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Ismailov's Replies
In fairness, Steven Seagal was/is considered a joke for a bunch of reasons; even in the 90s there were plenty of people making fun of him.
People remember Willis for Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, The Fifth Element, etc., nothing is going to overshadow those roles.
I think if he had rushed headlong into nonstop mediocre, forgettable films back in the 90s, then yeah his reputation would have suffered, not so much nowadays. It hasn't really impacted his reputation like it has for Nicolas Cage.
I just saw it yesterday. Aside from trying to transform Matthau into a 17th century English rogue, there isn't much else to write home about as far as characters and story go. I didn't think it was terrible, but I can understand why it's fallen into obscurity.
The two protagonists aren't meant to be heroes. They're pirates. At best they're what's called "anti-heroes," since their antagonists (the Spaniards) are arguably as bad if not worse.
In fact, the ending pretty much emphasizes how non-heroic they are. Captain Red betrays his crew (except Frog—and only because he needs him as a lackey) by escaping with the golden throne without them. Frog, who decided to help Red, loses contact with the love of his life. They're both shown stranded at sea, the throne utterly useless to them in their current predicament, and a shark is following them. If anything they're worse off at the end of the film than at the start.
There are fans of the movie, and you might like it, but I felt it was lackluster. The satire of televangelism felt more blunt than clever, and the whole plot just didn't interest me and seemed to run out of steam rather quickly. On the other hand, hearing Tim Curry with a Southern accent was... odd.
That person's brain might be conflating a particular film with something else. Back in the 80s Curry was in "Pass the Ammo," where he played a corrupt televangelist whose church gets held hostage and eventually destroyed by the National Guard, and it initially looks as if a few of the protagonists are killed. There's also characters who don costumes, although none dresses up as Wonder Woman.
So it sounds like a possible example of the Mandela Effect, like people who misremember Sinbad playing a genie in a movie (when in reality they're confusing him with Shaq in "Kazaam.")
He's probably meant to draw a contrast with Kristofferson's character, who ends up "betraying" his class by helping the impoverished immigrants wage armed struggle against the mercenaries.
I do agree though that if you took him out of the film, nothing would really change. I also don't see any logical reason (I may have missed something) why he would be accompanying the mercenaries. It makes sense for Sam Waterston's character to accompany them, but not Hurt's.
I think there's meant to be a little ambiguity when he first shows up. On one hand it makes perfect sense for his character, if a pod person, to ridicule the notion that people are "changing." But as a self-help author and psychiatrist it also makes perfect sense for him to allay suspicions by trying to rationally determine what's happening. So even if he isn't a pod person, the viewer is bound to consider his responses at the book-signing suspicious even if the character is totally sincere.
You were claiming that the Bush Administration "should have" justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam stopped allowing UN weapons inspections and because Iraq's government opposed the no-fly zones imposed by the US and UK (France withdrew from the zones in the 90s.) I disagreed for the reasons I gave above.
There were various justifications used when invading Iraq, such as Saddam "supporting terrorism" or his government failing to comply with a bunch of UN decisions. Christopher Hitchens simply argued that, at the end of the day, Saddam was so damn evil that the US and UK had a moral obligation to invade Iraq.
Whatever reasons were/are used to justify the invasion, I don't think any of them are particularly compelling (and that's ignoring the ones that are obvious nonsense, like that Saddam was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and bore responsibility for 9/11.)
Marx was a journalist, including working as foreign correspondent for a major American newspaper (the New-York Tribune.) He also worked as a newspaper editor until his revolutionary activities made that impossible.
As for Lenin, like Marx he was a revolutionary, so his ability to gain meaningful employment in Russia was rather slight. But he did practice briefly as a defense attorney.
If this post is just a snide remark about "haha Marxists don't work," there have been prominent Marxists with working-class backgrounds, two American examples being Eugene Debs and William Z. Foster.
