Oh, yeah.....another MSM (mainstream media) favorite was Kinsey -- a movie which portrays a real-life pedophile-disguised-as-a-scientific-researcher as having been a great Hero of His Day.  Much like the movie Birdman of Alcatraz portrayed the real-life violent murderer and sick criminal Robert Stroud as a man with a humane social conscious and a man who was possessed of depths of moral understanding over his jailers.

Needless to say, Kinsey flopped at the box office.  Big time.  But some of the professional movie critics absolutely loved that work of fiction-presented-as-biography.

It's true: often the critics love what the public hates, and vice-versa.

What are people thoughts on Bicentennial Man? I absolutely love it even though it doesn't stick rigidly to the original story.

Quote - ...Cars
Ratatuille...

Yep, loved them both.

I never listen to critics. Half the time the movies they rave about suck and the movies they say suck are excellent! Who are these critics and what special skill do they have to say what we should or should not see. They are just people with opinions, why we give them such credibility is beyond me.

I stopped listening to mainstrem critics after one described a movie as 'a pointless movie that jumps confusingly from shot to shot. it won't do well and will flop.'

1986.. reviewer was Barry Norman in the UK on Film '86..

the movie?

that well known flop Highlander.....

Heh. I can't wait to see what Pixar does with the option for 'John Carter of Mars'. Particularly since (a) Pixar has expressed wanting to do more than kiddie movies, and (b) Just about everone is butt naked for about the last half of the book.... Talk about a challenge..... For that matter, we might even see Pixar fall victim to the Beowulf Effect (that little known physical law that requires that no matter what kind of gymnastics occur, there is always -something- in the foreground to obscure the naughty bits)

Look at some of the movies mentioned - lets start with Golden Compass.  The story simply doesn't appeal to the vast majority of people because of it's atheistic undertones, and while that might be all the rage in Hollywood, they simply haven't figured out that the majority of the population of the US (and most other countries, for that matter) are religious in some shape or form.

Oh, man, are you out in left field with that one.  One of the criticisms of the movie from fans of the book series was that the script toned down or eliminated many of the elements critical of religion in order to pander to a religious public.  This despire the fatc that (a) Pullman's problem isn't with the idea of a deity or faith, it's with religion and how that's corrupted by people and (b) the atheistic elements are very subtle and dont' get explicit until the third book anyway when Pullman lets it get away from him.

In point of fact, Hollywood and the TV industry is incredibly sympathetic toward religion.  If anything, it's we atheists who are getting the shaft.  Quick, name a fictional TV series or movie where atheism plays a major role or there's a major character who is an atheist and a normal person.  Takes you a while to think of one, if any, doesn't it?

Quick, name a fictional TV series or movie where atheism plays a major role or there's a major character who is an atheist and a normal person.  Takes you a while to think of one, if any, doesn't it?

Red Dwarf. took 2 seconds to think of it. (Rimmer (sorry brain fart) is an athiest. )

Quick, name a fictional TV series or movie where atheism plays a major role or there's a major character who is an atheist and a normal person.  Takes you a while to think of one, if any, doesn't it?

*Red Dwarf. took 2 seconds to think of it. (Rimmer (sorry brain fart) is an athiest. )

*I repeat, where an atheist is a normal person.

I mean someone who goes to work, has normal relationships, isn't someone constantly agonizing over their "lack of faith" or whatever.  They're just someone who doesn't believe in a deity.  Full stop.  They don't undergo a sudden revelation, they're not constantly playing Agent Scully in the face of evidence, and, most importantly, they're not displayed as somehow wring or deluded.

If I was being mean, no science-fiction allowed.  Only fictional work that is based in the here and now.

Eastenders.
MASH.
Coronation Street.
Neighbours.
Law and Order.
CSI.

Quote - @Stepdad --

We agree 110%.

Brokeback Mountain was one of the most MSM-favored, over-hyped under-perfomers of a movie to come along in decades.  To read the press clippings, you'd think that the entire country was lining up at the theaters -- unable to contain themselves waiting to see this brilliant, inspiring film.

The reality was quite different........but hey, the movie was incredibly cheap to make by today's standards, and it eeked out a couple of dollars in profit (no CG required) -- so that meant that BM was the biggest movie house success since......since........A Beautiful Mind ! 

No, I haven't seen it.  In fact, I haven't even seen A Beautiful Mind.

Lol... A Beautiful Mind.. don't bother.  Even if someone offers to bring it over on DVD, don't bother. Even if they tell you they'll pay you money to sit and watch it with them, don't bother.

Sadly I sat through about 30 minutes of Brokeback mountain.  My wife is a big movie buff so we saw it on cable TV - and to call this movie awful would be the understatement of the century.  Funniest thing was, after half an hour of agony wife turned to me and said "You know, even if this were about a heterosexual couple it would be an awful movie".  I scared the dog half to death diving for the remote,.. lol..

