Last movie watched...

[Frank]

Burton's insinuating influence is so all pervading that both Addams Family films, Sucker Punch, Coraline, From Hell, and Bram Stoker's Dracula reek faintly of him, even though he never actually touched any of them. He's like a halved onion left un-boxed in the fridge.

[TordelBack]

Burton's insinuating influence is so all pervading that both Addams Family films... reek faintly of him, even though he never actually touched any of them.

Both Addams Family films are superb, and I would have thought they had a character quite distinct from the bulk of Burtonia: much snappier and more gleeful.  Which is not to say I dislike a lot of Burton's work, although I can see why he irritates.

[JamesC]

Burton's insinuating influence is so all pervading that both Addams Family films, Sucker Punch, Coraline, From Hell, and Bram Stoker's Dracula reek faintly of him, even though he never actually touched any of them. He's like a halved onion left un-boxed in the fridge.

I think the Addams Family comic strips were pretty Burtonesque to start with. If you do an image search you can see that the art style isn't too dissimilar to some of Burton's animated work - I'd be surprised if they weren't an influence on him.

[Frank]

Both Addams Family films are superb, and I would have thought they had a character quite distinct from the bulk of Burtonia: much snappier and more gleeful. 

I like both films too, and the undeniable Burton influence upon them is mainly aesthetic. They're like Burton films where he's managed to tell a coherent story and not bury the gags with duff timing. That said, I don't really share the hatred of Burton films generally evinced here; his Batman and POTA franchise films are mostly awful, but just about everything else I've seen is pretty good. He's got very little facility for narrative, and he's able to work around that best when he's creating original material which only has to obey its own internal (fairy tale) logic.

[JamesC]

I'll never forgive Tim Burton for what he did to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How you can take an almost perfect book and end up with that cinematic turd I'll never know.

It was the wrong book for him to try to adapt anyway - if anything I would have thought Burton would have been more suited to doing an animated version of The Twits.

[Spikes]

Back to the Future

That'd be another example of when his influence as a producer is felt so keenly folk think he directed a film.

Poltergeist: not only a film about ghosts but allegedly ghost-directed by Spielberg for which he didn't take the credit.

Spielberg couldn't contractually direct another movie while E.T. was being prepped, he simply hired another director to stand in for the credit, and directed it anyway.

This picture has always made me kinda chuckle, though Tobe probably doesnt see the funny side of it; Spielberg (left) not directing, with Hooper (right) directing...

But i guess its always been easy, if your so inclined, to knock Spielberg. His films are populist, and aimed at the largest audience possible, and he has released - or play a part in, some right old rubbish, but boy, the list of superb films he has created is a darn pretty long one. Just half of that list, most directors would kill for, to have on their C.V.
Current fave? Munich. Alltime fave? CE3K.

[Professor Bear]

In case a title like SHARKNADO is not self-explanatory enough for you: when tornadoes full of man-eating sharks descend on Los Angeles, surfing champion Fin must rescue his family and destroy the tornadoes with bombs - THIS IS THE ACTUAL PLOT OF THIS FILM.  Even shite like Sharktopus had the veneer of plausibility of being a film that someone would make with a straight face and thus was ruined when you watch it and see that it is actually a film that someone has made with a straight face and that is the entirety of the joke and there is 90 minutes of it to go, but Sharknado is willfully ludicrous rather than just poorly-implemented high-concept.

