[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
The worst of all time- Mystic River
The odds of your daughter being killed- one in 50,000 (?)
The odds of your daughter being killed the same night your best friend kills a paedophile, whose body is never found, so now you think your best friend killed your daughter- incalcuable.
[/QUOTE]
One of only a handful of books I was not able to read all the way through. I really hated it. I still have the book though. I cut out the center section of the pages to make a secret hiding place book.
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
If by “much, much worse” you mean opening the door for that Ewok-filled crapfest which shall not be named and the prequels, then I agree with you. As for how it was a cop-out, it reduced a cosmic struggle to a mere family squabble (aided by the fact that it’s implied in Revenge of the Shits that the Emperor created Anakin).
[/QUOTE]
I think the little fuzzballs would be there whether or not Vader was Luke’s father. Plus this makes the good part of RotJ (the parts not on Endor) work. Would it really be better if Luke had just said “die you putz”?
Not that I’m equating them, but King Lear is about a family squabble also.
[QUOTE=mswas] SageRat
I am not up to Season 3 yet. Your point about being decommissioned is valid. Even still, you’d think that the non-decommissioned Cruise ships and freighters would all have medical personnel. I cannot imagine an interstellar voyage with them.
[/QUOTE]
Galactica did have some medics, so that might have been considered all the medical personnel necessary at the time. If anything catastrophic would have happened to someone before the Cylon attack, it probably would have made more sense to get them back to a planet.
[QUOTE=mswas]
…I am not up to Season 3 yet. Your point about being decommissioned is valid. Even still, you’d think that the non-decommissioned Cruise ships and freighters would all have medical personnel. I cannot imagine an interstellar voyage with them.
[/QUOTE]
Who says they don’t. Cottle may have been the only physician on the Galatica, but there’s been nothing to suggest that he’s the only one in the fleet. Using modern cruise ships as an analogy most passenger vessels likely have some sort of clinic and one or two doctors onboard. And that’s not counting all the doctors, nurses, etc that were passengers at the time of the attack. Granted some ships (Colonial One) are glorified airliners.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Well, it’s not quite that way in the book, if that makes you feel better; they’re never surrounded by the Orcs, but rather fight off a reasonable-sized sortie before running to escape the Balrog.
(As for the movie you claim to have seen, I’ve decided to go back to my position that no such entity exists and the rest of you hallucinated it..)
[/QUOTE]
Wow! My imagination must rock because I hallucinated three of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
The movie “Armaggedon” has the worst plot contrivance known to man. Instead of training astronauts, you know, the smartest men in the world, to learn how to maneuver a drill in order to plant explosives on a killer asteroid, they throw in some flimsy excuse for why it would make more sense to send oil rig operators up in space. Because, of course, learning how to operate heavy equipment is far more difficult than learning astrophysics, etc.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
I think the little fuzzballs would be there whether or not Vader was Luke’s father. Plus this makes the good part of RotJ (the parts not on Endor) work. Would it really be better if Luke had just said “die you putz”?
Not that I’m equating them, but King Lear is about a family squabble also.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but like, the non-Endor parts (and I’m assuming you’re including the whole Tatooine sequence in the “suck” part) would have been a lot better if it hadn’t been a retread of the first film. (I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy that if it took them 20 years to build the first DS, that they could have one even larger nearly completed in the span of a few months.)
And if Lucas had cribbed from King Lear, ROTJ (which if you pronounce the initials aptly makes a retching sound, I’d like to add) wouldn’t have been teh suxxor that it was (and we wouldn’t have had teh uber-suxxor that the prequels were, because he undoubtly would have cribbed from something else, rather than blindly whipping it all of out his ass as he so obviously did).
[QUOTE=Enright3]
One of only a handful of books I was not able to read all the way through. I really hated it. I still have the book though. I cut out the center section of the pages to make a secret hiding place book.
[/QUOTE]
What’s your address? I want to mail you something.
[QUOTE=Chimera]
Ahem. The ENTIRE Harry Potter series is one long series of deux ex machina endings.
