The Last Movie You Watched

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I loved it.  

I thought the first one was absolutely terrific.  This one just pissed me off: A cyborg from the future travels back in time to kill a teenaged boy - golly, how original. 

Boru

I think you missed the parody angle here. The whole franchise mocks the MCU/DCU. I mean can you see Tony Stark changing Hitler's diaper?

[EgoDeath]

I was very disappointed by Polar. Netflix films/shows are at like a 20% approval rate for me personally. It's at the point where I should know better than to even click on a Netflix film.

I just somehow watched The Pianist for the first time and wow, what an amazing movie. Adrien Brody is amazing.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Life's a Jungle: Africa's Most Wanted. It's basically a mockbuster of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and you can tell how much care they put into the film when you look at the box and it says it's a paltry 70 minutes long, the disc says it's 88 minutes long, and the actual movie is 100.





It's basically a riff on Call of the Wild, the story of a beloved and pampered family dog who gets lost on safari and becomes a wild animal. Instead of a St. Bernard/Collie mix, it's a Jack Russell terrier with a cardigan who's built like a bodybuilder, for some reason. His name is Pip, and, for some reason, his family pronounces it strange. IHE said it sounded like his name was Poop, but it's more like they think there's an umlaut in the name. I was willing to chalk it down to them being South African, but apparently, they're from Cambridge, Massachussets. Which doesn't explain why they seem to live in a mansion overnight distance from the Serengheti. The CGI is terrible, like something the Veggietales guys tried before they figured out they're better off trying to anthropomorphise vegetables. The motion is often uncanny and the backgrounds often look like they've been bleach bypassed.

The strangest thing of all is the sound: it's pretty clear they're relying on stock sound effects [seriously, I'm pretty sure I've heard the panther's roar in some old MGM commercials; and it's the same two over and over again], and it's clear they're not even trying to make it sound natural. They can vary widely in sound quality and volume, to the extent that one scene of a cat's meow's is a lot softer, tinnier, and boxier than the sound of the baseball it throws at Pip. The music is barely utilised, and it's often just stock classical music (to their credit, they do put an excruciating amount of detail in crediting everything about it, from the standard details to its recording date, the YouTube channel they ripped it off of, and even its unedited length, down to the millisecond. When it's not used, which is a lot of the time, well, you know how Jan Svankmajer's movies often lack dialogue and music, and, to compensate, the sound effects are really loud, to make it all the more unnerving?



Well, a lot of the time, it manages to feel like the same, except they put shitty dialogue and voice acting into the mix.

The pacing is very slow, but, at least, unlike The Disappointments Room, at least they know something about pacing and structure. Still, there's a lot of dead air, and I think if they cut out some of it, it might not only actually match one of the runtimes on the packaging, it might also be more entertaining. Also, I just watched a scene where they introduced a three-toed sloth and Pip points out that they're South American, not Africa. The fuck?

Overall, I think it's the best film I've seen for The Deep Hurting Project so far. It's not quite as entertaining as the Bratz movie or Battlefield Earth (bear in mind, they're not officially part of The Project until I re-watch them, which will be during my trip to Door County) but at least it's tolerable in a way that the other films I've seen for it have utterly failed to be.

[Rev. Rye]

This week on the Deep Hurting Project: Andrew Wakefield's Vaxxed.

For those of us who don't know, Andrew Wakefield was a British doctor who claimed that he found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and nobody was able to replicate its results. People studied the MMR vaccine and weren't able to replicate his results; even when Japan withdrew it altogether, the incidence of autism still rose. Then they latched onto Thimerosal, and when many countries (including the US) phased it out, autism cases still grew. Then they decided it was down to the over-busy vaccine schedule, and even when some other countries changed theirs, cases of autism still rose. Then, over a decade after Wakefield's study was published, people realised that the reason Wakefield's results couldn't be replicated because he manipulated the data, and his previously acknowledged conflicts of interest led to the thing being entirely retracted and Wakefield being struck from the medical register. So, with his credibility buggered and celebrity fans like Jenny McCarthy and Robert DeNiro (ROBERT FUCKING DENIRO, WHO ACTUALLY PUT THE FILM ON THE 2016 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL SCHEDULE), he managed to put a documentary together about his pet theory.


