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Anonymous37

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Posts posted by Anonymous37

  2. Posted

    Doug Benson: Let's talk about some of the movies you've done.

    Paul F. Tompkins: Sure. Let's talk about all of them; I'm sure we have time.

    Doug Benson: I'll, I'll race through them if you'd like.

    Paul F. Tompkins: Sure.

    Doug Benson: Uh, Jack Frost?

    Paul F. Tompkins: A ball.

    Doug Benson: Did you think to yourself while playing "Man in Audience" that, that it could be a perennial classic at Christmastime, for the kids?

    Paul F. Tompkins: Well, yeah, I was thinking ...

    Doug Benson: You did it for your children?

    Paul F. Tompkins: I was ... I did it for my children and all of our children, really.

    Doug Benson: Future children.

    Paul F. Tompkins: Unborn children. Mostly for unborn children, and um, like fetuses. I did expect to be treated like Father Christmas himself in years to come. But it didn't happen because the movie was creepy as fuck. Cause nobody wanted to see the dead kid's ... the kid's dead father become an anthropomorphic snowman with terribly articulated eyebrows.

    Doug Benson: And fetuses had to sit through the whole thing because fetuses can't walk out.

    Paul F. Tompkins: Exactly. Right.

     

    -- I Love Movies with Doug Benson, October 16, 2006

    • Like 9

  3. Posted

    You guys forgot to mention that Jack Frost was the last notable film Michael Keaton starred in before going into semi-retirement. He would not appear in another major theatrical film for six years until he played the President of the USA in the Katie Holmes bomb First Daughter. Other notable stuff Keaton did since then was in White Noise, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Post Grad, The Other Guys and he has two films out this year: the action flick Need for Speed, and the remake of Robocop.

     

    I really liked The Other Guys, and Keaton in it. Joe Queenan has a theory about Michael Keaton's career:

     

    Twenty years ago, after appearing in two phenomenally successful, visually opulent and generally brilliant Batman movies, Michael Keaton decided he didn't want to make any more Caped Crusader films. So he walked away. It was a disastrous move that effectively ended Keaton's career as a leading man, the actor learning the hard way that the only unforgivable crime in Hollywood is to walk away from a phenomenally successful franchise. -- Man of Steel: does Hollywood need saving from superheroes?

  5. Posted

    Well, it does at least sound plausible. Like maybe there could be some sort of technology, that we haven't developed yet, that would use them. If you are more educated in the science behind it, that does make it less believable but for most people it sounds plausible because most people don't know enough about how microprocessors work. And it at least makes sense that this technology, if it existed, would be useful and profitable. In the movie, you can't even wrap your head around what the technology is supposed to do. It makes lasers? But it's supposed to be for information technology? But they have a gun that is clearly designed to use them as a weapon of mass destruction? But it's used for satellites? But it's so powerful that it blows up satellites? What the fuck is this?

    When the movie Starship Troopers came out, fans of the Robert Heinlein novel were hugely outraged by it. The way they spoke about it, you would think that the movie literally exhumed Heinlein's corpse and viciously kicked it to smithereens. They thought of the novel as a brilliant science fiction epic with incisive social and political commentary, and here was this cheesy teen love-triangle space soap opera that reduced the story to a bunch of models shooting giant bugs.

     

    Which is why the movie is so great. Heinlein's book -- a loathsome apology for fascism -- is completely beneath contempt and it deserved every bit of mockery the movie cleverly aimed at it. The fact that the novel has a superficial science fiction plausibility, at least in the eyes of its fans, doesn't make it any more realistic than the movie, which ends up being a smarter piece of fiction by far.

     

    There are any number of science fiction movies and books that require a limited suspension of disbelief in order to get the plot going. Primer, an amazing movie, works off of the premise that it is possible to create a time machine, albeit one with limited scope. That's as unrealistic as movie devices can get, but Shane Carruth carefully figured out a plot that had an airtight consistency, and used it to push forward a great story about the struggle between ambition and conscience. Jurassic Park had to posit that it was possible to clone dinosaurs from DNA that was millions of years old and spliced with frog DNA, because otherwise you don't get dinosaurs in the 20th century. It's also impossible, but fine. But because Michael Crichton wasn't smart enough to know when he didn't fucking understand what he was talking about, he told himself, "Hey, chaos theory is neat, why don't I shoehorn it into the plot, even though it's completely unnecessary and what the mathematician says about it makes no fucking sense?"

