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I maintain that A Bug's Life is ingenious. It's the fable of the industrious ant and the lazy grasshopper crossed with the The Seven Samurai. The acting is good; the animation is great. I don't get why people discount it. I like it a lot more than Finding Nemo or Wall-E, both of which I find to be rather insipid.
EDIT: Holy crap. A Bug's Life used "Baba O'Riley" to introduce it? Weird. "We're going to need to edit around the whole 'teenage wasteland' lyric. Yeah, but that first part about farming is great."
Ash, almost all of that stuff either comes from the director's commentaries or is more appropriate to a director's commentary. I feel like the point of a fan commentary is less to discuss the "behind-the-scenes" background and more to discuss how the story, characters, and setting fit together as well as the personal reactions about what works for one panelist and doesn't work for another.
I think it's great when a panelist has worked on the movie and DOES have behind-the-scenes stories, but that's quite secondary. I do like talk about theme and motifs (and the example of the cloud motif hinting that the Rainmaker looms in the future is a good one).
It sounds like you just really liked the movie and didn't care that the plotting is clunky (which is fair) and so got impatient that the panelists kept saying the screenplay wasn't tight. I care about stuff like that and agreed with the panel, so I liked the episode.
You know, if I could grow a beard, I'd look just like Ben Affleck in that photo in the link. It would hide the difference in our chins.
/begins plotting
//and buying elevator shoes
///and dieting
////on second thought, this may be more effort than it's worth
I believe you mean "Yippee kiyay, melon farmer."
Good point. I would normally call it Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, just like I say Leon: The Professional and also Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
I like to cover all the bases: wickets.
I watched Mad Max and The Road Warrior yesterday and today and, wow, do they hold up. I'm sure I hadn't seen them in about 25 years, and they just knocked me out with their attention to character and theme while delivering on the cars and crashes. Great, great films.
Lamer wrote:Jimmy B wrote:Bacon and Cage......
Sounds like a title for an 80's cop show 
Bacon and Cage
got a badge and gun
They're gonna clean up the stree-ee-eet
They got the bad guys
all on the run
They're bringin' down the heat
Bacon and Cage's
Maserati in black
is hotter than anyone's drea-ea-eam
Kickin' in doors
or jokin' with Mac
There's no better crime-fighting team
And Trudy and Joan
are waitin' at home
hopin' they come home soon
And Copper the dog
is asleep like a log
dreamin' of chasin' the mooooooon!
The captain will
have their badges for sure
if they embarrass the mayor agai-ai-ain
Bacon and Cage
have known trouble before
but they always win in the eeeeend!
BACON AND CAGE!
Oh man, there's no telling how Nicolas Cage fits into this. He has made some very weird choices since Face/Off, like maybe he KNOWS something that MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW, like a Lovecraft story or something.
I do know this: out of all those people who died this year, Nic Cage NEVER WORKED WITH A SINGLE ONE. What are the ODDS of that, man?! Hollywood is a very small town.
Just imagine when Kevin Bacon's horrible secret gets out! That's dude's connected to EVERYONE!
/keep watching the skies
I've already documented my suspicions about John Travolta murdering people he can't trust with his horrible, horrible secret*. Both Robert Hegyes and Ron Palillo—his co-stars in Welcome Back Kotter—died in 2012.
But how deep does this rabbit hole go? Travolta was in...
The Devil's Rain with Ernest Borgnine
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 for Tony Scott
Michael and Lucky Numbers for Nora Ephron
Two of a Kind with Charles Durning
Primary Colors with Larry Hagman
Saturday Night Fever with Sam Coppola and featuring the music of Robin Gibb
The Experts, scored by Marvin Hamlisch
a 1965 episode of American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark
the back of the Rodney King video with Rodney King (you have to squint)
ALL DEAD IN 2012. Coincidence? I think not.
Did Travolta mistake Michael Clarke Duncan for Ving Rhames? I know I do. And President Bush's dog Barney just died. COINCIDENCE? PROBABLY, BUT WHO KNOWS AT THIS POINT?
* Not being gay. That's no big deal. I mean, Christ, he played the mother in Hairspray. It has to be WAY WORSE THAN THAT to murder people. I'm not saying he's an alien, but....
I completely agree that we've had plenty of Jedi stories now. Obviously, we should be exploring more podracing.
I love beautiful cinematography, but I don't give shit number 1 about "one-ers". Cut, don't cut, I don't care. Shut up and tell the story.
Let's not put too much emphasis on the idea of foils. The 1980s were rife with what Roger Ebert called "wunza" movies: one's a cop; one's a con... one's a veteran about to retire, one's a lunatic about to commit suicide... one's a bounty hunter; one's a mob accountant who jumped bail... One's a black Detroit cop, two are white Beverly Hills cops...
That often worked, but it led directly to—for example—Rob Schneider getting cast in Demolition Man and Judge Dredd.
Great commentary!
