The Last Movie You Watched

[The Valkyrie]

Rewatched BSG Razor.

Still fairly decent.

[Fake Messiah]

Rewatched BSG Razor.

Still fairly decent.

Apparently "Mr. Robot" creator is making yet another version of BSG.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'The Princess And The Frog'.  Romance in the classic Disney tradition: girl meets frog, girl kisses frog, girl becomes frog.  Hilarity ensues, comic relief provided by an obese, musically inclined alligator.

7/10.

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is the 2017 film The Snowman, but first a little story about John Ford.

While filming Mogambo, producer Sam Zimbalist scolded him for being three days behind schedule (filming in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising will do that for a film). Ford responded by tearing out three pages of the script and saying "We're back on schedule." He never filmed those three pages. 

I bring this up because something very similar ended up happening during production of this film and it explains so much of why this movie is shit: This movie spent at least five years in Development Hell, during which time Martin Scorsese, Morten Tyldum, and Baltasar Kormakur were attached to direct. Eventually, Tomas Alfredsen got attached and, suddenly, in late 2015, a crucial backer was found, and the pre-production was really rushed, so there wasn't much time to prepare. By the time post-production came about and they began to cut it, they realised that they never got around to filming 10-15% of the script. There were some reshoots, but evidently not enough that the film couldn't just keep dropping characters, subplots, and scenes at absolute random. Characters just stop existing (they don't get killed off, they just stop appearing in the film), plotlines get brought up suddenly and get dropped just as suddenly (including one plot line about the Winter Games that wasn't even in the book), and scenes often have some really choppy editing, like they were made by some film school flunk-out and not a critically acclaimed director whose previous films were all certified fresh, with a little help from THELMA FUCKING SCHOONMAKER.

I was going to show you the first scene of the film, which was so bizarrely edited that it just had to be seen to be believed. Alas, that scene wasn't on YouTube, but I did find this compilation, with a guy breaking down three scenes and why they're shit:





Of course, this isn't the only problem with the film: while I haven't actually read the original novel, my research tells me the original was very darkly comedic, and, unfortunately, this plays it dead straight. Yes, a movie where a man named Harry Hole (Pronounced Ho-lleh in Norwegian; and the name was apparently chosen specifically to sound awkward in English, and the filmmakers fell for it hook, line, and sinker) tries to find a serial killer whose calling card is BUILDING SNOWMEN is played dead seriously. And here, the killer's backstory is changed enough that his crimes just make no fucking sense. I'll be relying on the TVTropes page in this section:

In the original novel, the killer's crimes are related to his misogyny, spurred on by his witnessing his mother having an affair as a child (which he saw while perched on top of a snowman), which led him to conclude that women who had affairs were as cold-hearted as those snowmen. In the film, he has a stock abusive father and dead mother (who he tried to save), so the snowman motif no longer has meaning, especially since he barely even has a consistent target in this film. And it gets worse: apparently, in this version, his start of darkness comes when he fails to save his mother from Susan Smithing herself, blaming her for abandoning him. So, he does the same fucking thing to other kids?

And there are some other weird things, like the doctor who's painting his toenails, or the decision to cast Val Kilmer as Hole's mentor. The problem with this: Kilmer is a Christian Scientist. This isn't so bad except for the fact that, during filming, he had throat cancer (though he denied it at the time) and his tongue was swollen enough that they couldn't use him saying his lines (other recordings of him around this time reveal he sounded like a bad Marlon Brando impersonator with an admittedly bloody good excuse). So they had someone dub over his lines in post, and to facilitate this dubbing, when he spoke, as a rule, his mouth was obscured, and, often, he was shot from behind. So, essentially, it looks like they somehow made Val Kilmer into his own Fake Shemp.

