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Sun Tzu Said That

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Posts posted by Sun Tzu Said That

  3. Posted

    Jurassic Park came out in 1993, LA was 96. So even less of an excuse for the SFX to be as cheesy as they are.

     

    Also can y'all discuss this paywall shit without throwing judgements at each other? You know, no insinuations that people are poors or immature or anything. I'm also in the arts and I get it, but we can talk about this without potshots.

    • Like 3

  11. Posted

    Oh sweet, is it Killing Joke time? Fair warning, I care way too much about this stuff. I'm only spoilering the brand new content.

     

    I found the first half hour of new material to be confusing at best and borderline upsetting at most. I don't understand why they basically presented

    Barbara using sex for Batman's approval.

    I'm confused as to how that was greenlit at all. Also,

    her gay best friend seems to have been lifted out of the mid 90s.

     

     

    As a major fan of Batman, the Joker, and one of the nerds who holds The Killing Joke near and dear to my heart, I am incredibly disappointed with a few points of the adaptation. First, while no one really expects any animated movie to live up to Bolland's drawings, it seems like little effort was made to offer the same emotional impact through framing or voice work. A good example of this comes during one of the flashbacks. For reference, this is how the book shows the man Joker was being told some incredibly terrible news:

     

    UIN5A9M.jpg

    The movie's version has this entire conversation take place in the far background and focus is put onto two minor characters instead. The book gives three panels that tell so much. The movie has a brief, detached frowny face instead. The flashbacks are full of a lot of this strange shift in priority which ultimately drains a lot of the emotion out of the Joker's past.

     

    My second major issue is the handling of the final joke. The book provides many layers to what is on the surface a pretty simple scene. You see Joker slipping back into the sane man he once was. You see Batman, the guy with arguably the world's biggest stick up his ass, actually smile and laugh at something for once. You see interaction between these two polar opposite characters that ends ambiguously. The only thing the movie salvaged from this scene was the ambiguity of the ending. I would really love to know why that scene was deflated so much.

     

    There was one line that got a huge laugh in the theatre that my boyfriend and I both found out of touch and just a gay joke for a punchline, no real reason for it. Again not sure if that was in the original story. If it was, then okay sure maybe the laugh was a "reference" laugh. If not, then that's unfortunate.

     

    The first thirty minutes is entirely newly minted, fresh-out-of-the-2010s material. The short scene after that shows Barbara becoming Oracle is also new. Unfortunate is a pretty good word for a lot of what they decided was appropriate for Batgirl.

    In a lot of ways she went from someone who in the original story is pretty much just there to get shot, to someone who gets objectified, is overly emotional, uses sex to persuade her mentor to allow her to remain on a case, and then shows up to get shot.

     

    • Like 5

  12. Posted

    he kills his master before finishing his training having to rely on outside sources of power like his ancestors burial casket and tibetan tapestries to "give him a boost".

     

    It's also possible that his training was completed just fine, but the act of clouding minds puts considerable strain on the user. Shiwan just found a way to recharge his batteries. This would explain Lamont only using his abilities when absolutely necessary and relying on a disguise when he's The Shadow. The movie definitely gives you the impression that Shiwan is much more knowledgeable about these powers than Lamont is.

     

    It would be interesting if Lamont only survived the war due to his latent psychic abilities and had to watch every "normal" comrade around him dying in the course of battle. Wondering why you were the only one who never seemed to be shot, much less seen by the enemy while everyone else got mowed down is enough to make anyone run off to Tibet.

  14. Posted

    The only way having a disguise makes sense at all is if it's too much exertion on Lamont to maintain his mind-clouding abilities for too long. After the opening fight as The Shadow, he looks worn out. That could have been from his powers or it could have been from beating up some gangsters in front of an innocent mat painting. If there was ever a mention of the toll his powers might take on Lamont, it would have helped explain why he was caught so ridiculously easy and might have actually given his fight scenes some real stakes and tension.

  15. Posted

    Yeah, I didn't watch The Shadow, but the plot described in the episode sounds remarkably similar to Batman Begins.

     

    American millionaire (Lamont Cranston/Bruce Wayne) does some bad shit, is "redeemed" by traveling to (Tibet/Bhutan) to train in the Mystic Arts, returns to (New York/Gotham) after many years to battle organized crime using fear/darkness/brute force while maintaining his cover as a hapless playboy, is confronted by (Shiwan Khan/Ra's al Ghul), a fellow practitioner of the Mystic Arts who (killed/secretly was) their master and is now threatening to destroy a decadent society via (atom bomb/microwave emitter). In the course of defeating their nemesis, our hero inadvertently reveals their secret identity to love interest (Margo Lane/Rachel Dawes).

     

    Also, something about fear gas and a talking knife.

     

     

    They are so similar, in fact, that someone drew comparisons between them years back.

     

    David Goyer noted that he wrote a screenplay for Doctor Strange in the 1990's. He noted that he wanted to follow the origin storyline -- a selfish, acquisitive man gets redeemed when going to Tibet and studying under a mystic. Then The Shadow came out in 1994 which featured a similar origin. "Batman Begins" also featured a somewhat similar origin (although Wayne was self-absorbed, he was not really acquisitive) -- and it was written by David Goyer!

     

    Considering that The Shadow was one of the inspirations for Batman and has even been sort of appropriated by the Batman universe as The Grey Ghost, I'm okay with this.

