Okay, I survived maybe twenty to thirty minutes before I walked out. That's the quickest I've ever bailed on a piece of shit. My tolerance level is going down sharply after the past few months of unrelenting dreck being thrown at my face. The only positive I can muster up from Breaking In, is it's a great tool for students to use in class. Every single little facet is done wrong, from the piss poor attempts at writing to lack of creativity in the direction. I've read rejected scripts in my Screenwriting class that sounded more interesting than what was approved to be shot here. Also, just a tip for producers now, and specifically Universal, if you are not even going to try creating likable characters, at least show them going out in grotesque ways. If this is a horror movie with shit characters, at least give me something else worthwhile, something I can think about on the drive home. When I see a woman getting her throat slit, and you cut away so you don't show anything, that's when I walk out.
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@paulvincent83 oh, takagi-san is awesome. It's an anime, not a cartoon, with well developed characters... Just saying. And who doesn't love a little gore?!
Characters that didn't have any logic. Annoying rebellious acts for no apparent reasons. "Wise" elder characters who bicker and are useless. Story line was inexcusably weak, character development was pathetic, and it was altogether a bad show. Original Airbender was good, this was not. Teen drama crap.
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@clobsters I did see Avatar, it was awesome. I mention it in the review as I'll point out for you below. I have no idea what you're asking me about TLOK. I obviously comment on it's flaws in the review. I'm confused since you missed that I'd watched Avatar, and not sure what you're on about tbh.
... Original Airbender was good, this was not ...
I loathe this recurring trend I'm seeing with a load of movies being put out, not just in the horror community. Studios take this engaging and expansive concept that could be fleshed out into a thought provoking and timeless archive of our culture, this Winchester story being the perfect capsule of life and death. There's plenty of interesting shit that's lightly tapped into... but like a ton of other projects of recent, we take this potentially enriching thing and throw it into the mainstream bubble. I can see the executives going, "Yes, this tale of a woman building time capsule rooms of dead people, and where they died, is cool and all... but it needs more poltergeists, jumpscares, and marketability." We're taking potential arthouse movies and slapping a studio coat of paint onto it. It's really disgusting.
In this movie, there are so many interesting conversations that are briefly explored. This woman is being told by supernatural beings (who were all killed by weapons from the company she owns), to build rooms in her mansion that capture their spirits and replicate the location where they died. That is so neat, and it amounts to barely anything. No big message at the end, no character study of this woman and the visiting doctor, who's also troubled just as much as her... really nothing. There's a lot of short scenes that go nowhere and inconsistent rules within the house. It's a generic ghost movie with a promising concept being used as the gimmick to draw suckers in like me. The synopsis is far more interesting than how it's executed.
I give credit for teed-bits of the production design, but we just had Crimson Peak and other great period piece movies, so I don't know what's the point of giving this credit for that. And for heaven's lord, I'm an apologist of egregious jump-scares, but this movie is not helping my case. I can't count how many times I wanted to walk about because of the predictable and ineffective jumps. Let's lock this movie up behind thirteen nails and forget it.
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@filmtoaster I won’t argue the movie isn’t special because at best it’s a decent dramatization of a widow’s sad descent into guild ridden delirium (in my subjective opinion)...
There was a big message conveyed aside from the illogically contrived gun control lobbyists’ political agenda ever present throughout that guns kill people more than people kill people and are therefore inherently evil, which is stupid. As long as more than one human exists we will find some way to kill each other. Needless political agendas aside...
It does touch on the anger, pain, and guilt that can be left behind in survivors of traumatic events and sometimes the unfinished business these entities have is merely helping those left behind come to terms with their reality and forgive themselves which in turn may help the entities themselves achieve their own necessary closure. That’s what I thought it was trying to say anyway, albeit it could have been done better, sure.
I completely agree that more could have been done. I’m still curious about the unresolved story about the first entity the Doctor sees, the devilish looking boy with the pitchfork and severed legs who we never see again but probably belongs in a sealed room. Maybe it’ll get picked up for a miniseries like haunting of hill house did, and maybe we’ll a better story then if any decent writing is done.
Review by Toliman
VIP10TLDR ? This movie is Disingenuous. At best, it's a Ghoulish dark satire of the republican party during the Bush/Cheney era. Except, they forgot to insert comedy or satire. As a result, it's grim and insulting, the parody is often at the expense of the audience being too stupid or uncaring, or religious. Large chunks of american history are deleted, omitted or filtered so that the movie can focus on the death toll of the war, or the "Wazzup" meme, etc.
large chunks of Dick Cheney's history don't make it into the movie, or are stylised / exagerrated / spoofed.
It is a well made disaster of a movie. Care went into making this.
But, it's as bad as Holmes & Watson, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters 2016. It's deeply unlikeable at times, and it is actively trying to rewrite history as it goes. I'm not a republican or a conservative, i don't follow politics, this is a highly deranged film that is deceptive at times, and I doubt that any of the events took place, as a result of the ham-fisted effort at painting Cheney as some mastermind villain, working in the shadows. It's only missing that villain laugh track during the more hammy moments.
The most sanguine part of the movie is that they treat the WTC bombing and 9/11 properly, but they draw an enormous bow throughout.
part of the movie hinges on the use of executive power being wielded by Dick Cheney through the Bush Presidency, to the degree that they'll infer it becoming part of the reasons why Cheney brought the war from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that he also used the position to secure oil reserves in Iraq before the war started, as well as ignore questions / receive kickbacks from Haliburton contracts, and infer that he brought a lawyer into the emergency/control room during the "crash" period of 9/11 post-pentagon collision, as airline flights and air corridors were shut down, airports were being closed, and private/civilian aircraft were being tracked and landed in airports, etc. So that he could wield this Executive Power without asking the senate or the Congress or the President for approval.
