Film forum off topic/random chat thread

Sad Professor · 17-05-2016 9:42pm

The Black Oil wrote: »

You'd like to think so, but I'd bet there's still some bully boy producers out there who can throw their weight around relatively unchallenged. Mo Ryan has touched on a lot of this in TVland.

I meant more in terms of sexual harassment. The bullying is probably much the same I'd imagine.

It's a high pressure industries full of dudes trying to get ahead. It must be a nightmare for anyone at the lower levels.

Mthor5 · 23-05-2016 8:30pm

Anyone listen to "Kermode and Mayo's Film Review" podcast?; seems to be unavailable on itunes for me since Friday, other podcasts are fine and I cannot see any mention of a problem online. The message that pops up is "authorisation is needed...."

FunLover18 · 23-05-2016 9:12pm

Mthor5 wrote: »

Anyone listen to "Kermode and Mayo's Film Review" podcast?; seems to be unavailable on itunes for me since Friday, other podcasts are fine and I cannot see any mention of a problem online. The message that pops up is "authorisation is needed...."

Downloaded this week's episode on itunes no bother.

Mthor5 · 23-05-2016 9:42pm

FunLover18 wrote: »

Downloaded this week's episode on itunes no bother.

Thanks, tried again and no joy. Turned off wifi connection and it worked over 4g on the mobile, strange that it will not work over wifi on either the pc or mobile. (Virgin Broadband fwiw)

The Black Oil · 23-05-2016 10:43pm

Unsubscribe, resubscribe? I used to get it through iTunes, now I get it from the app. Another podcast I listen to I had an issue a few months ago, but it was at their end, with the feed. They only picked up on it when people started to email them. Sounds like the issue is more so with your set up/configuration, or an annoying glitch.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 30-05-2016 1:19am

Odeon don't seem to be showing Love and Friendship at all?

It's getting rave reviews and seems a rare alternative to CGI heavy and/or superhero fare that's flooding the cinemas as summer approaches. Seems an odd choice not to show it at all.

johnny_ultimate · 30-05-2016 7:35am

I find Odeon's programming to be completely uninspired, on a level even beyond the other multiplex chains. Not surprised it isn't showing, if you're in Dublin there's plenty of other places screening it. Plus, you won't have to put up with Odeon's frankly appalling projection standards

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 30-05-2016 10:33am

Yeah, there's a few others showing it. Just disappointed my local is not one of them. My mum wants to see it and she's not a fan of trekking inot town just to go to the cinema. I don't expect to be able to see everything in Odeon but I didn't think L&F was that out there a film that they wouldn't screen it at all. They could make a fortune from the old people on €5 Wednesday.

On the subject of film releases, does anyone know what happened with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Was released in Northern Ireland but not in Republic?

pixelburp · 30-05-2016 10:45am

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Yeah, there's a few others showing it. Just disappointed my local is not one of them. My mum wants to see it and she's not a fan of trekking inot town just to go to the cinema. I don't expect to be able to see everything in Odeon but I didn't think L&F was that out there a film that they wouldn't screen it at all. They could make a fortune from the old people on €5 Wednesday.

On the subject of film releases, does anyone know what happened with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Was released in Northern Ireland but not in Republic?

It must have come and gone pretty quickly, because I definitely recalled seeing it advertised in my local (IMC Santry, Omni).

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 30-05-2016 11:00am

^I saw it advertised too but I searched every cinema chain I could think of and it wasn't showing anywhere. I asked the guys at Scannain.com and they said it was NI only. It was supposed to be out in March or April but then it got pushed back to May but then it never appeared south of the border.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 30-05-2016 10:53pm

Disappointing to see what John Carney's been saying about Keira Knightley lately.

http://variety.com/2016/film/news/john-carney-keira-knightley-begin-again-1201785176/

Fine if he didn't like working with her but he's made himself sound like a massive tool and could have a hard time getting people to work with him now. Not that he'll care, he seems to like working with musicians who think they can act and amateurs.

