f13.net

Finally saw this on DVD.

Nuclear fridge? RETARDED. The Russians were annoying, playing bad Keystone Cop parts the whole time, only with Rocky and Bullwinkle accents instead of Germans. Way way way too much fucking CGI. For a movie like Sky Captains, that had a low budget and was meant to done as a budget experiment, that looks is fine. When you have the budget Spielberg and Lucas did on this, there's no excuse for not filming on a location when the shot calls for the outdoors. Everything filmed on a soundstage LOOKS like it was filmed on a soundstage and it completely throws me out of the movie. It also makes the stunts not as impressive because without some of the danger, the director/write can just come up with the most insane stuff. The Mutt/Cate Blanchett sword fight was the perfect example of that. Most of the set pieces felt like variations on the more famous action sequences from past movies - for instance, the fist fight in the midst of the ants was too directly similar to the fight under the prop plane in Raiders.

Aliens in my Indiana Jones movie? DO NOT WANT.

The movie was horrible, and it certainly wasn't the raping that the South Park guys said it was. But man, it certainly wasn't worth a decade's worth of wait.

It was just so average and predictable and formulaic. It could have been far more than that.

Meh, the fridge didn't bother me (Temple wasn't any better for stupid shit like that), at least it didn't strike me as un-Indie. The masses of CGI (especially the actually pointless bits like the gophers) that fucking rankled. Also having aliens in itself didn't bother me too much, the fact that the bad guys and good guys both seemed to be aiming for the exact same thing (Both of them just want to put the crystal skull back on? Why the fuck were they fighting over it for an hour and a half?) was annoying. There were Indie moments in this and some bits where I thought they pulled off little jabs at the series but overall it just fell flat, moreso than Temple (at least that was watchably silly). And yeah, bad CGI never looks good and doesn't date in the same way traditional special effects do, they just look bad.

It was good. You guys just hate fun. Especially Haemish. I mean at least when Schild hates fun it's in a beret-wearing artsy sort of way. Haemish just sounds like a generic angry "nothing is as fun as it was when I was 8 years old" internet guy.

Seriously though, fuck CGI gophers.

Nothing was as fun as when I was 8 years old, because I was a fucking kid. George Lucas used to know what made good movies, now all he seems to know about is making gigantic CGI set pieces that don't fit with the story. I mean, gophers? SERIOUSLY? Or spider monkeys for that matter? The CGI allows him to do outlandish shit like that stupid sword fighting scene on the two cars, but it's like no one stops to think about whether they SHOULD be doing it. And the answer in that instance would be FUCK NO. Even at the worst, Raiders still had some grounding in reality despite the fantastical elements. It didn't require me to shut off my brain to enjoy it. Skull started with stupid things like the fridge and never got better.

So yes, nothing was as fun when I was 8, but good movies shouldn't require me to devolve in order to enjoy them UNLESS they are meant to be stupid (Harold and Kumar movies). Raiders is ageless - it had plenty for both kids and adults, without talking down to anyone. Hell, even Last Crusade was fun for adults and kids. Skull and Temple? They were trash pulp movies that could have been done with any generic pulp characters.

I love Indiana Jones. I love 3 of the 6 Star Wars movies and enjoy two more of them in a guilty pleasure way and find one somewhat boring. (Attack of the Clones.)

That said, this movie made me lose hope in Steven Spielberg. He's been seduced by the CGI and lost the magic he once had. Here's the secret. They're not getting greedy. They're getting old and it shows. They've lost that youthful idealism and you can see it in their pictures. I think the biggest thing wrong with this movie is that it felt like Spielberg thought he was slumming and needed to get back to his "real" movies. No more E.T. and Raiders for this guy. Munich and shit is what he's all about now.

To sum up: They've both stopped having fun and you can feel it in their movies.

Raiders had the worst fucking ending ever in cinema history. Indiana Jones was protrayed as this adventurer, living by the seat of his pants, wits and education, learning and fighting, a reluctant hero, then it gets to the end and Lucas and Spielberg are like "Well fuck we really painted ourselves into a corner, how's Indy going to get out of this?" He DOESN'T. He closes his fucking eyes and God shoots lasers at the Nazis and THE END. What the holy goddamned fucking hell is that shit, they just pissed all over their entire franchise and it wasn't even two fucking hours old.

You are wrong.

and ants.

1. You're wrong.
2. You need to watch more films.
3. You're wrong.

Also

Wall of Rant incoming.

Crystal Skull is indefensible.  Simply wanting to like the film is not sufficient.  I went into the film with an open mind, and it was slammed shut about the time that Indiana survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a steel lined refrigerator.  Ok, perhaps that would save him from the blast, but the fridge is then hurled, bouncing end over end for miles.  Indiana would have had every bone in his seventy year old body broken - not to mention the heat associated with a nuclear blast.  Its hard to suspend disbelief for the Big Lie when the little lies make no sense. 

As with everything Lucas has ever made, the dialogue was completely non-sensical, as if written by a child.  The line that did it for me was when Shia Le'whatever says, "God's skull isn't shaped like that!"  Despite the ignorance and, perhaps, innocence of that line, none of the characters are surprised or amazed by the events of the movie.  I don't blame the actors - its probably difficult to properly emote when the director films everything to be overworked with CGI later.

And the CGI was ridiculous.  Lucas has spent his career cultivating special effects.  This is fine - but he uses it as the primary focus of every film instead of using it to augment the story.  Jurassic Park is a very good film because the CGI dinosaurs were believable; they never defy physics or act in a way that we would think dinosaurs couldn't behave.  Crystal Skull is chock-full of unbelievable effects, physics-defying stunts, and situations where rocks, debris and bullets are flying around on screen by the thousands, and never once come into contact with an actor.  Again, its hard to suspend disbelief for the movie's plot when every scene has effects that would require a billion to one odds to occur.  You can do that once per film, not in every scene of every movie you make, George.

Perhaps my biggest complaint with the film is how intentionally cartoonish it was.  The characters are one dimensional.  The dialogue is childish.  Every scene is saturated in colorization.  There is endless and pointless bickering to reveal plot.  In other words, its a hard film to watch because of how distracting the film itself is.  I felt like I was watching a bad Japanese anime instead of a multi-million dollar film.

The final argument that Lucas defenders, and Lucas himself, fall back on is that he makes films for children.  This is entirely true.  But, you cannot use that defense for the Lucas films of old which were entertaining.  I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but the first two films were immersive and generally well done.  The dialogue still sucked, but the characters and stories were compelling.  There are Oedipal elements to A New Hope and Empire that certainly make them not children's films.  The drinking, sexual tension and gore in Raiders makes it certainly not a child's film.  I've watched them many times since I was a child, and I enjoy them as much now as I did then.  I cannot say the same for Little Mermaid or Problem Child.  Lucas' redefinition of his style was glaringly apparent in the infamous "Han shot first" debacle.  One gets the impression that Lucas is ashamed of his past films because they weren't made for children.  He would gladly redefine them, given the chance - and has, in the case of Star Wars.

Anyway, I think NowhereMan put it best:


There was supposed to be some kind of Cold War Russians vs. Americans technological race going on, but it was completely lost in the film.  I imagine it had a viable story at one point, but having a hard-on for special effects gives Lucas the excuse to ignore having a story.  I'm going to fore go the rants on Ray Winstone and John Hurt.  They got paid.

Err, it's part of the franchise:

God lasers
Runic rock with a flame-based DoT
Cup with an HoT
Aliens with lasers.

I didn't like the Aliens thing but I think they were trapped. Harrison Ford is OLD so they needed to push him into a time period that justified him being on screen. That meant the 50s and what everything thinks of the 50s. So Aliens made more sense than usual anything else (like, it'd have been worse than aliens to have it all be a Russian hoax).

The spider monkeys scene didn't work for me only because I didn't believe Mutt was the type of character that could pull it off so quick. Indy does something it's believable because he's got so much presumed experience at it. Some James Dean wannabe going from class to vine-swinging, not so much. It certainly didn't help that the presentation bit.

As to the general unbelievable, eh, all of the movies had that to a degree, though I will agree the first one was almost entirely plausible.

The refrigerator escape was dumb, but whatever. Beyond that we have a couple of "look at the animal" takes that comprise about six seconds of footage total, some generic bitching about them there new-fangled CGI effects, and the same "LOL DIALOGUE" crap that critics of the era were lobbing at the original Star Wars/Indy movies 30 years ago when you were too young to give a shit.

It wasn't nearly as good as Raiders. It was at least as good as Temple of Doom. Quit being a fun-hating angry nerd.

But it doesn't even pass that test.  It wasn't fun, it was irritating.

You realise that you're still defending Star Wars here WUA.  It's got nothing to do with Raiders.  You're still fighting the fucking Clone Wars in your head.

Haven't watched this film.  Not gonna either.  I've had enough of George Fucking Lucas.  The man's senile and dribbly.

But perhaps I just don't enjoy fun.

