I prefer Red Planet on account of the cute robot dog. The dog is my favorite part of the movie.

Rover. That's hilarious. See, cause we call them 'rovers' cause they...  rove...  but "Rover" is like a cliche name for a dog, see... so... "Rover"...

And Val Kilmer.

Just watched Dante's Peak. Having never seen it before, I can confirm that it is indeed better than Volcano, in much the same sense that Transformers 3 was better than Transformers 2.

Man, how come random movie-killing scratches on DVDs always happen right at the end of the fucking movie?

I still haven't seen the Apes prequel, but I think X-Men First Class was easily better than any of the star wars prequels.

That is an interesting read, but they've sacrificed their story on the alter of empty metaphor. Even if all of that is true - and it seems likely - why are you telling me that? Why are you making all of these connections between prometheus, jesus, the engineers and shaw? Just putting them there doesn't mean anything in itself. Why did you try to cram that into the alien mythos when you could have made it a completely different movie and probably had it make more sense?

EDIT:

I'm guessing they used Pearce as Weyland so they could later have a younger Weyland in one of the next movies? Or maybe his son? Or maybe a robot that looks like him or something?

Dunno...

It gets worse. If they were going to wipe out humanity with bio weapons, why would you go to earth to have ancient humans paint dots on the wall instead of either nuking the planet or infecting them with the bio weapon while you were there? Also, why would you make people in the first place if the goal was to then eradicate them? Also, why would you want to eradicate humanity by replacing them with a far more dangerous form of life? The Engineers are easily capable of killing the shit out of humans, but as we see at the end of the film, they are apparently no match for the resulting mini Lovecraft vagina tentacle monsters the bio weapon produces.

But you can rationalize this a bit: They're aliens so they don't think or act in ways that we'd find logical. They may have some kind of plan. Or maybe these guys are some kind of terrorist group that hates the fact that their kind are going around seeding life on other planets, so they set up a trap to kill off the races they've seeded with some kind of bio weapon. Whatever.

The problems I have with the movie revolve around David and the 'humans' on the ship. None of them are real characters.

The alien ship is taking off. We need to stop it. What's Plan A? Ram the only space ship we have into it, killing the three of us. Interesting. How about we try something else first? Or maybe we can cripple their ship by having our ship land on top of it, or by smashing the side of our ship into it's propulsion systems. As opposed to just ramming straight-on, cockpit-first into the thing. So that there might be some slight chance that we could possibly survive.

And let's not let this most important decision we've ever made in our lives have any sort of emotional impact on us. Just another day at the office, really. Well, the boss wants us to kamikaze into the side of an alien ship again. And they lowered our benefits last year, too. Buncha jerks. I might just hand in my letter of resignation after this trip. *crash*

Going back a bit further, we've got the revelation that the old guy is still on the ship. This is supposed to be a revelation, even though this is clearly what's going on due to the prior "David talking to some mystery figure in a hypersleep chamber. Which has it's own logic flaw of "how the fuck do you talk to someone in hypersleep", but they kinda wave their hands at that with the whole "i can see your dreams" bit, so fuck it. Anyway, Lisbeth walks into sick bay and there's the old guy and she's all "Oh, you're here too? Huh." I didn't get any sense that it was some kind of big deal. It didn't feel revelatory, possibly due to that scene, but just the way everyone is so blase about it in the room. How did no one else on the ship know about it besides Theron and David? And the medical guys? Like... No one noticed that they had a half dozen medical guys on a ship that otherwise had only a dozen other people on board? Doesn't seem weird at all?

The Engineer's ship just crashed. What's the first, most logical thing to do after your ship has crashed? Go kill the scientist bitch, right? Even though that guy had no clue where the fuck she was, and had no real reason to go try to kill her.

Further, how the fuck did he get there without some kind of breathing apparatus? If they need the keep their ships set up with an earth-like atmosphere and the humans - who share the same fucking DNA, apparently - can't go outside without helmets and breathing apparatus, how did he get to the ship? Better question, tho, is why the fuck didn't he go to one of the other alien ships that were all lined up and waiting for someone to just hop on board and fly it to earth?

You've got probes that go around picking up life-forms that apparently didn't pick up the life forms in the soil in the room as soon as they opened the door.

You've got David concocting some kind of scheme to have an alien baby put into hypersleep while still in the womb so it can be brought back to earth. Why? Did the old guy tell him to do that? WHY!? To make it a weapon or something? They don't know what the fuck it is! I can get why they'd want to do that in Aliens, and I can get kinda why they'd want to do that in the first film, although I kinda assumed that the droid just went fucking batshit in that movie. However, in this film, the thematic ideas presented kinda make you wonder if the androids aren't trying to do to humans what you assume the Engineers were going to do. They're sick of being second-class citizens and they want to use this alien species to kill off all humans. That kinda fits with the first movie's robot as well, and possibly MOTHER's motives, given that if this film is correct, then MOTHER must somehow figure out all of this. It's making me think about it too much and breaking things in the first movie and every subsequent movie where the robots aren't acting that way.

