Tag: movies

I have never watched Mad Men, never had any interest in it, but after reading about the final episode, that has to be the second-best ending of a television show ever, only surpassed by the epic end of Newhart. Third, in my opinion, would be the end of The Sopranos.

I love the fact that the show’s creator absolutely must have had the ending in mind from the beginning. That’s a first-rate lesson in doing storytelling right.

Somehow, I tend to doubt that A Game of Thrones will end anywhere nearly as well. While Benioff and Weiss have generally shown themselves to have much better storytelling instincts than George Martin, I’m still trying to figure out what on Earth is going on with Danerys inexplicably deciding to marry a member of the Mereen aristocracy. Fails as drama, fails as logic, and fails as being interesting.

I certainly have no desire to see it myself. In addition to all the Grrrl Power nonsense, the core plot obviously makes no sense:

The truth is I’m angry about the extents Hollywood and the director of Fury Road went to trick me and other men into seeing this movie. Everything VISUALLY looks amazing. It looks like that action guy flick we’ve desperately been waiting for where it is one man with principles, standing against many with none.

But let us be clear. This is the vehicle by which they are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat. This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women.

So do yourself and all men across the world a favor. Not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible. Not all of them have the keen eye we do here at ROK. And most will be taken in by fire tornadoes and explosions. Because if they sheepishly attend and Fury Road is a blockbuster, then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn’t contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism.

It’s a post-apocalyptic setting, right? That means survival is the absolute priority, which means K/selection, which means that having your women behave in a manner consistent with perhaps the ultimate r/selection environment means that you’ll be selected out of existence in short order no matter how awesome Charlize Theron pretends to be.

I don’t think I’ll be working with Hollywood anytime soon:

We’re not gonna lie, after watching the cringe-worthy “Iliad” scene from J.Lo’s new movie “The Boy Next Door” we wept for humanity a bit. Then, like the rest of the world we wondered “How the heck did this happen? Is Hollywood really that stupid?”

In case you missed it, the awful scene shows J.Lo’s hunky love interest / psychotic neighbor giving her a “first edition” copy of Homer’s The Iliad. You know, that epic 3,000-year-old-ish poem he wrote. The one in which the oldest version, called the Venetus A, dates back to the 10th century? Yeah. The “first edition” seen in the movie is clearly not 3,000 years old.

We just couldn’t let it go (seriously, The Iliad? Pick ANY
other book), so we contacted the screenwriter, Barbara Curry, a former
Assistant U.S. Attorney, and asked her point blank: “WTF happened?”

Turns out writers aren’t that dumb. But Hollywood producers are.

“Much of my original script was rewritten by the producers and the
director. I was not given the opportunity to participate in the
production of this movie,” Curry told Fusion. “As for the first edition
‘Iliad’ reference in the movie, that was not something I wrote in my
original script,” she says.

As a publisher of other folks novels, I will have a responsibility to be polite if options of those novels are pursued. But if anyone EXCEPT the guys who produce A Game of Thrones contacts me again about my own books, I am going to tell them, as before, the answer is no. And if they make the mistake of asking me why, I I will absolutely tell them that I have zero interest in working with retards with no respect for the Western canon.

I watched a documentary on a day in the production of A Game of Thrones and it confirmed for me that I prefer the game industry. There is a LOT of carpentry involved, among other things; it is insane how many people and moving parts are required in order to produce a show of that quality. And then to think how readily they will throw all that sort of effort away because some arrogant executive philistine is uneducated really boggles the mind

TolkienEditor has cut Peter Jackson’s abusive monstrosity in half and thereby, in large part, restored Tolkien’s much-beloved tale:

I decided to condense all three installments (An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies) into a single 4-hour feature that more closely resembled Tolkien’s original novel. Well, okay, it’s closer to 4.5 hours, but those are some long-ass credits! This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts, detailed below:

The investigation of Dol Guldor has been completely excised, including the appearances of Radagast, Saruman and Galadriel. This was the most obvious cut, and the easiest to carry out (a testament to its irrelevance to the main narrative). Like the novel, Gandalf abruptly disappears on the borders of Mirkwood, and then reappears at the siege of the Lonely Mountain with tidings of an orc army.

The Tauriel-Legolas-Kili love triangle has also been removed. Indeed, Tauriel is no longer a character in the film, and Legolas only gets a brief cameo during the Mirkwood arrest. This was the next clear candidate for elimination, given how little plot value and personality these two woodland sprites added to the story. Dwarves are way more fun to hang out with anyway. 😛

The Pale Orc subplot is vastly trimmed down. Azog is obviously still leading the attack on the Lonely Mountain at the end, but he does not appear in the film until after the company escapes the goblin tunnels (suggesting that the slaying of the Great Goblin is a factor in their vendetta, as it was in the novel).

I was pleased to learn that in addition to getting rid of “Tauriel”, the ridiculous barrel-fight is also gone. The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit is a 6GB MP4 file, available by either torrent or direct download. Not all of Jackson’s egregious stupidities have been excised, but most of them have been surgically removed.

