DVDs and Films You Have Watched Recently #2

[denzel_maggiore]

Saw the new X-Men film this week.

 

Throughly enjoyed the film and one of the best films I have seen in quite a while (didn't have any expectations for this film and had no idea about the cast or story, although have seen the previous films quite a while back and know the main characters).

 

Thought that the main characters were very well written and have previously enjoyed Fassbender's work (think he is a great actor) and didn't realise he was Magneto in this film before watching but loved the character throughout the film.

 

So yeah, didn't have any expectations on this film but the story was written well to those who knew of the X-Men but also towards those who may be new to the franchise.

 

Oh and Jennifer Lawerence

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

bought edtv on dvd earlier in the week from cash converters as id never seen it before, watched with my girlfriend on thursday night and the two of us enjoyed it, a decent cast in it to boot

[truthofsin]

Knucklehead: Well what can i say other than i can't belive i just sat through all of that, really really poor.. Show just didn't come over very well in and spent a lot of it crying.. The Chaperone was spot on and a flick i know my kids would enjoy, I doubt they'd sit through knucklehead and other than maybe 2-3 moments in the flick, i doubt they'd laugh at it.. I heard show was meant to be decent at the acting lark and expected a lot better from him. Especially as he comes across as a naturally funny guy (his dressing up phase showed he has great comedy timing).. I'd definatly throw this on the list of poor WWE films rather than the good ones..

[Green]

I've had trouble sleeping past couple of days and after running out of House and Community episodes on my hard drive I decided to watch a few films I'd been meaning to get around to:

 

Wishmaster

Really good fun for what it is. A typical 80s style gimmicky horror very much in the same vain of Hellraiser and Nightmare on Elm Street. The only problem is it was made in 1997. A decade earlier and this film would have been a lot more popular I imagine. Still, as mentioned, it's a fun concept.

 

Wishmaster 2

A huge waste. I know a lot of people hate the never-ending run of sequels that a lot of horror series have but I've got a huge soft spot for most of them. I guess I'm just easy to please but even with that I found this to be pretty awful. It offers so many potentially good set-ups and just pisses them away. And I know it's hard to talk logic about a film where an evil Djinn is unleashed from an enchanted stone but this just follows the one of the worst conventions of horror sequels by ignoring a lot of the rules established in the original.

 

The Incredibles

I wasn't a huge fan of this the first time I saw it. I like it more now but I think there are a lot of flaws still. It takes a long while to really get going and as a result the middle of the film feels very rushed. Then there are the annoying characters that I guess are to be expected once in a while from Pixar (I found Edna and Dash to be largely intolerable). I also thought the gag ratio was much lower for this compared to Pixar's other efforts. Even Monsters Inc, which I also found a bit disappointing, felt like it had more going on. However, most of the characters are really fantastic (particularly Elasti-girl, pun partly intended) and it's such a cool concept that I'd certainly be interested in a sequel, which I hear is the plan at the moment?

[Dr.PeterVenkman]

Anyone watch In Search of a Midnight Kiss last night? Quality film, I'm sure BBC 2 has the best track record going for showing great little known films

[Halitosis Romantic]

Rewatching Night Watch - as I recalled, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'm still really enjoying it.

[wwffan2]

watched Insidous and the Funhouse recently both are pretty dark and i would highly recommend them both.

[Philo_Vance]

Re-watched The Big Sleep yesterday. Can't recommend it enough. Bogart is untouchable in it and the supporting cast is excellent, with an unbelievably sharp script. Up there with The Maltese Falcon as my favourite crime film of all time.

[Mr. Seven]

Finally got around to X-Men First Class today. Pros and cons listed below, and SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS so you've been warned.

 

I LIKED

 

At times the film touches on greatness. However, Matthew Vaughn is not and never will be a great filmmaker so natually he can't quite nail it. The beats between Xavier and Magneto are excellent. If anything I wanted more of them. While there was lots of things in the film I didn't buy, I thought their relationship worked.

 

McAvoy (who I don't like) and Fassbender (who I do like) were perfectly cast and brought a lot of character to both roles. What was with Fassbender's Irish accent creeping in at the end though?

 

Kevin Bacon clearly had a lot of fun, and while his Sebastian Shaw is unquestiionably hammy (he's basically a Bond villain with superpowers), I did find him genuinely menacing. Bravo Kev.

 

Azazel's storm and massacre of the compound was done very well and was pretty fucking dark for a film that's bloodless and 12A. It was 12A wasn't it?

 

On a related note, Oliver Platt's death was so unceremoniously funny that I very nearly cackled.

 

Nicholas Hoult surprised me by being pretty damn great.

 

The Wolverine cameo was a nice touch.

 

The casting all round was pretty good.

 

How Charles winds up in his chair is done very well.

 

I also liked that we see him being a bit cocky and chasing skirts. Not something you really ever think of when you imagine Professor X.

 

Jennifer Lawrence did a good job as the conflicted Mystique, although I think her character was really poorly written.

 

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

 

So Mystique then. No easy way to say this. She's a bit of a dumb tramp isn't she? She's clearly dying to fuck Xavier, and when he shows no interest she goes after Beast, a lesser version of a genius. But he's not really interested either (the fucking idiot) so she is seduced by Magneto (understandable, Fassbender is a charmer), but to fucking end up in his bed, offering herself to him after being rejected by Beast? Come on. I realise she's meant to be naive and such, but jesus. Also, I'm not sure I like Magneto kissing (and probably fucking) her.

 

Her heel turn at the end, for the logic gaps in her character, is also a little hard to swallow.

