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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Trey
Take a movie that doesn't warrant a serious discussion ... and either script or semiscript an episode with the intent of funny.
But that would take planning and forethought and... effort.
Ewwwww.
Does that mean there's going to be an episode where characters from one show up in the other?!
See: DIF 2001 commentary.
Also, in the near future both shows will add a new crossover cast member - adorable Cousin Oliver. You're gonna love the hijinks that little scamp gets up to!
Film Grok was founded by Serge Delpierre, my surrogate (HAW!) on the 2001 commentary.
Which happened because I've known and worked with Serge for years. He was the line producer of Return of Pink Five and Ark, among his many accomplishments. Film Grok isn't a copy of DIF, it's a spinoff. 
Absolutely. Its also worth noting the era of each film coming out and how it relates to what the comics were in each of those time periods.
I can't wait to expound on exactly that, in great detail.
Wait, no... the other thing.
Scarcity equals value. Basic economics.
Very high on my list: Star Trek The Motion Picture would have us believe that an incomprehensibly advanced machine intelligence would call itself V'ger because it couldn't figure out there was dirt on its nameplate and that its name was really Voyager.
Or maybe because "My Name Is V... Something, Something, Something... ger" took too long to say.
Oh, and I guess if you haven't seen the flick, uhhh... spoiler?
Wait'll they stumble onto Independence Day - as I recall we did a lot of Baldwin chitchat in that one...
Being John Malkovich. Has there ever been a movie where puppeteering plays a bigger role? This seems to be in The amazin' stokes wheelhouse.
True dat. I lost count of how many people told me I had to see Being John Malkovich before I finally saw it. When I did, I loved it, it's defintely a one-of-a-kind flick. Some great puppetry in there, too.
And John Cusack looks just like me, so it's kind of eerie.
I've been rewatching Stargate SG-1 a lot lately, thanks to the dearth of summer programming. As a result, I've started trying to convince Trey to give the show a try.
For now, I'm not watching Stargate for purely business reasons.
Someday I hope to be able to explain that statement. And watch Stargate.
Bumping this because the Thursday schedule was just announced.
ooh, ooh - Phil Plait chairing a panel on bad science in movies and tv? Soooo tempted to go just for that....
Just so Jeffrey's got a wingman on this one, I liked The Village quite a bit, and the "twist" had already been spoiled for me before I ever saw it, too. There are a lot of great moments in there, not just scary ones but nice character touches as well.
Like Signs and Sixth Sense, The Village showcases Shyamalan's nifty skill at creating terror from the simplest of everyday situations. (Signs was pretty good until the lame ending, so I put it in third place among those three movies. )
Have never watched all of Unbreakable - apparently it's about comic books and my disinterest in that topic is already on record - so I've got no real opinion about that one, and haven't seen any of M's other movies at all. But Sixth Sense and The Village are both right up there on my list of nifty thrillers.
I think Shyamalan's got serious skills as a filmmaker, but I haven't made enough of a study to have a real opinion on how he's become such a pariah.* If whatever's been getting in his way can be gotten out of the way, I think he's got plenty of potential to knock another home run.
*But my first recommendation is the same as most people's - enough with the cameos.
Yep, that'll be a fun episode...
/got no dog in this fight, haven't seen it myself
But then after SIXTH SENSE, he had all of Hollywood telling him he was a total genius who could do no wrong, and he eventually started to believe that this was true, and stopped second-guessing his choices because he had been convinced they were self-evidently genius.
I'm not sure that's true - not one of his movies since Sixth Sense has been a hit, and more than one of those movies has been called the Wurst Movee Evar. Judging from this interview, he is aware of this.
Apparently it's not that he doesn't care, it's that he honestly doesn't know why people don't like his stuff anymore. I find this more plausible than the theory that he believes in his own hype, since that hype turned sour a decade ago.
I am reminded of the Akiva Goldsman quote about not knowing in advance which of his movies are the "bad" ones, since he works just as hard on all of them.
And Ghostbusters II, which was kind of like a comedy, except for the being-funny part.
The problem with comedies and DIF is that often there's not much to say, other than "this is a funny line..." Comedies that are fx-heavy (you'll notice almost all of the above list are in that category) at least give us something to talk about. And in more than one of the above commentaries we still degenerated into "yeah, so... this is a funny line..." .
If it's a good comedy, it'd probably be best to just watch the movie and hear the good lines, rather than hear us describe all the funny stuff you're not hearing.
But if it's a lousy comedy, then maybe. (See: Ghostbusters II)
I've been watching reruns of NewsRadio and thus right now Maura Tierney is stuck in my head.
Mmmm. Smart.
The correct spelling is forbideen.
But if it's on Netflix streaming, shit. No excuse not to, at this point.
