Schindler's List. It contains just about every aspect of humanity there is.

127

(74 replies, posted in Episodes)

If nothing else, Battleship is definitely better than Transformers 2, if for no other reason than because it's about a half hour shorter. Seriously, tho, I kinda enjoyed the hell out of it. By the time they were at the 'grid' part of the movie I was giggling pretty much nonstop at just how completely insane every aspect of the movie was.

128

(74 replies, posted in Episodes)

I just watched Battleship...

I feel that I must preface this post with a bit context so that I don't sound like I'm completely retarded. Maybe it will make me sound even more retarded. I dunno.

I like bad movies. Most people would say that my love of bad movies is ironic, but I disagree. I find them often to be entertaining so long as they are aware of what they are. The Asylum movies are fun to watch because the people making them know they're making a movie called Megashark vs Giant Octopus. Micheal Bay, however, had no idea while making the Transformers movies that he was making that sort of movie. The Transformers films are Asylum films with big budgets, but without the self awareness. It's not just that the Transformers movies are utterly incoherent most of the time. Most B-Movies have plots that make no god damn sense.

The Room and Birdemic are shitty B-Movie versions of Transformers. Megashark is, in my opinion, a shitty B-Movie version of Battleship. The Room is a movie that you can learn to love in an ironic way. You guys were talking about a kid clopping around in his father's shoes acting stupid. It's adorable and you can't really hate it. I think a better analogy is when a kid is doing something that you're not really supposed to do. When a kid's at a restaurant and eating with his hands and has a face covered in spaghetti sauce, it's cute so long as the kid is young enough. If you're 40 and you're eating it like that you're going to be offending a lot of people and putting them off their appetite. That's the difference between The Room and Transformers. It's OK for the room to be a mess, cause the people making it don't know any better. The people making Transformers SHOULD know better, and DO know better, but they're acting like dumb kids with the immature humor and the really stupid plot and the pointless action scenes, etc.

When it comes to Megashark and Battleship, I guess you'd have to liken it more to... I dunno... Playing the piano, maybe. You've got really awesome action movies like The Avengers at one end that do a great job of playing a fucking awesome version of Hungarian Rhapsody No2 that sounds like this:

And then you've got Megashark doing it, and it's not as good and it's off tempo and there are missed notes and it's just not as well performed, but it's still HR No2. With Megashark, the movie is still fun and watchable on purpose. They know they can't make the effects look good, so they just push the scenario to the extreme to compensate. No budget or time for that shark effect? Well then have it jump to take out a 747 from 20,000 feet. Then not only does the effect look like crap, but there's no way in hell you could have possibly made it look good.

Finally you've got Battleship. When they play the song it's also not the best performance. In fact, the song isn't even the point of the performance.

For movies like Battleship, the performance is the goal. They're saying "yeah, this whole thing is ridiculous", but they've got the budget to make the effects look really good. Just like that shark, tho, no matter how good you get them to look, the concept is so far out there that it doesn't matter, and they totally know it. Imagine you're Peter Berg and you just got handed a lot of money to make a movie based on a board game, and then they hand you THAT script. There's no way in hell you think "now how can I make this a good movie?" You think "How can I make this as fun as possible to watch?" Personally, I think he made a number of pretty good decisions for this flick, and there's not much in the way of insultingly bad shit. There were only a few times where I gave the film negative points, and most of them were handed out in the first twenty minutes. The first scene is pure exposition. The very next scene is one of the worst 'as you know' scenes I've ever seen in a movie. "As you know, we are brothers and it is your birthday and you have no job, car or money".

Further, they pretty much pay off everything. This is pretty close to a 'perfect' movie, guys. They don't pay off the soccer game, aside from the fact that he's a douche who makes bad decisions at the beginning of the movie. The fact that these guys play soccer doesn't come back up. THAT IS ALL I can think of. Maybe I should watch it again...

