[CubaLibre]

Rommel! You magnificent bastard, I read your book!
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

So many great lines which I only vaguely remember the morning after
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

An American Tail (1986) - Poor, poor Don Bluth. The world just wasn't ready for you.

After seeing it again for the first time since I was a little kid I actually have a lot of thoughts on this movie, which I'm just too tired atm to try and get sorted out. I think it's a surprisingly artful take on a children's fantasy film whose loose, dreamlike structure could be easily interpreted as sloppy or underdeveloped rather than as a refreshing departure from the Disney-approved Screenwriting 101 plotting that populates nearly all successful children's films. Instead the plot feels like it proceeds along the lines of how a child actually thinks, emphasizing emotions and themes over conventional Hollywood plot structure (in many ways it feels more like a condensed novel). It's less a single continuous arc than an interweaving of episodic plotlines, all united by the emotional throughline of Fievel's odyssey through the 19th-century American immigrant experience to reunite with his lost family.

At the same time it's uncommonly adult, situating itself in a rich historical context and predicating a number of jokes on literary allusions which would quite frankly be considered too sophisticated for a contemporary "family-friendly" audience, if studio heads had their say. (Example: a sleazy gangster who fancies himself an aristocrat quotes passages from Shakespeare in full, and a mouse-related pun is made on the title of The Brothers Karazhmov.) Like nearly all of Don Bluth's films it's willing to touch upon areas of darkness and melancholy that barely any Disney production would touch, and it's all the richer for it.

Some of the animation is gorgeous too (though other parts are clearly sub-Disney), and in visuals as in story the film is refreshingly willing to discard conventional Hollywood logic to indulge a child's fantasy. Most striking: when the ship on which Fievel's family is sailing across the Atlantic is beset by a storm, Fievel sees the crashing waves take the form of Poseidon himself assaulting the deck. This is never spelled out or explained to the audience, because really, why would it need to be? From the perspective of an imaginative child, it makes sense, and there's absolutely no reason why the heightened reality of animation shouldn't conform without excuse to such a subjective reality.

The animation of the human characters, glimpsed all-too-briefly at the margins of the film, is also breathtakingly beautiful. The guy behind Dragon's Lair puts his vision to work in painting a lush, moody moving portrait of a moment in history. The couple of scenes which attempt to evoke three-dimensionality of an object (the giant mouse-machine during the climax and the Statue of Liberty at the end), in a pre-CG era, are similarly stunning in their texture and vividness.

Also, the songs are pretty damn good, which is a surprisingly rare compliment for animated musicals and usually the one area in which Disney consistently beats out the competition. Not here. RIP James Horner.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Now to watch the direct-to-video sequel written by the same guy as the Chronicles of Riddick video games
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Renfrew]

[Renfrew]

If you are friends with me on Facebook you probably know that I just saw Age of Ultron and have been posting about it all evening. I'm going to share all my posts with you here. (not going to try to cover it up, a few of these thoughts were inspired by Tucker Stone's commentary.)

I just saw Age of Ultron. It was almost as long as I had to wait for it to come to Japan

Welcome to the team Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. Here's the complimentary Under Armor (tm) that all members of the Avengers get

So the Vision has a cape because he thinks that Thor is a cool guy who brings robots to life for unintelligible reasons and doesn't afraid of anything? Does he have his weird Under Armor (tm) skin because that's just how all of the Avengers dress?

So Iron Man quit at the end of Iron Man 3 but he also quit at the end of Avengers 2? I can't keep up. Will he also quit at the end of Captain America 3?

So the black people didn't get to be Avengers in this movie because..... they didn't want to? And the Avengers' girlfriends didn't get to be in it because, c'mon, who are we kidding here?

Chris Evans must have been really relieved after they filmed he first scene of the movie since he never had to put his mask back on after that

Real talk though it must suck to be Chris Evans.
A. He talks in interviews about how he just wants to direct small movies but he keeps having to make these comic book movies.
B. His body is not meant to look like that. He just looks uncomfortable and in pain all the time.
C. The apparent point of his character is that all of his lines are super corny and every line addressed to him is about how old, dumb, and corny he is.
D. He's one of the non-RDJ actors in these movies so he probably doesn't get paid very much

So Black Widow is Tron now? And she's sterile? But the whole purpose of her character is to deliver cleavage for the camera to center on in every shot she's in?

