What was the last movie you've seen?

[Pulsar_t]

It's a suburban Signs; not half bad either, but it's been done before.

[REPO Man]

Some drecky straight-to-DVD holiday movie called All-American Christmas Carol.

Basically, it's another reimagining of A Christmas Carol that yet again tries to put its own spin on things.

For one, here the Scrooge-type character, played by Taryn Manning, is a trailer trash stereotype who doesn't work and sponges off her boyfriend who has aspirations of going to college. For another, all four ghosts are people she knew when they were alive (one of her baby-daddies dies at the beginning from not wearing goggles while playing paintball and gets shot in the eye and he's the Jacob Marley character simply named Jake Marley; the three spirits are an old high-school classmate, a rocker whose gold album she owns, and her dead mother, who's played by Beverly D'Angelo). Also, the family member (in the book it was Scrooge's nephew, but in some versions it's the Scrooge character's niece, brother or sister) is her brother who also doubles as the Bob Cratchett character, who inherits the Scrooge's-nephew trope's loving nature towards his relative and the Cratchett trope's sympathies to the Scrooge character despite his wife (played by Reno 911 alumnus Wendi McLendon-Covey) feeling the opposite. Also, here the Tiny Tim character is the main character's nephew who has apparently a ton of health issues.

But for all the ways it tries to be different, it's just not better. It's somehow worse than A Carol Christmas, and that's saying something since the latter comes off as a low-budget made-for-TV mockbuster of Scrooged (A Carol Christmas came out a few years ago on ABC Family and stars Tori Spelling as a coldhearted talk-show host and also features the late Gary Coleman and William Shatner).

[Sload Soap]

Got roped into watching the Robocop reboot. I'm a big fan of the original so I kind of expected to hate the reboot but in the end it's too pedestrian a film to really get worked up over. As you can see from the trailers, the film has obliterated the subtext of the original to the point Gary Oldman's character is only there to explain how Robocop feels at the exact moment. The whole film is keeps telling instead of showing and it takes a full hour before Murphy does anything Robocop-y.

They also crowbar in lines from the original that have no meaning here; there is a reason original Murphy says "Dead or Alive, you're coming with me", but here it just comes out of the blue.

It's all really obvious and I think when the original Robocop, with its dick shootings and exploding mutants, is the more subtle movie you have a real problem. Someone got The Dark Knight stuck in my violent sci-fi satire and it tastes like bland.



I also watched the Doctor Who Tv movie. It's okay. There's a strange focus on body horror and science fantasy but for an American backed production it is surprisingly faithful. It definitely does feel like a TV movie though, with some cheap special effects and scenes following one another in a way that was obviously intended to be interrupted by adverts. When watched together there is some real tonal whiplash.

I do like the interior of the Tardis though. It looks like somewhere you could actually live and not just the bridge of a starship. And Paul McGann does a good job in the brief time allotted to stamp his own persona on the Doctor.

[Hobie-wan]

I also watched the Doctor Who Tv movie. It's okay. There's a strange focus on body horror and science fantasy but for an American backed production it is surprisingly faithful. It definitely does feel like a TV movie though, with some cheap special effects and scenes following one another in a way that was obviously intended to be interrupted by adverts. When watched together there is some real tonal whiplash.

I'm really surprised to hear that from someone in the UK. As an American that had seen every previous episode from the classic series, aside from lost Hartnell/Troughton ones, I thought it was absolutely terrible.

[Sload Soap]

I guess what I mean is that in comparison to other really, really awful American versions of British shows (see Red Dwarf, Inbetweeners and Spaced) it actually feels like Doctor Who. It's definitely closer to Nu-Who than Classic though.

[Hobie-wan]

I'm not familiar with the others, but I did see part of the awful Red Dwarf US pilot, so I gotcha.

[Luke]

CROCODILE DUNDEE

Whoa. So Dundee is actually a poaching, sucker punching. peeping tomming, all around jerk with a nice smile? Well, at least he gets some tail for it.

Rock on.

And Linda is sooooooooooooooo Miley Cyrus in a time machine. The smile, the eyes, the cheeks.

[Pulsar_t]

Top edge-of-the-seat entertainment with a bit of social commentary thrown in for good measure.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Last night, my wife and I watched the notorious box office bomb:



The Quick & The Dead (1995). In it, Sharon Stone plays a "lady gunslinger" who enters a dueling contest to avenge her father's murder, and the film plays out like a sphaghetti-western-inspired fairy tale. Sam Raimi's direction, the cinematography, the characters, and the set pieces are incredibly stylized, and the shoot out at the end of the movie is exceptionally awesome. While Sharon Stone's acting is a bit wooden at times, the rest of the cast - which includes a young Russel Crowe and a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio - is exceptional. (Gene Hackman, in particular, is fantastic as the charismatic villain, and he steals every one of his scenes.) Despite its poor box office performance two decades ago, I highly, highly recommend this film, and I hope that its recent addition to Netflix's streaming library will earn it the critical redemption it desperately deserves.

[Jrecee]

It probably bombed because Sharon Stone's name is on Gene Hackman's side and Gene Hackman's name is on Sharon Stone's side. Why do they do that?