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  I have to disagree with what some of you have said and say that I didn't think the acting by Christian Bale or Sam Worthington was very strong. There were a few scenes where I could hear his accent, and the whole "SHAKEN BY GRAVITY OF THE HORRIBLE TRUTH" thing went a little far. That having been said, I enjoyed watchin gthe movie, even though there were more than a few scenes that looked pretty lousy in terms of photography and editing, and an attempt to copy a hyper-realist style that did not mesh with the storytelling at all. On a positive note, I did see some things that I liked. The special effects were mostly really well done, especially the . The attempt at a deeper theme was bungled, especially considering the depth of potential in a story about cybernetic humanity, that could have made a statement about the nature of the human machine on par with Blade Runner. Maybe it was a short, sighted script... because the film was filled with one-offs and gimmicks rather than real deep visual storytelling.
  It was entertaining though, I'll give it that. Some of the cinematography, and a few of the action-sequences, really grabbed my eye. But like it has been said, it could have been a lot better and maybe we should be thankful that McG didn't do any worse than he did. B-/B
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I have never been a big fan of David Lynch, mostly because my first Lynch experience was Dune...
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The best part of Wolverine is the BERSERKER BARRAGE (snikitty snikkity *links with hypercombo*).

I am debating as to whether or not to go see this film because a girl I know said she wants to see it and I told her I heard it was awful and she said, "It looks amazing," and she insinuated that she might want to see it with me, which of course means the prospect of smooches. What should I do? Is it really that bad?
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I think you guys are overstating the quality of the Star Trek film.
  The plot, in places, had some serious setbacks. Firstly, I would have done away with the first half of the first act. The blonde kid jumping out of the car was four completely unnecessary minutes. The son being born on the same day his father dies (on the same ship) was a bit much. The same thing goes for the fact that the Captain made cadet Kirk the first officer (for no apparent reason). (SPOILER HERE) plotlines usually risk contrivedness and this one came very close. Too many "happy coincidences" had me rolling my eyes more than once.
  In addition to this, the writers did not seem able to manage the characters. Urban's Bones McCoy was interesting at the beginning and actually took part in the plot until the mid-point, but his character was completely abandoned afterwards. Pegg as Scotty was meant to be a comic releif character, and had a couple laughable jokes but all in all they lacked punch and delivery and so he comes off as "wacky ethnic character #2". The dialogue was decent overall, but lacked memorability.
  I've slammed the film a bit more than perhaps it deserves: it is on the side of the better "summer movies" I have seen in a couple years. The special effects were beautiful and spectacular, and never call attention to thier constructedness despite the fact that we are mostly looking at space explosions. I noticed some creative use of sound, attempting to simulate both the racket and ambience of space travel in the future, but it wasn't quite used to its full potential. I wonder if it is because of my familiarity with the franchise, knowing that the characters will probably all make it through in the end, or perhaps a growing jadedness towards the genre, but the action sequences didn't seem to pop out and grab me at all. Evidence of this is that my favourite part of the film was when . It was definetly entertaining and well produced, but I see it as dangerously close to falling into the mass of forgettable action films of the past 5 years (which Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe surely will). The film was decent, but at $25 dollars for theatre admission for me and a friend, I'm not sure if I can say that it was worth the price.
I give it a B/B+.

EDIT: I lol'd when I saw in the background of one of the earth cityscape shot a giant TACO BELL building, it reminded me of Demolition Man.
 
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No tits, though. You put tits in a movie, its rated R. Crows eating a rotting corpse is PG, a man getting disemboweled PG-13, but tits is R.
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Well, there is definetly a list of more than three notable names in video games, and those of us even vaguely interested in the industry have probable heard it all more than once (I'm suprised no one has mentioned Sid Meier *little heart* yet) and these usually are 'faces' we come to see attached to games. People who don't know what IGN or Gamasutra is, however, probably have no idea who most of these people are, and so I think to them, like someone already pointed out, Jack Black's name is going to stand out a lot more than Tim Shaefer's.