It walks the line of defamation, and yet, apparently it's from the guy who made Anchorman 2 and Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys. Brad Pitt and Will Ferrel financed this movie, i think. Their companies are in the titles.
All of the Actors do a great job. I even like Annapurna for their video game productions (Donut County, Gorogoa, Edith Finch, Florence), and i've seen a handful of Annapurna movies, like Phantom Thread, Her, American Hustle, and Sausage Party...
I went in with no preparation, and assumed it would be a dark comedy with political overtones, because, politics and Steve Carell, and I can see Aquaman later on. It can't be that bad, it's Christmas week.
This movie has the unfortunate effect of making you hate theatrical movie releases and critics, and perhaps all movies.
Yet, it's so well made, it has style, artistic credibility, and it's directed, shot and lit perfectly, the sound is on point, the acting is sometimes forgettable, But it's similar in style to other "moral" drama films, like "The Big Short", leading into the Global Financial Crisis where they pander heavily on people's motives and actions of "we're getting away with it", sic. The pandering is incredible.
It is a better political movie than most, but it's utterly manipulative and disingenuous at it's heart, and nothing can make that funny or amusing.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is unhinged and deranged, while Vice, is just powdercoated hatred and bile, trying to hide under progressive and democratic ideals. it's more like an upmarket youtube political conspiracy movie talking about Hilary Clinton's "SECRET Brain surgery", George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Jewish conspiracy movies you get recommended after watching "The Young Turks" or "David Pakman".
They even sink low enough to include a "Ghostbusters 2016" poke at the audience in the end credits by lampooning the partisan nature of the film, in an attempt to skirt criticism and outrage
A sideplot about an hour in, has a series of scenes in a focus group with the same strangers. The marketer/political consultant asks the group to raise their hands to choose between climate change or global warming. Another time, it's a choice between Estate Tax or Death Tax, inferring that marketing & political think-tanks, along with Fox News, used politically correct language in the 90's and 2000's to make conservative ideas palatable.
At the end of the movie, Cheney is in a cross-chair interview, after just having had a heart replacement. As the interview starts, the scene pauses, and Cheney/Bale instead, turns away and lectures the audience directly (invoking Frank Underwood's, stylised yet sociopathic 'lectures' in House of Cards) , saying he did what was best for America, despite the cost and the lives lost in the war(s) sic. It's just on the borderline of "helping make america great again" and a typical Frank Underwood self-justification, we fade to black, get a terrible americana/Fly Fishing title credits to the music of West Side Story's Puerto Rican version of "Coming to America" and we return to the Focus Group, mid-credits. The final scene has the consultant ask what people thought about the movie. A member of the group, complains that the movie insults conservatives, while the neighboring person insists it's factual, with the first man then calling it liberal propaganda, and then calling the other a libtard, sic. and hits him, both getting into a fist fight, while the camera turns away, to another woman, who turns to her neighbour in the room, and says she's going to enjoy the next Fast and the Furious movie (sic).
The implied comment is that they did the research, and had to improvise the story in-between, because nobody would speak about Dick Cheney's history or family to set the record straight. When/If you see a biography of Barack Obama in a few years, attending child brothels with kevin spacey in indonesia,
receiving oral sex from a pansexual transvestite, while he's snorting a line of cocaine off a preteen boy, while another person is handing Barack a membership form for the Democratic Party ... Vice, is going to be the movie that they quote and use dialogue from.This is the kind of movie that Alex Jones and infowars would make of Hilary Clinton & Barack Obama, by selectively omitting pages from a biography, and denigrating the characters and roles they undertook. The excuse would be, they couldn't confirm the story, so they took liberties and stuck with the facts, being transcripts, police records, licenses, marriage dates, etc.
I'm Australian, I genuinely don't care about the politics, but the smearing of the republican party is like a sledgehammer at times.
There are several Saturday Night Live level 'jokes' or skits/scenes that don't even make you cringe, they're just deeply unsettling attempts at humor or levity. Care went into the timing to paint several scenes as 'dark', or darkly funny at the expense of others. I expect people would laugh at them, it didn't connect with me, or the other 5 people in the theater.
It's not quite Fahrenheit 11/9 levels of insanity, on the contrary. It walks the line of parody, conspiracy and defamation neatly in a lighthearted attempt to skip 20 years of context, in a 2 minute conversation.
There's an early moment, perhaps 40 minutes in, where Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld is ruminating to a younger Dick Cheney in a random hallway of the oval office, about the imminent bombing of cambodia while Nixon is talking with Kissinger in a spare room of the Oval Office to avoid recordings. Mid-lecture, you hear Carell while we see a village about to be bombed mid-lecture, a typical cambodian/indonesian forest village, women and children sitting around, before explosions occur, and the scene changes back to Carell & Bale, unphased.
This kind of manipulative sledgehammer is used, repeatedly to invoke... satire? outrage ? compassion ?
This occurs about 5 or 6 more times, with even less subtlety.
Alfred Molina's "restaurant" scene, Molina's character offers Cheney and 3 seated guests at a restaurant table, Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay as menu options , is ham-fisted, but it's executed darkly and humorously, similar to say, Aaron Echkhart's Thank You For Smoking scenes, lampooning Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol lobbyists.
It's the kind of movie where you could let things slide if you were a lifelong US democrat, because it tries to tell harsher truths of the political and military consequences, overtly, by flashing to bombings, drone strikes, torture, rendition, deception and greed, during the more infamous moments of nixon's career and Bush's presidency.
