Nied

The problem is that even if we do get it right Knight is required not to tell us.

She has maybe five scene's and is completely dropped by the third act. She barely adds anything to the story at all. Hell in the books she appears almost completely in footnotes. Again it's been a while since I saw Kingdom of Heaven. He has a handful of scenes, and a handful of lines. He's a plot device to move the story forward and a side character at best. Which would be great if true. Newt is introduced in the first act (depending on the cut of the film very early in the first act).

Home Win XP pro+Firefox, at work it's a combo Win Xp pro+IE for work stuff (it's the only browser we support) and Portable Firefox running off my USB key for personal browsing during downtime. The nice thing about portable Firefox is that I can just slip my USB key into any computer and have all my bookmarks right there ready for use. ::edit:: Oh yeah. Holy crap did I just see Lebhead?!

I've already adressed the Fellowship of the ring, it has the most bizzare narrative structure i've ever seen (it's what happens when you try to squeeze a book and half into movie form, I gotta give it to Peter Jackson for pulling it off though). So Aragorn gets introduced in act two of a four act movie, and Arwen? In the Fellowship she hardly counts as a major character, she has a total of four or five scenes and is promptly dropped. He got cured during the second act, he was introduced during the first. IIRC they all get introduced on the bridge between the first and second acts. It's been a while since I saw Kingdom of Heaven though. That's really streatching the definition of major character. Proximo has a handful of scenes and does little to drive the plot. He's interesting sure (that's good screenwriting) but hardly major.

There's a very good reason why the camera angle and her pose was so weird... she's barely recognizable as the hottie she once was. Proof here 404243[/snapback] Maybe it's just me, but I actually think she looks a little better.

See I've been lurking on ARC for two months now and that one is news to me. Care to give us a rundown David?

OK Nied I just wanted to save myself the relief of not getting flamed by some guy that's hostile to noob's that's all. I just wanted ask you guys the do's and don't do's before I make a fool out of myself and get lampooned by the rest of the users. Like it's best if you checked to see if you locked the doors in your house before you go out somewhere. I'm using this and Shin's previous thread as a reference for my knowledge aircraft. So far I;m on page 52 of the first thread and I got 53 more pages to go. 404052[/snapback] My advice (and this goes for pretty much any message board I go to): Lurk for at least a month to get a lay of the land, that way you don't start posting stuff that might have been covered last week or last month. You're going to get a far better feel for how to act there by actually observing yourself for a whle rather than asking us and then going on a posting spree.

Phalanx WTF are you talking about? Seriously with forums like ARC and F-16.net it's best to lurk for at least a month or two before you start posting, they're not noob freindly.

Uh-huh. I'm stil waiting for those major characters.

Just to settle the argument over the transmition in the movies it's manual:

Used for spares probably. Either that or they were destroyed (again to avoid them getting into the hands of the IRIAF).

As much as I am loathe to defend Dick Cheney, the more I think about it, the more I can see a certain logic behind his shooting the F-14 in the face (*badum ching*). It's not hard to imagine some of that fine, brand new tooling for F-14D Super Tomcats falling into the hands of the IRIAF for their Ali Cats. His Jihad against the F-14D is still questionable, but once the decision to buy the Super Hornet was made, destroying the Tomcat tooling was at least logical.

Apparently the name Fury is out for the JSF and Lightning II might be in (though I can't help but think it fits the F-22 better than the F-35).

Just don't start a "which is better?" or "this plane vs. this plane" thread. We *HATE* those kind of discussions over there (it's academically proven that they'll get out of hand there). The moderators take a pretty hard line on stuff like that these days (they even went as far as to completely shut down one of the forums for a few days because people couldn't keep their ignorant thoughts to themselves) 403916[/snapback] Ditto with the F-16.net forums. To paraphrase the Simpsons: "Your forums reward knowledge. Our forums punish ignorance!"

Abovetopsecret.com? Ugh. Don't hang out there, buncha loony UFO conspiracy nutters. Go to places like F-16.net or the "Real Aviation" section of The Aircraft Resource Center forums.

I let the blood on Wolverine's shirt slide because incredibly easy to make simple wardrobe mistakes like that. Stuff like going from night to day like flicking a light switch is a lot worse. If I had to guess I'd say they set the Alcatraz battle in the middle of the night to save money. A daytime setting would have required either actually filming on location at Alcatraz (which given the buildings and locations that don't actually exist in real life would have been a nightmare), or filming in Vancouver with giant blue or green screens on all sides (which would require matching up the shots with San Francisco background plates in post production $$$). I actually think a daytime fight would have been much more impressive visually, but would have been a huge and expensive PITA to actually produce.

