EVA

Make another Santino retirement joke if you sleep with your sister.

It seems improbable to me that people haven't at least seen one of the first two GODFATHER movies. Years back, it seemed like one of them was on TV somewhere pretty much constantly. Surely, at some point, on some lazy Sunday, you'd just give in.

It's interesting that there's isn't much internet bickering over SHERLOCK, because when you read discussions of it, you quickly find that it's an incredibly divisive show. Just not one that people actually tend to get into heated arguments over. I guess maybe because it only comes around for 3 episodes every couple of years tempers things. No one can get too upset at something that happens only slightly more regularly than a leap year.

I was about to say it must've been great to be single in 1997.

I was actually referring to that vile dog Zeidler. But I'm also very appreciative of your tip on the release date for those blu-rays and will therefore compensate you with a like.

I haven't seen a single Pixar movie post-THE INCREDIBLES. No WALL-E. No UP. No TOY STORY 3. None of the shitty ones set in the world where cars exist without people. Yet I have seen every goddamn MADAGASCAR movie and THE MOTHERFUCKING LORAX.

Yeah, you were definitely out of step with the critical zeitgeist, if that was your thought process. If anything, it's been the other way around, with most critics on a mission to desecrate the corpse of any franchise movie that isn't exceptionally good. Speaking of zeitgeist, I think it's funny how quickly the moviegoing audience's interests can change from year to year. Last year, horror was the MVP of the spring/summer season, with EVIL DEAD, THE PURGE, and THE CONJURING all opening #1 and picking up the slack while a lot of high-dollar blockbuster fare was disappointing. This year, horror seems to be a dud, and I doubt even the Purge insta-sequel is going to change that.

ELSEWHERE... Dan Feinberg has an early non-review of the GOTHAM pilot here (no spoilers): http://www.hitfix.com/the-fien-print/take-me-to-the-pilots-14-foxs-gotham tl;dr it's good but doesn't really do much to alleviate concerns regarding whether this is a sustainable premise for a TV show or not. My guess is that all the *winkwink* This person is going to become THIS, and this other person is going to be THIS *winkwink* stuff is something they felt they had to put in the pitch and the pilot to make the show sexy enough to sell, and maybe they'll dial it back moving forward. But then I read an interview with Cannon and he's already saying stuff like, "I've got a great idea for Mr. Freeze in season 2!" which makes me question whether they have any ideas other than throwing villains at the screen.

Just when I thought you couldn't possibly be any dumber, you go and do something like this AND TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF.

So it's a troll. Thank you for your continued quality contributions to this thread.

Is this a troll, or do you guys actually think that's what she looks like in the movie? Snyder was literally just quoted the other day saying that they haven't even shot anything with Gadot in costume yet because she's still not quite in shape for it.

Patience. They'll get around to that one.

I stand by Revengeance being a really fun game. Only downside was that it's so short, it ended right when I had just mastered the combat. I would be so down for a sequel.

Here's the first edition cover: Like most genre writers, he was not held in the highest esteem in his own time. His work was considered pulp.

Mother is always right. Never leave home.

Oh, the final swerve is 100% contrived. Almost downright silly. I don't think we need to sit the fence on that one. But the reason you don't laugh it off the page is because it absolutely works as the final insult heaped on Marlowe. The guy spends the whole novel struggling against powers greater than him, getting caught up in the schemes of cops and crooks and the wealthy and the powerful, all of them seemingly conspiring to their own ends against his simple quest to grant his friend some dignity in death...only to find out that his friend had been playing him false the whole time, too. Really, I think it was clear by at least halfway through that whatever answer Marlowe got for Lennox's death, it wasn't going to be the satisfactory resolution he wanted. But finding out that his friend was really no different than the sort of people he had been fighting the whole time was probably the bleakest possible outcome. In some ways, I think it could be taken as the final straw, the death of however much idealisim Marlowe had left in him. Marlowe saw Lennox as a kindred spirit, a generally decent guy who found himself mixed up in the machinations of the rich and the crooked. (This is what Marlowe turning down Mrs. Loring at the end was about, for whoever was talking about it earlier.) Finding out Lennox was yet another in a long line of shysters had to be a real gut punch.

At this point, everyone should know that nothing good comes from anything beyond page 3 of the Raw thread.

There's not a lot else going on I got home from work, checked in, and thought, "Whoa, the July thread is already 6 PAGES. Some serious shit must have gone down." You cannot imagine my disappointment as it eventually dawned on me that, no, indeed we really had been reduced to just talking about the Emma thing for a damn day.

Seriously, how did you people get 6 pages out of this story?

I'm a huge Elmore Leonard fan. And after reading my first Raymond Chandler book here, it seems impossible to me that Leonard himself wasn't a fan of Chandler. Chandler's snappy dialogue and rhythmic prose seems like an obvious antecedent to Leonard's style.

I watched the Altman film a few months back, and I really enjoyed it, but it's so different, it's really more like they used the characters and some of the plot points to make a commentary on stories 50's era noir like The Long Goodbye than an actual adaptation of The Long Goodbye. Some folks might take that personal, but it seems like fair play to me. I can enjoy a certain type of story while also acknowledging the tropes and "articles of faith" innate to those stories. That said, I guess there's an argument to be made that Chandler didn't deserve to be the butt of this particular joke. It's not his fault he was so awesome that everybody else wanted to write his stories.

FINISHED. Very much enjoyed it. Don't have much time to react to it right now, but I will say that, for me, the best mystery stories are the ones where the actual resolution of the mystery becomes secondary to what the characters are going through, and this was a really strong example of that.

I'm not a big Transformers fan or anything, and I'm not beholden to any notions that there's a masterpiece just waiting to be made from the material, but it's kind of infuriating to me that there's this one guy who gets to be the sole cinematic voice of these characters. Can we maybe let someone else take a swing at making a giant transforming robot movie that isn't purile, incomprehensible horse shit? I believe there's someone out there who can do it.

I wouldn't even hate Bay so much if it wasn't for the TRANSFORMERS movies. They are that bad. He'd still kinda suck without them, but when he does more human scale stuff like the BAD BOYS movies or PAIN AND GAIN, there are at least some things to like about those movies. I get nothing out of his hideously designed robots having endless, indecipherable fight scenes while obnoxious humans scramble around beneath them. I can't even enjoy them on a "Turn your brain off and enjoy the robots and 'splosions" level because the robots are that atrocious and lifeless-looking and the action is incomprehensible. Fuck those movies. It's 2014. I could close my eyes and wander down the halls of a cineplex, and odds are I'll stumble into a movie with robots and/or explosions. No one should have to settle for this shit anymore.