Big-boo- tay!
Xander ,'Beneath You'
Buffista Movies 6: lies and videotape
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
The family quote Big Trouble in context all the time.
"Don't look!"
"I already did!"
"Well don't!"
"I won't!"
"Which David Lo Pan? The little old basket case on wheels, or the ten-foot-tall roadblock?"
"No horseshit, Wang?"
"No horseshit, Jack."
And of course (say it with me) "When (whatever the present boggle) taps the back of your favorite head on the barroom wall and says, 'have you paid your dues?' ol' Jack Burton just looks 'em in the eye and says, 'Yes sir, the check.is.in.the.mail'."
I still haven't seem BB all the way through. I always seem to fall asleep in there somewhere, so what I remember of the movie may actually be dreams inspired by the soundtrack. I need to drink a pot of coffee and try again.
Buckaroo has one of my two favorite John Lithgow performances (the other being Garp).
"Laugh all-a you want, Monkeyboy!"
It's not my DAMN planet, Monkeyboy!
"John SmallBerries?!"
Home is-a-where-a you hang-a your hat-a! I feel so breakup, I want-a to go home!
"Orson Welles!"
"The guy in the wine commercials?"
"Was she beautiful?"
"She was...the Queen of the Netherlands."
I just watched The Abyss (theatrical version). I think the Amazon.com summary puts it pretty succinctly: "Meticulously crafted but also ponderous and predictable." When it gets all action-y, it's very exciting, but it's very slow. And the aliens...didn't really do much. But I read about what they were supposed to do (in the director's cut), and it's kind of baffling since what Cameron took out appears to be the entire point of the movie. But it may work in his benefit since that point still pretty much comes across-ish, a little more subtly.
I guess there aren't a lot of underwater sci-fi action movies, though, so this is probably one of the better ones.
See, I liked all the characters and didn't find it slow at all. When I watched the director's cut, it was very very preachy (humans are bad and violent and must be destroyed) and took the movie from very insular and character driven to a ridiculous epic disaster movie place (with all the scenes outside the deep sea rig up on the surface with all these people we don't know) that was a little too high on it's horse. For me, at least. Which is odd because most days I think a second flood of forty days and nights would be good.
Maybe I'm just annoyed by the trope of "aliens meet humans and are horrified by how violent and evil we all are". Yeah, that's gonna look good on your resume, wiping out an entire planet sure makes you seem like you value peace and abhor violence. Genocide'll do the trick when some other alien race is acting as your judge, jury and executioner.