Cakebug Tranch

Easier on the eyes than Emma Watson? That man, I declare, is a lunatic. Away with him. This looks fun - my entire relationship with the cartoon version is watching it with my kids (it came out when I was 12 when I was 'too cool' for that stuff so didn't see it until adulthood) so when i saw this trailer I was bracing myself for another teeth-pulling session that these films usually represent to parents with kids (witness: 'Trolls'), but this looks pretty good. Then when we add the music (nearly none of which is in this trailer) that's a pretty good time, I'd say. The biggest questions for me when it comes to Disney filming their cartoon canon: will we get a CGI 'Fox and the Hound'? Or 'Robin Hood'?

This image is seen in the film at the 1.07 mark (see link below), when Peter is lying in his couch coffin and Flashdance comes in to talk to him. I assume they liked the image of Cage below Beals's legs, so they replicated it for the poster. http://imgur.com/a/gTmMN

All good points, and particularly agreed on the latter. I found the storytelling so convoluted: the lead-up to his encounter with Jackie (prior to the bat-attack) is so drawn out (with the kid in the stairwell, taking off socks, undressing so gradually, stumbling together, etc) that when he first connects with Beals they are into the neck-sucking almost instantly. Similarly with Alva: it felt like the director didn't know how much or little to show of each step which muddied everything. Maybe my problem was literalising a lot of what was happening, when so much of this was due to his psychosis. Earlier query post cheerfully retracted.

While I completely support the posters who have expressed dismay about this movie's sexual assault content, I am still puzzled about the nature of this assault. She assumes he will rape her and tells him not to rape her, and while he absolutely attacks, assaults, and violates her (by tearing her shirt open) I got the impression that that was the extent of his physical assault. He says later he raped her and she assumes he did, but was there more that was not shown? I say all this because the Wikipedia plot summary says, in excerpt: This lack of clarity is hugely problematic, of course, but I was unclear on the nature of the assault. Did I miss something?

Yes, I found the post-murder wandering around New York scenes very strange, as he's clearly got a death wish and is hoping to be released from his torment by way of Suicide-by-Vampire-Slayer. He's wielding that piece of wood and offering it to strangers to kill him but can't find any takers. Even if New Yorkers will blithely walk by crazy people on the street, eventually even the most disruptive and blood-drenched will be hauled into some holding cell. This last period is obviously part of his descent in his mental illness to wish for death - even in his fantasy where his therapist introduces him to 'Sharon', his mental image of himself still carries the piece of wood in the psychiatrist's office - yet he never attempts to harm himself, and he is only finished off in his 'death wish' by being stabbed to death by a (justifiably angry) home invader. If Alva's brother hadn't have broken in to his apartment and woken him from his sleep, Loew would have continued the cycle. I agree, I think the point at which Alva's brother straight up murders him is a real problem. Loew gets to die like he wanted to (by stake, in the classic vampire trope of a vampire hunter staking a sleeping ghoul in his sarcophagus) but now this other guy has blood on his hands. Also strange about all this is how we first meet the brother when Alva demands she give him live ammunition to defend herself, meaning that she is prepared to murder Loew for (what until that point) has been systemic abuses of power, only to have him laugh at her and recommend blanks. Yet an hour later he stabs the dude to death without much hesitation. He doesn't fight him or call the cops or talk to him, he just drives a stake through his sternum (a feat of strength in itself). And while we all want to talk about the fact that he's bitten the woman in the nightclub and eaten a cockroach, why is no one talking about his feast of pigeon flesh? Raw, I assume. That can't have been a pleasant meal, yet he still seemingly polishes the whole thing off.

Love the new signature Cameron, although I really think the moment is perfected in the next two lines: "Very good, you know your alphabet. / I never misfiled anything, not once, not one time." Cage's toolkit of gestures are so over the top in this movie - the jumping on the desk, the pointing, the walking into walls, the Peter Pan hands on hips - that the mimes having the slap fight didn't seem particularly out of place to me. In his psychosis, these guys fit in just right and I was disappointed not to hear the director own that choice. I can't remember when I saw a more overtly theatrical movie.

