Last movie watched...

[bigjobs67]

Thought so.

[I, Cosh]

Saw the original movie of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" last night, as part of Film Four's "vampire" season. Amazing that it went on to be such a popular TV series when the source material was so flawed. Some of the early vampire scenes are quite eerily done, but the final showdown is a bit of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of thing.

Didn't realise it was on. For some reason, when I got in last night I had a hankering to watch the first couple of episodes of the series to see if it was still as fun as I remembered. It was.

[bigjobs67]

It was fuckin awsum. Me my girlfriend and the kids would sit every Friday and watch it on this old school TV channel called BBC 2 (or some shit) and we loved it. They got into Babylon Five as well I seem to remember! Even though it was a big pile of shit.

[The Legendary Shark]

Don't dis the Bab, man. B5 rocks.

[bigjobs67]

Watchin 'Outland' with Sean 'The Big Yin' Connery. Fuckin ace. Its set on Jupters moon Io. How cool is that!!(I don't mean literally of course)

[bigjobs67]

Don't dis the Bab, man. B5 rocks.

Lol. Soz mate. Just couldn't resist the 'Spaced' reference. It will always have a special place in my heart will B5. What did happen to B4?

[TordelBack]

Lol. Soz mate. Just couldn't resist the 'Spaced' reference. It will always have a special place in my heart will B5. What did happen to B4?

Sinclair/[spoiler]Valen[/spoiler] travelled back in time with it and gave it to the Minbari to use as a base during the previous Shadow War.  Presumably it was destroyed then.

[bigjobs67]

Sweet! So what happened to the other three?

[TordelBack]

Blown up by sabotage while still under construction, but I don't recall who by.  The Centauri, maybe?  They seem like the types.

I do miss Babylon 5.  It was three-fifths of a really great series.

[The Legendary Shark]

Pulled through time by Valen, the Minbari Not Born of Minbari, to be a base in the last Shadow War.

[Roger Godpleton]

Babylon 5 is the second best "Babylon" thing to come out of the 90's. The first being Babylon Zoo.

[I, Cosh]

Blown up by sabotage while still under construction, but I don't recall who by.  The Centauri, maybe?  They seem like the types.

I do miss Babylon 5.  It was three-fifths of a really great series.

Dreadful scripts, terrible acting and ropy effects but still great. I'll never work that out.

[TordelBack]

Dreadful scripts, terrible acting and ropy effects but still great. I'll never work that out.

Well put!  There was a sense that they were pushing for some kind of critical mass of terrible acting by adding more and worse actors every season, maybe to balance out the genius of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik, who despite being slathered in scales, accents and comedy eyebrows out-performed everyone in sight.  It's certainly saying something when the late-lamented Jeff Conaway was the third-best actor on the show.

[Mardroid]

Blown up by sabotage while still under construction, but I don't recall who by.  The Centauri, maybe?  They seem like the types.

I do miss Babylon 5.  It was three-fifths of a really great series.

Dreadful scripts, terrible acting and ropy effects but still great. I'll never work that out.

I think the answer is: story. It's pretty good, and the over-arcing plot draws one in.

Funny enough, I didn't take to Babylon 5 much at all when it first came out. It seemed like a soap opera to me, just set in space. I went back to it years later and saw a series when things were getting exciting, and wondered at what I  had missed. I then caught earlier episodes, including the stuff I had disliked earlier, and saw it in a whole new new light. I think I prefer it to Star Trek now, although I have a soft spot for the films. Interesting how attitudes can change.

And I agree, the alien characters were probably the most interesting, the most three dimensional* of the characters there, although Garibaldi had his moments.

*Sorry for the cliché.

[Professor Bear]

Despite not having one of my favourite suit designs or performances, Giant Monsters All-Out Attack is one of the best entries in Godzilla's Millennium Series, with a decent human plot and some of the most impressive kaiju sequences you'll see, thanks to a mix of clever presentation and sheer ambition that admittedly isn't always matched by production values.
The US Godzilla was a camp romp that had moments of jeopardy that felt out of place as a consequence, but GMAAA shows people being killed and having their lives destroyed by Godzilla's baffling trail of unstoppable destruction that you gradually come to realise is driven by his utter hatred of humanity rather than his being a misunderstood animal - there is a moment in the film where he literally stops to torch a car park full of fleeing people with his lasery death beams, and while we don't see their deaths onscreen, we do see the aftermath as the resultant mushroom cloud casts a literal and figurative shadow across a school full of children.  Godzilla is not fluffy here, he is a straight-up Bad Mother Fucker to the point that people are actually happy when King Ghidorah shows up.
The monster battles are good fun, but this is the first time I can recall seeing such unambiguous onscreen deaths for kaiju in the Godzilla films, especially [spoiler]Gidorah, who is asploded into a gazillion meaty chunks that rain down on Tokyo harbour[/spoiler].  And if you think you hate that US Godzilla? Trust me, you got nothing on the people who made this movie, which shits all over it at the drop of a hat, with characters commenting that "the monster which attacked America's east coast wasn't Godzilla", and the military declaring "attack him from the side!" shortly before being toasted - even the ending [spoiler]shows Godzilla's heart defiantly still beating[/spoiler] as a last fuck you to the US version's death scene.
It's a great kaiju flick, but I'd worry that it goes on a bit too long with the human stuff, especially at the start, where it takes 40 minutes for Godzilla to even show up for the first time, but when it does kick off, it's really entertaining and the playful mean-spiritedness of some of the humour might take you by surprise.