<blockquote>Iraq no longer allowed weapons inspectors in AND continued to break the no fly zone</blockquote>
The United States used the cover of UN weapons inspection teams to spy on Iraq: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/world/us-used-un-team-to-place-spy-device-in-iraq-aides-say.html
Iraq regarded the no-fly zones as illegal, and the UN had never authorized such zones in Iraq. I fail to see how the Iraqi government seeking to exercise full sovereignty within its borders was a reason to invade it.
Yeah, Carrey's character in The Cable Guy is clearly deranged and malicious in a way his character in Dumb & Dumber isn't.
But in fairness, Lloyd had... issues. Besides selling a dead bird to a blind kid as noted, toward the end of the film he fantasizes about shooting the guy Mary is with. In an earlier fantasy he imagines some guys are trying to sabotage his date, whereupon he ends up ripping out one guy's heart to impress her. Also, spiking Harry's drink with a ton of laxatives is an exceptionally vindictive thing to do ("realistically" Harry could have ended up in the hospital.)
To me the surprising thing was how lots of people of both sexes seemed taken aback by Carrey's character at the time. Roger Ebert wrote a negative review which remarked, "Carrey seems [at first] to be playing a variation on his usual hyperkinetic goofball. Then our reaction grows more puzzled: This is supposed to be fun, right? By the end, the movie has declared itself as a black comedy about one very deeply troubled cable guy. . . . In my mind, I had a notion of how the movie might unfold—a notion nurtured by the ads and previews, which understandably emphasize the madcap zany stuff. The movie is not much like that."
You make a good point though about how women are more likely to regard The Cable Guy as creepy rather than funny.
I don't know if they could pull off a sequel. What would the plot be? The best I can think of is that Chip hosts his own stream with a small following of cable TV enthusiasts or devotees of 1950s-80s sitcoms or something, while trying to milk his sole claim to fame as a former stalker of cable customers who screwed up a satellite broadcast over twenty years ago. But then an obsessive fan, who feels lonely and craves interaction, begins to stalk Chip.
If the plot were "Chip's back and he's stalking someone again," then that sounds too similar to the first film.
Yeah I didn't mind the "Sam Sweet" subplot either. It's presumably meant to be a criticism of sensationalism and TV networks taking advantage of celebrity crimes and screw-ups for ratings.
If I had to give two possible reasons the bartender didn't care:
A. He may have figured that Marty must have a decent reason for doing it.
B. The bartender's odds of having to call someone from those specific pages are probably not great, especially by the time he gets a new version of the phonebook.
Yeah, the main message of the movie seems to be that both the scientists and the soldiers were so fixated on carrying out their contradictory and futile "missions" that they stopped relating to each other as fellow humans with the same goal of surviving. Logan for example needs dead soldiers to carry out further research and reward Bub. The soldiers aren't completely wrong to view the scientists as endangering their own survival, but their own utter hostility does nothing to improve the situation.
In real life, there were members of the Red Army Faction who received training at bases in South Yemen operated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. That's just one example of how West European terrorists could go outside Europe to train in use of weapons and explosives.
Given Hans' reference to rumors about Arafat's shopping habits during his banter with Takagi, it's possible that he and at least the Germans among his men received similar training.
From what I recall (I recently rewatched the film), Otto fires his gun a bunch of times, *then* McClane moves in and fires a shot that kills him.
They look similar, although they seem plenty different as actors. Like I can't imagine Glover as Bill Lumbergh unless the character was rewritten to be a sarcastic jackass with a fake smile, nor can I imagine Cole playing Glover's role in 52 Pick-Up (although I might be underestimating Cole's acting abilities.)
I recall he had a bunch of topics on IMDB back when it had its message boards. I assume this website, in trying to salvage threads and posts after IMDB abruptly shut down said boards, was unable to salvage Glover's.
To be fair, De Niro was playing a relatively "normal" character in this movie. He's already rather screwy at the start (anger management problems, unhealthy obsession with baseball, delusional about his life), but he feels he's ruined after he loses his job and has a restraining order limiting access to his son. Only then does he plunge off the deep end mentally.
His character in Cape Fear is a horrible human being even before entering prison. By the time he left prison he's a hardened criminal. It makes sense he'd give off a more threatening and psychotic vibe.