Among Chicago film buffs, Ebert is notorious for his frequent and lengthy trips to the snack bar while the movie is running. He sometimes misses important plot points on these jaunts, which may occasion a complaint in his review that the movie didn’t explain some development or other.
For example, in his original review of the caper flick The Italian Job, he complained that the heist at the beginning made no sense, because the safe plunging through the floor would be far too heavy to be caught in the waiting boat. The only possible way he could have missed what actually happened there (the boat was a decoy; the safe fell into the water and was cracked on the bottom while the authorities’ attention was elsewhere) was that he was out of the theater.
I note that the passage in question has been removed from the official review, but it was definitely there in the original version. Read it myself opening week when I saw the movie and thought, WTF?
I don’t know about Riddick, but the online review was changed. I read it the day the movie came out and it specifically said Cruise damaged a leg. It also said nature grants the number of legs in an animal so that they’re divisible by four. This second one I can accept as a brain fart, but the former statement is way too smelly for that.
I saw Fantastic Four. I liked it. I don’t have any actual reasons for this; I just liked it. Such is often the way of my liking movies.
That said, I happen to really really want a sequel. Why, you ask? Well, because I wanna see more of Johnny Storm. He’s just that cool. I mean, he’s all macho and can light himself on fire. How much cooler can you get? Plus, great CG job on that, too.
Er, in conclusion, Johnny Storm is cool and so by extension are the rest of that lot. (And hey, Jessica Alba is hot. :D)
I got dragged to it by my roommate. It was much better than I feared. If nothing else, there’s decent eye candy for both genders and stuff catches on fire, which is all I ever expect from an action movie.
No kidding. The movie is set in New York, and the Thing uses an SBC payphone!
I bet Debbie (?) gave him the ring back because he made an operator-assisted collect call from a payphone that turns out to be right across the street from her house! Within shouting distance, even! I know that I’d be pretty pissed if that happened to me.
As far as product placement goes, I thought that the Thing’s giant Nikes were pretty funny. Then again, The Thing was the funniest character in the movie, as far as comic relief goes.
I thought the film was pretty good, as far as superhero films go. I’m not familiar with the FF outside of the film, but I thought it was interesting how the heroes squabble like regular people do.
Surprised there hasn’t been a mention of the familiar-looking mailman yet in this thread.
Re The Incredibles: I can find no mention in Ebert’s Sun-Times review of the film, but he did compare the Four to the Incredibles on his TV show, along with the Hulk and others. I think he was just saying the Four have powers similar to other superheroes we’ve seen in movies. An Entertainment Weekly article said they feared unintelligent audiences wouldn’t know that the Four came first and think it was an Incredibles rip-off.
I saw the fantastic four this afternoon. The lion, the hippo, the zebra, and the giraffe.
Though the penguins were the most fantastic foursome of all, and totally stole the show. I was laughing through pretty much the whole film.
What can I say? My own fantastic foursome (9, 7, 6 and 3.5) had been begging to see Madagascar since it came out, and it was now showing at a nearby discount theater, where every ticket is the fantastic price of four dollars.
As far as the (properly capitalized) Fantastic Four, I’ll wait until it’s in the bargain theater at that price, or wait for Blockbuster.
I saw this movie today, and I think it’s total crap.
“Chem 101 - what happens when you rapidly cool a hot metal?”
Well, it warps and can crack or shatter, depending on how hot it is and how rapidly you cool it. What it doesn’t do is freeze to the point where something made out of it is less mobile than it was before. All they did, apparantly, was return Dr. Doom to his original temperature. Sooooo … why the hell couldn’t he move? I’m lost here. I don’t get it.
Alba does a poor job acting. So does the guy playing Mr. Fantastic. The Human Torch annoyed me to no end. The Thing is the only character I gave a damn about.
(And I agree with Aeschines: The blind lady was far, far hotter than Alba.)
Just musing on ways the story could’ve been better. I’ll spoiler-box it, though I’d be kinda surprised if there’s anyone still reading this thread who hasn’t yet seen the film:
[spoiler]Ditch the whole corporate Von Doom stuff. When he faces ruin and then uses his powers to kill the board member, it’s too much a copy of Norman Osborne’s actions in Spider-Man, anyway. Also, the entire notion of his corporation going into instant collapse after the mission failed is improbable, since the company already had the space station and the shuttle and the implication that flying into space is something Doom does pretty casually. Further, why is Doom an American (or at least with thoroughly American speech patterns?)
Rather, start the movie with Richards, Grimm and Sue Storm approaching Doom with the plan to study a radiation cloud they expect will pass near Earth two years from now. Richards knows Doom because they got their doctorates together at MIT some 20 years earlier, but Grimm is nervous. Doom has established himself as the dictator of his native land, the small Balkan nation of Latveria. Under his technical brilliance, Latveria has become a major leader in weapons and space technology, possibly rivalling the U.S. in innovation, though there are suspicions of humans rights abuses and whatnot. Richards is somewhat indifferent to these rumours, since he wants desperately to get to space. Grimm goes along, uneasily, but a sharp rift is created between Richards and Storm, destroying their tenuous romance (helped along by Richards’ over-thinking of just about everything). She stays with the project, but she and Richards are over. Then run the opening credits, showing the names and a bunch of comic-book panels showing the construction of the shuttle and the growing romance between Doom and Storm, with Richards and Storm throwing longing looks in each other’s direction, i.e. she loks at him while he’s bent over a computer console, he looks at her when she dancing with Doom at some fancy dress ball, etc.[/spoiler]
There, that could’ve saved at least 20 minutes of screen time, leaving more clobberin’ time available.
The “is anyone gonna see this turd?” question seems to have been answered, as the movie made about $56 million this weekend and the box office seems to have ended its run of 19 straight weeks of underperformance compared to last year. Which I guess ensures us some sequels and many more movies like this one.
It’s Kerry Washington, who was also in Ray. I thought she looked delicious in that movie too. Her RL pics don’t look as great, but still good. Look at the “come hither” look on her main IMDb pic. The very definition of heaaaaaat!
We just took our (almost) 4 year old son to see it the other day because he loves “Rock Boy” and I was pleasantly surprised. I am not very familure with the mag. charictures but I thought it was fun and I too like “Rock Boy”.
I recommend it for families to watch together.
