Good morning, Overthinkers! We’ve got pancakes for breakfast, kayaking for this morning’s activity, and the chance to make some Open Threads at the crafts table!
What’s going on this week? We’ve got the X-Men First Class trailer, Just Go With It opening in theaters, Willow Smith remaking Annie, the end of Guitar Hero, and the iffy debut of The Chicago Code.
Anything we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
I cannot celebrate the death of Guitar Hero enough. Oversaturation has dealt a huge blow to rythm gaming, and Activision’s dedication to ruining other people’s licences (they purchased the Guitar Hero brand from it’s original developer) without any attempt at innovation is largely to blame. This had serious reprocussions not just for themselves, but for Harmonix (developers of Rock Band) who had much of the innovation of Rock Band 3 buried under a mountain of Guitar Hero’s who-gives-a-shit. Hopefully with them gone and Harmonix’s coffers filling back up with Dance Central, the grenre an start creeping toward relevance again.
I heart Camp Perich.
I see X-Men is messing with the space-time continuum. The TV broadcasting the Kennedy Missile Crisis speech isn’t a colour TV.
Not every TV in America was color yet in the 60s. … or is there a gag I’m missing? I could be missing a joke here.
60s? You have to go even further. My family didn’t have a color tv until the mid 70s, and in the mid 80s I was at a friend’s house when her mom commented that she wished she had a color tv, to which my friend helpfully said ‘You do have a color tv. It’s red.’ The plastic casing was a vibrant 80s red hue.
Not a gag, more a case of sloppy film making so the X-Men teen/young adult demographic won’t be jolted out of their soma sleep. On the TV, the footage of the Kennedy speech is in colour. But they’re watching on a set that is a b/w set. (But it looks ‘space age’ and ‘modern’.) I’m not sure that news or presidents speeches were even broadcast in colour in 1962.
I already hated the musical Annie. This just gives me more rant fodder.
AGH! How did I not see this trailer before seeing the Open Thread? I feel ashamed. But it looks visually stunning, if nothing else. I know there are already some “continuity” issues, even with respect to the first movies, but I don’t think they’ll be all that terrible. I’m just curious why the flip James McAvoy decided to be one of the titular characters in Gnomeo and Juliet when he totally isn’t hurting for projects or franchises.
I think I am obligated to bring up Lady Gaga’s new single, “Born This Way.” It’s quite the departure from her previous modus operundi in terms of content. To me, it sounds like a reaction to all of the bullying stuff that has been in the news in the past few months. Give it a gander:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/listen-lady-gagas-new-single-born-this-way-20110211
I’m usually not all that much of a fan, but this really surprised me.
Also, Google “hipster ariel” and/or “hipster little mermaid.”
I came across that yesterday. It’s made of win:
http://fyeahhipsterlittlemermaid.tumblr.com/
“Flippin’ your fins you don’t get too far
Legs required for ridin’ fixies
Rollin’ along on that–what’s that word again?–BikelaneonKentAvenuuuuuuuuuuuueee”
(For non-NYers, Kent Ave is a major thoroughfare in hipster central, Williamsburg)
Cobie Smulders has been confirmed for the Avengers movie. Marvel want a Robin even if DC don’t?
The trailer for Atlas Shrugged is out, boys and girls. So far it looks like it’s suitably overwrought.
Lots of CGI trains, and I wish they could have got a female lead who can play “driven” without being “cold.” That said, I expected worse.
I actually enjoyed ‘Chicago Code,’ although I might be biased since I’m from the Chicago area (like the article said it got lots of hometown love) and that it really gets at even though they say that they’re “cleaning up” politics it still plays a big part of how the city runs.
This week also saw the series finale of Friday Night Lights air on DirecTV. The season DVD is coming out some time in April, and I think the NBC airing is also around then. It’s sad that this pretty amazing show never found a wider audience, but it was something of a miracle we got as much of it as we did.
I am now confused about the timeline of the X-Men movies. Or have they decided that X-Men Origins: Wolverine doesn’t count? Or does Emma Frost do some sort of Merlin-style backwards aging?
Don’t quote me on it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on. The former, I mean. As in they’re just pretending that little blip of Wolverine never happened. I can’t find anything official about it, but it at least appears that way from what goes on in the trailer.
Okay, while we’re on movie trailers, ish, my mind has just been blown/ the world makes so much more sense. I discovered this while trying to track down the music playing during that X Men: First Class trailer.
http://www.methodicdoubt.com/
These people, apparently, specialize in making little songs and soundtracks for “all of your production needs.” Music for movie trailers, specifically, is what I’m getting at. Dig into the site, they did all sorts of things you’d recognize.
