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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 11:24:46 GMT -5
4 films tied at number 27. They each recieved 7 votes, and IMO one of them should've been a lot closer to the top, but hey that's the way it goes. We'll start with the film I'm surprised didn't get more votes: The Shawshank Redemption ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/81/ShawshankRedemptionMoviePoster.jpg/200px-ShawshankRedemptionMoviePoster.jpg) The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American drama film written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The film stars Tim Robbins as Andrew "Andy" Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding. The film portrays Andy spending nearly two decades in Shawshank State Prison, a fictional penitentiary in Maine, and his friendship with Red, a fellow inmate. This movie exemplifies the potential gap between initial box office success and ultimate popularity. Despite a lukewarm box office reception that was barely enough to cover its budget, The Shawshank Redemption received favorable reviews from critics and has since enjoyed a remarkable life on cable television, home videotape, DVD and Blu-ray. It continues to be hailed by critics and audiences alike, 15 years after its initial release, and is ranked among the greatest films of all time. In 1947, a banker named Andrew "Andy" Dufresne[1] (Tim Robbins) is convicted of murdering his wife and her lover based on strong circumstantial evidence and is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary in Maine. At the prison, inmate Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) is rejected for parole, after having served twenty years of his life sentence, shortly before Andy's arrival. After a secluded first month, Andy gradually becomes acquainted with Red's circle of friends, and Red himself, who is known for cleverly smuggling in contraband. After a month of adjusting to his new life, Andy approaches Red and asks him to get a rock hammer, intending to pursue a hobby of rock collecting. Red supplies the hammer for ten dollars, and later fulfills Andy's request for a poster of Rita Hayworth. One day in 1949, while tarring the roof of Shawshank's license plate factory, Andy overhears the captain of the prison guards, Captain Byron Hadley (Clancy Brown), bitterly complaining about the taxes he will have to pay on a forthcoming inheritance. Andy approaches Hadley with a solution that will allow him to keep the entire inheritance tax-free; though Hadley nearly throws Andy off the roof initially, Andy's willingness to set up the transaction for the cost of beer for the tarring crew wins Hadley's respect. It also earns the respect of the inmates, especially when Andy gives his share of the beer to the others (as he had been drunk at the time of his alleged crime, Andy now refrains from drinking alcohol). Prior to this incident, Andy had frequently been beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang called "The Sisters", led by inmates Bogs (Mark Rolston) and Rooster (Gary Lee Davis). After a particularly vicious beating at the hands of the Sisters lands Andy in the infirmary, Bogs returns to his cell from a week in solitary confinement to find Captain Hadley and another guard there. Hadley and the guard inflicts a brutal nightstick beating on Bogs, which leaves him paralyzed. Bogs is sent away to a state hospital, and the message to the Sisters is clear: Andy is never bothered again. As other guards begin to come to him for financial help, Andy is given a makeshift office in the prison library to provide tax and financial services. His "clientele" grows to include the entire prison staff, guards from other prisons, and even Warden Samuel Norton (Bob Gunton) himself. To keep Andy happy, the Warden provides him with a single cell and allows him to keep an unusual amount of contraband in his cell. Conspicuous amongst the contraband are Andy's posters of "fantasy girlies" - first Rita Hayworth, followed over time by Marilyn Monroe and then Raquel Welch. The Warden also permits Andy's letter-writing campaign on behalf of the prison library. Through Andy's budgeting and purchasing activities, the library is expanded and remodeled into the Brooks Hatlen Memorial Library, which was the "best prison library in New England". The Warden capitalizes on Andy's skills and devises a program to put prison inmates to work for local construction projects, exploiting the prisoners' free labor for his own personal profit, with Andy acting behind the scenes as a money launderer. Andy uses his knowledge of "the system" to create the false identity of Randall Stephens, which he uses as a straw man to hide the Warden's involvement. In 1965, a young prisoner named Tommy Williams (Gil Bellows) enters Shawshank on a breaking and entering charge, and quickly becomes part of Red's and Andy's group of friends, with Andy helping him to pass the GED test. He learns of Andy's supposed crime and makes a shocking revelation: Elmo Blatch (Bill Bolender), one of his old cellmates, had gleefully described murdering two people who fit the description of Andy's wife and her lover, and how her "hotshot banker" husband got blamed for it. Andy hopes that he will be able to get a new trial with Tommy's help, and he approaches Warden Norton for advice and assistance. Fearing exposure of his illegal activities at Shawshank should Andy be set free, Norton sends him to solitary confinement and conspires to have Hadley shoot Tommy as an escapee. After Norton informs Andy of Tommy's death, Andy tries to refuse to launder any more funds for Norton. However, when Norton threatens Andy with the loss of his private cell, the loss of his protection against the "Sodomites", and the destruction of his beloved library (complete with a book burning), Andy relents, by all appearances a beaten man. Norton tells Hadley to give Andy another month in solitary confinement to decide. When Andy is back in the prison yard, he tells Red that if he ever gets out of prison he should go to a specific hayfield near Buxton, Maine to find something that has been buried under a volcanic rock. The following morning, Andy is missing from his cell. In a fury over Andy's disappearance, the Warden throws one of Andy's rocks at the poster of Raquel Welch - and is stunned to see the rock tear through the poster, revealing a large hole that Andy had used to escape. In a flashback sequence, it is revealed that Andy spent years chipping away at the wall of his cell with his rock hammer, using the posters of Hayworth, Monroe and Welch to conceal it. After his escape, Andy assumes the identity of Randall Stephens and uses it to withdraw Warden Norton's laundered money - $370,000 worth (over $2.4 million in 2009 dollars). Cashier's checks in hand, Andy sends evidence of Norton's activities to a Portland newspaper. The morning the story runs, Byron Hadley is arrested and Warden Norton (besieged by police officers and the press) commits suicide in his office. The next year, 1967, Red is finally released on parole after serving 40 years at Shawshank. Red is afraid of "the outside", dreading living in fear, worried that he would end up committing suicide once outside of the prison's strict regime, as fellow prisoner Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore) had done. Coincidentally, he's given the same room and the same job Hatlen had. But instead of committing suicide or committing another crime to be sent back, Red recalls his promise to Andy and heads to the field in Buxton that Andy told him about. He finds a small metal box containing money and a letter from Andy. In the letter, Andy reminds Red of Zihuatanejo before ending with a final message: "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies". Red then violates his parole and travels to Mexico, eventually reuniting with Andy in Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast. Both of them are elated and hug each other when they meet. In a very interesting note in 2007, Union County Prison inmates Jose Espinosa and Otis Blunt escaped the jail using similar techniques to those in the movie.[13] The escape note left behind by the escapees led to the suicide of prison guard Rudolph Zurick.[14] The escapees were later recaptured. Jose Espinosa denied responsibility over the death of Zurick.[15] Jaws![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/eb/JAWS_Movie_poster.jpg/215px-JAWS_Movie_poster.jpg) Jaws is a 1975 American horror/thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's best-selling novel. The police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant great white shark by closing the beach, only to be overruled by the town council, which wants the beach to remain open to draw a profit from tourists during the summer season. After several attacks, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter. Roy Scheider stars as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife Ellen, and Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn. Jaws is regarded as a watershed film in motion picture history, the father of the summer blockbuster movie and one of the first "high concept" films.[2][3] Due to the film's success in advance screenings, studio executives decided to distribute it in a much wider release than ever before. The Omen followed suit in the summer of 1976 and then Star Wars one year later in 1977, cementing the notion for movie studios to distribute their big-release action and adventure pictures (commonly referred to as tentpole pictures) during the summer. The film was followed by three sequels, none with the participation of Spielberg or Benchley: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). A video game titled Jaws Unleashed was produced in 2006. The film begins at a late night beach party on Amity Island, from which a young woman named Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) leaves to go skinny dipping. She strips on the beach and dives into the water, where she is suddenly jerked around and then pulled under by an unseen force. The next morning, Amity's new police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is notified that Chrissie is missing. Brody and his deputy Len Hendricks (Jeffrey Kramer) find her mutilated remains washed up on the shore. The medical examiner informs Brody that the victim's death was due to a shark attack. Brody heads out to close the beaches, but is intercepted and overruled by the town mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season which is the town's major source of income. The medical examiner says he was wrong about a shark attack and tells Brody that it was a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with this. A short time later, a young boy named Alex Kintner is attacked and killed by a shark while swimming off a crowded beach. Mrs. Kintner places a $3,000 bounty on the animal, sparking an amateur shark hunting frenzy and attracting the attention of local professional shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). Quint interrupts a town meeting to offer his services; his demand for $10,000 is taken "under advisement". Brought in by Brody, Ichthiologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) conducts an autopsy on Chrissie's remains and concludes she was killed by a shark. Soon after a large tiger shark is caught by a group of novice fishermen, leading the town to believe the problem is solved, but an unconvinced Hooper asks to examine the contents of the shark's stomach. Because Vaughn refuses to make the "operation" public, Brody and Hooper return after dark and learn that the dead shark does not contain human remains, just fish and garbage. Scouting aboard Hooper's state-of-the-art boat, they come across the half-sunken wreckage of local fisherman Ben Gardner's boat. Hooper dons a wetsuit and discovers Gardner's severed head. Vaughn still refuses to close the beach; on the Fourth of July the beaches are covered in tourists. While a prank triggers a false alarm and draws off the authorities' attention, the real shark enters an estuary, kills a man, and nearly takes the life of Brody's oldest son Michael. Brody forces a stunned Vaughn to hire Quint. Brody and Hooper join the hunter on his boat, the Orca, and the trio set out to kill the man-eater. At sea, Brody is given the task of laying a chum line, while Quint uses a large fishing pole to try to snag the shark; the first results are inconclusive and Quint and Hooper grow increasingly agitated with one another. As Brody continues his task, the enormous shark suddenly looms up behind the boat. After a horrified Brody announces its presence ("You're gonna need a bigger boat!"), Quint and Hooper watch the great white circle the Orca and estimate the new arrival weighs 3 tons (2.7 metric tonnes) and is 25 feet (8m) long. Quint harpoons the shark with a line attached to a flotation barrel, designed to prevent the shark from being able to submerge as well as to track it on the surface; but the shark pulls the barrel under and disappears. Night falls without another sighting, so the men retire to the boat's cabin, where Quint and Hooper compare their various scars and Quint tells of his experience with sharks as a survivor of the World War II sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The shark reappears while the men sing, damages the boat's hull, and slips away before the men can harm it. In the morning, while the men make repairs to the engine, the barrel suddenly reappears at the stern. Quint destroys the radio to prevent Brody from calling the Coast Guard for help. The shark attacks again, and after a long, hard chase, Quint harpoons it to another barrel. The men tie the barrels to the stern; but the shark drags the boat backwards, forcing water onto the deck and into the engine, flooding it. Quint harpoons it again, attaching three barrels in all to the shark, while the animal continues to tow them. Quint is about to cut the ropes with his machete when the cleats are pulled off the stern. The shark continues to attack the boat and Quint powers towards shore with the shark in pursuit, hoping to draw the animal into shallow waters, where it will be beached and drowned. In his obsession to kill the shark, Quint overtaxes his damaged engine, causing it to terminally seize. With the Orca immobilized, the trio try a desperate approach; Hooper dons his scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, intending to stab the shark in the mouth with a hypodermic spear filled with strychnine nitrate. The shark instead destroys the cage, causing Hooper to lose the spear and flee to the seabed. As Quint and Brody raise the remnants of the cage, the shark throws itself onto the boat, crushing the transom and causing the boat to begin sinking. Quint slides down towards the shark, slashing at it in vain with his knife before being pulled under and devoured. Brody retreats to the boat's cabin, which is now partly submerged, and throws a pressurized air tank into the shark's mouth when it rams its way inside. Brody equips himself with an M1 Garand rifle and climbs the mast of the rapidly listing vessel. After temporarily driving the shark off with a harpoon, Brody begins shooting at the air tank still wedged in the shark's mouth. He finally scores a hit, exploding the tank and blasting the shark's head to pieces. As the shark's carcass drifts toward the seabed, Brody reunites with Hooper. They cobble together a raft out of debris from the Orca and paddle back to Amity Island. Jaws was the first film to use Sidney Sheinberg's scheme of "wide release" as a distribution pattern. As such, it is an important film in the history of film distribution and marketing. Prior to the release of Jaws, films had opened slowly, usually in a few theaters in major cities. As the success of films increased, distributors would send prints to additional cities across the country. Following the success of Jaws, films have almost universally been distributed and marketed on a national scale. Jaws was the first film to open nationwide, on hundreds of screens simultaneously, coupled with a nation-wide marketing campaign – a then-unheard of practice. Scheinberg's rationale was that nationwide marketing costs would be amortized at a more favorable rate per print than if a slow, scaled release was carried out. Scheinberg's gamble paid off, with Jaws becoming a box office smash hit, and the father of the summer blockbuster.[12][13] When Jaws was released on June 20, 1975, it opened at 465 theaters.[14] The release was subsequently expanded on July 25 to a total of 675 theaters, the largest simultaneous distribution of a film in motion picture history at the time. During the first weekend of wide release, Jaws grossed more than $7 million, and was the top grosser for the following five weeks.[15] During its run in theaters, the film beat the $89 million domestic rental record of the reigning box-office champion, The Exorcist, becoming the first film to reach more than $100 million in U.S. box office receipts.[16] [17] Jaws eventually grossed more than $470 million worldwide ($1.9 billion in 2008 dollars[18]) and was the highest grossing box office film until Star Wars debuted two years later.[15] Jaws and Star Wars are retrospectively considered to have marked the beginning of the new business model in American filmmaking and the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood period. Jaws won Academy Awards for Film Editing, Music (Original Score) and Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture, losing to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Spielberg was not nominated for Best Director. Jaws was #48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies, a list of the greatest American films of all time, dropping down to #56 on the 10 Year Anniversary list. It was ranked #2 on a similar list for thrillers, 100 Years... 100 Thrills. It was #1 in the Bravo network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004)[19] and #1 on the Wayne State University film students' list of the Top 20 Films of the 20th Century (2007).[20] The shark was anointed #18 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2005, the American Film Institute voted Roy Scheider's line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" as number 35 on its list of the top 100 movie quotes. John Williams's score was ranked at #6 on AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores. The film received mostly positive reviews. In his original review, Roger Ebert called it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings".[21] Variety's A.D. Murphy praised Spielberg's directorial skills, and called Robert Shaw's performance "absolutely magnificent".[22] Pauline Kael called it "the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made... [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more electricity, [and] it's funny in a Woody Allen sort of way".[23] The film was not without its detractors. Vincent Canby, of The New York Times, said "It's a measure of how the film operates that not once do we feel particular sympathy for any of the shark's victims...In the best films, characters are revealed in terms of the action. In movies like Jaws, characters are simply functions of the action. They're at its service. Characters are like stage hands who move props around and deliver information when it's necessary," but also noted that "It's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun".[24] Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin disagreed with the film's PG rating, saying that "Jaws is too gruesome for children, and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age." He goes on to say: "It is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written".[25] The most widespread criticism of the film is the artificiality of the mechanical shark,[26] although it is only seen in the final moments of the film, and is often brushed over by reviewers. Spider Man ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5f/Spiderman_movie.jpg/200px-Spiderman_movie.jpg) Spider-Man is a 2002 American superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Spider-Man. The first installment in the Spider-Man series, the film, directed by Sam Raimi and written by David Koepp, stars Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, and Willem Dafoe. The film begins with Peter Parker, a high school student, being bitten by a genetically altered spider. After misusing his newly-given abilities, which indirectly causes the death of his Uncle Ben, he becomes the heroic Spider-Man. Peter hopes to win the heart of Mary Jane Watson, the girl he has loved since he was a boy, and battles the villainous Green Goblin, who is the father of Peter's best friend, Harry Osborn. After being stuck in development hell for nearly 25 years, the film was released on May 3, 2002 by Columbia Pictures. The film received multiple good reviews, went on to break box office records, and become the third highest grossing film of 2002 worldwide, making $822 million worldwide. Spider-Man became the most successful film based on a comic book and is the 18th most successful film of all time. The success of the film led to two sequels, Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, the latter of which surpassed the first film's record. Peter Parker, his best friend Harry Osborn, and Peter's secret crush Mary Jane Watson, visit a genetics laboratory at Columbia University with their high school class. While taking photos in the laboratory, Peter is bitten on the hand by a genetically engineered "super spider". Feeling unwell, he passes out shortly after arriving home. Meanwhile, scientist and owner of Oscorp Norman Osborn, Harry's father, is attempting to preserve his company's military contract, knowing that losing it will bankrupt his business. He experiments on himself with his company's new, but unstable, performance-enhancing chemical vapor which increases his speed, strength, and stamina. An undetected side effect causes insanity and he kills his assistant, Mendel Stromm. The next morning, Peter wakes to find that his previously impaired vision has improved (he put his glasses on and was unable to see what was ahead of him) and that his body has metamorphosized into a more muscular physique. At school, he finds himself producing webbing and having the quick reflexes to avoid being injured in a fight with bully Flash Thompson. Peter escapes from the school and realizes that he has acquired spider-like abilities from the spider bite. He quickly learns to scale walls, long jump across building rooftops, and swing via webs from his wrists. With much trial and error, he eventually developed his webbing and swinging skills. Lying to his aunt and uncle about where he is going, Peter decides to enter a wrestling tournament to get money to buy a car and impress Mary Jane. During an argument, Uncle Ben advises Peter, "With great power comes great responsibility." Peter lashes out at his uncle and leaves for the tournament. Peter wins, but is cheated out of the contest money. The ad he read clearly stated that if he'd be able to at least stay alive, let alone win, he'd win $3000. He goes there under the name "Human Spider", but the ring announcer doesn't like the name and says Spider-Man instead. But, since he beat his opponent, Bonesaw McGraw in only two minutes, the man in charge only gave him $100. In retaliation he allows a thief to escape with the promoter's gate money. Afterward, Peter finds his uncle has been killed and the killer took off with his car. Peter tracks down the carjacker only to find out it was the same thief he allowed to escape earlier. After Peter disarms him, the carjacker tries to get away but falls out of a window and is killed. The same night, Norman kills several scientists, including General Slocum, who are threatening to drive Norman out of business. Upon graduating school, Peter decides to use his abilities to fight injustice, and dons a new costume and the persona of Spider-Man. Peter is hired as a freelance photographer when he arrives in newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson's office with the only clear images of Spider-Man. Norman, upon finding out that Oscorp's board members plan to sell the company, attacks them at the World Unity Fair. Although he successfully murders them, Spider-Man arrives and drives him off. Jameson quickly dubs Norman the "Green Goblin". The Goblin offers Spider-Man a place at his side, but Spider-Man refuses, knowing that it is the right thing to do. At the Osborn and Parkers' Thanksgiving dinner, Norman, unknown to Peter, figures out Spider-Man's true identity; the Green Goblin subsequently attacks Aunt May. While Aunt May recovers in the hospital, Mary Jane admits she has a crush on Spider-Man, who rescued her on numerous occasions, and asks Peter whether he ever asked about her. Peter reflects on his own feelings, during which Harry enters. Feeling betrayed by his girlfriend and his best friend, Harry tells his father whom Peter loves the most, unintentionally revealing Spider-Man's biggest weakness. The Goblin holds Mary Jane and a tram car full of children hostage on top the Queensboro Bridge when Spider-Man arrives. The Goblin forces Spider-Man to choose who he wants to save, and drops Mary Jane and the children. Spider-Man manages to save both Mary Jane and the tram car, while the Goblin is pelted by civilians showing loyalty to Spider-Man. The Goblin then grabs Spider-Man and throws him into an abandoned building where he begins to beat him severly, having superior strength and fighting skill and nearly beats him to death with his bare hands.. The tables turn as the Goblin boasts of how he will later kill Mary Jane, and an enraged Spider-Man dominates over him, forcing the Goblin into being unmasked. Norman begs for forgiveness, but his Goblin persona attempts to remote-control his glider to impale Spider-Man. The superhero avoids the attack, causing the glider to impale Norman instead, and he dies asking Peter not to tell Harry about the Green Goblin. Spider-Man takes a dead Norman to his apartment, where he keeps him on a sofa. At that time Harry arrives and sees Spider-Man with his dead father (Spider-Man's mask was torn, but because of darkness, Harry couldn't see his face). Harry pulls out a gun from a drawer and points it towards the place where Spider-Man was standing, but he had gone. At Norman’s funeral, Harry swears vengeance toward Spider-Man, who he believes is responsible for killing his father, and asserts that Peter is all he has left. Mary Jane confesses to Peter that she is in love with him, but Peter, feeling that he must protect her from the unwanted attentions of Spider-Man's enemies, hides his true feelings. As Peter leaves the funeral, he recalls Uncle Ben's famous words, "With great power comes great responsibility," and accepts his new life as Spider-Man. AFter the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 11, 2001, Sony recalled teaser posters which showed a close-up of Spider-Man's face with the New York skyline (including, prominently, the World Trade Center towers) reflected in his eyes. The movie's original teaser trailer, released in 2001, featured a mini-movie plot involving a group of bank robbers escaping in a helicopter, which gets caught from behind and propelled backward into what at first appears to be a net, then is shown to be a gigantic spider web spun between the two towers at the World Trade Center. According to Sony the trailer did not contain any actual footage from the film itself and is consequently one of the most popular "Special Shoot" trailers since Terminator 2: Judgment Day.[39] The trailer was pulled after the events of the September 11, 2001 attacks, but can be found on the Internet.[40] Here's a picture of the original Spiderman teaser poster that was recalled after 9/11 ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Bannedposter.jpg) Critical reaction to the film was mostly positive. Film review site Rotten Tomatoes calculated a 90% overall approval based on 207 reviews, and it scored an 85% Cream of the Crop rating from major news outlets.[43] The casting, mainly Tobey Maguire, is often cited as one of the high points of the film. Eric Harrison, of the Houston Chronicle, was initially skeptical of the casting of Tobey Maguire, but, after seeing the film, he stated, "within seconds, however, it becomes hard to imagine anyone else in the role."[44] USA Today critic Mike Clark believed the casting rivaled that of 1978's Superman.[45] Owen Gleiberman, of Entertainment Weekly, had mixed feelings about the casting, particularly Tobey Maguire. "Maguire, winning as he is, never quite gets the chance to bring the two sides of Spidey — the boy and the man, the romantic and the avenger — together."