Topic: The Movie Thread

Because I happened to like John Travolta's performance in The People v. O.J. Simpson, I'd randomly added another thing with his face on it to my Netflix list.

Organised crime biography Gotti isn't the worst thing I've ever seen but, as we all know, I've seen some real crap over the years. Whilst it held my attention, I was surprised by its bizarre conclusions about both the 'Teflon Don' and his son, John A. Gotti, who were relentlessly romanticised throughout. I did like the way actual news footage was intercut throughout, but its decision to focus solely on positive testimonials from members of the public reinforced this unsettling consequence-free portrayal of mob life.

At least the acting was mostly good, even if it was all painting this weird, half-finished picture. Travolta strikes me as the kind of actor who is perfect for very specific roles, yet is unfortunately terrible at everything else. It's a shame he doesn't get more projects suited to his talents. The actor playing his son was solid, if unremarkable and a little too pretty to be a convincing mobster, and most of the film's value came from its illustration of this unique parental relationship. I'm just not sure if those story beats needed to be attached to a historical biopic of such weight, considering that we'll probably never know the truth of it all, happening as it had to have done behind closed doors. There was a definite sense of a scriptwriter excising their own demons through these extrapolated avatars.

Whatever the production background, what we're left with is a way to kill just under two hours. It's neither offensive nor inoffensive. It has a beginning, middle and end and yet it feels unfinished. It's just... well, it's just kinda there. But I sure as heck wanna go watch a documentary about the Gotti family now. I need something that at least feels balanced and factual.

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse 2

@RogerRoger The story behind the production of Gotti is way more interesting than the actual film. It's on YouTube, you should check it out!

I thought the film was pretty awful on every level, there are some unintentional hiliarous moments however. The problem I have with those types of movies is it's all been done before, and any new film just feels like you are watching another version of Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco.

@JohnnyShoulder It's rare for me to delve into behind-the-scenes information on things I'm not completely obsessed about, but I'll definitely check out the production story of Gotti because I get the sense it'll be one of the more interesting ones. Thanks!

This is the part where you yell "Get oudda 'ere!" as I admit to never having seen any of the classic mob movies (not even The Godfather, let alone the two examples you cite) but despite that, even I found large parts of Gotti derivative. You'd think basing it on a true story and including that news footage would've given it an edge but alas, they wasted the potential, it seems.

@LN78 Ah, now there's something we can definitely agree on. Battlefield Earth was pretty dire.

@LN78 @RogerRoger well what do you expect it was basically a fluff piece for Scientology

@FullbringIchigo Ah, scientonogy... what a cult.

Wait, I think I accidentally swapped an L and an N up there.

So... Terminator: Dark Fate. This isn't going to be sleeky written as an impression. It might resemble an angry rant, actually. I don't know. I'm tired.

Reviews have been saying it's the best film in the Terminator franchise since T2. And... that's probably technically true. As a noisy action-blockbuster, it's pretty competent fare. Lots of slick visuals and setpieces. In more ways than one, it reminds me of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: a pretty, but empty and creatively bankrupt affair that only manages to be notable as a sequel because it's not aggressively bad like previous sequels were.

In this case, it's basically T2, but with diversity-friendly casting and all the things that made T2 great systematically stripped away. It starts out with a twist: a T-800 that was sent out after the T-1000 in T2, but before Skynet ceased to exist, manages to assassinate John Connor in front of his mother one morning on a beach. A surprising opening, but maybe one that might have been an interesting lead in to a unique film. It's just business as usual after that, however: you have a young woman in Mexico City, nicknamed "Dani," who is being chased by a Terminator that looks like it's made out of liquid metal (although, in a bizarre and unexplained twist, this Terminator is able to effectively duplicate himself by separating his outer body, made of mimetic polyalloy like the T-1000, from his endoskeleton; but the mere presence of solid metal bits underneath makes him weirdly inferior to the T-1000, who could sustain any level of physical injury thanks to his composition). A cyborg supersoldier from the future named Grace (I couldn't help but see a young Ellen Degeneres) is sent back to save her. Meanwhile, the two run into Sarah Connor, who is being fed the coordinates to spots where Terminators will show up by a mysterious source. It turns out that this source is actually the T-800 who killed John Connor years ago. After having carried out his instructions, he loses his purpose in life and, after a few months, apparently finds it in the form of a hispanic woman and her young son, who are being abused by the woman's husband. Having magically grown a conscience, he tries to help Sarah work through the trauma of her son's death by sending her locations where other Terminators will show up. Grace actually has the coordinates for the T-800's log cabin in the woods tattoo'd on her body, which is how she finds him. This bit is never really explained. Anyway, Sarah and Co. have to work alongside the T-800 to help save Dani from the new Terminator.