Seriously. Press play, close your eyes and think of England, and it'll all be over in 90 minutes.
Of course, the scars will last a lifetime...
As you know... we've gotten a lot of mileage by mocking Surrogates.
But I don't know if any of the crew has ever actually seen the thing. I hadn't, until tonight.
My god.
My god, it's full of stupid.
So, the movie posits a near-future world in which everyone stays home in their bathrobe while an idealized robot simulation of themselves lives their life for them. Fine - that's the magic bean, ready go.
And then - not one thing in the entire movie makes any sense at all. The changes in society that supposedly result from this revolution are ridiculous and completely impractical.
And to top it off, the whole thing is one as-you-know scene after another. Or more like one you-live-in-this-world-so-why-the-hell-don't-you-know-this-already? scene after another.
Oh Jonathan Mostow, to think there would come a day when we would look back on Terminator 3 as your "early, better work".
I will give the movie points for an amusingly rubbery robo-Bruce Willis, and for Radha Mitchell, whom I'm always happy to look upon.
But otherwise, dayum.
DIF team, Surrogates is on Netflix streaming right now. If you haven't seen it, get busy. The time has come for us to stop talking about Surrogates and actually do something about it.
Gaah, the stupid, it still burns. Gaaaaah.
1. The Incredibles
Then, literally in no particular order because I can't choose among them and you can't make me.
Ratatouille Monsters Inc. Finding Nemo
Next, only slightly less awesome, on an awesomeness scale that is still entirely awesome:
Wall-E, Toy Story, Up
Near the end, only because it's been so long since I've seen them that I don't remember them. I'm sure if I watched either of them right now I would love them.
Toy Story 2, Bug's Life.
10th because I haven't seen it yet:
Toy Story 3
11. Cars
We're also not right, and are often left behind, left out, and get nothing but leftovers. Oh look, here comes the left hand of God to give us a left-handed compliment...
Dammit, being left-handed is rough, I tell ya - the english language itself is biased against us. Attica! Attica!
If I was just a bit older I might even have been forced to write right-handed in school. Fortunately that wasn't common practice anymore, or my brain would be even more screwed up than it already dipstick peanut balloon pants.
Dang, at our current rate of release, it would take a year just to do that list. So... y'know, vote early and often...
I'll go on record and say in my opinion it deserves both. At least I do love it, even though I recognize it's a shockingly brutal movie at times. I think that's probably one of the reasons I love it.
Not because I love brutality in movies, but because when Strange Days gets dark and violent, it doesn't pull its punches. The violence is ugly and disturbing as hell... as it should be.
It also got a lot of flack for being supposedly so demeaning to women, making them either victims or monsters. Feminists didn't know what to make of that, when the director of the movie was a chick herself. But that complaint only works if you completely ignore the presence of Angela Bassett, who's easily one of the all-time top female movie badasses because she's also a real character and not an automaton. (Hey, whaddaya know, the same screenwriter wrote Aliens...)
Plus Strange Days is also a twisty little neo-noir mystery with an extra-twisty ending, and a lot of funny bits as well. I don't expect everyone to love it like I do, but it's one of those movies that I will always watch anytime, anywhere because I find it so damn fascinating.
So, DIF'ers, if you haven't seen it, get on it. And if you think I'm wrong then I will see you in the audio arena, bitches. Bring it.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I maintain that AI is Pinocchio because AI IS PINOCCHIO. It's right there IN the movie.
Even without the blatant Pinocchio tie-in, David begins and ends as a sympathetic character and never becomes a rampaging killing machine. Ergo, Pinocchio, not Frankenstein.
As has been pointed out, none of the robots in the movie are evil, the evil is all done by humans. AI is post-modern Pinocchio: the puppets don't just become human, the movie says they're actually better than humans.
I guess I could see it as Frankenstein in the sense that the creations do eventually "destroy" the creators. But the creators really destroy themselves, so it's a stretch. I still vote Pinocchio.
Aren't PINOCCHIO and FRANKENSTEIN themselves fundamentally the same story? Artificial creature seeks acceptance, validation, and its place in the world?
The difference is how they end: one story suggests that an artificial being can have a soul, and the other teaches that an artificial being can NEVER have a soul and thus is inherently evil.
Pinocchios: Bicentennial Man, I Robot, Wall-E, AI
Frankensteins: 2001, War Games, original Battlestar Galactica, Metropolis, RUR
Oddly enough, Terminator is Frankenstein whereas Terminator 2 is Pinocchio. (Terminator 3 and 4 are blatant cash grabs and outside the scope of this discussion.)
And that's why I haven't had much luck getting Strange Days onto the schedule. It's one of my faves, but few to none of the rest of the team have seen the thing.
Which is just plain wrong.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Trey
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