I saw all of a Beautiful Mind, again thanks to cable TV.  That was one of those that my wife actually apologized to me for afterwards.  "Sorry honey, I kept thinking it was going to get better and it just never did".. lol..

Sadly Hollywood just churns out a lot of crap and not much in the way of good entertainment anymore, and the problem is not so much CG or the lack of it, it's a lack of talent for writing good characters and storylines and a lack of understanding on the part of Hollywood execs that not everyone, in fact very few people share their core values or worldview.  Mostly it's a total lack of clarity about the fact that for myself and others like me, when we pay the kind of prices you have to pay to go see a movie nowadays in the theater we want to be entertained, not preached at.

Quote - Oh, man, are you out in left field with that one.  One of the criticisms of the movie from fans of the book series was that the script toned down or eliminated many of the elements critical of religion in order to pander to a religious public.  This despire the fatc that (a) Pullman's problem isn't with the idea of a deity or faith, it's with religion and how that's corrupted by people and (b) the atheistic elements are very subtle and dont' get explicit until the third book anyway when Pullman lets it get away from him.

In point of fact, Hollywood and the TV industry is incredibly sympathetic toward religion.  If anything, it's we atheists who are getting the shaft.  Quick, name a fictional TV series or movie where atheism plays a major role or there's a major character who is an atheist and a normal person.  Takes you a while to think of one, if any, doesn't it?

Well, fans of the book series probably aren't too religious to begin with, so consider the audience there.  Hollywood may have tried to tone down the antireligious themes from the book, but most peoples objection to the movie (as far as the moviegoing public was concerned) was that it was based on an antireligious series of books.

Hollywood is certainly in no way, shape or form sympathetic to religion, in fact they are normally quite caustic about it, but that certainly isn't a debate suited for this particular forum. 

Quote - What are people thoughts on Bicentennial Man? I absolutely love it even though it doesn't stick rigidly to the original story.

I forgot about that one. One of my favorite non comedy movies that Robin Williams  did. Heard a rumor a few years back that someone wanted to do a reunion of Mork and Mindy but Robin stated no he does not want to live thru the shazbot thing again. Don't blame him there!

Quote - Hollywood is certainly in no way, shape or form sympathetic to religion, in fact they are normally quite caustic about it, but that certainly isn't a debate suited for this particular forum. 

Which is why I didn't make a fuss over that particular aspect of the matter in my opening post, and I instead put the emphasis on the CG aspect.  Some debates are appropriate for this forum: others are not.

Issues like the atheism angle can be debated at Townhall.com (linked below) -- a place more suited to that sort of subject matter.

However -- I will mention that I suspect that we agree on a great many things, Stepdad. 

Quote -
Which is why I didn't make a fuss over that particular aspect of the matter in my opening post, and I instead put the emphasis on the CG aspect.  Some debates are appropriate for this forum: others are not.

Issues like the atheism angle can be debated at Townhall.com (linked below) -- a place more suited to that sort of subject matter.

However -- I will mention that I suspect that we agree on a great many things, Stepdad. 

Lol.. not used to having people agree with me, I'll have to adjust to that. :)

No amount of CGI can make up for crappy storytelling.  The problem with CGI movies is not the CGI, but with the relaince upon special efects to hold the films together.  Beowulf, like 300 before it, was a boring film.  Even watching it in 3D, I started to get sleepy.  People aren't going to line up to watch video games on the big screen.  At least Beowulf didn't carry the deplorable political message of 300.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was very successful, in part because the books had a widespread fan base, but also because Peter Jackson knows how to tell a story visually and not make his films about the special effects.  There are many films, in fact, in which the CGI is not noticeable--films you might not expect used CGI, but were digitially enhance in terms of color, or where backgrounds, etc. were dropped in instead of the filmmakers' relying on matte paintings.

The fact is, however, that the imagination and creativity of the art directors has exceeded that of the stories that are told.  How many times can we watch scenes of endless murder without actual content?  Because Hollywood films are a business and are designed to make a profit, not to be genuinely interesting or original.

It's hard for me to believe that the population that has elevated Fox filth to a major entertainment would recoil from an anti-clerical fantasy. Most Americans are too illiterate to figure out that Narnia is a Christian allegory without somebody waving a sign at them, much less that The Golden Compass is an "atheist fantasy." And there is nothing blasphemous in the first Dark Materials book, so I think the fundie notion that they have scored another victory like the one they scored on the wonderful and very "blasphemous" Last Temptation is just a bit of that wishful thinking that characterizes a minority in decline, raging against the dying of the light they imagined. Hollywood, in spite of its dominance by Godless, high-minded, disdainful-of-Mammon-and-profit, anti-all-that-is-good, and thriving-somehow-in-spite-of-all-Good-Americans'-loathing-for-their-Evilness artists, intellectuals, and liberals (those figures of the loathsome and obscene Anti-trinity: Art, Science, and Community) is making money hand over fist, said money coming from the pockets of fallen Americans in such numbers that I suspect all the Godly will need for The Rapture is a Piper Cub.

