Jingus

You'd be disappointed, it's not some sort of I Spit On Your Grave or Irreversible type atrocity. It's what they call Tastefully Done, you don't see much of the event itself. There really is Type A and Type B nudity in movies. Type A is "HEY, LOOKIT DEM TITTIES" where the camera pretty much ogles the flesh and which is clearly sexploitive: like Halle Berry in Swordfish, Gwenyth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, Kate Winslet in Titanic, and probably every movie playin on Cinemax right now. Type B is when the moviemakers deem the nudity is necessary for the story, but are actively trying not to film it in a sexy way. Examples of that would be like when they took Madeline Stowe's shirt off so they could give her those electric paddle thingies to restart her heart in The Abyss, the breif look at topless Meryl Streep on a website in Adaptation, any graphic childbirth scene, and that kind of thing. The most common one is any sex scene where they wanted to keep a sense of realism and so didn't film it in the standard porno kind of way, but also don't make the actors pretend to hump under the covers or while still fully clothed or whatever. So while you might see her tit, you probably see it for like half a second, near the edge of the screen, and in dim lighting; like Keira Knightly in The Jacket. Anyway, point I took too long to make, Gillain Anderson in Straightheads is very much Type B nudity.

Firstly, uh, yeah, I don't think I've ever had any girl ever once tell me that she fantasizes about being raped. On the flip side, I've known several girls who have been raped, and they certainly didn't seem to regard it as sexy. As for Gillain Anderson's sweater muppets in Straightheads? It's not during the rape scene. It's once on a video screen when some perv is peeping on her, and again in a sex scene which never quite gets started and quickly devolves into a bunch of impotence and crying. So, not sexy.

No, I stopped watching it in like the third season. I got tired of the endless alien-government conspiracy crap that never got resolved. I was just trying to make the point that it's probably not going to lose money at the box office, as Bob seemed to be implying. Thirty-five million isn't a huge amount for a movie to take in these days. You mean Straightheads? As in, the rape-revenge flick where she gets reamed like Jodie Foster on a pinball machine? The one where you do briefly see her breasts, but in appallingly unsexy situations? Yeah, seen it, felt queasy afterwards.

Early tracking done by some guys on some website? Why should I care? The movie only has a $35 million dollar budget, so it doesn't have to to smash business to make its money back. Even a shitty-performing movie can make that much. Speed Racer, The Happening, Baby Mama, College Road Trip, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Strangers, Nim's Island, and Hellboy II all made more than that. Not many major releases made less; the only current ones are Meet Dave (which is bombing in a truly unusual fashion) and The Love Guru (which came within 3 mil of hitting the number anyway). So why are you insisting that this movie is gonna lose money?

Ebert's one of the few guys who I'll consistently check out his review on any movie which looks interesting. I've read so much of his stuff that I know his tastes in movies, and how they line up with mine. So even if his opinion of a movie differs from mine (which it often does) I can still get a sense from his review whether or not it's a movie I want to see. The fat jokes are really out of date, since it's been years now since he was last fat. With the cancer and all, he's lost like half his body mass. And I also liked how he totally dissed Rob Schneider. Dude published an entire book with the purpose of dissing Rob Schneider. Now that's a dedication to the artform which I can truly respect.

Gillian was never "hot" per se. She was more what I'd call a "handsome woman". Anyway, why do you say she's less attractive now? She's just older, is otherwise unchanged. And considering it's been fifteen years since the show first started, I'd say she aged remarkably well. Which might matter, if Indiana Jones didn't have 310,487,614 reasons why didn't matter. Anyway, it hasn't been all that long for the others, only six years since X-Files went off the air and seven years since the last Mummy flick. Both franchises have plenty large enough a fanbase and will probably make money.

Why? Name me anything X-Files has ever done which was lamer than Batman and Robin. My point was, people mark for what they mark for. Don't shit on someone because they just happen to like a franchise which you don't. At least unless it's those Parody Movie pieces of shit.

Why in the hell is there another Batman movie??? I have zero interest in seeing that. I mean really, who gives a shit?

Therein lies the problem. Non-fan: "Explain the plot of Watchmen in thirty seconds or less." Me: . . . It's... really, really complicated.

