ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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The Chronicles of Riddick is an unapologetically fun movie. I thought John Carter was a bit dull in certain areas and a bit stupid with a lot of its writing, but in Riddick it's never dull, and when it's stupid it doesn't really matter. It has so many glorious stuff in there. 'Fouuuur waaaay split!'

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Now I need to watch The Chronicles of Riddick again this weekend. I really liked that movie, the best thing is the rather over-the-top evilness of the badguys.

There aren't enough movies with true evil badguys. Even the James bond movies suck these days. Although Die Another Day had a proper badguy with an evil lair and stuff.

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Ok, I need a recommendation of a good 3D movie - i.e. one that actually uses 3D to good effect. I want to try it out on my tv. Do any exist? Obviously there's Avatar (:fart:), and I've heard good things of Despicable Me, but I've seen it twice and can't be bothered again. Any takers?

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My rant wasn't specifically aimed at you, or your comments. Thinking that a film could be better served by a different colour palette is obviously perfectly reasonable (although I'm not sure I could agree that orange and teal could be described as "sugary"). I have no issue with that.

I have issue with writing off an entire film, or its cinematography and art direction, because it's palette is orange and teal.

Sorry for being so aggressive. Maybe some people use it as an excuse to dismiss films, but others including me just find it uncomfortable and jarring in itself.

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Warehouse 13 is pulp that is often quite poorly written. I'm almost done watching the third season and after that I'm stopping. It's just too middling, especially if you consider this show was more or less inspired by the awesome The Lost Room miniseries.

Where Warehouse 13 fails most is when there's any sense of tragedy or a 'moment' going on. The writing becomes so appalling I get embarrassed in front of the TV. It's a shame, because the characters can be fun, especially Artie, Pete and

H. G. Wells

. Another big complaint is the facility of all the artifacts. They're supposed to be these mysterious, cool things, but almost every one of them comes across as gimmicky and is used for storylines that would serve as B-plots in better procedural shows. I wish this show were better, it has a lot of potential!

I don't disagree with this at all, but I am a firm believer in campy B cinema, and I can watch just about anything in sufficiently good humor.

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Ok, I need a recommendation of a good 3D movie - i.e. one that actually uses 3D to good effect. I want to try it out on my tv. Do any exist? Obviously there's Avatar (:fart:), and I've heard good things of Despicable Me, but I've seen it twice and can't be bothered again. Any takers?

As well as Avatar, the 3D Resident Evil movie, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and, to a lesser extent, Coraline all did 3D well. Most other 3D films I've seen don't.

I find this site helpful too: realorfake3d.com

I have problems with Lotr:Fotr these days also because the Prancing Pony scene looks like overdone crap because of the heavy orange use. i didn't notice it ten years ago, but it just sticks out too much.

This seems like the kind of thing that Thunder ranted about - it sounds like you now don't like a film which is heavily colour-corrected and graded etc throughout to give it a painterly and otherworldly feel, just because one scene set in a dingy firelit pub has an orange tint!

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I finally saw Halloween this weekend. Damn suspenseful, even if there are some parts that made me cock an eyebrow.

I have to hand it to Michael Myers: the guy's got immortality figured-out. In between being stabbed with a coathanger, stabbed with a knife, shot six times and thrown on his back out a second-story window, you'd think he'd at least get a little scratch. Nope, he's up and running at the end of it. In future movies he's apparently set on fire, and he survives that too.

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They were pretty clever with lighting in Driver IMO. They used lights of different warmth to get the effect. It actually tends to happen quite often in photography, especially if you shoot in twilight with daylight white balance. All incandescent lights will appear orange and natural light will have a blueish cast.

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I quite liked it (deliberately ignoring snobby comments about Battle Royale). The changes that they made I could mostly understand, and even the stuff that irritated me (such as

Rue's

death not having the impact it should. They spent so little time developing the relationship in the film that if I didn't already care about the character from the book I don't know if it would have mattered to me at all) I could at least rationalize by saying "well, the movie is already over two hours long...". I did think it was a bit of an odd choice to show

an uprising starting in district 11 on Rue's death

, as I didn't think that sort of thing got into full swing until book two, but I guess they assumed that the film's audience would expect a more immediate reaction to that sort of thing. The casting was really well done, for the most part (though Katniss and Gale were significantly whiter than I'd pictured them), with the two exceptions for me being that I'd imagined Gale being way lankier and had thought that Clove and Cato would be equally aryan, so making her a brunette was weird. All told, good movie. I'm not blown away, but am satisfied and looking forward to the next one.

