DrCrowTStarwars

DuracellEnergizer said:

TV's Frink said:

Mondess122 said:

Yeah, I usually don't use killing metaphores for my ratings. Sorry.

Guardians 's genuinely great stuff, Hobbitboy.

 I meant that you gave it a glowing review, and then just a mere 8.1/10.

Who knew eight was such a low number on a ten-scale voting system ... 

 It is according to gaming magazines and websites that are afraid of losing ads if publishers don't like their reviews:)

Yeah I would say eight is a fair rating, I liked it a lot more then that but hey that was me.  Eight should be a high rating.

Yeah that is why all the movies were animated but he also sighted the basic structure of the story and the fact that Arogon's love story wasn't part of the main structure of the book as a reason he didn't think it would work okay.  So it sounds like to me he understood that novels and films are different and he pitied anyone who would have to make the changes needed to make it work as a film.

Now I love both for different reasons and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.  I also like the movie Dune as well as the book so maybe I am just weird.  Still as someone who has seen the movies I think I have a right to say I enjoyed them from start to finish.

Well this made me laugh today.  Now if only we had found somewhere besides Star Trek to send Rick Berman.

Okay first what the series does right, it has 1940s music, it's lit like an early colour film, and they cast actors who are not hollywood pretty boys and look like character actors from the 1940s.

Now what this series does wrong, it is the worst most hamfisted written series I have seen in a long time.  It is clearly written by men trying impress woman. All the male characters are sexist idiots just because they happen to live in the 1940s, every single one of them. I know sexism was all over the place but if you look at films from this time period the female heroes were not treated this badly, just listen to some old Superman radio shows, or the shadow, or watch any number of films or shorts.  What is more they don't have a braincell between them.  I know the hero has to be smarter then everyone around them but if the people around them are written too stupid it just comes off as fake and that is the problem here. Also Agent Carter is way too perfect and doesn't make a single mistake so there is no suspense. True suspense comes from having heroes who can screw up and get things wrong from time to time, I mean look at any much love hero and will see someone who is over their head most of the time and staying just half a step ahead of disaster.  Oh and then there is the scene where she threatens to murder a man because he is rude to a waitress. Now don't get me wrong the guy was a jerk but in a world where people get mad at Superman for killing Zod after he killed tens of thousands of people are we really supposed to cheer when a female hero threatens to murder a guy for being rude?! Am I supposed to like this person at all?!  I guess maybe extreme violence and cold blooded murder is okay when a woman does it to a man because all men are evil?

So in short this show's world view is the same as cheap 70s rape revenge films,all men are stupid, evil, rapists who woman need to kill.  There is no chemistry in the cast, the story has no suspense because we know Howard Stark is okay later and this series goes way overboard making all the male characters look bad just so they can make the female lead look better.  You don't have to do it that way.  I don't think the writers have any real respect for woman because they seem to think that woman can't stand out as good leads unless all the male characters are made to look evil and stupid. Hey here is an idea if you want your female character to work, why not write everyone as a character and not a stereotype and then have the character who is smarter then the rest just happen to be a woman, you know like how they wrote Ripley in Alien, or how Agent Carter herself was written in the first Captain America movie.  They didn't have to make Captain America useless in that movie to get the point across that she was a good agent, so why are they doing it now.

I am sorry this sort of thing doesn't normally bug me but all of the male leads are so useless I feel like I am reading bad fan fiction written by a teenage boy trying to get into a girl's pants and not the writings of someone who has any real respect for woman at all.  The sexism on this show just goes way too far over the top and makes everything feel fake and stupid.  I wasn't even able to finish the pilot and I will not be tuning in again.

I was really looking forward to this show, it looked like it could be my favorite think in the MCU but the heavy handed writing and a plot that only has suspense if you forget that Howard Stark is okay in the future killed it.  ABC you could have had something great here but you killed it.  Maybe next time you should try hiring some female writers and producers to run your show with a female lead and they will not feel the need to impress anyone and write the characters as a characters and will write a female lead with some depth beyond being harassed and threatening people with cold blooded murder.

