sillstaw

Yeah, but I don't think people in Hollywood were going, "Wow! Hong Kong action movies have this new wire-fu stuff! Let's rip them off!" Commercially, they were most likely looking at how successful "The Matrix" was and ripping that off; the fact that "The Matrix" ripped off/paid homage to Hong Kong action movies just means this is a second-hand copy.

Something about the movie sounded familiar, and it turns out it was mentioned in a Cracked article. It points out something the original poster seems to have ignored: The local girl who the lead singer falls in love with is a teenager, and he's a full-grown adult. I haven't watched the movie, but it wouldn't surprise me if they thanked NAMBLA in the end credits. Also, ha ha, the town is called Grand Guignol.

Personally, if I had to suggest a way to police the tags, I'd say have a sort of voting system for them. If, say, three people add a tag, then it goes on; or, have the tags set up so that multiple people can submit it, and the more people vote on one tag, the higher it gets on a list of tags individual to each movie. Or have a way to say "this tag isn't applicable," and it goes into a section where people can vote on whether or not it should stay. None of these systems seems perfect; they all seem like people could still abuse them, and they all sound like they'd involve a lot of work, but I felt like sharing.

I got the impression he was a lot more genocidal and insane than just "I'm going to kill loopers." (Incidentally, I think the movie makes it pretty clear that SPOILER: Bruce Willis is really the bad guy. His goal is to kill children because one of them may turn out evil; did you really think the movie was making you root for him to do that?)

If I wasn't so attached to my DiscoHoff avatar, I'd totally use that bear's face.

Yeah, some of the submissions are just bonkers. (Who the hell submitted "Flight?" Nothing remotely crazy happens in that movie, and if someone thinks it's bad, it's probably because they'd find it boring.) Much as I wish some movies weren't available for voting, I think the rating system works perfectly fine for keeping them from being considered; if I like a movie (and not in a so-bad-it's-good way), I rate it one garbage can to bring the average down.

One of the most astonishing things about this movie is that it almost seemed to go out of its way to avoid being anything like the original. Keanu Reeves actually had to fight to get the line "Klaatu barada nikto" into the movie, and it's barely recognizable (supposedly, it's played backwards and forwards simultaneously).

I think the main complaint is that the story is about black maids in the South during the civil rights era, and the hero of the story is a white woman who doesn't do anything to improve their lot in life. It'd be like making a movie about Stonewall and making the hero a heterosexual lawyer; you have a great subject, so why ignore it for the story of someone who wasn't really affected by it?

One of the most astonishing things about this movie to me is that the story is co-credited to Peter Sagal, host of the hilarious NPR show "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!" Apparently, he had written a script set in Havana during the revolution; it was a romance, based on a true story, and had political themes. It was purchased, got rewritten, then set aside until the producer decided he wanted to make a "Dirty Dancing" sequel, and for whatever reason chose to use that script as a loose basis. Sagal claims the only thing left from his script is a scene where political prisoners are executed.

During one of the RiffTrax live shows, they had a trivia card with the anagram "Skete Ulirch." The answer was "Not quite Johnny Depp."

One of the things that creeps me out about this movie is that both of the handicapped characters are played by Scientologists. To me, that's like hiring Mel Gibson to play a champion for civil rights.

One of my favorite things that I've heard about this movie is how it tries to play the white characters as horrible snobs for looking down on the black players, except that A: It's only one white guy who acts all that racist, and B: the black players are not only supremely obnoxious, but they blatantly cheat at golf.

I'd dispute that this is the only "bad" Best Picture winner (I hate "The Artist" and "Slumdog Millionaire," and then you have older winners almost nobody remembers like "Around the World in 80 Days" or "The Greatest Show on Earth"), but this is definitely one of the few movies where, when it won, the backlash could be seen from Alpha Centauri. I think the ridiculous nature of the movie was best summed up when someone on a forum I used to frequent joked that it taught valuable lessons, "like how falling down the stairs can cure racism."

You can vote for as many movies in the top 10 as you want. Same here.

C. Thomas Howell did an interview with the AV Club recently where he claimed that the movie is anti-racist. Make of his comments what you will.

Chances are it's not on Rotten Tomatoes (which is what the FYI system uses for movies) because it's a TV movie.

Reading the Wikipedia page on this movie was kind of funny, because apparently Quincy Jones (who produced the movie [?!]) said in an interview that it wasn't so much a "superhero" movie as it was a "super-human being" movie. Can you imagine someone trying to make that distinction nowadays? It's the kind of evasive thing you hear when a "legitimate" director tries his hand at a horror film: "Oh, it's not horror, it's a suspenseful thriller."

Minor complaint: When I'm going through recommendations, it would be immensely helpful if the page had page navigation at both the top and bottom of the page. It's slightly annoying to have to scroll all the way back up every time, especially when I'm looking at them 50 per page. (I was going to suggest having the page jump back to the top, but this seems less annoying.) Also, I hate to feel like I'm adding a bunch of tags, but a tag to suggest remakes of older movies seems slightly more suitable than just adding "based on better."

You basically answered your own question. If a movie is a guaranteed box-office winner, why bother putting more effort into it than absolutely necessary? I don't get the impression a lot of Hollywood thinks about the long-term shelf life of their movies.

From what I've heard from a source less reliable than Wikipedia, the studio told Tim Burton that he couldn't cast Jack Nicholson and kill him off. So he cast him twice, then killed him off twice. No, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.

Only realized that later. Winter Doldrums: Movies released in January/February, the studios' dumping grounds. Misleading advertisements: The ads tried to sell the movie as something it wasn't. (Probably not a great tag, now that I think about it.)

Ah, thank you. I'd like to suggest a tag for sports movies. And maybe something for misleading advertisements. ETA: Plus, say, #WinterDoldrums and older movies.

FYI searches for Rotten Tomatoes ratings. "The Peanut Butter Solution" is on there, but there's no critic's ratings or, it seems, even audience ratings.

So a few questions: Should the voting be disabled for others? (I figured out that I could do so by substituting "results" for "movie" in the URL.) Also, will votes carry over between polls? This one confused me. Are we rating how much we actually like the movie, or how appropriate we think it is for the show? I personally went through on the second assumption, voting high for stuff I want to see and voting low for movies I didn't think fit.

If they do this, they should go into why Mike Myers had to do the movie in the first place. Back in 2000, Universal planned to make a movie based on the "Sprockets" sketch from "Saturday Night Live," where David Hasselhoff would kidnap Dieter's monkey because he was annoyed that they were becoming more popular than him in Germany. One day, Myers came in and basically said that the script was terrible, and because he had such high standards for his audience*, he was shutting down the movie. Fun fact: The screenplay Myers was dissatisfied with was one he had written. Universal then sued Myers for $3.8 million (the cost they had spent on pre-production). After a countersuit and months of wrangling, a deal was reached where Myers would have to star in another Universal movie. This is the one they did. So if you watch this movie, as the jokes about dirty hoes and acronyms that spell out SHIT are thrown about in an ostensible kid's film, just remember that the movie exists mainly because Mike Myers thought another script he had written was apparently worse. * I'm still trying to figure out how having high standards for your audience would let you release a movie as puerile as "Goldmember."