I'd be interested in people's thoughts on what there is to like about PAN'S, other than the creatures.

I wanted to read LOTR before the movies came out, but I barely made it through FOTR in time and I didn't have the strength to continue through to TWO TOWERS at the time. But then I saw the FOTR adaptation and was like "Oh, THAT'S what he was trying to describe." And then, weirdly, reading TWO TOWERS and RETURN OF THE KING was a breeze. I think I just needed someone to take my hand and paint me a quick picture to ground me in the world, and after that I was good to go.

Incidentally, ROTK is my favorite book but FELLOWSHIP is my favorite film.

I want to point out that LOST is a special case, because we're not just talking about magic beans in terms of where it went wrong.

The problem with LOST specifically is that it was promoted, until the end, as a mystery. And the central question of the mystery was: what is this island and why does it make these things happen? The question of the island was the point of the show. LOST literally advertised its final episodes with a commercial that ended with a guy saying "I promise, I'll explain everything."

To not answer that question makes the show, therefore, pointless, and a violation of the promise the storytellers made the audience.

I liked the idea of a "Wonderland" movie initially, but thinking about it more I don't think it replaces the "magic beans" concept. It's more a description of the type of movie -- a "Wonderland" movie or a "Heist" movie or a "boy meets girl" movie. The magic bean is still a definable thing -- in a Wonderland movie, it's what creates the Wonderland.

In HARRY POTTER, the Wonderland is the wizarding world. But the magic bean is simply "magic is real." The Wonderland is the execution of that concept.

The thing is, that the Wonderland/magic beans still have rules. The magic in Harry Potter is never "explained," insofar as they don't make up any bullshit about midichlorians or whatever, but there are still rules, both to the magic and to the Wonderland.

In HP, one rule of the magic is that magic cannot be used to create food, drink, or living creatures.

But in a broader sense, a rule of the Wonderland is that this is a magical wonderland. I mean to say that if suddenly Hermione developed leet hacking skillz by plugging a conduit into her brain, and stopped using magic, the rules of the Wonderland have been violated because it's not a science-fiction Wonderland. And if it IS a science-fiction Wonderland, you had better be ready to explain how everything that's come before can be explained through that lens. Otherwise, as a storyteller, you're just babbling.

That's the issue that I see with what I know about LOST, that it kept changing the rules without ever explaining clearly what the rules were, why they were changing, or how they weren't really changing, they just weren't what you thought they were at first.

I think a major problem with the "midichlorian" debacle in the prequels was that it didn't actually explain anything. It didn't answer a question the audience was asking, as they had just accepted "the Force" at face value as part of their original suspension of disbelief. Changing the rules like that signaled the audience to start thinking "What you think you know is wrong," which quite honestly I'm on board with in a prequel story. It seems to me that the only reason to do a prequel is to tell us that it's not what we think it is. But he didn't leverage that, at all. He knocked us off-balance by telling us this spiritual Force was actually quantifiable and sciency...and then just kind of left that hanging out there. Never returned to it, never leveraged it, just said it for no real reason. Babbling.

Or, to make a more related-to-LOST point: Lucas teased us for years in interviews and such, that Obi-Wan's line "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" was, like, the key to everything. That this was a major, important thing that we were going to understand much more deeply via the prequels. He said it was going to come into play in AOTC...and then it didn't. And then he said that it was the crux of ROTS...and then it wasn't. Yoda just has a throwaway line about "Oh, I've been chatting to Qui-Gon btw. Yeah apparently we can do that." The end. If you don't have the answers, don't go out of your way to put the questions in our heads.

Yeah, that piqued my interest in the theatre.

I actually have some stuff to say about ELI, because it's the kind of movie we sometimes reference, which is to say a movie that doesn't have any idea what the fuck it's trying to say.

Sometimes it seems to be pro-God/religion, but as a former born-again God-botherer I can tell you that the film's theology is all garbled even granting "God exists" as the magic beans; other times it seems fairly anti-religion but then that makes you wonder why it's being so pro-religion the rest of the time. I guess there's an argument to be made that it's pro-faith but anti-religion, but even that doesn't make much sense when you try to lay it over the top of the film itself.

Oh, and the twist is kind of dumb.

But I think I might be the only one on the panel who saw the flick.

In terms of theme months, I've been thinking it might be interesting to do the four iterations of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" over the course of consecutive weeks.

I didn't even remember that Master & Commander had action in it. All I remember is Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany sailing around and arguing like an old gay couple.

I liked the movie, I just don't think of it as having any action.

No, what happened was, you decided you needed to stop a conversation for no good reason and move it someplace else.

You then gave your reason -- that you didn't want conversation taking place in that thread at all. So far, fair enough, although why you allowed six weeks of conversation to take place, if that's the case, is beyond me. But then instead of locking the thread to prevent conversation you claim you didn't want, you decided to start another, actually off-topic conversation, and that when we have an entire off-topic forum for the purpose.

To put on your bold red mod voice to tell everyone to get back on topic, even though it was on topic, and then immediately be the one to yank the thread way more off-topic than it ever was, instead of just letting conversation flow, strikes me as totally capricious, and capricious, pointless redirection and/or stifling of conversation is not the way you build a social community.

Uh, Try reading the last bit of the thread again. I agree with you. Teague is the one who decided that wasn't the "place to just chat and discuss." He can reopen it if he wants, but he said he didn't want any conversation taking place there.

You could have locked the topic if you didn't intend anyone to post in it.

You could lock it now, too.

Yeah, the Hitchhiker's movie was pretty awful.

Kyle, you know handful of the bits where the movie would show an entry from the Guide and it was weird and quirky and just the way things were phrased and constructed were hysterical? The books are like that the entire time.

If I were God, you would know.

But, as we talk about in the commentary, 300 is a one-sided propaganda piece told by Spartans, to Spartans, the last ~third of which the storyteller himself could not possibly know, because he wasn't there, and everyone who was got the fuck killed out of them.

It's not an historical record. It's not trying to be. It's a testosterone-fueled, politically incorrect, partially-fabricated, cockslapping hyperbolic tall tale, the Spartan equivalent of the legend of Casey Jones, Paul Bunyan, or Davy Crockett.

I've been a fan of Shia as long as I've had him on my radar. I really hope the films back him up here.

But how many times have we heard and actor/filmmaker/whatever say "Oh, yeah, we totally fucked that last one up (even though in the early/promotional stages we said it was really good), but now that we're in the early/promotional stages of the next one, this one's really good. Seriously, go see it the first weekend and don't wait for the word of mouth or anything."