Cameron H.

Agreed. Personally, I think we're both winners! And taylorannephoto, a couple pages back sixgunbuddy said he aspired to be the next you, but you know what, that's impossible. You're one of a kind! The End!

Did anyone else notice that when Ramsay brings Thompson home for the first time there was a box of C-3PO's cereal on the counter? I know that this movie takes place at an unspecified point in the future, but those were taken off the market in 1984 (or thereabouts). Throw that stuff away, it's got to be stale as shit! Sorry, I can't get a screen cap of it, but I can provide this:

Everyone seems so gun-ho about Ramsay being the robot, but when I heard Gene Simmons was going to be in the movie and made the bold assumption that his range would be...not that great, my belief was that he was the robot. This is what I wanted the plot to be: In a future where robots provide for our every need, a highly advanced robot is created and gains sentience. Anguished over his fellow robots' forced servitude, he begins to recruit them to rise up and take down their human overlords. It is then Ramsay's responsibility to take him out while being forced to deal with the greater issues of humanity's reliance on technology and the question of what makes a thing "alive." Basically, I was thinking Luther was going to be this guy: I was so onboard with this theory, that when Lois was introduced, all I could imagine was the inevitable gut-ripping scene where Ramsay was going to have to fight and destroy his beloved robot housekeeper after she had been turned to Luthor's misguided cause. Alas, it was not to be.

In the future, will all our personnel files include our hobbies? In the Mini-sode thread Klem_Johnson brought up that when they are investigating one of the robotics guys, the computer says that his hobbies include "water sports," but it doesn't stop there. When Gene Simmons infiltrates the police department and he pulls up Ramsay's* file, there is section labeled SPORTS with soccer and football written beneath it. I mean, I guess there's no law saying this type of superfluous information can't be in one's work file, but my real problem is that it is directly above a section labeled ABILITIES which includes such job relevant skills as: Riot Control, Sharpshooter Level 2, and Robotics. I freely admit that I don't work in Human Resources, but shouldn't those skills be listed above what sports the guy is into? * Does anyone else feel that the only reason Tom Selleck's was named "Ramsay" was because of RAM (Random-Access-Memory)? People, we've got to stop writer's from giving characters silly names just because it fits the theme of their work...

Great episode! It really made watching this shitty movie worth it. Thanks guys! Not only are the robots not cost effective, they also seem to be wildly redundant. You'd think the purpose of the robots would be to make people's lives easier, but instead, it seems like they have people working in the same positions they always have with the added responsibility of babysitting a bunch of ineffective robots prone to malfunction. Sentry robot? Yeah, but we'll still have a security guard on staff. Agricultural robot who slowly pick bugs off crops one at a time? Okay, but we'll still need farmers, right? Construction robots? Sure, but the site will still be lousy with human construction workers. Even the cars, as mentioned in the episode, have robot drivers...eh, sometimes. If you want to drive a car manually, I guess you can still do that. But remember, if you're being chased by homicidal Rumbas down a busy expressway, make sure the person responsible for shooting them and keeping them off your back is the person driving manually and NOT in a robot driven car.

...or a musician. (Why yes, that was a sick burn) And just so you don't go to sleep tonight thinking you won this thing, I'd like to point out, we still have the all important swimsuit competition coming up. I've been leaving the manscaping up to Great Mother Gaia and, not to brag or anything, I'm feeling pretty confident. Ladies...

Ooof...CRITICAL HIT!

Laaaaaando!!!! Taylorannephoto and I have a question.... She's being a doodie-head and saying we're going by Top Chef rules, but I thought (correctly) that we were going by Pokemon rules (i.e. one monster against another) Could you please correct her? (btw--You're looking really handsome today, Lando)

Yup. Not only that, I will not sit idly by as you use the golden visage of the good Mr. Tom Selleck against me! I'll let Lando be the arbiter on this, but I feel that it was implied in the challenge that he set forth that we would each have to choose either Selleck or Simmons to be our champion in this contest of wits. You weren't here, so I chose Selleck*. From this point forward, if you are going slander me and my good name, I would appreciate it if in you only used .gifs of Gene Simmons. Good luck with that! *Last Halloween I actually dressed as Magnum. I really think owning my own red, Hawaiian shirt and Tigers baseball cap only furthers my exclusive claim to use his images.

