As for the The Happening, maybe star of the movie Mark Wahlberg, can chime in:
I can barely watch Avatar these days, outside of the theater 3-D experience it is really horrible. My wife loves it though, she gets teary eyed at the end, I just say nothing and hope she doesn’t catch me rolling my eyes.
My love for Mark Wahlburg, already boundless, just grew a little bit more.
Even though everyone you (and I) know hates them, his movies make good money. The only one thats done badly is “Lady in the Water”. Even Airbender doubled its budget. There are a lot of popular directors out there with much worse records.
I don’t expect to ever watch The FLy II (the one with Eric Stoltz), but I am kind of interested in knowing how the fetus survived the abortion that Geena Davis, CERTAINLY went back to complete after the closing credits of The Fly.
IOW, why does that movie exist?
Yes, the story is told backwards. And I wish I had walked out. I still feel sick to my stomach when I think about that piece of garbage. That level of brutality was not at all necessary; it was Tarantino-esque “Look just how shocking I am, aren’t I such an auteur?” bullshit.
This movie is so wonderfully awful that we all sat around MST3K’ing it when we rented it. I guessed the “twist” pretty early on. Even granting the ludicrous premise, the movie is filled with dumb. You have scenes of people trying to outrun the wind, lest they inhale the deadly plant stuff.
I saw it when it first came out. I was in my twenties and love scary movies.
When we entered the foyer, I noticed that there were quite a few paramedics, and people laid out on chairs and on the floor. Three quarters of the way through the movie, I just thought ‘I can’t take any more of this’, and walked out. As I stepped into the foyer, I fainted and collapsed. When I came round, the paramedic said ‘Welcome to the club.’ Dozens of people fainted.
I have never fainted, before or since. I have seen the film several times now and have enjoyed it, but in the '70s, we’d never seen anything like it.
Yeah, I could have watched it a couple of times since then but I had no interest at all to do this to myself.
Millers’ already pointed out that Graham Hess (the Gibson charcter) was not an atheist; he was an angry theist. But, as I said, I enjoyed the interaction between Graham, Merrill, Morgan, & Bo. My favorite bits from that movie are:
[ul]
[li]the early scene in which the little girl, Bo, asks her father if he ever speaks to her dead mother;[/li][li]the dinner scene in which the long-simmering rage the son, Morgan, has toward his father finally comes out under the strain of impending doom, and they whole family argues passionately only to reconcile; and[/li][li]the scene in the basement when Morgan (the son) has an asthma attack and Graham realizes he hasn’t any medicine, and thus he can offer only love, calm, and willpower to help his son through it.[/li][/ul]
Those scenes all spoke to me.
Naked Lunch.
WTF?
Cannot fathom how a movie could be created from that book.
The movie is more or less about how Burroughs wrote the novel, with many hallucinatory interludes. At some point toward the end, [spoiler]in a rare moment of lucidity when the characters based on Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac come to visit the character representing Burroughs (Bill Lee), he realizes that between visits with frightening creatures and other subterranean doings, he’s been chronicling all the weird events around him and ends up piecing them together into a manuscript, apparently meant to represent the novel itself.
A few of the famous prose pieces from the novel - the “talking asshole” bit, for instance - make it into the film as deadpan recitations from the protagonist.[/spoiler]
As did the reveal of Joaquin Phoenix and the kids… watching TV coverage of the aliens, with tinfoil on their heads.
How can they tell?
So, no one here saw Mars Needs Moms? I asked back on the first page why Mars needed moms, but no one has answered…
Can someone please give me a general rundown of The Usual Suspects? The reason I have no intention of seeing it is because I already know the spoiler* thanks to some careless person who posted it unboxed on the SDMB.
But what’s the general plot?
*Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze
Cuz Earth women are the hottest? If science fiction has taught us anything over the last century, it’s surely that.
Spoilers for a movie over a decade old…
A group of cons are brought together through suspicious means and all start working various jobs together. Due to various leverage against all of them they are basically forced into a suicide mission to steal a bunch of drugs and money off of a freighter.
It turns out that all of this was just to get the man arranging everything (Soze) into position to kill the one person who knows what’s in your spoiler.
