Reviews of older movies & TV shows comic fans can appreciate 1 1

[Catwomancomics]

I saw 13th Warrior years ago when it came out on DVD. I instantly loved the film and thought it was well done. I've seen it many times.

 

John Carter is one of the best comic movies made IMHO. I think that it's under appreciated and got snubbed because its not a main stream costumed super hero movie. When the ads came out for the film, there were no mentions of it being a comic book movie. No mention of Marvel. Huge mistake by the movie studio and a disservice to Edgar Rice Burroughs. If there was a mention/tie to Marvel I would think that more people would've seen it in theaters. Who ever decided not to have Marvel in with the film and advertisement dropped the ball.

 

Pathfinder liked it.

 

Kingdom of Heaven I enjoy this movie. It's on Directv and watch it here and there.

 

To this day I have not seen all of Lone Ranger. I seem to only be able to watch a little bit of it before I lose interest. Made several attempts to watch it with my son and just cant sit through more than 15 minutes.

[Bosco685]

I saw 13th Warrior years ago when it came out on DVD. I instantly loved the film and thought it was well done. I've seen it many times.

 

Same here! I even purchased the soundtrack, I enjoyed it so much.

 

John Carter is one of the best comic movies made IMHO. I think that it's under appreciated and got snubbed because its not a main stream costumed super hero movie.

 

John Carter and The Gods Of Hollywood

 

I believe this book goes into great detail how in-house executive fighting caused this massive failure.

 

Pathfinder liked it.

 

Really good movie!

 

Kingdom of heaven I enjoy this movie. It's on Directv and watch it here and there.

 

 

To this day I have not seen all of Lone Ranger.

 

I still have not seen all of this movie yet. But I want to.

[Zonker]

John Carter is one of the best comic movies made IMHO. I think that it's under appreciated and got snubbed because its not a main stream costumed super hero movie. When the ads came out for the film, there were no mentions of it being a comic book movie. No mention of Marvel. Huge mistake by the movie studio and a disservice to Edgar Rice Burroughs. If there was a mention/tie to Marvel I would think that more people would've seen it in theaters. Who ever decided not to have Marvel in with the film and advertisement dropped the ball.

 

 

 

John Carter is no more a "Marvel movie" than is Tarzan. ERB's original John Carter prose stories are over a hundred years old at this point, and both Western/Gold Key and DC published John Carter comics adaptations before Marvel.

[DR.X]

 

 

Is he trying to cop a feel there?

 

Is she smiling for the camera, while discretely trying to pry his mitts off of a prize possession?

 

Explain.

[Bosco685]

Is he trying to cop a feel there?

 

I she smiling for the camera, while discretely trying to pry his mitts off of a prize possession?

 

Explain.

 

You...

 

 

...ask too many valid questions with this photo.

 

[Catwomancomics]

John Carter is one of the best comic movies made IMHO. I think that it's under appreciated and got snubbed because its not a main stream costumed super hero movie. When the ads came out for the film, there were no mentions of it being a comic book movie. No mention of Marvel. Huge mistake by the movie studio and a disservice to Edgar Rice Burroughs. If there was a mention/tie to Marvel I would think that more people would've seen it in theaters. Who ever decided not to have Marvel in with the film and advertisement dropped the ball.

 

 

 

John Carter is no more a "Marvel movie" than is Tarzan. ERB's original John Carter prose stories are over a hundred years old at this point, and both Western/Gold Key and DC published John Carter comics adaptations before Marvel.

 

Thank you. I had no idea that DC etc. had published these stories.

[NewEnglandGothic]

To this day I have not seen all of Lone Ranger. I seem to only be able to watch a little bit of it before I lose interest. Made several attempts to watch it with my son and just cant sit through more than 15 minutes.

Picked up this today. I hadn't seen it too. I heard about the train sequence, so I watched that first. All I can say is "eyepopping!"

Might try the whole movie sometime this week.

[Bosco685]

I really liked this movie when it came out, and never understood why it didn't take off into a franchise.

The Best Movie You Never Saw: REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

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THE STORY: A New York cop is unwillingly recruited as an assassin for a top-secret government agency, CURE. Re-christened Remo Williams (Fred Ward), he’s sent on the trail of an unscrupulous weapons dealer, but first must survive his training with Chiun (Joel Grey) master of Sinanju.

 

THE PLAYERS: Starring: Fred Ward, Joel Grey, Kate Mulgrew & Wilford Brimley. Music by Craig Safan. Directed by Guy Hamilton.

 

THE HISTORY: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS…and ends, with this, the lone big-screen adventure of Remo Williams, the veteran of well over a hundred pulp novels (published as “The Destroyer” series – written by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir).