I could go on recounting the film's plot, but I'm a bit tired of talking about it, and you can probably imagine how it ends. Because there was absolutely nothing surprising about this film. It's just a loud, busy, stupid action movie. Gone is the tension of the old films and the thrill of the chase (this new Terminator chases them, of course, but he's so ridiculously good at his job that it just starts becoming a parody of itself; at one point the characters escape from a facility onto a plane to get away from him, so the Terminator somehow acquires a plane, flies up to their plane, jumps onto it, there's this big action sequence, the plane everyone was on crashes near a hydro power plant, with the main cast escaping on a... jeep with airbags (a vehicle with a parachute, actually; lol I did say I was tired) on it, or something. Anyway, immediately after this ridiculous, nearly 20 minute sequence, the Terminator is immediately on top of them again... it's so relentless that it stops being menacing and becomes like something out of a cartoon skit). No moody cinematography or frightening dreams of the future. We see the future, but it has lost the dark, stylized feeling you got when seeing the future in the old films: these sequences just feel like something out of a standard futuristic war movie. There are no interesting character dynamics (it approaches something interesting when Sarah is asked to work alongside the T-800 who killed her son, but this is never really explored). The action isn't cinematic and sleek, like in T2, but more like something out of a Transformers film. The characters are almost universally forgettable, with the sole exception being Sarah Connor. No iconic lines of dialogue are introduced here, and the actors seem so exhausted that they barely seem able to manage to alluding to classic dialogue from the first two films (at one point, Sarah boredly intones: "I'll... be back;" at another point, the T-800 picks up a pair of sunglasses, the classic Terminator music starts playing, and then he just sort of sits them down and walks off. The film doesn't even have the decency to shamelessly pander to the audience. I don't understand what the point was of killing off John Connor and practically invalidating the first two films if they were just going to retell the same basic story, but in a worse fashion.

EDIT: The T-800 in T2 reveals that they're put into "read only mode" so that their algorithms can't grow or evolve and make them into less efficient killers. How, then, is the T-800 in this film apparently able to randomly grow a conscience without some external help, and without a strong socializing presence in his life from the beginning? You know what? Doesn't matter.

I was prepared for the worst, yet somehow still ended up feeling insulted by this production. I can't necessarily say it's a "bad film." It's worse. It's an utterly soulless one. It feels like it was designed by a committee of people in grey suits. It's what happens when late stage capitalism happens to an iconic sci-fi property.

@LN78 Yeah, this film has nothing to offer fans of the first two movies. Even TFA had some nice nostalgic bits for old fans. This is just an attempt to strip-mine an earlier classic for content in order to generate more money from the property.

It's too bad the TV show was canceled after two seasons, as I actually kind of liked it while it was on.

@LN78 Cameron did basically nothing towards this film.

He's on record as saying that Terminator finished with T2, he's never been interested in revisiting the franchise but is happy for his friends to make money from it - hence him never having a bad word to say about the post T2 films on release.

@LN78 He has very little financial stake other than garnering the (undoubtedly profitable) producer credit. He didn't even own the rights to Terminator (sold the rights for $1 to get production money) or T2.

Miller said in an interview that he'd spoken to Cameron a couple of times and noted that he'd moved to NZ to concentrate on Avatar. Cameron did sod all on Dark Fate, but the rights owners need to turn a profit - so a slightly woke soft reboot with Cameron's name on it was the way forward.

As I say, he's big on his friends (namely, Schwarzenegger) being able to make money out of the brand.

