General Film Discussion

This is the place to discuss all things film - films you have seen, films you want to see, films you don't want to see, new film goings ons, etc.

 

Anyone excited about the new Star Trek film?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAEkuVgt6Aw[/youtube]

 

I actually couldn't stand any star trek movies up until now. I like the new movies, they just have more epicness. I am also looking forward to Iron Man 3

 

My Dad loves Star Trek and would always try to make me watch the movies when they were on TV. I never liked it but I do like the new film series.

I wouldn't mind seeing Iron Man 3 but I am more excited about Man of Steel.

 

It was the TNG ones, he liked the old series but not as much as the newer ones (especially the ones with Picard).

 

Interesting new Marvel film in production from Disney called "Big Hero 6".

Disney Unveils Big Hero 6 Footage
Marvel meets anime

09 May 2013 | Written by James White | Source: Disney/LA Times


Though visions of Pixar tackling a Marvel superhero danced in our heads when Disney bought the comics company, the first collaboration between the Mouse House and the mutant gaff will actually be the Manga-style Big Hero 6, as announced last July. Now the first, brief-but-gorgeous footage from the movie is online.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSV3laJplpU[/youtube]

With Winnie The Pooh director (and avowed comic book fan) Don Hall aboard, the film will adapt the Big Hero 6 stories created for Marvel by Steven T. Seagle and Duncan Rouleau.

Our protagonist in this case is brilliant robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who finds himself in the grip of a criminal plot that threatens to destroy the fast-paced, high-tech city of San Fransokyo. With the help of his closest companion – a robot named Baymax – Hiro joins forces with a reluctant team of first-time crime fighters on a mission to save their city.

Hall and his team have been hard at work on this one, which is set to hit US cinemas on November 7, 2014 and then our own screens at some point after that. The results can be seen in the nifty snippet above and some gorgeous concept art, which you can view below.


“The storytelling aspects are very frenetic, very visceral," Joe Quesada, Marvel's chief creative officer, tells the LA Times. "It takes tropes of Japanese culture, manga, anime. There are giant dinosaurs that invade a city, big robots, youth fashion, cutesy stuff in the vein of Hello Kitty." Suffice to say, we can’t wait for this one.
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=37439

 

@crazy-potato totally

 

I wanna see this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwYatpwrs8s[/youtube]

 

There's a lot of stuff released this and last month that I want to see.

After Earth
Epic
The Hangover Part 3
The Purge
Iron Man 3
Oblivion
World War Z
This is The End
Evergreen
Redemption
Pacific Rim
Turbo

 

This article is a rather interesting read, what do you guys think about this issue?

Chinese Propaganda Is Hitting Hollywood

Posted on Tuesday June 4, 2013, 11:03 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States



It is, by now, a truism that China is hugely important for Hollywood blockbusters. It’s currently the second-biggest single film market in the world; by the end of the decade it’s expected to be number one. The Chinese authorities only permit 34 foreign (mostly American) films to hit their screens each year – but those 34 get access to the country’s 1.344 billion people and take about 60 percent of a box-office worth £1.7bn last year. If you include sufficient Chinese elements in your film to be considered a “co-production”, you can take home 43 percent of the gross instead of the otherwise-typical 25 percent. In these straitened times, it’s no wonder that studios are shooting China-specific scenes and sub-plots (Iron Man 3’s Dr Wu had much more screentime in the Chinese cut), or that filmmakers are looking to include Chinese elements in their stories (Joss Whedon told EW in reference to Avengers 2 that, “China is on my radar. It can't not be at this point.”)

Arguably, there’s a nice rebalancing here: Hollywood looking beyond the West and becoming more inclusive around the globe. China’s first in line, sure, but behind it comes the rest of the world; the days when US domestic box-office generally outweighed everyone else combined are long gone. And it looks like we've moved beyond treating China as a Red Menace and towards treating China as a global power worthy of being more than a source of blockbuster villains.

