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Post by Rorschach on Apr 6, 2009 15:57:30 GMT -5
I swear, if the plot of this movie involves Michael playing second fiddle to a bunch of druggie hillbillies, I am going to be pissed as all get out.
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thump
Tommy Wiseau
Posts: 90
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Post by thump on Apr 6, 2009 18:54:45 GMT -5
Ehhh....I agree, but I didn't want to put it in such blunt terms. Legendary actors have played Frankenstein and Dracula, and I would never put Jackie Earle above Christopher Lee or Karloff. In other news.....here's a pic from Zombie's upcoming H2: HALLOWEEN 2 film. This is Scout Taylor Compton, who's playing Laurie Strode. Why she looks like a prosti-tot version of Rob's wife, I have no idea. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Cool pic, if only for the poster in the background. I'll second that while I take a moment to commend your signature. Alice is far and away my favorite musician and I especially love his 80s music. The four dark horse albums (Flush the Fashion, Special Forces, Zipper Catchers Skin, and DADA) are all top notch. From the Inside just may be my favorite album of all time. Raise Your Fist and Constrictor are also awesome!
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 7, 2009 14:54:13 GMT -5
Here we go - yet another review that will alienate me even further from the WC horror faithful than I probably already am. Oldboy is generally considered to be the best of Chan Wook-Park's Vengeance trilogy, a movie that barely lost to Fahrenheit 9/11 at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, and the recipient of a very nice 84% rating over at rottentomatoes. It's been called an "unparalleled masterpiece," "a movie that stripts bare the spirit of the human being" and "one of the ten best Asian films of all time" (all quotes culled from either the DVD box or various critics' comments found on the Internet). For the first two-thirds of Oldboy, I found myself enjoying it for all the reasons that I didn't necessarily enjoy Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first part of the Vengeance trilogy, as much. For starters, the story is much simpler, at least in the early goings. So caution, fellow crappers, spoilers ahead. The movie opens with a man holding another man over a building ledge by his tie. Through flashback, we see the same man earlier in his life - overweight, drunken Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik, in a virtuoso performance), just bailed out of jail by his friend Joo-Hwan, who then makes his family's life miserable by placing several drunken phone calls. After Joo-Hwan takes the phone to assure his family that he will soon be home, he turns around to find Dae-Su missing. For reasons unknown, Dae-Su has been kidnapped, and locked inside a small hotel room. For the next fifteen years he is in captivity, eating only fried dumplings through a hole in the wall, experiencing hysteria along with the rage that goes along with his situation, and already plotting out his revenge. He is gassed into unconsciousness frequently, at which point his captors cut his hair, change his clothes, and peform other experiments. Through television, he finds out that his wife has been murdered and his daughter has been sent to live with foster parents. He begins training himself for his revenge, shadow boxing in his lonely hotel room, and turning himself into a "monster" as he later refers to it. Just as suddenly as he was captured, he finds himself released on the roof of a building fifteen years later, at which point he meets the suicidal man whose life he saves and tells his story. The movie does an excellent job in the early goings making us feel sympathy for Dae-Su, which was one of the faults I found with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (to repeat one of the phrases I had from that review, for a movie with "Sympathy" in its title, I found myself feeling very little). Even better, upon his release, Dae-Su is a pretty damned cool badass. He takes on and easily defeats a gang singlehandedly within hours of being released from his imprisonment. Very different from the protagonist in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, who never had the feeling of being anything more than an ineffectual moron, we are compelled to root for Dae-Su very early on in the movie; he's clearly been wronged, he's a man of action, and even his character's look is pretty cool, with his craggy hair and weapon of choice (a hammer). Desperate for something to eat besides fried dumplings, he makes his way to a sushi restaurant, where he meets the film's other main character, Mi-Do (Kang Hye-jeong). After fainting in the restaurant, Mi-Do takes Dae-Su home. While it seems that Oldboy is a movie where romance serves no purpose, the love story in this film plays out extremely well, as we get the sense of loneliness and desperation in both characters' worlds. Oldboy is a movie that is acted so well that I can easily understand why so many have labeled it a masterpiece; it is indeed a movie about people for whom everything but the very basic emotions have been stripped away. Choi Min-Sik, in particular, is an absolute dynamo in this movie; running the gamut of emotions from rage to extreme depression (to the point of wanting to commit suicide), sometimes even in the same scene, Min-Sik remains believable and strangely grounded in the role. He also truly went above and beyond the call of duty for this movie in one instance; the live octopus eating? Yeah, that was no special effect. Throughout its middle chapters, Oldboy remains a very effective film, as Dae-Su begins to be contacted by the man who imprisoned him - a mysterious man who we will soon learn is named Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae). Taking the advice of the taunting man to heart, Dae-Su