I caught the IM trailer a week or two ago. The original speculation once upon a way back was that Tom Cruise would have the lead, which led me to eagerly join the howls of protest because he's too...uh...good an actor...
Downey is a perfect choice, both for skill and for his ability to relate to the subject matter.*
(* for all you unbelievers, Tony Stark aka Iron Man, is a drunken asshole)
Geeze, Smilin', even we raging queers avoid that over-sentimental, pastel drek. Just look up Photoshopped images of her naked on the internet like all the other nerds.
I would pay for The Lone Ranger's movie ticket for that one.
I think I would like to see 10,000 BC in the theater despite the anachronisms. Was it worth a matinée ticket, godfry?
Yes.
The mammoth hunt is kewl, even if it is placed 100,000 years too late.
Here's the one's I came up with off the top of my head:
No monumental cultures in 10,000 BC. This was not present until 4500 BC, at earliest.
Saber-toothed cats long gone. That one would favorably respond to the desires of a human is laughable.
Woolly mammoth long gone.
All the various racial types are all within hailing distance, seemingly.
The whole idea of domesticated woolly mammoths, pulling stone blocks up ramps (in a tropical locale, no less) to build pyramids in 10000 BC is laughable.
The idea of taking seed from the luxuriant valley back to the mountain home of the hero to convert from hunter-gather to settled agriculture is ridiculous.
I have my doubts that slavers would have wandered that far to capture slaves.
Why cross the "endless desert" when you can follow the antagonist down the river? Why, to show that our protagonist's understanding of the polar star for navigation....of which nobody else seems to think. That is the star he associates with his love, of course.
Of course, then there are the romantic aspects...foretold hero, sweetheart with blue eyes, signs of the hunter (Orion), the forerunner (in this case, the hero's father). It's a hero-romance tale in which a marginal culture is saved by the foretold actions of an unlikely hero.
In other words, standard fare for pre-adolescent legend/myth.
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Last edited by godfry n. glad; 03-11-2008 at 10:40 PM.
Geeze, Smilin', even we raging queers avoid that over-sentimental, pastel drek. Just look up Photoshopped images of her naked on the internet like all the other nerds.
But Lifetime has an hour of Will & Grace every weeknight. And Frasier.
Geeze, Smilin', even we raging queers avoid that over-sentimental, pastel drek. Just look up Photoshopped images of her naked on the internet like all the other nerds.
But Lifetime has an hour of Will & Grace every weeknight. And Frasier.
That's it.
Will & Grace annoyed me for the longest time, but when they finally let him have a real boyfriend who stuck around, I forgave its many prior sins. For American prime time television, that was ballsy. And I'll give you Frasier, too, but that's it. Too many Burning Bed flashbacks otherwise.*
It's a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Another one of those almost but not quite good movies. Nicole Kidman (who really is stunningly beautiful here) saves it from sucking but on the whole it's an unnecessary and forgettable movie.
I saw Vantage Point yesterday. It was a lot of fun. Tons of gun fighting and explosions and footraces, and an awesome car chase that goes on forever. There's lots of twists and turns in the plot, too. I liked it.
I saw Vantage Point yesterday. It was a lot of fun. Tons of gun fighting and explosions and footraces, and an awesome car chase that goes on forever. There's lots of twists and turns in the plot, too. I liked it.
I thought it looked like fun from seeing the ads for it. Glad to hear you confirm.
I'm a little late to the game, and not a movie, but I am just starting to watch the DVD's of Showtime's Dead Like Me. Fun!!
And, a movie, but not all that good: I saw Mr. Brooks last night. If I am to take it at face value, what a 2 hour crap fest! I don't even know why we continued to watch it, but if we hadn't I would not have decided:
It was all a dream, from start to finish. That redeems it just a little bit for me. But still, crap.
Stardust - Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert de Niro, Claire Danes
An all-star cast for this adaptation of a Gaiman book (which I haven't read). It's a fairy tale (or a fantasy movie if you prefer) with all the ingredients: witches, flying ships, unicorns. Well written, well acted, pretty funny and a whole lot better than I expected. Great movie.
The Good Shepherd, with Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Robert Deniro, John Turturro, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, and Joe Pesci (among others).
I rented Sunshine this weekend. I thought the first 2/3 or so was pretty decent, if slow. I didn't care for the last third or so, as it got all surreal and turned into some sort of weird slasher movie. What were they thinking? In my opinion, the last 1/3 ruined what had, up until then, been an excellent movie.
As an aside, if you're building a spacecraft whose sole purpose is to get as close to the Sun as possible, so as to literally save the human race from extinction, wouldn't "Icarus" be the last name you'd choose for it?
Surprisingly, given its premise, the movie contained relatively few egregious scientific errors. There were a few, but the film-makers forthrightly said in the commentary that they deliberately "exaggerated" on a few matters [actually, quite a few, as I recall], for dramatic effect.
Okay, I can live with that.
On the other hand, there were a few big plot holes that bugged me.
For instance, at one point there were 4 guys trapped aboard the Icarus 1, because the airlock had been destroyed. That meant there was 20 meters or so of hard vacuum between them and the Icarus 2. And there was only one spacesuit.
So, since the Icarus 1 was apparently identical to the Icarus 2, and we had already seen that there were many spacesuits aboard the Icarus 2, it stands to reason that the Icarus 1 had more than one spacesuit on board. So why on Earth didn't they just go and hunt up a few more spacesuits?