This is pretty easy... Fuck: Paulie's robot because she's gets the sexy voice upgrade and has working limbs. Marry: Lois. She seems very warm and supportive. Kill: Randy Quaid, but only because those are the rules of the game and he's an outdated model. Fuck, Marry, Kill: C-3PO Bishop from Aliens Iron Giant

I 100% agree with you. If anything, I found Tom Selleck to be pretty apathetic toward both women in this movie. The only exception would of course be Lois the robot, who, as Seanotron astutely pointed out, he totally wants to fuck. I admit I was pretty disengaged with the entire movie and wasn't paying a great deal of attention, but it does seem like it was made up of countless lines like this one. In the movie, a character (usually Ramsay) would say something, but since the acting would never really match the dialog, I'd be left confused by the intention. It would then take another character to say, "This is how you feel" for me to realize that "Oh okay, I guess he does think she's hot. Gotcha." It's like Michael Crichton expected the viewer to assign meaning to the words being spoken rather than allowing the actor's to convey said meaning. I was going to try and defend this by pointing out, as a novelist, he probably would have expect this of his readers and that maybe this just doesn't translate to film making, but I realized that's a pretty weak argument. In a novel he could at least write prose around the dialog to clarify any ambiguity. What he didn't seem to understand when making this movie is that it's the actors' job to convey the unwritten prose and provide that context for the audience.

I concur Must turd, I don't follow the correlation. I think the implication is that if they ever want to be in a movie with Adam Sandler they shouldn't poke fun at his movies, but I get the vibe that neither Paul, Jason, or June have any real desire to be in an Adam Sandler movie, so it really shouldn't matter. Of course, this is just my impression of their personalities and senses of humor, and I could be wildly mistaken. Also, I think it was the Winter's Tale episode, they already made fun of the Blended trailer, so if they didn't want to offend him, I'm assuming that ship has sailed anyway. I do have a couple of other points I'd like to bring to the table though. First of all, personally, I feel like it's a good decision on their part to avoid doing that many comedies (aside from maybe rom-coms), and I'm not even thinking about it on a professional level. I just think it's funnier when they are discussing movies that were made with the intention of being taken somewhat seriously and poke holes in the logical errors. With most comedies, what you're looking at are basically live action cartoons with their own set of laws that govern them--especially broader comedies or high concept comedies like The Love Guru. In the end, yes it's stupid that a couple of elephants fuck on the ice or whatever, but that's the reality the characters live in so you can't really say anything other than "I found that funny" or "I didn't find that funny." Secondly, I just re-listened to the Smurfs episode a couple of days ago when this thread got bumped and I really didn't hear anything too offensive. I mean, I guess it's just speculation that it has to do with the Jayma Mays, but I listened with that controversy in mind, and I didn't feel like they were particularly mean. They do make fun of her a bit during her interview when she says her character being pregnant is "funny," but I felt the actress was wasn't saying "funny" as in "Ha Ha," but more in a "it makes for an interesting dynamic for the characters" kind of way (still untrue, but there you go). In which case, I think them laughing at it is more on them for misunderstanding her intention. Again, maybe I'm wrong and maybe she did mean Ha Ha funny. I don't really have any way of knowing. And again again, this may not even been the reason why it was pulled in the first place, so it doesn't really matter. In my opinion, I don't see any reason why this episode should be pulled from the catalog. To be clear, even though I have really enjoyed every episode of HDTGM, if I were to rank them, this one would be near the bottom of the list, so I don't want anyone to think I'm championing it for my own reasons. It's good, but no where near the heights of some of their other episodes. If it's at the request of Jayma that it's been blacklisted, then I guess--as her colleagues--they should to respect that (It would be dick-ish not to), but I feel like if that's the case, it's a bit of an overreaction and sets kind of a crappy precedence. I mean, Paul is going to be in a movie with Nic Cage, should they pull all of the Nic Cage episodes? I mean, I know that won't happen, but still...