begins taking clues from his imprisonment to find out the identity and motive of the voice on the other end of the telephone and, in the movie's absolute best sequence, finding the site of his imprisonment. Boasting a truly gory, cringe-worthy torture scene and a masterpiece of a fight sequence, this is Oldboy's money moment, and absolutely electrifying movie-making. Perhaps the power of the first two acts of Oldboy are a curse; it's emotional gamut is so high and its characters are so well-acted that perhaps ANY solution to the mystery of Dae-Su's imprisonment would have felt like a letdown. As a result of this movie, I realized something about myself; I'm a cinematic moron. The three or four people on this here website who have read my screenplays will likely attest to this fact; I don't like ambiguity, twist endings, or any other sort of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in my movies. I prefer that stories be just that - STORIES; I prefer a concise, wrapped-up ending, and a clear-cut line between good and evil - at least in horror films. Moral ambiguity is fine in other genres, but to me, horror and thriller films are meant to be cautionary tales - i.e., bad deeds committed in life generally result in the ultimate form of comeuppance later in the film. Unfortunately, as the motive behind Woo-jin's torture and imprisonment of Dae-Su are revealed, I found myself comparing Woo-jin to Darth Vader of all people; here we had another absolutely outstanding villain character, a true maniacal, sadistic psycho for modern times, but in this movie's trimester we are once again given a tragic villain who is meant to be sympathized with. Indeed, the movie's final trimester does everything but apologize for his actions, and seems to be doing its best to attempt to explain them away as necessary. The movie's saving grace is Min-Sik; despite the movie's attempt to pull a Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance style switch on us and change protagonists and antagonists into increasing shades of grey, I still found myself sympathizing a great deal with Dae-Su. And even the movie's ambiguous ending works very well, despite all of the chaos and jumbled mindsnork past and motivations that precede it. Overall, I enjoyed Oldboy more than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; it's definitely got a more likable protagonist, better acting, and a tighter, more focused script - at least for the first two thirds. But while I was absolutely spellbound by Dae-Su's search for the truth and his quest for vengeance against his captor throughout the first and second acts of Oldboy, the final act nonetheless felt like a letdown. As a firm believer in the "Keep it simple, stupid" philosophy of storytelling, I found Oldboy's constant barrage of Russo-esque swerves in its final 45 minutes to be strangely boring. Oh, that's not really the way it is, either? Yawn. *** P.S. - Man, 27 pages into the second horror thread already? That means I have to get some hall of fame inductions prepped - so far, I have one that is a no-brainer. I'll have to go back and scour this thread to see if I can get some ideas for the other two.
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Post by mysterydriver on Apr 7, 2009 18:31:43 GMT -5
Lionsgate is bringing out Simon Says on DVD
It stars Crispin Glover...and he seems to be having a great time:
I want this. I really do.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 7, 2009 22:05:33 GMT -5
Reviews getting no-sold makes TR a sad panda.
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Post by DSR on Apr 8, 2009 0:12:29 GMT -5
I read your review. I haven't seen Oldboy, so I can't really comment on that, but I can comment on this:
I've said quite a few times that I don't exactly agree with this. I'm not particularly fond of clear-cut anything in movies. I'm a big fan of unpredictability, and the "this is black, this is white" mentality can often come off too formulaic for me. True, there are times when I can enjoy (and have enjoyed) a simple story like that, but I enjoy the shades of gray, the twists and turns, and whatever other cliche for being "off the beaten path" you wanna use here.
BUT hey, different strokes for blah blah blah...
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 8, 2009 10:27:10 GMT -5
I read your review. I haven't seen Oldboy, so I can't really comment on that, but I can comment on this: I've said quite a few times that I don't exactly agree with this. I'm not particularly fond of clear-cut anything in movies. I'm a big fan of unpredictability, and the "this is black, this is white" mentality can often come off too formulaic for me. True, there are times when I can enjoy (and have enjoyed) a simple story like that, but I enjoy the shades of gray, the twists and turns, and whatever other cliche for being "off the beaten path" you wanna use here. BUT hey, different strokes for blah blah blah... Thanks for the comment - at least somebody read the damn thing. At any rate, I'll add that I don't have a problem with horror movies having a few twists and turns here or there and blurring the lines between good and evil if it makes for a satisfying story, but for others who have seen Oldboy, I suspect you might have even felt the same thing - the barrage of twists, turns, and Russo-style swerves are artful and cool at first, but quickly grow tiring to the point of becoming cliche in and of themselves. It's difficult to become emotionally wrapped up in a film like this when you are CONSTANTLY having the rug pulled out from underneath you, emotionally as well as mentally. Near the end of Oldboy, I just found myself apathetic; when you've already had the message hammered into you that virtually everything you know about EVERY damn character in the movie is wrong, what reason do we have to care about any of the proceedings on the screen before us? So yeah - in short, I'm a cinematic moron.
