The Best Musical or Comedy Drama Action Film thread (THIS IS THE GENERAL MOVIE STUFF THREAD)

[majestic]

2 hours ago, Amentep said:

There are tonnes of TV shows that had movies.  Even more if you're counting movie reboots like A-Team.  Off the top of my head -

• Batman: The Movie (original cast)
• 21 Jump Street (reboot)
• Absolutely Fabulous (original cast)
• The Equalizer (reboot)
• Dad's Army (both)
• Fantasy Island (reboot)
• The Fugitive (reboot)
• The Flintstones (cartoon during original run, live action reboot)
• Scooby Doo (live action sorta reboot sorta continuation of series)
• Mission: Impossible (reboot)
• Man From UNCLE (movies made from tv eps with new footage for european market + reboot)
• George of the Jungle (live action reboot)
• Peter Gunn (continuation of series; movie just called GUNN)
• Transformers (cartoon movie follow up, reboot live action)
• GI Joe (cartoon movie, live action reboot)
• He Man and the Masters of the Universe (reboot movie)
• Get Smart! (revival with original characters, reboot)
• Are You Being Served? (original cast)
• The Beverly Hillbillies (reboot)
• Miami Vice (reboot)
• Dark Shadows (2 movies with original cast, reboot)
• The Monkees (follow-up to the series, called HEAD)
• The Munsters (movie with most of cast after series cancelled)
• The Addams Family (reboot)
• Pennies from Heaven (condensed retelling of series)
• Quatermass (condensed retelling of series)
• Quatermass II  (condensed retelling of series)
• Quatermass and the Pitt  (condensed retelling of series)
• Quatermass Conclusion (re-edited version of series)
• The Brady Bunch (reboot)
• Doctor Who (reboot during the series run)
• Doomwatch (original cast I think)
• Bewtiched (sorta reboot sorta meta)
• The Dukes of Hazzard (reboot)
• Our Miss Brooks (continuation of series)
• Charlies Angels (reboots)
• Police Squad! (continuation of series)

Indeed, that just further reinforces my point. With the exception of Mission Impossible (and even then you can make a point for the dreadful second and third film) these were mostly disappointing.

I loved Master of the Universe, which was very much so bad it's good. I watch it at least once a year. If for nothing else then for Tom Paris opening a transwarp conduit with a keyboard. In the same category was Batman: The Movie, which has its own charm, much like the series. Who else but Adam West's Batman would haveShark repellent spray available on a helicopter?

Also, ugh, thanks for reminding me of the attempts to revive the Addams Family. I hated them all. The original series is glorious, everything else nothing but a failure. Ugh.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

13 minutes ago, majestic said:

Who else but Adam West's Batman would haveShark repellent spray available on a helicopter?

I would.

[Zoraptor]

37 minutes ago, majestic said:

Indeed, that just further reinforces my point. With the exception of Mission Impossible (and even then you can make a point for the dreadful second and third film) these were mostly disappointing.

The ones I liked were:

The Fugitive (very good movie, also did well enough to get a sequel)

Man from UNCLE (good, but a bit of a flop)

Get Smart! (enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to)

Police Squad! (even the notably worse 3rd Naked Gun movie was funnier than most comedy releases)

Whatever its creative merits, the Transformers series was also very successful commercially despite it seeming to fall off precipitously recently. I'd also have to admit that I'm fundamentally biased against movies based on TV shows, as most of the time I start from the position that they're imagination lite to free cash grabs aimed at nostalgia.

[Hurlshort]

I Dream of Jeannie?

But really, most of these movies are definitely nostalgia cash grabs, but I fail to see the problem with that. These shows are all typically long gone at the point we get a movie. Sometimes its just a nice way to reunite a cast, like Veronica Mars and Firefly. Every once in awhile it ends being something special like The Fugitive and Mission Impossible. 

What about re-booted TV shows? Westworld is pretty fantastic. I hear Hawaii 5-0 is good.

Edit: Also I love parody remakes. Baywatch and 21 Jump Street were hilarious tributes that also poked fun at the source material.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Hurlshot

[Amentep]

Can't believe I forgot the Veronica Mars movie - I pledged to kickstarter and saw it in theaters!

I liked The Man from UNCLE recent movie. The movies edited from the new show with additional footage for Eurpean rerelease are a mixed bag but interesting to see.

The two Dark Shadows films from the 70s are good as 70 horror films, but not necessarily good adaptions of the series.

Also forgot The Wild, Wild West which was a horrible movie. I wish I forgot it more often.

The Mission: Impossible movies may be good, may not be good...but I'll never watch them.

I tried to watch Hawaii 5-0 but didn't like it. This was late in its run though, do I missed the early stuff that seemed to be well liked. I think Westworld is a good exploration of themes hinted at in the movies (and its a far sight better than the previous TV show, BEYOND WESTWORLD).

