Monday, February 7, 2011
What was your Favorite Super Bowl Trailer?
I liked Rango. I will see that in the theatre.
This Transformer movie, with fabulous effects, you'd have to pay me to see it. I've learned my lesson on this franchise. Love that head-on- car-crash change to spinning robots. Probably this trailer shows the only 25 seconds of the movie that doesn't make you feel like you're having 6 inch nails driven into your head.
I also liked Cowboys and Aliens and Capt America.
I still could care less about Thor. Super 8 might be good.
Scriptmag-Characters to do without
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Michael Bay said in an interview I read somewhere the third Transformers movie will atone for the sins of the first two movies and will actually be a flick with something resembling a plot and decent characterization. I don't buy that for a second and have no plans to see this new movie. I tried watching the second movie at home and it irritated me to no end. I couldn't make it through it without fast-forwarding constantly and taking many breaks. Great effects (I guess, I couldn't tell what was going on half the time)schizophrenic 'cinematography' and inappropriate language and humor for the intended audience (children, I would presume) are the hallmarks of this soul-less, crass abomination of a movie franchise. I really can't understand why something so easy to get right has been done so incredibly wrong. All that needs to be done is to take the original animated movie from 1986, update and cool-ify the lamer parts it. Not deviating from the simplistic and admittedly silly original material would make for a fine popcorn flick that would still make a ton of money.
ReplyDeleteCaptain America looks great. I'm trying to keep an open mind about Thor, but it hasn't done much for me so far. Rango looks incredible, but it takes a lot to get me to go to a theater nowadays, so I will probably pass and catch it on DVD.
Remember the Ray Harryhausen film, "Valley of the Gwangi"?
ReplyDeleteCowboys and Dinosaurs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y7v-g7A8zk
I love Valley of Gwangi. One reason to like it it, it was one of the first things Harryhausen ever wanted to do with his skills. So it was delayed until after all his other successful stuff.
ReplyDeleteRonnie, I'm so glad someone hates Transformers as much as I do. When I was still on facebook, right at the beginning when Doug TenNapel was also on, I bitched and reported leaving the theatre after 15 minutes. During the Professor lecture where he eats the apple.
Doug , knowing full well my steady diet of "bad" films, challenged my outraged stance . Telling me to go over to my DVDs and read the titles from left to right of the first 10. Of course it amounted to a grab bag of awful and campy. Any one of which better than Transformers 2. Still haven't watched it. If it's ever on Netflix streaming, maybe. I won't even waste a netflix delivery on it.
Ellis, everything I google says "Valley of Gwangi" was made in 1969, so I would have been 15 or 16 when this movie came out. But in my memory I thought I saw it when I was much younger, more like 1959! I must be imagining things. Do you remember seeing it in the theater when it first came out? How old do you remember being?
ReplyDeleteHa. Missed looking like a know it all by how many milliseconds
ReplyDeleteWow! Further research reveals that there was a 1956 film called "The Beast of Hollow Mountain". That's what I remember seeing as a little kid!
ReplyDelete" The first film to show dinosaurs and cowboys in the same picture it is notable for being based on a story idea by special effects innovator Willis O'Brien."
Funny because the plot summary for Gwangi says that the monster is burned to death in a church. But I remember him dying in a quicksand pit, which is actually the ending to "Beast of Hollow Mountain". My brain has blended the two films over the course of decades.
Both stories were based on Willis O'Brien's original idea. No wonder I got them mixed up. I would have been 3 years old when it came out, but I definitely remember the last scene where the cowboy swings on a rope over the quicksand and lures the dinosaur in.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of about a dozen maddening movies that my Mother gave me the synopsis of the day after it had shown on the late late show. Making it sound like the best fantastic fantasy film ever made. I was allowed to stay up for them I just never had the stamina to stay awake. Others were , The Incredible Behemoth (that was O'Brien), X-The Unknown, The Unearthly, The Maze, etc.
ReplyDeleteI was always mad at her for not some how keeping me awake.
Ellis, I agree with you. Campy and awful are often highly entertaining. Michael Bay movies can't even get being awful right. If the Transformers movies were just simply bad, as in Star-Wars-prequels-bad, I wouldn't hate the films as much as I do. As awful as the SW prequels are, it is possible to enjoy certain aspects of each movie (Phantom Menace being the movie that requires the most effort to enjoy, but even that movie does have some entertaining moments).
ReplyDeleteNot so with the Transformers. Despite the meticulously complex animated transformations, it takes genuine effort to sit through these movies because the experience is so gratingly irritating on every level from the first second to the last. His movies are big, dumb obnoxious assaults on the senses and I get the impression everyone is expected to not care, in a fraternity-nudge-wink-kind of way, how wretchedly sophomoric his movies are.
Movies which are bad, yet good, connect with the audience in some way. Even if the movie is schlock a good bad movie will still find a way to entertain. Whether it's by omission or by design, it is impossible to connect with Bay's soul-less movies on any level. Trying to find a hook in his movies is like trying to establish rapport with a brick. His films are simply frenetic spectacles that wear thin immediately and because he knows his movies make tremendous amounts of money, he can continue to pound out one excessive junker after another with little fear of someone yanking the reigns out of his hands.
Cowboys+Dinosaurs=Win
ReplyDeleteCowboys+Aliens=Fail
Transformers+LiveAction=Fail
Thor+LiveAction=PossibleFail
I've never been a big Cap America fan, so I don't have any investment in that one. I haven't developed any interest in Rango... doesn't mean I won't at some point, but so far it hasn't caught my fancy.
I could care less about any Transformers movie (again, no investment). In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't actually watch the Superbowl or any of its ads... all my judgments are based on what I've seen on the Apple Trailers page.
I did watch Night in the Museum 2 last night and was quite entertained.
Hard to tell from just the trailer, but it looks like they've used CG to make Steve Rogers go from 98 pound weakling to super-soldier. That kind of use for CG always impresses me.
ReplyDeleteYeah Tom. That is cool. I hope it's consistent and sell that it's the actor.
ReplyDelete