I guess I was confused because it makes it sound like, "Doing the same thing we've seen a million times already, but this time it's slightly different" has some kind of merit to it?

BUBBLE BOBBLE

Is this the one that is a breakdancing remake of Best of the Best?  Do they have to fight a team of evil Korean breakdancers?  Is there a hotshot breakdancer who has to learn to work as part of the team?  &c.

I like how they merge the Headless Horseman with Conquest (who carries a bow), but then instead of giving him a bow, they give him an axe, and then just brand a bow on his hand.

"Sleepy Hollow is a mishmash of established tropes and could easily end up playing out as a higher-budget Supernatural led by buddy-cops rather than a pair of brothers."That means Kurtzman and Orci ARE re-inventing the wheel.  That's what "reinventing the wheel" means — spending a lot of time setting up something…

Don't you understand?  Tom Haverford IS Jerry's doppelganger!!!!!

I disagree about all of this things.  The emotional plot that you describe are facile, its relationship to modern terrorism is wrongheaded and confused, and no quality of performance can stand in for insufficiently developed writing.

Right?  Kathy's only failure was NOT PUTTING ENOUGH SAUCE on the eggs!

Yes, good, but what about the answer to that question as someone who is interested in story mechanics?  Obviously, what happened in the alternate timeline isn't the backstory of THIS movie, right?  So, if it was the backstory that made Khan an interesting villain in Star Trek II, and that backstory doesn't exist…

@Superdeformed Oh, okay.  You too!

I guess…sorry, I am not a regular avclub guy, so I don't know the protocols here.  Are you saying that "asking about a character's role in a story and his relationship to that story's themes" is the same thing as "asking how a bar on a skeleton xylophone visible for two seconds in a cat and mouse cartoon could emit…

@@JerrodKingery:disqus  Yeah, and I think that's a legitimate point, but I was really only okay with it as far as, "Reboot of Star Trek, eh?  Well, all right.  Let's see if he does something interesting with it."

I think it's especially weird considering the whole premise of the first movie was that the timeline was changed, so now he could do anything he wanted.

Actually, J. J. Abrams has gone on record, at least twice, saying he didn't really like Star Trek that much.

I mean, I get that, and that's fine — the timeline changed from the point of incursion of whoever that Romulan guy was (a villain for the ages!), and so I guess something else must have happened and then someone ELSE found that Botany Bay.

So, wait a minute, though.  Isn't the whole thing about Wrath of Khan that the Enterprise found Khan in the first place, and marooned him on Ceti Alpha 5? It was about the history of Kirk and Khan's relationship, and how the good intentions of letting Khan live (much like the good intentions of engineering him in the…

"You're not hearing me. I didn't say he ignored the executives. I said, the executives told him not to do something that he wasn't planning on doing, and then he decided to do it just to tell the executives to go fuck themselves."

There's also a Ouija board in The Exorcist, one of the most consistently popular horror films of all time.

I actually wonder how much of that was motivated by other financial concerns.  Like, locking the actors into a 100 episode contract before the show becomes popular enough that they can start demanding million-dollar salaries, or something.

@avclub-9bd49c93a34e2aa722142ca8820954d1:disqus Plus there's the lingering stuff with Peter's dad, which I think is the worst for undermining his relationship with Uncle Ben.  That whole emotional arc is different when he's also still grieving his missing dad in flashbacks.