Movies you've just watched

[BrianC]

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
This was airing on tv, lucky! A wonderful adventure movie with fantastic stop motion Harryhausen effects, and beautiful Technicolour usage enhanced by a colourful and beautiful wardrobe. Unfortunately, the acting is very dry, and that would be, to me, the biggest fault with this movie. Nevertheless, highly recommended watching.

I still need to see that. I enjoyed The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

[soprano1]

I still need to see that. I enjoyed The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

Do it. I'll keep that one in mind, too.

[soprano1]

Shrek (2001)
It's great, better than I remember when I watched it back in 2003. The CG looks dated in some places, but that's to expect. Full of juvenile humour, although the music box and Robin Hood's song did make me snicker. There's also some dark humour, when Geppetto sells Pinocchio and the gingerbread man's torture scene.

Shrek 2 (2004)
Hmmm, it was good, but I felt it was just more of the same. Puss was great, though. Banderas just played himself, lol. I'm not sure if I'll watch the rest, maybe some other day to avoid burn out.

[BrianC]

I liked Shrek 2, though it definitely wasn't as good as the first one. I haven't seen 3 or 4, but I heard mostly mixed things. I did watch the Christmas special and enjoyed it quite a bit. I found Kung Fu Panda to be the best of the DreamWorks specials, though, even if it was a "holiday" special.

[soprano1]

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
That fucking djinn was scary as fuck, and those nails! That aside, great colours for a 1940 movie, another great wardrobe, very nice story with beautiful dialogue, and the acting wasn't too bad.
Many names and events here seemed to have been used in Disney's Aladdin, and since I bet they didn't read the whole of the 1001 Nights stories, that might be the case.

[Xyga]

I hadn't watched the Conan film in 'ages' and...ugh, sure it was always B-grade material but it's aged terribly.

What struck me this time though is that the film's fictional Hyborian Age, with all the things, people, landscapes etc depicted and mentioned in the film, massively points at what would have been the rough interval between the Bronze Age Collapse and the rise of Greece and Rome (c.1,200~700 BC), and located in the broader area spanning from West-Asia, Middle/Near-East, and as far as Southeastern Europe/Southern-slavic.
Many elements like technology, culture, arts, architecture, trade etc would check with that time, including that the tale of Atlantis was probably born from the Minoan Eruption event some 500 years before that. First mentions of steel also date roughly to that time, during the Iron Age.

I haven't read the book or whatever from the author, but summaries say what he imagined for a fictional time and era, he places in a corresponding real world time of around 10,000 BC of a civilization even taking its early roots during the long deglaciation of the last Ice Age.
He also makes Conan's people origins be that of devolved refugees from the collapse of Atlantis, and kinda proto-Celts and even Scotts (Atlantis also if I understand located somewhere in the Atlantic)

So in fact instead of giving even a slight hint of plausibility to the fictional setting (hypotetical lost age of humanity), it introduces a considerable far-fetchedness issue either in the film or the book, or both - I don't know which to blame the most - that spoils the effect by making the background completely ridiculous even by myth/fantasy standards.
If you're the author or filmmaker; either you call it a complete 'isekai' and therefore 100% fantasy, or you verify that your claims (lost chunk of pre/protohistory within the real world's) even if they're meant to be held with chopsticks and only serve the purpose of setting the mood, correspond even a tiny bit to what you write.
But apparently the author has done his 'research' and even wrote a book dedicated to that fictional age.
Oh really?

[drauch]

Haha, Robert E. Howard wrote pulp fiction. You're looking wayyyyyyy too into this. And he wrote a couple page essay about it, not an entire book.

[Mischief Maker]

Yeah, if you read the books, Conan ends up becoming king of an Arthurian-style monarchy with armored knights on horseback and everything.

[BryanM]

Talking about pulp fiction, can't wait for that The Destroyer film we've been waiting forever for. Been awhile since we had a respectable 80's style action flick. Can't wait for that super saiyan resurrection sequence it's gonna be so kewl:

"I am created Shiva, the destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds, the blind night tiger made whole by Sinanju. What is this dog meat that stands before me?"

Let's see how they're doing on that.

/googles The Destroyer
> IMDB: A police detective reconnects with people from an undercover assignment in her distant past in order to make peace.
> Wikipedia: Destroyer is an upcoming crime thriller film directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Nicole Kidman.

Uh, that doesn't sound right. Lemme try that again...

/googles Remo Williams 2
> IMDB: Remo Williams 2: The Adventure Continues (2017) - A hero who doesn't exist must save America from another enemy we never knew we had.

Uh, 2017? You're saying it already came out, IMDB? What??? IMDB, pliz.

So, absolutely nothing on this important groundbreaking movie of the century. If anyone has even a thread of intel... that'd be great.

If you're the author or filmmaker; either you call it a complete 'isekai' and therefore 100% fantasy, or you verify that your claims

Dude, you can't even get the TV news to avoid being at least 50% fantasy. (Not to mention all of fiction is an alternative reality to begin with...) You're asking too much of this dead man who never knew the touch of the internet. He was a neophyte in his 20's, give'em some slack on his webnovel.

