Amentep

Oh come on, you're going to go all that way and not say "...slip her the Oakemon"? Total waste. Well his name is Professor Oak and the -mon suffix was used in Digimon not Pokemon. Learn your 90's children's shows and get on my level. Oakemon rhymes with Pokemon, not Digimon.

Oh come on, you're going to go all that way and not say "...slip her the Oakemon"? Total waste.

I disagree, I think they got Ghostbusters just fine. The only cameo I thought didn't work was Ackroyd's cab driver - and it wasn't bad, it just felt stuck in within the context of where it fell in the film. Murray's debunker was a character the film had to have - given that Yates and Gilbert were both "believers", there needed to be a skeptical voice there because there would be ones if this was 'real world'. They also wisely don't try to force the character to be "the new movie's Peck", one of their many studious attempts to steer clear of just redoing the original film. The other three previous Ghostbuster cast member cameos are fine in their contexts. I felt the proton packs weren't overused; it felt natural to me that Holtzman would work on further developing the capturing ghost technology before moving to the issue of long-term containment. This is actually something the original movie glosses over entirely, since they go from having experimental packs on their first trial to having become experienced using the packs and a containment unit for holding multiple ghosts in the span of a series of newspaper headline edits and quick cut scenes of them running out of a building having caught a ghost. The villain is in the new film from nearly the beginning and his motivations are made fairly clear from his first line of dialogue. I'm not sure how much more "front and centre" he could become without the film becoming "The Adventures of Rowan North and His Attempts to Bring About the Fourth Apocalypse, plus The Ghostbusters (not the originals)". Can't say I get the working man theme you see in the original film. Sure I can buy that there is an element of the 1980s slob comedies in the film, but the idea that a con man (Venkman), an academic (Stantz) a mad scientist (Spengler) and a working class man (Zeddmore) is somehow more "working man" than two academics (Gilbert and Yates), a mad scientist (Holtzman) and a working class woman (Tolan) is somewhat lost on me. Perhaps its that idea that you'd "want to have a drink" with the original crew plays into it, but I never felt that way about the original crew given that Venkman arbitrarily antagonizes almost everyone around him. I can't imagine being well disposed to him in real life (don't get me wrong, he's a fine character for the film, but realistically he'd be a jerk if you met him in real life). To my mind the cast for the 2016 film is fine, IMO and they work well together. They are funny and charismatic and memorable in comparable ways to the original without just re-doing the original. No one is going to out "Bill Murray" Bill Murray and wisely they don't try. Wiig, McCarthy, McKinnon and Jones are fine as the leads; they work well together and I can buy their characters working together and developing as a group in the way the movie develops. And I like that ultimately Gilbert and Yates' friendship is the heart of the group and the movie; it makes a nice change of pace. I also thought the filmmakers did a good job of playing up some of the creepier aspects of the concept (some of the images are quite creepy, and the opening ghost haunting bit is like a miniature horror movie - compare to the original playing the first encounter entirely for laughs). And they come up with some fun moments that I wasn't expecting (days later I'm still laughing over the JAWS gag). So yeah, to me the new film is a fine addition to the Ghostbusters films. And they wisely only have the Falloutboy Ghostbuster's song in the movie sparingly, so that was also a plus in my eyes ears

I'd have thought the obvious movie reference would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Fallout Franchise goes to sleep after Fallout 2, wakes up as Fallout 3, an alien imposter that looks like, but isn't the same as, Fallout 2. Not that I dislike the Fallout games even with the changed direction/premise, but come on, Body Snatchers is the obvious film parallel.

Warner Bros settles FTC suit regarding not disclosing it paid for online positive videos from youtubers, et al for Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/07/warner-bros-settles-ftc-charges-it-failed-adequately-disclose-it

Diego Garcia - the interwebs tells me its an atoll under control of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Was this post supposed to be in this thread...?

I'd be reluctant to ascribe a singular motive or feeling to large groups of people involving complex situations of which they may only be partially aware.

isn't their purpose to place all of earth under control of the restored caliphate? That would mean you could do nothing at all and still be their enemy if you didn't acquiesce to their religious views and authority.

Sadly, I'd argue the vitrol is on par with the modern echo-conversations of "social media" as people try to one-up each other by describing how something they've never seen and probably never will has ruined their life and/or represents all that is bad about western civilization.

She's also ignoring the report of the police chief who said they tried to negotiate him, only to have those negotiations not work with the shooter expressing sentiment of wanting to kill more people.

I've always wanted to see a movie staring Keith David and David Keith. Just think of it, you could do the billing like: KEITH DAVID DAVID KEITH And it works anyway to read it! ... *ahem* Anyhow the likelihood of that match-up happening dims every year, so I'll go for a Gal-Guy Film. Tarzan always goes back to England as part of his origin story. This story was about why he decides to go back to Africa (where almost all of the later books happened).

