I'm going to see this movie when it comes out because I actually have a thing for bad movies. That said, I do also like watching shit blow up, and this movies does look like it'll have a lot of awesome stuff-blowing-up shots. I can see why these films make so much money. I just wish the people who make Transformers their meat and potatoes could get so excited for a movie like Children of Men or The Prestige. I believe this is due to the fact that explosions are pretty easily identifiable as awesome, while drama and acting probably all looks the same to them. Alas.

Also, I will give Bay credit for actually blowing up real shit in his movies. I suspect, tho, that he only does it because he himself wants to see giant fireballs throwing cars around on his set. He really is a connoisseur of explosions. A great chef knows what great food tastes like. Great art can only be created by an great artist who has spent years honing his skill. If explosions can be great art, then Micheal Bay is such an artist.

The part with the mouse. Totally didn't need that part, anyway.

Thank you for reminding me of My Cousin Vinny. Just watched it on netflix. That movie is great.

I guess I should add a few more that haven't yet been mentioned yet. Trying to keep thinking of overlooked flicks, but it's hard to come up with good ones.

Ed Wood. Overlooked film from the mid 90's by Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp. It's not really a biopic since it's heavily fictionalized, but it definitely gives you a good idea of how totally surreal Ed Wood's reality was. It's also a flick about film making, which may or may not make it more relevant to this forum.

And speaking of comedies about film making, Living In Oblivion is another that isn't widely known about. Steve Buscemi wrote, directed and starred in it. It's about a director trying to finish a film while the entire cast and crew seem hell-bent on making his life a living hell. Pretty much equal parts goofy antics and "it's funny cause it's true" type comedy.

(sorry if there's an ad before that...)

And now for one that's so obscure that you're probably lucky if you can find a copy of it in any way shape or form on the planet because as far as I know this film toured a few festivals and art house theaters and then failed to get wide distribution in any way shape or form. I speak of Colin Fitz Lives!. The story goes like this: in the mid 90's, this guy named Robert Bella decided he was gonna make a movie. I dunno if he was inspired by Kevin Smith or not, but the guy made the film by maxing out his credit cards to the tune of $150K. He made the film, it toured in festivals, won awards, became a hit at Sundance and the guy went from nobody to promising comedy director overnight. Unfortunately, the offers he was getting for distribution wouldn't give him enough money to cover his expenses for making the film, so he ended up not taking any of the offers, going flat broke and sleeping at night in a rented mini-storage unit curled up around the canisters containing his awesome film.

I saw this flick WAY back in the late 90's when it was still doing the festival / arthouse circuit, and I remember liking it a lot. The trailer I have below this sorta makes it out to be a wacky, goofy, sophmoric sort of dumb comedy, but the film I remember was pretty dark and was more dry comedy than zany antics. Anyway, for the last decade or so I've been waiting for this damn movie to come out on DVD or something so I could have a copy. Turns out that this Robert Bella fellow finally managed to pay off his personal debt and has struck a deal with IFC to release his film in a Video On Demand format. It's $20. I'm currently downloading it. I can only hope that it lives up to the memory I have of it. Anyway, here's a trailer, but I do believe it's trying to sell the film as something that it's not. Once I download it, assuming there's not some ridiculous DRM involved, I'll watch it and attempt to cut a trailer that better resembles the darker comedy tone I remember the film having.

EDIT: Colin Fitz Lives is ok. You can tell the guy was going for a Kevin Smith type of dialogue through most of the movie, but the actors weren't up to the task. Not bad, tho. It's not gonna make you laugh out loud or anything, but it's got some decent scenes.

Don't buy shit from IFC's little webstore, tho. It's got DRM that prevents you from using any player but their own, and their player is fairly crap. Play, pause, stop and not much else. No option settings that I can find. Kinda crap way to sell your movies. They should strike a deal with Netflix for rentals and just sell DVDs.

Have you guys seen the bit Conan did on it? http://teamcoco.com/video/conan-editors-love-final-cut
I could have sworn there was some other software that they announced at the same time that was getting the same sort of design "adjustments", but I can't find an article that confirms this. Meh.

On an aside, since we're talking about editing software here, have any of you tried Lightworks? I know it's not on mac, but it would be interesting to get some opinions from people who are familiar with other pro-level editing apps and who actually know what they're doing.

I only ask because it's one of the few editing apps within my budget (effectively zero) that 1) runs on windows and B) is targeted at people who want to do more than post vlogs on youtube.

The part with the alien invasion is the part that a lot of people - myself included - have a hard time getting over, not to mention a few other things that prevents the movie from making sense.

I don't have E.T. either. I dunno if my rental place will have it. I should probably just buy it...  It's probably $5 at walmart...

I almost watched that a while back when netflix was aggressively insisting that I would love it every time I logged on. "Dude, you are so gonna love this movie. We think you'd rate it like 4.5 stars. You HAVE to watch this." But the description sounded so dull, and there are very few documentaries that manage to keep up a decent pace for a couple hours and don't resort to padding and shit, so I never watched it. But since you guys said it's good, I watched it.

