Super Sweet Movie Discussion Thread

Finally saw the Guy Ritchie King Arthur Flick, it was fun, done in the guise of his Sherlock Holmes movies. Apparently it was planned to be a trilogy but it bombed at the box office which sucks. Would have enjoyed seeing the evolution of it.
 
I could be repeating myself....but "Shot Caller" was a very good movie, think it came out when some big movies realesed, overshadowing it at the box office. It's worth watching.

 
Kraut783 said:
I could be repeating myself....but "Shot Caller" was a very good movie, think it came out when some big movies realesed, overshadowing it at the box office. It's worth watching.

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I enjoyed it too, I just thought the space between being a scared white-collar inmate to full-on honcho seemed too fast. Similarly his endgame seemed like it could have been reached better ways. Still, well put together, acted, and engaging to the end.

I'm sure they needed to make those choices for pacing. I felt like it would have made a great series in the vein of Sons of Anarchy just on the prison stuff - where they might have done a 10 episode arc to let his development in the organization be more gradual and his ascension seem more real.
 
Frank S. said:
Dust Bowl of creativity.
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Strong concur. It would appear we've exhausted all originality on the big screen and no one is left that can write/tell a great story.

I'm sure that can't be true because there have been a several pretty decent shows on small screen. Still, Hollywood has a lot to prove and they need to stop churning out this garbage no one wants to see. And I hate this franchise view of crap from Hollywood...not every movie needs to be a series or trilogy. Just tell a good story, wrap it up in 2 hours, and let it go.
 
Strong disagree with the absence of creativity in Hollywood, I think a strong comparison in terms of creativity when it comes to Hollywood would be the music industry as a whole. Often I hear from people that music isn't like it used to be or that people are no longer churning out creative or compelling music anymore which is complete asinine.

That's not to say that there isn't some pretty garbage music out currently but that's how it's always been. You just have to search a little bit to find the good stuff, the same idea holds true for film.
 
As far as sequels, the big surprise for me was Split that was released early 2017. I’d completely forgotten about Unbreakable that was released all the way back in 2000. So it wasn’t until the end of Split that the dots connected for me, that it related to the Bruce Willis movie. They’re such entirely different stories too. I’d just randomly caught it and wasn’t sure what I was watching initially. I’m excited they’ve started filming Glass, and how they’ll tie it all together after so many years.

Filming begins on 'Glass,' M. Night Shyamalan's sequel to 'Unbreakable' and 'Split'
 
I read several years ago that 'Hollywood' (I think in this case large movie studio executives) had spent millions researching what kind of movies were most likely to earn positive return. The ultimate answer - other than creative fair that audiences love (which they were already pretty terrible at predicting ahead of time) was 'sequels.'

I was listening to a James Cameron interview where he said much the same thing. That Hollywood executives are dominated by the risks of big budget films and make movies largely out of the fear of missing out - that another studio will have a blockbuster while they have a dud - rather than motivated by belief in a creative product and it's quality. The result is that original, story-driven fair is almost impossible to make (in Cameron's opinion), while executives constantly look for projects drawing on existing intellectual property that provides supposed built-in audience, buzz, and fan base.

Cameron said the silver lining was the emergence of phenomenal television. Non-network television has proven the model for creative, original, high-production value programing with Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc. He said if he were starting out today he'd work in TV not movies. Accordingly he said TV like that is generating top writing, directing, producing, and acting talent for the shorter-series (8-12 episode) projects. He said on TV executives will give producers/show-runners (who are more analogous to directors in movies) much more leeway and time to develop characters, story, and plot than a movie studio would ever give.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of shitty stuff and unoriginal 'revamps' on TV - but I think with the success of great TV the last few years and the push into original content by streaming services and pay-channels the TV quality is only going to get better and better. I think Steven Spielberg wrote a few years ago - and Steven Soderberg has said much the same thing - that the Hollywood big studio economic model is one bad summer of blockbusters from going broke. Maybe the international market changes that calculus but I'm not sure.
 
Il Duce said:
I read several years ago that 'Hollywood' (I think in this case large movie studio executives) had spent millions researching what kind of movies were most likely to earn positive return. The ultimate answer - other than creative fair that audiences love (which they were already pretty terrible at predicting ahead of time) was 'sequels.'

