Cam Bert

I usually don't like to complain when a guest makes a factual error. They are busy people taking time out of their schedules to watch silly movies to entertain us. That said D'arcy hit upon one of my greatest and oddest pet peeves. There were no Brontosauruses in Jurassic Park because there is no Brontosaurus. See the problem all started during the infamous bone wars between O.C. Marsh and Edward Cope. The story itself is very fascinating about these two paleontologist that once worked together but became harsh and bitter rivals during the fossil like gold rush of the late 1800s. These two used many underhanded methods to get the leg up on the other which often led to some sloppy careless mistakes. O.C. Marsh discovered the Apatosaurus in 1877 when he found an incomplete skeleton. Two years later he discovered another similar skeleton yet this one more complete, he called this one Brontosaurus. However in 1903 upon further research by a third paleontologist, Elmer Riggs, it was discovered that the Brontosaurs was actually a more mature version of the originally discovered Apatosaurus and not it's own species. As Apatosaurus had precedent Brontosaurs became a synonym of it. Here's where the confusion with the public begins. When all these new dinosaurs were being discovered it was big news across the world and people were hearing all these new names and creatures. Brontosaurus means "thunder lizard" and has a big powerful sound while Apatosaurus means "deceptive lizard" and is less impactful. So when it came time to display the dinosaur at the American Museum of Natural History it was decided to go with the strong more publicly likeable name. Even though in the 1970s it was officially decided that there was no Brontosaurus the name had already been ingrained in the public conscious so much so Brontosaurus became a sort of catchall for any long necked dinosaur. Recently though, in 2015 a new study done by a Portuguese-British team determined that there were enough differences to reclassify the Brontosaurus as its own distinct type of Sauropod while belonging to the same subfamily as the Apatosaurus and thus we could use the name Brontosaurus again. Many paleontologist still disagree and argue over this fact, so its use is still highly debated and remains unused. However, in the end there were no Apatosauruses in Jurassic Park, so she was just wrong about the type of dinosaur in general.

Yea, thanks fellow Cameron. I would differently be interested in that. As a former high school musical theater dweeb it is something right up my alley. Was the last film Hairspray and are we talking original or remake? Edited because I was thinking of Cry-Baby

Also, I'm too late to the party to play any fun forum games this week but I saw this while I was away and thought you guys might enjoy it. Long story short, in Japan the next installment of of The Fast and the Furious series (Wild Speed as it's called here) will be called Ice Break. I can't tell if this is an improvement over The Fate of the Furious or not.

Hey everybody! It's been awhile, but I won't bore you all with the details. I just want to wish everybody a belated holiday greetings and I hope it was a good one. While I'm at it why not throw in a big welcome to the new year. Secondly as a person who suffers from depression, I just want to send a big internet hug to Elektra.

My father grew up in rural Alberta and in his hometown with population of a few hundred had three if I recall correctly. How Did This Get Named

Was Jobe suppose to be an idiot savant? When we first meet him the drunk Irish man comments that he built "Big Red" the lawnmower and that he is a whiz with machines. I thought that would play into things later on in the movie, but he's not good with the game or other machinery in the film until he starts to get smart. But also is he really that good with machines because Big Red is one very unsafe lawnmower. There is no front deck cover on Big Red to protect people from the blades or objects falling into them. Not to mention if he went over a rock or something with it it could fly right out at him. Very flawed. Also maybe this is not the time or place to admit this but.... I've never seen an episode of Gilmore Girls. I know Jason loves it and it seems popular on here. People I know have recommended it to me and I like the cast and from clips I've seen of it it seems like something I would enjoy. However, I always seem to forget about it or when I do remember I remember it's like 150 episodes and that's a huge commitment.

First off let me say to all my American friends here I hope you had a good holiday and got nice and fat on some delicious turkey and sides. Like Paul said they didn't cover nearly enough of this movie and there are lots of crazy things still to point out. However, I just want to go over one thing already mentioned and possibly ruin everybody's day as I think I have an answer to the crazy VR sex scene. The shocking and disturbing truth is that Marnie the widow was secretly into vore. Vore, or voraephilia, is a sexual fetish in which a person has an erotic desire to be consumed by another person or creature. The majority of the time the desire is not to be eaten like cannibalism but rather consumed whole. Due to the fact that it is implausible in reality and the thing consuming the person is most often not human, this fetish is not uncommon in the furry community so google at your own risk. With all that in mind let's go back and look at the facts. When Jobe first reads Marnie's mind he states "he has "some strange fantasies." Then when the get to the VR gyroscopes before he sends her in he tells her "in here we can be anything we want to be" and takes a long knowing pause. Then before turning into some sort of creature he tells her "Nothing can hurt us in here. I know what you really want" at which point he begins to consume her. Given that Jobe actually seems to genuinely care for her we can assume he wasn't trying to hurt her. Rather given his actions and what he said it seems more likely he was merely trying to help her live out this secret fetish of hers. Given that she hadn't been taking the injections like Jobe the whole experience was probably too much for her to handle and she is left brain damaged.

