The Movie Thread

Northumber said:
This is somewhat off topic but I feel the same way too. It's extremely difficult raising kids in this as they just want to relax and watch movies sometimes like anyone. We have a family movie night most weekends but we have run out of good movies. Knowing what I know now even some of the older ones I used to like from the 90s don't seem so great anymore. My views are rubbing off on my kids as they are even seeing the messaging and getting turned off.

This leads me to what I wanted to share. I've started collecting volumes of fairytales that I read to my kids at night. They are, overall, amazing. They are extremely good at telling a compelling story without sounding like propaganda. They are inspiring and uplifting, even though, yes, they are dark and severe too. I started with Grimms (these are mostly German) and then sought out other volumes of fairytales from different regions (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, etc). They are so different than the deconstructive drivel in all the movie storylines. It's amazing nearly none of those old stories have been used in cinema - there really is an incredible rich bank of stories out there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised as I'm sure jews would recoil in horror at such a rich beautiful tradition that points upward and subtly to Christ. But, an amazing history of stories infused with the Christian cosmos are out there. And here's a small whitepill: one of my kids actually said the other night their favorite thing to do was listen to me read these fairytales, over watching movies!
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I used to enjoy trips to the theatre every Friday night to see the latest films. I still have a stack of ticket stubs from the late 90's to the early aughts of going to see films. Since I've become aware of the JQ, it's hard not to see it anymore, and even in older films, you can see the groundwork being laid out for the corruption of society now. We have no interest in taking our kids to see many films anymore. My wife made the mistake of going to see the latest Kung Fu Panda with her mother and she said it was just too dark. All of our kids seemed to have a cloud around them for the rest of the day.

I did manage to go see Dune: Part 2 and I did enjoy it for what it was. But I think part of my enjoyment of it was having read the book twice before, and so in a sense it was fun to see the page visually represented on screen.

If you don't mind sharing, I'd love to know what fairy tale books you are getting. That is a quest my wife and I have been on lately, finding better, richer sources of material to entertain from .
 
thinkreadwritecode said:
I began to rewatch Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. I had to pause at Bree. I am already disappointed in the poor quality of my DVDs on my TV. Apparently they were formatted to look best on the kinds of TVs from 20 years ago because the movie looks atrocious and I need to fiddle with it, but it's not high definition. Because of this, the opening scene showing the initial battles against Sauron looked atrociously bad, like unfinished-obviously-cgi bad. The shire was maddeningly saturated and the hue of the green looked fake. I didn't care for the melodrama of Frodo running to leap on the ferry to cross the river with the black rider right behind him. I think the first time I saw the movies after reading the book it was jarring how quickly they moved on from the black riders in the shire to Bree. It's several chapters in the book, but to go from the ferry to Bree all in one night was too much. I still think cutting out the old forest and barrow wights was a mistake, but that's probably because they had to show backstory and what Gandalf was doing with Saruman and they didn't want the movie to be 5 hours long. A lot of visuals and decoration were good, but having Merry and Pippin stumble into Frodo and Sam in a cornfield was too abrupt. They make Merry and Pippin a bit too exaggerated. In fact, all of the hobbits are exaggerated bumpkins and not what I think Tolkien would have appreciated. I kind of understand why Christopher Tolkien thought the movies were terrible.

I hope to finish them again, but it will probably take me awhile since I find I cannot stomach to see much of it. I can already see how such spectacle can taint good literature, and as much as we like to see stories come to life, I am now not so sure if that's a good thing. It's not that Peter Jackson did a terrible job, but he is simply not Tolkien and even though they had first-rate source material from which to work, even little things like Gandalf hitting his head on the chandelier and then again on one of the crossbeams at Bag End were annoying to me, they were silly comic relief that made Gandalf less serious. Some parts of Gandalf, like him being tempted by the ring when Frodo offers it to him, were quite good, but again, my view of Gandalf has already been tainted, made fun of a little. Lastly, in the books the black riders never got close to Frodo until he came close to the river near Rivendell and then one of the elf-lords assisted him, and I say all of this because Tolkien kept a lot of tension in the hobbits early travels by use of the black riders but the movie couldn't keep tension like that, it had to be action because they have to keep a pace books needn't worry about.
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I always thought the first scene of the hobbit where the dwarves trash Bilbo's home and eat enough food for 600 was obnoxious. It's wacky, slapstick comedy, and was out of place in a swords and sorcery adventure movie.
 
