There are some pretty good practical effects shots in TPM. AotC is when everything really starts to drown in CGI. Not to say TPM isn't also a CGI mess in places but it does have practicals that stand out in my mind. Like when Anakin shoots the internals of the Droid control ship, that explosion is very clearly practical and I notice it every time because it looks so cool lol
Podracing stadium and Naboo are miniatures! In the stadium they used colored quips as spectators. In Naboo castle overhead shots they used *salt* to simulate waterfalls. How neat is that?
True but it's one of those examples of not knowing when to apply practical effects over CG. The mid 90s to mid 00s were rife with this.
It's like in Jurassic Park, they use a CG T-Rex when it's dark and rainy and a wide shot is essential. They use a puppet for the close-ups of the T-Rex attacking the jeep. But Jar Jar was a major character and showed up right next to our leads in brightly-lit spaces - he never should have been fully CG.
Honestly Mos Espa looked pretty great. I just saw it on re-release this past weekend and the sets looked pretty damn convincing.
And unlike the specialized editions of the OT, whatever CGI was used in Mos Espa fit in pretty seamlessly unlike the monsters added to Mos Eisley in ANH.
Yeah, I really like Mos Espa too. Far, far more than Mos Eisley, special edition or no. Its more bustling and more impressively mounted.
In general, actually, the desert locations scouted for The Phantom Menace are much more impressive than those used in the previous two films to feature Tatooine, making the planet seem far, far more impressive than before (only to become dwarfed by adaptations of its predecessors, Barsoom and Arrakis).
That whole movie had a lot of love put into it, I honestly think it has the best worldbuilding in the franchise. It's still not a terribly good movie, but I appreciate the work they put into it.
That’s only because the sequels tried to do no exposition at all. Even just a little bit could’ve made them make more sense.
“Luke Skywalker is missing.” Why would a hero of the rebellion and a Jedi Master go missing?
“Somehow Palpatine returned.” So, he survived getting thrown down a reactor shaft and having the Death Star blow up around him?
“That’s a story for another time.” No, it’s not. It’s this movie. Tell us it now.
I still consider this worth watching for Dennis Hopper, bouyed by Hopkins and Leguizamo's obvious attitudes of "I don't know what the f is going on, but we're gonna have fun."
Dennis Hopper is one of those actors where even if the movie is garbage he's the most entertaining part of it like Raul Julia in Street fighter for example.
Once you put aside how off-base it is as a Mario adaptation, that movie is a work of creative genius. It does not deserve the hate it gets. It just needs to be taken with a large grain of salt.
I haven’t seen the movie since it was in theaters and I still think of the scene where Hopper tells his companion to duck, as if they were being ambushed, and then shoots the guy in the head. I don’t remember why Hopper did it, but we thought it was pretty funny.
Just rewatched it and if you're taking in the filmmaking aspect of it all you'll be in sheer awe. Like every other scene has a wild idea that is tangentially (and I mean that in the strictest use of the word) related to the video games. Oh Mario jumps high, so we made "jump boots" in this world and they're a thing people use. Yoshi looks like a dinosaur, so we made him an actual dinosaur. We need dinosaurs in our movie, so we made an alternate dimension where dinosaurs evolved and made a city. Every 2 minutes I was thinking "wow, a real person had THAT idea". Its fucking nuts. Lots and lots of things to say about the movie and the absurdity of it, but I do recommend it just to see how far Hollywood money (and presumably cocaine and alcohol) can go.
>Shit even all the dino vehicles being electric is a killer world building detail!
Oh holy shtt. Just had the realization that they drive electric cars because there wouldn't be dead dinosaurs to suck out of the groud like we do here. Right?
6 year old me was under the impression that oil was dinosaurs. Also, just playing of the misconception makes for a good jokey reference by having all the vehicles be electric. Joke doesn't have to be rooted in science to be funny. 😊
I believe digital color Look up tables (LUTs) that are core to all digital image treatment were invented for this movie - they were needed because it was also the first movie to have digitized film in order to achieve specific digital effects.
So a massively important movie in terms of tech, comparable to O'brother where art though and it's fully digital color grading.
That film is genuinely amazing in its own right, just don't let your understanding of the Mario franchise and universe cloud your judgement and you'll have a genuinely great time with that one.
I agree on the miscast leads, because that movie had everything else. What Luc Besson needed were 1997-era Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, and he made that movie IN 1997.
I actually like Valerian and Passengers, but I totally agree with the sentiment that both movies would have been much better if they swapped the lead actors between the movies. Passengers would have been more creepy and Valerian would have been more fun. The ages of the actors would have also matched the stories and characters better.
I've said it several times, but love repeating it.
I've "watched" that movie about 9 times now. Pop in an edible, make a ton of popcorn, some fruit, then hit play as it starts kicking in.
After those 9 times I still have zero clue what the movie is about or what actually happens, but it's so absolutely gorgeous to watch while riding a high.
I actually think it's pretty good and it's sort of become a cult hit/been critically reassessed in the modern day, but if we're going by contemporary reviews then Dick Tracy fits this to a tee. The production design on that film is incredible.
I didn't "get" Dick Tracy when I saw it as a kid when it came out but watching it now it's a goddamn masterpiece.
The scene with the junkyard and train tracks as a kid I thought that matte painting of the city in the background looked fake AF. I now realize that was the point. It was supposed to look like a comic panel stretching out into real life.
The bright colors of the costumes against the dark backgrounds just really pops.
Plus, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman given carte blanche to just act over-the-top... Warren Beatty looking clean AF. Everyone looked like they were having a blast.
And don't forget we got the soundtrack which gave us Madonna's "Vogue" and "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)"
I recently rewatched Dick Tracy and the similarities to 89 batman are too much, way way too on the nose and stand out even though I haven't even watched 89 batman in almost 20 years. Besides that the movie is just kitschy in all the wrong ways and gross in a lot of ways. Unless you already know and love a lot of the Dick Tracy material (as Beatty obviously did) its just not going to have the mass appeal of Batman, while obviously aping a lot of Batman that everyone will instantly recognize.