That is like an instant go to reference and short hand for something really sad here in Japan. Why this is a popular children's story I'll never know. If any dog lover has a free ten minutes, a box of tissues, and wants to feel sad I suggest you watch Marimo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGQVX8iGbgk Just posting that has me in tears...

Okay, a few things to add. Can't go through and quote them all, so you all know what you wrote. 1. Yes, lots of good classic crying moments mentioned. I'm not afraid to admit I cry very often at movies. Most every Pixar film gets me going. However, for whatever reason there is one movie that had me crying like nobody's business. It's a Japanese movie called After Life (Wonderful Life in Japan) and I saw it years before coming to Japan. The story is simple. When you die you go to this production office type place where you're interviewed about your happiest memory. Then they take that one memory and they recreate it and give it to you, and that's what you get for the rest of eternity. The story has many beautiful and sad moments but the kicker is they mix in real people being interviewed with the scripted actors. The director, Hirokazu Koreeda, specializes in real powerful dramas and most of his other films like Nobody Knows and Like Father, Like Son will leave you in tears. 2. Online journalism is the worst when it comes to giving away spoilers. Not everything comes out here in a speedy manner and if it's more than a week later or sometimes days it seems to be okay to put the spoiler in a headline. Or the worst is when the headline is something like "SPOILERS!! You won't believe the shocking cameo/death" and then followed by a picture of said thing. Why put spoilers if you're going to put a picture of it that is twice the size of the headline? Once you saw you know and it doesn't matter if you read it or not. As for, There are numerous films I could pick here, but I'm going to go with something a little less subjective taste wise and go with something that seems to be a weird generational divide. YouTube shows and creators. There are a lot of YouTube channels and personalities that I over the years have fallen in love with and follow regularly. I will watch some of them everyday or week like I would a televised TV show. I have a lot of respect for people like MatPat, Good Mythical Morning, Day9, and Screen Junkies to name a few that churn out lots of well done quality content every week that we get to watch for free. However, none of my family or close friends get it. There is a weird idea that it's just YouTube so it's not hard. Or because it's for free it's "not good enough" to be on TV or elsewhere. Most of them won't even give the videos a try and if they do are very dismissive saying "it's okay for an internet thing." In the last two years I've heard kids at school talk about wanting to be YouTubers as a future job and other teachers just laugh at them. I see this as a perfectly valid idea. If they truly put effort into it, and try hard they could be successful or it could spin off into something else. Most of them may try and will fail but that's the same with any field of entertainment. Separate those who want to do it from those that think it's an easy pay day. I'm not going to defend every video or personality on there, but I just find the whole idea of dismissing YouTube outright a bit irksome.

Okay my two cents. Beauty and the Beast - I agree with my fellow Cameron. If it's going to be a shot for shot remake what is the point? While I will see it, I'm not dying to see it. I am looking forward to the music though. Also I find the CGI face of the Beast to be a little flat and off putting. GOTG2 - I love it and love how little information is given away. Neat visuals and a good joke, I know the tone and I'm hooked. I don't need or want to see more. As far as "Hooked on a Feeling" goes, I see it more as a marketing thing more than anything else. Like an unofficial theme song. I have no doubt that Awesome Mx Vol 2 will be a good listen. Now what do you guys make of this?

Well Ewan McGregor has been known to sing from time to time as well.

First off, thank you and thank you CakeBug. It is Vampire Kiss but this is largely due to grammatical issues of Japanese. Possessive is determined by the marker の (no) which functions like " 's " in English. In addition Japanese there is no distinction between plural and singular. So "There is a cat on the table" and "There are cats on the table" are the exact same sentence. So often when foreign worlds are translated with the plural they put ス(su) or ズ(zu) are the end. So to phonetically put the possessive in could make it mistaken for a plural. As to why the possessive の wasn't added, I can only assume because of the direct phonetic translation. As for Bat & Girl, I would have to assume because Batgirl is already a character. Also considering how much it was focused on the Jennifer Beals character is probably why they went with "girl" and not "man." There is a bat and a girl in the movie, so it's not an untrue statement.

