What was the last movie you saw?

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by Galacticdefender

I just watched Das Boot for the first time. That is an amazing movie. Filmed in 1981, and the special effects are very good even by today's standards. Totally captures the feeling of living on a German U-Boat. I think this is one of the best war movies out there, and I would recommend it anyone who is even slightly interested in the history of WW2. Awesome movie.

Unsurprisingly, I'm going to say it's too long (and there are versions even longer than what I have, I think) but I agree that it's a must-see movie. Some movies I like to see again and again - with this one, I don't think I'll do that, but it's still great and I'm glad to have seen it at least once.

[j. d. worthington]

That last I saw was not a complete film, but all that remains of an early short which featured a double role by Lon Chaney... Alas and Alack, from 1915 (the date given at the beginning of the piece is mistaken, as Chaney only appeared in one film in 1913, and this is recorded as having been released 10 October 1915), in which he plays "the hunchback Fate" in a fairy tale which a fisherman's wife tells to her child, and the fisherman himself (obviously the real-life counterpart of the figure in the tale). Pure melodrama, but it has some lovely touches to it, and even a little bit of magic which faintly echoes to this day....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHMxsuHuPTI

[AE35Unit]

John Carter
Where do I start...
They kept it on mars, first mistake-come on Disney, your audience isnt stupid!
The jumping, gets old really quickly!
The visual tone, mars is a cold cold planet, but they made it look like the sahara!
The context, its cowboys and indians, again!

And finally, the Star Wars references, George Lucas wont be happy, but he aint fool enough to go up against Disney!
I sort of tried to enjoy it, but failed! I liked the homage to the author at the end tho,!

[Moonbat]

Just watched Batman Begins and then The Dark Knight in preparation for The Dark Knight Rises on saturday

Pretty good films, I doubt the new one will live up to the hype

[Allegra]

Originally Posted by Moonbat

Just watched Batman Begins and then The Dark Knight in preparation for The Dark Knight Rises on saturday

Pretty good films, I doubt the new one will live up to the hype

Totally loved the first two and I've been looking forward to the 3rd! The Denver shooting incident certainly casted a dark shadow on the film's opening.

[JunkMonkey]

Would someone please explain the fascination with the Dark gothicy moody doom-laden angsty-wanky Batman because I find him a tedious self-obsessed bore.

I saw The Dark Knight a couple of years ago when I realised it was directed by Christopher Nolan whose Memento had really impressed me. The Dark Knight was a real disappointment - just another Hollywood special effects heavy superhero movie. I was bored. Mind you, I'm not the target audience. I'm not a teenager and have long since pretended to myself that I still I am one. Maybe that's it.

[Rangerton]

Just watched Real steel could have called it Rocky's robots

I enjoyed it though. Hugh Jackman played a good part, and the kid in it is very good.

[FireDragon-16]

Just finished The Blue and the Gray.

Filmed in 1982, it's the story of the civil war yes, but in reality, I think it's actually the story of one of the families and how they made it through the war, especially when the Geyser's fought for the south and the Hale's (their cousins) fought for the north, and John Geyser refused to fight for either. According to reviews, it's one of the best movies about the civil war and seems to stick fairly close to what happened.

I highly recommend it!

[FeedMeTV]

Saw The Dark Night Rises last night - I've heard there have been some negative reviews but I thought it was brilliant.

[Starbeast]

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

I thought it was a pretty good retelling of the Spider-Man origin, but I wasn't satisfied with new Peter Parker, he seemed grungy rather than clean cut. I did like going back to the original comic book idea of inventing his web-shooters. I was thrilled to see another classic Spidey villain "the Lizard" on the big screen.

I was asked by people which Spider-Man I liked better, the original three, or this new film. I didn't want to compare the movies, because I felt they were both very different, but since I was forced to make a decision, I had to say I love the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films the best.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Yep, I was in the mood for more of Marvel Comics wall-crawling web-slinger. I haven't seen this movie in a few years, but I was blown away at how great it was. Peter Parker discovers who really killed his uncle and battles the classic villain "the Sand Man" along with one of his newer and most popular villain, "Venom".

I am aware that director Sam Raimi was rushed to make this movie, but I thought he did an awesome job of bringing closure to the trilogy. For me, this film could have been titled: The SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, for it's drama, as well as action.

