DeathToMikeyBay

A pet peeve of mine in stories has always been the "flash forward" opening. It only works if there's some kind of twist to what we saw in the opening vs what actually happens when the story finally catches up. Memento is really the only one that works I can think of off the top of my head. Otherwise it's like you said, just a desperate plea fo the audience to stay awake right away. It was the only part of Fight Club I hated. It would have been a lot more fun seeing the club get more out of control without knowing exactly where it would end up from the very first scene, and there's no twist to what we saw in the beginning to the final act. Anyway, remember how they described Devil's Advocate as "this is what's cool to cigar shop guys"? Swordfish is the cigar shop cool guy's teenage kid getting to make a movie.

I used to live right across from "Superman" in L.A. The guy was...odd. People in the apartment complex would hang out in the courtyard. The ONLY two things superman talked about in group get togethers was appearences and events as superman, and trying to trick people into eating these super hot peppers that grew on a bush there. Not a single other topic of group conversation from him the entire year I lived there. His apartment was completely filled with Superman memorabilia. Display cases of Superman figures, Superman cereal boxes lining the walls, Superman figures hanging from strings, walls plastered with fake Daily Planet issues, etc. It was so packed with Superman crap that there wasn't even room for a bed. He had one couch and that's where he slept, not even a pull out. There was a one foot wide path from the door to the kitchen, where the sink was completely covered by so many boxes that it would take 5 minutes to clear them all so the only source of running water was the bathoom. The apartment also REEKED. His pet rats and the mentioned lack of running water meant the whole thing smelled like a zoo. Constant shouting matches heard through the walls with his manager slash not really girlfriend. His one non-superman hobby was listening to audio clips with dirty words. He would constantly invite me to listen to dirty Christmas song parodies. Would listen to Richard Pryor's "Super Nigger" bit over and over on loop. Would constantly creep on every girl who just moved in, promising them a ton of exposure and contacts because he was on Jimmy Kimmel.

Jesus christ. It seems like you can't browse Netflix anymore without seeing yet another obscure Eastern European Nick Cage movie on there. Does the guy owe money to the Russian mob? The latest is Pay the Ghost, and it is the hugest point for point ripoff of Insidious. What do you get when you have Insidious but take away all the jump scares and striking imagery? Pay the Ghost, apparently.

I just realized this was almost Charlize's first real role in a real movie! Prior to this she had a small part in That Thing You Do and that was about it. Also she was only 22 when this was made?!! I know the gang touched on how people used to look a lot older than their age equivalents now, but it seems like this was the case all the way up until the end of the 90s. It also begs the question...I know they marry younger in the south, but Keanu is 11 years older than her. It seems like they had been married for at least a couple years. So he was a 30 year old lawyer who married a woman who couldn't even legally drink yet? yeesh

All I can remember is how flat all the humor fell. This was everyone's "fuck you, I'm off to better things!" movie. Duchovny leaving X-files for movies. Orlando Jones leaving MAD Tv for movies (what the hell happened to him?). Stifler's attempt to be someone other than Stifler. We all know how that worked out. It's like that old proverb: Everything that made David Duchovny great in the X-Files made him terrible in everything else.

Yes! I was bursting out laughing at that scene. You think it's already going on comically too long and it just keeps going down the line! It was almost something out of a Zucker bros movie.

Finally finished it! They try to reveal the "twist" at the end like it's the end to The Usual Suspects and like everything else in the movie, falls flat on its inept face. Watching this, I realized this movie is like an inverse Left Behind movie. Instead of a world where persecuted god fearing Christians are surrounded by cartoonishly evil atheist strawmen, it's a world where rational scientists are persecuted by a cartoonishly evil religious public. Final notes: Why did De Niro decide to cancel a show in order to undergo the tests at the university? Especially if his goal was to retire after the final show? He also would have had to know the exact parameters of the test beforehand in order to set up his cheating system. Why did he send his goon to beat up the main character? It was the final show he was retiring after. What did he care? And holy shit the fight scene in the bathroom was almost at the level of the sunglasses fight from They Live meets the bathroom shootout from True Lies. What the hell high tech lab facility to test psychics? How much fucking funding does a university give a "Parapsychology" department? Shit looked straight out of Blacklist. 88 Minutes is my favorite episode. This movie is in the same vein as that, but even crazier. Definitely needs to be done (right after they get Pete Holmes back to do Any Given Sunday).

This movie was more tepid than trainwreck. Besides, if they're going to do a late De Niro movie, they first must do Red Lights! Holy shit that movie is like 88 Minutes but even crazier.

The one question Wizards always brings to my mind: Was the villain's look an artistic choice, or did Ralph actually have that poor an understanding of the anatomy of the skeletal system?

