What general film/series have you just seen.. marks out of 5

[HungFist]

There's no kawaii porn, for real?

There's no romantic rape, for real?

[Shingster]

the CGI alien is shit

It's a common misconception that the alien creature in Alien 3 was CGI, but IIRC there's only one (maybe two) CGI shot(s) in the whole film: the alien head seen cracking after being superheated then cooled at the end. The great tragedy of the Visual Effects in Alien 3 is that they used puppets for the alien creature and crafted and animated it beautifully, but at the end of the day they had to composite the creature in photochemically as they either couldn't afford to use digital composition or the technology just wasn't advanced enough at the time (forget which) and of course photochemical composition will never be an exact science and it gave pretty terrible results on Alien 3.

The worst creature effects for any Alien film was Alien Resurrection, although that's mostly down to the creature designs being horrendous for that film (at least the ones that were used anyway, but that's a long story in itself), they made the creatures far too brown and slimy and completely ignored the whole bio-mechanical aspect of the original designs - in fact Giger has said in interviews that they basically made the alien creature look like an animated dog turd. Ironically the Alien Newborn creature was one of the most advanced animatronic puppets in history, but again the visual design completely failed it!

[luckystars]

Plus didn't Fincher depart before post production?

[Shingster]

Yeah I think he left in the final days of production, although I'm not sure what he could have done with the photochemical composites because he certainly wouldn't have had the time or budget to reshoot or add any visual effects shots.

[bradavon]

Alien Resurrection baby ranks up there with the Die Another Day invisible car for a "what were they thinking?" moment. I quite like Alien Resurrection (especially the swimming scene) but the entire end is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[luckystars]

90% of Alien Resurrection is wrong wrong wrong!!

[gasteropod]

It's a common misconception that the alien creature in Alien 3 was CGI

Ah right fair do's, they failed then hah, really embarrassing since the first two films have brilliant alien effects.

[Shingster]

As I said in my previous posts the actual creature effects are genuinely good, it's just that the creature doesn't look even remotely "there" in most of the sequences because of the compositing, but they didn't have much choice with that because the whole evolution behind the concept of the creature for Alien 3 was that it moved like a fast quadrupedal animal, that was the hook, but there was no way to pull it off without compositing or limiting the shots of the creature and implying speed ala the Alien Queen in Aliens. They tested a dog in a costume and apparently that looked awful, so the options were either fullly CGI or manual puppets (as an animatronic puppet probably would have been too slow and too expensive), and from what I've heard in interviews with the Visual Effects supervisors the CGI technology didn't exist at the time to animate the creature convincingly.

I know it's become somewhat cool amongst us film-geeks to slate James Cameron post-titanic, whereas it's now geek-heresy to criticise Fincher given the standard of his output post-Alien 3, but I think it's interesting to compare their approach to their respective Alien films, Cameron took a concept that seemed impossibly ambitious for the time on the budget at hand and pulled it off on schedule and to the dollar with a largely hostile British crew because he got the visual design absolutely right and had A LOT of help from Stan Winston when it came to the visual effects. Fincher on the other hand took one concept: Prisoners being hunted in a dark, claustrophobic prison, and decided on an alien creature design that simply couldn't be realised convincingly with the resources at hand.

The big advantage Cameron had was that he wrote his own script and knew where he was going before production started, Fincher was hired and dumped in the middle of pre-built working sets ready to shoot without a working script. If the studio had just said "we've spent this much but screw it, write it all off and start from scratch because it's an Alien film and it's guaranteed to make money" then I think we would have had a much more consistent Alien 3. You need a very brave studio to make decisions like that though!

[gasteropod]

Catfish: The less you know about this docu-film, the better. I recommend it.

[grim_tales]

The poster for the film looked very much like The Social Network to me (isnt Catfish also about Facebook?)

[gasteropod]

Yeah it's about meeting people on Facebook.

[gasteropod]

Videodrome: Fantastic! I last saw this probably about a decade ago on TV so couldn't remember that much of it.

[Markgway]

I AM LEGEND **1/2

OK third version of Richard Matheson novel. Will Smith is better than I expected... but the film feels rushed in the second half with the characters of Alice Braga and the boy not making the kind of dramatic impact they should. A bit too reliant on CGI also.

[Godzooki]

True Grit 4/5

The Fighter 4/5

127hrs 5/5

These 3 in one day!! Amaze!!

[bradavon]

I AM LEGEND **1/2

The annoying thing about it, is it's not that bad but could've easily been so much better. You cannot say it was so bad you can just enjoy it as a guilty pleasure (like many do with Commando). It's just so average. I can barely remember it at all.

[Xenon]

The annoying thing about it, is it's not that bad...

I AM LEGEND **1/2

It was that bad. Too much emphasis on CG which wasn't even good. And Will Smith driving a Ferrari while hunting reindeer, how retarded was that? And comparing this with Commando should be considered blasphemy.

[Markgway]

I agree with Brad... but also Xenon.

The opening hunting scene was arse and my first thought was "I'm gonna hate this..." but once Smith got into the lab it picked up. But, yeah, too average overall.

[Markgway]

DEATH PROOF ***

Everyone loved Kill Bill... I didn't.
Everyone hated Death Proof... I didn't.

It could loose a little of the chick chatter to pick up the pace, but I enjoyed the characters, the car chases, and Kurt Russell's awesome performance.

[HungFist]

I would comment but I take it as a given no one would expect me to be included in "everyone"

[gasteropod]

Turquoise is blue-green, similar to Aqua.

Purple??

I was reading David Icke's latest book earlier, and he was on about when he became a laughing stock in Britain back when he wore a turquoise shellsuit, and he said that it was often reported as a purple one... how weird!

[Shingster]

Maybe the lizard men can only see subtle shades of blue-green as purple and hence brad is in fact the king of the lizard people and overlord of the universe!

[Godzooki]

Maybe the weasels can only see subtle shades of blue-green as purple and hence brad is in fact the king of the weasels and overlord of the vermin!

FIXED

[HungFist]

Maybe the weasels can only see subtle shades of blue-green as purple and hence brad is in fact the king of the weasels and overlord of the vermin!

FIXED

Godzooki, are you a fucking idiot or what? I already had to delete your posts in the other thread once, and I tried to tell you politely to stop that childish anti-brad campaign. You keep calling him weasel in every thread, try to insult him every chance you get, post childist anti-weasel pictures and all that shit. Some of the stuff you've been posting (and I've had to delete) you could be held criminally liable for.

Please try to act like a grown up.

[luckystars]

Maybe the weasels can only see subtle shades of blue-green as purple and hence brad is in fact the king of the weasels and overlord of the vermin!

FIXED

[bradavon]

I don't what Godzooki said and I don't really care but thanks Hung.

Maybe the lizard men can only see subtle shades of blue-green as purple and hence brad is in fact the king of the lizard people and overlord of the universe!

That's quite ironic really because naturally I am the overlord of the universe. I'm glad you've finally noticed .