I saw Tower Heist because I was hoping it would be like Tropic Thunder or Zoolander. Unfortunately, it’s not.
I only ever saw the trailer for Marci X. Did anyone actually see it? Was it ever released? Is it actually good, and we’ve been missing out on an unheralded work of comedic genius this whole time?
I haven’t looked, but it’s strange that you say that War of the Worlds is hard to find, because it seems to be a popular movie on YouTube reaction channels.
Armond White liked it, so…no.
Ah, I never watch movies on YouTube, so I guess that’s why. LOL
By the way, what’s a “reaction channel”?
It’s a channel where the content is videos of people watching or listening to other content, and then the video shows their reactions to what they’re checking out. The larger-than-life the reactions, the more attention the people who make the channel end up getting, so the “reactors” are incentivized to go over-the-top in their judgments and reactions.
It’s very meta. I’m considering starting a “reaction reaction” channel where I watch several reaction videos of the same piece of base content at once and react to them, just in case the reaction channels aren’t meta enough.
Not only that, it’s a reaction to reactions to reactions! Yet another level of meta past what I thought was possible! Pretty soon it’s going to look that that famous mirror shot in Citizen Kane…
In other words, I haven’t missed anything. LOL
I’d love to see a version of War of the Worlds that’s true to the novel instead of Orson Welles’ radio show. It would be set in Victorian England, and the Martians’ fighting machines would look like the ones in the Classics Illustrated comic book.
I was terrified of hyenas most of my childhood (okay, maybe my adulthood, too) because of this movie - I thought the killer shrews were hyenas when I watched it on TV when I was 4 or so.
The Martian invasion as depicted in Volume 2 of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is surprisingly faithful to Wells’ book – set in VictorianEngland, the description of the Martains and their machines matching Wells’ descriptions (even if the tripods don’t look like the ones in trhe Classics Illustrated).
And it’s unique in one thing no one else gets right – the Martian "heat ray is invisible, as described in the bbook. Virtually everyone illustrrating the story shows the rays from the Martian weapon, which not only doesn’t match the book, it’s not scientifically correcxt. Even visible lasers aren’t visible as they pass through the air, unoless there’s smoke or fog or something tro scatter the beam. And the Martian weapon is infrared, so it ought not to be visible at all. I think the way the beam’s effects become apparent – things being set on fire with no obvious immediate cause – is scarier and more effective than showing the rays could ever be.
You’re actually ‘seeing’ the tracer rays that are interspersed with the infrared, so that the Martians can adjust their sighting.
That sounds more like a transmographier to me…
A conceit of comic books is that the reader can see invisible things, i.e. the Invisible Woman or Wonder Woman’s plane.
I remember seeing The Monolith Monsters when I was a kid. I was young when I saw it, so I can’t really vouch for its quality, but I do remember the unique plot and was struck even then with how original the idea was compared to other “invasion from space” movies.
Awww. You should, at least, check out reactions to Game of Thrones’ red wedding.
One part that’s never made it to any of the media versions was the attack of HMS Thunderchild on three tripods in the Thames estuary. She managed to destroy one before being destroyed herself.
Some years ago on his YT channel Drachinifel read the passage, commissioned a drawing based on the book’s description and sold prints of it.
I like reactions to The Sixth Sense, especially the twist at the end, which almost no one sees coming. Here’s a compilation of reactions of just the ending. (Major spoiler; don’t watch if you haven’t seen the movie.)
It’s in the Classics Illustrated version. There’s a spectacular full-page drawing of the ship being blown to smithereens.
I remember the Classics Illustrated version. It accomplished its mission; years later, I would read the book.
HMS Thunderchild was also featured in Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds, from 1978.
When they do this, the artist uses dashed lines or some other way to suggest that the things are really invisible, and that the people in the story don’t se them. They don’t do that with the Martian heat rays. As with more recent ray-gin beams, phasers, and lasers, they simply show the beam transiting the space between shooter and shot. It is, I suppose, another convention – if they don’t make the beams “visible”, then how o you know anything’s being shot? But it’s still unphysical, and the NON-use of the trope in LXG is all the more striking.
The Classicis Illustrated cover shows the usual depiction. Here are some others:
