Vic Sage

A quiet, contemplative, deliberately paced movie with much to say, that avoids most (if not all) sports movie cliches. I liked it alot. And Pitt's perf as aging jock seemed pitch-perfect, working well off of goofball gone straight Jonah Hill. Just enough baseball to keep it a baseball movie and not a business movie. and it makes a folk hero out of Scott Hatteberg.

any gorram Browncoat knows that there bodyguard is JAYNE COBB, ya Hwoon dahn. We shiny?

saw it on the plane to san diego last month. liked it well enough.

did you like it?

There aren't any unicorns in this one, right? hardly any.

Edgy DC wrote: A scale of four stars or five? 1) Green Lantern 2) Thor 5 star scale: GL: [*1/2 - **] The script was a total disaster, but i actually liked Ryan Reynolds more than i usually do, and they got alot of the geeky stuff right. THOR: [**1/2 - ***] the Asgardian stuff was great, the Earth-bound stuff kind of lame. Overall, it was a little disappointing for me, but not bad.

Edgy DC wrote: God? Really? Then I will rephrase. I wanted to know if your enjoyment (and yours alone) was at all affected by the relative glut of recent superhero movies --- the magic made less magical by it's increased relative availability. Because we went to Thor and Lantern at my wife's suggestion. I warned her that the potential for suckitude was high. We each disliked them both, and both disliked them each, and now I'm not sure I could drag her to Captain 'Merica, despite my interest in him being far greater than those other two costumed big shots. my enjoyment was not affected, at least not that i'm aware of. I could watch superhero movies all day every day, and they each would rise or fall on their own merits, one having no conscious affect on the other. I mean obviously i could see where, having seen alot of action movies, you might be in the mood for something lighter, or heavier even. i just don't think superhero movies, per se, are more or less likely to suck or more or less bound by genre convention than any other kind of movie, such that i'd feel particularly gluttenous for having viewed a bunch of them in a relatively short period. But transmonk doesn't like anything with unicorns, so everybody's got their own tolerance for stuff. As far as quality goes, this was WAY better than GL, better than THOR, and perhaps not quite as polished overall as the last X-MEN, if that gives you any help. CA is more of an old-fashioned, square jawed hero tale, with a terrific performance by Chris Evans, and some good supporting bits by Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones. The bad guy from MATRIX and V FOR VENDETTA plays the villain here with typical over-the-top histrionics, and the wrap up does feel rushed and incomplete, but overall i thought it was more heartfelt, contemplative and corn-fed (but in a good way) than any superhero movie since this director's adaptaton of THE ROCKETEER, which had a similar vintage feel and quality.

Rank them in your order of preference. Here's my list so far: X-MEN:1ST CLASS - **** CAPTAIN AMERICA - ***1/2 THOR - *** GREEN HORNET - **1/2 GREEN LANTERN - ** PRIEST - * still to come -- COWBOYS & ALIENS ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

i swear to god i was just trying to answer your question, and realized in the middle of trying to do so, i wasn't sure what you were asking. Apparently, i'm an ocelot. or a black-capped chikadee. which is fine. i've been called worse. today, even. wheee! [still taking it easy]

wait... what just happened?

i thought i was taking it easy. this is me, taking it easy. wheeee!

Edgy DC wrote: Does the comic book movie glut affect of the impact of the Captain? i'm not sure i understand the question. Are you asking if it affects CAPTAIN AMERICA in particular, as opposed to any other superhero/action type movies, because its kind of a dated character or something? Or just that it's yet another superhero movie after a number of other superhero movies this year, some of which were not particularly good (yes, GL, i'm looking at you!), so this one is less likely to have the impact it would have were it being released in a relatively superhero-free zone? And by "affect the impact", do you mean hurt box office? or dampen critical response already numbed by the genre? or simply lessen audience anticipation, however quantified? at any rate, it pulled in $65m its opening weekend, which i think is comparable to X-MEN, THOR and GL. So the "glut" of summer SH movies doesn't seem to have kept anybody away so far, and the critics liked it better than THOR and GL (if not quite as much as X-MEN), and as for audience response, I don't know how to quantify accept anecdotally. also, the assertion that there is a "glut" is somewhat confusing, in and of itself. Its summer. SH movies are action movies. Would you say there is a "glut" of dramas in the fall? or a "glut" of comedies? Certainly, technology has made SH movies more producible and so more prevalent in the action/sf/fantasy genres, but with 70+ years of backlogged material to draw on, i'd hardly call 4 SH summer pics a "glut".