[46] The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt thought, "the filmmakers' imaginations work in overdrive from the clever design of the cobwebby opening credits and Spider-Man and M.J.'s upside down kiss — after one of his many rescues of her — to a finale that leaves character relationships open ended for future adventures."[47] Not all of the criticism was good, as LA Weekly's Manohla Dargis wrote, "It isn't that Spider-Man is inherently unsuited for live-action translation; it's just that he's not particularly interesting or, well, animated."[48] Giving it 2.5/4 stars, Roger Ebert felt the film lacked a decent action element; "Consider the scene where Spider-Man is given a cruel choice between saving Mary Jane or a cable car full of school kids. He tries to save both, so that everyone dangles from webbing that seems about to pull loose. The visuals here could have given an impression of the enormous weights and tensions involved, but instead the scene seems more like a bloodless storyboard of the idea."[49] Stylistically, there was heavy criticism of the Green Goblin's costume, which led Richard George of IGN to comment years later, "We're not saying the comic book costume is exactly thrilling, but the Goblin armor (the helmet in particular) from Spider-Man is almost comically bad... Not only is it not frightening, it prohibits expression."[50] The film has won several awards ranging from Teen Choice Awards to the Saturn Awards, and was even nominated for two Academy Awards ("Best Visual Effects" and "Best Sound").[55] While only Danny Elfman brought home a Saturn Award, Raimi, Maguire, and Dunst were all nominated for their respective positions. It also took home the People's Choice Award for "Favorite Motion Picture."[55] And then there's this On Her Majesty's Secret Service![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c0/007OHMSSposter.jpg/200px-007OHMSSposter.jpg) On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) is the sixth spy film in the James Bond series, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, and the only one to star George Lazenby as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. In the film, Bond faces Blofeld, who is planning on unleashing a plague through a group of brainwashed "angels of death" (which included early appearances by Joanna Lumley and Catherina von Schell) unless his demands are met. Along the way, Bond meets, falls in love with, and eventually marries Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo. This Bond film is the second in what is considered the "Blofeld Trilogy", coming between You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever. This trilogy is of interest not only for the three different Blofeld actors (Donald Pleasence in You Only Live Twice, Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Charles Gray in Diamonds Are Forever) but for its two Bond actors (Sean Connery, then George Lazenby, and back to Connery). This is the only Bond film to be directed by Peter R. Hunt, who before was a film editor or second unit director on every previous film. Though its theatrical release was not as lucrative as its predecessor You Only Live Twice and Lazenby's performance was much criticized, On Her Majesty's Secret Service grossed over $87 million worldwide and was met with positive critical reviews. The pre-title sequence shows Miss Moneypenny, M and Q discussing the whereabouts of Bond. Bond is actually in Portugal, driving on a coastal highway when a woman in a Mercury Cougar overtakes him. Bond follows the woman to a beach where she attempts suicide by drowning in the waters. Bond drives down to the shore, saving the woman's life by carrying her back to the beach. As he brings the woman back to consciousness and introduces himself, two thugs try to kill Bond. After a fight with the thugs, from which Bond emerges the victor, the woman jumps into Bond's car, driving it back from the beach to the road, then transfers to her car and speeds away. Retrieving her discarded shoes, Bond notes that "This never happened to the other fellow," presumably referencing Prince Charming (but also a nod to Sean Connery). Bond later encounters the same woman in a casino where she places a bet; a bet which she is unable to cover. On her behalf, Bond rescues the woman by paying her bet. The woman, Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo invites him to her hotel room to thank Bond for his deed. When Bond later visits Tracy's room, a thug emerges behind Bond, Bond knocks him out then goes back to his room where he finds Tracy. Tracy threatens to kill Bond "for a thrill"; however, Bond disarms Tracy and questions her about the thug in her room. Tracy has nothing to say about that. The next morning, Tracy leaves the hotel, and later, as Bond leaves the hotel, several men kidnap him and take him to meet Marc-Ange Draco, the head of the European crime syndicate Unione Corse, whom Bond recognizes immediately. Draco reveals that Tracy is his only daughter and tells Bond of her troubled past, offering Bond a personal dowry of one million pounds if he will marry her. Bond refuses, but agrees to continue romancing Tracy under the agreement that Draco reveals the whereabouts of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. Bond returns to MI6 but is told by M that he has been relieved from the task of hunting Blofeld, prompting Bond to resign. After M accepts the letter, Bond learns that as Moneypenny was recording his dictation, she changes the wording to request two weeks' leave instead. Realizing he can pursue Blofeld on his time off and not quit MI6, Bond thanks Moneypenny and heads for Draco's birthday party in Portugal. There, Tracy discovers Bond's deal with her father and strong-arms him into providing Bond with the information he requested. Draco tells Bond that his next line of pursuit should be a law firm in Bern, Switzerland. After a brief argument, Bond and Tracy begin a whirlwind romance. Bond and Tracy go to Bern with Draco to investigate the Swiss lawyer, Gumbold's, connection with Blofeld. Searching the law office, Bond finds Blofeld's correspondence with the London College of Arms: Blofeld is attempting to claim the title 'Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp'. His College of Arms correspondent is genealogist Sir Hilary Bray. Bond visits M at home and is granted permission to recommence investigation of Blofeld. Posing as Bray, Bond travels back to Switzerland where he visits Blofeld, who has established a clinical research institute atop Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps. In disguise, Bond meets ten young women, the "Angels of Death", that are patients of the institute's clinic. After having an uneventful dinner with them, Bond later that night, sneaks out of his room and meets one of them, named Ruby, in her room for a romantic encounter. But at midnight, Bond sees that Ruby and apparently each of the other ladies go into a sleep-induced trance while Blofeld gives them audio instructions for when they return to the civilization. In fact, the women are being brainwashed to distribute bacteriological warfare agents throughout various parts of the world. In that same night, Bond meets another woman named Nancy, who sneaks out of her room to visit his. The next day, Bond meets with Blofeld again to persuade him to leave Switzerland to visit Augsburg outside Switzerland where according to the College of Arms, the ancestral home of de Bleuchamp, a royal family which may have historical research for Blofeld as his title of a Count. Bond knows that if he lures Blofeld out of Switzerland, the British Secret Service can arrest him without violating Swiss sovereignty. But Blofeld refuses, for he is busy with work at his research facility. Bond's lasciviousness betrays him to Blofeld's henchwoman Irma Bunt, who captures him during a second visit to Ruby. Blofeld identifies Bond after he had made a small slip earlier that the real Sir Hilary Bray would not have made. (Bond had explained to Blofeld that the de Bleuchamp tombs are in the Augsburg Cathedral, which are actually located in the St. Anna Cathedral at Kirsche.) Bond escapes imprisonment, skiing down Piz Gloria while Blofeld and many of his men give chase. Arriving at the village of Mürren, Bond is almost trapped at a carnival by Irma and her men, when Bond encounters Tracy. After another long car chase through the town and the nearby town of Grindelwald, they escape. A blizzard forces them to a remote barn, where Bond declares his love for Tracy and proposes marriage to her. Tracy accepts Bond's marriage proposal. The next morning, Blofeld captures Tracy while leaving Bond to die in a man-made avalanche, which Bond survives. Blofeld holds the world to ransom with the threat of destroying its agriculture using his brainwashed women, demanding amnesty for all past crimes and that he be recognized as the current Count de Bleauchamp. Bond enlists Draco and his forces to attack Blofeld's headquarters, while also freeing Tracy from Blofeld's captivity. The raid is successful as Bond and Blofeld are the last to escape before the institute is destroyed. The pair engage in a furious bobsled chase down Piz Gloria, culminating with Blofeld becoming snared in a tree branch while Bond drives away in the bobsled. Bond and Tracy marry in Portugal, then drive away in Bond's Aston Martin. Bond pulls over to the roadside to remove flowers from the car. As this happens, Blofeld (wearing a neck brace) and Bunt in a Mercedes-Benz 600 drive past the couple's car, spraying bullets. Bond survives the drive-by attack, only to discover that Tracy has been killed by a shot to the forehead. A police officer pulls over to inspect the bullet-riddled car, prompting a stunned Bond to mutter, "We have all the time in the world," as he cradles Tracy's lifeless body. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was released on 18 December 1969. It grossed $ 87,400,000 worldwide,[15] with $22.8 million in the United States alone.[16] It was one of the highest-grossing films worldwide in 1969.[17] . Critical response to On Her Majesty's Secret Service remains sharply divided, affecting estimates of Lazenby's potential as Bond. It followed the plot of the novel more closely than the other film adaptations of the eponymous source novels, including serious dramatic subject matter pivotal to the development of Bond's character: Bond's contemplated resignation from MI6; his comically botched impersonation of a sexually ascetic genealogist at a mountaintop allergies clinic for beautiful young women; and his brief, tragic marriage to Tracy Draco, the daughter of a Corsican crime syndicate leader. A 1994 committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Bond's line 'Just a slight stiffness coming on' as the Rudest Ever Moment in Any Film.[citation needed] American movie reviewer Leonard Maltin has suggested that had Connery held the leading role, On Her Majesty's Secret Service would have epitomised the series.[18] On the other hand, Danny Peary wrote, “I’m not sure I agree with those who insist that if Connery had played Bond it would definitely be the best of the entire Bond series…Connery’s Bond, with his boundless humor and sense of fun and self-confidence, would be out of place in this picture. It actually works better with Lazenby because he is incapable of playing Bond as a bigger-than-life hero; for one thing he hasn’t the looks…Lazenby’s Bond also hasn’t the assurance of Connery’s Bond and that is appropriate in the crumbling, depressing world he finds himself. He seems vulnerable and jittery at times. At the skating rink, he is actually scared. We worry about him…On Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t have Connery and it’s impossible to ever fully adjust to Lazenby, but I think that it still might be the best Bond film, as many Bond cultists claim.” Peary also described On Her Majesty's Secret Service as "the most serious," "the most cynical" and "the most tragic" of the Bond films.[19] Feminist film critic Molly Haskell wrote an approving review of the film in the Village Voice: "In a world, an industry, and particularly a genre which values the new and improved product above all, it is nothing short of miraculous to see a movie which dares to go backward, a technological artifact which has nobly deteriorated into a human being. I speak of the new and obsolete James Bond, played by a man named George Lazenby, who seems more comfortable in a wet tuxedo than a dry martini, more at ease as a donnish genealogist than reading (or playing) Playboy, and who actually dares to think that one woman who is his equal is better than a thousand part-time playmates." Haskell was also affected by the film's emotional ending: "The love between Bond and his Tracy begins as a payment and ends as a sacrament. After ostensibly getting rid of the bad guys, they are married. They drive off to a shocking, stunning ending. Their love, being too real, is killed by the conventions it defied. But they win the final victory by calling, unexpectedly, upon feeling. Some of the audience hissed, I was shattered. If you like your Bonds with happy endings, don't go."[20] Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 81% "fresh" rating. IGN ranked On Her Majesty's Secret Service as the eighth best Bond movie,[21] Entertainment Weekly as the sixth,[22] and Norman Wilner of MSN, as the fifth best.[23] A heavily edited TV version was broadcast by ABC in 1976 and again in 1980. This version opens with Bond's escape from Piz Gloria, and follows that section of the film through to the scene in M's office after the avalanche that results in Tracy's capture by Blofeld. The entire film is then played as a flashback, including the entire ski chase/escape from Piz Gloria sequence, all over again.[24] The Barbican Centre in London has announced this film will be shown digitally in 2009 for its 40th Anniversary.[25] When Bond has broken into Gumbold's office and is waiting for his automatic machine to break the code of his safe, he finds an issue of Playboy to look at. From the cover picture, one can make out it is the February 1969 issue. He peels off the center spread of Lorrie Menconi, playmate of the month and is seen coming out looking admiringly at her picture.
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Post by Shovelman on Jul 18, 2009 11:30:28 GMT -5
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I'm impressed, that is a pretty underrated movie.
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 11:33:03 GMT -5
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I'm impressed, that is a pretty underrated movie. Honestly, it's my least favorite of the Bonds films and I find it incredibly boring. Then again the last time I saw it was 4 years ago and over time people tastes in movies can change.
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Post by Mr. Emoticon Man on Jul 18, 2009 11:34:41 GMT -5
And another of my picks appears on the list.
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Post by Shovelman on Jul 18, 2009 11:35:42 GMT -5
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I'm impressed, that is a pretty underrated movie. Honestly, it's my least favorite of the Bonds films and I find it incredibly boring. Then again the last time I saw it was 4 years ago and over time people tastes in movies can change. But Bond beats a guy to death with his bare hands. Then he leaves him in the closest and says "Merry Christmas" That's almost as badass as Daniel Craig running through a wall in Casino Royale!
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 12:01:16 GMT -5
this will pick up in 2 hours or so....I gotta cut the grass
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Post by The Raven on Jul 18, 2009 12:15:09 GMT -5
JAWS and Close Encounters are the only ones on my list so far.
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thelesserevil
Super Trooper
![*](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/stars/star.png) ![*](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/stars/star.png)
Thinks RKO is A-OK
Splat
Posts: 1,449
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Post by thelesserevil on Jul 18, 2009 12:54:46 GMT -5
I believe "Up" is the only one of mine on here so far.
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 14:55:10 GMT -5
4-way tie at number 23. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cb/TF2SteelPoster.jpg/200px-TF2SteelPoster.jpg) Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a 2009 American science fiction action film which was released on June 19, 2009 in the United Kingdom and June 24, 2009 in North America.[3] It is the sequel to 2007's Transformers and the second film in the live action Transformers series. Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg return respectively as director and executive producer, while Shia LaBeouf reprises the role of Sam Witwicky, the human caught in the war between Autobots and Decepticons. The film introduces many more robots and the scope has been expanded to numerous countries, most notably France and Egypt. The plot revolves around Sam, who has been seeing visions of Cybertronian symbols and therefore gets hunted by evil Decepticons to awake their long-time-hidden leader, The Fallen. A major hurdle that was overcome during the film's production was the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, as well as possible strikes by the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. Bay finished the production on time with the help of previsualization and a scriptment by his writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and series newcomer Ehren Kruger. Shooting took place from May to November 2008. Revenge of the Fallen achieved the highest Wednesday opening gross in history, bringing in $62 million in North America alone and close to $100 million worldwide; this is also the second-highest opening day gross of all time, behind only The Dark Knight's $67.8 million. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is currently the highest grossing film of 2009, beating out Angels & Demons which previously held the title. It is revealed that thousands of years before Optimus Prime and the other Transformers arrived on Earth, there was a race of ancient Transformers who scoured the universe looking for Energon sources. Known as the Dynasty of Primes, they used a weapon called the Sun Harvester to drain stars of their energy in order to convert it to Energon and power Cybertron's AllSpark. The Primes agreed that life-bearing worlds would be spared, but when one brother, who was thereafter dubbed "The Fallen", constructed a Sun Harvester on Earth in 17,000 BCE. The remaining brothers thus sacrificed their bodies in order to hide the Matrix of Leadership —the key that activates the Sun Harvester— from The Fallen, who swore to seek revenge upon Earth once he found the key. In present day, two years after the events of the first film, Optimus now leads NEST, a military organization consisting of human troops and his own team of Autobots (including newcomers Arcee, Sideswipe, Jolt, and the twins Skids and Mudflap) aimed at killing the remaining Decepticons on Earth. While on a mission in Shanghai, Optimus and his team destroy Decepticons Sideways and Demolishor, only to be given a warning: "The Fallen will rise again". Back in the United States, Sam Witwicky finds a splinter of the destroyed AllSpark, and upon contact the splinter fills his mind with Cybertronian symbols, which he is initially unaware contain a riddle that leads to location of the Matrix of Leadership. Sam gives the AllSpark splinter to his girlfriend Mikaela Banes, for safe keeping, and leaves her and Bumblebee behind to go off to college. Upon arrival, Sam meets his college roommate Leo Spitz, who runs an alien conspiracy website, and Alice, a co-ed who makes sexual advances towards him. Back home, Decepticon Wheelie tries to steal the shard, only to get captured by Mikaela. After having a mental breakdown, uncontrollably writing in Cybertronian language, Sam calls Mikaela, who immediately leaves to get to him. Decepticon Soundwave hacks into a US satellite to eavesdrop on the NEST forces, learning the locations of the dead Decepticon leader Megatron and another piece of the AllSpark. The Decepticons retrieve the shard and use it to resurrect Megatron, who flies into space and is reunited with Starscream and his master, The Fallen. The Fallen instructs Megatron and Starscream to capture Sam in order to discover the location of the Matrix of Leadership. Mikaela arrives in town just as Alice, who is revealed to be a Pretender, attacks Sam. Mikaela, Sam, and his roommate Leo drive off and destroy Alice, but are captured by Decepticon Grindor. The Decepticon known as "The Doctor" prepares to remove Sam's brain, but Optimus and Bumblebee appear and rescue him. Sam and Optimus are pursued by Megatron into a forest where Optimus engages Megatron. Megatron is then joined by Grindor and Starscream. In the ensuing battle, Optimus holds the upper hand and kills Grindor and rips off Starscream's arm. In the end, however, Optimus is impaled through the chest by Megatron and dies. With his dying words, Optimus tells Sam to run and the Autobots come to Sam's rescue. After Prime's death, Megatron orders a full-scale assault on the planet. The Fallen speaks to the world and demands they surrender Sam to the Decepticons or they will continue their attack. Sam, Mikaela, Leo, Bumblebee, the Twins and Wheelie regroup, and Leo suggests his online rival "RoboWarrior" may be of assistance. "RoboWarrior" is revealed to be former Sector Seven agent Simmons, who informs the group that the Transformers have been on Earth for a long time, as their language is written on ruins all over the world. Wheelie identifies the language as that of the Primes, and directs the group to a former Decepticon named Jetfire, who can translate the language. They find and reactivate Jetfire, who teleports the group to Egypt and translates the symbols, indicating that the tomb of the Primes is located somewhere in the surrounding desert, and only a Prime can kill The Fallen. By following the clues, the group locate a tomb that embeds the Matrix. Upon arriving at the tomb they expected would contain the Matrix, the group seem to find nothing there. Mudflap and Skids then argue, and their fighting accidentally opens a path to a chamber where they find the Matrix which crumbles to dust in Sam's hands. Believing the Matrix can still revive Optimus, Sam collects the dust and instructs Simmons to call Major William Lennox to bring the other Autobots and Optimus' body. The military arrives with the Autobots, but so do the Decepticons, and a battle arises. During the fight, Decepticon Devastator is formed and unearths the Sun Harvester inside one of Egypt's pyramids before being destroyed by the US military. Jetfire arrives in time to save the group from Mixmaster, but is mortally wounded by Scorponok. The Air Force carpet bombs the Decepticons, but Megatron breaks through the offensive and kills Sam. In a vision, Sam meets with the other Primes, who tell him that the Matrix of Leadership is not found but earned, which Sam has done, and send him back. The dust reassembles to form the Matrix, which Sam uses to revive Optimus. The Fallen steals the Matrix shortly after that and activates the Sun Harvester. In his final moments, Jetfire volunteers his parts and spark, giving Optimus the power he needs to defeat The Fallen. With enhanced capabilities, Optimus destroys the Sun Harvester and takes on Megatron and The Fallen, killing The Fallen. Megatron and Starscream retreat and vow that their fight is not finished. Based on 215 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an average 20% overall approval rating.[159] The film had a similar reaction among the 34 critics in Rotten Tomatoes' "Top Critic", which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television and radio programs,[160] where it received a 18% approval rating.[161] In contrast to the views of critics, audiences appear to have responded better, with exit surveys estimating that 91% of moviegoers consider it to be as good as, or better than, the 2007 film.[162] CinemaScore polls reported that on a scale of A+ to F, the average grade cinemagoers gave the film was "B+".[163] According to The Washington Post, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Bay's worst-reviewed film, faring even lower than Pearl Harbor.[164] Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter commented in his review that "for the uninitiated, it's loud, tedious, and at 147 minutes, way too long."[165] Roger Ebert, who had given the first film three stars, gave Revenge of the Fallen only one star, calling it "...a horrible experience of unbearable length."[166] He later wrote in his blog about the film, saying "The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive ($190 million)."[167] Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers did not give the film any stars considering that "Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade."[168] The A.V. Club gave the film a C-.[169] There has also been considerable negative reaction to the characters Mudflap and Skids, who are alleged to embody racist stereotypes. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said that "the characters [...] indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas."[170] Critic Scott Mendelson said, "To say that these two are the most astonishingly racist caricatures that I've ever seen in a mainstream motion picture would be an understatement."[171] Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, went further, asking his readers "not to support this film" because "you'll be taking [your children] to see a film with the lowest forms of humor, stereotypes and racism around."[172] Director Bay has attempted to defend the film as "good clean fun" and insisted that "We're just putting more personality in."[173] Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman responded to the controversy with "It’s really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it. I think that would be very foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it’s their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it’s a choice that was made. If anything, it just shows you that we don’t control every aspect of the movie."[174] Despite the mostly negative critical reception, the film yielded an impressive turnout, as indicated by its box office figures. Revenge of the Fallen grossed $16 million on its midnight premiere, at the time, the most ever for a Wednesday midnight debut. The film proceeded to achieve the biggest Wednesday opening in history, bringing in $62 million in total receipts on its first day, additionally ranking it as the second-biggest opening day of all-time behind The Dark Knight. The film grossed $108.9 million on its first weekend, making it the biggest weekend gross of 2009 and the seventh-largest in history, and brought in $200 million in its first five days, putting it in second place behind the The Dark Knight's $203.7 million for all-time biggest five-day opening. As of July 17, 2009, the film has made $733,174,657 worldwide.[2] Revenge of the Fallen remained #1 at the box office for two weeks straight, by a close margin. Initial studio estimates showed a tie between it and that weekend's new release Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, but the actuals showed Revenge of the Fallen taking the #1 spot yet again with $42,320,877.[175] Also, it was the first film of 2009 to reach the $300 million mark domestically.[176] Jurassic Park![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e7/Jurassic_Park_poster.jpg/200px-Jurassic_Park_poster.jpg) here's what you said about it: - Dinosaurs. I saw this in theaters when I was 6, it's a special movie for me Jurassic Park is a 1993 science fiction thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The film centers on the fictional island of Isla Nublar, where scientists have created an amusement park of cloned dinosaurs. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites a group of scientists, played by Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern, to inspect the park prior to its public opening. Sabotage sets the dinosaurs loose, and the technicians and visitors attempt to escape the island. Spielberg acquired the rights to the novel before its publication in 1990, and Crichton was hired to adapt his novel. David Koepp wrote the final draft, which left out much of the novel's exposition and violence, and also made numerous changes to the characters. Spielberg hired Stan Winston Studios to create animatronics to portray the dinosaurs, shots of which were then mixed with newly developed computer-generated imagery by Industrial Light & Magic. Paleontologist Jack Horner aided the actors and the special effects team in creating authenticity (although aspects of the animals' depictions became outdated due to changes in evolutionary theories). Filming took place from August 24 to November 30, 1992, in Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, and California. Jurassic Park is regarded as a landmark in the use of computer-generated imagery, and received positive reviews from critics, who praised the effects, though reactions to other elements of the picture, such as character development, were mixed. During its release, the film grossed more than $914 million worldwide, becoming the most successful film released up until that time, and it is currently the eleventh-highest-grossing feature film (taking inflation into account, it is the 17th-highest-grossing film in North America). It is the most successful film directed by Steven Spielberg. Jurassic Park spawned a franchise, including the sequels The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Jurassic Park III (2001). On Isla Nublar, an island to the West of Costa Rica, an employee for the genetic engineering company InGen is attacked and killed while placing a Velociraptor into a specially built enclosure, prompting a lawsuit from his family. CEO John Hammond is pressured by his investors to allow a safety inspection by experts before opening the park. He invites paleontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, and his investors' attorney Donald Gennaro to perform the inspection. The group meets a Brachiosaurus when they set off into the park. At the park, they learn that InGen created the dinosaurs by cloning genetic material found in mosquitoes that fed on dinosaur blood, preserved in Dominican amber. The DNA from these samples was spliced with DNA from frogs to fill in sequence gaps. Only female dinosaurs are created in order to prevent uncontrolled breeding within the park. The team is also shown the enclosure of the Velociraptor, dubbed "raptors", intelligent and ferocious predators. Malcolm and Sattler are worried, but Grant remains neutral. They meet Hammond's grandchildren, Tim and Alexis "Lex" Murphy, and go on a vehicular tour of the park. Ellie leaves the tour to supervise and take care of a sick Triceratops with Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Gerry Harding. A tropical storm hits the island as most InGen employees leave for the day leaving only Hammond, game warden Robert Muldoon, chief engineer Ray Arnold, and leading computer programmer Dennis Nedry to supervise the park and the visitors. Bribed by InGen's rival Lewis Dodgson, Nedry takes an opportunity to shut down the park's security system so he can steal dinosaur embryos and deliver them to an informant at the auxiliary dock. As a result, the security systems of the whole park are shut down, allowing the Tyrannosaurus to break through the deactivated electric fence surrounding its pen, devouring Gennaro, attacking Tim and Lex hiding in the car, and wounding Malcolm. The children and Grant only narrowly avoid being killed and eaten. Just after they flee the wreckage, Sattler and Muldoon arrive. At first, they believe the only survivor of the attack is Malcolm, but upon further investigation they find footprints belonging to Grant and the kids. Just then, the T-rex returns and Malcolm, Muldoon, and Sattler barely escape her in their Jeep. Meanwhile, Nedry crashes his Jeep and, while trying to winch it, is killed by a Dilophosaurus. Grant, Tim, and Lex spend the night in a tree. While hiking to safety the next morning, they discover hatched eggs, indicating that the dinosaurs are actually breeding. Grant realizes that the frog DNA is responsible: some species of frog are known to spontaneously change sex in a single-sex environment. Arnold tries to hack Nedry's computer to turn the fences back on but fails. He does a full system restart which requires the shutdown of the entire power grid from the Visitor Center and the circuit breakers to be manually reset from the utility shed. When he does not return from the shed, Sattler and Muldoon follow and discover the raptors have escaped, the shutdown having cut off power to the electric fences around their pen. Muldoon realizes that they are near and tells Sattler to go to the utility shed herself and turn the power back on while he tries to distract the raptors and hunt them down. Sattler arrives at the shed and manages to reset the breakers when she is chased by a raptor, discovers Arnold's remains, and manages to escape the maintenance shed. Muldoon is attacked and killed by a second raptor while hunting the third raptor. Grant and the kids finally arrive at the Visitor Center, after Tim is electrocuted when the fences turned back on and revived by Grant. Grant leaves them to find the others and finds Sattler first, then joins Malcolm and Hammond in the emergency bunkers. Raptors enter the Visitor Center and Lex and Tim narrowly escape them in the kitchen (locking one in the freezer). Grant and Sattler take Lex and Tim to the Control Room where Lex is finally able to restore the Park's computer systems in order to call Hammond to request a helicopter rescue of the survivors. Grant and Sattler hold off a raptor trying to open the door to the computer room, until the power is restored and the electromagnetic locks begin working. With the door secure, the raptor breaks into the room through the window, and the group climbs up into the ceiling crawlspace and arrive at the Visitors Center rotunda, above the skeleton display. The raptors pursue and after a scuffle on top of the fossil exhibits where the raptors block their escape route, help comes from an unlikely source: the Tyrannosaurus suddenly appears and attacks the raptors. The T-rex and raptors fight while Grant, Sattler, Lex, and Tim escape. The four flee climb into Hammond and Malcolm's jeep and leave. Grant says he will not endorse the park, a choice with which Hammond concurs. Meanwhile inside the T-rex kills the dominant raptor by tossing into a skeletel display. As the group fly away in the helicopter, the children fall asleep beside Grant, who contemplatively watches the birds flying nearby, the surviving relatives of the dinosaurs that escaped. The film received mostly positive reviews. High praise was heaped on the visual effects, although there was a lot of criticism leveled at the characterization and departures from the book. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "a true movie milestone, presenting awe- and fear-inspiring sights never before seen on the screen… On paper, this story is tailor-made for Mr. Spielberg's talents…[but] t becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away."[72] In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers described the film as "colossal entertainment—the eye-popping, mind-bending, kick-out-the-jams thrill ride of summer and probably the year [...] Compared with the dinos, the characters are dry bones, indeed. Crichton and co-screenwriter David Koepp have flattened them into nonentities on the trip from page to screen."[73] Roger Ebert noted, "The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values."[74] Henry Sheehan argued, "The complaints over Jurassic Park's lack of story and character sound a little off the point," pointing out the story arc of Grant learning to protect Hammond's grandchildren despite his initial dislike of them.[21] Rotten Tomatoes reported that 86% of critics gave Jurassic Park a positive write-up, based upon a sample of 33 reviews.[75]
In 1994, the film won all three Academy Awards it was nominated for: Visual Effects, Sound Effects Editing, and Sound (at the same ceremony, Spielberg took home Director and Picture for Schindler's List). The film won honours outside of the U.S. including the 1994 BAFTA for Best Special Effects, as well as the Award for the Public's Favourite Film.[76] It won the 1994 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation,[77] and the 1993 Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction, Best Writing for Crichton and Koepp and Best Special Effects.[78] The film won the 1993 People's Choice Awards for Favorite All-Around Motion Picture.[79] Young Artist Awards were given to Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello, with the film winning an Outstanding Action/Adventure Family Motion Picture award.[80]
Jurassic Park became the most financially successful film released worldwide as of that time, beating Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which previously held the title, though it did not top E.T. in North America.[66] The film opened with $47 million in its first weekend[2] and had grossed $81.7 million by its first week.[67] The film stayed at number one for three weeks and eventually grossed $357 million in the U.S. and Canada.[68] The film also did very well in international markets, breaking opening records in the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Taiwan.[69] Spielberg earned over $250 million from the film.[70] Jurassic Park's worldwide gross was topped five years later by James Cameron's Titanic.[71]
The American Film Institute named Jurassic Park the 35th most thrilling film of all time on June 13, 2001,[82] and Bravo chose a scene from it as the 95th scariest of all time in 2005.[83] On Empire magazine's fifteenth anniversary in 2004, it judged Jurassic Park the sixth most influential film of the magazine's lifetime.[84] On Film Review's fifty-fifth anniversary in 2005, it declared the film to be one of the five most important in the magazine's lifetime.[85] In 2006, IGN ranked Jurassic Park as the 19th greatest film franchise of all time.[86]
Most significantly, when many filmmakers saw Jurassic Park's use of computer-generated imagery, they realized that many of their visions, previously thought unfeasible or too expensive, were now possible. Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, contacted Spielberg to direct A.I.,[84] George Lucas started to make the Star Wars prequels,[87] and Peter Jackson began to re-explore his childhood love of fantasy films, a path that led him to The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.[88] Jurassic Park has also inspired films and documentaries such as the American adaption of Godzilla, Carnosaur, and Walking with Dinosaurs,[84] as well as numerous parodies, like the Leslie Nielsen comedy feature Spy Hard. Stan Winston, enthusiastic about the new technology pioneered by the film, joined together with IBM and director James Cameron to form a new special effects company, Digital Domain.[89]
The Breakfast Club
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/The_Breakfast_Club.jpg/200px-The_Breakfast_Club.jpg)
The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American teen film written and directed by John Hughes. The storyline follows five teenagers (each representing a different clique in high school) as they spend a Saturday in detention together and come to realize that they are all deeper than their respective stereotypes. The film has become a cult classic and has had a tremendous influence on many coming-of-age films since then. The film was shot entirely in sequence. Shooting began on March 28, 1984 and ended in May, 1984.
The plot follows five students at fictional Shermer High School in the widely used John Hughes setting of Shermer, Illinois[1], as they report for Saturday detention on March 24, 1984. While not complete strangers, the five teenagers are all from a different clique or social group.
The students pass the hours in a variety of ways. Gradually they open up to each other and reveal their inner secrets (for example, Allison is a compulsive liar and Brian and Claire are ashamed of their virginity). They also discover that they all have strained relationships with their parents and are afraid of making the same mistakes as the adults around them. However, despite these developing friendships, the students are afraid that once the detention is over, they will return to their very different cliques and never speak to each other again.
At the request and consensus of the students, Brian is asked to write the essay Mr. Vernon assigned earlier (the subject of which was to be a synopsis by each student detailing "who you think you are"), which challenges Mr. Vernon and his preconceived judgments about all of them. Brian does so, but instead of writing about the actual topic he writes a very motivating letter that is in essence, the main point of the story. He signs the essay as "The Breakfast Club" and leaves it at the table for Mr. Vernon to read when they leave. There are two versions of this letter, one read at the beginning and one at the end, and they are slightly different; illustrating the change in the student's judgments of one another, and their realization that they truly have things in common.
The beginning letter is as follows:
Brian Johnson (although that is unknown at this point): Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois. 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us... in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at seven o'clock this morning. We were brainwashed. The end letter is as follows:
Brian Johnson: Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...Brian Johnson ...and an athlete...Andrew Clark ...and a basket case...Allison Reynolds ...a princess...Claire Standish ...and a criminal...John Bender Does that answer your question?... Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.
The letter is the focal point of the film, as it demonstrates and illustrates the changes the students went through during the course of the day; their attitudes and perspectives have changed and are now completely different. The movie ends as the characters leave detention.
Shooting began on March 28, 1984 in Des Plaines, Illinois and ended in May 1984. Maine North High School was used in the filming of The Breakfast Club, the same school used for some of the school-based scenes in John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was released just a year after The Breakfast Club. Some of the posters on the walls during filming of The Breakfast Club were still there when Ferris Bueller was filmed. The giveaway is that the sign on the front of the school reads "Shermer High School" in both films. On the Ferris Bueller's Day Off DVD commentary (featured on the 2004 DVD version) John Hughes reveals that he filmed the two movies back to back to save time and money, and some outtakes of both films feature elements of the film crews working on the other film in each case. Hughes has never disclosed, however, whether Ferris Bueller was implied to be a student at the same school as The Breakfast Club students a year later.
Maine North High School was closed for two years before John Hughes stepped in and used it as a filming location for The Breakfast Club
John Hughes' first draft of the film was originally scripted out to be a 2-1/2 hour movie. However, many of the scenes were cut out and the negatives destroyed. John Hughes has stated that he has the only complete copy of The Breakfast Club, albeit in a VHS copy. This copy was shown by Hughes to a staff member of Premiere magazine for an article. Among the cut scenes from the movie (some filmed, some only written) are:
The janitor Carl talks with Vernon about where the five kids will be in the future. Bender will have killed himself, Claire will have had "two boob jobs and a face lift," Brian will have become very successful but die of a heart attack due to the stress of the high paying job. Allison will be a great poet but no one will care, and Andy will marry a gorgeous airline stewardess who will become fat after having kids.
In a dream sequence, Allison imagines Andy as a gluttonous Viking, Bender as a prisoner, Claire as a bride, Brian as an astronaut, and herself as a vampire. In an unfilmed alternative to this dream sequence, all five kids imagine random things, including cars, naked women, Godzilla, beer, and fighter planes, and these things end up filling the room until Vernon interrupts.
John Bender was not going to walk to school in the original script. He was going to be driven by his dad in a rusty tow truck, and have a brief fight with him before his dad drives off. Bender is also tossed a bagged lunch, his father saying "You are a waste of lunchmeat!"
After Bender demonstrates "Life at Big Bri's house" Brian stops Bender and corrects him with a much more pessimistic version of the skit. Claire then proceeds to act out her life before asking Bender to demonstrate his version. Bender's routine changes as well here. After Bender mimics his mom, he stops, commenting that "then they make me work to pay off the dentist for the teeth HE busts."
The scene where Andy and Allison are walking to get the sodas is extended to a point where Allison pulls out a pack of cigarettes and smokes one.
After getting the sodas, Bender shakes his can violently and places it among the five to see who gets the rigged one. Allison ends up getting it, and when she opens the can, all the soda squirts directly into her mouth.
After Vernon asks who has to use the lavatory, the five go to the bathroom. Vernon gives the boys two minutes and the girls three minutes. Claire catches Allison in a stall eating a bag of chips, repulsing her. Bender mocks Brian for sitting down to pee instead of using a urinal.
When Allison says "I can write with my toes", she actually does so. This was filmed.
Several staff members were cut out of the script before filming. Dr. Lange, a social studies teacher who dresses oddly, and Robin, a gym teacher. Robin helps Vernon on a few workout machines until Vernon injures his back, and she eventually visits the students while they are in their circle in the library. Robin initially replaced many of Carl's scenes and Carl was originally set to be a minor character with only two scenes.
John and Claire's kissing scene in the closet was cut because Hughes felt that "screen kissing wears thin very quickly." Molly Ringwald described it as a "great kiss". [5]
The Breakfast Club was ranked number 1 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies[6] and has had a tremendous impact on both the teen film genre and on popular culture since the 1980s.
In addition, its theme song titled "Don't You (Forget About Me)", performed by Simple Minds, reached #1 on the U.S. Hot 100 in 1985, where it stayed for one week, and has since then become a symbol of teen films. Yellowcard performed a cover of the song during a special tribute to the movie The Breakfast Club at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards. New Found Glory also remade the song on their From The Screen To Your Stereo Part II album, which is comprised entirely of covers the band has chosen from various movie soundtracks. The song has also been repeatedly used in several teen films as well as television programs and in a 2008 back-to-school commercial for the clothing store JC Penney.
The Breakfast Club has been spoofed by Swedish pop group A*Teens in their video remake of "Dancing Queen". It was also extensively spoofed by punk band Chopper One in their video for "A Punk Named Josh".[7]
The Breakfast Club is referenced many times in television shows created by cartoonist Matt Groening. The phrase "eat my shorts" (see Official Preppy Handbook) occurs in the film and was later popularized by Bart Simpson of The Simpsons. The character "Bender" in Futurama is named after Judd Nelson's Breakfast Club character, John Bender.[8] An LP record of the film's soundtrack appears in the Futurama episode "The Luck of the Fryrish," and "Don't You (Forget About Me)" is played over the same episode's end credits.
In the Family Guy episode "Let's Go to the Hop", direct and indirect references to the movie are made, i.e. when Peter walks into the cafeteria and sees "The Breakfast Club", which literally is a club of cereal box characters: Tony the Tiger, Captain Crunch, the Trix rabbit, Toucan Sam, and the Lucky Charms leprechaun. The final scene in the episode features "Don't You (Forget About Me)", and it shows Peter doing what Bender did at the end of the film, where he walks over the football field and throws his fist in the air.
The Degrassi: The Next Generation episode "Take On Me" follows the exact same premise with five similar characters from their respective cliques — jock/athlete (Jimmy), outcast/goth (Ellie), criminal/bad boy (Sean), princess/girly girl (Hazel), and nerd/brain (Toby).
In the episode of Disney's The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, "First Day of High School", while serving detention, Cody asks a fellow male detention inmate on why he was in detention. The male student tells him, "He had nothing better to do", a reason similar to the one Allison Reynolds gives for being in detention.
In Disney's Lizzie McGuire, an episode directly parodied The Breakfast Club where the characters had to be in detention. The episode ended with the characters writing a letter similar to the one at the end of the film, calling themselves "The Lunch Bunch" (one of The Breakfast Club's working titles). The episode ended with the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)".
Nickelodeon's As Told by Ginger referenced extensively to the movie in the first half of the episode "Detention", Disney's Lizzie McGuire did the same in "She Said, He Said, She Said". The latter one also had references to Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Dawson's Creek directly parodied The Breakfast Club in the Season 1 episode "Detention".
The promotional poster for the 2008 documentary American Teen has its cast members in the same poses as The Breakfast Club.[9] and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 promotional poster spoofed the Breakfast Club poster.
G4TV's X-Play had a retro themed episode where various G4 personalities played out roles from The Breakfast Club (Kevin Pereira as John Bender, etc.). However, the ending letter was revealed to be a suicide note as they all come to be involved in a suicide pact.
The second episode of the third season of Psych ("Murder?... Murder?... Anyone?... Bueller?") had multiple references to The Breakfast Club, including Shawn Spencer wearing a picture of Judd Nelson instead of his senior picture, and, later on, asking if star athlete Howie Tolkin would "have time to tape Larry Lester's buns together?"
In the spoof comedy Not Another Teen Movie, one of the characters in detention argues with the principal while he is in detention. Paul Gleason plays the principal and wears the suit he has in The Breakfast Club. The scene where Bender is in the ceiling is also spoofed.
The dialogue where John Bender mocks Brian Johnson's happy family in contrast with his abusive one is featured on the song "Diary of a Battered Child" from the band Dystopia.
A JC Penney commercial aired on TV and in theaters beginning in June 2008 pays homage the film. Several scenes are reenacted at a similar library by the commercial's actors, to the tune of a cover of "Don't You" by New Found Glory. The commercial shows a shot of the school with the name Shermer High School on the exterior of the building.
Jay and Silent Bob refer in Dogma to Shermer, Illinois as being the town in which John Hughes' movies take place. Jay decided he wanted to go there because "All the honeys are top-shelf, but all the dudes are whiny pussies - except for Judd Nelson, he was smorkin' harsh - but best of all, there was no one dealin', man; then, it hits me: we could live like phat rats if we were the blunt connection in Shermer, Illinois" only to find out that there is no Shermer, Illinois.
The band Fall Out Boy named their song "Don't You Know Who I Think I Am?" after the essay that Paul Gleason assigned the five main characters about who the kids "thought they were."
Regarding a potential sequel to The Breakfast Club, John Hughes stated in 1999 that he was against it, saying:
I thought about it. I could do it in prose. I know what will happen to them. I know them. But to do it with real actors ... they'd never come back together again. There's no excuse that could ever put them in the same room ever again. There isn't anything in their lives after high school relevant to that day.[10] In 2005, however, Emilio Estévez stated that Hughes has an idea for a Breakfast Club 2, with the characters now attending college and "doing time again." Estévez looked forward to the project at the time, saying "If it happens, I'm there.
Last but not least.....Robocop
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/Robocop_film.jpg/200px-Robocop_film.jpg)
RoboCop is a 1987 cyberpunk themed film directed by Paul Verhoeven. Set in a crime-ridden Detroit, Michigan in the near future, RoboCop centers on a police officer who is brutally murdered and subsequently re-created as a super-human cyborg known as "RoboCop". RoboCop explores larger themes regarding the media, gentrification and human nature in addition to being a action film. It has spawned merchandise, two sequels, four television series, video games and two comic book adaptations.
The film is set in a dystopian near future in Detroit, Michigan. Violent crime is out of control, and the city is in financial ruin. The city government contracts the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to fund and operate the Detroit Police Department, in effect privatizing it. OCP is not interested in rebuilding "Old Detroit" but rather replacing it with a modern utopia called "Delta City". Before construction can begin, however, OCP needs to end crime in the city, but knows it can't rely on an already undermanned police department.
At an executive meeting, OCP Senior Vice-President Dick Jones (Cox) presents the new law enforcement droid ED-209, which he believes will end crime in Old Detroit. The demonstration quickly goes awry, resulting in the violent death of a junior executive. Bob Morton (Ferrer), another junior executive, uses the opportunity to propose his "RoboCop" program directly to the CEO of OCP, the "Old Man" (O'Herlihy), who accepts. As a result, Morton immediately earns the hatred of Jones.
Meanwhile, Detroit police officers Alex J. Murphy (Weller) and Anne Lewis (Allen) pursue a crew of thugs fleeing a robbery to an abandoned steel mill. Inside, Murphy is captured, tortured and executed by the notorious gang leader Clarence Boddicker (Smith) and his men. After being pronounced dead, Morton's team reconstructs his remains into a powerful cyborg, dubbed "RoboCop." RoboCop has only limited memories of his former life as Alex Murphy, though he retains the habit of twirling his pistol before holstering it. This mannerism later helps Lewis recognize RoboCop as her old partner.
RoboCop patrols the city and proves extremely effective at stopping violent crime. Morton's overwhelmingly successful project propels him to an OCP vice-presidency, but Dick Jones warns him that his humiliation won't go unanswered. Boddicker, who has been secretly working for Jones, arrives at Morton's home and murders him on Jones' orders.
As time passes, RoboCop regains more memories of his previous life, triggered in large part by his incidental arrest of Emil Antonowsky (Paul McCrane), one of Boddicker's thugs and a participant in Murphy's murder. RoboCop begins pursuing Boddicker's henchmen, finally capturing Boddicker himself after a gunfight in a cocaine refinery. In desperation, Boddicker announces that Dick Jones is supposed to be protecting him. All that stops RoboCop from killing the helpless Boddicker is his programming, specifically his "Directive Three" ("Uphold the Law"). He instead takes Boddicker to the station and travels to Jones' office to arrest him. In the attempt, however, RoboCop discovers a previously-hidden part of his programming, "Directive Four", which prevents him from arresting any senior OCP executive. Jones boasts of his crimes, including the murder of Bob Morton, while RoboCop is paralyzed by the directive. RoboCop is then attacked by an ED-209 and later several SWAT teams, suffering heavy damage but escaping with the help of Lewis.
While RoboCop tries to repair himself, and for the first time removes his visor to reveal his face, the Detroit police begin their long-threatened strike, complaining of budget cuts that have reducing their salaries and manpower. In the subsequent chaos, Jones arranges to free Boddicker and his gang, ordering Boddicker to destroy RoboCop with the promise of making him the new crime lord of Delta City. Jones supplies Boddicker's gang with vehicles, Cobra Assault Cannons that use ammo capable of piercing Robocop's armor with a single shot, and a tracking device to pinpoint RoboCop's location.