That scene where they tried to make me care about Hawkeye's (of all people) normal family life was even worse than the scene where they tried to make me care about drunken Rocket Racoon's sob story

Marvel movies have never had particularly good CGI, but the stuff in this movie was kind of shockingly bad. The CGI models of people in the opening level fight scene stuck out so much that it kind of immediately turned me against the movie

I liked the bro relationship between Captain America and Thor

It's not that I disliked the movie. I don't see how anybody could dislike the movie.
Or like it.
It's like, "yeah I really dislike this plain white wall paper in my room."
That's how I feel about It

I couldn't stop staring at The Vision's luscious lips and expressive eyes

So. Scarlet Witch is totally cool with killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but she draws the line at killing billions

What's the over/under on her still having an accent by the time the next one of these things rolls around

That dusty Audi Hawkeye and Black Widow drive out of the rubble in sure was looking fine. I might have to get one of those

I'm going to watch Taken 2 tonight and think hard about my habits

Do you think the clandestine John Deere scene was like the shirtless Thor in the kiddy pool scene in that it used to be a longer scene with an actual purpose and it just got chopped down?

I liked how throughout the whole movie Cap and Iron Man were constantly arguing with each other and even actually came to blows at one point, and then at the end they were like, "Geez, you sure are the greatest, best buddy-o-mine. Well, see you in Civil War

Yo, my boy Thor had all the best one liners. After Rush I'm pretty far in Hemsworth's corner though. I'm really looking forward to seeing Black Hat.
Dude must eat a lot of boiled chicken, so that's pretty cool
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[Kabbage]

What'd you think of Ultron
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[Lick Meth]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

RDJ will have to appear in a lot more shitty films before he can overturn the inherent goodwill of being RDJ

Common complaints about Avengers 2 seem to be pretty much exactly my complaints with the first one (i.e. that it feels like a 2-hour toy commercial) so I gather I missed very little by not seeing it
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Also my crazy uncle who works at CBS got me a Criterion Blu Ray of James L. Brooks' Broadcast News signed by Susan Zirinsky who was the inspiration for the Holly Hunter character in that film

It's p. sweet
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[CubaLibre]

2501: What you just wrote applies to basically every Bluth film. They are worst when trying to ape Disney (Anastasia, All Dogs Go To Heaven) but they never lose that dreamy looseness. I've been watching them all on Netflix in a desperate search to find something my 2.5 year old will watch that won't make me go insane and they're all pretty good.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Kabbage]

I watched Titan A.E. somewhat recently and oh my stars and garters is that movie dogshit.

Not his finest moment.

I'd recommend starting Avatar if you're looking for something with a ton of episodes that's watchable.
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[notbov]

man, All Dogs Go to Heaven is nothing like most of the Disney oeuvre other than being a musical, which is mostly why I like it even though it is a fiercely mediocre product. I also take umbrage at Bluth being "the guy behind Dragon's Lair". he made other movies you know, like Secret of NIMH and A Troll in Central Park and Rock-a-Doodle (I never said he was good at picking projects, mind).

I watched Crazy Heart today and liked it enough that I'm mad that I hadn't watched it up until now and was also delighted that it was a totally different movie than what I had thought it was going to be.

and yesterday, I watched The Titan Find (aka Creature (1985)), which came out of me browsing Amazon Prime for a movie, finding Creature, starting it and seeing that MGM didn't give a shit and pretty much literally dumped a VHS pan-and-scan master onto the internet for money. a few minutes of IMDB action show the movie was shot in scope, at which point I poked around on the internet and found a rip of the movie from a DVD the director produced himself from a print he bought back when the movie came out so I could watch this thing all proper-like.

oh, the movie? it's like Alien+The Thing/low budget (the characters in the movie literally steal the idea on how to kill the creature from Hawks' The Thing From Another World). it also has a really good score for some reason. and sex on a moon of Saturn! well, implied sex. but there's boobs. anyway, fun, dumb movie.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I only invoked Bluth as "the guy behind Dragon's Lair" because I figured that would be the most immediately recognizable point of reference on a forum about video games. I first knew him from his movies and I've actually never played Dragon's Lair. (Also, Bluth's animation and use of FMV were landmarks in the gaming world while "doing animation" was not in and of itself revolutionary to film by the 1980s.)