Great episode, just what I'd hoped for when this film was announced. A tentative correction here on the murder of the girl in the nightclub. A lot of the conversation in the podcast was around how much damage Nic could do with those plastic teeth, but after watching the section in slo-mo a few times, I'm convinced that he doesn't use the plastic teeth at all when he bites her. He wears the teeth to sit down with her and 'flirt', but when he attacks her, he first does so by slipping his hand down the front of her shirt, to which she responds by whacking him in the face. I'm not sure if this is the point at which his teeth come out, but when he leans over to bite her, I'm sure there are no plastic teeth in there. Here's a screenshot of that moment. His mouth is way too wide to allow him to fit those little teeth in there: they have a small hinge at the back meaning that if he opened his mouth this wide they'd fall out. Every time he has them in, he has his jaw clenched to hold them there. Then, once the girl is dead, he sits up and slips the teeth back into his mouth which suggests that for him the teeth are more about the external show of vampirism, not the necessary tools for feeding on flesh. Here we see him popping those teeth back in, which are very clearly still white (no blood), before he leaves. This raises the question again: how does he kill her? Human teeth aren't designed to tear flesh in that way: he's very obviously biting her with his incisors. Without the sharp plastic teeth, he'd have a hard time making that hole without tearing the flesh more violently. Add to that, she glazes over and dies (or maybe just passes out?) in about ten seconds, assuming it isn't a time-lapse in the cutaways. According to this lovely site it'll take anywhere from 15-60 minutes to bleed out from a jugular vein injury. Some sites list this as little as 2 minutes if the internal jugular is cut, but her damage is external, which bleeds a lot slower, and would clot before she straight up died. That's my little correction, but multiple viewings of the moment make me sure it's true: he doesn't wear the plastic teeth to bite anyone. But why not? Great episode!

After I merrily showed my wife the OofMaGoof 'I'm a Vampire For Ten Minutes' clip, we moved on to to this highlights package from 'Vampire's Kiss', which had us in hysterics. Sublime stuff. (This is Kit Walker btw, the joke had worn thin from the Phantom ep so I am transitioning over to a much more appropriate CBB-inspired username)

Yes! Yes! So much yes! I watched this last night instead of the tire fire on CNN, and I am pretty sure I made the correct call. The extras in this film were the best. The taxi driver! The (several) "are you okay buddy" guys! The hilarious head-bopping clubgoers! The clubgoers who refuse to stop dancing even as blood drenched Nic Cage assaults Jennifer Beals! The writer of the film moonlighting as an inattentive waiter in the diner! The slap mimes! Nic Cage's brother at one point! The ineffectual bouncer! This (non-union) production could so ill-afford extras that they just pulled shmoes in from the street to interact with GIF Nic. This was utterly bananas. I loved it.

Agreed. The only thing that has me nervous are the sheer number of throwbacks to the first film: that image of Renton leaning on the car and laughing at the driver before being tackled is so iconic that to finish the trailer with the same image made me really antsy. Add to that showing a scene of the boys at the foot of Beinn na Lap (the mountain where the 'it's shite being Scottish' speech happens) and lots of slow-motion 'plunging into drugs' images (I love the one of Spud falling from the building though), and this one runs the great risk of being a retread. With that said, like you say, Danny Boyle has only improved since the first Trainspotting, and everyone looks just like you'd think they'd look after 20 years (Begbie and Spud in particular!). Rents looks pretty healthy (it's that Star Wars money) and Sickboy hasn't changed much, but that's to be expected. Diane (god the crush I had on her) looks as you'd expect. I have faith that this won't be a crappy overhaul. I just hope that the issue throughout this film isn't just Begbie chasing Renton for putting him in jail 20 years ago. Let that be a scene but I really hope there's more to this than that. And while I love the update of 'Choose Life' to include the vacuity of modern life (and hearing Born Slippy again!), the worry is that this is just a 'what are they doing now? I wonder what Spud would tweet!' story. I'm with you Fister Roboto. Full-crazed is likely.

This is almost certainly the wrong section to post this in, but after seeing the Wonder Woman trailer above, I thought I would come here to express my vibrating excitement about the trailer below. Not so much How Did This Get Made as HOLY FUCK THIS GOT MADE FINALLY. The first one was so hugely important to me as an 18 year old. Now I'm 38 and we get this. Year made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsozpEE543w Edit: I just 'liked' my own post, that's how excited I am. Not unliking.

I never got the impression that was high on Kable's list of priorities. He was much more interested in doing an Andy Dufresne at the end of Shawshank impersonation: hiding away and pretending the world isn't there. Ratings were high and the world domination plan was foiled: the guy with the iPad could have stepped right in and made a fortune!

See, I interpreted this to mean 'turn off MY control panel so my family can go be free,' not 'shut down the entire industry of 'Slayer''. I didn't get the sense Kable was worried that 'Slayer' was brutal, just that he wanted his wife and kid back. And the click of the mouse/button/iPad was just relating to his own brain control. Surely that makes a little more sense than turning off a whole prison industry?

Or, just as importantly, what happens if a Slayers gamer needs to take a leak mid battle or the UPS man comes to the door or (more likely for our hero) his mum tells him he has to clean his room? He can't hit pause to take care of something and pick back up. What if the internet goes down? That avatar is dead meat. I think you're right about the universe: this is a distant future where news anchors swear and people go out for Iranian food. I assume the crime rates are through the roof and we have a Judge Dredd style system of judge/jury/executioner for minor crimes. Speaking of: I know the Sly Stallone Dredd was terrible (spaghetti robot and all) but you have to give it up for the Karl Urban versus Lena Headey version. God DAMN that was awesome.