Lord of the rings I'll give you (I'm assuming you're referring to the Fellowship of the Ring), it's more the exception that proves the rule, as part of a larger story arc it's got a royally f*cked up narrative structure to begin with. As for Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, I'm not sure who you're referring to (remember I said major characters). Making a film is like building a house, you need to structure it properly or it won't stand up. If you throw main characters at people in the middle of the film you have no time to develop them so that the audience can understand why they're doing what they are. Kitty just gets thrown into the film right in the middle, we don't know anything about her character other than the fact she's upset that Professor X is dead, and we never do find out anything more about her. She's not a character with her own motivations, she's a thing put there by the screenwriter to do the things he wants to have done so that he can move the story forward to more special effects. Hell if they put her in the middle of the film to act as a foil to drive the Rouge/Iceman storyline forward that would make sense (that's essentially the role Bobby played in the first film). Or if they dropped Rouge from the film and used the time gained to introduce Kitty into the film earlier that too would have worked. In the end they did neither and gave us a flat character who goes nowhere.

While we don't see his face until the beginning of the third act, it's tough to argue that we aren't more than a little familiar with John Doe as a character by that point. As bsu pointed out, being a sci-fi movie doesn't suddenly absolve the movie from basic workmanship standards. JsARCLIGHT is most likely right, in every film theres someone who's charged with maintaining that kind of shot-shot continuity (usually in a big budget film like this, multiple people) it's pretty much impossible to what they did by accident. Instead they banked on people being too stupid to notice. Frankly I don't like paying $10 and staying up till 3:00am to have my intelligence insulted like that. Unfortunetly this movie did neither. If you're busy insulting the audiences intelligence with blatant continuity gaffes and supposedly uber-powerful characters that stand around and do nothing you're not really doing much entertaining.

The problem with the F-35 is that in trying to please so many different parties they're begining to make enough compromises to please no-one.

fart you. Name me one other good movie where a major character is introduced in the middle of the film. Tell me one other good film where the time of day abruptly changes in the middle of a scene. You can't becuase good movies don't do that. All the nifty special effects and big explosions in the world can't cover a vrappy film. My knowing the technical terms for what's going wrong doesn't mean it isn't.

It quickly establishes her as a threat, however she does nothing but stand there silent for the next hour of the movie. People talk about how powerful she is but we never really see even an inkling of that until the last 15 mins of the film, that's stuff you learn not to do in screenwriting 101. Indeed, he told us as much in yet another example of poor scripting (film is a visual medium you show don't tell, that's why the Matrix sequels were so awful). The only thing serviceable in that movie were the action sequences. In every other sense it was awful, it had inconsistent characterisation, poor dialogue, bad acting, continuity errors worthy of Ed Wood, and a truly awful narrative structuring (like introducing characters in the middle of the movie). None of that has anything to do with whether or not it follows the comics closely enough, lord knows the first two films don't do that, and they were great. It has everything to do with whether or not it's a good movie that can stand up on it's own if it didn't say "X-men" in the title.

With the add blitz preceding the premiere I'm not surprised. What will really make the critics eat crow is if it can do anything close to this next week. Another reason that ticket sales are declining (other than the "failing up" problem I mentioned on the last page) is because studios have settled on a strategy of building up an incredible amount of hype for a movie in an attempt to get the opening weekend gross to a high enough level to push the movie to break even, even if it bombs for the rest of it's showing. Considering the overall quality of this one I'm guessing that's the strategy here. The problem with this strategy is that it gets diminishing returns. People eventually get burned to many times and decide to ignore the hype and wait to watch it on DVD (if ever).

Note the location listed in my profile. That doesn't happen.

Extremely rookie mistake. Basic continuity like that is stuff you learn in Film 1. Stuff like this is why I decided to not pursue a career in film, the quality of your previous work (or even the box office return of said work) has next to nothing to do with whether or not you're successful. Just this year you have two excellent examples: the screenwriter for the Davinci Code (which is supposed to be Sony's big moneymaker this summer) also wrote blockbusters like Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, and I Robot, and the X-men 3 script got handed to a guy who's total output at the time consisted of xXx: State of the Union (which barely made back a quarter of it's budget). Everyone has their own little pet reasons why Hollywood is doing so badly (libruls, DVDs, piracy) but the truth is very simple: No one is buying tickets because the movies are horrible, and the movies are horrible because studio execs are basing their talent decisions on who's the most connected rather than who can do the best job.

Ugh. I really hated that film. Not because of some fanboyish change to how the characters were from the comics (I majored in film, that kind of thing is almost inevitable when adapting from another medium), but because it was badly written, badly directed and acted. *Minor spoiler if you haven't seen the trailer, commercials, or any other advertisements* The biggest single sticking point in my mind was that after Magneto flies the Golden Gate bridge to Alcatraz in broad daylight, they make a quick cut to the president watching this in his generic movie bunker, he says "God help us" and then the cut back to San Francisco and it's suddenly nighttime! WTF!? You've also got characters bouncing around the country (from upstate New York to Canada to what-looks-like-the-Pacific-Northwest to San Francisco) in a matter of hours, and a major character doesn't even get any lines until the middle of the second act (and has a few seconds of screen-time before this). *end of spoilers sorta* Considering how well constructed the first two films were it just made the armature hour crap in this film that much more glaring. At least we got to see Rebecah Romijn neckid.