They do pay off the freeway overpass killing scene, tho not the fact that they killed the freeway. They actually pay off a lot more than I was expecting. It's not the payoffs that suck, really, it's the setups, because at the time they set them up they seem utterly crazy, and the thing you think is important actually isn't. They're not setting up the fact that they're attacking infrastructure or anything. They're simply setting up the little death balls so that later when they get launched at the ship, you're aware of the threat they pose to the ship.

The cops tell the girl and the amputee to get off the mountain, right...  then they just leave them there instead of taking them along, and they leave the jeep to block the road. At the time I was like "WTF!? You left them there? You left the jeep? What the fuck kind of asshole cops are you?" And then they die, and that actually made me happy. And then the girl and the amputee get the keys from the dead cops, have a tense scene with Bippo the ADHD alien who gets distracted by random wildlife, and go back to the jeep to call for help. Everything in that previous scene mattered, but none of it made any god damn sense while they set it up for that. There's so much other stuff that's operating at that level of batshit crazy writing in this movie that it actually kinda works. There are some things that get really close to deus ex machina, but I think most of that stuff works fine.

I think the first draft of this movie had to have been fucking awful. I think they managed to have at least one writer who was handed a Transformers 2 type of script and managed to fix a lot of the glaring bullshit and kind of congeal the movie into something watchable, and there's actually a reason for pretty much every scene in the movie. It's not like the pot brownies / dogs fucking / parents eating snails scenes in Transformers 2, it's not like about 40% of Transformers 3... there are actual reasons for every scene that either set up the next scene or do something for the plot.

So...  yeah...  I'm gonna say that while this movie is not trying at all to be a serious movie, I actually found it pretty fun to watch. It's not insulting me or offending me every ten minutes like a lot of other big action movies, and that's really all I need to enjoy an action movie.

129

(99 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Now you have to answer both.

EDIT: god the thread's derailing so fast right now. I will try to fix it!!


Doctor Submarine wrote:

You have the opportunity to discover the complete truth about one historical event that is shrouded in secrecy. What do you choose?

The obvious answers would be typical conspiracy theory fodder, like JFK, moon landings or 9/11. I feel, however, that those answers are already plainly obvious and people simply choose to ignore reality. I'd rather know who Jack the Ripper was, or where Amelia Earhart went down. Let's say Jack the Ripper.

EDIT AGAIN! I CHANGE MY ANSWER! ABIOGENESIS! I want to know exactly how, where, when life erupted on this planet / possibly the universe. However many of them there may be.

You get to hang out with anyone from history for an afternoon, talking about stuff and having lunch. Who do you hang out with? What do you talk about?

130

(99 replies, posted in Off Topic)

[ignore]Biopic of Will Eisner, Scorsese or Ben Affleck directing a script from William Goldman, starring Giovanni Ribisi as young Will  in the 30's through WW2 and maybe up until the early 60's or so with some decent make-up. If Will Eisner ain't your thing, the same team could tackle a Lovecraft biopic as well. I think Ribisi could pull it off. Might need a fake nose, tho. Lovecraft's snout was flippin huge.[/ignore]

I guess I should have refreshed the page before trying to reply, eh?

I want to retire to Hawaii so I can drive a little ways and have a really nice spot to paint / take photos / etc. Barring that, New York for the same reasons.

You get $150 Million to set up a movie adaptation of a videogame. What game do you pick and which people do you hire to make it?

131

(11 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Sometimes that shit works. Troubled productions gave us Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Brazil. Also, Heaven's Gate, Alien 3 and apparently Green Lantern.

For the record, I didn't hate MIB 2, aside from the incredibly stupid plot stuff in the second half. The weird / awkward comedy made up to me for that, tho. I dunno why, but watching Will Smith try to fight his way off those plastic tubes for five minutes made me laugh. It just did. I've only seen it a few times, but each time I found myself wondering if that was done on purpose of if he just couldn't get the fuck off them and never broke character, thinking he was just clowning around for the crew at that point in what was obviously going to be a bad take... but then they used that take. It's also the only time I've ever laughed at that dude from the Daily Show.