Knightley has had an up and down career, performance wise, but I've never heard anyone say a bad word about her. Funnily enough Begin Again was one of her best performances and it's his best film, in my opinion.

Sad Professor · 30-05-2016 11:33pm

Carney is an idiot. You wouldn't mind so much if there was some truth to it, but what he said is patently false. Knightley is a not a supermodel. She's been acting since she was a child. Any modelling she has done has been a result of her acting career rather than the other way around. She's also an extremely brave actress, not afraid to look bad and fail.

What I can't get over, though, is that he bashes Knightley but praises Adam Levine, who is utterly awful in that film — oh but Carney liked hanging out with him so it's okay. I suspect there's more to this story.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 30-05-2016 11:39pm

Sad Professor wrote: »

What I can't get over, though, is that he bashes Knightley but praises Adam Levine, who is utterly awful in that film — oh but Carney liked hanging out with him so it's okay. I suspect there's more to this story.

It does sound like she just didn't want to hang out with him or something, as silly as that sounds. I doubt very much she'll give a **** what he thinks of her. She'll have no problems finding work, he may have some problems finding people that want to work with him.

https://twitter.com/markromanek/status/737389977198153728

https://twitter.com/lynnsheltonfilm/status/737396248777363457

https://twitter.com/MTadjedin/status/737328047754379264

Sad Professor · 30-05-2016 11:47pm

Cronenberg also had nothing but praise for her:

https://twitter.com/JustinCChang/status/736985364598951937

Sad Professor · 30-05-2016 11:52pm

Speaking of a**hole directors trash talking their lead actresses, Kate Beckinsale has been talking about her experiences with Michael Bay on Pearl Harbour:

“I don't think I fit the type of actress Michael Bay had met before,” Beckinsale recalls of the Transformers filmmaker in a new interview on The Graham Norton Show. “I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren't bigger than my head and I wasn't blonde.”

“I'd just had my daughter and had lost weight,” Beckinsale explains, “but was told that if I got the part, I'd have to work out. And I just didn't understand why a 1940s nurse would do that.”

Even after Bay presumably spent hundreds of hours staring at the actress during filming and post-production, he still was not able to acknowledge the actress's looks.

“When we were promoting the film, Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben [Affleck] and Josh [Hartnett], and he said, 'I have worked with Ben before and I love him, and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor',“ Beckinsale said. “Then when he was asked about me, he'd say, ‘Kate wasn't so attractive that she would alienate the female audience.’”

“He kept saying it everywhere we went, and we went to a lot of places,” she added.

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/05/kate-beckinsale-michael-bay

johnny_ultimate · 30-05-2016 11:54pm

Frankly, I'd put a career like Knightley's - idiosyncratic and ambitious, regularly appearing in interesting films and turning in wholly committed performances - on a different level to the career of a director with as few tricks as Carney (that'd be one trick)

Not to mention she's one of the best things about the steaming pile of misjudgements that is Begin Again.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 12:05am

Yeah, when you look at Knightley's career it is incredibly varied. Plus, she was one of the stars of a huge franchise at about 19 and could have gone on to have a very specific career and make a lot of money but went an entirely different, perhaps riskier, route and has made some really interesting choices. As I said some of her performances/films haven't been great but nobody has a nearly 15 year career with only winners in it.

