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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2107 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't normally watch war or action movies, but I watched Black Hawk Down (2001) last night. And it's fantastic. Ridley Scott used to really know how to make movies. He's made several that figure somewhere on my top 50 list. Blade Runner, Gladiator, Spy Game (edit: this is by the other Scott), Kingdom of Heaven, and Black Hawk Down. In recent years he has shat the bed, reportedly , with both Napoleon and Gladiator 2 (haven't watched them myself and don't know if I will). Did he fall into some ideological trap or what happened?

Anyhow, I was both thrilled and touched by BHD. The music is fantastic (Hans Zimmer). And the cast has so many good actors. Might actually watch it again with the commentary track on.

Did he fall into some ideological trap or what happened?

He got old. He's 87. He's also still extremely prolific, especially for his age. If you look at some of his contemporaries, they do a lot less now. The younger Scorsese and Spielberg still put out a decent number but far fewer than Scott. Only Eastwood has a similarly high release rate. Scott put out 7 films in the 2010s and already has 4 films this decade. Some of these films are crap and some are good; The Martian in 2015 received a bunch of Oscar noms while the more recent pair of House of Gucci and The Last Duel both reviewed reasonably well.

When you're pumping out so many films it's inevitable some will be good and some bad. As he ages the balance tilts towards more bad films, which is much the same as Eastwood. If he was a lot pickier like Scorsese he'd probably still have mostly hits

Kingdom of Heaven only recovered acclaim with the Director's Cut. It outlined backstory about the motivations of critical characters that was otherwise nonsensical and told a better story.

I don't think such a rework is possible for Napoleon or Gladiator 2.

All Ridley Scott movies are deemed hack-work crap when they first come out. Then 10 years after that they are pretty solid overlooked diamonds in the rough. Ten or twenty years after that they are modern classics. I suspect that will happen to Napoleon and the others.

Gladiator was the second highest grossing film of 2000 and was nominated for 12 Oscars and won 5 including best picture and best actor. That's not hack worthy crap by any means.

All Ridley Scott movies are deemed hack-work crap when they first come out.

Simply incorrect.

True but with huge caveats. Sometimes it isn't really the same movie that's being reexamined; the movie is "better" because Scott released a new cut that people preferred. Kingdom of Heaven is a very notorious example, probably Blade Runner too, though I think it was vastly better received than KoH.

Movies like Exodus haven't become better received in time. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are still highly divisive (depending on where you stand Prometheus may have aged worse because of what Alien: Covenant did to its dangling plot threads).

Movies like Gladiator and American Gangster were well received at the time.

I recall Gladiator was fairly well-received when it came out. I mean it got five Oscars including for best pic.

Napoleon was crap.

Ridley Scott is 87. I imagine that he's been handing off duties on the film that he used to manage himself.

Ideology has little to do with it I think. He doesn't give a shit about accuracy in general if it contradicts what he wants to do - one of the major complaints about Napoleon afaict. Gladiator certainly wasn't historically accurate and yet was very good.

Scott imo has always been a high variance director. The problem with Gladiator 2 and some of his other stuff -compared to The Last Duel for example - is that the script is awful.

The new problem he has though is that he's old and seems to want to bang out movies while he can and so just takes the path of least resistance. A cinematographer of his was complaining about it recently iirc.

Gladiator also had a messy script but he and Crowe pulled something amazing from it. He may simply not have the stamina to do that any more.

I read that recently Scott prefers to put a ton of cameras at lots of different angles around a scene, which ostensibly lets the actors have more freedom to move around and not worry about blocking, but also gets so much coverage that he can do far fewer takes and then edit everything together in post. This makes his filmmaking super fast for the scale, but also renders a lot of his shots and scenes less interesting and well-crafted.

Might be a combination of the factors brought up by you and @Loquat

Over confident director with little time left, no one vetoing him, decaying fluid intelligence due to age, lacking in stamina as well and thus taking the path of least resistance instead of taking the time for a complicated decision making process on each point of difficulty...

I can't speak for Scott in particular, but there's a known issue where a creative type gets too successful and then starts being allowed to do whatever they want, with nobody around to tell them, "this one thing is dumb and your movie/book/etc will be better without it," and it turns out they really did produce better work when they were subject to external veto.

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