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Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $120 million at t the box office alone.

...because it's my opinion, but am i the only one *completely* let down by the trailer? It looks.. mmm, cheap - the sets, the costumes, weapons, even the non-CGI monsters we've been told so much about. Not to mention giving away a major (at least from the game) part of the story at the very end, or the whacky story (human genome, eh?)

    By the way, Rottentomatoes.com is now hosting the same high quality trailer from IGN, without crappy subscriptions.

Has Hollywood any originality left? Lately all they seem to release are rehashes of Japanese horror movies, video game movies or remakes of other movies & TV series.

Quick: name the last 5 original Hollywood movies you've seen.

1. Half Life 2
2. Doom 3
3. Battlefield 2
4. Soul Calibur 2
5. Halo 2

Oh. You said original movies. ;) I suppose both industries dabble in a bit of sequelism, but I enjoyed most of the games in that list. How about a trailer for a movie that's based on a game that's a sequel to a game that's a sequel to a game?

The movie is apparently mostly dreck, but if you check out the reviews, many of them say that Michael Chiklis does a good job of acting and making the character work, and I've even seen some people say that they changed their minds about a CGI Thing after seeing that.

CGI for non-anthropomorphic characters can work well, but we have a lot of hardware in our brains for predicting the motion of humans. (Knowing which way the other guy was going to jump has quite often made a life-or-death difference.) CGI hasn't gotten far enough to fully model that, and it shows - look at Hulk. A very good try, but you could still see something was wrong.

Because if the average geek tried to be the next Batman, they'd end up more like this guy.

OK, so mice suck as an input device to our computers. The question then is: When do we get the cool screens where you can move stuff around, zoom in/out, etc. all "on screen" like Tom Cruise did in Minority Report? I know that would certainly improve MY productivity at work. (I usually have several spreadsheets, databases, and documents open all at once, and FREQUENTLY am jumping back and forth between many of them.)

Here's the Rotten Tomatoes take on it:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/crack_in_the_world /

Reminds me of the scene in Farenheit 9/11 where the kid, shot with Walmart bullets still lodged in his body, gets Walmart to refund their purchase price when he shows up to turn them in.

The cartoons were by Genndy Tartakovsky, the genius behind the excellent Samurai Jack. If you don't like the style, that's fine; but it certainly isn't a clumsy mismash of anime and 70s cartoons as you seem to feel.

Both cartoons (Samurai Jack and the Clone Wars) have, to my eyes, an extremely cool sense of style and technique. The lightsaber battles in the Clone Wars are incredibly better than any in the movies; ditto for...everything else (the use of the force, jedi tactics, space battles, trooper organization, etc. etc. etc.).

For the curious, browse the glowing quick reviews at rotten tomatoes or do a google search for "clone.wars tartakovsky review" and see the almost unanimous praise for the cartoons.

It's a mutated OS running on a triple-core CPU... it's... it's... it's Ghidrah!

I wouldn't mind either of the three. I wasn't too annoyed or mind-raped by the newer Episodes, and I for one want to know the full story behind that number.

What I really want to see (or perhaps write) is a book about how Web forum threads (like this often-viewed one) influence people's perception of others, vocabulary, and way of life--or at least make them utterly perverted.

Obviously you have mistaken that link for Master of Disguise with Dana Carvey.

and who ever moderated you as a troll will hopefully pay in metamoderation

and who ever moderated you as a troll will hopefully pay in metamoderation

At $20 a pop (yes married) I like to at least check rottentomatoes.com before forking out money on a movies I've got reservations about.

That said, only a fool would take any of it as gospel so if you're have such strong feelings maybe you should re-evaluate how you use movie reviews.

I loved Zoolander and never would have seen it if I'd gone by the critics. But Star Wars lived (IMHO) right up to its negative (and positive) reviews. No-one is out there trying to defraud you. Over analyzed? It just looks like maybe your taking them a little too seriously.

At least for me, I appreciated the heads up and frankly coming out of it I'm 100% confident I'd have better spent my time watching Kung-Foo Hustle (thanks 50/50 reviews, knowledge of actors/directors previous work).

