You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by C-Spin
Did you work on this or somethin?
He not only worked on it, he lost more than a few night's sleep over it, I'm sure. Me too, incidentally. Seeing as it's been posted and all, I'd love to hear any feedback anybody had to offer.
I'd like to help out on this. In a weird way, Trey is sort of indirectly responsible for me getting into visual effects at home in the first place. I think it was 2003, on a whim I picked up a Star Wars Insider at the grocery store, and it had a few articles about fan-films in it. One of them was talking about the fan-film awards for that year, and the bit that I remember the most was about Pink Five. It talked about Trey and Amy filming that together on a blue screen in his kitchen, and Trey doing the effects on his home computer. That idea made me really excited, so I made my own green screen and downloaded all the VFX freeware I could find. Of course the article only had stills from the short (and maybe one blue-screen image?), and being on my parents' dial-up I didn't get the chance to actually see Pink Five until years later. But it was conceptual inspiration, at least. Before I read that article, I didn't even know you could DO that kind of stuff on a home computer.
But yeah... I'd be down for helping in whatever way I'm allowed. I have CG and compositing skills bordering on "passable."
If it's a 2.5 hour movie and he's not really 'costumed' for the first two hours and then gets one before the climactic fight or whatever, I'd be OK with that as well. Supporting character gets to know him and helps him craft a public identity to be a beacon of hope and all that. That would be good as well.
Not really an option for Superman since Hancock already did pretty much exactly that. That'd be like doing an Indiana Jones sequel and ripping off the scarab beetles from The Mummy...
I saw it yesterday—it felt like Act One of a movie I actually want to see (the adventures of Shaw and David's head in search for the true origin of life, with lots of philosophical discussion on the idea of "who made us?").
That was one of the things that irked me the most about the way the movie ended. David and Shaw were the only two characters I came close to giving a damn about. A movie where they take their hijacked Engineer ship off on a space adventure to find our true makers and discover why they made us and why they want to unmake us... That sounds pretty awesome, actually. Because just in the initial premise you've ditched most of the dead weight that dragged Prometheus down. But I have two problems with that. One is that they'd still be building off this extremely flawed mythology, so they're crippled from the start. The other... they made a sub-par movie and sacrificed a sensible ending in the name of sequel set-up... I don't want to reward them for that by giving them more of my money should the sequel become a reality.
I assumed that the Giger look, like what we assumed was the Space Jockey's head but turned out to be a helmet, was just armor or a space suit. Which the guy at the beginning simply wasn't wearing. And given that the guys in the point cloud hologram were wearing the helmet, I assume they were wearing the Gigersuit as well. Didn't the decapitated one they found have a Giger-y body?
Why WAS old Weyland played by Guy Pearce in make-up? Surely it wasn't just so they could do that TED Talk thing as part of the viral marketing...
Since we're free to throw around spoilers here, and you've mentioned the alien fetus thing... I've got beef.
We know in the Alien universe that the face huggers can impregnate seemingly any creature, which is far-fetched, but whatever, there's your magic bean. And it combines with the DNA of whatever the host is and the alien characteristics merge with the host's to create a sort of hybrid creature. I'm fine with that.
But in Prometheus... David gives boyfriend scientist a smidge of the black fluid, which we saw cause the pale man to break apart. It's alien fluid, we don't know what it does, fine, free pass. It turned those maggots into giant penis snakes, let's see what it does to boyfriend scientist. Well seemingly it starts to turn him into one of the Space Jockeys, though we'll never know if he would have survived the transformation because Charlize Theron burns him to death. So far I don't have a problem with this.
But then... Dr. Shaw is pregnant. Because they had sex the night before, scientist boyfriend being in his semi-transformed state. And she's apparently three months pregnant with what we find out is... a tentacle monster? Um... where are these tentacles coming from? Scientist boyfriend didn't grow any tentacles. Break-away pale man didn't grow tentacles before he turned into DNA...
