Movies Talk

general
2871

I watched Top Gun (1986) for the first time last night. I highly recommend watching a dumb parody of a thing before engaging with the real deal.[1]

Enjoyed the beautifully framed F-14 porn, the powerful homoeroticism and Danger Zone. Lamented the reality that they could never have gotten real MiG-29s for the shoot so they invented an unintimidating substitute. I had a brother who would build model planes so I heard all about how cool the Fulcrum was and so it’s too bad you don’t see a squadron of those up there for villains. This is why anime is better than real life.

PS I forgot all about this

I am just reading now that many people are saying the sequel is even better?? Ok, I’ll check that out.

  1. actually I don’t really recommend Hot Shots! cause it’s like full of racism ↩︎

3 Likes
2872

There’s been a lot of talk about Alien: Romulus on here, but just wanted to drop in my two cents. I feel like I wouldn’t have minded Ian Holm’s deepfake if it didn’t look like an Xbox 360 cutscene. It looked so out of place talking to real humans. That being said, the shots of just his face in a CRT monitor bugged me less, so take that for whatever it’s worth. It wouldn’t make it better, morally, of course.

Also:

Spoiler

I think the last sequence with the pregnancy and the Alien/Human Hybrid felt really weak to me. It feels like they should’ve started the next movie with the pregnant woman going through that. The fact that it had the face of the engineer from Prometheus was a bad, off-putting choice and, maybe this is just me, but the fact that it seemed to have a sewn-up hole instead of scary genitals felt disrespectful to H.R. Giger.

2 Likes
2873

JT Mollner is a character. Company is named NoRemake, talks about shooting on film under any opportunity, and constantly wears a kangol hat.

You’re right that it’s a questionable move to step on the opening to a movie like that. Strange Darling begins bold enough to move past the pretentious statement pretty much immediately.

Would be funny if tentpole franchises picked up a trend like this. I’d be entertained by something silly like that at the start of a movie as long as its a phase and not permanent. Could get very funny if there are a number of qualifiers to a pre-movie statement too.

Strange Darling is my favorite new movie I’ve seen this year along with Challengers.

2 Likes
2874

In light of Romulus, I rewatched the original Alien last night, which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.

Can someone who knows more about the technical details of cinema explain to me why, despite relying on “practical effects”, Romulus looks so much like a video game compared to the original Alien? Does it have to do with the “CG-enhancement” mentioned above in the context of the Ian Holm animatronics? Or is modern camera work, editing and lighting philosophy just completely different from it was in the 70s? Is the video game look considered desirable now, and not just a side-effect of computer special effects like I had always assumed it was in modern action movies?

4 Likes
2875

There isn’t a perfect answer to be honest, especially for this movie, even with practical effects, there could be post alterations like digital camera moves, and they are layering CG on top of the practical effects. I also think they built their sets a lot larger than the Nostromo, so there are a lot of camera movements that are so perfect, particularly in the acid sequence, that’ll make it feel like an action game.

Something with Romulus is certainly the color correction, this is also evident in Marvel movies too, where part of the reason it looks so bad is because of how much they wash everything out. Romulus wasn’t necessarily washed out but I think it’s colored in that kind of modern “we have to see the entire frame kind of way, where even when the movie is supposed to be dark it doesn’t feel that dark.

I think some of it probably is cast too, look at the weirdos they found for Alien, those kids in Romulus likely just strode out of drama school, and I don’t think they’re as dirty at the end as the Alien cast is at the beginning. Probably a lot of it is edit as well, I rewatched the space jockey sequence earlier, and they let it live super wide and barely cut which is so good at selling scale.

