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JoelSchlosberg

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Posts posted by JoelSchlosberg

  1. Posted

    NBA Jam was famously the first arcade game to earn a billion dollars in revenue, so its level of popularity was on an order of magnitude comparable to Space Jam merchandise. And each of those billion dollars was fed in to an on-site arcade machine in quarters (each of which purchased a "quarter" of a basketball game), without any DLC or ancillary revenue streams. But the presentation of the game was so energetic and fun, with Monstar-level superhuman plays and classic catchphrases like "HE'S ON FIRE!" and "BOOMSHAKALAKA!" from legendary voice actor Tim Kitzrow's hyped-up announcer, that each buck felt like it was well spent no matter how badly it was played.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    One possible source for the association of the term "jam" with basketball (or confirmation that they were already associated) is the Michael Jackson song by that name. The music video is largely set in a basketball court where Michael Jordan joins the other MJ as a guest star:

    There's also an animated short called "Jam" mentioned in the book Young Animators and Their Discoveries, which quotes its young animator Kevin Huart explaining exactly what he meant by the term: "The title, Jam, is used in the sense of a jam session, like musicians going out just to have a good time, a free, atmospheric thing. It doesn't have anything to do with some grape jelly that appears at one point in the movie." No basketball is mentioned, but the cartoon does have aliens and home invasion: "There isn't a big plot to Jam. There are two little Martianlike creatures who come out of a book called The Mysterious Worlds, adn they explore my living room and my kitchen and they like what's happening."

  3. Posted

    When they said that Space Jam got a D+ CinemaScore grade, that just didn't seem right for a rating drawn from audience members who had chosen to go see the movie (and thus not including people who had avoided it on principle).  Looking it up on their website shows that its actual CinemaScore is an A- ... with the D+ probably coming from that being the grade in the Entertainment Weekly review that was quoted as calling it "greed promoted as synergy" just before mentioning the CinemaScore.

  4. Posted

    Two quick observations about video game tie-ins: first, not only is Space Jam not the most incongruous movie HDTGM has done that got a video game, it's not the most incongruous movie HDTGM has done live in Chicago that got a video game:

    https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/diqiu-production/32243e44-a877-11e2-9601-00242129f07b.jpg

    No kidding, the Blues Brothers 2000 movie got a Nintendo 64 game, and the actual gameplay has the same goofy cartoon art style as the cover.

    Second, the Space Jam video game wasn't even the first video game to put the Looney Tunes in a basketball contest with gameplay specifically based on NBA Jam! That would be a game called "Looney Tunes B-Ball" released a year before Space Jam:

    https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/231782-looney-tunes-b-ball-snes-front-cover.jpg

  5. Posted

    It's not quite the case that every film critic hated Space Jam. At least two of them gave it a big thumbs up:

    To be sure, Siskel and Ebert might be predisposed to see a movie-star quality in Michael Jordan since he's from their own Chicago, but they do mostly like the rest of the movie as well.  And they bring up a comparison to another HDTGM movie that I don't recall was ever being mentioned in the episode: Kazaam!  Which raises the question of whether Space Jam is at least better than that as a movie vehicle for a '90s superstar basketball player.  I will say that it's kind of ironic to hear Siskel decry Kazaam making Shaq a "genie" as opposed to just playing himself to be a "manufactured" role, when convolutedly "manufactured" is exactly what every single thing about the premise of Space Jam is except Michael Jordan just playing basketball like he does in real life.

    • Like 4

  6. Posted

    The limo driver reading the L. Ron Hubbard book jumped out to me to me as well. Except I am here to tell you that was no L. Ron Hubbard book!

     

    He was reading the 9th (out of 10) books in the Mission Earth series. My friends and I read the series in high school. They are extremely pulpy sci-fi. Dumb fun that should only appeal to a boy in high school. They were mixed with a healthy dose of his Dianetics views which I didn't know at the time. The cover art made a big deal throughout the series that it was going to be a giant 10 volume masterwork. It is said to be the last thing Hubbard finished before he died.

     

    I was the last in the group to read them and my friends warned me that Hubbard didn't actually finish them. He died first and because the Church of Scientology wanted the shine from him having written this 10 book series they brought in a ghost writer to finish them. This was my friends' own pre-internet theory based only on having read the books. I thought they were full of crap until I read for myself. Half way through book 8 it slams into a brick wall. It goes from being good bad writing to just extremely bad. Books 9 and 10 are an absolute slog to finish. Whoever they brought in was hired only for their ability to keep a secret and writing ability was a distant second.

