films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

maxi

Well-known member
he looks like a caricature of a leading man and has this stilted quality to his acting. gives everything he's in this slight air of comedy.
used well by kubrick in eyes wide shut in a way where cruise isn't really in on the joke. that film is a hilarious comedy after the first few times you see it and it's definitely intentional (from kubrick but not cruise)
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Good point, I like it.

Also would make an interesting question; what films are there in which the director uses an actor for his weaknesses deliberately - but unbeknownst to the actor - as they will give the desired effect?

Probably the most obvious way is to get some dumb lunkhead in when you really want someone to look truly confused.

It's analogous to a musician deliberately misusing an instrument or using a broken one (eg I believe Vic Flock played the James Bomd theme on a broken guitar) to get a sound they want but that it was never designed to make.
 

maxi

Well-known member
arnold schwarzenegger as the terminator

'i now know why you cry. but it is something i can never do..............because i can't act'
 

maxi

Well-known member
(although I actually think arnie is talented and way above people like van damme or whoever. definitely has comedic talent at least as an actor)
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Often discussed here is the Herzeg film Heart of Glass, the one where he allegedly hypnotised the actors to get the peculiar disaffected, er, effect.

I like to think of Kubrick thinking "Well, I could hypnotise the leads to so they portray a robotic, glassy-eyed inhumanity - or I could just use Tom and Nic!".
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
Seconds - John Frankenheimer. I remember on another forum years back someone was elated he finally got a copy of this DVD. I remember it looked pretty good to me at the time, a cold war thriller or something I thought. I finally got round to watching it and the orgy scene where they chant "CRUSH THE GRAPES" has to be one of the worst things I've ever seen committed to film.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The one where they fake their deaths and get given a new life? I thought it was a pretty interesting film.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
You know there is that film called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies right? Well, it was on telly today and I was hungover, just feeling pretty weak, unable to move etc you know, I mean, you've been hungover, and this was a bad one.

So... before I go on, for those of you who've not seen it, what do you think that film is gonna be like?

I totally assumed it was gonna be a sort of slapstick comedy gorefest along the lines of, I dunno, Brain Dead or sonething. I was thinking zombies getting chopped up all over the shop, Lizzie Bennet with a chainsaw or something, Mr Darcy gunning down zombie hordes with a gattling gun, posh horsey types being exploded left right and centre, hilarious Austenesque witticisms as enemies are despatched "You've delighted us long enough!!" etc maybe some tits. Perfect hungover viewing in short.

But it ain't that at all. They basically play it straight. Well it's a romance set during a war between humans and zombies and the Bennets' accomplishments are karate rather than piano recitals but there are no real jokes. It's a bizarre film: it's not funny, it's not scary, it's not Austen. It's got Charles Dance and Lena Headey and Sam Riley! How did this happen? What were they thinking? I don't get it at all.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The Many Saints of Newark... it's not bad bad but it's really very bland. There are many moments which foreshadow the coming events of The Sopranos and these are potentially interesting, but it feels as though they forgot to put anything of interest in the now of the film to make it a thing in its own right. There is none of the intrigue and plotting that was at least half of what made the series interesting, the main occurrence which the story could (should even) turn on is deliberately reduced to the dampest of squibs and the main antagonist is hard to care about as he is completely irrelevant to the series.

Basically a missed opportunity that never amounts to more than being some mildly interesting build up to The Sopranos and in which the most diverting bits are deciding how much that guy looks as though he could grow up to be the Silvio or whoever that we know in later life.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
When the Pauline Walnuts impressionist did his two finger pointer, I wanted to shoot the cunt

Wasn’t the whole point with Christopher’s father that he hunted down and took out an a entire crew from New England? A major league junk fiend. Think of what could’ve been actualised with those premises. What do you get instead?
Some div drowning his wife
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Forget to mention Heat which was on the other day. V had never seen it and, although it's on fairly often, I realised that I've not sat down and watched it from start to finish since its initial release when I went to see it in the cinema.

