What mean expendable and did we get to win this time?
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yeah, when i say āmessyā i do mean that the portrayal of the Vietnamese is pretty shallow. perhaps you could explain it away in that this movie is through the eyes of these men with PTSD and that the focus is mostly about how much work black people have put into the US without receiving the recognition or repayment. still think it could have been handled better though.
i also just mean weird plot stuff like how people start getting straight-up killed and yet everyone is kind of friends by the end, which likeā¦idk, i donāt think thatās how that works.
edit: itās also probably worth mentioning that iāve never watched a single fictional movie about Vietnam before, so i may be less burnt out on whatās going on in the film
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yeah, the parts of it that you can tell spike lee really cared about were great, and it is cool to see delroy lindo just fuckin acting his ass off, even though i found the move ultimately kind of repugnant that performance definitely deserves some recognition
i think in the back of my head i always knew it was going to turn into treasure of the sierra madre: vietnam edition, but after the first act i became so convinced it was going to end up being a kind of darkly comedic melodrama about these guys just like ptsd-vibing their way through reconciliation with the people of vietnam. there are these great moments in the beginning where they all seem to recognize that the war was this traumatic thing that all of them were kind of collectively forced to experience together. like, they are able to see that the vietnamese people they were fighting for and against have in some ways recovered and healed whereas they are still very wounded, but then there are other, deeper traumas that none of the foreign soldiers had even been forced to confront before going back. like all of this is set up so beautifully, and then at the end of the movie they end up having this grisly last stand with a bunch of āVCā stereotypes, who by the way are not actually fighting over money that was meant to go to them in the first place but are actually just soulless hired mercenaries working for a weird french colonialist double crosser, and then in the end the surviving members of the original team end up sharing their money with 2 literal white savior characters and 1 vietnamese guy, and everyone but the vietnamese guy are shown using their money for these like righteous charitable things but he just likeā¦ opens a fucking travel agency or something? like itās so ridiculous that it almost feels like itās meant to be satirical, but the movie just doesnāt do the work to demonstrate that level of self awareness
and this is coming from a person who was able to get past the pro-cop aspects of blackkklansman based entirely on like the last 5 seconds of the movie which totally redeem it. i feel like that could have happened here butā¦ it just doesnāt. sad.
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i do feel like part of being a spike lee fan is just being utterly confounded by like 2 out of every 3 movies he makes though, so i guess in that case it doesnāt disappoint
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Replying to an ancient post to sayā¦
That motherās strong!
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Watched the Ring remake again after listening to the We Hate Movies episode about it. I didnāt like it as much as I recalled. The son is too fucking precocious and the husband feels like if even a slight breeze brushes up against him heāll lose his concentration and go full-on California surfer dude. Also, itās funny how about 25 minutes into the movie, the threat to our protagonist is actually mitigated because she shows it to her husband literally the morning after she watched the tape, so. I wound up shutting it off at about 45 or so minutes in.
I also rewatched Scream, which did about as much for me now as it did when it first came out (which is nothing ā I donāt really like slashers). I always liked the goofy ghostface mask, though. I remember having a spare ghostface mask during Halloween of 1998 and basically doing a second go-around the neighborhood for candy with the same outfit but a different mask (I canāt remember what my initial mask was, I think it was some generic ghoul mask).
After Scream, it led right into The Craft. I didnāt watch more than 20 minutes or so of it because I was tired, but I think Iām going to watch the whole thing at some point because I havenāt seen it since the 90s and I think Neve Campbell is adorable in it as a sort of proto-Bridgit from Ginger Snaps.
I downloaded Black Magic, The Super Inframan, The Oily Maniac, and Love and Other Cults, so Iāll be watching those at some point. The first two have a dubbed audio track ā hell yeah!
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I watched the resident evil movies. I donāt know why people like these, sorry. 2 is awful, 3 milla jovovich has a snapchat filter on her face every scene sheās in for some reason. 4 and 5 each had a couple of interesting moments in them maybe though 4 obviously was intended to showcase 3d stuff, but then in 6 somehow paul w.s. has suddenly become a way worse filmmaker. itās a 2016 movie, a year after fury road, which it seems like itās trying to ape in parts, but with a worse color palette and edited like an action movie from 2006, and it seems to go out of itās way to come up with the most half assed reasons to drop or contradict anything that was ever set up in the previous movies.
the first one is closest to being an alright movie but mainly I think I liked it for nostalgia because I remember the first time I saw it was at a friends house with a couple people and after it was over we watched payback on tv and I thought āthis is a good movie.ā and then we played time splitters or as my elite cadre of friends called it, ātime shitters.ā those moments in life that stick with you
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hilariously enough i just watched the first resident evil movie and thought it was as fucking awesome as ever, itās got everything youād want out of a resident evil adaptation. itās weirdly gay in spots, itās super melodramatic, a bunch of bullshit happens. every action scene is completely overwhelming because theres constantly nu-metal playing and everyone is yelling ALL THE TIME, its fuckin great. they make milla wear a leather jacket cuz its cool and its true, it is cool. no less than 3 characters in this movie go on about how corporations are evil and all the evil corporate guys are played by perfectly cast anglo scumbags. the facility kills more people than the zombies do! the AI that runs it kills everyone on purpose or on āaccident.ā everything gets destroyed in this moment of paranoia by the intersections of the corporate machines we allow to run our lives. of course, you see this play out on a larger scale in the final scene, where the capitalist disaster of the umbrella facility finally spills out into the wider world. alice has a cool dyke haircut when she wakes up at the end. they play a slipknot song over the credits that really ties the whole movie together but then it goes into a coal chamber song thats fucking awful like come on paul. have some self-respect. anyway, pure cinema here
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the only good one is the one where michelle rodriguez plays a soccer mom.
