Oh I think I’ve seen this and its sequels on freeleech on PTP occasionally. I’ll download them when they pop up next, they look cool!
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today we watched Ainbo: Spirit of the Amazon since the oldest thought it looked cool. it was terrible, makes me think movies made by extroverts just have the deck stacked against them. but it opened up a conversation about ‘why are movies bad, why do the aggregated reviews for Ainbo on rotten tomatos all say “eh sure it’s fine”, what makes a good movie’
hilariously scathing
Baffler is my favourite lefty rag for a reason
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also I just saw Ahed’s Knee which was very good. it’s not easy to make a movie about self righteousness without glorifying or cheapening it
Screened some fun movies to glitch city, a local indie game dev community that I am a member of. Both are on Youtube so you can experience the whole thing for yourself. I selected these movies because they are opposing visions of moviemaking–the first is a joyful story, and the second is shockingly strange and dark!
First was Jackie Chan: My Stunts. I’ve written about it in this thread before but it’s incredibly entertaining shit. High energy, exuberant filmmaking. Jackie is operating at like 3x the speed of everyone around him. Sucks that this guy has weird politics now! In his prime he was a freakin genius, and this doc has so much character and warmth to it. It bounces from topic to topic almost randomly and is full of amazing little stories and observations. I really love it. Watch this Youtube version instead of the Criterion version because it has more movie clip examples in it!
Second was Under Pressure: Making the Abyss. I have seen this documentary more times than I have seen The Abyss. It’s a great story about why nobody should ever work on a James Cameron movie and especially not a Cameron movie which takes place even partially underwater. They filmed this movie inside a fucking flooded nuclear reactor. Everyone is constantly almost drowning, getting their hair dyed white and their skin burned by chlorine, screaming “WE ARE NOT ANIMALS” in a desperate attempt to re-establish their dignity, etc. Wild as hell that he is doing this again with Avatar 2 because the terrible cost of making The Abyss was absolutely not worth the merely OK final results!
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I always think about the story of how arduous and terrible filming was that one night Ed Harris had to pull his car off the road because he spontaneously started to cry
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this is that film where the one lady was actually trapped in a flooding chamber for a minute right? that’s all i know about it Cameron movies are really in one eye and out the other for me, Terminator notwithstanding (and i haven’t seen Aliens but i feel i know it intimately through Cuba)
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You always were an asshole, eska
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(thats a line from aliens)
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Yeah a lot of the stunts featuring the woman lead in this movie (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) where she appears to be without breathing apparatus underwater were really performed by this actress underwater without oxygen equipment. They would do the shot as quickly as possible and then a rescue diver would swim in with an air supply and hook her up so she could breathe between takes. Unfortunately this meant that she could not speak to anyone between takes while they were discussing performance. There’s a wild scene in the doc where everyone but her is hooked up to a mic and she’s just floating there listening to Cameron give her instructions on how to look properly limp and KOed underwater, lmao.
I haven’t heard that she was “really trapped” while filming that scene, but that sounds like something that could have happened on this movie, haha, and she really was dragged around the bottom of the tank without an air supply in the subsequent scenes. She also once stormed off set after having to do too many takes of the scene where Ed Harris revives her.
This doc contains the interview where he told that story! God it’s brutal. At the end of the doc he’s like “I don’t regret making this movie,” but I put it down to Ed Harris being a total professional because it sure as hell sounds like a lot of people in this movie ended up pretty traumatized!
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So much misery for a 6/10 film
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I guess I couldn’t think of a better way to spend two hours last night and watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
It’s…honestly super impressive in just how sort of completely bankrupt it is? It’s not just the actors sort of emotionlessly going through the motions, but the plot itself just constantly remixing stuff from every other movie in the franchise until you’re left in a state of perpetual deja vu.
Some childish part of my lizard brain (ho ho) still got a little dopamine influx from “oh neat, dinosaurs,” so I guess it gets kudos there. And I can also see why they’d cast that one actress as Faye in the doomed Bebop series.
I dunno, not gonna lie, I’ll probably wind up seeing this last one eventually. Not expecting them to stick the landing, but “a trainwreck, but with dinosaurs” has gotta count for something.
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same. ive gone through such a range of emotions about the jurassic world series having been a ride or die JP fan since early childhood. i was curious about the first one and at first like, basically satisfied if slightly disappointed, which over the years has transformed into revulsion. i never saw the second one in theaters but watched on an airplane and had almost the opposite reaction as with jw1. like, i hated it at first, but in my memory i appreciate it more and more for how audaciously bad it is. like it is a spiritual sequel to jurassic park 3 essentially.
i am kind of intrigued about the third one, and torn between hoping that it’s actually good, and hoping that it is like an event of moonfall-level ridiculousness.
it is weird in retrospect how jurassic park has basically turned into jaws redux, in that it is one undeniable spielberg classic followed by so, so many mediocre sequels. some of them are watchable in their own right, but they mainly succeed as camp rather than in their half-assed attempts to recreate what made the first one work so well.
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Can we call this the Rambo Effect or something?
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are the other rambo movies even good in any way at all though? the massive tonal shift between the very serious and introspective ptsd focused first blood and the others seems like… something else entirely
it would be pretty dope if that happened more often though, like if they did a sequel to that movie where ben affleck plays an alcoholic high school basketball coach where he becomes an nba coach and just wins all the time
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that was Stallone’s beat more or less, rocky is the same way
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though I do like the idea of a movie just called “Steve” about a fictionalized account of Steve Kerr’s life in which he wins all the time
the sequel would be called “Kerr”
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it seems like it must have happened a lot more in the 70s. like, similar deal with stayin alive being much more the kind of movie people always think saturday night fever was, when saturday night fever itself plays more like proto-scorsese
now i can’t stop thinking about upbeat and shallow sequels to otherwise serious movies
journalists from spotlight follow up that story with something more relaxing, maybe covering a county fair and getting into some hijinks
manchester by the sea sequel that just turns into like a peril at sea adventure movie after casey affleck takes the fishing boat out and encounters an unexpected storm
5 sequels to the revenant that are just leonardo dicaprio getting lost in the woods again and again under increasingly implausible circumstances
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