 

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WHY IT'S GREAT: REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS was a movie I loved as a kid. As a young’un, I remember catching a chunk of it on TBS one evening, which encouraged me to go rent the VHS, and I just about wore the bloody thing out with how much I watched it that weekend. What I liked about it then (and now) is how Remo is such a unique Hollywood hero, especially for the eighties. The middle-aged Fred Ward looks like a blue-collar, regular guy, and his recruitment and eventual transformation into an unstoppable hero (able to breathe underwater for an hour and dodge bullets at close range) was exciting escapism for me at the time.

 

More than thirty years after its initial release REMO WILLIAMS holds up, with some caveats. The elephant in the room is the very white Joel Grey as the Korean Chiun. His performance was so well-received at the time that he garnered a Golden Globe nomination (the makeup used on him was nominated for an Oscar), but it's cringe-worthy now.

 

 

If you can ignore this, REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS has a lot to offer, such as great stunt work, a few really good set pieces, and an amazing score by Craig Safan, which ranks as one of the best action scores of the eighties. Sadly, the production apparently ran out of money towards the end of the shoot, meaning the conclusion is anti-climactic, and the villain is the generic type you’d see every week on “The A-Team”. Still, this is a damn fun slice of eighties nostalgia, and something of a seminal title for film geeks of my generation.

 

"Great heroes need great villains! Our movie villain was a guy selling cheap rifles to the government. We told them about that out there in Lala Land but of course they were all geniuses so nobody would listen to us. Too bad." – Interview with Warren Murphy.

 

 

 

[media_junkie]

I loved Remo Williams.

[NewEnglandGothic]

9 hours ago, media_junkie said:

I loved Remo Williams.

Everything from Ward's everyman looks, to Craig Saffan's musical score worked in that one. Not bad for an action hero whose boss is the Quaker Oats pitchman. But the director did make the best bond movie (Goldfinger,) albeit a string of blah ones too (Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun.) Joel Grey wasn't too controversial for me growing up as he portrayed his character with so much dignity and respect, unlike say Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Roddy McDowell played the Chiun character in the pilot in the same manner (Remo on roller-skates at the beach in the opening scene.) Glad I caught the one back in the day. Speaking of Tiffany's, Patrick Kilpatrick really stood out as the henchman as well.

For me, this was the new Bond as "A View To a Kill" was just not as entertaining that year.

[chrisco37]

Remo Williams was a great movie.   Loved it as a kid.  Must've seen it 100 times.  

[fastballspecial]

The Day the Earth Stood Still. Absolute Classic. The Clip is at the end of the film. Unsure why it didn't show up.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TKKE58-06dk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Edited September 5, 2017 by fastballspecial

[Bosco685]

Talk about a horribly critiqued movie. This is so much better than its ratings indicator from both critics and even from the audience of that time.

After all the talk about this movie today, I went back to watch it. Enjoyed it from start to finish, even though it deviates near the end from the source material.

Kevin Costner starts off as a post-apocalyptic wanderer using his knowledge of Shakespeare to entertain small towns willing to share food and water with him for his performance. The story from there is worth the watch, so I won't spoil it. But the lead actress Olivia Williams turns out to be quite the bad-azz character that also makes it fun to watch this progress along. And the villain played by Will Patton delivers as a vindictive, dangerous psychopath.

And like was brought up today, you even experience scenes with Tom Petty. And great music sprinkled throughout.

Overall, this really should have been a 7.0/10.0 due to a great little story to inspire and entertain.

Edited November 16, 2017 by Bosco685

[Bosco685]

An interesting article on what went wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

15 Things You Didn’t Know About The Disastrous Wolverine Origins Movie

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• Movie: X-Men Origins: Wolverine
• Director: Gavin Hood
• Writers: David Benioff, Skip Woods
• Release date: May 1, 2009
• Worldwide box office: $373.0 million
• Reported budget: $150 million
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 38
• CinemaScore: B+
• Franchise context: Fourth X-Men film (first solo spinoff, prequel); first of three Wolverine films.

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HUGH JACKMAN NEARLY QUIT AFTER IT CAME OUT

That’s right, Jackman himself has admitted that it was just a bad film, and that it did not do what he wanted it to. In fact, he was so disheartened after the film came out that he nearly quit playing Wolverine altogether. In several interviews, he has admitted that he knows how much the fans hated it, saying that they are always very vocal in their opinions about his work. The actor had wanted the film to deepen the audience’s understanding of the character, and add more to his version of Wolverine. Instead, he has described it as ‘the fourth X-Men, with different characters’ and said that Origins didn’t achieve what he was aiming for.

