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They come free of context and as part of an obvious well-poisoning agenda, so it's hard to judge much about them. Darabont isn't a mean guy. The people who work with him love him and go from project to project with him. A whole slew of them agreed to work for less money than they'd normally be paid just for the opportunity to work with him on TWD. AMC was putting the screws to him all along.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
The stuff reports are spotlighting is where Darabont gets screwed over by someone and he's ranting and raving about it. He was having to do a lot more work than he should have because he was having to pick up where others were dropping the ball and became very frustrated by it. But overall, the show with him at the controls was the best it ever was or likely ever will be.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
This is AMC attempting to engage in some well-poisoning. None of this material is even relevant to the ongoing litigation. But it is interesting.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
By the time we get to THE AVENGERS, Hulk-outs are triggered by anger rather than, as in TIH, merely becoming excited. Banner, at the end of HULK, had come to terms with what he was, and was using his talents to help people, which is just where we find him in THE AVENGERS, like an older version of the same character. The TIH version, wherein he was fixated on the danger he posed as the Hulk and obsessed with finding a cure, is ignored. There's an exchange in THE AVENGERS in which it's asserted that the amount of radiation to which Banner was subjected "should have killed" him. This directly contradicts the TIH version, wherein he wasn't trying to kill himself and didn't subject himself to a lethal dose of radiation, but it sounds exactly like the lab accident in the '03 HULK. And it's explicitly described as an "accident" in THE AVENGERS--again, ignoring TIH, where it was an intentional experiment. It's also implied there was something special about him that allowed him to survive the radiation, which again references '03 HULK. To the proposition that he shouldn't have survived, Banner says something like, "So you're saying the other guy [the Hulk] saved me?" Implying the Hulk was something that was always inside him, just as was the case in '03 HULK.
"'ET' was the turning point. Before that he was a hungry tyro willing to try out a diversity of tones -- even if they got grim. After 'ET,' he became a 'family filmmaker'"
That's also the point at which his early promise ended and he also stopped being a filmmaker who mattered. E.T. taught him it was easier to simply peddle saccharine crap to an audience while telling it exactly what it's supposed to feel about what he's showing it. He's relentless in this, to the point that, during sections of SCHINDLER'S LIST when he pulled back from it a bit, it was surprising. He presents the spectacle of a man who has frequently had a terrible chip on his shoulder about not being taken seriously as a filmmaker yet, paradoxically, is so terminally insecure that he absolutely refuses to let viewers make up their own minds about anything he shows them, as if he's terrified they'll reach the wrong conclusions if he doesn't walk them through it as if they were children, with the "proper" reactions stamped on the work in 40-feet-high neon. I'm old enough to remember Spielberg when he was something really special. He's since become a complete waste of space.
Actually, most of Scorsese's output during his first few decades is better than SCHINDLER'S LIST, which is, uncharacteristically for Spielberg, a good movie but marred throughout by every instance of his inserting himself into it (including completely destroying the ending).
Scorsese, of course (that's like asking "who is better, Orson Welles or Brett Ratner?").
"Are Universal Studios trying to create something similar to Marvel universe and mash all their horror figures together?"
That's the plan, a series of non-horrors about monsters and the monster-fighters who stand against them.
"BTW, in Stevenson's book, Mr Hide never killed anyone. He just looked dirty and talked cheap. The worst he did was hit a guy with a walking cane in the heat of an argument."
Actually, he beat Sir Danvers Carew to death with that cane.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
I finally just stopped with the show about halfway through season 2--both it and the parent combined were just proving to be too much TWD. Unless something has changed between now and then, the budget is so nearly non-existent I don't see how it would be possible to cut it much more (within, at least, the confines of a wasteful Hollywood production). An audience of 2.5 million is still great for a cable series; it has been very depressing to see this one draw such solid numbers, given how awful it is. Everyone has always known TWD's premise--zombie apocalypse played straight--sells itself. That's a big part of how these shows have been able to be so successful, no matter how bad the writing gets. There's long been a discussion among both fans and critics about how much of TWD's appeal is [i]just[/i] that premise. FTWD offers another angle on the question. There's nothing innovative about it; writing-wise, it's just a clone of the parent series. Its major difference is that it's just done on a notably smaller budget, which removes some of the things TWD had in its favor.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
The version from the Ang Lee movie was better, which is why the Marvel movies have basically gone with it and ignored the one from INCREDIBLE HULK.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
It's a good idea. I was going to suggest something like it a few days ago and got sidetracked.
[quote]"Hitchcock vs anyone, Hitchcock wins."[/quote]
Not exactly but it's close. Nolan is a not-very-interesting journeyman director; Hitch is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
Hitchcock, and the question is like "King Kong vs. Pee Wee Herman."
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
Lately, I've found myself writing a string of articles like that one above, taking on a particularly virulent strain of hardcore Clintonite, one that hasn't yet gotten the memo about the larger party's embrace of Sanders and is still grinding out scurrilous rubbish aimed at smearing both Sanders and progressives in general. Medium is one of the swamps in which that strain seems to breed (I certainly ran into a lot of them right around the time I started writing there).
I don't know if one can say the general public has turned its back on those movies; THE WITCH was certainly successful, as was THE BABADOOK, just not in the U.S. IT COMES AT NIGHT is certainly going to turn a profit too. Those movies are more like niche items. They're successful, they just aren't hundred-million-+-dollar hits.
I'm certainly with you on shitty horror polluting the genre and having often very deleterious effects over time on audience expectations. A horror picture that unnerves as opposed to providing superficial thrills usually has a very steep mountain to climb to become a massive hit. Someone just looking for some stupid popcorn movie on which to waste a few hours isn't often going to look kindly on a flick that actively upsets them. People with no attention-span or only looking for cheap thrills will find a moody, slow-burn horror utterly boring.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
She wasn't just totally inappropriate, casting her was a rather profound insult. Making it worse, the word is that on Themyscira in the movie, there are actual Amazon-looking women. WW, who is supposed to be the most outstanding of the batch, is a heroin-chic model.
I'm glad the movie is a success and everyone seems to like it but casting her was a serious dick move.
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"The Dig"
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/[/url]
A lot more than doubled.
Given that it's a recent innovation, it would probably be relatively simple to fix. That needs to happen.
In the final days of IMDb, I put together a post that collected all the places people said they were going:
[url]http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-end-of-imdb-message-boards.html[/url]
I like the format here and have been doing some advertising for it but it's had some problems turn up recently too.