The best movie thread of the new year

[Ichirou]

These are some of the movies I have seen during Christmas vacation in theaters and on the television, ranked from best to worst.

1. No Country For Old Men. 9.99992/10
2. Dead Again 9.99991/10
3. La Niña de Tus Ojos 9.99990/10
4. The Big Lebowski 9.89999/10
5. Prince of the City 9.8923/10
6. Dog Day Afternoon 8.4521/10
7. El Topo 8.3427/10
8. Superman: Doomsday 6.7432221/10
9. Letters from Iwo Jima 5.3342110523/10
10. Enchanted 3.434251003/10
11. The last 30 minutes of The Departed on HBO /10

These films ranged from the masterful to the merely pedestrian.  Discuss.

[CajoleJuice]

Someone's been lurking!

Nice to have you back. 

[Van Cruncheon]

hey, welcome back.

[Ichirou]

Movie discussion really went to the shitter since I left.

[captainbiotch]

Letters from Iwo Jima was pretty lame, throwaway Hollywood Oscar-bait.

[Ichirou]

I loved how all the "good" officers were the ones who'd been Westernized (the Olympic athlete who was friends with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the general who had lived in the US for some time) while the bad ones were the ones who couldn't speak English.

[The Fake Shemp]

Superman: Doomsday was so bad that I couldn't even finish it.  The cancer curing bit was so awful, I even posted about it!

[Ichirou]

Superman: Doomsday was pretty bad.  The fight was really fucking underwhelming, too - Superman's costume doesn't even get fucked up like it did in the comics, which sort of served to show how badly the fight was going for him.

They got rid of the four fake Supermen (I especially miss the Eradicator and the Cyborg), and once Doomsday is defeated, he just disappears, while in the comic, his body was taken to a military lab for testing.  Did he die in the movie? What happened?

It's really bad.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed they don't fuck up with New Frontier.  I remember when Justice League did "For The Man Who Has Everything," they fucked that story up really badly as well.

[The Fake Shemp]

Yeah, they tanked what should've been a pretty straight forward adaptation of a great Alan Moore one shot.

[Ichirou]

I wish they'd do a version of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" and keep in all the melancholy stuff...but their record of straight story adaptations so far has them stripping out the complexity of themes inherent in the original books.  "For The Man Who Has Everything" is great because Superman gets what he THINKS is his heart's desire, and the result is incredibly unhappy.  The animated version makes it so that he gets his heart's desire and, whoa, everything's perfect!  It totally misses the point of the Moore story. :/

The problem with adapting Superman: Doomsday is that the original book really wasn't that great.  Superman fought a monster so strong that it killed him, and the devastation was just a few knocked down buildings and some small fires - not that big a deal in the comic book universe.  The storyline was basically seven issues of Superman and Doomsday punching each other.  The really interesting stuff was the funeral part (which the movie mostly skips over), the effect his death has on the other super-heroes of the DC universe (none of which even appear in the movie), and then the excitement of having the 4 Supermen and trying to guess which one is the real deal (they completely shit on the best part of the "return" arc by just deleting the four Supermen).

Truly disappointing.  It's pretty sad that this one also has some of the better voice casting in recent series memory, but it's wasted on the shitty script and so-so animation.

[The Fake Shemp]

See, I think if you take some liberties with the source material, the Death of Superman could be a fantastic story either done live-action or animated.  They key is to slim down some of the convoluted posthumus Superman stuff, maybe make some changes in the connection of the four Superman replacements and tie it all together with a resurrection and one, interconnected villain.  I still think the possibility exists for a great Death of Superman story, but the movie and the comic are not it.  The comic kind of gets it started, but it falls apart under the weight of its own comic book conventions.  The story is there, under all that crap.

[Ichirou]

I agree with you, the death should be somehow connected to the resurrection which should be connected to the fake Superman (or Supermen).  The movie's problem is that the first catalyst of the whole storyline (Doomsday) is totally unconnected to everything else that happens in the flick.  The problem with this in the comic book is that they never gave Doomsday a backstory until much, much later, but that was something that could have (and should have) been changed for the movie.

[The Fake Shemp]

I see nothing wrong with making Doomsday just the means to an end, with the origin or placement or what have you being connected to a villain (like say, Brainiac - how is this not obvious?) that's behind the new Superman.

[Ichirou]

Yeah, I agree with you...Doomsday should be a weapon unleashed by some adversary of Superman's to kill him and replace him with his own pawn.

Brainiac is a good choice, Darkseid would have been great as well.  I wish there'd been more than one replacement Superman in the latter half of the movie.  It was a real kick to see all the different Supermen banding together to beat the Cyborg Superman at the end of the "return" storyline.

[xnikki118x]

HAI WELCOME BACK!

[Ichirou]

When will Will Smith give the fans what they really, truly want - a big-screen adaptation of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

[Eel O'Brian]

I helped kill the comic shop I was managing during the reign of the Supermen storyline.  We sort of missed the boat on "Death"  (we ordered a bunch of copies because I knew it would be a sort-of sleeper hit - but it still wasn't enough, even with a two-copy limit per customer we sold out by noon, the line stetched across the parking lot), so the owner and I were all gung-ho not to get caught short again, ordering multiple hundreds of copies per issue.  I failed to realize that NO ONE GAVE A FUCK about Superman coming back.  Not being savvy to the revolving-door resurrections in the creepy world of comic books, all the people who bought that Death issue actually thought DC was killing Superman forever, and that they were buying a piece of history.  They didn't care about one Superman coming back, much less four.  We had so many boxes of unsold Reign issues we literally made a comic book couch out of them.  That, combined with another (cleaner) store gaining business, pushed the owner into deciding to sell his shop and concentrate on the travelling mall shows he enjoyed.

[bud]

ichi, you should watch zodiac if you haven't already.