Thomas More said:
I always thought the first scene of the hobbit where the dwarves trash Bilbo's home and eat enough food for 600 was obnoxious. It's wacky, slapstick comedy, and was out of place in a swords and sorcery adventure movie.
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Didn't care for any of The Hobbit movies. That hour long filler scene at the beginning of the first one didn't start it off right. The CGI was bad. Didn't like Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. Rented 2 and 3 from RedBox and fell asleep both times. The best scene was when they fought the ring wraiths at the end of 3, a scene that wasn't even in the book.

The 3 Lord of the Rings films hold up much better. I even have fonder memories of watching the cartoon Hobbit when I was a kid. When I watch LOTR, I cannot help but see it as Christian allegory, that was an element that just wasn't present in The Hobbit films.
 
thinkreadwritecode said:
The JQ has spoiled movies for me. I saw the trailer for the new Joker movie and I realized I had no interest. Why do I want to watch something dark that creates entertainment out of mental illness? I looked it up and the director and writer are both Jewish. The guy who plays Joker is Jewish. The guys who created the Joker character long ago were Jewish. I'm tired of letting them influence me in subtle ways through movies. I used to get the feeling I was missing out when I didn't watch movies like the new Napoleon or Oppenheimer or this second Joker film. I no longer feel that way. I finally grew up like my parents, who didn't seem to ever care if they missed films.
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I couldn't make sense of Joker. I love the source material. Joaquin Phoenix is a fine actor. But it didn't hit home the way I wanted it to. It felt like I was watching a lesser Taxi Driver. It was pretty good up until the final act, then whatever point it was trying to make just got lost in the sauce. Have a feeling this second one will be worse.

thinkreadwritecode said:
More JQ spoilage. I saw a thread on Logan, a dark movie about Wolverine, which I assume many here have seen if you have seen any Marvel films at all. I remember liking it, but also remembering that it was dark, dreary, and depressing. And the death of favorite characters. Turns out the film's screenplay was written by Jews and the director was a Jew. So many dark films now make sense when I find out who wrote and directed them.
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The best thing I can say about this film is that it had good action scenes, especially compared to the previous X-Men films.
 
Paused The Fellowship of the Ring movie just after Gandalf's fall in Moria. I can't stand the shaky-cam action sequences and I no longer care for Jackson's way of zooming through large spaces that look like video game shots. The quality of my dvd makes the special effects look dated, which I thought I'd never say, but they poor. The shots of the orcs are so quick you can hardly make them out, making me think they cheaped out on a lot of the costuming. I found I didn't care for Hugo Weaving as Elrond and they sullied Elrond's character a bit, not to mention Aragorn. They cut out the Dunadain and rangers protecting the Shire so they had to make Aragorn seem like a loser who chose exile and to give up his bloodline when he was nothing like that.

I find Jackson's usage of music to create intense drama to be cheap and juvenile. He'll have these great big crescendos during dullish moments and I bet he did it to create a sense of thrill to keep the audience from getting bored. I used to like the LotR music but upon this watching I find it irritating and distracting. It doesn't help the characters sometimes speak hardly above a whisper so I have to turn my volume up but then the next scene has a loud musical insertion.

I'm not poo-pooing on this film because I recently read the book and they're not going along with the books exactly as I'd like, but it's been 20 years since I've seen them and I've seen a lot of films in the meantime so my sense of good film has changed and matured with me and I don't think of Jackson as a very good film maker anymore. Jackson was my age when he made these films (edit - he was my age when they were released, he was younger than me, mid-30s when he began development), which makes him a heck of a lot more accomplished than me, but other than LotR and then the Hobbit trilogy *rolls eyes* he hasn't made anything memorable or good. King Kong was a cgi-fest and I bet it aged badly.

