Willow was great when I was like eight. Now it just seems tepid in comparison to other 80s swords and sorcery flicks like Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, and Excalibur (probably the best of the bunch).
Willow is still above average imo for its genre and time. Remember the category of 80s swords and sorcery flicks includes shit like Yor, Red Sonja, and Conan the Destroyer.
I liked Boondock Saints as pulp trash and I don’t mean transcendental pulp trash like Paul Verhoeven films or hilariously awful pulp trash like Con Air. I liked it for what it was: two Irish dudes shooting a bunch of people and William Dafoe hamming it up. That’s it. If you like this film as anything more than that, you have problems.
Seven Samurai has two major flaws imo: 1) the young samurai is annoying 2) the bandits should have just fucking attacked a different village after they found out the villagers had hired protection that was gradually whittling down their numbers
Gladiator would have been much better if he didn’t give the retardedly ahistorical ending speech and just either keeled over having got his revenge or shacked up with Commodus’s sister and ruled the empire using the kid as a puppet. Imagine all the trashy sequel opportunities. I mean like the awesome Rocky style of good trashy sequels, not the direct to DVD Disney/Starship Troopers crap.
Now on to movies I get shit for not liking:
- Crash (Paul Haggis one)
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s way overlong, repetitive, Cate Blanchett is annoying, and Benjamin Button himself is a watered down Forrest Gump. Easily David Fincher’s worst movie.
- The Fountain. It could have been about living forever, Aguirre 2, or lots of other good things. Instead it sucked. It’s Zardoz minus the campy fun. I don’t get why people like it.
- Gandhi. Fuck this overlong, boring piece of shit. Sure Ben Kingsley was good as Gandhi but the movie is a bore. Richard Attenborough IS NOT David Lean. If this movie was not about Gandhi, nobody would like it. Attenborough is a shitty director. Maybe even worse than Uwe Boll as at least Boll, despite his lack of skill, has some interesting ideas and is actually slowly improving film by film (his latest In the Name of the King AKA the DUngeon Siege movie is ACTUALLY WATCHABLE!)
- Reservoir Dogs. Some good dialogue, scenes, and characters but ultimately more a pastiche of good ideas than an actual movie.
- Enchanted. This was horrible. It’s as if everything bad about Disney movies came to life.
- LOTR Trilogy. They are solid movies. I just don’t like them. It had some good scenes, characters, acting, etc but I loathe the films. Frodo and Sam are really fucking annoying, the large battles have no emotion (the smaller fights such as the one where Beretorn dies, are much better), Sauron as a flaming eye (I wanted to see how horrible they could make him look without armor) and the ending sucks. Why the hell does it take them half an hour to sail off to the undying lands/Valhalla/Avalon/whatever? John Boorman managed to do the same thing in Excalibur in about 20 seconds. Boorman had some awesome ideas about how to do LOTR. Like Gandalf would have been made otherworldly (not a swords and sorcery Obi Wan Kenobi like Peter Jackson did), the Nazgul would have rode skinless horses, and the wizard duel would have been inspired by how actual shamans and witchdotocrs dueled with words in sub-Saharan Africa instead of Peter Jackson’s old man Mortal Kombat. Boorman lost the rights and made the awesome, better than LOTR imo Excalibur instead. I had it out for LOTR ever since I first saw the prologue to Fellowship of the RIng in the theater. You know, where Sauron is a giant Power Rangers villain? I was thinking to myself “oh my fucking god this is right out of fucking Power Rangers.” And you never really felt that this was a guy who could literally just charge into battle and slaughter tons of dudes. I mean he just swung his magical mace and everybody fell down. It was just underwhelmed when compared to other prologue battles like Highlander or Bram Stoker’s Dracula where you really got the feeling that those guys (Dracula and the Kurgan) could just ride down and single handedly slaughter hundreds of people. And to top it all off, Peter Jackson didn’t even represent what happened in the books. In the books, basically Sauron was beaten back to his tower, which was being laid siege to, and eventually was forced to attack the alliance of Elves and Men with a heavily outnumbered force. The scales seemed to be shifting with Sauron’s attack and basically the King of the Elves, Gilgalad, and the King of Men, Elendil decided to take him on themselves. Both were killed but Gilgalad managed to mortally wound Sauron (his body, not his soul which is in the ring) and Isildur later cut the ring off of Sauron corpse after his attack collasped without him. That would have been a lot more epic than the movie. Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Viggo Mortensen, and Andy Serkis were good in it though.
- Andrei Rublev
- Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
- The Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter was always campy but Buffalo Bill was genuinely creepy. Wannabe transsexual (he really doesn’t even want to be a woman and he really isn’t even gay. He just gets off on rape and domination and in prison there are no women) flays fat chicks to make a woman suit to prance around in.
- Irreversible
- Salo
- Cannibal Holocaust (the sexual violence) but all the rapists fucking died so not as bad as say Salo.
- Last House on the Left same as Cannibal Holocaust.
- In the Realm of the Senses
- Stansfield is like if Gary Oldman was in Home Alone.
- Lee Harvey Oswald
- Drexl the pimp
- Dracula when he wasn’t trying to be a sympathetic character (the prologue bacl when he was Vlad the Impaler was cool though). If only his Dracula was written as lord of muthafucking darkness like Christopher Lee’s. I really liked his snarl and evil laughter.
- Sid Vicious even though he supposedly wasn’t anything like the real Sid Vicious. That’s not his fault though but the writer and directors.
- I liked him as Rosencratz/Guildenstern (I forgot which one he is). He was almost like a ye olde Beavis and Butthead.
- Conan the Barbarian. Mako says some stuff and then comes music with the forging of the sword and you are like woah. Then right after the opening credits his dad says that there are no gods to protect him and then is village is sacked (his dad is fed to armored rottweilers and his mom beheaded) to another great Poledouris composition and you are like this “movie is awesome.” Probably the best one,two punch of back to back musical pieces ever put to film.
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula. the best part of the movie that didn’t involve Monica Bellucci’s tits
In the Realm of the Senses
I, Claudius
Vengeance is Mine
Kill!