Boddicker's gang tracks RoboCop to the same abandoned steel mill where the gang killed Murphy. In a final showdown, RoboCop and Lewis kill Boddicker's group. The battle leaves RoboCop with further damage and Lewis seriously wounded.
RoboCop proceeds to OCP headquarters and plays a recording of Jones' confession to the murder of Morton at an OCP executives meeting. He also reveals that he cannot act against an officer of OCP. Jones panics and takes the CEO hostage, demanding a helicopter to make his escape. The Old Man fires Jones, invalidating his Directive Four protection. RoboCop thanks the Old Man and shoots Jones, sending his body flying through a boardroom window and plunging down to the ground. The Old Man compliments RoboCop on his shooting and asks his name. RoboCop, having regained his humanity, smiles and replies: "Murphy."
Prior to being released, the movie was originally given an X rating by the MPAA in 1987 (The rating which replaced X, NC-17, emerged in 1990) due to its graphic violence. To satisfy the requirements of the ratings board, Verhoeven trimmed blood and gore from the most violent scenes in the movie, including the malfunctioning of ED-209, Murphy's execution (where his entire right arm is severed by a shotgun blast and a final overhead shot of Lewis sobbing over Murphy on the blood-soaked floor), and the final battle with Clarence Boddicker (in which RoboCop stabs Boddicker in the neck with his neural spike and a chunk of Boddicker's throat splatters onto RoboCop's chest). Verhoeven also added humorous commercials throughout the news broadcasts to lighten the mood and distract from the violent aspects of the movie. After 11 original X-ratings, the film was eventually given an R rating. [6] The original version was included on the Criterion Collection laserdisc and DVD of the film (both now out of print), the 2005 trilogy box set and the 2007 anniversary edition, the latter two were released by MGM and are classified as unrated.
Regarding the cut scenes, Verhoeven stated in the 2007 anniversary edition DVD that he had wanted the violence to be 'over the top', in an almost comical fashion (the executive that is killed by ED-209, for example, and the line about calling a paramedic soon after his demise, was meant as black comedy). Verhoeven also states that the tone of the violence was changed to a more upsetting tone due to the cuts requested by the MPAA, and that the cuts also remove footage of the extensive animatronic puppet of Murphy just before he is executed by Boddicker.
RoboCop opened in American theaters on July 17, 1987. The film was a commercial success and grossed over $8 million in its opening weekend and almost $54 million during its domestic run, making it the 16th most successful movie that year.[7][8]
The film received mostly positive reviews. On the Rotten Tomatoes site, it has an 85% freshness from critics, with the following consensus: "While over-the-top and gory, Robocop is also a surprisingly smart sci-fi flick that uses ultraviolence to disguise its satire of American culture."[9]
RoboCop was nominated for an Academy Award for Film Editing and an Academy Award for Sound. It won the Academy Award for Sound Effects Editing. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly named it the #14 greatest action movie of all time.[10]
At its release, British director Ken Russell said that this was the best sci-fi movie since Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927 Due to the enduring popularity of the character, there have been a number of RoboCop spin-offs, sequels, and attractions. They are:
Two feature film sequels, RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3, were made. Both movies were based on a story by Frank Miller, but each one was less successful than the last, both critically and commercially. A series of licensed video games for various arcade and home console systems. See: RoboCop computer and video games and RoboCop versus The Terminator. Two animated television series, RoboCop: The Animated Series in the 1980s, and RoboCop: Alpha Commando in the late-1990s. A live-action television series in 1994, RoboCop: The Series. RoboCop: The Ride – SimEx-iWerks (formerly iWerks Entertainment) opened RoboCop: The Ride around the world at its various iWerks Motion Simulator Theaters, amusement parks, and casinos in the winter of 1995 . The "Turbo Ride", as it was called, was a "ride simulation" synchronizing hydraulically-activated seats with an over-sized screen displaying the projection, putting the audience right in the middle of the movie action. The ride focused on you assisting RoboCop riding a souped-up police motorcycle on a mission to save the mayor of Detroit from the clutches of the vicious Cyberpunk ROM and his gang of villains. In the latter part of the ride the bike would then convert into hover mode and would fly through the skyline of New Detroit using rockets that jettisoned from the back sides of the motorcycle. Though not as impressive or technical-savvy as other iWerks attractions at the time, due to the enduring popularity of the character the ride was very popular amongst children and teenagers and especially in foreign markets outside of North America. The ride was a mixture of motion picture film and computer animation which lasted approximately 4:00 minutes, the cost was $5.00 USD to ride at pay-per-ride theaters. The ride was removed from the iWerks theaters in the North American market in 1998.[12] A four-part television mini-series, RoboCop: Prime Directives, in 2000. Comic books published by Marvel, Dark Horse Comics and Avatar Press which, along with containing the further adventures of RoboCop, also included titles such as the speculative crossover RoboCop vs. The Terminator (which was also converted into a video game and almost into a movie) and Frank Miller's RoboCop, a graphic novel limited series of Miller's rejected original script for RoboCop 2. In 1989, Toei Company created a series similar to, and based on, RoboCop, called Kidou Keiji Jiban. They did the same in 1993 with Tokusou Robo Janperson. The former's similarity was in concept (a police officer revived as a cyborg, but specifically to fight a mutant criminal element); the latter's was in appearance (Janperson's head design greatly resembled Robocop's, yet was otherwise closer to 1973's Robot Detective). In 1990, Data East released a pinball machine based on the movie
Sony Pictures (Screen Gems division) was working on a new RoboCop film in late 2005. No details were revealed other than the unofficial (and confirmed) announcement. In November 2006, Bloody Disgusting reported that the RoboCop remake had been halted.[13]
In March 2008, however, RoboCop was mentioned in an MGM press release[14] regarding franchises it would be focusing on in the future. An MGM poster displayed at the Licensing International Expo of June 2008 read, "RoboCop coming 2010".[15] The studio has met with Darren Aronofsky to discuss the possibility of his directing the film.[16] Aronofsky was confirmed as the director during G4's live coverage of Comic-Con[year needed] with David Self writing the script.[citation needed] Release has now been postponed to 2011
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 16:45:48 GMT -5
3-way tie at number 19. Pulp Fiction![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/82/Pulp_Fiction_cover.jpg/200px-Pulp_Fiction_cover.jpg) Pulp Fiction is a 1994 crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino, who cowrote its screenplay with Roger Avary. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references. The film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture; Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. It was also awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A major critical and commercial success, it revitalized the career of its leading man, John Travolta, who received an Academy Award nomination, as did costars Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters' senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film's title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of "pulp". The plot, in keeping with most of Tarantino's other works, is presented out of chronological sequence. The picture's self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film. Considered by some critics a black comedy,[3] the film is also frequently labeled a "neo-noir".[4] Critic Geoffrey O'Brien argues otherwise: "The old-time noir passions, the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes, would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up. [It is] neither neo-noir nor a parody of noir".[5] Similarly, Nicholas Christopher calls it "more gangland camp than neo-noir",[6] and Foster Hirsch suggests that its "trippy fantasy landscape" characterizes it more definitively than any genre label.[7] Pulp Fiction is viewed as the inspiration for many later movies that adopted various elements of its style. The nature of its development, marketing, and distribution and its consequent profitability had a sweeping effect on the field of independent cinema. A cultural watershed, Pulp Fiction's influence has been felt in several other popular media. In keeping with writer-director Quentin Tarantino's trademark of nonlinear storytelling, the narrative is presented out of sequence. Pulp Fiction is structured around three distinct but interrelated storylines—in Tarantino's conception, mob hitman Vincent Vega is the lead of the first story, prizefighter Butch Coolidge is the lead of the second, and Vincent's fellow contract killer, Jules Winnfield, is the lead of the third.[8] Although each storyline focuses on a different series of incidents, they connect and intersect in various ways. The film starts out with a diner hold-up staged by "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny", then picks up the stories of Vincent, Jules, Butch, and several other important characters, including mob kingpin Marsellus Wallace, his wife, Mia, and underworld problem-solver Winston Wolf. It finally returns to where it began, in the diner: Vincent and Jules, who have stopped in for a bite, find themselves embroiled in the hold-up. There are a total of seven narrative sequences—the three primary storylines are preceded by identifying intertitles on a black screen: 1.Prologue—The Diner (i) 2.Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife" 3."Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife" 4.Prelude to "The Gold Watch" (a—flashback, b—present) 5."The Gold Watch" 6."The Bonnie Situation" 7.Epilogue—The Diner (ii) If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically, they would run: 4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 3, 4b, 5. Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view; the same is true of sequences 2 and 6. In Philip Parker's description, the structural form is "an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative."[9] Other analysts describe the structure simply as a "circular narrative". "Pumpkin" (Tim Roth) and "Honey Bunny" (Amanda Plummer) are having breakfast in a diner. They decide to rob it after realizing they could make money off not just the business but the customers as well, as occurred during their previous heist. Moments after they initiate the hold-up, the scene breaks off and the title credits roll. As Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) drives, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) talks about his experiences in Europe, from where he has just returned—the hash bars in Amsterdam; the French McDonald's and its "Royale with Cheese." The dress-suited pair are on their way to retrieve a briefcase from Brett (Frank Whaley), who has transgressed against their boss, gangster Marsellus Wallace. Jules tells Vincent how Marsellus had someone thrown off a fourth-floor balcony for giving his wife a foot massage. Vincent says that Marsellus has asked him to escort his wife while Marsellus is out of town. They conclude their banter and "get into character," which involves executing Brett in dramatic fashion after Jules recites a baleful "biblical" pronouncement. In a virtually empty cocktail lounge, aging prizefighter Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) accepts a large sum of money from Marsellus (Ving Rhames), agreeing to take a dive in his upcoming match. Butch and Vincent briefly cross paths as Vincent and Jules—now inexplicably dressed in T-shirts and shorts—arrive to deliver the briefcase. The next day, Vincent drops by the house of Lance (Eric Stoltz) and Jody (Rosanna Arquette) to score some high-grade heroin. He shoots up before driving over to meet Mrs. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) and take her out. They head to Jack Rabbit Slim's, a 1950s-themed restaurant staffed by lookalikes of the decade's pop icons. Mia recounts her experience acting in a failed television pilot, "Fox Force Five." After participating in a twist contest, they return to the Wallace house with the trophy. While Vincent is in the bathroom, Mia finds his stash of heroin in his coat pocket. Mistaking it for cocaine, she snorts it and overdoses. Vincent rushes her to Lance's house for help. Together, they administer an adrenaline shot to Mia's heart, reviving her. Before parting ways, Mia and Vincent agree not to tell Marsellus of the incident. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Television time for young Butch (Chandler Lindauer) is interrupted by the arrival of Vietnam veteran Captain Koons (Christopher Walken). Koons explains that he has brought a gold watch, passed down through generations of Coolidge men since World War I. Butch's father died of dysentery while in a POW camp, and at his dying request Koons hid the watch in his rectum for two years in order to deliver it to Butch. A bell rings, startling the adult Butch out of this reverie. He is in his boxing colors—it is time for the fight he has been paid to throw. Butch flees the arena, having won the bout. Making his getaway by taxi, he learns from the death-obsessed driver, Esmarelda VillaLobos (Angela Jones), that he killed the opposing fighter. Butch has double-crossed Marsellus, betting his payoff on himself at very favorable odds. The next morning, at the motel where he and his girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros), are lying low, Butch is horrified to discover that she has forgotten to pack the irreplaceable watch. He returns to his apartment to retrieve it, although Marsellus's men are almost certainly looking for him. Butch finds the watch quickly, but thinking he is alone, pauses for a snack. Only then does he notice a submachine gun on the kitchen counter. Hearing the toilet flush, Butch readies the gun in time to kill a startled Vincent Vega exiting the bathroom. Butch drives away but while waiting at a traffic light, Marsellus walks by and recognizes him. Butch rams Marsellus with the car, only to collide with another automobile seconds later. After a foot chase the two heavily injured men land in a pawnshop. The shopowner, Maynard (Duane Whitaker), captures them at gunpoint and ties them up in a half-basement area. Maynard is joined by Zed (Peter Greene); they take Marsellus to another room to rape him, leaving a silent masked figure referred to as "the gimp" to watch a tied-up Butch. Butch breaks loose and knocks out the gimp. He is about to flee when he decides to save Marsellus. As Zed is raping Marsellus on a pommel horse, Butch kills Maynard with a katana. Marsellus retrieves Maynard's shotgun and blasts Zed in the groin. Marsellus informs Butch that they are even with respect to the botched fight fix, so long as he never tells anyone about the rape and departs Los Angeles forever. Butch agrees and returns to pick up Fabienne on Zed's chopper. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The story returns to Vincent and Jules at Brett's. After they execute him, another man (Alexis Arquette) bursts out of the bathroom and shoots wildly at them, missing every time before an astonished Jules and Vincent can return fire. Jules decides this is a miracle and a sign from God for him to retire as a hit man. They drive off with one of Brett's associates, Marvin (Phil LaMarr), their informant. Vincent asks Marvin for his opinion about the "miracle," and accidentally shoots him in the face. Forced to remove their bloodied car from the road, Jules calls upon the house of his friend Jimmy (Quentin Tarantino). Jimmy's wife, Bonnie, is due back from work soon and he is very anxious that she not encounter the scene. At Jules's request, Marsellus arranges for the help of Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel). Wolf takes charge of the situation, ordering Jules and Vincent to clean the car, hide the body in the trunk, dispose of their own bloody clothes, and change into T-shirts and shorts provided by Jimmy. They drive the car to a junkyard, from where Wolf and the owner's daughter, Raquel (Julia Sweeney), head off to breakfast and Jules and Vincent decide to do the same. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As Jules and Vincent eat breakfast in a coffee shop the discussion returns to Jules's decision to retire. In a brief cutaway, we see "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny" shortly before they initiate the hold-up from the movie's first scene. While Vincent is in the bathroom, the hold-up commences. "Pumpkin" demands all of the patrons' valuables, including Jules's mysterious case. Jules surprises "Pumpkin" (whom he calls "Ringo"), holding him at gunpoint. "Honey Bunny," hysterical, trains her gun on Jules. Vincent emerges from the restroom with his gun trained on her, creating a Mexican standoff. Reprising his pseudo-biblical passage, Jules expresses his ambivalence about his life of crime. As his first act of redemption, he allows the two robbers to take the cash they have stolen and leave, pondering how they were spared and leaving the briefcase to be returned to Marsellus, finishing the hitman's final job for his boss. Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival. The Weinsteins "hit the beach like commandos", bringing the picture's entire cast over.[68] The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation.[69][70] It won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize, generating a further wave of publicity.[71] The first U.S. review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety. Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a "spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture...a startling, massive success."[72] From Cannes forward, Tarantino was on the road continuously, promoting the film.[73] Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe, building buzz: Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway, and San Sebastian.[74] Tarantino later said, "One thing that's cool is that by breaking up the linear structure, when I watch the film with an audience, it does break [the audience's] alpha state. It's like, all of a sudden, 'I gotta watch this...I gotta pay attention.' You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats. It's actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie."[75] In late September, it opened the New York Film Festival. The New York Times published its review the day of the opening. Janet Maslin called the film a "triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color.... [He] has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers."[70] On October 14, 1994, Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States. As Peter Biskind describes, "It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters."[2] In the eyes of some cultural critics, Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence. Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign: "You won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction", went one slogan.[76] Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the box office its first weekend, edging out a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, The Specialist, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters. Against its budget of $8.5 million and about $10 million in marketing costs, Pulp Fiction wound up grossing $107.93 million at the U.S. box office, making it the first "indie" film to surpass $100 million. Worldwide, it took in nearly $213 million.[77] In terms of domestic grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20.[78] Popular engagement with the film, such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase, "indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately."[79] As MovieMaker puts it, "The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon."[80] Abroad, as well: In Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller The response of major American movie reviewers was widely favorable. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times describing it as "so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'"[82] Richard Corliss of Time wrote, "It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in."[83] In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new."[84] "You get intoxicated by it," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, "high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does."[40] "There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive", wrote Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. "Pulp Fiction is indisputably great."[85] Overall, the film attained exceptionally high ratings among U.S. reviewers: a 96% score at Rotten Tomatoes[86] and a Metascore of 94 on Metacritic.[87] The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film's opening weekend. Kenneth Turan wrote, "The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities."[88] Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming."[89] Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, especially his first, most famous feature, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote, "The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful—namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand."[90] Observing in the National Review that "[n]o film arrives with more advance hype", John Simon was unswayed: "titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness".[91] Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages. Violence was often the theme. In the Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy to not see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior".[92] Some commentators took exception to the movie's frequent use of the word "SHUTCHERMOUTH!!". In the Chicago Tribune, Todd Boyd argued that the word's recurrence "has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool".[93] In Britain, James Wood, writing in The Guardian, set the tone for much subsequent criticism: "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies.... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest."[94] Around the turn of the year, Pulp Fiction was named Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Southeastern Film Critics Association, and Kansas City Film Critics Circle. Tarantino was named Best Director by all six of those organizations as well as by the New York Film Critics Circle and Chicago Film Critics Association. The screenplay won several prizes, with various awarding bodies ascribing credit differently. At the Golden Globe Awards, Tarantino, named as sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honor, failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech.[95] In February 1995, the film received seven Oscar nominations—Best Picture, Director, Actor (Travolta), Supporting Actor (Jackson), Supporting Actress (Thurman), Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. At the ceremony the following month, Tarantino and Avary were announced as joint winners of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.[96] The furor around the film was still going strong: much of the March issue of Artforum was devoted to its critical dissection.[97] At the British Academy Film Awards, Tarantino and Avary shared the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, with Jackson winning for Best Supporting Actor.[98] Pulp Fiction quickly came to be regarded as one of the most significant films of its era. In 1995, in a special edition of Siskel & Ebert devoted to Tarantino, Gene Siskel argued that Pulp Fiction posed a major challenge to the "ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas". In Siskel's view, the violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde [1967], and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange [1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.[99] Ken Dancyger writes that its "imitative and innovative style"—like that of its predecessor, Reservoir Dogs—represents a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.[100] In a widely covered speech on May 31, 1995, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling "nightmares of depravity". Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence. Dole had not, in fact, mentioned the film; he cited two less celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Natural Born Killers and True Romance.[101] In September 1996, Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction—which he had not seen—of promoting "the romance of heroin".[102] Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction "simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir".[103] In Peter Biskind's description, it created a "guys-with-guns frenzy".[104] The stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent. Less than a year after the picture's release, British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School's end-of-semester screenings and assessed the impact: "Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch before offing their victim. Not since Citizen Kane has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking."[105] Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), in which Tarantino acted,[99] Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995),[106] and 2 Days in the Valley (1996).[107] It "triggered a myriad of clones", writes Fiona Villella.[108] Pulp Fiction's effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007, when David Denby of The New Yorker credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives.[109] Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still. According to Variety, the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash "forever altered the game" of so-called independent cinema.[110] It "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower",[2] writes Biskind. "Pulp became the Star Wars of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office."[111] The film's large financial return on its small budget transform[ed] the industry's attitude toward the lowly indies...spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions.... mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits.... Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own...copy[ing] Miramax's marketing and distribution strategies.[112]
In 2001, Variety, noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low-budget independent or indie-style projects, suggested that the "watershed moment for movie stars" came with the decision by Willis—one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers—to appear in Pulp Fiction.[113]
And its impact was even broader than that. It has been described as a "major cultural event", an "international phenomenon" that influenced television, music, literature, and advertising.[108][114] Not long after its release, it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users.[115] Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of "Great Movies" in 2001, Roger Ebert called it "the most influential film of the decade".[116] Four years later, Time's Corliss wrote much the same: "(unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s".[117]
Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status; in 2008, Entertainment Weekly declared, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic."[118] Jules and Vincent's "Royale with Cheese" dialogue became famous.[119] The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere's list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments".[120] The scene of Travolta and Thurman's characters dancing has been frequently homaged, most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool, starring the same two actors.[121] The image of Travolta and Jackson's characters standing side by side in suit and tie, pointing their guns, has also become widely familiar. In 2007, BBC News reported that "London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by 'guerrilla artist' Banksy.... The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns."[122] Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases, in particular Marsellus's threat, "I'm 'a get medieval on your ass."[123] Jules's "Ezekiel" recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ad/PulpFictionGuns.jpg/180px-PulpFictionGuns.jpg)
Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all-time great films. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter-century.[118] That same year, the American Film Institute's "Ten Top Ten" poll ranked it number 7 all-time in the gangster film genre.[126] In 2007, it was voted 94th overall on the AFI's "100 Years...100 Movies" list.[127] In 2005, it was named one of Time's "All-Time 100 Movies".[117] As of June 2008, it is number 9 on Metacritic's list of all-time highest scores.[128] The film ranks very highly in popular surveys. A 2008 Empire poll combining the opinions of readers, movie industry professionals, and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth best film of all time.[129] In a 2007 poll of the online film community, it placed eleventh.[130] In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film, it ranked as the number 3 film in history.[131] It was voted as the fourth greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain's Channel 4 in 2001.[132]
Tarantino has stated that he originally planned "to do a Black Mask movie", referring to the magazine largely responsible for popularizing hardboiled detective fiction. "t kind of went somewhere else".[133] Geoffrey O'Brien sees the result as connected "rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition: the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich [and] Fredric Brown.... Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes, a realm that Pulp Fiction makes its own."[134] In particular, O'Brien finds a strong affinity between the intricate plot mechanics and twists of Brown's novels and the recursive, interweaving structure of Pulp Fiction.[135] Philip French describes the film's narrative as a "circular movement or Möbius strip of a kind Resnais and Robbe-Grillet would admire."[136] James Mottram regards crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whose influence Tarantino has acknowledged, as the film's primary literary antecedent. He suggests that Leonard's "rich dialogue" is reflected in Tarantino's "popular-culture-strewn jive"; he also points to the acute, extremely dark sense of humor Leonard applies to the realm of violence as a source of inspiration.[137]
Robert Kolker sees the "flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality [as] a patina over a pastiche. The pastiche...is essentially of two films that Tarantino can't seem to get out of his mind: Mean Streets [1973; directed by Martin Scorsese] and The Killing [1956; directed by Stanley Kubrick]."[138] He contrasts Pulp Fiction with postmodern Hollywood predecessors Hudson Hawk (1991; starring Willis) and Last Action Hero (1993; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) that "took the joke too far...simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience" and flopped.[139] Todd McCarthy writes that the film's "striking widescreen compositions often contain objects in extreme close-up as well as vivid contrasts, sometimes bringing to mind the visual strategies of Sergio Leone", an acknowledged hero of Tarantino's.[72] To Martin Rubin, the "expansive, brightly colored widescreen visuals" evoke comedy directors such as Frank Tashlin and Blake Edwards.[140]
The movie's host of pop culture allusions, ranging from the famous image of Marilyn Monroe's skirt flying up over a subway grating to Jules addressing "Pumpkin" as "Ringo" because of his English accent, have led many critics to discuss it within the framework of postmodernism. Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino's "postmodern masterpiece...to date", David Walker writes that it "is marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s...and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films". He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as "postmodern tricksiness".[141] Calling the film a "terminally hip postmodern collage", Foster Hirsch finds Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece: "authoritative, influential, and meaningless". Set "in a world that could exist only in the movies", it is "a succulent guilty pleasure, beautifully made junk food for cinéastes".[142] O'Brien, dismissing attempts to associate the movie with film noir, argues that "Pulp Fiction is more a guided tour of an infernal theme park decorated with cultural detritus, Buddy Holly and Mamie Van Doren, fragments of blaxploitation and Roger Corman and Shogun Assassin, music out of a twenty-four-hour oldies station for which all the decades since the fifties exist simultaneously."[5] Catherine Constable takes the moment in which a needle filled with adrenaline is plunged into the comatose Mia's heart as exemplary. She proposes that it "can be seen as effecting her resurrection from the dead, simultaneously recalling and undermining the Gothic convention of the vampire's stake. On this model, the referencing of previous aesthetic forms and styles moves beyond...empty pastiche, sustaining an 'inventive and affirmative' mode of postmodernism."[143]
Mark T. Conard asks, "[W]hat is the film about?" and answers, "American nihilism."[144] Hirsch suggests, "If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family."[107] Richard Alleva argues that "Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics." He reads the movie as a form of romance whose allure is centered in the characters' nonnaturalistic discourse, "wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigrammatic".[145] In Alan Stone's view, the "absurd dialogue", like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin, "unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliché.... Pulp Fiction unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the power trip glorified by standard Hollywood violence."[146] Stone reads the film as "politically correct. There is no nudity and no violence directed against women.... [It] celebrates interracial friendship and cultural diversity; there are strong women and strong black men, and the director swims against the current of class stereotype."[146]
Where Stone sees a celebration, Kolker finds a vacuum: "The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn't pretend seriousness and therefore didn't mock it."[139] Calling it the "acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking", he explains, "the postmodern is about surfaces; it is flattened spatiality in which event and character are in a steady state of reminding us that they are pop-cultural figures."[147] According to Kolker,
That's why Pulp Fiction was so popular. Not because all audiences got all or any of its references to Scorsese and Kubrick, but because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification. The film's cycle of racist and homophobic jokes might threaten to break out into a quite nasty view of the world, but this nastiness keeps being laughed off—by the mock intensity of the action, the prowling, confronting, perverse, confined, and airless nastiness of the world Tarantino creates.[148]
Henry A. Giroux argues that Tarantino "empties violence of any critical social consequences, offering viewers only the immediacy of shock, humor, and irony-without-insight as elements of mediation. None of these elements gets beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing...[t]he facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight
Category — Recipient(s) Academy Awards Best Original Screenplay — Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary BAFTA Awards Best Supporting Actor — Samuel L. Jackson Best Original Screenplay — Quentin Tarantino/Roger Avary Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, director) Golden Globe Awards Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) — Quentin Tarantino National Society of Film Critics Best Film — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, director) Best Director — Quentin Tarantino Best Screenplay — Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary
It also received the following nominations:[96][98][184]
Category — Nominee(s) Academy Awards Best Picture (Lawrence Bender, producer) | Best Director (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actor (John Travolta) Best Supporting Actress (Uma Thurman)| Best Supporting Actor (Samuel L. Jackson)| Best Film Editing (Sally Menke) BAFTA Awards Best Film (Lawrence Bender/Quentin Tarantino) | Achievement in Direction (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actress in a Leading Role (Uma Thurman) | Best Actor in a Leading Role (John Travolta) Best Cinematography (Andrzej Sekula) | Best Editing (Sally Menke) | Best Sound (Stephen Hunter Flick/Ken King/Rick Ash/David Zupancic) Golden Globe Awards Best Motion Picture (Drama) (Lawrence Bender) | Best Director (Motion Picture) (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actor (Motion Picture—Drama) (John Travolta) Best Supporting Actor (Motion Picture) (Samuel L. Jackson) | Best Supporting Actress (Motion Picture) (Uma Thurman)
Creepshow
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/25/CreepshowPoster.jpg/200px-CreepshowPoster.jpg)
Creepshow is an American horror-comedy anthology film directed by George A. Romero (of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead fame), and written by Stephen King (Carrie, The Shining, Misery, The Stand).