Yeah, but to base the trailer so heavily on that makes it look like Constantine or something. Stupid decision. Speaking of stupid decisions, who the hell decided that Mila Kunis = Mona Sax? That's a part which needs a Carrie-Anne Moss or an Angelina Jolie type, not that 70's chick. And even though the cast is bad and the director has done nothing but generic crap, there is one thing which gives me a little hope. Look closer at the credits. There's two writers credited: one is some nobody who's never done a movie before, but the other one is Shawn Ryan. As in, Shawn "I created The motherfucking Shield" Ryan. If anyone on earth could keep this from being too much of a dumbass video game action flick along the lines of Hitman, it would be him.

Yes, there is. It's called Google Image Search. You just turn off the family filter and type in the words "redhead" and "nude", and after some brief aerobic exercise you should feel better.

Give it a shot sometime, I think you'd like it. A little heavy on the pretentious literary allusions and faggy poetic shit, but still a rather great experience overall. Easily the best thing Gaiman's ever done, at least of the stuff I've read.

I have read it, I said so in the first post. I just added the "barely" because the only way I was exposed to it was that some forgotten kind soul posted the link to for some online archives of the entire Moore run, in the Comics folder like six years ago. I've never read the Gaiman run though. Speaking of which, would you add Sandman in with those other top tier comics you mentioned?

Shitting you how? Not denying it's great. Just repeating the oft-made complaint about how damned hard it is to find. Since they never rerelease it, you pretty much have to go hunt down all the individual issues yourself in comic shops or online auctions. It's not like most of Moore's other stuff, which is easily available at any decent bookstore.

Mac, seriously, why would you expect a guy named "Anakin" to have read Miracleman? Hell, I'm as big a sheeplike Moore mark as anyone, and even I've barely read that one (someone posted links to it online here years ago, never ponied up for whatever Ebay's charging for the collection now). But if he's only been mostly exposed to the type of art which got popularized in the 90s (I think of it as the "The X-Men All Get Steroids And/Or Implants" phenomenon) I could understand how he wouldn't be used to a more old-fashioned style. Especially in the more relatively primitive books like V For Vendetta or From Hell. But of all of them, it does seem to complain about Watchmen, since aside from the aforementioned Killing Joke, it's the most standard and modern of artwork for anything Moore's ever done. Well, from his classic days anyway, not counting more recent stuff like Top 10.

That's a fun guessing game: what movie will knock TDK out of the #1 spot? Admittedly, the competition isn't terribly strong over the next month., though with every passing week the chances of that happening get better. Here's the upcoming major releases: July 25: Stepbrothers, X-Files 2 August 1: Mummy 3, Swing Vote August 8: Pineapple Express, Sisterhood of Travelling Pants 2 August 15: Star Wars: Clone Wars, Tropic Thunder, Mirrors And peeking at the next few weeks after that, it gets even lamer. I don't see any surefire hits until High School Musical 3 and Saw 5 in late October. So I'd say Mummy has as good a shot as anything else at being the first one to slip past TDK. ...godDAMN that's a lot of sequels.

Nevermind the Hogan stuff, how that explanation is REALLY bad bullshit: the Outsiders had held the tag belts for ten months straight at that point. This was already the all-time record holder for longest WCW tag title reign ever, and they'd go on to hold the belts for two more months after that. How exactly do the title changes hurt you when there are no title changes? And people wonder why I still hate Nash.

Considering that the most common cause of unnatural death in this country is car crashes and the most common contributing factor to preventable car crashes is speeding, he does have a point. Though cheering "yeah, go get that BARELY ILLEGAL PASSER, you fought the law and the law WON, MOTHERFUCKER" does seem rather odd.

Wait a minute. Here's an even better question. Why was he in the Queen of the Deathmatch tournament?

That was the one I couldn't decide over with Nosferatu. What an awesome movie. Even more awesome than Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, which revisited a lot of the same themes and was pretty awesome in its own right, but it's got nuthin' on Aguirre. It's the best Evil White Guys Ruin The New World movie ever. Also clearly had a lot of inspiration on Apocalypse Now, which warms my heart towards it even more.

Punk didn't leave "at the first opportunity". He was there for several years, and kept going back even long after he was an ROH headliner. It's not like this is the worst company in the world. This is standard for lower-level outlaw indy promotions. Hell, in Tennessee a couple months back there was a guy who got his ear bit off in a shoot. Shit like this happens all the time. It just doesn't often get turned into a mini-scandal like this. Please note that I'm not defending this, but it's simply wrong to go "OMG, Worst. Fed. Ever." when if you went to many indy shows you'd know that IWA doesn't exactly hold the exclusive patent on shady shenanigans and unnecessary violence.