Naturally, there's a lot of bullshit bandied about in this film, and it's what you'd expect:

• that somehow there's a link between autism and vaccines, and that if someone seems to develop symptoms of autism after getting a vaccine, it's because of the vaccine and not because these symptoms just become more obvious to the untrained person around the time they get it. At the Autism Omnibus trial, the closest thing these anti-vaxxers have had to a class-action lawsuit, they showed a video of how a certain child used to be a "normal" baby until she had a vaccine, and points out that even in the video they used to show this point, she STILL showed pretty obvious (to a specialist) symptoms of autism.
  
• that the actual incidence of autism is growing and that somehow, our increased understanding of autism and that people have finally figured out we don't all act like Raymond Babbit isn't related to it.
  
• Parenthood overrides the invalidity of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
  
• People can somehow "regress" into autism.
  
• Autism is more or less an intellectual dead end, and the fact that people on the spectrum can range in functioning from the sort of profoundly effected kids Autism Speaks likes to trot out all the way up to physicists whose contributions to the field rival Einstein.
  
• Autism somehow has an effect on gastrointestinal function.
  
• Wakefield's discredited paper isn't the only study to document this "rise," but also this other one which is also questionable.
  
• Surprisingly, it took halfway through the film before they brought up Big Pharma conspiracy theories. And, surprisingly or not, the fact that Wakefield was himself subsidised by Big Pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson, Merck, SmithKline Beecham, and Axcan Pharma Inc, at least until he became a liability.
  
• All three of the main theories are given significant play, and the mainstream hypothesis is explained only to dismiss it entirely.
  

To be fair, he admits he's a bit more moderate about vaccines than many of his acolytes, being more concerned about the specific MMR vaccine than vaccines in general. That said, this film seems to pander a lot to the full-on anti-vaxxers.

As a film, it's competently put together. It looks professionally made, and one wouldn't suspect that this was the work of a first-time director like Andrew Wakefield is; even the scenes where a phone call with William W. Thompson is heard, I have to admit I like the fact that he had the soundtrack represented by these squiggly lines that looked like multi-coloured cigarette smoke.

On the other hand, well, there is no excuse whatsoever for a documentary to fuck up the facts this badly. And for a documentary to do so for such a despicable cause, being cavalier about the rise of potentially deadly diseases because you seriously think autism is the greater evil than, well, pick a fucking disease. That said, there are two movies, The Other Side of AIDS, and House of Numbers, that promote similar denialism, denying that HIV causes AIDS. The former film includes a woman who was HIV+ and breastfed her daughter. In the time between the release of the two documentaries, the daughter and mother both died... of AIDS. Those two films may objectively cause more damage than this one, especially in developing nations, but I have autism and I don't have HIV. So, I'll just let Jon Stewart and this gospel choir he hired for this purpose explain my final verdict:





Also, apparently, according to the film, they expect half of all children born in 2032 (and 80% of boys) to have autism at the rate it's been "increasing." I look forward to laughing at this statistic in about 15 years.

[Athene]

FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, on a co-worker's recommendation.
And it did not disappoint.

The most unintentionally hilarious documentary ever. Laughed so hard, I could barely speak.

[EgoDeath]

FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, on a co-worker's recommendation.
And it did not disappoint.

The most unintentionally hilarious documentary ever. Laughed so hard, I could barely speak.

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I was really disappointed to hear about this and was dumbfounded after watching the documentary. People need to be in jail for doing this to people; it's absolutely insane.

Goes to show not just anyone can throw a music festival.

[Rev. Rye]

FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, on a co-worker's recommendation.
And it did not disappoint.

The most unintentionally hilarious documentary ever. Laughed so hard, I could barely speak.

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I was really disappointed to hear about this and was dumbfounded after watching the documentary. People need to be in jail for doing this to people; it's absolutely insane.

Goes to show not just anyone can throw a music festival.

To be fair, Billy himself is currently in FCI Otisville for the next six years for wire fraud as a direct result of his shenanigans.

Also, here's a brief rundown of the events that led to the disaster that was Fyre Festival:




Apparently, it looks like things could have actually been halfway decent, but, crucially, Billy-boy took out far too many short-term loans and all those ambitious ideas he had planned for the festival might have actually been doable if, if nothing else, he had decided to hold back on the festival for at least another year. Granted, I have yet to watch either Hulu or Netflix' documentaries, but I suspect that they'll just build on the same material.