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Post by Rorschach on Apr 8, 2009 11:39:28 GMT -5
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Ken Ivory
Hank Scorpio
This sorta thing IS my bag, baby.
Posts: 5,282
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Post by Ken Ivory on Apr 8, 2009 14:06:46 GMT -5
Wow, 27 pages! Will we make it a trilogy?
When i get time i will write and post my Saw V review and my next Hall of Shame induction.
Speaking of Halloween, last week i was gonna show my girlfriend Rob Zombie's Halloween (she's a horror fan too), as I was loading the disc into the player I was telling her how the original would obviously be better to which she replied "I've never seen the original".....
Needless to say, we ended up watching John Carpenter's instead and boy did I forget how good it was!!! Classic, tense horror at it's best! Also I never noticed this before but Linda says "Totally" a lot in Halloween!
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Post by Rorschach on Apr 8, 2009 19:12:18 GMT -5
I read your review. I haven't seen Oldboy, so I can't really comment on that, but I can comment on this: I've said quite a few times that I don't exactly agree with this. I'm not particularly fond of clear-cut anything in movies. I'm a big fan of unpredictability, and the "this is black, this is white" mentality can often come off too formulaic for me. True, there are times when I can enjoy (and have enjoyed) a simple story like that, but I enjoy the shades of gray, the twists and turns, and whatever other cliche for being "off the beaten path" you wanna use here. BUT hey, different strokes for blah blah blah... Thanks for the comment - at least somebody read the damn thing. At any rate, I'll add that I don't have a problem with horror movies having a few twists and turns here or there and blurring the lines between good and evil if it makes for a satisfying story, but for others who have seen Oldboy, I suspect you might have even felt the same thing - the barrage of twists, turns, and Russo-style swerves are artful and cool at first, but quickly grow tiring to the point of becoming cliche in and of themselves. It's difficult to become emotionally wrapped up in a film like this when you are CONSTANTLY having the rug pulled out from underneath you, emotionally as well as mentally. Near the end of Oldboy, I just found myself apathetic; when you've already had the message hammered into you that virtually everything you know about EVERY damn character in the movie is wrong, what reason do we have to care about any of the proceedings on the screen before us? So yeah - in short, I'm a cinematic moron. Read your review, and while I disagree with you on OLDBOY, I can see where you'd say that, too. And hey...did anyone else know that they're doing a FINAL DESTINATION 4 in RealD later this year? As much as I think that series has run it's course, THAT could be a fun little "event" movie. www.reelzchannel.com/movie/261274/final-destination-4
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 8, 2009 19:56:57 GMT -5
Wow, 27 pages! Will we make it a trilogy? I am the Moustapha Akkad of this board, meaning that this franchise will eventually reach absolutely ridiculous points of self-parody, including Busta Rhymes getting an account and beginning to post in here. And I still won't let it die. ;D Like pretty much everything associated with Rob, I've learned to look at it this way - if it SOUNDS too stupid to be true...he's probably already planned it out.
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Post by Rorschach on Apr 8, 2009 20:09:20 GMT -5
Yeah, I mean, 70% of the movie without Myers in a mask?
Jesus....if that's true....H20 is no longer the worst HALLOWEEN movie ever....hell, neither is RESURRECTION, for that matter!
Back to OLDBOY for a minute: I will say that the film does suffer from a "swerve overkill", especially if you're going into it thinking you're going to get a neat little ending, all wrapped up in a bow. You're not, and you don't, and I think if any OTHER film had done this, I'd be ready to crap all over it. But somehow, when I was watching OLDBOY, I was so wrapped up in the ride, that I didn't much mind all of the swerves....I could say the same about THE DEPARTED, too. I loved that film as well.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 8, 2009 22:15:46 GMT -5
I don't know, R-Man, I'd have to say that Resurrection is FAR worse than H20, and even Zombie's movie. At least those movies have redeeming qualities! ;D
Some final words on Oldboy: for all the issues that I have with it, and I obviously have a lot, people forget that I actually give the movie a positive review. By my scale, *** or greater is "positive" - the movie's good qualities are SO good that, to me, they outweigh the huge misgivings that I have with the movie's massive inability to transition its insane levels of coolness in regards to fights and cringe-worthy gore scenes into the same levels of coolness with paying its setup off with a satisfying conclusion.
