26 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

The idea that was presented in the article posted in one of the two Prometheus threads was that the Engineers created life on this planet via an act of self sacrifice. Their race is totally comfortable with death. The idea of cheating death or not wanting to die disgusts them. When they bring the head to life it's horrified and destroys itself (lol?). When the live alien is asked for more life, it is disgusted and enraged and tries to kill everyone. It's not hostile until David (apparently) asks him to prevent raisin-man from dying. That's pretty much the only logical explanation that makes any semblance of sense. That ties into Space Jesus, in that the act of us killing one of them was the motivation for them to say "uh...  wait a minute... we need a reboot down there..." The flood may have been a similar period where they said to themselves "yeah, we need to rethink the process a bit...  maybe next time we should send one of us down there to supervise?"

However, We are talking about a period of time in the hundreds of millions of years, if not billions, from the point at which they created life on this planet to the point where we finally showed up at their Life Goo Storage And Distribution Facility. Since this is true, then everything about that previous theory is totally believable when compared to the notion that in the hundreds of millions of years since they started creating life, their civilization never apparently changed. They upgraded their spaceship design from a saucer to a wishbone. That's the result of 100 million years of technological development. Apparently. Their culture and philosophy apparently made no change in that time.

@ Trey: The cool thing about humans is that we are totally capable at looking at our own species and saying "wow...  we are really fucked up..." and we do that quite a lot. Even when we acknowledge how fucked up we are, we are convinced that that acknowledgement makes us awesome.

EDIT: OK, I have to get this off my chest. The reply to Trey was originally just the first sentence. I wasn't sure if the point of the first sentence would be clear, so I added a second sentence that's basically the exact same sentence, but in reverse and a bit more obvious. I don't think even I would have gotten the first sentence's meaning, but I feel like I just broke that rule where you don't underestimate your audience. I feel dirty, but I dunno if I should. Should I feel dirty about that second sentence, or do you think it was necessary?

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27 Reply by Squiggly_P

(1,649 replies, posted in Off Topic)

paulou wrote:

Let's be honest, here. The guy writes something like 10,000 lines of dialogue per script. The odds of a few of them being the same are actually pretty good.

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28 Reply by Squiggly_P

(19 replies, posted in Off Topic)

That makes sense. I do like the idea of them doing a bunch of different miniseries in this world.

  Show
She should have lost her power in episode 9 or 10 and been stuck with airbending until the climactic battle, or until AFTER the climax. Spend a couple episodes with hear dealing with that. Heavy shit.

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29 Reply by Squiggly_P

(19 replies, posted in Off Topic)

K, so I just watched the entire season in one day.

Much spoilers. Don't read this if you don't want to hate me. Show
Is it just me or did they just hit the reset button? I mean, this guy is probably gonna come back, but you've got the murder suicide, Korra getting her bending back and being able to give everyone else their's back as well. Assuming that the murder/suicide at the end actually sticks, then even the threat of losing your bending power is now gone.

I mean, I like the show so far. I think it was doing some really great stuff, but now I'm wondering what exactly they're going to do now, as all of the threats from this season have apparently been dealt with. The last episode had me going "WOW...  they actually went there... the stakes in this series are pretty high." and literally five minutes later it had me going "Oh you fucking cock suckers! You gave them back already? WTF?!"

And I think some of the background painters should try harder. Some of the backgrounds were kinda rough, which is fine, but some of the backgrounds were fuckin ROUGH. To the point of being unreadable.

I do like it tho. The half dozen or so main characters are really well fleshed out and have interesting interactions. It has a lot of the same charm as the previous series. I'm glad they bicker a lot.

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30 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

Zarban, I've not seen that, but I've noticed a disturbing lack of training montages in recent years as well. I mean, how the hell are we supposed to know he's been trained without the training montage? They put one into every Rocky movie. You're not even allowed to grandfather clause that shit. Remove the training montage from Rocky 4. Now it looks like Dolph Lundgren was destined to fail the whole time, right? Not to mention how all the training sequences in movies like The Karate Kid weren't just giving you an excuse for the hero's ability to beat the crap out of the bad guy at the end, but were providing you with examples of how he deals with situations or what happens when he gets frustrated, and then he can overcome that by the end of the movie, or it gives ObiWan or Mr Miyagi a reason to get all philosophical and work the theme of the movie in there somehow.

