Tendo City

The Expendables!

It certainly sounds it, considering the cast... is it good?

A Black Falcon Wrote:It certainly sounds it, considering the cast... is it good?

Definitely!

The primary appeal of this movie is seeing almost just about every action star and superstar of the last 30 years team up or face off , Its action packed and loaded with witty humor.

If you like awesome action movies, then you will love The Expendables.

I'm not normally an action-movie kind of guy unless it's completely ridiculous and ironic like Con Air, sending up silly action movies in a hilarious way.

That said, I'll probably see this, if not in theatres then from Netflix.

It has to be interesting to see a cast of action stars, who are used to hamming it up for the camera and chewing up scenery by themselves, all put into one movie. I'm a little eager to see what happens. :)

I'm going to see Scott Pilgrim this weekend, though the trailer made it look lame. I get what it was going for, but it seemed too meta in a corny kind of way. On the other hand, it's Edgar fucking Wright. I thought Hot Fuzz looked corny by its trailer, but it's one of my favorite comedies.

Well, aside from one or two scenes that are played straight, The Expendables is pretty ridiculous [in an awesome way] and had lots of hilarious lines.

If you can only see one, see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I haven't seen the Expendables, but Scott Pilgrim was funny and good enough that I don't need to.

Rotten Tomatoes:
Scott Pilgrim: 81%
The Expendables: 39%

Don't be a donkle, SJ!

I have yet to see it however I will note that I have seen every movie that the cast of Expendables has been in, so I feel like I already saw it. What do I want to see? Kindergarten Cop 2 or anything with Kevin Spacey. Otherwise its difficult for me to get involved with films lately because they haven't had a soul in some time, its like having an imagination became sooooo last century.

That said I am looking forward to this.

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Sorry GR, but you and I both know it'd be worthless to start a new topic, what with the slow traffic around here. :D

Lazy: I thought that looked interesting too. People groaned in my theatre when M. Night's name came up. He's only producing, though, and hopefully his creative control will be limited to a minor role.

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:People groaned in my theatre when M. Night's name came up.

Same here. I was one of the groaners :D

I saw Scott Pilgrim last week, not really sure what to make of it, but with some glowing recommendations from good friends. I must say I'm glad I did, it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. I was onboard the second the 8-bit Universal logo came up

All you guys should The Expendables, it'll make a real man out of you.

Honestly that "devil in an elevator" movie looks like another cheesy "Twilight Zone" episode turned movie that M Night does all the time, like one of the bad ones. Seriously, the devil's some random person in the elevator? Oh, no no, it's the FEAR of the people in the elevator that MAKES the devil! That's it! SYMBOLISM! They're ALL the devils, just like WE'RE all devils when we let fear take control! Pfft, please.

Just because you cant write doesn't mean you should get mad at writers. No wonder your mother doesn't like you and everyone deleted you from myspace.

Say what you want but Night has a gift with portraying realism and a comprehension of human study that's unmatched by any director alive today save maybe Spielberg. The 'Twilight Zone' feel is exactly why I see his films because that is his thing and doing it right is difficult.

Something happened with Night somewhere between Unbreakable and the Happening that drove people to dislike him. Almost everyone will say Unbreakable is a fantastic film, but after that they all say he went downhill and I dont see it. I think it has less to do with the actual content and more to do with the style that got people annoyed that the feeling and scope was the same for every film. The fact that a director can carry a trademark feeling and scope to each movie is something to be praised not condemned (unless it gets boring), I guess it wasn't that the content was predictable but more that people knew it would have a twist, like they were just being lied to and couldn't accept devoting energy to a film that will just turn everything on its ear.

Mind you Last Air Bender was pretty well deserved in its poopiness. But I think that was a contracted film that Night didn't want to do.

All that a side, I love modern films that focus on a single set. Joel Shmuckmaker struck gold with Phonebooth and I also approve of The Strangers, Panic Room, Red Eye and other films where one location is our primary focus. imo the writing benefits from the focus and almost all of them would make Hitchcock proud. So DEVIL should be really interesting, my theory is that the people on the elevator strike a temporal rift or a pocket of space in to another dimension because of the imagery of the world being upside down (alternate dimension). But i dunno, the evil looking dude in the trailer at the end is a man wearing a mask. Is that a lost soul of hell or a terrorist? or a thief attempting to create a distraction while the vaults of the building are emptied and electronically playing with people to make sure his get away is undetected? There's a hundred scenarios and thats the fun of going in to a film like that.