The old guy clearly just wanted answers, or to be fixed by these aliens or something, but the robot seemed to want to kill everyone on the ship for no particular reason. He also doesn't do a very good job of hiding the fact, given that he sticks the alien jar thing in the fridge with transparent doors.

The geologist guy, when he first goes into the alien structure, acts like he's about to have a claustrophobic breakdown or something. When that happened in the movie I was like "Well, you were stuck on a space ship for a couple years, so that's kinda weird." Then he blatantly says "I'm a geologist". At this point I was like "You're a fucking geologist? Do you do that in between playing bass with your punk rock band?" The guy doesn't act like a geologist, and makes his weird nervousness about being IN that place even weirder. You're a geologist and you're not used to dealing with enclosed spaces? Wait, you're a geologist and you've not once said something like "huh, these rocks are kinda cool" or ANYTHING!?

The biologist guy finds an alien life form on another planet and immediately tries to interact with it without knowing a single thing about it other than the fact that it looks like a penis with a vagina face. How does he interact with it? He sticks his finger in front of it's... vagina? Mouth? What the fuck am I looking at, here? Is he about to get his finger bit off, or is he about to sexually molest a worm? What the fuck, creature designers?

David gives that guy some contaminated booze. Guy drinks it, then fucks his wife, implanting her with some kind of creature. Had she not cut the creature out of her, one can assume it would have bursted out, yeah? Out of her womb? Not out of her chest, tho. Anyway, following that logic a bit, let's say that some Engineer drinks a little bit of that stuff. Did he then get his cock sucked by the Engineer in Alien that we see dead with a chest burster type damage to his... suit (no exoskeleton... ok...)? So that his... throat or stomach or whatever is impregnated? Wait, if the aliens take their shape from the things they replicate from, how the fuck do they have exoskeletons? Or acid blood? I guess the acid blood could be from the stomach acid? Cock sucking is the only thing that makes sense, here. The Engineers apparently swallow. Maybe the alien next impregnated a lobster or something and got the exoskeleton that way.

"That's because I'm a human being and you're a robot." Worst line in the movie.

Lindelof's method of writing seems to be to come up with a bunch of scenes that would be cool and cryptic, and then write scenes in between those scenes that serve as an excuse as to why the last scene makes sense or why the next scene is about to happen.

Cool scene where they're running from a cloud of silicon ... rocks... that, OK, why the fuck was that scene there? They pilot dude was like "oh shit bros, get back to the ship or y'all gonna die in this dust cloud thing" and then you're all "oh shit I hope they don't die in the dust cloud thing" and then they get caught in the dust cloud and nothing happens, and then those two guys are still in the thing and nothing happens to them... So why the fuck is that dust cloud thing an issue? Lose communication? They keep communicating with the guys all fucking night, telling them about the life form and where to go and all that shit. I would understand if they had to move the ship or something and thus stranded them all there for a while. I could understand if those silicon chunks had been like little flying razor blades and cut them all to bits. But it was just a chunky version of a dust storm with strong wind.

In the first couple alien movies, that would have crippled the ship, killed one of them, doused communications and created a sense of being trapped and isolated. In this movie it just kept the two stupidest guys trapped in a structure where they then flip-flopped from being completely idiotic to flying into hysterics for the slightest reason.

"I believe in things because that's how science works. I'm a scientist."

The real reason this pisses me off so much is because you could SO EASILY have made a bad-ass movie out of this. I had like a dozen different possible ideas in my head before watching this. Things they could have done. Aliens made us was one of the things. The aliens being a doomsday weapon to use against humans was one of the things. You could make that work logically and have an actual reason for that to be the case. Or you could have had these guys entire home world be destroyed by the alien creatures after having discovered them during their explorations. Our future destruction would have been preceded by their previous destruction. An advanced race whose goal is to push their boundaries and explore succumbs to a horrifyingly primitive one whose only instinct is survival and multiplication. The ship they find is crashed and maybe there's a survivor or something living in cryostasis. Give one of the intelligent aliens the same sort of backstory that Ripley had in Alien 3. Just pick it up without the prior movies to give it some mystery.

But this movie fails in just about every conceivable way. The dialogue is unbelievably bad, the characters are either completely flat archetypes or fucking bipolar, none of them act like scientists to the point where when you are blatantly told that they are scientists you say "what the fuck? those dudes are scientists?", the questions it poses aren't thought-provoking questions about humanity or life or religion or science, they're cryptic guessing-game questions where any answer that seems to be correct is totally illogical or nonsensical.

I haven't seen Lawrence of Arabia, tho. Maybe the movie makes complete sense if you've seen that flick?

OK, I just got back.

Fuck Damon Lindelof.

Who the fuck is this guy and what has he done with Ridley Scott?

This movie is terrible. Every five minutes I wanted to scream "WHO THE FUCK WRITES THAT AND WHY DID YOU FUCKING FILM IT!? WHAT THE FUCK!?" This is one of the most poorly written things I've ever - EVER - fucking seen, but I have to wonder how Scott could have possibly thought that this was even a serviceable script.

Though I guess it's not quite as bad as Alien: Resurrection.