The Last Temptation of Christ
Reservoir Dogs
RoboCop
The Conformist
Shogun Assassin 2: Lightning Swords of Death
Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugalooo
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula
If…
Enter the Fat Dragon
Drunken Master
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
The Silence of the Lambs
I actually liked In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Yeah it was Uwe Boll but it was surprisingly watchable reminded me of crappy 80s swords and sorcery films. Ray Liotta was probably the most over the top medieval/fantasy villain since Alan Rickman in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood (which is worth seeing only for Alan Rickman saying “Join us or die”). In terms of recent fantasy/medieval battle movies, I would put it above Eragon and even say Kingdom of Heaven (I still wish Verhoeven had made Crusade with Ahnuld). It’s easily Boll’s best movie yet despite some horrible editing choices.
The movie is great and deeply thought out. Some reasons:
- Batman as almost a kind of sin eater? A great original take on the character
- Not giving the Joker a backstory? Awesome. Having a backstory just detracts from the character. Like Nicholson’s Joker was just a gangster who after losing his grip on reality from a chemical bath, lost nerve endings, and bad reconstructive surgery decided to take the world down with him. The Animated Series Joker had a better one as he was basically already the Joker before Batman dropped him into the chemical vat. The clownish aspects were just his way of reconciling his appearance with society. Ledger’s Joker is just the character boiled down to his essence: A mass-murdering, psychopath with no conscious who does everything for his own amusement and just dresses and sometimes acts like a clown in order to reconcile his monstrous appearance with the society that he antagonizes.
- A villain who “wins” no matter what you do? Awesome. Stop him? He still had his fun and either has something going on or will soon create some more chaos to amuse himself. Beat the shit out of him? He thinks your funny. Kill him outright? He still had fun and he made you stoop down to his level, even if only temporarily. I really hope they bring Joker back in the sequel just so we can have Harley Quinn.
- Excalibur (my favorite Swords and Sorcery/mythological film. Similar to how Apocalypse Now isn’t about Vietnam, IT IS Vietnam; Excalibur isn’t about or an adaptation of Arthurian legend, IT IS THE Arthurian legend). A lot of people don’t like this film for this very reason.
- Buckaroo Banzai. So randomly awesome. Neurosurgeon, rockstar, time traveling, astronaught, samurai, action hero.
- Con Air. This movie is a classic of unintentional comedy.
- Flesh and Blood. Rutger Hauer as a robber knight who takes over an entire castle by himself? awesome.
- Caligula. so bad but fun to watch as because it’s so poorly edited together you never know what the hell is coming onscreen next
- Conan the Barbarian. I love James Earl Jones in this. “Crucify him on the Tree of Woe!”
- Dragonslayer
- Rocky 4. Rocky stripped of all filler, boiled down to its cheesy core.
- Time Cop. Most people think Van Damme lost his way after Bloodsport and Kickboxer but I think it was after Street Fighter: The Movie. Starts out very strong but how the fuck did they get such a confusing movie from such a dumb fun idea. Still good though.
- Point Break. Bromance gone wrong.
- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey.
- Dracula AD 1972
- Die Hard 1 and 3. 1 is probably the best action movie of the 80s. 3 is the only sequel to even come close to matching it.
- Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Only for Alan Rickman chewing more scenery than a black hole.
- Street Fighter: The Movie. Raul Julia is great as the villain M. Bison. Van Damme is so bad, he’s funny
- The Hitcher. the original is great.
- Lair of the White Worm. Hugh Grant fights lesbian vampire cultists? must watch for me
RoboCop is one of my favorites. It seems like dumb cheese but is actually very deep and Peter Weller gives an incredibly nuanced performance. Frankenstein + Death Wish/Last House on the Left + a hint of comedy rolled into a masterpiece by Paul Verhoeven. The sequels are horrible though. After watching the original, just watch the trailer for RoboCop 2 and as soon as you hear RoboCop speak, you know it sucks. I hope Aronofsky just makes a semi sequel to the original instead of a complete reboot. Like different time, different place, different characters but acknowledge that the events in the original happened.
Caligula. Yeah it’s bad but fun to watch as it’s so poorly edited together, you never know what is coming up next!
Con Air. They tried to be so “bad ass” to appeal to overly macho 12 year olds that the movie went from probable turd to comedic delight.
Dracula AD 1972. Hammer tried to update their Dracula series to appeal to the youth market and we got the cheesiest one ever. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing play it straight but the movie is a camp classic.
The Curious Case Benjamin Button (5.5/10)
Forrest Gump-lite. Overlong, repetitive, Pitt was boring, and Blanchett annoying. A few of the support characters are very interesting though.
Black Book (6.8/10)
2nd or 3rd worst Verhoeven movie ever and that’s saying something as the only unwatchable movie he has ever made was showgirls and that was almost so bad, it was good. Everything you think will happen and discount as too obvious/exploitive happens. Fun pulp trash.
Vengeance Is Mine (6/10)
Catch Me If You Can + Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer + really misplaced soundtrack. Not as good as either of the aforementioned films but still ok. Ken Ogata is good in it though. Worth watching on cable, renting, or the internet (watch it now if you have nothing better to do). Not worth buying imo.
Cannibal Ferox (7/10)
2nd goriest cannibal movie ever
Cannibal Apocalypse (7.1/10)
most watchable cannibal movie ever
Slave of the Cannibal God (4/10)
mediocre Italian cannibal sexploitation movie. Would have probably liked it better if I was intoxicated.
SS Hell Camp (5.5/10)
above average exploitation film.
10 favorites as of right now in no real order. This is really hard. I have seen at least a thousand movies. These are not the best but merely some of my personal favorites that I really like right as I am writing this. If I made a top ten list tomorrow, half of these would be gone.
Kill Bill
Quentin Tarantino liked samurai and kung fu movies so he decided to make the ultimate samurai movie and throw in some kung fu for good measure. And it doesn’t even have any samurai in it!
RoboCop
Nobody was willing to make this until Verhoeven came along. He made what could have been schlock into a darkly humorous, deeply moving piece about one man’s loss of humanity and his quest to regain it.
Excalibur
Best. non-comedy King Arthur movie. Ever. Don’t give me the Lancelot du Lac bs. Excalibur is a way more fun (unless you have a foot fetish) and Boorman just understands the material better than Bresson. Bresson didn’t really grasp the the mythology, so he just chooses to deconstruct it. Anyone can do that (maybe not in Bresson’s way). Only Boorman could have made Excalibur and breathe new life into in ways Bresson could never dream off.
The 400 Blows
Truffaut’s first and best.
Taxi Driver
The Pineapple Express
My personal favorite film of 2008 and the greatest stoner-action movie ever. It’s a top of the line stoner flick meets an awesome, over the top action movie.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Klaus Kinski and Warner Herzog are crazy.