Too many words in this thread.

Bullshit.  The spider monkeys/vines thing doesn't work in any context.  Go back to the beginning of Raiders when Indy is running from that Amazon tribe towards his plane.  He grabs a vine and swings on it.  He looks clumsy.  He doesn't land smack dab in the plane's cockpit, instead he just hits the water and starts swimming towards the plane while arrows are shot all around him.  Still fun, still interesting, but actually believable.

Unlike this film, where they have Indy survive a nuke, have Mutt swing on a never ending supply of vines for what seems like miles, command monkeys, and apparently ants can form cheerleader like pyramids to catch sexy, dangling KGB agents.  Oh, and Indy and crew can survive not just one death trip over a waterfall, but three.

This movie is shit.  Indefensible shit.

We finally watched the film last weekend and we weren't expecting much because of all the hate for it.

I found it enjoyable enough. I'd say it was better than the 2nd one, Temple of PG13 or whatever it was called. If for no other reason than annoying teenager > annoying child.

Nothing comes even close to Raiders which is a truly fine adventure film. If the stunts in the original are more realistic, it may be because every single scene was pulled out of a movie from the 20s to 60s. There's almost nothing really original in the film from Lucas.

I do think the literal deus ex machina at the end of Raiders is a black mark, but otherwise I love the movie. I've been putting off seeing this one because I just don't trust Lucas anymore.

Watch the discovery channel.  Ants can actually do that.  And the big nasty fucking hungry jungle types (while they don't usually live in underground colonies) are bastards you DON'T want to fuck with.

It's hard to call the end of Raiders a deus ex machina when the whole point of the ark was that it held the unadultered product of God. I mean, what would you expect would happen when you open such a thing? It was basically the Pandora's Box myth given a modern context.

Agreed - almost anything is more tolerable than ToD though.  New rule, every even numbered Indiana Jones is shit.

Army Ants.  :drill:  There was one special on them where a huge (I want to say it was about a mile long and 50 yards across) colony went through a town and the town just closed up.  Ants swarming everywhere over everything as they moved on through their foraging.

God from the machine indeed. I find it in fact *very easy* to call it a deus ex machina.  :oh_i_see: I call it a black mark because it essentially makes everything that happened in the entire movie irrelevant from a plot perspective. I find it unsatisfying. The rest of the movie is basically brilliant so it sticks out just a bit.

I watched this again recently for the first time in years and I have to say it was actually a lot better than I remembered. I went in thinking 'this is the shitty one' but it has some really nice high points, along with some pretty dumb stuff. The opening sequence, from nightclub to where they get on the plane flight, would be very hard to improve on. After that yeah it gets very uneven.

Yeah, I think the difference is, in Indy 2-4, Indy had to use his super archaeology knowledge and/or courage and/or ability to survive insane stunts to save the day. In the first movie, he didn't even have to show up.

This doesn't make me hate Raiders, but considering how all of Lucas' movies except American Graffitti have had god-awful shit moments, it makes me wonder why Indy 4 is under such scrutiny.

You guys are grasping. Once again:

Temple of Doom: (Shiva Stone) Rock with DoT. Indy would have lost his heart if not for the rock magically self-igniting.
Last Crusade: (Cup of Christ, the Holy Grail before Holy Blood, Holy Grail  :awesome_for_real:) Regenerative cup with HoT (and maybe a rez effect): Indy would have died if he drank from the wrong cup and Henry definitely would have.

Yes, neither had the God lightning and ghosts, but neither were they early 20th century tech.

As to insane stunts to "super archaeology knowledge"? Come on. Watch Raiders again. Scrolls, amulets, staves, knowing to close his eyes, the whole beginning sequence. Jeez, I haven't seen the movie in 15 years probably and it still all comes crashing back.

And by using his knowledge of ancient languages and lore, he made the rock go "fwoomp!" making the guy burn and fall down and get eaten by alligators while Indy's swinging from a bridge. If Indy never went there, the children would have all died in the mines and the Sankara Stones would have been in the hands of evil forever.


This time not only was it his knowledge and cunning, but also his father's lifelong research, resulting in a father-son team up of dodging deadly traps and outsmarting the Nazis. Without Indy and Henry Sr, the Grail would still have remained, and the temple would have still come crashing down. But this time, it was a personal journey, father and son healing wounds with their own personal Holy Grail.


Through the whole movie, sure. I can't deny that it really set up the character of adventure, lore, wits...and that's what makes the ending all the more insulting. The dumbass got himself tied up so he closed his eyes while Lucas and Spielberg dazzled us with special effects. If Indy stayed home and the Nazis opened the ark without Indy there, the Nazis would have died just the same and the ark would have remained lost forever. Was it even a personal journey? Well at least he got drunk and got laid afterwards. Hm, come to think of it, Indy wouldn't have spawned Mutt without the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So there we have it! The only reason for Raiders was so Indy could see flying saucers with his son 20 years later! GO INDY!  :grin:

Okay, let me put it this in a more acceptable (dare I say Schildian) sort of way.

George Lucas writes terrible fucking dialogue and always has. He wrote terrible fucking dialogue 30 years ago, and he writes terrible fucking dialogue now. You dipshits are deluding yourselves if you think any of his old movies were any better written than the rectal spew coming out of his characters mouths now.

Seriously, this movie was literally almost called "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men". Whether you think it's an awful idea or not, Lucas is deliberately schlocky as fuck and always has been. That's the fucking problem with angry butthurt nerds. They don't want to admit that George Lucas was and is basically just a very imaginative schlock peddler with really good special effects. I just happen to have a soft-spot for it.

Say all you want about Lucas, but Empire Strikes Back, for all the pulp/genre origins, was cinematic excellence as was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Both those movies are the proof that Lucas and Speilberg had something that they have never equaled. It isn't angry butthurt nerdery so much as comparison with vastly superior films.

Geek fight!


And if not for having shown up, the Nazis would have eventually found the ark, opened it, killed everyone on the island, another group from the submarine cavern would have investigated (or another group showed up from the fatherland), and they would have had it. With Indy having found it with all of this knowledge and stuff he could follow it until everyone local died and then got it out of there.

Without Indy, the Nazis would have blown through all that bibical stuff with mortars and tommyguns until they found the Knight, killed him and then forced Turkish slaves to drink from all the cups at gunpoint to achieve process of elimination.

His archaelogical curiosity got the better of him due to prodding from Belloq.

Why the fuck do those two Star Destroyers in Empire crash into each other? Were they planning on pinning the Falcon between them? Like some kind of bizarre vicegrip manuver? Are all Imperial captains in the habit of smashing their ships into each other? It's not like some fighter dogfight were such a thing could happen. These were ships the size of skyscrapers. How do you NOT SEE THE OTHER GUY COMING AT YOU?!?!?!

That scene... it's just so totally bizarre.  :uhrr:

God hates the Nazis. No matter what they did, God would have roasted them all with his God Lasers.


Yep, good point. Last Crusade is now ever more awesomer than Raiders. Thanks!


Yeah, that was totally cool. Not only that, but Indy realized the real treasure he was after was Marion, and not the ark at all. Great symbolism and character growth. Unfortunately Lucas and Spielberg felt they had no way out other than "Close your eyes, it's face-melting time!"

I can't agree with that on Lucas.  I think the best of Star Wars was Empire, and that was in spite of Lucas, not because of him.

Spielberg, on the other hand, has been responsible for a few of what I call "perfect movies".  Jaws, for one.  Raiders for another.  It's obvious to me that he's less interesting as an older director than he was when he was young.

Seriously, everyone hears me stick up for Star Wars and thinks that means I think George Lucas is some sort of Great Filmmmaker(tm). No. He's a pulp-genre schlock merchant with lots of imagination and high production values, who incorporates a lot of basic mythological themes that most modern movies consider themselves too sophisticated to embrace.

But it's fun, and nobody else really does it. That's all. Crystal Skull was fun. It's popcorn fare. It wasn't meant as anything more.

I think I might have liked Return of the Jedi if Lucas hadn't been a pussy and passed on Cronenberg to direct it.  God, would that have been pure awesome - probably better than ESB. 

Fucking Ewoks.

I'd agree with this, particularly Raiders which is as close to perfect as any adventure movie.

On the early vs. late Spielberg, I think Spielberg is a real master at manipulating audiences and he's so good at it, that he just throws it into his movies and doesn't bother to do anything else anymore. I love his movies until I walk out the door and then I feel dirty. His earlier movies had a lot more real human elements, not just audience manipulation.

Oh and living on Cape, you don't even want to know how many times we've seen Jaws or as a town employee how accurate the portrayal of town government is.

 :ye_gods:

STAYOUTOFTHEWATER NUMTINI!!!

War of the Worlds was fucking tripe.

Which was a shame, since it started out so well and had the potential to be the best adaptation yet.

Wasn't Tom Cruise prominently involved? That would make it a non-starter in my book.