 

When promoting The Wolverine, he was open about his hopes that this second solo movie would be an improvement, and said the same again when it came time to talk Logan. And while Origins may have been a dismal failure, at least the solo Wolvie movies got significantly better with time!

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RYAN REYNOLDS WROTE MOST OF HIS OWN LINES

Reynolds' love of the character certainly came in handy on set, as he ended up writing most of his own lines. The actor has revealed that because the project was being filmed during the writers’ strike of 2007/2008, during scenes, he was working with as little --script direction as ‘Wade Wilson talks really fast’, and he had to fill in the gaps himself.

 

In an interview, the actor recalls “So we were in the middle of production, there were no writers, no anything. Every line I have in the movie I just wrote myself.” Despite this, Reynolds did such a phenomenal job that his role was eventually expanded from a cameo to a more central role in the movie - albeit one that didn’t portray the character properly at all, but hey, you already knew that.

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THE MOVIE GOT A FOX REPORTER FIRED

Before Origins: Wolverine was released in theaters, a copy was leaked online, to disastrous reviews. The leak was a massive issue for 20th Century Fox - and a bigger one for Fox News reporter Roger Friedman. The entertainment columnist not only watched the leaked copy, but wrote an online review of it that was definitely less than complimentary. To make things worse, Friedman included a line in the review about how easy it was to find the leaked copy online and download it - all but pointing potential viewers to the site himself.

 

To no one's surprise but Friedman's, the studio was not happy with the review, and he ended up getting canned - not for writing a negative review of a Fox movie on a Fox website, but for admitting that he pirated the film, and telling readers that it would be easy for them to do the same.

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KARL URBAN NEARLY PLAYED SABRETOOTH

Although Liev Schreiber eventually ended up getting the part of Sabretooth (thanks in part to Jackman) several other actors were considered for the role of Victor Creed. Tyler Mane, who played the part in the earlier X-Men, asked to return for this film, but was turned down. It was decided that the actor should be younger, given that the film takes place earlier in the timeline. (He wasn’t the only actor from previous films to be left out of Origins, either. Brian Cox would have returned as William Stryker as well).

 

Karl Urban and Gerard Butler were also considered for the role of Sabretooth, before Liev Schriber was finally cast, as Jackman claimed that the competitive nature of their friendship would translate well onto the big screen.

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MULTIPLE ENDINGS WERE FILMED

End-credits scenes are a fantastic part of Marvel movies (even those by Fox, which aren’t made by Marvel Studios) - and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was no exception. However, there wasn’t just one ending filmed for this film, but three different post-credits end scenes, which were originally intended to be sent out to different theaters.

 

The first shows Stryker walking down the road with bloody feet, before being detained for questioning. Two more were also filmed - one, showing Wolverine in a bar in Japan, "drinking to remember". The other shows the return of Deadpool, as his hand crawls across rubble to take hold of his severed head. The Stryker scene was attached to all versions of the film, but the other two appeared on different versions...though both appear in DVD copies.

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HE DIRECTOR BLAMED STUDIO HEADS FOR THE AWFUL DEADPOOL DESIGN

While there are plenty of issues with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, few would argue against the idea that the biggest one of all is the absolute travesty that was Deadpool. The Merc With A Mouth ended up having his mouth sewn shut, for one thing, but he also had some fairly awful design flaws: no Deadpool suit, eyes that shoot lasers, and of course, a big ‘ol sword that somehow telescopes into his forearm (or bends, who knows!).

 

This version was so bad that Ryan Reynolds nearly quit the film, and later made fun of it during the promo for the (much, much better) Deadpool solo movie - but whose fault was it? Director Gavin Hood revealed in an interview that a big problem was that the character was 'encumbered by, you know, PG-13 requirements and a great deal of marketing debate”, and that it was difficult for him because of ‘certain parameters’ set by studio heads.

It sounds like some of the contributors were a 2007-2008 writers' strike, studio tampering in the Deadpool design and a --script that was constantly in-flight. Gavin Hood talked about this again during the Ender's Game press tour.

And he talked about it in 2016 at a film festival when questioned.

‘Eye in the Sky’ Director Gavin Hood Talks About the Mistakes of ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’

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He explained that his first Hollywood film, ‘Rendition,’ was a “very good experience.” He said the studio left him alone to do his own thing, and even though Meryl Streep played a supporting role, it was still a lower budget film that wasn’t star-driven. However, he said the stakes were much higher with “Wolverine.” He said it was Jackman who approached him to make the movie.

 

“He’s a great guy to this day,” said Hood of Jackman, “and he’d seen ‘Tsotsi,’ and he really felt that he wanted to try to make this film about a guy who is a superhero, but doesn’t really like what he does and has all this post-traumatic stress disorder.”

