Messages

Frankly, I want to know what happened to the big transparent dome that seeemd to cover at least part of the city, protecting it from the Cursed earth.

You can quite clearly see it at the end of the first ep of The Cursed Earth, when Dredd sets off out into the wilderness.

So never mind the big wall that hadn't been built yet, why didn't we see the big dome in the Monkey story?  Huh?  HUH?  HUUUUHHHHH??????


My favourite 'sweep it under the carpet and pretend we never saw it' Dredd continuity stuff were the Mega City cops we saw in the earliest days, when it was clear that Judges were a kind of elite super-cop force, but there was a regular police force to deal with all the everday stuff.

And remember the story where Goodman calls all the Judges in the city together for a meeting, and there's about eight of them sitting round the table?

See?  This is why we need paulvonscott back.  He was great at trying explain away stuff like this.

>>There is also the sound of brains ticking all over the country as they try to figure out if Grennie has ever replied to one of their posts; "Was it me? I'm sure I said I loved Witchworld but he said nothing in reply..."

Mentioning Witch World would absolutely guarantee you a non-reply, my friend.  ;->

>>Now everyone wants to know if they are on someone else's kill-file!!

I'll show you mine if you show me yours, mate.

>>I think I'd be bored witless if I only ever read stuff from people that I knew were going to agree with me.

Hey, if that's how it worked then I'd have killfiled paulvonscott a long time ago...  ;->

While I don't always agree with him (and sometimes strongly disagree with him) I appreciate that he's willing and able to argue his point in an articulate, informed and often pretty funny way.

I do use the kill-file facility here.  Up until this week, there was only one person in there (aside from maybe a few old scojo aliases), and that was because, after watching their antics for a while here, I decided they were basically an irritating jerk and semi-troll, with absolutely nothing interesting, witty or relevant to say that I was going to miss hearing.

As for the off/on topic business, it's not off-topic stuff that I and others object to.  The thread about the Cursed Earth soon turned into a discussion about the films of Van Damme and then Al Leong-spotting, all of which I was quite happy to help along.

What does set my teeth on edge is an endless series of stuff that has nothing to say for itself other than "Look at us!  We're being whacky!", especially when, people start exporting this stuff from threads where I can happily ignore it to ones where I can't.

And, y'know, if any of it was actually genuinely funny, I probably wouldn't mind as much...

Al Leong rocks!

He's also in Big Trouble in Little China, and he's the bad-ass terrorist dude in Die Hard who looks all sheepish and guilty as he steals a candy bar from the shop.

Top action movie comedy moment.

Matt said:

>>Me thinks you know way too much stuff about Van Damme.

Hey, just wait until I move on to the life and films of Wings Hauser.

>>The only muscley actor to ever make as much as 2 great films was Arnie

Has the career of Victor Mature been forgotten so soon?  ;->

Or, more seriously, Burt Lancaster, who was a trained circus acrobat before he became one of the all-time genuine greats.

He was also in the American TV version of Men Behaving Badly, which, condidering the contraints on characters drinking, smoking, swearing etc on US network TV, should really been called Men Behaving NOt Very Badly At All.

Unsurprisingly, it only lasted a series, I think.

>>Has the Dammed made anything like a decent film? ... he's like Segal, a charisma free zone. But he can do the splits... as he shows us in every single film.

Ahhh, now I could talk all day about the oeuvres of the Dammster and the Segalmeister.

Hard Target, with was John Woo's first US film, is probably Van Damme's best film, maybe followed by Timecop.

For Segal, I'd nominate Out For Justice, which is actually a fairly gritty cop story.  

Jean-Claude knows he's a bit crap and has reached his natural level, but Seagal just loves himself too much.  Check out the Seagal-directed On Dangerous Ground, where at the end he gives at hilarious pro-environmental speech at the end, to get an idea of the man's self-image of himself.


 

>>You've got to wonder at the mentality of Van Damme... "Oh, wow! A*nother* action-heavy film without any particularly original ideas or set pieces. This one'll take me back to the top for SURE!"...

I suspect he's not dumb enough to believe that.  He probably knows his career has flatlined at the level of churning out low-budget action movie fodder destined for late-night cable tv and the lower shelves of your local Blockbuster.

All those cable TV movie channels have an insatiable appetite for this kind of stuff, and, hey, someone's got to make them.

Plus, I bet he's still really big in Central America or some of the former Soviet republics, and places like that.

>>Why Dredd would team up with (either version) is beyond me.

For reader-pleasing comic relief.  If you look at early Dredd, you see he's surrounded by comic relief stooges - Fergee, Walter, Maria, even Tweak to a certain extent.

I suppose the makers of the Stallone movie thought their Dredd needed a similiar comedy sidekick to relieve the perceived humourlessness of the central character.

btw, I saw Rob 'Fergie' Schneider in a crap Jean Claude Van Damme filmn on cable last night.  He basically seemed to be playing the same role - shouting "Are you crazy?  We're going to die!"  and screaming a lot as they went from one dumb action scene to another.

>>The Day the Law Died/Apocalypse War/Judge Child were all better IMO

Actually, I think it's considerably better than The Day The law Died, which I bought in hardback at Xmas, and which was a bit of an eye-opener.

As the guy says, there are lots of blatant plot-holes and bits of duff dialogue in The Cursed Earth, but taking it as a product of its time - a rollicking 1970s SF adventure story written for 10 year old boys - it still comes out better than DtLD.

Too many changes of artist, a long rather rambling structure, a contrived plot (Cal's a great villain, but he's just too big a loon to ever have got that far up the ranks in the Justice Department.)

On the other hand, there are still come great bits in it, it gave us Ron Smith on Dredd (Mega City One really did look MEGA when the Smithmeister drew it) and the Kleggs are still absolutely tops.

Good news for singing midget actors everywhere, though!

It's DeClerk, I tell you.  Look, he's got an Arrikaaner name - he MUST be evil!

>>I'd say this site is more fun, has better content - although CI's the place to go for all the industry news

Well, it is, if you're looking for industry news, reviews etc that's 2 years out of date.

The CI site doesn't seem to have been updated since July 2001, as far as I can see, and yet still they won.

Bit of a poor result, really, coming second to that.

See, kids?  Ballot box stuffing *does* work.