What movie did you watch last night? (4 Viewers)

[Unicron]

Warm Bodies, John Malkovich does comedy zombie romance films now. Quite good if pretty disposable.

 

[pete]

Warm Bodies, John Malkovich does comedy zombie romance films now. Quite good if pretty disposable.

trailer looked awful

 

[Unicron]

trailer looked awful

It did, went on the recomendation of a friend.

 

[GO]

Cosmopolis.Turned off after 5 mins.

 

[xsteox]

Transporter 3. The sped-up fight/car chase scene's veered between annoying and ridiculous. Over all, laughably bad crap.

 

[тхеодоре кацзынски]

Sinister-Had its scary moments but the ending was weak as.
The ward-Awful all the way through.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Moby Dick. Gregory Peck showing these young upstarts how it's done.

I'm Not There. That Dylan film with Cate Blanchart, Christian Bale and others playing Dylan's various personas. Awful fucking nonsense. Just embarassing.

 

[washingcattle]

Dredd

After seeing Skyfall and The Avengers and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the Batman series and Inception and even Crank 2 and having thought they were all either brilliant or utterly bonkers or in the case of Inception- both. I was ready to give action movies a chance. I heard The Raid was good and that Dredd was essentially the same kind of deal and not as good but still good I was prepared to give this a go. I went out for a few pints and saw Poino, A brilliant band from around these parts and Staer a hypnotic Norwegian band that made me briefly consider quitting smoking. I go home merry and ready to continue with the entertainment and somewhere around 3 am I decided to give Dredd a go.

Look paragraphs!!!!

I popped it on and within seconds remembered exactly why I hate action movies, film studios and lazy directors. I doubt I've ever seen a film which so consistantly manages to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. Part of the problem with Dredd is that it's trying to be faithful. It's a poor bastard on a night out getting the eyes from accross the bar from a beautiful woman in a Slint T-shirt with a copy of Underworld hanging out of her understated gig bag which contains a beaten up Fender Jaguar. She's sipping Jameson straight out of the bottle and smoking a Johnny blue in a way that makes his loins and heart and eyes and engorge palpitate and dialate she's engaging him in conversation about Werner Herzog films and the last time she saw The Ex live and he's going to go home alone, the walk of infinite shame back to a woman who weighs the same as his obese father, listens to Pinks greatest hits abhores fags, reads "what's going to happen next in Eastenders" and drinks alco-pops and beats her kids. He's doing this because it's the right thing to do he's got a wedding album and a mortgage to prove it. He's a stand up guy.

You see the problem is that Judge Dredd isn't a great character to base a film around. He just looks cool. Like a reverse of the analogy above, the lady with the guitar and the tits (did I mention the tits ? there are definitely tits... It's my story there's tits) she's as shallow as fuck she never got past page 22 of the book, her band plays surf pop and she is going to vomit as soon as she leaves the bar. That's Judge Dredd. He's as close to a human Robocop as you can get this side of the May day riots and he makes The Terminator seem like Hunter S Thompson. He just isn't filmable. You can't make him that aloof and that powerful and also manage to hint at what makes him this way and tell the story of the mythology of Mega City One comfortably in a 2 hour movie unless it's an origin tale and no one really wants to see Dredd get that treatment anyway so the only options to make a successful and faithful Dredd movie you can do one of 2 things.

1. Bend the rules to suit the film and make Dredd a real human character. Make him flawed and vulnerable, get Fucking Leonardo Di Caprio to play him. Go one further get Paul Schrader to write it.

2. Leave Dredd as is and have someone else play the human element.

They tried both of these methods with "The Stallone Version" which should really be a term in cinema. Like when you have a film which has a great concept and then some ass hat in hollywood pumps money and steroids into it until it looks like a sausage with veins. "The Stallone Version". Anyway 1995s version didn't work because A. Stallone was in it and B. The human aspect was played by Rob Fucking Schnieder!! What the team behind Dredd have decided to do is to have Dredd remain Dredd and give him a rookie who he's showing the ropes, so it's Training Day.... yeah and then they go to a big fuck off block of flats controlled by a criminal yadda yadda so it's The Raid which is of course a modern Die Hard - so it's that, meets Training Day and since there are elements of Judge Dredd "the character" in The Terminator and Robocop there in there too. It's as unoriginal a premise as you can get but that's not the part that the team get utterly and irrideemably wrong.

Okay the plot's not original but they actually have some great stolen ideas to work with. There's the child soldiers from the impoverished community which they steal from City Of God and then never manage to use effectively, they have a psychic in here that can do interegations by going inside the criminals mind, good idea which fails, they have a drug that slows down the perception of time to 1% the norm and this fails because it just dissappears during scenes when it could been employed to do something visually spectacular, instead it's employed to show glass break and water drops, for no fucking reason. It's got a really sinister slashed up ex hooker for a villain, but she only get's one scene in which to impress and then dissappears for most of the film to look like a beaten up alley cat and bully Donal Gleeson, who is also completely wasted as a slave at the end of his teather. What's even more frustraiting is that the film tries so hard to look original that it manages to just look fake and as such it reminded me a lot of Manga or of the roto-scoped world of A Scanner Darkly, which begs the question of why they didn't go the whole hog and just use the considerable budget to use that technology and make something genuinely inventive instead of this which has it's Fifth Element patch on it's denim jacket the whole time. The action is pedestrian and the good ideas are like aiming through balls at Fernando Torres. Everything misses it's mark and then there's the sinker.

