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League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Trailer
An anonymous reader notes that the
League of Extraordinary Gentleman Trailer is on apple.com. It's in quicktime. And since I'm downloading at under 3k a second, I'll let others comment on it. Here's hopin'
Maybe you should finally get rid of that 36.6Kbit/s Modem...
Yeah, trailer looks good-- but what is it? Am I supposed to know that?
I don't need a signature.
Can't help but think they messed up naming this one - everyone (in the UK anyway) is going to confuse it with the League of Gentlemen - a very twisted black comedy.
Here's just the link to the .mov file:1 a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d80d3cb12453c02 589f25382f668c9329e0375e8177dec6493ff77de/lxg_480. mov
http://a772.g.akamai.net/5/772/51/f31fd0bc5c0b1d/
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Name is kinda weird, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (sounds more like a Monte Python parody) but the trailer looked pretty damn good. A bit gothic, but good.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?
Interesting point. In times of trouble (war, for instance) people need heroes. I have seen many news stories to this effect. Its a 'nurture' type need. For those of us in the US, a few more heroes would be a good thing, post 9-11.
In trying times, people don't want to see the bad guys win, and movie makers know that. I would imagine many projects where "good wins over evil" that were sitting on the sidelines pre 9-11 were given a second look, and we are just now beginning to see the fruits of this.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I saw the trailer before Daredevil, and I have to say, this could be incredibly good, or it can be the worst thing ever to grace the silver screen, beyond the badness of Batman and Robin. There will be no halfways on this thing.
I was really psyched by the various characterizations, though; they seemed spot-on. And the voiceover sounds like they kept the, um, moral ambiguity aspect of the Alan Moore stuff. Hopefully he had a large hand in the story/script...
Too bad Sean Connery is such a bigger star than anyone else; this means that the center of the story is likely to be Alan Quatermain, rather than, um, whatsherface. I wonder if he will be the leader, just because of the star power present there...
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book written by Alan Moore. The movie is extremely loosely based upon the first six issues, which comprise the first volume. The movie, due to its rather frightening changes, has a rather high suck-potential, but the trailer gave me hope.
The comic books are very good, however. Alan Moore has read every book ever written. And he really likes the ones written in and about Victorian England. In the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reality, just about every book and character ever written is real. The level of detail is astounding. Check it out.
B.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
I found this site, which sort of explains the origins.
Physics: Making the universe open source.
Buy the original graphic novel now before it is out of print and zooms up in price.
A mindless SFX extravaganza with none of the original's wit, subtlety, irony, cleverness, in-jokes, immaculate period references and panache.
I was going to say, a fine opportunity wasted, but I don't think it was. The League was too sophisticated for the type of audience attracted to a movie derived from a comic in the West. They mainly want mindless violent-action crap, such as Dardevil appears to be.
Ignore the movie. Alan Moore's stuff is too good for movies; this looks to be a travesty even more egregious than the appalling From Hell. Read the book, instead. It's pure, inspired brilliance, with breathtakingly intricate Kev O'Neill artwork to match.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
The league of Extraordinary Gentleman was a Comic written by Alan Moore (at least for some time, I haven't read it myself though I've heard about it).
Basically it consists of pulp heros and villains, like alan quartermain (as in Alan quartermain and the lost city of gold, which i have seen, No imdb but plot synopsis here. )
Basically Moore rewrites the characters of british pulp mythology in ways reminiscent of The Watchmen.
The Invisible man has sex with girls at a boarding school. It's that kind of comic I guess.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is a very successful comic book written by Alan Moore, who also wrote "Watchmen" with Dave Gibbons (THE comic book of the '80s) and "From Hell" with Eddie Campbell (which was recently made into a movie with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham).
The comic book follows the adventures of several fictional Victorian characters (like Alan Quartermain and the Invisible Man).
For more information on Alan Moore, you should check out The Alan Moore Fansite. LoEG is really worth the read.it looks like a lot of people haven't heard of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and are passing this off as a matrix/x-men/whatnot ripoff.
;) true, it has the slick look of just about any another special-effects movie, but give it a chance.
if you want to know more about the comic book, take a look here.
come on guys, this is a comic book. i thought you were geeks?
It might look like I'm standing motionless, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is kinda like X-Men 1800's sytle with a dash of James Bond both in story and because it includes Sean Connery.
The League is a recuited by MI-5 to protect England and includes Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea," Alan Quartermain from H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," and Jekyll/Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man" and Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
From the Alan Moore graphical novel http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563898586
It's just a rather large typo.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
But then again, it's seldom that trailers don't look good, assuming you like the actors and the genre.