At the moment, I'm watching this week's entry in the Deep Hurting Project: Soviet Avengers Guardians. So far, I think this may end up being the first consistently "So Bad It's Good" film in the Project. More detailed reporting to follow.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Watching "Under the Skin", with Scarlett Johansson. Somebody explain that shit.

[Rev. Rye]

This week's entry in the Deep Hurting Project is The Guardians, and, of all the films in the Project, this is probably the first one I'd actually consider buying on DVD.

I like to call it Soviet Avengers, because, well, that's basically what it is: the Guardians are basically a group of superheroes created by the Soviet government during the Cold War, and they're being reunited in the present day because there's a supervillain who can control any vehicle he sees and the Russian Army is powerless against him. The only people who can defeat them: an Earthbender, a Bear version of the Incredible Hulk (who also has a fucking Gat on his back), a guy with super speed (who uses it in a very bizarre way: he jump cuts to various locations, accompanied by smoke and just stands in one place, maybe moving his two giant fucking sieves in slow-motion, and then teleports to another location to repeat the cycle as long as he has to; well, at least it's effective enough to cut through an SUV like butter), and an unusually flexible woman who can turn invisible (only in water, though) and is impervious to temperature changes (except when she isn't.)

This movie had a budget of 330 million Rubles; in US terms, that's roughly $5 million. For a superhero movie, that's pretty fucking cheap. So, how do they spend it?



Why, yes, this does look like shit. And the dubbing is hilariously bad, the actors are wooden, the dialogue is stilted, and they still don't have the lips match. Remarkably, even THE ORIGINAL RUSSIAN VERSION IS LIKE THIS. To be fair, apparently, it's standard operating procedure for dubs in Russia to just be one guy doing all the voices and not even trying to make it match, often with the original audio barely audible below it, and I have a DVD of Tarkovsky's Stalker with an English dub that does the same damn thing, so at least that's a step up.

And, of course, if you're familiar with the MCU, you'll know how they had to set it up with all the heroes getting their own movie (well, except for Black Widow and Hawkeye) before we could properly appreciate a movie with all the Avengers fighting Loki. This movie seems to go overboard in rejecting this approach: not only do we not have any history with these characters so we can appreciate how important it is that they all got back together, but there was an entire history we're missing out on. To be fair, this worked amazingly well for Watchmen, but that had some astonishingly well-developed characters and some room for it to breathe. This one only has 88 minutes and 55 seconds. And it's not like there's years of Guardians comics to fill in the gaps, since this is a stand-alone property.

That said, it's ridiculously bad. It takes itself more seriously than the MCU does (there's usually some room for levity in those films, even if it's just in Tony Stark's wisecracks), and despite leaving little room for intentional levity, there's so much ridiculous in the film, whether it's the idea of a man turning into a bear with a Gat on his back, the villain looking like an even shittier version of Ben Grimm than Jamie Bell, or the government fixing Ler's suit by just adding rocks to it. This is the first film in the Project I would legitimately recommend other people watch, especially if they're into superhero movies or so-bad-it's-good movies, without all the baggage of a shitty American superhero adaptation, since, as these are original characters, nobody's worrying about how OOC everyone is.

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Watching "Under the Skin", with Scarlett Johansson. Somebody explain that shit.

She's an alien who tries to seduce men so she can consume them. Lather, rinse, repeat a couple times before she has a change of heart and tries to become human (by eating a cake, which her body rejects.) Eventually, she gets raped by a logger who discovers her true form and burns it with fire.

Honestly, there is a video essay from a YouTuber I used to follow that explains it pretty well, but, honestly, in recent years, he's pretty much become everything I find insufferable about the left, with an all-encompassing obsession with being "woke" at the expense of actually giving good and insightful critique of the films in question (and despite his using philosophy as a major thread in his videos, quite a few times, he gets the philosophy itself wrong, most glaringly in his take on The Departed and Nietzsche, where he just latches onto the theme park version of his philosophy just so he can bash it and claim he did his homework when he gets basic facts about the philosophy wrong), and I really don't want to give the sumbitch any new views, even if this was made before he became insufferable, hell, back when he was still on Channel Awesome.

[pocaracas]

Hey, I watched that guardians movie in Russian, with English subtitles.
Their voices seemed natural enough.
The subtitles, however, were hilarious because they looked like the translator did a literal Russian to English translation, word by word, instead of adding all the important bits that make proper English sentences.