Sorry, can't stop posting about this thing because every time I watch another 5 minutes, something AMAZING(ly idiotic) happens! Sigourney directs a police raid on a faith healer seminar, actually ordering police around and reprimanding their superior. Her team sets up in the auditorium's control room as the healer goes around expelling cancer by the power of god. CSI style editing and tense music as she screams COME ON WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME and her assistant I'M TRYING THESE GUYS ARE USING MODULATION THEY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING until finally...some number appears on a readout and they have the radio frequency of the healer's assistant feeding information over the hidden wireless earpiece. Some feedback somehow lets Sigourney know that the assistant is in the...other control room? Right next door to their room. She opens up the door and cops run in to arrest the assistant. So in this world, psychics are the worst plague on America and pedalling religion is against the law? Cut to next morning. Sigourney wants to go after a new case, hands her (PhD) TA a photo saying, "This image hasn't been digitally altered at all." A guy appears to levitating crossed-legged. TA says, "It's a trampoline." Case solved! Sigourney runs into the rival psychic scientist team stealing all their university funding. They announce that they've made huge progress with breakthroughs proving telepathy using the same card test Bill Murray gave in Ghostbusters. Sigourney asks for him to give her the test. She gets every card right and schools the scientist by pointing out that his glasses shows the card reflection. Yes, the professional scientists sucking up all the univsersity funding made such a basic idiotic mistake that not even the most amateur poker player would commit it. This is a 2 minute long scene building up to the glasses like it's this shocking surprise revelation, but it's the viewer's immediate first guess because yes the writing in this movie is that dumb. Literally every scene is this insane. Jaw dropped, wondering out loud, "Did adults work on this movie?" I'm changing my opinion that it's actually better in the amazingly terrible movie category than 88 Minutes. This all isn't even touching on how terrible "witty" the dialog is. Check out just the first 10 minutes on Netflix right now and you'll be hooked to the end.

Mentioning this reminded me of a movie discussion I had a little while ago. I think a big part of why so many modern movies are worse these days (look at the best picture winners of the 60s-80s compared to the last 20 years) is that Hollywood has completely lost the ability to create convincing workplaces and occupations. I think it began with Armageddon and Independence Day. Nobody could be just a believable professional anymore. Everybody had to be a hot dog devil may care rockstar no matter how mundane the job. You couldn't have believable crises centers anymore without someone snarling, "GET ME THE PRESIDENT!" every scene. Compare the scientists/engineers/officials of older disaster movies like The China Syndrome and The Andromeda Strain vs Armageddon and Independence Day. Red Lights is the apex absurdity of this trend. National anti-psychic activist and researcher competing for federal anti-psychic funds with other hotshot anti-psychic teams, teaching the hottest anti-psychic classes at university while making anti-psychic house calls and then on weekends directing police raids against anti-faith healer rallies!

$20 million is fairly low budget. When you get that many big name stars in a $20 million movie (unless it's a labor of love art house deal), you're not going to have that much money left over after their paychecks for the actual movie.

Oof. Just caught this one on Netflix. I'd say it's almost up there with 88 Minutes as just another lame thriller at first glance, but gets more insane and ridiculous as you watch. The exact same plot as Haunted and The Awakening (also on Netflix), Sigourney Weaver is a professional paranormal hoax debunker goes for ONE LAST JOB to debunk a phenomenon that may finally be real! Not only is it a terrible movie, but it was obviously written by some hack screenwriter with zero real world experience to what he was talking about: -De Niro in full auto pilot ham mode. With the sunglasses and grand speeches, it's almost like he's channeling Brando in Dr. Moreau. In scenes where a younger De Niro is talking to journalists, he just nods and wobbles his hand in a perfect imitation of an SNL sketch imitating De Niro. -Weaver actually says, "I'm getting too old for this shit." -Like Haunted and The Awakening, it opens with her visiting a house to debunk a psychic hoax. Unlike those movies, it doesn't show her debunk it. Instead, she leaves, then it cuts to her lecture class where she lectures a related topic that sort of explains how the hoax in the previous scene might have worked. Yes, much more interesting than actually showing the fraud be exposed. This sets the trend of the movie's strict "tell, don't show" policy. -Lecture hall? Yes, Sigourney is a university professor teaching an entire course on paranormal hoax debunking to a PACKED lecture hall (rather than what such a class would actually draw: 5 students looking for a joke class to fill an elective). -Her TA for this undergrad course has a doctorate???! -There is some pointless introduction of a rival paranormal physics department jockeying for university funding????? -Sigourney's lecture including "witty" lines that no professional academic would ever say or get away with to her class. "And watch the table legs fly up like a school girl's dress." The whole abusive rock star professor teaching the hottest, but most ridiculous course in school is like watching an even dumber form of How to Get Away with Murder. -They set out to debunk psychic De Niro, not in the standard haunted house setting, but in haunted paranormal TED Talks! WooooOOOOOoooo! This movie is obsessed with lecture halls. -It's supposed to take place sometime after 2005 ("over 30 years" after 1975), everyone is using modern laptops, yet every single television set is from the 80s. Bars and diners all have TVs with dials!!! (and I'm no car expert, but how fucking old is Sigourney's car in this?) -Remember Sigourney's inappropriate lecture? Later on, she tells a rape joke! ("A woman gets raped VIOLENTLY every night by aliens. She sees a hypnotist and they stop. She asks him if they can visit just once a week!") Not only is the joke COMPLETELY OUT OF NOWHERE, but she tells it inside the hospital room of her son who has been in a decade long coma! Right after a heartfelt speech that she would shut off his life support in a second if she believed in heaven! God DAMN, lady! I'm only 23 minutes into it! All this has happened since then! I've got to slowly work my way through and savor this, like layers of a trainwreck onion. Totally check it out on Netflix right now. Give it 10 minutes and if you're not in awe at the terrible setup and screenwriter 101 clumsy exposition, then I'll eat De Niro's wig. This is now my 2nd most wanted movie to have an episode on (after getting Pete Holmes back for Any Given Sunday).

