Well, except for gee, I dunno, LORD OF THE RINGS.
But yeah, D&D was a big disappointment.
Aliens vs. Predator
Had they followed even loosely some of the Dark Horse comics, they’d have had an infinitely better film than this ridiculous slapdash of elements from both franchises, consistent with neither.
I often hear this stated and I agree with it, when I say it. That is, I think the Gor movies would have been MUCH better if they’d followed up on the sexy slavegirl stuff that was the major draw of the novels. But then, I’ve got a specific reason for saying that … without the sexy slavegirl stuff, the Gor novels are just a pretty good Barsoom pastiche. So WHY would the movie have been better if it had followed the original Dark Horse comics storylines.
(I actually liked the movie a lot, but am open to see where it could have been improved. Never read the comics.)
Well, for starters, the Dark Horse comic series set the conflict in the far future, around or shortly after the time-frame of Aliens. A human agricultural colony finds its cattle all getting sick, aliens pop out, predators show up, hilarity ensues. The movie stole one element from the comics - the central human character is a black woman who earns sufficient respect from a predator to receive a honour-scar on her forehead in alien blood.
All that crap about the pyramids and whatnot… where the hell did that come from?
A movie that would have been vastly improved with the inclusion of a zombie-making virus and some apocalyptic destruction.
There are so many subpar films that could have been better with a few minor tweaks, but my dollar is going to go on Wag The Dog. For a film with such players as Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, and William H. Macy, with a script co-penned by David Mamet (with some excellent snaps–“What’s the thing people remember about the Gulf War? A bomb falling down a chimney. Let me tell you something: I was in the building where we filmed that with a 10-inch model made out of Legos,”) and such a prescient and skewering take on national politics, it just fell apart about midway through the second act, as if they just couldn’t maintain the gag. Still a great film, but it could have been better if it hadn’t come apart at high speed.
Still, any film with Willie Nelson complaining that, “Albania’s hard to rhyme,” get’s a solid rate in my book. Put it up on the shelf next to Bob Roberts.
Stranger
It would have been better with zombies chasing them.
S1m0ne. Take the concept that a studio can try to make a human actress into a star by giving her every characteristic and publicity boost necessary to get the public’s attention and hold it. (Forget the fact that that doesn’t always work; assume that in this case it will.) Now, bump that up a notch by creating an “actress” through CGI. Now, let’s go through a step-by-step process, with producers, publicity-types, focus groups and techies all working in tandem to create this CGI “actress”. She passes easily, and becomes a star.
So where’s the conflict, you ask? Well, how about, after an hour of screen time, the techies go on strike, telling the producer, “Pay us what we deserve, or no more ‘Simone’.” Maybe have the payoff be that they drop the dime after all, and “her” fans bluster, “Oh, I always knew she was fake,” while the producer hooks up a vodka IV. Wait—wait…what? You’re just going to take 30 minutes of screen time to create the “actress”, then devote the rest of the film to the producer running around like a Looney Tunes character, trying to fool all of the people all of the time? Aw…crud.
Billy Budd—not that I’ve ever seen anyone else around here who likes this novella (and I’m not saying there is no such person)–but the 1960s movie had nothing going for it except for the fellow playing the title role. Otherwise: Robert Ryan sounded stilted, Peter Ustinov mumbled his way through it as if he were bored to death, and he was directing the thing.
"The League of Extraordinary Gentleman" - Apparently Connery had control of the script and it shows.
Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are Dead A wonderfully funny play, by one of the greatest living playwrights, which he adapted himself, with great actors and a big budget - and yet it’s the only time I’ve actually fallen asleep in the theater. It was awful. I have no idea what made it so bad. Richard Dreyfus was trying his best, but everyone else seemed to be stumbling around in a vacuum, totally detached.
IIRc, I know what you mean–the pacing is way too slow. It’s like the Marx brothers directed by Kubrick. Maybe a good editor could have found a good 90-minute movie in this 117-minute mess.
Horror:
The Shining. Stephen King himself didn’t do it (pacing was all wrong, way too slow, badly needed an editor…,kinda like his latter-day fiction), what’s-his-face Kubrick certainly didn’t.
Session 9. A setting as inherently creepy as an abandoned psychiatric hospital is a hell of a good start. I was hoping they’d done it well, for personal/political reasons that are no secret on this board. And it got off to a good start plot-wise, with distinct overtones of ancient coercive horrors like prefrontal lobotomy instruments and whatnot. But they couldn’t make up their minds whether to do a gothic psychological thriller, an el cheapo screamfest-bloodbath, or a whodunnit thriller, and the dime-store pseudo-Freudian suppressed-memory hypnotherapy was totally out of venue (what, they did memory regression on couches in these places? yeah right)
Kids:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Should be a movie for 10 year olds, not 5 year olds. A movie about a racing-quality sports car from the early 20th Century, a 12-liter 8-cylinder supercharged Paragon Panther that, on restoration, turns out not only to have so many knobs and gadgets that no modern mass-produced car would have, but also a tendency to think for itself. You gotta make the car seem real, feel believable. The stupid candy-striped putt-putt car with slow-motion propellers on its homecoming-float mudflaps is to the ideal Chitty what Barney the Dinosaur is to the sauropods in Jurassic Park. I picture it something like this, but with eccentricities galore.
