The Gaming Den

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/12/3 ... -grounded/

I don't know if this is a good summary, but it sounds like the plot of Grounded is Superman going through a mid-life crisis.

I think whoever picked up writing duties after Straczynski left immediately began a 'what the hell? Why am I acting totally out of character?' story arc.

edit: Yes he did.

Okay people. "Suing the Devil".

Down on his luck crap Australian semi-amateur lawyer decides to sue satan in a court of law. Has some great actors in it.

So that's that one with like Billy Conolly in right? Awesome film right?

NO

THAT movie is "The Man Who Sued God". THAT is a all things considered a pretty excellent fucking movie. Thank's to subjective comparison and a new standard for awful it is an AWESOME movie.

The "Man who sued god" was insightful, and interesting.... and funny and entertaining. And it did it with surprising subtly on a number of angles including having no magical pixie beings appeared in court.

Now "Suing the Devil" is... massively terrible. I mean it has fucking Malcolm McDowell in it being the devil and he can't even come CLOSE to saving the film. "The Man Who Sued God" was not exactly a big budget film, and I am prepared to bet had a similar budget but "Suing the Devil" SCREAMS cheap.

Worse than cheap it is tawdry and tacky and terribly written. The dialogue, the plot, EVERYTHING is laughable. It doesn't survive it's own official previews without painting ITSELF as a terrible terrible film.

And VERY clearly the nutjob incompetent Evangellicals who made "Suing The Devil" made it as a direct attempt to attack "The Man Who Sued God" and it is laughably inadequate.

The "Man Who Sued God" poses an interesting premise of "Insurance companies and Churches rake in the cash but then hand off all responsibility to a god immune to prosecution, here is your charming underdog story to go with that!"

As a direct counter "Suing The Devil" is a drooling Hillsong hillbilly screaming "Aw Yeah You Think You So Fucking Smart attacking my Jeebus! Wehell Satan is EEEEBIL! FUCK YEAH! Woohoodooheeedeee! ... here is your laughable offensive pile of poorly connected nonsense and none too subtle Evangelical dog whistles to go with that"

I am bereft for words it took under a minute indeed the first lines of dialogue in the movie sprung it's game and revealed it's agenda, it is just that fucking heavy handed. Even as an actual propaganda film designed to ensnare "The Man Who Sued God" audiences for some evangelizing that makes it a blatant failure, indeed a stupid failure. The PROPER way to disappoint your audience and reveal yourself as a propaganda film is in the big reveal at the twist or climax of the story. Letting the cat out of the bag 3 seconds in is just purely ham handed.

WORSE STILL within the FIRST minute of the movie the set up the OBVIOUS "It's all a dream" lead in, I called it the moment I saw it (while groaning at the sheer clumsiness and outright terribleness of it) and YEAH I WAS FUCKING RIGHT. That's right I just spoiler ed the whole stupid thing for you. No really, you should fucking thank me.

You know what Evangelical media-misisonary morons? You want me to respect your bullshit agenda. Make a half decent film. Even half as decent as all that sinful questioning "atheist agenda" media you have your super girly knickers in a super girly twist over.

Edit: I am unsure if I have communicated how bad this film is, especially since while "The Man Who Sued God" was a remarkably successful movie many may not have seen it.

So lets put it this way. The entry of this film into the Genre has just elevated Bruce Almighty and it's friend Evan Almighty to the status of "Relatively good films to watch".

PhoneLobster wrote:It doesn't survive it's own official previews without painting ITSELF as a terrible terrible film.

Got links to any trailers?

Sounds like a(nother) movie adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster.

I liked Bruce Almighty. Made me laugh.

So I got Ace Combat: Assault Horizon today. Ace Combat is a game where you fly around in a jet while shooting down other jets, it's a simple formula, one that should be tough to cock-up. They found a way. To make the game more 'intense' or 'extreme' or whatever, in the middle of a dog fight you go into a super zoom mode where you're not really flying your plane any more. Then, when you get a kill there is a screen-filling explosion and big gushes of black oil (ie airplane blood) splashes on the screen. I find it insultingly juvenile.

So why don't I just not use the super zoom mode if I hate it so much? Well not using it is not an option, besides the ludicrous increase in difficulty some planes can only be shot down in zoom mode. And by some I mean most, all the planes with difficult AI I think. I'm going to try and take it back tomorrow, what a way to ruin a weekend though.

So I was worried for a minute, but Assault Horizon is one of those ones that doesn't take place in Strangereal anyway, so it's not like I'd be missing anything by skipping it. I think they were going for the Call of Duty fanbase on that one.