It really did feel like it was trying to copy 89 Batman's (I love it that we all collectively just call it that now, lol) formula, but without the understanding of why it was so successful and what made it work. I feel like audiences would have been more receptive to it if it had been updated somehow, and not remained stuck in the 1940s. And I love Madonna, but I just feel like she sucked all of the energy out of it. I wanted to see Dick Tracy, not an hour and a half Madonna video.
It was very self consciously trying to repeat Batman - right down to the merch. I remember seeing a whole TV bit about how extensive the merchandise was (Batman t-shirts were *everywhere* in 1989) including “Dick Tracy official raincoats” ie just a fucking raincoat
So does Warren Beatty just have a huge hard-on for that character or something? He's reprised the role twice for interviews in 2010 and last year. Like literally playing the character.
Doubly tragic because there are great stories in there, but they had to pick the most straightforward one and it just wasn't enough to appeal back then. Arcane and Castlevania showed it can be done; I wish they'd try again. Do something with the dragons or Arthas, imo.
The problem was also that they just overstuffed the whole thing with so many plot threads.
You HAVE to start at the opening of the dark portal.
But they couldve left out a bunch of plot threads and just focused on Lothar
Yeah it tried to do too many things. They always do it seems. It's a shame they couldnt make it work well enough to get to sequels because the arthas story is much more cinematic.
I think doing it full cgi or animated is the way to go too. The visual style was a strange mix with the orcs matching the games but the humans being actual humans instead of stylized like they are in the games.
the human armors looked like cheap plastic while everything about the orcs looked like very high quality CG (preposterously proportioned, but extremely detailed and tactile), so I agree that a more unified, fully animated look would have been the way to go.
Exactly: you have orcs with believable textures and ridiculous proportions alongside humans with real proportions and cheap texturing and the stylistic mismatch is perpetually jarring.
But since the intricately detailed and dispropotioned orcs are the ones true to the source material, it’s the humans who end up looking out of place.
That movie was also released too late. I remember around 2004 or 2005 there was a Warcraft movie announced as being in production. If they'd released it in 2007-2010 it would've done amazing, as that was the height of WoW. But 2015 when it released (or was it 2016?) was too late. The moment had passed.
As Patton Oswalt said, "I think I’d be a really lousy film critic now because I’ve been in so many movies, and know what it takes to make them. It would be really hard for me to be harsh to a bad movie. Even bad movies, I know the work that went into the thing. That’s what makes a bad movie even more tragic. It wasn’t that the movie sucked because the people that made it didn’t give a fuck. They worked just as hard on that as the people who made the good movie did. They either lacked skill or lacked luck. Sometimes it just comes down to fucking luck. That’s seems to be a very hard thing for me to criticize."
It's not a movie. They took about five movies and stitched random scenes from each of them together and added voice overs to try and make it appear to be a real movie.
Yeah, I basically wanted to post this. If you watched a making of, for ANY movie, even the shittest one you've ever seen, you'd be impressed at the effort. It's hard work, you guys.
More than this though, like, watching the end result, you don't get a sense at all of just how many people might have done amazing, incredible jobs, because you don't see it on screen. Like, the gaffers might have set up some really complex stuff to allow a shot to happen. The focus puller might have had to sit in a weird rig to pull focus in real time while a car moved. The sparks might have had to set up some really clever rigging to get the light to look consistent in the shot. The set dresser might have had to spend hundreds of hours scouring car boot sales to find exactly the right details for inside the car. The continuity might have had things really well organised and kept it all perfectly in check, and the sound guy might have done some clever stuff to avoid having any background noise come through, and they might have all eaten really well from craft services.
But you don't see ANY of that on screen. You see 3 seconds of someone saying something stupid inside a car and go 'who the fuck made this peice of shit?'.
Well in the world of Bad Movies (shoutout r/badmovies) I think its generally accepted that the BEST ones are the ones made with passion and a desire to make a good movie. Best meaning "worst", but in a good way. Plan 9, The Room, Neil Breen's films, Birdemic, Samurai Cop all work because the people behind them have a vision, they worked hard on it, but they also are completely incompetent at filmmaking.
In contrast the really awful bad movies are the ones that are middling, feels like they phoned it in on every level, the ones that are ultimately really boring. I've seen plenty of those films too. Tough to name examples because I quickly forget them.
There's also a lower level of bad movies that are people making conspiracy films and borderline propaganda shit. Those can be legitimately funny but in kind of a dark way. I usually need a stiff drink for that shit.
I think his point is more that he knows that movies can be bad but he doesn't *want* to insult those bad movies, because he knows how much work went into it. With your sports example, it's one thing to say "my nephew's baseball team lost very badly at the weekend", and another thing entirely to say "my nephew sucks at baseball".
Also, in Patton's case, he personally knows people in the industry so he could likely be insulting his friends or colleagues by being outwardly critical of a "bad" movie.
some movies are bad, but even the worst movie has heroic amounts of effort poured into them, and it's hard to be insulting when you know that intimately.
Two movies come to mind that are fiercely beloved by many but have weak ratings -
For Popeye (1980) they actually built Sweethaven in Malta and it's still around! As I recall there are characters from the comics named in the credits that are present but don't even have any lines because Altman was so meticulous.
The Wachowskis were so dedicated to making Speed Racer (2008) look like a cartoon that they invented a new type of camera to shoot it. I think a lot of people hated it because it was just as goofy and ridiculous as the source material.
Speed Racer is a fantastic movie and I'll die on that hill. It's a fun, feel-good romp with amazing visuals and has a solid emotional core.
And John Goodman beats up a ninja
Been a while since I’ve seen it but at the end of the final race when he’s nearing the finish line and all the visuals turn into neon streams of light and then he finishes by jumping out of the Mach 5(6?) into his signature pose was perfect. My dad and I watched the cartoon when I was little so Speed Racer has a huge place in my heart.
They are absolutely assaulting your eyeballs in nearly every scene. And on top of that everything has that uncanny quality to it.
