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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/15/2009 : 00:14:48
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2012
It's ironic that I exited the cinema and smacked headlong into a small gust of the hurricane-force winds sweeping the UK today. Stepping from a Roland Emmerich apocalyptic disaster into a real-life blowy cause for concern put the previous 2� hours into some perspective.
Emmerich's like some manic Jewish mom, determined to feed us spoonful after spoonful of what he believes are nourishing scenes of devastation, a moral kreplach in every mouthful.
You can imagine without my rehearsing it for you all the lead-ups to nature's carnage, the attempt at cliched human stories to give pause for breath between literal waves of destruction.
And I don't really care how good or bad the cgi is, how good or bad the acting is from a fundamentally talented cast, or how good or bad the script and dialog is. I don't care because none of that is why you go to films like this.
You go for the rush of seeing the power of tsunami waves rolling all over the threatened planet. Rolling a battleship called the John Kennedy inland until it comes to rest on the roof of the White House. Rolling and rising and rolling over the tallest mountain range in the world.
You go to see how the hell us human beans are gonna get out of this one. Like how the hell is Hoppy or Roy Rogers or The Lone Ranger gonna save them folks from the stampede, the runaway train, the tornado.
And, if you think you go for any other reason, you're just lying to yourself, dude.
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Sean 
"Necrosphenisciform anthropophagist."
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Posted - 11/15/2009 : 01:04:36
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| I was bored about 2 minutes into the trailer for this one. Not sure I'll be able to handle 2.5 hours... |
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 11/15/2009 : 06:40:06
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftenBabe
2012
It's ironic that I exited the cinema and smacked headlong into a small gust of the hurricane-force winds sweeping the UK today. Stepping from a Roland Emmerich apocalyptic disaster into a real-life blowy cause for concern put the previous 2� hours into some perspective.
Emmerich's like some manic Jewish mom, determined to feed us spoonful after spoonful of what he believes are nourishing scenes of devastation, a moral kreplach in every mouthful.
You can imagine without my rehearsing it for you all the lead-ups to nature's carnage, the attempt at cliched human stories to give pause for breath between literal waves of destruction.
And I don't really care how good or bad the cgi is, how good or bad the acting is from a fundamentally talented cast, or how good or bad the script and dialog is. I don't care because none of that is why you go to films like this.
You go for the rush of seeing the power of tsunami waves rolling all over the threatened planet. Rolling a battleship called the John Kennedy inland until it comes to rest on the roof of the White House. Rolling and rising and rolling over the tallest mountain range in the world.
You go to see how the hell us human beans are gonna get out of this one. Like how the hell is Hoppy or Roy Rogers or The Lone Ranger gonna save them folks from the stampede, the runaway train, the tornado.
And, if you think you go for any other reason, you're just lying to yourself, dude.
Well, there is another reason. To preview what could be a really cool new ride at Disney Land! |
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silly 
"That rabbit's DYNAMITE."
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Posted - 11/16/2009 : 01:44:38
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My son and I just watched this.
As Joe Bob used to say, there isn't a whole lot of plot to get in the way of the story. And the story here, of course, is that the earth is fragile and can be broken by Mayan prophecy. Unless that's not really it.
The eye-rolling "no way" moments come fast and furious for a while, but of course, that's part of the fun. It is just like one big amusement park ride. At some point you think "Dang, can we get off already?" but no, you stick it out till the end, for some reason.
My son ran in the house and told the entire story in about five minutes to my wife; she said that was enough, now she doesn't have to sit through it.
Funny, lots of movies like that nowadays  |
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Sean
"Necrosphenisciform anthropophagist."