6 Likes
2876

havent seen romulus but I imagine film vs digital is a factor and also that there are more camera moves in the romulus trailer I just watched than in all of Alien

4 Likes
2877

Both of these make up the answer. There’s a lot to cover and I don’t know very much about the particulars, but to reinforce what freakscene said, every single way Hollywood movies are made today is different: the way they’re lit, shot, staged, colored, edited, and eventually exhibited[1] is handled by new workers with new know-how using new technology and new opinions about how to use that technology following new industry rules developed around the new technology. Even when it’s Scott in charge of Prometheus and Covenant, he’s working with a different crew and they with different tools. Scenes of people standing around and talking are paced differently (nonlinear digital editing and digital cameras inform the shooting schedule, the coverage a director can get; coverage informs editing, shot duration), framed differently (again informed by essentially limitless digital storage), and are nevertheless filled with CGI—not the only differing elements, just the most visible and the easiest to talk about; the crew shoots similar sets from Alien and Prometheus differently and prioritize different visual elements[2]. One small difference: camera moves today are aided by computer stabilization, while you can see the crane wobbling in the original—one potential demarcation between lifelike and video game-like. I’m just speculating, I have no idea what it was like on the set of any of these movies, but all these changes in circumstance could be at play and serve to explain why new movies look the way they do, and even why Prometheus (pre-COVID) looks different from Romulus (post-COVID), besides of course being made by completely different people. (Incidentally: it’s too bad almost all the uploads of these clips to Youtube are weirdly upscaled or compressed, makes it hard to compare.)

Moreover, “special effects” is itself a vague term which encompasses a variety of artforms like makeup, animatronics, backgrounds, lights, composite photography, computer graphics, and a million other things. That Romulus involves practical effects is true, but in the same way it’s true that bottles “made with recycled plastic” may be made from 1% recycled and 99% new plastic, for example. I haven’t seen Romulus but the trailers suggest a reliance on practical effects, at least compared to its contemporaries—something which does help it stand out—but many effects shots, like the one where a character shines a light through her torso to show her ribcage being smacked by an alien, are computer-reliant; I would bet a significant number of Romulus’s “money shots” are entirely dependent on computer imagery. But reducing the issue to computers vs. physical material doesn’t tell the whole story, it’s just easier to discuss than halogen vs. LED light bulbs.

For comparison, every single thing you see in the original is accomplished with physical matter, light, and chemicals. Marketing for Romulus may play up its use of practical effects, and whatever those effects are may serve the movie better than the complete reliance on (underfunded, rushed) computer stuff in other Hollywood movies today, but it doesn’t really work to compare it to a monster movie from the seventies (or eighties or nineties) because of how different the palettes are that the filmmakers are working with.

All that being said, with all its resources the studio (Disney) would certainly be capable of recreating the exact look/texture/etc of the original Alien, if they felt like it: they could afford the film, the cameras, the lights, everything. Getting ahold of enough Eastman color 5247 film stock to shoot a movie would be no problem for Disney money, and the laboratory which developed Alien is still around, but it would of course be cost-prohibitive and basically pointless in capitalist terms—it’s much easier to talk up the use of practical effects in marketing and let this kind of metatextual discussion (which is itself based on intentionally incomplete information) sell tickets.

None of that fully answers the main question…

Speculating again but in addition to all of the above I believe it[3] is born of a reliance on post- rather than pre-production work (cheaper)

  1. we’re all watching a stream or DCP or Blu-ray of Alien just like you’ll be able to see a stream or DCP of Romulus, but how films are shot and mastered (film : print :: digital : DCP) are inextricable from the subtle ways in which they look different today vs. 1979 ↩︎

  2. granted the assignment was not to recreate Alien exactly, but the crane shot at the beginning of the Prometheus clip mirrors the one in Alien in nearly that capacity ↩︎

  3. insofar as “it” is a defined thing which executives and filmmakers aim for; one wonders what they would say if they saw this discussion of the video game look ↩︎

5 Likes
2878

Some directors actively do want things to feel like a video game, Dave Leitch for one. Also I mean a lot of special effects are quite literally made in this Unreal Engine.

Adobe is still more prevalent but Unreal is making a push.

2 Likes
2879

Matt Parker must have a time machine, and a few weeks ago decided to make a video that addresses some of this; at least, the look of film and how it differs and why

6 Likes
2880

My girlfriend sat me down to watch this for the first time a few weeks ago and I loved it. I’m not sure how it went completely under my radar as I’d never heard of it.