John Carney has made the same film 3 times with varying degrees of success.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 12:07am

Sad Professor wrote: »

Speaking of a**hole directors trash talking their lead actresses, Kate Beckinsale has been talking about her experiences with Michael Bay on Pearl Harbour:

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/05/kate-beckinsale-michael-bay

It's nice to see women talking about this kind of thing. Michael Bay has been making films for years and has probably been treating women like that for years. I'm sure he's not the only one and given how overwhelmingly male the film industry still is I'm sure a lot of actresses are still being treated like this on a regular basis.

e_e · 31-05-2016 12:33am

Well I feel a lot more secure now in not being won over by Sing Street. :pac:

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 12:39am

e_e wrote: »

Well I feel a lot more secure now in not being won over by Sing Street. :pac:

Sing Street was fun and the music was great but that was all it was. The attempts to add depth with the troubled love interest and the family drama were pretty poorly executed and felt a bit tacked on. The ending was ridiculous too. Carney basically makes extended music videos and somewhere along the way someone forces him to add something resembling a plot.

As I said, I think Begin Again is actually his best film and when you take the music out there is actually something resembling a proper film there and that is, in my opinion, down to Ruffalo and Knightley.

FunLover18 · 31-05-2016 2:01am

Purely playing devil's advocate here lads but I wouldn't define Knightley as a brilliant actress, she's good and she definitely has done some interesting work but I've never been wowed by her and I can't think of any performances that I think would deserve an Oscar or anything. Also that article opens by admitting that directors usually praise their actors and actresses as though it's almost refreshing to hear someone be honest and then ends the article on a quote of a director praising an actress they just worked with. There's no doubt he's talking a lot of pretentious twaddle about exposing oneself on camera (poor word choice) but I don't see why everyone's jumping to her defence. Her entourage made it difficult, according to him, and he didn't get the performance he wanted.

johnny_ultimate · 31-05-2016 7:31am

I don't think she's necessarily a brilliant actress outside one or two performances, but she is a consistently good one, perhaps increasingly so in recent years. Mostly I think it's a bit rich of Carney, given the fundamental problems with Begin Again that the cast make genuine efforts to overcome (although found Ruffalo's performance bizarre). People in glass houses... and all that. Like his comments on Sing Street:

And working with the kids on this film and real instruments there was no hiding going on.

Well, no hiding apart from the overproduced, anachronistic and bland studio recordings you opted to dub over their performances :pac:

e_e · 31-05-2016 9:38am

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Sing Street was fun and the music was great but that was all it was. The attempts to add depth with the troubled love interest and the family drama were pretty poorly executed and felt a bit tacked on. The ending was ridiculous too. Carney basically makes extended music videos and somewhere along the way someone forces him to add something resembling a plot. .

That's where I disagree with a lot of praise for the film. I found the overly produced and insipid 2010s X Factor sound of many of the original songs really jarring and kinda bland tbh. They go from being this gritty band of Dublin kids with no budget and few instruments to sounding like big studio acts 30 years later that were written by middle aged people in suits. There's just no passion or personality to the sounds. The rawness and authenticity of We Are the Best! was much more endearing to me.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 10:35am

^^ The "entourage" comment has been dismissed by a few people. Maybe he's talking about her agent or a PA, people most professionals have working for them. It just sounds like he doesn't like working with professional actors. Whether that's just his "style" or it's because he's not very professional himself and someone with experience working with a lot of great directors can call him on that, I dont know.

It's not about defending Knightley either. I happen to like her, from what little we see of her in real life, she seems okay. Her acting, as we've said, varies but she has had a decent run lately, and she's hardly the worst performance John Carney has gotten in a film. I won't even go back to Zonad to illustrate my point. The point is though he's thrashed her completely to the press, as a person, as a professional and as an actress. I saw Ava DuVernay comment on it and she sums it up pretty well. She says there are always actors that a director won't call again, for whatever reason, but trashing them in the press is completely unnecessary and ultimately it only reflects on you.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 10:37am

e_e wrote: »

That's where I disagree with a lot of praise for the film. I found the overly produced and insipid 2010s X Factor sound of many of the original songs really jarring and kinda bland tbh. They go from being this gritty band of Dublin kids with no budget and few instruments to sounding like big studio acts 30 years later that were written by middle aged people in suits. There's just no passion or personality to the sounds. The rawness and authenticity of We Are the Best! was much more endearing to me.

