28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[Watashi]

Someone broke Davis again.

[D_Davis]

#justmatchcutthings

[Dead & Messed Up]

Hehehe.

I'll take something incomprehensible over something mediocre any old day.

I dunno. I'm no big fan of Marvel, but I enjoyed plenty about The Avengers, The Winter Soldier, and especially Guardians - probably since the latter feels more like a breezy SF pulp pulling from the old-school tradish and retains quite a bit of Gunn's personality.

[Dukefrukem]

You're probably thinking something about hipsters and IPAs.

I love IPAs but seriously, no one on the planet actually believes what you wrote (except for Boll himself). I'm convinced you're trolling me.

[D_Davis]

no one on the planet actually believes what you wrote (except for Boll himself). I'm convinced you're trolling me.

You should know me better than that by now.

[Sven]

I'll back that D up. The idea of sitting through Winter Soldier again is giving me terrors. I'd be happy to watch any crappy Boll film first.

[D_Davis]

I'll back that D up. The idea of sitting through Winter Soldier again is giving me terrors. I'd be happy to watch any crappy Boll film first.

I knew I could count on you.

[Dead & Messed Up]

This really is why I enjoy this forum.

[D_Davis]

A good example is the Resident Evil movies versus Boll's House of the Dead.

Now, none of them are great. They're all pretty bad. However, the RE movies make a lot of money and are quite popular. They're also incredibly bland, safe, and utterly boring, dull and mediocre in every single way (no wonder they make money - mediocrity sells). Worst, the series tries to pretend that it has some class, and never fully commits to the wackiness of its video game roots.

House of the Dead, on the other hand, is absolutely bonkers. It embraces its video game roots, and uses the absurdity of the games in the film. It's not afraid to just be a dumb zombie movie, and also amps up the gore and nudity - two things I look for in a solid B-movie.

So while the box office shows that the RE movies are "better," I'd rather watch House of the Dead a hundred times before seeing another RE movie once.

Rampage, on the other hand, I could probably make the argument of it being a good movie, or at least it is a movie attempting to be good. I was, surprisingly, reminded of Tsui Hark's Don't Play With Fire while watching it. It's not as artistically made as Hark's masterpiece is, but it is a film that is using the same kind of theme - modern culture's fascination with violence - as a foundation on which to build a somewhat sick and twisted genre film.

[Dukefrukem]

What a strange argument. No one, especially here on MC, ever considers box office results to the deciding factor in what makes a movie "better". Popular to the mainstream market MAYBE. It's better to just never mention it when talking about quality.

House of the Dead is based on a rails shooter. It had no story to begin with and is fucking shit video game and maybe a decent arcade game / a good time waster at the movie theater. 15 seconds of the first and last Resident Evil movies is better than any full feature of Boll's work. You just blanketly saying Resident Evil is bland, safe, and utterly boring, dull and mediocre in every single way doesn't make it true. Do you have any specific evidence or examples to backup those words??

Actually I don't want evidence of Resident Evil. Let's bring it to where the mind explosion occurred. Apply it to the Marvel movies.

[D_Davis]

You just blanketly saying Resident Evil is bland, safe, and utterly boring, dull and mediocre in every single way doesn't make it true. Do you have any specific evidence or examples to backup those words??

Yes - there are 5 movies worth of examples.

[Dukefrukem]

Yes - there are 5 movies worth of examples.

SPECIFIC examples. You probably havent even seen them all.

[Dukefrukem]

Or you probably watched them wrong.

[Spun Lepton]

Are we arguing opinions again? In my opinion, that's silly.

[Irish]

I'm not sure any of these movies are worth watching, much less arguing over. But in short:

- Boll is only for Boll. From every piece of media about and around him, I've gotten the resounding impression he only cares about Boll. He doesn't care about the licenses, the scripts, the actors, the sets, the editing. He doesn't care about the movies as an art form or a business. This is a guy who owes his entire career to a German tax law loophole and boy does it show.

- Troma and Hong Kong are bad basis for comparison. Not because of any metric of quality but because those movies functioned outside the mainstream. Troma made its bones by marrying gonzo premises to good marketing in a nascent home video market. (I mean, look at the cover for Surf Nazis Must Die. If you're a kid in the video store in 1987, you're gonna pick that box up. It doesn't matter what's inside.) Likewise Hong Kong. Those movies had a completely different aesthetic and energy level than their American counterparts. You'd see stuff in them that no American producer would ever dream of doing. Movies like Resident Evil and House of the Dead don't operate this way. They're not offering an alternative to Marvel, Warners, or anyone else. They're simply copying the mainstream and offering a similar, but cut rate, experience. To add insult to injury, they do it badly. It feels cynical as hell.

- Marvel isn't so much mediocre as completely middlebrow. That is, I think, an important distinction. I wouldn't mind what Disney does so much if they didn't eat culture and shit money, because it means everybody wants to copy their model. This is bad for fans and for the overall culture in the long term.

[D_Davis]

The Hong Kong flim industry was all about making as much money with as much disposable, cheaply-made entertainment as possible. It's my favorite film industry, and it's also probably the most-factory like of all time. The Shaw Brothers were a movie producing factory/machine, with the only determining factor being the bottom line. Same goes for Golden Harvest, Film Workshop, and many others.