Despite Tom Cruise embodying the essence of flakiness, he's still a great actor.  I watched Lions for Lambs in its entirety just because his performance was so good.

I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but I am forced to agree.  I think he's actually a really talented actor.  And a douchbucket in real life.  But I can distinguish the two.

Right.  I have to judge him on his craft, and its hard for me to name a performance of his that was poor. 

lolwut

/signed

As for Indy4, it was flawed on the conceptual level.

Raiders - Judaic myth
Temple - Hindu myth
Crusade - Christian myth
Skull - Aliens

One of these things is not like the others.

George Lucas knows effects, but he's always been a lousy writer and a poor editor. The problem is, he's come to think he's a great writer and editor. In the past, he accepted the advice and guidance of those more talented than himself. In the gap between the trilogies, people slobbered his knob for 15 years, and he came to believe the hype.

It's auteur mentality and nothing more. It sucks, but the only person who can fix it is Lucas himself.

As in, getting the hell out of the way.  Lucas should confine himself to being a producer.  He has the money, the studios and, obviously, the CGI.  He's missing the golden opportunity of being a benefactor to up and coming talent.  Instead, he still envisions himself as the imaginative young director that he once was and is clueless to the fact that he's been jaded by his own success.


Yes, the list of poor performances that you cited is convincing.  Tom Cruise is a Hollywood whore - certainly you can name a couple of films.  I've never even seen Jerry Macguire, so you could probably throw that in and I'd agree.  Even when Tom Cruise phones it in, he's better than, say, Nic Cage.  I will grant you that he doesn't broaden his range much.  Even Bruce Willis did 12 Monkeys, which completely reversed his image as a one trick pony.  But 'lolwut' is well above par for someone with your reserve of bile.

And don't say Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut.  :awesome_for_real:

Here's my problem with Tom Cruise as an actor (wholly separate from the batshit insanity of his "religion). He's a one-trick pony, and not a very good one at that. He's all flaring nostrils and cockgobbling smile and that's it. The Color of Money, Risky Business, THOSE are things he's good at. Hell, I'll even give you Top Gun because he's a cockgobbler in that one as well. But can you really tell me there's much range between A Few Good Men (boring other than Nicholson's few minutes) and The Firm? His best performance of a character that wasn't himself was in Collateral and I'll give you that. But there's not a lot of range between Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible movies and that character - other than a better writer and director. Interview with the Vampire was Tom Cruise if he were gay and immortal. Jerry Maguire was Tom Cruise as L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. And Eyes Wide Shut was just bad.

Of the movies I've seen Cruise in (and that happens to be most of them according to his IMDB entry), he's had what I consider one good performance and a shitton of performances where his character served as a thin veneer on his own personality.

Brad Pitt has range. Kevin Spacey has range. Tom Cruise does not have range.

Oh and Nic Cage. He's pretty much the same, but at least he's not a Scientologist.

I'd contest this one.  I've never seen one of his movies where he didn't play the usual Kevin Spacey smarmy douche role.  I can't even count Seven because he's just a creepy smarmy douche in that one.  Maybe The Usual Suspects, but he's really more of a caricature in that movie.

I'd also contest Brad Pitt, but not as vehemently.  If you want range you don't go with movie stars, you go with character actors.

Should have gone with Joseph Smith's golden plates for the last one.  :rimshot:

Collateral?


If you can play one narrow range of characters really fucking well,  than there is no problem with that.  Christopher Walken since the mid '80s?  Deniro since '89?  Ron Pearlman?  Adam Baldwin?  Pacino since '90?  Samuel Jackson?

Spacey is a great example of this.  He HAS range,  as you can see from his '90s appearance on SNL in almost every skit,  but especially the one where he played a bunch of different actors auditioning for roles in Star Wars (great skit).

He hit on a general type of character that he really nails,  and since then he's tended to take those roles.

If? 

Even though he did a decent job acting wise, he was horribly miscast as Lestat.

The thing is, I don't necessarily think any of those are great actors other than Deniro or Pacino, and since as you said, neither has really stretched themselves that much, they have been resting on their laurels. Although, if you watch Heat, both Deniro and Pacino are absolutely transcendent in that movie, range or no. The scene in the coffee shop where the two are talking is one of the greatest filmed and acted scenes in cinema history. Cruise could NEVER have pulled that off.

As for Brad Pitt's range, looking at his entire career, he is one of the few star actors who has consistently taken roles that go against type, and he's still doing it. His pikey in Snatch has as much to do with his character in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Burn After Reading is so far from his character in 12 Monkeys to not even be in the same field. Yes, he's a star, but he's also not allowed himself to just coast along in typical Hollywood bohunk fare.

There's nothing wrong per se with staying in your acting comfort zone. Adam Baldwin and Ron Perlman are great examples of that. But I wouldn't ever call them great actors. Grand Design and Cyrrex said Tom Cruise was a great actor, I disagree vehemently. At his best, he's no more than mediocre.

I don't think you're wrong about him being something of a one trick pony...but I do think that within that narrow range, he is quite good.  I suppose that's the difference.

Tom Cruise is one of the cases where I can't distinguish his performance from himself. I realized that when I saw Top Gun recently and his movie laugh there reminded me so much of his real life crazy laugh that I had to switch the channel.

Plus, I won't give money to known Scientology shills, even if they were good actors.

Cruise's producer character in Tropic Thunder was perfect. Perfect. However, in movies like Last Samurai and Vanilla Sky, Cruise added nothing to the role. He isn't that much unlike other actors in that sometimes the role just doesn't fit.

HOW'D IT GET BURNED

I've seen the 'highlights' youtube video of his version of the Wicker Man and I cried inside. There is no way they cut out some sort of amazing bits in between and that is a travesty of film history.

Wicker Man is unintentional comedy gold.

Nic Cage's Wicker Man makes baby satan cry. And stomps on the spines of poor disabled, dyslexic seal pups.

Can't immediately recall this. Was it when they were fleeing Hoth or before they suction-cupped to the back of the Star Destroyer? If it was the former, if I recall it was because the Ion Cannon knocked out their power. Which is something I never understood. If they had one of those things, why didn't they have ten of them. Then when the Empire inevitably showed up, disable everything and then take your sweet ass time lollygagging out of there.

I just think it is in keeping with the law that all Imperial officers are British and stupid.

I thought that was a general rule of hollywood movies. I need to try and find a link to the Monkey Dust sketch of Anne Frank, where she and her Jewish friends are all happy go lucky Irish folk and the Nazis are evil British cowards but everyone gets saved by the blond haired blue-eyed American GI who then snogs Anne. After punching out Hitler in his London stronghold.

Wasn't that Top Secret!, that Val Kilmer flick from 84?

I doubt a disabled and powerless ship was participating in a chase.


I know, right? And like the Rebels have some warships, but why not have infinity warships? That would make winning a lot easier.

Infinity warships?

Still haven't had time to queue up the sequence, but my thought went like this: Star Destroyer (SD) 1 turns to chase the Falcon. SD2 is closing in. Ion cannon fires, hits SD1 and/or SD2. Inertia takes care of the rest.

But the more I think about it the more I don't think it was the Hoth escape sequence.

Because this sub-topic matters.  :awesome_for_real:

No, you're not right.  They both just fucking crash into each other chasing the falcon from opposite ends.  It's fucking stupid.  The theory, I suppose, was that SD are able to go REALLY, REALLY FAST, YOU JUST DON'T SEE IT MAN !

Which actually takes you back to the Original Star Wars where those two Star Destroyers were 'catching up' to the falcon over tatooine.  I always thought that was fucking stupid too.  It can do the Kessel Run, amirite ?

Though I agree with the snarkiness of WUA.

The Falcon wasn't going at max speed in both cases to maintain maneuverability. You can't outrun a tractor beam but you can out-manuever it.

And remember that the Kessel Run is measured in distance traveled not raw velocity ("3.2 parsecs"). There's a whole story to that, but the short form is that the Kessel Run goes around a collection of black holes (which later is understood as the Empire's Maw complex for high tech weapon research). The reason the achievement is significant is because Solo came closer to the event horizon than any craft before it, thus shortening the distance from start to finish.

Back to the original derail though: I'll need to watch it again. I am probably wrong though.

You're mixing EU and Movies. Stop that shit.  That explanation is a bad writers attempt to fix Lucas' gaffe 20 some years later and it sucked.  Yes, Lucas didn't know a Parsec was a distance, 99% of the audience didn't either. Accept it was meant to be a spacy unit of time and move on. Otherwise, begin bitching about the explosions and fireballs and the WW2 fighter plane physics the X-wings and TIEs were using as the battled over the trench.  Which then begs the question, why the fuck did you need to run the trench?  Coming at the site from orbit is somehow less reliable than needing your energy projectiles to make a 90 degree turn and continue for several hundred miles in a straight line down a shaft that's only 6' wide?

