Sep 24 2010
Our RSS Feed- The Batman: what were they thinking (1.5 stars out of 5)The Batman was terrible. If you’re mainly watching this for comedic potential, I’d get as many Spanish-speakers or gringos as you can find, and let’s learn about the difference between “el” and “la” with Batman. –There’s a spectacularly strange scene where Batman tries interrogating Riddler and Riddler bursts into a soprano rendition of Ave Maria. […]
- Suicide Squad sequel: 2.5 stars out of 5, far improved over original–There’s intense violence but not a lot of feeling here. It’s not a very exciting movie. But it’s functional. It’s frequently tedious but rarely boring. Only the political sermons and Weasel are viciously bad. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the first movie. –Most of what sucked about Suicide Squad 1 was an overfocus on […]
- Hour 1 of Justice League’s Snyder Cut, Scene By Scene1:30 – 6:55: Cyborg sees his Mother Box acting up. Then Mera sees her Mother box acting up. Then Amazon guards see their Mother Box acting up. Also there’s a Lex Luthor flashback where the computer shows him that Mother Boxes are plot relevant in case you missed that. PS: In the first 8 minutes […]
- 2020: Even Wonder Woman Lets Us Down–Wonder Woman 1984 is not nearly as good at the original. Pluses: the cast is still very charming, and a few of the fight scenes are effective. I did actually like most of the first hour of the movie. –Setting: In the original Wonder Woman, the WWI setting contributes to a hard bleakness which effectively […]
- Captain Marvel Review: 1.5 Stars Out of 51. I don’t know where to start with Captain Marvel. So many things went so wildly wrong that we’d need a presidential commission to get to the bottom of it. It’s like the Chernobyl of superhero movies. 2. If at any point you feel like your action movie would benefit from a character whose main […]
- Spider-Man: Far From Home Review (1 star out of 5)1. This version of Spider-Man is a useless toolbox who actively avoids doing interesting things, and what he does attempt is usually wimpy and/or incompetent. 2. Unlike most main characters, his choices don’t matter much. For example, he chooses to leave his supersuit at home (but his aunt sneaks it in anyway) and he tries […]
- Rotten Tomatoes Score Dataset UpdatedWe’re up to 72 superhero movies since 2000 (current as of November 2017). You can download the full data here. Some observations: R movies are making up the quality gap with PG-13 movies. Superhero movies are improving. Over the last 5 years (2013-2017), the average superhero movie is averaging 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, up […]
- The Batman: what were they thinking (1.5 stars out of 5)
Quite funny, in my opinion.
That was hilarious, heh.
Yet also scary, the albino snake creature looked exactly like my sister-in-law, extremely similar appearances, plus, she too has a habit of flying directly at the camera.
Horror works best when it just might be true.
Great punchline. Makes no sense on so many levels. Like irony made of plastic.
True story: My friends and I were at the movies and we saw an opening attraction for Devil (M. Night Shyamalan’s horror movie about people stuck in an elevator), and people were laughing. At first it was just a few people giggling, but it got pretty loud after MNS’s name was shown.
Is it really about them being stuck in an elevator? I thought that was just some aspect that comes along at some point. That sounds wack. I’m quite angry at Shymalan for what he did to The Last Airbender. The series was amazing, but the movie couldn’t nip the heels of the show. Although, the action was pretty good. Then again, it’s 2010, what action isn’t good?
Umm, yeah, the premise of the movie is that several people are trapped in an elevator car with the Devil. Worst of all, it is brazenly obvious that the Devil is the killer, but the movie thinks that it’s being suspenseful by throwing out obvious red herrings (like “did the rich woman get killed by her husband’s employee for the insurance money?”–obviously not, given that we know the Devil is doing the killing).
I haven’t SEEN The Last Airbender and I have no intention of doing so. From what I’ve heard it has just been so intensely messed up that it makes no sense. They even cut the Kyoshi Warriors out, and they’re very important later on! Maybe it was for the best, given that Suki, the leader, looked about 30 in the pictures from the set and Sokka’s a teenager. And they’re meant to have a thing for each other! Ewww…
I really hope they reboot it later, the way they did with the Hulk movies. Then I’ll go see it. The screenplay needs to be written by the creators or at least someone they choose to write it, the characters NEED to fit what they looked like in the show and say the names right! It’s AANG, not UNG. (facepalm)
“They even cut the Kyoshi Warriors out, and they’re very important later on!” Well, they had to cover a season of 20 episodes (about 450 minutes of airtime) in an 100 minute movie, so I think it’d be very hard to get everything in. I sorta wish they would’ve cut more, actually.
…
A lot of plot elements would have to be pared down and/or removed to make the length, I think. Maybe ~75% of the first season, possibly more after factoring in that the movie might drag out the fight scenes for visual effect. The series doesn’t strike me as a particularly promising fit for a movie adaptation. For one thing, they didn’t have nearly as much screentime to work with as the Harry Potter or LOTR or even the Watchmen teams did. But I think the conventional wisdom is that younger viewers would have trouble handling a movie significantly longer than 1 hour and 45 minutes. (The actual age of the audience is older, I think, but they didn’t ask me).
PS: I’d recommend seeing it. I found it quite horrible, but at least it’ll give you some more ideas about what precisely went wrong. (Good God, it was a long list).
I am a fan of movies with twists, but one of the things that trips writers up is that everything revolves so closely around the twist that if you figure it out early or if you figure out that you just can’t figure it out because it’s going to come out of left field that it’s not particularly entertaining.
I have a novel that is Shyamalanesque insofar as it does turn out the character has been dead the entire time (I started with it before MNS got started), but one of the things that I strived to do was make it interesting on its own merits even apart from the twist. The twist is simply the revelation of the main character as to why these supernatural elements have been following him around. I got the period where he’s freaking out over the fact that he’s talking to people that have died out of the way as having taken place before the novel starts. Tried to keep it something that the audience would be curious about, but it’s sort of a side question wherein the main question is the protagonist’s quest.
Not sure how well I succeeded. The novel got so long that I basically split it into two and haven’t written the second installment. So people who have read the first novel don’t actually know the “twist” but so far nobody has objected. At least among my friends, they can accept supernatural elements simply being there without having to be explained in detail. I’m not sure how true that is with the larger public, though. When it came to LOST everyone wanted a scientific and logistical explanation for everything.
“I have a novel that is Shyamalanesque insofar as it does turn out the character has been dead the entire time (I started with it before MNS got started), but one of the things that I strived to do was make it interesting on its own merits even apart from the twist.” Good plan. That way, in case you come across an editor that isn’t quite feeling the twist, the story is still functional.
In your case, I think the Sixth Sense is possibly sufficiently well-known that readers will be able to guess why the character sees dead people/supernatural elements.
Also, you may able to plug the plot hole that Sixth Sense didn’t. How does Bruce Willis’ character go several days without talking to anybody but his one patient?