sillstaw

Joke or not, they tend to be funny.

This reminds me of a bit I read from a book written by a screenplay reader who, in one part, was marveling at how "Fatal Attraction" went from a boring script to a big blockbuster. He pointed out that (IIRC) Paramount got the cover of "Time" the week the movie came out to talk about adultery; as he pointed out, it must have been a really slow news week if that was the big story. The thing I love about both of those examples is that they seem to ignore what people went to see the movie for. Nobody went to see "The First Wives' Club" because it was a big feminist film; they went for wacky antics and a silly revenge plot.

I actually like the idea of a superhero sponsored by corporations. You know, besides how all the superhero battles in the latest movies seem to start a small distance away from whoever paid the most money for product placement (like the aliens in "The Avengers" crashing just away from a Farmers Insurance office). But from what little I remember of this movie, it does seem like a huge missed opportunity.

I endorse this whole-heartedly. A few thoughts: How is it that nobody even questions the idea of a guy going around fighting people and challenging some random kung-fu student to matches? Not to mention, nobody even calls the police on him. And also, he calls himself the Shogun of Harlem, as if that actually meant anything in the USA. (Incidentally, watching the movie, I couldn't stop thinking that he looked like "Conan" writer Deon Cole.) The bad guy's mistress/musician basically came across as Cyndi Lauper with the fashion sense of Lady Gaga. That "head lights" song, where she wears a bunch of road signs all over her clothes, is amazing. Near the end of the movie, the musician finally gets sick of Arcadian's* under-handed tactics and leaves. Arcadian still goes after Leeroy, apparently just because he managed to fight off his thugs. At one point, Leeroy mentions to Vanity that he's seeking the Glow. She takes him to her studio and starts playing a music video where some guy keeps mentioning the Glow. I honestly thought that was the end of it, that he was sent to seek out something his master had heard on MTV, but no, it's apparently a real thing (in the movie, I mean), and some musician just happened to make a song containing the words "The Glow" so popular that she had it on standby to play in her studio. * A guy named Arcadian owning a chain of arcades is like if Bill Gates made his fortune by building fences.

He appears at the start of the film, and narrates the rest.

Actually, this movie really isn't that bad or weird. Like I said in the thread for "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol," Tom Cruise may believe in some really stupid, messed-up things, but he knows how to choose action films.

I actually saw that Kevin Smith was on the "Wild Wild West" podcast and avoided listening to it. (The topic where someone asked that he not come back helped me make that decision.) And you're right, he does act like nobody's ever forced a screenwriter to add something stupid to a script before; I think he's deluded from working in indie films and his geek cred (see also: his belief that critics should pay to see his movies).

This put a delightful picture of Sylvester Stallone playing Travis Bickle in my head. "Yew talkin' to me? Well, I'm de only one heah."

Between this and "The Big Wedding," it's safe to say that Robin Williams should never, ever play a priest. It just doesn't work.

One of my favorite quotes from a long-gone forum I used to frequent was from one guy's review of "Premonition:"

I imagine that it wouldn't be any different than having any other guest talking about a movie they had nothing to do with.

You didn't even mention the insane behind-the-scenes story! This is Bette Davis' last movie, and she appears in it for about 11 minutes (according to IMDb). She walked off the movie, saying she hated the script. (The director claims she left for health reasons, which might be plausible seeing as how she died soon after it was released.) After debating whether they should replace her with Bea Arthur or Lucille Ball, they ended up deciding on having her character become a cat at various times while her daughter shows up. Because hey, who can tell the difference between a cat and Bette Freaking Davis?

I'm not sure it'd work, because A: It's obviously kind of a deliberate WTF movie, and B: I'm not sure it'd be possible to do a non-nauseating discussion of the movie. Or, alternately: How can they make fun of and exaggerate the king of all bad-taste movies?

I do like the soundtrack of "Scarface," but that's more out of my love of 80's synthesizer music than for any way it worked with the movie or whatever. (In fact, I think I may like it more because I heard it first in "Grand Theft Auto III.")

Wow. The first 30 seconds of that trailer had my jaw hanging open in a "what were they thinking?!" pose. Also, nothing says "we're really sensitive about race" like having a title that's one extended name from being confused with one of the most well-known minstrel shows of recent memory.

My favorite part about that (which I think I identified in a thread for "Lady in the Water") is that everybody blames him for misassigning some role or something, but all he did was identify the roles that needed to be filled, and really it was Paul Giamatti's character who misassigned it. Giamatti, of course, gets no blame and lives happily ever after.

According to the IMDb, Universal wanted to put in a hip-hop soundtrack for the 2003 rerelease, but Brian De Palma refused to let them change it, saying that the music was "true to the period."

Much as I didn't like "Scarface" (dear freaking heavens, this movie did not need to be nearly three hours long), I don't think it would fit on HDTGM. The most WTF thing in the movie is the incestuous vibes between Tony and his sister, and there really isn't that much of it. I'd heard about USA wanting to do an urban remake of "Scarface" back in about 2005. I sincerely doubt it'll happen, if only because it's the most laughably pandering idea I've ever heard.

"Mars Attacks" was also a trading card series before it was a movie, I think.

Things I love about this movie: The main character's inexplicable love of coffee and chocolate, to the point where he consumes NOTHING else. The fact that it's set in a futuristic London where global warming has flooded the city, which had to have been a bitch for a film crew to set up and shoot around without electrocuting themselves... and it literally never affects the plot. The inexplicable ability of Hauer's sidekick* to interpret astrological signs the monster leaves behind. The fact that the enemy of the movie is an alien monster, who in the first scene (before he's revealed to be a monster) manages to kill someone in a crowded club's bathroom and escape completely unseen. Things I don't love about this movie: Why the hell is it not on easily-accessible DVD? The cheapest DVD of it on Amazon is $90! * Fun fact about the sidekick: In real life, he's married to Anna Gunn, the actress who plays Skyler on "Breaking Bad." It's the kind of relationship that just makes no sense when you look at them.

Huh. I didn't really think "Easy A" was trying to be an awards-bait movie so much as it was a teen sex comedy (that, from all appearances, talked more about sex than had any characters having it, or even trying to have it). But I do agree that it wasn't good; I couldn't make it past 20 minutes in due to the raging quirkiness and the screenwriter's constant need to show off how much he knew about movies.

I wasn't as big on "Mean Girls," either, though I think that has more to do with how most of the jokes in it have been quoted over and over, so they seem less fresh in context. (I had similar problems when I finally got around to playing "Portal.") Though I did laugh at Regina getting hit by a bus.

"The Matrix" probably didn't invent those, either, but I see what you mean now. (And really, if I were to start claiming, "Oh, 'The Matrix' ripped off the walking-on-walls stuff from Fred Astaire!" I would look insane.)

Nobody's saying white people weren't involved. What we're saying is that the way the movies portray it, black people had almost nothing to do with their battles for civil rights. Like it or not, movies are heavily trusted as a kind of history book; playing it like this is like erasing Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in favor of the white guys in the marches.

People were getting on Jodie Foster's case for a long while. (There was a Huffington Post article I read where someone lambasted her for taking so long to come out when doing so earlier could have helped gay teenagers, somehow.) And people still want Queen Latifah to come out of the closet. It IS likely more amplified for people like Travolta and Spacey, though, perhaps because of the whole "middle-aged women in Hollywood can only be moms, but men of any age can be the lead" thing.