Then later in the movie we see the thing is like a giant face hugger kinda, but with no human characteristics, despite its two human parents. Save the penis tongue it uses to fuck the final pale man to death. And then it also dies, because it's just totally spent, I guess. And this dead pale man gives birth to a proto-xenomorph because... why? Why does giant face hugger's rape-baby take on Space Jockey characteristics, but black goo scientist boyfriend and Shaw's baby has no human characteristics? Where's the biological logic here? And then... so the proto-Xenomorph is going to go off to evolve and lay eggs and then the pale men will space jockey them right into the cargo hold? What is going on, movie?
It's Sunshine V2, it really is.
As a big fan of Sunshine, I sort of take issue with this. Yes, Sunshine has that third act shift that so many hate, though I myself personally do not. But Sunshine also has consistently good acting. Prometheus does not (except from Fassbender and Rapace). Sunshine has dialogue that human beings would actually say. Prometheus does not. Sunshine tells a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end, leaving no loose ends floating around. Prometheus does not. And Sunshine was Danny Boyle's first foray into science fiction and was just a movie that came out. Prometheus was Ridley Scott's return to the genre after two classics thirty years ago, and was being touted as the master's homecoming.
Potential spoilers, maybe. The thing that really gets me about this movie... Scott kept going on about how it wasn't really an Alien prequel, and was merely telling a new story in the same universe. And yes, it wasn't a typical prequel, in that it barely explained a damn thing about Alien. But nevertheless they used the Alien universe as a total crutch. Give Guy Pearce's character a different name, don't give the planet the LV prefix, sub in some original spaceship on the planet, with corridors that don't reference Giger, and don't put your big translucent humans in Space Jockey armor. And now I have no idea why you're telling me this story.
The Alien trappings were so nonessential to the story the movie was telling, and yet if you remove them you've just taken away the very thing that made me stick with the movie for the full run-time. It's a cheat, it's like they had this lousy script in the vault that they knew nobody would ever want to watch, and then they said, "Hey, what if the ship is one of those horseshoe things from Alien?"
"That's brilliant, let's see if Ridley Scott is available. Isn't he doing the Monopoly movie? He must be crazy hard up for cash right now."
I saw it today. I was pretty into it for the first forty minutes or so, but it started to lose me as it went along. It's been about five hours since I got out of the theater, and the more I think about the film the more depressing and bland and nonsensical I find it. I'd really like to talk to some of the reviewers who touted its intellectual and philosophical depth. Also thanks to the marketing team for spoiling the climax.
I'll just do one for now, nothing else is really coming to mind. My all-time favorite sci-fi book is Ubik by Philip K. Dick. A very unique, very darkly funny story. Difficult to write a synopsis for without spoiling it, but I'll say that it starts with a private firm of psychic agents hired to protect a facility on the moon from a similar organization.
Man, you guys are sticking with the "depression" theme that you set up a little while back, huh? Not that the depression isn't warranted, I totally agree with your critiques of the movie business as it currently stands. Though the latter half of the year is looking fairly promising, at the moment. Hopefully it pans out that way.
I haven't seen Snow White and the Huntsman yet, but I was actually quite looking forward to it. I've been a big fan of Rupert Sanders' film and commercial work (https://vimeo.com/user5381930) for quite some time now, and I was excited when they announced he was going to be behind this. Then I saw the trailers and I thought it looked really cool. Then I saw the clips and I started to cool. Then I read the reviews, Dorkman's included, and listened to this... I decided to save my theater money for Prometheus and wait until this hits Netflix. Disappointed to hear that it wasn't everything I was hoping for.
The way I see it C-Spin, repeat movies emphasize their importance to be seen.
Easy for you to say, refresh ninja. I said refresh genie for a second before I realized it wasn't in any way correct.
If repetition emphasizes importance, though... Raiders of the Lost Ark. Just... Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Constantly refreshing the thread to make sure nobody steals my answers, steering clear of Teague's suggestions though I agree with plenty.
Blade Runner
Apocalypse Now
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
A Clockwork Orange (and also 2001: A Space Odyssey...)
In Bruges
Groundhog Day
M*A*S*H
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Chinatown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Sunshine
They're mostly just personal favorites, it's a hard question to consider. And even harder to not just list every movie I like. As for my own missed essential viewing. I never saw any of the Godfather movies until last summer, much to my great shame. And the world at large was correct, two of them are great...
