JoelSchlosberg

What do you mean, it's unmanly for a fully grown adult to be seen in public playing a video game arcade machine? I rest my case.

But you see, that was all a careful setup by Draco's buddy so that he could then tell the girl how much she doesn't remind him of his grandmother. (Which is only the second-worst pickup line ever)

They say that the young lady whose skirt they flip "hasn't worn panties since she was 12." How... do... they... know!?!

How have we not brought up the absoludicrous scene where Caleb take a friend to his old family home and promptly gets shot by Gorman the caretaker? He says afterward that Gorman has poor vision, but wouldn't that make him even more careful to not get out of the car into the open before he's sure that Gorman's Mr. Magoo-style vision hasn't misidentified him or his new-to-Gorman companion as a threat?

They didn't half-ass it as much as one would think with the newspaper issue. Instead of lorem ipsum text or gibberish, freeze-framing the article shows that the article text actually makes sense. But would a student ODing really be front page news for an entire county?

It's striking how bad the CGI is in when the car disassembles into pieces because a scene with lots of floating objects moving rapidly is actually something CGI should be able to do better than practical effects. Those were exactly the sort of things that always made the changes in film grain and inconsistencies along the edges of composited objects show: for instance, And they can be done seamlessly in digital.

Heck, even the concept of a year being 365 days would have been anachronistic if the witches predate 46 BC, when Julius Caesar changed the Roman calendar from a 355-day year. Does the power take into account leap years?

Could the use of powers causing aging be a metaphor for smoking? The mom is smoking a cigarette when she explains it. Could that be a deliberate reference to the supposed factoid that each smoked cigarette reduces life expectancy by 7 minutes?

Wikipedia lists the motley array of powers associated with witchcraft in the world of this film: At least they don't have witch-ventriloquism.

Isn't it coincidental that the witches ascend at exactly the age that only was considered the beginning of adulthood relatively recently? If the witches were around centuries ago, that threshold would have been widely considered to be anywhere from 13 to 21. And the concept of adolescence (also conveniently aligning with the ages of developing witch powers) would not have even existed.

Why don't the cops notice that the car which has supposedly gone off a cliff has made no crashing sound upon hitting bottom? It's foggy/dark/generally murky enough weather to handwave away not seeing it, but why didn't they expect to hear it? And was I the only one who expected them landing aligned exactly behind the cop car to be a setup for them pushing it over the cliff?

So, what book is "the Book of Damnation"? It's shown as a big leatherbound volume, but what is its identity? Is it The Necronomicon? Twilight? Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire? The Covenant wiki (yes, it has a wiki) is less than helpful:

Even friggin' Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull bothered to explain how they could have a car chase in a forest.

Renny Harlin on the casting, from the DVD making-of: I report, you decide how successful he was...

Or if they're doing movies without Steve Guttenberg, where's the other theatrical effort of Steel's Kenneth Johnson: Short Circuit 2?

Ironically given The Covenant's status as an early Twilight knockoff: its DVD has a trailer for The Messengers wherein Kristen Stewart takes up most of the screentime (unlike Zathura where her role in the film is minimal), but the trailer doesn't push her name/presence at all, choosing to emphasize only producer Sam Raimi instead. At the time, what was The Covenenant compared to? It's easy to see the parallels to Twilight and Harry Potter in hindsight. But Twilight was still mostly a book phenomenon that hadn't crossed over from its target audience to general ubiquity. (I remember seeing a trailer for National Treasure having not yet heard about The Da Vinci Code; I had no idea where its weirdness was coming from.) And Harry Potter was still associated with a kid audience (not to mention creepy middle-aged weirdos), and its child actors were still way younger in the movies that were out by 2006 than the angsty teens of The Covenant. Did general audiences process it as similar to other stuff that it wouldn't evoke as much in 2016?

And

The comments on that Facebook post definitely express a consensus that Bloodsport is a good movie. Or maybe the question is how did a good movie get made at Cannon? Is there any particular reason why the poster is in German? For a second my tired brain thought "but I won't be able to follow the episode if they do it in German!"

At first my brain read "Face/Off" as Con Air... which I would say is great evidence of casting magic! Face/Off... is a solid double order of ham, but both were A-list stars at the time. And her filmography includes some... unfortunately-cast stuff like Jennifer's Body and Cutthroat Island (also Renny Harlin!) But with this, it hardly matters since the directing uses the cast so poorly. I seriously could not tell all the pale brunette guys apart. Are there any other casting directors who have gotten great casts for bad movies? I'd have to think about it (the one obvious one is the casting of Michael Paré for Streets of Fire, on the word of the same caster who had made Eddie Murphy a movie star.) I'd pick the casting director for Con Air knowing nothing more than that they had cast Con Air, but it turns out casting duties on that film were the work of 3 people rather than 1 genius.

What is your source for this? Is there anything less mockable in the entire Cannon library? It's just an utterly solid, straightforward, unpretentious action movie. Moreover, it actually avoids some of the issues that usually come with the territory in its genre. Particularly how the hero has no superfluous additional motivation to enter the central martial arts tournament. There's no mentor/family member/buddy/whoever needing to be avenged, no chosen-one destiny to fulfill, no greater scheme by the villains to unmask of which the tournament is a mere front for. He enters the contest simply to win it.

There is definitely enough material out there for a segment like "Second Opinion" but for opinions on dubious music cues in movies. And wasn't that particular song on a preroll ad that was attached to what seemed like almost every online video at one point?

Maybe that's the Covenant's equivalent of ? Maybe The Thing-style impersonation is a witchcraft power? And it is able to imitate external appearance but not muscle memory? (Like the aliens in A.E. van Vogt's The War Against the Rull, who are in fact distinguished from the humans they impersonate by their inability to handshake.)

National Treasure also beat the Da Vinci Code movie to the screen by over a year, and the year after the book. And 2006 was really the nadir for bad CGI. At least '90s to early '00s bad CGI has the "yeah it sucks, but at least they were ambitious in trying to do stuff with CGI that CGI couldn't really do yet" factor. By the mid-'00s, cut-rate CGI didn't have the outreaching-its-grasp factor anymore. And by the '10s even bad movies tended to have access to decent CGI. The mid-to-late-'00s stuff is just charmless and ugly.

4 pages in and nobody's mentioned Home Alone 3-era Scarlett Johansson!?!?!?!