Let me put it this way I am a man and man times in my life I have when out in public had woman that I don't know reach out and touch my butt, so according to this show do I have the right to slit their throats with a knife?  Of course not that would be a complete over reaction!  Still that was the big moment that was supposed to get a cheer in the pilot of this series????  Fail!

This series should have been great bud sadly for this viewer it crashed and burned and this is coming from someone who liked the pilot of AOS.  Avoid this show, Supernatural and The Flash are on opposite this show and they are what I will be watching in coming weeks, they are a much better use of my time.

Sorry if this upsets anyone but it's just how I feel.  This show just doesn't work.

RicOlie_2 said:

generalfrevious said:

TV's Frink said:

You haven't even seen them?  Get out of this thread.

I don't need to eat arsenic to know it's poison. And I have seen the LOTR trilogy, so I should be in half of this thread.

 Anyone can make a movie look bad to someone who hasn't seen it, but that has little to do with whether or not that person would enjoy it or not if they actually saw it.

 Yeah well said, I at least watched the last Transformers movie before calling it garbage.  Now I may not be interested in the next Star Trek movie after the last two but once it comes out I wouldn't claim to know if it was a good or bad movie when I have not seen it.

I have read all of Tolkien's stuff several times and that doesn't stop me from enjoying Jackson's version of middle earth.  They are well made films and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know a thing about modern film making.  I live and breath bad movies and there are far worse films out there.

Also adapting a book to the screen in a way that you think will best work as a film and get investors in the film their money back is nowhere close to digging up a corps. Oh and Tolkien himself said that anyone who wanted to turn his books into films would have to make major changes to them in order to do so and he was fine with that, that is why he let the film rights go cheap when he was alive, because he knew the director would have to put a lot of work into the script to make it work on screen.  I can't say the changes bother me.  I enjoy the films and I have seen them.

I had that problem, do you have your original windows install disc or did you make a system repair disc, because when i had that problem I booted it up and ran that disc and it repaired the problem.  Another thing that once worked for me was starting up the computer in safe mode and then restarting it in normal mode.

Hope you get your computer fixed soon.

Warbler said:

I may not be with you guys for a while.  The computer that I've been using is dying.  The Hard Drive is failing.   The computer is operating incredibly slowly when it does operate at all.  

What a start to the new year.  : (   : (    : (

 Ouch, sorry to hear that.  That happened to me last year.  I hated being out of touch and I lost a bunch of stuff I was working on including a novel that was about half way done.  Hope things get better for you soon, i will miss reading your posts.

Not really I have to say because of all the plot problems and the stupid reason Anikan is given for turning and the fact that he wasn't really needed any way(I mean all he did was kill kids and unarmed people and the one trained Jedi he went up against kicked his ass so what good was he?)Episode is the worst of the prequels to me. So for me it only gets worse after episode one.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Mondess122 said:

Black Christmas (1974)- Some people argue day and night about what the first slasher film is...and I think it's this one. It's not as well made as something like Halloween, but it's also much more stylish and moody than Friday the 13th.

I'd disagree with you in regards to Halloween. I think Black Christmas is a much more engaging film with more interesting characters and a far scarier murderer.

I do agree with your point on Friday the 13th, though. Of course, the entire Friday the 13th franchise is an exercise in derivative mediocrity, so it's hard not to.

 Granted I don't watch a lot of slasher films so i am not an expert but I always thought psycho was the first slasher film since it was a horror film that was more bloody then anything made up to that point and Norman Bates killed woman with a knife.  Then again I am not an expert.  i will have to track down Black Christmas and give it a shot.

Mondess122 said:

DrCrowTStarwars said:

Dawn of the planet of the Apes

6.5/10.

I'd rate it similarly. My biggest problem with it was how predictable it was. Not just that, but they threw out the social and political commentary that makes the PotA films (aside from the Burton remake) so endearing to me, and instead replaced it with a cliched and tired plot that disguised itself as 'political'. Rise had the annoying references, but at least that film had a 'heart' to it , and it had some ideas of its own. I'm still kind of baffled that people ate this up, the same kind of people that criticized Avatar for being unoriginal, while this is almost as bad in that regard. And the less said about the bland characters, the better (...not that you can say a lot of things about bland characters, but whatever). 

