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JoelSchlosberg

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Posts posted by JoelSchlosberg

  4. Posted

    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?

  5. Posted

    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?

    TheCovenant0713.jpg

  6. Posted

    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.
    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    I thought about this with Teen Witch too (after the mini-episode had come out) but 16 being a significant birthday is very much a modern American concept. I highly doubt the witches of Salem were throwing sweet 16 bashes on their birthdays.

     

    And The Witch refers to the oldest daughter as "approaching womanhood" and she looks no older than 15, and to me that's still pushing it cause she looks so young. (EDIT: Holy crap the girl who played her is reportedly 19 or 20 so they did a really great job of convincing me she was like 14.)

     

    Even in Harry Potter there was never a certain age where the powers just appeared of they suddenly changed, it was just a, "Oh you're 11 and old enough for schooling now so here's your wand and you can actually direct that power you have." Still I wonder if they maybe changed some of the age requirements with the changing times in British culture.

     

    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?

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    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.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    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?

  13. Posted

    Can we talk about the chase scene through the woods? Apparently those cops and kids are all fucking AMAZING drivers. Because they're somehow able to make it through what looks to be a fairly thick forest (that's for some reason almost devoid of underbrush or big roots or branches), and from the looks of it, don't even scratch their cars. Also, as hard as that hummer hit the ground when they landed, there's no way it's not totaled, and it never shows them using their magic demon eyes to fix it before they drive off again.

     

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

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    Renny Harlin on the casting, from the DVD making-of:

     

    I needed great young actors, who of course are good-looking and look very different from each other. Because we are rapidly introducing 5 new characters to the audience in the beginning of the movie, and you have to be clear that we can tell them apart. We didn't want to have really famous stars in the film, because it is an ensemble piece, and the concept of the movie is really the star, in a way.

     

    I report, you decide how successful he was...

    • Like 4

  16. Posted

    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?

  20. Posted

    I was really confused as to how such an awful movie managed to find so many talented actors before they hit it big.

    • Sebastian Stan - Winter Soldier
    • Taylor Kitsch - Friday Night Lights, True Detective, tons of blockbuster films
    • Steven Strait - starring on one of the best new shows this year
    • Jessica Lucas - TONS of TV work
    • Chace Crawford - lots of success on TV (Gossip Girl)
    • Laura Ramsey - nothing huge, but has stayed very busy

    Turns out the casting director is Mindy Marin, who has cast a bunch of awesome movies like Nightcrawler, Drive, Juno, etc. She also cast a few HDTGM classics: Anaconda and Face/Off.

     

     

    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.

  21. Posted

    You Guys!!!! They are going to do BLOODSPORT!!!!!!!!

     

    What is your source for this?

     

    How? That movie is fucking FLAWLESS.

     

    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.

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    someone helpfully put the clip up on youtube. the description includes "The song is just perfect fot this scene". must be a fan

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLcdbnzHOZA

     

    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?

  23. Posted

    there was a 6 minute period in the movie where it was nearly all handshakes ... and not normal handshakes but stupid "yo dude" handshakes ... i think kitsch even gives his girlfriend one ...

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AB6WKiI3qU

     

    (not sure if this will play everywhere)

     

    Maybe that's the Covenant's equivalent of

    ?

     

     

    Yeah, that bugged the crap out of me too! It was like every time the met up with one another they were acting as if they hadn't seen each other in YEARS! Then it was ten minutes of handshakes and bro hugs.

     

    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.)

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    this came out in 2006, a year after the twilight books started coming out and 2 years before the first movie ... renny works fast. which is evident from the amount of CGI in this movie. theres nearly as much CGI in this movie as green lantern .... nearly

     

    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.

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