Yojimbo and Sanjuro
Seven Samurai may be a better made than this duo but it’s not as watchable do to it’s extreme length.
Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
My favorite romance movies ever. Just two people walking around a city talking.
The Dark Knight
I have to put this here since I have been a huge Batman fan since I was a little kid and this was basically an interweaving of some of the best stories combined with a great original take on the character (except for the voice). Heath Ledger deserves all the trophies.
Michael Bay is misunderstood. The only problem is that producers do not always allocate his genius correctly. After Bad Boys , The Rock, and Armageddon which were all all instant leave your brain at the door and just have fun pyrotechnical classics of intentional cliche, the studio handed him Pearl Harbor, which he just couldn’t do outside of making sure the pyrotechnics were historically accurate. Only Paul Verhoeven could make something like that worth watching. Bay seems to have realized this and gone back to making whiz-bang action movies such as Bad Boys 2 and the Transformers series. Compare his films to those of say Paul WS Anderson (just a bunch of cool shit thrown onscreen with no skill and no plot), Rob Cohen (even worse) or Len Wiseman (same but he may actually be improving as Die Hard 4 was legitimately good outside of the retarded plot and lame main villain both of which were not his fault), Bay is a technical genius. It takes shit like Ghost Rider, XXX, or even the upcoming GI Joe really shows you how skilled he really is. I want to see Bay do an old school, R-rated, middle ages/swords and sorcery hack ‘n’ slash adventure film. I just have this feeling that he could do it very well (and be sure to not make a classic character like Conan or King Arthur so he won’t have any source material to butcher).
Richard Attenborough. Gandhi sucks as a film (Ben Kingsley is great as Gandhi but the movie is crap). All his other movies range from sortof shitty to pure shit. He’s no David Lean or James Ivory.
Michael Bay is misunderstood. The only problem is that producers do not always allocate his genius correctly. After Bad Boys , The Rock, and Armageddon which were all all instant leave your brain at the door and just have fun pyrotechnical classics of intentional cliche, the studio handed him Pearl Harbor, which he just couldn’t do outside of making sure the pyrotechnics were historically accurate. Only Paul Verhoeven could make something like that worth watching. Bay seems to have realized this and gone back to making whiz-bang action movies such as Bad Boys 2 and the Transformers series. Compare his films to those of say Paul WS Anderson (just a bunch of cool shit thrown onscreen with no skill and no plot), Rob Cohen (even worse) or Len Wiseman (same but he may actually be improving as Die Hard 4 was legitimately good outside of the retarded plot and lame main villain both of which were not his fault), Bay is a technical genius. It takes shit like Ghost Rider, XXX, or even the upcoming GI Joe really shows you how skilled he really is. I want to see Bay do an old school, R-rated, middle ages/swords and sorcery hack ‘n’ slash adventure film. I just have this feeling that he could do it very well (and be sure to not make a classic character like Conan or King Arthur so he won’t have any source material to butcher).
Some unmentioned ones and comments on performances:
- Ian McKellen in GODS AND MONSTERS and RICHARD III. His Richard the III was just a Shakespearean Freddy Kruger. He knew he didn’t have the raw machismo to pull it off as written so he decided that he was going to devour the screen, which he does. The movie would have sat a lot better in my stomach if he killed the horrifically bad Annette Benning. Who cares about the original play? Her character deserved to die and her performance made me call for her head.
- whoever played Oh Dae-su and Lee Woo-jin in OLDBOY
- Jack Nicholson in lots of stuff. Sure he just plays various aspects of himself but who cares?
- Michael Caine in GET CARTER
- Bill Murray in anything by Wes Andersen and LOST IN TRANSLATION. See Nicholson.
- Alan Rickman in DIE HARD and ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES. He was the ultimate 80s action villain and with a little help from Kevin Costner, he made everyone root for a rapacious, satan-worshipping murderer. Sure the movie sucked but Rickman makes his scenes fun to watch. Witness his perfect hilarious delivery of such hammy dialogue as “Join us or die!”
- Gary Oldman in SID AND NANCY, JFK, LEON/THE PROFESSIONAL, TRUE ROMANCE, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, etc. He becomes his character and then proceeds to believably eat up the screen. Notice his perfect mannerisms. About Dracula, his perfomance was excellent even though the character was written schizophrenically. Oldman’s portrayal just calls out for a prince of motherfucking darkness, lord of all things that go bump in the night characterization, not a sympathetic portrayal.
- Christopher Walken in anything as he’s Christopher Walken.
- Anthony Hopkins in THE ELEPHANT MAN, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and HANNIBAL.
- Keanu Reeves in BILL AND TED.
- Nicol Williamson, Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Robert Addie, and whoever played Percival in EXCALIBUR. Nigel Terry perfectly embodies the unwilling boy king who must heal the land while dealing the ramifications of the sins of his father and his own. Nicol Williamson eschews the Obi Wan Kenobi archetype and goes for something practically from another dimension and he pulls it off. Robert Addie conveys familicidal sociopath with only a couple of lines and successfully manages to use his what could have been as bad as nipples on the batsuit costume in order to add deeper meaning to his character. Mirren has never been better cast and the dude who played Percival is great too.
- Jon Finch in MACBETH. He does what Toshiro Mifune, Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles could not and successfully pulls off a transition from opportunistic warrior to genuine monster.
- Klaus Kinski in AGUIRRE AND FITZCARRALDO. Why hasn’t he been mentioned yet?
- Peter Weller in ROBOCOP. He was perfectly cast. No one else could convey the unassuming Irish cop who lost his humanity and his violent quest to regain whatever little of it that remained in his monstrous body. He delivered a Frankenstein’s monster that no Frankenstein’s monster will ever touch.
- James Franco in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. He was good in Freaks and Geeks but his film work left much to be desired until he climbed aboard the Apatow train once again.
- Val Kilmer in THE DOORS. The movie could’ve been much better but Kilmer became Jim Morrison.
- Ahnuld in THE TERMINATOR. He was perfect. Notice how he never blinks.
- Uma Thurman and Gordon Liu in KILL BILL.
- Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and THE DARK KNIGHT. He perfectly underplayed his character in Brokeback and simply became The Joker onscreen losing none of the psychopathic, almost sadomachostic playfulness of the comic character. Jack was just a slightly more violent version of himself on a bad day dressed as a clone. Ledger was the Joker.
- Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER, THE HITCHER, FLESH AND BLOOD, and all his Dutch films. He was the ultimate unstoppable force of 80s cinema and the greatest actor ever in his native language. You seriously could believe he was a genetically engineered to be a superhuman and do things like go on an intergalactic killing spree in search of enlightenment, jack an entire castle by himself, or just harass some teenagers until they die.
Nakadai was not nearly charismatic enough for Kagemusha and only got away with it in Ran due to the Noh theatreness that tons of people could have done. Daniel Kasman is partly right. Nakadai has this Christopher Walken-like otherworldiness thing going on that makes it hard for him to play roles that aren’t villains (Yojimbo and Sanjuro), psycho killers (The Sword of Doom), deformed (that movie where he is scarred by acid), or just plain weirdos. It’s actually more like a Keanu Reeves style, face as blank slate otherworldiness combined with Walken style weirdness.
The Fountain. Stop giving me shit for calling you out on how shitty it is. Stop trying to defend it because it could have been good. It’s not. Some of Aguirre-like conquistadoring gone wrong stuff is almost watchable but it somehow bombs as you realize it was shot in some narrow alley with bad CGI jungle effects and cuts away to the totally bullshit that is the two thirds of the movie. This film is one of the biggest messes in recent memory. It’s Zardoz minus the fun and hilarious philosophical dialogue. This was one film that needed to be recut, reshot, or just fucking not given a theatrical release. It’s that bad.
I’m not going to do a top ten but simply give you my favorite movie of the year and the runners up.
Winner:
- Pineapple Express
Honorable mentions:
- Man On Wire
- In Bruges
- Gran Torino
- The Dark Knight
- Rachel Getting Married
- The Wrestler
- Let the Right One In
- Milk
- Forgetting Sarah Marshall
- Iron Man
- Religulous
- JCVD
- The Dutchess of Langeais
- The Dutchess
- Kung Fu Panda
- Chocolate
- Yip Man
- Snow Angels
- The Visitor
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
- Wall-E
- Burn After Reading
- Frost/Nixon
- Waltz with Bashir
somewhat crappy movies I enjoyed:
- Doomsday
- The Machine Girl
really crappy movies I enjoyed:
- In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
- Death Race
- Rambo
best restorations:
- Witchfinder General
- The Godfather
I don’t really consider to be Ran and Kagemusha to be samurai movies. They are Shakespeare movies with a samurai setting. Kagemusha is a costume drama. Saying they are samurai movies is like saying The Seventh Seal is a slasher flick because it has death pursuing a group of people (same plot as Final Destination!). Seven Samurai isn’t just a samurai movie either as it transcends the genre while still being a part of it.
best actual samurai movies:
- Yojimbo and Sanjuro
- Lone Wolf and Cub series
- Kill Bill
- Zatoichi series
- Harakiri
- The Hidden Fortress
- the stuff in the Rebel Samurai boxset
- Hanzo the Razor
- The Sword of Doom. I didn’t want to include this as it doesn’t have a plot other than Tatsuya Nakadai kills tons and tons of dudes but maybe that is actually a good thing.
- Seven Samurai
Honorable mentions:
- Samurai trilogy. Way too much crappy filler but some great scenes.
- I also like Death to Smoochy! It’s surprisingly funny.
- 300 is also great borderline gay porn. So cartoonishly over the top awesome, it becomes legitimately awesome. It even has random sex scenes to try to balance out the gayness of 300 muscly dudes in leather underwear kicking ass together. It’s the kind of movie that you have to be in the theatre with a good audience to love or just watch it with a group of friends getting gradually drunk. It’s not meant to be in the same class as say Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, or even Braveheart. It’s like Conan the Barbarian level, which is also awesome.
The first Star Wars movie (the only one of the original three that Lucas directed) was good in spite of him. The script went through several uncredited rewrites by people such as Francis Ford Coppola. If other people hadn’t significantly contributed, the OG Star Wars would have had Yoda narrating the adventures (think the role that Mako has in Conan style narrating only shittier) of Biggs Starkiller and Mace Windu. Lucas didn’t really do anything for Empire and only interfered somewhat with Jedi. When he made the prequels, he actually didn’t want to direct. He actually tried to get someone to direct the actors for him so he could concentrate on the technical stuff but he didn’t get any takers. Thus when he hired young actors inexperienced with weak directing (a bunch of the line readings sound like they are simply one take BECAUSE THEY ARE ONE TAKE. LUCAS DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT), they ended up sucking. Liam Neeson and Christopher Lee of course did not as they have experience being in subpar B-movies (Especially Lee. Neeson at least had dialogue written for him in shit like Krull. Lee had none in a bunch of the pirate and Dracula movies he did. He had to make it up himself or sometimes in the case of Dracula: Prince of Darkness didn’t do anything except snarl as what was given to him was that bad.) Ewan MacGregor, Samuel L Jackson, and Ian McDiarmid eventually sort of realized that they were going to have to do everything themselves. The guy who played Darth Maul didn’t suck too. Probably because he has experience being in badly plotted martial arts movies.
I used to think this movie was great, but i don't anymore over 3 years ago
Willow was great when I was like eight. Now it just seems tepid in comparison to other 80s swords and sorcery flicks like Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, and Excalibur (probably the best of the bunch).
Willow is still above average imo for its genre and time. Remember the category of 80s swords and sorcery flicks includes shit like Yor, Red Sonja, and Conan the Destroyer.
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What can we expect of Werner Herzog`s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans over 3 years ago
This will be comedy gold even if it sucks as it has Nicholas Cage, star of the unintentional comedy classics Con Air and The Wickerman.
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What films do you always catch shit for for not liking? over 3 years ago
I liked Boondock Saints as pulp trash and I don’t mean transcendental pulp trash like Paul Verhoeven films or hilariously awful pulp trash like Con Air. I liked it for what it was: two Irish dudes shooting a bunch of people and William Dafoe hamming it up. That’s it. If you like this film as anything more than that, you have problems.
Seven Samurai has two major flaws imo: 1) the young samurai is annoying 2) the bandits should have just fucking attacked a different village after they found out the villagers had hired protection that was gradually whittling down their numbers
Gladiator would have been much better if he didn’t give the retardedly ahistorical ending speech and just either keeled over having got his revenge or shacked up with Commodus’s sister and ruled the empire using the kid as a puppet. Imagine all the trashy sequel opportunities. I mean like the awesome Rocky style of good trashy sequels, not the direct to DVD Disney/Starship Troopers crap.