To heck with the critics!

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by AE35Unit

John Carter
They kept it on mars, first mistake-come on Disney, your audience isnt stupid!
The jumping, gets old really quickly!
The visual tone, mars is a cold cold planet, but they made it look like the sahara!
The context, its cowboys and indians, again!

Okay, you're gonna have to explain this to me.

"John Carter of Mars". So why should it not be on Mars?

Burroughs liked to talk about John Carter's "Earth trained muscles". So jumping is part of the deal. So is smashing, flinging and otherwise beating the stink out of the bad guys.

Mars is not a hospitable destination for space explorers. We know that now. But Burroughs in 1912 probably wasn't playing all that fast and loose with known science.

Cowboys & Indians. Well, this is about good guys and bad guys. Paint 'em up any way you like.

The film certainly had its faults. Ironically, however, the thing that probably kept it from being a box office hit was that it actually tried to follow the original story to a large degree. Much better fan appeal these days to re-write everything and proceed any way you choose. Just use the title. The blazes with the story.

(Oh, and congrats on 5000 posts!)

[Metryq]

Originally Posted by clovis-man

But Burroughs in 1912 probably wasn't playing all that fast and loose with known science.

It was "known" at the time that Mars was unlikely to support advanced life, but that didn't stop Percival Lowell's reported observations from becoming a sensation. Similarly, spectrographs of Venus showed that it could not be the rain forest imagined by some, but that did not stop sci-fi writers from using the idea late into the 20th century.

Steam punk is just one genre where known violations of science or at least technology are par for the course. And Einsteinian Relativity never stopped writers from invoking faster-than-light starships.

I haven't seen JOHN CARTER yet, but I know it will not have the one thing that I liked most about the books: the flowery language—including every character's penchant for long soliloquies—and the completely over-the-top superlatives of John Carter.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by Metryq

It was "known" at the time that Mars was unlikely to support advanced life, but that didn't stop Percival Lowell's reported observations from becoming a sensation.

Then again, I've seen a 1953 encyclopedia (The Standard International Encyclopedia, William H. Hendelson, Editor-in-Chief) that says Mars' "seasons are quite similar to ours. Its atmosphere is like ours and has clouds. The telescope reveals reddish spots that are thought to be continents and greenish tints which are considered bodies of water. The proportion of land to water is directly reversed from that of the earth, fully three-fourths being land."

That much, huh?

Things then were probably much as now - there are the life-skeptics who see a barren solar system (I have to include myself - though I'd be happy to be proven wrong) and then there are the life-believers who insert life under the surface of Mars and in moons and everywhere they possibly can where it hasn't been verified that life absolutely isn't. So it depends on who the person listens to.

As far as Burroughs playing fast and loose, though, his method of travel to Mars and the nature of Dejah Thoris and various other things say that strict adherence to science would never get in the way of his telling a yarn. Then again, those two points aren't much different from FTL and "just alike but for the bumpy foreheads" of more recent things generally called SF - gotta get there somehow and, since Carter's method of locomotion meant he couldn't take any ladies with him, there had to be an alien one there for him.

[clovis-man]

J-Sun and Metryq: Interesting posts. I had to chuckle because I had resisted the urge to quote Wikipedia. But it's true that the whole canals controversy (and a lot of other things) never got solved until we got a better look at Mars via the Mariner spacecraft in the 1960s. One thing I noted while I was digging was that as early as 1909, a spectrographic analysis had shown that there was very little water in Mars' atmosphere. So wouldn't that make for a good premise of a Martian desert?

[Alex, The G and T]

I've pretty much had my fill of comic book super hero movies; but my daughter made me watch The Green Hornet.

Turned out that the movie is pretty funny, in a Hangover fashion. Better, the flick is quite campy, in the tradition of the olden radio plays upon which the original was based.

Reminded me of a weekly, goofball spoof "The Brown Hornet and Leroy" which was on my pop radio station, when I was tennish inage, in the late 60's.

***

On a side note... I saw an episode of the Adam West, 60's Batman tv shows recently.

I had forgotten how campy that was; and resolved the mystery of why Captain Kirk talked that way he did: Adam West pioneered that ridiculous, staccatto delivery of mock-dramatic lines slightly before, or about the same time as Kirk debuted.