So I just now realized that Crispin Glover and Christian Slater are, in fact, different people. I really wish I was kidding.

Honestly they definitely could have done it in one. The old Rankin/Bass cartoon did it in like an hour and a half, and while they obviously cut some stuff, they still did a really good job. Peter Jackson & co could have done it in one three-hour movie no problem, but of course, they would have made one third of the money than with a trilogy. I'm not complaining too hard, I quite enjoyed the first one, but I'm not kidding myself about their motives, either.

Oh don't get me wrong, money absolutely had a hand in it too. Why else would one think Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was split into 2 movies, or Kill Bill, or the last Twilight movie (although in that movie's case, splitting it into 2 movies led to a TON of pacing and padding issues, and this is a series of movies that stretched the premise of each novel to 2 hours of boring padding)?

Ah come on, Kill Bill is a very lame example. It was more than 4 hours so it got separated into 2 movies and they're both pretty different so it works really well. It wasn't a book that got separated to make more money out of it.

Kill Bill does work very, very well as two separate movies, but it was still originally intended to be one giant 4 hour movie that got split in half. Money still had to be a bit of a factor in the decision to separate the movie, but I'll admit it wasn't the best example ever.

Yes, money but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Tarantino's decision. And to be honest, I don't really want to watch a 4 hours movie at the theater.

I would have liked The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions to have been one film. Considering the ending eludes to some greater discovery for Neo, the introduction of various new characters, a world between the real and fake, that The Matrix still has many secrets. The last film serves merely as a long drawn out conclusion (that could have been summed up in half an hour), almost entirely scrapping what it built upon previously. Why introduce these new elements if not to build upon them?
Edit: Or alternatively for Revolutions to not have been released and to be left with questions.

Hah, I must've been fuming so much about all the other extraneous crap in the Hobbit trailer that I missed the spiders completely. I'm sure it will still be an enjoyable movie, especially if it climaxes with Bilbo's confrontation with Smaug, but...I dunno. The LotR movies took liberties, but in the form of leaving things out, giving certain lines to other characters, expanding on certain elements that weren't really major parts of the book (Aragorn & Arwen's romance, Boromir & Faramir's relationship in the extended edition) but they didn't quite go so far as having entire plot lines fabricated and tossed in the mix.

Yeah, they actually filmed a pg-13 and r rated version(which could explain the cgi blood). Rambo was very obvious, but it was so awesome that I didnt care(though sly did, since he cut some of it out in the DC). One of my big complaints for Expendables 2 is it felt too much like a parody and most of the cast are just cameos.

Minus the child focus that sounds a lot like Cloud Atlas which, as I recall, you hated. I don't much like crime thrillers or Ryan Gosling but I may have to check this one out. Could be interesting.

I know you're just going off of what I wrote, but if you watch that movie and think it's anything like the sugary sweet hack-work of Cloud Atlas, I will eat my hat and admit Cloud Atlas is brilliant after all.

Is Cloud Atlas hack work because of its sugary sweetness though? I agree it does have an element of that, but to me it's offset (and magnified) by the fact that 95% of serious modern American movies do the opposite - bleak and malevolent for the sake of it, which is just as bad. If Pines does the same I might still like it, but not for that reason.

And it was only the overall message of Cloud Atlas which was positive. The rest of the film featured suicide, slavery, apocalypse and gore, enough to fill any modern moviegoer's quota.

Since it was mentioned earlier, I'll jump in and say that CGI blood is fucking stupid. It ALWAYS looks incredibly fake, and I'd have to think the the amount of money spent to animate it is much greater than the amount it'd take to just make a bunch of fake blood and use it. The perfect example I can think of for a new movie and CGI blood is the Carrie remake coming out this month. They show in the trailer Carrie getting the pig's blood dumped on her (as well as everything else in that movie since it's a really crappy trailer), and the blood is not only obviously CGI and obviously not actually being poured on her, it's also this really weird, almost purple color. It just looks completely unnecessary.

