I didn't dislike Sucker Punch as much as most folks seemed to. But I must say I inadvertently sabotaged my own enjoyment of the film by watching the animated shorts that were released to the Internet prior to its release. These shorts put each "fantasy sequence" into a wider context, providing a backdrop separate from…

Um, why do these characters need new designs? That just messes with established continuity, no?

I felt it was a gimmick from day one. There's nothing about modern stereoscopic filmmaking that shows me it has become any less of a gimmick than it was in the 1950s. Hollywood still doesn't really know how to use it for purely storytelling purposes, which means they only know how to exploit it for its gimmick value.…

Wow, I don't think I ever realized before that the egg shown in that 1979 trailer (along with how it cracks open along the side) is absolutely nothing at all like the alien egg(s) in the actual film (or the Alien mythos as a whole).

I'm not sure this is exactly news. I don't think this notion was exactly lost on the founding fathers either. It is largely the reason they created a representative democracy rather than a "pure" democracy. They recognized that not everyone is educated enough, informed enough, or passionate enough to effectively…

That Chronicle poster is a brilliant piece of graphic design. The movie itself, well, I dunno. I'm not a fan of "found footage" movies in general, and I am skeptical that one on superheroes would be anything but irritating to me. But, man, I sure do dig that poster!

Cute.

...can you just imagine if the Galactus in the movie had looked like his painting above?

The image of Cthulhu is fast becoming iconic.

The job of a wingman (wingperson) is never done...

Without a doubt, feature films and major network tv series are a staggering logistics endeavor. However, when it comes to the primary talent, everyone involved (read: agents, managers, and executive producers) have and take as much time as they need to "make things happen." In most cases when a major production fails…

Another code phrase, usually surrounding inability to negotiate a fee or to get all the primaries on board with a casting choice, is "scheduling conflicts." That's not to say that either code phrase can't, occassionally, mean literally what it says. But the literal meanings are not typically what the Hollywood PR…

"Creative differences" is code in Hollywood for insurmountable personality conflicts.

Its resemblance to the original story is about as strong as its resemblance to Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Why not call it something original, since that is what it clearly is? Even using the character names is of no value here since they are merely cyphers when removed from the milieu of Lovecraft's tale (which…

So the Mayans were a civilization that provoked catastrophic climate change, and yet the human race endured. Imagine that.

As if we need any more evidence that 90% of a film's success is proper casting, and the other 90% is a well-written script.

Conan Doyle's Holmes was not a romantic/sexy character in the least. Rather, Holmes had a detached, dismissive attitude towards feelings of romantic/sexual love that was spelled out (via Watson, of course) quite explicitly on the first page of A Scandal in Bohemia:

My only problem with that statement is that it suggests to me that either people don't know what facism is, and are all too-eager to throw out that word anyway (often surrounded by other qualifiers like pseudo- and quasi- to get the impact of the word without having to use it properly), or they are reading the book…

The film was a satire about the human urge to kill.

A proper rendition of the novel would be quite welcome by me. Verhoeven's film, while entertaining in its own way, was not what I wanted from an adaptation of the book. Yes, the lack of powered armor and brain-dead military tactics definitely detracted from my enjoyment, but there were multitude other sins committed,…