And as for the timecoding/lightsabre reviews Star Wars is a little geeky. Thats got very little to do with anything aside from its status as a cultural icon (for better and worse). Those you really should learn to appreciate at the very least for humors sake. Where else do you get to see people so worked up about things so inconsequential? :)

At $20 a pop (yes married) I like to at least check rottentomatoes.com before forking out money on a movies I've got reservations about.

That said, only a fool would take any of it as gospel so if you're have such strong feelings maybe you should re-evaluate how you use movie reviews.

I loved Zoolander and never would have seen it if I'd gone by the critics. But Star Wars lived (IMHO) right up to its negative (and positive) reviews. No-one is out there trying to defraud you. Over analyzed? It just looks like maybe your taking them a little too seriously.

At least for me, I appreciated the heads up and frankly coming out of it I'm 100% confident I'd have better spent my time watching Kung-Foo Hustle (thanks 50/50 reviews, knowledge of actors/directors previous work).

And as for the timecoding/lightsabre reviews Star Wars is a little geeky. Thats got very little to do with anything aside from its status as a cultural icon (for better and worse). Those you really should learn to appreciate at the very least for humors sake. Where else do you get to see people so worked up about things so inconsequential? :)

Where is everyone? The thread on the 2004 Indie Games of the Year brought about hunrdreds of comments! It's Star Wars, isn't it? Everyone's out watching the midnight showing of Episode III. By God, I blame George Lucas.

Damn you, Sir. Damn you, and such.
____________________________
Epidemic Groove - Our casual/action/real-time strategy hybrid about women curing a worldwide epidemic by constructing nanomechanical defenses. You know, the usual stuff.

Sounds good on paper when I remember that Rotten Tomatoes has given a silly movie like Rock School a perfect, 100%

Rock School has a whopping 7 reviews right now, making the Tomatometer statisitcally meaningless. Wait until it gets at least 30 before you start comparing it to films that have reviews from the full gamut of critics.

In any case, if Kevin Smith AND Roger Ebert say it's good, that's enough to convince me to buy a ticket.

Single reviewers are often unreliable, having bias and agendas of their own. If you want a more objective approach to the popularity of a film, you should look at sites that provide an overview of all reviews for a given film.

Rotten Tomatoes is one of the best examples of this. They simply assess a review as either favorable or unfavorable and do away with the less empirical ratings. They count up the total number of positive versus negative reviews, and give a percentage. They'll link every review, include a blurb from each, and pick the most well written ones (positive and negative) and put them in a sidebar.

Their film ratings so far on Star Wars are...

A New Hope - 93%
Empire Strikes Back - 98%
Return of the Jedi - 80%
Phantom Menace - 62%
Attack of the Clones - 65%
Revenge of the Sith - 84%

Looks like it's on par with Jedi in the opinion of most critics.

I mean, come on, he gave a great review to the universally panned Phantom Menace, and an equally good review to the moldy cheese production of Anaconda. I like Ebert but this guy is not a barometer to a film's quality. Leave that to Rotten Tomatoes (which looks to be positive so far).

"Oh my...it's neither spongeworthy nor Vader-riffic."
-- John Venable, SUPERCALA.COM

I'm so glad someone decided to finally put together a service that lets me look up movie times in my area!

Thank GOD Google is here to push the envelope and bring us new, exciting features!!

WHAT NEXT?! WILL THEY LET US BUY MOVIE TICKETS OVER THE WEB TOO? LOL!

Kicking and Screaming is rated Rotten. I haven't seen the movie though, generally, RottenTomatoes' ratings are trustworthy.

Something somebody wrote on a whiteboard at work..

STAR WARS DARK SIDE INITIATION RITES

1. Give a Gungan a wedgie
2. Ewok target practice (Pull!)
3. BBQ a bantha using force lightning
4. Post to the Light Side message board mocking size of Yoda's lightsaber
5. Voiceover work for CNN
6. Write test plan for the Death Star laser cannons
7. Shave the empire logo on the dark side of a Wookiee.

The apathy of Fox certainly was a factor, but you're forgetting that Titan A.E. also was a very bad movie:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/titan_ae/

Don Bluth directed this movie, after all: he who brought us such quality cartoons as All Dogs Go To Heaven, Rock-A-Doodle, and Bartok the Magnificent.