-Joe
General plot. Let’s see:
The whole thing’s told in flashback, basically, as the cops interrogate Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) about what happened on a burned-out boat that was supposed to have $90 million in dope aboard. No trace of drugs, all the gangsters killed, what the hell happened? So, Kint starts spilling the beans, telling the elaborate story of how he met four other criminals in a line-up, they start working together, and find themselves tangled up in something huge involving a shadowy underworld figure named Keyser Soze, someone so evil and spooky he’s practically the boogeyman. Much death ensues, and the final reveal of what all happened on the boat is:
there was no dope on the boat. It was all a secret deal to “sell” a man who had seen and could describe Keyser Soze, between, I believe, the Hungarian and Turkish mafias. Verbal Kint, who was in fact Keyser Soze, masterminded and manipulated every step, from the line-up on down, in order to ensure that he could get on the boat and kill the eyewitness. All the way, Kint acted like a cripple with an overactive mouth, but the final shocker is when Kint leaves the police station, starts walking normally as the police he left in the building slowly start to realize that the whole thing was a put-on, and gets into a car and disappears for good. “And just like that, he’s gone.”
That leaves out a ton of nuance, though. You do yourself a disservice by not seeing the movie.
Edit: I remember and type way too slow, but I’m leaving this here anyway. I still think it’s worth seeing, too.
The Usual Suspects: Verbal Kint is an awkward small-time crook with cerebral palsy, being questioned by Detective Kujan about what happened on a boat that led to many deaths and the boat being set afire. The only other known survivor is in bad condition in the hospital. Kint tells the story in flashbacks, alternating with interrogation.
Weeks prior, a bunch of the “usual suspects” (cf the movie box/poster image) get hauled in for a lineup; this includes Kint. Afterwards, one of them proposes a big hit on some corrupt cops. They fence the loot, and get a jewel heist offer from the fence. They end up with heroin instead. The fence points them at who told him about the job, who ends up being Mr. Kobayashi, a lawyer for the mysterious Keyser Soze.
Soze, they are told by one of the others in their group, is a near-mythical Hungarian mobster who is utterly ruthless. When rivals kidnapped his wife and kids and confronted him, threatening to kill them, he killed his own family himself, and then all but one of his enemies so that the survivor could tell the tale. Almost no one even knows what he looks like. He works through intermediaries.
Kobayashi says Soze is pissed about the heist. One tries to run and is killed. The others grab Kobayashi. He pulls out dossiers on each of them about their loved ones and private lives, threatening their loved ones and blackmailing them all into attacking a rival’s boat and destroying the huge supply of cocaine on board. They are welcome to the cash if they stick around to confront the buyers.
We’ve come to the story at the start of the film: one of the characters named Keaton, who was trying to go straight, tells Kint to hang back, and split some of the money with Keaton’s girlfriend if things go bad. Two of them search the boat and find no cocaine. One goes after the vehicle with the cash and is killed. One of the foreign mobsters is killed by someone unseen. The others in the group are killed one by one.
The detective tells Kint that one of the dead mobsters his group ran into was a man claiming he could identify Soze; the other group there (Hungarians) was trying to buy out this guy so they could find Soze and take revenge. Soze had sent this group of small-time criminals to be a distraction so he could have the witness killed. Kujan beats down Kint’s story, trying to get him to admit that this was a setup for Keaton to fake his death (he’d done it before), and Kint breaks down and says it was Keaton’s plan to do a lot of what they did and that no, maybe he didn’t really see Keaton die. Then he clams up; his bail has been posted and he gets to leave.
[spoiler]Kujan looks around the room - he’d borrowed an office from someone else for the questioning - and starts seeing details from Kint’s story: a coffee cup made by the Kobayashi company, names from articles and other things around the room, etc. He realizes it was all made up and runs out of the room. Meanwhile the witness in the hospital had woken up and gave a description of the killer at the docks, repeating Soze’s name over and over. A fax comes through with the artist’s rendering of “Kint.”
“Kint” leaves the police station and his crippled gait and stance straighten up. He gets into a car driven by “Kobayashi,” and they drive away. Kujan runs out of the police station and looks around frantically.
The last line is a flashback to something said by Kint about Soze - “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” And then another line: “And like that, he was gone.”[/spoiler]
If you like vampires and the Pacific Northwest maybe. It wasn’t all that bad, and I do not like chick flicks.
I found it scary or at least horrifying, and that was before the ‘your Mom fucks George Bush on the moon’ thing’ or whatever it was.