And I think this should be a good enough explanation of why this film is shit. So, I'll leave you with this:

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is FearDotCom, the last of the three Deep Hurting Project films on the list to have an F score on Cinemascore (the previous two being I Know Who Killed Me and The Devil Inside. In the 40 years they've been scoring films, exactly 19 films have been given F scores. A lot of the time, it's actually because studios just didn't know how to market it, like treating Solaris as a love story when it's a lot more complicated, or Mother as a jump-scare-heavy horror movie when it's actually mostly a riff on The Skin of Our Teeth with more overt commentary on religion and fewer dinosaurs, or Bug and The Wicker Man as horror films when they're clearly meant to be comedies (I'm actually serious about the former one). Or maybe Harvey Weinstein decided to release Wolf Creek, a movie where a woman gets her head on a stick, on CHRISTMAS DAY. But, of course, some of them just are that shit. I've already reviewed two of them here, and two more would have made the list if my library had DVD copies (Disaster Movie and Alone in the Dark, BTW), and this is the last one.

• This film has one of the dumbest opening scenes I've ever seen: so, a man and a little girl are alone in a subway station. The little girl is playing with a big ball, and it falls into the tracks, she jumps onto the tracks, and somehow gets away. Then the man jumps on the tracks to try and save her. Then he notices a train is coming and he hides in the eaves. Then, just before the train gets to him, he JUMPS INTO THE PATH OF THE ONCOMING TRAIN!
  
  
  
  
• Also, that guy's name? Polidori. Yes, as in John William "Author of the first vampire story and sidekick on Mary Shelley's Frankenhole" Polidori. Christ, they even call him "Polly Dolly" like Frankenstein does!
  
• You sleep with bugs. Goddammit, I'm watching this shitfest late at night and I do not need to think about the dust mites in my mattress!
  
• Earlier today, I watched the new Three Arrows video about Rammstein. It was a video essay about their new video "Germania" and the controversy over its use of Auschwitz Mittelbau-Dora imagery in one scene. It was pretty good, and kind of uplifting to see him talk about these people who keep playing German stereotypes to the hilt and yet still openly despise the worst bits of it.
  
  
  
  Then, less than 12 hours later, you hear them using "Sonne" as the soundtrack to a snuff film.
  
• Okay, so the villain's making snuff films, he's making appearances in these snuff films, showing his face, speaking without a voice changer, and distributing them on the Clearnet. I know that Stephen Rea's putting on a Jewfro and a Heath Ledger Joker voice, but this is just begging to be caught.
  
• FEARDOTCOM.com. They put "Dot com" in there TWICE. Surprisingly, fear.com seems to be an empty domain.
  
• So, the ball from the beginning is back? Why? Honestly, according to Wikipedia, director William Malone wanted to make the film look "basically like a nightmare." And the result is a bunch of creepy imagery that lacks any rhyme or reason and just falls flat. I mean, I've done shit like that, but when I do it, it's as a sort of joke, like, say, witnessing your older self having sex with a dead squid. While this doesn't appear in the film (at least, I hope it doesn't), I swear, if Malone had that idea, this would be played dead straight.
  
• So, there's a little girl and she has hemophilia. She's the girl we saw in the beginning. Some people balked at this revelation, but female hemophiliacs actually are a thing. As an X-linked recessive disease, it's a hell of a lot more common in males, but some females actually do get it. And some even live into adulthood! So, yes, Virginia, something that bleeds for three days and doesn't die can still actually have hemophilia!
  

You know, it's close to midnight, so I think now is a good enough time to go to sleep, dust mites be damned.

[Shell B]

We went to see "Joker" last night. For the better part of the movie, it moved very slowly and painfully. It was almost anxiety producing. The whole piece was the darkest take on the Joker so far, and focused entirely on him. There wasn't a single scene without him in it that wasn't just a shot of the television as he watched it. The climax was incredible, and the ending scene grotesquely funny.

I think there's some talk that you'll feel bad for him or that he's a sympathetic character. You might feel sorry for him in the beginning, but make no mistake. He's not likable. He's pathetic, so you feel bad, but you'd be fucking weird if you liked him.

Overall, an amazing performance from Joaquin Phoenix, but I'd only give it a 7/10 because of it's incredibly slow start.