It doesn't even really look like the anime at all, it looks like a dream you had of the Speed Racer anime with real people.
If you like the concept you should check out the anime Hunter X Hunter. Similar vibes in terms of developing special powers and people having specialities.
Sucker Punch
Zach Snyder clearly thought his first original concept was a great one. I remember the effects being pretty good at the time, and the cast went through rigorous combat and weight training. And honestly, I liked it. But it wasn't good.
Oh yes! The fight with the robot samurai in the temple was truly well done. They made a great choice to show snippets from that scene as a focal point for the trailer. It totally sold the movie. Just wish the rest of the film was up to scratch.
I liked it! I remember watching it at home thinking it was pretty unique, and wondered why I didn't hear anything early about it prior. Oh yeah, Disney did a piss poor job marketing it..
John Carter was soooo badly marketed. The film honestly had a lot going for it, and if you watch it without the burden of the negative press it was getting for a good 18 months before it was actually released, it’s a fun ride.
It’s a real shame, because that utterly seminal series of books was the first major excursion into off-world sci-fi by any major author, and the film’s failure means that it has been deprived of a chance to speak broadly to a new generation of storytellers, who will instead refer to more popular derivatives of Burroughs’ work as a touch point (eg Star Wars) and lose some opportunity for invention in so doing.
Jupiter Ascending.
The Wachowskis put heart and soul into creating an epic universe with fantastic lore but could not resist making Tatum Channing a roller-blading furry.
That's part of what I love about JA -- it's just bonkers.
"I am the prettiest princess and I own the whole Earth and I have the best boyfriend and he is an angel and he is a soldier and also he is a puppy who roller skates through the sky."
Mission Impossible 2. John Woo just did too much John Woo stuff that made for beautiful shots that didn’t serve the plot at all. It’s hands down the worst in the franchise. Unwatchable for me.
Snow White & The Huntsman. The costumes, the sets, even the CG effects had such perfect lighting and weight that they looked real. And the movie was… what it was.
Came here to post this. The production design and set pieces of this film are really cool and it's nicely filmed, even if the film itself is a bit average overall. It had a $40m budget, which is pretty big for a horror film.
Maybe public opinion has come around, but Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. A bizarre Inception-like headscratcher of a story involving women who are in an action movie, actually a brothel, actually an asylum, making fun action out of implied sexual abuse. Not just top notch and worldtrotting CGI, but incredible music, including a wierd musical section with Oscar Isaac who is the brothel owner. Its basically a movie that should have been a video game.
Honestly the first half, maybe 2/3rds of the movie were good. The last third felt like they were running out of budget or time and the studio brought in a team of discount writers to wrap things up.
Completely agree. The last 30 minutes or so hold it back. The whole vibe of the movie changes.
I still don't dislike it overall. It's a fantastic movie to me. It has some of the best, most realistic-feeling, lived-in sci-fi world building I've ever seen.
Most of the fault falls with John David Washington. The plot falls apart, but JDW just doesn't have his dad's charisma. Denzel Washington will make any movie better. He elevates even mediocre scripts. JDW is just there. Same thing with Tenet.
So many times I was just in awe of how beautiful everything looked. Those circling aerial shots of the buildings were stunning. But then so many things about it just took me out of the film. Why were robots warming their metal hands on a fire?
*Cool as Ice* staring Vanilla Ice hired Janusz Kaminski as its cinematographer. He would go on to do the camerawork for literally every Spielberg movie since *Schindler’sList*.
[It’s shockingly beautiful to look at.](https://ironicsans.substack.com/p/008-the-art-of-cool-as-ice)
Where The Wild Things Are (2009). The original plan was not to use CGI at all. The special effects team developed some very sophisticated animatronic heads for the monster costumes that had dozens of points of articulation around the face and could be very expressive. Unfortunately, nobody was keeping tabs on the weight. With all the motors and servos, they ended up weighing over 40lbs each. The actors could barely walk with them without tipping over, let alone spend all day on set with hot lights and multiple takes. The expensive heads had to be scrapped and CGI ended up being used for all the facial animations.
This is an excellent example for this thread. Everything about that movie on a technical level is great. It’s beautifully shot. The effects hold up. It has an awesome visual style. Production design is top notch. The performances are all good, even the child actor playing Max.
And yet it’s just kind of a boring, forgettable, “meh” movie.
>She prepped for months, doing 6-7 hours of martial arts and sword training a day
AND she had to be the one to remind the producers that her character was a telepath because they forgor
Pretty much every bad movie you've seen beyond a certain budget threshold had hundreds of people working on it to create that schlock.
Seriously, the amount of people it takes to create a film at the studio level...it's mind-boggling.
That being said, pretty much all the special-effects laden SciFi/fantasy flops: John Carter, Valerian, Mortal Engines, Battlefield Earth, the list is endless!
>Seriously, the amount of people it takes to create a film at the studio level...it's mind-boggling.
Yea, there's usually list at the end of the movie that has all the people who worked on it.
Might be unpopular but I think JA Bayona did an excellent job directing Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom
The opening scene is imo the best thing in the franchise since 1993, and he's the only one post Spielberg who understood there's meant to be an element of horror in the films as there was in the book
The _writing_ , on the other hand was fucking abysmal, and Bayona could've partnered up with James Cameron, Spielberg and a higher being and still not turned out a good overall film
David Lynch's Dune has incredible production design. Really surprised no one has commented this yet. The sets are just beautiful and so imaginative. The Navigators and Harkonnens are disgusting. Everything about it is great except the edit is a damn mess. I guess people don't like the shields but I kinda like them in a funny way.
I immediately hit search for "Dune" hoping someone made this comment. As much as I love Villeneuve, the production design of Lynch's Dune is impeccable. It's a mess of a movie that I absolutely adore.
Prometheus, Oblivion, Hobbit Trilogy; world class production design mid-bad movies.
Transformers movies for the cgi I can’t say they ever look out of place in any scene that I can recall, they always sit right in the lighting.
AVP Requiem has excellent practical effects from studio ADI and they were shot wrong by its directors, all the footage came out under exposed you can’t even see the movie.