The Magnum and MacGyver reboots aren't really the same type of show as the originals, being much more in the modern crime solving team of people with special talents genre. They're not bad shows for what they are imo, but what they are aren't what the original shows were.

Haven't seen the Lost in Space reboot yet.

[Zoraptor]

1 hour ago, Hurlshot said:

..Baywatch..

Oh yes indeed. I went into it expecting an utter trainwreck and it was... really good. Better than the source material and I'm actively disappointed it flopped.

I see Dwayne Johnson and expect Hulk Hogan level dross yet he's almost always a positive surprise (was in Get Smart! too), and even in something of... dubious merit such as the Doom movie the casting wasn't close to being a problem (though nearly everything else was).

[Malcador]

Finally saw Rise of Skywalker, it was.... meh.

[Hurlshort]

Aquaman - had a campy kind of charm to it thanks to Jason Mamoa and Willem Dafoe (oh, and Dolph Lundgren!) Amber Heard is very unlikable. She should only be used as a villain. But overall it was a pretty decent flick. Kind of felt like they were trying to tap the Thor Ragnarok vibe. It doesn't, still felt like an imitation, but it is better than most of the DC stuff.

 

Edit: oh, and Murlocs!

Edited May 17, 2020 by Hurlshot

[LadyCrimson]

^ I couldn't watch all of Aquaman. Or maybe I just FFWD through most of it. Mostly I just kept laughing at it but there were some decent bits and effects. :D

I finally got to see the last Star Wars sequel movie tonight. At this point I don't care at all about any "ruining of Star Wars" but it just wasn't a very good film. Way too many chrs, stuff that goes nowhere, stuff that comes out of the blue, contrived coincidences. That said, Rey and Ren still come out as the best things about that trilogy and the only thing that keeps my interest.  I was a little ticked off with the ending because of that but oh well, I suppose can't have cake and eat it too.

[Amentep]

IMO, it was a mistake to start filming the final three with the idea that the second and third films were being developed while the first was being developed and shot.  They probably wasted a lot of time going up blind alley's and changing their minds regarding what they were going to do (there are several variations of this last film that were started AFTER The Last Jedi premiered).

[Hurlshort]

I've been slowly working my way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy with my son. We watch about an hour a night, which is about what his attention span can handle. We are 4 nights in and it should take about 9 nights total. It's always hard to judge how engaged kids his age are, but I think he's enjoying it. I mean, I do keep pausing it and quizzing him on the lore (I might be missing the classroom a bit.) 

I'm enjoying the heck out of it. I think it works really well in short chunks like this. It was been a number of years since I watched them, and they've held up well. I've been humming the heck out of the theme song for the last few days.

I'm a bit torn on whether it is worth showing The Hobbit Trilogy. They didn't have the same magic.  

edit: I'd rather he read the book, but he is only 9, and I'd say he has a couple more years before he can sink his teeth into Tolkien. I tried to find the Andy Serkis reading of The Hobbit he did recently, but it looks like you needed to catch it live.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Hurlshot

[Bartimaeus]

I read Fellowship, Towers, and Return in 3rd grade. I do not recommend for various reasons. The Hobbit, of course, is much more appropriate for that age: unless he's not much of a reader, I don't think it'd be beyond his reading level - but my perspective might be slanted, given that I was reading around 30-50 novels every year from the time I was about seven to when I was eighteen. Big-time book nerd when I was younger, sadly I don't read nearly as much anymore. The way it goes, .

Edited May 18, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[ShadySands]

I didn't much care for The Hobbit book but I was that weird kid who liked Ivanhoe. It wasn't until the Lord of the Rings movies came out that I got interested in Tolkien

[LadyCrimson]

I was an avid reader from a very early age. I think I was around 9 when I found parents copy of War and Peace and managed to read and mostly "get" it (not my fave book tho).

Tried to read bro's copy of The Silmarillion at maybe age 10-11. Didn't get it at all, didn't finish. My memory says I then tried his copy of The Hobbit and it was too dull so I put it down.  His style annoys me. Even reading LotR as an adult, I enjoy the story and some of his craftmanship (if that makes sense), but the writing style ... is annoying. 

 

Edit: interestingly, Guy Gavriel Kay helped edit The Silmarillion ... who is the author of one of my fave stand alone fantasy novels (Tigana). 

Edited May 18, 2020 by LadyCrimson

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, I didn't enjoy the LotR books when I was in 3rd grade at all, and I think I also gave the Silmarillion a try at some point and didn't care for it either. Tolkien's style was...long-winded, to say the least. However, I did read The Children of Hurin years later and thought that was solid if a bit off-color for Lord of the Rings.

[majestic]

I liked the Silmarillion much more than Lord of the Rings (which I also enjoyed). As long as you know what you're getting they're pretty good. As Gromnir likes to point out, it's Tolkien's idea of what he wanted British mythology to be and therefore differs from usual (fantasy) novels.