Anyway, it's Michael Mann and so, obviously it's more macho than that scene at the start of Commando in which Arnie carries a tree would be if he was also oiled and naked and arm-wrestling a grizzly bear at the same time. There are LOTS of shouty sweary men shouting and swearing at each other all the time and all the women are reduced to being the wife of x or the daughter of y and most of the time they are really just there in the background being a tedious drag on our heroes, unreasonably expecting them to take the occasional break from their lives of relentlessly exciting machismo to do boring real world stuff such as be home for dinner as planned or pay the rent or whatever.

I'm not complaining about that though, that all comes with the territory; it's Michael Mann directing De Niro, Pacino, Danny Trejo (as the imaginatively named Trejo), Vale Kilmer, Jon Voight and more in a film about a crazy maverick cop obsessively trying to bring down a crack team of highly trained professional bank robbers whose leader is an ice cold pro as well as being, at the same time, a hotheaded macho motherfucker. Obviously it's swimming in the gallons of testosterone which are exploding out of every pore of every person involved in the project. There is simply no room left over for women to do anything except moan monotonously, whine neurotically or occasionally try and commit suicide. But complaining about that would be like marking down a Jane Austen adaptation for its lack of explosions.

And the narrative is satisfying complex with a number of subplots that are actually developed to a surprising degree of detail. Some minor characters get much more back story than you might expect and, for someone such as me who has recently started to get frustrated with the relatively shallowness of such things in films compared to the way that these 80 hour long tv series have the luxury of lingering on them for as long as they like, that can only be a good thing.

The actors do what they are supposed to in the main, and of course it's the first time that Vito Corleone is on screen with his (slightly older) son Michael Corleone. Or, in other words, it's the first time The Two Greatest Directors of Their Generation - DeNiro and Pacino - are actually in the same scene. At the time this was a major event, it was part of the selling point of the film. I even remember Mark Kermode at the time saying something about how that scene should send shivers down one's spine, and if it didn't then you should probably walk out of the film right then and there cos you would never understand the film.... or quite possibly film in general for that matter.

So where did it go wrong then?

Two words... Pacino and Al. My guess is he wanted to lay down some kind of marker, rise to the challenge and show that chump DeNiro who is really the greatest, once and for all. And so he went for it. He really fucking went for it... gibbering and screaming randomly, chewing the scenery and just generally burying the whole thing under one of the worst and most stupendously misjudged performances I've seen in a long time.

In the latest series of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry is blackmailed into giving a restaurant owner's talentless daughter the main role in his new show and they represent her as the worst actor of all time by making her shout and laugh and seesaw emotions in a manner startlingly reminiscent of Pacino's ego trip in Heat. He thinks he's winning an oscar while in fact he looks more like a senile old man whose subordinates are constantly struggling to remind him what film he's supposed to be in without bruising his incredibly macho and thus fragile ego.

Sadly you aren't gonna remember sinisterly gleaming cars gliding through the night as Moby's surprisingly unshit reworking of New Dawn Fades ratchets up the tension, you are going to remember Pacino's baboon-like attempt to inject an extra level of machismo into the film that needed that less than any other in history.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
but what about when he says "cos she's got a great ass" to the guy he busts in vegas?


pacino is great in that film. you should watch the other mann-pacino one, the insider now. he's good in that too.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
A shame as I’d been looking forward to it as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a cornerstone text for me - I did my dissertation on it many years ago. The reviews have generally not been kind. Birtwhistle did an opera based on it but I know fuck all about opera.

I still wanna see it. And I like that bloke who played Finchy. Although Green Knight is made by the same studio as The Witch, Hereditary and Midsommar all of which I have found - to say the least - disappointing.