Now on to movies I get shit for not liking:
- Crash (Paul Haggis one)
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s way overlong, repetitive, Cate Blanchett is annoying, and Benjamin Button himself is a watered down Forrest Gump. Easily David Fincher’s worst movie.
- The Fountain. It could have been about living forever, Aguirre 2, or lots of other good things. Instead it sucked. It’s Zardoz minus the campy fun. I don’t get why people like it.
- Gandhi. Fuck this overlong, boring piece of shit. Sure Ben Kingsley was good as Gandhi but the movie is a bore. Richard Attenborough IS NOT David Lean. If this movie was not about Gandhi, nobody would like it. Attenborough is a shitty director. Maybe even worse than Uwe Boll as at least Boll, despite his lack of skill, has some interesting ideas and is actually slowly improving film by film (his latest In the Name of the King AKA the DUngeon Siege movie is ACTUALLY WATCHABLE!)
- Reservoir Dogs. Some good dialogue, scenes, and characters but ultimately more a pastiche of good ideas than an actual movie.
- Enchanted. This was horrible. It’s as if everything bad about Disney movies came to life.
- LOTR Trilogy. They are solid movies. I just don’t like them. It had some good scenes, characters, acting, etc but I loathe the films. Frodo and Sam are really fucking annoying, the large battles have no emotion (the smaller fights such as the one where Beretorn dies, are much better), Sauron as a flaming eye (I wanted to see how horrible they could make him look without armor) and the ending sucks. Why the hell does it take them half an hour to sail off to the undying lands/Valhalla/Avalon/whatever? John Boorman managed to do the same thing in Excalibur in about 20 seconds. Boorman had some awesome ideas about how to do LOTR. Like Gandalf would have been made otherworldly (not a swords and sorcery Obi Wan Kenobi like Peter Jackson did), the Nazgul would have rode skinless horses, and the wizard duel would have been inspired by how actual shamans and witchdotocrs dueled with words in sub-Saharan Africa instead of Peter Jackson’s old man Mortal Kombat. Boorman lost the rights and made the awesome, better than LOTR imo Excalibur instead. I had it out for LOTR ever since I first saw the prologue to Fellowship of the RIng in the theater. You know, where Sauron is a giant Power Rangers villain? I was thinking to myself “oh my fucking god this is right out of fucking Power Rangers.” And you never really felt that this was a guy who could literally just charge into battle and slaughter tons of dudes. I mean he just swung his magical mace and everybody fell down. It was just underwhelmed when compared to other prologue battles like Highlander or Bram Stoker’s Dracula where you really got the feeling that those guys (Dracula and the Kurgan) could just ride down and single handedly slaughter hundreds of people. And to top it all off, Peter Jackson didn’t even represent what happened in the books. In the books, basically Sauron was beaten back to his tower, which was being laid siege to, and eventually was forced to attack the alliance of Elves and Men with a heavily outnumbered force. The scales seemed to be shifting with Sauron’s attack and basically the King of the Elves, Gilgalad, and the King of Men, Elendil decided to take him on themselves. Both were killed but Gilgalad managed to mortally wound Sauron (his body, not his soul which is in the ring) and Isildur later cut the ring off of Sauron corpse after his attack collasped without him. That would have been a lot more epic than the movie. Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Viggo Mortensen, and Andy Serkis were good in it though.
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movies that shake you to the core over 3 years ago
- Andrei Rublev
- Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
- The Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter was always campy but Buffalo Bill was genuinely creepy. Wannabe transsexual (he really doesn’t even want to be a woman and he really isn’t even gay. He just gets off on rape and domination and in prison there are no women) flays fat chicks to make a woman suit to prance around in.
- Irreversible
- Salo
- Cannibal Holocaust (the sexual violence) but all the rapists fucking died so not as bad as say Salo.
- Last House on the Left same as Cannibal Holocaust.
- In the Realm of the Senses
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Favorite Gary Oldman Role!! over 3 years ago
- Stansfield is like if Gary Oldman was in Home Alone.
- Lee Harvey Oswald
- Drexl the pimp
- Dracula when he wasn’t trying to be a sympathetic character (the prologue bacl when he was Vlad the Impaler was cool though). If only his Dracula was written as lord of muthafucking darkness like Christopher Lee’s. I really liked his snarl and evil laughter.
- Sid Vicious even though he supposedly wasn’t anything like the real Sid Vicious. That’s not his fault though but the writer and directors.
- I liked him as Rosencratz/Guildenstern (I forgot which one he is). He was almost like a ye olde Beavis and Butthead.
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Your favorite title sequence over 3 years ago
- Conan the Barbarian. Mako says some stuff and then comes music with the forging of the sword and you are like woah. Then right after the opening credits his dad says that there are no gods to protect him and then is village is sacked (his dad is fed to armored rottweilers and his mom beheaded) to another great Poledouris composition and you are like this “movie is awesome.” Probably the best one,two punch of back to back musical pieces ever put to film.
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula. the best part of the movie that didn’t involve Monica Bellucci’s tits
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Best title over 3 years ago
In the Realm of the Senses
I, Claudius
Vengeance is Mine
Kill!
The Last Temptation of Christ
Reservoir Dogs
RoboCop
The Conformist
Shogun Assassin 2: Lightning Swords of Death
Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugalooo
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula
If…
Enter the Fat Dragon
Drunken Master
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
The Silence of the Lambs
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Movies you love, but everyone else hates. over 3 years ago
I actually liked In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Yeah it was Uwe Boll but it was surprisingly watchable reminded me of crappy 80s swords and sorcery films. Ray Liotta was probably the most over the top medieval/fantasy villain since Alan Rickman in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood (which is worth seeing only for Alan Rickman saying “Join us or die”). In terms of recent fantasy/medieval battle movies, I would put it above Eragon and even say Kingdom of Heaven (I still wish Verhoeven had made Crusade with Ahnuld). It’s easily Boll’s best movie yet despite some horrible editing choices.
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CHARACTERS IN A FILM WHO FATE MAKES YOU WEEP over 3 years ago
Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day and Ahnuld in T2. Seriously.