Book 1: Harry’s touch KILLS Professor Quirrell. How convenient
[/QUOTE]
This was my first thought too. I remember thinking…“Oh man Harry’s REALLY fucked now. This kid couldn’t even get a feather to float 6 months ago and now he’s going to be killed by one of the greatest witches of all…what…WHAT!!! That’s IT???” ALL HE HAS TO DO IS FUCKING TOUCH THE GUY? :smack:
[QUOTE=RikWriter]
Wow! My imagination must rock because I hallucinated three of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, and they even have the same titles as some really good books. What a coincidence!
[QUOTE=PunditLisa]
The movie “Armaggedon” has the worst plot contrivance known to man. Instead of training astronauts, you know, the smartest men in the world, to learn how to maneuver a drill in order to plant explosives on a killer asteroid, they throw in some flimsy excuse for why it would make more sense to send oil rig operators up in space. Because, of course, learning how to operate heavy equipment is far more difficult than learning astrophysics, etc.
[/QUOTE]
I know defending Armageddon will not endear me to many members of this board, but the movie clearly states that drilling is mostly instinct learned from years and years of experience.
The drillers also did not have to learn astrophysics because they were solely passnegers, not real astronauts.
The movie had a lot of holes, this was not one of them.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Mary Corleone’s death at the end of The Godfather Part III: :mad: What a fucking abortion! No foreshadowing! No dramatic necessity! Nothing but a malus ex machina! (Unlike the deaths of Carlo in Part I and Fredo in Part II, both of whom, tragically, had to die because they betrayed the Family.) I think Coppola was just groping for some way to get a “tragic” ending without having Michael actually defeated by his enemies.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. There were only two Godfather movies.
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
Speaking of Sean Penn The Pledge with it’s ending of “the serial killer was on his way but died in a car crash” is total crap.
[/QUOTE]
I agree about the contrivance, but give them credit for a quirky ending like that- sort of like the Paul Newman film Fort Apache the Bronx, where they are tracking a cop killer and they never find her, it turns out she was killed in a unrelated incident and they never found out who the killer was or that she was dead.
[QUOTE=PunditLisa]
The movie “Armaggedon” has the worst plot contrivance known to man. Instead of training astronauts, you know, the smartest men in the world, to learn how to maneuver a drill in order to plant explosives on a killer asteroid, they throw in some flimsy excuse for why it would make more sense to send oil rig operators up in space. Because, of course, learning how to operate heavy equipment is far more difficult than learning astrophysics, etc.
[/QUOTE]
To be fair, no astrophysics were actually used in the making of that movie. The astronauts were pretty much just cab drivers.
[QUOTE=saoirse]
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. There were only two Godfather movies.
[/QUOTE]
No, there’s another one, I saw it I swear. Robert De Niro plays a Jewish guy who’s great at picking the horses, and the mafia puts him in charge of a casino. Sharon Stone plays his shrill harpy of a wife. Joe Pesci plays a psychopathic asshole who dies gruesomely. Again.
[QUOTE=Cyberhwk]
This was my first thought too. I remember thinking…“Oh man Harry’s REALLY fucked now. This kid couldn’t even get a feather to float 6 months ago and now he’s going to be killed by one of the greatest witches of all…what…WHAT!!! That’s IT???” ALL HE HAS TO DO IS FUCKING TOUCH THE GUY? :smack:
[/QUOTE]
Well Harry’s just a little kid up against an adult wizard, there’s no way he’s going to make it out alive without a deux ex machina. What would you have him do, suddenly realize that Quirrel’s one weakness is wingardium leviosa? With the odds stacked against him, Quirrel’s got spells that can make Harry instantly die, but Harry’s got cleverness and ingenuity? That’s the kind of plot device that’s probably worse than deux ex machina, when the rookie goes up against the expert and wins through some clever trick that somehow in all his years of training the expert never came across.
Illuminatiprimus already mentioned Superman making time go backward. The same stunt was pulled, big time, in this year’s Doctor Who season finale. The whole thing never happened. I appreciate Russell Davies’s work in resurrecting the series, but he simply should not be allowed to write scripts.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
No, there’s another one, I saw it I swear. Robert De Niro plays a Jewish guy who’s great at picking the horses, and the mafia puts him in charge of a casino. Sharon Stone plays his shrill harpy of a wife. Joe Pesci plays a psychopathic asshole who dies gruesomely. Again.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not Godfather III. That’s Mean Streets III.