Inframan rules. Waaay back when (93ish?) a short-lived Godzilla-themed coffee shop started doing late night screenings at an actual theater, and that was their first feature. It changed my life.
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i definitely prefer the back half of the RE movies but god i just watched Apocalypse and to be honest, i kind of love this movie a lot. itās a total fucking blast. but it doesnāt follow up on a thing i like about the original, which is that it really maintains the vibe of the re games without pandering so directly. thereās direct shots ripped from like code veronica and shit in this one that are just as stupid as they were in the games lol. that being said, it does continue the sense of atmosphere and dread from the games these movies are so good at evoking, that feeling when you see a fucking dog kennel in one of the pre-rendered backgrounds or have to wade in knee deep water in any horror game ever. basically: paul w.s. anderson didnāt direct this one and exactly what you figured would happen happened. but itās still amazing, just in different ways.
i mean iām just gonna start with JILL VALENTINE because oh my god jill fuckinā valentine in this movie is the most powerful yuri nosebleed waiting to happen. she is utterly badass in this movie even with her stupid impractical tubetop outfit weighing her down - thus making it the truest adaptation of RE3 possible. her introduction is amazing, āim good butā¦im not that goodā, the way she and alice look at each other, yet another gay as fuck resident evil movie much to my delight. āgirlās gotta make a livingā with a knowing laugh and smile from jill is A++. at one point she sobs in a car for like 20 minutes at the prospect of leaving her new gf behind. anybody who says milla jovovich doesnt emote in these movies has evidently not watched her talk to jill valentine!! i literally screamed at the part where alice heroically reappeared to save jill by flicking a lit cigarette to ignite a gas leak and covering herself with a fireproof blanket to survive the blast. thereās this amazing scene where theyāre talking about raccoon city getting nuked, she asks alice what the yield of the nuke is and alice says ā5 kilotons,ā jill immediately just says FUCK ME in the funniest way like a smaller number would matter in the slightest. sheās cynical and smokes cigarettes inside a church and is the most competent person in the room at all times - jill valentine is a fucking bisexual icon.
the editing is completely out of control in this movie and i cannot stress enough how much of this movie is shit that just makes you holler at the TV. GTA TEN POINTS MOTHERFUCKER!!! as a guy plows into a zombie, motorcycle flying thru the church windows, COMPLETELY SANITIZED cocks shotgun, ZOMBIE KIDS, the S.T.A.R.S. cowboy sniper having a blast shooting zombies, when did you get bit? ITS YOUR LUCKY DAY, one on one nemesis/alice fight like the end of lethal weapon. this shit is fucking pure delight. the last half hour is this amazing exultation of revolutionary violence, our heroes at the mercy of umbrella once more until they heroically break their bonds and engage in revolt. nemesis, whose body was forcibly medicalized and turned into a weapon by umbrella, fires the first shots. evil umbrella man who sees people as assets to the corporation or not gets torn apart at the hands of his victims, his deathblow coming at the hands of someone he personally brutalized. the truth is immediately suppressed and our heroes are slandered by umbrella-controlled media outlets. we pan out to see an umbrella satellite floating above the earth - their reach is global. the crimes of capitalism know no bounds.
ākilling me wonāt make things right.ā
āno. but itās a start.ā
hell fuckin yeah thatās resident evil baby awooo, i love this shit SO MUCH. the opening strike may have been ineffectual - but there will be more to come. death to the bourgeoisie
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if there was justice in this world capcom wouldāve embraced apocalypseās characterization of jill for the re3 remake. i love her
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I watched those Resident Evil flicks with Veronica. The first was solid formula shlock ā a collection of cardboard cut-outs nailing their single dimensions, and existing in a world which evokes the tone (if not necessarily the classic aesthetic) of the games. The moment the goddamn Slipknot song kicks in with the credits is pure early aughts bliss, and took me right back to a moment in time where I wouldāve thought this was the sickest shit that could possibly exist.
But boy howdy, how about that Apocalypse? Every bit as dumb as I remembered, and just as entertaining as well. It helped to have a friend along to help hoot and holler at all the lesbian subtext, but the core action is still over-the-top enough to sufficiently compel on its own. Couldāve done with a few less ānodsā to the franchise history ā mixing and matching different names and plot threads for the sole purpose of cramming as much in as possible. But at least theyāre designed to not distract / detract the casual viewer ā not to bring the action to a grinding halt with something that the non-fan has no context or appreciation for.
Will never not pop for Jill confessing to Alice that āIām good, but Iām not that good.ā Girls with guns light up my life.
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jill valentine is COOL and BADASS so she lights all her cigs with matches in the silliest way possible!!
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lmao that exact moment is very much what I was thinking of when I wrote that. so much dyke bait in this series, paul w.s. anderson is an ally imo
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I only saw a low quality rip of Apocalypse at a friendās place in 04 and could not make out what was happening in the action scenes with the editing and lighting, and since then Iāve always had a disinterest towards the RE films
This conversation is making me reconsider that stance a lot!
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dakota is totally right to say itās the worst one but that should really be testament to the quality of the rest of the films in the series lol, the editing is always A Lot but that frantic style is also part of what makes the digital cinematography in the later films directed by paul w.s. anderson completely stunning to watch. the wesker fight in afterlife completely redefines the way action scenes can be shot.
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sometimes i remember this monster hunter movie is actually happening and i have to take a nap
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