Fantastic Four
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Well, we saw 13 as pointed to in the above post. Much better than 12, but not a patch on the first, which was fun and clever.
Anyway, I did the two big 4s last night: Silver Surfer and Die Hard.
F4:ROTSS - I liked it. Was fun if lightweight and I couldn't remember anything about it when I came out! Not even Jessica Alba, who looked like a China doll who could crack at any moment if anything touched her. Her skin - plastered with way too much makeup - looked more fake than Michael Chicklis!
But the SS effects worked better in context than they did in the trailers and there were some expectedly exciting summer blockbuster moments that made it fun enough. Thought the ending, which none of the 4 helped out in, was very weak, and the Surfer coming back during the credits can only point to a spin off.
Thought the Stan Lee cameo was stupid - he's <I>actually</I> Stan Lee? WTF!?
I hope they make one more and call it a day. Doom was rubbish, and it was all just about held together with the camaraderie of the cast rather than any specific performance, sequence or plot innovations.
Like the first one, not a <I>fantastic</I> four, but a solid three out of four.
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (or DH 4.0 as we get it here) I saw for nostalgic reasons.
It was pooh. During the last chase thing/whatever I actually sat back in my chair and muttered out loud "this is ******* awful". A cyber thriller in this day and age? Maybe as a DH 4 back in the day when the net was really taking off, but everything just felt dated.
And boring.
Geeks tapping out a million words a second, hyper realtime graphics zipping up on screens while Brucie-boy Willis stuck about asking what was going on. None of it produced any real excitement.
Gone was the sparring between Bruce and the bad guy (here way too young and ineffectual...if they needed to go young, then have him be intense or something...anything).
Stunts...sillier and sillier. The DH franchise was already going downhill in the third one. Die Hard is all about one lone guy stuck in a trapped situation and breaking his way out. Die Harder just about did it, expanding to the airport, but still using the same premise. With 3 they opened it out to a city, brought other people in, and diluted what makes Die Hard Die Hard.
This wasn't a Die Hard/John McClane movie. This was a re-hash of the kinds of action films Willis used to make after the first two Die Hards: The Last Boy Scout, Striking Distance, Mercury Rising, The Jackal, etc... Before he broke into the darker, deeper roles, those films were pretty much all one and the same and might as well have been Die Hard movies. This new one follows that trend.
It's a Die Hard movie in name only. The character might as well be any of Bruce's previous roles, and the convoluted, talkie-talkie plot bogged down in too many convenient happenstances.
I'm not sure it was even a good <I>action</I> movie - it all felt dated, and was basically keyboard typing and talking, or fighting and explosions - all of which, for all the talk of "real" stunts, looked fake and just played as mind-numbing.
It was shot, edited and directed badly too, and by the end it seemed all the filmmakers had given up any reality: Willis stomping across the city pointedly remarking that he was going to kill the bad guy: that's not John McClane self preservation, that's movie cliche premeditative murder.
The point of the first three - yes, even the third to a certain extent - is that they preempted the Jack Bauer 24 realtime concept, without really playing on that. All three films - particularly the first and second (which was based on a short story called "57 Minutes") - work in a loose sense of going up against the clock. This one throws out everything that built the Die Hard series: the ticking clock, the ethics of the main character and the tight situations he faces, and just throws so many things at the screen that something is sure to stick.
But nothing does. Not even the re-use (in the most boring spots) of Michael Kamen's four-note music score motif, which has no place being in a movie that is nothing more than a generic, dated, action thriller that happens to have a character named "John McClane" in it.
Die Hard 4.0? Die Hard Poor, more like.
Anyway, I did the two big 4s last night: Silver Surfer and Die Hard.
F4:ROTSS - I liked it. Was fun if lightweight and I couldn't remember anything about it when I came out! Not even Jessica Alba, who looked like a China doll who could crack at any moment if anything touched her. Her skin - plastered with way too much makeup - looked more fake than Michael Chicklis!
But the SS effects worked better in context than they did in the trailers and there were some expectedly exciting summer blockbuster moments that made it fun enough. Thought the ending, which none of the 4 helped out in, was very weak, and the Surfer coming back during the credits can only point to a spin off.
Thought the Stan Lee cameo was stupid - he's <I>actually</I> Stan Lee? WTF!?
I hope they make one more and call it a day. Doom was rubbish, and it was all just about held together with the camaraderie of the cast rather than any specific performance, sequence or plot innovations.
Like the first one, not a <I>fantastic</I> four, but a solid three out of four.
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (or DH 4.0 as we get it here) I saw for nostalgic reasons.
It was pooh. During the last chase thing/whatever I actually sat back in my chair and muttered out loud "this is ******* awful". A cyber thriller in this day and age? Maybe as a DH 4 back in the day when the net was really taking off, but everything just felt dated.
And boring.
Geeks tapping out a million words a second, hyper realtime graphics zipping up on screens while Brucie-boy Willis stuck about asking what was going on. None of it produced any real excitement.
Gone was the sparring between Bruce and the bad guy (here way too young and ineffectual...if they needed to go young, then have him be intense or something...anything).
Stunts...sillier and sillier. The DH franchise was already going downhill in the third one. Die Hard is all about one lone guy stuck in a trapped situation and breaking his way out. Die Harder just about did it, expanding to the airport, but still using the same premise. With 3 they opened it out to a city, brought other people in, and diluted what makes Die Hard Die Hard.