The Village started out pretty good, but when the revelation came out it just all went downhill pretty fast. Can't really get myself to care much about it anymore.

The Happening is pretty awful, in a funny sort of way because of the ridiculously-stilted dialog/acting and "Oh no the wind is chasing us!!" stuff.

The Last Airbender is one of the most boring and choppy movies I've ever seen. And he wrote/directed/produced it, so it's not like he can back out and say "Oh, the studio made me cut it down" or "I did the best I could with a bad a script" because this was his movie all the way.

Haven't seen Lady in the Water, don't really care to.

I've gone into depth explaining exactly why I didn't like the vast majority of his movies in another thread. In summery, he's got this weird view of human behavior that says "everyone is somber, sad, and serious all the time". It worked AWESOME in the sixth sense, because it made perfect sense. However, it didn't work very well at all in the majority of his movies. That's basically my problem with the "human study" part of the equation, I just don't SEE actual human behavior IN most of his movies now. The fact that a lot of his movies have "twist" revelations isn't the problem, it's that a lot of them revelations are just plain stupid and insulting. Just ANY plot won't work. It has to actually be somewhat intelligent. Emotion isn't the ONLY equation to solve in story writing. Humans are also rational beings, and if everyone in a story is acting like complete idiots, well, that kinda makes me not want to watch any more.

Lady in the Water was nothing more than a writer's self-inflated importance writ large on the screen. It was him saying "I create WORLDS, worship me" in the most obvious and overplayed way I've yet seen in a story. It was silly. Oh, and as I said in that other thread, any artist who's ONLY possible counter to critics is to create a fictional straw-critic in their own works and then kill them is being a child.

I'm different than a number of people in that I disliked the big reveal at the end of Unbreakable. I actually liked most of that movie, because I really didn't notice the "one note emotionalism" of Night's movies yet and it still kinda worked here, though still better in Sixth Sense. I really enjoyed most of the movie, but the ending? Yeah, to me that came off as... silly. When you have one mood for the people in your whole movie, and at the very end ONE human is suddenly cackling like Lex Luther... it throws you off.

The problem with "The Village" more than anything else wasn't necessarily the story-telling (though it did suffer from the "everyone's always somber and serious all the time" feel, seriously it's become clear that that's the only emotion Night thinks people have), so much as the lame plot twist. The sixth sense's plot twist was intelligent, it was a person who was in denial of what happened to them (and on another level, in denial of everything he did wrong in his life). The Village? "Turns out they're in modern day" really doesn't MEAN anything to me. It's just a "reveal" for the sake of a reveal. There's nothing TO it. Worse, I predicted it from the PREVIEWS because that plot's been done before, IN JOHNNY QUEST.

"The Happening" was moronic. The "eco-friendly" message was just stupid, like Captain Planet level stupid. There's NO amount of writing skill that can save that premise. It would be like Shakespeare trying to salvage "The Core". Premises and basic story concepts MATTER. It doesn't matter how realistic or dramatic or whatever perfection of a certain style you get for your characters if they're reacting to the world's clouds turning into goats flooding the world with milk or something.

I haven't seen The Last Airbender (and wasn't even aware it was based on a cartoon until a friend told me, this friend also told me that apparently he DID want to make it, that he asked to write it because his kid watched the show or something). However, from what others have told me it suffers from the obvious, fitting an entire series into a few hours, and from Night's style, apparently the original show had a much wider range of human emotion (read: comedy) which just got reduced to "brooding, this is my brooding face, because of how fer serious this war is, it's so serious, see how serious I am?". Again I haven't seen it myself, but that's apparently a general consensus on the problem with it.

So yeah, it's not that we're so awed and terrified of his POWERS as a writer that it makes us uncomfortable (though I'm sure he'd love to think that), it's because his stories are really terrible now.