Did he do Once Upon a Forest? I remember finding that one pretty gripping as a kid.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[notbov]

he did not, although my brain skipped a beat because I read the title and thought "That weird European movie?" and realized I was thinking of the Elm-chanted Forest. I don't have enough sanity to think about that movie right now....

oh, do I know about laserdisc games (my sig is from a LD game flyer). it just rubs me wrong because in the end, Dragon's Lair is like, 25 minutes worth of produced animation (a short's worth, more or less), where as his features are features and also coherent (most of the time) stories not meant to be chopped up and shown randomly. unless we're talking Space Ace or DL2. those are a little more, um, linear is the word I guess.
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[Renfrew]

[Ronnoc]

[notbov]

[boojiboy7]

For some reason, I recall American Tale 2 having a theatrical release. what the hell?

also hell yeah NIMH.

[notbov]

it was, it was a thing since it and the original were Amblin joints, having the financial and name baggage of Steven Spielberg

I'm not surprised that it would get mixed up with the two AAT video sequels, the upmteen Land Before Time sequels, the theatrical (?!) All Dogs sequel (with Charlie Sheen!), the All Dogs TV show, the American Tail TV show and the Land Before Time TV show

we don't talk about Secret of NIMH 2
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[shrugtheironteacup]

I do.

I talk about Secret of NIMH 2.
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[notbov]

yes, but no one in their right mind would try to stop a shrug
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[TMFK]

As a kid I watched All Dogs Go to Heaven a lot, but I haven't rewatched it since then. I definitely remember it having a grittier feel than any Disney movie, which I suppose is a relative virtue.

I tried to watch Nimh a few years ago, but was turned off by the over-animation and the lack of sound design. Vacuum silence in a cartoon really bothers me, but I get that it was a touch that a lot of people simply missed in the 80's-90's (maybe due to a stylistic transition from every moment being soundtracked to a more naturalistic sensibility).

I also found Richard Lewis Crow pretty annoying.

I've always loved Land Before Time, but other than that I gotta go Disney > Bluth by leagues and bounds.

I caught the Penguin and the Pebble on TV a few years ago and was stunned by how completely awful it was. I remember it as just truly abysmal and definitely trying to be a Disney musical to make that fat cash.

[Tulpa]

I liked Secret of NIMH until the completely crap ending, with a really sloppily animated weightless sword fight capped off with a fairly literal deus ex machina ending in what was before at least a grounded talking-animals movie.

It was a favorite when I was a child but I habitually fell asleep during movies and missed the endings. I would often dream completely ridiculous, incoherent endings to movies so I often thought movies were very strange objects with ludicrous plots.

NIMH has an ending that feels like I fell asleep twenty minutes earlier and I dreamed of "NIMH but with magic."
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[Ronnoc]

As a dumb kid who read the book first, I was quite taken aback by the magic in NIMH's ending

[RT-55J]

I rewatched Avengers (the first) on July 4th. It holds up pretty well, but I was surprised to see how much of it was recycled/repurposed into Age of Ultron, from concepts to plot points to even some minor gags. It's weird.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Whedonspeak(tm) is one of the most obnoxious things in the universe to me
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Kabbage]

Eh, I dunno. I liked him. I feel like someone who has just devoured the entire internet would be pretty fucking insufferably smug.
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[boojiboy7]

[Renfrew]

Taken 2 was a big disappointment after Taken 1
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

It's time to break a taboo and mention that David Simon's writing shares a lot of the same vices as Joss Whedon's (he even considers Buffy his favorite show)

While I was watching it I could always immediately tell which episodes of The Wire were written by him and which weren't because in his episodes every character from every background talks like David Simon.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Felonious Monk]

[CubaLibre]

[shrugtheironteacup]

Taken was also released as PG-13 in US theaters.

Taken 3 is just as bad.

Olivier Megaton is a crime scene.
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[Renfrew]

[Renfrew]

OH MAN Collateral! Tom Cruise should play the bad guy more often. Jamie Foxx should play a weak guy more often.
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[CubaLibre]

You know what's a good "realistic" action-thriller? Jack Reacher. Got no acclaim from what I could see, but it's at near-Ronin levels of tactical funtimes.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[shrugtheironteacup]

Cuba is so hype now that JACK REACHER 2 is in the hands of Ed Zwick
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[CubaLibre]

Who the fuck is Ed--

Defiance?

The Last fucking Samurai?

They always have to ruin everything.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[boojiboy7]

No Herzog, no sale.

[shrugtheironteacup]

The Jack Reacher: Port of Call Des Moines