Movies you like that no one else does

[Guest LiterateParakeet]

Oh and Swing Kids. Its one of my favorites. Its historical fiction about World War II. So tragic and beautiful. Most people I talk to have never heard of it.

[Vort]

Adventures in Babysitting: No one remembers this film, but I thought it was a blast. Haven't seen it in decades, so I'm not sure what I would think today. But I loved it at the time, when everyone else bagged on it.

Undercover Blues: What is wrong with people that they don't like this movie? What's not to like? I tend to like Dennis Quaid anyway, and this popcorn-muncher with Kathleen Turner was a lot of silly fun. If you haven't seen it, you should.

Next: Yes, it's an amateurish movie with an intriguing but kinda-silly plot, mediocre writing, and directing no better than competent. Plus, you know, Nicholas Cage, whom everyone except me seems to think is subpar. (If this were the only Cage movie I had ever seen, I might tend to agree.) But say what you will. The movie just worked for me.

Almost everything I've seen with Tom Cruise: Everyone's favorite Hollywood whipping boy just makes solid movie after solid movie. From his Mission: Impossible movies to his various pop-SF films, he brings a warmth, humor, and intelligence to his characters that I just like. Yet many love to rake him over the coals because they think (get ready for this) his religion is weird.

Again I ask, what is wrong with people?

[NeedleinA]

On 3/15/2020 at 5:59 PM, Midwest LDS said:

I also liked the Last Samurai.

Speaking of Tom Cruise The Edge of tomorrow.

19 minutes ago, Vort said:

Almost everything I've seen with Tom Cruise:

As a family, we have enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow and all the Mission Impossible movies.
And yes, I remember Adventures in Babysitting with Daniel LaRusso's girlfriend!

 

[LadyGunnar]

John Wayne movies. Big Jake, McLintock, Donavan's reef, and on. I don't like it when he is younger. 

Old musicals. I loved Gene Kelly, Howard Keel, Jane powel.

My husband says I should be much older with my taste in movies and music.

[Vort]

56 minutes ago, NeedleinA said:

Adventures in Babysitting with Daniel LaRusso's girlfriend!

So THAT"s where I know her from!

[JohnsonJones]

11 hours ago, LadyGunnar said:

John Wayne movies. Big Jake, McLintock, Donavan's reef, and on. I don't like it when he is younger. 

Old musicals. I loved Gene Kelly, Howard Keel, Jane powel.

My husband says I should be much older with my taste in movies and music.

Good Choices!

[tesuji]

A couple sci fi come to mind:

Jupiter Ascending
This is the perfect movie for me - space opera, escapist, interesting new angles on the genre. I thought it was a lot of fun.
Doesn't get much love on IMDB - only 5.3 out of 10
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1617661/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_4

Passengers (2016)
Another space movie. The ship seems so wonderful - I want to travel on it! 
I think the low ratings from critics were partly due to it coming out right after the 2016 election results, and grouchy critics weren't in the mood for this kind of movie.
Also, I think some people (many women?) are angered at the choice the man makes for the woman (OK, but empathize with his situation a little; and also - what would have ended up happening to the woman at the end of the movie if he hadn't made that choice?) 
Rotten Tomatoes - 31% critics's rating, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/passengers_2016
IMDB is kinder at 7/10, but I think this score used to be lower - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355644/

 

 

Edited March 22, 2020 by tesuji

[Guest MormonGator]

For @NeuroTypical

[NeuroTypical]

...the heck is that?  Some sort of Disney's Robin Hood, except with humans instead of foxes?

[Jamie123]

Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Pryddain has been on my to-read list for about 30 years, and for most of that time I refused to watch the movie till I'd read the books. I've since been led to understand that the books and the movie have little in common. Lloyd Alexander himself claimed that he enjoyed the Disney movie, but he saw no connection between it and anything he had written.

I always liked David Lynch's Dune, though there's a kind of heresy in saying that. It's not 100% true to the book I grant you, but that doesn't make it a bad movie.

I also liked The Postman with Kevin Costner. People sneer at it, saying it's "Waterworld without the water" - and then go on to pan Waterworld too.

I quite liked Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings. My main complaint is that it was cheaply finished off with rotoscoping instead of proper animation. If Bakshi had had the budget to make the entire movie to the same standards as the best scenes in it it would have been fantastic. (BTW I think Annette Crosby was way better as Galadriel than Cate Blanchett was. As for Treebeard though...*shudder*.) 

