I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately. I love movies, and now that I have money again, it makes sense I would start seeing them again. Urn and I watched Pitch Black (again for me) and it was still really really cool. I’m amped about Red Planet. Can’t beat Val Kilmer, Trinity and a CG Robot! We saw Charlie’s Angles, which was WAY better than I thought it would be. It has head nods to almost every kung-fu and action film ever made, from Bruce Lee to Mission Impossible, and it doesn’t take itself very seriously at all, so it’s totally fun to watch. Of course, all the boobies help. Annie and I rented Tarzan, which I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. Miles said it was cool, and I trust him. He was right. It was fun just to watch the way they made him move! We also watched Titan A.E., which I didn’t think was that bad. I definitely enjoyed it, which was more than I expected from it. And finally, I watched the first half of the animated version of The Hobbit, which was actually pretty bad. Too many liberties with the plot for my liking. It makes me simultaniously nervous about and really excited for when they release the live-action Lord of the Rings trilogy. My friend KT put it best: “They’re releasing ONE a YEAR? WHAT IF I DIE BEFORE THE LAST ONE COMES OUT?”
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user Says:
Tuesday, November 14, 2000 at 8:36 am.
I feel the same way about Star Wars my man. An almost bigger concern with that is, "What if George Lucas dies before he makes the third one?"
user Says:
Wednesday, November 15, 2000 at 12:00 am.
Okay, so with the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming, I pretty well figured that the Dungeons and Dragons movie couldn’t possibly compare. And it won’t, but based on the trailer we just got at work, it still looks pretty cool.
Of coures, the trailer looks like it gives away the entire plot, but it should be cool. Basically, Thora Birch(Kevin Spacey’s daughter in American Beauty) is the princess of this fantasy kingdom. Jeremy Irons(and the bad guy from Highlander: Endgame) come to town with a scepter that lets them control black dragons. They summon a horde of dragons and take over the kingdom. The princess sends two theives(some guy I don’t know and a Wayons brother) to get the red dragon controlling scepter, which looks to be hidden in the standard underground labyrinth. They quest for it, and the whole thing ends amid a battle between huge swarms of black and red dragons(very cool shots).
Will it be stupid? Yeah. Will it be a hella cool anyways? Looks that way…
user Says:
Wednesday, November 15, 2000 at 4:04 pm.
Nah, Red Planet’s not that great. Lurking somewhere in there is a good film. But it can’t decide if it want’s to be a hard-SF, "Houston, we have a problem" procedural, a Big Action confection, or a character-driven nailbiter.
What you wind up with is a movie where they spend like 15 minutes lying on their backs in the desert going,
"soo,… the algae, like… eats the rocks… and… then it makes oxygen… see, and… "
"… only it’s not."
"rright… it’s not… do you want me to stop talking?"
"no… go on… it’s soothing…"
OH THE SUSPENSE
The robot was cool, though. I for one follow the Sean Vandehey school of filmmaking: Screw the humans, the *whole movie* should be robots! In epic kung-fu clashes, with giant superintelligent bugs, in an underground city beneath mars’ crust! And Carrie-Anne moss in the Leia slave girl costume! Sure! Why not?
Matrix 2, that’s the sequel I jones for.
user Says:
Wednesday, November 15, 2000 at 10:46 pm.
an example of my ‘genius’
I recently saw Hollow Man. I wasn’t going to at first, but now that the KOIN has been bitchslapped by Regal from an arthouse to a discount house, I’ve got more motivation to see mainstream crap, namely that I can do it free at the KOIN where I feel safe. And there’s noone else watching them.
So I saw Hollow Man. It was allright, because they were trying to be a cool action flick for the second half. If you get past the rape scene, then it’s almost interesting. But then you get to the parts where Kevin Bacon defies physics: just because you’re invisible doesn’t make you superman.
1. When you get blasted by a flamethrower and rip off your burning clothes, but there’s still crap on you that’s visible, it doesn’t just flake off BECAUSE THATS YOUR BURNED FLESH!!! And even if it did just flake off, yeah you’re invisble again, but you’ve got exposed muscle tissue.
2. Unless you’ve been seriously sharpening it, you cannot run up behind someone and ram a crowbar all the way through their ribcage, then slide it back out and kill someone else with it.
3. If you’ve had the ‘hook’ of a crowbar stuck into your stomach(again, it’s not that sharp), the odds of it not hitting any vital organs(like your intestines?) is slim. The odds of the horrible gash being securly sealed up with duct tape is slimmer. And even supposing those first two were true, you cannot then go on to participate in an action sequence, because the tape would fall off and you’d bleed to death!
But enough of that. Hollow Man was okay. My main beef was that they tossed out all options for a sequal by killing Bacon at the end!
Then I came up with a brilliant idea for Hollow Man 2. First off, we’d need an awesome hong kong wire team for the stunts. Plus more special effects.
Okay: genius scientist Bacon develops invisibility serum, goes crazy, tries to kill his labmates to keep himself secret. Get’s captured and locked up.
Then, after several years, once he’s gone completely insane, he escapes. Redevelops the formula, and gives it to his badass commando team. Then he and his invisible commandos try to take over the world!
To stop them, the government gives the invisibility serum to a team of good guy commandos, and the invisible battles begin!
Imagine a secret base, inside the armory or something. There’s an invisble bad guy and an invisible good guy in there. Neither can see each other. They have to throw things and shoot guns off around the room trying to locate their opponent, without giving away their own location at the same time, meaning firing off a shot, tossing the gun aside and jumping to the left, then watching for a response. Or throwing knives or something.
Imagine the invisble fistfight! Once they find each other, they start beating the tar out of each other. We see nothing but the occasional spray of blood as a punch connects!
Then I realized that was silly. One of the problems of hollow man: as he had transparent eyelids, he couldn’t close his eyes. Reality? He wouldn’t be able to see, as light wouldn’t be reflecting off of his eyes. How to fix this? Either invisible people are blind, or their eyes are visible and to be fully invisble they have to cover them.
This would turn that scene into two guys standing in a big room, with their eyes closed, blinking them open every few seconds hoping to spot their opponent w/o being seen, and then attacking them while blind…
to be worth watching, the whole movie would have to take place in some place where they’d be partially visible: sprinklers going, smoke venting, lasers all over the place(maybe they just refract light around them, so the laser’s refraction would be visible?) or something like that. But I think it could work…
user Says:
Friday, November 17, 2000 at 8:20 am.
You may want to let the cooling fans kick in before you continue this one. It sounds entirely too complex. :)
user Says:
Saturday, November 18, 2000 at 3:48 am.
Heh… To even consider this I’d need millions of dollars and a lot of SFX people and studio approval. All the good SFX people are tied up with E2/E3, the Lord of the Rings, and the Matrix sequals. No one’s going to give me money. Besides, it probably wouldn’t work.
But I might use one of those ideas later… Perhaps a sequal to my Jedi Kung Fu movie, where there’s a group of Dark Jedi who are invisible? Maybe not.