Look, everyone likes to Nerd Rage about the new movies but that's because you're old and watching them. I've said it before, I'll say it again. The old movies sucked just as much as the new ones.  Filled with plot holes, convenient twists and deus ex machina out the ass.  The more you analyze them the more you'll realize this and hate them as much as you hate the prequels.   So you have  a choice, eat the popcorn and shut off the brain or discard them as shit.

Yes, the SDs run into each other.  Yes, it's incredibly stupid.  No, you're not going to get a better resolution than "well if they were ships on the ocean, they might have..."  But even then the captains would have to be drunk or incompetent to such a degree that Vader was justified in fragging their asses.

/nerdrage

You are wrong.

No, that's not it.  That's not it at all.

/pileon!

When I saw Attack of the Clones, I was as old as my parents were when they saw A New Hope, with me in tow. What they loved then was prequeled in what I didn't like today. I know it's easy to assume that our childhood memories being shat on is the source of the nerdrage, but you're wrong. They were bad movies glossed over with pretty good sfx. The only real nerdrage is the few dozen remasterings of the original series.

As to you other stuff, sorry, if someone asks "why" something happened, they're beyond just letting bad script mindlessly wash over them.

Darniaq's tastes versus those of his parents aside, I'll just point out again that the Star Wars movie most brutally critiqued upon release was... Empire Strikes Back (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/comments/?entryid=197859). Sorry, but this refrain of "Shitty kids movies with stupid dialogue and crappy acting!" wasn't something unique to the prequels.

What's more, I have to laugh at the common nerdrager attitude of "George Lucas is so stupid and out of touch for not realizing how much he sucks now." When you make a bunch of movies, critics bitch that they suck, but they make you a billionaire and 30 years later everyone thinks they were great, what are you supposed to think? That your critics are valid and important?

No-one gets me.

If it's part of the lore it's part of the lore. It's just a question of how much you've read it, or whether GL has retconned it  :grin: If someone disagrees with that then they are only not debating the difference between comic book lore and movie lore. Which is fine, but then they are not really nerd enough to care about this sub-topic anyway  :oh_i_see:


Welcome to my feeling of every "what makes a successful MMORPG" debate since 2004.

link for all (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1xJq1f_8bw4)

It was after the Falcon had fled Hoth but before the asteroid field.

As for Ion Cannons, I figured the Rebels couldn't afford batteries of them. They're big and probably cost a lot of power to fire.


Pretty much. The Empire was doomed before it formed, and Palpie only got it off the ground because Lucassezithappened.

Ewoks? Fitting end.

I'm quite possibly the biggest SW nerd imaginable - but for the damned life of me, I simply cannot recall two SDs colliding together in any of the films.

Also, while I'm sure there is some contradicting canon somewhere, Ion cannons where supposedly fairly new at that time, so it is fair to assume that they were costly. 

They were fairly new at the time even according to canon. They were basically just introduced as a "secret weapon" a few episodes ago in the Clone Wars series on CN. Apparently they were able to scale them down enough between ESB and RotJ to fit them onto B-Wings (the bottom cannon on a B-Wing is an Ion Cannon iirc).

And that's not even getting into the EU stuff, to avoid the meruskblast  :oh_i_see:

@Ratman: Ah that makes sense. So yea, back to the original point: Empire r dum.

It was more of a scrape than a collision.  They were trying to pincer in the Falcon and sideswiped each other when the Falcon dove down.  They, much like Kahn, clearly only had two dimentional thinking.

Or, you know, the B-wing had a ship-to-ship scale weappn and the Echo Base was a ground to orbit version.  Kinda like the difference between a turbolaser and a Han Solo's blaster.

Shit - caught in nerd debate.  It's a trap!

The Meruskblast is because childhood memories love to be defended to stupid degrees.  If you're going to accept a movie as "pure awesome" or not "so full of loopholes, contrivances and deus ex that if it came out today you'd all tear it a new asshole" based on fan fiction (licensed or otherwise) retconning silly shit out, I'm going to nominate ID4 as the best Sci Fi movie ever.  Based wholly on my own to-be-written novel that fixes all the dumbass shit in the movie and makes it liquid awesome.

Look, I'm a huge SW geek myself, but that doesn't mean I can't accept that Lucas was as bad then as he is regarded now by the same fanbase.  SW was huge because it was so very different from previous shlocky sci-fi crap.  It's a classic because of the redefinition of a genre and the way it manipulated a very timeless story into that genre.  It was also presented to a much less sophisticated audience in a much different time in history where certain things 'just aren't done.'  You take Lucas from 30 years ago and put him around today, you'll get fart jokes, whizz-bang effects that are all style no substance and basically everything else hated in the prequels and the '97 re-release of the classics.

The reason that Star Wars is a classic is not just because of it's significance at the time but because it is actually a classic film.  WUA is right that it was given bad reviews at the time but that was by the film critics who were not a bunch of internet fanboys and nerds but an assortment of people who were well versed in journalism, dramatic critique, the language of film and so on.  But the people loved it and sold so well that it got released again in 1978 and became a phenomenon.  It's a classic because it remains an entertaining and watchable film.

Saying that it couldn't be released now because people would rip it to shreds is ridiculous - as long as a film is entertaining, fun, watchable and enjoyable then people will overlook any plot holes, contivances, slips of logic or whatever.  I present as evidence The Matrix, Blade, Hellboy, Batman Begins, Spiderman, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings... I could go on.  The Matrix is quite a good example: the first film was great.  The sequels were fucking abysmal.  But they were abysmal because they were bad films and not because of any nostalgic pining for the first film.  Similarly with the SW prequels - they're just not very good films. It doesn't help that they follow on from a series that's loved and adored by millions and undermines a lot of what was set up before - yes, that's nerdrage talking - but even taken apart, they're still lacking.

And, to bring it back on to topic, the same can be said for Crystal Skull.  It just wasn't written very well.  I don't actually give a stuff about nuclear blasts or taking a boat over several waterfalls or other incidental bits of plot - or even the illogical nature of using shotgun lead to find the alien coffin in Area 51. Take it or leave it, I don't care.  But the story and the characters were so badly written that I lost interest.  What should have been a fun film ended up verging on dull and tedious.  Marion Ravenwood is a great character - one we know from Raiders but it was an woefully underused and abysmally inadequate character in the new film.

John Hurt's character - wtf? What the hell was the point in having his character? Whatever purpose he had in the film could have been dealt with by any MacGuffin of your choosing - very much like the Grail Diary in Lost Crusade.  It was a criminal waste of John Hurt's talent and a pointless waste of screen time. Ray Winstone's character was much more rounded and far better characterized in Frank Darabont's draft of the script than the final version we saw on screen which devolved into generic double crossing sidekick #27951.  Sallah probably had less screen time in Raiders than Winstone had here but the character was much better defined and far more memorable.  And Mutt? Don't even get me started. The father-son interchange was done infinitely better in Last Crusade and there was absolutely no reason to go over that ground again here.  Not unless it was going to be better.  Which it wasn't. It was pedestrian, predictable and patronising.

The story itself felt tacked on. I don't mind that it was about aliens or vaguely sci-fi related but it was just a bad story.  There was no clear threat or danger in the same way that there was in any of the previous films.  In fact, Lucas seems to have overlooked the basic element of any written drama and that's creating conflict.  Indiana Jones wants to take the skull back to it's temple.  The russians want to take the skull back to the temple. And the conflict would be where exactly? Oh yes, in the contrived and artificial interplay that passed for plot points throughout the rest of the film.  Screenwriting 101 - how to create drama. Give your protagonist and antagonist conflicting goals:

- The Nazis want the Lost Ark (or Holy Grail) so they can win the war.  Indy wants to stop them.  Conflict.
- The Thuggees wants to steal the Sankara Stones and use their power for evil. Indy wants to stop them. Conflict.
- The russians want to take the skull back to the temple. Let's see - what sort of motivation could we possibly give Indy in order to create conflict here?

tl:dr version - Bad film is bad.

Yeahbut I'm trying to think of how their 'pincer' manuver would have worked if the Falcon had... done whatever they thought it was going to do? It doesn't even make sense on a 2-dimensional plane to drive right at each other.

At the risk of derailing the thread.

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp001.jpg)

Falcon fleeing Hoth.

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp002.jpg)

Two more SD's show up "trying to cut them off"
I gues nobody in the Empire has played Homeworld.

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp003.jpg)

Silly spacemen. Space is in 3-D! Yoink!

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp004.jpg)

"Oh wow. We're awful close to the other guys now. Didn't anyone notice the skyscraper sized spaceship coming right at us?"

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp005.jpg)

"Guess not... Ow, coffee all over my lap! I'll sue!"

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SDImp006.jpg)

"What the hell was this manuver supposed to accomplish in the first place?"

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/Geico.jpg)

Le art.

Ratman, as usual, is funneh as Le Fuck.

What the hell do you guys mean "Didn't anyone see it out the window?"

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/SDImp005.jpg)

Maybe their radar was jammed?

