PlanBFromOuterSpace

I was a fan of his as a teen, and I got a new appreciation for him after my dad got to work on "Speed". To this day, watching the movie with him is like watching the DVD if the only thing you could listen to was the commentary track. Anyway, my dad was working with people that were working on the freeway, and for the most part he was just doing his normal job the whole time, except for occasionally having to toss non-English-speaking workers out of the way of speeding buses and camera vehicles (their BOSS hadn't told them to move), but managed to get fed on 20th Century Fox's dime for 6 weeks and got to know the cast and crew. He managed to take a pretty great picture of Keanu that Keanu later signed to my sister, which made for a pretty great Christmas for HER. Apparently, he forgot to get a signed shot of young, nubile, about to break big in "Demolition Man" Sandra Bullock for ME, the bastard...

Oh yeah, does anyone that was around at the time remember the mini-controversy that surrounded the film shortly after it's release? Apparently, one of the paintings or pieces of art in Pacino's office was either used without permission or the artist had a problem with some of the crazy shit that was happening with it towards the end, so when the "Special Edition" came out on home video, the only thing that was special about it was that the artwork had been removed from the scene. I just looked it up on Wikipedia to be sure, and here's what they had to say about it... "The film was the subject of legal action following its release. The claim was that the sculpture featuring human forms in John Milton's apartment closely resembled the Ex nihilo sculpture by Frederick Hart on the facade of the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and that a scene involving the sculpture infringed Hart's rights under copyright law.[8] After a federal judge ruled that the film's video release would be delayed until the case went to trial unless a settlement was reached, Warner Bros. agreed to edit the scene for future releases and to attach stickers to unedited videotapes to indicate there was no relation between the sculpture in the film and Hart's work.[9" I forget, but did anyone mention that Taylor Hackford went on to direct "Ray" and had also directed "An Officer and a Gentleman"? Oh jeez, he also did the current Jason Statham/Jennifer Lopez joint, "Parker". If most of Statham's non-"Crank" work wasn't so horribly average and generic, I'd almost suggest doing a show on THAT film, since it stars two esteemed HDTGM alumni.

I hadn't seen this movie in at least a decade, having seen it once in the theater and maybe once on DVD, so I gave it a spin the other night, and I'm so, so glad I did. First off, I've owned the DVD since '99, so my copy is a first generation disc, and holy shit does it ever show. Of course it wasn't enhanced for widescreen TVs (they wouldn't really be around until the next millennium), so it looked like VHS quality, which is probably the way that this was supposed to be seen anyway. Perfect! Also, being that this was an early DVD, the chapter stops (there were more than 40) were all named and listed in the packaging, so you can accidentally ruin the entire movie for yourself in 30 seconds. OH, and if you click on "Recommendations" on the menu screen, it ONLY brings up Al Pacino and JEFFREY JONES movies. Apparently, Keanu and Charlize hadn't done any movies for Warner Brothers yet. They'd team up for "Sweet November" for WB a few years later. Hmmmm, this might have made a nice double feature with a later Keanu film where he plays a guy that can interact with the spirit world that's basically trying to buy his way into heaven after an unsuccessful suicide attempt earlier in life (sound familiar?) damns his soul to Hell. "Devil's Advocate 2: This Time It's CONSTANTINE!". While I've had issues with Keanu's non-acting in a lot of films, I don't think they could have picked a better guy for the "Matrix" films. He is PERFECT in the first film as the guy that doesn't know what's going on that has to have things explained to him very slowly, the ultimate audience identification character!

I KNEW that scene in "Iron Man 2" looked vaguely familiar...

The plot for that movie sounds like a big to me.

She should have to give it back for "Aeon Flux" then, agreed?

The twist means absolutely nothing though, and that's the funny thing. In a movie full of openly horrible people, here's just one more, y'know? "Oh, you're a murderer? It's cool dude, we already knew". The twist comes at the end and doesn't affect anything at all aside from him paralyzing the girl or whatever it was, which doesn't amount to anything. He wasn't manipulating things throughout the movie or anything, which would have at least given us the tried and true "It was him all along!" flashback montage. If anything, it would have been a better twist if he was a known serial killer the entire time just for him to do something HEROIC at the end. Eh, oh well.

I haven't seen it since it was in theaters, but I remember wondering why they had to throw in the twist with the serial killer. It LITERALLY added nothing to the story. Yeah, you know what a movie about the Predator needs? A plot twist. Anyway, I gotta go, it's bitch-raping time...

To be fair, I think he was just saying that the idea for this film comes from the same mind that inspired one of the greatest films of all time! I think that "Shawshank Redemption" is the closest that we males have to a chick flick. A dick flick, maybe? I don't like the sound of that thought at all. Ouch....