I think I am ready to say it. Lord of the Rings could use a reboot. Not a Disney woke reboot but a proper filmmaker reboot who could take a less spectacle and action driven angle on the story but something fresh and artistic yet deeply Christian. It's a shame the richest nation in the world with access to the best technology and the largest Christian population has no good Christian studio or Christian director, I guess other than Mel Gibson. Heck, I bet Mel could make a better trilogy than Jackson.

Postscript. They didn't explain why Aragorn had a bag full of weapons for the hobbits. According to the movie, Gandalf was still imprisoned at Orthanc when Aragorn met the hobbits in Bree. How did he know to look for them and how did he know to carry weapons for them? In the film, he wouldn't know, but I guess they assumed audiences wouldn't care or pick up on that detail. Then there's Bill the pony, who in the books they got from Bree, but in the movie I guess they got Bill from Rivendell? It seemed sloppy and I notice that the movies are long but made up of a ton of short and trite scenes. I'm watching the extended addition and they didn't bother to include stuff like how they got Bill or how Aragorn learned of the hobbits.

Post-Postscript. I forgot to add: I hate all of the slow-motion Jackson uses. The film felt overedited, like a lot of things had to be inserted in order to push the audience into feeling a certain way, like the funereal music and slow motion after Gandalf fell. Perhaps I know too much about the characters, the story, and the films and I can't accept it like I did when I first watched it when I was younger, but it all falls so very flat.
 
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thinkreadwritecode said:
Paused The Fellowship of the Ring movie just after Gandalf's fall in Moria. I can't stand the shaky-cam action sequences and I no longer care for Jackson's way of zooming through large spaces that look like video game shots. The quality of my dvd makes the special effects look dated, which I thought I'd never say, but they poor. The shots of the orcs are so quick you can hardly make them out, making me think they cheaped out on a lot of the costuming. I found I didn't care for Hugo Weaving as Elrond and they sullied Elrond's character a bit, not to mention Aragorn. They cut out the Dunadain and rangers protecting the Shire so they had to make Aragorn seem like a loser who chose exile and to give up his bloodline when he was nothing like that.

I find Jackson's usage of music to create intense drama to be cheap and juvenile. He'll have these great big crescendos during dullish moments and I bet he did it to create a sense of thrill to keep the audience from getting bored. I used to like the LotR music but upon this watching I find it irritating and distracting. It doesn't help the characters sometimes speak hardly above a whisper so I have to turn my volume up but then the next scene has a loud musical insertion.

I'm not poo-pooing on this film because I recently read the book and they're not going along with the books exactly as I'd like, but it's been 20 years since I've seen them and I've seen a lot of films in the meantime so my sense of good film has changed and matured with me and I don't think of Jackson as a very good film maker anymore. Jackson was my age when he made these films (edit - he was my age when they were released, he was younger than me, mid-30s when he began development), which makes him a heck of a lot more accomplished than me, but other than LotR and then the Hobbit trilogy *rolls eyes* he hasn't made anything memorable or good. King Kong was a cgi-fest and I bet it aged badly.

I think I am ready to say it. Lord of the Rings could use a reboot. Not a Disney woke reboot but a proper filmmaker reboot who could take a less spectacle and action driven angle on the story but something fresh and artistic yet deeply Christian. It's a shame the richest nation in the world with access to the best technology and the largest Christian population has no good Christian studio or Christian director, I guess other than Mel Gibson. Heck, I bet Mel could make a better trilogy than Jackson.

Postscript. They didn't explain why Aragorn had a bag full of weapons for the hobbits. According to the movie, Gandalf was still imprisoned at Orthanc when Aragorn met the hobbits in Bree. How did he know to look for them and how did he know to carry weapons for them? In the film, he wouldn't know, but I guess they assumed audiences wouldn't care or pick up on that detail. Then there's Bill the pony, who in the books they got from Bree, but in the movie I guess they got Bill from Rivendell? It seemed sloppy and I notice that the movies are long but made up of a ton of short and trite scenes. I'm watching the extended addition and they didn't bother to include stuff like how they got Bill or how Aragorn learned of the hobbits.