First off just a warning this post will be a bit long and image heavy. Sorry for making you scroll through it all in advance. How Did This Get Named? When movies come to Japan sometimes they change the name to make it easier to understand, if the name is a play off a saying or idiom that is not the same in Japanese, or to be more in line with the international name. However, a majority of the time it's just simply a phonetic retooling of the name. So in this case the Vampire's Kiss simply became バンパイアキッス (Banpaia Kissu) which is a fascinating story if you are a linguistics nerd because both words have other phonetic spellings which are used in different situations. However, this week this not really a story of how did this get named. Rather it is a case of how did this get marketed. So as some of you might be aware Japan can be particularly tardy with getting movies. For example, I have to wait until January to see Doctor Strange. However this isn't always the case because we got Civil War a week earlier than America. The reasons why some movies are delayed is complicated. Sometimes it is so it can align better with Japanese public holidays or vacation periods, and sometimes it's to leave room for bigger Japanese movies. Such was the case in the summer of 1989. There was one movie that had a lot of buzz around it, and when it was released on June 23 it smashed records at the time. That film was Tim Burton's Batman. In Japan however Batman was not to be shown until December but the hype was there. Now, comedies are hard to market internationally. Humor is not always universal, and dark humor especially not. However high-concept horror movies are marketable, but Vampire's Kiss is a low-concept horror story mixed with dark humor. A hard sell to be sure but the most hyped movie of the summer also involves bats and a big city and they ran with that. I give you the first poster for the film. Based on the imagery and words this is clearly an attempt to cash in on the hype and word of mouth of Batman. First in the upper left corner the "bat symbol" saying "Bat & Girl" with the ampersand being almost too small to see. Then at the bottom is a woman dressed up as a poor Ben Cooper-esque Batman costume. So to translate the poster. Again reading right to left I will bold the purple text. "By day a beautiful working girl, by night a cool vampire, from the country having a bat boom, comes a bat & girl! Get ready narcissistic New Yorkers with alliterative motives!" The second part is a bad pun. It says "one thing in their heart and a second thing in hand" which is an expression meaning to have alliterative motives. However the pun is that the second part can also be read to mean "a bulge in their pants." Now, yes it was a "bat boom" with Batman and all but also the mid to late 80s had tons of Vampire themed movies as well. After all that in the bottom left hand side it says Vampire's Kiss and above it, it is billed as a slightly naughty horror comedy. Well this is all fine and well but when the movie comes out on VHS this doesn't make for a good covers. Too wordy and people will have forgotten Batman by then. So then when released on VHS they went with the left cover which was also an alternative movie poster. Just the bat symbol with Jennifer Beals in it. Years later when Nicolas Cage became more well known it was changed once more to this cover. And finally years and years later when it was released on DVD they decided one more time to try and shake up the cover. Notice the clearly added in after the fact fangs on Nicolas Cage. I know this was long and picture heavy, but I found the original poster so fascinating I just had to dig into it and the subtle evolution over time was also worth pointing out. Also when I wanted to find more information out about the original poster I ran across a Japanese guy who runs a blog called "とってもニコラス!" or "Very Nicolas!" which I found to be very funny and charming.

Well it was a good theory but this information is good to know. Not that I have to worry because Japan is supposedly rabies free. Speaking of which I have some fun Japanese stuff related to this movie that I'll wait until things die down a bit to post.

I'm very conflicted over Alva's brother killing Nic Cage. Throughout the second and third acts as he succumbs more and more to his illness he starts wanting to be killed as a sort of release. Whether it be the metaphoric release from his inner demons and psychosis or release from the grip of the vampire, he wants out. So when he's killed at the end of the film he gets his release. So he basically rapes two women, murders one of them, and gets to die like he wanted. If we were suppose to root for him, is it a positive outcome? Sure he dies, but he gets what he wants and while Alva gets some sort of "justice" via her brother the club victim is left as a cold case. If we weren't suppose to be rooting for him and rather rooting for Alva, is his death a meaningfully outcome to her story when he was begging to die? If he had lived would he have confessed to his therapist like he did in his mind? Was his hallucinatory confession suppose to absolve him to us the viewers?

