Tucker is a pretty good movie as well, though it's more about the car's history than the man's.

I seem to be in a small camp on this one, but I liked Chaplin.

Would you consider Ed Wood to be a bio flick? If so, then that one. It may not be accurate, but it's great.

the fourth one didn't have nazis in it and people hated it as well.

I'm tellin' you guys, it's the nazis.

This has been in production for four years? Or just had a really long preproduction period? That's a lot of time, either way.

I dunno about this one, tho. The dialogue in the trailer bothers the hell out of me. It's like they chopped up every motivational speech ever given and made a movie with it. Some of the flying bits did look pretty good, tho.

If they did The Last Airbender, I would love to hear them talk about why the long takes work in movies like Children of Men and fail completely in a movie like Airbender. Also, slow motion is the worst thing you could do to an action sequence. Every frame of that movie looks good on it's own. It's when you put them all together that you have a problem. And the writing is awful.

I vote Zodiac / Collateral for a neo-noir discussion. Zodiac has the traditional noir stuff going on. Moody lighting, gritty realistic tone, detective story, etc. Collateral is, in my opinion, a noir film that tries to break as many of the typical noir rules as possible while still remaining noir. It still has a mystery element to it, it still has a guy who unwittingly gets involved in solving some kind of crime or series of murders and it's obviously dark, gritty and realistic.

EDIT - replace Zodiac with LA Confidential.

Yeah, I guess I didn't think about how people might take that bit about action sequences. You guys see what I was trying to say, tho. I'm not all film-schooled, so I dunno how more well read people refer to this stuff. It's just stuff I've noticed when comparing movies I loved vs movies I didn't like and trying to figure out where one succeeded and the other failed to impress.

I do agree, tho, that sometimes I just wanna see some shit asplode.

Yeah, I loved this movie. I haven't seen any of Miike's other flicks that I can recall, cause I had previously heard that most of his movies were gorefests. I'm thinking about catching some of his other stuff, tho. What other Miike films would you recommend?

Someone should post the hour of showtunes and sing-a-long that followed the commentary. I wish I had had the foresight to record it myself. Shame on me.

I'd never read the books and went into the theater for this only knowing that there was going to be a train part, a part where a guy jumps out of a window and a lot of guns and car chases and stuff. I walked out wondering why the hell they had tried to throw all this mystical magical weaver BS into a movie that was primarily marketed as "People shoot each other in slow motion". I recall a review for this film that called it "The Matrix for Fast and Furious fans." Having never seen the fast & furious films, I have no idea how accurate that was. I thought it was OK for a big dumb action movie. It has a certain cheesy quality to it that I kinda dig, but then, the previous films this director has made have that same sort of cheesy quality.

I'm kind of a fan of the "______ Watch" films, tho. They are goofy and weird and cheesy and stupid and over-the-top and fun. A lady does a high-speed car drift across the front of a building in Day Watch. I feel like this film was trying to do that sort of shit, but in a less OTT way, like the guy thought "no, we can't do that...  that would just be silly."

Remove the loom stuff, make it a simple revenge flick, crank up the crazy shit and make the action sequences have consequences for the good guy or the bad guys and you've got a movie I'd like. The main problem with the movie is that the action scenes don't really have an impact on the plot until the very end. It's just stuff they do to show off what awesome assassination skills they have. The first 3/4 of this film could have been replaced with a Star Wars style text crawl.

Or you could just do what they did in the comics. The comics described in the commentary sounds like it would have made a cool flick.