I didn't see "Movie 1" through "Movie 42", so am I going to have any trouble following it? *crickets*

I'm 34, and I'm surprised by how many people I waited on at my theater that seemed to be in my general age group or a little younger that had no idea what "Red Dawn" was, much less that it was a remake, which I just can't understand at all. As a child of the 80's with cable, the original "Red Dawn" was on at least twice a day for what I would guess was a solid decade. Even if you don't think you've seen "Red Dawn", I guarantee you that you HAVE seen it at least 14 times. I recently saw it for the first time in a very long time, and I don't think I even remembered about two-thirds of it, but I'm sure that I knew it by heart when I was 10. Believe it or not, there was also a lot of confusion a couple months back with another film that had the word "Dawn" in it's title that caused some mix-ups, which led to people coming out of their theaters and alleging that we sold them the ticket to the wrong film, which was certainly not the case. One film was the fifth in a series of extremely popular films about vampires, and the other was a re-make of a movie that's been on TV every day for nearly 30 years, and people still couldn't tell the titles apart. No matter how much money a movie makes, no matter how much something pops up on TV, and no matter how many millions of dollars are spent on marketing a film to drive you into theaters, some people cannot be reached. I'd like to believe that these people that show up oblivious to anything and everything around them are just immune to the hype, but most times, I think they really just ARE fucking idiots.

That's kind of disappointing, I think we could have imagined so much better! That reminds me of when someone puts out a director's cut of their movie that's actually worse because they DO spell out the stuff that was better left a mystery. Speaking of which, we need to go suggest "Southland Tales" again...

I actually just saw an ad on TV for Stamps.com, so I guess it's legit, but I still think it sounds like a service that's most successful with serial killers and kidnappers...

I think I remember seeing a bit of it in the Poison episode of "Behind the Music", as part of the "But now he's got his shit back together, and this is what he's doing now" segment, where they show that after conquering drugs and alcohol/bankruptcy/near death experiences/whatever, our favorite musicians are BACK, and they're doing....awful, terrible things that will further alienate their fanbase. Bret Michaels is actually originally from around where I live, and he was playing at the local Days Inn a week or two before "Rock of Love" debuted. Yeah, he hasn't been back around in a while...

I remember the second one being on ALL the time once it hit cable, though I don't think I can remember a single thing from it anymore. Was there some sort of adorable goblin dog thing?

That doesn't mean it's not crazy! And to be fair, it's not like only good movies are huge hits, and bad movies get remade all the time.

Are you saying that "Superstar" worked? I'd put "Night at the Roxbury" before "Superstar" any day!

It would be interesting, especially with something that's probably really good that's a surefire hit, if we saw a big tentpole movie that's not screened for critics, just to prove that their word usually doesn't mean anything when it comes to things that people really WANT to see regardless of what anyone says about it. I mean, "Hansel and Gretel" ain't that kind of film, that's for sure. I've worked at a theater for way too long, and the only time I hear any talk from customers about what critics think is when they're trying to convince the people they're with to see/not see something, and it's almost always in favor of another film that was as equally praised or shit on. "I don't know, I've heard bad reviews for 'Grown Ups'. We should really see 'Jonah Hex' instead". I shit you not.

Anyone else find it odd that the actors playing Hansel and Gretel are 15 years apart? They wouldn't have both been children at the time of their original run-in with the witch. It's like in "Ghost Rider" when you see the young version of the characters and they're the same age, but then years later Nicolas Cage is clearly at least a decade older than Eva Mendes.

I'm pretty disappointed that we didn't get "The Revengers" with the Almighty Thor, one of the Transmorphers, C. Thomas Howell, and Mark Decascos facing off against Richard Grieco and SS Doomtrooper I'm crossing my fingers that they'll have "Guardians of the Solar System" ready to go by next summer.

Yeah, that's never addressed that at all! Here you've got a single mom with a kid that's like 5 or 6 that also has an INFANT, and we don't know if the dad bailed or if mom's a widow or what. In the third one, when Andy's off to college, we don't get any sort of "If only dad were here to see this" talk, which leads me to believe that the guy took off and that he's just something that they don't talk about. The rest of the Disney catalog has parents being murdered in front of their children, kids with evil stepmothers that are trying to kill them, straight-up negligence, manipulation, etc. How silly is it that something like the excellent "Lilo and Stitch", a film about a young girl adopting an alien killing machine from an animal shelter while being raised by her older sister, is the film that most directly tackles the issue of trying (and mostly FAILING) to adapt to life after mom and dad die unexpectedly? There's even child abuse humor, and Ving Rhames as the world's coolest social worker!

Historically, Disney's actually been pretty anti-family in their FAMILY films, or at least in the majority of their animated output. How often has there been a family that has both parents in the picture where at least one, if not both of them doesn't end up dead by the end? I mean, that's usually how those films BEGIN. "Timothy Green" kind of flips the script a little by killing off the kid, which might be a Disney first, certainly in live-action.

That just reminded me of something I like to do when watching movies, particularly action flicks, and that's trying to figure out which people playing cops, soldiers, etc. have never handled any of that equipment before in their lives, whether it's radios, weapons, vehicles, etc. I've seen SWAT teams in Asylum films that look like 8-year-olds playing war in the backyard.

If camera phones and YouTube had been around in 1988, I would have been the sobbing, traumatized mess in that video. Also, the movie would have been "Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach". Why was Steve Gutenberg taken from us? WHY?!?!

They never had a problem him, but maybe HE had a problem with the florist being gay, and that was his way of saying "I forgive you for your alternative lifestyle. It's not natural, like me, a hybrid of plant and man that comes from nature itself (the most natural thing there is!), but we can't all be perfect". Everybody just assumes that the kid loves everybody, but he's got to have some serious identity issues going on himself and is probably one hateful son of a bitch behind closed doors. However, I've never seen the film in it's entirety or the scene in question, so there's a 50% chance that I'm 100% wrong.