I would have welcomed this twist. Some kind of multi-layered Inception revealing the real Big Bad. But sadly, no, it's megalomaniacal Dexter working alone, who has control tech in everyone around him, and his big final plan is that he'll send microbots out in dust to infect the whole world, so he can control everyone by his thoughts. Which for some reason ignores the fact that Dexter has to be thinking about a move for it to happen (see: self stabby) so controlling more than one or two people at a time seems really inconvenient. Maybe his grand plan revolves entirely around Beijing Olympics-level mass choreography, assuming he can get everyone to do whatever he wants, so long as they all do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

Yes! Later in the film Kable tells Percy that if he wants him to win, he needs to set him loose. This seems to suggest that Percy is controlling him well up to a point, but he's still not realising his full potential as a slayer because Percy is holding him back. This, combined with the dreaded 'ping' that haunts the lives of these soldiers, seems to make the controllers a liability rather than a strength. Kable makes it clear that he would win the game faster and more effectively if he wasn't being controlled by Percy. So what's up with the end of the film where Kable beats Dexter in the dance fight with the assistance of Percy Jackson controlling him (enhancing him?) from home? Percy is in his gamer den throwing punches, somehow still in contact with Kable, even though it's made clear that Dexter has overrode the control. The 'gamer' and their control is very tenuously established and used, whenever it's convenient.

One other thing I was never clear on - does Kable win 30 battles because Kable is a brilliant soldier, or because Percy Jackson is a brilliant gamer? Wouldn't it be a much more interesting movie if Percy Jackson was controlling an avatar that wasn't a perfect killing machine? I would love a movie where we see John Leguizamo's character win 30 battles in Slayer, to emphasise the skill of the controller.

The impression I got was that the release period of winning 30 games was set as an impossibly high standard, so they never had to worry about making good on their promise. It seemed like Slayers was an event-style TV experience (maybe like early American Idol?) where the whole world is watching, yet it seems the Slayers are fighting quite frequently. Given that these guys are returning from battle one win closer to freedom yet probably pretty banged up and traumatised, maybe these are less like weekly episodes of American Idol and more like monthly (plus) installments of UFC? Surely these guys need some time to recover from each fight? They go out of their way to say these avatars are real humans, but then they treat them like they're actual video game avatars, where after a game is done, you hit 'start again' and the avatar is back, good as new. But how can that be the case? Castle mentions that he has the Department of Justice's cooperation for the programme, which makes you assume that they've signed off on letting these battle-traumatised killers back into society. Indeed, at the end of the film, Butler is hanging out with his family in the car, unmolested by the law, so the implication is that there has been some kind of unconditional pardon, even though he's killed probably hundreds (or more? into the thousands?) of avatars in the Slayer game? What about the risk of PTSD for someone like this? No risk he'll snap and head up to a belltower somewhere? The premise of 'fight for your freedom' clearly revolves around the assumption that no one will ever get to 30, but their solution to deal with Kable getting so close is to set Terry Crews loose, whose only advantage is that he has no controller? Why wouldn't they rig the game a little more reliably to ensure this guy is never released? I know it's good ratings to have the hope that he'll get out, but yes, I agree - the reality of letting someone like this on to the streets is way too dangerous. Add to that the ease at which he escapes the game (vomiting booze into a prop car), and it seems they're really playing fast and loose with the safety of the law-abiding citizens of this world.