132

(449 replies, posted in Off Topic)

New P.T. Anderson flick "The Master" just got a teaser trailer:

THAT is how you tease a movie. I'm already sold. I will see this movie.

And C-Spin, I also liked Quantum of Solace a lot. I've talked at length to some people who didn't like it and a lot of them seem unable to deal with the notion that the thing the bad guys wanted to control wasn't the whole world, but a bit of water in the desert. I do, however, feel that trying to put too much continuity into the Bond movies will only end badly. You can watch pretty much any bond movie and know immediately where you stand, cause the plots are fully contained. In QoS a lot of Bond's motivation stems from the previous movie. It was an interesting experiment that I think was a success, but I get why people didn't like it.

133

(449 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Damn, that looks a lot better than I thought it would. I might actually watch that, and I don't (as in do not ever) watch TV. Hopefully it'll end up on Hulu or netflix or something...

Don't forget Dolph Lundgren! He directs himself a lot now.

The real reason Seagal's movies all suck is because he has all these rules, and the people making his movies bend to his will for some reason. "I don't bleed, I don't run, I don't get hurt, I don't like guns so we're gonna do lots of hand to hand stuff, we have to have a scene where I sit in a room while incense burns, blah, blah, blah." He's not that big a star, you silly director people! He was in a few above-average action flicks over a couple decades ago. Pretty much everything he's done since then has sucked a camel's ass. Stop letting him dictate things!

Cuba Gooding Jr is making a lot of halfway decent to utter crap action movies lately as well. They mostly go straight to DVD. Some of them are actually not bad at all, like "Linewatch" and "Wrong turn at Tahoe". A lot of them are fucking unwatchable, tho, like "Way of War".

135

(99 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Beatles.

Personal preference, but mainly because Abbey Road and White Album. I am one of those rare people who despises Sgt Pepper's with every fiber of my being. I even like their earlier stuff. As for the Stones, a lot of their music sounds very samey to me. Their newest albums sound like their first albums but recorded with better equipment. On one hand I think it's awesome that they still have the same vibe, but on the other, they haven't really done much experimentation that I'm aware of. The beatles, on the other hand, played the same stuff for a couple albums, and every subsequent album was a bold experiment of newness.

I don't listen to much of Sgt Pepper's, like I said, but that album was amazingly different and fresh when it came out, and remains a pretty unique sounding album even today. Even the album I hate is something I respect a great deal on a musical level. Not to mention the fact that the Stones were and are all about sex drugs and Rock, while the Beatles ended up being more Peace, Love and Grooviness, which is a philosophy I dig a hell of a lot more.

I love the Beatles.

You have a 35mm camera, a single role of 35mm film (24 exposures) and a time machine. What do you do?

136

(9 replies, posted in Off Topic)

That's a good idea, Teague...

rdsarna, send me your driver's license. I'm going to be checking in on you. If you're still at that old job in a month, I'm going to kill you.

137

(449 replies, posted in Off Topic)

The Goon movie really pisses me off. That video was posted on youtube two years ago. On that account, at least...

The shorter version of that trailer existed in 2007 or 2008. There was an article with screen shots in a magazine I read probably around 2005. I dunno if it's still in production or what. Everything I've seen of it has been in that bar sequence. The early shots were there, this trailer, the previous trailer, a parody PSA they did, some early test animation stuff... Nothing new has been said about it or released for it in a couple/three years. I think it's dead. I think it was never really alive.

I think The Goon is just David Fincher trolling everyone.

138

(9 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Besides, if the place does shut it's doors, then you've got two things to put on your resume / in your portfolio instead of just one.

139

(39 replies, posted in Episodes)

Or they could do something bold and scrap the whole "individual movies" thing and go for a series of mini-avengers movies that feature multiple characters.

They actually kinda teased a bit that Hulk may show up in the next Ironman movie, having Tony offered him a job and then having them both drive off together. I can't remember if Cap dorve off with anyone, but Hawkeye and Black Widow have some obvious history that could make for an interesting film.

