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A community focused on discussions on movies. Besides usual movie news, the following threads are welcome
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2024 discussion threads
John Dies At The End. Weird, sci-fi horror comedy that nobody saw
Budget <$1 million, box office $141,951
The story was originally written as a serial and released on a web site for free before getting sold as a book, the movie cuts out big sections that makes some scenes meaningless or contradicting earlier scenes. I think it's pretty fun to watch and it has a low budget sci-fi charm, but I get why it didn't do well. Given another screenwriter/director I think it could be retried.
Fight Club
Budget: $62 million.
Domestic Earnings: $37 million.
That's not really fair. How were they even supposed to market/promote a movie in which the first 2 rules are to not talk about it.
Ginger (the segway) was supposed to change the way cities were made
Blade Runner 2049
Yeah, I don't get why it's so underrated.
Dark City is my favorite flop movie.
A flop but a great movie.
Second this. Hard. It was a great film.
Kiefer Sutherland at his best.
Shocked nobody mentioned The Shawshank Redemption yet. Box office flop, they had to re-release it back to theaters after it got nominated for 7 Oscars and it only really took off with home video.
Idiocracy.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Great movie, though a bit disappointed that the ending was so awkward, since the movie director wanted to go with the underaged ship instead of the consenting adults, and had to scramble to change it when the final graphic novel was released.
Which, honestly? I don't understand, since they made it clear halfway through the series that that pairing was not going to come back.
Hudson Hawk.
Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello are cat burglars who synchronize their movements by singing, which does not seem at all subtle or stealthy.
It's batshit insane. But it's also very fun. I saw it in the theater.
My wife loves it and few watch it once a year. We sing too during the movie. The humor is really awful but I still like it.
"Bunny! Ball ball!!"
John Carter. I just... Liked it! I feel like it was so close to being a big deal, and it got Focus Group-ed into mediocrity. Like, they could have called it "A Princess of Mars", leaned into its legacy of being this epic thing, but instead they buried it.
Cutthroath Island. Basically no CGI, most of the stuff you see are done for real and Geena Davis did her own stunts.
and it was partially shot in my tiny country of Malta! So one of the reasons I am also slightly fond of this one
Equilibrium. I don't care what people say, gun-kata is cool. lol
The Last Action Hero
There have been a lot over the years, like Buckaroo Banzai, but my latest one was Babylon. A complete stiff in theaters, but I think its brilliant.
Was Nic Cage's Pig considered a flop? That was another truly great movie that few people saw. When he did his terrific AMA on Reddit (one of the best I've ever seen), he said Pig was one of his acting performances that he's most proud of. It barely got any attention, and no Oscar noms, but he fully deserved the Oscar for that one.
Buckaroo Banzai is amazing. I had no idea how many big names were in it until I got the chance to watch last year.
Buckaroo Banzai is the quintessential New Wave film, capturing the zeitgeist of the era perfectly. Also, easily John Lithgow's most unhinged performance: "Laugh while you can Monkey Boy!"
If I ever meet him, I'm going to remind him of that role.
The one I always immediately think of is Dude, Where's My Car? because I remember how Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs down and called it the worst film they had ever seen, as well as it generally bombing in reviews at the time, but it was fucking hilarious and is when I started thinking maybe the critics are just pretentious snobs; I mean the only thing they ever do seem to like are artsy-fartsy things and super old shit that they probably have nostalgia for because they were new when they were young.
Critics are comparing a film to thousands of movies whereas most people will compare it to a few dozen. Some subjects get boring when you have seen this premise 100x times before. That’s why sometimes critics and audience scores can have such a huge gap.
I think Roger Ebert's quote was "I wish to take up a habit smoking pot in the hopes of killing the brain cells that record my memory of watching this movie"
In a world where The Emperor's New Groove gets a 97, Dude gets a 2. Out of 100.
We got free tickets to a movie of our choice when the film for shaft melted and burned up like you see on TV. It was awesome! And it was a dialogue part between Shaft and Palmieri That didn't detract from the film at all.
So we saw dude. It was so bad that we almost felt we wanted our money back on a free film
Having said that, we say both the quotables all the time.
I don't have a favorite but a few I liked a lot.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: great fun crazy cast.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant. Such a strange world. I would have loved to see sequels.
Pandorum: Clever scifi horror. Unique situation and setting.
Rustlers Rhapsody: The main character is a genre savvy singing cowboy from 1940s westerns transported to a 1980s western. The bad guys have to team up with some spaghetti western villains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Moves_%28film%29 I saw that one as a teenager but I remember that it was quite good.
And the best movie ever: Last Action Hero with Schwarzenegger.
Last action hero is a classic. I fucking love that movie. The second half isn't as good as the first, but it's not terrible. It was ahead of its time.
As a kid the line about area codes hit me like a revelation.
I remember Knight Moves too! Christopher Lambert was never a great actor but I enjoyed watching him work nonetheless.
I love me some cheesy Christopher Lambert movie. I watched all Highlanders after all. Added this to my watch list, thanks.
I was worried because of his usual cheesyness, but its really different and IIRC serious.
There are some really good movies that flopped that are too boring to list so I’ll go with something more controversial. I really really enjoyed last Matrix movie. I’m 99% sure most people didn’t understand what it was.
I thought that film was at its best when it was essentially mocking the franchise in a very meta way. When it tried to get serious it just fell flat, the story was uninteresting and the action scenes (particularly the choreography) were so much worse than the older films.
I’m now at risk of becoming a Wachowski-explainer but I think actions scenes being this bad was either intentional or intentionally neglected. It got dumb at times because it expected you to suspend disbelief and all of us have trouble with that these days. 20 years of unserious media full of quips, 4th wall breaking and so on killed the child like wonder in many people.
Possibly, I'm not invested enough in their films or the franchise to notice that stuff though. I guess that makes me part of the joke!
It felt to me that the studios told the directors that they were going to reboot the franchise if they didn’t make a new one, so the writers decided to just make that the plot.
And what a great nose rub to the studio it was! :)
I think the movie stands on its own however. I didn’t like Matrix 2&3 but Resurrections made them irrelevant. We got an ending to the story that included both Neo and Trinity and we got some ambiguity in place of convoluted lore, which is good for something as crazy as Matrix. It’s basically Matrix 1 reboot/remake that prevents another terrible follow-up. Making fun of CGI-heavy actions flicks was just a cherry on top.
Eternals. It has a different “feel” than other Marvel movies, and I like it!
I liked Green Lantern.
The Warrior's Way (2010)
The Way of the Gun is fantastic.
I actually liked Ishtar.