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Galactiac

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Posts posted by Galactiac

  1. Posted

     

    Agreed. "Anyone" definitely should not be the standard of a "great film" nor of "The Canon". Art that anyone can appreciate tends to be terrible or, worse, mediocre and harmless. I kind of hope that the majority of The Canon gets filled with titles that not everyone would think are "great". (speaking of, isn't it about time some David Lynch films got nominated?)

     

    You're taking me too literally and out of context. I was responding to something very specific.

  2. Posted

     

    Found it:

    During World War II, he had a friend named Kim Noonien Singh; after the war Kim disappeared, and Gene used his name for some characters in the Star Trek series (Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Noonien Soong from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987)) in hopes that Kim might recognize his name and contact him.

     

    They even connected the lore on Star Trek: Enterprise. Brent Spiner played Arik Soong who is the great grandfather of Noonien Soong (who he also played on TNG). Arik was an admirer of illegal genetic "augments" like Khan, implying that the name "Noonien" was likely passed to his descendant for that reason.

    • Like 2

  3. Posted

     

    "Anyone" is a tough standard.

     

    This specific exchange started with someone holding Wrath to an extremely high standard. Probably higher than it needs to be for the canon. I don't think it meets either standard. If Star Wars hasn't already made someone interested in the genre then Wrath won't come close.

  4. Posted

     

    I saw Wrath of Khan before I'd ever seen an episode of the original series, and I immediately understood that it was a good, well-told story. Honestly, the opinion that it doesn't hold up outside of Trek fandom baffles me. It is THE movie that showed Trek could hold up outside of that.

     

    Well I never said it was a bad movie. But do I think this movie works so well that anyone would hail its greatness? No, I think most people would just be entertained by the ship-to-ship stuff and amused by the characters but not inordinately impressed with any of it. That's fine, but it's not good enough for the canon.

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    We have so few examples of a genre movie like this, that are so well plotted and themed and executed, that they can and do easily break out and touch people who otherwise have no interest in the genre, that we can really hold them up as an example of what cinema can be at its best.

     

     

    I'm a huge Trekkie and I honestly don't consider Wrath of Khan to be "so well plotted and themed and executed" that it can "break out and touch people who otherwise have no interest in the genre."

     

    I think it's an okay, but fun movie that mostly appeals to people that have already watched 60+ hours of a television show. Which really just makes it good supplemental content to a television series than a great film. That's why judging it on its own merit is important. I really don't think this movie has the universal appeal to non-genre lovers that some people think. I also think it's clunkier than people like to admit.

     

    I think if you're looking for a Star Trek movie that stands on its own and appeals to a wide audience the only one is Star Trek (2009), but I don't think it's definitive Star Trek at all, and I don't think it's canon-worthy. Trek is legendary TV, and 12 enjoyable but spotty films.

    • Like 2

  6. Posted

    Alright, I'm seeing that it's only 3 minutes longer. Probably doesn't make too much of a difference, then

     

    Right. I watched both versions this week and it's practically the same movie. I think the director's cut was just a DVD selling scheme. About the only significant difference is that you learn Peter Preston is Scotty's nephew. Does it make much difference? Nope. Peter's death scene is goofy in both versions.

  7. Posted

    So I've seen every episode of the Star Trek franchise which is something like 546 hours of television. Obviously I've seen the movies too, and what I've believed now for years is that Star Trek shines on television, but not nearly as much in cinema. While there are many famous villains from the television show, Star Trek rarely focused on the "villain of the week" until the movies came along and needed exciting third acts.

     

    In Star Trek VI (a movie I actually like a little more than Wrath of Khan) Kirk actually utters the words "Let them die!" about the entire Klingon race. Probably the most un-Star Trek line being uttered by arguably it's greatest character.

    Star Trek is about exploration and keeping the peace. It's about philosophy and ethics, diplomacy, and reaching across cultural boundaries. SOMETIMES it's about defeating a villain, or killing a monster (when they're given absolutely no other choice), but the movies tend to shift all of those priorities to turn Star Trek into an action movie. I'm fairly certain Star Trek is solely responsible for my own personal ideas of what a good man or woman is, how to be fair to other people, and how to respect other cultures. As fun as Wrath of Khan is ... it taught me none of that stuff.

     

    Plus Wrath of Khan does look cheap, and it does contain some wonky filmmaking. Carol Marcus, David, and the Genesis cave add very little to the movie, and Amy is absolutely right ... Spock is barely in this movie until he dies. Let me repeat that last part ... the movie that gets all the credit in the world for killing Spock BARELY does anything with his character until he dies just to give Kirk an interesting moment.

     

    I really like Wrath of Khan, honestly, but to say that it is the best thing Star Trek has to offer I think ignores what Star Trek is about. To say that it's great cinema sells cinema short. To say that it's canon sells The Canon short. There are many episodes of Star Trek that I would put in a tv canon, and I might put Wrath of Khan in a sci-fi film canon, but for the canon? It's a "no".

