Jingus

That's one problem, when a remake just repeats the original movie and doesn't even try to do anything different. Of course Gus Van Sant's Psycho is the poster child of this, but a few other remakes have done similar crap, The Omen for example. What's the point of even remaking it then, if you're going to literally make the exact same movie over again?

25 kids. I was ambivalent about how hard and dirty I'd fight against a bunch of five year olds. And I think the questions about weight and balance knocked me down a bit. It doesn't have a difference between Steven Segal fat, John Goodman fat, or Guiness Book of Records fat, it all just says "overweight". I'm oddly inconsistent when it comes to various exercises. Bad on a treadmill, good on a rowing machine. Bad on curling motions, good at pushing weight straight up or out. Like, I can do a dozen reps on an overhead press machine lifting my own body weight with no problem, but trying to curl even 40 or 50 pounds leaves me feelings like I just broke something. Similarly, I've gotten up around 500 pounds on the leg press, but on that machine which I forget the name of where you sit and the bar presses on your shins and you raise it that way, let's just say "way way less than 500 pounds".

I don't think there really has been a definitive Celebrity Deathmatch type of movie, has there? Lord knows there have been enough attempts at it, from the various old Most Dangerous Game pictures to The Condemned. The original Running Man was kinda goofy and suffered from some weird plot decisions, though the potential was definitely there. Part of that may be bias on my part, but I did think The Ring was a big improvement on Ringu. It got rid of the stupid subplot about the dad being psychic, and added some more creepy backstory about the little girl, plus it was just generally a more slick and polished production. Admittedly I did see the American version first, and the fact that it actually scared the shit out of me (an incredibly rare thing for any horror movie, period) might have led me to expect more than was fair from the original Japanese version. Actually I don't think we have, not with me anyway. Interesting opinion. I did think that the original Halloween was always a bit overrated by people who put it up there with stuff like Psycho, Alien, Texas Chainsaw, Jaws, or whatever when talking about the best horror flicks ever. Hell, it's not even my favorite movie Carpenter has made, I'd put The Thing ahead of it for sure, and a couple others might be debatable. And I did think that Zombie's remake has received unfairly harsh treatment from some quarters, even though I don't think that his final product quite matched his ambition. Why did you like it so much? Because of the scenes with the little kid version of Michael? I did admire that part, though once it got to the masked adult version it felt like Zombie kinda lost his nerve for retconning and mostly just stayed faithful to the original version. I understand where you're coming from, if they didn't spend that money on this stupid remake, they'd probably just spend it on an equally stupid original picture. And it usually at least guarantees that the original movie is re-released in a nice special edition on DVD. But I always have this kneejerk emotional reflex whenever anyone takes a franchise which I used to like and makes a crappy new version of it. As previously implied, if I ever happen to find myself standing at Paul W.S. Anderson's grave, I might seriously consider relieving my bladder upon it for the crappy, crappy movies he's made from various original sources which I greatly cherished.

This is Fox we're talking about, don't forget.

I hates them wascally wemakes so much, I posted it twice.

Most of them do deserve it. How many of the recent horde of remakes we've gotten have been good movies which weren't significantly inferior to the original films? Off the top of my head, I've got Dawn of the Dead and The Ring, and I'm running empty after that. And some of them are so much insanely worse (The Fog definitely comes to mind) that it pisses me off that they wasted money bastardizing an old favorite of mine instead of just spending it on an all-new movie. I mean, I understand why they do it since it's pretty hard for movies to lose money these days with the DVD market and remakes guarantee some built-in name value, but still, outside of "movies based on a video game" it's hard to think of a genre which has produced more pieces of crap than "remakes of other movies". And then we've got Death Race. Okay, this movie already has a strike against it for me because it was made by the same guy who did Alien vs Predator, so I'll probably be snarky and bitchy about it no matter what. But that's far from the only thing that worries me. The original Death Race 2000 had the greatest sociopathic concept ever: a race where hitting innocent pedestrians gets you points! And the racers, far from being reviled as murderers, are embraced and worshipped as national celebrities. But the remake changes it to some Running Man or Twisted Metal type of concept where it's a bunch of condemned prisoners trying to kill each other instead. It's a gutless and cowardly change which rather strongly undermines the possible satiric overtones and social commentary of the storyline.

Did anyone miss this? Those damn partisan embezzlers at the Red Cross ain't getting his six hundred bucks, bah gawd.

To be honest, actually I have known quite a few people that have refused to for that very reason, or have stayed away from it even if they've tried it because of the possible legal repercussions involved. I was like that. I never drank before I was 21, and never did drugs at all back then, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that you could go to jail for it, plain and simple. If it were legal earlier, I probably would've tried it earlier. However I don't think my behavior while drunk would've altered, since I was still mostly the same person at 21 that I was at 18 and hadn't really changed much. As long as they're above the state's age of consent and you didn't actually supply them with the alcohol yourself, there's no law against picking up drunk teenage chicks now. Slippery Slope argument? Ugh. Can we put those on the list with Nazi comparisons as tactics which should be disqualified from online debates? But we're not talking about underage kids. We're talking about legal adults. And schools mostly already ban any alcoholic drinks on school property, so they're not legally liable anyway unless you can prove they're intentionally subverting their own rules. But when you're 18, you are an adult. You can vote, own property, own guns, drive, have kids, get a job where people will shoot at you, and do it all legally. Why is drinking the one thing which has an arbitrarily higher age of consent? It's illogical, and saying "well I think drinking rates might go up" or "if I had to wait, so does everyone else, goddammit" aren't good arguments in favor of that artificial limit.

I dunno. On one hand, I think that essentially promoting more drinking is generally a bad idea, in theory at least. But I've always thought it was damned bizarre that you can drive a car at 16, have sex and get drafted at 18, but have to wait until 21 to drink a beer.

