Topic: Rate the last movie you've seen

[Oblivion]

Its not perfect, but if you ever seen the original then you'll know they have rubber glued to their face and none of them can talk right and thats way more off-putting than this is. There is a thing called suspension of disbelief, but you know you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy any movie, and if you spend too much time picking things apart than you're fucked on every movie. None of its real its all fake.

But practical effects are real. CGI is not. The lightning and texturing looks wrong on these CGI apes and immediately kills the suspension of disbelief. Well done facial make-up does not. Suspension of disbelief is the problem. Full CG scenes just don't cut it. It looks like Roger Rabbit.

Actually, watching high-profile actors over and over is often a buzz kill. Usually they just end up playing "that character". I'd usually prefer decent no-names that fill a role than A-listers pandering the audience.

Does motion capturing do anything to sway you? Because people ARE there. The "real" actors do have a point of reference to look at. They may look wrong to you, but I saw the movie on a 60 foot thetre screen. I didn't see anything wrong with them. You're killing the movie before you even give it a chance.

[Stogi]

Say what you want about CGI but it's here to stay. Avatar cemented that fact.

[TJ Spyke]

Unagi, I think you mean motion-capture. CGI was already a staple of the film industry before Avatar. I don't mind the use of motion-capture when it's done right. I won't comment on the quality in Rise of the Planet of the Apes because I have only seen trailers and commercials, and it would be unfair to judge based on those.

[Oblivion]

I won't comment on the quality in Rise of the Planet of the Apes because I have only seen trailers and commercials, and it would be unfair to judge based on those.

The lightning and texturing looks wrong on these CGI apes and immediately kills the suspension of disbelief.

I literally laughed out loud when I caught the trailer. The CGI looked terrible (doesn't it all?), James Franco looked stoned, and there are already a couple of "prequels" within the original Planet of the Apes franchise. There is really no reason for this to exist. There are plenty of people out there with new and interesting ideas... maybe Hollywood should hire some of them instead of retreading the same stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?

If you're interested in the story and for some reason just can't bring yourself to watch the original film (which is great)... then go read the book. Skip the crap that's in the theaters today.

[ThePerm]

practical effects are no more real than CG, watching any film is not even real. You're watching a series of pictures at 24 framers per second. The trailer doesn't even do the movie justice, most of the movie takes place inside an Ape "sanctuary" where the CG is better, not on the San Francisco streets where it would be hell for even the best special effects team to get the lighting right. 

Still, I'd love to see a bunch of guys in ape suits climbing around the Golden Gate Bridge at high speed, but it just isn't possible.

whats silly is when someone avoids a movie when everyone who has seen it is telling them its good, and is already bashing the movie because they saw a trailer and they think that's the movie. Its like the opposite of Cowboys and Aliens.

[Morari]

whats silly is when someone avoids a movie when everyone who has seen it is telling them its good, and is already bashing the movie because they saw a trailer and they think that's the movie.

Not really. Most people have terrible taste in entertainment. That's why movies like this continue to exist, after all. I know from experience what can generally be expected. I don't watch American Idol of listen to Britney Spears because everyone tells me they're great.

practical effects are real. They are lit properly because they exist in some plane or another. They move properly (if not realistically) because they are governed by the laws of reality. There are bad effects, sure. But even the best CGI is only applicable in very narrow circumstances.

[Oblivion]

It's subective. You may think they have terrible tastes but you aren't any better than anyone else.

[ThePerm]

practical effects are never real, unless someone genetically engineers a monkey and this monkey leads a revolution and news crews happen to catch every single event then its not real. Its just a guy in makeup. I get what your trying to say, but your missing the point of suspension of disbelief.

I don't see makeup as any more real than CGI, and I honestly don't care how good or bad the CGI or makeup is as long as the story works. I can pick out make-up and it never looks real to me and its the same with CGI. Does the movie have to be made by Pixar to have CGI?  Does a movie have to be totally CGI for it to be believable? Or can they integrate CGI and live action?  This very thinking means I could never watch an old movie like Nosferatu and enjoy it, because I have to have the expectation that everything has to be photo-real and perfect for it to be good, and any instance of fakeness means its automatically bad. That movie doesn't even have sound, and I can't even get the original soundtrack (originally played by a guy with a piano in the background of the theatre) so I have to get some dollar dvd of it with some forward by David Caradine with weird cover goth band music,  but i can suspend disbelief for 94 minutes and get into the story. Why, because I don't take everything so unbelievably serious that I cannot enjoy myself.

I could never watch Metropolis, Wizard of oz, ghost busters, original King Kong, Star Wars, and Jason and the Argonauts!, having the assumption that everything had to be perfect all the time.  I'm not under the assumption that everything film makers do must be perfect, and I think it's really disrespectful to discount what they do as **** because its isn't perfect. What I do however, is grade them on how they compare to others and everything I've seen before, and more specifically grade them against whats been on screen in the last 5 years and I think that is much more fair. As far as it goes, because I've been watching a lot of movies, I would say it compares favorably. They put in a good effort.