Training scenes now are terrible. TERRIBLE! Excuses to write some slapstick or show off how bad-ass all your characters are. The hero often shows up and barely needs training at all. The trend lately is that they get to the point where they're about to do the training montage, but then the hero's like "whatever" and does something super-impressive and the trainers look at each other and say "He's amazing! Surely he's going to be the best ever!"

I'm being totally serious right now, too. Training sequences are so important to that sort of film.

On a totally unrelated note:
http://metaphilm.com/
Anyone ever read any of the articles there? It seems to be people who interpret the meanings of film. I don't think they're joking. There's an article where this guy argues that Pirates of the Caribbean is an allegory for the way debt and bankruptcy are handled the same way, legally, as death. The film is trying to clue you into the fact that we're all living under maritime law, and that you don't have a right to property. I finally have a place where I can post ten page interpretations of all of the Asylum films. HUZZAH!

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31 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

I just read Bendis' "Torso" again today. Really good comic with some unfortunate layout ideas (Let's make the page a giant spiral that the reader has to flip around to read! That won't be annoying at all!), and this thread popped into my mind afterward because Fincher would be perfect to direct a film version of this. Lo and behold, in the back of the book it mentions that one of the writers had adapted it into a screenplay. I head to IMDB to see if it had been made already in a small production or straight to DVD or whatnot and, well, it died in preproduction apparently. Guess who was all set to direct it?

I guess he didn't want the next film after Zodiac to be another serial killer flick, tho. Also, the film had been retitled to "Ness" because the main character is Elliot Ness. Probably an attempt by the studio to drum up interest for the flick by associating it with The Untouchables or something. I feel like Bendis is one of those guys who hollywood really needs to tap into. He's kinda like Joss Whedon in the sense that everything he's done has been above-average to fucking amazing, but no one outside of comic nerds has apparently noticed.

The only fault I've found in his writing is that you can often totally remove the last line or two of dialogue from every scene and it plays better. Not so much in his latest stuff, tho. Powers and Alias are both pretty tightly written. Dunno if he still does Alias or not, tho.

Go read Torso. It's really good. Not if you're squeamish, tho. He draws anything that involves blood or gore, and there's quite a bit of that, but there are photos of actual dead people and skeletal remains in the book as it's based on an actual series of murders.

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32 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

Honestly, the only reasons I completely geeked out over the fact they were remaking it was based on the assumption that they'd then follow through and make the next two movies as well. Guess not, tho. I've not heard a damn thing about it.

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33 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

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34 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

I didn't like how they wrapped up the mystery, but the way they wrapped up the US film I much prefer. I've never read the books, but I had assumed that Fincher's version was a remake of the book, and that things would be different than the swedish version because that version altered a number of things from the books from what people told me. I dunno. They seem pretty similar to me, aside from the bits I mentioned. I'm sure there are book purists out there who despise both adaptations, regardless of how good both of them are.

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35 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

That would be amazing. And he'd get a chance to use his "I'll be back" line at the end.

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36 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Uh... It has a happy ending, I guess... The manga is even better, btw. Go read the manga.
MY ANUS IS BLEEDING!

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37 Reply by Squiggly_P

(43 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I can't believe I've not posted in this thread before now...

  • Once Upon A Time In The West

  • Sunset Blvd. - Seen it in bits & pieces, never sat down and watched it from beginning to end.

  • Rebel Without A Cause

  • Amélie - I love the director and have this on DVD...  never watched it for some reason...

  • Barry Lyndon

  • But Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

I could have filled the list with Kubrick films, tho. I'm not really a fan. Never seen Lolita. never seen any of his films prior to Strangelove. I started watching Paths of Glory, but that movie is a bit on the slow side.

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38 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

Well, he wrote the book so maybe this time he'll stick to the source. That would be pretty funny, tho.

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39 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

Paul Verhoeven is now adapting his book "Jesus Of Nazareth" to film. Co-Written by Roger Avery. He basically portrays Jesus as just a dude whose story got blown out of proportion by writers trying to one-up each other. I tend to agree with him, though I'm not sure Jesus ever existed (or if he wasn't a number of dudes who kinda got rolled into one dude via said writers).

