Posted on 09/28/2005 9:11:34 AM PDT by pabianice
"I'd have to add one to the list, the volcano movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche - yetch! what crap."
I laugh every time I watch the part where there is molten lava moving through the streets of LA, and there's firefighters spraying water on flaming palm trees. Riigghht.
Actually, I only watch it UP to that point, and then I turn it off.
On the flip side, there's Pay It Forward, where the long, over-drawn-out ending makes you want to scream "please make it stop!!!"
I really liked unbreakable and just like the sixth sense it was the last scene that made the movie..
Exactly, the biggest problem for me with WOTW, is the premise of the movie that aliens have already visited Earth a million years ago to leave their Tripod war machines. Which begs the immediate question: Why didn't they just populate the Earth at that time?
This was not in the book as I recall.
I walked out of AI after maybe 20-30 minutes. it was lousy. somehow I had convinced myself that since Spielberg directed it, it would be good (although I can't think of another Speilberg film I'm a fan of - I think I just wanted an excuse to see it and hoped it would be good.)
the "signs of a bad movie" I noticed within the first half-hour:
1. the conference of software or computer-graphics designers smirking with superiority and laughing at "Pong" or other primitive computer games.
- while the general public may laugh at old technology, those in the field have respect for the pioneers and wouldn't laugh. today's computer-gaming designers continually deal with getting the most out of their current hardware, and they know how limited early computers were.
here's an analogy - maybe the general public might laugh at a film of old Model-T cars or Wright-brothers type planes, but professional car-designers or plane-designers never would.
2. the "gratuitous" pulling the arm off the female "robot." - not necessary. just a shock-value thing.
3. portraying the robot comany guys as one-dimentional stereotypical cartoon-villian bad guys.
- that's just bad writing and directing, and juvenille story-telling.
4. the woman freaking out because her robot kid walks in when she's sitting on the toilet.
- come or she knows he's a robot, and besides that he's just a kid. her over-reaction doesn't make sense. most people would have just laughed and told the kid to go away.
5. (this is when I decided to leave) the kid walks down the hall with his toy that defies gravity - an obvious computer-generated image.
-- computer-generated graphics should not be the focus of attention if they bring the viewer "out of the movie." the gravity-defying toy just makes the viewer think, "computer-graphic thing there."
"Who is Merritt Stone???"
Always fast forward that episode just to see that segment.
My most frequent comment after seeing a generally good movie is, "But why did they have to put THAT in?" So many movies are ruined by Hollywood taking a basically good story and sticking in something "quirky" or something that "pushes the envelope" (which is a laugh, because the one thing Hollywood rarely does is push the envelope).
Two movies come to mind: Mystery, Alaska, ruined by a ridiculous teenage sex scene, and Home for the Holidays, which, except for the de rigueur "I'm a downtrodden homosexual" garbage from a grotesquely hyperactive Robert Downey, was a little gem of a Thanksgiving movie.
MRXL! MRXL! MRXL! Do you have more MRXL than us? I don't think so!
ASH!!!!
The book, written by Wells in 1898, had the Martians arriving by spaceships.
Oddly enough, the two movies I hated as a kid, but liked as an adult, and yet are rarely on TV, are "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" and "Mary Poppins". As a kid, they were wierd. As an adult, they are fun.
LOL!!
I'll never hear "Stuck in the Middle With You" quite the same way ever again.
Sounds like 'Mission to Mars' with Tim Robbins & Gary Sinise. Crappy movie with ridiculous violations of inertia.
If that comes on the car radio, my wife will make me change it. It's indelibly burned into her brain.
SD
He's an English guy, who came to fight the Turkish!
How about when NewBomb sings Volare?
The one armed violinist, Sasha!
Newbomb Turks Pie wagon and who can forget Mrs. Friedman. The tramp that she was.
The Day After Tomorrow fills that bill.
The only reson I didn't crawl out of the theater on my elbows was because I refused to see it at the Dollar Theater and instead watched it on HBO - where I could instead crawl on my elbows to bed, thereby avoiding the popcorn burns and empty candy wrappers!
Exactly, if they had been advanced enough to have pre-positioned war machines on the Earth a million years before mankind, why would they just have not populated the Earth for themselves at that time?
I found "Shakespeare in Love" mildly entertaining.
But better than "Saving Private Ryan" that year for Best Picture? Not in a gazillion years.
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