Condolences on your loss Bartimaeus.

We get the "south's culture and heritage is in danger of being lost" locally every time some transplant doesn't follow the local custom of pulling over when a funeral procession drives by. People fret about those "northerners" with no respect for the dead, which leads to no respect for southern culture which leads to the inevitable "go back where you came from" sort of thing. That said, I think the worst enemy of "the South"'s culture and heritage is the south itself...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)#Europe_1830.E2.80.931938_.28Bairoch.29 Bairoch estimated Sweden as ahead of Denmark, Finland, Norway, Serbia, Bulgaria, Portugal and Greece ranging somewhere from 4th - 8th lowest GDP during the 1830-1890 period.

It's an anti-bot measure. The first handful posts needs manual approval and new people can only queue 5 posts. After that, people can create threads and posts once we are convinced it's a real human I guess this puts out my theory that 2/3rds of the board are bot-alts of other posters...

I have several electric bug swatter rackets at my house. Most smaller bugs will be killed, most larger bugs will be stunned long enough to kill them in some other fashion.

Used the term was called slash (from "Kirk / Spock" or "Kirk 'slash' Spock" - fan fiction postulating a romantic/sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock). Shipping used to be reserved for fans of a relationship in cannon vs another canon relationship (Buffy's Buffy & Angel vs Buffy & Spike, Willow & Tara vs Willow & Kennedy) or might have romantic feelings (Lost's Sawyer & Kate vs Jack & Kate) but hadn't committed to relationship. I think this then became a catch all for any desired pairing in a fandom whether it had any connection to canon or not, expressing the desire of the fan for the relationship ("I'm shipping X & Y in show Z" for example).

The Shallows (2016) - Nice "killer shark" thriller. Well done.

Being in the middle of nowhere means nothing on the internet. But as long as you're not blasting anything from The Final Cut, I won't complain.

That doesn't sound anything like the Disney version! Yeah Disney changed the plot around, significantly. Co-Director Art Stevens argued that they couldn't kill Chief - a major character off - in the film and the changes snowballed from there.

Beware following the path of The Fox and The Hound novel. 'Tis depressing.

Pretty sure that the government, officially, did not refer to them as cults. I've only skimmed a few of the FBI's "open records" papers on the subjects (as a result of this topic), but Jim Jones was referred to as "Jim Jones" leader of the "People's Temple of the Disciples of Christ" or just "People's Temple". David Koresh is referred to as the "leader of a religious sect, the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists".

Houdini and Doyle ep 8: "Strigoi" Given the pile-up of historical inaccuracies (but to be fair, this has to be an alternate history, really), its sometimes amazing that I like the series as well as I do. This one deals with (Doyle's real life friend) Bram Stoker. Doyle had met Stoker at about 18 or so, IIRC, and they had become friends. Stoker would have already had his first book published and Doyle would have been starting (or about to start) medical school. Later in life Stoker and Doyle would collaborate on two chapters of a collaborative novel, "The Fate of Finnella". Stoker was a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Set about 3 years after Stoker's publication of DRACULA. In real life, while well reviewed, the book was only a modest seller. Dracula's popularity as an element of pop culture was three decades away. Here, though, the novel has made Stoker a veritable recluse - sort of. We find the real reason he has become a hermit is his tertiary syphilis (speculated by biographers, but I believe not actually proven). I believe the symptoms presented here don't really match up, but not being a disease expert I'll leave that alone. Stoker is presented as a little old man - and while he may have been 53 at the time the show is set in, the real Bram Stoker was a big burly man with red hair and beard. Also this presentation dispenses with Stoker's wife entirely - she outlived him by two decades (and while considered a great beauty of the time is mostly known today as the widow who fought the distribution of NOSFERATU for copyright violations and won). Henry Irving - the actor Stoker represented, and Stoker's role as Business Manager of Irving's Lyceum Theater is also missing (this being where he primarily made his money for many years, including the post Dracula ones) That said, the story was fairly fun; Stoker's servant is killed with a stake. Two groups circle Stoker's fame - a group of self-professed vampires and a group of self-professed vampire hunters. Its funny to see Houdini rail against the vampires for hanging around graveyards, given that we're only a year (or so) removed from the Victorian era that saw many seeing a cemetery as a park - a nice place to walk and have a picnic. While Houdini from the US may not have had any connection to that, Doyle and Constable Stratton would have, and so nothing being said seemed odd (or maybe it was because hanging around the graveyards at night was odd - just seemed a bit like a missed opportunity to talk about a weird real-world historical factoid). The mystery adds a lot of inconsistencies allowing the viewer to muse whether or not there really were vampires or not. And as always the main leads make their characters engaging, with Houdini having dialed back some of his more irritating mannerisms to be more in tune with the other characters.

Been looking forward to that starting almost as much as the Twin Peaks continuation.