I mentioned it in the chat during the episode but it likely got lost amidst the discussion or no-one had ever heard of it, but there's a European comic called The Wheel - The Prophecy of Korot (and by European I meant it's non-English). It's set in a future society where criminals are sentenced to live out their lives in an alternate dimension/dream state, and the story involves a man whose sentence involves him living out a life in this fantasy Conan the Barbarian-like realm... as a princess. It's a bizarre story and involves this guy-as-a-girl leading a kingdom to victory in a war. At the end he returns back to his reality and with his sentence over continues his normal life, no-one being any the wiser about what he accomplished whilst in the form of this princess.

I thought it was a really interesting twist on the hero/heroine's journey. Worth googling and reading a scanalation, since I don't believe it's published in English.

An example of a movie where the hero loses all his powers and is ok with being normal at the end is TRON.

Awesome and genius clip. Fantastic turn from Guy Pierce too.

Added me, did I do it right though? Looks different to the others

Great interview, thanks for the link. She sounds like a genuinely nice person (on top of being gorgeous).

I have to admit I'm really surprised that so few of the forum members appear to have watched many westerns. Mainly because as a kid, one of the most obvious toy or roleplaying games was to play cowboys and indians and movies of that genre were the inspiration for new characters and stories etc. Like others, I was born long after the genre's heyday but I was still able to watch a fair amount of them due to the fact that they were often shown on daytime TV here in the UK. The afternoon film on one of the 4 terrestial TV channels over here would invariably be an old movie - either a WW2 film, a Western or perhaps a black and white adventure film.

It's tempting to think of Unforgiven as a landmark but it wasn't entirely a new approach - the Western genre has always had 'darker' revisions over the decades. The Searchers for example was not a typical Western at the time (compare and contrast to Stagecoach), and others like Little Big Man, Soldier Blue and the Wild Bunch have all had different takes on the genre. Even Eastwood himself had been in several movies which were far removed from the typical John Wayne adventure long before Unforgiven came around (Pale Rider, Outlaw Josey Wales), and the Spagetti Westerns are a very different take on the standard set of tropes. Young Guns and Dances with Wolves both preceded Unforgiven as well.

Good Westerns worth a watch (no particular order):
Wild Bunch
The Searchers
Young Guns
Tombstone
True Grit
Geronimo (both Wes Studi and 1962 versions)
Gunfight at the OK Corral
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Last Outlaw
The Quick and the Dead
Maverick
Silverado
A Man Called Horse
Broken Arrow

And then there's Deadwood, which is a fantastic series.

John Woo is another director who has a distinct style, or used to have. You can definitely see a common style between Hard Target, Face Off and Mission Impossible 2, though these are admittedly an over-emphasized version of the style in his early Hong Kong films (e.g. The Killer, Hard Boiled).

LA Confidential has a moment like that and I remember thinking that it was an awesome movie. Years later I watched it again and surprised myself by just having a meh reaction to the whole film.

And a lot of Korean films manage to shock, and not always in that 'twist' way that you see favoured in most Western movies. Which is probably why I enjoy watching Korean films so much.

Leading me to suggest an intermission topic in the future could be on the key differences between American films and those from the rest of the world, e.g., British, European, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian, Korean and Japanese, and why Americans usually aren't enamoured with foreign films.

This has one of my favourite one-liners - "Eat floor... high fibre". Looking forward to the commentary guys, should be an interesting one.

This looks amazing, actually looking forward to this.

GELFLING!

I love Dark Crystal and will fight any man, woman, child or beast that dare say anything negative about it. Or I'll get my brothers to do it for me 

I guess it's a movie that you had to see growing up, rather like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which I never saw when I was a kid and think is a bit pants... so there!

Yeah, I saw that too. I've not seen it myself, but is it one of those terrible films that people say that they like because it's 'intellectual' to do so?

So the visual effects noms are:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Very interesting, especially in light of The Potter Fuckup. No Captain America and no Ghost Protocol. Shame really as like Trey I was kinda amazed to hear that it's actually Evans in all the scenes and not just a pasted  head - I wonder if the effect itself wasn't considered good enough.