nthurkettle

For all the great jokes made about Van Helsing's hat, our hosts missed what I think is the most obvious one. Look at this damned Wanted poster: It shows you absolutely NOTHING about Van Helsing's face. Literally the only detail there for people to latch onto is his hat. If he's having so many problems with people telling "MURDERER!" at him everywhere he goes, TAKE OFF THE HAT. BUY A DIFFERENT HAT. NO ONE WILL RECOGNIZE YOU.

At this point, I have to believe this is like how they've been teasing a Showgirls episode forever - in that they've got something special in mind for this movie and are just waiting for it to come together. Otherwise, I have no idea how this hasn't happened yet, because it is LEGENDARY ridiculous badness but so entertaining.

This was Dark Heart's only appearance - IIRC (my little sister was very into these movies), the first movie had an evil book (Don't read, kids! Watch cartoons instead!), and the third movie took them to Wonderland. But the "Twilight" vibe on him is strong; he's totally the 80's toy version of a supernatural teen crush.

I would submit that the biggest reason this movie needs to happen is that a major plot point involves Meg Ryan meeting a TIME TRAVELER and then deciding that the most natural thing to do is cast him in a commercial for a butter substitute.

The gang may need a break from babies after those Look Who's Talking movies, but I fully endorse this; because there's no actual plot but "being pregnant is the most embarrassing, horrifying disaster possible at every single stage and there's no good reason why anyone should do it humans should just stop and die out. Wokka Wokka Wokka!"

Bumping because 1) Jason fears clowns 2) June fears robots 3) I want to hear Paul compare the Robot Clown toy to his My Buddy doll.

THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T BE LIVING HEEEEEEEEEEEEERE! You could do a full "Inside the Actors' Studio" episode just breaking down that one line, and I would watch it.

Hey, you love those Lethal Weapon movies, right? So how about a movie in a different genre, starring two people who aren't the star of the Lethal Weapon movies? GUARANTEED HIT!

My First Lithgow (fine name for a podcast, there!) was actually Harry and the Hendersons, so when I got older and started seeing these movies where Doofy Dad Henderson is shanking people, it was like an introduction to all the tremendous possibilities of acting.

What breaks your brain with this movie is that Brendan Fraser should learn early on that EVERY wish he makes is going to blow up on him and yet he keeps making vague wishes that have such easily-exploitable loopholes, the Devil doesn't even need to try that hard. If you're doing a kind of unserious arse-ing around comedy like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, it's fine because we're in on the joke, but this is played as such a sincere spiritual journey for him, it just makes him look like Earth's greatest idiot.

The director, Russell Mulcahy, also directed the first two Highlander films, which is I think why the blades in the crazy phonebook-armor prison sword fight give off magic sparks for no damn reason. Honestly, Lithgow would have been a great Evil Immortal in either of those movies. Poor Jesse "The Body". He would have lived if he'd had literally any other page of newspaper taped to himself.

But "The Room" doesn't have any "military intrigue" - aka "a guy looking under a car". Original trailer got pulled from YouTube. Here it is again. The kid's voice-over about surfing sounds like he's reading a hostage statement.

This just played at the art-house near me with the director in attendance. He filmed his son on and off for ten years. I wasn't in attendance, so I don't know if the friendship was "stroung" enough.

The Purge only with Los Locos led by Johnny 5 leading people to safety.

I remember even as a heartless teenage boy being shocked by Grieco's transition from head-bobbing high school student to bullet-spraying spy; and how this was supposed to be funny? When we get into the climax, he doesn't even take a beat before he starts gunning down stunt randos. He's like "welp, I guess it's mass murder time. Wokka wokka."

THANK YOU! I think about it way more often than I should think about a movie I saw a single time 17 years ago and thought was bad. On what planet are Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones SISTERS? Why cast John Cusack, whose persona has always been that hip, alternative guy who wouldn't be in to being super-famous (and doesn't even try to be different in this movie), to play Bobo Tom Cruise? How damn long does that scene of Billy Crystal running back and forth between limos last? In my memory it lasts for at least three hours.

I love that the villain's super power is to show people things that make them sad; and then they join his cult. Like, if he showed up today all he'd need is that commercial where it rains on the puppy and he would rule all of humanity.

"Eraser" is on Netflix now, and it has a scene where Vanessa Williams is frantically burning top secret evil villain information onto a mini CD-ROM and I can't get enough of 90's computing in movies and "The Net" is the "Citizen Kane" of those movies.

I feel like with Striptease out there now, we are primed to spend more time in the mid-90's heyday of Demi Moore; either this or the absurd "The Juror" would easily qualify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juror

They are like the Mt. Rushmore of HDTGM. Well - four of them. Pacino, Cage, and Stallone for sure, and....I'm genuinely torn whether Travolta or Van Damme is more worthy for slot #4. Someone with artistic skill should draw the Mt. Rushmore of HDTGM.

It feels like they'll binge on an actor for awhile then take a break - Pacino, Cage, Stallone, Travolta, Van Damme. It's been a year since Timecop - time for more Muscles from Brussels!

My guess is that, being a mercenary, aka a freelancer, "Captain" is a good rank to self-market with. As they always say in marketing, your job is to make the customer feel like the hero - Mayor So-and-So saved the day by calling in Sky Captain! Ranked any higher, he might not sound like a guy who actually goes into battle himself; so he essentially runs the Flying Legion with the equivalent rank of a Squadron Commander, but that name for potential customers to remember is Sky Captain. These days he'd be building his brand on Instagram.

I wanted to highlight this article in the London Telegraph, published in 2015, catching up with Kevin Conran, brother of Sky Captain director Kerry Conran and one of the movie's lead designers and visual effects artists. Kerry himself still won't talk publicly about the experience: https://www.telegrap...-what-happened/ It actually gives you some sympathy for these brothers, who sound like they were lifted way, way, way out of their league by an ambitious producer, and were actually being courted and saluted by the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood for what was honestly seen by people like George Lucas and J.J. Abrams as a pioneering new filmmaking method, until the movie became a financial catastrophe and everyone scattered. Kevin Conran has a really intriguing quote about the film's reported $70 million budget. He says: Add to this that the money for the film was raised outside the studio system, and here's my question - is there a chance that we're looking at a real-world scenario like Mel Brooks' The Producers, where someone took advantage of the fact that big movie stars were getting dazzled by this demo, and that the technology was so new that no one knew how much the movie would actually cost to make, and so raised way, way more money than they actually needed and just pocketed it and let these rookie filmmakers crash and burn knowing that no one would pay as much attention to the financial details of a flop? Can we get Blake Harris on the case of this?

And I think it was actually a terrible idea to cast someone so French when the rest of the casting choices are just an IHOP full of DGAF. You've got American, British, Irish, none of them especially trying to pass as French; and then you've got Gerard, who's, like, a 10/10 on the Chevalier Scale of Frenchness. It emphasizes their non-Frenchness to the extent of making it all more absurd.

Bumping because this was Leonardo DiCaprio's first movie after becoming the most famous actor on Earth in Titanic and he's trying to be such a serious shouty grown-up Actor and he still looks 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRal_feCStc