RE: The Last Movie You Watched
March 5, 2019 at 10:20 pm
(This post was last modified: March 5, 2019 at 10:33 pm by 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.
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.
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.
(March 5, 2019 at 10:12 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: 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.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.