Print

[Iriez]

QUOTE

Oh and I know this is petty but I just couldn't resist...

QUOTE

hehehehehe prsonly ppl who typ lik this i dnt tak seriusly

QUOTE

I've seen more than a few Iriez posts ending with "k thnx" have I not???... We're all guilty of this sometimes. Minor abbreviation is most often a sign of laziness or indifference rather than a poor command of the language. So don't be too hard on those folks...

Incase you didnt catch it, i say "k thx" as a sarcastic smartass reply, making fun of people who are like that. Its also the same reason i ramble in grammatically incorrect sentences in caps.

[Iriez]

QUOTE (XDelusion @ Jan 10 2004, 01:15 PM)

I am looking foward to reading the new Dark Tower from King, it'll be the 1st new King Book I'll prolly ever finish as I typically only like the old stuff from him (he's gone soft).

I am also. It will be the only king book i've read once i finish it.

I've heard alot of good things about the series, so im waiting for it to be finished before i read it. Im not getting myself into another WOT saga unless its finished.

Myself, im a fantasy geek. I like david eddings, raymond feist and robert jordan to name the tops.

I of course enjoyed tolkien, though would not put him on the top of the list. Unlike likkle (and in agreeance with the rest of the world) the LOTR movie was absolutly fantastic, and return of the king was literally the best movie i've seen in my life.

QUOTE

and I also liked Tolkien before they made those crappy movies

I also cant help but to comment that this is a incredibly ignorant statement. Tolkien died years ago, what on earth does he, or the quality of his books, have to do with the movie? They were written during world war ONE for christs sake.

I DONT LIKE APPLES BECAUSE THEY MADE APPLEJUICE AND IT TASTES BAD. APPLES SUX

[XDelusion]

--------
As for Clive Barker. He to me is what Stephen King only dreamed of being, though for some reason King will always be more remembered. Recently Clive Barker has been writing these odd littel stories about gay guys, which I've never touched. It was hard enough to read through some of the stuff in The Great And Secret Show let alone a whole book about it!

Barker started off doing small films for school, and after that began working on plays, and soon after short stories. The short stories are in a collection called: The Books Of Blood and there are a total of 6 of them, though here in the states the books of blood 4-6 are under a different name or packed in with other novels.

The 1st books opens with the line: We are all books of blood, where ever we are opened, we are red.
-- Clive Barker.

The stories are HIGHLY influenced by the writing of H.P. Lovecraft who wrote in the 20's and 30's and is responsible for all modern horror. Basically the premise of the stories has to do with haunted houses, canabalistic sub-human races who live under the city, new and interesting twists on urban legends (Candy Man), there is one about a detective (same one from Lord Of Illusions) who is hired to protect a womans' husbands corpse from some sort of evil that will attempt to come and steal his soul from it or some shit (been a while). Ect. You would just have to read them, they are hard to describe. They all end up having to do with people loosing the flesh, or there mind, or both, and if not that, then seeking to become a god or something to that effect. Clive Barker is highly influenced by Biblical stories, as well as Fantasy and Lovecraftian Horror. There is a constant theme of the "flesh" where he states that the flesh is illusion, and suffering, and mortal, and that redemption comes from loosing the flesh...

...literally.

Or he may take it another way, and seduce the characters in the story with the pleasures of the flesh, which are not only sexual, but also VERY VERY sadistic, such as self mutalation and the like.

You'd just have to check him out.

His later stuff, is a bit different, it focusses not so much on the Horror side of things, as it does on the Fantasy. Weave World and Imagica are two prime examples of this side of his writing style:

http://www.greenmanr....clive.omni.htm

http://www.greenmanr...etimesthree.htm

He's reall hard to eplain I hope this gives you some sort of idea.





Non-Fiction authors that interest me are of course:

William S Burroughs: Naked Lunch (fiction), Junky, The Soft Machine

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good And Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra (fiction)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Autobiography

George Harrison: I Me Mine

Ben H. Bagdikian: The media monopoly

Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves To Death

You get the picture..

..I'm one of "them".

As for movies not being able to carry the same weight of a book...

... you should watch some David Cronenburg movies some time...


The Lord Of The Rings movies were great by the way, not toally my cup of tea, but very VERY well done I must say! I only hope that Peter Jackson now takes all this money that he has made from that, and will probably make from his upcoming re-make of King Kong and dump it back into classic horror, and bring all that back. What am I talking about?

Look here, I'm a child hood fan of his b-rate films.

http://tbhl.theoneri...ilms/index.html

Both him and Sam Raimi are going good for themselves, I just hope they NEVER loose there roots like so many do.

