Well, while I can't stand Confused Mathew (so tired of obnoxious nitpickers on youtube), you'd still have to go a long way to convince me Cloud Atlas is anything but a misguided failure. Well intentioned, ambitious, and smartly edited, but a bad movie nonetheless. I'll wait until the DIF on it, but I don't think you'll sway me on this one (and I'm hardly in the minority judging by both the critical and commercial response).

About fell out of my chair laughing when they

Kevin Smith needs to just go away. His movies weren't ever particularly good to begin with, but he happened to land just at the start of the internet fanboy generation and managed to get a career out of it. At which point he never bothered to try to get better as a film-maker, or mature as a writer, and when people started calling him on it turned into a huge crybaby and said he was done making movies.

He's absolutely thin-skinned and a total drama queen. It irks me too, because the whole "you aren't allowed to criticize because you aren't a great director yourself" is the oldest fucking defense in the book, that gets trotted every time a creative person starts receiving criticism. Trouble is, you never see those same people using that logic when they start getting praise from critics and audiences "who are you to say my movie was good, you've never made a movie, you aren't properly qualified to judge it's merits".

While White has insane opinions, if you listen to the man talk (check out some of his discussions on the slashfilmcast), its clear that A. he truly believes this stuff, and B. He's an extremely knowledgeable and well-versed film critic, who knows his shit. The guy is really interesting to read because he'll offer a reading or viewpoint on a film that you are not going to get anywhere else. Most of the time I think his viewpoint is wrong, but even when I disagree, his reviews often highlight an aspect of a movie that I overlooked, or put it in an interesting or original context. And other times, he completely gets it right, like his infamous Precious review calling it an awful, racist movie that promotes negative stereotypes of minorities.
(http://nypress.com/pride-precious/)

He does what so few film critics care about anymore, instead of just saying whether a movie is good or bad and trotting out the same points as every other goddamn review out there, he writes something that will inspire discussion.

I think we've kind of reached the point culturally where just transposing Romeo and Juliet into random movie premises is not enough to hold up your idea.

I mean, it's been over 10 years since Romeo Must Die, screenwriters need to stop doing this.
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Do you honestly expect a filmmaker to mount an extended defense of their screenplay in 140 character chunks with some random guys he's never met before on Twitter? The fact that he even bothered to engage with some of the criticisms and have a brief discussion is incredibly impressive. The 1 hour thing absolutely makes sense, if you've worked on something for 4 years, I think there's a lot you can go into regarding your intentions and motivations in making various choices that is simply unfeasible to discuss in that kind of format.

Man, this project really is cursed, I don't know if you want to take it on Tom, you might get struck by lightning or something

BDA, I couldn't agree with you more.

I am so fucking tired of "competent" and "average" summer action movies with no vision, originality, or personality to them. The whole Comic Book movie explosion was honestly the worst thing that could've happened to blockbuster film-making. The 90s had its share of shitty action movies and die hard knock-offs, but at least every movie was self-contained and tried to 100% deliver on its premise (I'm thinking of stuff like The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, Speed). Now everything is a goddamn origin story, or a setup for a more interesting story that "we'll totally get around to in the sequel guys".

If anybody except James Cameron had made Avatar, it would've ended before the big battle even took place, with a post-credits scene hinting at what was to come. I miss movies that just go all out and deliver on their premise, walking out of the theater feeling satisfied instead of thinking "well the sequel will probably be good".

My specific fear about the new Star Wars is that we'll get a situation similar to Tron Legacy. That's a dangerously close parallel, where it's taking a 40 year old franchise and trying to make a direct sequel to it while also re-introducing it as a big Disney franchise. That's a movie that is to me at least, totally boring, that doesn't at all deliver on the promise of it's premise, and seems to exist to setup a better sequel in the future instead of being a good adventure movie on its own. I really, really hope that doesn't happen here. The smartest thing they could do is to really tell a good self-contained Star Wars story, with a satisfying finale that ties up everything from THIS movie, instead of leaving us hanging.

Ya, it's tough to get on board because I simply haven't enjoyed any of his films that much up to this point, but that isn't necessarily a reason to write him off. He's consistently made movies that are competent, but flawed and not very memorable, which is not what I want out of a new Star Wars.

That being said, as has been pointed out, he may be the right guy for the job on this one given how much he turned Star Trek into a Star Wars movie and as it's well known that he's a fan.

The biggest worries for me then are how he's going to handle the action and how he's going to handle the score.

Up till this point, I've not been a fan of his approach to action, which tends to be way too shaky, cutty, and close-up. I really disliked how he shot the space battle stuff in Star Trek for this reason, the guy seems terrified of Wide establishing shots and almost every Enterprise shot was a medium shot or a close up.
My fear is we'll get a movie that feels decent, but doesn't have any kick-ass memorable sequences in it (kind of like Superhero origin story movies where they save all the good stuff for a sequel).
The juries still out until Star Trek Into Darkness comes out though, because just off the trailer it looks really impressive visually.

Regarding the score, if we're lucky John Williams will still be with us and willing to finish out the new trilogy. If we're going to have all the original cast back, I feel like we need that continuity of bringing back Williams.
If not, the writing is on the wall that it'll be Giachinno. My dislike for his Star Trek score is well documented, but if it has to be him, my hope is that JJ being a big fan of the originals can convince Giachinno to not fuck with the original feel and write something that feels similar in style. If he pulls another Star Trek though, I'm officially done with the guy.

Die Hard 4 was not an R in America, and you could tell cause they really cut the crap out of the movie and it suffered for it and didn't feel enough like a Die Hard movie (the unrated dvd cut is better, but still weak, lots of added CGI blood, which is lame).

Also, it actually was not as successful as you think. It made back it's money and all, but if you adjust for inflation, it's actually the least successful of the entire series: http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/cha … amp;p=.htm

I should point out that I disagree with Trey's contention that Ma-Ma's heart-monitor is poorly designed.

You would never want to design the dead-man switch to send a continuous signal until it goes away, as any kind of radio interference would set off the bomb and likely kill you. You can't really count on a reliable enough signal to risk the chance of this happening, so Mama's version is actually much more sensible.

In her position, you'd much rather risk having it accidentally not go off, than risk it accidentally going off and either killing you or blowing up your business (also, she would never be able to leave the building technically speaking).