I've gotten really tired of shows that exploit the perceived randomness bias as something that is some form of fantastical synchronicity rather than just what this stuff is. It isn't synchronicity. It's just random numbers that are given special attention to because of some sort of perceived pattern. So, 11:11, 3:18, 12/12/12 are all just number sets that are given special but unneeded importance to.

So, "Lost", "Touch", "Flashforward", "Fringe" and other shows that act on this should stop doing this. The new show "Alcatraz" looks like it might be using this formula. I do like the show but I hope this plot device isn't a primary part of the show.

Fringe suffers from sometimes being really stupid and having characters periodically drop character in order to pretend they aren't atheists and such. But in general it's been a fun ride. However, the thing they did with the Time War at the very end of Season 4 is horse shit. It's basically just as bad as the Time War from Enterprise.

What they introduced was a single throwaway episode in the future where observers from the future (or at least a future) came back in time to our near future to conquer us and had totally different powers from the ones observers had showed up until now. And seriously what the fuck?

The observers already went back into the ancient past, why the fuck would they conquer the mid 21st century when they could conquer the 3rd century BCE? If they are going back to claim a world with more resources and less pollution, why not go back before humanity even existed? The supposed timeline for them coming into existence doesn't even make any sense, they apparently evolved from humans in a few hundred years? Huh? The observers could say what you were going to say because they could see shortly into the future, why are they now suddenly able to read minds?

Why are time wars always so shitty in scifi shows? Time wars could be awesome. But instead, we're always served up a plate of shitty continuity errors. Don't writers know that we can forgive really egregious continuity errors except when we are asked to keep track of time loops, at which point our continuity error acceptance falls to near zero?

-Username17

I don't know, I quite liked the Time War stuff in Doctor Who.

echo

Fucking season finale of Grimm. The writing was atrocious. My wife and I just finished watching it on Hulu and were groaning through the whole stupid thing.

The villain guy is stupid-evil and Nick becomes a retard. Whyyyyyy?

M. Night Shymalamadingdong finally hit my permanent shit list.

I got the A:TLA movie inflicted on me over the weekend.

I mean, I know Shemalimgaman is a hack director. Trying to put The Twist into every movie? It worked...once...for the Sixth Sense. Everything since then has been trying to cash in on his name.

And don't even get me started on him being Political Jesus in Lady In The Water.

And then the A:TLA movie just proved he's a crappy director, period. He had a rich, ready-made world and decent story HANDED TO HIM and he still managed to screw it up.

Fuck 'im.

erik wrote:Fucking season finale of Grimm. The writing was atrocious. My wife and I just finished watching it on Hulu and were groaning through the whole stupid thing.

The villain guy is stupid-evil and Nick becomes a retard. Whyyyyyy?

Considering that the exact previous episode began with Juliette discovering that some creatures were human hybrids, why did he not just start with telling her that Blondie was one of those?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

erik wrote:Fucking season finale of Grimm. The writing was atrocious. My wife and I just finished watching it on Hulu and were groaning through the whole stupid thing.

The villain guy is stupid-evil and Nick becomes a retard. Whyyyyyy?

Considering that the exact previous episode began with Juliette discovering that some creatures were human hybrids, why did he not just start with telling her that Blondie was one of those?

Arg, I know! Thanks to that and Hank's recent close encounters I was thinking, hey, they finally laid the groundwork to bring both Hank and Juliette in on the big secret so that they're ready to accept it. This could be a cool setup for forming a proper Team Grimm. But noooooooooo.

And since Jules was needing Wesen medicine, why not take her to the local Blutbad-Fushbau pair first for 2 birds with 1 stone instead of gushing over his unconvincing creepy trailer like a crazed schoolboy? That's totally what he would do in any other episode but they had to contrive to make him an idiot for the finale.

I wonder if the writers just weren't privvy to what happened in previous episodes (if so, what a shitty way to do things). Or if they are just stuck on their stupid coin storyline to the detriment of everything else- making the villain into a metaphor of their situation. Perhaps the villain is a cry for help from that writing pair.

FrankTrollman wrote:Fringe suffers from sometimes being really stupid and having characters periodically drop character in order to pretend they aren't atheists and such.

What do you mean by this? Is it just something that's never explicitly mentioned and just assumed? Do you have an example?

Maxus wrote:M. Night Shymalamadingdong finally hit my permanent shit list.

I got the A:TLA movie inflicted on me over the weekend.

