Uwe Boll...in a more positive light

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http://loadingreadyrun.com/videos/view/330/An-Interview-with-Uwe-Boll

After watching this, I may have just gained a modicum of respect for Dr. Uwe Boll. Now, don’t get me wrong, his movies are still unimaginably horrible and you’re doing yourself a favor by not watching them, but some of the key points he made I can actually agree with.

1- Michael Bay and Eli Roth are retarded not because Uwe Boll was just being an egotistical douche but because they chose to follow mainstream media demands and keep creating the same shitty movies over and over again. Now, I like Eli Roth especially as Donny Donowitz in Inglourious basterds, but it is fairly true that his movies are fairly similar in style. As for Michael Bay, Bad Boys was alright, The Island was alright, everything else he made just pissed me off. Pearl Harbor and Armageddon basically tie for being the two shittiest movies he’s ever made, and they’re among his first.

2- It is not fair to compare low budget, outward thinking movies like his to the mega-hollywood budget box office smashes like lord of the rings or chronicles of Narnia. While this doesn’t change my view of his movies, they are legitimately awful, the statement is indeed true. I personally don’t like it when movies are compared to other movies of -any- kind, regardless of budgets and expenses. Unless it’s a remake (i.e. comparing Peter Jackson’s Lord of the rings to Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the rings), I will not judge a movie based on other movies.

3- He does blatantly admit that while he is trying to be innovative, thinking outside the box when creating these movies, they don’t always work and can indeed come out fairly awful. However, he also says he’s not doing this for the money or the glory, he’s doing it to push the boundaries on what is acceptable in mainstream media. Whether that means we’re talking about brutal violence or something more subtle like video games turned into movies, this is something I can respect. To try something new and fail is better than to settle with the status quo.

4- Graham, the interviewer, points out something that I feel like adding to this list. Video games turned into movies and movies turned into video games get bad reception, and it’s not because they’re done by idiots or something, it’s because it flat out doesn’t work. Take a game like dungeon siege, this is a game you could play for quite literally hundreds of hours. To condense that all into 90-120 minutes, well a lot of stuff gets thrown out, ignored, overlooked, etc. And considering they’re trying to apply actors to a game-turned-movie that does not rely on acting or much thought at all (it’s an linear world-exploring action RPG, you move, you fight, you level, and you move again), it just makes it that much harder to really work with the material, because theirs not much there. On the flip side, movies turned into video game don’t work for a very similar reason, you have 90-120 minutes that you need to stretch out into at least 10-15 hours of gameplay. Devs might add new events or enemies or scenes or something, but overall, it’s kind of like taking a sentence and turning that single sentence and thought into an entire paragraph and any of us who writes stories have ALL been there.

So…to summarize, I still hate his movies and everything they represent but I don’t hate him as much. He’s still a narcissist, but is at least a little more tolerable now. Instead of an asshole, now we have the drunk guy at a party that wants to arm wrestle everyone.

On an entirely unrelated note…much like the Ke$ha video, this video violates me almost as if it were rape and makes me want to hurt things-

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Re: Uwe Boll…in a more positive light

I think I love Uwe Boll for all the reasons most people hate him. His movies are often complete and utter crap, to a point where it’s getting absurd and almost painful to watch. He can take Oscar nominated actors, or for all I know, Oscar winners, and get them to act like they’ve never ever been on a movie set, and the amazing thing is you’ve seen the same actors do incredible performances in other movies. The most simple and easy computer games with almost no story end up as movies with no story, a completely different story, or just random events that make no sense. And even though everything sucks to a certain point it might just turn into a black hole, he continues to make movies. Somehow, somewhere, somebody is still feeding him with cash to make more and more utter crap. How can you not love a guy who can manage to do that?

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Re: Uwe Boll…in a more positive light

He’s known more to gamers than he is movie-goers as most of his movies come from video games.

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Re: Uwe Boll…in a more positive light

Quite difficult for movie-goers to know bout either him or his films, as they rarely end up in cinema. Most of them are straight to DVD.

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Re: Uwe Boll…in a more positive light

My opinions on your opinions:

  1. Movies are made for many reasons. That one of them is giving the masses what they want is not wrong in any way. Thinking that your “really bad” directing is better then the directing of others simply because you don’t follow the mold of creating “popular” movies is not a good argument. Uwe is an ass. Pure and simple. He makes REALLY bad movies. And I doubt it’s because he really wants to be that different. It’s because he’s not just an “egotistical douche”. It’s because he’s THE “egotistical douche”. When critics whom were out of shape criticized him, he challenged them to box him. Those that accepted didn’t train because they didn’t think he was really serious. He beat their asses. Then a person that reviewed one of his moves that WAS trained tried to accept as well… Uwe refused. When he said he’d never direct another movie if a petition got one million signatures on-line, hundreds of thousands of gamers rushed to sign. When it hit one million… He refused to stop directing. He’s an ass. Of the first order.

  2. There are plenty of movies with WAY smaller budgets then any of his that make it big. “In the name of the King” had about a 70 MILLION dollar budget… Read that again. 70 MMMIIILLLLLLIIIOOONNN… There’s a LOT of Academy award winning movies that cost less. (The Hurt Locker. Won 6 (six) academy awards. It cost 15 million.) I don’t care if a movie cost a dollar or hundred million dollars, if it sucks balls, it sucks balls. His movies CONSISTENTLY leave me with the feeling of my testes being plopped into the hose of a vacuum that is running with a clean filter, and turned up to 11.

  3. “He does blatantly admit that while he is trying to be innovative, thinking outside the box when creating these movies, they don’t always work and can indeed come out fairly awful”

How could he not admit that? But of course he’s STILL perverting the truth. Just like his second grader mentality of threatening people that critique him, he likes to hide reality behind half truths. NONE of then have “worked”. A bad director is bad bad director. People think outside the box and come up with bad movies. But those bad movies can still have good direction or good acting, or good plot, but then have a bad version of one or two of the three thus killing the rest of the movie. HIS movies have all three categories as “bad”. He’s not “just thinking outside the box”. He not thinking at all.

  1. As the directors of the Harry Potter movies have shown, there’s only so much crap you can shove in a ten pound sack. I personally liked the first movie. The book was shorter then the rest. And the plot was pretty single lined. Making a movie easier the make from it. Pretty much every movie after that I don’t like, and don’t own. To much was carved from the books to meet the 2 hour dead line. Though apparently there are enough fans that still like the movies that they make good money. So…. What’s Uwe’s excuse? It’s probably personal. Personally he likes money. He’ll make anything shoved in front of him. It’s not that his movies are based on concepts that are hard to reduce into a movie. It’s that people with ideas that CAN be made into good movies would rather be slapped to death then let him lay a finger on the script. Instead of showing he can create something from a steaming pile of crap, he just rolls around in it, and says; “It’s not my fault. The concept is to hard to express with a two hour movie.”

In summation, he’s a horrible person. Not just a bad movie maker, but an honest to goodness horrible human being. I would not let him into my home. I actually thank the gods I live in America where I could use lethal force if needed to prevent his entry into my abode. He’s little more then a thief, he takes money from people. And much like the victims of actual robbery leaves them feeling broken and abused after the whole affair is over. It’s because of his antics that people think all video game related movies suck.

He’s like a loud fart in a church, or place of worship. Loud, obnoxious, and with no real need or merit. But funny to laugh at as long as you’re not to close.

Though, in the end everyone would be better off if it had been allowed to never be fired off in the first place.