    • Like 6

  8. Posted

    So I watched the first film yesterday and I was really surprised. Robert Wise and Gene Roddenberry somehow managed to make a 2-hour existentialist art house movie, discussing religion and evolution, out of a 70s soap opera. Who'd have thought? I quite liked it.

     

    Yeah, look, it's not the worst movie ever, but the problem is they took what could have been an average to good single episode of Star Trek and padded it out into a full two hours. Not only that, but most of the padding is a first-person view moving through various nondescript energy fields and alien landscapes.

     

    I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture last night for the first time since I bought the Director's Cut dvd in 2001 and all the same problems are there. Not much story, slow, boring, that overlong sequence of Kirk and Scotty admiring the Enterprise. I will say it's a slightly better watch on Blu-Ray because a lot of the V'Ger space stuff is really pretty, and there are some serviceable split-diopter shots inside the Enterprise (along with some pretty bad ones). Watching this on cable as a kid was brutal. Two commercial breaks go by and you're still slowly moving through space.

     

    Not the worst Trek film, but certainly not the best. Possibly the least entertaining though.

  9. Posted

    If I had my way, I would scorch The Usual Suspects from every list of essential films, but I'm gonna stick to my guns and say that I think what's in ought be in. Though if perhaps we were replacing a movie with an old Vs loser, instead, that could be a compromise I could work with. I could even deal with losing Re-Animator (though, yknow, preferably something else) if it meant Road Warrior getting in.

     

    We're on the same page there. Love Road Warrior.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    I don't see why we need to tabulate percentages and determine whether horror has overstepped its genre bounds. The Canon hasn't exactly gotten into the deep cuts of horror, yet, mostly been slam-dunk 'duh's. I don't think we need to shave off the horror simply because this podcast happens to be hosted in part by a horror buff who wants to give plenty of them a chance. Guarantee if this thing was hosted by a couple of Film Twitter jerks they might have just let Nosferatu in by now, at best.

    Now, if The Ring ever gets in, then we can talk about a low bar. I guess there's an argument to be had with Re-Animator, maybe, but then, Devin and Amy have always been open that they would lord their power over The Canon at all times, and do as they please to manipulate it, so calling in the fanboy cavalry for what was openly an indulgence pick (which I happen to agree belongs in The Canon), eh? All is fair, yknow. I wanna see some hard data that all those sudden sign-ons for Re-Animator ended up dead-weather Canon listeners, anyway, if a good many stuck around for other votes then I figure there's no foul. I suspect the indulgence picks will be off-limits, anyway. But other than that, I don't see what there is to complain about, the Canon listenership chose for every single damn one of those horror movies, and they chose "yes". I wouldn't want a Canon without a healthy dose of the rough stuff, and if this Canon has a unifying "theme" it's the co-mingling of low and high cinema, arthouse and genre, breaking the demarcations and recognizing what is simply good, essential film, with neither pretension nor pandering. That's the Canon I envision.

     

    I think most people agree with a lot of that, but don't necessarily agree that everything in the canon is good or essential. It's a constant discussion about where the bar is and how we define it and I think having a knock-out episode is a great way to stoke the fire.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

     

    He 100% kills Dr. Hill by cutting his head off with a shovel. Why is everyone forgetting that?

     

    Oh sure. Someone mentioned that way back in July. I think it was mentioned on the episode that he never killed anyone, and I just never double-checked.

     

    My original assumption was definitely that he killed the cat.

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

     

    That's what "The Best of 20XX" is all about. It's a kind of a gimmick pick, from a knowingly very limited sample set and with full knowledge that it's all speculation that the film will even age well. At least that's what was said during their first one, when they did Grand Budapest vs Guardians of the Galaxy. Which I still feel the voters made the right choice on, given that, for all the buzz Guardians got, I think Deadpool has already stolen its fire, and will end up being the more influential film.

     

    Unless the new Howard the Duck ends up topping even that. :P

     

    I'm not so sure about Deadpool being the better movie. I was looking forward to it, but then felt like I'd just seen Kevin Smith's take on a Wolverine movie (not a compliment). They would have been better off lifting from Lord and Miller's 21 Jump Street films. Plus it fell into typical origin story schlock. We're well into the second decade of origin films, and any comic book movie that wants to move the genre forward should be avoiding that garbage.

     

    I love that it did so well, but I really hope the sequel is a big improvement.

  14. Posted

    Re-Animator and Working Girl are the only two I've seen that I would easily nominate. This thread is making me realize most of the really unpopular ones were before my time with the podcast. I'm tempted to catch myself up, but that sounds like a really awful way to spend a Saturday.

    • Like 2

  15. Posted

    I only discovered Blow Out because of this podcast and I feel exactly the same about The King of Comedy. They're just great films that belong in the canon despite how under the radar they are.

     

    Actually those are my favorite kind of canon movies. It's like discovering a classic from an alternate universe.

     

    I will say I disagree with Amy about the dinner scene. I think that's one of the best parts of the movie. It's just broad enough that it's funny, but not from a totally different reality like the hilarious fantasy sequences. It could have gone off the rails, but I think they nailed it, and it actually makes me sad Bernhard didn't have a bigger career.