The strangest part about this episode: someone over 35 not ever hearing of Matthew Modine?

I guess I'm the only person in the world who couldn't get into the Fables comic. The initial Rose murder mystery wasn't that compelling, and from then on it felt like every year they had a new head writer come in and take a dump on what the previous head writer had built by wiping the slate clean with the most anti-climatic resolution. Rambling spoilers

Buddy, I stopped at J-O-L before thoughts of pixie bowl cuts and T'Pol fan fiction took over. Cut me a break here.

Ugh, I hate it when fencing is presented as this elite ubermensch activity in movies (almost as much as movies who only know how to show a character is super smart by having them play chess). I took fencing for 3 years at 3 different schools. Each and every fencing class was a collection of weirdos who couldn't stop quoting Monty Python, fat neckbeards talking about their katana collection, and preppies with major rage issues.* * The preppies were usually upperclassmen running the team/club. They would all introduce every class by how we're all just there to have fun, and then throw MAJOR fits when they lost. It wasn't uncommon for them to tear off their mask and hurl it against a wall whenever they had a point scored against them. When they started losing a practice match, they would call over a fellow preppy to take over directing (reffing) where mysteriously every call would then starting favoring them until they won.

Hackers is the Lord of the Rings of computer hacking movies, in that every cliche of the genre can be traced back to it. Angelina Jolene looks an awful lot like a certain Star Trek Enterprise character. Wait a minute...2 Jolenes? Angelina Jolene Blalock????!!!!! O_O WHAT IS HAPPENING? Top 3 sideburns + pixie bowl cut hairdos: 1. Anne Hathaway - Interstellar 2. Jolene - Enterprise 3. Jolene- Hackers

In case anyone hasn't seen the Star Trek recut featuring the Lifeforce "Patrick Stewart scene" Also I am not ashamed to admit that Mathilda May in this movie might have the most perfect boobs in all of movie history (holy crap though she was only 20 when this was made?). T&A and somewhat aimless story aside, this was actually a freaky movie with fantastic practical effects and makeup. Almost seemed like a John Carpenter movie at times. Disagree that Alien puppet/suit work was better. It only worked there because they hardly ever showed the alien. When you finally saw it walk around at the end, it was obviously a rubber suit. Regarding everyone looking older back in the 80s and earlier, one word: smoking.

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This is the most "early 80s movie actually made in the late 80s" movie since Teen Witch.

Jesus, I couldn't even find a plot synopsis of this movie. The only wikipedia entry is a single sentence! In French! From the imdb description, it sounds like Sleepaway Camp at a health spa?

Just saw this for the first time on Netflix. It's hard to think of a more 90s movie. The only thing that comes close is Vanilla Ice rapping with Ninja Turtle. If you sat down and TRIED to write a cheesier early-mid 90s computer hacking movie, you would fail. It makes Sneakers and The Net look like War Games. More notable moments than I can count: -The whole "phone phreak" concept of using sound to "hack" pay phones had run its course by the mid 80s at the absolute LATEST. -The 2 cool 4 school IT guy who rode around everywhere on a skateboard, including inside the office. To get a ride somewhere, he has a company limo piggyback him, Marty McFly style. -The pinnacle of "super overly flashy hacker GUI" sequences. It's like the last 5 minutes of Johnny Pneumonic the entire movie. -Everyone dressed like Back to the Future 2's 2015 sequence. -The techno RAWK soundtrack that blasts every hacking sequence. -"The most common passwords are 'sex', 'love', and 'god'." Uh huh....

I'm sure everyone has pointed this out already, but the reason for the lame slo-mo in the dark final fight with Skeletor was they had literally run out of money at that point. There was no final fight scene shot. They were supposed to do this huge thing where they run around the entire throne room set (the highlight production value of the movie), but since they could only shoot like an hour on no money, they improvised with closeups and darkness to cover up slapped together mistakes and shoddiness. Here's a fun 11 minute clip explaining the trainwreck of a production the whole thing was. Severe limitations from the toy company on what they could and couldn't do (couldn't use the sword to hit people, which is why he just deflects lasers with it), and the story of running out of money. Everything makes sense when you realize that it's a Golan-Globus film.

Speaking of April O'Neil and adult films, I present to you a typical scene from the first TMNT movie. Kids movie!