I think this is more evidence as to why movie trailers need their own awards, or at least a category in preexisting awards shows. Now, if only there was a way to buy the music by trailer. I mean, however bad some of the movies they scored trailers for were (and not all of them were bad), the trailers themselves were great, as were the soundtracks to said trailers. Excellent costumes and production designs for terrible movies get nominated all the time- why don’t fantastic trailers for sub-par films? (I’m thinking of one these people actually did music for, specifically as an example- Terminator: Salvation. The trailers looked great, the music in those trailers was phenomenal…)
I can’t express how stupidly giddy this discovery made me.
“Excellent costumes and production designs for terrible movies get nominated all the time- why don’t fantastic trailers for sub-par films? (I’m thinking of one these people actually did music for, specifically as an example- Terminator: Salvation. The trailers looked great, the music in those trailers was phenomenal…)”
Thanks for re-opening an old wound, Gab. RRWAARGHGHGHGHG
In all seriousness, though, yes I agree that trailers are an art unto themselves, and there are some great trailers out there for terrible movies. “Terminator: Salvation” is my go-to example; do you have any others?
Sorry about the old wound. :(
To answer your question, X-Men Origins: Wolverine immediately springs to mind, as well- and I think it’s actually a poignant example, given the discussion ^up thar^. That trailer looked totally fantastic, as does ^that^ one, and look at what happened to the movie. So it at least makes me a little trepidatious about First Class– I don’t want it to suffer the same fate as Wolverine. Sincerely.
Some other examples? Well, all of the Underworld films. They’re fun and all, but not necessarily “good.”
Or the trailers for the Twilight franchise, those actually look really great. Little would a person unfamiliar with them know just how incredibly, mind-numbingly pathetic the characters are, how nonsensical the plot is, and how devastating the mythos is to all preconceived notions of vampiric and werewolfian (totally made that one up- is there a better word?) lore.*
Legion. I tried really, really hard to get into that one, and I just couldn’t. Similar feelings of trepidation about Priest are lingering within my soul right now, as a result- I really want that one to be as awesome as the trailers look.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Another fun one, but baaaadly written, and some of the acting was just awful. And it was quite dim in comparison to the source material (I usually don’t hold that sort of thing against an adaptation, but there it is).
I’m borderline about Watchmen. I had such a history with the original that separating it from the movie is really, really hard. Even so, the sloooooooooooow mooooooooooootion just makes it difficult to endure sometimes.
Daredevil. And Ghost Rider. Two films on my very short list of films that I felt angry about having watched afterwards because they were so bad.
The Spirit. I didn’t hate that one, but I had a kind of sentimental reason for wanting to like it, so I can admit that it was pretty terrible.
For some reason, my list seems to be limited to action (or movies trying to pass themselves off as action ::coughtwilight::), and actually, comic ones, more specifically. But I know I have felt that way about a number of other genres. Perhaps part of the problem is I am pretty easy to please when it comes to movies (meaning it takes a LOT for me to feel less than neutral about it), so I tend to forget the difference between trailer and film quality. Still, I know there were comedies and dramas that let me down, too. I can’t be alone in this, though, right? Do you have any examples of your own?
*Btw, those movies have fan-f***ing-tastic compilation soundtracks. Seriously, if you didn’t know it was Twilight, you’d think it was some genius indie-angsty-rocky person behind them. I haven’t brought myself to buying them, but I do have enough friends that are Twihards to have heard all of them in their entirety, and by golly.
Oh, and another btw, that homepage for Methodic Doubt I already linked to has a link to another page where you can dl a zip of some of their stuff. It plays like an actual movie soundtrack, reminded me a LOT of the soundtrack for Unleashed (originally called Danny the Dog), done by Massive Attack. There are myriad pages for streaming if you dig around the site, too.
I’m totally hijacking this thread. A related topic I’d love to discuss some time is soundtracks that out-do their movies. But maybe next time a bad movie with good music comes out, instead. Ahem.
Might I suggest “lycanthropic” ?
Doesn’t quite fit in as this film was actually pretty great, but the trailer for The Social Network was really something special. I just got the film the other day and had to find the trailer on youtube before I watched it just to get me in the mood. Fantastically put together and an incredible cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” in the background.
Oddtwang: Nice, I’ll take it.
Nick: Hey, that’s it! I finally saw The Social Network two (ish) weeks ago, and I didn’t think it was as faaaaaaaaantastic as everyone says. Maybe it was hyped up for me. I didn’t actively dislike it, per say, but I certainly didn’t think it was as uh-may-zing as I had been led to believe.
Here’s another different genre with a good trailer and sub-par movie: Happy Feet. And another one, The Gruge.
My go-to example is always “The Patriot”. The trailer still blows me away; I like to watch it on the 4th of July to get psyched up about the U S of A. It’s almost as inspirational as “40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes”, and the “before they were legends, they were heroes” tagline makes me tear up a little. Plus I still get freaked out that the cannonball might hit me this time.
The movie, not so much…