     

    Which brings us to Congo. Crichton could have decided to have the team search out a rich vein for mining coltan. He could have decided that they were after diamonds, but for the usual reason that they're (artifically) valuable, and can be sold to jewelers. In the book, it's just a MacGuffin, after all, and the plot is really about intelligent apes. But he just couldn't resist. He just had to bring up diamonds for use in integrated circuits, because that would demonstrate just how smart he was. And the actual effect was the exact opposite of what he intended.

     

    So the movie, which as you say claims that the diamonds are variously for making lasers, information technology, satellites, and for blowing up satellites, isn't any less plausible and isn't the slightest bit dumber than what Crichton had in mind. And the big plus of the movie being all over the place about this is that it serves as a nice kick in the teeth to a completely unnecessary part of the novel, just like how Starship Troopers the movie apparently raped the childhoods of Heinlein fans, to hear them go on and on about it. From what June, Paul, Jason, and Nick say, it was an accidental kick in the teeth, but fuck it, it still counts. And that's why if someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose between watching Congo the movie 4 times in a row and re-reading Congo the book, I'd pick the movie in a heartbeat.

    • Like 3

  6. Posted

    What's weird is that the screenwriter basically decided to give Crichton the finger when he wrote the script, especially after how well Jurassic Park did. While he did have some elements of Crichton's style in the book with the tech talk and some corporate espionage, it was all so rushed and came off has unnecessary.

    I haven't seen the movie, but if there was ever a writer who deserved to be given the finger early and often, it's Michael Crichton.

     

    I'll give him a pass on his novels with medical themes and plots; I've only read A Case of Need, and nothing about it jumped out as being obviously stupid. But with the exception of Airframe and Disclosure, every other book of his that I've read has some insane and gratuitous logical or factual howler in it. (Note that I'm only discussing logical and factual flaws, here. I'm purposely leaving out political and social arguments.) Jurassic Park had a moronic digression where the mathematician character argued that chaos theory proved that Jurassic Park would fail. Rising Sun out and out lied about the reason why T. Boone Pickens wasn't allowed onto the board of directors of Koito; it was actually because he didn't really own all of the shares he claimed to, and the whole thing was an attempted greenmail scheme to get paid by Koito to shut up and fuck off. Prey had swarms of nanobots outracing human beings, a notion that any physics graduate student could have told him was stupid, because the movement of objects that small would be severely limited by the mean velocity of the air molecules. And State of Fear was utterly retarded when it came to discussing global warming. The generous interpretation of Crichton's writing in that novel would be that he consciously decided to lie about it to get money from stupid right-wingers. It would almost be slander to state that Crichton actually believed that shit.

     

    So, Congo and those colored diamonds. Look, if you could preferentially dope diamond films with n-type and p-type dopants, like you do with silicon when you make integrated circuit elements, you could (potentially) do some really interesting engineering, as diamond has higher thermal conductivity and has a higher breakdown voltage, allowing for smaller features and therefore a greater density of features in an IC. But if there is some way to use a naturally occuring colored diamond to make those features, no one has been able to explain to me what the hell it is.

     

    And there it is. The whole reason given in the book for going to get the damn diamonds makes no sense. Let's stop implying that an adaptation of a Crichton novel sucks because it wasn't faithful enough to the source material. Because most of the time, that's a fucking plus.

  8. Posted

    Tami Sagher Fun Facts!

     

    In the 30 Rock episode "Ludachristmas" (Season 2, Episode 9), Liz Lemon's parents mention that her old high school boyfriend, Chris Stanek, recently got divorced. Chris Stanek was the real-life high school boyfriend of Tami Sagher.

     

    Tami Sagher's old nickname in high school was "Sammy Hagar". No offense was intended by nicknaming her after the man who ruined Van Halen post David Lee Roth.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    I'm not sure how many of you have heard of Jason Gann, the guy who plays the dog on Wilfred. That was a show I used to watch, until I found out that Jason Gann got drunk, refused to stop acting like an ass on a public bus, then when the driver tried to get him to behave, beat him so severely that he's now severely mentally ill.