UPDATE: Another, even more reduced option:

After about 312 new edits and cuts and almost 5 hours removed
from the trilogy, this single film combines the three Peter Jackson
movies into one immense epic that accurately tells the story of Bilbo,
while maintaining what new ideas and battles have been implanted in
Jackson’s retelling (such as the Battle of the Five Armies containing
orcs instead of goblins). 

The following is a list of all the major
edits/alterations to the films for this single edit. Scenes aren’t
always simply removed, sometimes they are repositioned or sometimes
specific elements are taken out or added in for coherency or pacing:  

• Removed all of Elf-Dwarf Love Triangle Plot
• Removed all of Gandalf’s necromancer adventures
• Removed most of orc scenes/battles/mentions in first 2/3’s of
  the film (including removing frames with orcs from the post-goblin
  escape scene at the end of “Unexpected Journey”)
• Removed Bilbo killing a wolf – the first thing he kills is the spider in Mirkwood forest, giving the sword the name “Sting”
• Removed all of (elder) Bilbo’s introduction to the lore
• Removed all of the heavy foreshadowing for LOTR and the evil of the ring – kept to the spirit of the book, it was a playful invisibility ring!
• Added a deleted scene of the Shire villagers as an intro to the film
• Reduced much of the Dwarves’ dinner at Bilbo’s
• Created faster transition to Bilbo getting out of the house
• Reduced Rivendell
• Reduced Stone Giant scene
• Reduced goblin scene, re-ordered dialogue to mirror book interactions between Thorin & Goblin King
• Kept Gollum scene entirely intact – no cutting between that
  and the goblin lair, although shortened as well as removed Gollum
  beating the corpse in the beginning
• Created voice-over transition into Beorn scene at the beginning of “Desolation of Smaug”
• Reduced Mirkwood forest & Woodland Realm capture scenes
• Heavily reduced Laketown capture (all of Laketown is about 10 minutes total now)
• Removed Smaug battle scene with dwarves in the mines (kept
  Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, the battle was outrageously cartoonish
  and long)
• Removed Bard using his son as a bow, the shots dance around it and the scene is intact 
• Rearranged much of Battle of Five Armies for coherency of
  Bilbo concealing and giving away the Arkenstone without the need for so
  many silly slow-motion Thorin bits
• Removed many elements of the Battle of Five Armies that
  contained too much CGI monsters or silly battle actions (like repeated
  head-butting) 
• Reduced and rearranged the battle to get to Thorin quicker
• Removed elves from the final fight scene (Kili fights the orc in order to protect Bilbo instead of his elf love interest)
• Removed final flash-forward scene, the film ends with Bilbo finally coming home

Matt Taibbi is underwhelmed by American Sniper:

Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There’s the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the “human story.”

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle’s officers suggests that they could “win the war” by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America’s peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

Look, I get it’s a movie. Movies end. They need an ending, and the sort of 4GW morass into which Iraq has ever so predictably descended isn’t suitable. So, it’s understandable that Eastwood turns it into a story with a coherent ending, right down to the dramatic mano-a-mano that is conventional in these sorts of war movies. And it is refreshing to see Hollywood take the side of an American soldier for a change.

But that doesn’t make that line any more intelligent. It just doesn’t.

The only good thing about The Hobbit III is that it means Peter Jackson and his two-woman Harem of Stank is done squatting and urinating upon the text of Tolkien.

It’s a damn shame that the three Hobbit films feature so little of the titular hobbit.

Martin Freeman has established himself as a quietly great actor with serious dramatic and comedic chops, and his scenes in these movies have consistently been the best thing about the films. Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience, which is what Peter Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy needed more than anything—Bilbo’s scenes form the kernel of what could have been a smaller, quieter, but ultimately more narratively successful series of films, one where Bilbo’s personal journey isn’t swallowed whole by loud Lord of the Rings-style battle sequences.

Other than Freeman’s wonderful, quiet little scenes and a bare handful of others, Battle of the Five Armies is one big two-hour-and-24-minute-long argument against splitting the book up into three films.

The disappointing thing is that Jackson actually got off to a pretty good start. He did a wonderful job bringing the scenery of Middle Earth to life. The Shire and the hobbits were excellent. The first thing he really got wrong, in my opinion, was Arwen Evensong, followed by Rivendell and Elrond. But Arwen was a harbinger for Jackson’s lack of respect for the text, which only got worse as the movies went on, culminating in the insane decision to completely vivisect and spread out The Hobbit over three cash-grabbing vehicles.

Verdict: “These movies aren’t Star Wars prequel-level unredeemable, but both as a follow up to the Lord of the Rings movies and an adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this new trilogy misses the mark in just about every possible way.”

The movies were not a complete loss. The first three were genuinely enjoyable despite the “improvements” to Tolkien’s masterpiece. Perhaps in another generation, a filmmaker will do the sort of justice to his books that the producers of A Game of Thrones have done to George Martin’s.

I haven’t paid any attention whatsoever to the Star Wars universe since seeing what was called Episode I. Not the games, not the movies, not the animated LEGO cartoons, nothing. So, I’ll have to wait and see what the verdict is on this Episode VII before I even think about bothering to see it. It would be nice to think that Disney isn’t going to make an even bigger fiasco of the franchise than George Lucas did, but I’m not particularly optimistic. Let’s face it, Disney movies all have one basic theme these days: the supreme importance of being yourself.