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Posted - 12/06/2009 : 02:01:14
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It's a rainy Sunday so I'm reading stuff. Including this 2012 review here that I liked, it sums up why I've virtually given up on large-budget action-fests. If it's too long, then cut to the final three paragraphs, in fact I'll paste them here:-
Even by the popsicle-stick standards of its genre, 2012 is an expensive (though lucrative) failure. Confronted with the task of creating a single believable or sympathetic human being or relationship, Emmerich and his co-writer Harald Kloser are as powerless as their doomed masses. The human story beneath the noise in 2012 is a numbing pastiche of clich�s tantalizingly close to a Zuckerman Brothers-style spoof. Towards the end, I remember thinking that the only trope yet to be trotted out was the slow-clap. The moment nearly came after Ejiofor�s expository speech on the need to save the billionaires at the gate. The filmmakers spent vast sums of money fine-tuning scenes of mega-destruction, but for story-mortar relied on weak echoes of dialogue from Kramer Vs. Kramer, The Dukes of Hazard, Daybreak, and Free Willy.
The most absurd example of this comes in the film�s final minutes. Moments after the entire Indian subcontinent is violently subsumed by water, Emmerich expects us to bunch our fists over the fate of a yappy purse dog. But we don�t. Even the best-trained American audience has by then long transferred its allegiance to the side of apocalypse. It is simply not possible to make it into the second hour of this film and not root for the cosmic clusterfuck to hurry up and finish its business with every last member of the species responsible for Roland Emmerich. Nothing makes a catastrophic polar shift seem overdue like a stylized product placement for Bentley Motors, set against the death of a billion Chinese.
John Cusack deserves his reputation as a likable actor. Back in 1985, you wanted him to get the girl more than most teen actors. But 2012 is so dumb you only want to cheer, Die Cusack, Die! Ditto Amanda Peet. And their children. You don�t want this family to reunite, to make good on broken promises, or to carry the American flame forward into the reset future. You don�t want them to do any of that. You just want them to do what they�re supposed to do at the end of the world, and that is experience a brief moment of bone-chilled terror, then die like everyone else.
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Edited by - Sean on 12/07/2009 09:51:14 |
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silly
"That rabbit's DYNAMITE."
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Posted - 12/07/2009 : 03:37:07
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quote:
Originally posted by Se�n
Even the best-trained American audience has by then long transferred its allegiance to the side of apocalypse.
Brilliant. |
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MisterBadIdea 
"PLZ GET MILK, KTHXBYE"
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Posted - 12/07/2009 : 15:47:25
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"Moments after the entire Indian subcontinent is violently subsumed by water, Emmerich expects us to bunch our fists over the fate of a yappy purse dog."
This was the worst scene in the movie, which was, yeah, pretty bad. I also like that the two leaders of the rescue plan, the heartless cutthroat political advisor and the bleeding-heart science advisor, were always butting heads over how much they were supposed to care for the people they couldn't save, and that the science advisor was supposed to be the one who was right, yet was ALWAYS ALWAYS WRONG. I started calling him Dr. Fuckup, and his opponent the political adviser Savior of Humanity. |
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Beanmimo 
"August review site"
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Posted - 04/26/2010 : 00:42:33
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I should have read this thread and not listened to my roommate.
I watched and enjoyed the earth rendering scenes, laughed at the cheesy touches and made tea and food when they tried to tackle the micrscopic plot with tweezers made of thinly sliced character. |
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randall
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 04/26/2010 : 02:47:23
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| On its own terms, it works OK. It never advertised itself as anything serious. It's an Irwin Allen spectacle, nothing more, but things do get blowed up real good. Once again, as in WATCHMEN, if you're looking for scientific verisimilitude, you're in the wrong auditorium and it's nobody's fault but yours because you've been duly warned in every medium possible. |
Edited by - randall on 04/26/2010 02:52:21 |
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Chris C
"Four words, never backwards."
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Posted - 01/02/2011 : 22:28:42
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Finally, we sat and watched this.
What a load of shite.
After about 60 minutes we were on the side of the apocalypse. Woody Harrelson was far and away the best thing in this pile of tripe.
'Nuff said. |
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randall
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 01/02/2011 : 22:39:33
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| Wow...first person ever who hated the movie but liked Woody Harrelson in it! Cheers! |
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Chris C
"Four words, never backwards."
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Posted - 01/02/2011 : 23:22:03
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| Yup. As somebody said before, this was almost a spoof, and Woody seems to have been the only member of the cast to treat it as such. |
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 01/03/2011 : 13:44:00
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| By the way, even the theme song sucked! |
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2012 - only the spoilers that are in the trailer