And now I don't know how to feel. As a documentary it's fucking amazing. The content in the movie makes me feel really bad about saying anything positive about it, tho, cause I'd honestly rather the thing had never had to get made in the first place.

I loved Super 8 as well, but yeah, it's got some weird problems in the writing that you could have fixed really easily. The only thing that really started to bug me were the jump-scares. Good lord there are a ton of those in there.

The part of the story that matters is the part about the parents and their kids, and the monster story is secondary to that and really sort of supports it. I mean, the kid likes this girl, but their parents hate each other, so they want to keep them apart. The monster steps in at that point and physically takes her away. The two fathers have their talk in the car and confront their guilt and anger right before the kid's scene where he stops running and confronts the monster.

The monster is building this machine that will apparently collect all the little cube things, but he's also wasting time killing people. In the scenes where the monster attacks people it's initially just collecting parts for it's machine, but then it's distracted by some human and takes them or kills them. I guess the scene with the kid was supposed to make it realize that it should stop wasting time and take off. The two fathers spend the movie ultimately defeating their own goals, which is to have a positive relationship with their kids, because they're too preoccupied with being pissed off at each other and feeling sorry for themselves. They take their selfish emotions out on their kids in the same way the monster takes it's own selfish emotions out on the humans in town. Overcoming selfishness is something of a theme in the film, as the fat kid has to deal with it as well.

I wanted to facepalm when the locket thing happened, but later I met some people who actually didn't get the whole "letting go of the locket" thing, so I guess the movie is riding that fine line between being your typical summer blockbuster and being subtle, though subtle isn't the right word.

I also thought the 8mm film was going to play much more into the movie's plot.

Overall, tho, it's probably the most fun and upbeat movie I've seen in a theater in a while. Too many action flicks are just so damn dark and depressing. Also, those two main kids can fuckin act. Pyro kid was funny. I liked how scenes with a bunch of people would often have multiple conversations going on at once. I'll probably see it again in the theater. Unfortunately, as I was being shoved through the exit door of the theater by the dicks behind me the kids' film started playing, so I didn't get to see more than a couple seconds of it. Wish I had just kept my ass in my seat.

On a totally unrelated note, if you guys haven't seen it, you should watch "Find Me Guilty". It's not amazing or anything, but I'd say it's probably Vin's best performance and kinda proves that the guy can act.

Not just that, but wasn't this supposed to be the first in some kind of trilogy or something? They still talk about making another one. At the end of the flick he is now in control of the most powerful army in the universe. Assuming the next movie isn't about the sudden arrival of some interdimensional space demons he has to fight with his new army, where do you go from the end of this movie?

When I was 15 or 16 I was bored one night and was surfing around late-night cable TV to see what I could find. I ended up bumping randomly into Fellini's "La Strada". Some goofy chick who was acting all weird about her hat started getting bullied by some big oaf guy. I left it there for a minute just to see what the hell was going on and ended up watching the whole thing and having my feeble little teenage mind blown. My idea at the time of what a good movie was supposed to be was stuff like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and Die Hard. I never really got into Fellini after that, tho La Strada is still one of my favorite flicks, but becaues of that movie I ended up finding Kurosawa and allowed myself to watch older movies like "M" and "Breakfast At Tiffany's", which are both also favorite films of mine now.

A year or two later I got into anime with Akira, and eventually discovered "Grave of the Fireflies" (in a theater at a film festival, no less), which blew my mind again. Grave is my favorite film without a doubt.

La Strada showed me that movies could tell these really simple stories without any special effects or action sequences, yet they could be just as exciting and absorbing in other ways.

Grave of the Fireflies taught me that you could use a movie to eviscerate a theater full of grown adults and make them all sob uncontrollably like little babies.

And Return of the Jedi, for the record, was the first flick I ever saw (or at least remember seeing) in a theater.

I saw this in the theater and was amazingly perplexed at how much I liked it compared to what sort of reviews it was getting and what people were saying about it. I thought it was a great parody of sorts to all the various "constantly too dark but with tons of neon" superhero flicks that had been coming out at that time, and just funny if you're into comics in general.

Actually, if you go back to the so called "golden" age of comics, you find a LOT of characters that have the same sort of super powers that these guys have. "Brick Bat" was a guy who dressed up like a bat and threw bricks at people. Why? Cause it's a cool sounding name, I guess. The Shoveler and Carmine The Bowler would have fit right in with that era of super heroes.

There's actually a site that has info for a lot of those old abandoned crap characters, and the best part is that they're all so old now that they're public domain and you could make your own comics or movies based on these guys if you wanted to. Public Domain Superheroes

But yeah, I liked this flick. I wouldn't want to watch it all the time, but once every few years is good.

You know what's weird as hell, tho. This morning I woke up and went outside for a cigarette and was thinking about the movie I saw a couple days ago, "Super". I started thinking about all the various superhero parody films and this one popped into my head. I thought "Hey, I should add that to the DIF suggestion thread, that would probably be an interesting flick to talk about, given the cast, the recent spurt of superhero parody flicks, etc." So I clicked on the DIF book mark and look what pops up. If I had been drinking anything it would have resulted in a beautiful spit-take.