[Likklebaer]

QUOTE (Iriez @ Jan 10 2004, 09:07 PM)

Unlike likkle (and in agreeance with the rest of the world) the LOTR movie was absolutly fantastic, and return of the king was literally the best movie i've seen in my life.

While ROTK was the better of the 3. If it's the best movie you've ever seen then you seriously need to see some more movies. Are you seriously suggesting that this popcorn movie is better than Lawrence of Arabia, better than The Godfather, better than Dawn of the Dead?

The main problem with the LOTR movies is the horribly poor portrayal of the characters by almost all concerned. Could Viggo Mortensen look more bored to be there? Elijah Wood can't seem to manage to convey any of his character's pain and so just ends up looking bewildered all the time. And the less said about Hugo Weaving and Liv Tyler the better.
The only notable exceptions were Christopher Lee (inexcusably absent from ROTK) who is in top hammer-horror form. And Ian Holm who was nothing short of excellent as Bilbo.
And why is it they feel the need to leave out sizeable chunks of the story in exchange for additional pointless overblown action sequences? (stupid fight with cave-troll in Fellowship, Warg-writhe battle in Towers etc.)
These films aren't terrible they just rely too much on the strength of their source material to cover up the fact that no one in Hollywood has any idea anymore of how to make a good movie.

QUOTE

I also cant help but to comment that this is a incredibly ignorant statement. Tolkien died years ago, what on earth does he, or the quality of his books, have to do with the movie? They were written during world war ONE for christs sake.

I agree I didn't make this clear enough. The reason I'm put off Tolkien right now is that whenever you mention that you like his work to people they automatically assume you're either talking about the movies or you're only reading him because you've seen the movies. I'll regain my old love for Middle Earth once all the hype has died down and the popcorn crowd have some new adaptation/remake/sequel to rave about.

[mamajo]

[Likklebaer]

QUOTE (lantus @ Jan 11 2004, 01:16 AM)

and Likkle, i loved the Godfather Part 1...but i thought part 2 was even better

Absolutely. Part 1 was excellent, Part 2 was a masterpiece.

Part 3?... what Part 3??  

[XDelusion]

While ROTK was the better of the 3. If it's the best movie you've ever seen then you seriously need to see some more movies. Are you seriously suggesting that this popcorn movie is better than Lawrence of Arabia, better than The Godfather, better than Dawn of the Dead?

[Likklebaer]

QUOTE

1 you brought up Dawn Of The Dead, which to me, is one of the best movies ever (in its uncut format)

It took me ages to find the full director's cut of DOTD on DVD in its original 1.66:1 theatrical aspect ratio. I finally managed to get a danish 2-disc set which also contains Dario Argento's cut of the movie and Document of the Dead.

[XDelusion]

[DuDeR MaN]

this use to be a plugin thread right?  or am I just crazy?

my meaningless, pathetic thoughts:
books = good
movies = good
arguments = fun/funny
using words wisely = involves to much thought and key strokes

Conclusion:
Don't mess with Iriez.. he'll destroy ya.

[Iriez]

QUOTE (Likklebaer @ Jan 10 2004, 05:50 PM)

QUOTE (Iriez @ Jan 10 2004, 09:07 PM) Unlike likkle (and in agreeance with the rest of the world) the LOTR movie was absolutly fantastic, and return of the king was literally the best movie i've seen in my life. While ROTK was the better of the 3. If it's the best movie you've ever seen then you seriously need to see some more movies. Are you seriously suggesting that this popcorn movie is better than Lawrence of Arabia, better than The Godfather, better than Dawn of the Dead?

I have never seen lawrence of arabia or dawn of the dead, and quite frankly i found the godfather to be boring. The second seemed to be better, and i wouldnt dream of seeing the third.

The reason i think ROTK was the best movie ever is because it touched me on a emotional level that movies normally do not. This is because LOTR was the first fantasy epic i read. I cried in happiness when Sorontur flew to pickup frodo and sam off of the mountain at the end. It touched me very much, and the movie accomplished the same on many fronts. I completely understand why everyone can say it wasnt the best movie. The fact is that you did not read the books, or could not get into the books. Now that i have read many many more books, i can critisize tolkien's writing style, but very very fortunately, i read it first before i had much of a opinion. This left me open to really feel the book, without critisizing his writing or something else that was small. LOTR is on the bottom of my 'favorite books' list now, but to me it was the best book i ever read when i read it, and i can never get rid of the emotional feeling it gave me. It will forever be there, and it will forever touch me. How can you get anymore sad than giving up eternal life for the man you love? Its such a beautiful book/movie on so many fronts.

I will pickup lawrence of arabia sometime, it seems very interesting.

