JsARCLIGHT

Booyeah! I'll trade you my crackerjack kuwaiti liberation medal for that!

Yes it is there, it starts about 65% through the credits. It as well has been "altered" a lot... the basic "jist" is there still but it is quite unfunny in it's new altered form. My wife was angry with me for not taking her to see it, aparently she was a large fan of the books in her youth. So I did not want to spoil her watching and kept my opinions to myself and we went this afternoon for a 2pm showing. Low and behold she walked out of the theater on my arm saying "wow... that was... um... different than I remember" Having a little talk on the way home her biggest complaint about the movie was the newfound "romantic comedy" aspects of Arthur and Trillian, she was quite put off by that. Her "likes" about the movie where the Alan Rickman Marvin and seeing the original BBC marvin in line. She is a lot more forgiving than I when it comes to this movie but she, like me, really did not like their handling of most of the "jokes". We both feel most of the movie has this "knee-capped" feeling to it. We both agreed it should have been two movies. Edit: I know it is a Sunday noonish show but the theater we went to was 75% empty... has bad word of mouth spread this much about this flick already?... or did we just pick the right place and time to have the theater mostly to ourselves? The opening day screening I went to with my co-workers the place was packed... same theather too.

I have to honstly say that Mos Def did not ruin the movie though... people who harshed on him early on as possibly ruining it could not be further from wrong. If only they would release a much longer, "finished" movie with all the removed and altered stuff returned I would be super happy. The movie sure has the look and the feel but not the soul.

If you have no prior knowledge of the book or BBC series I would say you stand the best chance of enjoying it as you will not be noticing all the missing and altered things. I knew going to see this movie I would not be able to remove my preconceptions from my head but I at least hoped the movie would fulfill some of them...

I think I have isolated my biggest complaint with the movie... I went with some of my employees from my office and during the movie I could remember the bits, the scenes and I would lean over to my coworkers and say "this is going to be great, watch this..." and then nothing. The movie would just "move on" and totally miss, what I thought, are some of the best comedy spots in the series... either that or it would fumble them. I'd say if you are very forgiving, go see the movie. Or better yet if you have NEVER seen the BBC mini a lot and know and love it's execution of the movie then go and see it. I have to honestly say that I went in expecting certain things that were totally not met. It's one thing to have expectations not be met but rather filled with alternate entertainment you did not predict coming, but this movie just fails to deliver on a lot of levels. It is an inflated, effects heavy juggernaught that gets caught up in it's visuals and forgets its roots.

But you have to admit that his new movie takes many key elements and either throws them out the window completely, altering the story to hide their omission, or it just glosses over things usually taking out the jokes but leaving the buildups. That guy that wrote the review that Graham posted hit the nail 100% squarely on the head.

You do realize the BBC miniseries was 3 hours long right? And they fit almost every important thing from the books into it. This movie is pure hollywood ruination. Edit: And I'm far from a purist, I was comparing it to the far superior BBC miniseries which with a smaller budget and slightly more running time is a vastly superior execution of the books. Edit of the Edit: The things that disappointed me most about this movie are the blatant and very painful changes to key dialogue pieces that "make" hitchhiker's what it is. Rewrites galore and in some cases the complete cutting out of things that other things are supposed to roll into. They cover a lot of bases but in a very hurried half-assed sort of way. The pacing and presentation of the BBC miniseries is very methodical but it at least is approachable and easily viewed by the audience without cutting things out and altering the dialogue. My disappointment in this movie is also NOT any sort of "joke barrier" that may exsist with me not being British. I got the books completely and I find the BBC mini to be great entertainment... this movie is ham-fisted hollywood mistreatment. I don't like it, pure and simple.

Saw this movie at lunch today, was first in line for tickets for the first showing. One word: TERRIBLE. No, two words are better: ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE Avoid this movie at all cost, even if you THINK you can stomach a butchery of the original work this movie takes it one step further. Complete waste of money, etc. etc. etc. everything you can say about a horrid movie. I don't think I laughed once the whole time. Every opportunity to be creative is wasted with juvenile humor, every chance to be faithful to the books is rewritten or altered into being not funny and every scene is just like one long drawn out lead up to a joke but with no punchline given. It was bad... worse than bad, awful. Avoid at all cost like Vogon poetry.

His last full blown Zombie movie was Day of the Dead in 1985 but he did a TV commercial for Biohazard (Resident Evil) 2 in Japan in 1997 and was rumored to have been the first director/script writer on the Res Evil movie in the states but was booted. He has also supposedly been booted from other recent horror movies for various reasons. In other words he was been working but he has not really had anything that has made it to the big screen in decades.

The real question is if Romero sticks to his traditional "the zombies are not the true enemy" storytelling or if he just sells out and makes a stupid summer twitch picture. The man fought the hollywood system in his other movies to get them made and released them the way he wanted so I really want this one to be a good "classic" Romero picture... only time will tell I guess. It almost feels like too much emphasis is being put on the "uber zombies", but then again this is just the trailer... most likely just something thrown together from all the buzzy, edgy scenes in the movie.