This is an issue in the comics as well.

As far as Thor...  I'd never seen it before the live show. The movie felt really ass-pull-y. It didn't even pull that much stuff out of it's ass, it just felt that way. The robot fight at the end was set up, but it still felt like it came outta nowhere. The random book grabbing stuff...

Also, there's a great bit in the comics I hope they use in one of these movies. Thor's fighting Loki, Loki gets the upper hand, but Thor grabs the back of his head and basically says "Knock it off or I call my hammer through your fucking skull". I'm paraphrasing, tho. That line would only happen in Tarantino's Thor.

Now I wonder what would happen if you gave Tarantino a superhero movie...

I think Statham is a great actor who needs to take more roles where he's not kicking the crap out of people. He was really good in both The Bank Heist and Snatch and there was nary a fist fight in either of those two flicks. Not with him, at least. If he does have to kick the crap out of people, it should be in a movie that is less martial arts and more brawl.

I have to mention The Horseman at this point because it's such a great friggin movie with good raw action scenes. Steven Kastrissios needs to write/direct more movies. Someone throw him some money, please.

Something like that with Statham in the lead role would be incredible.

I want Fincher to do a live-action remake of Perfect Blue.

The trailer does it no justice at all. It's a movie about a girl who goes from being in a mediocre group similar to the Spice Girls or something into acting. She ends up with a crazy stalker who basically terrorizes her for leaving the group. Meanwhile, in order to get noticed as an actor she decides to get her smallish role expanded to something much larger and darker and it fucks with her head. Then people start dying.

If you removed some of the weirder aspects of the film you could turn it into an amazing live-action flick. Rewrite it and focus on the themes of control (agents goals vs mima's goals, mima vs fans, self control, etc) and privacy (and rape...  literally and figuratively... kinda fits with the control theme) and you've got a bad-ass little thriller that would be pretty topical in today's cyber-stalky internet.

142

(180 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dorkman wrote:

Why not give girls someone THEY'D want to be?

Isn't that what romantic comedies are for?

I can totally understand why people love ID4, but I can't. Almost every scene in that movie has something in it that makes me nerd rage so hard. The worst thing, for me, has to be the scene where they're looking for new pilots.

They're looking for pilots to go fight the aliens and doing impromptu interviews to see what everyone's flight experience is. They get to Russel K. (Kay?) and he's all "I flew in 'nam, but now I do crop dusting" and the guy's like "cool, that's useful I guess..." and he's about to ask the next guy when Russel says "Oh BTW I'm glad I'll get a chance to get some payback for the time they abducted me and did strange alien tests on me and shit".

Everyone in the group looks around at each other with these "Oh, this dude is fucking crazy" looks on their faces. The audience laughs and shit, cause Russel K's being oh so goofy right now. Problem:

YOU'RE RECRUITING GUYS TO GO FIGHT THE FUCKING ALIENS!

I saw that in the theater and even the audience was laughing like "LOL he's so stupid!" But he's not stupid. He totally got abducted. The roswell crash was real, aliens have been abducting people...  The president literally said that they were doing that a couple scenes ago. It's just a stupid joke in the movie, but their reaction should have been different. Maybe laughing at first, but then going "Oh...  wait..." and getting serious about it. Or have his kid literally say "why are you laughing at my dad? You're going to fight aliens!" That would have not only hung a lantern on it, but also been a little character relationship moment where you can see Miguel now has a totally different opinion of his dad, etc.

There's a thing like that in just about every scene for me. Some of the jokes work, some of the effects are amazing, but the little problems add up.

144

(180 replies, posted in Episodes)

I think it's kinda dumb to argue about how Widow's dressed and posed. This is ostensibly a movie targeted at teenage / 20-something males. At the very least, it's based on books that are definitely targeted at that specific group. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they'd sexualize the one major female character. While the rest of the characters aren't necessarily sexualized, they're definitely idealized. The target demographic says "I want to be Cap, I want to be Hawkeye, I want to be Thor" but they don't say "I want to be Black Widow". They say "I want to be Thor and I want to fuck Black Widow".