I thought it was just way too one-dimensional in terms of its stories; they all basically had the exact same message - this whole "people are oppressing us but we rise up against it" thing. I don't have a problem with that. Many movies, books, etc have told that story. But the way Cloud Atlas did it just wasn't interesting at all to me - there wasn't a lot of real humanity or depth in it. I get it if you, or anyone else, enjoyed the positivism or the spiritual aspects of it, but it's not what I look for in a movie at all. I like seeing the little details, subtle things, that show us what the characters are like. That way, we care about them and we have a stake in their journey when they finally do win against their oppressors. With Cloud Atlas it was just giving us a bunch of hollow stock characters only there to further the whimsical "look at us, we are different because we rebel against The Man" message going on. Like that story about the slavery ship thing - sure, that could've been very interesting, but all of those characters were just so droll and boring, and the end where the guy stands up and decries slavery against the Big Bad Slave Owners was just so contrite and cliched. It wasn't done at all in a way that felt realistic or captivating to me. Just so fake and faux-happy - happy is good, but not when it's jammed down your throat.

If the story was more involving or complex, I'd be fine with that, but as it was, it was a lot of huffing and puffing that dragged on for hours, and amounted to nothing more than a message you'd see on a Facebook meme or something. Just a huge waste of time I thought. I also hated the tone of the whole thing. Some of my favorite movies in recent years - Moonrise Kingdom, Spider-Man, etc - are very upbeat and positive, but Cloud Atlas's positive tone was just too hammy and forced-whimsical for me. Didn't work for me at all.

I think it's more complex than an issue of positive versus negative. I don't look for one or the other, I look for good, human stories that teach me something about people.

Honestly it's not the fakeness that bothers me so much, but the quality of the fakeness, in a way I'm not quite able to explain. Plenty of "real" fake blood in old 70s and 80s B movies looks fake as hell, sometimes it looks nearly orange on camera, or too thin, to like ketchup or whatever, but for some reason that sort of fakeness is much more fun than CGI blood fakeness. I guess it's because of the craftsmanship involved? Like, they actually had to make something, rather than just slap an effect on in some video editing program. Even if it looks bad the real fake blood is still actually physically in the scene, on the actors and their costumes, rather than obviously superimposed later. It's like generic CGI monsters vs. generic rubber suit monsters. Both look like shit, but the rubber suits are way more fun. Makes me wonder if in 20 years, kids who don't remember a time when there weren't crappy CGI monsters and blood won't make that distinction.

Again, I have to completely agree with failsafeman. I'd take movies that have the shittiest looking fake blood ever like the original Dawn of the Dead over Freddie Vs Jason's reddish-water-cgi-whatever.
But if we're talking practical vs CGI overall, all you have to do is watch Carpenter's The Thing, then watch the semi-remake-prequel-shitty movie.

I watched Drive Angry yesterday, it was ridiculous. Nic Cage has the shittiest haircut imaginable, is blonde, and escapes hell to kill a bunch of dudes, while the FBI guy from Prison Break tries to find him. The dialogue is the cheesiest thing ever, and it's not all that visually interesting. the movie revels in it's own shittiness, and not in a good way. It half-assedly establishes this mythology, which it never really explains or explores. The bad guy suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkksss too. I was expecting grindhouse silly fun, and I was even really baked while watching it, but no dice. Only 2011 Nicolas Cage would have willingly made this movie. Although a cursory look at the director's previous work reveals that he's utterly incapable of making something watcheable. Unless you thought Dracula 2000 was a masterpiece.

I watched 2 Guns in the cinema yesterday. It was A W F U L. I was expecting an action movie, but what I got was terrible, terrible one-liner comedy with only about 2% of the one-liners approaching anywhere near funny.

So did most people here dislike The Thing prequel, then? I thought it was a great, mostly unpredictable sci-fi thriller with some really eye-catching set pieces and a fresh cast, paying homage to its precursor without being hamstrung by treating it as some sort of sacred dogma. I don't really hold the original to the kind pedestal most people here do though, so maybe I just didn't mind it getting an unnecessary and un-called-for spin-off...