     

    I haven't figured out yet how this ties into Striptease. Maybe a message from the 2nd unit director about who should really get credit for the movie.

     

    By complete coincidence, this week I've also been reading The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, a book by science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch about his love-hate relationship with his genre. It's not surprising that he deals with L. Ron Hubbard as one of the more infamous personalities in the field, but I was still startled that he actually does bring up the issue of whether Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth series were ghostwritten! "As a believer that genius is induplicable, even inverse genius, I am inclined to believe they are his."

     

    xbvQfG2.png

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    According to a 1996 CNN article "Demi Moore puts her all into movie roles" Ms. Moore did in fact "research" her role at real-life strip clubs:

     

    And yes, she did research for her role as a dancer.

     

    "I went to Club Tier in New York, I've been to clubs in Florida and Los Angeles and various places," said Moore. "You know, on my path of enlightenment of the stripping world."

     

    And on that path, Moore says, she found some women just like the one she plays, and one that was even doing better than her character in the movie.

     

    "(There was) one in particular who I was most fascinated with because she was a mother of two," Moore said. "So beautiful this girl, (she) had two kids in private school, owned her own home, had a rental property, had her own car, had live-in help, was able to work nights and have her days available to her children, which meant she spent more time with them."

    • Like 2

  8. Posted

    Did anyone else notice how similar the logo in the poster and the font of the opening credits is to the title design of a very different work of cinema that begins with the letters S, T and R?

     

    s-l1000.jpg

     

    pqr7ESQ.jpg

     

    They both seem to be based on a font called ITC Benguiat - and most of the differences were changes made for the Stranger Things logo:

     

    Benquiat-large.jpg

     

    stranger-things-logo-design-04.jpg

     

    The logo is admittedly and obviously a throwback to '80s horror book covers by the likes of Stephen King, but I like to think that it's also a nod to how even Eleven would be horrified by some of the sights of Striptease:

    C69-XGEUwAAozue.jpg

     

    child.JPG

    • Like 2

  10. Posted · Edited by JoelSchlosberg

    The limo driver reading the L. Ron Hubbard book jumped out to me to me as well. Except I am here to tell you that was no L. Ron Hubbard book!

     

    He was reading the 9th (out of 10) books in the Mission Earth series. My friends and I read the series in high school. They are extremely pulpy sci-fi. Dumb fun that should only appeal to a boy in high school. They were mixed with a healthy dose of his Dianetics views which I didn't know at the time. The cover art made a big deal throughout the series that it was going to be a giant 10 volume masterwork. It is said to be the last thing Hubbard finished before he died.

     

    I was the last in the group to read them and my friends warned me that Hubbard didn't actually finish them. He died first and because the Church of Scientology wanted the shine from him having written this 10 book series they brought in a ghost writer to finish them. This was my friends' own pre-internet theory based only on having read the books. I thought they were full of crap until I read for myself. Half way through book 8 it slams into a brick wall. It goes from being good bad writing to just extremely bad. Books 9 and 10 are an absolute slog to finish. Whoever they brought in was hired only for their ability to keep a secret and writing ability was a distant second.

     

    I haven't figured out yet how this ties into Striptease. Maybe a message from the 2nd unit director about who should really get credit for the movie.

     

    When the New York Times reviewed the first book in the series, they said that "the characters were thoroughly obnoxious (although not in any interesting way)" - that could very well be it! It's definitely not the title of the particular book in the series the driver was reading at the time: "Villiany Victorious" in a movie whose antagonists are about as pathetically inept and ineffectual as, well, Terl in Battlefield Earth. Which I'm surprised you didn't mention - the Mission Earth series achieved the distinction of being even worse received than its infamously reviled predecessor. Admittedly, I am impressed by the driver having the dedication to have read all 3,249 pages of the 8 volumes in the series preceding Villainy Victorious - over 3 times more than the 1,050 pages of Battlefield Earth!