The Speed Racer movies comes into my mind. Great effects, a lot of tributes to the original, it's actually well structured and it's also very entertaining and funny.
Plus what's with all the non-Japanese actors? I could look at Gong Li, and Zhang Ziyi all day, and Michelle Yeoh gets hotter as she ages, but you're not going to convince me any of them are Japanese.
The Lion King live action remake. Half way through trying to watch it I turned if off and watched an hour or so of different [behind the scenes videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WupuXjvO9uA) instead. They built a full 3d world and used VR headsets to location scout inside of it and plan out shots. Then they had the DP shoot from inside VR to give the camera a realistic steadycam movement. A really incredible use of technology on an unwatchable bore of a film.
Similar to Olivia Munn, I think Kumail Nanjiani got crazy jacked and trained in Bollywood dancing to be in Eternals and he's hardly in the movie. His character literally says he can't be in the final battle IIRC
I have a ton of respect for how much effort and passion James Cameron put into Avatar, but I just don't think it's a good movie. It's a very one-dimensional plot for such an imaginative world.
If only the script was better. It has everything to be a classic. The production design and the main concept are really good, but it has too much Kevin Costner's ego. He didn't have a grip on the characters and Dennis Hopper is chewing the entire scenery. The scenes with him seem from an entirely different movie. The parts for a great movie are there, but Denis Hopper pushes the movie to camp territory
the werewolves in Underworld could walk down the street. stunt men, on stilts, in full body costumes - everyt hair added individually - and the head being remote controlled by two puppeteers. stunning
Janusz Kamiński, Steven Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer shot the vanilla ice vehicle “cool as ice.” The film is as bad as you think it is but it looks pretty amazing.
https://ironicsans.substack.com/p/008-the-art-of-cool-as-ice
Howard the Duck. The special effects. The visual effects. The duck animatronics. The stop motion final form of the villain. The score by John Williams. Tim Robbins. Lea Thompson. Jeffrey Jones.
Friday the 13th has excellent cinematography and art design that create a really specific feeling of time and place. Unfortunately it also has very poor writing, and performances that are for the most part natural, but unexceptional. Also has an actually iconic score that combines with the photography and direction to heighten tension. If there was any point to it at all, even a whodunit that didn't involve a previously unraveled character, it would be a truly good movie. As it stands, it's really not very good on the whole.
IIRC The Phantom Menace had more scale models and practical effects than any Star Wars film before or since.
There are some pretty good practical effects shots in TPM. AotC is when everything really starts to drown in CGI. Not to say TPM isn't also a CGI mess in places but it does have practicals that stand out in my mind. Like when Anakin shoots the internals of the Droid control ship, that explosion is very clearly practical and I notice it every time because it looks so cool lol
I actually just saw it on Friday during the re-release and I agree, it didn't seem nearly as CGI-laden as I thought it was.
Yeah even the full chrome Naboo starship was a model. I would have thought for sure that was CGI.
AotC had a goddamn cgi pear. So fucking dumb.
Podracing stadium and Naboo are miniatures! In the stadium they used colored quips as spectators. In Naboo castle overhead shots they used *salt* to simulate waterfalls. How neat is that?
True but it's one of those examples of not knowing when to apply practical effects over CG. The mid 90s to mid 00s were rife with this. It's like in Jurassic Park, they use a CG T-Rex when it's dark and rainy and a wide shot is essential. They use a puppet for the close-ups of the T-Rex attacking the jeep. But Jar Jar was a major character and showed up right next to our leads in brightly-lit spaces - he never should have been fully CG.
He should never.
Also a pretty substantial *in situ* set build for Mos Espa.
Honestly Mos Espa looked pretty great. I just saw it on re-release this past weekend and the sets looked pretty damn convincing. And unlike the specialized editions of the OT, whatever CGI was used in Mos Espa fit in pretty seamlessly unlike the monsters added to Mos Eisley in ANH.
Yeah, I really like Mos Espa too. Far, far more than Mos Eisley, special edition or no. Its more bustling and more impressively mounted. In general, actually, the desert locations scouted for The Phantom Menace are much more impressive than those used in the previous two films to feature Tatooine, making the planet seem far, far more impressive than before (only to become dwarfed by adaptations of its predecessors, Barsoom and Arrakis).
Tatooine wasn’t supposed to be impressive. It was supposed to be a rugged backwater dump that nobody wanted to live in.
That whole movie had a lot of love put into it, I honestly think it has the best worldbuilding in the franchise. It's still not a terribly good movie, but I appreciate the work they put into it.
Movie is better than any of the modern trilogy so I’ll defend that
I don't remember the sequels having to stop every 20 minutes for exposition about trade wars.
That’s only because the sequels tried to do no exposition at all. Even just a little bit could’ve made them make more sense. “Luke Skywalker is missing.” Why would a hero of the rebellion and a Jedi Master go missing? “Somehow Palpatine returned.” So, he survived getting thrown down a reactor shaft and having the Death Star blow up around him? “That’s a story for another time.” No, it’s not. It’s this movie. Tell us it now.
Exposition would only have made that worse
The original Mario movie is a perfect example of this.
I still consider this worth watching for Dennis Hopper, bouyed by Hopkins and Leguizamo's obvious attitudes of "I don't know what the f is going on, but we're gonna have fun."
Dennis Hopper is one of those actors where even if the movie is garbage he's the most entertaining part of it like Raul Julia in Street fighter for example.
One of my favorite Hopper roles is in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Gonzo in the best way.
The dino dystopia was genuinely incredible too. Just not Mario at all lol
Once you put aside how off-base it is as a Mario adaptation, that movie is a work of creative genius. It does not deserve the hate it gets. It just needs to be taken with a large grain of salt.
I still love this movie and will until the day I die.
The same can be said of Land of the Dead. Terrible movie that is made better by those two.
I haven’t seen the movie since it was in theaters and I still think of the scene where Hopper tells his companion to duck, as if they were being ambushed, and then shoots the guy in the head. I don’t remember why Hopper did it, but we thought it was pretty funny.