Post-Postscript. I forgot to add: I hate all of the slow-motion Jackson uses. The film felt overedited, like a lot of things had to be inserted in order to push the audience into feeling a certain way, like the funereal music and slow motion after Gandalf fell. Perhaps I know too much about the characters, the story, and the films and I can't accept it like I did when I first watched it when I was younger, but it all falls so very flat.
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I appreciate a bold take, and the LOTR movies being not very good and in need of a reboot are certainly bold takes. But yeah, I can't agree at all. I think they're amazing (I even think King Kong is really good). And while I would certainly welcome a really well-made reboot, I just doubt it would be improved upon anytime soon. I say that not because I don't think there aren't talented filmmakers to pull it off, but out of respect for what I think Peter Jackson did. I say all three are among the top 25 movies of the last 25 years.
 
GodfatherPartTwo said:
I couldn't make sense of Joker. I love the source material. Joaquin Phoenix is a fine actor. But it didn't hit home the way I wanted it to. It felt like I was watching a lesser Taxi Driver. It was pretty good up until the final act, then whatever point it was trying to make just got lost in the sauce. Have a feeling this second one will be worse.


The best thing I can say about this film is that it had good action scenes, especially compared to the previous X-Men films.
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I loved Joker, but have no interest in watching again. Too depressing for me. Great film imo, but put me in a dark place.
 
cheapchampion said:
I appreciate a bold take, and the LOTR movies being not very good and in need of a reboot are certainly bold takes. But yeah, I can't agree at all. I think they're amazing (I even think King Kong is really good). And while I would certainly welcome a really well-made reboot, I just doubt it would be improved upon anytime soon. I say that not because I don't think there aren't talented filmmakers to pull it off, but out of respect for what I think Peter Jackson did. I say all three are among the top 25 movies of the last 25 years.
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I can appreciate where you are coming from, my memories of the movies were that they were in my top 10 personal favorites, but I hadn't watched them for almost two decades and now that I watch them again I notice them differently. Let me ask you, when was the last time you saw them? It could also be that my copy I'm watching, which is a standard dvd, simply can't translate well to my TV and makes all of the special effects seem goofy. I am finding myself more and more in agreement with Christopher Tolkien that the movies are action-thrillers for young audiences, which was why I loved them so much in the past, I was the core audience, but as a middle-aged man with a hefty dose of JQ awareness I feel less conditioned to respond to movies in the way I did before and I surprised myself by how I am seeing LotR.
 
thinkreadwritecode said:
Paused The Fellowship of the Ring movie just after Gandalf's fall in Moria. I can't stand the shaky-cam action sequences and I no longer care for Jackson's way of zooming through large spaces that look like video game shots. The quality of my dvd makes the special effects look dated, which I thought I'd never say, but they poor. The shots of the orcs are so quick you can hardly make them out, making me think they cheaped out on a lot of the costuming. I found I didn't care for Hugo Weaving as Elrond and they sullied Elrond's character a bit, not to mention Aragorn. They cut out the Dunadain and rangers protecting the Shire so they had to make Aragorn seem like a loser who chose exile and to give up his bloodline when he was nothing like that.

I find Jackson's usage of music to create intense drama to be cheap and juvenile. He'll have these great big crescendos during dullish moments and I bet he did it to create a sense of thrill to keep the audience from getting bored. I used to like the LotR music but upon this watching I find it irritating and distracting. It doesn't help the characters sometimes speak hardly above a whisper so I have to turn my volume up but then the next scene has a loud musical insertion.

I'm not poo-pooing on this film because I recently read the book and they're not going along with the books exactly as I'd like, but it's been 20 years since I've seen them and I've seen a lot of films in the meantime so my sense of good film has changed and matured with me and I don't think of Jackson as a very good film maker anymore. Jackson was my age when he made these films (edit - he was my age when they were released, he was younger than me, mid-30s when he began development), which makes him a heck of a lot more accomplished than me, but other than LotR and then the Hobbit trilogy *rolls eyes* he hasn't made anything memorable or good. King Kong was a cgi-fest and I bet it aged badly.

I think I am ready to say it. Lord of the Rings could use a reboot. Not a Disney woke reboot but a proper filmmaker reboot who could take a less spectacle and action driven angle on the story but something fresh and artistic yet deeply Christian. It's a shame the richest nation in the world with access to the best technology and the largest Christian population has no good Christian studio or Christian director, I guess other than Mel Gibson. Heck, I bet Mel could make a better trilogy than Jackson.