If you don't like it, don't watch the movie. I like me some tits and ass, and I wish they made real exploitation movies and not all this politically-correct PG13 bullshit they make now. It's so hard to find good sleazy action movies today. Avengers one and only non PC thing is that poster. I've seen people complain that the other poster that shows her from the front is also sexist because the zipper on her shirt is partly open, but it's barely below her neckline. Meanwhile, every horror film for the last decade has had a full-on half-naked ass shot on the poster. The shitty part is that that's usually about as exploitative as most of those movies ever got as well.

145

(180 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dammit, Trey. Now all I'll be able to think of during the film is goatse.

Sweeny Todd is worth a watch, if for nothing else than the music. Burton is mostly style over substance (obviously) but he's managed to make a few movies that were good enough to make you ignore how much he's bashing you over the head with visual design. Sweeny Todd, Beetlejuice and maybe his two batman movies, tho his batman flicks are teetering on the brink of falling into that pit as well. I think Ed Wood is the closest he's ever come to making a normal movie, and Edward Scissorhands is a very self-aware movie which combines with the visuals and ends up feeling more like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. I think Jeunet actually pulls off what Burton keeps trying and failing to do.

Also, if you've not seen it, check out Micmacs. All of Jeunet's films, actually. Just go watch them all.

147

(43 replies, posted in Episodes)

Here's another random thought about games:

What happens when you remove all the numbers, aside from those that tell you how much of a thing you have. Ten gold, three potions, two pairs of pants, etc. Remove stat points, remove health bars, remove experience bars, remove the damage rating for weapons, the armor rating for armor. Your choices are now based on your intuition and how something looks. Replace the numbers with visual / audio cues.

With swords, for instance, you could tell the player if it feels heavy, if it feels sharp, where it's balanced, etc, and they could judge whether it was better than what they already have based on that. For health, you could have an icon system that would let the player know how badly they're hurt and where, and maybe have a better damage model that would allow for limb wounds to affect combat / movement / perception of the world (permanent deafness / blindness?). Also, in a multiplayer environment, remove the chat and player names and replace with speech balloons or something similar. You can only 'hear' people nearby. Have whipser and shout commands so you can speak softly to nearby players only, or shout that will let people 'hear' your speech bubble coming from farther away.

Would the lack of other numbers shift the focus to getting lots of money as opposed to leveling your character or finding the best gear? Would people still play WoW or Skyrim if they had no idea how much damage / experience / level / health they had? Would that sort of chat and lack of knowledge of other players encourage more actual roleplaying and draw players in, or would it repel them?

Would you play WoW, or The Elder Scrolls Online if it were set up that way?

Sorry, I'm posting in a lot of threads today cause I've been offline for like three days and just got my shit fixed tongue

148

(12 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Kyle wrote:

My counter argument to this is as follows:

People falling down.

Yeah, I think physical comedy is less subjective. Wile E Coyote popping open a little umbrella before getting crushed by a boulder is hilarious.

149

(126 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I don't get the Angry Birds thing either. I mean, I get that it's a fun game, but they've built a fucking theme park in europe based on it. There's a giant-ass Angry Birds standee at my Best-Buy for no discernable reason. It's just there. They're not selling the game. The game is a fucking dollar to buy, or free if you get certain phones. Zynga tried to buy the company out for something like 2 Billion dollars. For fucking angry birds! What the hell?!

I had angry birds on my trs80 back in the day, minus the physics and instead of birds and pigs it was two monkeys throwing bananas at each other. That game and variations of it has been around for three decades. I'm wondering what other early 80's puzzle games one could rip off and apply physics to.

150

(4 replies, posted in Off Topic)

They are great if you like to spend $1500 to surf the web. Slowly.

This is what I want:

Pretty sure that toy is green-lit and being made right now. If it gets released, I will buy at least two of them.