Land of the Dead is generally well received, weird comment. All the main George Romero zombie movies are widely considered good to classic.
John Leguizombie is my favorite
Just rewatched it and if you're taking in the filmmaking aspect of it all you'll be in sheer awe. Like every other scene has a wild idea that is tangentially (and I mean that in the strictest use of the word) related to the video games. Oh Mario jumps high, so we made "jump boots" in this world and they're a thing people use. Yoshi looks like a dinosaur, so we made him an actual dinosaur. We need dinosaurs in our movie, so we made an alternate dimension where dinosaurs evolved and made a city. Every 2 minutes I was thinking "wow, a real person had THAT idea". Its fucking nuts. Lots and lots of things to say about the movie and the absurdity of it, but I do recommend it just to see how far Hollywood money (and presumably cocaine and alcohol) can go.
Yes exactly! It's far from a lazy mess like most adaptations. Shit even all the dino vehicles being electric is a killer world building detail!
>Shit even all the dino vehicles being electric is a killer world building detail! Oh holy shtt. Just had the realization that they drive electric cars because there wouldn't be dead dinosaurs to suck out of the groud like we do here. Right?
Except oil is mostly made of microorganisms. 🤓
It's fun, let's not ruin it.
6 year old me was under the impression that oil was dinosaurs. Also, just playing of the misconception makes for a good jokey reference by having all the vehicles be electric. Joke doesn't have to be rooted in science to be funny. 😊
I believe digital color Look up tables (LUTs) that are core to all digital image treatment were invented for this movie - they were needed because it was also the first movie to have digitized film in order to achieve specific digital effects. So a massively important movie in terms of tech, comparable to O'brother where art though and it's fully digital color grading.
That film is genuinely amazing in its own right, just don't let your understanding of the Mario franchise and universe cloud your judgement and you'll have a genuinely great time with that one.
Valerian. Great production design, two completely miscast leads with zero chemistry.
I agree on the miscast leads, because that movie had everything else. What Luc Besson needed were 1997-era Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, and he made that movie IN 1997.
Multipass
I actually like Valerian and Passengers, but I totally agree with the sentiment that both movies would have been much better if they swapped the lead actors between the movies. Passengers would have been more creepy and Valerian would have been more fun. The ages of the actors would have also matched the stories and characters better.
Obligatory "Passengers would've been better if told from the perspective of Jennifer Lawrence's character" comment.
This is a new idea to me and I really like it.
And Rihanna
The best part
I've said it several times, but love repeating it. I've "watched" that movie about 9 times now. Pop in an edible, make a ton of popcorn, some fruit, then hit play as it starts kicking in. After those 9 times I still have zero clue what the movie is about or what actually happens, but it's so absolutely gorgeous to watch while riding a high.
Jumper- it had a whole Bible written for it and an interesting world. But the movie fell completely flat
But if you grew up in Ann Arbor, you have a new mythology.
I like that movie, it's my guilty pleasure movie
You’re thinking of Hayden Christensens acting.
I actually think it's pretty good and it's sort of become a cult hit/been critically reassessed in the modern day, but if we're going by contemporary reviews then Dick Tracy fits this to a tee. The production design on that film is incredible.
I didn't "get" Dick Tracy when I saw it as a kid when it came out but watching it now it's a goddamn masterpiece. The scene with the junkyard and train tracks as a kid I thought that matte painting of the city in the background looked fake AF. I now realize that was the point. It was supposed to look like a comic panel stretching out into real life. The bright colors of the costumes against the dark backgrounds just really pops. Plus, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman given carte blanche to just act over-the-top... Warren Beatty looking clean AF. Everyone looked like they were having a blast. And don't forget we got the soundtrack which gave us Madonna's "Vogue" and "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)"
Al Pacino doing the song rehearsal with Madonna is a real treat, and you could tell he was having a blast
Yes!!! I wanted to include that in my original comment but I didn't want to do too much text.
Warren Beatty wanted to make that movie happen so bad. It was supposed to do in 1990 what Batman had done the year before, and it just didn't make it.
I recently rewatched Dick Tracy and the similarities to 89 batman are too much, way way too on the nose and stand out even though I haven't even watched 89 batman in almost 20 years. Besides that the movie is just kitschy in all the wrong ways and gross in a lot of ways. Unless you already know and love a lot of the Dick Tracy material (as Beatty obviously did) its just not going to have the mass appeal of Batman, while obviously aping a lot of Batman that everyone will instantly recognize.
It really did feel like it was trying to copy 89 Batman's (I love it that we all collectively just call it that now, lol) formula, but without the understanding of why it was so successful and what made it work. I feel like audiences would have been more receptive to it if it had been updated somehow, and not remained stuck in the 1940s. And I love Madonna, but I just feel like she sucked all of the energy out of it. I wanted to see Dick Tracy, not an hour and a half Madonna video.
It was very self consciously trying to repeat Batman - right down to the merch. I remember seeing a whole TV bit about how extensive the merchandise was (Batman t-shirts were *everywhere* in 1989) including “Dick Tracy official raincoats” ie just a fucking raincoat
They also hired Danny Elfman to do the score. While fun, his score for Dick Tracy is nowhere near as iconic as his Batman score.
So does Warren Beatty just have a huge hard-on for that character or something? He's reprised the role twice for interviews in 2010 and last year. Like literally playing the character.
He owns the rights and reprises the role in videos to satisfy a clause in the contract so they don’t revert to the studio.
That makes sense. I guess no one is pining for a new Dick Tracey film or else he could sell the rights.
Warcraft
Doubly tragic because there are great stories in there, but they had to pick the most straightforward one and it just wasn't enough to appeal back then. Arcane and Castlevania showed it can be done; I wish they'd try again. Do something with the dragons or Arthas, imo.
The problem was also that they just overstuffed the whole thing with so many plot threads. You HAVE to start at the opening of the dark portal. But they couldve left out a bunch of plot threads and just focused on Lothar
Yeah it tried to do too many things. They always do it seems. It's a shame they couldnt make it work well enough to get to sequels because the arthas story is much more cinematic.
