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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Rob
Just saw the season premiere of The Newsroom. I admire the show's writing, on the one hand, but I'm often annoyed with certain aspects of it on the other. This leads me to watch the show compulsively.
The premiere was pretty good, I thought. If anyone's looking to start watching, I think it's a lot easier to jump on board at any point than some dramas are. (Although at some point you'll want to catch Season One in order to see a pretty funny Apollo 13 reference.)
I've never totally hated the G.R. Hill version. It's amazing how flat the film is—especially when you consider how the source material is so damn inspired, so infused with personality.
Much of what makes the novel compelling (like the narration) has to do with the fact that it's very much a book. It knows it's a book, and it loves being a book. Vonnegut's weird, wild meta-storytelling works like gangbusters on the page. How do you adapt that vibe to the screen? I don't know. But putting Kaufman on the job seems to make sense. He's someone who definitely says "Screw the way movies normally behave—I'm doing this." That's probably a useful attitude here. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Oh gosh yes. Fast and the Furious 6 is ridiculous.
(Has anyone already come up with the idea for a bizarro version of Kickstarter?—call it "Kneecapper," a site that allows people to donate money toward stopping certain projects. Get enough people to pitch in, and you could essentially pay Vin Diesel to stop making Fast and the Furious movies. Reasonable people across the globe could band together and bribe M. Night Shyamalan to take an early retirement. Just think...)
BTW, for the best thing to come out of the Fast and the Furious franchise, I nominate this season's premiere of Futurama, which lampooned the tropes beautifully.
I know others get sick of debating, rehashing or fixing the prequels but I never tire of it.
Same here. I love this shit.
Michael's version of Episode III is solid. The moment when Anakin "turns" rings truer. He is essentially radicalized in something more like the way people can get radicalized in real life: someone (Palpatine) gets to him at a crucial moment and provides just the right explanations. (As the gang pointed out in the Ep. III episode, George's Anakin is a grown-ass man who loses his shit over the fact that death exists. He's Darth Vader, and we can't even respect his intellect.)
Hell, if you can build the 140,000 foot tether this thing needs, I don't see where an actual space elevator wouldn't be a better option.
You know, my only real argument against the idea would be the inevitable muzak version of the theme from 2001. Other than that, I'd love to ride a frickin' space elevator.
I can almost hear the first stuck-in-a-space-elevator movie being pitched by Brent Ratner...
It already is a thing, but the keyword is smaller payloads. For example there's the Pegasus rocket, with a max payload of about 1000 lbs. Enough for a small satellite, not nearly enough for a passenger vehicle.
Oh wow, see, I had no clue this was going on. Pretty damn cool.
I remember similar questions being asked during the 80s, about the Space Shuttle: "If it can land like a normal plane, why can't it take off like one?" My (awful) 6th grade science fair project said the answer was "Earth's gravity"—I drew pictures about how it takes more "rockets" to shoot the shuttle out there than it does to bring it home. I built an ugly papier-mache replica of Discovery, and the twin rocket boosters were PVC pipe. None of it to scale.
Well, for smaller payloads, I think using planes will probably be a thing. Not next week, but at some point. I don't know that they've cracked the code yet. The last thing I read about it was this article from a couple months back; it's about that Swiss company that's going to start test launching in 2017 using a modified Airbus A300.
a reminder that rockets and getting to space are difficult
Indeed. I still occasionally marvel at the fact that we as a species have accomplished as much as we have out there. I've actually had dreams that a space program somewhere in the world was stupid enough to let me tag along on a manned mission.
Congratulations!
That kid looks like a go getter.
It's the best Superman film to date. IMHO, anyway.
I'm down on the film, but I agree with that when it comes to certain aspects. Superman's dad has never been this well realized and performed. And MoS has several little moments that strike right to the core of what fascinates people about the Superman mythos
Such a sweet pic Trey!
I always liked the fact that he was not on screen very much but still enjoyed the fans and appearances.
MTFBWY!