Citing the "failure" of the film version of the only book to rival The Bible in sales (and with a much shorter printing history) as an example of Americans getting their religious knickers in a knot is pretty funny. What do you think people did with all those copies of the book that was #1 on every best seller list for four years? Read it and were aghast and therefore recommended it to their friends? How American! And why love the book and hate the movie in the Name of Baby Jesus? After all, the movie removed the part about how cool it would be to bonk the great granddaughter of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and ole Mr. Langdon does, right after the last page. I guess the theory here is that atheists and the godless bought 10-100 copies each of The Da Vinci Code in their desire to create the illusion of success? A vast conspiracy, led no doubt by Saddam Hussein, the Democrats, and Jane Fonda.

I'm very disappointed that the GC film softened the ending. I'm guessing how; I will see it this weekend. (I'm planning to buy two tickets; one for myself and one in the name of my favorite theofascist; and maybe a few more. See above.) The original ending doesn't exactly make "the hero," for all his hatred of Yahwehism, very attractive, and it strikes me that the change was made not for any philosophical reason but for the amazingly inconsistent desire to not offend the preconceptions of the audience. (Heroes don't kill kids. I can say no more.)

As for Beowulf, I liked it (though I'm with the comment above: I loved Stardust, especially for its attack on religion!). For me, the value of the medium was expressed in a reported exchange between Gaiman and Zemeckis. Gaiman wanted to write a certain scene, and told Zemeckis it would be too expensive to film. Zemeckis said something to the effect that every minute of the film costs the same, regardless of what Gaiman wrote. So he wrote what he pleased. The freedom of the page, perhaps for the first time on film. The Beowulf film isn't perfect, but I enjoyed it because it captured the spirit of the original. For example, in the moment when Beowulf tells his men to "sing" and they respond by chanting dirty limericks about girls from Iceland, or when Wulfgar, Beowulf's closest friend, mutters to someone while Beowulf is describing his heroic battle with nine nickers, "Last time, it was three...." And if "I AM BEOWULF!" "YOU ARE BEOWULF!!" isn't Old English by way of the Green Bay Packers, what is?

And I liked it that Gaiman found a way to bring coherence and unity to what is essentially a handful of disconnected biographical details. A favorite example: We see Beowulf's battle with the nickers. In spite of the wisecrack of Wulfgar. I didn't count the monsters, but I did notice that Beowulf fails to mention in his retelling the final moment of the battle, which we see: The last nicker is a beautiful mermaid-like woman, seen briefly and quite possibly played by Jolie. She has a distinctive tail that we will see again, on the dragon child of Grendel's mother. And Beowulf fails, as he has apparently always failed, to tell this little detail of the story. The sea is his mother indeed.

Grendel's mother is a brilliant concept brilliantly executed, however much its origin is in John Boorman's interpretation of Morgaine and Modred (without Boorman's rightwing misogyny, homophobia, and fixation on incest). Her last two minutes on screen twist the story into a Gordian knot I'll never untangle. And the pathetic element of Grendel is as wonderful an idea as John Gardner's solidifying of the monster into an Existentialist without portfolio. I was reminded of the terrible photo I saw one day of the typical deformed and crippled white tiger that breeders get while they pursue the photogenic and unnatural 4-5%. And prolifers note: Breeding once with Angelina Jolie makes you sterile!!!

In other words, Beowulf works as a testosterone festival with some boring idea sections, and it works as an artistic and literary vision with some hysterical riffs on Jock Lit. Porter Scene, anyone? So it's fake. Right, and when Edgar pulls out Gloucester's eyes and steps on them, it's really sheep's eyes. Ooooooh, you ruined Lear for me!!! Frankly, all CGI looks fake because, live with it, it is fake. Those birds were never fooled by that Greek's grapes, we all knew Apollo was just a statue, the moviegoers were only startled by that first bullet because it was a new experience, and Grampa may look "so natural," but he's still dead. Film is fake, books are fake, people pretending to be Electra and MacBeth are fake, fake, fake.

Art is fake. As Defoe, that beacon of Puritan purity who denounced Homer as lies and made his living forging autobiographies (including one of a whore only a bit less candid than Fanny Hill -- Scholars note: The origins of Fox purotainment), has said, fiction is Godless lies! So tell me a good story and I promise not to whine because I can see the puppets' joints.