MAYBE this new one will turn it all around, but considering I'm predicting the big reveal in advance and the "message" really isn't much of one, I'm not convinced as it stands. I went to see Scotty Pil, and for the record GR? Never heard of this guy before the thread you made, but WOW, that movie is awesome! It's just so perfectly made! I mean, yes, it won me over the moment they played the intro music to Link to the Past to start it (I mean, like ripped straight from the game), but it's not just that. The style, the writing, the story, the overall presentation, all perfect! I really can't complain about anything here. It's... it's the perfect movie, and the majority of people aren't going to "get" it because of all the in-jokes directed at old school gamers. Even the 8-bit Universal logo reminds me of the "bombastic" Lucasarts and Sierra logos before their old games. The whole "style" of the movie I've seen before, from this same director (a sort of extremely fast "plot point to plot point" execution with almost no fluff at all), but I think it's with THIS one that this particular style is finally perfected. I honestly think this could change a lot of movie making.

Back to M Night, I think we can ALL agree that Michael Bay's movies are still worse (except maybe The Happening, wow that was just insultingly bad, but it's still close).

Dark Jaguar Wrote:Back to M Night, I think we can ALL agree that Michael Bay's movies are still worse (except maybe The Happening, wow that was just insultingly bad, but it's still close).

There's always Uwe Boll.

Quote:I went to see Scotty Pil, and for the record GR? Never heard of this guy before the thread you made, but WOW, that movie is awesome!

What does this thread have to do with Scott Pilgrim?

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"except Charles he's african"! LOL!

So everyone is basically saying movies with serious and dramatic overtones are ridiculous but this movie with disembodied cultural references and random events pieced together from already existing sitcoms from the past 40 years is a "must see".

There's a strong biased towards the faux indie scene these days where a studio makes a low budget film written by the same people who produce Collegehumor clips (apparently) and rake in the cash with (usually) no-name talent, all because there's usually a borderline watermark of indecency pushed for each film, someone gets hit with a dildo, a girl queefs in public, tubs of semen or "blah blah blah Halo" where the punchline is that a film made a reference to something you know that is not usually talked about in a film beyond the generic eyebrow raise to sex or "video game" moniker. Real writing? actual characters? arcs? movies that make you feel good? the last one I saw was Hot Tub Time Machine but it still had to go in to piss and cum jokes, old fashioned shock imagery and again the punchline is "I cant believe they showed that!" no ACTUAL joke, no actual writing, just an image or scene to surprise you.

"Night is too serious and somber". So the preacher living by himself and his two kids out in the country who is invaded by aliens should have more Independence Day quips like "welcome to earth" or MIB's sarcastic view of humanity? Signs isn't a comedy by any stretch of the imagination, it's also not a blockbuster. It's not mean to please everyone, its meant as a very particular style of film. Not everyone likes Star Trek for the same reasons you mentioned DJ, or Twilight Zone. But the idea that you think its less credible or an inferior product because of your personal opinion is bullocks. Night's movies have a flow of dialog that flows realistically. If you want to talk about unrealistic dialog look at almost any Spielberg film. Night captures dialog as fluently as Kubrick where real-life scenarios play out and create actual human conflict, another supporter of that style did a little movie called Inglorious Bastards. Instead of pretending the realism was there and then dramatizing it, its laid out as realism AND THEN dramatized through photography which is something Spielberg and Cameron only do during slow scenes and magically forget about during action so they dont 'overload the audience'.

Night also wrote Stuart Little and I remember reading that the film script was doctored by several of Hollywood's golden boys of comedy before being finalized. Maybe comedy just isn't his thing, but creating something very serious for something extremely fantastic is exactly what a good film should do. And then complaining that they were running from the wind in the Happening? are you serious? Haven't you ready ANY King or Koontz? like, ever? they ran from fog, rain, wind, darkness, light, trucks, cars, bicycles, snow and a fucking clown. And you're upset that a movie that tells you at the start of the film that AN AIRBORNE VIRUS IS INFECTING HUMAN BEINGS which causes the players of the film to avoid strong winds???? REALLY?

REALLY???

If we were talking about Day after Tomorrow's ULTRA ICE WIND that literally CHASED THE CHARACTERS UP STAIRS then yes I would see your point, but then again its DAY AFTER FUCKING TOMORROW.