And it profoundly relies on Fly fishing to represent Dick Cheney, as other movies do (2007's Shooter) to the point where they use gaudy Americana as Fly Fishing decorations (rockets, drones, Oil Rigs, missiles, the white house, Surveillance cameras) in the end-credits.
There's element's of Zero Dark Thirty in the invocation/flashes of torture, waterboarding, confinement, exposure, even the Abu Ghraib incident/leak with a prisoner being dragged by a Dog Collar by Lynndie England (the "work safe" versions) appears here. and rendition scenes along with the "Shadow government" themes of Dick Cheney's role as Vice President during George W Bush's tenure. It is highly implied several times that Cheney set himself up as the Executive, the CEO in charge of the war by undermining George Bush and, being responsible for the birth of ISIS, hiding reports from the president, etc.
They walk the line when it comes to defaming the Cheney family, there's also an implication of Lynne Cheney's father, Wayne Vincent murdering his wife in an argument by drowning, and of Lynne Vincent, being raped by her father Wayne in an over-edited and dubbed scene that was heavily muffled to avoid the censor noticing. Wayne, is seen pointing to his daughter during a muted, abbreviate shouting scene implying alcoholism and frequent domestic violence.
It extrapolates the most defamatory versions of people, and highlights that absurdity.
It takes what should be parody or simulacra, a 'bad saturday night live' sketch comic scene, and extrapolates moments as their cheapest moments. It's also high budget, they take Sam Rockwell's version of President Bush, Governor Bush, and rotoscope him into the more infamous moments of Bush's Presidency, i.e. the mid-war "Mission Accomplished" presentation on the Carrier Deck.
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@shubniguroth One "could" imagine that if every usage (ie the three times I used it) is flawed, there are (at least) 3 reasons.
Either that: #1. I don't understand, #2. You did not, and #3. that there's a reason, subtext or point being made that was not understood.
Facts aside, the film is terrible IMO. Feel free to disagree, but arguing for "grammar" makes you look irrational, retributive resentful, bitter and angry. At least talk about the film.
My lackadaisical/carefree use of grammar is intended, to make a larger point later on.
The film is trying to develop a conceit that people will personally accept, or reject by allowing a slippery slope.
If I/you didn't have any knowledge of Cheney, and I don't, I'd probably believe the film was accurate in some ways. The Opening Quotes go that far as to say it's interpreted from biography and history of what was available. But the intent is to create "Post-Truth", a dramatic and compelling fiction based on emotions.
This Post-Truth is akin to what people with Borderline Personality Disorder experience, subjective reality being distorted by their own emotional dysphoria, never recalling or storing accurate events, only emotional events that become eroded and jaded with time because their memory is overloaded by dysfunctional emotional regulation, regressive memories being reinforced with fantasies and interpreted versions; "feeling" true, rather than being true.
Vice's perspective is clearly in the Post-Truth version of reality, in which Subjective drives Objective. The emotion is more important than the object, method or measured Truth. Vice, tried. It had great aspects, the film is a monument in some ways, but it's also terrible, for many of the reasons I posted when it was in theatres, and you had to pay to see it.
You could have disagreed.
Honestly, It does not matter. It's an opinion on "the internet", and it's grammatical consistency doesn't change the argument as it was made, ~9 months ago as a post-mortem soliloquy / diatribe / screed in cathexis for the film's waste of time, money and energy.
I can appreciate that you didn't like aspects, few people appreciate opinions that aren't theirs, or have enough time/effort/wisdom to reflect before reacting. Hence, Engagement and Click-Bait's ego-driven leverage over people's emotions relies on "takes", etc.
If your benevolence and altruism allows for introspection or imagination, when reading an internet comment... then #1, #2 or #3 would be valid.
But, if you can't imagine or give someone "on the internet" any altruistic reading or intent,
Then, #1 it's because I don't understand grammar.
But, if #2, and one could be benevolent and/or that imaginative...
Why would you be wrong, when Occam's Razor would point to the most reductive; i.e. #1 That I don't understand the usage of sic as a semantic reference, providing an exact quote to a movie's dialogue and script as an exact context. If you proceed with this emotive line of thinking, you can also point to the fact that I also don't use quotes properly either, and that I rely on strange tangential arguments to make an emotional metaphor, poorly.
And, It's just horrible writing.
It also reinforces the argument that "I don't have any idea what I'm doing", and you can thus, use this logical parry (Argument from fallacy) to dismiss all of my opinion and arguments, and ignore everything written that you disagree with, having "won" internet points in dismissing my screed.
And, yes it is a screed, and perhaps Conservative Agitprop, given the content. Eh.
As long as you're right.
However, there's still point #2 and #3
#3, I used sic, and not [sic] or (sic) as a reference or quote.
Sic. has more than one context.
Especially when it's deliberately not appropriate.
Especially in post-modern ironic and meta-contextual semiotics, words can have their opposite intent, or act as a semiotic / referential / symbolic meaning, especially in a culture that uses verbs as brands and nouns, language and meaning can be redefined by context(s) or have multiple and parallel contexts.
e.g. a "Hot Take" being a symbolic reference of grasping, or in reference to media/journalism, a sliced moment from a whole that is consumed/removed, that is "Hot", in the reference of being inflammatory in nature, but also served/prepared as if it were "heated'.
Two words that can have an abundance of meaning in it's use and overuse, and meta-contextual usage, that a "take" is often removed or omitted opinion, derived to "grok", a digest /interpretation of someone's opinion or motives from a thin slice. so when you have someone's "Take"; it's often a strange or false interpretation, or a disingenuous interpretation that benefits the POV of the writer, not the reader.
That context comes from its usage, and all of the other allusions, meanings and contexts of Take, i.e. theft/removal, etc. are also applicable when using Take.
TLDR, everything is ironic. Even when it's not supposed to be.