(http://starsmedia.ign.com/stars/image/article/857/857268/ocd-spaceballs-radar-technician--20080305054920161-000.jpg)

Jesus, this Indy movie is not that bad at all. I was expecting something truly horrible. But it entertained me, and I got a few good laughs. You guys are dorks.

I'm exhausted just thinking about how to respond to that.

Why? It's not that big of a deal. That's my only point at least.

Nope.

Going to sip my coffee and watch HBO.

Not a big deal at all.

Let me "extend" then.. I need to clarify.

First, they didn't miss a beat with the whole beat slapstick/chase scene stuff that these movies are known for. This kind of thing will always be entertaining to me.

Harrison was Indy again. It had a good supporting cast. Blanchett, Winstone, Hurt, LaBouf. Cool. I don't know what that one complaint above was about with the corny Russian accents and all that. These movies were always about caricatures. It's not supposed to be much of a step up from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Every single character, from Indy himself, to little Chinese kids, to Nazis, to scary brown people, to whatever the fuck - all caricatures. And Blanchett just had fun with it -- it's not like she couldn't pull off a realistic "Ukranian" woman, if a film required it. She easily could. But this is Indiana Jones. Not Doctor fucking Zhivago.

As for the Aliens.. /shrug They explored other boneheaded sides of ancient cultures, why not this Chariots of the Gods stuff? Those skull shapes, for one, are grounded in reality. There are also all of those weird patterns on the ground down there that appear as if they were meant to seen from high aerial views.

Among other things.

Point is though, it's another odd subject in archaeology, that is grounded in some facts - and it's fair game to have fun with in a film like this. In fact, it's grounded in more truth than some "Holy Grail" or "Ark of the Covenant" shit. At least people have seen these skulls. While the Holy Grail is complete nonsense, when it comes down to it.

This coffee is fucking great.  It was ground last week and is still fresh.

My favorite crystal skull film. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elWG256cAzg)  This one has Shatner!

oh, one other thing, i was expecting a movie full of gophers, the way you guys made it sound.

they were in but 7 seconds. if that. in two seperate scenes. you guys were overblowing it, complaining about spielberg having no soul and how he's getting old or some shit. i, otoh, would say that anyone who acts like a bitch for 7 seconds of cgi gophers is getting old.

Random thoughts: "The Empire Strikes Back" wins the award for Worst Lucas Movie Title Ever, way way above and beyond "Attack of the Clones." At least "Attack of the Clones" has "Attack!" in it!

Winstone's character in Indy 4 was annoying and unnecessary. Hurt was a bit more tollerable, but honestly, the movie was at its best when it was just Indy, Marion, and Mutt. I don't know why they had to have MORE SIDEKICKS for Indy.

Overall, while I liked Indy 4, it had the feeling of a retirement project. Other people do crossword puzzles or model boats in bottles, while Lucas and Spielberg make movies!

Quoting for  :awesome_for_real:.

I really think they need to stop activley making movies and groom the next generation of moviemakers. They're not bad filmmakers, it's just that their tale has been told, and now they're making movies out of inertia.

Oh, he sounded confused. I figured I'd give him something more substantial to work with.

I just think we went through this with WUA already and I can't make the same arguments twice without feeling a tad too attached to something I really don't give a shit about.  I, and a lot of other people, didn't like Crystal Skull.  It felt forced and childish, which happen to be the same feelings we had about Star Wars I-II-III.  Those who were able to self lobotomize and enjoy these films want to say that we're too attached to memories of previous movies, or that those movies were just as stupid as these.  We disagree. 

You probably won't believe this, but I had this conversation - completely unprovoked - with a woman in her sixties today.  She was lamenting changes to the re-released Star Wars that I hadn't even noticed.  It was pretty tripped-out to hear this coming from someone who was my age now when the original SW and IJ were made.  The entire time I was thinking, if I had a video camera, I'd ask her to record this to show to WUA and Stray.  It isn't some sugar coated childhood fantasy; those were better films, and these just suck.

I don't think you're attached to those old movies at all. Instead of being attached to them, I think you've distanced yourselves from them.. from what you really liked them for.. and are merely nostalgic now.

Kids, on the other hand, will enjoy these new movies. A new Star Wars can similarly get a kid stoked just like an old SW movie affected you when you were young. That shows that something's still being done right.

Anyways, calling it self-lobotomizing is just an indicator on how much you take this stuff and yourself more seriously than what is healthy. There's a time and place for that, but Indiana Jones is hardly a good excuse for it. Complaining about refrigators or gophers or "sets" is just being a grouchy old fart, when it comes down to it.

I'll distill everything I've posted on this subject in one paragraph.  I think its reasonable enough.

Certainly, my initial and subsequent enjoyment of SW or IJ is affected by the fact that I saw them as a kid in the theater.  However, they are good adventure flicks and not children's movies.  They pass the test of the Big Lie - you believe it because the little lies are never too far fetched.  SW I-II or Crystal Skull are bad, B-Movie quality adventure flicks.  They were made as children's movies and therefore Lucas did not feel the need to even attempt to pass the Little Lie or Big Lie test.  The evidence of this shift in style is now, in full hindsight, completely on display in the re-release of Star Wars IV-V-VI. 

Now, I'm going to watch Fitzcarraldo naked while sipping Heineken from a fucking champagne flute and forget that I ever devoted this much time to proving that crap is, in fact, crap.

OK, fair enough. I think we just disagree on how much the axis has tilted into the "solely for kid's realm". I think they're all, both old and new movies, following the same formula. Especially this Indy film. It isn't any more childish than the last ones. Star Wars is a slightly different story -- but I think enough of what made the old ones worked are still there. They just lack Han Solo.

Heh. Awesome (and true).

Listen, I'm just saying that some of you need to stop being so dramatic. You can dislike it all you want. I don't mind. I just think that you falsely sold me on how crappy it was. And good or bad, I don't think you would have said much of anything if you weren't so nostalgic. And on that note, Temple of Doom is still the crappiest one. I saw that on my 7th birthday - a day when any kid should enjoy a movie - and I still thought it was pretty lame even back then.

Anyways, gonna get some coffee now myself.

It's amusing hearing people proclaim "I haven't become the sort of humorless old fuck who would have hated the old Star Wars movies 30 years ago, really I haven't!" while sounding like such humorless old fucks. I'm glad to see I'm not the only person around here who thinks squealing to high nerd heaven about six seconds of CGI gophers in a 2 hour long movie makes one sound like a grumpy old douche.

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. Lucas defender to the rescue.   :roll:

This movie sucked.  As a result, it has taken a lot of the luster off the old ones. Enough luster that what has been a staple on my Christmas list has been taken off (no one got me the DVD box set in past 3-4 years  :awesome_for_real: ).  The next Indy better be directed by Christopher Nolan and staring the reanimated corpse of Heath Ledger or I won't be seeing it.

I just don't understand why it is so hard to believe that certain filmmakers can have films of different quality over the span of 30 years and that Crystal Skull is just an exceptionally lousy one within that spectrum. Has nothing to do with nostalgia or any of the other nonsense.  My wife has nothing invested in any of that crap and was actively angry with how shitty Crystal Skull was since we don't get that many opportunities to get out to the movies.

That's a fair enough point Ab -- but I think there's probably as many people as those like your wife who like it on it's own terms too. I mean.. just like any other movie, I guess? :)

The reason why nostalgia comes into play is... because this is F13 ;) Home of 100+ page threads on "WAAAH!! STAR WARS!!"

If it quacks like a duck...

Really though, if you just think it sucks, that's fine. Some people are overstating it's suckiness though, which to me is indicative of the whole nostalgia bullshit.

This. Stray, it's fine if you like Crystal Skull. But can you HONESTLY AND WITHOUT EQUIVOCATION say that Skull or Attack of the Clones is a better movie than Raiders or Empire? And if so, where do I get the drugs you been smoking?

No, I don't think they're better. In the case of Indy, I just think it's more or less following the same formula. I think it's better than Temple of Doom though. And I think Last Crusade is the best one pulled off actually.. Not Raiders.

Star Wars is a little different. Really quite different plot than the old ones. Indy's always the same plot, but with different settings and gags. The new Star Wars trilogy, on the other hand, was a completely different story than Luke's. And Luke's story has a whole other mythology to it than Anakin's. In fact, Anakin isn't much of a hero at all. So it lacks any of the themes that made the first ones immediately interesting. The new ones also lack a good, crass, funny human character to ground them (Han Solo).

Anyways, it's a still a decent enough story, some hammy parts, but not that badly executed for what it is.. and as far as all of the action and zany characters and shit goes.. It's pretty much the same thing. It's the same Star Wars universe. I can still be entertained by that.

I've got to agree that I think overall Skull is a better film than Temple of Doom. The problem I've got is that Temple's bad points just seem comically bad, I think it's fine to watch if I'm in a shitty B movie mood (or horribly hung over and unable to take anything of quality) but Skull just struck me as bad. It isn't OMGterrible levels but it's a middling film with a enough moments of bad CGI (that's not annoying because it's bad per se but because it's totally unnecessary) to make me not enjoy it overall.