Then again, I thought Boyhood was just okay, so maybe (i.e. clearly) I'm the crazy one.

Nightcrawler - A good film that becomes a not-quite-great film thanks to Gyllenhaal's performance. It's worth seeing just for his performance alone. Everything else - direction, screenplay, other characters - was fairly standard stuff, although not necessarily bad. Cinematography was really good. The score was really out of place, it sounded like it belonged in an inspirational sports film. Maybe it was the point to sound like that, but if it was, I thought it was a failed experiment. 

7.6 out of 10 Taxi Driver Diets.

Spider-Man 3 - Better than The Amazing Spider-Man...both of 'em. It has plenty of issues, but it's still pretty entertaining thanks to Raimi's direction. He nails the tone that a Spider-Man film should have. While it may have some of the same issues as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (too many subplots, too many villains, a nonsensical romance), at least you can tell that there went some care into this, whether you look at the Sandman introduction or the action scenes. It's not the bland commercial dreck that was The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The CGI also holds up really well, especially if compare it to the newest film.

6.1 out of 10 Sony products.

Black Christmas (1974)- Some people argue day and night about what the first slasher film is...and I think it's this one. It's not as well made as something like Halloween, but it's also much more stylish and moody than Friday the 13th. There's some hokey acting here and there, but overall, it's a slasher flick worth seeing. 

7.1 out of 10 glass unicorn figures.

 Yeah it didn't have much to say and despite being full of good characters I didn't care about any of them much.  I can understand why some people like this since it is a remake of a good movie but some parts of it were just stupid like apes somehow knowing how to fire guns better then humans without any training and the fact that all the guns were in working order and had plenty of ammo after ten years on the shelf.  Still I can understand why people like it if only for the acting but personally I liked BFTPOTA better. With that film I was impressed by what the film makers did for less then a million bucks, the relationships felt closer so I cared more about what happened to the characters, and the stakes just felt higher somehow, also the original was just around 90 minutes long so it didn't feel as padded as this one did. Maybe I am just missing something that other people saw because I didn't hate the movie, I just liked the low budget film it was a remake of better.

Now that would be fun, if I had all the programs needed to pull it off I would give it a shot:)

X-MEN

This is a strange movie now. At the time it helped save the comic book movie but now it feels small scale and like something that would be done on TV.  Still that isn't a bad thing, the focus is kept on the characters and the situation and that is done so well that it makes up for the lack of action scenes.  The casting is good across the board and apart from that one line the writing is good and solid.  I like the dark look of this movie and Wolverine and Rouge work well as POV characters. There is a tension running through this movie that you don't feel in most modern Superhero movies and the problem facing the characters is shown as being so complex that Magneto isn't without a point and you can understand where he is coming from.

While it's small scale and late 90s CGi may not hold up for some people I found that returning to this movie after all these years I was sucked in from minute one and enjoyed every minute, that's pretty good for a popcorn movie this old.

8.0/10.

X-Men 2:X-Men United

This movie ups the ante from the last entry in every way.  The characters are taken to a much darker place and the raid on the mansion complete with children being shot is still one of the most intense and disturbing scenes ever put in a PG13 rated comic book movie, i can see how a cut of this movie was rate R.  Still unlike a lot of Hollywood films this all serves a purpose and it shows that there are villains on both sides, this reinforces the theme that Mutants are not better then humans and should be treated no differently. The villain from the last movie steps forward as the leader of the team in this movie and it doesn't feel forced or out or character, now that is good writing.  There is only one complaint I have and that is that the love triangle feels forced, and since it was never really resolved in this series it just feels pointless.  my other problem with these films is that they want us to be invested in the relationship between Scott and Jean and yet we don't get any real scenes between them that show us why they love each other.  I don't know if it is a failure of the script or if the scenes were shot and then cut for time but we are given no reason to care about the relationship.  Still I do give the actor who plays Scott credit, if you look in the background of a lot of the scenes he is doing a lot of emotional reaction in response to everything Jean says and does and he does it well and all without his eyes, he is clearly trying to give viewers some reason to care but it is not enough and when Jean dies I don't really feel anything because there is nothing at stake that I care about. Still compared to everything this movie does right that is a small price to pay and over all it still holds up today.