     

    I think that part of the (well-deserved) hatred aimed at Chris Brown is from people who didn't have anything invested in him in the first place: they were never going to listen to, let alone buy, his music. But Wilfred, despite having much fewer watchers than Chris Brown has fans, appeals to people who aren't just going to wave away the abuse Rihanna suffered at the hands of Chris Brown.

     

    Frankly, as much as Rihanna suffered, she didn't and doesn't have it as bad as Joseph Hosny. But at least in some cases, people -- people who make a point of bashing Chris Brown, with a kinda sorta ironic winky -- will rationalize it by saying that Hosny should just get over it and refusing to learn anything more about the incident.

     

    I'm still working my way through the podcast episodes, and I haven't got to this one yet. But when Hollywood decides to have a real housecleaning and sit the Jason Ganns and Charlie Sheens in the penalty box for a few years, I won't attribute at least some of the venom Chris Brown gets to racism.

  10. Posted

    A brief comment about the Washington Redskins: the name was the focus of a lawsuit. The US Trademark Act says the feds can refuse a trademark if it "consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage" (source); this list has been interpreted to disallow trademarks of racist material. So people sued to have the trademark overturned, which would have been huge: people could then print their own Washington Redskins apparel and sell it without approval from the team, the NFL, or anyone else.

     

    Apparently, the lawsuit was lost on a technicality, as the Native Americans who filed suit waited too long (source). But the actual basis of the case was not ruled on, and it's possible that the suit may be refiled at some point.

  13. Posted

    Oh yes. This movie is so bad, you actually wonder if it wasn't meant to be a stone-faced parody of sex thrillers. The twist ending is given away about halfway through the movie, for crying out loud.

     

    It is an awful, awful movie that you will be unable to tear your eyes away from.

  14. Posted

    We really appreciate all of your support and I hope this doesn't dissuade anyone from donating...without the donations we couldn't keep doing our shows.

     

    Hi Jeff, it honestly wasn't my intent to dissuade anyone from donating (like I did) -- I was just hoping that I could write it off.

     

    That said, wouldn't it be great knowing you helped out your favorite show?

     

    Oh, absolutely (although my donation wasn't directed at a particular show).

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    I don't know where someone was asking if it would be available on iTunes - but looks like they're doing that with Season 2 of Portlandia. So maybe? I'm not in charge of that.

     

    I was that guy (I think -- maybe there was more than one of us). Thanks for the reply, and I'll keep my fingers crossed. I should mention that I did donate $100 to Earwolf last year, so it's not as if I'm failing to support Earwolf if CBBTV isn't available for purchase on iTunes. It's just that since I'm not a Nielsen family and I don't know any, I am hoping for another way to directly show TV executives that the show has its baked-in fanbase.

  19. Posted

    I hope so... I have to assume some other podcast addicts like myself have long since given up on traditional forms of media like TV.

     

    I agree -- I don't have cable, so I wouldn't be able to watch the episodes on IFC.

     

    Of course, not being privy to the economics of TV on basic cable, I couldn't say that IFC is or isn't doing the right thing by having/not having CBB, the TV Series available for purchase on iTunes. All I can do is point to myself as a data point.

  20. Posted

    Thanks, Cyrus. Here's hoping -- Jeff Ulrich created a thread for open-source revenue generation ideas, and I would think that this could be a good one, if IFC gives the go-ahead to sell the episodes on iTunes. (Of course, not having any first-hand experience with this sort of thing, this falls into the category of "wild-ass guesses".)

  25. Posted

    How do I explain the prison scene? Honestly, that sort of reflexive aggression from none-to-bright violent felons makes perfect sense. Sure, Hancock is supposed to be a superhero, but for some reason, despite the stories that he's bulletproof, super-strong, and can fly, he's decided to turn himself in and go to prison. He claims it's because he's turned a new leaf, but for all the prisoners know, it's because his powers are fading or even entirely gone. After all, none of them would turn themselves into prison if they had any choice about the matter, so why would Hancock?

    It's probably not too fruitful to get into whether certain things are realistic in superhero movies, but once you suspend your disbelief that far, why wouldn't you think that someone would try to jump him in prison?

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