f13.net

There's no press release or anything for this, but I didn't want to necropost the Metroid thread. So here's a new one. Movies.com has this listed (too lazy to get the link which has ZERO information in it anyway), and it says it's being based on the book rather than the video game....which is based on the book. Anyway, feel free to have a flung-monkey-dung contest about Woo's directing again.

Unemployed doves everywhere rejoice!

I havn't played the game, just read the book. The book is about a plot by evil people who TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Using an idea the Brain and Pinky wouldn't do, it's so stupid.

Wounder how they plan to update it? Arabs instead of IRA presuably. Hmm, mabye the'll change the left wing enviortmental person in the US Govrenment to Richard Perl and the Rainbow 6 Team have to stop the US from invading Iraq (with the US being under control by Iranian Intellegence).

This is just terrible news. I really enjoyed the book (and all the video games that followed), and in the hands of a competent director, it could have been a great movie. In the hands of Woo, however, it will be fucking atrocious.

Metroid, Spy Hunter..Now Rainbow Six? The first two are absolutely perfect for him. Under anyone's direction, those films would suck. Might as well make them suck hard. But Rainbow Six? I'll agree with WayAbv...At least there's something to work with there (Then again, if I wanted a decent Spec-Ops story, I'd rather someone use Richard Marcenko's books or something).

There's probably some potential for a "video game ---> film market", but these three films will probably put an end to that.

Anyways, it took me a while, but I'm just now realizing how bad John Woo sucks (if I had known he was the one behind Broken Arrow, that would have saved a lot of time). Maybe some good action sequences here and there, but..

I won't even dip into this cesspool of vitriol again.

Well, to be fair, I just finished watching Paycheck. I only got it because of Uma (who seemed a little out of place), but it turned out to be pretty interesting. Clever story, so Woo couldn't fuck it up too bad (the BMW scene was kinda funny tho).

To partially quote Homer Simpson:

"...No misdirected woo. Which is pretty much every John Woo Film."

Which should just about fit Woo perfectly.

/meh

The fact that there is a new MI movie coming out that I think Woo is directing is telling me that I really won't be seeing any Woo movies because it's a Woo movie anymore. It's going to have to impress me in the trailer or I won't bother.

My problem with Paycheck was that the action scenes fucked up the movie.  Take them out and add in dialog and you have a far better film.  The action scenes maybe would have worked if the character was someone like Jason Bourne, but not with random_engineer_01.  I won't even try to place blame for who wrote or scripted the action scenes, I don't know the politics involved, but they were HORRIBLE for the movie and didn't fit at all.  That whole movie reminded me of the end of 28 days later where the protagonist suddenly became a green baret for not apparent reason.

He didn't become a green beret, he became a desperate man in a desperate situation. I'm not just defending the movie because I loved it (which I did), I'm defending it because he didn't do any wire-fu or anything special, he just did exactly what he had to do.

As for Paycheck, I'm still delaying the inevitable DVD purchase, but I mean, look at Ben Affleck, poor guy doesn't even compare to Matt Damon anymore.

Alot of the more Woo trademark action scenes were in there because Ben Affleck insisted. He's a big Woo fan and wanted to have some of the trademarks. (Tense standoff, etc).

As an author, Tom Clancy is barely acceptable.  He does cracking good research and whips up a lively story... it's just his writing that gives me a headache.   I think he writes like he used to sell insurance.  Oh, right.  He did.  I have to admit, however, I really enjoy his interviews and lectures.  He's a self-made military expert.  I think he would probably been an excellent teacher.  

As for Woo... I always thought he should only do sequels.  That way he wouldn't have first crack at screwing up a good story.  Sequels nearly always suck, anyway.

Cracking good research except, quite noticeably, at the end of Rainbow Six, where he got taken in by a charlatan over the whole "heartbeat detector" nonsense.

Still, I'm sure the rainforest will be packed full of doves.

Clancy's best book I read (and the first one I read) was Red Storm Rising with that other guy (I forget his name, but his books are getting siller and siller). 'Corse, I was playing M1 Tank Platoon at the time.

Red Storm Rising was good, so was Hunt for Red October.  Pretty much everything since then has just gotten worse and worse.

I tried to read Rainbow Six, the prose made me quit only a few chapters in.  I usually finish any book I start so it has to be exceptionally bad for me to just drop it.

Yeah, his books that are much more concerned about the technical details are better than the ones where he goes off on a moralizing tear.  His characters have gotten more and more two dimensional as his career has gone along, and honestly the direction he's taken Jack Ryan has been ridiculous.  I think I vowed to stop reading when Ryan became president after the Japanese airline pilot kamikazed the capitol.

You look at it now and it's fairly prescient, but I think he just wanted to slap his ultimate cardboard, boyscout good guy in the presidency and he went at it in a really clumsy manner.

Larry Bond - creator of the Harpoon board game.
He did a few good books after Red Storm Rising.
Red Phoenix abou a Korean war. Cauldron about the rise of France and Germany as European agressors and my favorite Vortex about a possible different outcome to the Apartheid regime in South Africa involving Cuba and an US Carrier group.
Great 'What if' books, that are still plausible even though history proved them wrong.

As to the hack that is Clancy. He climaxed with The Sum of All Fears and then wrote himself into a corner, he has never been able to recover from. Now his books are more about his far right views than good research.
The audio commentary on the Sum of All Fears dvd is solid gold though:

"Why Neo-nazis? Do anybody outside Hollywood actually believe neo-nazis are a threat capable of anything?"

"Why only three f-16s. Was that all you could afford? Everybody knows there's always four to a group..."

Poor director.

Clancy's use of his books as a vehicle to espouse his right wing ideology would be why I have ceased reading them.  The last book I read was The Bear and the Dragon, and that was a somewhat reluctant purchase.  The ones where Jack's son figures prominantly have gone unpurchased.

That, and his decision to make Jack Ryan the God Emperor of the US (credit: Boogaleeboo.)

edit:  Word misuse.  GRAMMAR IS HARD.

Yeah, that's where I stopped too.
800 pages of 'abortion is evil, m'kay!?' followed by 200 pages of tanks blowing up is not my idea of a well built techno-thriller.

I should add I tried reading this book (spin off?) where he has 2 brothers becoming assiasns for the US...err...something with licenses to kill. Gave up when it became clear that the characters were serious about training an FBI agent and a US Marine, whom did not seem to CARE they were being trained as hired killers, and not worried about any legel implerications.

Then again, it's scarily precentient after Iraq....