$120 shotgun mic

^^^ Likewise, I've got a proper mic now

I think that's partly because people who have good original ideas would rather keep them to themselves and go pitch them instead of posting them online. 

The Director's Cut is a huge improvement, but it's still a pretty forgettable movie. In terms of action though, the director's cut adds in a crap-ton of violence to the battle-scenes, to where you can now follow the action much better (since it isn't all cut to hell to keep the PG-13), and there's lots of cool minor details. Like the Trojan's have an awesome guy (Ajax?) with a giant warhammer who just destroys dudes. Sean Bean as Odysseus gets some really nice added moments too. The whole thing flows better.

I think the casting of Paris and Helen is a huge problem, as you don't buy their romance at all, which really hurts things as it's the central motivation for the whole story. Orlando Bloom is so shitty in this, that it makes it really hard when the movie wants you to root for him to survive. The lack of gods in the story isn't a dealbreaker necessarily, but it does leave you with a kinda dull war film. It's just never as epic and tragic as it feels like it should be.

That remains actually one of my most wished for director's cuts. Allegedly, Woo's original cut of the film was 3.5 hours long and R-rated, the studio took it away from him, cut the action scenes way down, and chopped it into 2 hours and got that PG-13.

I will go on record as defending MI-2 to an extent. On a rewatch, it's got an hour of nothingness in the middle, and John Woo is held-back by the PG-13, but it's got a really memorable goofy personality and style (and a really awesome Hans Zimmer score). I still prefer MI-2 to MI-3, which may be more "competent", but is completely forgettable, and suffers from a lot of Abrams tropes I really dislike (the flashforward, stupid unexplained mcguffin, everyone crying all the time instead of actual character development, shaky camera-work).  MI-2 at least has the distinction of going completely for broke, between the car chase ballet, constant slo-motion, and the nutso motorcycle chase at the end. It's one of the worse Woo movies, but he's still one of the all time greats at staging a setpiece.

I'm surprised at all the bashing of the original Mission Impossible, as I think it's by far the best in the series. It takes a much grittier approach and feels more like a real hardcore spy movie, versus a dumb blockbuster. Ghost Protocol is good, but it has a basically non-existent villain, and everything after Dubai is really disappointing (MI-3 has a similar problem after the bridge sequence).

I will say, I really like that the series changes up directors and aesthetics with every movie, as it keeps it fresh each time out. MI-1 is super de-palma with all the extended suspense and paranoia. MI-2 is a hard-turn into a crazy melodramatic slo-motion bullet opera, MI-3 is basically a feature version of Alias, and Ghost Protocol is super bouncy and light almost adventure-comedy.

So your favorite will probably just end up being whichever one's aesthetic genre appeals to you the most.

^^ Ya, that phone call is semi-redeeming in that way, although he's so far gone that it can be a bit hard to tell which parts of the call are serious and which are staged for the cops.

You know, it's not super hard to jam nearby cell-phone signals. I have a friend who cooked up his laptop so it would trick nearby phones into thinking it was a cell tower and forward all their calls through it, wouldn't be a stretch to have it drop signal. I haven't looked, but I'd be surprised if there weren't solutions like this all over the web. Maybe it's time we take the fight to them.

Huh, didn't realize Zemeckis directed Romancing the Stone, weird. I dunno, I remember it being a pretty forgettable Indiana Jones knockoff, I distinctly remember the action being pretty weak, but maybe it warrants another watch.

Ya, pointing out you're a shitty cynical focus-grouped remake doesn't suddenly make that OK.

An actual good version of this movie would take the ultra-violence of the original and merge it with all the crazy political stuff happening in recent years, like Dredd with the satire turned up more. In 10 years, Robocop would probably be created by Google or Boston Dynamics, and be used to fight and stop protesters fighting for fair wages. Actual warfare in other countries will all be air-drones dropping bombs (which the movie would be wise to make a point of), but if you're trying to put down unrest domestically, Robocop would be the perfect tool.

We just had a whole discussion about this in the chat.

I think this looks like hot garbage. Totally joyless, and I hate almost every single creative decision in this trailer.

So instead of a traumatic, iconically violent death by close-range bullets, he dies from a car explosion, like something from a TV pilot on NBC. And instead of having his hand amputated, where you just have a face surrounded by metal emphasizing how he is a cyborg, he now walks around with his 2nd hand completely in-tact, making the suit look like just another power-armor suit. Speaking of the suit, they've thrown out an iconic believable looking design in favor of an awful, ugly, "hip" black-neon monstrosity, to try to make him look cool to 13 year olds. And instead of cool-looking practical models, ED-209 is a fake-looking CG effect.

Oh, and now it looks like Murphy immediately remembers who he and his family are, completely nullifying the entire emotional arc of the first film. The whole thing that's great about the character is that he's a tragic frankenstein monster, a man abused by the system against his will, who finds out who he used to be and re-discovers his humanity by the end.

But nope, instead we can have his wife telling him how he should be a better robo-father and hang out with his son more 

Oh, and its PG-13, so he just fights other robots, because if there's anything we having seen enough of yet, it's robots fighting eachother.

And actually, if you're just kicking around music video's for funsies, I'd be curious to see if any forum members were interested in doing fan-made music videos for any of the songs. Like if I wasn't cripplingly busy for the next 3 months I would film a video for Communist Propaganda of Steve just for the hell of it, cause it'd be an incredibly fun project.