Jump to content
🔒 The Earwolf Forums are closed Read more... ×

JoelSchlosberg

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    297

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by JoelSchlosberg

  1. Posted

    What do you mean, there are no musical sequels with unironically good songs?

    The various "Gold Diggers of..." movies have plenty of great, original, literal Bubsy Berkeley numbers. To be sure, it's unclear whether they are technically sequels or remakes, reboots, reimaginings, or just a Madden-style "put out a new one every year or two with the year in the title so it's clear it's not the existing ones" thing. (The Museum of the Moving Image showed Gold Diggers of 1933 at the same time that they had an exhibit spanning the Madden series, showing how such annual refinement could be art.) Even IMDB seems unclear on the issue, listing "of Broadway" and "of 1933" as both remakes of and follow-ups to The Gold Diggers. But as early as 1933, there were outstanding musical numbers in a movie that owed at least as much to a predecessor in premise/storyline as Grease 2 does to Grease.

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    The 3 video games based on Lawnmower Man is not an extraordinarily high number. Movies often have licensed video games for almost all the various gaming platforms current at the time, which can be a lot. For instance, there were Spider-Man 3 video games on at least 9 different devices: Game Boy Advance, mobile phone (pre-smartphone), Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Windows PCs, and Xbox 360. Last Action Hero had 7: Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Nintendo.

    • Like 2

  5. Posted

    Emily touched on this at the end of the show, but the one scene that really irked me takes place when Jobe is driving the truck and is listening to the first five seconds of each CD he puts in the boombox. I get that this is supposed to be something akin to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation super speed reading a book, but seriously? Speed listening?!? Even when Data would speed read, he would read whatever he was reading in its entirety.

     

    It's as if the movie is telling us all Jobe needs to do to fully comprehend music is to listen to a snippet of it. Wouldn't a true genius listen to an entire song or album to glean the nuances of it? Like say, Jobe listens to Beethoven's 9th Symphony and, using his super genius brain, hears something in each and every note no human has ever conceived of before.

     

    Data did have an efficient way of listening, but it was a bit different:

    [media='']

    [/media]

  6. Posted

    Was Jobe suppose to be an idiot savant? When we first meet him the drunk Irish man comments that he built "Big Red" the lawnmower and that he is a whiz with machines. I thought that would play into things later on in the movie, but he's not good with the game or other machinery in the film until he starts to get smart.

     

    Why isn't he even worse the first time he plays the VR game? The first arcade game, Computer Space, was famously incomprehensible to a general audience, and it has graphics like this:

    Computer_Space.jpg

    How is Jobe able to fly around in 3D with no prior experience? (The game's rules are unclear, but it does not appear to be a rails shooter-type game that takes care of movement for the player.)

  7. Posted

    For all the monkey business, it's never explained why they use chimpanzees in particular. Wouldn't gorillas be more effective on the battlefield, larger and stronger and with a longer thumb making it easier to hold weapons?

    655a3972e1364cdf06cab179b7e38f5a.jpg

    Are the chimps being trained to actually use weapons in physical reality the way the chimp uses the gun in the opening? If so, why don't they take precautions against just such an occurrence? If not, and they're only controlling the weaponry remotely like a drone pilot (or virtually), why would the training make them good at holding and aiming a physical gun? Having lots of practice playing Street Fighter doesn't automatically translate toward the motor skills used in an actual street fight.

    • Like 2

  8. Posted

    More head-scratching dialogue: Jobe is confused by Dr. Lawrence Angelo's mention of "endocrine", which the good doctor then explains as follows:

     

    Endocrine: it carries secretions of certain glands, like the thyroid, adrenal, and pituitary, which regulate growth.

     

    If Jobe doesn't know the word "endocrine", how would he know the words "secretions", "thyroid", "adrenal", and "pituitary"? How is he acquiring new vocabulary, anyway? Even if he's getting smart, he can't know words he doesn't encounter. Is there a virtual reality educational program, like Reader Rabbit on steroids? Is he speed reading like Johnny Five in Short Circuit?

    [media='']

    [/media]
    • Like 3

  10. Posted

    Omission: the Lawnmower Man short story is in Night Shift, the very first book collecting Stephen King short stories... which also includes "Trucks", the basis for HDTGM favorite Maximum Overdrive! Plus the sources for such quality motion pictures as Children of the Corn and The Mangler.

     

    You'd think they would have stopped making movies from Stephen King short stories after that, but then we wouldn't have Stand By Me or The Shawshank Redemption (both from his second book collection of shorter-than-full-length-novel tales)!

     

    Also, in Night Shift's introduction, Stephen King answers in detail the question in the Vampire's Kiss episode of how much an agent earns for selling a short story! About the only thing King doesn't lay out is how long it takes the agent to sell a short story, but unless it's more than a couple full days' work, his agent would be earning more an hour from the story than he is!