Well yeah, I guess in terms of being realistic and fitting in with the kids supposedly playing them, they were over produced and a bit ridiculous. Still pretty catchy though, I thought.

FunLover18 · 31-05-2016 5:58pm

Really interesting article here on fan-entitlement, admittedly it does veer towards accusing anyone who thinks the new Ghostbusters is **** is sexist, even though the author admits they're not overly keen on the reboot idea, but was wondering people here thought in general.

Personally, I never understood people's possessiveness when it comes to franchises and films; I dislike Die Hards 4&5 but in no way does that affect my enjoyment of Die Hard which is possibly my favourite film of all time. If they decided to remake it I'd be miffed and annoyed but more because of the laziness and unoriginallity rather than because I feel it a personal attack which some fans seem to do, as though the remake will not only destroy the original but **** all over their memories of experiencing the movie for the first time.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 7:02pm

Fan entitlement is something that bugs me. I like story telling. I like to hear/read/see someone else's vision. If I like it, great, if not I'll go watch/read/listen to something else. What's worse is that social media seems to have a lot of power when it comes to decision making and then fan service becomes a thing and nobody gets to tell the story they want to tell.

When it comes to reboots it is particularly bad. To use Ghostbusters as an example, it's been so roundly discussed/trashed across social media, before it even started shooting, that I already feel like I'm sick of it and I personally don't give two f***s about any of the Ghostbusters films.

I think if you're going to "reboot" something you should be allowed go as far from the original as you like. If fans want a scene for scene remake they may as well just go and watch the original film.

31-05-2016 7:06pm

FunLover18 wrote: »

Really interesting article here on fan-entitlement, admittedly it does veer towards accusing anyone who thinks the new Ghostbusters is **** is sexist, even though the author admits they're not overly keen on the reboot idea, but was wondering people here thought in general.

Personally, I never understood people's possessiveness when it comes to franchises and films; I dislike Die Hards 4&5 but in no way does that affect my enjoyment of Die Hard which is possibly my favourite film of all time. If they decided to remake it I'd be miffed and annoyed but more because of the laziness and unoriginallity rather than because I feel it a personal attack which some fans seem to do, as though the remake will not only destroy the original but **** all over their memories of experiencing the movie for the first time.

It's because fan boy nerds are the most entitled people in the world, they think that they own these things they obsess over and honestly, if Captain America being an agent of Hydra or the Ghostbusters being women rapes or ruins your childhood then it wasn't very good to begin with.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO · 31-05-2016 7:11pm

Deleted User wrote: »

It's because fan boy nerds are the most entitled people in the world, they think that they own these things they obsess over and honestly, if Captain America being an agent of Hydra or the Ghostbusters being women rapes or ruins your childhood then it wasn't very good to begin with.

To be fair it's not just "fan boy nerds".

It's pretty desperate across a lot of TV too.

Done know if anyone watches The 100? Pretty decent show but impossible to have any kind of interaction about it online. The show runners get crucified for killing characters, the fan base ignores the actual plots and makes up their own, interpret things to suit themselves. It's ridiculous and it happens with a lot of media and it's not all nostalgia based.

Sad Professor · 31-05-2016 7:27pm

TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: »

Fan entitlement is something that bugs me. I like story telling. I like to hear/read/see someone else's vision. If I like it, great, if not I'll go watch/read/listen to something else. What's worse is that social media seems to have a lot of power when it comes to decision making and then fan service becomes a thing and nobody gets to tell the story they want to tell.

I wonder if this is really the case anymore. Gone are days when Harry Knowles would get flown out to film sets to act as a consultant, or when Peter Jackson felt compelled to join the AICN comment section to answer concerns about the LOTR trilogy. Back then studio execs were reading these things and having panic attacks. But these days I think they've had enough success with these kinds of films that they are paying less and less attention to online fans.

Film forum off topic/random chat thread

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