Especially if it's not supposed to be.
Sic, without the brackets, isn't supposed to be literal. It is detached. And, being detached and used inappropriately, it is being used 'stupidly' / 'ironically' to juxtapose that it's not an actual quote, the meaning is inferred and substituted as a simile or figure of speech, that it's being used as a figure of speech.
Especially when it deliberately does not quote a third party, and is an allusion or reference, thus being an ironic transposition or inversion of accurate reproduction. Especially because sic erat scriptum is not being semantically or contextually used to quote actual dialogue or points made.
Perhaps.
The intent of using sic. Poorly. was to create a different semantic meaning of "Exactly" to "Inexactly", which would transpose/ridicule the intent of providing a quote, as an in-joke to the loose transcription of Cheney's biography through the film.
Especially... when in the context of this review, frequent "quotes" highlight moments of poorly transposed meaning, is also a reference to Cheney's biography being opportunistically dismantled in the most alienating and least humanising way to represent someone's life.
Review by filmtoaster
VIP3EDIT: It has now been revealed the original film/script was radically different, longer, and explained many of my issues presented in this review. Studios, stop butchering your films to be more palatable to audiences.
This is what happens when the people who say, "Godzilla movies don't need to have good human stories," get their way. Easily one of the weakest Godzilla films ever made and the worst of this series. You're not a fan of this franchise if you say Godzilla movies don't need story. Every one so far has had an interesting enough script to justify it's monster bits, even the worst Showa or Heisei outings do more. It's not even really sure what it wants to be. Kong is propped up as the hero and clearly the protagonist of this story with Gojira making cameos as he hunts the organization Apex, but then Kong just loses anyways. What purpose is there for even setting up these monsters as sympathetic when all writing and soul is tossed out the minute they start brawling in Hong Kong. It actually forgets humans exist for a good four minutes as these two punching bags throttle around neon buildings. Craft is gone, it turns into The Avengers, with barely any collateral damage. "Oh but, you can follow the journey through the monsters! You don't need humans to have that nuance." Oh really? Godzilla doesn't like Kong being off his island, he puts him in his place, story done. Talk about deep. No moments to breath or for a character to properly react. This is hot off the heels of King of the Monsters, a film that continues the themes of Skull Island and Gareth Edward's Godzilla. Dougherty's outing before this deeply explored the themes of what it means to live with these monsters on Earth. How do you continue living when a relative of yours has been taken at the hands of one of them, do you shut yourself off or do you try to change the world? Emma became essentially so riddled with guilt she released the devil on Earth. How are these monsters really not so different from us, considering they were birthed out of our own arrogant, persistent lust for control over this world. It's too much to get in to, but that film dealt a great deal with overcoming grief, putting your faith in God, coexistence, and forgiveness. Mark's scene where he looks in to Godzilla's eyes and finally restores his faith is one of my favorite moments from this series. There is nothing in Godzilla vs. Kong that could be remotely construed as a plot. Charles Dance's role has been replaced for some reason, we have a wacky podcast conspiracy guy that serves as just a walking prop for the viewer to see world explanations, Kyle Chandler as Mark has been reduced to a cameo, and on that note: Why is he working at Monarch? He consistently hated Godzilla until he had a change of heart and faith by virtue of Serizawa and Mothra. Monarch didn't change to the good guy, they're still an organization on the cusp of lawsuit and government shutdown. Would GvK mind explaining that for us? How and when was Apex formed? How is it possible the creation of MechaGodzilla never leaked out? The world has been introduced to the titans. It's plainly established everyone is obsessed with these things, the internet and news won't shut up about them. The government doesn't know this is how Apex is using their power supply? In '14, it's at least explained their research on the MUTO was a government cover up for Monarch, that's why Joe in that film became a crackpot theorist who wouldn't let the nuclear incident go. But it's not 2013 anymore, the creatures are no longer a big secret. In King of the Monsters, the people unleashing Ghidorah to rival Godzilla are small band of eco-terrorists, they aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation. It makes no sense and done so much more poorly. It's rushed and done with quips. The most we ever get in terms of world building is a single shot of a map and newspapers, talking about the UN vetoing Godzilla or Apex facilities springing up across the map. We don't hear internal communication or even have a Senate scene like in this last film. The world has simultaneously been expanded greatly and shrunken to nothing, something Pacific Rim Uprising also horrifically accomplished. This series was built off the foundation of engaging with this science fiction, government monster universe through the lens of a sympathetic every-man that's been hurt by the monsters in some way, usually a familial death. Dr. Nathan Lind is given two words to establish he lost a brother in the Hollow Earth, but nothing ever comes of that information. Humans? There are storytelling devices used to get the audience from scene to scene. In the same span of runtime, from '14 to this, Bryan Cranston is grieving over his dying wife, to this has a fat guy making jokes about toasters. The most amount of interesting character development are thrown away in two very specific pieces of dialogue. The little native girl's family was killed by the storm surrounding skull island, which we saw in Kong's film, as was the whole island wiped out. I imagine there was a sequence that explored this and able to give a more tragic or perhaps resounding, uplifting message of sticking with family even when you've suffered so much loss. It would fit the overarching narrative that's stuck to this MonsterVerse so far, but it seems the cutting room floor did a number to this movie, as even stated by director Adam Wingard. It really does feel like the movie is playing damage control. Audiences didn't understand the previous films' stories, so they got fed up trying to understand them and just declared they don't want any characters in these movies. So we get walking action figures that say the words necessary to get us to our next fight. The best potential that existed in one of these dolls was Shun Oguri's character, Ren Serizawa, who is related to the Serizawa of previous films, the one who sacrificed himself to save Godzilla and prove humanity needed to accept him as their king. It was a very touching, holy piece in the last film, and Ren could work as an antagonistic son who resents his father for giving up his life to this monster he doesn't understand, and we could go through a similar arc Mark Russel did in the last film. None of this is realized, he is a dummy test pilot told to get in the goddamn chair, like it's an Evangelion reference. The most amount of enjoyment anyone could get out of this is the splodge of CGI dumped on to the screen with no visual grace or narrative substance. If that's all you want, then I pity what this means for blockbusters. Edwards crafted a fantastic character movie in 2013 and the series has been handed a blow here.
