There are some hilariously stupid movies coming down the pike though. Priest, Battle: Los Angeles (which has to be the worst movie title ever), Sucker Punch, and Cowboys & Aliens all had me laughing my ass off at their previews. What's really weird about Cowboys & Aliens is the A-list actors in it. How the hell did they get Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford -- blackmail?

__________________
(Humans) are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just self-congratulatory delusion. Next Question."
-- Michael Crichton, The Lost World

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Originally posted by Bugger:
What's really weird about Cowboys & Aliens is the A-list actors in it. How the hell did they get Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford -- blackmail?

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To me the title doesn't match the content. I realize the title is the title of the graphic novel, but when I hear "Cowboys and Aliens" I think of Wild Wild West meets Men in Black.

and I'll tell you how they got those big names: the biggest name in film, Spielberg (although I would argue Christopher Nolan has been better the last 10 years, Spielberg is still the alpha-dog of film, just look at the building hype over "Super 8")

edit: just watched the trailer again. Favreau is the next great director, and Ron Howard is a producer.

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Originally posted by speechjew:
To me the title doesn't match the content. I realize the title is the title of the graphic novel, but when I hear "Cowboys and Aliens" I think of Wild Wild West meets Men in Black.

and I'll tell you how they got those big names: the biggest name in film, Spielberg (although I would argue Christopher Nolan has been better the last 10 years, Spielberg is still the alpha-dog of film, just look at the building hype over "Super 8")

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True. And FTR I think James Cameron would be on the short list of "directors with most clout" (note: not necessarily "best directors") as well.

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edit: just watched the trailer again. Favreau is the next great director, and Ron Howard is a producer.

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Favreau? I dunno... (see what I did there?!) What's he done lately besides Iron Man and Iron Man 2? I mean IM was excellent, Iron Man 2 not so much. He amped up the color contrast for IM2 also, which is a cheap trick at best.

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And who wouldn't want to work with olivia wilde?

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Haha definitely, but I wouldn't consider her A-list just yet. Depends on how C&A ends up doing.

__________________
(Humans) are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just self-congratulatory delusion. Next Question."
-- Michael Crichton, The Lost World

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Originally posted by Bugger:

Favreau? I dunno... (see what I did there?!) What's he done lately besides Iron Man and Iron Man 2? I mean IM was excellent, Iron Man 2 not so much. He amped up the color contrast for IM2 also, which is a cheap trick at best.

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Originally posted by ryan2754:
Is Inception worth watching?

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Absolutely. It was among the best films last year. It was nominated for Golden Globes (but lost). It got rave reviews from critics and most people who watched it. Rotten Tomatoes gives is a very high rating.

I think it is visually spectacular and the story is fantastic. I watched it twice in the theaters and almost watched it a third time.

There are some who didn't like certain aspects of the film, but I think some of those complaints are invalid and others are being nitpicky.

Among the complaints of the movie:

1) Ellen Page is in the movie. I don't think she sells the film, but she's hardly distracting or awful in the movie.

2) The ending is ambiguous. First of all, it isn't (ask us again after you've seen it), and secondly, if it IS left open-ended, I don't believe that's bad, either. Wizard of Oz, Total Recall, and many other movies don't end with you knowing 100% whether it was a dream or not, and it doesn't take away from those films. I liked A.I. all the way up until he meets the Blue Fairy and I thought the movie would end there (if it DID, it would be a fantastic ending), but there's clearly a Spielberg (not Kubrick) ending to the film that feels needlessly tacked on to give an artificial warm, fuzzy feeling.

3) The movie is TOO complex. Again, I don't feel this is a problem in movies, in general. Inception is an absolutely welcome change of pace from anything in the past few years with The Rock, Jennifer Aniston, or Ben Stiller, who tend to star in films with very unadorned scripts and very simplistic plots. Conflicts are one-dimensional, sources of entertainment cheap, and resolutions are obvious. I'll take a film like Inception with layers over something Transformers 2 any time.