 

The film ultimately became something else, Hood said. The reasons for it were plethora, including having to deal with stunt casting, a second unit director who didn’t match his style (“I felt the action looked like ‘80s action”), and the writers’ strike that left the director with an unfinished --script and facing a looming, fixed release date.  He felt he had little control. Characters like Gambit and Deadpool were written in, and even the title was changed on him, which Jackman broke to him after the actor stumbled across the change on IMDb.

 

It was a bit of a rant for Hood that took everyone by surprise. He paused several times to admit that he had never been as honest as this about the making of the film, but he felt beholden to the aspiring filmmakers in attendance.

 

“I’m very grateful because I managed to buy a house off that film, so don’t get me wrong,” he said at one point. “I own the mistakes I made. I learned a great deal, but I hope that the film tonight is more in my wheel house. If you don’t like the film, you can tell me after. I come back for Q&A, and I have no one to blame. It comes from working with a writer who I loved, prepping it with producers who really wanted to make the same movie, and that’s the Hollywood story.”

 

Edited May 28, 2019 by Bosco685

[Bosco685]

On 8/9/2015 at 4:01 PM, Bosco685 said:

Since there was so much talk about 'The 13th Warrior' and the actors that later on ended up in comic book films such a 'Thor' and 'Thor: The Dark World', I went back to see if Joblo.com had a decent review of this film. That site does periodic reviews of older films called 'The Best You Never Saw'. Bingo!

 

The Best Movie You Never Saw: The 13th Warrior

 

 

 

And what timing. It becomes clear why this film was lost upon release due to studio and creator bickering, along with Crichton in the middle.

 

 

 

 

 

A very detailed review, loaded with the history and results of this film. And some of the lesser-known actors ended up in a few successful productions.

 

- Vladimir Kulich, Buliwyf, 6'5" tall

+ Vikings TV show (History Channel), Eric

+ Ironclad (2011), Captain Tiberius

 

 

- John DeSantis, Ragnar, 6'9" tall

+ Seventh Son (2014), Tusk

+ Supernatural TV show, Scarecrow / The Golem / Freeman Daggett

+ Smallville TV show, Solomon Grundy

+ 30 Days of Night: Dark Days, Gunther

+ Stan Helsing, Frankenstein

+ Painkiller Jane, Henry Perkins

+ Blade: The Series, Thorne

 

 

- Clive Russell, Helfdane, 6'6" tall

+ Thor: The Dark World, Tyr

+ Game of Thrones, Brynden 'Blackfish' Tully

+ Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Captain Tanner

+ Sherlock Holmes, Captain Tanner

 

- Tony Curran, Weath, 5'11" tall (the short fellow in the film)

+ Defiance TV Series, Datak Tarr

+ Sons of Anarchy TV Series, Gaines

+ Thor: The Dark World, Bor

+ Boardwalk Empire TV Series, Eamonn Rohan

+ The Adventures of Tintin, Lieutenant Delcourt

+ X-Men: First Class, Man In Black Suit Agent

+ Underworld: Evolution, Marcus

+ Beowulf & Grendel, Hondscioh

+ The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Rodney Skinner

+ Blade II, Priest

 

Who else has another one to share loaded with actors that had many roles associated with comic productions, and story content that inspires us comic nuts to watch them?

Another revisit of The 13th Warrior from a positive and negative point of view.

 

[Gatsby77]

I don't have a review handy for it, but one of my all-tme favorites is True Romance.

Done in 1993, it's got a ridiculous cast that would be hard to replicate today. And -- of course -- was written by Quentin Tarantino.

Stars:

• Christian Slater
• Patricia Arquette
• Gary Oldman
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Christopher Walken
• Dennis Hopper
• James Gandolfini
• Brad Pitt
• Val Kilmer
• Tom Sizemore

 

[Bosco685]

43 minutes ago, Gatsby77 said:

I don't have a review handy for it, but one of my all-tme favorites is True Romance.

Done in 1993, it's got a ridiculous cast that would be hard to replicate today. And -- of course -- was written by Quentin Tarantino.

Stars:

• Christian Slater
• Patricia Arquette
• Gary Oldman
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Christopher Walken
• Dennis Hopper
• James Gandolfini
• Brad Pitt
• Val Kilmer
• Tom Sizemore

 

You are not the first one I've seen to be a big fan of this film. I need to go back and watch this, as much as I see it come up on film recommendation lists.

[Bosco685]

 

 

[Bosco685]

The 13th Warrior has gone on a Disney sale on digital provider sites, which I strongly support as a film. For anyone that has never seen this film, check out the review.

 

[Bosco685]

Clark "Agent Coulson" Gregg wrote the script for What Lies Beneath??!!