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[teg]

ITT teg bein' all up on top of the times by watching movies several decades before her time

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is basically perfect.


I think the reason why practical effects are coming back in style recently is because, while everyone and their dog knows at least the basic principles behind CG, I can look back at old movies like this and legitimately think "how the hell did they do that?"

[Mothra]

I rewatched this with my dad a couple weeks back, as well as the making-of. Evidently they made two different Gort suits, one with the zipper in front and one with it on back. The saucer itself was also basically half a saucer, with the backside all 2x4's sticking the thing up.

It then proceeds to interview the kid who played Bobby and it all gets significantly lesson engaging.

Good watch as ever, though. My favorite guy is still the ambassador for the U.S., Harley. Dude is just completely honest:

Mr. Harley: Your impatience is quite understandable.

Klaatu: I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it.

Mr. Harley: I'm afraid my people haven't. I'm very sorry... I wish it were otherwise.

ALSO

I never got this before, likely because I was only paying half-attention in the past, but Gort is Klaatu's master, isn't he? They give their robots full authority over them to destroy violence wherever it appears. Their solution was essentially to allow themselves to be dominated by an artificially altruistic force.

[Büge]

I think the reason why practical effects are coming back in style recently is because, while everyone and their dog knows at least the basic principles behind CG, I can look back at old movies like this and legitimately think "how the hell did they do that?"

Just like the Pyramids!

[Beat Bandit]

I watched Tiimer a while ago, long enough ago to forget any details that would help you decide on it, but I recommend it. Not highly but like, if you have Netflix and some time to kill it's at the top of that list.



This week trapped more-or-less without internet I finally got around to watching Crash and what the fuck, society? Why was this the greatest movie ever that everyone jerked off over when it came out? Now, I know this movie isn't old enough to be spoiler-immune but it's well watched enough for me to not bother with tags, so keep that in mind.

First off and most minor, the car accidents had basically nothing to do with the movie. I can't think of a single event in the movie that required the car accidents, they could have been any other thing in the world and you have the exact same movie without any other editing. For this reason I have renamed the movie Don't you Feel Like a Douche? and I feel that makes a lot more sense for this story. Okay, now to get into the specifics. I'll describe each character using one word and I guarantee anyone reading this will know who I'm talking about as soon as they read it.
I would use their names, but that would require I care enough to remember. Actually, the only character I cared about was Mexican, and we only meet him to move two other character plots forward. He has what, two scenes? ShucknJive was a fun character I guess, but only because that term makes me giggle every time I think of it. There were some other people too, but they didn't matter because we had racist and he was the entire plot. Racism, not to be confused with the character, was the entire plot by the way. In case you didn't notice. That's cool I guess, it's totally topical and no one has ever heard that LA is racist, so I'm glad the word got out on that.
Really the only thing to watch it for is that it does make good on Chekhov's gun and it gets points for that. Even the Shamalamadingdong-esque tweeeests were weak, though. More "The Happening" then "The Sixth Sense". I mean, if you didn't realize the bullets were blanks as soon as Mexican got in a fight with Muslim you weren't paying any attention. I can't really fault you for that though. It was nice how they do manage to tie everything together, but once I went through my dad's DVDs I moved on to my little sister's books and Dear Dumb Diary did a better job of that.

tl;dr: DyFLaD is pretty good I guess. I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't choose it over... much, but it's watchable. It didn't deserve half the reception it got but I guess you get enough names people recognize together and critics will just Shuck 'n Jive.



hehehe

[Büge]

I was confused for a moment, but then I realized you were talking about Crash: Thirty Two Short Films About Racist Pig Cop Pulp Fiction and not Crash: The Only Way These People Could Get More Perverted Is If They Were Wearing Fursuits.

[Beat Bandit]

I saw that one shortly after the newer one came out and made the same mistake. I was even more disappointed in humanity then.

[Brentai]

The fun part is trying to figure out which director was masturbating harder while making it.

[teg]

Plan 9 From Outer Space doesn't really deserve its reputation as "the worst film of all time". Plenty of films have been more poorly made, and Plan 9 is at least unintentionally uproarious.

I mean, that guy knocking over the tombstone? Hilarious.

[Mothra]

Yeah, saw the live Rifftrax of this a couple months back. It's definitely abysmal, but it's entertaining as the dickens, which is a lot more than I can say for most movies of its era.

[Brentai]

I never quite got that either, but I wasn't alive when Ed Wood was trying to push it on people.  I imagine at some point he took out an ad in every magazine reading "ED WOOD IS GOING TO MAKE YOU HIS BITCH", which is generally the quickest way to achieve everlasting notoriety.

At the very least you can't tell me it's worse than The Begotten* though.


* NSFW in case you didn't know.

[Mothra]

It's mostly that it's the most overt B-movie ever made. I mean it's got flying saucers and vampires and zombies thrown into the same premise.