Seconded.

I started watching the Asylum's version of Snow White last night and stopped half way through because it was so god damn boring. I know they're mostly aware of how schlock their films are, but someone needs to tell their directors to stop making dull shit. The last several I've seen have been hard to watch, with the Three Musketeers being the only exception. I've not seen Lincoln Vs Zombies yet, tho, and Brad Jones apparently loved it a lot, so I'll have to check that one out.

When I first heard they were making a movie called "The Raven" about Poe, I was hoping for a biopic, cause the dude lived a really tragic life that would make for a very compelling story. After I saw the trailer I lost interest, but the visuals looked pretty good. Haven't seen it yet, tho. My parents liked it.

My parents, however, have horrible taste in film. If it shows up on netflix instant I might watch it just to see how bad it actually is.

It's not contagious, and apparently they think they've found and treated the source, though it's apparently very difficult to culture that particular bacteria so it could be over a week before they're certain.

So you probably don't have to worry much unless you live in the area they're talking about.

In other news, the Trololo guy died

Battleship is one of the funniest things I've seen so far this year. The bluray for that is going on my shelf right next to US Seals 2.

Nice spreadsheet, tho I'd agree that if you're gonna do both the 'good' and 'bad' stuff, it should probably be separate lists. Just so you don't randomly pick something to watch and end up with a turd when you were looking to watch something good

I feel like I should suggest these two films:

"Dreams" by Akira Kurosawa

The title is literally what the movie is. Kurosawa would apparently write down interesting dreams he had, and this film is a collection of several of them in short film form. I've found the first and last to be the most interesting to watch, but there are striking visuals in every sequence.

"Koyaanisqatsi" by Godfrey Reggio

It's an 'art' film / pseudo documentary I guess. Nothing but visuals set to music, but the juxtapositions and pace of the film along with the music is interesting. You kinda have to watch it to get it. The first trailer for GTA 4 was an homage to this movie.

Also:

M - Fritz Lang. Movie is AMAZING.

Also:

The post I made vis-a-vis anime films probably shouldn't be included on any list of 'best whatever' movies. Mind Game is not a 'great' film, although it's a great example of a movie that is balls-out insane. Tekkonkinkreet, tho... That's a hard call to make... That movie has some really well done character arcs and weaves a nice couple of themes throughout the film's various subplots... It just gets so god damn ANIME at the end, you know? I'd say keep it.

Just got back from Snow White & The Huntsman. It's not bad. That's about all you can say about it, really. I like how they gave the queen a bit more of a tragic backstory to her. I like how they kept a lot of the weird fairytale aspects without having it interfere with the story too much via deus ex machina. There are a couple bits that kinda come out of nowhere, but they don't feel wrong or out of place...  more they just pop up and you go "oh wait...  yeah...  this is a fairytale...  huh... I kinda forgot for a minute..."

I do, however, dislike Kristen Stewart's portrayal of Snow White, in that she basically does the same thing Pattinson does in Twilight. I wanted to hand her a bottle of ex-lax and a magazine and say "go take care of that problem, then come back and finish shooting the movie". When she's not pulling a pooping face she does OK, but she does that a lot in this movie.

Also wasn't a big fan of some of the camerawork. Getting really sick of close-up jitter-cam action scenes where just keeping your eyes focused on the point of interest is a chore in itself. I don't think many movies are really planning out how the camera is working to tell the story.

I liked the dwarves, tho, and the movie becomes much more watchable after they show up as they provide the few lighthearted moments in the film. Unfortunately they also aren't really characterized all that well, and it leads to a couple hollow, undeserved moments that are supposed to be emotional but aren't.

I also really liked Theron in the movie. It's not a one-note performance (it's two notes... with a third note every once in a while), and she alternates between chewing the scenery and adding a bit of vulnerability to what is normally the definition of a one dimensional character in most other adaptations. I wish she'd had better motivation in this version, though they do try to rationalize what the typical motivations are. Kinda. It's not entirely successful... at all...

Spoony described it as being similar to the sort of fantasy films you'd see in the 80's like Willow and Ladyhawk, and he's right, but in those movies the fantasy stuff was more involved in the story. Here it's more of a background where the story takes place. The queen and her abilities are the only real fantasy aspect of the film that has bearing on the film. You can remove most of the other bits and not really notice.

There's no Medusa you have to kill in a certain way, there's no curse that needs to be lifted, there's no magic sword that must be found, there's no charmed trinket that bequeaths protection or some special ability. The fantasy aspects are more akin to... i dunno...  more like science, really. Biology. There are creatures. There are plants. They behave in ways that aren't typical of our reality, but in the reality of this world they just ARE a certain way. The queen is the only thing that doesn't really fit, but they magic bean her up, so it's OK. Everything else is just the way things are.

But I liked it overall. Definitely a movie worth picking apart for future study. It's an interesting take on the story that adds some pathos to the queen and thus gives it a bit of a tragic feeling. It's worth watching just for that aspect. There's also a blatantly obvious Princess Mononoke reference in the flick, which will always make me like your movie slightly more.