The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Films

Posts Tagged ‘Good Bad Ugly’

Sorry for the late post, but I totally forgot to edit everything. Listen in to John, Ross and myself as we discuss Saturday Night Live, MacGruber, and its attempts to break into the movie market.

We also give our Good, Bad and Ugly SNL movies. Do you agree with us? Think we’re way off? Send us an email to podcast@goodbaduglyfilms.com or a voice mail via Skype to let us know what your favorite SNL movie is and why.

Mark

GOOD: Blues Brothers BAD: Blues Brothers 2000 UGLY: It’s Pat

John

GOOD: Wayne’s World BAD: Superstar UGLY: The Ladies Man

Ross

GOOD: Wayne’s World BAD: Night at the Roxbury UGLY: Stuart Saves His Family

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Ross hosts this episode of the GBUF Podcast, an all reviews show. Today, we review the new releases of: Valentine’s Day, Legion, Edge of Darkness, and The New Daughter.

What did we think these movies did right? What did they get wrong? Why didn’t one of the lead actors in Valentine’s Day wave a shotgun or a handgun around? Get the answers to almost all of these burning questions by listening to the podcast.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day follows the lives of several couples in this light-hearted comedy. Their ups and downs in the game of love. All of the stories are inter-connected in a bit of a ham-fisted way, but it still works as a good date movie. The cast is populated with many stars, including: Ashton Kutcher, Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Taylor Lautner, Topher Grace, Queen Latifah, Hector Elizondo, Patrick Dempsey and Jennifer Garner.

John: BAD Mark: GOOD (after I finished) Ross: N/A

Legion

Legion takes place in a diner on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The angel Michael comes down from heaven to protect a pregnant woman and her unborn child, who, no surprise here, is going to be the next saviour of mankind. The other angels don’t like this idea so much, feeling that the time of man is coming to a close and try to speed up the apocalypse by killing the woman and anyone trying to help her. This stars Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Charles S Dutton, Tyrese Gibson and Kevin Durand.

John: BAD Mark: BAD Ross: UGLY

Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson stars as Thomas Craven, a homicide detective that loses his daughter to an unknown assailant at his house. Working under the impression that he was the intended target, he is set straight by Jedburgh, a corporate “fixer” played by Ray Winstone. His investigation into his daughter’s life leads him to darker and darker places in his search for justice and revenge.

John: BAD Mark: BAD Ross: BAD

The New Daughter

Kevin Costner plays a father with two children whose wife has recently left him for another man. He and the kids move to an idyllic town in South Carolina. The daughter, played by Pan’s Labyrinth’s Ivana Baquero, starts acting even stranger than a regular teen girl acts, which leads the dad to start investigating the strange mound on his property. This movie went directly to DVD/Blu-Ray.

John: UGLY Mark: UGLY Ross: UGLY

If you’ve seen any of these movies and would like to add your comments, then please feel free to do so right here on the article, or email us at podcast@goodbaduglyfilms.com. You can also leave us a voice mail via Skype. You never know… we might just play your message on one of the podcasts.

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In Allen’s final podcast, we discuss the films of writer/director/producer extraordinaire, Judd Apatow. From his early days as a writer and producer for TV shows, to the comedy film power house that he is now. We visit every film in his career and Ross, Mark and John weigh in with their Good, Bad and Ugly choices.

Ross GOOD – Forgetting Sarah Marshall BAD – Pineapple Express UGLY – Year One

Mark GOOD – Forgetting Sarah Marshall BAD – Drillbit Taylor UGLY – Step Brothers

John GOOD – 40 Year Old Virgin BAD – Funny People UGLY – Fun With Dick and Jane

If you think that we’re WAAAAAAY off-base, feel free to leave us a voice mail with Skype, or send us an email to podcast@goodbaduglyfilms.com.

We here at GBUF are going to miss all of Allen’s hard work on both the podcast and the website. We wish him well in his future endeavours. – Mark

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Good

Back in the early 80’s, when she was on the set of David Lynch’s Dune, Sean Young shot some home movies of the cast and crew. You get to see a young Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, Lynch, and all kinds of other people. It’s narrated by Young and is a fun look back. If there’s more of these, I’d sure like to see them.