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@isdamc as a fan of the godzilla franchise you do go in expecting a human story, becasue that is what godzilla is all about
Review by Toliman
VIP10TLDR ? This movie is Disingenuous. At best, it's a Ghoulish dark satire of the republican party during the Bush/Cheney era. Except, they forgot to insert comedy or satire. As a result, it's grim and insulting, the parody is often at the expense of the audience being too stupid or uncaring, or religious. Large chunks of american history are deleted, omitted or filtered so that the movie can focus on the death toll of the war, or the "Wazzup" meme, etc.
large chunks of Dick Cheney's history don't make it into the movie, or are stylised / exagerrated / spoofed.
It is a well made disaster of a movie. Care went into making this.
But, it's as bad as Holmes & Watson, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters 2016. It's deeply unlikeable at times, and it is actively trying to rewrite history as it goes. I'm not a republican or a conservative, i don't follow politics, this is a highly deranged film that is deceptive at times, and I doubt that any of the events took place, as a result of the ham-fisted effort at painting Cheney as some mastermind villain, working in the shadows. It's only missing that villain laugh track during the more hammy moments.
The most sanguine part of the movie is that they treat the WTC bombing and 9/11 properly, but they draw an enormous bow throughout.
part of the movie hinges on the use of executive power being wielded by Dick Cheney through the Bush Presidency, to the degree that they'll infer it becoming part of the reasons why Cheney brought the war from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that he also used the position to secure oil reserves in Iraq before the war started, as well as ignore questions / receive kickbacks from Haliburton contracts, and infer that he brought a lawyer into the emergency/control room during the "crash" period of 9/11 post-pentagon collision, as airline flights and air corridors were shut down, airports were being closed, and private/civilian aircraft were being tracked and landed in airports, etc. So that he could wield this Executive Power without asking the senate or the Congress or the President for approval.
It walks the line of defamation, and yet, apparently it's from the guy who made Anchorman 2 and Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys. Brad Pitt and Will Ferrel financed this movie, i think. Their companies are in the titles.
All of the Actors do a great job. I even like Annapurna for their video game productions (Donut County, Gorogoa, Edith Finch, Florence), and i've seen a handful of Annapurna movies, like Phantom Thread, Her, American Hustle, and Sausage Party...
I went in with no preparation, and assumed it would be a dark comedy with political overtones, because, politics and Steve Carell, and I can see Aquaman later on. It can't be that bad, it's Christmas week.
This movie has the unfortunate effect of making you hate theatrical movie releases and critics, and perhaps all movies.
Yet, it's so well made, it has style, artistic credibility, and it's directed, shot and lit perfectly, the sound is on point, the acting is sometimes forgettable, But it's similar in style to other "moral" drama films, like "The Big Short", leading into the Global Financial Crisis where they pander heavily on people's motives and actions of "we're getting away with it", sic. The pandering is incredible.
It is a better political movie than most, but it's utterly manipulative and disingenuous at it's heart, and nothing can make that funny or amusing.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is unhinged and deranged, while Vice, is just powdercoated hatred and bile, trying to hide under progressive and democratic ideals. it's more like an upmarket youtube political conspiracy movie talking about Hilary Clinton's "SECRET Brain surgery", George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Jewish conspiracy movies you get recommended after watching "The Young Turks" or "David Pakman".
They even sink low enough to include a "Ghostbusters 2016" poke at the audience in the end credits by lampooning the partisan nature of the film, in an attempt to skirt criticism and outrage
A sideplot about an hour in, has a series of scenes in a focus group with the same strangers. The marketer/political consultant asks the group to raise their hands to choose between climate change or global warming. Another time, it's a choice between Estate Tax or Death Tax, inferring that marketing & political think-tanks, along with Fox News, used politically correct language in the 90's and 2000's to make conservative ideas palatable.
At the end of the movie, Cheney is in a cross-chair interview, after just having had a heart replacement. As the interview starts, the scene pauses, and Cheney/Bale instead, turns away and lectures the audience directly (invoking Frank Underwood's, stylised yet sociopathic 'lectures' in House of Cards) , saying he did what was best for America, despite the cost and the lives lost in the war(s) sic. It's just on the borderline of "helping make america great again" and a typical Frank Underwood self-justification, we fade to black, get a terrible americana/Fly Fishing title credits to the music of West Side Story's Puerto Rican version of "Coming to America" and we return to the Focus Group, mid-credits. The final scene has the consultant ask what people thought about the movie. A member of the group, complains that the movie insults conservatives, while the neighboring person insists it's factual, with the first man then calling it liberal propaganda, and then calling the other a libtard, sic. and hits him, both getting into a fist fight, while the camera turns away, to another woman, who turns to her neighbour in the room, and says she's going to enjoy the next Fast and the Furious movie (sic).