 

Edited June 16, 2020 by Jamie123

[NeuroTypical]

Just now, Jamie123 said:

I always liked David Lynch's Dune, though there's a kind of heresy in saying that. It's not 100% true to the book I grant you, but that doesn't make it a bad movie.

It can be an acquired taste, that's for sure.  I liked it too.

FYI, there's breaking news on the new 2020 Dune.  We should have trailers and release information in July.

[Carborendum]

23 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

I always liked David Lynch's Dune, though there's a kind of heresy in saying that. It's not 100% true to the book I grant you, but that doesn't make it a bad movie.

I agree that it doesn't mean it's a bad movie.  But to say "It's not 100% true to the book" is a monumental understatement.

I liked the movie because as a stand-alone story/movie, it was pretty good.  I just have to consider them two completely different stories.  Then I can enjoy both the book and the film.

Just the other day my family saw a "new take" on the Cinderella story.  If I weren't acutely aware of source material, I would have thought the stories were completely unrelated.  But it was a cute film.  It had some similarities:

Wicked step-mother and sisters.
Put-upon main character daughter.
Eventually gets together with the man of her dreams.
She even dropped a shoe on her way from some big gala event.

But that was where the similarities ended.  It was a COMPLETELY different story.  And I'd like to see how just about any modern rendition of Cinderella has the "turn and peep" sequence AT ALL (other than "Into the Woods").

Edited June 16, 2020 by Carborendum

[Jamie123]

 

49 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I agree that it doesn't mean it's a bad movie.  But to say "It's not 100% true to the book" is a monumental understatement.

I wouldn't say "monumental". Here are the differences as I remember them:

• I'm pretty sure Paul was younger in the book than he appears in the movie. I can't recall if the book ever specified his age, but I imagined he was mid-teens (though forced by circumstances to "grow up fast"). Kyle McLaughlin looked more like he was around 20.
• Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis) is much more outwardly emotional in the movie than she was in the book. Her Bene Gesserit training causes her to keep all that inside.
• The weirding modules do not appear in the book.
• Ditto the Harkonnen heart plugs.
• Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck is nothing like the Gurney Halleck of the book. In fact Freddie Jones (who plays Thufir Hawat) would have been closer. Simiarly Stewart would have been better cast as Hawat.
• In the book, all aircraft are ornithopters. (They fly by flapping their wings.) In the movie they all have fixed wings.
• In the books, the "third stage Guild navigator" does not appear until Dune Messiah.
• The idea of Guild ships "travelling without moving" is not introduced until much later in the book series. As far as any reader of Dune knows they are just ordinary (though exceedingly large) spaceships.
• It does not rain at the end of the book. (By the third book rain has become quite common on Arrakis, but that is set a generation later.

On the other hand there is a considerable narrowing of the plot. In the book, much more is at stake than the Atraides' revenge on the Harkonenns: Paul sees the devastation which is coming to the universe, but once things start moving he is powerless to stop it. From the movie alone you'd be forgiven for thinking that "kwisatz haderach" simply meant the Fremen messiah ("lisan al gaib" - quite a different concept in the book). The end seems to be a great victory of right over wrong - which of course it is nothing of the sort. But unless they were planning a Star Wars style movie series, there would be little point in elaborating on these things.

Edited June 16, 2020 by Jamie123

[Carborendum]

11 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

• I'm pretty sure Paul was younger in the book than he appears in the movie. I can't recall if the book ever specified his age, but I imagined he was mid-teens (though forced by circumstances to "grow up fast"). Kyle McLaughlin looked more like he was around 20.

He was a young teenager in the book, online says 15.  I thought he was 13.  But it's been a while.  Kyle MacLachlan was 34 years old during filming.  Quite the jump.

Quote

• Lady Jessica is much more outwardly emotional in the movie than she was in the book. Her Bene Gesserit training causes her to keep all that inside.

I didn't mind this so much.  There were so many italicized passages indicating the inner thoughts of all the characters that it simply wasn't made for the big screen.  So, some efficiency was due.

Quote

• The weirding modules do not appear in the book.

Yes.  And they didn't really go into the weirding way enough to really understand what that was.  The Sci-Fi  Channel miniseries had an interesting take.

Quote

• Ditto the Harkonnen heart plugs.

That was... disgusting.

Quote

• Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck is nothing like the Gurney Halleck of the book. In fact Freddie Jones (who plays Thufir Hawat) would have been closer. Simiarly Stewart would have been better cast as Gurney.

I agree with Stewart as Hawat.  But Freddie Jones as Gurney?  No, I'm thinking someone more like Jason Statham.

