If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.
Not true for the other roles.
Not true for the other roles.
What struck me most was how the action scenes, editing, costuming, sets, casting, and acting all seemed—to my nonexpert eye—to have been carefully and professionally done, while the storytelling was horrible: implausible, unnatural, and full of obvious holes. The story didn’t need to be great literature, but it should not have been hard to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense.
I don't know whether to blame the writers, the director, or the commercial motivation for making the film. This particular movie was obviously intended to lead to spinoffs in video games and other forms of merchandising, and that may have influenced the editing in a way that garbled the story.
I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.
no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable.
There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable.
Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.
Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?
I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.
Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.
It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...
There's a surface similarity but the tone is completely different. To me, the film is pretty obviously a largely satirical retelling of the book's story.
Neil Patrick Harris!
This is quite likely the intent. The same style that makes Robocop to be understood as a classic action movie even if the intention was to subvert.
The same director made Robocop which had similar satire and themes.
I think for a lot of people Star Wars is a 1 in a 100 - if so, to quote Harrison Ford: "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!"
on edit: I had missed that he was looking for a 1 in a 100 movie originally so I went back and reread, he says "Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience." so it is not that he is looking for an objective 1 in 100 movie, but rather the 1 in a 100 he likes, thus Con Air and The Rock could stand for someone as those 1 in a 100 - for example I like both those movies but I hate everything else Michael Bay has ever done (don't know who directed Con Air - hmm Simon West quick google, yeah looks like I hate all those too)
I can't remember the name of the show, but I read about it in a reputable newspaper, so I hope I'm not spreading an urban legend.
Now I finally understand why they are always raving about those crappy old westerns on a German image board I often visit.
LOL, by some reason this phrase causes search engines to reduce ad hitlerum
If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.
For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.
But we're talking about basic competency now, not what makes a movie the very best it can be.
> If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.
I wonder if you had Paul Greengrass movies in mind
I never thought I'd see someone praise the writing of The Room. The acting is bad, but the dialogue is so completely inhuman that I can't imagine anyone doing it well.
Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible