The Film Thread: Page 44 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

The Film Thread

Pepe LeFrits

X-Men: First Class is out next week. I'm looking forward to it. Fassbender as Magneto looks like great casting.

lorddulaarsenal

although they've downgraded mystique in terms of hotness 🙁 ooooooooooow

Pepe LeFrits

Yeah she's more cute than hot now, still would though!

lorddulaarsenal

oh yeah no doubts there peperatum. that films gonna be proper giddy funness. gonna get me a bad ass giant coke, some popcorn, nachos and ben and jerry's as i get ma x-men first class on

asajoseph

That film looks so monumentally shite. Why do they have to fucking Twilight-ify everything these days? When did teenagers become so fucking gay?

Claudius

Watched Hangover 2. Most of it was unfunny and desperate. I thought The King's Speech was genuinely funnier.

Ricky1985

asajoseph wrote:
That film looks so monumentally shite. Why do they have to fucking Twilight-ify everything these days? When did teenagers become so fucking gay?

To be fair it looks a lot better in this trailer:

Ricky1985

Caligula wrote:
Watched Hangover 2. Most of it was unfunny and desperate. I thought The King's Speech was genuinely funnier.

Mates were pissing themselves in laughter, I thought it was okay.

There were a good few bits that I thought were just not funny or necessary. Like the 'Bachelor Brunch' in the IHOP where Phil called the dentist's missus a cunt - was there a need for that? Was it funny? Not for me.

Pepe LeFrits

I just saw a short clip of the new X-Men film featuring Magneto - big Oirish accent on him. That's going to be very off-putting.

lorddulaarsenal

Just watched face off. Top flick. Nic cage is an awesome actor

anyways big bang looks a top film coming our way

RonBurgundy

Machete wrote:
Just watched face off. Top flick. Nic cage is an awesome actor

Wow, that takes me back. Awesome film!

Klaus

John Woo was badly mistreated by Hollywood. He should've been the one to pave the way for the new action film era, not Michael Bay.

USArsenal

watched Shutter last night (the original Thai version).. not great, not really scary at all

tried to watch Lebanon today.. turned it off after 15 minutes.. terrible

saw OSS 117: Cairo-Nest of Spies today.. funny and campy, as long as you know what it is (spoof) ahead of time

y va marquer

Pepe LeFrits wrote:
I just saw a short clip of the new X-Men film featuring Magneto - big Oirish accent on him. That's going to be very off-putting.

He's German Irish raised in Kerry - no wonder the accent's a bit mangled.
I think he looks a bit like a cross between Mad Jens and Eddie Irvine.

asajoseph

Saw Hangover 2 again tonight. Apart from the fact that the cinema I saw it in was fucking shit, it was pretty funny. Liked it.

Burnwinter

Klaus wrote:
John Woo was badly mistreated by Hollywood. He should've been the one to pave the way for the new action film era, not Michael Bay.

Maybe. I love John Woo to death, but he's made many poor films, especially in Hollywood. You have to judge directors on results, given that half the job is being able to kick heads when people get in your way.

Hard Target is my favourite Woo film after he attempted Hollywood. Good film too.

Burnwinter

Ok I finally got around to watching Visconti's The Leopard last night.

Fucking wow. Superb film. Guys I recommend not watching it until you're 30+ though - persistent themes include mortality, age and decline. 😉

Klaus

Burnwinter wrote:
Maybe. I love John Woo to death, but he's made many poor films, especially in Hollywood.

That was kind of the point though. He was typecasted by film studios that wanted the gimmick of Woo's filmmaking (slow-mo shots, jumpcuts and gunplay) without the social commentary or visual poetry that came along with it. His highly stylized heroic bloodshed films were completely different compared to the american action wave that was spearheaded by Arnold, Sly and van Damme. The story was similar for Yun-Fat Chow. He's easily one of the most talented actors of his generation and starred in some of the most memorable films of the late eighties/early nineties back in Hong Kong. The only big roles he could get in Hollywood were in direct-to-video flicks like The Replacement Killers and The Corruptor, though. Hollywood wasn't ready for Hong Kong.

Hard Target is pretty typical for the kind of films Woo ended up doing in LA. He had both hands tied to his back while the studio rewrote the script and casted van Damme instead of Chow as the lead. Personally I think the film sucked ass. There's a funny story about it in the book "Hong Kong Babylon", though. Apparently van Damme, enjoying a career high, had a number of clauses in his contract that meant he could do pretty much what he wanted on the set. He didn't like the fact that Woo wasted perfectly good footage on fleshing out other characters "because the audience pay to see van Damme and not a lot of supporting actors" (yes - he referred to himself in third person), so he made his own cut of the film and edited out most of the scenes where he wasn't in the frame. He ended up cutting over forty minutes of footage. He tried unsuccessfully to convince the studio heads to use his version instead of the one they had edited, but they weren't too keen on it. They came to some sort of agreement in the end where he got a few more minutes of screen time just for the sake of it.

Burnwinter

None of that's news to me Klaus. I'm a long time follower of both Chow and Woo, together and apart.

I think some of the Hollywood efforts of both are trying to recreate blood opera (e.g. The Corruptor) but they fail. Something about the melodrama of HK cinema doesn't transfer so easily to Hollywood.

For me Hard Target's in the "so bad it's good" category. For me anyway. Has some great sequences too. Lance Henriksen's role is very enjoyable. I prefer it to MI:2, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, etc.

Again though I think if Woo failed to make a great film in the American system it's partly his own limitations that led to that failure.

Klaus

I just don't see how you come to that conclusion when every single one of his Hollywood films ended up more limited in scope than the ones he made back in Hong Kong, and continued to make once he moved back. Do you mean in the sense that he shouldn't have moved abroad at all? Well, in retrospect he probably shouldn't. But it's hardly his fault that the american film industry gave him the cold hand once the papers were signed. Tinseltown is full of similar tales.

If anything good at all came out of Woo's failure to establish himself as a prominent filmmaker in Hollywood it's probably the fact that even more talented directors like Johnnie To stayed behind and continued to develop their unique brand of action.

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