79 replies to this topic

[Shadow]

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. It's a rather confusing movie and has nothing to do with the rest of the series. Apparently, some company hates kids, so they run a big campain to make all the kids in a specific town get their brand of masks, which will melt the kids' faces off when an images is played on the TV. Or something like that. I don't recall the detective ever figuring out what that was about... Or maybe they edited out those scenes to make room for the commercials... It's really not the kind of movie you can follow through a commercial break...

You must understand, after Halloween II, Carpenter wanted to make Halloween into a anthology series of each movie being a seperate story about halloween. H3 is one of my favorite horror movies for being so different. Once you stop wondering why didn't Michael show up, it really is a good movie.

[salamander]

I know everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but sometimes I feel that most people just aren't that accepting with what they're offered. Yes, the prequels are lacking compared to the original trilogy; but I feel that the trilogy's lackluster reception was mostly due to the fan's over-hyped reaction. The older generation hated it while the younger generation (like myself) liked it for what it had to offer.

it's cool if you enjoyed them, but it's not just nostalgia backlash. Well, there are some people who would complain about the prequels no matter what they were like, but I think there's more to it than that. There's legitimate flaws with how the movies work as standalone films, not just how they compare to the OT. That's why I like the redlettermedia reviews so much, because they don't just nitpick on the story or complain that it didn't hold up to what they imagined the story should have been, they actually go in depth about the filmmaking process and what makes the movie just plain not work compared to movies in general, not just star wars. Stuff like story structure, tone, editing and composition.
not to say that you have to agree with the reviews, but I think they do a good job showing why a lot of people didn't like the prequels.

[Gojira007]

I think my two least favorite movies of the last decade would be...

X-Men 3: The Last Stand
This movie is agonizing on two fronts. For one thing, it's just a terrible movie in its own right. The usually-reliable actors all seem to be completely stoned or uninvested in their characters, the action scenes are lifeless at best and incoherent at worst, and the script is just a dreadful, scattershot, unfocused mess which piles on sub-plot after sub-plot, loses track of most of them, and deals with the ones it does remember in an annoyingly off-handed manner. The effects are decent enough but mostly forgettable, with more than a few instances of laughably awful effects to tip the scale, and the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But the other, even more frustrating part is that there exists a version of this story which doesn't completely suck, and we might well have gotten it if only Bryan Singer had been the one to do it.

The Last Airbender
Never mind the nakedly racist casting and the bizarre effects it has on the story, "The Last Airbender" is just an abysmal movie in its own right. The actors are all simply awful, with Assiv Mandvi making a truly spectacular hash out of his performance as Zhao and Noah Ringer failing to convince me he's even fully human, while Nikola Peltz as Katara is unconvincing at best and more than a touch cloying at worst, and Jackson Rathbone's Sokka seems to think gritting his teeth for every line will mak him seem "serious". Dev Patel's Zuko and Shaun Toub's Iroh deserve some credit for sucking the least, I suppose, but that is damning with faint praise if ever there was any. Meanwhile, M. Night Shyamalan's direction leaves us with unimpressively limp fight scenes and tawdry special effects, and a story that has no clue how to follow any of the emotional or intellectual cues of the animated series it's based on. The attempts to condense all of the show's first season into a single movie are misguided, confusing, and frequently just outright stupid. Sure, they do a decent job of translating the show's locations and costumes, but that's about it. Otherwise, the movie is just an annoying, stupid, insulting mess.

[RedAuthar]

X3 wasn't written by the guy who wrote the other two. That is why it was so bad.

[Prime]

I know everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but sometimes I feel that most people just aren't that accepting with what they're offered. Yes, the prequels are lacking compared to the original trilogy; but I feel that the trilogy's lackluster reception was mostly due to the fan's over-hyped reaction. The older generation hated it while the younger generation (like myself) liked it for what it had to offer.

I'm by no means a Star Wars fan. I like the original trilogy and know enough about it, being a film fan and all, but that's about it.

Thing is, George Lucas likes to make us believe he always had the entire Star Wars saga thought out ahead of time, not written, just thought out, and that's just bullshit. George Lucas NEVER intended the original Star Wars to be Episode IV, since in it's original 1977 release, it was just called 'Star Wars' and Empire was originally gonna be the second movie in the series, not the fifth one. It wasn't until Lucas changed his mind, having Vader being Luke's father that he thought "Hmm, you know, I could do a backstory on how he became Vader!" and made Empire Episode V. Now I could go into major detail and so forth about the history of making Star Wars, but I won't bore anyone with that much.