Btw, I don't even have an issue with the film's actual FINAL scene and wrap-up - I actually really enjoy the open-ended ending that leaves the audience to come up with their own "fan fiction" style conclusion to the precedings. Two VASTLY different movies that use this technique to perfection that immediately come to mind are Sleepaway Camp and Fight Club. These films also use that technique in very different ways, but there's no denying its effectiveness; where so many movies are already half-forgotten by the time you leave the theater, those movies leave you shell-shocked and full of questions and discussion.
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Post by Rorschach on Apr 8, 2009 22:54:05 GMT -5
Really, horror or not, the best film always DO make you want to run up to the first person you see and talk about them; they make you want to remember them, and watch them over and over again. Honestly, JAWS would have had an ending like that, had they never made the second one. Do Brody and Hooper make it back? Will Brody still have a job? What will become of Amity, now that it's known as "Shark City"?
Lots of questions left unanswered, had they not made JAWS 2....and sometimes, you know, I wish they hadn't.
That's not to say that bad movies don't also make you talk, or make you remember them; they do. Just for completely different reasons. Especially the ones Hollywood is churning out lately.
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Post by DSR on Apr 9, 2009 0:24:46 GMT -5
Wow, 27 pages! Will we make it a trilogy? I am the Moustapha Akkad of this board, meaning that this franchise will eventually reach absolutely ridiculous points of self-parody, including Busta Rhymes getting an account and beginning to post in here. And I still won't let it die. ;D Like pretty much everything associated with Rob, I've learned to look at it this way - if it SOUNDS too stupid to be true...he's probably already planned it out. If Busta Rhymes started posting on this forum, in this specific thread, I would probably be around a lot more often. As a Michael Myers non-fan (I appreciate the first couple of movies for their influence, and they are certainly well-made, but they're not my favorites by any stretch of the imagination), I enjoy "Resurrection" for its absolute cheesy wrong-headedness. And, I'm just generally a Busta fan. *shrug* And this is my favorite thread/series of threads, so I'll be sure to come in every once in a while and annoy everybody, and make sure this thread franchise Takes Manhattan, and goes 2 Tha Hood, and <insert other worn out franchise joke here>. ;D
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Welfare Willis
Crow T. Robot
Pornomancer 555-BONE FDIC Bonsured
Game Center CX Kacho on!
Posts: 44,259
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Post by Welfare Willis on Apr 9, 2009 6:02:04 GMT -5
Well ghouls and gals I've got a three day weekend coming up and tenative plans are to get some reviews up in the thread. So stay tuned
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erisi236
Fry's dog Seymour
... enjoys the rich, smooth taste of Camels.
Not good! Not good! Not good!
Posts: 21,904
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Post by erisi236 on Apr 9, 2009 8:36:53 GMT -5
Just a thought but the next thread should be titled The WC Horror Thread: In Space, or The WC Horror Thread: In Da Hood. Though those plots are usually for the 5th or so movie, so The WC Horror Thread Part 3D is probably more apt.
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Ken Ivory
Hank Scorpio
This sorta thing IS my bag, baby.
Posts: 5,282
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Post by Ken Ivory on Apr 9, 2009 9:09:16 GMT -5
Wow, 27 pages! Will we make it a trilogy? I am the Moustapha Akkad of this board, meaning that this franchise will eventually reach absolutely ridiculous points of self-parody, including Busta Rhymes getting an account and beginning to post in here. And I still won't let it die. ;D So, does that mean in The WC Horror Thread Part 5, it turns out that it is not us posting but a group of disgruntled ambulance drivers that have set up accounts under our names?
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Post by Sir Woodrow on Apr 9, 2009 9:30:30 GMT -5
I am the Moustapha Akkad of this board, meaning that this franchise will eventually reach absolutely ridiculous points of self-parody, including Busta Rhymes getting an account and beginning to post in here. And I still won't let it die. ;D So, does that mean in The WC Horror Thread Part 5, it turns out that it is not us posting but a group of disgruntled ambulance drivers that have set up accounts under our names? But by the sixth thread you're all better and get to kill Horshack in the opening.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Apr 9, 2009 10:29:49 GMT -5
If Busta Rhymes started posting on this forum, in this specific thread, I would probably be around a lot more often. And, I'm just generally a Busta fan. *shrug* Here here! Posted the video for all those who may judge Busta based on the movie Halloween: Resurrection alone - here he is in his natural element. He's a phenomenally talented dude with loads of charisma who was unfortunately saddled with a pretty crapty script in Resurrection. So, does that mean in The WC Horror Thread Part 5, it turns out that it is not us posting but a group of disgruntled ambulance drivers that have set up accounts under our names? Yes. But by the sixth thread you're all better and get to kill Horshack in the opening. And yes. ;D
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