QUOTE

I agree I didn't make this clear enough. The reason I'm put off Tolkien right now is that whenever you mention that you like his work to people they automatically assume you're either talking about the movies or you're only reading him because you've seen the movies. I'll regain my old love for Middle Earth once all the hype has died down and the popcorn crowd have some new adaptation/remake/sequel to rave about.

Yes, very true.

Though LOTR was very memorable to me, i would have to say my favorite story was from one of the lost tales books tolkien wrote. It might have been in the silmarillion aswell. It was the story of beren and tinuvel <sp?> where he and tinuvel goes into melkor's lair and steals one of the silmarillion's off his crown, and gets his hand bitten off by the beast, and The dog (i forgot his name...huang?) fights the beast to the death.

That was a really good story.

[XDelusion]

[Likklebaer]

QUOTE

Though LOTR was very memorable to me, i would have to say my favorite story was from one of the lost tales books tolkien wrote. It might have been in the silmarillion aswell. It was the story of beren and tinuvel <sp?> where he and tinuvel goes into melkor's lair and steals one of the silmarillion's off his crown, and gets his hand bitten off by the beast, and The dog (i forgot his name...huang?) fights the beast to the death. That was a really good story.

That story was told in both the Silmarillion and the Book of Lost Tales. I think I preferred the Lost Tales version since it focussed on the characters more internally. The Silmarillion (quite intentionally due to its writing style) concentrated on the events themselves.

I look forward to seeing the extended version of ROTK as I found both the other two to be superior to their theatrical counterparts. Plus I found it criminal that they omitted two key scenes from the original story. The face-off between Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard and the face-off between Gandalf and the Witch King at the Gates of Minas Tirith. Since both of these scenes are dialogue-only with no action to speak of, I guess they figured it would test the attention span of the average american movie-goer.
Other issues they could address (but won't); why does it take Frodo, Sam, and Smeagol longer to climb that bloody cliff at the beginning than it takes to climb mount doom at the end? Why does Shelob just look like a giant tarantula (she's supposed to be far more evil and repulsive looking than that) and also change size depending on the width of the tunnel she's trying to fit down? Why does Minas Morgul look like some kind of funky nightclub? And (not really related to ROTK) after all those elves and men that had fought and died to get to this point, as if Elrond wouldn't have just pushed Isildur into the volcano at the beginning of Fellowship. Rather than save the world from inevitable darkness, he just lets him walk out with the ring!

Ah well, I guess it's a compliment to the movie that I consider it worth dissecting. Most modern movies I've forgotten before I'm even home from the cinema.

[Dante_Ali]

Some more info on these two films...

Lawrence of Arabia is what you would call one of the few true adventure films of the last century.  It was made in 1962 but it has aged well - moreso than any other David Lean flick with the exception of Bridge On The River Kwai perhaps. It is deservedly regarded as one of the best films ever.

IMDB

Dawn of The Dead on the other hand is a zombie flick from 1978 with lots of blood and guts and a layer of social commentary somewhere in between. It is actually the second in a trilogy of zombie flicks (the first being Night Of The Living Dead) which kickstarted the whole zombie craze (it's safe to assume that without George Romero's movies there would have never been a Resident Evil) Day of The Dead SHOULD have been better than the second one but because of budget restrictions Romero had to scale down his vision for the third film and thus it ended up being the worst of the trilogy (but certainly the most thought-provoking)

A remake of Dawn of The Dead will be released in 2004 (not by the original director and without any of the original cast).

IMDB

[XDelusion]

As for Day Of The Dead, I DO NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME understand what it not to be liked about this film, aside of the fact that they cut the script down BIG time, and took it from an X rating to a R rating. Yes it would have been great to have a super long, underground  Zombie film from the master of the undead, but as he states in the interviews on the CD, he had no money, and had to make a desicion which I'm sure was not what he wanted either, nobody wants that!

Regardless, I'm sure you can track down a copy of the script on-line and read what was supposed to happen, which I plan to do.

As for what is left of the film, well Dawn is still my favorite of all time, but Day was still a GREAT film that I find no faults with. I both loved and hated the characters' the acting was on top, there was zombie aligators (can't beat that), it had the Romeroish high tention that you would expect, not to mention that Insestual father from The Crazies was back taking the role fo Dr. Frankenstein, what more can you ask for!??!

As for the Night Of The Living Dead remake from Tom Savini and Romero's sister, I TOTALLY LOVED more so than the original, I think if George had a direct hand (and he did have a small hand in this) that he would have done it exactly the same. Who ever says this film is dumb needs there head checked!


As for Part 4....

...the script has been written, some music has been composed for it, and they are waiting to start shooting, all according to Tom Savini.