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Does anyone else feel THE DARK KNIGHT is way overrated? over 3 years ago
The movie is great and deeply thought out. Some reasons:
- Batman as almost a kind of sin eater? A great original take on the character
- Not giving the Joker a backstory? Awesome. Having a backstory just detracts from the character. Like Nicholson’s Joker was just a gangster who after losing his grip on reality from a chemical bath, lost nerve endings, and bad reconstructive surgery decided to take the world down with him. The Animated Series Joker had a better one as he was basically already the Joker before Batman dropped him into the chemical vat. The clownish aspects were just his way of reconciling his appearance with society. Ledger’s Joker is just the character boiled down to his essence: A mass-murdering, psychopath with no conscious who does everything for his own amusement and just dresses and sometimes acts like a clown in order to reconcile his monstrous appearance with the society that he antagonizes.
- A villain who “wins” no matter what you do? Awesome. Stop him? He still had his fun and either has something going on or will soon create some more chaos to amuse himself. Beat the shit out of him? He thinks your funny. Kill him outright? He still had fun and he made you stoop down to his level, even if only temporarily. I really hope they bring Joker back in the sequel just so we can have Harley Quinn.
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Movies you love, but everyone else hates. over 3 years ago
- Excalibur (my favorite Swords and Sorcery/mythological film. Similar to how Apocalypse Now isn’t about Vietnam, IT IS Vietnam; Excalibur isn’t about or an adaptation of Arthurian legend, IT IS THE Arthurian legend). A lot of people don’t like this film for this very reason.
- Buckaroo Banzai. So randomly awesome. Neurosurgeon, rockstar, time traveling, astronaught, samurai, action hero.
- Con Air. This movie is a classic of unintentional comedy.
- Flesh and Blood. Rutger Hauer as a robber knight who takes over an entire castle by himself? awesome.
- Caligula. so bad but fun to watch as because it’s so poorly edited together you never know what the hell is coming onscreen next
- Conan the Barbarian. I love James Earl Jones in this. “Crucify him on the Tree of Woe!”
- Dragonslayer
- Rocky 4. Rocky stripped of all filler, boiled down to its cheesy core.
- Time Cop. Most people think Van Damme lost his way after Bloodsport and Kickboxer but I think it was after Street Fighter: The Movie. Starts out very strong but how the fuck did they get such a confusing movie from such a dumb fun idea. Still good though.
- Point Break. Bromance gone wrong.
- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey.
- Dracula AD 1972
- Die Hard 1 and 3. 1 is probably the best action movie of the 80s. 3 is the only sequel to even come close to matching it.
- Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Only for Alan Rickman chewing more scenery than a black hole.
- Street Fighter: The Movie. Raul Julia is great as the villain M. Bison. Van Damme is so bad, he’s funny
- The Hitcher. the original is great.
- Lair of the White Worm. Hugh Grant fights lesbian vampire cultists? must watch for me
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CHARACTERS IN A FILM WHO FATE MAKES YOU WEEP over 3 years ago
I think Puyi realized he had didn’t have anything when he was about 12.
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SCIENCE-FICTION AS A GENRE - WHICH ARE THE BEST FILMS AND WHY? over 3 years ago
RoboCop is one of my favorites. It seems like dumb cheese but is actually very deep and Peter Weller gives an incredibly nuanced performance. Frankenstein + Death Wish/Last House on the Left + a hint of comedy rolled into a masterpiece by Paul Verhoeven. The sequels are horrible though. After watching the original, just watch the trailer for RoboCop 2 and as soon as you hear RoboCop speak, you know it sucks. I hope Aronofsky just makes a semi sequel to the original instead of a complete reboot. Like different time, different place, different characters but acknowledge that the events in the original happened.
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Thoughts on 'Donnie Darko' over 3 years ago
The theatrical version is good, the director’s cut is shit.
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Films Where The Shortcoming of the Filmmaking Gives the Film Unintentional and Different Power over 3 years ago
Caligula. Yeah it’s bad but fun to watch as it’s so poorly edited together, you never know what is coming up next!
Con Air. They tried to be so “bad ass” to appeal to overly macho 12 year olds that the movie went from probable turd to comedic delight.
Dracula AD 1972. Hammer tried to update their Dracula series to appeal to the youth market and we got the cheesiest one ever. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing play it straight but the movie is a camp classic.
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Best criterion transfers over 3 years ago
The Last Emperor would have been better if it’s aspect ratio wasn’t mangled.
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What's the most annoying film music you've had to endure? over 3 years ago
I just watched Vengeance Is Mine and while not the worst soundtrack, it doesn’t fit the film at all. It’s like cheesy 60s cop/spy show music.
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Last movie you saw and rate it over 3 years ago
The Curious Case Benjamin Button (5.5/10)
Forrest Gump-lite. Overlong, repetitive, Pitt was boring, and Blanchett annoying. A few of the support characters are very interesting though.
Black Book (6.8/10)
2nd or 3rd worst Verhoeven movie ever and that’s saying something as the only unwatchable movie he has ever made was showgirls and that was almost so bad, it was good. Everything you think will happen and discount as too obvious/exploitive happens. Fun pulp trash.
Vengeance Is Mine (6/10)
Catch Me If You Can + Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer + really misplaced soundtrack. Not as good as either of the aforementioned films but still ok. Ken Ogata is good in it though. Worth watching on cable, renting, or the internet (watch it now if you have nothing better to do). Not worth buying imo.
Cannibal Ferox (7/10)
2nd goriest cannibal movie ever
Cannibal Apocalypse (7.1/10)
most watchable cannibal movie ever
Slave of the Cannibal God (4/10)
mediocre Italian cannibal sexploitation movie. Would have probably liked it better if I was intoxicated.
SS Hell Camp (5.5/10)
above average exploitation film.
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What's your Top 10? over 3 years ago
10 favorites as of right now in no real order. This is really hard. I have seen at least a thousand movies. These are not the best but merely some of my personal favorites that I really like right as I am writing this. If I made a top ten list tomorrow, half of these would be gone.
Kill Bill
Quentin Tarantino liked samurai and kung fu movies so he decided to make the ultimate samurai movie and throw in some kung fu for good measure. And it doesn’t even have any samurai in it!
RoboCop
Nobody was willing to make this until Verhoeven came along. He made what could have been schlock into a darkly humorous, deeply moving piece about one man’s loss of humanity and his quest to regain it.
Excalibur
Best. non-comedy King Arthur movie. Ever. Don’t give me the Lancelot du Lac bs. Excalibur is a way more fun (unless you have a foot fetish) and Boorman just understands the material better than Bresson. Bresson didn’t really grasp the the mythology, so he just chooses to deconstruct it. Anyone can do that (maybe not in Bresson’s way). Only Boorman could have made Excalibur and breathe new life into in ways Bresson could never dream off.