4) The film is confusing. This is related to #3, but deserves special mention since I've heard from a number of people that they enjoyed the movie, but someone they know did not largely because they couldn't follow the story. In a nutshell, you are being asked to follow one person in his own storyline, while two others are involved in another, two others are in another, and two others are in another, while the story flips back and forth between the groups of people. The locales are so distinct (a van in a city, a hotel room, a mountain, and people walking in a city) that it should be easy to separate who is where and doing what.

I don't think the movie is much more confusing than any classic novel, where there are three storylines going at once, say the main protagonists trying to find each other, the students uprising against the government, and a man obssessed with finding a criminal.

5) There is TOO much talking in the film. I hate this criticism of the movie and think it's absurd. There's plenty of fighting, shooting, running, and other action in the movie. Part of the movie is like a mystery, where you're trying to find out a dark part of someone's past, so there has to be *some* talking to explain just what he did in the past that haunts him when he's talking to another person. It can't always be just flashbacks. Those who want the film to just be non-stop fights and chases can watch any number of other films where the plot seems threadbare, just present enough to give an excuse for people in cars to shoot at each other and people to beat up others.

6) The characters are morally gray. I admit, the movie IS making you root for people who specialize in identity theft, deception, and corporate espionage. To repeat myself in a more succinct manner: SO WHAT? There are plenty of movies where the good guys wear uniforms with American flags and kill the bad guys from that Other Country because they want to kidnap politicians, blow up our buildings, and steal lots of money. That doesn't make the film bad. Real people are all sorts of shades of gray and while a fantasy movie now and then is nice where there's clearly a bad guy (I DID love Lord of the Rings, after all), equally as entertaining are movies that deal with characters who aren't perfect.

How good is inception?

The fight scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the hallway was visualized, written, and storyboarded for X-men, first class, and was ripped up by Matthew Vaughn.

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Originally posted by speechjew:
How is ellen page a bad thing?

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This is not *my* opinion, but those who criticize her presence in the movie are usually of one of two thoughts:

1) She is small and believable as a college student, but she sticks out like a sore thumb among guys who hardly break a smile and kill people. I've seen Hard Candy, but from X-Men and Juno, where 99% of the people know her, could you imagine her killing anyone?

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Originally posted by speechjew:
He directed "Elf" as well. Is there a better christmas movie in the last decade than "Elf?"

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True, but
1) elf is what, 7 years old by now? And iron man is 3. That's a fairly sizeable gap. And I just plain didn't consider it "recent", though that's just a subjective standard
2) he's directed 3 movies that have yet been released, two of which were solid films. I wasn't impressed with Iron Man 2; it was way too cluttered. I don't feel cconfident calling someone "the next great director" after 2 movies, especially if they're merely (though nothing to sneeze at) good films - rather than 2 truly great ones. Eh, to each his own

@ ryan: Inception is absolutely worth watching.

__________________
(Humans) are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just self-congratulatory delusion. Next Question."
-- Michael Crichton, The Lost World

If you haven't seen it, I would suggest Law-Abiding Citizen.

I thought that was great.
Dinner for Schmucks was eh. Typical Steve Carell performance. Tried to make it a romantic comedy. Poor choice.

The Social Network wasn't my cup of tea.
They portrayed Mark Zuckerberg as a complete douche and it felt more like a documentary to me. The resolution was sub-par. Had they portrayed it as a documentary-ish type movie, would have been like, "ok..."
Girlfriend liked it though.

- Star Trek, original series
- ET
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Spiderman
- About a dozen star wars references (including an out of place Wilhelm Scream)
- Lord of the Rings
- Close Encounters
- ET

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Originally posted by speechjew:
saw Paul tonight. It's like a sci-fi nerd's wet dream. Subtle references to:

- Star Trek, original series
- ET
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Spiderman
- About a dozen star wars references (including an out of place Wilhelm Scream)
- Lord of the Rings
- Close Encounters
- ET

I'm sure dozens more, but those stood out. The Wilhelm Scream and the Raiders of the Lost Ark reference got me good.

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That's awesome. Whenever I watch star wars or indiana jones I like to play "find the wilhelm"

So I'm on spring break and ive decided to take the opportunity to see a bunch of the movies on my list of films to see. So far I've watched Pulp Fiction and Apocalypse Now, both of which were of course excellent. Apocalypse Now in particular was great fun to watch having read Heart of Darkness (the novel of which the film is an adaptation, and one of my favorite books) and comparing how coppola and the DP chose to visually express the emotions from the literature.

