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Last Good Movie You Saw


Gyaruson
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You can get CBS with a TV tuner so why not just ditch cable, download Mythbusters, and save a ton of money?

Yeah, it's probably cheaper to just buy the season passes for Mythbusters.

 

:o I didn't even know that was a thing!

 

*Edit* - Wait, it appears that Amazon only has them in low-definition, and I won't use iTunes cause I hate Apple. Checking on Zune now...

Edited by TheMightyEthan
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Yeah, so I went through looked at what we watch regularly, and we don't watch our cable anywhere close to enough to justify the cost. I can get all the shows we watch regularly through one online service or another, and Netflix can easily cover the "watching something cause I'm bored and want to watch something" scenario.

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Or use Netflix?

 

I actually went ahead and signed up for Amazon Prime, and we're going to cancel our cable.

Nice! I plan to do the same thing as soon as I go out on my own, but my parents just can't get enough of their crime shows. And at the moment it's convenient, since their cable subscription also nets us an HBO subscription.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Welp I saw it last night at the midnight showing. It is good. Very good, even--a big, booming, epic sci-fi with an amazing score, great visuals (consisting of a combination of understated CGI and practical effects), a thought-provoking plot, and some standout performances. It wasn't perfect--there's a sense that none of the threads or themes really end up coming together satisfactorily at the end. And there's some cliche moments. But overall I've missed this brand of sci-fi and am glad Ridley got to make it for us.

 

 

The one exception to my enjoyment--the Xeno that chestbursts out at the end. Feels like a commercial tack-on. Pretty cheesy, especially since the scene before that would have been a pitch-perfect ending ("...and I'm still searching." PERFECT closing line.) I would not be surprised if a studio suit added that on.

 

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Really? Huh. I enjoyed the movie, but I felt like it could have been so much more. It felt like characters often made bone-headed decisions that went against their established nature, and while it certainly had a lot of interesting questions and themes, it never really answers most of them.

 

EDIT: Yeah, I see now that you had similar complaints. Guess it just got to me more.

Edited by DukeOfPwn
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I'm going this afternoon. Did you see it in 3D and if so how was the effect? I know it was actually filmed in 3D, not converted later, so it should be good, but I'd still like to hear.

 

Also, I definitely think the best visual effects come from combining CGI and practical effects whenever possible, rather than using just one or the other. Practical effects have the advantage of actually having something in front of the camera and so it looks very physically extant for lack of a better description, and CGI is good for getting lots of little details and movements that you can't get with a model (oversimplifying, obviously there's more to it, but those are to two biggest things to me). I'd say Christopher Nolan does a good job, but I think sometimes he biases too heavily on the side of practical effects. I'm thinking specifically of the scene in Batman Begins where the train crashes through the parking garage; it definitely looks like a miniature, not a full-scale train, and I think it could have benefited by doing parts of it in CGI.

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Some characters made bad decisions, but that's what people do--and I didn't feel anything was too contradictory to established personalities or motivations. As for the themes, the very theme of the film is a question; it was not intended to answer anything. So from that perspective it's the movie equivalent of a Bob Dylan song ("the answer is blowing in the wind").

 

So I can see why it can disappoint, but I enjoyed it very much.

 

Ethan: Saw it in 2D. I feel that practical effects nearly always do a better job with matching the lighting in the surrounding environment. Just a few shades off, the wrong hue, whatever, and CGI looks totally fake.

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No way. It was entertaining but it was crap at story telling. Prometheus does not get a free pass just for having heaps of atmosphere.

 

 

The story, generally: Some dude went to Earth, turned himself to goo and created life. Then someone else decided to drop more goo on Earth which will change everything on Earth into killer zombie people for some reason also there might be killer worm things. But then they forgot, or fell asleep, or got bored, or something. We somehow knew about a military moonbase (some genetic memory bs?) and went to the moon. We woke up some guy who unlike the rest of his species is still pretty set on this whole goo dropping lark. He then gets faceraped by an octopus. Aliens.

 

On David: He finds some goo, has no idea what it does, contaminates Alcoholic Idiot Scientists drink. Alcoholic Idiot Scientist then has sex with Sterile Fanatic Scientist. For some reason Sterile Fanactic Scientist now has an octopus alien baby that is attached to her via an umbilical cord. David tells Sterile Fanatic Scientist: "You have a baby! Lol not really. It's an Alien." Instead of saying "You have an infection, we will put you into stasis, night night."

 

Sterile Fanatic Scientist: Cuts the alien out of her and thinks, aww what the hell I might as well go and meet the Engineer fellow, after all, my lover is dead and I'm not pregnant with a Cephalopod anymore...