In all honesty, Lucas became a whore after the release of Empire. The first two Star Wars movies are Lucas at his best, and he didn't even direct Empire. Plus, Lucas had people helping him in developing the story to those movies too, it wasn't all him. Now when Jedi came around, Lucas was now all about the money! Ewoks? Originally meant to be Wookies, but Ewoks are more cute and cuddly and more marketable as toys! Plus, Lucas was lazy. Now we all know the original movie had the climatic Death Star battle, but that was originally intended for Jedi (or the final movie of his originally intended 9 movie saga, depends on what you read/hear) but the producers convinced him to use it in the 1st movie to give it a memorable event. So then comes Jedi and what does he do? Reuse the whole Death Star thing. The producer Gary Kurtz had actually said to Lucas to come up with something else because people had already seen the Death Star before, but Lucas shrugged him off, saying "people don't care for the story, they want to see action!" And what's more action packed then destroying the biggest threat to the entire galaxy... For a second time? But this time we've got marketable teddy bears who gently tap Stormtroopers to death to help defeat the Empire! And with this whole "people want action" mindset of his, Lucas feels like he can give us a 45 minute lightsaber battle and we'll cream in our pants over it because it's action! Fuck the story, it's all about ACTION! When in reality, we're bored by the 5 minute mark. Look George, it doesn't matter how epic you make it look, if it adds little all to the story, we don't give a fuck!

The prequels are pretty much in the same bag as Jedi, but on a bigger scale. Lucas can't be arsed with developing a decent story, his more interested in creating mountains of characters, vehicles and anything else that can be marketed as toys. Lucas is a terrible story teller (when his writing on his own) and an terrible director too. And since there's nobody there to question him now (like there was during the making of the first two movies) he can do whatever the fuck he wants. And with the advances of technology, ideas he had before for the original trilogy but couldn't do then, he could do now. That whole Volcano planet thing from Episode III? Originally meant for Jedi.

And that's another thing about the prequels (and to an extent, the special editions of the original trilogy) that piss people off, is the needless amount of CGI stuffed into every shot! It loses it's charm if you do it every single time! It gets old and boring really, REALLY quick and it's distracting as hell. Plus CGI has an overall fake feel to it. Take the space battles, I enjoy the original trilogy's space battles more so and one reason was that the ships were models that looked real! The prequel space battles? It's all CGI and I can't stand to look at them. I don't care how many impressive shots you can pull off in CGI, because before the days of CGI, it was a "How can we do this?" kind of way of working. Having to build stuff like models and trying to pull off said shots. If you got it, you got it! If you didn't, it couldn't be helped. CGI lets film makers do whatever they want, but the practical way of doing it is more rewarding, because they HAD to pull it off without the aid of computers. Aliens is a prime example, James Cameron only had a total of 6 Alien suits in that movie and had to use mirrors and editing to make us believe there was an army of them. The most annoying part of CGI though is when they use it and they don't need it! I wanna pull my hair out every time I see a fake CGI explsion in a movie these days. Bottom line? You can use special effects to help tell your story, but DON'T use your story to tell special effects, which is what Lucas does. CGI when used right can be an excellent tool, like in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

At the end of the day, Lucas gave us exactly what he wanted and because nobody challenged him during the making of those movies, we got total arse for the prequels. And it's sad when people look at the expanded universe stuff and consider it better then the prequels. The expanded universe stuff which isn't cannon and yet is more enjoyable. Lucas can tell us all he wants that "After Jedi, there's no more story to tell." because the creators of the expanded universe material have proven that the story can be continued because they are creative enough. Lucas wants us to believe the Empire was over thrown once the Emperor was thrown down that shaft. Why? Because Lucas can't think of anything decent to follow up on, and if he did, it'd probably be wank too.

So fuck you George Lucas.

And you know what? Fuck you again, George! We didn't like the changes you made for the special editions of the original trilogy back in 1997, we didn't like the additional changes you made back in 2004 and we won't like the changes for the blu-ray release too. Stop dicking about and making changes! If you wanna make the original trilogy match your precious prequels, then remake Episodes IV-VI!

[DMoney]

Come on people, dont try to help out Tron: Legacy. Lets be honest, it had a good plot,but beyond terrible acting. That just took away from the entire film. Its the same thing with Titan A.E.

[Bakuda]

I actually love star wars ep I to III because of the depth of story. There may not have been as action packed as the originals but it more than made up for that with it's plot.

Recently...my biggest disappointment was Cars II. I'll admit that I wasn't expecting much but seriously, come on Pixar, I expected better from you...

[Shadow]

Come on people, dont try to help out Tron: Legacy. Lets be honest, it had a good plot,but beyond terrible acting. That just took away from the entire film. Its the same thing with Titan A.E.

Terrible acting? Its got goddamn Jeff Bridges in it. I don't know what you been smoking,man.
And Titan A.E. is a classic. Was the last real animated movie to come out before the advent of CGI cartoons.

[Reed Teran]

Any other bad movies...
Basically, everthing the Nostalgia critic reviews as sucky.

