KnightWing

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Posts posted by KnightWing

  1. I don't know how to quit when I'm ahead and apparently think it's wise to insult moderators.

  2. Yeah, because Ant-Man was a movie that desperately needed to happen, lest that lucrative property be lost.

    Look at X-Men Origins: Wolverine. There was loose talk of a Wolverine movie, but Fox needed a proper X-Men movie to retain the rights, so they hurriedly tossed a bunch of mutants and subplots into a loose Wolverine narrative, slapped "X-Men Origins" onto the tittle, and put together something that even the filmmakers weren't proud of afterward. To the point of deliberately using Days of Future Past to wipe it all out.

    Yes, every movie is there to make money. But they aren't all made equal.

  3. Okay, that's not quite what I meant. I didn't mean to suggest that it was only made to keep the rights (though I suppose I did technically say that), but more that it was the primary impetus for making the movie. Instead of "we have a great idea and we can/should make a great movie out of this," it's "we need to make an FF movie by X date; let's get something together by then." Not that I think they went out to make a bad movie or entirely didn't care, it's just that I don't believe that's a good place to start, creatively speaking.

  4. Here's hoping the rights end up back with Marvel because of it.

    This isn't a shot specifically at you, Jason, but I hate that argument. I refuse to buy into the idea that Marvel Studios only makes good movies that fully respect the source material it puts out there. When they hit the mark (Iron Man, Guardians), the films are awesome; when they don't (Incredible Hulk, any Iron Man sequel), the films get a 7/10 and are then never referred to again.

    Here's the thing: a 7/10 "halfway-decent" Marvel movie is at least better than any Fantastic Four movie currently made under Fox. The first Fantastic Four movie got the "fun" aspect right, but almost completely missed the superhero angle of the team, as well as having real believable character interactions between anyone except Ben and Johnny. The second one actually had some superhero stuff but was somehow a worse movie, and this new one was apparently made just so they could keep the rights to the franchise, and it's a trainwreck. So yeah, no matter which way you look at it, there's almost no way Marvel wouldn't do a better job. Heck, the F4 are a really odd group of characters, and the people at Marvel are probably the only ones who are guaranteed to actually get who the characters are and why they're great.

    Also, as with the Marvel comics universe, the Fantastic Four characters (especially Reed, Doom, Galactus & Silver Surfer) are arguably more important as a part of the greater Marvel Universe than they are in their own corner. So their presence in the MCU wouldn't only result in a good movie or series of movies, but a boon for all the other movies as well.

    So yeah, here's hoping Marvel can get the Four back.

    (Fox can keep X-Men, though. They seem to be doing well.)

  5. I feel like Starship Troopers is legitimately good because it does exactly what it's trying to do and is really entertaining along the way. If it were trying to be Schindler's List in space, then yeah, it would be a failure and a bad movie. But it's a cartoony satire/farce about space marines fighting giant bugs. I've always felt that the bad acting is part of what makes the movie so fun, and I don't think it's by accident.

    And then we can also get into trying to define "bad" acting, but that's an endless vortex of of debate that ends with me INSISTING that everyone is wrong about Mark Hamill's brilliantly on-point performance in Star Wars.

  6. Starship Troopers: This is a movie that confounds me. I am always torn if it's a bad movie that stumbled into clever satire or if it actually is good satire. There are times it gets really heavy handed but still, I never know what to think with this one.

    It's decent satire and also a really fun B-movie.
  7. I wouldn't be so quick to come to the defense of Trank. There have been a lot of rumors swirling about how awful he is to deal with and there is a reason he got shit canned from the Han Solo movie.

    The second batch of rumors (which Trank seems to agree with) say that after the awful experience making FF, he'd basically had enough of making big-budget studio movies for a while.
  8. What the...

    Part of the interesting thing about Spielberg directing this film is that the novel is very much rooted in the ’80s pop sci-fi culture that Spielberg helped define.

    I kind of wonder if there's a chance that Spielberg (who helped define 80s pop culture) might end up helping the movie a lot.

  9. I actually wasn't a fan of the Rogue Cut at all. Most of it was extra unnecessary lines, and the Rogue scenes only make the movie more complicated. I actually thought the original cut was very tight and easily-understood, but the new cut almost lost me once or twice.

    I really don't think the Rogue Cut is something that needed to happen, and it only lessens the movie as a whole. And this is coming from someone who thinks the theatrical versions of Lord of the Rings should be tossed into the fires of Mount Doom and only the extended cuts should ever be viewed.

  10. Well, spider-Walkens are the fiercest killers in the animal kingdom.

    :lol:

    Yeah, I think the movie would have been weird and problematic as hell, but Walken as Brainiac could have legitimately been awesome. I think it was said best in the documentary when they said that no matter what, it would have been a really interesting movie.

  11. Whilst I don't fully disagree, I also don't understand the mentality of walking into a film screening, that you'd paid money to go see, expecting to dislike it or be bored by it.

    Whether good or bad, it's an MCU movie, and it will be the subject of many a geek discussion (like this one). So if only to be on-point with everyone else, I knew I was going to see it.

    More thoughts now that I've had a week-plus to mull it over:

    I, like many, expected Ant-Man to be a good Edgar Wright movie shoved through the Marvel machine into something generic (the marketing REALLY didn't help this idea). In the end, I actually enjoyed Ant-Man more than Avengers 2, and it made me excited for the future of Marvel. Avengers 2 was basically "more Avengers," which is fine, but it was basically exactly what I felt I'd already gotten in the first movie, only less special. Ant-Man, on the other hand, was so different from the other MCU movies (but still fun) that it made me more optimistic about variety in the Marvel U—a bit like Guardians of the Galaxy, but this is squarely in the Avengers corner, which I think makes it mean a little more for most of the Marvel U.

  12. I've always found the idea of a tax-funded major TV network to be really odd, actually. If it were entirely educational and/or non-fiction content, then it would make sense, but since the BBC is so entertainment-focused, it's hard to make sense of it. In America, something like the BBC would be eliminated immediately, since no one wants to be forced to pay for entertainment that they might not want anyway. It's like... if you bought a DVD player, and were then taxed on your ownership of said DVD player, and then sent DVDs by the government made using said tax money. Even if you're getting your money's worth in the end, is it worth it if it's not something everyone wants?

    That isn't at all to speak of the BBC's quality, of course. Doctor Who forever, yo.