The man is so cool that that stoner dude in the background is quietly masturbating right there on the spot! Who hasn't been there?—sometimes your mind gets blown at conventions...
Welcome Throwback. The Strangelove episode is a favorite of mine.
Not only was this amongst the best 40 minutes of audiobookery there is, my playlist started "Holy Diver" by Killswitch Engange(cover version, I know) right after it. Worked well.
That's a fun cover, and, wow, the song does kind of go well with the story—all that hellish imagery is reminiscent of the Internet's scariest depths.
Teague, that narrative was downright fascinating.
I completely agree. Made a comment a couple of pages back about how all these recent blockbuster movies have our heroes fail to stop millions of people dying. That's not how I would define a hero.
I saw MoS again yesterday, and our hero truly does seem indifferent to the thousands of people that must have perished during his Earthly battles. Yeah, that's no hero.
So far, the only halfway-coherent argument I've seen in favor of what Nolan/Goyer/Snyder might have been doing with all that destruction has been made by Richard Brody, the guy who blogs about movies for The New Yorker (note: Brody is kinda snooty, even by The New Yorker standards, and I often find his opinions goofy):
The destruction wrought on Earth by the malicious Zod is one thing, but when the newly dubbed Superman stands up to his father’s killer and Earth’s ravager, each zooming chase through the air and each blow landed wreaks horrific destruction. I found myself thinking of Gog and Magog, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Flood, and remembering that the term “Biblical” implies catastrophe, suggests an unfathomably large, and therefore legendary, devastation. Beware, Goyer and Nolan seem to warn, of the morally motivated conflict that you yearn to fight and win; beware of thinking in terms of realizing good or vanquishing evil on a grand, mythic scale, because when forces that hold the world in the balance do battle, even the winners are losers.
[My italics.]
I mean, I understand what he's saying, but it never occurred to me that that's what Nolan/Goyer "seem to warn" with the presentation of all that collateral damage. To me, the film appears downright oblivious to the fact that every building toppled has many living, breathing human beings in it.
Something occurred to me on listening to you guys call out the various long takes. In the directors commentary for the musical 1776, the director says he was constantly fighting with the studio over cuts to the film. To combat this, he filmed as much as possible in long takes. This made cuts harder, although they still managed to remove one whole song and the opening against his will. Given the fight Donner was having, I wonder if he was trying to do the same thing.
Yeah, that may well be. Cutting-in-the-camera and doing other things to arrange it so it's harder to butcher your film is definitely a neat trick. John Ford, Hitchcock, Bogdanovich all did it at some point. (Peter Bogdanovich tells a cool story—he's full of cool stories—about how he resorted to cutting-in-the-camera to make it harder for the suits to fuck with Last Picture Show.)
I actually don't know if that's what Donner was up to or not, but I wouldn't be surprised. During the commentary, I think it was Trey who made the point that a lot of the coverage during the newsroom scenes seemed influenced by All the President's Men. So the long takes might not be monocausal, but yeah, they may have served as a creative "insurance policy" for Donner. Whatever it was, the long takes are quite well done and come off naturally. I love the one in Lois' apartment, when Superman flies off the balcony and we move, without a cut, to see a suit-and-tie-clad Clark enter through the front door. That one really makes the long take serve the storytelling—very cool.
I'd be down for that. Seems like a fine idea. (Jake's "Mending Steel" treatment is inspired, so it would make a solid first entry if he wanted to cross-post it on such a board.)
Often the reviews posted to the Reviews board contain this kind of rewriting/re-imagining of plots anyway, so making it its own thing would be pretty cool, I think.
No Netflix in Japan, unfortunately
.
Wow, is that so? I wasn't aware of that. I'm a little surprised, I guess.
Jesus H. Christ. Just when I thought I'd go through the whole day without being amused.
Bravi!
(BTW, I'm seeing Jason Schwartzman as Barney and Christina Hendricks as Mindy. Perhaps a mo-cap performance by Benicio del Toro as the alien. Just spit-ballin' here, you know, my mind's wide open...)
Well, I believe you pilgrims will totally do The Searchers someday... just as sure as the turnin' of the Earth.