Quote

• In the book, all aircraft are ornithopters. (They fly by flapping their wings.) In the movie they all have fixed wings.

I never got that the wings "flapped".  Did the books actually say that?  I had assumed by the naming convention that the wings were more like humming birds which don't "flap". They tend to "cycle".  Whatever you call it, hummingbirds wings don't do what other birds wings do.

Quote

• It does not rain at the end of the book. (By the third book rain has become quite common on Arrakis, but that is set a generation later.

Looking at it from a fan of the books, I understood why they had it rain.  But from the perspective of one who had not read the books, it would have seemed a very strange ending without something like that.

Quote

On the other hand there is a considerable narrowing of the plot. In the book, much more is at stake than the Atraides' revenge on the Harkonenns: Paul sees the devastation which is coming to the universe, but once things start moving he is powerless to stop it.

The fact that he walked away at the end of the second book would say otherwise.  And the end of "God Emperor" says that he found a way to stop it.

Quote

From the movie alone you'd be forgiven for thinking that "kwisatz haderach" simply meant the Fremen messiah ("lisan al gaib" - quite a different concept in the book).

The Kwisatz Haderach was first mentioned by the Reverend Mother in the book.  It was expanded upon by the Fremen.  And this was similar to the book.  But they just brushed over the significance in the movie.  The idea was that they all had a different idea of what the messiah was to be like.  But it turned out that they were all right.  But each only had a piece of the puzzle.  Only Paul realized what the full significance of this messiah was as he took up the mantle.

Quote

The end seems to be a great victory of right over wrong - which of course it is nothing of the sort. But unless they were planning a Star Wars style movie series, there would be little point in elaborating on these things.

The end of the movie left much to be desired.

[Jamie123]

4 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I agree with Stewart as Hawat.

Yes I meant Hawat of course. I changed it.

5 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

I never got that the wings "flapped". 

I'm pretty sure it states in the glossary at the end that an "ornithopter" flapped its wings like a bird.

6 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

The fact that he walked away at the end of the second book would say otherwise.

By that time the Jihad had already cost trillions of lives across the universe, with some entire planet populations wiped out. I always thought the "walking away" was to save himself. He knew by that time that the next step on the "golden path" would be to join with the sandworm and become the "God Emperor" - which he didn't want (who would?) so he abdicated that to his son. Some dad! LOL

 

[Vort]

19 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

I'm pretty sure Paul was younger in the book than he appears in the movie. I can't recall if the book ever specified his age, but I imagined he was mid-teens (though forced by circumstances to "grow up fast"). Kyle McLaughlin looked more like he was around 20.

My take:

This is almost always the case with Hollywood. Male teens are a huge market for such movies, and a male teen typically wants to see a protagonist who is a few years older than himself. Along with the demands of acting, which can overwhelm a younger child, ages for roles are typically moved into mid-teens to provide more "connection" with the audience, and the producers try to cast young-looking actors for the roles. Remember the Ender's Game movie? Not a bad film, certainly better than it might have been. But Ender was supposed to have been six.

Six.

Nopers. He morphed into a mid-teen for the movie. Why? Many reasons, but primarily because the teen audience (or so it is always thought in Hollywood) wouldn't turn out to watch a movie with some six-year-old kid as the protagonist.

THE SECRET ABOUT HOLLYWOOD THAT MOST PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF HOLLYWOOD DON'T KNOW

Hollywood is super-duper, head-in-the-sand conservative.

Not in the modern political sense, but in the classic cover-your-assets sense. Despite its blaring,  politically correct voice, Hollywood has long been thoroughly racist in that it has hesitated to cast a black man in a standalone leading role. (You can find the odd historical exception, e.g. many blaxploitation films—including Black Panther, btw—and in recent years that has slowly changed somewhat. Will Smith, talented and good-looking, has been a popular leading man even in a standalone role. Samuel L. Jackson has made a great many more movies than his mediocre talent alone can explain. So this is changing a bit. But if black Americans constitute 17% of the population, go investigate whether 17% of the leading men and women in films are black. Then ask yourself why not.)

Why this type of undisguised racism, in Hollywood of all places? Because Hollywood banks big money on many films, commonly in the tens of millions of dollars and sometimes as much as $100 million or more. Those who finance such enormous sums demand good odds of getting their money back, hopefully with a profit. So Hollywood goes the tried-and-true route, again and again and again and again and again and again. Ever noticed how popular sequels are in Hollywood? Ever wondered why? That's why.