8.5/10

X-Men:First Class

I only saw this movie once on opening weekend and I thought it was average at best.  I don't know what I was thinking, I must have been in a bad mood or too caught up in the MCU to enjoy this movie at the time.  This movie is amazing.  it injects the X-Men movies with all new energy and it again does a great job of exploring complex issues. I like the use of the old style suits and the whole thing does a great job of bringing the world of 1960s spy movies to life and I love those things so I can't figure out why I wasn't blown away by it at the time.  This is not only one of the most fun Superhero movies of all time but also one of the best and darkest.  It really a credit to the writers and the director that all these pieces work together and don't clash, all the characters are rich and have texture to them and you care about them on.  Seeing the friendship of Charles and Eric build up only to be destroyed is heartbreaking and it doesn't feel rushed at all.  Towards the end of the movie I said "This is what the relationship between Anikin and Obiwan should have been in the prequels." and I still think it's true.  I was so invested in it despite knowing that is was doomed and I like Eric a little more then Charles and could completely understand why people would choose to follow him.  This movie did more with it's characters in one film that most modern film series do in their whole run, and it still had plenty of action and dealt with a complex problem for which there were now easy answers.  If the people behind this movie were put in charge of the Star Trek films I would line up to see the next movie on day one.  I can't believe I was so wrong about this film when I first saw it, it is not only one of my favorite Superhero films but one of my favorite action films of all time, great job by all involved and I wish we would get more Xmen prequels with these characters and this setting.

9.5/10

doubleofive said:

TheBoost said:

NuSpock calls OldSpock and asks "Dude, how did you beat Khan in the other movie?" 

Did that make anyone happy?

I'm on record as enjoying the new movies. I'm also on record as literally throwing my hat to the ground in frustration at that scene in the IMAX theater.

 Yeah by that point I had pretty much given up on the movie but even i felt bad for the new cast when I saw that scene. Out loud I said "Really Paramount, Can't you let these guys stand on their own?!" that was just so cheap.  Oh and how does Spock know Khan is bad in this universe any way?  I mean in the prime universe he was never pure evil before he went insane and in the AU Khan's main goal seemed to be to just save his people and destroy the weapons he had been forced to build, that is not really the height of evil and even if Khan is pure evil he is clearly a completely different person and thinks in a completely different way so what would make either Spock think that any advice old Spock would have to give could be of any help?

Not only is the scene rude to the new cast but it doesn't make any sense in the story. Thank goodness the guy who wrote it isn't writing the next movie.

I am hoping that is just him trying to make people think he is still in control when he isn't.  From what I have read he got where he is by playing Hollywood power games and one of the reasons he is off as director is that he was way too pushy and rude to everyone else on the film and no one wanted to work with him.  If that is true then it is very likely he is putting up a front.

I don't think paramount is happy with him, if they were why fire him and throw out his script?  Also why get rid of his script if he will still have control over the new script.  I am hopeful this means new smarter writers are now in charge.

Dawn of the planet of the Apes

This movie is smarter then your average summer blockbuster and it is well directed and very well acted and some of the special effects are very impressive.  Still I could not get past the fact that this is just a beat for beat remake of Battle for the Planet of the Apes with one hundred times that films budget and a longer running time.  All of this film's strengths and weaknesses are the same as that film's, to the point where it seems pointless to review this film as it's own film.  Now I liked BFTPOTA so I don't think there is anything wrong with this film, it's just a straight up remake, nothing more nothing less.

6.5/10.

Happy New year!

Hopefully I will lose another 70 pounds this year and I will find a job.  Not likely but it could happen.

I gave up on Falling Skies after three episodes.  I just could not stay awake for that show. It was just BSG with everyone walking instead of flying ships.  Every time I tried to watch it I fell asleep.

