sillstaw

I would much rather not give Michael Haneke any more attention than he already gets. (He comes off to me like a schoolmarm who is offended by the idea that anybody should go to a movie for entertainment instead of being lectured.) As for foreign film suggestions, there was a thread on here a while back suggesting "Hausu," which I wholeheartedly endorse. How can you resist a movie where one of the characters is eaten by a piano?

One of the many, many movies Hollywood has failed to take as a cautionary tale against starting production on a movie without a final script. Also, if you want to feel like your brain will explode, look at what the director has been doing since 2002.

So which movie is more insulting towards the gay community, this or "Cruising?"

Filling the Marlon Brando role of "I may be a respected actor, but they offered me enough money to buy a house in the Hamptons for doing barely a week of shooting."

Also, they were saying that they'd start the second where the first book ends, since they were under pressure to give the movie a happy ending. (As Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant said in their book on screenwriting, never start talking about a sequel before your movie is released.) Of course, a lot of fans said that the first movie screwed up so many plot points that doing a sequel would be impossible. Could be hyperbole, but still.

The astonishing thing is that the books are essentially an atheist version of "The Chronicles of Narnia" (I'm vastly oversimplifying, I'm sure, but I don't care). Naturally, since making a hundred-million dollar pro-atheist film would result in protests unseen since "The Last Temptation of Christ," the studio and filmmakers toned it down significantly... meaning that fans of the book (at least, the ones who liked it for that reason) were completely pissed off. (Even the fans who didn't care about the atheist messages were annoyed, since a lot of changes were made to the source material that broke points of the story.) Oh, and church-goers still resented it. The really amazing thing, though, is that to finance the movie, New Line Cinema sold the international rights to other studios. Overseas, the movie did well (because they don't have as many problems with non-religious people as America does), but in America, it flopped, hard. This is why New Line Cinema pretty much no longer exists as its own studio.

From watching the trailers, I was under the impression that somebody involved in the making of the movie had confused magic tricks with having superpowers. I don't care how great a magician you are, there's no way you can have somebody appear in a vault halfway around the world. (Some of my in-laws claim that this is explained in the movie. That must be one doozy of an explanation.) And when I read what the twist ending was, I felt like if it was possible, I would slap the movie if I had sat through it and found it out. It's the kind of twist ending that gives twist endings a bad name.

And they often get the details of that (like how it's actually called dissociative identity disorder, and that it's controversial on whether it even exists) wrong, too. I swear, sometimes it's like screenwriters aren't obsessively checking their DSM-IVs.

That, or he was contractually obligated/got a big paycheck. (I lean toward the first.)

As someone with mild autism, and as someone with a very autistic brother: HAHAHAHAHAHA no. In my experience, autism makes you very focused on certain subjects, to the point where you kind of learn everything you can about it (and also, it gives you a tendency to prattle on about it to people who don't really care). Math/code-cracking can be one of them, but it's not a trait that every autistic person has; it's just that Hollywood is under the impression that autism automatically makes you Rain Man. (Although, seeing as how they apparently still believe every schizophrenic has visual hallucinations, it's entirely possible that most filmmakers just don't care about looking into what mental disorders are actually like.)

There's a great article on the Agony Booth about Burt Reynolds' collaborations with the director of "Cannonball Run" (who also did "Stroker Ace" and "Smokey and the Bandit" with him, and movies like "Rad" without). It makes it clear how, over time, the two of them stopped trying to make movies that were fun for the audience in favor of having fun on set without regarding the end product (also known as the Adam Sandler method).

Which continues to mystify me, seeing as how were shown with music closer to opera than pulse-pounding headbangers. If you saw that and expected "The Fast and the Furious," you fail at watching movie trailers. Needless to say, there's no way this movie would work on HDTGM.

There's a surprising lack of information on the director on the Internet. No Wikipedia page, IMDb page only has her credits, etc. That said, she doesn't appear to have directed music videos; her only other directing credit is "Corinna, Corrina." (Though she has written movies like "The Story of Us" and "Stepmom," which says a lot.)