Let me ask this: would you buy a videogame because it featured your favourite film/television actor? I'm fairly sure there are people out there who would go "oh man van damme is in this game i want to buy it because that is spiffy" the same way they do with movies.
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Wow, DNF is what we write on the grading sheet if a kid doesn't hand something in. It stands for "did not finish". Coincidence.
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Yeah, if anything, Starship Troopers the film was a parody/reimagining of Starship Troopers the book. If you listen to the commentary on the DVD, Verhoeven specifically points out that the reason why they wanted to put Doogie Howser in a Nazi uniform was to deligitimize Heinlein's ideal. Its tricky though, the level of parody played as such is fairly thin, and so I don't think most people would catch it unless they were looking for it. I saw the movie about half a dozen times before I took a course on sf film and discovered exactly what the film was trying to do. There is even a "Hitler Youth" scene: its crazy, but its also really subtle.

Which is kind of a scary thing about fascism! If you get caught up in the film, you don't really notice that its there, that the military state dominates the lives of the characters. Most people don't even really notice that it is an aspect of the movie, because they get more interested in the war with the bugs and the characters than they do with the world around them. Verhoeven is clever enough, I think, to work it in like this so we might not acknowledge the defecits of the military state while we are a part of it as spectators. I think that the "light touch" Verhoeven gave to this aspect of SST actually is one of its more compelling features. For these reasons I would say that SST was a good movie and shouldn't be on this list.
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I loved Full Throttle. I recognized that it was the same guy but I thought it would be interesting to talk about media convergence rather than the changing conceptions of the developer but this has been pretty interesting, I must say.
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Here are my two cents, if you want them. I liked the compositions, mostly. Those were well done. However, I think that the lighing in the shots with the guy and girl could have been improved with a single soft forward key, maybe from a reflector or a lightbox or umbrella. Its not a lot but it would have been enough to make them more distinctive because you would have gotten better contrasts that way. The parts with the singer were well lit though. I know you weren't the director, but what I wish I would have seen more than anything else was the rest of the band! This guy is a bit of a wiener and can't hold my attention on his own, so the story needed to be more dynamic. But these aren't really your concerns.
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Anything Bruce Timm has done with the Batman franchise automatically gets an A-OK in my books. I really liked Mask of the Phantasm and Batman Beyond, haven't seen Sub-Zero with Mister Freeze but the way that Freeze was presented as a character in the animated series was really well done, so I would anticipate that it would be worth buying to watch.
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I also liked King Kong, but yeah the whole "romance with the monkey" thing was a bit too heavy for me to be able to swallow, and the movie could definietly have been cut down, especially in that first hour.
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ALL COMIC BOOK ADAPTATIONS SHOULD BE BAS RELIEF SHITTY MUSIC VIDS.

not saying they should be, just saying the ones I've enjoyed most so far have been. 300 was probably the best comic/graphic novel adaptation i have seen since the crow, in terms of capturing the aesthetic and narrative of its source with style and memorability. all the marvel-to-film attemps have just been eye-rollers, as far as I can think of (with the rare exception of Pyun's Captain America, which has some genuine charm in the bowells of its otherwise emetic quality, but that is mostly nostalgic charm by now, because it was like 20 years ago now so I guess it doesn't exactly fit in with this new breed of superhero flicks that started with the first spider-man.)

idk, i liked the crow more than any other superhero movie i've seen in the new wave, but then I enjoyed Starwars ep III more than most of them. Haven't seen Punisher: War-Zone yet but hoping it will be just some good old fashioned ultraviolence that fits the character persona more than the "superhero faces off against: bad guy with the same powers as him" template.
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I really didn't like The Dark Knight all that much. Its far too long, the dialogue is fairly wooden, and Christian Bale's "batman voice" is just too much for me to tolerate without doing an over the top imitation to the person sitting next to me. On the topic of JJ Abrams, I liked Forever Young and Regarding Henry, and he wrote those. I liked Lost until last year and the whole time travel thing.

best comic to movie adaptation is the crow imo edit: maybe 300 but idk I cant remember them all this late
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I like the gothic horror, personally, over the other sub-genres of horror. My favourite "horror" movie is Bram Stoker's Dracula, just because it is such a mindwarp. Coppola uses the camera, the light, subtle cinematic tricks and a lighter touch of special effects to completely shake your sensibilites while compelling you to continue to watch, and yet its all remarkably cohesive, well performed, and a beautiful and scary vignette of Victorian repression. I have not seen Nosferatu either, but I probalby should put it on my list.