[DLTN]

No one is mentioning Dragon Ball Evolution? Seriously?
It is not the same as the Manga I read all those years ago... I mean no Red Ribbon Army or Goku in tournaments fighting Jackie Chun, we get this... Abomonation.

[Inhibitor]

The thing is, everyone heard how bad Dragon Ball was and didn't go to see it. Whereas movies like The Last Airbender already have a large following; many fans went to watch it weather they heard it was bad or they didn't...including me.

[saber16]

Dragonball Evolution. Not the worst... but... ah man.
I was a huge fan of the series when I was a kid, and back in 2002, I remember them going on about how a movie was planned... well, whatever the case it took 7 freaking years to finally get somewhere... and it I couldn't be more upset with the results.

I'm still a fan of the series, but I'm also someone who's real tolerable with films. X-men Orgins Wolverine? I liked it. Daredevil? I liked it. Spiderman 3? I liked it as much as the other two. Batman Forever? Dumb here and there, but still fun. The Mario Bros movie... stupid... but a fun kind of stupid. I'm real tolerable with films... with that in mind, Eveloution deserves no mercy.

I knew they were going to change some things... and even after the fact, they were still annoying... they needlessly rewrote things that didn't need it, characters hardly behaved like their original comic/cartoon counterparts... but maybe they could make the film work as it's own thing, sure it wouldn't be the dragonball we knew and loved back in the day... but maybe it would still be enjoyable.
The acting was lousy, the dialogue was crap, the fight scenes bland, and the story was just boring.

Soo... They pissed off the fans, and they pissed of movie goers.


Then there's Airbender... Somehow it follows the story more closely than Dragonball did... yet it was still lousy The show was a fantasy adventure known for it's balance of action and comedy. What happens when they take out the comedy, they make action boring, and they make everything so unnecessarily dramatic. Oh, and the acting was pretty lousy, save for some characters.
Another problem was how much they tried to cram in to it... which leads to a lot of telling, and not showing... gawd.
I think my problem with this was that it's so close to being good... but, something stops it from even that... at least the film looks nice.

On a plus note, the music and soundtracks for both films were actually really good. Highly recommend you check them out.

[Inhibitor]

Like I said in my first post I REALLY liked the music from The Last Airbender, but I didn't even bother to watch Evolution...maybe the soundtrack is worth a listen.

[saber16]

Like I said in my first post I REALLY liked the music from The Last Airbender, but I didn't even bother to watch Evolution...maybe the soundtrack is worth a listen.

Someone uploaded a few tracks on their channel:
http://www.youtube.c...57F7FBB32E991DE

and here's a video that samples some of the tracks, to give you an idea what it's like:

[Vlad Yvhv]

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. It's a rather confusing movie and has nothing to do with the rest of the series. Apparently, some company hates kids, so they run a big campain to make all the kids in a specific town get their brand of masks, which will melt the kids' faces off when an images is played on the TV. Or something like that. I don't recall the detective ever figuring out what that was about... Or maybe they edited out those scenes to make room for the commercials... It's really not the kind of movie you can follow through a commercial break...

You must understand, after Halloween II, Carpenter wanted to make Halloween into a anthology series of each movie being a seperate story about halloween. H3 is one of my favorite horror movies for being so different. Once you stop wondering why didn't Michael show up, it really is a good movie.

It could've been the fact that I caught it on TBS or Sci-Fi or something... They could've chopped out the good parts to make way for commercials, as tv stations tend to do. I made the mistake of trying to watch The Thing on Chiller and it was terribly edited and confused the way they played it. And that's my favorite movie. And perhaps the more definitive work for Carpenter than Halloween... Maybe the networks just have something against Carpenter?

Come on people, dont try to help out Tron: Legacy. Lets be honest, it had a good plot,but beyond terrible acting. That just took away from the entire film. Its the same thing with Titan A.E.

I haven't seen Tron Legecy. But I have the DVD of Titan AE. It's good enough a movie for me to invest in the DVD of. A lot of movies can't boast that capacity. Perhaps you made the mistake of trying to watch it on TBS or something, like I did with Halloween 3?

Like I said in my first post I REALLY liked the music from The Last Airbender, but I didn't even bother to watch Evolution...maybe the soundtrack is worth a listen.

Don't confuse Evolution with Dragonball Evolution. Evolution is a fun movie. Dragonball Evolution is something I've had the good sense not to even bother watching... Also, Evolution gave us this:

[Inhibitor]

Yeah, I know he's talking about Dragonball. I never heard of Evolution though...

[DLTN]

Evolution is a feature length "Head & Shoulders" advert starring David Duchovney...

[Shadow]

I saw the Evolution cartoon and hated it. Ripoff of Ghostbusters

[Bakuda]

Ghostbusters!

[RedAuthar]

GHOSTBUSTERS!