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I get why some people might like the movies I don't, like Elysium. I'm not saying they are movies that everyone must hate. But I'm also not going to pretend that many of these films aren't flawed to the point of distraction for me.
It's not like I'm demanding originality; everything's pretty much been done before but you have to elevate that shit. You can't take every beat from Die Hard and then come away with a shittier movie ala White House Down. My boredom at Oblivion isn't abated by the fact that it reminds me of scenes from better movies.
And I'm sorry but story and plot and characters and dialogue matter to me and I just can't watch a film like The Dark Knight Rises and ignore the fact that none of the shit makes a lick of sense.
When it comes to action films, I always say start with Predator. That movie is basic as shit. The plot is "Get to tha Choppa!". The villain's motivation is that he's a hunter and humans are game. Simple. Clean. And a good fucking movie. Die Hard is essentially a game of keep away.
If you want to add to that, you better make sure that you work it in and most things make sense. My friend liked Elysium and was talking about the political stuff and whenever I pointed out how it was simplistic to the point of undercutting any message, he said, "Well, yeah, but it's a dumb sci-fi film." To me, that's a failure.
Elysium and World War Z and even Man of Steel bring up "smart" concepts and then do nothing with them in the story. I just am not impressed by nods to something more that really just end up slowing down the movie and leading to things being underdeveloped (and to be fair to Elysium, it's more underdeveloped than dumb.)
Even if I had gone into Elysium knowing that it was a sci-fi b-movie, the characters and storyline were still too weak for it to be much fun. It looks great and some people blow up all sorts of funny but, beyond that there wasn't much.
Honestly, if they had cut Elysium out of the movie and just focused entirely on Sharlto Copley using futuristic weapons to hunt Matt Damon around dystopian Los Angeles and it would have been a much better film. It wouldn't have strived to be more than it is but, then again, it wouldn't have failed at being more than it is either.
Instead we got a film that seemed like someone came up with a cool idea, wrote up an outline, and then forgot to flesh it out into an actual film.
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As for movies I liked:
Of this decade so far, my top movies are: Margin Call, Kick-Ass The Social Network, Exit Through the Gift Shop, 127 Hours, Crazy Stupid Love, Animal Kingdom, Black Swan, Blue Valentine, and Perks of Being a Wallflower.
This year I liked Furious 6, This is The End, Side Effects, Mud, We Steal Secrets, Iron Man 3, It's a Disaster, and Now You See Me.
Last year (a year in which I missed a lot of films) was: Perks of Being a Wallflower, Argo, Looper, The Avengers, The Cabin in the Woods, Chronicle, The Raid, 21 Jump Street, Ted, and Headhunters.
Oh, and finally, this is a message board. I think discussing films' flaws and looking at how they could have been fixed is far more interesting than, "Hell, yeah. That shit was awesome. And fuck you for being thrown off by the parts that sucked because that one dude totally blew up into a million pieces and that was rad!" I mean, even when people pick apart movies I like, I can often admit the film had flaws. Nothing's perfect. It's all subjective. ----
NBA MOCK DRAFT #1 - https://thecourierclass.com/whole-shebang/2017/5/18/2017-nba-mock-draft-1-just-lotto-and-lotta-trades
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