I watched Doctor Sleep at the cinema last night, and I really enjoyed it. A great cast, particularly Rebecca Ferguson as the main antagonist, Rose The Hat. Ewan McGregor is great too as Danny (protagonist), although I did want a tad bit more depth to the emotional moments of his arc.
The film is 2 1/2 hours long, but the story didn’t drag at all, has a great score and cinematography, and some fantastic set pieces.
I didn’t find it particularly scary, but parts are most certainly thrilling and tense, with a couple of gore bits that made me wince.
I love horror as a genre, and I like Kubrick’s The Shining, but don’t hold it as an elevated masterpiece as some do. I’ve never read any of Stephen King’s books, but I am aware of his reported dislike for the movie adaptation of The Shining, and am also aware that he’s been praising Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep adaptation.
Now, I am a huge fan of Mike Flanagan, and I think Doctor Sleep works really well as a sequel, and is another great addition to Flanagan’s impressive resumé.

It’d be great to hear the thoughts of any horror fans that have read both the books and seen these films, so please let me know 👍

@Ralizah Thanks for the Terminator Dark Fate impressions. I didn’t (and certainly don’t now) have any plans to see the movie, but I read them mostly for their entertainment value since I enjoy reading your posts.
It sounds like the Terminator IP is dying a slow and painful death. It’s a metaphorical irony —like it’s machine characters, the franchise just won’t stay dead and every few years it keeps rising up from the ashes after fans and critics shoot down each new bungled entry. Maybe it will stay down this time.

@LN78 Could easily have been something done over the phone. Miller had meetings with a bunch of sci-fi writers early on to come up with ideas too.

As I say, Cameron doesn't care a jot about the IP. If he gets to make a bit of money from it, all the better.

@LN78

Found a bit more - the rights reverted back to Cameron after 35 years - it's still in the hands of Skydance by way of a license agreement.

So yes, Cameron does have a very vested interest in DF making a lot of money.

"I was kind of reluctant to come back into that world, but when I had the opportunity to recover the rights through the copyright law, I started thinking about it," Cameron admitted. "It's like, 'Well is there still something to say?' And when I met with David Ellison at Skydance, he said, 'Look, what I want to do is take it back to the basics. In a sense you can do the sequel to Terminator 2.' And I thought, 'Well that simplifies things.' The movie came from him; that was not my vision walking in the door."

@LN78 Yeah. He was married to the producer he sold the rights to initially and divorced her between T1 and T2.

Between Annapurna, Skydance and now Cameron - there will never be a shortage of people trying to squeeze cash from the brand. DF has probably done badly enough not to warrant the planned sequels as they'd hoped, but there'll be something.

@LN78 @KALofKRYPTON Interesting discussion, guys.

I'll never quite understand how creators whose names are so closely associated with classic, beloved films can stand to agree to associating those names with cheap knock-offs within the same franchise.

I'd forgotten the horrible way Alien 3 basically undid the entirety of the character/plot development in Aliens to justify another sequel. Unlike this, though, I still thought Alien 3 was, overall, a pretty decent film. Certainly the last one. Resurrection was awful. Prometheus was a disappointment. As was Covenant (aside from the hilariously homoerotic interactions between the two androids; put this flute in your mouth while 'I do the fingering' wink wink). Actually, that whole movie would have been improved if it had just been about the two Michael Fassbender androids making out the whole time.

@Th3solution It's the horror story of capitalism. Nothing is sacred in the light of profit. I'm telling you, once science figures out how to resurrect the dead, there are going to be chain-gangs of corpses working the local Walmart and McDonalds, as if the companies were run by powerful Haitian sorcerers.

@Ralizah Lol, that’s really dark, man. But you’re probably right. 😂

@LN78 We can only hope. I liked some of the ideas in 'Rise of the Machines', but it wasn't a good film; 'Salvation' was a solidly squandered opportunity to really dig in to the future war; less said about 'Genysis' the better - other than it's the basic soft reboot building blocks of Dark Fate.

@Ralizah Cash-money! Sadly, that's the answer most of the time.

I quite like Alien 3 - the Director's Cut version especially. Growing up, I was always taken with how different the Alien films were from one another, and while 3 certainly borrows heavily from the tone of Alien - the stylistic differences set it quite nicely apart.
Resurrection for the most part is never more than so much popcorn fodder - and the prequel films are just terrible, self-indulgent nonsense.

@LN78 Do we really want an ageing Arnie running round in next to nothing? I've said something similar a while back, they really need to stop running these titles into the ground. Very few of the recent ones are are any good and are just crapping over the 'legacy' of the originals.

In other news, the recent release of Midsommar for home viewing comes with a directors cut which extends the film to 177 minutes. Eeek.

Toy Story is probably best movie franchise for me. Enjoyed all four movies so far.