Unpopular movie opinions...

[Feraud]

Bogey and Bacall... I never got the hype. [huh]

 

[jamespowers]

Bogey and Bacall... I never got the hype. [huh]

Heresy I say!

 

[Unlucky Berman]

Bogey is just cool and Bacall is the eyecatcher It's like Rita Hayworth in Gilda or The Lady from Shanghai. After all the audience needs in such a dark movie and place an eye candy to enlighten it a bit.

 

[CharlieB]

In my mind, I didn't like that Avatar was a melting pot of many stolen ideas.
1) Take Disney's Pocahontas (1995)
2) Add Dances with Wolves (1990)
3) With a hint of Apocalypse Now (1979)
4) Throw in a dash of Blizzard's Star Craft space exploratory technologies, ships, weapons, vehicles
5) Design aliens with characteristics of Blizzard's World of Warcraft's Draenei and Elves
Roll it into one big ball and bake in a new 3D technology oven and walla! Avatar

But I did like the movie a lot.

This is a great recap. My first reaction was "Dances With Trees" or "Pocahontas Meets Alien"!

 

[CharlieB]

One of only two movies I ever wlaked out on (the other was so bad, I can't remember the title) was He Said, She Said Some horrible Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth Perkins nonsense.

 

[rue]

One of only two movies I ever wlaked out on (the other was so bad, I can't remember the title) was He Said, She Said Some horrible Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth Perkins nonsense.

That's the only movie with Kevin Bacon I like. If you ever want to torture me, lock me in a room and force me to watch Footloose, especially that stupid dancing scene in the barn *yucky*

 

[CharlieB]

That's the only movie with Kevin Bacon I like. If you ever want to torture me, lock me in a room and force me to watch Footloose, especially that stupid dancing scene in the barn *yucky*

I've never thought much of Bacon as a leading man anyway. He's not bad in a supporting role, but just don't think he has the presense.

 

[Doctor Strange]

This is a great recap. My first reaction was "Dances With Trees" or "Pocahontas Meets Alien"!

Re Avatar, in addition to all the films that were "borrowed" from, let's not forget some classic written SF inspirations:

Poul Anderson's 1950s novella Call Me Joe - a disabled man remotely pilots an alien body to explore a world deadly to humans (won the Nebula Award)

Ursula K Le Guin's 1970s novella The Word for World Is Forest - a high-tech human army rapes an entirely wooded world in search of resources, unconcerned that the native humanoid creatures who live in the trees are highly evolved and live in a delicate balance with the ecosystem (won the Hugo Award)

Don't get me wrong: Avatar was fun, but it didn't have an original idea in sight...

 

[CopperNY]

i also thought of "A Man Called Horse" when i was dragged to see "Avatar".

now i refer to it as "Dances with Last Cat-Monkeys".

 

[rue]

I wouldn't watch Avatar if it was playing in my living room. I don't need a 'green' lesson via a movie, thank you very much. I cannot believe it outsold Titanic... ugh.

 

[Edward]

What's worse is how Navy recruiters set up shop in the lobby in anticipation of those who came out of the theater in the "afterglow" of the movie's jingoistic "message."

I would have to post this on Veteran's Day, wouldn't I?

lol I get where you're coming from. Even more sinister, in my mind, is the way they will bend over backwards to "assist" a film like that in the making because of the propaganda value. Top Gun sole worth is to serve as the basis for the comic monologue provided by Quentin Tarrantino in character playing a cameo role in Sleep With Me....

Warning for Language: if you're offended by the occasional use of the eff word, this may be one to avoid.

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Bogey is just cool and Bacall is the eyecatcher It's like Rita Hayworth in Gilda or The Lady from Shanghai. After all the audience needs in such a dark movie and place an eye candy to enlighten it a bit.

Bacall was a lot more than eyecandy - she was more than a match for Bogie. I don't think I've ever seen chemistry like it in anything else.