I love MasterZap's interpretation (but I don't agree that Dredd's reasoning is obvious). My comment at the end was that it didn't feel right for Dredd to pass Anderson despite her losing her gun. But it would have been perfectly in line with Dredd for him to simply interpret "primary weapon" differently for her. My friend and I agreed that her psi ability was underused—or at least under-useful. It doesn't stop her from getting captured or help her escape much.
I think the movie would have gone from 6.5 to 7.5 for me if:
Ma-ma and Anderson were a little more interesting
We knew Dredd and Anderson were walking into a hornet's nest but they didn't (it took me a while after the lock-down to realize "Oh, THIS is the movie.")
Anderson's psi ability is what allowed them to realize that Ma-ma's detonator wouldn't work if it was as far away as the ground floor
Dredd explicitly said that Anderson passed because her "primary weapon" is her psi ability and not the gun she lost
I'm right with you on Filmspotting and Filmspotting SVU, altho I'm not quite ready to go back to Original Recipe yet. By the way, Matt Singer did some very funny commentaries as one half of the late, lamented Gymkommentary.
Just watched The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), another of the Ealing comedies starring Alec Guinness. I pooped on The Ladykillers here a few weeks ago, but I really liked this one. Guinness is a gold bullion delivery man who finally musters up the courage to rob it. He and his little gang (with Alfie Bass) recast the gold into model Eiffel towers to smuggle it out of the country. The humor and acting are solid thruout; there's a fair bit of car chases and other modest action; and there are a couple of really clever set pieces.
If you've only ever seen Guinness in Star Wars, check out this and/or Bridge on the River Kwai. He had a wonderfully light comic touch and class.
As long as the movie answers your question with "that would be bad for the future", there's no more point in asking it. They're the experts. 
But you're right that there's a whole lot logically wrong with that scene, despite its being awesomely horrifying.
The real question is why Kid Blue doesn't kill Old Joe; that's the whole point of sending him back in time in the first place, and they don't need any information from him. Instead, he takes him back to HQ, where Old Joe is able to kill everyone and solve all his and Young Joe's problems—I mean not accomplish anything.
I just thought of another thing, tho. Think of the story from Abe's point of view. He gets high up in the Mob, where he is awarded the trusted position of... leaving behind the awesome future and living in a shit hole in the past, supervising punk hit men?
Possible sequel idea?
johnpavlich wrote:I forget who said it, but I'm reminded of this quote: "The best way to critique a film, is to make another one."
Oh sure. I'll just wait until Hash Men—my re-imagining of Rashomon as a comedy about a drug deal gone wrong—hits the street before saying that Kevin Smith is a clueless dork of a film maker.
I haven't even managed to attach James Franco and Miley Cyrus to it yet.
EDIT: Wait, do you think Kevin Smith would be interested in directing it?
This thread has come to remind be of that Onion article about the guy who writes for Just Shoot Me and refers to it as "JSM" and assumes that everyone watches it.
By the way, did you see the sequel to Run of the Arrow? Run of the Mill. Kind of average.
Jimmy B wrote:Well, no you are talking about actively betraying your race
Well, I personally have betrayed my race, but I mean the movies Squiggly cited were specifically "betray your race" type.
Run of the Arrow is clearly presaging that, tho, so it's a great example, but I'm guessing Rod Steiger doesn't abandon his military post or kill a white man.
I'm willing to pay off my bet on Little Big Man, tho. I think he actually betrays Custer.
/small bills or bucket of quarters, Trey?
Little Big Man is a pretty good example (haven't actually seen it), and I don't know what happens in Run of the Arrow, but we're not talking about just going native or making a friend out of an enemy. We're talking about actively "betraying your race". That's the DwW/Fern Gully/Last Samurai/Avatar story.
For the record, I think it's fine to retell a familiar story, as long as you do a good job. I thought Avatar was a horrible, paint-by-numbers mess, whereas all three Toy Story films are well made.
Also, my favorite part of Never Cry Wolf was when Liam Neeson showed up and killed all the wolves. That guy is awesome.
Squiggly_P wrote:People shit all over Avatar for being Ferngully. ... The first movie I thought of was Dances With Wolves (and The Last Samurai). Trey can probably think of some older film from the 70's that has the same basic plot. My dad can probably think of one from the 60's or 50's.
I bet not. Dances With Wolves marked the shift from America's bullish "manifest destiny" philosophy to "Oh, you Indians have lived here for thousands of years? Maybe we should respect that or something." Westerns had been losing their Indians for years before that, tho, and had become all about cowboys.
And there aren't really any other stories that are similar because there were very few situations similar to the American West. Other "colonization" movies ran to the likes of Zulu and such: holy shit, look at all those Zulus who are trying to kill us! I wish we didn't have to kill them all!
Only vaguely would I put Lawrence of Arabia in that category, and that film doesn't exactly have a lot of love for Arabs.
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