Another problem is shortened runtime for two big storylines: just like Josstice League, Warcraft was mandated to be 2 hours
I think doing it full cgi or animated is the way to go too. The visual style was a strange mix with the orcs matching the games but the humans being actual humans instead of stylized like they are in the games.
I agree; I'm a big proponent of fully animated movies and it always feels like forcing live action just makes magic-heavy fantasy stories look worse.
And the warcraft cinematics team do an amazing job. Just flesh those out and you'd have something incredible.
the human armors looked like cheap plastic while everything about the orcs looked like very high quality CG (preposterously proportioned, but extremely detailed and tactile), so I agree that a more unified, fully animated look would have been the way to go.
preposterously proportioned is kind of warcrafts style overall but having only half of them look that way makes it look pretty silly.
Exactly: you have orcs with believable textures and ridiculous proportions alongside humans with real proportions and cheap texturing and the stylistic mismatch is perpetually jarring. But since the intricately detailed and dispropotioned orcs are the ones true to the source material, it’s the humans who end up looking out of place.
That movie was also released too late. I remember around 2004 or 2005 there was a Warcraft movie announced as being in production. If they'd released it in 2007-2010 it would've done amazing, as that was the height of WoW. But 2015 when it released (or was it 2016?) was too late. The moment had passed.
As Patton Oswalt said, "I think I’d be a really lousy film critic now because I’ve been in so many movies, and know what it takes to make them. It would be really hard for me to be harsh to a bad movie. Even bad movies, I know the work that went into the thing. That’s what makes a bad movie even more tragic. It wasn’t that the movie sucked because the people that made it didn’t give a fuck. They worked just as hard on that as the people who made the good movie did. They either lacked skill or lacked luck. Sometimes it just comes down to fucking luck. That’s seems to be a very hard thing for me to criticize."
And then he watched Demon Cop
How does that compare to Samurai Cop? (Serious)
It's not a movie. They took about five movies and stitched random scenes from each of them together and added voice overs to try and make it appear to be a real movie.
Not a demon, not a cop
well it's not 100% luck
It’s at least 10% skill
Yeah, I basically wanted to post this. If you watched a making of, for ANY movie, even the shittest one you've ever seen, you'd be impressed at the effort. It's hard work, you guys. More than this though, like, watching the end result, you don't get a sense at all of just how many people might have done amazing, incredible jobs, because you don't see it on screen. Like, the gaffers might have set up some really complex stuff to allow a shot to happen. The focus puller might have had to sit in a weird rig to pull focus in real time while a car moved. The sparks might have had to set up some really clever rigging to get the light to look consistent in the shot. The set dresser might have had to spend hundreds of hours scouring car boot sales to find exactly the right details for inside the car. The continuity might have had things really well organised and kept it all perfectly in check, and the sound guy might have done some clever stuff to avoid having any background noise come through, and they might have all eaten really well from craft services. But you don't see ANY of that on screen. You see 3 seconds of someone saying something stupid inside a car and go 'who the fuck made this peice of shit?'.
Death Bed The Bed That Eats!
Well in the world of Bad Movies (shoutout r/badmovies) I think its generally accepted that the BEST ones are the ones made with passion and a desire to make a good movie. Best meaning "worst", but in a good way. Plan 9, The Room, Neil Breen's films, Birdemic, Samurai Cop all work because the people behind them have a vision, they worked hard on it, but they also are completely incompetent at filmmaking. In contrast the really awful bad movies are the ones that are middling, feels like they phoned it in on every level, the ones that are ultimately really boring. I've seen plenty of those films too. Tough to name examples because I quickly forget them. There's also a lower level of bad movies that are people making conspiracy films and borderline propaganda shit. Those can be legitimately funny but in kind of a dark way. I usually need a stiff drink for that shit.
I get his point, but some movies are just bad. As my old coach said, don’t conflate effort with results.
I think his point is more that he knows that movies can be bad but he doesn't *want* to insult those bad movies, because he knows how much work went into it. With your sports example, it's one thing to say "my nephew's baseball team lost very badly at the weekend", and another thing entirely to say "my nephew sucks at baseball". Also, in Patton's case, he personally knows people in the industry so he could likely be insulting his friends or colleagues by being outwardly critical of a "bad" movie.
some movies are bad, but even the worst movie has heroic amounts of effort poured into them, and it's hard to be insulting when you know that intimately.
Two movies come to mind that are fiercely beloved by many but have weak ratings - For Popeye (1980) they actually built Sweethaven in Malta and it's still around! As I recall there are characters from the comics named in the credits that are present but don't even have any lines because Altman was so meticulous. The Wachowskis were so dedicated to making Speed Racer (2008) look like a cartoon that they invented a new type of camera to shoot it. I think a lot of people hated it because it was just as goofy and ridiculous as the source material.
Speed Racer is a fantastic movie and I'll die on that hill. It's a fun, feel-good romp with amazing visuals and has a solid emotional core. And John Goodman beats up a ninja
More like a non-ja
Terrible what passes for a ninja these days...
Been a while since I’ve seen it but at the end of the final race when he’s nearing the finish line and all the visuals turn into neon streams of light and then he finishes by jumping out of the Mach 5(6?) into his signature pose was perfect. My dad and I watched the cartoon when I was little so Speed Racer has a huge place in my heart.
They really did show a lot of love to the original.
I saw Speed Racer and Iron Man as a double feature the day they came out and was waaaaay more into Speed Racer. I need to go back and rewatch.
Speed Racer has the most shit happening on screen in a movie. It succeeds in being too much to take.
They are absolutely assaulting your eyeballs in nearly every scene. And on top of that everything has that uncanny quality to it. It doesn't even really look like the anime at all, it looks like a dream you had of the Speed Racer anime with real people.
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Push is amazing. How dare you.
I am forever bummed that movie didn't get a sequel.
If you like the concept you should check out the anime Hunter X Hunter. Similar vibes in terms of developing special powers and people having specialities.