God knows that having Sean in it tells us nothing about the movie's quality. He lets himself appear in some real stinkers.
Here's hoping for the best...
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
This is an excellent Alan Moore comic book (Watchmen, From Hell, etc.) but from looking at the trailer (two days ago at the Daredevil movie) I can already tell that they're taking liberties with the story and characters. The most blatant of these IMO is Wilhemina Murray (Harker) who in the comic (and the book) never becomes a vampire. In the trailer, she's manifesting out of bats, etc. I guess having a regular but strong woman-figure among the likes of Captain Nemo, Allan Quartermain, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and the Invisible Man was just not enough for viewing audiences. A good (well-researched comic) that will be gutted in the movie.
Alternatively, maybe they're hoping to duplicate the out-of-control appeal of Dick Tracy.
No one is going to see this movie.
I might, some of my friends definitely will, and some other slashdotters, but this movie is going to bomb. I want to know how a group of people can make decisions which are, at the same time, totally driven by greed and, at the same time, so obviously directed towards utter commercial failure.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You have no business here!
This is a LOCAL shop, for LOCAL fol---
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Every media player in existence (RealOne, Windows Media, QuickTime, even Winamp3) attempt to register themselves as the default player of every type of media they support on installation. I have all four installed, with no major conflicts -- it's really not hard to pick "advanced installation" when you install it and change the settings for file types. Even the fairly devious installation routine for RealONE lets you do that.
Don't rag on Quicktime just because you're too lazy to read the screens during the installation. Quicktime is a great player.
complaining about a low download speed on slashdot is certainly the best way to improve it...
Fleur de Sel
> What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?
Yep, ever since Superman came out.
In 1978.
That's about the time special effects were making large leaps forward (no pun intended) and it was finally possible to make a realistic-looking flying man. The Superman tagline was "You'll believe a man can fly".
Now we are seeing the results of a new generation of low-cost, high-power computers, which make realistic effect cheaper and cheaper.
Superhero movies are a necessary result of Moore's Law.
I dunno. It doesn't look all that "extraordindary" to me. Just some slick CG from what I could see. In this day and age, the eye candy won't make the movie. Just look at Final Fantasy. My interest is piqued, I guess, but the trailer didn't convince me.
Compare this with the X-Men 2 trailer that also played. Just as good of CG as LXG, but with a healthy dose of plot. I suppose it could be that it's already riding on the success of the first one, and perhaps they are going with the whole "mystery" thing to get word of mouth going. And maybe I'm also full of BS, but I think that even non-comic book readers would be more likely to see X2 instead of LXG. Too many acronyms?
I'll reserve any final judgement (as if my opinion means anything) until I get more info on the plot. But many potentially good movies are bad because Hollywood thought they could dazzle moviegoers with distractions instead of paying attention to plot.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Hollywood seems to follow a pack mentality at times, but this time I think they've actually hit the right cultural spot...
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What you say !!
It's a comic by Alan Moore (of From Hell fame) about a group of superheros who are literary figures - Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, etc.
Personally I didn't care for the book (and I was blown away by "From Hell" (the comic, not the movie)). Maybe this'll be one time the movie is better than the book.
Still waiting on movie adaptations of Bendis books. Goldfish, Jinx... Hollywood, I tap my foot in your general direction...
c-hack.com |
To be honest, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is probably one of my less favorite Alan Moore comics, but I've never been a big fan of the genre of dumping a bunch of unrelated characters into a narrative. Perhaps the worst example is Young Indiana Jones in which kid wonder Jones bumps into every historical figure of the 20th century. People who realy think that an Aliens vs. Predator movie would be "cool" should be profoundly pittied. League does not have the rich exploration of diverse characters bound to a common fate that makes The Watchmen work nor does it have the political poetry of V for Vendetta or the raw mystical imagination of Promethia. V is probably the Alan Moore work I would most like to see translated to the silver screen and the least likely to be made.
I will probably go see this for many of the same reasons that I saw Daredevil a movie about which the best I can say is that it didn't suck, and it enabled me to listen in on a funny conversation about Ben Afflec's chin afterwards. Perhaps this time I'll wait for the $2 theatre.
From the trailer, we have an adaptation that isn't an adaptation. Part of the fun of the comic was the inside jokes on these Victorian characters put into a "Justice League" situation. The trailer delivers little more than "Blade" in 19th century England.
Actually I think it is more economic than anything else. I think we are past the post-Joel Schumacher/Batman and Robin backlash which iced the idea of comic book movies for a while. Then X-Men came along and, although flimsy, it went on to make big cash. From that Marvel was able to sell the rights to three of its biggest movies (Hulk, Daredevil, and Spiderman... along with franchising X-Men).