I think Boll fits well within the HK film style of doing things. He doesn't give a shit about anything.

Neither did Tsui Hark. They coined the term "lip rape" for his style of editing, because he was known to completely change the story and dialog days before a film's release, and would hire random actors to come in and dub over the lines of the actors already recorded. Hark would also hire "producers" to work on films for him, and he would stop by to "direct" whenever he had a chance. This way, he could make more movies - as a matter of fact, the credit he takes on most of his films is a combination of producer-director. He saw himself as the foreman of a movie making factory.

I can see Boll doing both.

Boll doesn't have as much creative energy in his entire body that Hark has in his pinky, and in no way does Boll's best film compare to any of Hark's, but I still have no problem putting them in the same school of film making.

[Peng]

I haven't watched the Resident Evil films, but I find it funny that you choose that to represent the bland and colorless, since there is quite a hoopla around them (especially the ones by Anderson) about "vulgar auterism" and all that. I can't imagine rushing to see any of them anytime soon, but too many critics I respect write seriously about them that I won't dismiss the notion as silly outright. Espeically since that group leads me to Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which is quite enjoyable and makes me have a vague grasp of what they are talking about.

[transmogrifier]

I don't think I've ever seen a Boll film.

*checks IMDB*

No, I haven't. I guess I'll have to rile Duke up with my opinion about some other series of movies. Too bad.

[Watashi]

I'd rather seek out and watch good movies rather than argue why one bad movie is better than another bad movie.

[Irish]

The Hong Kong flim industry was all about making as much money with as much disposable, cheaply-made entertainment as possible. It's my favorite film industry, and it's also probably the most-factory like of all time. The Shaw Brothers were a movie producing factory/machine, with the only determining factor being the bottom line. Same goes for Golden Harvest, Film Workshop, and many others.

True, true. When I talked about Hong Kong operating outside the mainstream, I meant the American mainstream. They absolutely milked every single hit for all it was worth within their own market. I think you're right that they had factory/machine-like perspective on the business. But that's besides the point.

The Pacific Ocean washed away a lot of bad culture. The cheapy Category III and IV films and endless sequels based on some Korean telenovela never showed up here in a significant way. Chow Yun Fat and John Woo did.

Those movies, the ones people still talk about thirty years later, are still energetic and removed from the American mainstream.

I think Boll fits well within the HK film style of doing things. He doesn't give a shit about anything.

The main difference (as you sorta note) is that Boll doesn't give a shit about quality control. In my mind, it isn't so much about whether he has that zeitgeisty balls-to-the-wall, anything-goes attitude. That doesn't matter so much when your basic technique is in the shitter.

[EyesWideOpen]

Uwe Boll movies > all Marvel U movies

Quality wise no but I have zero interest in ever watching another Marvel U movie and at least with a Boll movie it's going to be interesting no matter how terrible it is.

[D_Davis]

That's pretty much how I feel

[Dead & Messed Up]

A good example is the Resident Evil movies versus Boll's House of the Dead.

Now, none of them are great. They're all pretty bad. However, the RE movies make a lot of money and are quite popular. They're also incredibly bland, safe, and utterly boring, dull and mediocre in every single way (no wonder they make money - mediocrity sells). Worst, the series tries to pretend that it has some class, and never fully commits to the wackiness of its video game roots.

House of the Dead, on the other hand, is absolutely bonkers. It embraces its video game roots, and uses the absurdity of the games in the film. It's not afraid to just be a dumb zombie movie, and also amps up the gore and nudity - two things I look for in a solid B-movie.

So while the box office shows that the RE movies are "better," I'd rather watch House of the Dead a hundred times before seeing another RE movie once.

Rampage, on the other hand, I could probably make the argument of it being a good movie, or at least it is a movie attempting to be good. I was, surprisingly, reminded of Tsui Hark's Don't Play With Fire while watching it. It's not as artistically made as Hark's masterpiece is, but it is a film that is using the same kind of theme - modern culture's fascination with violence - as a foundation on which to build a somewhat sick and twisted genre film.

Gore and nudity?

Also, if you don't think the Resident Evil series has committed to its lunacy, I can only assume you haven't watched them. The last one I watched featured an epilogue with the entire USA overrun with zombies and mutants and bat-monster things with a bombed-out capitol building. And as for RE failing to embrace the games, they're pastiche but hardly without love for their inspiration:

[Raiders]

This whole embracing of shitty films because they are earnestly made is weird to me, but I respect it if that's what you go for. I am a noted PWSA apologist, if that's even the right word for it, but it is pretty categorically wrong to say his films are any less committed or bland than Boll's. The latter doesn't have a clue what he is even doing with a camera. I don't really see why I would support that.

The saturation of Marvel films has indeed overtaken me. I never thought I would have zero interest in a Whedon product, but I still haven't seen Ultron and that isn't probably going to change any time soon. It's just enough already. Guardians of the Galaxy is the only one that I have seen recently to not feel like just another checkbox in the grand marketing scheme building to 2018 or whenever it is that they plan to eyefuck everyone with the grand finale... before they reboot it.

[EyesWideOpen]

I'll take a bad earnestly made film over a bland cookie cutter film any day of the week.