Ep. I-III are better without Jar-Jar (mostly I obviously).

Not to be too much of a cock, but who cares? Pointing to scattered anecdotal examples of people who manage to dislike the movie even without being sweaty 38 year old male internet nerdragers seems to be the popular thing to do (see Grand Design and his random old lady talking about Star Wars) but the fact remains that the movies in question were well-received by the general public using any criteria you care to look up.

I never had a problem with Jar Jar. My problem with the prequels is that GL sucked at telling the story. It was told, but lacked the emotional punch of the original trilogy.

A little clever editing, a re-write of some of the more cumbersome dialogue, and a better director, and I think the prequels would have been even better movies than the originals. The basic plot and characters were fine.

And this is relevant to the thread because I think Crystal Skull shows more of that. Lucas has lost his touch, in many ways. He's gone from the guy who changed Hollywood, to another M. Night Shamamalong. Missing as often as he hits.

Well, for one, you have been positing a combination of strawman and atomistic fallacy, so anecdotal evidence is just as persuasive and a proper counterexample if you want to be technical.

For two, none of them made close to the same amount of money domestically as their earlier incarnations when you adjust for inflation so if you want to get into a "popular=good" argument (which is a stupid argument considering that Transformers and Independence Day made as much as these things, but whatever) you aren't going to win that one either when comparing the previous to the current. The prequels earned roughly half of what the original Star Wars trilogy made domestically (you can't really include international numbers because that isn't apples to apples because of broader distribution these days). Crystal Skull made about half of of Raiders did (despite costing 4 times as much in adjusted dollars to make).  This despite them all having golden pedigrees and established IP.

For three, none of this matters. I watched the thing. It stunk. I have sufficient self-awareness and critical thinking to be able to separate any nostalgia from objective analysis. This was a bad movie for the multiple reasons outlined in painstaking detail in this thread. 

Ooh look, another can of worms.  :awesome_for_real:

I thought Transformers was OK too. Don't think it deserved the bitching it got here. Just since we're doing anecdotes, I'm actually quite surprised how many women I know like it. I mean, all of them do. Like a lot.  :headscratch: Kids do too, of course. Basically everyone I know does.. except some guys on the internet who actually still play with Transformers.  :oh_i_see:

Honestly, if you didn't like Independence Day then you really do just hate fun.

Or dislike shitty movies. Plus, quite honestly, it was boring.


Sweet.  The "you're all dorks" argument.  Always a classy card when played here. 

Edit: Sorry for messing up the facepalm order.  Well, unless you're facepalming me.

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Hmm i remember seeing Independance Day in the movie theaters, every person in that movie theater cheered and clapped and hollered at various points in that movie, i remember it as being one of the few movies that i have ever seen that stirred everyone up. Transformers was fun.

Don't hate on a good argument.

It's a joke y'all.  :awesome_for_real:


But somewhat of a phenomenon too. I am genuinely confused why so many women like it.

It was released on July 4.  They made a big show of acknowledging that at my movie theater I saw it at.  It was a fun movie experience that played very heavily on everyone's mood for the day.

Then I saw it again.  Bored stiff.  Doesn't mean it wasn't fun in that environment, and a movie being bad doesn't necessarily preclude it from being entertaining (did here for me).  Hell, Starship Troopers (ohh yes, I went there) is a god awful movie, but it's one of my favorites and never fails to entertain me. 

Seriously, Starship troopers :grin:, but you think independance day was bad. You sir are confusing. :headscratch:

Read closer. Christ.

I'm a Transformers dork, and I liked the live action movie. I think it was successful with "non-fans" because it was accessible. It didn't throw a lot of geek knowledge and references at the audience. It was a straightforward mcguffin hunt with keen visuals, humor and robots smashing shit. They didn't go much beyond "These robots from another planet are looking for the magic cube that makes more robots, they change into cars and jets and there are good guys and bad guys."

I think it could have been better, but I don't think it was a shit movie, and I'm pretty sure that's about as good a Transformers movie as hollywood is capable of giving us.

I reserve my geek hatred towards the LOTR movies myself.  :awesome_for_real:

 

I did, Im just confused as to how you can still enjoy and be entertained by a god aweful movie in your own words, while still hating something thats arguably not as god aweful. Hehe.

Okay, I'm pretty sure at this point EVERYBODY loved Indy 4, and the only reason people pretend to hate it is because someone said something bad about Lucas after Phantom Menace, and that person came across as real cool, so everybody's pretending to hate Lucas now. And secretly masturbating to their DVDs of Indy 4. And hugging their Jar Jar stuffed animals in their sleep.

SHEESH why do people go to movies anyway?! It ALL sucks. I prefer Shakespeare and Aristophanes myself, or the occasional Dickens or Tolstoy novel. I WIN!!!

You're all fucked in the head.

I don't think the "It's a kids film" excuse is the get out clause you're looking for. A good kids film is entertaining for both kids and adults. The fact that I didn't like Independence Day or the SW prequels or Transformers or Godzilla or whatever is not, as WUA might assert, because I hate fun.  How do I know this? Because some of my favourite films are Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Toy Story, Wall-E and just about anything by Pixar. I love them because they're fun films, they're well written, they're entertaining and they're good films. Hell, my 3 year old son loves Cars which is probably the weakest of the Pixar catalogue and I think it's pretty good too.  Because it's fun. Same could be said for just about all the Disney films (although there are some I really dislike.)  

Of course, the real reason I like this films must be something to do with their technical and artistic merit because, apparently, I hate fun.  It can't be because of kiddie nostalgia because I've only ever been an adult when watching them.  

That's not what I'm saying there. I was saying in that quote that I don't think it swung solely into the "just for kids realm", but that it has enough to be enjoyed generally. You guys disagree. That's quite fine. I'm just confused on what's supposed to make it any more immature or dumb than the previous movies. It's practically the same thing. Lucas' proclivity to include childish gags like flying refrigerators and cgi gophers does not instantly put it into the kids-slash-retard realm.

Also, while factually correct, this is bunk that ignores the nature of the modern market. For example if Phantom Menace did twice what it actually did domestically, as you apparently think it ought to have, it would have made $860 million. That's more than the entire domestic gross of The Dark Knight and Iron Man combined.

Needless to say, movies just don't do that. Not in today's front-loaded "get it on home video in a few months" market. Once you adjust for inflation, only 3 guys have had movies in the all-time top twenty within the last 25 years. Namely James Cameron (Titanic), Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park), and George Lucas (Phantom Menace). And Cameron's flick bucked the trend by having a tiny opening weekend but sticking around the box office for the better part of a year.

Oh yeah? Well, double-dumbass on you! (http://startrekiv.ytmnd.com/)

If you want relevance, here you go :

I haven't seen Indy 4.  It sounds not too great.  All my family and friends who have seen it said it sucked balls.  My 3 nephews, ranging from 8 to 12 said it sucked balls.  (No, seriously, they actually did.)

I will not be watching it.  I am a full time parent and Director and have seen about 2 movies at the Cinema this year.  I will not be wasting my fucking time. And, frankly, I could never go to the Cinema again after watching The Dark Knight because I doubt it could be topped.

Also, I liked Transformers, all the while realising that it wasn't a cinematic height.  Again, I could pick many, many, many holes in it (Samprimary's Cartoon summed it up for me) but I still liked it.  Optimus stuck a fucking knife in a decepticons head for fucks sake.  That rules.

You people all need to clamber down off the high horses. Really.  Even those cheerleading Lucas and his wattle who are telling people to get off their high horses need to get off their high horses.

Thanks for listening.  I'm drinking tea and I don't like it.

Actually, it did BUT it didn't make the mistake of making them central points, or having prior knowledge of them as essential for understanding the over all film.   The "one shall stand, one shall fall" line being the best example.  Complete ripoff from the animated movie and a wholly geek reference that gave me chills hearing it again, but it worked for the movie as it was used.  The Optimus Prime hand-axe was another good geek toss-in.

I haven't seen Crystal Skull.

Transformers the movie is shit, Michael Bay sucks.

The end.

I just wanted you to type more than one sentence because I think you're a beautiful person, and I cherish your posts.  :heart:

On it's own, I would probably have considered Indy 4 an average to below average movie.  Expectations are what primarily lead me to dislike it more strongly, however, because it simply should have been better.  Shia Lepoof as a swordfighting greaser...I mean, fuck.  Blanchett did a horrible, HORRIBLE job with her role, or if it was intentionally meant to be campy, then it was insultingly stupid, to us and to her.  Harrison was actually okay, considering the age factor.  Some of the action scenes were just...damn it.  Too fucking cheesy.

The story, while an obvious departure from previous films, didn't actually bother me at all.  The execution just stank.