Israel, being a country constantly "under attack", has a different mindset than us spoiled frightened children in america. Basicaly everyone over there is put into manditory military service at the age of 18 after graduating high school unless they have a physical handicap that prevents it. After their manditory military service all able bodied men and women consider themselves Israel's "Second line of defense" either in spirit or by continuing their military service as reserve forces. Either way, by the time your average Israeli is 21 they have more small arms training and military toughness than any group of americans. The girls shown in the photo are actually off-duty IDF soldiers visiting a local ice cream shop. The M16's around their shoulders are their duty weapons, which they are allowed to carry openly "off duty". When they "retire" from military service they can purchase just about any small arm they want with very little restriction from the government and use it to "defend themselves"... which includes open carry of full auto and SMG's. A friend of mine who is Jewish made her pilgramage to Israel two years ago and brought back a lot of pics just like the one I posted... you can see men pushing strollers with full auto Uzi SMGs slung over their shoulder beside baby bags, you can see women in business suits with hip holsters with G17's and you even see the occasional boy or girl in a high school uniform with a rifle slung. There are two rules of the world: you don't eat the yellow snow and you do not, under any circomstances, f##k with Israel. They take their slogan of "never again" quite seriously, and you have to admire them for that.

It's been my experience that some folks (mostly the gangbangers and the stupid) have adopted "Glock" as a synonym for "handgun". Every time I spend a few hours in my friend's gunshop just hanging out helping him sell some items there always are one or two groups of "gangbanger" looking posers (or they could actually be gang members you never know) come into his shop and point at every pistol in the case and call it a Glock. It's a fork on a chalkboard to my ears to constantly hear "there go a little Glock", "damn look at that big Glock", "these are tight Glocks", etc, etc, etc into insanity. One time we even had a guy walk up to the counter, which is a glass display case filled with actual Glocks and ask us "you guys got them Glocks here?". These are the same guys that point at AR15s on the wall and call them M16's, point at SKSes and call them AK's, point at Mini 14's and call them AK's, and on and on and on. Hell, I was even carrying in a shoulder holster one day at the shop openly (took off my jacket) that had my G21 in it and a guy asked me if I ever owned a Glock.

As the proud owner of two Glocks I can say all the urban myths are TRUE! You really CAN walk through an airport metal detector with them and it not go off! They really CAN shoot in space! They really DO explode if you don't burp their tupperware parts every time you clip up! And they WILL melt into goo if you shoot them too fast! Because you know, Glocks are so terrible that every gun maker started making their own plastic framed clones of them just so they could be "in" on the whole conspiracy to flood the world with cheap unsafe plastic guns that kill the user.

How about an all midget albino remake of the Magnificent Seven? Vern Troyer could play the Yule Brenner role. Midget albino Steve McQueen! (looks back at Peter Jackson thread) Oh yeah... this was about PJ...

Technically isn't it a "return to it's origins" then? It's well doccumented that The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was an "all norms" remake of the legendary 30's movie "Terror of Tiny Town"?

My personal favorite is: "The Bastards have landed!" (Aside from Peter Jackson spraying with the Uzi making "Atatatataattatata" noises...) If anyone has not seen Bad Taste or Brain Dead (Dead Alive in the US), you are missing the "true" Peter Jackson. He can take is Heavenly Creatures and LotR and shove it, I want Bad Taste 2 dammit!

Peter Jackson will forever be a high pitched "eat lead, sucker!" and a spraying of an Uzi to me... I marvel at how much that man let himself go. ... that and I wonder what happened to that cool stand up beatles truck...

Not to derail our beloved thread into a "chicks with boomsticks" thread but this has always been a favorite picture of mine... not a dupe, not a photochop, this is an actual picture taken in Israel. Girl's night out at the ice cream shop... after all, a girl can never be too safe when out with friends. And that creepy ice cream mascot might start some sh!t.

From what I remember of my P99 it did not really have the ability to push the trigger forward when cocked... what it did have however was Walther's sort of dumb "two stage" single action trigger. What that meant is that the trigger would return to full double action pull every time the trigger was pulled but it was mush from the double position to the single position. Their idea was that this allowed the shooter extra pull to commit to a shot... what it actually translated to in real life was this strange weak pull back to the single action position that resulted in quite a few of my friends "yank-firing" the weapon unintentionally expecting a firm DA trigger and getting a mush single with a mile of play in front of it. The P99 definately takes some getting used to but once you do it's unique feel is nice. I grew to love that little gun but alas he was just another pistol in a full lockbox and had to go. I'm thinking of getting another one, this time in 9 mil to replace my aging Browning Hi Power that has seen better days. Either that or I'll get one of those P22's and just plink bricks of .22 through it all day.

He won the movie lottery by making Star Wars and Indiana jones. Who needs to do anything else when those two properties spawned ILM, Skywalker Sound and other mega million dollar businesses... besides Star Wars and Indiana Jones. All he can do is wake up, go outside, rake up the piles of cash on his front lawn and go back to bed. What a hard life filled with responsability and the need to work hard to put food on his plate. Edit: You could also ask "why isn't Thomas Dolby still making music?"