No need to trade-in a healthy arm for an artificial one if it has a similar level of function/sensation. The premise would have to be if it was twice as strong or had inbuilt wi-fi or something.
You're on a 13 hour flight to Sydney and can sit anywhere you want. As you walk on, you notice there are spare seats next to James Cameron, Stephen Fry, Megan Fox, Richard Dawkins, and Jon Stewart.
Who do you sit next to?
Well... James Cameron seems like an ass who's pretty in love with himself, so I'd keep away from that guy for sure. Stephen Fry would be an experience, but he's also a pretty large man, and airplanes are not spacious. Megan Fox... I'm just repulsed by her for some reason. Next. As for Richard Dawkins I'm sure there'd be plenty of interesting discussion to be had, but for 13 hours straight? That leaves Jon Stewart. He's funny, he seems pretty approachable, and he's also tiny. Perfect plane-ride buddy.
Oh no, you've happened upon a wizard and gotten on his bad side! He decides he's going to turn you into an animal. You beg and plead with him not to do it, and he graciously allows you to pick from any animal on the planet, including insects. What is your new form?
EDIT: from the comments:
(...) He also volunteered to be Narrator, because he was not feeling well. (I went to ECCC)
Okay, I feel better now. Video is solely funny, no undertones of sadness. Carry on.
It was pretty funny, but I spent most of the video feeling sorry for Kevin Conroy. Everybody else gets to have fun switching parts and doing all these different voices... And he occasionally gets to read stage directions as Batman. Almost like an hour-long play about the past twenty years of his career. 
To break from this topic a little, I'd just like to apply the comment about laziness in alien design to the whole movie. Everything was copy-pasted from something else. The alien suits were from Halo, that scene is from Jurassic Park, this console is from Half-Life. Talk about unoriginal, this is literally a movie that is assembled from bits of other properties whole-cloth! It sounds so familiar, it's almost like...
...oh my god.
What if this is no accident? What if... What if Battleship IS Transformers 4 as so many joked, but also the Surrogates prequel, as nobody suspected!?!? And John Turturro will take the Battleship alien ships and reverse engineer their technology, which will lead to many major break-throughs... Like the SURROGATES FROM SURROGATES YOU GUYS! And then in Surrogates 2 we find out that the aliens in Battleship were Decepticons but with creatures so the surrogates are ALSO FUCKING DECEPTICONS and they get triggered by the all-spark that Megatron found somewhere and they go crazy and NO GODDAMNED SKYSCRAPER IS SAFE BECAUSE DECEPTICON SURROGATES HAVE SEXUAL ADEQUACY ISSUES! I'm telling you, we're one Shia LeBeouf stinger away from the next Marvel universe...
So who's looking forward to Battleship Surrogates: The Revenge of the Transformening in 2016?
Portal, Nolan.
By the way, Nolan was not a default answer, I was trying to figure out who could take what was basically a game mechanic and make it interesting, and Nolan is good with taking technical machinations and making them into movies. If I was focusing more on the Aperture Science side of things... potentially Duncan Jones. Joss is a cop-out answer at this point, but it'd need to be someone with a sense of humor and a grasp of scifi.
Interesting question. I'd like to see someone else answer it, so, next person: same question.
I suppose it'd be cheating to say "Halo, Neill Blomkamp." *sigh*
I guess I'd kind of like to see Terry Gilliam do a Wario movie... Starring James Gandolfini, maybe? I don't have any idea what the plot would be, because the Wario games are pretty plotless. But there are plenty of opportunities for weird humor and wide-angle lenses in a bizarre fantasy universe.
You have to have either both legs or your non-dominant arm amputated. Which do you choose?
I'm in what seems to be an extreme minority of people who not only loved Quantum of Solace, but thought it was better than Casino Royale. And I thought Casino Royale was great.
Anybody else totally psyched for Skyfall?
I love what they've been doing with Craig's tenure as Bond.