Not to say that Titan A.E. doesn't have its fans, but then, so does Showgirls. Titan A.E. may not have gotten the support from Fox your friend would like, but that doesn't mean the movie didn't fail on its own merits.

Generally, I don't put much faith in a critic's opinion. I do check out http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ for most movies that I end up seeing, but I typically use the content of the reviews to determine if a movie is to my tastes...ignoring the actual positive/negative result.

In this context, however, critics happen to be the main topic of conversation according to the story that was submitted. So, naturally, I made a reference to critics in my response.

Rottentomatoes has an ``Episode III Tomatometer Watch'' going on on its home page http://www.rottentomatoes.com/. It's at 92% now, with 24 reviews in. Not too shabby.

check out http://rottentomatoes.com/ it's a reviews aggregator. you'll get a zillion reviews, from sources like the NYT to iamanewmoviecriticandsuck.com, and an average score, between other things.

There were good reviews.

Reviews are doing the same thing these days, and some include major spoilers, although many contain minor ones. If I'm going to give a film a chance, I'd prefer not to know the wittiest line ahead of time, or the neatest view, or whatever.

What I will do is go to Rotten Tomatoes and scan both the freshness ratings and the synopsis. That way I get a general feel for what reviewers think without having to worry about spoilers.

To be honest though Lucas didn't have an awful lot to do for this film - he already knew how it had to end. I'm no writer but I'd wager it is a lot easier to formulate a screenplay when you already know exactly what it has to achieve to be considered a success.

Contrast that with Episodes I and II, where Lucas had very little in terms of pre-ordained plot development - the result was obvious, Jar Jar Binks et al.

Not to mention of course that since Episodes I and II were poorly received (62% and 65% respectively), reviews of this film were (and are already) bound to draw comparisons and as such favour it accordingly anyway.

For me one of the worst things about the previous two films in the franchise is that because they were continuations (albeit prequels) of what had already become legendary - no one had to try very hard. As a result the acting is wooden, the dialogue stunted and insincere, etc. Reminds me of the cringeworthy Matrix sequels.

Anyway, I personally believe that if the film didn't happen to include the words "Star Wars" in the title, that we would be seeing completely different reviews. And I consider myself to be an avid Star Wars fan to boot.

To be honest though Lucas didn't have an awful lot to do for this film - he already knew how it had to end. I'm no writer but I'd wager it is a lot easier to formulate a screenplay when you already know exactly what it has to achieve to be considered a success.

Contrast that with Episodes I and II, where Lucas had very little in terms of pre-ordained plot development - the result was obvious, Jar Jar Binks et al.

Not to mention of course that since Episodes I and II were poorly received (62% and 65% respectively), reviews of this film were (and are already) bound to draw comparisons and as such favour it accordingly anyway.

For me one of the worst things about the previous two films in the franchise is that because they were continuations (albeit prequels) of what had already become legendary - no one had to try very hard. As a result the acting is wooden, the dialogue stunted and insincere, etc. Reminds me of the cringeworthy Matrix sequels.

Anyway, I personally believe that if the film didn't happen to include the words "Star Wars" in the title, that we would be seeing completely different reviews. And I consider myself to be an avid Star Wars fan to boot.

Isn't that what they said about the Hitchhiker movie? Brillaint? True to Adam's vision? Except critics are pretty much split about it...and many Hitchhiker fans all have the same thing to say, which is that it really wasn't that funny, because it didn't have that mix of absurdity and sophistication his books had- ie, it wasn't true to Adams at all. Example- we don't learn that beer is a muscle relaxant that'll help with teleporting- we're just left to assume they're getting drunk because that's the right thing to do when the end of the world is coming. We all knew that was probably the REAL reason when we read the book...but we were robbed of this by the movie.

Remember, folks- the first people to get previews of products- movies included- are those who are guaranteed to say nice things about it. Either because they always have something nice to say, they're getting compensated to have something nice to say, or they're desperate for the attention that comes with being first in line to "review" a product.

I prefer to let Rotten Tomatoes compile all of the ratings for me...