[Xyga]

@drauch,MM
Yeah of course it's pulp, but it's just a late realization that the world of Conan - at least as seen in the movie - is a copy-pasta of a gross millenium that actually existed, real shit and myths included, into our same real world but with an added 0 to the BC time.
AFAIK this fact is never mentioned anywhere by anyone, author, critics or fans of the franchise who have ever uttered or written a word, or gave a single thought about Conan while busy on the throne
Had Howard not done that the setting wouldn't sound like the dumbest kind of pulp, maybe. It's just like two unnecessary quotes that make the whole thing crappier.
(that he ends up in a simili-middle ages Britain thanks to the DeLorean he hides in the stables, at the very least concerns the book and not the standalone film lol)

I don't really complain, but it's like with lots of old things you know, I don't like these moments when years later you pick an old film, game, book, whatever you used to enjoy back in the days even if it was campy low grade stuff, and there suddenly you notice an horrific flaw (if just one) you hadn't before and boom! it's garbage forever.
Not even funny-bad, just unwatchable material for good.

EDit: yeah I know he was young and had no internet (lol)...but the copy-pasta shows he was decently documented!

[drauch]

I don't really complain

You ain't foolin' nobody with that one!

But really, damn man... I don't get it. If something like that ruins your pulp fantasy and makes it "garbage forever" you gotta lighten up, or just forego it completely. Nobody raised a fuss about it because nobody cared--they knew what it was! You're in a forum for video games with infinite derivative and impossibly illogical worlds. Just sit back and enjoy it .

[Xyga]

Yes and no, of course I want to and I can still lose myself in pulp as firmly as a crackhead in his stuff, but I mean noticing details like that today ruins my, what should I say, suspension of disbelief? guess I'm just an old fart.

[soprano1]

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)
Like Machete, a fake trailer from Grindhouse turned full feature. I prefer Machete, but this one was badass in it's own way. Now, when are they making the werewolf nazi movie?

Django (1966)
Nice Spaghetti Western! I liked some of the crazy shit they pulled, like the humorous mud fight between the whores with the spy watching in disgust, and of course the surprise hidden in the coffin.
I was expecting the plot to be similar to Django Unchained, but it seems Tarantino decided to spin his own tale.

[Mischief Maker]

AFAIK this fact is never mentioned anywhere by anyone, author, critics or fans of the franchise who have ever uttered or written a word, or gave a single thought about Conan while busy on the throne
Had Howard not done that the setting wouldn't sound like the dumbest kind of pulp, maybe.

Well if you read the book, you'd know that while Howard uses names that imply certain cultures, he usually spells them wildly differently. While Conan's homeland sounds like Sumeria, it's spelled Cimmeria in the books. Kind of like how restaurants that serve fake crab meat sometimes spell it krab.

I'd think when Conan is fighting a wizard that turns himself into a giant snake that it's pretty clear at that point that it's not a documentary.

You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs

Uh, ACTUALLY a parsec is a measure of distance, not time.

Han Solo raped my childhood.

[emphatic]

Avengers - Infinity War. 4/5

I shaved the rating one point because I don't like cliffhanger endings. A fun ride for Marvel fans like myself.

[Xyga]

Well if you read the book, you'd know that while Howard uses names that imply certain cultures, he usually spells them wildly differently. While Conan's homeland sounds like Sumeria, it's spelled Cimmeria in the books. Kind of like how restaurants that serve fake crab meat sometimes spell it krab.

I'd think when Conan is fighting a wizard that turns himself into a giant snake that it's pretty clear at that point that it's not a documentary.

You missed my point completely.

[lilmanjs]

King Cat
A Shaw Brothers movie from the 60s. It also is one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen and I thought you couldn't get much worse than the one movie where that guy shoots lasers out of one of his fingers. A judge executes a guy for corruption who happens to be related to another person of power. They try to kill the judge, and a guy swoops in at the last moment to save him. Then later on saves a lady and becomes King Cat. A bunch of other idiots join in trying to kill King Cat after he's given this. After that the movie becomes really junky and loads of people bound over rooftops and such in one leap and turns into the awful stereotypes of 60s wuxia movies.

[xxx1993]

I just saw Avengers: Infinity War. All I can say is, “Bring on Part 2”.

[EmperorIng]

Howard tries to get around his wildly anachronistic world by stating that at some point in the hyperborean past, some unknown cataclysm essentially "reset" the world and sent it back into the dark ages, whatever that meant.

That being said, the Conan stories are awesome, even if a lot of them devolve into Howard's bread-winning formula of "Conan goes to place, kills evil wizard, and fucks near-naked princess over his corpse."

[Mischief Maker]

That being said, the Conan stories are awesome...

...provided it's a story where Conan stays the hell away from Africa and Africans because HOO-LEE shit was Howard a raging racist. The shit he says about black people makes Trump look like the least racist person you've ever met.