Anyway, I can't wait for this for any number of reasons.

1) New Paul Verhoeven film. Awesome. Kinda surprised I hadn't heard of Black Book before now...
2) I cannot wait to see how people react to news of this movie's existence and apparent plot.
3) Judging by Verhoeven's other book-to-film adaptations, I bet this movie will have an innocent bystander bodycount of biblical proportions.

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40 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

dbngaa, you should add City of God and The Grey Zone to that uplifting family film festival.

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41 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

The scene just after that where you watch Cage go apeshit for five minutes on a motorcycle was great as well. The final car chase was fun. The last little bit of the movie was a let down in that the big bad of the movie was a complete pushover and then the movie kinda drags itself across the finish line after that.

I knew going in that it was going to be a crappy B-movie with crazy camera shit. I guess that allowed me to laugh at it instead of getting angry. Kinda like Skyline. Just never ever watch it in 3D. I'm amazed there haven't been any whiplash lawsuits brought over the snap-zooms-in-3D. My neck was actually sore the next day. I was so glad that the only other people in the theater were seated in front of me tongue

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42 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I love Grave of the Fireflies. It was one of the first anime I'd ever seen, and it was the first time I remember seeing an animated film that took it's subject matter that seriously. Lately I've heard conflicting things about WHY it was made. When I first saw it I was amazed and went out to find information about it. This was back in the dark age before the interwebs were a thing, so it was kinda hard to find info, and there was not much to find. I remember reading an arcticle / interview with Takahata who seemed surprised that audiences were relating to and pitying Seita by the end of the film, when - according to him - he had expected audiences to be angry at him for acting so selfish and prideful. But a recent interpretation quoted some other interview where he apparently stated that the film was made so that the target audience - teenagers and young adults - would understand what the older generation had been through. That their life was easy compared to their parents' lives. The film ends with Seita looking dead at the camera with this oddly stern sort of look that always confused me. If what this dude said is true, then that look is a literal "fuck you" to the audience, which kinda alters my perception of the film. The very last shot sorta drives that point further home.

But I still think it's an amazing film. It got me into anime for a long time, until I realized that I started out at the top of the anime pile and was slowly working my way down into the endless layers of demon porn and abstract nonsense.

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43 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I think we were trying to think of what the alien races in this movie would be called if it were directed by George Lucas.

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44 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Noomara Rapooney.

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45 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Gregory Harbin wrote:

I don't really have anything to add here except to point out to Squiggly that Shaw is played Noomi Rapace, who was the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, not Rooney Mara. Although Rooney might have been a more awesome choice.

Man, I have been screwing them up ever since they announced the remake for the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

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46 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Was I the only person who understood everything the Architect said the first time I watched it? Hell, that was one of the few bits in the second flick that actually felt like it fit in with the first movie.

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47 Reply by Squiggly_P

(971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)

SPOILER!

This is an edit of the car thief scene from the new Spiderman movie. I dunno how it exists on the youtubes. I tend to think that it's probably from a screener source or something, but I dunno... might have just been a regular promo release that someone edited a few more leaked shots into? Kinda early for a screener release, but then Wolverine got leaked a couple months in advance. Regardless, don't watch this if you don't want to be spoiled, and don't read the spoiler text beneath it if you don't watch it, cause Spoilers.

  Show
The dialogue in this clip isn't doing it any favors and I dunno why they keep putting it in trailers. Seeing the whole scene (or an extended clip of it, as the case may be) made me less excited, overall. The "I'm swinging here" line and the ghetto-inspired reading of the "boys in blue" line both made me cringe.

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48 Reply by Squiggly_P

(133 replies, posted in Off Topic)

agreed.

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49 Reply by Squiggly_P

(109 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Owen Ward wrote:

I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim and didn't like Prometheus...where do I stand?

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ppgeTRiO1qzozj1.gif

I think most of the people here thought Scott Pilgrim was OK, tho, so...

I haven't watched all of it. I don't even know why. I just keep stopping it after ten or fifteen minutes.

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50 Reply by Squiggly_P

(956 replies, posted in Off Topic)

almost without fail, every time I see a photo of Jim Henson, the first thing that pops into my head is "I want that shirt."

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