AUSTIN 3:16 Another soon to be forgotten farce.

over at rotten tomatoes

Currently 62% positive

Are you sure? IMDB has as many braindead reviews as every other site on the net, imho - if anything, i think they drop the ones with insults and "l33t" talk, which is fine; it is their website after all. Same with Amazon.

Anyway, i preffer Rottentomatoes.com for accurate reviews, even though i use IMDB for specific information too - soundtracks, cast lists and so.

You can find pretty harsh reviews on JCVD movies if you browse them :)

Here is a man, who for some reason or another, seems to have devoted a large proportion of the last twenty years of his life to the veneration of the works of Douglas Adams.

Look at his CV in the Google Cache (since the original site's down), the guy looks more like a fanboy than an objective biographer: one of those people who becomes the "guy everyone ends up interviewing" in the fan community, but who doesn't have any real connection to Adams beyond his fandom.

Of course the review is going to be bad. He's devoted far too much of his life to a belief in the genius of one man. To believe that anyone else could match that man's vision by bringing Adams' work to the screen in his absence would be far too much cognitive dissonance for him to handle.

Plenty of links to positive reviews have been posted in other threads - I'll wait for the Rotten Tomatoes verdict, I think.

Charles

Your nickname wouldn't be Powder, would it?

P.S. Pearl Harbor wasn't a "bomb"--it was a bad movie that did very well at the box office. To suggest that it was a bomb is just plain silly. Pearl Harbor was a plodding movie with a trite script and stilted acting that performed extremely well at the box office thanks to aggressive marketing and some pretty good technical work. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can go around claiming it failed miserably.)

Yeah. That movie gets an 18% rating at RottenTomatoes.com. People are idiots to even watch garbage like that for free.

If you are worried about this movie being good, check out the reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes; all 9 have been positive so far (for a 100% rating).

Classic example of "Americanisation" of a reasonably good British comedy: The film Fever Pitch has been remade as a Hollywood film. It looks appalling, and bears all the hallmarks of a "bad americanisation" of something.

Be aware, of course, that it is entirely possible for Americans to get it, and produce something good suitably adapted: Look at High Fidelity. Same source author, similar kind of story and humour, yet well adapted.

Jedidiah.

Yep, regardless of the quality. Oh, I grant you that some products are so poor they can't be helped, for example Gigli, but if your product isn't more than a standard deviation or two away from median quality, advertising can sell it.

Take, for example, the 50 films at the top of the U.S. box office over the last 4 months. (Films make a fair example, since they are fungible and have basically the same price, etc.) Rotten films (as rated by Rotten Tomatoes) out-earned fresh ones in Feb, Jan, Dec, and Nov, despite there being more fresh titles out there. You have to go back to October, when SpiderMan 2 was still in theatres, to find a month when fresh films won. Now, consider that theatres should drop bad films faster than good films; yet, bad films still win in dollars. Why?

Feb: Fresh 32 ($1159.6); Rotten 18 ($1228.2)
Jan: Fresh 25 ($885.8); Rotten 24 ($1297.9)
Dec: Fresh 24 ($721.3); Rotten 24 ($1330.4)
Nov: Fresh 26 ($952); Rotten 22 ($989.2)
Oct: Fresh 25 ($1326.5); Rotten 24 ($1047.9)

It's not just that advertising can sway people as between two choices of equal quality. Advertising is more powerful than that and people are more manipulable. Throw enough money at promotion, and you can convince people to choose a product of inferior quality.

Yahoo does this too and if Google just started this, Yahoo has been doing it longer.
And while I haven't tried Google's database thing, Rotten Tomatoes does it as does Metacritic, and Metacritic does music too, so it ain't nothing new, it just has the Google name.

1. He'd already left Square
2. Square still owns Final Fantasy
3. Yes, Microsoft is still evil.
4. Yes, Square is still greedy and angry that the Final Fantasy movie tanked (relative to its budget).

There, now we can cue that Victory Track...no...must...not...type it out...DADADADADUUHDUUHDADUHDAAAAH*does Cloud Strife freakout*

Or maybe Loki damned the site 'cause that movie his mask was in wasn't liked too much and was getting torrent'd instead of being seen at theaters.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ has been doing this for years.

Sounds like Rotten Tomatoes to me...