This. I don't go in that folder much, but it seems like every time I read one of his posts it's a nearly physical experience of pain.

I think I've told that one before. I just find it funny that for once a critic actually got exactly what they asked for, and it was such a terrible idea that they pretended they never said such a thing.

The funny thing is it's happened before, and then everyone who asked for it pretended otherwise. On an episode of Siskel & Ebert sometime in the mid-late 90s, they reviewed a crappy French movie called Little Indian, Big City. They both hated it and buried it. On the same show, they reviewed some remake of some classic movie, can't remember exactly what. One of them complained that Hollywood shouldn't be remaking good movies, they should try to remake and improve some pieces of crap like Little Indian, Big City. Well, a year goes by, and wouldn't you know it, here's the crappy Tim Allen flick Jungle 2 Jungle, a direct remake of Little Indian, Big City! Neither Siskel nor Ebert seemed to remember that they literally demanded that this movie be made when they tore it apart in their reviews.

Should this technically go in the Fucking Wisconsin thread?

Speaking of newish Batman cartoons, anyone ever catch that The Batman piece o' crap? I saw that The Batman vs Dracula direct-to-video movie they made, and whoa Jesus was it terrible. They literally made the Joker into a barefoot monkeyman with dreadlocks who fought with wire-fu.

"Helper often speaks about the upcoming war between mankind and his machine brothers." ...fuckin' two-parter cliffhanger.

I still wish they'd make Werewolf Women of the SS into a real movie. Of all the fake trailers in Grindhouse, why did they choose freaking Machete, the most boring and conventional-looking one, to actually finish into a feature film?

I did like that one a lot. Of course, I'm a fan of Tarkovsky's original too, so I'm biased. Soderbergh changed just enough stuff to make it different and not a xerox of the original, but left enough alone that the basic story was still intact. One of the better-done remakes of this depressingly remake-filled decade.

When is the alleged press conference supposed to take place?

I actually own a copy of Crimewave, and it's not THAT bad, it's flawed but has its moments. But yeah, I don't see the comparison to Eternal Sunshine at all, no similarities whatsoever except both being printed on celluloid and being projected onto a large screen. Maybe he was joking?

whaaaaaaat? This is coming from YOU??? Well, it's different from a "What Movies Have You Seen Today" type thread. In that one, in theory any given movie from Birth of a Nation to Tropic Thunder might be discussed, so it's not fair to just randomly spring spoilers on people who possibly haven't seen that movie. But in a thread like this, a sixty-page monster devoted to just one movie which we've almost certainly all seen by now, not the same thing. If you click on a thread which is specifically about one particular movie and it came out several weeks ago, you should expect that people are, y'know, talking about shit that happened in the movie. Same reason I haven't ventured into the Metal Gear Solid 4 thread: I haven't played the game yet, and don't want any surprises ruined, so I stay away from the one place where spoilers are guaranteed.

Bruce Campbell is great at playing Bruce Campbell-type parts. But he doesn't have much range outside of that. Like when he played a serious role as a tormented cop on Homicide, he was average at best.

I'm kinda in between you two. I do agree that The Fountain was by far Aronofsky's worst movie, way below Pi and Requiem. But I do gotta give him props on making it just look so damned amazing, one of the more beautifully shot movies I've seen in a long time. Too bad the story was so incoherent and pretentious. And oh MAN could you tell that Weisz was the director's wife, it was definitely one of those cases where the guy making the movie is so in love with his star that he just assumes that everyone else will love her too and forgets to build up her character so that we'll care about her. Actually, that reminds me of a pet peeve of mine: movies where they have people crying a lot. I mean, where they have the same characters crying all the damn time. Kevin Kline's Hamlet was real bad about that too, iirc. Yes, it's impressive that you can use the Method or whatever to produce real tears. But you don't need to remind us about it every five minutes. It's like if you had a wrestling show where every worker got busted open in every match. Overkill, and dilutes the impact for the high points where it would really help sell the emotion.

Yeah, we talked about it a whole bunch. General consensus is but there were a few who disagreed. ...do we really need the spoiler tags anymore? I mean, if you're in this thread and haven't seen it by now...

Still, point is, he's been in a whole hell of a lot of movies which most people would say didn't suck. The NOES remake will suck because it's a horror remake, not because of whoever plays Freddy.

It had to have been intentional. Even the WWE isn't that stupid. Steiner hadn't wrestled in two years. He had a broken foot. He was still suffering from his longterm back problems. And he was carrying so much muscle mass that even if he was in perfect health, he still couldn't perform a long main event-style match without getting completely blown up pretty quickly. You do NOT take a guy like that and stick him in a 20-minute long match in the main event of a frigging PPV. Yet that's exactly what they did, without even giving him any warm-up matches beforehand. They knew damn well how bad off Steiner was, since they did all that crap with arm-wrestling and posedowns and bench press challenges even before he and Triple H stunk the joint out at the Rumble. They went out of their way to keep Steiner from actually wrestling at all, until he was tossed into the deep end with a high-profile match which was booked to go longer than anyone could reasonably expect Steiner to go. That's gotta be deliberate sabotage. Especially since Hunter was probably the one calling the match (between being the boss's son in law, the champion, the experienced WWE main eventer, the guy who'd actually wrestled over the past year and wasn't rusty, and the heel in the match, he would've almost certainly been the one in charge), so you can most likely blame the bad pacing and repetitive spots on him. Hunter gets to say "well, I tried to get a good match out of him, but he couldn't do anything!". Considering this was in the Quadruple H period where he put out the workout book and was constantly so roid-bloated that he looked like he was always about to explode, I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that Trips might've felt threatened by a guy whose muscular physique was even more freakish than his own.