I thought it was pretty decent, yeah. It did vaguely bug me that, once the thing became known, there was only about five minutes spent investigating/arguing or whatever before the shit hit the fan, so there wasn't as much of the tension built up before the gory release as there was in the original. That said, I'm not sure how they could've done it while feeling fresh since the thing is a known quantity for most of the audience. So, it was probably about as good as it possibly could've been.

Surely, wether you enjoyed it or not, you can agree that the CGI in it looked terrible and the effects paled in comparison to the mastery of the ''original''?

Really though, I just hate that the movie was made at all. It was a clear instance of a prequel/sequel/remake/whatever that simply should never have been made. The Thing is one of the greatest horror films ever made. It'd be like making a prequel to Rosemary's Baby or Jacob's Ladder or something - just really poor taste. If they had wanted to make a similar sort of horror film about a shape-shifting alien that's fine, but why not just make their own? There's no good reason beyond the fact that they were trying to cash in on The Thing's popularity.

The Thing prequel wasn't bad, but I really didn't care for the atmosphere. Everything's so dark/shadowy and open, where the glaring bright lights against narrow metal/stone surfaces in the original, alongside the slightly grainy filming, really added to the surreal, claustrophobic feel.

I just watched the The Thing prequel the other night, and it wasn't bad. Really, it seemed much more like a re-remake than a prequel, but whatever. The CGI was indeed quite bad. Everything else was fine, and I enjoyed hearing all the Norwegian. It won't replace the 'original' remake, of course, but obviously that wasn't the point. One thing that I hated about both movies was when the Thing infested the dogs. I know it's just a movie, but I hate seeing bad things happening to dogs.

This kind of unflinching dogmatism towards the "untouchableness" of particular works is sort of what I was getting at: I don't really believe any work of art, be it a film, a song, a literary work, a hedge maze, a Hello Kitty backpack, should be completely exempt from the re-imagining brush. I mean, sure, results will vary wildly depending on who's spearheading the project and how the assets come together; but if you can get one remake of The Thing for every five Holy-Diver-covered-by-Killswitch, I still think it's an idea worth pursuing. All art is, after all, just a shuffled-around rebranding of previous works of art; what's wrong with just being a bit more honest about it?

You're establishing a false dichotomy here - that in order to have a remake of The Thing, we also have to have a cover like KSE's Holy Diver. This is clearly false. Remakes, sequels, etc. are fine, but in order to be good, require respect for the original and skills up to the task. The remake of The Thing in my opinion simply didn't exhibit the necessary skills. Say what you want about the new one's set pieces, its unpredictability - the original thing was a special effects masterpiece, and by its very nature, the concept heavily relies on them. The special effects in the new one were just not good, even by CGI standards. It also lacked a lot of the subtlety and deft characterization. Tell me - what did the new one bring to the table that the John Carpenter movie didn't? What did it do to justify its existence, beyond being just generally decent? I could name a dozen things the 1982 version does better than the 1951 version.

That's really the onus a remake has, as opposed to an original work. It's not simply existing on its own merits, it's deliberately placing itself next to the original, insisting upon comparisons and, if the motives aren't purely profit-driven, attempting to justify its existence as an improvement or elaboration upon something in the original. The better the original, the harder the justification becomes. I don't actually believe any movie is literally "untouchable" in that sense; rather, some movies are so good that the chances of a remake/sequel/prequel/whatever being worth the trouble are infinitesimal and probably shouldn't even be attempted.

I generally hate posts like the one I'm making right now but... ^nailed it.

That's the other thing about the prequel, I didn't remember a single character afterward except



But the original had a cast of unusual, well-defined characters. Very easy to remember them all.

Ha, wow, it completely slipped my mind that Carpenter's The Thing was itself a kind-of sort-of remake of the Howard Hawks film. I still need to see it...