Bad

In a bid to try to virally market their new movie, Piranha 3D, the Weinsteins had a decidedly NSFW web site created. I’m going to assume that it’s based on the movie in some way, seeing as Jerry O’Connell and Eli Roth can be found in amongst all the scantily clad/half nude women. Will this kind of campaign work? Should there be an age disclaimer on the website to protect themselves from lawsuits from parents of inadequately supervised children? How does this really promote the movie? I think I picked up a little clue about the movie in the giant ad for the energy drink, but is that it? This doesn’t make me want to go see it any more than I did before I looked at the website, and goodness knows I like looking at boobies. If nothing else, this kind of shows that they’re going for a hard R rating for the movie, which is nice to know.

Ugly

Thanks to Buzz Out Loud, one of the tech podcasts that Allen and I listen to, we learned of something that could potentially kill pretty much all digitally recorded video, as it relates to sharing and viewing. No, it’s not some big scary virus, it’s something far more sinister… a group of corporate patent holders known collectively as the MPEG-LA.  The group contains Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Panasonic, LG, Mitsubishi, and many, many more. The patents they hold affect the majority of the digital camcorders, including cell phones and digital cameras.

They license these patents to the makers of the cameras, as long as the recorded video is only used for non-commercial purposes. This statement is in *all* the user agreements for these products, up to and including PROFESSIONAL VIDEO CAMERAS. Up until now, they’ve pretty much turned a blind eye to film-makers that upload their video to ad supported sites (which infringes the user agreement) and directors using these cameras to make movie, videos, etc.

Recently, MPEG-LA extended their "free internet broadcasting AVC license" until 2015. So until then, users can use a licensed encoder (x264 doesn’t count, in their view this makes both the video producer AND every random viewer of that video *liable*), to stream online royalty-free, as long as that video is free to stream. However, what’s "free to stream"? According to one interpretation of the U.S. law (disclaimer: I’m no lawyer), if you stream your video with ads (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo), then that’s a non-free usage.

-OS news

This could get tricky and financially devastate many people and companies if the MPEG-LA ever decided that they wanted a bit more money and went about legally enforcing their multiple patents. It could effectively kill a lot of innovation and creativity. Or not… Hopefully it’ll all work out for the good and all these big corporations won’t decide to be greedy.

I feel like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat. -Mark

Good

Thanks to one of the joke feeds I get with my news reader, I stumbled across a great adaptation of the Avatar script.

It doesn’t take too long to read and pretty much sums up the movie. It points out some fairly obvious plot holes and generally pokes fun at everything.

SAM mentally links to BLUE SAM WORTHINGTON.

BLUE SAM WORTHINGTON

I can feel my legs again!  That makes it completely worth how utterly ridiculous I look!

BLUE JOEL MOORE

Be careful with it, Sam.  James Cameron spent millions of dollars to develop the advanced facial capture technology it needs.

BLUE SIGOURNEY WEAVER

Cameron spent millions to develop advanced facial capture technology then strapped it to a guy whose face shows no expression?

-The Editing Room

Check out their Clash of the Titans: The Abridged Script as well for some laughs. Don’t forget to bring your 3D glasses.

Bad

George Clooney’s new film, The American, finally has a trailer for it and I can’t say that I’m all that impressed. Sure, I’ll probably still see it, it is a Clooney film after all, but the trailer makes this action/thriller look a bit on the boring side. I sure hope they come up with a tighter trailer closer to the release date.

The American is about an assassin that’s looking to retire after the shit hit the fan on his previous assignment. He takes one last job and going against the code he’s lived by for years, befriends people in the town that he’s staying in, including a priest and a possible romance with a local lady. At some point the job is going to get in the way. Are his new community ties going to hold him back, or make him that much more dangerous?

Take a look at the trailer and see what you think. Let me know if I’m totally off track with this.