Postscript. They didn't explain why Aragorn had a bag full of weapons for the hobbits. According to the movie, Gandalf was still imprisoned at Orthanc when Aragorn met the hobbits in Bree. How did he know to look for them and how did he know to carry weapons for them? In the film, he wouldn't know, but I guess they assumed audiences wouldn't care or pick up on that detail. Then there's Bill the pony, who in the books they got from Bree, but in the movie I guess they got Bill from Rivendell? It seemed sloppy and I notice that the movies are long but made up of a ton of short and trite scenes. I'm watching the extended addition and they didn't bother to include stuff like how they got Bill or how Aragorn learned of the hobbits.

Post-Postscript. I forgot to add: I hate all of the slow-motion Jackson uses. The film felt overedited, like a lot of things had to be inserted in order to push the audience into feeling a certain way, like the funereal music and slow motion after Gandalf fell. Perhaps I know too much about the characters, the story, and the films and I can't accept it like I did when I first watched it when I was younger, but it all falls so very flat.
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I'm with you on this one. My church and I got together and watched all 3 last year. I felt that they could use an update.

Personally, I just can't sit down and watch them. Because I know it's a task that requires me not falling asleep. The extended editions contain even more bloat. The Return of the King is the best one and the leanest, despite being the longest.

I also liked King Kong, but there's something about Peter Jackson's style that makes his films hard to rewatch. There's not a lot of reward to rewatching them. They're more one and done.
 
cheapchampion said:
I loved Joker, but have no interest in watching again. Too depressing for me. Great film imo, but put me in a dark place.
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Glad to know I wasn't the only one. It's one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen and it took me 3-4 separate viewings to finish it. Each time I felt depressed after watching just a few scenes. And most of that is a testament to Phoenix's acting skill. He deserved that Oscar 100%.

But yeah...I have no yearning to ever watch that movie again.
 
Just echoing the fact The LOTR films were much better than The Hobbit, which was basically a cash cow for Peter Jackson. As a Kiwi it's amazing to see the reach of the LOTR films, even to this day NZ tourism reaps the rewards for the cinematography using our incredible landscapes to help drive the fantasy of the original books.

In my travels around the world when you let people know you're from NZ it's either Rugby (The All Blacks) or Lord Of The Rings.


Regarding films, to this day i've never seen The Godfather trilogy.
I keep waiting for a good rainy day. Winter is coming up, so maybe soon.
The Sopranos is my favourite TV show so I think i'll enjoy it.
 
I watched The Karate Kid recently (the original 80's one). I had actually never seen this film before: I was more of a child of the 90's & 00's.

I was expecting it to be some cheesy kids movie, but I ended up really enjoying it! Great hero's journey plot line & likeable (and mostly white*) characters.

I would definitely recommend The Karate Kid if you haven't seen it!

*With the obvious exception of Mr Miyagi
 
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“My wife made the mistake of going to see the latest Kung Fu Panda with her mother and she said it was just too dark. All of our kids seemed to have a cloud around them for the rest of the day.”

I’m not trying to be critical here, I’m genuinely curious, is there anything in particular that you could point to or specify that was problematic about KFP4? I ask because I saw the film a few weeks ago myself and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of any “woke” or overly modern elements in it. I know that I’ve mentioned the “wokeness scale” before but the only thing even remotely “woke” was Po saying that he had two dads. The thing is that this is very true for many adopted kids who meet their biological parents. There was his adoptive father who raised him and Bryan Cranston’s character who is his biological father. They were both very concerned with his well being and making sure he was ok-it was kind of sweet actually seeing how freaked out they were and the lengths they went to in spite of their own shortcomings. Now don’t get me wrong, this is obviously mass market entertainment. It’s no Ghibli movie, or even on the same level as Pixar’s work in better days-Wall-E and Up come to mind. That being said, it was far better than almost anything from Disney over the last 3-4 years. I’m told Encanto was the last remotely good one.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I’d enjoyed the previous films and found this one to be fairly good. There was actually a nice theme of righting your wrongs and the dangers of following a flawed mentor. I think it was even said that you can’t blame your own awful behavior on your past troubles-something that a lot of people could learn from. Some people hate Awkwafina, but I’m kind of indifferent towards her. I liked her character and thought that she was interesting and her dynamic with Po worked well. It was pretty easy to see where they were going with her character but I still enjoyed seeing things play out. They even gave Ian McShane’s character something of a redemption arc in this film. He’s one of those actors who always delivers regardless of the film’s quality. Not surprising after Deadwood, but this is obviously far removed from that.

