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I have the ROTK:EE in my hands now but wont be able to watch before saturday night. I cant wait to see this given the quality of the previous two EE's.
1.) Gremlins 2
2.) The Goonies 3.) Gremlins 4.) Big Trouble in Little China 5.) Hmmm probably had something else to put here, but forgot what it was. saw this at a friends last night and didnt even make it the whole way through. Way too many effects and someone was on acid while shooting the action scenes. The strobe lighting and relentless chopping made it hard to tell what the fuck was going on.
Production design stuff was pretyy good though, even though it was ripped straight from Dune or Coriolis Storm. 1 - Raiders of the Lost Ark
2 - Empire Strikes Back 3 - Raging Bull 4 - Die Hard 5 - Aliens 6 - Blade Runner 7 - Back to The Future 8 - Das Boot 9 - Scarface 10 - Ran I would substitute Fast Times for Back to the Future, Terminator for Aliens, and Empire of the Sun for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And no Porkies, Police Academy, Revenge of the Nerds or movies with Ron Jeremy in them? How representative of the 80's could it really be? Raiders of the Lost ark cant be substituted in my books :)
There were others that could have snuck on to that list too : Platoon, IJ & the Last Crusade, The King of Comedy, This is Spinal Tap, and Blue Velvet. It would be impossible to take it off the list, but I have always considered EOS his most underrated film (but then I am a JG Ballard fan too).
I notice we haven't even touched on the great schlock horror flicks of that time; Amityville, NightMare on Elm Street, etc. PS. when I was a kid, I got to mess around the Blue Velvet set because it was being made locally. The ear prop was really cool to touch. dennis hopper what he was on when he was performing as frank booth? That has to be one of the evilest performances ever.
he gave. He nailed that character dead on with that jive talk that was sort of Jazzy and Honky Tonk at the same time.
The #5 slot on my list was Short Circuit 1 or 2, either one. BTW, it's based on simple zaniness, not actual quality. Just good simple mindless fun!
just finished watching this and although it has some nice bits, it didnt really work for me. In the Mood For Love was a much superior film.
The heavy stylish touches on display here severely distract from the actual film and on the whole this actually seems like a lot of random footage was shot and then spliced together to make a movie. Top 5 Best of the 80s
1. Shinning 2. Full Metal Jacket 3. Salvador 4. Elephant Man 5. Rainman Top 5 'Fun' 80s movies 1. Ferris Bueller's Day Off 2. Big 3. Say Anything (how can you make lists without giving props to someone who wrote for the magazine that is most famous for writing useless lists) 4. Revenge of the Nerds 5. Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade (my favorite of them all) just saw this 1996 french film with Vincent Cassel and the extremely hot Monica Bellucci, I think there's a recent american remake called Wicker Park. Anyway, it's an outstanding film with a clever plot and effortless direction. And I wonder if the remake will keep the same ending given the Hollywood Way of upbeat conclusions.
First a disclaimer - I am a massive fan of the LotR theatrical versions. Easily my favourite films of all time, and they will most likely remain that way.
Also, I can seperate my enjoyment of the films completely from that of the books (which I have read once, when very young, so my memory of them isn't that great). Thus, I judge these films on their own merits, and not on how accurately they duplicate the text of the book. ======== MASSIVE SPOILERS ========= That said, I was a bit dissapointed with the EE cut of RotK. I felt that the new additions were a real mixed bag; most of them I'd rate as mediocre, with a couple of outstanding moments, and a couple of downright bloody awful moments. First of all, the downright bloody awful: Gimli's antics during the drinking game, and the similar stupid crap he did at the beginning of the extended Paths of the Dead sequence. The PotD additions were uniformly shite in fact - the avalanche of skulls was just bizarre and the arrival of the Corsairs was equally rubbish. It also killed the surprise of the Dead Army revealing themselves later at the Pelennor. Another scene I hated was when Denethor was giving Faramir a bollocking for letting Frodo go, and then we get a stupidly cheesy bit where he looks over Faramir's shoulder and sees a ghostly vision of Boromir. I felt that John Noble's acting in this scene was a bit shoddy as well; perhaps they only did a couple of takes of this one. Another bit I hated was the alternate take of the Gandalf-Merry "Deep breath before the plunge" scene. WTF was up with Gandalf's coughing fit? I mean WTF!? The outstanding bits: The one single great moment that stuck out in my mind was at the aftermath of the Pelennor battle, when Eomer finds his sister's seemingly lifeless body. Karl Urban's performance here along with the cinematography amounted to one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the film. Combine this with the following sequence in the Houses of Healing, and then the subsequent re-edited scene where Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield (this time at night!) and you have a moment which really, really had no right to be cut from the theatrical version. (I guess you could argue that to make the Eomer-Eowyn scene work you had to show the HoH bit as well, so that the audience knows she's not actually dead after all, and that this would slow the film down too much at this point. It's worth it though, IMO). The mediocre: Well, as for the rest of it, I can pretty much take it or leave it. Saruman's scene was a pretty good scene in it's own right, but I don't think the theatrical version suffered from it's absence. If anything, Saruman's fate should have been dealt with at the end of TTT, but I'm not sure how exactly. Or maybe the Smeagol-Deagol prologue should have been left out entirely from the theatrical version (it was originally intended to slot into the TTT Dead Marshes scene) - this would have freed up some time for the inclusion of the Saruman scene in the TE. Similarly, the Gandalf-Witch King confrontation was a cool scene, but it felt a little tacked on. Gothmog's death was pretty cool, and gave closure to a major bad guy, and although the build up to it was a little comical, with him groaning and lurching towards Eowyn, I'd probably have liked to have seen it in the TE. Aragorn confronting Sauron in the Palantir before the march on the Black Gates felt a little off IMO, and I'm glad it was cut. I could go on really, giving a breakdown of all the new bits, and how I felt about them, but, meh. The odd new battle shot here and there was cool, especially the smaller battering rams stuff before Grond. The extended Grond bit felt a bit silly though. Just for the record, I feel similarly towards the EEs for the other two films. I can quite happily take them or leave them; the theatrical editions will always be the definitive version of LotR for me.
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