I agree that the alien attack in War of the Worlds was pretty fucking cool shit. Doesn't make this look any less cool, in my eyes.

I have an allergy to Tom Cruise, so that's one movie I skipped.

Juliana, how do you feel about Daniel Day Lewis' running in The Last of the Mohicans?

We called that The Running Movie around our house on its release.

but I always like that sort of thing, and agree with ita that it is meant to convey raw experience.

I'm going to be in the disagree camp with MM. I loved the first Bourne movie and merely liked the second. It lost all kinds of points for its incoherent action.

See, in the first movie the action scenes are not only coherent but they reveal his character. They show he's resourceful and a badass and he's smart. They're constructed so the action itself has some kind of narrative up and down, left and right and you can follow it. So you're closer to Bourne's experience. He knows what's going on and you and see that. Whereas in the second movie, the raw blur of it is not Bourne's experience. It's the experience of a passive camera and reveals nothing about the character except - ta da! - he survives.

There are many cool bits in the first movie's action scenes that you can refer to: magazine attack! Pen in the hand! Driving down stairs! Narrow alley employ! In the second there are no such distinguishable elements.

The suspense in the first is actual suspense because you know what's happening and anticipate what could or couldn't happen next. The tension in the second is roughly equivalent to somebody sounding an air horn next to you in the theater. Sound and fury signifying crap direction.

We called that The Running Movie around our house on its release.

I took a dear old (in his 80's) scientist friend to see Mohicans thinking he'd like the period and the nature of it.

He spent the entire film sniffing about how it wasn't filmed where the story was set (He identified every. single. plant. on sight...and loudly) and that DDL should know better than to run through the woods carrying a long gun.

Big mistake on my part.

I was a big Ludlum fan when I was in college. He kept the pace going so fast you didn't recognize the gaping holes in logic until much later.

Because Jason met Marie when he kidnapped her. And then she fell in love with him.

All I remember about Last of the Mohicans is that it induced hysterical laughter in me and my friends. I can't even remember why.

What I remember from Last of the Mohicans, aside from discovering afterwards that it was a well-meaning whitewash from the original (staggeringly racist) novel, was learning that there are, in fact, no Mohicans any more. (The Mohegans, in Connecticut, are only distantly related.) The Mohicans died out before their language was very much written down, so the Mohican spoken in the movie is half-guess and half-handwave.

Although the first Bourne movie's action sequences were cut together more comprehensibly, they tended not to be members of the reality-based consituency. For example, if you are a member of a secret spy organization? Attempting to kill someone with an automatic weapon in the middle of Paris is not the way to go. It is not secret. It was as if a whole organization of twisted sideways-thinkers had never heard of the word poison. Which, I'm aware poison is not nearly as exciting as automatic weapons, but, hello!

Also, I mean, although both Bourne movies had incomprehensible plots, I found the first one vaguely insulting. If the assassination target hadn't been such a buffoon, I might have actually cared when he got splatted.

From Mohicans, I remember:
"Stay alive...whatever occurs...I WILL come for you."

wibble

There's a LotM cult here where much of it was filmed. They have a con every year. Are you surprised? The privately owned park which is the river gorge where Magua's troop walked single file along the cliff face, where Alice and Uncas fell, the waterfall where Chingachgook and Magua fought, and the site on the gorge rim where the Sachem's camp was is up for sale, as the private landowner can no longer care for the park.

The park museum has one of Cora's dresses, her straw hat, a buckskin suit of Nathaniel's, and one of Chingachgook's war clubs, held together with a bunch of those little crack-spanning things you get at Home Depot and nail into either side of the crack, spray-painted blue.

This, despite Dawson's Creek being filmed here for like, forever. We loves us our LotM here in NC.

Also, I mean, although both Bourne movies had incomprehensible plots

Really? I got them, and I never get spy movies without help from Stephen. I thought the first Mission Impossible was incomprehensible, but I followed both Bourne movies really easily.