 

No one is surprised that Peter "I'm dead, not really" Weyland is on the ship.

 

A ship with the CEO of a mighty Megacorp and his heir has no defensive capabilities whatsoever.

 

This exchange:

 

Ice Bitch: "Where are Angry Geologist Man and Weedy Biology Dude?"

Pilot: "I have no idea."

 

Yet behind him is a 3D map that shows their exact location. You can even see it in the fucking shot.

 

And the laboured "Peter Weyland! You are my father! Duh duh duhhhh... Wait what do you mean that was fucking obvious?" scene.

 

Angry Geologist Man and Weedy Biology Dude after running away from the beheaded alien room, then go back to it to tickle the deadly deadly alien snakes.

 

Engineers go to the trouble of creating a breathable atmosphere on their ship. Yet they apparently don't need it because the Engineer gets to the life pod with no breathing apparatus.

 

 

 

 

Despite all that, it was a very entertaining 2hours. But man did it lack the brutal simplicity of Alien / Aliens.

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No way. It was entertaining but it was crap at story telling. Prometheus does not get a free pass just for having heaps of atmosphere.

 

 

The story, generally: Some dude went to Earth, turned himself to goo and created life. Then someone else decided to drop more goo on Earth which will change everything on Earth into killer zombie people for some reason also there might be killer worm things. But then they forgot, or fell asleep, or got bored, or something. We somehow knew about a military moonbase (some genetic memory bs?) and went to the moon. We woke up some guy who unlike the rest of his species is still pretty set on this whole goo dropping lark. He then gets faceraped by an octopus. Aliens.

 

On David: He finds some goo, has no idea what it does, contaminates Alcoholic Idiot Scientists drink. Alcoholic Idiot Scientist then has sex with Sterile Fanatic Scientist. For some reason Sterile Fanactic Scientist now has an octopus alien baby that is attached to her via an umbilical cord. David tells Sterile Fanatic Scientist: "You have a baby! Lol not really. It's an Alien." Instead of saying "You have an infection, we will put you into stasis, night night."

 

Sterile Fanatic Scientist: Cuts the alien out of her and thinks, aww what the hell I might as well go and meet the Engineer fellow, after all, my lover is dead and I'm not pregnant with a Cephalopod anymore...

 

No one is surprised that Peter "I'm dead, not really" Weyland is on the ship.

 

A ship with the CEO of a mighty Megacorp and his heir has no defensive capabilities whatsoever.

 

This exchange:

 

Ice Bitch: "Where are Angry Geologist Man and Weedy Biology Dude?"

Pilot: "I have no idea."

 

Yet behind him is a 3D map that shows their exact location. You can even see it in the fucking shot.

 

And the laboured "Peter Weyland! You are my father! Duh duh duhhhh... Wait what do you mean that was fucking obvious?" scene.

 

Angry Geologist Man and Weedy Biology Dude after running away from the beheaded alien room, then go back to it to tickle the deadly deadly alien snakes.

 

Engineers go to the trouble of creating a breathable atmosphere on their ship. Yet they apparently don't need it because the Engineer gets to the life pod with no breathing apparatus.

 

 

 

 

Despite all that, it was a very entertaining 2hours. But man did it lack the brutal simplicity of Alien / Aliens.

Not to mention,

 

When they're running away from the falling alien ship, instead of side-stepping it as it rolls after them, they just keep running IN THE SAME DIRECTION THAT IT'S ROLLING. So of course Charlize Theron gets smooshed like a pancake. And then when Noomi Rapace rolls out of the way, she doesn't move when it starts falling towards her.

 

Edited by DukeOfPwn
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Eh, it's easy for us to criticize when we're sitting in comfy chairs watching the action unfold. If you've just been through hell for 48 hours or whatever and

 

 

an alien horseshoe starts to fall on you as dust and rocks fly at your face and your helmet obscures your vision and senses, you might not be able to figure out exactly which direction to run.

 

 

I'm always a little forgiving of that kind of stuff in horror movies, because you need a little bit of stupidity to move them along. Heck, the whole Alien franchise is built on people being idiots.

 

This song is great:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oo9VuVdmMM&feature=relmfu

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The rolling thing got to me the most.

 

I'm not sure what it was about it, but for some reason I just felt no tension at any point during the entire movie. It was so predictable; at no point did I think someone would/might die and they didn't, or vice-versa. After the beginning, where I was intrigued about what was going on, the only things I felt during the movie were irritation at the characters, confusion as to why they were doing what they were doing, and boredom due to the way it dragged toward the end.

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