I think Loki actually has more motivation than most when it comes to the villainous ruler bit. I saw it as being his chance to give his family a big middle finger. He's showing his father that he can take and rule a kingdom on his own, without Daddy's help, and he's fucking with Thor's favorite people as a bonus. He wasn't particularly interested in the idea of ruling Asgard in Thor. But making Odin and Thor witness the subjugation of Earth whilst they're stuck in Asgard... that's just his kind of mischief. You might even say he's the god of that sort of thing.
Humans came up with atomic bombs about 70 years ago. And yet aliens from the future invade with chariots and space-clubs that have to shoot inhabitants individually, possibly the most inefficient way to take over a planet. You'd expect a scaly green finger in an orbiting ship to press a button, deploying 100,000 neutron bombs that wipes out all mammals on the surface of the planet. There's probably an app for that on the alien's smartphone.
This technological anachronism reminded me of Starship Troopers, where we've developed faster-than-light space travel for massive spaceships, and yet have to shoot the bugs with bullets.... individually..... over and over again.
Wasn't the whole point of the deal for the aliens to take over Earth so that Loki could rule it, in exchange for the Tesseract, which they can do whatever they want with... IN SPAAAAAAAACE? How much fun is it to rule a planet upon which you are the only living thing?
So this was a good commentary, but... Not really digging the Avengers spoilers. It's only been ten days, come on... And yes, I have not seen it yet.
The reason being... I just wasn't interested in it, and in fact hadn't seen any of the set-up movies except the two Iron Mans. But I decided I was going to see Avengers after the entire internet seems to have loved it, and figured before I do I should see Hulk, Thor, and Captain America first (in that order). So my week in Netflix rentals was all Marvel all the time, just finished Cap yesterday. What a bunch of mediocre movies. I thought Thor was the best of that trio, and better than Iron Man 2, not as good as Iron Man. But Thor had one moment that totally ruined this shared universe of the Avengers for me.
Agent Coulson and his boys breeze down to the desert plain to greet the Godbot. One of the SHIELD agents says, "One of Stark's?" and Coulson is all, "Haha, Tony never tells me anything, ell oh ell." And it's just a cute little line that's there to remind the audience that Iron Man and Thor are currently sharing the same planet. Except it's NOT, and it TOTALLY pulled me out of the movie.
They spent half the climax ruining Iron Man 2 by having Agent Coulson being all mysteriously interested in this mysterious thing that has landed in the desert and then driving to go check in and see if it's as mysterious as they thought. How exciting! And then the post-credits sequence is him coming up on Thor's hammer or whatever, I haven't seen Iron Man 2 since the theaters and will never watch it again. But regardless, I know that wherever Thor's hammer is, it is within a relatively reasonable driving distance to whatever fucking city Tony Stark lives in.
Are you seeing my problem yet? If not, let me remind you that there's a whole montage in Iron Man where Tony flies to the Middle East in the suit without having to stop for a piss or anything, and just blows the shit out of some terrorists. So Iron Man travels for work, I've just been reminded that he exists, and there's a fucking Godbot marching around tearing up this damned town. In what universe does Tony Stark not quickly find out that this is happening and Iron Man the fuck out there to fight it? This thing is bigger and more destructive than Jeff Bridges or Whip Guy. Showboat Tony would be all over this.
So that was my big, world-shattering problem with the movie, and I think a big pitfall for any potential Thor sequels. Unless the whole movie, or at least most of the threat, takes place in Asgard. Because on Earth, if it's a big enough problem to require Thor, it's probably big enough to draw the attention of the other Avengers, and we know they're all pals now.
Or I assume they're pals. Still haven't seen the movie, but I can only assume that they'll stop butting heads and learn to work together by the end.
This trailer got me excited for the film in a way neither of the other two had. I wasn't really feeling the anticipation before, but now I'm pretty pumped.
Gotta say, though... That new DC logo is damned unfortunate.
It's been all rainy and sad here. Supposed to be partly cloudy on Tuesday, is that suitable? I don't know how important sunniness is, but to me "daytime" reads as an implied "sunny."
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by C-Spin
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.
Currently installed 9 official extensions. Copyright © 2003–2009 PunBB.