Like apparently everyone else here I used to read a lot as a kid. I was particularily fond of Story Teller magazine because it helped me to learn to read early. Story Teller and playing on a bootlegged Atari 2600 knockoff ar some of my earliest childhood memories.

Everything else that I read was very much non-fiction. I had books about a wide variety of subjects, from space to biology to the at the time inescapable dinosaur craze and of course my favorite, a book called "How does that work?" - a couple hundred wonderful pages detailing how various day to day technology works, from ballpoint pens to locks that I must have read tens of times.

When I was nine I didn't read War and Peace like LC, I read the MS DOS 5.0 manual. That was a long and dry read too. Heh. Probably not much easier to make sense of at that age either. Yeah, I was that weird kid at school that even the other weird kids made fun of. *shrug*

Still read a lot. Lots of tech stuff too, mostly for work.

[Skazz]

On 5/19/2020 at 1:12 AM, majestic said:

Like apparently everyone else here I used to read a lot as a kid

I grew up reading Donald Duck comic books. That hardly counts.

[Hurlshort]

Lloyd Alexander was my jam growing up. I'd say we are due for a revisit to Prydain. I still use the name Taran for basically all my fantasy RPG characters.

[Malcador]

On 5/18/2020 at 7:12 PM, majestic said:

Like apparently everyone else here I used to read a lot as a kid. I was particularily fond of Story Teller magazine because it helped me to learn to read early. Story Teller and playing on a bootlegged Atari 2600 knockoff ar some of my earliest childhood memories.

Everything else that I read was very much non-fiction. I had books about a wide variety of subjects, from space to biology to the at the time inescapable dinosaur craze and of course my favorite, a book called "How does that work?" - a couple hundred wonderful pages detailing how various day to day technology works, from ballpoint pens to locks that I must have read tens of times.

When I was nine I didn't read War and Peace like LC, I read the MS DOS 5.0 manual. That was a long and dry read too. Heh. Probably not much easier to make sense of at that age either. Yeah, I was that weird kid at school that even the other weird kids made fun of. *shrug*

Still read a lot. Lots of tech stuff too, mostly for work.

Cool story, bro.

[Hurlshort]

I stumbled upon a documentary about Galaxy Quest called Never Surrender. Will Wheaton refers to Galaxy Quest as the best Star Trek movie ever made, and I completely agree.

[majestic]

6 hours ago, Malcador said:

Cool story, bro.

Yeah, you're right. I didn't read Story Teller as much as the German translation called Erzähl mir was. I just figured it would be easier to refer to the original, the other stuff was from the How and Why Wonder Books series (Was ist Was by Tessloff, and Hurlshot probably knows or at least knows of the book series).

My bad.

 

Unless you don't believe the DOS manual thing, in which case I can't prove anything. I mostly wanted to figure out why typing in "windows" at the C:\> prompt of my family's computer did nothing. Not that the manual helped, but I eventually figured out it was "win", not "windows" - and people wonder why you had to press the start button to turn off the computer in Windows 95. Feh, amateurs.

  

3 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

I stumbled upon a documentary about Galaxy Quest called Never Surrender. Will Wheaton refers to Galaxy Quest as the best Star Trek movie ever made, and I completely agree.

Whil Wheaton also loves Star Trek Picard. That makes him whatever the opposite of an authority on Star Trek could be called. A Star Trek Trump, perhaps. Not that I disagree that Galaxy Quest was a great film.

Edited May 20, 2020 by majestic

[Hurlshort]

I am not that old majestic, I wasn't teaching in the 70's.

[Malcador]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Yeah, you're right. I didn't read Story Teller as much as the German translation called Erzähl mir was. I just figured it would be easier to refer to the original, the other stuff was from the How and Why Wonder Books series (Was ist Was by Tessloff, and Hurlshot probably knows or at least knows of the book series).

My bad.

Was just a play on you reading stories

[ShadySands]

17 hours ago, majestic said:

Whil Wheaton also loves Star Trek Picard. That makes him whatever the opposite of an authority on Star Trek could be called. A Star Trek Trump, perhaps. Not that I disagree that Galaxy Quest was a great film.

The clips of him from the Trek talky show that were in the Plinkett review really make me question his opinion on this stuff

Shut up, Wesley!

or just swap out Quark for Wil in this clip

 

Edited May 21, 2020 by ShadySands

[213374U]

8 hours ago, ShadySands said:

The clips of him from the Trek talky show that were in the Plinkett review really make me question his opinion on this stuff

Shut up, Wesley!

or just swap out Quark for Wil in this clip

Funny story. Wheaton has likely not seen that scene (from Q-Less), because he went with a DS9 watching guide that leaves it out, for his first time through the show. I'd say Q makes for fun -if not necessarily good- Trek so that makes it worth recommending especially as it's the only appearance of the character in the entire show, but what do I know.

So yeah, pretty much the opposite of a Trek authority as majestic said. In his defense (ugh), I don't think he's never presented himself as one.