It was considered a sleeper hit at the box office when released in November 1982, earning over $21 million domestically,[1] and remains a popular film to this day among horror genre fans. The film was shot on location in Pittsburgh and the suburb areas. It consists of five short stories referred to as "Jolting Tales of Horror": "Father's Day", "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill", "Something to Tide You Over", "The Crate" and "They're Creeping Up on You!". Two of these stories, "The Crate" and "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" (originally titled "Weeds"), were adapted from previously published Stephen King's short horror tales. The segments are tied together with brief animated sequences. The film is bookended by scenes, featuring a young boy named Billy (played by Stephen King's own son, Joe King), who is punished by his father for reading horror comics. The film is an homage to the E.C. horror comic books of the 1950s such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.
In later years, the international rights of the film would be acquired by Republic Pictures, which today is a subsidiary of the Paramount Motion Pictures Group, itself owned by Viacom. The film's UK rights are owned by Universal Pictures.
A young boy named Billy (played by Stephen King's real-life son Joe King) gets yelled at and slapped by his father, Stan (Tom Atkins), for reading a horror comic titled Creepshow instead of doing his chores. His father tosses the comic in the garbage to teach Billy a lesson, but not before threatening to spank him should Billy ever get caught reading Creepshow comic books again. Stan also refers it as "such horror crap". Later after he tosses the comic book away, Stan reminds his wife that he had to be hard on Billy because he can't believe all the crap that's in the book. He closes out the discussion with the reason why God made fathers: to protect their ways of life and their children. As Billy sits upstairs hating his father, he hears a sound at the window, which turns out to be a ghostly apparition, beckoning him to come closer. "Father's Day" (First story, written by King expressly for the film)
Third Sunday of June, seven years ago, an elderly despicable patriarch named Nathan Grantham was killed on Father's Day when his daughter Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors) bashed him in the head with a marble ashtray as he screamed for his cake. Third Sunday of June, seven years later, his ungrateful, money grubbing relatives get together for their annual dinner on Father's Day. Nathan Grantham comes back as a zombie-like creature to get the cake he never got, and kills off his relatives one by one. "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" (Second story, originally titled "Weeds", adapted from a previously published short story written by King)
A dimwitted backwoods hick thinks a newly-discovered meteorite will provide enough money from the local college to pay off his $200 bank loan. Instead, he finds himself being overcome by a rapidly spreading plant-like organism that comes off the meteorite. Stephen King himself plays the doomed protagonist in this darkly humorous story. "Something to Tide You Over" (Third story, written by King expressly for the film)
Richard Vickers, a coldblooded, wealthy husband, played by Leslie Nielsen, stages a terrible fate for his unfaithful wife, Becky (Gaylen Ross) and her lover, Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson) by burying them up to their necks on the beach, below the high tide line. They drown, but the tide somehow revives them as waterlogged zombies intent on getting revenge of their own. "The Crate" (Fourth story, adapted from a previously published short story)
A mysterious, extremely lethal creature is unwittingly released from its crate in this suspenseful and gory monster story. Hal Holbrook stars as pacifistic college professor Henry Northrup, who sees the creature as a way to rid himself of his drunk, emotionally abusive wife, Wilma, played by Adrienne Barbeau. (The monster in the crate was nicknamed "Fluffy" by the film's director, George A. Romero.) "They're Creeping Up On You!" (Fifth and final story, written by King expressly for the film)
Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall) is a cruel, ruthless businessman whose Mysophobia has him living in a hermetically sealed apartment, but finds himself helpless when Mr. White, his put-upon employee, allows his apartment to be overrun by endless hordes of cockroaches. Epilogue The following morning, two garbage collectors (one played by special effects makeup artist Tom Savini) find the Creepshow comic in the trash. They look at the ads in the book for X-ray specs, a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course, and a voodoo doll, whose coupon is missing. Inside the house, Billy's angry father complains of neck pain, which escalates to deadly levels as we see Billy jabbing the voodoo doll over and over.
Creepshow was given a wide release on November 12, 1982. It started strongly with an $8 million box-office gross for its first five days.[2]
Creepshow received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "Romero and King have approached this movie with humor and affection, as well as with an appreciation of the macabre".[3] In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is".[4] Gary Arnold, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, "What one confronts in Creepshow is five consistently stale, derivative horror vignettes of various lengths and defects".[5] In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, "The Romero-King collaboration has softened both the horror and the cynicism, but not by enough to betray the sources - Creepshow is almost as funny and as horrible as the filmmakers would clearly love it to be".[6] David Ansen, in his review for Newsweek, wrote, "For anyone over 12 there's not much pleasure to be had watching two masters of horror deliberately working beneath themselves. Creepshow is a faux naif horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire".[7] In his review for Time, Richard Corliss wrote, "But the treatment manages to be both perfunctory and languid; the jolts can be predicted by any ten-year-old with a stop watch. Only the story in which Evil Plutocrat E.G. Marshall is eaten alive by cockroaches mixes giggles and grue in the right measure".[8]
Fight Club
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/fc/Fight_Club_poster.jpg/200px-Fight_Club_poster.jpg)
here's what you said about it: I like it because it's like no other movie ever made. It's a guy movie without all the sex and explosions, it explores what goes on inside our heads beyond that.
Fight Club is a 1999 American feature film adapted from the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. The film was directed by David Fincher and stars Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays the nameless protagonist, an "everyman" who cannot find happiness in his white-collar job in American society. He forms a "fight club" with soap salesman Tyler Durden, played by Pitt, and becomes embroiled in a relationship with him and a destitute woman, Marla Singer, played by Bonham Carter.
Palahniuk's novel was optioned by 20th Century Fox producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Jim Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was one of four directors the producers considered; they hired him due to his high level of interest in the film. Fincher developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from others in the film industry and his own cast members. The director and the cast compared the film to the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause and the 1967 film The Graduate. They said the theme was the conflict between a generation of young people and the value system of advertising. Fincher intended for the film's violence in the fight clubs to serve as a metaphor for feeling based on the generation's conflict. The director copied the homoerotic overtones from Palahniuk's novel to make audiences uncomfortable and keep them from anticipating the twist ending.
Studio executives did not like the film, and they restructured Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to recoup perceived losses. Fight Club failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office, and the film received polarized reactions from film critics upon its debut. The film was cited as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999. The Guardian perceived it as ground-breaking for its visual style in cinema and for presaging a new mood in American political life. The film later found commercial success with its DVD release, which established Fight Club as a cult film.
The nameless narrator (Edward Norton) is a traveling automobile company employee who suffers with insomnia. His doctor refuses to give him medication and advises him to visit a support group to see real suffering. The narrator attends a group for testicular cancer victims and after being accepted as a fellow victim, he finds an emotional release that cures his insomnia. He becomes addicted to attending support groups and pretending to be a victim, but the presence of another impostor—Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter)—disturbs him, so he negotiates with her to avoid meeting at the same groups.
After a flight home from a business trip, the narrator finds his apartment destroyed by an explosion. He calls Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman whom he befriended on the flight, and they meet at a bar. Their conversation about materialism leads to Tyler's inviting the narrator to stay at his place but only if the narrator will hit him. The two enjoy a fistfight outside the bar, and the narrator becomes a guest in Tyler's dilapidated house. They have further fights outside the bar, and these attract a crowd of men. The fighting moves to the bar's basement where the men form a fight club.
Marla overdoses on pills and telephones the narrator for help, he ignores her, but Tyler answers the call and saves her. Tyler and Marla become sexually involved, and Tyler warns the narrator never to talk to Marla about him. Multiple fight clubs are formed across the country, and they become the anti-materialist and anti-corporate organization "Project Mayhem" under Tyler's leadership. The narrator complains to Tyler that he wants to be more involved in the organization, but Tyler disappears. When a member of Project Mayhem dies, the narrator tries to shut down the project. He follows evidence of Tyler's national travels to find him. In one city, a project member greets the narrator as Tyler Durden. The narrator calls Marla from his hotel room and discovers that Marla also believes him to be Tyler. He suddenly sees Tyler Durden in his room, and Tyler explains that they are dissociated personalities in the same body. Tyler controls the narrator's body when the narrator is asleep.
The narrator blacks out after the conversation. When he wakes, he discovers from his telephone log that Tyler made calls during his blackout. He uncovers Tyler's plans to destroy buildings housing credit card records so civilization's debt is reset. The narrator tries to contact the police but finds that the officers are members of the project. He attempts to disarm explosives in a building, but Tyler subdues him and moves to a safe building to watch the destruction. The narrator, held by Tyler at gunpoint, realizes that in sharing the same body with Tyler, he is really holding the gun. He fires it into his mouth, shooting through the cheek without killing himself. Tyler collapses with an exit wound to the back of his head, and the narrator stops mentally projecting him. Afterward, Project Mayhem members bring a kidnapped Marla to whom they believe is Tyler and leave them alone. The explosives detonate, collapsing the buildings, and the narrator and Marla watch the scene, holding hands.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/30/Fight_Club_bathtub.jpg/250px-Fight_Club_bathtub.jpg)
When Fight Club premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, the film was debated fiercely by critics. A newspaper reported, "Many loved and hated it in equal measures." Critics expressed concern that the film would incite copycat behavior like when A Clockwork Orange debuted in Britain nearly three decades previously.[60] Upon the film's theatrical release, The Times reported the reaction: "It touched a nerve in the male psyche that was debated in newspapers across the world."[61] While filmmakers called Fight Club "an accurate portrayal of men in the 1990s", critics called it "irresponsible and appalling". Another newspaper charged, "Fight Club is shaping up to be the most contentious mainstream Hollywood meditation on violence since Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange."[62]
Janet Maslin, reviewing for The New York Times, praised Fincher's direction and editing of the film. She wrote that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood", and that, if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism.[63] Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, called Fight Club "visceral and hard-edged", as well as "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy" that most audiences would not appreciate.[64] Ebert later acknowledged that the film was "beloved by most, not by me".[65] Jay Carr of The Boston Globe opined that the film began with an "invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz", but that it eventually became "explosively silly".[66] Newsweek's David Ansen described Fight Club as "an outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload" and thought that the ending was too pretentious.[67] Richard Schickel of Time described the director's mise en scène as dark and damp: "It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better to be wet than dry." Schickel applauded the performances of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, but he criticized the film's "conventionally gimmicky" unfolding and the failure to make Helena Bonham Carter's character interesting.[68]
Cineaste's Gary Crowdus reviewed the critical reception in retrospect: "Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original, and thought-provoking films of the year." He wrote of the negative opinion, "While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film's critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs ... They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless."[69]
Fight Club was nominated for the 2000 Academy Award for Sound Editing for Best Sound Editing, but it lost to The Matrix.[70] Actress Helena Bonham Carter won the 2000 Empire Award for Best British Actress.[71] The Online Film Critics Society also nominated Fight Club for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Edward Norton), Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jim Uhls).[72] Though the film won none of the awards, the organization listed Fight Club as one of the top ten films of 1999.[73] The soundtrack for Fight Club received a nomination for a BRIT Award, which it lost to Notting Hill.
Fight Club was considered one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s.[20][75] The film was perceived as the forerunner of a new mood in American political life. Like other 1999 films Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, and Three Kings, Fight Club was recognized as an innovator in cinematic form and style since it exploited new developments in filmmaking technology.[76] After Fight Club's theatrical release, it became more popular via word of mouth,[77] and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame.[78][79] The film's success also heightened the profile of the novel's author Chuck Palahniuk to global renown.[80]
Following Fight Club's release, several fight clubs were reported in the United States. A "Gentleman's Fight Club" was started in Menlo Park, California in 2000 and had members mostly from the high tech industry.[81] Teens and preteens in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state, and Alaska also initiated fight clubs and posted videos of their fights online, leading authorities to break up the clubs. In 2006, an unwilling participant from a local high school was injured at a fight club in Arlington, Texas, and the DVD sales of the fight led to the arrest of six teenagers.[82] An unsanctioned fight club was also started at Princeton University, and matches were held on campus.[83] In May 2009 a homemade bomb exploded outside a Manhattan Starbucks Coffee shop.[84] According to the police, the suspect —17-year old Kyle Shaw— was trying to emulate "Project Mayhem". Shaw had formed his own fight club in various locales around the city including Central Park.[85]
In 2003, Fight Club was listed as one of the "50 Best Guy Movies of All Time" by Men's Journal.[86] In 2004 and 2006, Fight Club was voted by Empire readers as the ninth and eighth greatest film of all time, respectively.[87][88] Total Film ranked Fight Club as "The Greatest Film of our Lifetime" in 2007 during the magazine's tenth anniversary.[89] In 2007, Premiere selected Tyler Durden's line, "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club," as the 27th greatest movie line of all time.[90] In 2008, readers of Empire ranked Tyler Durden first on a list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters
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Post by Shovelman on Jul 18, 2009 16:51:22 GMT -5
Creepshow....very interesting
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 17:31:29 GMT -5
5-way tie at number 16. They all received 10 points. Superman: The Movie![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6d/Superman_ver1.jpg/200px-Superman_ver1.jpg) Superman (also known as Superman: The Movie) is a 1978 superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name. Richard Donner directed the film, which stars Christopher Reeve as Superman, as well as Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure, Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty. The film depicts the origin of Superman, from infancy as Kal-El of Krypton and growing up in Smallville. Disguised as reporter Clark Kent, he adopts a mild mannered attitude in Metropolis and develops a romance with Lois Lane, while battling against the villainous Lex Luthor. The film was conceived in 1973 by Ilya Salkind. Several directors, most notably Guy Hamilton, and screenwriters (Mario Puzo, David and Leslie Newman and Robert Benton) were associated with the project before Richard Donner was hired to direct. Donner brought Tom Mankiewicz to rewrite the script, feeling it was too campy. Mankiewicz was credited as creative consultant. It was decided to film both Superman and Superman II simultaneously. Principal photography started in March 1977 and ended in October 1978. Tensions rose between Donner and the producers, and a decision was made to stop filming Superman II and finish the first film. Donner had already shot 75% of the sequel, eventually giving birth to Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. Superman was released with critical acclaim and financial success. Reviewers noted parallels between the film's depiction of Superman and Jesus.[1] The film's legacy helped create a reemergence of science fiction films and the establishment of the superhero film genre. On the planet Krypton, using evidence provided by scientist Jor-El, the Ruling Council sentences three insurrectionists, General Zod, Ursa and Non, to "eternal living death" in the Phantom Zone for attempting a totalitarian rebellion. Although the Council widely respects him, Jor-El is unable to convince them of his belief that the Kryptonian sun will shortly explode and destroy their planet. As a result, Jor-El launches a spacecraft containing his infant son, Kal-El, towards Earth, a distant planet with a suitable atmosphere, and where Kal-El's dense molecular structure will give him superhuman powers (since all Kryptonian life-forms gain superpowers from exposure to a yellow sun, such as Earth's sun). Shortly after the ship launches, Krypton is destroyed. Three years later, the ship reaches Earth, crashing near an American farming town, Smallville, Kansas, where Kal-El is found by Jonathan and Martha Kent and raised as their own son, Clark. Eighteen years later, after the death of Jonathan, Clark hears a psychic "call", discovering a glowing green crystal in the ship. Compelled to travel north, Clark heads to the Arctic Circle, where the crystal builds the Fortress of Solitude, resembling the architecture of Krypton. Activating a control panel inside the fortress, a vision of Jor-El explains Clark's origins, educating him in his powers and responsibilities. After twelve years, with his powers fully developed, Clark leaves the Fortress and finds a job at The Daily Planet in Metropolis. He meets and develops a romantic attraction to reporter Lois Lane, but the feelings are not returned: she regards him as merely a friend. Lois becomes involved in a helicopter accident where conventional means of rescue are impossible, requiring Clark to use his powers in public for the first time in order to save her. Later, he visits her at home, takes her for a flight over the city, and allows her to interview him for a newspaper article in which she dubs him "Superman." Meanwhile, criminal genius Lex Luthor has developed a cunning plan to make a fortune in real estate by buying large amounts of "worthless" desert land and then diverting a nuclear rocket from a missile testing site to the San Andreas Fault. This will destroy California and leave Luthor's desert as the new West Coast of the United States, greatly increasing its real estate value. After his incompetent henchman Otis accidentally redirects the first rocket to the wrong place, Luthor's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher, successfully changes the course of the second missile. Knowing Superman could stop his plan, Luthor lures him to his underground lair via a supersonic greeting and exposes him to Kryptonite. As Superman weakens, Luthor taunts him by revealing the first missile is headed to Hackensack, New Jersey, in the opposite direction, knowing Superman could not stop both impacts. Teschmacher is horrified because her mother lives in Hackensack, but Luthor does not care and leaves Superman to a slow death. Teschmacher rescues Superman on the condition that he will deal with the New Jersey missile first. He is consequently too late to stop the second impact, causing a massive earthquake which he battles to correct. While he is busy saving others, Lois' car falls into the ground as a result of an aftershock, and quickly begins to fill with dirt and debris, which suffocates her to death. Distraught at being unable to save Lois, Superman ignores Jor-El's warning not to interfere with human history, preferring to remember Jonathan Kent's advice that he must be here for "a reason", and travels back in time in order to save Lois, altering the historical timeline so that her car is never caught in the aftershock. Superman then delivers Luthor and Otis to prison, where he knows they will be secure until they receive a fair trial. ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6f/Sprmnmovie.jpg/240px-Sprmnmovie.jpg) Superman was originally to be released in June 1978, but the problems during filming pushed the film back by six months. Due to the rushed post-production, no premiere took place. Editor Stuart Baird reflected, "Filming was finished in October 1978 and it is a miracle we had the film released three months later. Big-budgeted films today tend to take six to eight months."[20] Donner wished he "had another six months; I would have perfected a lot of things. But at some point you've got to turn the picture over."[19] Warner Bros. spent $7 million to market and promote the film.[16] Superman opened on December 15, 1978 in America, grossing $134.22 million in North America and $166 million in foreign countries, totaling $300.22 million worldwide. The film was declared a financial success since it beat its $55 million budget.[29] Superman was the sixth-highest grossing film at the time of its release, as well as Warner Brothers' most successful (which has since been beaten).[20] Based on 46 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of reviewers enjoyed Superman, with the consensus "Superman deftly blends humor and gravitas, taking advantage of the perfectly cast Christopher Reeve to craft a loving, nostalgic tribute to an American pop culture icon."[30] By comparison Metacritic collected an average score of 88, based on 12 reviews.[31] Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave a positive reaction.[14] Shuster was "delighted to see Superman on the screen. I got chills. Chris Reeve has just the right touch of humor. He really is Superman."[12] Roger Ebert gave a largely positive review. "Superman is a pure delight, a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects and wit. Christopher Reeve is perfectly cast in the role. Any poor choice would have ruined the film."[32] James Berardinelli believed "there's no doubt that it's a flawed movie, but it's one of the most wonderfully entertaining flawed movies made during the 1970s. It's exactly what comic book fans hoped it would be. Perhaps most heartening of all, however, is the message at the end of the credits announcing the impending arrival of Superman II."[33] Harry Knowles is a longtime fan of the film, but was critical of elements that didn't represent the Superman stories as seen in the comics.[34] Dave Kehr felt "the tone, style, and point of view change almost from shot to shot. This is the definitive corporate film. It is best when it takes itself seriously, worst when it takes the easy way out in giggly camp, When Lex Luthor enters the action, Gene Hackman plays the arch-villain like a hairdresser left over from a TV skit Superman was nominated for three Academy Award (Editing, Music (Original Score) and Sound), and received a Special Achievement Award for its visual effects. Donner publicly expressed disgust that production designer John Barry and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth were not recognized.