Nah, I just know a few people who simply refuse to have anything to do with a remake (of any variety) because they think a particular piece of art is a snapshot in time, and any attempt to re-do is not only in itself artistic heresy but engaging with it in any way will sully the genuine memory of the original as well. You're obviously not one of those people but your earlier post sort of reminded me of them.

A remake of a great movie is like re-painting the Mona Lisa, giving her giant breasts and collagen lips and then having the audacity to say Leonardo da Vinci would be proud of the accomplishment, that both should be viewed with an equal high regard. @darkeningday, it does sully the memory of the original, I've encountered numerous Gen Y's who have no clue it's a remake and cite the remake as an original with a straight face. I've also encountered many who are aware that it has been re-made but completely overlook the original because it's old (ten years is too old for them). You go to mention your favourite movie and it is met with an expression of being feces, then it has been sullied. The difference between great movies and great music, is that great music has been shamelessly remade since the birth of music, it's to be expected. It doesn't mean that people still don't get fussed about it though, say Enya's Boadecia being used as toilet paper by rappers. If no one ever complained or raised an eyebrow about remakes then we'd have at least 10 versions of every movie, and most would completely miss the point and add direct insult to it's creator.

You should be aware that the 1982 movie was, in fact, a remake.

Of course I'm aware of that. A mere handful of good remakes, most from shoddy and poor originals doesn't absolve the majority of remakes.

Remakes have gone on since the beginning of cinema; it's just part of how storytelling works. We re-tell good stories. Unfortunately in these days it seems to mean "let's put lots of swearing, extra violence and stupid music in" more than anything. Not sure that applies to the latest The Thing remake though.

You should also be aware that the 1951 movie is actually quite good, as far as 50s monster movies go.

I always considered the 1982 Carpenter movie and the 1951 Hawks film to be two widely differing interpretations of John Campbell's "Who Goes There" story. Isnt' the 1951 movie officially entitled The Thing from Another World? Anyway, I enjoy both movies obviously, while the 1982 movie is much closer to Campbell's original vision (except for the ending, which is much bleaker/more ambiguous in the movie)....

Sure, but it's clear that Carpenter took quite a bit of inspiration from the 1951 movie as well. I mean, the opening title is basically the same thing, just in the Carpenter movie it cuts out the "from Another World".

I thought it was too similar to 82 and the cgi was horribly outdated.

The recent remake of The Thing didn't need to be made. I mean, we have a cult film that still stands up, albeit thirty years old, and the classic from 30 years before that. Both different interpretations that each worked well. Did we really need to know what happened at the Norwegian base? Wasn't it obvious already when macready and copper went up there and found the bodies etc? Oftentimes, less is more. Jesus, hollywood.

Less may be more quality, but not more money.

I can agree with that. It was the ambition of Cloud Atlas which I liked, and not much else. The individual stories mostly bored me but I can't say I wasn't dazzled watching it. I actually think being way too ambitious was the main problem. For a movie with a similarly sugary spiritual message which is actually absorbing to watch, see Tree of Life. Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild too. All of them fairly simple stories. Even Kubrick could not have deconvoluted the Cloud Atlas story enough to make it work on film.

Iron Man 3 - I can't really explain why no Iron Man appearance since the first movie has appealed to me all that much. Many people were probably as underwhelmed as I was by Iron Man 2, but then The Avengers came out and made everybody cream their pants. When I finally got around to seeing The Avengers on DVD after its hugely successful theatrical run, I thought it was........ decent. Watchable. Just far from the masterpiece I had been told it was.

So then they made a third Iron Man movie. "Sweet, it's written and directed by Shane Black, who wrote all those Bruce Willis lines from The Last Boy Scout that I'm always quoting! This will be great!" Well I finally saw it on DVD and had the same reaction I had to The Avengers. Didn't hate it, but found it kind of bloated, and it never grabbed me the way Iron Man 1 did.