Usually when folks are calling it the worst movie ever, they just mean it's the ultimate B-movie.

[Fredward]

You're Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!

[teg]

So now that I've watched the original, I'm watching The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008 version).

Okay, the original is a tough act to follow. It's basically perfect and very difficult to modernize. But you can't just shoehorn your own message into an existing script. You just can't. Like the original, the military serves as the primary antagonist, yet the plot tells us that they're not the antagonist. Generally speaking, a film comes off as really incongruous if your characters literally have to tell the audience what the problem is.
This bizarre compromise between the more relevant new additions and adherence to the original story is what really ruins this for me, simply because it's not well thought-out.

Why was there another alien? He doesn't tell Klaatu anything he couldn't have learned from a human character, and Klaatu seems to completely disregard him anyway.
Why does Klaatu want to deliver a message to the UN if he's just going to wipe out humanity afterward?
Why has nobody been noticing the spheres if they've been coming to Earth for decades?
Why does Gort respond to violence if it's indestructible? Anti-violence isn't the message of the film anymore, and it responds to being attacked even when it's not protecting Klaatu.
Why does the government bother covering up Klaatu's escape? The entire Earth knows there is an alien. Every single time somebody turns on a TV the news programs are either showing something about the alien landing or a mysteriously high-priority "escaped convict." You would think somebody would put two and two together.

None of it really makes a lot of sense. and in the end, the deviations from the original are pretty brutal. There's no speech to the UN. There's no Klaatu Barada Nikto. The Earth doesn't stand still*. Everything has been gutted and replaced with grim seriousness and an uncharacteristic amount of violence from Klaatu and Gort.
As a movie, it's an okay film filled with plot holes. As a remake, it really doesn't have much to do with the source material.


*It's sort of kind of implied by the ending that Klaatu shut off the power, and there's mention of an oil shortage throughout the film, but there's no clear warning.

[Büge]

Sounds like the film didn't even merit a "Whoa."

[Dooly]

There's no Klaatu Barada Nikto.

By the way, those bwort bwort bwort noises? That's Keanu Reeves saying the famous line, "Klaatu barada nikto", which was apparently inserted into the film at Reeves's insistence. I feel good knowing I'm not alone in totally not even noticing it—there's a whole article about it at Sci Fi Wire. It's so digitally altered (and with a backwards version played on top of the forwards version) that it's impossible to know it's there unless you've read about it on the Internet and are determined to hear it by sheer act of faith. That's how you separate the fanboys from the poseurs. "I heard klaatu barada nikto! The Voice of Keanu spoke to me, and I alone was witness!"

Oh, it's in there, but it's just completely gutted and meaningless.

EDIT: It turns out that the Sci Fi Wire article linked therein doesn't exist anymore.  Not my fault.

[Kashan]

I'm torn, on one hand it's nice that Reeves realized the remake was kind of trampling on some of the important parts of the classic, on the other he still decided to be in the movie and I can't imagine that it wasn't obvious this movie sucked from the script.

[Mothra]

That remake is just completely unforgivable

[teg]

Reeves makes a good emotionless alien, which would be entirely relevant if Klaatu weren't supposed to be so compassionate.
I mean, Klaatu is basically Jesus.


It would seem that I am making it my accidental mission to watch every major version of Dracula.

Nosferatu is even older than I thought it was, it would seem! It's a silent film, and like most silent films the dialogue is exceedingly sparse without the audience really noticing. The version I watched (the Kino version) was colourized in an extremely odd way: each scene is entirely one colour, with the colour indicating the intended lighting. Blue is for night scenes, yellow is daylight or lamplight, purples and reds are sunrise/sunset, etcetera. It all makes for a very surreal viewing experience. Some of the narrative doesn't really make a lot of sense (Despite being important plot points, it's never shown how Hutter got back from Transylvania before Orlok or how Knock became Orlok's slave), but there's a lot of atmosphere to the whole thing. I consider Count Orlok to be one of the most legitimately terrifying movie monsters because his design is so creepy, but I also like how much he differentiates from his Dracula roots. He spreads the plague rather than vampirism, and his downfall is entirely his own undoing rather than by the action of any of the human characters. And he's called "The Bird Of Death"! How cool is that.

Also, this movie is the origin of the good part of the Thriller dance. Really. Orlok does the pose and glides off in just one shot.

[Mothra]

In that Day the Earth Stood Still documentary thing I watched the director straight-up said that Klaatu was meant to be Jesus. It feels like that was kind of fashionable at the time, as I see it all over the damn place in 50's-60's sci-fi, but the way he said it was oddly evasive. It's kind of the same thing as Aslan from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - Lewis never admitted to it outright but through letters he wrote to folks that asked directly.

I never got why people hid this stuff. Maybe it had no meaning when they wrote it in but that the savior character fit?

[Brentai]

My best guess is that that sort of indulgent wankery isn't any less pathetic when it isn't a JRPG.