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Originally posted by Bugger:
That's awesome. Whenever I watch star wars or indiana jones I like to play "find the wilhelm"

So I'm on spring break and ive decided to take the opportunity to see a bunch of the movies on my list of films to see. So far I've watched Pulp Fiction and Apocalypse Now, both of which were of course excellent. Apocalypse Now in particular was great fun to watch having read Heart of Darkness (the novel of which the film is an adaptation, and one of my favorite books) and comparing how coppola and the DP chose to visually express the emotions from the literature.

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Yes the Wilhelm is brilliant in Paul. It's loud and painfully obvious.

Apocalypse now is in my top 5. You don't realize how young some of those guys were in that movie, or even who was in it. Sheen, Brando, Duvall, Harrison Ford, Lawrence Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper.

It's much more appreciated now, but Coppola made it too soon after Vietnam ended. It was too fresh in people's minds to look at a fictional account of something during that time.

There was nearly 200 hours of footage when they were done shooting, and the shoot took 16 months instead of the planned 5.

Two of my favorite quotes from AN:

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving. "

quote:

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Originally posted by speechjew:
Yes the Wilhelm is brilliant in Paul. It's loud and painfully obvious.

Apocalypse now is in my top 5. You don't realize how young some of those guys were in that movie, or even who was in it. Sheen, Brando, Duvall, Harrison Ford, Lawrence Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper.

It's much more appreciated now, but Coppola made it too soon after Vietnam ended. It was too fresh in people's minds to look at a fictional account of something during that time.

There was nearly 200 hours of footage when they were done shooting, and the shoot took 16 months instead of the planned 5.

Two of my favorite quotes from AN:

"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving. "

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "****" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

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Damn, fishbourne was in that? Was he the 17 year old on the boat crew?

Also I must say Kilgore (the character) was a great choice for the uncaring havoc wreaked by invaders at the outer station. The novel's equivalent is an accountant who sits in his office poring over figures and crowing about england's financial success while a native sits in the corner of his office literally wasting away.

My dad had no idea it was based on a novel until I told him, so I guess he just thought it was a war movie that turned into a total acid trip at the end. LOL

and finally, I liked the use of triple overlays in the opening and concluding shots. Does Coppola do that regularly in his films?

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Originally posted by Myy:
Saw Sucker Punch, and Liked the movie a lot. and the soundtrack is just plain insane Awesome.

half of the people that I went to go watch it didn't like it. And I can understand why, but still I think there's more to the movie than just special effects.

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Scott seemed to too too far fetched for me. I know it's based on a comic book and all, but I just wasn't convinced in the character or whatnot. How did he get super-ninja powers? *Shrug*

Inception was pretty good, I was just bored at times during it, and I guess I'm an idiot according to you guys, but it was a bit hard for me to follow. They didn't explain the technology very well, so I wasn't sure how everything was working. And, at times, I just didn't know whose dream they were, which was very frustrating. I also didn't understand why there were going to not take Adriane with them at first, in the other dreams, the Architect was with them, during the dreams, at least in the first level. I mean, how was she going to be the Architect, if she wasn't there? They all had to be connected to her to be in her dream...

Thanks,
Jazaray

__________________
A Plastered Dragon Original Limerick:
There was a nice lassie named Jaz
Many wished to have what she has,
A delicate face,
A soft warm embrace,
And a whole lot of bedroom pizzazz.

WeedIan: Jazaray is like MOTL's Mom.

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Originally posted by speechjew:
http://www.superherohype.com/news/articles/164263-the-dark-knights-rises-in-pittsburg h

I know there are a bunch of MOTLer's in PA who love this

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LOL. That's quite a dubious honor.

i thought it was pretty good

I'm hoping to see the Lincoln Lawyer this weekend, I heard that was good.

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Originally posted by Skwirlnutz:
So is Netflix worth it? It came already to go on my PS3 but I don't want to activate anything until I know its worth the $10ish bucks a month.

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