The only thing that I can really criticize is the “Furious Five” barely being present outside of a brief nonspeaking cameo. Maybe Angelina Jolie and Jackie Chan are too expensive for voiceovers these days?
 
Murdock said:
“My wife made the mistake of going to see the latest Kung Fu Panda with her mother and she said it was just too dark. All of our kids seemed to have a cloud around them for the rest of the day.”

I’m not trying to be critical here, I’m genuinely curious, is there anything in particular that you could point to or specify that was problematic about KFP4? I ask because I saw the film a few weeks ago myself and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of any “woke” or overly modern elements in it. I know that I’ve mentioned the “wokeness scale” before but the only thing even remotely “woke” was Po saying that he had two dads. The thing is that this is very true for many adopted kids who meet their biological parents. There was his adoptive father who raised him and Bryan Cranston’s character who is his biological father. They were both very concerned with his well being and making sure he was ok-it was kind of sweet actually seeing how freaked out they were and the lengths they went to in spite of their own shortcomings. Now don’t get me wrong, this is obviously mass market entertainment. It’s no Ghibli movie, or even on the same level as Pixar’s work in better days-Wall-E and Up come to mind. That being said, it was far better than almost anything from Disney over the last 3-4 years. I’m told Encanto was the last remotely good one.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I’d enjoyed the previous films and found this one to be fairly good. There was actually a nice theme of righting your wrongs and the dangers of following a flawed mentor. I think it was even said that you can’t blame your own awful behavior on your past troubles-something that a lot of people could learn from. Some people hate Awkwafina, but I’m kind of indifferent towards her. I liked her character and thought that she was interesting and her dynamic with Po worked well. It was pretty easy to see where they were going with her character but I still enjoyed seeing things play out. They even gave Ian McShane’s character something of a redemption arc in this film. He’s one of those actors who always delivers regardless of the film’s quality. Not surprising after Deadwood, but this is obviously far removed from that.

The only thing that I can really criticize is the “Furious Five” barely being present outside of a brief nonspeaking cameo. Maybe Angelina Jolie and Jackie Chan are too expensive for voiceovers these days?
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Not sure if serious!

The part of the story where the main character's two dads were very concerned with his well being, and other insane mentions about redemtion arcs and all!


By redemption arc do you mean they found salvation in Christ the King?

I'm afraid you might not mean it that way. :oops:
 
Thomas More said:
Not sure if serious!

The part of the story where the main character's two dads were very concerned with his well being, and other insane mentions about redemtion arcs and all!


By redemption arc do you mean they found salvation in Christ the King?

I'm afraid you might not mean it that way. :oops:
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No, I’m being completely serious. There’s no question that this film was made from a secular perspective but I still found some value to be gained from it. If you want to credit what value there is to be gained in it to the Lord then I certainly won’t argue with you. As far as the father’s concern it really did come across as genuine parental concern for a child in trouble.

The redemption arc? No it was definitely in more of a street urchin led down a bad path by an unsavory mentor story. Kind of a very watered down play on Dickens if anything.

I’m afraid that at this point if a film isn’t “woke” and has some degree of good messaging then it might actually be worth a watch. I hate to admit it but by this standard something like “Morbius” becomes a passably decent film not because it’s actually any good but because it’s sort of watchable and the actor’s seem to be enjoying themselves. Granted it’s an a “it’s so bad it’s good” kind of way. I’ve never been particularly fond of that kind of movie, either it’s just good enough to be worth your time or it isn’t, but lately even a bad movie will get a pass if it doesn’t set out to insult its own audience. I do think it’s sad that’s the point we’ve come to, though.
 
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