Ludicrous Speed

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

I thought Mel Brooks issued a press release like five years ago that now that the prequel movies were coming out that it might be time to make SBII:TSFMM now.

Oh, that's right; I remember that now. Still, I have to wonder whether he was being serious when he said it. He seems to have missed his deadline by a bit, as well.

And remember, Spaceballs wasn't just a Star Wars parody, it was Trek, Alien, Planet of the Apes, etc etc. He could toss in the prequel trilogy stuff, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, etc, etc.

Haven't forgotten.

[Nate the Great]

Yeah, that's the press release. It just seems to me that he would make so much money on SBII: TSFMM that it would be idiotic to pass up on making another cult classic.

You know, as long as we're talking about cult classics, how many movies do you know that people claimed were the best ever at the time, but are no longer considered that good? Titanic springs to mind immediately, but even Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings run into the diminishing returns problem.

On a recent crosscountry bus trip I suggested to my friends that we watch The Princess Bride. The approval rating was well over eighty percent. I doubt that Lord of the Rings would have gotten that kind of response.

[evay]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

On a recent crosscountry bus trip I suggested to my friends that we watch The Princess Bride. The approval rating was well over eighty percent. I doubt that Lord of the Rings would have gotten that kind of response.

That's because LOTR is twelve freakin hours long. You have to be really devoted, or travelling from Maine to Alaska via Texas, to want to sit through all that at one clip.

[Nate the Great]

Yeah, I keep hearing people say that you need twelve hours to tell LOTR properly. My question is: why? Who says we need the 100% complete Tolkein experience? I tried to read the trilogy a few years ago and got halfway through Two Towers before I gave up. To many characters, too much description, too many parallel plots. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that the effects are awesome, but when you look at battlefields with thousands of soldiers in them, my major problem becomes "do I want to see thousands of imaginary people fight each other?" I'd rather have two armies with a few dozen each, if they were all real.

Bryan Singer made a comment in his X-Men commentary that in the scene where Magneto has usurped all of the cops' guns and is holding them all at gunpoint, some of the guns are CG and some are real ones on wires, etc. I can tell. The guns felt real, I could "see" their physical presence in the scene. That means more to me.

[Nate the Great]

Looks like Dave Barry is a fivist and doesn't know it. In a column (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...ry/5023564.htm) he summarizes Two Towers quite well. Definitely worth a read.

[e of pi]

Yeah. He does things like that occasionally, though this is the first time I've seen him do it in that actual format, and for a movie that actually exists.

[Nate the Great]

Hey, another Barry fan! Always glad to meet other followers of the Church of Exploding Toilets.

[evay]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

Yeah, I keep hearing people say that you need twelve hours to tell LOTR properly. My question is: why? Who says we need the 100% complete Tolkein experience?

You don't, necessarily. You don't necessarily need four hours for Jane Eyre either, but I like that version (BBC miniseries) much better than the shorter ones. There are shorter versions of the LOTR trilogy (animated and such) which you could also watch.


I used to read Dave Barry every week, but he started getting tired in the late '90's and repackaging old columns with a few sentences changed and not admitting it was a rerun. I enjoy his style of humor, but he hasn't had anything new to say in a long time. That Two Towers column is from 2003.

[Derek]

Originally Posted by evay

I used to read Dave Barry every week, but he started getting tired in the late '90's and repackaging old columns with a few sentences changed and not admitting it was a rerun. I enjoy his style of humor, but he hasn't had anything new to say in a long time. That Two Towers column is from 2003.

That's pretty close to my feelings as well. I'll read his column if I have a paper and nothing to do, but without a subscription anymore, those times don't occur much.

[mudshark]

About the same here. I used to find Dave Barry quite funny 15 or 20 years ago, or whenever it was that he first came to my attention, but I don't think I've read a new column of his in quite some time. It did seem to me that in more recent years, as was pointed out above, he's had a tendency to recycle or to just plain phone it in.