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I just saw Hunger Games and aside from the shakey-cam, I didn't care for it at all, with the shakey cam it was even worse. To be fair I was sort of near the front, maybe 10 rows back or so, but one of my friends had to leave the theater for a few minutes because it made him sick. As for the movie, eh, I knew a lot of what was going to happen because my friend (the same one who got nauseous) told me about the books as he was reading them a while back. I didn't like the story at all because it felt like there were so many cop-outs and she didn't want to have to make any hard decisions with the writing in terms of characters. I wouldn't call the movie bad, I'd just say that I'm not the person that this movie would appeal to, so I don't have any disagreements with people who thought it was really good.

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Saw Sound of Noise. That was a nice little treat. Not much going on, but I had a lot of fun at the theatre. I really like being able to have fun at the expensive theatre.

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Ok, I need a recommendation of a good 3D movie - i.e. one that actually uses 3D to good effect. I want to try it out on my tv. Do any exist? Obviously there's Avatar (:fart:), and I've heard good things of Despicable Me, but I've seen it twice and can't be bothered again. Any takers?

I asked a 3D artist I know, and he says Day and Night, a short by Pixar, uses it better than anything else he's seen. I don't know where you could get a 3D copy, but there's a bit about it here:

http://www.pixar.com/shorts/d&n/index.html

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I liked the 3D in Hugo a lot, it didn't do any of the annoying stuff that happens in every movie where they constantly have stuff jumping out at you. I thought it made the movie a lot better to watch, but without being super obvious that it was there all the time.

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I liked the 3D in Hugo a lot, it didn't do any of the annoying stuff that happens in every movie where they constantly have stuff jumping out at you. I thought it made the movie a lot better to watch, but without being super obvious that it was there all the time.

Yeah, when Martin Scorcese thinks he can do something interesting with 3D, you go and see it in 3D! He did a huge amount of research, watching all the old classic 3D movies, to see what previous directors had done. He studied things like Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder", which most people have never even seen in 3D. Yep, he made good use of the tech in Hugo.

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Yeah, when Martin Scorcese thinks he can do something interesting with 3D, you go and see it in 3D! He did a huge amount of research, watching all the old classic 3D movies, to see what previous directors had done. He studied things like Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder", which most people have never even seen in 3D. Yep, he made good use of the tech in Hugo.

I don't understand that just happened.

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I like stuff jumping out at me from time to time, and attention-grabbing depth, though. Hugo had its fair share of justifiable in-your-face moments, iirc. It's always disappointing when you go see a film like Toy Story 3 and they're being so subtle and "don't worry, we won't throw things at you, we're artists" about it that you can't actually tell it's in 3D. Which reminds me, Harold & Kumar 3D makes excellent use of the format and is a very enjoyable film to boot.

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My unironic love for all things that include Nicholas Cage acting continues unabated despite the shitstorm that was Spirit of Vengeance.

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Also just watched The Hunger Games, having just finished reading the book I have to say that they actually did the best job they could given that the book alludes to a lot while staying in a first person perspective.

There were some nice inclusions from the beginning of the second novel and the cast were all good (although Woody Harrelson and Lenny Kravitz did not resemble the people in my head but that will happen). The lead from Winter's Bone and X-men: The first Class nails the main character's depth of emotion while still managing to keep a stern facade.

My main complaint was the Batman fighting (even if it makes contextual sense) and the 12a rating. Not to sound like a gore monger but the books gave you a very real sense of brutality happening and in the film it is toned right back.

Anyway as a person who thought the book was good but not the be-all end-all (a shit ton better than the awful Battle Royale book and manga) I would recommend the film to anyone who likes the book. However, for a film exploring the horrible concept of teens killing each other; Battle Royale is the better film.

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