[Athene]

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

Yowsa. I could really see that....what, 6 years or so? ....of aging in the character flashbacks; Especially Todd.
What are you gonna do though? People get older.
It wasn't a distraction from the story, really--just made me giggle from time to time.

The story was okay. More like an extended episode, really. It was reasonably entertaining, though I'm not sure it was worth staying up this late to watch when I've got work in the morning.

I enjoyed the Robert Forster's character the most. Lol...What a cool MF.

[onlinebiker]

Deadwood.

It was amazing they got all the originals cast back for thes movie - and we quite enjoyed it.

But - really? In a 1890's mining camp you expect to see the same people 10 years later? You'd be luck y to see the same people next month.....

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia. Honestly, I only watched the original two movies a couple weeks ago when it became clear that I would have to tackle this movie soon. They really weren't for me, but then again, I'm really not into fantasy movies. This movie, well, it was legitimately shocking how bad it was, and I'm legitimately baffled as to why this was even made; the first two films covered the plot of the entire original book, and there was no sequel to the original book. And the second film just had such a poor reputation (somewhat rehabilitated by this one being an even bigger fuckup) that one's seriously confused about why they even bothered. While I don't have an official story, my hypothesis is that someone wrote a script that someone found a bit too similar to the original movie and they just decided to make it a sequel instead of its own thing. That's how was made, and as far as I can tell, that's why this sequel was made.

• Let's start with the main antagonist. In the first film, it was an mysterious creature called the Nothing, a thing that personified the threat of non-existence. The next film, they had an evil sorceress. This time around, it's a group of bullies called The Nasties. Yes, school bullies. And their leader? Jack Fucking Black. Yes, they give him a unibrow and made him into a school bully, and, surprisingly (or not), he actually ends up the best part of the movie. He takes what was written as a one-dimensional bully and makes him an obsessed madman on par with Ahab, and he does Kubrick stares out the wazoo.
  
• Okay, full disclosure, I barely paid attention during the sequel, but since when does the NeverEnding Story itself talk about Bastian's life as well as what's going on in Fantasia? This is part of why I believe it was just an unrelated script that got shoehorned into the canon.
  
• Apart from Jack Black, nobody in this fucking movie can act. The humans are full of dull surprise, and the puppets are just obnoxious. Falkor is basically a flying white version of Scooby Doo without a speech impediment, the Rockbiters (yes, the Rockbiter has a wife and child) are basically a mix between the Flintstones and the Gorgs with none of the endearing personality traits from the original, and there's also a tree-bark guy who talks like a Borscht Belt comedian and keeps making wood-related puns. Honestly, the writing is on par with Doogal, but it's not like there's an excuse like Harvey Weinstein just wants to add American celebrities to make it accessible for American audiences. This was made this way.
  
• And speaking of the Gorgs, the Jim Henson Creature Shop actually did the puppetry work here, and I'm legitimately baffled that they could make something like this look so shit.
  
• The Childlike Empress is older than Bastian now, and she gives him the Auryn and forbids him from doing anything with it, even just saying "No, Bastian!" when he asks to just wish everything back to normal and send back the Fantasians who came with him by accident. And then, his new stepsister steals the Auryn and uses it to exploit mall employees. She's okay with this somehow. And somehow, she lets her wish everything was back to normal, just like Bastian tried and she refused to allow for some reason. And somehow, this makes the Nasties a group of studious youngsters.
  
• Also, there's this thing that looks like a bunny drawn by Ralph Steadman who keeps  getting run over? Dafuq?
  
• Also, this happens. Twice, once in the film proper, and once repeated during the credits, because they must have been proud of this shit:
  
  
  

I was hoping to say that this would be the end of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy films in the Deep Hurting Project, but I just checked the TVTropes history page for the So Bad It's Horrible Film pages. There's another shitty sci-fi sequel there, it's available at my local library, and, fortunately, it's one whose source material I'm more familiar with: Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm legitimately baffled as to why this was even made

The answer to questions of this sort is usually, 'Money.'

Boru