This occured after 2000 (when X-Men was released and became a hit). Soon after that the rights were sold and all the projects entered the development stages (I remember the whispers appearing online and in publications like Wizard at the time), over a year before 9-11.
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
Take Daredevil. According to the Coming Attractions page on it, February 24, 2000 was the first time that Mark Johnson's (the director) name was attached to the project and July 13, 2000 when New Regency locked him in along with the Electra and Kingpin properties to make the movie. Over a year before WTC.
What is music when you despise all sound?
If you have quicktime working in mplayer under linux and you use Mozilla for browsing, you might want to check this out:
http://www.webfreetv.com/linux/
Its a plugin that uses mplayer for quicktime on the web. It works pretty well for most of the trailers that I have tried it for. (Worked for this trailer, for instance)
If you have another plugin that handles quicktime (I was using plugger, which seldom worked) you will have to locate the plugin, rename it (xxx.so.OLD or some such) edit pluggerrc (if you use that) and start Mozilla. This removes Mozilla's "dependence" on the old plugin. Then, you close Moz, add the new plugin, rename the old plugin (if you were using plugger) back to its original name and start Moz. It should work, then. I would advise patience when you first try it out as the plugin gives no indication that it's downloading the movie. Pick a small, low res version to start out with.
God is imaginary
Crappy Adventure Movie. Looked like Rambo.
Hollywood please meet plot, Plot; Hollywood.
And since I'm downloading at under 3k a second, I'll let others comment on it.
Let me get this straight - your're dissatisfied with the speed at which you can download this thing, so what do you do? You LINK TO IT ON SLASHDOT? Do you understand CAUSE AND EFFECT???
Most people already know, but if your new to linux I'll mention it anyway. With Mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
the quicktime codecs and the Mplayer Plugin (there is one at mozdev.org but I haven't tried it)
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/
You can easily watch quicktime movies in Mozilla. Not to mention many windows media files as well. It sucks to have to do a "workaround" but besides paying for the crossover plugin its your best bet for proprietary media types.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I saw Daredevil yesterday, and the LXG trailer was there. I'm a little put off by the "X". Last I checked, Extraordinary started with an "E". I don't expect this movie to to do all that well, but I'll probably see it simply because it's got Sean Connery. When I was in college, my friends in I came up with a scale of whoop-ass for actors. It involved how many cans, cases, or kegs of whoop-ass an actor could open. Sean Connery earned the top spot as the Epitome of all Whoop-ass.
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And we also have a cancel button...in case you don't want toast.
You didn't miss much. The whole trailer looks pretty generic. They don't explain who the "League" is (B-Grade, classic literary characters turned superheroes), not even naming them. And what's with this "LXG" crap?
The whole trailer looks like an X-Men 2 rip-off.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Everyone's saying this movie is set in Victorian England. Queen Victoria ruled until 1901. That car, and the WWII-style German helmets, don't look "Victorian" to me.
And besides the Victorian anachronisms, why is it never daytime there?
the characters may not exactly have amazing powers, but they've definitely got a lot more going for them in terms of depth and charm
That certainly didn't come across in the trailer! It looked like an invisible guy, a long haired guy with a gun, blond guy in a car with two pistols, Sean Connery punching some bad guy, and some scenery falling down. {yawn}
... but I'm sure they were restrained somewhat by the marketing department who insisted the preview feature Sean Connery saying something "witty".
Heh...some other movies that shouldn't be made besides Aliens vs. Predator (which COULD be a REALLY cool movie)...
Paul Atredies vs. Harry Seldon
Borg vs. Vorlons
Gremlins vs. The Littles
MIB vs. Illuminati
US vs. Iraq
Tech Support vs. the Vast Horde o'Clueless
Count Chocula vs. Lucky
The Thing vs. the Blob
IE vs. Opera (bork bork bork)
Cats and dogs living together...TOTAL CHAOS!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I don't understand this need for heros, if indeed it truly exists. Does anyone else find the thought that Americans are so frail and weak minded that we need heros to comfort/inspire/nurture/motivate/whatever us, to be somewhat pathetic?
Most find heroes inspiring. We look for the best qualities in our hereos that we hope to find in ourselves. Heroes remind us that the fight is worth fighting, and that in the end, generally, good does win over evil if the goal is worth sacrificing for.
Not everyone believes this. I do. I think the motivations behind every day heroes (doing the right thing) is stronger than the motivations behind the bad guys (self gain), in general.
