I watched the first two on Blu-ray and then we all went to the theater together as a family because it was the rare Christmas we were all in one place.

I hate those movies deeply. I cannot find any good in them. I hope whoever made any of those calls one day has to clean Grand Central station's urinals with their tongue.
 
@altcunningham What I'm sayin'.
The common denominator is PJ. Instead of saying 'it can't be his fault because LotR was so good' - look at who was involved in LotR that WASN'T involved with The Hobbit, and you'll know who's actually good at their job. It isn't PJ.
 
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