You want to generalize and say everyone has bad taste, and this could be subjective, but that's a terrible blanket argument. Not everyone likes American Idol, or Britney Spears. The foolish thing to do is the be willfully ignorant. If I was willfully ignorant of food I'd never try Menudo because its cow intestines.  I'm aware **** goes through it, but I'm also aware they clean it out and it tastes fantastic, but I guess I have bad taste. Apparently, so do millions of Latinos who eat it all the time. At least the can say for sure what appeals to their tastes because they tried it.
With this logic you're combining the logical fallacies of Ad Hominem Abusive and Hasty Generalization at the same time.

 The addage goes "Don't knock it, till you tried it". You saw 2 minutes of a 105 minute movie. Unless you watch the other 103 minutes your opinion on the movie is meaningless. Its a prejudice opinion. However, I'd figure by now you wouldn't be able to watch the movie with the proper objectivity.  I can however say in my opinion, and opinions are like assholes and everyone has one, that this movie has the best story of any in the franchise since the first one. Also, because it has such a good story, even if it we're called World of the Simians with no ties to the franchise it could stand up on its own because it is a totally different movie.

[Oblivion]

Speaking of Metropolis, I fucking love that movie.

[ShyGuy]

I just watched Hot Rod. It was awesome!

[Morari]

practical effects are never real, unless someone genetically engineers a monkey and this monkey leads a revolution and news crews happen to catch every single event then its not real. Its just a guy in makeup. I get what your trying to say, but your missing the point of suspension of disbelief.

I think you're taking this out of context. Practical effects are real. They physically exist within reality. You can physically touch an animatronic dinosaur. Actors can interact with it and around it. It casts real shadows. It absorbs and reflects lights as you would expect, because light is actually hitting it. None of that can not be done with CGI because it does not exist within reality. Full CGI scenes and entities always look fake because of these very reasons. It kills my suspension of disbelief immediately because it doesn't just look fake, it looks impossibly out of place given the scene. At least bad make-up and practical effects simply look cheesy, as opposed to unreal. Lighting is the worst with CGI. That's why cars and spaceships get more leadway as CGI. they just have to reflect light and nothing more.

It's subective. You may think they have terrible tastes but you aren't any better than anyone else.

Yes, I am.

[MaryJane]

Super 8: Super 8/10

Only thing that kept this from being a 9 was that it was a kid's movie, and thus the kills were muted. Otherwise, very well done.

[ThePerm]

Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, it is impossibly stupid that the only difference is that one wears glasses and the other one doesn't, the flimsiest disguise ever. I guess i'll call the police every time someone gets killed in a horror movie. The idea is you're supposed to make believe. Its bad when someone can't make believe just because its CGI,

basically there's no such thing as x kills suspension of belief, both x and y are not real, you must ignore not just one thing, but everything is fake for it to work. After all you cannot touch the people in a movie; its just projected light. Its superficial to do anything less then that. Its like a guy who dates the hottest supermodel who is as stiff as a corpse in bed, when there's a chick with a big nose who give amazing head down the street that he's been ignoring. 

i mean they try to make it look real as possible, they take photographs of the scene, they record where the light sources are, sometimes they reconstruct the rooms in the computer just so they can get the light sources and reflections just right, not to mention most people doing lighting in movies just do 3 light sources. Then you have people spending 80+ hours molding polygons so that they can stretch in all the right ways, sometimes they use a laser scanner on real objects, rigging up physics, sometimes you have different modelers for doing the hair, the eyes, the textures etc, the textures are taken from real objects, they even take the time to add glistening to the eyes just so their convincing. Its not even fair in especially in this case to say that theres nothing physical there when in this case there actually is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8XTBVGLD8&feature=player_embedded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM9Pvfq1KhE&NR=1

I remember a couple months back I made the assertion that cgi is just modern stop motion. Then someone said well at least there is something physically there, but that doesnt hold up because the lighting always looks worse in stop motion then the lighting in CGI, and CGI always has more fluid motion. Thought i've seen some great stop motion recently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywu1DeqXTg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asBTY34YMp4&feature=channel_video_title

The only thing you can really knock it for is the speed in which it was put together. It could have been 100% believable if the had spent another 6 months on it, but then it would have cost 50 million dollars more. Still, it was worth it to see the experiment. This will have ramifications in the future for media people tend to be more forgiving on like television.

[Morari]

The only thing you can really knock it for is the speed in which it was put together. It could have been 100% believable if the had spent another 6 months on it, but then it would have cost 50 million dollars more. Still, it was worth it to see the experiment. This will have ramifications in the future for media people tend to be more forgiving on like television.

And that's ultimately what it comes down to, isn't it? Stop motion generally looked great because it was a craft that people took pride in. CGI is used because it is cheap and quick. Good CGI is neither, so no one uses it. I still think that 99% of the special effects in Jurassic Park are better than what you generally get today. A lot of it was full CGI, but most was CGI enhancement atop physical props. That's where CGI belongs, touching up and perfecting time-tested techniques... not replacing them.

[TJ Spyke]

I have rarely like stop motion stuff, it almost always looks like crap and I can't get sucked into it because it just looks so fake. When CGI is done well, it looks great and even better than real life actors.

