Seven Days In Entebbe and 6 Days
The former is about the 1976 hijacking of a French airplane (Tel Aviv to Paris), which was captured and then rerouted to Africa and a hostage crisis ensued. The latter is about the 1980 Iranian Embassy hostage crisis in London, which saw the SAS 'go public' for the first time as their assault on the building was televised (from a distance).
Seven Days In Entebbe does a good job of exploring the characters (even if it, at times, the perspective starts to feel a bit questionable) - specifically the two German hostage takers and some of the passengers - but it utterly fumbles the climax. We've spent all this time with these people, so you'd think that seeing the passengers rescued and the hostage takers taken out would be of key importance, and yet the film spends most of the (brief) time of the actual operation cutting away to a performance art piece (with the focus being on the girlfriend of one of the IDF soldiers who stormed Entebbe airport). It was a frustrating way to finish the film. I cared about seeing the hostages freed, and not about this interpreteive dancer side character who had no actual connection to the Entebbe crisis, so to keep cutting back to her was seriously frustrating. The actual mission is swept aside in a quite a rush and lacks any sense of tension whatsoever, and amazingly, kind of forgets about the hostages! So, the character stuff was interesting (if a bit laboured), but the film absolutely stuffed the main event.
6 Days, on the other hand, focuses far more on the processes of the hostage crisis, specifically from the perspective of a young man in the SAS who would go on to lead the assault on the embassy. We also focus on the negotiations, too, with lots of tense phone calls going back and forth, with the military snooping around the outskirts of the Embassy with microphones and cameras to secure intel. The film could have done with a little more characterisation - we don't really get to know the hostages and hostage takers all that well, just a rough sketch of two hostages and two hostage takers really - although the main focus is on the SAS man and the negotiator, so the weight of the situation is placed squarely on their shoulders. Cutting away to a characterisation of news reporter Kate Adie on the outskirts also felt kind of redundant as she was similarly 'at a distance' like the viewer, despite the historical import of her actual news reports at the time. So, while the film struggles a bit to really connect to many of the characters (leaving you feeling a bit emotionally distant), the film absolutely shines when it comes to tension - the SAS getting ready to breach, but then having to stand down at the last second, plans getting drawn up and then changed, etc ... and then the actual event (the SAS storming the embassy) is utterly gripping and viscerally told with a nerve jangling score, deep breaths in gas masks, and barked orders ratcheting up the tension.
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 Originally Posted by blind2d
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): 1/10. Even if I were still twenty, I would despise this film. There are exactly zero redeeming qualities throughout. WHY does the preschool have a basement?! WHY does a man live there?! HOW is his only job gardener? WHAT suburban town with a preschool that regularly caters to about twenty kids has a live-in ANYthing, let alone GARDENER?!! Zero logic. Shitty CGI. Terrible acting. Terrible ENDING. Terrible score. Bad cinematography/editing/pacing/directing. Just... Awful. I blame Michael Bay.
Originally Posted by Neil
Wow! Almost tempted to watch it now just to see how pointless it is :/
Yeah, I couldn't be doing with the ANOES remake either, a real watermark in how bad remakes can be sometimes. The only thing I liked is that they showed a bit more of Freddy's lynching, which was an interesting bit of backstory that was mostly just skimmed over in exposition in the original movies IIRC.
However, the pointlessness and generally crapness of the remake can be summed up with one scene: Freddy lurking through the bedroom wall as Nancy sleeps.
In the original it was achieved, quite ingeniously, with a stretch of spandex that had been painted to match the bedroom wall of the set. Lit from below, all that was required was for the actor to push into the spandex to distort it and make for an iconic and creepy image. The crucifix falls off the wall and when Nancy puts it back up (after we've cut to and from a close up of said crucifix) she knocks on the wall (now the original wall of the set again) to further sell the effect.
In the remake it was done in CGI, which no doubt cost a silly amount of money (far in excess of a sheet of spandex and some paint), and it looked like nothing more than CGI - totally fake and too animated to ever be believed as real.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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