Ugly

Thanks to the fine folks over at Cinematical, I read about this guy that wrote a power ballad for the Green Lantern movie. If this was the 80s and Green Lantern was going to be a TV movie, then maybe. Watch/listen in amazement to the as the super crappy song plays to random Green Lantern images cut with with marines training, fire fighters, a boxer, and what looks like a quick shot from GI Jane.

The first lines in the song are priceless: “Soaring through the sky on the wings of my mind, I light up the sky.” Cringe-worthy.

In today’s podcast, we review 3 movies: Tooth Fairy, It’s Complicated and The Descent: Part 2. Ross wasn’t able to join us, so we keep our Michelle Rodriguez jokes to a minimum. Yes, I know she isn’t in any of these films. That doesn’t stop us from making fun of her.

If you think we’re wrong with any of our reviews, or have something to add to the mix, please feel free to email us at podcast@goodbaduglyfilms.com or leave us a voice mail with Skype.

May the 4th be with you…

Tooth Fairy

Allen: BAD John: BAD Mark: BAD

It’s Complicated

Allen: BAD John: UGLY Mark: GOOD

The Descent: Part 2

Allen: BAD John: BAD Mark: BAD

For the article Allen talks about that reviews The Descent (the first movie), click here.

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We’re a man down today as Johnny was called in to work. He won’t be giving his two cents to today’s topics (and we get to make fun of him). We start off by examining a few of the blog posts we made and some of the news in the past week. Here’s a brief rundown of what’s in store for you:

• Movies I Wish I Could Un-See: Ross wants all recollections of Hook gone, and Allen would like to have Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom expunged from his memory
• Movies to Introduce People To: John chose the Todd Solondz film, Happiness as the one he likes to show his friends for the first time, while Allen wants to show you The Long Kiss Goodnight, by Renny Harlin
• Helen Mirren joins the Arthur remake
• Avatar breaks even more records, this time in DVD/Blu-Ray sales
• Against the odds, Blockbuster’s stock rises thanks to the sweetheart studio deals
• With MGM’s financial woes, the fate of James Bond is up in the air
• Joss Whedon in line to direct Marvel Comic’s Avengers movie
• Ross nerds out talking about Star Wars

The movie we review this week is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. With it getting a brand new Blu-Ray release, we thought we’d bust out the old DVD of it and watch it again. We give our thoughts about what works and what doesn’t, but pretty much end up at the same place in the end. Johnny’s input would have been really appreciated for this because I think he might have a different perspective.

If you think that we’reway off in our opinions, or you’d like to tell us what you think, how about sending us an email to podcast@goodbaduglyfilms.com, adding a comment to this article, or leaving us a voice mail with Skype.

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Good

As many of you might know, I have a love/hate relationship with Jason Statham’s Transporter franchise. Mostly love though. Not only does it have Statham, but it’s written by Luc Besson. A winning combination if ever there was one.

Hold on to your hats (or your BMW’s steering wheel) because it’s going to be a tv show!

“Transporter — the Series” will be filmed in English with a budget of $4 million per episode. Lagardere Entertainment subsidiary Atlantic Productions will ensure financing and executive production for the 12 one-hour episodes of the first season.

-The Hollywood Reporter (int’l)

It will be shot in both Canada and Europe starting February 2011. Casting hasn’t begun yet and I guess it’s too much to ask to have Statham in it. Maybe as a cameo in the first episode? Passing the keys of his tricked out BMW to the new driver?

In other GOOD news, the iconic Hollywood sign has been saved from the very people that erected it in the first place: Real Estate Developers.

Developers were planning on selling the 138 acre chunk of land in order to build even more luxury homes on the property.

Money poured in from all over the place, from stars and fans, but it was pushed over the top by Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner, with a $900,000 donation.

Thanks Hef!

Bad

It looks like The Green Hornet has yet another delay in coming to the big screen. The powers that be decided that they’d like to cash in on this big 3D craze and it’s going to be sent in for conversion.

The new (proposed) release date is January 14, 2011, a full 7 months after it was supposed to make it into theatres.