The implied comment is that they did the research, and had to improvise the story in-between, because nobody would speak about Dick Cheney's history or family to set the record straight. When/If you see a biography of Barack Obama in a few years, attending child brothels with kevin spacey in indonesia,
receiving oral sex from a pansexual transvestite, while he's snorting a line of cocaine off a preteen boy, while another person is handing Barack a membership form for the Democratic Party ... Vice, is going to be the movie that they quote and use dialogue from.This is the kind of movie that Alex Jones and infowars would make of Hilary Clinton & Barack Obama, by selectively omitting pages from a biography, and denigrating the characters and roles they undertook. The excuse would be, they couldn't confirm the story, so they took liberties and stuck with the facts, being transcripts, police records, licenses, marriage dates, etc.
I'm Australian, I genuinely don't care about the politics, but the smearing of the republican party is like a sledgehammer at times.
There are several Saturday Night Live level 'jokes' or skits/scenes that don't even make you cringe, they're just deeply unsettling attempts at humor or levity. Care went into the timing to paint several scenes as 'dark', or darkly funny at the expense of others. I expect people would laugh at them, it didn't connect with me, or the other 5 people in the theater.
It's not quite Fahrenheit 11/9 levels of insanity, on the contrary. It walks the line of parody, conspiracy and defamation neatly in a lighthearted attempt to skip 20 years of context, in a 2 minute conversation.
There's an early moment, perhaps 40 minutes in, where Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld is ruminating to a younger Dick Cheney in a random hallway of the oval office, about the imminent bombing of cambodia while Nixon is talking with Kissinger in a spare room of the Oval Office to avoid recordings. Mid-lecture, you hear Carell while we see a village about to be bombed mid-lecture, a typical cambodian/indonesian forest village, women and children sitting around, before explosions occur, and the scene changes back to Carell & Bale, unphased.
This kind of manipulative sledgehammer is used, repeatedly to invoke... satire? outrage ? compassion ?
This occurs about 5 or 6 more times, with even less subtlety.
Alfred Molina's "restaurant" scene, Molina's character offers Cheney and 3 seated guests at a restaurant table, Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay as menu options , is ham-fisted, but it's executed darkly and humorously, similar to say, Aaron Echkhart's Thank You For Smoking scenes, lampooning Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol lobbyists.
It's the kind of movie where you could let things slide if you were a lifelong US democrat, because it tries to tell harsher truths of the political and military consequences, overtly, by flashing to bombings, drone strikes, torture, rendition, deception and greed, during the more infamous moments of nixon's career and Bush's presidency.
And it profoundly relies on Fly fishing to represent Dick Cheney, as other movies do (2007's Shooter) to the point where they use gaudy Americana as Fly Fishing decorations (rockets, drones, Oil Rigs, missiles, the white house, Surveillance cameras) in the end-credits.
There's element's of Zero Dark Thirty in the invocation/flashes of torture, waterboarding, confinement, exposure, even the Abu Ghraib incident/leak with a prisoner being dragged by a Dog Collar by Lynndie England (the "work safe" versions) appears here. and rendition scenes along with the "Shadow government" themes of Dick Cheney's role as Vice President during George W Bush's tenure. It is highly implied several times that Cheney set himself up as the Executive, the CEO in charge of the war by undermining George Bush and, being responsible for the birth of ISIS, hiding reports from the president, etc.
They walk the line when it comes to defaming the Cheney family, there's also an implication of Lynne Cheney's father, Wayne Vincent murdering his wife in an argument by drowning, and of Lynne Vincent, being raped by her father Wayne in an over-edited and dubbed scene that was heavily muffled to avoid the censor noticing. Wayne, is seen pointing to his daughter during a muted, abbreviate shouting scene implying alcoholism and frequent domestic violence.
It extrapolates the most defamatory versions of people, and highlights that absurdity.
It takes what should be parody or simulacra, a 'bad saturday night live' sketch comic scene, and extrapolates moments as their cheapest moments. It's also high budget, they take Sam Rockwell's version of President Bush, Governor Bush, and rotoscope him into the more infamous moments of Bush's Presidency, i.e. the mid-war "Mission Accomplished" presentation on the Carrier Deck.
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@toliman Thank you for saving me 2 hours of my life. Love all these actors but suspected the agenda. Fake news movie!
Grotesque insanity. Absurd Fakeumentary with claims that Democrats are the ones in the south who ran the slave plantations of the south...
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Anyone who says that this Documentary is fake doesn't know actual United States History and needs to read a book. A typical liberal that's butt hurt over the truth after being lied to.
released some time in 2020
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@queensroe You know, you say that...
I just hate Rob Zombie..
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@anaedz go rewatch Frozen ya Mary
pathetic patriotic fearmongering bullshit ... first 15 minutes is enough to facepalm. PR movie for white house to sell the tax-waste for the war on terror to the public. Not worth the money to watch this - or even the time
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@oya-kesh Wow! Very impressive review. Do you work in the journalism field by any chance? Because it seems like you based your entire review on other reviews and by watching a couple of trailers. You have really (and I mean, REALLY) contributed something beautiful to the world. We could really use more unfettered hatred. You are my hero. (NOT)
A good movie ruined by lame pop culture references and political agendas.
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@gloom8 we can overlook the toxic masculinity """"joke"""", but what about the Velma raceswap and please hollywood allways try to insert political BS to their products.
Grotesque insanity. Absurd Fakeumentary with claims that Democrats are the ones in the south who ran the slave plantations of the south...
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@danmoorehead u must learn! Don't deny the true history!
This is not a movie about dragons and the world of Kumandra. This is about Earth, this is the real world. We are divided, groups of people completely hating each other inside the same nation.
Unfortunately we are facing our own Druun, our plague. But as in the movie, this isn't our biggest problem. The real enemy is our inability to work together as a community, to put aside political views and really trust each other, working together for the best of everybody.Beyond the important and necessary message, the movie is a fun adventure, the world building is great and the technical aspect is what you would expect of a Disney movie.