Quote:And then complaining that they were running from the wind in the Happening? are you serious? Haven't you ready ANY King or Koontz? like, ever? they ran from fog, rain, wind, darkness, light, trucks, cars, bicycles, snow and a fucking clown. And you're upset that a movie that tells you at the start of the film that AN AIRBORNE VIRUS IS INFECTING HUMAN BEINGS which causes the players of the film to avoid strong winds???? REALLY?

It has little to do with the concept, it's all in the execution. You can see this look of absolute fear in the character's eyes as the wind SLOWLY creeps across the ground toward them, you can practically see a guy somewhere off to the side tilting a giant fan. The whole scene is absolutely ridiculous. But, then again, so is pretty much every other scene in the whole movie.

Quote:but then again its DAY AFTER FUCKING TOMORROW.

Yeah it was, and it's pretty awful too.

Humans can't outrun wind. If it's in their town, it's too late. It falls flat because of that. The science is so ridiculous you can't get into it.

lazy I think you miss my point. Firstly, if you liked it, that's all that really matters. It's just not my cup o' soup.

Secondly, no that's not what I wanted. That's a false dichotomy. I'm saying that I didn't see any of the conversations as realistic. I've never met people who talk or argue like that. Again, Sixth Sense is where that style works, but the rest? That's where I find a problem.

Independence Day is a popcorn flick, that's it. I don't consider it "well written" or something Night should work towards. Day After Tomorrow sucked too, it was just as bad as The Happening. Both had an environmentalist message that falls apart because the science of both is just as bad as Captain Planet.

Oh, and I HATE most of the "teen comedies" being made today. However, HOWEVER, Scott Pilgrim is NOTHING like any of those. You need to see it yourself. I myself had thought it was going to be like what you said. Hot Tub Time Machine is lame, all those "<blank> Movie" movies are aweful. American Pie I hated. I hate MOST of the "teen comedies" you describe for exactly the reasons you listed. I'm glad we're on the same page there. HOWEVER, that's NOT Scott Pilgrim. If you've seen Zombieland, or Hot Fuzz, or Shaun of the Dead, you know the style. That's the thing you'll be seeing if you see this movie.

I personally don't like M Night. I find his movies predictable, stilted, tiring, and insulting to my intelligence (with some exceptions in each of those categories). Oh, here's something I should mention. I like SOME but not ALL of Twilight Zone and SOME but not ALL of Star Trek, for the same reasons. Some Star Trek episodes are truly amazing with some interesting messages and plot twists, but SOME are insultingly stupid getting everything wrong from human behavior to the science to a plot that makes no sense. An example? There's that Next Generation episode with Barkley's Disease where everyone "de-evolves", where I just couldn't get over how stupid the plot was to really enjoy anything. There's that Voyager episode where they hit "warp 10" and two characters turn into newts. I guess the shock was supposed to be "intelligence may not be selected for in evolution" but that's not really very interesting for a story. I remember an episode of Outer Limits where people find out all of humanity went extinct because genetic engineering made people too different from each other to mate (which is idiotic because the moment someone notices this problem, if you've got the tech to MAKE it, you have the tech to FIX it), and then there was that Twilight Zone movie where they took the rather good episode with the kid who could control the universe and ruined it by focusing for most of it on the "cartoon" he made real that, uh, was just... it looked nothing at all like any cartoon character I've ever seen, and it wasn't really scary either because it was too stupid looking.

You can't dramatically run from wind. It doesn't work because wind doesn't work like that. That's why I had a problem there.

Human behavior is a vast rainbow, that's the thing that frustrates me about M Night. It's not JUST the behavior that ruins it, the biggest problem with Signs is the aliens are complete morons. I don't care how different their brains work, if they are going to build ships and attempt to take over, they shouldn't pick a planet that's 70% stuff that instantly melts them. It would be like humans deciding one day to take over Venus. Heck there's water in the ATMOSPHERE, wouldn't that really mess with them? What's the lethal dosage, the humidity level, that does the damage? What if it... rains? Snows? What if a particularly lingering fog forms? Oh, and how did they invade? Did they bring weapons of any kind? No! They depended entirely on what they're born with, a cheap little poison "spurt" out their wrists. Well, I think a gun or even a sword beats that. The humans are no smarter. Yes it's terrifying, but if you want understanding human behavior, there's a scene where they are inside a basement with an ax propped up against the door handle to hold it shut. Fine, until one of them decides to check out what's going on upstairs. They pull out the ax, SET IT ASIDE, and go upstairs. Ugh. There is NO person on the face of the planet that wouldn't HOLD the ax with the intent to use it. I don't care if it's a small passage, you take the ax! That's human instinct! You can always drop it if it doesn't work, but you can't just "will" it to you when you do want it, so TAKE it.

