SNOWPIERCER, a (mostly) English-language film by Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother) starring Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-ho and some other people

Thinking about my complaints, I suspect part of it is my expectations were raised by all the recut foofaw so that I had some idea this was going to be a Blade Runner-style masterpiece mangled by a scared, money-centric studio, when in fact it was just an above-average SF action movie

yup

Still an interesting premise all that said!

lol you guys know studios demand recuts of about everything, let alone foreign films. sometimes the recuts are... better

lol why would you assume we don't know that

wow -- Tilda Swinton is fitfully entertaining w/out being much good, is she?

if you're constantly worried about everything having to be "tasteful", yeah

who sez I am? I love Bong's movies.

Oh I really want to see this.

Coming from the director of Memories Of Murder, The Host and Mother - how the fuck can anybody not be disappointed with this half arsed, bodge-job of a movie?

I like all four of them, sorry fella

xp i am also haunted by that question. I think in comparison to most any other big budget scifi dystopia fantasy that's come out this year, this is good enough. compared to anything bong's done, it's utterly disposable.

It disappointed me -- his worst film. Chris Evans is a large part of the problem.

I liked it enough, but thought the pacing and over long fight scenes were not great.

any ideas how i can see this in the UK?

its leaked fwiw

i think i just glanced at a torrent that said Korean DVD

subbed?

its in english and yeah it leaked a few months ago iirc

Weinstein will also be releasing "Snowpiercer" in several hundred theaters in the UK, which has less sophisticated VOD apparatus

“Snowpiercer wouldn’t, really, be worth writing about at all, except that a number of prominent critics… seem inexplicably convinced of its virtues.”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/babies-taste-best#

I enjoyed this well enough. A few big plotholes and inexplicable moments (what was the Andrew kid doing at the end? Why would gilliam be in cahoots with Wilford?) And the jumps in tone were indeed jarring too but it was watchable and I never got bored. Thought the soundtrack was especially good too.

Just saw this and thought it was great. Euro as FUCK, tho, with the premise being a post-apoc class system based on a train.

Didn't realize until an IMBD lookup that the Korean father/daughter team was the same pair as the The Host.

Disappointed that the Weinstein Bros didn't open the film wider; this is destined to be the other scifi flick of 2014 tht you have to evangelize to all your friends to see.

what's the first?

Edge of Tomorrow

^^^yeah saw that last night and was really srsly surprised/impressed

I still need to, thanks for the reminder

i went into it knowing that it starred cruise and had a groundhog's day premise and that was about it

Watched the first half of this last night before falling asleep. Do I need to watch the second half?

If you didn't get to the classroom scene, yes. Highlight of the film, feel free to give up if it leaves or left you unmoved.

Thanks! Clicked it on and it was iced up exactly at that scene and you are right.

Lol autocorrect. "Cued up."

All right, reading this thread beforehand helped me make it through the rest of this movie. Some good stuff here and there but not quite enough to make up for its flaws as noted by many above. Definitely would check out director's other work though.

Is it naive to think the thing would have been better if it wasn't in English?

So was Ed Harris reprising his role in The Truman Show, this time in bathrobe instead of beret?

So liked all the exteriors and agree that the classroom scene was the best and that the front of the train was better than the back. As a whole this film was unsatisfying, just couldn't suspend disbelief or stop mentally comparing it to things that covered somewhat similar territory much better such as Dark City or Inverted World. The tone ran the A-B gamut from heavy-handed to uneven.

And yeah, Cap'n Save-a-Train was a cipher.

I noticed, albeit from sketchy details on his imdb entry that Joon-ho's next project could possibly be a Gwoemul sequel. I hope that doesn't mean a bland re-make because it is one of the greatest multi-genre Comedy|Drama|Horror pics of all time and shouldn't be fucked with.

continuing the murder of cinema

So why dump such a promising movie onto VOD? Because it made economic sense. When you see a production budget for a film, roughly $40 million in this case, you need to almost double that to account for prints and advertising — the cost of rolling the film on in thousands of theaters.

By releasing the film on VOD, Radius and TWC avoided almost all of those costs. Advertising consisted of partnerships like Chris Evans welcoming San Diego hotel guests during Comic Con on the hotel VOD systems and suggesting they rent his new movie, Snowpiercer.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2014/09/08/what-the-economics-of-snowpiercer-say-about-the-future-of-film/

"When you see a production budget for a film, roughly $40 million in this case, you need to almost double that to account for prints and advertising"

Well it's already made 80+ million dollars in 'foreign' markets.

idk if cinema as much as movie theater attendance is the victim here

yeah, if you watch at home, it's not cinema. (seeing Flowers of Shanghai and Wings on big screens this weekend reinforced this)

bringing up the budget is kinda dubious when weinstein wasn't on the hook for it, and they don't even acknowledge that part of Weinstein's lack of enthusiasm was his inability to get cuts.

what about really big home screens tho?

I have a couple friends with home digital projects and nice sound, and the experience is better than a number of independent cinemas I've been to. In larger cities where home space is at a premium that doesn't happen, but it's viable for a surprising number of people elsehwere.

projectors, that is, not projects

when i saw The Trip at the IFC Center it basically felt like I was in someone's shitty private screening room for sure

nice to know this movie didn't bomb financially
lol, otm on many small theaters being as shitty or shitter than a friend's home theater setup

The Trip is a UK TV sitcom reassembled for foreign theatrical exploitation tho!

i assume they show other movies on that screen