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@renanmansur we must not unite with people who wish to do us harm.
Wait Is this actually happening?
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@kieranlittleuk https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2021-12-12/the-devil-is-a-part-timer-season-2-video-unveils-more-cast-new-studio-july-debut/.180550 Yes it is. :)
(ok i know this movie is heavily discussed or whateva but....it was boring as hell. anyways...)
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@nothingtobust you are boring as hell
Shout by Jim222001
VIP6Despite being a very long movie Avatar: The Way of the Water at times is a superior sequel. That is more beautiful to look at “especially in IMAX 3D.” With some better action and adventure.
The movie might even manage to make the Avatar haters fans. Even if James Cameron doesn’t have something so good on his hands. That he can drag it out to seven movies.loading replies
@jim222001 Yep, thats pretty much what happened!
Meh...... Seems like its always tradition that girls need to be as naked as possible in fantasy movies like these
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If you're that sensitive to this you better not watch his other work...
Grotesque insanity. Absurd Fakeumentary with claims that Democrats are the ones in the south who ran the slave plantations of the south...
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@danmoorehead That's because they were.
Review by hirkiti
VIPEP2I'm a huge fan of SF and AI based plots - I was really looking forward to seeing this but it was a frustrating disappointment. It has terrible horrible shamefully bad writing. Not a single original idea about AI and in fact they don't really deal with AI apart from robots basically being exactly like humans but nicer. No original futuristic sci-fi ideas either with a lot of the futuristic stuff not making any sense. For example the AIs speak to each other in English, no super fast data pours between them. They can't even speak remotely over cellular or whatever... they use walkie talkies lol. They had an old women robot that limped around though the robots do not age?!? I could have forgiven all of this in the 80s or from an adaptation of an Isaac Asinov novel but we're in 2023 and we've all watched the Matrix etc... Also it had very little action and the action sequences it did have were bad and boring with yellow lazer tracers zapping around in the near dark or fog. Visually it was ok and the score was decent but the poor writing completely ruined it for me. Half way through, I couldn't wait for it to end. You can't be a serious Sci-fi fan and think this is any good, it's just not possible... yes that's you good reviewers.
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You can't be a serious Sci-fi fan and think this is any good, it's just not possible... yes that's you good reviewers.
That gatekeeping at the end of your comment, yikes.
"I'm right, you're wrong", lol
I hope whenever this drops in 2018 it does justice to the first one, the dynamics of History, Culture, Spirituality & Social awareness worked great. I was actually surprised that a lot of people said they didn't like it.
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@cali_20 Yeah can't wait to see it then!
Hated it.
As simple as that.
Terrible way to take the series to. I mean it's not as bad as the prequels, because the acting is quite all right, but it hits so many bullshit moments where I was facepalming every other scene it's unbelievable.loading replies
@dannyland Look, I get it, Disney wanted a clear horizon for the next installments. They killed off all the main characters, Carrie Fisher died in reality, so they need to kill her off somehowe between this and IX, they should kill Chewie, destroy the Falcon and send the droids to some junkyard and that'll give them a clean slate to build next trilogy on.
I LOVED TFA, watched it in every format I could in cinemas, and just yesterday I went for a special screening of TFA before TLJ and I loved every second of the first one just to have my hopes crashed in the next. Everybody's allowed to have an opinion and that's just mine. I love me some Star Wars, don't get me wrong, but this was just too much.
An immigrant child in a new school battling hormones and her mother's Senegalese traditions tries so hard to fit in she breaks.
Cuties / Mignonnes is everything but cute. It's rough, hard, brutal, tragic and very real. Director Maïmouna Doucouré paints the gut wrenching portrait of the young lady and the clique she's dying to enter with sensitivity, soul and a touch of magical realism that mark the reader like a dark tattoo.
Amy is a complex character (terrifically written by Doucouré and played to a T by Fathia Youssouf) because in the same instant she elicits our sympathy, our anger and our disgust. She makes all the wrong decisions for all the right reasons and because for an 11-year-old on the threshold of puberty, there is only right now and desires that blind them from seeing any consequences of their actions.
As for the ridiculous controversy launched by those who haven't seen the film and fueled by blind ignorance: I find it interesting that people will criticize a female woman of color for directing a film based on her personal experiences, whereas when Woody Allen makes a film about young women throwing themselves at older men, he's hailed as a genius.
Shame on those who shame someone for trying to tell their story. Cinema is meant to be a stage for sharing, not an arena for executing artists we judge despite knowing nothing about them or their art.
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@saint-pauly And this is coming from "Saint" Pauly... Well, I'm not surprised!
"White people are better at everything – even things which are unique to other cultures."
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@artisover at least you can admit it
Only cultist Trump supporters wouldn't find this funny. Hilarious AND it has some heart.
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@the_argentinian Categorizing really isn't a liberal action, oh wait, Yes it is, but you blame others for doing the same thing. As long as it is on your agenda you are ok with it otherwise it is wrong!!???
I've just stepped out of the cinema having watched the worst movie of the year. I feel like the director has played me for a fool. I feel like the joke here.
Joaquin Phoenix must want to shake Todd Phillips till his eyes pop out his head for he went 100% down the rabbit hole to create this performance - only for a horrendously bad director, languid editing, and a screenplay-by-numbers to fail this picture into the miserable, sodden, car-crash of a film it is.
The last time I felt so vitriolic after a 'much-hyped' film was Guy Ritchie's Revolver. Another stinker for the ages.
I particularly feel like a joke has been had at my expense by the presence of Robert De Niro, who must have had deja vu cashing his paycheck reminiscing back to his (actually a good film) The King of Comedy.
This film tries to marry that Rupert character to Taxi Driver and comes up with garbage. Much like the garbage epidemic denoted in the plot itself.