The problem is that China has an authoritarian government with an enthusiasm for censorship and propaganda – and Hollywood’s beginning to adopt their attitude with a little too much enthusiasm. As a rather chilling example, there’s a very odd moment in this summer’s World War Z. An almost-overheard remark suggests that Patient Zero in the zombie epidemic originates in Taiwan. Now this wouldn’t be a big deal except that, in the book from which the film takes its inspiration, Patient Zero is Chinese: a boy is bitten by something underwater in the lake behind the Three Gorges dam and becomes the first of the horde. So not only have filmmakers Paramount shied away from the book’s origin story - for what could, perhaps, be good reasons even apart from wooing Chinese audiences - but they have actively relocated that origin to a historic enemy of the Chinese regime.

There’s something quite breathtaking about that. Sure, the film is about as unfaithful to the book as it’s possible to be, so this is hardly its only departure from source, and sure, the film leaves open the origin of a foreign soldier who arrives at a US military base in South Korea and begins the infection there (he could be Chinese, so maybe there's a little subversion there). But that line goes beyond removing any possibly-offensive mention of China and actively relocates that possible-offense to someone against whom China has a beef. This seems a different and a worse affair to other examples of China-wooing self-censorship. The decision to change Red Dawn's baddies from Chinese to North Korean made the resulting film ridiculous, but at least one didn't get the impression that that was an intentional dig at China's obstreperous neighbour on behalf of the superpower.

You may think that this is all unimportant given that there is no such thing as zombies, but if Taiwan shouldn’t be offended then neither should China. And yet the superpower takes these things very seriously: author Max Brooks recently told us about the changes he was asked to make in order for his source novel to be published in China. "I can tell you that I turned down two Chinese publishing deals because they wanted to censor the book. The first time they said, 'Let's change the name of China to some fictional country'. And it was a very Chinese Communist argument, a sort of, 'Look, everyone knows it's going to be China; you're not hiding anything. All we want you to do is just change the name'. And I said, 'No, China's China, I'm sorry.' Then the second time they said to me, 'You can keep the China name, but we want to take those chapters out of the book and put them online.' I said, 'No, I'm sorry. I know there's a billion of you and if you all gave me a dollar that would be awesome, but China's China and I have to be true to my book."

You might shrug and say that these changes are the cost of doing show-business, but there’s a very big difference between adding some Chinese characters and scenes to a Chinese version of a movie in order to get a tax break, and changing your dialogue to fit the Politburo’s view of the world. If it were only about avoiding offence, the filmmakers could have omitted any mention of Patient Zero and the chances are that no one would have noticed, given that they omitted 90 percent of the rest of the book as well. But here, they’ve actively – and presumably intentionally – shifted the focus somewhere else. It’s an almost surreal inversion of the book’s satire. If Paramount simply wanted to get China onside, they could have found some time and space for the book's heroic Chinese characters like Dr Kwang Jingshu or Captain Chen. We’d expect the latter – a submarine captain who supplies power to an atoll full of refugees before helping to reclaim China from the zombies – to crop up in any sequels. By this rate of Hollywood kowtow, any mention of his role in ending civil crisis or prompting regime change will be abandoned on the pages of the book – and the film will be poorer for it.

By all means, let’s avoid demonising other countries and let’s be fair to China and her people. There may well be cases where looking at things from a different political viewpoint could be positively beneficial: slightly more of an eyebrow-raise at the rampant US militarism of some blockbusters would be no bad thing. But Hollywood can and should draw the line before adopting active Chinese government propaganda as its own, even in fantasy and zombie films. Nobody wants it to turn out that there actuallywere reds under the bed all along.
http://www.empireonline.com/empireblogs/empire-states/post/p1358

 

Well the chinese have their fingers in everything now. They have invested the world over. Hollywood has been dominated by Jewish ownership but it's obviously changing because China is fast becoming the strongest economy. I don't like their censorship at all but just like the Chinese censor things the American military only give the use of facilities and the like to Hollywood if they portray the American military in a good way in movies and that's been going on for a long time so now it's just moved over to what the Chinese want as well.

I hate censorship but as long as a movie entertains me I don't much care. If they censor too much they will fast lose their money because people won't buy their shit so we don't have much to worry about I think.

 

I went and saw "Man of Steel" last week and enjoyed quite a bit. I liked the serious tone and enjoyed the more Sci-fi elements that were put in.