With how many delays this movie has had and the well-publicised director and casting issues, I’m not holding my breath on the quality of the finished product. If the rumors are to be believed, it’s not just 3D conversion that’s going on, but reshoots of large sections of the movie.

In other Why Bother? 3D news, it looks like The Ring is getting dusted off and another unnecessary sequel  being made. In 3D. Why?

I’ll admit that The Ring genuinely creeped me out when I first saw it in the theatre, but the sequel, yeah, not so much. The first movie made back a staggering 5x its budget in worldwide box office, but the second one only did about 2.5x. If the formula holds true, they’d just break even and saddle us with another piece of crap. In 3D.

The Ring (2002) is a remake of the Japanese film, Ringu (1998) and is based on the books written by Koji Suzuki about a disturbing video tape that kills people a week after they watch it. With VCRs going the way of the dinosaur, how are they going to update this? DVD? Blu-Ray? Pirated download?

Ugly

When I first heard that Jonah Hex was going to be made into a movie, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl. It was one of my favorite comics growing up and I’m a big fan of the Western movie genre. Excellent.

In case you don’t know, Jonah Hex is based on a comic book about a heavily-scarred ex-Civil War soldier turned bounty hunter in the Old West. The supernatural and the macabre seem to follow him in his travels.

In some sad news for me (and other fans of the comic book), reviews from the test screenings of Jonah Hex haven’t been all that enthusiastic. In fact, much, much less than that.

I didn’t read the entire article over at Ain’t It Cool News, but I skimmed the opening paragraphs of several of the reviewers and several quotes jump to the front:

The editing lacked polish, but I’m not sure any amount of polish or music can help this turd. -Mattman

-and-

I was excited to see a sneak preview of the upcoming film. Unfortunately, it was a complete disaster. Anyone who loves the comic needs to stay far, far away from this film. It’s a heartbreaker. –Anon

-Ain’t It Cool News

In even Uglier news, the Department of Justice has added 15 Assistant US Attorneys and 20 FBI Special Agents to its Intellectual Property Protection Task Force.

“With its implementation of the IP Task Force and appointment of Victoria Espinel as the first-ever Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, the Obama Administration has made it clear that stamping out practices that harm American ingenuity is a strong priority, and we applaud their efforts to combat this threat to creative workers.” –MPAA spokesman

-Deadline

It sure does make me scared to think that the DOJ might be taking orders from the Entertainment Industry instead of looking for drug dealers, serial killers, terrorists, kidnappers, and any number of violent, dangerous criminal. Yup, let’s prop up a failing business model with Stasi-like zeal instead of forcing the bloated Movie Industry to adapt to their changing customer base.

-Mark

Good

In what I can only consider inspired casting, it looks like Helen Mirren has signed on for the remake of Arthur. She would be in John Gielgud’s role, except as Arthur’s long-suffering nanny. Russell Brand is set to play Arthur.

How perfect! You’ve got the style and sophistication that Dame Helen Mirren would bring to the role mixed with the raw, comedic talent of Brand. It sounds like a good match.

For those of you who have never seen the original with Dudley Moore and John Gielgud, you should really search it out and give it a view. It’s about a spoiled rich man that falls in love with the hard working, poor, girl-next-door type. Gielgud’s performance as the straight man to Moore’s eccentric millionaire is sheer brilliance.

I can only see good things coming from this pairing of old and new school..

Bad

In a startling move, Platinum Dunes has killed off the proposed sequel to the 2009 reboot of the Friday the 13th franchise. While not an outstanding movie, it was decent reimagining of the source material by Marcus Nispel, the same director that brought us the great Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot back in 2003.

Despite Friday the 13th being a mediocre film, it had an extremely low end budget of 19M, but it pulled in over 91M worldwide (with 65M of that being domestic take). With an amazing return on your investment like that, how could you not keep this up? With several tv series winding up their runs, you’ve got a large supply of young, out of work actors that you can kill in interesting ways.

I, for one, would love to see more Jason Voorhees. C’mon Platinum Dunes, get this back into production!

Ugly

Holy crap! Who would have thought that there would have been so many people willing to just throw their money away?

Avatar’s Earth Day release on DVD and BluRay shattered the previous single day BluRay sales record held by Dark Knight (600k units) with an estimated 1.5 million sales. If you add in the DVD sales, you have almost 4 million units sold on the first day alone.

I wonder how many people either knew or cared that this was a super bare bones offering, with only the movie in 2D and no special features at all. If they were expecting to relive that “awesome” 3D experience that they had in the theatre, then they are in for a rude awakening.

A version with special features should be out in November, with 6 additional minutes of footage, and the 3D version of it won’t be out until some time in 2011.

I’ve been there before, we all have. Been the early adopter of a movie, gadget, etc., only to have a more kick-ass version come along a few months later. For the highest grossing movie of all time, how many times do you think they are going to lead their customers to the well.? Judging from sales alone though, apparently enough people are still drinking the Kool-Aid. Sad.

-Mark

Good

Good news for all you Men in Black fans out there (myself included)… It seems like Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith and director Barry Sonnenfeld have all signed on for the third instalment of this fun series. It being the third movie and with the state of the industry today, you know it’s going to be shot in 3D. This is a movie that might genuinely utilize the 3D effects to good purpose. Word is that all they’re waiting on is a script that everyone is happy with. They’re even looking for an early summer release in 2011.

With Sony not having any big tentpole releases in either May or June 2011 as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 got shelved, it would make sense to get an already established franchise into next summer’s schedule. And even though May 2011 is busy with Marvel’s Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover 2 and Mission Impossible IV, having Will Smith in your movie is as close to a sure bet as any actor in Hollywood.

-Collider

I don’t know. Maybe I’m going to have to get contacts or laser eye surgery so I can start seeing some of these big budget films in 3D. MiB and 3D seem to be a marriage made in heaven and will probably be worth the trouble for me to find a workaround in order to see it.

Bad

Speaking of 3D movies, James Cameron was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming DVD/BluRay releases of Avatar, the box office juggernaut. He confirms that today’s release of Avatar is going to be as bare bones as you can get. Nothing whatsoever in the way of special features or added bonuses.

There’s zero extras! There’s so few extras that you put it in, you push play, and the movie starts. There are no trailers, there’s no bulls— at the beginning that you have to endlessly go through. I have a deal with the studio and it goes like this: Any movie I make that makes over a billion dollars goes out without a bunch of crap trailers for your other movies.

Avatar is the highest-grossing film in history, it got nine Academy Award nominations, why would I want to f— with that? Why would I want to change that? I want to drive a stake in the ground and I want to say, This is the movie we released and you can now own it.

-James Cameron (EW interview)

He then goes on to explain EXACTLY how they are going to “fuck with that”. They’ve identified 6 minutes of extra scenes that are being given the fancy CG treatment and will be added to the proposed RE-RELEASE of Avatar to theatres in August. You should get all of those added minutes and some special features on the NOVEMBER release of the DVD/BluRay. Yeah, a double-dip is planned for just 7 months from now.

When asked if the November release will be in 3D, he said:

Not at this point. We haven’t announced when we’ll be releasing it on 3-D DVD. Our feeling is there just aren’t enough players out there. We don’t want it to come out and be a fart in the frying pan.

So, at least a triple dip from the oh-so-eloquent Cameron. More, if you count the August theatre re-release. Hmmm… maybe this should be UGLY instead of BAD.

Ugly

Word came down yesterday that they’re thinking about doing a movie from the 1960s tv series, I Dream of Jeannie. What are they thinking? It’s too creatively similar to Bewitched and look what happened to that at the box office. It failed to make its budget back domestically by over 20 million bucks!

Yes, there have been some success stories in regards to mining 60s tv shows for box office gold (Star Trek, Get Smart), but the failures more than outweigh them. For example, McHale’s Navy only made back 4.5 million of its estimated 31M budget and My Favorite Martian made barely more than half of its 65M budget back.

Is the world ready for this to be redone on the silver screen, or should we just leave it where it belongs, in our memories?

-Mark