    MyzMgTL.jpg

    (I had a correction/omission in mind that I never got to writing up: I don't think it was implied that Nicolas Cage was agenting short stories full time. The author specifically refers to the short story he's asking for archived info about from Cage as one he wrote earlier at the beginning of his career. It seemed to me to be implying that he'd moved on to higher-paying markets since, but had some sentimental nostalgia to the short story sale for breaking him in to getting paid for writing.)

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    I haven't listened to the episode yet, but watching the movie made me wonder what VR was really like back then. Which led me to this PBS special from 1992 on virtual reality: https://www.youtube....?v=u6CARe34Nxg. Kinda interesting!

     

    From the same year, a news segment on VR:

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

    "The kids that use our system say, 'I'm not going back to flatscreen after this!'"

     

    A few years later into the 1990s, there was Nintendo's infamous Virtual Boy:

    avb4-adc86.jpg

    • Like 4

  17. Posted

    I fully agree with the 'No Strings On Me' comment: I thought to mention it once I got done but Joel beat me to the punch. In any case: I remember when Age of Ultron used that song in the teaser trailer, it was not long after Disney had acquired Marvel, meaning this was (one of) the first crossover(s) between the two companies. I remember seeing it and thinking, "oh, we'll see Disney stuff in Marvel films now. Rad." So that sort of explains the out of context presence of the song in Age of Ultron - but how do we explain 'Gamer'? Is the song in the public domain? How else do we explain that someone at Disney must have signed off on licensing this song from 'Pinocchio' to be sung by a naked, tweaking, murderous Terry Crews immediately after killing a dude and bathing in his blood? This makes no sense to me. None. How could Disney let their song be associated with this? Tell me it's public domain and I might sleep better tonight

     

    The songs list in the end credits includes "I've Got No Strings", but the "courtesy of" line included in every other song, is conspicuously absent:

     

    wFRq2xS.jpg

     

    The Nostalgia Critic has both parody and commentary grounds for claiming fair use. Neveldine/Taylor... don't.

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    What's going on with the games being controlled by Minority Report-style hand gestures in the air? Is the position of the hands being measured directly, like a theremin performer's, or is a camera image being interpreted Kinect style? Either way seems prone to indistinctness and misinterpretation. Competitive fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat still rely on mashing buttons for good reason, and the precision they offer would be far more essential if actual lives were at stake.

  19. Posted

    Why aren't the boundaries of the game actual boundaries? There's a line saying that "It's restricted area. It's beyond the borders of the game. I couldn't put you there if I tried." But shouldn't the borders of the game be actual, well, borders? Like thick prison walls or the water around an island? Even the trailer for Escape from New York had to beef up Manhattan Island's physical isolation with extra security measures to make the premise work -- "The bridges are mined. The rivers are patrolled." Or it could avoid restricting the action to begin with, as in the original book of The Running Man where the contestants are free to roam the country -- subject to the full opposition of law enforcement. Or they could deliberately make the boundaries contrived, like the invisible walls in video games, as a deliberate satire. Or they could have the boundary be enforced by the nanites, like those grocery store shopping carts whose wheels lock up past the parking lot. There are many possibilities that would add to the suspense and satire of the movie, and exactly none are used.

  20. Posted

    I kinda get why they would be specific by saying sushi as when someone asks if I want Japanese I think of tonkatsu or panko chicken or various other food items, yet when someone says sushi I know they want sushi. Maybe it's just me but that's how I broke it down.

     

    But why wouldn't they also clarify the specific Iranian and Mexican foods available, when there are many possibilities for those as well? Even Taco Bell has more varieties of Mexican food than just tacos.

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    Nobody's mentioned the puzzling moment of dialogue when Kable asks Simon "What are you, 12?" and Simon replies "I'm 17 actually, thank you." Is Kable just being sarcastic when he thinks that Simon may not be old enough for a bar mitzvah? And is being controlled by an underage teenager really that much better? What IS the minimum age to play the game? How does it correlate to the minimum age of military service? Is the minimum age lower with parental consent? Do teens get fake IDs to sneak into the game?

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    Did Ultron get the idea to sing "I've Got No Strings" from this movie? Either way, it is crazy that not one but two action movie villains have sung what may be the least intimidating Disney song. In his End of Days episode, the Nostalgia Critic has Arnold Schwarzenegger sing it to make him look ridiculous:

     

    What is YOUR pick for a Disney song from a non-villain that would actually work as a badass villain song? My pick is the Ballad of Davey Crockett: I'm not messing with someone who killed a bear as a 3 year old!

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

     

    There's also a bit of a connection to another HDTGM film: The Covenant. During an English class scene in The Covenant the teacher brings up Stephen King and the blonde witch yells out "Dreamcatcher is the shit!"

     

    I couldn't tell if the audience's intended reaction is supposed to be "haha, that student really stuck it to that snotty teacher!" Or "that student sure has terrible taste".

    • Like 1
×