     

    The ghostwriter/editor of Mission Earth HAS in fact gone public about the experience, with this lengthy account full of the gory details. Ironically, "Villainy Victorious" was the one title for a book in the series that was the idea of Hubbard and not the ghostwriter:

    http://www.lermanet....issionEarth.htm

     

    Oh, and the Mission Earth books have a soundtrack! (As did Battlefield Earth, but it wasn't even subsequently made into a movie that would have music.) As you might guess, the music isn't exactly Annie Lennox quality:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522hrnzve0k

     

    (PS: I haven't read that ghostwriter's account in ages - probably last around the time that the Battlefield Earth movie came out! - and I had misremembered it relating the ghosters/editors creating a lot more of the books from whole cloth, rather than just the "previously on..." introductions to volumes 2-10. But in a sense it is way more L. Ron Hubbard's megalomaniac style to actually write more than a million words of a manuscript, and then allow subordinates to make as few changes as possible, rather than lazily doing an outline and hoping that they'd flesh it out. Although it could very well be that he was losing it as he got toward the end of the original unedited version.)

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    The editor of this movie is one Anne V. Coates:

    8CEcRHq.png

    First off, yes, this of all movies was edited by a woman (who later went on to edit Fifty Shades of Grey)! But she's also the legendary editor of Lawrence of Arabia:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccB1KTzr9o

    Some of the less distinguished titles in her filmography have also been previously featured on HDTGM, like Congo and Masters of the Universe, so I'm surprised nobody's mentioned her yet.

     

    RogerEbert.com's Peter Sobczynski is probably right that the bad movies she edited would be even worse without her contributions (I'm less sure why he doesn't classify Striptease among the "outright junk" - both of the other HDTGM movies he mentions are conspicuously more watchable in a dumb-fun sort of way):

    One of the keys to Coates’ brilliance as an editor was her versatility. Coates cut epics (“Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines," “The Adventurers”), serious dramas (“Becket," which earned her a second Oscar nomination); comedies (“I Love You To Death” “What About Bob?”, “Striptease”), action spectacles (including “The Eagle has Landed," “Raw Deal” and “In the Line of Fire," for which she earned her fourth Oscar nomination); erotic dramas (“Unfaithful," “Fifty Shades of Grey”); horror (“The Legacy”), and yes, even some outright junk (“Masters of the Universe," “Congo"). Though not all of the movies that she worked on were masterpieces, her contributions were almost always solid, and one shudders to think how some of them might have fared without her deft touch.
    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    One I thing I thought was odd about 'Rad' was the log-line: in a movie that features some quintessentially '80's music, including a whole slew of Australian royalty Johnny Farnham and Real Life's 'Send Me an Angel', the log-line of this film is:

     

    "A Hometown Kid on His BMX Against the Best in the World. At Helltrack… The Heat Is On."

     

    With a line like that, how do they not include Glenn Frey's 'The Heat is On'? It was a huge hit in 1984, and would have fit this movie perfectly for a training montage. Do you think they couldn't get the rights so subbed in a Johnny Farnham B-side instead?

     

    A year later, Can't Buy Me Love was planning to be called Boy Rents Girl until they got the rights to use the Beatles song. Isn't it standard practice for movies to use a placeholder name if they can't get permission to use a song?

     

    But if they really wanted the perfect video game and song tie-in, they shouldn't have looked to Paperboy, Frogger, Glenn Frey or the Beatles, but to the "really rad" hip-hop beats of this Nintendo classic - released the same year as Rad in Japan only, they could have built the movie around a preview of the American version just like how The Wizard gave a sneak peek at Super Mario Bros. 3:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGZv30buf-U

    • Like 2

  13. Posted

    A movie of Paperboy would be even crazier than Rad. The game has the literal grim reaper try stopping you from delivering newspapers. Can you imagine Cru getting stopped on the Hell Track by death himself?

     

    For those who haven't seen it:

    hqdefault.jpg

     

    Plus if Death doesn't kill you, a tornado will:

    gfs_49623_2_22_mid.jpg

     

    A Paperboy movie would also explain one of the other puzzling things about the game: if you're able to finish your paper route, you then go on a "training course" full of obstacles and opportunities for stunt jumps. That never seemed to have much relevance to newspaper delivery, even in a suburban neighborhood that's Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey meets Twister:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FL6SyBlySc

     

    And if Rad and Paperboy were the same franchise, it would probably be the all time champion of the movie with the most versions of a tie-in game! The crew thought that Lawnmower Man getting 3 different games was excessive (for that particular movie, it is), and the most games for a HDGTM movie I could find was 9 for Spider-Man 3. But that pales to the cross-pRadform cornucopia of 25 different versions listed on Paperboy's Wikipedia page:

    • Arcade
    • BBC Micro
    • Acorn Electron
    • Commodore 16
    • Commodore 64
    • Commodore Plus/4
    • Amstrad CPC
    • ZX Spectrum
    • Apple II
    • TRS-80 Color Computer
    • MS-DOS
    • Apple IIGS
    • NES/Famicom
    • Amiga
    • Atari Lynx
    • Atari ST
    • Master System
    • Game Gear
    • Sega Genesis
    • Game Boy
    • Game Boy Color
    • Nintendo 64
    • Mobile phone
    • Xbox 360
    • iPhone/iPod Touch

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    Paul kept asking about Sky Captain's profession and asked the nagging question "What is a sky captain?" I want to address this, but the answer involves one of the weirder aspects of this alternate 40s US ... weirder than the three generations of Hinderburgs and the British accents of New Yorkers.

