Imagine you were killed by Eli Roth.

Imagine how embarrassed you'd be.

Damn ****'s kind of heavy for a Disney movie, no wonder millennials all joke about suicide.

don't forget... getting most of the seamen out of the phallus on the way to freedom

Hi Jim

Seriously what the **** is with this film. The toaster crushes a flower's dreams and it dies, then the toaster walks away all sad?

How about this ****? The walrus cheats the carpenter out of his meal, and he eats all of the cute little (sentient) baby oysters. I was all confused and sad when I saw it as a little kid (six years old or so).

Pretty intense. Kids movies have had some real **** put into them before.

Das Boot is an amazing film.

I can't get my mind off this film. It's long as ****, but I love it. It makes a great contrast in my mind with everything I'm sick to death of in modern films. So many films today fail to build any tension. It's as if they're afraid the viewer will lose interest if they aren't moving the plot forward constantly. Marvel films are the primest example, or anything Transformers.

The time between each depth charge going off in Das Boot is a few minutes of tense hell you go through with the sailors. Each charge stands out in my mind as a distinct event, dragging down the psyches of everyone you've grown to empathize with. Tension is built superbly and it makes the film.

There's also absolutely zero heroism in the film. When they sink a British ship, you don't get a moment of glory, you're shown the terribleness of the act. You're never cheering on the war effort. You're just feeling and understanding the people.

I love it. It's an amazing film and it's a shame they don't make films by these standards anymore.

Reid, it just depends on who "they" are. It's a little goofy to compare Das Boot to ****ing Transformers and say "they don't make 'em like they used to."

Truly remarkable, high quality, original film-making obviously only accounts for a small fraction of movies being made, but it still exists.

I've seen the argument made that this particular fraction is shrinking, which is noteworthy for sure.

Movies have definitely been transformed, by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. And I also remember when I was a kid, the version of the Holy Bible I was given had some inset pages that, e.g., ELI5'ed puberty by telling me that my "body is changing like a transformer".

That explains the "****ing transformers" bit

Did you know the unhealthy pallor developed by the crew is real? They filmed Das Boot in sequence over a year, and the cast was made to avoid sunlight. The full-scale interior set was also built on a motion rig so they could realistically simulate dives and depth charges ( alternative: did you know the PTSD developed by the crew is real? )

With characters like "The Metatron" who wouldn't insert Transformers into the bible?

Have they ever made films by such standards in America?

And yes, films in particular, not cable TV shows like The Wire which, based on what I've heard, would pass das Bootmark.

Check out Tod Browning's 1932 movie Freaks.

I think everyone knows the Germans have pretty much always done everything better.

I approve of this message.

Avengers #whatever finally landed on Netflix and I watched it because I didn’t have to pay money to see it. And I gotta say, it was worth every penny.

My favorite part was when that CGI blue monster used the power of the 6 chaos emeralds to prosecute his ecological crusade and beat the **** out of a rich roboticist,

My second favorite part of Avengers #Infinity: WAR! was when the movie had to repeatedly explain that Thanatos wanted to kill half of ALL life, because Disney sure as heck wasn’t gonna waste money on an extra to show the civilian impact of it. We’re really just going by their word here, aren’t we? For all we know, they’re lying and Thermos really did only kill superheroes. And I think he kinda has a point about overpopulation in that particular ecological niche.

I guess not showing the outcome makes it easier to localize for foreign dictatorships where mass killings are a good thing?

”ugh, we can’t have Spider-Man die as part of a purge, the Chinese will think he’s uyghur”

“what about black panther?”

”probably fine, it’s a feng shui thing”

I found out that people are a-okay with genocide as long as it doesn't seem like an ethnic cleansing.

There was so much about this movie that didn’t work, for so many reasons. This is how I imagine it went.

Executive: Hey, hows it going?
Director: Great, we’ve wrapped principal photography. We’ve only got 6 hours of usable footage but
Executive: 6 hours?!?
Director: Yeah but it’s okay because
Executive: We’d better make it two movies
Director: Umm
Executive: Yeah, we’ll make it two movies so we don’t have to waste any of that footage. We’ll use it all.
Director: UMMM


This should have been one movie. Or, alternatively, at least half of the scenes in this movie should have been cut. But there were also really important scenes they didn’t bother shooting so I guess maybe it could have been two movies if they’d bothered doing it well.

Here’s some examples.

The opening scene was entirely pointless and should have been cut for the sake of effective storytelling. Everybody saw the ship at the end of Thor 3. People have been imagining Thanos attacking the Asgardian ship for more than a year. You can’t compete against imagination and you shouldn’t even try; the movie should have opened with the Guardians of the Galaxy responding to the distress call, finding everybody dead except Thor.

