Wow. That's awful.

After watching John Carter along with DIF yesterday, I made the most of my rental fee and watched it properly. I found that I liked it okay, for the most part.

Certainly, everything that the panel said was accurate. There is a hell of a lot of pipe being laid in the opening half hour, much of which is totally unnecessary. While the stuff with Bryan Cranston was funny, it's not a part of THIS story. And while the opening action on Mars sets up the stuff that we find later, it's confusing and largely unnecessary.

Instead, imagine opening with John Carter searching for his gold and getting chased by Indians into a cave. You could even involve Bryan Cranston if you like, just put it in open country. There's your opening action.

The death of the thern in the cave not only transports Carter to Mars but also causes the other therns to change their plans and give their spider-technology weapon to Sab Than. This might happen in part because of what Carter does when he initially arrives on Mars if he, say, attacks Sab Than and rescues Dejah Thoris but ends up getting thrown off the ship and lands near the thark hatchery.

Now the film proceeds as Stanton presented it but we now know the good guy, the bad guy, the princess, and the sky wizards cleanly and naturally before spending time with the tharks for a while. Carter now has a purpose: he wants to get back to help the princess but has to heal and gain allies among the tharks first.

Stanton's ending is clever, but the whole frame story is unnecessary. It's not in the book and doesn't help our understanding of the main story, altho it DOES make it more romantic. You could still use it—just cut the opening prolog to a few minutes.

Instead, the film spends several minutes with the baffling opening action, then several minutes with Carter in the city, then several minutes with Burroughs, then several minutes with the cavalry before getting Carter to the cave.

I thought I'd hate Rose at first, but I absolutely loved her. And her admiration for the Doctor made me like Eccleston. I actually think he was almost perfect as the Eighth Doctor because he was no good with the humor, which made him seem all the more haunted by the Time War.

Tennant was just great, and the second series is my favorite overall. I thought I'd love Marta but her mooning over the Doctor was annoying, and the third series finale was awful. Donna was okay. I don't see what some people see in her, but she didn't really annoy me much.

Smith is just terrific, and altho I didn't like the arc in series 6, series 5 and the development of Amy and Rory has been fun. I've never really liked Rory, but the producers heaped such endless misery on him that he grew on me just for his dogged persistence and humility. I liked River a lot at first, but as they tried to untangle her story, it just fell apart, and she became more and more annoying in her smugness and selfishness.

Cool! The low-budget roots certainly show, but I like the acting, and some of the visual effects are terrific. I was a little confused by the audio, tho.

Scarecrow's voice in particular seems disconnected from the character because, I think, the actor was recorded in a studio like a podcast but Dorothy was recorded on set with a boom. That tonal difference was quite noticeable. I thought it was some kind of voiceover at first before I realized it was supposed to be coming form Scarecrow.

I just got an insurance payout (whoo hoo! Mom didn't need that leg!), so I contributed handsomely. Well, inoffensive-looking-ly.

Well, the film makers clearly agree with you and not Matthew. PreCrime definitely thought Lively was alive because Anderton's "Where is she now?" indicates that he isn't misled by the phrasing "he drowned her". What baffled me on first viewing was, if Lively was murdered less than a minute after the arrest, how did the cops not think it was weird that she didn't show up for the indictment, trial, and sentencing? I mean, Anderton gets suspicious about Lively after noticing she's missing during a cursory investigation of the containment prison. Spielberg would probably pull a ninja punch in the nuts by saying "Well, everything after Anderton gets put in the containment prison is his revenge fantasy, per the creepy guard, so it doesn't matter."

Well, Burgess hired Crow to portray Anderton's son's killer. I agree that he then needed to clue Anderton in, but he did that because Anderton asked about Lively, which... seems really unnecessary. He could have just said, "I looked into that Lively thing you asked about. She got scared and decided to live off-grid after the crime. [smirk] It took Missing Persons all of about 4 hours to find her." Ha ha, question answered; no need to frame your close friend for murder.

Of course, THEN you have Agatha freak out and clue Anderton in that Lively really is dead, and the minute Anderton looks into it himself, Burgess knows he's screwed. He hires Crow and gives Anderton an envelope with "all you need to know". Anderton gets the ball and does what he does, only opening the envelope LATER when he's on the lam. It just says "Leo Crow killed your son." Since Anderton WOULD have read that eventually, he would have tracked down Crow regardless.

Something I think is funny about Minority Report (aside from the ridiculous bullshit about getting your eyes replaced so you can't be found because you're a fugitive and then REPEATEDLY using them to get thru security because you're a VIP) is the idea that Leo Crow thinks he's going to make bank on his plan. Leo, man, no one has been murdered in DC in SIX YEARS. The cops ALWAYS stop it! Make your deal to get paid based on the dude getting ARRESTED, you PUTZ! Then find a way to dispose of Anderton's son's picture (hint: go digital) and tell the cops it was all a big mistake.

There are several things wrong with Minority Report, and certainly that's a major one. However, I personally think that the biggest plot hole in the history of the universe is the fact that the airplanes in danger of running out of fuel in Die Hard 2--the whole threat behind the bad guys' plans--could have just landed at Washington National or Baltimore. No pilot would just circle until he got so low on fuel that he couldn't divert to a nearby airport.

OMG! Now Horshack has died!

Think about it! Robert Hegyes, Ron Palillo, that guy who played Kenickie in Grease. John Travolta is killing everyone he can't trust with his secret!

Olivia Newton-John's boyfriend even FAKED HIS OWN DEATH to avoid being murdered! He knew too much!!

The Star Wars redesigns are cute, but the Old West Justice League makes me melt.

Oh, man, I totally should rewrite The Importance of Being Earnest to be set in the Star Wars universe.

LADY BRACKNELL*
To lose one parent, Commander Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness. Who was your father?

ERNEST
Well, I don't actually know who I am. I was found by a protocol droid of charitable disposition in a battle droid factory on Geonosis and given the name "Worthing". Worthing is a class 1 space port there.

LADY BRACKNELL
And where did this charitable protocol droid find you?

ERNEST
In a bag of leftover hands.

LADY BRACKNELL
A HAAAANDBAG?!?!!!

High Flight of Barbarella
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. and Zarban

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — rocketed high and fast among
The eerie, tinny silence. Orbiting there,
I’ve sought Durand Durand, and flung
My eager craft through high halls without air....

Up there, beyond the burning blue
I’ve searched Tau Ceti's heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or ever angel flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Unzipped my spacesuit and showed my boobs to God.

I always assume that when an author leaves the ending ambiguous it's merely because he or she didn't know how to end the story satisfactorily. I'm willing to grant that sometimes it's done for purposeful artistic reasons, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Lang contended that M is ultimately anti-death-penalty, but his wife was the writer, and she was more politically conservative (and, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer). The Nazis agreed with her and offered to make Lang head of German film studio UFA. (He fled Germany that night.)

I don't have a problem with the ambiguous ending, but it's one more thing that makes me feel like the movie is not as tight as it could have been, and its reputation relies on Lorre's terrific performance.