     

    First, I think it's obvious that "Sky Captain" is not a profession or a thing ... it's just Joe's superhero name. The public calls him "Sky Captain" just like it calls Tony Stark "Iron Man."

     

    What if it was the other way around, so that Tony Stark's day job is literally just to iron clothes? And if other superheroes had occupations that were literal versions of their names?

     

    Superman would be a superintendent.

     

    Batman would be a baseball player.

     

    The Punisher would be a dominatrix.

     

    But the thing is, "Sky Captain" is not a superhero ... he's a mercenary. The news broadcast clearly states that the city is waiting on Sky Captain "and his army-for-hire." Army-for-hire means mercenaries. Sky Captain is in it for the money, and some way some how probably expects to be paid for all the hero work he's doing. That's how he funds his tricked out dogfighter and his cool base with a huge hanger and cannons and a crackerjack weapons development/radio triangulation/gum chewing wing for his best friend/sidekick/submissive.

     

    And in this alternate reality, there appears to be NO standing military of any kind. When the robots attack, we see a few cops firing tommy guns at them but otherwise, no one is doing anything to combat them except for Sky Captain. Again, the radio news guy immediately puts all the city's hopes squarely on Sky Captain, which implies that that is standard procedure because they have no army. The modern day equivalent of this would be if we had to call in Blackwater in emergency situations. And we see Sky Captain breaking some pretty severe rules of engagement like firing weapons and dropping bombs in highly populated areas and flying 10 feet above paved city roads.

     

    He's a cavalier merc with a million dollar operation and no overseeing regulatory body that the whole country relies upon for its security. How and why, in a world where Germany is wrangling secret cabals of scientists and Britain has a fucking armada of flying aircraft carriers, has this been allowed to happen?

     

    The idea of giant flying robots invading the streets of NYC comes from the Superman cartoon The Mechanical Monsters, where they carry out the villain's diabolical evil plan to... steal jewelry. So in that context, it does make sense that their only opposition besides the hero would be local cops armed with Tommy guns.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DadH3KjHZws

    • Like 5

  16. Posted

    Correction: Sin City was not released in the same year as Sky Captain but the next year - and in fact, its director met with the Conrans in the interim and modeled his digital-backlot approach on theirs:

     

    "We rather suffered from the first-guy-through-the-wall syndrome. We took the hits because we were new," Kevin says. "A lot of people don't want things to change and aren't interested in something new or different. Out of that whole moment in time, Kerry and I were invited to Skywalker Ranch by George Lucas where we spent a weekend just hanging out with him, Robert Rodriguez, James Cameron, Brad Bird and Robert Zemeckis. It was all these luminaries and us.

     

    "They were really interested in what we were doing and I personally felt validated at that point. Robert Rodriguez was really cool. He was getting ready to do Sin City, so he was of course very curious about how we were going about Sky Captain. If we had been released somewhat later, the reception might have been different. We're definitely a cult favourite among people who like this kind of movie."

    • Like 4

  17. Posted

    Well them starting off the movie with a prominent close-up of the "Hindenburg III" makes it clear from the get-go that history in the movie's universe hasn't unfolded in quite the same way as our own. If there's a zeppelin that never really existed at all, existing events could have occurred at different times. (Similar to how the sitcom The Goldbergs takes place in a deliberately vague "1980something" that blends its creator's memories of the entire decade, so that he can go to see Poltergeist on its theatrical run which was in the summer of 1982, but in the same episode wear a T-shirt of Top Gun and play The Legend of Zelda both of which didn't come out until 1986.) It's far from alone in such regard - the 1930s Frankenstein movies take place in a setting that's a mix of their own decade and the early 1800s of Mary Shelley's original book. And the anachronisms are less of a stretch than, say, Captain America: The First Avenger having the Unisphere which wasn't built until 1964.