And while they were at it, since the main reason they came to the Icarus 1 in the first place was to restore their lost oxygen supplies, wouldn't it have been a really good idea to have picked up some O2 canisters and sent them back to the Icarus 2? That is, after all, why they came!
Okay. So maybe, for some reason, there really was only one functioning spacesuit on the Icarus 1. So what? Put somebody in the spacesuit and send him back to the Icarus 2 to fetch back some more spacesuits. It was made pretty clear in the movie that the Icarus 2 had more than one airlock, so presumably the Icarus 1 did, too. So losing one airlock shouldn't have been that big a deal. Even if the Icarus 1's damaged computer meant that the airlock could only be operated manually -- so what? There was no reason why the guys remaining on the Icarus 1 couldn't have operated the airlock manually to let him back in when their comrade returned with the spacesuits.
And why was it that the Icarus 1's airlock could not be manually operated from the inside -- thus meaning that they had to leave somebody behind on the Icarus 1? It was explicitly shown later in the movie that airlocks on the Icarus 2 could be manually operated from either side, after all. (And who, in their right minds, is so stupid as to design an airlock that can't be operated from either side?)
Even in a worst-case scenario, they still could have saved all 4 crewmembers, if they'd given the problem 10 seconds' thought -- even if we accept that there was only one airlock and that it could only be operated from inside the Icarus 1, and even if there was only one spacesuit.
All they had to do was make sure that the guy with the spacesuit was the one operating the airlock. He could have fired the others over to the Icarus 2, more or less as was done in the movie.
Since he had a spacesuit and all, he could then take all the time he needed to gather up some O2 cylinders and any other supplies that might be handy, depressurize the Icarus 1, and then ferry the supplies back to the waiting Icarus 2.
In short, the whole scene insists that these supposedly-intelligent people are all idiots.
And given that they'd established the implausibility of anyone aboard the Icarus 1 being capable of sabotaging the airlock, shouldn't these supposedly-intelligent people have realized that they almost-certainly had a stowaway on board?
And speaking of idiotic premises: given that the mission of the Icarus 2 was literally to prevent the extinction of the human race, why on Earth was Capa the only person on board who knew how to operate the bomb? We saw him operate it late in the film, and there didn't seem to be anything involved other than pressing a few buttons and flipping a switch. So, wouldn't it have been a really good idea to have made sure that everyone else on board was trained to use the bomb?
And given the immense size of the Icarus 2 and that there seemed to be plenty of space, wouldn't it have been a really good idea to have more than one "oxygen garden" on board? At the very least, shouldn't they have had a whole bunch of seeds in storage, just in case they had to replant the garden at some point?
By the way, we have the technology now to build chemical/mechanical "scrubbers" that can remove CO2 from the air. They're used aboard modern-day spacecraft to do just that. Some scrubbers to keep down the CO2 levels, coupled with electrolysis of water to produce oxygen, would have taken care of their O2 concerns very nicely. The Icarus 2 had plenty of water on board, and electricity surely wasn't in short supply, so why didn't they just make their own oxygen? And why didn't they have some scrubbers to remove CO2 from the air, just in case something happened to the garden?
Given the importance of the mission, you'd expect the designers of the Icarus to have thought of such elementary safeguards.
Anyway, my opinion of Sunshine is that if they'd stuck with the initial premise -- and if they hadn't made the supposedly intelligent crewmembers into idiots at a couple of crucial points -- it could have been a great film.
If they'd stuck to the issues outlined early in the film -- 1.) the intense psychological pressures from being cooped up in a confined space with 7 other people for years at a time, 2.) the sense of insignificance they'd feel from being in such proximity to the immense size and power of the Sun, and 3.) the psychological burdens of literally bearing responsibility for the survival of the entire human race -- it could have been a terrific film. Instead, they turned it into some stupid slasher flick. What a waste of potential.
Cheers,
Michael
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I rented Sunshine this weekend. I thought the first 2/3 or so was pretty decent, if slow. I didn't care for the last third or so, as it got all surreal and turned into some sort of weird slasher movie. What were they thinking? In my opinion, the last 1/3 ruined what had, up until then, been an excellent movie.
I couldn't agree more. The transition from an intelligent science fiction story into a horror movie was completely silly. And not even subtle: the tone of the thing changed from one minute to the next. Unbelievable.
The only explanation I have is that someone decided at the last minute that a slow-paced movie like this one wouldn't sell at the box-office.
I couldn't agree more. The transition from an intelligent science fiction story into a horror movie was completely silly. And not even subtle: the tone of the thing changed from one minute to the next. Unbelievable.
The only explanation I have is that someone decided at the last minute that a slow-paced movie like this one wouldn't sell at the box-office.
There may be another explanation.
When young filmmakers are starting out, they start with well over the required amount of ego, and well under the required amount of money. Often they have only half the money they need to finish the film, which they shoot anyway under the assumption that people will be lining up to bankroll their film after they've shot half the script.
When this hoped-for financing falls through, they usually go on a bender and forget all about it. But every once in a while you get someone who is willing to do anything to finish the movie, and they find a producer who makes certain demands of the film: cast a new lead actress, recut the film, even change the genre. Documentaries become slasher films, supernatural horror tales become romantic comedies, kitchen-sink dramas become sci-fi tales.
So it's entirely possible that, having run into funding problems, a fairly intelligent sci-fi film was turned into a slasher flick at the insistence of the producers.
Hmmmm, Species seems to fit that theory fairly well. It wasn't brilliance incarnate, but the first 80% of the movie was at least pleasantly characterised.
Then it turned, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, into a movie about things jumping out from behind other things.
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