Actually, when I see it written down like that, I do wonder why I keep coming back for more, but, I think there is a reason. These guys are trying to make good films. They are having a real go at making films which are original and interesting and distinctive and so on, and they are really doing their best - already in itself that makes them quite unusual - unfortunately two things are preventing them from succeeding, the first is really fundamental, and hard to see a way round other than hard work and failing better and so on, and it is basically the problem that they just lack any particular film making talent but I do sort of feel that if they keep on plugging away with that attitude then maybe they will start to improve. The second problem is what will fuck them in the long term though, and that's the excessive amounts of acclaim they are getting for these clumsy attempts, if they don't ever succeed in making good films then the reason will be that they have been sitting on their laurels cos moronic film critics have been pretending that Midsommar is good. If Ari Aster never makes a good film and his career is still born then it will due to these idiots who stifled him and stopped him stretching himself before he'd begun.
 

jenks

thread death
I still wanna see it. And I like that bloke who played Finchy. Although Green Knight is made by the same studio as The Witch, Hereditary and Midsommar all of which I have found - to say the least - disappointing.

Actually, when I see it written down like that, I do wonder why I keep coming back for more, but, I think there is a reason. These guys are trying to make good films. They are having a real go at making films which are original and interesting and distinctive and so on, and they are really doing their best - already in itself that makes them quite unusual - unfortunately two things are preventing them from succeeding, the first is really fundamental, and hard to see a way round other than hard work and failing better and so on, and it is basically the problem that they just lack any particular film making talent but I do sort of feel that if they keep on plugging away with that attitude then maybe they will start to improve. The second problem is what will fuck them in the long term though, and that's the excessive amounts of acclaim they are getting for these clumsy attempts, if they don't ever succeed in making good films then the reason will be that they have been sitting on their laurels cos moronic film critics have been pretending that Midsommar is good. If Ari Aster never makes a good film and his career is still born then it will due to these idiots who stifled him and stopped him stretching himself before he'd begun.
I’m currently sitting in the back bedroom self isolating waiting for a PCR to return, I should really just get on with it and watch the fucking thing shouldn’t I?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
but what about when he says "cos she's got a great ass" to the guy he busts in vegas?


pacino is great in that film. you should watch the other mann-pacino one, the insider now. he's good in that too.
Yeah that's exactly the sort of scene I mean. It made me cringe, I felt embarrassed for him and it didn't make any sense in context and... what had poor old Apu done to deserve that really?
 

version

Well-known member
The Conformist.

Haven't had this negative a response to a film in quite some time. Gorgeous to look at, but awkward and clunky and I just couldn't get into it. Tonally all over the place, horrible Italian dubbing, performances that did nothing for me, pacing so poor it felt more like studio execs had butchered the thing than anything deliberate on Bertolucci's part. Felt like an oddity you'd find in CEX or a charity shop on some ancient DVD.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just seen a film called King Arthur; Legend of the Sword directed by Guy Ritchie - now with that title you might think it was gonna be about the guy in the legend with the round table and Guinivere and Sir Lancelot and so on but actually it turns out to have nothing to do with that whatsoever. No, wait a minute, I'm wrong again, it IS about that King Arthur, it's just that Ritchie has added a few embellishments of his own to the famous legend - and to be honest, I am all for that; if you're making a film of something like this that has been adapted so many times, told and re-told and of which there is surely no totally agreed definitive version, then that means you have plenty of wiggle room for putting your own stamp on it...

But you can understand my confusion when it begins with Arthur growing up a street urchin in a ghetto in Londinium (presumably in the East Endium) where he learns martial arts from a wise old Chinese guy called Kung-Fu George. That's not a joke by the way, I am one hundred percent serious when I tell you that Guy Ritchie's King Arthur grows up running a gang of petty criminals and prostitutes in a ghetto where he also studies kung fu.

Soon after that though, he has pulled the mythical shooter Excalibur from out of a stone and he's found a tasty bunch of cockernee knights to help him do over the local mob boss and demon knight Vortigern - there are two hours of shoot outs, elephants with cities on their back, a giant snake and a humorous mix-up over a marijuana factory before he faces off against the afore-mentioned demon knight, beats him and then - as if Ritchie has just remembered what story he's telling - he builds a round table right at the end. It's bollocks.
 
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