     

    In fact, there's even a science fiction short story that won both of the top prizes for that category (the Hugo and Nebula awards) that specifically takes place in an alternate history wherein zeppelins regularly dock with the Empire State Building using technology that has been developed in the wake of the first and only World War - Fritz Leiber's "Catch That Zeppelin!" With Leiber spelling out what is implied in Sky Captain that Nazism never arose in the alternate timeline - instead of developing technologies of warfare, Germany has developed peaceful use of blimp tech that is clearly impractical for aerial combat.

    • Like 4

  18. Posted

    Sorry for the multiple posts, but I also wanted to ask if anyone else got Citizen Kane vibes from this movie? Citizen Kane was fresh on my mind, thanks to Unspooled (the new podcast series covering the AFI 100), so I noticed a few similarities from Sky Captain. For example, in many dialogue scenes, the screen is divided so that the speaker is facing the camera and on the left, while we only see the back of the head of the receiver/audience on the right of the screen, very similar to shots in Citizen Kane.

     

    Then there is the name of the newspaper that Polly works for, The Chronicle. Kane ran the Inquirer, but during the breakfast table montage with Kane's first wife, as their relationship deteriorates we see that Emily starts reading the rival paper, The Chronicle.

     

    Lastly, when they showed Totenkopf's castle, did anyone else think this looked like Kane's castle, Xanadu?

     

    vDWWt74.png

     

    "Conran admits that he 'stole' from everything from comic books to B science fiction films to Citizen Kane."

    • Like 6

  19. Posted

    The lens cap is off

     

    Maybe the meta-joke is that Sky Captain is just messing with Polly Perkins? Like telling someone that their shoelaces are untied, which actually are tied but they glance down to check - "made you look!"

     

    In any case, as several reviews have pointed out, if the lens cap WAS on, the un-exposed film could be used for another try at the photo!

     

    Anyone who has studied photography 101 knows that she could just rewind the film as it an old timey camera meaning the film hasn’t been exposed. But the audience who probably knows nothing of photography or anything else gets a cheap laugh.
    • Like 4

  20. Posted

    One rather ironic omission: for all the kvetching about the movie's alternately-washed-out-and-muddy color scheme and its excessive referencing of The Wizard of Oz, I don't think it was ever brought up that the former is a case of the latter! The opening "black and white" scenes in Kansas are actually sepia-toned (they used to be shown B&W on TV and VHS, but were always originally intended to be in shades of brown rather than gray)!

    ezgif-4-01b6680fc3.gif

    The scene where Dorothy opens the door to full color Oz even had her dress and the door frame painted sepia so that it could be shot in-frame (ironic that Sky Captain did not use such practical tricks):

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=F4eQmTizTSo

    • Like 6

  22. Posted

    At the risk of given this teaming tureen of turds too much credit, I do think I have an in-universe explanation for the dreadlocked and rat-tailed vampires.

     

    Historically, one of the benefits of having short hair in the military is to prevent exactly what happens in this movie. Long hair is incredibly grabable. It makes absolutely no sense to provide your opponent such an easily exploited weakness.

     

    The fact that these specific hemophages have allowed their hair to grow so long speaks volumes about who they are, or at least, who they're supposed to be. If this were a video game, these dudes would be the boss battle. Their hairlength implies a confidence in their lethality that should be terrifying. It’s a way of getting into their opponent’s head. It’s saying, “I’m so deadly I can afford to be reckless.”

     

    This also means, by the Transitive Law of Buttkicking, that by defeating them, Violet is even more badass.

     

    Plus there's a 1991 precedent for using a lack of military-approved haircut to surprise advantage in combat:

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    While the biohazard symbol-shaped building was mentioned, the podcast didn't really go into just how impractical such a design would be, particularly the sharp corners at the edges of the crescents:

    BBTIvJM.jpg

    Wouldn't it be super awkward if your cubicle was in the narrow space at the very tip? How far do hallways and stairwells/elevators extend to the end? Don't the sharp curves put unnecessary strain on the structure?

     

    There are real-life buildings in the shape of a sharp wedge, like the Flatiron Building in New York City, but they're usually built at intersections where the angles of intersecting streets is an external constraint.

    Flatiron-Public-Domain-1024x768.jpg

    But the biohazard-symbol building is on a solid foundation with empty space between the buildings that isn't being used for anything! There aren't even skyway bridges connecting the main building with the three smaller buildings inside.

    • Like 1
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