[18] Superman was successful at the 32nd British Academy Film Awards. Reeve won Best Newcomer, while Gene Hackman, Unsworth, Barry and the sound designers earned nominations.[36] The film won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.[37] At The Saturn Awards Margot Kidder, Barry, John Williams and the visual effects department received awards, and the film won Best Science Fiction Film. Christopher Reeve, Richard Donner, Valerie Perrine and the costume designers were nominated for their work as well.[38] In addition, Williams was given a nomination at the 36th Golden Globe Awards and won a Grammy Award.[39][40] In 2007, the Visual Effects Society listed Superman as the 44th most influential use of visual effects of all time.[41] In 2008, Empire named it the #174 greatest movie all-time on its list of 500.[42] With the success of the film it was instantly decided to finish Superman II. Ilya and Alexander Salkind and Pierre Spengler did not ask Richard Donner to return because Donner criticized them during publicity.[4] Donner commented in January 1979, "I'd work with Spengler again, but only on my terms. As long as he has nothing to say as the producer, and is just liaison between Alexander Salkind and his money, that's fine. If they don't want it on those terms, then they've got to go out and find another director, it sure as s*** ain't going to be me."[19] Margot Kidder, who portrayed Lois Lane, was dissatisfied by the producers' decision,[20] and also criticized the Salkinds during publicity. As a result, Kidder was only given a cameo appearance for Superman III, and not a main supporting role.[43] Jack O'Halloran, who portrayed Non, stated, "It was great to work with Donner. Richard Lester was as big an asshole as the Salkinds."[44] Two more films, Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), were produced. Superman Returns was released in 2006. Director Bryan Singer credited Superman: The Movie as an influence for Superman Returns, and even used restored footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut also was released in 2006.[21] The film's final sequence, which features Superman flying high above the Earth at sunrise, and breaking the fourth wall to smile briefly at the camera, featured at the end of every Superman film starring Christopher Reeve, and was reshot with Brandon Routh for Superman Returns. Alongside Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman created a reemergence of science fiction films. Superman also established the superhero film genre as viable outside the world of Saturday matinee serials, although it was a decade before the comparable success of the Batman series and two decades before that of X-Men and Spider-Man. American Broadcasting Company aired the television debut of Superman in 1981, adding over 30 minutes of footage not seen in theaters. A syndicated version of the film aired in local television stations in Los Angeles, California and Washington, D.C. in the 1990s included most of this added footage and two additional scenes never seen before.[13] When Michael Thau and Warner Home Video started working on a film restoration in 2000, some of the extra footage was not added because of poor visual effects. Thau felt "the pace of the film's storyline would be adversely affected. This included timing problems with John William's musical score. The cut of the movie shown on TV was put together to make the movie longer when shown on TV because ABC paid per minute to air the movie. The special edition cut is designed for the best viewing experience in the true spirit of movie making."[45] There was a special test screening of the Special Edition in 2001 in Austin, Texas, on March 23 with plans for a possible wider theatrical release later that year, which did not occur.[46] In May 2001, Warner Home Video released the special edition on DVD.[47] Director Richard Donner also assisted, working slightly over a year on the project. The release included making-of documentaries directed by Thau and eight minutes of restored footage.[48] Thau explained, "I worked on Ladyhawke and that's how I met Donner and Tom Mankiewicz. I used to hear those wonderful stories in the cutting room that Tom, Donner and Stuart would tell about Superman and that's how I kind of got the ideas for the plots of Taking Flight and Making Superman.[48] Donner commented, "There were a few shots where the Superman costume looked green. We went in and cleaned that up, bringing the color back to where it should be."[49] Thau wanted to make the film shorter, "I wanted to take out the damn flying sequence where Lois is reciting a poem ["Can You Read My Mind"] when they're flying around. I also wanted to take out where it was just generic action. It was like a two minute car chase. Donner protested and the stuff stayed in."[48] It was followed by a box set release in the same month, containing "bare bones" editions of Superman II, Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.[50] In November 2006, a four-disc special edition was released,[51] followed by a HD DVD release[52] and blu-ray.[53] Also available (with other films) is the eight disc "Christopher Reeve Superman Collection"[54] and the 14 disc "Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition Rockyone of the most famous theme songs ever...some would argue more so then the Star Wars theme ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/18/Rocky_poster.jpg/225px-Rocky_poster.jpg) Rocky is a 1976 film written by and starring Sylvester Stallone and directed by John G. Avildsen. It tells the rags-to-riches American Dream story of Rocky Balboa, an uneducated but good-hearted debt collector for a loan shark in Philadelphia. Balboa is also a club fighter who gets a shot at the world heavyweight championship when the scheduled contender breaks his hand. Also starring in Rocky are Talia Shire as Adrian, Burt Young as Adrian's brother Paulie, Burgess Meredith as Rocky's trainer Mickey Goldmill, and Carl Weathers as the champion, Apollo Creed. The film, made for only $1.1 million,[1] and shot relatively fast in 28 days, was a sleeper hit; it made over US$117.2 million,[2] and won three Oscars, including Best Picture. The film received many positive reviews and turned Stallone into a major star.[3] It spawned five sequels: Rocky II, III, IV, V and Rocky Balboa In November, 1975, Rocky Balboa is introduced as a small-time boxer and collector for Anthony Gazzo (Joe Spinell), a loan shark. The World Heavyweight Championship bout is scheduled for New Year's Day, 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial. When the opponent of undefeated heavyweight champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is injured, Creed comes up with the idea of fighting a local Philadelphia underdog and, because he likes Rocky's nickname, "The Italian Stallion," he selects the unknown fighter. He puts it in light by proclaiming "Apollo Creed meets 'The Italian Stallion.' To prepare for the fight, Rocky trains with 1920s-era ex-bantamweight fighter Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith), while Rocky's good friend, Paulie (Burt Young), a meat-packing plant worker, lets him practice his punches on the carcasses hanging in the freezers. During training, Rocky dates Paulie's quiet sister, Adrian (Talia Shire). The night before the fight, Rocky confides in Adrian that he does not expect to beat Creed, and that all he wants is to go the distance with Creed (which no fighter has ever done), meaning that lasting 15 rounds (the typical scheduled length of championship fights at the time) against him would mean he "... wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood." Creed does not initially take the fight seriously, but Rocky unexpectedly knocks him down in the first round and the match turns intense. The fight indeed lasts 15 rounds with each fighter suffering many injuries; as the final round bell sounds with both fighters locked in each other's arms, an exhausted Creed vows, "Ain't gonna be no re-match", to which an equally spent Rocky replies, "Don't want one". After the fight, Rocky calls out for Adrian, who runs down to the ring. As the ring announcer declares the fight for Apollo Creed by virtue of a split decision, Adrian and Rocky embrace while they profess their love to one another, not caring about the results of the fight With the character of outspoken Apollo Creed influenced by Muhammad Ali, one interesting detail is the cameo appearance of Joe Frazier, another real-life former world heavyweight champion who fought Ali three times. During the Academy Awards ceremony, Ali and Stallone staged a brief comic confrontation to show Ali was not offended by the film. Due to the film's low budget, members of Stallone's family played minor roles. His father rings the bell to signal the start and end of a round, his brother Frank plays a street corner singer, and his first wife, Sasha, was the set photographer.[citation needed] Other cameos include Los Angeles television sportscaster Stu Nahan playing himself, alongside radio and TV broadcaster Bill Baldwin and Lloyd Kaufman, founder of the longest-running independent film company Troma, appearing as a drunk. Longtime Detroit Channel 7 Action News anchor Diana Lewis has a small scene as a TV news reporter. Tony Burton appeared as Apollo Creed's trainer, Tony "Duke" Evers, a role he would reprise in the entire Rocky series, though he is not given an official name until Rocky II Sylvester Stallone was inspired to create the film by the famous fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner. Wepner had been TKO'd in the 15th round by Ali, but nobody ever expected him to last as long as he did. Wepner recalls in a January 2000 interview, "Sly (Stallone) called me about two weeks after the Ali fight and told me he was gonna make the movie." Some of the plot's most memorable moments — Rocky's carcass-punching scenes and Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as part of his training regime — are taken from the real-life exploits of heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Frazier, for which he received no credit. The small apartment that Rocky lived was shot at 1818 East Tusculum Street in the Kensington section of North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The famous scene of Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has become a cultural icon. In 1982, a statue of Rocky, commissioned by Stallone for Rocky III, was placed at the top of the Rocky Steps. City Commerce Director Dick Doran claimed that Stallone and Rocky had done more for the city's image than "anyone since Ben Franklin."[8] Differing opinions of the statue and its placement led to a relocation to the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia Spectrum Arena, although the statue was temporarily returned to the top of the steps in 1990 for Rocky V, and again in 2006 for the 30th anniversary of the original Rocky movie (although this time it was placed at the bottom of the steps). Later that year, it was permanently moved to a spot next to the steps.[8] The scene is frequently parodied in the media. In the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can", Lisa Simpson runs up a flight of stairs wearing a tracksuit similar to the one worn by Rocky.[9] In the movie You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Zohan's nemesis, Phantom, goes through a parodied training sequence finishing with him running up a desert dune and raising his hands in victory. In the fourth season's finale of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, as the credits roll at the end of the episode, Will is seen running up the same steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; however, as he celebrates after finishing his climb, he passes out in exhaustion, and while he lies unconscious on the ground, a pickpocket steals his wallet. In addition, a TV advert for the UK Ford Escort Mark 5 RS2000, launched in 1991, and lasting one minute long, is based on Rocky, using the theme tune. It ends with the car going up the steps, and turning round to face the camera. The advert ends with the slogan "The Champ is Back", another play on Rocky. Although, in this case, it was the return of the RS2000 after nearly 10 years. In 2006, E! Entertainment Television named the "Rocky Steps" scene number 13 in its 101 Most Awesome Moments in Entertainment.[10] During the 1996 Summer Olympics torch relay, Philadelphia native Dawn Staley was chosen to run up the museum steps. In 2004, Presidential candidate John Kerry ended his pre-convention campaign at the foot of the steps before going to Boston to accept his party's nomination for President.[11] . Rocky received many positive reviews when it was released in 1976. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Rocky 4 out of 4 stars and said that Stallone reminded him of "the young Marlon Brando[12]." Box Office Magazine claimed that audiences would be "...touting Sylvester 'Sly' Stallone as a new star".[13][14] The film received positive reviews from such critics as Pauline Kael, Richard Eder, Katie Kelly, Lita Eliscu, Ben Nolan, and David Sterritt. Negative reviewers included Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who called it "pure '30s make believe" and slammed both Stallone's acting and Avildsen's directing, calling the latter "...none too decisive..."[15] Frank Rich liked the film, calling it "almost 100 per cent schmaltz," but favoring it over current movie cynicism. Richard Corliss, in Time, found the film "Preposterous. One can really not deal with such a howler and at the same time interest oneself fully with Rocky's quest for a moral victory" and that the film's preposterousness is predicated on the fact that "an entire film devoted to so dreary a fellow would be intolerable." He lamented that a film such as this had been the small-budget independent to break through to mainstream commercial success.[16] More than 30 years later, the film enjoys a reputation as a classic and still receives positive reviews; Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 93% fresh rating.[17] Another positive online review came from the BBC Films website, with both reviewer Almar Haflidason and BBC online users giving it 5/5 stars.[18] In Steven J. Schneider's 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Schneider says the film is "often overlooked as schmaltz."[19] In 2006, Rocky was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Preston "Marty" Long, A.K.A. the Silver Fox, denounced the National Registry for not having selected it sooner saying "Watching Rocky is a religious experience. Nothing else compares to it." In June 2008, AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten"— the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres— after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Rocky was acknowledged as the second-best film in the sports genre.[20][21] In a review published in October 2008, film critic David Thomson finds the film "excruciating" and harshly criticizes its poor acting, writing, and production values.[22] In an interview, Thomson said of his review, "Now, I think Sylvester Stallone is absurd, in every thought and movement. But he is a vital, vitally absurd part of the movies... the trashiness in movies will never die."[23] Rocky received ten Academy Awards nominations in nine categories, winning three:[24] Best Picture (Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler) (won) Best Director (John G. Avildsen) (won) Film Editing (Richard Halsey and Scott Conrad) (won) Best Original Screenplay (Sylvester Stallone) Best Actor (Sylvester Stallone) Best Actress (Talia Shire) Best Supporting Actor (Burt Young) Best Supporting Actor (Burgess Meredith) Best Music, Original Song (Bill Conti, Carol Connors and Ayn Robbins for "Gonna Fly Now") Best Sound (Harry W. Tetrick, William L. McCaughey, Lyle J. Burbridge and Bud Alper) Rocky has also appeared on several of the American Film Institute's 100 Years lists. AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, number 78.[25] AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition), number 57.[26] AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers, number 4.[27] AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes number 80: "Yo, Adrian!".[28] AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains Heroes number 7: Rocky Balboa.[29] AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills #52 AFI's 10 Top 10: Sports #2 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Songs number 58 Gonna Fly Now The Directors Guild of America awarded Rocky its annual award for best film of the year in 1976, and in 2006, Sylvester Stallone's original screenplay for Rocky was selected for the Writers Guild of America Award as the 78th best screenplay of all time.[30] Blade Runner ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/53/Blade_Runner_poster.jpg/215px-Blade_Runner_poster.jpg) Blade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically manufactured beings called replicants — visually indistinguishable from adult humans — are used for dangerous or menial work on Earth's "off-world colonies". Following a replicant uprising, replicants become illegal on Earth and specialist police called "blade runners" are trained to hunt down and "retire" escaped replicants on Earth. The plot focuses on a brutal and cunning group of recently-escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the semi-retired blade runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment. Blade Runner initially polarized critics: some were displeased with the pacing, while others enjoyed its thematic complexity. The film performed poorly in North American theaters. Despite the box office failure of the film, it has since become a cult classic.[1] Blade Runner has been hailed for its production design, depicting a "retrofitted" future.[2][3] It remains a leading example of the neo-noir genre.[4] Blade Runner brought the work of author Philip K. Dick to the attention of Hollywood, and several more films have since been based on his work.[5] Ridley Scott regards Blade Runner as "probably" his most complete and personal film.[6][7] In 1993, Blade Runner was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2007, the American Film Institute named it the 97th greatest American film of all time in the 10th Anniversary edition of its 100 years... 100 Movies list. Seven versions of the film have been shown, for various markets, and as a result of controversial changes made by film executives. A rushed Director's Cut was released in 1992 after a strong response to workprint screenings. This, in conjunction with its popularity as a video rental, made it one of the first films released on DVD, resulting in a basic disc with mediocre video and audio quality.[8] In 2007, Warner Bros. released in select theaters and DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray, the 25th anniversary digitally remastered definitive Final Cut by Scott Advances in genetic technology have allowed scientists to create sophisticated biologically-engineered humanoid beings called "replicants". Following a violent revolt that takes place "off world," replicants are declared illegal on Earth. In Los Angeles, November 2019, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called out of retirement when a fellow Blade Runner, Holden (Morgan Paull) is shot administering a Voight-Kampff test to Leon (Brion James), an escaped replicant. A reluctant Deckard is brought to his old boss Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), who informs him that the recent escape of Nexus-6 replicants is the worst yet. He orders Deckard to eliminate the four replicants, a process referred to as "retirement". Deckard agrees to help after Bryant makes thinly-veiled threats – if Deckard is not a cop, then he is 'little people'. Bryant briefs Deckard on the replicants: Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader, is a "combat model"; Leon Kowalski (Brion James) is a nuclear fuel loader; Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) is an assassin built for martial arts; and Pris (Daryl Hannah) is a "basic pleasure model". Bryant also explains that the Nexus-6 model has a four-year lifespan as a failsafe to prevent them from developing emotions and desire for independence. Deckard is then teamed with Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and sent to the Tyrell Corporation to ensure that the Voight-Kampff test works on Nexus-6 models. While there, Deckard discovers that Tyrell's (Joe Turkel) young assistant Rachael (Sean Young) is an experimental replicant who believes she is a human; Rachael's consciousness has been enhanced with implanted memories from Tyrell's niece, an accomplishment with which Tyrell seems most pleased. Deckard and Gaff search Leon's apartment as Roy and Leon enter the eye manufactory of Chew (James Hong); under interrogation, Chew directs them to J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) as their best chance of meeting Tyrell. Roy's plan to meet his maker is hampered by the urgency created by his limited lifespan; he is already exhibiting symptoms of impending death. Later, Rachael visits Deckard at his apartment to prove her humanity to him but leaves in tears after Deckard coldly tells her that her memories are implants. Meanwhile, Pris meets J.F. Sebastian and he invites her into his apartment in the Bradbury Building where he lives with his manufactured companions. In some versions of the film, Deckard is seen in his apartment daydreaming about a unicorn; he gets back to work and uses a computer scanner to find an image of Zhora in Leon's photos. Deckard goes to an area of the city where genetically engineered animals are sold to analyze a scale found in Leon's bathroom, learning that it came from a snake made by Abdul Ben Hassan. After a rough interrogation, the snake dealer directs Deckard to a sleazy strip club owned by Taffey Lewis (Hy Pyke), who employs Zhora. After a struggle in Zhora's changing room and a chase through the crowded streets, Deckard shoots and "retires" Zhora. Deckard meets with Bryant shortly after and is told to add Rachael to his list of retirements, as she has disappeared from the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Deckard spots Rachael in the crowd and follows her but is grabbed and brutally beaten by Leon. Rachael saves Deckard by shooting and killing Leon, and the two head back to Deckard's apartment, where they make love. Back at Sebastian's apartment Roy arrives, kisses Pris deeply and tells her they are the only ones left. They employ Sebastian's help by explaining their plight in a subtly threatening manner. Roy discovers that Sebastian, though human, is suffering from a genetic disorder that accelerates his aging; he sympathizes with Sebastian because of their common fate. Under the pretext of Sebastian informing Tyrell of a move for a game of correspondence chess that Sebastian and Tyrell are playing, Roy and Sebastian enter Tyrell's penthouse. Roy demands an extension to his lifespan from his maker. Tyrell refuses to help because of limitations of nature that even he can't overcome. Roy then asks absolution of his sins, confessing that he has done "questionable things". Tyrell arrogantly dismisses this, praising Roy's advanced design and his amazing accomplishments. He tells Roy to "revel in his time", to which Roy comments "Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for." Roy then holds Tyrell's head in his hands, gives him a kiss, and kills him by crushing his skull. Sebastian, watching in horror, begins to run for the elevator, with Roy following. Roy rides the elevator down alone, strongly implying that he has killed Sebastian as well.[10] Deckard arrives at Sebastian's apartment and is ambushed by Pris. Deckard manages to grab his gun and retires Pris, just as Roy returns. Roy is horrified at her death. Angrily, Roy manages to punch through a wall and grab Deckard's right arm, and proceeds to break two of his fingers in retaliation for killing Zhora and Pris. Roy releases Deckard and gives him a little time to run before he begins to hunt him through the dilapidated Bradbury Building. However, not too long into the hunt, the symptoms of Roy's limited lifespan worsen and his right hand begins to cramp, so he jabs a nail through it to regain control. Able again, albeit temporarily, Roy eventually forces Deckard to the roof, as Deckard attempts to escape Roy, he leaps across to another building but falls short and ends up hanging from a rain-slicked beam. Roy easily vaults the same distance and is left standing above his struggling opponent. As Deckard loses his grip, Roy seizes his arm and hauls him onto the roof, saving Deckard. As Roy's life fades away, he sits and delivers a brief soliloquy about the experiences of his life: I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die. Roy dies, and from a distance, Gaff shouts over to Deckard, "It's too bad she won't live; but then again, who does?" A worried Deckard returns to his apartment and is relieved to find Rachael alive. As they leave, Deckard finds an origami unicorn, a calling card left by Gaff. Depending on the version, the film ends with Deckard and Rachael either leaving the apartment block to an uncertain future or driving through an idyllic pastoral landscape. Blade Runner was released in 1,290 theaters on June 25, 1982. That date was chosen by producer Alan Ladd, Jr. because his previous highest-grossing films (Star Wars and Alien) had a similar opening date (May 25) in 1977 and 1979, making the date his "lucky day".[65] However, the gross for the opening weekend was a disappointing $6.15 million.