Semi-Fake edit:  this coming from someone who didn't outright hate the prequel trilogy.

I know you guys will chase me with pitchforks but...

Shia's character was the only Indy in this Indy movie. He was doing all the stunts that Harrison would have done 20 years ago. That's right, I said it. Shia was the best part of the action sequences.

 My biggest bitch was how old Harrison is and how it hobbled Indy's fight scenes.

For example:

How many times did you see this?

Indy jumps onto something, steps out behind bad guy, etc...
Camera pans away, usually to the legs/under the vehicle/on Shia.
Punch sound.
Bad guy falls.
Cut back to Harrison trying to look like smug Indy and not just...tired.

He's still Indy in character though. Which was cool.


Also, I'm sorry, but Shia swinging with those monkeys was funny shit to me. It's not quite something I could see the real Indy doing, but I liked it. Maybe because I like monkeys, I don't know.

NECRO!

Just because it had been awhile, I subjected myself to Temple of Doom recently. I wanted to see if my memory was correct and if I was perhaps judging Crystal Skull too harshly.

Wow, Doom really really sucked it. Talk about a movie that just completely failed on almost every level. The only worthwhile part of that movie was Harrison Ford and the score. It was only marginally better than say a King Solomon's Mines (or even Tales of the Golden Monkey TV show) in the production values. Skull was only worse because of the overuse of CGI and the seeming incoherence of the story.

I'm one of those people who likes Temple of Doom.  I "get" the hate for it, but I myself still like it.

Up until the point where they jump out of the plane I liked it. That said it can be halfway decent when watching the trilogy very hung over on a Sunday, so I hear...

ToD is fucking Godfather 2 compared to IJATKOTCS.

Necro of vindication!

Crystal Skull wins Razzie for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/love_guru/news/1798238/razzies_announce_their_winners)

Looks like Markie Mark went back to his cycle of suck (he does this). Expect a fantastic movie after the next one.

Wahlberg is doing the new Aronofsky movie that sounds fucking amazing. His next movie is a Peter Jackson Rachel Weisz flick. And he's doing the new Italian Job sequel. What cycle of suck are you talking about?

He usually does something great, and then picks like 2 or 3 shitty movies to be in, then does something good again, etc..

[edit] For the most part, I think the "suck" is tied in to all of his attempts at blockbuster stardom. Which he will never be. It is ordained. But he is a cool actor when he needs to be.

I couldn't resist spending 5 minutes in Paint. I was going to have response bubbles coming from the sides of the money bin, but then I realized it was way funnier without them.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/moneybinlol.jpg)

And Girls Gone Wild has generated more wealth than Citizen Kane ever could.  Next, you're going to point out that the sky is blue and, therefore, IJATKOTCS is not a bad film.  Fuck, man. 

I want to see you, and anyone else who continues to defend this wretched filth, post the words, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine, praiseworthy work of cinematic art," or something equivalent.  I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that IJATKOTCS is shit.



And did I just read that Darren Aronofsky is remaking RoboCop?  Did I drop acid this morning and forget about it?

I don't think he was defending the movie. Rather, I think his point was that George, Harrison, and Steven don't give a shit what someone says on the internet about it since they have bathrooms with solid gold toilets paid for by the same people who bitch about them.

No.  He is.  Its right there on page one. 



Again, in what way does that matter?  If the debate has devolved into, "they made a ton of money off of this piece of shit," then you can't ignore the premise of the point.  Its a piece of shit.

The point is.. they don't fucking CARE.  They've realized they don't have to, we're all suckers who will continue to shovel money after shit, hoping that this time it doesn't suck.  Sometimes lightning strikes and it doesn't suck.. but not usually.  There is no Blizzard to crush the SOE that is Hollywood Blockbusters.

I still haven't seen this movie.  I choose to be part of the solution.

I watched it twice.

If you enjoy a really bad movie, as I do, this one has it all.

I kind of liked it in a Sunday afternoon, 1970's crappy sci-fi movie way.

I would almost rather watch Battlefield Earth than this again. 

Ditto.

I also just felt sure I wouldn't care for it, so I haven't bothered.

There are worse things out there. It's silly, but it's still an Indiana Jones movie. So it's entertaining mostly. This other shit about fucking up one's childhood is stupid. Get a life. :)

It really didn't feel like an Indiana Jones movie to me.  It was more like some bad cable TV movie.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/moneybinlol2.jpg)

I don't really care about this particular nerdfight, but that was pretty not funny.

You had it right the first time.

Plinkett review incoming. Buzz is that it will be released X-mas day. Here is the Trailer (http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/plinkett-review-trailers/indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull-trailer/)


BTW, the "fake Plinkett" is part of the Half in the Bag (http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag/) review show that they have been doing which is really funny in and of itself (sort of a twisted, drunken Siskel & Ebert), particularly when they go to various Cons and mock the shit out of them.

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed that.  That was a great imitation of the Emperor.  I really thought they hired the actor.  Also hot redhead ho is hot.

I think that trailer gave me blue balls.

I'd always thought that the two Plinketts (Rich Evans and Mike Stoklasa) were supposed to be the same character; establishing the Rich Evans version as "fake Plinkett" in their "canon" is interesting.

Curious if they found the stripper on Craigslist or what.  She's not one of their regular guest stars.

bwangyangyangyangyang It's here:

http://redlettermedia.com/mr-plinetts-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull-review/

About to watch it now.

I'm going to watch it tonight after I am a bit more lubricated.

I made it halfway through part two before getting bored and skipping to the end. I don't mind his rambling pervert schtick, but that voice gets fucking old after 30 minutes straight.

Sumup: Lucas and Spielberg to a lesser degree, have become the kind of guys they themselves used to bitch about when they were hot rod 30something filmmakers. Dudes need to retire.

Yeah I agree the reveiw could have been condensed into 10minutes saying "This movie was watered down and family friendly: the end"

Didn't he do exactly that in the first minute of the review?   :awesome_for_real:

Persued this thread out of boredom. I still think the SD scene in Empire is nuts.  :awesome_for_real:

Kingdom... Plinkett has that short bit of stuff that he didn't hate about the film, and I agree. There are some scenes with real human touches (probably Spielberg) like Mutt snagging the beer, and Indy putting it back. I think the idea of the grey alien mythology becoming our modern religion is a valid and interesting one. And the story could have been about that, and about Indy passing the torch to Mutt, but instead we got the hodgepodge of Indy tropes without any heart or real thought. And I'm not talking Citizen Kane here, just putting some effort into the film. If the Ark, the Stones and the Grail were macguffins that inspired thought, the crystal skull was jut a macguffin to get wheezy ole Indy back in the saddle one more time.

Part time.

To use a take on the eternal Dr. Who defence - Indy 1-3 and SW 4-6 were family films, Indy 4 and SW 1-3 were kids films.

I think the shift in Indy films reflects Spielburg's changing attitudes towards what makes a good film. I'd dispute that Indy 1 & 2 are good family films, given the melting Nazis and hearts being ripped out, but they were much more focused on Indiana Jones as a character and how he took his lumps and still came out on top. He wasn't afraid to fight dirty to win, and probably had to, given all that was against him.

Later films had him sharing time with 4 to 5 characters at once, which is fine if I wanted to see "Dr Marcus Brody & His Comic Tomfoolery", but I don't.

All of which fails to recall the ridiculous scenes where Shia is swinging through the trees with monkeys at the same rate of speeding vehicles.  Or where he is ridiculously sword fighting on top of speeding jeeps (the precise details of which my brain has wisely chosen to forget).  Or all the other ridiulous stuff.  No, the difference between 1-3 and number four is what happened in the first three was, while highly improbable, very cool (even Temple, to an extent).  The stuff that happens in number four is equally improbable, but is not remotely cool and is actually completely retarded.  The gags in the first three were funny, the ones in the final one were embarassing.  And the unlikely and uncomfortable reunion with his old flame?  Facepalm.  They should have left her out of the movie entirely, jesus criminy that was some uncomfortable stuff.

Oh, and didn't Cate Blanchett play a crazy Russian lady?  I don't have a big opinion of her as an actress one way or the other, but she was goddamn terrible in this movie.  Talk about miscasting.

The fact that number 4 was about aliens and crystal skulls had nothing to do with how terrible it was.  Bad casting decisions, wooden acting, and reprehensible direction and screenplay.  Primarily the latter two.


This is also quite true, but I think the lack of focus on Indy had something to do with his inability (physically) to play the role like he did before.  Which doesn't mean we have to accept it.

The MacGuffin in Skull being goddamn aliens, while bad, was certainly not untenable. But none of the buildup to it made much fucking sense, and it all looked horribly over CGI'ed. The brain just rebelled at how bad most of it looked, like the uncanny valley reared its ugly head even though there were live action bits on top of it. Most of it was also just stupid. Temple of Doom was not great, but at least its wacky stunts didn't make me go "OH COME ON!" Shia swinging with the monkeys and sword fighting over jeeps? That shit didn't look remotely real and it wasn't.