Wakanda shouldn’t have been in this movie. It added nothing and as-is, this movie only tainted it. But really most of the Scarlet Witch/Vision scenes were unnecessary, didn’t even develop the characters and ended up going nowhere. They spent so much of the movie building up the relationship between those two characters and how reluctant Wanda was to do what was necessary, but you only needed three scenes to show that: the first when Vision looked human, the second when they talked about destroying the mind stone, and the last when Wanda does it. Everything else was pointless, including the entire trip to Wakanda. And Wanda is abruptly killed so who even cares? We don’t get to see her live with any kind of remorse over what she was willing to do. It’s a non-event that the characters aren’t even going to remember after the next movie anyway.

Thor’s return was squandered on a ****ty boring fight. Thor and Rabbit shouldn’t have returned until the climax (meaning the real climax, not the fake one they put in this movie when they split it into two).

They only ever explain the civilian impact through dialog. “The world is on fire!” says some congressman. But is it, though? They don’t show that. They don’t even say why it is on fire; we’d only seen Thanos’s minions fighting with Iron Man on a single New York street. Even if the destruction was catastrophic it’s still just New York, and they didn’t show anything happening anywhere else or offer any suggestion for why Thanos would have attacked anywhere else on earth.

And like I said, when Thanos killed half of all life, all we saw was a bunch of superheroes and Wakandan soldiers die. These were people already engaged in a pitched battle and willing to give up their lives for a cause. They should have shown civilians die. They didn’t have a problem showing New York skyscrapers getting dropped on dudes in the first one, so I don’t think it’s much to ask to have a pan around some shots of normal people turning into ash. Maybe it would make Thanos seem almost as ruthless as we’re supposed to think he is??

I saw Aquaman. Meh. Superhero films are already worn pretty thin, this one wasn't a trainwreck like most DC films but also wasn't particularly noteworthy in.. any way.

Can I complain about something in general with these films? Superhero films feel like they don't think they need to earn anything. Aquaman starts introducing Aquaman's background. Minor spoilers if you give a ****. Basically his mom washed up on some shore. A lighthouse guy found her. She tries to kill him but collapses. He rescues her. Very fast "fall in love" moment, Aquaman is born, then some dudes attack to bring her back. They're defeated. Then she leaves because they'll keep sending dudes to find her or something. Queue in a long scene about how sad it is that she is leaving.

But the scene doesn't work. I don't feel sad she's leaving. You know why? Because the film so far has done no significant work to make me give a **** about her or the relationship. It's been nothing but pointless exposition, you could imagine the script just says "and then they fall in love". I don't get why films feel they are entitled to emotional scenes when nothing built up towards that emotion. It's like they don't want to do the hard work of writing a convincing relationship and want to tell you when to feel sad.

I hate it. It's cheap and boring and is a bad way to write.

I haven't seen IW, but "****ty boring fight" basically encapsulates the genre.

I know it's just not my thing and never has been, but I'll never get where the tension is in fights based on arbitrary bull****.

It's surreal. I see them less as characters and more like corporate property to return the next day. There is always going to be another movie on the horizon.

Who the **** even wanted an Aquaman movie. Say it with me: Ahh-Qua-Maannnn.

Yeah, but all the same it's already made more money than Justice League did. Either way, they're not going away anytime soon.

Oh I know. It's just hard to accept they made an Aquaman movie and put this much effort into an 2.5 hour film about a man with the powers and personality of a fish.

Did they have an exit plan if this movie just bombed.

The sad thing is, the early MCU movies weren’t like this at all. The fights were more personal and the hero won by using the character traits that make them unique. Lately though, every single fight is some bull**** spectacle. The heroes don’t win because they earn it, they win because their Power Level is higher.

Are you excited for Captain Marvel, the most powerful superhero ever???!!

This is some Naruto **** right here.

Haven't seen any of this Avenger stuff, though I'm holding out for the Echoman Movie.

I, for one, am excited for which superhero's lasers took the longest to render. The lasers are what do it for me.

In other news.

We should feel grateful that the Lord of the Rings trilogy even exists. It's amazing to me each time I go back how well constructed they are give the source material. They're just such solid films. Great emotional tones, everything they do is built up to and is earned. Just the Battle for Helm's Deep is just fantastic. It's a logical progression, the tactics make sense, the stakes are high and believable. There's lots of great character payoffs, there's character development while it happens. I can't do enough to express how great it is and contrast it to how bad other "epic" films are in comparison (Aquaman. Cough.).

And no, I haven't seen all of The Hobbit films. I saw the 2nd, and I decided that was enough for me..

there's no reason to watch the hobbit films

i mean except to check out how long the lasers took to render etc.

(Skip to 3:32 for lasers)

Ah, much improved.

I tried to watch the new Netflix interactive Black Mirror movie, Blandsnacks. A few thoughts:

1. For a people who invented, and ostensibly speak English, I sure have a hard time understanding what the English are saying. I had to use subtitles.
B. I got a couple of "bad" endings pretty early on and was told to start over/go back a few times.
iii. It wasn't a very good movie, and I didn't finish it (other than the bad endings I got about half an hour in) I went to the programmer guy's apartment instead of seeing the shrink. We took drugs and one of us jumped off the balcony and that was that.

Anyone else give it a shot?

oy, thaz a tad racis’, innit?

eh?