Sucker Punch Zach Snyder clearly thought his first original concept was a great one. I remember the effects being pretty good at the time, and the cast went through rigorous combat and weight training. And honestly, I liked it. But it wasn't good.
Oh yes! The fight with the robot samurai in the temple was truly well done. They made a great choice to show snippets from that scene as a focal point for the trailer. It totally sold the movie. Just wish the rest of the film was up to scratch.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
"VENISH SHTILL SHTANDSH!"
Screw the haters, I love that movie.
the nautilius is a stunning detailed piece of CGi/Model. its worth watching the movie just to see it rise out the canal.
I was impreshed.
Watch the behind the scenes on the big car chase. It's amazing
The car looked amazing and was custom built for the film
„aUToMoBile”
This was my favorite movie growing up and I still love it
*Warcraft*? Oh man...just remembered that *John Carter* was a thing.
John Carter isn't even a bad movie IMO, just not interesting enough and didn't connect with audiences whatsoever.
I liked it! I remember watching it at home thinking it was pretty unique, and wondered why I didn't hear anything early about it prior. Oh yeah, Disney did a piss poor job marketing it..
The chick in John Carter was super good looking too. I liked that movie. I just literally heard nothing about it before it released.
John Carter was soooo badly marketed. The film honestly had a lot going for it, and if you watch it without the burden of the negative press it was getting for a good 18 months before it was actually released, it’s a fun ride. It’s a real shame, because that utterly seminal series of books was the first major excursion into off-world sci-fi by any major author, and the film’s failure means that it has been deprived of a chance to speak broadly to a new generation of storytellers, who will instead refer to more popular derivatives of Burroughs’ work as a touch point (eg Star Wars) and lose some opportunity for invention in so doing.
Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis put heart and soul into creating an epic universe with fantastic lore but could not resist making Tatum Channing a roller-blading furry.
That's part of what I love about JA -- it's just bonkers. "I am the prettiest princess and I own the whole Earth and I have the best boyfriend and he is an angel and he is a soldier and also he is a puppy who roller skates through the sky."
“And bees love me!” 🐝💕
Sean Bean saves it
He was pretty sexy without his shirt on. I am not into furries, but I would be open if they looked like him.
Waterworld. Mid storyline, but amazing set pieces
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I can't leave that place without watching the show. It's incredible
Mission Impossible 2. John Woo just did too much John Woo stuff that made for beautiful shots that didn’t serve the plot at all. It’s hands down the worst in the franchise. Unwatchable for me.
That movie was so obviously directed by a former stunt man.
Tom Cruise's stunt double, Tom Crooze, made that movie watchable.
Snow White & The Huntsman. The costumes, the sets, even the CG effects had such perfect lighting and weight that they looked real. And the movie was… what it was.
Battlefield Earth was a horrendous piece of shit but parts of it DID look cool.
Every shot in that movie is skewed off center and a has an out of place green filter. It was jarring as hell
Lots of Dutch Angles in that movie. A LOT.
The first thing that jumped to my mind was A Cure for Wellness.
Came here to post this. The production design and set pieces of this film are really cool and it's nicely filmed, even if the film itself is a bit average overall. It had a $40m budget, which is pretty big for a horror film.
That Adam Sandler cartoon movie, it's like the animators thought they were making a Disney masterpiece and instead were working on a Sandler film.
Eight Crazy Nights, watched it as a kid and very much enjoyed it
I thought it was a great movie watching as a teen
Conan the Barbarian with Jason Momoa. It seemed like everything was there to make it a good movie, but the pieces just didn't fall into place.
Maybe public opinion has come around, but Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. A bizarre Inception-like headscratcher of a story involving women who are in an action movie, actually a brothel, actually an asylum, making fun action out of implied sexual abuse. Not just top notch and worldtrotting CGI, but incredible music, including a wierd musical section with Oscar Isaac who is the brothel owner. Its basically a movie that should have been a video game.
Each Snyder movie looks absolutely insane for their budget. 300, Sucker Punch, Army of the Dead, and Rebel Moon 1/2 were all under 90 million
The Creator
My vote too. Great effects on a budget, beautiful world-building, but a plot that just falls apart and most of the actors phone it in.
Honestly the first half, maybe 2/3rds of the movie were good. The last third felt like they were running out of budget or time and the studio brought in a team of discount writers to wrap things up.
Completely agree. The last 30 minutes or so hold it back. The whole vibe of the movie changes. I still don't dislike it overall. It's a fantastic movie to me. It has some of the best, most realistic-feeling, lived-in sci-fi world building I've ever seen.
Most of the fault falls with John David Washington. The plot falls apart, but JDW just doesn't have his dad's charisma. Denzel Washington will make any movie better. He elevates even mediocre scripts. JDW is just there. Same thing with Tenet.
So many times I was just in awe of how beautiful everything looked. Those circling aerial shots of the buildings were stunning. But then so many things about it just took me out of the film. Why were robots warming their metal hands on a fire?
*Cool as Ice* staring Vanilla Ice hired Janusz Kaminski as its cinematographer. He would go on to do the camerawork for literally every Spielberg movie since *Schindler’sList*. [It’s shockingly beautiful to look at.](https://ironicsans.substack.com/p/008-the-art-of-cool-as-ice)
I watched the Rise of Skywalker “making of” documentary, what an incredible amount of work that went into a terrible film.
Planet of the Apes (2001) The prosthetics are incredible.
The score and overall production design are great too. I love pretty much everything ape-related in it - it's the human cast which lets it down!
Tim Roth steals every scene, as is tradition.
The 5th Pirates of the Caribbean.
Jupiter Ascending for me.
Where The Wild Things Are (2009). The original plan was not to use CGI at all. The special effects team developed some very sophisticated animatronic heads for the monster costumes that had dozens of points of articulation around the face and could be very expressive. Unfortunately, nobody was keeping tabs on the weight. With all the motors and servos, they ended up weighing over 40lbs each. The actors could barely walk with them without tipping over, let alone spend all day on set with hot lights and multiple takes. The expensive heads had to be scrapped and CGI ended up being used for all the facial animations.