3 Likes
2881

Cuckoo 2024 - i liked it! the scifi over-explanation stuff at the end undercut the weirdness of it all but hunter schafer is good in it. she has a weird presence on screen (which really works in Kinds of Kindness, where everyone is being their weirdest selves) but sells the emotional bits very well. cool weird film.

3 Likes
2882

Casino (1995). I’m experiencing this like I might have experienced a movie at the time: without synopsis, without other online resources, just encountered in the wilds of cable TV. No resources from the time either, like TV Guide or a friend talking up a film.

This feels like a movie where it’s cathartic to watch other people’s problems. This guy (Robert De Niro) is in charge of a casino, and he’s in the mob. He pisses off the locals and jeopardizes his licensing, his wife is unhappy, the bosses need handling, the killer is disgruntled, and so on. I am not well-read or well-viewed regarding mafia media, so I don’t know enough about whether this is derivative or original.

Anyway, I end up viewing it like a period piece. This could be regency drama or Mad Men, except for the addition of the criminal element. And even that mainly changes the flavor of the problems and the tools in the toolbox. So, in that sense, the film is engrossing, whether it is being low-key humorous or we’re seeing killing. (The overdubbing of cussing is hilarious, though - “act” for “ass” and “fancy” for “fuckin,” for instance.)

Also, I like all the actors pretty much, but especially I want more Sharon Stone.

8 Likes
2883

I just watched Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In and had a real good time with it. It is super over the top dumb fun, and I’m ok with that.

This is film probably does a better job of feeling like Yakuza / Like A Dragon than the upcoming series will.

1 Like
2884

The last few minutes of that movie are some of my very very favorite Scorsese and I think summarizes him well, we see the mob be patently evil for two hours and fifty minutes, and then private equity comes in to be even worse.

3 Likes
2885

Yee I saw Walled In a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it. First thing I told my wife as we were walking out was how much the melodrama reminded me of Yakuza.

Another movie I saw recently that reminded me of video games was the new Shyamalan, Trap. If you like Hitman, the movie’s hilarious.

3 Likes
2886

I doubt we have Riefenstahl fans here but my god every new thing I hear about her makes it seem like she stops just short of stroking a raven.

1 Like
2887

I dig Casino. I had it on VHS back in the day. It came on two tapes!

Goodfellas is to Arkham Asylum as Casino is to Arkham City.

5 Likes
2888

So over in the Normal Day thread I had posited that there are only 2.5 good Alien movies. I’m happy to report that there are now like, 3!

Here’s my tier list:

Overall, I liked Romulus, but I think it would actually work better if you weren’t a fan of the series. There are waaayyyyy too many callbacks. It was distracting. But, if you can ignore that, the movie kind of stands on its own pretty well! It was scary and tense and there were some moments that were suuuuper gross and I felt that the heroes all had motivations that made sense. A 7/10! Really liked it!

3 Likes
2889

Have any of the Brazilians we have on the forums here seen Apocalypse in the Tropics yet?

Sounds interesting!

Edit: oh I just realised it only had its worldwide premiere a day or so ago, probably at a festival— so likely not! I’ll be keeping an eye out for it, at least

2 Likes
2890

Just caught Buffalo 66 for the first time. Honestly, felt like a movie where the personality of the filmmaker is more interesting than the content of the film. His idea that this is a movie advocating for conservative values is hilarious, I suppose he phrases it as, because Billy takes control of his life, things get better for him. When you look at it as is, it’s a guy who’s life is ruined by emotional distance and the prison system. I suppose that’s libertarian.

As I read up I find out Gallo is a close personal friend of Basquiat, what would those conversations even be?

Then I found out Gallo is big in Japan, which kind of rules because about halfway through I came to the conclusion that, oh, this is Oyasumi Punpun. I feel like Gallo being huge in a world that has voted center-right for eighty years makes total sense.

7 Likes