     

    I was taken on this journey of liking Rupert, then pitying him, then hating his guts, and then actually rooting for him when he got on the air, and then actually being kind of proud of him when his monologue wasn't half bad. It wasn't hilarious, but it was halfway decent 1982 stand-up. Great movie. Yes.

     

    (Oh I liked Jerry Lewis in this too even though I can never shake the feeling that he's a huge scumbag. It works for this movie.)

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    I often disagree with Rotten Tomatoes, but I think it's one of the best indicators of the reception of a film.

     

    Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome at 81% blows my mind. I just have to assume all of the reviews are from thirty years ago and the critics were just taken in by the scale of the production. Terrible movie.

  18. Posted

     

    Don't think the odds are in your favor on this one, but you are welcome to your opinion.

     

     

    I mean it already has a pretty poor audience score on RT. Maybe that's just some kind of hipster backlash that will clear up in a few years, but I think it will just get worse.

     

    But hey, obviously that's not the majority opinion here, so welcome to the canon The Blair Witch Project. I surrender. Really fun discussion, guys.

  19. Posted

     

    Honestly, I think your personal dislike of the film is blinding you a little bit to its overall cultural impact. I mean, it's already been 17 years since The Blair Witch Project's release and people are still talking about it, and clearly it's still popular enough to inspire a sequel/reboot. I'd say that's enough to qualify it as more than a gimmick or fad. It hasn't faded.

     

     

    Nostalgia. And I really believe it will fade as more time passes and there are more and more adults who weren't old enough to see it in 1999. I was, but I put it off for 17 years. I think it will feel more and more staged to people; which obviously it is, but when you "feel it" the spell is broken and the film turns into a pumpkin.

  20. Posted

    Yeah I feel very differently. I feel like The Blair Witch Project is a big gimmick and a fad, and as the decades go by it will work for fewer and fewer people and seem less and less important. That doesn't mean people shouldn't experience it for themselves, but it does mean, for my money, it's not a canon movie. I feel similarly about Forest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, and The Sound of Music (though I wouldn't call them gimmicks). Those movies are important to a lot of people, and anyone that's read up on a bit of film history should see them for themselves, but they didn't make it into the canon, and I think it's perfectly justifiable.

     

    This is an interesting case I think, because I can tell that my experience with The Blair Witch Project was dramatically different from the people that love it. But I guarantee if they experienced the movie the way I did there would be no question this movie doesn't belong here. It's just a curiosity to me, not a great film, not even a scary film, and often pretty irritating.

  22. Posted

    I definitely agree anything can be great. I just think in a general sense found footage isn't there yet. In my personal life I'm not a snob, but I do have a higher standard for canon picks.

     

    Like BLADE for instance. I kind of like this movie, and it has influenced every comic book movie for the last two decades. Try watching it. It's not a canon movie.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

     

     

     

    I just think that a Canon would be incomplete without some representation of every aesthetic/movement, and found footage is undeniably one to have struck a big chord for the last decade or so (and I do not think Cannibal Holocaust counts). Though I do think it'd be interesting, if this were a "one-and-done" conversation, to pit Blair Witch against Paranormal Activity, which is the only plausible competition I can think of, in terms of a FF movie enough people would consider good or important enough to grant it entry. I would argue that Blair Witch has enough merit on its own, but that's subjective, and I suppose the premise of that portion of my comment was to look at Blair Witch as an objectively Canon-worthy film, apart from its artistic worth. This is one of those things where I feel that a line has to be drawn--like, I think it was correct for The Interview to be declined, as you don't need to watch the movie to understand its import as a global "moment", at all. But I do think, if this is viewed from the "objective" stance, that you'd still need to watch Blair Witch (or any submitted rival for the throne) to at least have a working grasp of the found footage phenomenon, even if you see said phenomemenon as artistically minor, so something, certainly, needs to get in.

     

    I mostly vote based on what I think are quality film experiences. If something doesn't hold up, but inspired a lot of other really amazing films then I might vote for that, but it's a tough decision. So I take more of a curator's approach to voting than a historian's.

    • Like 2

  24. Posted

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPyav6hQlI

     

    Having become a part of the pantheon of great comic book storyteller's with 1986's The Dark Knight Returns, Miller continued to be successful in that world until around the year 2001 when his work began to sour. Following the success of the co-directed Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez film adaptation of Miller's Sin City graphic novel series, OddLot Entertainment decided to give him the chance to solo direct another adaptation with an original story. This time it was the work of another legend, Will Eisner, and his character The Spirit.

     

    The result was pants-on-head crazy, and came in at a whopping 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's full of awful humor, sexism, INSANE plot points, Samuel L.Jackson and Scarlet Johansson dressed as Nazis for comedic effect, and one scene featuring a genetic mutation that will leave me scratching my head forever.

     

    Its certainly visually stunning, but whoa.

     

    I had the pleasure of seeing this in the theater. Amazing. Perfect for the show.

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