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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Jeffery Harrell
Wow. That "Super 8" trailer looks promising. I have to admit, J.J. Abrams knows a thing or two about making movies.
Okay, top five sequels:
Godfather II
The Dark Knight
Toy Story 2
The Wrath of Khan
From Russia With Love
Along those same lines … top five most disappointing sequels. Same rule: trilogies don't count. If the next movie in the series was a foregone conclusion when this one was released, don't include it.
Ah, but are the comic books canonical in the context of the movies?
That is the nerdiest sentence I've ever typed.
I tried Vegemite once. It was on a hotel breakfast buffet in Sydney. Put me off my feed for the whole trip. I had what was allegedly a delicious piece of grilled barramundi that night for dinner, but all I could taste was tar and despair.
Vegemite does not belong in mouths.
Silly Trey. Nobody in X-Men was named "Jim." Your thesis is wholly untenable. Untenable!
Okay, fine. So hockey combines the very best aspects of soccer and figure skating, which still adds up to a great big stonking "blech."
I'm not sure about "unsuccessful." I looked up the numbers, and IMDB said it made a modest profit ($35M gross on $20M budget), not counting rentals and sales and whatnots. So commercially, it seems like it was at least not a fiasco.
And artistically … there's nothing about this movie that doesn't creep me the fuck out. Just watching the very beginning and seeing the matte paintings of the stars — they're surprisingly distinctive — creeped me the fuck out.
Also? The science isn't entirely awful. It's not super-hard-sci-fi, but it's not totally stupid either. Which for a Disney movie from 1979 is saying something.
The Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Olympics, even though hockey combines the worst aspects of soccer and figure skating. Blech.
The Shot Heard Round the World, the game-winning homer that won the Pennant for the Giants in 1951.
Bob Beamon's shattering of the long-jump record by two feet in 1968.
Kerri Strug's one-legged vault landing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
The 2007 Fiesta Bowl. Boise State beats Oklahoma on a two-point conversion in overtime with a goddamn Statue of Liberty play. Greatest football game ever played, period, end of paragraph.
Next: Top five best lines of dialogue in movie history.
I got The Black Hole from Netflix tonight. You guys need to do this movie. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I remember every frame. I can't really tell whether it's secretly a great film, or whether it irreparably scarred me.
Please please please do this one.
I always assumed it was pronounced "Ewwwww."
Why don't you guys ever do this on weekend nights? Being employed sucks.
Anything called a typhoon cause that's an awesome word
Mount Pinatubo, cause of this picture
The Chinese Famine
The Boxing Day quake and tsunami
And coming in at number one, with an estimated death toll of a hundred million people, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic
Top five films based on original screenplays, 2000-2009.
I can't even name five Jean Claude van Damme movies. I'm out.
Posting from the giant living room computer, Brian, Fayda Vayda and I just noticed your name is spelled oddly in our experience with Jeff names.
Yeah, no kidding. Thanks, Mom, for condemning me to a lifetime of spelling my name out loud to people and being really easy to google.
The readers demanded plot and characters, and for their sins, they were given the Rama sequels.
I think there's room for movies that are more about ideas than plots or characters. I'm damned if I can think of an example right now beyond 2001, but I think such a beast could be, if it were done right.
So much of the actual plot of Rama, though, is based on solar-political intrigue, and that spells death to a movie plot.
Who's been fucking who now?
Deep Blue Sea
Jurassic Park ("Clever girl.")
Lake Placid
Tremors
The Ruins even though it's technically a plant but seriously whatthefuck :shudder:
Top five songs with the word "blues" in the title.
I was just looking at that one on the iTunes and wondering whether I should rent it. But I never heard anybody say anything good about it. It's worth seeing, you think?
If it makes you feel any better, I specifically opted out of buying a Blurry player just a couple weeks ago. My vintage DVD player finally died — motor burned out, I think — and I was all set to go HD when the stories of the Avatar firmware problems began to emerge. I sent Amazon forty bucks, they sent me a very serviceable SD DVD player, and all is well. When we go a year without hearing about mandatory firmware updates and all that crap, I'll buy.
As for the iPad itself, all I can say is use one. Don't just go to the store and play with one for a minute, I mean actually use one for a little while. Cause I was iffy on it until I bought mine — I bought it for a specific purpose — and now I simply cannot imagine trying to live without it. I was at a meeting with some C-level executives at a major federal government agency last week, and I swear, all anybody wanted to do was play with my iPad.
Oh, right. Movie. So the music for "Sunshine" was done at least in part by Underworld, who also contributed to the soundtrack for "Trainspotting," which is another Danny Boyle movie and probably one that's ripe for the Downinfrontening.
And Matthew, I'm not sure I could get through that drinking game drinking water. That's one beardy movie.
I wonder if Danny Boyle and Peter Boyle are related?
I always heard it as "Shaving Ryan's Privates," but the judges have ruled yours is also acceptable.
Peter Hyams made it. It was called "Outland." Although admittedly, that was more "High Noon" in space. Okay, it was entirely "High Noon" in space.
The great irony is that just as visual effects have gotten good enough that it might be possible to adapt "Rendezvous with Rama" for the screen, we've reached a sort of point where a story that contemplative and cerebral could never, ever work.
I wanna play too. Can I be the second unit second assistant camera's second assistant?
Top five movies starring a black dude in a leading role, in no particular order:
1. The Shawshank Redemption
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Glory
4. The Matrix
5. The Empire Strikes Back (shut up Darth Vader totally counts)
Next: Top five spoof porn titles not including "Edward Penishands" because that's just too easy.
After "Sunshine," I think you guys should do both "Event Horizon" and Soderbergh's "Solaris."
I've owned an iPad for ten days now. And you know what? It is magical. No, not really. But that's as good a word for it as any. It's transcendent. It's a total luxury item, and there's an excellent argument to be made that I shouldn't have spent the money on it, but I would have been amazingly happy with it at, literally, twice the price.
As for the movie … yeah. You guys were back on point this week after an Avatar commentary which — I'm really sorry — disappointed me. When Dorkman said you were doing this one on Twitter, I think my reply was something like "Sunshine is two thirds of a great movie." Words to that effect. Which obviously isn't a unique insight or anything; it seems like everybody shares that opinion more or less. But I think it's true in two respects. First, two thirds of the movie is great; the other third not so much. But if you take out the part that fails — Brian's phantom edit — you're not left with a whole movie. It's missing something.
You guys talked about this throughout the commentary, but I don't think you ever got anywhere with it. That's not a criticism; I can't really crack it either. There's something important missing from the story and I just don't know what it is.
I almost wish it'd been bigger and more mystical — and I rarely say that. The movie's about the fucking sun, for crying out loud. It's the biggest thing in our everyday world, and it's so bright we can't look at it so we have only the faintest notion of what it actually looks like. Primitive cultures worshipped it and it's really not all that hard to see why. It's the fucking sun.
So make it an ensemble character piece on a hard-sci-fi backdrop. There's the guy who gets depressed because he feels so small. There's the guy who gets addicted to staring at it through NDs. There's the guy who's terrified of it but tries to hide it and self-medicates to deal with it. There's the guy who starts having delusions that the sun is alive and talking to him. And conflict emerges between those people.
I dunno. Maybe that's a stupid idea. But on a high-school-lit-class level, there's gotta be some key conflict at play. Man versus man, man versus nature. This movie went with man versus blurry monster, and that's just not cool.
But the stuff that's not terrible is awfully, awfully good.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Jeffery Harrell
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