I paid 8 pounds to see this. You'd have to pay me 800 to watch it again.
It almost worked for a few minutes during the scenes with Bobby D's Johnny Carson bit. Almost. The rest was as predictable yet immensely tedious as it could be without me being handed a copy of the script on the way in.
Do yourself a favour... Don't ruin your opinion of Joaquin Phoenix by seeing this. It doesn't feel like he is to blame here. But it's best to just steer clear of the movie altogether. It offers nothing to the DC universe. It offers nothing to the Batman legacy. It actively dishounours the greatness of Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero and all future Jokers.
This film itself IS the joker.
Utter crap.
3/10 - for the attempts made by Joaquin Phoenix saving it from 1/10.
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@porteruk ur bugging.. Great Movie Even Greater Acting
Characters that didn't have any logic. Annoying rebellious acts for no apparent reasons. "Wise" elder characters who bicker and are useless. Story line was inexcusably weak, character development was pathetic, and it was altogether a bad show. Original Airbender was good, this was not. Teen drama crap.
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@kuzronk is that comment supposed to invalidate what I said about this show?
Review by Corrupted Noobie
VIP9Didn't have high hopes, and thank god. Still sad to see yet another fan favourite video game character be ruined by the adaption to film.
It's bad, and mostly because of the script. The story is awful and is very inconsistent. Sonic can run around loops and jump on missiles in mid-air but can't run up a slightly tilted wall? Also the amount of force-feeding of exposition they give in the first third is so bad. Not to mention the non-original and unneeded "Ya, that's me, how did I get here?" trope at the very beginning. The writers clearly didn't care how their story would be so generic and fall into the background because Sonic would draw people in. Like, in the action scenes, people should be dead. But, when you look around the streets, there's no one there. It honestly feels very empty throughout.
It feels like a rushed and cheap way to give a character that has been prevalent in the gaming community for almost 30 years a film. It really seems like they found someone's fanfiction and made it into a motion picture. Because if the first trailer was anything to go off of, they probably saw Sonic fanart on DeviantArt and thought that's what he looked like.
But speaking of looks, some positives. The colours work well, the art direction is okay and cinematography ain't half bad. The production design is pretty good and we all know Sonic looks much like himself again. As for a score, I don't remember it. Flat sad music is all that comes to mind.
I truly believe hardly anyone cared about this project, and that goes for the actors as well. I was kinda intrigued by how Jim Carrey would play the role here. After his great show Kidding where he used his over the top acting in a profound way. I was hoping to see it continue with this weird eccentric character. But no, it's just the old Jim Carrey again. His ability to move the way he does did seem to fit right in my mind, but when he spoke it just didn't work. Plus, the way he was written is so lazy.
I laughed once, right near the end at that damn Fitbit joke. The tonal shift of that character and her delivery honestly caught me off-guard. The best part of the movie.
Not the worst video game movie, but certainly not improving the general view on them either.
3/10
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@corruptednoobie I think it’s actually faithful. Watch the Smurfs and then this. Hollywood has made worse adaptations.
Shout by Clayton Parker
VIPOG12Take Alien. A perfect movie. Then ruin it with a bunch of action bullshit. You get Aliens.
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@claytron You gave Alien Resurrection the same rating lol CLUELESS!
Hated it.
As simple as that.
Terrible way to take the series to. I mean it's not as bad as the prequels, because the acting is quite all right, but it hits so many bullshit moments where I was facepalming every other scene it's unbelievable.loading replies
@imtherhetorician For the third time in this thread — it is MY opinion and I'm not forcing it on you, or anybody else. I don't like the direction, becaue I don't like the direction. That's it. And based on the amount of many ”likes” some people seem to agree.
But you don't have to :) I don't only like the OT, I LOVED the TFA, I think it was a the best SW movie up to this point.
Instead of throwing shit at me try to convince me otherwise, but with a proper rhethoric, facts, and observations, like many online articles and video reviews did. If people got scared because of — once again — MY opinion, that just says a lot about them in general.
Also I don't really care what Lucas said, he made prequels, and changed the OT to the point it sometimes makes no sense :)
I've just stepped out of the cinema having watched the worst movie of the year. I feel like the director has played me for a fool. I feel like the joke here.
Joaquin Phoenix must want to shake Todd Phillips till his eyes pop out his head for he went 100% down the rabbit hole to create this performance - only for a horrendously bad director, languid editing, and a screenplay-by-numbers to fail this picture into the miserable, sodden, car-crash of a film it is.
The last time I felt so vitriolic after a 'much-hyped' film was Guy Ritchie's Revolver. Another stinker for the ages.
I particularly feel like a joke has been had at my expense by the presence of Robert De Niro, who must have had deja vu cashing his paycheck reminiscing back to his (actually a good film) The King of Comedy.
This film tries to marry that Rupert character to Taxi Driver and comes up with garbage. Much like the garbage epidemic denoted in the plot itself.
I paid 8 pounds to see this. You'd have to pay me 800 to watch it again.
It almost worked for a few minutes during the scenes with Bobby D's Johnny Carson bit. Almost. The rest was as predictable yet immensely tedious as it could be without me being handed a copy of the script on the way in.
Do yourself a favour... Don't ruin your opinion of Joaquin Phoenix by seeing this. It doesn't feel like he is to blame here. But it's best to just steer clear of the movie altogether. It offers nothing to the DC universe. It offers nothing to the Batman legacy. It actively dishounours the greatness of Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero and all future Jokers.
This film itself IS the joker.
Utter crap.
3/10 - for the attempts made by Joaquin Phoenix saving it from 1/10.
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@porteruk a 3 really? Lmfaooo what?!