Between this and "The Last Stand," I'd go with Arnold's movie. This one was just kind of there, without a lot of really crazy over-the-top moments; even the climactic ax fight didn't really go nearly as insane as it could have. For comparison, the bad guy in "The Last Stand" steals an sports car from Las Vegas and drives it to the Arizona-Mexico border without ever seeming to have stopped for gas or bathroom breaks. Nothing in "Bullet to the Head" reaches that level of WTF.

That may have been one of my problems with the movie (at least in that some details were either made less subtle or, in the case of the "Outer Limits" reference, were muddled by changes to the source material*). But other things about it turned me off, as well. I imagine it would have been better if someone who wasn't all about action made it, but of course, you can't make a $130-million superhero movie without throwing in a few action scenes. Also—and I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just saying this—I don't want to bother watching a 4-hour "Ultimate Cut" of any movie, unless it's a really good, important film. That's less about wanting to waste time and more just a dislike of so-called "director's/unrated cuts." I kind of prefer judging movies based on what people who paid to see it in theaters saw, because if you're not going to put something in the version where people's first impressions are made, then it's not worth considering. * In the book, the specific "Outer Limits" episode playing is about a man-made alien threat intended to force the world into peace, alluding to Ozy's plot. By changing his plot, and also just showing the intro instead of naming the episode, the reference is meaningless and could have been cut with no ill effect on the movie. Yes, I AM a nitpick-y bastard.

As I said in another thread, I seriously can't imagine anybody these days saying, "Oh boy! A new Vince Vaughn film!" (You could say the same thing for Owen Wilson, as well.) The Onion is partly responsible for my impressions, by the way. Yes, there was this story from today, but also this story (from so long ago that it's about being on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien"). ETA: Also, maybe the few commercials I've seen don't explain it, but why would two guys who know next to nothing about computers or the Internet be considered for an internship at Google amongst people who actually know what they're doing?

I've only seen "Watchmen," and just from that, I think Snyder missed all the allusions and subtle details in the comic book in favor of "Ooh! Superheroes! Shiny!" Also, in film school, one of my teachers put on the directors' commentary for "300," and it's one of the most boring things imaginable. He seems to want to discuss nothing but how they achieved all the technical details ("we shot her doing this dance underwater so her robes would flow"), never acknowledging the stupidly insane things going on in the movie. (Also, his comments about making the enemy of that movie more flamboyant because it's scarier for guys in their 20s is... ugghh, grr.)

I've actually heard it's pretty good, much better than the movie (not that that's a hard achievement). Supposedly it was based on an earlier draft of the script, and got released before the movie.

The subject of one of the best Citation Needed posts ever:

Isn't this acknowledged in the film, like near the beginning? (Haven't seen it yet; wish I had HBO.) My best guess is that it probably has a lot to do with the fact that gay culture was not as mainstream as it is now. (And yes, I know gay culture isn't really mainstream; I'm talking in relative terms.) Also, the fact that most of his fans were old women might have something to do with it.

There may be a lot of legitimate criticisms of the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" franchise, but I think calling it a "rape fetish classic" misses the whole freaking point of the story. Alas, any hope I'd have had for this movie was evaporated by the appearance of the WWE Studios logo in the trailer. I hate to say it, but I get the impression they're being run by a bunch of guys who've taken a lot of blows to the head.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie. Even Johnny Knoxville is tolerable in it. (I was also surprised to find that, given the director's , it wasn't nearly as gory as I expected it to be.)

I recall watching the very end of that one night. The major thing I remember from it (beyond the whole "completely-different-ending" thing) was when Steven Weber was doing the iconic axe-through-the-door bit... and instead of "Here's Johnny!" he just says, "Boo!" I'm not kidding. He doesn't even say it in a threatening way like Nicholson did. I recall reading that one of Stephen King's complaints about Kubrick's "Shining" was that Jack Nicholson "tipped off" the audience that he would be going crazy, and that he would've preferred Jon Voight or Christopher Reeve in the role. Casting Steve Weber gave me an idea of what it would have been like if "Smokey and the Bandit"-era Burt Reynolds had played Jack instead.

Since "Suits" is coming back, should we start tweeting random things with the hashtag #Suits?