Saw it with my son; we both enjoyed it.

i'm a sucker for a redhead... sign me up.

maybe you're thinking of GREEN HORNET?

disappointing, but not terrible -- as usual, too much time worrying about stunts/effects, too little about narrative.

i liked it, 3.5 too. It has that 60s Cold War Bondian adventure feeling. I think Fassbinder would make a great Bond, by the way. I liked Jennifer Lawrence a LOT, but i agree that her relationship with Charles doesn't adequately set up their subsequent relationship in the original trilogy. And that's what you want from a good prequel... to feel like it feeds naturally into what you already know. This didn't do that well enough in alot of areas. From a comic book perspective, they wasted the Hellfire club and Sebastion Shaw, and Bacon as a nazi mad scientist? feh. still, there was a lot of good stuff, too. entertaining, overall. I'd rank them: X2 = **** X-MEN = ***1/2 X-MEN: 1ST CLASS = ***1/2 X-MEN (1992 Animated tv series) = *** WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN (2008 animtated tv series) = *** X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE = **1/2 X-MEN: EVOLUTION (2000 animated tv series) = ** X-MEN 3: LAST STAND = ** GENERATION X = *

Shelton is adapting it as a Broadway-bound musical

most earlier westerns make no attempt to show white racism toward natives and simply embrace white heroism against a hostile horde. I don't know see how one could accept that as preferable approach. and i don't give spoilers for 55 year old films. If you haven't seen it by now, then tough shit. Especially since the move was selected for preservation by National Film Registry in 1989, and has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time, with the 2007 AFI 100 Greatest American Films list ranking it in 12th place (they also name it the greatest Western of all time).

I think reading 21st century post-racial sentiments onto a 1950s Western is irrelevant and unfair, and anyway SEARCHERS is about "seriously, I just used a racist word when I really meant "Guardians"" the way MOBY DICK is about a whale. It's about the nature of obsession, and what "heroism" is, and what it took to carve civilization out of an unforgiving wilderness. The Indians are totems, symbols of unforgiving Nature. Wayne stands with his fist upraised, shaking it at the hurricane. Ultimately, the love of family overrides his instincts and he rescues his niece, despite her having gone "native". He returns her to that cabin on the plains, and the movie ends with the family going inside, but the Duke cannot enter their world. He is uncivilized; he is necessary for civilization but not a part of it. He walks away from the camera as the door to the cabin closes behind him. This scene bookends the opening of the film, in which the door first opened and the camera went out into the West... And it's TEXAS like its CIMMERIA. It's "the West", and that's all it has to be. It's not a nature documentary. But even on the most literal (and least mythic) level, the movie doesn't celebrate Wayne's attitudes toward the Indians. In the end, he is as "other" as the Indians, and he is shut out (literally) for it. Still his hate fuels him, and gives him the strength to continue the search, just as love fuels the others. He was a necessary beast whose time was passing, but he got the job done. if anything, Ford is attacking racism as one of the bases for genocide against the native population. Even the more genteel characters express racist attitudes toward the indians, and especially toward miscegenation. That was the world in which Wayne's ETHAN EDWARDS lived. Edwards' racism is primarily motivated by desire for revenge against acts of cruelty actually committed by the commanches in the story against his family and community, not some small-minded prejudice formed outside experience. He is a complex character that to simply dismiss out of hand as a hateful racist is to miss the point entirely. Ford's westerns always had that corny, sentimental humor going on in the background, but this had a much hotter flame burning in the foreground, for which SEARCHERS deserves every accolade its achieved.

yeah, LaRoche is a 2nd-half hitter, and Francisco will lose time when Dominic comes up. bad deal.

I must of missed something about Stardust. We made it a half hour into it and bailed. It felt corn-fried and Disneyfied, as obvious as the day is long and not enchanting at all. i loved the graphic novel it was based on, and i have a raging hard-on for Claire Danes. So all bets are off.

Conan is sort of set in a Scandanavian-like place just outside the fringes of Rome-like receding empire, but I guess doesn't quite qualify. Conan takes place during Robert E. Howard's "Hyborian age", approximately 14,000 BC to 10,000 BC, whereas the Viking age was roughly 8th century to 11th century. So that's about 11,000 years earlier than Vikings. Also, as a Cimmerian, Conan's descendants were Gaelic/Celt, not Scandanavian. Conan is only similar to a Viking in that both have come to be seen as products of the "noble savage" tradition of 19th-century style of Romanticism that Howard was steeped in. Necessary conditions for a Viking movie * Horned helmets * Round shields * Long boats with square sails and optional dragon's heads on them. necessary elements for viking movie -- It must relate in some way to the 8th-11th century Scandanavian seafaring warrior culture of the "Viking Age", or to the subsequently romanticized depictions of same, including but not limited to: - long ships; - paganism; - conquest and/or exploration; - horned helmets and battle axes; - scandanavian geography and climate - at least a little pillaging; - and drinking beer out of a skull would be ok too

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: BEOWULF (2007) - Robert Zemeckis used his "motion capture" technique for this animated version of Neil Gaiman's excellent adaptation of the Scandinavian myth. Gaiman makes the story work better (and more coherently) than it ever has before, but as usual the motion capture animation is life-deadening and annoying. Still, pretty good overall. I think Hollywood's still looking for the medium that will fully realize the potential of a Gaiman script. Coraline was close. i didn't like CORALINE, either as a book or a movie. but i loved STARDUST. And the low-budget BBC miniseries of NEVERWHERE is highly recommended to afficianados.

i feel your pain.