The last movie I watched was Das Boot. If anyone wants to know how vital sound can be to a filmic experience, watch Das Boot. The sound is amazing, the aesthetic is industrial and also surreal, and even though the director's cut weighs in at a haughty three-and-a-half hours, it stays suspenseful. I suggest that anyone interested in steampunk or diesel watch it just for the look of the film, and pay attention to how the men sort of merge with the submarine in different ways.
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Brütal Legend is a heavy metal-themed game coming out later this year which 'stars' Jack Black.

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  I thought that the idea for the theme was novel, where you 'rock stuff to death', I guess. It will be neat to see how they incorporate it into all the regular aspects of an action-adventure game. Aside from this though, what really struck me was the way that the trailer sort of uses the cutscenes in a way to make it seem like it could be an animated movie and as well as a video game. Because I just finished a university course on digital and trans-media texts, I thought it was really interesting how the game sort of 'stars' Jack Black, and that is a part of its marketing and its appeal. Despite whatever you think of Jack Black, he has come to associate himself with this kind of 'rock will save the world' attitude.
  I might be wrong (bring up any instances if you can think of them) but is this the first time where a videogame, as a unique text (ie not as a spinoff or adaptation of a film or whatever) has had a prominent and popular film actor in a starring role, and the game marketed as such? Do you think that we will see more of this (ie Morgan Freeman in System Shock 3?) in the years to come as the distinctive industries of film and video games continue to merge? Also feel free to post your opinions or thoughts on this game in particular.
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My first advice is to start shopping for another job. If your workplace is caustic, it can really cut into what would otherwise be a perfectly happy life. If the turnover rate in that office stays high, eventually someone in charge of the money will point it out to "THE" John Carmack, who may come to realize that putting his wife in charge of a development team was probalby not the best idea. So yeah, striaighten up your portfolio and get to a place where you think they'll treat you better. I know jobs are lean right now, but the games sector is always growing.

Failing that, buy a puppy and use "taking care of new puppy" as an excuse to work from home?

What you COULD do (although I don't know how well it would work out) is talk to your co-workers about some sort of collective rapproachement (fancy word for non-agressive confrontation) with your employer. Maybe get together and start talking about policies of workplace etiquette and sexual harrassment and stuff like that, or get someone from the labour board to come in and give a talk about what is accepptable or what is not. If you pretend that the problem is each other and not the boss she may change her behaviour by osmosis.

"Lead by example" is always something people can do in any situation, and if you encourage people in your office to all try and maintain an impenetrable, ataraxic professionalism (which can be hard if its not the norm) maybe she will conform to what you all are doing. Tell the guys to start wearing pressed shirts, ties and slacks, to set up established breaks and to try not to do social things at work. It is a place of business, so even if the boss doesn't treat it as such, you employees might as well.

I totally feel for you, your position is really unenviable. The only thing I can say is to lean on your coworkers when you feel alienated, try not to take stupid people to seriously, and laugh it off. Understanding that a lot of people can't realize what douchebags they are should make you feel compassionate towards them rather than hating them.

Also, I agree with whoever said to grow a pair and ask for a promotion and a raise.
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I wouldn't buy it. I personally think that all the charm of the FF series was encapsulated in FFT and was lost with X. Maybe Squaresoft doesn't realize that their increasingly divergent style is alienating international audiences because their games still sell amazingly and get the stroke-off from the magazines and reviewers? I dunno.
But yeah, this doesn't look like the kind of world, story, or gameplay I would enjoy so I can't see any reason to pay money or attention to it.
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If you're a young guy it might cost you an arm and a leg to insure the sucker. If you're going to live in a van, you'll have to clean it like every day, otherwise sludge will buil up on the inside of the windows (know from experience).
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