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. The premise of Signs is something I think was brilliant. Don't get me wrong, the idea of taking an alien invasion story and telling it from the perspective of a completely unimportant average family that WON'T be playing any part in "saving the world" and are just trying to survive themselves, completely ignorant of what's going on. That's great, I love it, but the execution comes off, again to me, as downright insulting and idiotic.

M Night's chief offense is that he makes movies with too many fatties. Dude, I watch movies so I don't have to look at fat people, I don't wanna toss my popcorn while watching bloated ass Bruce Willis talk to that little kid about dead people. I see enough of that shit in real life and have to shield my eyes, even while driving if necessary.

Of course, M Night's a bit of a heffer himself, so he's probably just promoting some Fat Acceptance crap instead of encouraging people to be healthy.



God, that double chin :Gonk: Sorry, forgot to NWS that shit.

By the bye, if a director fails at creating suspension of disbelief enough to make wind scary, then he's at fault, not necessarily the audience. You can make a stupid idea scary if you execute it well enough, or add enough details to make it sound sensible rather than its cheesy-sounding synopsis.

I've never seen any of the most hated Shyamalan movies, only Unbreakable, Six Sense, and Signs (which is divisive unlike say The Last Airbender or The Happening which seem universally hated). I liked them all, though I can see why people didn't like Signs. To me, the rest of the movie was entertaining enough to make up for the cheesy climax. It was sort of a Deus Ex Machina, but those can be forgivable.

Hey Great Rumbler. I saw the Expendables. It sucked.

I was hoping for it to be campy and ironic. Instead, it's played straight, trying to be a good action movie with cheesy stars from action movies immemorial. The plot was thin and stupid, the characters were cliched. They could have hammed it up and made it so hilarious. They tried to be serious. They failed.

Not to say that it doesn't having some action chops, but overall, it was disappointing. Highlights go to things like a guy's torso getting shot into two. If they filled the movie with more pointless gore, it would have been better. As it was, seeing people get gunned down and explosions were most of the time boring. I felt my eyes glazing over many times.

I WANTED to enjoy it. I found myself trying to make myself laugh at some parts, like that ridiculous scene with Mickey Roarke and Sylvester Stallone. "When I left that woman to jump off that bridge, I lost a part of my SOUL too" or something along those lines. That was probably the funniest serious scene. I wish I was with other people who laugh at action movies, we probably would have been dying. As it was, the entire theatre was silent, and I think some audience participation (laughter) would have made it more enjoyable.

Some jokes I did enjoy: "Why's he so cranky?" "He just wants to be president" (talking about Schwarzenegger in his cameo). "Who did you see?" "Your hair dresser" (talking to bald-ass Steve Austin, who should have been better than he was).

A lot of the fighting scenes were either boring or the camera was shaking so much it was frustrating to watch. It wasn't the worst shaky-cam in the world, but they would have done better to get more stunt doubles and flesh that shit out more. Doesn't Jet Li usually do his own stunts? They should have cast someone better opposite to him, who could have kept up. The David and Goliath idea was okay. If the scene were better orchestrated and more engaging, it could have been pretty kick ass.

Bad blood special effects, c'mon, they could have easily done a lot of blood splattering with practical effects, only using a little CGI to clean it up if necessary. The blood spraying out looked fake enough to give me fond memories of the Turok games. It even looked like cell animation at one point! I figured they might clean that up for the DVD and then I thought, c'mon, they couldn't do that in like 5 minutes in post production?

All the women in this movie are worthless damsels in distress, but it IS a stupid action movie, so...

All in all a waste of 8 bucks for me, but at least the person I went with enjoyed it.

I'll remember this at Christmas!

lmao I love you Grumbler.

It's because I'm so gosh darn PRECOCIOUS.

A lot of people lately are saying "precious" where I'd think "precocious" would go. I really don't get this new usage.