And while I'm at it, here's my other big question. Okay, so in 'Society', it appears that this game has been around for nine years, ever since Dexter became richer than Bill Gates overnight. We only see one 'Society' setting, but the way that it's described, hundreds of millions of people play it, so I assume there are more 'Society' areas than just the one Detroit one that we see. That 'hundreds of millions' statistic is likely to refer to early adopters and people riding the zeitgeist when it first came out, much like Facebook in around 2008. Maybe Dexter sat in a big room and watched his subscriber numbers go up and up like Zuckerberg did in the Social Network. Anyway, the fact that it's been nine years since it launched and that he's moved over to the Slayer show suggests that there must have been a huge amount of user attrition over the years. The early adopters and casual users have drifted away, leaving only the hardcore and weird. It ALSO appears that users of 'Society' own their avatars. Gerard Butler's wife is played each time by Waffle Humping Whale Man, so does that mean we assume that he pays to 'own' her? In this setting avatars are limited by their physical proximity: surely these at-home players are seeing the same people over and over, since there are only a limited number of avatars in that liminal space, as opposed to, say, SecondLife, where you can log on and never hope to run into the same people twice, since geographical borders don't apply. When Gerard Butler's Wife meets Rick Rape (Peter Petrelli!) she seems to know him: he has a reputation around here, and he's known as being an asshole. Maybe that contributes to the attrition: avatars quit the game (can they do that?) and their users have no one to 'play' (this WHOLE premise hinges on a 1:1 player to avatar ratio by the way) so they stop paying. In any case. When Waffle Humping Whale Man encounters Terry Crews in the elevator licking his knife, menacing two innocent avatars who are making out, he urges Terry to kill them. But, those two avatars are controlled by other perverts at home, who are probably having a very nice evening, making out in an elevator. They own those avatars, and Waffle Humper encourages Terry to stab them both to death. Surely Waffle Humper knows how expensive these avatars are! I mean, when we go over to 'Slayers', we see Percy Jackson (wearing his Crank t-shirt) getting offered a hundred thousand euros by the flashing CumDumpster Twins to have access to Gerard Butler. But Percy turns them down without a thought, so clearly he knows this avatar is worth much more than that. But if Gerard Butler wins his freedom, what is in it for Percy Jackson? He loses his avatar, he's not in the game anymore, he has to start again. Sell your avatar Percy! In any case, if someone's willing to offer a hundred thousand euros for an avatar, that means the avatars that Terry Crews are murdering are not cheap lives. Can we have a parallel film all about the grief of those Society perverts (who knows what they're humping at home) as they have their beloved avatars snuffed out. If someone's avatar dies, do people go buy a new one? And where do they get the new ones from? is there a stable of avatars waiting to get in to the game? How MUCH are these avatars being paid, anyway? They know they're going to get raped, groped, abused, and risk death at the hands of the psychos who play these games. What's the financial model for Society, Dexter? RELEASE YOUR TAX RETURNS!

Okay. I have a question about the time frame. We assume that this is set in some kind of weird dystopian future, but it's very clearly in our world, because real-world figures like Bill Gates are mentioned. Okay. So maybe a few years in the future. Add to that, that Dexter says that he had t-shirts made of his catch-phrase in 2010 (which at time of release, _was_ the near future), so we can again assume that we are sometime in our current decade. Vehicles are not futuristic, but culture seems to have gone right off the rails, so maybe it's some kind of Biff-Tannen-Got-The-Sports-Almanac parallel universe, where Dexter invented a way to bring SecondLife to life and offer it to perverts and assholes. Add to this, that when they show the crazy 'Slayer' crowds from around the world, they cut to one crowd in 'Bombay' (sic), which HASN'T BEEN THE NAME OF THAT CITY SINCE 1995, when it was officially changed to Mumbai. Yet, on IMDb, in the trivia section, it clearly states that this film is set in the year 2034. There are elements to distant future like the ridiculous outfits worn in the SecondLife game, but other than that, I see nothing happening that sends us 20 years into the future. AND, Dexter talking about 2010 t-shirts means he's talking about some innovation he made 24 years ago. So, maybe that's just a continuity issue. The Closer says that no one has interviewed Dexter in 9 years, so clearly we are nine plus years after his 2010 t-shirt slogan. That puts us into the early 2020's. Closer to 2034, but still no one told the set decorators or costume people. Is this just a matter of crappy continuity or production design? Or are we in some kind of strange parallel future where we get to see where the world wound up because Dexter invented his SecondLife thing? Are we to believe that this was the pivot point on which our timeline shifted? Should Marty and Doc Brown get in their DeLorean to go back and stop Dexter to prevent this alternative timeline?

Damn you Eastern Time Zone! My Phantom costume will be all for naught!

Welcome back! I only know your name from multiple C+O on the podcast, so seeing you in the forum feels like meeting another from the HDTGM pantheon.

Just finishing the podcast now: I have plenty to say that wasn't said, and with regular commenters dropping like flies due to the general grossness of this movie, I'll step up with a few things! First, I have to take my kids to swimming lessons, so will comment more later. In brief to start: - 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. - Second: to speak to the final point made in the podcast about how Gerard Butler will do any old film that's thrown his way, because why not - the thing to remember when watching 'Gamer' is that in the years prior to this, Butler played the Phantom of the Freaking Opera on film. What a mess that film was. But when we talk about Gerry's song and dance in Gamer, never forget that he was sad singing Erik. - Finally - was there something to the fact that Terry Crews kept coming back even though Butler killed him at the end of each 'level'? Is this part of the video game aesthetic (where the film ends with 'game over') and Crews is established as a level boss that Butler has to evade to level up? He's essentially killed several times, he gets squashed by a car, shot in the foot, other ways (?), but always comes right back, good as new. Is there a video game structure here we're missing, kind of like 'Unbreakable' and its comic book format?

Yes! Amazing!

Not to mention the fact that the film is set in 2034, according to IMDb.