I love that in whatever world this movie inhabits, sharks are basically the equivalent of pigeons, they're just everywhere, with one person driving along looking in his rear view mirror and it's just water and loads of shark fins like a Father Ted visual gag only done completely and utterly serious, and every single establishing shot has sharks in it - even if it's an establishing shot of a house on top of a hill, a drain will suddenly spit out a full grown shark that starts rolling downhill going GRR, or a bird's eye view of the city shows sharks flopping about on the tops of buildings.  At one point, someone comments "that storm out there looks to be getting worse" and then a shark smashes through a window and starts flopping about on the floor snapping at people and the attitude isn't "FUCK ME A SHARK HAS COME FOR US EVEN IN THE SAFETY OF A BUILDING ON DRY LAND", everyone is just like "TCH, one of them's got indoors.  Mind your feet."  Faced with not-unreasonable skepticism about there being a plague of sharks several miles inland and up a mountain, a character flings open the curtains of the house they're in and the street is just water with fins going back and forth and the other character still isn't convinced until sharks jump through the window, then the house is flooded and the characters are like SHH THERE'S SHARKS IN THE HOUSE SOMEWHERE and go deadly quiet and like I say, it's all completely straight faced and topped off with a hilariously sexist comment that is both contextually unjustifiable and yet also utterly impossible to take seriously or be offended by.  Later, a character is dangling from a rope while a shark is climbing up it after him like that bit in the 1960s Batman film, so the character cuts the rope and says William Shatner's line from Star Trek 3 when he kicks Christopher Lloyd into a volcano, and we're still not even near the most ludicrous parts of a film that has a proprietary theme song called "The Ballad of Sharknado" and features a character cutting themselves of a shark's belly with a chainsaw.
I downloaded this, but God help me, I'll be buying the blu-ray as soon as it's available.  Fantastic.

[Ghost MacRoth]

Spielberg pioneered the merchandising age by taking all the stuff that studios gave away to promote their movies and instead charged people for it,

Well....there was purchasable merchandise before that though, Dr Who was selling crap pre 1970. And at a guess I'd say Star Trek and others were too?

http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t320/whoviansdelight/BerwickDalekPlaysuit.jpg

Between the two of them though, GL and SS (unfortunate initials for a Jewish lad!) refined it into the machine it is now.  Although GL took it all too far with the overpriced toy adverts that where the Star Wars prequels, at least SS still concentrates more on the film than the goods.

[JamesC]

The World's End

Really, really good fun and sort of poignant too. Loved it.

[JamesC]

Return of the Jedi.

Still my favourite Star Wars film although I wish they'd show the original version. The original music for the Sy Snootles bit and the Ewok celebration was about a million times better. The galaxy wide celebration doesn't make sense either.

[TordelBack]

Return of the Jedi.

Still my favourite Star Wars film although I wish they'd show the original version. The original music for the Sy Snootles bit and the Ewok celebration was about a million times better. The galaxy wide celebration doesn't make sense either.

S'right.

While I do guiltily enjoy those bits as new stuff, I far prefer the original versions, particularly the music.  OTOH I have nothing but bilious hatred for Hayden Christensen's curly locks replacing Sebastian Shaw in the finale, and the less said about the Audrey II's questing wang the better.  And I haven't even seen the Noooooo version from the BluRay, and hopefully never will.

[JOE SOAP]

I think one of the best trips to the flix I ever had was the trip to the Ambassador Cinema with the sun splittin' the trees to see ROTJ.

[TordelBack]

I think one of the best trips to the flix I ever had was the trip to the Ambassador Cinema with the sun splittin' the trees to see ROTJ.

I remember it well - in fact I think there's a photo somewhere of us all standing under the big sign.  Saw Star Wars in the Adelphi (oh that was a night), Empire (and Raiders, and Close Encounters) in the Classic Harold's Cross and Jedi in the Ambassador.

[JOE SOAP]

I remember it well - in fact I think there's a photo somewhere of us all standing under the big sign.  Saw Star Wars in the Adelphi (oh that was a night), Empire (and Raiders, and Close Encounters) in the Classic Harold's Cross and Jedi in the Ambassador.

I miss the double-features too. I saw Raiders the day after first communion- nothing like a bit of Old Testament propaganda; melting faces and demonic angels (you don't see that kind of shit in kids films anymore) to spend your money on.

[Link Prime]

I think one of the best trips to the flix I ever had was the trip to the Ambassador Cinema with the sun splittin' the trees to see ROTJ.

ROTJ was my very first trip to the cinema...think it was The Classic cinema in Harolds Cross, but not sure.
A very impressionable experience.