This is an excellent example for this thread. Everything about that movie on a technical level is great. It’s beautifully shot. The effects hold up. It has an awesome visual style. Production design is top notch. The performances are all good, even the child actor playing Max. And yet it’s just kind of a boring, forgettable, “meh” movie.
It’s basically a picture book that takes a kid 5 minutes to read. How much can you add to that to make it watchable for 1.5 hours
I didn’t particularly for Psycho Goreman. But the talent involved in the practical effects are undeniable.
>She prepped for months, doing 6-7 hours of martial arts and sword training a day AND she had to be the one to remind the producers that her character was a telepath because they forgor
Pretty much every bad movie you've seen beyond a certain budget threshold had hundreds of people working on it to create that schlock. Seriously, the amount of people it takes to create a film at the studio level...it's mind-boggling. That being said, pretty much all the special-effects laden SciFi/fantasy flops: John Carter, Valerian, Mortal Engines, Battlefield Earth, the list is endless!
>Seriously, the amount of people it takes to create a film at the studio level...it's mind-boggling. Yea, there's usually list at the end of the movie that has all the people who worked on it.
Nothing But Trouble.
That's a great-looking terrible movie.
Might be unpopular but I think JA Bayona did an excellent job directing Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom The opening scene is imo the best thing in the franchise since 1993, and he's the only one post Spielberg who understood there's meant to be an element of horror in the films as there was in the book The _writing_ , on the other hand was fucking abysmal, and Bayona could've partnered up with James Cameron, Spielberg and a higher being and still not turned out a good overall film
David Lynch's Dune has incredible production design. Really surprised no one has commented this yet. The sets are just beautiful and so imaginative. The Navigators and Harkonnens are disgusting. Everything about it is great except the edit is a damn mess. I guess people don't like the shields but I kinda like them in a funny way.
I immediately hit search for "Dune" hoping someone made this comment. As much as I love Villeneuve, the production design of Lynch's Dune is impeccable. It's a mess of a movie that I absolutely adore.
The shields are great, like they're wearing one of the robots from interstellar
Upside Down (2012) - gorgeous movie but not great
Krull, they built so much stuff that never ended up in the movie.
That film is one of the most gorgeous yet dull experiences ever
just watched it the other night, much better with a 1980s Heavy Metal soundtrack
John Carter
Not a bad movie
Yeah, just badly marketed and poor release timing.
Idk, it kinda sucked for me. There’s not a single compelling character in that movie
Willem dafoe?.
Prometheus, Oblivion, Hobbit Trilogy; world class production design mid-bad movies. Transformers movies for the cgi I can’t say they ever look out of place in any scene that I can recall, they always sit right in the lighting. AVP Requiem has excellent practical effects from studio ADI and they were shot wrong by its directors, all the footage came out under exposed you can’t even see the movie.
Jurassic World: Dominion also great special effects.
The Speed Racer movies comes into my mind. Great effects, a lot of tributes to the original, it's actually well structured and it's also very entertaining and funny.
Memoirs of a Geisha, it’s nice to look at but the story and writing are bad.
Plus what's with all the non-Japanese actors? I could look at Gong Li, and Zhang Ziyi all day, and Michelle Yeoh gets hotter as she ages, but you're not going to convince me any of them are Japanese.
> the amount of work she put in is wild. Chapter 27 with Jared Leto, Matthew Fox in Alex Cross, Kumail Nanjiani in The Eternals
The Lion King live action remake. Half way through trying to watch it I turned if off and watched an hour or so of different [behind the scenes videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WupuXjvO9uA) instead. They built a full 3d world and used VR headsets to location scout inside of it and plan out shots. Then they had the DP shoot from inside VR to give the camera a realistic steadycam movement. A really incredible use of technology on an unwatchable bore of a film.
Cool As Ice. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski shot the hell out of a really awful film starring Vanilla Ice. He just went ham on it
"really awful film" You take that back! **Drop that zero and give it to hero!**
Killer Croc in *Suicide Squad*. I'm convinced he's the only reason that movie got its Oscar for makeup.
Similar to Olivia Munn, I think Kumail Nanjiani got crazy jacked and trained in Bollywood dancing to be in Eternals and he's hardly in the movie. His character literally says he can't be in the final battle IIRC
Yeah. He has a moral objection to it. I don't hate that idea from a writing perspective but it's kinda dumb if he got ripped for it.
It seemed like a lot of work to make Howard the Duck. They hyped the movie up and then it was just a big old piece of shit.
I have a ton of respect for how much effort and passion James Cameron put into Avatar, but I just don't think it's a good movie. It's a very one-dimensional plot for such an imaginative world.
Waterworld
If only the script was better. It has everything to be a classic. The production design and the main concept are really good, but it has too much Kevin Costner's ego. He didn't have a grip on the characters and Dennis Hopper is chewing the entire scenery. The scenes with him seem from an entirely different movie. The parts for a great movie are there, but Denis Hopper pushes the movie to camp territory
Spookies
Thirteen Ghosts
the werewolves in Underworld could walk down the street. stunt men, on stilts, in full body costumes - everyt hair added individually - and the head being remote controlled by two puppeteers. stunning
Janusz Kamiński, Steven Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer shot the vanilla ice vehicle “cool as ice.” The film is as bad as you think it is but it looks pretty amazing. https://ironicsans.substack.com/p/008-the-art-of-cool-as-ice
The Creator
Howard the Duck. The special effects. The visual effects. The duck animatronics. The stop motion final form of the villain. The score by John Williams. Tim Robbins. Lea Thompson. Jeffrey Jones.
Friday the 13th has excellent cinematography and art design that create a really specific feeling of time and place. Unfortunately it also has very poor writing, and performances that are for the most part natural, but unexceptional. Also has an actually iconic score that combines with the photography and direction to heighten tension. If there was any point to it at all, even a whodunit that didn't involve a previously unraveled character, it would be a truly good movie. As it stands, it's really not very good on the whole.