Just watching that, I could tell about ten seconds in that it was no work. I've been hit by Mickie, and it was a thunderous shot, but it wasn't anything like this. She was obviously trying to hurt the guy for real. For the headbutt, I've seen Mickie do that move countless times without anyone getting a giant welt on their face like that, so without better video footage I'm more inclined to blame the guy than her. Though she got downright dangerous with those lighttube shots, she swung it in a way where a lot of the glass flew out of the ring, though you could make a joke here about the IWA crowd being used to that shit for years now. As for the rest of the beating, yah, overkill to say the least. You could kill someone doing that shit. But this is always the way Ian's done business (refer to the beating he gave Peter B. Beautiful at King of the Deathmatch 2001) so it's not like this is anything new. It didn't help this poor Levy schmuck at all that Ian is often overprotective of Mickie (refer to him ordering the cameras shut off and the building emptied after she broke her leg), I don't think he would've committed the same frightening level of violence on behalf of anyone else on the roster like that. What's the backstory on this? Who's Mike Levy, how'd he get booked against Mickie on an IWA show if he was some untrained jabrony?

To be fair, it's not like the WWF/E has always been a bastion of sound psychology. Like, check out the first Rock/Jericho match for the WCW belt back in 2001. That was twenty minutes of nonstop action, but afterwards it all blended together in my head and I had a hard time remembering any one individual spot from the entire match. It was basically "Jericho hits Rock with a bunch of moves, crowd cheers, Rock makes a comeback and hits Jericho with a bunch of moves, crowd cheers more, wash rinse repeat". That's remarkably similar to what I've thought for a while now. Yes, Sabu's aerial maneuvers lacked precision and grace: so what? His character was that he was supposed to be a fuckin' madman who didn't give a shit about his own safety and took risks that nobody else would. RVD did too many flashy movez~!: so what? His character was the cocky showoff who thought he was the best wrestler on earth because of his flashy moves. It made sense for those guys to wrestle in the style they did. Hell, that's more of an in-ring, wrestling-based character than most WWE guys have now. Like, in storyline terms, what exactly does Triple H do in his matches that makes him unbeatable. Yeah he's teh cereal assasin and teh gheyme and all that, but why does he win, why does he wrestle in the manner and the style that he does? The old ECW actually told those types of stories in the ring; pretty much every guy had a very specific individual style. Sandman: crazy drunk brawler who doesn't give a fuck. Taz: judo champion. Tommy Dreamer: takes insane beatings and innovates offense involving foreign objects. Raven: prefers to be lazy whenever possible, but will step up his game if he's forced to. Jerry Lynn: always makes the mistake of trying to "prove himself" instead of just winning, often tries to match the style of whoever he's wrestling. Mikey Whipwreck: talented kid, but not all there. Mike Awesome: the world's biggest cruiserweight. Spike Dudley: mostly a joke, but has one killer move that he can hit outta nowhere to beat anyone. New Jack: homicidal street thug who don't know a wristlock from a wristwatch, but will just straight beat you to death. So forth and so on. Now tell me: along similar lines, what's John Cena's style? Yeah he has freaky retard strength and DEFIES THE ODDS~!, but why does this man wrestle the way he does? Answer: because that's the way the WWE wants all their top guys to wrestle. And it's lots more boring, at least it is to me.

I wouldn't have minded it so much if Other than that, it's fucking awesome. "...the hammer is my penis." Gold.

Exactly, all of those movies had very specific reasons why they sucked, usually because of studio interference, often including personel changes for the worse. Superman III: they tossed Richard Donner, gave way too much time to Richard Pryor, and most of the original supporting cast refused to do anything but brief cameos Batman Forever: Tim Burton > Joel Schumacher Blade Trinity: screenwriter David S. Goyer happened to shat out his worst script in years while simultaneously making the dumbass decision to direct it himself X3: Bryan Singer >>>>>>>> Brett Ratner Spiderman 3: studio insisted they had to include Venom Though truthfully not all of these were the same level of suck, for me at least. X3 was downright unwatchable, Blade Trinity was frustratingly worse than the others in the series, and Batman Forever and Superman III unfortunately went for a more goofy, unambitious tone than the films which preceeded them. But while I certainly don't think it's anywhere near the quality that part 2 exemplified, I thought Spider-man 3 was okay. Hell, I'd put it on about the same level as the first one, which I always thought was overrated. EDIT: and another agreement here that one of the mods needs to change the title of this thread since it's not the real boxoffice wanking we do here each week.