Re Avatar, in addition to all the films that were "borrowed" from, let's not forget some classic written SF inspirations:

Poul Anderson's 1950s novella Call Me Joe - a disabled man remotely pilots an alien body to explore a world deadly to humans (won the Nebula Award)

That sounds like it could also have been the inspiration for that Bruce Willis film a year or two ago - the one where everyone did that??

 

[CharlieB]

Here's one that I managed to get through to the end, only hoping something interesting would happen:

The Blair Witch Project, or as I like to call it "90 minutes of screaming and swearing"...

 

[jamespowers]

Here's one that I managed to get through to the end, only hoping something interesting would happen:

The Blair Witch Project, or as I like to call it "90 minutes of screaming and swearing"...

That damned movie gives me a headache with all the shaking and pitching from side to side. Its like Seasickness:The Movie.:eusa_doh:

 

[Doctor Strange]

That sounds like it could also have been the inspiration for that Bruce Willis film a year or two ago - the one where everyone did that??

You mean Surrogates. I caught it on cable recently.

You know, it was actually a much better film than I expected. A surprisingly well-done futuristic cop drama anchored by a very good performance by Bruce Willis... But it was sunk by its TOTALLY unbelievable premise: that a huge majority of the population would be using these mega-expensive, high-tech surrogates in a time close enough to now that the cars, clothes, phones, and everything else still looked the same. It didn't even try to look like a hundred years in the future a la A.I. (to name one SF film that I think did a very good job of sketching out a believable near-future in terms of its home design, kitchen technology, cars, clothes, etc.) For me, this made the film's unbelievable-to-start-with-premise impossible to swallow...

Actually, Surrogates also reminded me of Isaac Asimov's classic novel The Naked Sun - a detective story set on a sparsely populated planet where people live alone, far apart on huge estates, and only "see" one another as holographic projections, having developed a pathological avoidance of actually being physically together. (The mystery being how a murder could have taken place without another person being present.) Surrogates mined some of the same distaste of people being together as their "real" selves and using technology to avoid it.

 

[Feraud]

Here's one that I managed to get through to the end, only hoping something interesting would happen:

The Blair Witch Project, or as I like to call it "90 minutes of screaming and swearing"...

The Blair Witch project is Lawrence of Arabia compared to Paranormal Activities I & II..

 

[Edward]

Blair Witchwas one of the biggest piles of steaming doo doo ever committed to celluloid. What I found offensive was that they had the gall to claim it to be so original, when I don't think I've seen a single film as utterly derivative within the horror cannon. Ever. Even the basic 'found footage' premise was derivative - they did that in Cannibal Holocaust back in the early 80s. The marketing-hype overkill maybe spoiled it for me; maybe I've watched too many horrors over the years, but the idea that anyone could have been convinced that this was 'real' is, frankly, laughable.

Doctor, Surrogates - that's it. I think a lot of sci-fi involves suspension of disbelief. I'd quite like to see that one, though.

 

[HepKitty]

Blair Witch was so stupid (and nauseating, due to the high-quality bouncing) that I don't think I watched more than 10 minutes of it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm tired of indie movies with grim, depressing endings. I know it's all modern and realistic to show that life is a meaningless exercise in futiility and all, but I'm sick of seeing patrons come dragging out after the show looking like they've been hit between the eyes with a frozen mackerel. It's possible to make a happy, upbeat modern film. So start making them, already.

 

[jamespowers]

I'm tired of indie movies with grim, depressing endings. I know it's all modern and realistic to show that life is a meaningless exercise in futiility and all, but I'm sick of seeing patrons come dragging out after the show looking like they've been hit between the eyes with a frozen mackerel. It's possible to make a happy, upbeat modern film. So start making them, already.

Its a Wonderful Frozen Mackeral (the movie)---kind of like Finding Nemo but with more action and adventure thrown in.

 

[WH1]

To bring it back to Unpopular Movie Opinions, I couldn't get thru the entire "Godfather" saga either.

First one was good, second was great but the third was lousy, especially sophia coppola, amazing how good a director she is though which is great because her acting was awful. I sometimes wonder though if the massive influx of mafia movies and television shows such as the sopranos hasn't diluted the impact of the godfather movies?