I think it's worth taking a brief moment to look at the timeline of this movie. Based on his conversations with the therapist throughout the film we can firmly establish that Nic Cage's character visits his therapist every Tuesday afternoon. With that in mind, given the first scene is with the therapist we now know that this movie takes place over the course of a month. Week one, he meets Jackie and has his encounter with the bat. He also gets the letter about the client wanting a copy of the contract. Week two begins with Alva still not finding the contract. That Saturday night he gets "bitten" and the following day goes to Jackie's art show. It is at this point he starts wearing the band-aid which he will do so until the end of the movie. Week three, Alva is still unable to find the contract. He's mean, but not full on cruel yet. On the weekend he tries to patch this up with Jackie only to be derailed by his delusions. It's the Monday at the end of this week when he chases Alva through the office. Week four starts with him reciting the alphabet and takes us to the very end of the movie. So what does this all mean? Well, even though we know the neck wound is from shaving what if he did get bit or scratched by the bat? Symptoms of rabies include insomnia, anxiety, increased activity, restlessness, and hallucinations. All of which Nic Cage's character starts showing by the second week of the bat incident. Rabies usually starts around three weeks which puts it in line with the scene of him chasing Alva. However, rabies can start showing signs around 9 days which puts it nearly exactly in line with his first encounter with Jennifer Beals. Based on his actions and how it corresponds to the timeline I think it's clear that this movie is about a depressed man with inferiority and relationship issues that get amplified to the nth degree and manifest themselves as a vampire fantasy when he is infected with rabies from a bat.

I completely agree with you. I know it's TV but I worked with a person who got really into Game of Thrones but had never read the books. After the second season they basically binged and read all the books over the course of the summer and fall. When the third season came around they were just complaining about how many things they were leaving out or were missing. It really hurt their enjoyment of the show. Now that the show has kinda passed the books, they love the show again. I found the whole thing very bizarre.

I am too part of Ravenclaw. My patronus is a dun mare and I'm packing a 14 1/2" elder wood wand with a unicorn hair and hard flexibility. Odd that there are so many Ravenclaws. It must mean something. Also I am back after a short break of Halloween insanity and sports festivals. I was hoping to come back to Lawnmower Man, because I don't have much to say about Gamer. Other than I bet real gamers are embarrassed to share a name with this movie. Also the movie here is called "GAMER" not even translated in Japanese phonetics or anything. I guess they didn't give two shits either. Also Paul, I think you'd be better off getting a one day pass if you come to Japan. You can use it to ride the street cars, cable cars, subways, monorail, and trains as long as they are private lines in a give city/prefecture. Far more interesting than the bullet train everyday. Also much much much cheaper. I can fly to Tokyo and back for half the price of the bullet train.

Welcome back!! I was very much saddened upon my return to not see you kicking around anymore, but very glad you are back.

It's not much off a nickname like "Beaver" in this movie but most of my childhood friends when they talk to me or write me, they still call me "Bert" which is just a shortening of my last name. I guess kinda like Jonesy.

As I work with children in Japan it's sometimes hard to be things that are fun for them and me. The last three years I've been Mario, Wario and Harry Potter but this year I'm doing one for me and the super nerdy kids. Bepo

In fairness to Stephen King, to whom I have been dutifully reading since I was 11, a lot of what he writes I think works because it's in your mind and doesn't translate so well to screen. That said Lawnmower Man the film and Lawnmower Man the short story are related in title only so you can't really blame him for that. Looking forward to this, that and hopefully if they keep doing more King eventually The Mangler about the killer laundry machine! Also congrats to Bella for trying to help us understand and snagging the no-prize!

This goes by kinda quick but I found it very bizarre. During the "sweet sassy molassy" scene we get a look into Dimitri's bedroom. The fact that he has a roaring fire in a fireplace in his tiny room isn't the oddest thing about it. His room is covered in posters and pictures of western movies and various cowboy related things. In fact the book he is reading when Rose comes in is a cowboy novel! The weird thing is none of the cowboy movie posters are even for real western movies. No, they decided that this 25 year old Russian guy is just obsessed with cowboys and the old west and rather than pay for a Rio Bravo poster and a Zane Grey novel, they took the time and effort to make up a dozen fake movies and books. Maybe his obsession with the old west is explained in the novels. Personally I hope it's not and it's just some odd character choice made between the actor and the production staff

Thank you. I guess this just leaves me with the lingering question, why even make them vampires? I mean aside from drinking blood and an aversion to sunlight, why make them vampires at all. The fact they are vampires has nothing really to do with the overall plot. Everything they do is more about their magic powers more so than their vampire abilities. I mean just make them wizards that can be turned into vampires.I guess that's more of a question for the author and not the movie makers or screen writer. I mean they take more than a few digs at Twilight but based on my limited knowledge of Twilight, their vegan sparkling vampires seem more "vampire" than the Vampire Academy ones.

This is a question for Taylor Anne, or anyone else who read the books, do vampires, sorry, morois age normally? Regular vampires you're just kinda stuck at the age you turned at yet the morois have kids and go to school which seems to imply they age. If they age slowly like Wolverine, wouldn't they go through like a bunch of dhampirs even if they were soul bonded or whatever they were. This whole thing kinda confused me.