Oh and is it just me or is the current plot line for AOS the same main plot line as seasons six and seven of Stargate Sg1?

Well happy new year Star Trek fans!!!

http://www.gamesradar.com/roberto-orci-reveals-star-trek-3-will-not-use-his-script/

So sorry to hear that.

I'll be praying for him and your family.

The Sinbad movies are always good fun, and a great place to spot classic Doctors:)

I agree that the Hobbit films get unfairly slammed, I have completely enjoyed the first two and given that it was the end of a ten hour epic I did not think the ending of The Return of the King went on to long, it had a lot of loose ends to tie up.

Mr.Peabody and Sherman

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends is my favorite cartoon of all time so while I didn't much care for the big heads on all the characters and I found the plot to be predictable I am pleased to report that this movie did capture the spirit and style of humor of the show and the characters felt and sounded right.  Over all I enjoyed this movie a lot more then I was expecting to.  7.5/10

I will be working my way through the X-Men film series in this order. X-Men/X-Men 2/X-Men:First Class/X-Men: Days of Future Past

As for what show I watch it will be one of these three I have not decided on yet, Chuck, Babylon 5, or Person of Interest.

SilverWook said:

DrCrowTStarwars said:

What is it with Steven King Mini-series starting out good and then somewhere around the half way point turning into a joke? I swear that is what happens to ever single one I have ever watched.  It's like he starts out with a good idea but then doesn't know what to do with it so he drags things out and then pulls some insane twist that the only reason you don't see it coming is that it is so stupid.

 King still bitches about Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining after all these years. It must suck to cash the royalty checks for sales of the novel with Jack Nicholson's face on the cover.

Nobody constructs elaborate theories or conspiracies about the tv miniseries version. ;)

 Yeah I never understood that.  I mean does he really think anyone would care about the sequel he wrote if the movie wasn't out there?  That is the version of the story people remember. Does he really think the movie would have been better with bad stop motion hedge monsters and a badly foreshadowed explosion at the end? Where would the tension come from that? The Shinning is my favorite horror movie of all time and the fact that King still bad mouths Kubrick almost two decades after his death combined with the fact that King himself has yet to make a good miniseries doesn't make me think much of him.

RicOlie_2 said:

DrCrowTStarwars said:

Thanks a lot Darth and the rest of you.  I am feeling better today, I think it was just the stress of the holidays, losing my favorite great aunt, and feeling lonely that caused me to lose it.

I saw my doctor today and I got a new med to take when I am hit with one of these waves.

Thank you all so much for your support and thank you Darth for starting this thread.

 I'm glad to hear that things are going a bit better now. Hopefully it stays that way for a good long time.

Because you share my religion, perhaps it might also help you to know that you are one of the people I pray for regularly. It may not take much for me to do, but hopefully it helps you see that my support for you is genuine, even if I can't do anything concrete to help.

 Thank you that is a big help.  Just knowing people care is a big help and things are getting better it's just slow right now and the holidays kind of rubbed in the loss of my great aunt.

Thank you so much this is a big help.

Yeah that could be it.  When you put as many things as he does up in the air it's hard to explain them when you reach the end of the story.  Still it has given us some very silly scenes on the TV versions.

Yeah the fact the AU is different doesn't really bother me and I was willing to go along with Kirk being a jerk in the first movie because it looked like he learned his lesson at the end of that movie but then when he was an even bigger jerk in the second movie and we got Blingons, that was were I lost it. Well that and when all the 9/11 truther stuff showed up in the story and people's actions stopped making a lick of sense. Oh and that stupid death cure, I mean is McCoy just too stupid to know that he should take a sample of Khan's blood and replicate the death cure in it or in the next movie is everyone who died in this one going to be alive again?

As I said I was willing to go along with the dumb stuff(but that super nova was still pretty dumb)if that was what was needed to get Star Trek back if the next movie showed some improvement, but instead the next movie was even dumber and I hated Kirk even more. 

This is just painful.  I hope whoever the new writer is will have enough clout and good ideas that they can turn things around, really I do but it seems like Paramount is actively trying to destroy Star trek, so i don't hold out much hope.