The 400 Blows
Truffaut’s first and best.
Taxi Driver
The Pineapple Express
My personal favorite film of 2008 and the greatest stoner-action movie ever. It’s a top of the line stoner flick meets an awesome, over the top action movie.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Klaus Kinski and Warner Herzog are crazy.
Yojimbo and Sanjuro
Seven Samurai may be a better made than this duo but it’s not as watchable do to it’s extreme length.
Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
My favorite romance movies ever. Just two people walking around a city talking.
The Dark Knight
I have to put this here since I have been a huge Batman fan since I was a little kid and this was basically an interweaving of some of the best stories combined with a great original take on the character (except for the voice). Heath Ledger deserves all the trophies.
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WHICH DIRECTORS...NOT...CURRENTLY REPRESENTED IN THE CRITERION COLLECTION DO YOU WANT TO SEE INCLUDED? over 3 years ago
John Boorman
Paul Verhoeven (I want to see criterion release his pre RoboCop films)
Takashi Miike
Takeshi “Beat” Kitano
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Worst Criterion DVDs over 3 years ago
Michael Bay is misunderstood. The only problem is that producers do not always allocate his genius correctly. After Bad Boys , The Rock, and Armageddon which were all all instant leave your brain at the door and just have fun pyrotechnical classics of intentional cliche, the studio handed him Pearl Harbor, which he just couldn’t do outside of making sure the pyrotechnics were historically accurate. Only Paul Verhoeven could make something like that worth watching. Bay seems to have realized this and gone back to making whiz-bang action movies such as Bad Boys 2 and the Transformers series. Compare his films to those of say Paul WS Anderson (just a bunch of cool shit thrown onscreen with no skill and no plot), Rob Cohen (even worse) or Len Wiseman (same but he may actually be improving as Die Hard 4 was legitimately good outside of the retarded plot and lame main villain both of which were not his fault), Bay is a technical genius. It takes shit like Ghost Rider, XXX, or even the upcoming GI Joe really shows you how skilled he really is. I want to see Bay do an old school, R-rated, middle ages/swords and sorcery hack ‘n’ slash adventure film. I just have this feeling that he could do it very well (and be sure to not make a classic character like Conan or King Arthur so he won’t have any source material to butcher).
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
Richard Attenborough. Gandhi sucks as a film (Ben Kingsley is great as Gandhi but the movie is crap). All his other movies range from sortof shitty to pure shit. He’s no David Lean or James Ivory.
Michael Bay is misunderstood. The only problem is that producers do not always allocate his genius correctly. After Bad Boys , The Rock, and Armageddon which were all all instant leave your brain at the door and just have fun pyrotechnical classics of intentional cliche, the studio handed him Pearl Harbor, which he just couldn’t do outside of making sure the pyrotechnics were historically accurate. Only Paul Verhoeven could make something like that worth watching. Bay seems to have realized this and gone back to making whiz-bang action movies such as Bad Boys 2 and the Transformers series. Compare his films to those of say Paul WS Anderson (just a bunch of cool shit thrown onscreen with no skill and no plot), Rob Cohen (even worse) or Len Wiseman (same but he may actually be improving as Die Hard 4 was legitimately good outside of the retarded plot and lame main villain both of which were not his fault), Bay is a technical genius. It takes shit like Ghost Rider, XXX, or even the upcoming GI Joe really shows you how skilled he really is. I want to see Bay do an old school, R-rated, middle ages/swords and sorcery hack ‘n’ slash adventure film. I just have this feeling that he could do it very well (and be sure to not make a classic character like Conan or King Arthur so he won’t have any source material to butcher).
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List the most exemplary acting performance(s) over 3 years ago
Some unmentioned ones and comments on performances:
- Ian McKellen in GODS AND MONSTERS and RICHARD III. His Richard the III was just a Shakespearean Freddy Kruger. He knew he didn’t have the raw machismo to pull it off as written so he decided that he was going to devour the screen, which he does. The movie would have sat a lot better in my stomach if he killed the horrifically bad Annette Benning. Who cares about the original play? Her character deserved to die and her performance made me call for her head.
- whoever played Oh Dae-su and Lee Woo-jin in OLDBOY
- Jack Nicholson in lots of stuff. Sure he just plays various aspects of himself but who cares?
- Michael Caine in GET CARTER
- Bill Murray in anything by Wes Andersen and LOST IN TRANSLATION. See Nicholson.
- Alan Rickman in DIE HARD and ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES. He was the ultimate 80s action villain and with a little help from Kevin Costner, he made everyone root for a rapacious, satan-worshipping murderer. Sure the movie sucked but Rickman makes his scenes fun to watch. Witness his perfect hilarious delivery of such hammy dialogue as “Join us or die!”
- Gary Oldman in SID AND NANCY, JFK, LEON/THE PROFESSIONAL, TRUE ROMANCE, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, etc. He becomes his character and then proceeds to believably eat up the screen. Notice his perfect mannerisms. About Dracula, his perfomance was excellent even though the character was written schizophrenically. Oldman’s portrayal just calls out for a prince of motherfucking darkness, lord of all things that go bump in the night characterization, not a sympathetic portrayal.
- Christopher Walken in anything as he’s Christopher Walken.
- Anthony Hopkins in THE ELEPHANT MAN, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and HANNIBAL.
- Keanu Reeves in BILL AND TED.
- Nicol Williamson, Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Robert Addie, and whoever played Percival in EXCALIBUR. Nigel Terry perfectly embodies the unwilling boy king who must heal the land while dealing the ramifications of the sins of his father and his own. Nicol Williamson eschews the Obi Wan Kenobi archetype and goes for something practically from another dimension and he pulls it off. Robert Addie conveys familicidal sociopath with only a couple of lines and successfully manages to use his what could have been as bad as nipples on the batsuit costume in order to add deeper meaning to his character. Mirren has never been better cast and the dude who played Percival is great too.
- Jon Finch in MACBETH. He does what Toshiro Mifune, Ian McKellen, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles could not and successfully pulls off a transition from opportunistic warrior to genuine monster.
- Klaus Kinski in AGUIRRE AND FITZCARRALDO. Why hasn’t he been mentioned yet?
