One can only hope to aspire to that level of correctness.

Hey! I never said anything about this movie!

All three of these movies drove me insane, purely from a special effects point of view. When they'd come out, people would say "oh, those movies suck, but they have really neat special effects" to which I would scream "NOOOOOOO!" while thrusting my arms upward and crushing the surrounding scenery with my brain powers. They don't have really neat special effects. They have horrible awful special effects. Granted, the artists put in a lot of work and the resulting shots look, I'm sure, exactly the way Lucas wanted them to look, but none of the effects are really successful at all. And when you're entire film is basically a nonstop string of effects shots, that lack of success is going to drag the movie down a lot.

Yoda looked like crap, the lighting was off, there was no fine detail, there was little to no depth of field going on in a shot, just foreground and background plates with different blur settings, the CG camera moved too much and too often while the real camera was apparently bolted to the floor, the lighting was bad, the specular was blown out on just about everything, the models didn't deform properly at all - AT ALL, the lighting was just flat and even and dull in most scenes, the color pallets were muted and nasty looking, everything looked like plastic.

The movies looked the way those shitty FMV games used to look back in the early 90's. You know, the ones where they'd shoot their actors on a green screen saying cheesy, poorly written dialogue, and then they'd add extremely fake looking CG backgrounds that never matched. The prequel trilogy is like a bad FMV videogame knock-off of Star Wars. I could never stop thinking about how bad the entirety of every one of the prequels looked every time I saw them. I don't honestly think there's one single successful shot in any of those films. Not even the live-action stuff on location. Even those shots fail in some way. Maybe a coupe of the Tatooine shots in Episode 2.

Would you consider Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans a remake / reboot? Because it's awesome.

The Thing is barely a remake, really. It's got the same basic idea going on, but the original flick was just another dime a dozen campy monster movie with a few interesting twists thrown in. Carpenter took the idea and actually made it scary. Both of them are kinda sorta based on At The Mountains Of Madness. The Thing prequel actually has me really pissed off, because Universal axed Del Toro's ATMOM project, but went ahead with the Thing prequel, which is basically a variation on ATMOM. I guess the budget is a lot lower, but still. Annoying.

What about Airplane? It's a comedy remake of a dramatic film. A lot of the dialogue is word for word from the original. I liked Airplane, too.

Also, I kinda liked the new Karate Kid flick. It should have been called "Kung Fu Kid" and it could have been darker than it was, but as a family film it was pretty damn good. Way better than I had expected it to be.

I dunno about Shyamalan anymore. His blocking is great, he chooses some nice angles to shoot from, he's good at longer shots, so he's got that going for him. The way he directs his actors, tho, is his weakest skill, and second to that would be his ability to choose the proper way to shoot a scene.

Example: The action sequences in Airbender are often done in long, single shots. These are often in slow motion, or slow down in parts. That's not a good way to shoot an action sequence. It made the action in that movie boring. It looked really staged and planned out and also quite a bit silly.

Example 2: The Happening had a number of shots that I couldn't help but laugh at. He was trying to shoot a horror movie, but instead made a really dark dead-pan comedy. The lawnmower shot, the old woman at the end of the film, the shots of people who start walking backwards. It's all shot in this really flat way that has no tension and really betrays his normally well-thought-out staging. The part with the cop who shoots himself and a few other shots are staged really well and are pretty chilling, but half the time his shots in that flick have the opposite effect on me.

His writing does suck, tho.

Joe Pesci as every pissed off gangster ever. And Vinny.

Ian Hubert makes awesome stuff. I've been waiting for Project London to get released ever since he posted on a few forums looking for artists. I wanted to get in on that, but there's no way in hell I would have been up to snuff. I wasn't even aware of TFN until recently.

Show was awesome as always. It's not really redundant at all and I was kinda hoping you guys would start doing a non-commentary podcast about movies and fandom and VFX and random stuff.

Mark Hamill as the Joker.
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

And yeah, Robert Downey Jr doesn't even have to try to be Tony Stark. He already was Tony, right down to the substance / alcohol abuse. It's like he was preparing for the role.

Do you guys think that maybe the expectations for Basterds is why some people hate it, the same as Volume 2? Cause you guys talk about that as well, where you were expecting this to be like the first one and didn't like it as much, but you've warmed up to it. Do you think maybe Basterds suffers from the same thing, or is the general dislike for it due to something else?

I liked it a lot, myself, but I also knew going in that the two stories were going to be pretty evenly weighted. But hell, I thought Shoshana's story was one of the best things Tarantino's ever written / shot.

I would vote for Jackie Brown as the next commentary, tho. I love it more.

I think it might be neat to see the intermissions between the recording sometimes. I know there have been a few times where some truly classic DiF moments happened after the recording was done.

Doesn't Justin.tv save your recordings? I swear there was a guy who used to do a painting show on there and I was able to go back through and watch their older shows. Maybe I'm thinking of some other service, tho. Or maybe they stopped doing that. It's been a few years, I think.