I once owned a Ruger GP100, a Redhawk .44 and a Walther P99 in .40. All where excellent weapons. I ended up selling all of them to fund larger and more expensive weapons... I still wish I had kept that P99 though it is a nice little gun. Very handy and easy to use but some of my friends (who don't shoot much) complained that the recoil was a tad ferocious for such a small guy.

Here in the midwest have have very few if any bear... what we do have are pack animals like Boar and wolves/coyote. We also have problems with bobcats and cougars. Not really around my neck of the woods as I live in a dense urban center (saint louis) where the worst pack animal you will encounter are those annoying little sparrow birds I call "chippies" that steal your crackers off your plate at outdoor resturants downtown. But in the backstate areas that are rural the threat from critters is high. As for mag backloading that is almost necessary on most high cap mags. The only weapon I have ever owned that I did not need to backload was a Calico Liberty 9... but that POS had it's own share of issues that backloading a mag would never fix.

On the subject of the whole "magazine capacity" issue, for most weapons 30 is the magic number. Due to spring tensions, right around 30 rounds is the maximum effective and reliable round count that can be put in a magazine. Any more and the performance of the magazine suffers. Sure you can make special magazines like the beta C, helical drum, rotary drum and others but those don't use the common box spring system. Case in point: a 30 round AR15 magazine is very reliable but the 40 rounders you see on the market have a tendancy to fail quite often. The factory 25 and 32 round Uzi mags are bulletproof when it comes to their track record but the hanky 40 and 50 round mags are plauged with issues. The Tec-9, besides being a boat anchor, has a standard 25 round mag. Sure there are super capacity stick mags available but they jam up the weapon ten times as much as the low cap types. Durring the development cycle of most modern arms many manufacturers have tinkered with spring fed 30+ large cap magazines and in almost every case right around 30 rounds in the box is the cutoff point for constant reliability. As for the "who needs more than X number of rounds in a defensive position" argument there is a good degree of merit to that. Outside of a combat situation where you stand a chance of engaging multiple hostile targets at once, the need for high capacity firepower is sort of overkill in a civilian defensive role. Studies have shown that the old saying of "if you can't solve your problem in 6 shots, it ain't getting solved by you" is quite true. If you are a civilian protecting yourself from armed attackers and you have to do a magazine change you are in way over your head. No matter how well trained or "elite" you are, engaging multiple hostile targets by yourself is dangerous and best avoided alltogether. First rule of CCW training in most states is: run away. Draw down and run. Use your gun to provide you an exit, do NOT use it to escallate the situation. Do NOT stand and fight... as your problems and danger level will only increase minute by minute if the situation is not defused right off the bat. The longer a gun battle goes on the higher the chance of bad things happening such as hitting inocent people... although that is a danger from the start. Then again weapons with 30+ round magazines in pistol form are few and far between and are actually the ecception and not the rule. General rule of thumb on pistols is that they are defensive weapons... there are "offensive" pistols but most of those are simply semiauto conversions of SMGs. As for animal encounters that is another story... especially in the case of pack animals. You stumble into a hutch of wolves, a pack of boar or other such hostile or predatory pack animal and you are in big trouble. Running away usually gets you in more trouble as animals will persue so a good high capacity magazine is your best friend in that sort of situation when fast reaction shooting is tantamount and you usually end up doing a rolling mag dump.

In the Korean war you had GI's shooing Chicoms with their .30 carbine M1 rounds and the rounds hit the enemy, knocked them over, but basically bounced off their clothing and they got back up and kept coming. Range and other factors have a lot to do with the effectiveness of a round. Did they happen to say how close that perp was they shot with the coat? As for the round bouncing off a skull that happens more often than you would think. The human skull is like a chicken egg, it is a natural shape that absorbs a lot of punishment and still won't break. For a bullet to penetrate the skull it needs to have a good straight hit and sufficient energy behind it. A lot of people "shot in the head" survive, more than you'd think, because the round fails to penetrate the bone of the skull.

I personally just can't get into Ghost in the Shell... not the movies, not the SAC. I used to love Masamune Shirow but for some reason GITS just doesn't do it for me. I've been watching all of the SAC episodes as they come over on Adult Swim but I just don't find myself drawn into them like other shows. I think it's the same problem I had with the last Appleseed book (book 4)... the plot is just so needlessly convoluded and they plop down plotpoints in a sort of "what? you mean you don't know about this?" sort of way all the time. Such as last night's episode "Annihilation", lots of stuff just sort of "happens" with no real explanation or cause. I guess I can see sort of what is going on but it's almost like the episodic nature of the show is working against it in that massive leaps forward in the plot seem to happen off camera and the viewer has to catch up in each episode. It could be the dubbing script, it could be me... I don't know. What I do know is that I just can't get "into" this anime like I thought I would.