This wasn't a Die Hard/John McClane movie. This was a re-hash of the kinds of action films Willis used to make after the first two Die Hards: The Last Boy Scout, Striking Distance, Mercury Rising, The Jackal, etc... Before he broke into the darker, deeper roles, those films were pretty much all one and the same and might as well have been Die Hard movies. This new one follows that trend.
It's a Die Hard movie in name only. The character might as well be any of Bruce's previous roles, and the convoluted, talkie-talkie plot bogged down in too many convenient happenstances.
I'm not sure it was even a good <I>action</I> movie - it all felt dated, and was basically keyboard typing and talking, or fighting and explosions - all of which, for all the talk of "real" stunts, looked fake and just played as mind-numbing.
It was shot, edited and directed badly too, and by the end it seemed all the filmmakers had given up any reality: Willis stomping across the city pointedly remarking that he was going to kill the bad guy: that's not John McClane self preservation, that's movie cliche premeditative murder.
The point of the first three - yes, even the third to a certain extent - is that they preempted the Jack Bauer 24 realtime concept, without really playing on that. All three films - particularly the first and second (which was based on a short story called "57 Minutes") - work in a loose sense of going up against the clock. This one throws out everything that built the Die Hard series: the ticking clock, the ethics of the main character and the tight situations he faces, and just throws so many things at the screen that something is sure to stick.
But nothing does. Not even the re-use (in the most boring spots) of Michael Kamen's four-note music score motif, which has no place being in a movie that is nothing more than a generic, dated, action thriller that happens to have a character named "John McClane" in it.
Die Hard 4.0? Die Hard Poor, more like.
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According to DVD Active, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, is going to be released October 2nd, on a single edition, and a special 2-disc "The Power Cosmic Edition" DVD.
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Re: Fantastic Four
SNORE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BVs-KCSiA
Just...so...boring. Can't believe how UNexciting this trailer is to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BVs-KCSiA
Just...so...boring. Can't believe how UNexciting this trailer is to me.
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."
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Re: Fantastic Four
The trailer is so much like Interstellar, it's kinda mind-boggling.
It's not a bad trailer in my book, but goodness, it's pretty generic. Would have really loved to see the groups dynamic bouncing off each other rather than more generic dialogue about "something is coming".
It's not a bad trailer in my book, but goodness, it's pretty generic. Would have really loved to see the groups dynamic bouncing off each other rather than more generic dialogue about "something is coming".
I love all things cinema, from silent movies to world cinema to animated cinema to big blockbusters to documentaries and everything in between!
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Re: Fantastic Four
Looks like it's trying to go for the Man of Steel/Godzilla idea of burying the last mistake by going COMPLETELY in the opposite direction and trying for Somber Epic.LotsoA113 wrote:It's not a bad trailer in my book, but goodness, it's pretty generic.
I saw maybe two shots--I can count them--that even remotely looked like Stan's Four (one of the Thing, and one of the Torch):
From what I can piece together on the fly, it looks like Fox is going to try and paste XM:First Class's formula on it and reinvent it with teen characters, and looks like they don't even go into space.
(And I'm not sure whether the black teen is going to be Johnny or Ben.)
Going back to the '07 posts about ROTSS, at least they tried to go back to the comic, bring in Galactus and the Surfer, and make Dr. Doom an iron-masked character again. Here, I haven't a freakin' clue what they're doing.
I don't know about Sony, but that Fox rights-reversion is looking closer by the day.
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Re: Fantastic Four
"From the studio that brought you X-Men: Days Of Future Past"...hehe!
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Re: Fantastic Four
I dunno EricJ, Godzilla and x-Men: First Class turned out excellently in my book. Those two movies had distinct and qualities identities, which this Fantastic Four movie currently lacks. There's really nothing distinctive about this one currently, except for its overbearing dark tone.
I love all things cinema, from silent movies to world cinema to animated cinema to big blockbusters to documentaries and everything in between!
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Re: Fantastic Four
Going against the grain here, but... I like it! In fact, I like it way more than I expected. (Of course, I expected the worst!)
Yes, pretty generic in some ways... but let's remember those awful John Carter trailers. And JC turned out pretty good.
I might roll my eyes at an overly somber take on the FF, but that doesn't mean they're wrong to try it. Yes, perhaps they may be overcompensating for the last FF films, but this could really work.
This is more an adaptation of the Ultimate FF comics than the originals (just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based more on the Ultimate line), with younger characters and a new attitude. The black actor indeed portrays the Torch, which seems weird but why the heck not, right? (OK, sister Sue is still white in the new film, but there's lots of ways to explain that, though I'd have just made her black too.)
And, this article makes some good points too, on what the comic was originally intended to be, and how that may be reflected in the film:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-v ... ler-767586
And, did you know Philip Glass is reportedly doing the score, with Marco Beltrami?
In fact, I like it way more than I expected. (Of course, I expected the worst!)Yes, pretty generic in some ways... but let's remember those awful John Carter trailers. And JC turned out pretty good.
I might roll my eyes at an overly somber take on the FF, but that doesn't mean they're wrong to try it. Yes, perhaps they may be overcompensating for the last FF films, but this could really work.
This is more an adaptation of the Ultimate FF comics than the originals (just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based more on the Ultimate line), with younger characters and a new attitude. The black actor indeed portrays the Torch, which seems weird but why the heck not, right? (OK, sister Sue is still white in the new film, but there's lots of ways to explain that, though I'd have just made her black too.)
And, this article makes some good points too, on what the comic was originally intended to be, and how that may be reflected in the film:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-v ... ler-767586
And, did you know Philip Glass is reportedly doing the score, with Marco Beltrami?
Last edited by Randall on January 27th, 2015, 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.