[ThePerm]

yeah, i was going to mention Jurassic Park the other day on one of the other posts. I was watching it the other day, and it really is an amazing movie. The parts that are cg are perfect, but its easier to do featherless dinosaurs than hairy monkeys. Also, the motions of the 10 seconds you see a running t-rex, and the 8 seconds of cg raptors is much simpler. You can't however make the assertion that those CGI artists don't take pride in their work. Thats asinine. I'm sure if there was still a market for stop motion it would be equally expensive, and CGI is not quick. It takes less time to build armatures and prosthetic makeup and film them then it does to build CGI models. The only thing they've done in recent years made animation easier.

[Adrock]

Hereafter
I liked it though I will probably never watch it again. There were some good performances here. I'm a fan of Cecile de France and she didn't disappoint. The scene where she takes off her robe and changed seemed pandering which was odd in a movie like this. Some plot threads felt stunted and were subsequently abandoned. Not Eastwood's best, but I didn't hate myself for watching it.

Tangled
Great. Highly recommended. I only had 2 major issues. The first: Mother Gothel was a pretty tame villain though she got the typical horrifying Disney villain death. The second: the songs were pretty weak. It doesn't hold a candle to the music in late-80s/early-90s animated Disney films that I still know by heart to this day. I've read that some people found the humor too slapstick but I was okay with it. Disney changing the title from "Rapunzel" to "Tangled" is a minor gripe.

Red Riding Hood
Eww... Pretty much everything about this movie sucked. Gary Oldman should have known better. Even Amanda Seyfried should have known better. Shame on them. The Twilight reject had a bit too much hair product for the time period. I'm surprised that in such a primitive society, they still had hair gel. This movie was so bad that I wanted to slap my friend for insisting we watch it and especially since she saw it before and admittedly enjoyed it.

[ThePerm]

same director as twilight, i might forgive sparkling vampires if the rest of he movie was decent. I Still haven't seen the movies, but non 14 year old non females say it sucks so im not a total hypocrite.

[SixthAngel]

I also had the unfortunate experience of watching that movie.  It makes the Twilight movies look great.  Reading the box the basic idea had at least some potential and Gary Oldman was there so I listened to someone else and gave it a try. Big mistake.

[broodwars]

Every once in a while, my mother gets a terrible movie and I get roped into watching it with the folks as part of "Happy Family Time, Damnit!"  Today's selection was a donation from one of her online friends, a Danny DeVito movie I had never heard of called Other People's Money.  Long story short, it's about a Wall Street investor (DeVito) who decides to liquidate a small-town company because he wants more money as a shareholder.  Did it uphold the tradition of terrible movies when the family gets together?  Oh yeah.  It's quite possibly one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  It's slow, it's boring, the characters are almost uniformly unlikeable, the writing is terrible, there's no chemistry between the two leads , and the ending is a wild Hail Mary that might have worked had the movie set up the characters' motivations properly...but it didn't, so it sucks.

The worst thing about the movie, though, is that this movie is billed as a comedy, yet there isn't a single funny moment in the entire film.  If anything, the film is a trashy romance with pseudo-drama about the decay of American values.  I usually find Danny DeVito hilarious (or at least amusing) and this is a pretty good cast that includes the likes of Gregory Peck. But this movie is just painfully un-funny and I don't recommend it to anyone.

[Stogi]

You should have watched See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Hall Pass - ::crickets::

I bet it seemed funny on paper, but it most certainly did not transfer to the screen.
The only part that was kinda funny was the last scene before the credits. Everything else was like a joke that would've been funny, had the person told it right.
4.5/10

& did i forget to mention that it is completely predictable?

[MaryJane]

Hall Pass - ::crickets::

I bet it seemed funny on paper, but it most certainly did not transfer to the screen.
The only part that was kinda funny was the last scene before the credits. Everything else was like a joke that would've been funny, had the person told it right.
4.5/10

& did i forget to mention that it is completely predictable?

As a comedy it failed, but as a movie it was decent, and predictable? You didn't think everyone was going to have sex, and then only one on them did?

[BlackNMild2k1]

I knew the message right from the start and I knew that Owen Wilson wouldn't be able to go through it with. After all that chasing, once he got what he thought he wanted, he would realize he already had everything he wanted. I also figured that his wife just wanted to know that she could if she wanted to, but wouldn't actually do anything stupid.

There was something just wrong with this movie, and it sux because I was kinda lookin forward to it. It was kinda entertaining, and it should've been funny, but it just fell really really flat. Some parts that you would think should have been hilarious, just came across as sad and pathetic some times.

[Dasmos]

Nikki Whelan was pretty hot though.

I just came back from Cowboys & Aliens and I thought it was pretty ****. Well not ****, just boring. Nothing interesting really happened. I never really liked any of the characters and the whole reason for Aliens being there was pretty ****. At least the Alien designs weren't completely horrible and Harrison Ford being in it automatically gives it bonus points. 4/10

ps Daniel Craig had the worst hat in the world. Someone needs to fire that costume designer. I just wanted to punch him in the face the entire movie because of how ridiculous it looked.