The Dialogue is woeful, perhaps their aiming for irony, but even then it's too cumbersome, meandering between inane, idiotic and cheesy (really fucking cheesy) it's hard not to feel embarassed for Wood Harris who's gone from playing Avon Barksdale and saying some of the coolest lines ever (Like - "look at these delta force motherfuckers" or "Big paws on a puppy") to spouting what amounts to the kind of shit you that fat nerds shout at each other over the internet during a game of Halo. Karl Urban and most of the cast in fact deliver their lines while doing an impression of Clint Eastwood which is just fucking annoying and fucking weird. Only Lena Headey seems to be even trying to act and does this quite well but she only gets one scene and that's an announcement over a PA. Olivia Thrilby is, I suppose doing her best, but it's apparent that she's there to play "the human" in the same way that Troy McClure did in Planet Of The Apes: The Musical. If Dredd is trying to be funny it's just repeating the one gag over and over and over and over and over and over and over and, you get the idea. I was waiting for Rob Fucking Schnieder to show up at one point.

I hated this film, but for the most part I hated the fact that it had so many decent ideas that just stacked up in the failure pile. Writer Alex Garland also wrote The Beach, Sunshine and 28 Days Later all of which had great ideas, some things didn't work like the last third of the Beach or Sunshine but in the hands of teams of film makers who had one some ambition the results where a lot better than this. Ultimately Dredd tries to remain faithful but by ignoring the source materials loftier purposes it ends up fingering a pissed up slapper down an alley outside the club as she holds her sexy mates hair back while she vomits on your chips. That's enough misogyny for one night Cattle. Now off you go to curl up beside that long suffering love of your life you go. And yes she also finished Underworld and can drink Whiskey properly.

 

[pete]

i enjoyed it

 

[therealjohnny]

I liked it too

As for the 'considerable budget', there wasn't one.

I like the paragraphs though

 

[hermie]

Moby Dick. Gregory Peck showing these young upstarts how it's done.

That's a John Huston movie, right? Any good? Often wondered how they'd pull this off back then. Pretty tough book to adapt. Do you see the white whale?

 

[David Kronenbourg]

That's a John Huston movie, right? Any good? Often wondered how they'd pull this off back then. Pretty tough book to adapt. Do you see the white whale?

I enjoyed it a lot. I haven't read the book, but I imagine its very dense and full of symbolism. This is basically an exciting chase movie with a great central performance. For its time the whale looks really good. You don't see much of it for ages and then you only get brief glimpses but it looks fine.

 

[Anthony]

Skyfall. It was class. Too long though.

 

[washingcattle]

As for the 'considerable budget', there wasn't one.

$45 million dollars is a considerable budget.

You could have made A Scanner Darkly 5 times or Reservoir Dogs 44 times for that.

 

[evil bandit]

http://www.ifi.ie/film/cutters-way/

Cutter's Way is on in the ifi this month for those finding it difficult to get a good d/l of.

 

[Ferox13]

Point Blank - Excellent though strange original film version of the revenge novel, The Hunter. (remade as The Outfit/Payback and most recently Porter). I keep noticing more everytime I see this film...

Stand up guys - Great cast dial it in. Pretty terrible but I can watch Walken in anything.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Skyfall. It was good for about 10 minutes in the middle when Javier Bardem came along and acted a bit mental. The rest of it was boring.

 

[jonah]

American Mary. Body horror film about extreme plastic surgery and body modification. Starts off really well. Disturbing, creepy and intriguing but then loses its way and becomes a bit silly. Worth a watch all the same. I'm not squemish but I did have to look away a few times. Something about plastic surgery puts me on edge.

Pretty much my thoughts exactly. The opening was very promising and she was great in it, but they lost the plot with her character. The human stuff at the beginning was way more interesting than the stupid route they brought her down for the fecking sake of it. And the little twinge of humanity at the end was just hard to believe, after everything. Overall, I thought it was a bunch of dick, which is irritating when you get hooked in at the beginning so well.

 

[nlgbbbblth]

now vying for greatest concert film ever.

 

[dunderhead]

watched this based on someone saying it was decent in this thread.
without giving anything away, i'd like to know to what extent this was based on real events because man some of these characters were fuckin thick. if they really were that stupid then fair enough, this was alright. only alright though

this is touted in some corners of the internet as being a hitchcockian manga movie. it is in a way. but in a way that still makes this an average watch. expected more