 

Speaking of heel turns, that's the only reason Angel is in this. Shit character.

 

And speaking of shit characters with tenuous reasons to be here, step forward Darwin. This poor fucker gets to:

 

1: Have a shit power.

2: Be the Token Black Guy.

3: Die to show how serious the situation/evil the villain is.

 

Great job guy!

 

Banshee. Pretty meh.

 

Havoc. Should have turned heel, would have made a more interesting choice.

 

Azazel. Did he need to look like the fucking devil?

 

Emma Frost. Not as rubbish as I had been led to believe but she's pretty vacant.

 

Beast looked a bit shit.

 

The boats sequence goes on waaaaaaaaay too long, reminding you of the much worse and longer boats sequence in The Dark Knight.

 

The film is too long. You could easily lose half an hour.

 

Also, and I realise this is highly sexist of me, but Rose Byrne is a pretty shit actress, so if you're going to go to the trouble of having her strip down to her underwear for ridiculously convoluted reasons, at least include a shot of her posterior.

 

So yeah, good film, but fell way short of greatness. But that's Matthew Vaughan for you. A huge improvement on the odious Kick-Ass though.

[FLips]

SPOILERS

 

If this is a reboot, how do they manage to put Wolverine in and make sense? I never got that, and it's not the type of film I would watch.

[Astro Hollywood]

That is the worst attempt at hiding spoilers ever.

 

SPOILERS - *the thing that is a spoiler*

 

But I'd already been spoiled on that in two other posts on here anyway.

[chokeout]

Its not a reboot its a prequel although by saying that they have left themselves open for a LOT of continuty errors.

The original plan to have Xmen Origins:Magneto would have been an awesome film if they had just stuck with 2 hours of Fassbender being Jewish Bond.

 

After talking about the film with my friend one point that really bugs me is that Charles and Magneto talk in the later films like they are life long friends who worked together for years. Within the context of this film they knew each other for a few weeks then split. They really shouldnt have ended it like they did. They could easily of had Magneto and Charles still working together and Magneto trying to push his views on the mutants in the school leading to a better xmen / brotherhood of mutants split. Lets face it as cool as Azazel was in the film Magneto has the shittest group of mutants of any Xmen film

[Green]

I think the reason Azazel is the fucking devil in the film is because that's pretty much what he is in the comics. Nightcrawler's dad I believe. He could be an interesting character with development. I agree Emma Frost was awful though, even more so because she's one of my favorites and this is twice they've made her shite.

[Deaq]

I think the reason Azazel is the fucking devil in the film is because that's pretty much what he is in the comics. Nightcrawler's dad I believe. He could be an interesting character with development. I agree Emma Frost was awful though, even more so because she's one of my favorites and this is twice they've made her shite.

 

Yeah he is Nightcrawlers dad and Mystique is his mom, he is a kind of devil and if they make another 1 might explain him in a bit more detail. Darwin's powers are much better in the comics and make him a lot better then the way he was used as fodder,

 

Continuity errors in the film are beyond a joke, e.g

 

Lots of spoilers.

 

At the end of First Class, we see the incident that paralyzes Professor X from the waist down. Mind you, this movie takes place in the 60s. In the movie, The Last Stand, the opening scene shows Professor X walking, which is set to be 80s.

In the same opening scene in The Last Stand, Xavier and Magneto are still friends. In First Class, they have already went their separate ways.

In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we also see Professor X standing at the end of the film.

Back to the Wolverine movie, during the escape of Three Mile Island, we see Emma Frost as a teenager. In First Class (which happens years before), she is an adult. Of course, they never mentioned her name in the movie, but the actress was credited as "Emma Frost."

In the first X-Men movie, Xavier states that his first meeting with Magneto was when they were teenagers. In First Class, they are grown men the first time they meet.

In X2, we see Beast in human form. In First Class, we see him transform from human to blue mutant. Unless he was able to transform himself back to human, and decided to turn himself blue again in The Last Stand, that just wouldn't make any sense.

First Class establishes that Hank McCoy (Beast) was the one who built Cerebro. In the first movie, Professor X explains that he built it with the help of Magneto.

Because it was stated that Magneto helped Professor X construct Cerebro, Magneto was able to build a helmet that was impervious to telepathy. Well in First Class, Magneto merely takes the helmet from Sebastian Shaw.

In First Class, during the scene when Xavier uses Cerebro for the first time, we see a young Storm cameo. That would mean Storm in the trilogy should be about 50 years old. I'm sure this was made clearly for fan service, but I'm just sayin'.

In The Last Stand, Mystique becomes cured from her mutation, where we see her revert into a brunette. In First Class, she's a blonde. First Class also establishes that her blue form is her "true" form, which means she was born blue. If being "cured" in The Last Stand means she gains a human appearance, I'm going to assume that she had normal skin before her blueish scales. So which one came first?

Moira Mactaggert seems to look about the same age in both First Class and The Last Stand, which is set decades apart.

There is no Stan Lee cameo.

 

On a side not I watched half of The Fourth Kind on the 360 after reading that it uses REAL footage having no idea at the time the real footage was fake, I gave it ago, as soon as I saw the real footage I gave up realizing it was anything but real. Shame as the idea of the film sounded like it could have been interesting.

Edited June 18, 2011 by Deaq

[Green]

The other X-Men films ranged from appallingly dull to god-awful so I'm not too bothered about the lack of continuity. I'd rather take it as a reboot that just coincidentally uses some of the same actors. I mean Hugh Jackman basically IS Wolverine at this point anyway.

 

And I'm aware X2 was decent...but it's nowhere near as great as people make it out to be. I found First Class to be much better.