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    I absolutely think you could try to make this movie in the current atmosphere. An entire subset of humanity with psychic powers that are used to hide various aspects of themselves in society? Hell yeah I'd watch that.

     

    Really, all this script needed was a single, concise direction. It tries to do too many things at once and so doesn't do much. For example, you could have taken out the entire first few scenes in the opium den and then in the temple and instead used another vehicle to deliver backstory. It could have been something as simple as a photograph of Cranston with a monk and Wu somewhere in there.

     

    We also don't need to see Cranston being a bad guy to know he was one. He served in The Great War, that's a source of more than enough angst for his moral dilemmas. And if they wanted to setup for the knife to show up later, Cranston could have had an old, visible blade-type injury to his person that even he was unable to hypnotize away - just like his shadow. That would have also symbolized his lack of control over the knife, and we could later see the scar gone when he gains control over it.

     

    They put several dream sequences in the film. Those could have been giving us something actually world-building instead of telling us over and over how tormented Cranston is.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    When Baldwin is brought to the temple, The Master tells him, "You watched your spirit, your very face change, as the beasts claws its way out from within you."

     

    This is probably giving the movie too much credit, but what if the structural changes in his face when he is The Shadow isn't a disguise? Maybe that's his actual face, and the one we see the rest of the time is one he actively works to construct by hypnotizing surrounding individuals? It might not even be an intentional move on his part. It could possibly be something he picked up over time in the interim before becoming an opium kingpin; because, really, who would say no to 90s Alec Baldwin's face? Even when it's surrounded by gross hair and long weirdly-painted fingernails.

     

    eta: I skimmed but I'm not sure if this was mentioned. So, the long fingernails - in Chinese culture it's a symbol of wealth. No, really. Long fingernails mean you aren't out in the fields busting your ass all day. It shows you live in comfort and style to be able to maintain long nails. Now for the grosser side of things: having one long nail (usually on the pinky) isn't just a coke thing. Many sober men will keep a long pinky nail to dig wax out of their ears and pick their noses.

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    My thought on the nose prosthesis thing would be that The Shadow projects a small aura around himself that changes his face just enough to further distance the Shadow persona from Cranston. I don't believe he actually physically changes his face. The deal with his nose just seemed like hiding the hotel on a much smaller scale.

     

    RE: why have a disguise when no one would see him?

     

    He clearly does show himself to his Shadow bros, and apparently, as is the case with Dr. Tam, appears to them as Cranston under the guise of a random other Shadow bro. There's also the possibility he could be exposed in a fight, necessitating another layer of identity protection.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    If anyone is looking for more hilariously bad dinosaur detective crap, Syfy made a movie about ten years ago called Anonymous Rex. It co-stars Billy Baldwin and you also get to see Issac Hayes growl at someone. And it goes into some weird conspiracy reptilian territory. I believe you can find the whole thing for free on youtube.

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    So is this movie better or worse then Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Which had the same plot, and also had dinosaurs and robots and crappy special effects.

     

    I would argue that Theodore Rex has better special effects relative to 1995 than Sky Captain has relative to 2004. Not sure which one is more watchable though.

  22. Posted

    Hate to say it but the cold-blooded theory doesn't work. Cold blooded animals -like reptiles - rely on the environment to regulate their body temperature. That's why you'll often see reptiles basking in the sun. Warm blooded animals - like humans- are capable of of self regulating, through sweating, shivering, physical activity ect.

    The idea of clothes is to trap the heat already being created by the warm-blooded body. They would do nothing for a cold-blooded creature.

     

    So...maybe it is to hide the seams?

     

    The entire point is moot because dinosaurs are not cold-blooded. If this wasn't common knowledge prior to Jurassic Park, it certainly was after.

     

    On a different note, I want to talk about how much Teddy's eyes bother me. Why are they so ridiculously huge and blue and human and completely out of place on his face? The Henson workshop gave their dinosaurs on the show Dinosaurs large eyes, but they were actually factored into the design of their characters so the proportions and coloring at least made some sense.

     

    Also, in the scene where they go get chewed out by the chief, Teddy's right eye doesn't seem to want to cooperate and I guess they just sorta went with it anyway.

     

    dHLIYYM.png

     

    At the end of the movie, our bad guy seems happy to get Teddy into his facility because it means he finally gets his "pair of Rexes." Why didn't he already have a pair of Rexes frozen? He can ostensibly recreate extinct animals and probably also clones at any time, so why couldn't he just create a pair for his ark? No one would know. Was Teddy planted on the case as a cop by Summers specifically so Teddy could be frozen? If so, where was the female Rex supposed to come from? The murdered Rex was on New Eden's payroll already and had a female Rex for a roommate. Why wasn't he coerced into bringing his roommate to the compound for whatever reason? If the two weren't open to being a couple, I imagine they could be forced into it through the magic of "glando" manipulation.

     

    And is it just me or does Molly Rex look to miss her cue on jumping out of her pod before being unfrozen?

     

    Edited with one final thing to add:

     

    How commonplace ARE dinosaurs exactly? When Coltrane and Teddy get to the kid's street hockey thing, you hear the kids gasping saying "look at the dinosaur oh wow." We see lots of humans among dinosaurs in other places in the movie but in this scene it's treated as if there are still people who are just never exposed to them at all.

    • Like 1
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