TheLadyEve

Holy cow, I just looked up the director of this film and he has a stunningly terrible resume. D.A.R.Y.L, Quigley Down Under, and Operation Dumbo Drop are all poor to mediocre films, but Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles are legitimately terrible films. Who kept giving this guy projects? With the exception of Free Willy, I can't really think of anything he did that made a decent profit.

Quick side note: the Phantom does have a daughter. Her name is Heloise. The comics go into a lot more detail in terms of the Phantom family tradition. Heloise and Kit are actually twins who were born in Skull Cave. Here's a picture of badass Heloise hunting in diapers: http://www.phantomtr...it-and-heloise.

I completely forgot that was Meshach Taylor in the Mannequin movies! Like June, I remember thinking his character was a prime example of comedy at the time, and it does make me cringe a bit looking back on it. Small point of correction--Taylor's character on Designing Women was never supposed to be gay--he was straight but he only dated a couple of times throughout the whole series. He eventually got drunk and accidentally married a showgirl named Etienne. Oh that kooky show!

How does an Anne Rice romance novel about S&M turn into a kooky sex comedy about two up tight cops trying to catch a jewel thief? No, seriously, how? I want to ask Gary Marshall, because he's responsible for this. Starring Dan Aykroyd in a creepy mustache, Rosie O'Donnell in a BDSM corset, Dana Delaney, and Dana Delaney's glorious early 90s bush. I really, really want to hear a show about this movie, not just because it's terrible but because I am genuinely curious as to how it came into existence.

All I could think about the plot of this movie (and I use that term reluctantly) is that it reminded me of The Iliad, but much dumber. Ellen is Helen of Troy, and Raven as Paris, and Moranis's Billy Fish character as Menelaus (and either Tom or Reva as Hector). Given that The Warriors is based loosely on Anabasis by Xenophon, I wonder if Streets of Fire was also trying to put a greaser street gang spin on an ancient work? Maybe I'm reaching a bit too far, but it's the only way I could make sense of this mess.

The film isn't totally wrong about the etymology of the word "disaster." The confusing part here is Greek vs. Latin. The Ancient Greek prefix "dys" means "bad" or "evil," while the suffix "aster" means star. The Latin situation, however, is a little bit different. The prefix "dis" in Latin means "against" or "apart" or generally having a negating or reversing force. The suffix comes from "astrum" meaning star. These roots led to the Italian term "disastro" and Middle French "desastre" and eventually the English "disaster." It originally referred to a negative aspect of a star or planet, as we see in Hamlet Act 1 Scene 1 when Horatio says "As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters in the sun, and the moist star upon whose influence neptune’s empire stands was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse." Eventually this meaning morphed into an "ill-starred event," which is much closer to the definition we go by today.

They mentioned the weird connection with the Oklahoma City Bombing, and in the film they talk about Hitler's birthday being the day to pick for an attack. That made me think of the Columbine massacre, which also took place on 4/20. I was 17 at the time, and I remember buzz about why the shooters chose that day and whether or not they were white supremacists because of the Hitler's birthday connection. Now I wonder if the shooters just saw Top Dog. They would have been 14 at the time Top Dog came out. Maybe we can blame this movie for the OKC bombing AND Columbine.

Good call on the Brazil reference, that seems pretty obvious now that I think about it. But while Brazil was dark and clever in its satire of beurocratic bullshit, I thought Jupiter Ascending was basically using the scene for a brief few moments of much needed levity. And at least for me, that was welcome.

I recently watched Jupter Ascending, and was absolutely confounded by certain aspects of the plot. The whole thing reminded me of a weird mashup of Cinderella and Labarynth, with the Abrasax siblings as the wicked stepsisters and Jupiter as both Cinderella and, in a weird genetic reincarnation twist, her own wicked stepmother. Some things I found particularly confusing: Why does Balem refer to the lizard man as "Mr.?" And why do they speak English, period? Are we to understand that the customs of only English speaking populations that developed on Earth after it was seeded came directly from these progenitors? Eddie Redmayne is absolutely absurd in this film. His quivering fish face and weird, raspy voice made me want to pour candlewax in my ears and eyes. “Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty." What the fuck? The automatic spacesuit says "37 minutes of air remaining!" when Caine puts it on, but not when Jupiter and Caine put them on in the end--and how the hell are they talking to each other through the spacesuits at the end? It would have been funny if the automatic voice had started talking over them... What was up with Kalique? Did I miss it, or did we ever figure out what her end game was? She did her nifty regeneration bath thing and then we basically didn't hear from her again. Did anyone else notice that Jupiter's royal tattoo moved spots on her wrist a couple of times? They mentioned that Caine is some kind of lupine-human hybrid creature, so I kept expecting him to show some wolf-like characteristics, but that didn't happen--in fact, without his gravity boots, he would have been pretty useless, so why even make him a hybrid creature at all? It's like if Jacob from Twilight just snarled a little and never did his cheesy naked wolf-morph maneuver. How are they not just completely incinerated as soon as the shield is breached? It made no sense--metal is literally ignited into flames all around them, and Mila Kunis seemed just fine. It reminded me of a scene out of Sucker Punch, but at least those elaborate scenes were supposed to be fantasies. I thoroughly enjoyed the "DMV" scene, and it reminded me of the afterlife in Beetlejuice. I can see a lot of thought went into this shambling mess of a film, and it strikes me that it could make a pretty cool TV series. A series would provide opportunity to actually explain this world instead of rushing through it at a breakneck pace.