[66] A significant factor in the film's rather poor box office performance was that its release coincided with other science fiction film releases, including The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and, most significantly, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which dominated box office revenues that summer.[67] Film critics were polarized as some felt the story had taken a back seat to special effects and that it was not the action/adventure the studio had advertised. Others acclaimed its complexity and predicted it would stand the test of time.[68] In the United States, a general criticism was its slow pacing that detracts from other strengths;[69] Sheila Benson from the Los Angeles Times called it "Blade crawler," while Pat Berman in State and Columbia Record described it as "science fiction pornography".[70] Roger Ebert praised Blade Runner's visuals and recommended it for that reason; however, he found the human story clichéd and a little thin.[16] In 2007, upon release of The Final Cut, Roger Ebert somewhat revised his original opinion of the film and added it to his list of Great Movies Blade Runner has won the following awards: Year Award Category – Recipient(s) 1982 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award Best Cinematography – Jordan Cronenweth 1983 BAFTA Film Award Best Cinematography – Jordan Cronenweth Best Costume Design – Charles Knode, Michael Kaplan Best Production Design/Art Direction – Lawrence G. Paull 1983 Hugo Award Best Dramatic Presentation 1983 London Critics Circle Film Awards – Special Achievement Award Lawrence G. Paull, Douglas Trumbull, Syd Mead – For their visual concept (technical prize). It has been nominated for the following awards:[72] Academy Award (1983) Best Art Direction-Set Decoration – Lawrence G. Paull, David L. Snyder, Linda DeScenna Best Effects, Visual Effects – Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich, David Dryer BAFTA (1983) Best Film Editing – Terry Rawlings Best Make Up Artist – Marvin G. Westmore Best Score – Vangelis Best Sound – Peter Pennell, Bud Alper, Graham V. Hartstone, Gerry Humphreys Best Special Visual Effects – Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich, David Dryer British Society of Cinematographers: Best Cinematography Award (1982) – Jordan Cronenweth Fantasporto International Fantasy Film Award (1983) – Best Film – Ridley Scott International Fantasy Film Award (1993) – Best Film – Ridley Scott (Director's cut) Golden Globe: Best Original Score (1983) – Motion Picture – Vangelis Saturn Award (1983) Best Science Fiction Film Best Director – Ridley Scott Best Special Effects – Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich Best Supporting Actor – Rutger Hauer Best Genre Video Release (1994) – Director's cut ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/BladeRunner_Spinner_Billboard.jpg) Among the folklore that has grown up around the film over the years has been the belief that the film was a curse to the companies whose logos were displayed prominently as product placements in some scenes.[89] While they were market leaders at the time, many of them experienced disastrous setbacks over the next decade and hardly exist today. RCA, which at one time was the U.S. leading consumer electronics and communications conglomerate, was bought out by one time parent GE in 1985, and dismantled. Atari, which dominated the home video game market when the film came out, never recovered from the next year's downturn in the industry, and by the 1990s had ceased to exist as anything more than a brand, a back catalog of games and some legacy computers. The Atari of today is an entirely different firm, using the former company's name. Cuisinart similarly went bankrupt in 1989, though it lives on under new ownership. The Bell System monopoly was broken up that same year, and all of the resulting Regional Bell operating companies have since changed their names and merged back with each other and other companies to form the new AT&T. Pan Am suffered the terrorist bombing/destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 and after a decade of mounting losses, finally went bankrupt in 1991 with the falloff in overseas travel caused by the Gulf War. The Coca-Cola Company suffered losses during its failed introduction of New Coke in 1985, but soon afterwards regained its market share.[90] Its continued success has made Coca-Cola one of several exceptions to the Blade Runner curse; also appearing in the film are logos for Budweiser, and the electronics company TDK, which continue to thrive in contemporary markets. I knew this next film would show up somewhere on this countdown...... Transformers ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/66/Transformers07.jpg/200px-Transformers07.jpg) Transformers is a 2007 live-action film adaptation of the Transformers franchise, directed by Michael Bay and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. It stars Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky, a teenager involved in a war between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, two factions of alien robots who can disguise themselves by transforming into everyday machinery. The Decepticons desire control of the All Spark, the object that created their robotic race, with the intention of using it to build an army by giving life to the machines of Earth. Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Jon Voight, Anthony Anderson and John Turturro also star, while voice-actors Peter Cullen and Hugo Weaving voices Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively. Producers Don Murphy and Tom DeSanto developed the project in 2003, with a treatment written by DeSanto. Executive producer Steven Spielberg came on board the following year, and hired Orci, Kurtzman and Bay for the project in 2005. The filmmakers wanted a realistic depiction of the story, and created a complex design aesthetic for the robots to stress their alien nature. The computer-generated characters were programmed to have thousands of mechanical pieces move as they transformed and maneuvered. The United States Military and General Motors lent vehicles and aircraft during filming, which saved money for the production and added realism to the battle scenes. Hasbro organized an enormous promotional campaign for the film, making deals with hundreds of companies. This advertising blitz included a viral marketing campaign, coordinated releases of prequel comic books, toys and books, as well as product placement deals with GM and eBay. The film was a box office success despite mixed critical reaction to the radical redesigns of the characters, and reviews criticizing the focus on the humans at the expense of the robots. It is the thirty first most successful film released and the fifth most successful of 2007, grossing approximately US$708 million worldwide. The film won four awards from the Visual Effects Society and was nominated for three Academy Awards. The film became the first in a series, it revitalized media interest in the franchise, and a sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was released on June 24, 2009 The film opens with Optimus Prime, heroic leader of the benevolent Autobots, describing in a voice-over the destruction of the Transformers' home world, Cybertron. It was destroyed by the evil Decepticon leader Megatron in his quest to obtain the All Spark. The Autobots want to find the All Spark so they can use it to rebuild Cybertron and end the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, while the Decepticons want to use it to defeat the Autobots and conquer the universe. Megatron had managed to locate the All Spark on Earth, but crash-landed in the Arctic Circle and froze in the ice. After stumbling upon his frozen body in 1897, the explorer Captain Archibald Witwicky accidentally activated Megatron's navigational system and his eye glasses were imprinted with the coordinates of the All Spark's location, an incident that left him blind and mentally unstable. Sector 7, a secret government organization founded by Herbert Hoover, discovered the All Spark in the Colorado River and built the Hoover Dam around it to mask its energy emissions. The still-frozen Megatron was moved into this facility and was used to advance human technology through reverse engineering. In the present day, the group of Decepticons — Blackout, Scorponok, Frenzy, Barricade, Starscream, Devastator and Bonecrusher — have landed on Earth and assumed the disguise of Earth vehicles (except Scorponok and Frenzy, who hide within Blackout and Barricade). Blackout and Scorponok attack the U.S. SOCCENT forward operations base in Qatar and try to hack into the U.S. Military network to find the location of Megatron and the All Spark. Their mission is thwarted when the base staff severs the network cable connections. While Blackout destroys the rest of the base, Scorponok chases a small group of survivors, led by Captain William Lennox and Sergeant Robert Epps, who have photographic evidence of the robots. Scorponok is eventually repelled and hides in the sand after his tail is damaged. During this battle, the military discovers the only effective weapons against the Transformers' armor are high-heat sabot rounds. After Blackout's failure, Frenzy infiltrates Air Force One to again hack into the military network, planting a computer virus. He finds the map imprinted on Captain Witwicky's glasses. While the Pentagon interrupts Frenzy's plan, he finds that Witwicky's descendant Sam Witwicky intends to sell the glasses on eBay. Frenzy and Barricade begin tracking Sam's location. Meanwhile, Sam buys the Autobot scout Bumblebee (also on Earth disguised as a 1976 Chevrolet Camaro,[2]) as his first car. After Bumblebee helps Sam woo his crush, Mikaela Banes, he leaves at night to transmit a homing signal to the rest of the Autobots. Sam pursues Bumblebee, thinking someone is stealing his car, but is shocked to find his car is actually a giant robot, which he initially regards as evil. Sam then gets arrested, and in the police station, tries to explain to the police officer what happened, but the uncaring officer just assumes he's on drugs. When Bumblebee (in car mode) returns the following day, Sam flees, believing the car is stalking him. While out, Barricade attacks Sam and interrogates him about his grandfather's glasses. Bumblebee saves him (as well as Mikaela). In the process, Mikaela severs Frenzy's head but he morphs into her cellphone and hides in her purse. They leave to rendezvous with the rest of the Autobots — Optimus Prime, Jazz, Ironhide, and Ratchet — who have landed on Earth and taken the forms of Earth vehicles as well. Sam, Mikaela, and the Autobots return to Sam's home and obtain the glasses; however, agents from Sector 7 arrive and take Sam and Mikaela into custody. The Autobots intervene, but Sector 7 captures Bumblebee and sends Sam and Mikaela away. Sam and Mikaela are taken to Hoover Dam, as are Lennox and Epps, under Defense Secretary John Keller's orders. Frenzy sends an alert to the other Decepticons and sneaks into the computer system, freeing Megatron from his frozen state. Sam convinces the Sector 7 agents to release Bumblebee so that he can deliver the All Spark to Optimus Prime. Frenzy's virus has shut down government communications, but Keller and two hackers, Maggie and Glen, manage to establish a signal to the Air Force in order to support the Autobot-human convoy that has gone to nearby Mission City to hide the All Spark. The Decepticons attack; Bonecrusher, Frenzy, Jazz, Devastator and Blackout are all killed during the ensuing battle. Sam, who was instructed to put the All Spark into Optimus Prime's chest (subsequently destroying it and Optimus Prime if the battle went in Megatron's favor), instead chooses to ram the All Spark cube into Megatron's chest. The All Spark disintegrates, and its power kills Megatron. Optimus takes a fragment of the All Spark from Megatron's corpse, but admits that with its destruction, their home world Cybertron cannot be restored. The government orders the closure of Sector 7 and has the dead Decepticons dumped into the Laurentian Abyss. Lennox and Epps are reunited with their families, and Sam and Mikaela form a relationship. Optimus transmits a message to all surviving Autobots in space, telling them that they have a new home on Earth. During the credits, Starscream, who fled the battle, escapes into space. Reviews of the film were "generally favorable".[78] Review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 57% of critics gave the film positive write-ups, based on 206 reviews,[79] with a 68% rating from selected "notable" critics.[80] At the website Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 61, based on 35 reviews.[78] IGN's Todd Gilchrist called it Michael Bay's best film, and "one of the few instances where it's OK to enjoy something for being smart and dumb at the same time, mostly because it's undeniably also a whole lot of fun".[81] The Advertiser's Sean Fewster found the visual effects so seamless that "you may come to believe the studio somehow engineered artificial intelligence".[82] The Denver Post's Lisa Kennedy praised the depiction of the robots as having "a believably rendered scale and intimacy",[83] and ABC presenter Margaret Pomeranz was surprised "that a complete newcomer to the Transformers phenomenon like myself became involved in the fate of these mega-machines".[84] Ain't It Cool News's Drew McWeeny felt most of the cast grounded the story, and that "it has a real sense of wonder, one of the things that’s missing from so much of the big CGI lightshows released these days".[85] Author Peter David found it ludicrous fun, and said that "[Bay] manages to hold on to his audience's suspension of disbelief long enough for us to segue into some truly spectacular battle scenes".[86] Despite the praise for the visual effects, there was division over the human storylines. The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt liked "how a teen plotline gets tied in to the end of the world",[87] while Empire's Ian Nathan praised Shia LaBeouf as "a smart, natural comedian, [who] levels the bluntness of this toy story with an ironic bluster".[88] Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles felt Bay's style conflicted with Spielberg's, arguing the military story only served as a distraction from Sam.[89] James Berardinelli hated the film as he did not connect with the characters in-between the action, which he found tedious.[90] Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan found the humans "oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen",[91] while ComingSoon.net's Joshua Stames felt the Transformers were "completely believable, right up to the moment they open their mouths to talk, when they revert to bad cartoon characters".[92] Daily Herald's Matt Arado was annoyed that "the Transformers [are] little more than supporting players", and felt the middle act was sluggish.[93] CNN's Tom Charity questioned the idea of a film based on a toy, and felt it would "buzz its youthful demographic [...] but leave the rest of us wondering if Hollywood could possibly aim lower Transformers fans were initially divided over the film due to the radical redesigns of many characters, although the casting of Peter Cullen was warmly received.[26] Transformers comic book writer Simon Furman and Beast Wars script consultant Benson Yee both warmly received it as spectacular fun, but Furman argued there were too many human storylines.[96] Yee felt that being the first in a series, the film had to establish much of the fictional universe and therefore did not have time to focus on the Decepticons.[97] The film created a greater awareness of the franchise and drew in many new fans.[98] Transformers' box office success led to the active development of films based on Voltron and Robotech,[99] as well as a Knight Rider remake.[100] When filming the sequel, Bay was told by soldiers the film helped their children understand what their work was like, and that many had christened their Buffalos – the vehicle used for Bonecrusher – after various Transformer characters.[101] After the film's 2009 sequel was titled Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Roberto Orci was asked if this film would be retitled, just as Star Wars was titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when rereleased. He doubted the possibility, but said if it was retitled, he would call it Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye.[102] Before its release, Transformers was voted "Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet" at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards,[122] and at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, it was voted "best film". It was nominated for three Academy Awards, in the fields of Achievement in Sound Editing, Achievement in Sound Mixing, and Achievement in Visual Effects.[123] It received a 2008 Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Movie.[124] The film received a Jury Merit Award for Best Special Effects in the 2007 Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival.[125] Visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar was honored at the Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony on October 22, 2007 for his work on the film.[126] In 2008, the Visual Effects Society awarded Transformers four awards: for the best visual effects in an "effects driven" film and the "best single visual effects sequence" (the Optimus-Bonecrusher battle). The film's other two awards were for its miniatures and compositing.[127] Broadcast Music Incorporated awarded composer Steve Jablonsky for his score.[128] Entertainment Weekly named Bumblebee as their fourth favorite computer generated character,while The Times listed Optimus Prime's depiction as the thirtieth best film robot, citing his coolness and dangerousness.
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 17:32:29 GMT -5
this spot was too damn big for the last post...it exceeded the character max limit so the final movie at this spot gets it's own post finally.........the only film to feature a prowrestler in a lead role They Live![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3d/1988They_Live_poster300.jpg/200px-1988They_Live_poster300.jpg) here's what you had to say about it: Life's a bitch...and she's back in heat They Live is a 1988 film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage." The movie is based on Ray Nelson's 1963 short story "Eight O’Clock in the Morning." Part science fiction thriller and part black comedy, the film echoed contemporary fears of a declining economy, within a culture of greed and conspicuous consumption common among Americans in the 1980s. In They Live, the ruling class within the monied elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of subliminal media advertising and the control of economic opportunity. George Nada (Roddy Piper) is a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site. One of the workers, Frank Armitage (Keith David), takes him to a local shantytown. After eating at the soup kitchen and spending the night, he notices odd behavior at the small church across the street. Investigating, he discovers that the church's soup kitchen is a front: inside, the loud "choir practice" is a recording, scientific apparatus fills a back room, and cardboard boxes are stacked everywhere, including some in a secret compartment he stumbles into. That night, the police surround the church, forcing the inhabitants to flee. The police then turn on the shantytown, destroying it with bulldozers and beating the blind minister of the church to death. Nada returns to the site the next day and investigates the church again, which has been emptied. He takes one of the boxes from the secret compartment and opens it in an alleyway, finding it full of sunglasses. He keeps one pair and leaves the rest in a garbage can. When Nada later dons the glasses for the first time, the world appears in shades of grey, with significant differences. He notices that a billboard now simply displays the word "Obey"; without them it advertises that Control Data is "creating a transparent computing environment." Another billboard (normally displaying "Come to the Caribbean" written above a lovely woman lying on a beach) now displays the text "Marry and Reproduce." He also sees that paper money bears the words "This is your God." All printed matter around him contains subliminal advertising. Additionally, he soon discovers that many people are actually aliens, who are human-looking except for skull-like faces. When the aliens realize he can see them for what they truly are, the police suddenly arrive. Nada escapes and steals a police shotgun; he eventually stumbles into a local bank filled with aliens. Upon entering he proclaims, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.. and I'm all out of bubblegum." A shooting spree ensues and after killing many of them, one of the aliens sees him and disappears after twisting a dial on his wristwatch. Fleeing the bank, he forces a woman at gunpoint to take him to her house in the Hollywood Hills. Taking off the glasses to rest, he remarks "these glasses are like a drug... but when you take them off, you come down hard." Holly (the woman) tricks Nada and pushes him through her window, nearly killing him. He leaves behind his pair of sunglasses, however. After recovering, Nada returns to the construction site to talk over with Frank what he discovered. Seeing Nada as a wanted man for the shooting spree, Frank is initially uninterested in his story. The two engage in a long fight as Nada attempts to convince and then force Frank to put on the sunglasses. When Frank finally puts on the glasses, he sees the aliens around him as well. Frank joins Nada as they get in contact with the group from the church. They learn that a meeting is being held at a local community center later that evening. The community group listens to a seminar in the background introducing radical ideas. For example, the aliens are blamed for carbon dioxide and methane emissions--"they are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere"--and quickly using up the planet's resources. Holly returns, claiming to now believe John, and delivers some information to the rebels. At the meeting, they learn that the aliens' primary method of control is a signal being sent out on television, which is why the general public cannot see the aliens for what they are. An unknown but brilliant inventor has created a lens called the Hoffman lens. The lens shows the world as it really is. The sunglasses, which are also available as contact lenses, interfere with the aliens' hypnotic signal. The meeting is raided by the police, who shoot to kill. Nada and Frank escape with the help of one of the wrist devices. They find themselves in a network of underground passages that link hidden parts of the alien society including a port for space travel. Through the passages they find the aliens are throwing a party for their human collaborators. Further passages lead to the basement of a local TV station, Cable 54, and the source of the aliens' signal. Holly, who works at the station, is found by Frank and Nada and they take her with them to the roof. Nada runs up to the roof expecting that Holly and Frank are behind him. Holly pulls out a gun, presses it against Frank's temple, and kills Frank. Through the special lenses Nada notices the broadcasting antenna. Holly gets to the roof, then takes aim at Nada. Nada uses a hidden sleeve pistol and kills Holly. Nada then turns his attention back to the broadcasting antenna. Nada is shot and fatally wounded by the aliens, but manages to destroy the broadcasting antenna in the process. As a last dying act, Nada gives the aliens the finger. With the signal now destroyed, people around L.A. are surprised to discover aliens in their midst—chatting with them at the bar, meeting with them at the office, and even having sex with them. Although not an immediate commercial success, the film developed a cult following, reflected by a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 89%, although it was as high as 96% at one point.[2] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Since Mr. Carpenter seems to be trying to make a real point here, the flatness of They Live is doubly disappointing. So is its crazy inconsistency, since the film stops trying to abide even by its own game plan after a while".[3] Richard Harrington, in his review for the Washington Post wrote, "it's just John Carpenter as usual, trying to dig deep with a toy shovel. The plot for "They Live" is full of black holes, the acting is wretched, the effects are second-rate. In fact, the whole thing is so preposterous it makes V look like Masterpiece Theatre".[4] In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft make this fun and watchable, although the script takes a number of unfortunate shortcuts, and the possibilities inherent in the movie's central conceit are explored only cursorily".[5] Rick Groen, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, "the movie never gets beyond the pop Orwell premise. The social commentary wipes clean with a dry towelette - it's not intrusive and not pedantic, just lighter-than-air".[6] In his review for the Boston Globe, Jay Carr wrote, "But once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness", but felt that as a "as sci-fi horror comedy, They Live, with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with Terminator and Robocop, even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps".[7] Carpenter is on record as attributing the film's initial commercial failure to result from an audience "...who go to the movies in vast numbers these days [who] don't want to be enlightened".[1] The film was also ranked #18 on Entertainment Weekly magazine's "The Cult 25: The Essential Left-Field Movie Hits Since '83" list.
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Post by Mr. Emoticon Man on Jul 18, 2009 18:26:11 GMT -5
finally.........the only film to feature a prowrestler in a lead role What about the Hulk Hogan movies?