I was listening to a James Cameron interview where he said much the same thing. That Hollywood executives are dominated by the risks of big budget films and make movies largely out of the fear of missing out - that another studio will have a blockbuster while they have a dud - rather than motivated by belief in a creative product and it's quality. The result is that original, story-driven fair is almost impossible to make (in Cameron's opinion), while executives constantly look for projects drawing on existing intellectual property that provides supposed built-in audience, buzz, and fan base.

Cameron said the silver lining was the emergence of phenomenal television. Non-network television has proven the model for creative, original, high-production value programing with Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc. He said if he were starting out today he'd work in TV not movies. Accordingly he said TV like that is generating top writing, directing, producing, and acting talent for the shorter-series (8-12 episode) projects. He said on TV executives will give producers/show-runners (who are more analogous to directors in movies) much more leeway and time to develop characters, story, and plot than a movie studio would ever give.

Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of shitty stuff and unoriginal 'revamps' on TV - but I think with the success of great TV the last few years and the push into original content by streaming services and pay-channels the TV quality is only going to get better and better. I think Steven Spielberg wrote a few years ago - and Steven Soderberg has said much the same thing - that the Hollywood big studio economic model is one bad summer of blockbusters from going broke. Maybe the international market changes that calculus but I'm not sure.
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J.J. Abrams is I think an excellent craftsman, his "Super 8" checked most of the boxes of what passes now as great TV, and it's no surprise he was tasked with rebooting Star Wars with ep.VII. For "Super 8", he went so far as digitizing light artifacts which would have been absent from digital shots, simply to recreate the feeling of watching an actual film. This was either Abrams or Spielberg's idea. Talk about attention to detail. Very clever.

Sequels... Really make me question the value of the original, other than box office returns. Looking forward to sequels?


It's probably me, but. No. It's definitely me: I don't see all that much difference between "Super 8", "Stranger Things", "Dark" and probably a couple others which escape me.
Enjoyable and well made though they may be, I find myself actively looking for the bright spots and discounting the ho-hum, retread nature of the material. It's all subjective to the max, naturally. And part of the feeling has to do with scouring the "trending", "new releases" and "recommended for you" lists on Netflix, finding absolutely nothing of interest.
Sometimes, I see a title and/or thumbnail poster which demands a second look. Read the synopsis, meh, look at the running time before deciding I'm not gonna work at this shit for 100 minutes.
I have two fears: fading across the Styx with the TV blathering in the background, and kicking the bucket on the crapper, mid-shit like Elvis.
Back in the Golden Age of dystopian sci-fi, you could find seedlings rooted in significance. "A canticle for Leibowitz" as literature is probably next to impossible to adapt for the screen, but it inspired a lot more books and films.
It was written by a tail gunner/radio man who participated in the bombing of the Abbey at Monte Cassino in Italy in WWII. Walter Miller Jr. converted to Catholicism after the war and wrote "canticle" in '59.
Pierre Boulle was a French engineer and agent of the Free French in Singapore during WWII. He was captured and sent to forced labor camps for two years, the genesis for his book "the bridge over the river Kwai". Also later, he wrote "Planet of the Apes" which I took to be a parable about the decolonization of Africa, though I could be wrong.
There is a gap between "inspiring" and "basing on", a gap I don't see between the films I mentioned earlier. Films which reference other films tend toward reflections of reflections to the point of distortion. We learn mostly through repetition. Writing lines and lines of the same letter, when learning the alphabet. Nursery rhymes, cadence, techno and trance muzak, driving down a freeway at night with cruise on, mind drifting to the rythm of expansion joints punctuated by light poles. Now. White or red pill? Dunno.
It's the argument between cyclic and linear again, but I'm optimistic that from 16 years (to date) of continuous conflict, fresh perspectives and directions will emerge.
Which reminds me: do fractals exist in nature or are they man made? And at what level do imperfections appear in them? Microscopic, molecular, nano?
The lack of purity in film material is flagrant, needs art more than craft. But that's me.
 
Need a name change or a new thread.

For mine, most of your formulaic movie sequels would be made as stand alone pieces anyway, but if the studio can attach it to a set of characters that have already proven financially viable, then that's a win for them, they can use a weaker story and still make coin on it.
 

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