- Peter Weller in ROBOCOP. He was perfectly cast. No one else could convey the unassuming Irish cop who lost his humanity and his violent quest to regain whatever little of it that remained in his monstrous body. He delivered a Frankenstein’s monster that no Frankenstein’s monster will ever touch.
- James Franco in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. He was good in Freaks and Geeks but his film work left much to be desired until he climbed aboard the Apatow train once again.
- Val Kilmer in THE DOORS. The movie could’ve been much better but Kilmer became Jim Morrison.
- Ahnuld in THE TERMINATOR. He was perfect. Notice how he never blinks.
- Uma Thurman and Gordon Liu in KILL BILL.
- Heath Ledger in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and THE DARK KNIGHT. He perfectly underplayed his character in Brokeback and simply became The Joker onscreen losing none of the psychopathic, almost sadomachostic playfulness of the comic character. Jack was just a slightly more violent version of himself on a bad day dressed as a clone. Ledger was the Joker.
- Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER, THE HITCHER, FLESH AND BLOOD, and all his Dutch films. He was the ultimate unstoppable force of 80s cinema and the greatest actor ever in his native language. You seriously could believe he was a genetically engineered to be a superhuman and do things like go on an intergalactic killing spree in search of enlightenment, jack an entire castle by himself, or just harass some teenagers until they die.
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Tatsuya Nakadai or Shintaru Katsu? over 3 years ago
Coppola is right.
Nakadai was not nearly charismatic enough for Kagemusha and only got away with it in Ran due to the Noh theatreness that tons of people could have done. Daniel Kasman is partly right. Nakadai has this Christopher Walken-like otherworldiness thing going on that makes it hard for him to play roles that aren’t villains (Yojimbo and Sanjuro), psycho killers (The Sword of Doom), deformed (that movie where he is scarred by acid), or just plain weirdos. It’s actually more like a Keanu Reeves style, face as blank slate otherworldiness combined with Walken style weirdness.
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Art-House films people give you "shit" for not liking over 3 years ago
The Fountain. Stop giving me shit for calling you out on how shitty it is. Stop trying to defend it because it could have been good. It’s not. Some of Aguirre-like conquistadoring gone wrong stuff is almost watchable but it somehow bombs as you realize it was shot in some narrow alley with bad CGI jungle effects and cuts away to the totally bullshit that is the two thirds of the movie. This film is one of the biggest messes in recent memory. It’s Zardoz minus the fun and hilarious philosophical dialogue. This was one film that needed to be recut, reshot, or just fucking not given a theatrical release. It’s that bad.
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Top Ten Films of 2008 over 3 years ago
I’m not going to do a top ten but simply give you my favorite movie of the year and the runners up.
Winner:
- Pineapple Express
Honorable mentions:
- Man On Wire
- In Bruges
- Gran Torino
- The Dark Knight
- Rachel Getting Married
- The Wrestler
- Let the Right One In
- Milk
- Forgetting Sarah Marshall
- Iron Man
- Religulous
- JCVD
- The Dutchess of Langeais
- The Dutchess
- Kung Fu Panda
- Chocolate
- Yip Man
- Snow Angels
- The Visitor
- 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
- Wall-E
- Burn After Reading
- Frost/Nixon
- Waltz with Bashir
somewhat crappy movies I enjoyed:
- Doomsday
- The Machine Girl
really crappy movies I enjoyed:
- In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
- Death Race
- Rambo
best restorations:
- Witchfinder General
- The Godfather
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Anybody seen films from India? over 3 years ago
Is it just me or would Bollywood be much better if they actually embraced the concept of genre more often?
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Greatest samurai film of all time? over 3 years ago
I don’t really consider to be Ran and Kagemusha to be samurai movies. They are Shakespeare movies with a samurai setting. Kagemusha is a costume drama. Saying they are samurai movies is like saying The Seventh Seal is a slasher flick because it has death pursuing a group of people (same plot as Final Destination!). Seven Samurai isn’t just a samurai movie either as it transcends the genre while still being a part of it.
best actual samurai movies:
- Yojimbo and Sanjuro
- Lone Wolf and Cub series
- Kill Bill
- Zatoichi series
- Harakiri
- The Hidden Fortress
- the stuff in the Rebel Samurai boxset
- Hanzo the Razor
- The Sword of Doom. I didn’t want to include this as it doesn’t have a plot other than Tatsuya Nakadai kills tons and tons of dudes but maybe that is actually a good thing.
- Seven Samurai
Honorable mentions:
- Samurai trilogy. Way too much crappy filler but some great scenes.
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Movies you love, but everyone else hates. over 3 years ago
- I also like Death to Smoochy! It’s surprisingly funny.
- 300 is also great borderline gay porn. So cartoonishly over the top awesome, it becomes legitimately awesome. It even has random sex scenes to try to balance out the gayness of 300 muscly dudes in leather underwear kicking ass together. It’s the kind of movie that you have to be in the theatre with a good audience to love or just watch it with a group of friends getting gradually drunk. It’s not meant to be in the same class as say Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, or even Braveheart. It’s like Conan the Barbarian level, which is also awesome.
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Who do you think the most overrated director is? over 3 years ago
The first Star Wars movie (the only one of the original three that Lucas directed) was good in spite of him. The script went through several uncredited rewrites by people such as Francis Ford Coppola. If other people hadn’t significantly contributed, the OG Star Wars would have had Yoda narrating the adventures (think the role that Mako has in Conan style narrating only shittier) of Biggs Starkiller and Mace Windu. Lucas didn’t really do anything for Empire and only interfered somewhat with Jedi. When he made the prequels, he actually didn’t want to direct. He actually tried to get someone to direct the actors for him so he could concentrate on the technical stuff but he didn’t get any takers. Thus when he hired young actors inexperienced with weak directing (a bunch of the line readings sound like they are simply one take BECAUSE THEY ARE ONE TAKE. LUCAS DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT), they ended up sucking. Liam Neeson and Christopher Lee of course did not as they have experience being in subpar B-movies (Especially Lee. Neeson at least had dialogue written for him in shit like Krull. Lee had none in a bunch of the pirate and Dracula movies he did. He had to make it up himself or sometimes in the case of Dracula: Prince of Darkness didn’t do anything except snarl as what was given to him was that bad.) Ewan MacGregor, Samuel L Jackson, and Ian McDiarmid eventually sort of realized that they were going to have to do everything themselves. The guy who played Darth Maul didn’t suck too. Probably because he has experience being in badly plotted martial arts movies.
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