But I'm no insider, nor even a competent film critic. I'm just some outside observer. So take what I have written with a grain of salt.

[Vort]

2 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

...the heck is that?  Some sort of Disney's Robin Hood, except with humans instead of foxes?

A Google search says The Black Cauldron. Never seen it.

[Guest MormonGator]

4 minutes ago, Vort said:

A Google search says The Black Cauldron. Never seen it.

He knows, I think he was just playing. 

It's a "classic" Disney movie that Disney has long ignored because it bombed at the theaters and isn't really well known. 

[Jamie123]

I'm going to get "roasted as a racist" for saying this, but I'd love - just once - to see Song of the South in its entirety. I've only ever seen the Brer Rabbit segments, and the "zippety doo dah" scene on The Wonderful World of Disney when I was a kid. I believe they did once release it as a DVD, but you can't get it for love nor money now. These days Disney prefers to pretend that the movie never existed.

[Vort]

4 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

I'm going to get "roasted as a racist" for saying this, but I'd love - just once - to see Song of the South in its entirety. I've only ever seen the Brer Rabbit segments, and the "zippety doo dah" scene on The Wonderful World of Disney when I was a kid. I believe they did once release it as a DVD, but you can't get it for love nor money now. These days Disney prefers to pretend that the movie never existed.

You horrible racist, you.

The Song of the South was one of the cutest and most enjoyable animated/live action movies ever made, by Disney or anyone else. It's a treasure. Future generations will enjoy it, historical context and all, and will be amazed that our generation was so stupid as to reject it as somehow offensive to descendants of the slave population.

Enjoy!

https://archive.org/details/SongOfTheSouth_Disney

Edited June 16, 2020 by Vort

[Jamie123]

11 minutes ago, Vort said:

You horrible racist, you.

The Song of the South was one of the cutest and most enjoyable animated/live action movies ever made, by Disney or anyone else. It's a treasure. Future generations will enjoy it, historical context and all, and will be amazed that our generation was so stupid as to reject it as somehow offensive to descendants of the slave population.

Enjoy!

https://archive.org/details/SongOfTheSouth_Disney

That is SO cool!! Thanks!

[NeuroTypical]

2 hours ago, Jamie123 said:

Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck is nothing like the Gurney Halleck of the book.

How dare you question the keeper of the BattlePug!  So impressive, I made it my avatar.

 

 

Also, let's hope they get the outfights right in 2020:

[Carborendum]

11 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

How dare you question the keeper of the BattlePug!  So impressive, I made it my avatar.

I have been wondering about that avatar ever since I came back here.  Cropping it out removed all chance of me recognizing that image.

[Carborendum]

2 hours ago, Jamie123 said:

I'm pretty sure it states in the glossary at the end that an "ornithopter" flapped its wings like a bird.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ornithopter

Apparently, it was jet powered.  But the wings were used for maneuverability.

While many images are online that look more hawk-like, I always invisioned something like:

 (as shown on the Dune wiki)

Quote

By that time the Jihad had already cost trillions of lives across the universe, with some entire planet populations wiped out. I always thought the "walking away" was to save himself. He knew by that time that the next step on the "golden path" would be to join with the sandworm and become the "God Emperor" - which he didn't want (who would?) so he abdicated that to his son. Some dad! LOL

I didn't get that from the books.   Paul knew he, himself, could not any longer since he was blind.

I also got the impression that Paul believed NO one should go down that path.  I don't believe he knew that Leto (II) would be able to go down the golden path at all.  He was surprised to learn that Leto had indeed done so.

Part of being the K.H. was that you had to have the balance of both aggression and compassion (both male and female).  But the golden path would require that he detach himself from humanity entirely to the point where he simply couldn't relate to them anymore.  Without that empathy, he would have neither compassion nor aggression.  He would simply be "above all that."  There is no aggression in stepping on an ant.

Leto was indeed above all that for many centuries until the Tleilaxu created that girl.  I forget her name.  But that was the first time he felt human in a very long time.  He actually felt vulnerable.

But anyway.  I liked the Sci-Fi series as a TV series.  I liked the movie as a theatrical film.  I liked the books as books.  But I couldn't get through Heretics.

Edited June 16, 2020 by Carborendum

[Vort]

It has been many decades since I read Dune, but I see to remember various descriptions of ornithopter flight detailing how the wing motion went from normal flight to short, cupped motions. Or something like that. Based on such descriptions, I always presumed the ornithopters were wing-flapping airplanes.