I quit reading Howard with one short story that was pretty much "Birth of a Nation" where Conan completely breaks character and heroically declares that he will rescue a white princess from rape at the hands of an African chieftain purely out of white solidarity.

[EmperorIng]

Yeah, that reminds me of the unfortunate aspect of H.P. Lovecraft's writings as well. There's 'man of the times' and then there's, well...

That's an aspect of Howard that John Milius smartly left behind.

[Xyga]

Howard tries to get around his wildly anachronistic world by stating that at some point in the hyperborean past, some unknown cataclysm essentially "reset" the world and sent it back into the dark ages, whatever that meant.

He must have been thinking of primitive communism.

Yeah I read about the racist stuff in Conan, brutal stuff when it pops, and you think Gor received so much more flak just for being sexist. *sigh*

[soprano1]

White Heat (1949)
Just plain old good gangster movie with the great James Cagney. No bullshit story, he keeps walking that destructive and criminal path until the end of the movie.

[Mischief Maker]

Yeah, that reminds me of the unfortunate aspect of H.P. Lovecraft's writings as well.

Interesting factoid: Howard and Lovecraft were friends. Every so often in Howard's work you can sense a little Lovecraft influence.

I look at the two authors as the inverse of each other. Lovecraft had some ideas that were out-there to this day, but couldn't write worth shit. I was legitimately horrified when I read second-hand monster descriptions in the Call of Cthulhu PnP game sourcebook. But when I tried reading the actual work, Lovecraft's bumbling prose failed to engage. Stop making up new adjectives so you can keep repeating, "it was scary, it was really scary, you would go insane if you saw how scary it was!"

Meanwhile Howard had a crackling prose. Fight scenes in a Conan story are exciting, edge of your seat stuff! But like EmperorIng said, the plot is pretty much always the same. And while Howard is better at building up a sense of Lovecraftian dread in the leadup than Lovecraft ever did, once the ancient evil is revealed it's inevitably either a giant snake or a giant ape which Conan summarily beheads.

Of the two, I'd rather read Howard. Give me a formulaic story that's well-written than something creatively inspired that's nevertheless a slog to puzzle out. Lovecraft shines through other artists' interpretations.

[wgogh]

For me, it is the other way around. While I really like Lovecraft's books, I've never bothered much about the adaptations or works inspired by the mythos. Not only that, his peculiar way of writing is one of the reasons one would read his works and his style fits the content very well. In others words, I'm glad the text is the way it is. I don't know what you've read by him, but maybe you would prefer The Shadow over Innsmouth from what you've told.

"it was scary, it was really scary, you would go insane if you saw how scary it was!"

.
But that was funny
Anyway, going a little off topic here

[BrianC]

White Heat (1949)
Just plain old good gangster movie with the great James Cagney. No bullshit story, he keeps walking that destructive and criminal path until the end of the movie.

Good stuff. I loved the scene at the end.

Spoiler

I'm on top of the world!

I watched The Petrified Forest. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though it was a bit different from the other movies in the gangster movie set. Humphrey Bogart made a nice gangster and it starred a young Bette Davis and Leslie Howard.

[soprano1]

Miles Ahead (2015)
Don Cheadle was very cool and all. The movie's plot was something: Miles Davis and Obi Wan Kenobi say motherfucker all the time while high and drunk running after a session tape.
If you watch the movie to see Don Cheadle doing some fine acting, good. If you are expecting to see a movie on Miles Davis, you will be disappointed.

[wgogh]

Miles Ahead (2015)
Don Cheadle was very cool and all. The movie's plot was something: Miles Davis and Obi Wan Kenobi say motherfucker all the time while high and drunk running after a session tape.
If you watch the movie to see Don Cheadle doing some fine acting, good. If you are expecting to see a movie on Miles Davis, you will be disappointed.

When I saw the trailer of that movie (I believe it was on a DVD of the Eat That Question Zappa film, that is very interesting, btw), I was confused. Looked more like an action movie than a Miles Davis movie. Seems like I was right.

[lilmanjs]

Wolf Warrior
Wu Jing does a horrible job at acting in this and the plot also has also been done a zillion times at this point. The movie wasn't too bad up until suddenly we get a shift to patriotic must save China or the entire world will die type crap showed up. From then on Wu Jing was immortal and couldn't be killed, even by stepping on a landmine. I can't believe this got a sequel.

[Squire Grooktook]

Well if you read the book, you'd know that while Howard uses names that imply certain cultures, he usually spells them wildly differently. While Conan's homeland sounds like Sumeria, it's spelled Cimmeria in the books. Kind of like how restaurants that serve fake crab meat sometimes spell it krab.

I'd think when Conan is fighting a wizard that turns himself into a giant snake that it's pretty clear at that point that it's not a documentary.

You missed my point completely.

I honestly do not understand the point at all. It feels like a totally irrelevant nitpick that might make for a good chuckle but barely constitutes a flaw, let alone a grave one.