Yes, Cate Blanchett was the Russian military psychic. I thought she was okay, but it wasn't a great role (possibly for anyone).

I agree that the script for Indy IV was awful as were most of the set pieces, even if they were fitting the pulp roots of Indiana Jones. And too many didn't involve Jones that much - if Ford can't do the action, get stuntmen to do it and he can just do the close-ups.

I'm not a fan of Indy III, and see a lot of the flaws in that movie - slapstick comedy, too many characters, badly done emotional scenes - creeping from that film into Indy IV. Plus in the earlier films it seemed that Spielburg was willing to spend time on the set-ups - the Nazis had been in Egypt longer than Jones, or the corrupted palace in Indy II eating weird food - but by Indy IV it was, "We need a fight here - the tribesmen can just pop out of the walls or something".

Likewise. Curiously, it was the CGI shots of the plane and tank going over the edge of the cliff that did it for me. Plus the totally contrived prologue with River Phoenix.

Shia laboof or however it's spelled ruined every scene he was in.

The Indiana Jones movies very quickly fell into formula. There has to be a scene where there is a dude with a sword and Indy has a gun. There has to be a retread of the scene where Indy fights the guy who gets chopped up by the airplane propeller - in 2 it is some choppy thing on a conveyer belt, in 3 it is a boat propeller. One had a room of snakes so 2 had a room of bugs.

None of the movies past the first feel like genuine efforts where someone had another story to tell, to me they all come of as cash-ins that just hit the same crowd-pleasing story beats and every film is an homage to the first.

You all really do hate fun.   :oh_i_see:

I think Indy III was probably my favorite.  Still loved all 3, however (Crystal Skulls doesn't get to count as one).

Just going to plug the Plinkett review here (in case you didn't see it) and say that he did a very good job of laying out the "Indy formula" by showing those bits from each movie side by side.  It's pretty fun to watch.

Yes the second and third movies followed the same formula without being very original but the formula as it was, worked.  You can argue that the first was the best but the second two were both very good in my opinion and most would agree.  The problem is applying the same formula to a fourth movie while losing a lot of the touches that made the first three(family friendly!)  it just wore it's welcome out.

I don't think it wore out its welcome at all...I just think the 4th movie was executed extremely poorly.  Had they kept the exact same story, and managed to better honor the original formula, it would have been a smashing good time as far as I am concerned.

The main problem is that Harrison Ford is now old and a rather shitty actor.

Old yes, and probably too old to play that role in any capacity.  But shitty?  Nah.  I imagine that he could smell the shittyness on this one from a mile away and just phoned it in.

He phones everything in now.  He basically plays "crotchety Harrison Ford" now.  That ain't Indy.

I'll take your word for it, having not seen any of his other recent stuff.  I didn't really know there was any.

I can't even remember the last Ford movie I saw. Maybe that one with Ann Heche when it played on cable, 6 Days 7 Nights? But that was ages ago.

Ab isn't wrong.  Everything since Ford hooked-up with Callista Flockheart has been pretty blatantly phoned-in.   Part of that's probably because he's 70 and the public wants him in action movies.

I thought he was fucking great in K-19, but IMDB tells me that was way back in 02. So yeah, not as relevant as I thought.

Did she turn into dust yet?

I thought he was pretty good in Morning Glory.  And IMDB appearently lists him as being Col. Hyram Graff in Enders Game (in pre-production, slated for 2013), of which I am cautiously optimistic that he wont fuck up the role.  Course, There is a very good chance that they will totally fuck up Enders Game in and of itself :(

I don't see how you could fuck something up that sucked to begin with, the only direction Ender's Game can go is up.

 :thumbs_up:

The bits of "Morning Glory" I saw with Harrison Ford were good, but he plays the role of grumpy asshole in the film so it may be a whole art-imitate-life thing.

Lucas did an interview that's been widely quoted this week in which:

a) he promises to never to Star Wars stuff again because, you know, he's tired of hearing the fans bitch about what he does with HIS PROPERTY

and

b) says it was nice of Spielberg to claim credit for the nuke-the-fridge idea to try and protect him, but that it was in fact all Lucas' idea (we could tell, you schmuck, because if it's a terrible idea, it's probably yours) and that "most scientists" agree with him that the scene is actually quite plausible.

Are those the same 'most scientists' that claim Global Warming ain't happening and the Earth is 7000 years old ?

ie, the ones that will take a massive fuck off cheque ?

I think in this case it's "most scientists that are as real as Jar Jar Binks is real".

Weesa peoples gonna die ?

Thing is, I am completely willing to believe that hiding in an old fridge might actually protect you from nuclear radiation.  God only knows how much lead was in a fridge back then.  The part where suspention of disbelief jumps up and kicks you in the nuts with steel toed boots is where we are expected to believe that being inside a fridge would also protect you from being HURLED HUNDREDS OF YARDS THROUGH THE AIR AND SLAMMED INTO THE GROUND REPEATEDLY.

Not a good time for Lucas to get snotty with "Red Tails" coming out tomorrow.

Not much.  Maybe the paint and some solder.

The fridge scene was the smallest of the problems that film had.

Red Tails is currently sitting at 35% on rotten tomatoes.  Poor Tuskegee Airmen.  If only somebody, ANYBODY, else had decided to take on the movie about them.

The HBO version from the 90's (the one with Laurence Fishburne) was pretty good.

--Dave

And of course, the message that fails to penetrate into Lucas's skull is that there are millions of people who still want to see the Star Wars stuff...just not by him.  Why can't he just sit back and let others do the work while he collects a check?  That's a rhetorical question.

I mean, really, get some of the Bioware writers and Blur together and let them have at it.  You already let them mess with a certain timeframe in your canon, get them on the payroll and go balls out!

Does lucas making the movie count as a hate crime?

I feel bad for Red Tails because Lucas actually seems to have a good motivation for wanting to do the film. But I'm also quite sure his comment on The Daily Show about this being "as close to episode 7 as you're ever going to get" has caused spergy nerdrage angst across the globe.

That and the trailers make it look like they turned the Tuskegee into a rap video.

I saw the trailer for the first time last night before hearing about it and that was exactly what I thought followed by "who makes this shit?"

There is the animated Clone Wars series for that. And the movie, that was by all reports terrible.

Actually, now that I think about it: "Droids".

Wrong target audience.  Clone Wars cartoon has it's place, but even a raging nerd like me skips it.  It is very much for kids.  And the animation style makes me want to go into epileptic fits, with all it's jerkiness.

No, I mean to loan out the license to somebody to make episodes 7, 8 and 9.  Let Blur animate the thing.  You can pay giant wads of money to get all the original actors to voice their stuff.  Put that shit into the hands of some competent writers, and it would make bank.  Shit, it is even written already!  Let them do the Zahn trilogy!  I would soooooooo go see that.  Don't tell me that most of the neckbeards around here wouldn't also.  Let Lucas sit back and collect his 40%, or whatever.

Zahn trilogy was ass.

Much like folks point out about Dragonlance in the, "why don't... fantasy," thread tangent, go back and read it now.  You'll agree; complete ass.

I have read it several times, and I don't agree (the next duology he did after them was probably ass).  And even if I did agree that the writing was ass, I think the plot in general would have fit well with the movie formula...and that is the bigger reason why I would pick that as the subject matter for a new trilogy

Whatever.  At the end of the day, my only point is that I think there are people out there that could make a much better SW movie than Lucas, and I would like to see it done.  Will never happen, of course.

It is several steps of ass above the Dragonlance stuff. Readable ass, as opposed to 'Jesus how did I ever get past page 5.'

I'd quite happily watch (and do!) the Clone Wars cartoons rather than read the Zahn trilogy again. Everyone raved about it when they came out and I gave it a go. It took me four attempts to get past the first chapter. Something about Lando introducing Luke to an exotic beverage called "Hot Chocolate" always made me put it down in disgust.

I always felt that the whole trilogy read like bad, bad fanfic. Like most of the EU stuff. Which, I think, is best summarized by this:

(http://3do.jediknight.net/dcm/strips/dcmeu.gif)

EDIT: bonus

While I'll agree it's some of the best EU stuff out there, I disagree that it's above ass.

The Force-Blocking slugs alone were ham-fisted wank.  Then it started to get really silly as the Luke-Mara story evolved.  Thrawn was a cool character with a wank superpower of using art to determine how folks would react in space battles.. and then had a huge blind spot about the art of his bodyguards?  Wat?

What would you have rather we'd gotten: a trilogy of feature-length CGI animations of the Zahn books, or the actual prequel trilogy?

Technically I didn't say it was above ass.  :grin:

At least the prequel trilogy felt like Star Wars.

It makes me feel dirty to say it but... the prequels. At the very least, the Clone Wars series of comics that came out after Episode 2 were okay and I quite enjoyed them - which is more than I can say about anything that came out of the Zahn books.