As the changes to the industry play out over the coming years, I find that one of my biggest hopes is that it somehow brings about a return to the masses going to movies—as in, seeing movies in movie theaters. On Demand, iTunes, and streaming are awesome, and I don't want them to go away. But there's a generation of people who are more and more believing that the ideal way to see a movie is on their iPad. JJ Abrams was on Howard Stern a few weeks ago, and he joked that it's now almost possible for people to watch his latest movie on a screen that is smaller than the actual film on which the movie was shot. Which is kind of horrifying, in a way. [Hops down] Okay, done—anyone need this soapbox?
P.S., Should any relocation to Idaho include the kidnapping of Fred Schneider so he can lead daily sing-alongs, count me in. I've got a good table saw I can bring, ideal for cabinet making.
I'm on board.
Paper Moon and The Cowboys would make a pretty weird double feature. Who wouldn't love going from Tatum O'Neal to Slim Pickens?
Rob wrote:The kicker is that Kirk Alyn is actually in the Donner film (!), briefly and uncredited, along with his original Lois (!!).
We mention the Kirk Alyn/Noel Neill cameo when it happens (right around the 36 minute mark).
However, I said that Neill was the Lois from the TV show opposite Reeves... what I didn't remember - until I looked it up just now - was she was Lois in the Alyn movie serials and the tv series.
Oh I know, I know. You guys were on target on everything. I also appreciated that you guys:
* Called-out Superman III for its (even for a Superman movie) inanity. Richard Pryor in that film... ugh, it's one of the saddest, most unfunny things that man ever did.
* Showed admiration for Chris Reeve as a (Juilliard-trained) actor and as a person. By all accounts, he was a really nice man. After his accident, he stumped for stem-cell research. That was back when George W. Bush was saying that stem-cell research was somehow a thorny issue that he had to "think about." He was like Michael J. Fox—in that you had these serious, tragic health problems that could not have happened to a nicer, more talented fella.
* Reflected on the creature known as Margot Kidder. I never liked her as Lois. Someone like Jaclyn Smith or Ali McGraw would have fit the bill so much better. Indeed, she was kind of odd looking. It won't win me any chivalry merit badges any time soon, but I think Teague's insinuations that Kidder resembles Gollum were spot-on.
* Explained the time travel thing clearly. It's still shocking how unclear the presentation of that was.
Good work on this one, fellas. Nice that Richard Donner's deft use of long takes got some love. Always felt that was a cool, somewhat overlooked aspect of the movie.
Because I'm a die-hard Superman fanboy (I had Superman underwear when I was 8 years-old, and I have Superman boxers now—what of it?), I'm going to be the douchebag who points out that you guys actually had the Reeve/Reeves thing reversed. It's about the easiest mistake to make in the world—one-letter's difference. But yeah, Christopher Reeve (no "s") was the star of the 1978 film and its subsequent sequels. George Reeves (he gets the "s") played the character on TV and in the film Superman and the Mole Men.
Sometimes you'll hear people say that George Reeves was "the original Superman," or "the first Superman," which is not strictly true. Aside from the voice actors who played Superman on the radio and in cartoons, the first actor to put on the blue tights in live-action films was a dude named Kirk Alyn, who starred in two sets of Superman serials. The kicker is that Kirk Alyn is actually in the Donner film (!), briefly and uncredited, along with his original Lois (!!).
Apologies if this has been brought up, but how did people like Mr. Costner in this movie?
I think he's always had this even-keeled, very calm presence on screen. I found I didn't care for this quality when he was a young star, except of course in cases when being serene and unflappable was exactly right for the role—like in The Bodygaurd (a movie that is slightly better & more interesting than you remember it being). The strong, silent type is a tough thing to pull off for a younger actor. But now that he's began to really age, I must say, I find him incredibly compelling. It's not one of those things where, it's like, he was there the whole time and I didn't realize. It's more like the qualities he has always had as an actor may simply be better suited to a graying, middle-aged dude than a man in his early 30s.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Rob
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