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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?
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I think tomorrow night I'm going to see It Comes at Night and then maybe stick around for a double-feature with Wonder Woman? I don't know. Maybe WW should be a different night, or I should skip out on work early one day and catch an early afternoon show.
Any other movies in the theater worth checking out right now? There's no way in hell I'm going to watch The Mummy.
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MattDP wrote: And what was the whole thing with the "team" that they took into France with them? A Scotsman and Arab and an American Indian, none of whom added anything to the film at all: I can't ever remember their character's names. There was some odd thing with the sharpshooter not being able to shoot that looked like it was going to become a sub-plot and then didn't. Their entire roles could have been cut and it would have improved the film for being marginally shorter.
Yeah, that bit was clumsy at best. Awkward even. With all the positive press I didn't expect the writing to be so sub-par either. Thewlis as Ares was weak and the revelation was too plain. And this and that. But it was an amusing 3 star affair, regardless.
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Gregarius wrote: Any other movies in the theater worth checking out right now? There's no way in hell I'm going to watch The Mummy.
Eh, The Mummy isn't bad, really. It's getting a weird backlash because it's not super amazingly awesome (it's definitely not), but Tom Cruise is great as usual. Better in some ways, because he's playing a bit against type, and I like that. There's some excellent action, and more humor than I expected. Go in without expectations and it's decent. Or better yet, catch it on Redbox. Probably a similar thing to Mumu's description of The Great Wall. It's easy to bash, but it's far from terrible. (I haven't seen Great Wall, but I've mostly heard it's terrible from critics, and not half-bad from everyone else.)
But yes, It Comes at Night is quite excellent.
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There's also a Mummy in Monster Squad.
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jeb wrote: BUBBA HO-TEP is good. That's a mummy movie.
Ashamed I forgot that one. I've watched it with Bruce himself, even.
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Josh Look wrote:
jeb wrote: BUBBA HO-TEP is good. That's a mummy movie.
Ashamed I forgot that one. I've watched it with Bruce himself, even.
I forgot about it, too. I think that I was more horrified by the prospect of the normal problems that come with advanced age than by the supernatural elements in that movie.
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DO NOT TURN IT INTO A GIGANTIC, MULTIMILLION DOLLAR ACTION MOVIE INTENDED TO JUMPSTART A SHARED UNIVERSE FRANCHISE.
What a fucking tone-deaf mistake. Did the suits not bother to watch Dracula Untold first?
The Mummy, as a horror movie concern, ONLY works on a small scale. I am not including the Brendan Fraser picture because it is a B adventure movie, not a horror movie. It does not work with the Mummy attacking cities and firing off biblical plagues. It works when you follow a very simple narrative course:
- British people, in their colonial avarice, disturb an Egyptian mortuary
- These people are smug and are assumed to be learned scions of Western civilization
- They go back to England to celebrate their Englishness
- The Mummy turns up to get revenge on them for being graverobbing, smug, colonial Englishmen
That's pretty much the entire Mummy story, with some variations possible based on setting and period. Terence Fisher's Mummy film (the one Josh mentioned) follows exactly this protocol. It's a simple movie that has Fisher's very traditional approach to horror and morality. The supernatural is a gross inconvenience to right-thinking, right-minded people.
There is also a problem that the Mummy doesn't tend to have any kind of powers or advantages. He lumbers around and strangles folks. If he gets too close to an open flame...anyway, it's kind of like a zombie movie with ONE zombie, which isn't very scary on paper. So what you need to do is to create the suspense that the Mummy is SOMEWHERE, watching and waiting patiently for his moment to choke a fool. This works really well in a 19th century setting and in a gigantic mansion. Not great in a 21st century one where the Mummy is supposed to be an apocalypse level threat.
I haven't seen the new movie but I new it was a disasterpiece from the first trailer. My thoughts were "wow, this is a movie virtually no one will want to see".
Nobody wants to make low key, refined monster movies where the big impact is seeing an actor in makeup. Those Universal movies, the Hammer stuff...they are just so far out of step culturally that I don't even think a decent writer could really make a modern update. Even Dracula, at a subtextual level, does not make sense in today's culture. You have to go period to capture those Victorian concerns about sexual morality, bodily disintegration, contamination, and the feral self. MAYBE Del Toro could do something, because he knows the material and what makes it work. Crimson Peak had a host of issues, but it was a very traditional gothic story that valued atmosphere and suspense over Nicholas Cage hollering "HOLD ON TO SOMETHING while running away from fireballs thrown by a Mummy played by Jason Statham.
I wish I had the tapes we made of it back in the 1990s, but at one point we were going to make a short film for a festival that was going to be the classic Universal monsters as a crime family. I had this hilarious footage of this actor in a cheaply made mummy outfit totally doing the gangster thing. Started writing it, then a bunch of personal shit hit and never picked it back up.
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