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 18:35:48 GMT -5
finally.........the only film to feature a prowrestler in a lead role What about the Hulk Hogan movies? meant to add that made the list
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Post by Mr. Emoticon Man on Jul 18, 2009 18:42:38 GMT -5
Ah, okay. So I'm guessing Mr. Nanny won't be coming in at #1, then? ![:P](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/tongue.png)
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 18:45:03 GMT -5
sadly neither will No Holds Barred
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 19:10:41 GMT -5
The next two films are tied at the 11th spot on the countdown and strangely enough they both recieved 11 votes. GREAT SCOT!!!! Back to the Future ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/52/Back_to_the_future.jpg/200px-Back_to_the_future.jpg) Back to the Future is a 1985 science fiction adventure film directed by Robert Zemeckis, co-written by Bob Gale and produced by Steven Spielberg. The film stars Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, as well as Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson. Back to the Future tells the story of Marty McFly, a teenager who is accidentally sent back in time from 1985 to 1955. He meets his parents in high school, accidentally attracting his mother's romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by causing his parents to fall in love, while finding a way to return to 1985. Zemeckis and Gale wrote the script after Gale mused upon whether he would have befriended his father if they attended school together. Various film studios rejected the script until the box office success of Zemeckis' Romancing the Stone, and the project was set up at Universal Pictures with Spielberg as executive producer. Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly when Michael J. Fox declined as he was busy filming the TV series Family Ties, but during filming Stoltz and the filmmakers decided Stoltz was miscast so they asked Fox again and he managed to work out a timetable so he gave enough time and commitment to both: the subsequent recasting meant the crew had to race through reshoots and post-production to complete the film for its July 3, 1985 release date. When released, it became the most successful film of the year, grossing more than $380 million worldwide and receiving critical acclaim. It won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film, and also earned Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Ronald Reagan even quoted the film in the 1986 State of the Union Address, and in 2007, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It marked the beginning of a franchise, with Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III released back-to-back in 1989 and 1990, as well as an animated series and theme park ride. Marty McFly is a 17-year-old living in Hill Valley, California. On the morning of Friday, October 25, 1985, his eccentric friend, scientist Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown (Lloyd), calls him, asking to meet at 1:15am the following morning at Twin Pines Mall. Upon arriving home from school, Marty finds the family car wrecked in the driveway, ruining his plans to spend the weekend with his girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells). Inside the house, he finds his meek, nerdy father, George (Crispin Glover), being bullied by his supervisor Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), who had borrowed and wrecked the car. At dinner that night, Marty's mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) recounts how she and George first met when her father hit George with his car as George was "bird-watching". That night, Marty meets Doc as planned in the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. Doc presents a DeLorean DMC-12 which he has modified into a time machine. As Marty videotapes, Doc explains the car travels to a programmed date and time upon reaching 88 miles per hour using plutonium in a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of power it requires. Demonstrating how to program the machine, Doc enters in November 5, 1955 as the target date, explaining that it was the day he conceived the idea of the flux capacitor; the device which "makes time travel possible." Before Doc can depart for his planned trip into the future, a group of Libyan terrorists, from whom he stole the plutonium, arrive in a Volkswagen bus and murder him. Marty jumps into the DeLorean and is pursued by the Libyans until he accelerates to 88 miles per hour and is inadvertently transported back in time to 1955. The car's starter fails shortly thereafter; Marty hides it, and makes his way into town on foot. He finds that the town square now reflects the popular culture of the 1950s, and that the clock tower which was destroyed sometime in his past is once again functioning. Marty runs into his own father, then a teenager, being tyrannized just as he was in 1985 by Biff, then the school bully. Marty follows George (who turns out to be a peeping tom, not a birdwatcher) as he is about to be hit by a car; Marty pushes George out of the way and takes the impact. The car turns out to be driven by Lorraine's father, resulting in Lorraine becoming infatuated with Marty instead of George. Marty is disturbed by her flirtations, which contrast sharply with the prudish mother he is familiar with. He flees from her home to find Doc Brown. The scientist at first believes that Marty is a lunatic. Marty convinces Doc by recounting the story of how Doc got the inspiration for the flux capacitor, and then by showing Doc the videotape of the 1985 experiment. However, when he hears his older self describe the power requirements for time travel, Doc is shocked. He tells Marty that aside from plutonium, the only possible source of that much power is a bolt of lightning, which cannot be predicted. Marty remembers that the lightning strike at the clock tower will occur the following Saturday (November 12, 1955) at 10:04pm. As a result, Doc begins planning a way to harness the bolt's power. Doc also deduces that Marty, by saving his father from the car, has prevented his parents from meeting, and instructs him to set things right. After several failed attempts at playing matchmaker, Marty eventually works out a plan to have George appear to rescue Lorraine from Marty's overt sexual advances on the night of a school dance, so he can leave to make his return to 1985. However, Biff shows up unexpectedly and orders his friends to lock Marty in a car trunk. Heavily intoxicated, Biff jumps into the car and attempts to force himself on the horrified Lorraine. George arrives as he and Marty have planned and is shocked to find Biff instead of Marty. Biff orders him to turn around and walk away, but George cannot bring himself to ignore Lorraine's pleas for help. When Biff pins his arm behind his back and laughs as he knocks away Lorraine who tries to defend him, George finally snaps and knocks out his tormentor with a single punch. A smitten Lorraine follows George to the dance floor, where they kiss for the first time, ensuring Marty's existence. Doc, meanwhile, has used cables to connect the clock tower's antenna to two lampposts, which he plans to have Marty drive under in the DeLorean, now sporting a lightning rod, the moment the lightning strikes. Before Marty can leave, Doc finds a letter in his coat pocket that Marty has written, warning him about his future murder. Doc indignantly tears up the letter without reading it, describing the dangers of altering the future. Marty instead adjusts the time machine to take him back to 1985, the parallel year, ten minutes earlier than he left, giving him time to warn Doc. Upon his return to the future, however, the car stalls and Marty arrives at the mall too late to save Doc. As Marty begins crying behind his friend's body, Doc wakes up and opens his radiation suit to reveal a bulletproof vest. He shows Marty the letter he had written, taped back together. When asked about his belief in not altering the future, Doc replies, "I figured, what the hell?" The next morning, Marty finds his family has been changed for the better. Most notably, Lorraine is physically fit and is no longer prudish, and George has become a self-confident novelist who confidently confronts a servile Biff. Just as Jennifer and Marty reunite, Doc arrives, insisting frantically that he has visited the future and that they must go back with him to work out a problem concerning their future children. The three take off into the sky in a newly upgraded DeLorean that can fly, and disappear into the future Michael J. Fox was the first choice to play Marty McFly, but he was committed to the show Family Ties.[7] Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg felt that Fox was essential to the show's success, particularly with costar Meredith Baxter on maternity leave, and refused to allow him time off to work on a film. Back to the Future was scheduled for May 1985 and it was late 1984 when it was learned that Fox would be unable to star in the film.[3] Zemeckis' next two choices were C. Thomas Howell and Eric Stoltz, the latter of whom impressed the producers enough with his portrayal of Roy L. Dennis in Mask – which was yet to be released – that they selected him to play Marty McFly.[1] Because of the difficult casting process, the start date was pushed back twice.[8] Four weeks into filming, Zemeckis decided Stoltz was miscast. Although he and Spielberg realized reshooting the film would add $3 million to the $14 million budget, they decided to recast. Spielberg explained Zemeckis felt Stoltz was too humorless and gave a "terrifically dramatic performance". Gale further explained they felt Stoltz was simply acting out the role, whereas Fox himself had a personality like Marty McFly. He felt Stoltz was uncomfortable riding a skateboard, whereas Fox was not. Stoltz confessed to director Peter Bogdanovich during a phone call, two weeks into the shoot, that he was unsure of Zemeckis and Gale's direction, and concurred that he was wrong for the role.[3] Fox's schedule was opened up in January 1985 when Meredith Baxter returned to Family Ties following her pregnancy. The Back to the Future crew met with Goldberg again, who made a deal that Fox's main priority would be Family Ties, and if a scheduling conflict arose, "we win". Fox loved the script and was impressed by Zemeckis and Gale's sensitivity in sacking Stoltz, because they nevertheless "spoke very highly of him".[3] Per Welinder and Tony Hawk assisted on the skateboarding scenes, though Hawk had to leave the film because he was taller than Fox, having doubled for Stoltz in various scenes.[9] Fox found his portrayal of Marty McFly to be very personal. "All I did in high school was skateboard, chase girls and play in bands. I even dreamed of becoming a rock star." Back to the Future opened on July 3, 1985 on 1,200 screens in North America. Zemeckis was concerned the film would flop because Fox had to film a Family Ties special in London and was unable to promote the film. Gale was also dissatisfied with Universal Pictures' tagline "Are you telling me my mother's got the hots for me?" Yet Back to the Future spent 11 weeks at number one.[3] Gale recalled "Our second weekend was higher than our first weekend, which is indicative of great word of mouth. National Lampoon's European Vacation came out in August and it kicked us out of number one for one week and then we were back to number one."[5] The film went on to gross $210.61 million in North America and $170.5 million in foreign countries, accumulating a worldwide total of $381.11 million.[15] Back to the Future had the fourth-highest opening weekend of 1985 and was the top grossing film of the year.[16] Adjusted for inflation, the film is the 58th highest-grossing film in North America, as of October 2008.[17] Roger Ebert felt Back to the Future had similar themes to the films of Frank Capra, especially It's a Wonderful Life. Ebert commented producer "Steven Spielberg is emulating the great authentic past of Classical Hollywood cinema, who specialized in matching the right director (Robert Zemeckis) with the right project."[18] Janet Maslin of The New York Times believed the film had a balanced storyline. "It's a cinematic inventing of humor and whimsical tall tales for a long time to come."[19] Christopher Null, who first saw the film as a teenager, called it "a quintessential 1980s flick that combines science fiction, action, comedy, and romance all into a perfect little package that kids and adults will both devour."[20] Dave Kehr of Chicago Reader felt Gale and Zemeckis wrote a script that perfectly balanced science fiction, seriousness and humor.[21] Variety applauded the performances, arguing Fox and Lloyd imbued Marty and Doc Brown's friendship with a quality reminiscent of King Arthur and Merlin.[22] The BBC applauded the intricacies of the "outstandingly executed" script, remarking that "nobody says anything that doesn't become important to the plot later."[23] Based on 44 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of critics gave the film positive reviews.[24] Back to the Future won the Academy Award for Sound Editing, while "The Power of Love", the sound designers, and Zemeckis and Gale (Original Screenplay), were nominated.[25] The film won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation[26] and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film. Michael J. Fox and the visual effects designers won categories at the Saturn Awards. Zemeckis, composer Alan Silvestri, the costume design and supporting actors Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover and Thomas F. Wilson were also nominated.[27] The film was successful at the 39th British Academy Film Awards, where it was nominated for Best Film, original screenplay, visual effects, production design and editing.[28] At the 43rd Golden Globe Awards, Back to the Future was nominated for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), original song (for "The Power of Love"), Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Fox) and Best Screenplay for Zemeckis and Gale President Ronald Reagan referred to the movie in his 1986 State of the Union Address when he said, "Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads.'"[30] When he first saw the joke about him being president, he made the projectionist of the theater stop the reel, roll it back, and run it again.[1] George H. W. Bush also referenced Back to the Future in his speeches.[31] This movie ranked number 28 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies.[32] In 2006, Back to the Future was voted the 20th greatest film ever made by readers of Empire.[33] On December 27, 2007, Back to the Future was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[34] In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed the AFI's 10 Top 10 – the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres – after polling more than 1,500 people from the creative community. Back to the Future was acknowledged as the 10th best film in the science fiction genre.[35] Back to the Future is among Channel 4's 50 Films to See Before You Die, being ranked 10th.[36] According to Zemeckis and Gale, when the film was released on VHS, Universal added a "To be continued..." caption at the end to increase awareness of production on Back to the Future Part II and Part III. It was removed when the film was first released on DVD in 2002.[11] I haven't seen this next film but have heard nothing but good reviews........ Iron Man upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/70/Ironmanposter.JPG![]() Iron Man is a 2008 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Directed by Jon Favreau, the film stars Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist and master engineer who builds a powered exoskeleton and becomes the technologically advanced superhero, Iron Man. Gwyneth Paltrow plays his personal assistant Pepper Potts, Terrence Howard plays military liaison James Rhodes and Jeff Bridges plays Stark Industries executive Obadiah Stane. The film was in development since 1990 at Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and New Line Cinema, before Marvel Studios reacquired the rights in 2006. Marvel put the project in production as its first self-financed film. Favreau signed on as director, aiming for a naturalistic feel, and he chose to shoot the film primarily in California, rejecting the East Coast setting of the comics to differentiate the film from numerous superhero films set in New York City-esque environments. During filming, the actors were free to create their own dialogue because pre-production was focused on the story and action. Rubber and metal versions of the armors, created by Stan Winston's company, were mixed with computer-generated imagery to create the title character. Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures, the distributor, planned a $50 million marketing campaign for the film, which was modeled on Paramount's successful promotion of Transformers; Hasbro and Sega sold merchandise, and product placement deals were made with Audi, Burger King, LG and 7-Eleven. Reviews were mostly positive, particularly praising Downey's performance.[2] Downey, Favreau and Paltrow will return in the sequel Iron Man 2, scheduled for release on May 7, 2010. Downey also made a cameo appearance as Stark in The Incredible Hulk. Tony Stark gambles at a Las Vegas casino, leaving his deceased father's friend and business partner, Obadiah Stane, to accept a prestigious award for him. As Stark leaves the casino with his entourage, he is approached by reporter Christine Everhart, whom he charms into a one-night stand at his Malibu house. When she awakens the next morning, Stark is gone and she is coldly greeted and helped on the way by Pepper Potts, his personal assistant. Stark flies off to war-torn Afghanistan with his friend and company military liaison, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, for a demonstration of Stark Industries' new weapon, the "Jericho" cluster missile. On the way back, however, his military convoy is attacked. In the firefight, his escort is wiped out and Stark himself is knocked unconscious by one of his own company's bombs. Waking up in an Afghan cave, he discovers an electromagnet embedded in his chest, placed there by fellow captive Dr. Yinsen. Powered by a car battery, it keeps shrapnel from working its way to his heart and killing him. Stark has been captured by a terrorist group known as the Ten Rings, whose leader, Raza, orders Stark to build a Jericho missile for him. Instead, during his three months of captivity, he and Yinsen begin secretly building a crude suit of armor, powered by a miniature "arc reactor" invented by Stark's father. Finally, the terrorists grow impatient and give Stark 24 hours to finish. Unfortunately, the terrorists become suspicious of their activities before the suit is fully activated, so Yinsen makes a suicidal attack in a desperate bid to buy time. Once the armor is ready, Stark charges through the caves. Near the entrance, a dying Yinsen tells him not to waste his life. Forever grateful to Yinsen, Stark burns all the munitions the terrorists have accumulated and then flies away, only to crash in the desert. Stark survives, but his suit is in pieces. After being rescued by Rhodes, Stark announces at a press conference that his company will no longer manufacture weapons. Stane tells him shortly thereafter that his decision is being blocked by the board of directors of Stark Industries. Stark focuses his energies on building a better version of his power suit, while making an improved arc reactor for his chest. Potts gives Stark a gift: his first miniature reactor encased in glass and bearing the inscription, "Proof that Tony Stark has a heart". During Stark's first public appearance since his return, he spots Potts wearing a dress and realizes that he has romantic feelings for his assistant. As they are about to share a kiss, Potts interrupts them by asking for a martini. While ordering the drinks, Stark is accosted by Everhart, who shows him pictures of Stark Industries weapons, including Jericho missiles, recently delivered to insurgents. He realizes that Stane has been supplying both the Americans and their enemies, and attempting to remove Stark from power. Enraged, Stark dons the power suit, flies to Afghanistan and rescues Gulmira, Yinsen's village, from the Ten Rings. While leaving, Stark attracts the attention of the United States Air Force, which dispatches two F-22 Raptors to try to identify the mysterious flying object. Rhodes is consulted about the nature of the object, but cannot offer help, and the fighters are ordered to destroy the target. During the resulting dogfight, Stark has time to reveal to Rhodes that he is the unidentified target. One of the planes is accidentally destroyed when it collides with Stark. The pilot ejects, but his parachute does not deploy, so Stark rescues him before escaping. Stark sends Potts to hack into the company computer system. She discovers that Stane hired the Ten Rings to kill Stark. The group reneged on the deal upon discovering who the target was, which ultimately seals their fate when Stane has them eliminated later. She also learns Stane has recovered the pieces of the original power suit and reverse-engineered his own version, one much larger and more powerful than Stark's, but his engineers are unable to construct a small enough arc reactor to power the suit. As she leaves Stane's office, she meets Agent Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D., a newly-established counter-terrorism government agency, who has been accosting her and Stark about an interview concerning Stark's escape from the Ten Rings. After she leaves, Stane discovers what she has done. He ambushes Stark in his house, using a Stark Industries device to temporarily paralyze him. While revealing his plan to take over Stark Industries, Stane removes the arc reactor from Stark's chest and leaves him to die. However, Stark gets to Potts' gift and re-installs his original reactor. Meanwhile, Stane returns to Stark Enterprises where SHIELD agents, guided by Potts, break in to arrest him, only to be attacked by the criminal wielding his Iron Monger armor. Although his original reactor is underpowered for his latest armor, Stark races to the rescue, and a battle erupts between him and Stane. Finding himself outmatched, Stark lures Stane atop the Stark Industries building. With no power left, Stark instructs Potts to overload the full-sized reactor in the building. This unleashes a massive electrical surge that knocks Stane unconscious and sends him falling through the ceiling into the reactor itself, apparently incinerating him. The next day, it is revealed that the press has dubbed Stark's alter ego "Iron Man". Rhodes gives reporters a false explanation of what happened. Before speaking, Stark briefly makes an attempt to establish a romantic relationship with Potts, but is put on hold. During the press conference, Stark starts to tell the cover story given to him by S.H.I.E.L.D., but then instead announces openly that he is Iron Man. In a post-credits scene, Stark is visited by S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury who notes that Stark is not "the only superhero in the world" and states he wants to discuss the "Avenger Initiative". ![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c7/Ironmonger_2008film.jpg/180px-Ironmonger_2008film.jpg) In April 1990, Universal Studios bought the rights to develop Iron Man for the big screen.[25] Stuart Gordon was to direct Universal's low-budget film.[9] By February 1996, 20th Century Fox acquired the rights from Universal.[26] In January 1997, actor Nicolas Cage expressed interest in being cast for the lead role,[27] and in September 1998, actor Tom Cruise had expressed interest in producing as well as starring in the film debut of Iron Man.[28] Jeff Vintar and Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee co-wrote a story which Vintar adapted into a screenplay. Jeffrey Caine (GoldenEye) rewrote Vintar's script.[29] Director Quentin Tarantino was approached in October 1999 to write and direct Iron Man.[30] With no deal made, Fox eventually sold the rights to New Line Cinema the following December.[31] By July 2000, the film was being written for the studio[32] by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio,[29] and Tim McCanlies.[33] McCanlies's script used the idea of a Nick Fury cameo to set up his own film.[29] New Line entered talks with Joss Whedon, a fan of the character Iron Man, in June 2001 for the possibility of the director taking the helm.[34] In December 2002, McCanlies had turned in a completed script.[35] In December 2004, the studio attached director Nick Cassavetes to the project for a target 2006 release.[37] After two years of unsuccessful development, and the deal with Cassavetes falling through, New Line Cinema returned the film rights to Marvel. Screenplay drafts had been written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and David Hayter, but they were not retained. New Line's script pitted Iron Man against his father Howard Stark, who becomes War Machine.[38] In November 2005, Marvel Studios worked to start development from scratch,[39] and announced it as their first independent feature, as Iron Man was their only major character not depicted in live action.[6] In April 2006, Jon Favreau was hired as the film's director, with Arthur Marcum and Matt Holloway writing the script.[40] Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby worked separately, with Favreau compiling both team's scripts,[41] and the script received a polish by John August.[42] Comic book staff Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Tom Brevoort, Axel Alonso, and Ralph Macchio were also summoned by Favreau to give advice on the script.[43] Favreau had wanted to work with Marvel producer Avi Arad on another film after the Daredevil adaptation.[6] Favreau celebrated getting the job by going on a diet, and lost seventy pounds.[9] The director found the opportunity to create a politically ambitious "ultimate spy movie" in Iron Man, citing inspiration from Tom Clancy, James Bond, and RoboCop.[44] Favreau also described his approach as similar to an independent film, " f Robert Altman had directed Superman",[6] and also cited Batman Begins as an inspiration.[45] He wanted to make Iron Man a story of an adult man literally reinventing himself, and realizing the world is far more complex than he believes.[46] Favreau changed the Vietnam War origin of the character to Afghanistan, as he did not want to do a period piece.[10]
Choosing a villain was difficult, because Favreau felt Iron Man's archnemesis, the Mandarin, would not feel realistic, especially after Mark Millar gave his opinion on the script.[43] He felt only in a sequel, with an altered tone, would the fantasy of the Mandarin's rings be appropriate.[47] The decision to push him into the background is comparable to Sauron in The Lord of the Rings,[45] or Palpatine in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.[47] Favreau also wanted Iron Man to face a giant enemy. The switch from Mandarin to Obadiah Stane was done after Bridges was cast.[24] Stane was intended to become a villain in the sequel.[43] The Crimson Dynamo was also a villain in early drafts in the script.[7] Favreau felt it was important to include intentional inside references for fans of the comics, such as giving the two fighter jets that attack Iron Man the call signs of "Whiplash 1" and "Whiplash 2," a reference to the comic book villain Whiplash, and including Captain America's shield in Stark's workshop.[48]
Iron Man received highly positive reviews from film critics. On May 1, 2008, the film was identified as the "best-reviewed film of the year so far" by Jen Yamato of review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with the site reporting that 93% of critics had given the film positive reviews, based upon 218 reviews and this rating has held its place as of November 2008.[2][74] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 79, based on 38 reviews.[75]
Among the major trade journals, Todd McCarthy in Variety called the film an "expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza" with "fresh energy and stylistic polish",[76] while Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter praised the film while nonetheless finding "disappointment [in] a climatic [sic] battle between different Iron Man prototypes [...] how did Tony's nemesis learn how to use the suit?"[77] In one of the first major-daily newspaper reviews, Frank Lovece of Newsday lauded the film's "emotional truth [...] pitch-perfect casting and plausibly rendered super-science" that made it "faithful to the source material while updating it – and recognizing what's made that material so enduring isn't just the high-tech cool of a man in a metal suit, but the human condition that got him there".[78] A.O. Scott of the New York Times called the film "an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least — since it certainly has its problems — a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways."[79]
Among the specialty press, Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons commended the "impressive sets and mechanics that combine smoothly with relatively seamless CG", and said, "Robert Downey Jr., along with director Jon Favreau [...] help this rise above formula. The result is something that, whilst hardly original or groundbreaking, is nevertheless refreshing in its earnestness to avoid dark dramatic stylings in favor of an easy-going, crowd-pleasing action movie with a sprinkle of anti-war and redemption themes".[80] IGN's Todd Gilchrist recognized Downey as "the best thing" in a film that "functions on autopilot, providing requisite story developments and character details to fill in this default 'origin story' while the actors successfully breathe life into their otherwise conventional roles".[81]
Among major metropolitan weeklies, David Edelstein of New York magazine called the film "a shapely piece of mythmaking [...] Favreau doesn't go in for stylized comic-book frames, at least in the first half. He gets real with it — you'd think you were watching a military thriller",[82] while conversely, David Denby of The New Yorker put forth a negative review, claiming "a slightly depressed, going-through-the-motions feel to the entire show [...] Gwyneth Paltrow, widening her eyes and palpitating, can't do much with an antique role as Stark's girl Friday, who loves him but can't say so; Terrence Howard, playing a military man who chases around after Stark, looks dispirited and taken for granted".[83]
Roger Ebert and Richard Corliss named Iron Man as among their favorite films of 2008
In its opening weekend, Iron Man grossed $98,618,668 in 4,105 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking number one at the box office,[86] giving it the 11th-biggest opening weekend,[87] ninth widest release in terms of theaters,[88] and the third highest-grossing opening weekend of 2008 behind Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dark Knight. It grossed $35.2 million on its first day, giving it the 13th-biggest opening day.[89] Iron Man had the second-best premiere for a non-sequel, behind Spider-Man. It had the fourth-biggest opening for a superhero movie.[90] Iron Man was also the number-one film in the United States and Canada in its second weekend, grossing $51.1 million,[86] giving it the 12th-best second weekend and the fifth-best for a non-sequel.[91] On June 18, 2008 Iron Man became the first movie of 2008 to pass the $300 million mark for the domestic box office.[92][93] As of July 2009[update], Iron Man has grossed $585,133,287 worldwide — $318,412,101 in the United States and Canada and $266,721,186 in other territories.[1]
Iron Man was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound Editing at the 81st Academy Awards, but lost to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Dark Knight, respectively.[99][100] It was nominated for nine Saturn Awards,[101] winning Best Science Fiction Film, Best Director for Favreau and Best Actor for Downey, Jr.[102] It was nominated for Favorite Movie at the 2009 Kids' Choice Awards but lost to High School Musical 3: Senior Year.[103][104]
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Post by The Raven on Jul 18, 2009 19:48:36 GMT -5
That means somebody voted for They Live other than myself! I want names. ![:D](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/grin.png) .....or was it somehow just me?
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Post by bob on Jul 18, 2009 19:52:23 GMT -5
That means somebody voted for They Live other than myself! I want names. ![:D](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/grin.png) .....or was it somehow just me? I'll never tell ![:P](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/tongue.png)
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