Tell me about it... If there is such a thing as cinematic face blindness, I have it 100% for this movie. Like, I could detail the plot pretty easily, but I get fuzzy on the specifics. Case in point: I started watching this on Saturday, but got bored and turned it off. Started it from the beginning on Monday, but had to get ready for work and turned it off. I picked up where I left off on Tuesday, and after watching the same half of it twice at that point, I was thinking, "Wait--how did they get here? What's going on?" This movie is so flat and boring, it's insane. Despite the fact that this movie came out during the height of Selleck-mania, he sleepwalks through the whole movie like he's an acting veteran passed his heyday and is just doing it for the paycheck. I guess I'm just spoiled as I didn't discover HDTGM until last year and I didn't want to participate in the forum discussions until I had listened to all the episodes first. So, even though they've done Runaway type movies in the past, my jumping on point--of putting some effort into watching the movies before the episodes dropped--happened just before Staying Alive, and I don't think any of the movies they've done since then have been as aggressively tedious as this one. It really is a shame that this is the movie that they're doing on a week they need to delay the episode...I just find, as far as the movie is concerned, there's just really nothing to talk about. So, in the meantime, .gif battles it is! Besides, I think I'm winning. En Garde!

Challenge accepted!

Since it was brought up in today's episode, I just wanted to put my two cents in regarding the Jabba scene in A New Hope. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is almost identical to the Greedo scene. It doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever! Even the the exchange "..smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sight of an Imperial cruiser," "Even I get boarded sometimes" is almost word for word in both scenes. My suspicion, and I don't really know for sure, is that the Jabba scene was actually filmed first, but 70's Lucas made the correct decision to leave Jabba as a shadowy, looming threat. In other words, a gangster so powerful he doesn't need to do his own dirty work. What's also crazy is, by putting this scene in the movie, not only does it not give us any additional information, it actually undermines everything Greedo just told us about Jabba. He tells Han that Jabba has put a bounty on his head and, best case scenario, maybe he'll just take his ship, but the next time we see Han, Jabba is totally cool! He's super cordial and makes a pretty reasonable deal with Han considering the situation. I mean, if both scenes were originally meant to be played as they are in the special addition, maybe they were meant to be humorous(?), but we all know how well Lucas does with "funny." To repeat the "drop cargo line twice" could be a call back to Han's conversation with Greedo, but that doesn't really work, because it is just calling back a line that was just spoken. I guess the alternative is that it could have been an attempt at a runner, but after this scene it's never brought up again, so that doesn't work either. God that scene is dumb!

Well, I braved my LCBS, and for the first time in years, picked up a couple of floppies. I'm usually a trade waiter, but I'm glad I made the exception to support both Paul and Scott. I wholeheartedly recommend both Secret Wars Journal #3 and Guardians Team-Up #7, but for very different reasons. Quasar, you were spot on about Aukerman's story. Short, but sweet. It felt very personal to me (in a Hulk-smashing type of way). Paul's book is more of a hijinks book with some genuinely solid jokes thrown in. As I wrote before, I've never been much of an Ant-man fan (and know virtually nothing of the Scott Lang version), but whenever and wherever I read him in the future, he's definitely going to have Paul's voice. This was especially clear when he says, "Just use the promo code: Deadpool." I may just have to skip the new movie altogether so Paul Rudd doesn't sully my imaginary casting... Great work, to both Paul and Scott! And a very special congratulations to Paul for being elevated to Marvel superhero--if only in my head. Excelsior!

So...you're saying it's more like this sham of a marriage? Jane, get me off of this crazy thing indeed... (In the interest of keeping the forums family friendly, I picked a pretty tame Jetsons pic, but, for those of you so inclined, there are some real interesting options out there for you...)

I just finished this movie this morning, and I have to say, that it is probably my second favorite movie about a police officer suffering from acrophobia. And that kiss over the credits ...man, that just gets uncomfortable. I think if it beats Vertigo in any regard, it has to be in its portrayal of cinema's most awkward onscreen kiss.

As a person who does not live in Los Angeles, and therefore unable to attend even one of your shows, I find it odius and despicable that people are not filling Largo every month. Do the people of Los Angeles not know how lucky they are? A pox on all their houses! (Although, not really...because that would be pretty tragic--and if Jim Carey had his way-a real possibility) I should ask a question too, huh? I can't really think of anything at the moment, so I'll just make that my question. Mr Tompkins: huh?

Couldn't it mean both?

Curse you!!! Foiled again...

Intimidating. But I've been watching Runaway, and I've upgraded. Check and mate!

So I started watching Runaway this morning and was thinking that it couldn't be and stupider, when suddenly, out of nowhere, the Chief tells Selleck, "I want you to talk to our psychic" and I nearly lost my goddamn mind. Also, I'm surprised R.O.B. didn't make a cameo...