To most persons, heroes don't represent any new ideals, rather, they affirm the deep convictions of those who admire them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Wanting to watch virtual heroes defeat the bad guys doesn't make me weak as an American. It reinforces the American ideal that ordinary persons can do extraordinary things when they do it for the right reasons.
As a form of entertainment, I find this much more palatable and uplifting than "Faces of Death", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Scream".
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Nothing I had ever heard about this movie boded well, but the trailer is just absolutely diabolical.
They've taken an intelligent well written comic by one of the masters of the genre and created a complete travesty!
It looks absolutely fucking awful, a mad sub-matrix mindless special effects extravaganza.
(Excuse me? Mina Murray coalesces from a swarm of bats? I think they missed a major point here in that she's not a fucking vampire!)
Alan. Alan, why do you let them do this? Do you really need the money so much?
When it comes on TV I may watch it if I have nothing better to do, but I'd not pay money to see this piece of shit, and I suspect anyone who enjoyed the comics will do likewise.
"Information wants to be paid"
The comic's pulp brilliance also relies upon Kevin O'Neil, the hyper-frenetic, stylistic artist who has brought us (along with writer Pat Mills) such sick-humor nightmares as Marshall Law (one of the original and best post-modern deconstructions of superheroes, but one all about the humor and the sado-masochism). Kevin got his start with British imprint AD 2000, responsible for such stalwarts as Judge Dread and Slaine, working with Pat on stuff like Warlock.
I recommend LoEG the comic quite heartily (despite Ain't it Cool's support. . .even a stopped clock is right twice a day). It's written in the tradition of Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton books, where he takes such characters as Tarzan and Doc Savage and writes his own 'more realistic' adventures mixing them with other pulp heroes and villains. Moore can't use these characters due to our criminal copyright laws (he wanted to originally with the Twilight of the Superheroes series, the proposed DC book of which Kingdom Come was a very weak but direct rip-off) so he had to go back to earlier characters.
For those with twisted humor and a high tolerance for violence, I especially recommend looking for the original graphic novel collection of Marshall Law, Marshall Law: Fear and Loathing.
O'Neill's over-the-top art work is as detailed as Moore's references, and without it LoEG wouldn't be half the book that it is.
Additionally, LoEG predates the show League of Gentlemen. As for the trailer, it looks fun, but also a bit sad as they felt the need to turn Mina Harker into a vampire. I suppose that's their idea of grrl power, the dumbest/most-hypocritical ploy in marketing history (baby, you've come a long way. . .not only can you smoke yourself into an early tomb, but now you can be as brain-dead violent as so many Neanderthal men!)
Now, I was never a regular reader of the comics, but I did have a healthy respect for them. So I cringed when they trotted out the giant glowing "LXG" logo.
Where's the fun in that? The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wouldn't use an acronym like that? In fact, I find it hard to swallow that ANY Victorian would use the letter "X" for extra. I guess they were just trying to make the logo not say "LEG."
The clips in the background look good, but I worry that the trailer's missing the feel of the comic completely. Something about the entire thing just doesn't feel Victorian. To much of the overblown "action movie" music, possibly. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope they pull off this movie...
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
If this film is a success, it could move us all one step closer to "Watchmen."
I think Pharmboy is totally correct in his assessment of "trying times," which closely parallells Adrian Veidt's thoughts near the 11th hour of Watchmen.
. . . and I know a pretty good actor who will work for scale if you'll let him be in the movie.
I am sure you are correct in saying that X-men opened up the door for more comic book hero movies, but the original post was about "heroes" in general, not just comic book heroes.
Well, the original post was this: "What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?"
That sounds like a question about superheroes to me.
That was my point, there were plenty of projects on the side that "looked good, but not good enough" that now look good enough, and we are just seeing the fruits, 18 months later.
I'm sorry, you're just wrong. Spider-Man was already filming in January of 2001 (well before 9/11, it was finished with filming before 9/11), Daredevil was already in pre-production in August of 2001 (again, BEFORE 9/11), and I believe that Hulk was as well- I first read about the Hulk movie being directed by Ang Lee in the months after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out here in the US (which was in 2000, I believe).
The reason these products are getting made is because X-Men was very successful, NOT because of 9/11. These films were either already in production, or pre-production BEFORE 9/11. A big budget film like a superhero movie takes at least 2 years to make. Hell, Spike Lee's the 25th hour has no special effects, only a few main actors and was shot right after 9/11 and that JUST came out a month or so ago.
This is just like what happened with various superhero films coming out in the wake of the success of Batman.
Read it once, then read it again, in conjunction with this.
I'm just about to start again with the annotated guide...