I mean, I know Shemalimgaman is a hack director. Trying to put The Twist into every movie? It worked...once...for the Sixth Sense. Everything since then has been trying to cash in on his name.

And don't even get me started on him being Political Jesus in Lady In The Water.

And then the A:TLA movie just proved he's a crappy director, period. He had a rich, ready-made world and decent story HANDED TO HIM and he still managed to screw it up.

Fuck 'im.

This is what happens when you try to compress 440 minutes of material into an 103 minutes. When you cut out more than 3/4 of the series, you're going to loose a lot. When you cut out more than 3/4 of the series but still try to follow roughly the same plot, it's going to be a mess with people doing things for little reason with no buildup.

Was the movie even 103 minutes long? He took Book 1 (which is 20 episodes@22 minutes each Hence the 440 minutes) and condenced it down to 103 minutes. Thankfully, he didn't try to make 1 movie out of all 3 books. That would have made me cry.

Even with those limitations, there are things he could have done to mitigate much of the damage. But somehow, he managed to make it worse.

I know he was a fan, and he made the movie for his kids, but I wish he hadn't.

I don't have a problem with the adaptation, oddly enough.

My problem is...well, casting (for a bunch of people from ethnic groups supposed to be inspired by Asiatic countries, they look awfully white), how the action was handled (great job on making bending look slow and unexciting), finding out he thought it was all inspired by Indian aesthetics (it isn't), etc. Oh, and shitty CGI. Yeah.

So, yeah. He can't direct a good movie even when his hand is held.
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Also, it's likely very petty of me, but I keep seeing Joss Whedon fans orgasming over how Avengers is the greatest superhero movie ever, thanks to the Hand of Joss.

When I ask if they'd watched the rest of the Marvel superhero movies (at least, the ones leading up to the Avengers), they say "Noo...?" and then I facepalm on the inside.

RobbyPants wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Fringe suffers from sometimes being really stupid and having characters periodically drop character in order to pretend they aren't atheists and such.

What do you mean by this? Is it just something that's never explicitly mentioned and just assumed? Do you have an example?

In the episode about things blowing up in fields, Dr. Bishop goes off on this huge rant about god and divine plans and forgiveness and shit. It makes no sense at all on any level. In the episode about dopplegangers forcing a scientist to fix them, the scientist goes off on this deal about how William Bell had warned him that making new life forms was the providence of God, not Man. William I-am-the-villains-from-Evangelion Bell.

There are a couple other places where some writer goes off about Jesus despite the fact that the characters in question are very obviously atheists. And it's annoying every time.

But it's something I can deal with. The Observer Time War plotline I cannot. I doubt that I'll be watching season 5.

-Username17

Dark Shadows (2012) - I think I gave up all hope for the rest of the movie when Helena Bonham Carter's character leaned in to give Johnny Depp's character a blowjob.

The Avenger's movie probably IS the best Marvel super hero movie to date. It's great. Its also the best rendering of the Hulk. Joss did a great job, and yes, I've seen all the super hero movies to date.

Iron Man 1/2 were good, bust mostly because Robert Downey Jr is an amazing Tony Stark. Thor, wasn't that good, but that Aussie guy was a good Thor. The Hulk movies to date have sucked. Captain America.. was actually a pretty good movie. The Xmen movies are.. schitzo. Though I have always loved the Dark Phoenix/Sentinel story lines so that helps. And X-Man First Class.. was painful, even if it had some cute moments.

The Avenger's movie had everything a Comic Movie should.
Good quips, high action, and some good inter character moments.

Thor is an arrogant Dick.
Captain America is a boy scout with self confidence issues.
Tony Stark is a giant egomaniac.
Banner is tortured and always looking for a cure, Hulk is a Brute with great one liners.
Nick Furry/Samuel Jackson is an interesting mix. It's definitely a post Universe Reboot Nick Fury, and I wonder if he's going to turn out to be head of Hydra, like in the comics.

When Joss Whedon does good work, he does great work. Course, when he flops they're pretty hard core.

I'm waiting to see how the new Spider Man movie comes out.. to see how I feel. But currently, no Comic Super Hero movie has made me go, "They got it! Like Avengers did."

Er... I think you posted that in the wrong thread Sabs.

On Dark Shadows... I loved it. I ... wait. Remembering the scene Ancient History calls out... *sigh* I swear there is some kinky swinger thing going on with Burton, Carter and Depp. That, or they're really into cuckolding and exhibitionism.

I was responding to the 2nd half of what Maxus said