“Gracious me. Was I raving? Please forgive me. I’m mad.”
The Scoop: 1989 R, directed by William Peter Blatty and starring George C. Scott, Ed Flanders and Brad Dourif
Tagline: Do you dare walk these steps again?
Summary Capsule: Demons + mental hospital + serial killer + mystery + exorcisms = 666
“I don’t think the dead care about vengeance.”
The Scoop: 2008 PG-13, directed by Marc Forster and starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko and Mathieu Amalric
Tagline: Bond is Back
Summary Capsule: James Bond, still blatantly hurt by his true love’s betrayal, lives up to his 00-status by traveling the world to find out exactly who or what is trying to pull a whole lot of powerful strings
“You don’t understand how serious this is. They killed my dog.”
The Scoop: 2007 R, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Mark Wahlberg, Michael Peña and Danny Glover
Tagline: Yesterday was about honor. Today is about justice.
Summary Capsule: Powerful men do what they do best: frame the one guy who has enough skill, training and deadly weapons to make them regret it
“The story goes he’ll be normal during the day, but at night, in the presence of evil, the Rider takes over.”
The Scoop: 2007 PG-13, directed by Mark Steven Johnson and starring Nicolas Cage, Peter Fonda and Eva Mendes’ chest
Tagline: Long ago he made a deal to save someone he loved
Summary Capsule: Stunt cyclist makes a deal with the Devil to save his father. In an unprecedented move, the Devil cheats and turns him into the original “Hell’s Angel.” Bad stuff happens.
“Holy crap. You’re worth every penny.”
The Scoop: 2005 PG, directed by Clare Kilner and starring Debra Messing, some guy named “Dermot”, and Amy Adams
Tagline: Love doesn’t come cheap.
Summary Capsule: I mean, seriously, “Dermot”? How very much did his parents want him beaten up every day at school?
The topic for today’s Saturday Roundtable is this: If you could go back in time and be in charge of running the three Star Wars prequel movies (episodes 1-3), what would you do different? This is assuming that you HAVE to do them as prequels, you have to do three, and you can’t give a dismissive comment like “throw them in the trash”.
Start the discussion!
KYLE: First off, I certainly would NOT have wanted to see any of the cherished Original Trilogy characters as kids or anything ridiculous like that. But that doesn’t mean I would have cast Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru as young action heroes. Each prequel film would have taken place in a different era, ranging from thousands to finally maybe a hundred years prior to Episode IV. I would have been a lot more interested in the very beginning of the Jedi and Sith orders, early on as prophecies are made and tenets to operate by are devised. That way you can still have occasional hints towards what will come later (”No one will EVER make this Kessel Run in less than 18 parsecs!” and “One Sith will walk openly, his master will remain in shadows; no one will suspect their identity until it is TOO LATE!” and so on). I would be a lot more interested in the universe at large versus the origins of the handful of heroes and villains that decided the fate of their galaxy. I’m sure to play to the fans slightly that third prequel film would namedrop a couple lineages, or more likely show the origins of the man who would become Emperor Palpatine. Lots more moral gray areas and suspicious motivations, rather than the bland ineptness of the Jedi Order and far-too-easy manipulations of the Sith. How about you?
“I’ll be back, Bennett.”
The Scoop: 1985 R, directed by Mark L. Lester and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong and Alyssa Milano
Tagline: Somewhere… somehow… someone’s going to pay!
Summary Capsule: Ahnold snaps and kills half of the western hemisphere when his daughter is kidnapped. Overreact much?
“You hear that? Sounds like somebody’s sheering.”
The Scoop: 2006 NR, directed by Jonathan King and starring Nathan Meister, Tammy Davis and Peter Feeney
Tagline: There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand… and they’re pissed off!
Summary Capsule: Genetic tinkering results in a woolly revolt
One of the most aggravating tropes in movies — at least to me — is the oh-so-noble hero who, after engaging in a life-or-death battle with a villain, decides at the last possible second to spare his life. Mind you, this guy’s been trying to kill to the good fella, and they haven’t been pulling punches in the past five, ten minutes. But we all know that nobody really gets killed during the end of the film fights; sure, there’s some wounding, a moment where the hero looks doomed and stages a comeback, but it’s not like either the good or bad guy get in a lucky blow that happens to go through the other guy’s head.
There’s some bizarre unwritten rule in Hollywood that it’s not just enough for the good guy to win, but he has to win in this precise order:
The topic on the table today is this: What movies were so cool to you as a kid, but now you are embarrassed to be in the same room as them?
Let’s hear what the Mutants have to say!
Mike: It’s funny, a friend of mine actually coined a term for this phenomena: Darkman Syndrome. It’s a weird category here. Mortal Kombat at the time it came out was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and upon seeing it more recently I literally cringed at the crappy CGI, atrocious dialogue, and wooden acting, but alternatively, Howard the Duck has only improved in my estimation. Go fig.
